I seem to remember a big flap some time ago where cartoonists said they had the right — no, the duty — to be intentionally offensive. I’m guessing this guy wasn’t on board with that. No, wait.

But it brings to mind a question my pal Greg over at Rhymes With Right raised a while ago: If you can burn a flag, why can’t you burn a Qu’ran?

The answer of course is that you can.

It’s revealing that the Left is absolutely bat bonkers about the Qu’ran barbecue but has always been totally supportive of burning the American flag as a matter of Constitutionally mandated free speech if nothing else. Quoted in “Emotional Puberty and Wingnuttia”

See what he did there? He took one position: (“hey, let’s go to a flag burning party!”) and confused it with another issue entirely (“is there a legal right to burn the flag?”). I don’t have any friends on the left who have burned a flag. People who burn things in protest are jerks. This guy who wants to burn a lot of Qu’rans? He’s publicizing being a jerk.

But that’s his right.

Recognizing that someone has a right to be a jerk is an entirely different thing from supporting the actions of jerks. This particular jerk seems to have missed that subtlety.

So I say “I need something that automatically draws graphs of data,” and start looking around. Turns out that’s a whole discipline within computer science and math. Very complicated. They even hold international symposia in Vienna on this.

On the one hand I hate it when I get a problem like this. Deadlines and all, you know? But on the other … man, I think I could get into graph theory. I wonder if I would have dropped out of CS all those years ago if someone had introduced me to graph theory first. “Wait, don’t go! This is what you eventually get to study!”

We have to decide on our majors too young. We should get to wait until we’re really quite old.

A lot has changed since then. Elf and I got married. I got laid off a couple more times. We moved a few times in the DC orbit, then finally to rural Southwest Virginia. We had a son, and then we bought a house. Professionally in that time I’ve changed from pushing PSDs, through HTML production, to web application development and now iOS development. Come to think of it, I’ve had about three career changes. But I’ve never felt like I’ve left the industry.

That’s a long time. It’s long enough for me to look back on my older posts and wonder, sometimes, what I was thinking. Sometimes I’ll start a post and I’ll think, wait, I think that contradicts something I said in 2004. And yeah, it does. It seems like I’ve changed my mind about a few things, too, without even being aware of it.

I’ve considered nixing the archives before. I’m not going to do it. For better or worse, Thudfactor is as close to a journal as I’ve anything I’ve ever had. So I’m going to keep it around, even if it is mostly ranting. It helps me keep track of my obsessions-of-the-moment. It helps show me how I’ve changed.

I don’t write here as much as I used to either. Partly because time is at more of a premium for me — I have work, and I have my son, lawns to mow, groceries to buy, meals to cook, APIs to study. That’s part of it.

The other part is that I’m trying to be more thoughtful about what and how I write. Large sections of Thudfactor read like me screaming at the television, and it has pretty much served that purpose. It’s been cathartic but not persuasive or constructive.

I’m not sure people like to read that anyway.

I’ve also slowly and gradually come to the realization that people inhabit entirely different realities from me. things that seem like they should be obvious to me sound like crazy talk to others, and vice-versa. I always had this faith that if you could explain something carefully and accurately, the people around you would go “oh, you’re right.” I believed reasoning things out would cause consensus.

Sometimes it does, if you’re starting out with enough common ground.

But time and time again I’ve run into thinking and reasoning that make absolutely no sense to me — people who seem not to just have different opinions, but live in a world with different facts. Arguing those facts is like arguing how frozen is up. It just doesn’t parse.

You can say, well, they’re stupid. Or they’re lying. Or they’re deliberately being obstinate.

But I’m not sure any of that is true. Well, sometimes it is. But sometimes it’s people off good faith, with good brains, looking at the world around us both and understanding something entirely different from me.

Robert Anton Wilson called these different perspectives “reality tunnels.” I’ve recently learned how to recognize when I’ve run up against one and withdraw. I used to stick around and fight it out because I didn’t want the other person to think they’d shut me up. But now, well, I have to mow the lawn.

And really, what can you do with someone who has different facts? How can you be so sure about your own. Neither of us are coming out of our tunnels any time soon. How do you deal with that?

All of which is to say I know things have been slow around here. But the “paper jam” light on my brain is blinking and I haven’t figured out how to clear it yet.

Yah, that’s right. I’ll go vegan. I’ll sacrifice my general health and well-being by eating a diet completely unsuited to me, but at least I won’t get salmonella. At least until I eat some tainted spinach or something.

Now that the hordes of Sansabelt-clad teabaggers who waddled to descended upon Washington, D.C. for a group primal scream therapy session have taken their honor, along with their fannypacks, back issues of Parade magazine, and Medicare cards, back to their gated retirement communities, we can cogitate on what really happened in our nation’s capital. Take Back the White 2010

You know what? Just shut the hell up. When you start flapping your jaw about “doughy” this and “couch potato” that, I am sure you get a big laugh from all your skinny, fat-fearing friends. But to everyone else you sound like a jerk. Especially to all the obese liberals in earshot. Find another insult.

Thanks.

