Interesting Links for 18-11-2015

[andrewducker]

• Record Number Of Terrorism Experts Report For Duty In Internet Comment Sections
  • terrorism satire funny web comments
• The gene that explains why some people cannot hold their drink
  • serotonin alcohol genetics
• Ten Things You'll Only Get if You Were a 2050's Kid
  • scifi short_story
• The media did cover attacks on *insert country here*. You just weren’t

Comments

[supergee]

I am sure there are people who dreamed of taking over the Star Trek franchise and making it a series of XXX K/S flicks. The fanfic J.J. Abrams gave use may be less interesting.

[andrewducker]

Yeah. I've seen repeated quotes from him saying that basically he's not a Star Trek person. And you can tell. I enjoyed both movies for themselves (while seeing big holes), but neither of them felt like Star Trek to me.

[andrewducker]

Important note about the "Butch People" link - it doesn't just apply to women. Men should also be able to dress up in a "manly" way without it being assumed that they're only interested in sportsball, beer, and shooting.

[alitheapipkin]

Yeah, I think the title does the content a disservice in some ways - most of it is really a wider discussion about how daft our ideas of masculinity are, and the differences between presentation/performance and identity too actually.

[momentsmusicaux]

Yup, the labia majora are basically the same as the scrotum.

And 'clitoral erection' is a pretty good tongue-twister.

[cmcmck]

Genitals post.

I knew that, but I suppose given my history, I would do! :o)

[ext_2864067]

Regarding 'The media did cover attacks...'

The article's writer is taking an opposite and equally absurd position to the one that she criticises.

Western media do give less coverage to disasters and deaths further away. Yes, they're reported, but they're not displayed anything like as prominently.

This is primarily because their audience are less interested by things happening far away. But even so, placing all the responsibility on the reader and none on the media source is as wrong-headed as the other way round.

[andrewducker]

It seems to me that if someone wants to be well educated about the world then they need to go to media sources and read them in depth. Reading jus the front few pages or, even worse, those articles that their friends choose to repost on FB/Twitter/LJ means that they are choosing to only get the most popular articles in their in-group. And I do hold people responsible for that (once they realise that newspapers _don't_ order their articles randomly, but by the amount of perceived interest/category).

[ext_2864067]

The responsibility is shared.

It is very easy to read up on things at a surface level, and most people don't have the time - and aren't encouraged to make the time - to research much deeper than that.

Media sources aren't some sort of passive mechanism that simply produces what people will click on or read. They're run by people, and those people are well aware of the effect of prioritising one news story over another.

To say that it's the consumers' responsibility to read critically, not that of the media sources as well, is the Daily Mail excuse. 'We're not being irresponsible, we're just giving people what they want'.

[andrewducker]

I don't see it as shared, because media _has_ to categorise and order things. Unless you are literally saying that they should shuffle their articles so that people get randomly exposed to stuff, I don't know what you want them to do.