Closed for the summer

Not Exactly My Point of View

PointInstead of a rant, I'm gonna just link to this, and say that, no matter what you think, you're wrong. Everybody. Everything. All wrong.
CounterPointWrong as Wrain. Anybody?
PointlessOK, how 'bout this: I'm gonna re-read this, and you read as much as you can read. Then, I'll post something offensive and you comment on it. It'll be great, I promise.

Edit: added, 3:15pm
Here's where I'm sittin' on this, having read the first 3 and being a chunk of the way into 4:
First, I disagree with him that women are incapable of thought. Granted, he's right that women are guided by emotions to a far, far greater degree than most men. It's also creepy how right he was about the Viktor Travis/Rick anecdote. Just be happy every waking minute. That works and it's awful that it does, and its awful that I knew that before I read it from him and it's really too bad that I've used it ever.
Y'see, I suppose I'm one of those whipped husbands he talks about. Granted, I'm not married, but I've chosen to live my life with a woman and it's not possible to be sensible all the time. It is possible to affect happiness all the time, and in that way create the absolutely wonderful illusion of satisfaction. I'm afraid it's a trick we all know.
A complaint I've had for a long time: the appropriateness of crying. Personaly, I don't know how to deal with it. If, in the middle of a public appearance, President Bush chose to burst into tears instead of answering criticisms of his choices in Iraq, he would be ridiculed and his mental abilities called into question even before he'd left the room. Everyone would decide that he was doing this either because he was unfit for office or because he was ducking the question. If, in the course of a discussion, a woman bursts into tears, that's probably my fault or perhaps to be expected. If there's any kind of emotional content to the discussion, my natural tendancy to examine my situation and react, attempting to be calm, is hard and callous.
I was schooled in the 80s and 90s, and was told over and over again that women and men were absolutely and inarguably equal in all things. I honestly believed it for a long time, too. Hell, I still believe it about many and several things, with the following two exceptions: a)any given two people are not equal; b)many, many women are sore, mean and/or irrational for one week in a month, or five days in 28, or whatever their natural cycle is (vs. the regulatory nature of birth control. Your results my vary), and I'm not.
All men are created equal in the eyes of the law. This means that my status as a healthy landowner, from a family of landowners, does not entitle me to extra votes or representation in Congress. I get one vote. A blind woman with no arms or legs also gets one vote. In the eyes of the law, as regarding the intent of the Founding Fathers, we are the same because in a democratic Republic, the worth of a man is very directly equated to his ability to participate in the public discourse that is voting. However, and this may seem callous or cruel, in a foot-race, the odds will probably be on me.
As to the other thing: I don't know exactly how to elaborate. I don't menstruate: I don't have painful cramps with regularity; I don't have hormonal emotional embalances every month; I don't lose blood unless a hole is put in me. That's the truth. Does it mean women are inferior? No. Does it mean that women and men are not equal? Yes.
Women and men aren't the same. "Homosexualists," and "Heterosexualists" are not the same. It's the truth.
So, he's got a point there.
I actually took offense to his implication that women and children should be treated the same; that it is the job of a man to hand down physical and verbal reprimands to women as he would children. I think that's a load of crap, and is actually Sim using the arguement he attacks in pointing out that children are not adults and cannot be treated as such. The same goes for adults. If a man treats a woman like a child, he is not showing her the respect she deserves as a grown adult. I think this goes with my disagreement on the subject of thought. I know women can think. This fact alone is enough to require their treatment as equals.
Now, going back, I agree with him that it is the job of adults to rear children. I know my biggest regret as I grow older will be my handling of my child. I can justify it by saying that I was very young when she was born, and that this entitles me to errors in judgement regarding her upbringing, but I also thought and still think that she has received the best treatment given her options.
My parents, who are rearing her, are very good at it. They do a service that cannot be overstated with regard to their four direct children and also to Ruth. Any twisted ideas I've picked up I can, with confidence, say I picked up from the world at large and not from them. They are decent people who are, infuriatingly at times, very good parents. I'm proud, though, that neither parent claimed exclusive pervue of discipline. Neither of my parents was the "soft" one, and neither was the ogre. They are humans, guided by human moods and emotions, which is what growing children need to have exposure to.
So, that's my take right now on parts 1-3(ish). I've read the Cerebus issues these came from, but I'm a modern child and I have trouble reading from newsprint. I'm sure I absorbed more of this with this reading than from the issues. How 'bout that.

