Nina Power on chocolate:
Chocolate represents that acceptable everyday extravagance that all-too-neatly encapsulates just the right kind of perky passivity that feminized capitalism just moves to reward with a bubble bath and some crumbly coca solids. It sticks in the mouth a bit. In a total abnegation of her own subjective capacity as well as the entire history of huamn achievement, Fay Weldon, for example, claims that:
“What makes women happy? Ask them and they’ll reply, in roughly this order: sex, food, friends, family, shopping, chocolate”
I think there’s a very real sense in which women are supposed to say ‘chocolate’ whenever somebody asks them what they want. It irresistibly symbolizes any or all of the following: ontological girlishness, a naughty viginity that gets its kicks only from a widely-available mucky cloying substitute, a kind of pecuniary decadence [One-Dimensional Woman, pp 36-7]
It’s an interesting compare-and-contrast question: why have parts of the CIS been resolutely pro-American, while the Middle East has largely not? Presumably in part it’s the effect of living under unpleasant Soviet rule, to which the USA was always the most visible opposition. But that effect can’t last indefinitely; will there ever be a mass turn towards anti-Americanism in eastern Europe, the baltic states or the caucasus?
In Central and Eastern Europe, the countries of the former Warsaw Pact followed more or less that script. But in 2004-06, when Condoleezza Rice tried to extend the model to Iraq, Egypt, and Palestine, she got a rude shock. Citizens in those countries, given anything resembling a free vote, tended to support strongly anti-American candidates.
— Helena Cobban
I’ve just been working in a cafe whose wifi blocks outgoing email. So I had to figure out how to send mail through an ssh tunnel. That is, hussle it through the firewall by sending it encrypted to a server elsewhere, and send the email outgoing from there.
For future reference, and in case it’s useful to anybody else, here’s how. This is assuming you are running ubuntu on your own machine, and have ssh access to a server somewhere else that’s capable of sending mail.
We use ssh to set up a SOCKS proxy, over an ssh tunnel. This establishes a port on the local machine (here, port 1234). any traffic sent through that port will emerge from the server at the other end:
ssh -D 1234 username@server.net
Now, install tsocks. This lets you run another program, with all outgoing connections sent via SOCKS
sudo apt-get install tsocks
configure tsocks to use the tunnel you’ve set up
sudo vim /etc/tsocks.conf
look for the default server settings, at the bottom. Edit so that:
server = 127.0.0.1
server_port = 1234
Now start your mail program under tsocks
tsocks evolution
In order to make external mail sending work under this setup, I had to turn off TLS in evolution. I’m not sure if this is a problem inherent to the socks/ssh setup, or just with my particular situation.
more info: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=791323