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.
Showing posts with label social studies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social studies. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Friday, April 29, 2011
The Tinkerbell Effect
Several facts of society, facets we take for granted, aren't quite as intractable as they seem. They're plenty intractable, but the reason for that is that we say they are. Things like money, the rule of law, government, even society itself only exist because we all agreed at some point that they should be so. A 2004 article (PDF) in the Macquarie Law Journal by Cameron Stewart referred to it as the Tinkerbell Effect. If everyone agreed that, say, planes couldn't fly, that doesn't make that true. The plane will still be airworthy no matter how many people claim otherwise. But if everyone agreed that planes should not be ALLOWED to fly, if nobody is willing to take the plane up in the air, the plane won't fly. It COULD fly, but it won't.
We could bring up several things to illustrate the point of what happens when people as a group decide to stop existing under a particular societal setup- riots, mobs, rebellions, revolutions, even the odd community that prints its own local currency- but today, we have something much more unique.
Ken McElroy of Skidmore, Missouri was not a nice man. In fact, Skidmore's nickname for him was "the town bully". He had a rap sheet that would stretch halfway to Kansas City, including theft, rape, pedophilia, arson, assault, cattle rustling, even burning down someone's house... or at least, he would have had he actually been convicted of anything. He would, on 22 out of 23 occasions, escape conviction via witness intimidation- sometimes by making threats, sometimes just by parking outside the witnesses' houses and watching them. After acquittals would come the bragging- once safe via double-jeopardy law, McElroy would taunt townsfolk about what he was now free to admit he did. After one acquittal in 1973 over the attempted shooting of a farmer, McElroy bragged to Skidmore that he might as well have killed him. Through the multitude of offenses, townspeople terrified of McElroy kept turning to law enforcement, but every time, all they got back was a message that there wasn't anything they could do, but keep an eye on him.
Then there's the matter of that one conviction. McElroy was convicted of shooting grocer Bo Bowenkamp. Trena McElroy, Ken's wife, accused Bowenkamp's wife, Lois, of accusing Trena's daughter of stealing a 10-cent piece of candy. After a threat from Trena to "whip her ass" and the brandhishing of a pocketknife by Ken, Lois banned them from the store.
After several nights of parking outside the Bowenkamp house, at least two of which involved firing his shotgun, and one offer of $100 to Lois to settle the dispute with Trena via a street fight (Lois was in her 50's; Trena was a teenager), he pulled up behind the grocery and shot Bowenkamp. McElroy was convicted in April 1981 and sentenced to two years in prison.
But not for long. McElroy appealed, won the appeal mere hours later, and was freed on bond. Not long afterward, he showed up to a local tavern, rifle in hand, threatening to finish the job. This immediately violated his bond, and several witnesses were willing to testify, but McElroy's lawyer managed to get the hearing postponed. That was all the town could stand.
On July 10, 1981, less than three months later, much of Skidmore gathered at the Legion Hall to demand the county sheriff do something. He suggested a neighborhood watch program. They responded that that's supposed to be his job. Meanwhile, McElroy arrived at the tavern. It was no coincidence; he had heard about the meeting. The sheriff, upon wrapping up the meeting, headed out of town for the county seat of Maryville, 15 miles away. The rest of the meeting-goers soon decided to head to the tavern. Soon, over 40 people were there, about 30 in the tavern itself. Some of them had never gone there before. McElroy left, got into his truck, and the crowd followed.
Then McElroy was shot from at least two directions, in the middle of the day, in July, with a crowd of a reported 45 people present. Trena was spattered with blood; she was not shot and soon rushed to safety. The sheriff got word over the scanner and rushed back into Skidmore.
But nobody saw anything.
Obviously, this was a bald-faced lie- dozens of people were standing right there- but the town had mutually agreed that nobody saw anything. Nobody had told the sheriff of anything during the earlier meeting. And, as per the Tinkerbell Effect, so it was. Trena, Ken's wife, wasn't in on this, and made accusations, but with nobody else willing to back her up, her word alone was not enough to press charges. Every time a potential witness was asked, they would simply say that they heard gunshots, hit the ground, and saw nothing. A hotline was set up for tips. Nobody called, unless you count the media.
And the media wasn't being talked to either, at least after the initial stretch of time. As daughter Cheryl Bowenkamp recalled 25 years later,
The shooting was in 1981. 30 years later, no further progress on the case has been made. None is likely to be made.
The town of Skidmore, still refusing to finger a shooter, doesn't regret it, because they feel to this day it had to be done. Had McElroy not been shot, he simply would have continued his reign of terror, and law enforcement would have continued to allow it. But at the same time, they do regret it, as the incident is all the otherwise very sleepy town is likely to ever be known for. As it happens, the media only appears interested in Skidmore when someone gets killed there, and every time they come around, Ken McElroy's name is thrown around again.
Skidmore, which mainly caters to truckers and farmers, has an annual four-day Punkin' Show in the fall, which includes such things as dance contests, tractor pulls and frog-jumping contests. It is by all accounts lovely. If that sounds boring and sleepy, good. That's just the way Skidmore would like it.
But everyone else has determined that Ken McElroy will be Skidmore's claim to fame. And so it is.
We could bring up several things to illustrate the point of what happens when people as a group decide to stop existing under a particular societal setup- riots, mobs, rebellions, revolutions, even the odd community that prints its own local currency- but today, we have something much more unique.
Ken McElroy of Skidmore, Missouri was not a nice man. In fact, Skidmore's nickname for him was "the town bully". He had a rap sheet that would stretch halfway to Kansas City, including theft, rape, pedophilia, arson, assault, cattle rustling, even burning down someone's house... or at least, he would have had he actually been convicted of anything. He would, on 22 out of 23 occasions, escape conviction via witness intimidation- sometimes by making threats, sometimes just by parking outside the witnesses' houses and watching them. After acquittals would come the bragging- once safe via double-jeopardy law, McElroy would taunt townsfolk about what he was now free to admit he did. After one acquittal in 1973 over the attempted shooting of a farmer, McElroy bragged to Skidmore that he might as well have killed him. Through the multitude of offenses, townspeople terrified of McElroy kept turning to law enforcement, but every time, all they got back was a message that there wasn't anything they could do, but keep an eye on him.
Then there's the matter of that one conviction. McElroy was convicted of shooting grocer Bo Bowenkamp. Trena McElroy, Ken's wife, accused Bowenkamp's wife, Lois, of accusing Trena's daughter of stealing a 10-cent piece of candy. After a threat from Trena to "whip her ass" and the brandhishing of a pocketknife by Ken, Lois banned them from the store.
After several nights of parking outside the Bowenkamp house, at least two of which involved firing his shotgun, and one offer of $100 to Lois to settle the dispute with Trena via a street fight (Lois was in her 50's; Trena was a teenager), he pulled up behind the grocery and shot Bowenkamp. McElroy was convicted in April 1981 and sentenced to two years in prison.
But not for long. McElroy appealed, won the appeal mere hours later, and was freed on bond. Not long afterward, he showed up to a local tavern, rifle in hand, threatening to finish the job. This immediately violated his bond, and several witnesses were willing to testify, but McElroy's lawyer managed to get the hearing postponed. That was all the town could stand.
On July 10, 1981, less than three months later, much of Skidmore gathered at the Legion Hall to demand the county sheriff do something. He suggested a neighborhood watch program. They responded that that's supposed to be his job. Meanwhile, McElroy arrived at the tavern. It was no coincidence; he had heard about the meeting. The sheriff, upon wrapping up the meeting, headed out of town for the county seat of Maryville, 15 miles away. The rest of the meeting-goers soon decided to head to the tavern. Soon, over 40 people were there, about 30 in the tavern itself. Some of them had never gone there before. McElroy left, got into his truck, and the crowd followed.
Then McElroy was shot from at least two directions, in the middle of the day, in July, with a crowd of a reported 45 people present. Trena was spattered with blood; she was not shot and soon rushed to safety. The sheriff got word over the scanner and rushed back into Skidmore.
But nobody saw anything.
Obviously, this was a bald-faced lie- dozens of people were standing right there- but the town had mutually agreed that nobody saw anything. Nobody had told the sheriff of anything during the earlier meeting. And, as per the Tinkerbell Effect, so it was. Trena, Ken's wife, wasn't in on this, and made accusations, but with nobody else willing to back her up, her word alone was not enough to press charges. Every time a potential witness was asked, they would simply say that they heard gunshots, hit the ground, and saw nothing. A hotline was set up for tips. Nobody called, unless you count the media.
And the media wasn't being talked to either, at least after the initial stretch of time. As daughter Cheryl Bowenkamp recalled 25 years later,
"Right after the shooting some of us here in Skidmore were willing to talk about what we had gone through in the year prior to the shooting. No one was going to talk about the shooting itself. But it only took the first couple of stories that were printed for us to realize that it didn't matter what we said. It was going to be twisted. So...everyone quit talking. That seemed like the best way. Most of the stories that got printed were blown out of proportion and would have made a great western."
The shooting was in 1981. 30 years later, no further progress on the case has been made. None is likely to be made.
The town of Skidmore, still refusing to finger a shooter, doesn't regret it, because they feel to this day it had to be done. Had McElroy not been shot, he simply would have continued his reign of terror, and law enforcement would have continued to allow it. But at the same time, they do regret it, as the incident is all the otherwise very sleepy town is likely to ever be known for. As it happens, the media only appears interested in Skidmore when someone gets killed there, and every time they come around, Ken McElroy's name is thrown around again.
Skidmore, which mainly caters to truckers and farmers, has an annual four-day Punkin' Show in the fall, which includes such things as dance contests, tractor pulls and frog-jumping contests. It is by all accounts lovely. If that sounds boring and sleepy, good. That's just the way Skidmore would like it.
But everyone else has determined that Ken McElroy will be Skidmore's claim to fame. And so it is.
Friday, April 15, 2011
The Back Page, Before They Cut It All To Fill The Back Page With The Royal Wedding
With it hailing out, and me working on something larger- might be tomorrow, might not, but still- today we'll do something of a back-page roundup. I'm going to fire four stories at you that I'm banking you haven't seen today, and we'll see if anything socks you in the eyeballs.
*Bolivia is on track to to pass a law, the Law of Mother Earth, giving nature the same rights as man. The Guardian shows them as "the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered," as well as the right of nature "to not be affected by mega-infrastructure and development projects that affect the balance of ecosystems and the local inhabitant communities." They're also trying to get something similar through the United Nations, though that shows far poorer chances of success.
*The FDA has given approval to a hat, the NovoTTF-100A, that fights brain cancer by generating electric fields using the electrodes on your scalp to attack tumor cells. It comes with a gazillion caveats- the type of brain cancer, how much the cancer has progressed, what else has been tried- but it got a narrow approval after a clinical study showed it was as effective in the test group as chemotherapy, with less of some side effects (and more of others). That paves the way for further testing in other circumstances.
*Women in Tajikistan are increasingly taking note of a quirk in Tajik society that leaves them at major risk, according to Eurasianet. Divorce rates are on the rise, but the common way for Muslim spouses to get married is a religious ceremony called a nikkah. Couples that opt for a nikkah frequently do not obtain paperwork officially recognizing the marriage. No official marriage means no prenuptial agreement, and with women's rights lacking in that part of the world, the husband-that's-not-officially-a-husband can easily wind up with just about everything; according to the article, about 80% of female spouses wind up without property or child support, usually because they didn't register. Women can be hit from the other end as well, as even the ones that register and obtain a divorce (Tajik law enforces a 50-50 split) can end up shunned by their community because of the divorce.
*And finally, let's head over to Alicante, Spain, where authorities have recovered two priceless paintings stolen in the late 1990's: "La Anunciación" by El Greco and "La Aparición de la Virgen del Pilar" by Francisco de Goya. The paintings are reportedly undamaged; the thieves looked after them well. That's about all they could do; as they were both placed on the Art Loss Register and made known to the art community and to police, they couldn't easily be resold. When they reportedly started trying to do so in October, the cops got wind of it and began an investigation that led to the paintings' eventual recovery.
*Bolivia is on track to to pass a law, the Law of Mother Earth, giving nature the same rights as man. The Guardian shows them as "the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered," as well as the right of nature "to not be affected by mega-infrastructure and development projects that affect the balance of ecosystems and the local inhabitant communities." They're also trying to get something similar through the United Nations, though that shows far poorer chances of success.
*The FDA has given approval to a hat, the NovoTTF-100A, that fights brain cancer by generating electric fields using the electrodes on your scalp to attack tumor cells. It comes with a gazillion caveats- the type of brain cancer, how much the cancer has progressed, what else has been tried- but it got a narrow approval after a clinical study showed it was as effective in the test group as chemotherapy, with less of some side effects (and more of others). That paves the way for further testing in other circumstances.
*Women in Tajikistan are increasingly taking note of a quirk in Tajik society that leaves them at major risk, according to Eurasianet. Divorce rates are on the rise, but the common way for Muslim spouses to get married is a religious ceremony called a nikkah. Couples that opt for a nikkah frequently do not obtain paperwork officially recognizing the marriage. No official marriage means no prenuptial agreement, and with women's rights lacking in that part of the world, the husband-that's-not-officially-a-husband can easily wind up with just about everything; according to the article, about 80% of female spouses wind up without property or child support, usually because they didn't register. Women can be hit from the other end as well, as even the ones that register and obtain a divorce (Tajik law enforces a 50-50 split) can end up shunned by their community because of the divorce.
*And finally, let's head over to Alicante, Spain, where authorities have recovered two priceless paintings stolen in the late 1990's: "La Anunciación" by El Greco and "La Aparición de la Virgen del Pilar" by Francisco de Goya. The paintings are reportedly undamaged; the thieves looked after them well. That's about all they could do; as they were both placed on the Art Loss Register and made known to the art community and to police, they couldn't easily be resold. When they reportedly started trying to do so in October, the cops got wind of it and began an investigation that led to the paintings' eventual recovery.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
The Famewhore Experiment
You are probably familiar with the Milgram experiment, named for its creator, Stanley Milgram. In fact, it's probably the most famous psychology experiment of all time. In order to test human obedience to authority figures, and more specifically, to see whether Adolf Eichmann's accomplices in the Holocaust really were in mental league with Eichmann or whether they might have been just average Joes afraid to stand up to authority- essentially, whether a similar situation could happen outside of Nazi Germany- subjects were given a scenario. They, after being given $4 for showing up, were paired with a plant who would answer- and eventually, deliberately answer incorrectly- a series of word-association questions. Every time the plant got an answer wrong, the subject was to administer electric shocks of increasingly dangerous voltage, topping out at a fatal 450 volts. (The shocks were fake, but they didn't know that.) The plant made sure to mention in front of the subject that he had a heart condition, and would, at predetermined voltages, start yelling and screaming from the pain. Or, at least, a tape recorder would do so; the plant was not in direct view of the subject, and once out of the subject's sight, played no further part in the proceedings.
If a subject expressed concern at any point about administering the shock, the experimenter would give the following succession of verbal prods, in order:
"Please continue."
"The experiment requires that you continue."
"It is absolutely essential that you continue."
"You have no other choice, you must go on."
