The Green Tortoise and Other Travesties

MyBlogLog Claim Post

2008-07-01T00:48:00.001-07:00

So I need to start playing more country?

2008-01-03T13:25:00.000-08:00

Which sci-fi crew would you best fit in with? (pics)
created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Serenity (Firefly)

You like to live your own way and don't enjoy when anyone but a friend tries to tell you should do different. Now if only the Reavers would quit trying to skin you.

Serenity (Firefly)

81%

Millennium Falcon (Star Wars)

81%

Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica)

63%

Babylon 5 (Babylon 5)

56%

SG-1 (Stargate)

50%

Moya (Farscape)

50%

Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix)

44%

Enterprise D (Star Trek)

44%

Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda)

31%

Deep Space Nine (Star Trek)

31%

Heart of Gold (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

25%

FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files)

25%

Bebop (Cowboy Bebop)

19%

Some more photomanipulation

2007-12-06T20:22:00.000-08:00

Another piece, one that I'll play around with a little more, from my gallery space on DeviantArt. Let's call this one of the gifts of poverty. Maybe.

What I would really like, among so many other things many of which I would like even more, is access to a darkroom, but I can't afford that, so I have to rely on Osco, which means assembly line service. For example, I brought in a shot I took along Broadway of a neo-baroque building whose ornamentation was brought out by the shadows cast by the setting sun and they developed it as if I had shot it at noon, "compensating" by lightening the image until they had washed almost all of the color out of it. One might imagine that the sight of a clearly shining street lamp in the picture would have tipped off the developer that this image had obviously been shot later in the day, but she was probably too rushed to notice. The image was ruined.

Further, as is so often the case, my handicap gets in the way. I can't drive, which means that even if I could afford a tripod, I would have trouble taking it everywhere I went - try carrying even a small object in your hands for a few miles and see how heavy it gets. You'll be surprised. This becomes a nuisance, because low light conditions are common in Chicago. That doesn't always keep me from getting a shot - if one finds something to brace oneself against, sometimes one can steady oneself enough to compensate for long exposures - but again, a lot of blurring occurs. These factors have left me with a wealth of ruined pictures which I'm loath to just throw out.

But the good news is that with the scanner comes an earlier release of Photoshop, and what would have been wasted shots proved, very often, to be a good starting point for image manipulation. Had I the money for my own darkroom, if I had motorized transportation to help me get around - then I'd probably have had lots and lots of nice, clean, crisp, well developed shots and no urge to repair them with software that in some ways, proved unsatisfactory, leading me in simple frustration to acknowledge the unreality of the whole process in the final result, pushing the images in the direction of surrealism or outright abstraction. Had I a little more money, I suppose that I might have gotten a later, better release, ... and so it goes.

Not that I wouldn't rather be gainfully employed, of course, but it is always a pleasant surprise when one is blessed by one's bad luck.

The old place at Yahoo 360

2007-10-26T03:57:00.000-07:00

In case anybody should later find himself wondering what a 360 blog used to look like, since they seem to be on their way out right now, clicking onto the following screen shots of my old place (Joseph Dunphy's Soapbox at its original location on Yahoo 360) might help satisfy a little curiosity.

Screenshots - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

If you'd like to see those slices assembled into a whole of sorts, I have a page where I do that. I'll probably post some more pages over on one of my Googlegroups, just for ... old times' sake? Something like that.

Note inserted: October 27. As good as my word, and I'm sure you were in suspense over that, right? I'll add these as they come in

Pages from my old blog- 2 3 4 5 6 7

If you popped over here from the Oct.22 post on Joseph Dunphy's Soapbox, now is the time to go back.

Why this blog is called "The Green Tortoise and Other Travesties"

2007-10-01T11:38:00.000-07:00

In case you were tuning in late and wondered about this ...

A long time ago, during a time when I had become very tired of the petty repression that had come to be taken for granted in life in Chicago, I suppose in preperation for the greater repression to come during the era that we are now living through, I used to go an Arts Festival called "Around the Coyote", a pleasant island of quirky and spontaneous festiveness in the midst of a sea of psychotically intolerant staidness during the weekend of its existence each year. I find myself starting to write a story to illustrate just what life was like, about the man who boarded the El when I and some of my fellow students were on board, and started playing charades with us. We're not sure what he had enjoyed in the way of refreshments, because he'd start acting out one word and by the end of the round couldn't remember what that word had been, which all involved found very funny, the man himself included, but that was the thing. We were laughing, not at him but with him, and far from getting hurt, we were getting a little lightness in a day that certainly needed it.

I want to write "can you imagine our surprise" ... our surprise as members of the Chicago Police, untroubled by the absence of any laws which had been broken, goosestepped, literally goose-stepped, onto that El car, marched all of us (the man included) out onto the platform, and started searching us all in response to no discernable threat, and no unlawful act, unless one wants to count soft laughter and a little nonobscene gesturing on somebody's part as being "disturbing the peace" - but I think that I know the answer to that question. Something was already missing from our urban experience, missing without good reason, and when something is missing, sooner or later one does go looking for it, even if one doesn't always know at the time that one is doing so. A few years passed, and I found myself at an art festival - yes, Around the Coyote.

This was back during the event's height in the 1990s, before real estate speculation drove out the very people whose activity had been driving up property values in that neighborhood (the artists), greatly diminishing the event, which I doubt will be worth attending in another five years at its current rate of decline. Before one gets any images of a 60s like outpouring of creativity and mind blowing excess, I should point out that by the standards of the civilized world, the rebellion was mostly very mild stuff; just the fact that the attendees were starting to spontaneously interact with each other was considered to be a sign of just how wild things were getting over in Wicker Park, which should tell one just how wild they really aren't in Chicago. One of those mild bits of nonrebellion was a very nice film program, held in the Chopin theatre I believe. At it, I saw something entitled "Burning Man: Just Add Couches" following another film simply called "Burning Man", and I couldn't help but be intrigued.

Imagine the contrast between a world in which the Chicago Police were in the habit of making sure that nobody was allowed to "loiter" (ie. relax outdoors) in one place long enough to meet anybody - yes, that's how far we take Social Conservatism in the Midwestern United States - and the one in pieces of real life footage in which we get to see a group of people setting up a "drive by shooting range" - just like a regular shooting range, only one had to do at least 45 while aiming at the target, out in the middle of the flat and empty desert. The "just add couches" part of the title of the second film, in which Joe Winston (the producer) and his friends, as they prepared for their second visit to Burning Man, decided that what the Black Rock Desert of Northern Nevada (where Burning Man occurs) needed was a living room, and so they did. Inside their tent, they set up a Midwestern US living room, complete with refigerator, recliners and working cable hookup, in a place called "Couch Potato Camp" - raising a question that I'm sure you've already asked yourself. Wouldn't the participants have to get up out of the recliners to get their beers, and is that something that a real couch potato would feel happy about?

