You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Rant’ category.
Another ardent believer in free speech, as long as you aren’t calling them on their bullshit, Gnyii has managed to append my last comment on a thread that, as usual with the deluded religious right, is strong with the fetus-fetish. Thus, in the interests of clarity, I’ll republish the last comment that I replied to.
Gnyii: “Given the level of your prose… I have great argument.”
LOL. You have great argument?
This is cliche liberal debate 101. It’s like you guys follow some kind of handbook on how to be an Internet troll. Step 1, make asinine comment on random conservative blog without actually reading the article. Step 2, attack the prose, grammar, or spelling of the original poster. Step 3, immediately follow up with bad prose, grammar or spelling.
Anyhoo, everything you stated in your response is fully and thoroughly addressed in my main article. It’s obvious you did not actually READ the article… that or you are so far entrenched in trying to justify murdering your own child that no amount of science or common sense will sway you. The humanity of the unborn is so scientifically established that to believe otherwise is akin to being a flat earther. But when it comes to justifying having your offsprings spine ripped out their skull to suit YOUR selfish needs, I’m sure intellectual suicide isn’t that extreme.
Anyway, go find some other blog to troll, I’m done feeding you. Your regurgitated and scientifically unfounded extremism has been addressed enough by me and at this point…. haters gonna hate, Proverbs 9:8. ;-)
Arb replies – @gnyii
Quite happy to let you leave this in moderation – This is just for you anyways :) (ed. and my readership)
It is fascinating really, when in the original article, you set the tone of what sort of response you are looking for.
G:”Petulant feminazis don’t realize that…”
Realize that you are not just talking to the rest of your ‘base’ high up on bullshit mountain, and if you start the slinging of mud, expect the same in return, my dear reality challenged friend.
G: “without actually reading the article.”
Why argue with stuff you pulled out of the right wing hate-o-sphere? Or did you want to cite the document where Planned Parenthood lobbied for children being able to express themselves sexually. I believe that you can’t, or won’t because the facts don’t seem particularly relevant to you.
G: “Step 2, attack the prose, grammar, or spelling of the original poster.”
Hmmm…let’s look at this exchange.
G: “And here I assumed everyone reading had an elementary school level understanding. Well, if your general education ever exceeds that of 6th grade biology, […]”
Arb:”Given the level of your prose, let me assure you, much less is necessary.”
Interesting it’s almost like you don’t see the savory hypocrisy in your statement. Of course, when you’re a denizen of bullshit mountain being right no-matter-what is the default setting. Just know that outside of BS mountain, we’re laughing at you. :)
G: “It’s obvious you did not actually READ the article…”
Again, poorly researched screeds are mostly boring (or did all those citations from the sources your claiming to quote disappear?). Concomitantly, your misogyny is nothing new under the sun.
G:”you are so far entrenched in trying to justify murdering your own child that no amount of science or common sense will sway you.”
LoL. You are calling the fetus a “child” and accusing me of being not following scientific facts? Not to mention the grand dramatic distortions, appeals to emotion that are so typical to anti-choice advocates when it comes to terminating a pregnancy.
G:”The humanity of the unborn is so scientifically established”
Wow, did you even read my argument? Huh, guilty of not doing what you accuse me of again. It’s very hard to take your sanctimony seriously when, after berating me for doing “x”, you go and do “x”.
Here is my argument. Try and read for comprehension next time.
“Women are autonomous human beings and have say as to what goes on in their bodies. It is absolutely their within their rights as human beings to decide to terminate their pregnancy, as it is their body. “
I never once call in question the humanity of the fetus. Assign it as much as humanity as you’d like. It’s rights should never supersede those of the women, as it is her body being used.
G:”But when it comes to justifying having your offsprings spine ripped out their skull to suit YOUR selfish needs,”
I know you’re just dying to show some fetus porn here, I can feel it. Maybe with the whingy caption “What about the Baaaaabeeeee?!?!?”.
Unlike you, I do trust women to make the best choices for planning their families. Also I arrived at that conclusion not having to consult any sky-daddies or related mythology to do so. Reality based argumentation is great, you should try it some time.
Funny how I’m almost sure you advocate for smaller government, except when its used to persecute women, then surprisingly, more government restrictions are a good thing.
Right-wingers and consistency – what is it??
G:”Your regurgitated and scientifically unfounded extremism”
You do know that “science” doesn’t have a position on abortion right? Science is concerned about facts, as opposed to the dramatic reading you’ve presented here.
