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Those of you who still have this journal added...for whatever reason...should know that I don't post in it anymore.

But if you still insist on following up on my ramblings, then just add the livejournal feed of my new comiblog to your friends list. Sometimes I talk about interesting crap related to science, atheism, or what have you--but usually it's just me making bad fart jokes with crappy comics. So add at your own risk.

Here's the feed: Saint Gasoline

It'll show up in your friends page with a small excerpt of each post.

I now have a real blog (and a webcomic), so this journal is strictly reserved for reading other people's entries and ranting in comments.

If you are interested in reading any of my recent thoughts, of course, feel free to visit my new awesome, totally fucking horribly drawn webcomic and poorly-written blog.

I like living with Lissa more than I thought I would. When I was living in the dorms at SMS, it never really felt like home to me. I wondered how long I would feel uncomfortable in my new apartment, but surprisingly I immediately felt comfortable here.

The only thing that I am not quite used to is Lissa herself. I am not used to seeing people (especially girlfriends) at all times of the day. I get to see Lissa when she is feeling sad, happy, depressed, and so on.

Sometimes I don't know what to think. She will sit next to me on the couch, and I can tell she is frustrated or angry or upset about something. I have no idea what to do to console her. She doesn't seem to want to talk to me at the times she is upset. It bothers me that she internalizes everything. I have no idea if she is upset about her job or if she is somehow upset with me.

Today seems to be one of those days. When she came home she didn't seem happy at all. She didn't really say much to me, but just said her workday had been annoying. Then when my friend called, I could see her get this displeased look on her face. (She dislikes my friend because I used to sort of "date" her.) She especially seemed upset when she asked me if I was going out and I said yes. We didn't end up going out, but she still seemed angry with me. I just wish I could do something to make her feel better, but I get the distinct impression that I am the reason she is upset. Soon after that she left the room for a while and then left to go to the store. I guess she is walking there.

I wonder at times like this if things are as good as they seem to be. Who knows what she is harboring inside her? I know she keeps a lot of emotions bottled up inside her. Maybe she hates me. Maybe she is sick of living with me. I really don't know. It bothers me, though. As much as this apartment feels like home to me, it sometimes feels like a house divided. There is a part of her that I can't seem to reach, and it sort of scares me.

My girlfriend (known here as the illustrious mwissa or pushesbuttons) is no doubt going to write a lengthy post about how I girlishly stepped upon a piece of her dog's poo while gallavanting around the house in the nude. She will write, in excruciating detail, about how my miniscule schlong dangled ferociously as I danced around the room, in search of the poo that I had been informed lay encrusted on the floor. She will detail how I emitted a piercing, bat-like shriek that caused an uproarious howling from the neighborhood's collective dogs, and how I subsequently ran to the bathroom like a frightened gazelle with a wounded hoof, submerging my whole body into the bathtub and rolling around as if I were cleansing myself in some sort of ecstatic religious ritual.

All of this is a viscious lie perpetrated to ruin my good name. What actually happened is that I was walking, quite bow-legged and masculine I might add, around the house in a way that did not resemble prancing at all. I was not nude, as she will indicate, but instead wearing whatever it is that masculine men wear, which is probably some sort of combination of sleeveless flannel, a construction hat, and low-hanging jeans. And when I stepped in the poo, I did not squeal like a little girl, but rather growled angrily and smote the poo into dust as if I were some vengeful tribal deity.

Okay, okay. I'm lying. I'm a little girl around poo. And somehow, some way, my foot finds a way to immerse itself in dog shit whenver it can be found upon the ground. When Lissa had remarked that she had found this particular poo today, for instance, my first remark was a surprised, "I can't believe I didn't step in it first!" As I came out to pick it up, I spotted it near my dresser. As I crept towards it, I felt something awful squish beneath my feet. In my enthusiasm for finally picking up a piece of crap without having first stepped in it, I had failed to notice the turd-mine that Squirt had carefully hidden within the folds of the carpet. The bastard had foiled me. Some people are color blind. Me, I'm incapable of seeing poo. I live in a world of my own mental-construction, and it just so happens to be a world that does not contain any poo at all. Consequently, my foot lands in the poo every single time.

Don't read this if you don't want to hear about my pee pee problems, because they are no doubt gross and disgusting and will drive you to fling yourself from the nearest window. Do read, however, if you wish to mock someone with an embarrassing pee pee problem who will soon cry himself to an inadequate sleep in an inadequate bed with an inadequate cover covering his inadequate pee pee.

Earlier today, Lissa had said that she doesn't like her weiners hard in reference to hot dogs. Well, my cock was listening. Its cock ears perked up at the sound, and my balls said, "Hey boys, let's give her what she wants!" So tonight, as I was fondling her and pretending to be retarded while sexually invading her, I suddenly find that I cannot launch the missle. All systems are go, the fuel has been pumped, and the launchpad was splayed before me, and yet my missle just nose-dives into the ocean like some sort of defunct Korean warhead.

