#840
11:57 pm, Monday, June 18th, 2007Yet another day where I don’t want to post. Stupid IMBC.
Very little going on. I need new reading material. Forgot my DS in Pasco, so that’s out (till I go back on the 26th anyway). I saw the new Daniel Tosh special on Comedy Central today. Very, very funny. The facial expressions and hope-you-can-keep-up pacing kill me. I especially love the wide-eyed grin he does during his breast augmentation bit. One thing I found odd was the low production quality for this show. Usually these specials are done very well that way — the recent Dimitri Martin and Amazing Jonathan shows are evidence of this. But Tosh’s program had bad audio (very echoey) and a few shots that were really out of focus. Maybe the venue just wasn’t set up for what they needed.
Has anyone noticed that Google won’t index certain pages? A couple times now I’ve searched for a blog entry I know I made (using the “site:upsidaisium.com” parameter) and I can’t turn anything up. Even when I use a word I know was in the original entry. Maybe it’s a transitory glitch — I just did a search for “carcass crab” and it turned up the two entries I expected. But that same test case wasn’t working a few days ago. And it’s not like it’s new/changed content either; they’re old entries I’ve never edited. Very weird.
I’ve been kinda working on this mini-zeppelin cutaway view thing in SketchUp. I might half-ass the gasbag component though; I can’t seem to find a way to model the skeleton that doesn’t take three and a half weeks of clicking. Anyway, the whole thing’s loosely inspired by these 1939 Graf Zeppelin plans (5.8 MB JPEG, dialuppers beware) I found on some imageboard.
Re: TotD (fave political candidates): Right now, I like Mike Gravel and Ron Paul (the latter a little more than the former). Of course, neither has a snowball’s chance. Amongst the first-tier folks, I guess I like Giuliani best. I was pretty pro-McCain about a year ago, but I’ve been liking him less and less since then.
Update: (Note that this bit was added after midnight. You can always check the page source for update/edit timestamps.) Just came across this Ron Paul quote on racism that I thought was really brilliant:
Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans strictly as members of groups rather than individuals. Racists believe that all individuals who share superficial physical characteristics are alike: as collectivists, racists think only in terms of groups. By encouraging Americans to adopt a group mentality, the advocates of so-called ‘diversity’ actually perpetuate racism. Their obsession with racial group identity is inherently racist.
June 19th, 2007 at 1:07 pm
He’s got a little something there.
I’ve always held that racism was properly defined as a belief in races.
June 19th, 2007 at 9:32 pm
I’ve heard a talk radio host say that racism was a recognition (i.e., not a belief) that the races are actually different, that they have different strengths and weaknesses. He went on to say that bigotry is the big bad thing people confuse with racism.
All sounds like semantics to me. I’ve never understood why anyone feels the need to defend a particular word. Or to “reclaim” one that’s become derogatory/taboo/etc. If the overwhelming consensus is that a word means X, why waste energy trying to convert people to accepting meaning Y? Language isn’t something anyone can dictate in a society with free speech — you just have to go with the flow.
June 20th, 2007 at 7:23 am
That attitude is responsible for half of what’s known as “lawyer-speak.” Because so many words can mean so many things, lawyers frequently have to define precisely what a word means before they use it, which is where you get concepts like “Sexual Relations” not including oval-office blowjobs. :P
Just a pain in the ass for everybody. “Racism” is a word a lot of people use, and noone really has any idea what it means (which makes it functionally meaningless.) So you make up your own definition before you use it. It’s the trend.
I don’t think that you can be excused from being considered racist because you’re “nice to other races.” There aren’t any races. We have populations, but a bit of interbreeding would kill that off in a generation or less.
All in all, there’s often less difference between a fella with white skin and a fella with black skin than there is between two fellas with white skin, or two fellas with black skin. Grouping people together by skin color is idiocy.