If the fourth prod did not cause the subject to continue, or if the subject gave the 450-volt shock three times in a row, the experiment ended. It didn't really matter how much prodding it took to get the subject to press the button. All that mattered was did they press the button. As it happened, 65% of the subjects went all the way to 450 volts. And while the subjects that stopped, stopped, nobody demanded that the study itself be stopped, and nobody went to check on the plant. Various objections were raised from multiple corners, especially since those in the know predicted that only 1-3% would go all the way, and the experiment has been redone many times over the years with many different tweaks and twists, but no matter what the circumstances, no matter what kind of psychological pressure has been placed on subjects to stop, people keep pressing the button, normally with percentages in the high 60's or low 70's.
Which brings us to an experiment conducted in France last year. The premise of this particular revisit centered around the effect of television on someone's decision-making process; how much more likely someone is to do something just because they're on TV. A fake game show was created for a documentary called Le Jeu de la Mort- The Game of Death.
After being given 40 euros, and being told they wouldn't win any money because it was just a trial run for a pilot, subjects were given essentially the exact same experiment as Milgram, only replacing the experimenter with a game show host, a studio audience chanting "punishment", and all the bells and whistles and flashing lights and dramatic music a prime-time game show deserves. The 450 volts became 460, the word-association questions were replaced with trivia, but otherwise, it was the same thing.
65% of subjects followed the original Milgram experiment to the end- 26 out of 40.
The Game of Death saw 80% of its subjects do likewise- 64 out of 80. (Time here claims 81%; their math is wrong.) That's about as high a percentage as any replication has shown.
And when you think about it a bit, 80% actually seems low.
In more recent iterations of the Milgram experiment, subjects have had to be screened beforehand to ensure they weren't already familiar with it. If this isn't done, the results would skew low; subjects would try to present themselves as the kind soul who would never hurt a fly. They wouldn't press the button, but it wouldn't mean anything, because they'd just be giving the answer they know the experimenters want. (There might also be some smartasses that just start jamming on the buttons all at once, like they were playing a piano or something.)
In The Game of Death, however, the results might be skewed low already. The setup, while replicating a TV game show, went without two critical factors. First, there was no actual money at stake. The subjects were given 40 euros at the start and then told no more money was on the line. That money is a crucial factor in getting game show contestants, and reality show contestants, to do things they normally would not do. You might not shock this guy for free... but would you do it for a million dollars? Or to place even more pressure on the contestant, would you do it if you had $500,000 in hand, and you would win $1 million by shocking him, but if you don't shock him, we'll drop you down to $25,000, or even nothing? Do those 16 that didn't press the button still not press the button with life-changing amounts of money on the line?
Second, it wasn't actually going to be broadcast, and the subjects knew that going in. It was presented as a test run for a pilot. There are a lot of pilots that never see air. What happens if the show is already on the air, and the contestant knows that they will, guaranteed, be on national television, in prime time? And to take it even further, what happens after the show has been on long enough that they have to put out casting calls? Everybody that sees that casting call knows exactly what would be expected of them if they made it on the show. Does anyone that would refrain from pressing the button even apply for the show? After all, they might get on TV, but they would lose. Wouldn't the contestant pool just wind up being a bunch of people ready and willing to knowingly apply fatal shocks to another human being for the sake of money and 15 minutes of fame?
Even if you were to invoke some kind of twist, like strapping in a loved one to take the shocks when you press the button, even then, anyone that couldn't bear to make the shock would never in a million years apply for the show. The most you'd get out of the 'loved one strapped in' stipulation would be family members predetermining prior to applying how far they're willing to go and how much money that would earn them, and then abruptly stopping the second they hit that point.
But they'd still be pressing the button.
Which leads to another set of questions: if such a show ever made air, how many people would watch?
And how many would watch more than once?
If a subject expressed concern at any point about administering the shock, the experimenter would give the following succession of verbal prods, in order:
"Please continue."
"The experiment requires that you continue."
"It is absolutely essential that you continue."
"You have no other choice, you must go on."
If the fourth prod did not cause the subject to continue, or if the subject gave the 450-volt shock three times in a row, the experiment ended. It didn't really matter how much prodding it took to get the subject to press the button. All that mattered was did they press the button. As it happened, 65% of the subjects went all the way to 450 volts. And while the subjects that stopped, stopped, nobody demanded that the study itself be stopped, and nobody went to check on the plant. Various objections were raised from multiple corners, especially since those in the know predicted that only 1-3% would go all the way, and the experiment has been redone many times over the years with many different tweaks and twists, but no matter what the circumstances, no matter what kind of psychological pressure has been placed on subjects to stop, people keep pressing the button, normally with percentages in the high 60's or low 70's.
Which brings us to an experiment conducted in France last year. The premise of this particular revisit centered around the effect of television on someone's decision-making process; how much more likely someone is to do something just because they're on TV. A fake game show was created for a documentary called Le Jeu de la Mort- The Game of Death.
After being given 40 euros, and being told they wouldn't win any money because it was just a trial run for a pilot, subjects were given essentially the exact same experiment as Milgram, only replacing the experimenter with a game show host, a studio audience chanting "punishment", and all the bells and whistles and flashing lights and dramatic music a prime-time game show deserves. The 450 volts became 460, the word-association questions were replaced with trivia, but otherwise, it was the same thing.
65% of subjects followed the original Milgram experiment to the end- 26 out of 40.
The Game of Death saw 80% of its subjects do likewise- 64 out of 80. (Time here claims 81%; their math is wrong.) That's about as high a percentage as any replication has shown.
And when you think about it a bit, 80% actually seems low.
In more recent iterations of the Milgram experiment, subjects have had to be screened beforehand to ensure they weren't already familiar with it. If this isn't done, the results would skew low; subjects would try to present themselves as the kind soul who would never hurt a fly. They wouldn't press the button, but it wouldn't mean anything, because they'd just be giving the answer they know the experimenters want. (There might also be some smartasses that just start jamming on the buttons all at once, like they were playing a piano or something.)
In The Game of Death, however, the results might be skewed low already. The setup, while replicating a TV game show, went without two critical factors. First, there was no actual money at stake. The subjects were given 40 euros at the start and then told no more money was on the line. That money is a crucial factor in getting game show contestants, and reality show contestants, to do things they normally would not do. You might not shock this guy for free... but would you do it for a million dollars? Or to place even more pressure on the contestant, would you do it if you had $500,000 in hand, and you would win $1 million by shocking him, but if you don't shock him, we'll drop you down to $25,000, or even nothing? Do those 16 that didn't press the button still not press the button with life-changing amounts of money on the line?
Second, it wasn't actually going to be broadcast, and the subjects knew that going in. It was presented as a test run for a pilot. There are a lot of pilots that never see air. What happens if the show is already on the air, and the contestant knows that they will, guaranteed, be on national television, in prime time? And to take it even further, what happens after the show has been on long enough that they have to put out casting calls? Everybody that sees that casting call knows exactly what would be expected of them if they made it on the show. Does anyone that would refrain from pressing the button even apply for the show? After all, they might get on TV, but they would lose. Wouldn't the contestant pool just wind up being a bunch of people ready and willing to knowingly apply fatal shocks to another human being for the sake of money and 15 minutes of fame?
Even if you were to invoke some kind of twist, like strapping in a loved one to take the shocks when you press the button, even then, anyone that couldn't bear to make the shock would never in a million years apply for the show. The most you'd get out of the 'loved one strapped in' stipulation would be family members predetermining prior to applying how far they're willing to go and how much money that would earn them, and then abruptly stopping the second they hit that point.
But they'd still be pressing the button.
Which leads to another set of questions: if such a show ever made air, how many people would watch?
And how many would watch more than once?
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Nature Doesn't Care
A recent poll from Pew Research showed a partisan split on the question of global warming. When asked "Is there solid evidence the Earth is warming?", self-identified Republicans come down 53-38 against the existence of global warming, while self-identified Democrats are convinced be a 79-14 margin. Indies are convinced 59-31.
A sub-question asked those convinced why there's global warming. The Dems and indies come down on the side of human activity over natural patterns, 53-18 and 32-17 respectively, while the convinced Republicans come down 18-16 on the side of natural patterns.
A Fark headline from earlier today, as Fark headlines so often do, cut right to the point:
And there's the rub.
Nature doesn't care.
When nature decides it wants to do something badly enough, it really doesn't care what the humans think of it. It doesn't care what speeches are made, what laws are passed, who wins an election, how much money is spent, whether the budget's been drained. The only thing the humans can do is make something strong enough to stop it. There had better be a barrier high enough, long enough, thick enough and strong enough to hold back the water, or there's going to be a flood. There had better be enough water to cool the lava flow quickly enough, or it's going to swallow up whatever it wants, and even then it may not be enough. The heating or heat retention system had better be robust enough, or you're going to freeze in that blizzard. And on the inverse, when nature doesn't want to make any more of a finite resource, you'd better be done using it by the time it runs out, or there's a whole lot of things that aren't going to be usable anymore. Hope you didn't need them.
Quite often, the human resources required to hold back these acts of nature are far beyond what humans could ever hope to muster. Too bad. Nature doesn't care. If human capacity were, hypothetically, only strong enough to earthquake-proof structures against, say, an 8.0 quake, and then a 9.0 comes along, those buildings are coming down. Humanity's best just isn't good enough. And if it's not good enough, there's little humanity can do except run for its life.
And there's no partial credit given either. A $10 million levee that barely fails and a $10 levee that completely fails end up looking exactly the same in the end. Either way, there's a gigantic floodplain and a bunch of broken construction remnants afterwards. The levee holds, or it doesn't. The house withstands the earthquake, or it doesn't. The house is rendered unlivable by mold, or it isn't. The volcano swallows up the house, or it doesn't. The ground underneath the house on a hill is stable enough to keep from being part of a mudslide, or it isn't. The house is high enough to stay out of the flood, or it isn't. People survive through a natural disaster, or they don't.
This also applies to proactive measures taken by humans. You don't believe in global warming? Fine then. We won't use global warming as an example. Let's set that entire discussion aside. We'll use invasive species. No denying the existence of those and in order to be considered invasive, a species' introduction must be indisputably the act of human intervention. We could use starlings, rabbits, killer bees, the Asian long-horned beetle, carp, or anything else you find on this list, but we'll focus here on kudzu, which is common throughout the heavily-Republican south (imagine that). Japan introduced it in 1876 at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia; it looked nice enough that Americans used it for decoration. In the 1920's, people started actively planting it, and in the 1930's, it was promoted as a form of erosion control during the Dust Bowl, with farmers being paid to plant it by the 40's. It grew very well. Too well. Way, way too well. So well that it started choking out everything that wasn't kudzu. So well that by 1972, it had gone from being something the government paid to have planted to being something the government called a weed.
Kudzu grows better in the United States than in its native Asia, mainly for the reason that when it came over, the insects that eat kudzu didn't come with it. And that's a common theme with invasive species: the places to which they're introduced lack their natural predators, and in nature, no predators means unchecked growth.
But even after being called a weed, kudzu is still hell to remove. Once again, nature doesn't care what kudzu is called. If you want it out, it means an effort that lasts several years to get rid of a single weed. As nature.org advises, "To successfully control kudzu, its extensive root system must be completely eradicated by cutting vines just above the ground and mowing every month for two growing seasons—all cut material must be destroyed." Clemson University goes even further, saying "Because of its rapid growth (up to 60 feet per year), a single surviving kudzu plant can spread and re-infest a site within a few growing seasons. Eradication requires multiple broadcast applications of herbicide and follow-up spot treatments over a period of 4 to 10 years. Establishment of pine trees or other crops should not be attempted for at least 4 years after control measures are initiated."
If you can't muster that effort, too bad. Kudzu doesn't care. Have fun with your kudzu, and as Southerners will advise, close your windows at night or the kudzu will creep in.
Believe in global warming or don't. But, like kudzu, like any form of nature's wrath, if and when the consequences of it show up at your doorstep, either be ready to deal with them, or be ready to run. Nature never asked your opinion about it. Nature does not refrain from plowing over humanity because that might not poll well. Nature doesn't care.
A sub-question asked those convinced why there's global warming. The Dems and indies come down on the side of human activity over natural patterns, 53-18 and 32-17 respectively, while the convinced Republicans come down 18-16 on the side of natural patterns.
A Fark headline from earlier today, as Fark headlines so often do, cut right to the point:
"Pew poll finds 53% of Republicans do not believe in global warming. No word on whether global warming cares what Republicans think of it"
And there's the rub.
Nature doesn't care.
When nature decides it wants to do something badly enough, it really doesn't care what the humans think of it. It doesn't care what speeches are made, what laws are passed, who wins an election, how much money is spent, whether the budget's been drained. The only thing the humans can do is make something strong enough to stop it. There had better be a barrier high enough, long enough, thick enough and strong enough to hold back the water, or there's going to be a flood. There had better be enough water to cool the lava flow quickly enough, or it's going to swallow up whatever it wants, and even then it may not be enough. The heating or heat retention system had better be robust enough, or you're going to freeze in that blizzard. And on the inverse, when nature doesn't want to make any more of a finite resource, you'd better be done using it by the time it runs out, or there's a whole lot of things that aren't going to be usable anymore. Hope you didn't need them.
Quite often, the human resources required to hold back these acts of nature are far beyond what humans could ever hope to muster. Too bad. Nature doesn't care. If human capacity were, hypothetically, only strong enough to earthquake-proof structures against, say, an 8.0 quake, and then a 9.0 comes along, those buildings are coming down. Humanity's best just isn't good enough. And if it's not good enough, there's little humanity can do except run for its life.
And there's no partial credit given either. A $10 million levee that barely fails and a $10 levee that completely fails end up looking exactly the same in the end. Either way, there's a gigantic floodplain and a bunch of broken construction remnants afterwards. The levee holds, or it doesn't. The house withstands the earthquake, or it doesn't. The house is rendered unlivable by mold, or it isn't. The volcano swallows up the house, or it doesn't. The ground underneath the house on a hill is stable enough to keep from being part of a mudslide, or it isn't. The house is high enough to stay out of the flood, or it isn't. People survive through a natural disaster, or they don't.
This also applies to proactive measures taken by humans. You don't believe in global warming? Fine then. We won't use global warming as an example. Let's set that entire discussion aside. We'll use invasive species. No denying the existence of those and in order to be considered invasive, a species' introduction must be indisputably the act of human intervention. We could use starlings, rabbits, killer bees, the Asian long-horned beetle, carp, or anything else you find on this list, but we'll focus here on kudzu, which is common throughout the heavily-Republican south (imagine that). Japan introduced it in 1876 at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia; it looked nice enough that Americans used it for decoration. In the 1920's, people started actively planting it, and in the 1930's, it was promoted as a form of erosion control during the Dust Bowl, with farmers being paid to plant it by the 40's. It grew very well. Too well. Way, way too well. So well that it started choking out everything that wasn't kudzu. So well that by 1972, it had gone from being something the government paid to have planted to being something the government called a weed.
Kudzu grows better in the United States than in its native Asia, mainly for the reason that when it came over, the insects that eat kudzu didn't come with it. And that's a common theme with invasive species: the places to which they're introduced lack their natural predators, and in nature, no predators means unchecked growth.
