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People who keep journals? (But yeah, I wouldn't call McIntosh/Sarkesian journalists, either.)

Meh, the US also has different regions with very different levels of export-dependency, and yet it does reasonably well with a single currency. I also don't buy the whole black-and-white "weaker currency = good for economy, stronger currency = bad" meme. There are both advantages and disadvantages to each. Like that article demonstrates, "austerity" (Boo! Hiss!) is actually a conflation of two different things: Trying to balance income & expenses by cutting government spending Trying to balance income & expenses by raising taxes I guess for the likes of Krugman, it's convenient to obscure that distinction in cases like the current Greece crisis, because the analysis of which of the two is really hurting the economy, might not turn out to their liking.

Got a big bottle of homemade "sloe gin" as a gift. At first I didn't even know if I should open it, because I'm not really into hard liquors. But now that it's open I have to watch myself to not drink too much per evening, because damn that stuff tastes good....

They already are, if by "marry" you mean "make wedding vows before witnesses (and god if that's your thing), and live together accordingly". The question is, which of those marriages should receive state recognition along with tax benefits and bureaucratic/legal conveniences.

A little harsh, but it does make some good points. I think this hits the nail on the head: "The Confederate flag, and other rebel iconography, is a marker of Southern distinctiveness, which, like American distinctiveness, is inextricably bound up with the enslavement and oppression of black people. But only the South is irredeemable in the Left’s view, and it has been so only since about 1994, when it went Republican."

The famous photograph which that statue is based on, was staged, wasn't it? So they didn't actually need so many soldiers to put up the flagpole, the photographer just decided that it looked better... I don't think they don't adorn any official government building/memorial though.

Usually, an affair involves one of each... (But your general point stands.)

Doesn't it technically fly over a Civil War memorial behind the state house? Or something like that.

Wow, that moon-sized entitlement mixed with willful economic illiteracy. Those kinds of SJW indie devs seem to honestly believe that the world at large owes them money because they choose to spend their time delivering a 1st year sociology essay in multimedia form and call it a "game", and that big bad capitalism is preventing them from getting what they're owed.

So...... In 2013, in response to wide-spread criticism, President Obama set strict rules for drone strikes to help prevent civilian casualties. But, as it turns out, he then went and secretly exempted drone strikes in Pakistan/Yemen/Afghanistan (i.e. pretty much all of them) from those rules. :facepalm: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/20/americas-drone-policy-all-exceptions-no-rules-yemen

In today's world, that would accomplish little. Somebody would dig into court records or something and post the details online regardless. Indeed. The media are covering that info because if they didn't, people would go to competing outlets who do.

Huh. From the article: Can hosting providers legally do that? I would have expected there to be procedures in place whereby the hosting provider would have to inform the customer which exact part of their content is violating which exact terms of the hosting agreement, give them an ultimatum for correcting things, etc. Just flipping the off switch on a whim, could cause significant financial damage to the hosting client. Don't they have contractual or legal protections?

If your minority status affected the perpetrator's motives for carrying out the crime, and/or the way they carried out the crime , then yes.

Hate crimes cover everything from "3rd grade student shoved a classmate of the opposite race on the playground" to massacres like this; I do think we need our language to be able to differentiate between the two. I wouldn't necessarily restrict the terrorism label to "organized groups", because there's no reason why it can't be committed by a single person. However I think it does involve: indiscriminate deadly violence that is premeditated / was planned ahead in cold blood and is designed to indirectly target a whole demographic (to make them feel unsafe/unwelcome, or make them bow to some political demands) and optimizes the choice of target in such a way as to maximize casualties and/or symbolic value From the information we know, all of that seems to apply to this massacre, just like it applied to the Boston Marathon bombing.

I guess one can make the case that we should retire the word "terrorism" altogether. But as long as it is used for other attacks with similar MO, we should use it here as well.

