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http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/24/caitlyn-jenner-halloween-costume-sparks-social-media-outrage-.html

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ne...een-costume-labeled-817515?utm_source=twitter

It's nowhere near October, but one ensemble is already on track to be named the most controversial Halloween costume of 2015.

Social media users were out in full force on Monday criticizing several Halloween retailers for offering a Caitlyn Jenner costume reminiscent of the former-athlete's Vanity Fair cover earlier this year.

While Jenner's supporters condemned the costume as "transphobic" and "disgusting" on Twitter, Spirit Halloween, a retailer that carries the costume, defended the getup.

"At Spirit Halloween, we create a wide range of costumes that are often based upon celebrities, public figures, heroes and superheroes," said Lisa Barr, senior director of marking at Spirit Halloween. "We feel that Caitlyn Jenner is all of the above and that she should be celebrated. The Caitlyn Jenner costume reflects just that."
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JohnDoe said:
According to Ikea they have meatballs, more than that I cannot say.
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Dysnomia said:
Well the Swedes felt sorry for the poor little snakes and this is what they get. And now every time they get bit they keep making excuses.
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these people know the more they try to bottle up people with BS the more they're going to just one day say "fuck it, sieg heil" and go full on racist against muslims.
 
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JohnDoe said:
I wonder if there is a Swedish version of this tale:


Here's another good one.


Getting old school:


The risk of being progressive is twofold; first you chance throwing out all the good lessons in your haste to dispose of the antique, and secondly you often fail to realize that others have not progressed.

Here the Swedes have forgotten elementary caution and assumed the savage religious zealots they imported were as liberal and kind as they.
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It's more like the old fable of the frog and scorpion.
One day, a scorpion looked around at the desert where he lived and decided that he wanted a change. So he set out on a journey through the forests and hills. He climbed over rocks and under vines and kept going until he reached a river.
The river was wide and swift and he couldn't see any way across. So he ran upriver and then checked downriver, all the while thinking that he might have to turn back. :(

Suddenly, he saw a frog sitting by the bank of the river.
"Hey, froggy, can you get me over the river?" the scorpion said.

The frog looks at the scorpion and asks "How do I know you won't sting me while I carry you across?"

The scorpion replies, "Because if I do, I will die too, I cannot swim. I'm not an idiot."

Now this seemed to make sense to the frog. But he asked. "What about when I get close to the bank? You could still try to kill me and get back to the shore!"

"This is true," agreed the scorpion, "But then I wouldn't be able to get to the other side of the river!"

"Alright then...how do I know you won't just wait till we get to the other side and THEN kill me?" said the frog.

"Ahh...," crooned the scorpion, "Because you see, once you've taken me to the other side of this river, I will be so grateful for your help, that it would hardly be fair to reward you with death, now would it?!"

So the frog agreed to take the scorpion across the river. The scorpion crawled onto the frog's back, his sharp claws prickling into the frog's soft hide, and the frog slid into the river. The muddy water swirled around them, but the frog stayed near the surface so the scorpion would not drown. He kicked strongly through the first half of the stream, his flippers paddling wildly against the current.

Halfway across the river, the frog suddenly felt a sharp sting in his back and, out of the corner of his eye, saw the scorpion remove his stinger from the frog's back. A deadening numbness began to creep into his limbs.

"You fool!" croaked the frog, "Now we shall both die! Why on earth did you do that?"

The scorpion shrugged, "Honestly, I did not realize we hadn't reached land yet, centuries of inbreeding have made me pretty much retarded" and as they both sank to their deaths the scorpion leaned in and whispered to the dying frog "Allah Ackbar, faggot"
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JohnDoe said:
I wonder if there is a Swedish version of this tale:


Here's another good one.


Getting old school:


The risk of being progressive is twofold; first you chance throwing out all the good lessons in your haste to dispose of the antique, and secondly you often fail to realize that others have not progressed.

Here the Swedes have forgotten elementary caution and assumed the savage religious zealots they imported were as liberal and kind as they.
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This is my favorite version.
 
