I wonder if that pic was taken at the local YMCA?

Some recent troubles I had with my health insurance have motivated me to start looking around for different health care options. I've considered looking for a different company or changing the deductible on my current plan. But I also decided to look into what the State will provide me.

Of course, anything involved with the government is going to be a snarled morass of bureaucracy. Especially when it's at the State level, or at least when it's at the Most Corrupt State In The Union level. I eventually did what I always end up doing at any government website; I started clicking links at random until I saw what I was looking for.

Take a look at this screencap of the page I eventually found myself on. Not at the two definitely-heterosexual men posing suggestively in the photograph, but rather at the link I've circled.

I think I saw these two at the Cook County Clerk's office applying for a Civil Union. In those same shirts.

Why the hell does a website about medical plans for men have a section where men aren't supposed to go? Am I missing something here? And I'd like to point out that I didn't add that Venus symbol, it was already there.

So I clicked it, and there was, I kid you not, the words "WARNING: ONLY FOR WOMEN" in bold red letters. I was then that I realized what was going on. They're using the old Forbidden Fruit ploy. Tell someone he can't do something, and he'll just wanna do it all the more.

I read a bit more, and the page was telling women about why they should be worried about men's  health. What the reason it boiled down to was "Men are too stupid and lazy to worry about their own health, so you better do it for them." That piqued my ire at first, and then I realized that was the whole point. They were trying to piss me off, so I'd be like "I don't care about my health? I'll show you!"

Just one more bit of evidence that the basic assumption behind all politics is that normal people are complete morons.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

How academic debates flare up

There's people out there that other people call word or grammar Nazis. Linguists get mad at his pigeonholing, and not just because of the reference to fascism. Language, they argue, is the most effective means humans have devised to communicate with each other. While most animals can communicate basic concepts such as "danger here" to each other, humans have developed the ability to explain abstract concepts to each other.

At this point biologists step forward and point out we don't know that other animals can't communicate as effectively as we can. Linguists respond by politely asking the biologists to shut up, they're trying to make a point here.

Anyway, where were we? Oh, right. The point of language is effective communication. If people are using a word incorrectly, then they are not communicating effectively.

But, Joe Sixpack points out, even if I'm using this word wrong, so's everyone else. So they all know what I mean.

Linguists, who are beginning to lose patience at this point, resist the urge to stamp their feet. Everybody being wrong in the same way doesn't make them all right, they say. Before Columbus, everyone was wrong about the world being flat. Doesn't mean the world was flat.

Hang on, say logicians. Your counterargument doesn't apply. Language is a human construction, plastic and evolving, while something like the shape of the Earth is solid physical fact, and no amount of rhetorical prowess can alter it.

At this point historians, who happened to be passing by and caught the tail end of the conversation, come storming in. Dammit, they shout, we're so tired of hearing that. Look, nobody in the 15th Century thought the Earth was flat. Pythagoras proved it was round over 2,000 years ago. Columbus thought...

Look, look, linguists say, we're getting away from the original point, which was...

No, by God, historians say. It's time the record got set straight, and we're gonna...

Come on, linguists say, the story about Columbus and the orange and all that are in the collective unconscious by now. You can't...

Oh, say historians, so now you're psychologists?

Did someone mention us? Psychologists ask.

Stay out of this, everyone else yells.

Keep this in mind next time some reactionary calls Universities a breeding ground for sedition.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights