The first wool beanie being made for me by members of the Lazy, Stupid & Godless knitter conspiracy is now complete! Many thanks to wonderful generous Lab Cat (cdavies) for this beautiful wool beanie!

How fucking awesome are the cables!? It’s like an Irish fisherman’s sweater. I am very touched by this kind and affectionate act. More photos are below the fold.

Here is the template for a less elegant, but more festive design:

Yesterday during the Yankees pre-game show, Michael Kay asked manager Joe Girardi about the foofaraw surrounding phenom pitcher Joba Chamberlain’s habit of fist pumping when he strikes out a batter. For those that don’t give a flying fuck about the Yankees, or even about baseball, the context here is that baseball players are very, very concerned about being “shown up” by opposing players. So a bunch of whiny-ass fucknozzle batters who have been struck out by Chamberlain have complained that his fist-pumping is “showing them up”, and he better stop it because he is TOTALLY RUINING THE DIGNITY OF THE GAME OF BASEBALL!!!!1!111!!11!!TWELVETY!1!!!!1!!!!!1

Girardi’s answer—while technically correct—shows you how ridiculous these pampered baby-ass baseball players really are. According to Girardi’s analysis, Chamberlain’s fist-pumping is absolutely fine, because when he does it he is looking into the Yankees’ dugout, and not at the batter he just struck out, or at the oppposing team’s dugout. This means that he is not “showing up” the opposing batter or team, but rather is simply “celebrating” with his teammates.

In the context of absurd wackadoodle semiotics of athletic celebratory fist-pumping, this analysis is definitely correct. But the fact that it even needs to be engaged is totally fucking pathetic.

If you don’t want to get “shown up” by Chamberlain, don’t let him strike you the fuck out! And for fuck’s sake, don’t be such a sensitive soul that it hurts your baby-ass feelings that an enthusiastic kid pumps his fucking fist at you after striking your overpaid whiny-ass the fuck out!

(And let’s not even get into the fact that plenty of other pitchers do the same exact fucking thing—including lame-ass Red Sox closer Jonathon Papelbon—without comment, and the only reason Chamberlain is TOTALLY RUINING THE DIGNITY OF BASEBALL!!11!!!!!11! is because he is a New York Yankee.)

So it looks like even more likely now that Obama will win the nomination, although I guess there is some non-zero chance that Clinton could somehow pull something off. Regardless, it will soon be time to focus on the general election. This has been a very hotly contested primary, and there are a lot of short tempers and tense feelings. Well, it is now time for all Democrats—regardless of Democratic candidate preference—to settle the fuck down!

Do not forget that you are a member of a political fucking party! The entire purpose of a political party is for its members to collectively pool their political influence for the purpose of gaining power!! This means that sometimes you have to put your influence—votes, campaign efforts, donations—behind a candidate who is not your first choice!

However, if you are a loyal member of a party you do this anyway! It’s what political parties are for! You don’t get to pick and choose which general election candidates you will support, and you don’t get to have litmus tests!!

If you consider yourself a Democrat, and you believe that the Democratic Party is the best possibility for steering our country away from the edge of the cliff that we may, unfortunately, have already plummeted over, then you must support the nominee!!! To do otherwise is to play right the fuck into into the hands of the sick-fuck theocratic wackaloon neo-confederate right-wing feudal oligarchy.

This is not fucking negotiable! Any fucking questions!?

Zuska has a fascinating discussion going on concerning the curious fact that shitbag privileged assholes always seem to come slithering out from under whatever skanky rocks they reside to “explain” the fact that the non-privileged are under-represented in some endeavor because of some essential aspect of human biology, psychology, or other immutable inevitable feature of human nature, and never because of their fucking lack of privilege.

Now personally, whenever I hear a privileged asshole explain that the reason why the non-privileged aren’t equally represented in some endeavor is due to “genetics” or “lack of interest” or some other cockamamie essentialist bullshit he pulled right the fuck out of his ass, I tend to be pretty fucking skeptical! It’s just a little bit too convenient to just be a coincidence that dispassionate consideration of the scientific evidence on the ground leads right the fuck to maintenance of the privilege status quo, you know what I’m saying?

What lead to this discussion at Zuska’s was a comment on another post of Zuska’s made by some dumb fuck concerning the severe under-representation of women in engineering:

I’m simply saying that it is [foolish] to expect female engineering enrollment to be equal to men’s enrollment, if engineering is a field which is, statistically speaking, more attractive to men than to women.

Zuska cleverly took down this shithead’s pathetic excuse for an argument by translating his fake-ass scientific-sounding dumbassery into clear English:

There aren’t a lot of women in engineering. I personally believe this is because women just don’t like Teh Engineering. They don’t like engineering because engineering is for Teh Men. Engineering is for men because it is what men do. It is not for women because it is not what women do. There is Boy Stuff, and there is Girl Stuff. Engineering is Boy Stuff.

