New Story!

Well, not so much a story as a re-worked essay I wrote in college. At the very least, it’s got some super cool links. Enjoy!

You Know That Feeling

I DERIDE YOUR TRUTH-HANDLING ABILITIES!

I read ‘Growing Up Bin Laden’ not long ago. Very interesting read. As of its publication in 2009, it’s the only book about Osama bin Laden written with any co-operation from an immediate family member – in this case, Najwa and Omar bin Laden, his first wife and favoured son. Each chapter switches between the two, telling the story of when Najwa, also his first cousin, met him as a child, on through the birth of all eleven of her children, ending just after September 11th 2001.

It’s…pretty heavy, and quite depressing, for many reasons. There are dozens of stories – told mostly by Omar, as Najwa was essentially a prisoner in whichever mansion or mud hut Osama chose to keep his wives and daughters – that are so shocking I had to read them repeatedly just to be sure I understood them. He didn’t allow his children to smile, and would beat them if they showed too many teeth. In the Saudi world, Omar explains, dogs are regarded similarly to rats in the West. Even still, Omar, whom Najwa considered her most sensitive child, couldn’t resist the appeal of puppies and would keep a few as pets…until Osama and his soldiers took them away and gassed them, testing new poisons to see how long it took for them to die.

That is one of the less depressing stories. The two worst, told by Omar, are as follows:

“The al-Jihad and al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya groups had brought their families to live in Sudan as well. At first our father had kept us isolated from everyone but our own family members, but increasingly he allowed us to mix with the teenage sons of those leaders. There was one particular boy who was my age and enjoyed the same sort of activities. He was the son of Mohammed Sharaf, an important man in the al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya group.

There was a sickening incident when someone targeted my friend, the son of Mohammed Sharaf. That young man was abducted and brutally gang-raped by a group of men. The rapists added insult to the attack and injury by snapping photographs of the young man during and after the rape.

My poor friend managed to escape with his life and returned to his father, Mohammed. Shockingly, those damning photographs ended up in the hands of Dr. Zawahiri, the leader of the al-Jihad group. Dr. Zawahiri was incensed, believing that the teenage boy was somehow at fault. There were pictures to prove it! In our world, sex between men is punishable by death. So a second horror was awaiting my friend when he was arrested by the group leaders, put on trial, and condemned to death.

I was so sad that my father refused to approach Dr. Zawahiri about the incident, and to save my friend’s life, as I believed in those days that my father could accomplish anything he wanted.

Mohammed Sharaf knew the truth. That good father strongly defended his son, telling Zawahiri that his son was an innocent victim. But no one wanted to believe that they had wrongly condemned an innocent boy. And so it came to be that Dr. Zawahiri ordered that my doomed friend be delivered to his offices. My friend was dragged into a room with Dr. Zawairi, who shot him in the head.”

The other story, possibly, is worse. At this point, Omar is nearly 20 years old. All the bin Laden sons, even the two children, are with Osama and his men in a mosque, listening to him explain how martyrdom is the greatest honour for a Muslim.

“Once we were at his feet, my father said, ‘Listen my sons, there is a paper on the wall of the mosque. This paper is for men who are good Muslims, men who volunteer to be suicide bombers.’

He looked at us with anticipation shining in his eyes.

For once we did not keep our gaze to the ground, but stared at our father, although no one spoke. As for me, I was too shocked to cry out the words that were on my tongue.

Although our father did not tell us that we must add our names to the martyr’s list, he implied by his words and his expectant face that such would make him very happy.

No one moved a muscle.

My father repeated what he had said.

That’s when one of my youngest brothers, one too young to comprehend the concept of life and death, got to his feet, nodded reverently in my father’s direction, and took off running into the mosque. That small boy was going to volunteer to be a suicide bomber.

I was furious, finally finding my voice. ‘My father, how can you ask this of your sons?’

