More at http://www.newsweek.com/american-researchers-discover-stupidity-virus-283319

This bit of eye candy merges the Danish Chamber Orchestra and a hot chile tasting producing hilarious results. The miracle is how little the music suffered before the mad dash after the last note was played.

This is my contribution to Kitchen Dancing.

When the Men's Group started. I thought that group was a bad idea at the time for the same reason a White Power Group and a Multiillionaire Group would have been, seriously entitled people have been circling the wagons lately and nothing enables them to escalate like a group of like minded people at the top of the entitlement chain.

Time has only succeeded in confirming my worst fears about that group, it's acting just like MRA groups across the web are and the action is not good.

My own ignore list, once restricted to word jumpers and other threadshitters has expanded to include many members of that group.

DU has been a safe haven for all lefties, especially in the early 00s when the country solidified around Stupid after 9/11. That is no longer the case now that it has a "no gurls alowd" sign that has been tacked up by the worst behaved members of one group. It is no longer a safe place for women to post.

Yes, there has been friction between believers and atheists, conspiracy theorists and boring fact based people (ahem) and vegans and omnivores. Most of that has been on the level of banter and easy to dismiss, no one is going to change belief or behavior based on a web site.

However, the systematic trashing, belittling, denial, baiting, patronizing, and viciousness toward half the human race is different.

Thank you for your post, Bjorn Against, it lets us see that not all men are represented by that group. You're one of the people here who convince me it's not hopeless.

My own childhood was scarred by dressup and careful posing, never having my picture taken when I was doing anything like painting or making sparklers with my chemistry set or building a Lincoln Log casket to hold the stupid dolls I never played with. Anyone who sees the few pictures of my youth would think I was a doll, myself, taken out of a box full of cotton batting once a year for a photograph and replaced carefully, never to be marred with a skinned knee or lump on the head from a rock in a snowball.

Other than the photos taken of starving women during the Depression and Rosie the Riveter during WWII, photos I saw growing up were of everything female being decorative objects.

I love this project. Thank you so much for posting it. And the little girl in the tutu with the basketball says it all, that we're not just little dollies put in the world to look at, we actually get out into that world and do things.

Do antiabortionists never consider the fully human, living, breathing, and thinking person called a woman in their antiabortion equations? Or do they subscribe to the mediaeval view that women are nothing but animated flowerpots into which a man places his seed, their wishes and lives to be disregarded?

No antiabortion person has ever addressed the damage forced childbirth does to women. They can't. Everything breaks down when they have to admit there is an adult human being with her own civil rights involved.

that said a day's work was worth a day's living wage, supported by a minimum wage which was geared to support a family of four on a "thrifty" lifestyle, which meant chuck instead of sirloin and vacations in a tent rather than in a big hotel.

The minimum wage was allowed to fall relative to inflation from the early 70s onward and now it won't support a single worker in safe housing with a diet nutritious enough to keep him healthy.

That is the main thing that has happened, a government policy of depressing labor's wages as far down as they will go. When they hit the floor, they started shipping jobs to the third world, aided by trade policies that disadvantaged the US labor market.

The New Deal + strong unions gave labor the best deal it had ever had. A strong middle class was created and it was stable, giving a great deal of stability to the country. If the rich paid attention to what was going on, they got richer. If they didn't and just spent money without keeping an eye on what was coming in, they got poorer.

The generation that benefited the most was the generation born during and after WWI and who were teenagers during the Depression and came of age just in time for WWII. There was a lot of pent up demand there and their bliss was to be able to go out and buy the things their families had been deprived of when they were growing up. To their children, they seemed crass and materialistic, ready to settle for toys rather than achieve the progress that would break down regimentation and social segregation across ethnic, racial, religious, sexual, occupational and class lines.

That's basically what the 60s were about, that and a nasty little war that we should never have gotten into.

We brats did a lot when it comes to kicking down the barriers, especially the ones that said women were only teachers, nurses, waitresses and maids and only until they married. After that, they were SOL when it came to jobs.

The rich declared war on us during Nixon's paranoid administration and it's been that way since then. The economy now is the direct result of 44 years of conservative, pro business, anti labor government policy.

I'm your typical white bread suburban cracker. I've been poor and I've even lived on the street for a short time but the sense of entitlement to better was always there. It was weird. I've always been oddly aware of it, probably because my health has caused me to fall through the holes in our tattered system more than once.

That entitlement is reinforced all over the place simply because of the way I speak and present myself to the world, the way I was taught in infancy by suburban, educated parents.

Entitlement for a lot of people is the basic culture they were brought up in and they don't know it's there until it's threatened, often by people who are only pointing it out.

Conversely, people who are not entitled by birth to a certain place in the social order but who make a lot of money despite the odds against it often have a hard time if they try to move up a class or two. Since they don't present themselves the way entitled people do, they're not accepted no matter how ostentatious their lifestyle. The latter is why so many of them die broke.

Entitlement is a bizarre thing when you recognize your own, really difficult to escape even when you see it for what it is, hitting you with guilt if you don't live up to it.

It's a lot more comfortable if you don't recognize it and that's probably why people hate it when you point theirs out to them.

who mopped the floor in heels and pearls and never said a cross word and would let him use her body in any way he chose because she literally had nowhere else to go and no other way to survive.

Why any human being would want that is beyond me, but slavery was popular for millennia and doormat wives are the last vestige of it, although getting rid of one in favor of a new, young, racy model is more problematic than just putting her on an auction block. One must hire lawyers and pay bribes to get her out in favor of the younger one with the tight ass and perky tits unruined by childbirth.

Why a certain type of male needs to be that tyrannical to get it up is beyond me, but I learned how to recognize the type early in life and have managed to avoid them like the plague they are.

However, the "nice guy" phenomenon is something completely different, he's the joker with subpar looks and little personality who goes on whining tirades because the supermodels aren't particularly interested. He thinks he's a nice guy but he isn't, he's just another one who thinks women are worth something solely based on looks and can't understand that a five minute conversation is likely to put 99% of women off for life because he's such a whiny narcissist with absolutely nothing to be narcissistic about.

Both are likely to be in that angry male category that the Republicans have been so great at courting. Since both are utterly clueless because women aren't quite human to either, this is why Republicans are doing some hand wringing because women don't seem to want to be slaves any more and are leaving that party in droves.

How odd. Who could have foreseen that economic dependency and sharing powerlessness with their children was unappealing to adult women? Don't they know what's best for them?