If so, they had that covered. The furniture was motorized. In theory, one could have ridden one's recliner up to the refrigerator, reducing the chore to one of sitting up as one opened the door. They hadn't motorized that yet, but this was the first year, after all, so we should cut them a little slack on that. At about this point, somebody must have notice just how very flat that part of the desert really was - Burning Man takes place in a part of the Black Rock desert called "the Playa", which is the dried bed of the old Lake Lahontan. Where the event is held, during the last ice age, was under a few hundred feet of ice cold water, and to this day is periodically flooded to the depth of a few inches during the Winter. The land, during the bone dry sunshine of a late Nevada summer afternoon, in which dripping wet skin becomes dry to the touch within 90 seconds, becomes a bleached white, table top flat expanse of gypsum and gypsum powder, perfect for racing by vehicles with very low frames, like, say ... they started holding furniture races in the middle of the desert, and yes, I have witnessed at least one lounger topping 10 mph on the straightaway, with my own eyes. No, they weren't making this up.

The contrast with Chicago's habit of treating its own citizenry as cattle to be herded, already anticipating the attitudes of the current era, couldn't have been greater. I had to go. The problem was that I couldn't seem to get there. A few details:

1. I have a mild case of cerebral palsy, courtesy of a physician who decided to rush my delivery with foreceps.

With a great deal of practice, I've managed to mostly make it invisible - mostly. Keep in mind that what I learned to do was build a rhythm as I consciously fired muscles that an undamaged motor center should be firing for me. Periodically, blessedly rarely, something throws off the sequence and the illusion breaks as I stumble over my own feet. Let's say that as I do those mountain hikes, I avoid the cliff edges for a reason.

This is enough to rule out driving a car for me and yes, I have tried to learn. The motor skills just aren't there.

2. While I can certainly offer other services (eg. cooking) to make up for not being able to take a turn behind the wheel, when I would go to the lists and look for somebody to hook up with to get out to Burning Man, nobody was open to discussing the possibility. "You know, I actually am an electrical engineer, and you guys keep talking about how you can't find anybody to set anything up for you" ... and all I got was a determined stonewalling. Not that I'm not used to that.

3. Ableism is alive and well in the United States, and offered with a lot less of an attempt to disguise it as something other than what it is, than one usually sees accompanying the antisemitism which is never so far beneath the surface in our area. In part, I suspect, this is where a lot of the raw, unreasoning hatred I found directed toward me came from, online.

The official line is the disabled would be given a chance to prosper in our fairly run land if only they would apply themselves and achieve in school. I worked overtime before studies to put myself through school, ended up with a high dean's list average in a PhD program from a top 20 school in one of the fields that supposedly goes crying for qualified labor (Mathematics), and years later, am still looking for my first "real job", one that pays more than the $6000/year that TAs were graciously paid in my department for work weeks that occasionally topped 60 hours, and certainly never dropped down to the 18 hours that were the polite fiction written into our contracts.

I've applied to over 40,000 companies with the first graduate degree in hand, and another few thousand with the engineering coursework added on, so certainly I haven't just been waiting for the jobs to come to me, and so we are left with the message that our neocon friends can't live with and remain neocons; the official line is a load of fertilizer. That success in this country is as much a roll of the dice as anything else, and that the disabled can not improve an employment rate that is on the order of 30% (yes, that's 70% unemployment) simply by applying themselves in school; education is no remedy when the problem is one of discrimination, as this one can easily be seen to be on examination.

I've worked as a tutor, training the semiliterate children of real privilege in their corner offices as they worked at careers in which the use of statistics was included in the job description. I've found that many of them couldn't even understand algebraic notation on an 8th grade level; imagine somebody trying to do experimental design without understanding what a variable was or why that mattered. I have strained to teach such people, before they went back to their six figure jobs, and I went back to being thankful for the fact that I came from a cultural background that taught me so many different ways of cooking beans, because meat was just not going to be happening that day.

Which some have pointed to as a problem; the name "Dunphy" was imposed on my family as a joke by an immigration official. Our actual background includes a blending of Southern European and apparently (ahem!) other things as well, which I'd just as soon not go into specifics about until people get a little less trigger happy in this country; let's just say that I get spoken to in both Spanish and Arabic a lot by people who seem to think that I'm going to understand them (which I don't), and that this is no blessing where I live; some would say, not elsewhere in this country, either. Maybe so. While I wouldn't care to guess whether or not the open bigotry directed toward anybody whose ancestry derives from countries where Romance and Semitic languages are spoken in this area is as widespread elsewhere in the United States, one does notice just how quickly the phrase "freedom fries" caught on. One also can't help but notice just how much professional workspaces tend to look like gatherings of the Mayflower Society in places where the local demographic really doesn't run that way, even on the university campuses. Some have argued that this, as much as the disability, would have been a problem in any job search.

Maybe yes, maybe no. I've heard a lot of screaming about the question, but either way, we're left with the really that some of us just have to live with - that for some of us poverty is a given and we just have to build our plans around it. The "reasonable alternative" that one person offered involved hiring a charter flight to take me out to that desert. I can only imagine what being able to afford such extravagances would be like.

4. Like a lot of people, I have some allergies and food sensitivities that I'd better not ignore. Consuming uncooked, uncultured milk products, for example, would do some pretty ugly things to me as it would to most adults on most of the planet. One of the things that I shouldn't consume is a protein found in wheat and a few other grains called "gluten"; I have something called Celiac Disease, which I'm told is fairly common in the Jewish population.

In regard to that last one, the fact that it, like Lactose Intolerance, is called a disease at all says something about today's America and the way in which it seems to exclude the bulk of its own population in the ways in which it defines normality. There are fermented vegetable pastes used by a variety of cuisines which arose in warm climates, which we've learned to not give to those of Anglo-Saxon descent, because if we do - bottoms out. What for most of us is a nice seasoning for a stew is, for them, an evening spent riding the porcelain bus. But note that we don't speak of the Aryan fermentation byproduct digestion disorder; we simply refer to those food products as being "relatively indigestable" even though, for the vast bulk of the world's population, they are nothing of the sort.

Celiac is a lot like that. If you avoid consuming wheat and a few other grains, thus leaving it alone, it will leave you alone. To my way of thinking, the word "disease" is best reserved for things that will hurt you even when respected, like, say, leukemia. (Miss you, mom). We are all different, and this is just a difference, albeit one that needs to be noticed. I did indeed notice it, and one those rare occasions when I've scrimped and saved enough money to travel, make sure to bring it up with those with whom I will be travelling. On only one occasion has that ever proved to be a problem - and yes, we're getting to that and to where the title of this blog comes from, in however roundabout a fashion.

How does one get to where one is going, when one couldn't sit safely behind the wheel of a car? Picture going off the curb of a road, as I did at 7 mph, while doing 65 - very bad. Sometimes I've done so by travelling with family, but my family is a bit too conservative to go to something like Burning Man. Sometimes I've flown to where I was going and used public transportation - you haven't really flown until you've been in a Cessna at a few thousand feet in a thunderstorm, by the way, watching the thing sway along all three axes in the winds that, lacking a pressurized cabin, it can not rise above. But that limits me to a limited set of major cities, and the Black Rock Desert is two hours outside of Reno. How, then?

