it's basically you getting trolled by proxy

image credit: rawstory.com

Tennessee woman arrested for counterfeiting after reading on the internet how obama made it legal.

okay, so now i have to wonder:  are there going to start being legal ramifications for poe posts?  because whatever poe posted to this woman's newsfeed that obama said it was legal to print your own money is at least partly responsible for this woman's fate.

i mean, yeah, she should have been smarter than that, and i see that kind of wholly unbelievable nonsense about obama this or obama that all day every day.  i've got people on my friends list who post several times a day about how obama is personally coming to my house to take my gun and force me to have gay sex with the immigrant he's giving my job to (that i do not have a gun and most mexican ladies think i'm way too full of shit to sleep with notwithstanding, i suppose).

it never even occurs to me that any of it even might have even a glimmer of truth to it... but not everyone is me.   sure, i can be left to my own devices and trusted to either figure it out for myself or survive the consequences.  you (i would hope) can be similarly left to the wisdom of your own judgment.

but apparently, not everyone can.

legally, it's the same question that gets brought up with hardcore porn and books like "the anarchist cookbook".  "Can the author/creator of a work be held responsible for damages if the consumers of that work follow its precepts or believe its premises?"  the fact that the information came via facebook opens up a whole new can of lawyers with, "what constitutes an individual, original work of art, education, or information?"  does the poster have responsibility only if they created the post, or does simply reposting someone else's work spread the liability the same way it spreads the (allegedly) damaging idea contained within the meme?

because this woman is having real world consequences as a result of believing something she saw on facebook, and we all know that there are people posting that kind of stuff who are purposely going out of their way to appear legitimate.  admit it, you've all been taken in, however briefly, by some bit of nonsense on the internet. i know i have (kony2012, anybody?).  i'm not saying she should be held personally blameless.  it should be obvious to any reasonable person that no government is going to ever allow its citizens to print their own money, and the reasons for that should be largely self-evident upon very little reflection.  if i were a betting man, i'd bet that she was already half interested in ways to justify counterfeiting when whatever infowars/newsmax/daily fail post it was scrolled down her newsfeed and she decided to give it a shot.  

the law, however, will not be taking my uninformed conjecture into account.  if she has legal ground to stand by her "facebook made me do it" story, the ride around here might get a little bumpy for all of us.  facebook is neither a government agency nor a public service (it's mostly a marketing firm, if you think about it), so they don't have to honor any of anyone's rights at all.  if it's going to cost them money, no rights for you.

Restricting Kids' Screen Time for Their Own Good?

NYTimes.com blog article on "Screen Addiction" and the psychological effects of electronic multimedia exposure on children.



it would be a very bad idea to prohibit your children from using media devices entirely for at least two reasons.

1) they're absolutely going to need to know how these devices work, what they do, and how to use them if you intend for them to have any job more responsible than municipal speed bump.  cutting kids off from electronics and the things they do would be equivalent to having put them in a wheelchair instead of letting them learn to walk.  you wouldn't have done that, would you?

2) you don't live alone on this planet, tech toys are cool, and children have poor judgement about people's motives.  so where would you rather your kids play x-box:  your living room, or the mancave of some suddenly present Mr. Cool Guy from the Community Center or Church Youth Group or Summer Sports Camp or wherever else might have something of a reputation for being a traditional pedophile hunting ground?  entertainment is something you have to provide for your children, if not for their psychological well-being, then at least because if you don't, someone who doesn't care about their well-being at all will.


people talk a lot of crap about the schools, but your kids' teachers really do know an awful lot about kids in general, how kids learn, your kid in particular, and what works best to motivate him or her to learn.  call your kids' school at about three pm on any school day and ask to speak to their teacher about how to turn the rules you have for their electronics use into an experience that will make them better adults.

remember, that's the goal.

tl;dr: this is why there "aren't" "more" "female" "atheists"

Popular Atheist Vlogger Drops Trou - Universe Transfixed

time for everyone's favorite show: Unpopular Opinions with Auntie Zeropoint

okay, so first, let me say i already dislike jacklyn glenn.  not personally, and not even because of anything she's said.  not being a heterosexual man, i have no reason to watch her videos, so i've never heard a word of it.  it's nothing personal.  i hate her in that "i hate mondays" kind of way, and it's because of her business model and the way it paves.

