Scalia Pretty Much Just Comes Out as a Racist

How do you put words to this? I mean... no. You don't. There is no reason to put words to this, at least not yet. The mere act of pointing to it is enough. Simply recognizing it is all that really needs to be said.

Judge Antonin Scalia has gone full Fox-News with a recent statement, saying that the Voting Rights Act is an example of racial entitlement. Because, you know how we give blacks everything. They're just too damned lazy to make use of it.

I was reading about SCOTUS cases a few days ago and was blown away to find that as early as 1986, we had a decision that upheld laws against homosexuality, Bowers v. Hardwick. It was fully overturned in 2003, where the court majority opinion was that it was wrong in 1986, and it is wrong now.

Of course, Scalia, along with Thomas and Rehnquist, were the dissenters. I'm glad to see that Scalia's vile bigotry and hate remains unchanged.

I do not think that I can effectively communicate through the typed word, at least not in the format of a simple blog post, the anger that causes my hands to shake even now. I want to swear like a ship full of sailors. I want to just smash by keyboard for ten minutes and then post it. The fact that this troglodyte of a human is a member of what is likely the most powerful judicial entity on Earth makes blood come from my ears.

Also in this is yet another example of the racism that is almost undoubtedly endemic in the tea party movement that defenders of the movement try to claim doesn't exist. Really? How many "isolated incidents" like this need to happen before everyone accepts that the current conservative movement is as much predicated on hatred of non-whites as it is paranoid hatred of government? A hundred? A thousand?

I will not mince words. He is scum. He is the highest representation of the infection of block-headed conservatism to which Fox News panders. Old men, clogging up the functioning of society. All that gives me hope is that they will all be dead sooner or later. Based on the fact that these men don't seem to much believe in doctors and good diet (hippy conspiracies and all that), I would assume that it will be sooner rather than later.

The world will be a better place when they are gone.

Intel and AMD Have Two Years To Get Their Shit Together

My post from yesterday talked about how happy I am that the portable processing market is seeing an explosion of innovation and development so fast that it will soon threaten the traditional computing market. CES is doing more to evince that reality than anything in the past two years.

Samsung, Nvidia, and Qualcomm are all releasing new, super-powered versions of their processors. Samsung is wedging eight full cores into their new processor, Nvidia's Tegra 4 has 72 virtual cores, and Qualcomm's newest Snapdragon 800 will allow for 4K resolutions and graphics power that is more than double the previous generation. When was the last time we saw leaps and bounds like that in the traditional processor space? Oh right. Never.

As the video below points out, the new Tegra 4 already delivers graphics on par with the Xbox 360, and at a higher resolution to boot. At this rate, it will only be a matter of time before this architecture and paradigm eclipses the old, x86 paradigm and architecture for every consumer use.

Phones And Tablets Are Getting Faster. Thank god.

CES is going on as we speak... I mean write... and by we, I mean I, since you aren't writing. Well, you might be writing. I don't know.

One of the biggest companies that is presenting is Intel, who is showing off integrated television technology about which no one gives even a single shit, and their newest line of processors, about which almost everyone gives at least one shit. Their upcoming processors offer a performance increase over the previous generation of, at most, 15%. This may seem pretty cool, since desktop processors usually moved in increments that large, but it's not. It's boring.

Compare this to other technology markets. Hard drives halve their prices every year while seeing 25% increases in storage capacity. I have two 2TB hard drives in my desktop right now that cost me less than $300 in total. And yet an Intel processor released a year and a half ago is still selling for the same price.

I have frequently suspected that, at least recently, the reason for this comparatively slow progress was that Intel utterly dominated the processor market. Other companies just could not get their act together in any signficant way. Just look at the graveyard of broken processor companies: Cyrix, Transmeta, VIA, IDT. And in almost all cases, their performance lagged Intel's chips. Even today, with only AMD remaining, AMD's chips cannot compete clock-for-clock. Intel is king.

