THIS IS NOT NEWS EITHER

Played for humor, this video nevertheless raises a good point. (Minor spoilers for Wall*E).

We all know that most of our menial jobs will be eliminated whenever it is we get around to making robots that do them. Odds are good we'll have maybe two minutes to worry about that before the robots take over and kill us all, but it's something to think about. Specifically as regards our approach to fiction set in such a future as would have service robots.

The question I ask is this: would we move towards classlessness or would socio-economic stratification become all the more entrenched and ugly as a result of replacing poorer labor with synthetic labor? My money is on the cynical answer--that as soon as people get closer to the poverty line/unemployment as a result of not having skills to do jobs that robots can't, society as a whole starts shitting on them more than ever. Something to ponder.

*

They call it the "Global Literacy 2008" issue. So why not completely simplify shit and undermine the idea of literacy--which is an ability to decipher complex thought in addition to simple grammar and vocabulary--by positiing this riveting question? I can't find the cover picture anywhere, though you can see a small picture of it on their homepage now, but it is pretty stupendously...stupid. Imagine two stuffy, fairly old white guys standing back-to-back like prizefighters bumping shoulders while posing for heavyweight championship posters. That's Abe Lincoln and Chuck Darwin posing. And the title reads: "Lincoln vs. Darwin: Who Matters More?"

Can we say "false dichotomy" much?

( I might have to, as they say, choke a bastard. )

Fuck you, Newsweek. Fuck you and your anti-intellectualism, nationalist ass-licking "news." If you want to publish an article saying that Lincoln was awesome, fine. If you'd like to take a closer look as to WHY Darwin has fallen out of favor, that might, in some way, be relevant to how we live today. (The answer, by the by, is because ignorance rules the day. If Newsweek can offer opinion as fact, so can I.) Fuck you, you fucking fucks.

And another

Here's some actual news: the next time you hear something that sounds like an urban legend with the names/places changed, assume it is one. I'm looking at you Time Magazine.

Most of the people who read my journal are smart. You are, so give yourselves a hand. And the majority of you are very young indeed. Meaning that most of you are not so far removed from high school that you have forgotten how tough it was. Meaning that if you heard someone say that girls at a high school got together and formed a clandestine pact to get themselves pregnant on purpose, you'd laugh harder than you did at the person who believed the sperm-on-the-cheek-swab story was true for a friend's classmate. I think I was that person, actually, and even I'm not dumb enough to buy the bullshit about teenaged girls forming a coven of sperm-seeking mommy wannabes.

Especially not when the principal who "reported" this "pact" to the "press" points to one person in any sort of authority to back him up and that person says that his pearl-clutching media moment was the first that she'd heard of it. His only other sources are anonymous, uncited folk talking in hallways. Because hallways have never been known to distort facts. Facts being factually reported have never lost accuracy as the message moved from one mouth to one ear and back in crowded, noisy places. Apparently, neither this principal nor the ace reporter has ever played a game of Telephone in their entire lives. I'd pity them, but they're smearing teenage girls' names in the mud, and if the resignations over the principal's refusal to allow the nurse's office to stock contraceptives is any indication, he's fixing to do worse.

It's the set-them-up, knock-them-down strategy in one fell swoop. He denies them contraceptives, the sex-ed is nonexistant, the girls get knocked up because HELLO THEY ARE ONLY HUMAN BEINGS AND THEY ARE PULSING WITH HORMONES, and he gets to pretend they did it on purpose because they should have known better (how if school won't teach them?) and they could have protected themselves (without knowing how? without access to means?) but they didn't, so obviously they chose pregnancy (they're not human? they're not fallible? they don't forget? they always use the contraceptives they don't have perfectly accurately?).

And his bullshit, not the corrected story (i.e. that he is full of shit) is what will be used as a weapon against girls and women having control over their bodies. Well done, you magnificent asshole.

(no subject)

I walked into the bathroom and was assaulted with a peachy-fruity-pinky (that's the only word for it) smell. Imagine the smell of bubblegum, concentrated and amplified by about ten thousand.

Someone needs to lay off the perfume. Or the bathroom spritzer. Or the bubblegum. (Because if it's bubblegum, there's a wad of chewed Bubblicious the size of a dinosaur hiding in there somewhere.)

More Good News (and I am really, really being sarcastic)

I have to give these "trigger warnings." Most of the time I post things and I'm all cool with making people uncomfortable, but these even made me uncomfortable, and I'm not easily provoked.

Just FYI. They're also behind cuts so I can goggle and go WTFWTFWTFWTF'ingF!?!?

( I hate people. That should be a tag. (If it isn't already.) )

Get your nose out of McCain's asshole, Maureen

The greatest question ever since yesterday's Lincoln-on-Darwin showdown: Obama: Is He Patriotic Enough!?

My favorite parts:

-Obama = MUSLIM MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE
-Wesley Clark, GENERAL, says that John McCain, CAPTAIN, being shot out of the sky =/= perfect guy to be president. Maureen Dowd sez, "It’s the old business of grunts resenting flyboys." Yes, because life is just like an episode of Battlestar Galactica, and everyone who is not John McCain is looking at him and sighing and wishing they could be so cool, doing all that flying n' shit. Damn those good-looking pilots!! DAMN THEM! WHY CAN NOT WE LOWLY GRUNTS EVER BE SO MAGNIFICENT? Wesley Clark is going to take his umpteen billion stars (and his ball) and go home now.
-McCain is funny! Obama is not! Let Maureen demonstrate!
NOT FUNNY: "I can’t have fun anymore,” Obama said, in a comment meant to be wry but sounding wistful. “It’s not allowed.”
SO FUNNY YOU SHOULD BE SHITTING YOURSELF NOW: Yet McCain himself has joked: “It doesn’t take a lot of talent to get shot down. I was able to intercept a surface-to-air missile with my own airplane.”
WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? WHY AREN'T YOU LAUGHING?