So, barring a shock vote in the Senate, it's August 2nd and we're out of the debt-ceiling crisis. For now. (It'll keep being 'for now' as long as we have a debt ceiling to raise, something we enshrined during World War 1 with the Second Liberty Bond Act of 1917 and modified with Public Debt Acts during World War 2. It wouldn't be very difficult to repeal the ceiling if we didn't want to have one anymore.)
Beyond the point just noted, we're not going to discuss here my feelings on the bill itself. I'm more focused on the feelings channeled through the bill and the debate over it. And those feelings are abysmal. Just about everybody hates... well, everybody hates everything. We're angry at each other for the feelings our opposite number holds. We're angry at the middle for not picking a side. We're angry at our own side for not getting enough out of the bill.
One person I saw, a Democrat or progressive or liberal or whatever term it is we want to use today, noted that they had a sort of grudging respect for the Tea Party, because "at least they stand for something."
At least they stand for something.
Whenever I hear this phrase uttered, it is always from a person fed up that their side hasn't gotten close enough to their ideals. That they compromised-- actually, no, "compromised" is never the word used in this context. The word is "caved" or "folded" or something else to that effect. My side lost. The other side 'at least stood for something'.
'Standing for something' is in this context just about always confused with 'being a stubborn asshole'. 'Standing for something', I would argue, plays a very large part in how Congress got to its current state. Use the two phrases interchangeably, and you tell me if the sentiment changes at all. In fact, oftentimes that's the first half of the sentence. 'He may be a stubborn asshole, but at least he stands for something'. It's somewhat unintentionally redundant.
Congress is full of people who stand for something. They stand for something so much that they only talk to each other in the most technical sense of the word, never seriously making progress towards critical, must-pass legislation until the very last possible second before disaster hits. And some won't even talk then. There are only barely enough people to barely operate for barely enough time to function. Imagine a plane flying through a mountain range, headed straight for a cliffside. Essentially, we are gunning the engine and headed right for it, only to wildly yank on the controls while screaming "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" and missing the cliff by 20 feet... only to aim the plane straight at the next mountain over and start it all again. Sooner or later, that plane is going to slam into a mountain.
And there are mountains ahead. There's a government shutdown fight coming up not too long from now. The debt ceiling will raise its head again. And then there's every routine bill that can be blocked, held, filibustered or otherwise held hostage in any way, shape or form.
The thing is, there are a whole lot of things that can be stood for. Political positions. Sports teams. Coke or Pepsi. And, as is becoming increasingly apropos, the positions held in wars. Which wars? At the risk of sounding like Sarah Palin: All of them. Pick your favorite. Every war ever began because people stood for things quite forcefully.
"We believe rather fervently that your oil/land/people actually belong to us. We also believe that you should be dead."
"We disagree."
"Well, let us settle this disagreement through grievous bodily harm on the grandest possible scale."
"Kudos to you for standing up for your beliefs, but by the same token, I do hope you enjoy the sight of your own blood, good sirs."
We reached a point, somewhere along the line, where the middle is unacceptable. If a bill goes left, it angers the right. If a bill goes right, it angers the left. If a bill goes anywhere in between, it angers EVERYBODY.
And on some level, we have to realize that we did this to ourselves. The sentiment- and Nate Silver's analysis bears it out- may show that the will of the voters and elected officials are in total disconnect with each other. But don't think yourself blameless. Each and every one of them is only there because the voters put them there. (And please don't give me the 'it's who counts the votes' line. If anyone should be using that line right now, it's me. I'm from Wisconsin. Look at all the shenanigans going on here with open sacks of votes and fliers muddying the knowledge of when Election Day is and fake candidates who say outright that they're fake... and I'm not boycotting or acting like my vote doesn't count even given all that. Why? First off, that's just not how I operate. Second, because I know if I stay home the other side won't care. Me staying home seems to be what they're actively trying to CAUSE. Me staying home is only going to be seen as an increase in their margin of victory. I'm not going to give them the satisfaction. They want me not voting, they are going to have to physically hog-tie and drag me from the precinct.)
You put them in. You- or people you know; you may have supported their opponents- went into the booth and checked the name of each and every person in that body. America voted for gridlock, for checks on one-party rule, and gridlock is exactly what America got. You voted them in, and you can vote them out as well. At the very least, this particular set of people has proven fundamentally incapable of working with each other. Given that the legislative process is built around debate and negotiation and compromise, what that means is that this set of 535 people is incompatible with the system.
What needs to happen, if we are to avoid fights like this in the future, is that there needs to be a movement towards people who are compatible with the system. People that aren't stubborn assholes. People who can talk to each other like adult human beings. People who, instead of arguing over whether the plane in the mountain range should veer at the mountain on the left or the mountain on the right, stop and consider that maybe the plane should fly over the mountains and not veer at any of them.
You know. People who don't stand for things so much.
Showing posts with label morals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label morals. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Nothing Left To Lose
Have you ever watched one of those police-videos shows? Usually, whatever the person the police are chasing did to have the cops going after them, the smartest thing they can do, at any given moment of the chase, is to pull over and surrender. Their chances of getting away are minimal at best, especially if the chase happens to be one that gets picked up by the local news. The longer they run, the more cops chase them and the more opportunity they have to make things worse for themselves by racking up additional charges.
However, every so often, you'll see a video where the consequences facing the fugitive in question are so severe that it becomes a case where they feel they have nothing left to lose, or at least where the narrator interprets it as such. They have such a sentence facing them that, in a coldly pragmatic sense, for them pulling over would be pointless. These are the ones who tend to face either life or effective life without parole, the death penalty, or in a few rare cases, are destined to die where they stand facing off against the cops. These people tend to yield the most harrowing and spectacular chases of all. The last category- the fugitives destined to go down in a blaze of glory- is almost a first-ballot Hall of Fame of the police-video set: the North Hollywood shootout, the Killdozer, the San Diego tank rampage.
It's troubling, but at the same time, it is a natural human response. When someone feels as though they have nothing to lose, inhibitions, reservations, and anything else holding that person back all fall away. All that is possible becomes a potential course of action, and all thought to be impossible is considered anyway. After all, might as well. The feeling is responsible for some of humanity's most dramatic and heroic moments, but it can also lead to some of its worst.
Over the weekend, one of these moments happened in Columbia, South Carolina. Kenneth Myers was found dead on Saturday after having killed his wife, her twin sister and mother, and his ex-girlfriend before turning the gun on himself. His relationship with the ex-girlfriend slowly deteriorated over seven years, and his marriage was doing the same. The economy was also negatively affecting his business in auto glass repair.
Michael Rushton of the Wagoner Police Department noted of Myers, "At one point in time, whenever he tried to evade us, I saw his face for a brief second, and you could tell he was a different person," Rushton said. "He had gotten to the point where he thought he had nothing else to lose. He figured he was done for, I'm assuming, and I really hate that he had done what he had done."
Which leads us to a bit of a problem. Any effective punishment or treatment, or threat of same, depends on the target believing that things will be measurably better if they cease their undesirable behavior. If that does not exist, they won't stop. And if they reach a point where they are convinced that they're screwed no matter what they do, that allows them to let loose. Instead of one dead body, there are five. Instead of a surrender, there is a shootout.
At the same time, though, to a degree, properly calibrating a punishment so that this feeling is not triggered is outrageously difficult, and may not even be possible. Again, usually a punishment's effectiveness depends at least partly, and sometimes completely, on the offender's perception of it. If the offender doesn't think it's worth restraining themselves over, they won't. And if they think they have nothing to lose-
think being the keyword- well, we've just gone over that.
Whether or not there is even a minorly feasible way to prevent the nothing-to-lose sentiment from taking hold in the mind of a suspect, the failure of one to be identified results in tragedy that need not happen every time it does. The consequences of not having a preventative procedure are such that at least some brainstorming should be devoted towards trying to make one.
Maybe a fix is possible. Maybe it's just one of those things that happens. But whether or not there's an answer to the problem, it's at least worth asking the question.
However, every so often, you'll see a video where the consequences facing the fugitive in question are so severe that it becomes a case where they feel they have nothing left to lose, or at least where the narrator interprets it as such. They have such a sentence facing them that, in a coldly pragmatic sense, for them pulling over would be pointless. These are the ones who tend to face either life or effective life without parole, the death penalty, or in a few rare cases, are destined to die where they stand facing off against the cops. These people tend to yield the most harrowing and spectacular chases of all. The last category- the fugitives destined to go down in a blaze of glory- is almost a first-ballot Hall of Fame of the police-video set: the North Hollywood shootout, the Killdozer, the San Diego tank rampage.
It's troubling, but at the same time, it is a natural human response. When someone feels as though they have nothing to lose, inhibitions, reservations, and anything else holding that person back all fall away. All that is possible becomes a potential course of action, and all thought to be impossible is considered anyway. After all, might as well. The feeling is responsible for some of humanity's most dramatic and heroic moments, but it can also lead to some of its worst.
Over the weekend, one of these moments happened in Columbia, South Carolina. Kenneth Myers was found dead on Saturday after having killed his wife, her twin sister and mother, and his ex-girlfriend before turning the gun on himself. His relationship with the ex-girlfriend slowly deteriorated over seven years, and his marriage was doing the same. The economy was also negatively affecting his business in auto glass repair.
Michael Rushton of the Wagoner Police Department noted of Myers, "At one point in time, whenever he tried to evade us, I saw his face for a brief second, and you could tell he was a different person," Rushton said. "He had gotten to the point where he thought he had nothing else to lose. He figured he was done for, I'm assuming, and I really hate that he had done what he had done."
Which leads us to a bit of a problem. Any effective punishment or treatment, or threat of same, depends on the target believing that things will be measurably better if they cease their undesirable behavior. If that does not exist, they won't stop. And if they reach a point where they are convinced that they're screwed no matter what they do, that allows them to let loose. Instead of one dead body, there are five. Instead of a surrender, there is a shootout.
At the same time, though, to a degree, properly calibrating a punishment so that this feeling is not triggered is outrageously difficult, and may not even be possible. Again, usually a punishment's effectiveness depends at least partly, and sometimes completely, on the offender's perception of it. If the offender doesn't think it's worth restraining themselves over, they won't. And if they think they have nothing to lose-
think being the keyword- well, we've just gone over that.
Whether or not there is even a minorly feasible way to prevent the nothing-to-lose sentiment from taking hold in the mind of a suspect, the failure of one to be identified results in tragedy that need not happen every time it does. The consequences of not having a preventative procedure are such that at least some brainstorming should be devoted towards trying to make one.
Maybe a fix is possible. Maybe it's just one of those things that happens. But whether or not there's an answer to the problem, it's at least worth asking the question.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Cleri, Cleri, Way Too Eerie
Reality TV, unless you live under a rock, you know as filled with preening, uninhibited, often intoxicated loudmouths who are willing to do anything to get their 15 minutes. (Minus some far-too-uncommon blessed souls.) Once in a while, one of these inherently hateable people somehow becomes a person that people love to hate, or at least is viewed as such by the producers, and is brought back for future seasons, or even guest appearances on other shows, or for a rare obnoxious few, a show all to themselves.
This is a large part of why so many obnoxious people show up. Aside from the stated, primary goal of the program, many of them hope that by standing out enough, by being the famewhoriest of the famewhores, they too will get their own show, or at least another appearance on the one they're on.
What none of them realize, however, is that they can't all have that. The punishment for failure in acquiring the Famewhore Holy Grail can have disastrous effects once the cameras go off. Relationships at home can be strained or ended. Employers may be humiliated to have these people on the payroll. And if you're on a talent-search show for a common job- a cook, a businessperson, an interior designer- and you make a disastrous blunder, or get eliminated early on, your career in that field can easily come to a screeching halt. Never mind getting the dream job the show was offering. What aspiring cook anywhere is going to take lessons from the person who, on national television, can't tell sugar from salt?
(Colleen, Season 5, Hell's Kitchen. I know you were wondering.)
If you truly suck at what you do, or if you truly suck as a person, reality TV has a billion ways to make sure you get yours.
Take 'The Moment Of Truth', technically a game show but with all the spectacle of reality TV. The premise is simple enough. You take a lie detector test prior to the show, are asked a series of questions (some more personal than others), and are given many of the same questions on air. You are tasked with answering honestly. The more questions you answer honestly on-air, the more money you win, up to a top prize of $500,000. (In the American version, at least, and yes, there were international versions.) But if at any point you lie, you lose everything and the game is over. Refuse to answer, and the game is also over, although you (and your loved ones) are given one opportunity to swap out one question you feel is better left unanswered by pressing a button.
On its face, it doesn't sound so bad. But once you start asking the kind of questions you expect someone to answer for half a million dollars- or $200,000, as nobody ever made it to the top of the money ladder in the US version- things go south in a hurry, especially since friends, family and other people in the contestant's life were commonly brought in by FOX to spectate and sometimes ask a question themselves.
And this is prime-time television. They know how you answered before the cameras go on. You know full well they're going to make a beeline for the most humiliating and damaging answers in the whole test. Which is the other thing: the answers are out there once you give them, whether you win any money or not.
The most spectacular revealing of skeletons in someone's closet came by way of Lauren Cleri of Piermont, New York, who would later flat-out admit to the New York Post that she was solely going for the money.
Lauren left enough bridges burned in the process to span an ocean. Host Mark L. Wahlberg, who you'll note as the person who signed up to host this show in the first place, felt the need to make a preshow comment that the episode containing Lauren, had Wahlberg had his way, would not have aired at all, and that it was "the most uncomfortable I've ever been on television."
The episode is available on YouTube here:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Here is the line of questions Lauren faced, with her answers in parentheses:
1: As an employee of a hair salon, have you ever told a customer you liked their hairstyle when in fact, you didn't? (no)
2: Have you ever flashed a stranger just for laughs? (yes)
3: Would you give food to a stray dog before you would give it to a homeless person? (yes)
This one got the first groans from the audience. If they only knew what was coming...
4: Have you ever derived pleasure when one of your siblings has gotten into trouble? (yes)
5: Have you ever been fired from a job for stealing money? (yes)
Please note, Lauren hasn't actually won any money yet. The first prize level, $10,000, comes only after answering the first six questions.
6: If you knew you wouldn't get caught, would you steal money from your place of employment? (no)
Now she's won money. The next level is five more questions for $25,000.
7: Since you've been married, have you ever pretended to be asleep in order to avoid having sex with your husband Frank? (yes)
8: Do you blame your husband for your lack of close friends? (yes)
9: Would you ever be a surrogate mother for your sister if she were unable to have children? (yes)
10: Do you think your parents are proud of you? (no)
11: Do you know things about your father that you keep secret from your mother? (yes)
$25,000 and some long talks with Frank are now Lauren's... for now. Next up, four questions for $100,000. And those long talks are about to get longer, as at this point Wahlberg appears for a second advisory warning, mentioning the following to be the part that made him not want to air the episode.
12: Do you secretly stay in touch with any boyfriends that your husband does not know about? (no)
13: Have you ever taken off your wedding ring to appear as if you were single? (yes)
14: Do you believe you might have been in love with a former boyfriend on your wedding day? (yes)
At this point, Wahlberg is half-facepalming and telling Lauren "I can't tell you to walk away" while in the process strongly suggesting it. When she elects to continue, he just shakes his head. Lauren's aforementioned ex arrives on stage to ask the $100,000 question.
15: If I wanted to get back together with you, would you leave your husband?
Wahlberg is almost begging Frank to hit the button and swap the question out, but by now Frank's reaction is 'no, no, now I kinda want to hear this'. So Lauren's sister hits the button instead.
Fate can be cruel, Lauren's sister.
15-A: Do you believe I am the man you should be married to?
Not only was that fight not avoided, it actually got worse. Lauren said yes with disturbingly little hesitation. Coming back true (and making the skipped question easily guessable), she made it to $100,000, which by this point seems not nearly enough money to cover the costs of even attempting to undo all the damage.
So of course Lauren continues on for $200,000, three more questions away.
16: Since you've been married, have you ever had sexual relations with someone other than your husband?
Wahlberg: "I wish the button was still there."
Frank: "You're telling me."
Lauren answered yes. The answer is true. Frank is now burying his face in his hands. Lauren's face has gone cold at this point. ...well, it was prior, but now it is flat-out emotionless. Forget the long talks. There's no longer anything to talk about. This marriage has died right there on-stage.
And then reality TV rears up to give Lauren a good hard smack:
17: Do you think you're a good person?
The entire human race and several species of lichen found only in Antarctica immediately scream the answer. Frank shakes his head no before a word comes out of Lauren's mouth.
Lauren answers yes.
The lie detector begs to differ.
Game over. Lauren walks away with absolutely nothing. This is the end of the episode, and Wahlberg makes one final note in front of an empty stage:
"I honestly believe that some truths are better left unsaid. Hopefully, Lauren and her family can make peace with what happened here tonight. I wish them all the very best."
In fact, the marriage may have been doomed from the moment she was cast. As the New York Post reported:
In an update interview, Lauren noted that she and Frank split up. Or as she put it, "are no longer living under the same roof." An aspiring model, she also told the New York Post that no job offers came out of her appearance.
Considering the nature of modeling, and considering there has been no update on her since, she is in all likelihood still waiting. Her only stable job now is as a cautionary tale.
This is a large part of why so many obnoxious people show up. Aside from the stated, primary goal of the program, many of them hope that by standing out enough, by being the famewhoriest of the famewhores, they too will get their own show, or at least another appearance on the one they're on.
What none of them realize, however, is that they can't all have that. The punishment for failure in acquiring the Famewhore Holy Grail can have disastrous effects once the cameras go off. Relationships at home can be strained or ended. Employers may be humiliated to have these people on the payroll. And if you're on a talent-search show for a common job- a cook, a businessperson, an interior designer- and you make a disastrous blunder, or get eliminated early on, your career in that field can easily come to a screeching halt. Never mind getting the dream job the show was offering. What aspiring cook anywhere is going to take lessons from the person who, on national television, can't tell sugar from salt?
(Colleen, Season 5, Hell's Kitchen. I know you were wondering.)
If you truly suck at what you do, or if you truly suck as a person, reality TV has a billion ways to make sure you get yours.
Take 'The Moment Of Truth', technically a game show but with all the spectacle of reality TV. The premise is simple enough. You take a lie detector test prior to the show, are asked a series of questions (some more personal than others), and are given many of the same questions on air. You are tasked with answering honestly. The more questions you answer honestly on-air, the more money you win, up to a top prize of $500,000. (In the American version, at least, and yes, there were international versions.) But if at any point you lie, you lose everything and the game is over. Refuse to answer, and the game is also over, although you (and your loved ones) are given one opportunity to swap out one question you feel is better left unanswered by pressing a button.
On its face, it doesn't sound so bad. But once you start asking the kind of questions you expect someone to answer for half a million dollars- or $200,000, as nobody ever made it to the top of the money ladder in the US version- things go south in a hurry, especially since friends, family and other people in the contestant's life were commonly brought in by FOX to spectate and sometimes ask a question themselves.
And this is prime-time television. They know how you answered before the cameras go on. You know full well they're going to make a beeline for the most humiliating and damaging answers in the whole test. Which is the other thing: the answers are out there once you give them, whether you win any money or not.
The most spectacular revealing of skeletons in someone's closet came by way of Lauren Cleri of Piermont, New York, who would later flat-out admit to the New York Post that she was solely going for the money.
Lauren left enough bridges burned in the process to span an ocean. Host Mark L. Wahlberg, who you'll note as the person who signed up to host this show in the first place, felt the need to make a preshow comment that the episode containing Lauren, had Wahlberg had his way, would not have aired at all, and that it was "the most uncomfortable I've ever been on television."
The episode is available on YouTube here:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Here is the line of questions Lauren faced, with her answers in parentheses:
1: As an employee of a hair salon, have you ever told a customer you liked their hairstyle when in fact, you didn't? (no)
2: Have you ever flashed a stranger just for laughs? (yes)
3: Would you give food to a stray dog before you would give it to a homeless person? (yes)
This one got the first groans from the audience. If they only knew what was coming...
4: Have you ever derived pleasure when one of your siblings has gotten into trouble? (yes)
5: Have you ever been fired from a job for stealing money? (yes)
Please note, Lauren hasn't actually won any money yet. The first prize level, $10,000, comes only after answering the first six questions.
6: If you knew you wouldn't get caught, would you steal money from your place of employment? (no)
Now she's won money. The next level is five more questions for $25,000.
7: Since you've been married, have you ever pretended to be asleep in order to avoid having sex with your husband Frank? (yes)
8: Do you blame your husband for your lack of close friends? (yes)
9: Would you ever be a surrogate mother for your sister if she were unable to have children? (yes)
10: Do you think your parents are proud of you? (no)
11: Do you know things about your father that you keep secret from your mother? (yes)
$25,000 and some long talks with Frank are now Lauren's... for now. Next up, four questions for $100,000. And those long talks are about to get longer, as at this point Wahlberg appears for a second advisory warning, mentioning the following to be the part that made him not want to air the episode.
12: Do you secretly stay in touch with any boyfriends that your husband does not know about? (no)
13: Have you ever taken off your wedding ring to appear as if you were single? (yes)
14: Do you believe you might have been in love with a former boyfriend on your wedding day? (yes)
At this point, Wahlberg is half-facepalming and telling Lauren "I can't tell you to walk away" while in the process strongly suggesting it. When she elects to continue, he just shakes his head. Lauren's aforementioned ex arrives on stage to ask the $100,000 question.
15: If I wanted to get back together with you, would you leave your husband?
Wahlberg is almost begging Frank to hit the button and swap the question out, but by now Frank's reaction is 'no, no, now I kinda want to hear this'. So Lauren's sister hits the button instead.
Fate can be cruel, Lauren's sister.
15-A: Do you believe I am the man you should be married to?
Not only was that fight not avoided, it actually got worse. Lauren said yes with disturbingly little hesitation. Coming back true (and making the skipped question easily guessable), she made it to $100,000, which by this point seems not nearly enough money to cover the costs of even attempting to undo all the damage.
So of course Lauren continues on for $200,000, three more questions away.
16: Since you've been married, have you ever had sexual relations with someone other than your husband?
Wahlberg: "I wish the button was still there."
Frank: "You're telling me."
Lauren answered yes. The answer is true. Frank is now burying his face in his hands. Lauren's face has gone cold at this point. ...well, it was prior, but now it is flat-out emotionless. Forget the long talks. There's no longer anything to talk about. This marriage has died right there on-stage.
And then reality TV rears up to give Lauren a good hard smack:
17: Do you think you're a good person?
The entire human race and several species of lichen found only in Antarctica immediately scream the answer. Frank shakes his head no before a word comes out of Lauren's mouth.
Lauren answers yes.
The lie detector begs to differ.
Game over. Lauren walks away with absolutely nothing. This is the end of the episode, and Wahlberg makes one final note in front of an empty stage:
"I honestly believe that some truths are better left unsaid. Hopefully, Lauren and her family can make peace with what happened here tonight. I wish them all the very best."
In fact, the marriage may have been doomed from the moment she was cast. As the New York Post reported:
The show's executive producer, Howard Schultz, said Lauren Cleri told him later that "she doesn't want a relationship [with her ex or her husband].
"She wanted out of her marriage, and she wanted to . . . tell the truth," Schultz told The Post.
"Perhaps some of it was then, 'If I'm going to end my marriage, then if I can win a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand dollars. I can start a new life with some cash in my pocket.' "
Asked if she went on the show to get out of her marriage, Lauren yesterday said "definitely" not.
In an update interview, Lauren noted that she and Frank split up. Or as she put it, "are no longer living under the same roof." An aspiring model, she also told the New York Post that no job offers came out of her appearance.
Considering the nature of modeling, and considering there has been no update on her since, she is in all likelihood still waiting. Her only stable job now is as a cautionary tale.
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Please Stop Talking About Some Guy's Clothed Wood
I'm not going to speak on the political implications of the whole Anthony Weiner scandal except to say that it is inescapable and that I would like to escape it. What Weiner did was dumb. That's undeniable. But I'm not clear on how dumb tweeting choices adversely affect one's ability to govern. One has to wonder just how misplaced our priorities are when the nation can, with high unemployment and a looming debt ceiling crisis and the ongoing labor battles, find itself so thoroughly distracted by a picture of a bump in a Congressman's pants. There's been more reaction to this picture than to bin Laden's proof-of-death photo.
And really, how much of this is being spurred on by the mere fact that the guy's name is Weiner? How much do we sound like one giant episode of Beavis and Butthead?
All this whole ordeal is really going to accomplish is to drive people away from the prospect of public office, as Mario Almonte of the Huffington Post exposits. We're sending the message that we care less about 20 years of public service than we do one tweet. It doesn't even take actual sex anymore. Just a bump in the pants and maybe a shot of you without your shirt.
Meanwhile, in Europe, Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi can be a straight-up dirty old man and be permitted to leave on his terms at a time of his choosing, weathering every storm.
That off my (clothed) chest, we might as well try and learn something from this mess, so here's Robert Weiss, founding director of the Sexual Recovery Institute, explaining the psychological aspects of why people do things like what Weiner did.
And really, how much of this is being spurred on by the mere fact that the guy's name is Weiner? How much do we sound like one giant episode of Beavis and Butthead?
All this whole ordeal is really going to accomplish is to drive people away from the prospect of public office, as Mario Almonte of the Huffington Post exposits. We're sending the message that we care less about 20 years of public service than we do one tweet. It doesn't even take actual sex anymore. Just a bump in the pants and maybe a shot of you without your shirt.
Meanwhile, in Europe, Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi can be a straight-up dirty old man and be permitted to leave on his terms at a time of his choosing, weathering every storm.
That off my (clothed) chest, we might as well try and learn something from this mess, so here's Robert Weiss, founding director of the Sexual Recovery Institute, explaining the psychological aspects of why people do things like what Weiner did.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Remember The Goat
Sunday, on Lisa Ling's Twitter feed:
Here's the ad she's referring to. So as not to cause the highlighted problem, it's a link and not an embed. Her first comment got picked up by a couple gaming forums, and the reaction was pretty largely 'who cares what she thinks' and 'idiot media is trying to stir up videogame controversy again'.
I'm not going to speak to the actual PTSD-causing quality of the ad- my dad, a Vietnam veteran, will commonly talk in his sleep using statements that frequently seem military-related, though to my knowledge he's not yet seen the ad and hasn't shown any waking-hour flashbacks of any stripe; otherwise he wouldn't be watching war stuff all day.
Though I will say that that particular ad isn't really all that outstanding or notable considering the genre. There are plenty of games just like it who have done similar ads. Unless this is some sort of crazy Pikachu-causing-a-seizure instance where the specific blend of images causes a trigger, I don't think she has much to worry about here. I think it might just be a side effect of her having been, as she said, working with PTSD veterans. Being around the subject a lot lately, it was fresh in her mind when she saw the ad, noticed it when she wouldn't have noticed it previously, and had the reaction she had. I think she overreacted, but I get her train of thought.
It's easy to see where the gamers are coming from too, particularly for me, a gamer myself. I grew up on the Atari and NES. A number of fights with the media and even governments over the years over a wide variety of games- Mortal Kombat, Grand Theft Auto, Manhunt, Postal, Doom, Night Trap, Death Race 2000, just to name a few off the top of my head- has given gamers a sort of 'oh, geez, here we go again' attitude towards any new controversy, or anything that even has the whiff of a controversy. They brace themselves any time a videogame is even tangentically connected to something bad in the news. If a kid shoots up a school, after 'that's terrible', one of the first reactions you'll likely get from a gamer is 'please don't let there be an Xbox in his room when the cops show up at his house,' because if there is, they know exactly what's liable to happen next. Whatever game was spinning in his Xbox at the time is at risk of being the next controversy, especially if it was a game with guns in it.
