Archive for Bravery

A Cellphone’s Missing Dot Kills Two People, Puts Three More in Jail

The terrors of typography. Flipping through Tumblr, I came across this rather tragic story and reminder to make sure your punctuation is perfect, lest you offend someone and cost people both their freedom and their lives. The money quote from Gizmodo:

The surreal mistake happened because Ramazan’s sent a message and Emine’s cellphone didn’t have an specific character from the Turkish alphabet: the letter “ı” or closed i. While “i” is available in all phones in Turkey—where this happened—the closed i apparently doesn’t exist in most of the terminals in that country.

The use of “i” resulted in an SMS with a completely twisted meaning: instead of writing the word “sıkısınca” it looked like he wrote “sikisince.” Ramazan wanted to write “You change the topic every time you run out of arguments” (sounds familiar enough) but what Emine read was, “You change the topic every time they are fucking you” (sounds familiar too.)

Read more here.

On Sandy Hook…

Words fail.

If you have children, cling to them during this time. We are guaranteed nothing in life.

‘Dude, Where’s My Lifeboat?’

In terms of good manners and bravery, things have changed for the worse.

I had the honor of being raised by a chivalrous father. He had always let it be known that I’d ‘get it’ if I didn’t hold doors open for women, let the woman walk into a room first (except for German girls, where one should walk in first, to make sure the room is safe), and so on. It became something so deeply ingrained into my psyche that every time I hear a feminist cackle about equality to this day, I wonder about the mind-numbing sludge spilling out of their mouth and ponder their seriousness in anything in life. Is that rough? Perhaps, and it’s not entirely meant to be. The problem is that I decided long ago that it was no longer worth my time or effort to decipher things that made absolutely no sense to me.

The problem seems to be two-fold: first, women demand equality, yet expect deference. To say otherwise is to lie, and everyone who thinks critically about this story knows it. It is not to say that feminism, in and of itself, is such a horrible thing. There will be situations in life where you WILL have to rely on yourself, either for your own benefit or for the benefit of those around you. This should be commended and encouraged. Just don’t complain if, in an emergency, that a man won’t steamroll over you to save his skin while you or your child drowns. When you subscribe to certain theories, think fully of the consequences. The second is far more disturbing to me: cowardice. I included a link to National Review Editor Rich Lowry’s column. It left me feeling sick that men feel absolutely no shame in blatant cowardice anymore. It has become an accepted part of society. The man has nothing to defend, and the woman has nothing to shield her from the harsh realities of natural disasters. Our culture rots every time a story like this comes out. We’re in a truly pitiable state.