Rabbits, Blinkity

So, this is a cool thing to write about: Things are easy/hard to learn. (Found via Clarissa's Blog which is awesome.)

The gist of the meme is to list three things in the course of your lifelong learning that came as natural as falling off a log, especially if they strike you as possessing elegance, expository power, arousal of curiosity, or best of all, a lot of formerly disparate concepts somehow “fall into place.” The other list is three things that are utterly opaque to your mind, that you have made repeated attempts to learn, but for some reason or other, you just don’t seem to be meant to learn these things.

Easy things

1. Understanding cultures and subcultures. Partly as a result of being raised in a mostly religious-right-conservative community, and now having shifted most of the way to the other extreme, I find it easy to get inside the heads of all different sorts of people.
2. Reading and writing. I don't remember learning to read, not even a little bit. I don't really remember even reading at a 'beginner' level, as it were. I just sort of... read. It's a part of me. I don't really understand, except in a superficial way, what it would be like to read with difficulty, word by word, or have trouble understanding complex grammar. I blame my parents for this.
3. Not being bored. I don't think I'm ever bored, actually. Even if I don't have anything specific to do, I'm perfectly happy daydreaming and…

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On the 1 in 1,000,000 change that someone reads this and hasn't managed to hear about SOPA, or isn't sure about it, or something, let me just urge you to look it up and consider it carefully. This is pretty bad stuff, even by post-9/11 standards. The really amazing thing, is how little our congresspeople seem to know about how the internet even works. Will this stop piracy? No. It won't even bother it a little bit. Will it seriously annoy legitimate content producers? You bet.

Could it potentially be used to censor anti-government, anti-corporate, or other forms of free speech? Absolutely. Will it? Probably not immediately to a great extent, and hopefully it would be stopped in court if it became too extreme, but in the future, well, who knows.

It's clearly wrong, clearly pointless, and possibly dangerous, which is why it needs to be stopped. Contact your congresscritters and senatecritters now.