Life Exceeds Art, in Terms of Racist Absurdity, at CPAC

Posted on March 15, 2013 by wellsdc

I have no idea what conservatives think would have happened without slavery.

I’m having a hard time believing that this guy, who went on a bizarre rant in defense of slavery and only went downhill from there, is for real.

A panel at the Conservative Political Action Committee on Republican minority outreach exploded into controversy on Friday afternoon, after an audience member defended slavery as good for African-Americans.

The exchange occurred after an audience member from North Carolina, 30-year-old Scott Terry, asked whether Republicans could endorse races remaining separate but equal. After the presenter, K. Carl Smith of Frederick Douglass Republicans, answered by referencing a letter by Frederick Douglass forgiving his former master, the audience member said “For what? For feeding him and housing him?” Several people in the audience cheered and applauded Terry’s outburst.

ThinkProgress generally seems to have good reporting, so let’s assume for argument’s sake that its reporting on this story is accurate. Because that’s not all, folks:

When asked by ThinkProgress if he’d accept a society where African-Americans were permanently subservient to whites, he said “I’d be fine with that.” He also claimed that African-Americans “should be allowed to vote in Africa,” and that “all the Tea Parties” were concerned with the same racial problems that he was.

At one point, a woman challenged him on the Republican Party’s roots, to which Terry responded, “I didn’t know the legacy of the Republican Party included women correcting men in public.”

Look, I wouldn’t claim to be an expert on comedy, satire, or political subterfuge, but I’ve done a reasonable amount of comedy-related writing and performing in my life, such that I know a thing or two about creating a caricature of an opinion or attitude that you want to mock. The trick to creating a character who expresses or embodies a position that you want to lampoon is that you have to make that character over-the-top and believable at the same time. Have the character express opinions that might represent an absurd yet realistic extension of an actual opinion. The character has to be someone who could exist in our world.

At the moment, I am having a hard time believing that Scott Terry exists in our world.

By this, I mean that several possibilities occur to me:

Terry is an earnest, if catastrophically misguided, young man, but the depths of his depraved beliefs make me wonder how he was able to hold these beliefs, wake up and get dressed in the morning, eat food with utensils, and get to the meeting hall, all without somehow hurting himself. You know, by walking directly into a brick wall because he thought it might be a special doorway reserved for white people or something.
Terry is a James O’Keefe-caliber troll sent to make conservatives look like epic doucherockets. For the record, my opinion of James O’Keefe, based on what I have seen and read, rests somewhere around the level of inorganic material intertwined with forest undergrowth—no one really wants to come into contact with either it or the organic undergrowth, and unlike the organic stuff, it doesn’t even help trees grow. My point being, this is not meant to be a compliment for Mr. Terry.

I’m pretty sure this guy was for real, as much as it pains me to think that people younger than me think this way and are able to function in society. CPAC, after all, is the place where two white guys did a rap number last year and dropped an almost-N-bomb for comedic effect. The Republican Party boasts among their 2012 candidates a guy who thinks slavery was good for Africans because it meant that their descendants could live in the U.S. and not, you know, Africa. So yeah, I guess it’s plausible that a CPAC attendee would actually believe all the things that guy said.

Anyway, if an actual liberal wanted to smear conservatives by infiltrating and posing as a racist idiot, it would have been far more clever than this.

Photo credit: See page for author [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

When Conservatism Meets Empathy (UPDATED)

Posted on March 15, 2013 by wellsdc

1146008_19639910 Modern-day conservatism cannot survive a head-on collision with empathy, at least when the empathy is for a close loved one. That is really the only way to explain Senator Rob Portman’s (R-OH) about-face on same-sex marriage.

