Quickies
Quickies: MRAs, drug testing welfare recipients, and that damned blue/white dress
- What kind of man joins the men’s rights movement? – The caption for that first photo…just ugh. From Courtney.
- Drug testing welfare users is a sham, but not for the reasons you think – “The false positive rate for drug tests is – well, it depends on the test procedure, but it’s usually at least 1%. So if every single welfare user in Tennessee was 100% clean, we would still expect between 1% to 5% positive drug tests. Instead, they got 0.12% positive drug tests. This isn’t just suspiciously good, it’s impossibly good.” From Dan.
- The science of why no one agrees on the color of the dress – Also, Ryan at Mad Art Lab covered this, with much more interesting photo examples.
- Astronomers discover a supermassive black hole dating to the cosmic dawn – From Courtney.
- Cute Animal Friday! Red pandas eating apples and making adorable noises. And a dog taking another dog for a walk.
Paul Elam and Albert Calabrese and their ilk are not men, they are scared little boys who are afraid to engage in a world with a level playing field. They realize that without their cultural advantages they will fail. Kind of reminds me of certain segments of other culturally advantaged groups and their imaginary persecution, you know like Christians, white men, heterosexuals etc.
My question about drug testing is, when do we start drug testing our representatives? Who is going to do more damage after all, a welfare recipient on drugs or a legislator on drugs? Seriously.
That dress just proves that on the internet there are always some people who will need to be contrarian.
True. Like, when Paul Elam starts talking about female rapists, I can’t help but remember his ilk also talk about lowering the age of consent to 12, or lower. The problem isn’t that the law exists; to the contrary, the problem is that it isn’t enforced enough! And that’s true regardless of the genital anatomy of the parties involved in the rape.
I’ve actually come up with a name for Elam’s particular variety of hypocrisy: Khamenei’d, after the ayatollah’s tweets last December about Ferguson…while having David Duke on Iranian state TV.
I was actually thinking the dress discussion is a good example of perspective – especially when we don’t have the whole picture (or in this case a good picture). The reality is the dress is black and blue, but most people saw white and gold (including myself). Perspective is an amazing thing.
When I watched the dog walking the dog video I kept saying – why is the snow blue???
Good point on the MRAs I couldn’t get past the first picture to read the article. I am disgusted.
I would’ve put male rape victims in the “legitimate issues” column, personally, rather than putting it next to wives being “cuckoo for penis puffs”. (And honestly, “cuckoo for cocko puffs” works better.) I’d even consider false accusations of rape a legitimate issue, if MRAs didn’t assume every accusation of rape was false.
Am I the only person who thought the dress was blue and gold?
Not at all. I’m close myself – I see blue and brown – but I’ve seen others say they’ve seen blue and gold. The thing is that the initial post that shared this asked people if they saw blue and black or white and gold, priming most people to one of those two possibilities, as did many other posts which repeated it.
Blue/black and white/gold are just the two extremes of how your brain might choose to color-correct the image, assuming two different types of lighting. Since the lighting is ambiguous, it goes different ways for different people, and apparently some people’s brains don’t correct in this particular image at all.
Just one of those weird things about human brains. My brain doesn’t correct in this image, but it’s fooled by every artificial example of this optical illusion. *shrugs*
The quoted section on the drug article is flat-out wrong; the priors are all messed up, since the quoted positive rate is after two rounds (a “screening” and then a test.) There was a 1.2% positive rate on the screening and 17% positive rate on the actual drug test (one out of the six actual tests). The false positive rate is for a single test…that’s why there are B samples and multiple tests.