Oh My

From LF:

This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US Department of Energy. I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the municipal water utility. After that, I turned on the FCC-regulated channels to see what the National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. I watched this while eating my breakfast of US Department of Agriculture-inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the Food and Drug Administration.

At the appropriate time as regulated by the US Congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the US Naval Observatory, I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration-approved automobile and set out to work on the roads built by the local, state, and federal departments of transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issued by the Federal Reserve Bank. On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the US Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school.

After work, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to a house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and fire marshal's inspection, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the local police department.

I then log on to the Internet which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration and post on freerepublic.com and Fox News forums to express my rage at the possibility of a public health care plan, because the government can't do anything right.

War on the Winter Solstice

So apparently at the Washington State Capitol building there's a nativity scene, and not far away is a sign posted wishing onlookers a "Happy Winter Solstice". Now, the state has allowed displays of the aforementioned nativity scene, a "holiday" tree, and a menorah. So what's the big deal?

Well apparently people have been protesting the capitol to have the sign taken down, declaring that it discourages faith and embarrasses the state of Washington. The people who put the sign up belong to a local group of atheists who feel that religion is among the ranks of "superstition and myth," though nothing about the sign itself is particularly anti-Christmas. It's simply another viewpoint to add the pile.

Now what I don't understand is the fact that it's okay to display Christian and Jewish paraphernalia but anything else is offensive and against the spirit of the holidays. And, of course, when it comes to the "War on Christmas," our good friend Bill O'Reilly isn't far behind. He considers this as another piece of "evidence" that anti-Christmas sentiment is growing in the ranks of the "secular progressives." You mean someone who considers themself secular doesn't like displays of religion on public property? Well I never!

The governor has defended the right of the group to display the sign, not wishing to be exclusionary, and I completely agree with him. Allow everything, or allow nothing, otherwise you're playing favorites and agreeing with the "tyranny of the majority." By far the best part of the article was this:

The atheist sign was briefly stolen Friday but was returned to the Capitol after somebody dropped it off at a Seattle radio station.

It was restored to its display site, along with the added message, "Thou shalt not steal."

When will people in real life realize what the meaning of the word "troll" is?

Pope Guilty posted:
christianity is the largest religion in the world

atheists should target smaller, weaker religions to build XP and level up first

I Blame Patriarchy

So I've been delving into a lot of reading on the subject of gender, feminism, and patriarchy. A lot of very interesting things come up when you really think about this stuff.

Masculine conditioning in our society obviously points males to maintain certain norms. The stereotype of the male condition is, of course, the unfeeling and stalwart being who deals with things on a completely detached and distance level. The effect has been compared to that of Effexor, an SNRI which essentially begins to block out feelings to the point of a person resembling a zombie.

Men are socialized, in a general sense, to be everything that is specifically not feminine. Concepts like empathy, sharing feelings, and addressing emotional concerns have been virtually eradicated between two heterosexual men. Most guys I know would grow really freaked out and uncomfortable if a male friend approached them and began talking about how hard it's been dealing with being dumped, or how concerned they are that the other is angry. Guys are simply "supposed" to be equipped to deal with these feelings alone rather than showing weakness by going to others.

And what do guy friends do when something devastating happens in their life, say a parent or significant other dying? They go drinking. Not only is drinking a social lubricant, but it provides a way for men to actually connect with one another, providing a sort of plausible deniability in their feelings. This is pretty sad, really. The constant drive for competition in the normative male makes showing vulnerability a horrible thing. I've seen this first hand with a lot of my friends; there are some of them that I could never even imagine opening up to, describing how I feel about certain things, etc. It's kind of sad, really. There are some, though, that are a lot more receptive to it, but it's tough to get them to open up themselves. Maybe it's some kind of fear of exploitation?

I've never had a whole lot of female friends that actually open themselves up. Most of the ones I knew in high school, with a few exceptions, fell into two categories: those popular and high-up ones that always carried a peppy sense of "happiness" without ever seeming to show any sort of chink in their armor, and the ones that seemed to expect that I was the normative male, causing feelings to be pushed off the table. There were then the shining few who would open themselves up, to an extent, but it seemed some things still remained buried. It then became difficult to adjust to actually having someone available to speak about what's driving me to do things. In never really having opportunity to open up before, it's tough to move to doing just that.

