Month: April 2022

Advice from strangers

~ Jeremy ~ Leave a comment
It’s very little mystery that Naked Pastor David Hayward is one of my favorite humans of all time. He pushes himself to be creative. He’s a self aware, deconstructed (deconstructing?) evangelical with a penchant for artistically expressing complex thoughts and ideas.

He has posted the above cartoon before. The correlation between being spiritual/religious and being a dick is directly connected.

On the other hand, the more of a dick you are, the less you can identify how big of a dick you are.

Or you’re like me, and you have to grapple with your own dick-ish-ness, and push to be less of one in general.

Apropos, I just saw this list over at Kottke. It’s a collection of a 70 year old’s wishes his old self knew then what he thinks now. It’s a great list, and I could probably quote the whole thing. But take a look for yourselves.

Here are some standouts for me:

• Dont keep making the same mistakes; try to make new mistakes.

• Anything you say before the word “but” does not count.

• Whenever there is an argument between two sides, find the third side.

• The biggest lie we tell ourselves is “I dont need to write this down because I will remember it.”

• 90% of everything is crap. If you think you don’t like opera, romance novels, TikTok, country music, vegan food, NFTs, keep trying to see if you can find the 10% that is not crap.

• Dont believe everything you think you believe.

• You see only 2% of another person, and they see only 2% of you. Attune yourselves to the hidden 98%.

• Dont purchase extra insurance if you are renting a car with a credit card.

In Charleston, there were gun shots fired near a children’s baseball game

~ Jeremy ~ Leave a comment

This is fucking insane. The audio from this video sounds like a war zone in the Ukraine.

I was in North Carolina earlier this year having a conversation about liberalism vs. conservatism and our views on guns. I expressed that liberals aren’t anti-gun. They are pro-regulation to maintain guns in responsible owners’ hands and out of irresponsible ones.

An otherwise smart person asked me through a straight face, “Why do liberals want to take away guns as soon as there’s a shooting?”

I almost spit my drink.

“Because we want to advocate for people to stay alive.”

When the topic turned to, “But but but … there are regulations.”

I brought up that the data shows that other countries do not have this problem of gun violence in their countries and perhaps we can learn from them. That statement was met with heat nods, but seemed to move away from it.

I can’t tell you how disturbing it is to hear otherwise intelligent people bemoan liberals’ views on guns when it seems we all want people to stay alive.

When do we talk about gun responsibility? There never seems to be a downtime between mass shootings.