G:”Anyway, go find some other blog to troll, I’m done feeding you”
Thank goodness. I’d hate for any of that reality based commentary to seep into your world view. Dangerous stuff.
*****
Sadly, this is almost always the way these conversations go when it comes to the attack on women and their reproductive rights.
I’ve always enjoyed(?) studying philosophy. The courses I’ve taken have always been intellectually challenging and have provided some small insight into explaining how we think about ‘stuff and things’. Fast forward to the present – the experience of Philosophy has changed. It is an inward cringe because what philosophy means on the interwebs is usually a dense obscurantist pile of word-guano ostensibly put forward as a “defence” of some vile maxim or another (see all of christian apologetics). Wading through the glitzy word patina to uncover, and then prove, that the author(s) is(are) self-justifying the jebus shaped hole in his heart just isn’t a satisfying intellectual experience.
So I’m with Mary on what she says about philosophers.
“What is wrong is a particular style of philosophising that results from encouraging a lot of clever young men to compete in winning arguments. These people then quickly build up a set of games out of simple oppositions and elaborate them until, in the end, nobody else can see what they are talking about. All this can go on until somebody from outside the circle finally explodes it by moving the conversation on to a quite different topic, after which the games are forgotten. Hobbes did this in the 1640s. Moore and Russell did it in the 1890s. And actually I think the time is about ripe for somebody to do it today.”
A little less word salad and a little more clarity would be a good move for Philosophy. :)
One of my responsibilities in my part time job is to ensure that the bathrooms are reasonably clean and stocked, this equates roughly to once a shift boogieing around the building with a cart full of TP and paper towel (or many times during the most dreaded of all times on campus, dance festival season, but that is a different post). I’m not sure if behaviour in bathrooms are a psychological goldmine for understanding the human psyche, but a couple of interesting behaviours come to mind when it comes to maintaining the Water-closets where I work.
1. The amazing stupidity of people who think that wetting a bit of paper towel or TP and putting it on the roll of TP; thus ruining an entire roll of toilet paper. For what? What brave crusade are you fighting here dudes (and it is always dudes, not once in my 10 years working have I seen women be this stupid)? Your brave ‘fuck the system’ stance starts with destroying 45 cents worth of TP? Your cherished radical narchism has no room for bumfluff? The fuq? I just don’t get it.
2. For point two we have pictorial evidence. Observe.
Aww, you don’t want to catch anything from the nasty toilet seat, amiright? Your fine sense of hygiene is protecting your valued tuckus by laying down that half-micron thick patina of toilet paper protection. You are good now, “golden” even. You can do your business confidently and securely. Your commitment to cleanliness and hygiene should be applauded.
So, hyper hygiene freaks, why do you leave the TP on the seat? What is your reasoning behind this? Is pushing the TP the two centimeters into the bowl some sort Everest K2 type of task? Is Atlas pounding on the door demanding that you save some of that world-lifting action for him? If you’re all squicky about touching the TP your ass was just on could you not use your foot and nudge the now “toxic” paper straight into the loo (it is what I do after shaking my head for having to deal with your idiocy)?
Here is my hypothesis – and this applies to both dudes and dudettes – you are worried about your hygiene, but in your cravenly small self centered universe you really don’t care about the next person who has to deal with now adorned porcelain you’ve left behind. You exhibit a glaringly pathetic of empathy and consideration for the next person by not taking the two seconds to move your butt-shield into the loo. Concomitantly you are also slavishly embracing the foolhardy notion of the world revolving around your special-snowflake axis of posterior protection; and that positively pisses me off.
And thus, you too my toilet dressing friend are lumped into the same opprobrium deserving category as the brave anarchists sticking it to the Man by wetting toilet paper rolls.
Do you do this? If you do, please consider reforming your behaviour as I am sure it is furrowing brows everywhere for those who have to look after restrooms and puzzle why people do such inane things on such a regular basis.
Gaah!
We live in an age of innovation. Using the great scientific advances of previous generations and implementing them in new and creative ways is huge part of our progress. No longer burdened by what we can do (mostly), the question for most fields now is how we can do it better. Can we do it faster? Can we do it cheaper? Can we do it greener? Can we do it prettier? Can we do it easier?
In these pursuits we have seen some phenomenal advances. Urban transportation has seen cars go from obnoxiously loud, disgustingly dirty, and horribly dangerous automobiles for the social elites to quick, small, light, potentially electric cars for most families, some having two or three vehicles. Computers have gone from hand cranked, room-sized bean counters to tiny tera-byte twirling do-almost-anything devices. Body armour has gone from heavy, ill-fitting, steel barrels to light-weight, bullet absorbing liquid kevlar vests. Cast iron stoves to electric grills. Horse-drawn ploughs to John Deeres. Muskets to laser-sighted assault rifles. Absolutely everything is being made with advanced materials to get the most out of just the right resources. All these technological wonders flashed through my head as I waited in yet another traffic standstill due to construction. Why are roads still made of asphalt?
