It List

- Kliener Perkins lost it’s battle to drag a sexual harassment lawsuit out of the public eye and into private binding arbitration.
- Pandas, fuck yeah!
- Obama is one of the most fiscally conservative presidents since Eisenhower.   This is disputed by one dude but also repudiated by other reputable sources.
- Turning old shipping containers into houses.
- Termites that explode with toxic poisons when they get old.

When confronted by a competing species of termites, the animals tend to burst, releasing a sticky substance from their backs. However, the authors noticed that a subset of animals had blue stripes across their backs, and were far more prone to bursting with just a bit of minor prodding from an enemy termite.

:: exploding termites ::

Shit List

- People who talk about politicising tragedies

And, of course, the angry accusations that one person or another is “politicizing tragedy,” unquestionably the worst sin in post-tragedy rhetoric.

This is stupid. There is no such thing as “politicizing” tragedy. James Holmes did not materialize in a movie theater in Aurora this morning, free of any relationship to law and authority and the structures of power in this country; nor did he exit those relationships and structures by murdering 12 people and injuring several dozen more. Before he entered the theater, he purchased guns, whether legally or illegally, under a framework of laws and regulations governed and negotiated by politics; in the parking lot outside, he was arrested by a police force whose salaries, equipment, tactics and rights were shaped and determined by politics. Holmes’ ability to seek, or to not seek, mental health care; the government’s ability, or inability, to lock up persons deemed unstable — these are things decided and directed by politics. You cannot “politicize” a tragedy because the tragedy is already political. When you talk about the tragedy you’re already talking about politics.

It’s easy to understand the impulse to decry “politicization”: politics is necessarily antagonistic, and in the aftermath of a violent tragedy confrontation seems distasteful and disrespectful. No one wants to be accused of using a tragedy for “political ends.” But you don’t really get to escape. The insistence that no one talk about politics is itself a political act. Politics is how we effect change in the systems and structures that govern our lives. To take the stance that tragedies are or should remain “apolitical” or “depoliticized” is to say, essentially, that everything is fine and nothing needs to be fixed; that such an act was random and unpreventable. (In a country with rates of violent crime that far exceed our economic and cultural peers, such a sentiment seems misguided at best.) To demand politics be left out of the conversation is only to hide them.

:: Gawker ::

- This dude I met at a party, for seriously trying to tell me that the heads of the UN were practicing black magic.
- The dude who fucked up the bbq, for injuring a bunch of people at an Anthony Robbins fire walk.