Shit that Pissed me off This Week 8/3
Climate Change Denier Releases Study that, in Effect, says “I was Wrong”
I know, why would this piss me (someone who has long accepted the Global Climate Change is happening and is largely caused by humans) off?
Because it won’t change anything. No amount of data proving that climate change is happening will convince those who believe otherwise.
Not even when that data actually convinces a skeptical scientist. Unless 100% of scientists agree on climate change, the deniers will always have someone on their side. No matter that 97% (or more) of climatologists – the people whose field of expertise most closely focuses on climate change science – believe climate change is real and caused by humans. If one climatologist says differently, we still have a “controversy.”
I don’t blog much about climate change science because I know a lot of deniers and they are smart people who, I believe, are completely wrong on this one topic. My fear is the longer we argue, the more damage we are doing. That is a fear shared by many scientists who know a lot more about this shit than me.
Shit that Pissed me Off This Week – 7/27
Some guy kills a bunch of people in a Movie Theatre and Some other guy on Facebook has a Solution
So first off, thanks for taking a horrible tragedy and making it all about your agenda. Well done.
This is not a guns are awesome/guns are awful thing. I’ve talked about that before. This is a “what are you – stupid?” thing.
You don’t know what the fuck you are talking about because the guy released tear gas into the theatre and then opened fire. If you were in that theater with a gun, you would have needed to get a clear shot at the killer so that you wouldn’t kill any of the panicking crowd that is all around him. In a theatre filled with tear gas. Your odds of killing an innocent bystander are probably just as high or higher than your odds of killing the bad guy.
It’s great to think that if you were there, you would have saved more people. We all want to believe that. It’s bullshit. John McLean is a character in a movie.
A guy walks into a packed theatre, fills it with smoke and starts shooting, a bunch of people are going to die. If you were there and you had a gun, you wouldn’t have stopped it from happening. You are not Rambo.
Shit that Pissed Me off This Week 7/20
I note that yes, the shooting in Colorado pissed me off. But I’m not going to write about it because fuck that guy. This is all the 1’s and 0’s I’m going to commit to him.
What pisses me off is that there is no there there. I’m a liberal. I don’t like Romney.
Yet if you read the article linked above that quotes both anonymous and public sources who are Democrats that Support Obama, this whole thing appears to be much ado about nothing.
The Bain issue appears to be the Democratic equivalent of a swiftboat campaign. There are a lot of good reasons why Romney shouldn’t be our next President. If there is an honest belief he can’t be beaten on those grounds, the problem is with our campaign.
Just look at the guy! I’m telling you, he’s an Auton!
I don’t like it when Republicans lie and obscure facts because I don’t agree with the majority of their agenda and if people really understood it, I don’t think a lot of others would either.
What I really hate, though, is when Democrats do the same thing. I know – they do it all the time.
But I agree with them most of the time and I wish they would figure out how to get people to understand their point of view without resorting to misdirection.
When is a Personal Opinion a Business Practice?
Yesterday evening, my friend Cargill decided to poke the bear. In response to the internet vitriol over Chick-Fil-A, he tweeted the following:
Boycotting a business over their business practices is the democratic free market in action. Doing so over their personal opinions is not.
By boycotting a business over personal opinions, you are saying it is okay to threaten someone’s livelihood if they don’t think like you.
Let’s start by pointing out that Cargill isn’t a dick. Yes, he’s a Republican and I’m a left-of-Democrat liberal but he and I actually agree on most social political matters and even some economic ones. I don’t fully agree with him here, although I do see what he is saying and understand the point he’s trying to make.
He’s a good guy and he argues fairly. I’m not trying to take him down. He got me to think and that is a good thing. He’s very good at it.
But this isn’t an argument that could be fairly explored over Twitter.
I don’t want you to feel comfortable about being a bigot
I wrote a radio play for Vaudevilification Tennis and because the show took place during Pride, I decided to include a “public service announcement” against the gay marriage ban. My opinion on the issue should be clear but I saw a good opportunity for some comedy that also made a statement that is important to me.
When it came time to put that script in the CONvergence show, I initially balked at the idea of including the public service announcement because I felt that CONvergence is not a political convention and the announcement might be out of place.
Two things changed my mind.
CONvergence 2012 Highlights
There were a few low points at CONvergence 2012 but they aren’t even worth mentioning. Most of them had to do with last minute planning failures and my complete inability to sleep past 7:30, even when I went to sleep at 5:00 A.M.