Over the past few months, my father had become increasingly unhappy with me. I was turning out to be a disappointment, a son who did not want the mantle of power, who wanted peace, not war. He stared at me with evident hostility, gesturing with his hands. ‘Omar, this is what you need to know, my son. You hold no more a place in my heart than any other man or boy in the entire country.’ He glanced at my brothers. ‘This is true for all of my sons.’

My father’s proclamation had been given: His love for his sons did not sink further than the outer layer of his flesh. His heart remained untouched by a father’s love.

Such a truth was no small pain to me. I finally knew exactly where I stood. My father hated his enemies more than he loved his sons. That’s the moment that I felt myself the fool for wasting my life one moment longer.”

Omar was able to get away, after being warned by friends and soldiers in the know that “something big” was coming, before the WTC attacks happened. At first he and his mother’s family refused to believe it, but eventually realized the truth. To this day Omar spends his time doing humanitarian work, and dreams of one day having the world associate the bin Laden name with peace. Not one of Osama bin Laden’s children followed his path of hate.

—

Before I read this book, I had never gave much thought to 9/11 conspiracy theorists because they’re, you know, stupid. Anytime anything historically major happens, like the moon landing or JFK’s assassination, it’s basically a countdown to when someone who couldn’t be farther from the event claims to know what really happened.

First of all, has any conspiracy, of any kind, ever been proven true, at all? Second, the 9/11 conspiracy theories have been de-bunked in many places, most notably here, here, here and here, and most hilariously, here and here.

On top of this, I’m going to venture a guess that most of the people purporting the conspiracy probably don’t think very highly of George W. Bush. Yet, according to them, the most elaborate and difficult conspiracy of all time – one that involved hundreds of high-ranking officials and killed thousands of civilians on American soil – was pulled off expertly, flawlessly, by this man.

Oh, and he pulled it off in his first nine months in office.

All that aside, and getting back the book, I realized after reading it just how utterly fucked up, hateful and twisted a person has to be to even dream up such an atrocity. Along with giving Bush too much credit, these conspiracy theorists aren’t giving bin Laden enough credit. They’re brushing aside the wanton mass murder of civilians – fellow civilians – like it’s only a semi-far-fetched movie plot. As if slaughtering thousands of people was a cool trick Bush did as part of an elaborate scheme to go into one of the most hostile places on earth, get some oil, and finish up about a decade later, the only negative by-product being the near collapse of the entire American economy. No big deal.

Now, I’m not so naive to think America, or any country hasn’t done plenty of shady things that resulted in the death of civilians (except for Sweden, but they hardly count). But to have as your target, your main objective in both war and life, be nothing but the destruction of people working an office job, including women, children and fellow Muslims…well, to me, that can only come from the mind of a man who kills his kids’ puppies, forbids them from smiling, and encourages them to die by their own hand.

In Defense of ‘Faggot’

There’s been some hoopla about the word ‘faggot’ recently, after a hockey player used the word to trash talk another player. It’s worth noting that the player who said it is black, and had a banana thrown at him by an opposing fan a few games prior, and that the player he said it to is Sean Avery, who in all likelihood was being a faggot.

So now everyone’s talking about ‘appropriate trash talk’ in sports, which sounds like an oxymoron to me, and how certain terms and phrases are off limits. ‘Nigger’ is the most obvious (and Avery allegedly said something similar to a black player before), and apparently, so is anything about an opponent’s wife or children. Personally, I think anything a player can say to get an opponent off his game is fine, and the more creative, the better. If he’s stupid enough to resort to full out hate speech, he can’t be surprised when the entire opposing team comes after him.

But this isn’t a sports post. The controversy over this word has come up in other high profile professions, and in all the discussion that’s happened since, about how homosexual slurs are horrible in sports or anywhere, nobody is talking about a crucial point: faggot isn’t a homosexual slur.