And since the Battlefield 3 ad doesn't really stand out, the reaction is pretty much to dismiss Lisa as one more stupid journalist that has no idea what she's talking about.
Epke of the forum NoobToob, however, made a different point:
That's the other thing about 'controversial' games: controversy sells. People want to see what all the fuss is about. And oh, it can get much, much worse.
How much worse?
In 2007, Sony was promoting God of War 2 at a European release party in Athens, Greece. Fitting, as God of War references (read: kills) a large chunk of Greek mythology. In this release party, Sony went for the theme of an ancient Greek orgy. Attendees were treated to topless women.
Nobody noticed the topless women.
This is because everybody was too busy noticing the decapitated goat. The Daily Mail kicked off the controversy by describing it as such:
Sony released a statement in response saying that this was irresponsible reporting. Nobody was eating out of the goat, and it was returned to the butcher afterward. Well, that just makes it SO much better.
Everybody got in an uproar over this one, gamers included. Sony's explanation barely even slowed anyone down, with the response being simply 'you're still using a dead goat to promote your game'.
Here's actual footage of the event, so as to get away from he-said-she-said. You'll note in the video that snakes were not pulled out of a pit, but rather a key from a box filled with snakes, and the goat thing consisted of drinking something out of a large pot; Sony claimed it was punch. The knife-throwing, though, seems to have been described accurately.
God of War 2, of course, sold like gangbusters.
The eternal knock on violent games has been that the gamers somehow can't tell games from reality; that they'll put down the game, go about their day, and then mindlessly shoot someone thinking they'll get points for it, or something else of that nature.
Everything described by the Daily Mail, even that which was shown as wrong, is something most gamers would do in a game without thinking twice about it. Killing a goat is nothing. Using an in-game goat as a golf ball is a story you repeat on forums. In real life, though, when a goat gets killed, those same gamers will react like everyone else.
Battlefield 3 shouldn't be any different, for gamers or veterans. At least, that's what I'm hoping.
UPDATE: Lisa took the time to respond...
"Thx Aaron...I JUST returned home from a veterans retreat where men had been dealing with severe ptsd for decades. They told me that any realistic portrayal of war sends them into a panic. When I saw that commercial out of the blue, I couldn't help but think of those guys. I have nothing against the video game itself, but seeing the commercial on TV--and how real it is just startled me."
"Any realistic portrayal of war" is a fair bit more disheartening; as I stated, Battlefield 3's ad isn't that unusual. Ads and trailers for franchises like Call of Duty and Medal of Honor, as well as the rest of the Battlefield franchise, aren't going to be any easier on them. Halo, Killzone and Metal Gear would easily count as well if the threshold for 'realistic' is adjusted low enough.
Horrified by the new Battlefield 3 commercial I just saw--especially after working with U.S. veterans with severe PTSD.
To the Battlefield gamers out there: I have no prob with the games, but when commercials come on randomly, it can trigger things.
Here's the ad she's referring to. So as not to cause the highlighted problem, it's a link and not an embed. Her first comment got picked up by a couple gaming forums, and the reaction was pretty largely 'who cares what she thinks' and 'idiot media is trying to stir up videogame controversy again'.
I'm not going to speak to the actual PTSD-causing quality of the ad- my dad, a Vietnam veteran, will commonly talk in his sleep using statements that frequently seem military-related, though to my knowledge he's not yet seen the ad and hasn't shown any waking-hour flashbacks of any stripe; otherwise he wouldn't be watching war stuff all day.
Though I will say that that particular ad isn't really all that outstanding or notable considering the genre. There are plenty of games just like it who have done similar ads. Unless this is some sort of crazy Pikachu-causing-a-seizure instance where the specific blend of images causes a trigger, I don't think she has much to worry about here. I think it might just be a side effect of her having been, as she said, working with PTSD veterans. Being around the subject a lot lately, it was fresh in her mind when she saw the ad, noticed it when she wouldn't have noticed it previously, and had the reaction she had. I think she overreacted, but I get her train of thought.
It's easy to see where the gamers are coming from too, particularly for me, a gamer myself. I grew up on the Atari and NES. A number of fights with the media and even governments over the years over a wide variety of games- Mortal Kombat, Grand Theft Auto, Manhunt, Postal, Doom, Night Trap, Death Race 2000, just to name a few off the top of my head- has given gamers a sort of 'oh, geez, here we go again' attitude towards any new controversy, or anything that even has the whiff of a controversy. They brace themselves any time a videogame is even tangentically connected to something bad in the news. If a kid shoots up a school, after 'that's terrible', one of the first reactions you'll likely get from a gamer is 'please don't let there be an Xbox in his room when the cops show up at his house,' because if there is, they know exactly what's liable to happen next. Whatever game was spinning in his Xbox at the time is at risk of being the next controversy, especially if it was a game with guns in it.
And since the Battlefield 3 ad doesn't really stand out, the reaction is pretty much to dismiss Lisa as one more stupid journalist that has no idea what she's talking about.
Epke of the forum NoobToob, however, made a different point:
EA [the publisher] will be pleased, there is no such thing as bad press, BF3 will sell more because of this.
And what is the biggie? it is not like the airport massacre in [Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2], just war like war is.
That's the other thing about 'controversial' games: controversy sells. People want to see what all the fuss is about. And oh, it can get much, much worse.
How much worse?
In 2007, Sony was promoting God of War 2 at a European release party in Athens, Greece. Fitting, as God of War references (read: kills) a large chunk of Greek mythology. In this release party, Sony went for the theme of an ancient Greek orgy. Attendees were treated to topless women.
Nobody noticed the topless women.
This is because everybody was too busy noticing the decapitated goat. The Daily Mail kicked off the controversy by describing it as such:
At the event, guests competed to see who could eat the most offal - procured elsewhere and intended to resemble the goat's intestines - from its stomach.
They also threw knives at targets and pulled live snakes from a pit with their bare hands.
Topless girls added to the louche atmosphere by dipping grapes into guests' mouths, while a male model portraying Kratos, the game's warrior hero, handed out garlands.
Sony released a statement in response saying that this was irresponsible reporting. Nobody was eating out of the goat, and it was returned to the butcher afterward. Well, that just makes it SO much better.
Everybody got in an uproar over this one, gamers included. Sony's explanation barely even slowed anyone down, with the response being simply 'you're still using a dead goat to promote your game'.
Here's actual footage of the event, so as to get away from he-said-she-said. You'll note in the video that snakes were not pulled out of a pit, but rather a key from a box filled with snakes, and the goat thing consisted of drinking something out of a large pot; Sony claimed it was punch. The knife-throwing, though, seems to have been described accurately.
God of War 2, of course, sold like gangbusters.
The eternal knock on violent games has been that the gamers somehow can't tell games from reality; that they'll put down the game, go about their day, and then mindlessly shoot someone thinking they'll get points for it, or something else of that nature.
Everything described by the Daily Mail, even that which was shown as wrong, is something most gamers would do in a game without thinking twice about it. Killing a goat is nothing. Using an in-game goat as a golf ball is a story you repeat on forums. In real life, though, when a goat gets killed, those same gamers will react like everyone else.
Battlefield 3 shouldn't be any different, for gamers or veterans. At least, that's what I'm hoping.
UPDATE: Lisa took the time to respond...
"Thx Aaron...I JUST returned home from a veterans retreat where men had been dealing with severe ptsd for decades. They told me that any realistic portrayal of war sends them into a panic. When I saw that commercial out of the blue, I couldn't help but think of those guys. I have nothing against the video game itself, but seeing the commercial on TV--and how real it is just startled me."
"Any realistic portrayal of war" is a fair bit more disheartening; as I stated, Battlefield 3's ad isn't that unusual. Ads and trailers for franchises like Call of Duty and Medal of Honor, as well as the rest of the Battlefield franchise, aren't going to be any easier on them. Halo, Killzone and Metal Gear would easily count as well if the threshold for 'realistic' is adjusted low enough.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Wikiplexed
Julian Assange.
What am I going to do with you?
Anyone who doesn't know the name Julian Assange by now is hiding under a rock. He's the Wikileaks guy, for the two of you that applies to. He takes leaks provided by a range of whistleblowers, and after a period of time spent X-ing out the informant's name, releases the leaks to the general public. For a while, this worked out pretty well. The leaks had a place to go, once in a while they'd get major media airtime, Wikileaks got a free plug, everyone ends up happy (aside from whoever's information got leaked.)
Recently, though, it's all gone wrong. Half the world's governments would love nothing more than to see a bullet through Assange's head, with much of the general public none to fond of him either, generally those from countries Assange has targeted. Interpol knows where he is and is one order away from moving on him. Sweden wants him on (disputed) sexual charges. Some Americans want to try him as a spy. Ecuador offered, then rescinded, an offer of safe haven. Wikileaks is losing places to host a server, as well as sources of financial support.
Things began to fall apart, at least from my vantage point, right around the time of the leak of the 2007 "Collateral Murder" video, obviously NSFW, which was leaked back in April. Wikileaks, at this point, went from an in-the-background place to do your leaking to a news item in and of itself, placing its own practices in the spotlight. They came to a head just recently, when the first of the 251,287 diplomatic cables began to see light. So what of it all? What can we learn from all this?
Not all that much, actually. At least, not much that Assange has been intending to teach.
You see, a lot of his previous leaks never really drew much attention. Part of the reason, I think, has to do with the sheer size of the information dump being conducted. Remember the healthcare debate? Remember how many teeth had to be pulled to get people to read a 2,000-page bill? Remember how much hay was made of the size of said bill? People often made it onto the news simply for having read the entire bill front to back. 2,000 pages is a tiny, pint-sized Wikileak. Again, the diplomatic cables number 251,287. Assange himself has readily admitted that he receives more material than he can sift through on his own. Which is the thing. If he can't do it, the average person has no chance. No matter how much info is presented, one person can only get through so much. If the important bits are hidden among pages and pages of detritus, the important bits tend to go unnoticed, as if they were never leaked at all. In journalism, this is called 'burying the lede', and considering that Assange believes himself to at some level be a journalist, he ought to know this. When the important information is easily findable by a visitor, things run smoothly. When not, it has less impact.
With the diplomatic cables, he has reversed this and resolved not to bury the lede. However, he has gone too far in the other direction. He has made everything a lede. News cycle after news cycle sees only a small easily-digestible handful of the quarter-million cables released, with each and every one devoured. So far, only about 1,100 have seen air.
But there's a problem. 251,287 cables does not mean 251,287 bombshell revelations. Far from it. There is the assorted useful piece of information. There almost has to be. You take any random group of 251,287 diplomatic cables, there's bound to be something new and interesting. The knowledge that China is not as warm towards North Korea as originally thought, the plan by Hillary Clinton concerning spying at UN headquarters, these can be of use. But other things Assange may have intended as bombshells are really nothing that someone paying sufficient attention to the news might already have figured out independently. China's cavalier attitude and hacking of Google shouldn't come as a large shock if you had been paying attention to Google's early adventures in China, where they came perilously close to pulling out of the country entirely. Google had suspected as much. Corruption in Pakistan and Afghanistan are not big surprises if you had been paying attention to previous reports on same that did not require Assange's assistance to find out. Vladimir Putin knew of the death of Aleksander Litvinenko, we've learned, but then, this was merely a confirmation of something just about everybody had reckoned from day one. The cables show China as flexing their muscle in diplomacy to the point of irritation by much of the rest of the world, but then, this is about as easily seen as the sun. The part about China's irritation with Norway was already found out when the Norwegian-based Nobel committee awarded Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo the Nobel Peace Prize, to where people came away knowing that if China wasn't aggressive towards Norway before, they certainly are now. We learn from the cables that the United States is doubtful of Mexico's ability to fight the drug cartels, but then, who isn't? Any news value is merely concerning tone and scale. Even the China/North Korea leak is seen as some as overstating the case.
And then there's the chatter behind each other's backs. The insults. The gossip, as it's been so frequently called. These are functionally worthless. Less than worthless, even. Sure. Diplomats are catty behind each other's backs. So are workers in just about any field of employment ever. This is nothing compared to what often happens in the diplomatic world. Spies are frequently sent into that field; it's easy to spy and easy to pull the spy out if something goes wrong. Duplicity is a grand, time-honored tradition in the diplomatic universe, of which you can find examples all the way back to ancient Greece and Rome; the Bible; the time of Hammurabi. People talking derisively about other people in the State Department? Well, I never! All that is likely to happen by releasing these is that it makes people less likely to talk to these diplomats, and go to other methods, potentially war, to achieve their goals concerning the countries involved. Diplomats also engage in diplomacy- trying to get along with each other. Why engage in conversation with another country if this is going to be the result of discussing things in their country (these are all cables from embassies in the US)? Forget talk. Might as well take the more direct and forceful route. And in moments of particularly high tension, one wrong word can sometimes be all it takes to light the powder keg. Go and look at all the duplicity that went on over the course of the Cold War, spying, name-calling and everything. How much of it that was not public at the time of its occurrence do you think could have been leaked without either the Americans or Soviets pushing the button in response? Not a whole lot, really.
That is, if it's only one target. A curious thing about blame is that when everybody is guilty, frequently, nobody is. Governmental investigations of lobbyists and corporations and such more frequently claim a scalp when someone is singled out for blame. When someone wants people not to 'play the blame game', this is what they're trying to do: make everybody guilty so that individuals- or, more to the usual point, they themselves- don't actually suffer consequences.
