Stop making so much sense, straw man!

I've been on Twitter for a good year or so now, and there's one thing I don't really understand. I follow several actors on there, which is one of the main draws for Twitter. And many of these actors, being human beings, have political views. Sometimes strong political views, which they like to express on social media like Twitter. All of this is perfectly normal. What I don't get is when people who disagree with some actor's political views level ad hominem attacks against the actor, rather than address the actual issue.

Of course, ad hominem attacks are nothing unusual in and of themselves. There wouldn't be a word for it otherwise. And it's Latin, so there's nothing new in this idea.The thing about it is that the attacks are usually along the lines of "Don't you hate it when washed-up has-beens try to get involved in politics?" What does one's fame (or current lack thereof) have to do with anything? How does being on a television show disqualify you from having an opinion?

I've been trying to determine the line of thinking that leads to this kind of comment, and while I'm sure it's not a conscious process, I imagine it goes something like this.

1) The person making this comment has an opinion that differs from mine.
2) My opinion is the (only) correct one.
3) I don't have enough information to defend my position in any meaningful manner.
4) Childish insults are my only recourse.
5) When I think of this person who disagrees with me, all I can think of is something s/he did in the past which gave them a measure of celebrity.
6) Therefore, that must be the only thing the celebrity can think of him/herself.
7) I am jealous of that celebrity.
8) I will attack the person from that angle.
9) The celebrity will either see the error of his/her ways, and/or retreat into a dark corner and weep uncontrollably.
10) The world shall crown me Grand High Victor of the Universe.

Ok, I went a little overboard at the end there.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

You know what your problem is? I'll tell you what your problem is.

I have a friend, and I'm sure many of you do too, who I can only handle in small doses. He's a decent enough time, and we have some laughs together, but he's got this infuriating habit of being a dime store psychiatrist. He's certain he has the solution to all my problems, real or imagined. He's so convinced of this, he never even bothers to ask me what I think my problems are. He explains to me what's wrong with me, and then tells me what I should do about it, usually in maddeningly vague terms. Things like "If you want something, you can't just sit around and expect it to come to you, man. You gotta go out there and get it." Or "You gotta do like the exact opposite of what you're doing." Statements like these are usually followed by "I used to be just like you, and look at me now." Which is rather jarring, since his unsolicited psychoanalysis generally comes on the heels of him complaining to me about his own problems.

I get the feeling he's doing it for his own benefit, rather than some misplaced sense of altruism, and that's why it always comes right after he ruminates on his own regrets. He figures that by running through a laundry list of my supposed issues in life, followed by lightly condescending "help." he'll look better by comparison.

What really gets me about all this is the bit I mentioned before about him not even asking me what I think is wrong with my life. He seems to think he not only knows better than me what the solutions are, he also has a firmer idea of what's vexing me than I do. And more often than not, it's all built on false assumptions about what my goals are and where I think I need to improve my life. I can't tell if it's projection (He must really want this because I really want this) or he's just making it up as he goes along. Usually I assume the former, but every now and then he'll say something that as far as I can tell has no basis in reality, let alone either of our lives.

Even on the rare occasions when he does seek input on my own feelings about my life, he still turns it back around to himself. I can remember a recent one where I was talking about a job I'd just gotten (this would be the one I quit earlier this month), and he asked me how I liked it. When I confessed I didn't, but I could use it to pad my resume, he asked what I planned on doing from there. I told him my plan was to work there a year (I only lasted about two months in fact), then start farming out for a job that fit better with my experience. He asked if that was what I really wanted to do, and when I gave a half-hearted shrug, he starting going on about the his start-up company for about half an hour.

I don't mean to rag on this guy too much. Like I said, he's not really a bad person, and I've known him since High School, so I must see some reason to keep him around. But man, he can really try one's patience.

But I guess I'll keep listening. Even fortune tellers occasionally get one right by pure chance, so maybe in all that yammer he might hit on something that I'd actually like to work on, and chuck out some solid advice. And it seems to make him feel better to have someone he can unload on like that. I don't mind helping someone else unburden themselves. It's not like I gotta carry it around for them.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

I'm Gonna Need a Bigger Plate

Got a lot going on right now, good and bad. I got a new job, but for now all I can really say about it is that it's not pizza delivery. I don't think I'd ever mentioned on this blog before that I'd spent the last several years delivering pizzas. I'd made an oath to myself when I started this blog that I'd never discuss it until I was finally done with it. Not really out of shame...well, Ok, partly out of shame, but mostly because I didn't want to think about the job when I wasn't actually there. Maybe somewhere down the line I'll relate some amusing anecdotes of my time there, but for right now I got other fish to fry.