Or at least, it’s not only a homosexual slur. I would argue, and I am arguing, that the majority of time someone calls someone else a faggot, there is absolutely zero homosexual connotation to it at all. It doesn’t make up any part of the ill will they wish to express.

It’s like when you call someone a cock sucker. You aren’t saying “you are person who pleasures men orally, and I find that offensive”, because who would hate someone for doing such a wonderful thing? Cocksucker, like faggot, is much closer to jerk, or prick, or asshole, or big meanie, than it is to “person who pleasures men orally”.

Even fudgepacker – the actual description of buttsex – is rarely if ever a homosexual slur. It’s someone who’s being an annoying little douche bag, which has nothing to do with feminine hygiene.

It’s also a fucking fun sound to say. Pressing your top teeth against your bottom lip just enough to filter your breath into a ‘fff’ sound is one of the great joys of the English language. And the way the rest of the word ricochets, from the back of your throat to the tip of your tongue tapping the top of your mouth, is simply satisfying.

The more serious point I’m making is that the people talking about this issue are completely ignoring the fact that language is a constantly evolving thing, and faggot has historically meant many things that have absolutely nothing to do with homosexuals. Without getting too word nerdy, over the years, faggot has meant, at the very least, the following: a bundle of sticks (or someone who collects them), an old haggard woman (or old person in general), a little bird, a man hired into military service simply to fill out the ranks (17th century Britain), a kind of meatball, a cigarette, and yes, a pejorative for homosexuals.

But it’s also meant something else, and it’s meant it since I was a kid, if not longer. Similar to cocksucker, it’s someone who is being lame, but not because of where they like putting their penis. As always, South Park explains it better than I can:

So basically, Sean Avery.

Now I don’t want to diminish the homosexual struggle for equal rights at all. That gay marriage and all the rest is even an issue strikes me as a stunning waste of time. In fact, it upsets me even more that someone would use it towards a gay person, because that takes away the fun of using it towards someone who is actually being a faggot.

But the truth is, faggot doesn’t mean faggot the way nigger means nigger. Not even close, mainly because that’s always been a term for black people, the only thing that’s changed is that at certain times, in some places, it wasn’t always a slur. And aside from black people, and only black people, using it as a term for each other, it’s not changing anytime soon. Faggot, on the other hand, doesn’t seem able to go more than a lifetime without changing its meaning.

And that’s my point. Language as a whole is always changing, and saying fag is really fun. I’m just trying to hurry up the process with this word specifically, because I think using it to bash someone’s sexual preference is stupid and mean, whereas using it to bash someone’s actions is accurate and fun. The more we use the word exclusively for people who ruin everyone else’s nice time, the sooner we’ll take power away from those Westboro Baptist Church people , who by the way, are total fags.

So an unnamed female friend made the mistake of telling me what her gynecologist said the other day…

Things were moving along, when the doctor piped up.

“Hmm…”

My friend didn’t say anything, but was understandably concerned by her doctor’s high-pitched interjection.

Without prompting, the doctor continued.

“You know, it’s funny. Every vagina looks different, but every asshole looks exactly the same.”

Words to live by. Think I’ll make that my life’s motto.

Thinking of Stuff

So after an embarrassingly long amount of time, I’ve finally finished reading, and re-reading, Steven Pinker’s ‘The Stuff of Thought’. It’s part of a series of books he’s written about how language influences, and is influenced by, our perception of reality. Or, to put it in his own, more eloquent words, the book “analyzes how our words relate to thoughts and to the world around us and reveals what this tells us about ourselves.”

It’s a tough read, not because of the writing, at all, but because of the depth he goes into for each concept he covers. At its base, the book basically says:

Language must do two things: convey a message, and negotiate the social relationship between speaker and hearer. Even a phrase like “If you could pass the salt, that would be great”, generates many pages of analysis, including this passage:

“It’s become so common that we don’t even notice that it is a philosophical rumination rather than a direct imperative. It’s a bit of a social dilemma. On the one hand, you do want the salt. On the other hand, you don’t want to boss people around lightly. So you split the difference by saying something that literally makes no sense while also conveying the message that you’re not treating them like some kind of flunky.”

