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High as in Hello, Hi Easter sunday Part 1

I want to write a creative nonfiction piece because I think I’d be good at it. If you don’t know what that is its a essay about something where the author gives you his voice mixed in with information, his opinions, his take on it, you get a vibe from him. Suck it OED. I mean David foster Wallace, John CrackinHower type of shit. But I don’t do anything interesting. However after consideration I have decided that this is not a good excuse.

                To motivate myself I’m updating the blog as I go, some type of tiny public audience will keep me spellchecking and somewhat sober.

                You don’t know me, and I don’t know you, unless you’re one of my loyal blog followers.

                Nevertheless I think I can get you up to speed.

                I’m playing Tekken. I’m a blind guy, playing tekken. This involves memorizing a lot of sounds and attack tempo’s and special moves so when you hit forward and right punch you know if you’ve been thrown and are really hitting back and right punch. That’s not the point of this entire work of creative nonfiction.

                But I strongly believe a lot of people are wondering both why a blind guy would play tekken and why anyone would play tekken.

                First, tekken is a game I think that I can almost master even though I can’t see. If you want that explained further, ask someone else.

                You might be wondering if tekken isn’t the point, what is. Well, here’s the deal.

                When I said I was doing nothing, that wasn’t completely true. I like to think of myself as a writer and a rapper. How many other people think of me in this way is unknown. I mention this not because I want to promote either of those things with respect to me, but because knowing that I rap is important for this next part.

                I am going to record an album soon but this is happening sooner than I anticipated, which screwed up my travel plans so instead of going to see my mother for Easter I’m spending it with a friend whose closer to my final destination. I know him well. On twitter he’s @TheFeezz.

                Anyway, I’m anticipating that it’s going to be very strange being around someone else’s family, what happened was I made plans thinking I was recording my album later, and now the plans make no sense because the date I was leaving changed, not that I mind spending Easter with a friend’s family, but it’s going to be odd looking in on family dynamics from the outside. I’m kind of excited. Not truly, we’re going to climb Everest or take up stick fighting excited, but you know, excited enough not to sleep through it.

                I promise that if the response to this is good my next creative nonfiction piece will be about something more action movie fun. Like going and watching a crack den or a fight club tournament, or something.

                I plan to experience today, Easter with my friends family, drunk and also high. Less drunk than high, to be accurate I mean tipsy and really high.

                You might ask why. (don’t ask why ask why not,)

                But because it’s fun to be tipsy and high, as evidence I site everyone who gets tipsy and high. I don’t get drunk at my own family gatherings. My families not about that when they’re not doing it by themselves. I’m not talking about all of them, only some of them, and I’m not joshing anyone, I’ve had a few long conversations with a bottle of jin over six or seven years.

                The point is that because I don’t get my smoke/drank on, more smoke, less drank, at my own family gatherings, I have decided to get drunk at this one for the experience of it.

                The reason you can’t get away with this with your family, if you have the type of family that cares about such things is because your family knows you, and has seen you drunk at least once and will easily realize your drunk at the gathering.

                People who have never met me won’t, they’ll think I’m quiet if I’m high or a dick if I’m drunk, I talk a lot when I’m high, but I’m quiet unless I’ve smoked and then around people I don’t know. I have no problem babbling on about whatever in print, as you can see.

                I’ve been drinking a cool white wine temperature wise. Sip that sour white for Jesus.

                I want to talk about tekken and videogames. Stay with me though, it all adds up.

                What is the point of playing tekken. Well, on a shallow level of personal entertainment, after about twenty-five matches on ghost mode, a never ending no holds or weapons barred two on two blood sport tournament of the best hand to hand fighters from around the world, (a lucky arbitrary few of whom possess magical abilities,) the artificial intelligence knows and understands you and gives you such tough love you either get better at tekken or lose five hundred or so matches in a row. I’m throwing out numbers here without contemplating them much, five hundred could be two hundred and twenty five could be fifty.

                Have you ever played chess against the computer. If you try and compete with a good chess program the computer rapes you. You can’t get anything started, you’re a prisoner trying to escape that gets shot in the face for having a halfway clever thought.

                The folks behind Namco didn’t want you to lose like that. I am not crazy, and all you have to do to prove it is to play a hundred or so matches of tekken ghost mode on medium or easy. Eventually what happens is not only do you start to lose, but you start to lose and get mocked at the same time.

                Very briefly, a fighting game works like this. You pick a character. That character has an obvious thing going on. Bruce lee, sword guy, big fat sumo wrestler, hot chick who has chainsaws for hands, hot chick whose an assassin, hot chick whose an assassin, robot, different robot, different robot, break dancing fighter, you get the idea. Everyone has forty to sixty moves, so if you don’t know what your doing you beat your friends by discovering one good move and pounding them with it fifteen times in a row, or you jab them to death, or you kick them a lot in the shins.

                But the more you learn about tekken, the more the computer decides to rape you.

                If you play aggressively it stops fucking around and hits you ten times in five seconds and then breaks your arm. It lets you switch characters and it then beats your ass but only after letting you get five or six good hits in. Then, in the second round you try every single trick you can think of and it dies. Then, in the third round, the computer finally switches to a character who proceeds to mercilessly whoop on both of your characters. So that even if you managed to do work on the first computer character, lets say you half 140 percent health while the computer, now only having one other character has one hundred percent health.

                I’d like to say at this juncture that this discussion about my recent matches of Tekken Tag Tournament Two is just as relevant as the discussion of a piece of history comparable in detail to the way a miner civil war battle played out if you are not a history   

2013
03/31
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Who Cares About Affairs?

Pete Domenici used to be one of our  senators. As it turns out he had a child with the daughter of one of his senate colleagues. As should surprise no one, MR. Domenici and his lover kept the child a secret because he was an upstanding family man, concerned with America’s morality and how God feels about our great nation. Or at least he was concerned with how people who are genuinely concerned with such things would feel about him if it were known he had a secret love-child.

Naturally it came out, as all things do, and, naturally, the media’s jumping into fake shocked mode. “How could this happen, no one saw this coming, washington is rocked by scandle.” By now the capital should be a crador. I don’t think its rocked by scandles involving two people having sex.

Here’s a secret! People love to fuck. Women like to fuck powerful men, older men want to fuck younger women, and we have a match that pleases both parties. It happens An awful lot and not just in the ranks of polititions and their flunkies. So much, in fact, that it is a surity you know someone having sex they aren’t supposed to be having. Its called an affair, ladies and gentlemen.

And I’m so sick and tired of the news sensationalizing every affair that comes to light.

And I’m sick of the wrote aftermath. Husband and wife have joint press conference, husband apologizes, wife acts like she’s cool with it. Who knows! Maybe she already knew. Maybe she is cool with it. Maybe they have unorthodox bedroom arrangements, or maybe the marriage is already dead and its only function now is to appease all those Christians who talk about the sanctity of marriage, getting a divorce can weaken support for an office seeker among certain demographics, although not mine, the sane.

Here’s what I’d like to know, and if you’ve gotten this far, please use the comments section to enlighten me on these questions, because they have been puzzling me for a while.

First is anyone surprised? I’m not surprised and haven’t been surprised after I saw the fourth or fifth story of this type, that means I haven’t been surprised for years, and I’m twenty-five! Who cares? Who cares whose giving it to whom as long as after the pants go back on, everyone gets back to work like responsible adults? Why is it the business of the American Public if a senator or congressman or congresswoman, whatever, sends a picture of himself or herself wearing next to nothing to someone? Its called flirting in the digital age. You’ve flirted, sex is something you know about, you might have had an affair, you might be having an affair and you certainly know someone whose having an affair right now.

Pete D isn’t the point here. He’s an example. He has a love child. Big deal, bill clinton had a host of mistresses, so did JFK and LBJ. So have a countless number of our elected officials.

Why? because they are human, humans are animals and really want to have sex, and so we do.

Come on! Thomas Jefferson had a literal sex slave and as many as six secret love children and we got over that! We still venerate the man as brilliant, one of our founding fathers. And then Anthany Wener sends a dick pic and  its a huge deal worth hours of cnn and fox coverage.

