Authors Note: I originally wrote this about five years ago for a community blog site that no longer exists. Despite the age of the piece, much of the rhetoric which inspired it remains relevant, and as the Republican Primaries kick into high gear the militant, fight fire with fire attitude toward terrorism is likely to intensify. The players may have changed, but the game remains the same.
Our President tells us that "We are at war with the Islamic Fascists." We are told that they are a serious threat that can cause massive destruction through fiery blasts, which may be mostly true, but the same has been said of dragons. We are told that they want to destroy our freedoms, which are extremely valuable to Western civilization, while dragons were notorious for destroying the innocence of maidens. Negotiating with the "Islamic Fascists" has never been an option, and negotiations with dragons only occurred in stories meant to be funny. Finally, and most importantly, neither dragons nor Islamic Fascists really exist.
The fact that there are no Islamic Fascists does not mean that there are no members of fanatical sects of Islam who use violence and intimidation to attempt to achieve their goals. There are. Some of them may be determined to destroy Western civilization and impossible to reason with. But they are not Fascists.
Fascism requires that citizens value the State above everything else, and the militant extremists behind terrorist plots tend to value religion far above any national allegiance. While Al-Qaeda is notorious for suicide attacks, "The Fascist accepts life and loves it, knowing nothing of and despising suicide." (From Mussolini's Fascist Doctrines) Fascism dictates that the ideal state needs to fight like the shark needs to swim, while I'm sure that most of Al-Qaeda would prefer peace if their enemies are destroyed or at least defeated. Is more proof really necessary?
I have no problem with al-Qaeda being called evil. You can call them dangerous extremist lunatics, and I will agree with you. But don't call them Fascists. It's inaccurate, and it needlessly angers people. Since he has no credibility left anyway, President Bush probably would have been better off announcing that we are at war with dragons.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Friday, May 2, 2008
What's My Name?
For most things that I do online, anonymity is not a priority. I don't use hacking skills that I don't have in order to steal money nor do I encourage violence or anything else that carries the potential for major problems if my identity was discovered. It would be nice if my identity was important because if it was I believe it would be for positive reasons, but it's not. It is unique - as far as I know nobody shares my name even without including my middle name or initial. And for some sites that require passwords, such as banking ones, I see no reason whatsoever to hide who I am.
Lack of a good reason isn't always enough to prevent a mistake, and a mistake has been made. I gave myself a user name for my online bank account that I keep forgetting. They have a password reset option which requires the user name and after a few guesses I got an password email sent to me, but when I tried to log in with the new password (email doesn't include user name) I was told that the user name and password didn't match. Did I forget my user name already? Are the capitalization rules different for getting my password reset and the actual log in? I don't know, but I do know that if I get it wrong one or two more times then the account will get locked and I don't want that to happen even though that is really no worse than never trying to log in because of fear of a forgotten user name. I also know that I wouldn't have this problem if I just used my actual name.
Lack of a good reason isn't always enough to prevent a mistake, and a mistake has been made. I gave myself a user name for my online bank account that I keep forgetting. They have a password reset option which requires the user name and after a few guesses I got an password email sent to me, but when I tried to log in with the new password (email doesn't include user name) I was told that the user name and password didn't match. Did I forget my user name already? Are the capitalization rules different for getting my password reset and the actual log in? I don't know, but I do know that if I get it wrong one or two more times then the account will get locked and I don't want that to happen even though that is really no worse than never trying to log in because of fear of a forgotten user name. I also know that I wouldn't have this problem if I just used my actual name.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Out of Practice
My vacation from work last week wasn't supposed to be a vacation from writing. I didn't leave the NYC metropolitan area and had plenty of time to write blog entries and other things that might be read by other people someday, but I spent most of my time doing no such thing. I think I completed one blog entry during the entire week, and that was in a blog that was originally supposed to be updated daily. That lasted for three days, and now once a week seems like a much more reasonable goal.