One thing I’ve actually retained from the book is a part about how our environment can shape our language. You know how you have a ‘left’ and a ‘right, using your body as the reference point? Not every culture does that. I can’t find the actual quote, but there is an example of people in South America (I think) whose entire concept of space and distance is based on where they are in relation to the mountain their village is next to. So they have a term for ‘near’, ‘far’, ‘up’, ‘down’ and ‘beside’, but the mountain is always the reference point. Another group of people, I forget from where, have an unmatched ability to tell the compass points — without using a compass. They would never say “you are to my left”, since the concepts of ‘left’ and ‘right’ don’t exist in their world. They would say “you are west of me”, if west happened to be the direction we would call left.

In an easier-to-understand and more-fun-to-read chapter called The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television (the title taken from this famous routine), Pinker boldly asks the question, “Just what does the ‘fuck’ in ‘fuck you’ actually mean?”

He cites the great Lenny Bruce to expand on this point:

“What’s the worst thing you can say to anybody? ‘Fuck you, Mister.’ It’s really weird, because if I really wanted to hurt you I should say ‘Unfuck you, Mister.’ Because ‘Fuck you’ is really nice! ‘Hello, Ma, it’s me. Yeah, I just got back. Aw, fuck you, Ma! Sure, I mean it. Is Pop there? Aw, fuck you, Pop!”

But I don’t like the book only because it analyzes naughty words using intellectual language. I like the intellectual stuff, too!

I can’t add much commentary on this one, but it’s one of my favourite passages and I want to share. The question posed is: what do we really mean when we mean something?

It talks about a priori knowledge (before the fact – knowledge you could theorize about), and a posteriori (after the fact – knowledge attained by experimentation), but it adds a third type, from Philosopher Saul Kripke: a posteriori, but necessary. An example given is the discovery that the Morning Star and the Evening Star were both in fact Venus, and that once that fact was discovered, there was no turning back.

“There is no possible world in which the Morning Star and the Evening Star refer to different things (though of course they could be called different things – Kripke’s claim is about what we mean by the terms).”

Anyways, here’s the passage I have a boner for:

“Kripke’s argument is an attempt to clarify what we are logically committing ourselves to when we use proper names and names for natural kinds. We are, surprisingly, committing ourselves to a certain class of logically necessary truths (though we can’t know what they are a priori). It is a major revision of our understanding of what kinds of truths there are and how we can know them – all from some intuitions about how we use names.

When we stand this close to the concept of meaning we start to sniff an odor of paradox. What exactly am I doing when I mean something by a set of words – when I refer to Aristotle, or Alpha Centauri, or water, or the even numbers, or the first baby born in 2050, or what the world would be like if Paul McCartney had died? It is bracing enough to realize that just by firing some neurons or moving my lips, I can stand in relation to a long-dead philosopher or a distant heavenly body. But at least in those cases we can glimpse a connection between the meaner and the meant in a chain of word-learning stretching back to a primeval dubber with firsthand acquaintance. The mind starts to reel, though, when we ponder what connects us to some of the other referents of our words: to water wherever it may be found in the cosmos, to an infinity of abstract entities, to a specific person who does not yet exist (but not to any of the other billions of people who do not yet exist), or to a parallel universe that has no reality but obeys certain laws. These entities spray no energy our way, and our bodies have no sense organs for them, yet somehow a diaphanous strand of semantics connects them to us. As the philosopher Colin McGinn put it, meaning seems to “enable thought to exceed the bounds of acquaintance: it can take us any distance in any direction, travelling across arbitrarily extensive portions of reality, yet keeping to fixed rails as it does so.” Perhaps it is not surprising that people in so many cultures think words have magical powers (as we shall see in the chapter on swearing), or that one of the gospels should begin “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” McGinn has a more prosaic explanation: the problem of meaning, like many mysteries in philosophy, may always be shrouded in enigma, because it pushes our common sense into conceptual realms that it did not evolve to think in.”

