An examination of the real cost of gay marriage:
If the good God had wanted people of the same sex to marry, he’d have created laundry baskets with separate compartments. The gender-neutral clothes hamper speaks volumes about reality’s well-known heterosexual bias.
Aaron Shwartz and James Robertson trade discussion points about the impediments to start-ups in America, namely the social safety net and the time requirements. I’d like to just recount a story from a previous employer.
Some years ago, when Bush was in his ascendancy, I worked for a CEO of a small start-up that was a staunch Republican support. This is important because one day, over lunch, we happened upon the topic of health care, specifically nationalized health care. What shocked me was that he admitted that of late, he had come around to be a big believer in nationalizing the health care system. The reasoning he gave me, which is distinctly capitalistic, was as follows:
What this does is place start-ups at a severe disadvantage to more established companies. By nationalizing health care, you take that major issue out of the equation, and people can consider a broader set of opportunities. More freedom is better for everyone.
James discusses the issue around hours, etc., but that’s much further down the consideration process than “I can’t do it because my kids need insurance” decision point.
It’s difficult to deal with the Democratic primary without the issue of race rearing its ugly head. While many Americans would like to pretend that they are “blind” to it, it’s simply the refusal to admit it exists. What we saw during the election was the difference between yesterday and tomorrow.
Yesterday, there was us (white) and them (non-white). Identity was entangled in the simplistic explanation of skin color. There was a time for this; a time of Jesse Jackson and Jeramiah Wright; a time of Black Panthers and the KKK. That time, however, is not now. That time was then.
For those of us who came of age and awareness after the race riots, after Jim Crow, after sit ins, after anti-miscegenation laws, the concept of race has a more nuanced feel. While race continues to be a defining characteristic for many people, it is not the only characteristic that we define ourselves by. We have witnessed inter-racial marriages and relationships first hand, and many of us have found that skin tone plays little role in determining attraction or opinion.
We are all different, and yet, underneath, we are all Americans; we are all human. Just as the views of sexuality have progressed from simplistic labels of “normal” and “other” to one that understands that our desires and attractions span a gamut of individuals, we have seen that calling someone “black” or even “white” is rarely instructive.
My heritage is mixed. I am part Italian, English, Scottish and Cherokee. My mother is from Appalachia, and that cultural background is powerful. I have always looked at the inevitable “race” question on school forms and job applications and said “other”. I’m not simply white, nor am I simply Native American. I am a new race, one that has been centuries in the making. I am simply American.
This road has been long, and it has been difficult. Many before us have not survived the long journey, but as each generation begins to dominate the discussion—as mine is beginning to now—the old fears pass just a little further into the hazy memory of yesterday. Like so many before him, and more to come, Barack Hussein Obama is nothing more, and nothing less, than the great melting pot of America, where we have progressed from allowing others to define us as a group to defining ourselves, but still as a group, and now we are finally looking out, not in, for our place. We are simply us: an earth-tone rainbow of humanity.
For just $40 a year, believers can arrange for up to 62 people to get a final message exactly six days after the Rapture, that day when—according to Christian end times dogma—Christians will be swept up to heaven, while doubters are left behind to suffer seven years of Tribulation under a global government headed by the Antichrist.
Really? Could it be? Could it be even better?
Users can also upload up to 150 megabytes of documents, which will be protected by an unidentified encryption algorithm until the Rapture, then released to up to 12 nonbelievers of your choice. The site recommends that you use that storage to house sensitive financial information.
Brilliant! Onward fundamentalist morons.
From that “liberal rag”, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, comes this little bit of irony:
A minister at a Dallas-area megachurch was charged with online solicitation of a minor after police said Friday he was caught in an Internet sex sting.
Undercover officers posing as a 13-year-old girl communicated with 52-year-old Joe Barron of Plano for about two weeks. The online conversations were sexual in nature, police said.
Thirteen! WTF is wrong with people? Why is it the more people preach about sin and the evils of others the more likely it is that they are the lowest form of scum imaginable. I’d like to say “innocent until proven guilty”, and I will, but it sure don’t look good for the “good minister”:
Police said they found a web-cam and condoms in Barron’s car.
