Absolute Sincerity

April 21, 2009

I keep thinking I will someday be able to overcome the fact that the world is full of bloody hypocrites, especially where morality is concerned. But I just keep coming up with new gripes.


I don't have much to say, except that I was speaking to someone about the supposed controversial comments by Miss California in the recent Miss America Beauty Pageant. I performed a Google news search just to check it out, and lo and behold, right on Fox News.com, I see a picture of a hot babe in a swimsuit.

Apparently there was a story. I am sure she was Miss California. Supposedly she lost because she thinks marriage should be between a man and a woman. For some reason, I wasn't really interested in reading.

Snap! Sorry - I got a little sidetracked. So let me get this straight. Someone enters into a pageant where the only real reason anyone pays attention is to look at hot chicks in bathing suits, and then she is a hero because she thinks gay marriage is wrong? Does anyone see the glaring contradiction here?

I know I am being incredibly cynical here, but I am not backing down on this one. People who rail on gay marriage (and I'm not saying it's wrong or right - it's not the issue here), saying it is going to cause the disintegration of society, are probably many of the same people who watch scantily clad women in bikinis on TV, drooling, and trying to find rerun videos on YouTube after the pageant ends because they haven't fantasized enough.

The Miss America Pageant is nothing but a way to make women objects. And if we're going to make moral judgments, then the pageant has to be just as immoral as two people of the same sex wanting to form a union together. I guess what it comes down to is there are not that many gay people out there, compared to the big business out there geared toward the number of people who will spend their time and money to look at swimsuit models strutting their stuff, and then acting like they watch to see what the hell said models think about world poverty.

Let me put it another way: when you prance around practically naked in a swimsuit (if you can call it that), you probably don't have much room to talk about your opinion on morality.

Such hypocrisy has the potential to make one ill.

Update: (4/22/09) Well, what do you know, a woman (Caroline Heldman) who agrees with me. Of course, pervert Sean Hannity and his two male guests want the controversy to go on as long as possible, so they can continue to show pictures of babes in bikinis as much as possible. Of course, these "manly" men more than likely feel they are superior to Heldman just because they are men.

Her argument is just too much for them to handle. The pageant is degrading to women. So what? They're hot, and Hannity wants to watch them.

A Nation of Narcissists

This is so true. We are all narcissists. We are just too damn narcissistic to figure it out. This is from The Week magazine. I hope I don't get in trouble for posting it. My sister suggested I subscribe, and I love the publication. I would recommend it to anyone.


Facebook and Twitter: The new pornography

“Americans are now more interested in social networks than pornography,” said Robert Cringely in Infoworld.com. “No, that is not a typo.” For as long as there has been a World Wide Web, eyeballing porn has been far and away the most popular activity on the Internet. No longer. Self-described “data geek” Bill Tancer contends in a new book that surfing for porn has dropped from 20 percent of all Internet searches a decade ago to 10 percent today, while traffic on networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter is soaring. Skeptics note that porn consumers no longer need search engines to find sites featuring sexual content—that’s what bookmarks are for. But I’d argue that Tancer is missing another key point: For most young people today, “social networks are pornography. Have you seen some of those profiles?”

It’s not just the bra and underwear photos that make the networking sites pornographic, said Eric Adler in The Kansas City Star. To an obscene degree, they are “self-absorbed and narcissistic.” Millions of young people spend hours a day checking out their friends’ profiles while obsessively updating their own profiles with new photos, along with the most mundane of tidbits—from what they ate for lunch to the song they’re listening to that very moment. Never in history has there been so much “self-documentation,” and it’s having a profound impact on how people relate. “Today,” says Stanford University’s B.J. Fogg, “if you choose not to do Facebook in college, you have all but chosen to be a social isolate.”

To people over 30, said Clive Thompson in The New York Times Magazine, “the idea of describing your blow-by-blow activities in such detail is absurd.” Yet experiencing it, as I recently did, changes your perspective entirely. While all those individual factoids are petty on their own, “taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends and family members’ lives—like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.” At the same time, “the act of stopping several times a day to observe what you’re feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act.” That’s certainly a high-minded way of looking at “la vida Facebook,” said Chuck Crowder in the Chattanooga, Tenn., Pulse. You could also just say that Facebook is so successful for the same reason that porn always has been: “We’re all voyeurs.”