seretogis

The other day I was reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog and came across this other guy’s post about bisexuality which contained this eye-roll-inducing goodness:

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.

States.

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.

So, I installed the last.fm client today on my (cough)work(/cough) laptop. It asked me if I wanted to import my (meager) iTunes listening history. How delightful, I thought, and agreed. Then I connected to my home laptop via VNC and attempted to do the same there so that I would have my full listening history.

Unfortunately, that is apparently not possible. To prevent “abuse” you can only import once, from one machine, and only upon creation of a new account. What the hell? Is there a serious concern of people with six computers simultaneously playing music and importing all six histories? What is the downside of someone even doing this? If “data integrity” is of concern, they shouldn’t allow ANY imports at all because I could easily manipulate my iTunes library XML file to report some crazy made-up shit.

Limiting imports to a one-time deal is stupid and senseless. Damn you last.fm!

Separate but equal.

We’ve all heard the above phrase, and for many it summons forth an image of a “White Only” water fountain, and a “Colored Only” fountain 50 feet away. There are certainly those who may still argue that “separate but equal” works, but I doubt many of them are proponents of gay marriage today, which is fundamentally the same concept.

Gay marriage, by means of “civil unions” or “domestic partnerships” is harmful to the spirit of equality unless it is applied universally to gay and straight couples alike. What about committed partnerships between a man and two women? A woman and two bisexual men? Will they need to wait another sixty years for their “separate but equal” union?

Why is a social contract — that’s what marriage is at its core — being limited in number and gender by the government? Why is it ever? Why, to legislate morality, of course. The people who want to limit marriage to one man and one woman (either directly or by supporting “separate but equal” options) are the same people who want to prevent you from smoking marijuana or paying that nice Korean masseuse $20 for a happy ending.

The solution, as with the “drug war” and taxes, is abolition. Strip marriage from the tax code and let social institutions handle social contracts. Strip marriage from legal documents and let the association be known for what it is — a contract between two (or more) people to share responsibility of and for assets, including each others lives.

Stories like this in The Olympian disgust me:

Pond suffered the aneurysm just before the R Family Vacations cruise ship left Miami for the Bahamas in February, Langbehn said. After Pond was taken to the emergency room, Langbehn said she was informed by a social worker that they were in an “anti-gay state” and that they needed legal paperwork before Langbehn could see Pond.

Even after a friend in Olympia faxed the legal documents that showed that Pond had authorized Langbehn to make medical decisions for her, Langbehn said she wasn’t invited to be with her partner or told anything about her condition

To what end was she prevented from being at her dying partner’s bedside? What was gained?

The other day I came across this fantastic bit of news: (as an aside, the comments for Information Week reports are a cesspool of idiocy — it’s almost unbelievable)

Google and the X Prize Foundation have announced that 10 teams will compete to put a privately funded robotic spacecraft on the moon.
The Google Lunar X Prize, announced six months ago, offers $30 million worth of prizes for the first teams to create a machine that can travel at least 500 meters on the lunar surface and send video and other images and data back to Earth.

Dr. Peter H. Diamandis, chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation, said the two organizations received more than 560 letters or inquiries of interest from more than 53 countries.

“By comparison, at the six-month point of the Ansari X Prize, we had only two teams registered,” he said in this week’s announcement. “I think we’re going to see an exciting and very competitive race to the moon, highlighted by some very creative designs unlike anything we’ve seen come out of the government space programs. Many of these teams represent some of the most creative and entrepreneurial minds in space exploration today.”

This is great. I was a big fan of the Ansari X Prize (the competition to create a craft capable of suborbital flight) and this will hopefully be as successful. These pots of gold help to create and stimulate new markets, and provide much needed incentive for R&D in those areas. It is market stimulus in a similar way that a tax refund is economic stimulus — give back some tax money, and people will spend it; put forth a $20 million prize, and people will compete for it.

These market stimulus prizes put forth by private ventures are precisely what we need, and are 180 degrees from the government standard of no-bid contracts. The Google X Prize will help bring about practical and efficient methods of space travel and exploration of the moon. I have no doubt that the hundreds of billions poured into NASA will be looked at in stark contrast of what private ventures can do for < $20 million.

Over at The Atlantic, Jim Manzi posts..

Patrick Appel points to a very interesting debate about Intelligent Design at The Corner. (To put my cards on the table, I believe ID to be pseudo-science.)

The debate about evolution is a great example of the kind of sucker play that often ensnares conservatives. Frequently, conservatives are confronted with the assertion that scientific finding X implies political or moral conclusion Y with which they vehemently disagree. Obvious examples include (X = the Modern Synthesis of Evolutionary biology, Y = atheism) and (X = increasing concentrations of atmospheric CO2 will lead to some increase in global temperatures, Y = we must implement a global regulatory and tax system to radically reduce carbon emissions). Those conservatives with access to the biggest megaphones have recently developed the habit of responding to this by challenging the scientific finding X. The same sorry spectacle of cranks, gibberish and the resulting alienation of scientists and those who respect the practical benefits of science (i.e., pretty much the whole population of the modern world) then ensues.

