One of the most prolific science fiction writers and my favorite authors has show his true colors. Orson Scott Card has recently written an article in the Mormon Times about how we, as a nation, should rise up and overthrow the government to prevent gay marriage from becoming law. It’s more than a little shocking to see this kind of rhetoric coming from such an (otherwise) brilliant man. I believe he may have what is clinically referred to as “asshole, stuck in his ways, old man syndrome” or (SIHWOMS).
How long before married people answer the dictators thus: Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn.
It’s upsetting to think that someone as creative and open-minded as Orson Scott Card can be a closed-minded bigot with little remorse for a group of people who have not only haven’t harmed him but have been lining his pockets by buying his works. Overthrow the government over something as benign as gay marriage? You crazy, you crazy. He needs to get off his pulpit and go back to writing about how one idea can change the world for the better, not how it can destroy it.
It is an exceptionally narrow view to think that allowing gays to marry will be the downfall of marriage.
The pretext is that state constitutions require it — but it is absurd to claim that these constitutions require marriage to be defined in ways that were unthinkable through all of human history until the past 15 years. And it is offensive to expect us to believe this obvious fiction.
Homosexual behavior has been around for a VERY long time, much longer than the Mormon Church. It has been celebrated for centuries and has only recently become vilified. Same-sex marriages have been recorded all the way back to the Romans and have been thought to exist before recorded history. Applying insular ideals towards people you don’t even know is not Christian, it’s wrong. Christianity is about love and hope, not advancing your own agenda.
What would Jesus do? If you can answer that question with anything other than “shower the world with endless love and understanding, then flip a wicked ollie on a flaming skateboard,” then you and I have a very different understanding of the man.
–Michael Swaim
I hope to continue enjoying his works, but it will be with a giant asterisk. This is as bad or worse as when Bradbury said Fahrenheit 451 wasn’t about censorship (You can’t apply your current morals to your past morals in a revisionist way Mr. Bradbury. You can’t.). I hope that he will change his stripes. I’ll wait a long time.
A police officer in uniform walked into 20 classrooms at El Camino High School in California and announced that several students had been killed in car wrecks over the weekend.
The hoax was intended to teach the dangers of drink-driving.
But the scare tactic backfired when some students, who were not told that it was a stunt for two hours, became hysterical and wept uncontrollably.
Is this an acceptable way to teach high school students about the perils of drunk driving: tell all of them a prominent student died in an alcohol-related car crash and then let them believe he is dead for several hours before revealing the truth, he’s alive! It seems a bit… heavy-handed.
They were traumatized, but we wanted them to be traumatized, That’s how they get the message
–Lori Tauber, Guidance Counselor
There are other programs about drunk driving taking place in high schools called Every 15 Minutes (no I will not link you past the flash intro, you will sit through it and you will like it.). In Every 15 Minutes a student is pulled from class every 15 minutes (to represent that in America someone dies from an alcohol-related car accident*) and then their eulogy is read by their parents at an assembly later in the day. The idea is to show the mortal ramifications of drinking and driving. It’s morbid, sure, but at least no one ACTUALLY THINKS THE KIDS ARE DEAD**.
Imagine this happening to an adult. You call Miss Tauber (I assume she’s not married because she is evil) at home and tell her that her kindergartner ate bleach, turned blue and died. Once she gets to the hospital you take her into the morgue to show her the body the kid comes running around the corner. It’s a lesson in what it is like to lose a child. Do you think she has a right to be angry? You bet your ass she does, and no amount good intention will save you from the impending lawsuit.
Another interesting fact is that all of the fabricated stories about dead students didn’t have ANYTHING to do with the students drinking. All of the accidents were caused BY drunk drivers. The students weren’t drinking. Read that again, the students were not drinking and driving in these “accidents”. Cpt. Tim on BoingBoing nails it.
The most screwed up thing about this is that the story told was that their friends were hit BY a drunk driver. So it wasn’t even something that was preventable by not drinking and driving.
The lesson? Don’t be killed by a drunk driver.
They might as well have taken them aside one by one and told them that their mothers had been raped and murdered to demonstrate the dangers involved in being raped and murdered.
Why did they do this again? They should be fucking ecstatic that none of the students killed themselves because their best friend or boyfriend/girlfriend died. High schoolers are a wacky bunch and you shouldn’t go toying with their emotions. You shouldn’t “want them to be traumatized”.
