30 April 2007
Nonsensical Advertising
"New and Improved": This is a nonsense phrase. If something is improved, then it can't be new. And if something is new, what is it improving on?
27 April 2007
24 April 2007
Punishment
Notable loser Fred Phelps and his band of ignorant reprobates, the Westboro Baptist Church, have made headlines in the news the past several years for protesting the funerals of gay people and soldiers. He and his church believe that the Iraq War is God's punishment on us for allowing gay people to exist in our country.
In fact, they believe that pretty much anything bad that happens to Americans must be the work of a vengeful, homophobic god. Case in point: this past week, they wanted to picket the funerals of those killed in the VA Tech shooting. Clearly, they argue, the massacre was another punishment inflicted by god on a society that tolerates homosexuals.
They ended up not doing the pickets in exchange for getting some air time on a radio show.
But you know what the real punishment is for tolerating gays in America? Fred Phelps. Fred Phelps and other ministers of idiocy like him are the inevitable byproducts of a tolerant society that ensures equal protection under the law and protects the freedoms of speech, belief, and expression.
As long as we in this country tolerate gays - and blacks, and asians, and hispanics, and anyone who differs in religious creed or political ideology - we will have to put up with a few mentally stunted bigots who feel threatened by the freedom enjoyed by those around them.
In fact, they believe that pretty much anything bad that happens to Americans must be the work of a vengeful, homophobic god. Case in point: this past week, they wanted to picket the funerals of those killed in the VA Tech shooting. Clearly, they argue, the massacre was another punishment inflicted by god on a society that tolerates homosexuals.
They ended up not doing the pickets in exchange for getting some air time on a radio show.
But you know what the real punishment is for tolerating gays in America? Fred Phelps. Fred Phelps and other ministers of idiocy like him are the inevitable byproducts of a tolerant society that ensures equal protection under the law and protects the freedoms of speech, belief, and expression.
As long as we in this country tolerate gays - and blacks, and asians, and hispanics, and anyone who differs in religious creed or political ideology - we will have to put up with a few mentally stunted bigots who feel threatened by the freedom enjoyed by those around them.
23 April 2007
The Right to Maintain and Display Ignorance
I didn't think that anyone would actually be so imbecilic as to put forth the proposition that the incident at VA Tech last week might not have been as bad, had only more students been carrying guns.
Surely, I thought, such a position would be self-satirizing. No one could be that dumb.
And then the Virginia Citizens' Defense League went ahead and exceeded my expectations.
"They had gun control on campus and it got all those people killed, because nobody could defend themselves," [the president of the league] told AFP.
"You want people to be able to defend themselves -- always," he said.
Yes, you read that correctly: the responsibility for the Virginia Tech Massacre lies with gun control. There just weren't enough guns at VA Tech.
Well, now we know what the problem was. But at least there's a clear solution: more students need to carry guns. How patently logical. I'm sure such a trend will ensure a marked drop in gun violence on campuses. And we can't forget how much college students like to drink. Surely, binge drinking + concealed firearms = safety for all. Problem solved!
Now, using the same intrepid logic, let's ensure permanent world peace by giving every country on Earth a nuclear weapon.
Thank you, Virginia Citizens' Defense League. You are inspiring proof that things like illiteracy and a lack of a high school education shouldn't stop you from getting out there and solving the world's problems.
Surely, I thought, such a position would be self-satirizing. No one could be that dumb.
And then the Virginia Citizens' Defense League went ahead and exceeded my expectations.
"They had gun control on campus and it got all those people killed, because nobody could defend themselves," [the president of the league] told AFP.
"You want people to be able to defend themselves -- always," he said.
Yes, you read that correctly: the responsibility for the Virginia Tech Massacre lies with gun control. There just weren't enough guns at VA Tech.
Well, now we know what the problem was. But at least there's a clear solution: more students need to carry guns. How patently logical. I'm sure such a trend will ensure a marked drop in gun violence on campuses. And we can't forget how much college students like to drink. Surely, binge drinking + concealed firearms = safety for all. Problem solved!
Now, using the same intrepid logic, let's ensure permanent world peace by giving every country on Earth a nuclear weapon.
Thank you, Virginia Citizens' Defense League. You are inspiring proof that things like illiteracy and a lack of a high school education shouldn't stop you from getting out there and solving the world's problems.
