Bug report to Facebook

This is an actual bug report I made to The Facebook. I welcome all manner of comments.

Why is it that, while there is a trend towards "automatic" sharing, which is supposed to make sharing links and ideas with my friends so easy I don't even have to do it, I have to try to read some inscrutable captacha when I want to share a link to a news story? Is it because I share too many links? If so, think of me as a loyal user of your platform and don't tax my eyesight.

Also, with regard to automatically shared news links and music, are you serious or what? I don't want to have to add an "app," as you call it, just to read a story that's potentially (but probably not) interesting. Does that seem worth the potential risk of sharing my personal information with (yet another) third party? If you think I'm spamming you now, why would should the fact that there's an "app" for that change the fact that I'm spamming you? I read loads of articles on the internet, and the ones I post comprise a very small fraction of that set. I post the ones that I like best, or that I think my friends will like best, or the ones I'm not embarrassed  to share with a group of hundreds of people that includes a range of social circles from close friends to [guy I met at a party once] to [family member I don't want to tell grandma I am a lush / commie pinko / gay rights sympathizer]. Maybe I would like to ogle Scarlett Johansson's bum without broadcasting that fact to Yahoo News and a bunch of relative strangers. Maybe I want to know why it hurts when I pee without engaging the machinery of the fourth estate. Maybe I don't have anything to hide, but I've made a conscious decision to keep certain things to myself "just cos." You know, privacy.

Are you high? Are you high right now? Or do you think this is going to boost your profit margin? Sharing a link with you is sharing a link with you. The ads still get displayed and/or clicked on whether I use the "app" or not. Likewise, you can ad that I prefer to read a particular news source or that I have a particular interest by parsing the URL or metadata. There's no need to open an even bigger hole in my privacy by allowing some BOFH or social media moron at The Guardian see the data you dutifully store away in a database that's so big that RELATIONALITY IS NO LONGER FEASIBLE. Why is that even a good idea? Think about your life. Think about your choices.

Does making changes to your weblog make you live longer?

I would like there to be one of those pop-ups asking you to take a survey as soon as you find yourself on one of my webpages that you were only minimally interested in. Ideally the pop-up will black out the text you came here to read based on a title that's only minimally related to the body text (i.e., what the economically-minded will call "content" on the mistaken assumption that I digest pointless words made up of tiny pixels only to express it as waste matter or "web-streaming," in the language of the 1%ers). Make it go away I can't bear to look at it anymore. Give me a survey pop-up or give me death. I would like to share my opinions about a text I haven't read on a website I haven't heard of that isn't about what I thought it was and if you won't let me do it just end it for me before the agony becomes too much. Promise? Changing your weblog won't make you live longer. Nothing will. Is it a cliche to claim that an article isn't worth writing if you can answer its title with a yes or a no? No, a cliche is a typesetting implement that only typography-[heart]ing hipsters will appreciate. Altering a cliche is like poking your typesetter in the face with a hot iron. Also, clever! God, I love me some altered cliches like a dead horse. You don't have a typesetter. You don't even have someone to read your copy. You don't know what copy is. Push it to the Web. Push, push, push, Williams-- push, push, push. But mainly I would like a pop-up ad to obscure these pointless words. They will not help you. Do not read them. Do not let them upset you. They are good words, like content and monetization. This weblog is monetized; give me the money please. [Find: "please" replace all with "if you please."] Incoherent lightly, do you telephone? No, no, not on this backbone, smartly.

