Thank you, Rush!

"I look at how easily people are made to follow and made to believe things, and lied to, and act like sheep. There's a professor...a liberal professor named Noel Ignatiev, and he is actually teaching -- and I am not making this up -- he is actually teaching and telling white male students to commit suicide to benefit society. 'The key to solving the social problems of our age it to abolish the white race.'"
—Rush Limbaugh, falling for a satirical online post

You know, I should tell him about this amazing bit of news that I received from a Nigerian oil company, it seems that one of their founders is a friend of my dad's and I'm owed many millions of dollars.

A little more info on Ignatiev: he's a retired PoliSci prof who has some controversial theories about sociology and race which I think make for good discussion. Specifically, (from Wikipedia): "Ignatiev is part of a group of social scientists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries who view race distinctions and race itself as a social construct, not a scientific reality" and "Ignatiev's web site and publication Race Traitor display the motto "treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity". In response to a letter to the site which understood the motto as meaning that the authors "hated" white people because of their "white skin", Ignatiev and the other editors responded: “We do not hate you or anyone else for the color of her skin. What we hate is a system that confers privileges (and burdens) on people because of their color. It is not fair skin that makes people white; it is fair skin in a certain kind of society, one that attaches social importance to skin color. When we say we want to abolish the white race, we do not mean we want to exterminate people with fair skin. We mean that we want to do away with the social meaning of skin color, thereby abolishing the white race as a social category. Consider this parallel: To be against royalty does not mean wanting to kill the king. It means wanting to do away with crowns, thrones, titles, and the privileges attached to them. In our view, whiteness has a lot in common with royalty: they are both social formations that carry unearned advantages."

...so it would be easy to propagate a hoax saying that he advocated white male students to suicide.

Anyone else having major problems posting to LJ?

I've had serious trouble posting and replying for a few days now. I wasn't able to find anything when it started, and don't have time to look right now. The thing that I hate is that it is just silently failing, no error messages, and everything else in my browser and on my computer is working just fine.

Probably the NSA vacuuming their databases again.

Ten weapons that you can build INSIDE an airport

Whee!

A security researcher had a thought: what could you build that would be dangerous/deadly/destructive based on materials that you could buy inside the security barrier of an airport, using a multitool that was approved by the TSA?

The results are not pleasant: a blunderbuss shotgun, nunchucks, a spiked mace, and a suitcase bomb that took one and a half fire extinguishers to put out. He notified the TSA on four occasions before publishing and was thanked, but they never said they were doing anything. He was visited by some FBI agents and had a pleasant discussion, and that was about that.

http://www.wired.com/design/2013/12/terminal-cornucopia/?viewall=true

From A Demon's Nest of Sentiments

People are, on the whole, decent. Decency, by its nature, causes one human being to help another without urging, to offer comfort and succor without question, to politely and tacitly agree to the proscription of politics and religion as dinner conversation, to be among his own kind without taking a swing. In short, we indulge people their convictions because we are all fundamentally decent. We disagree, but we know it is inevitable and something can be borne without rancor. It is the nature of advocacy, and a right.

The foregoing, being true, is the primary bane in a politician's effort to scrabble for votes, and an obstacle over which the elect must step day in and day out – human decency is the excrement on the sidewalk of a politician's life. Overcoming decency, and scooping up large bushelfuls of votes, can be achieved only through polarizing, demonizing, and building unthinking enmity between groups of people; to manipulate crowds through the husbandry of hatred. In this approach to vote-grubbing, people are no longer capable of meaning well, but, instead, vile conservatives and degraded liberals, the Dems and Pubs, kitten poisoners and family destroyers, white hats and black hates (except, somehow, everybody is wearing a black hat). The greatest indecency exists in the slaughter of decency – decency as a belief, as an assumption, as a part of the physiognomy of humanity. In American politics, it is mostly penny-ante, a means to electoral victory. However, when any politician attempts to spoon-feed a crowd a fearful loathing of a segment of society, bypassing thought, generosity, law, and the knowledge that most people, on the whole, are decent, they are treading the low road to power, one paved to famously efficient effect by such as Hitler.

The only thing that stands between us and this lowest of roads is our sense that decency provides the maintenance of a free country.

http://www.gocomics.com/pibgorn/2013/12/01