Fuck you, don’t tell me what to do. It’s a free country–don’t tread on me! A comic on my Facebook feed triggered my wanting to write this, but I’ll save it for the end because it’s substantively different than what’s been irking me. This is one of those thing’s that’s floating around the aether. It…
Category: Sociology/Psychology
Science Has Not Proven People Who Swear Have a Bigger Vocabulary
“People who curse a lot have better vocabularies than those who don’t, study finds“. If you don’t want to read the whole thing, what they did find was that people don’t have a huge repertoire of swear-words, but if you put a classroom together, pretty much every single person is going to have a swear…
Gun Debates Mean Not Having to Confront That God Is Dead
Note: this used to be a much larger essay that also looked at multiple sources on gun violence and data analysis thereon. That info has been moved to a separate article here. Recently, there was a high-profile mass shooting in my country of America. The specifics aren’t all that essential to my thoughts. It’s functionally…
Are People Who Disagree With You Politically Mentally Ill?
Just because you want it to be true doesn’t make it so. Or, Science says: “No association between hostility and homophobia” http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2015/09/13/is-homophobia-a-mental-illness/ “Is homophobia actually mental illness?” Well that’s a hell of a question. What constitutes a mental illness is an interesting question itself. Most people in the West tend to accept a number of mental…
Guys Dig Chicks Who Are Non-Conformist
…says psychologist dressed in all black standing with a clipboard outside a punk rock concert. Or, young people don’t really care about “conformity”, based on mostly dubious survey data. “A Critical Test of the Assumption That Men Prefer Conformist Women and Women Prefer Nonconformist Men” This paper involves discussion of statistics which can be confusing…
SciAm Goes Full Buzzfeed
Part 1: Fisking View post on imgur.com http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/men-are-attracted-to-nonconformist-women/ This article is stupid for like 10 different reasons. “Men are often advised to stand out from the crowd to attract women—there can be only one alpha male.” Somebody watched Highlander recently. There can be only one alpha-male? Sure. Okay. “Women, on the other hand, are told…
Millennials to Blame for Incompetent Universities, Apparently
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/nation-wimps/201510/where-did-colleges-go-wrong The author of a book title A Nation of Wimps and the author of an Atlantic article entitled The Coddling of the American Mind had a conversation bitching about young people in academia and put it in Psychology Today. That probably suffices as a tl;dr of the article, actually. I wonder how long I…
What If People Treated Physical Illness Like Mental Illness? The corollary:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/13/mental-illness-physical-i_n_6145156.html I have a problem in that I hate shoddy journalism, so that will detract from what is probably a more reasonable comment on the topic of mental health awareness. Forgive me. HuffPo posted an article that caught my eye. And by article, I mean ~150 word comment on a webcomic the author found. “It’s…
Men in STEM Are So Sexist They Don’t Even Know It!
Or: females and university faculty have a small bias regarding sex and institution when reading psychology abstracts, and male university faculty in STEM departments slightly more skeptical than females about abstracts that accuse men of being sexist “Even With Hard Evidence Of Gender Bias In STEM Fields, Men Don’t Believe It’s Real”, reads the…
Likely Meaningless Dutch Study to Sooth American Parental Neuroticism.
“No offense, Homer, but your half-assed under-parenting was a lot more fun than your half-assed over-parenting.” Science has now proved that all that bitching adults have been doing about kids these days being spoiled is totally justified, so pat yourself on the back if you have not done so already. A new study from The…