Big Fat Hairy Living

I’ve been mentioned on Usenet! The guy who quotes me is only the second person I know of who listens to Rush and reads this blog.

Dean Esmay continues drooling about the whole ten commandments judge thing. He’s such a bad debater, it’s not funny. Luckily for him, the Internet is not a place for real debate. It’s a place for a bunch of self-important bloggers to link to each other incestuously and repeat the mantra of “we’ll replace real journalists any time now!”

Esmay continues to be a complete dolt about the ten commandments thing, as evidenced by this comment on another blog. His response to my comment that the court considered and rejected all of Judge Moore’s arguments is “Yeah, well he’s wrong and I’m right!” Gee, Esmay, thanks for the in-depth rebuttal. Esmay’s entry on the subject is similary filled with such uninsightful non-analysis.

John Kusch partially explains Esmay’s simultaneous stupidity and popularity:

his ideas are incomplete, shabby, fixer-uppers — he couches a rather narrow, parochial view of culture, society, religion and law in the language of classical thought, and it’s total fucking garbage (e.g., women got the right to vote in America; therefore, oppression of women did not and does not occur). It’s like the scene in Wall Street, where the young Sheen asks the young Douglas why he broke apart Company X, and Douglas shouts, “Because it was breakable!”

That’s only part of Esmay’s stupidity, though. Esmay’s problem is that he’s an intellectual butterfly who flits from idea to idea in the garden of right-wing ideology because he lacks the ability to critically evaluate what other people write. You can tell this by the fact that he appears to change his mind often (see his recent entries on gay marriage and on the whole stupid “bright” thing for examples). He unquestioningly accepts stuff that plays to his biases, any any dalliances with opposing thought are easily crushed by a new opposing blog he find somewhere else on the net. I’m not just saying that because I think his political opinions are stupid; he really appears to be totally lacking basic logic and debating skills. You can see this in his blog: many of his entries involve a link to someone else’s post on a topic followed by a bit of supportive commentary and “I agree” as a closer. Esmay never seems to read and critically evaluate opposing points of view – like those from the judge who ordered the removal of the ten commandments monument, for example. He doesn’t pester himself with annoying primary sources! Second-hand wannabe punditry from the Internet is good enough for him.

This will be my last bit on Esmay, at least until he posts something else that’s monumentally stupid. (And by the way, don’t expect this to show up in Esmay’s trackbacks. He edits out trackbacks he doesn’t like.)

Postscript: The anti-Esmay e-mails that I’ve received on this topic have been heartening. Thanks.

Dean Esmay is a political blogger who thinks of himself as a “liberal thinker” but really is anything but. His long, rambling posts are usually free of any deep examination of issues, and instead focus on dressing up shabby arguments with emotional appeals and standard right-wing rhetoric. (See his postings in this comment thread on his site for a nice example. Tell me what “liberal thinker” would say that it’s not valid to argue that gay marriage should be allowed because it’s unfair to deny it?)

Esmay refers to himself as a “bright,” a stupid term used by people who want to window-dress over the fact that they’re atheists. Esmay is lying. He’s not a bright, regardless of what he tells you. Brights embrace a naturalistic worldview, and nobody who honestly embraces a naturalistic worldview could possibly respect the views of christian nutballs like C. S. Lewis, who thought that the “lord, liar, or lunatic” fallacy is valid and argued that god exists because people want him to. Of course, this might all be moot, as Esmay could change his mind at any moment. So who even knows what he believes this week?

The uninsightful vomit that Esmay spews on most political topics is bad enough, but the shit he farts out when the two intersect has to be the worst of it all. He masquerades as someone who doesn’t believe in a god, but wastes no opportunity to rail against “anti-christians.” So it should come as no surprise that Dean Esmay is against the separation of church and state.

Esmay thinks that it’s appropriate and permissible for an Alabama Supreme Court judge to erect, without approval or knowledge of the other Supreme Court justices, a 5200 pound stone inscribed with the ten commandments in the central rotunda of his court house. If that’s not the government favouring the christian god over others, I don’t know what is. Even stupider, Esmay complains that the Constitution doesn’t contain the words “separation of church and state.” Any lawyer making that idiotic and irrelevant argument in court would be laughed all the way out. But Esmay insists that he knows better; it’s his nonsensical interpretation of the Constitution that’s correct, not the generally accepted interpretation that’s supported by 200-plus years of legal precedent from the best legal minds in the United States.

If you want to read a reasonable opinion on the matter, read the legal decision that forced the monument to be removed from the rotunda. (Caution: PDF.) Don’t go to Esmay’s planet for reasonable analysis; posting contradictory views will result in you being banned. He prefers people who suggest that gays should — and I quote — “bow down periodically” before Southern Baptists. That kind of comment is OK.

I’d point out more of Esmay’s stupidity, but there’s too much of it, and I need to go home and swallow my boyfriend’s load before we go out tonight.

