Below is a particularly interesting tidbit:

Many people seem to care more about AIDS abroad than in the U.S. President Bush has sponsored billions of dollars in funding to prevent AIDS in third-world countries, but said little abut AIDS in the U.S. Some evangelical churches are involved in helping to combat AIDS abroad, but show no interest in AIDS in the U.S. It seems clear that they are interested in helping heterosexuals abroad, but want nothing to do with homosexuals in the U.S.

Indeed, working toward the solution to a problem when the American public are concerned seems to be to distance it from homosexuality in general. It’s not filthy filthy fags having anal sex that you’re helping, it’s poor sick African children who contracted HIV from a blood transfusion! [insert sound of checks being written.]

This same approach was tried, and failed, in regards to Prop 8. Turning a gay rights issue into a civil rights issue [in television ads] doesn’t convince the religious bigots who are so dead-set against equal rights for homosexuals. They don’t understand it as a civil rights issue because they cannot identify the importance of it, as they do not understand what it is to have less rights than others. Even some groups who should, seem to be unable to reconcile these similarities.

Ben X is a Belgian film about an autistic boy who is tormented by a majority of the below-average students he is forced into sharing a school with, and works through problems with the help of a MMORPG. Throughout the film there are cuts to and blending of that RPG world with the real-life world which are very helpful in portraying what Ben is thinking and how he is attempting to come to terms with what is occurring.

One thing that is easy [for me] to take away from the film is that public schools are ill equipped to deal with (and I’d argue simply incapable of dealing with) anything but the lowest common denominator. The instructors are powerless, the administration inept, and most of the students ruthless in their sadistic desire to destroy anyone different than they.

While I wouldn’t say I “enjoyed” Ben X, it was definitely worth the price of admission and I’d recommend it to anyone else who is subtitle-tolerant, would appreciate the MMORPG references, and is patient enough to watch yet another film about someone with a handicap.

I rate Ben X 4 out of 5 rare items.

That tells me that counting Michigan and Florida would disenfranchise a large number of voters who did not vote, because there was no campaigning and/or the voters there thought the contest would not count and so did not bother to vote.

So, voter disenfranchising now extends to voters who don’t vote? In that case, what about the 50% of the vote-able populace who don’t vote for Republican or Democrat candidates? Surely THEY are being disenfranchised as well, right?

I’ll humor this line of thinking with a counter-argument.

If voters being disenfranchised really mattered to Mr. Sullivan, I think he would examine this beyond the OMG-OBAMA-IS-TEH-WINNAR context. Clearly there is a massive percentage of people who do not find Democrat or Republican candidates to be worth the time to vote for them. Why is this, and what can be done to change the trend?

When Jesse Ventura ran for Governor of Minnesota he was a clear underdog but awakened a lot of non-voters who voted him into office. Unfortunately he was a failure of a Governor for a variety of reasons not related to his party affiliation, but the point was proven that there is a serious possibility of bringing “new” voters to the table by offering a clear and different third choice.

No 2008 Democrat or Republican candidate entertains more than roughly 25% of the voteable populace. Starry-eyed singing of “yes we can” and talk of “bringing people together” makes for a good campaign ad, in reality that 75% opposition is not going to budge.

It’s disturbing how many people have been sucked into the notion of a presidential candidate as a product, packaged brightly for consumption by the largest target market possible. We no longer are Americans, we are Black Americans, White Americans, Female Americans, Male Americans, Poor Americans, Rich Americans, Christian Americans, Jewish Americans. We are market-segments, not individuals. We are consumers of a product, not voters of a leader. The insurgence of marketing into politics, our perfection of its methods, and the dumbing-down of the general populace all work hand-in-hand towards the goal of the annihilation of personal liberty and individual thought. The dumbest 51% will hold all of us in shackles, as the lowest common denominator will rule over us.

In the free market, if a product is put forth people either buy it or don’t. If no one purchases it, the product is a failure. Imagine if our currency were our votes, and if the product that is already being marketed to us could be rejected by our saving our vote for a better product. 25% of the population (half of the voting populace) would no longer be able to buy a shoddy product on behalf of the rest of us who choose not to waste our money. No more could clinching narrow market-segments mean victory or defeat — a candidate would have to appeal to ALL Americans as individuals.

Celia is obsessively in “love” with Martin, of which Martin is aware but refuses to acknowledge. Perhaps driven by Martin to make his existence more painful in an attempt to milk ANY sort of emotion from him, she re-arranges his furniture and holds back his dog when Martin calls for him at the park. A love triangle of sorts materializes between the three main characters — Martin adores Andy, horny-horny Andy wants into the pants of Celia, and Celia wants to carve her name into Martin’s chest. Hey, I said “of sorts.”