This has never happened to me before. Normally I can get aroused by just looking at toilet paper. Now, no amount of toilet paper can save me, no matter how soiled. All I can manage is a weak little shimmy of the weinus. It simply will not grow. Weeks from now, I will no doubt be drooling and forgetting my own name as the nurse drains my catheter bag. My penis will fall off with disuse as my girlfriend takes to making it with the leftover hot dogs in our fridge, because they are harder than me and they don't hide themselves in shame under the covers because of their softness, whining like baby rabbits.

But you see, I am not used to having no control of my pee pee. It is a sad, sad day. I don't know what to do. Not even the vast expanses of internet porn seem appealing to me now, for all I want to do is bury my head in the sand like some sort of ostrich with erectile dysfunction. Maybe I could star in one of those commercials, where I run along a beach and smile while my voice-over carries the mournful tale of how I can no longer maintain an erection, and then reveal to the hopeful consumers that the answer to my problems was Viagra. And then I can do all the silly commercials that no one wants to do. The people who make these commercials will see me in the erectile dysfunction one and go like, "Hey, this guy has no dignity or class! He'll probably star in our herpes commercial!" And I will. Soon people will recognize me on the street, saying, "Hey, it's the herpes/erectile dysfunction/horrible piercing infection/guy with terrible yeast infections man!" And then I will cry silently to myself under the warm covers in my warm shame as Lissa no doubt straddles our deli meat in the kitchen.

Woe is me.

Today, Lissa's dog, after voraciously humping me awake, was surprisingly docile. I suppose all the humping wore him out. Honestly, that dog is little more than a fuzzy, semen splaying alarm clock. The only downside is that there is no snooze button to stop his mad humping frenzy. Well, I suppose the crust of dog semen that I have to chisel from my hair in the mornings is a downside, as well, but I'd rather not speak about that. It brings back memories that are much too uncomfortable for me; memories involving...childhood dog semen encounters. We've all had our childhood run-ins with dog semen, and its best to just shove them out of our conciousness and to focus upon our present mental problems.

At any rate, after being humped awake I dutifully played with the little hairball. I forgot, of course, to do things like feed it and give it water. This is why I always failed my psychology tests on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I always thought dog semen and playing were the most important needs, but for some reason this Maslow character thought that food, shelter, and other things necessary for survival were somehow more basic needs. He must have been a communist--always so obsessed with his food and shelter seeing as how he lacked my wasteful American opulence wherein food is an afterthought.

Anyway, seeing as how this entry is rapidly devolving into a description of my girlfriend's dog, I suppose I will just let the literary tide carry me away. It seems that Squirt (that's the little monster's name) hadn't been fed in a day or so. He had devoured all his food in a fit of gluttonous rage. (Well, actually the lack of food is probably more a result of our slothful disdain for leaving the house to buy pet food, but never mind that.)

Despite his hunger, I think that perhaps Squirt will grow to love the joys of starvation. You see, having no dog food to feed him, we were forced to feed him human food. (And we are using "human" in a very loose sense, owing to the fact that my diet consists mostly of corn dogs refried beans.) Squirt rejoiced in this, and he ate from his bowl as if it contained gold--not that you can eat gold or anything. That's right, it's a dog eat dog world out there, and Squirt was able to feed on my month-old hot dogs which were beginning to decompose in the fridge. Incidentally, Lissa is eating two of said hot dogs at this very moment as she sits next to me, and she is eating them without a bun, as if she is some sort of uncivilized beast frothing at the mouth and unaware that hot dogs are customarily eaten with, you know, buns.

At any rate, today was a good bonding experience with Squirt. When Lissa came home, and I found out she had a bad day, I promptly jumped up and smothered her with hugs, urging Squirt to do the same by saying, "Let's get her, Squirt! Hug time!" Squirt, however, opted out of hugging her and instead jumped against my leg while barking at me as if I were beating his owner. Oh well.

In a fit of quiet desperation, I have decided to come slowly sulking back to my online journal, having found myself quite incapable of writing a book or doing anything else similarly productive with my life. I decided to quit posting these mental ejaculations upon realizing that it was never going to cause me to skyrocket into fame and provide me mountains upon mountains of jewels, bars of gold, and such. I wanted to devote my time and energy to more worthwhile pursuits, and I set out hoping to write a book or a novel of some sort, or a reputable comic strip, or a screenplay, only to realize that I possess the attention-span of an autistic rhesus monkey who has been confronted with something shiny and which clangs seductively in the breeze. So I quit writing in my journal, in hopes of converting this energy into something far greater and much more important--something which wasn't a whiny rant about my penis size or how horrible my day was. But I soon found myself unable to write outside of the reassuring confines of my livejournal, where heaps of mindless commenting drones would assure me of my greatness while figuratively e-sucking me off. Writing nonfiction frightened me because of the necessary citations and research (which should be no problem given my proclivity for reading mass amounts of texts), and I was also frightened of publishing because countless pseudo-intellectuals on Amazon.com would no doubt trounce my book by giving it horrible one-star ratings and referring to it as a pile of dung. And the sad part would be that this would be the extent of its publicity, and professional reviewers would avoid it in favor of more stimulating and informative works, like Harry Potter and the Wizard's Underpants Part Four.