What is a consumer to do? Grin and bear it? That's what we've been doing with Intel for years. Unfortunately, we cannot simply refuse to buy their products. Those of us in the know can buy our own processors from AMD (which I have done), but for the average person who simply wants a laptop to watch Downton Abbey on, they're stuck. It's Intel or nothing.

This tyranny is one of the reasons I suspect so many companies are jumping all over the tablet/cellphone bandwagon. There is no Intel hegemony. Indeed, Intel can't crack into this market to save their life. And precisely because the other companies are tired of dealing with Intel is one of the reasons, I suspect, that they are being less than accommodating.

Another reason is that I think Intel has forgotten what it means to compete. AMD and Nvidia have been going at it for years, doubling their GPU performance nearly every year. We are seeing the same thing in the portable technology space. Processors and GPU's see gains of double, triple, quadruple, every year.

That's the reason why the tablet space is so exciting while the laptop and desktop market is contracting. Because it is energetic! Every year sees something new. Innovation is driving things ever forward. Games on a cell phone look like the first games that came out for the Xbox 360. In two years, cell phones will be more powerful than the Xbox 360. We aren't seeing anything even remotely like that coming out of the old-guard companies.

I am so excited about portable processing. Not because I use it extensively. Truly, I don't. I spend almost all of my time on a desktop and a laptop. But we need something, anything, to get AMD and Intel off their damned asses and really push forward -- really innovate. While I didn't expect it even only a year ago, it is now obvious; the motivation, the fear, necessary to get the old companies to step up their game in the traditional computing industry will come from portable technology. It will come from your pocket.

Of Rapists And Nazis

The recent video, uploaded by Anonymous, of the Steubenville "Rape Crew" is suitably mind-numbing. It shows a human being, seemingly too young to even be coherently using the words he is speaking, display a lack of empathy and consideration that would make a psychopath blush.

It is coincidental that I was reading an article about The Angel of Life, Gisella Perl, who described her treatment in the death camps. Men would gleefully kill babies, throw women alive into furnaces, and beat starving, helpless human beings to death.

After the war, psychologists took up the task of studying the behavior of the Nazis. How could humans possibly become so depraved, and do so in such large numbers? Even those who were involved would look back with shock at their own actions.

The core of that depravity is on display today in Steubenville. While the holocaust and the behavior of a small town's stupid population are in different leagues, what allows the two to exist is the same. In a different environment, the boy in that video would have been a Nazi, or a mercenary, or a murderer. That behavior is simply the manifestation of an internal characteristic that I don't think I need to even bother trying to explicate. It is apparent.

What we saw, for a brief moment, is the rotten core that can take hold that is held in check by society. Yes, we do not have bands of mercenaries rampaging around the countryside like it was 1300's Europe. But just because the behavior doesn't manifest in the ways that they previously did does not mean that the Freudian motivation is gone.

What society has done, and especially what the progressive movement of the past one hundred years has done, is make the display of this behavior incredibly unacceptable. It is the genesis of the term "politically correct" in the pejorative sense. People who use the word "PC Police" or something equally negative are essentially saying that they are angry that they are not allowed to be aggressive, violent, or bigoted in public.

But what every oppressed group in the country knows full well is that this rot, this toxin, is in full effect behind closed doors. This monster, this animalistic man-child, would have never dreamed of saying these words in public, but he did so in private. He even defended himself to those in the room who made wan efforts at arguing with him.

This is only the most recent case of the festering underbelly of our society bursting out into the daylight like some pus-filled boil. Apologists for this sort of behavior love to point to the very consequences of their loathed politically correct movement -- the lack of public behavior of this sort -- as proof that it doesn't exist. They claim that those who pull the racism, sexism, or classism "card" are simply paranoid and themselves bigoted.

No. This rot exists, and pretending that it doesn't because we have brow-beaten those that would act this way into some semblance of submission fails to address the wellspring of the poison. We must chase bigotry and anti-social behavior wherever it hides. There can be no apologies. There can be no toleration. We must go after it with a righteous fire and the profound desire to see justice done, no matter how painful. Because until we do, we will continue breeding those who would be well at home stoking the fires of Auschwitz.

