Stanley Cup Riot Apologies: Neither Accepted Nor Rejected

I'm sure many of you (if your Canadian 99.999%) have heard of the little "party" that occurred in Vancouver on June 15th after the seventh game of the Stanley Cup finals. For those of you that have not, here is an article from CNN that should give you a good summary of the events (I haven't read it, I'm just assuming that's the case). I suspect though, that if you have any interest in this article, you will already know enough about this incident so I will not discuss the events anymore at length.
                                                             
                                                          News Video from CBC covering the event.

The purpose of this blog entry is to give my take on the aftermath of the riot and specifically the apologies made by some supposedly remorseful "miscreants" who took part in the events. The first thing I want to get off my chest here is that unlike so many other people who feel that they have to express outrage regarding these events, I don't give a rat's hairy cock about this riot neither do I hold any animus against the people that took part. In fact, if an event like this only happens every time the Canucks get to the finals, then I am pro-riot because it makes the news a little bit more entertaining than usual. Given that, I suspect that we can look forward to another repeat in say, 2028. Now I'm not a fan of hockey in the first place, and for all I care, the Canucks franchise should fold or move to Portland then they can tear down that blight on Vancouver, Roger's Arena (give some of those looters work) and replace it with a bird sanctuary.

On The Title Of This Blog: An Explanation

I have been thinking for awhile about the title of my blog and whether it conveyed what I wanted this blog to be about. I actually went through a number of titles at first, finding that many of them had already been taken. In the end, I settled on something that I thought would convey the way I think, but it may not be as clear to others as it is to myself so a little explanation is in order here.

 I'm the kind of person who has two sides inside myself that fight for domination. The one side is the happy, optimistic side that believes that everything will turn out swell in the end. The other part of me is the negative pessimist that believes that everything will turn out wrong and that the worst outcome is usually the one to be expected. This battle rages on inside me whether I am thinking about my own fate, or the fate of the world at large. Thus, it plays a large part in my commentary on social and political issues as well as the somewhat personal stuff that I write about from time to time. When you read this blog, you may find that some posts seem to come from quite different perspectives. This can be accounted for by whether the optimist or the pessimist in me was more in control at the time the post was written. 

 It should also be noted that not all of my posts fall into either of these categories, some are just random observations and some are just for fun. The fun ones often come from me being in  my pessimistic state, as I often tend to have a dark perverse sense of humour when I am in that state.

Spare The Rod and Spoil The Child?

This is about a story that I came across a few days ago and I though it would be as good a news piece as any to do some commentary on. It concerns the case of Rosalina Gonzales, who pleaded guilty to a felony charge of injuring a child, for what amounted to simply spanking her child with her hand. Judge Jose Longoria seemed to think it was a big deal, saying "In the old days, maybe we got spanked, but there was a different quarrel. You don't spank children." Here is a video from the courtroom.

This is the link to the story that I quoted from and I would recommend looking through the comments below as they relate to an  issue that I am going to bring up later.

Some Further thoughts On Libertarianism and Pragmatism

This is a follow up post to my previous post reviewing the first episode of "The Pragmatic Libertarian podcast." As I mentioned in that post, the description below the title of the podcast on the site reads "Because Liberty Works" indicating that Shawn (the creator of the podcast) believes that individual liberty will lead to good results. The purpose of this post is to discuss what my view of putting libertarianism into practice would be if liberty did not work and specifically how I would feel about it on a personal level.


My main point here is that I really care less and less about the supposed negative results that could happen in a society based on libertarian principles. Both Conservatives and Liberals warn of the dire prospects for society if their plan to control society is not put into practice, but the question I would ask is why care that much about these horrible consequences in the first place. My reason for this is that most people say that I, and the majority of people over college age (high school age for some) am past the supposed "best years of my life." Now, that may or may not be true, the hopeful part of me would like to believe it not to be so, but the pessimist inside is inclined to accept it. As unhappy a conclusion that may be, the happen to see a silver lining in giving up one's hopes and dreams.

Blog Designs

Having been experimenting design wise with my blog, I have gradually become more aware of my looks and dislikes stylistically. I have been changing things around rather frequently trying to find a design that suited my tastes. I may as yet change the template for this blog, I'm looking at some on the Internet beyond the basic ones on this site, but I'm a little wary of making such changes lest I mess up some of what I've already done on this blog. I've also become quite fond of the Georgia font, I use to think Arial was the most readable, but having compared posts using both fonts, I happen to think that Georgia is easier on the eyes. 