To be clear, I’m very glad that he has seen the light, so to speak. I also have no doubt that he will face severe backlash from his party’s “base,” who don’t seem to like any policy that expresses any sort of kindness towards people they dislike. So he went out on a limb here, and his specific reasons are perhaps not as important as the fact that he did it. I am less interested in why someone comes to the right conclusion as I am in supporting the fact that they got there. The reasons become important, however, when you consider how a change in tune will affect their positions on related issues. In this case, Senator Portman pretty much flat-out said that his mind was changed gradually after his son came out as gay in 2011. I assume he will continue to be a Republican darling on issues that do not affect his loved ones.

I don’t much feel like quoting from the senator’s self-serving justification for his flip-flop in the Columbus Dispatch, so I’ll quote Sylvia Nightshade, writing about it in Daily Kos:

[H]e never considered how the issue of gay marriage affects people until it affected him. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad he’s come over to our side (we have cookies!), but this reveals exactly why Republican politicians suck. They don’t think about things from other people’s perspective. They don’t have to struggle to eat, so they don’t think about what happens when they cut food stamps and people who already have too little to eat have even less. They have retirement savings and won’t have to depend on Social Security, so they don’t think about how gutting SS effects people who depend on it to survive. They can afford their own healthcare without any problem, so this big scary Obamacare mandate is all bad news, it can’t possibly help people who have no insurance now and just pray they don’t get sick or injured, because it doesn’t help them. They just end up paying extra taxes for people who are lazy, right? Because how else would you end up in a situation like that, unless you were lazy? Because Republican politicians aren’t lazy, and they’re all well-off, so the opposite must be true–if you’re lazy you fail at life. Thus if you’ve failed, it’s your own fault, so why should anybody else help you? Help yourself, damnit!

Leaving aside the misuse of the word “effect,” she raises many excellent points. Much of the ideology of the modern-day Republican party derives from a near-total failure (dare I say refusal?) to understand the actual lived experiences of the people affected by their policies. Perhaps the most obvious example from the past year would be Rush Limbaugh’s treatment of Sandra Fluke, who offered expressly non-sexual reasons for women to use contraception. Limbaugh, either because he is cognitively incapable of understanding that she was not talking about sex, or because he knows that his fan base won’t care that he was wrong, ignored all of the actual words that came out of her mouth and called her a slut. Repeatedly.

Same-sex couples want to get married? Well, they are sexual deviants, conservatives know, despite the fact that they want to get married and raise families.

Meanwhile, individual Republicans declare their support for policies deemed anathema to conservatism once it affects them or a family member directly. See Dick Cheney on same-sex marriage, Nancy Reagan on stem-cell research. Compare Nancy Reagan’s position on that issue to that of Rush Limbaugh.

It is tiresome to argue these points, because the only surefire way to make the point clear, apparently, is to put the effects of their policies directly in front of their faces, where it affects someone who actually matters to them.

UPDATE (04/18/2013): Peter Miller at Vice has a good piece on this phenomenon, “Republicans Don’t Have a Ton of Empathy for Strangers.” The whole thing is worth a read, but this jumped out at me:

I’m not saying that Republicans are monsters. I’m not even saying they don’t care about other people’s kids. They probably don’t, but that’s beside the point. The point is, right-wingers of all stripes, from the feisty libertarian to the noble Santorumite, are incapable of learning from the experiences of others. They just can’t help it.

He goes on to list examples, but this really captures the phenomenon for me.

Photo credit: twitchtoo on stock.xchng.

Pope Corky IX (Do It for George!!!)

Posted on March 13, 2013 by wellsdc

George Carlin offered his suggestions, in his stand-up routine and in his book Brain Droppings, about the nomenclature process in the papacy.

George_Carlin_Standup_in_2001

Through all these years, I have kept alive my one remaining childhood fantasy: I’m hoping that someday a new pope will choose the name Corky. Just once in my life, I want to look up at that balcony and see His Holiness, Pope Corky IX. I think you’d have to skip straight to nine to give him a little credibility, don’t you? Somehow, Pope Corky the First doesn’t command a great deal of authority. (Page 24)

New Pope, take the name Corky. Do it for George.

