Day: August 28, 2015

Another in the continuing series of clearing off the pre-vacation and vacation links.This collection all has to do with thing or concepts that are either abandoned, or should be abandoned:

• Women Want To Have Extramarital Affairs. If the Ashley Madison hack demonstrated anything, it demonstrated we must abandon the fantasy that women want to have affairs with handsome married men. The New York Post actually said it best:
  

  The Ashley Madison hack proves men are dogs. But the Ashley Madison service itself proves men are suckers.Not simply because millions of men who were trying to hide from their wives decided to use their real names and email addresses in signing up for an adultery website — though that wasn’t exactly the mark of genius. It’s because they thought that there were millions of halfway attractive, married women out there just waiting for a hot proposition from a married man so they could be unfaithful.

  There aren’t. And chances are there won’t ever be. It’s hard to know how many users of the site are real (it sounds as if some were signed up by friends or enemies as practical jokes). But even taking the numbers at face value, the ratio is abysmal. There were about 28 million men and 5 million women in the account list, while the credit-card information belongs almost entirely to men.

  Ashley Madison confirms what we already know about infidelity. Men are much more likely to engage in it than women. And men are much more interested in casual sex than women.

  To suggest otherwise is either a male fantasy or a feminist one.

  Or, as LA Observed put it:

  But the bigger story is that Ashley Madison isn’t actually a website where men pay to have hot affairs with women then have their names and personal info hacked. It’s a site where men pay and try to have affairs, then have their info hacked. A real distinction.

  The LA Observed article goes on with a whole bunch of statistics about the “women” on the site, including the fact that “Out of 5.5 million female accounts, roughly zero percent had ever shown any kind of activity at all, after the day they were created.”. In other words, Ashley Madison was a huge self satisfaction site for men. Now think about the fact that we’re pillorying people for being on it, even thought it is highly likely they were actually unfaithful. In fact, given they didn’t validate email addresses, it is highly likely that all the people who are on the list were really on the site.* Perhaps what we should abandon is the notion that society knows how to do critical thinking and reasoning.

• Suitcases. From the 1910s through the 1960s, many patients at the Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane left suitcases behind when they passed away, with nobody to claim them. Upon the center’s closure in 1995, employees found hundreds of these time capsules stored in a locked attic.  Mental Floss has a fascinating article about the contents of those suitcases, and what it says about the lives and hopes of the patients.
• Handwriting. Those of us in the computer generation may be of the belief that it was the computer and text message that led to the death of handwriting. Atlantic Magazine has a different opinion: they opine that it was the ballpoint pen that killed handwriting. This was because the pen used different ink that required more pressure and made writing harder. As a regular fountain pen using, I can believe it. A good fountain pen is head and shoulders above a ballpoint.

*: On Facebook, about a week ago, I wrote the following: “Re: 2nd Ashley Madison Data Dump. Perhaps it is just the way my mind works, but what is to prevent anyone with a grudge from taking any past data dump (say any Target breech), doctoring with additional information, and then dumping it as Ashley Madison data? Certainly not the reaction of the victims: they are tainted if they admit, and not believed if they deny.”