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The PC purpose of the female breast
Here’s the latest PC war:
A children’s publisher has bowed to pressure and pulped remaining copies of a puberty guide for boys that claimed girls have breasts for ‘feeding babies and looking grown-up and attractive’.
Growing Up for Boys by Alex Frith, published in 2013, promises to ‘prepare boys for what to expect from puberty.’
But it sparked outrage among social media users after a blogger posted a page [from the book] on Facebook which reads: ‘Girls have breasts for two reasons. One is to make milk for babies.
‘The other is to make the girl look grown-up and attractive. Virtually all breasts, no matter what size or shape they end up when a girl finishes puberty, can do both things.”
Ah, the humanity! The outrage!
If, like me, you wonder “WTF?” or “Is there something I’m missing here?,” then it’s time to get with the program and understand just what is so offensive about it:
The extract was posted by Simon Ragoonanan who blogs at Man vs. Pink, ‘chronicling the fun and games of a geek father, his fangirl daughter, and their ongoing struggle against pinkification’.
He wrote on Facebook: ‘The problem is that the book is saying that looking attractive and grown up is a key purpose of the breast.
‘It’s like saying the same about a woman’s legs. Nothing wrong with finding them attractive – and I do – but it’s not their ‘purpose’ to make a girl/woman look attractive or grown up.
Ah, but Mr. Ragoonanan, no one would say that about legs because they obviously are there to stand on and to walk with, and both men and women have them in fairly similar fashion.
Not so for breasts. I know the PC crowd isn’t really interested in biology, but breasts in the human female are a puzzling anomaly. Mammals—and the human is a mammal, at least until the PC crowd gets around to revising that fact if they need to or want to—feed their young milk from breasts, but humans are the only mammals whose breasts are enlarged all the time. And this is true only in the female, so there is a great deal of male/female dimorphism on that score.
Biologists and evolutionary biologists have argued about the purpose of the permanently enlarged female breast in humans, and they are not in total agreement about it. The main function of the female breast is to feed the young milk, as with any other mammal, but the main function of its permanent enlargement is thought to be—yes, sexual attraction.
You can find a gazillion articles on the subject. Here’s one that’s fairly typical:
The full, plump bosom seen in the human ape is an anomaly. No other primate has a permanent breast. During lactation all the ape species develop a full breast to store milk. In non-human primates (and other mammal species) a full breast is a clear indication the female is suckling young. Not so in humans. In addition, females in early adolescence can start developing a breast before menarche and females maintain breasts post menopause, so the full breast is not a reliable indicator of fertility. Neither is size an indicator of milk production ”“ bigger breasts don’t necessarily produce more milk. It is the symmetry of the breasts that indicates the phenotypic quality and fitness of the individual female, not the size.
The sex appeal of rounded female buttocks and plump breasts is both universal and unique to the human primate1. Fertile women tend not to store fat around the abdomen, so the waist of a fertile female is usually slimmer than her hips. Other female primates do not have fat deposited on the rump. For example, the female gorilla has a skinny posterior and stores fat on her abdomen, as do human males. So it has been widely theorised that the plump buttock and bosom of modern women are sexual ornaments, selected for by ancestral males2.
And there’s even a theory that compares human female breasts to the tail of the strutting male peacock:
Because breasts sometimes get in women’s way, some scientists have developed an evolutionary theory they call a “handicap principle.” According to this theory, heavy breasts honestly announce a woman’s genetic health, but at a cost of her carrying them around.
Barash and Lipton explain that this same idea applies to creatures like the male peacock, which struts around with his awkward, ornamental tail in hopes of roping in mates.
One lesser-agreed upon theory, supported by Leonard Shlain, a surgeon and author of “Sex, Time and Power: How Women’s Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution,”(Viking, 2003), suggests that women’s breasts grew round after our early ancestors stood upright.
In this view, the breasts of the female ancestors of humans evolved over time, along with a gradual tilting of the pelvis, so that the vagina was more oriented to the front of the body. Together, these transformations encouraged face-to-face sex, and marked a departure from the position most commonly used by other apes, in which the male approaches the female from behind.