glenn is one of a handful of visible female atheists who turn their trade by banking on the public's impression that people who don't believe in god are more sexually available than people who do.  this isn't true, but it's what everyone seems to believe.

as of late, it's been getting really popular among a subset of men to physically threaten women for not having sex with them when they think we should.  if those kind of men decide that being an atheist means a woman should be "loose", and then come into my environment and encounter the fact that i'm an atheist, i'm concerned that those kind of men are going to mistake my personal chastity for their public failure to close the deal with town bicycle (because hey, jacklin glenn made porno, right?  so "atheist" mean she want the d, amiritebraw?)... and then suddenly me and maybe seven or eight of my classmates are on the news getting carried out of stats class under sheets, and all the redpillers will moon in voiceover about what a beautiful day it would have been if i'd have just put that crazy guy's penis in my mouth... just once.  

after all, if there's no god, what am i saving it for?

the reason you don't think there are more female atheists in the world is because a lot of men have a kind of threatening reaction to female atheism, and i see this woman right here as being part of the problem.  i really don't want "atheist" to become the next thing on the list after "short skirt," "dark alley," and "intoxicated".

i wasn't going to say anything because i wasn't raised by that kind of christian*, but if she's proud of her choices, i'll gladly have an opinion about it.

*my parents are agnostic einsteinian deists ["a human being's relative ability to observe increasingly complex levels of order is too limited to be relied upon for obtaining scientific truth about any propositional composer or its personal will, and in the absence of that information, we are left to extrapolate what we are intended to do only from what we are able to learn about how order's resulting creation works."), they just don't realize it because they got "roman catholic" in the "who is your daddy and what does he do?" lottery.

#firstworldproblems

okay, so this is firstworldy, but i'm wondering if i should just get a new phone.  right now, i'm buying minutes ten bucks at a time on a phone the government gave me and it's okay.  it does what i want it to.

i also already have a smartphone, but it's the dumbest one they sell.  i "innovated" to the prestigious samsung admire... about two years after the release of the first galaxy... about six years ago.

y'know, thinking about it, most of my electronics purchases are "obsolete in box" like that.  the guy who sold me my laptop knocked fifteen bucks off the price and gave me a bunch of extra norton's because he felt sorry for the poor shmuckette who didn't know the company was going to stop supporting the model within a month (srsly - lenovo announced the obsolescence of my laptop [G560] the week after i bought it, so the salesguy knew. but he also knew i couldn't go up in price at all... and that he was gonna need the empty shelf soon.  better to sell the pos while you still can, right?).

the problem is that my smartphone will only connect to my own router.  everywhere that offers "free wifi" offers it through some method that my smartphone is just too stupid to handle.  i can't use the wifi on campus, i can't use the wifi at the bus terminal, i can't even use the wifi at the friggin burger king.  my phone can see their routers and connect, but it can't transfer data.

it would be very nice if i could have access to the campus wifi while on campus, considering that everyone else on that campus has access, and they're set up to communicate that way.  i'm the one who's kept permanently out of the loop over not being able to generate a condition for myself that's "good enough" for their system.

and this is, like i said, kind of perpetual for me.  the reason i'm even having to think about whether or not to update my technology (considering that that's what the government gave me the pell grant for) is because no matter what i buy, no matter how much i spend, no matter how carefully i research, the second i put my money down, not only will my tech be obsolete, but every last network and system that prompted me to purchase the upgrade will immediately upgrade to whatever new thing that i will subsequently be unable to use.  i'll just have a more expensive collection of bricks tethered to my couch.  what's the point of having mobile tech if it doesn't work anywhere but my living room?  if it's just going to be a waste of money anyway, i have other things i'd rather waste money on.

eventually, i'm going to need something with which i can write an article on the fly and then access a network and email it to an editor, but i figure once it gets to that point, the editor will be the one providing me with the tech.  then, it'll be his problem that the world appears to have summarily decided that anything i touch must necessarily be obsolete.

or maybe i'll just buy the most advanced smartphone on the market, and anyone who wants to stay ahead of me is going to have to invent a new motherfuckin' phone.  then i might actually be able to use mine for a couple of months.