The weather was great for most of last week, but I didn't play any competitive basketball because my shoelaces are a wreck. It's like they are living beings with the life span of a hamster but this time the hamster has some bizarre genetic ailment causing one side of its body to become inexplicably twisted and then it was treated by a stumped vet that managed to make the problem worse and now my left shoe features a knot leading to a lace-goatee leading to a relatively normal looking lace that sticks out much too far and half the lace on the other side is still twisted and if I play any sort of sport someone will probably step on my laces causing me to trip and fall and hurt my knee even worse than I did last night playing video games.
When one thinks of video-game related injuries, which is itself probably a sign of playing too many video games, the knee is not likely to be in the first five injury-prone areas considered. The wrist (obvious) eyes (staring at the screen too long), back (terrible posture sitting in the chair), elbow (Wii sports), and fingers (same reason as wrist) are all more likely and the same can probably be said for other body parts. But I managed to hurt my knee. I am currently re-playing Twilight Princess and this time I would like to finish it by myself and in less than the 88 or so hours that it took the first time. One of the things that I couldn't do myself last year when I first played the game was fishing. Fishing in that game requires a lot of patiently waiting for a fish to go on the hook and then swinging one of the controllers around your arm to simulate reeling in a fish. After ten minutes of not doing anything productive yesterday basically sitting and slightly moving the Wii Remote, the game told me that I caught a fish so I reeled it in without causing myself much pain. Unfortunately for my knee, the game requires the player to catch two fish consecutively, so I repeated the process and...actually I think that was harmless too and I lost control and hit myself with the "nunchuk" later. But I'm ok now.
If you rank things by how much time I spent on them over the past week and a half, which is probably more problematic than pondering video-game related injuries, then playing Zelda would not be ranked very highly at all. I spent more time sleeping, eating, at improv shows, at open mics, on the subway to get to those places, writing emails, checking baseball stats, talking about baseball stats, watching baseball games, reading, playing poker in Harlem...and the list goes on but probably not for all that much longer. If you want to know what I think I wasted the most time on over the break, my answer would be Facebook's poker tournament. They give you a thousand chips of fake money and then the goal is to try to get a lot more chips without running out. I managed to end up with about 60,000 at the end of the week after spending ridiculous amounts of time (about 20 hours total I think) playing that game in my room. If I took ten real dollars and turned it into sixty times that it would sadly be an amazingly great week of work, but internet gaming laws and my current financial situation make it virtually impossible for me to try that so I just won 75,000 facebook poker points which have the approximate monetary value of my left shoelace (my right shoelace is worth considerably more). Maybe the upcoming tax rebate will allow me to try to make some extra money (right now poker is probably a better investment than the stock market) but I doubt it. Finishing in the top 500 out of 400,000 should be worth something besides facebook points but unfortunately it is not.
Hopefully the time that I spent writing about my relatively wasted vacation will get me more in a writing mood so that I would go over a week without writing in this blog again and I'll write more for my other blogs too. I feel like it's been ages since I wrote a sonnet.
The weather was great for most of last week, but I didn't play any competitive basketball because my shoelaces are a wreck. It's like they are living beings with the life span of a hamster but this time the hamster has some bizarre genetic ailment causing one side of its body to become inexplicably twisted and then it was treated by a stumped vet that managed to make the problem worse and now my left shoe features a knot leading to a lace-goatee leading to a relatively normal looking lace that sticks out much too far and half the lace on the other side is still twisted and if I play any sort of sport someone will probably step on my laces causing me to trip and fall and hurt my knee even worse than I did last night playing video games.
