Hey, Remember When Those Old White Men on the Texas Supreme Court Ruled That Upskirt Photos Were Perfectly Legal?

This was a news story that went around. I never really read it. I saw it on HuffPo and the like and didn't give it much credence.

However, I will say this: Had I read those articles, I probably would have been outraged by their claims about the ruling.

I probably would not have looked the actual ruling up, in all honesty.

I say this not proudly but rather ashamedly. A lot of bad information gets put out there by people reacting! hot to breaking news without really taking any time at all to think about the situation, or read more into the story than is contained in a headline.

I fall down on that front myself.

Most people do, honestly.

But then again, most people don't have a blog where they presume to infect people with half-baked ideation.

So I'm kinda finding fault with myself for something I would probably have done, but did not do, simply because my superficial laziness of not bothering to actually read the relevant opinion was actually trumped by my even deeper laziness of not feeling like dealing with the story at all.

Sometimes deep laziness works out in your favor. Not often, but if deep laziness keeps you from making a superficially lazy error, then bully for deep laziness.

Popehat has bothered to read this ruling. And he's troubled himself to actually think about it.

I didn't post on this story. In all likelihood, if I had, I would have joined the Outrage! brigade.

I furthermore probably might have gotten snarky or condescending to those who, rightly, thought a bit more about the issue than I had bothered to.

I'm not proud of this, you understand. But I do think it's a healthy thing to occasionally find fault in oneself, instead of forever scanning for it in others.

As I said, Popehat has read the ruling, and has bothered to think about the matter, which makes him superior to HuffPo, Salon, and all the rest.

Actually that's a rather stupid point, since he was already superior to all of those ant-headed viral nonsense aggregation-and-anger factories.

But I suppose it also places him somewhat above myself as well, which is difficult to admit, but there you go.

Anyway, the reason I'm praising him is that he has taken an unpopular opinion, sure to be condemned by the baying animal pack, and he did so because he actually bothered to fucking read the thing and then thereafter to consider the situation, rather than just shouting about it in order to garner Viral Hits and Social Positioning Gold Stars.

Which is rare, and commendable. Like the passing of Halley's Comet, we should note the few times this actually occurs on the internet.

Anyway, read the whole thing. And before you do: Fix in your mind the idea that these jurists had ruled that "upskirt photos are a-ok," like a lot of Stupidity Aggregators claimed.

Gin up some moral outrage about that. I'm not insulting you, or not meaning to, anyway: But consider if I told you just that -- that some judges had ruled it's perfectly okay to snap upskirt pictures of completely-ignorant female subjects.

Those of you without daughters would be angry.

Those of you with daughters would be incensed.

Again, no insult is intended: Just a demonstration of how you would feel if someone gave you an accounting of the ruling which was not only false, but designed to make you outraged about its falsities.

Now, if you can gin yourself up to that hypothetical emotional state which you would have been had you been so careless to accept the HuffPo's claims as accurate -- I know you wouldn't have been, but pretend you were, for purposes of this hypothetical -- now read Popehat's pice of actual knowledge and reason and let that faked-up internet outrage nonsense be swept away.

I say all this not to impugn any of you but to demonstrate to you what the world looks like to someone who just reads Salon, Slate, HuffPo, and all the rest of the Outrage/Viral Hits monkey aggregators.

This is what the world looks like to them -- a world in which Old White Men on the Texas (Racist, that means) Supreme Court rule that there's nothing at all objectionable about taking creepy upskirt photos of young girls who have consented to nothing at all except wanting to wear a skirt.

It's a false world -- but this is the world we actually live in. A world created by Gnostic priests, and not even smart Gnostic priests.

A world created by the stupidest, laziest, most crudely dishonest Gnostic clerisy you can imagine.

The Bottom Dwellers. The less-than-minimum wage imbeciles they won't even trust to dust the Plastic Scepter of Conjured Factoids.

I live in that world myself. Sometimes I am insufficiently skeptical of the illusions those Gnostic Idiots create.

Sometimes I buy into their lies, figuring: Shit, they couldn't lie every time, could they?

But, pretty much, they can.*

* I'm reminded of that post I read and linked recently -- damn, I can't find it, I think maybe Joan of Aarrgh! -- which noted Schopenauer's theory that most human "knowledge" had never been questioned or vetted.

Schopenhauer posited that most human knowledge was just crap said by one guy, then repeated by two others -- then the rest of humanity assumed, wrongly, that those early adopters must have known what the hell they were talking about, or else they wouldn't have pronounced it with such overbearing confidence.

But that assumption is false. People state things with confidence because that's how they garner attention and esteem.

Very few people check into anything. They don't want to know things which are true; they just want to sound like they're saying things which are true.

And hence, whatever the example -- say the recently-revived claim that Bush did not have a coalition for the War in Iraq -- three imbeciles say it, and the rest of humanity parrots the imbeciles.

Update: I corrected the spelling of "Halley's Comet" because of a pedantic dick who needs to get a life and Touch a Girl.

posted by Ace at 05:11 PM

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