Archive for April, 2007

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Better watch out . . .

26 Apr 2007

Because school bullying, emo music and the interwebz turn kids into mass murderers and suicides.

After having ridden the outrage they built up and stoked, detail by gory detail, for as long as they could, giving self-promoting pop psychologists and shameless politicians alike their chance to say something insensitive and inappropriate, sensible media types are now chiding us for credulously believing such nonsense and seeking scapegoats for more complex issues.

Yes, that would be the same media that has been beating up the story for the past week.

The Herald’s entertainment reporter Emily Dunn tut-tuts:

From Black Sabbath to goth-rocker Marilyn Manson and the disaffected pin-up boy Kurt Cobain, the dramatic lyrics and costumes of the dark music genres have always been a more tangible enemy than the behavioural and mental health problems that contribute to a young person’s decision to stop living.

Ah yes, that old chestnut. But surely the media and our fearless leaders would never attack the easy targets, rather than addressing the complicated and harder-to-solve issues, for cheap points-scoring or page hits?!

Personally, I’m with Denis Leary: we need to put more messages into heavy metal and emo records:

Kill the band, kill your parents, then yourself, ok!? Make sure you get your whole head in front of the shotgun. Thank you for calling!

But if being bullied at school, internerdism and a love of dark music are to blame, it can only be a matter of time before I kill myself and/or a whole bunch of other people. Then when I do, the media can go into another feeding frenzy about how I warned everyone in my “blog” - a form of electronic communication popular with the young people - and how come nobody saw the warning signs?!

Posted in media, music, techno-wankery, violence | No Comments »

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Taste with your earlobe

23 Apr 2007

Sorry for the dad joke, but I heard that awful song Listen with Your Heart on the radio in a cab yesterday and it occurred to me that technically speaking, you can’t listen with your heart any more than you can:

  • Taste with your earlobe
  • Do a poo with your elbow
  • Produce bile with your toenail
  • Transport oxygen from lungs to organs and muscles with your armpit
  • Synthesise glucose from amino acids, lactate or glycerol with your cerebellar flocculus.

Posted in music, nerds, science | 2 Comments »

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That time of month

23 Apr 2007

Menstrual Dreamer by Mari-chan
Image by Mari-chan via Gawker via raincoaster.

Posted in sensitive stuff about chicks | No Comments »

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Newsflash: guns kill people

23 Apr 2007

I doubt anything I say here hasn’t been said before, but I’m always completely mystified when people who otherwise seem at least vaguely competent at rational thought repeat the NRA slogan - now all together kids, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” - as if they actually believe it.

Because it is obvious to any sentient being with a capacity for reason greater than that of a retarded chihuahua that this is utter, utter nonsense. Here are four very simple reasons why:

  1. It is easier to kill someone deliberately with a gun. Easier than stabbing them, poisoning them, pushing them in front of a bus or beating them to death with a computer keyboard. No planning required, instant gratification - bang, dead, before you have time to think about it or regret it.
  2. It is easier to kill someone accidentally with a gun. In countries with lots of guns, there’s no shortage of manslaughter cases where people were shot through mistaken identity, fooling around, accidents, losing your cool in the heat of the moment, etc. It’s a lot easier than killing someone accidentally with a computer keyboard.
  3. It is easier to kill yourself deliberately with a gun. Without guns, some would-be suicides would instead slit their writsts, poison themselves or jump off a tall building. Some wouldn’t. We lack sufficient knowledge of the afterlife to say for sure what proportion of people who shot themselves regretted it afterwards or might have been put off if they hadn’t had a gun handy, but we can only assume it was at least some of them.
  4. It is easier to kill yourself accidentally with a gun. See #2, particularly fooling around and accidents. Guns are dangerous!

These all add up to one very big meta-reason against gun ownership: fewer guns means fewer dead people. Japan has probably the strictest gun ownership laws in the world, which goes a long way to explaining this statistical difference:

Country Population Gun-related deaths
in the last year
United States 300 million Around 30,000
Japan 128 million 53

Admittedly, Japan has had a fairly quiet year gun-wise, but this is a pretty big disparity that is hard to explain away by other factors. So in order to justify private gun ownership, it would be necessary to demonstrate the social good of allowing people to own guns. These benefits must outweigh the deaths of 29,947 people each year, so they’d better be bloody good. But almost none of them stand up to basic scrutiny.

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Posted in damned lies and statistics, politics, violence | 4 Comments »

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Second Lifers: mass murderers in the making?

