clever username

Cops do have quotas for tickets. They are punished for not meeting them. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/nyregion/10quotas.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/02/nypd-quotas_n_5916596.html People who bring this up have blood on their hands, though, the Benevolent and Sacred Fraternal Order of Philanthropic Police Officers tells me. Also Ferguson largely funds it's white police department by over ticketing the city's black population, and it is far from the only ex-white suburb to do so. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/11/26/how-segregation-led-to-speed-traps-traffic-tickets-and-distrust-outside-st-louis/

You're confusing a lot of things about the word "fetish". It originally had religious meanings, not psychological ones. It didn't come to mean "a sexual perversion" until Freud, and still doesn't exclusively mean that; that's just the most popularly known use of the word. See commodity fetishism, as an example. The term "cargo cult' is also almost never used to describe the religious practices of Melenisian islanders. It was probably made most famous by Richard Feynman in his speech Cargo Cult Science: http://neurotheory.c...cargo_cult.html Even if you're right, though: why is that racist? If these terms were being used to denigrate people of color, that'd be one thing. But they aren't. The entire point of both metaphors is that these are universally human foibles that anyone can fall into, no matter how "civilized" they think they are.

I think it means... "Bend over, bitch?"

It suddenly occurred to me that Kevin might have been being ironic in that post. If so, sorry. As I said: drunk.

New question: is the word magic racist?

I'm drunk so I'm going to expand on this. Anthropology is the study of other cultures, but inevitably that's going to mean a study of our own culture. You go out and study a people, and immediately the differences are going to stand out to you. Those people worship a little idol instead of the Holy Cross, as all right thinking people should. How come? They think there's a spirit in that idol that controls the world around them. How weird. Let's call that fetishism. As soon as you start to walk down this path, you're inevitably going to come around to the the thought: well, how come we worship the cross? There are two responses to this question: a right-wing response and a left-wing response. The right wing response is: we are inevitably right, these other cultures are inevitably wrong. There is fundamental difference between us. We are different races. The tools of anthropology should not be turned back on us. The left wing response is the complete opposite. We are all human beings; there are no fundamental differences between me and someone who was born in Gao. I should apply the same level of critical inquiry to what I believe as I do to the beliefs of those people who worship that idol. This is the stand of thought that ended up winning in Anthropology, and it's the reason why the term Mongoloid and the entire idea of racial classification was abandoned by mainstream anthropology at least fifty years ago. When Andrew comes on air and is like, "Uh... I think like... a cargo cult is... liking iPods?" it is extremely frustrating to me. There is an interesting discussion under-girding all of this that he isn't taking the time to research. Fifteen minutes on Google would have made this episode much, much better I like discussions of race and politics and think they're both necessary and helpful. But Yo is this Racist always disappoints me when I listen because it's so, so surface level. Like the time when Andrew and his guest said that racism in Hollywood was entirely the fault of Middle America, and the nice writer and studio executive friends they have are blameless. Come the fuck on, you dipshits! Don't fucking shit in my mouth and tell me it's a chocolate sundae! Fuck you! Sorry. I've drunk a lot of vodka and there would be a lot more misspellings in this if not for spell check. Sorry. But no, fuck you.

Why? It's a useful metaphor, and the use of literal fetishes isn't restricted to West African religions even though that's how the term was popularized. Communion wafers, for instance, are fetishes. Hell, so is a cross.

Congrats on proving that racial classification and eugenics were racist. That was a real hat trick. Do you want to actually engage with my question at all? Do you think the term fetish is racist? Unlike Mongloid, that's actually analogous to cargo cult.

A cargo cult isn't just used to describe cultish behavior in general. It's a metaphor for someone replicating the trappings of something without understanding the underlying dynamics, and therefore failing to get the results they want. Andrew really mangled the definition. Moreover, I don't buy the argument that anthropological terms like cargo cult are racist. Is the term fetish racist?

If Hillary's the Democratic nominee in 2016, it'll probably be her against Jeb. We'll have to choose our third Bush or our second Clinton. "Left" neo-liberalism vs. "right" neo-liberalism. If Monica Lewinksy actually really is trying to sink Hillary Clinton's run for the nomination, then she's the greatest hero who's ever lived. Sadly I think Joe (I think it was Joe who made this point) is right and Monica's reentry into the public sphere is very clever PR on the Clinton's part. She's probably a shoe-in.

Does knowing that it wasn't Tom Cruise who pretended to jump out of the way of that huge explosion you just saw on screen, but instead a different human who was slightly more practiced at the specific skill required to make it look like he'd just jumped out of the way of said huge explosion, in any way affect how plausible you found Jack Reacher? No, it doesn't. Would changing the credits of Jack Reacher so both Tom Cruise and his stunt double were credited as the eponymous (sorry Uncle Scott) star of the film change how plausible you thought the scene was? No, it wouldn't. Believing it would is dangerous.