Yeah, well…
Julian Delasantellis, writing for Asia Times, looks at what went wrong with Sears:
In this case, nobody thought twice, nobody blinked an eye, when Wall Street took a truly unique American institution, Sears, and turned it from a fine, respected American society matron into a common streetwalker reduced to pimping through the night for Eddie Lampert.
I don’t know how long it’s been since Sears was fashionable, if ever, but growing up, it was a reliable retailer, who generally employed knowledgeable staff in the home and garden areas, and had inoffensive, if nondescript, clothing and other accessories. It was, to seem a bit cliché, where the real middle class shopped. My last time in a Sears was a depressing experience of un-stocked shelves, disheveled and un-knowledgable employees, and a general malaise of doom.
At least someone got rich destroying it.
As I was reading some of the reactions and blog postings this morning about yesterday’s primaries in Pennsylvania, something sparked in the far reaches of my memory. Something I had read many years ago, and, as with so many things of this persuasion, I had to seek it out. I found it in the words of Alexis de Tocqueville, and inscribed 168 years ago in a still-prescient volume:
I want to imagine with what new features despotism could be produced in the world: I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others: his children and his particular friends form the whole human species for him; as for dwelling with his fellow citizens, he is beside them, but he does not see them; he touches them and does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone, and if a family still remains for him, one can at least say that he no longer has a native country.
Could anything better describe the culture of consumerism better?
Nothing says I support the troops and the war in Iraq like a big plastic camouflaged scrotum hanging from your SUV. Oh yeah, there’s a yellow ribbon.
We’ve Respectfully placed the Yellow Ribbon designating Support the Troops on our Exclusive 8” Customized Desert Scheme Camo Nutz.
WTF people?
From Possummomma comes this tale of a morality test. Shall we see how I do?
Have you ever spoke the name of our Lord in vain? Yup.
Have you ever killed another human being? Not that I’m aware of, but my cooking may have at some point, and they were simply too polite to tell me.
Have you every lied? I’m human, therefore yes.
Have you ever had relations before marriage? Since you bloody Christians won’t let me get married, yes. It’s your fault. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
Do you go to church every Sunday or once a week? Isn’t that the same thing? Never mind. The last time I was in a church for anything other than a wedding or funeral, my parents were still together and I was probably 12.
Do you wish you had more stuff? I’m an American, so yes. It doesn’t drive my life, but I do sometimes buy a lottery ticket, knowing I’ll never win, just to yammer with friends about what we’d do with $300M.
Do you gossip? Why else do you go to parties?
Do you give to charity? With time and money.
Do you listen to rap or heavy metal music? Hip-hop yes. Heavy metal just annoys me.
Have you ever had an abortion or been pro-choice? Um, as a guy, I’ll say “no”. I am pro-choice, as it’s none of my business, and I’ve been supportive to friends who have had to go through the decision process, regardless of their final decision.
Have you ever read Harry Potter or Spiderwick Chronicles or the Golden Compass? Bunch of amateurs. How about Diane Duane’s Tale of Five, where the main characters are not only two wizards, but gay wizards in love. (Thanks, Brian).
Do you see movies with unwholesome content? I consider the warnings a recommendation, honestly. If it’s wholesome, why would I want to watch it?
Do you pray every day? Only when I drive on the beltway. Seriously, though, no.
Do you believe that God is the creator of heaven and earth? If by “God” you mean a bowl of pasta. But that’s mostly ‘cuz I just love pasta.
Are you overweight because you eat too much? As I tell people, “I didn’t get this body eating at McDonalds”. And if you did, shame on you—it won’t fit in a Happy Meal.
Do you take pride in accomplishments other than service to God? In mine and others? Yes to both.
Do you put God and Jesus first? First what? First up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Do you view pornography? Yes, though I’m opposed to actually paying for it. That’s what my tax money is for.
Do you practice temperance in every thing you do? Temperance is for the weak.
Are you quick to anger? I’m 1/2 Italian, naturalmente.
So let’s see, out of 20, I score a … 2. I wonder what Dante Alighieri would think of that? Circle 7, it seems.
The kid, however, is qualified to work for the FDA under Bush.
