my other journal is totally emo

the death penalty: a reasonable compromise

2007-07-27T04:10:58Z

some are in favor of the death penalty because they feel that some criminals just deserve to die.
sometimes people just have too much faith in the justice system and are completely oblivious to its racist tendencies

some are against the death penalty because they believe it's wrong to kill a human
and some are just against the fallible system killing potentially innocent people
and some just thing the methods used are inhumane

my solution:

set the life without parole or other possibility of release sentence as the judicial equivalent of the death sentence, or as an execution method
allow the condemned to choose their method of execution

this allows the continuation of the death penalty in the system while both virtually eliminating the possibility of killing nonsuicidal innocent convicts, since they would likely choose the life sentence in hopes of being proven innocent later, and the inhumanity argument leaves since the convict could choose any execution method that is not dangerous to others.

a more sensible way to reduce abortions

2007-05-17T19:32:13Z

while the abortion debate rages on, there seems to be no point of reconciliation between those who are pro-forced pregnancy and those who favour infanticide. [i think we're all pro-life and pro-choice, thus rendering such labels pointless] my biggest problem is that those in charge of making the decisions are those least effected by it: they are not doctors of any kind, they have never had an unplanned pregnancy, and chances are, they themselves were planned to the minute, or at least wanted.

as i am pro-murder, i feel that all forms of abortion should be legal. no, forget abortion; a woman should be given one year after conception in which to kill her offspring. think about it: if you have fraternal twins from different fathers, you want to make sure you kill the right one, and if you are on you way to have an abortion and suddenly you begin early labor and it's the policy of whoever finds you to save the baby, then you're stuck with the little bastard forever, when you would have been safe if only it had more patience.

i used to be on the forced-pregnancy side until i received just one too many of those emails that try to trick you into saying that you would abort jesus and colon powell, given the circumstances of their conception. sometimes i go back to that opinion because of the disproportionate amount of disabled and female babies killed by extremely selfish married couples, so i have come up with a few ways to reduce the amount of abortions without restricting a woman's right to kill her own offspring:

1. allow adoption agencies, especially those which specialise in disability or interracial adoption, to stake out places where abortions are performed
1a. they can even bring along perspective parents for added persuasion
1b. this can apply to pharmacies that dispense any form of chemical/hormonal birth control
2. remove any restrictions on gay adoption
3. have it mandatory that any college, high school, or middle school have a daycare center
3a. it can even be part of a pedagogy program if resources are tight
3b. any school which suggests that mothers drop out shall have any accreditation removed, even if it is a private institution; eat it, epworth christian and seaford baptist, with your disproportionately high and artificially low pregnancy rate
4. make it a crime to gossip about unwed mothers
5. have stricter domestic abuse laws against psychotic fathers who go crazy and hit things when they find out their middle schooler is pregnant
5a. anyone can be charged with murder1 if any abuse results in a miscarriage, even if the mother was on her way to an abortion clinic, since it is her right alone to infanticide
6. bring back the death penalty for rape; i should be ok now that we have better dna processing labs
6a. and let's have the torture to death penalty for incest because...ewwww
7. have more information available on the potential risks of hormonal birth control, since it is still infanticide even at the zygote stage
8. subsidize the production of physical birth control, that's right, wrap it up, wankers
8a. i should at least be a misdemeanor to 'hook up' without using such barriers

EU admissions

2007-03-07T03:22:45Z

Dear Turkey,

I know it's a shameful subject, but I've been there too. There's nothing to be ashamed of; we've all done it. No one will think you are more barbaric or less tolerant; we all make mistakes. In fact, admitting it will show that you are willing to change. Admission and acknowledgement represent the 1st, 5th and 10th steps in the 12-step program system, so you may as well get on with it. Go ahead, say the Ottoman Empire committed genocide agains the Armanians. Go ahead, say it was in Anatolia. Go ahead, say it ways you.

We all have. I and my sister even have laws against Holocaust denile, as do most of our neighbors. America hasn't restricted speach, but they let their sins be known in other ways, like giving towns cute names like Slaughter Beach or Indian River. They aren't even shy about lynching slavery or the Japanese internment camps.

So, go ahead, make a few declarations and unseal a few records. The EU will let you in, and everyone will forget about it eventually. No one cares about history unless there's a fun conspiracy surrounding it, and that's how America isn't falling apart at the seams.

Your loving friend,
Germany

pointlessness

2007-03-02T03:12:19Z

i have to laugh that gay marriage is not legally recognised in many places for the simple fact that gender-reassignment surgery is legal.

i cannot have a nationally recognised marriage with a physical and biological woman, but i could with a currently male transexual, because no one would check. i could also, according to some texas judges, marry a fake woman because some still believe that gender is determined by chromosomes, and we would be a biologically straight couple. in theory, i could also find another woman and have us both get sex changes. if only one of us is examined, it would still work.

gay adoption should also be recognised under the same principle, and what else is there to do with the surplus of children that the same folks who can't stand gay marriage also don't want aborted?

why i can't stand zealous atheists

2006-12-10T01:10:53Z

religiously zealous atheists hold that since religions are not the irrefutable Truth that they claim to be, nothing that can be found in religion should ever be taken seriously. the mistake is that religion should not be taken as anti-scientific, but rather prescientific.

pain has existed longer than microscopes have, so if someone is experiencing pain, and had not been bitten by a strange bug, assaulted by anyone, experienced a change in eating or moving habits, it would be perfectly reasonable for him to assumed that he is being attacked by demons, having never seen a microbe or virus. [which can be considered the modern word for demons, as dinosaurs are starting to be considered the modern interpretation of dragons]

even absurd notions of cleanliness and purity are finding scientific validity, or rather, reasons to be practiced. pork is unkosher because if improperly burnt, can host parasites or become tainted. many people are allergic to shellfish. fasting allows the digestive system needed rest so that it can last longer. women shouldn't fast while menstruating because large amounts of iron are lost,
and it is the best time for bones to absorb calcium. promiscuity puts you at a higher risk for stds. [condoms weren't around when these rules were written, not that people aren't sometimes allergic to the materials, and not that all materials reliably block all diseases all the time, and not that herpes can't be spread from the hand to the genitals, and no one is going to wear a full body condom; they'd suffocate]
but of course some of these laws are only out of spite, such as don't get it on during vampire week because the egyptians do. well, that is a bad idea in areas with no running water, but not because of an increased rate of infection. circumcision is only unnecessary if you really can clean it well on a regular basis, which was not the case back then.

someday, they will find that prayer and other acts of worship stimulate the immune system.

yoga makes you feel better by stretching muscles and tendons you would only stretch to please the gods.

you don't wear clothes for modesty but for weather conditions, except for loincloths which are used in every climate for sanitary purposes. in places where veiling became popular, it is sunny, windy, or cold and covering the hair protects it from harsh weather. hot sleaves are better than hot sunburn.

what really gets me are the zealots who can't stand the idea of the 10 commandments in federal buildings. the only ones that should be even remotely offensive to nonjudeochristians are the first 4, and perhaps the zealots could just put decorative plants over them.
murder and theft aren't very nice, and they are at least frowned upon in every culture. there aren't many cultural universalities, but i think that might just be one of them.
adultery is a bad idea for its tendency to upset children, friends, family, and of course the other spouse if they aren't cheatin too.
envy is just pointless; work harder and get your own.
respecting your parents sets a precedent for your children to do the same.
lying in court may also be something that is universally frowned upon.