I was given what I later found to be the no-effort answer of recommending the service linked to from the Burning Man homepage. "Take the Green Tortoise to Burning Man". As I always did and always should, I called ahead, months in advance, explained the Celiac situation in detail, and asked them if this was something that would pose a problem for them. Could they provide me with food that wouldn't make me violently ill. They said that they could and would accommodate my needs in this area during the trip. They lied, about this and so much else, with results that I described in a journal of experiences I had during the trip.

Burning Man : Bad Times on the Green Tortoise

One might reasonably think that, in reading a story like this, that there wouldn't be a lot of room for controversy. Surely, one would have to agree that lying to a customer in order to get his business under false pretenses is an unacceptable practice? Yet, one can see apologists for that profit making company trying to talk their way around that very issue, and finding public support as they did so. The game plan, when one defend that which, by its nature, is indefensible is to try to confuse the reader about exactly what it is that is under discussion. The remedy is to keep one's cool and make precise what others would make vague and I do.

Deconstructing a Rationalization
An Open Letter to "Mike Tattoo" (aka Mike Bolger)

To repeat what I fear may be starting to become a mantra for me - one may be entitled to entitled to one's own opinions, but one is not entitled to one's own facts. What I found astounding in the case that gave this blog its name is not just that so many people were so eager to do so on behalf of a company's crooked business practices, or even that Ask.com suddenly seemed willing to go along with that company's clearly expressed wishes to bury all accounts of this affair. (Take a good look in the archived discussion section of the Green Tortoise article on Wikipedia, which once linked to the aforementioned journal, and to this archived comment on GTWebmaster's Wikipedia profile). What I find incredible is the number of people who will argue in favor of an attitude that would have been reportedly thought of as being more than a little backward during the 1950s and think of it as being "progressive" during the early 21st century, fifty years later. Where, indeed, have people's heads gone and yes, will they wash their hair afterwards?

In its blatant, indefensible absurdity, the incident, for me, became the perfect symbol of my experiences during an era in which basic honesty has been held in as little regard as it has been during this one. Watching people lining up for the opportunity to spread disinformation at my expense, simply for writing a truthful consumer report about a business that provided poor service and failed to live up to its commitments has been a remarkable experience; one never imagines, even after years of witnessing trolls in action, how fluid and effortless their dishonesty will be. Consider, for example, the way in which a complaint that after two hours of my providing the company that had charged me a few hundred dollars for a trip out into the desert with uncompensated labor at a work station preparing food for other customers, making me late to see somebody I had arranged to meet, I asked to simply be allowed to prepare some food for myself and was refused - and then my account of the abusive behavior on the part of a Green Tortoise staff member that followed was spun by somebody on another site as a complaint that I was being expected to work at all. To lie on behalf of authority, any authority at all, for them is like swimming for a fish - so much a reflex as to require no thought on their part at all, and no motivation.

Why do they lie? Because that's what they do. What is messed up is how the rest of us are called on to respond to these pathological liars who have shut the process of rational discussion down - gently, as if we didn't hear the tone in their voice, and as if a mild tone on their part, even were it present, should get one past the fact that honesty is a fundamental part of civility, and that when such is absent, one might well have good reason to be angry. The "you're not entitled to your own facts" line comes to me from Stephen Colbert, who I'm told uttered them while he was out of character. "Truthiness is tearing our nation apart", I'm told he said, and I don't doubt it. The whole premise of civilized society, of living in a place where, when we have serious disputes we don't resolve them by cracking each other's skulls open or otherwise resorting to violence, as human beings probably have throughout most of their time on this world, is that we can talk matters out. But how does one discuss matters with somebody who has assigned himself the right to create his own facts, refuse to accept the reasonability of any point that doesn't fit in with his preconceived opinions, in general responds to any attempt to reason with him by refusing to really listen, by using threats, deceit and whatever else might work to keep others from listening as well? In the absence of a general recognition of a duty to be fair minded and reasonable, civilization itself becomes the greatest non sequitir of all, one which almost everybody will see through, eventually.

I could write of the road to ruin a supposedly democratic society puts itself on when it asks so little of its own people as they exercise the duties of citizenship. I probably could make a very good case that this is exactly the road America is on, right now, as I made this blog a lot more political than it is likely to become, but at some point I just, in some sense, ran out of steam. I'd just rather do my math, my cooking, my photography, and looking over the head butting matches I had been in over the years, as I opposed this idiot or that as he tried to persuade reader to embrace some horrific social change of another, I've come to the conclusion that I had more than done my part in this area years ago. Think of the current drama over the unemployment problem in the United States, how many times the official unemployment rate has been cited, how many times that statistic has been discredited, and how many times those trying to pretend that all is well have responded by acting as if the debunking had never occured and simply repeating themselves over and over and over ...

I don't usually write about big things in my blogs for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the rationale for caring enough to bother to do so is long gone. What I offer you, instead, is the individual perspective of somebody who, knowing that he can't really think of himself as being an American any more, regardless of where he happens to be from, is trying to find out who and what he is, as identities redefine themselves in this deservedly fading and clearly deranged society that we have to deal with. The aggravations, the fun, the experiences as they are for better and worse, and yes, some of them will in one way or another, touch on the subject of the title experience, even if most might not. You can expect to see some wheatfree recipes on this blog and one the sites associated with it. I do have a flickr group for past customers of the Green Tortoise and a googlegroup for those who wish to discuss low budget alternatives to using the Green Tortoise, not to mention sharing their own tales of woe, which seem to get buried in the search engines under a tidal wave of something that reads suspiciously like professionally written ad copy. But for the most part, this is just the personal journal of somebody who is best known online over a drama that he is amazed ever happened before.

"No sir, we don't handle special dinner requests, so you might want to do business with another company" - really, seriously - how difficult could just saying that before any of this ever happened have been? Would it maybe have been easier than having Mike Waggoner ("user:here") trying to corrupt the Wikipedia editorial process over what the records say is a matter of months? Would it have been cheaper than, say, bribing Ask.com to remove the url from their search engine results, if such was the case - as appears to be, judging from the sudden disappearance of that specific url from their records, at a time when a search would still turn up pages that a spider could only reach by passing through the no longer indexed pages, pretty clear implying the presence of human intervention in the results. Today, try doing an ask.com or lycos search under the term "commonsense666atlast.tripod.com", and note that the pages missing from the results in that subdomain are precisely the high profile pages that a human being would first notice, but the side pages remain; how could software do that on its own? Short of somebody at ask.com taking a bribe to fix the results, or somebody breaking into their site and doing the job himself, one is left with the question of how this could occur, and more to the point, how could it occur in such a way as to make scamming me out of my meal ticket a paying proposition for the Green Tortoise? Bribes aren't cheap, especially as questions sooner or later do get asked. On the other hand, sending a customer whose needs you have no desire to meet can be very cheap, indeed - what are the odds the customer will care enough to remember the next month, much less a few years later?