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Here's a freebie @Cat Party:

How workers killed the liberal arts

“Work is fundamental to who you are and who you will become,” Bates College president Clayton Spencer told freshmen who had just arrived at the small liberal arts college in 2013. And, she continued, “I hope you realize by now that you have been working all of your life.” These freshmen, she assured them on that autumn day, were about to embark on their “college careers,” which would soon usher them into their professional careers.

Nothing may seem out of the ordinary about Spencer’s remarks, but from the vantage point afforded us by history, we can see how unusual it is for a liberal arts college to ground its existence in work.

The liberal arts, until relatively recently, were regarded as “liberal” to the degree that they taught students that some things in life, being good in themselves, were not done because they were useful or necessary but entirely for their own sake. The liberal arts took as its purpose that of introducing students to a space of freedom beyond expediency, practicality, and utility. Work, therefore, had nothing to do with it.

Sadly, pretty much all that was liberal (or “free”) about the liberal arts has since withered away, and now they live on mostly in name only, and only so long as they’re deemed useful.

How did the liberal arts meet their death?

Newman’s university and the last formidable defense of the liberal arts
During the early and mid-nineteenth century in England, old liberal arts universities such as Oxford and Cambridge were forced to confront a new philosophy and a rising need. The new philosophy was utilitarianism, the new need was for a mass public education geared toward training young persons in the relevant skills of the day. The former insisted that the good was utility, the latter in the establishment of professional schools. As a newly appointed rector of a new Catholic university in Dublin in 1852, John Henry Newman was invited to give a set of lectures on the aims of the university in his time. What he provided was probably the last formidable defense of the liberal arts before their demise.

In the Idea of the University lectures, Newman argues that the chief purpose of the liberal arts is neither to engage in novel scientific experiments (for there are research institutions committed to doing just this) nor, strictly speaking, to be professionally useful, but to cultivate each student’s intellect so that he or she can comprehend how the various forms and fields of knowledge fit together into a whole. The aim is not novelty but breadth of comprehension; not inventiveness but the exercise of judgment. Newman thought that theoretical knowledge of this kind spoke to a “direct need of our nature”—a need, we might say, to discover who we really are as well as how the world really works. Newman wrote that it is “the boast, or at least the ambition, of Philosophy” to have “mapped out the Universe.” Knowledge of this kind, therefore, just is good—good in itself well before it is useful.

He went on to say that cultivating each student’s intellect would also prove to be beneficial for society: “training of the intellect, which is best for the individual himself, best enables him [also] to discharge his duties in society.” Individuals whose intellects had been improved by rigorous study would be able to think clearly, speak eloquently, and converse with general understanding and thus would be, at least in those respects, better citizens.

After arguing both that the liberal arts are intrinsically good and that they’re good for society, Newman carefully spelled out how they were also useful: People capable of rational inquiry, able to see vital connections, and accustomed to seeing how a wide array of things could fit together into a whole would be able to fulfill their professional duties afterward with “a power and a grace.”

In our age where knowledge work in Silicon Valley is highly valued, Scott Hartley’s popular book The Fuzzy and the Techy: How the Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World attests to this, showing that “fuzzies” (or those coming from liberal arts backgrounds) are needed in startups just as much as “techies” (or those from STEM). And Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class—and How it’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life made the case back in 2002 that individuals working in creative industries (and presumably, therefore, those coming from liberal arts backgrounds) would drive the “new economy.”

In crucial respects, Newman’s argument advanced in 1852 was not just different but also more ambitious than that of Hartley and Florida’s in our time. He was not suggesting that the liberal arts are justified by dint of their utility, but rather that their reason for being is both the acquisition of general, overarching knowledge and the cultivation of the intellect. It just so happens that being engaged in these things for their own sake tends to also be economically beneficial to oneself as well as good for society at large.

Pieper’s Elegy and the death of the liberal arts
The demise of the liberal arts as a good in themselves is directly linked to the way that society thinks about work.

In his short yet powerfully insightful 1947 book Leisure: The Basis of Culture, the German philosopher Josef Pieper posed a seemingly innocent question: “Are there such things [today] as liberal arts?” He wrote the book shortly after World War II, when West Germans, he wrote, were “engaged in the re-building of a house, and our hands [were] full.” So, he asked, “Shouldn’t all our efforts be directed to nothing other than the completion of that house?” Surprisingly, he didn’t think so, yet he worried, and with good reason, that activities not tangibly directed to rebuilding society would be regarded as otiose and hence subject to mockery.

