Reading, fiction and non-fiction

I do a lot of reading. I read non-fiction and fiction and opinion. In the end what amazes me most is the ignorance of various writers. Non-Fiction writers are as bad as fiction and opinion writers. We all end up making decisions with insufficient information and then we become emotional invested in our decisions.

One of my political positions is being pro-choice. That is not just an abortion issue to me, it is abortion, gender identity, gambling, prostitution, alcohol, recreational drugs, just about everything.

Why am I pro-choice? Because God is pro-choice. God invented choice. God gave people free will and people have the right to use their God given gifts.

I believe that is a pretty simple argument. People argue that God gave people the responsibility of enforcing his laws and there is some Old Testament justification for that. Of course many of the 615 commandments in the Old Testament focus on sacrificing in the Temple in Jerusalem and there is no temple in Jerusalem, not one we can sacrifice at anyway.

Anyone trying to justify the enforcement of the Laws that people make by saying that they are based on God's laws is being pretty lame in my opinion, unless they try to enforce the laws about sacrificing at the Temple just as hard as the enforce the laws regarding a Woman's fruit, which they don't. In Exodus it tells us that the punishment for causing a woman to lose her fruit should be decided by the Judges and the woman's husband, but, I guess that interferes with the idea that abortion is murder and that screws up the entire idea.

You could always try using Paul's commandments to obey the law of the land and accept the rulers God places over you, as long as those laws are not against God.

But God invented choice and free will so anything that inhibits free will is against God's gift of free will. Now you could argue that the Golden Rule, “Love Everyone as you Love Yourself” or Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” could be legislated forcing people to a specific standard of love or respect. Yeah, somehow I don't think you can force a love standard or a respect standard.

People try though, they behave as if they have the right to force everyone to believe as they do.

This happens with governments too. China has been industrializing and has currently surpassed the United States in the total amount of pollution they have produced (according to one study, others have them just behind the United States). China claims they have the right to pollute as much as the United States did. I see the difference as being that the United States and western industrialized nations did not know how much environmental damage they could cause and as awareness of the damage increased so did legislation requiring environmental protections. Not in China and Mexico though so businesses moved production to those nations because it was “cheaper”.

How do you figure costs? How can anyone understand the real “value”?

The people making these decisions all base their decisions on specific information, essentially on information that tells them what they want to believe.

We all do.

I was reading a book by Lawrence Blocker about a detective called “Matthew Scudder”. The detective has a conversation about Batman, talking about how Batman never killed anyone in the comics, the movies just screwed it up.

Yeah, well, people (like me) who have read Batman know that is crap, Batman has gunned down his enemies and killed more people than John Wayne Gacey (sic?). In the sixties and seventies DC low balled the old vengeful Batman into a peace-love-non-violent kind of super hero who just locked up the bad guys, no “capital punishment”.

Things change and the “Batman” Lawrence Block knows is not the “Batman” the more “comically educated” of us know. Block writes a few lines out of ignorance based on his perception of “Batman”. His readers nod and read on, knowing the the “Detective” is “always right”.

I can't tell you how many papers, opinions and articles I have read where the comments were so totally groundless that I can't even begin to describe how hilarious they are.

Yep, hilarious. I spend my entire life biting my lip and trying not to laugh out loud at all the moronic stupidity. I tell people this and they get mad at my arrogance, as if I am claiming to be better than anyone else.

Am I smarter than 98% of people? Yep and I have IQ test scores to prove it. Am I more educated on some subjects than others? Yep, anyone who has read my blogs knows that. Am I a handsome guy? You bet, I have had plenty of women tell me that over the years.

Does that make me any better or any worse than anyone else?

Being a unique pea in a pea-pod means that you are still a pea and you'll never be anything but a pea in a pod.

When someone tells me that I think I am better than everyone else do you know what it tells me? That the person I am talking to believes that people can be better than other people, more of a pea in a pod and I want to laugh in their faces.

Back when I was 25 I had a goal, to have a nice boring life just like Archie Bunker. Was he opinionated? Yep, just like everyone else. Archie let his son-in-law mooch off of him for years even though Archie had no respect for the opinions or ideas of the son-in-law. Now would the son-in-law character do the same for Archie? No, in fact the character ran off with one of his students and dumped Archie's daughter.

Of course that is fiction, but, there is a lot of reality in it too. I don't believe very many people would support a person with such a diametrically opposed ideology who spent a half hour every evening ridiculing, humiliating and generally denigrating them all in “good fun”.

The thing I hated about the character Michael was that he was constantly making rude comments that went over Archie's head. I see a lot of semi-educated liberals doing things like that, trying to make jokes that go over over my head. I really like it when they try to use words they think I have never heard. Sometimes I will ask them to explain. Often they are incorrect about their understanding of the definition and I spend my time laughing at them inside.

One time a guy tried to get me to stop using the word “irregardless” which is not, as it sounds, the opposite of regardless. It is a non-standard usage of the word regardless. The first time he tried to correct me I let him have his little “verbal victory” and the second time I e-mailed him a link to the definition at Miriam-Webster.

I have little to no regard for grammar or spelling. Communication is about taking the time to understand what the other person is saying. In my opinion grammar and spelling complaints are made by people who are too lazy to try and understand what the other person is trying to communicate. As dumb as this sounds I communicate better with people whose first language is not English than I do with people whose first language is English.

When someone complains about grammar or spelling they are saying “You have to communicate on my terms” and that is the basic “Ugly American” complaint. “Do it the American way”, or if you prefer, “Do it MY way or hit the highway”.

How would you react to an ultimatum like that?

It isn't opinions or ideas that separate people. It is the intolerance people have for others, issuing ultimatums like “communicate MY WAY (or OUR WAY) or we will ignore you!”, “THINK MY WAY (or OUR WAY) or we will ignore you”.

In the end, the people that have been ignored will rise up, break down the castle walls and guillotine everyone in the castle.

Morons will always build castles to protect themselves from the “ignorant” and people will always tear them down.

Ignorance is a choice. It is a choice we all make and usually without even considering the consequences.