Archive for the ‘Soapbox’ Category

The title is pretty much literally what the American Family Association is claiming right now.

I wish I was making this up.

So its not enough to have a state allow discrimination under the guise of religious freedom.  You have to actively support it or you are trying to limit somebody’s religious freedom.

If we were talking about fruit instead of, y’know fruits, the entire dialogue would go something like this:

AFA:”I like apples.”
Gay People:”Well I like oranges.”
AFA: “Oranges are not as good as apples.  They’re disgusting and you shouldn’t eat them.”
Gay People “I don’t see how its any of your business what I eat.”
AFA: “NO! Oranges are WRONG, and you shouldn’t be allowed to eat them!  We’ll make laws against it!”
Federal Courts: “Oh FFS guys, it’s really none of your business what anybody puts in their mouth or any other part of their body for that matter.”
AFA: “But if they can eat oranges, it makes apples less delicious!”
Federal Courts: “Sounds like a whole bunch of your problem.”
Gay People: “You seems suspiciously obsessed with oranges for people that hate them so much.  Are you sure you’re not just mad because you would really like to try an orange?”
AFA: “Noooooooo.  And the fact that anti-orange…I mean PRO-APPLE people keep getting caught with oranges, and occasionally tangerines, by no means suggests that we are curious about your juicy and tangy citrus fruit.  For reals.”
Gay People: “If you say so.”
AFA: “Shut up!  We’re just going to make it okay to deny basic services to people who like oranges.”
Gay People: “That’s not very nice.”
If You’re Buying: “We’ll sell any kind of fruit you want.  Apples, oranges, pears, even tomatoes.  We’re fucking crazy!”
AFA: “Tomatoes aren’t a fruit, they’re a vegetable!”
If You’re Buying: “Will you please shut up and read a goddamn book for once?”
AFA: ” Why do you hate apples? STOP OPPRESSING ME!”

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9/11

There are a lot of ways we can look at it.

We can lament the first responders that lost their lives, price who rushed to their doom to save others.
Or we can celebrate the fact that we had so many heroes within our midst.

We can mourn the attack that hurt so many, so deeply, in an attempt to break our spirit.
Or we can choose to celebrate the fact that we have survived with our spirit so very much intact.

We can agonize over the very high cost of what followed, in terms of gold and more importantly, lives.
Or we can take comfort that so many were willing to place themselves between us and danger, whether you agree with how it was done or not.

We can discuss this day in the terms of blame, politics, and name calling.
Or we can hit the people that do so with a stick.

Leave the bickering for another day.

Today is a day to honor what was lost, and take solace in what it proved we have.

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In light of my last post this seems like a good time to plug Give an Hour.

Give an Hour is a nonprofit organization that provides free mental health care to US Military personnel.  They do good work to help out the people that risked everything for the rest of us.  A lot more vets could use their services than they can possibly provide for so if you can, ambulance consider donating.  If you are a mental health professional consider donating your time.  And if you know of anyone that could use their services, please try to gently steer them in this direction.

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A national guard soldier from my city was killed in Afghanistan by an IED. I didn’t know the guy and I don’t really know most of my neighbors all that well, but his parents live a few houses down the block from me on the corner.

The police have been camped at the intersection for the past several days because the news media will not leave them alone. Sure, there was the standard feeding frenzy of reporters the day that they found out, but they seem to have failed to grasp the family’s message of “we’re in mourning and we don’t want to talk, please leave us alone”.

I understand the importance of the press, but there’s a point where trying to get the latest scoop can go too far. Intruding on the privacy of a grieving family to get a scoop falls under that purview in my book.

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This may shock some readers I debate with, but I have more in common with them than they may realize.

I consider myself a moderate. By that I mean that I find that whenever debate about politics happens, I frequently find my views tend toward the middle of the road. And while I do favor many policies that appear to be of a progressive viewpoint, I usually do not favor them for the same reason that folks of a liberal bent do.

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And this is how you deal with bigots.

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So recently I started playing Left 4 Dead 2 again.  It’s a fun game, I can hop in and out depending on my schedule, and it’s got zombies.  What’s not to love?

Well for starters the boatload of assholes that sign on for no other purpose than to try and ruin everyone else’s day.

In any sort of online game you get a certain percentage of folks who just want to screw with everyone else, and nearly every one of these games has a mechanism for discouraging that sort of behavior.  One of the most frequently seen of these mechanisms is the vote kick.  And like many other online games L4D has the ability for players to vote an annoying team member out of the game.

The problem is that unlike a lot of these other games, the amount of players is very low.  Only four per team, in fact.  So if you have two assholes who like jerking everybody else around your only choice is to leave the game yourself.  And while I am fine with the theory of “if you don’t like the players you are with, then find some others”  this does not address the long term problem.  Namely: There are no long term consequences for being a d-bag and making the entire game less attractive to customers.

The flip side is any system designed to punish players will probably be abused by the same players that we are worried about.

I think I have a relatively simple and elegant solution to this problem.
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If I catch you spamming your business in my comments section, order | I am allowed to use any means I deem fit to link your business to extreme bestiality, anesthetist human trafficking, or frankly anything that I find amusing. Posting an advertisement in my comments section will be as considered consent to said practice.

Note: Linking to a site/business that is somehow related to the post/discussion thread is fine. Filing in the Website portion of the user form with your own personal site is fine. Asking for a plug if you are a regular is fine. Spam is not.

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I don’t normally care all that much for Megan McCain. She rarely contributes anything useful to political discussions. She achieved her fame more or less solely through family connections without doing anything noteworthy on her own. And frankly her writing rarely strikes me as insightful, or even particularly well thought out.

But then there’s this. This is brilliant.

*Yeah I can see how this title is ironic, all things considered, but it’s funny, right?

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So no doubt by now everybody has heard the news. If not, please stop reading to go and visit pretty much any news source in the Western Hemisphere.

Osama Bin Laden is dead.

He died on May 1st, of an acute attack of SEAL Team Six to the face. He was given a burial at sea to prevent a grave site being used as a shrine for terrorists, and because his home country didn’t want the body back. And possibly because somebody wanted to make a “sleep with the fishes” joke.

Some people can try and twist these events to fit a political agenda. They might come up with arguments based on how our country proceeded with this particular subject or how all of the details were handled. They might try to turn this into a religious discussion.

I just want to say for the next few days at least, let it go. For right now just take it as this. A bad person did bad things to our country. And he paid for it.

Thank you to all the brave men and women who gave up all the wonderful things our society takes for granted, sacrificing years and sometimes their lives, limbs, and mental well being to bring us to this moment. They’ve given up so much for us, please don’t try to take anything else away by trying to make it into anything else.

Tomorrow we can go back to fighting tooth and nail over every detail of our lives.

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