I'm with Mitt stupid

So I guess by this point we've all seen that Mitt Romney - as of last night, the official Republican nominee for the 2012 US presidential election - has launched an iPhone app which mis-spells America as Amercia. And, as you can imagine, I'm having waaaaay too much fun with this. Here are just a few - something tells me I might be spending a lot of my time today doing this...

Update:

I couldn't resist adding some more...

Huh?

Ok, I has a confuse. So as the entire world probably knows by now, Obama has publically confirmed his support for gay marriage. We all know that this is nothing new, that he really did support it, but he was reticent to come out and say it in so many words for fear of backlash from more conservative types or whatever.

So, in response to this, the BBC has posted two opposing viewpoints on Obama's announcement here. And I'm a bit confused by the conservative argument. The guy doesn't come across as some sort of Fox pundit right-wing nutjob or anything, it's not like he's just spouting bile and bigotry, he's trying to make some sort of well-reasoned point, but I still don't understand his article at all. I mean, I literally don't know what he is trying to say. He talks a lot about the history of the civil rights movement in the southern states of America, and a lot about how media and popular culture outweighed local popular opinion. I see where he's coming from with that, but as soon as he starts talking about Christianity, he loses me.

America is such a fucking weird place to me, and to many people outside of it. And, I suspect, to many people inside of it. They've had separation of church and state written into their constitution from the get go, yet no one will ever be elected their president in my lifetime, I think, who does not express and live a Christian faith. Why do conservatives keep bringing Christianity into this argument about gay marriage? Why do they think it's ok for them to enforce their religious beliefs onto the rest of the population? It doesn't matter if these conservative Christians are the minority or the majority - their constitution clearly forbids religion having anything to do with the law or the way that the country is run. They're free to believe whatever they want, they're free to preach whatever they want in their churches, but why do they think they can make that law?

I don't ask these things as an outraged, bleeding-heart liberal (although I freely admit to being all of those things), I'm genuinely confused by the argument. I wanted to read his thoughts because I wanted to try to understand where it is that these people are coming from when they oppose gay marriage, but I just cannot get my head around what it is that this guy, at least, thinks. He seems to be saying that his conservative, traditionalist Christian view is that gay marriage is morally wrong. Ok. I get that much. But I just do not see any sort of legal argument for why his belief should be enshrined in law. There's lots of things I believe to be right and wrong, but I don't necessarily think that there's any basis for making laws out of those things. I just don't understand. I'm genuinely, really confused.

And I'm even more confused about the arguments that it's somehow detrimental to Christian churches for the law to oppose the things that they teach. That by making laws that are on the other side to the churches on particular issues, that it's somehow making it illegal or harder for the churches to preach what they believe? Lots of laws stand in opposition to what various churches believe and preach. For instance, the Catholic Church is opposed to divorce, abortion, contraception, sex outside marriage, and the death penalty, but no one is seriously arguing that the church's freedom to continue to preach such things is legally obstructed by the laws which allow all of those things. Or if they are, they certainly seem to be people on the fringes of conservatism.

Or am I getting this all wrong? Do these people actually just want to change the constitution to remove the separation of church and state? Do they think that the founders and the framers and the fathers or whoever were wrong to put that in there in the first place? Is that what they really think, and they're mostly just too afraid/savvy to actually come out and say it? If they did say it, at least I'd be a lot less confused.

 Edited to add: Where I'm from, we have our fair share of reactionary, conservative, evangelical, far-right Christian nutjobs who prevent us from even being able to open shops - during a recession! - at reasonable hours on Sundays. I just wish we had a legal statement of the separation of church and state here. But that's a whole nother rant.

Today's emotion is...

This sums up my day perfectly thus far.

Why?

Once again this is a very poorly informed, completely un-researched rant about how much I hate the government. Not much new there, but since I'm not very likely to ever address this in person to any cabinet ministers, I may as well have a bitch session here. I also issue a disclaimer at this point that I've been watching far too much of The West Wing recently.

The Queen's Speech was today, where the legislative agenda for the parliament is laid out. Kinda like the US State of the Union speech, only with more crowns and shit. There are many aspects of the coming parliamentary objectives to which I am opposed, but one thing in particular really got my goat. not that I have an actual goat. I kinda like goats, there's something endearingly dorky about them. But then I remember the time that one almost bit me when I was trying to feed it at an open farm, and I'm suddenly not so keen on goats anymore.

Ahem. Anyway.

Our glorious leader tells us that the first priority of the government is to reduce the deficit. Now. I don't think that that's particularly evil or immoral or inhumane. It's a perfectly practical and logical goal to have. But I would like to ask Mr Cameron this. Why is that the first priority? Why isn't making sure that people have jobs the first priority? Why isn't making sure that people can afford to feed themselves and their children the first priority? Why isn't making sure that pensioners don't have to choose between heating and food the first priority? Why isn't making sure that our young people don't feel that they need to emigrate to find career prospects and have any sort of future the first priority? Why isn't curbing the terrifyingly steep raise in the cost of living the first priority?