Sometimes the right thing to do is also the smart thing to do. What a shame that more people don't get that.

What this blog almost certainly won't be about, for reasons that should be clear if you go through Burning Man pages, is Burning Man itself. For all of the aggravation, expense and missed opportunities, I am glad that I went. It was an escape. But I don't think that it would be any more; in its own way, Burning Man turned even more repressive and conformist than the city I live in, and at least in Chicago I get to bathe - and staying home is a lot cheaper. I can't really convey what it was like; I can tell you what Draka was, but you would have had to be there in the belly of the metal beast to really get why that was as cool as it was, and these days, one doesn't get fire breathing dragons on wheels and late night discussions of comparative theology inside giant glowing mushrooms and all of the other happy strangeness that made a festival into all that word used to mean, all that people hardly remember that they used to know. Now, the kids wrap blinky lights around their go-carts and we wonder how long it will be before somebody draws a bead on them because he thinks that the go carts must be bombs. "Gosh durn muslim hippy terrorists, show them a thing or two I will!" All seems to be going downhill, with no potential turnaround in sight.

Part of the reason for this, perhaps, is that America has been getting steadily poorer ever since 9-11, and the money isn't there for big projects, but I don't think that's the whole problem. That which caught the eye or imagination at Burning Man was given much out of the goodness of people's hearts, but the administration and the community it guided never really seemed to appreciate those who gave. It never celebrated or even greatly tolerated the intellectual, unless he was of the poseur variety seen in such numbers in coffeehouses of the sort that suited San Francisco's temperament, and what was deeply strange was that many of us were finding that a city could have a temperament; there seemed to be no real diversity of thought there. At an event whose look and feel was practically defined by blinking light devices, one can find people who, on the official forum for the event, can now be heard saying that an innocent 19 year old girl would have deserved to die for wearing just such a blinky device, and getting a far friendlier reception than those who have disputed the rightness of such an act. One quickly comes to see just how little genuine love there is to be found for the tinkerer there, or for the artist who turns what the tinkerer makes into things of beauty.

No, there's no need to travel thousands of miles and spend hundreds of dollars just to encounter substance abuse, hatred, anger, and petty jealous spite; all fell apart in the end. The party is over at Burning Man, and perhaps for America as well, but there are always other parties to be had. Maybe some of them will be worth mentioning here.

Pincushion of the week

2007-08-01T16:55:00.001-07:00

I started an add-on to my previous post with the words "On an unrelated note, let's ponder with wonder and amazement the fact that this managed to become a featured video on Youtube. Slow week, boys?", thinking that there was too little going on to justify devoting an entire post to this. How wrong I was, but this certainly isn't the first time I've underestimated my fellow man's capacity for just sheer, gratuitously coarse insanity. A young girl who claims to be 18 (I'm skeptical about that) posts a video to Youtube stating something that would have been a platitude when I was her current age, talking about the importance of not just believing what one is told. She does seem to take herself terminally seriously, but remember yourself at that age. Probably, you were doing a little of that yourself. What I hope you weren't doing was responding to a provocation that mild with wishes that somebody would be killed or threats of rape, accompanied by graphic sexual suggestions directed toward somebody who either is a minor or was one in the recent past.

While I initially teased her a little, I found myself regretting my decision to do so very quickly. I've seen online mobs like hers in action before, and I can definitely understand her anger. Here's her post:

And you knew there was going to be a sequel, right? Hope you enjoy the word "f**k", because she uses it a lot. Not that I don't sympathize as she talks about the idiocy of netizens, but she did bring a little of this on herself.

Maybe. She's 18, isn't she? Meaning that she came of age during the "self esteem based education" era? Hmmm, maybe there's a context in that which I haven't been picking up on. What you're seeing is a repost of a followup video which AngryLittleGirI deleted, though the comments for her video are still up. I definitely am not supportive of the title this other user attached to the repost, and will be asking for permission to repost this one myself, with a far more respectful blurb attached.

For those craving more of her writing, rumor holds that this is her blog and here is her YouTube profile, for those who wish to enjoy a little more postadolescent bitterness. Either way, have fun, preferably with aspirin bottle in hand. But Jessica, that's OK. This is normal for those your age.

One can say much the same about reading many of the replies she has received, at least as far as the aspirin goes (in its hatred, the response went well beyond what would be understandable at any age), but at least one case (this video by HippyOrGTFO the teasing stayed good spirited instead of descending into the gutter and at least one of them (this one by Lehrane, strictly speaking a response to one of the responses) seemed genuinely sweet.

But then there were those that were genuinely psychotic, like this one by somebody named Joyce. You can actually watch this depraved little girl express a hope that the target of her misplaced rage will kill herself, merely for having expressed opinions that she didn't like and having called a group of trolls on Youtube "retards" for no better reason that the fact that they were acting like retards. Truth hurts, Joyce?

If I seem a little slow to comment in YouTube in the future, this is why. This was like returning to the bad old days of Usenet. I like the fact that Google is not as eager to shoot first and ask questions later as some providers, but there is such a thing as having too much of a good thing, even when the good thing is tolerance. Somebody who posts a threat that he will stalk, rape and kill a poster not only is not entitled to state that in the forum of his choice, he isn't even entitled to be outside of a prison cell at that point where, one might well hope, he might gain a little added perspective on the crime of rape. Somebody being piled up on does not need to be teased at such a moment, because one can count on that moment to have driven away her sense of humor. What Google has done is create a kind of Usenet in a can, back in the days when the vileness of Usenet was fresh and young, and psychiatric outpatients of all descriptions were still excited about it.

I've had that experience, in fact I think that most of us did, because it's a big part of where political correctness came from, and wasn't that a magical experience to go through? I don't think I need to have that experience again. I've posted rebuttals in a few places because I remember the experience of having been the one ganged up on, and nobody should have to face that unsupported, if only because nobody should ever be left wondering if the whole world has gone insane. If anybody actually reads this blog and they'd like to do something decent, do a search, find the videos where this girl is being attacked and give her some backup, because she doesn't deserve what she has been getting. But beyond that, if Google is going to let the comments section of Youtube turn into a cesspool, I think that they should be taught that eventually nobody but a piece of s**t is going to want to swim there.

IF I ever post to Youtube, I will always do so with comments disabled and will shun the discussions, aside from offering support to those deserving it during this sort of drama, and not even that very often. Trolls gain more attention and power than they would otherwise enjoy because there is content that others would enjoy reading, enticing them to come look. The paradox of a troll dominated forum, then, is that if the trolls win, they lose, because soon after they drive off all of the sane posters, they will run out of readership. One enters such a discussion to reaffirm the values of civil society and leave a needed reminder that they are being breached as wakeup call to those being lulled into acceptance of what they are seeing, but then one departs, having implicitly reminded others that they ought to do so as well. This is the victory one seeks in such a place. Idiots are as free-willed as anybody else; you can't force them to be anything other than what they are, so you have to accept that they will be in the majority where they have gathered when you depart, but you can help make the virtual territory they hold onto become worthless.

