enchantedsleeper

Like every other villain in Trump World, I think it’s important to not give [UFC CEO Dana] White too much credit here. He’s not some kind of mastermind, but he has been instrumental it changing American masculinity, making it inseparable from conservatism and, of course, inseparable from the UFC brand. And now he and every other weird muscle man that comes to UFC fights are all aligned in their hatred of women and deep desire to feel masculine and powerful. A sea of, usually, very bald men in tight shirts that want to hurt the world and be celebrated for it. But if you drill further down into their ideology you’ll also find the same thing every time. Someone who is trying to get rich, has failed every thing they’ve tried, and realized that manipulating sad internet men was the easiest way to do it.

Ryan Broderick on branding.

One of the things I think it’s important not to lose sight of is the fact that toxic masculinity is a product. It’s something manufactured and sold for profit, at immense cost to the consumer; in identity, self-worth, community, and even humanity. It is neither natural nor inevitable, and as with all forms of commodification it shrinks down something infinitely precious — masculinity or, more rightly, masculinities — into something nasty and cheap.

Men deserve better than being turned into grist for someone else’s capitalist grift machine.

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Normally I record the classes I teach. It gives students who miss class a chance to catch up. I also make space in my classes to talk about what is happening in government right now. A couple of weeks ago, students asked we keep the discussions, but stop recording the class. They worried about any record of their words that might be viewed as criticism of the current administration, and somehow weaponized against them.

Don Moynihan on chilling effects.

This is the opening paragraph of the post, incidentally, and the rest gets worse from there. Fucking grim.

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TIL most celebrity portraits are licensed, meaning they can’t be used for Wikipedia. Which is why Wikipedia often has the most horrible celebrity portrait photos imaginable. Cue a new team of people, WikiPortraits, out to fix this, and it’s interesting to read about the different reception they get from publicists (mostly negative) versus the portrait subjects themselves (“oh gods yes please fix that”).

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One of my more obscure toxic traits is that if I ever have to manually line-break something for formatting purposes (e.g., source code, config file, etc.), my default maximum line length is 83 characters.

Why 83 characters? I have no idea. I think I copied it from comment block formatting during my Baby’s First Coding Project back in like circa 2001 and have done it ever since.

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