Irony doesn’t even begin to capture this case:
A scout leader who once sued the City of Berkeley for challenging a national Boy Scout ban on members who are gay or atheist has been arrested on felony charges that for at least five years he sexually abused young males in the troops he led.
I think the idea that the more someone talks about how wrong being gay is, the more likely they are to have repressed feeling of their own. The more radicalized they become in those opinions, the more likely that their own feelings come out in abusive and exploitive fashions.
“It’s crazy that they want to force their morality down our throats,” said Dawn Burton, 45, a regular guest at the parties. “We’re all frustrated.”
Ba-zing! It’s an amusing read. Personally, I don’t care what two (or 100) consenting adults do.
I’m simply not sure how else to frame this terrifying survey of almost 2,500 Americans, which determined that … well, go read the article, and then come back. Done? Right.
How can we possibly be labeled a modern nation when more people believe in all-powerful sky spirits than believe in natural selection, which has been demonstrated literally hundreds of thousands of times to be factual? How can we take seriously people who think that witches, ghosts and other fantasies are real? How can we progress as a nation when we live under a collective delusion of reality that contravenes all available evidence?
What does it mean to have 58% of the country deny the veracity of a principle that is the foundation of all biological research, progress, and a vast swath of medical research of the past century? I say we take away their vaccines, their antibiotics, and find out how long their sky spirit protects them.
Gays in the Vatican? Say it ain’t so:
A Vatican official suspended after being caught on hidden camera making advances to a young man says he is not gay and was only pretending to be gay as part of his work.
Seriously, can we just stop this charade? It’s insulting to everyone, and demeaning to all the people forced to lie constantly to hide something that is obviously more common than anyone cares to admit.
What does it say about a society that spends three times more on prisons than higher education?
This year, California will spend an estimated $3.3 billion to operate UC. It will spend three times as much—$9.9 billion—to run the state’s prisons.
I haven’t looked, but I can’t imagine that it’s probably that much better in many other states. What’s even worse:
Titled the “Higher Education Compact,” the agreement calls for modest annual increases in state funds, private fundraising to help pay for basic programs, and large student fee hikes, especially for graduate and professional students.
If you depend on private fundraising for basic programs, you are no longer a public university. You are a de-facto private university that gets a lot of public money. To me, this is just further evidence that our obsession with micro-managing people’s lives (e.g., “The War on Drugs”) is having a negative effect on society as a whole, even further than the direct cost in lives.
Our future is no better than our education, and if it’s slipping down hill, even with more and more kids going to college, it’s becoming more and more a remedial system for the tragedy of primary education in this country.
A Pleasant Grove teen might face jail time after streaking during the Pleasant Grove High School homecoming pageant. An 18-year-old student at Pleasant Grove High school is drawing attention from police for running across the stage nude in the school’s auditorium. The teen’s name is not being released until an arrest has been made. The man will be charged with lewdness in the presence of a minor, a class A misdemeanor. Police the charge of lewdness in the presence of a minor stems from the fact that many young children were present in the audience of roughly 800 people. If the teen is convicted, it is possible he will have to register as a sex offender because he is an adult.
I’m sorry, streaking is not a “sex offense” no matter how insane you wish to define it. Not in anywhere except überpsychosexisbadchristofascistworld. Oh wait, I forgot where we live.
Seriously, I don’t think anyone in the history of all humanity has ever been hurt or traumatized by a floppy penis or ass running across stage many, many feet away. The only trauma is from making such a big deal out of it.
Esquire sends Greetings from Idiot America:
A “politically savvy challenge to evolution” is as self-evidently ridiculous as an agriculturally savvy challenge to euclidean geometry would be. It makes as much sense as conducting a Gallup poll on gravity or running someone for president on the Alchemy Party ticket. It doesn’t matter what percentage of people believe they ought to be able to flap their arms and fly, none of them can. It doesn’t matter how many votes your candidate got, he’s not going to turn lead into gold. The sentence is so arrantly foolish that the only real news in it is where it appeared.
The article is great, and well reasoned overall. The fact that we are even having these absurd discussions—faith and reason are diametrically opposed—implies that not only has our political system been hijacked by idiots, the educational system has completely failed to instill even the slightest element of reason in a terrifying number of people.