SXSW 2013 Diary, Day 2 (March 9, 2013)

Posted on March 11, 2013 by wellsdc

[Typed on an iPad with minimal proofreading.] Since it was a Saturday, I could use my fiancee’s parking pass downtown. No bus for me!

I almost immediately regretted trying to drive downtown. I got one of the last parking spaces on the roof of the garage, which I only obtained after a lengthy process of abruptly stopping to avoid rear-ending the driversnwho seem to think that you must close every 10-foot gap between you and the car in front of you at 20 mph or more.

Te first session I attended was entitled Tweets from the DMZ: Social Media in North Korea with Jean H. Lee, AP Bureau Chief for North Korea. While there was some interesting “slice of life” information about a Seoul-based journalist’s regular trips to North Korea, it mostly consisted, quite literally, of screenshots of tweets she has sent. I learned some interesting stuff, though. She said that the regime never stops her from taking pictures, but they always know what she is doing. They try to make sure she is “respectful” to her subjects more than almost anything else. South Korea has very strict limits on access to online material from the north. It is apparently illegal in South Korea to access North Korean websites, and the government has a strict firewall in place. It is illegal even to retweet something from North Korea. People in South Korea, she said, must be careful even following people in North Korea. North Korea has a few government-run sites, including Flickr, Twitter, and Instagram. The main goals of these government-run social media sites are propaganda, getting pictures of the leader out, etc. One person, during questions, basically suggested that she was a dupe of Pyongyang, doing their bidding by presenting their side of things, but she disputed this. He even suggested that North Korean agents might be in the room keeping eyes on her. She responding by inviting any North Koreans in the room to stand up and say hello. No one did, and I decided that would be a good time to leave.

Last year, I met some interesting people in the Samsung Blogger’s Lounge, so I headed there next. Let me try to be charitable here……while I recall that they used the room last year both to give bloggers a place to work and socialize and to do webcasts of interviews with people who are “buzzing” at SXSW, this year the interviews were harder to ignore. Impossible to ignore, actually. The host of these interviews is probably a very nice person, but her style is, I dare say, not suited to any room where anyone is expected to pay attention to anyone except her. She’s bubbly, goofy, and loud, is all I’m saying. I was able to finish my Day 1 blog entry, but couldn’t hold a conversation with anyone for long.

I hesitated to attend the next panel, for pretty basic social reasons of taboo and embarrassment. I’m glad I did, because it was one of the best sessions I’ve attended at any conference, ever. Not just because the presenter, Cindy Gallop, has an awesome British accent. The session was entitled The Future of Porn, and the line to get in extended out of the ballroom quite a long way. (She noted that nearly everything she was going to say in her talk could be a double entendre, andit was good to get that out of the way.) This was not a discussion of smut per se. In fact, she maintains that the sites she created, MakeLoveNotPorn.com and MakeLoveNotPorn.tv, are not porn, but “real world sex.” I’m just going to paste some things from my notes (shout-out to Evernote here):