Honestly, this may be why I'm so intent on making friends who lie on the opposite side of the gender spectrum. I suppose that such societal norms make it a lot more comfortable to open up to women. The strange thing is, though, the person who I spent a lot of time with in the first few months of living out here was a girl, but for all intents and purposes may as well have been a guy. Everything was shut in, guarded. It just felt horribly awkward whenever I tried to ask her how she felt about essentially anything. Maybe that's merely because it's strange to see a male share his feelings, no matter who's doing the listening?

More thoughts on this later, probably. Gender studies is fascinating.

Civic Literacy

I stumbled on a very good civics test here. For the most part, it's good at testing your civics knowledge, though its scope creeps a little. I tested 93%. The questions I missed tended to be more about economics and history than actual government. I don't claim to be a great economics, nor have I taken an econ class in six years, so I'm not too concerned about the fact that I don't know why free market economies work better than federally planned ones on a micro scale.

People are pretty stupid, though. The average score is 49%.

Hunting Season, and You Know What That Means!

It's time for the amazing accidental killing of children and loved ones post!!!

Now, ladies and gentlemen, it's time to answer our final question for a fabulous prize!

Which story is true:
A) Sixteen month old shot in the chest and killed by a hunter. The man shot an Eastern White Tail and failed to kill it in the first shot. His second shot penetrated a trailer, killing the toddler residing inside. He was using .300 Magnum rifle shells - GUESS WHICH ONE THAT IS!
B) Father shoots and kills his six year old daughter while cleaning his gun. He was drinking at the time. Also among this man's awesome history is being handed a shotgun and immediately pulling the trigger, accidentally discharging what he had thought was an unloaded weapon.
C) Nineteen year old woman shoots and kills herself by accident while handling a gun that apparently belonged to her boyfriend.
D) Eight year old Massachusetts boy accidentally shoots himself in the head when firing an Uzi. The kickback caused the child to lose control of the weapon.

Oh wait, looks like all of them are true, and each of them tragic beyond words.

I understand that people want to hunt, and they have every right to do so within reason. Within reason means you don't have to use rifle shells that could kill an elephant for hunting small deer. Within reason means you don't need to let small children fire a dangerous submachine gun. Within reason means that owning a gun should be a privilege to the people who have earned it, and not the absolute right some people think it is. Whatever interpretation of the Second Amendment is used, the founding fathers were fallible. Even if they thought every citizen should own a musket for their own personal defense, why can't they have been wrong about it?

There sure are a lot of these.

Digg Annoys Me

So I came across a thread about a new method the ESRB is using to get better ratings out to parents for video games. Essentially they have a website where they display a bunch of descriptions of games, telling about their content with somewhat of a context. For example, instead of just looking at TF2 and seeing it it's rated "M" and a couple of descriptions why, it could say something like "a first person shooter where two teams compete with one another in an online environment. Contains significant amounts of blood and guts in a cartoonish context." et cetera.

Now, I don't see anything wrong with this. So a regulatory agency wants to put something out there that's pretty easy to access and all in one place. Nothing changes for the average person who buys video games, right? It's not even that they're making it harder for minors to purchase games of any stripe. But of course, there is somehow still irrational hatred for the ESRB trying to deliver more information to parents to allow them to make a more informed decision:

Why bother? NOTHING will satisfy the nanny groups until every game has been turned into a PG game. Sure she praises it now, until she needs to rile up her base and starts going on the evil of games again. I think we have learned a valuable lesson to how to stop the political madness. Get a campaign started to Give money to the opposition party during election cycles and explain exactly WHY you are doing it. If enough gamers/free speech supporters/etc band together and give money to political groups who support OUR view, politicians will quickly change their tune.

This kind of slippery slope argument is really, really stupid. Sorry, I'm not fan of censorship, not at all, but taking steps to inform more people is never bad.

There's always a backlash in the video game industry to school shootings, and video game advocates always say the same thing - that parents should be more responsible for what their kids are exposed to. This is true: parents are chiefly responsible for such things. The thing about this story is the fact that it allows parents to make more informed decisions. It doesn't restrict free speech. It doesn't make games "evil".

There's a reason why slippery slope is a fallacy. Way to go, Digg.

Speaking of Digg and their blind support for everything Ron Paul, apparently he appears on every "Choose Your Own Cabinet" list that the New York Times posted. He peaks at #3 for Treasury Secretary and is #7 on Secretary of State, where for Defense, Homeland Security, and Attorney General he's somewhere in the 4-6 area. People are really stupid. At least Noam Chomsky made it in the top 20 for Defense and State:

Foggy posted:
Would [Noam Chomsky] be better in defense or state

The New Zorker posted:
merge them, dep't. of power/linguistics