i also find it puzzling that some claim that evolution is either more afrocentric or less racist or sexist than creation stories. we are all essentially related whether we had evovled from abyssinia or were created there, or in iraq, or australia, or greece, or india. we were created male and female in god's image, implying that god is either genderless or a hermaphrodite [or a set of hermaphroditic conjoined twins], and humans, like cats and horses, unlike dogs, all look basically the same regardless of ethnicity/breed, so it is silly to say that one ethnicity is more in its image than another, although racist propagandists that have hijacked the church have tried. evolutionists, on the other hand, have said that races they don't like are lower on the evolutionary scale, and these notions are still only in the process of being refuted. i can't remember all the sexists theories posed by evolutionist, but most, like racist theories, center around brain size [ignoring the brain to lean body mass ratio, which is what explains why humans are smarter than whales]

and what's more irritating are the zealots who hate christmas. just appreciate the day off, you oily little wanker. they don't deserve to have weekends either. and if they want to argue that it's unfair to have christmas off and not hannukah or eid, then they should be arguing for more days off, not less because people need vacations to not feel burnt out.

the real sticking point in getting atheists and religious creationist to understand each other is the issue of time estimates involving the origins of our existence. creationists can accept micro evolution because there is no reason why the creator would not endow finches with the genetic ability to change their beaks at every generation to adapt to the variety of food It provides them. macro evolution requires a bit more mental gymnastics. the monks have calculated the age of the universe to be in the ballpark of 20k years, at most, and the evolutionist hold that it should be measured in terms of billions of years.

and going with the macroevolutionary problems is the issue of whether dinosaurs existed at the time of humans. the facts around this are: serveral unrelated cultures have dragon mythology, dragons are of roughly the same proportions of known speacies of dinosaur, there are modern, living reptiles and insects that emit fire or at least very hot gasses that can set other things on fire. the possible explanations for this are that ancient people found large skeletons belonging to extinct dinosaurs and started making up dragon stories [and harpy for pterodactyls], aware of these fire emiting animals, or that dinosaurs were alive when our species of humans existed, and some of those humans recorded or exagerated their interractions with them.

i, personally tend to be more of a creationist, because even if life started from the big bang, how did that condensed, lifeless particle come into existence, and what force caused to to expand and eventually grow life? i think it is easier to think that a divine entity had always existed, but that's just me. why is it more scientific to believe in the eternal existence of matter rather than the eternal existence of gods, which are essentially a prescientific way of describing energy?

perhaps the monks could concede that god was sitting around bored, making origami out of stars and planets and asteroids, and then started experimenting with life, after 3 billion years of making possible surfaces. It tried the atmosphere on mars as a place for Its toys to live first, but decided it was too difficult to make creatures that breath that stuff. after about a billion years of that, It moved on to earth, where it was much easier to make oxygen-dependent life forms.
It started small with monocellular organisms, then went on to plants, then started experimenting with the use of a nervous system, leading to increasingly intelligent life. what would prove my crackpot evolution of creation theory would be if the creator made a more intelligent and physically efficient being than humans, but i'm sure if they came into existence, anyone who saw them would either destroy on sight, or just be thought of as a crazy UFO-chaser.

so, in conclusion,
atheists deserve food poisoning and no weekend.
not every aspect of every religion should be so lightly dismissed.
time-specific creation stories should be adjusted to account for hyperbole that is common in mythology,* so that religious leaders can be expect to be taken more seriously by intelligent people.

*inaccuracy in recording is not a monopoly of those who have written sacred religious texts.
it is my opion that anyone who studies religion seriously should take a journalism course to understand the misquoting that takes place first when you try to quote the source directly, second when the editor attacks your story with the style book, third when it is translated into another language, fourth when the translation is subjected to a stylebook, fifth and sixth when the translation is translated into a more relevant language, after aramaic and ancient greek and latin and classical arabic and sanskrit fall out of use and that translation is styled, and seventh when someone reads and interprets the processed text for an illiterate or too lazy to read audience.
in my journalism experience, the main story remained the same as when i wrote it down [a step i missed just there], but numbers were rounded and details missed, enough that you could say i hadn't even written it, but the important facts were still there.

squidofdespair @ 2006-11-09T23:14:00

2006-11-09T23:14:13Z

voting for the write-in is like not voting at all, only a lot more fun, and by ther percentages, no one seems to agree with me, damn sheep

at least i didn't leave the space open for the republican to sneak in

my highschool criminal justice teacher is now the county sheriff

damn my mother for keeping danny short in office, sternberg was much more fantastic