This is the phenomenon that Assange, in his zeal, has seemingly triggered. Though he may hate Hillary Clinton and want her to step down, he has created so many other guilty parties that few are in a moral position to press for her ouster, not that one would do so over such trifling things anyway, and the ones that have not been targeted have ample reason to believe they will be soon enough and any attempt to go after Clinton will end up blowing back on them. There will be a black eye for a while, yes, but eventually, all will be forgiven.
There is a debate that exists over whether we have a right to know about the content of these cables or whether they should remain secret. The first thing we must establish is that, either way, the debate does not apply to Assange. His informant, perhaps, who's surely in for a world of hurt because Assange's technique of simply X-ing out the informant's name is absolutely boneheaded, but not Assange. (Any interested party with a copy of the information can just look to see what got X'ed out, see what name is there, and go after that person; the informant would actually be better hidden if Assange didn't X out anything at all. It's the anonymity equivalent of giving the informant a large neon sign saying "PAY NO ATTENTION TO THIS MAN".) The cables originate in the United States. Assange is Australian and does not answer to American authority. (Not that he answers to Australian authority either, but you get the point.)
We've covered this particular mentality in a previous piece. Foreign nongovernmental entities don't really care what you think of them. And when an empire declines, as the piece exposits, everybody wants to get their licks in. Assange could, in a sense, be compared to the Visigoths sacking Rome, accelerating the empire's decline by making off with things of importance to the empire- in this case, the empire's secrets, privacy and reputation. An actual sacking of Washington DC, or any major world capital, would be unfeasible in this particular day and age, but what one can do is, instead of taking objects of value directly, take the ability to earn those objects or be able to afford to keep the objects they have. This being an age of information, every time a secret is divulged against one's will, every time one's dirty laundry is forced out into the open, it's like another gold coin, another gemstone, another crown jewel out the door.
Anyway. Do we have a right to know about these things? It's in the eye of the beholder as to the exact amount, really, but there is a line somewhere. You wouldn't divulge nuclear launch codes, for example. Obviously to suggest that you should is ridiculous, but that's just to establish the fact that a line exists somewhere- somewhere, anywhere. Any secret less important than that which you'd want to keep is merely helping to establish the location of the line. And the line, at least to me, does come well before that. Obviously there are things we need to know as well. I mean, look what I deal in around here. I want to know a whole bunch of stuff too. But I'm willing to wait if that knowledge is of the type where the downsides of having it be public knowledge outweigh the upsides. It's the political equivalent of a football playbook. You would not ask a football team to divulge, for public consumption, the contents of the playbook they are using this season. For them to do so would be to virtually guarantee that they lose their games. When a football player is called into the coach's office to be cut, they're told to take their playbook with them. You don't want them running off with it after they're no longer on the team.
However, the downsides diminish over time, as the information becomes outdated, so eventually just about everything becomes safe to release. Including playbooks. Any random fan can go out and find books containing diagrams of old plays. Most Packers fans will be able to tell you about a particular old play of Vince Lombardi's, the power sweep. Someone made a Broadway play to tell you all about it. It's a matter of what is okay to release and when, and it can be very tricky sometimes to establish the threshold.
As a whole, Assange has selected cables for which the downsides have been deemed by most to outweigh the upsides, in particular the catty insults. The questionability of the value of the leaked cables has done a strange thing: it's made this all less about the rights of the people to know, and more about Assange and his motives than is healthy for one who purports to engage in journalism. And his motives are plain as day: he describes himself as "a combative person" who enjoys "crushing bastards." Crushing bastards, as he puts it, is well and good, and a lot of people get into the industry with visions of the day they get to crush a bastard dancing in their head like sugar plums. But it is not something where you should be waking up and saying 'So which bastard am I going to crush today?' You try not to make the story about you. Sometimes you can't help but insert yourself into the story, but even so, you are trying to be merely a part of the story, not the story itself. And if you do become the story, you want to try to get the story off of you and back onto the original topic. Assange has become the story and is making no efforts to change that, and in the process a budding debate over how some governments are reacting to the content- the United States with warning people in an official government capacity away from reading the leaks, China opting for a straight blackout- has been to a degree choked out by stories about Assange. The debate here is peppered with frustration that while Wikileaks goes to considerable lengths to force out the information of others, they themselves remain deeply in the shadows. Considering the amount of people after them, this seems necessary if they want to remain able to do any leaking, but it smacks of hypocrisy to some who disagree to one degree or another.
He does, however, have an out. Maybe not out of his problems with the authorities, but out of his problems with the public. If there's one entity people tend to hate these days more than the government, it's banks. Assange has made note that among his cache of yet-to-be-released information is a "mega-leak" from a major American bank. Which one, he will not say. This fact has caused the ears of many to perk up, eager to find out what this leak contains. Arguably, there's more interest in the prospective bank leak than in the diplomatic cables. Assange, by releasing this, would get a significant segment of the public back on his side, carrying the dual advantage of being a popular and worthwhile target. The fact that he also has information on BP (he doesn't know if it's unique) helps his cause further. And if apprehended by Interpol or someone else, he has a contingency plan, namely, tens of thousands of other people who went to the Pirate Bay, a sympathetic site, and downloaded an 'insurance' file which includes, among other things, the remaining cables and the BP files, who will all recieve decryption codes in the event of his capture or death and put everything out in one gigantic tsunami of information dumping. This brings us back to the first problem of some important information flying under the radar, but at that point it can't really be avoided.
Assange has what is surely some extremely useful information, somewhere in all of that, and has taken great pains to ensure its eventual release. But he has no sense of what information is useful and what information is filler, or alternatively, he doesn't care. He has the potential to change the world in profoundly positive ways, and has provided a vehicle for this to be facilitated with an ease not previously seen anywhere, but has let it go to his head such that the vehicle has been damaged.
Julian Assange.
What am I going to do with you?
What am I going to do with you?
Anyone who doesn't know the name Julian Assange by now is hiding under a rock. He's the Wikileaks guy, for the two of you that applies to. He takes leaks provided by a range of whistleblowers, and after a period of time spent X-ing out the informant's name, releases the leaks to the general public. For a while, this worked out pretty well. The leaks had a place to go, once in a while they'd get major media airtime, Wikileaks got a free plug, everyone ends up happy (aside from whoever's information got leaked.)
Recently, though, it's all gone wrong. Half the world's governments would love nothing more than to see a bullet through Assange's head, with much of the general public none to fond of him either, generally those from countries Assange has targeted. Interpol knows where he is and is one order away from moving on him. Sweden wants him on (disputed) sexual charges. Some Americans want to try him as a spy. Ecuador offered, then rescinded, an offer of safe haven. Wikileaks is losing places to host a server, as well as sources of financial support.
Things began to fall apart, at least from my vantage point, right around the time of the leak of the 2007 "Collateral Murder" video, obviously NSFW, which was leaked back in April. Wikileaks, at this point, went from an in-the-background place to do your leaking to a news item in and of itself, placing its own practices in the spotlight. They came to a head just recently, when the first of the 251,287 diplomatic cables began to see light. So what of it all? What can we learn from all this?
Not all that much, actually. At least, not much that Assange has been intending to teach.
You see, a lot of his previous leaks never really drew much attention. Part of the reason, I think, has to do with the sheer size of the information dump being conducted. Remember the healthcare debate? Remember how many teeth had to be pulled to get people to read a 2,000-page bill? Remember how much hay was made of the size of said bill? People often made it onto the news simply for having read the entire bill front to back. 2,000 pages is a tiny, pint-sized Wikileak. Again, the diplomatic cables number 251,287. Assange himself has readily admitted that he receives more material than he can sift through on his own. Which is the thing. If he can't do it, the average person has no chance. No matter how much info is presented, one person can only get through so much. If the important bits are hidden among pages and pages of detritus, the important bits tend to go unnoticed, as if they were never leaked at all. In journalism, this is called 'burying the lede', and considering that Assange believes himself to at some level be a journalist, he ought to know this. When the important information is easily findable by a visitor, things run smoothly. When not, it has less impact.
With the diplomatic cables, he has reversed this and resolved not to bury the lede. However, he has gone too far in the other direction. He has made everything a lede. News cycle after news cycle sees only a small easily-digestible handful of the quarter-million cables released, with each and every one devoured. So far, only about 1,100 have seen air.
But there's a problem. 251,287 cables does not mean 251,287 bombshell revelations. Far from it. There is the assorted useful piece of information. There almost has to be. You take any random group of 251,287 diplomatic cables, there's bound to be something new and interesting. The knowledge that China is not as warm towards North Korea as originally thought, the plan by Hillary Clinton concerning spying at UN headquarters, these can be of use. But other things Assange may have intended as bombshells are really nothing that someone paying sufficient attention to the news might already have figured out independently. China's cavalier attitude and hacking of Google shouldn't come as a large shock if you had been paying attention to Google's early adventures in China, where they came perilously close to pulling out of the country entirely. Google had suspected as much. Corruption in Pakistan and Afghanistan are not big surprises if you had been paying attention to previous reports on same that did not require Assange's assistance to find out. Vladimir Putin knew of the death of Aleksander Litvinenko, we've learned, but then, this was merely a confirmation of something just about everybody had reckoned from day one. The cables show China as flexing their muscle in diplomacy to the point of irritation by much of the rest of the world, but then, this is about as easily seen as the sun. The part about China's irritation with Norway was already found out when the Norwegian-based Nobel committee awarded Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo the Nobel Peace Prize, to where people came away knowing that if China wasn't aggressive towards Norway before, they certainly are now. We learn from the cables that the United States is doubtful of Mexico's ability to fight the drug cartels, but then, who isn't? Any news value is merely concerning tone and scale. Even the China/North Korea leak is seen as some as overstating the case.
And then there's the chatter behind each other's backs. The insults. The gossip, as it's been so frequently called. These are functionally worthless. Less than worthless, even. Sure. Diplomats are catty behind each other's backs. So are workers in just about any field of employment ever. This is nothing compared to what often happens in the diplomatic world. Spies are frequently sent into that field; it's easy to spy and easy to pull the spy out if something goes wrong. Duplicity is a grand, time-honored tradition in the diplomatic universe, of which you can find examples all the way back to ancient Greece and Rome; the Bible; the time of Hammurabi. People talking derisively about other people in the State Department? Well, I never! All that is likely to happen by releasing these is that it makes people less likely to talk to these diplomats, and go to other methods, potentially war, to achieve their goals concerning the countries involved. Diplomats also engage in diplomacy- trying to get along with each other. Why engage in conversation with another country if this is going to be the result of discussing things in their country (these are all cables from embassies in the US)? Forget talk. Might as well take the more direct and forceful route. And in moments of particularly high tension, one wrong word can sometimes be all it takes to light the powder keg. Go and look at all the duplicity that went on over the course of the Cold War, spying, name-calling and everything. How much of it that was not public at the time of its occurrence do you think could have been leaked without either the Americans or Soviets pushing the button in response? Not a whole lot, really.
That is, if it's only one target. A curious thing about blame is that when everybody is guilty, frequently, nobody is. Governmental investigations of lobbyists and corporations and such more frequently claim a scalp when someone is singled out for blame. When someone wants people not to 'play the blame game', this is what they're trying to do: make everybody guilty so that individuals- or, more to the usual point, they themselves- don't actually suffer consequences.
This is the phenomenon that Assange, in his zeal, has seemingly triggered. Though he may hate Hillary Clinton and want her to step down, he has created so many other guilty parties that few are in a moral position to press for her ouster, not that one would do so over such trifling things anyway, and the ones that have not been targeted have ample reason to believe they will be soon enough and any attempt to go after Clinton will end up blowing back on them. There will be a black eye for a while, yes, but eventually, all will be forgiven.
There is a debate that exists over whether we have a right to know about the content of these cables or whether they should remain secret. The first thing we must establish is that, either way, the debate does not apply to Assange. His informant, perhaps, who's surely in for a world of hurt because Assange's technique of simply X-ing out the informant's name is absolutely boneheaded, but not Assange. (Any interested party with a copy of the information can just look to see what got X'ed out, see what name is there, and go after that person; the informant would actually be better hidden if Assange didn't X out anything at all. It's the anonymity equivalent of giving the informant a large neon sign saying "PAY NO ATTENTION TO THIS MAN".) The cables originate in the United States. Assange is Australian and does not answer to American authority. (Not that he answers to Australian authority either, but you get the point.)
We've covered this particular mentality in a previous piece. Foreign nongovernmental entities don't really care what you think of them. And when an empire declines, as the piece exposits, everybody wants to get their licks in. Assange could, in a sense, be compared to the Visigoths sacking Rome, accelerating the empire's decline by making off with things of importance to the empire- in this case, the empire's secrets, privacy and reputation. An actual sacking of Washington DC, or any major world capital, would be unfeasible in this particular day and age, but what one can do is, instead of taking objects of value directly, take the ability to earn those objects or be able to afford to keep the objects they have. This being an age of information, every time a secret is divulged against one's will, every time one's dirty laundry is forced out into the open, it's like another gold coin, another gemstone, another crown jewel out the door.
Anyway. Do we have a right to know about these things? It's in the eye of the beholder as to the exact amount, really, but there is a line somewhere. You wouldn't divulge nuclear launch codes, for example. Obviously to suggest that you should is ridiculous, but that's just to establish the fact that a line exists somewhere- somewhere, anywhere. Any secret less important than that which you'd want to keep is merely helping to establish the location of the line. And the line, at least to me, does come well before that. Obviously there are things we need to know as well. I mean, look what I deal in around here. I want to know a whole bunch of stuff too. But I'm willing to wait if that knowledge is of the type where the downsides of having it be public knowledge outweigh the upsides. It's the political equivalent of a football playbook. You would not ask a football team to divulge, for public consumption, the contents of the playbook they are using this season. For them to do so would be to virtually guarantee that they lose their games. When a football player is called into the coach's office to be cut, they're told to take their playbook with them. You don't want them running off with it after they're no longer on the team.
