The loudest person who believes roughly what you believe is officially your spokesbastard.

Trudy, may I tag this please?

Allyson, I read that. But I don't understand how you're interpreting the part you quoted...

You're usually much more rational than I am (I'm typically bananas), so I gave some thought about how I was interpreting the various texts. I think because I've been immersing myself in cognitive dissonance regarding women's issues within this group and men's reactions to the women and their complaints, I bent backwards in the other direction and read it with a huge amount of confirmation bias. The arguments frequently made (and I don't discount some degree of trolling) in defense of sexism as a biological adaptation (usually in the form of evo psych just-so stories) is the weird way sexism is justified in a movement that excoriates religion for justifying sexism because it says so in the bible/torah/koran (apparently, sexism did not exist prior to Abraham). And when people ask these justification people for citations on their claims that men have no control over sexist behavior, we usually get a PDF of a paper on how bedbugs mate. Which, not helpful.

In the last two weeks, I have diagnosed 543 internet commenters with Aspergers.

In fact, I think there needs to be some sort of godwin's law that says that the longer a discussion on women's frustration at being objectified at conferences grows, the probability of a comparison of chimp mating habits as a justification for gangrape reaches 1.

I keep catching myself, or having other people catch me in confirmation bias traps like this. It's frustrating.

I do think sociobiology tends to degenerate into just so stories. That is, it is perfectly rational to suspect that biology affects our social behavior in the abstract. But actual attempts at this mostly degenerate into storytelling that may have literary merit but has no scientific value.

Here is JZ Meyers on that. [link]

The new library building on my campus had $80,000 worth of copper wire stolen from the fenced, locked, and patrolled construction site. Given the sheer volume, they had to have had a truck, so more likely an inside job than r.andom junkies.

Speaking of what junkies steal, when my apartment was robbed when I was in grad school, the cops asked me to check my freezer to see if any steaks had been stolen, as apparently this is very common. Since I was living on 10K a year, the idea that my empty freezer had been recently full of steaks cracked me up

Fucking fuck. I have to go up to Milwaukee for a wedding this afternoon. I'm so exhausted and behind on work stuff and I really wish this wedding were any day but today. And now I realize that the wedding is at 1:30 when I thought it was at 3 so I need to get my ass in gear a lot sooner than planned. Feh.

Who holds a loud street concert at 7:30 am on a Saturday? WHO IS TO BLAME?!? And more importantly, who do I have to beat the crap out of to make sure it never happens again?

Sheesh, sorry.

Who holds a loud street concert at 7:30 am on a Saturday?

That seems very unreasonable.

My flight to Seattle is on Virgin America, which now flies out of terminal 2, which just opened on Thursday.

It's going to be really nice in about a month, but right now all the TSA and service people are still in OMG real people not training mode.

OTOH, good mimosa.

I know this isn't workable with copper wiring, but our neighborhood has had a lot of success with a program the police started where they (the police) give homeowners a specific color of paint. The homeowners paint the copper pipes, and then if the pipes are stolen and taken to a scrap yard, the people at the scrap yard know it's stolen copper and can call the cops. Apparently other cities that have instituted such a plan have seen copper theft go WAY down.

Eeeenteresting. We've been discussing various security measures, but haven't settled on any solutions.

We had someone stroll up on a weekend, wearing a hardhat, and steal a freaking Bobcat from a fenced job site. Now they chain the safety bar up to the top of the cage, because you can't drive a Bobcat when the safety bar up.

Also, we get the toilet paper stolen out of our Porta Potties. For realz.