It’s Sunday morning. Sunday mornings are for comparatively sleeping in, though still getting to work on time for brunch. Alternately, Sunday could be for listening to the amazing Portal 2 soundtrack. Or it could be for thinking difficult thoughts.
This week… It’s sort of amazing how much news one misses by not having access to a computer for several days. A quick look at Google tells me that there’s a truce in Yemen, the space station is finally completed (sadly, Obama does not get to fly up and cut a ribbon), and the Supreme Court ruled that- despite having no access to exercise equipment for about 20 years- California inmates are too scary to be treated humanely.
Africa is big. How big? It’s roughly 80% the size of the moon. Oddly, because of the way we humans tend to make maps, and the position of Africa at the very center of the surface of the Earth, we tend not to understand how big Africa really is. Let’s fix that.
I don’t really want to make Apple bashing a regular feature here on Sunday Morning. That’s not going to stop me from telling you how awful Steve Jobs is as a human being. The man actively colludes with the worst aspects of our entertainment culture to profit from the fencing off of human culture. He is an odious toad who needs to stop being treated like a visionary.
The only downside to my Kindle is that it’s a device locked to a single store, and the books I buy from that store are locked a device from a single manufacturer. This fractures the potential market, causing some rather inefficient competition. I’ll go so far as to say that all the inefficiency is on the consumer-harming side. Funny how that so often happens. It’s almost like capital is afraid of competition.
Bit by bit, piece by piece, we Americans are asked to give up our rights in order to do business. Sign a cellphone contract and lose your right to sue if the handset blows in your pocket. Visit a dentist and they will claim the right to own anything you ever say about that dentist. Most lawyers believe these provisions will be laughed out of court. I’m not sure that’s the case.
In the United States, intellectual property law exists for the express purpose “To promote the progress of science and useful arts,” that word “useful” could arguably be construed to mean that music or movies do not qualify for protection (it would be a silly argument, I think). The UK have released a report showing that their IP regime actually hinders, rather than promotes, innovation and growth. The UK system of IP law was modeled on our own, at our insistence.
Note that I’m refering only to the right to copy or distribute. I am certainly not speaking to the morality of encouraging the theft of someone else’s work. Nor would I argue that plagiarism should ever be ok. Sadly, there are a great many content aggregation sites that do this– I will no longer visit any of “Cheeseburger Network” sites for this reason.
Poland is so proud of a recent video game release that they’ve Given a copy of the game to President Obama. I really hope that he finds time to play it– I’m told the Witcher 2 is amazing. Interestingly: the publishers of the game removed all the DRM from it about a week after launch.
It seems that Sony can screw up movie theaters, in addition to video games and CD players. I’ve long made a point of not giving them my money.
Congressional oversight committees are designed to be bipartisan, specifically so that members from both parties can have the opportunity to scream loudly at abuses of the American Constitution being done in secret. The US Constitution even contains a clause (” for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place”) which specifically enables encourages such whistle blowing. All of which makes me think that Rep. Wyden is doing a grave disservice to his country by not being more forthcoming about the ways in which the USA PATRIOT act are being abused. If he has some detailed knowledge about abuses committed by the US government, he is specifically charged by his oath of office to report those abuses to the American people.
The City of San Francisco is mandating that all taxi cabs in the City install credit card machines so that taxi users can have an added convenience. The City is actually going so far as to forcibly add the machines to taxis. The City is going to start charging drivers a 5% fee for each time one of those machines is used, to defray the cost of installation. That fee will be charged to taxi drivers. Taxi drivers in San Francisco (probably other places also) don’t own their vehicles, but must rent them. Looking at this chain, I see: Rich people take taxis, and aren’t being asked to pay for something that benefits them. Rich people (literally capitalists!) not being charged for material changes to their equipment in ways that may benefit them. And the people being asked to pay? The poorest people in this triad. Class warfare folks, even in San Francisco.
In my mind, the struggle for women’s equality and the struggle for equality of people in other traditionally disenfranchised groups are so linked that I have difficulty separating them. That’s probably an example of privilege on my part. Easy rule of thumb: if I look around and see that I’m in a room full of white people, I’m probably at fault and need to fix something.
This week’s theme? Good ideas gone wrong. So below, tell me what word you’d trademark, if you had the money to bribe the patent office.
Check out this awesome StarCraft 2 match. Best viewed at High Definition.
It’s Sunday morning. Sundays are for cuddling in bed reading this very thing right now. Or Sundays could be for recovering from the cold which inspired the edition name of this post. Alternately, Sundays might be for recovering from a very bad, no good, horrible date.
