If nothing else Pat Robertson is definitely consistent. He’s always been pretty vocal about his disdain for feminism and his opinion that women should be subservient to men, but somehow that doesn’t stop me from being a bit amazed by the advice he gives in the following video clip:

CO-HOST: Pat, this is from Anne who says, “My husband has always been a flirt and loves to talk with other women he finds attractive. He says he would never cheat on me but his actions are starting to get to me. What should I do?”

ROBERTSON: Anne, first thing is you need to make yourself as attractive as possible and don’t hassle him about it. And why is he doing this? Well, he’s doing it because he wants affirmation that he is still a man, that he is attractive — and he gets an affirmation of himself. That means he’s got an inferiority complex that’s coming out. And he’s not gonna cheat on you. He’s just playing.

But you need to not drive him away or start hassling and hounding on him, but make yourself as beautiful as you can, as fun as you can, and say let’s go out here, let’s go there, let’s go to the other thing.

Given some of the things Robertson has said in the past this is pretty mild, but I’m still amazed by it. Inferiority complex or not, Robertson seems to be assigning all of the blame for this issue to the woman suggesting that she’s not trying hard enough to be attractive for her man. I shouldn’t be surprised as Pat’s been stuck in the 1950′s nuclear family myth for decades now. I suppose what I should be really surprised by is the fact that any woman in the 21st century would write this old crackpot for relationship advice at all.

Though I do have to give credit to his female co-host who appears to be biting her tongue pretty hard over Robertson’s advice and suggesting that “we would be having a conversation” if it were her husband who was playing the flirt.

Here’s an interesting article I stumbled across today:

Opinion: Why the web benefits liberals more than conservatives – CNN.com

(CNN) — From the micro-donation platform first popularized by Howard Dean in 2003 to the million-strong Barack Obama Facebook page to the huge audience of the Huffington Post, liberals have been the dominant political force on the internet since the digital revolution began.

Now, research out of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society suggests that the reason behind this imbalance may be the liberal belief system itself.

Liberals, the research finds, are oriented toward community activism, employing technology to encourage debate and feature user-generated content. Conservatives, on the other hand, are more comfortable with a commanding leadership and use restrictive policies to combat disorderly speech in online forums.

All of this suggests that the internet may benefit liberals more often than conservatives — at least for now.

Gregory Ferenstein, who wrote the article for CNN.com, goes on to compare The Huffington Post (liberal) blog to Hot Air (conservative). Both are the most popular sites for their target demographics, but the Post’s audience absolutely dwarfs that of Hot Air:

A leading right-wing blog, Hot Air was founded by Michelle Malkin, an author who is known for her support of wartime loyalty oaths and racial profiling as a defense against terrorism. In criticizing Obama’s 2009 address to the United Nations, she said, “he solidified his place in the international view as the great appeaser and the groveler in chief.”

Indeed, Malkin’s hard-line national security views are matched by Hotair’s unusually restrictive comment policy. The site permits comments only by registered users; currently, registration is closed to any new users. The site states, “We may allow as much or as little opportunity for registration as we choose, in our absolute discretion, and we may close particular comment threads or discontinue our general policy of allowing comments at any time.”

By contrast, the left-leaning Huffington Post, the most visited blog on the Internet, has thousands of bloggers and invites active users to become featured authors and comment facilitators.

This makes a lot of sense when you think about it. How many Conservative blogs can you think of that have ridiculously restrictive commenting policies? If you show up and voice a Liberal opinion you’re lucky if it ever gets out of the moderation queue, assuming you can even leave a comment without registering and waiting to be approved beforehand. Now how many Liberal blogs do you know that have a similar policy?

I can’t speak for all Liberal blogs, obviously, but part of the reason I set up SEB was to get my liberal ideas out there where they could potentially change minds and where they could be refined by criticism. I’m willing to have my ideas challenged and I have been known to change my mind after a good debate on a topic. The few Conservative blogs I check in on from time to time seem to want nothing more for their ideas to be accepted without criticism by the people following them.

Of course that’s just my subjective personal experience which is why it’s nice to see someone doing some research to see if it’s true:

Harvard professor Yochai Benkler finds that these differences are representative of the broader political web.