Honesty — trust, really, and its place in relationships — is what the film is ultimately about. In the end, the most important scene of the film shows us how a lack of trust can turn someone into an emotional cripple. How without understanding how to reconcile the ethical imperfections of people, one can become a shell of a person, incapable of healthy human interactions. Only after we have proof of our wrongs will the most stubborn and untrusting of us have a chance to redeem ourselves — hopefully, before too late.

Trust is a difficult thing to give openly, particularly if you have been stung in the past. It is the single most important thing that someone can earn of you, more so than love. Love can be volatile — as in the case of Celia, whose love has twisted her into a sadistic bitch — but someone in which you can place complete trust is beyond our concept of worth. Martin’s innate distrust, not the imperfections of Celia and Andy, is the cause of his troubles. Perhaps had he been exposed to the proof at a younger age that his limited senses required, he would have learned the value of trust and thus of love without trudging through so much misery.

I rate Proof 4 out of 5 deranged housekeepers.

The possibility that everyone is born with the potential to experience both same-sex and opposite-sex attraction is borne out by the anthropologists Clelland Ford and Frank Beach in their pioneering study, Patterns Of Sexual Behaviour (1965). They examined dozens of tribal-based societies all over the world, including many where homosexual relations were common and accepted. In some, all young men went through a period of homosexuality as part of their rite of passage to manhood, and then later switched to heterosexuality and got married. Ford and Beach concluded that human sexuality was predisposed to bisexuality and that a person’s subsequent sexual orientation was largely the product of social learning and expectation: “Men and women who are totally lacking in any conscious homosexual leanings are as much a product of cultural conditioning as are the exclusive homosexuals who find heterosexual relations distasteful and unsatisfying. Both extremes represent movement away from the original, intermediate condition which includes the capacity for both forms of sexual expression”.

..thus reinforcing the idea that sexuality is in fact not binary, and that it is perfectly natural for a majority of people to engage in various sexual activities with the same gender — diluting the impact of the gay stereotype in association with homosexual behavior.

These insights suggest that if society ended its favouritism towards straightness and its chastisement of gayness, same-sex desire would, since it is an intrinsic human potentiality, be much more widespread. This doesn’t necessarily mean that a higher proportion of the population would be lesbian and gay. More likely, bisexuality would become the norm, and the prevalence of both exclusive heterosexuality and exclusive homosexuality would diminish.

I see this as a good thing. Call me a homophobe if you wish, but I do not find stereotypical gay men in any way appealing, sexually or otherwise. This distaste is not borne of any self-hatred, but of contempt for those who let themselves be so easily defined by others. As I told John, I try not to be definable with a single word — be it “fag”, “geek”, “emo” or what have you. To consider oneself gay or bisexual does not necessitate that you adhere to the applicable stereotypes. Though many people do, even if only subconsciously, and that irritates me greatly.

Adherence to negative stereotypes helps to perpetuate them and give them value. It doesn’t make me a homophobe to look down upon homosexuals (declared or otherwise) who are walking manifestations of a negative stereotype. By not adhering to it myself, I am helping to defeat it as an inaccurate label of homosexuals, whereas they are proponents of it and make it more difficult for me to fight it.

Patrick says..

dude

people should just be who they are

and not worry about stereotypes

for the realz

..which I am afraid is a bit silly. “Who they are” is imaginary. Our self is not determined in the womb, it is a culmination of our upbringing and interactions with society. We do have free will to determine who we become (as inferred by “interactions with society.”) Part of this interaction involves stereotypes — either learning from them in attempts to defeat them, or adhering to and propagating them.

There’s a part of me that’s always thinking that the bisexuals are getting the joys of homo transgression while reaping the benefits of hetero assimilation.

Please.

Homosexuals who aren’t absolute “I-like-it-like-a-latte-but-noooot-quite-there-yet” fags can enjoy homosexual transgression while fitting in with the assumed heterosexuals around him. You don’t need to be bisexual to not conform to the homosexual stereotypes.

And from the comments of that post:

My own experience echoes yours. I’ve long felt I would “get” bisexuality if I met bi guys who were in relationships with other guys and having sex with women on the side, instead of always the other way around.

Intellectually bisexuality makes sense, Kinsey scale and all that. In practice, it seems more live a closet tactic.

Intellectually it makes sense because even in nature, sexuality is not binary. We are not all either “gay” or “straight” — in fact, few of us statistically-speaking would precisely fit those labels. Labels. Our intense desire to label those people and things around us — to put them into easily understandable boxes and categories — is what drives so much misunderstanding regarding sexuality.

Mr. Bugg decries bisexuality because those who he performed oral sex on went back to their girlfriends and made fag jokes. How does that make bisexuality in any way less substantial? One can experience many things sexually and yet not tailor their lives to revolve around it. While the labels of “gay” and “straight” imply a lack of sexual attraction (and thus interaction) with the other gender, bisexuality is a very grey space in which you would be foolish to require equal-time or deny the comfort of a relationship with either gender.

