Dead to Irony

I see some twerp on the front page of yesterday's Notional Past has accused Jack Layton of missing his "Blair moment" to turn the NDP sharply right. Nice to know that the NP considers it a loss to abstain from following the example of a liar, cheat, and very likely war criminal who rode his party to ruin in the last British election. I suppose in the eyes of the NP, Blair's fellating of George Bush absolved all sins.


Bush is certainly guiltier, but in a way, I'd prefer to see Blair in the dock first. Blair is the greater hypocrite: who Bush was and what he would do had always been fairly obvious, but B-liar tried to polish Bush's turds with the spit-shine of a false and contrived statesmanship. And then, after he left office, one of his first priorities was to join the Society for the Promotion of Pedophilia, ooops, otherwise known as the Catholic Church. What a sorry piece of human shite the man was, and is.

Weinergate

In the spirit of completeness, and also to get some people on the Left off the window sill (though god knows the Left as a whole would probably be better if we pushed them), let's run down some positive consequences of Weinergate:

1. We got rid of a weak link in good time. Weiner was a bomb waiting to go off. Breitbart the alleged genius showed himself a f*cking idiot in this respect. Weiner gave us the dick; Breitbart the premature ejaculation. Imagine this happening at a crisis point -- a key vote for instance. But now, the chief consequence is....
2. Breitbart is full of himself and preening. Which is a bad career move for him, since now more people hate him that ever and his earlier bullshit isn't any better supported. He thinks he's god. Look for him to get a nasty reality check in the near future. Pride goeth before, &c.

They're frightened

I see that the Notional Past, our perpetually in the red source of sage wisdom about capitalism, has decided that the most interesting in-depth news story for the day is not global warming, the financial crisis, Canada's dismal economic performance, or even Harper's breaking his own expenditure rules but.... DFHs. Dirty F*king Hippies. In the form of a five-part series on the horrors of growing up with a radical father. Who no doubt will confess in the final installment that he was terribly in error, and will join either the Catholic Church or the Toronto Stock Exchange.


They're frightened. And with good reason.


Enjoy your fantasies while they last, assholes.

On Motivation

I have always hated national anthems. Not only national anthems, but group songs of all kinds. Much later, after years of this, I read Bloch and found the reason. As he says, "You cannot argue with a song." You either take it in whole and sing, or you refuse. And, in the case of national anthems and a lot of solidarity songs, refusal is likely to draw a shitstorm down on your head.


Music is a drug, and I want control over the drugs I take. No one doses me without my permission.


But there are times when music is useful, so long as it is controlled by me. It's an acceptable non-prescription substitute for Wellbutrin in beating down background noise and static in my thinking. For this it has to be loud and harsh. Something with a driving beat is best, and it doesn't matter if it makes much sense. I used to use Pink Floyd for this while I was at university, though a lot of their songs are borderline for the purpose -- they make too much sense. Non-English bands like Rammstein are better, or the more forceful sort of movie theme music (Pirates of the Caribbean, anyone? The theme for the latest Batman pictures is good too), or best of all decent-quality video game music. Some of the music that Nine Inch Nails did for Quake II is ideal. It hammers and thrusts, mindless but endlessly active. Or the infamous Hell March from Command and Conquer, a game that I've never actually played. Some of the tracks from the original Unreal Tournament score do very well, such as "Run" and "The Course."


I wonder why this works? Of course, it tends to shout down the static in my head, but I think there's also a sense of process to this type of music, the feeling that you're off and running and for the time being at least, successfully ignoring where you are going. 


Process is all. Destinations suck.

Foot Meet Bullet

Some people have no luck.


Here the Conservative Party spends all this time and effort to do outreach to ethnic communities, with more success than failure, I believe (obviously the black community is a total loss).


And then their BFF in the Fraser Institute come along with a report that calls immigrants parasites who suck more from the country than they give. The reaction from leaders of the immigrant communities is predictable, of course. 


Thomas Tam of the Chinese support organization S.U.C.C.E.S.S. (a very successful organization, all sarcastic punning aside) complained, "There are many bright, highly educated immigrants who did not cost Canada anything in education. If [the authors] are economists, why didn't they quantify the social benefits?" (The Asian Pacific Post, May 26 edition, p. 15).


Well, Mr. Tam, it's very simple. They hate colored folk. 


And they include you among the colored folk, though they're happy to have your votes at elections and your stupider members as MPs and Vice-Secretary in Charge of Sitting By The Door And Pretending We Are Not Bigots.


Hope you didn't vote Conservative. It's going to be a long few years for me, but it's going to be a longer few years for anyone with more than a touch of melanin in their skin. A lot longer.

Trying to explain

I can't really get annoyed at others who find it difficult to understand my condition. After all, I lived inside it for five decades and didn't understand it very well.


I was talking with my dear one last night, after we had finished a game of Left 4 Dead 2. She, being a normally motivated person, wants to up the difficulty of the games we play so as to get a greater sense of accomplishment at winning. I don't. I never play video games at anything other than the Very Easy setting, because I get nothing from it. She's trying to understand that, but it's hard, especially for a former CounterStrike player.


So why play the games at all? I certainly don't get a kick out of "winning," at any difficulty level. If I've been enjoying the game, my feeling when it ends is more one of sadness than anything else, especially with slower-paced RPG games like Fallout: New Vegas, which ends by detailing the consequences for other people and organizations of all the decisions you have made during the game. (It's virtually impossible to have a completely happy ending, by the way -- somebody always gets screwed.) Sometimes I don't bother to go to the ending at all -- I've never finished Crysis, for example, because I find aliens in video games mostly asinine. But I've played the first and middle parts again and again.


Process. Process is all. I'm closing in now on a thousand hours of playing Fallout: New Vegas alone, which is a bit lunatic, especially for a single-player game. It's because I focus on process. When the game ends, it's always tempting to see what another character with other attributes would make of it. I'm playing a woman now (for some reason I only play women) who has Strength, Charisma, and Luck maxed out at the expense of other attributes. It's worked fairly well, at least better than I feared. I've developed her Barter attribute to 80+ when I usually just ignore that part of character development, with interesting effects on the game as a whole (shitloads of money make a difference here, as anywhere). Now she's working her way through the add-on campaign Dead Money, with me wondering whether my original skimping on Perception is going to screw up my relationship with the mute Christine. Oh well. I suppose I'll survive it. But I also suspect I'll be back with a character with Perception maxed out, just to see what happens to the flow of the game under those different conditions.


Process. It fascinates me. The journey, rather than the arrival. I need to stay in the middle of things always. That's harder than it sounds.

Vain Hopers

I didn't think it would happen so soon.
Thanks to here for bringing the good news.
Already, the threats are being made: a radical Right agenda or bust. Not threats to Canadians in general (though they are surely under threat) but to Harper from some of his own "supporters."

...the Harper minority government did precious little to implement a conservative agenda. Rather than making government smaller, the Harper Tories made it bigger; rather than cutting spending they massively increased it; rather than providing fiscally responsible policies, they amassed record-setting deficits.

And now it's time to become true conservatives, or else they will take their ball and go play elsewhere.


These people live in an alternate reality where less than 40% of the vote, secured by soft-pedaling extremist views, is a landslide victory. Where Canadians just can't wait to ban gay marriage and abortion, and restore capital punishment. Where guns are a fetish and the protests of police chiefs at loosening regulations becomes stupid babble to be ignored.


They'll make Harper into the Kim Campbell of the new millennium if they get their way. They'll throw a huge tantrum and possibly walk out if they don't.


Popcorn time.