20 April 2007
Survival of the Fittest
Most people assume that Charles Darwin coined the famous phrase 'survival of the fittest'. Actually, Darwin never used those words in any of his writings. The man who invented the term was Herbert Spencer, the 19th-century thinker and founder of the school of thought known as Social Darwinism.
Darwin used the phrase 'natural selection' to describe the process that lay at the center of his theory of evolution. 'Survival of the fittest', though still a term commonly used as shorthand for Darwin's theory, is actually misleading: it makes it seem as if survival is the standard for evolutionary success. Actually, reproduction is what counts, and survival only matters insofar as it allows reproduction. If you compared a parent of three who died at 25 years old with another person who lived to 100 but never had children, the former of the two would be the more successful in evolutionary terms.
Darwin used the phrase 'natural selection' to describe the process that lay at the center of his theory of evolution. 'Survival of the fittest', though still a term commonly used as shorthand for Darwin's theory, is actually misleading: it makes it seem as if survival is the standard for evolutionary success. Actually, reproduction is what counts, and survival only matters insofar as it allows reproduction. If you compared a parent of three who died at 25 years old with another person who lived to 100 but never had children, the former of the two would be the more successful in evolutionary terms.
19 April 2007
Inside the Multimedia of a Killer
Welcome to the 21st century, when an extensive massacre is accompanied by a 'multimedia package'.
At least it removes all doubt regarding the meaning of this tragedy. There was no meaning. It wasn't political, it wasn't religious, it wasn't even a personal vendetta. It was just an addle-minded scamp with a severe martyr complex and a gun.
Note, however, that without the gun, he would have been just another addle-minded scamp. So much for the second amendment.
At least it removes all doubt regarding the meaning of this tragedy. There was no meaning. It wasn't political, it wasn't religious, it wasn't even a personal vendetta. It was just an addle-minded scamp with a severe martyr complex and a gun.
Note, however, that without the gun, he would have been just another addle-minded scamp. So much for the second amendment.
15 April 2007
This just in: teens have sex even when you tell them not to
BBC: US sex-abstinence classes queried
US students attending sexual abstinence classes are no more likely to abstain from sex than those who do not, according to a new study.
Duh.
I've asked this before, and I'll ask it again: how is it that conservatives can get away with calling liberals naive?
Conservatives actually believe that telling teenagers not to have sex will prevent them from having sex.
Yeah. Right. Problem solved. Because we know that if there's one thing teens love, it's doing exactly what adults tell them to do.
This study proves what anyone who's ever been a teenager, had contact with a teenager, or seen a teenager on TV should have inferred: that teenagers will have sex. Period. As the study shows, it doesn't matter whether you throw 10 million dollars or 176 million dollars at programs trying to stop them. You can't. They're teenagers!
The question is not whether teens are going to have sex. The question is, when the time comes that they do have sex, will they do so safely?
As long as this administration continues to model its sex education policy after that of the 17th-century Puritans, the answer is no.
US students attending sexual abstinence classes are no more likely to abstain from sex than those who do not, according to a new study.
Duh.
I've asked this before, and I'll ask it again: how is it that conservatives can get away with calling liberals naive?
Conservatives actually believe that telling teenagers not to have sex will prevent them from having sex.
Yeah. Right. Problem solved. Because we know that if there's one thing teens love, it's doing exactly what adults tell them to do.
This study proves what anyone who's ever been a teenager, had contact with a teenager, or seen a teenager on TV should have inferred: that teenagers will have sex. Period. As the study shows, it doesn't matter whether you throw 10 million dollars or 176 million dollars at programs trying to stop them. You can't. They're teenagers!
The question is not whether teens are going to have sex. The question is, when the time comes that they do have sex, will they do so safely?
As long as this administration continues to model its sex education policy after that of the 17th-century Puritans, the answer is no.
12 April 2007
So It Goes
Listen:
Kurt Vonnegut is dead. He always quipped that he was "committing suicide by cigarette," and it finally worked.
So it goes.
He will live on in his writing. He had a unique gift for conveying profound truths through simple reductionism - stepping back from everyday life like an anthropologist would (he actually did have an M.A. in anthropology), and explaining conventions in such simple terms as to reveal their absurdities. (I still remember how, in the beginning of Breakfast of Champions, he called the American National Anthem "gibberish sprinkled with quotation marks.")
