Tuesday Hatred Celebrates Brotherly Love

I can’t be bothered with extensive google-checking of my facts but according to me this is about to become the first openly gay prime minister of the world:

Elio Di Rupo

His English is horrible and his Dutch is quasi-non-existent and people bitch about that but

Tuesday Lovred

I’m getting old as fuck. Hating used to come naturally to me. I loved it. As much as I try nowadays however, I don’t quite get to the type of all out hatred that used to be able to make my day. I still hate but, whenever I want to focus my hatred, some understanding sips in and dilutes the experience. It could be a matter of incontinence of my sympathetic gland even if all evidence suggest that growing old is mostly associated to another type of incontinence: that of the supremacy gland.

I don’t particularly hate getting older: to die young never appealed to me and living eternally positively appalls me. This way I can start thinking about my euthanasia request, knowing there will come a time where the mere act of living costs a lot more energy than I’m willing to muster, for anything (one would hope that the age at which one dies would  be such as to lower the average such age; I mean, you can’t want to crowd this planet such that younger generations need to make it the largest part of their young life to sustain you in your old life or can you?).

I do hate other people getting older. On the whole they don’t seem to suffer from the aforementioned type of incontinence which may well be an indication of a common birth defect: being born without a sympathetic gland. Rather, they seem to suffer from incontinence of liver fluids (i.e. bile). All in all I think it is the increasing average age of the world’s population that is the root cause for the perceived interruption of progress in the last decades. It works as a double whopper: people on average whine a lot more than they used to (because they’re older and whining comes with old age) and this whining is in the direction of ‘when I was young things were so much better’. In itself both things are of all ages but the tsunami of old bastards refusing to die or shut up has broken the reflexive stability between the progressive and conservative reflexes of the age groups.

Or something like that. What do you think?

I also hate Krugman. The guy is acting like a prima donna. Whenever somebody gives the impression he or she is certain that she or he cannot be right, the risk is that their growing old will not be very gracious. Before Long they will start going on about family values, meaning the values they enforced in their own family. Unfortunately I can’t really hate him, there is a lot of celebrated stupidity out there and it’s only a matter of time before you fight yourself into a position of the stupid celebrity.

Friday Afternoon Confessional: Accomplishments (& lack thereof)

I confess that being on the upper side of the comments field on a blog that actually gets read is my biggest non-family accomplishment to date. I say ‘non-family’ because I fear The Girlfriend will be missed by regular readers and I therefore present to you: The Wife and The Kids. All of them are great but how many of them there is will remain non-disclosed for now (in what may well turn out to be the idle hope of creating a running gag). With ‘them’ I am referring to The Kids. The Wife is, by the way, great too.

I also confess that I have not told them of this accomplishment for fear of them reacting by saying, for instance, “O-Kay, that’s great!” whilst rolling their eyes in line with what I would interpret as the thought:  ‘There he goes again.’ Obviously, they would neither say nor think that for the simple reason they don’t speak and, probably, don’t think in English. The latter at least not when they are not playing on a game console or using four-letter words. The Wife, by the way, does speak English (albeit reluctantly).

I finally confess that I mainly said ‘non-family’ because I am proud of them, even if they are not an accomplishment and certainly not one I can claim. The latter, if one can speak of accomplishment at all, being rather the other way around.

Lest you might find some of this indicative of a praiseworthy character I do confess that in this week of the historical event I felt lousy because I had to get a new car. I hate cars and I hate having to have one and I hate having to renew it. I do understand this is a luxury problem. But, however much I hate being faced with practical problems, I do not feel bad that in my case most of them are of the ‘luxury’ kind. That said, I do feel bad not all people have the luxury of some of their luxury being problematic.

A cherished tradition

For the last few years, one of my uncles has consistently shown up on Christmas with a new crackpot belief, and I am always eager to see what it is. For instance, in 2007, it was Kabbala. (He recommended that I study it, as it would help with my research; when I replied that my specialty is Christianity, he said, “But Kabbala is Christianity.”) In 2008, much to my disappointment, it was merely televangelism.

This year, less than five minutes after we arrived at the get-together, he was talking about when the hyperinflation would hit, and I was sure I was dealing with a goldbug — but when I brought it up to another uncle, he said that it was actually the silver standard that my crackpot uncle was into, as gold had been monopolized by the rich. If things had been insufficiently awkward, I would have mounted a spirited defense of fiat currency, but fortunately the seemingly interminable white elephant gift exchange kept the awkwardness quotient sufficiently high.