In general, it would be far wiser to challenge the assertion that X implies Y. Scientific findings almost never entail specific moral or political conclusions because the scope of application of science is rarely sufficient. In fact, for the two examples that I provided, I have tried to show in detail that X does not come close to implying Y.

Conservatism has often been called (by intellectuals) the “stupid party”. But I think it is more precise to say that healthy conservatism from Burke onwards has been the party of “facts trump theories”. Naturally, if you are in the business of spinning theories – that is, if you are an intellectual – this can be pretty frustrating, and it will often be to your advantage to characterize this as “stupid”. But this is what makes contemporary conservative ideology that refuses to engage seriously with the scientific enterprise so damaging: it sacrifices the key conservative virtue of empiricism.

I wholly agree. Accepting evolution implies nothing but that we likely evolved from less-developed beings to what we are today. Examples of evolution and adaptation in many forms are omnipresent. To ignore the evidence just to blindly cling to theism is ridiculous. You can be a theist and believe in the likelihood of evolutionary theory just as well, you’ll just have to think rationally as you determine the difference between literal and figurative teachings in your various religious texts.

As for global warming, I also agree that accepting a warming globe does not require one to be for cap-and-trade / carbon-credit systems. Are we making a direct impact on the Earth’s climate? Sure. Should that mean that we halt our technological advances and regress to living in caves? Of course not. Efforts for cleaner energy should certainly be made, but not at the expense of the amount or reliability of that energy. While hydroelectric and wind power make a lot of sense, those solutions are not practical everywhere. Burning coal is technologically retarded and we definitely need to move away from it as a major source of power. All signs point to nuclear power as being the answer — let’s move forward with that.

Tonight John, Emory, Tony, and I played Starcraft: The Board Game for the first time ever. I wish I could say it was fantastic fun, but it wasn’t. For the benefit of the makers of the game who may or may not be reading my blog, I have divided up my complaints into a few major points below:

STBG is too convoluted.
So, you have your planets, one of which is your starting planet and upon which you place your starting base — in one of the 2-4 “areas.” Then you have your order tokens, SPECIAL order tokens, base tokens, worker tokens, transport tokens, module/upgrade tokens, building tokens, dozens of plastic figures for units, resource cards, technology card deck, combat card deck, and your faction sheet. On top of those things you need to keep track of your conquest points (which, in the Starcraft environment don’t seem to make any sense.) There simply is too much going on, and too many fucking tokens to keep track of it all. I still have no idea what the cryptic symbols on my upgrade token meant. K.I.S.S.

STBG is SLOW.
Setting up the board and distributing / setting up our respective piles of tokens and cards took an hour. Sixty minutes. Granted, it was our first time ever and likely will only take 20 minutes next time, but it still has a substantial learning curve simply to get everything started. Each turn then comprised of three phases — planning, execution, and regrouping. During the planning phase you set up your order tokens in little stacks on whatever planets you want to build units on / invade / etc. This is a fairly quick process. Execution, on the other hand, sucks. People play their orders — initiating combat (more on that later), shuffling through cards to research technologies, building workers / units / bases / structures, and move units around the board. This involves a lot of waiting around, unless you take that time to study your own cards and potentially miss an important development.

Combat in STBG sucks.
The process itself involves aligning units against each other in formation and drawing, then playing combat cards. This takes a while. If you have four units attacking four other units, you have four completely separate skirmishes set up which all resolve individually and may result in a situation where a sole surviving zealot causes three hydralisks and a zergling to flee in terror. Stupid. Units themselves do not have any base stats (despite the seemingly useless listing of “average stats” for units on a quick reference card) so it is entirely possible to have an ültralisk lose to a firebat if you happen to place or draw a shitty card for it. That is retarded. Instead, units should utilize some form of base stats, and build off of it with the combat/technology cards. Or, simply scrap combat cards altogether. Assuming you lose a battle, the losses are catastrophic. Not only do you lose the units, you potentially can lose your base (and consequently, the ability to gather resources from the planet), and all workers which were harvesting from it. When you start with seven workers, losing four sets you back one to two turns. When the game lasts only three turns, … well … that’s just poor design.

Suddenly, it’s over.
At the end of our third turn — over three hours after we began — we drew two event cards which ended the game. Just like that. In a game which takes so long to set up, which takes multiple turns to make any reasonable progress, it is absolutely ridiculous to have the game simply end at the snap of fingers. Perhaps they were trying to emulate the experience of everyone but one person going linkdead. In the three hours we played none of us progressed past the second tech tier with any of our buildings, meaning we had perhaps three different types of units altogether.

