Software designer Ali Almossawi has been moonlighting as the author of this wonderful primer on the logical fallacies that have been screwing up our thinking and our argument construction since shortly after the invention of dirt. While that information is copiously available both in intro philosophy courses and, naturally, online, such sources are often dry, laden with jargony academese, and pitifully bereft of the marvelous work of illustrator Alejandro Giraldo. The writing is tight, sharp, and accessible enough that it might (MIGHT) actually penetrate the dense, reality-repellent cranium of any given straw-man enthusiast posting Alex Jones links to your Facebook feed.
 

 
From Almossawi’s introduction:

This book is aimed at newcomers to the field of logical reasoning, particularly those who, to borrow a phrase from Pascal, are so made that they understand best through visuals. I have selected a small set of common errors in reasoning and visualized them using memorable illustrations that are supplemented with lots of examples. The hope is that the reader will learn from these pages some of the most common pitfalls in arguments and be able to identify and avoid them in practice.

 

 

 
The work is currently being supported by an online tip jar and distributed under a Creative Commons license, but the site claims that a print edition is forthcoming.

And because it is inconceivable to me to post about argument without including this, please enjoy, for what surely must be the thousandnth time in your life, Monty Python’s classic “Argument Clinic” sketch. It’s still amazing, no?
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Comedian’s hysterically funny ‘Hotel Graffiti’ blog: ‘If you’re reading this it’s already too late’
Quality vs. quantity in life: Man’s touching and inspirational speech about what’s really important
Neil Innes on The Rutles, ‘working’ with Lennon & McCartney and being impersonated by Elvis!

 
Okay, that’s not the only reason Bill de Blasio will be the next mayor of American’s greatest city. He advocates for paid sick leave, he’s spoken out against the racist “stop and frisk” NYPD tactic, and he’s been incredibly frank about raising taxes for the rich, all while wishy-washier Democrats faltered (or embarrassed the hell out of themselves). In fact, current NYC Mayor (and resident rich billionaire asshole) Bloomberg has referred to his campaign as “class warfare and racist,” so you know he’s gotta be doing something right!

But let’s talk about what (and who) has to be the first drag queen in a campaign commercial for a major political race! It’s Wigstock founder and and all arounf drag legend, Lady Bunny, who’s never shied away from politics (her Sarah Palin-themed parody of Harper Valley PTA is brilliant). While de Blasio’s biggest competition, Christine Quinn, is the first openly gay Speaker of the New York City Council, her race and class politics are absolute shit, and don’t fool savvy radical queer folk like Lady Bunny! What’s more, Bunny is featured in the ad as a dignified, concerned citizen, and not some socially liberal window-dressing to indicate how socially progressive the candidate is.

Fun fact: While jabbering moron and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has mistakenly portrayed de Blasio’s wife Chirlane McCray as somewhat homophobic, McCray self-identified as lesbian until meeting de Blasio. (She was even a member of the black feminist lesbian organization, the Combahee River Collective. So there, Maureen Dowd!)
 

 
Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase were almost at the center of a Cold War “incident” during the filming of Spies LIke Us. It all happened when they were in Norway, as Aykroyd explained to the Daily Telegraph:

“We shot some of Spies Like Us in Norway, on the top of a mountain near Sognefjord , and we had a replica of a Soviet SS20 rocket on the back of a launcher parked right there on the mountain. It was a very beautiful spot. We were shooting over a week, and one day we got a call from a representative of the United States Department of Defence because their satellite had spotted our rocket and called the Norwegian government. They thought a Soviet rocket had been secretly moved into Norway, so the producers had to clarify that this was a fake. Thus a major international diplomatic incident was averted.”