However, the downsides diminish over time, as the information becomes outdated, so eventually just about everything becomes safe to release. Including playbooks. Any random fan can go out and find books containing diagrams of old plays. Most Packers fans will be able to tell you about a particular old play of Vince Lombardi's, the power sweep. Someone made a Broadway play to tell you all about it. It's a matter of what is okay to release and when, and it can be very tricky sometimes to establish the threshold.
As a whole, Assange has selected cables for which the downsides have been deemed by most to outweigh the upsides, in particular the catty insults. The questionability of the value of the leaked cables has done a strange thing: it's made this all less about the rights of the people to know, and more about Assange and his motives than is healthy for one who purports to engage in journalism. And his motives are plain as day: he describes himself as "a combative person" who enjoys "crushing bastards." Crushing bastards, as he puts it, is well and good, and a lot of people get into the industry with visions of the day they get to crush a bastard dancing in their head like sugar plums. But it is not something where you should be waking up and saying 'So which bastard am I going to crush today?' You try not to make the story about you. Sometimes you can't help but insert yourself into the story, but even so, you are trying to be merely a part of the story, not the story itself. And if you do become the story, you want to try to get the story off of you and back onto the original topic. Assange has become the story and is making no efforts to change that, and in the process a budding debate over how some governments are reacting to the content- the United States with warning people in an official government capacity away from reading the leaks, China opting for a straight blackout- has been to a degree choked out by stories about Assange. The debate here is peppered with frustration that while Wikileaks goes to considerable lengths to force out the information of others, they themselves remain deeply in the shadows. Considering the amount of people after them, this seems necessary if they want to remain able to do any leaking, but it smacks of hypocrisy to some who disagree to one degree or another.
He does, however, have an out. Maybe not out of his problems with the authorities, but out of his problems with the public. If there's one entity people tend to hate these days more than the government, it's banks. Assange has made note that among his cache of yet-to-be-released information is a "mega-leak" from a major American bank. Which one, he will not say. This fact has caused the ears of many to perk up, eager to find out what this leak contains. Arguably, there's more interest in the prospective bank leak than in the diplomatic cables. Assange, by releasing this, would get a significant segment of the public back on his side, carrying the dual advantage of being a popular and worthwhile target. The fact that he also has information on BP (he doesn't know if it's unique) helps his cause further. And if apprehended by Interpol or someone else, he has a contingency plan, namely, tens of thousands of other people who went to the Pirate Bay, a sympathetic site, and downloaded an 'insurance' file which includes, among other things, the remaining cables and the BP files, who will all recieve decryption codes in the event of his capture or death and put everything out in one gigantic tsunami of information dumping. This brings us back to the first problem of some important information flying under the radar, but at that point it can't really be avoided.
Assange has what is surely some extremely useful information, somewhere in all of that, and has taken great pains to ensure its eventual release. But he has no sense of what information is useful and what information is filler, or alternatively, he doesn't care. He has the potential to change the world in profoundly positive ways, and has provided a vehicle for this to be facilitated with an ease not previously seen anywhere, but has let it go to his head such that the vehicle has been damaged.
Julian Assange.
What am I going to do with you?
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Consuming, Imbibing, and Engaging In Amusement
First off, it's Rally to Restore Sanity Day. It's going on right now, in fact. Go, be fruitful and propagate the mindset.
But I would advise you to be careful before you eat, drink and be merry. Surely, you have heard of the phrase. I'm not so sure you know its origin or, more importantly, its context. So, today, let's take care of that.
The phrase 'eat, drink and be merry' comes from the Bible, first off. Bible-wise, that doesn't say much all by itself. There are a lot of different anecdotes that eating, drinking and being merry could be plugged into. The Last Supper. The Garden of Eden. Samson living it up.
In actuality, "Eat, drink and be merry" pops up twice. The first comes in Ecclesiastes 8:15. As the King James version puts it, "Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry: for that shall abide with him of his labor the days of his life, which God giveth him under the sun." Sounds pretty close to what everyone imagines it to be, right?
Let's fill in the surrounding verses, 11-17. This we'll use New International for, even though it changes the key phrase, because it's much, much easier to make out; King James is a tad on the archaic side.
What you see here, in the entire chapter, is King Solomon recognizing the limits of wisdom. Sometimes life just doesn't make any sense, sometimes the bad guys win and you don't know why, and sometimes you're just not going to understand it. And if you spend too much time trying, you're going to drive yourself nuts, so you might as well lighten up once in a while.
Again, pretty much by the book.
I said there was a second place it popped up, though. Luke 12:19. The King James original: "And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry."
Still about how one would imagine it. This time, though, context hits like a ton of bricks. It's part of Jesus' Parable of the Rich Fool. Switching back to New International, which this time keeps the key phrase, for verses 13-21.
Jesus is railing against fuigmism. The message: Eat, drink, be merry... but make sure you let those around you join in. You can really only get a certain amount of merry from having a lot of stuff, and you can really only eat and drink so much. Be nice. Spread it around. Others would like to be merry too.
But I would advise you to be careful before you eat, drink and be merry. Surely, you have heard of the phrase. I'm not so sure you know its origin or, more importantly, its context. So, today, let's take care of that.
The phrase 'eat, drink and be merry' comes from the Bible, first off. Bible-wise, that doesn't say much all by itself. There are a lot of different anecdotes that eating, drinking and being merry could be plugged into. The Last Supper. The Garden of Eden. Samson living it up.
In actuality, "Eat, drink and be merry" pops up twice. The first comes in Ecclesiastes 8:15. As the King James version puts it, "Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry: for that shall abide with him of his labor the days of his life, which God giveth him under the sun." Sounds pretty close to what everyone imagines it to be, right?
Let's fill in the surrounding verses, 11-17. This we'll use New International for, even though it changes the key phrase, because it's much, much easier to make out; King James is a tad on the archaic side.
When the sentence for a crime is not quickly carried out, the hearts of the people are filled with schemes to do wrong. Although a wicked man commits a hundred crimes and still lives a long time, I know that it will go better with God-fearing men, who are reverent before God. Yet because the wicked do not fear God, it will not go well with them, and their days will not lengthen like a shadow.
There is something else meaningless that occurs on earth: righteous men who get what the wicked deserve, and wicked men who get what the righteous deserve. This too, I say, is meaningless. So I commend the enjoyment of life, because nothing is better for a man under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad. Then joy will accompany him in his work all the days of the life God has given him under the sun.
When I applied my mind to know wisdom and to observe man's labor on earth—his eyes not seeing sleep day or night- then I saw all that God has done. No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun. Despite all his efforts to search it out, man cannot discover its meaning. Even if a wise man claims he knows, he cannot really comprehend it.
What you see here, in the entire chapter, is King Solomon recognizing the limits of wisdom. Sometimes life just doesn't make any sense, sometimes the bad guys win and you don't know why, and sometimes you're just not going to understand it. And if you spend too much time trying, you're going to drive yourself nuts, so you might as well lighten up once in a while.
Again, pretty much by the book.
I said there was a second place it popped up, though. Luke 12:19. The King James original: "And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry."
Still about how one would imagine it. This time, though, context hits like a ton of bricks. It's part of Jesus' Parable of the Rich Fool. Switching back to New International, which this time keeps the key phrase, for verses 13-21.
Someone in the crowd said to him, "Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me." Jesus replied, "Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?" Then he said to them, "Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions."
And he told them this parable: "The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop. He thought to himself, 'What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.'
"Then he said, 'This is what I'll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I'll say to myself, "You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry."'
"But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?'
"This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God."
Jesus is railing against fuigmism. The message: Eat, drink, be merry... but make sure you let those around you join in. You can really only get a certain amount of merry from having a lot of stuff, and you can really only eat and drink so much. Be nice. Spread it around. Others would like to be merry too.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Things That Aren't Cool
Head-stomping opposition political supporters.
This should not even need elaborating on. For God's sake, people, American History X is not a campaign strategy guide. And if you think it is, you need to take a step back and seriously think about what the fuck can of worms you're opening. Get a damn grip. You may have your differences, you may think the other guy's out to screw you over, but is it really worth stomping on his goddamn head?!
This should not even need elaborating on. For God's sake, people, American History X is not a campaign strategy guide. And if you think it is, you need to take a step back and seriously think about what the fuck can of worms you're opening. Get a damn grip. You may have your differences, you may think the other guy's out to screw you over, but is it really worth stomping on his goddamn head?!
Saturday, October 2, 2010
The Ballad of Honest Dick
It is common knowledge these days- or at least it should be- that anyone in a position of public dependency that handles large amounts of money needs to be placed under some sort of watch. The more money handled, the more stringent the watch should be. Because far too often, people in these positions prove unworthy of trust, and will start to take some of that money for themselves to the maximum extent they are allowed.
Far too often, we forget this fact, and every time we do, we pay dearly for it. Bernie Madoff. Enron. Savings and Loan. James Tate.
Today I tell you about that last one.
James W. Tate was named state treasurer of Kentucky in 1867, after two stints as assistant Secretary of State, and one stint as assistant clerk of the Kentucky House of Representatives. While an elected position, Tate became a fixture in the office, often placing among the biggest winners on the ticket, and putting in two decades of service. Over time, he earned the nickname "Honest Dick" (why a man named James would be called 'Honest Dick' is a question for the ages), with one man, John McAfee, writing in 1886, referring to Tate as a "trusted and honored treasurer" with an "unblemished record for probity and principle."
Famous last words.
Apparently, Tate was regarded as so honest that he had, for 20 years, never been subjected to a serious look at his books. His 1886 opponent, William O. Bradley, found this a little odd, and ran on it in his attempt at unseating Tate. He lost, but he did manage to get the seed planted in Kentucky's collective head. So they asked Tate for a look. Tate replied that he would need some time to get his books in order. Okay, Honest Dick, we can give you a bit of time to do that, but really, we would like to look.
You have surely figured out by now that Tate was not using that extra time to actually get his books in order. During that time, he stopped putting cash into the state's bank account, using checks instead. If he weren't Honest Dick, he'd have been called on this. Or the personal debts he was starting to rack up. On March 14, 1888, one of his clerks DID call him on the fact that he was filling two tobacco sacks with money, about $100,000 worth ($2,357,406 in 2009 money, according to the Consumer Price Index), just like a cartoon bank robber. All that was missing was a dollar sign on the bags. Then Tate hopped a train for Louisville, leaving a note that he would be back in two days.
He never set foot in Kentucky again. From Louisville, he went to Cincinnati, and then vanished, leaving his wife and daughter behind.
By March 20, the state figured something was up, and suspended Tate from his position as state treasurer, the epitome of closing the barn door after the horse has left. They finally, finally, after 22 years, would audit the financial ledger of Kentucky.
Or at least they would have if they could actually make out what in blazes Tate wrote in the darn thing. All they did know was that a whole bunch of money wasn't there anymore. Unpaid loans, advances, personal investments and straight-up theft ultimately relieved the state of Kentucky of $247,128.50. That's 1888 money, remember. According to the Consumer Price Index, in 2009 money, that translates to $5,825,822.76. The treasury vault had personal and state property in it, including beaded bags and purses, one of which was a satchel belonging to a dead child.
The entirety of Kentucky almost had a collective heart attack. Why would Tate steal so much money? He was rich already through land investments! He didn't need the money! (Ah, the naviete of people in 1888.) According to 'Kentucky: Decades of Discord, 1865-1900' by Hambleton Tapp, James C. Klotter and the Kentucky Historical Society, one person wrote "Such a flash of lightning, such a peal of thunder, as was never before seen or heard came out of a clear sky, and rocked the state as nothing had done since the war."
After they got the shock out of their system, the call went up for Tate's head, seeking to try him in absentia. That is exactly what they got; according to 'Political Corruption in America: An Encyclopedia of Scandals, Power and Greed' by Mark Grossman, he was officially brought up on a misappropriation of $197,000 (the official estimate; that's $4,464,090 in 2009 money), along with abandoning his office, doing so without providing for proper administration, and three other charges. He was convicted of four of the charges on March 31, 1888- remember he had fled on the 14th- and the now extremely unfortunately-nicknamed 'Honest Dick' was disqualified from holding state office again. When a new state constitution was written in 1891, three years later, Tate turned out to be singlehandedly responsible for the state banning consecutive terms for state officials, a provision that was only rescinded in 2000, and even then only partially so. A position of overseer was also created.
No recipient of funds, ultimately, was asked to repay, however. Even though just about everyone in Frankfort was under suspicion of having gotten money from Tate at some point, and nobody was trusting anybody by now, it was ultimately determined that Tate acted alone. The governor made a loan of his own to the state until taxes could replenish the coffers.
Not that Tate noticed much of any of this. He had long since gotten away. He had fled to the four corners of the Earth, with varying accounts putting him in places such as Chicago, Arizona Territory, San Francisco, Vancouver, Toronto, Germany, Japan, China and Brazil. It's not really certain what became of him, or even how long he lived after fleeing Kentucky; correspondence to his family ceased in December 1888. There were reports of various Tate sightings in the following years, but in 1897, his daughter had him declared legally dead, and his life insurance was paid off in 1898.
As for William O. Bradley, the guy who first called for a look at Tate's books, he was karmically rewarded by being elected governor of Kentucky in 1895, a term marked by his championing and passage of an anti-lynching law, among other measures protecting the rights of blacks, and elected to one uneventful term in the US Senate from 1909-1914.
He was, in his Senate term, appointed, among other things, chairman of the Senate Committee on Expenditures in the Department of Justice. Just in case.
Far too often, we forget this fact, and every time we do, we pay dearly for it. Bernie Madoff. Enron. Savings and Loan. James Tate.
Today I tell you about that last one.