In a similar vein, I don't want to discuss this job just yet. In large part because it's still new. I don't want to say anything that I might look back on with regret once I've made some decisions about how this job fits in with my goals in life. I don't want to count my chickens before they've hatched.

There is one really big decision I've got to make, and fairly soon. Friends and family have been telling me for a while now that I should consider a career in Allied Health, otherwise known as Medical Technician. And I have to admit it does sound very appealing. The thing is, if I do decide to pursue this career path, it will mean going back to school for a few more years. I'm not against the idea, I'm only a year out of earning my A.A. after all, but fitting it into my schedule will be tricky. Taking classes on-line is an option for several of the courses, and I'm no stranger to taking on-line classes. But there's going to be a lot of Lab work involved in this degree program, so I'd have to seek out classes that fit in with my work schedule.

Times like this I wish I didn't have bills to pay. If I could just ignore my financial obligations, I could focus on going to school full-time, like most college students do when they're fresh out of High School. But, no use crying over spilled milk. I have to play the cards I've been dealt, especially since it's in large part my fault that I have no real career at this stage in my life.

Well, I took a first step in this direction today. I hustled over to Triton College, spoke to a counselor, and found out what I have to do in order to be able to pursue an Associate in Applied Science in Diagnostic Medical Sonography. Fortunately, I have a little over half of the preliminaries covered already, through courses I took getting my Associate in Arts. I'm gonna go onto Triton's website now, and take a look at when the classes I need to take are offered, and try to work out a schedule. I haven't made any decisions yet, but I'm gonna do my homework so I have everything I need at my fingertips to ensure I my decision is an informed one.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

Resident Evil: Retribution

I have a friend who lives down by the South Side, who will often take a 45 minute trek up to where I live so we can hang out. He does this without complaint, and this week I decided to return to favor by coming down to him. He suggested we go see a movie, which was fine by me. He looked up what was playing, and gave me three options.

One of the movies I'd already seen, and the second I had zero interest in seeing, so that left the third one, Resident Evil: Retribution. I had mixed feelings about that, but I was in the mood for a movie, and it was the only thing that I was even remotely interested in seeing.

I think a good way to describe Retribution would be to say that it's an fairly good example of how a poor director can single-handedly destroy a film. During the movie, my friend commented to me "Couldn't they find any good actors for this movie?" I said back that I recognized many of the actors in this film, and had seen them in other projects, and they're not bad actors. The problem was that they were receiving bad direction, making their performances flat and wooden.

I can't call myself an expert on this sort of thing, but I have done a bit of (community theater level) acting, so I can say with some confidence that the performance and actor gives is the result of a number of factors, and the instructions given to him by the director are a large part of that, especially if the director is the tyrannical sort who micro-manages every aspect of a performance. I don't know if Paul W.S. Anderson is that type of director, but there must have been some sort of creative control being exerted on set to explain the performances I saw in this film. Also telling, the best performance of the movie was handed in by star Mila Jovovich, who just happens to be married to the director. I'm guessing she was given more free reign in her acting.

The script was also weak and tumescent. I was going to say that the blame can't fall fully on director Anderson's lap for that, until I checked IMDb and saw that he's credited as the screenwriter. So nevermind my attempt to spread the blame, it's all Anderson's fault. I guess the movie had a plot, in that there were a series of events which occurred in chronological order. Except for the opening credits, which for some bizarre reason was the ending of the third movie, run backwards and in slow motion.

There were two things about the plot/narration that got me. Anderson doesn't seem to have grasped subtle ideas like "Show, Don't Tell," so large chunks of the movie were literally characters looking directly at the screen and explaining what was happening to the audience. It was ok, if clumsily done, in the opening when Alice (Jovovich) was catching the audience up on the events of the last three movies. What got me, though, was when the main bad guy of the movie, an evil computer AI that looked like a young girl with a British accent, explained to the viewers exactly what she was doing whenever the action cut to a different set of characters. I guess he was trying to make it look like the girl was issuing orders, but instead it looked like she was talking to herself. Especially since everything she said was also written on the screen as she said it.

