• Paid Content: Ganxy offers an easier way to sell and market ebooks
• Pando Daily: New York Times writer taps startups for all the news that doesn’t fit the print

So to rationalize this choice, you say that there isn’t a significant difference between the two candidates.

But remember the biggies in the Obama administration — can you imagine McCain or Romney doing any of these?

• health care reform
• ending discrimination against gays and lesbians in the military
• saving the US auto industry
• new fuel efficiency standards
• credit card reform
• getting OBL

There is a difference between Democrats and Republicans, and it is that list. We live in an imperfect world, but one in which you can chose to have the things in that list.

And it’s the Democratic party that supports those decisions too, so even if you aren’t in a swing state, you still need to vote for them in other offices.

(And then you need to pressure Democrats to be more progressive. An easy way to do that is to give money to progressive PACs like Howard Dean’s Democracy for America and Russ Feingold’s Progressives United)

(And if you are really ambitious and have the time, you can work to reform the voting system)

Further reading:

• Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers and an extremely progressive civil liberties activist, says: Progressives: Defeat Romney/Ryan in Swing States
• Robert Reich, one of the most prominent liberal and pro-union thinkers and chairman of government reform org Common Cause, says: If You Succumb to Cynicism, The Regressives Win it All
• This person has a bunch of awesome videos explaining our voting system’s problems and possible solutions. Start with this one about why a plurality-wins system (what we have in the US) leads to a two-party system.

from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.

- Todd Akin

This man is stupid. Donate to Planned Parenthood today!

However I take issue with how much reporters love to take out the cases-of-rape thing. It makes for great television because:

• You get to talk about two adult, taboo topics at the same time: abortion and rape.
• It has the appearance of an interesting edge case in an ethical conundrum. It’s a cheap way to add another dimension to an already contentious issue, so it forces very opinionated people to have and defend even more opinions.

Are there any actual arguments for abortion being more ethical in cases of rape? I have never heard one. The idea that abortion is more ethical in cases of rape implies and requires that it is less ethical in other cases. As such, it is an enormously anti-abortion idea. All reporters who entertain the question are supporting an anti-abortion agenda, because abortion makes for such great television and they don’t want the issue to go away. Furthermore, even pro-choice advocates who answer the question directly instead of challenging its premises are unintentionally reinforcing the idea.

(Donate to Planned Parenthood today!)

update:

Also, from an American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology study in 1996:

One of the worst things about this is learning that there are 32,000 rape pregnancies a year in the US.

— John Perry Barlow (@JPBarlow) August 20, 2012

update 2:

Akin is on the House Science Committee :-(

update 3:

Why am I not shocked that @toddakin invoked 9/11 in defending himself. No, seriously: wonkette.com/481563/todd-ak…

— Cristóbal Palmer (@coxn) August 20, 2012

Homicide Watch is a community-driven reporting project covering every murder in the District of Columbia. Using original reporting, court documents, social media, and the help of victims’ and suspects’ friends, family, neighbors and others, we cover every homicide from crime to conviction.

They currently are trying to raise $40k to fund a student to work for a year to learn crime reporting.

Go give them $5!

The United States is concerned about both the verdict and the disproportionate sentences handed down by a Moscow court in the case against the members of the band Pussy Riot and the negative impact on freedom of expression in Russia.

We urge Russian authorities to review this case and ensure that the right to freedom of expression is upheld.

– U.S. Department of State

That’s a slippery slope my friend. - Damir

Currently on day 7

A well-known demonstration of how complex thoughts work top down to shape human-kind perceptions was orchestrated nearly thirty years ago by David Rosenhan, a professor of law and psychology. He and six volunteers — three other psychologists, a psychiatrist, a painter, and a homemaker — checked themselves into mental hospitals, each claiming to hear a voice that kept saying three words: “empty,’ “hollow,” and “thud.” That was all they did to be psychiatrically interesting; they did not alter their behavior in any other way. In each of the twelve hospitals they tested, they were admitted without question as mental patients.

Once inside, the pseudopatients immediately stopped talking about their voices, and, if they were asked, claimed that they no longer heard them. Nonetheless, all were confidently labeled schizophrenics and kept confined for weeks. (The average stay was nineteen days; one person was kept for nearly two months.) In the context of the psychiatric ward, their ordinary actions were taken as symptoms. For example, when they paced (remember, they were stuck in the ward, which is kind of boring), they were described as nervous and on edge. One of the fakers told a psychiatrist that he’d been closer to his mother as a child but then had become closer to his father as a teenager. “Ambivalence in close relationships:” wrote the psychiatrist. The only people who suspected the experimenters of faking were other patients.

A second experiment reversed the situation. Rosenhan warned the staff of a teaching hospital that he would try to sneak in some pseudopatients, but he never managed to recruit any. Nonetheless, psychiatrists at the hospital labeled scores of people as fakes.

From Us and Them: the science of identity

(or is this on purpose, to sell more Ultra Ivory?)

There is an anthropologist man. He is very loving, empathetic, and loyal to his wife. He is an atheist, and enjoys having a drink after a hard day at work. He dies.

There is a woman who is ambitious, single, makes cautious decisions based on reason, and has sex for pleasure out of wedlock. She dies.

There is a black man who is the captain of the ship. He is loyal to all around him. He appreciates music and is skilled at seducing women. He sacrifices his own life in order to save humanity. [He dies.]

There is an asian man who is good at computers, and also sacrifices his own life to save humanity. [He dies.]

There is a white man who hangs out with the black and asian men and ultimately follows their lead when they sacrifice their lives. [He dies.]

There is biologist man. He is an NPR listener (based on his hair and glasses), curious, and soft. He is open-hearted and trustful, assuming the best of others and wishing to bridge gaps between differences, even in the face of potential danger. He dies.

There is a geologist man. He has tattoos and smokes. He protects his own interests when others do not need his help, and immediately offers help to others when they are in need, even if their misfortune is a result of their own poor decisions. He dies.

There is an immortal robot. He is white and male and was designed by a human white male. His primary purpose is to support the needs of the human white male. He lives.

There is an anthropologist woman. She is married, wants very much to have children, and has strong religious faith even in the face of contradictory evidence. The white male immortal robot compromises her contraception, forcing her to become pregnant (with an alien). He then then drugs and restrains her in order to stop her from having an abortion. She is forced to perform the abortion on herself with almost no anesthesia using tools which were designed for a different purpose. Ultimately, the white male immortal robot has resources that she needs in order to survive, so she is forced to rescue him and carry him on her shoulders. She lives.

If you haven’t gotten it by now, I am suggesting that the film supports a status quo, racist, sexist, anti-science, anti-peace worldview. The one exception is the abortion, err, cesarean scene, in which the anthropologist woman is presented as a righteous hero for doing the procedure on herself. However, the alien is not aborted but allowed to live, and later saves the anthropologist woman’s life by killing one of her enemies.

So while the access-to-procedure aspect is pro-choice, the alien-saved-her-life aspect is perhaps pro-adoption. I’m guessing that neither of these messages were intentional, and further that any of the other morality expressed in the film was mostly unintentional and merely based off of tropes extracted from other horror/10-little-indians films. It was just a poorly-written film that copy and pasted concepts from other films into what the writers knew would hold an audience’s attention, kind of like an episode of Lost.

My first post there is a review of Prometheus.

The new rss feed is here.

Nevermind.

• code.jjb.cc ?
• jjb.cc/code ?
• software.jjb.cc ?
• softwareblog.johnjosepbachir.org ?
• thisisthecodeandsoftwareblogofjohnbachir.com ?
• co.de ?

Discuss.