Category: Side Notes

What Makes Me Laugh

The day before yesterday, if you talked to many members of the gun rights community, you would have learned that Starbucks sell some of the best damned coffee this side of Sagittarius A*. In addition to absolutely banging coffee you would have also learned about Starbucks’ excellent selection of delectable pastries. You would wonder why anybody would bother going to the obviously inferior likes of Dunn Brothers or Caribou Coffee when they could have excellence from a company that has always been rabid supporter of right to keep and bear arms!

Somehow Starbucks managed to change everything it did overnight. Now asking many members of the gun rights community about Starbucks will lead you to learn about its absolutely shitty coffee. You may wonder exactly how shitty Starbucks’ coffee is. Fear not because you will be told that you need only imagine the worse coffee you’ve ever had and multiply its shittiness by infinity + 1. But don’t worry because these friendly advice givers will gladly point you to the local Super America, which they will note has way better coffee for a fraction of the price. You will also be warned about the dry, flavorless concoctions that Starbucks tries to pass off as pastries. Fortunately Super America sells pastries. They may be three day old pastries but, according to the gun rights activists I’ve talked to today, they still taste way better than Starbucks’ pastries.

Seriously guys, this shit is hilarious. I haven’t seen this many opinions change this quickly since Orson Scott Card announced his hatred of homosexuality.

The “No True Anarchist” Fallacy

I think the most entertaining aspect about anarchism is the fragmentation that exists within the philosophy. Such fragmentation isn’t unusual. No philosophy that I’m aware of has remained united. But anarchism, as a philosophy I personally identify with, is more entertaining to write about than most other philosophies.

There are many heated debates within anarchist communities. My favorite debate at the moment is whether or not anarcho-capitalists are real anarchists. For the sake of transparency I will note that my path to anarchism started in libertarianism and move towards anarcho-capitalism. While I now identify primarily with discordianism, I feel that I’m still marginally qualified to speak on matters involving anarcho-capitalism. With that out of the way, let’s discuss the argument.

The reason this is currently my favorite argument is because it’s quite clear that traditional anarchists, who identify with socialism, don’t like the term anarcho-capitalists and anarcho-capitalists don’t care what traditional anarchists like or don’t like. Traditional anarchists are spending a great deal of their time and energy explaining why anarcho-capitalists aren’t real anarchists and anarcho-capitalists are saying “We don’t care. Have fun with your semantic argument.” If you participate in any online anarchist communities you quickly learn that traditional anarchists have a tendency to isolate themselves from anarcho-capitalists. This isolation has two effects. First, it creates an echo chamber where ideological dissent is crushed. Crushing ideological dissent is the most effective way to ensure your movement never advances. Second, it leaves anarcho-capitalists free to go about their business unfettered. While traditional anarchists are telling anybody who will listen, which is only other traditional anarchists, that anarcho-capitalists aren’t real anarchists, anarcho-capitalists are expanding their philosophy and proselytizing to gain more memebers.

What’s even funnier is the common justification traditional anarchists give for spending so much time declaring anarcho-capitalists heathens. Their reason is that they are trying to prevent the term anarchism from being hijacked. Considering the majority of the world believes anarchism is synonymous with molotov-cocktail-throwing-asshole-who-wants-to-bring-death-and-destruction-down-upon-all I believe it’s accurate to say that the term has already been hijacked. The definition of anarchism used by traditional anarchists is a minority definition compared to the definition used by most people. At this point traditional anarchists can only claim to be trying to reclaim the term. If I were going to reclaim the term anarchism I would start by trying to change the common vernacular definition.

As for me, I don’t care. One of the reasons I identify with discordianism is because it encourages schisms and cabals. You don’t have to worry about philosophical arguments about who is a real discordian because the philosophy itself encourages everybody to define the term however they want. That frees me from worthless semantic arguments and allows to go focus on what I love: promoting the idea of freedom.

Check Back Later

You’ll notice a lack of fresh content today. That is due to the fact that I had to travel to Duluth this weekend for a wedding. Instead of going to the wedding and rushing back to write more posts I decided to tour the city with my girlfriend. While I can’t comfort those waiting with bated for new posts I can offer the vast library of previous posts for your reading pleasure.

The Nonissue of Chelsea Manning

You have to give the state’s propaganda arm credit, they known how to cover up an important story with a unimportant one. If you were to believe the media you would think the news that the person formerly known as Bradley Manning is now Chelsea Manning is new. Truth be told, everybody who has been following this story has known that, during her deployment to Iraq, Chelsea had communications with a gender councilor. Manning even contacted her master sergeant, Paul Adkins, and informed him that she was suffering from gender dysphoria. So this news isn’t new.

