Saturday, June 21, 2014

Unacceptable

This isn't a statement by some grown-up cussing out a teenager for lamenting that she's not popular.
This was a statement by a peacetime Signaleer to a war veteran in a Combat Arms MOS.

Let me be clear, here.... this is NOT how to treat fellow veterans. This is NOT helping anyone. This is someone who has had it comparitively easy telling someone who has been through Hell that they're "just being a pussy", and trying to make them seem like they had it worse.

I seriously want you all to let this sink in. Normally I wouldn't say a word to compare one person's trauma to another, but this all sounds like a fucking cakewalk compared to what I have seen and done in my life.

And the person who wrote this.... yeah, they're a complete and total sack of shit:

"Oh for god's sake. Every person on here has some kind of disability! I have had PTSD since 1986 from watching a fucking building fall down on 29 men, and spending 14 days digging them out, each find bringing the families out to se if it was their husband/son/dad. and that one lady...that one poor lady who did that walk 28 times. 
I've seen the results of drunk drivers, who kill people, and complain about their fucking broken toe. I have had 18 broken bones in my body NOT counting toes and fingers. every day is horrendously painful to get up. I suffer from a medical condition that is so debilitating that within SECONDS, knocks me to the ground, AND qualifies me for 100% disability.
In 1985, I fell FORTY FEET off a telephone pole, breaking two bones in my spine, and dislocating a shoulder. I spend exactly three weeks off work. I didn;t get the shoulder fixed permanently until 2009. all the time between, I suffered with 'a dead arm' every morning until the nerves and blood were working again. Yet every fucking day, I get up, I get dressed myself, I feed myself and I go to work at a job, where I spend 8 hours with other people who some have worse situations than I do. and you know what? THOUSANDS of other people do the same thing every damn day of their lives! how many friggin WW2 POW's came back, far more 'damaged', yet went to work, and raised families and held jobs and RETIRED from them without being a drain on society.
And guess what? You never knew all that about me did you. No. you didn't. You know why? Because I don't spend all my days whining about how terrible my life is, on a social network site, to people I don't really know.
And I hate how you sit and whine about how you cannot work, but can work on and road race cars all day long. While another person in this group cannot even drive because of a disability, yet every damn day he gets up and gets himself to work.
I'm sorry, I no longer think you are disabled. I think you are lazy, and afraid to try and push yourself. I think you take the easy way out, or make excuses to do so. And frankly< I think you really need to look deep inside and re-evaluate how you cause yourself many of your own issues!"

Wednesday, January 1, 2014

They Must Be Stopped, 2013 Edition

A list of people and things from last year that need to not follow us into this one. Enjoy and do your best to put them behind us.

- Miley Cyrus: Your 15 minutes should have been up a long time ago, but now I have to deal with you all over my TV set, and in magazines, screaming at the top of your lungs "I'M AN ADULT! LOOK HOW GROWN UP I AM!". Child, please. If you were so "grown up", you'd be acting more like your older sister. Nobody knows who she is for a reason. Because she's not an idiot, like you. Good bye, and don't come back.

-The Kardashians: I am so sick of hearing about 45-minute-long marriages, and rich people not being able to afford birth control. I don't care how long it took you to shed your pregnancy weight. I have no sympathy on you when you fall on "hardships". Your sad, pathetic family is proof positive that money can't buy happiness. Or brains. Or common sense. Or decency. Maybe every one of you should hire someone with good decision-making skills to make your life choices for you... because I know 9-year-old children who are FAR better at it. How you have all managed not to accidentally walk off cliffs or bridges, is quite beyond my capacity to understand.

- Congress: I would be here all day, listing off all your sins against the people you're supposed to represent. We all know the complaints. You lot are all terrible excuses for human beings of the worst order and an embarrassment to our entire country. Not a single one of you should be re-elected. I wouldn't even trust you to serve me food... because I'm afraid you'd steal that, too.

- Voters Who Don't Think For Themselves: See above listing, because guess what? Those guys are YOUR fault.

- Crap Journalism: Stop making mass killers famous. Stop selective reporting. Quit with the agendas. And enough is enough with all the sensationalizing. Your lack of proper research and your unethical methods of reporting the news are only making the problem worse. I don't need celebrity gossip, and I certainly don't want a journalist telling me how to feel about what happened... when I watch the news, I just want to know what happened. This has been a problem for a long damn time, but it seems to have grown a hundredfold, this year alone.

- Tailgaters: Tailgating makes me want to murder you. One of these days, I'm going to snap. Driving like a total dickhammer, then acting like I did something wrong because you didn't get your way, is a surefire method to accelerate the day when I finally figure out how to get away with killing someone for being a total menace on the road.

- "GOTTA GET THIS ON VIDEO!!!": From now on, every time someone that could help when something bad happens, decides instead to whip out their camera phone and drool over how many upvotes the video will get on YouTube... I am going to report you to the police for breaking the Good Samaritan Law.
Not only are you an asshole for benefiting in the popularity game off of someone else's misfortune, but you put yourself in a position to possibly impede emergency workers (which is why the aforementioned law even exists, to begin with... help out or move along... taking a video is neither). You are not a freelance journalist, and your shaky/blurry video sucks, just like your idiotic commentary babble.

- Douchebag Salesmen: The commissioned salesman is a minor annoyance in everyone's retail experience, but a necessary evil. At least you have a job, and you somewhat help me, from time to time. I'm not talking about the normal everyday type... I'm talking about the self-styled "pitch master" who lists his favorite movie as Glengarry Glen Ross, and actually wholeheartedly believes that the end user of the product he sells is always a lost, hopeless idiot in need of his "expert" guidance. That wannabe hipster guy who tells you about "helicopter glass" at the mobile phone store... the gel-haired asshat at the new car dealership who tries to convince a gearhead that tap-shift automatics are the same thing as manual... they're all the same. You can end this one, on the spot. Ask for the sales manager and tell them "send someone else to help me, or I'm taking my money elsewhere".

- "TL;DR": You'll read a 600-page block of repurposed Twilight fanfiction, but you won't read a well-crafted diatribe about something that actually matters? YOU are what is wrong with America. No, I will not pare down to 140 characters or less. If you don't have the time to read it, you are not my intended audience, and you need to STFU/GTFO. Using that slang to ask politely for a shortened "to the point" version is barely tolerable, but sometimes understandable. Taking the time to simply announce it just to taunt the writer? Just slap yourself. Oh, and I hate you.

- People Who Hate Pit Bulls: Take all the reasons you give for thinking that breed shouldn't be allowed in your town/neighborhood/immediate vicinity, and apply that same thing to a random ethnic category of humans. Look how racist you sound. Feel ashamed of yourself.

- Gun Control Advocates: While I do support common sense regulation such as registration, background checks, and Class III licences, the bulk majority of these laws only harm people who DON'T want to use weapons for criminal purposes. Chicago, NYC, and DC are prime examples of this.
No gun ban or restriction has ever been a "compromise", and using "safety of our children" as a guilt-trip tool is just plain unacceptable sensationalism. More children are protected by responsible use of a firearm in this country every year, than are killed or otherwise endangered by criminal or irresponsible use of them. The statistics on how many "children" are killed by guns every year includes everyone up to the age of 24, for various nit-picky reasons, and the part of those figures that includes only ACTUAL children is a relatively small part of that figure. This goes hand-in-hand with Crap Journalism.

- Science Deniers: You're holding us back. Mankind is reverse-evolving because we let stupid people make all the decisions. I am no fan of any form of eugenics... but the intelligent cross-section of mankind needs to step the hell up. It scares the crap out of me that I am smarter than 98% of the people on this planet. Considering the ignorant shit that I say and do on a daily basis, that should scare all of you, too.
Infectious diseases we had all but stopped are making a comeback because more and more people are refusing to get their children vaccinated, based on the opinions of high profile science-deniers.
We could have a cure for multiple sclerosis and be able to triple the human lifespan, if we were allowed to take advantage of stem cell research... but we let a bunch of religious nutballs talk a bunch of shit about dead babies and abortion, and it got outlawed.
Our hard sciences are suffering. We used to be the #1 innovator in the world, and now we're slowly sinking down to 3rd World status... and it is almost entirely because of fundamentalist religion and people who think all scientists and doctors are evil.

- Misogynist Gamers: The way that Mintchip and Anita Sarkeesian were treated by the gaming community, was absolutely shameful. As a gamer, myself, I am embarrassed.
I honestly don't see how scantily clad giant-breasted pixel women are so important to some basement-dwelling douchecanoe that he feels the need to threaten to rape and murder someone just for saying "can we stop doing this, already?". That whole debacle made me want to strangle a lot of idiots. Ms. Sarkeesian has my full support. Especially because it pisses so many morons off.
As for the Mintchip Incident... sure, she popped off at the mouth and pissed some people off... she deserved to hear it from EVE community a little bit. But it wasn't kept in context. You just HAD to go and make an issue out of her gender. That's when you crossed the line.
Women ARE misrepresented in games. Not only is it just wrong in the first place, but it also cuts a major cross-section of potential gamers out of the equation... which is dumb. And to make matters worse... it's uninteresting and a little frustrating to look at all the time. We've had successful games with strong female leads... and they were awesome. Final Fantasy 6 was a perfect example.

- American Patriotism: At this point, we're just kidding ourselves. There is no longer anything to be proud of. And clinging to patriotism in the face of everything we're getting wrong is only prolonging and worsening the problem. Take the constructive criticism and improve our society before we fall completely apart. Waving the flag isn't making things better, and insulting the rest of the world is just stupidly ironic. Fix it, already. Because we're starting to sound like North Korea.