James W. Tate was named state treasurer of Kentucky in 1867, after two stints as assistant Secretary of State, and one stint as assistant clerk of the Kentucky House of Representatives. While an elected position, Tate became a fixture in the office, often placing among the biggest winners on the ticket, and putting in two decades of service. Over time, he earned the nickname "Honest Dick" (why a man named James would be called 'Honest Dick' is a question for the ages), with one man, John McAfee, writing in 1886, referring to Tate as a "trusted and honored treasurer" with an "unblemished record for probity and principle."
Famous last words.
Apparently, Tate was regarded as so honest that he had, for 20 years, never been subjected to a serious look at his books. His 1886 opponent, William O. Bradley, found this a little odd, and ran on it in his attempt at unseating Tate. He lost, but he did manage to get the seed planted in Kentucky's collective head. So they asked Tate for a look. Tate replied that he would need some time to get his books in order. Okay, Honest Dick, we can give you a bit of time to do that, but really, we would like to look.
You have surely figured out by now that Tate was not using that extra time to actually get his books in order. During that time, he stopped putting cash into the state's bank account, using checks instead. If he weren't Honest Dick, he'd have been called on this. Or the personal debts he was starting to rack up. On March 14, 1888, one of his clerks DID call him on the fact that he was filling two tobacco sacks with money, about $100,000 worth ($2,357,406 in 2009 money, according to the Consumer Price Index), just like a cartoon bank robber. All that was missing was a dollar sign on the bags. Then Tate hopped a train for Louisville, leaving a note that he would be back in two days.
He never set foot in Kentucky again. From Louisville, he went to Cincinnati, and then vanished, leaving his wife and daughter behind.
By March 20, the state figured something was up, and suspended Tate from his position as state treasurer, the epitome of closing the barn door after the horse has left. They finally, finally, after 22 years, would audit the financial ledger of Kentucky.
Or at least they would have if they could actually make out what in blazes Tate wrote in the darn thing. All they did know was that a whole bunch of money wasn't there anymore. Unpaid loans, advances, personal investments and straight-up theft ultimately relieved the state of Kentucky of $247,128.50. That's 1888 money, remember. According to the Consumer Price Index, in 2009 money, that translates to $5,825,822.76. The treasury vault had personal and state property in it, including beaded bags and purses, one of which was a satchel belonging to a dead child.
The entirety of Kentucky almost had a collective heart attack. Why would Tate steal so much money? He was rich already through land investments! He didn't need the money! (Ah, the naviete of people in 1888.) According to 'Kentucky: Decades of Discord, 1865-1900' by Hambleton Tapp, James C. Klotter and the Kentucky Historical Society, one person wrote "Such a flash of lightning, such a peal of thunder, as was never before seen or heard came out of a clear sky, and rocked the state as nothing had done since the war."
After they got the shock out of their system, the call went up for Tate's head, seeking to try him in absentia. That is exactly what they got; according to 'Political Corruption in America: An Encyclopedia of Scandals, Power and Greed' by Mark Grossman, he was officially brought up on a misappropriation of $197,000 (the official estimate; that's $4,464,090 in 2009 money), along with abandoning his office, doing so without providing for proper administration, and three other charges. He was convicted of four of the charges on March 31, 1888- remember he had fled on the 14th- and the now extremely unfortunately-nicknamed 'Honest Dick' was disqualified from holding state office again. When a new state constitution was written in 1891, three years later, Tate turned out to be singlehandedly responsible for the state banning consecutive terms for state officials, a provision that was only rescinded in 2000, and even then only partially so. A position of overseer was also created.
No recipient of funds, ultimately, was asked to repay, however. Even though just about everyone in Frankfort was under suspicion of having gotten money from Tate at some point, and nobody was trusting anybody by now, it was ultimately determined that Tate acted alone. The governor made a loan of his own to the state until taxes could replenish the coffers.
Not that Tate noticed much of any of this. He had long since gotten away. He had fled to the four corners of the Earth, with varying accounts putting him in places such as Chicago, Arizona Territory, San Francisco, Vancouver, Toronto, Germany, Japan, China and Brazil. It's not really certain what became of him, or even how long he lived after fleeing Kentucky; correspondence to his family ceased in December 1888. There were reports of various Tate sightings in the following years, but in 1897, his daughter had him declared legally dead, and his life insurance was paid off in 1898.
As for William O. Bradley, the guy who first called for a look at Tate's books, he was karmically rewarded by being elected governor of Kentucky in 1895, a term marked by his championing and passage of an anti-lynching law, among other measures protecting the rights of blacks, and elected to one uneventful term in the US Senate from 1909-1914.
He was, in his Senate term, appointed, among other things, chairman of the Senate Committee on Expenditures in the Department of Justice. Just in case.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
The Lesser Of Two Evils
Not too long ago, I stated some reasons I was given as to why people did not vote in the Wisconsin primaries. Not among those reasons, though, was one of the most common reasons people don't vote, one of if not the major factor in the coming election, and why one of those primary nonvoters does not intend to vote in the general: the unwillingness to vote for the "lesser of two evils".
Granted. The field isn't exactly what one would call "strong" this year. In fact, some of the matchups just plain suck. Nevada in particular is facing a particularly dreadful decision, where they know Sharron Angle bites, they know Harry Reid bites, and yet one of them will wind up a Senator at the end of it all. The primaries might have eliminated your favored candidate. There might not have been anyone you'd consider acceptable to begin with. Maybe everyone good just got driven away from serving in politics and these dregs of society are who's left. The candidates set before you blow. Fair enough.
Don't think of it like that.
The purpose of your vote is so that you can set the best possible course for the future of you, your friends and family, your town, your state, your country, the world, whatever scope you want to use. The best possible course. Not necessarily the perfect course, but the best one possible given your options. Is not the lesser of two evils the best possible course in a two-horse race? Go for that. After all, every vote not cast for the lesser of two evils brings us that much closer to the election of the GREATER of two evils. And that's no good for anybody. It's not like the election will be canceled because you, or all your friends, or in fact half the country stayed home. Some elections can easily get all the way down to 15% turnout and the winners of those will have just as much authority to rule as a guy that wins with 100% turnout. There's no turnout threshold below which they cancel the election. Some places will even force a result of some sort even if nobody votes, candidates included. They might rerun the election with the same candidates and make you pick one anyway, as happened in Centerville, Mississippi as Parade Magazine reported on January 2, 1994 when nobody voted in a race for board of aldermen. (Denny James ran unopposed and got 45 voted in the rerun.) The incumbents might be able to simply appoint themselves back into office, as Pillsbury, North Dakota found out in 2008. Were such a thing to happen in the Presidential election, all that would happen is nobody gets 270 electoral votes, and when nobody gets 270 electoral votes, the election is taken out of the voters' hands and into those of Congress, with the House voting for President and the Senate voting for Vice President. (Hope there isn't a split Congress when that happens.) This is assuming that any tied states- tied at zero, but tied- do not simply decide to hold a runoff election and make you do it again.
What if there's a third party, and you think them to be better than the two major parties? Well, go for that then. Be aware that the greater of two evils may be hoping you do that, so as to siphon votes off of the lesser of two evils. In fact, the greater of two evils may have actively inserted that third party into the race, and funded it to a small degree, for the specific purpose of siphoning your vote off. But if you weren't going to take the lesser of two evils anyway, well, go for it.
Another thing to consider are the age-old enemy of clean politics, the lobbyists. The people that are tossing so much money into the race, more than you can afford or are even allowed to donate on your own. The people that have done so much to make the campaign as ugly as possible. The people that think, if they make things dirty enough, they can drive you to stay home.
Oh yes. This happens. This is a time-honored tactic: disgust you so much with politics that you outright refuse to vote. If you're refusing to vote on the lesser-of-two-evils basis, it looks like they've done their job. And that's good for them. It's one vote closer they are to getting their way.
After all, whether you vote or not, the lobbyists will vote. Do you think they're going to go through all this trouble and then stay home themselves? If absolutely nothing else, by going to vote, you dilute the effect of the lobbyist bent on driving you away. If you share a constituency, your vote directly cancels out that of one lobbyist. If you don't, your vote OUTSHOUTS every single out-of-constituency lobbyist that helped drag that race into the mud. And while one vote may not seem to you as very valuable, going into the booth knowing you're about to negate the vote of the dirtiest, most corrupt son of a bitch in the area- and overrule a whole slew of out-of-state slimeballs who don't know anything about your hometown but are willing to lie incessantly to decide its fate- THAT should feel pretty damned good.
"I think that by staying home, I'm sending a message." No. You're not. Really, you are not. You may think your silence is deafening. No. Your silence is silence and nothing more. By not going in and at least voting, you send no message at all. If anything, you FORFEIT your voice. If there is one type of citizen that is reliably, routinely ignored by elected officials, it is the citizen that did not vote at all. Why SHOULD they care? What are you going to do if they know that screwing you over will just make you stay home? Are you going to stay home even harder?
And there is one more effect that sucking it up and voting the lesser of two evils has. After the elections are all over, one of the things the parties look at is the margin of victory. The people who win in crushing, one-sided blowouts will be likely to be primaried from their own side in an attempt to go even further in that direction, if they are opposed at all. The people who only gain narrow wins are more likely to be vigorously opposed by the other major party next time out. By not voting for the lesser of two evils, you skew the voteshare in favor of the greater of two evils a little bit more than would have otherwise happened.
Which means that by not finding someone worthy enough to vote for in this election, you help ensure that there won't be anyone worthy enough next time either.
Granted. The field isn't exactly what one would call "strong" this year. In fact, some of the matchups just plain suck. Nevada in particular is facing a particularly dreadful decision, where they know Sharron Angle bites, they know Harry Reid bites, and yet one of them will wind up a Senator at the end of it all. The primaries might have eliminated your favored candidate. There might not have been anyone you'd consider acceptable to begin with. Maybe everyone good just got driven away from serving in politics and these dregs of society are who's left. The candidates set before you blow. Fair enough.
Don't think of it like that.
The purpose of your vote is so that you can set the best possible course for the future of you, your friends and family, your town, your state, your country, the world, whatever scope you want to use. The best possible course. Not necessarily the perfect course, but the best one possible given your options. Is not the lesser of two evils the best possible course in a two-horse race? Go for that. After all, every vote not cast for the lesser of two evils brings us that much closer to the election of the GREATER of two evils. And that's no good for anybody. It's not like the election will be canceled because you, or all your friends, or in fact half the country stayed home. Some elections can easily get all the way down to 15% turnout and the winners of those will have just as much authority to rule as a guy that wins with 100% turnout. There's no turnout threshold below which they cancel the election. Some places will even force a result of some sort even if nobody votes, candidates included. They might rerun the election with the same candidates and make you pick one anyway, as happened in Centerville, Mississippi as Parade Magazine reported on January 2, 1994 when nobody voted in a race for board of aldermen. (Denny James ran unopposed and got 45 voted in the rerun.) The incumbents might be able to simply appoint themselves back into office, as Pillsbury, North Dakota found out in 2008. Were such a thing to happen in the Presidential election, all that would happen is nobody gets 270 electoral votes, and when nobody gets 270 electoral votes, the election is taken out of the voters' hands and into those of Congress, with the House voting for President and the Senate voting for Vice President. (Hope there isn't a split Congress when that happens.) This is assuming that any tied states- tied at zero, but tied- do not simply decide to hold a runoff election and make you do it again.
What if there's a third party, and you think them to be better than the two major parties? Well, go for that then. Be aware that the greater of two evils may be hoping you do that, so as to siphon votes off of the lesser of two evils. In fact, the greater of two evils may have actively inserted that third party into the race, and funded it to a small degree, for the specific purpose of siphoning your vote off. But if you weren't going to take the lesser of two evils anyway, well, go for it.
Another thing to consider are the age-old enemy of clean politics, the lobbyists. The people that are tossing so much money into the race, more than you can afford or are even allowed to donate on your own. The people that have done so much to make the campaign as ugly as possible. The people that think, if they make things dirty enough, they can drive you to stay home.
Oh yes. This happens. This is a time-honored tactic: disgust you so much with politics that you outright refuse to vote. If you're refusing to vote on the lesser-of-two-evils basis, it looks like they've done their job. And that's good for them. It's one vote closer they are to getting their way.
After all, whether you vote or not, the lobbyists will vote. Do you think they're going to go through all this trouble and then stay home themselves? If absolutely nothing else, by going to vote, you dilute the effect of the lobbyist bent on driving you away. If you share a constituency, your vote directly cancels out that of one lobbyist. If you don't, your vote OUTSHOUTS every single out-of-constituency lobbyist that helped drag that race into the mud. And while one vote may not seem to you as very valuable, going into the booth knowing you're about to negate the vote of the dirtiest, most corrupt son of a bitch in the area- and overrule a whole slew of out-of-state slimeballs who don't know anything about your hometown but are willing to lie incessantly to decide its fate- THAT should feel pretty damned good.
"I think that by staying home, I'm sending a message." No. You're not. Really, you are not. You may think your silence is deafening. No. Your silence is silence and nothing more. By not going in and at least voting, you send no message at all. If anything, you FORFEIT your voice. If there is one type of citizen that is reliably, routinely ignored by elected officials, it is the citizen that did not vote at all. Why SHOULD they care? What are you going to do if they know that screwing you over will just make you stay home? Are you going to stay home even harder?
And there is one more effect that sucking it up and voting the lesser of two evils has. After the elections are all over, one of the things the parties look at is the margin of victory. The people who win in crushing, one-sided blowouts will be likely to be primaried from their own side in an attempt to go even further in that direction, if they are opposed at all. The people who only gain narrow wins are more likely to be vigorously opposed by the other major party next time out. By not voting for the lesser of two evils, you skew the voteshare in favor of the greater of two evils a little bit more than would have otherwise happened.
Which means that by not finding someone worthy enough to vote for in this election, you help ensure that there won't be anyone worthy enough next time either.