facebook and my "real name" #nonametag

so i just got a thing from facebook saying that if i don't 1) prove to them what my "real name" is and 2) make it public for everyone to see and use however they like, i won't be allowed on facebook anymore.  i don't know if this happened because somebody reported me for not agreeing with them or if it's just something facebook doing.  i don't see anyone else reacting to anything like that, so i'm going to assume i've been somewhat singled out for this "attention".

from an emotional standpoint, i've basically just been told that all of my friends will be dead next week unless i put myself at risk. because there's a reason i don't want to use my "real name" as my facebook handle, and it's not just "i want to be cool online." (although, we'll see that's actually one of the reasons, to a certain degree.)

I have a unique name (especially my last name), but it's easy to spell, so it's easy to remember in print.  what this means is that most of the people in my life who i would very much like to not have to be honest with (and i would... and it would not be pleasant) know absolutely nothing about me other than my legal name. every other part of my online "persona" is just me.  it's the same way i'd be in "real life".  i just happen to have a past that's littered with people who went out of their way to know exactly nothing about me besides what the name on the bank account looked like.  i'm not worried about my identity being known.  that's never been the problem.  i haven't done anything.

something bad happened to me and it makes me uncomfortable having my first and last name on a public forum like facebook because that information will return my home address on any search engine.  the "something bad" included some pretty heavy duty gaslighting, and i'm going to be really upset if anyone around where i live brings up anything about what happened unprompted.

what happened to me?  "what happened to me."  in the end, what it boils down to is that i married the wrong man.  i married the wrong man and his "family" ripped mine to shreds.  given the nature of the legal aspects of my family being vaporized in front of my eyes for, as i understand it, government grant money, i have no doubt that were the people involved given the opportunity to involve themselves again, it would start back up.  these are people who believe they have a personal stake in, essentially, dirtying my reputation, and they have a good pitch.  they're able to generate credibility for themselves just based on being able to call themselves fancy titles because that's how my ex husband's government works.  i'm just a crazy old dingbat who's just now figuring out how to graduate from junior college.  the people talking about me would be calling themselves "representative" and "liaison" and "chairperson", and it wouldn't matter that they're basically lilliputian titles, the fancypantsieness will be enough to plant that seed of doubt that will grow into a few weeks of slowly having to experience everything i now know and love change into a wasteland of hatred and resentment until finally i'm no longer welcome in my own life... again.

i got the message when my family kicked me out.   all i want now is to be able to get a job that pays my rent.  my motivation for obscuring certain details about my legal identity is, to a large extent, being let to live what's left of my life in peace.

so you can see why it would seem easier to me to just... not have my real name out in public.  but that's just my personal reason.  i actually have a larger moral context from which to restrict access to my legal name in certain settings.  i don't want my legal name on my public facebook profile for the same reason i don't want it spray painted across the front of my house or tattooed across my forehead, and people who happen by my facebook profile who i don't know anything about don't need to know my name any more than the guy in line in front of me at the grocery store does. wouldn't it be creepy if every stranger you saw somehow knew your name?  that's not how real life "social networks" operate.  a name is something you get to know about a person, not something handed to you on a platter by virtue of you having shown up. people should have to ask.

and not for nothing, but there's scientific research that says your name does something special in your mind.  it's not like other noises or even other words.  it's one of those things that transcends the part of your consciousness it's a part of and becomes other parts of you.  when someone says your name, it activates parts of your brain that other words and sounds don't activate the same way music doesn't activate the same parts of the brain that the sound of a lawnmower does.  so i don't think i'm being untoward by considering my name something i offer as a token of friendship. i'm not a celebrity or anything, so my real name is still my name.  it's not property, not a commodity.

have i given my real name to people online?  yeah, i have.  i'll be honest, i've lied to a lot more people than i've told.  usually strangers get a lie.  they'll get the name "kristin polroniczac" (and if you believe this to be my name, i'm afraid you've been misled, and i apologize).  that's actually my real middle name and my father's mother's maiden name.  my name isn't quite so exotic, but it pairs with pejoratives fairly well, so i got tired of hearing it from people i didn't want to hear it from at a pretty young age.  i monitor whether or not i give it to strangers, and strangers who aren't going to matter once i close the chat window tend not to get told any private information.  it's just safer that way online.

there are two types of online people who know my name.  well, one type of person and one other person.  there are the people who know me in real life, people i've met or family or whatever... and then there's one person who i told because i wanted them to know (and the liekly two to five people that person told, depending on the validity of my sample size and strength of my inferences).