Like I said, not much to add to that. I just like to change things up a bit and not make this blog 100% about swear words and funny sex stories.

They say it’s good for your skin!

I wish the word ‘Bukkake‘ meant something more appropriate in everyday language (I’m aware it’s also a method of cooking noodles or something), because it’s fun as shit to say.

Like, if it was some kind of black lingo that all us less cool people adopted and overused, like ‘shizzle’ and all its variations. Maybe a word for money or something, like, “he’s rolling in bukkake”?

Or maybe a verb, like “he bukkakeed his way to a promotion”, meaning he focused real hard to finish his job before his fellow workers.

I dunno, just spitting things out here.

But seriously, just say it a couple times: boo-KAH-kee. So much fun, the way it travels from your lips down to the back of your throat.

What, what’d I say?

In the land of Superfantastica…

I like to daydream, when I’m driving or in the shower, or pretending to drive while in the shower, about how society would run if I was President of Everything. It’s egotistical, but fun. Here’s what I got so far.

National Song: Blinded by the Light, the Manfred Mann version.

Vice President: Spiderman.

National Flag: To be determined. In the interim, a looped video of Jessica Alba making out with Sloan from Entourage will be shown on flat screens that sit in front of all government buildings.

Wayne Gretzky can literally do anything he wants, anytime, ever.

Jay Leno and Carrot Top will have a fight to the death, after which Carrot Top will be shot, regardless of who won.

Free hot dogs for all.

No one will ever be more than a twenty minute walk away from a water park.

Education would be totally reformed. Without getting too into it:

First of all, it would be free. All of it. Always. To everyone. It wouldn’t happen in one place, either. All kids would spend, at minimum, a quarter of their education in a different country, and would be encouraged to spend more. Until about 10 years old, kids are taught manners, mostly. Other than that, they will spend their time colouring things and running outside until their baby legs fall off. From 14-19, part of their education will include volunteering. They can volunteer anywhere, but preferably service jobs. Let’s say about…10 hours per week.

In fact, every able person will be required to complete a minimum amount of volunteer hours (like, say, 40 per year). Those who surpass the minimum get tax breaks and the like. It would be possible, in Superfantastica, to modestly support yourself on a completely volunteer lifestyle.

Bars don’t have to have Happy Hours, but if they do, they must go to 8PM.

Make it 9PM.

The salary of every politician will be whatever the average citizen salary happens to be at any given time. The more the average citizen makes, the more politicians make. Lobbyists won’t exist, and all the corporations in the world combined will never equal more than half a single person. Basic health care is free, but that’s obvious.

Anyone can worship anything, but it is completely legal to open-hand slap anyone who says you should worship the thing they worship.

Not everyone gets a full vote. A fairly simple test needs to be passed in order to earn a single half-vote. If you can’t pass it, you can’t vote. If you pass the progressively more difficult tests, you could eventually earn a single full vote.

Anyone who rapes or kills or harms children will not be imprisoned in the traditional sense. Instead, a large land mass will be closed and guarded off, with food and drugs and weapons air dropped randomly. In this area, absolutely anything goes, and it’s all filmed and broadcast around the world. Bad Ass civilians and/or crazy people are free to enter as they please, but they cannot leave. Occasionally, people from this area will be taken out in order to test new vaccines and stuff.

Everyone gets to stay home on their Birthday. Also, half-day Fridays.

The Army will be regularly deployed into the poorest parts of the world to bring the people living there technology and books and food and water, for fuck’s sake.

Girls can go topless, and are encouraged to kiss each other often.

To be continued…

Oh, and feel free to add your own in the comments!