That's how you win.

Addendum, August 14,17. In case you were wondering how somebody was holding up, this is the harassee's response to the drama. She seems to be in good spirits.

Though not too good to break a hippy's heart. Jessica, how could you? We see the man scarfing down a tub of what I can only hope is Ben and Jerry's, drowning his sorrows in lactose ... sorry, I just have to log off now ... it's so sad. What does "emo" mean?

Burning Man Labor Demonstration, sort of

2007-07-30T14:17:00.000-07:00

How very delightful. For those who thought that I was exaggerating when I starting writing the Ninnies on Parade section of Bad Times on the Green Tortoise, that the burners couldn't really be like that, watch and enjoy. (There is a small amount of profanity on the video).

Click To Play

Yes, but is she Jewish?

2007-07-23T10:07:00.000-07:00

What?! Mom would want me to ask. Video found on Metacafe, from Joey and David.com.

The Laundry Girl, Never Forget Her ! - Funny bloopers are a click away

The Express, Dennis Quaid, and a friendly suggestion

2007-06-22T19:26:00.000-07:00

In case you didn't already know, Dennis Quaid is in a movie currently being shot on the Near North Side of Chicago. The name of the movie is "The Express". Judging from the cars used in the shooting, it seems to be a period piece set some time around 1960. I only know this much because I ran into the crew as they were shooting. Mr.Quaid wasn't around at the time, as far as I knew.

Let me set the time and place for you, and you'll see where the friendly suggestion is coming from. It's a bit past five in the afternoon on a bright, warm Wednesday afternoon - yes, about two days ago. Not hot, just warm, warm enough that the girls are dressed lightly and the boys of all ages are enjoying the scenery, as boys are prone to do until the day they drop. I'm walking along North Avenue, on the north side of the street. People are now getting out of work, and as the nice weather is a novelty, they are doing as much walking as they can. The street I happen to be walking down is a major thoroughfare, passing through the most densely populated section of the third largest city in the United States, a neighborhood thick with highrises, having about as many people per square mile as Manhattan. Get the picture, yet? Let me flesh it out a little more, then. Along the north side of the street, which narrows from four lanes to two as it crosses Clark, the street is forested, deep green branches bending low, providing welcome shade in abundance to those who wish they had remembered to bring sunglasses when they headed out in the morning, and obstructed lines of sight for the rest of us, especially when the sidewalk is packed, as it is bound to be on a day like today, not that those of us present mind - with one exception.

As I walk eastward, headed toward the underpass to the lakefront, somewhere near State I start to see trailers, a camera pointed toward Clark Street and those of us coming from the West, an empty stretch of sidewalk in front of it with no visible signs of action - and a very testy looking woman. A pedestrian who had been approaching looks at the camera, points across the street, asking her "should I ...?", nodding to one side to quickly indicate a simple question: "would you like me to cross the street, to get out of the camera shot somebody's setting up or has set up or ... because the one thing that has been absent throughout? The crew didn't think to make any effort to block off the sidewalk. The way we all found out was that we walked along and ... surprise! ... there they were. Glaring at us as if we had no business going toward the Lake on a sunny day, on a public sidewalk.

A swift and courteous question from an apparent local who was trying to be cooperative with a visitor to the city was greeted with an uncivil tone, from somebody who seemed to imagine that she was in the middle of a studio backlot and we were tresspassers. I could say something about the wisdom of wearing out one's welcome in a friendly place by treating the local people as if they were intruders, and I suppose that I just did, but let us focus more narrowly on the practicality of this woman's approach and what passed for managerial judgement on her part. At the very heart of a major city, at rush hour on a bright day, she and her team assume that nobody is going to walk down the shady side of the street. What could they possibly be thinking about?

Obviously, if one is shooting a film set in the mid 20th century, one doesn't want to have somebody walking past with an ipod; the illusion will be broken, and those passing understand that. By and large, they wished to be cooperative, but being cooperative does not mean being psychic, it does not mean being able to see through crowds or a dense canopy of leaves. It means being willing to act on the information one has in order to try to avoid causing another unnecessary inconvenience, and when that other decides not to give one the information one needs to act in as timely a manner as the other wishes, whose fault is that? How difficult would it have been, for the crew to merely post a sign at the end of the block stating "film shooting in progress, please use other sidewalk"? Or to use those little sawhorses used by .... oh, practically every other film company to have ever shot on the Near North side, to block off the sidewalk? But, with precious daylight burning on a day which was soon to be followed by grey overcast, as the bills mounted, this team decided that what it really needed to do to get that sidewalk clear was be abrupt with the locals as they wandered in, unwarned, in a column, one by one. Coming home by foot on rush hour.

Good plan. I can't imagine why it didn't work. All the same, next time, they might want to consider just blocking off the sidewalk and maybe even trying to not irritate the friendly locals in whose home they are guests, if only as a change of pace.

Mildly cute graphic effect

2007-03-17T10:14:00.000-07:00

I was putting in some "links back to home" on a few of my pages, and I accidentally came across this effect. Take a look at the bus graphic at the bottom of this page. The bus seemed to almost float above the background. Yes, yes, warm colors advance and cool recede, but the colors in the graphic aren't that warm. I think there may be a little more going on that just that, and it didn't necessarily come out of that glass of iced coffee I haven't gotten around to getting, yet.

You can read the rest of that page if you want, I guess, but it's mostly just me telling my side of the story of a dispute with a group of drugged out Burning Man people (no, that's not redundant ... OK, maybe it is), so aside from the visual effect I have you looking at, maybe the most interesting thing to come out of that page is the question of where I got such poor taste in selecting the company I keep.

Bringing bad things to light

2007-03-05T08:10:00.000-08:00

G-d save us from those so desperately eager to save us from ourselves:

TORONTO, ONTARIO Ontario is considering becoming the first province in Canada to follow Australia's lead in banning old-fashioned, energy-sucking light bulbs, Environment Minister Laurel Broten said as the province draws up a plan to cut its greenhouse gas emissions.

Conservative Leader John Tory and environmental groups are urging the government to ban incandescent bulbs in favour of energy-efficient ones, saying it's the push people need to save electricity and a move that would eliminate much of the province's dependence on coal-fired power plants.

"There are a lot of great ideas out there and that's one of them," Broten said. "Everything is on the table." --> (more here)

A halfway decent definition of liberty is that desirable state we attain when everything is not on the table. Otherwise, we spend all of our lives fighting over those many things that are on the table, because there is no decision that one can make for oneself that some busybody won't try to interfere in. This is not to say that the government should never deny the individual freedom of choice, just that the government ought to be so greatly reluctant to do so, that it won't in the absence of a disturbingly compelling reason to act.

What that reason might be in this case is anybody's guess. Consider where Ontario is located. Considering the fact that I hear from people who think that Chicago is located somewhere near Kentucky, maybe I'd better give a map.