This week, President Obama caught some flack for saying the sort of perfectly sensible things about Israel that every president has said since 1967. Economically ravaged Iceland experienced an eruption of it’s most active volcano. Also: Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh promised to step down. Eventually. At some point. Also Also: the Iranian president is at loggerheads with the Iranian supreme leader- both men want more power.
Last Sunday, we San Franciscans held a “race” called the Bay to Breakers. I put the word “race” in quotes because we San Franciscans don’t take it very seriously as an athletic competition. For most of us, it really is a giant, drunken, moving street fair, complete with costumes, nudity, and floats. The floats are how we know that it’s a special day in San Francisco. I mention this because every year, there is a male and a female winner of the race. Every year that winner is from Africa- usually Kenya. It amazes me that there is a large enough prize pool that traveling across 3 continents to race is worth the bother. But then, Kenya is a very poor country.
This comic does a great job at capturing the dynamic of cross-pond super hero expectations.
The single most depressing job I can imagine is oncology. The entire job is dealing with people who either have cancer, or think they might have cancer. The best news an oncologist can deliver is “the problem you’re experiencing isn’t cancer.” Fortunately, oncologists have a simple Six-Step Protocol for Delivering Bad News. Handy for all your bad dates! Table 2 is especially noteworthy.
The supreme court this week decided that the police may enter a home without a warrant if they suspect that illegal behavior is happening inside that home. Put more bluntly, the Supreme Court violated its oath to the US Constitution by wiping its metaphorical ass with the 4th Amendment. As much as I truly detest marijuana, I don’t hate America more than I hate pot. I’m not sure why the Supreme Court seems to.
The idea of putting cameras on police officers seems obvious. The money counting room at a grocery store has cameras. The police are a lot better armed than your average Safeway clerk. Shooting someone is a lot more serious than stealing from the till. This shouldn’t be at all controversial.
A week or so ago I mentioned that I don’t understand the idea of being transgendered. I’ve also said that I don’t have to understand, I only have to accept. Carolyn Michelle is a damned good games reviewer. Anyone who will overlook that fact because of her gender is doing themselves a grave disservice- and failing in a prime duty as a human.
One of the more interesting things about the emergence of trans people into the public consciousness has been grammatical. While English isn’t nearly as gendered a language as the Romance languages, it does lack a gender-neutral option. Attempts to change this, or any parts of the language, have been met with incredulity, derision, hostility, and illogic.
One of the more interesting realizations I’ve had over the past few years is that even if all gender identities were treated with true equality, there would still be need for separate spaces for the various genders. The problem is not that “The Mary Sue” exists (far from!), nor is it a problem that “The Mary Sue” needs to exist (I just said it would be necessary even in a perfect world). No. The problem is that The Mary Sue is the female version of a default that is assumed to be male. That’s not their problem. That’s mine.
One of the things that becomes clear reading this retrospective from Rosanne Barr is that by the end of the show, she was crazy, and it was unfunny. Unfortunately, so many people had told her that she was crazy and unfunny when it was demonstrably untrue that she was unable to distinguish between lies and truth. Did the patriarchy literally cost Ms. Barr a bit of her sanity? Arguably. It certainly cost her a crucial bit of judgment and cost humanity an enormous talent.
I watched Thor this week. It was incredibly good. In fact, it was so good that I went back and re-watched Iron Man 1 and 2, as well as the most recent Hulk movie. They were all pretty enjoyable. I came to the conclusion that a good script, good director, and good acting can make any concept fun. Wonder Woman is a kind of silly concept. It isn’t sillier than Thor, Hulk, or Iron Man. Those stories feature men, though, and are thus given a lot more leeway than a story featuring a woman.
Every Saturday night, I sit down and bang out a bunch of words to put together a post you guys can enjoy on a Sunday Morning. Sometimes it’s better than others. Sometimes it’s easier than other times. I do know that if I skipped a week I, people would notice, and (I hope) complain. That knowledge is one of the things that keeps me motivated. I say that because whatever my problems as a writer, George R R Martin has them ten or a hundred thousand times worse. It’s been about 12 years since the 3rd book in his epic was published. Book 5 is due soon.
Representative Ryan would like to cut funding for the elderly and the poor, so that America can slash taxes for the rich. Before the implementation of Social Security, one in two of the elderly were impoverished. Representative Ryan would like to undo decades of progress and return to the days when grandparents died on America’s sidewalks. Representative Ryan would like to replace all the government programs with strong multiplier effects and replace them with programs that have small multiplier effects- thus shrinking America’s economy and giving a bigger share of it those who are already well off. Representative Ryan claims that President Obama is engaged in Class Warfare. Representative Ryan is implicitly agreeing with us: it’s only class warfare when the poor fight back.