We’re trying to live in a society here, people!

You know what I would hate? Being a pervert. I mean, I’m a guy, so that’s kind of a relative term on a sliding scale, but for the most part, my perverseness has plateaued. The internet long ago passed both my ability and desire to think of sexually depraved scenes and scenarios. I pretty much checked out years ago at lesbians going down on each other a whole bunch. At this point, if I’m looking to treat myself, like on my birthday or something, I’ll just watch a video with yet another lesbian joining the train. Or the pile. Whichever.

The worst would to be a pedophile. I mean, that would be ‘the worst’ for so many reasons, most of which aren’t funny in the least. But looking at it from a strictly pragmatic point of view, it seems like a hassle. First of all, there’s the mental torture of wanting something awful. That’s gotta suck. Probably interferes with your work and stuff, too. Then there’s the fact that searching for it probably sets off red flags on your IP address. Or at least, it should. Also, I wont check, but I doubt that kind of porn is easy to find.

The most annoying part though, would probably be having to pay attention to different trends in children’s pop culture, so you have something to talk about when you’re online pretending to be a 12 year old girl. I mean, who actually wants to talk to stranger’s kids unless they have to? Especially online. Kids these days have horrible grammar. Now, if this was back in the 90’s, when Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was on, it would be better, because you’d at least have something interesting to talk about.

Even if you’re not an extremely demented fuckwad of a human being, from the times my cursor has hovered over and previewed certain videos, being hardcore seems like a lot of work. I used to think foot fetishes were weird, but nowadays, there’s latex, food (not talking whip cream), costumes, and various types of machinery – who has the time and money for all this?

And the gaping – my god, the gaping! I don’t wanna get vulgar here, but isn’t tighter, in general, better? I’ve certainly never heard ‘loose’ used to describe anything sexually positive, but now I’m wondering if my friends and I are just prudes.

Again, being glad I don’t have some kind of fucked up fetish is relative, I know, but if I ever reach the point where I purposely click on the videos I sometimes accidentally click on because the ‘sex’ part of my brain is that jaded and deranged, I’m hanging up my balls.

Oh god…that’s a fetish, isn’t it?

So we were talking about advice we’d give to our unborn children the other day…

And I came up with the following gems.

To my hypothetical son or daughter:

Be as musical as you can be. Music is the best drug you could possibly do.

There are no sure things in life, but wearing a condom is pretty close.

Be willing and able to laugh at everything, especially yourself.

Don’t ever brag. If you’ve done something brag-worthy, let others do it for you. If they don’t praise you, what you did wasn’t brag-worthy.

Read and write whenever you can. Thoughts going in and thoughts going out is how your brain eats and shits.

Asking forgiveness really is better than asking permission, but don’t be a dick.

Expect more from yourself than from others. Have more patience for other people when they fuck up than for yourself.

Listen lots.

Truth is pretty much the most important thing. The truer, the better.

Whenever you hear someone say some variation of “well that’s just my opinion…everyone’s entitled to their opinion”, know that their opinion is most likely wrong.

Ignore the jokes and listen to the knowledge in this video. Then watch it again, and pay attention to the jokes.

Don’t peak in high school. People who peak in high school have shitty lives.

Hypothetical Son:

(Paraphrasing Stephen Colbert) Impressing girls is the most fulfilling thing in the world. Your mom or your wife (or girls you go to school with or whatever) — impress them whenever you can, and your life will have meaning.

Play sports, even just casually for fun. Hockey, at least. You may kick a soccer ball around from time to time, but only as warm up for a real sport.

Hypothetical Daughter:

Pleaseohpleaseohplease wait until you’re 18 to have sex. Pretty much the only request I’ll ever make.

Don’t be easily impressed by boys who are trying to impress you.

I love you more than your brother.

Feel free to share any of your own in the comments…

NEW STORY!

LOVE YOUR HATE PART THREE

The thrilling conclusion!