{a betrayal at which, btw, i am appropriately consumed with rage, because that's the fun part} :-P

which is the other, mostly stupid reason i like using a pseudonym on social media, even though i think its pretty obvious that i'm not trying to hide who i am or what i do in any way.  but i have this little tiny bit of myself to romanticise and make special for no other reason than that it's a part of me and i can.  people talk all the time about how social media is killing interpersonal communication, but i think maybe the pundits are missing the whole point of the social media.  using an obvious pseudonym allows me to generate a certain amount of presence, even in people who find it trite.  the reason it's a "tradition" to use a pseudonym online is because people who aren't very socially adept figure out how to use other things as a means of starting a conversation.  it's called "having a personality".  the handle i use tells the people who encounter it as much as what i'm wearing would tell them about me if they saw me on the street.  to my knowledge, i don't wear a nametag.

and if anyone's out there reading this and going, "you're seriously whining about facebook?"  first of all, thank you for having read this far.  second, yeah, of course i am.  i really like having the facebook account that i have in my life and facebook just told me i'm going to lose it in seven days unless i stop being me.  it's going to suck.  what else is there?  youtube comments?  twitter?  140 characters... right, there's a conversation, awesome, thanks.  and the only people who have ever looked at my blog are when i crosspost on facebook.   and all the facebook notes go... and my past posts... my history just disappears.

i actually don't have a choice but to change my profile to show my real name.  i lose a giant chunk of who i am if i don't.  but i won't be able to use it to interact with the public anymore.  i can post to the friends i have now and that's it.  i can't interact with the facebook profiles of my school or my news or my groups or anything.  facebook's real name policy will make it so the social part of their "social media" will exclude me.  i'll keep asking for the right to use the name i choose for all the reasons i've put here. hopefully facebook will decide to acknowledge my existence and i'll be able to be a person there again.  as long as they think being narcs is more important than being a social media platform, the only people they're going to be allowed to publicly narc on me to are the people already on my friends list.


update: i ended up saying screw it and opened a new facebook page.  www.facebook.com/z3ropoint68 (still not my name... but still me)

on death; fear of

the first time someone pointed out to me that i wasn't alive before i was born and i don't suffer any trauma from that "experience", i stopped needing to wish upon an afterlife. oddly enough, that's how i realized that death is actually just an illusion. all the stuff that makes you you will still all be here and exist. it will just be different.  

instead of existing as a creation of your own neurobiology, your essence exists as a reflection in the neurobiology of others. instead of being a watery sack of meat and electrolytes, you'll be converted into metabolites and aether as your biome reduces your components for recycling 

or, if you're my mother, stuck in a wall in southeastern michigan with the rest of your weird, gigantic family until the earth crashes into the sun and we can be fused on the quantum level as the star implodes so we can be spat out together as the new god of whatever universe happens on the other side of the resulting singularity (which i'm just assuming is my mother's plan, considering how many books about theoretical physics she owns, you know, because).

there is nowhere that we "go" when we "die", and frankly, i don't want to leave. reality isn't just where i live. it's what i am, and i'm staying here. we're all staying here.

where else is there to be?

dear united kingdom,

hi.

disclosure: all my information about ukip comes from a comedian*

(*except for all the shit i've spent the last week researching)

you guys know what ukip is doing? they're slobbering on a copy of the karl rove playbook. the difference is that karl rove had five thousand square miles of exploitable religious bumpkins to bank votes with. ukip's been forced to default to racism because there's literally no other problem with which to divide the uk population that won't just result in a speedy legal solution, no ukips required.

the goal is to over-radicalize their base in order to compel as many of them to the polls as possible. the idea is to play the percents. it's probably not going to work as well as they'd like because another part of the karl rove election strategy is to count on seventy percent of the electorate voluntarily disenfranchising themselves, and while that's been historically true of the american electorate, uk voter turnout generally runs significantly higher.

and regret to inform, but you're already in for about twenty years of race relations issues because of this. if i were you, i would nip these guys in the bud because they will continue to mess up your country (and probably a couple of the countries near you). why do you think you keep seeing daily fail headlines like "americans refuse to breathe because they think the 'x' in the word 'oxygen' looks like devil horns"? the karl rove election strategy fucked our country all up socially, and we may not be able to keep all our pluribuses unum in the aftermath.

also, you realize that germany and a bunch of other countries are (probably) going to start pulling out of trade deals with you if ukip gains any real political traction. nobody in europe is going to do business with Potential Hitler. just sayin'.

if you don't want to go back into civil warfare, you need to keep the ukips away from your government.  seriously, just for pragmatism's sake, because your little flerp of islands right there is nowhere near big enough to keep you guys from having to fight over it.  like i said... the game is rigged for five thousand square miles of cornfields and ignorance that you no has.

these guys are "don't even wrap your fish in it" bad news.

if you can't see the video because of country restrictions, i apologize for not being able to transfer my right to watch american public broadcasting onto you.  this video deals with how karl rove got george bush elected governor of texas in the eighties using the "divide and conquer" strategy with tort reform ("judicial activism").  he used the same strategy to get w. elected president using religion as the dividing point, and the ukips are doing the exact same thing with race and immigration.

letting go

am i the only one burning out on the steady stream of news reports about some enclave of religious fundamentalists rotorootering their baby girls' reproductive organs out or giving their infant sons venereal diseases through oral copulation or murdering all their breeding age women just because some men are heterosexual?

it's not that i want to see these things happening, it's that there's nothing i can do about it.  in fact, there really isn't anything i should do about it.  these people are living their lives the way they choose.  it's no more my place or business to try and change them or tell them they're wrong than it is their place or business to tell me.

if we have reached a point in human history where that sort of adherence to fear and shame in the name of religion has become incompatible with the survival of whatever part of the species it afflicts... if religion is what causes a group of people to stop engaging in reproduction, whether through social pressure or physical violation, then that's just evolution.  the environment has changed.  if they are unable to adapt they're going to go extinct, and we're not going to have much choice but to let them.

i'm not forcing religious people to do these things to one another, and i'm having a very hard time not applying what i understand about the nature of reality to this just like i do to everything else.  i don't feel good about it, but there comes a point where my inability to do anything but feel bad begins to interfere with my ability to be a productive member of my own society.

if religious people could understand the kind of toxic despair they're causing in the world, we wouldn't have to have this conversation anymore.  until then, i just don't think i can afford to care about what they do to themselves and each other.  i have a life to live, too.

little things matter

i just realized that i've owned the same watch for three years. i've never owned any small personal item for that long ever before in my adult life.

i just wish i wasn't so sure that the only reason i still have my watch... and my coffee maker, and my violin, and my computer, and my books, and my coffee mug... is because i don't have someone in my life taking those things away from me constantly. there hasn't been someone in my life to "accidentally" break my watch or lose my watch or throw my watch away or give my watch to one of his other girlfriends... and so i still have my watch.

i'm going to guess it's just me, but men do this weird thing with me where they won't let me keep anything of my own. i don't know if it's on purpose or if it's just that men don't realize that i have personal belongings and just see everything in my environment as either theirs or garbage. for whatever reason it happens, i don't like it. i dated one guy who couldn't even let there be a flat surface near me. if i cleared things off a table where i was sitting, he would actually go out to the store and buy something to fill that space with. it would sit there until i cleared the space again, and he would do it again. he was only ever moved to interact with anything in our home whenever he saw that i was treating the apartment where i paid the rent like i actually lived there and wasn't just some unwanted guest he was patiently suffering.

when i pointed out to him what he was doing, he acted like i hadn't even said anything, and not like, "i'm ignoring this on purpose". more like, "i don't recognize the sounds you're making as you attempting to communicate with me." it was like i was suddenly talking to a goldfish. it reminded me of the fable you hear about the native americans not being able to see the first european boats on the horizon because they had no inkling of what they could possibly be.

but this is true for every small personal item i ever owned. i'm just plain afraid to buy things like hairdryers and curling irons ever again.  i haven't been able to own those types of things for more than a few weeks before something "happens". and don't even get me started about my glasses. what is so difficult about "leave my glasses alone. i need them to see"? is it just something about men that makes them not realize that waiting until i'm asleep and then moving my glasses without telling me is actually cruel? and these are people who told me they loved me... who expected me to allow them into my body.  

as long as i'm not getting any kind of sign that men even recognize me as a human being, i'm not really interested in having one around me on a regular basis. that would just be stupid on my part. hey, maybe men are nicer to other women, and maybe it is just me, but that doesn't mean i have to buy a new watch every other month.

i can do bad just fine by myself.

