The Opinionated Bastard

So Flagstaff has a local free paper that comes out once/month called The Noise. After their last issue, I gave the author of a piece on voting machines a bad time, and I sent him my piece on No Child Left Behind.

So Thursday, I got this email:

We all enjoy the cool conservative tone to your articles. It’s something we’ve been missing, actually, with the tremendous amount of overtly-liberal submissions we get on a monthly basis. We were wondering if you’d at all be interested in writing a monthly column from the right (anywhere from 500-700 words). We could even call it “the opinionated bastard” and promote your website a bit. It doesn’t pay much now, but in a couple months, who knows …

Well, I did it, so now I’m a monthly columnist for the Noise. Tomorrow my first column comes out, which I’ll repost here. It’s basically about voting machines again and pulls my two blog posts relating to that together.

This isn’t my first professional writing gig, but its the first time anyone has paid me for my political opinions…

I’ve seen a lot of hysterical stuff around about how the Bush administration is going to “steal your vote” using “black box voting” unless the populace insists on having paper records.

Which just bugs me. Paper in itself is not going to prove that a vote has been correctly recorded. A computer can display one thing, print a second thing, and record a third.

While paper is invaluable in testing, it becomes a more complex issue in actual voting, because now you have 60,000,000 pieces of paper to deal with. Which means machine counting of those pieces of paper, which brings us back to square one…machines we might not trust.

It turns out that voting is a very complex problem. We would like voting to be:

Easy: You shouldn’t need a computer science degree to be able to vote. We especially don’t want to disenfranchise people who don’t speak English well, are slightly computer-phobic, or who are just elderly.

Secret: There can’t be any way for an outsider to tell which candidate you voted for, so you can’t be forced to vote for any particular candidate. Nor can there be any way for you to “sell” your vote.

Secure: We want voting to be secure so that the ballot box (real or computerized) can’t be “stuffed”.

Verified/Accurate: Since the debacle in 2000, many voters would like to be able to verify that their vote has been recorded. This is especially important most feel with computerized voting.

Doing any three of these is easy, but doing all 4 is a pretty complex problem.

Well, given that I had a Saturday deadline, I’m going to assume The Noise (the local paper I write for) is out in print, so here’s the long version of the article I wrote for it. (I’m limited to 900 words and no web links on paper…):

Since I got interested in politics, I get lots of strange emails from both the right and the left. About a month ago, I got this strange email claiming that Kerry was ineligible to be President due to the fourteenth amendment, specifically section 3. Now I didn’t take it too seriously, for one thing, the email had edited the fourteenth amendment down to be shorter. It seemed kind of silly to be saving electrons in an email, so that made me suspicious. I went to a Constitution website and got the full text of the 14th amendment:

The Noise being the local monthly paper I write a column for. This month’s will be about debunking the draft myth, and I’ll post it in a few days after I figure the real world copies are out.

Though I’m not sure why. Its not like any of my readers were going to fly to Flagstaff in order to get their free copy of the Noise. Somehow though, it seems like minimal politeness to my editor to not broadcast stuff on the Internet first.

This month is a first as its the first column I wrote specifically for the paper, rather then retooling one of my longer blog postings. Usually I take one of my 1500 word missives and trim it down to 900 words.

So I assume the Noise is out, since my deadline was a week ago.

Its interesting writing for the paper because its really a different medium. I have to be more coherent, and I have to cram everything into 500-900 words. I haven't gotten paid yet, but they did do this cool logo for my column (I'm sort of this curmudgeonly-looking devil wearing glasses), which I might put into a Cafe-Press store.

This month's article was debunking the draft nonsense from the election. Old hat for the blogosphere, but news to everyone else.

Article is after the jump. Here's a taste:

I was in Late for the Train the day after the election and I happened to overhear someone in their 20’s comment that they were thinking of moving to Canada so they wouldn’t get drafted.

Sigh. I hate election years.

I wanted to write about something else this month, not spend my 900 words debunking leftover election lies. But here goes.

Well, my editor asked me this month for a piece responding to this blatantly one-sided left wing article these two “radical” feminists had submitted. It was written as this fake interview, with one member of the group interviewing the other. It was, in my not very humble opinion, complete dreck. I barely got through the first two paragraphs. There were lots of gratuitous exclamation points, and this weird comparison between life for women under the Taliban and women wearing high heels in America.