Aykroyd was discussing highlights from his life of travel at hotels and venues across the world, and included his spookiest moment:

“Ghostbusters evolved from my interest in the paranormal. I remember being in the Hotel del Coronado, in San Diego, and they told me a story about a woman who’d been beaten and strangled in a room there. She had been killed by a sailor more than 100 years before and they said her blood was still on the room’s carpet. They took me up to the room, which looked pretty much as it would have at the time of her murder, and I looked but there was no blood on the carpet. But then, just as I was walking out, the bellboy said, “Look!” I turned back and one, two, three, four brown blotches just seemed to materialise before our eyes. Maybe it’s a trick. You can rent that room – I think it’s number 419 – so go see for yourself.”

Aykroyd also detailed his favorite bar (Jean Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, on Bourbon Street, New Orleans), and his involvement in a bizarre moment on an Air Canada flight, which you can read here.
 

 
Via the ‘Daily Telegraph’

 
A satirical painting of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev dressed in frilly ladies’ lingerie, Travesty, was confiscated by officials from the Museum of Power art gallery in St. Petersburg a week before the G20 summit started. Putin is shown combing Medvedev’s hair.

Other paintings of authority figures in the “Rulers” exhibit that “violated existing legislation” and were confiscated included depictions of two evil politicians, Vitaly Milonov (deputy mayor of St. Petersburg) and Yelena Mizulina, the ones responsible for recent vicious anti-gay legislation, with a rainbow flag, and conservative, homophobic Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, who was painted with skull tattoos and busts of Stalin and Lenin. The government won’t say which existing laws were violated, but they could always point to the one prohibiting insulting state authorities or the new one banning alleged homosexual propaganda aimed at minors. It would be hard to argue that seeing the equivalent of a political cartoon in a newspaper is going to give young people “The Gay.”

Milonov, who may be the last male on the planet who has never seen actual pornography, had already complained about the paintings being displayed and described them as being “of a distinctly pornographic character.”

According to gallery owner, Alexander Donskoy, the paintings were seized with no formal warrant for their removal, the director was detained by police but not charged, and the museum was closed for a few days. Donskoy has been a thorn in the side of the Russian government since announcing his intention to enter politics in 2006. He also owns the G-Spot, a gallery of erotica, where a painting of a nude Putin and Barack Obama (with multiple massive dayglo penises) by artist Vera Donskaya-Khilko was seized by police yesterday. The G-Spot was shut down.

The artist who painted the Putin-Milonov Travesty piece, Konstantin Altunin, has fled to France and is planning to seek asylum. Maybe he and Femen’s Inna Shevchenko, the two members of Pussy Riot who fled Russia in 2012, and the upcoming diaspora of Russian artists can all be housemates.

Oh, and he wants his painting back. In an open letter to G20 leaders, Altunin wrote, “I ask [you] to mention the topic of censorship in [a] personal conversation with Putin and ask him to return my paintings seized from the Museum of Authority.”

So, hey, just in case G20 leaders or their staff members are actually reading Dangerous Minds during boring meetings, instead of playing poker on their phones (hi guys!), here are two other paintings they’re not supposed to see:

 

 
Reuters report on confiscated paintings, below:

Cheburashka toy

Cubans in their forties and fifties may not have vintage Disney toys from the 1960’s and 1970’s or boxed sets of every Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon, but chances are they may still have a Bolek and Lolek toy or book somewhere. And they’re probably downloading hours worth of other old cartoons from the Soviet era.

Following the Cuban Revolution in 1959 state television ran cartoons from Bulgaria, East Germany, Poland (Bolek and Lolek), Hungary (Gustavus), and the Soviet Union (Mashinka and the Bear, Ny, pogodi!) . A lot of these cartoons did not have dialogue, preventing the need for dubbed audio. 

Following the break up of the Soviet Union in 1991 Warsaw Pact cartoons were no longer shown in Cuba, but there was a generation of young adults with fond memories of them.

A graphic designer, Darwin Fornes, started a small business in Havana this year, which he called Chamakovich, and printed up 300 T-shirts featuring his favorite cartoon characters from his ‘80s childhood. Despite the dire Cuban economy, his first run sold out almost immediately. Darwin told La Jiribilla that he used grayscale for the images of Bolek and Lolek for added authenticity: most Cubans had black-and-white televisions well into the ‘90s.