Certainly some bisexuals like women more but occasionally have varying degrees of sexual interaction with men. Just as certainly, some bisexuals are much more into men but don’t deny some level of attraction or interaction with women. Just because few people have heard of a bisexual man who is in a steady relationship with another man but occasionally sleeps with women doesn’t mean that bisexuality is a figment of our collective imagination, it just suggests that perhaps the average straight woman offers something different than the average gay man. Agreed, one of the things that she offers is social acceptance, but I am wary to boil it down solely to that.

There, I said it.

Our country is a loose federation of states, all of which are intended to handle matters not specifically allocated to the federal government in the Constitution. Things like healthcare. If the California state legislature wants to attempt to enact a universal healthcare program, they are perfectly free to. However, if Alabama doesn’t want to they should not be forced to enact their own or to pay for California’s.

What about those Alabamans(?) who don’t have healthcare and want it for free? They can move to California. Surely, you say, that would cause an influx of non-tax-paying people to California to leech off of their universal healthcare system and that would be awful! Indeed — that is a major downside of providing something to everyone at no cost to the recipient.

Assuming that tax-paying individuals found universal healthcare coverage to be something valuable, they will flock to states who provide it and reinforce effective policy with the movement of their tax dollars. Hey, that sounds a lot like competition?! It certainly does — make states compete for the tax dollars of its citizens just as they do for businesses (case in point, the $75 million tax break Washington (state) is giving Microsoft for a server farm to keep it in the state.) Competition is good, it sparks innovation and necessitates efficiency.

One behemoth federal system will be garbage, and we will see no other option other than to deal with it. It will be a drain on the economic and physical well-being of our younger generations for the sake of the prescription drugs and hip replacement surgeries of the same baby boomers who are destroying Social Security (another result of no competition and federal government overreaching.)

States’ rights is hugely important, and should be considered anytime that programs like universal healthcare are considered. The federal government has their fingers in so many pies already that they simply have no right to be in — education, healthcare, drug enforcement, agriculture, steroid use in sports, the list goes on. We need to cut out all of the federal fat and get back to the basics, leaving the states to decide those really important issues like whether or not Roger Clemens is a liar and how much money to give people to not grow anything on their farm land.

Both the Republican and Democrat parties are driven by lust for power. Both Republicans and Democrats are blindly ignoring the economic crisis that they are spending us into. There no longer is a distinction in terms of economic policy between the “tax and spend liberals” and the war-mongering neo-conservatives. While the Republicans want to spend trillions on wars, Democrats want to spend trillions on universal healthcare and social safety-nets which functions as hammocks. Where the money is spent is irrelevant — it is taken from us and redistributed for votes. We are paying for them to remain in power, and not only in dollars.

I’ll believe in a “candidate for change” when one of them starts to listen to this guy:

ArsTechnica has published a review of the SSD version of the MacBook Air. The question they ask is, “is it worth another $1300?” Without even having to read it, you can safely assume “no.”

However, after reading the comparison, complete with benchmarks galore, it is very easy to see just how pointless it is to get an Air. The battery life is weak, it is slow, and doesn’t begin to stack up to a MacBook or MacBook Pro, even though it is between two and three times more expensive than the former, and more expensive than the latter with a SSD.

Near the end of the article, I noticed something funny (not ha-ha-funny):

The $1,300 question is whether the SSD is worth the extra cash. The answer seems to be no. I experienced only moderate gains in battery life and not very noticeable speed differences. The one major benefit of the SSD model is that it doesn’t cause the same types of slowdowns as the HDD model during times of high disk activity, and that’s certainly a huge plus. Speedy read times are great, too, but they are balanced out by pokey write times.

Still, even if it’s more usable, it’s hard to justify the huge price difference for the SSD model. If you’ve got an extra $1,300 to blow and, for some reason, haven’t just bought a second computer with it, perhaps the SSD model is for you. For anyone else looking to buy an Air, the HDD model appears to provide the most bang for the buck.

Um.

How about the fact that the HDD version is not worth $1,800? I imagine that if someone is stupid enough to throw away $1,800 on a “thin” poorly performing version of a MacBook that they would be stupid enough to throw away another $1,300 to get a SSD regardless of any concern for “most bang for the buck.” You heard it here folks: if you want the most bang for your buck, fuck the MacBook Air and just get a vanilla MacBook instead. Get two of them. If you want to throw away $3,100 get three and give two away to people who need them.

The MacBook Air is not marketed to people with common sense, it is marketed to people — no, idiots — who have no idea of the worth or value of a computer. It is marketed to mindless Apple fanbois with a home-made rubber replica of Steve Jobs’s junk in their mouths.