The key to Pieper’s diagnosis of the post-World War II human condition is the idea that human beings have become defined by their work—by the useful, the socially beneficial, and the functional—and so are products and purveyors of what he calls the “servile arts.” In this world of “total work,” everything must be undertaken in the name of “work,” and because of this, there can remain no space of inquiry distinct from and higher than the demands of work. Contrary to the vision that Newman had defended, now even intellectual engagement, if it was to be justified at all, could only be justified as “intellectual work”—not as contemplation for its own sake—and only so long as it proved to be socially beneficial. In this worldview, work is indeed fundamental to “who you are and who you will become.”

What the liberal arts had for the longest time held open was a space in which human beings could discover that they were more than “functionaries” or “workers,” a space devoted solely to the contemplation of higher things. Now this sentiment cannot but sound highfalutin, nostalgic, “useless,” “indulgent,” unambitious,” “idle,” “lazy,” and most especially “wasteful.”

While there are scholars still insisting that the liberal arts’ value lies in its development of critical thinking, which is spoken of in terms reminiscent of Newman’s intellectual cultivation and encouragement of active citizenship, the purpose of this critical thinking is most often framed much differently than it used to be. By the time I went to college in the late 90s, I had grown accustomed to hearing that developing strong critical thinking skills would make me highly employable.

Witness Chris Teare, who is here interviewing John Ager, a consultant with Kepner Tregoe and an advocate for critical thinking in the workplace, in Forbes:

Teare: Based upon your experience with professionals in various businesses, what would your recommendation be with regard to the undergraduate educations of college students?

Ager: My recommendation would be to ensure undergraduate educations teach methods of inquiry and of communicating findings. My eldest daughter’s liberal arts education did just that, and she is translating that into a career in data analytics.

At the end of the interview, Teare confides: “I know that my own liberal arts education has enabled me to succeed not only in secondary and higher education, but also once upon a time as a television anchorman. I have always needed critical thinking skills in education, but TV news sometimes required nothing other than the ability to read a teleprompter. Of course, if the teleprompter broke, and I had to ad-lib, or was conducting an interview live, I had nothing but my liberal arts critical thinking skills until the next commercial arrived.”

The liberal arts, which once advocated free thought for its own sake, have now been put to use instead as a way to prepare us for a compressed life of creative office work.

The year 2050 and hope for the liberal arts to reclaim its place in our lives
If the world of 2050 turns out to be even more bewildering than that of 2018, then we’ll need a reinvented version of the liberal arts more than ever.

In an excerpt from his new book, historian-turned-futurist Yuval Harari describes a world that, by 2050, is defined by “accelerating change,” a welter of information and misinformation, and unforeseeable technological inventions. No longer, Harari thinks, can education be focused on the acquisition of information (since new information will constantly arise, old information becoming obsolete) or on skills training (“we don’t really know what particular skills people will need” or how quickly human skills might be replaced by machine learning).

Instead, Harari suggests that lifelong education should be grounded in sense-making (the ability “to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world”), the capacity to come to a “comprehensive view of the cosmos” (which is reminiscent of Newman’s view), the need for self-reinvention (given how rapidly reality could continue to turn over), and, most of all, the search for self-knowledge.

Self-knowledge, he implies, is part dispositional and part content-rich. As he explains:

Dispositional: “To survive and flourish in such a world, you will need a lot of mental flexibility and great reserves of emotional balance. You will have to repeatedly let go of some of what you know best, and feel at home with the unknown.”

Content-rich: “To know what you are, and what you want from life. This is, of course, the oldest advice in the book: know thyself. For thousands of years, philosophers and prophets have urged people to know themselves. But this advice was never more urgent than in the 21st century, because unlike in the days of Laozi or Socrates, now you have serious competition. Coca-Cola, Amazon, Baidu and the government are all racing to hack you.”