Yes, that Minneapolis, Minnesota you're seeing well to the south of Ontario, which you can see generally lies to the north of the generally frosty American Midwest, with Hudson Bay, an inlet of the Arctic to its North. One might go out on a limb and guess the beach weather there might not be optimally warm, most of the time, and one would be right, as one can see by looking these month mean temperatures for Toronto, and then noticing how far Ontario reaches to the north of that city. One might be safe, then, in concluding that Bob and Doug MacKenzie do not live in a tropical paradise, and in fact probably have the heat on most of the time.

Guess what happens to the energy "wasted" by an incandescent light bulb? This is the issue that gets glossed over by advocates of this kind of intrusive legislation, who tend to act like the energy that an incandescent light bulb fails to turn into visible light just vanishes into nowhere. Obviously, it can't do any such thing, because one would have to circumvent basic physical conservation laws, as in the laws of Physics themselves, to accomplish this undesirable goal. Where, then, does the missing energy go?

The vast bulk of it becomes heat, which helps to keep warm the space it is heating, reducing the need for heating feul. Outside of the summer months, and mainly during the day even at that, that energy isn't going to waste at all, and the clueless consumer who so badly needs to be micromanaged for his own good turns out to be not so clueless after all. Go further south, into a place like Chicago, and you'll find that our year still isn't wall-to-wall toastiness, either, and so even down in balmy Illinois, most of the waste energy is being put to good use, even without any deliberate attempt being made.

We're left with a proposed law which our activist friends are trying to spread from place to place, rather unconcerned with the fact that there is no clear rationale for promoting it, and a very clear rationale for opposing it. The problem with passing a law or otherwise imposing decisions upon the individual from above, is that individuals are very different from each other and while they can and likely will factor those individual differences of their own into the purchasing decisions they make, the law isn't very good at doing that, itself.

For some people, fluorescent lighting is as good as any other, and they are free to maybe save a little money by buying the new fluourescent bulbs - if, indeed, they do save money. For others of us, though, that light can be intensely unpleasant. Some can see its flickering, others find its decidedly unnatural mix of colors unsettling, and these factors can greatly reduce the mental focus and comfort of those so affected. Certainly, I've found that they affect mine, and one can easily find others who will say the same. Pass that law where we live, and we are denied the freedom to rationally act by making a very small added expenditure of our own money during a relatively brief time of the year. Very brief, indeed, because during the day during the summer, one tends to either be working or outside, not at home either way, and so we're facing the possibility of sustaining a real loss in productivity and quality of life in order to force us to engage in what may well be nonexistent savings, based on the theory that individual people are so stupid that they can't manage to decide to save money on their own, unless they are forced to do so at gunpoint.

People acting in a free market are certainly capable of acting stupidly, which is why when their stupidity affects others on a large scale lassez faire may not prove to be a valid nonresponse on the part of government, but the assumption of this argument is something very different. The assumption is not that we may have lone individuals who may make irrational use of their disproportionate amount of personal power to work mischief on the undeserving, but that on the whole, the customer can not be trusted to make the simple decision to avoid wasting his own money, that he has to be babysat and forced to make the right decision for his own good, by people who, in reality, don't live inside his skin, don't see out his eyes, and really aren't qualified to decide for him what that right decision is. If my decision to make that purchase is something that an administrator must decide on, as he elects whether or not to allow a variance on an ordinance, and I tell him that I find myself feeling very, very sleepy under those lights, he can only guess as to whether or not I'm telling the truth, but I know, which is why one leaves things like this up to the market. How many people do you know of who don't want to save money, and how much extra energy will likely be consumed by those whimsical few? Where is the disproportionate impact of the few that requires intervention on behalf of the relatively many?

Electricity, after all, isn't free, and unlike some well-to-do person owning his own company, very few of us have money to burn. But Big Brother knows best, right? What's next, I wonder? Maybe a law mandating the proper way in which we may tie our shoelaces.

Webring: the insanity continues

2007-03-02T21:16:00.000-08:00

Following up on my recent post about my experiences at Webring, here's the latest in that ongoing drama, posted from another one of my accounts.

Support's latest abuse of power - chicago

Take a look at my Chicago photo gallery page

http://www.geocities.com/commonsense666atlast/Chicago/

until recently active on a small number of rings. Now take a look at the ring return page for that site

http://www.geocities.com/commonsense666atlast/webring.html

and note how one would need considerable ingenuity to wander through my site and NOT run into a link to that page, clearly marked as "return to your ring" or something like that. Look at the page. Notice how every page on that site belonging to a ring on any system has a link back to either the page somebody would have came in on off of the ring, or to a page with a second copy of that same code, which includes a clearly labeled link back to the page of entry anyway? Notice how there are also links taking those who entered one of my other sites from Webring back to the webring return page for that site? Have you ever seen anybody take the concept of total webring navigability that far?

Guess what? Somebody in support has apparently taken the position that reality is beside the point, and declared that page to be a one-way site, suspending all of its ring memberships, and now refuses to respond to any attempts to reach him or her through reason. Here's a copy of my latest message to support. Ask yourself if there is anything unreasonable in it at all.

"Would you please look into this. My page is most certainly not a one-way site. The code is on the content page. No matter where somebody wanders in my site, he will find himself wandering into clear paths back to the ring, over and over, because I've place links to my webring return page on the main page for my site, and in multiple locations throughout, including on the final page of the gallery. So how, given these facts, do you draw the conclusion that you're looking at a one-way site?"

It's a serious question. Do the facts matter around here, or are decisions made purely on a whim driven basis? Does Webring expect its administrators to conduct themselves in a reasonable and professional manner, or are they free to run wild and terrorise users just for the H*** of it?

Even though support did not have one word to say about this, I didn't have to wait long for a response.

Re (2728): Support's latest abuse of power - chicago3

Notice the change in webring id? I just got locked out of my chicago account. They did the same thing to this account that they did to others. They changed the password and the e-mail address, the latter now beginning in abuse@. While I'm sure that somebody will write in to deny this, all that you have to do to confirm it is go to the sign in page, click on the link for looking up a lost password, enter "chicago", click and see what address you're given on the page where you're asked if you really want that password sent. You can read my own yahoo id right off of that geocities url I gave you, and I'm sure you'll notice that the word "abuse" doesn't appear on it.

Should I take this as an answer to the question I closed out my previous post on? As a sign that there are no rules on this site, and that admins are free to run wild and do anything they want to any user they want, for any reason they want or for no reason at all? What exactly did I do that would justify my losing this account? Questioning an arbitrary and clearly unreasonable action on the part of an administrator who never even identifies him or herself?

How much further is this going to go?

Better I should ask, how much further can it go, because it will surely get there. As of the time of this writing (11:26pm), I seem to have been locked out of all of my other webring accounts in the same way, with password and e-mail address changed, the new address beginning the same way: "abuse@", in response to something that no sane individual could possibly regard as having been abuse.