Barack Obama's new speech on gay marriage

    My fellow Americans, if there is anyone out there who still doubts that it was possible for me to end my long evolution from my naïve days as a state senator supporting gay marriage, to going back into the closet to serve as your president, and up to the present day, tonight is your answer. It's the answer told by my decision to take the Citizens United case one step further and allow corporations to marry anyone they like, just like the American citizens they are. Now any American can marry anyone they like, except for the gays, but, like, gross. This is your evolution!
    The speech will start out by pandering to the gays, the not-gays, the disabled, the not-disabled, the minorities, the not-minorities, the people who I can comfortably label, and the people I can't comfortably label but can comfortably sit down to dinner with. But by the end, you'll all be upset by my carefully considered bland hypocrisy.
    This evolution exists thanks to the people sitting at home with a microwaveable dinner and popping in the sort of DVD that can unite Americans from all walks of life by portraying gender stereotypes in a way that makes us all cringe. This is your evolution
    To paraphrase a great American, the late Bobby Kennedy: “Some people see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say, why not string you along under the pretense of waiting for a politically opportune moment while your long-term partner dies in a hospital bed you are not allowed to sit by?”
    Earlier today I received a most gracious call from my opponent, Mitt Romney, congratulating me on selling out. I have thought long and hardly about this evolution, but Governor Romney has thought about it longer and more seldom than me. “Corporations are people, my friends,” he says. Tonight, I am here to prove him right. In addition to forming my own SuperPAC, I am happy to announce a new horizon in American family values: the corporate right to marry. I congratulate Romney on his achievements in service of corporations and in knowing how tall trees are.
    But after talking about all this gay stuff, I would like to assure you that your president is uber-straight by telling you about my white bread family and the puppy, too. Those heterosexual norms rock. I got mine. Now, you can got yours, too, as long as you're publicly traded. This is your evolution. It belongs to you.
    Never mind an environmental record that's nearly as bad as George Bush's. Never mind those illegal wars I took a lot longer than promised to get America out of... sort of. Never mind that in this economy, a college graduate will be lucky to work bagging groceries. Tonight, this victory is yours.
    Never mind that my Attorney General's take on “due process” is a real John Ashcroft-quality move or that I've also evolved from calling Guantanamo unconstitutional to using it as a model for taking away Americans' right to a trial. Tonight, we inaugurate a new spirit of sacrifice – of giving up your daughters for Exxon-Mobile. As a father, using the slut word makes me uncomfortable. Comparing wage slavery to prostitution is so untoward that it might make people notice that I'm not only not a socialist but well far right of the pope. I don't like to hear our daughters put down in such a way. So I'll just say this: “drill, baby, drill!” Who doesn't want their kids to marry up in the world? This is your evolution.
    Let's leave behind our history of partisanship and pettiness. Let's heal those divides and promise to get things done, as long as what's getting done is good for the bottom line of a megacorp that doesn't pay taxes in the United States.
    Let me tell you a story about an old lady – a lesbian – a story about her heartache and her hope. She has lived through wars and gas shortages, being ostracized by her peers and her family, public health crises and crises of public conscience... also gas shortages. Those must have really hurt. At a time when young boys and girls are taking their own lives in despair and isolation: yes we can! At a time when lesbians' voices were silenced... you know what, I got nothing. Yes we can!
    She was there to witness a generation rise to greatness, a generation that didn't give a shit about her. Yes we can! A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by the American telcos. And in the last election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because she believed I would do something about heterosexual privilege. Man, what a sucker. Yes we can!
    This is our chance to answer the call to progress. This is our moment. This is our time to end discrimination against corporations and allow them to fulfill their dreams of marriage. Remember: this is your evolution. You deserve it.
    Thank you. God bless you. And may God bless the United States of America.

Feminists gone wild!

The article "JFK and 19-year-old White House intern Mimi Alford -- a truly shameful revelation" from a Fox News contributor is truly shameful. I normally like reading the 'feminists' hired on by the likes of Fox or the Daily Mail (Femail) because it's good for a laugh, but this is simply irredeemable, not least of all because its author holds a PhD in psychology and has a website full of 'feminist' articles. Since when have so many morons held advanced degrees? I refer, of course, to Newt Gingrich and friends.

The article opens with an image of an innocent girl's aspirations to 'marry' a prince, with no commentary on where those aspirations might have come from. Then there's a bit of Tea Party-style leader bashing. Phyllis Chesler calls Monica Lewinsky a hoebag, and after she says that Marilyn Monroe and Judith Exner were hoebags.

Feminist protip: don't call women hoebags.

Chesler says it's fine that these adult women were hoebags because at least they were consciously advancing their careers. But God forbid the president have consensual sex with a 19 year old -- one can't meaningfully consent at 19. Basically, in one paragraph she accuses president Kennedy of command rape and in the next says, "but he wasn't a rapist."

Glad we cleared that up.

Next she describes sex workers as hoebags, then implies that they are traitors for writing about their encounters. She vaguely refers to "similar" abuses from our leaders (without clearing up which of the many abuses she's written about are in question) and nuclear weapons in the same sentence, implying that our long history of leaders with knobs instead of brains has made us less safe.

