All Thoughts Being Equal

I attended my first community meeting today. Or rather, a "homeowners heckle a City representative" meeting, but I suppose that's par for the course. But what was the stated root of all this anger? Homelessness. And drugs. And drug-addicted homeless people coming for your children and valuables. You see, the City is proposing to lease a privately-owned lot for 1-2 years as a site for up to 50 "tiny houses," which will then be used as "low-barrier" housing for up to 70 homeless people who maybe can't get into a traditional shelter; one such "barrier" is drug use. In other words the City is shoving down the throats of the homeowners dozens of drug-maddened freaks not two blocks from a school (no, five schools!) where they can abduct, chop up and eat, fuck to death, experiment on, sew together into a second-grade-centipede, feed to their chained beasts, sacrifice to the Old Gods... our children! -- I may seem hyperbolic and s...

Now that we've seen why Western Washington University decided (and was justified, in my view) to cancel classes for Tuesday, 24 November 2015, in response to racist and threatening comments on the anonymous social media shithole application Yik Yak, let's look at the reaction from the students and the community. Was their response justified? I don't think so. This post is a partial follow-up to: On the rigged-world fallacy and pullback error , Rhetorical imperialism I. Let's get this out of the way first: of the two "camps," so to speak, of students who disagreed with President Bruce Shepard's decision to suspend classes, the ones who thought classes shouldn't have been suspended have a very weak position. Now, there wasn't a lot of publicity of the various posts made, so I can understand why—at the time—some people might have thought the class cancellation was the wrong call. I hope that since those posts have come to light, those peop...

A dive into the inexcusable vitriol burbling up through social media and message boards over the WWU Viking mascot controversy. 4chan and Yik Yak are the main cesspools here, although Breitbart and Twitter make appearances. I. I wish the previous post had been the end of it, me making some criticism at the WWU AS for being silly about social media nonsense, then ending with a half-joking, half-serious suggestion that WWU change its mascot to the Viking... landers. Tee hee!  Or, you know, some fucking asswipes could ruin everything. That could happen, too. What... the... Are you... fucking... kidding... And that's just about when Western Washington University, for the first time in decades, decided to cancel classes on Tuesday, 24 November . Now, these are just the things that were publicly available to me [NB: The 4chan thread has since been deleted] , so there could very well have been additional private threats, emails, or deleted Yik Yak posts that I...