Documentary Night: Order And Disorder With Jim AI-Khalili

Yet another amazing documentary with Jim Al Khalili. Why don't these ever make it to the US? Come on Discovery!

Why Does Religious Extremism Flourish?

There is a touching little article over at RH Reality Check, a reproductive rights website, about a Catholic man who also happens to be strongly pro-choice, and his interactions with others who outwardly are against reproductive rights, but inwardly feel the same as he. Why, the author asks, do these level-headed bishops and priests not attain the levels of power as the extremists so perfectly manifested in the Pope's recent blessing of a woman who is pushing for a Ugandan death penalty for homosexuals?

He recounts the unease with which his fellow-Catholic conversational partners circumlocute the issues — the tendancy to avoid the subject all together — to keep their head down, as it were. Why do these people not succeed?

They do not succeed for the same reason that people like Bishop John Shelby Spong have reached the point of almost rejecting divinity in Christianity. For the same reason the religious are terrified of gay marriage. For the same reason we have an absolute first amendment. The slippery slope.

Absolute knowledge is comforting. When we accept flexible interpretations, interpretations of religion as not having the absolute model of reality, we lose our foundation. We lose the comfort of knowledge, in a scary and indeterminate world, that religion gives. This sort of thinking was recently embodied very well by the Supreme Court justice you love to hate, Antonin Scalia, who likened homosexuality to murder.

“If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against these other things? Of course we can. I don’t apologize for the things I raised. I’m not comparing homosexuality to murder. I’m comparing the principle that a society may not adopt moral sanctions, moral views, against certain conduct. I’m comparing that with respect to murder and that with respect to homosexuality.”

He claimed this was a reduction to the absurd, which only reveals that he doesn't know what that term means, which is truly depressing for someone on the Supreme Court.¹ Regardless, what he claims to be arguing against is the dreaded slippery slope. To wit, if we cannot hold beliefs about, and thus predicate laws on, moral intuition in the case of homosexuality, then we are not justified in holding moral beliefs against murder and any other number of heinous crimes.

Scalia arrogantly and condescendingly feigned surprise that his interlocutor was not persuaded by this argument. Perhaps he was not persuaded because it was apparent to everyone that what he had actually done was undermine the belief that murder is morally wrong, or was simply defining "moral" incorrectly.

The point remains though. Scalia put into explicit, logical parlance the belief that by accepting one level-headed proposition, we are forced to recognize that a large swath of other beliefs are undermined, which when applied to strongly-held dogmatic beliefs, is unacceptable.

We do not give time to these religious people precisely because of the nature of religious belief. Dogma must be affirmed absolutely, and no matter how kind-hearted that dogma may become in some circles, it will become ever more resolute in others. Religion is, at least in the Western Judeo-Christian formulation, doomed to forever be lead by the fanatics. I mentioned J.S. Spong earlier, and he is the perfect manifestation of where Christiantiy, and truly any religion must go to avoid this trap: away from deity worship and into a life philosophy. Christiantiy must, for all intents and purposes, become Buddhism.

Most people find this unacceptable. They do not want to give up what they have, even if what they have is of only the vaguest definition. They want their god to be God, their truth to be true, and their world to be the way the world truly is. Even if none of those propositions stand up under scrutiny, that only means that scrutiny should be avoided.

There are many who call for religion to neither become something else nor be extreme. The term no absolute model is taken from William Egginton, who argues for religious moderation by rejecting the belief that one has access to an absolute model of reality. One model of reality is no better or worse than another model of reality. Ignoring all of the issues that I have with this, it is a friendly and acceptable idea on its face. It is a way that we truly can all just get along, even if our dogmas don't mesh.

Again, I believe that the issue that prevents religious moderation, and always will, is that the very act of being moderate undermines the beliefs. Dogmas do not mesh not because people are at logical odds with one another about metaphysical particulars. Dogmas do not mesh because dogma invariably must access the "real" world.² Dogma must be attached to behavior of some sort, and it is here where they clash, since metaphysical dogmas can never be truly attached to the real world in any significant way. Anyone could be correct, since truth is meaningless in the battlefield of dogmatic beliefs. And accepting that anyone could be correct about something that is so important is obviously something that will never fly. As a believer who is going to predicate a large amount of internal and external behavior around a belief, I want to be damn sure that the belief is true.