 

If anything, sexually deviant presidents have saved us from total annihilation: I'd rather the president was getting a blowjob than launching a strike during a nuclear crisis. In fact, I propose keeping anyone who has the authority to use weapons of mass destruction SO busy with blowjobs that they can't remember their own name-- at least until such time as our puny human minds have figured out that nuclear weapons are never an option.

Chesler makes out that one's sex life isn't private in an age where some people make sex tapes to gain notoriety. 24/7 news cycles and Facebook don't in themselves constitute an argument for anything, and for all the wacky antics our Supreme Court has gotten up to these last years, it seems to be moving in a sensible direction with regard to keeping government out of your bedroom.

 

She turns to breaking down our golden age view of the past by giving a litany of presidential and gubernatorial infidelities. For good measure, let's throw Anthony Weiner in the same boat as Tiger Woods, because that makes sense. Why not slag off the recently dead Ted Kennedy, too? In the face of all the Kennedy tragedy, "One would have hoped for no further dirt." Alas, some hoebag had to dig some more up, shattering my golden age image of Kennedy as a sex maniac to replace it with one of a sex maniac who has been accused as a rapist. 

Is Santa Claus the Antichrist? (part one)

Author's note: Now that we find ourselves well into February, it seems an appropriate time of year to begin our annual investigation into the War on Christmas. Back around December 26th, when I realized that for the umpteenth time in my life I hadn't received the present I most wanted -- heaps of cash -- I began to suspect that Santa Claus was in fact the Antichrist. Let us begin part one of our investigation with two meditations:

"Did you hear about the dyslexic devil worshiper? He prayed to Father Christmas." -A man who claims not to be homeless


"Dude was greasier than Satan's balls / and he wouldn't return my letters nor calls" -Dante Alighieri

Following some instructions I found on the Internet, I decided to head  straight to the source: Santa Himself. I put on my money t-shirt and Santa hat, queued up that Kenny G number from A Very Merry Chipmunk on my brand-name hi-fi, and generally got moody. I also had my dad print out some North Pole themed stationary and help me find my big kid pens. I decided to use the red and green colored ones for this letter.

After a month, I have received no reply. I can confirm that Santa will neither confirm nor deny that He is in league with the Prince of Darkness. Awfully suspicious, don't you think? Already this throws dubiousity on his Christian credentials. Should he not be ready to confess that the Bigger Guy is His Savior? Sure, we all have a little Manichean in our past. In the words of another Fat Man, "everybody's just a little bit homo-sexual." We could deal with that, Santa, even if Mrs Claus were less than sympathetic. Skeletons in the closet -- literally? Everything's been forgiven, girls! You can come home! But a lack of faith? Non, mon capitaine.

If the secrecy on this matter reveals anything, it's that Santa be illin'. But it may also be true that he also be marking us in a beastly fashion, if you'll pardon the pun.

Dear Santa Claus.

It's me, Luke. Are you there? I understand you get a lot of letters everyday, but this isn't your creditor Luke, it's the other one. You know, with the hair. Of course you know. You know everything. You see me when I'm sleeping and everything ;-) but you never call just to say hi. You only call when things aren't going well. What did I do wrong? I promise I haven't been too naughty.

So, how have you been? Are the reindeer staying out of trouble? Seen any good broads lately? That Mrs Claus is nice and all, but she really needs to lay off the eggnog if she's going to pretend to deserve you. Me? I'm going okay I guess. I just recently figured out that I'm such a miserable fuck because some asshole let George Carlin onto kids' TV. Thanks for asking.

Here's the part where I tell you how good I've been this year. Like, whoa! Not only did I put all my toys away, but I only used toys that would help in the fight against the War Against Christmas. I particularly made use of my toy sword, and those unbelievers couldn't get enough of my ray gun.

I know it's polite enough to limit my toy list to two or three things, but I'll keep it to one. Please bring me heaps of cash.

Thanks for bringing me toys every year. It's nice enough, I guess, even if what I really want is heaps of cash. You're great.

Love,
Me

PS- Are you a Satanist or what?

Then I asked my parents to put it in the mail for me. What's the hold up for then?

Part two of this investigation later as soon as my parents allow me more computer time. As always, I welcome your comments.

