Go to Chepooka and read. Go, now.
December 6, 2004
Darn you, I say!
Queer means odd which means gay which means queer
Remember when I posted about the symbolic penis?
I mentioned that I had posted in the comments of Lee’s site. Most of the people there, of course, leaped straight into the insult stage, showing how open minded and welcome to dialogue Lee’s readers are. Some actually had clever insults … well, no, they didn’t. They also weren’t very good at delivering them. Take a look at this from Drumwaster:
You are a jackass. That is not intended to imply that you have four hoofs, are covered in a gray fur, and have a tail that people are always trying to pin back on (for whatever reason). It is intended to imply that you have a corrosive personality and/or a braying voice that conveys lots of noise but very little intellectual content.
First of all, let me agree that I am, in personality, a total ass. However, when you try to deliver an insult on the sly, you usually don’t then turn around and explain that it’s an insult. He needs to work on his delivery, but that’s okay - I don’t judge, and I wish him well in the future.
I actually want to point attention to one aspect of the conversation. You can find the comments thread here.
I’m excerpting portions of the “discussion”, or as I call it “insult fest.” I encourage you to visit the site and read on if you feel you’re not getting a complete picture from moi.
A fellow named Darkstar127 wrote, “Its fucking shameful that libs can’t see the “other†uses of words. Instead they must get irrationally sensitive to their use as they believe it applies. Lee’s use in this phrasing means odd. Islamofascists makeup less than 1% of all muslims in the world. See the relation? Gays are thought of as “queer†because most are odd or different in how they do things.”
Another fellow named Comments (0)
Shaddup
A couple of great posts on censorship you should read -
First, Captain’s Quarters discusses the criminalization of thought:
What has happened to the idea of “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”? Ample legislation already exists for speech which specifically directs or demands violence against others. However, the notion that the state can decide which political speech springs from “hate” and which springs from reasoned debate only derives from the philosophy that the state must remain supreme over the individual — indeed, that the state has omniscient insight into the mind and soul of an individual.
Hate speech, while repugnant, remains as just words. Words have power to convince but none to harm, except in terms of libel or slander — which, again, ample legislation already covers. Hate-crime legislation attempts to create criminality where no crime has occurred, and puts more control over political debate into the hands of the government. The cure for bad speech is not handcuffs but more free speech. It’s a lesson that we all should have long ago learned.
I was, for a long time, a supporter of hate crime legislation because I believed that some crimes, motivated by the victim’s skin color or sexual orientation, deserved extra punishment. Lately, though, that isn’t how I’ve been looking at this legislation - I’ve been looking at it as it should be, as an attempt to criminalize thought.
And, no matter how despicable some people’s thoughts may be, freedom means the right to live your own life. I don’t like racists, or homophobes, but I don’t think trying to make their brains illegal is going to accomplish anything except getting a lot of folks to say, “Hey, this bill passed, I feel good.”
I figure (using my extremely well developed skills of detection) that this is why many right-wing pundits term this legislation, “feel good legislation.”
But I don’t believe the good skipper has all the answers, either. Posting on various blogs, I’ve noticed that a lot of right-wingers reply with some variation of, “I can have my (racist/homophobic/un-PC) opinion, and you telling me that I’m wrong is akin to censoring me.”
Over at Pinko Feminist Hellcat, PFH contends, “…It’s gotten to the point that people who merely criticize something for being misogynist, homophobic, racist, or violent are told (with lots of finger-wagging) that people have the right to say what they want. This seems to be the tactic du jour–if someone criticizes you, cry censorship. Who cares if you’re not actually being censored? Best to just tie yourself to the martyr’s stake and whine about how you’re being oppressed by those PC meanies who don’t recognize your genius.”
If I go into a bagel shop and I ask for a large pepperoni pizza, am I seriously going to start screaming “Censorship!” when the counter guy says, “We only sell bagels?”
There are an awful lot of Americans out there who believe that someone offering a different opinion is equal to censorship. It isn’t. And if they’re too brainwashed to recognize that, then it is their problem.
Like I said - both Captain’s Quarters and Pinko Feminist Hellcat have great posts that are worthy reading. You’d be doing yourself a diservice to yourself to not read them.
Getting My Feet Wet
My current computer is a Dell Dimension 4600. I’ve had it since April, and I love it.
My old computer was a piece of crap HP Pavilion that I had for, probably, half a century. Well, four years. Towards the end, it just got so sluggish I almost decided to go without a computer at all.
About two years ago I asked a friend to help me improve its speed. She asked if I had ever defragged it. To understand my technical ineptitude, I truly thought she’d just suggested I throw some grenades at the computer. “You’re really NOT a computer person, are you?” she asked, realization dawning on her.
I really am NOT a computer person.
I hired a friend of mine, Tim, to build this site for me. He does a great job - the layout, the color scheme, it’s all him. But I’ve recently started playing around a little bit, experimenting, trying to get my feet wet in the great world that is the Blogosphere, and in the smaller reality which is Moveable Type.
If you’ll look at the title of the webpage, you’ll see that where it used to say, “A Snay’s Gotta Say What a Snay’s Gotta Say”, it now reads: “Naturally Argumentative.” I’ve very proud of this change, because I did it all on my own.
On your right, you’ll notice two new links on the blogroll - Michelle Agnew & Rockstar Mommy. I’m very proud of these new additions, because I did them all on my very own.
Admittedly, neither of these were very difficult changes to make, but I kept clicking “Rebuild Site” with the fear that I would delete EVERYTHING.
Very happy to find that NOT being the case.
Stupid People are Funny
Via the Las Vegas Sun comes this story of stupidity, & lawmakers trying to determine what they can do about it:
A couple decides to go “car surfing,” with the surfer climbing on the roof. The driver takes off but stops short, sending the surfer to the pavement, causing critical injuries.