And as a quick side note, how cliched can you get in your bad guy character? Anderson managed to cram Creepy Child, A.I. Is A Crapshoot, and Evil Brit into one package. Me, I would have kept going. Given the girl an Evil Laugh while she slouches in an easy chair stroking a kitty cat.

The other thing about the plot that confused me is the way it's paced. The movie felt like it was supposed to be a lot shorter than it was. My thought was that Anderson had come up with this as the movie's first act, and then after a couple months, realized he had nothing else, so he stretched that one act out into three.

Then there were the costumes. Now, I'm not going to claim I am offended by the sight of sexy women jumping around in revealing clothing. On the contrary. And I know that having said sexy women in movies tends to increase ticket sales. But there's eye candy, and then there's pandering. Some of it I could kinda understand; Alice didn't choose the outfit she's running around in, she just grabbed the first clothes she found. Why someone had specifically laid that bondage gear out for her is another matter, and one I'd rather not inspect too closely.

And then there's the outfit Ada Wong is wearing in the movie. Ok, I get it, that's what she wore in the fourth game. But am I really supposed to believe that when setting out for a rescue mission, she decided to wear a cocktail dress? That's like if I put on a tuxedo to go bail a friend out of jail.

As for Jill Valentine's clothing, she looks like Zero Suit Samus. So much that I have to wonder if it was done on purpose. And here's a disturbing though I just had: she was put in that outfit by a computer AI who looks like a ten-year-old girl. That's just wrong.

So, in conclusion, don't bother seeing Resident Evil: Retribution. As I said to another friend earlier today, "sexy women in hot clothing is not enough to excuse the rest of the film." Also, there wasn't a whole lot of Retribution going on in the film. It's rarely a good sign when the film's title is a random assemblage of words.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

I wonder if this happened in the French salons of the Enlightenment?

I was looking up a certain Youtube video that's been on the news lately. I won't say which one, the trollish moron who made it doesn't deserve recognition of any sort, and the title of the video will mean nothing in a couple weeks, anyway.

I don't know if you've ever tried looking for a video on Youtube a day or two after making international news, but it's next to impossible. Youtube is a microcosm of the Internet, and like the Internet, it's a vast echo chamber, with everything repeating back on itself, and dropping in fidelity each time. In other words, by the time I went looking for the video, it had been redacted down into hundreds of bite-sized clips, as well as a countless number of copycats and fakes. There were probably a few Rick Astley videos crammed in there, as well.

I found one video that I thought might be the right one, since the title and the length of the video matched what I'd read in the news. So I checked it out, and found it to be an even more poorly-produced piece of garbage than I'd expected. I also couldn't make sense out of the dialogue, as people seemed to be responding to other people's internal monologue. About then is when I spotted a comment saying the original dialogue had been overdubbed.

It was the comments more than the video itself that got me. People had written freaking essays, paragraphs and paragraphs of stuff about the video. And most of it was commenters arguing with each other on topics peripheral to the subject of the video itself.

This isn't the first time I've seen anything like this on Youtube, either. It makes me wonder who these people are, and what they think they're accomplishing. Does user mcpeepants92 type out a comment refuting the claims made in Absolute Undeniable Proof Of Young Earth Creationism* thinking to himself "This is really gonna set the record straight once and for all."

Youtube

It's like some kind of infinite recursion.The guy who made and posted the "Absolute Undeniable Proof Of Young Earth Creationism" clearly thought he was ending the argument forever. Unless he was actually parodying those kinds of people, but for the sake of this argument let's assume he was acting in earnest. So, he posts this video, and he says to himself "There, that'll shut up all those Evolution morons out there."

Then someone else comes along. Maybe he's a troll. Maybe he's in a bad mood. Maybe he's a die-hard Evolutionist with more opinions than good sense. Maybe he's just bored. Either way, he comes upon this video, watches it, and says to himself "This cannot stand."