As I read Harari, I find myself thinking that the promise of the liberal arts may lie not far off into the future. Might he not be urgently pointing us to the need for a revitalized liberal arts education—this one lifelong, more spontaneous, more flexible, and more supple—that would encourage each of us to know ourselves as well as our place in the general order of things? And might not the goal, this time, be not just to find our way through, but to find our way home to genuine freedom?
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https://qz.com/work/1402745/how-workers-killed-the-liberal-arts/
http://web.archive.org/web/20180930.../1402745/how-workers-killed-the-liberal-arts/
 
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tehpope said:
Here's a freebie cat party:

How workers killed the liberal arts



https://qz.com/work/1402745/how-workers-killed-the-liberal-arts/
http://web.archive.org/web/20180930.../1402745/how-workers-killed-the-liberal-arts/
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Liberal arts existed because the children of gentility/nobility needed something to prove they were “educated”. This is why most in that class usually still have entirely useless degrees, because they could afford it. It never improved, only got better at hiding it.
 
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A year after Harvey Weinstein was outed as an alleged rapist by the New York Times and the New Yorker, #MeToo is on the brink of evolving from being a movement about powerful men abusing women in the workplace to one more about men behaving badly in general.



That, at least, is what a piece published by Jezebel last week argues.

The piece, entitled “The Next Step for #MeToo Is Into the Gray Areas,” starts with a meditation on the future of #MeToo, but it’s actually a take-down of Jack Smith IV, a writer and video correspondent for the progressive website Mic. Smith is not exactly a public figure—unless you spend a lot of time on Media Twitter, there's very little chance you've heard of him. Over the last few years, however, Smith has made #Resistance journalism something of his personal brand, covering white supremacist movements and extremism in the U.S. Smith is also, according to Jezebel, a shitty boyfriend, and for this, he is now out of a job: Just hours after Jezebel’s piece was published online, Mic announced that their reporter had been fired. Even before that, the Mic Union came out in support of his alleged victims on Twitter.


even publications like Women’s Health have endorsed it: "Having a man’s hands around your neck plays into the fantasy of being taken, also known as ravishment,” sex therapist and researcher Christine Milrod told Women’s Healthin 2016. “As a result, you feel you have an erotic power over him and your dopamine receptors are firing on all cylinders.” That does not mean, however, it’s safe. Choking someone incorrectly can and has proved deadly.)

In Smith’s case, far more common than allegations of physical abuse were allegations of "emotional manipulation" and "gaslighting." Nina, a pseudonym for one of Smith's accusers, told Jezebel that she met Smith on Tinder. Jezebel editor in chief Julianne Escobedo Shepherd writes:

[Nina] said that their first two dates seemed normal, if intense. “Both times, we did have a connection,” she said, and on their second date, on May 19, they had consensual sex. For a few days after, they didn’t see each other because of conflicting schedules; after Smith was unresponsive to several text messages, Nina said she attempted to end their brief relationship, saying it was clear it was going nowhere. Smith texted later, writing, “I’m surprised you couldn’t sense my interest in you; you’re very sensitive to praise (not a criticism).” Nina responded, “ahh, i’m sorry, maybe a lot of this was in my head!! we texted a lot over the weekend and then the quick fall-off/non-replies to the two times i asked you if you were still into it got me thrown off.” She would later characterize this as Smith’s first attempt to gaslight her, by ignoring her and then making her feel that she had interpreted his lack of response incorrectly.


Another of his accusers, Becca Schuh, said Smith “got me very used very quickly to a specific type of attention from him, and very quickly gave so much of it to me,” she said. “And very abruptly took it away, and only gave it back in tiny doses.” She called this behavior “grooming,” a term typically used in reference to children.

Another of Smith's former lovers, Erica Kay, told Jezebel that she began dating Smith in 2014, while they were both in college at Montclair State University, and continued to sleep with him for several years after they broke up. Kay classifies Smith's behavior as "coercive." Smith "employed tactics of control and manipulation," Shepherd writes, "including an unwillingness to have sex with [Kay] unless she wore a specific eye makeup."

In June, after rumors about Smith’s behavior began to circulate and Jezebel started looking into the story, the company conducted an internal investigation. “We were naturally concerned by what we heard,” Mic’s executive news director Kerry Lauerman told Jezebel. “One of Mic’s core principles is the fair treatment of all people. We immediately removed him as one of our video correspondents until we looked into the matter further.” Through their investigation, according to Lauerman, “the team found no evidence that Jack had behaved improperly at Mic." Smith returned to work on September 5. He was fired less than three weeks later.