Monday, August 30, 2010
On Entitlement and Dependency
If a Wisconsinite were to look at Ron Johnson, Russ Feingold's Senate opponent this year, based solely on his ads and website, one wouldn't learn much of anything about him. He seems to play the campaign on the basis of 'the less people know about me, the better'.
One must learn about him by his live appearances at campaign stops. And if his strategy is in fact 'the less people know about me, the better', it is a wise one. It has, for one, as previously reported, forced Feingold into making blind stabs at what he thinks Johnson's record might be, allowing Johnson to later attack Feingold for distorting his record when he turns out to be wrong.
When one does see Johnson in action, he turns out to be exactly the Tea Partier he is billed as being. I want to focus on this article from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. The piece details a pair of recent campaign stops in Wisconsin Rapids and Marshfield, in which he, among other things, refers to the health care reform law passed earlier this year as "the greatest single assault on our freedom in our lifetime." He is 55 years old, and since he has yet to reveal a specific birthdate, we can best assume that he was born in 1955. A lifetime that has included the Cuban Missile Crisis and 9/11, which makes healthcare reform legislation pale in comparison. Add in Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein and something Vietnam-related if you want to as well. You get the point.
There's also this passage:
This from a party that has sent Jan Brewer into superstar status for signing an immigration law that, whatever they may claim as intent, is pretty much designed to not leave Hispanics alone. This from a party that brought us warrantless wiretaps, "free speech zones", and "enhanced interrogation techniques", among other things. So that's a patently ridiculous claim as well.
But neither of those were the part of the article that really popped me between the eyes. That honor went to paragraphs three and four, right at the top of the piece.
Damn straight America is a culture of entitlement dependency.
And I wouldn't have it any other way.
Let's hit the 'entitlement' part of it first. Yes, Americans, as individuals, should be doing their level best to work for what they get in life. But there are things in life that one should not have to work for, that one should in fact feel 'entitled' to. A decent home. A decent education. A loving family, whatever its makeup. A job, should they wish to have one. A long and healthy life. Not having to put oneself in the poorhouse to get that health. A voice in their government. Government officials who can ably and ethically do their job. Safety and security. The ability to travel abroad without having to stick a maple leaf sticker on their luggage so they don't get beat up or mugged. (By the way, they can see right through that.)
These, among others, are things that every American has every right to feel 'entitled' to, that no American should have to earn. These are things every American should be able to simply start out with, and then be able to earn whatever they get past that. If that's entitlement, I'm all for it. One should not expect everything in life to fall into their lap. But one should be able to expect a starter set of amenities such as these.
As for 'dependency', Mr. Johnson.
Dependency is not something to be taken lightly. Dependency is not something to be derided. Dependency is one of the most critical characteristics of not just Americans, but all of humanity. You may have heard someone say, at some point, that when things are at their worst, humanity is often at its best. This saying celebrates those who simply refuse to let anyone fall through the cracks if they have anything to say about it. When the earthquake has struck, when the flood waters are rising, when the building is coming down, when someone is living in quiet desperation every day of their lives, there is someone out there that will do everything in their power, lay their jobs, their bodies, their lives on the line to find these people, hold out their hand, and help as many of them as possible back to their feet.
What would happen to these souls if they did not have these people rushing to their aid? They would simply be left to their miserable fate. And any help that arrives knows it. That help also knows that if, one day, they should be so unfortunate, they would hope someone else in turn comes to their aid.
If we have no other redeeming qualities as a species, we at least have that. We have support structures, haphazard as they may sometimes be.
My brother recently lost his job. He is of course looking (and looking, and looking), but in the meantime, unemployment notwithstanding, he is dependent on friends and family to help him through. An extra set of eyes to catch that extra job opening he may have missed. People to watch his baby nephew while he's out of the house looking (or for any other purpose). The odd bit of financial support (because just because the paychecks stop coming doesn't mean the bills do). Lord knows where he'd be if it weren't for people he knew he could depend on. I don't even want to think about it.
And if the same thing were to happen to me, I know that, should I need it, he and they would be there for me as well.
And as for dependency not being the America you recognize, let me tell you that if it weren't for dependency, America never would have come into existence in the first place.
Flashback to the Declaration of Independence. The signers of that document knew that, by affixing their names, they would be committing treason against the British crown. They had a wide variety of backgrounds- some richer than others, with different lifestyles and viewpoints and background and lineages, but every one of them was risking everything they had by putting their name to the parchment and allowing King George III to know exactly who was to be arrested. And yet, 56 people did so, depending on each other for backup. One man, Charles Carroll, wrote his hometown by his name, reading 'Charles Carroll of Carrollton.' (He had always signed his name like that, but still.)
As Ben Franklin said on that occasion, "We must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately."
And then there is the very job for which you apply. Congress is supposed to be there for when things get to be too much for a friends-and-family support structure, even an entire community. Congress is there, through high-profile legislation as well as low-profile casework, for when someone needs nothing less than the full power of their country to rescue them from some wretched fate. When people mockingly use the phrase "I'm from the government and I'm here to help", they are mocking the government's all-too-frequent failure in that task. They don't want to have to mock it. So many people have been voted in and out of office for their success or failure in doing so. Ron Paul is untouchable in his district because of his full understanding of this concept; a realization that, whatever his votes, he is supposed to be there to help. He knows his constituents depend on him when they need help finding work, finding housing, finding lost war medals. Kissing babies? He'll deliver them.
Whether you realize it or not, this is what you ask of the people of Wisconsin. You ask them to depend on you. You ask them to count on you when the chips are down. You ask them to trust that, when they fall, you, Ron Johnson, will be there to pick them back up.
If you do not understand that basic concept, if you are seemingly campaigning on the concept of leaving our most in need to suffer, how are you possibly qualified for this job?
One must learn about him by his live appearances at campaign stops. And if his strategy is in fact 'the less people know about me, the better', it is a wise one. It has, for one, as previously reported, forced Feingold into making blind stabs at what he thinks Johnson's record might be, allowing Johnson to later attack Feingold for distorting his record when he turns out to be wrong.
When one does see Johnson in action, he turns out to be exactly the Tea Partier he is billed as being. I want to focus on this article from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. The piece details a pair of recent campaign stops in Wisconsin Rapids and Marshfield, in which he, among other things, refers to the health care reform law passed earlier this year as "the greatest single assault on our freedom in our lifetime." He is 55 years old, and since he has yet to reveal a specific birthdate, we can best assume that he was born in 1955. A lifetime that has included the Cuban Missile Crisis and 9/11, which makes healthcare reform legislation pale in comparison. Add in Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein and something Vietnam-related if you want to as well. You get the point.
There's also this passage:
Conservatives, he said, just want to be left alone. "The problem is (liberals) are not leaving us alone," he told supporters. "They haven't left us alone. They are threatening our freedom."
This from a party that has sent Jan Brewer into superstar status for signing an immigration law that, whatever they may claim as intent, is pretty much designed to not leave Hispanics alone. This from a party that brought us warrantless wiretaps, "free speech zones", and "enhanced interrogation techniques", among other things. So that's a patently ridiculous claim as well.
But neither of those were the part of the article that really popped me between the eyes. That honor went to paragraphs three and four, right at the top of the piece.
At campaign stops on Friday before groups at a Wisconsin Rapids restaurant and later at the Marshfield Area Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Johnson said he sees a society that is lurching toward a culture of entitlement dependency.
"People are saying, 'That's my right, give it to me.' That's not the America I recognize. I think we're losing America. That's what's at stake in this election."
Damn straight America is a culture of entitlement dependency.
And I wouldn't have it any other way.
Let's hit the 'entitlement' part of it first. Yes, Americans, as individuals, should be doing their level best to work for what they get in life. But there are things in life that one should not have to work for, that one should in fact feel 'entitled' to. A decent home. A decent education. A loving family, whatever its makeup. A job, should they wish to have one. A long and healthy life. Not having to put oneself in the poorhouse to get that health. A voice in their government. Government officials who can ably and ethically do their job. Safety and security. The ability to travel abroad without having to stick a maple leaf sticker on their luggage so they don't get beat up or mugged. (By the way, they can see right through that.)
These, among others, are things that every American has every right to feel 'entitled' to, that no American should have to earn. These are things every American should be able to simply start out with, and then be able to earn whatever they get past that. If that's entitlement, I'm all for it. One should not expect everything in life to fall into their lap. But one should be able to expect a starter set of amenities such as these.
As for 'dependency', Mr. Johnson.
Dependency is not something to be taken lightly. Dependency is not something to be derided. Dependency is one of the most critical characteristics of not just Americans, but all of humanity. You may have heard someone say, at some point, that when things are at their worst, humanity is often at its best. This saying celebrates those who simply refuse to let anyone fall through the cracks if they have anything to say about it. When the earthquake has struck, when the flood waters are rising, when the building is coming down, when someone is living in quiet desperation every day of their lives, there is someone out there that will do everything in their power, lay their jobs, their bodies, their lives on the line to find these people, hold out their hand, and help as many of them as possible back to their feet.
What would happen to these souls if they did not have these people rushing to their aid? They would simply be left to their miserable fate. And any help that arrives knows it. That help also knows that if, one day, they should be so unfortunate, they would hope someone else in turn comes to their aid.
If we have no other redeeming qualities as a species, we at least have that. We have support structures, haphazard as they may sometimes be.
My brother recently lost his job. He is of course looking (and looking, and looking), but in the meantime, unemployment notwithstanding, he is dependent on friends and family to help him through. An extra set of eyes to catch that extra job opening he may have missed. People to watch his baby nephew while he's out of the house looking (or for any other purpose). The odd bit of financial support (because just because the paychecks stop coming doesn't mean the bills do). Lord knows where he'd be if it weren't for people he knew he could depend on. I don't even want to think about it.
And if the same thing were to happen to me, I know that, should I need it, he and they would be there for me as well.
And as for dependency not being the America you recognize, let me tell you that if it weren't for dependency, America never would have come into existence in the first place.
Flashback to the Declaration of Independence. The signers of that document knew that, by affixing their names, they would be committing treason against the British crown. They had a wide variety of backgrounds- some richer than others, with different lifestyles and viewpoints and background and lineages, but every one of them was risking everything they had by putting their name to the parchment and allowing King George III to know exactly who was to be arrested. And yet, 56 people did so, depending on each other for backup. One man, Charles Carroll, wrote his hometown by his name, reading 'Charles Carroll of Carrollton.' (He had always signed his name like that, but still.)
As Ben Franklin said on that occasion, "We must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately."
And then there is the very job for which you apply. Congress is supposed to be there for when things get to be too much for a friends-and-family support structure, even an entire community. Congress is there, through high-profile legislation as well as low-profile casework, for when someone needs nothing less than the full power of their country to rescue them from some wretched fate. When people mockingly use the phrase "I'm from the government and I'm here to help", they are mocking the government's all-too-frequent failure in that task. They don't want to have to mock it. So many people have been voted in and out of office for their success or failure in doing so. Ron Paul is untouchable in his district because of his full understanding of this concept; a realization that, whatever his votes, he is supposed to be there to help. He knows his constituents depend on him when they need help finding work, finding housing, finding lost war medals. Kissing babies? He'll deliver them.
Whether you realize it or not, this is what you ask of the people of Wisconsin. You ask them to depend on you. You ask them to count on you when the chips are down. You ask them to trust that, when they fall, you, Ron Johnson, will be there to pick them back up.
If you do not understand that basic concept, if you are seemingly campaigning on the concept of leaving our most in need to suffer, how are you possibly qualified for this job?
Thursday, August 26, 2010
In Which Pete Rose Takes Up Teaching
I don't need an incentive to learn anything. Self-education is a big selling point of mine. My public schooling experience drove home the message more than a few times that if I wanted a halfway decent education, I'd have to go get it myself. Middle school in particular seemed particularly uninterested in teaching me things, greatly favoring the alternative method of placing me in close proximity with people who wanted to beat me up. (To this day, I still cover one eye when driving past it, so I don't have to look at it. Let's not discuss further.)
Had I left things purely to the schools, I'd be a hell of a lot dumber than I actually am. Besides, learning doesn't stop when school does. It goes on. After you get out of school, you need to start motivating yourself. It's one thing to learn when there's something on the line- when there's a job on the line, when there's a promotion on the line, a grade on the line, a life on the line. It's quite another to learn when there's nothing on the line except for a sense of self improvement.
Which is why this story troubles me. There is a site, Ultrinsic.com, that allows college students to bet money on them achieving a certain grade. Currently, 36 schools are part of the program. This is technically legal, as while online gambling is illegal in the United States, that applies to contests in which you have no control, and you do have control over your grades.
But there's just something seedy about it all. It's betting money on school. The student's own money. It's one thing to create an incentive program for getting good grades; lots of places do that for elementary school students. There's a video rental place in town that offers free rentals for every A on a kid's report card. Plenty of parents offer their kids money for good grades. There are two key differences between those and this:
1. The elementary school student does not have any skin in the game. If he doesn't meet the goal, he doesn't lose anything. The college student does.
2. The elementary school student has a lot fewer financial concerns on his mind than the college student. The elementary school student doesn't have any living costs; the parents provide everything. The college student has some pretty crushing student loans looming right after he gets out.
It may be more of an incentive to hit the books, but more likely, it's simply an incentive to win that bet. If a student put some fairly significant money on a grade, and is skirting the bare edge of it going into a final exam, the pressure of that bet is going to be enormous. At that point, the possibility exists that studying may take a backseat to cheating. Money gets some pretty base reactions out of people. There's going to be somebody, eventually, probably sooner rather than later, that is going to forget about studying and just focus on hitting the goal grade by any means necessary.
Which teaches a lesson school was never meant to teach.