Rather then write a response to it, I interleaved my comments in with the original article. I wasn’t very nice. In fact you might say, I was an opinionated bastard. The resulting article was much more fun to read, and pretty funny. They made their points, I made fun of them, and the article was much enjoyed by all the people I inflict my rough drafts on.

Even my editor liked it. He was a little concerned where I mocked them for being lesbians, but really, since they never said they were lesbians, I think I was mocking them for how their sexuality was obviously influencing their political beliefs. (“Men are evil” if you want the short version.)

The “radical” feminists? They felt “attacked”, and chose to pull the entire article.

As my wife put it “What princesses. They fold their tent and go home because someone says something mean to them? I’ve been shot at for my beliefs.” (It’s true, she has. In fact, my wife actually IS a radical feminist unlike these two. )

So much for the wannabe “radical anarcho-feminists”. There are women in the world who get beaten/jailed/killed fighting for their rights, but these two couldn’t handle being mocked? Princesses.

So not only am I the token Evil Neanderthal Conservative for the Noise that you know and love, I have a new title: Crusher of Princesses

It brings to mind a funny true story though. Once upon a time there were these two man-hating trust-fund lesbians who ran a non-profit. (They weren’t really man-hating, but its funnier if you think of them that way.) They had this one male employee.

One day, one of the women found that someone had been looking at naked pictures of women on the internet! On their computer! The horror!

Clearly, it was the man’s fault. He was looking at porn, the evil patriarchical bastard! Didn’t he know that naked pictures of women subjugates women and teaches men to treat women as sex objects?

So they fired him.

He responded by suing them for wrongful termination.

So they asked a friend of mine to look at their computer, to prove what a moral degenerate this guy was.

You know what he found? During the time that the gentleman in question was on vacation, or after hours when he wasn’t in the office, that’s when someone was looking at naked pictures of women on the internet. It wasn’t the evil patriarchical bastard trying to keep women down, it was the other lesbian.

I laughed for days when I found this out. My friend recommended to their lawyer that they settle, and that was the last I heard about it.

Of course, the moral to these two stories:

Calling yourself radical doesn’t make you a radical. In fact, being a lesbian doesn’t make you a radical feminist either. Real radicals don’t whine, and they don’t have to call themselves radical.

It’s not just men who oppress women by looking at naked pictures of them on the internet. Life and Truth are complex.

Anyways, given the joy of the internet you can read the original interleave after the “continue” link.

So I went to my editorial meeting for the Noise yesterday.

SkunkRising (the author of the piece I made fun of here) showed up and proceeded to dominate the editorial meeting for 45 minutes whining because I wasn’t nice to her. Then she left.

Oh, and by the way, she wasn’t a lesbian it turns out. She wasn’t quite like I thought. I pictured her as sort of this freshman NAU student with more piercings and passion then sense who had decided she was a lesbian and that men were responsible for all the evils of the world. The reality is that she’s a single mom who somehow makes time out of the rest of her life to work for her beliefs, who was deeply offended that I automatically assumed she was a lesbian because she said she was a radical feminist. Even more annoying, this is the standard response she gets from people.

What can I say? Its true. I felt I was making fun of her mostly for being whiny while claiming she was a “radical”, but I can see her point of view. It is bad (not that I care) that radical feminists get labeled as lesbians. But I’m not one of those people who thinks being a lesbian is a bad thing, and frankly, if you go around using the word “queer” 3 times in one eassy, not to mention in normal conversation, people are going to think you’re gay.

I was right about the nose ring though.

You can see it here

My entry is my rant called Real Women Have Hips

Though I’m not sure I really understand this bonfire thing, since its supposed to be your worst posts, and I always submit my best posts…

One disadvantage of writing is that you often have all these half-finished pieces floating around in your head. One of the pieces is this imagined invective to the feminist princesses I had a run in about a month ago ( 1, 2 ). Since one of the liberal guys was going to write an article condemning the Noise editorial staff for the whole debacle, I’ve been carrying it around in my head. Better to get it out…

Basically, Skunk, the reason the editors of the Noise decided not to run your article unopposed was because by formatting it as a fake interview, you presumed upon the editorial voice. Now being an editor isn’t really that fun the best thing about it is that you always get the last word. When you presumed on that last word, you presumed on their opinion. At the New York Times, they have a special room in the basement where they take writers who presume to speak for the editors so that they can beat them with rubbers hoses without the screams of pain disturbing the other writers.

Luckily, the Noise is not the New York Times, so we get to write about truth, beauty and art instead of boring stuff like how much snow fell yesterday versus last year. Unluckily, the Noise doesn’t have a room in a basement, or even a basement. Instead, they have me, the journalistic equivalent of the rubber hose.