*a number that seems a bit low if you ask me
**I still think they should spend their time on other activities, but this is preferable.
Woah. WOAH! Hold on now! They’re taking away my Bleach and I’m not sure I can handle that emotionally.
I can understand their reasons though. They want to remain obscure so the big corporations don’t bring down the hammer on fansubs in general. People have been taking Dattebayo’s (the main Bleach and Naruto fansub group) work and publishing it on the Youtubes. That’s fine, I guess. They’d better get back to work soon though or I’ll write an angry letter to my senator.
Which is why Dattebayo has decided that we will put a hold on all our subtitled episode releases until the uploaders comply. We’ve been way too nice so far by letting this issue slide, but this is the end. Here’s our (repeated) request to everyone who butchers our work by uploading it to streaming sites. STOP. If you’re an uploader, please DO NOT UPLOAD DATTEBAYO SUBS to any more streaming sites. If you’re guilty of doing this in the past, and your streaming site account is still valid, GO AND DELETE ALL THE DATTEBAYO VIDEOS WHICH BELONG TO YOUR ACCOUNT. We NEVER gave ANYONE permission to upload our work to ANY STREAMING SITE. If you’re not an uploader and want to help, flag our work you find on streaming sites as copyright infringement, send private message to uploader asking to remove content, etc. This is probably futile due to immense amount of idiots who are unable to read yet are able to figure out how to click “upload” button, but it doesn’t hurt to try.
The corporation that I work for has locked down the internet. I can no longer check my gmail accounts and until moments ago I could not even SEE this blog. I cannot view youtube or google video and most of my webcomics are verboten. Thankfully XKCD and Dinosaur Comics are still kicking. I can take solace knowing that Big Brother loves me.
click me.
Fitter Happier
More productive
Comfortable
Not drinking too much
Regular exercise at the gym (3 days a week)
Getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries
At ease
Eating well (no more microwave dinners and saturated fats)
A patient better driver
A safer car (baby smiling in back seat)
Sleeping well (no bad dreams)
No paranoia
Careful to all animals (never washing spiders down the plughole)
Keep in contact with old friends (enjoy a drink now and then)
Will frequently check credit at (moral) bank (hole in wall)
Favours for favours
Fond but not in love
Charity standing orders
On sundays ring road supermarket
(no killing moths or putting boiling water on the ants)
Car wash (also on sundays)
No longer afraid of the dark
Or midday shadows
Nothing so ridiculously teenage and desperate
Nothing so childish
At a better pace
Slower and more calculated
No chance of escape
Now self-employed
Concerned (but powerless)
An empowered and informed member of society (pragmatism not idealism)
Will not cry in public
Less chance of illness
Tires that grip in the wet (shot of baby strapped in back seat)
A good memory
Still cries at a good film
Still kisses with saliva
No longer empty and frantic
Like a cat
Tied to a stick
That’s driven into
Frozen winter shit (the ability to laugh at weakness)
Calm
Fitter, healthier and more productive
A pig
In a cage
On antibiotics
Well I know who’s not getting my vote, it’s good old Mike Huckabee. He said at a campaign stop yesterday (video)…
I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution. But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And that’s what we need to do is amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than trying to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view of how we treat each other and how we treat the family.
If this doesn’t scare the living hell out of you then you, my friend, are un-scare-the-shit-out-of-able. (sweet video)
Yeah, that’s fucked up. It’s fucked up AND it’s not even funny. Don’t let the fact that this guy uses Lava Soap sway you, he’s totally insane.
There are people paying $150 for an exfoliation. I could just hand them a bar of Lava soap
This one came out of left field! Mark Wahlberg will star as Max Payne in a live-action adaptation of the video game to be directed by John Moore (Behind Enemy Lines, Flight of the Phoenix, and The Omen).
It was nice while it lasted. But I know this one is going to blow hard, really hard. The Flight of the Phoenix remake was one of the worst movies I’ve seen this decade. I cannot believe that that same director will be able to bring Max Payne to life in any acceptable way. Guys, if we’re going to make movies out of video games can we at least get some decent directors and some screenwriters that we’ve heard from before? That’s all I ask.
