Extremely Lame

A growing excuse I’ve been hearing from single women as to why they’re single is something along the lines of, “I’m soooo independent and intelligent and confident and men just can’t accept that.” They then proceed to tell their friends (and by extension, everyone around them because they seem to always do this in public and always really loudly) just how awesome they are and how intimidated everyone is by her and her sheer awesomeness.

Yes, I am sure there are plenty of backwards, mouth-breathing morons who would prefer their women subservient, weak, and lilting. I’m sure that there are plenty of people who cannot tell the difference between confident and assertive and manipulative bitch. I’m not one of them. I prefer women who can take care of themselves and don’t resolve themselves to being forced to rely on others to get anywhere. Furthermore, I know that I’m far from the only one.

All that said, maybe the problem isn’t that men are driven to emasculation by the dazzling brilliance that is you; maybe it’s that you can’t tell the difference between confidence and pretension. Just as many people like smart people but hate know-it-alls, there are a lot of people that like and admire confidence, but are turned off by people that tacitly assume that others are inferior because of their inflated senses of self worth.

The other day I got lambasted at a gathering because I and another philosophy geek were discussing existentialism. People who weren’t even part of the discussion overheard us and because they thought that we were talking about religion, we were not-so-politely told to shut up because religion and politics aren’t  appropriate for “polite conversation,” never mind the hypocrisy of rudely butting into a conversation and telling others to be more polite.

Oh, how I despise this idea that politics and religion are to treated like radioactive waste in “polite conversation.” Maybe it’s my philosophy background, but the very idea of actively not discussing something cheeses me off, particularly when it’s something so important. I’m so cheesed off that I’m even using scare quotes.

Why should I have to tailor my conversations to the least common denominator because some people aren’t mature enough to disagree without getting pissed off? Oh, no! Someone might be offended because they disagree with me about something important! What’s the point of having a discussion if it means nothing to you? Are people just trying to pollute the air with noise simply because they are terrified of silence, but equally terrified of having to think?

A cooler-headed person than I has discussed this very thing recently, positing that such a socially manufactured censorship is actually detrimental to society in that it enables these immature people to continue their charade and never requires them to mature. Furthermore, he makes the very convincing point that, “if the conversation would turn to bickering simply because there’s a disagreement, than it is not a polite conversation to begin with, only pseudo-polite,” and that, “the parties to a conversation like that never had any real respect for each other in the first place, they just didn’t have the opportunity to display their disrespect.”

This artificial censorship construct may very well be the reason for the widening chasm between liberal and conservative and Christian and atheist that has gotten significantly worse these past few decades. Because you cannot discuss your political views with the other side, as it were, the only conversations you have on religion and politics are merely echo chambers where the loudest, most radical views tend to be the most heard and eventually shift everyone bit by bit to the extreme. For every Fred Phelps, there is a Christopher Hitchins and for every Mike Meehan there will be a Michael Newdow. Mind you, it’s not that I completely disagree with some of these people, but all of them are so pigheaded that they just make their side look equally ridiculous.

It’s as if the spirit of Rudy Giuliani has been summoned to the land of the snow birds.  A man in Orlando has rented several billboards to promote his CD and website, which also encourages people to not vote Democrat. Okay, fine, whatever. It’s dumb and a cheap marketing ploy.  The bonus is that he’s invoking 9/11 to encourage you to vote for Republicans.

Yeah, the billboard has a picture of the smoldering twin towers right next to the text, “Please don’t vote for a Democrat,” followed by a link to the guy’s website right below.

What I can’t understand is why Democrats are trying to get this billboard taken down. For one, it’s a free speech issue and trying to get it taken down makes them look like a bunch of freedom hating censorship lovers. But possibly more important, it shows their rivals as mouth breathing tards that even the most conservative of people shy away from, even if they had absolutely nothing to do with it, which seems to be the case. If anything, it makes the Republicans look bad.

Hell, if I were a Democrat in Florida, I’d actually consider putting up more of these ridiculously tasteless billboards that lambaste Democrats in such a way and have them up there until election day. I think more people would be swayed to vote Democrat than would be swayed to vote Republican by this. Sure, people in general are morons, but I think most people by now have become steeled against those who would use 9/11 for fun and profit.