“The left not only chooses more participatory technology, but also uses the available technological tools to maintain more fluid relations between secondary or user-contributed materials and those of primary contributors,” he writes. “The left is more egalitarian in opportunities for speech, more discursive, and more collaborative in managing the sites.”

By contrast, Hot Air’s prohibitive policies, and Malkin’s support of strong leadership, seem consistent with Benkler’s conclusion that the right is more “hierarchical” in its approach.

[...] Republicans tend to see a “limited participatory role” for citizens, Dalton writes in his book “The Good Citizen: How a Younger Generation Is Reshaping American Politics.”

One of the things that always amuses me when Conservatives criticize Liberals is how often they accuse us of doing what they tend to do themselves. We’re trying to “restrict freedoms” and “dictate to others” and “force things down the American public’s throats” which is all stuff the Conservatives like to do.

Take the Public Option that used to be in the Health Care Reform package that was passed awhile back. Conservatives accused the Obama administration of a “government takeover of healthcare” when what was being offered was the freedom to choose something other than a private insurance company driven by profits. There was nothing in the legislation that said the private companies couldn’t go on offering insurance. It wasn’t the fabled “single payer system” the Republicans kept trying to claim it was. Didn’t matter, it was an unAmerican thing, as far as the Conservatives were concerned, to offer a government backed plan that would provide coverage to everyone who needed it. What could be more egalitarian than providing health care to everyone? Who didn’t want that kind of freedom and fairness? The Conservatives.

The article goes on to point out that the surprise victory of Scott Brown in the Massachusetts Senate Race happened in part because Brown pretty much emulated everything Obama did on the Web. While that worked once, it goes on to say that it’s unlikely that Conservatives will suddenly adopt that approach:

The conservative philosophy of ironclad loyalty to a singular message does have decided advantages. In Congress, strong party loyalty has allowed Republicans to vote as a bloc, giving them formidable strength despite their minority status.

However, the internet is less predictable. And, from what we have observed from the short life of the web, opening one’s site to the capricious innovations of grass-roots users can be enormously beneficial but hard to control.

Conservatives may one day embrace the participatory web en masse. However, the very structure of the internet as a decentralized grouping of communities may never appeal to the large portion of right-wingers who prefer military-style hierarchies and commanding leaders.

And, as years go by without a conservative social-media pioneer or a top-ranked website, it looks as though the internet has already chosen a side.

In short, the web benefits Liberals more than Conservatives because the web is Liberal by its very nature and just look how successful that approach has been for it. Had it been more Conservative in nature I doubt it would ever have been the phenomena it has turned out to be.

At the very least you can be damn sure that a site like SEB would never have been allowed on a Conservative internet.

Haven’t posted in a day or two so I thought I’d take a moment to let folks know why. We’re trying to get ready to move out of our current apartment to a smaller unit some four doors down as it’ll knock about $300 off our rent. This has been complicated by a couple of things. The first being my ongoing recovery from the knee surgery.

At this point I’m able to walk with only a minimal limp, but my knee still isn’t up to full strength and it keeps wanting to buckle every few steps. The entry wounds from the surgery have healed up well and are down to just small scabs at this point and the only pain I have occurs if I spend an extended amount of time walking. Walking being one of the things I’m supposed to be doing a lot of to get the knee back into shape. I’m good enough that I should be able to help quite a bit in the move, but still weak enough that I’ve called in some friends to help with the heavy furniture. That’s supposed to happen on Saturday. We get the keys on Friday and I’ll begin moving some boxes over then. Sunday will be spent moving whatever didn’t get moved on Saturday and then doing a thorough cleaning of this apartment. My hope is to be able to relax on Monday.

The other thing that’s been complicating the move is my wife’s health. She’s been having problems with headaches, IBS, and high blood pressure. We ended up seeing the doctor today about it and the diagnosis is excessive stress. Her job has been more stressful than usual lately and when you combine that with the upcoming move and my continuing unemployment the Doc decided she needed to take a few days off to decompress. Needless to say we don’t have as many things ready for the move as we would have liked, but if worse comes to worst we’ll clear off the heavy stuff to be moved on Saturday and get that much done and worry about the rest on Sunday.

Speaking of my unemployment, I’m trying to ensure that I get at least one resume out a day using the various job finding websites that are out there. So far I’ve been pretty successful at that which is impressive considering how a lot of the jobs listed are well beyond my skill set. Those that are in my skill-set are, of course, being inundated with applicants. I’ve yet to have any interview calls, but at least one company sent me a follow-up questionnaire which I answered and sent back.