I like to tell people that I don’t care what my father thinks of me.

I visit my mother, who still lives with my father, every few weeks. Because she lives in deepest Scarberia, she picks me up at Kennedy station rather than having me take a 45-minute bus ride to get from there to her house. Last Saturday, she met me as usual at Kennedy station with my sister, but instead of picking me up in the car in the passenger pick-up area, she was waiting for me in the concourse next to the collector’s booth. She had planned to take me out to a restaurant for a birthday lunch, but her car had stalled while running errands, so she took a taxi to meet me at the station.

When we got back home, she poked her head into my father’s room and angrily asked him why he hadn’t answered the twelve (!) separate phone messages she had left him telling him about the car. “Zit’sh jusht advertishing,” he slurred. I imagined my mother having a heart attack and my father not answering the phone.

I suppose it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that he would refuse to pick up the phone, even though it’s equipped with call display. This is the person that the gets jealous of phone messages that my boyfriend leaves for my mother because he thinks my boyfriend is my mother’s secret lover. I’m not kidding. Her secret lover.

Unsatisfied with his complaint that “Zit’sh jusht advertishing,” my mother snapped to him that the car had broken down and refused to start and told him where it could be found. She slammed the door and left him to his own drunken, brain-damaged devices. Twenty minutes later, he stormed out of his room yelling at the top of his lungs, calling her a “brainless woman” and demanding that she tell him where the car was.

I yelled back. I told him to leave the house right then or I’d make him leave. I think he knew that I wasn’t kidding, and I wasn’t kidding. I would have inflicted serious damage.

He left. I didn’t.

He slinked back into to the house an hour later. He walked up me from behind me and tried to tell me that he wanted to talk to me. Not wanting to get myself even more angry and having enough self-control not to want to hurt him, I turned my back to him and didn’t respond. “David, I want to talk to you,” he repeated.

I knew exactly what he was going to say. It was going to be the same thing he’d always told me whenever I had defied him: that I needed to respect him because he was my father. As if an alcoholic, emotionally abusive, gambling, lying, adultering cross-dresser deserves respect just because he had sex with my real parent 28 years ago.

I gave him a one word answer: No. Unsatisifed at having been denied the opportunity to pull the sperm-donor card, he asked me why I didn’t want to talk to him.

I told him why: “I hate you, and you have nothing of value to say to me.” Knowing that there wasn’t much that he could say to that, he left. I couldn’t see the expression on his face, but I could feel it. It was shock. He was shocked that I hate him. He was actually shocked.

So why did I feel guilty for telling him that I hate him? I don’t want to feel guilty.

Danforth Avenue, way before 1981.Metro Today, the free subway newspaper, is so awful that it makes me want to scream.

Today they ran an “in-depth look at the past, present, and future of Danforth Avenue.” Too bad their in-depth look didn’t include fact checking.

The article shows a picture that is supposed to depict the intersection of Greenwood and Danforth in 1981. The problem: The picture shows streetcar tracks and overhead, which didn’t exist along that stretch of Danforth after 1966.

What’s more, they can’t even figure out the layout of their own paper: the “now” comparison picture was identified as being to the right when it was in fact to the left.

The article is also accompanied by a sidebar that claims that the avenue was named after the American contractor who constructed it, Asa Danforth. The problem: Asa Danforth constructed Kingston Road, not Danforth Avenue. He had nothing to do with the street named after him.

Given those two errors, it’s probably pedantic to point out that the subway line running under the Danforth Avenue is called the Bloor-Danforth subway, not, as they call it, the Danforth subway.

Claude has a rental copy of Baby Geniuses and doesn’t know what to do with it until it’s due back at the video store.

He neglects to state that he asked me to pick it up at the video store and bring it over, because he was — and I quote — “Craving it.”

At work this morning:

Project Manager: I noticed that the physical designer isn’t working on the new product. He’s sitting there idling.

Me: I know. I still need to make some changes to the schematic.

Project Manager: We need to get that done.

Me: I would have had more time to work on it if I hadn’t been chasing people in China who can’t understand how our bills of materials are set up.

Project Manager: I know that you’ve been busy, but we’ve known about this for two and a half weeks.

Me: And I’ve known that you’re annoying for six years and I haven’t done anything about that either.

Silence

Me: I’m going to work on that schematic now.

The award for most idiotic statement by a politician goes, as expected, to Ernie Eves, quoted in the Toronto Star:

“The rate freeze had absolutely nothing to do with the interruption with the grid system in the northeastern part of North America,” Eves said. “When you have maximum power going through any system in the world — not just Ontario’s — for several consecutive hot days in a row, the stress that puts on the distribution system is enormous.”

Yes, Ernie. The maximum power going through the system for several hot days in a row had absolutely nothing to do with the artificially high demand caused by your electricity rate freeze.