“Abortion is murder”

We’ve all doubtless heard today that an anti-abortion activist acted in an insane manner. We’ll also probably hear a lot about how this shouldn’t reflect on the anti-abortion movement at all — it’s a completely isolated incident, etc. In line with other discussions going on today, though, I’d like to point out that the position that “abortion is murder” is fundamentally insane, and if people really work themselves into a place where it seems to make sense, acting insanely is the logical consequence.

The very fact that there are so few anti-abortion terrorists is actually evidence that the slogan “abortion is murder” does not match up with any recognizable moral intuitions. Certainly I would hope that no one would have the same disapproval of a woman who had an abortion and a woman who had purposely murdered her post-born baby.

But let’s look at another example. We all know of situations where someone has accidentally killed a baby. Even if it’s truly not their fault, we think it’s appropriate that they feel remorse. But if abortion is murder, then miscarriage is unintentional murder. The woman’s body naturally fights against the fetus for resources, and just as the accidental killer of an infant always thinks “there’s something I could’ve done differently,” surely a woman who suffers a miscarriage could think along the same lines and should feel some amount of remorse that her body accidentally killed this human being inside of her. Yet isn’t that a monstrous thing to say? Wouldn’t you instinctively want to punch someone who said such a thing to a woman who suffered a miscarriage?

Obviously no one wants to draw such an insane conclusion from a widely-used slogan like “abortion is murder” — but such insane conclusions are possible because the slogan is itself insane. It’s not a deeply held moral conviction we should “respect,” it’s an amoral conviction that actively fights against our moral instincts and, when fully accepted, leads to insane behavior.

Gay marriage cap-and-trade

The California Supreme Court has upheld Proposition 8 but allowed the existing gay marriages to stand. The question that arises is what happens when, as is virtually inevitable, one of the gay married couples decides to divorce. On the one hand, they will, you know, want to get divorced on a personal level. On the other hand, however, they will probably feel like they’re betraying the cause by reducing the number of gay people who are legally married.

For this reason, I propose that the California Supreme Court issue a supplemental ruling implementing a gay marriage cap and trade system. The total number of gay marriages in the state is capped at whatever number happened to exist presently. Once one of those marriages is dissolved, either through death or divorce, it opens up a new slot that can be auctioned off to help California’s budget crisis.

Bursting with pride

As moms tend to do, my mom enjoys harrassing me about her lack of grandchildren, a situation that it is presumably in my power to rectify. This week while I was visiting, we were talking to a friend of hers, and my mom said, “I think it’s about time for him to get married and start producing grandchildren.” The friend mentioned she had a daughter, so maybe she could introduce me. I asked, “Is she fertile?”

I think it says a lot about my family that both my mom and sister were really proud of me for coming up with such a snappy comeback.

Christmas report

The last few years, I have grown increasingly frustrated with Christmas. My relationship with my family has been better and better other than that, but somehow Christmas brings out all my latent neuroses at once, something that seems to be true for my sister as well.

Imagine my surprise, then, when Christmas turned out to be an actual pleasant experience this year.

It’s a pathetic life

This article on It’s a Wonderful Life is really good. Here’s a summary, with a representative offhand observation:

“It’s a Wonderful Life” is a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams, of seeing your father driven to the grave before his time, of living among bitter, small-minded people. It is a story of being trapped, of compromising, of watching others move ahead and away, of becoming so filled with rage that you verbally abuse your children, their teacher and your oppressively perfect wife. It is also a nightmare account of an endless home renovation.

The overarching theme is George’s anger, and as I think of what I would be like if I had stayed in Flint, or stayed in the Nazarene church to try to save it as some do, I would probably be pretty angry too. I wouldn’t have as large a role in the community as George — at most, I’m assuming I would’ve been a high school teacher — so the effects of my staying likely wouldn’t have been as great. If I’m currently living in the “bizarro world,” though, I wonder what the “real” world in which I’d stayed would look like.

Or perhaps I’m actually George’s brother, and my sister is George, dutifully staying in the area while I swoop in increasingly rarely, generously taking time off from my exciting city life. This Thanksgiving I invited her to come to Chicago, but she pulled out — or actually claimed to have been “joking” about accepting the invitation in the first place — because she felt it would be hard on my family to have us both gone. Reportedly, Thanksgiving dinner was very peaceful this year, my absence having apparently removed any pretext for my uncle to start opining about controversial subjects, which he seems to do in order to goad me into an argument.

On hating McCain

I can’t express how much I hate John McCain. I can’t stand the fact that anyone would even consider voting for that stupid fuck — he’s even worse than Bush, difficult as that is to believe.

My family is Republican, and it just occurred to me that if McCain wins, I might not be able to go home for Christmas and face them. The only thing that comforts me is that my mom might secretly vote for Obama.