Strawberries are blue; therefore, the capital of Lithuania is Los Angeles.

As I've mentioned, I sometimes like to visit that vast repository of insane troll logic known as the reader comments on The Washington Post's Web site. Many posters follow the pattern of making up a "fact" and using a non sequitur to jump from that "fact" to whatever conclusion they want, thereby achieving twice the certainty. While I don't hope to reach such people, at least I can amuse myself and evidently a few other people by posting nonsense like the title of this post and explaining that it is every bit as logically sound and for the same reasons.

Quote of the week

"Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual)." — Ayn Rand

The glorious success of gun control

One of the surest ways to start an argument with orthodox queer people is to question the sanctity of gun control. Now, in The Washington Post, which is not exactly well known for its libertarian bias, we read this:

Mexico has some of the toughest gun-control laws in the world, a matter of pride for the nation's citizens. Yet Mexico is awash in weapons.

President Felipe Calderon reported this month that Mexican forces have captured more than 93,000 weapons in four years. Mexican authorities insist that 90 percent of those weapons have been smuggled from the United States. The U.S. and Mexican governments have worked together to trace 73,000 seized weapons, but both refuse to release the results of the traces.

It just goes to show something that I've been saying for a while, namely, that when guns are outlawed, outlaws can still find ways to smuggle in guns.

What the externalities say about you, or: Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover.

I'll let you guess which of the following I have.

Trendy facial hair on a younger guy

What you think it says: "I am a man."

What it says: "I am barely out of puberty."

Trendy facial hair on an older man

What you think it says: "I am young at heart."

What it says: "I am having a midlife crisis and cannot afford a Porsche."

An iPhone

What you think it says: "I keep abreast of tech."

What it says: "Everything I know about tech, I learned from the general-interest media."

A BlackBerry

What you think it says: "I am so important that if I didn't keep in touch with the office 24/7, everything would fall apart."

What it says: "I am such a toadie that if I didn't keep in touch with the office 24/7, my self-definition would fall apart."

A mechanical watch

What you think it says: "I appreciate the watchmaking heritage."

What it says: "I am an Aspie."

An armband tattoo in a Celtic or barbed-wire design, plus enough piercings to form the constellation Cassiopeia

What you think it says: "I am an individualist."

What is says: "I am anything but."

A tattoo of a symbol from an Abrahamic religion

What you think it says: "I honor my religion."

What it says: "I just don't understand it very well."

A vast collection of leather and gear, immaculately maintained

What you think it says: "I take the scene seriously."

What it says: "I take the scene (and myself) entirely too seriously. Also, I have somehow come to believe that sex is a costume party."

Bears and racism (2)

Some people seem desperate to believe that the bear community is racist. For example, here we find a tortured analysis "proving" as much.

The author provides the following explanation for "[t]he whiteness of Bear culture," which, given my experience with D.C.'s bear community, I find to be screamingly question-begging. The author draws a link from bears to the teddy bear to Teddy Roosevelt to the "raced cultural dynamic that equates the return to nature with whiteness" supposedly represented by Roosevelt. That connection is so attenuated that it has snapped in two. I could use the same sort of reasoning to "prove" the following: The author has written the article in the Roman alphabet, which was originally developed for a patriarchal, slave-owning, imperialist society; therefore, the article implicitly endorses patriarchy, slavery, and imperialism.

We then read the following:

While many gay white men revel in their identification with the bear (this extends to purchasing Bear T-shirts, caps, vanity license plates, and other items of "Bearaphernalia"), men of color may be much less eager to do so, in light of historically racist comparisons between animals and people of color (Becker 1973; Plous and Williams 1995).

I guess that we are not supposed to notice either the speculation as to people's internal lives or the history of homophobic comparisons between gay men and animals, which would render the argument self-contradictory.

Quote of the week

"I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death." — George Carlin

A suggestion (2)

You there, with the bumper sticker or vanity license plate extolling the virtues of the old home town from which you took the trouble to move here — If it's so wonderful, move back there. I suspect that the local yokels whom you so love to hate won't miss you.