But even after being called a weed, kudzu is still hell to remove. Once again, nature doesn't care what kudzu is called. If you want it out, it means an effort that lasts several years to get rid of a single weed. As nature.org advises, "To successfully control kudzu, its extensive root system must be completely eradicated by cutting vines just above the ground and mowing every month for two growing seasons—all cut material must be destroyed." Clemson University goes even further, saying "Because of its rapid growth (up to 60 feet per year), a single surviving kudzu plant can spread and re-infest a site within a few growing seasons. Eradication requires multiple broadcast applications of herbicide and follow-up spot treatments over a period of 4 to 10 years. Establishment of pine trees or other crops should not be attempted for at least 4 years after control measures are initiated."
If you can't muster that effort, too bad. Kudzu doesn't care. Have fun with your kudzu, and as Southerners will advise, close your windows at night or the kudzu will creep in.
Believe in global warming or don't. But, like kudzu, like any form of nature's wrath, if and when the consequences of it show up at your doorstep, either be ready to deal with them, or be ready to run. Nature never asked your opinion about it. Nature does not refrain from plowing over humanity because that might not poll well. Nature doesn't care.
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Hawaii's Art Scene and the Shocking Difficulties of the Rapid-Fire Book Club
I am a day back from vacation, and that means I'm back online. This is the first Internet access I've had; I came home to a busted modem. First off, the Rapid-Fire Book Club has two entries to be made:
Farquhar, Michael- A Treasury of Deception: Liars, Misleaders, Hoodwinkers, and the Extraordinary True Stories of History's greatest Hoaxes, Fakes, and Frauds
Keale Sr., Moses K.; Tava, Rerioterai- Niihau: The Traditions of an Hawaiian Island
That second one did not come easy. Hawaii has a vibrant creative culture. They have their own music style (Don Ho, anyone?), and practice it extensively. Pre-existing songs will commonly be covered in the Hawaiian style, and even if you didn't want to hear it, it's pretty tough to get away from. Artists are even easier to find. I stumbled upon one by accident at one point, named Midori, when a painting caught my eye at a gift shop at Byodo-in Temple. As it turned out, she was the gift shop's cashier. (If you happen to be in the area, stop on by; she's quite good. Wish I could link her, but she doesn't seem to have a link to go to.) Dance is particularly alive and well; not just hula can be found, but also urban-style dancing, clubbing, and if you head out to the Polynesian Cultural Center, the show 'Breath of Life' will take it away, especially when the fire comes out. Paintings, sculptures, murals, jewelry, physical movement, and much any other kind of creative expression is completely at home on Oahu.
Except books, apparently.
Sure, there are your Hawaiian books, there are places to buy them. But there aren't many. It's Borders, Barnes and Noble, and then a smattering of utterly forgettable places that you forget even as you drive past them. And it's understandable. In a city that is such a global cultural nexus as Honolulu, visual and aural art can speak to everyone present, but the written word can only speak to those who speak that language. And when English, Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Tagalog, and your more popular European languages all try to fight for airtime in one place, any one book will only have a limited audience.
Which makes it tough to find something good that you aren't just as, or more, likely to find back home.
Eventually, though, I settled on the book on Niihau. The reason for that is, as tough as it was to find a good Hawaiian book, it would be even tougher to set foot on Niihau.
Why? I'm not a native of Niihau. There are only just a few hundred natives of that island, and while they are able to freely travel to and from Niihau, you and I are not. It's known as the Forbidden Island for this reason. Niihau is a place that hangs on, as best it can, to old Hawaiian tradition. Niihauans keep their history primarily through storytelling which sometimes mixes with Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill-style tall tales. The book I purchased was originally published in 1989, and was the first real written history of the island. There are still very few titles out there about the place.
Which, being a guardian of old Hawaiian tradition, likely serves to further explain the dearth of literature on the islands. But seeing as the Hawaiian creative soul has been channeled into so many other outlets, it's rather hard to complain much about it.
Farquhar, Michael- A Treasury of Deception: Liars, Misleaders, Hoodwinkers, and the Extraordinary True Stories of History's greatest Hoaxes, Fakes, and Frauds
Keale Sr., Moses K.; Tava, Rerioterai- Niihau: The Traditions of an Hawaiian Island
That second one did not come easy. Hawaii has a vibrant creative culture. They have their own music style (Don Ho, anyone?), and practice it extensively. Pre-existing songs will commonly be covered in the Hawaiian style, and even if you didn't want to hear it, it's pretty tough to get away from. Artists are even easier to find. I stumbled upon one by accident at one point, named Midori, when a painting caught my eye at a gift shop at Byodo-in Temple. As it turned out, she was the gift shop's cashier. (If you happen to be in the area, stop on by; she's quite good. Wish I could link her, but she doesn't seem to have a link to go to.) Dance is particularly alive and well; not just hula can be found, but also urban-style dancing, clubbing, and if you head out to the Polynesian Cultural Center, the show 'Breath of Life' will take it away, especially when the fire comes out. Paintings, sculptures, murals, jewelry, physical movement, and much any other kind of creative expression is completely at home on Oahu.
Except books, apparently.
Sure, there are your Hawaiian books, there are places to buy them. But there aren't many. It's Borders, Barnes and Noble, and then a smattering of utterly forgettable places that you forget even as you drive past them. And it's understandable. In a city that is such a global cultural nexus as Honolulu, visual and aural art can speak to everyone present, but the written word can only speak to those who speak that language. And when English, Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Tagalog, and your more popular European languages all try to fight for airtime in one place, any one book will only have a limited audience.
Which makes it tough to find something good that you aren't just as, or more, likely to find back home.
Eventually, though, I settled on the book on Niihau. The reason for that is, as tough as it was to find a good Hawaiian book, it would be even tougher to set foot on Niihau.
Why? I'm not a native of Niihau. There are only just a few hundred natives of that island, and while they are able to freely travel to and from Niihau, you and I are not. It's known as the Forbidden Island for this reason. Niihau is a place that hangs on, as best it can, to old Hawaiian tradition. Niihauans keep their history primarily through storytelling which sometimes mixes with Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill-style tall tales. The book I purchased was originally published in 1989, and was the first real written history of the island. There are still very few titles out there about the place.
Which, being a guardian of old Hawaiian tradition, likely serves to further explain the dearth of literature on the islands. But seeing as the Hawaiian creative soul has been channeled into so many other outlets, it's rather hard to complain much about it.
Friday, November 12, 2010
We Need More (And Less) Of This
Earlier tonight- a day I spent putting time into my club-soccer book- I stumbled upon the Rachel Maddow Show. Tonight, she was spending the hour talking with Jon Stewart, who has been sick with what he calls "the bubons", which is a pretty good way to describe a bug that's recently been making the rounds more or less everywhere you look including my whole family (but not me personally, fingers crossed).
As it happens, that hour was one of the most intelligent and refreshing hours of television I have seen in quite some time. Here you have two very smart, rational individuals having a calm discussion about, mostly, the media's role in politics (including Rachel and Jon's own roles), and an amazing thing happened when they disagreed:
Neither one raised their voice in anger.
They found common ground. They ceded ground. They agreed to disagree. They did all this calmly, talking like normal human beings who just happened to be very very smart (and one of whom was very very sick). And what's more, they were kind of working without a net. Rachel had a small bit of notes, but by her admission, the discussion got away pretty early on from the intended set of questions because neither one was getting bored with the topic they were finding themselves discussing (which I have no problem with whatsoever; there is no sense cutting off a good debate with 'we'll have to leave it there'), and Jon had no notes at all. It's just two people in chairs shooting the breeze. It led to a smattering of factual errors, but really, you try having a discussion of that length sometime with that few notes and not screwing anything up. You probably fail at it all the time. So do I. I spend time away from the Internet. My memory's not perfect. (We'll see how they handle the errors they did make. They have time now to go over what they biffed; we'll see if corrections are forthcoming.)
The raw feed can be found here; it goes nearly 50 minutes, so set some time aside.
The problem is that the national debate in this country has become so utterly poisoned that I go around looking at reactions to the discussion on Facebook and Daily Kos and Penny Arcade- all places that saw the debate- and a not-insignificant number of people failed to pick up on the tone at all. They started to look for a "winner" (usually Maddow, giving no slack to Jon being sick, which, really, you try being at the peak of your cognitive skills when you're throwing up all day long), in the process completely missing the point of what was going on. They think Jon had a fall from grace, that he should stick to jokes. One said if she had seen this before the Rally to Restore Sanity, she'd have skipped it.
Why do we have to declare a winner and a loser? This is not what this discussion was. Jon and Rachel even expressed mutual respect for each other. Jon didn't even have to appear on the show. Sick, remember? He could have cancelled. Yet he showed enough respect for Rachel that he sucked it up and fought the bug (and at the close of proceedings, called Maddow his "ginger root".)
This is the core of the underlying political problem plaguing us. Too many of us have lost the ability to talk to one another. Worse, too many of us seem to look at someone with which we disagree on some things, look at another person with which we disagree on all things, and reserve our greatest contempt for the former, acting as if they're betraying us. If you don't agree with me on everything, you're the enemy and must be destroyed along with all the others.
That needs to stop. This isn't a football game, where it's one team fighting another team. This is the Royal Rumble: a whole bunch of people in one ring, every man for themselves. Two of our forefathers would tell you themselves-- Ben Franklin once said "We must all hang together or surely we shall all hang separately"; Abe Lincoln said "A house divided against itself cannot stand."
We may not agree on the best way to move the country forward, but an utter contempt for anyone that disagrees with us on anything sure as hell is not it. If we don't learn to listen to one another, we all go down together.
Think about this: If we were bombed tomorrow morning by a foreign entity, any one you care to think of, would we set our differences aside and do something about it, or would we sit around and bicker about which party is to blame and speculate about the impact on the 2012 elections for so long that the same entity bombs us a second time?
If you even consider for a second that it might not be the first option, it's time to have a serious think about just how far our regard for each other has fallen, and what you personally are willing to do about it.
As it happens, that hour was one of the most intelligent and refreshing hours of television I have seen in quite some time. Here you have two very smart, rational individuals having a calm discussion about, mostly, the media's role in politics (including Rachel and Jon's own roles), and an amazing thing happened when they disagreed:
Neither one raised their voice in anger.
They found common ground. They ceded ground. They agreed to disagree. They did all this calmly, talking like normal human beings who just happened to be very very smart (and one of whom was very very sick). And what's more, they were kind of working without a net. Rachel had a small bit of notes, but by her admission, the discussion got away pretty early on from the intended set of questions because neither one was getting bored with the topic they were finding themselves discussing (which I have no problem with whatsoever; there is no sense cutting off a good debate with 'we'll have to leave it there'), and Jon had no notes at all. It's just two people in chairs shooting the breeze. It led to a smattering of factual errors, but really, you try having a discussion of that length sometime with that few notes and not screwing anything up. You probably fail at it all the time. So do I. I spend time away from the Internet. My memory's not perfect. (We'll see how they handle the errors they did make. They have time now to go over what they biffed; we'll see if corrections are forthcoming.)
The raw feed can be found here; it goes nearly 50 minutes, so set some time aside.
The problem is that the national debate in this country has become so utterly poisoned that I go around looking at reactions to the discussion on Facebook and Daily Kos and Penny Arcade- all places that saw the debate- and a not-insignificant number of people failed to pick up on the tone at all. They started to look for a "winner" (usually Maddow, giving no slack to Jon being sick, which, really, you try being at the peak of your cognitive skills when you're throwing up all day long), in the process completely missing the point of what was going on. They think Jon had a fall from grace, that he should stick to jokes. One said if she had seen this before the Rally to Restore Sanity, she'd have skipped it.
Why do we have to declare a winner and a loser? This is not what this discussion was. Jon and Rachel even expressed mutual respect for each other. Jon didn't even have to appear on the show. Sick, remember? He could have cancelled. Yet he showed enough respect for Rachel that he sucked it up and fought the bug (and at the close of proceedings, called Maddow his "ginger root".)
This is the core of the underlying political problem plaguing us. Too many of us have lost the ability to talk to one another. Worse, too many of us seem to look at someone with which we disagree on some things, look at another person with which we disagree on all things, and reserve our greatest contempt for the former, acting as if they're betraying us. If you don't agree with me on everything, you're the enemy and must be destroyed along with all the others.
That needs to stop. This isn't a football game, where it's one team fighting another team. This is the Royal Rumble: a whole bunch of people in one ring, every man for themselves. Two of our forefathers would tell you themselves-- Ben Franklin once said "We must all hang together or surely we shall all hang separately"; Abe Lincoln said "A house divided against itself cannot stand."
We may not agree on the best way to move the country forward, but an utter contempt for anyone that disagrees with us on anything sure as hell is not it. If we don't learn to listen to one another, we all go down together.
Think about this: If we were bombed tomorrow morning by a foreign entity, any one you care to think of, would we set our differences aside and do something about it, or would we sit around and bicker about which party is to blame and speculate about the impact on the 2012 elections for so long that the same entity bombs us a second time?
If you even consider for a second that it might not be the first option, it's time to have a serious think about just how far our regard for each other has fallen, and what you personally are willing to do about it.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
In Other Election News...
...we have a Russian performance artist named Oleg Mavromatti, currently based in Bulgaria, who has recieved some death threats accusing him of inciting religious hatred in a previous piece where he had himself crucified.
He has responded by creating a new piece, which he calls Ally/Foe, in which he is putting himself in an electric chair and putting it to an online vote on whether he lives or dies.
Clearly, this guy is unaware of the general demeanor of the Internet, in which normal people end up acting like jerks for no good reason. There's even a theory for it.
As I post this, the vote is not yet active. However, if anyone would like to head over and save him from himself, that would be greatly appreciated. The linked article supplies further information on just what's going on. He'll be in the chair for a week- and probably a whole lot longer than that if things go pear-shaped for him- and so you'll have that long to save his hide. The website is available in English, as well as Russian and Bulgarian. I want to stress here: this is a real person who, if you vote against him, has rigged it so he will really die. If you head over and then vote against him, that's on you.
He has responded by creating a new piece, which he calls Ally/Foe, in which he is putting himself in an electric chair and putting it to an online vote on whether he lives or dies.
Clearly, this guy is unaware of the general demeanor of the Internet, in which normal people end up acting like jerks for no good reason. There's even a theory for it.
As I post this, the vote is not yet active. However, if anyone would like to head over and save him from himself, that would be greatly appreciated. The linked article supplies further information on just what's going on. He'll be in the chair for a week- and probably a whole lot longer than that if things go pear-shaped for him- and so you'll have that long to save his hide. The website is available in English, as well as Russian and Bulgarian. I want to stress here: this is a real person who, if you vote against him, has rigged it so he will really die. If you head over and then vote against him, that's on you.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Let's Go To Suriname! (One Way Or Another)
I'm going to be handing out candy today for Halloween, so not much time to put something together. So, as is our custom, we turn to YouTube.
If you've got 26 minutes and change on your hands, Journeyman Pictures in 2005 put together this piece on the descendants of African slaves who were taken to Suriname, the middle of those three teeny countries that sit on top of Brazil, and escaped into the Amazon. The descendants were, and continue to be, under threat of their land being taken for development (boy, does that sound familiar to American ears, particularly with Thanksgiving on the way). I'd embed it, but they don't want to be embedded. You'll just have to give them the click.
If you've got 26 minutes and change on your hands, Journeyman Pictures in 2005 put together this piece on the descendants of African slaves who were taken to Suriname, the middle of those three teeny countries that sit on top of Brazil, and escaped into the Amazon. The descendants were, and continue to be, under threat of their land being taken for development (boy, does that sound familiar to American ears, particularly with Thanksgiving on the way). I'd embed it, but they don't want to be embedded. You'll just have to give them the click.