So consider yourself flogged.

As a fellow writer, I give you the following pieces of advice:

1. Use the editorial voice carefully. If you had called up the Noise and asked them to interview you, the price probably would have come out about the same but you wouldn’t have gotten the verbal flogging.

2. Editors are simple creatures. If you want them to like you, check your spelling, proofread, and always make your deadlines. If you want them to love you, turn in your pieces early.

Hosted on This Blog is Full of Crap who published my favorite blog rant of all time after 9/11 about how the terrorists shouldn’t mess with us because we were crazier then them. You can read it here

So the Noise, the local art monthly I write a column for came out this week. My piece is here, I posted it on my blog 3 weeks ago. As I expected, it had two slams against me. Funny thing is, the second slam is in the form of a letter to the editor supposedly written by a independent person. Except it quotes almost word for word what Sylvia said to me at the editorial meeting a month ago.

You know, its funny, because what really happened is that I had three complaints about Sylvia:

1. She was a whiner.

2. Her writing was a boring rant no one would want to read.

3. It seemed to me that her piece confirmed the worst aspects of some feminists, the whole “we’re all victims of the patriarchy” nonsense, and then made comparisons I found offensive by drawing equivalency between genocide in some countries and wearing high heels in ours. I generally associate that sort of nonsense with lesbian feminists, as heterosexual feminists usually have a little more clue about men. Given that she also used the word queer, something most enlightened heteros won’t do, I assumed therefore that she was an intelligent lesbian instead of a clueless heterosexual.

That’s basically because I don’t disagree with most feminists, I just think the ones that blame all their problems on men are idiots. Men and women have different strengths and weaknesses, but not everything women struggle against is sexism.

Guess which one complaint Sylvia focused on to the exclusion of the others? The lesbian part of course. God forbid she actually improve her writing.

As an example, this month she had this 2000 word rant called Outdated Stereotypes of Feminism. Here’s an excerpt (bad punctuation and missing words are as published):

Feminists are Humorless

We tried and tried to come up with something funny respond to this one, but we just couldn’t think of anything because we…we’re feminists.

But, Seriously, folks!

Feminists would have all committed suicide by now if they didn’t have a sense of humor, for the reality of sexism is grim and serious, not funny.

That was the funny bit. The rest of the article was just as grim. Three women who know me read the part about me, read 2 sections, then moved on because it was too boring. Eventually, they got to my article, and complimented me on it.

Anyways, men and women have different strengths. Women are really good at networking, but that means that if you piss one feminist off, they tend to form a pity party to pick you apart. Hence the term feminist mafia. However, they picked the wrong fight this time. Ganging up on a single person who complained about a feminist being whiny is well, just silly. Ganging up on someone who has “The Opinionated Bastard” in his newspaper masthead for being opinionated is just stupid. Here’s what my masthead looks like.

Would you write a letter to the editor about someone who has this at the top of his column?

The other weird thing in the letter to the editor (first a fake interview, then a fake letter to the editor, geesh) was an offhand comment that PMS Media was doing their activities in no way to be self serving. It took me awhile to realize this, but that was supposed to be referring to me. Well, all Art is self serving, its all about the ego chicky-babes, otherwise no one would do Art. My main issue with these so called feminists is that all their art so far consists of “look at me, look how cool I am”. Do cool art, and people will know how cool you are. The letter to the editor also mentioned this terrible thing in Juarez. Which is funny, because if you go to the PMS Media website above, they’ll tell you all about how they traveled to Mexico to protest this horrible occurrence, but not one word or link about whatever the horrible thing was. I even emailed them and asked, but I never got an answer, so I still don’t know what the hell is going on with this terrible thing they’re supposedly trying to “raise consciousness” about.

It’s still weird how my situation parallels Estrich vs. Kinsley.

‘Ware the feminist mafia!

The Noise is out, and I got a check from them, which makes me a professional writer.

Here’s this month rant.

So Flagstaff is having a vote on this local proposition. Basically, the issue is all about whether or not to let Whalemart build a super-Whalemart in town.

Typical of the hippies in town, its a badly written and badly argued proposition.

Since I don’t live in town, I can’t vote for or against it, though I decided to write an article for the Noise about it.

45 seconds after sending my piece off to my editor, I get this spam from one of the hippies claiming that the main guy arguing against the proposition was a liar.