"follow me, and i will make you fishers of men"

The US Air Force will no longer prohibit security personnel at Robbins Air Force Base from wishing people a "blessed day".

okay, my reading of the book goes like this:

(Matt 5,6&7)  My dad left you guys in charge of making sure all the blessings get sent out to all the people because he says that everyone who hears about him gets the Good Stuff now.

that's how i read all that "salt and flavor", "don't hide your light under a basket", "shining city on the hill" stuff.  it means that a christian's job is to do god's good regardless.  if there exists a dog's backside, if you're a christian, you were told to be the sun that shines upon it.

as an atheist, i understand common, conversational, religiously-themed greetings from christians as an interpretation of jesus christ's mission on earth, thus rendering my opinion about it legally irrelevant in the united states of america.  simply disagreeing with what someone says is not sufficient cause to strip them of their right to free expression.

i said, "disagreeing with someone is not sufficient cause to strip them of their rights."

... i really feel like repeating that until i think everyone understands all the implications of this "not a sufficient cause to strip people of their rights" thing.

tl;dr: media bias is bad, m'kay?

so i'm reading a piece in the new york times about the outcome of the ferguson investigation.  of course they found racism in the police.  duh.

but that wasn't what caught my attention about the article. the teal deer here is going to be that bias in news reporting is bad, but if you're interested...

this new york times piece here, called Justice Department Report to Fault Ferguson Police, Seeing Racial Bias in Traffic Stops, contains a lot of implicit bias in favor of the brown side of things. personally, i agree with the reporter who wrote this article.  anybody who knows anything about me knows that i just about hate the police and have to try very hard to keep my discussion about them civil and productive (see my previous post here for one recent helpful suggestion for law enforcement vis a vis the use of force).

the problem is that i shouldn't agree with the writer of this article.  or rather, i shouldn't know that i agree with the writer of this article.  what the writer believes about this article should not be present, because the person who wrote this article was writing as a news reporter at the time.  his beliefs about the situation aren't fit to print, regardless of how many people agree with him.

so shame on the new york times, then.  all and then some, eh?**

but it makes me think about the larger charge of "agenda journalism".  a lot of people talk about bias in the media, and the charge is true.  reporters are guilty of this all the time.  if human consciousness itself is a rube goldberg machine built out of biases, it stands to reason then that our more ephemeral endeavors necessarily stand on these biases alone.  the philosophies of justice and politics are just that... philosophies.  the only hope any of it has of becoming history is through meticulous record keeping.

when the social bias of a reporter or publication becomes evident on a particular issue, that publication or reporter does damage to the institution of journalism in a way that cannot be undone.  the fact that history is written by the "winners" doesn't help the fact that that has changed our history.  time does damage enough to how we'll tell each other it was. biased news reporting in the here and now... voids that perspective on the event almost entirely.

putting your opinion in the reporting doesn't make your opinion news.  it makes your reporting less valuable to history.  when you are reporting the news, you aren't writing for your posterity.  you are being given the privilege of witnessing history on behalf of your kind.  show some respect for their intelligence.

they're going to make their own decisions anyway.

** "All the News That's Fit to Print" is the longtime slogan of the new york times.

dichotomy interrupted

oh your god, people.  is this really that difficult?

dipshit killed those three kids for parking in his spot, and the thing that anti-theism did was give him a context to dehumanize them far enough for the fucking coward to carry it out.

actually, that's only why he killed the first one.  he killed the other two because he was compelled by his own completionism... because he is a weakling.  once the first one was dead, his brain needed to complete the scenario that he'd (obviously) played out repeatedly in fantasy.