An excellent summation of the importance of the Enlightenment, and how some people are in full denial of it:
In the 18th century, a revolution in thought, known as the Enlightenment, dragged us away from the superstition and brutality of the Middle Ages toward a modern age of science, reason and democracy. It changed everything. If it wasn’t for the Enlightenment, you wouldn’t be reading this right now. You’d be standing in a smock throwing turnips at a witch. Yes, the Enlightenment was one of the most significant developments since the wheel. Which is why we’re trying to bollocks it all up.
Welcome to a dangerous new era—the Unlightenment – in which centuries of rational thought are overturned by idiots. Superstitious idiots. They’re everywhere – reading horoscopes, buying homeopathic remedies, consulting psychics, babbling about “chakras” and “healing energies”, praying to imaginary gods, and rejecting science in favour of soft-headed bunkum. But instead of slapping these people round the face till they behave like adults, we encourage them. We’ve got to respect their beliefs, apparently.
Exactly. Why should I respect insanity?
With the growing attention on bottled water, I decided to do my best to stop drinking it. The main reason I had been using it was that the water in Arlington, while of very high quality, it has always had a bit of a chlorine taste to me, which is off-putting when you’re trying to drink it. With my recent move, I decided to stop that habit, and I purchased a Pur dispenser for my fridge. So far, it tastes as good, if not better, than most bottled waters, and I find myself drinking a lot more than before.
Alas, with all my travels, I can’t have it with me all the time, and so in airports, I’m continually forced to choose soda or bottled water—and not even really good stuff, but the overpriced tap water sold by Coke and Pepsi. Still, at least I can change my habits at home.
From a random person trying to take a photograph of an unmarked building in a busy neighborhood near a Metro station comes a fun Stalinist experience, courtesy the US Government and the Arlington police department:
Officer Malara stopped to take information from a friend and I on the grounds that he observed us taking photographs in a “high security area.” And by “taking photographs in a ‘high security area’” I mean being in possession of a camera while walking down the street opposite several blocks of non-descript office buildings, less than a block from the Virginia Square-GMU Metro station.
The level of paranoid stupidity that is demonstrated by the police in this case is absurd. Just because someone could use a camera to take a picture of a random office building1 for some nefarious deed does not mean that there is any probability that they will do so. Someone might purchase bleach to help destroy the evidence of a murder, but that doesn’t mean everyone purchasing bleach should be questioned. There are substantially better uses of time.
The only thing this policy, if one can call something so ill-conceived and asinine a policy, accomplishes is to attempt to instill an Orwellian fear in the populace of doing anything that might, based on the whims of some random bureaucrat’s idol fantasies, insight the police to question them. It is simply yet another step in the quelling of the sheep to keep them as docile as possible. Just for entertainment, I think it’s time to start taking pictures of random buildings.
1 The address of DARPA’s HQ is well published, and hardly a secret.
Via Pharyngula comes a story from Cyprus (a Houston suburb) about the murder of a gay man:
A Cypress man charged in the death of a Southwest Airlines flight attendant said Saturday that he was doing God’s work when he went to a Montrose-area bar last month, hunting for a gay man to kill.
“I believe I’m Elijah, called by God to be a prophet,” said 26-year-old Terry Mark Mangum, charged with murder June 11. ” ... I believe with all my heart that I was doing the right thing.”
Seriously, lock him up for the rest of his life in the loony bin and throw away the key. Just because you hear voices in your head doesn’t mean there’s anyone else there. People need to stop confusing their psychotic episodes for “divine inspiration,” which is just another way of justifying stupidity.
Mangum, who described himself as “definitely not a homosexual,” said God called on him to “carry out a code of retribution” by killing a gay man because “sexual perversion” is the “worst sin.”
Obsessed much? Closet case. Self-loathing is the most dangerous form of hatred.
Mangum believed Cummings to be gay.
Do “not homosexual” men obsess over their gaydar this much?
“I planned on sending him to hell,” he said.
I suspect, if there were a hell, you might find the roles reversed.
Cummings disappeared June 4. His charred remains were found June 16, buried on a 50-acre ranch near San Antonio owned by Mangum’s 90-year-old grandfather.
