Interesting Links for 21-10-2018

[andrewducker]

More information than you could possibly want to know about whether you should have sex with a malachite dildo

(tags: masturbation geology biology chemistry )

Why dogs lick people's faces

(tags: dogs funny comic )

I score 104 for masculinity and 95 for femininity

(tags: gender psychology )

The Activists Waging a War to Make The Far Right Go Broke

(tags: money bigotry )

100 different Brexits

(tags: uk europe )

How to avoid raising a materialistic child

(tags: children psychology )

Saudi Arabia's Troll Army and Twitter Insider

(tags: saudiarabia twitter OhForFucksSake propaganda )

Asterix in Translation: The Genius of Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge

(tags: comics french translation france uk english )

The Elegance of the Deflate algorithm

(tags: algorithm programming compression )

What will be left of the people who make our games?

(tags: games working_hours )

Why the Milkman Shudders When He Perceives the Dawn

(tags: short_story )

Understanding Science: An overview

(tags: science )

UK stands 'absolutely resolute' with the US after Trump pulls out of Russia nuclear weapons treaty

(tags: usa Russia nuclearweapons )

Civil servants war-gaming a second Brexit referendum amid impasse fears

(tags: UK europe referendum )

Comments

[cmcmck]

Your score for masculinity was 72.
Your score for femininity was 112.

Why am I not surprised? :o)

[ninetydegrees]

"Your score for masculinity was 82."
"Your score for femininity was 97."

"According to Sandra Bem, high levels of both masculinity and femininity is androgyny and is psychologically healthy. Low levels of both is undifferentiated."

So I'm not psychologically healthy? *laughs*

[danieldwilliam]

I'm not really sure what I should think about the nuclear treaty.

If the Russians are not abiding by it at all then I think probably withdrawing from the treaty is not unreasonable.

[andrewducker]

Yeah. I think I'd like a decent explanation of the situation.

The INF

[nojay]

The Russians have been working on making an existing naval cruise missile into a land-based Ground-Launched Cruise Missile (GLCM) i.e. capable of being fired off a truck. Like most decent-sized cruise missiles it's nuclear-capable, tactical rather than strategic but still a Bucket Of Instant Sunshine delivered like pizza to a front door but probably with a better chance of getting the correct address.

That GLCM development breaches the INF since it bans both Russia and the US from having such missiles -- they can put cruise missiles on ships, in subs, hang them from aircraft wings or bomb bays, whatever but don't put them on wheels.

Cruise missiles are slow and, for a modern well-defended nation, not that difficult to stop. America doesn't have neighbours it could or would use such missiles on so it doesn't really care. The INF was basically an agreement to defuse a short-range nuclear arms race between the US-dominated Western Europe and the Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact in the 1970s and 1980s (remember Greenham Common?)

Russia has China to worry about now and at the moment its existing strategic nuclear capabilities are pointed at both the US and China and, it is reported, they're in a dire state of repair. A big-ticket replacement of their mainstay SS-18 silo-based missile system doesn't seem to be going well and will probably end up being reduced in number from the existing 45 ready-to-fire missiles of dubious reliability (the US, by comparison has 450 ensiloed missiles and they all work, probably). This GLCM is a cheap short-range alternative to shore up its nuclear delivery capabilities against threats like China, it's not really meant to threaten Western Europe and certainly not the US but since it's on wheels it could be moved west of the Caucasus in a hurry if needs be.

The INF is probably obsolete in its present form, a lot of it depended on geopolitical considerations like the Inner German Border being a thing and they don't hold any more. An updated INF2 is possible but the Russians are still pissed off about the US deployment of anti-missile systems in Poland and elsewhere under the pretext of a non-existent ballistic missile threat from Iran and they're unlikely to come to the discussion table any time soon. I can't see the US spending money to develop and deploy a new GLCM or similar nuclear-capable missiles in Europe, the most you might expect would be uprated anti-cruise-missile defence systems (basically anti-aircraft missile batteries configured to intercept low-and-slow cruise missile threats).

Re: The INF

[andrewducker]

Thank you!

[danieldwilliam]

I score

Your score for masculinity was 114.
Your score for femininity was 101.

But I notice that one of the questions was repeated.

[marahmarie]

Ah, the sex role inventory, I dunno...1970sish in origin, plenty of sexist questions (do you like guns/dancing/remember birthdays/leave special notes are just some of the ones that seemed iffy)...given all that I scored 103/124, when I expected roughly the same numbers flipped, which has me side-eyeing the nature of some of those questions pretty hard.

[cmcmck]

I was made to take so many of these (I note than my score hasn't altered much in forty odd years) and considered it deeply sexist even back in the seventies when they first tried to prove I wasn't who I said I was!

How does a female military historian manage, I ask myself? :o)

Misleading in nature

[marahmarie]

All it's measuring is how well you've been socialized or self-taught to perform stereotypically gendered roles. Given my near-perfect feminine score I've apparently been socialized/self-taught rather well, but if it proves that, it proves literally nothing else - least of all how feminine or masculine or dual feminine/masculine you actually are.

[naath]

Your score for masculinity was 88.
Your score for femininity was 81.

'undifferentiated', well, probably.