Of Irony

This past Friday I got into some heated debates about socialism and health care and laissez faire economics and Ayn Rand and other good stuff. The only trouble, really, was that this went on for the majority of a few solid hours. I love arguing, but, well, there were cute girls at this party.

About 4 a.m. Jay walks down the stairs after making himself a bowl of Kraft EasyMac to find me sitting down, my head in my hands, looking haggard, and a furrowed brown gently massaged by the temple. He chuckled as he neared me, soaking in the irony of the great Dave laid low by the drudgery of entrenched opinions held by young geniuses to mired in small lives to see the complexity of grander designs.

"The use of words for something other than their literal intention.
Now that is irony." Here it was the situation, but whatever.

On the up-side, he totally thought I was humbled enough by what all my friends must put up with around me to give me some EasyMac, and that was just glorious. I'm totally down for the Revolution if we all get EasyMac.

On Bumper Stickers

I'm going to take a break from Comic Con coverage to mention this:

I keep seeing a bumper sticker on the way to my dad's house each week for dinner. It's a sticker I used to see a lot of a few years ago and it's always annoyed me: "SMILE! Your mom chose life!"

I get it, you're pro-life. And you put a little smiley face there so you can convince people through happiness to agree with you. That's really a dick move, but as far as dirty tactics go that's pretty much the nicest and cleanest. Bad debating strategy, but a very courteous way to argue. Someone might disagree, but they'll still think you a nice person.

Which is exactly what you want, don't you? Get them all ill-prepared and then overturn Roe v. Wade when they're trying not to be mean spirited. I see what you did there.

Full disclosure, yes, I'm on the Choice philosophy, mainly because I can see reasons why an abortion might be necessary and no good argument for why it never should be. Never is big. A lot. I'm not going to argue that a blastula is a person or that a 7 month old fetus can't live on its own. What I am going to argue is logic.

This bumper sticker is annoying. It raises no ethical questions, makes no pertinent points and contributes nothing to the discussion at all. In fact, all it really does is take the driver's opinion and rub it smugly in your face. 'Do you agree with me? Be happy! Don't? Be happy anyway, just know that YOUR MOM agrees with me.' Real nice, sticker. Way to bring our mothers into this. Dick.

And I can't even argue it because my mother did choose to birth me. Granted, though, I was a planned pregnancy in a stable(ish) middle class suburban household.

But I think I've found a response that can continue the open discourse while sticking to the same kind of polite yet improper debating techniques begun in the original sticker: guerilla stickerjobs.

Gotta love freedom.

Arguments I Will Never Win and Why

Arguments I Will Never Win and Why:

WHAT: There are too many fitness articles written about losing fat and too few about gaining muscle without becoming a complete creatine d-bag.
WHY I WILL ALWAYS LOSE: I live in America, not Europe.

WHAT: Do what you love, everything else will fall into place.
WHY: I'm white and my mother pays my rent.

WHAT: There is nothing wrong with gay marriage; sexuality is a spectrum and we should respect the expression of natural rights by every human being.
WHY: I'm straight.

WHAT: Modern feminism almost exclusively replaces equality through shared human experience added to purely feminine viewpoints with inverted ideals and roles for what is abstractly considered to be prototypically masculine, furthering the original misconceptions of traditional gender-performance roles as diametrically opposed binaries.
WHY: I have a penis.

I think this might be a photoshopping of a Lichtenstein print, or at least comics from the same era as the ones he based his work off of. Neat!