But the media is giving it wall-to-wall coverage. Why? I’m unable to read minds but I’m guessing the reason major media outlets are covering this story is to discredit Manning. In the United States people suffering gender dysphoria are often treated as weird or somehow lesser. This attitude is strong enough in some people that they will now view Manning negatively no matter what good deeds she did or does.

Let’s not lose sight of the fact that Manning, regardless of her gender identity, is a hero. She provided proof that supported the accusations of war crimes being made against the United States. In my opinion she was executing a warrant against a suspected wrongdoer. Now that the collected evidence has been sifted through and proof has been found of criminal activity we should be focusing all of our attention of prosecuting the evildoers. Instead we’re wasting our time with nonissues, such as Manning’s preferred gender, and prosecuting the person who brought us the evidence.

E-Mail Servers: The Bane of My Existence

E-mail is a really shitty means of communication. The amount of spam versus the amount of legitimate mails is skewed heavily towards the useless advertisers and phishers, the underlying software to run an e-mail server is complex, and there is no way to implement complete security and anonymity. Why am I complaining about this? Because I spent all night upgrading my e-mail server.

There’s no point to this post, I just wanted to bitch and moan.

I’m Back

Defcon has concluded and I’m back in the Twin Cities. I plan to write a post detailing some of the cooler things I saw at the conference later but for now I’m just going to say I had a great time. Things may be a little slower around here than usual as I recover from my absence (557 unread e-mails, yay) but new material will be posted at regular intervals again.

I’d Give Them a Medal

Last week a group of Satanists did the entire world a giant favor by trolling the shit out of the Westboro Baptist Church. The group held a “pink mass” on the grave of Catherine Idalette Johnston, the mother of the founder of the Westboro Baptist Church, which they claimed would turn her gay in the afterlife. Finally, to add insult to injury, the man who officiated the ceremony, Lucien Greaves, placed his penis on the tombstone. While I don’t support defacing graves, I also don’t support the douchebaggery performed by the Westboro Baptist Church. In the end I have to deal with the latter so I’m willing to overlook the former in this case.

I was about to nominate this group of Satanists for a medal of awesomeness but, as is often the case, the state took a slightly different view of the event:

The officiant of a ritual in which gay couples kissed at the gravestone of the mother of Westboro Baptist Church founder Fred Phelps Jr., has been charged with desecration of a grave in Lauderdale County, Miss.

In a phone interview with The Huffington Post July 24, Meridian Police Capt. Dean Harper confirmed that the spokesman for New York’s Satanic Temple, who goes by the name Lucien Greaves, faces a misdemeanor charge stemming from the July 14 incident.

Fortunately, they’re only being charged with a misdemeanor. Still, I’d strongly consider giving the group the keys to the city for proving themselves to be excellent trolls trolling for a good cause.

What Probably Happened with Those Cuban Weapons

After the government of Panama detected and seized Cuban weapons bound for North Korea the general sentiment seems to be that those glorious people in Panama, who have the decency of being allied with our glorious government here in the United States, stopped those dirty Cuban communists from shipping weapons to those dirty North Korean communists. I’m wondering if a different scenario played out:

Cuban General: “Hey, Mr. President, we have to do something about all of these explosive ordinances. They’re getting old and we’re worried that they’re becoming unstable.”

Cuban President: “Can’t you detonate them in the ocean or something?”

Cuban General: “No. The Americans will get their panties in a bunch and you know how they are when their panties are in a bunch.”

Cuban President: “Yeah. Damn it, I don’t want to spend a bunch of money to dispose of those old relics.”

Cuban Bean Counter: “Why don’t we put them on a ship bound for North Korea? That way we can get the Panamanians to dispose of them after they catch them going through their canal.”

Cuban President: “Brilliant!”

Deux Ex: The Fall

As most people can probably guess I’m a huge fan of cyberpunk. There’s something really cool about the idea of merging man and machine to create something that far exceeds the capabilities of any natural person. The Deus Ex series is the epitome of cyberpunk in the video game world so I was pretty excited when Square Enix announced a new new entry in the long running series. However, I was hesitant because it was announced for iOS and to this day I haven’t played a first person game on a touch device that had even remotely decent controls.

Much to my joy I think Deus Ex is the first game to finally get the control problem solved. Although Square Enix didn’t do anything revolutionary the little shortcuts make a world of difference. Moving around in the game is done with the traditional on screen “move” zone and “look” zone. Moving your finger in the “move” zone moves your character around and moving your finger in the “look” zone moves the camera relative to your character. Where Deus Ex improves things is that you can move to a location by double-tapping it. Although it sounds like a very minor addition it saves you a lot of finger waving. You can also target an enemy, which locks your camera on it for firing purposes, by tapping them.

I haven’t made it far enough into the game to make any kind of formal judgement by the controls have impressed me. With any luck we’re entering the stage of touch screen gaming where first person shooters become enjoyable.