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Phobias literal and figurative

This has to be one of the more stupid news items I’ve come across recently (via InstaPundit):

[P]sychologists from the University of Arkansas claim that homophobia is not an actual phobia because it’s caused by disgust, not fear or anxiety.

Duh! We needed a study to tell us that the “phobia” part of “homophobia” is and probably has always been used figuratively?!

However, despite the “yeah, we knew that” nature of the study’s findings, I am troubled by the assertion that “fear or anxiety” don’t cause homophobia, but rather disgust. So disgust and “fear and anxiety” are mutually exclusive?

A fascinating array of heretofore unknown to me indexes or scales were marshalled to come to the study’s conclusion, including:

[…] the Index of Attitudes Toward Homosexuals (IAH), which measures homophobia; the Sexual Attitude Scale, which explores what people think about human sexuality; the Disgust Emotion Scale, which measures a person’s response level in terms of disgust; and the Padua Inventory, which assesses contamination obsessions[….]
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Islamists in our midst

By far the sanest commentary on the whole Lou Dobbs/”Islamist” business is this bit from Demosthenes over at one of my recent blog discoveries, Shadow of the Hegemon:

The sad (and funny) thing is that the distinction Dobbs tried to make and failed is one that he never can, because it would beg questions of its own. What Dobbs was trying to say and would have said if he only could was that the war was against religious fundamentalism; that this was actually a conflict between secular tolerance and religious ignorance and intolerance. The problem, of course, is that we have religous extremists of our own, mouth breathing fundamentalists of our own; foul libellers of our own. They have power in our society, power that can’t be dismissed or ignored. How can Lou Dobbs say that the war is against fundamentalism when religious fundamentalists occupy places in the administration, seats in Congress, and many of the seats of power that can’t be ignored in Washington? He can’t, of course, so he can only try to split hairs and hope that nobody realizes that “they” aren’t so different from rather a lot of “us”; that the desire to “invade them, kill their leaders, and convert them all by the sword” is a more universal one than anybody wishes to admit. Lou Dobbs can never admit on television that the war is really against fundamentalism, full stop. This is far too fundamentalist a country to ever say that.
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Yahoo redesign

I see that Yahoo! is contemplating a new design. The most striking thing to me about the new design is the realization that I never look at Yahoo’s front door anymore. I still do use Yahoo, all my email is read via Yahoo Mail, I belong to some groups over at Yahoo Groups, and I do check out their news page as well as their MLB baseball news page. But all these I get to from bookmarks. What I used to use Yahoo for was browsing or searching among its directory. Now I notice with the redesign that Yahoo’s once-vaunted directory is barely “above the fold”, that is to say viewable on normal monitors/resolutions without needing to scroll. They’ve also made the type size of the directory smaller. One of these days I predict it’ll be nowhere to be found on Yahoo’s front page. Meanwhile their Shopping box gets larger and larger.