Now there is a troubling aspect to polititions who like to fuck, and it is the power diferencial between the two parties in the relationship.

Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky might have been wrong on his part. It was certainly a breaking of his marriage vows, but that wasn’t new. What might have made his copping dome wrong was if MS. Lewinsky was giving it to him because she felt there would be negative consiquences of some form if she refused.

Here is a perfect example. If barack Obama made advances of a sexual nature towards me, I’d tell him I wasn’t interested because I’m not. This means that Obama wouldn’t have put me in an awkward position because I wouldn’t feel honor bound to hook up with him whatsoever.

The ethical problem arises when someone wants to say no but doesn’t because its the president asking.

But I assume that most affairs are not president to intern and I further assume the two parties involved are inteligent and aware of what they are doing, in which case the only person who should give a crap about this  is MRS. Domenici.

But the news acts like this has never happened before, and they  cover stories that get ratings, so presumably some of the American people care, and my question is why?

I literally cannot count how many times during my life a powerful man, or woman, of course, has gotten caught with his pants down in a room with someone who wasn’t his wife. Therefore this should not be surprising and shouldn’t make the news like an asteroid landing in russia.

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2013
02/26
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Kicking and Screaming, Republican Adaptation

I have a lot of trouble understanding Republicans. I always said I was an independent, but that hasn’t been true for years, and not because my political views have changed all that much. More because of what’s going on with the Republican party. A hairpin turn to the right.

I want to talk about politics. I usually want to talk about politics. I don’t know of any harder discussion to have with most people.

If I say “I hate 85 percent of the republican platform,” which I do, many Republicans will instantly brand me as a liberal, which I suppose isn’t a hard argument to make.

My problem comes when I see two people have a conversation about any political issue. The two talk passed each other, not to each other.

The larger problem is that republicans as a group confuse me. And I would like to express that confusion as inoffensively as possible for a change, because at a certain point, reached about thirty years ago, the jokes become too obvious to make.

What gets me screaming mad about republicans?

Well first its the gays. All these republicans opposing gay marriage. To me this is the civil rights movement with fewer people being beaten and somewhat less at steak because gays today aren’t treated as badly as blacks were in the fifties.

If you are a republican and want to know why I support the right of gays to get married its because I’m allowed to get married already and I think denying anyone a right you have is exactly how to live as a bigot.

I try and get into the Republican headspace and find it hard. God hates gays, or at least gay marriage, so you must hate gays, or at least gay marriage, because you and god are like this. (close.) All other reasons Republicans give for being against two men or two women getting married are clear smokescreens to hide the true issue, religious conviction.

The next thing I would like to point out because it bothers me is the lack of racial and ethnic and religious diversity in the republican party verses the democratic party. If you guys want to be the white very conservative Christian party I’m ok with that, but maybe you should make some type of official statement above and beyond the nomination of Sarah paylin as John Mc Cain’s running mate in 2008 and the entirety of last years republican presidential  primaries. Did I say I wasn’t going to make jokes?

My logic goes like this. If republicans and democrats treated race as a nonissue then the racial split between republicans and democrats would be close to even when its anything but.

And here’s something else I don’t comprehend. The appeal of someone like Sarah Paylin. I don’t know what Paylin is qualified for but I do know what she isn’t qualified for. National office of every kind.

I’m not being sarcastic, or a dick. She’s too stupid to be in national politics. The McCain campaign has admitted on record that they found it necessary to brief Sarah paylin on history and politics and political history with index cards because she knew nothing. This is on record, its not me delighting in some Internet conspiracy theory.

My point is this. I see Sarah Paylin as a pretty woman who may have been qualified to run the state of Alaska, because all you need to run Alaska well is knowledge of Alaska and the political skills possessed by all good mayors. Paylin very well might know a lot about Alaska, and it looks to me like she does have good political instincts.

Yet when she took the national stage all I kept thinking was, “ok, you know nothing at all. Every time you are interviewed or speak uncoached my sense that you know none of what I think you need to know in order to averagely govern increases!  You irritate me beyond words because so many people love you for reasons I don’t understand.”

Do Republicans and I want the same things out of our leaders? I’m not sure. I want my elected officials to be smart and looking out for the interests of whomever they are representing and to treat those interests like gold or children. I don’t care about their personal lives as long as their conduct at work is excellent. I don’t care where they worship but the less the better. When I listen to people in office or running for office I want to be comforted by the idea that these people know more than me most especially about the issues they are being paid to deal with.

Much has been made of the republicans loss in 2012 both because when the economy is bad the currently sitting president tends to lose and he won, and because the only demographic the republicans won was white men. And thank god they didn’t win white men under thirty because that’s my demographic.

Since the election republicans have been making noises about making some changes, and now something awful to watch has taken place.

Because the changes aren’t being made willingly. As a direct result of their abysmal performance with Hispanics republicans are embracing immigration reform in a whorish display of begging for votes.

And the anti-gay anti-abortion stuff has quieted because I’m sure the outwardly sane and inwardly crazy had a talk with the outwardly and inwardly crazy to keep the toxic speechifying turned down until the senate’s back in republican hands.

Republicans keep talking about changing their messaging. But the reason I am angry at republicans isn’t the messaging, which is sneaky already and doesn’t need to be made more sneaky, but the message.

I don’t understand! Democrats spend way too much money, readily I admit it! But they spend it trying to feed poor people and they spend it to try and clear out all the shit we’ve pumped into rivers and oceans and into the air. They spend it on things like universal healthcare, our public schools, alternative energy, jobs training programs for dumb adults with no skills, whereas republicans spend their money on our military which already outclasses every other in the world. Republicans fight for the rich to pay less because helping the poor with money from the rich is socialism even though today’s helped poor person is tomorrows mother of a middle class worker.

I do not agree with even two thirds of each democratic budget, but I can’t say the democrats don’t have their hearts or heads in the right place, but I do say this about republicans loudly and often.

My problem is that if I had to join a side like this was a war for our country, which more and more I think it is, but its cool because its just like the civil war, we have more men, better technology and half your troops are eighty, that’s new, I’d have to side with democrats and while I wouldn’t be happy with the choice it would be one of the easiest I’ve ever made.

Its rare I get “racist” vibes from a democrat. All the time I see southern and western republicans saying things that went down great in 1880 and 1950 but today, well, they only play well with the racist grandpa set. And I’m confused because apparently no one in the south and Midwest has any problem with this or else the republicans down there wouldn’t be such ass holes.

And I think this is what it comes down to, especially with my generation which Obama won by 63 percent. We see the GOP as old confused ass holes, emphasis on the ass hole. When something untrue and funnily antiquated has to be said about women a republican is there to say its not rape if she had a pair of pants on or that women can’t get pregnant unless they’re enjoying the sex or whatever it will be next time. Whenever  a politicians caught calling someone a dothead or a spic or a monkey its a republican from a two car town in hicksville. Again, no surprises. When republicans discuss immigration what I feel strongly is a subtext which is saying if you were white we wouldn’t get real riled about this.

Republicans hate Obama, and I think they hate Obama more than Clinton. The word socialist gets thrown around a lot when dumb people describe Obama. So first things first. We’re all socialists. Food stamps, social security, Medicare and Medicaid, farm subsidies, oil subsidies, welfare, student loans, progressive taxation, reduced or free school lunch, unemployment benefits and a hundred other programs are textbook socialism, if you’d asked socialists for a wish list in the 1880’s, it would be a shorter list today.

And, yes, this expansion of our government from go fuck yourself to here’s a bagel   was a democratic victory, but with essential republican backing for much of the way, we’ve made ourselves this way. If you are a republican and you think the governments gone socialist send back your benefits, cancel all your government handouts and live off the land. Or is it other peoples government benefits and not your own government benefits you have a problem with? Its only black women who shouldn’t be able to collect welfare? Everyone in hitching post Texas can keep on keepin on? Did I say I wasn’t going to make jokes?

One final point on the socialism thing. We’re socialist because we have things like public schools, we don’t let our broke people die from lack of food, etc. Places with no socialism don’t look like your picturing.