When one thinks of video-game related injuries, which is itself probably a sign of playing too many video games, the knee is not likely to be in the first five injury-prone areas considered. The wrist (obvious) eyes (staring at the screen too long), back (terrible posture sitting in the chair), elbow (Wii sports), and fingers (same reason as wrist) are all more likely and the same can probably be said for other body parts. But I managed to hurt my knee. I am currently re-playing Twilight Princess and this time I would like to finish it by myself and in less than the 88 or so hours that it took the first time. One of the things that I couldn't do myself last year when I first played the game was fishing. Fishing in that game requires a lot of patiently waiting for a fish to go on the hook and then swinging one of the controllers around your arm to simulate reeling in a fish. After ten minutes of not doing anything productive yesterday basically sitting and slightly moving the Wii Remote, the game told me that I caught a fish so I reeled it in without causing myself much pain. Unfortunately for my knee, the game requires the player to catch two fish consecutively, so I repeated the process and...actually I think that was harmless too and I lost control and hit myself with the "nunchuk" later. But I'm ok now.
If you rank things by how much time I spent on them over the past week and a half, which is probably more problematic than pondering video-game related injuries, then playing Zelda would not be ranked very highly at all. I spent more time sleeping, eating, at improv shows, at open mics, on the subway to get to those places, writing emails, checking baseball stats, talking about baseball stats, watching baseball games, reading, playing poker in Harlem...and the list goes on but probably not for all that much longer. If you want to know what I think I wasted the most time on over the break, my answer would be Facebook's poker tournament. They give you a thousand chips of fake money and then the goal is to try to get a lot more chips without running out. I managed to end up with about 60,000 at the end of the week after spending ridiculous amounts of time (about 20 hours total I think) playing that game in my room. If I took ten real dollars and turned it into sixty times that it would sadly be an amazingly great week of work, but internet gaming laws and my current financial situation make it virtually impossible for me to try that so I just won 75,000 facebook poker points which have the approximate monetary value of my left shoelace (my right shoelace is worth considerably more). Maybe the upcoming tax rebate will allow me to try to make some extra money (right now poker is probably a better investment than the stock market) but I doubt it. Finishing in the top 500 out of 400,000 should be worth something besides facebook points but unfortunately it is not.
Hopefully the time that I spent writing about my relatively wasted vacation will get me more in a writing mood so that I would go over a week without writing in this blog again and I'll write more for my other blogs too. I feel like it's been ages since I wrote a sonnet.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Gridlocked on the Information Superhighway
I mentioned in an earlier post that I had gotten back to work on a novel that I had been writing on and off with much more time off than on over the last couple of years. Shortly after that, I realized that I am not comfortable enough writing in the third person to make a full book that was and decided to start over yet again using the first person point of view. Then I made the choice that in order to prevent myself from scrapping my work anymore before it got seen by anybody I would write it as a blog with posting dates going backwards from years in the future so the beginning would be on top. Seemed like a good plan at the time.
My writing was delayed somewhat by a mysterious cut on the finger that I do most of my typing with, but by yesterday afternoon I set out to work on it anyway using a modified typing strategy that was probably very bad for my wrist and definitely very slow. The writing that I had done so far disappeared somehow but I remembered enough to approximate what I had written before and possibly improve upon it slightly. I wrote a paragraph and took a break.
During that break, I looked up some things on the internet. First I looked up what I had named the primary location of my story to see if it had been used before and it had in an online political role playing game. It suddenly felt extremely unoriginal and not worth using. The same was true for what I had originally named the same place, and even the name of what I thought was an original type of halfling may have been thought of by someone else before me. Frustrated by this information that I probably should have known long ago, I deleted the new blog and haven't worked on the story since (even if it has only been a day).
The internet can be very useful for writers. With blogs and forums and other interactive sites it is possible to express oneself creatively to audiences that would never have been reached before the advent of the information superhighway. As a whole this is a good thing, but the increased opportunity allowing more ideas to be expressed means that it is increasingly likely for a good idea to have been thought of and e-published by someone else beforehand thus making ideas seem plagiarized even when they were not. I think most of my ideas are still original and the combination of them certainly hasn't been done before, but until I can fix the names then I am definitely stuck and even if that hurdle is cleared I'm still worried that other problems will arise.