Here is a selection of the quirky and adorable cartoons that inspired Fornes’ T-shirts:

Bolek and Lolek (Poland):

Mashenka (Little Masha) and the Bear (U.S.S.R.):

More Soviet-era cartoons after the jump…

 
A cafe in Glasgow, Scotland, has come under criticism for selling Breaking Bad crystal meth cupcakes.

The Riverhill Coffee Bar is selling the cupcakes, with a blue topping that resembles the crystal meth drug manufactured by Bryan Cranston’s character, Walter White, in the hit TV series, at $3.00 a hit.

Christine Duncan, chief executive of Scottish Families Affected by Alcohol and Drugs, told Glasgow’s Evening Times:

“The glamorising of drugs is completely distasteful.

“We know from our membership base that the impact of drug misuse on families includes financial instability, breakdown in family relationships and the loss of employment.”

Two different points being made by Christine here, neither of which relate to the subject of cupcakes.

Meanwhile Nina Parker, city councillor for the Green Party said:

“It doesn’t sit well with the work that is being done to tackle drug abuse. Quite frankly, there’s nothing funny about recreational drug use.”

I bet Nina’s parties are a riot.

The criticisms relate more to drugs and drug use rather than the retail of a novelty confection. Methinks, the comments are almost veering a wee bit towards Chris Morris’s Brass Eye satire on the drug Cake.

In response a spokesperson for the Riverhill Coffee Bar said:

“We absolutely do not condone the use of drugs. Breaking Bad is such a huge, cult hit and this was simply us jumping on that bandwagon and making something that would appeal to fans of the show.”

If you want to bake your very own Breaking Bad crystal meth cupcakes, then check recipes here and here, or video here.
 

Lest we forget: Chris Morris investigates the misuse of Cake.
 
Via the Evening Times

 
Happy Birthday to Sylvester, the “Queen of Disco,” who would have been 66-years-old today.

As m’colleague Niall O’Conghaile has previously written:

If there’s any one artist who represents everything that was revolutionary about disco music, it was Sylvester. It doesn’t matter how many Bee Gees, Ethel Mermans, Rod Stewarts, Boney Ms et al you can throw at the genre as a reason to hate it, the fact is that if it wasn’t for disco there is no way that a linebacker-sized, black, openly gay, outrageous, gender-bending performer like him could have reached the top of the world’s charts.

Sylvester broke every taboo going. In fact he didn’t just break them: he tore them up, threw them on the floor and stamped on them with uproarious glee, all while dragging you out to dance with his irresistable energy. He didn’t have to shout about any of his social or political inclinations because he was already living them, out in the open, for everyone to see.

Sylvester didn’t make “political music” because he didn’t have to: Sylvester’s very existence was inherently political.

Sylvester James jnr. was born in Watts, Los Angeles, on September 6th 1947. He started his singing career with the choir at his local Pentecostal Church. Openly gay from a very early age, Sylvester quit the church allegedly aged 13, after being persecuted by the Jesus-lovers, who it has been said would beat him, punch him and spit on him, for having a consensual relationship with a much older “man of the cloth.” Even so, Sylvester would retain a deep love of the church and Gospel-singing.

By 16, Sylvester was homeless and living by his wits. But his desire to sing eventually led him to start a band of black cross-dressers and trans-women called The Disquotays—this at a time when it was possible to be arrested in LA and charged with “masturbation” for cross-dressing in public. After The Disquotays disbanded in 1970, Sylvester joined the legendary, radical, hippie, drag troupe The Cockettes, performing with them in San Francisco, where he became a major sensation—receiving standing ovations whenever he performed. When The Cockettes toured New York to negative reviews, Sylvester quit the band (famously making his announcement to quit onstage) and began his solo career - performing and recording his first album with backing group The Hot Men, then gigging with three of The Pointer Sisters as his backing.

