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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • Andrea Dworkin was an influential feminist mainly in the '80 and '90. She was pretty clearly anti pornography, at least as it existed in her time (she died in 2005. Who knows what she might think of some of the stuff out there today). She’s also one of the most frequently misquoted feminists of all time, particularly by anti-feminists. she did not say all heterosexual intercourse was rape:

    Several reviewers accused you of saying that all intercourse was rape. I haven’t found a hint of that anywhere in the book. Is that what you are saying?

    Andrea Dworkin: No, I wasn’t saying that and I didn’t say that, then or ever. There is a long section in Right-Wing Women on intercourse in marriage. My point was that as long as the law allows statutory exemption for a husband from rape charges, no married woman has legal protection from rape. I also argued, based on a reading of our laws, that marriage mandated intercourse—it was compulsory, part of the marriage contract. Under the circumstances, I said, it was impossible to view sexual intercourse in marriage as the free act of a free woman. I said that when we look at sexual liberation and the law, we need to look not only at which sexual acts are forbidden, but which are compelled.

    The whole issue of intercourse as this culture’s penultimate expression of male dominance became more and more interesting to me. In Intercourse I decided to approach the subject as a social practice, material reality. This may be my history, but I think the social explanation of the “all sex is rape” slander is different and probably simple. Most men and a good number of women experience sexual pleasure in inequality. Since the paradigm for sex has been one of conquest, possession, and violation, I think many men believe they need an unfair advantage, which at its extreme would be called rape. I don’t think they need it. I think both intercourse and sexual pleasure can and will survive equality.

    It’s important to say, too, that the pornographers, especially Playboy, have published the “all sex is rape” slander repeatedly over the years, and it’s been taken up by others like Time who, when challenged, cannot cite a source in my work.





  • But you’re just here arguing about semantics anyway.

    Well duh, this is a post about the meaning of soup. We’re all here arguing semantics. Anyway, if you can justify the meaning of “vegetable” by its culinary use in the kitchen, then we might as well shortcut this chain of thinking and use that argument directly for soup.

    Clearly cereal is not a soup, going by its culinary use in the kitchen.




  • It’s a very USA specific thing and people in other countries are often surprised this is such a big deal, because in many countries it’s a non-issue. Mostly because having an ID is so ubiquitous in many places. People are often surprised that many Americans don’t possess ID.

    There’s a lot of stuff about the US elections that’s surprising to e.g. Europeans. Why do so many not have ID? Why do you so often have to wait in line for hours? Why do some areas apparently have not enough polling places? Why do I need to register to vote, sometimes repeatedly? Why is it so hard to get time off work to go vote? A lot of these seem like basic requirements for a functioning democracy.

    The US election system has a bunch of historical quirks. And also to my eyes there seems to be a conscious effort from some government officials to make people not go vote.


  • This will not work. Giving two countries who are actively at war nuclear weapons will result in them firing their nuclear weapons. That’s not the result you want.

    “Yes, we have nuclear weapons, and we’ll only use them if our continued existence is being threatened. By the way, you’re threatening it; you should really stop.”

    This threat is really weak, because the second sentence undermines the first. If they are already threatening your existence, why haven’t you fired your nukes yet?



  • I agree with the sentiment: a lot of cooking does not require great precision, so a scale is not often necessary. but I think at that point you should be able to dispense with measuring equipment altogether and just go by feel for most things. A lot of cooking for me is throwing an amount into the pan that feels right, and I don’t see a need to measure cups of things.

    If I’m baking, accuracy is necessary and I will always reach for the scale.

    I guess the point I’m making is that measuring in cups represents a kind of midpoint in the precision-convenience trade-off that I just personally don’t find very useful.


  • “You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?

    We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.

    Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

    ~ John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon



  • The general argument for getting rid of minimum wage is that there is a whole bunch of work out there which is simply not valuable enough to be profitable if the labour must be paid at minimum wage prices, and so those jobs simply aren’t available right now.

    The trade-off is that it guarantees laborers are able to afford a basic life with their jobs, which greatly reduces the ability of capitalists to prey on the working class. However with UBI that problem isn’t so big anymore, so there’s theoretically no need for a minimum wage.