They look like slum dog millionaire. Dirty because no government program exists to ensure clean water. The poor starve or not as the markets dictate. That’s straight up capitalism baby, can’t you smell the money?

the places where there is no socialism look like the places featured  on those commercials where some dude tries to guilt trip you into paying just fourteen sent’s a day to take little  insert impossible to pronounce name here out of poverty.

Religions obviously super important to republicans. I figured that out all on my own. And to all republicans, sincerely, you can believe whatever helps you get to sleep at night and if it makes you feel better to picture your dead parents and grandparents sitting on clouds with nothing better to do than watch your stupid ass do what they did with a better phone, ok, you believe whatever crazy tract of bullshit you want. Bible, Koran, something else, its all the same to me, but its two-thousand thirteen now, not 1500. I want you to pretend from now on  that your goofy religion is exactly like your junk,  keep it out of my face. But more importantly keep it out of the countries face. There are great reasons to do lots of things but religious motivation is never ever ever one of them.

See this is where I feel like we start talking past each other. Or we’ve been talking passed each other all this time. If republicans care about god, and I think they might as well say I’m doing this because the tooth fairy told me I should, what’s to be done? Taking all the polite language off the table you think I’m a heathen and I readily agree, and I think your fucknuts.

In fact, I don’t want to talk anymore. I’m not the smartest person I know and my morality isn’t based off extremely complex logical arguments, but feeling. How would I feel if legally I couldn’t get married. How would I feel if people made lots of racist comments about white people? How would I feel if I could get pregnant from rape and a national party didn’t want me to be able to get an abortion? How would I feel if when I was five my parents brought me to this country and twenty years later I have a college degree but can’t use it for fear of being deported back to the shithole I left before I started  first grade? The answer to all of those questions by the way is “I would feel very sad and undervalued and ignored and like I wasn’t part of society.”

Half of government benefits, unemployment, welfare, food stamps, heat assistance, half these programs are used by republicans, it isn’t as though more democrats are on welfare than republicans, we all use the programs only the GOP keeps pushing in cuts which it gets its flock to support while lots of those people are using the benefits they say they want cut.

There is one silver lining to all this which makes me think its almost not worth bitching about republicans ever again.

You guys are done. Every year some old white people die and every year some young white people are born. The young white people wonder what’s wrong with the old white people who really do in all honesty act way more racist than I’ve seen anyone my age act. Lots of white dudes say racist things with an understanding that we’re sooooo tolerant we can say “yo nigga” like, um, ironically or whatever. Old people just come out with a “those goddamned niggers,” and its like, ok, so it really was like that back when you guys had the power.

As old people die and young people are born, the share of the white electorate shrinks. This only matters because now all the republican racism of the last fifty years and the sense gotten by many that modern efforts by republicans to be less racist are instead efforts to seem less racist further erodes the share of minority demographics republicans can win in a given election.

I want to point out republicans also lost women to Obama this election cycle and last election cycle. Women are another group turning democrat. I wonder why. The answers abortion and  other sex stuff. I didn’t want to leave you hanging.

The truth is that the republican party is dying, literally. There may be a republican party in four years, but in those four years approximately six percent of America will have died, the overwhelming amount of that six percent being old, conservative voters. In this time fourteen year olds will grow up and turn eighteen, and this cycle isn’t going to stop. If anything its accelerating.

So its worth being said. I’m not going to compromise because all your yelling scares me. Your going to adapt. If you don’t your kids will. I’m going to sit here and wait until you all drop dead.

The funny part is I’m sure I’d like at least half of you republicans if we met through some nonpolitical thing. And being put into a position where it excites you to know old  people are dying is weird because who wants to be happy about death, the worst thing in the world? But its time to grow up and have an adult conversation about the issues, and Republican views have become too childish for the discussion. Plus if we had more than one sane party in this country I could stop voting democrat.

　

2013
02/06
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The Muslim Problem

