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tompurdue's journal
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Remembrances of Tom Purdue  So happy to break out this image again:  "It is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married" -- Barack Obama The news today is that Justice Kennedy seems skeptical of the individual mandate, and that's the ball game. I'd meant to post on this yesterday, about how I'd steeled myself for that months ago. It was in response to a New York Times poll suggesting that most people don't want it anyway. I deleted the post for dropping the f-bomb too many times. I'm trying to reach equanimity about it. Yeah, the nation is going to be worse for it. Yeah, hatred and fear have defeated any chance of being better than we are. There will never be another health care law; that one existed only due to a perfect storm of events that will never occur again. In the end, the Obama experiment is already over, and answered in the negative, regardless of this decision. Will America come together around a centrist President? No, no they won't. Americans claim they want centrism, but they won't actually turn out to vote for it. It's the extremists who turn out, and the legislature will end up pandering to them. There's no point in trying to attract centrists. Even if they win an office as important as the Presidency, there won't be a sufficient number of them to pass any legislation. Obama may well win reelection in the fall despite this, but I honestly can't imagine why he'd want to. There's more to the Presidency than legislation; it's arguably the least of a President's duties. But it's the most visible, and this isn't really about Obama anyway. It's about what we want as a country, and the answer, apparently, is "to stop the other guys from winning," regardless of whether it's good for the country or not. I actually don't care all that much about health care legislation. I don't like health care, and to be blunt, if I ever need a lot of health care, I'd just as soon let it kill me instead. I don't see this as about me, but rather about us. And apparently, there isn't an "us". Or rather, an "us" and a "them", and I'm going to always be "them". The only way to cope with that will simply stop wanting there to be an us. Here's the thing: sluts use condoms. Conservatives are spaztastic about birth control pills because they seem to think it promotes sleeping around. But birth control pills provide only birth control, not death control. Ya know what's even scarier than an unintended pregnancy? AIDS. Birth control pills are what women in committed, long-term relationships use. Married women use birth control pills. Girls who are sleeping around use condoms, which provide both birth control and death control. Even those who are on the pill also use condoms. The pill serves many other purposes that have nothing to do with sleeping around. Arguing about birth control pills is just the wrong argument. If you really want to stop fornication, you go after the condoms. And then you can make it abundantly clear that you're not interested in personal responsibility. You just hate sex. http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifes
To all you companies advertising on Limbaugh: I am boycotting you. I will never buy your product. The key word here is never. I am not going to start patronizing you if you pull your advertising now. By supporting Limbaugh, every, you were a hateful piece of shit. If you imagine that you are less of a hateful piece of shit by deciding that this latest scandal is the last straw, then you are also a stupid piece of shit. You knew that he was this hateful all along. The best you can possibly claim for yourself is that you were so mind-bogglingly idiotic that you weren't aware who your target demographic was, and were so desperate for customers that you would use any advertising medium that hit it. And you're no less stupid today than you were yesterday. So I'm boycotting you, but this isn't one of those "win me back" boycotts. You can't fix this. You helped make the political discourse in America today so irretrievably poisonous. Limbaugh told everybody who would listen that I was stupid, that I was racist, that I hated America, that nearly every woman I've ever known is a slut, and then he took a break to advertise for your product. He can't take back what he said: people believed him, and now they despise me. Until those people stop despising me, I'm not going to purchase any of your products. And since that's not going to happen any time in the foreseeable future, you might as well carry on advertising. You've made your bed, and we're all lying in it. 
Grumpiness of the weekend: an episode of Phineas and Ferb (Disney Channel kid's show) misquoted Shakespeare: "What hempen homespuns have we swaggering here" was changed to "What flaxen homespuns...". Sounds like somebody at Disney got nervous about "hemp". "Flax" scans, at least, and probably nobody noticed but me... but I noticed.  Thanks to whimmydiddle, who pointed out that I hadn't yet posted this for yet another resounding defeat for Prop 8!But think of this more as pre-celebrating for both Washington State and (more speculatively) Illinois. We'll drag the nation into the 21st century kicking and screaming if we have to. Today, my alarm clock went off. It was an alarm I set three-and-a-half years ago, to check this prediction:
The date: November 8, 2008, four days after the election. I suppose it's not quite true, but it's pretty darn close. If I hadn't forgotten about this until today, I might have actually worried about it. It wasn't that long ago that will-she-or-won't-she was front page news. By then, it was hard to imagine why she was being taken seriously, and with the very-slightly-less stupid Michelle Bachmann in the race, she seemed redundant, as well as yesterday's news. Really, though, I'm just here to either admire the Internet, or deplore the fact that I can set an alarm for three years hence and still be here to notice it when it goes off. Birthdays are kind of odd things. There's no real magic associated with the orbital similarity to the day on which I was born. However, there is a theory that there's a limit on how many people we can know closely. It's called Dunbar's Number, though it seems odd to talk about a "number" whose value you have little idea of. It's generally thought to be around 150. And perhaps that's what birthdays are really all about. Birthdays are one way to say, "Today is yours. Today is the day I single you out in particular, among all of the other 150 or so of my acquaintances who are close enough for 'happy birthday' to be something other than a hollow stock phrase." The day itself is arbitrary, but if your circle is around 150 people, then once every 365 days is a pretty good frequency to acknowledge a person as special. If it were more frequent, then "happy birthday" would lose that symbolic meaning. There would be too many people on any given day, every day. With only 150 out of 365, most days aren't anybody's, and that's good. It highlights the ones that do. You get some doubling, but not all that much. If Dunbar's Number were much higher, we'd have to choose some other, longer period for the equivalent of birthdays. But once every 365 days is about right; it leaves enough of a trace for you to feel loved and not forgotten. It's a good interval for a reminder, independent of orbital dynamics. So, if it's your desire to wish me "happy birthday", then do so below. The above tells you what I think it means. And despite the nerdy, dry tone, those of you who know me well enough to wish me "happy birthday" know just how much that means to me. |
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