What happens when you combine easy access to porn online with societal reluctance to discuss sex at all?
MakeLoveNotPorn compares porn world to real world. Led to TED Talk in 2009.
Not anti-porn. Issue is lack of honest conversation about sex in the real world.
Social media platforms generally won’t deal with sex. She wants to “socialize sex.” Launched MakeLoveNotPorn.tv, where people can submit their own videos of real sex. Site is curated, so it’s not like YouPorn. $5 submission/curation fee, $5 rental fee for 3 weeks unlimited viewing, 50% of revenue shared with submitters. The “Etsy of Sexy.”
Not porn, not “amateur.” They are #realworldsex. Community tells them what real world sex is.
Real world sex is funny, while porn sex is “earnest.” Sexual equivalent of “America’s Funniest Home Videos”
Real world sex is messy. Porn is “clean,” i.e. hairless, and you never see lube. No sex during periods [Ed. note: no judgment here. Whatever floats your boat.].
Real world sex is responsible. Porn either doesn’t have condoms, or they magically appear. More condom use if it seems sexy.
“Lazy person sex” – after long day, really tired, but horny. Don’t want to lift a finger to get off. No representation of that in porn or other media.
Thumbnails & copy are all SFW, so no one has to slam down the laptop when someone walks by.
You can make personalized playlists, send them to people. Lets you tell people what you like w/o awkward conversations [Ed. Note: I don’t get how this is less awkward than talking, necessarily, but what do I know?].
Could be the “Kinsey of today.” Had to design in-system scoring that is easy to use and one-handed. You hit the space bar to say “yes!”
Porn industry has been supportive. Gen Y in porn has reached out to her (entrepreneurial, ambitious, want to be part of the “new world order” of things.)
They’re not competing with porn. Most porn labeled “amateur” isn’t.
One viewer told her “Porn makes me want to jerk off. Your videos make me want to have sex.”
No bank in the U.S. will work with her because “porn” is in the name. No mainstream payment processor would work with her. Finally got PayPal challenger Douala (?) on board, had to go with a European bank and payment processor.
Porn is falling prey to the same dynamics as the music and publishing industries. Businesses play it safe by doing what everyone else is doing. Porn’s way of dealing with it is more controversial.
***”It’s not that porn degrades women. It’s that business degrades porn” Pushing any business into the shadows enables bad things to happen. She’s trying to change the world through sex, make sex better for everybody. Business world is trying to stop her. She says the business world is driven by men who believe men are their target audience. She listed women entrepreneurs who are doing great work (Nina Hartley, etc.) “Women challenge the status quo because we are never ‘it.'”
She listed a few other products or sites she felt were worth mentioning:

Vibease – device for couples in LTRs.
Offbeatr – website for sex projects
They Fit – custom-made condoms, no FDA approval in the US
Bang with Friends – launched about a month ago.

Average age of first seeing hardcore porn online today is 8. They don’t necessarily go looking for it.
Less than 5% of parents, she says, ever talk to their kids about sex. The talk has changed, as it needs to include discussion of what shows up in porn.
Legalities: 2 forms of ID, “no children, no poop, no animals.” Brought in adult industry lawyers to help.
Protecting privacy and IP: members-only site, no way to guarantee no piracy, though. They review everything submitted to the site before posting it. They remove videos on request if a couple breaks up.
Finance: adult industry-specific companies, payment processors, etc. She wants business partners who get their mission. AI-specific processors think they’re just porn, have extortionate rates. Even they though MLNP was too risky. Company like Manwin has $$$, has easier time with banking.
None of their videos have an “extraneous” cameraman. Spouse might record other spouse, or person might use webcam.
Difference between porn and sex ed. Teachers have asked to use MLNP dot com in their sex ed classes. So few people are willing to stand up for these issues, that everyone wants Cindy to do all of it.

A couple of questions stood out. Someone eventually asked if Cindy appears in any of the videos on her site. Less predictably, the questioner was a woman, and the question was asked very earnestly (as opposed to a pervy manner). A mother of teenagers got up and described how her kids have used the family computer to access adult content. She is worried about the false impressions they will get about sex, and so asked about how to use the MNLP video site to give her kids access to more realistic, perhaps even “educational” material. Mom of the Year? Quite possibly.

I could write for weeks about everything I think is wrong in the way we deal with the issue of sex. It’s prety screwed up in most of the world, but I’ll focus on the U.S. Her opening statement summed it up very well, though: we have unprecedented access to “adult” material, and not just through porn, but through an overall sexualization in our culture. At the same time, we still lack almost any ability to discuss it like rational adults, and we still attach ridiculous forms of stigma to people regarding sex. This applies to people who have sex a lot (cf. Sasha Grey), people who don’t have it at all (cf. Lolo Jones), and everything in between. And that’s only covering the conventionally-attractive young white woman demographic. Don’t get me started.

I went to a 15-minute session on copyright law after that. Blah blah fair use and so on. Then I went home to assemble more IKEA furniture.