The killing of four Americans in Libya by Muslims is not at all surprising. An anti-Muslim video that mocks Mohammad was produced by persons as yet unknown. The video was clearly produced to send the Islamic faithful into a gigantic tantrum and despite the obviousness of this ploy has sent the Islamic faithful into a gigantic tantrum.
This is nothing new. Muslims all across the middle east childishly freak out whenever anyone denigrates their faith.
Let me try a little experiment.
Hey, Jesus was a pedophile. He totally used to fuck kids. His parentage is uncertain. He was a drunk, all that water into wine stuff, eh? Just a drunk kidfucker.
Anyone throwing rocks at my house? No. Is anyone going to look me up online and show up at my house to shoot me? Probably not.
And this is not because I have no readership. Christians make fun of Christian Icons all the time. America has culture wars, but we have somehow arrived at a point where Christian mobs don’t run through the streets killing people when secular things happen in this country.
Instead we try and talk it out.
And Muslims don’t do this. Of course I’m not talking about all Muslims, of course there are civilized Muslims, moral men and women who are as contemptuous of the constant convulsions of the militant members of Islam. Everyone who thinks about this situation knows that it isn’t every single Muslim throwing a violent hissy fit in the street over nothing, its only some of them throwing a violent hissy fit in the street over nothing. But this doesn’t change the facts.
Which are these.
Islam in the middle east and in north Africa are nothing but dry gunpowder atop a dry woodpile waiting for a spark.
And how often sparks fall!
Danish cartoons insulting Mohammad, Salmin Rushdi writing a book depicting Mohammad, southparks satirizing of Mohammad, a priest in Florida burning a Koran, all of these and more examples just like them resulted in violence.
And I say there should be no respect for the people who conducted this violence and there should be no respect for those who do not swiftly condem such violence. I do not think of them first as people. I think of them first as a strong force trying to drag civilization back into the dark ages. Darker ages, for the mid east.
Religious outrage is not acceptable. I don’t care if someone ate a Koran and shit it out, the proper response is not to kill people.
And here is where my own fury builds to a crescendo. Because the problem in the middle east is ignorance and savagery and a medieval temperament.
These people rioting are not worthy of our respect or our empathy. I wish to see them cut out of the fratirnity of man and pounded into the mud and dust of history. They are motivated by insanity and mass delusions.
They are little children transplanted into the bodies of grown men.
Christianity used to be equally bad. I’m not trying to intimate otherwise. The crusades and Jew burnings and witch trials and a historical record of religious war and rioting that literally fills hundreds of books.
But Christianity is a western religion and as most of the west has done well for itself in the first world you aren’t going to see the same type of Christian lynching that Muslims take such pleasure in performing every few months when someone somewhere does something that gets a cleric fired up.
This leaves me so angry because it is so senseless. There are good reasons to kill people. The Arab spring proves that. In a war or in self-defense the murder of our fellow men can be justified.
Those who defend Islam will argue they are in a war. They aren’t in a war. They are literally crazy people who are angry that someone made a bad joke about a long dead warlord they venerate as Christians venerate Jesus.
Get over yourselves or shove it, please.
Everyone is upset at the American deaths in Libya. And we condemned the violence as we always do. But no one is condemning the actual flesh and blood carriers of religion that caused it, and that’s what I’m here to do.
This is just one example of Muslim savagery. And yet again, Christians used to be just as bad, and in poor predominantly Christian countries I will never be surprised if I hear about someone making fun of God or Jesus and a mob ripping people apart in the streets or people storming an embassy or people killing someone or destroying something their feeble minds believe is responsible for the mockery of their beliefs. It is the providence of the poor, religious and ignorant to do these things. And it should be the natural reaction of everyone else to condemn them.
Everyone who seriously participated in the attack on our Embassy in Libya either needs to be locked away for the rest of their lives or shot in the face. I do not have a preference for which punishment is handed out. Its all the same to me.
Whenever something like this happens I think about our predator droans and I really hope we have lots of pilots working overtime.
This problem is systemic. Muslims are more religious than Christians.
Perfect example. Sodomy used to be punishable by death. And now in America Gay marriage is legal in six states. No mayors have been dragged out of doors by mobs eager to sodomize them with phallic shaped objects before hanging them gutted from something. To the catholic church a man wearing a condom is just as bad as a Muslim eating a pork sandwich. But no violent protests from American Catholics over this.
If it had been Christians who had done this my posts title would have reflected this. But it is not.
Look at the nonexistent logic. A video making fun of Islam surfaces. So the response is to kill members of an American Embassy despite the lack of involvement by that Embassy in the distribution or production of the video. Oh well. I shouldn’t be surprised by this either, religion to thought is darkness to light.
But I’m angry. This makes me want to see lots of bodies piled up. I want these extremists out of the world. I don’t care if they are out of the world because they are in prisons or out of the world because we have killed them.
As long as rats like this exist civilization will suffer.
A man killing another man for the tipicle reasons, money, drunkenness, jealousy, whatever, that’s bad. But a mob killing people in defense of mass delusions is worse and it offends me. It offends my sense of what humanity should be.
I do not wish that we stamp out all Muslim extremists in vengeance for Mr. Stevens. He’s already dead and is in no position to take any satisfaction from such a gesture.
I wish it be ripped out of the fabric of reality so that this does not keep happening.
Such Muslim stupidity leaves me feeling bellicose and hot headed. Part of me wishes that it becomes American policy to respond to every Muslim protest in which an American is killed by reacting with no sense of scale.
I don’t mean fighting a war like in Iraq. I mean a leveling of property and production. Just carpet bomb Libya for a few days, wipe out a few thousand Mosques, and tell them it will be ten times as bad if this happens again. Sorry, when this happens again.
But that response negates American Embassies and civilized behavior, so I draw away from it reluctantly.
But I do ponder. These little bastards don’t understand what they are doing. Do you have any comprehension of how utterly we could destroy Libya? And I’m not talking about nuclear weapons. I’m just talking about an ant trying to fight a war with a giant.
And part of me wishes to see an example made.
I’m not talking about our pissing away money into Iraq trying to rebuild a nation which is already falling back into the mud with our withdrawal, I’m talking about just smashing things and burning things and killing people as a demonstration.
Yes, I know we should not do this and it would be evil to do this.
But because we don’t do things like this these people believe they can kill our diplomats with impunity. And it infuriates me.
I don’t care if Libyans kill Libyans. It is very sad and also Libya’s problem. But when American diplomats are killed I do care and want something outsized done about it.
It is our benevolence that lets this happen in the first place.
Look at a map! Most of these Arab countries don’t even have the population of New York city! Its like one of the islands off Massachusetts declaring war on the United States.
I know the Libyan government apologized and I further realize that this attack was perpetrated by rogue elements within Libya.
And so fast on the heels of my rage at the needless bloodshed is just this vast onrushing feeling of intelligent superiority. Not American superiority, just first world superiority.
Let me break this down for you! Every place where this Libya thing can happen, that place is a bad uncivilized place! And I couldn’t say that if there wasn’t a civilized example to balance the scales. Look at all the places where religious riots don’t happen on a regular basis, and those places are probably better!
China and Iran, authoritarian exceptions.
The point I’m trying to make here is there is civilization there is hell and in developing nations there is purgatory.
Shitty countries are not intrinsically shitty. It isn’t the land that makes them the way they are, it isn’t the trees or the rivers or the water or the air. It is the people! Get ten thousand pacifists from across the world and give them a chunk of land and you will not see Muslim linchmobs running fuck wild through that country! You’ll see a lot of peaceful protests!
Similarly, make an atheist state. Make a video mocking atheists and atheism. You know what’s going to happen? Take a guess. Please take a guess! Seriously guess!
Nothings going to happen! Fucking nothing!
And I’m sick of the entire world continuously kowtowing to goat fucking retards! Syria’s a shit show, has been for a while. No one cares enough to do anything meaningful. Its not all on the United States. I’m sure there are at least fifty countries that could go and topple the Asad Rejeme. But they don’t want to. Its not happening at home, so who cares.
Everyone knows what’s happening in Syria is terrible. No moral country is seriously suggesting that Asod is a good leader. But no one is doing anything about it either.
Muslim rampages are like American school shootings. We all get really sad and cry. We eknowledge that this is a problem. We then berry and memorialize the dead with nice words. Some vague idea of doing something about this some time at some point somewhere is bandied about. Then we sit down hard with both thumbs shoved firmly up our asses and spend a long time doing nothing about it until it happens again, we get sad, wipe our hands, make some nice speeches and then put thumbs back in previous position and do a hole lot of nothing.
What has to happen for this peace love shit to stop? Dumbass Muslims in poor countries have Ala fever! You don’t give a crap someone made a crack about Jesus because you have other things going on. You don’t want to go rioting, you want to get on with whatever it was you were doing.
I don’t know what we’re supposed to do now. But something seems warranted. Because when we decide we aren’t going to do anything, its going to happen again.
Someone’s going to say Mohammad was gay or that turbans look stupid or that maybe Jews aren’t so bad after all, or perhaps women shouldn’t have to be forced into raps and should be able to drive and there’s going to be fire and blood and inaction. Enjoy.
Also, if this did something for you, whatever that was, follow the blog.

2012
09/14
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Smoking, a Guide for the Blind

I’m blind. I don’t mention it in the blog because it usually isn’t germain to railing against god or drug laws or the fact that HBO canceled luck or whatever I usually talk about, but this time its important for the post.

Blind people have forums, which I never go on. But I was bored and so I was looking through the topics, found one about what blind people think they miss out on. Some kid said he didn’t know how to smoke cigarettes. I hate that I smoke cigarettes.

You can’t post to the forum unless you have an account, and I’d made one four years ago to ask a question about something which I hadn’t used since it got answered. But I went back and found my username just so I could write this little essay on how to smoke if you can’t see. So to old men going blind, curious people with vision and my fellow members of the army of darkness, enjoy.

So I have my own thing I think I missed out on, but first let me respond to the smoking thing.

My initial advice is don’t

 

fucking smoke. I smoke, I’ve been smoking for five years, I’d love to quit, I can’t.

That said, if you want to smoke, here’s what you do.

Get a bick lighter. You’ll know its a bick because its oval. The bottom of the bick is flat, the top is raised with a wheel. On one side of the wheel there is a hole. This is where the flame comes out. On the other side of the wheel there is a small… trigger. Its not like the trigger on a gun, it feels more like the spray button on cleaning fluid, its flat and doesn’t push down very far.

Hold the lighter in your dominant hand. The trigger part faces towards you, the hole faces away from you. You know your doing this right because your hand makes a fist around the lighter and your thumb is free, kind of hovering over the thing. Now take your thumb, and rub it quickly down the wheel. You want to push, not mad hard, you’ll figure it out when the wheel turns. As the wheel turns, your thumb should almost automaticly slide down to the trigger. Once it hits the trigger, push the trigger and keep your hand there. If all has gone well you should now have a flame lit. You’ll know because you’ll hear it fwish and feel the heat.

 

 The flame is now going to be in existence above your fist.  lol, is this description totally retarded?

Anyway, practice that a few times so that you feel reasonabley sure you know what your doing.

 

 It should be one quick little motion, not all fumbling, kinda like snapping your fingers.

Now, get your pack of cigarettes. If your cigarettes have filters, when you open the pack of cigarettes the filters will be facing you, that is, filters = top of pack, end of cigarette you burn equals bottom. Cigarettes have a weird rapper like a pull tab, but just tear the plastic rap to skip past more crap you don’t want to deal with for now.

Put a cigarette in your mouth. If your cigarette has a filter, you will know because if you hold the thing in between your teeth, not between your lips its gunna have some give to it like rubber and when you poke at it with your tongue it will be flat. If you have tabaco on your tongue after doing this you either have a cigarette without a filter or your about to screw up.

 

 If you light the filter, something I wanta point out for whoever’s keeping score I have literally only ever done once in five years, you will know because your going to smell burning plastic. If the cigarette has no filter you will know because you will feel the roughness of tabacco at both ends.

Moving on.

Put the cigarette in your mouth. Now hold the lighter just in front of the tip of the cigarette, like you may have done as a kid when you were playing with magnets, almost touching but not, The flame comes straight up out of the lighter and widens, so if you hold the tip of the cigarette fucked up your going to light it crooked or in the upper third, rather than the tip. If you were to draw a line from the tip of your lighter to the tip of your cigarette the angle would be something like fifteen or twenty degrees.

