Wednesday, February 21, 2018

The Bill of Things They Thought Were Important in 1791

The United States has an odd relationship with its Bill of Rights. One might say a fetishistic, nigh-sexual obsession with it. Not everyone's obsessed with the same amendments, sure. Hell, you almost never find a hardcore third amendment supporter. Except us. NO SOLDIERS QUARTERED! GET OUTTA MY HOUSE, YOU SOLDIER!

Aww...
But that ol' Bill of Rights, what a thing! What an important thing to wave around! So important that we need to constantly argue about the intent of the Framers! What they thought about these ten sacred amendments should determine what we do now, in the 21st century! Their thoughts were so important!

I guess we just need to ignore the fact that the great majority of them just didn't even want the damn thing in the first place.

No, really. At first only George Mason and Elbridge Gerry (the guy they named Gerrymandering after) wanted a Bill of Rights. Everyone else wanted them to shut up so they could get this damn Constitution thing over with.

Thursday, February 8, 2018

You're Not Alone

"No man is an island" is a common, if somewhat sexist, truism.

(Come on, those ladies? All islands. The lot of 'em. Can't stop 'em from shopping or being islands, amirite, fellas?)

Ahem.

As a truism, most of us kind of just take it for granted. Of course we're not islands. There are people everywhere, and we have friends and families and social interactions all the time. And yet the very fabric of our society (and when we say "our" we mean "American," cause that's where we live) seems to belie this fundamental and obviously empirical truth about humanity.

We'll explain.

Monday, January 22, 2018

Happy Roe v. Wade Day

Let’s set up a scenario:

We have a two year old child who, for medical reasons, requires another person to be hooked up to them via an IV to survive. If the child goes longer than several minutes without being hooked up to another person, it dies.

We didn’t say it’s a happy scenario.

Is it moral to force someone to hook themselves up to the child? The child’s mother, for instance? Should it be legal to force a mother to let her child use her body for survival? Why should it be the mother and not the father?

These are the questions we want the Fetal Supremacists, heretofore the pro-life crowd, to answer.

You see, the abortion issue amounts to people who think fetuses have special rights versus those who think fetuses have the same rights as everyone else. Yet it’s the Fetal Supremacists who frame themselves as the ones who want equal rights!

Confused? Fuck yes, we are.

Fetal Supremacists say that everyone, including fetuses, have a right to life. We agree on that. Where we disagree is when the fetus requires the use of another person’s body to survive.

If a fetus can survive on its own and the mother no longer wishes to be pregnant, that fetus (now called a “baby”) should be removed (at the woman's discretion) and the baby gets to live.

If a fetus cannot survive on its own and the mother no longer wishes to be pregnant, that fetus should be removed from the mother’s body.

If we can’t force a mother to be hooked up to her two year old, we shouldn’t force a mother to be hooked up to her fetus.

What the Fetal Supremacists are doing is this:

If a fetus is not viable and the mother no longer wishes to be pregnant, that mother must be forced to maintain the fetus against her will until such time as the fetus is viable.


Fetal Supremacists support granting special rights to fetuses, and they need to demonstrate why that is fair.

Sunday, December 31, 2017

Just One More Thing

I get that reference.Okay, Tater Lady is ridiculous. She's an inane dipshit on cursory analysis, medium analysis, and deep-tissue scanning with a goddamned tricorder.

Potatoes are not magic. They are starch. They are delicious fried, baked, or mashed. They can be a part of every single meal.

They are the roots of a plant related to the deadly nightshade plant.

Which, incidentally, is why that green fry you occasionally get at McDonald's tastes so nasty. It has a higher level of toxic nightshade chemicals called glycoalkaloids. Don't worry; the green fry won't kill you. It's just enough of the glycoalkaloids to taste like shit.

Winner, Most Punchable Face, 5 years running. Sorry, Richard Spencer!
Yes, your honor, I am a piece of shit.
Anyway, if potatoes could cure the common cold, Big Pharma would have isolated the active compounds, slapped them in a pill, and patented that shit decades ago. Martin Shkreli would be raising the price of potato-based meds by 2500% and then smirking like a prick when he got called out on it.

So Tater Lady is laughable.

But why is she laughable?

Turns out that, even in our short history, we already wrote about this syndrome.

Tater Tall Tales

Oh for fuck's sake.

Visual representation of underfunding science education here, folks

This came across our newsfeed, and this is the type of bullshit we can't stand.

So I saw an article about putting potatoes in the babies [sic] sock [sic] when they're sick [soc?]. So [baby] had a little cold and i [sic] put potatoes in his socks last night around 8-9pm. [editor's note - this process took an hour?] He didn't cough through the night...nose isn't running...isn't as congested and he slept for 12 hours. [Praise the mothafuckin' Lord emoji]

We were going to comment on how absolutely un-fucking-reasonable this person was and how over 117,000 brainless Facebookian morons immediately took it as gospel truth, but...

Wait.

How did this procedure come to be? Obviously this is Bullshit Bin fodder, and we could tear it apart, but...

Thursday, December 28, 2017

Colloquial Meaninglessness

We were tweeting at Sarah Palin today (okay, we were poking fun at Sarah Palin today on Twitter) and this exchange resulted when someone claimed he hated Barack Obama.


Now, scott here has said something dumb. And not just because it's a run on sentence. And not just because Obama is not and was not a socialist.

No, it's because scott thinks he is saying something that has meaning but he absolutely isn't.