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Well, she clearly had the "Math class is TOUGH!" Barbie and not the "Vengence is MINE!" Barbie.

It's like those Barbies that got shipped out with G.I. Joe voice boxes a few years ago.

Actually, the Barbie Liberation Organization switched the voice boxes and put the packages back on the shelves.

Actually, the voice boxes were swapped by "reverse-shoplifters": The so-called BLO - Barbie Liberation Organization.

http://www.sniggle.net/barbie.php

It's not like "those Barbies that got shipped out with G.I. Joe voice boxes" at all. Those voice boxes were switched after the toys were on the shelves by the Barbie Liberation Front http://www.sniggle.net/barbie.php/.

The shipping of Barbies with G.I Joe voices was not a mistake but an politically intentional prank.

Serves Spielberg right, IMHO.

>It's like those Barbies that got shipped out with G.I. Joe voice boxes a few years ago.

Actually, that was deliberate tampering:

In 1989 the Barbie Liberation Organization was formed. Taking advantage of similarities in the voice hardware of Teen Talk Barbie and the Talking Duke G.I. Joe doll, er, "action figure," they absconded with several hundred of each and performed a stereotype-change operation on the lot.

http://www.sniggle.net/barbie.php

Mind you, any terrorist Santaistas might face actions by the Department of "Homeland for the Holidays" Security.

Television is something that networks the masses, it represents the "mainstream". The population watches television and relates to the social interactions they are observing. The more television watched, the more the ones watching will be socialized to what is mainstream/normal in society. Check out this link for an interesting take on this subject.

I believe the same situation is present on the internet in message boards, in social circles, or anywhere that would present a non-varied take on society. For example a gamer frequenting message boards that discuss the effects of violent video games on children will be exposed primarily to the viewpoint that video games don't cause violence, despite whether it is actually true. So that gamer will most likely then adopt the same take on that subject. This would be what is often referred to as "groupthink" on Slashdot.

However, I don't think this is entirely bad. Many denounce television on the premise that it causes groupthink. But to detach ourselves completely from society as you have only serves to isolate us and break apart our cohesiveness with society. So now we have the two extremes: being glued to the television set and being socialized completely to mainstream society's values, or detaching oneself completely but lacking cohesiveness with the rest of society.

I believe that the "truth" lies somewhere in the middle. It is important that we are all not relying on groupthink, as our range of opinions and thought will be bland and not diverse, so that we are not resilient enough to change and adapt. At the same time it is important that we do not detach ourselves completely, so that we as a society are all locked into niches and identity politics, making us unable to act with any useful degree of solidarity in human society.

The polite explanation for this might be Stockholm Syndrome*. The impolite explanation is pig ignorance.

(* "The Stockholm Syndrome comes into play when a captive cannot escape and is isolated and threatened with death, but is shown token acts of kindness by the captor. It typically takes about three or four days for the psychological shift to take hold.
"A strategy of trying to keep your captor happy in order to stay alive becomes an obsessive identification with the likes and dislikes of the captor which has the result of warping your own psyche in such a way that you come to sympathize with your tormenter!")

I used to be a science teacher long ago, so let's see if I can grab some statistics for you.

As I recall, girls perform about the same as boys through adolescence, though their percepetion is that they don't do as well. In later years, the girls who think of math as "a boy thing" tend to do even more poorly.

Still, remember that these differences are small and are much smaller than other differences (by race, private/public school, geography). If there are biology based differences between the genders, they're likely to be small and a poor predictor of how any particular woman will do in math or science.

There's a fairly statistic-free article here (pdf) you can look at.

Maybe it was all those Barbies claiming that math is hard.

If it wasn't for the very democratic China, the US couldn't grow any deficit at all - sense the irony of that...

This has "HOAX" written all over it. It's classic culture jamming.