So far, having reviewed all the pro and against stuff, its been the pro-proposition guys who are the liar. This was no exception. The claim is that Flagstaff, on National Geographic Traveler’s 10 Great Towns list, is one of only 3 towns without a WhaleMart Super Center already. That is, the anti-proposition guy pointed out that 7 out of the 10 didn’t have a Super Center.

The email claims that none of them have it. Here’s a quote from the email:

National Geographic Traveler’s 10 Great Towns:

1. Berkeley, CA. No Wal-Mart Supercenters within 30 miles.

2. Eugene, OR. No Wal-Mart Supercenters within 30 miles.

3. Boulder, CO. Nearest Wal-Mart Supercenter 9 miles away.

4. Madison, WI No Wal-Mart Supercenters within 30 miles.

5. Ann Arbor, MI No Wal-Mart Supercenters within 20 miles.

6. Chapel Hill, NC No Wal-Mart Supercenters within 10 miles.

7. Charlottesville, VA No Wal-Mart Supercenters within 30 miles.

8. Princeton, NJ No Wal-Mart Supercenters within 30 miles.

9. Hanover, NH No Wal-Mart Supercenters within 20 miles.

It’s pretty obvious that this is a lie. In these days of urban sprawl, saying that Boulder, CO doesn’t have a WhaleMart Super Center because its not within 9 miles of downtown is just stupid. Berkeley, CA is in Silicon Valley, am I supposed to believe that Silicon Valley doesn’t have umpteen Super Centers? Similarly with Chapel Hill, I’ve been there, if the Supercenter is in Raleigh or Durham, that’s the same thing as being in Chapel Hill as far as a resident shopping there, its part of the “Triangle” and all the shopping ends up being in Raleigh or Durham. So out of 3 items on the list, I’m already distrustful of 3 of them, and I notice 2 others that say “20 miles” instead of “30 miles”.

A quick trip to the Walmart web catches the “Yes” guys in their shading of the truth:

nikita demosthenes has P.J. O’Rourke as his hero.

Me? Oscar Wilde, Camille Paglia, Ann Coulter, and Cartman.

A gay man, a lesbian, a woman, and a cartoon character.

I’m not sure what that says about me. Maybe I just think the conservative writers write like pussies!

P.J. O’Rourke is pretty funny though. He’s just not vicious enough for me. This is the Opinionated Bastard blog, not the Opinionated Tea Drinking Surrender Monkey blog.

Must now go drink foofy hippie-ass chinese herbs for my health now.

(I never said I was consistent.)

So I got a copy of the local art rag I write for occasionally this Saturday. The piece called Parking Lot Wars was actually written for them, but I got bumped due to lack of space because they had a long tribute article to a friend of theirs who committed suicide.

I read a few pages of the Noise and started seeing red. There was this long article about questioning the “official” 9/11 story. (Their quotes not mine.)

9/11 was one of the most heavily documented events in human history, and people still want to believe something other then the evidence of their own eyes. It's just amazing. In March of 2005, Popular Mechanics of all people had to run an article debunking all the 9/11 myths. Read it here

It was just infuriating. Frankly, I was ready to quit writing for the Noise, I didn't want to be associated with that kind of crap, in the same way that I wouldn't want to write for a paper that took Holocaust deniers seriously.

I rewrote my Beliefs piece for The Noise. Most of my blogging is basically first drafts, so I thought you might be interested in the rewritten version, since its one of the better pieces I've written so far, especially after the rewrite.

If you've ever shaken your head at someone who can only be described as a moonbat, you'll like it. Even moonbats may like it, because its actually somewhat sympathetic.

Technorati Tags: Flagstaff, Iraq, moonbat, Griffin

I rewrote my Beliefs piece for The Noise. Most of my blogging is basically first drafts, so I thought you might be interested in the rewritten version, since its one of the better pieces I've written so far, especially after the rewrite.

If you've ever shaken your head at someone who can only be described as a moonbat, you'll like it. Even moonbats may like it, because its actually somewhat sympathetic.

