Is it bad that I occasionally catch myself daydreaming about punching Kanye West in the douchegoggles*?

It’s not that I have anything specific against the guy, hell, I don’t know him any more than most people know any “celebrities”. And I fully realize how stupid it is to spend any brain cycles thinking about the guy in the first place. But it’s obvious by his antics that he’s a spoiled manchild**.

The twit acts like a full-grown toddler; “infantile megalomania”, I believe is the appropriate term. Kanye West is the spoiled brat running through the grocery store intentionally knocking things off the shelves because they were out of Super Sugar Fruity Crack Flakes. And just like how I find myself shoving my hands into my pockets to be extra double sure that they don’t fly out on their own and give a brat like that a righteous spanking, I get a similar precautionary twitch when it comes to grown-ups who act like spoiled children.

Hopefully Will-I-Am’s recent punching of Perez Hilton is a trend that will continue. As I’ve always said, the world would be a better place if everyone, on occasion, got punched in the face.

*That’s awesome; “douchegoggles” is apparently an actual word according to my spell checker by way of it not triggering an ugly red underline denoting a misspelling.

**What the hell? The spell checker flagged that, and I know goddamn well that it’s a word. Curse you Google Chrome!

It is incredibly difficult to sit down and compose a coherent post on little more than half a cup of coffee and sheer willpower. And the latter seems to be much more effective than the former.

“Social justice” is a phrase that I’ve seen popping up a lot in the past few days, usually related to left/liberalism and especially within the context of health care. Come to think of it, the guy in my last blog post used the phrase as a part of his denunciation of liberal politics.

So whenever I see a trend like that, whether it’s a genuine emerging phenomenon or just a random fractal blip on the cultural canvas, I do what I can to get my head around it. I mean, it’s not like as grownups we get a vocabulary hand-out to study every week for the test on Friday.

The problem with the term “Social Justice” is that the concept of “Justice” is mostly subjective. And given that the term originates from Liberalism (which is generally anything but, these days), anything with the word “Social” appended to it in that context tends to mean “Government-run and supported by heavy taxation” in my experience.

So if I were to draw a picture of “Social Justice” as espoused by those most likely to use the term, it would probably involve Robin Hood in a cheap suit sodomizing an entrepreneur through his back pocket in a public square in front of a crowd of hippies, celebrities, and slackers. He’d have a briefcase in one hand, and his other would be a fist triumphantly raised in the air.

But being as it’s still early in the morning I’m not even going to pretend I’d attempt to construct an actual image for this. Anyway, feel free to let me know if my picture of “Social Justice” is incorrect.

Oozies This comes from Chicago Gun Rights Examiner, Don Gwinn, via a blog entitled The Breda Fallacy.

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) – The crime curbing effort has collected over 1,600 guns over the past 2 years and city leaders said this is another successful year.

Mayor Byron Brown said, “We will get anything from long guns rifles, AK-47’s, oozies, so we have gotten those assault weapons.”

And all those weapons are good for a pre-paid credit card, with assault weapons collecting 100 bucks.

I’m not even going to deal with the ridiculous notion of how law-abiding citizens turning in legally owned firearms somehow curbs crime, or the idiocy of the term “buyback” given how the guns never belonged to the government in the first place. But really? Are you that goddamn ignorant that you think “Oozie” is perhaps a slang term for a type of firearm, or worse, the actual spelling of one?

It took me three seconds to do a Google search on the word “Oozie”, and two of those were spent sipping luke-warm coffee. The first 4 results included an Urban Dictionary definition of a Burmese elephant rider and a jazz club or something. Right below those, Google helpfully asks “Did you mean UZI?“.

There’s no excuse for this level of ignorance and lack of fact-checking if you consider yourself a journalist, or even an intern hoping to become a journalist. But it’s symptomatic of the same ignorance when it comes to firearms reporting, and why there’s such a decidedly hostile slant against the amendment that bumps up right next to the one that allows journalism to exist in the first place.

From now on I’m going to refer to journalists who incorrectly report on firearms issues as “Oozies”.

Maybe it’s just me, but as time goes by I notice more people on Facebook befriending celebrities; not their fan pages, the actual celebrities.

One of the things I prefer about Facebook over MySpace has always been the low signal-to-noise ratio (also the completely lack of glitter, spam, and profiles so wide they’d require a Jumbotron to display without a scroll bar).

The reason for this is simple: people are more selective about who they befriend. Granted, everyone has those friends that they’ve added simply because 20 of their other friends have and they keep showing up as “People you may know”. If you don’t add them, you’re pretty much an asshole, even if you only have a shaky connection to the person at best.

But I’m not talking about these people; the socially expedience of adding acquaintances from work and school is a given. I’m talking about the “social drift” that would, apparently, eventually culminate in everyone directly networked with everyone else.