It's just like the stories about hunting nude women with paintball markers, Arm the Homeless, and Stu Magazine. I'd say odds are excellent that this is somebody pulling one over, quite cleverly and effectively, on the media.

See Sniggle.Net's News Trolls page for more information about the long, hilarious history of news trolling in the United States.

-Waldo Jaquith

I touched on alternative currencies, a concept which is tangential to my experiment, in an earlier entry. If you're intrigued by that sort of thing, you'll probably be interested in this interview with Bernard Lietaer. He discusses several alternative or complementary currency systems in use worldwide. He also claims that something called the time-dollar that is being used in the U.S. has been ruled tax-free by the IRS, something that I would want to see documented before I'd believe it, since the feds aren't usually so kind to barter or mediated-barter arrangements.

Well, thanks to google, the documentation is at hand. "Why the Taxman didn't come" explains the background of the ruling and its limitations, and a Time Dollar FAQ goes into more detail, but I wasn't able to find anything on the Internal Revenue Service website.

I touched on alternative currencies, a concept which is tangential to my experiment, in an earlier entry. If you're intrigued by that sort of thing, you'll probably be interested in this interview with Bernard Lietaer. He discusses several alternative or complementary currency systems in use worldwide. He also claims that something called the time-dollar that is being used in the U.S. has been ruled tax-free by the IRS, something that I would want to see documented before I'd believe it, since the feds aren't usually so kind to barter or mediated-barter arrangements.

Well, thanks to google, the documentation is at hand. "Why the Taxman didn't come" explains the background of the ruling and its limitations, and a Time Dollar FAQ goes into more detail, but I wasn't able to find anything on the Internal Revenue Service website.

A relevant quote on the subject:

"As to whether Stockholm Syndrome applies to customers of abusive service providers (Microsoft, AOL, Blockbuster Video, etc.), I think this is much more akin to the behavior of a battered spouse. In order to justfy bad choices, people will often rationalize and defend their tormentors, even to the extent of projecting the same aspects onto other people's spouses and providers: Her husband really is mean to her, and her Mac crashes just as often as my PC."

Jokes always seem funnier to me when I don't get them at first reading -- yeah, I actually did have to look up "Stockholm Syndrome."

As the Barbie Liberation Army

You must be smoking some good shit

I thought the misassociation of a famous confidence trickster's words to PT Barnum was common knowledge... I mean this was stated in the A&E biography by numerous historians, as well as in the History Channel recanning of the same interviews.

However, just because PT didn't say it, doesn't mean it wasn't true. But really, we're the suckers in the end... Since we've all got to pay higher rates now.

Does anyone remember reading about the Barbie Liberation Organization? How long until something like this pops up in a grogery store I wonder. Or perhaps wireless cart-hacking? I'm assuming that they'll have a central system to ease administration in case products are moved (which happens every other Thursday). Why not just save the trouble and throw all the food in a big pile in the center of the store?

I have said that it was difficult to understand, in what we call our free world, how it can come about that a scientist who has been working on CBR [Chemical, Biological and Radiological weapons] but is dubious about the morality of what he is doing should not find it in his power to resign. But how free are we citizens of this free world to resign from the gigantic and demented undertakings to which our government has got us committed?

That quote is from Edmund Wilson's 1963 book The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest which I reviewed a few days ago at The Picket Line, a blog I run to chronicle my experiences with tax resistance

The point being that there's a continuum of attitude towards the government - from active participation, active cooperation, collaboration, passive acquiescence, resentment and passive resistance, to active resistance. Many people who think of themselves as being in opposition to the government-sponsored evils they know about (and who congratulate themselves for this) are actually contributing to and supporting the government in all but attitude and words.

