Shelled out

I was looking through some old PowerShell scripts of mine.

What in the world was this attempting? It appears to be trying to add, multiply and concatenate numbers, and to be reading out the contents of files and directories to the console. Which are completely unrelated and connected by no logic. Why, just why?


Function Examine-Dir($contents, $padding)
{
write-host "Examining folder"
$spacer = "".PadLeft($padding)
Foreach ($file in $contents)
{
$isDir = Test-Path $file -pathtype container
write-host "$spacer Found $file $isDir"
if ($isDir)
{
$childContents = Get-ChildItem $file
$childPadding = 2+$padding
Examine-Dir $childContents $childPadding
}
}
write-host ""
}

Function My-Add($num1, $num2)
{
return $num1 + $num2;
}

Function My-Multiply($num)
{
return $num * $num
}

Function My-Concat($num)
{
return "$num$num"
}

Function Switch-On-User-Choice()
{
write-host " 1) for add"
write-host " 2) for multiply"
write-host " 3) for concat"
$choice = read-host "Please make a choice"

write-host "You typed [ $choice ]"
$starter = 3

switch ($choice)
{
1 { $result = My-Add $starter $choice }
2 { $result = My-Multiply $starter }
3 { $result = My-Concat $starter }
default { $result = "[input not recognized]" }
}
write-host "Starting with $starter, result is $result"
return $result
}

# Start program #################################################

$r = Switch-On-User-Choice

write-host "------returned from function: $r------"

$files = Get-ChildItem
$padding = 2
Examine-Dir $files $padding

I can think of no reason I wrote that, nor what I ever would’ve done with it.

The narrative

The new conventional wisdom among truth-challenged liberals is that sexual assault and harassment were just as bad from German men prior to the events in Cologne and other cities — and in fact that those evil German men may have even taught those gentle, lamb-like North African men how to harass those German women! Who probably deserved it anyway for being, like, racist or something and wearing short skirts to tempt those meek little kittens into evil!

Never even among the conservative loons, morons and nutcases have I seen such a sorry display of treachery and a forsaking of the values that one professes to hold.

And the odd thing about it is that it’s (mostly) women who are telling these assaulted and harassed women that they had it just as bad before — when both the stats and anecdote show pretty definitively that this was absolutely not the case.

I know that the legacy of racism causes huge cognitive dissonance among liberals when anyone whose skin is darker than Heidi Klum’s does something wrong — but good god, I never thought I’d see a whole bloc of my fellow liberals perfectly willing to tell millions of women to lie back and try to enjoy the theft and rape because they probably either deserved it or brought it on themselves.

Kinds of rebellion

It is not any kind of rebellion to be fat and unhealthy (which, yes, statistically do go hand in hand) because some men prefer you’d be lithe and limber.

That’s only rebelling against yourself, which isn’t that useful.

Being fat and unhealthy is its own punishment, on many axes. Your life will be more uncomfortable and difficult. You’ll tend to be a burden both literal and metaphorical on others. And you’ll die earlier.

Corpulence to spite some ill-perceived expectation from others is roughly equivalent to gouging your own eyes out when you see something on TV that you don’t like.

Reason, though, is the last thing people try and only when all other approaches have failed. This is no different.