Proud Parent Of An Aging, Bitter Punk Rocker

It is worth noting that many of the policies it was criticizing, however (such as book-burning), were also utilized by corrupt communist governments like the Soviet Union. So it would be fair to say that what it was calling out was fascism and fascist elements introduced by corruption.

Under ancient Jewish law, if a suspect on trial was unanimously found guilty by all judges, then the suspect was acquitted. This reasoning sounds counterintuitive, but the legislators of the time had noticed that unanimous agreement often indicates the presence of systemic error in the judicial process, even if the exact nature of the error is yet to be discovered. They intuitively reasoned that when something seems too good to be true, most likely a mistake was made.

In a new paper to be published in The Proceedings of The Royal Society A, a team of researchers, Lachlan J. Gunn, et al., from Australia and France has further investigated this idea, which they call the “paradox of unanimity.”

…

The researchers demonstrated the paradox in the case of a modern-day police line-up, in which witnesses try to identify the suspect out of a line-up of several people. The researchers showed that, as the group of unanimously agreeing witnesses increases, the chance of them being correct decreases until it is no better than a random guess.

Democrats gotta learn to automatically demand a recount before conceding. Republicans cheat. Always always always take that into account.

RECOUNT.

Chop off the stalks and put some butter inside and roast them upsidedown for like 10 mins til they’re soft

chop up the stalks and an onion and a couple of cloves of garlic and some thyme and fry it all w salt n pepper til its soft n brown

stuff that shit in the mushrooms. coat it in blue cheese (or other cheese I GUESS) and cover in breadcrumbs

roast it for like 5-10 mins til its all melty and brown

(a lot of people seem to add bacon to this kind of thing but that sounds like a way of making men eat a vegetable once in their lives and its good without)

Another stuffed mushroom option is to take some olive oil, breadcrumbs, Italian seasoning, and shredded parm, mix those all up with the stems, garlic, and onion (if you like onion) and put that in your mushroom caps and bake for a while.

I was a professional bellydancer for over a decade.

The focus on gendered talk is one major reason I had to leave bellydance behind. There’s way too much gendered talk in that dance despite that not being its real history and it made me feel very uncomfortable (not to mention the general policing/cattiness aspect, which also rubbed me the wrong way; it was like dealing with cheerleaders/mean girls in high school). Really unfortunate, since I did love the actual dancing.

I think we all need to be a lot more mindful of how we talk about and depict gender. I can’t be the only one in the bellydance community, or other communities, that feels shut out by the gendered talk alone. Even prior to realising I was trans in some capacity, I knew about my own genetic chimerism, and that really makes you feel like you don’t belong *anywhere*. How do I relate both to bellydance as a masculine person, and to fixing cars as a woman? Neither of these things are *actually* about gender, but in our society, we’ve stratified this stuff to the point of insanity.

People often say things like, ‘well my girl loved dolls/boy loved cars and I didn’t teach them anything like that, therefore all boys and girls just naturally do X and Y!’ I’ve heard this used as: an excuse for men to act like shitheads, a way for women to demean each other, all in the name of gender. Like each gender has this *inherent behaviour* that can’t be helped, because it’s instinct. I fight *hard* when someone says, 'oh of course he’s useless at housework, he’s a man’ or when a woman says, 'I’m disgusted by women who don’t paint their toenails’. This just perpetuates the general horror of gender to the nth degree. And the thing is, even if a parent never spoke a single word to their kid about any of this, indoctrination starts young, all the way down to the blue and pink bassinets. 

Parents don’t have to do it. The world will do it for them.

For example, I had bright ginger long hair for a while. I am a model and actress as well as a writer, director, and historian. So most of these style choices were related to filming or modelling (requested/necessary vs. choice of my own). I find that I like having long ginger hair. I also like having short, spiky brown hair. But the number of people who keep demanding why I don’t have long ginger hair anymore is…weird. It gets to a point where you wonder if the way you look is your own choice, or pressure to conform. I even had one model photographer recently say exactly the above-mentioned phrase about painted toenails; when I mentioned that I didn’t do that and it’s not very nice to shame other women,  citing the 'prettiness is not a rent you pay to occupy a space marked female’ quote, she spent ages trolling through my Facebook page in order to point out that ‘since I’ve dyed my hair I obviously care about beauty!’  This also prompted a friend of hers, in the usual Facebook echo chamber, to not only agree with her but to say that she was more concerned about having unpainted toenails in front of other people while she was having her baby at the hospital than she was about people looking at her crotch. This type of performative femininity is insidious, and tends to turn people on each other.

One male friend of mine wrote to me privately and said that he knew I was 'much happier in my femininity’ than I was with short hair/looking masculine because one of my modeling photos (the blonde, fake-cheerful one, commissioned by The Sun) made him think that it was clearly natural that I 'glowed with femininity’. I WAS PAID GOOD MONEY TO LOOK LIKE THAT. This is exactly the kind of bullshit that Christians used to tell me regarding the roles of men and women. The thing is, that photograph was ACTED; it’s probably the phoniest one of me I have. The short-hair photos aren’t 'anger’, that’s what I look like with a straight face if I bow my head a little and look up from under my eyebrows. ie my NATURAL FACE. I’ve always had a terrifying face, or I wouldn’t have the streetfighting reputation I have. It’s amazing what you can do just because you naturally look scary. Ask Christopher Walken. Other friends have told me that they’ve never seen me happier than when I have short hair. But sexism is a powerful thing.

And it’s these things, they aren’t even necessarily mean or meant maliciously, that push you into one box or the other. The shame is hardcore, sometimes. My partner’s mum recently asked why I didn’t have my 'long beautiful auburn hair’ anymore. She’s seen me several times with the short brown hair. She also insists that the new Doctor 'shouldn’t be a woman’ even though she thinks the actress is a good Doctor. I know that sounds small, but it’s death by a thousand cuts, and that’s not even my own parents saying it, but somebody else’s. This is what I mean by 'you don’t have to tell someone you disapprove of them directly if by what you say it’s evident that you disapprove of them in general’.

When The Lottery (by Shirley Jackson) was first published, tons of people wrote into the newspaper that published it to demand to know what the hell it was meant to be about

I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story’s readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.

So basically the story is written in such a way that the uncritical nature of the townspeople is highlighted, when it comes to their own traditions. Every year the town commits outright violent murder, but because it’s ‘normal’ to them, they don’t think of it in those terms. The reader, who isn’t part of the town’s cultural assumptions, sees the horrific nature of their actions. But the characters in the story don’t.