Well, Mr. Asshat Apologist responded in a hurt and indignant tone (waaahh, waaahh, you feminists are so mean!!! you are soo misinterpreting me!!) that he was just making a “conditional statement”:

I was making a conditional statement: if it is true that engineering is more attractive to men than it is to women, then expecting, in enrollment, the same number of men as women is an unattainable goal.

I never claimed to know this for a fact, but merely accepted that it is possible, given that men and woman seem to have (as a group or on the whole) different interests. I’m not saying that either is better or worse, just different.

Yeah, it’s all just a fascinating dispassionate intellectual exercise in the positing of “conditional statements”, old chap.

Of course, it’s these same fucking asshole douchemonkeys spewing ridiculous buffoonery like dumbfuck Mr. Asshat Apologist’s wholly speculative “conditional statement” designed to “raise the possibility” solely “for purposes of discussion” that women might not be interested in engineering (i.e., a load of wholesale bullshit pulled right the fuck out of his ass) who bitch and moan endlessly about how detailed exhaustive quantitative analyses of actual fucking reality like Sherry Towers’s are “not well-supported by statistics” or “incomplete” or “insufficient to establish discrimination”. Fucking hypocritical scumbags.

Here’s the fucking deal: If you are arguing from a position of privilege that the existence of under-representation of the non-privileged is not a consequence of your privilege, the motherfucking burden of proof is on you to prove it. Pulling speculative shit out of your ass that happens to reinforce the status quo, while at the same time shifting the burden of proof to the non-privileged and setting an absurd standard for satisfaction of that burden does not hold any fucking water.

We’re onto your fucking game. Capisce?

The Reverend Wright foofaraw is just an inevitable consequence of the fact that in the United States we incorporate into our political discourse–indeed elevate to the highest level of importance–the delusional views of wackaloon religious assholes and the relationships of political candidates to those assholes. And with the collusion of people who literally hate America and everything it stands for—the sick-fuck right-wing and its craven canape-eating chardonnay-swilling shitbag fake-ass journamalist enablers (Russert, Matthews, Scarborough: Fuck you, you motherfucking scumbags!)—we just keep doing it over and over and over and over.

This garbaggio is totally fucking insane, and is yet another reason why our nation is swirling down the shitter. (h/t Abel Pharmboy for making me think about this absurd douchecornetry!)

UPDATE: Welcome to my shiny happy visitors from Crooks & Liars! Make yourselves at home, but don’t use those lace towels in the fucking powder room. They’re just for show.

Academic responsibilities have drained my time over the last few days, and will continue for a few more. This is the reason for the lack of recent posting. Expect righteous ranting and raving to resume this weekend! Carry on, motherfuckers!

Can someone please tell the ridiculous fucking assmonkey shitbag talking heads at ESPN that the plural of “RBI” is “RBIs”, not “RBI”? I have had it up to here with this fake-ass illiterate pseudo-intellectual pompous douchebaggery coming out of the mouths of a bunch of dumb-ass frat boys who all got picked last for kickball! FUCK!

Those who are interested in the opinions of others concerning this important issue, please go here.

Commenter Bijan Parsia made an important point in our discussion of intellectual appropriation and attribution about the role of good faith all of this:

One thing to remember is that *good faith* is critical: One shouldn’t let the idea of better than due diligence prevent one from doing work (or posting), but if one makes an attribution mistake it helps to apologize and try to rectify (as you did in your case).

This requirement of good faith also pertains to the manner in which one becomes aware of a failure of attribution. And it is exactly why RandomObserver’s “gotcha” game–trolling around a blog or other body of work solely for the purpose of looking for unintentional failures of attribution–is a complete load of fucking horseshit, and does not merit response.

It is trivial to go around intentionally looking for innocent failures of attribution and find them. When innocent failures manifest themselves through the natural process of good-faith intellectual dialogue–as they did in the anecdote I related in my post–then courtesy, honesty, and practicality demand acknowledgment. Bullshit rhetorical gotcha games like RandomOberserver’s do not.

The main reason for this is that it is a total waste of fucking time and effort for people to add attributions to an existing work if the innocent absence of those attributions isn’t relevant to anyone other than some asshole playing a game.

An astute reader expressed concern yesterday that the tagline of this blog currently read as follows:

“Step in, Sit Down, Chill The Heck Out” — I said that

She speculated that perhaps WordPress had ordered the removal of what those who are observant as she is will recall as the original tagline:

“Step in, Sit Down, Chill The Fuck Out” — I said that

(emphasis added).

No, WordPress doesn’t seem to give a flying fuck about evocative language on blogs they host. Actually, as part of my totally fucking hilarious April Fools joke, I changed “fuck” to “heck”, and I just forgot to change it back.

Deepest apologies to those readers who have been scandalized by my egregious use of the despicable slimy weak right-wing shitbag euphemism “heck”. I have restored the honest strong liberal evocative term “fuck” to its rightful place in the tagline.

From Digby yesterday:

Update: I hadn’t actually read this Krugman column before I wrote this, but as readers point out it makes some similar observations.

This is an illustration of what one can do when related material comes to light pursuant to good-faith intellectual discourse.