Apparently this blog exists

Although I am not quite sure why*. Blogs, man. I couldn't even be bothered when blogs were a thing,

*(As many people have no doubt thought similarly about me)

You may have heard about the woman killed by Irish doctors because they wouldn't allow her a life-saving abortion

If you haven't, here's the story. Read it, be outraged and disgusted. Makes you want to fire off an angry letter, doesn't it?

I had a look on the Hospital website for an email link, but sadly there was none. The closest I could find was a media contact, and so that had to do. I do hope they pass it on to somebody relevant.

Hi,

UHG don't appear to have any email contact details, which is a shame because I, like many people, would dearly like to send in some constructive advice.

Please let them know that they're being assholes and it is killing people. If they have to go against what they perceive to be their religious mandate in order to stop killing people in such an asshole-ish way, then perhaps they should wonder if being murderous assholes is really the behaviour their religious values are meant to instil. 

Perhaps they have got this one wrong? But what do I know; I'm an atheistic ex-Jew, and it could be that letting people die needlessly in agony is precisely the sort of loving Christian thing God wants doctors to engage in. It kind of ties up with the whole bombing innocent people because they're the wrong kind of Christian tradition I've been hearing about.

Nevertheless, I do kind of feel like the Christian God isn't supposed to be a complete bastard. Wasn't there something about 'love' and 'compassion' and all that sensible stuff?

Personally, though, I think whoever made this decision is scum and I hope they wake up screaming, shivering and drenched in sweat for the rest of their natural lives. I'm kind of a vindictive bastard.

Love,

Michael

Non-divisive news site

It's obvious that there's a huge problem at the moment, particularly in America, in that people of different views are polarised and ghettoised into their own communities and news-sources. The right-wing, in particular, seem keen on rejecting reality and alternative ideas for their own ever-more extreme viewpoints. The charge is always that you can't trust [whatever] because of its [liberal/right-wing] bias.

People aren't communicating with the other side, but when they do it's confrontational and just serves to exacerbate things.

So here's an idea for a news/commentary site that can be trusted and read by people of all stripes, hopefully bringing them together to talk.

First off, try for initial stories to be as unbiased and objective as possible (e.g., BBC or Wikipedia), but for bias/legitimacy scores to be allocated via community moderation.

Commentaries and notes can also be tagged as such, and the highest scoring responses are all viewed along with the article along with their own slant. Fact-checking should be considered highly important, as should gentlemanly discourse.

Of course, we need to find a way to stop the moderation being abused by trolls and agenda-groups, and everything should be made as transparent as possible. Could reddit and slashdot's karma models be used as a basis? How could we take partisanship into account?

Any thought?

Oh gods what is that thing?

So here I am: fat,  hairy, ugly and in ridiculous spare glasses. Don't worry. I'm on a weight loss plan. It's to lose some weight.

Blog, awaken!

After 5 almost 6 years of drought, and nothing before that beyond the feeblest acknowledgement of its own existence, this blog shall rise once more and actually do something.

Much like me, I do hope.

Not that I expect anyone to be reading this who is not already more familiar with my life than they would likely prefer, it would seem good manners to start with an introduction of sorts.

An introduction of sorts

This is rosyblog, and I am the titular Rosy. Or, for the formally inclined, Michael. I'm one of those underachieving wastrels, but I am trying to do something about it. No, really I am. 

At least that's over with, now what?

I'm resurrecting this here blog for a couple of reasons. Firstly, my girlfriend has gone to Japan for a year and set up her own blog, and out of symmetry and the fact that I outright promised to do the same, here we are.

Also, I do like to talk about stuff, sometimes. Mostly inane bullshit, granted, but you're reading this far so don't complain.

About 10 years ago I was heavily involved with atheist discussion boards, but I no longer argue religion. It's not that I have much respect for it, you understand, but there is simply no point - it bores me, I have nothing new to learn from it, and the people you argue with generally aren't there to be reasoned with.

Instead, I have graduated to wild and whacky metaphysical interests which I am more than happy to harp on about. For now, I shall just say that I am pretty convinced by something very much like Quantum Immortality.

Unsurprisingly, I am also a very liberal leftie. I find the right-wing generally obnoxious, closed-minded, discompassionate sometimes to to the point of psychopathy.

I might talk about science and technology a bit; after all, I love them to pieces. I am more likely to talk about sci-fi though, or just plain awesome things. I'm racing through Breaking Bad right now, and it is certainly an awesome thing.

That was pretty rambling, unfocused and disjointed, wasn't it? Stay tuned for more of the same!

Not sure if I will be using this blog

I currently have:

• a blog
• an LJ account (which I use to keep track of other people's LJs)
• a facebook account (which you need to register to see, is a little useful and a lot diverting)

I haven't yet used the LJ as a blog, as I prefer to keep everything centralised. FB does at leat import my blog entries.

I keep track of non-LJ blogs using Google Reader, and one of my motivations in creating this blog is the hope that the shared Google heritage would allow them to work together, or at least centralise things more (especially as a lot of my friends appear to be using blogger). This doesn't seem to be the case, unfortunately.

My other motivation was that I think I prefer the style and interface of blogger to blogsome. However, there does not seem to be a facility to import my blogsome content, and I don't want to leave it out in the cold.

Well, we'll see what happens....