Needless to say, I didn't write much of anything. Instead, I became distracted by religious fundamentalists and evolution-deniers in forums I found while searching for porn. I typed and I typed and I typed--and all of it was for nought. All that effort could have been channeled into a ground-breaking book, but instead it was wasted upon ignorant retards who think that the fact that monkeys still exist disproves evolution. If only there could have been a drooling fundamentalist egging me on to write a book on the evils of religion, the necessity of atheism, or the flaws of the Bible! But now everyone is beating me to it. This Sam Harris character steals my idea and writes about the dangers of faith (and I still think I could have done it better than him), and now Dennett and Dawkins have books critiquing religion out on the shelves.

So now I'm back on livejournal, like some sort of bottom-feeding scumbag, and I'm here to stay. I shall waste away my writing skill here, in hopes of trying to regain "the touch" that seems to have deserted me after so prolonged an absence from any writing--that is, writing that doesn't involve telling a creationist to suck me.

I remember when I used to be witty and amusing, now I just sound like a bitter, crotchety jackass who has grown disillusioned with everything around him after spending too much time in the company of nitwits.

Try to avoid news forums, people. Only the lowest common denominators of human society congregate there. They are like a plague upon the internet. The horror. The horror!

Is flip-flopping a bad thing?

Ever since the last election, it seems to me that "flip-flopping" has become the act of a coward. It dawned on me that this fear of flip-flopping may also reflect upon America's dismal understanding of science.

Science, even more than Kerry, is the king of flip flops. Were it not for flip flops, science would never even get anywhere! Science once believed Newton, then it flip flopped and believed Einstein, and now further flip flops are being made about the specifics. The same can be said of virtually every other scientific achievement--it is built up from flip flops.

Is it really so terrible to flip flop? Let's say someone is told that his apartment building is on fire. However, the person who told him appeared to be joking. He decides to stay. A few minutes later, he notices smoke and people screaming. After this, he "flip-flops" and decides to get the heck out.

Clearly, the man flip flopped. Clearly, he didn't "stay the course". But, equally as clearly, it was a good thing he flip-flopped!

It is high time people realize that flip-flopping is not shameful, cowardly, or always a deliberate act of deception. It is better to be a flip flop than to be a fool who holds so dearly to his favored beliefs that he will let no amount of incoming evidence sway his decision.

With this anti-flip flopping mindset, people tend to go around trying to prove themselves right or everyone else wrong--but without bothering to look at the actual evidence. Everyone is simply afraid of being seen as an evil "flip flopper" who changed his mind--who was convinced by the arguments, the evidence, the observation.

The anti-flip flop mentality is one of the worst things about our country, and humanity in general. We need to do our best to fight it. If we were wrong, we were wrong, and we can thank whoever corrected us for putting us on the proper track. What this country needs is a good, flip-floppin' leader. The kind who won't stand resilently on the pan even while his underside burns black. We flip flop our pancakes, by golly, and we should flip flop our anti-flip flop attitude, too!

Who's with me?

I made a quite crappy philosophy test, and you bitches should take it. Oh, and if you know anything about philosophy, suggestions for improvements or corrections are also welcomed.

http://www.okcupid.com/tests/take?testid=13372526327873131397

Feel free to criticize or discuss this little hypothetical scenario I am offering that attempts to show why abortion is morally acceptable even if the fetus or embryo has moral rights.

There is a really fun amusement park that couples enjoy visiting called Sex Flags. The only downside of the amusement park, however, is that a deranged group of lung cancer patients have escaped a local hospital. They prowl the park and look for distracted females to attach themselves to so that they may use their healthy lungs. For a period of nine months, these lung cancer patients live off the women, until a lung transplant becomes available within the nine months. The couples know about these deranged lung cancer patients, but they often go to the amusement park anyway, because it is a very fun place to be, and there are several lung-cancer-patient preventative measures, anyway, such as putting yourself in a giant rubber tube to prevent the patients from attaching themselves to your body.

Let us say that a young couple goes the amusement park, and despite their attempts to avoid such a problem, a lung cancer patient attaches himself to the girl. Does it follow that the girl is obligated to support the patient for nine months of her life? Is she morally responsible for keeping this man alive when she did not assent to his use of her body? Try to put yourself in her shoes: a man just jumps on you and attaches himself to your lungs. Does it make sense to say that you are responsible for this man when you never assented to such a responsibility? Would it be wrong to disconnect yourself even if it meant killing the lung cancer patient?

