User:VatoFirme

Howdy.

Stuff I know about

I'm 27 years old, in grad school for art, and I've also spent a great deal of time studying gender and sexuality including LGBT studies. Not to mention I'm gay so I've had a lot of real-life experience with the subject.

I'm a white guy in an interracial relationship with a wonderful Chicano guy who I love with all my heart. We've been together for almost five years now, and in that time I've had to confront a lot of my own assumptions and prejudices about people of color, and I've become very interested in social justice and race relations in America. This prompted me to take classes on race issues, such as Chicano studies and race in popular culture. I'm interested in finding ways of explaining the reality of racial inequality in America to other white people without making them feel defensive, but it seems really difficult sometimes.

I study mythology/religion/folklore (all the same thing) in my free time, and I'm especially interested in how values and traditions intersect with popular culture.

I'm an atheist and I've noticed there is a ton of misunderstanding and stereotypes about atheists, so I'm interested in clearing those up. I lack a belief in god because I think there isn't any objective evidence for it. That doesn't mean I claim to know every secret about the universe or that I can say with 100% mathematical certainty that nothing sentient is behind the universe, and no I don't have just as much "faith" in logic and science as religious people have in their deity. Faith is belief without evidence. I prefer evidence to faith. And atheism is a lack of faith, not a faith itself, but a lot of people don't seem to understand that very well. And no I am not an immoral person, I am extremely concerned with morals. I think "do unto others" is a great rule, and I wish more religious people would follow it.

I've been a gamer all my life, and know quite a bit about the history of video games. Remember Rygar for the NES? Classic. I'm also a fanatical Smash Bros. addict.

I've taken great classes at UW-Madison on some subjects that unfortunately don't get a lot of attention and/or are typically underfunded, such as African art history and Native American studies, and I hope to put all the textbooks I've accumulated over the years to use on some wikipedia pages.

My editing style

I just try to be logical and fair. I'm interesting in reason and objective facts. I'm not interested in people trying to pass their subjective opinions or spiritual beliefs off as literal truth.

I definitely don't think NPOV means you should balance every point from one side of an issue with a point from the opposing side, because there is the matter of claims having different weights according to their reliability.

Most of the time I just clean up grammar and spelling errors. In my short time here I've come to hate the word "however" and how it is overused in so many articles (and I often catch myself using it too, I'll be the first to admit it!). I habitually put two spaces after a period but I'm trying to train myself not to, because it seems to me that the practice is falling out of style.

As far as politics goes I've noticed that some people in America are very polarized, they think the Republican party is like fascists and the Democrats are like communists, which sounds really distorted to me. From what I've been studying, the United States in general is far more religious and is skewed more toward the right than most other Western countries. I don't see anything the Democrats are trying to do that is remotely communist. I'm not trying to say that the Republican party is fascist (though some individual politicians and supporters certainly fit the description), but what I am saying is that our parties don't occupy opposite sides of the entire possible spectrum of Western political positions. My personal views aside, I think it would be helpful for more editors to take that into consideration, or if they disagree with it to at least examine the issue objectively, and stop painting the two dominant parties as polar opposites of each other on a general scale of politics, when really they both occupy a smaller spectrum of world politics that skews right compared to the rest of the Western industrialized world, i.e. Europe, Canada, etc.

So like this:

WESTERN POLITICS: left..............................|..............................right

U.S. POLITICS: liberals............|............conservatives