So forget that stuff, here’s some of my best moments from CONvergence 2012 (more or less in chronological order):
Shit That Pissed me Off This Week – 6/29
Iranian Americans Told They are Not Allowed to Buy an iPad because Racism
I’ve been an Apple customer for a long time. There are more Apple products in my house than there are bathrooms. It’s pretty sad.
This story is a publicity nightmare and I’m pissed they didn’t have the intelligence to publicly state “you know what – we messed up.”
While Apple has a policy against exporting their products to Iran (because what Iran needs to bring down the US is clearly lots and lots of iPads), that doesn’t mean that anyone who speaks Farsi should be denied service.
A vital piece of the dreaded Iranian “iPad enrichment” program
Hell, I think it is a pretty major invasion of privacy just to ask what language was being spoken. If I was speaking a foreign language in an Apple store and an employee asked me what language it was, I’d tell them it was none of their business. Especially now.
Come on Apple! Wake up and admit your policy is screwed and tell people you won’t be denying service to anyone based on what language they speak. To achieve your goal of world domination by 2018, it is a necessary step.
You can’t dominate the world if you don’t dominate Iran. I think Napoleon said that.
Shit that Pissed me off this Week – 6/8
Doctor Allegedly Refused Treatment to an HIV Positive Patient
The accusation is that a doctor refused to get an HIV patient his medications because the patient was gay and (I’m paraphrasing) “he deserved it.”
In a culture where preachers are teaching their children to sing songs about how homos are going to hell, this shouldn’t come as any sort of surprise. People are being told that it is OK to treat homosexuals differently on one topic (marriage) and, therefore, they reach the conclusion that they can treat those people differently in all situations.
The people who think that way are horrible people. They would probably still be horrible people if they hadn’t been trained to behave this way toward homosexuals. I think that perhaps we need to re-direct that acrimony towards something more productive. Like hating Wal-Mart. Or Ke$ha.
Shit that Pissed me Off this Week – 6/1
Missed last week because I was on vacation so here’s a couple weeks’ worth of annoyances.
Disney Changes it’s FastPass System – Sort of
I’m not going to try to explain the whole thing but the basic issue is that Disney has a system wherein you can get a pass that will allow you to go to the front of the line for various popular rides. The catch is that you can’t go on the ride until a particular time. So if you want to go on Space Mountain, you get a fast pass for – say – 10:00 and come back later rather than waiting in a 40 minute line.
Now the fast passes have always given you an hour window. If your pass starts at 10:00, it ends at 11:00. Except it never did. They have been honored all day for as long as the system has been around (over ten years now).
Until now. Now if you have a fast pass that says 10:00 to 11:00, you’d better get there between 10:00 and 11:00. No exceptions.
So great – if I’ve got a lunch reservation at one and the fast pass time available is 1:00 to 2:00, I’m out of luck. This wouldn’t bug me so much if the rules had always been that way. No matter what it says on the pass, though, they have never enforced it. Until now.
It is a strange fate that we should suffer so much fear and doubt over so small a thing. Such a little thing.
Why did they do it? I don’t know for sure but I would guess they did it to cut down on the wait in the standby line. I would imagine most people using a fast pass wait well past the posted time on their pass and that serves to back up the standby line more and more as the day progresses. Most people with a 9:45 fast pass don’t show up until much later. I know I didn’t . Also, by having the fast pass expire, not everyone who gets one will end up using it. Overall, it means fewer people going through the fast pass line every hour which means the standby line is probably at least fifteen minutes faster.
That’s great for them. But what about me?
Shit that Pissed me Off this Week – 5/18
I’m on vacation this week and next week so the column is shorter than usual. That, I imagine, is probably a good thing.
Most Psychotic Anti-Gay Person Ever
This lady’s crazy rant has been circulating the internet quite a lot in the last week.
This doesn’t piss me off. It makes me laugh but if I’m being honest with myself, it also makes me sad. This woman isn’t just anti-gay, she is completely around the bend crazy. She needs some sort of medication in the worst way. Just listen to the crazy shit she is saying. Normal people don’t talk like this. When you can make Michele Bachmann look sane, you have a very serious problem.
Update: Yep – she’s mentally ill. Her family says she is on medication (up the dosage) and that makes the attention on her all the more sad. The whole thing points up the kind of hatred that is focused on gay people. She’s mentally ill and you can’t control that but would her vitriol be focused on gays if there weren’t so many sane people doing it already.
Grail Diary 