True, Democrats putting up tasteless anti-Democratic billboards is slimy and underhanded, and I’m not going to invoke a tu quoque by saying it’s okay because the Republicans did it first, I just like seeing things like that billboard backfire on people.

Oh, and WFTV, you’re living proof that computers make crappy spell checkers. It’s censor, not sensor. The spell checker didn’t catch it because sensor is a real word; it’s just not the word you want to use when you are talking about some agency interfering with someone’s right to free speech.

At the beginning of the year, I was really excited about this election cycle. Several months later, I’ve not only lost my excitement, but I’ve pretty much gone to dreading it. By now it seems that no matter who wins, we all lose.

Let’s start with McCain. Pretty much every scruple he had held for decades has been sold in order to net his party’s nomination. I think he learned the wrong lesson from George W. Bush in 2000. Certain things like calling Jerry Falwell an “agent of intolerance” and then buddying up to him later is small potatoes compared to things he’s done more recently. McCain’s switch to pro-torture and anti-veteran platforms are what just stun me. For the love of all that is holy, he is a veteran and he was tortured. How can you be for torture when you have first hand experience of being on the receiving end of it?!

Obama? Je crois que non. Not anymore, at least. For all that talk of being a different kind of politician, one with principles, his recent stances on FISA and telecom immunity and faith-based initiatives virtually scream more of the same old same old. Even if you accept the fact that the entire faith-based initiative B.S. is an attempt to attract evangelicals who are less than pleased with John McCain’s voting record and stances back when he had a spine, I simply can’t find a reason for supporting telecom immunity after previously saying that you’d filibuster anything of the sort. Yes, he did support the filibuster to kill the bill, but then he goes and votes for the bill he just tried to kill? DOES NOT COMPUTE. And don’t get me started on that, “Oh if he voted against it, the Republicans would say he was soft on terror!” You know what? THEY ARE GOING TO SAY THAT OF OBAMA NO MATTER WHAT HE SAYS OR DOES, so there’s no reason whatsoever to go against one’s principles. Then there’s the argument that the Senate is more about comprimise and giving a little to get a little. One problem with that with regard to FISA. GIVING EVERYTHING AND GETTING NOTHING IN RETURN IS NOT COMPRIMISE, IT’S CAPITULATION.

The saddest thing about this election cycle, though? Even the third parties suck this year. The Libertarians have Bob Barr, who, until just a few years ago when he “saw the light” had quite a horrible Santorum-esque voting record. If I’m going to nail McCain for his record and his platform being radically different, you better believe I’m going to do the same to Bob Barr. Sadly, if he were running and had a similar voting record, it’d show that the Libertarians are maturing and not just throwing up a bunch of nutty anarcho-capitalists that want privatized police forces and roads and whatnot to run for President.

As for the Greens? I can’t believe they’re going with Cynthia “Crazy Legs” McKinney. Dude, she’s living the stereotype and seems to be actively trying to maintain the loud, obnoxious stereotype that black women are often saddled with. She reminds me a lot of Jesse Jackson in that she’s an attention whore, race baits at the drop of a hat, and has a false sense of entitlement (What do you mean, I have to go through security like everyone else, don’t you know who I am?). It’s just a really sad bunch of people to vote for this year. I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am nonetheless.

Well, that is 1 hour and 41 minutes that I am never going to get back, and I have only myself to blame. I generally enjoy the overwhelming majority of movies. Even the worst of Troma and other independent films are things I can enjoy. Mind you, I may not go out of my way to watch something like Meet the Spartans or Epic Movie, but if I had to endure them, I think even those movies I’d be able to find a couple scenes or lines that didn’t make the movie a complete waste.

After tonight, I think a little part of me has died, for I watched Zombies Gone Wild in its entirety.

One would think that with a title like that, you’d expect some combination of Girls Gone Wild and zombies, with zombified nymphettes baring it all to get a taste of brains or something. Not so. The only frontal nudity in the movie occurs in a dream sequence about 24 minutes in, and that lasts about 4 seconds. College age women don’t come into the plot until 44 minutes into the movie. A zombie isn’t even shown until over an hour into the movie. And finally, you don’t actually see anything resembling “zombies gone wild”, i.e. good looking female zombies, until the one hour 16 minute mark, a scant half hour before the movie is over.