Ethologist Desmond Morris has also proposed this theory, and has suggested breasts are substitutes for the round, red buttocks of our female ape ancestors.
Growing Up For Boys simplified matters a bit, but all the explanations I’ve read in the past for the human female breast (and I’ve read quite a few) talk about sexual attractiveness. But shhhh, musn’t tell. Biology must bow down to our PC masters, and books that don’t do so must be destroyed.
Richard Landes on Europe’s destructive Holocaust shame
Richard Landes has a piece in Tablet entitled “Europe’s Destructive Holocaust Shame: How the narrative of Israel as the new Nazis and Palestinians as the new Jews helps Western Europe avoid its culpability in World War II.” Here’s an excerpt:
And yet, in 2000, when the Western public sphere””now a global public sphere, itself an astounding creation””was split in two (right vs. left) by a civilizational crisis, both the public and the scholars whether they despised or admired Western history, showed astonishing incomprehension about the role of Jews””and Israel””in the creation and maintenance of a global civil society. If anything, the post-grand-narrativists, for whom the Western narrative is an ugly succession of oppression and injustice, see the national (autonomous) Jews (Israel) as the last remnant of the Western racist, imperial/colonial past. Israel ist unser Unglé¼ck (Israel is our misfortune). So instead of appreciating what these sovereign Jews were trying to handle (Jihad against infidels), they sought liberation from shame in embracing Palestinian terrorists, whom they welcomed as fellow victims of the vile, unbearably provocative behavior of the Jews.
For those unfamiliar with the work of Landes (who, by the way, is a friend of mine; I met him through blogging), I suggest they take a look at his blog Augean Stables and also his invaluable work in exposing the al Durah propaganda (website here). Landes is the person who coined the phrase “Pallywood,” and just about anything he writes is packed with thought and well worth reading.
Landes writes that European championing of the Palestinian cause and its equation of the Jews with the Nazis is actually a “get-out-of-Holocaust-shame-free card” for Europe. He recognized that fact long ago, and he was not alone.
The following quote on a related topic is from a post I wrote in 2006:
If the Israelis/Jews…are as bad as the Nazis and their European collaborators, this serves a double function: first, it norms Europe’s behavior during WWII (“see, there’s nothing special about the guilt of Europeans, move along now”); and second, it can even be seen as justifying the Holocaust, as well (“Jews are evil, so it was okay for us to cooperate in attempting to destroy them”).
Anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism not only both have a long history in Europe (the first phenomenon is an ancient one; the second has existed for centuries), but they both have a more recent function, and that it is to deflect and sooth European guilt.
The Landes article goes into this in much greater detail, and focuses on the function of sympathizing with the Palestinians, as well as the differences between guilt and shame and how both enter into the picture.
I would add that this desire to avoid the bad feelings inherent in either guilt or shame or both has long been part of human nature. the Roman historian Tacitus hinted at that when he wrote: ““It belongs to human nature to hate those you have injured.”
Unlike Richard Landes, I’m not a historian. So although I learned that quote long long ago, and was deeply impressed by it (I’ve seen it’s workings over and over again, and not just in politics, either), I’m unable to describe the context for the quote except that I’ve read that it comes from a book Tacitus wrote entitled Agricola, a biography written by Tacitus and dealing with “the life of his father-in-law Gnaeus Julius Agricola, an eminent Roman general and Governor of Britain from AD 77/78 – 83/84.” But my interpretation of the quote is that the motivation for that commonplace hatred of people we have wronged is a rage at the feeling of guilt and/or shame they engender in us, and a desire to escape from those feelings by blaming the victim. It’s the easy way out compared to soul-searching and redress of wrongs, and offers respite from a nearly intolerable burden. It’s no surprise that people jump at the chance.
[NOTE: In the case of Europe today, leftism has a big place in this process, as Landes also notes when he writes: “in 2000…the Western public sphere””now a global public sphere, itself an astounding creation””was split in two (right vs. left) by a civilizational crisis…”. That split has long existed, of course, but it widened considerably during the 21st Century. By the way, Landes’ professional field of expertise as a historian is Millennial Studies.]