SXSW 2013 Diary, Day 1 (March 8, 2013)

Posted on March 9, 2013 by wellsdc

I’m going to be honest here: I’m not really feeling it this year. I suspect that is approximately 100% due to the fact that I moved into a new house at the beginning of this week, and am experiencing the associated anxiety and odd depression that always seems to come with that. Don’t get me wrong, I love our new house. It’s just that I also sort of hate it at the moment.

It was in the midst of this chaos that I embarked on my second year as a badge holder at SXSW Interactive. Once again, I don’t really have a clear notion of my goals, other than to meet people, learn more about tech, blogging, and social media, and just be around talented, interesting, and occasionally self-important people. I’m sucking at the “meeting people” part so far, but being at the Austin Convention Center in a relatively festive atmosphere is a welcome reprieve from a week spent mediating between furniture deliveries, movers, and contactors. (Also, the purchase of a house with enough repair needs to quickly burn through most of our money, but let’s not go there just now.)

I took the Capital Metro rail for the first time, parking where I’m probably not supposed to park and riding the train to the final stop just outside the Convention Center. I don’t know if the train is usually that crowded, or if that is a SXSW effect, but it was a decent ride. It certainly beats trying to find parking downtown.

Since I don’t do much late-night partying anymore, I was able to arrive downtown at about 9:30, give or take, and it took a mere 5 minutes to get my badge. I remember last year needing about 20 minutes, but then seeing that the line had circumscribed the Convention Center later in the day. This would be an example of the hipness of being square – less time waiting in lines, or something.

I spent much of the morning catching up on work, and found the environment to be oddly conducive for work. Maybe there was some osmosis of creative power, or maybe I was just determined to finish so I could move on to fun things.

By the time I broke away from the siren call of legal-blogging-for-hire, I was not sure where I wanted to go. I considered catching a shuttle to a different venue for a panel on the business potential of animated GIFs, but ran into a friend who was going to a panel on disaster relief.

Disaster: The Future of Crisis Communications addressed how the Coast Guard has made use of social media and other technologies in disasters like Hurricanes Sandy and Irene. Very interesting stuff. Much of what they said seems obvious at first, but when you consider conditions after a disaster, you understand their importance, and how easy it might be to overlook them. In sufficiently serious crises, the very network we rely upon for information might be out of commission. How would we get information without our smartphones? Yes, many people still use things like radio or newspapers, but social media allows responders to get information out in, to use a cliché, real time.

Teaching Cheetahs: Disruptive Education in Africa was the only other panel I went to this day, partly because it sounded interesting, and partly because I didn’t have to change rooms. A group of panelists included two executives from a nonprofit that funds scholarships for top students from African to study at American universities, the founder of a Kenyan startup that provides tablets to students loaded with school curricula, and the director of an organziation that produces documentary videos highlighting educational needs. There was far more than I can justifiably summarize here, but the overall theme was “African solutions to African problems.” I just read an article the other day about well-intentioned but catastrophic efforts at aid to Africa, most of which amounted to dumping America’s leftovers in rural Africa rather than supporting infrastructure and education. It is also generally annoying that people in the U.S. often refer to “Africa” in a unitary sense, when in reality it is a continent with 54 countries (I think that’s the right number), about 1 billion people, and a wide diversity of culture, history, and language. It’s also more than twice the size of the U.S., so it’s big. Here are the organizations and companies represented, and I’d say they are worth checking out:

African Leadership Academy in South Africa
African Leadership Bridge in Austin, Texas
The Nobelity Project, also in Austin
eLimu, a startup based in Nairobi, Kenya

After that, I went home to assemble IKEA furniture.

Other highlights of the day included getting my picture taken in the Iron Throne…

…and also with Clifford the Big Red Dog…

There was also this odd display by 3M, which I call 3M’s 2D Hottie.

Maybe Not the Best Way to Make Friends at SXSW (UPDATED)

Posted on March 7, 2013 by wellsdc

(WARNING: I’m going to be mean in this post.)