I reason that most people would reason that it is totally acceptable to disconnect one's self from the cancer patients. The mere fact that the cancer patients cannot live without their hosts does not give them the right to live off their hosts without their assent. Nor does their hijacking of the host's body deprive the host of her right to do with her body as she will please.

Obviously, the situation mirrors the abortion scenario almost perfectly, and it reasonably shows that even if fetuses or embryos are like cancer patients in that they have moral rights--it does not follow that these moral rights obligate the mother to preserve their life at the risk of her own rights to do with her body as she pleases. As it is quite evident, a woman's freedom to do as she chooses with her own body takes precedence over any right to life--for what is a life without freedom to choose such things?

Comments? Criticisms? Assent or dissent?

In a recent St. Louis Post-Dispatch article, much ado was made about a Missouri bill that would supposedly affect the teaching of evolution. The article mentioned that the bill said teachers should distinguish between verified empirical data and theories. It also said teachers should try to minimize dogmatism by promoting a healthy skepticism. Nothing in these claims, however, poses a threat to evolution.

The bill seems to hinge on a common lay misconception that a "theory" is equivalent to a baseless conjecture. But in science, the word has no connection to its lay meaning. A theory is merely a framework that explains certain facts about the world. The facts that it explains are said to support the theory, making it much more than "baseless conjecture".

At any rate, the bill is useless at best, because scientists and teachers already do distinguish verified empirical data from theories. No credible science teacher argues that plate tectonics is "verified empirical data"--it is rather a theory designed to explain the empirical data of observed fault lines, sea floor spreading, and so on. The theory of evolution, in a similar way, is not "empirical data", but a framework designed for explaining empirical data--it predicts homologous biological structures, an evolutionary progression of life, the existence of rudimentary and vestigial parts, and so on. The fact that so many of its predictions are instantiated and no falsifying instances have come up is strong evidence that the theory is true.

Furthermore, to deny all the evidence in favor of evolution is not a form of "healthy skepticism" such that the bill wants to promote--rather it is a sort of dogmatic denial, a plugging of one's ears whilst shouting "Na-na-na! I refuse to believe it!". The bill's anti-evolution connotations (which aren't even warranted if one understands the meaning of the word "theory" in science) would actually serve to promote the dogmatism and ignorance it hopes to eradicate. Evolution is not a theory in crisis, and only someone who was dogmatically ignorant or just plain stupid could maintain this absurd claim.

Politicians should leave it to the biologists to decide what should be taught in biology class. Ignorant physicians with an obvious lack of understanding of such basic scientific terminology as the word "theory" certainly have no place writing bills about what sort of standards our schools should maintain for biology classes.

I wrote a test called "The Evolution Versus Design Test" on OKCupid quite awhile ago, and I have received many a retarded email about it ever since. The test basically mocks creationists and Intelligent Design advocates at the end, so the morons don't take kindly to it. Anyway, this is perhaps the most interesting (and dumb) email I have received about it:

i am writing this not necessarily in my defense but in the defense of the supporters of intelligent design. i am very much a student and probably will be for the rest of my life. i happen to find very many holes in the interperetation of intelligent design myself, but i find just as many in evolution. i am probably the only person on the planet that will honestly make the argument that i dont know what happened cuz i wasnt there. until we meet someone as old as the earth itself that could explain it to us, we could never know. but the issue that i have is that u seem to be a very steriotypical person. u also seem to think u are always right. i will tell u that after five minutes of conversation with me i could systematically tear everything u know for a fact down to absolute unbelief. i could do it on any subject on any side of the spectrum, and i cant lean one way or the other. until god comes down to this planet and explains a few things to me, im not going to follow his master plan. but just because he gives the world the silent treatment doesnt mean he/she/it doesnt exist. if u want science, ill give u science! i can scientifically prove the existence of god! if uve read this far, then write back if ur curious. i wrote a term paper on it in biophysics class in college. i had every athiest and believer doubting what they knew after they read that paper. welcome to my world if ur interested!
-Casta

My response was this:
I highly doubt you can disprove evolution or prove God's existence--I think if you had really managed to do something like that, your paper would be a lot more recognized and famous than it is. But go ahead, try to refute evolution.

For the record, though, I've already found a few fallacious remarks in this email:

"i am probably the only person on the planet that will honestly make the argument that i dont know what happened cuz i wasnt there"

Who says you have to "be there" to know what happened? Let's say I wasn't at home for a good five hours, and when I return, I find shit all over the floor. I have a dog. I notice that there are shit stains all over my dog's fur. Does the fact that I wasn't there mean I can't know what happened? Of course not.