Gruesome, and he knew he was wrong because he attempted to cover it up. Again, the voices are really contradictory.
“It’s not that I’m a bad dude,” he said, expressing concern that people might view him as “strange.” Pausing briefly, he said, “I love God.”
No, you are pure Evil, “bad” simply doesn’t begin to describe this kind of behavior. Love the voices in your head, but keep your insanity to yourself.
I don’t believe that, if guilty, this is a man that should ever walk the street again. Even if he were to respond to anti-psychotics, he shows no remorse, and only pride, in his crime. The drugs might “cover it up,” but they won’t eliminate the issue, and I suspect if he ever stopped taking them, he’d kill again.
If it’s not one thing, it’s another:
The Washington Post reported Friday that the economic crisis in Zimbabwe is contributing to the decline in the HIV prevalence rate in the country as men who might be tempted to have extramarital relations lack the means to indulge themselves.
Oy!
Seriously what the hell is wrong with people:
Britain’s decision to award a knighthood to author Salman Rushdie was condemned by Pakistan on Monday as an affront to Muslims. One cabinet minister said it provided a justification for suicide attacks.
“This is an occasion for the (world’s) 1.5 billion Muslims to look at the seriousness of this decision,’’ Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq, religious affairs minister, said in parliament.
“The West is accusing Muslims of extremism and terrorism,’’ ul-Haq said. ”(But) If someone exploded a bomb on his body, he would be right to do so unless the British government apologizes and withdraws the sir title.’’
In the eastern city of Multan, Muslim students burned effigies of the Queen and Rushdie. About 100 students carrying banners condemning the author also chanted, “Kill him! Kill him!’’
I’m so glad Islam is a “religion of peace,” as if saying it makes it true. Islam is no more a religion of peace than any other Abrahamic religion, which is filled with torture, violence, incest, and every other form of abuse possible, all in the name of some voices in your head. It’s unfortunate that better pharmacology wasn’t available long ago so that people could have taken a pill, rather than write books and encourage others to be stupid, insane, and kill.
Seriously, stop listening to the voices in your head.
Mostly stupidity. From an article in Network World:
Can a $93 billion company be publicly shamed into charity? My guess is not, but the Contra Costa school district in California is hoping IBM can see it in its Big Blue heart to erase some $5 million in long-overdue debt.
[...] “Unlike corporations such as IBM – with revenues of $22 billion in the first quarter of 2007 alone – our schools do not have the ability to generate new dollars to fund projects or pay for employees,” the lawmakers wrote. “Our schools rely solely on limited state and federal assistance to educate our students and every dollar is precious.”
I’m sure IBM is the evil corporation here. Or are they?
In 1993 the district and IBM negotiated a long-term settlement that said the school district would pay the first of four $1.25 million installments beginning in 2008. Payments were deferred until then because 2008 was the year the district was scheduled to finish making state loan repayments under its previous loan plan, according to the Contra Costa story.
So basically, IBM gave the school district 15 year grace period, during which time they not only didn’t have to make payments, but they also didn’t owe interest. A quick “back of the envelope” calculation says that at only 5% interest, IBM forgave over $5M in interest payments alone based on compound interest, which I believe is the norm for this kind of financing. Now the school district, incompetent from the start1 thinks that IBM should “think of the children” and take a bath.
As a stockholder in IBM, all I can say is: Hell No. Pay up.
1 No matter what you say about IBM, they signed a legal contract to purchase equipment. If they think they were misled, lied to, or otherwise duped, they should have sued the company, and given California’s penchant for lawsuits, I’m sure they would have.
At least, that’s what the government would likely think were they to look back on my childhood. I love chemistry, and throughout life have done a lot of chemical experiments—some turned out well, some not-so-much. I’ve dropped large (500g) quantities of metallic lithium into water to see what would happen1. I’ve built improvised explosive devices (from coffee creamer and model rocket ignitors) for junior-high class projects2, and numerous other ad-hoc “experiments,” some more valid than others. In the end, nobody was hurt, and over the years, I accumulated a nice collect of glass labware. In many ways, it was 100x more interesting than what was going on in school itself.