Some will try to justify this by pointing to the fact of my having more than one Webring membership, following the ex post facto school of victim blaming: Webring has never had a rule against having multiple memberships, as one might note by counting the number of memberships the aggressor in this case (Andrea Stalnecker) has herself, and these are memberships I had had for some time. But such rationalizations are to be expected, as is a certain amount of heat I've already seen from a few of the usual right-wing extremists in my life, because an honest report of such an experience just doesn't mesh well with what for them is the party line: that monopolies and oligolies are nothing to worry about, and that markets need in no way be regulated, because "market forces" will compel the parties in a marketplace to deal with each other fairly and honestly.

Such an idea seems compelling to a great many 18 year olds, because one can present a great many arguments in support of it that can (at first) sound very persuasive to somebody lacking in life experience and driven by the rashness of youth to listen only to soundbite arguments, and to regard all issues as being forever settled by the first winning of an argument, without regard for the means by which that argument may have been "won". But, as one gets older, and is no longer immersed in a pool of overreacting adolescent peers who one is so very afraid of losing face in front of, experience has a way of seeking one out. The only question is, how do you respond to it?

The reality is that there is no mystical market force that will transform a megalomanical jacka** into a reasonable human being, and that what having no legal restraints in the marketplace means is that if you are not one of the lucky and very well connected few, you will be able to look forward to being buffetted around by the insane whims of those lucky and well connected few, and getting scr**ed over on a regular basis. The way you learn this basic truth of life is by either getting scr**ed over on the aforementioned regular basis, or noticing that this is happening to others around you. What will define you, at that point, is not the naivite we all begin with, but how willing one is to shed that naivite when life is ready to teach one yet another lesson.

The way I responded to a few of those lessons was by holding onto my sense of common decency and common sense, along with my self-respect, accept that the way I thought life worked back when I was a callow adolescent had turned out to not be the way it actually did, and moved on, learning from experience. Others refused to do just that, and responded to the reality that lassez faire was producing a long list of stories of people badly mistreated and finding that they had no recourse, by distorting their own notions of right and wrong to make that which was wrong seem right as they abandoned the very notion of fair play, thinking of this decision as being an expression of idealism, instead of what it was - pride. The exaggerated refusal to accept one's own fallibility, taken to the point at which one won't even back down from extreme positions taken at an age not noted for wisdom. People like this really aren't friends, because a friend is somebody who has your back, not somebody who is going to defend the dropping of a knife into that back just for the sake of his own ego. That isn't idealism, that's just gross selfishness and cowardice, maybe mixed in with a little of a kind of megalomania not so far removed from what I saw out of Killeen or his anonymous representative.

It's hard to tell which, when the acting party doesn't have to identify himself.

At a moment like this, there are those who do right by one and those who prove to be a disappointment. Some of my disappointments, today, as I told this story to those I knew, were ones that nature gave me - members of my own family. I don't get to choose those, so certainly I won't blame myself when they let me down, as some of them often do, but in the case of some of my acquaintences, I can't let myself off the hook that easily. I was foolish enough to allow myself to be defined as a conservative, instead of asserting my status as an independent, and that brought me some company that, at this point, I find unwelcome. No great sense of tragic loss on my part, as none of these were people I had come to think of as close friends, but certainly an opportunity to engage in a little self-examination as I ask myself precisely why I would agree to go along with something when philosophically speaking, I knew better. The sad truth is that part of the answer is that, despite the image I've acquired on some parts of the Net, an image that I suppose that I've internalised to a degree, I can be something of a wimp, and just wanted an ideological camp to belong to so there could be an end to the fighting, of which I've seen far more than I care for.

Oh, wow, I'm still writing this post, having taken a break to go to the store and play around in the kitchen a bit, and I already have an update. Blogging in real time. The last two posts you see above were deleted some time around 1 am Chicago time, and responded to by some semi-anonymous and semiliterate individual signing in as "system", who writes

Re (2729): Support's latest abuse of power - system

whomever writes...

"How much further is this going to go?"

Well, we could delete your account.

The fact is, we aren't willing to tolerate personal abuse. We say so in the forum notes. You crossed that line, whether under this ID or another. We don't care WHICH id you choose to be asusice from, it's the same person. We also don't care WHO you abuse. None of it is tolerable. So, your account(s) get locked. If you behave like a member of society (REAL society) and rejoin the group then the accounts can be unlocked. Otherwise, why would any of us wish to continue the association?

Which id I chose to be "asusice" from? Is that even a word?

You can see for yourself that absolutely nothing I wrote could be considered "personal abuse" under, yes, as I keep saying, "any sane standard". Some of us, in this brave new deregulated world, have not forgotten how to be flabbergasted, and if I'm repeating myself a little, this may be why. One gets the picture of a high school student being radically empowered and writing the missive above, warning me that I'd better start showing that I know just how important he is, whoever he is, or else. Wimp though I may be, I do have my limits, and when somebody has behaved this outrageously, I am most certainly not going to swallow my self-respect and apologise to him for having reasonably voiced my objections to my having been treated unjustly. Nor should I have to.

A serious question for any free market ideologues reading this, of the sort I mentioned above, who will maintain that market discipline will make professionalism an economic inevitability - just how much professionalism did you see in that response, and how much power playing adolescent petulance? There reality is, staring you in the face. While you can see for yourself just how absurd and out of line this individual's actions have been, whoever this individual may be, notice that others visiting the forum will not be free to see that themselves, seeing only the spin put on my remarks without being able to see those remarks for themselves. As they make decisions, as customers, about how to respond to what has happened, how informed are their choices when a grossly unprofessional administrator has control over the flow of information, and can make anything that casts his or her actions in a bad light just go away, or come close to doing so? Because realistically speaking, how many people are going to read this blog? Given this, how is "market discipline" supposed to act as a restraint upon a company that allows its employees to run wild or otherwise engages in misconduct, when the decisions moving the market are not informed ones?

This, as often as not, is the true face of the underregulated market: not cool, responsible professionalism, not even calculating greed, but the sight of some nobody, who finds himself unrestrained as he abuses some small amount of power he has been unwisely been entrusted with, and runs amok for reasons that have to do with nothing but his own personal issues. Theory says that the company will restrain this individual, because in alienating its customer base, the rogue employee harms the company, forcing the company to take action. Reality, as you can see for yourself in cases like this, tells a much different story, perhaps in part because the executives often aren't much of an improvement over the rogue employee.

We will see if this was one of those cases.

If I sound like somebody who's changing the subject, I am, and with good reason. If there is one lesson that the Internet has taught me, over and over, it is that there is no such thing as making peace with a lunatic, and that after all of the gyrations and unreasonable compromises one will make in trying to do so, one will end up much the worse for having made the effort. I would try appealing to the boss, if only the boss had a conscience for me to appeal to, but he doesn't seem to have one, so is there any point to bothering? If not, then it's a given: I'm already getting scr**ed, and I'm going to get scr**ed even worse. I don't accept that, but I do recognize it as a reality that I might as well build into my plans.