"but just because he gives the world the silent treatment doesnt mean he/she/it doesnt exist."

Of course not. And just because my car always turns right when I turn the wheel right doesn't mean that it couldn't suddenly start to turn the opposite direction. This possibility, however, that is not supported by any evidence, should not be seen as any reason to suppose God does exist, or that my car will turn left when I turn the wheel right. You have to distinguish from probability and possibility

----------------

Oy. Where do these people come from?

Lissa constantly notices the number 1111. While in her presence, she has noticed this number at least four times, pointing it out on clocks, receipts, and so on. I, being wary of such a search for meaning and patterns, tried to explain that this fact doesn't need to be explained and that if she had chosen out any other number she would notice it just as often. I used the example of 12 and then would constantly point out, a minute after 11:11, that it now said 12, validating my theory. Of course, this argument did not sway her. 1111 is certainly less common than twelve, so seeing it so often seemed odd to her.

But anyone who has looked at a cloud or an ink blot knows the human mind is prone to finding patterns. This is what we do--it must have played some role in our survival while we were evolving, because we seem to be very good at it. The constant repetition of 1111, I say to myself, is only the constant use of her ability to find patterns, to pick out a random pattern (four ones) and then try to find it and give this pattern significance.

As an example of this, I remember going to a poetry slam with Lissa, and a poem emphasizing the numbers three, six, and nine was read by one of the more talented poets. She found instances of these numbers throughout nature and life--it takes NINE months to have a baby, THREE times SIX is eighteen, which is half of NINE, the number of letters in "gestation". You get the point--she would just point out observations of these numbers and then use math tricks to show how they could all be interconnected. The meaning I got from the poem wasn't the intended one--I came away from it thinking that it brilliantly pointed out that the pattern was only apparent, it was imposed upon the numbers by our minds. So I liked the poem for that reason--it just showed how we pull patterns out of things and try to attribute deeper meaning to our own creations, trying to make them into "objective" facts rather than just some sort of subjective reality. Were I to write such a poem, I would end on the note that while "object" has six letters and "objective" has nine, "subjectivity" has 12 letters, like the year has twelve months, and the 15 letters of "object" and "objective" subtracted by their their true "subjectivity", which is 12 letters, produces THREE letters, just as their are three trimesters in a birth, and three beings in one God, and so the three is equal to one, which is equal to all, which is equal to "my mind", which is a phrase of SIX letters, meaning these threes and sixes and nines are only an apparent pattern produced in the mind. And "apparent pattern" has fifteen letter, which can be broken apart into a 1 and a 5, and a one and a five make SIX. Whereas a six can be broken into a THREE and a THREE, and three times three makes NINE. But what does this really show us? Nothing.

So the point is that we produce the patterns. But Lissa was beginning to notice this number so much that I began to have my doubts--what are the chances of this occurring? Suddenly, however, I was driven back from my doubts by the ultimate realiziation that it was just a random pattern we were noticing. Nine Inch Nails helped me realize this, of all things.

As anyone knows, Trent Reznor is quite fond of saying, "Nothing can stop me now" or something similar in his songs. For some reason, his favorite lyric likes to tell everyone that he cannot be stopped. It seems that whenever I'm with Lissa, if Nine Inch Nails is playing that lyric will come up in a song. It was MY pattern that we had picked out, after only hearing it twice. Sure enough, I put in another CD and Rage Against the Machine sang the same line--"nothing can stop me now". It immediately dawned on me that this is just a random coincidence, brought out by my expectation and my prior acknowledgement of the phrase...which caused me to look for more instances of it! Lissa had chosen to notice the 11:11, and thus look for more instances of it. My experience with the "unstoppable" lyrics caused me to look for instances of it, to realize that my earlier explanation was correct--if Lissa had constantly seen the number 12 instead, then she'd just look for twelves, and would be equally as amazed.

Of course, I don't think Lissa was convinced. Because at that moment the clock flashed 11:11.
I could only sigh and look down for a minute.

At which point I could only say: "Wait for it...wait for it...A TWELVE! Holy crap, 11:12 has the number 12 in it! That is MY number! And 'subjectivity' has TWELVE letters! And a TWELVE minus the six letters of 'object' is yet another six, which is how many letters there are in 'truths', which is in turn a three and a three, and everyone knows that a lie is a word of three letters, and two lies--a lie that is a lie--will make six letters, which returns us back to the 'truths' of the world. But a false God is a being of three persons, as well, and 'false' has five letters which is the THIRD prime natural number, multiplied by the four letters of true brings us back to 12, the letters of 'subjectivity'."

(Edit: I can only imagine what sort of doomsday theories will start going round as June 6, 2006 starts to approach. Those religious nuts who are scouring the place for the "mark of the beast" will no doubt take the date of 6-6-06 as a sign that the end of days are coming.)