Jezebel’s article is almost as much about Smith’s hypocrisy as a progressive man acting badly as it is about the behavior itself. As one of Smith accusers told Jezebel, “How can you…be this woke feminist progressive person who’s the face of this sort of purportedly leftist media organization and treat women the way you do?” she said. “It’s just unacceptable.” In light of this, it’s worth wondering if this story would have been published if Mic weren’t a hub of progressive politics and if Smith hadn’t presented himself, at least professionally, as a woke male. Being an asshole to dates isn't (or wasn't) all that notable; plenty of both men—and women—are coercive and manipulative to people they date. Being a bad boyfriend might not be criminal, but it has officially become a fireable offense (bad girlfriends, however, still get a pass).

Kay, the woman who told Jezebel that Smith would only have sex with her if she wore particular eye makeup, tweeted after the piece came out: “what he did to me was rape, even though it was through coercion and manipulation.” She also spoke about him more than once on her podcast, The Ex Files. In an episode that aired in April, she says: “I'm not going to say his full name because I guarantee that pussy would sue me. He's literally the worst person ever. Find my Twitter and I have at least three threads on why he's a [awful] human being and why he should not be employed at mic.com.” She also says that when she realized Smith was balding, she went out and got a bottle of champagne to celebrate.

The last time Kay and Smith slept together (which Kay called her “monthly dick appointment with Jack”), she says she noticed a Victoria's Secret bag in his bedroom, as well as an extra toothbrush, which made her suspicious. After leaving his house, she says on the podcast, “My stalker ass goes to social media. … He had me blocked since we broke up and I’m like, whatever. Still going to fuck you. Dick too bomb. I didn't give a shit about this man as a human being.” By combing through his Instagram (because she was blocked, she used her dog’s Instagram account to log in), she discovered that Smith did have a girlfriend. She later contacted that woman to tell her that she’d been sleeping with Smith for years, which, she says, Smith denied. (Kay, it should be noted, has a history of issuing threats: In March, she tweeted a screenshot of a text exchange with someone named Patrick. After a heated disagreement about whether or not the Wes Anderson film Isle of Dogs is racist—she says it is; he says it’s not—she texts, “if you ever get anywhere in life i will personally make it a point to call you out for this. i will not forget. i am not the person to make enemies with.” Kay declined to comment for this piece.)


I have no doubt that Smith treated Kay and the other women in Jezebel’s story poorly. But still, he is not, according to the Jezebel report, accused of malfeasance at work or in a professional setting. None of the women Smith is alleged to have mistreated worked with or for him. Some worked in the same field, but he wasn't their boss or manager or in any position of power over his accusers. He also wasn’t prominent enough to make or break anyone's career. He’s not a politician or a nominee for the Supreme Court. Mic’s own internal investigation found that there was no evidence he’d acted improperly on the job. Still, Smith’s firing shows his personal life was clearly a liability for the company—which, according to a report published last week in the Wall Street Journal, is currently considering an offer to sell.

Over the course of the #MeToo movement, a small number of writers and thinkers expressed concern that what started out as a legitimate response to sexual assault, harassment, and inequity in American society will spin into a moral panic, in which poor but normal human behaviors take on the weight of crimes. Masha Gessen wrote about this possibility last year in the New Yorker: “A moral panic is always a reaction to something that has been there all along but has evaded attention—until a particular crime captures the public imagination,” she wrote. “Sex panics in the past have begun with actual crimes but led to outsize penalties and, more importantly, to a generalized sense of danger.”

If this piece from Jezebel is any indication, we’re entering the “generalized sense of danger” phase of the movement now. And maybe that’s a good thing. For far too long, many men have gotten away with brutality against women, both at work and at home. The man currently nominated for the Supreme Court has been accused of multiple counts of sexual assault. The man in the White House has been accused of similar crimes. Is a period of moral panic the appropriate corrective to decades of crimes? The answer, according to Jezebel, seems to be yes.

Straight men of America: take note.
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Written by the woman with the most punchable face in the world - Katie Herzog. Link here, archive here.

Question is: when's my ex gonna get #metoo-ed?
 
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