Synova

The paradox of tolerance nearly disappears if we understand that "tolerate" isn't "celebrate". So "intolerance" isn't a "failure to celebrate." We've got people proclaiming, as if it's smart and means something, that we ought not "tolerate intolerance." But what they mean is that we must not tolerate those who fail to celebrate...whatever it is thing that they think ought to be celebrated. "Tolerate" is this...I may hate what you have to say but will defend with my life your right to say it. I can HATE your opinions and your choices, and still defend your right to have your opinions and make your choices. In the PARADOX the only person I'm allowed to show intolerance for is the person who doesn't allow other people that same freedom to have opinions or choices that they hate or even allow other people to have disapproval or dislike of opinions or choices that they think are right. We could say the same ...

I previously posted this to Facebook. If you are watching Teen Wolf because I talked about it, don't read this because spoilers. Not awful ones, but I know it wrecks stuff if I'm anticipating something happening. Knocks me out of the story. Anyhow, I want to talk about the character, Kira. At first she works. And then, in my opinion, she stops working. And she stops working because she's a Mary Sue. Sort of a fake, artificial, logical Mary Sue but the effect ends up being the same. Which I find interesting  and possibly important from a writing point of view. If you've watched, staring in season 3, the character of Kira is introduced. Kira is a kitsune or she's possessed by a kitsune. As it gains power she loses control of it. But in the mean time it confers to her the ability to be a bad-ass sword fighter. She can control electricity as well, but doesn't do anything with it. Compared to Allyson who's back story is that starting as a very young girl ...

Let's have a conversation about what humans DO. Like all other life on Earth we aggressively colonize all available ecological niches. It is, at the end, the PRIMAL VIRTUE of all life. ALL life. All life is intended to reproduce itself. It began in oceans because the water protected life from radiation. Life crawled out to the margins of the continents. Life c reated the atmosphere and the air to breathe.  Life COLONIZED every place on Earth from the highest mountain to the deepest, darkest, chemical fueled abyss. Animals pushed their limits to find places to live. The most primitive humans managed to WALK ON THEIR FEET to every extent of the whole world, across the Bering Strait and all the way to the Southern tip of South America. Humans built boats and managed to find their way to tiny DOTS of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Every form of life on Earth competes, steals territories, steals them back, steals STUFF, exploits niches that other life pioneered. A...

This article quoted a psychology study that a lot of us probably heard about some few years ago.   All about how all white people have internalized racism because when given pictures of black people we all reacted in a way that indicated the perception of threat.  I can't promise it was the same study as the one cited here, but I'd be willing to put money on it. The important quote: "Psychology research tells us that seeing people as individuals, rather than as members of groups, helps reduce social prejudice. The psychologist Susan Fiske showed exactly how easy this is, if we put our minds to it. In a 2005 neuroscience study, she found that when white participants saw photos of black faces and had two seconds to judge whether the people in these photographs were over the age of 21, they showed activity in the area of the brain called the amygdala, which indicates a high level of alertness and emotional arousal. In other words, they saw a threat. But she discovered a...

           It seems to me that the "conversation" about Black Lives that is focused on intersectionality is focused on doctrine to the exclusion of life itself; the exclusion of physical, actionable life itself. Rather than focus on how people live or even what they think and feel, the focus is on confession, language, and conversion to a doctrine.            Someone asked if what was going on was a religion.            Not only is it a religion but it can't even really be discussed without using religious  terms.            There's a Church, now, more concerned with exclusivity than with reform. More concerned with an Inquisition than with reform. It's not that some people are going to do it all wrong, are going to address Black Lives wrong, but that anyone outside of the Fellowship can not be ALLOWED to address problems which nearly everyone, to a person...

Distributed systems are always more flexible and more responsive than centralized systems. It doesn't matter what the subject is, this is always true. The current push towards centralized decision-making and authority, to emphasize groups and government instead of individuals, and to insist on the assumption that one overarching enormous system is more efficient than distributed, duplicated, and independent systems, is profoundly untrue and terrifyingly dangerous.

A friend is reading a book about critical race theory or some stupid stuff. A white author writing to a white audience. The author INSISTS that it's racist to avoid having a white racial consciousness. We're SUPPOSED to have a white racial consciousness, and she knows that makes white people uncomfortable because we've been taught that this is racist, but we have to get past that and learn to identify as and think about our whiteness as our identity. Just reading a paragraph, yeah, sure, it made me more than uncomfortable. It made me angry. Yeah, sure, we've been taught that we're not supposed to do this. But part of the anger I felt was that I recognized in my own self a growing desire to give her just precisely what she was demanding of me. Good. And. Hard. I wanted to shout, FINE, I'm going to Be White, now. I'm going to think of myself that way and I'm going to LOVE IT. Idiots. Complete and utter idiots. They don't want an end to racism,...

Elijah 2019 - a freckled elf.   My kids are remarkably talented. (I've just been informed this isn't completed yet.  So maybe I'll get to post an update.) Update:

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The current thing seems to be the burning moral need to oppose charities for wrong think. 