How Broken is the system?

Point Following are your New York Times Bestsellers for the week of June 20th:
Hardcover Fiction
1. Da Vinci Code
2. Rule of Four
3. Five People You Meet in Heaven
4. Angels & Demons
5. The Taking
6. Hidden Prey
7. Bergdorf Blondes
8. The Narrows
9. The Jane Austen Book Club
10. Memorial Day
11. Glorious Appearin (Left Behind 12)
12. Slightly Dangerous
13. A Good Year
14. Killer Smile
15. Double Play

Hardcover Non-Fiction
1. Dress Your Family in Corduroy & Denim
2. Eats, Shoots & Leaves
3. Big Russ & Me
4. Plan of Attack
5. Father Joe
6. Battle Ready
7. Alexander Hamilton
8. More Than Money
9. Founding Mothers
10. On the Down Low
11. Secrets of the Code
12. Three Weeks With My Brother
13. Against All Enemies
14. The Pentagon's New Map
15. Rewriting History
16. Truth & Beauty (Patchett)

Hardcover Advice, How-To & Misc
1. South Beach Diet
2. Ultimate Weight Solution
3. Purpose Driven Life
4. South Beach Diet Cookbook
5. Ultimate Weight Solution

Paperback Advice, etc.
1. Rich Dad, Poor Dad
2. 1,000 Places to See Before You Die
3. What to Expect When You're Expecting
4. The Pill Book, 11th Edition
5. Atkins for Life

Paperback Fiction
1. Anna Kerenina (The Oprah Bookclub Edition)
2. Angels & Demons
3. Dark Horse
4. The Notebook (Sparks)
5. To The Nines
6. Wild Orchids
7. Entranced (Roberts)
8. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
9. White Death
10. Johnny Angel
11. Naked Prey
12. Devin & Shane
13. Deception Point
14. A Little Fate
15. The Lovely Bones

Paperback Non-Fiction
1. Reading Lolita In Tehran
2. Tuesdays with Morrie
3. Stupid White Men
4. The Devil In the White City
5. Stiff (The Curious Lives of American Cadavers)
6. Living History
7. Friends... 'til the End
8. Bringing Down the House
9. Moneyball
10. Running with Scissors
11. Beyond Belief (Pagels)
12. Benjamin Franklin (Isaacson)
13. Me Talk Pretty One Day
14. The Faith of George W. Bush
15. A Child Called "It."

OK, so you guys get to buyin'. Those books will be the bestsellers for the week of the 20th, so you better get going.