In search of this confidence, we look to those who are sure, and anyone who is sure is bound to be an extremist, especially vis-a-vis religion, since no one can ever be sure about it! No matter how much kind-hearted believers want to wish otherwise, religion needs strong dogma to survive. Religion needs extremism to be its assured guiding hand. Without it, it crumbles under the weight of its own inconsistencies and slides down the slippery slope of reason into an abyss of forgotten dreams.


Further reading:
The Problem with Religious Moderates (Excerpt from The End of Faith, by Sam Harris)

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1: There are a number of permutations of the reductio argument, but two types that most frequently receive the label: negating an argument by deriving something contradictory from its underlying principles, or maintaining an argument by first negating it and then deriving the original argument from that negation. Scalia thinks he is doing the latter. What he is actually doing is calling into question the foundation of moral thought, even though he doesn't want to admit that.

2: I put "real" in quotes because I am in some dodgy linguistic waters in this part of the article. Egginton argues against the idea of an absolute model of reality, and by using the term "real" to describe the physical realm implies that there is an absolute reality to which dogmas refer. As you can imagine, following his line of thought to its absolute conclusion results in skeptical nihilism and an inability to reject or accept anything. We can freely kill one another because reality isn't anything in itself. For my part, I accept phenomenalism. All that "exists" for me is what I sense, and the model of a persistent physical realm in which other minds exist is a model that has proven useful for my mental continuity. Everything I write is predicated on the idea that there are other minds like me floating in this metaphysical realm. I do not seek the truth of an absolute model, I seek the truth of functional consistency.

Again, The Art Institutes Are A Scam

As if to further advertise that they are a money-sucking scam of epic proportions, the Art Institutes recently fired a professor for refusing to force expensive, electronic, single-use books upon his students. First, this isn't at all surprising. The Art Institutes are a gigantic vampire of a corporation, vacuuming up huge amounts of money from desperate people. Second, the Art Institutes actually have good professors?

Thankfully, this diamond in the rough is suing the schools for wrongful termination. I relish the opportunity to see these succubi of the educational world get screwed in any way possible.

I've complained on a number of occasions about not only the Art Institutes, but about all for-profit institutes of higher education in the country. The data are unequivocal; you will not get a job. Well, obviously, you might get a job, but it will not be easy. These schools do not help people.

I repeat, the only schools worth attending are those schools which reject people! If you do not go through a rigid acceptance process, there is no point in going to the school. The only schools worth attending that do not reject people are Community Colleges. Those are worth every penny.

When Values Collide

I like Bill Murray. At least, I liked Bill Murray. When I was in second grade, our teacher asked us to tell the class who our hero was. Most kids said one of their parents or a sports star. I said, much to the amusement of my teacher, Bill Murray. I was seven. Whadda'ya want?

So Bill Murray gives me a good perspective on people who apologize for rapists, attackers, murderers, and otherwise antisocial people. We don't want to believe that people are capable of these crimes. We have never experienced these crimes. Nothing in our experience tells us that a particular person is capable of these crimes. It's why men who have experienced sexual assault are much more likely to accept that it happened than men who haven't.

I'm sure that you have figured out without my saying that Bill Murray is a thundering asshole. He's abusive and mean. And while no one escapes his wrath, he is especially mean to women. There are dozens of people in entertainment that have managed to get something of a free pass for their abuse because they are good at being entertainers. As this article at Cracked, a website that produces articles far too good for its name, points out regarding Sean Connery,

It's always interesting to see the double standard we have for different categories of celebrity. If Sean Connery had been, say, a pro athlete or a politician, he'd get tarred with this reputation until the day he died. But he's so fucking suave. His accent wears a tuxedo. It's so impossible to connect that voice with the image of a drunken man slapping around a woman that we wouldn't believe it even if we had it on video.

Precisely. We wouldn't believe it because we don't want to believe it. It so clashes with the rest of our programming that we simply reject it.

For someone like me, it's a slightly different problem. I've more or less managed to push my social biases into the background. They are still operating, and likely will for the rest of my life, but I've overpowered them. This isn't a brag. It's not something worth bragging about. It's something we should all do, and as such, bragging for doing something any decent human would do seems rather counterproductive. It's like demanding recognition for not being an asshole.

My problem is that there are certain characteristics that, for lack of a better phrase, make a person dead to me. Being an asshole is fine, but being aggressively abusive to other people is not. It's the primary reason for not finding out too much about your favorite artists or actors: they are frequently such mind-blowing jerks that it negates one's ability to enjoy their work. Woody Allen, Quentin Tarantino, and Mel Gibson all come to mind.

It doesn't necessarly even need to be artists or actors. It can be anything. And so it is with The Salvation Army. In these contentious times, there are many things that can make an entity dead to me. Misogyny, racism, global warming denial. Homophobia is another. It indicates both ignorance, fear, and hatred, but also blind religious dogma. And boy howdy, has The Salvation Army dropped the mother of all homophobic bombs.

They have literally said that homosexuals deserve to die. An organization built on feel-good concepts of caring and helping has said that homosexuals are not just second-class citizens, but they actively need to be killed. Obviously, the organization on the whole has distanced itself from these statements, but it would be foolish to think that this kind of behavior coming from one regional director isn't representative of wider views held within the Army. Those at the top realize that what they say must be more measured, and it becomes a minor catastrophe when someone actually says what everyone thinks.

This is a difficult thing for me to digest. About a decade ago, when my family was in seriously bad shape and had been evicted from our house, the Salvation Army paid our medical bills, which were not insubstantial. I like the Salvation Army. Even though I'm an outspoken atheist and they are an explicitly religious organization didn't much matter to me. They helped me, and I tear up even now thinking about it.

This is causing serious cognitive dissonance. There is basically no way for me to reconcile the problem. With artists and actors, I can at least say that their work is distinct from them. There are many artists who created great art while also being psycho-arsonist-sheep-rapists. But for people and organizations where their actions are so tightly intertwined with their views, I cannot ignore it. I want to!

I know how it feels to want to apologize for the behavior of someone or something you like. You don't want that conflict in your mind. It doesn't matter. Bigotry is bigotry. Violence is violence. Nothing in the past changes that.

There Is No Discussion

Andrew O'Hehir is one of my more well liked writers. He reviews movies, writes on a variety of subjects, and has a well-measured attitude on most things. As such, it's not surprising to find him as the most recent addition to the pantheon of writers and thinkers who ask "can't we all just get along?"

If we think we can understand this division better by using cute demographic shorthand or by trying to claim that it’s fundamentally about religion or abortion or sexual morality or the role of government or whatever other hobby horse we choose to ride, we’re kidding ourselves.

Defining it as libertarian vs. communitarian, for instance, or as a religious view of society set against a more secular one always simplifies or overlooks some aspect of the problem. It involves values or mores that people hold on a primordial or unconscious level, which are not easily expressed in language and not readily subjected to rational inquiry. Translated into the political realm, these fundamental cultural mores become entrenched ideological positions, modes of expressing the unshakable conviction that my side is right and yours is wrong.

We just had an election that was a de facto contest between America’s competing cultural factions, and one side won a narrow but decisive victory to the intense amazement and anger of the other. More name-calling isn’t going to help. If there were ever a moment to talk about this stuff dispassionately, this would be it.

If we can’t find a way to address the American cultural divide, beyond insults and quadrennial beauty contests, it is sure to destroy us.

And so is O'Hehir's point. While he blunts the false equivalency attack at a point early in the article, he misses another point: the uselessness of the discussion. I don't mean to say that understanding the conservative movement is useless, I mean to say that a discussion about dealing with them as humans is useless.

Even though both sides have abdicated logic and reason, at least to a degree, it is the conservative side that has abdicated it, and any hope for cogent language, to the extreme. They are relying entirely on nebulous, emotional concepts, and if we attempt to address these issues rationally, contradictions and problems are sure to arise. The instant that happens, and stress is thus caused, we have lost the people with whom we are trying to argue.

It is unfortunate, because I appreciate his feelings regarding the referenced video very well. I do feel bad for those who have been duped by the cynical patriotism of the modern Republican party. But at the same time, while I do not judge them, I will cast them aside without worry. They must be defeated in whatever way possible, because they represent the claws of the past, terrified by a brave new world, desperately trying to impede the future.

Moreover, I do not look at this battle in apocalyptic terms like O'Hehir does. I do not think that it is sure to destroy us. If the Civil War didn't, neither will this. Change comes, bit by bit, with every funeral. No matter how angry or contentious our current issues may become, and even if we accept that there is no way to resolve these issues, we will continue our march into the future as each generation rejects elements of the value system of those that came before.

We do not need to reason with the bigots, since they will die soon enough. And with few great works, with few marks in the sands of time, their sound and fury will be remembered as little more than a tale, told by an idiot, signifying nothing.

Climate Change: A Debate Between Correct And Stupid

I love how they wait to show the conversational bomb dropped by Mr. Buggy Eyes at the conference. When someone calls science the result of a Marxist conspiracy and that "green is the new red," they are so blatantly out in left field as to make watching the rest of the show almost unnecessary.

Watch Climate of Doubt on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

From Whence Misogyny In Geek Culture?

There's a good article up over at Shameless Magazine that explores misogyny in geek culture. The basic thesis is that geeks feel that women and pop culture are taking away geek culture. It's summed up in a later adumbration.

1. Straight White Dudes, we are not here to steal geek culture away from you - we’re here to help make it MORE AWESOME. 

2. Excluding people just because they’re not geeky enough, or bullying them because they’re female is just as bad as the isolation and bullying you may have experienced while growing up. If, as a geeky teenager, you hated and resented the kids who picked on you, why the hell would you turn around and do it to someone else?

I think that the author is missing the wellspring of the behavior and the reason why her arguments will fall upon deaf ears. Namely, geek culture has never been about acceptance, and it is not surprising that geeks have turned around and behaved identically to ways in which they themselves were treated. It's like the Pilgrims coming to America to escape religious persecution, when in fact they were coming to America so they could be free to be the ones doing the persecuting.

While geek culture has many elements, one of its unifiers was exclusion from popular culture. They were rejected, so they created a culture that was purposely separate. It was not a culture that was defined internally, but also externally. Geek culture requires something separate from it for it to be geek culture. If it becomes integrated into the wider culture, it loses one of its original bricks and is thus no longer geeky. This connotation is built into the very history of the word.

Similarly, geek culture was defined by rejection by women. The point of it was to happily accept that rejection and create a society where part of its very make-up was a lack of women. Geeks have been resistant to accepting pop culture and women because part of geek culture is not having these things.

Let's face it. Many of the people in geek culture are not attractive and have few social graces. It hurts to be that way. It hurts to be rejected sexually. When one's life is heavily influenced by sexual rejection, a safe haven will be sought. And once found, that safe haven only remains safe when the object of rejection, be it pop culture or sexuality, is specifically left out.

It doesn't matter if women entering geek culture are as "geeky" as the men already there. Their not being there is the point. They could never make the culture "more awesome." And when one considers the perspective of those within the sub-culture, this makes sense.

While this is a sympathetic viewpoint, it does not absolve them. Perhaps my own experience with the sting of rejection makes me appreciate their views more than some others. I have never been an object of desire and that sucks. Losing myself in a fantasy world always felt great.

Moreover, this doesn't absolve the community of its racism and homophobia, although I think that these elements are something much more easily expunged. I think that it has more to do with the fact that middle-to-upper class culture in America is dominated by white, cis-gendered people. the biases of that socio-economic group will obviously rub off on any fantasy worlds created by it. Since geek culture was not created by people who had previously been rejected by homosexuals and people of other races, accepting these people will be something that will happen quickly. Accepting them will not undermine a tenet of geekdom.

