Author Archives: Casual Notice

You’re Doing It Wrong

Far be it from me to tell anyone else what they should believe. My own faith is a learning process with very few actual graven-in-stone tenets. Be a good host, bring honor to your family name, don’t piss off the local spirits; other bits that may or may not be true or even accurate. Reconstructed faiths are that way. It’s a lot like putting together an old Lego set: pieces get lost, and sometimes you end up with a red brick right where the Death Star’s giant laser belongs. That’s fine; I need the challenge.

So, no, you believe what you want to believe, because this is America, and you have that right. Whatever you believe, however, stop doing it wrong, okay? Faith is not about forcing the world to fit into your personal matchbox of expectations. Faith is about understanding the world and your own place in it. Whether it’s God’s plan, fractal math, or Nuada’s lessons on accepting a situation and dealing with it, the whole point of religion, all religion (and a lot of demi-religious philosophies) is about you, and no one else.

If you’re an atheist and you find it necessary to share your thoughts on the illusion of faith, and the great epiphany you had that joy is just a bunch of electro-chemical reactions, zip it. You’re doing it wrong. My Corn Flakes may just be deep fried cattle feed, but I like them, and I don’t need you crapping in them because you don’t approve of my choices. If your life runs better believing that life is more or less meaningless and we’re really a bunch of ants on a cosmic truck tire, then fine for you. I think otherwise, and I’m not interested in debating the ineffable with someone who demands a NASA report to believe the sun still rises on cloudy days.

LIES!!!

LIES!!!

By that same token, if you’re a Christian, and you’re berating people (who aren’t your minor children) for committing any sin, zip it, and read your bible again. You’re doing it wrong. There is nothing, from the first letter of Matthew to the last period in Revelation that instructs people of the faith to browbeat anyone for anything. The harshest treatment you will find you are allowed to direct at people who don’t engage in Christian morality is to dissociate from them. You don’t get to tell to people in love that they can’t get married under the law, because the civil law is Caesar’s coin and it is reserved for Caesar. You sure as hell don’t get to tell anyone why being gay, reading crappy literature, or dressing in their own fashion makes them horrible. I can give you five quotes attributed to Jesus that tell you the opposite; his whole thing was your salvation, and he spent a lot of time reminding people to keep their own house in order. Period. Full stop.

Besides, Pretend Cat already knows what you did.

Besides, Pretend Cat already knows what you did.

Lastly, if you are a practicing neo-pagan of any kind, and you’re not just trying to piss off your parents, shut up. The victims of witch-burnings weren’t Wiccans, they were Christians who had things that some douchebags wanted. The Celts, Greeks, Egyptians, and even Native Americans were never about peace and good stewardship of the planet. If those faiths speak to you. Yay for you. I know how you feel, Reconstructed Celticism is where I settled and it feels right. Just try not to subscribe to the Facebook Infographic version of that faith, because that’s doing it wrong.

Your faith is your own, and you are free to celebrate it any way you want to. But the same goes for me.

Facepalm

There is something seriously wrong with us. Is it just me? Has it always been this way? It feels like we’re letting ourselves be ruled by the lunatic fringes of society. On every side, for every issue, the voices of moderation and reason are drowned out by crazy-ass jeering from the cheap seats. Is that the way it’s supposed to be?

I spend way too much time like this.

I spend way too much time like this.

I don’t want anyone getting all “No kidding, those (insert political/social group/quasi-group/trend here) are cray-cray!” because it’s not just them, it’s you—and me, too. Do you ever catch yourself making note of one opinion or view held by someone and immediately and forever that person becomes just that opinion? Of course you don’t. If you caught yourself doing that, you’d stop it ,right?

But then how can all conservatives be racist pro-lifers who want to hand America to Big (insert industry) while they blast away at random wildlife. How can all liberals be baby-killing communists who think the Constitution is something you use to clean the bloodstains off of the country’s past? Why is there no middle? Why is everyone who refuses to identify as a single big-basket philosophy a “low-information voter,” as if stupidity and ignorance were ever associated with avoiding the extremes.

It goes beyond me how we’ve allowed “voices crying in the wilderness” to speak for us, to even influence our opinions and decisions. Here’s a clue about those guys: they spend their time crying in the wilderness because they’re too bugshit crazy to be allowed in-doors where the grown-ups are talking.

The last ten national elections have shown that Americans are still pretty central-biased. As a group, we still have a pretty good bullshit-detector. We’ll give someone a chance to prove their theories, but, as a nation we don’t subscribe to any philosophy whole-heartedly without some kind of verifiable result.

So why doesn’t it sound like it? I don’t just mean the news media, either. Internet comments sections and forums are filled with angry vituperative fired blindly in all directions. Those rare occasions when a compromise is suggested or a moderate opinion is raised, they’re shouted down—sometimes with death threats.

It’s time to move the children’s table back out of the dining room, so the rest of us can talk.