I also, by the way, have an empty blog on wordpress with the exact same name as this one that I don't think I'm going to be using. I have to say that the controls were a lot more complicated than the one's here, which is not good for a moron like myself. 

The Pragmatic Libertarian Podcast

Today, I want to discuss the first episode of a podcast entitled "The Pragmatic Libertarian" by a person named Shawn aka as XOmniverse on YouTube. I would recommend his channel as he has done a lot of interesting videos on topics like libertarianism, objectivism, and related matters. For the purpose of this post, I'm going to be dealing entirely with Shawn’s first podcast. So far, it looks good and I hope there are many more episodes to come. The tagline to the podcast is "Because Liberty Works" which is something that needs to be articulated if a liberty oriented viewpoint is to gain widespread adherence within society. What I want to do here is not a full review, but rather to touch upon a few points of interest for me within this episode and to add some of my own thoughts. My purpose for doing this is not for criticism (not really even constructive criticism) but rather to offer an additional perspective upon these issues. I would recommend listening to the podcast's first episode before reading the rest of this.

In this first episode, Shawn's main point was to introduce the podcast and the main part of it was first to deal with a certain kind of libertarian which he pointed out was a stereotype to some extent (though some do fit it) but he was mainly going after the kinds of ideas that these types hold to because they are at times held by more moderate libertarians. After that there was a brief explanation of deontological vs. consequentialist ethics and then a part where Shawn dealt with the misconceptions about pragmatists. There were a few points there that I wanted to touch on where I have a different perspective.

Weinergate update

A stupid pointless post:

I have no interest at all in this story and couldn't care less about the integrity of politicians etc. but considering this is a blog and blogs often tend to have news stories, I figure I will throw something out here until my next post of substance.  Apparently, Anthony Weiner did send photos and messages to an "underage girl"

For the voyeuristic types:

Weiner's wiener (apparently)

DRUGS !!

I have been wondering about what to discuss in my first real blog post for a few days and several things came to mind. After thinking them over, I decided that the subject of drugs would be just as good a topic as any. Considering that this is a libertarian-oriented blog politically, and such types are supposedly obsessed with this issue, this would make a perfect start to my blog. 

 Now I am not going to talk about drug legalization or the problems with the war on drugs or anything else like that. Rather, I want to deal with a certain claim that I have heard regarding how people would behave if the availability of drugs was dramatically increased such as would occur if they were legal.                                              

The argument is that if drugs were legal, the temptation to try them for people who have never used before would be so great that a huge segment of the population, formerly non-users, would become hooked on these horrible substances. I have heard this concern expressed not just about morons, but even regarding people with superior intelligence. One of my professors in a philosophy class discussion said that he did not know if he would not go out and buy heroin if it could be purchased legally. Now I understand that when it comes to people that are addicts already, having a more readily available supply at a fraction of the current price would allow these users to consume a higher quantity of their drug of choice. The thing I don’t understand is the notion that all these people out there who have never tried drugs are just itching to get their hands on some cocaine, heroin, meth, take your pick. 

 Maybe my brain just works differently than 99% of the population (it does actually) but I can't for the life of me understand this desire to  consume  things that  people have never tried, but are considered so horrible and destructive.  As an example, if someone tried to offer me a dish that was supposedly the best tasting food in the world, but it also had all there horrible possible side effects comparable to hard drugs, I think I would pass. I suppose that if I had one day to live, I might consider using  some of these  substances, but even then, there would be a whole host of things I’d rather do if I had such limited time, like drinking 50 strawberry virgin daiquiris for example,  as opposed to snorting  coke, injecting heroin, smoking  crack, smoking  weed  etc. Hell, even in some hypothetical world where I could have anything I wanted and could take any drug and get all of the pleasure without any of the repercussions, I really don’t think I would be that interested in doing so. There are just so many more things in life that I desire to do, and it’s hard for me to fathom how psychoactive drugs are considered to the ultimate forbidden fruit.  Anyhow, in closing, it seems to me that anyone with a half-decent brain would be able to resist such temptation, but then again, I could be wrong.

Intro

A welcome to any unfortunate souls who managed to stumble upon this blog in the nether regions of the Internet. As this is the first post of my blog and I am still experimenting with the design a bit, I won't have much of anything to say at the moment. If anyone cares, this post's font is in Georgia, but I suspect I will be using Arial mostly, I just want to see if this font looks better. I may also be adding some gadgets as time goes on. Well that's about all for now.