Mayor de Blasio: you know you want the heavy hand of government, and so do I
Steven Hayward at Powerline calls our attention to an interview and quote from New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio. It’s quite revealing not just about de Blasio, but about the leftist mindset about the role of government, our legal system, and what people themselves want [emphasis mine]:
Q: In 2013, you ran on reducing income inequality. Where has it been hardest to make progress? Wages, housing, schools?
de Blasio: What’s been hardest is the way our legal system is structured to favor private property. I think people all over this city, of every background, would like to have the city government be able to determine which building goes where, how high it will be, who gets to live in it, what the rent will be. I think there’s a socialistic impulse, which I hear every day, in every kind of community, that they would like things to be planned in accordance to their needs. And I would, too. Unfortunately, what stands in the way of that is hundreds of years of history that have elevated property rights and wealth to the point that that’s the reality that calls the tune on a lot of development…
…Look, if I had my druthers, the city government would determine every single plot of land, how development would proceed. And there would be very stringent requirements around income levels and rents. That’s a world I’d love to see, and I think what we have, in this city at least, are people who would love to have the New Deal back, on one level. They’d love to have a very, very powerful government, including a federal government, involved in directly addressing their day-to-day reality.
It’s not reachable right now. And it leaves this friction, and this anger, which is visceral.
There’s an awful lot packed in there, isn’t there?
First and foremost, we have the fact that de Blasio feels comfortable enough to express these sentiments openly rather than hide them. My guess—and it’s only a guess—is that he really believes that most New Yorkers, and maybe even most people in the US, agree with him about the function of government and how much it should dictate their lives. Sentiments and goals that just a few years ago were only whispered in private by any politician hoping to actually get elected are now declared openly by the current mayor of New York.
Next we have the scope of his vision. De Blasio would like the government to control as much as possible, and not just about real estate development. He says “[People would] love to have a very, very powerful government, including a federal government, involved in directly addressing their day-to-day reality.” And if Bill de Blasio and his cronies have anything to say about it, that’s exactly what would happen—for your own good, of course, because you know it’s really what you want. When Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever,” it was a dystopian and horrific vision. De Blasio thinks it’s what we all secretly—and maybe not-so-secretly—want. And he thinks that he’s just the guy to do the stomping, only he’ll call it a love tap.
Next we have the idea that government is capable of doing this sort of regulation much better than the market ever could, and much better than free and autonomous human beings ever could. When he says that “[people] would like things to be planned in accordance to their needs,” he’s not only echoing Marx (“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”), but he’s also assuming that government is capable of figuring out what people’s needs really are and designing a world that meets them. Although it’s possible that he doesn’t really believe that and he’s just cynically saying it in pursuit of power, I actually think—based on many (not all, however) of the leftists I know—that he is most likely sincere in his belief and in his hubris.
Then we have the contempt for the rule of law and for hundreds and hundreds of years of protection of property rights under it. Does de Blasio have even the remotest understanding of why our system is designed the way it is, and why property rights are so protected? I doubt it. He seems to see it as a little thing, a mere anachronism that should be pushed aside in favor of the great beneficent government he wants (“That’s a world I’d love to see..”) put in place. And he knows that you want it, too.
Lastly is the ominous phrase “right now,” found in the next-to-last sentence of the quote. We’re not there yet, folks, but if the kindly de Blasios of the world have their way, we’ll be there some day soon.
Men and women and the sex and marriage market
There’s a new book out, entitled “Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy.” But the message that lies therein is actually fairly old news. I’ve written about similar ideas before, for example here, here, and in particular here.
However, it bears repeating:
In generations past, women generally made men wait until marriage to have sex. To get a wife (and, therefore, sex), men had to be clean and presentable and have a good job. This, Regnerus reasons, gave men all the motivation they needed to become respectable members of society…
Regnerus backs this theory up with a quote from social psychologists Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs, who study this phenomenon. “Nowadays young men can skip the wearying detour of getting education and career prospects to qualify for sex,” they write. “Sex has become free and easy. This is today’s version of the opiate of the (male) masses.”
Regnerus argues that while women have maintained their role as sexual gatekeepers, men control the marriage market. And given the ease with which sex can be accessed, Regnerus believes that men’s motivations for marriage have all but disappeared.
I know plenty of young people who are still getting married. But I have little doubt that the statistics that show marriage as declining are correct, and I deeply believe that the phenomenon the book describes (although I haven’t read the book) is one of the reasons it is happening. I called one of my previous posts on the subject “Getting the milk for free.” It’s an old saying, one I heard in my youth. It was told to young women in order to discourage them from having cheap and easy sex; the idea was that men wouldn’t buy the cow if they could get the milk for free. It’s crass, but it makes the point.
Of course, even today’s women can refuse to have sex unless there is commitment. But the big problem with that approach is that, although some young men will value that standard in a woman, unless it’s the practice of a majority of women (or at least a large percentage) then men can—and often will—turn elsewhere. If women want to withhold casual sex, there’s strength in numbers. Society used to back them and even advocate this practice—but no more.
Blue on blue: now Hillary’s blaming Bernie
I have to say I’ve been very very happy not to have to talk about Hillary Clinton ever since the 2016 election. And it’s also true that I don’t have to talk about her, even now.
So, why am I talking about her? Well, this caught my eye:
Hillary Clinton casts Bernie Sanders as an unrealistic over-promiser in her new book, according to excerpts posted by a group of Clinton supporters.
She said that his attacks against her during the primary caused “lasting damage” and paved the way for “(Donald) Trump’s ‘Crooked Hillary’ campaign.”
Clinton, in a book that will be released September 12 entitled “What Happened,” said Sanders “had to resort to innuendo and impugning my character” because the two Democrats “agreed on so much.”
What I get from that—among other things—is that Hillary cannot seem to stop blaming others for her loss. I wonder if anything in this new book indicates at least a modicum of awareness of her own responsibility and her own very real failings that made her vulnerable to those attacks on her extremely questionable and suspect character. I doubt it.
But I don’t wonder enough to wade through a book that is purported to be a 500-pager. This woman has written—or has had ghost-written—an awful lot of verbiage, hasn’t she?
Here’s some of the verbiage from the new book:
Clinton wrote that President Barack Obama counseled her to “grit my teeth and lay off Bernie as much as I could,” according to the excerpts. That strategy, Clinton wrote, made her feel she was “in a straitjacket.”
Poor, poor Hillary. One big bad guy (Obama) told her to lay off another big bad guy (Sanders) while the latter abused her. Oh, if only she’d taken the gloves off!
And now I’ll tiptoe out, and leave you with Hillary and Sanders and Obama…
Oh, one more thing. I have a feeling Sanders isn’t going to be much of a force in 2020, although his supporters will be, and they will be looking for a very progressive—although younger—person to run.
Trump to Congress on DACA: the ball’s in your park now
I am here today to announce that the program known as DACA that was effectuated under the Obama administration is being rescinded,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Tuesday at the Justice Department…
In a statement after his agencies and attorney general announced the decision, President Donald Trump blamed former President Barack Obama for creating the program through executive authority and urged Congress to come up with a solution.
“It is now time for Congress to act!” he said.
Trump said that winding down the program would be more considerate than letting the courts end it, but emphasized he stands by his “America First” agenda.
“As I’ve said before, we will resolve the DACA issue with heart and compassion — but through the lawful Democratic process — while at the same time ensuring that any immigration reform we adopt provides enduring benefits for the American citizens we were elected to serve,” Trump said. “We must also have heart and compassion for unemployed, struggling and forgotten Americans.”
The administration also announced a plan to continue renewing permits for anyone whose status expires in the next six
months, giving Congress time to act before any currently protected individuals lose their ability to work, study and live
without fear in the US.