Casual Notice 2015

Okay, let’s be honest. If you’re here, and you’re not a spambot, then you’re either (a) some poor sap making scut wages as a human spambot to get around filters, or (b) you followed the link in my last Facebook post because you can’t go without some Brett-y goodness. If it’s (a), you have my sympathy, but not my support. If it’s (b), welcome! Comments are limited to approved users and moderated, but only to keep the site more or less spam-free. You can expedite user validation by sending an e-mail to my address: bhainley(at-sign)casualnotice(tiny-circle)com.

I have a Facebook problem. I have a Facebook problem in the sense that some people have a heroin problem, except Facebook doesn’t cost me any money (but it may, eventually, cost me friends and family if I don’t deal with it). I spend too much time registering an opinion on almost everything. I spend way too much time correcting people when they have the facts wrong. I apparently never learned when things weren’t any of my business.

Worse, I would camp comments, wasting entire days checking and rechecking my news feed for something that “demanded” my input. This is a bad thing. If I spend an entire day staring at a blank page on MS Word, it’s not wasted because my brain is still working through whatever has me blocked. If I spend that same day clicking over to Facebook to see how people reacted to one of my snide, cat-based graphics, my brain is focused on defending the theory that my cat, Coleridge, finds partisan political ranting tedious, and that day is wasted. I track the word-count on my current projects on a whiteboard in my office. Those counts haven’t changed in over a month.

So I came back here. I’ve had A website since 1996, and Casual Notice has been the home of my ramblings since 2004. I don’t check it compulsively for opinions, and the blog format tends to give me an impetus to think through the commentary that is posted here. More importantly, this is my home. I own the server, and I own the website and everything on it.

Facebook is like a front yard. Yeah, the space is yours (sort of), but everyone passing by can see what’s there. They can bitch about your opinion because it’s right THERE assaulting their eyes like a concrete flamingo. The thing about Casual Notice is that you have to come here to see my opinion. If you come to my home and you don’t like the ratty green sofa in my office, you’re very free to fuck off. This is my space, and you’re a guest here.

Anyway, big changes coming for CN (again), including a probable migration at the beginning of the year. Again, if you want to expedite user validation, send an e-mail to bhainley(spiral-ay)casualnotice(point)com.

Talking Points: Immigration

Hey, remember a week and a half ago when the President announced that he was going to direct ICE to ignore the law (and half of their reason for existence). Yeah, that’s still a thing. I’m not going to debate whether an elected official directing his subordinates to ignore the law is illegal (it is–there’s no debate on the subject–it’s called obstruction of justice). I don’t mind debating the Illegal Immigration issue, but we all have to admit to a few facts or it becomes a big clusterfuck.

The vast majority of migrant farm workers are American Citizens. I know it’s hard to believe, because it’s been drilled into us for years that our low-cost food and other products is the result of farms paying scut wages to poor immigrants because their undocumented and have no power. Except that’s the opposite of true, Farming is the most protected industry in the US, and one of its protections is that farmers are exempt from a wide range of payroll and OSHA laws and regulations. How do they find American citizens willing to put up with that? It turns out that whole hordes of people will do whatever it takes to not starve.

The Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t guarantee a child the right to stay in the US if his or her parents are foreign nationals. The relevant clause of the 14th Amendment, the one that declares any person born in the US or its legal territories to be a citizen of the United States says nothing about that person having a right to grow up in the United States. The fact is, there is a wealth of rights that are reserved until a person reaches adulthood. This “anchor-baby” notion does nothing for anyone except encouraging stupid people to take ridiculous risks during the most fragile period of an adult woman’s life (at least until she reaches seniority).

There is not a flood of anchor babies being squirted out for Free Welfare Cash. Anchor babies exist, but they aren’t an epidemic. Of the few that do exist, if their parents had any idea of the lifelong shitfest their children would have to endure, they wouldn’t bother trying this law-hack. Speaking as the child of two natural-born Americans, born on a US military reservation on a spoils-of-war territory, I can honestly say that every encounter I’ve had with the Federal bureaucracy started with me being asked for my green card and ended with me showing my consular birth certificate to a supervisor while explaining the laws that make me a natural-born American citizen while writing “Okinawa” as my place of birth.

No one is against immigration. The question at hand is the treatment of illegal immigrants. That is to say, people who have entered the country illegally, are staying here illegally and are probably breaking a few related laws to do so. This is close to my heart because my wife is a legal immigrant, and every time they “reform” the laws to make it easier to be an illegal, they make it harder and more expensive for us to maintain her legal status.

Coyotes are filthy criminal assholes, and no matter what is ultimately decided about the immigrants themselves, the coyotes, regardless of race or nationality, should be punished in some way that better people than me can devise, because everything I can think of as suitable violates the 6th Amendment. Seriously, the nicest thing I can think to do to them would be to banish them to one of the Aleutians with a pen knife and a bottle of Deja Blue.

I have no conclusion, and there are a lot of facts that are misinterpreted or just ignored, but these are the ones that I can’t ignore.