She seems to think that she is nothing but my toy, something that I will play with and abandon when the fun has stopped. And we certainly play--it seems that everything is laughter when she is with me. But there is more to life than play, than toys and laughter. Sometimes even sadness can be good in the arms of someone you care about.

I play and laugh, but she is not just a toy. Sometimes I will go home, take leave, or bid her goodbye when I am all laughed out. And then she will become sad, dejected, and depressed. She will think of herself as a toy whose purpose is laughter, who must remain in her toybox when the boy has finished playing. She refuses to call out, to say anything, until it is too late. The boy will enter the room and hear her sleeping whimpers at two in the morning, but he cannot wake her. She has to work, care for her dog, take responsibility. Who can even conceive of a toy with responsibilities?

I want that toy to stop playing make-believe. I want that doll to pull out her cotton stuffing, to remove those button eyes, to replace those worthless parts with flesh and feelings and desires. When I first met her, I liked her for who she was, for her humanity--not for the fact that she made me laugh when we played. When I first met her, I wanted to be able to play with her and also comfort her, to do all the things that make being a human being wonderful. Instead there's just this whimpering doll. I can hear the whimpering. I wish it would just let go, just let it all go, just let me hear everything and stop being so damned afraid. When I say I want to leave after playing, I look at her and wonder if everything is okay, or if she will wish I could have stayed. I wish she would just say it. Why is she afraid to ask something of me? Why is she afraid of burdening me? I WANT her burden. If all I wanted were a toy, I would have bought a damned toy.

But maybe everything is all wrong. Maybe I'm just blind. Maybe she's not playing the part of the toy at all; maybe she wants me to be the hero, the one who knows exactly what to do and when to do it without being told. But I don't know how to do that. All I can say is that, while I can't read minds, I will respond to calls of distress. But she has to make sure I can hear her in time. And she has to stop being so afraid that I will hear her. I would cry out for you if I had these sorts of troubles; fortunately I live a rather lazy, care-free life and don't have to worry about such bothers. Fortunately I was never horribly used or hurt in past relationships. Fortunately I don't give a rat's ass about my mininum wage job enough to get concerned about it when old ladies yell at me for not using the right kind of bag.

I do not mean to sound annoyed at her, but I think I am a little. I have tried to encourage her, to tell her that she can call me whenever she wants, to have her be more than just a toy. I want you to have at least enough faith in me to trust me with your problems, to talk to me if something is bothering you, to simply ask if you want me to be near you. I dread the thought that I regard you as so much more than a toy, yet you seem incapable of treating me as nothing but a boy who wants to play with you. That's not what I want. And I don't know how to get anything more from you. I don't know how to make you see that I care about you enough to not get angry when you call me wanting to do something, to not get angry when you want me to stay--why would someone be angry at such a thing? I have known you for a while now and I would like to believe that you could get some sort of comfort from ME instead of random emails on OKCupid or random comments on livejournal. It is insanely depressing to think that these people have taken the role I should be fulfilling.

I don't know whether to blame you or myself, to be honest. I think I have decided to blame you. I know this doesn't help considering your post about scapegoats. But as I said, I am a dumbass, on a different level than the scapegoat. Where you bah I stupidly hee and haw. Where you get blamed and feel bad, I fuck up and don't even know it until it is too late, and even then I am too stupid to realize the significance. Where no one can understand your pleas and your bahs, I am unable to understand anyone, to concerned with the fact that they are understanding my hees and haws. Where you are left alone to secure the blame, dejected and depressed--I am left alone to share the blame, but ignorant of my share and smiling stupidly away. It's a perfect union, in a way, this dumbass and this scapegoat--but sometimes the dumbass needs to be told what to do, and sometimes the scapegoat needs to know that a dumbass is in no position to blame the scapegoat for anything except being a wonderful person and showing it a wonderful time and being totally and completely obligated to it for all the wonderful things the scapegoat has done for it. The dumbass may be dumb, but it knows how to appreciate. And it knows how to love, even though it doesn't exactly know when.

For the first time ever in my life, I have witnessed the glory of a man purse. A young black man came up to my register. I, being disgruntled, grunted (or is that "dis-grunted") what was meant to be a greeting and simply kept my head down, scanning each item with furious speed, flinging it towards the wide-eyed bag boy with such dexterity that cripples and parapalegics everywhere suddenly all began to cry in jealousy.

Finally, after I threw the last item across the scanner, I looked up, belching out the total. The young man nodded, and pulled up some sort of bag. I eyed it warily, knowing that bags were horrible nuisances and hating them with intesity after having worked around them for years, and soon my hatred dissolved into inner laughter as I realized that I was looking at a man purse. It was not a tote bag, or some other sort of bag--this could only be described as a man purse.

