In which I’m not looking forward to the upcoming Even Greater Depression.

1. Fox News lies regularly, and this behavior isn’t even illegal.

The country is fractured, and it’s partialy because news reportage is terribly damaged. The people who watch one station honestly believe the people who watch another station are insane because they can’t agree on “the facts.”

Well, it turns out that the news isn’t required to tell the truth, nor to give equal time to opposing views. In fact, it’s actually okay to knowingly lie on a news program:

• Fox won a Florida Appellate Court decision that ruled news media can legally lie to the public

This means that Fox, for example, can say anything it wants, without restraint, regardless of its truthfulness or accuracy, and sell this product as “news”:

• Fox News Calls Would-Be Obama Assassin ‘Occupy Shooter’ A Day After Authorities Found ‘No Connection’ To Protests

Continue reading On the Occupy movement. →

In which it’s all peace and sunshine!

People are rioting in the UK, and apparently no one can figure out why. (Hint: happy people don’t riot.) Egypt thinks they’re doing it wrong, and Egypt’s right. Authorities are freaking out that rioters are coordinating via technology so watch this space for more legislation seeking control and monitoring of electronic communication.

There are kids in jail for sending packets to corporate servers. Seriously. Fuck you very much, Paypal. It was really cool when you blocked donations to Wikileaks but allowed donations to the KKK.

Parents seem to believe that protecting children from perverts is government’s job, not their own. They’re wrong. Don’t want your 13-year-old in a chat room with a pedo? Then fucking monitor your kid yourself, breeder.

The Anonymous and Wikileaks drops are proof that government keeps horrible secrets. They tap, they lie, and they kill. Transparency is essential; allowing more and more government monitoring of citizens’ data does nothing but tighten the noose. There is no privacy on the Internet for individual users, there should be none for governments and corporations, either.

Oh, and if you don’t believe corrupt government is corrupt, human beings are starving to death in Somalia as we speak.

Have a nice day.

In which I suggest that the American Dream is propaganda.

I spend a lot of time on Twitter, and I’m following more and more political feeds (as a result of my fascination with Anonymous). I now even see tweets I disagree with, because my timeline’s not as curated as it once was.

And so this[*] bullshit happened the other day:

And it got me thinking.

“The poor” are all lazy, entitled creeps who want to take our wealth from us, right? We seem to think so, even if there really isn’t much evidence to support it. The idea’s so embedded in our cultural consciousness that even I used to believe it, to the point of being frightened of the poor: the most helpless, disenfranchised, and powerless sector of America.

Jeez. I’m not like that. I pride myself on my compassion. Where did this heartless idea really come from?

And then I realized: it came from our pride and joy, our rallying point, our deepest belief. It came from the American Dream.

Continue reading Fuck the American Dream. →

In which there’s an incoherent brain dump on love, desire, and the mind.

I am surrounded by human beings who appear to be quite infatuated with romantic love and/or the frequency and quality of sexual intercourse they are (or aren’t) experiencing.

As I’m currently seeking neither romantic love nor sex, I end up watching behaviours and parsing sentences and thinking thoughts I often can’t voice because they’d be tangential or inappropriate, but here are some of the observations I’ve been mulling over:

Romantic love hurts you because it’s false, not because you’re unworthy of it.

I’ve wasted a lot of time recovering from gut-wrenching break-ups, and I’ve seen a lot of friends waste a lot of time grappling with intense emotional and psychological pain due to failed romantic entanglements.

Romantic love isn’t a universal human experience; it was invented in or near the 12th century. Before that, we didn’t have a way to think about it or express it, so it effectively didn’t exist. People knew about love and sex and partnership and family and raising offspring together, of course, but they didn’t have some kind of nebulous, Disney-fueled desire to meet a prince or princess and live happily ever after, nor did they experience the crushing pain of disappointment and self-doubt associated with failing to achieve or maintain it.

Continue reading Love and sex. And suffering. And thinking. →

In which everyone wants to be thin and rich and have great sex. They also want to be more right than everyone else about what God wants.

The top 25 most-highlighted books on the Kindle are about vanity and fucking, the love of money, self-help, and God.

The Bible appears five times.

The other “religious” books are tortured odes to human ego’s self-worship, and are written by the unenlightened. Because when the blind lead the blind, it always works out so well!

There are six novels.

Considering how many Kindles are in use and the type of people who use them, this list is terrifying to me.

In which there’s just so much stupid shit going on that I can’t keep my mouth shut.

Here’s a list of unrelated items! I am basically bitching, here. YHBW.

1. Republicans Against War? MY ARSE.

Republicans against enforcing the Libyan no-fly zone “because it costs too much” are proof, as if we needed any, that politics are no longer about policy or even a set of beliefs but about absolutely nothing whatsoever. The GOP doesn’t like Obama because he’s a Democrat, and they’re going to block anything he does just to be contrary.

That kind of maturity is really attractive, gentlemen. Not. You rich fucks.

2. Science Fiction Would Have More Women If Not For Patriarchy!

There already are women in sci-fi. There already is science in sci-fi. Yeah, feminism and queer studies are cool, but give it a rest already: not everything is a fucking plot to punish you for having a uterus.

A lot of women don’t like science and just aren’t interested in it, period, and that’s why they drive the market for character-based, sociological science fiction. This is not something men have done! Men are not trying to keep women out of sci-fi, and there’s plenty of hard sci-fi written by women and read by women. Including me. But if I have to read one more hyper-academic, angry, factless article about how science fiction needs more women and more science, and about how those things aren’t there due to some imaginary cultural construct built by the penis people to keep women down, I will seriously go fucking ballistic. Continue reading Observations. →

In which I smack you around a little.

Here’s the deal. Gaddafi, a crazy person, whose family holds over half of Libya’s entire wealth, has been using a mercenary army to battle unarmed civilians. (A mercenary army made up of non-Libyans hired when Gaddafi lost control of the Libyan army after telling them to shoot their countrymen, their friends and family. These forces are NOT “pro-Gaddafi forces,” as you keep hearing, they are a combination of paid professionals and what’s left of the Libyan national army.)

What’s happening in Libya is that armies of mercenaries hired from sub-Saharan Africa are attacking normal, civilian Libyan citizens. Imagine that. Tanks and soldiers, opening fire into crowds of untrained, unarmed, non-combatant human beings. It would be like the National Guard coming to the elementary school you’re voting in and opening fire, killing everyone in the booths and in line. Do you get it now?

It’s a fucking abomination, a massive violation of human rights. Only a monster would think it’s “none of our business” or that it has “nothing to do with us”: we are the richest, most powerful nation in the world. It’s our duty to help the helpless. If we are capable of standing by while atrocities happen YET AGAIN, we might as well just go ahead and finish dropping dead of heart disease and diabetes en masse, because we deserve it. Continue reading Okay, listen up, assholes. →