So he leaves a long comment to the post. One so long that even the OP is saying "tl;dr." And the whole time he's thinking to himself "Hah, this will put that guy in his place."

But astonishingly, "that guy" doesn't roll over and play dead. And even if he does, there's someone else out there who agrees with him, and is willing to take up the torch. He might write out a rebuttal to every point in the comment, but he's more likely to latch onto one part of it and go off on a tangent about it. And away we go.

In a way, I guess it's good there's places like Youtube for these people. It keeps them and their whackjob opinions out of general circulation. Or rather, it gives them an outlet, so they're less likely to assault co-workers or strangers on the street upon whom to deliver their manifesto. If they want to see themselves as Diogenes, let them do it in the privacy of the Internet, where they're a lot easier to ignore.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

*I am not a believer in Young Earth Creationism** so don't bother arguing about it with me.
** I also don't want to hear your arguments for Young Earth Creationism.

I wonder if that pic was taken at the local YMCA?

Some recent troubles I had with my health insurance have motivated me to start looking around for different health care options. I've considered looking for a different company or changing the deductible on my current plan. But I also decided to look into what the State will provide me.

Of course, anything involved with the government is going to be a snarled morass of bureaucracy. Especially when it's at the State level, or at least when it's at the Most Corrupt State In The Union level. I eventually did what I always end up doing at any government website; I started clicking links at random until I saw what I was looking for.

Take a look at this screencap of the page I eventually found myself on. Not at the two definitely-heterosexual men posing suggestively in the photograph, but rather at the link I've circled.

I think I saw these two at the Cook County Clerk's office applying for a Civil Union. In those same shirts.

Why the hell does a website about medical plans for men have a section where men aren't supposed to go? Am I missing something here? And I'd like to point out that I didn't add that Venus symbol, it was already there.

So I clicked it, and there was, I kid you not, the words "WARNING: ONLY FOR WOMEN" in bold red letters. I was then that I realized what was going on. They're using the old Forbidden Fruit ploy. Tell someone he can't do something, and he'll just wanna do it all the more.

I read a bit more, and the page was telling women about why they should be worried about men's  health. What the reason it boiled down to was "Men are too stupid and lazy to worry about their own health, so you better do it for them." That piqued my ire at first, and then I realized that was the whole point. They were trying to piss me off, so I'd be like "I don't care about my health? I'll show you!"

Just one more bit of evidence that the basic assumption behind all politics is that normal people are complete morons.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

How academic debates flare up

There's people out there that other people call word or grammar Nazis. Linguists get mad at his pigeonholing, and not just because of the reference to fascism. Language, they argue, is the most effective means humans have devised to communicate with each other. While most animals can communicate basic concepts such as "danger here" to each other, humans have developed the ability to explain abstract concepts to each other.

At this point biologists step forward and point out we don't know that other animals can't communicate as effectively as we can. Linguists respond by politely asking the biologists to shut up, they're trying to make a point here.

Anyway, where were we? Oh, right. The point of language is effective communication. If people are using a word incorrectly, then they are not communicating effectively.

But, Joe Sixpack points out, even if I'm using this word wrong, so's everyone else. So they all know what I mean.

Linguists, who are beginning to lose patience at this point, resist the urge to stamp their feet. Everybody being wrong in the same way doesn't make them all right, they say. Before Columbus, everyone was wrong about the world being flat. Doesn't mean the world was flat.

Hang on, say logicians. Your counterargument doesn't apply. Language is a human construction, plastic and evolving, while something like the shape of the Earth is solid physical fact, and no amount of rhetorical prowess can alter it.

At this point historians, who happened to be passing by and caught the tail end of the conversation, come storming in. Dammit, they shout, we're so tired of hearing that. Look, nobody in the 15th Century thought the Earth was flat. Pythagoras proved it was round over 2,000 years ago. Columbus thought...

Look, look, linguists say, we're getting away from the original point, which was...

No, by God, historians say. It's time the record got set straight, and we're gonna...

Come on, linguists say, the story about Columbus and the orange and all that are in the collective unconscious by now. You can't...

Oh, say historians, so now you're psychologists?

Did someone mention us? Psychologists ask.

Stay out of this, everyone else yells.

Keep this in mind next time some reactionary calls Universities a breeding ground for sedition.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights