Year In Review, 2009!

[theweaselking]

As always, the post of the month that got the most comments.

January:
People Are Stupid. A nurse yanks out the IUDs of patients when she examines them, then lectures them about how IUDs cause abortion, then refuses to replace them citing a "conscience clause" that says she doesn't have to do her job if she doesn't want to, as long as she claims bigotry and illiteracy. For bonus points, she went *on the record* to say that she's got a foolproof defense by just claiming it was an accident that she yanked out *every* IUD of *every* patient.

Why did it get so many comments: Some people actually thought she was doing something illegal. Nope - the laws in her state make it perfectly legal. She's just being sued. I looked it up, by the way: No progress on the case so far, but no further reports of torn-out IUDs since the nurse and clinic got sued, so it's a start.

February:
Wherein I shall steal a math problem from XKCD.

Sue and Bob take turns rolling a 6-sided die. Once either person rolls a 6, the game is over. Sue rolls first. If she doesn’t roll a 6, Bob rolls the die; if he doesn’t roll a 6, Sue rolls again. They continue taking turns until one of them rolls a 6.

Bob rolls a 6 before Sue.
What is the probability Bob rolled the 6 on his second turn?

Hints: The answer is not 1/6. It is not 5/36. It is not 125/1296.

Why did it get so many comments: It's a very nonintuitive problem.

Honorable mention: Fuck You, Virgin Mobile - from *2007*. I locked it and banned further comments because it was getting 3-5 spam messages a week, since it's *still* one of the top search hits for a couple of those phrases.

March:
JOHN Watches The Watchmen, That's Who.
Why did it get so many comments: Inviting commentary, from my audience, on a geek topic, gets tons of comments. Especially when I call a lot of Alan Moore's work stupid.

Honorable mention: a two-fer with I don't need no stinkin' context. and The answers to the quiz!, wherein I ask questions about copyright law and then answer them.

April:
"Failed Attempt At Treason To Be Honoured By America's Slow Learners."

Why did it get so many comments: The confederate flag is a racist symbol, and the sole defining factor in the decision of the Slavers to rebel was, in their own words, slavery. Anyone who says differently is deluded or not paying attention.

Honorable menion: Puppy!

May:
You know why it's called "alternative medicine"?

Because if it worked, they'd just call it "medicine".

Why did it get so many comments: Homeopaths, naturopaths, antivaccinationists, yogis, and other religious idiots don't like being called stupid, even when they're stupid and they're getting people *killed* by their stupidity.

Honorable mention: "Children take energy and time! Wouldn't it be an evolutionary advantage to eat them instead? Eating your children would mean you live longer, so the lack of animals doing that disproves evolution! Duh, I eat poop!"

June:
See this young lady?

Why did it get so many comments: Jay would rather spend 50 comments claiming a massive decades-long conpiracy among thousands of people than admit that maybe Dru Blair might be a scary-good airbrusher who makes a living doing scary-good airbrushing.

July:
A Brief Visual Guide To Culture
Why did it get so many comments: Some people were disgusted. Others didn't believe this was an ongoing trend until examples got trotted out, and sometimes not even then.

August:
I should never, ever go into bookstores.

Why did it get so many comments: A long list of new books, three paragraphs on why I HATE HATE HATE HATE all the characters in Kim Harrison's books and yet bought the rest of the series and spent a couple of weeks reading through them and yelling a lot, and really, a discussion of "books we like" in *this* audience.

Honorable mention because it was so close: "Fandom, you have no taste", which got lots of comments because I hate Joss Whedon and consider him and Orson Scott Card to be pimples on the ass of the universe. And this is, inexplicably, a non-universal opinion.

September:
Humanity: Doomed

Why did it get so many comments: Battleship, The Movie.

October:
On driving, and warning signs that another driver is going to try to kill you.
Why did it get so many comments: Lots of people discussing different crazy-driver warning signs.

November:
Clarissa Ruins Thanksgiving.

Why did it get so many comments: It's Jason Yungbluth, who once drew a clown beating the Pope to death with a baby harp seal while pissing on the Vietnam Memorial, with the original Clarissa comic. It's a rape joke.

December:
Homosexuality is a sin! No, Corduroy Skirts are a sin!

Why did it get so many comments: Apparently there is some uncertainty about whether or not calling for the forceful elimination of homosexuals, as practiced by hateful American bigots, is or is not hateful and bigoted.

Comments

[flemco.livejournal.com]

Re: June
As I noted in that post, you were right, I was wrong. That airbrushing is totally legit.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I actually thought about including a link to that directly in the Year In Review post.

But I figured it would be more fun to see *which* old argument got re-picked first without my help, and, today, a winner is you!

[flemco.livejournal.com]

YAYES WADDO I WIN

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

You win nothing!

My fabulous prizes budget for the year was blown on my dog's giant christmas chewing-bone.

[flemco.livejournal.com]

I WILL FUCK THAT DOG

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

That dog would chew off your dick and your cats would laugh at you.

I'm just sayin'.

[flemco.livejournal.com]

So, Saturday night?

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

HOPE YOU LIKE SLOPPY SECONDS

go troll go!

[mcfnord.livejournal.com]

QUOTIN MYSELF IN RECAP!

"Get in there with your correcto-hammer of pseudoscience and save these people from themselves!"

"If they're good ideas, we mustn't credit their source, heaven knows!"

"Arguing that specific religions kill people begs the question whether atheistic abortions do, also, but again that's not convenient complexity for your soaring rhetorical excoriation."

love quoting myself at my best. i probably make much more money than you telling shit from shinola, which always comforts me in skirmishes like this. like, take that rhetorical clusterbomb and kill some real villagers! or can u?

"You're welcome to malign and smear the vast swath of intelligent, functional believers in mysticisms, and it's a small group that feels the need to fight about it."

I LOVE ME!

"You remind me a little of the fascist scientist in Atlas Shrugged: Seduced by a misappriated and steroid-addled caricature of western reductionist scientific thinking, which concludes outrageous excoliations that no rationalist would bother with, you soldier on. in a sense that's the mutual dynamic here and we all need to appraise how much bullshit is worth shovelling to keep going."

to another year of idiot smears and futile refutations to closed ears! beats working today! heart internet

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Sorry, want to try that again, maybe in non-stupid this time? You didn't make much sense in this try.

Oddly like your, uh, "contributions" to the previous thread.

[mcfnord.livejournal.com]

kinda easy:
1) love smarmy condescention as much as you!
2) get paid more to smell bullshit than you do.
just typical snot-nose tag-team action!

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

That makes more sense.

1. And if you weren't *wrong*, it would mean more.
2. Interesting assertion. How do you justify it?

[mcfnord.livejournal.com]

b. milk it while you can (http://www.google.com/finance?q=fxc).
a. your mom.

FTW!

see, none of this is interesting. it's all petty. but yes i am paid well to find b.s. perhaps you're not paid at all to smell bullshit. perhaps you're even paid to produce it. wouldn't be the first.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Son, if you're trying to claim that all your past bullshit was, in fact, *fake* bullshit and not *real* bullshit the way we all treated it, and that you're somehow claiming victory because we all treated your identical-to-everyone-else idiocy as identical-to-everyone-else idiocy? Yeah, doesn't work. Claiming "hahahaha YHBT" requires that you do something that either isn't stupid, or is SO stupid as to be unbelievable.

As opposed to just being stupid. Which you did, and got called on, because it was, and is still, stupid.

[mcfnord.livejournal.com]

You've misparaphrased me, son! To another year of being a kid and thinking we're brilliant!

[kafziel.livejournal.com]

Think he's trying to say that as someone who is "paid well to find b.s.", he knows bullshit when he sees it, and chakras are NOT bullshit.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

That would make him heavily overpaid.

[mcfnord.livejournal.com]

I know the attack on them often is, even if they do or do not exist. Above all, science is a massive admission of ignorance, so an attack on most mysticisms is not scientific, because the absense of a thing is hard to disprove and only tautological when it comes, axiomatic, like concluding the world is not full of untasteable, intangeable mayonaise. Says who?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

You're really mindblowingly ignorant. And since you now claim that you're being *deliberately* stupid and not just *naturally* stupid, it's starting to annoy me rather than amuse me.

You should probably fix that.

Re: go troll go!

[torrain.livejournal.com]

Well, the "go troll go!" subject line is appropriate.

Seriously, a bunch of out-of-context, non-linked quotes, interspersed with poorly written insults? You're bringing down the tone, here. (Yes, yes, I know. You don't have to care about how you present yourself, because you can state that you make money.)

[mcfnord.livejournal.com]

It's more like I don't have to care how you conclude. The missing context is mostly what I was responding to: still more poorly written insults! Like urs!

[absynthe77.livejournal.com]

I can't thank you enough for the link to Clarissa Ruins Thanksgiving. Totally made the day.

[marlo.livejournal.com]

It would be fun and meta if we could make this post the one with the most comments in December.

[cuddlycthulhu.livejournal.com]

Man, I wish I'd paid attention to some of those conversations.

[sparkindarkness.livejournal.com]

Hee glad I was a part of some of those discussions this time :)

And you're still totally wrong about Kim Harrison's books

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

How so? I love 'em. And I hate all the characters in them because all the characters are STUPID.

[sparkindarkness.livejournal.com]

I still love them so I agree with you there :)

But I still say the characters are no more stupid than most people - in that most people are REALLY stupid

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Also: Kim Harrison is much less good than Jim Butcher. For the record.

[jaundicedaye.livejournal.com]

Jim Butcher is a pretty tough standard to judge by though. That's like comparing someone to Zelazny or John Varley.

[alumiere.livejournal.com]

Huh - I missed the post on Clarissa/Jason. I know him and a bunch of his friends. The strips aren't meant as a ha ha joke or rape/incest apology; they are a condemnation of how victims are treated and silenced.

They're disturbing and triggery for some people I guess, but I see things we've talked about in Clarissa's stories, bits of myself and others. FWIW, I think he handles our stories pretty well.

[alumiere.livejournal.com]

Also, I rarely comment, but almost always enjoy your posts. I do have one question though - why are so few of the images pulled from elsewhere live links or at least credited?

I understand your stance on copyright and DRM, I even agree with most of it. But there are often times when I want to see more from whoever made the image and there's no info.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Hi,

I rehost almost everything myself so I can ensure that the image stays where I put it and I'm not using someone else's bandwidth. When I *have* a source, I link the images, but a lot of times I get 'em by skimming (or someone else skimming) through image sites like photobucket or some of the Russian equivalents, and the only link I can give is to the image in it's original "here is an image" context.

And, really, I don't link the source as much as I should. I try to remember, but I tend to open tons of pages at a time and then read them later, and this often means I'm left with an image open with no context for the source.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

Wait, "honorable mention"?

[torrain.livejournal.com]

By the way, hon?

I don't think I've said it lately, but thank you for cluebatting people. Knapsacks are *much* less annoying when they stop being invisible and start being things you can use to get the point across.

You give me hope, you know that?