Seems legit (via austin.craigslist.org)

Meet Daniel. Daniel is an Austin musician who just wants to meet cool people and hang out for South by Southwest, and he is offering up his place if you need somewhere to crash.

And if you’re a lady. Or two ladies. Who are willing to provide “services.”

I’m looking for one to two ladies to stay free during SXSW at my place. This is a simple deal; a free place to stay with many extras, for your services.

The precise meaning of “services” is left unstated, although you can read between the lines.

He offers many amenities, including “recording equipment and instruments” and “free internet and computer access.” This sort of begs the question: who charges for internet access at their own place?

Listed among the amenities, it is worth noting, is “a 6′ tall 190 lbs 6% body fat with ripped abs and a musician, for company.” The grammar is unclear, but I think that is all in reference to Daniel, although it is possible that he has a musician growing out of his abdomen. If he does, you can’t tell from the picture.

Anyway, Daniel wants us to know that his needs are pretty simple, and that he’s just reaching out to make new friends.

I’m just looking for cool people to hang out with during SXSW.

• Two friends
• Sisters/twins
• One girl is fine too

I mean, when I meet a woman with whom I’m interested in forming a friendship, I always ask if she has a twin. Who doesn’t?

Perhaps I am being unfair here. Perhaps this really is just an Austinite reaching out to make friendships and offer a place to stay during the city’s busiest week of the year, when hotel rooms are scarce and expensive. What do you say, Daniel?

I’m not a shallow person as this ad may seem. This is really a business deal, a nice way to meet cool people, and have some fun at the same time!

Were you maybe picturing something like this? (via moejackson.com)

A……business deal? I’m a little confused. I don’t usually include a picture of my abs in business proposals, but then again, mine are hiding under multiple layers of pizza. Yes, you said you could offer a place to stay with free home-based wifi in exchange for “services.” You also just want to make friends. With ladies, possibly twins. It’s almost like there’s something you don’t want to come right out and say……are you going to make these women clean your pool? Let’s just go with that.

Also, thank you for stating that you are not shallow. I have always found that the best way to reassure someone that you’re not shallow is to tell them that you are not shallow. Because we are all the most credible source when it comes to our own shallowness, or lack thereof.

I suppose I should applaud Daniel’s initiative. Who knows if he’ll get any responses, or if any responses he does get will be remotely close to the image he may have in his mind. He’s offering room, board, other amenities, and his abs in exchange for “services.” I have long advocated for decriminalizing sex work, and now I can point out that decriminalization would make not-shallow stuff like this mostly unnecessary.

Because I figure the post will come down soon (I can’t be the only person to have noticed it), I screencapped it here and here.

UPDATE (March 8, 2013): I forgot to give a hat tip to Damon, who brought this bit of oddness to my attention.

Big, Mysterious Things in the Desert II

Posted on March 7, 2013 by wellsdc

The Garabogazköl Basin is a large body of water in Turkmenistan that connects to the Caspian Sea via a small strait. It is very shallow and, according to Wikipedia, ridiculously salty, with a salinity level of 35%, compared to 1.2% in the Caspian Sea and 3.5% in the overall ocean. This makes it the second-saltiest body of water in the world outside of Antarctica (saltier than the Dead Sea). While Turkmenistan harvests salt from the area (obviously), it sounds like a place that is not terribly interesting.

Except for what I will call the Rectangle. On Google Maps, what would otherwise be an unassuming, albeit huge, lagoon, with a total area of about 6,900 square miles, has a large rectangular area that is either much more shallow than the rest of the lagoon, is somehow obscured, or is just not photographed as well.

Via Google Maps

There is a very large, probably 40 mile by 50 mile, rectangular area in the lagoon, with an odd shadow in the top right corner. This time, my attempts to Google my way to an answer only yielded confirmation that this is, in fact, a mysteriously obscured or incomplete area. In all likelihood, the area looks different because there is no point in going to a lot of trouble to take satellite photos of the middle of a lagoon filled with water that is too salty even for sore throat sufferers.

