Wednesday roundup

In Ukraine, atrocities on both sides.

How your polarised sunglasses work.

Friends going through a hard time need a listener, not an offerer of undue optimism.

Bruni on how Charnov got away with far too much for far too long.

More Hobby Lobby analysis.

Did you know there was just a MENSA MRA convention outside of Detroit?

One speaker postulated that women are responsible for all domestic violence because, having all the power in relationships, they could simply choose not to marry violent men.

The greater tragedy, though, was that they're not altogether wrong on everything:

They’re not unsympathetic issues. In fact, when men are talking about wanting shared custody of their children, when they are talking about wanting to reshape the culture to make it acceptable for men to be primary caregivers instead of just primary breadwinners, when they want to raise awareness about the military industrial complex that sends mostly boys to die in wars — then, they don’t sound like angry white misogynists. They sound like they could be feminists.

There’s a kernel of something in this tiny, peripheral movement that might speak to larger questions: regarding our expectations of modern masculinity, regarding how to truly measure equality. But the kernel gets rhetorically buried in paranoia and anger, which, at this conference, created a wounded echo chamber of nebulous statistics.

But they're held back by their amazing compulsion to miss the point.

Here's the Clark-Flory piece referenced in the above link, which is worth reading in and of itself, not least for its identification of the Omega Male. I want to elaborate on that a bit: there's another breed of Omega Male--F., an ex of mine, is one--who are Alphaish in their careers but functionally castrated man-children in every other aspect of their lives. They're just as useless as the full Omegas.