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.