AKotW 2/18

This is the inaugural post for the now by necessity Internet-bound weekly Western family dinner discussion of the week's news. Specifically, the best and worst of the news, from the perspective of everyone participating. Some effort will be made to reach consensus each week, but in general there will be a few nominees listed each week. And presumably at some point I will get to where I'm posting them more closely to the time of the discussion, instead of a week later.

So worst things first: who do we want to punch in the face today? For the week of 2/18/11, the nominations for Asshat of the Week are:


The executives of Borders Bookstores, who filed for bankruptcy this week, closing hundreds of bookstores across the country (and, since those big chain bookstores put many smaller indie and chain bookstores out of the market in the first place, this has left many towns like mine without any bookstore at all).

She looks exactly as I would expect her to look.

Carole Lieberman, a psychiatrist doing her best to stigmatize gamers, make the mental health professions look bad and sell her own books by claiming that a recent rise in sexual crimes is directly attributable to sexual content in video games. (And not to give her any more attention, but just look at her website. Look at it. Wait, don't. All she wants is attention, and it will probably make you sick.)


And finally, the contender with the strongest consensus, the government of Bahrain, which fired on its own citizens this week. Early estimates were that at least 120 people were hurt as the army opened fire on protesters with live rounds, tear gas, and according to some reports, anti-aircraft guns.

Now on to the main event: who in the news has given us hope for the future?
The nominees for the coveted title of Asskicker of the Week are:



Watson the IBM Supercomputer, or more to the point, Watson's team of programmers, which beat up pretty soundly on two human opponents in Jeopardy this past week, showing great advances in the ability of computers to comprehend natural human speech. As a followup to his victory on Jeopardy, Watson is going to work in medicine, where his ability to comprehend natural human language (and not something pre-made for computer processing) looks to be a great advantage.


This discussion of Jeopardy also prompted an AKotW nom for Ken Jennings, puny human, who lost to Watson but kept it a game until the end as well as being a good sport about it and also being smart and funny. You can't take our pithy comments, robot overlords! Did I say overlords? I meant protectors.



Facebook, for adding 'In a domestic partnership' and 'In a civil union' to its relationship status options. This nomination depends on why they did it which is as yet unknown. We are all about Kantian ethics here at the Western Round Table.


The strongest contender in discussion was webcartoonist Zach Weiner of SMBC Comics, who thoroughly pwned the National Organization for Marriage (deceptively wholesomely named, as they mostly are an organization to lobby against gay marriage), which took one of his cartoons and, after thoroughly misinterpreting the joke, decided they would post it on their front page as an example of why gay marriage would lead to blenders marrying squirrels... but instead of downloading the image and posting it from their own servers, they just hotlinked to Weiner's image (they're even bad at netiquette!), giving him the opportunity to plant a rainbow flag and a Thomas Jefferson quote on their main page (and incidentally, since he's a lot more popular than they are and sent a lot of traffic over, shutting down the site for awhile).

Nice.

We the blog would also be remiss not to give space to the AKotW for the week before, which was decided in an informal forum the week before. For the week of 2/11/11, the nominees were the last surviving WWI veteran, a woman from the WRAF who just turned 110, a gorilla in England who has started to walk upright, the people of Egypt for successfully and relatively peacefully protesting Mubarak out of power, and Karen for successfully attending a Tae Kwon Do class. Although Karen made a late break for power, we the blog have to judge that the Egyptian protesters would probably successfully wait her out for the title. Special mention is given to the guys who slept in the tank treads so that the army couldn't enter the main square.