As was the case with the bewildered ex-ringmaster I mentioned in my ealier post, I'm d**ned if I do and I'm d**ned if I don't. I'm presented with a complaint that has no basis in reality (the one-way site report), and thus can not possibly be addressed. If I object to the report, this is declared to be "personal abuse" and grounds for deleting my account. If I don't object, then I'm admitting to wrongdoing that I haven't in fact engaged in, and that admission becomes grounds for action. Imagine the absurdity of trying to defend yourself under a system of justice in which the very act of entering a plea of innocence is itself a prosecutable offense. It's a moment straight out of Kakfka. How do you win?

Certainly not by feeding the admin's ego, because one is just walking into a set up by doing so. No, the real question at this point is not how to deal with Webring. That's probably a dead issue. I've written to Tim Killeen personally, on the off chance that he isn't the ogre he is reputed to be and that what many of us have taken to be his actions have been those of a few anonymous employees acting in his name, but I am not optimistic. Usually the boss sets the tone for the company. I am open to being pleasantly surprised, but seriously doubt that I will be.

The real question for me to ponder, at this point, is that how it is that I found myself as the lamb who decided to go hang out with the wolves. Why oh why oh why did I ever decide to let myself be associated with a political movement (Conservatism), that has done me so much to bring me new "friends" who, precisely when I am being wronged and the most in need of their support, are least likely to be supportive? What good are friends like that? With a better base of support than the one I'm currently enjoying, I wouldn't have to worry so much about being shafted by some semi-anonymous nobody like "system", and it's not like I'm asking others to do more for me than I've already shown a willingness to do for them. How many of today's "rugged individualists" today were able to find somebody to do the heavy lifting for them when they needed to move, helped them through courses without charge when they were struggling with the material, provided them with a sympathetic ear when others wouldn't, or in some other way found that they could rely on somebody when I just generally acted like a friend, only for me to find just how little reciprocity I would get out of some of those people. Not all or even most, but a large enough minority that I have something to think about.

Especially in this case, when so few of the ones who didn't let me down have e-mail accounts. The question becomes more focused: not merely, where am I going wrong as I find my friends, but where am I going wrong as I find people to associate with online.

If this sounds like the post where I switch sides and decide to become a liberal, probably with lots of overdone hugging following as we go save the Egyptian rain forest, without my worrying about the general shortage of rain forests in Egypt as long as going along lets me be one of the gang, no, I'm not going to go there. This is more the kind of post where I ask myself "where and how have I been meeting people, and how can I do better than to end up with the kind of friends I've been finding?". The heart of the problem, I think, is that I've been finding some of these people through an -ism, Conservatism in this case, and that any -ism as potentially tentative as a political belief system is going to be a shaky basis for a friendship.

Philosophically, I should have known better. I'm sure that we're all familiar with the existentialist argument against the possibility of perfect self-knowledge, that the very achievement of that perfect self-knowledge would be an experience that would change the person achieving it, rendering that self-knowledge out of date in the very moment it was achieved. If we can not even hope to perfectly understand ourselves, how vain of us to imagine that we can perfectly understand the species of which we are but a small part, individually. Any sensible philosophy must be designed with the nature of those who would live by it in mind, as as the understanding of that nature can only be tentative, so must be the conclusions of the philosophy that grows out of that understanding. Even were it to grow under uncorrupted, ideal conditions, any sort of philosophy would either be an ephermal creation, waiting to be replaced by something better, or a descent into willful blindness and hysteria of a sort seen with depressing frequency out of the extremists one meets. With all of the deal making and factional alliance building that goes into politics, and all of the backstabbing one finds in it from the highest levels right down to the grassroots, one can scarcely sensibly expect any political philosophy to grow up under untainted, ideal conditions.

So, what happens to the friendship when one find that reality is pushing up hard against that pretty conceptual picture that everybody has been rallying around, and one has to utter something that just doesn't fit in with what one is expected to believe by those supposed friends? If the friendship is built on little else, that's the end of the friendship, and there is the source of my small disappointment. In focusing so much on issues so connected with ideology, I surrounded myself with idealogues, and they're inherently a fickle bunch when it comes to personal loyalty.

This was the straw that broke the camel's back, as far as I'm concerned, as far as having a political affiliation is concerned, or it least it will be until there's a less cliched metaphor for that last little thing that pushes one's patience past the breaking point. I am not a conservative, a liberal, a moderate, a libertarian, a socialist, or anything else of that sort. I'm just me, yet another person who has run out of patience with watching common sense be ignored on behalf of ideology on issues so simple, that they shouldn't be able to confuse a mentally retarded toddler, and yet leave full grown adults supposedly in posession of their faculties unable or unwilling to see the forest for the trees. A serious argument over whether or not an admin has a right to take action against somebody for something he didn't do? Are we totally f***ing serious? The best response to an argument like that is to put the man who made it into a straightjacket, not to discuss the merits of unrestrained property rights with him. It's high time that the rest of us stopped being indulgent of those who argued insane points like that, and tell them that if they must continue to do so, that we'd prefer that they did so where we couldn't hear them.

There is not now, never has been, and never will be any such thing as the right to be a capricious nut job. Anybody who feels otherwise is a nut job himself, somebody whose company the rest of us are better off without. The rest of us, those who are more concerned with living our lives than in trying to shove life into some preconceived ideological mold, have been very patient with some of our louder neighbors and their extremist views, and where has it gotten us? To lives in which we watch each of our days die the death of a thousand cuts, a bit lost here because a bus driver didn't feel like slowing down just because there were people waiting at your stop, another lost there because your landlord has decided to haul you into a meeting over the emotional turmoil you caused somebody by wearing blue on a Tuesday, and yet another still to something else so insane that you can't believe what you're seeing, and throughout it all are people who will tell you that you're wrong for minding, because your objection doesn't fit in with one of their pet causes. Well, that's bulls**t. There is a limit to how much patience one has a right to ask of another, and what has become the daily free-for-all under the current system of anything goes is so far from being liberating, as to go almost infinitely far beyond those limits. There have to be rules. Life isn't livable, otherwise, and if that means limiting somebody's right to act like a loon when running a business or otherwise disposing of his property, then both we and him will live.

Where I shall look for a better crowd is a good question. The short form is "through my nonpolitical interests", but so much gets politicized these days. Even cooking isn't safe around here any more, thanks to people like our own Ald.Joseph Moore, author of the infamous foie gras ordinance that has been earning our city such well deserved mockery across the country. But in general, I'll be sticking to the arts and sciences and a few hobbies, yes, including cooking, and just remember the words

"that's nice, now p*** off"

and share them the next time somebody decides that my use of garlic in a pan roasted chicken recipe is offensive because the Turks use garlic and he just saw this heart wrenching movie about the Armenians and how could I not be sensitive to that, or that my use of red as the background for a photoshopped image speaks to my latent communism which he's not going to stand for, or otherwise decides to free associate his way into yet another tirade that so badly cries out for Prozac. Where ideology is not inevitable, I'm just going to refuse to respect the fixations of the idealogues, or even to be especially tolerant of them. I've said it before and I'll say it again.