Now, as P.Z. Myers so accurately points out, there is a whole sale attack on non-commercial chemistry. Whether it be the War on Some Terrorists, or the War on Some Drugs, the rational is always “trust us, we’re protecting you from evil people,” but in the end, it never seems to reduce suffering in the world. Has drug use actually gone down since this War started? I highly doubt it, but a lot of people have been locked up in jail, which keeps a lot of companies rolling in money. I have to present an ID and sign a “registry” anytime I buy decongestants so that I don’t sniffle all day at work because the evil boogey-man of drugs might use them. Seriously, I can’t even buy more than 10 pills at a time now because of this law—or at least because of CVS’ reaction to it.
Have we collectively lost our minds? Or do we think these people are idiots?
1 Boom! Pretty shiny lights.
2 Really, it’s the only use for the stuff. There’s a reason the British call it “whitener,” since it has no other effect.
Today, Massachussets affirmed gay marriage, for all intents and purposes, by turning aside an attempted referendum on the whole issue. For those who will beat their drums of “but what about public voters? isn’t this a democracy?” I will point two things:
It was not until 24 years after the Supreme Court decision that a majority of Americans agreed that interracial marriage should be allowed. Even today, a terrifying number of people still think it’s wrong. Tyranny of the majority is always wrong, and that is why the United States is a Republic and not a strict direct Democracy.
As difficult as it is to understand, the majority are often wrong, short-sighted and ill-informed. People would like to pretend otherwise, and I would only dream of it being so, but the truth of the matter is that much of people’s beliefs in this Nation are founded on faeries and fantasies. That’s no way to run a country.
I’ve got more to say about this whole insanity over illegal immigration at some point in the future—hopefully more nuanced than this—but this is my basic view: We’re all illegal immigrants. My forefathers/foremothers1 were not invited here, and did not “apply for immigration” with those who were already here. They simply murdered a huge percentage of them. This is true of most people who are here already, and the only difference that truely exists is the color of our skin and the level of violence (less now, more then) associated with the act.
1 This excludes to some extent (again, more later) the Native American component of my background.
Inspired by a well reasoned post by Martin Fowler, I’d like to add a microliter drop of my own experience to the oceans worth in the blogosphere1. It all coincides with Kathy Sierra’s post on the death threats she’s received, and the impact of that behavior on herself, and by extension, society in general. Let me be up-front that I border on being defined as a liberal libertarian2 and as such, I generally hate the nanny state that has developed, and as a rule, believe that “more government intervention” generally is a bad thing if it is too specific in nature.
My miniscule contribution centers around my observations of the changing nature of discourse “online.” This requires a more encompassing view of online than just the Internet. It also includes BBS chats, Fidonet, UseNet, Compuserve, and all the other myriad of electronic communications mechanisms. In my experience, a vast majority of the people currently partaking of the online world are new to the whole electronic experience, and I think perhaps some of it is the cause of much of the collapse of rationality and sanity that is demonstrated by Ms. Sierra’s experiences.
When I first started getting involved in online communication, the world was ruled by Hayes and 300 baud modems. In those days, the modus operandi for communications revolved around local (and regional) BBS systems that often served specific interests. With only one user at a time possible, and a swizzle stick of bandwidth available, much of the discussion was direct and to-the-point. Without the ability to have the near real-time responses that today’s Internet allows, more thought could be invested into a response while you waited for the busy signal to abate. Compound that with the reality that most of these BBS communities had off-line events—parties, BBQ, movies, etc.—and you developed a generally collegial atmosphere. Without the mask of anonymity, people generally behaved themselves, just as they do in society in general.
Fast forward a few years to the start of the “national” infrastructure, at least as the common person knows it, and the creation of systems such as Compuserve, Prodigy, The Source, and even The WELL. For me, this was the beginning of the slow slide into discordance that we have witnessed of late; only the accelerating powers of the Internet have changed its pace. With the growth of geographically disperse communities, the opportunity for off-line interaction wained and the ability to retreat into a pseudo-anonymity increased. The removal of the negative impact of people’s actions from their calculation of behavioral choices brings out their more basic and underlying fears and drivers. This was best illuminated in the Stanford Prison Experiment, which demonstrated the situation altering nature of power and anonymity.