While I'm stifling giggles, he attempts to pay with his food stamp card. Naturally, he doesn't have a balance. He probably spent all of his money on man purses. And who can blame him? It was a fine man purse.

I point out to him that the annoying sound my computer just made signaled the rejection of his food stamp card. His response was to say, "Oh, let me get my other EBT card."

Now, maybe it's just me, but I always thought the government wouldn't be stupid enough to give ONE person TWO food stamp cards. I mean, if I were running things, that'd probably be a rule or something. Perhaps they made an exception for this man--he had a man purse, after all.

Of course, instead of pulling out a second EBT card, instead he pulls out several huge piles of receipts. He must have had a life's worth of receipts in his man purse. Soon I could no longer see anything as I was buried beneath the receipts from his bottomless man purse. And no EBT card to be found.

I felt saddened, but I was forced to tell the man-purse man to get the fuck out of the store and to leave his groceries with me. So he collected his abundant receipts, stuffed them back into his man purse, and waddled away dejectedly. He was a terrible nuisance, and he wasted so much time that all the customers behind him were now scowling and speaking tersely and angrily as if the man purse fiasco had been of my devising--but I could not bring myself to hate the man purse man as much as the others did. Sure, he was cheating the government, he couldn't afford his groceries, and he had somehow collected every receipt he had ever received--but his man purse made up for it all. In retrospect, I am sort of thankful that he did not have any money. It just would have been another receipt added to the collection. I slyly would have purposely "forgotten" to give him his receipt, just out of pity. I, too, can understand the plight of receipt-collecting. My wallet bulges with the five-year old receipts I still have saved. Will I, too, be forced to buy a man purse? Will my receipt clinginess damn me to man-pursedom? Only time will tell.

I came across this gem on Advicenators today, in response to a question about which famous celebrities were gay.

Why should gay people get married? It's not natural; they can't have kids. So, why should they be allowed to get married? That's like saying I have a right to be in the NBA, even though I suck at basketball.

Naturally, I sent him a response. I basically pointed out the obvious fact that his reasoning would equally prevent infertile couples from marrying. I then pointed out that his proclamation that homosexuality is not natural would also lead to the destruction of marriage, for certainly marriage is not "natural"--seeing as how no animals outside of humans practice marriage and very few are actually monogamous to begin with. Finally, I told him that this would only justify preventing religious marriages, but not secular, state-approved marriages, because we live in a country that (thankfully) does not endorse a national religion and therefore cannot deny people such things on the basis of religious reasoning.

The subject of my message? "PWNED."

The offending answer can be found here, at the bottom:
http://www.advicenators.com/qview.php?q=415303

The following is a lengthy justification for atheism being more probable than theism.
Issues addressed:
1. Burden of Proof.
2. Absence of evidence--in some cases--is indeed evidence of absence.
3. The lack of evidence for God is one such case where we can infer nonexistence from a lack of evidence.
4. The universe we observe is incompatible with God's existence.
5. The problem of evil, the strongest case for atheism.
6. Replies to various objections to the argument from evil.

( Papa's going to take you for a ride, baby. )
Cross-posted to convert_me, agnosticism, atheism

Join my community, bitches.

funny_captions

Post pictures, and then post funny captions for the pictures. Come on, it'll be fun!

Here's an example:



"This is one small step for man, one giant walk off the plank for piratekind."

If an is does not imply an ought, what on Earth allows one to know what they ought to do? And even if there is some objective factor that can determine how we all should live our lives, how would it motivate us to do so? If morality is objective, why be moral at all?

Morality seems to me no more objective than language. Indeed, we can and should all use the word "cow" to refer to those spotted animals in fields that produce milk and eat grass. But there is no logical connection between the word "cow" and the actual cow itself. We could just as easily call the thing a duck. The only reason we refuse to do so is because there would be no language if there were not some sort of objective standard--we could not adequately talk of cows or ducks if these words had no consistent reference. "There is a cow" would become equivalent to "dkjl djei kipo" if the rules of language were trashed.

But then the question arises--why should we even use language? Language may require objective rules for its pragmatic function, but the command that one must treat the rules of language as objective would mean little to one who cared nothing for communication. If you want to be understood by others, then refer to spotted animals that produce milk when using the word "cow". But if you don't want to be understood by others, there is no reason to be objective. Speaking in gibberish is no more logically outlawed than refusing to play the game of morality.

Yes, if the concept of morality is to make any sense, we must come to an adequate definition about what sort of actions are good and what sort are evil. But there seems to be little hope of cementing this definition into place, making it a logical requirement that murder is bad or charity is good. In the same way one can deny the wish to communicate, the very hypothetical imperative that gives us reason to treat language as bounded by objective rules, one can also deny the wish to be moral, to describe things in terms of morality.