20 Apr 2007

Having avoided it for as long as humanly possible without going into total media boycott, I finally watched the infamous Cho Seung-Hui videos on Lateline tonight. Those videos that NBC News in the US received in the post and “handled it with dignity”, according to Virginia Police Superintendent Steve Flaherty. (Yeah, all the dignity of broadcasting them around the world a hundred million times with NBC logos slapped all over them.)

What is clear is that Cho, like so many other massacre-ists, suffered a troublesome combination of “a persecution complex, an enormous, fragile ego, an obsessive need for control and low competence for exercising it”, as a chap by the name of raincoaster rather aptly puts it. They are most often “tightly-wound, ego-driven men who would conventionally be described as failures”.

In a subsequent post, raincoaster draws an unkind but not inaccurate (cruel, but fair) parallel between mass murdering psychos and people who are hugely into Second Life, which is currently the mainstream media’s second-biggest obsession after serial killers.

. . . it seemed obvious that Second Life was most attractive to mature people who’d failed in First Life . . . it gives you the opportunity to hit REPLAY and live your life over, and if you don’t like the way it’s going, you hit DELETE and create a new life. This is not something that those accustomed to success would find compelling.

Which is also, if you think about it, a pretty decent explanation of much of the bizarre, antisocial and immature behaviour that goes on in L2 (that’s what the cognoscenti call it), such as, oh I dunno, interrupting someone’s lecture with a bunch of flying penises. Second Lifers even invented a new name for people who do stuff like this: they’re called “griefers”, apparently because “no-life losers” is too long or accurate, or something.

I mean, if you want to see a textbook persecution complex, look no further than the paranoid ravings of high-profile SL dissident Prokofy Neva, which have recently descended to threats of physical violence against some of his/her nemeses. And there is no shortage of control freaks or enormous fragile egos in the never-ending flame wars on Second Citizen and other forums.

If these nutjobs can teach us nothing else, they at least demonstrate the point a very clever person recently made to me: there’s no point moving to another country, and that goes doubly for a virtual one, if you’re fucked in the head. Because no matter where you go, you take your head with you.

This is the ultimate futility of people who come to Second Life trying to compensate for their real-world shortcomings and lack of success. If you’re a loser in first life, you’re probably a loser in Second Life too.

Posted in media, nerds, techno-wankery, violence | 11 Comments »

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Newsflash: George W Bush is stupid and US democracy is broken

18 Apr 2007

Australian Martin Bryant still holds the record for the world’s worst gun rampage, when he killed 35 people at Port Arthur, Tasmania in 1996. A dubious honour, to be sure. Prior to this, Australia had a fairly strong going-postal tradition: Milperra in 1984, Hoddle Street and Queen Street in 1987, Strathfield in 1991 and the Central Coast in 1992*. After Port Arthur, in a display of political bravery and farsightedness that proved to be as rare as it was uncharacteristic, the Howard Government passed tough gun laws and collected and destroyed more than half a million weapons.

Since 1996, here are some sobering statistics*:

Country Massacres People killed in massacres
Australia 0 0
United States 9 93

The US has had Jonesboro in 1998, Columbine in 1999, Wichita in 2000, Red Lake in 2005, Goleta, Capitol Hill and the Pennsylvania Amish school in 2006, Trolley Square earlier this year and now Blacksburg*. Australia has had none*.

That’s just gun massacres folks. Guns, sorry PEOPLE with guns, kill at least 30,000 people in the US each year. In Australia, it’s more like 300, most of which are suicide. Yet opinion polls consistently show that Americans believe poor parenting and violent movies and video games are greater causes of gun violence than gun ownership.

More guns = more dead people. It ain’t rocket science.

But President Bush took time out from consoling his country to assert that he continues to believe in the “right to bear arms”. From memory, every time a gun massacre has occurred in the US (that’s six* so far during Dubya’s presidency) he has immediately come out to reassure the NRA nutjobs that even though a whole bunch of people were just killed by guns, sorry, people with guns, he won’t make stricter gun laws.

What would make a politician do something so abjectly undiplomatic, insensitive and idiotic as to stand up in front of a bunch of people whose loved ones were just killed with guns (people with guns) and say “We support people’s rights to own guns”?!

The only possible answer is that Dubya and all US politicians live in absolute fear for their political lives instilled by a power-mad lobby group that represents the views of its insane, stupid and myopically self-centred members all too well, to the obvious and ongoing detriment of American society.

*(Lists and statistics collected from Wikipedia. May not be complete, accurate or true.)