Up to that point, all you have are three morons driving around in a van forcing us to endure an endless parade of dick and fart jokes for over an hour, mostly fart jokes. I typically don’t knock a movie’s production, being a fan of low budget movies, but I’ve seen my brother and his stoner friends put out higher quality stuff, and they even knew they couldn’t drag their jokes out for over an hour and a half.

Okay, now that I’ve completely bagged on the movie, there are one or two things that I thought were funny. Mind you, it’s not worth watching the entire movie for them, not by a long shot. But here they are anyway.

When the moron triplets first meet up with the beautiful women (44 minutes in, as previously mentioned), Randy, the wannabe guido that thinks he’s a lady’s man, can’t get over the fact that one of the women is deaf and can’t help making fun of her voice. His dialogue during this scene is pretty amusing, especially when he suggests she “get one of those voicebox things that people with holes in their necks get because he can’t understand a word [she] say[s].”

And the end of the movie has a very Monty Python and the Holy Grail-esque non sequitur ending. But instead of everyone getting arrested, a stereotypically gay hairdresser character comes and stops the shoot and then people get pissed that the shoot gets interrupted and walk off the set and it just sort of ends.

I’m so glad I didn’t waste a Netflix spot or paid any money for this movie. My biggest gripe was that for the most part, it was as boring as Ishtar, another really crappy movie that I actually, legitimately sat all the way through and watched.

I’m going to give it one out of a possible five brains.

Homeowner’s association thugs strike again, this time over air drying laundry in the back yard. You know, the part of the yard that no one sees so there’s no way in hell it can cause property values to fall. You would think that having laundry to dry in the backyard would seem to hark back to the ’50s and a sensibility of housewives with phony smiles and husbands who like to smoke a pipe and read the newspaper after his wife cooks him dinner. Isn’t that the kind of ideal neighborhood these people are dreaming of?

I suspect that the people who run homeowners associations are the kind of evil shrews who used to lord over people in social clubs like Elk lodges and Eastern Star chapters. With membership of these kinds of fraternities/secret societies well on the decline, they’ve decided to take their control issues and pettiness out on their neighbors in the supposèd interest of maintaining property values, when in fact they just like being little tyrants.

Maybe this is why I tend to be a proponent of smaller government in most cases. Every time you give someone a little bit of power, it inevitably gets abused sooner rather than later. The same can be said of government. See: local smoking bans, sobriety checkpoints that assume everyone on the road is a criminal, and Kelo v. City of New London (The eminent domain case where the gov’t took land from one private entity and handed it to another private entity. That lot is still empty three years later).

I mean, I understand the point of homeowner’s associations. They’re there to ensure that no one becomes that house, the house in virtually every neighborhood with the bright yellow paint, unkempt yard, and broken down vehicles in the driveway that bring down the property value of all the houses near it. But being at a point where a homeowner’s association foreclose on your house from under you for failing to pay dues to them? That’s downright criminal. And no, that’s not just me being melodramatic. Having your home taken from you because you couldn’t pay your HOA dues for a couple months? Seriously? How can anyone see this as right?

As relayed to me in the comments, apparently they can get away with this because you don’t own your home in an HOA; no one does. You merely own a share in the neighborhood. What’s that word that describes something where no one owns anything and everyone lives peacefully until someone realizes they can wield the rules like a bludgeon against someone they don’t like and eventually creates an oligarchy more harmful to its members than the unsavory people they vilify? Oh yeah, communism.

Coming back from Ft. Worth, I didn’t have time to make lunch, so I stopped at a 7-11 and picked up some sunflower seedsm and upon reading the back of the package (since I obviously have nothing else to do), I found this gem:

CONGRATULATIONS!

YOU’RE A SEEDER!

Seeders are unique. They’re cool, confident, independent, active, and hard working. They know that eating DAVID® Sunflower Seeds makes what they do more enjoyable. Things are better with DAVID because they’re a snack and an activity. Experience SNACKTIVITY.™

Are they serious? Eating sunflower seeds makes you confident, indepentent, active, and hard working? HOLY SHIT WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE? No wonder I’ve had such terrible luck with the ladies; I wasn’t eating sunflower seeds. It all makes sense now! Hell, I bet I wouldn’t even need a million dollars to do two chicks at the same time, I bet all I need are sunflower seeds! And my perceived lack of multitasking ability? GONE! Thanks to DAVID® Sunflower Seeds, I can do two things at once by experiencing SNACKTIVITY™! Is there nothing that sunflower seeds can’t do?

