Between the good and bad, that's where you'll find me, Reaching for Heaven

:: Takes out soapbox, gets up on it::

A lot of ink and a lot of electrons are being used to comment and puzzle over the recent shooting in Tucson which claimed the lives of six people and left thirteen others injured, including a Congresswoman. I'm praying for everyone involved in this tragedy, but I feel the need to voice my thoughts on it as well.

One commentator on a local TV news broadcast credited the amount of vitriol that has contaminated political debate as part of the reason for this tragedy. Much as I agree with the man, I believe the problem is a lot more widespread than just the political arena. I believe -- no, I *KNOW* we have a problem with people being disagreeable and vitriolic about most *anything*. Not just politics or religion, but on every level of our life, people are being crass, rude and just plain disagreeable towards each other. I know it's impossible for everyone to agree on everything, and it would be just plain unrealistic. *BUT*, it would help settle things if people would learn to phrase their statements in a polite, well-thought, and articulate manner. I hardly expect people to sound like they wandered in out of a Jane Austen novel (though that would be extremely cool...), but using nonconfrontational I statements (i.e "I believe :: Insert statement" or "I think.... :: Insert idea::") instead of the finger-pointing You statements (ie. "You people do :: Insert action phrase:: ) would probably go a long way toward purging some of the vitriol. I sometimes feel you can't discuss *anything* without it turning into an argument or a debate, that everything gets turned into "sriuz biznesz" whether we want it to or not, and it makes it hard to communicate ones thoughts, when one feels like they're talking to crabby Mrs. Tolliver who's so old and set in her ways that she can't imagine any other way of thinking or acting and who's gotten so entrenched in a Screw Manners, I'm a Senior Citizen manner of behavior that you can't make any headway.

Add to the loss of a sense of manners, is a sense of critical thinking. It seems like a lot of people take things at face value, rather than probe into them and look at them from both sides of the matter. It's a gulp it down way of taking in information, rather than a chew it properly way.

Also, simply stopping and thinking and imagining oneself stating what you're about to come out with to someone you truly love and care about and whose feelings you wouldn't want to hurt might be a good thought exercise. I've been known to mentally rehearse some of my more soapbox-y posts (like this one! :: Laughs::) as if I were speaking it out loud to my mother.

I'm also bothered by the fact that people are trying to lay the blame for this incident on any one particular ideology or group that subscribes to it. There were some liberal commentators who wanted to blame this incident on the conservatives, only to find out that the shooter in this case was one of their own, technically (found that out from one vampirism forum I subscribe to). And of course, the gun laws are being argued over. I personally take a middle stance when it comes to Second Amendment rights: I believe that responsible people should be allowed to own and use firearms; permits, trigger locks, licensing and so forth only do so much good, and criminals and the mentally unstable probably aren't going to utilize them. In and of themselves, firearms pose no threat. It's only when they're loaded and there's someone holding the trigger that they become a threat.

I likely will have more to say about this, but the post is starting to go into TL,DR territory, so I'll get back to it in a bit... I have some fics I'd like to post, and I also have headspace dwellers who are clamoring to have a post written in their journal(s)

I'd better clarify a comment I made in my somewhat geeky then suddenly wangsty entry last night: My boss came back to work from his honeymoon in Hawaii, and I was cursing God for *not* sending a typhoon to wash his bride off a sea wall as they were walking along it, the way it happened to some poor newly-wed fellow I heard about on the news a few years back. I honestly felt like announcing on the 'Net that I was going to commit suicide at midnight on New Year's Eve, if some reasonable guy hadn't tried to win my hand by then, but I realized this would be an extremely rash move: I'd probably get all kinds of sick, fucked-up (in all senses of the phrase) perverts responding to this kind of announcement.

I had to confess all this (and some other embarassing blunders) today when I went to St. Joseph's in Lowell, before I had a session with my therapist (If you're able to read this weblog, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, I am living *proof* that not every person who goes to psychological counselling automatically stops going to confession, to receive the sacrament of reconcilliation). Unfortunately, the priest somehow got the notion that because I feel my feelings so passionately that I scare guys off. I'm not throwing myself at guys' heads: far from it. If anything, I'm probably the least forward woman imagainable. I'm not the most voluptuously-formed woman (from the waist up, I'm virtually indistinguishable from a young fellow in his early teens, except that my face is feminine), and I'm a very conservative dresser, though my tendency towards wearing men's shirts (I like the cut: they're doing wierd things with women's blouses these days) and now a man's jacket (ie. the Oleg Cassini raincoat with no lining which I bought since it resembles Constantine's jacket) *almost* makes me a crossdessser. It would be nice if I could find some fellow who, like me, is wired to be slightly bisexual, but (unlike me) is a functional metrosexual: we'd get the best of both worlds that way. I'd get a guy who's deeply in touch with his feminine side (to the point of taking as much pains about appearances as most women do), and he'd get a gal who likes traditionally male-oriented things like manual labor and sci-fi.