Monday, August 9, 2010
What Is An American?
Lately, there has been a quite serious- and quite shrill- "discussion" in this country over what, exactly, constitutes being an American. Legally, an American is anyone born in the country, born to at least one American parent, or who goes through the arduous, notoriously red-tape-laden naturalization and citizenship process. Pretty simple.
That's apparently not the discussion we're having. Instead, we've found ourselves in something more of what an American should be. There are votes- contentious ones- on healthcare for 9/11 responders that might be illegal immigrants. The term "anchor babies" has been rampant. For some time, there has been heated talks about who and what constitutes a 'real' American, as some Americans are apparently fake. Like they were created in a wax museum or something.
And let's not even get into the ongoing yammering about Obama's birth certificate.
The legal part of what should constitute an American, I've already covered earlier. That needs to be made easier. But even that strayed into the deeper philosophical debate about what an American should be.
So let's just go in with both feet on it. Let's answer two things. What is America as a concept, and what constitutes a 'real' American.
America as a concept, to me at least, is not bound by its borders or its legal intricacies. Rather, it is its ideals. That is what it was always really meant to be. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. A government of the people, by the people, for the people. Laws can be changed. The Constitution can be changed. The people will absolutely change. The world will change in ways that our forefathers never could have even comprehended. Surely, George Washington never envisioned me making words appear like magic on a screen by pressing buttons labeled with letters, which is exactly what I'm doing right now. Even doing it on paper was beyond him. There weren't even typewriters back then. Thomas Jefferson never foresaw something to replace the horse-and-buggy. Or paved roads connecting the country.
They surely didn't foresee a way to keep track, on a day-to-day basis, of just who was crossing over the border. Even today, there are many international borders that aren't well-marked. There's no real way to know when you've crossed a border- no landmarks, no checkpoints. The Tuareg live on this, crossing the various borders in the Sahara as if they didn't exist-- and to them, they don't. Illegal immigration was the furthest thing from their minds. And besides, their forefathers didn't come in under the grandest of circumstances, so who were they to judge? If you're on our side, welcome aboard. (As long as you're a white landowner, of course.)
A 'real' American was and is, in my mind and in the minds of our forefathers, simply anyone that does whatever they are able to do, to the best of their ability, to make America the best possible place it can be, in their own small way. I don't care if you're not "legal". I in fact don't care if you have never even set foot in this country. Do you hold true to the same ideals? Do you bust your butt, day in and day out, to improve the life in whatever fashion of not only yourself, but your family, your friends, people you've never met, even people that may question your commitment or your very right to be here? Do you make a commitment to better the United States, to make it a beacon of freedom- true, honest freedom, not just 'freedom to do whatever you want unless I don't like it'? Welcome aboard.
Conversely, someone that is not a 'real' American does not do, or attempt to do, these things. They make little to no effort to improve their country, themselves. When their country calls them, they respond with silence. They consume America's resources and do not make, nor have they ever made, a good-faith effort to put any of them back. (Trying and failing to find a job is a good-faith effort. Unemployment happens. Sometimes jobs and applicants just don't match up and somebody gets the butt end of it. But if you're not even sending out applications, that's another thing entirely.)
Basically, you don't have to be American to be American, but you can be American without being American. If that makes sense.
Now, you're probably asking 'what do you mean you don't care if someone's never set foot in this country? Those guys can't POSSIBLY be American! That doesn't even make any sense!'
Follow me.
There are those people that seek to improve, however they can, not just their own country, but all the others as well. The most successful at this tend to be among the world's most revered: Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, Pope John Paul II, Norman Borlaug, Dag Hammerskjold. These are not just people of their own country, but in fact citizens of the entire world. They are Polish, Swedish, Macedonian, South African, but also Dutch, Chinese, Australian, Argentinian, Tunisian, Qatari... and American as well. They're American; we just share them with everybody else.
Which is what leads to the most maddening part of this all, the recent failed vote to supply health benefits to 9/11 first responders. You would think that this wouldn't even be a question. They're 9/11 first responders, for Pete's sake. Give them whatever they want. They've earned it. However, the vote was turned from a simple-majority vote to a two-thirds vote to avoid an amendment being attached that would deny the benefits to illegal immigrants.
The vote was a majority in favor, but they couldn't clear two-thirds, and the bill was killed.
Consider that a second. There is someone in this country that is so despising of those that are not officially Americans that it does not matter to them if those same people laid their lives on the line to save American lives during one of America's darkest hours. It does not matter. There are people that will jeopardize and ultimately deny health benefits to ALL 9/11 first responders because one or more of them might not be here legally. None of them necessarily are. One of them just MIGHT be illegal, and that is apparently enough for some ungrateful soul to turn on them all.
If you are willing to go through that for the sake of the United States, if you are willing to lay your lives on the line for the sake of people that may later turn on you for the sake of political expediency, I really don't care in the slightest how you got here. You are welcome in my country. You are an American. You are, in fact, an American hero.
You are, at least, more American than they.
That's apparently not the discussion we're having. Instead, we've found ourselves in something more of what an American should be. There are votes- contentious ones- on healthcare for 9/11 responders that might be illegal immigrants. The term "anchor babies" has been rampant. For some time, there has been heated talks about who and what constitutes a 'real' American, as some Americans are apparently fake. Like they were created in a wax museum or something.
And let's not even get into the ongoing yammering about Obama's birth certificate.
The legal part of what should constitute an American, I've already covered earlier. That needs to be made easier. But even that strayed into the deeper philosophical debate about what an American should be.
So let's just go in with both feet on it. Let's answer two things. What is America as a concept, and what constitutes a 'real' American.
America as a concept, to me at least, is not bound by its borders or its legal intricacies. Rather, it is its ideals. That is what it was always really meant to be. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. A government of the people, by the people, for the people. Laws can be changed. The Constitution can be changed. The people will absolutely change. The world will change in ways that our forefathers never could have even comprehended. Surely, George Washington never envisioned me making words appear like magic on a screen by pressing buttons labeled with letters, which is exactly what I'm doing right now. Even doing it on paper was beyond him. There weren't even typewriters back then. Thomas Jefferson never foresaw something to replace the horse-and-buggy. Or paved roads connecting the country.
They surely didn't foresee a way to keep track, on a day-to-day basis, of just who was crossing over the border. Even today, there are many international borders that aren't well-marked. There's no real way to know when you've crossed a border- no landmarks, no checkpoints. The Tuareg live on this, crossing the various borders in the Sahara as if they didn't exist-- and to them, they don't. Illegal immigration was the furthest thing from their minds. And besides, their forefathers didn't come in under the grandest of circumstances, so who were they to judge? If you're on our side, welcome aboard. (As long as you're a white landowner, of course.)
A 'real' American was and is, in my mind and in the minds of our forefathers, simply anyone that does whatever they are able to do, to the best of their ability, to make America the best possible place it can be, in their own small way. I don't care if you're not "legal". I in fact don't care if you have never even set foot in this country. Do you hold true to the same ideals? Do you bust your butt, day in and day out, to improve the life in whatever fashion of not only yourself, but your family, your friends, people you've never met, even people that may question your commitment or your very right to be here? Do you make a commitment to better the United States, to make it a beacon of freedom- true, honest freedom, not just 'freedom to do whatever you want unless I don't like it'? Welcome aboard.
Conversely, someone that is not a 'real' American does not do, or attempt to do, these things. They make little to no effort to improve their country, themselves. When their country calls them, they respond with silence. They consume America's resources and do not make, nor have they ever made, a good-faith effort to put any of them back. (Trying and failing to find a job is a good-faith effort. Unemployment happens. Sometimes jobs and applicants just don't match up and somebody gets the butt end of it. But if you're not even sending out applications, that's another thing entirely.)
Basically, you don't have to be American to be American, but you can be American without being American. If that makes sense.
Now, you're probably asking 'what do you mean you don't care if someone's never set foot in this country? Those guys can't POSSIBLY be American! That doesn't even make any sense!'
Follow me.
There are those people that seek to improve, however they can, not just their own country, but all the others as well. The most successful at this tend to be among the world's most revered: Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, Pope John Paul II, Norman Borlaug, Dag Hammerskjold. These are not just people of their own country, but in fact citizens of the entire world. They are Polish, Swedish, Macedonian, South African, but also Dutch, Chinese, Australian, Argentinian, Tunisian, Qatari... and American as well. They're American; we just share them with everybody else.
Which is what leads to the most maddening part of this all, the recent failed vote to supply health benefits to 9/11 first responders. You would think that this wouldn't even be a question. They're 9/11 first responders, for Pete's sake. Give them whatever they want. They've earned it. However, the vote was turned from a simple-majority vote to a two-thirds vote to avoid an amendment being attached that would deny the benefits to illegal immigrants.
The vote was a majority in favor, but they couldn't clear two-thirds, and the bill was killed.
Consider that a second. There is someone in this country that is so despising of those that are not officially Americans that it does not matter to them if those same people laid their lives on the line to save American lives during one of America's darkest hours. It does not matter. There are people that will jeopardize and ultimately deny health benefits to ALL 9/11 first responders because one or more of them might not be here legally. None of them necessarily are. One of them just MIGHT be illegal, and that is apparently enough for some ungrateful soul to turn on them all.
If you are willing to go through that for the sake of the United States, if you are willing to lay your lives on the line for the sake of people that may later turn on you for the sake of political expediency, I really don't care in the slightest how you got here. You are welcome in my country. You are an American. You are, in fact, an American hero.
You are, at least, more American than they.
Monday, July 26, 2010
Voting With Their Feet
You've lost ground on an issue very important to you. A ton of ground, perhaps in one fell swoop. So much ground that you either can't stand your homeland anymore, or fear for your safety if you remain. Or perhaps you've simply slipped through your current society's cracks, and can no longer properly function within it And you don't feel very much if any hope of things going back to an acceptable state anytime soon.
However, there's somewhere else that remains acceptable, and is in fact more acceptable than where you are now.
If you have the means, what do you do? You vote with your feet. You go to the greener pasture and you don't come back.
As previously mentioned here, this is currently happening in Arizona as Hispanics of all stripes flee the state in response to their new immigration law. You'll also hear threats to invoke this in the runup to any Presidential election- 'if X wins, I'm moving to Canada'. (Only a handful actually do it.)
The term is sometimes used for things as mundane as quitting a job, but that's not really what we're talking about here.
Officially, it's known as the 'Tiebout model', after Charles Tiebout, who put forward the theory in 1956, in response to the 'free rider' problem: that there are those in society that consume more resources than their fair share, and/or contribute less. He assumed that, assuming perfect conditions and perfect information, people will move to the place most suitable to them. Specifically, assuming these conditions:
1.Mobile Consumers: Consumers are free to choose where they live. There are no costs associated with moving.
2.Complete information
3.Many Communities to chose from
4.Commuting is not an issue
5.Public Goods do not spill over of benefits/costs from one community to the next
6.An optimal city size exists: Economies of scale
7.Communities try to achieve "optimal size"
8.Communities are rational and try to keep the public 'bad' consumers away.
Of course, most of these are unlikely to occur in any given case, and for them to all happen at the same time is unheard-of. Perhaps if people could pick their time to move, but if you're moving in response to some external force, you're rarely ready for it. More often it's going to be something of a rush job to the first place that looks halfway decent; maybe just simply wherever there's a pre-existing family member.
And in a sudden exodus, assumptions 6-8 are going to be thrown out the window. Someone is probably getting flooded with a whole lot of people in a short amount of time.
What happens to the place left behind? Nothing good. When people vote with their feet, they're taking all their stuff with them to the new place. Money, possessions, a teeny bit of the existing or potential labor force. Every time someone goes, that's a little prick on the finger of the old location's general economy. Enough people leave, and it can cripple the old location with ease, as we're currently seeing in Arizona. In addition, there's a brain-drain effect- the smart people, the technically-skilled people leave, even if it's only a side effect of everyone else leaving too. Remember, everyone voting with their feet is in agreement with each other that whatever just happened, they don't like it. That's a lot of people that, until that point, may have been able to reverse the course of the new policy. The more leave, the more the old location is locked into the new policy, as there is less remaining opposition to it. Whatever they just did, they're going to end up seeing it, and all the consequences both good and bad, intended and unintended, through. They will be rendered, to put it bluntly, simply too stupid to fix any problem they've created.
Or put in Simpsons terms:
While Arizona is seeing a sudden effect, a longer, slower burn has been seen for years, decades, from Rust Belt to Sun Belt, as a decaying regional economy has sent and continues to send northeasterners and midwesterners south and west. Both, however, suffer the same effect: an economy lagging behind their peers. In the grand scheme of things, both pale in comparison to every mass exodus ever brought on by violence of all stripes. In the end, though, all wind up sharing a miserable aftermath.
After all, whatever problem you as a government were trying to solve in the first place will soon be the least of your worries if you suddenly have nobody left to govern.
However, there's somewhere else that remains acceptable, and is in fact more acceptable than where you are now.
If you have the means, what do you do? You vote with your feet. You go to the greener pasture and you don't come back.
As previously mentioned here, this is currently happening in Arizona as Hispanics of all stripes flee the state in response to their new immigration law. You'll also hear threats to invoke this in the runup to any Presidential election- 'if X wins, I'm moving to Canada'. (Only a handful actually do it.)
The term is sometimes used for things as mundane as quitting a job, but that's not really what we're talking about here.
Officially, it's known as the 'Tiebout model', after Charles Tiebout, who put forward the theory in 1956, in response to the 'free rider' problem: that there are those in society that consume more resources than their fair share, and/or contribute less. He assumed that, assuming perfect conditions and perfect information, people will move to the place most suitable to them. Specifically, assuming these conditions:
1.Mobile Consumers: Consumers are free to choose where they live. There are no costs associated with moving.
2.Complete information
3.Many Communities to chose from
4.Commuting is not an issue
5.Public Goods do not spill over of benefits/costs from one community to the next
6.An optimal city size exists: Economies of scale
7.Communities try to achieve "optimal size"
8.Communities are rational and try to keep the public 'bad' consumers away.
Of course, most of these are unlikely to occur in any given case, and for them to all happen at the same time is unheard-of. Perhaps if people could pick their time to move, but if you're moving in response to some external force, you're rarely ready for it. More often it's going to be something of a rush job to the first place that looks halfway decent; maybe just simply wherever there's a pre-existing family member.
And in a sudden exodus, assumptions 6-8 are going to be thrown out the window. Someone is probably getting flooded with a whole lot of people in a short amount of time.
What happens to the place left behind? Nothing good. When people vote with their feet, they're taking all their stuff with them to the new place. Money, possessions, a teeny bit of the existing or potential labor force. Every time someone goes, that's a little prick on the finger of the old location's general economy. Enough people leave, and it can cripple the old location with ease, as we're currently seeing in Arizona. In addition, there's a brain-drain effect- the smart people, the technically-skilled people leave, even if it's only a side effect of everyone else leaving too. Remember, everyone voting with their feet is in agreement with each other that whatever just happened, they don't like it. That's a lot of people that, until that point, may have been able to reverse the course of the new policy. The more leave, the more the old location is locked into the new policy, as there is less remaining opposition to it. Whatever they just did, they're going to end up seeing it, and all the consequences both good and bad, intended and unintended, through. They will be rendered, to put it bluntly, simply too stupid to fix any problem they've created.