My writing was delayed somewhat by a mysterious cut on the finger that I do most of my typing with, but by yesterday afternoon I set out to work on it anyway using a modified typing strategy that was probably very bad for my wrist and definitely very slow. The writing that I had done so far disappeared somehow but I remembered enough to approximate what I had written before and possibly improve upon it slightly. I wrote a paragraph and took a break.
During that break, I looked up some things on the internet. First I looked up what I had named the primary location of my story to see if it had been used before and it had in an online political role playing game. It suddenly felt extremely unoriginal and not worth using. The same was true for what I had originally named the same place, and even the name of what I thought was an original type of halfling may have been thought of by someone else before me. Frustrated by this information that I probably should have known long ago, I deleted the new blog and haven't worked on the story since (even if it has only been a day).
The internet can be very useful for writers. With blogs and forums and other interactive sites it is possible to express oneself creatively to audiences that would never have been reached before the advent of the information superhighway. As a whole this is a good thing, but the increased opportunity allowing more ideas to be expressed means that it is increasingly likely for a good idea to have been thought of and e-published by someone else beforehand thus making ideas seem plagiarized even when they were not. I think most of my ideas are still original and the combination of them certainly hasn't been done before, but until I can fix the names then I am definitely stuck and even if that hurdle is cleared I'm still worried that other problems will arise.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Thinking by itself doesn't pay very well
It would be nice if it did, or at least it seems that way at first thought but in fact food for thought interpreted literally is not the best of ideas. Just about everyone can express thoughts, so if that alone was compensated monetarily then the value of money would be depreciated and the transfer of funds would be a waste of time and effort. And money. Payment for good thoughts is somewhat more reasonable, and happens to some extent, but that requires a third party making decisions about what thoughts deserve payment and the third party would probably demand more money than the sum paid to the thinker.
At least, that is how things worked in the past. Nowadays, thoughts are often judged to worthy of payment not so much by one person but by ranking algorithms that determine how likely it is for thoughts made public over the internet to actually reach large enough members of the public through search engines that they will lead a potential customer to a product or service advertised nearby or within a set of thoughts by a writer. As of now, my thoughts are not considered to pull much weight by the powers that be and therefore I may not be able to get much money through the thoughts on this blog anytime soon.
As many potential readers probably already know, it is possible to make some money online by linking to other websites that want publicity through a combination of potential customers clicking on the link to their site and search engines giving them favorable treatment because sites that get linked to seem important. Payperpost is a service that I used on a regular basis during the summer of 2006 but unfortunately for my bank account that ended quickly because my blog back then was part of a community site that became associated with sloppy writing practices. Payperpost apparently did not take long to discover that if they wanted to have a good relationship between bloggers and advertisers they would have to employ good word of mouth ethics, which in my opinion includes not expecting advertisers to pay for bloggers to talk about them when said bloggers are basically talking to themselves or might harm the advertiser by association if the blog is poorly written. Since my blog is relatively new it might seem like I am talking to myself so Payperpost cannot ethically facilitate a business relationship between myself and advertisers that have not specifically expressed a lack of concern about whether a blog has a Google Page Rank or not. That equals very few opportunities for quick money so far, but quick money often turns into dead money anyway so I will have to work on filling my blog with interesting thoughts so in the future Payperpost will be able to do more to help me support this blogging habit that I seem to have.
It is also ethical to make it clear that an advertisement is in fact an advertisement as well as to make sure that a blog whose owner gets paid through Payperpost isn't full of paid ads. The latter will certainly not happen anytime soon due to reasons stated above, and I am about to insert code clarifying that this is in fact a paid advertisement and not mere rambling about how I used to make money blogging and haven't really done so recently. Behold the code in its intended form:
At least, that is how things worked in the past. Nowadays, thoughts are often judged to worthy of payment not so much by one person but by ranking algorithms that determine how likely it is for thoughts made public over the internet to actually reach large enough members of the public through search engines that they will lead a potential customer to a product or service advertised nearby or within a set of thoughts by a writer. As of now, my thoughts are not considered to pull much weight by the powers that be and therefore I may not be able to get much money through the thoughts on this blog anytime soon.