I would argue that this was an inevitable outcome of human nature, which mixed with the explosive level of anonymity perceived to exist on the Internet. Ms. Sierra is not the first person to experience death threats online, and in fact, I hazard she is not the 10,000th person. Instead, she is one of the most vocal about the impact of behavior on community. Right now, the Internet is not a community. Perhaps it can be, perhaps it can not, but either way, with the vast influx of new people that it has received over the past few years, the nature has changed, and a crossroads of the future has been reached.
If we do not reign in our illogical and ill-conceived behaviors, with death threats being only the most glaring example, we will find that our future is more bleak than it could be. This brings me to my title-driven point: the jackbooted thugs of “freedom”.
Historically, we have used the term “jackbooted thugs” to refer to the oppressor, and so some might wonder how I could apply this term to someone fighting for “freedom” which, as well all know, is made of rainbows, sunshine and happy puppies. The problem is that absolutes are always dangerous. They often form the most egregious examples of intellectual slippery slopes possible, and lead the holder to make irrational pronouncements about the world around them.
Take, for example, “freedom of speech,” which has been a hallmark of the American experience for many years. There are some who, mistakenly, believe that it is an absolute right, without limit, and without restriction. It is not. One is not allowed to say things that specifically endanger other people’s lives, such as yelling “fire” in a crowded room. Additionally, one can not conflate the right to say something with the right to be heard. I might wish to say irrational and crazy things—and often do—but that does not require anyone around me to provide support, whether in the form of monetary commitments, or even a forum.
Herein lies the conundrum of the Internet. What are public places in an era of ephemeral information? Are comments on someone’s blog a “public place,” and if not, what are the implications of that toward what is, and is not, acceptable speech. In a world where something is paid by someone, and not by the common purse of universal taxation, what is common? These are not simple issues, but they are ones that we must struggle to answer if we are to move the Internet forward from the wild-west mentality that it currently brings out in some people.
I loathe to involve government in this issue, as it is so often incapable of the nuance of reality, but as with the “I know it when I see it” precept of pornography, it is perhaps the same thing that applies in cyberspace to the speech of those who might wish harm on others, no matter how theoretical that wish. When does such a statement become “incitement?”
1 Boy do I hate that term.
2 Yes, this is somewhat contradictory. I believe in substantially (50-75%) smaller government, and a refocusing of the government’s efforts on historically “liberal” causes, such as health care, education and long-term research.
The Open Congress project has entered a beta phase, and has opened their website up for people to access. While a lot of this information was previously available in various forms, the group is attempting to make things a lot more accessible and easily discovered. Hopefully, in the end, it will assist in better oversight of the government itself.
For example, here’s the roll call of a recent bill, and you can dig into individual representatives for more information. For example, if you want to hear about the latest insanity you could subscribe to a Atom feed.
I used to watch Food TV (or Food Network, or whatever the hell they’re calling it this week) all the time. It was education, entertaining, and made for—at the very least—good background to whatever else I was doing. I have been repeatedly to see Alton Brown, who I think is by far the most educational, and I’ve experienced what Mario Batali can actually do (at his original restaurant Po), and it’s unbelievable. The rest? Largely dreck. EVOO my ass. Anthony Bourdain takes them all down and in rounding style. A highlight for me:
SANDRA LEE: Pure evil. This frightening Hell Spawn of Kathie Lee and Betty Crocker seems on a mission to kill her fans, one meal at a time. She Must Be Stopped. Her death-dealing can-opening ways will cut a swath of destruction through the world if not contained. I would likely be arrested if I suggested on television that any children watching should promptly go to a wooded area with a gun and harm themselves. What’s the difference between that and Sandra suggesting we fill our mouths with Ritz Crackers, jam a can of Cheez Wiz in after and press hard? None that I can see.
It’s a fun read, especially if you are a disenchanted viewer of what used to be interesting television.
I can’t imagine a better opening paragraph for an article about the obsession that Republicans seem to have with gay sex:
It seems to me Republicans spend more time thinking about gay sex than any other group of people in the known world even more so than gay people trying to find other gay people with whom to have sex.
The lady doth protest too much, methinks. Seriously.