I don't know a lot about economics, I'm happy to admit to that. I do have enough wit to realise that reducing the deficit is a Good Thing overall for the country, but I don't know a single damned person who gives a crap about the deficit. I do know people who are scared stiff about their jobs, because job security disappeared a couple of years ago for a lot of people. I know people who can't find jobs and have no idea what sort of future they're supposed to have when they can't even find a job to pay the bills, let alone a career. I know people who place coal on the fire, lump by lump to make sure they aren't wasting any. I know people whose children are deeply concerned about how much it would cost the family if they chose this secondary school over that secondary school. I know people being forced to give up their cars because they can't afford to run them anymore. I know people terrified about how they're going to feed themselves every single day, because they have to count each penny so carefully.

Why doesn't Mr Cameron think his first priority is to help these people? Why isn't his first priority to the people who make this country work, the people who pay the taxes, the electorate? Why isn't his first priority us?

Complain, complain, complain...

I've been deliberately trying not to write so much about my head and all of my many issues (for which I really wish there was a better word), especially because counselling was really helping there for a while. But alas, it was only a temporary measure (which I realise is better than nothing, but still, it's intensely infuriating to feel like you're just starting to get somewhere, and then the resource is over. But anyway - back to the point). So, given that I'm currently without any sort of counselling provision, maybe it will do me a bit of good to talk about things a bit.

Today, it's complaining. Negativity is a difficult and complicated thing for me. It's a huge part of my personality - I think most people that I know would mention complaining at some point in any description of my characteristics, and certainly being a bit cynical, negative and pessimistic is just a part of who I am, and who I have always been. And I like a lot of things about that - it's just not in my nature to be some happy clappy, sunny, optimistic person who accepts everything around them. It's important to me to question things, to play devil's advocate and see the downsides of things to try to weigh things up, so negativity is a big part of that. Also it's just funnier. It's difficult to have a sarcastic, sardonic sense of humour (which is the sort of humour I've always been attracted to) without being negative, darker, cynical - whatever you want to call it. And god knows I love a good rant.

But dwelling on the negative, complaining about every.little.thing in my life, making mountains out of molehills, and searching out things to get angry and annoyed about - these come down quite firmly on the Not Good side of things. And it's astonishing to me how easily and quickly I can go there without even realising it. There's a little bit of self-righteousness in there too (well, maybe more than a little bit). I seem to get a kick out of finding things to be annoyed about, and putting myself on what I see to be the right side of any argument. Something in there about my high standards, I should think. Maybe I'm constantly trying to find a way to vindicate my way of looking at a situation, trying to find a way to see myself as right so I find all these arguments, even if they're just in my head, and a storm of anger comes down from it.

It gets to the point where I don't know what else to say or think or talk about. I literally have no words left that aren't negative, that aren't complaining or moaning about something. I feel blank inside, like there's just a huge vacuum when I take out the whininess. And then, of course, I get down on myself and start to beat myself up, as if the constant anger and glass-half-empty-and-probably-has-poison-in-it-anyway attitude wasn't bad enough.

So I've been trying to be a lot more conscious of this lately. But when it's such a big part of who I am, it's difficult. I find it hard to come up with anything else to put into my head, to have any other thoughts at all. Which is probably why I end up spending so much time spaced out in front of the tv, trying not to think about anything at all.

And, inevitably, this all comes back down to balance. Finding a middle road that doesn't mean that I have to change my entire personality to be like Alec Baldwin when he guested in Friends that time, but to also not be a complete pain in the ass, and an extremely miserable, depressed and angry one at that.

I don't know why I find balance so hard. I don't know why I inherently seem to oscillate from one extreme to the other. I know that a lot of it is down to the whole perfectionist thing - if something isn't perfect, it's completely shit, so everything starts to exist for me in a solely binary state. But I don't really know why that is. And the question of why is a difficult one in itself. Part of me looks at this as some sort of logical problem, like an equation, or a murder mystery where one clue will suddenly solve the whole thing. And I do think that there's at least some rationale in the idea that if I could figure out why, then I could start to address it better. But it's highly unlikely that I ever will understand why, that's just the nature of these things. Wherever this all came from, it's here and I have to deal with it. These are just some of the rabbit holes that my mind likes to disappear down, to avoid having to actually do anything, to deal with the situation.

So, for the moment I'm trying to just not complain as much. To think twice before I write or say something that's moaning about something that's really not all that important. To stop and think and be conscious of what I'm saying or thinking, before I just let it take over. And as corny as it sounds, I've found that (for the meantime, at least) covering my room in photographs is helping. Photos of everything and anything from the last few years - a reminder that everything isn't all that shit. That I do have good things, and to try to stop the "but..." that tends to come after that. And as much as I don't like photographs of myself all that much, I'm generally grinning like an idiot in most of them and in some weird way that actually seems to help me remember that while I might not have a rose-coloured view of the world by nature, neither am I utterly miserable. I might act like it a lot of the time, but it's not really who I am. I just have to keep trying to remember that.