Technorati Tags: Flagstaff, Griffin, Iraq, moonbat

My editor at [The Noise](http://www.thenoise.us) seems to be unable to receive email consistently, so this month's rant didn't make it in. Sigh. Well, here it is for you internet readers at any rate. ###Jumping Over Brooms Yet another group of people is attempting to screw up marriage. Now that there are idiots on both sides, I can vent with impunity, and you’ll know I’m an equal opportunity bastard. This makes me very happy. We’ve forgotten what marriage really means. Let’s go back, back to the good old days when everyone lived in caves. When Zoog got caught sneaking into Moog’s cave, the members of the local tribe would get together and make a broom. At the nightly bonfire, Zoog and Moog would jump over the broom. This meant that Zoog no longer had to sneak into Moog’s cave because now everyone knew that Zoog and Moog were a couple. Moog and Zoog got to keep the broom. (Really, I’m not making this up, this is how Irish people used to get hitched.) Things really haven’t changed very much. Sure, now we give vacuum cleaners and fondue sets instead of brooms, but same-old same-old really. Yet in the big picture this whole jumping-over-brooms thing is completely messed up. That’s because Moog and Zoog ruined it for everyone when they invited tribal chief Kahuna, to watch them jump over the broom. Kahuna saw how much fun everyone was having and immediately thought “There’s got to be a way I can make some more seashells on this”. You can always count on the government to mess up a good thing. Now after you jump over a broom, you have to register the fact that you jumped over a broom with the government, and _this costs you money_. If you want to throw the broom on a bonfire, you have to register _that_ with the government, and this _costs you even more money_ and you have to talk to _lawyers_. Because you’ve jumped over a broom, the government _charges you more in taxes_, and you can’t complain because if your spouse hears you, they’ll think you don’t believe they’re worth the extra money every year. The government’s not the only group to screw up broom jumping. People only do as much work as they have to, and so while they could have said “the person who we’ll stick with your debts when you die, so they might as well be on your health insurance”, they called that “your spouse”. So this simple act of jumping over a broom now has all sorts of extra legal baggage attached to it. No one even knows how much baggage is attached to it, because like I said, people are sloppy, so they used “married” in a lot of situations where it might not be appropriate. No one, not even the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, gay people, who have been jumping over brooms for years have been feeling left out. They want in. I’m sorry, but anyone who says “I’d like to pay more in taxes, please” must be a complete idiot. I’ve thought that about the Democratic presidential candidates for years; now I’ll have to lump gay people into that category as well. Never give the government more money then you have to. I know, I know. You think somehow, if you have the government register all this broom jumping, that instead of having to fill out 20 different forms, you’ll only have to file 1 with the government. I don’t know where you got this delusion that the government is there to make your life easier, but its just wrong. If you all had just asked me, I would have told you. It doesn’t help. Instead of filling out 20 different forms that say “I’d like this person to make this sort of decision for me” you have to fill out 20 different forms that say “I’m married to this person, so they can make this decision for me”. At the end of the day, its the same thing. You’d actually be better off going to a lawyer and having him craft a piece of paper that says “Moog good. Me like Moog. Signed, Zoog” than you are getting the government involved. Because if you get the government involved, somehow its going to end up costing you a lot more money. The mistake gay people are making is thinking that broom jumping and marriage are the same thing. They’re not. Being married is the government tax on broom jumping. The government pretends to give “married” people privileges, but if you talk to any lawyer, you’ll find out that’s a lie. So gay marriage would be a disaster for gays, and it would be a disaster for the rest of us as well, because we have all these sloppy definitions in our society where we used “married” and we should have used something else. Bottom line, more taxes on gays, more lawyers, more paperwork for everyone. So I’m against it, because while I could care less about _other peoples_ sex lives, anything that means I have to do more paperwork is bad. Plus somehow whenever someone says that other people are going to have to pay more taxes, it really means that _I_ have to pay more taxes. Perhaps gay people feel that if gay broom jumping was officially recognized by the government that they’d get more love and respect from the rest of us. Guys, this is a capitalist society. If you want more love and respect from the rest of us, its very simple. Give us money. Otherwise, we’ll treat you like everyone else. As you’ve noticed, that’s not so great, but if you think the government would be any better, go wait in line at the Motor Vehicle Department. Which brings us to the next group of idiots. The Proposition 107 people. These people are so worried that the government might recognize gay broom jumping that they want to amend the state constitution. A moment’s reflection on the capability of lawyers to argue should have convinced them this was a bad idea; I suspect that if we called it the “Protect Broom Jumping Amendment” everyone would realize exactly how stupid this is. Would me and my wife need a note from our doctor saying that her “fun bits” were different than my “fun bits” before we could register our broom jumping with the state? Bottom line: More paperwork, more lawyers, and we don’t even get to stick gay people with a higher tax bill. These people have to be _even stupider_ than the gay marriage people. So both of you: Leave broom jumping alone, or I’ll come over there and smack you silly.