Thoreau put the moral responsibility in these words:

It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too. See what gross inconsistency is tolerated. I have heard some of my townsmen say, "I should like to have them order me out to help put down an insurrection of the slaves, or to march to Mexico; - see if I would go"; and yet these very men have each, directly by their allegiance, and so indirectly, at least, by their money, furnished a substitute.

www.sniggle.net ("the culture jammer's encyclopedia") links to a couple of little hacks like this. In the most famous one, a group switched a bunch of voice chips between Barbie and GI Joe dolls, so Joe was saying things like "Let's go shopping!" Another interesting if less pointed experiment involved filling a bunch of teddy bears with cement and placing them on the shelves of a major toy store ...

Is the Barbie Liberation Front still in business? Yup, seems to be

We are all pikers in his wake. The Abyssinian gag. The Dreadnought Hoax. The Venice Horse Mystery. And, possibly, The Piltdown Man.

My life's goal is to write a book about WHdVC. I know. I'm a loser.

What a great opportunity for culture jamming! We just need a few thousand webloggers to start using weird words designed to repel "normal" people.

Obviously this could backfire and we could actually start a real trend. So, I propose that the first words we need to put out are ( geek || nerd ) && sexy. (And if you understood that, you must be hot stuff.) I'm willing to take this risk if you are.

• Adbusters
• Sniggle (jamming encyclopedia)
• some theory
• examples

What a great opportunity for culture jamming! We just need a few thousand webloggers to start using weird words designed to repel "normal" people.

Obviously this could backfire and we could actually start a real trend. So, I propose that the first words we need to put out are ( geek || nerd ) && sexy. (And if you understood that, you must be hot stuff.) I'm willing to take this risk if you are.

• Adbusters
• Sniggle (jamming encyclopedia)
• some theory
• examples

There are so many vulnerabilities to the news media's meme filters. Check out the list at sniggle.net for instance.

In this arms race, like that with copy protection and access restriction schemes, the advantage is all in favor of the clever crackers I think.

When form letters get well-filtered, algorithmically-generated letters a la the Dada Engine will step up to the plate. From there, the race will be on.

There is something glorious about a college prank. A really good prank brings not just laughter, but a visceral satisfaction and a kind of awe that does not fade with time nor diminish with retelling. In the narrow world of university life, so routine, so programmed and often - like life in the real world - too dull to tolerate, a prank shakes things up, breaks the tedium, and gives hope for a life filled with hidden, delightful possibility.

Although the article is quite flawed the basic underlying premise, that bad research is geometrically propogated through inadequate review of sources, has some merit

This propogation reminds me of the myth surrounding history of the bathtub. H.L. Mencken once wrote a joke history of the bathtub to prove a point about the gullability of americans. The funny part is despite the admission that there was no truth whatsoever in the article, because of sources referencing unreviewed sources parts of it are still quoted as fact in modern history textbooks.

A site I run (sniggle.net - formerly found at syntac.net) was removed from the wayback machine when the church of Scientology complained about an image of L. Ron Hubbard on one of the site's pages.

Now, not only all of the pages on my site, but all of the pages at syntac.net have vanished from the wayback machine.

Oh yeah, and they can't be found at Bibliotheca Alexandria either, so that's no solution.

Brewster's going to have to turn down his rhetoric about the wayback machine a bit until he gets the resources to fight back. Otherwise people might get the impression that he really is keeping the history of the web, even the parts of the web that entities like the church of Scientology don't like, alive.

It will probably not come as a surprise to know that the "Nigerian Scam" predates the internet and really, in its essential form, predates Nigeria. If you're interested in historical examples of this sort of thing, you might want to check out sniggle.net's Scams page.

It will probably not come as a surprise to know that the "Nigerian Scam" predates the internet and really, in its essential form, predates Nigeria. If you're interested in historical examples of this sort of thing, you might want to check out sniggle.net's Scams page.

Well, if people weren't willing to hand over tons of cash to overpay for somebody else's marketing campaign then more of the worthless a$$holes of the world would be asking us for change on the street instead of designing crass public art.

Really, now: Don't pretend you've got a brain and use it if you're going to hit its snooze button every time a Big Lie comes along.