These video games are part of who I am. I played them and enjoyed them. I want them to be represented properly. This piece of trash will end up being a sappy noir love film with a gratuitous sex scene. Mona Sex is hot and all, but she wasn’t the point of the games, Max’s troubled past was.
At least Super Mario Brothers didn’t appear to take itself seriously.
It would appear that I’m not the only one that hatesthe new season of Heroes. Tim Kring, the writer/producer of Heroes also believes that the show is no good this season.
Kring regrets sticking Claire (Hayden Panettiere) with a super-dud boyfriend and forcing Hiro to moon over a cutesy princess. ”I’ve seen more convincing romances on TV,” he admits. ”In retrospect, I don’t think romance is a natural fit for us.”
Hopefully I’ll be able to get back into this show. I do wish it didn’t assume that the audience is mentally retarded though. The last few ‘big revelations’ have been no-brainers. I don’t need to be coddled to enjoy a show. Show some balls, go out on a limb, DO SOMETHING NEW. And please, please, please stop with the quirky love stories. They don’t work at all.
We assumed the audience wanted season 1 — a buildup of intrigue about these characters and the discovery of their powers. We taught [them] to expect a certain kind of storytelling. They wanted adrenaline. We made a mistake.
Today the authorities raided a small flat in England and a server farm in Amsterdam. They were raiding because these two locations were owned by Oink.cd, my favorite torrent tracker. It seems that my days of extremely easy access to music are over (at least for the next week or so).
The IT worker was led from his home in the town’s Grange Road and is being questioned on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and infringement of copyright law.
At the same time his employer - a large multi-national company - and his father’s home were also raided.
A Cleveland Police spokesman said: “This extremely lucrative and creative scheme consisted of a private file-sharing website being set up. Membership was by invitation only.
It’s funny how wrong these guys have it. They assume that Oink’s main purpose was to disseminate high-quality music. If a pre-release track was not up to snuff then it would be shunned by the collective and removed from the server.
Members paid ‘donations’ via debit or credit cards, ensuring their continued access to the site. Users were only invited to join the site if they could prove that they had music to offer
–IFPI spokesman
Oink was not about money. If it was about money then why was the owner of the site working at a “large multi-national company”? He wouldn’t need to work, he could live like a king off of the ad revenue. Oink was about community. Oink was about high-quality music. Oink was about saying “fuck you” to the record companies. So fuck you record companies.
If this is anything like when they arrested the owners of thepiratebay Oink will be back up in no time and all the more popular for it. The Oink servers did not actually “serve” any illegal or copyrighted materials. Good luck pinning anything on them. Give the article on The Pirate Bay on wikipedia a once-over. There is some interesting stuff in there.
There are some major problems with this country when a 7 year-old kid cannot draw a stick figure holding a gun without being suspended from school. Unless the stick figure is shooting another stick figure with the name “John Tartabull” or some other asshole kid from class’s name over it’s head it shouldn’t be a problem. Even then I think a “don’t do that anymore” talk would be sufficient. Let the kids be kids. How else are they supposed to figure out what the true boundries are when they can’t push them? And no, drawing a picture like this is not a boundry. Art in all its forms should be encouraged almost to the fault of everything else.
*I found this while looking for a picture to add to this post. Apparantly there has to be pictures before people will read anything.
One of the most prolific science fiction writers and my favorite authors has show his true colors. Orson Scott Card has recently written an article in the Mormon Times about how we, as a nation, should rise up and overthrow the government to prevent gay marriage from becoming law. It’s more than a little shocking to see this kind of rhetoric coming from such an (otherwise) brilliant man. I believe he may have what is clinically referred to as “asshole, stuck in his ways, old man syndrome” or (SIHWOMS).
It’s upsetting to think that someone as creative and open-minded as Orson Scott Card can be a closed-minded bigot with little remorse for a group of people who have not only haven’t harmed him but have been lining his pockets by buying his works. Overthrow the government over something as benign as gay marriage? You crazy, you crazy. He needs to get off his pulpit and go back to writing about how one idea can change the world for the better, not how it can destroy it.
Homosexual behavior has been around for a VERY long time, much longer than the Mormon Church. It has been celebrated for centuries and has only recently become vilified. Same-sex marriages have been recorded all the way back to the Romans and have been thought to exist before recorded history. Applying insular ideals towards people you don’t even know is not Christian, it’s wrong. Christianity is about love and hope, not advancing your own agenda.