Phrases for language acquisition

The sad truth about most language learning courses and teach yourself apps is that they suck. As a man fluent in dozens of languages who has also read some stuff on Wikipedia about human nature and shit, I can be quite certain when I say that these so-called tools just don't understand me. They throw out all kinds of pseudo-scientific terminology about grammar being in the aether of the human mind and innate-submersion-transmogrification, when what we really need is a psychotomimetic approach to language acquisition. For you lame men, a psychotomimetic approach is to follow an average person around for a few days and figure out about 5-10 phrases they use most frequently. Sadly, our ante-intellectual po-po-patrol have tried to throw me in the hoosegaol for 'stalking' on a few occasions. But, like, they had to follow me around to catch me, right? Who's the stalker now? They only set science back by a few weeks, though, and I've been able to sort out those commonest phrases. If you can memorize these few things, you can become familiar with a new tongue in a matter of minutes.

• Yes
• No
• Where is the bathroom?
• Two whiskeys
• I just watched the free channels
• This party is lame
• I love you
• Get away from me, you crazy bitch

In A Mirror, Blackly

Since almost all of my friends and two out of my three Twitter followers are Americans, I feel that my subject requires some explanation. This is a reflection on the Channel 4 production “Black Mirror: The National Anthem,” which was written by comedian, dramatist, opinion columnist, and bitter but lovable asshole Charlie Brooker (Screenwipe, 10 O'Clock Live, How TV Ruined Your Life, The Guardian). It aired on 4^th December. As far as I know, it wasn't screened on any stations in the States, but in the 21^st Century that shouldn't stop you. I urge you to find it.

What spoilers I do provide will not detract from the immediacy of the program, and I have omitted what I believe to be the most tragic aspect, as that scene is possible to ruin. You may feel safe in reading this if you have not seen Black Mirror yet.

I'm not a TV reviewer, or even a blogger (where forms requiring more than 140 characters of attention [cont...]), but I feel compelled to write on two aspects of the first story in the Black Mirror trilogy which have been overlooked in the traditional media reviews, the reaction of viewers who have taken to Twitter, and the questions about human nature this stark picture raises.

I've read all the major British papers' reviews of “The National Anthem.” Initially, this was to see how advance viewing held up to my high expectations of Brooker. After I had seen the program, this curiosity turned to disbelief: how could none of the papers have mentioned, amid favorable comparisons to The Twilight Zone, just how traumatic Black Mirror is? It falls into the same category as the Coen Brothers' No Country For Old Men and Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers: that is, it is excellent, but the world it depicts is so psychopathic – yet so familiar and plausible – that one is left feeling so nauseated and disturbed that no degree of excellence could compel a second viewing. I didn't sleep well as a result of seeing it, and I still feel slightly physically ill. Once the initial traumatic phase wears off enough to allow for reflection, one is left with an even more troubling question:

What does it say about us as a species and as a culture that the most intellectually-stimulating television drama of 2011 has as its driving force a global movement compelling the British Prime Minister to fuck a pig?

In addition to convincing nearly 4 million people (according to BARB) to watch simulated man-on-pig sex, which is an achievement in itself, Charlie Brooker has managed to disgust me out of my entire repertoire of Welsh jokes, and make an even more acidic statement on contemporary art than the 1994 K Foundation award. It goes without saying that, in spite of this, I wouldn't have "seen it through to the end" if it weren't for compelling characters and plot. The urgency of the horror is derived from real life scenarios such as Gordon Brown's being forced by social media to issue an apology.

How much have we changed in the first century of our transformation to electric media if only thirty years ago Mary Whitehouse, CBE (yeah, fucking CBE) was banging on about pim-holes, pempsliders, and Daleks being too scary? A great deal, surely, but in America our regulatory stipulations lag further behind.

In America, it is all too easy to find stories of the goriest murders, with seven second jump cut action thrill scenes of gleeful artisan flamethrowing interspersed with long shots of witty banter over the charred human remains. It is all too easy to find the same glibness applied to such violent and deplorable acts as rape. All this and a healthy sample of verbal abuse for the kiddies to mimic and willful ignorance to boost your self-esteem thrown in, all on the terrestrial stations, straight to your home to stoke your hard-on for military excess. Meanwhile, nipples are digitally removed from lingerie catalogs; may God have mercy on us if one appears on a glowing screen.

But I digress... Suffice it to say, this won't be on our airwaves any time soon, even though it is the first meaningful look into the dark soul of our new age in the cult of glowing rectangles. The vomit-worthy physicality of Black Mirror is a necessary expression of our emotional disconnection from our disturbed internet personas.