Asphalt roads began being made in the early 1800’s (even before the first combustion engine cars hit the streets) and all I can find, as far as research and advancement goes, are efforts to make asphalt cheaper and faster to produce. That’s it. No new materials for roads. No ideas for the super draining, no-slip driving surface. No new compound that will last more than a year before cracking and developing potholes. Nothing. Why the hell not? Read the rest of this entry »
We need more of this in our music scene because frankly, the omnipresent bland radio pop (A big unthankyou to CBC radio 2 for adding more of this soul withering drivel to my listening day) bores the everliving fuck out of me. So hit me with some hard rock hallelujah any day of the week and I will be appreciative.
And no, it doesn’t get better and that is why its *great*. :)
Speaking of the “great” category – BOOM – Cezar from Romania nails this performance. Gold pure sonic gold.
I’m not much for the Hollywood movie-culture scene. Either I’m getting to old or too smart for the usual smarm of what Hollywood has to offer; and on that note I’d like to think of my self in the later rather than the former category.
Ironic self-delusion aside, pop culture these days rarely entices me with its chintzy glitz and shiny images. Enter Iron Man 3. This is the end chapter for Tony Stark and the current Disney/Marvel money machine. IM3 hastily ties up the plot lines started in the previous movies and attempts to give the viewer a satisfying denouement to the Iron Man story (rest assured dear readership the money-mantle is just changing form, prepare yourself for Avengers “9” and Thor Infinity).
Iron man 3 is a mediocre flick, it had all the prerequisite action and ‘witty-dialogue’, but as a final chapter those are now baseline expectations, and thus I expected more.
I suggest looking at rotten tomatoes or metacritic for an actual review of Iron Man 3 because it is not really my intent to review the movie so to speak, but rather set up a preamble to some inane meta-thoughts spawned by the viewing of said movie.
Meta-Thought #1 – How long is the superhero fad going to last? Marvel and DC are currently churning out flick after flick about super powered characters and the woes that they face, but the saturation point must soon be coming. There are only so many times we can genuine feel someone with fledgling superpowers/super-situation rediscover their humanity and victoriously battle evil to save the girl/earth/multi-verse.
Why do I tire of this? Because humanity isn’t that fucking special. Human dignity and worth are crushed as a matter of routine and a large majority of people who are not the ones with Orwell’s perpetual boot stamping on their face do not know or do not care to know about it. We stand atomized in our societies and hem and haw about the injustice going on, while those without the burden of conscience continue to perfect the system that allows for the savage exploitation of so many.
We have ‘super-problems’ in the present on a scale that individuals cannot fix. Yet, we are fed a stream of movies that exemplify individual action and ‘sacrifice’ that always somehow manages to resolve the problems and win the day. I think that the glut of hero movies being promulgated as Triple A entertainment of late represent the subconscious desires of people who feel fundamentally powerless to escape that crushing reality and identify with a idea/role that gives them some feeling of autonomy and power.
Meta-Thought #1A – A meta thought on a meta thought (Groovy!). Gee-Wilikers! How far can the Arbourist go on this thought-wanking experiment? Don’t worry gentle readership it will be all over soon, my interest and angst are waning as writing stuff like this depresses the heck out of me. But, back on topic, (let’s, like good academic writers, paraphrase the last sentence to establish a sense of coherency ((another level of meta! Holy Frak!))) the idea that somehow an individual can rid themselves of the sense of powerlessness through exclusively embracing individual action is at its very foundation misleading. Misleading in the sense that, back here in the real world, it is going to take to change things is mass-coordinated, cooperative action to change what is wrong with our societies.
The great man (and I do use “great man” because it is part of the trope, women-folk with their “feelings” just don’t cut it) that is going to change society for the better does not exist. Great men wannabees are identified and either destroyed or co-opted to work for the system rather than against it. Herein lies my discontent – the model of change we are being shown simply does not work. Individuals, without organizational support, that go against the system are crushed. It is only through collective action and coordination that change can be affected on the societal level. But we’re never given that set of blueprints to base our narratives on.
Why? Because it might inspire people to get together and actually change the system. And that is why Iron Man 3 is a mediocre movie.
(Wow…concluded just about as well as the movie did…)
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…