No, sorry, it still makes no sense. The audience knows that monkey didn't really kill anyone. People know how movies work. They don't dive out of the way of the screen if a train comes barreling towards the camera anymore. And even if you somehow discovered a completely unsavvy country bumpkin who had never heard of a movie before, telling him or her that the monkey was in fact a composite of six monkeys wouldn't do anything to help disabuse that person of the belief that a monkey might go crazy and try to kill them. And that's not even getting at the craziest part of June's rant: the idea that we shouldn't give animal actors (and possibly animals in general) names.

I'm still crying from that argument. When June started raising her voice, I lost it. I really want to know if her anti-animal name stance is just limited to monkeys. Should people not name their dogs and cats either? Is this dangerous?

People call Lizzy Caplan's character Gini all the time it pretty much wrote itself

Scott's reference to his Master's of Sex style study made my mind wander. SCOTT AUKERMAN stands in the middle of the new Earwolf studios, boxes stacked around him. GINO enters, unseen by SCOTT. GINO: No matter how long you stare it's not going to unpack itself. SCOTT turns to look at him in the doorway. SCOTT: Wait a minute, you're my intern. Shouldn't you be unpacking it? GINO shrugs. SCOTT picks up a clipboard from the top of one of the boxes. SCOTT: *nervously* Human Resources wrote up a contract specifying the details of your employment. If you'd like to peruse? SCOTT hands it to GINO, then turns away, not able to bear looking at him. GINO enters the room, shutting the door behind him. This requires privacy. SCOTT: Your office is in there. He points to the men's room. SCOTT: Next door there's a dedicated exam room, with a viewing area. Which raises the question of where we'll be resuming our sessions: here or at the hotel? I'm amenable to either. GINO: I was wondering if there's a third option. SCOTT: Oh? And that would be? GINO: To stop. They make eye contact for the first time. GINO: We've been at this a while now. At some point haven't we exhausted the possibilities? SCOTT: Sexual research. That's like saying someone's done mapping the milky way. GINO: *laughing weakly* Yes. Well, maybe if we took some time to reassess our objectives. SCOTT: And what objectives exactly are you referring to? GINO: The scope of our involvement. The terms. SCOTT: Oh, we're back to terms now. *beat* GINO: I suppose I'm wondering if our personal participation is a condition of my internship here. *a longer beat* SCOTT: *forced nonchalance* No. GINO: *half-disappointed* Well, maybe it's better if we- SCOTT: What I meant was yes. Yes, it is part of the job. Relief floods GINO's face, which he hides by looking back down at the contract. The tension between them is electric. GINO: Hotel then. SMASH CUT TO: SCOTT jacking off and fellating GINO at the same time, while the intern records his boss's climax time with a stopwatch. Also in the next episode you see Sarah Silverman's titties.

You keep bringing up Isaac Newton, and I think that proves my point. We know that guy wasn't visited by aliens because we have his writings. We know his name. We know his thought processes. We can see he came up with calculus because he showed us his work. We don't know any of that stuff about the Egyptian who measured the proportions of the pyramid of Giza to match the sun. Or the Briton who came up with the log-rolling idea. So UFOlogists can go into this (supposed, because we can infer thIngs from the physical record) gap and say "Aliens did it!" I don't see racism there I see classic religious, god of the gaps style thinking.

I know Atlantis is not a real place; it makes it the perfect thing for UFOlogists to speculate about. And I suspect that, not racism, is why they focus on the civilizations/monuments they do. Like Stonhenge. Not exactly the most complicated structure ever built, and the only mystery there was about it was how they got the stones all the way over there. A mystery we solved a long time ago. Now, the reason we know less about non-European civs is definitely because of racism, either because of less interest or because conquering Europeans destroyed their languages and written records (as Spain did in the Americas). But I don't see racism drawing people to UFOlogy. Ancient British people were white as can be and plenty of people don't think they could roll stones on logs. Some people just want to believe in aliens; they're like modern day gods.

More genetically diverse doesn't mean they had more disease; that comes from having a high population density. Also 450 feet is not "one of the tallest buildings in the world" by a long shot. We know how the Egyptians built the pyramids and it wasn't by getting aliens to do it for them.

Doesn't Atlantis get tied into the whole Alien Visitation thing? Those were Greeks and those dudes are "white". And I know Stonehenge does a lot too. I don't think it's fair to chalk ancient alien theories up to racism, even if they are pretty ridiculous.

Like even huge gun nuts buy like what, maybe five guns? Ten if they're rich and really, really feel like they need to prove they've got a big dick? You can't really sustain a criminal empire on that kind of turnaround, you dumbass gun owners.

Did that caller really try and make an analogy between banning alcohol, an addictive substance you can literally gin up in your bathtub, and banning semi or fully automatic weapons, which are extremely complicated pieces of machinery you need expensive and pretty obvious factories to build and which a person is going to buy a really limited number of? Does he really think there's gonna be people slinging glocks they made int heir basement on street corners?

I don't want to be "that guy" but since Matt asked the Irish Potato Famine was caused by a fungus. I think potato bugs eating all the potatoes is way funnier, though.

if marissa had been there there's no way scott would have been able to get away with pushing poor gillian around. there definitely needs to be a jacobs/wompler team up episode, imo