The 10,00 tweets per minute egging PM Michael Callow on and the death threats against his family, which ultimately break his resolve, are not solely the domain of dystopian fiction. In our own world, behind the platitudes and conspiracy theorists available online, one finds an undercurrent mix of anonymous pointless venting and genuine hatred for others, both of which can be traced to a constellation of factors including the alienation and isolation of global communications and our culture-wide confusion about how we, as individuals, are to interface with a society so scarred by the integrated circuit that the institutions and careers our parents hold dearest have been replaced by automated racks of servers and a psychic vacuum.

If I can't see the person at the other end of of my vitriol, surely it is no harm to wish AIDS or cancer on them, or to hurl racist slurs on them, or even simply to describe their dearest work of art a pointless piece of shit. In the last decade, rightly-if-too-infrequently called the Uh-Oh's, joking about AIDS took on the status of a meme, right along with more innocent fair like rickrolling. This despite the fact that persons active in the LGBT community from a short 15 or 20 years prior had undergone an experience as harrowing as a war and thus deserved a measure of respect usually reserved for veterans. This despite the fact that if you live in the developed world, someone you know has died of cancer or has been cut and poisoned and burned to death first. At the heart of the population of Black Mirror's quasi-fictional public is a lack of empathy.

Ordinarily, one has a vague sense that bestiality is wrong or unnatural. The lack of visceral revulsion is more accurately described as a lack of imagination than as a moral failure. As Mr Brooker has put it in his other projects, our beloved box has so distorted our relationship to reality, that we mistakenly believe that we are the only losers in a world where everyone else is married to The One and living in the sort of homes you see on MTV. In the mix of alienation and dampened epathic imagination, we add the information addiction and overload that has compelled me to check on my social media profiles a dozen times in the last hour. I don't remember what you said two hours ago.

How short our collective memory has grown! From forgetting about our ongoing epidemics as they were a decade or two prior, we have moved into a period that would drive Kierkegaard, who described his own contemporaries as spectators and his own time as transitory and trivial in its concerns, to gnaw off his own limbs in a fit of madness. Earlier this year, for one day, the entire world gathered around their glowing rectangles in solidarity with Troy Davis. You had to Google that name just now. By the next day, the Twitterspheroid had returned to its regular programming of [replace movie name with bacon]. Indeed, the fictional Mr Callow's reputation as prime minister has improved a year after his demoralizing ordeal. Presumably this has nothing to do with the release of the princess and the incident has mainly been forgotten.

The relationship between imagination and empathy is most apparent in the fictional TV audience's status as audience surrogate. For the first 20 minutes of Black Mirror, we laugh along with them. By 30 minutes in, we are slightly on edge. In the climax (haw haw), we begin to feel a visceral disgust. Even the perpetrator of the kidnapping and initiator of the mob has by this point realized that he has underestimated the aspects of human nature which he relied on to carry out [his project]. Only he and Mr Callow's chief of staff are able to share in the knowledge of the day's true tragedy, brought on by our inability to look away from the media long enough to see what's going on in the world. The marks of great tragedy, horror and pity, are to be found in abundance in the final part of the drama, but there is no catharsis. The electric age society has not been purged of its evil and is free to commit it again. The most pitiful sight in drama in 2011 is either Mr Callow's profuse vomiting or the state of his relationship with Mrs Callow.

Initially, one might be excused for not understanding the merit of the comparisons to The Twilight Zone. Rod Serling dealt with such pressing issues as nuclear annihilation and racial discrimination. What possible parallels are there between that and the prime minister fucking a pig on live TV? In a world under constant threat of nuclear annihilation, a world of severe economic injustice, of racial inequality, of a lack of empathic imagination, one can scarcely imagine the effects a direct democracy carried out via social media without imagining a glib forum moderator going over his site's rules about being more creative than picking directly from the World Targets in Megadeaths manual.

What is frightening about Black Mirror, The Twilight Zone, and even the Daleks (particularly their creation myth) is the closeness of the possibility of these alternate worlds. We hate what we have been, and we fear what we could become.

Mr Brooker's Twitter followers today [the day after broadcast] tweeting at him regarding their desire for David Cameron to fuck a pig. “I bet he already has,” said one. I would get upset about it, but I'd like to get back to my TV. I'll probably have forgotten about this stupid program soon enough.