With Such Words
if you aren't a hypocrite, your moral standards aren't high enough
for your weekend reading 
24th-Oct-2014 11:59 pm
talibusorabat: Interesting - engaging or oh god oh god we're all gonna die... (Quote: Interesting)
I still feel like I don't have a lot to write about, but I have been doing a lot of reading. (ReadKit has been, if you'll permit a little melodrama, an absolute lifechanger.) I have a Pinboard account where I save links I think would be interesting to people, but I thought: Hey, why not make a weekly links post like all the other cool kids on the net? If nothing else, it will give me something to post about. (It also gave me a great excuse to spend an hour messing around in Keyboard Maestro, creating the best macro for putting this post together. Few things make me happier these days than messing around with Keyboard Maestro macros.)

So, for your weekend reading, may I recommend:

This Post Is Not About GamerGate
And, you know, it's not just tech journalism either: The side effect of this is that the world starts thinking that every time the House votes to repeal Obamacare or every time Congress holds a hearing about Benghazi or every time John Oliver TOTALLY EVISCERATES someone every time a fringe scientist says climate change isn’t real or every time a normal person or government agency joins Twitter or every time a celebrity gets plastic surgery or every time some internet nerds can rile up a Gawker writer on Twitter is capital-I Important. They're all attempts to "win the social media lottery" to have a story go "viral" and suddenly have a lot more traffic.

Ralph Nader letter to Apple
“That’s the price of affordable phones,” says the corporatist argument. This could be the case, if Apple was just barely profitable. But, as revealed in a recent letter responding to Carl Icahn’s call for more stock buybacks (you respond to billionaire’s pleas much more often than workers’ pleas), Apple is planning to have repurchased $130 billion of its own shares by the end of next year. In short, Apple is so profitable, that it does not know what to do with $130 billion except buy back stock from its shareholders to maybe boost its share price. There are many alternate ways could have spent its surplus profits. For example, what if Apple decided to invest that excess $130 billion in dignified working conditions and living wages, instead of unproductively using their surplus to buy stocks back from the wealthy? Estimates differ, but according to Chinese labor watchdogs, factory workers in Apple’s supply chain make average salaries of, estimating at the high end, about $500 per month for about 80 hours of work per week. Doubling monthly salaries and cutting hours in half -- reforms that would make great strides towards having Chinese factories meet modern, dignified standards of a living wage from a 40-hour work week -- would cost ~$1500 per month (~$18,000 per year) for each factory worker.

You Don't Have To Feel Your Breasts
Breast cancer is the most common cause of cancer among American women, and early detection is still a key way to reduce the risk of death. But in 1997, a big, randomized trial of Chinese women found that those who performed regular breast self-exams had the same chance of getting and dying from breast cancer as those who didn’t. Instead, the self-examining women found more benign growths, the removal of which carries its own risks. A Russian study from the late 1980s had yielded similar mortality results.

Jennifer Garner Speaks Out Against Sexism in Hollywood
"We got home at night and we compared notes," she explained. "And I told him every single person who interviewed me, I mean every single one... asked me, 'How do you balance work and family?' And he said the only thing that people asked him repeatedly was about the tits on the Blurred Lines girl [model Emily Ratajkowski, his co-star in Gone Girl]."

Real equality is when women have the right to be as drunk and stupid as men
In addition to just being ineffective – women get raped drunk and sober, in skirts and in sweatpants – warnings to avoid alcohol in order to avoid being raped send a clear message to women: you can never make a mistake, or any crime committed against you will be at least partially your fault.

European Soccer Has a Racism Problem. Its Solution: Sexism.
Sports culture is overwhelmingly male, and fan violence is generally perpetrated by male fans. But the point here isn’t to deal with male aggression or machismo; this is about racism, and the violent behavior it often elicits. And racism isn’t male. By banning men and bringing in women, UEFA would be implying that women cannot be racist—that women could not possibly be capable of foul-mouthed, virulent racism, and must be brought in to save men from themselves. Even when gender stereotyping depicts women in a positive light, it still removes agency and forces women to assume a specific identity.

America, The Defensive: Wars, Terrorism And Thirty Years Of Perpetual 'States Of Emergencies'
And so, "state of emergency" becomes shorthand for government abuse. It conjures up images of towns destroyed by national disasters or extreme threats from foreign nations, but in practice it's rarely anything more than a leading indicator of governmental power grabs.
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