Or put in Simpsons terms:
While Arizona is seeing a sudden effect, a longer, slower burn has been seen for years, decades, from Rust Belt to Sun Belt, as a decaying regional economy has sent and continues to send northeasterners and midwesterners south and west. Both, however, suffer the same effect: an economy lagging behind their peers. In the grand scheme of things, both pale in comparison to every mass exodus ever brought on by violence of all stripes. In the end, though, all wind up sharing a miserable aftermath.
After all, whatever problem you as a government were trying to solve in the first place will soon be the least of your worries if you suddenly have nobody left to govern.
Saturday, July 3, 2010
What's With Miley Cyrus?
If you are a parent, or knows someone who is, or in fact have eyeballs, you are probably aware that Miley Cyrus is rather emphatically casting off the Hannah Montana persona for one of a definitely not Disney-approved nature. Her latest (and as she tells it, last) album, 'Can't Be Tamed', is full of barely-veiled shots at the House of Mouse. There were some warning signs beforehand, most notably the 2008 Vanity Fair shoot where she was photographed barebacked and topless- but as of late she has projected just about as wild and sexual an image as one can do prior to their 18th birthday (which comes November 23).
So what's going on?
In 1987 Daniel Wegner of Trinity University conducted a three-part psychology experiment. In the first part, students were asked to just say whatever they thought for five minutes. This was easily done.
Then in the second part, they were told to do the same, except they were told to try not to think of a white bear. Every time they did so, or said 'white bear', they were to ring a bell in front of them. Of course, now all the students could think about was the white bear. They'd try to block it out, but it was easier to do when they just, you know... didn't think of one. Now that they were told to suppress it, here it is and it won't go away. They'd end up ringing the bell rather often.
Then in the third part, the students were given permission to think about white bears. The result was that their thoughts just became 'white bear white bear white bear'. The white bear utterly overwhelmed them.
Compare to Miley. Early in life, Miley was pretty much any other pre-puberty girl, except that she happened to be the daughter of Billy Ray Cyrus. She'd go to a Baptist church, wear a purity ring.
Then she moved to Hollywood in 2005 and became Hannah Montana, and along with it an army of Disney makeup and wardrobe people, and a rock-star persona. She also got a Disney personality construct: no overt sexuality, no excess showing of skin, nothing about boys that's not Disney-approved (she wound up dating a Jonas Brother). All white bears that Miley now had to suppress, while being made- and developing her own accord- into an attractive young woman.
The Vanity Fair shoot came about amidst all this. Ding. Prior to that, pictures surfaced of her flashing her bra strap and draping herself over an unidentified male. Ding. She broke up with Nick Jonas and decided to "just figure out who I really am." Ding.
But now she nears her 18th birthday, Hannah Montana will soon wrap, and now she, like all Disney teen idols, must strike out into the entertainment industry without Disney's assistance. Or to put it another way, she is now free to express herself however she sees fit.
White bear white bear white bear white bear white bear.
What does Miley need to do? Well, now that the white bear is here, it's pretty tough to make go away. But she does need to dial it back. Dolly Parton may be fine with the image, but she's had years of her own to properly develop, at her own rate. She started thinking of the white bear naturally, and just generally knows what she's doing. Miley didn't and doesn't. She is at risk of having it consume her at a young age, and needs some sort of proper guidance that, clearly, she is not getting.
None of this is to say Dolly is not worthy of advising Miley. In fact, Dolly Parton is probably the best mentor Miley could possibly have concerning this kind of thing. Like I just said: Dolly knows what she's doing. She knows how to convey a sexual image without having it consume her. She's actually a corollary to another aspect of the white bear experiment: some subjects were told from the beginning that they had permission to think about white bears, without any prior suppression. They thought of the white bear less frequently than those who had been suppressing it.
If sexual expression is the direction Miley wishes to go, Dolly's just the person to tell her how to go about it properly. But all the sound advice in the world does no good if it is never given in the first place.
It's a very delicate time in Miley's life, as it is with any child star, particularly Disney child stars. The most dramatic example is Britney Spears, a former Mouseketeer. Her mental derailment after leaving the safety of Disney is well-documented, which progressed to the point where she began making prominent appearances in death pools, in which people make predictions on which celebrities they believe will die in the next year. She recovered, but only after her father asserted legal control over every aspect of her life, control that is currently ongoing.
Miley, obviously, is nowhere near that point, and this should not be regarded as a statement that she will ever reach that point. Christina Aguilera was a Mouseketeer as well, and made the transition expertly. But Spears is to be regarded as a cautionary tale. Control the white bear, or the white bear will control you.
So what's going on?
In 1987 Daniel Wegner of Trinity University conducted a three-part psychology experiment. In the first part, students were asked to just say whatever they thought for five minutes. This was easily done.
Then in the second part, they were told to do the same, except they were told to try not to think of a white bear. Every time they did so, or said 'white bear', they were to ring a bell in front of them. Of course, now all the students could think about was the white bear. They'd try to block it out, but it was easier to do when they just, you know... didn't think of one. Now that they were told to suppress it, here it is and it won't go away. They'd end up ringing the bell rather often.
Then in the third part, the students were given permission to think about white bears. The result was that their thoughts just became 'white bear white bear white bear'. The white bear utterly overwhelmed them.
Compare to Miley. Early in life, Miley was pretty much any other pre-puberty girl, except that she happened to be the daughter of Billy Ray Cyrus. She'd go to a Baptist church, wear a purity ring.
Then she moved to Hollywood in 2005 and became Hannah Montana, and along with it an army of Disney makeup and wardrobe people, and a rock-star persona. She also got a Disney personality construct: no overt sexuality, no excess showing of skin, nothing about boys that's not Disney-approved (she wound up dating a Jonas Brother). All white bears that Miley now had to suppress, while being made- and developing her own accord- into an attractive young woman.
The Vanity Fair shoot came about amidst all this. Ding. Prior to that, pictures surfaced of her flashing her bra strap and draping herself over an unidentified male. Ding. She broke up with Nick Jonas and decided to "just figure out who I really am." Ding.
But now she nears her 18th birthday, Hannah Montana will soon wrap, and now she, like all Disney teen idols, must strike out into the entertainment industry without Disney's assistance. Or to put it another way, she is now free to express herself however she sees fit.
White bear white bear white bear white bear white bear.
What does Miley need to do? Well, now that the white bear is here, it's pretty tough to make go away. But she does need to dial it back. Dolly Parton may be fine with the image, but she's had years of her own to properly develop, at her own rate. She started thinking of the white bear naturally, and just generally knows what she's doing. Miley didn't and doesn't. She is at risk of having it consume her at a young age, and needs some sort of proper guidance that, clearly, she is not getting.
None of this is to say Dolly is not worthy of advising Miley. In fact, Dolly Parton is probably the best mentor Miley could possibly have concerning this kind of thing. Like I just said: Dolly knows what she's doing. She knows how to convey a sexual image without having it consume her. She's actually a corollary to another aspect of the white bear experiment: some subjects were told from the beginning that they had permission to think about white bears, without any prior suppression. They thought of the white bear less frequently than those who had been suppressing it.
If sexual expression is the direction Miley wishes to go, Dolly's just the person to tell her how to go about it properly. But all the sound advice in the world does no good if it is never given in the first place.
It's a very delicate time in Miley's life, as it is with any child star, particularly Disney child stars. The most dramatic example is Britney Spears, a former Mouseketeer. Her mental derailment after leaving the safety of Disney is well-documented, which progressed to the point where she began making prominent appearances in death pools, in which people make predictions on which celebrities they believe will die in the next year. She recovered, but only after her father asserted legal control over every aspect of her life, control that is currently ongoing.
Miley, obviously, is nowhere near that point, and this should not be regarded as a statement that she will ever reach that point. Christina Aguilera was a Mouseketeer as well, and made the transition expertly. But Spears is to be regarded as a cautionary tale. Control the white bear, or the white bear will control you.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
I Get Beck All Over Your Nice Internet
I've reached the point with the likes of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh that I try to just cut them, and any mention of same, entirely out of my day. Complaining about them just gives them ratings and you're really not going to convince anyone about them that's not already on your side. Just leave them to wallow in their own muck.
But then this came across the Fark wires, showing such a fundamental lack of basic understanding of American history by Beck that it deserves special mention. He tosses out some trees, but completely missed the forest. I'll allow Beck the courtesy of having his um's and uh's cleaned up for ease of reading...
Race relations in America went wrong when we politicized slavery. Apparently. I think we all know why slavery was being politicized- because the north thought it was wrong for whites to keep blacks as slaves (which would tend to be a mildly questionable moment in race relations) and the south rather militantly begged to differ.
But... that said, back to ignoring Beck.
Go Yanks today.
But then this came across the Fark wires, showing such a fundamental lack of basic understanding of American history by Beck that it deserves special mention. He tosses out some trees, but completely missed the forest. I'll allow Beck the courtesy of having his um's and uh's cleaned up for ease of reading...
"Tonight, you will see that... I'll show you clippings from the newspapers of the war heroes as they were buried with full honors from the Revolutionary War, where they were getting full benefits. I will show you, I held in my hand, the statement on benefits from George Washington. It was the last thing he did as the general. And it was-- this is-- these are our benefits, for the troops. There was no delineation between white and black. It was white, black, it didn't matter, if you fought... there was nothing like that from our founders. And when you see the newspaper clippings of African Americans who fought heroically and recieved full military honors and are buried at such-and-such. You see-- I'm gonna give you a piece of a sermon that was preached in the first real megachurch. It was a white and black megachurch. The preacher, at one point, wanted to separate and say 'Hey, let's just do a black church.' The congregation of the church- both white and black- said 'Why? Why would we separate ourselves?'
The things that have happened in the country where it really started to go wrong was in the leadup to the Civil War. And it became politicized and it was all about slavery. Before then, we were moving on the right track. You'll learn things tonight you've never, ever learned before, and ask yourself 'Why?'"
Race relations in America went wrong when we politicized slavery. Apparently. I think we all know why slavery was being politicized- because the north thought it was wrong for whites to keep blacks as slaves (which would tend to be a mildly questionable moment in race relations) and the south rather militantly begged to differ.
But... that said, back to ignoring Beck.
Go Yanks today.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Conviction In Being Wrong
Most debates end up fairly inconclusive. Everybody argues, but nothing is really settled, and everybody comes back the next day for more. Some questions can't be settled in this matter- just about any question that is at its core subjective, or that nobody really has proof of one way or the other, is usually destined to be finished more or less where it started. How do you best end a soccer match that ends in a tie? Are you better off now than you were four years ago? Should the toilet paper roll go over or under? Aruba or St. Lucia? Ford or Chevy? DH or no DH? Are we really alone in the universe? What happens after we die? All arguments that are destined to live for another day.
But on THIS day, you've really stepped in it. Your argument that the Civil War ended in a tie went down in flames the second someone brought up Appomattox Court House. You've been proven objectively, conclusively, irrefutably wrong.
Now what?
For most of us, this isn't even a question. You admit defeat, admit you had your facts wrong, and adopt the new thing you learned.
But let's face it: unless you're predicting doom and the reality is flowers and maypoles, being proven wrong sucks. Everybody is wrong on something. But it's hard to take for some people. It's an admission that you're, well, wrong. You're imperfect. You're human. Some people can come to terms with that better than others, but it's never fun.
Some simply can't come to terms with it at all. They can't comprehend the fact that they might be wrong, or it may be too painful in whatever way for them to consider. They dig in. They look for progressively more feeble reasoning to entrench in their original viewpoint.
Surely, if you've argued on the Internet long enough, you are positive you have dealt with one of these people, although most are dismissed as trolls. And to be sure, some are- people that don't truly believe what they argue but are needlessly nonconstructive for whatever reason.
Do not dismiss, however, the possibility that... well, first off, don't dismiss the possibility that, in fact, you're the one who's wrong. But we'll set that aside and assume that you are actually right and the other guy is wrong. Do not dismiss the possibility that your opponent is simply unable to comprehend their own wrongness.
These people do exist, but to best display that, we can't use anything even remotely political. So let's go back to 1954, when Leon Festinger of the University of Minnesota caught wind of one of your periodic doomsday cults, called the Seekers, led by Chicago grandmother Dorothy Martin, who professed that on December 21, 1954, a series of natural disasters would kill most people on the planet.
Festinger wanted to be there to see what would happen when the world failed to end. His theory: the Seekers would just keep on believing, and in fact would believe even harder than before. He had a theory he called 'cognitive dissonance'. Yep. This is where that term comes from. As Festinger figured, if you've sunk enough emotionally and physically into a certain belief- if you've staked your job, your marriage, years and years of your life- on a certain belief, coming to the realization that you've bet all your money on the wrong horse is a tad on the 'emotionally shattering' side. You will do whatever you have to do to avoid it. So instead of obeying the law of sunk costs, admitting defeat, and starting to rebuild, you just dig in. In fact, you try and convert others into believing your already-proven-wrong theory. After all, if other people believe it, it must be true, right?
Right?
RIGHT?!
Festinger, of course, was dead on, or else you wouldn't recognize the phrase 'cognitive dissonance' today. Festinger- and a crew- had to first gain admittance to the Seekers, which they were only able to do through the invention of anecdotes supporting the cult's position.
Specifically, Martin- who Festinger renamed 'Marian Keech' for his resulting book When Prophecy Fails- claimed to have been receiving messages via "automatic writing" from the planet Clarion, warning of flooding and tidal waves that would raise sea levels and swallow up the Midwest. This would be a problem for Martin, who lived in Chicago, but at the appointed hour- midnight, December 21- UFO's from Clarion would arrive to carry the cult away. (Though Martin thought the UFO might show up early.)
As Alex Boese argues in his book Elephants On Acid and Other Bizarre Experiments, Festinger had already tainted the experiment at this point, as he was providing the supporting viewpoints that cognitive dissonance craves, and thus artificially confirming the hypothesis. As it would turn out, though, if Festinger hadn't, someone else would have, because as December 21 drew closer, Martin's home was targeted again and again by a series of people trying to prank her. Just about everybody who pulled a prank wound up going home happy, including the man who asked the cult to come look at his flooded bathroom, and the man who claimed to receive a message from "Captain Video From Outer Space".
A note: Captain Video- specifically, Captain Video and his Video Rangers- was a TV show at the time, famous for its low budget. At this particular point in time, it was in its seventh and final season. A major character was a robot named "I TOBOR", named such because they accidentally stenciled the name onto the costume backwards.
Come December 20, there's nothing left for the Seekers to do but sit around, remove all metal items from their person (metal would conduct heat aboard the UFO), and hold out until midnight.
Midnight comes. Nothing happens.
12:05 comes. Nothing happens. Someone notices a clock saying 11:55. Okay, maybe that clock's right and it's not really midnight yet.
12:10 comes, or as the other clock says, midnight. Still nothing. The flooding is supposed to start at 8 AM.
4:00 AM. Nothing. The Seekers are lost for an explanation. Martin starts to cry.
Right here is when Martin really could have used someone to try and snap her out of the whole thing, but the only people that could were running an experiment designed specifically around finding out what she did unassisted.
4:45 AM. Martin receives an automatic writing message. The explanation comes: the Seekers had spread so much light that the world was spared. Soon afterward, another message comes telling the Seekers to spread the word. Merry Christmas!
The rest of the day is spent throwing open the drapes to the media, who until now the cult had been shunning, to the point that on the release of When Prophecy Fails, even though Festinger had changed Martin's name, it wasn't too hard to figure out it was her. She would later change her name to Sister Thedra and spend time making progressively less specific doomsday predictions in Arizona, moving from Chicago on threats from the police of being committed to a psychiatric hospital, and later Peru.
One final note on Martin, by the way: prior to the entire episode, she had been involved with L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics movement, the forerunner to Scientology.
And we all know how hard they are to convince of anything.
But on THIS day, you've really stepped in it. Your argument that the Civil War ended in a tie went down in flames the second someone brought up Appomattox Court House. You've been proven objectively, conclusively, irrefutably wrong.
Now what?
For most of us, this isn't even a question. You admit defeat, admit you had your facts wrong, and adopt the new thing you learned.
But let's face it: unless you're predicting doom and the reality is flowers and maypoles, being proven wrong sucks. Everybody is wrong on something. But it's hard to take for some people. It's an admission that you're, well, wrong. You're imperfect. You're human. Some people can come to terms with that better than others, but it's never fun.
Some simply can't come to terms with it at all. They can't comprehend the fact that they might be wrong, or it may be too painful in whatever way for them to consider. They dig in. They look for progressively more feeble reasoning to entrench in their original viewpoint.
Surely, if you've argued on the Internet long enough, you are positive you have dealt with one of these people, although most are dismissed as trolls. And to be sure, some are- people that don't truly believe what they argue but are needlessly nonconstructive for whatever reason.
Do not dismiss, however, the possibility that... well, first off, don't dismiss the possibility that, in fact, you're the one who's wrong. But we'll set that aside and assume that you are actually right and the other guy is wrong. Do not dismiss the possibility that your opponent is simply unable to comprehend their own wrongness.
These people do exist, but to best display that, we can't use anything even remotely political. So let's go back to 1954, when Leon Festinger of the University of Minnesota caught wind of one of your periodic doomsday cults, called the Seekers, led by Chicago grandmother Dorothy Martin, who professed that on December 21, 1954, a series of natural disasters would kill most people on the planet.
Festinger wanted to be there to see what would happen when the world failed to end. His theory: the Seekers would just keep on believing, and in fact would believe even harder than before. He had a theory he called 'cognitive dissonance'. Yep. This is where that term comes from. As Festinger figured, if you've sunk enough emotionally and physically into a certain belief- if you've staked your job, your marriage, years and years of your life- on a certain belief, coming to the realization that you've bet all your money on the wrong horse is a tad on the 'emotionally shattering' side. You will do whatever you have to do to avoid it. So instead of obeying the law of sunk costs, admitting defeat, and starting to rebuild, you just dig in. In fact, you try and convert others into believing your already-proven-wrong theory. After all, if other people believe it, it must be true, right?
Right?
RIGHT?!
Festinger, of course, was dead on, or else you wouldn't recognize the phrase 'cognitive dissonance' today. Festinger- and a crew- had to first gain admittance to the Seekers, which they were only able to do through the invention of anecdotes supporting the cult's position.
Specifically, Martin- who Festinger renamed 'Marian Keech' for his resulting book When Prophecy Fails- claimed to have been receiving messages via "automatic writing" from the planet Clarion, warning of flooding and tidal waves that would raise sea levels and swallow up the Midwest. This would be a problem for Martin, who lived in Chicago, but at the appointed hour- midnight, December 21- UFO's from Clarion would arrive to carry the cult away. (Though Martin thought the UFO might show up early.)
As Alex Boese argues in his book Elephants On Acid and Other Bizarre Experiments, Festinger had already tainted the experiment at this point, as he was providing the supporting viewpoints that cognitive dissonance craves, and thus artificially confirming the hypothesis. As it would turn out, though, if Festinger hadn't, someone else would have, because as December 21 drew closer, Martin's home was targeted again and again by a series of people trying to prank her. Just about everybody who pulled a prank wound up going home happy, including the man who asked the cult to come look at his flooded bathroom, and the man who claimed to receive a message from "Captain Video From Outer Space".
A note: Captain Video- specifically, Captain Video and his Video Rangers- was a TV show at the time, famous for its low budget. At this particular point in time, it was in its seventh and final season. A major character was a robot named "I TOBOR", named such because they accidentally stenciled the name onto the costume backwards.
Come December 20, there's nothing left for the Seekers to do but sit around, remove all metal items from their person (metal would conduct heat aboard the UFO), and hold out until midnight.
Midnight comes. Nothing happens.
12:05 comes. Nothing happens. Someone notices a clock saying 11:55. Okay, maybe that clock's right and it's not really midnight yet.
12:10 comes, or as the other clock says, midnight. Still nothing. The flooding is supposed to start at 8 AM.
4:00 AM. Nothing. The Seekers are lost for an explanation. Martin starts to cry.
Right here is when Martin really could have used someone to try and snap her out of the whole thing, but the only people that could were running an experiment designed specifically around finding out what she did unassisted.
4:45 AM. Martin receives an automatic writing message. The explanation comes: the Seekers had spread so much light that the world was spared. Soon afterward, another message comes telling the Seekers to spread the word. Merry Christmas!
The rest of the day is spent throwing open the drapes to the media, who until now the cult had been shunning, to the point that on the release of When Prophecy Fails, even though Festinger had changed Martin's name, it wasn't too hard to figure out it was her. She would later change her name to Sister Thedra and spend time making progressively less specific doomsday predictions in Arizona, moving from Chicago on threats from the police of being committed to a psychiatric hospital, and later Peru.
One final note on Martin, by the way: prior to the entire episode, she had been involved with L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics movement, the forerunner to Scientology.
And we all know how hard they are to convince of anything.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Good Idea, Bad Idea
And now it's time for another Good Idea, Bad Idea.
Good Idea: Protesting Arizona's new immigration law by calling for the 2011 MLB All-Star Game to be pulled out of Arizona.
Bad Idea: Protesting Arizona's new immigration law by boycotting Arizona Iced Tea, which is made in New York.
The End.
Good Idea: Protesting Arizona's new immigration law by calling for the 2011 MLB All-Star Game to be pulled out of Arizona.
Bad Idea: Protesting Arizona's new immigration law by boycotting Arizona Iced Tea, which is made in New York.
The End.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
An Open Letter To Potential Assassins
So.
Apparently, a number of individuals in this country have thought it acceptable to openly threaten violence, or even commit violent acts, against elected members of the federal government. It's well-documented at this point. The gas line of Tom Perriello's brother's house being cut by someone who thought it was Periello's house and had the wrong address. 'If Brown Can't Stop It, A Browning Can'. 'We Came Unarmed This Time'. If you don't like these examples, just scan the next Tea Party gathering near you and there are fair odds of seeing someone similar. Or check out this, or this.
If any reader out there happens to know one of these people, bring them on yonder because we need to have a bit of a talk.
Hi, potential assassin. (As this is what you are.) Have a seat.
First off, let's address the obvious: what you're thinking of doing is completely and utterly morally wrong. But I wager you're not going to be convinced to put down the gun on moral grounds. You're no Manchurian Candidate. Nobody who gets this far down the line, to the point of considering murdering an elected federal official, has any real moral uncertainties. In fact, you probably think I'm the crazy one. If you have any moral qualms about what you're doing, rest assured you're putting the brakes on any plan of action far before it gets around to 'hey, let's assassinate the President of the United States'. By this point, you legitimately think it's a good idea.
So let's dispense with the sermon and instead walk through why this is a BAD idea.
Your first and biggest mistake is estimating your level of support for this kind of thing. Surely, you are positive that history will look at you as the hero.
As Obama is naturally going to be the primary target- being the President and all (and noting that only four sitting members of Congress have ever been assassinated, with one of them, Leo Ryan, killed in Guyana during the Jonestown massacre; and two others, Robert F. Kennedy and Huey Long, having Presidential ambitions; the other was James M. Hinds)- let us go over the list of Presidential assassins and attempted assassins to this point, and see exactly what kind of company you're going to be joining. We'll limit ourselves to those who have put an attempt into action, and omit those apprehended in the planning stages. We will also omit attempts from external sources.
1835- Richard Lawrence, attempted to kill Andrew Jackson
1865- John Wilkes Booth, killed Abraham Lincoln
1881- Charles Guiteau, killed James A. Garfield
1901- Leon Czolgosz, killed William McKinley
1912- John F. Schrank, attempted to kill Theodore Roosevelt
1933- Giuseppe Zangara, attempted to kill Franklin D. Roosevelt
1950- Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, attempted to kill Harry Truman
1963- Lee Harvey Oswald, killed John F. Kennedy (no, we are not getting into the whole conspiracy thing)
1974- Samuel Byck, attempted to kill Richard Nixon
1975- Squeaky Fromme, attempted to kill Gerald Ford
1975- Sara Jane Moore, attempted to kill Gerald Ford
1976- Chester Plumber, attempted to kill Gerald Ford
1981- John Hinckley Jr., attempted to kill Ronald Reagan
1994- Francisco Martin Duran, attempted to kill Bill Clinton
2001- Robert Pickett, attempted to kill George W. Bush
The first thing to note is that Lawrence and Schrank were eventually declared insane, and many of the others on the list had emotional issues as well. The second thing to note is that most of the rest ended up dead themselves, either from being killed in the act, at the scene, soon afterwards, or from a formal execution; this was the fate of Booth, Guiteau, Czolgosz, Zangara, Torresola, Oswald, Byck and Plumber.
As for the rest, Collazo was to be executed as well, but Truman commuted his sentence to life, and Jimmy Carter pardoned him after 29 years. Fromme was given life in prison, but released after serving 34 years. Moore was paroled after 32 years. Duran was sentenced to 40 years and is currently serving that out. Pickett, who was shot by a Secret Service agent on-site, got three years.
The third thing to note: these people are either viewed as crazy, history's villains, or this is the first you've heard of them at all. The sole exceptions are Collazo and Torresola, looked upon fondly by the Puerto Rican independence movement. (And Fidel Castro, whatever you wish to make of that.) A movement that seeks to break off from the United States, which only is a fair analog to you if you seek secession.
We'll get to that later.
The fourth thing to note: none of these things actually has led to anything larger. If you actually do seek secession, look towards Booth. If anyone was going to bring about secession (or at least a recharge in Southern enthusiasm; the states were still seceded) it was him, as the Civil War had just ended. It didn't happen. Collazo and Torresola? Their act was in 1950. Now, in 2010, Puerto Rico is the exact same status that it was in 1950.
So it's not going to lead to anything, you're in all likelihood not getting vindicated by history, and you'll probably die trying.
What's your goal, assuming mental stability? (And it cannot be assumed; according to the US Attorney's Manual, approximately 75% of all threats on the President are made by the mentally ill.) Is it regime change? Get a Republican in office? Because if it is, you'd need a lot of accomplices. Six of them, in fact. I'm assuming you're a Republican here (or an "independent" that's just So Fed Up with a group of people that, if you listed them off, would turn out to be just a bunch of Democrats with maybe the occasional moderate Republican mixed in; whatever you want to call yourself to make yourself feel better). The first Republican in the line of succession right now is Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense. In front of him are Obama, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Robert Byrd, Hillary Clinton, and Timothy Geithner. If you prefer the other Republican in the line of succession, Ray LaHood, that would require eight additional accomplices to take out Gates, Eric Holder, Ken Salazar, Tom Vilsack, Gary Locke, Hilda Solis, Kathleen Sebelius, and Shaun Donovan.
This would be a tad difficult, as it should be noted that no Vice President has yet been assassinated, never mind the effort involved in killing the six highest-ranking people in America at the same time, let alone the 14 highest.
So Biden's President now. And you think he'd just stumble around like Dan Quayle 2.0 until he could be driven from office, right? Obama didn't pick him for his mouth. There's a brain in there that his mouth just happens to outrun. While in the Senate. Biden chaired the Foreign Relations and Judiciary Committees, the latter of which he chaired during the Supreme Court nominations of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. Not a guy you'd like very much. Aside from that, he drafted the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, created what became the Office of National Drug Control Policy, and led efforts to get involved in the Balkans in the 90's. Since becoming Vice President, it was Biden who leaned heavily on Specter to flip parties, and he's the guy the administration relies on to convey expectations to Iraqi leadership. (Whether Iraq meets those expectations, that's not Biden's problem.)
Long story short, there's a reason his verbal gaffes always get shrugged off.
And if you do get Obama and Biden... President Nancy Pelosi. I know you don't like the sound of that one, and that's before you take into account that she'd take the 'first woman President' title, and as a woman, she would have absolutely no problem laying into Sarah Palin without having to worry about looking like a chauvinist pig. Obama can't hit a girl, you say? Biden can't hit a girl, you say? Pelosi sure as hell can.
Are you after an overthrow of the government? Do you think the military will side with you and turn the administration out of office? Put your side in, remake the country in your image? Well, in your attempt to remake the United States, you've pretty much ended the United States as we know it, but never mind your pipe dream. Here's what's actually going to happen.
You get the stuffing knocked out of you. That's what's going to happen.
Note that even with the size of the Tea Party movement now, there isn't much of anybody in the military joining in. There's one officer refusing to follow orders because of birther-related concerns, and that guy's simply getting court-martialed. If an actual movement were to take place, don't expect very much military support. Maybe you get a couple scattered people to break off, and maybe they bring their weapons with them. Maybe they attach to whatever local militias have taken up the cause.
That still leaves the rest of the military. That still leaves all the gigantic military toys that scattered desertions can't simply walk off with. That still leaves, if it were to come to it, all those missile silos that somebody has the launch codes to, and that somebody isn't going to be you. It's going to be the high-ranking officers loyal to the Commander-in-Chief. And if they leave and take the codes with them, they better call for the missiles fast, because the codes are very likely to be changed almost as fast.
A smattering of local militias, probably a couple hundred guys at best, against thousands and thousands of military professionals in addition to local police. The former probably has some fairly impressive guns at their disposal, admitted, but the latter has impressive weaponry too. And tanks. And airplanes. I'm willing to wager not many local militias have tanks laying around. And if things got into a sustained gunfight, the militias are running out of ammo first.
Are you trying to get your state to secede? Please note that the Civil War was not originally fought as a war over freeing slaves (though it eventually became so, and slavery was the core issue at hand), but as a war over preserving the Union. Secession, it should be noted, is in fact unconstitutional. Right after 'we the people', you'll note the phrase "in order to create a more perfect union". This was in reference to the Articles of Confederation, which talk of a "perpetual union", which should really be self-explanatory.
Unfortunately, some people were confused about that little clause. The Supreme Court laid it out bare in the 1869 case Texas v. White, in which they ruled 5-3 that the Confederacy never actually left the Union during the Civil War, because states can't secede.
So even if you get your state to secede, you haven't seceded. All you've done is commit treason. And treason tends to be frowned upon in our modern times.
Do you simply not like Obama because he's black? I already had words with you a couple months ago.
So you've been squashed. You manage to survive the altercation, and are arrested (as you should well expect). No matter, even if you didn't manage to complete the assassination, you can just vote out your quarry normally anyway, right?