So by now the news of the deadly attack on a bible study meeting at an African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina, should have reached everyone, since it's also made the front pages of non-US news outlets now. From what is know at this time, it was a white supremacist terrorist attack. (And since one of the victims was a state senator, at the same time also a political assassination.) It's also very reminiscent of the darkest periods of southern US history, when violent attacks against black churches by groups such as the KKK were commonplace. It's sad all around. As Jon Steward expressed on his show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJl9iqnvkOE Politicization / Reactions Of course, before the bodies were even in the grounds, the wrangling about political interpretations and calls to action began like clockwork. This guy sums up the usual suspects perfectly: For example, Rick Santorum tried to completely ignore all racial aspects of the massacre and shamelessly spin it as an attack on Christianity instead. And I hear that Fox News and Rush Limbaugh are using most of their coverage to try and spin it as "a lone kid with mental issues" and trying to brush away any connection with a larger white supremacist movement and an even larger society-wide racism problem (although since I'm not following those outlets myself that's just second-hand info). On the other extreme, besides using it as a platform to predictably lobby for gun control laws, over-zealous left-wing activists are trying to extend the terrorist's extreme racism to all white people and especially to the authorities handling the case, and they're constantly starting social media outrage campaigns based on misinformation like: "Look, the police is not doing a full-scale man hunt because the perp is white!!!!!!" (...when in fact the police was doing such a man hunt, and did indeed end up arresting the perp quite quickly), "Look he wasn't hand-cuffed when he was arrested, because he is white!!!!!!" (...when in fact he was both cuffed and shackled, it just wasn't very clear on photos from some angles), "Well why wasn't he shot dead instead of being arrested like <random example of a black person who was shot dead by police>, that's white privilege!!!!!!" (...when in fact the Occams Razor explanation to that is, that the guy gave himself up immediately when caught and did not run or resist arrest), and so on. However, beyond those predictable right/left-wing deflections and overreactions and politicizations, there are also two more unique aspects to the media and social-media reactions to this particular case: Calls for removing the Confederate Flag from South Carolina government buildings. The terrorist who carried out the attack loved to wear emblems and flags from historic regimes where white rulers oppressed black people (like Rhodesia and apartheid-era South Africa), and many commenters consider the Confederate Flag in the same category, or even believe that its public presence "encouraged" people like him to become white supremacists. The South Carolina government has been entrenched in a conflict for or against showing the flag, for decades - one group seeing it as a symbol for racism and slavery, and the other group seeing it as an important part of the state's historic heritage and a symbol for political self-determination. Apparently they reached a bipartisan compromise a while ago (not showing the flag in the most prominent/meaningful spot, but still showing it elsewhere), but the 'anti' side seems to be taking current events as an opportunity to restart the debate. Sarcastic snipes by members of the online atheist/skeptic movement Along the lines of "So much for 'prayer helps against mass shootings' amirite? lol", referring to the fact that the location of the attack was a bible study meeting in a church. I was honestly somewhat shocked to see these crop up. I guess they were responding to some stupid remarks (about player being the solution for society's problems) made by some conservative in the past, but it came across to me as completely inappropriate and ugly. Not sure how it will all develop from here. I hope that the families and communities of the people who were murdered in this attack, can heal. Maybe at some point in the distant future, so can our broken society.

Here's a little gem about the Dolezal story that I had previously missed: Rachel Dolezal boycotted Exodus: Gods and Kings because it cast white actors as Africans - She accused the film of 'misrepresentation' Not really. This literally has already happened in my country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_for_Neighbourly_Love,_Freedom,_and_Diversity Well, ****. According to the wiki page it was a party that had only 3 members, never took part in an election, and has disbanded. I wouldn't call that much of a threat, nor an indication of larger social trends.

The academic left (and parts of the civil rights movement) already went there, back in the 70s. These days, the groups in question don't like to talk about that aspect of their history. I doubt it'll make a comeback.

I guess race-bending is not so uncommon: In her education and day-to-day life, probably not. In the political activism circles in which she moved, probably yes.

Japan never fails to deliver when it comes to "Weird, Random and Interesting" : [link to article]

I don't know what you mean by "perfect capitalist system", but I think that a perfect free-market system would likely have a much larger number of, and on average much smaller, companies than we have today - and little to no unemployment. Mega-corporations are likely not sustainable in a perfect free market, since they function like inefficient command economies internally. They're kept alive today by the government - directly via Fed loans, bail-outs, legally enforced monopolies, etc., and indirectly by a ridiculously oversized legal body of anti-free-market regulations that keep smaller competitors down. (Many of those laws and regulations were actually, at least in part, written by big-business lobbyists and rubber-stamped through Congress. And yet the left loves to pretend that "big-business" and "regulations" are like ice and fire, and that to keep the corporations in check we should encourage politicians to pass even more numerous and complex regulations... )

Well, there's a reason why Rand's Objectivism is sometimes nicknamed "the Marxism of the right" Though I think you're deflecting too much if you brush away the comparison between SJWism and Marxism on the grounds that "other ideologies assigns labels to groups too". They do, but they're different kinds of labels, not related to the Marxist "oppressed class" concept. While I don't like objectivism, I really don't think that one can accuse it of rejecting individual justice in favor of class justice like Marxists and SJWs do... Or put another way: Whatever labels objectivists assign (however childish or ungainly), are cosmetic and not foundational to their conception of justice. They may approve or disapprove of a group of people, but regardless of that consider justice something that needs to be administered equally to everyone regardless of group membership, based on individual actions. Whereas to the Marxist/SJW, class membership (in an "oppressed" or "oppressor" class) very much determines what kind of "justice" a person deserves, what rights they should be granted or denied, whether their personal success should be assisted or hindered (think quotas), etc.

Except for the foreign replacements... From the article: