Worthless Cunts

Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann are worthless cunts.

Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann are worthless cunts because they trumpet their own alleged patriotism, pounding their heaving, idiotic chests with their flailing, ignorant fists about the supremacy of self-sacrifice, common sense, and decisive action, while never once coming within 1000 miles of ever conducting their own lives in a way that can render such cuntitude anything other than rank hypocrisy.

As an example of a white, native English-speaking, female, true American patriot, read no further than the case of Heather "Lucky" Penney (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/11/heather-lucky-penney-flight-93_n_957326.html). Read her story and then tell me to my face that she isn't, in actuality, what those worthless cunts Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann ceaselessly proclaim themselves to be. Read her story and then tell me to my face that the ideals she can readily prove to have actually structured her existence around aren't the same ideals that those worthless cunts Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann ceaselessly proclaim themselves to honor.

Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann are worthless cunts because they use exclusive language to talk about how best to solve complex large-scale problems. They invoke the tacit glorification of martyrdom that lies at the core of the entire Abrahamic tradition (smooth move, Yahweh/Allah) to position themselves as "the only ones tough/assertive/bold/brave/etc. enough" to step forward to take the decisive action needed to save this country. And they invoke it loudly over their shoulders while sprinting the fuck away from any political situation that could force them to actually exhibit any of these characteristics.

Contrast this with how Lucky Penney describes her conduct: "I was prepared to die for my country. It's something everyone else would have done if they were in my shoes. I didn't have time to feel fear. We had a mission, and there was a sense of urgency."

The active ingredient in this quote is "It's something everyone else would have done if they were in my shoes." And when she says it, every real patriot within earshot runs the little lightning-fast simulation in their minds and reaches the same conclusion. Like those worthless cunts Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, she too uses plain English to talk about how to solve complex large-scale problems, but unlike those worthless cunts, she does so inclusively. Any other rational adult with equivalent skills would have acted the same as Lucky Penney, she says, and we all know it. But those worthless cunts Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann caw and squawk the exact logical inverse, the contrapositive, of Lucky Penney's statement: there in fact exists a majority of rational adults with equivalent skills that would never once act the way they do, and they are the only ones who don't know it.

In fairness, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann are worthless cunts because their lives have presumably taught them that the only way to get and retain the political attentions of the average white male conservative voter in this formerly great country of ours is to become the physical instantiation of the two emotional concepts that mark the ends of the continuum of femininity that dwell within the minds of those average white male conservative voters. Those Nascar-fellating simpletons view all women they've ever known as occupying a point somewhere on a line that ends with Worthless at one end, and Cunt at the other. They're very shrewd, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. They know there's a vast market of voters who can't conceive of a real live woman as being something other than some alchemical fusion of the base elements Worthlessness and Cuntitude, so they have used Fox News -- the Philanderer's Stone, as it were -- to transmute themselves into flashy, smarmy nuggets of Worthless Cunt gold.

In other words, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann are worthless cunts because it takes one to know one. And there are an awful lot of worthless cunts among the white men who are either part of, or enjoy the benefits of a financially parasitic relationship with, the Republican party.

This might seem like an undue psychoanalytic generalization, but the social experiment required to back it up has already been conducted. Its results were published recently at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/01/adult-industry-2012-gop-convention_n_943906.html. (Go read it; I'll wait.) This article actually contains my favorite political parable of the modern age: a small business owner whose #1 customer base is the GOP brass condemning the economic policies of the GOP brass. This has to support the idea that the GOP aren't pro-business, they're pro-Worthless Cunt. The GOP brass exists to amass money mainly so they can ensure themselves a reliable supply of attractive female human beings that have no economic freedom to do anything other than accept the mantel of Worthless Cunt being handed to them.

Fuck you, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, you worthless cunts. And thank you, Heather "Lucky" Penney, for giving all of the average white male GOP hoarders of Worthless Cunt gold an irrefutable example of what real, genuine white female native-English-speaking American patriotism looks like. Thanks to your having been you, maybe enough of the male worthless cunts running the GOP will come around to a sensible world view, freeing the two female worthless cunts under discussion to finally gather up their balls and go home.

An Open Letter To Supreme Court Senior Associate Justice Antonin Gregory Scalia

Dear Justice Scalia,

It is with great pleasure that I imagine you deigning to read this letter. It is not lost on me what a legitimate honor that would be, seeing as how you are the longest-serving justice on the Court. After earning a Bachelor of Laws degree from Harvard, you built a successful private practice, but then heard the call of public service and failed to miss the opportunity to ride Ronald Reagan's disgraceful coattails to your current august position.

Before delving into the substance of our discussion, I want to acknowledge the caliber of your legal acumen. I want to recognize your mind as a direct lineal descendant of the Magna Carta. And then, I want to crumple that recognition into a ball, and wipe my ass with it, you warthog-faced buffoon.

It may have penetrated the dimly-lit sphere of your Cialis-fueled consciousness that there is a Constitutional battle brewing in the state of Mississippi, where the unfortunately named "Personhood Amendment" is being debated by a representative subset of that spineless species of asshole we continue beyond all reason to call "legislators." (If any so-called legislators happen to be listening in -- fuck you, assholes.) The citizens of the Mississippi Delta Nuclear Family Waste Containment Area, exhibiting a degree of thoughtful civic deliberation remeniscent of ancient Athens, have proposed that legal personhood be granted to human fetuses.

I have a hunch this case will make it to you at some point, and since you sat on the Court during the recent Citizens United case, you presumably have built up some experience navigating the tricky ontological waters of legal personhood. So, as repugnant as I find you personally, I must overcome this defect in my compassion and actively seek out your expertise.

If the Supreme Court holds that the status of legal personhood can be granted to both corporations and fetuses, then the Supreme Court will create an ontological crisis that will be as devastating to the practice of American law as the Greek debt crisis is turning out to be to the commerce of Europe.

By "ontological crisis" I mean, two things that are both (stipulated to be) real, but are in fact completely fucking different from each other, will be indistinguishable from the perspective of Constitutional protections. Corporations, as you may have heard between pig roasts and rounds of golf, are vast agglomerations of physical objects and human beings, distributed in potentially many geographic places at once, using technology to exchange information amongst each other. Fetuses, on the other hand, are lumps of tissue that are basically indistinguishable from your appendix except for the magical property that they will, left to their own devices, turn into human beings. These two objects, corporations and fetuses, are arranged in an ontological opposition best described as diametric.

Not only are the ontological essences of corporations and fetuses diametrically opposed to each other, but they are both diametrically opposed to the folk notions of personhood prevalent in the American electorate -- y'know, the John Q. Public commonsense notions of what the word "person" means. These notions are hosted in, and originate from, the minds of sentient beings (presumably somewhat like yourself) that our friends and our families have seen fit to call "persons" without a second thought, for generations and generations, long before anyone felt a burning need to give that term legal primacy.

By "ontological crisis" I mean, it will be impossible to contrive a reliable test for determining whether a given ontological entity that might be referenced in a legal proceeding does or does not constitute a person. Such basic ontological tests as "Is it alive?" will fail: this answer is "yes" for fetuses and for the folk notion of person, but is "no" for corporations. "Can I converse with it?" yields "yes" for the folk notion of person and for corporations, but will yield "no" for fetuses. "Is it capable of love?" yields yes for the folk notion of person and for fetuses, but will yield "no" for corporations. "Is it capable of being sued?" will yield "yes" for corporations and for the folk notion of person, but will yield "no" for fetuses. "Can I readily determine how much money it's worth?" yields "yes" for corporations and for the folk notion of person, but "no" for fetuses. "Can it be owned?" yields "yes" for corporations (and maybe fetuses, depending on how our hillbilly fucktard brethren in Mississippi want to play it) but "no" for fetuses and the folk notion of person.

The only ontological tests that can reliably succeed for all three flavors of legal person are so general as to be useless: "Can it die?" Yes in all cases. (Note how "Can its death be mourned?" yields "yes" only for fetuses and the folk notion of person.) "Is it made of matter?" Yes in all cases. "Can it experience the passage of time?" Yes in all cases. Surely a mind as keen as yours sees this Boschlike landscape of hellish ontological chaos. Words (which I understand are used heavily in law) would literally cease to convey meaning reliably, regardless of whose mouths they emerge from.

The way I see it, a strict constructionist like yourself has only one honest option: you get to pick one. Either corporations enjoy legal personhood, but not fetuses; or fetuses enjoy legal personhood, but not corporations. But hear me loud and clear, you bitch motherfucker: YOU DON'T GET BOTH. If you were to get both, that would mark the moment when the entire population of this country realizes that the law has become completely self-referential and untethered to the ontological realities that constrain us all. This isn't a political ax I'm trying to grind, either: I don't give a fuck which one you pick. Leave Citizens United intact, at the price of smacking down this dreadful "Personhood Amendment"; or give the Personhood Amendment the thumbs-up, at the price of overturning Citizens United. BUT YOU DON'T GET BOTH.

So my question is this: what ontological test, or set of tests, do you plan to rely on in this eventuality? What "strict constructions" will you use to express your strict proclivities while orienteering through these thorny wildernesses? What set of guiding principles will you use to map the abstractions of law back to the ontological catalog from which this world is populated with objects? Articulate for me, if you will, your underlying legal philosophy for approaching these questions in the future. Give me a glimpse of the heated conversations you have with yourself when these matters intrude on your CPAP-enabled sleep. Thrill me with your acumen.

Why I Got Euler's Identity Tattooed On My Back

The majority of people in my life are uninterested in math, to put it mildly, but that has not prevented them from expressing curiosity about my Euler's Identity tattoo. "What's it mean?" they ask. "Why is it so important to you?" These questions are difficult to answer without invoking so much math as to make the questioners' eyes glaze over (at best; at worst they run screaming from the room). This post attempts to provide a non-mathematical metaphor that, I hope, will convey even to math-phobic readers the same kind of awe and beauty that I experience when contemplating Euler's Identity. I'm going to start with a totally un-mathy topic: literary characterization.

Readers of novels have slightly different ideas about what makes for good characterization than, say, readers of comic books. (I'm deliberately defying the growing pressure to call this benighted artform "graphic novels" by focusing specifically on comic books about superheroes, which is how it all got started, no matter how much the breathless fanboys may inform me that it's grown up since.) Readers of novels define their characters in terms of interiority: they talk about childhood memory, emotional nuance, mannerisms, depth. Readers of superhero comic books define their characters in terms of exteriority: they talk about costumes, superpowers, Achilles' heels, weapons, amulets, etc. It's the difference between viewing a character as a human being versus as a mere bundle of attributes.

Although I have little patience in general with the superhero comic book way of approaching character, it is useful in this context because it provides an interesting approach to numbers. Numbers, too, can be described merely as bundles of attributes. Of any number, there's a list of well-defined characteristics that it may or may not have: odd or even? Real or imaginary? Positive or negative? Whole or fractional? As long as we're willing to view the world through these glasses, then it's not such a stretch to reimagine the set of all numbers as literature's only infinite cast of characters.

Granted, some of these "characters" are a lot more interesting, compelling even, than others. Zero is a good example. We have yet to discover any other number that is as devoted a pacifist and yet simultaneously as rapacious a conqueror as zero. When it comes to addition, zero is a cuddly, harmless teddy bear: you can add anything to zero and that number will just emerge as itself, untouched. But when it comes to multiplication, zero is Genghis Khan, slaughtering all hapless comers, leaving only itself standing. (Don't even get zero started on division.)

In 2005, Roger Ebert popularized the term "hyperlink movie" (coined by Alissa Quart in that same year) in his review of Syriana, where he says it "describes movies in which the characters inhabit separate stories, but we gradually discover how those in one story are connected to those in another." Part of the power of this narrative structure, he explains, is that "the motives of one character may have to be reinterpreted after we meet another one." The TV show Lost, for instance, also has a "hyperlink narrative."

Euler's Identity is the best evidence thus far discovered that all of mathematics is one giant hyperlink narrative. Before Leonhard Euler discovered it in the sixteenth century, mathematics better resembled, say, the work of Stephen King -- a collection of largely unrelated narratives that occasionally overlap in character or location. There was the "number theory" narrative, whose heroes are 0 and 1; the "calculus" narrative, whose hero is e; the "complex analysis" narrative, whose hero is i; and the "trigonometry" narrative, whose hero is pi. Nobody had any idea that the arcs of these characters, which had been entirely separate up to that point, would directly intersect each other.

If math is a hyperlink movie with numbers as its heroes, then Euler's Identity can be thought of as that mindfuck scene at the end that makes the viewer go "No way!" It is the first, and so far only, scene in Math: The Movie in which all five of these compelling number-characters, 0, 1, i, pi, and e, interact directly. (When Heat came out, much was made of the fact that Pacino and DeNiro, two Italian giants of crime noir, had a single six-minute scene together; imagine how much more of a publicity coup it would have been if they were joined by, say, Humphrey Bogart, Denzel Washington, and Laurence Olivier.)

But what are these mathemacting luminaries saying to each other? No one knows. After proving the Identity in a lecture, Benjamin Peirce said, "It is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth." Euler's Scene is the mathematical equivalent of something out of a David Lynch film -- arresting, bizarre, inscrutable -- only, this David Lynch film is actually a documentary.

I Miss C-Style Switch Statements

It took me about a year to fully warm up to C# after years of unmanaged C++ in the COM/Win32 world. Now I'm at a point where I love it. But there is one thing about it that drives me nuts: Microsoft no longer lets you have "fall-through" control transfer between case clauses inside a switch statement. You have to have every case paired with an explicit break, even if it doesn't make logical sense. This means that now I have to do a lot of if...else if...else if...else-type constructions to get the desired control flow, when a C-style switch statement would've been the most elegant thing. *sigh*

Blessings In Disguise?

I suppose, in the long run, a net reduction in the population of Tennessee is probably a good thing.

Ruthless Reviews Gets It Right!

This site used to be awesome. I discovered it in 2002, and it just blew my socks off with its combination of extreme left-wing political opinion (although paradoxically mixed with some unaccountable misogyny), high IQ, creativity, and lazy editing.

Starting around 2006 they experienced a slump, but it seems like they've been getting better over the last 6 months or so. But this bit, about the recent Tiller assassination, is the best bit of commentary they've done in years. Bravo.

David Frum Just Keeps Getting Better

I became a David Frum fan last year, after not liking him very much initially. This recent article proves that, in the Civil Cold War (aka the post-election Republican Party infighting between the Southern wingnuts and everyone else), he's fighting for the North. Kudos.