Shit that Pissed me Off – 6/6

Guy Threatens to Kill a Dad Who is Teaching his Daughter How to Ride a Bike

He didn’t just threaten to kill someone.  He did it while holding a loaded shotgun.

He admitted he did so to police.  He even said he probably should have fired.

At issue is not the question of whether or not people have the right to own guns.  The issue is why people feel that casually producing a gun and pointing it at someone in the street is an acceptable act. This guy is a loon but his action is, I think, part of a greater movement that troubles me.

When people openly carry semi-automatic weapons into Target because they feel it is their right, we have a problem.  This isn’t about the right to bear arms any longer.  It is about the right to not have someone point a gun at you when you are shopping for produce.

I told you to get away from that lettuce!

I feel that if I like a different kind of Pop Tarts than you, I shouldn’t be concerned that we are going to need to have a showdown in frozen foods to settle the problem.

This Week’s Meme That Pissed Me Off

Dear Facebook friends:  Stop posting this stuff.  Just stop.  In the case of this meme, please remember that something as complicated as the gun control debate cannot be distilled down to a couple of sentences like these:

Ha ha!  That’s so funny!  It’s a completely equivalent argument.

Except only the tiniest fraction of anti gun advocates want to make all guns illegal.  It isn’t the same thing at all.  Don’t get started on the slippery slope fallacy either.

Wanting to place limitations on the possession and use of some firearms is not equivalent to outlawing all mind altering drugs.  Nor do gun control advocates think that responsible controls will end gun related deaths.  They believe it will reduce gun related deaths.

On an unrelated note: legalization of drugs would also probably reduce gun related deaths.

You may think you are being clever and making your opposition look dumb but in fact, you are just making yourself look ignorant.

People are More Likely to Take a Hurricane Seriously if it is Named After a Boy

The implications of this study go far beyond everyday sexism. It means we are teaching people to make stupid decisions based on the supposed gender of a storm.

I propose a solution: from now on, all hurricanes should be named after horrible ways to die.  I’m pretty sure that nobody is going to stick around for Hurricane Decapitated or Hurricane Ripped out Your Spine.  Not only do we solve the problem of people making decisions purely based on subconscious ideas that female hurricanes just aren’t so bad, hurricanes start to sound a lot more bad ass.

Admit it. If you heard hurricane Aneurism was about to make landfall, you’d get the fuck out.

Alternative suggestion: Name all hurricanes after Super Heroes.  Sure, Hurricane Captain America is a silly name but you’d take that thing seriously, wouldn’t you? That idea could backfire though because people would assume that there is no way any attempt to turn Tropical Storm Wonder Woman into a hurricane would succeed.

Abusive Parents are Upset Their Children Were Adopted by a Same-sex Couple

Two words: who cares?

When you beat your children to the point the state removes them from your home, you lose the right to get pissed off by the moral choices of the people who adopted your kids.  Unless they are abusive parents as well, your kids have traded up.

That these asshole parents have an anti-gay group supporting them says all we need to know about anti-gay groups, doesn’t it?

If you stand with abusive parents in the fight against same-sex adoption, you should probably take a good long look in the mirror and then smash it to pieces because that’s the only way you can actually respect what you are doing.

Football Player Claims a Positive Drug Test Was The Result of Second Hand Smoke

Really?  That’s the excuse he came up with? Why didn’t he just claim a dog ate his urine test?

What is it with professional athletes that they can’t say “yes, I screwed up and violated the substance abuse policy?”  Instead, they come up with excuses that sound stupid because they are stupid.

Honestly, all I did was tie some knots. I swear I wasn’t smoking the rope!

Now look, I happen to think a policy banning the use of marijuana is a bad idea in the first place.  However, these guys are getting paid millions of dollars to play football.  Most of them have about ten years before they enter the private sector at which point they will have plenty of money with which they can spend the rest of their life stoned.

I realize we aren’t much for delayed gratification in this life but still, if I was getting paid millions of dollars a year, I think I could make a sacrifice or two.

And if I got caught snorting cocaine, I wouldn’t claim that I failed a drug test because I was watching Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction.

“Team No Hoes” Outs A Woman With An STD So They Can Make Fun Of Her

So much is wrong with this story that I don’t even know where to start.

Let’s start with the obvious criminal act of hospital personnel releasing private information to a group on the internet.  Then we’ll move on to that group publishing the illegal information.

All that is more than enough for these people to be shunned at dinner parties.  Shunning probably doesn’t go far enough, actually. Everyone else at the party should throw food at them.

But then they all decide to make fun of this woman – who is a real person with feelings – because she has an STD.  She’s not the only person with an STD.  Hell, I’ll bet at least one of the people making fun of her has an STD.  She got it from somewhere.

Serves her right for being sexually active, right?  Ha ha ha!  However any guy who gets an STD from her is a victim!!!!!

Who thought this was funny?  Who thought this was OK?

No, not all guys are like this.  As a guy, though, I’d like to say that I’m pretty fucking pissed that any guys are like this.

Crazy Anti-Vaxx Lady Is On The Daily Show And Considers Her Appearance A Success

What is fascinating about this lady is she seems positively cheerful about the fact she was eviscerated on national television because she figures it gets her point of view out there.

Sadly, she may be right.

What the Daily show segment did was expose someone as obstinate as the fundamentalist Christians who annoy me so frequently.  She has not interest in evidence unless it supports what she already believes.

Has she even heard of confirmation bias or does she think that she is immune?

It is interesting that whenever someone chooses to disagree with scientific fact, they simply dismiss the source of the data that disagrees with theirs.  There is always a vast conspiracy that is working to support the “incorrect” claims (evolution happened, climate change is happening and is caused by people, vaccinations are safe) and suppress the “truth.”

Anti vaxxers may point and laugh at creationists without ever realizing they are using the same logic to support their own particular flavor of anti science bullshit.  They can’t see it.  It’s embarrassing.

Dude on Fox “News” Thinks Neil deGrasse Tyson Deserved To Be Racially Profiled Because He’s Black

Yeah, I know.  I shouldn’t get so annoyed at some idiotic douchebag who was handed a microphone by Fox. Any network that can call on Oliver North to criticize Obama’s decisions regarding hostage negotiations has already established a pattern of bad choices.

The headline of the article is critical of this guy because he says white liberals love Tyson.  As a white liberal I guess I have to say yeah, OK, I really like him.  Way to go, Fox News jackass.  You nailed it.  Even though he was white, I liked Carl Sagan too.

But then he goes on to say that of course Tyson was racially profiled because he looked like a guy who should be racially profiled.  If he wasn’t black, he wouldn’t have that problem. The guy got what he deserved!

This dope also questions Tyson’s credentials as an astrophysicist.  One assumes that he didn’t ignore Tyson’s PhD in astrophysics but rather he doesn’t think that the degree counts if you give it to a black guy.  They just did it because of affirmative action.