a fantasy he'd constructed out of the trappings of anti-theism.  not because they were muslim, but because they kept parking in his spot.  if it wasn't religion, it would have been some other damn thing. if those three kids had been white girls, we'd be talking about how he's an anti-feminist and gawking at the links to "a voice for men" and girl writes what videos on his facebook page. if they'd been three white dudes, we'd all be putting ourselves through talking about elliott roger again.  it didn't start with the kids being muslims.  it started years ago when the village idiot decided to go captain dickhead on his neighbors.  the fact that the ones he ended up shooting were muslims is a result of hicks having a context from which to dehumanize them.

do i blame anti-theism?  no.  but i would suggest (... politely) that anti-theists take stock of what about the collective balance of their output might be getting assembled in such a way that it provides scaffolding for this magnitude of sociopathy.  i make this suggestion the same way i make the suggestion to the catholic church that letting priests be married men might cut down on the kiddyfiddlers and muslims might want to ask that their imams not make people angry on purpose.  just saying.  being anti-stuff doesn't have a good track record, organizationally speaking.  the problem with being anti-stuff is that line between "anti-anything" and "anti-everything" is too thin for the human eye to notice when it's crossed... at least, not in time to make any damn difference.

you know who i personally blame?  whoever gave him the gun.  i have a reason to be acquainted with the type of personality that goes into a "blind rage" when they're angry.  if a gun had been present in my psych 101 class at Hard Knocks U, the vector for that sudden realization you just had about my personal history would not be me.  whoever put that gun into craig hicks' hands needs to be knuckleslapped.

and, postscript, there isn't going to be any resolution for any of us on this, just so you know.  if i'm prognosticating, i'm going to guess there won't even be a trial.  that chickenshit will take whatever deal he's offered to keep his ass out of federal prison.  they'll bust the charge down from murder to whatever they're allowed to keep him in regional for (probably manslaughter) and he'll plead guilty to that.  the judge will sentence him to 99 consecutive life sentences and he'll spend the rest of his life in Podunk County Prison getting federally funded college degrees and visits from his mom every sunday.  the best we can hope for is that he accidentally invents something useful on the company dime before he croaks.

the *real* "domestic violence awareness" day

(sorts through bag looking for the little chalk heart that says "is it over yet?")

yes, national "make anyone who doesn't feel compelled to permanently embed an expensive boat anchor into themselves feel like there's something wrong with them" day 2015 has commenced. let me assure you that all this means to me, functionally, is i have a higher than average possibility of witnessing the domestic violence related death of one or more of my neighbors today.

the women will wake up expecting the men to be solicitous and kind, and the men will wake up expecting the women to be unconscious and lubricated... someone's gonna be wearing a bruise by noon.

we don't need a "valentine's day".  we need a "try not to hit the person you're living with for twenty four hours" day... which i also won't be participating in, because the odds that i'll ever live with anyone again are slim and none, and slim's got no clue he's invited. besides, i kind of like living in a world where none of the things i keep in my home get "accidentally" broken (or sold) every time i go out somewhere.

along those lines, there's a guy out there who has no idea that the reason he's alone this valentine's day is because he assumed he was more welcome in my apartment than my violin.  live and learn, i guess.  at least i know what to say to the next guy who watches me fix a spot on the couch for him, then points to the broken chair my violin is on and grunts, "are you going to let me sit down?" (hint: it's going to rhyme with "shmet the shmuck out of my shmapartment.")

on the other hand, there was the guy who told me "i like everything about you except your personality."  ...  'k.  and he said this with a straight face and the expectation that those words would make me genuinely consider changing my personality in order to give him an opportunity to masturbate into me.  it makes me wonder, because nobody says anything that stupid unless it worked at some point.  i can't imagine what that woman's life must be like.

y'know, maybe it's not valentine's day that's bullshit.

i've been watching some minor fb "drammer" go down, and it reminds me of my hypothesis...