It's Gone, It's Over Now

Point Art is fucked. Any two-bit ass can slap a little paint on a canvas or strum a couple of notes. Hell, I've done it myself. I don't dare call what I do fine art. I don't dare pretend it's anything but crap. So, where the hell does the average hack get off calling what he does great? How can anybody every claim that, in twenty years, the White Stripes or Moby or Peaches will be anything but embarrassing and dated? I mean, at the time they were actually working, people thought Huey Louis and the News were at least not crap. Now listen to anybody talk about them. A fan of the white stripes, absolutely straight-faced, said to me not two weeks ago, "Twenty years from now, people will be thanking the White Stripes for everything they're doing." No, the truth is, people will be 20 years older in 20 years, and they will either a)remember what the White Stripes are doing now fondly as a "Golden Oldy," or b)think everything about their parents' generation was lame and not worth the time it takes to ignore. Sorry. Them's the brakes. Art doesn't hold up unless it has a huge amount of skill behind it. If Leonardo spat on canvas, threw paint in its general direction and called it art, it would have been forgotten inside of a century. Only because its recorded in books and a hack movie will the work of Jackson Pollock be remembered at all. "You see, kids, in the middle of the 20th century there was a powerful movement away from skill. We called it 'modern art' because 'bag of crap' already meant something else." OK, honestly, no art teacher will ever be so direct, but you get the idea. Those who whine and claim that this is an elitist and exclusionary attitude are right. It is. People who don't have the skills necessary to make art should not make art. They should practice at home and not subject the rest of us to bullshit, unskilled attempts to create some hack meaning.
And don't even get me started on poetry. It's a useless art form on its own. With modern poetry, you can generate a random string of words and attribute any meaning you want, as the medium is garbage. At its best, it approaches music. At its worst it's this:
The buttercup
how like a
train
in a placid
dildo
afternoon.
I mean, what the fuck? Classical poetry isn't any better. It's just somebody's half-assed prose, divided into lines.
CounterPoint OK. So, the problem with this is, you're absolutely right. I can't really add much more.
Pointed Opposition I guess I have to say something here. You have to differentiate between "art" and "pop culture." Mostly all of the examples you're riding rough-shod over are pop culture. They're meant to pander to the LCD and make the common man say something along the lines of "I could do that. I mean, if I wanted to." The People Who Bother create the pop art. I think what you're actually lamenting is the loss of skill in so-called high art. Somewhere out there, somebody is making high art. Yeah, it probably doesn't appeal to any actual persons, but that's why it isn't pop art. The crossover of the two is the reason high art today sucks so effectively. There isn't, and has never been, a lot of money in making real art. In a capitalistic society, whatever makes money is what sticks around because the artist has to get money to fail to starve. The White Stripes, whom you seem to love to pick on, are just making music for the average normal person. No, it's not high art, and no, it won't be kept for posterity in any way other than that in which everything recorded in any way in the last ten years including this will be, but it's popular right now. The News weren't high art either. Popular music isn't high art, and high art tends not to be popular. Need I point you at the novelty act that Phillip Glass and John Cage are, balancing between the popular and the artistic as they do? Of course, much of that garbage leaves the realm of music and becomes performance art, but that's neither here nor there.

The End of the World

Point The end of the world is happening. It's around the corner. These are truly the end times. Famine is rampant, War is unceasing, Pestilence sweeps across every continent, and massive Death rapes the world population. These are the four signals of the end times as fortold in the Historical Document, the Holy Bible. Everything in the Bible is true, and these are fortold as the signs of the end times. Israel will be miraculously reformed as the tribes of Israel are gathered from around the globe. Armies will march down through the area now encompassed by Russia, and into the area that is now Afghanistan. The Holy Roman Empire will reform, and in this case it's the unification of Europe. The bible tells that in the end times, everyone will receive a mark written on their skin: how many people do you know who don't have tattoos? All of these are foretold in the Historical Document that is the Bible, which is supported by scholars around the world as the literal, historical truth. The Rapture will be the final sign: at that time, it will be too late.
CounterPoint Man, where to start? You're wrong. The bible is a religious book, and it's for an outmoded religion that isn't worth examining in a historical context. The world is ending because of global environmental disaster brought on by corporate greed. The "signs of the apocalypse" you bring up are all the result of the logging of old-growth forests and dumping of chemical waste into rivers, streams and oceans of the world. There has been a six degree average rise in global temperatures over the last fifty years! If this trend continues, pollution will render more than half of the earth uninhabitable by the year 2060. The ice caps will melt and cover most of the Earth's remaining landmass with water. If we don't stop corporate greed, we will burn and drown ourselves completely. The only way to stop this death is to spread organic farming methods, stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (in which, by the way, I count GEfoods) and end all forms of globalization.
Pointedly Disagreeable Lord. There's just so much fertile ground. I'll start by sowing my seeds in the bible. The bible is what it is. It fails to meet one very important criterion as a historical document: it contains prophecy. History, by definition, is what has happened. History only contains the way the world came into being, not the way it goes out. Second, in the book of Matthew 24, back in teh history part of the bible, Joshua talks about his second coming. Now, for those who can't count, let's enumerate: 1)Jesus was born into the world, lived a holy and righteous life, at least at the end for sure, and died on the cross, thus leaving the world; 2)Jesus returned, coming back to earth. I count 2 there. He came, he went, he came back, he left again. It sounds to me like the whole End Times (they actually call it the "end of the age" or the "second coming," not the "end of the world.") happened before the book was written. So there's one end of the world set aside.
What about the dire predictions about globalization? Again, where to begin? The average temperature rise over the last 100 years has been 1 degree, not 6 or 10 or any other number. It's 1. At that rate, we'll be fine for a long time. The same scientists who are predicting global warming were screaming about a new ice age thirty years ago. Where'd that go? Global Coprorate Greed has another name: Capitalism. If you don't like it, that's great and I respect that, but don't go deciding it's the same thing as environmentalism. If you hate globalization, avoid the two biggest globalized corporate ventures: telephones and the internet. Also, and this is fascinating, if we relied only on organic farming techniques, we'd be able to feed a whopping four billion people. Wow. Four billion is a lot of people, until you realize that there are six billion alive today. If two billion environmentalists want to go ahead and volunteer to save the planet and kill yourselves, go right ahead. We'll probably cover suicide in a later installment. Oh, and as for the loggers, they aren't the ones cutting down the rainforest: it's poor people who cut down the trees, farm non-native, non-adapted crops, use up the nutrients and move on. If we could, say, introduce a strain of rice that was better adapted to the area, as has been done in Mexico and parts of Africa, they wouldn't have to clear-cut and slash-and-burn areas to raise enough food to eat. I'm just sayin' is all.