Wrong. Oh so wrong.
Simply making threats on the President's life is a class D felony under US Code Title 18, Section 871, punishable by five years in prison. And the Secret Service isn't known for being picky about what constitutes a threat. An actual attempt, well, that's straight-up attempted murder all by itself, before you add in the whole Presidential thing.
Felons aren't allowed to vote. Through your actions, you've simply reduced your electoral ranks by one, and given your opposition that much more breathing room.
But let's say, knowing all that, knowing the odds against you, you succeeded. Let's say you actually do manage to kill the President.
Who's to say the events of the aftermath won't backfire on you? Who's to say that your target- and here we loop back around to that original error of overestimating your level of support- won't gain a slew of sympathy points, thus making them, or at least their policies, even more popular, thus taking the country even further from your worldview at an even faster rate? Reagan got that treatment. Kennedy became mythical. Teddy postponed going to the hospital so he could use his attempt in a scheduled campaign speech, which turned out to last an hour and a half, and added it to his already-burgeoning legend. (He didn't win the race, but he wasn't going to win anyway.) And let's not even get started on Lincoln.
So there you go. You're going to get crushed, you're not going to get away, you're going to pay dearly- possibly with your life- you won't accomplish anything by it other than potentially cause a lot of people a lot of grief, you will in all likelihood go down in history as crazy or worse- if you go down in history at all- and even if you complete your task, in trying to silence your target, you may very well give him a larger voice than you could possibly imagine.
Put the gun down.
Apparently, a number of individuals in this country have thought it acceptable to openly threaten violence, or even commit violent acts, against elected members of the federal government. It's well-documented at this point. The gas line of Tom Perriello's brother's house being cut by someone who thought it was Periello's house and had the wrong address. 'If Brown Can't Stop It, A Browning Can'. 'We Came Unarmed This Time'. If you don't like these examples, just scan the next Tea Party gathering near you and there are fair odds of seeing someone similar. Or check out this, or this.
If any reader out there happens to know one of these people, bring them on yonder because we need to have a bit of a talk.
Hi, potential assassin. (As this is what you are.) Have a seat.
First off, let's address the obvious: what you're thinking of doing is completely and utterly morally wrong. But I wager you're not going to be convinced to put down the gun on moral grounds. You're no Manchurian Candidate. Nobody who gets this far down the line, to the point of considering murdering an elected federal official, has any real moral uncertainties. In fact, you probably think I'm the crazy one. If you have any moral qualms about what you're doing, rest assured you're putting the brakes on any plan of action far before it gets around to 'hey, let's assassinate the President of the United States'. By this point, you legitimately think it's a good idea.
So let's dispense with the sermon and instead walk through why this is a BAD idea.
Your first and biggest mistake is estimating your level of support for this kind of thing. Surely, you are positive that history will look at you as the hero.
As Obama is naturally going to be the primary target- being the President and all (and noting that only four sitting members of Congress have ever been assassinated, with one of them, Leo Ryan, killed in Guyana during the Jonestown massacre; and two others, Robert F. Kennedy and Huey Long, having Presidential ambitions; the other was James M. Hinds)- let us go over the list of Presidential assassins and attempted assassins to this point, and see exactly what kind of company you're going to be joining. We'll limit ourselves to those who have put an attempt into action, and omit those apprehended in the planning stages. We will also omit attempts from external sources.
1835- Richard Lawrence, attempted to kill Andrew Jackson
1865- John Wilkes Booth, killed Abraham Lincoln
1881- Charles Guiteau, killed James A. Garfield
1901- Leon Czolgosz, killed William McKinley
1912- John F. Schrank, attempted to kill Theodore Roosevelt
1933- Giuseppe Zangara, attempted to kill Franklin D. Roosevelt
1950- Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, attempted to kill Harry Truman
1963- Lee Harvey Oswald, killed John F. Kennedy (no, we are not getting into the whole conspiracy thing)
1974- Samuel Byck, attempted to kill Richard Nixon
1975- Squeaky Fromme, attempted to kill Gerald Ford
1975- Sara Jane Moore, attempted to kill Gerald Ford
1976- Chester Plumber, attempted to kill Gerald Ford
1981- John Hinckley Jr., attempted to kill Ronald Reagan
1994- Francisco Martin Duran, attempted to kill Bill Clinton
2001- Robert Pickett, attempted to kill George W. Bush
The first thing to note is that Lawrence and Schrank were eventually declared insane, and many of the others on the list had emotional issues as well. The second thing to note is that most of the rest ended up dead themselves, either from being killed in the act, at the scene, soon afterwards, or from a formal execution; this was the fate of Booth, Guiteau, Czolgosz, Zangara, Torresola, Oswald, Byck and Plumber.
As for the rest, Collazo was to be executed as well, but Truman commuted his sentence to life, and Jimmy Carter pardoned him after 29 years. Fromme was given life in prison, but released after serving 34 years. Moore was paroled after 32 years. Duran was sentenced to 40 years and is currently serving that out. Pickett, who was shot by a Secret Service agent on-site, got three years.
The third thing to note: these people are either viewed as crazy, history's villains, or this is the first you've heard of them at all. The sole exceptions are Collazo and Torresola, looked upon fondly by the Puerto Rican independence movement. (And Fidel Castro, whatever you wish to make of that.) A movement that seeks to break off from the United States, which only is a fair analog to you if you seek secession.
We'll get to that later.
The fourth thing to note: none of these things actually has led to anything larger. If you actually do seek secession, look towards Booth. If anyone was going to bring about secession (or at least a recharge in Southern enthusiasm; the states were still seceded) it was him, as the Civil War had just ended. It didn't happen. Collazo and Torresola? Their act was in 1950. Now, in 2010, Puerto Rico is the exact same status that it was in 1950.
So it's not going to lead to anything, you're in all likelihood not getting vindicated by history, and you'll probably die trying.
What's your goal, assuming mental stability? (And it cannot be assumed; according to the US Attorney's Manual, approximately 75% of all threats on the President are made by the mentally ill.) Is it regime change? Get a Republican in office? Because if it is, you'd need a lot of accomplices. Six of them, in fact. I'm assuming you're a Republican here (or an "independent" that's just So Fed Up with a group of people that, if you listed them off, would turn out to be just a bunch of Democrats with maybe the occasional moderate Republican mixed in; whatever you want to call yourself to make yourself feel better). The first Republican in the line of succession right now is Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense. In front of him are Obama, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Robert Byrd, Hillary Clinton, and Timothy Geithner. If you prefer the other Republican in the line of succession, Ray LaHood, that would require eight additional accomplices to take out Gates, Eric Holder, Ken Salazar, Tom Vilsack, Gary Locke, Hilda Solis, Kathleen Sebelius, and Shaun Donovan.
This would be a tad difficult, as it should be noted that no Vice President has yet been assassinated, never mind the effort involved in killing the six highest-ranking people in America at the same time, let alone the 14 highest.
So Biden's President now. And you think he'd just stumble around like Dan Quayle 2.0 until he could be driven from office, right? Obama didn't pick him for his mouth. There's a brain in there that his mouth just happens to outrun. While in the Senate. Biden chaired the Foreign Relations and Judiciary Committees, the latter of which he chaired during the Supreme Court nominations of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. Not a guy you'd like very much. Aside from that, he drafted the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, created what became the Office of National Drug Control Policy, and led efforts to get involved in the Balkans in the 90's. Since becoming Vice President, it was Biden who leaned heavily on Specter to flip parties, and he's the guy the administration relies on to convey expectations to Iraqi leadership. (Whether Iraq meets those expectations, that's not Biden's problem.)
Long story short, there's a reason his verbal gaffes always get shrugged off.
And if you do get Obama and Biden... President Nancy Pelosi. I know you don't like the sound of that one, and that's before you take into account that she'd take the 'first woman President' title, and as a woman, she would have absolutely no problem laying into Sarah Palin without having to worry about looking like a chauvinist pig. Obama can't hit a girl, you say? Biden can't hit a girl, you say? Pelosi sure as hell can.
Are you after an overthrow of the government? Do you think the military will side with you and turn the administration out of office? Put your side in, remake the country in your image? Well, in your attempt to remake the United States, you've pretty much ended the United States as we know it, but never mind your pipe dream. Here's what's actually going to happen.
You get the stuffing knocked out of you. That's what's going to happen.
Note that even with the size of the Tea Party movement now, there isn't much of anybody in the military joining in. There's one officer refusing to follow orders because of birther-related concerns, and that guy's simply getting court-martialed. If an actual movement were to take place, don't expect very much military support. Maybe you get a couple scattered people to break off, and maybe they bring their weapons with them. Maybe they attach to whatever local militias have taken up the cause.
That still leaves the rest of the military. That still leaves all the gigantic military toys that scattered desertions can't simply walk off with. That still leaves, if it were to come to it, all those missile silos that somebody has the launch codes to, and that somebody isn't going to be you. It's going to be the high-ranking officers loyal to the Commander-in-Chief. And if they leave and take the codes with them, they better call for the missiles fast, because the codes are very likely to be changed almost as fast.
A smattering of local militias, probably a couple hundred guys at best, against thousands and thousands of military professionals in addition to local police. The former probably has some fairly impressive guns at their disposal, admitted, but the latter has impressive weaponry too. And tanks. And airplanes. I'm willing to wager not many local militias have tanks laying around. And if things got into a sustained gunfight, the militias are running out of ammo first.
Are you trying to get your state to secede? Please note that the Civil War was not originally fought as a war over freeing slaves (though it eventually became so, and slavery was the core issue at hand), but as a war over preserving the Union. Secession, it should be noted, is in fact unconstitutional. Right after 'we the people', you'll note the phrase "in order to create a more perfect union". This was in reference to the Articles of Confederation, which talk of a "perpetual union", which should really be self-explanatory.
Unfortunately, some people were confused about that little clause. The Supreme Court laid it out bare in the 1869 case Texas v. White, in which they ruled 5-3 that the Confederacy never actually left the Union during the Civil War, because states can't secede.
So even if you get your state to secede, you haven't seceded. All you've done is commit treason. And treason tends to be frowned upon in our modern times.
Do you simply not like Obama because he's black? I already had words with you a couple months ago.
So you've been squashed. You manage to survive the altercation, and are arrested (as you should well expect). No matter, even if you didn't manage to complete the assassination, you can just vote out your quarry normally anyway, right?
Wrong. Oh so wrong.
Simply making threats on the President's life is a class D felony under US Code Title 18, Section 871, punishable by five years in prison. And the Secret Service isn't known for being picky about what constitutes a threat. An actual attempt, well, that's straight-up attempted murder all by itself, before you add in the whole Presidential thing.
Felons aren't allowed to vote. Through your actions, you've simply reduced your electoral ranks by one, and given your opposition that much more breathing room.
But let's say, knowing all that, knowing the odds against you, you succeeded. Let's say you actually do manage to kill the President.
Who's to say the events of the aftermath won't backfire on you? Who's to say that your target- and here we loop back around to that original error of overestimating your level of support- won't gain a slew of sympathy points, thus making them, or at least their policies, even more popular, thus taking the country even further from your worldview at an even faster rate? Reagan got that treatment. Kennedy became mythical. Teddy postponed going to the hospital so he could use his attempt in a scheduled campaign speech, which turned out to last an hour and a half, and added it to his already-burgeoning legend. (He didn't win the race, but he wasn't going to win anyway.) And let's not even get started on Lincoln.
So there you go. You're going to get crushed, you're not going to get away, you're going to pay dearly- possibly with your life- you won't accomplish anything by it other than potentially cause a lot of people a lot of grief, you will in all likelihood go down in history as crazy or worse- if you go down in history at all- and even if you complete your task, in trying to silence your target, you may very well give him a larger voice than you could possibly imagine.
Put the gun down.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Rationale and Inhibition, or Lack Thereof
Unless your moral compass is utterly beyond reproach, every so often there's a little voice, somewhere in the deep recesses of your head, that at least openly wonders what would happen if you engaged in an extreme, sociopathic reaction to some mundane act, or to no act at all in particular. Not just what we know as the id, but the most drastic possible form of id. What would happen if I took my half-eaten hotdog and smashed it in the face of the guy next to me who won't stop mugging for the Jumbotron. What would happen if I slammed on the brakes and forced that tailgater to ram into the back of my car. What would happen if I did this. What would happen if I did that.
Most of us quickly disregard these thoughts, though, as we know these actions to be immoral and wrong.
Most of us, anyway.
Now, perhaps you play video games, and perhaps you've gone on an indiscriminate rampage in Grand Theft Auto or something. The rules are different for video games; that's a controlled, ultimately safe environment in which nobody actually gets hurt. That is not what's at hand here. We're talking about real-life actions.
Nor are we talking about actions for which some sort of rationale, however twisted or flimsy, is provided. Even the examples provided at the top of this article don't really qualify. 'But he wouldn't stop mugging for the Jumbotron' and 'But he was tailgating me' are at least reasons. Bad reasons, but reasons. That is having a rationale. The issue at hand here is not a twisted rationale for sociopathy. The issue at hand is a total, utter lack of social inhibition control. The action for the sake of the action, and nothing more.
And it has happened. We'll examine here two such cases.
First, there's Thomas Venezia. Venezia in 2003 was given a five-year ban from hunting anywhere in the world, and was banned from Canada for life.
Venezia has claimed to have the "K chromosome", being quoted as saying "I love to kill. I have to kill." Luckily for us humans, for Venezia, that primarily means birds and deer.
Unluckily for us humans, Venezia would step on any toe to gain access to the grounds where he could shoot them. And Venezia stepped on a lot of toes, more or less the entire hunting community of Vermont. He would nudge people off longtime hunting grounds they'd used for years. He would park right next to people that beat him to a hunting spot he wanted. He would, in an activity where silence is paramount, scream "Lock and load, boys!" or "Come over here and I'll give you the nasty sting of steel!"
And it didn't end with straight hunting. According to an article from the Ludington Daily News,
After the sentencing, Venezia was pretty much shut out of the community, to the point where one person in the linked Atlantic article, Saskatchewan investigator Ronald Maynard, hesitates to call him a hunter at all. But it hadn't altered Venezia's mindset. When reporter John Vaillant met Venezia after the sentencing, a group of pigeons flew overhead. When Venezia looked up at them, Vaillant asked Venezia what he was seeing, and Venezia- who remember was starting a five-year worldwide hunting ban- responded "Fodder." He went on to nod at them and say "See those pigeons?... Now they're in range. (beat) That one's dead. So's that one."
Second, there's a pair of girls in Perth, Australia, whose names went unpublished as they were below the age of majority at the time. This is the purest possible form of a lack of social inhibition. The two, during a sleepover, discussed what it would be like to kill someone, decided they'd feel no remorse, and then duly set upon a friend, Eliza Davis, in a cold, detached manner. At the ensuing trial, no further reasoning was given, no further emotion supplied.
They were both given life in prison, eligible for parole after 15 years due to their age. In addition, the two were separated on the rationale that they would pose an unacceptable threat to others as long as they remained together.
Normally, you'd try and analyze something like this by trying to discern why. But when the sake of the act IS the reason, it's exponentially more difficult.