 

Oh my god I just used geometry for the first time since high school. Now light your bick and when the flame is working puff on the cigarette, do this two or three times. If its lit your going to know.

Now when you smoke, hold your cigarette between pointer and middle fingers, almost but not quite at the tip. When you aren’t actually dragging on the cigarette you should lower your hand, you don’t leave your hand up in front of your face. Hold the cigarette either by the filter if it has one or at the butt end if it doesn’t have a filter, don’t hold your hand up towards the flame or you’ll look retarded. To flick ashes off your cigarette, flick the corner of the butt end with your thumb. When your done with your cigarette, you can’t see, so jesus, grind it out

 

, don’t just drop it. I never do this and I guess god must love me. I’ve rarely seen cigarettes light other things on fire, but it can happen.

But really, you shouldn’t smoke.

P.S. The two things I missed are colors, I like to write and am always struggling to use subtle color descriptions, a novel wouldn’t work with no colors at all, but its hard, are cars usually blue,

 

 maybe red, but dark or bright red or rusty brown… Its all about setting a mood I can’t see and only has to be there rarely, because people need it. I know there not pink, that kind of stuff.

P.P.S. The other thing is dancing. When I’m at clubs or parties I’m sure

 

beyond a shadow of a doubt I look more retarded than whiteness can excuse.

P.P.P.S Everyone worried about eye contact, just wear a pair of dark shades.

 

 It might make you look like you think your a douchey  asshole, but I’ve gone out shades on and shades off and the “is he a fucking retard” quotient is way lower with shades on. Dark Shades inside tip people off, especially with a dog.

2012
05/02
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Great TV in one season, my review of the Fades

The biggest problem with most TV shows that begin with extremely promising episodes and then later start to suck is that half way through it becomes apparent to everyone watching that the writers methodically planned eight episodes in and then from that point on began to franticly create more plot because they had no ultimate end in mind. In retrospect shows that are solid all the way through are usually that way because its clear when viewing them that the writers of the show had a plot mapped out from the beginning.

There are two types of shows on TV today. Shows you can watch in random order and not be lost at all, police shows and sitcoms, and shows that have to be watched in order like a long movie. Serials.

The Fades, a show that aired last year on the BBC and BBC America is a prime example of what the latter should be and why as it finally grows up TV is a more complex medium for telling long form stories than film.

The Fades is about a high school student named Paul who starts seeing ghosts and having dreams showing the world after an apocalypse. He also starts developing a host of angelic theme powers. I know, not original.

Within the first fifteen minutes the revelation is made that the ghosts, which are known as fades, are for some reason now able to take on corporeal form which is apparently against the laws of the universe.

If you’ve been scornful of the British with there six episode seasons, the Fades is the reason you no longer should be because not one episode is wasted. From the revelation that the fades can take on corporeal form, the plot never stops moving; by the end of every episode something significant has happened. This is most apparent in the “previously on” segments which are in the form of a minute long monologue delivered by Paul’s best friend. In a show with normal pacing, this wouldn’t change for about three seasons, but by episode three, its having to cover so much ground that it does not resemble at all the monologue of episode II and so on.

The show is a mix of fantasy and horror, and those elements are handled well. There are many scenes of people creeping through dark and dank locations as monsters stalk them, there are lots of action sequences, lots of death, and the good thing is that the scenes that are supposed to be scary are actually scary rather than Buffy the Vampire Slayer scary. Namely not at all.

and unlike in an American show of this type where the main cast confronts danger fifty times and everyone’s fine, in this show people die in episode one and when you think they’ve killed a person off to show that maybe in episode five someone else might die they kill someone else you knew was now safe because there’d already been a death this episode, and that sets the tone for the entire season.

This is extremely gratifying because when someone gets in some kind of trouble the odds that they’ll survive it are about fifty fifty so you never zone out.

This show doesn’t really innovate in its basic plot elements but makes up for that because it plays off the expectations you have going in. Paul’s a geek who gets powers and has personal growth, his best friends a geek who thinks that its cool his best friend has powers, Paul’s sister is the cool chick who pretends he doesn’t exist, Paul has a crush on her popular but unfulfilled Asian friend, Paul’s mom is comically clueless like every TV mom, his therapist is profound, his life is absolute shit until the first episode when all of a sudden he starts making social strides, there are other people who can see the dead who tell Paul he’s important and is the person who can save the world and that he has to leave his normal life behind, but the reason this is compelling television is that the fades is like a show of this type that ran five seasons squeezed into one and what I realized after watching it is that the length made the writer, Jack Thorn, do wonderful things with pacing and plot structure that would only work with these time constraints.

Its the type of show where by episode three the steaks are high and shits gotten real, and by episode five things have kicked into the end game.

In some ways this is all so fast its a little disorientating, but if you think of the show like a Miniseries rather than a TV show it’ll feel less strange.

The fades also works because for the most part people act like people really would if the apocalypse began in there town. They run. It drives me crazy when there’s a show where all this supernatural stuff starts happening and it takes the residence of the town about four years to cop to it, but by episode three normal people have realized something’s up, and by episode four there’s almost no more secrecy.

The show is dark and works because it doesn’t promise to be dark in episode one but by episode three has broken that promise in favor of false tension. There aren’t plot teases where questions are raised, raised again, and then not answered, and the Fades also does not go waste time with crap that no one really cares about to fill time because it doesn’t have the time, so the things that happen episode by episode on this show are the same kind of things that are usually reserved for the season premiere or finale of a longer running show.  All plot points raised in the first five episodes are satisfactorily addressed in episode six. The fades being able to take corporeal form is the first sign of the apocalypse and the Fades quickly inspires a foe biblical feeling to the idea that the worlds going to end and the people trying to stop the world from ending have good enough acting chops to give the situation enough weight that by episode two the show has made the threat feel real.

The Fades also makes up for its cookie cutter plot with tone. The dreams some of the characters have of the apocalypse are truly desolating and give a wonderful feeling of hopelessness and ramp up the tension every time they happen because the writers really sell the idea that the odds of stopping the apocalypse are infitesimal and are getting worse every second. Because the fades becoming corporial is just the start of the plot.

Also the idea that some seventeen year old has crazy powers isn’t hand waved, when the other people with powers tell him, “hey, maybe high school isn’t so important,” they’re proven right on a daily basis and Paul’s determination to live a normal life in spite of the end of the world rapidly approaching, while made believable and understandable by the writers also makes him look like an idiot. People start out in a morally black and white framework but by episode three or so everyone’s compromising there ethics in response to valid changes in the situation and things are getting delightfully crazy. Its the type of show where characters don’t fit neatly into boxes and a guy you liked in episode one can become a dude you aren’t really sure about in episode II, and the teenagers act stupid because they’re teenagers and the people trying to stop the end of the world are deadly serious about it and the people with no powers who are caught in the middle don’t beat the hell out of ghosts with heretofore undiscovered kung fu fighting skills, they run and hide and run some more and get kidnapped and try and stay out of the way, and with the exception of Paul who is pretty heroic in the classical sense the rest of the cast react on a spectrum from moral to immoral true to who the show has shown us they are.

Its a rarity for shows to pull this off so well. Usually you have good guys and bad guys and not very many people in between, but with two exceptions everyone stays in the in between area.

The show balances its tone expertly. Just when you think its taking itself way too seriously moments of comic relief happen which are laugh out loud funny and then within fifteen seconds everything can get genuinely scary again.

The show proceeds to pull fewer punches in its storytelling with each episode.

You ever see a show where some dude goes through fifteen years of bad crap condensed down into a month but he’s more or less fine? The Fades doesn’t do that. Most of the first episode is spent with Paul in denial that he can see dead people, he thinks he’s going crazy, and even though everybody knows that he’ll eventually realize that he isn’t going crazy the Fades still handles this necessary aspect of story telling well. In fact it gets through with all the things we expect to happen by episode two. There’s a mentor, so obviously the hero is going to start taking lessons from him, the best friend likes the sister, the girl Paul likes has a crush on him as well,  Paul has a special destiny.