As many potential readers probably already know, it is possible to make some money online by linking to other websites that want publicity through a combination of potential customers clicking on the link to their site and search engines giving them favorable treatment because sites that get linked to seem important. Payperpost is a service that I used on a regular basis during the summer of 2006 but unfortunately for my bank account that ended quickly because my blog back then was part of a community site that became associated with sloppy writing practices. Payperpost apparently did not take long to discover that if they wanted to have a good relationship between bloggers and advertisers they would have to employ good word of mouth ethics, which in my opinion includes not expecting advertisers to pay for bloggers to talk about them when said bloggers are basically talking to themselves or might harm the advertiser by association if the blog is poorly written. Since my blog is relatively new it might seem like I am talking to myself so Payperpost cannot ethically facilitate a business relationship between myself and advertisers that have not specifically expressed a lack of concern about whether a blog has a Google Page Rank or not. That equals very few opportunities for quick money so far, but quick money often turns into dead money anyway so I will have to work on filling my blog with interesting thoughts so in the future Payperpost will be able to do more to help me support this blogging habit that I seem to have.
It is also ethical to make it clear that an advertisement is in fact an advertisement as well as to make sure that a blog whose owner gets paid through Payperpost isn't full of paid ads. The latter will certainly not happen anytime soon due to reasons stated above, and I am about to insert code clarifying that this is in fact a paid advertisement and not mere rambling about how I used to make money blogging and haven't really done so recently. Behold the code in its intended form:
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Band Name Trivia Game (April 2008 #1)
In the ancient era of 2006, I used to belong to a community website that, for a time, had a very strong sense of community. Part of the community spirit was expressed through games that I used to run in which certain I would write trivia questions that fit with a certain theme and the first letter of the answers to all of those questions could be unscrambled in order to spell the pseudonym (or real name) of a member of of the blogging community. Whoever guessed the hidden clue got to make a new set of clues using the same format on their blog within the site, thus drawing traffic to their blog. It was good while it lasted.
It ended for a time, but there is no reason to keep the game down just because the original host site is kaput. I am going to start again over here, but this time I will use general (but related to music somehow) trivia questions off the top of my head and instead of a blogger the first letters of all of the answers can be scrambled to spell the name of a band. Whoever guesses the name correctly gets to post a new set of clues on their blog, but I would appreciate it if the explanation for the blog links back to this post. I think it would also be the right thing to do to check out the non-game content of the blog you are playing on whenever you play this sort of trivia game.
And now it begins:
1) The "hairless" variety of what bird is a national symbol of the United States of America?
2) What classic rock song could also be the result of a tree falling in an empty forest according to some philosophers?
3) In a classic country song, the singer claims not to be afraid of Clifton Clowers. What geographical feature is in the song's title?
4) What do you get when you take away an apostrophe, the second letter of the alphabet, and a space from the collective name of the powerful hitters that the Houston Astros used to have?
5) Which city's Richmond County is notorious for its landfills?
6) Part of the argument for invading Iraq was that Saddam Hussein wouldn't change his (fill in the blank) ways.
7) If what people did was dictated by similar pronunciation of words, what musical instrument would be favored by vagrants?
It would've been much easier without the music theme.
It ended for a time, but there is no reason to keep the game down just because the original host site is kaput. I am going to start again over here, but this time I will use general (but related to music somehow) trivia questions off the top of my head and instead of a blogger the first letters of all of the answers can be scrambled to spell the name of a band. Whoever guesses the name correctly gets to post a new set of clues on their blog, but I would appreciate it if the explanation for the blog links back to this post. I think it would also be the right thing to do to check out the non-game content of the blog you are playing on whenever you play this sort of trivia game.