The never-ending saga of people insisting that you must love the dumpster fire of The Last Jedi goes on and on.  A "real" comic artist just wrote up a four panel comic warning women of "red flags" about guys they meet in fandom and proposed a test... find out if they loved The Last Jedi.  Points?  1) Was Canto Bight pointless.  2) Should Holdo have told Poe her plan.  and 3) Was Rose Tico useless and poorly acted. These three things prove that 1) A person doesn't understand the connection of theme and plot.  2) Men need to face the consequences of their actions, and 3) he's probably a racist who hates women. I will never tire of explaining all the myriad ways that The Last Jedi sucks.  Was Canto Bight pointless?  In one sense it was one of the more fun parts and it was the only planet hopping that really happened in a franchise known for ridiculous planet hopping.  But what ever potential it had was wasted.  Part of the cringe w...

You know that saying… a person is smart but people are dumb? I think that in almost all of the very important ways that matter, it’s the opposite. A person is dumb. That’s why people believe there’s some magical thing about being smart. They look around them and it’s a wonder any given individual can even function. And if that’s true, and it sort of is, then how could people, in aggregate, be anything other than dumb-multiplied? So we need that super smart person who somehow can assure us that even if life is messy and scary and chaotic, that someone does know better. We don’t have to be afraid. Except that even a dumb person knows more about their own life, what they need, and what’s possible, than the smartest person who isn’t them. And the inability of that smart person to know more about any given person’s life than them… well, *that* is what multiplies. People with the freedom to make and then change any number of sub-optimal choices, to try and then fail and try again,...

 This one is so general purpose (and wow do people never stop trying to use kids for advocacy because then anyone who doesn't "respect" them is MEAN) that it almost doesn't need a note that the current events prompting this is Greta Thunberg's Tour of Scolding.

Sounds like a hero to me. This teacher objected to the new policies in his school district (and indoctrination about why they were "good" policies) on the basis that it caused real harm to black students to be treated as if they were only capable of lower standards of behavior because of their race. It's a toxic message to send. And if it were voiced by anyone else, exact same meaning but with normal language instead of critical race theory jargon it would be just as shockingly racist as it really is. Because what it really is is this... morality and behavior is genetic, these children are less evolved. It's disgusting, damaging, and repulsive.

Over and over in one context and another, it seems that people today haven't anything to fight or work for and so they choose to go after History, borrow their battles from the past. It doesn't seem to matter who fought those battles and won them or that those battles have been won.  When your identity centers on activism you can't allow victories.  And so what we see is people borrowing oppression that doesn't belong to them and borrowing it from people in History.

Well, it looks like Zoe Quinn wasn't getting enough attention lately (people who actually don't create anything worthwhile in the world often have this problem) and decided that she needed to find herself some victimhood to become important again. Which meant finding a person to destroy while her toadies and sycophants worshiped her bravery. The fellow she destroyed killed himself. You know... anyone with any understanding of human nature watched her during the early gamer-gate times and what they saw is someone who was self-aggrandizing to the extent that anyone working on inclusion and social justice who didn't *go through her first* was put on the list for destruction. She was like the mafia don and you had to go to her first and get her blessing or she'd find some fault in your program to promote women and your plans to support trans people and she'd sic her mob on you. She suffered no competition in her supreme righteousness....

There was a couple of items in the news lately where someone who was a zealous woke warrior ended up on the wrong side of accusations which required apologies and even a demotion for something which the fellow (I did look, several times) never actually said. And I always sort of wonder how disorienting and confusing that must be.

I've got a problem. I can't make a comic about this because I can't make my earnest woke girl into someone that no one would like. Even if she's wrong, her heart is in the right place. So tell me how I'd make a comic about YET ANOTHER elected Democrat making (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) calls to target people personally AT THEIR HOMES? Because that's standard these days... protesting at someone's home. Making the threats personal. And I have to ask... have any DEMOCRAT representatives been put in a hospital? Any? Permanently lost part of a lung? Become crippled from a gun shot wound? Also, to Castro...   "Brown-skinned immigrants" are afraid because YOU TOLD THEM TO BE. https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/06/joaquin-castro-trump-donors-1450672?fbclid=IwAR0ShoFckAtp8ELH7_wXs3kmamdvpkbgAe3j6ryB7ngrHqQ0PFGk39DXJ6g

People almost always say what they mean. We've got people today that believe that half the country believes horrible, horrific, and evil things, half... and this half *still* bothers to speak in code, to hide what they really think? Why would anyone do that? You're going to be called a racist no matter what you do. Nazi even. You're going to be accused of wanting anyone you disapprove of to die, because disapproval is the same thing as wanting people to die. So why would anyone fake it? Why would anyone bother to fake it? They wouldn't. Someone introduced me to the "genetic fallacy." Genetic refers to the source, and the fallacy is in interpreting anything and everything based on its source. So two different people saying exactly the same thing have their words judged by the source, by them, or whatever group they belong to, the source rather than the words. And that explains about 90% of the "that's a false equivalency" rebu...

I don't like this one.  I couldn't figure out a way to make it funny.  Couldn't find the joke.  That people really are making this argument is also not funny.