Finally, I want to take a moment to thank everyone who has sent in a donation to the SEB Spring Fundraiser. You guys have been a huge help and we really appreciate it. Some of you sent along notes apologizing for only being able to donate a small amount like $10 and I want you to know there’s nothing to apologize for. Ten bucks is still ten bucks more than I had before you donated and every little bit helps. SEB gets around 2,500 unique visitors a day on average with the occasional peak of 10,000 plus on some days due to an entry gaining popularity on Stumble Upon. In short, there’s enough folks pitching in that your $10 goes a lot further than you might think. Again, I thank each and every one of you who has tossed a few bucks my way. It is sincerely appreciated.

A little late-night atheist hymnal for your listening pleasure:

Good stuff indeed. I would love to get a good MP3 recording of this. Hope they release one.

Originally found over at Unreasonable Faith. This is an alternate version I tracked down as it’s easier to hear the lyrics.

As many of you know, I’m a huge fan of Mark Twain and I already own a number of biographies and collections of his writings. One of the things he wrote that I’ve been looking forward to reading for, literally, decades is his own autobiography. The reason I haven’t read it already is because Mark Twain left instructions that it wasn’t to be published until 100 years after his death:

The creator of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and some of the most frequently misquoted catchphrases in the English language left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century.

That milestone has now been reached, and in November the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain's autobiography. The eventual trilogy will run to half a million words, and shed new light on the quintessentially American novelist.

Scholars are divided as to why Twain wanted the first-hand account of his life kept under wraps for so long. Some believe it was because he wanted to talk freely about issues such as religion and politics. Others argue that the time lag prevented him from having to worry about offending friends.

Bist of his autobiography have appeared in other books, including some that billed themselves as being autobiographies, but more than half of the original material has never been published in book form. People who have seen the writings already, which was possible if you were willing to make the trip to the Berkeley Bancroft research library, say that Twain had a lot to say that is surprisingly vitriolic:

“He had doubts about God, and in the autobiography, he questions the imperial mission of the US in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. He’s also critical of [Theodore] Roosevelt, and takes the view that patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel. Twain also disliked sending Christian missionaries to Africa. He said they had enough business to be getting on with at home: with lynching going on in the South, he thought they should try to convert the heathens down there.”

In other sections of the autobiography, Twain makes cruel observations about his supposed friends, acquaintances and one of his landladies.

Oh yes, I’m looking forward to that. No word yet on when to expect it to hit store shelves, but I’ll definitely be picking it up once it does.

If you’re reading this then you’re still viewing the old RSS feeds. You’ll want to update to the new feed URL which will be http://stupidevilbastard.com/feed/.

Imagine that you’ve just paid off your five year old car when this happens to it:

Todd Jamison doesn’t have to imagine it. His 2004 Hyundai Elantra was one of the two cars crushed by a 62-year-old woman by the name of Tripta Kaushal who was

That had to be a pretty shitty day. The folks at Hyundai thought so too so they did something to cheer him up:

You have to admit that giving Todd a brand-spanking new car free of charge was a pretty nice thing for Hyundai to do and will probably make Todd a customer for life. If nothing else it probably went a long way to relieving him of the stress such an event can cause. Kudos to Hyundai for stepping up and helping out even when they had no obligation to do so.

We’ve got lots of candy to hand out tonight, probably more than we need, and I’ve got a emo plastic pumpkin that lights up and a fog machine that I’ll be setting up on the back porch. No costume for me again this year and I’ll be handing out candy solo as Anne is working tonight and Courtney is up in Grand Rapids. Which really makes it kinda spooky for me in an odd I’m-all-by-myself sort of way. Well, I’ll have the Official SEB Black Cat, Melvin, with me to add yet another layer of appropriate atmosphere, but he isn’t much of a conversationalist.

Or at least he shouldn’t be.

One of these years I’ll own a home where I’ll be able to go all out on the spooky decorations and really do things the way I’ve always dreamed of doing them, but for now I’ll have to settle for what I have. Still, it’ll be fun to see the kids as we actually get a few of them through here unlike just about every other apartment complex I’ve ever lived in. How about you guys? Doing anything for Halloween? Got any cool decorations out in the yard?