Does that mean that traditional geekdom will not transform? Of course not. Traditional geek areas like science fiction, fantasy, and games will expand into the general culture, and the language is what will fade. Just as art and filmmaking are no longer the domain of those who lived on the outskirts of polite society, we will stop calling fantasy, science, and games "geeky." The label will die.

Perhaps that's the ultimate point that people should be making: geek culture as it was once known is dying. Science fiction, Dungeons & Dragons, comic books, video games, and fantasy are in the mainstream. I don't begrudge these men for wanting to have something into which they can escape, and specifically something that is theirs, separate from the broader culture. But they must realize that the world of traditional sci-fi, fantasy, and games is no longer that world.

Our Drug Laws Are Stupid (A Documentary)

Hooked: Illegal Drugs And How They Got That Way was a documentary that aired on the History Channel some years back--around the same time that the History Channel was still primarily the World War II Channel.

One thing that can be said of The History Channel, now simply called History, is that they are an incredibly timid, conservative channel. They want to insult no one, and worse still, have recently started catering to the lower common denominator in their show selection. While the LCD programming is a relatively new characteristic, they have always been conservative. That said, the fact that they were willing to air a series of shows that all but directly call our drug laws stupid is amazing. It should tell you how truly idiotic the laws actually are.

I Still Support Lance Armstrong

I assume that I am not the only person out there who still supports Lance Armstrong, but I'm going to say this anyhow. For one thing, I accept that the procedure by which the case against him was developed is one-sided. Cases that would never in a million years pass successfully through a court trial are held up as fact. The USADA is a sham organization.

That said, even if the USADA was as pure as the driven snow and Lance Armstrong was a creature of pure pitch straight from the pit of Sheol, my opinion wouldn't change. I may not like Armstrong as I now do, but I would still stand in support of his activity.

Likewise, I stand in support of every single major cyclist who was nailed for doping. I stand with any athlete who uses performance enhancing drugs. I see nothing wrong with it because there is nothing wrong with it. People get up in arms about it, but when forced to try to explain why they are up in arms, the explanations all  fail to pass even the most rudimentary analysis.

Not only do I support the principle of using drugs, but I also support Armstrong's wins as legitimate. The only way we can assume that they are not legitimate is if we likewise assume that no one else was using this special mojo that Armstrong was using. We now know that this is not true. All of the major players were using drugs, and in all likelihood, most of them are currently using drugs. If everyone was using drugs, and Armstrong still won, in my book that makes his wins legitimate.

But I feel that is beside the point. Armstrong (to say nothing of Ulrich, Basso, and others) did nothing wrong by taking the drugs. For me, a better case cannot be made than the documentary Bigger Stronger Faster: The Side Effects of Being American, the entirety of which is available on YouTube.

And if you don't choose to watch it, I'll leave you with a couple of questions. Why are hypobaric chambers and chemically engineered nutrient bars legal, but drugs not? Why were Oscar Pistorius' artificial limbs legal, but drugs not?

Conservatives Losing the Fight on Same-Sex Marriage

From Free Thought Blogs.

The notable silence by the Republicans on the issue of same-sex marriage during the current election campaign is a sign, if one needed one, of how rapidly sentiment has shifted on this issue. In 2004 opposition to this was very potent and was used to galvanize voters to go to the polls and vote for George W. Bush. Daniel McCarthy argues in The American Conservative that it is one more sign of the retreat of religion in the face of modernity... 

Even conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly thinks that they are losing this battle and blames (of course) public education.

No. You are losing the fight because you are a bunch of backward, bigoted, troglodytes and people don't want to be associated with you.

There is an extensive quote from an article in The American Conservative, and the author tries his best to frame the loss of a fundamental tenet of conservatism as something that is totally cool. I guess he is tired of being automatically classified as a bete noire at dinner parties when everyone there finds out he writes for a magazine called The American-freaking-Conservative.

My recommendation: stop being conservative. Then you won't simply be the most recent iteration of a grand tradition of being left behind by the progress of society.

Dropout Nation: The American Education Crisis

Watch Dropout Nation on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.