I think this article deserves one of the many many facepalm macros living out there on the tubes. Seriously.

A pair of Vietnamese valedictorians have caused quite the uproar in the bayous of Louisiana. During one of the girl’s speeches, she decided to honor her parents with a single utterance directed toward her parents in a language they understood, as their English was relatively poor. She then translated the line for everyone else so they wouldn’t be left out.

Oh, the shit storm that arose from that single line. People are protesting and wailing and gnashing their teeth because they think that this is ‘murica, damn it, and people should talk English, by God! And because Terrebonne Parish (Nice English name that is, let me tell you) has been so corrupted by furn’ners that they’ve even considered requiring prayer to be recited at commencements in order to get back on Jesus’ good side.

Please please please please get something like that passed so someone can bankrupt the fuck out of your school district. It’s obvious that you mouthbreathing fucktards are just letting education go to waste anyway.

The latest xkcd is a great homage to a Discovery Channel commercial that pays homage to a classic campfire song. However, there are a lot of internal references to the comic that a lot of people may not understand. So, because the comics are released under a Creative Commons license, I’m able to cut apart the panels and have each frame of the comic link to the original comic that it’s referencing.

Thanks to Photobucket for the image hosting, and xkcd forum members hideki101, Ansible, VHBT, aco, and Random832 for making the references far, far easier to find.

Back when the internet and e-mail was new, we slowly began to see the emergence of a plague on the internet. No, I’m not talking about Sasser or MSBlast or Melissa. I’m talking before any of that. Back when AOL completely dominated everyone’s 28.8 modems, we saw the formidable rise of chain letters. Naturally, they were almost always in all caps. SEND THIS TO 25 FRIENDS IN THE NEXT 25 MINUTES OR WEASELS WILL CRAWL OUT OF YOUR BUM AND DEVOUR YOUR SOUL. I never sent these. As far as I know, my soul is still intact. Despite my ignorance on that account, I know that weasels have never crawled out of my ass, so that goes to prove that these things were a crock.

Once AOL faded into the twilight as broadband began to take over dialup connections, this kind of stupid became less and less prevalent. Instead, it got eclipsed by a new kind of stupid: The ridiculously easily refuted scare/free money chain forward. Instead of the idiocy of the blatant chain letter, these didn’t usually tell you to forward them. It simply did one of a couple of things. Either they promised monetary rewards for doing so or they were filled with easily refutable, but scary sounding warnings. These forwards made a terrible attempt at spoofing people. Hmm, it must not have been so terrible a job if millions of people got fooled and forwarded them. No, they were indeed terrible. It’s just that people are god damned morons when it comes to the Net. Remember the forwards that supposedly were from Bill Gates/AOL/Intel/The Fairy Fucking Godmother and that this person could track your e-mail and pay you a thousand bucks if you forwarded this message? Yeah, that was one of the free money ones. These weren’t typically in all caps, but there was another way you could know what they were without having to infect your brain with stupid. Just look for the subject line to have “FW: FW: fw: FW: Fw: FW; FW: fw: fw; Fw: READ THIS” and you’ll be able to spot them from a mile away. Hell, if I see even a single FW: in the subject line, I pretty much toss it out of habit.

Fortunately, now that human generated e-mail is on the decline, we’re beginning to see less and less of this stuff. Unfortunately, we’re seeing another explosion of spam and other unwanted e-mails from social networking sites. At first, it was just porn invites from MySpace and quiz results and stupid apps from Facebook. Now Myspace has applications people can add. As if MySpace wasn’t bad enough, now I get to see MySpace corrupted with L’il Green Patch and SuperPoke! spam all over the god damn place. If they didn’t send me stuff all the time, or if I knew what they were in the subject of the e-mail, it wouldn’t be so bad. Myspace apps are the worst about it. I’ll get an e-mail saying someone left me a message and I get happy because I’ve not talked to said person in a while. So, I log in because I can’t read the message from my  e-mail. I log in, check the message, and it turns out to be spam.

I’m pissed off enough as it is, I think I’ll go outside and get some air and think about something that I hate less, like Tom Waits.