Married. Buried.

Point: Marriage is a tired and useless institution, and is ready to be called obsolete. Marriage, once necessary for ending wars between clans, tribes, et cetera, and for giving away useless chattel in the form of money, gifts, daughters and herd animals, has become a civil state. It is used only to determine next of kin for debts left from life, burial expenses and who gets to take your Stuff when you Die. The institution serves no real purpose. If we believe those who are polled and those who take the polls, fully eight in ten of us will cheat on our spouses and 100% of marriages end in divorce, separation, annulment or death. Numbers don't lie, folks. Marriage is obsolete. I say we should not only not recognize marriage between gay men and women, but also not between any men or women. The simple fact of the existence of marriage is a blight on a society far evolved since the days when marriage was useful or had anything like meaning. Now, we struggle to cope with an outmoded idea long since outlived its need. Marriage is a primitive concept. We will never really leave behind our simian ancestors until we leave behind their concept of ownership by males of the females of the species. It's not anti-religious to be against marriage: it's egalitarian.
Counterpoint:That's a load of crap. First, society is based almost completely on the constant need of man to stop other humans from stealing his possessions and having sex with his wife. People cannot be trusted. That's why an "attractive nuisance" is illegal. People can't control themselves. Abolishing or even weakening marriage laws would lead to mass chaos. It's not a move forward. It's a move toward herd mentality, like simple animals. As for your "numbers," by the same logic you use all disease is fatal and all births are still births. After all, anyone who has a cold will die within zero to 100 years, and 100% of babies born will die. I don't know where you got the eight in ten number, but clearly you cannot be trusted with numerals. The fact that you manipulate data in such a nefarious way makes all of your other points suspect. This isn't about religion. God's plan is scientific and necessary. Humans wouldn't reproduce if there were not marriage. Sodom and Gomorrah are proof of that. Humans' natural state is sin. This isn't religious, this is based on the Bible, a strict historical document. The truth of these histories has been proved over and over again. You don't have to be Judeo-Christian to respect the Truth.
Pointed Head: That's all crap. People get married because they love each other and want to demonstrate to all of humanity that they intend to have a monogamous sexual relationship for the rest of their lives. Sure, it doesn't always work out, but what does? People buy a house with the intent of living there for the long term, otherwise they wouldn't shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars. You can buy a temporary dwelling for less than $100. It's called a tent. And yet, people move all the time. Life isn't just breathing, eating and dying. It's about the things that happen to you while you do. Unexpected things come up, that's why marriages end. Marriage between two people who love each other and want to have a monogamous sexual relationship and want to demonstrate that to all of society should be legal. And if Rush Limbaugh and the Republicans want to marry their dogs and demonstrate to society that they will have a monogamous sexual relationship with their ferns, that's fine with me. The fact that they even suggest that they'd like to come out and marry their dogs (to have and to hold, forsaking all others I'm just sayin' is all) is a little sick in my opinion. And the manipulation of data isn't anything new. I mean, hell, studies show that one in one of us lie at least some of the time.

Just like starting over

OK. That's enough of that crap.

He intoned quietly into the telephone:
dirtdirtdirt imyourdirt givememycoffeebitch soIcanhaveagood nightssleep
She stared in horror-struck disbelief at her receiver,
slammed the handset down
You Prick!
She stood,
walked toward the cafe,
ordered another large coffee
and brought it up to him.