But it has to come from somewhere, doesn't it? No matter how heinously or seemingly inexplicably one behaves, there are prior events and experiences in their lives that combined somehow to lay some sort of groundwork for it. One is not born a monster, and to dismiss someone as such is to disregard possible clues as to how they became who they became, thereby permitting others to follow similar paths in the future.
What might cause someone to completely lose their sense of social inhibition like this? Feel free to chime in below if you've got a theory.
Most of us quickly disregard these thoughts, though, as we know these actions to be immoral and wrong.
Most of us, anyway.
Now, perhaps you play video games, and perhaps you've gone on an indiscriminate rampage in Grand Theft Auto or something. The rules are different for video games; that's a controlled, ultimately safe environment in which nobody actually gets hurt. That is not what's at hand here. We're talking about real-life actions.
Nor are we talking about actions for which some sort of rationale, however twisted or flimsy, is provided. Even the examples provided at the top of this article don't really qualify. 'But he wouldn't stop mugging for the Jumbotron' and 'But he was tailgating me' are at least reasons. Bad reasons, but reasons. That is having a rationale. The issue at hand here is not a twisted rationale for sociopathy. The issue at hand is a total, utter lack of social inhibition control. The action for the sake of the action, and nothing more.
And it has happened. We'll examine here two such cases.
First, there's Thomas Venezia. Venezia in 2003 was given a five-year ban from hunting anywhere in the world, and was banned from Canada for life.
Venezia has claimed to have the "K chromosome", being quoted as saying "I love to kill. I have to kill." Luckily for us humans, for Venezia, that primarily means birds and deer.
Unluckily for us humans, Venezia would step on any toe to gain access to the grounds where he could shoot them. And Venezia stepped on a lot of toes, more or less the entire hunting community of Vermont. He would nudge people off longtime hunting grounds they'd used for years. He would park right next to people that beat him to a hunting spot he wanted. He would, in an activity where silence is paramount, scream "Lock and load, boys!" or "Come over here and I'll give you the nasty sting of steel!"
And it didn't end with straight hunting. According to an article from the Ludington Daily News,
Once, Venezia spontaneously leaped from a truck and started firing at ducks, then later at pigeons because, he said, he needed action because he had gone an hour without killing anything.
After the sentencing, Venezia was pretty much shut out of the community, to the point where one person in the linked Atlantic article, Saskatchewan investigator Ronald Maynard, hesitates to call him a hunter at all. But it hadn't altered Venezia's mindset. When reporter John Vaillant met Venezia after the sentencing, a group of pigeons flew overhead. When Venezia looked up at them, Vaillant asked Venezia what he was seeing, and Venezia- who remember was starting a five-year worldwide hunting ban- responded "Fodder." He went on to nod at them and say "See those pigeons?... Now they're in range. (beat) That one's dead. So's that one."
Second, there's a pair of girls in Perth, Australia, whose names went unpublished as they were below the age of majority at the time. This is the purest possible form of a lack of social inhibition. The two, during a sleepover, discussed what it would be like to kill someone, decided they'd feel no remorse, and then duly set upon a friend, Eliza Davis, in a cold, detached manner. At the ensuing trial, no further reasoning was given, no further emotion supplied.
They were both given life in prison, eligible for parole after 15 years due to their age. In addition, the two were separated on the rationale that they would pose an unacceptable threat to others as long as they remained together.
Normally, you'd try and analyze something like this by trying to discern why. But when the sake of the act IS the reason, it's exponentially more difficult.
But it has to come from somewhere, doesn't it? No matter how heinously or seemingly inexplicably one behaves, there are prior events and experiences in their lives that combined somehow to lay some sort of groundwork for it. One is not born a monster, and to dismiss someone as such is to disregard possible clues as to how they became who they became, thereby permitting others to follow similar paths in the future.
What might cause someone to completely lose their sense of social inhibition like this? Feel free to chime in below if you've got a theory.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
The South Shall Rise Again (Or At Least Erect)
Virginia governor Bob McDonnell, breaking from the precedent set by the previous two governors, has brought back Confederate History Month in the state. He also managed to omit the word 'slavery' from all traces of the proclamation, for which he caught so much heat that he ended up apologizing.
Despite the apology, you would be mistaken if you're inclined to think this kind of thing stopped with McDonnell. Whitewashing the Civil War and race relations, or even glorifying the Confederate side, is a problem throughout the South.
Nathan Bedford Forrest has 32 historical sites dedicated to him in Tennessee, more than any other American in a single state. Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, is most famous for his command at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, during the Civil War. According to 'Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong' by James W. Loewen, which speaks extensively on our topic today, the Union surrendered, but Forrest was not inclined to offer quarter. Or at least, he was not inclined to offer quarter to the black Union soldiers. 64% of black Union soldiers died compared to 33% of the whites. Some black soldiers attempted to get on their knees to the Confederates, but they were ordered back to their feet, then shot. Acording to a later Congressional inquiry, some soldiers were buried alive, and others were crucified and burned on tent frames.
In Louisiana, there is a statue called, alternately, 'Uncle Jack' and 'The Good Darky'. It depicts a disheveled black man with poor posture, tipping his hat in content subservience. Originally standing in Natchitoches, and reading "Erected by the city of Natchitoches in grateful recognition of the arduous and faithful services of the good darkies of Louisiana," has been since moved to Baton Rouge's Rural Life Museum, and has since seen the inscription covered up, but that only leaves the statue with no context at all.
And then there's Stone Mountain, Georgia, which sees three people carved into the mountain: Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee, a project undertaken by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (who are responsible for a large quantity of historical monuments glorifying the Confederacy, though this one proved beyond their financial means), and has over the years been used repeatedly for KKK rallies. One incarnation of the Klan was in fact founded at Stone Mountain. For everyone else, it's a nice picnic area. With fireworks.
These are only three examples, but similar occurrences can be found throughout the South; monuments that seek to deny racial injustices or atrocities, or even glorify them.
They should be monuments of apology. Or maybe, not even monuments at all.
Despite the apology, you would be mistaken if you're inclined to think this kind of thing stopped with McDonnell. Whitewashing the Civil War and race relations, or even glorifying the Confederate side, is a problem throughout the South.
Nathan Bedford Forrest has 32 historical sites dedicated to him in Tennessee, more than any other American in a single state. Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, is most famous for his command at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, during the Civil War. According to 'Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong' by James W. Loewen, which speaks extensively on our topic today, the Union surrendered, but Forrest was not inclined to offer quarter. Or at least, he was not inclined to offer quarter to the black Union soldiers. 64% of black Union soldiers died compared to 33% of the whites. Some black soldiers attempted to get on their knees to the Confederates, but they were ordered back to their feet, then shot. Acording to a later Congressional inquiry, some soldiers were buried alive, and others were crucified and burned on tent frames.
In Louisiana, there is a statue called, alternately, 'Uncle Jack' and 'The Good Darky'. It depicts a disheveled black man with poor posture, tipping his hat in content subservience. Originally standing in Natchitoches, and reading "Erected by the city of Natchitoches in grateful recognition of the arduous and faithful services of the good darkies of Louisiana," has been since moved to Baton Rouge's Rural Life Museum, and has since seen the inscription covered up, but that only leaves the statue with no context at all.
And then there's Stone Mountain, Georgia, which sees three people carved into the mountain: Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee, a project undertaken by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (who are responsible for a large quantity of historical monuments glorifying the Confederacy, though this one proved beyond their financial means), and has over the years been used repeatedly for KKK rallies. One incarnation of the Klan was in fact founded at Stone Mountain. For everyone else, it's a nice picnic area. With fireworks.
These are only three examples, but similar occurrences can be found throughout the South; monuments that seek to deny racial injustices or atrocities, or even glorify them.
They should be monuments of apology. Or maybe, not even monuments at all.
Monday, March 29, 2010
Fuigmism
Fuigmism is one of the most insidious diseases in America today. It can devastate communities, pit neighbors against each other, and it often proves extremely difficult to cure.
What is fuigmism?
FU, I've Got Mine.
Well-functioning societies, regardless of their industrial status, at some level require a shared sense of community, of teamwork. I help you, you help me. Members of a community must be willing to help each other achieve mutual goals. When someone becomes for whatever reason unable to contribute to society (e.g. temporary injury/sickness or job loss), it's incumbent on the rest of us to help them become able again and ready to once again contribute, and if their potential contribution has become permanently limited (e.g. permanent injury/sickness or retirement), it's incumbent on the rest of us to not take advantage of them in their reduced capacity.
That's how it's supposed to work, anyway.
Fuigmism happens when this sense of community breaks down. It occurs when someone becomes not so much unable to contribute as unwilling, and yes, they are two different things.
Some of the symptoms of fuigmism:
*Repeated requests to know what's in it for you even if no monetary investment is asked of you
*Rationalization that if you've gotten to where you've gotten in life under your own power, so can everyone else under theirs
*Failure to recognize just how many things are in fact helping you out in your daily life
*Lack of sympathy for those more unfortunate than you coupled with never having suffered their misfortunes yourself
*Overuse of the word 'bootstraps'
*General disregard for anyone that isn't you or a loved one
Fuigmism comes and goes in American life. During the 80's, it more or less swept the country, with Patient Zero arguably being lifelong carrier Donald Trump. It was the Me Decade, the Gordon Gekko era of 'greed is good'. Sure, he was the primary factor in the death of the USFL when he ignored the salary cap and and made the league move games from spring to fall so as to force a merge with the NFL, sure he went bankrupt and needed to be bailed out, sure he was slimy as all get out, but deep down, you kinda wanted to be him anyway. You wanted to be the guy that could coat anything in gold just for the fun of it. You wanted to be the guy whose house Robin Leach would fawn over in his over-the-top rich-guy British accent this week. You wanted to be the guy that owned the casino, that flew in the private jet, that could name things after himself at will.
But look at Trump now. He hasn't really changed since then, but now he just seems tacky and disgusting. Oh, great, you gold-plated your toilet again and invited another dozen celebrities everybody hates to go admire it. Must be nice.
Who is most likely to be afflicted with fuigmism? The upper middle class. Statistically, even though the poorest among us are expected to have to contribute the least, they, proportionally, contribute the most, according to this 2009 graph regarding charitable giving, which counts both financial contributions and volunteer work. (Volunteer work is officially valued at $20.25 an hour.) A separate reading done in 2008 found similar findings, as do most studies done on the subject. The poor give the most, but then giving drops off sharply from the lower middle class, middle class, and then bottoming out at upper middle class. A small uptick occurs when you reach the richest members of society, but not nearly enough to match the poor.
Why is that? The poorest know what each other are going through, and help out in a shared sense of necessity. Everyone must pool resources or everyone's in big trouble. Past that, though, once the sensed necessity of community decreases, fuigmism takes over. One loses touch with the problems afflicting those on society's bottom rungs. Once one becomes rich enough, some among them feel an urge to give back, and do so (my local library was funded by Andrew Carnegie), but between the two extremes, there is a giant donut hole. It's similar to how bacteria has trouble surviving at very cold or very hot temperatures, but flourishes and ruins food at room temperature.
So what's the cure for fuigmism? Simple: start giving a damn about those around you. Or at least, care more than you currently do. It's that simple. No sense overcomplicating things.
You can start here.
What is fuigmism?
FU, I've Got Mine.
Well-functioning societies, regardless of their industrial status, at some level require a shared sense of community, of teamwork. I help you, you help me. Members of a community must be willing to help each other achieve mutual goals. When someone becomes for whatever reason unable to contribute to society (e.g. temporary injury/sickness or job loss), it's incumbent on the rest of us to help them become able again and ready to once again contribute, and if their potential contribution has become permanently limited (e.g. permanent injury/sickness or retirement), it's incumbent on the rest of us to not take advantage of them in their reduced capacity.
That's how it's supposed to work, anyway.
Fuigmism happens when this sense of community breaks down. It occurs when someone becomes not so much unable to contribute as unwilling, and yes, they are two different things.
Some of the symptoms of fuigmism:
*Repeated requests to know what's in it for you even if no monetary investment is asked of you
*Rationalization that if you've gotten to where you've gotten in life under your own power, so can everyone else under theirs
*Failure to recognize just how many things are in fact helping you out in your daily life
*Lack of sympathy for those more unfortunate than you coupled with never having suffered their misfortunes yourself
*Overuse of the word 'bootstraps'
*General disregard for anyone that isn't you or a loved one
Fuigmism comes and goes in American life. During the 80's, it more or less swept the country, with Patient Zero arguably being lifelong carrier Donald Trump. It was the Me Decade, the Gordon Gekko era of 'greed is good'. Sure, he was the primary factor in the death of the USFL when he ignored the salary cap and and made the league move games from spring to fall so as to force a merge with the NFL, sure he went bankrupt and needed to be bailed out, sure he was slimy as all get out, but deep down, you kinda wanted to be him anyway. You wanted to be the guy that could coat anything in gold just for the fun of it. You wanted to be the guy whose house Robin Leach would fawn over in his over-the-top rich-guy British accent this week. You wanted to be the guy that owned the casino, that flew in the private jet, that could name things after himself at will.
But look at Trump now. He hasn't really changed since then, but now he just seems tacky and disgusting. Oh, great, you gold-plated your toilet again and invited another dozen celebrities everybody hates to go admire it. Must be nice.
Who is most likely to be afflicted with fuigmism? The upper middle class. Statistically, even though the poorest among us are expected to have to contribute the least, they, proportionally, contribute the most, according to this 2009 graph regarding charitable giving, which counts both financial contributions and volunteer work. (Volunteer work is officially valued at $20.25 an hour.) A separate reading done in 2008 found similar findings, as do most studies done on the subject. The poor give the most, but then giving drops off sharply from the lower middle class, middle class, and then bottoming out at upper middle class. A small uptick occurs when you reach the richest members of society, but not nearly enough to match the poor.
Why is that? The poorest know what each other are going through, and help out in a shared sense of necessity. Everyone must pool resources or everyone's in big trouble. Past that, though, once the sensed necessity of community decreases, fuigmism takes over. One loses touch with the problems afflicting those on society's bottom rungs. Once one becomes rich enough, some among them feel an urge to give back, and do so (my local library was funded by Andrew Carnegie), but between the two extremes, there is a giant donut hole. It's similar to how bacteria has trouble surviving at very cold or very hot temperatures, but flourishes and ruins food at room temperature.
So what's the cure for fuigmism? Simple: start giving a damn about those around you. Or at least, care more than you currently do. It's that simple. No sense overcomplicating things.
You can start here.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Updates
According to the Penny Arcader who made the previous post, the I-know-where-you-live death threat person was arrested. Which is good.
Also, four new books to add to the Rapid-Fire High-Intensity Book Club:
*Bowering, George- Egotists and Autocrats: The Prime Ministers of Canada
*Godwin, Nadine- Travia: The Ultimate Book of travel Trivia
*Lyons, Andy; Ronay, Barney- When Saturday Comes: The Half Decent Football Book
*Wallechinsky, David- The Complete Book of the Winter Olympics, 2010 Edition
Also, four new books to add to the Rapid-Fire High-Intensity Book Club:
*Bowering, George- Egotists and Autocrats: The Prime Ministers of Canada
*Godwin, Nadine- Travia: The Ultimate Book of travel Trivia
*Lyons, Andy; Ronay, Barney- When Saturday Comes: The Half Decent Football Book
*Wallechinsky, David- The Complete Book of the Winter Olympics, 2010 Edition
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)