I've seen this image floating around:

Okay, supposedly about 55% of applicants make it into a law school. Of those, some fraction manage to graduate (which varies widely by school.) Of those, this person "graduated in the top 15% of [her] class" at law school.

Let's make a quick and dirty estimate that 2/3 of the class she was in successfully graduated. .15*.66*.55= 0.05445

So congratulations, miss. You're already above about 95% of the population, well on your way to being in the top 1%. (Technically you're in the top 5% of people who aspire to be lawyers, who as a group are already smarter than average and more ambitious than average.) Perhaps you should realize that the reason your perspective doesn't align with the supposed "99%" is that you are sociologically not one of them to begin with. See, your self-righteous condemnation of protesters assumes that to begin with, you are like them, and thus you have a basis for saying they should adopt your methods for success. It's pretty clear that was never true, so this entire exercise is a sham on your part. At the top 15% of law school graduates, you're also definitely smart enough and educated enough to realize this, making it a deliberate exercise in invoking guilt instead of compassion when dealing with the economically less fortunate.

I can only assume that your choice of such a transparent ruse is the result of deep-seated denial about your own privileges or advantages, because there's no way in hell you got to the top tier of law school by making self-defeating arguments like that.

If you're not chasing something, you're dead.

Why is it that we are okay with the assertion that men must respect women regardless of their appearance (i.e. dressing slutty is no excuse for disrespect), and simultaneously hung up on the appearance of female characters (so their garb being too revealing is invariably a horrible failing on the part of costume designers)?

Let me ask the question: is it more feminist to propose a world in which women must ape men in order to be recognized as fellow humans, or to propose a world in which a woman can kick ass even in a frilly pink skirt, if she so chooses?

Police militarization is now an ingrained part of American culture. SWAT teams are featured in countless cop reality shows, and wrong-door raids are the subject of "The Simpsons" bits and search engine commercials. Tough-on-crime sheriffs now sport tanks and hardware more equipped for battle in a war zone than policing city streets. Seemingly benign agencies such as state alcohol control boards and the federal Department of Education can now enforce laws and regulations not with fines and clipboards, but with volatile raids by paramilitary police teams.

-The Huffington Post, on Police Militarization

Benign? The ATF? I guess nobody remembers Waco burning.

Anyhow, the article is rather interesting, painting a picture of the police culture that resulted in the needless pepper spraying at UC Davis.

In her piece I need an Intervention, SaintVI reinterprets the phrase "cutting" to mean "cookie cutting," a harmless act of baking. This is cultural appropriation, but it is a very benign, everyday sort of cultural appropriation.

Is this like, or not like, the sort of cultural appropriation that comes of naming a football team "The Redskins"? Is this like, or not like, the sort of cultural appropriation that comes with Orientalism a la Edward Said? Do cutters deserve to be protected by having their terms become sacrosanct?

It's kind of difficult to tell where we draw the line.

I'm convinced that knowingly playing to type can be a valid form of social commentary. For example, suppose I saw a black university student wearing a shirt that read, "WHERE THE WHITE WOMEN AT?" It would be obvious to me that the student was knowingly invoking a negative stereotype to underscore the absurdity of it.

Of course, most people seem determined to take only the most literal reading of such things . . .

I don't think the Gervais study is saying precisely what Jezebel seems to conclude it is.

In a new study, the only group participants found as untrustworthy as nonbelievers were rapists.

One of the main issues in studies of behavior and stereotype is the desire to avoid telegraphing to the subject what he or she is "supposed" to do. But in explicitly selecting "religious" people from the USA via an internet survey company, Gervais - a foreigner - may have been unconsciously prompting them to act more in accordance with common stereotypes of religious Americans.

Furthermore, the way in which the questions were asked is definitely not as it was explained on Jezebel. Jezebel would have the reader believe that the test subjects, for no particular reason, homed in on atheism to explain immoral or selfish behavior. But that isn't exactly what happened; read the study setup and you may find that the participants were, well, set up:

Across subjects, we manipulated the target groups to which the man might belong by asking participants whether they thought it more probable that the man was a teacher or a teacher and (a) a Christian, (b) a Muslim, (c) a rapist, and (d) an atheist. In this way, we evaluated the degree to which people find an untrustworthy description to be representative of atheists, relative to a majority religious ingroup (Christians), a religious outgroup (Muslims), and an unambiguously distrusted group (rapists).

