Guess I should talk about politics again

Yay! It's another bullet points post!

- Sotomayor's firefighter case is the latest of her decisions to be overturned by the Supreme Court. Not really big news, ultimately. It was 5-4, so it's not as damning of Sotomayor as it should be. I think Obama has every right to nominate someone with the intent of changing the face of the court. I think he and she are dead wrong, but I'll allow them to be wrong so long as they continue to allow me to say they're wrong.

- The 5 did the right thing, though I find it hard to unequivocally say "justice was done." There are racial inequalities, I just don't think it's the government's job to meddle with them. It's something we need to take care of on our own.

- The Democratic Speaker of the Assembly in California thinks democracy is terrorism. The headliner, of course, is that she thinks that talk show hosts are terrorists, which is a stupid and inflammatory and inconsiderate and perverted thing for a politician to say, but unfortunately not a rare one. The real news, in my opinion, is the way in which she says talk show hosts are committing terrorism: by calling for recall elections of politicians who make choices that a large enough faction of their listeners don't like. That's direct democracy. So, just to emphasize, this Democrat doesn't want voters to utilize a built-in facet of California government because it makes it too lowercase-D democratic. Glad we got that straight.

- This is more religion than politics, but whatever. Richard Dawkins opens his own summer camp, Camp Quest. It's not quite an "atheist summer camp", I guess. They're not telling the kids that God doesn't exist, they're just telling them how to come to that conclusion. Dawkins seems to have made a career out of ignoring that there really are intelligent Christians out there who have reasons for what they believe, as well as creative applications of the genetic fallacy ("Some people who believe x do so because of this non-logical reason, therefore x is false."). Also, there's a Camp Quest counselor in there who says that part of what tell the kids about at "Cafe Socrates" is "We teach them that even people like Sir David Attenborough are religious sceptics," so there's an argument from authority right there. You can't have it both ways, Dawkins. You complain about Christians bragging about Einstein maybe believing in some kind of deity, and then your camp does this. You can either get rid of the testimonials and make it purely a logical battle, or you can turn it into a "who has more famous people" contest, but you can't do a half-assed job at both and expect it to be enough, just like when a test tells you to pick one of two essay questions and write two pages on it, you can't just do both and write one page for each.

- Am I the only one who doesn't get why the name FCAPs is funny? I get it probably has something to do with the F, but I don't hear it. Maybe it's a British thing. And why is the column that mentioned it to me from tomorrow, anyway? Did I fall into a vortex?

- Maybe I'm just thick, but it seems like Wikipedia uses links as a crutch, especially on advanced scientific articles. They think that because we can click on on their words to go to huge articles to figure out what the word means, they don't have to explain things in a concise and understandable way. They need to realize that the only people reading those articles are members of the general public who are curious about science but know very little about it and don't have a lot of free time. The people who can understand those technical terms already know about everything in there, and if they don't, they're certainly going to look somewhere more reputable than Wikipedia. Stop being so elitist and write for us. Be Prometheus. And stop covering for the New York Times.

- Also Hawaii might get bombed again.