That strikes all the correct notes—not that it will matter to Trump’s critics on the left, who will say he’s heartless and cruel, and on the right, some of whom will say he passed the buck to a worthless GOP Congress that is no different than the Democrats. To me, the correct notes that were struck include first and foremost the idea that this should be a Congressional function and that Obama overstepped. Other good notes are the postponement of the effects of the announcement, the compassionate consideration of the very real problems around the situation that “Dreamers” face, and the setting of a deadline of sorts by which Congress needs to act.
It’s that last part that worries me. What will Congress actually do? My hope is that they manage to find a middle ground that substantially reduces and tightens the categories of persons allowed to stay and work here.
Let’s take as a starting point the Obama-era DACA eligibility provisions:
—are under 31 years of age as of June 15, 2012;
—came to the U.S. while under the age of 16;
—have continuously resided in the U.S. from June 15, 2007 to the present. (For purposes of calculating this five year period, brief and innocent absences from the United States for humanitarian reasons will not be included);
—entered the U.S. without inspection or fell out of lawful visa status before June 15, 2012;
—were physically present in the United States on June 15, 2012, and at the time of making the request for consideration of deferred action with USCIS;
—are currently in school, have graduated from high school, have obtained a GED, or have been honorably discharged from the Coast Guard or armed forces;
—have not been convicted of a felony offense, a significant misdemeanor, or more than three misdemeanors of any kind; and
—do not pose a threat to national security or public safety.
The new bill could—just as an example—change the requirements to state that the age of entry would have to have been younger (12, for example, instead of 16). It could tweak any of the dates of numbers to make them more restrictive. It could (and absolutely should, IMHO) add an English language proficiency requirement. Allowing people to stay here who came here illegally as children and lived here virtually their entire lives, and who are well-assimilated into this country and its culture and mores, seems like a decent (although flawed) compromise in a tough situation. And yes, it does send a message that if you somehow get here, even if illegally, and stay here illegally, your child will be allowed official status and be allowed to work. This constitutes a troubling incentive, and it bothers me. That’s the big drawback as I see it. But if the bill is crafted correctly and it is made crystal clear that this only grandfathers in people who have already been here a long time, I think the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.
I am not certain about that, though, and I understand the arguments for a much more Draconian bill. That said, I don’t think either Congress or Trump would support a bill that didn’t allow some leeway for the people known as Dreamers. Trump has been back and forth on the issue, but the bulk of his statements on the subject have made it pretty clear to me that he is at least somewhat in favor of the sort of bill I’m talking about, as long as it’s passed by Congress.
The North Korean conundrum
[NOTE: I’ve already had a busy day, having come home last night on the redeye from the West Coast. Since I didn’t sleep on the plane, I tried to stay up this afternoon in order to reset my bioclock. No dice. Instead, I was overcome with exhaustion, staggered to my bed, and fell asleep for four hours. I just woke up. Therefore this will be less comprehensive than I’d like. I probably will write more on the subject of North Korea tomorrow.]
With North Korea, all solutions are bad ones. The real question is which one is the least bad?
And there’s almost no reason to trust the experts on what to do. Experts on all sides have been wrestling with this problem for decades and not had any success. They haven’t even managed to stall North Korea for a significant amount of time, and certainly have had no success in deflecting the country from its bellicose and increasingly-powerful nuclear path.
I don’t envy President Trump. As Ambassador Nikki Haley said yesterday:
And here’s some news from South Korea:
Here in Seoul, the defense ministry warned that Pyongyang might be preparing to launch another missile into the Pacific Ocean, perhaps an intercontinental ballistic missile theoretically capable of reaching the mainland United States.
President Trump and his South Korean counterpart, Moon Jae-in, spoke on the phone for 40 minutes Monday night, Korean time ”” some 34 hours after the nuclear test and more than 24 hours after Trump took to Twitter to criticize Moon’s “talk of appeasement.”
The two agreed to remove the limit on allowed payloads for South Korean missiles — something Seoul had been pushing for ”” as a way to increase deterrence against North Korea, according to a read-out of the phone call from South Korea’s Blue House.