Let us presume that the average person, knowing both positive and negative examples of Christians, is willing to consider being religious a positive, negative, or neutral matter. Being asked how "strongly religious" they are by the very terms of the study, Christians, who consider being Christian at least neutral, are primed to consider being atheist not a neutral matter, but a negative matter: it clashes with their avowed identity, and they feel an obligation to act out that identity. (Studies have shown that reminding people of cultural, ethnic, or other stereotypes produces a similar reversion to type, even if that stereotype is seen as negative.)

Further, we already have one positive piece of information - the character is a teacher, generally a fairly selfless role in society. There must be some negative element to counterbalance this given positive, or the result is essentially, "this man is a jerk for no explainable reason." It's sort of a game of "which of these is not like the other?" Being a rapist is categorically not like any of the others. Being an atheist is not like being a religious believer, and so also not like the others (or at least, more dissimilar than being a Christian and being a Muslim.) The pressure on the respondent is to pick something to account for the behavior. It's at least equally valid to look at this study and say that the respondents are surprisingly free of bias against Muslims as it is to say that they are astonishingly biased against atheists.

As an aside, I question whether rapists truly constitute a proper "unambiguously distrusted group:" while we all consciously say we don't accept rape and abhor it, as a population this is simply not true. Feminist studies assert that men often have mental blind spots that cause them to effectively downplay the likelihood or severity of it. According to the more cynical of these sociological studies, this is what enables men to bond with other men and work together on matters that do not touch their personal histories. In other words, it's more that men are wired to mute their outrage over rape than that America morally equates atheism with violent crime. This is a hidden cognitive bias that, if present but not accounted for, could easily skew interpretation of the results.

When deciding whether it is more probable that Linda is a bank teller, or that Linda is a bank teller and a feminist, most participants incorrectly choose the latter option—that is, they commit the conjunction fallacy— because they heuristically judge that the description sounds representative of a feminist, even though logic dictates this option is necessarily less probable. People only commit the conjunction fallacy when the target’s description (single, outspoken, and liberal) is deemed representative of the target’s potential group membership (feminist).

Well, certainly. According to models of how our minds make sense of the world, we wish to tell tales that account for the given facts. If making Linda a feminist makes the whole story more plausible and easier to remember, then it is unsurprising that we are willing to believe it. If "atheist" implies "not dedicated to a fixed moral code" (falsely, in many cases, but widely believed) then it may be invoked to make a story of opportunistic actions easier to rationalize and believe. Also, the conjunction fallacy is easy to commit where there is no penalty for guessing wrong; I would be interested to see an economic study where the participants are asked if they are willing to bet $20 on the bank teller being a feminist with no supporting evidence, or similarly on the selfish man being an atheist with no supporting evidence.

A far better study design would be to take reactions from thousands of people, and only mine the data later for the relevant reactions. This avoids the issue of prompting people to behave like stereotypical fundamentalist Christians. It would also be best to even out the response options so that rapist and atheist are not two options that might be perceived as too strongly dissimilar to the other options, or rather, to eliminate options which are too similar. If testing distrust, why use "rapist" and not "used car salesman" or "telemarketer"? Finer gradations would more precisely pinpoint the level of bias the public has against atheists without necessarily throwing everything to the apparent level of violent crime.

Schadenfreude is the opium of the masses.

GreekPhysique asks why he once thought of dating primarily in terms of the jobs his dates held.

I don't really find this to be surprising, if one thinks about how we attach labels to things. Our society obsesses over what people "do for a living." People are introduced as doctors, lawyers, priests, etc. In other words, your job is your identity.

Surely you're concerned with the identity of the one you date - even if, as it turns out, society's descriptor of that identity turns out to be somewhat arbitrary.