If we desire as a people to regulate each other's actions, we should at least be honest about what we are doing. Our demands for justice, goodness, and other values are equivalent to the schoolmarmish insistence of a grammarian that prepositions are not parts of speech that we should end sentences with. It is all arbitrary and utterly without any stone foundation. Our values float untethered in the air, just waiting to float away. And who really cares? Does it really matter if there is no objective agreement over which values we should keep, and which should be tossed away? Isn't that in itself a value judgment that would need justification? When Kant said the only intrinsic good was a good will, what exactly did he mean? Did he mean that, given that we are rational beings, we are required to value a good will, the ability to choose the good? Because the will is a necessary part of our being, it seems to follow that the only thing that can be called "good" is a "good" will. How is this not just an absurd tautology? Any action becomes good, for an is does not imply an ought! And no reflection on what kind of beings we are can determine any sort of categorical imperative. I AM a rational being with a will, but that does not establish any ought in regards to this will! There is no categorical imperative here! It is even logically possible to hate my own freedom, to see it as some sort of prison sentence--to see it how Sartre saw his own freedom, "condemned to be free." This "intrinsic" goodness is not even necessary for a being that is free, for value doesn't have to follow the road of common sense. It is good in the same way that a spotted animal is a cow, but this provides no categorical incentive to call a cow a cow. I shall call it what I want.

So let us just say it: There is no reason to be moral, unless we accept a morality, and there is no way to define a morality, unless we agree to certain definitions. But why try to delude ourselves that this is any unchanging, objective fact that transcends our inclinations or arbitrary edicts? Even the things that are arbitrary and changing have a value, depending on how you want to use that dreaded five-lettered word.

So I've started reviewing a bunch of crap on Amazon.com. I figured I'd read some books on philosophy, and the process of writing a review of it would help formulate the ideas I had ingested in my mind and help me learn. Instead of doing that, though, I've just used it as a sort of masturbation. Here's one review I wrote today:

The Matrix is one of those movies that is only as good as you make it. Analyzing just the bare bones story, we have nothing more than a pseudo-religious allegory, in which Christ (Neo) becomes resurrected in order to save mankind from an illusory reality, perhaps ushering mankind into some Platonic realm of true essences and Forms and souls--whatever you'd prefer to call it. But even when horrid stories attempt to become allegories, the fun of interpretation renders the movie watchable. For all intents and purposes, however, The Matrix is not a *bad* movie. It is not a great movie, either. But those viewers willing to put something into the movie are going to walk away with a much more satisfying movie-watching experience.

There is so much symbolism, so many implications, so much intended meaning to dispute here! What is reality? Morpheus can't even answer this, offering the tentative definition that it *can* be defined as electrical impulses in our brain. But that, of course, can't be correct--for then the Matrix is just as "real" as Neo's ultimate arrival in "wonderland". Indeed, it is funny that Morpheus would refer to his idea of reality as wonderland.

Who are the enemies? The machines seem more than simple robots. They are sentient beings, using humans in much the same way humans had intended to use them. While the viewers, being human, are tempted to see the inversion of this reality as the "right" one, it would still be, logically, just as immoral. If we are justified in enslaving sentient machines, then why are not sentient machines justified in enslaving sentient biological organisms? And then there are so many more questions! How do we determine whether a thing is a machine? The flying, superhuman Neo the viewer is looking up to and cheering for, after all, is nothing more than a digital representation, no more a "real person" than the agents he is fighting! And if the "reality" is to preferred to the simulation, why does the movie center on the simulation? We glorify the heroics of some digital representation, when the real Neo is strapped into a chair, or cowering on some crusty ship eating white sludge. The values we are expected to hold are actually inverted by the movie, with its explicit endorsement of escapism in its fantasy realm, with its emphasis of the glory attained in the fantasy world rather than the harsh existence in the reality.

And why accept the man machine distinction, anyway? The agents are capable of emotion, as one snarls that humans are nothing more than a virus destroying the world with intense hatreds. And the humans are little more than machines as well. They have SOCKETS in their arms and heads. Programs can be DOWNLOADED into their brains. After an intense session of downloading programs into Neo, the operator exclaims, "He's a machine." Ah, but if he is a machine, he is the enemy!

I could go on and on like this. I could tell you why Cypher is the real hero, and why Neo is an antichrist. I could explore the religious allegory with more detail. I could explor the philosophical implications, the metaphysical questions roused by the movie. But that would take up pages upon pages.

It should be obvious, then, that this decent movie is indeed worthy of four stars when one invests some effort in analyzing its themes and symbols. With an unbiased, "objective" viewing, it is a three star movie at best--but that's not the way I viewed it. The extra star is thus masturbatory, a reward not for the movie, but for the pseudo-intellectual bullshit it allows me to spout after an analysis.

For anyone interested in reading my other crappy reviews:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A1DU8DCU3JT78Q/ref=cm_pdp_reviews_see_all/104-6761611-5916737