Posted in damned lies and statistics, politics, violence | 11 Comments »

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Why Microsoft loves open source

16 Apr 2007

The open source movement has been a godsend for Microsoft and the other commercial software developers. It allows them to say, “Maybe our software is shit, but LOOK AT THE ALTERNATIVES!”

Open source software is, with a few well-known exceptions, not as good as commercial software. Linux has been around for 15 years, you’d think they’d have been just a little bit closer to getting it right by now.

Instead we’ve had 15 years of “it’ll be much better in the next release” or “it does the 20 percent of functions that 80 percent of people use almost as well as the commercial equivalent” or “what the fuck would you know, n00b?!” or “how much did M$ pay you to write that?”.

This is because the people who write open source software spend all their time abusing non-believers and arguing on slashdot about the minutiae of the minutiae of how evil Microsoft is or why the 0.89beta7 yggdrasil distribution was mankind’s greatest achievement . . . instead of writing better software.

Until there are serious alternatives, commercial software developers have no incentive to improve their products. Instead, they just need to point out how much worse the alternatives are and keep everyone distracted by this ridiculous ideological phoney war.

Even if they spend a few million here and there funding propaganda against open source software, it’s still that much cheaper and easier than paying developers to write better software.

Posted in nerds | 4 Comments »

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PM should shut the fuck up

11 Apr 2007

Even Singaporean former head honcho Lee Kuan Yew, as he accepts his honorary doctorate in Fascist Cronyism, or something, from the Australian National University, says John Howard is out of touch and risks becoming irrelevant.

And he’s got a freaking point. What the fuck is Johnny doing supporting Alan Jones after the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) found Jones breached the Commercial Radio Code of Practice in 2005 by vilifying Middle Eastern people and inciting the fucking Cronulla riots?

I mean, let’s look at the evidence, your honour.  Four days before the riot, Jonesy read out a reader letter, which said:

My suggestion is to invite one of the biker gangs to be present in numbers at Cronulla railway station when these Lebanese thugs arrive, it would be worth the price of admission to watch these cowards scurry back onto the train for the return trip to their lairs.

Australians old and new shouldn’t have to put up with this scum.

And the absolute best the Parrot can offer is the Sheikh Hilaly defence: I was taken out of context. But this is clearly enough for the PM, who said (despite having absolutely no place wading into this debate and especially not contradicting the findings of a government agency that is run by the same government that he is in):

I am not going to get involved in comments on individual decisions, but let me say this; I think Alan Jones is an outstanding broadcaster. I don’t think he’s a person who encourages prejudice in the Australian community, not for one moment, but he is a person who articulates what a lot of people think.

Jones doesn’t encourage prejudice, the PM argues, he just broadcasts what prejudiced fuckwits think. This is the same dog-whistle bullshit that odious little troll Howard keeps  pulling and getting away with; by appealing to xenophobia, he divides and conquers rather than trying to lead and unify.

Even the Sunday Terror thinks Jones is severely on the nose, and if the PM wants to go down on that sinking ship, he can be my guest.

Posted in media, politics | 1 Comment »

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Bitter misogynist fuckwits are the problem

2 Apr 2007

The downsides and limits of all this Web 2.0 free speech blogarama have been brought into sharp focus by the perils of prominent blogger Kathy Sierra (not for the squeamish) who has gone into hiding after having received death threats on her blog and others. Violent, ugly, woman-hating threats like “fuck off you boring slut… i hope someone slits your throat and cums down your gob”.

Anyone who’s anyone in the blogverse gets hate mail, even me. But unlike irate Shannon Noll fans, these charm-school dropouts have serious problems. This is symptomatic of what Andrew Keen calls the “rampant and uncontrollable misogyny of the blogosphere“.

But the problem is that the blogosphere has been colonized by a type of technophile male whose dialectic method is insult rather than polite argument. And this rotten culture of anonymity has spawned a contemporary Internet of social deviants, loonies, perverts and get-a-lifers (not to mention weird Second Lifers). The consequence is digital miasma.

Keen’s apt description owes much to Penny Arcade’s famous Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory: Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad. (In Australian English, we would say ‘fuckwit’ or ‘Sam and the City reader’.)

It’s not just limited to the bloggerati either. You don’t have to go far on Urban Dictionary, supposedly a reflection of modern culture, or at least online culture, before you come across something stomach-turningly violent and offensive (not for the squeamish, or anyone else really).

But there are no easy answers.

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Posted in nerds, sensitive stuff about chicks, techno-wankery, violence, wordy things | 4 Comments »