Interesting article: students at Indiana University “were shown photographs of women and asked to categorise them as friendly, sexually interested, sad or rejecting. The male students were far less accurate than the females at interpreting the body language, and were particularly baffled by the difference between flirty and friendly gestures.”
The researchers also found that women overestimate men's ability to pick up on sexual signals. They argue that many females wrongly believe that the men are well aware of their attempts to woo, but are just not interested in responding. In contrast, women are very aware that males get the wrong end of the stick when they are simply being friendly.
Best- selling author Kathy Lette said the research proved that women are far more fluent in body language. "It is really confusing for women," she said. "The average bloke either doesn't realise that we fancy him until we are giving birth to his children in the labour ward; or he presumes all women fancy him all the time.”
Comments:
Jamesinthegiantpeach in the UK, chimes in, saying: “Many men would rather just ignore the signs women throw out than misinterpret them and risk getting into trouble. Women, if you want sex or whatever, don't play these stupid games, tell the guy I think you're hot and get on with it.”
Edward from London says: “The other way of interpreting this is that women are not very good at communicating clearly. The dysfunction in communication is generally the sender's responsibility, not the receivers.” So what's the deal? I personally never had trouble like this, so perhaps men are stupid and can be criticized for never "closing," but let's hear from some women about this.
I'm freaking out about how fucking awesome this song was, and is. Seriously. When I first heard this as a kid in 1976, it was like mainlining some serious ontology. Those synths really move the soul. I heard this song for the first time and discovered the universe, it seemed. I discovered loss, too. How weird that my ol' school friend James Bogdan got his hand nearly ripped off by some amusement park ride at the time, and THIS was the song I associated with that kid, my best friend in Pittsburgh, back in the day. Shit.
Just when it seems that there are no longer any big ideas around except dumb ones, Michael Hardt, an internationally renowned political theorist from Duke University, and his co-author, Antonio Negri, are publishing important books that are big in every sense of the term: Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004). In these works, they diagnose the contemporary global order and describe the conditions that can lead to its democratization, not from the barrel of a gun but through the productive and creative capacities that inhere in the Multitude - i.e., in us in all our differences.
Lest this all seem like Benetton multiculturalism, hold on. Hardt's explanations about our global condition are defamiliarizing, fresh, and sometimes funny in their yoking together of the wild oppositions that typically make headlines, if not the pablum of talk radio: the postmodernists are shown to bear affinities with religious fundamentalists; democracy falls on the side of war; violence is the condition for peace; and - yes - multiculturalism emerges as the best of marketing strategies. It is a problem that these opposites are identical. And for Hardt, the problem is that we are passing into a new age, in which new modes of political being that are full of creative and democratic potential compete with the new methods of state and corporate control. Their question is, Who will win the escalating tussle? Humanity or Social Control in all its forms? The Multitude or Empire?
Refusing the glib protocols of academic deconstruction (yawn), and endeavoring in every way to write books are that are readable and erudite, they leisurely sketch out the bigger picture that is Empire - their word for the social, political, and economic power of global capitalism. Think of Empire this way: If the older coercive forms of monopoly capitalism could be depicted in a 1904 cartoon as the giant octopus of Standard Oil, sitting on top of the world with its tentacles around U.S. Capitol Buildings and hapless minor businessmen, Empire is a different creature altogether, with no center, no body. It diffuses itself globally and rhizomically and constrains our desire to work, love, and live without fear. In explaining Empire, Hardt juxtaposes industrial labor and the newer forms of "affective labor" in the service economy (including information, media, internet, and fast food services). And it is here that Empire is shown to be susceptible to the genuine democratic possibilities of the Multitude, the total aggregate of self-actualizing individuals who realize the "life in common" through communication, collaboration, and cooperation.
"The challenge of the multitude," he writes, "is the challenge of democracy. The multitude is the only social subject capable of realizing democracy, that is, the rule of everyone by everyone." Of course, Empire will always proclaim to champion democracy but in practical terms democracy is its own "sed noli modo" ("but not yet"!): power is just too addictive, just as premarital sex was irresistible for Augustine. It is for that reason that democracy can only be put into practice by a "radical insurrectional demand" from the Multitude. On this point, Hardt concludes: "We can already recognize that today time is already split between a present that is already dead and a future that is already living - and the yawning abyss between them is becoming enormous. In time, an event will thrust us like an arrow into that living future. This will be the real political act of love."
This is a Super8 film from May 1986 that my buddies and I made (and starred in) for a project for Mrs. Beckman's New Media class at Naperville North High School. The same cast of characters, and the same protagonist as in Ninja, our other hit video, with which this film evinces intertextual connections.
This film was shot on location in McDowel Woods, off River Road in Naperville, and edited with tape and that splicing implement on loan from the top floor of the library. We all wish we made the film a bit longer. I distinctly recall being cast as a preacher, and I came to the shoot in my '78 Buick Park Avenue with a blue suit on and my hair completely hairsprayed down, but somehow the monkish theme became irresistible -- let alone suffocating and noxious, as you will soon see.