They agreed as well to work together to punish North Korea for Sunday’s nuclear test, pledging “to strengthen joint military capabilities,” a White House statement said, and to “maximize pressure on North Korea using all means at their disposal.”…
Haley ruled out the “freeze for freeze” proposal backed by China and Russia, which would suspend U.S. joint military exercises with South Korea in return for suspension of North Korean nuclear and missile tests.
“When a rogue regime has a nuclear weapon and an ICBM pointed at you, you do not take steps to lower your guard. No one would do that. We certainly won’t,” she said.
Instead, she reiterated a White House threat from Sunday to cut off trade with any countries that also trade with North Korea. That would presumably include China, with which the United States had nearly $650 billion worth of trade in goods and services last year.
But at this point I wonder how much leverage China really has over North Korea on this particular issue, and I wonder whether the Chinese will ever use what they do have. China has its own reasons for wanting Kim Jong Un to stay in power in North Korea, because they don’t want the country destabilized:
The fall of the North Korean regime would send vast numbers of refugees pouring into China, and in the long run, Beijing fears that a unified Korea would mean a permanent U.S. military presence right on its border.
Meanwhile, the longer the world waits, the less empty Kim Jong Un’s threats become. He definitely has nuclear weapons and he talks as though he also has the will to use them, even preemptively if he sees fit. Is it just bluster, or does he mean it?:
Kim Jong Un has been very open about his regime’s ambitions. North Korea regularly issues apocalyptic warnings to the U.S. and its allies. Last month, the regime’s official Rodong Sinmun newspaper said the U.S. would be “catapulted into an unimaginable sea of fire” if it imposed more sanctions or threatened military action. In May, the paper said the North was “waiting for the moment it will reduce the whole of the U.S. mainland to ruins” after President Donald Trump dispatched a naval strike group to the region.
Such threats have been a staple of Kim’s regime since he took power after his father’s death in 2011.
In October, top North Korean official Lee Yong Pil told NBC News that “a preemptive nuclear strike is not something the U.S. has a monopoly on.” He added: “If we see that the U.S. would do it to us, we would do it first.”
The conventional responses have been previously tried by the US and the West—and tried, and tried, and tried. I agree with John Bolton that they don’t work:
…Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton said Sunday that economic sanctions against North Korea is a useless gesture, because North Korea is more like a huge prison than a real country that can be hurt by sanctions.
“It’s a 25 million person prison camp,” he told Fox News.
“The sanctions simply give people a warm and fuzzy feeling that we’re doing something about North Korea. We are not,” he said.
If this administration follows the same policies as Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations of carrots and sticks, and efforts to persuade North Korea, it will fail just like they did,” Bolton added.
The option—some sort of military action—could spark a huge attack on South Korea. What are South Korea’s defenses against that kind of action?:
The First Terminal High-Altitude Area Defence (Thaad) systems were installed on a South Korean golf course in April and now more will be installed. Thadd is intended to be able to stop missiles from hitting their targets. This is how the system works.
Developed by Lockheed Martin, the Thaads system is designed to detect missiles flying through the sky. It is essentially a rocket system mounted on the back of a truck that fly into other missiles and destroy them. This is done in four steps: using radar to spot an object, identifying it as a missile, firing a counter Interceptor missile, and using kinetic energy to obliterate the target…
Thaad isn’t the only missile defence system in South Korea. US armed forces also have the Patriot 3 system, which it started upgrading earlier this year and is designed for shorter ranges than Thaad.
Barrie says this approach is a layered defence technique using different systems to cover a variety of firing ranges.
How effective would this be in the event of an attack? These defenses seem to work pretty well as long as they’re not faced with a great many missiles at once, but we just don’t know how well they’d do against a barrage.
The dilemma is profound.
Five reasons why Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, is pregnant again
(1) You can never have too many heirs to the throne. Actually, I suppose you can; in the very olden days, when the throne really meant something, heirs sometimes duked it out rather than Duking it out. But those days are long gone.
