It's like my head

Bravo routinely airs two episodes of “The West Wing” back to back every morning. Curiously, with no explanation, they jumped over an episode this morning. They skipped the one entitled “Faith Based Initiative.” I wonder why. Well, let’s check the episode description:

On the same day that an anti-gay-marriage amendment is attached to the federal budget, an Internet rumor surfaces that C.J. is a lesbian. Josh and Toby attempt to kill the amendment without forcing the President to publicly take a position on this unwinnable issue.

Okay. I find that…interesting.

PAD

Let’s assume that a group of people under the influence of those individuals takes things a step further. They manage to smuggle a large amount of explosives at some military event and end up killing 216 American soldiers and their families.

Now, 10 years have passed. Somebody wants to build a Christian church a couple of blocks from where this incident occurred.

However, a bunch of people - and politicians - are infuriated by this. They start protesting, any time they are near a microphone, about how insensitive those Christians are for wanting to build a church near such a traumatic event.

One politician says, “The First Amendment protects freedom of religion, but I think that the church should be built someplace else.”

If any politician should stand up and say it is perfectly legitimate for Christians to build a church within 2 blocks of this event, they are accused of being insensitive and of “siding against the families of the victims” of this tragedy.

Immediately, we can see the bigotry that would have to lie at the root of these types of protests. The only people who could possibly have their sensitivities hurt in any way by a Christian church 2 blocks away from such a tragedy are bigots who think that everybody who shares the same general religion as the terrorist deserve blame for what happened.

And as I read it, he’s managed to miss…or maybe just not want to see the core of Judge Walker’s decision. Douthat wants the legal system to endorse his view that Hetero Marriage is somehow superior to gay marriage. Judge Walker’s decision was not that it is or it isn’t; just that it isn’t the business of the state to make such a judgment. That oughta be the Conservative position, telling the government to keep its judgmental opinions to itself…but anything relating to sex seems to make The Nanny State acceptable to some and political considerations impact others. As I wrote in a Tweet the other day, it’s very confusing: My governor, who’s a Republican, is in favor of gay marriage. My president, who’s a Democrat, is not.

Or maybe it’s not so confusing. Obama doesn’t need the added grief he must think he’d get from an outright endorsement of it, and Arnold is going back to making movies and would probably like there be someone on the crew who’ll style his hair.

According to the NY Times,

• women are “still slightly in the minority” among web users globally but
• women spend more time online than men do, on average two more hours online a month
• women spend about one-third of their time online in communications: email, IM, social networking, while men spend about 25%
• women spend more time than men gaming
• the biggest demographic (most time spent) for online gaming is women over 55; they play mostly board, card, and puzzle games
• half the men visit “sex-themed sites”, but over one-third of women do too

Of course, traditional gamers, the boys 15-24, will likely say those types of games “don’t count”, the way they discount the Wii as only for kids and girls. But that kind of comment comes out of fear that they’ll quit getting product targeted for them. If the markets are bigger elsewhere (and likely easier to please), then it would make sense for companies to start targeting those customers.