Still, maybe something unusual is going on. Google Maps has been known to obscure areas for security purposes.

For my part, I still hold out hope it is a breeding and training area for a new race to inhabit the oceans, sort of like Sea-Monkeys but more science-fiction-y.

Monkey_Sea__Monkey_Do_by_AbandonedUntilDeath

No, not *that* kind of sea monkey! (via jaxgraphix.deviantart.com)

Photo credit: “Monkey Sea, Monkey Do” by *JaxGraphix [CC BY-NC-ND 3.0], via deviantart.com.

I’ll Take a Check, but You Could Just Set Up an Account in the Caymans for Me…

Posted on March 6, 2013 by wellsdc

USMC-060115-M-7772K-062 An official estimate of the cost of rebuilding Iraq, or whatever it is we did, was recently released by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR). Of the roughly $60 billion spent on reconstruction, it estimates that we wasted $8 billion. The Atlantic points out that this amounts to $1,500 of taxpayer money wasted per minute.

As we all know, quite a few people believe that their tax dollars should not go towards anything they personally morally oppose. This seems to only apply to women’s reproductive health in the minds of these particular people, but let’s expand the idea further, shall we?

The population of the United States, as of the Census Bureau’s estimate at 16:19 UTC on March 6, 2013, is 315,444,368.
Applying the formula devised by top Republican thinkers, the United States has 167,185,515 taxpayers.
I have paid federal income tax for numerous years, and I own my own business, so I know that I am part of Ayn Rand’s ruling class.
If we divide the total amount of money allegedly wasted in Iraq among all American taxpayers, it comes to $47.85 per taxpayer.
If we were to divide it among both taxpayers and everyone else, it comes to $25.36.

I have often made the argument that I want my money back from the Iraq war if we don’t have to fund government activities we morally oppose. To be honest, I thought the per-taxpayer number would be higher. While I set out to make a ridiculous demand for an untenable sum from the government when I started writing this post, ten minutes ago, I see that its purpose has, ahem, evolved. Any single government program is unlikely to affect any individual taxpayer’s bill very much. The numbers sound big, but there are also a lot of Americans.

That said, if the government were to send me a check for $47.85, or even just $25.36, I’d accept it.

This still does not address the concern about funding things that someone morally opposes. For that, I guess all I can say is that the government can’t make all of the people happy all of the time, and if your opposition is to other people having the realistic ability to control their own lives and bodies, I’m inclined to say suck it up.

Photo credit: Lance Cpl. Shane S. Keller [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Living in Hell

Posted on March 4, 2013 by wellsdc

Source: Reuters, via Buzzfeed

BuzzFeed published a couple of photo sets recently about marriage equality in Washington state and elsewhere:

20 Photos That Could Change Someone’s Mind About Gay Marriage

and

60 Moments That Gave Me The Chills During Seattle’s First Day Of Marriage Equality

I admit that there was a time when I did not understand the marriage equality issue. I didn’t see why it was such a big deal. Quite a few people still oppose allow people to marry the consenting adult of their choice. They cite many reasons, all of them ultimately indefensible. But that’s not why I’m writing this today.

Look at the pictures at these links. Look at the people who have spent decades waiting for the society in which they live to accept their love as worthy of recognition.

Source: Meryl Schenker/ZUMAPRESS.com, via BuzzFeed

If you can look at these pictures, and see the joy that is so much in evidence, and yet you still maintain that limiting marriage to your particular view of it is more important than their happiness, then I have nothing kind to say to you.

Honestly, I want to tell you to go to hell. But I won’t.

If you look at these faces full of love, of lifelong commitments finally brought out of the shadows to show that they are no different than what society has deemed “normal” after all, and you still believe that your world is somehow under threat, then it is clear to me that you are already living in a hell of your own making.

A Black Dog Named Depression