In conclusion..
I think STBG could be a fun game but will most certainly require some user-modifications to the rules to speed things up and make combat less shitty. With D&D Minis this was easily accomplished by lowering the point and unit limits. I’m not entirely certain yet what we will need to do to fix STBG up next time. I wouldn’t spend the $80 for it yet (unless you really want some purple and green Hydralisk minis) but if you are considering spending three hours playing a Starcraft-themed board game, you probably have nothing to lose by trying it out if a friend of yours already owns it.

From one of the greatest films of all-time:

Freedom is the absolutely most important thing that any of us can experience in our lifetime.

It is more important than love, security, equality, or health. It also is a prerequisite for all of those things. Until taste absolute freedom you cannot truly feel love in an objective fashion. The blissful experiences some feel out in nature, unattached from everything else, is as close as we can get. Without freedom, security and health are meaningless. A caged bird does not live for itself, but for its owner. Its security is incomprehensible to it, or to us who sacrifice our freedom for security. As for equality, the only way any of us will be equal to another is for us both to have absolute freedom to determine our future. The outcome may not be the same, but our opportunities will be equal.

It is alternatively sad and infuriating to see freedom given and taken away so hastily. From former small-government conservatives brainwashed into accepting the sacrifice of others freedom for their own security, to bleeding-heart Robin Hoods “stealing from the rich to give to the poor,” stealing from others for what they perceive to be a good cause.

No cause, no matter how noble it may seem, is worth sacrificing freedom for it. Someone who respects freedom would never steal from one man to feed another. He would never force one man into military service to protect the state, regardless of the cause. If the cause for war cannot sustain itself by the choice of those who are able to enroll in service, the war should not be fought. If military victory requires forced enlistment in order to prevail, the battle is already lost.

If a charity cannot survive on a free and open market of ideas, it should not continue to exist — it should not, then, exist solely because of government-sponsored Robin Hoodery™. Relief of suffering is an easy sell — there is no reason why a charity cannot market itself to consumers-turned-contributors just as a set of encyclopedias was years ago. In this great information age — when dark horse candidates can raise multi-millions in a single day — a well run charitable organization can survive, even thrive, without taking freedom-stained blood money. Propping up inefficient organizations with involuntarily acquired funds (read: taxes) is reprehensible and provides no incentive for positive change within the organization.

Each organization — along with each person within it and, sadly, a majority of Americans — will do the bare minimum in order to maintain the status quo. This is unhealthy, as maintaining the status quo leads to stagnation of thoughts and ideas — of innovation. Each person and each organization must feel the sting of imminent defeat/failure so that it can recognize what it must work to avoid. If a child never experiences pain or loss, how can it have any perspective of success or failure? You must let it touch the hot stove once so that it can learn from its mistake and become a more informed and prepared individual. The same principle applies to all people and all organizations. Corporate bail-outs do nothing to teach other than the lesson that no matter how badly you fuck up the government will help you out — as long as you continue to contribute to a few dozen politicians’ campaigns. These safety nets become hammocks, and once they are reclining in one, it is difficult to dump someone out.

I was reading this SLOG post, and just had to make note of it here.

Looks like Catholic voters are still an Obama weakness, but there’s some movement in his direction. Seems to me like he could pick up a few more—especially among voters who care about just war theory, the death penalty, and asking for forgiveness when you’ve made a terrible mistake. But I was raised by hippie Catholics, so what do I know.

(If you’re curious: Obama won the small Latino vote in Virginia but lost the smaller Latino vote in Maryland.)

How disgusting. People actively showing interest in the segmentation-for-manipulation of our population in an attempt to figure out which subculture, religious affiliation, or skin color of people to appeal to for votes. The division of America is being planned and discussed in the open by politicians and their ilk who have nothing to stand on or for but turning people against each other. This Talking Points Memo puts it well at one point:

The Obama campaign’s instruction to their volunteers to steer clear of policy questions. How can we truly bring about real political change if the movement the Obama people are building is devoid of ideological content, content merely to mouth gauzy generalities about “coming together” and “yes we can”?

..and from Megan McArdle at The Atlantic:

I’m watching his speech now, and it’s inspiring. But it’s also saddening, because deep down, I don’t believe that Obama is going to change Washington, eliminate lobbying, etc. I wish he wouldn’t tell me things that I can’t possibly believe–and moreover that I can’t really understand anyone believing. He might be the best president; he might even make Washington work a little better, though I kind of doubt it. But he isn’t going to transform American politics in the utopian way his speech implies. No one who has dried out behind the ears could reasonably believe that he has this power. So why is he saying he does?

When you avoid real questions of policy and instead pander to population segments, you are not fulfilling your duty to the people as a whole. When the people themselves expect — and even encourage — that pandering, the system has failed.

A real politician who stands for actual, real, serious change, like our buddy Ron Paul, needs not pander to subgroups in an attempt to buy their votes with fake smiles and pats on the head. Unfortunately, in our broken system that means that he earns only 10% of the vote. Regardless, I would rather vote for someone I know will lose than to throw my vote away on a momentary perception of a lesser evil — or worse try to prove a point by selling my vote to a candidate with darker skin, or different genitalia.