However, it was his teaming with Two Tons of Fun (later known as The Weather Girls of “It’s Raining Men” fame), that Sylvester became the major star of Disco and Soul. As his biographer Joshua Gamson wrote in The Fabulous Sylvester: The Legend, the Music, the 70s in San Francisco:

“Something clicked and sighed into place when Sylvester and the Tons got together – something that wasn’t there with the Hot Band white boys, for all that they could cook; something that wasn’t there with Peter Mintum, for all the beautiful oddness that he and Sylvester shared; something that wasn’t even there with the black drag-queen singers, for all the fierceness they projected. Izora and Martha were whom he came from and who he was… They were women who got their own. They sounded right with Sylvester, and looked just right, one on either side of him. Plus, next to them, Sylvester, who had grown quite round, looked positively svelte.”

In 1977, Sylvester relased his self-titled album, followed by the superb Step II in 1978, from which came his best known single (originally a Gospel tune) “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).”

Happy Birthday Sylvester—supreme singer, performer and “Queen of Disco”!
 

The now gone “Diana” Facebook page

It sounds like a comic book plot or like something from a Tarantino movie. But it’s real.

A middle-aged woman wearing all black and a blond wig has taken it upon herself to avenge the on-going sexual abuse of female bus passengers in the city of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, right across the border from El Paso, Texas (the city across The Bridge in the FX crime drama).

Last Wednesday and Thursday “Diana” boarded a public bus and shot the driver in the head with a pistol and walked away. A witness claims she told the second victim, “You guys think you’re real bad, don’t you?” before shooting him.

She then sent e-mails to Mexican media outlets with the handle “Diana, the hunter of bus drivers.”  There was a Facebook page under that name, now removed.

She wrote in her e-mail:

I myself and other women have suffered in silence but we can’t stay quiet anymore. We were victims of sexual violence by the drivers on the night shift on the routes to the maquilas [assembly plants in the city]. I am the instrument of vengeance for several women.

Several bus drivers were arrested in connection with the mass rape and murder of women in the city from the 1990’s to the early 2000’s. Hundreds of women disappeared after boarding public buses. Their bodies were found weeks or months later, dumped in the desert or vacant lots.

Local and Chihuahua state police are planning on putting undercover agents on city buses to hasten the capture of Diana. Maybe they should also consider devoting more energy and resources to ensuring the safety of women just trying to get to work.

Via The Guardian

The City of Lost Girls documentary, below:

 
After I watched the video below, pondering how difficult it really must be for members of the Westboro Baptist Church to date outside of their own… gene pool, for shits and Google, I decided to see if there actually was a WestboroMingle.com. 

And you know what? There is! It’s place where, “God hates Friday night loneliness.”

Written by C.S. Rutledge. Directed by Nick Snow and Corey Scott Rutledge.
 

 
via reddit

 
A great find by Mike Novak at Smithsonian Magazine proves that movie fans were just as interested in “special effects” as any fan of Star Wars, Alien, Terminator 2, The Matrix, or Avatar—a June 1927 issue of Science and Technology magazine laying out the innovative techniques behind Fritz Lang’s masterpiece Metropolis.

Metropolis is one of the greatest, most astonishing movies ever made—it still holds up. Indeed, it’s arguably the only movie from the silent era that has widespread currency among younger viewers today. That’s how good it is. Imagery from Metropolis is something of a staple in our culture—you can often spot it in random montages of miscellaneous footage, and especially in Queen’s video to “Radio Ga Ga,” which ends with the words, “Thanks to Metropolis.” (I should hope so!)

If you’ve seen the movie, the crowd scenes and the close-up shots of electricity surrounding certain characters—these shots are done so well that you hardly stop to ask how they were done. It turns out that Lang’s brilliance didn’t stop at composition and thematic storytelling—he was tinkering at the very edges of what could be done in motion pictures, a theme that is right at home with—and yet at odds with—the moral and message of the movie itself.
 

 

 
Be sure to see the rest at Smithsonian Magazine; Novak’s explanations of the various pictures are excellent.

Here’s part 1 of the recently restored Metropolis:

 
After the jump, parts 2 and 3 of the restored movie….