That said, it's fair to say that there's something appropriately surreal in its brevity -- all the way to its irresolute ending. Then there's the weird broadside at the beginning credits depicting some celestial irruption in the medieval fashion of a flaming face shouting at you unnecessarily, breathlessly, and extremely loudly from the heavens after coursing through the darkest reaches of goddamn where daemons and spheroids alike are borne in their inbreathed comminglings: it's come to say you suck, so smile!
Oh, I'm not sure why the sound is so low. It was fine in the original file.
GBDH writes in to the Obama campaign with the following advice:
My brief suggestion to O: use the word "Clintonian" as a pejorative, and tell O to offer remarks such as, "Here is another Clintonian strategy of twisting the truth and changing positions. The only change in Hillary's campaign is a change of position when it suits the politics of the moment."
The point: "Clintonian" will merge Hillary and Bill in the minds of the public, and will evoke the worst of Clintonian politics, to which - I'm afraid - your campaign is succumbing.
Make "Clintonian" a bad word. Do to "Clintonian" what Limbaugh and then later Rove have done to "liberal."
I'm not saying be Rove-like. I am saying that O's rhetorical abilities need to be refined towards better soundbites and pejoratives to defeat the Clintons (PLURAL), who are too deft at floating smear balloons.
I honestly don't think you have much time to save this, and I want O to be prez. PLEASE DO THIS, and go O!
Here’s the latest racist shit coming from the Hillary campaign - in the words of one of her advisors: "If you have a social need, you're with Hillary. If you want Obama to be your imaginary hip black friend and you're young and you have no social needs, then he's cool."
Or in the words of Hillary's pollster, Sergio Bendixen:
The Hispanic voter—and I want to say this very carefully—has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.
So the Hispanic vote is the latest firewall for February 5: “In all honesty, the Hispanic vote is extremely important to the Clinton campaign, and the polls have shown—and today is not a great day to cite polls—that even though she was slipping with women in Iowa and blacks in South Carolina, she was not slipping with Hispanics,” he said. “The fire wall doesn’t apply now, because she is in good shape, but before last night the Hispanic vote was going to be the most important part of her fire wall on February 5th.” You can bet they will stir up racial animosity to assure the firewall is in place, and working. They'll stir it up by saying Obama's campaign is stirring it up.
Or in the words of Hillary:
I mean, who needs all those Civil Rights leaders when you have a President? Maybe racist isn't the word for this one. How about stupid? Her reply to the charges?: “Clearly, we know from media reports that the Obama campaign is deliberately distorting this. . . . It is such an unfair and unwarranted attempt to, you know, misinterpret and mischaracterize what I’ve said.” No, Mrs. Bill Clinton: you are distorting this. You think LBJ would have given a flyin’, flagellatin’ rat’s ass about Civil Rights if it weren’t for MLK. Do you? You think that the nation would never have awakened itself to its racist abuses if it weren’t for LBJ? You think that January 21, 2008 should be renamed LBJ day? Has MLK’s dream even been realized when you and you're campaign are talking this shit? How dare you go there. Man, what a fucking cynical campaign you have.
Combine Hillary's stupidity with her team's racist balloons floating hither and thither and you have a real Rovian campaign strategy. You're aimin' to win! And that's the point. The Hillary Campaign is taking a page from the playbook of that sissy fatXfuck Karl Rove, who says of Obama: "His trash talking was an unattractive carryover from his days playing pickup basketball at Harvard. . . . He is often lazy, given to misstatements and exaggerations and, when he doesn't know the answer, too ready to try to bluff his way through." Basketball? Just had to say it. Lazy? Ditto. Where's "welfare cheat"? "Pimp"? "House negro"? "Half breed?" What Karl, what? What do you really want to say?
I’m sick of this shit, and more sick of it from the Clintons -- all that crap coming from buttholeXmouth of American’s so-called "First Black President." EAT A BAG OF DICKS (with Ranch).
My response to all this? I’ve donated to a political campaign for the first time in my life, and am mailing my check on my way to the gym. [done and done]
Go O
This is war. It’s the soccer moms, blurry but imminently fuckable and strategically placed bourgeois redheads waving and “wooooing” and snapping digi-photos on TV behind Hillary in NH, and old ladies VS Everyone Else who gives a shit about history (and remembers it) and cares about the future of this country.
Come on bruthasand sistas. Get on board with this! I'm sick of this shit, and of course, stupid ass white people aren't gonna go out of their way to help you -- at least not Hillary voters: all the more reason to get fired up.
------------------------------
MORE Clinton egginess (1/13/08):
Her interpretation of the Tears to the White House ploy:
"I'm very 'other' directed — I don't like talking about myself.... For me, it's always about, ‘What can I do for you? How can I help you?' And I was very touched when that woman said, 'How are you doing? How do you get up in the morning?'" [Source]
Ah, ain't that precious. What this is, in fact, is Hillary absorbing the MSM's points about how Obama's speeches are oriented toward what "you" and "we can do," and Hillary is "I," what "I will do for you." This is a nice flip-flop, and another bit of rewriting recent history and robbing from the great O.