The incidents, often seen as all-too-common accidents, have set off a debate among police, prosecutors and lawmakers who are trying to define when an “accident” becomes a crime.
The answer lies somewhere between a prosecutor’s view of the law, the way the law is written and the facts of the case. The answer, however, doesn’t always seem clear.
For instance, in 2003 a Las Vegas father left his infant in a van and the child died, but the father, a schoolteacher, was not prosecuted because he told authorities he forgot his son was there.
However, a father earlier this year left his sleeping child in a locked and air-conditioned car to get a cup of coffee in a Starbucks. He was charged though no harm came to the child.
“You can’t fix dumb, and there is no cure for stupidity.”
Is passing a law saying “You can’t ride cars” going to stop people from riding on cars? The law already exists, so the answer is clearly no. It isn’t government’s job to baby its citizens — not local, not state, not Federal. It’s government’s job to be able to help and assist when requested or needed.
I still say stupid people = funny.
Bills Schmills
Credit: Mike Smith, USA Today.
This is essentially how I ran my budget while I was in college. It was a bad idea to run my budget this way, y’ get it?
This is how Bush and the Republicans are running our budget, in Congress. And it is still not anything but a bad bad bad idea.
It’s an Online Vote!
Who gives a fuck?
I’m speaking of course of the Weblog Awards.
Well, apparently something is smelly in Denmark. Many right-wing bloggers are reporting that some lefties are trying to swing the results, “Unashamed liberals continue their cheating ways” says YoungPundit.
In this thread at DailyKos, you can see the code used. But for all of the Republican and Conservative pundits using these handful as an excuse to bash all Dems and liberals and leftists, how many mention the posts decrying the activity? Like this one:
I read and understand your code. I read your post, but in order to understand it completely, I have to ask, in fact I would be remiss if I did not ask:
HAVE YOU LOST YOUR MIND???
We’re here talking about how to make sure that every legal vote is counted in the elections that really matter, and you go and disgrace us with this!
If we are going to have any credibility in looking at elections, we must avoid even the appearance of impropriety. In one shot you managed to destroy DailyKos’ credibility.
DUMB
Sorceress Sarah
It is no accident that Liberty and Liberal are the same word.
Or this:
they’ve taken the dailykos out of the running. in response to your stupid ass.
why the hell would you cheat when we were winning anyway? it’s fucking pathetic. same to everyone who used this.
and every one of you who said this was okay because the poll was run by republicans and republican sites were winning is just as fucking pathetic and unscrupulous. you people are no less thugs than the right wing freaks at LGF if this is the sort of ethos you follow.
in short, piss off.
Or this:
You, sir, are a moron!
I have no doubt that this poll is easy to hack, I have no doubt that it ultimately means nothing in the grand scheme of things, I have no doubt that your little 16 year-old “hacker” morality tells you that finding security holes is a good thing.
I also have no doubt that posting “HAY D00DZ HERE IS HOW TO HACK THIS POLL HURR HURR HURR!!” in public, on one of the most prominent pro-Democrat sites in the blogosphere, is tantamount to being one of the most stupid and ridiculous things I have seen anyone do in a long, long time. Put simply, this is now making its way all around the right-wing blogosphere, one more thing for them to beat “the left” with.
“No wonder Kos is such a sewer of conspiracy theories about vote fraud. It’s just elementary projection; some of those people are just that dishonest, and so of course they assume everyone else is, too.”
“It’s done in a spirit of fun, and relies on a modicum of good faith among the participants. But liberals don’t seem to be able to do anything honestly, to follow the most minimal standards of sportsmanship, or to do anything in a spirit of good will and good humor. Since Kevin hasn’t designed the competition using national security-level safeguards against cheating, the liberals think it’s OK to ruin the contest for everyone else by writing code that racks up thousands of fictitious votes for “their” blogs. Not only do they see nothing wrong with this, they brag about it openly.”
So congratulations. If you wanted to display yourself as a counterproductive, socially illiterate cheat, and in doing so (and this applies to all the commenters with their faux-intellectual justifications for cheating as well) tar “the left” with your actions, you have succeeded. If, however, you wanted to do anything to improve the standing of this blog site and the left in general, you have failed, dismally and miserably, in every respect.
Maybe people on the right were doing it too. Who knows, they didn’t fucking post that they were cheating on their fucking blogs, did they? This isn’t crazy hacker land, mate. Nobody’s fucking impressed by what you did. You’re an idiot and you’ve hurt yourself and others because of single-minded thoughtlessness.
Kevin, creator of the Weblog Awards, wrote this:
As a personal aside, I am deeply disappointed in a few bloggers from the left and right who encouraged their readers to cheat, game the system, and inflict a flood of crap (much like blog comment spam) on another blogger. You know who you are, and you should be ashamed of yourself.
Despite what the wingnut bloggers will tell you, some on their side were cheating too. Kevin caught them, as well as other lefty cheaters. So why aren’t these righty bloggers all up in arms over the right-leaning cheaters?
Because, of course, the intellectual dishonesty of the far-reactionary right — and those who follow their sway because of a ticket crawl on FOX or CNN is incapable of anything but — demands nothing less than a smear campaign on everyone on the left. EVERYONE, even — especially — those who haven’t cheated.
I’m a leftist blogger. In this instance, members of the left behaved in a manner that was BLOODY FUCKING STUPID. My honesty demands that I hold them accountable. Right-leaning bloggers who hold cheaters within their own ideology as guilty as left-wing bloggers deserve kudos.
And left-wing or right-wing bloggers who apologize or defend the actions of the cheaters within their ideological sphere should be ashamed of themselves.