What Mark Twain was to the 19th century, Kurt Vonnegut was to the 20th. Whereas Mark Twain revealed the insecurities of a post Civil War America, Vonnegut exposed the incoherencies and hypocrisies of the America that emerged after WWII. America after the war was catapulted from depression to prosperity, from devastating world war to nuclear brinksmanship in a cold war. Advances in science had improved our quality of life, while simultaneously improving our capacity to take away life. And Vonnegut, the master satirist, was there to write about it all, with a simple, honest narrative voice that had the power to make you look at the world with fresh eyes.
As he dedicated the library at Connecticut College thirty years ago, Vonnegut had this to say:
By reading the writings of some of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate not only with our own poor minds, but with those interesting minds, too.
This to me is a miracle.
Yes - and when I speak of interesting minds, I am not limiting my admiration to belletrists, to poets and story tellers and elegant essayists and the like. We should be equally in love with astronomers and physicists and mathematicians and chemists and engineeers - cooks, bakers, mechanics, musicians - people telling, sometimes clumsily, sometimes not, what they have perceived as the truths of their trades.
On occasion, even children have written instructively. Anne Frank was a child.
So much for that.
If Vonnegut's worldview could be encapsulated in one sentence, it would be 'so much for that'.
Rest in peace, Mr. Vonnegut. And thank you.
Kurt Vonnegut is dead. He always quipped that he was "committing suicide by cigarette," and it finally worked.
So it goes.
He will live on in his writing. He had a unique gift for conveying profound truths through simple reductionism - stepping back from everyday life like an anthropologist would (he actually did have an M.A. in anthropology), and explaining conventions in such simple terms as to reveal their absurdities. (I still remember how, in the beginning of Breakfast of Champions, he called the American National Anthem "gibberish sprinkled with quotation marks.")
What Mark Twain was to the 19th century, Kurt Vonnegut was to the 20th. Whereas Mark Twain revealed the insecurities of a post Civil War America, Vonnegut exposed the incoherencies and hypocrisies of the America that emerged after WWII. America after the war was catapulted from depression to prosperity, from devastating world war to nuclear brinksmanship in a cold war. Advances in science had improved our quality of life, while simultaneously improving our capacity to take away life. And Vonnegut, the master satirist, was there to write about it all, with a simple, honest narrative voice that had the power to make you look at the world with fresh eyes.
As he dedicated the library at Connecticut College thirty years ago, Vonnegut had this to say:
By reading the writings of some of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate not only with our own poor minds, but with those interesting minds, too.
This to me is a miracle.
Yes - and when I speak of interesting minds, I am not limiting my admiration to belletrists, to poets and story tellers and elegant essayists and the like. We should be equally in love with astronomers and physicists and mathematicians and chemists and engineeers - cooks, bakers, mechanics, musicians - people telling, sometimes clumsily, sometimes not, what they have perceived as the truths of their trades.
On occasion, even children have written instructively. Anne Frank was a child.
So much for that.
If Vonnegut's worldview could be encapsulated in one sentence, it would be 'so much for that'.
Rest in peace, Mr. Vonnegut. And thank you.
10 April 2007
Forgetting Anna
I've tried to insulate myself as much as possible from the past two months' media orgy surrounding the death of Anna Nicole Smith. Nevertheless, when I logged on to CNN's website today, I couldn't miss the big headline announcing the dramatic news that the father of Smith's child has been identified at last.
Great. Fine. Nice. Can we forget about her now?
It is a depressing commentary on the state of our culture that our media spend two months ranting and raving about the death of a woman whose only contribution to society was her enormous rack. Certainly more ink has been spilled about Anna Nicole Smith in the past two months than about the Darfur genocide in the past year. And for what?
A woman who became a B-list celebrity by taking her clothes off died in a hotel of a drug overdose, leaving behind a child with doubtful paternity. Truly an unexpected, unprecedented, consequential event. She will continue to be mourned by masturbators everywhere, but can we please now give more media attention to news that actually matters?
Great. Fine. Nice. Can we forget about her now?
It is a depressing commentary on the state of our culture that our media spend two months ranting and raving about the death of a woman whose only contribution to society was her enormous rack. Certainly more ink has been spilled about Anna Nicole Smith in the past two months than about the Darfur genocide in the past year. And for what?
