According to Daniel Nettle from the University of Newcastle, UK, the classically promiscuous man will be high in extroversion, low in neuroticism and fairly low in agreeableness as well. “The extroversion gives you the desire to do it,” he says, “the low neuroticism means you don’t worry too much about doing it and the low agreeableness means you don’t really care if you mess someone around or cheat on your wife.” The situation is similar for women, says Nettle, although another factor, openness, comes into the mix to some extent. This makes sense since people who are open to experience are likely to want to explore new relationship possibilities.
The Daily Mail’s take on this- “OMG! THE BRITISH ARE SUCH SLUTS!” And apparently it’s all the fault of female equality and rationalism.
The US elections are like a big, scary soap opera. They’d be more entertaining if they weren’t so important. So far all the best stories have come from, or been generated by, the Republicans.
The polling figures are so poor, and John McCain’s campaign so dire, that the right wing bloggers and commenters have descended to grabbing any fantasy solution that comes near them and holding on tight. Over the weekend I saw reports that Barack Obama was about to be arrested as part of someone else’s corruption scandal, that he had an affair (the details of that one look a lot like one of the plots from the first season of 24, they have a hard time with original thought on the right it would seem) and that he was somehow knee deep in an invented voter registration scandal involving a group called Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN).
I’ve done a little research into the ACORN “scandal” and it looks like a smear. The organisation is accused of voter registration fraud (cut down to voter fraud as part of the smear so that it can sound like an attempt to steal the election) because they turned in dubious or duplicate registration forms. ACORN hands over every registration form its workers generate, as they are required to, so if an individual gives them something fraudulent they’d be breaking the law if they discarded it. In fact, ACORN points out that they separate suspicious registrations out and flag them for the electoral commissions to investigate.
Meanwhile, Republican organisations are trying to remove people from the electoral roll. Specifically the sort of people who would be more likely to vote for Obama- the poor, blacks, people who have lost their homes as part of the mortgage meltdown. It’s a familiar story, basically the same methods they’ve used to steal the last two elections.
Meanwhile, Sarah Palin- whose husband was a member of a political party that wanted Alaska to break away from the United States- is accusing Obama of wanting to destroy the country because he worked with a reformed- if unrepentant- former member of the Weather Underground. This has struck such a chord with certain McCain/Palin supporters who prefer not to think that they’ve started parroting “terrorist”, “traitor” etc. at rallies. It’s got so bad that the people who started the name calling are now asking them to shut up and getting booed for it.
Whichever way the election goes it looks more and more like the USA wants to be two countries.
This post was inspired by an article on the Daily Mail website. It’s an expansion upon the comment I left there, which I expect, based upon past experience, won’t be published.
Update I forgot to mention that the link is to a Daily Mail article, so if you do read the comments be prepared for a lot of frothing “political correctness gone mad”, “homosexual agenda!” type stuff. Apparently it’s good that he has stood up and chosen to counter all the homosexual propaganda that’s out there. Where is this homosexual propaganda exactly? I’d love to see some, just to find out what it looks like. I guess those perfume adverts with David Beckham could be guerilla gay propaganda- it can claim to be about something else, but smelly stuff is a bit gay isn’t it?
I can’t believe that I’m so much less aware than the average Daily Mail reader that I can’t see the great big billboards that must be out there emblazoned with catchy mesages like “Become a poof- it’s good clean fun”. I assume that’s what they mean by homosexual propaganda, because they can’t possibly mean calls to treat homosexuals equally when they go on about it. Can they?
A couple of random things that have been in my head for the last few days but haven’t coalesced into anything long enough to post by themselves-
We need leaders, but what we get are politicians.
Fundamentalist levels of danger: individually, Islamic fundamentalists are more evil, but they’re not going to destroy our society unless we help them. Collectively, Christian fundamentalists are far more dangerous, because they exert an influence on the US and other western governments far out of proportion to their grasp on reality.
I’m reminded of one of the many satirical radio adverts in GTA IV, which plays on this tendency of some parents not wanting to do any responsible parenting and demanding the rest of the world should shut up so they don’t have to explain things to their kids. Heaven forbid they should try to prepare their little ones for the real world by having to explain that we’re all different.
Call them what they are- terrorists, murderers, criminals. Don’t play into their hands. This is actually a sensible suggestion. The phrase “Islamist terrorist” gives them something to use. It lets them make claims of islamaphobia (merited in some cases given the pathetic bigotry of the sort of person who wants to use such stupid words as Islamofascist) and try to get sympathy from other muslims who wouldn’t normally pay attention to such criminals.
We should use language to marginalise terrorists and other criminals who hide behind religious or political causes. Make them sound stupid and pathetic and they’ll have a harder time drumming up support amongst the group they claim to be a part of. It won’t stop them all by itself, but it’s a start.
Also, spot the hypocrisy of the Daily Mail website. Having taken the high moral ground about how terrible this behaviour is and suggesting it shouldn’t be uploaded to YouTube, they embedded the video below in the report.
He said: “These people have actively sought British citizenship because they want to make a contribution to the UK.
“I am not sure how many people born in this country have the same commitment. The tests for citizenship are greater than they have ever been.
“We are now turning immigrants into better citizens than people born with a British passport.”
The Daily Mail and its frothing “I’m not a racist, but…” readership are up in arms about this, and goes out of its way to cite Abu Hamza et al as examples of the sort of immigrant we’re getting, insinuating that they’re all muggers, rapists and killers. Take any million British citizens and I think you’d find a number of vile scum in the mix. I mean, a few of them would be Daily Mail readers for a start.
So long as the gay adoptive parents are flamingos, anyway. Carlos and Fernando, Greater Flamingos living at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust in Slimbridge, Gloucestershire, have a history of stealing eggs from straight birds and hatching them (which got them in the news last year). So when a chick was abandoned keepers stuffed it into a broken egg which they left in Carlos and Fernando’s nest so they could bond with it when it “hatched”. So far the little bird’s two dads are doing a fine job of raising it.
Tony Blair et al insist that their fixation on nuclear power is a brave and radical attempt to counter global warming when it’s actually a cowardly and backward effort to avoid doing anything. If they want to do something radical they should start subsidising insulation and double glazing for houses in the worst Council Tax bands and paying to put solar water heaters on every South facing roof in the country. Start by reducing the need for centralised energy production and helping those whose energy costs are a greater proportion of their expenditure. It will increase the prosperity of the country, likely encourage further spending on energy saving and cut carbon dioxide production.
Then they can start funding micro-generation and communal energy projects. Water turbines on weirs, local windmills, geothermal for a whole street, that sort of thing. Lots of little projects have a better chance of coming in on time and under budget than one big one and a distributed power generation system will be more robust.
There are a lot of reasons why this won’t happen, but they all have one common factor- Tony Blair’s cowardice. The Daily Mail would moan about the undeserving getting cossetted with free insulation and rail against "Nanny Statism". The NIMBYs would try to halt schemes designed to make them better off. Big Energy companies would complain because they would lose their monopolies and hold over consumers. Most of all, this sort of scheme would give power back to ordinary people, the sort of prospect that gives every politician nightmares.
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