I’m a big arguer, I like finding a way to express my opinion effectively, backed up with facts, while responding nimbly and intelligently to criticism and counter arguments. When someone offers me a piece of evidence or solid logic I hadn’t previously considered, I try to pause, incorporate it, and if I’m wrong, admit it and move forward. I’ve had to learn, however, that a lot of people don’t argue this way. They don’t argue in any real sense. They just state their opinions, attack your opinions, and either ignore or attempt to invalidate facts and logic that run counter to their preconceived notion.

That’s the kind if person who just wants to restate over and over how they feel about a subject, they just want to gesture emphatically at the baggage they walked in with. They don’t want to debate, they just want to declare.

Short version: There are two ways of approaching an argument, a person either wants to be right going into it, or right coming out of it. If they want to be right going into it, they’re not arguing in good faith, they’re just defending a position. If they want to be right coming out of it, they’re willing to modify their stance, meet in the middle, or even change their view completely.

Don’t talk to the first kind of arguer like the second kind, or you will go insane.

Regions are to scale, but the scale is subjective and semi-arbitrary.

So today is my birthday. It’s ALSO a super cool date in the Roman calendar, as written by people from the US. People who write dates down in a reasonable day-month-year format please read this post on November 11th of this year.

So, today’s date:

Right off the bat, it’s an anagram. Same backwards as forwards. Pretty fun. But it’s so much more.

It’s an ambigram! That’s when an image is the same even when you rotate it 180 degrees.

It’s the same flipped horizontally

and vertically.

It kind of goes without saying, but it’s also the same mirrored at the midpoint horizontally

and vertically.

This post has no real content, and I’m kind of sorry for that, but I’m a big nerd and I think this is neat.

Oh, also, it’s binary for 30.

First, a joke.

A young couple moves into a predominantly Jewish neighborhood. They’re goy, but very gregarious and quickly make friends. As they get to know their neighbors it comes up that they are members of the Society of Friends, or Quakers. They’ve started a meeting in their home, and some of their Jewish friends, intrigued, go to a few meetings. Alarmed by this, the mother of a young Jewish man who has been going to the meetings goes to her Rabbi to discuss the issue. The Rabbi listens to the woman and smiles. “I wouldn’t worry,” he tells her, “some of my best Jews are Friends.”

I was around 13 years old, watching Nick at Night, as I generally did, and I caught an episode of the Mary Tyler Moore show. It was the 1970 episode Some of My Best Friends Are Rhoda. Mary is in a fender bender with a WASPy lady named Joanne Forbes. They become friends, and Mary starts going with her to the Country Club. When Mary tries to invite her friend Rhoda, Joanne is unwilling to bring her, because Rhoda is Jewish. I was totally confused.

It was this episode, roughly 25 years after it originally aired, that taught me that antisemitism was a thing that existed.

Of course, I was aware of the World War II. I knew about Nazis and the Holocaust. The thing was, given the universal disdain felt for the National Socialists, and the focus on the Murder of Jews rather than all the other groups, I assumed people really liked Jews. At the very least, people had a baseline level of empathy for them. The notion that there were people that actually feared and hated Jews JUST BECAUSE THEY WERE JEWISH was entirely foreign and absurd to me. Now, to be fair, I was kind of foggy on racism existing at all, but as far as I knew it was against people who were non-white. The idea that white people could be racist against a specific sub-group of white people was really confusing. It still is, really.

I’m a big fan of meaningless phrases like “reverse sexism” and “reverse racism.” The idea that when a gender bias causes things to be harder for a dude it’s reverse sexism is such a fantastically sexist notion in the first place that it just tickles me pink. Sexism is acts or beliefs which use gender as an overwhelming defining characteristic. It’s not reverse sexism when cops assume that any violence in a relationship was initiated by the man, it’s just regular old sexism.

Actual reverse sexism would be refusing to be aware of any distinction between men and women. Abolishing separate sex locker rooms in high school, buying your male children and equal number of dresses and jeans, and giving tampons to absolutely everyone.

Presented without comment.

Subject: Origen de la influenza porcina

El verdadero origen de la influenza porcina!!!

The real origin of influenza!!!

The fault is of this son of bitch child!!!

Todo por culpa de este pinche escuincle!

I know people say there’s no harder job than being a parent, but I think maybe underwater welding.

Why did the clown have a sore back?

He slept funny.

I once knew a man named Steele Harden.

There’s no joke. I just think that’s fantastic.