A woman who became a B-list celebrity by taking her clothes off died in a hotel of a drug overdose, leaving behind a child with doubtful paternity. Truly an unexpected, unprecedented, consequential event. She will continue to be mourned by masturbators everywhere, but can we please now give more media attention to news that actually matters?
05 April 2007
The 'N' Word
The word 'nigger' connotes some of the most terrible aspects of our nation's history and heritage. It invokes memories of over two hundred years of chattel slavery, and another hundred years of continued social oppression. It conjures images of the overseer's whip, of mob lynchings, and of the segregationist campaigns to keep black people separate, indigent, and powerless.
Does that mean we should make a law banning the word 'nigger'?
Since the Michael Richards gaffe last year, the debate over whether there should be formal laws or bans prohibiting the use of the notorious 'n' word has heated up.
But no no word should ever be banned, regardless of how derogatory, how ugly, or how inappropriate it may be. Freedom of speech is the foundation of a free democracy, and the reason that such a freedom exists is precisely for cases like this. The very reason we have a constitutional protection of free speech is because there are people who will voice unpopular opinions and use unpopular language. But freedom of speech also allows the more rational and ethical among us to openly criticize such opinions and language. That's the free exchange of ideas, and it's what makes a democracy work.
Also, if we were to ban the word nigger, what about kike, fag, chink, spic, dyke, gook, wop, dago, cracker, guinea, towelhead, and redskin? And what about bitch, idiot, and dumb - words that are pejorative to women, the mentally handicapped, and the mute, respectively?
How would you enforce such a ban? Fine people who are overheard saying the word? One would think there are more serious crimes that the police should be fighting than the use of naughty words.
Lastly, and most importantly, banning words won't change people's mindsets. A law might stop a racist from saying 'nigger', but no law can stop him from thinking it.
The whole problem with the word 'nigger' is not the word itself; it's the profound ignorance that is a precondition for using the word. Banning words won't solve anything; it's as impracticable as it is contradictory to our nation's ideals. Curtailing free speech is not the solution to the problem of racism. Education is the solution to racism, and keeping free speech free is necessary for an educated, open-minded society.
Does that mean we should make a law banning the word 'nigger'?
Since the Michael Richards gaffe last year, the debate over whether there should be formal laws or bans prohibiting the use of the notorious 'n' word has heated up.
But no no word should ever be banned, regardless of how derogatory, how ugly, or how inappropriate it may be. Freedom of speech is the foundation of a free democracy, and the reason that such a freedom exists is precisely for cases like this. The very reason we have a constitutional protection of free speech is because there are people who will voice unpopular opinions and use unpopular language. But freedom of speech also allows the more rational and ethical among us to openly criticize such opinions and language. That's the free exchange of ideas, and it's what makes a democracy work.
Also, if we were to ban the word nigger, what about kike, fag, chink, spic, dyke, gook, wop, dago, cracker, guinea, towelhead, and redskin? And what about bitch, idiot, and dumb - words that are pejorative to women, the mentally handicapped, and the mute, respectively?
How would you enforce such a ban? Fine people who are overheard saying the word? One would think there are more serious crimes that the police should be fighting than the use of naughty words.
Lastly, and most importantly, banning words won't change people's mindsets. A law might stop a racist from saying 'nigger', but no law can stop him from thinking it.
The whole problem with the word 'nigger' is not the word itself; it's the profound ignorance that is a precondition for using the word. Banning words won't solve anything; it's as impracticable as it is contradictory to our nation's ideals. Curtailing free speech is not the solution to the problem of racism. Education is the solution to racism, and keeping free speech free is necessary for an educated, open-minded society.
03 April 2007
Nurses Uniforms Place
Part 4 of my ongoing series of pictures of ruined English:
That's not even ungrammatical. That's agrammatical. It's like three random nouns collided in a train wreck of nonsense.
Is that really the name of their business? Do they actually print that nonsensical combination of words on their tax forms?
I wonder what their company motto is. The Nurses Uniforms Place: you're one stop solution four nurses uniforms!
Picture taken in Philly PA. Thanks to KW and KAO for the image.
That's not even ungrammatical. That's agrammatical. It's like three random nouns collided in a train wreck of nonsense.
Is that really the name of their business? Do they actually print that nonsensical combination of words on their tax forms?
I wonder what their company motto is. The Nurses Uniforms Place: you're one stop solution four nurses uniforms!
Picture taken in Philly PA. Thanks to KW and KAO for the image.
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