(2) No baby sitter problem.
(3) The kids they already have are awfully cute
(4) Kate gets to wear a whole new wardrobe.
(5) Kate has no problem losing the baby weight.
On the other hand, I salute Kate’s bravery, because in pregnancy she suffers greatly from something known as Hyperemesis Gravidarum, an extreme form of morning sickness in which the mother-to-be is so severely nauseated for so long that hospitalization is often necessary. Nausea and vomiting is such a noxious feeling that most people would do anything to avoid it.
You might ask me why I’m writing about this. Yes, I know it’s not important news. But it’s nice news.
Happy Labor Day!
Labor Day is the bookend on the opposite end of summer from its holiday beginning, Memorial Day.
July Fourth is summer’s early peak, with the promise of long light-filled days ahead. But Labor Day is summer’s last gasp, the moment I dreaded as a child because it marked the end of vacation and the start of the school year. Spiffy new clothes, a shiny bookbag, freshly sharpened pencils, and the promise of the beautiful autumn leaves’ arrival were nice. But they couldn’t make up for the fact that a new school year was beginning. Where oh where had the summer gone?
And it goes even more quickly these days. But let’s celebrate the fact that we don’t have to worry about the start of school anymore””except, perhaps, for the teachers among you.
Here’s wishing you all a Happy Labor Day! Barbecues, picnics, parades, beach, just hanging out in your yard, whatever you desire. And for the historically-minded among you, some information the origins of the holiday.
YouTube’s switcheroo
I hate, hate, hate the new YouTube format. I am not alone in this, although plenty of people like it as well.
You may not have noticed it, but it happened a few days ago. It happens now and then—you’ve been going along for years, happily using a site, accustomed to the way it looks, knowing how to navigate around and get to what you want, and then suddenly things are upended and most of the old familiar landmarks are gone.
Not only that, but the current online trend is to hide things—to purposely hide things to make a site look “cleaner” or some other rubbish.
Now, I have to say I’m probably not your typical YouTube user, so I’m not surprised if YouTube doesn’t care what I think or what I want and doesn’t cater to my needs. I tend to generally dislike technical change unless it’s obviously and unequivocally an improvement, and much of what I see that constitutes change online is merely cosmetic. I especially hate the tendency to hide things, something I’ve seen on site after site and which seems to originate in the limitations of mobile viewing. Now those mobile limitations have become the dominant esthetic, and we all have to play “button, button, who’s got the button?” as we search for something that used to be quite easy to see.
I’m not alone in that sentiment, either. This commenter expresses my sentiments exactly, and better than I have:
This trend of hiding a UI element (e.g. the comment menu) until the user hovers over it is bad, bad, bad. I see this sort of thing confusing people all the time. Unless you know it’s there, you won’t know where to find it.
Google keeps doing this all the time, and it’s a terrible design practice. I think it reflects how they assume users are well-versed in their platform, so they’d know where to look, but a good chunk of their users aren’t in that boat, and end up just lost about how to do things.
And there’s a lot of chatter about the wonderful new YouTube logo. Logos are something I don’t tend to notice and when I notice them I tend to not care about them. But here’s the stunning and revolutionary new YouTube logo design (and yes, that’s sarcasm):
But fortunately, although I had to be told about it (and not by YouTube, I can assure you), there’s a way to go to “settings” and restore old YouTube, which I promptly did. I wonder how long they’ll let us do that before they force permanent change, just like Yahoo email did.
Grrrr.
[NOTE: More about the change here.]
Trump and Ryan and DACA
So, what’s going to happen with DACA?
I’ve read a number of articles on the right recently that mull over what Trump will do—will he preserve it or won’t he?—and a bunch more about the pernicious Republicans in Congress wanting to save it.
I won’t even bother to link to most of the articles; they’re easy enough to find. But this one is fairly typical, and it ends with a familiar sentiment: “It’s time to primary these Republicans. We did not elect them to provide amnesty.”
But I recall two things from way back when DACA was announced by President Obama. Continue reading →