Had I left things purely to the schools, I'd be a hell of a lot dumber than I actually am. Besides, learning doesn't stop when school does. It goes on. After you get out of school, you need to start motivating yourself. It's one thing to learn when there's something on the line- when there's a job on the line, when there's a promotion on the line, a grade on the line, a life on the line. It's quite another to learn when there's nothing on the line except for a sense of self improvement.
Which is why this story troubles me. There is a site, Ultrinsic.com, that allows college students to bet money on them achieving a certain grade. Currently, 36 schools are part of the program. This is technically legal, as while online gambling is illegal in the United States, that applies to contests in which you have no control, and you do have control over your grades.
But there's just something seedy about it all. It's betting money on school. The student's own money. It's one thing to create an incentive program for getting good grades; lots of places do that for elementary school students. There's a video rental place in town that offers free rentals for every A on a kid's report card. Plenty of parents offer their kids money for good grades. There are two key differences between those and this:
1. The elementary school student does not have any skin in the game. If he doesn't meet the goal, he doesn't lose anything. The college student does.
2. The elementary school student has a lot fewer financial concerns on his mind than the college student. The elementary school student doesn't have any living costs; the parents provide everything. The college student has some pretty crushing student loans looming right after he gets out.
It may be more of an incentive to hit the books, but more likely, it's simply an incentive to win that bet. If a student put some fairly significant money on a grade, and is skirting the bare edge of it going into a final exam, the pressure of that bet is going to be enormous. At that point, the possibility exists that studying may take a backseat to cheating. Money gets some pretty base reactions out of people. There's going to be somebody, eventually, probably sooner rather than later, that is going to forget about studying and just focus on hitting the goal grade by any means necessary.
Which teaches a lesson school was never meant to teach.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Fun With Logical Absolutism: Abortion Edition
Abortion has largely been an issue I've steered clear of over the years. Not my place to say, and the sheer vitriol of the debate has been cause for me to largely withdraw from it altogether. I've been content to let people whack each other over the head with their signs as long as they left me alone about it.
This has not been easy. Apparently, you're not allowed to stand down from the debate either. "You HAVE to pick a side! ...no, no, no, not THAT side!" Pretty much, you can either hold women's bodies hostage, be a baby-killer, or you can be both. Not an enticing prospect.
In fact, I kicked this very post down the road a day due to a bit of apprehension over wading into the abortion waters.
Over time, though, I have kind of drifted into positions, largely based on not being stupid or heartless.
The 'stupid' part comes mainly from terminology. 'Pro-choice' and 'pro-life'. What seems to get lost in the debate is the fact that the first one, 'pro-choice', is exactly what it says on the tin. Pro-CHOICE. The pro-life crowd appears to act as if that position is actually 'pro-death', as it is the position that allows abortion. They're baby killers.
More like fetus killers, but as the argument from the pro-life camp contends that life begins at conception, it is at least rhetorically consistent. But then you see some of the pro-life camp say things like "I chose life". Which implies that this is the one and only side that does so.
Okay, listen, geniuses. You CHOSE life, correct? Life was not IMPOSED on you. You chose it of your own free will.
That is being pro-choice, is it not? You had the CHOICE to have or not have your child, and you CHOSE to have your child. That is the pro-choice position: to choose, of your own free will, whether or not to carry a child to term. Being pro-life removes that option: you will carry the child to term, whether you like it or not, and that is that. (Being pro-death, of course, would be aborting all the children whether the mother likes it or not. For more on this position, please consult your friendly neighborhood doomsday cult. What do you mean, you don't have a friendly neighborhood doomsday cult? Go get one.)
The 'heartless' part comes from having some basic level of concern for the person that, in the event of carrying the baby to term, is going to be using her own body to conduct the birth, which most women will tell you is quite possibly the opposite of pleasant, particularly because dying in the act is not unheard of and before modern medicine was actually quite common, and still is in some of your lesser-developed countries. Aborting in the interest of the health of the mother does not appear to be controversial, thankfully. If one must choose between the death of someone who has not technically been born yet, and the death of someone who has, I'm picking the person who has been born every single time.
After that, the next step is abortions in the case of rape or incest: the mother had an unwanted pregnancy imposed on them by someone else. Up until now, abortions in this case wasn't controversial either. Why put a mother through carrying, giving birth to, and raising a child that was literally forced upon them via a sex act that was also forced upon them?
Well, apparently, three Senate candidates- Rand Paul of Kentucky, Sharron Angle of Nevada, and Ken Buck of Colorado, all Republican- have decided that the mother should be made to go through with the birth in this instance. That just doesn't sit well with me. 'But what if YOU were that baby?', I can hear the pro-life camp asking, and to that I say I just so happen to have spent nine months as a fetus myself, and at no point did I even comprehend what was going on. I just showed up one cold day in 1985. Hi, who are all of you? It's really freaking cold! Wait a minute, I haven't learned to talk yet! Agagoogoo waaaaa!
The centerpiece of these particular three is Angle, who had this exchange on radio's Alan Stock show:
Cue bewildered outrage from everyone who had previously been living under the assumption that being raped and impregnated at age 15, or 13, simply does not qualify as a lemons-into-lemonade situation.
Consider a roadtrip. If your car breaks down in the woods in a national park, that's a lemons-into-lemonade situation. While you're waiting for help to arrive or for Dad to fix the car, go off and enjoy whatever location it is exactly you broke down in. Settle down, have some lunch if you've got food in the cooler.
Now consider a bear coming out of the woods and mauling little Susie. You do not think 'Well, at least that's one less person to lug around! Little Billy, looks like you're going to have some extra legroom!'
But I got to thinking lately-- always a dangerous thing-- and it occurred to me that perhaps a rigid pro-life position like this is still somewhat inconsistent.
After all, if we're going to be absolutist about giving the maximum amount of life, are we not all mass murderers every time we engage in sex, regardless of whether or not a pregnancy results?
An average sperm count is 20 million. That means every time you attempt to concieve- or, in fact, every time a male ejaculates for any reason- he sends out 20 million sperm, on average. But it's unusual for a woman to even give birth to two of them. Many of the sperm never have a chance; the ones that get there first have to spend their energies breaking down the egg wall.
That means when I was concieved, assuming that average sperm count, did my dad not knowingly send 19,999,999 sperm to slave away and give their lives so I might live? After all, even if life begins at conception, are not all sperm sentinent enough to know how to seek out an egg out of a primitive survival instinct? And isn't masturbation considered a sin for the reason that one denies those sperm a chance at life?
How can we save these 19,999,999 other sperm from this fate? Why are top scientists not working on a device or a pill that can pre-emptively break down the egg wall, so that I might have 19,999,999 brothers and sisters? (They shall all be named Pat.) Sure, it might be slghtly uncomfortable for the mother, but just think of-- actually, no, I don't think any of us wants to think about what that might look like, but that isn't the point. We will learn to make it precious and beautiful and 20 million simultaneous miracles. (Minus, of course, any non-viable sperm. They had their chance.)
And what, exactly, is the lifespan of a sperm anyway? Inside of a male, a fully-developed sperm can survive only for about five days. That means, logically, if you are not impregnating a woman with 20 million children every five days- if you are not concieving 1,460,000,000 children every year (minus the non-viables), if you are not ballooning your woman's uterus to the size of a zeppelin- you are dooming untold numbers of potential lives before they are ever born. (And you had better succeed, for while there's a five-day lifespan inside the male, it's sliced to a mere six hours for any sperm that doesn't hit the target.)
Or, you could be logically consistent, and admit there are some cases where it's okay not to go to term.
EDIT: Dammit, Duggars, that wasn't supposed to be taken seriously.
This has not been easy. Apparently, you're not allowed to stand down from the debate either. "You HAVE to pick a side! ...no, no, no, not THAT side!" Pretty much, you can either hold women's bodies hostage, be a baby-killer, or you can be both. Not an enticing prospect.
In fact, I kicked this very post down the road a day due to a bit of apprehension over wading into the abortion waters.
Over time, though, I have kind of drifted into positions, largely based on not being stupid or heartless.
The 'stupid' part comes mainly from terminology. 'Pro-choice' and 'pro-life'. What seems to get lost in the debate is the fact that the first one, 'pro-choice', is exactly what it says on the tin. Pro-CHOICE. The pro-life crowd appears to act as if that position is actually 'pro-death', as it is the position that allows abortion. They're baby killers.
More like fetus killers, but as the argument from the pro-life camp contends that life begins at conception, it is at least rhetorically consistent. But then you see some of the pro-life camp say things like "I chose life". Which implies that this is the one and only side that does so.
Okay, listen, geniuses. You CHOSE life, correct? Life was not IMPOSED on you. You chose it of your own free will.
That is being pro-choice, is it not? You had the CHOICE to have or not have your child, and you CHOSE to have your child. That is the pro-choice position: to choose, of your own free will, whether or not to carry a child to term. Being pro-life removes that option: you will carry the child to term, whether you like it or not, and that is that. (Being pro-death, of course, would be aborting all the children whether the mother likes it or not. For more on this position, please consult your friendly neighborhood doomsday cult. What do you mean, you don't have a friendly neighborhood doomsday cult? Go get one.)
The 'heartless' part comes from having some basic level of concern for the person that, in the event of carrying the baby to term, is going to be using her own body to conduct the birth, which most women will tell you is quite possibly the opposite of pleasant, particularly because dying in the act is not unheard of and before modern medicine was actually quite common, and still is in some of your lesser-developed countries. Aborting in the interest of the health of the mother does not appear to be controversial, thankfully. If one must choose between the death of someone who has not technically been born yet, and the death of someone who has, I'm picking the person who has been born every single time.
After that, the next step is abortions in the case of rape or incest: the mother had an unwanted pregnancy imposed on them by someone else. Up until now, abortions in this case wasn't controversial either. Why put a mother through carrying, giving birth to, and raising a child that was literally forced upon them via a sex act that was also forced upon them?
Well, apparently, three Senate candidates- Rand Paul of Kentucky, Sharron Angle of Nevada, and Ken Buck of Colorado, all Republican- have decided that the mother should be made to go through with the birth in this instance. That just doesn't sit well with me. 'But what if YOU were that baby?', I can hear the pro-life camp asking, and to that I say I just so happen to have spent nine months as a fetus myself, and at no point did I even comprehend what was going on. I just showed up one cold day in 1985. Hi, who are all of you? It's really freaking cold! Wait a minute, I haven't learned to talk yet! Agagoogoo waaaaa!
The centerpiece of these particular three is Angle, who had this exchange on radio's Alan Stock show:
Stock: What do you say then to a young girl, I am going to place it as he said it, when a young girl is raped by her father, let's say, and she is pregnant. How do you explain this to her in terms of wanting her to go through the process of having the baby?
Angle: I think that two wrongs don't make a right. And I have been in the situation of counseling young girls, not 13 but 15, who have had very at risk, difficult pregnancies. And my counsel was to look for some alternatives, which they did. And they found that they had made what was really a lemon situation into lemonade. Well one girl in particular moved in with the adoptive parents of her child, and they both were adopted. Both of them grew up, one graduated from high school, the other had parents that loved her and she also graduated from high school. And I'll tell you the little girl who was born from that very poor situation came to me when she was 13 and said 'I know what you did thank you for saving my life.' So it is meaningful to me to err on the side of life.
Cue bewildered outrage from everyone who had previously been living under the assumption that being raped and impregnated at age 15, or 13, simply does not qualify as a lemons-into-lemonade situation.
Consider a roadtrip. If your car breaks down in the woods in a national park, that's a lemons-into-lemonade situation. While you're waiting for help to arrive or for Dad to fix the car, go off and enjoy whatever location it is exactly you broke down in. Settle down, have some lunch if you've got food in the cooler.
Now consider a bear coming out of the woods and mauling little Susie. You do not think 'Well, at least that's one less person to lug around! Little Billy, looks like you're going to have some extra legroom!'
But I got to thinking lately-- always a dangerous thing-- and it occurred to me that perhaps a rigid pro-life position like this is still somewhat inconsistent.
After all, if we're going to be absolutist about giving the maximum amount of life, are we not all mass murderers every time we engage in sex, regardless of whether or not a pregnancy results?
An average sperm count is 20 million. That means every time you attempt to concieve- or, in fact, every time a male ejaculates for any reason- he sends out 20 million sperm, on average. But it's unusual for a woman to even give birth to two of them. Many of the sperm never have a chance; the ones that get there first have to spend their energies breaking down the egg wall.
That means when I was concieved, assuming that average sperm count, did my dad not knowingly send 19,999,999 sperm to slave away and give their lives so I might live? After all, even if life begins at conception, are not all sperm sentinent enough to know how to seek out an egg out of a primitive survival instinct? And isn't masturbation considered a sin for the reason that one denies those sperm a chance at life?
How can we save these 19,999,999 other sperm from this fate? Why are top scientists not working on a device or a pill that can pre-emptively break down the egg wall, so that I might have 19,999,999 brothers and sisters? (They shall all be named Pat.) Sure, it might be slghtly uncomfortable for the mother, but just think of-- actually, no, I don't think any of us wants to think about what that might look like, but that isn't the point. We will learn to make it precious and beautiful and 20 million simultaneous miracles. (Minus, of course, any non-viable sperm. They had their chance.)
And what, exactly, is the lifespan of a sperm anyway? Inside of a male, a fully-developed sperm can survive only for about five days. That means, logically, if you are not impregnating a woman with 20 million children every five days- if you are not concieving 1,460,000,000 children every year (minus the non-viables), if you are not ballooning your woman's uterus to the size of a zeppelin- you are dooming untold numbers of potential lives before they are ever born. (And you had better succeed, for while there's a five-day lifespan inside the male, it's sliced to a mere six hours for any sperm that doesn't hit the target.)
Or, you could be logically consistent, and admit there are some cases where it's okay not to go to term.
EDIT: Dammit, Duggars, that wasn't supposed to be taken seriously.
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