The good thing is that the show moves so fast that by episode four all the pieces are completely in place and all the things we know are going to happen because its a show about a kid who sees ghosts have either already happened or have gone down in some way we weren’t expecting, so all that has to happen in the second half of the short season is the story has to play out given all the rules and character relationships that have been set up so neatly already.

The cast of the show is British and I don’t know what it is but in British shows for some reason its much rarer that I find that ass hole actor who really can’t keep up with the rest of the actors on the show, and there are no such in the Fades. I haven’t heard of any of the central cast, but none of them pissed me off with bad acting, and most of them impressed me with lots of good acting, which is all I really want out of a cast. The ones who weren’t great were at least good enough that I never resented them for not acting as well as the standouts.

I’m not sure if the Fades is going to be renewed for a second season, and in a way I hope it isn’t renewed because what the Fades has done is told one story very well and has not in any significant way screwed itself with a bad episode or people acting out of character or a dumb plot twist. Its balanced a complicated plot with an evocative tone and has complimented this with a good cast.

The way the show jumps from mood to mood is reminiscent of firefly and probably hasn’t been done so well since then.

So go watch it already.

2012
03/24
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What owning a dog and being a hot chick have in common

I’ve had a Seeing Eye dog for the last five years now. I asked for a german chepoard, because chepoards look more wolfish than most other dogs, and people are scared of wolves, not atracted by them. Instead I got a yellow lab. People think yellow labs are the cutest dogs ever, or at least that’s what they all tell me.
Every day, where ever I go, I have a conversation that starts with someone telling me what a beautiful dog I have, I tell them thank you very much, they ask me how old he is, I answer, and then they say a few more things about the dog, tell me it was nice meeting me as an afterthought, and then they go on there way.
If you’ve had this conversation with me, you might notice that I start getting a glassy eyed look at the beginning of it, my face probably slackens as I go through the motions. Its not your fault. Its just that I have the same conversation around five or six times a day, so it stopped having any meaning about four years, eleven months and thirty days ago.
I get pissed whenever I have to have it because I’ve had it so many times and all that I can think while I’m having it is about how many more times I’m going to have it before I die.
I was trying to figure out why it bothered me so much, and finally the answer came to me. Owning a cute dog is the closest a guy will ever come to being a hot chick.
Sometimes I watch as dudes hit on girls and I can just tell that about nine tenths of that girls brain is focussed on something she considers more important than making polite conversation whith whomevers flirting with her. I can hear the deadness in her voice which says, “I really don’t want to be having this conversation but there isn’t a nice way of getting out of it.” Even I can see the flat cold stare she’s giving the guy whose trying out his dumbass line on her. She’s heard it before, and he just keeps going like the next shitty thing he says is suddenly going to turn the situation around for him.
And here’s where having a dog and being a hot chick are similar. Girls, if a guy walks up to you out of the blue and starts to flirt with you, its not because you have a great personality, though you probably do, its because you have a great body. You defenetly don’t need me to explain this to you. Pretty girls are used to this happening, and so they have varius defenses to get around it. I totally get that now.
Because the dudes that hit on chicks aren’t really hitting on the girl based on what she’s like as a person, but for what she looks like as a person. Sometimes I’m sure its flattering, but other times, most times, I assume based on what its like having a dog, its probably annoying as hell.
My dog overshadows me because its more atractive than I am. Of course I resent this because I love being the center of attention. But people totally don’t get that they aren’t the first person to walk up to me to tell me the dogs cute, just like most dudes that walk up to chicks and say something they think is clever are just the latest shmuck in a long line of shmucks to bother them with something they’ve heard word for word before.
The funny part about this is that although I realize what a pain it must be to constantly be flirted with when you aren’t interested, I’m not going to stop flirting with atractive women I happen to meet, and I also realize that no one is going to stop telling me my dogs cute. Why? Because both conversations make at least one person involved happy. When men flirt with women, we assume they might be into us, and when people tell me my dogs cute, they assume either I don’t know, or its nice to hear for the sixth time today.

2011
05/20
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An easy solution to prevent most rapes

