A mind is a terrible thing to taste, especially mine sometimes

I used to be a message board junkie. I would go on sites like FreeRepublic, Kuro5hin and others to raise the flag of libertarianism time and again. Did that from my my mid teens until I was about twenty, when I started blogging. Today, when I actually go back to that, it just strikes me as a load of bovine excrement because of stuff like these responses to my comments. A lot of people who participate on message boards are the sort of people who can neither read for comprehension nor follow an argument to save their lives. It really is just a waste of your time to duke it out in comments sections most of the time. I look at some blogs and boards that get linked and my god... the drivel that spans pages of comments! Doesn't matter what idea or group is involved, I've seen it. It's an ideology-neutral phenomenon.

By now I'm sure a lot of people have heard of this case where a sixteen year old girl has been denied bail on charges of having committed a hate crime. While the hate crime charge is contemptible because hate crime laws are thought crime laws, the fact is that this girl does deserve to be prosecuted for harassment. She specifically targetted an individual that she knew, and distributed possibly libelous content about him in a way that if nothing more could come down as a malicious attempt at character assassination. While "God hates fags" is protected speech, specifically targetting one individual in a campaign of harassment like that, is not free speech. Hopefully she will beat the hate crime charge, but any other charges will stick to her and this event will kick her ass a little. She's sixteen and has already had at least thirteen run-ins with the law. Not exactly the best posterchild for anti-hate crime speech sympathy...

If you like to play video games with your significant other, and have a XBox 360, you can't go wrong with Fusion Frenzy 2. Rachel and I have been playing that a lot lately. Last night we played through several rounds of it together. It's a good game for casual gamers because it doesn't require the sort of strategy and committment to learning that games like Gears of War and Halo 2 require. You can actually pick it up and just go with it. Still, I do plan to push her into getting good at Halo with the split screen enabled for when Halo 3 comes out. She's got the controls down, which isn't that common for women in my experience. It's mostly that she's not used to playing on a split screen. That screwed me up when I first started playing Halo because I was used to the whole screen as a PC FPS gamer.

By now it's pretty obvious that I've taken to sort of abusing the random thoughts meme that Pablo started. Unfortunately for me, my thoughts often just stream out like this, so it works better for me than writing several little blog posts. That, and I haven't had the need or creativity to wax eloquent about a subject worth waxing eloquent about lately...