Here’s an example:

I recently “befriended” MMA and San Shou fighter Cung Le, and a few other notable personalities in the MMA industry. That’s not so bad, I’m a (D-List, at best) personality in MMA myself by virtue of running a huge MMA site, being a Judge, and occasional columnist/reporter/etc. Le popped up in the column on the right where it notifies you about mutual friends and very subtly mocks you for not being friends with so-and-such. An incidental mouse-click and the “situation” is rectified, pending approval. (If for some reason you’re rejected I’d imagine you wouldn’t get bothered with it again anyway).

So shortly after the request was accepted, I wander over to Mr. Le’s profile and notice he’s got around 4k friends. Deep within my itty-bitty heart, my inner child shed a tear; I guess I wasn’t so special after all. If I took anything on the Internet seriously, I probably would have been genuinely bummed to an appropriately minor extent for one simple fact: I hadn’t actually “networked” with Cung Le, I’d just added another point to his eCred (everyone knows at 5000 friends you level up and get new abilities). The guy obviously hasn’t been introduced to Facebook’s fan pages which allow notable persons to create page that can be more “public facing”. In my estimation, Fan Pages were created as a hedge against the kind of drift that’s effectively neutered MySpace as a viable networking platform: having umpteen-billion “friends”, 99% of which you’ve never actually met or share genuine connections with. But note to Facebook: it’s not working.

Like most reasonable people, I’ve never conflated my friend count with any statement on my individual worth, but it’s apparent that entirely too many denizens of the tubes actually do, and that this mindset is here to stay. It’s already effectively neutered MySpace as a viable medium for anything other than getting the word out about your crappy band or awesome t-shirts. And if Facebook doesn’t watch it, it’ll decimate them as well.

The true take-away from this is that as social drift occurs, people inevitably migrate towards progressively smaller and more “intimate” niche networks with a lower signal-to-noise ratio. An excellent example of this is LinkedIn.com. You could use Facebook to network for jobs, with colleagues, or to reach out to possible mentors and leaders in your industry. But do you really want to have your CEO sharing a data stream with the teenage friends that convinced you to get drunk and vandalize a railroad crossing? Or take my own “social network”, Bullshido, for example. The entire site’s centered around people getting together and beating the piss out of each other, in mutual celebration of everyone’s love for MMA and the Martial Arts. As such, the interactions there would generally not be appropriate in “Cube Land” or with your church’s youth group (especially since most people who participate there lean towards unrepentant skepticism).

Social drift is a boon to niche networks because the upside of networking is also its downside; the ease of information sharing can often unintended consequences (such as getting fired). The “you” you are with your drinking buddies isn’t appropriate or appreciated in the 10 AM Sales Meeting. In real life it’s easy to draw clear lines of separation between private, professional, and public life; on the internet: not so much. And it’s especially hard if you’re only networking on the conventional sites.

So I’d like to personally thank the attention whores who feel compelled to befriend anyone remotely connected to them. You folks are driving more and more people to niche networks like mine where people generally don’t have to worry about the social consequences of turning down a friend request from their boss, since he probably doesn’t train in MMA anyway.

I went here to catch some video and see what was what. I have to admit that I wasn’t expecting to see that many people show up. Someone said there were upwards of 70.

A few notable things:

• Guy with a beard and long hair in only a button up shirt and tie, yelling “Scientology Eats Babies” and “Scientology Gave Me Hemorrhoids”.
• Xenuanon
• Someone holding a poster that read “Scientology Says Jesus was a Pedophile”
• People shouting “Ebaumsworld.com”
• The cops bringing 2 squad cars and the paddywagon until ultimately realizing nobody was actually going to blow up the CoS building or anything
• A massive hawk that flew up and perched above the CoS building, seemingly taking in the spectacle.
• Huge numbers of people honking at the signs (”Honk if you think Scientology is a cult”, etc).
• Very out-of-place couple that looked like they just walked off of the set of Melrose Place 2008 or something, asking questions. Maybe they were with the CoS?

I wasn’t around to see this, but one anon on the KC raid thread on Enturbulation.org noted:

There was a grand exit at 1:30 when everyone counted down from 10 to 0, then everyone just went in every direction, was def lulz. We had 1 guy following our group as we left, but he noticed us taking pictures of him and dropped off tailing us. All in all, a good day.

And Scientology is their target:

Quick thought.

This video is an example of why it took me 10 years before I actually put up a site dedicated to my random thoughts. The current tagline here is “A Tribute to Internet Narcissism, Skepticism, and Various Other ‘isms”, and that’s because I realize there’s something narcissistic about posting what’s in your head and expecting random strangers to give a damn.