*hypothesis*

hypothesis that young men who appear to be initiating anonymous sexual interactions with women online are actually interacting sexually with whatever other young men are present with them at their end of the interaction, and that group of young men is using the woman as a proxy for their sexual interaction because it keeps them from having to work out how gay they are (because everyone's at least kinda gay - we're systems, not programs.  there are no absolutes).

because you'll notice that heterosexual women don't have the same problem interacting in a superficially sexual way with one another. we braid each other's hair and rate each other's tits and do each other's makeup. there's no need for us to use a male in order to impress a reminder of our heterosexuality into the experience for ourselves because we aren't made to feel bad about ourselves for engaging in first-order sexuality (grooming behaviors) with one another.

i think the closest a young heterosexual man is allowed by "society" to get to having that kind of intimacy with other heterosexual men (where nobody feels compelled to advertise their raging case of notgays) is in the context of physical exertion and competition.  playing sports and working out is the closest men come to grooming with other men without feeling compelled to invoke a female presence to justify their normal, healthy sexual responses to one another.  i mean, have you noticed that auto shops, military barracks, male college dorms... these places are all plastered in images of sexualized women.  look around a locker room next time you're watching a post-game interview.   see any pictures of hoochie-coochie girls there?  hell to the no.  not in a one i've seen.  the locker room is the Man Zone, baby.

that's where real men give each other hamstring massages and carefully wrap one another's most delicate joints to keep them safe. it's the only place we allow men to realize that they're all on the same side, and that loving one another is loving themselves.  men who experience satisfying first order sexuality with other men just don't feel compelled to turn women into a tertiary context for that. team sports affords them all the same-sex interaction they need to feel sexually whole... which, for straight guys, just isn't all that much.  i think we see that an occasional pat on the ass during timeouts tends to suffice.

and what's at fault?  patriarchy.  yes, our good friend patriarchy. this is men telling other men that there's something wrong with them for having any sort of attachment to or need for psychosexual interaction with other men, even though that's normal and healthy. this is men telling other men that they're only "men" if the only people they ever make physical contact with are female.  this is men denying other men the full extent of human experience.  now, nobody's suggesting you go peg a dude for equality or anything if that's not what you're into, but the next time you and your friends are giggling over having made some random woman vaguely uncomfortable by talking to her chest, stop and think about who you're really having sexytimes with right there.

hint: it's not the woman... and that's not her fault.

pepper spray =/= air freshener

police are unpredictable.  they liken themselves to wild animals for a reason ("always show your hands because we're more scared of you than you are of us", etc.).  this is why it's never a good idea to get too close, even if it doesn't seem like anything is happening:

i really think someone needs to make this officer sit in front of this video, watch it with her a few times, and then have her explain exactly what was going through her head right here.  what is the threat she's reacting to?  does she have any self-awareness in this moment at all?

this is something i believe the american people have a right to know about their police officers.  we have the right to know why they choose to employ the power we grant them in the way they do because it is the power, ultimately, to do us harm.

the fifth amendment to the u.s. constitution compels agents of the government to give justification for the actions they take against citizens as a matter of due process, so i want to know what this lady's major malfunction is.

speech isn't free. it's just cheap.

maybe i'm just a little cranky right now, but it seems like there can't actually be such a thing as the protection of free expression in america anymore because too many americans simply aren't familiar enough with the english language to comprehend what's being expressed.

for example, the US Army was just recently forced to delete a tweet that people had called "racist". the tweet contained the phrase "a chink in the armor" (they were talking about issues with their new fancy-shmancy tech-mech wifi-warrior suit) and everyone randomly decided that they were talking about asians.  that expression is hundreds of years old... and you mean to tell me that the only americans who understand it are the ones doing p.r. for the army?

can people who don't understand the language be reasonably considered to have "freedom of speech"?  further, do the rest of us have a duty to protect the rights of those who have rendered themselves incapable of exercising them?  i don't mean not protecting illiterate people from exploitation.  of course we should do that.  i mean; do we have to afford the same amount of weight and respect to the speech of a person who doesn't know what they're talking about, and are we bound to allow that to interfere with reality?  does the fact that nobody understands that "a chink in one's armor" isn't a racist sentiment necessarily mean that we have to drop the idiom from our language entirely, even though they're the ones who are wrong about what it means?

and what happens when the ubiquitous "they" decide to start labeling other random words "palabra non grata"?  do we just let them do it?  does their "freedom of speech" extend to the right to outright destroy the language?  giving people who aren't using the language correctly ultimate control over how the language is to be used by everyone doesn't seem very "freedom"-perpetuating to me.  in fact, manipulating a society by manipulating how they speak is part of every dystopia ever conceived, real or fictional.