If I woke up tomorrow to discover that during the night I’d transformed somehow into a woman I would buy a gun before I had breakfast.
I’m being completely serious, and this is when I lose most people because what I’ve just said is funny and they’re distracted because they’re laughing.
I know this discussion is a strange one to be having, but when I look at the statistics showing the number of both rapes and attempted rapes in this country I profoundly wish two things. Firstly and most profoundly, I wish that ignorance, and the savagery it promotes could be eradicated from the earth, and, recognizing that wish to be hopeless, I instead fervently wish that the majority of women owned guns.
One The FBI estimates that 58% of women report when they are raped. Forty-four percent then obviously do not. When the estimated number of unreported rapes is added to the number of rapes that were reported, the numbers apparently say that one out of four women will either be raped or will have to fight off or otherwise escape a rape attempt.
I think some men have a tendency to dismiss this issue because in most circumstances the incidence of men raping men are far lower than men raping women.
But I can’t even imagine how awful it would be to have to recover from such a thing. I would feel stripped of will and dignity, violated in a fundamental way. If I were ever raped, it would become the central event of my life for quite a while. I would spend all of my time wondering what I could have done differently to avoid being in whatever situation I’d been in. I would wonder if once I’d seen my rapist and understood what was going on, could I have fought harder to avoid being raped.
I have a feeling that lots of people reading this might find the above slightly repulsive because you’ve never thought about what being raped would do to you on a psychological level, and there is no reason to wonder. Rape fucks you up, it breaks you, at least for a while.
. The ideal solution is to somehow discover what it is that makes people rape, and the act is so breathtakingly cruel that I know it cannot be motivated much by sex.
I’ve been thinking about my hole if I were a girl I’d buy a gun thing for a while. Primarily because I said it when it popped into my head, but I wasn’t kidding and most people thought I was.
I tell people, and they don’t get where I’m coming from.
My thinking goes like this. We can’t eliminate rapists, and men are stronger than women. These two facts result in a highly unfortunate chain of events far too often. The solution. women should buy guns.
There are some who would say that if my solution were to be taken seriously then we would have more guns in this country. If we have more guns in this country, we will probably have more murders in this country. And further they will say that you will have murders even if the guns women buy are used to fight off rapists.
They are correct, but I except it as the price to pay for a much lower incidence of rape.
The issue is one of physical makeup. There have been times in my life where I was worried for my safety because the people around me were obviously stronger, faster and in the hole more vicious than I was, but for the most part I’m pretty secure. I don’t ever imagine an assault to be coming, I never worry, for instance, that some crazy unwashed fiend craving a fix is going to shiv me and steal my wallet as I’m in the middle of doing something perfectly normal on an average day. Nor do A thousand scenario’s a great deal more likely trouble me at all. I don’t worry about sudden death all that often either which I recognize to be a privilege of living in a good area.
But women who live in similarly well off areas don’t have that protection, as to my mind rape is one of the five or six things that can happen to you which is not as bad as death but is just a touch better.
No one seems bothered by this. No one I see every day says to me, “Jason, one out of four women is either raped or has to beat the hell out of some moral degenerate to avoid getting raped.” And I feel like people should be upset enough to talk about it a lot more frequently.
It took me a long time to figure out why I was suddenly so furious about this issue whereas before today I was upset about it only when someone brought rape up, but had otherwise been able to go through my life not thinking about it at all. What I realized, and I hope this doesn’t strike very many of my readers as profound is that I would never rape anyone.
I just have never contemplated it and I don’t get how people do.
I’ve gone through dry spells, and I’ve had friends who’ve gone through dry spells, and none of those guys has ever said to me, “Hey, its been a while since I’ve gotten laid, I think I’ll just rape someone, relieve some of that no sex tension.”
People don’t do that which shows you that we judge rapists harshly within society. I believe that I would turn my father and male friends in for rape instantly while with murder I’d give them that minute to explain themselves.
But yet, rape itself is the evidence that some people think rape is ok, and I think it would be permissible for people attempting rape to be shot if that’s the only way to get them to back off.
That is not overkill, its a fair exchange of force. If rape is devastating emotionally, if it takes years to fully recover from, then surely the use of a firearm to prevent rape cannot be excessive. If you were given a choice to let a rapist either die, or rape a girl and live, you would want him to die. Similarly, it isn’t as though we might threaten a rapist with the simultaneous threat of rape to discourage him from his per suits, which would, in a strange and twisted world be the most fair solution.
So because we cannot stop rapists from attempting to inflict there vileness on others, and because men are stronger than women, they need to buy guns, learn how to shoot those guns, and respond to the threat of rape with gunfire.
I have begun to think of attempted rape as a type of arms race. Its been played out before, in the context of nation building and the constant quest for dominance within the international arena.
Look at any conflict between two groups of people and it usually comes down to arms. The native Americans that we decimated to found our country were not less intelligent people than the European colonists that killed them, they were simply weaker, and that weakness was mainly one of technology. To quickly sum up, Europeans had guns and had been using them for a long time, whereas native Americans, while quickly adapting to guns, could not make up the deficit in the proficiency with them fast enough to prevent all of there societies from being ground into the dirt of history.
Look at any conflict and it is usually the more violent faction that ultimately wins it. I know there are exceptions to this rule, the mostly peaceful protests in Egypt, and Gandhi’s campaign to free India, and Martin Luther King’s nonviolent protests to make real the promises laid out in the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments, but the only reason these nonviolent approaches worked was because the world was watching and forced to talk about what it was seeing, it was further forced to admit violence and savagery when it saw it, as apposed to being allowed to ignore it which is what happens when wars are fought in private, for lack of a better word.
The real problem is that women have to be ok gut shooting someone who is attempting to rape them, and here is where I think we might run into some trouble.
I know that if I owned a gun, which I do not, and was in a situation where I thought I was going to be raped, I’d shoot someone to prevent it. I’d shoot him in the stomach or the leg if I could, and if that didn’t seem like enough I’d shoot him in the head. I’m pretty sure I’d be able to do that without much reflection during, and without all that much guilt afterwards.
But it is the hesitation to kill or mame that would, I suspect, be most women’s undoing in this situation.
I can’t know for sure, and trying to predict is only stereotyping, but I take as evidence that buying a gun to prevent rape is not a solution that is complex. It didn’t take me hours of careful thinking to come up with. I just thought that if I had to contend with rape, I’d buy a gun.
The fact that the vast majority of women haven’t done this already is the worry I’m left with, as stopping rapists from doing what they are somehow predisposed to do is basically impossible.
I look at the steps women have taken to prevent rape, and I am skeptical. Rape whistles and self-defense classes.
As to the latter, the commitment that it takes to get good at self-defense is a large one of time and physical conditioning.
Its one thing to tell someone that the way to discourage a rapist is to stomp on his instep, breaking small bones in his feet, or it is to kick him in the testicles, rendering him helpless, and its another thing entirely to expect a person, in the heat of what is in essence the first fight for her life, to remember to do such a thing, and once remembering, to have the ware with all to pull it off successfully.
I’ve never had to fight someone who was twice as strong as me. I’ve wrestled people my strength, in the type of fights young men engage in for fun, not quite serious things that are more about testing each other than anything else, and I’ll tell you the obvious truth, that fighting someone exactly my strength for any length of time is tiring work. Fighting someone half again as strong as I am would be almost impossible. I’m not saying that it is a fight that I would lose right away, I like to think if put in such a position I wouldn’t do so badly, but I’ve also been thinking on and off about the most efficient ways of hurting people for a long time, against the day when I’ll actually have to do it.
But most people, I believe, do not spend free moments picturing fights so as to be prepared to have them, and a physical confrontation that you have not prepared for is one you will probably lose.
Moving on to rape whistles.
I think rape whistles are retarded. I wouldn’t go running if I heard one, I’d just think, oh, someone’s blowing a whistle, and I’d continue doing whatever I was doing.
If I were trying to rob someone and they stopped to blow a whistle, I’d hit them in the stomach as they raised a hand to blow it, and that’d be that.
Similarly, things like mace aren’t enough of a deterrent. If I were maced in the face, I’m sure I’d be in terrible pain, but pain is a matter of willpower to ignore, and if I were determined enough I suspect that I could fight my way through mace.
So we’re left with a knife or gun. Guns seem the obvious solution, as they do the most to equalize, if not to entirely invert, the physical disparity between men and women.
I would never rape anyone, but if in some crazy world I was faced with the choice of going after someone with a gun verses someone without a gun, the choice would be such an obvious one that I really don’t have to tell you which I’d choose.
We need to face the fact that our mild sanctions are not enough to prevent rapists from raping. Attempted rapists don’t always get life in prison, an oversight so monstrous that I refuse to contemplate it for very long.
Women owning guns, and knowing how to shoot them effectively, would change the face of the cost and rewards of rape. The cost is now a six in ten shot of being reported, and, unless I miss my mark, a very low probability of being seriously injured or killed while attempting to rape someone. Both of these things depress me.
How many people knowingly try and rob a navy seal? Not that many. And while it is of course unrealistic to assume that all women will put fourth the effort to transform themselves into instant killing machines, it is not unrealistic for women to take an eight week class on how to blow someone’s brains out of the back of his skull, and stay in the state of readiness that would allow them to pose a serious threat to anyone that tried to rape them.
It is fucked up, but raping women and hitting women are similar. I’d never hit a girl, either, I shouldn’t even have to point that out, but its important for this discussion. I probably wouldn’t randomly hit another guy, either.
But my mindset for why I won’t do both these things is different. I won’t swing at random women because they are weaker than I am, they have not been raised to take a punch and come back swinging, and attacking someone who will typically put up such a poor defense feels so deeply unsporting and unfair that I’ve never seriously contemplated seeing how it actually felt.
I won’t try and punch men because it would instantly turn into a fight. I suspect that if I walked up to the next dude I saw and hit him in the face, he’d try and hit me back, and I don’t want to get into a fight.
Its important to note the differences in motive here. One is a choice motivated by civilization and one is a choice motivated by the fear of getting hurt in return.
I wouldn’t fear for my safety, striking a woman, whereas I would if I struck a man. This needs to change if we really want equality.
I recognize that it shouldn’t have to change, I believe that physical strength is decreasing in importance the further we get from the savagery that once surrounded us, but at the same time I know that savagery will not be wiped out of our culture in my lifetime, and that requires adaptation.
I have been going on about this at some length, and I think its time to rap this up.
Women need to become more physically threatening, and the easiest way for them to do that is to learn to use firearms. They need to become more threatening because once some do, the perception will be that most are threats. Rapists will not rape so cavalierly if they suspect that most women carry guns and will use them if threatened.

2011
05/19
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No Reason for Pride