Fortunately, I don’t and this is more of an exercise in writing something on a regular basis. Regardless, this guy is exactly how I picture many “bloggers” who write about themselves and not something specific like Aesopian, for example.

Someone IM’d me with this video the other day. Apparently he had some crackpot theories about Bruce Lee and got dismantled on the Bullshido Forums. I completely missed that discussion thread, which isn’t a surprise given that we’ve got thousands of new posts per day over there.

And it’s not just the whining (and borderline crying) this guy does over people who don’t like his stupid ideas that irks me. Heck, this could be fake, or a tribute to the “Leave Brittney Alone” video. It’s the medium itself. There’s something almost intrusive about a person posting rants like that online. Most people who’ve been raised with decent manners are conditioned to look at someone “speaking to them”. So like it or not, when you stumble on a video of someone ranting or whining like this, deep down in your psyche, there’s that extra bit of aggravation that wells up just the same as if some jerk on the street walked up to you with the intention of talking non-stop in your face for 9:59.

And from a cultural perspective, if there’s not a backlash against this (whether natural or manufactured) kind of narcissism, we’re going to be in a world of hurt. Why? Because the Internet will listen to anybody.

If you’re into cramming watermelons up your ass sideways there’s a constituency of people just like you, waiting to validate your opinions, on the Internet. So out of necessity or out of convenience, you chose to associate only with those people who support your views on watermelon cramming. And when enough of you get together, you start thinking not only that the world actually cares about your viewpoint, but that you should crusade to spread your cause.

This is why we’ve seen the explosion of groups like The National Association for Fat Acceptance, Furries, Juggalos, and Ninjas. Through the Internet, the fringe manages to gravitate towards one another, providing the illusion that they’re members of mainstream society with just a different take on things.

And yes, the irony of writing this isn’t lost on me given the fact that I run a community of Martial Artists who expect people that spend years and thousands of dollars learning how to punch, to actually punch each other. (Of course, unlike the fruitcakes, we’re right.)

And I guess that’s the flip side to this phenomenon. Whereas there are thousands of communities of these social rejects that band together to reinforce their own delusions or trauma-induced fetishes, there are a handful of communities/sites out there, working hard to beat back the tide of stupidity with the paddle of reality.

Communities like those at Something Awful, or a bit more serious, The James Randi Forums, or even my very own Bullshido, are all filled with thousands of people dedicated to fighting/exposing/making fun of stupid.

So while I still think people who post video of themselves ranting and whining are colossal douchebags with delusions of self-importance, at least there are thousands more willing to bring the swift boot of reality crashing down on their balls.

And that brings me comfort.

This is something that was brought to my attention, in passing, as a subject of discussion on Bullshido.

To preface this, Kyle Maynard probably doesn’t describe himself as a hero. And for what he’s accomplished, Kyle Maynard could even be considered somewhat badass.

Here’s what I posted, slightly adjusted for audience.

There’s two sides to this story for any logical, rational person:

1. Guy with a ton of physical handicaps busts his ass to be good at something. Cool!

2. Guy with a ton of physical handicaps that prevent him from fully participating in a sport feels he’s owed the right to exploit the rules, drag down the sport (literally and figuratively), and get a disproportionately large pat on the back for not just resigning himself to being a punchline for jokes that end with “Phil”, and “Matt”. Not Cool.

IMO it’s a product of our fucking Oprah-ized, spoiled suburban culture that everyone now expects a pat on the back for busting their ass to achieve something or overcome obstacles. It’s like nobody recognizes that that’s the @#(#ing point of life, and everyone has their own challenges to face. You’re not a !@)$ing hero for doing the best with what you’ve got, you’re a human being.

Kyle Maynard grappling

Have our standards sunk so low? Do people really need to be told they’re heroes for doing their best at something? For going to work 5 days a week? For getting up in the morning?

Jesus *^_!ing christ. Don’t crap on real heroes like that. Kyle’s an awesome guy, but he has his limits. Trying to bring people down to the same level because of your own limitations is an asshole move in any context.

The word “hero” these days has no meaning. This is the phenomenon that describes Jessica Lynch as a “hero” for doing little more than getting captured.

A hero is someone who does something well beyond the exceptional. They’re someone society is supposed to be able to point to as an example of what we all should be in a perfect set of circumstances.

Don’t the types of people who push this “everyone’s a unique and beautiful snowflake” crap get the fact that everyone, by the very definition of the word, cannot be special?

Very few people have the character traits and strength of will to be heroes, and that’s a good thing. We need heroes who sacrifice themselves for just causes, we also need the plain-old-people who wake up every morning, go to work, come home, and repeat the cycle until they’re dead. Because without these people whose lives are the rule, we wouldn’t be able to distinguish those who are truly the exception.

Want to know what a real hero is? read this.