And now it begins:
1) The "hairless" variety of what bird is a national symbol of the United States of America?
2) What classic rock song could also be the result of a tree falling in an empty forest according to some philosophers?
3) In a classic country song, the singer claims not to be afraid of Clifton Clowers. What geographical feature is in the song's title?
4) What do you get when you take away an apostrophe, the second letter of the alphabet, and a space from the collective name of the powerful hitters that the Houston Astros used to have?
5) Which city's Richmond County is notorious for its landfills?
6) Part of the argument for invading Iraq was that Saddam Hussein wouldn't change his (fill in the blank) ways.
7) If what people did was dictated by similar pronunciation of words, what musical instrument would be favored by vagrants?
It would've been much easier without the music theme.
Top Secret...Shh
I wasn't at work on Monday. As for where I actually was, I can't tell whoever may be reading this blog. It's top secret. Confidential. Classified. In case you are thinking of launching an investigation, which would be more of a waste of time than reading this blog. I can tell you that what I was doing was, as far as I know, completely legal. Do you know what's not legal? Besides arson and a bunch of other things that have nothing to do with this paragraph? Since this is a blog entry and not a conversation, I will tell you. I won't tell you about Monday because that's the answer - telling you any real information according
to my understanding of a legal document I read any may not be able to give many details about is illegal. Breach of contract. Punishable by a significant sum of money. I won't say how much, but it's far more than I have made or expect take ever make through writing this blog.
What I did on Monday provided a boost to my confidence. Confidence regarding what? you might ask if you are in fact a real person and not some google bot trolling my site and hopefully deciding to give it some sort of page rank. I might tell you, but then I might be breaking a very expensive promise so I will not. Will that feeling of confidence remain? I hope so. I can tell you that I am not referring to confidence regarding my ability to avoid litigation in the event of a breached contract, and I hope I do not gain any confidence in that area because that would be stupid.
I have not gained much confidence in my primary fantasy baseball team lately. Three consecutive bad days. That constitutes a streak, and not the kind I would like to have although there are certainly worse kinds of streaks to have. At least I can take solace in the fact that the bad luck affecting the performance of baseball players whose statistics are important to me is not my fault. As opposed to last night when I would have won some very unique pieces of artwork but my raffle ticket fell into my otherwise empty wallet and I couldn't find it until the next number was called. What kind of artwork was it? The confidential kind that I'm not going to say anything else about here. I wouldn't get sued for being more informative about it, but I don't want to talk about it and that's my prerogative. It's my blog I can omit what I want to. And end it whenever
to my understanding of a legal document I read any may not be able to give many details about is illegal. Breach of contract. Punishable by a significant sum of money. I won't say how much, but it's far more than I have made or expect take ever make through writing this blog.
What I did on Monday provided a boost to my confidence. Confidence regarding what? you might ask if you are in fact a real person and not some google bot trolling my site and hopefully deciding to give it some sort of page rank. I might tell you, but then I might be breaking a very expensive promise so I will not. Will that feeling of confidence remain? I hope so. I can tell you that I am not referring to confidence regarding my ability to avoid litigation in the event of a breached contract, and I hope I do not gain any confidence in that area because that would be stupid.
I have not gained much confidence in my primary fantasy baseball team lately. Three consecutive bad days. That constitutes a streak, and not the kind I would like to have although there are certainly worse kinds of streaks to have. At least I can take solace in the fact that the bad luck affecting the performance of baseball players whose statistics are important to me is not my fault. As opposed to last night when I would have won some very unique pieces of artwork but my raffle ticket fell into my otherwise empty wallet and I couldn't find it until the next number was called. What kind of artwork was it? The confidential kind that I'm not going to say anything else about here. I wouldn't get sued for being more informative about it, but I don't want to talk about it and that's my prerogative. It's my blog I can omit what I want to. And end it whenever
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