Whew, that was long-winded... Typical Aspie behavior: giving a big, long, complicated answer where a so-called normal person would give a one or two sentence reply.

Now for the rest of my day... The bad news: The CyberCafe at Middlesex Community College is now open *only* to full-time students. Not to night students or former night students, e.g. yours truly. In order to use the computers there, you have to type in your Student ID number into a password-type box on each workstation. No more free printouts. No more editing pictures. No more burning CDs. I guess I really have to get a faster, better computer now.

The good news: I managed to steal an extra hour at the Lowell Library and update the AIFFOA, adding a link to Catholic Charities' page for donations to help their work in the relief effort for the Hurricane Katrina survivors. I specifically chose Catholic Charities, since I've been getting my counselling through them. It's my way of helping them help folks who are way worse off than I am, and showing them how much I value the way this charity has helped me. I'll be adding a link to their page from this weblog very shortly, for anyone who's interested...

I also nipped up to the St. Vincent de Paul Thrift Store, to see if I couldn't get that black tie I need for my Constantine costume. No such luck, but I bought that red canvas button-front shirt that gave the Merv conniptions when I spotted it last week. Of course I had to listen to him gripe in French for a few minutes, but I reminded him it's juuuust the right shade of blood-red, which seemed to appease him, though I caught him muttering that "the fabric may as well be of *burlap*."

Also went to the Tewksbury library with my folks: I renewed "Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell" for the fourth time (It's a thick book with teeny, close-set type...), and I also got out the DVD of Charlie Chaplin's classic film "Modern Times", which is on the Vatican's list of great movies. Too bad the library doesn't have it on VHS, so my folks can watch it, too: considering the cramped conditions of the computer room, I wouldn't make them watch it on my DVD-ROM.

And I've just been watching the second hour-long documentary on Disk 8 of the Matrix Box: "The Hard Problem: The Science Behind the Fiction", which featured several experts on AI science and theory, including Cynthia Breazal (the gal who created our little buddy "Kismet", the face 'bot) and Ray Kurzweil (the greatest AI theorist since Alan Turing) and cyberpunk writers like Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker. That's one segment that definately needs to be rewatched since it throws an incredible amount of info at you. One concept that I couldn't help getting out of it is that the incredibly innocent Kismet (a bot with the intelligence of a small child) and the extremely decadent Merv are close cousins, at least by their behavior: they both crave stimuli and interaction with humans (or in the Merv's case, human-like programs like himself), even if the one is extremely childlike and cute and the other is extremely adult and sly, and they will do what they can to get what they want/need. That's at one in the same time a rather scary thought and a rather reasurring one: it just goes to show that G.K. Chesterton knew what he was saying when he compared adults to overgrown children:

Some tie gold paper round their heads
And play at being kings
And others sit agains the wall
And think of serious things

We are not always very good
We strut and shriek a lot.
We have our games they all must have
And toys that they must not

-- From "A Nursery Rhyme"

I don't see it as "playing God" to attempt to create AI or A-Life: I see it as an aspect of our nature as beings made in His image, an ability to create something within the universe He has given us. It's not really right for us to mess with life as He made it, but I think if we *could* create AI or A-Life, it would give us a better understanding of our place in the universe, that we are subject to God as these beings would be, in a sense, subject to us. Hopefully we'd be as beneficent to these beings as God has been to us, but I don't doubt that we'd mess up and ruin things for them and for ourselves. I hate to sound like a gloomy oracle, but I can see things happening like in "The Animatrix: Second Renaissance". Maybe not in the extremes that the Wachowski Brothers portrayed (I hope not: the second half of that segment gave me the willies and I ended up with floaters of horrific images for days. I haven't been able to rewatch it, and even clips of it make me nervous), but something just as catastrophic. Consider this: We can't even get along with each other, how can we expect to live in harmony with beings that we might bring forth? And even if we *tried* to reach in to their world and try to understand and seal over the gaps, they might reject us the way man rejected his own creator... Man proclaimed "God is dead", so in a sense, the machines (however they manage to reject us) might declare "Man is dead". I just hope the world as we know it comes to an end before that happens, and we get that "new heavens and new earth" that St. John the Evangelist speaks of in the book of the Apocalypse.