Nitwits Aplenty in This World of Mine

Today has been a good day thusfar, despite the phishing scam email some slavering, knuckle-dragging peon sent in an attempt to gain access to my Paypal account. While by no means fluent in computer languages like DOS or Unix or C++, I am smart enough to think before I click, so I sent the suspicious email to the Paypal security team and changed my password for good measure. Sure enough, it was a scam, but the Paypal team assured me that since I didn't click anything, my account was safe.

Because I was curious about the email's true origins, I checked the headers. Apparently, it was sent from Yahoo.bizzmail, whatever that is. I wonder if I should notify Yahoo, though I suspect Paypal will be in touch soon enough.

I'll never understand why more people aren't more circumspect about the links they click, particularly when it pertains to their money. Granted, my caution stems from having my identity stolen when I was twenty-two, but it only takes five minutes to double check links, URLS, and email headers, and it saves a great deal of frustration. Trust me, fighting off bill collectors and filing police reports and writing letters to credit bureaus is no fun, and I still rue the day I filled out that credit card application my freshman year and lost my Florida ID.

Between bouts of protecting my money from the greedy clutches of mouth-breathing troglodytes without a shred of decency, I've been catching up on the flist. wolfma has a link to the latest symptom of The Stupid that is slowly but surely devouring this country from the inside out. A library in Florida has decreed that all books containing "adult" material inappropriate for children are to be removed from the shelves in order to protect prying little eyes from the dirty, dirty taint of forbidden knowledge. The book covers will be on the shelves, but those wishing to read the book will have to ask for it.

From what I can gather, the reason for this is that parents leave their children unattended in the library for hours at a time and have no interest in monitoring their child's reading material, as that would encroach most grievously upon their Hide the Bald Hamster sessions with Daddykins or their dildo-molding workshop with the girls. No, they would rather the state and federal government shoulder that responsibility, and in so doing, make it more difficult for responsible, consenting adults to access books. In other words, the general public is once again held to account because of a woman's decision to have a child.

What gets me is the vagueness of the definition of "adult material inappropriate for a child." When last I checked, my library was hardly a cornucopia of porn. Yes they have books like Lady Chatterly's Lover or the works of Marquis de Sade, but they don't have Hustler or Anal Cherries 80 fanned over the tables in the reading room, and in the case of the former, De Sade is hardly a book that would appeal to a prepubescent child. There are no bright colors or capering monsters, after all, and even if the "child" was a hormone-addled teenager on the prowl for wanking material, most would have to know of De Sade in order to find it.

It's not just sexual content, either. What if a mother decides that her Johnny Sproggins shouldn't be subjected to violence, lest it warp his fragile, innocent mind? No more The Chocolate War, The Outsiders, or Uncle Tom's Cabin. No more The Crucible. No more books on the Civil War, World War I or II, Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement. We can't have Johnny seeing soldiers with their guts floating in a rice paddy or a lynching victim dangling from a tree in Birmingham. It might burst his reality-insulated bubble.

And no more Bibles. Lord, with all the raping, looting, pillaging, beating, flogging, stoning, disembowelment, crucifying, burning, crushing, evisceration by animals, homoerotic undertones, polygamy, incest, fratricide, and genocide, I'm surprised it's lasted this long on the shelves. Imagine the dangerous effects a book like that might have.

Almost as an afterthought, the article also mentions that sex education material may no longer be checked out without parental permission. Good. Because God forbid a child realize that there are ways to prevent pregnancy without loathing their own bodies, and that no, they don't have to keep the baby if they don't want to. Independent thought is getting entirely out of hand.

Word Count on hexennacht's drabble: 398

Word Count HOBF 2: 1,001

Word Count SLS 53: 0

Farewell, bloodapple, from the flist.