The American people, in the vast majority, are a profoundly religious people. We must never allow the noisy liberal minority and radical groups like the ACLU to impose their secular vision on the majority. We must resist the oppression of religious liberty.

We must never allow the Liberal, anti-God, anti-religious freedom minority to remove the words Under God from the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag. We must never allow them to abolish our National Motto: In God We Trust. John Fleming for US Congress

That’s from a sitting U.S. Congressman.

It is true that we, in this country, oppress theocrats. We tell them they are not allowed to use the weight of the State to impose their religious beliefs on us. For people like John Fleming, this means our government is too big and too powerful; he would much rather do the oppressing himself.

People like John Fleming require the rest of us to have a strong government in self-defense.

I once saw a guy described by the newspaper as “the head of the local anarchist group,” which should tell you everything you need to know about the anarchy’s feasibility as a theory of government. At some point even the anarchists seem to look for leadership.

Anyway, here’s Tom McNaughton explaining that the misbehavior of corporations is aided and abetted by a strong central government:

A few years ago, I watched a stupid left-wing documentary that compared corporations to sociopaths. As an example, the filmmakers showed how a company that builds water systems moved into a small country and then (according to their narrative) made it illegal for people to collect their own water. This prompted me to scream at the TV, “How the @#$% can a corporation make anything illegal?! Corporations can’t pass laws! The @#$%ing government passed the law! The @#$%ing government enforced the law!” Raw Milk gets Another Raw Deal

McNaughton’s solution is less government: “If [government officials] have the power to outlaw products you don’t like, they also have the power to outlaw products you do like,” he says. So, you know, knock them down a peg.

But what steps into the void? If McNaughton thinks a corporation needs government to enforce its will, he’s not thinking creatively enough. He should probably spend some more time with Philip K. Dick and Max Barry.

If there was no government business would have to invent it. But weaken government too much and you don’t get an innovative, libertarian garden of eden. You get violent, brutal societies where rich and powerful warlords rule through force of arms. Between those two extremes there are lots of opportunities for the powerful and innovative to create their own micro-governments.

We can see that in Pakistan and Afghanistan now. But also in the old South. Arguably that’s what the Southern states resented to much about Northern meddling — “regulating” slavery meant disassembling the fuedal societies southern slave owners had created for themselves. We can even see that in online societies tried to be libertarian and ended up being authoritarian instead.

It is certainly true that government restricts our freedom, sometimes in ways — like the ability to buy raw milk — that it probably shouldn’t. But weakening or getting rid of government won’t make us more free; it just creates the opportunity for other people to force their priorities on us. We have a beaurocratic, democratic government. But we could also have a despotic government (like North Korea), a fuedal government, or an authoritarian government.

What we could not have is no government. Nor can we have a government too weak to regulate behavior, which amounts to the same thing as no government. Someone will always find a way to take charge. Government is a natural consequence of living in groups. It is inevitable.

This is a Sufi dancer. There's probably a better phrase for that, but I don't know it.

In other words, if you couldn’t say to yourself “over the river and through the woods,” you might never make it to Grandmother’s house.

Likewise, it’s hard to recognize, understand, or respond to the complexities of Islamic culture when you don’t have the vocabulary and understanding to distinguish between Sufi, Shia, and Sunni.

The politics of bigotry and fear rely on perpetuating this lack of understanding. The basic strategy is this: take two notions that are similar in some ways and insist there’s very little real difference between them. Conservatives are fascists, liberals are Socialists, Muslims are terrorists. “Theists” are all deluded fundamentalist creationists and “atheists” are all immoral arrogant jerks.

I think we need to be wary of this tendency to boil issues — or cultures — down. We’re not finding an “essence,” we’re building cartoons. And then we’re getting vein-poppingly furious at these cartoons. Worse, we feel we know something when we’re only capable of having the simplest thoughts about it.

Maybe if we embraced complexity, with all its hard vocabulary words and difficult ideas, instead of trying to reduce everything to sound bite all the time, we’d be able to think smarter.

So here’s a registered dietitian telling parents to serve their children chocolate milk as snacks, actually suggesting that kids need a post-game sports drink (they certainly don’t) and that it ought to be chocolate milk, that kids who are lactose intolerant get calcium and vitamin D from fortified juices (despite calls to limit juice consumption in children to 1/2 – 1 cup daily) and that basically any dish that can be spiked with milk should be. Dietitians — a question for you

The dietitian is concerned kids aren’t getting enough calcium, so he or she is recommending that we get calcium into kids even if it’s in the form of sugared drinks — which, just about everyone agrees, puts the child at greater risk for obesity. So the blog item I’m linking to is deeply concerned that if we give kids too much milk that we’ll make them fat.

This is not an unusual occurrence; diet advice is not only conflicting and confusing, but often delivered with histrionics and dire threats of crippling disease if the advice is not followed to the letter. Elf’s Ideal Pregnancy Diet is compiled from all the dietary advice she got from her doctors while pregnant; it’s clearly impossible to follow.

The state of dietary research is miserable. Either we know next to nothing or what we know gets so drowned out by people who have marketing or political agendas that it’s no longer recognizable as fact.