Recently, with the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the civil war, there have been what can be best called confederate pride rallies in some southern states. Such marches disgust me.
The only thing worse would be a march of the KKK in a prominent southern city, and frankly, it wouldn’t be worse by all that much.
The argument made by descendants of confederate soldiers must be willfully wrong, unless southerners are truly as stupid as stereotypes would have one believe.
These re enactors claim that the confederacy seceded because of states rights. This is true, but over general. They seceded for one states right, the right to subjugate African American men and women into slavery. That’s it. Of course the question of whether or not blacks would continue to be property was not the only factor in the south’s ultimate decision to secede from the union. There was also the perception that the agrarian lifestyle of the south was becoming outmoded by the north’s industrialization, (which it was,) and the feeling that the north was deliberately attacking the south’s way of life as a slave holding society.
I’m primarily upset with two groups of people here, the people marching, and the news media.
There’s a reason that the grandsons of German soldiers from world War II aren’t marching in Berlin every year. The reason is that these men were Nazi’s in Hitler’s army and are partially responsible for the Holocaust, and the millions Hitler invasion of Europe ultimately killed.
It hurts being on the wrong side of history, I’m sure. I feel bad enough knowing that our country used to allow the buying and selling of men and women I’d feel worse if I knew my great grandfather took up arms to defend that abomination.
Slavery is talked about so much in school and in general conversation that I strongly believe many have forgotten how horrific it truly was. Female slaves were raped, and most were whipped and beaten for not working hard enough. Even if a slave was lucky enough not to experience any of these privations, he or she still experienced something no one living in this country today has ever had to. The feeling of being someone else’s property.
It is equal parts sickening and ironic that the people who have forgotten most completely are the fools marching in Birmingham and other state capitals because it was there ancestors more than anyone else’s who were most responsible for the slave trade.
I’d like to remind those men of a few things. Your “country” was founded almost exclusively to keep the institution of slavery alive and well. While your ancestors who served may have done so bravely, and may have done so ignorant of the larger political implications of what there service meant, the reality is that the CSA was defending its right to hold slaves against a popular trend which was increasingly coming to see slaveholding as the despicable action which it is.
My rage at you is total and complete, because rather than stand up and proclaim the reality, that your great grandfathers were soldiers who fought bravely, but for a cause which was wrong, you stand up and obfuscate the issue with empty rhetoric, when you aren’t lying to people altogether. Anyone with a high school education, (at least where the teachers weren’t spinning history,) knows that the primary cause of secession was slavery, and those who took up arms were defending slavery even if they were too removed from larger events to know it. But ignorant’s has never been a satisfactory excuse for actions which are detrimental to society.
If I thought the members of these diluted groups were a serious sociological movement I’d get on a plain, go down to one of those rallies, and I’d spit at the feet of someone marching. Luckily for my wallet, I feel no pressing need to do this.
These people marching in the south are a dying breed, thank god. They are the last gasps of a world almost two-hundred years gone bye. To be repulsed by them is natural, but to mobilize against them is mostly a waste of time. History is crushing these peoples misplaced pride into a memory more than anyone in the world could, and I must say, for myself, that the sound of them being ground down under times heel is the most pleasant sound I’ve heard in years.
A common complaint from these pro confederate people is that they’re simply proud of there haratidge. They ask why people have to attack them for that pride.
I have an answer for anyone in that camp who hasn’t stopped reading this in rage. I must call you and yours out for being idiots. Your cause was wrong, and gets increasingly wrong with the passing of time. In addition to committing treason, which was bad enough, you didn’t even commit treason for a good cause. Your great grandfathers were sort of evil guys. They weren’t consciously evil, but they were serving a country that was.
The union wasn’t all rainbows and understanding. Many people in it were racist to a degree, and many didn’t see the war as one about slavery at all. But luckily, the war became a violent referendum on that issue as it progressed and the United States found itself on the right side of history this time.
I won’t waste much space on the second reason I’m upset, as my expectations of the news media sink by the day, but why the hell hasn’t anyone taken the trouble to point out all the things I just did. People have a legal right to freedom of speech and the right to assembly, but this doesn’t mean that what they say under this protection is right. Someone should lambaste the sons of the confederacy on national television, otherwise those who hear about the rallies won’t realize how disturbing they truly are.

2011
02/21
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Fantastic Fantasy, my Review of Mitsfits

                Let me take you back four years in time. No, not literally, you dolts, it’s a mental exercise…

                Anyway, remember when Heroes was coming out on Fox? The promotional material made it look cool. It was going to be X-men, only with a dose of reality added. It was going to be like a comic book with a big budget, a live action version of superheroes. The promotional material gave the impression that it was going to be fun, fast paced, well acted and like Lost, with less foot dragging.

                Unfortunately, the promotional material was wrong on all counts, because now all Heroes is is dragging feet. Now when I try and watch heroes, I can’t. I have to change the channel because I feel like I’m getting stupid. Because, you see, saving the cheerleader did not save the world, and once the show failed so spectacularly to deliver on that promise, I stopped giving a crap.

                So for those disappointed in Heroes, I offer an alternative. And what a splendid one!

                It’s called Misfits, and it’s made by the BBC. Yeah, going all the way across the pond.

                It was created and written by Howard Overman, and stars Iwan Rheon, Robert Sheehan, Lauren Socha, Nathan Stewart,    and Antonia Thomas,. I’ve heard of exactly  none of these people, but it seems only polite in a review to give credit where credit is due. Maybe you know them.

                Anyway, the show is about five punk kids in Britain who are assigned community service for various petty crimes. While there working, a freak storm hits! And they wake up the next morning with… Superpowers!

                But let’s move passed that contrivance and get to the real meat of the matter, shall we?

                The powers themselves are a mix of been there done that and new. Invisibility for the shy nerd, telepathy for the insecure one, the ability to rewind time for the one who regrets a lot, lust inspiring for the one who likes sex, and no powers, seemingly, although maybe not really, for the sarcastic brash dick.

                Now, this might sound boring or trite, and in a few small ways it is. But in many more ways it’s not. The girl who inspires lust, for example, always inspires it with a touch, and she has no way of turning it off. So she can’t ever kiss a guy without him trying to rip all her clothes off and have sex with her where ever they happen to be.

                The girl with Telepathy hears people thinking how people want to “shag” her, which means sex, in case you didn’t know. She hears her friends badmouthing her, and she breaks up with her boyfriend because she can’t keep quiet about what she hears.

                Now, this was done in Heroes, but that was one interesting element in a stew of Bla. The Misfits is great because there isn’t anything Bla about it.

                When four teens get superpowers, what would you suppose they’d do? If you guessed become superheroes, you’d be wrong, at least for now.

                Instead what they do is drink and have sex and do some drugs and bicker and sometimes someone reads a stray thought or rewinds time to fix something or turns invisible.

                Its not all nothing though. The teens have to contend with fallout from the storm in the form of their dead probation officer.

                The probation officer got a power which gave him super strength and incontrollable rage, and was killed by our superpowered teens twenty minutes into the first episode.

                The next couple episodes, and most of the season as a hole, deal with the teenagers attempts to hide this crime of self-defense from their new probation officer and the police.

                The shows tone is a mix of drama and comity and the balance between the two hasn’t been achieved so well since Firefly. Serious situations can suddenly turn hilarious, and vice versa. The humor isn’t diminished by serious moments, and the serious moments are only enhanced when they happen to turn humorous.

                The show’s writers have a grasp on their characters, and after the first episode, people act in believable ways, and deal with each other as real kids would. The group isn’t suddenly a band of brothers or fast friends, they tolerate each other. It’s looking like they’ll be united, but it hasn’t happened yet.

                I’d also like to praise the cast. The main actors are all very good, with props going out to Simon and Nathan Especially. But the guest stars are all superb as well; there isn’t one bad actor in the bunch.

                If you aren’t familiar with shows produced by the BBC, there are two things you should know.

                The first is that the BBC isn’t constrained by the censorship that constrains broadcast networks in this country which means people do drugs on screen without suffering a karmic death five minutes later, and there’s also a fair lot of swearing and almost as much sex. But don’t think the shows pornographic, or at least don’t think that when it is it somehow feels cheapened for being that way.

                The second thing that is important to note is that British seasons of television tend to run for a shorter episode run than do American seasons, and Misfits is a striking example of this, having only six episodes in its first season.

                But this is fine, as not a second is wasted. The show, in its short first season, exemplifies what American Television, (with the exception of reality shows,) is obviously heading towards, i.e., a story told in the length of a season, or in the length of an entire show.

                You can watch a random episode of the Misfits without being totally lost, “teens have superpowers,” is really all you need to know, but the show is twice as good if you watch it in order.

                Now, about watching it. It’s a British show, and as far as I know and as far as Wikipedia knows, it hasn’t been broadcast anywhere else, and it hasn’t been released on DVD. And that’s a damn shame.

                And the worst part is there isn’t anything you can do about it. You certainly can’t go to a bit torrent sight such as the pirate bay, and you certainly can’t run a search for “misfits” and you then certainly can’t download a torrent which will allow you to watch the show. You can’t do that, I certainly most definitely did not do that, because its illegal and its copyright infringement and no one should do what I’ve just described.

                If you do, though, you’ll be in for a great six or seven hours of television. I can’t wait until the second season airs. The show has created an intriguing world, and while the season answers the questions it posed, new questions are raised in the last two episodes and the pace of the series leads me to believe that these new questions will be answered, rather than spun out to get ratings.

2010
08/20
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