The major difference between East Coast geeks and West Coast Geeks is that East Coasters can love sports and West Coasters cannot. Even in my geekdom, I am atypical, I guess. Sports really do create enormous safe spaces to engage in mutual activities. Even small steps towards becoming more inclusive are, of course, welcome.
I’m not really a fan of wrestling. Nothing against it, but nothing for it either. It’s just not my thing. So the rapturous death of “Macho Man” Randy Savage didn’t move me. Nevertheless, this obituary paints a picture of a man who was a net positive to the human experience. That is all anyone can ask for in a lifetime.
Fun fact: George Orwell’s grandson taught my introduction to Political Science course. That’s why I often refer to the great author as “Eric Blair”. Orwell was undeniably brilliant, and so often correct that it’s more than a bit humbling. In his diary, he makes some guesses as to England’s probable fate in the war. It’s shockingly plausible, given what we know of history. It is also entirely wrong. I wonder why he misread Churchill so badly.
Sound design is one of those things most people rarely pay attention to. It is generally one of those things done at least adequately. It is worth, therefore, spending some time thinking about what makes sound design good– extraordinary.
I don’t have anything really to say about this article about death in video games. It’s good. Go read it.
Every teacher at a University of California is (in theory) committed to spending about a third of their time “for the public good”. Sadly, things like Academic Senate counts as fulfilling that requirement, and the public good is conflated with the downward gaze at one’s own navel. Nonetheless, it points to an important truth: Universities aren’t merely for teaching, but for learning new things about the way humanity- or the universe works- and using that knowledge. The mission of every public university and college is- or very much ought to be- the betterment of humankind through the creation and dissemination of knowledge. Someone in the Obama administration gets this, and is taking steps towards making it happen.
One of the more interesting things I learned while studying theology in college is that it is unclear whether Jesus was insulting bankers by calling them terrorists– or if he felt that calling them bankers was a sufficient insult. While it’s arguable that Jesus didn’t have disgust for the rich, he certainly had violent rage towards anyone who stood between poor people and meeting the needs of poor people. Shockingly, it seems it is possible to have spent a lifetime in bible study and utterly fail to understand this point.
Know what else San Francisco does better than anyone else on Earth? Porn. Imagine a porn company with the corporate ethos of Ben and Jerry’s. That’s Kink.com. They’re doing pretty well by the City. Also: the fact that they’re located at the Armory means they’re literally making love, not war.
It’s not trespassing if it’s done in the name of art, right? It can’t be. How can anyone call themselves a photographer of beautiful things and fail to climb the Golden Gate Bridge to photograph San Francisco at dawn? We here at Indignant Desert Birds applaud audacity, oddity, and awesomeness. Also: beauty.
Some day in the future, I can well imagine that people will only buy paper versions of their most-beloved books. That cheep paperback I bought to pass time on a plane? Gonna delete that file when I’m done. The new Michael Lewis masterpiece? Let me proudly display that on my shelf. Like Ezra Klein, I was resistant to ebooks. Now? Obviously I’m a convert.
Douglas Adams died a decade ago this week. He made his reputation as a humorist, but he seemed to have a deep and fundamental grasp on what makes humanity tick. Read this in remembrance of him.
This week’s theme was the cost of non-inclusiveness. In the comments, leave a link to a cute puppy.
It’s Sunday Morning. Sunday mornings are for taking part in the giant moving party that San Francisco is pleased to call the Bay to Breakers. Sundays are also for overcoming one’s “I’ve just finished a new book” melancholy by reading a completely different book. Alternately, Sundays could be for enjoying time in Alaska, visiting the Great Frozen North.
This week Pakistan showed it’s displeasure with the bin Laden raid in a myriad of ways, not the least of which was telling the world the name of our top operative in Pakistan. In response to raising gas prices, America seems hell bent on all the wrong policy measures, and the mess in Syria seems to be getting messier. Facebook tried to hire Mark Penn to covertly smear Google. Penn handled that job about as well as he handled Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
One of the more contentious issues with… anything, really, is pricing. In the bad old days of haggling, sellers used to claim that they had to sell at a certain price– after all: they had costs as well. Today things are different. Wholesale costs are transparent, and for the increasing array of goods that are digital, replication costs are near zero. Instead, content creators are having to fall back on the discredited labor theory of value. Figuring out a fair pricing model will be the important struggle for 21st century artists.
The problem with an Ikea TARDIS is that it falls apart after only a couple time jumps.
End users are incredibly resistant to actually paying for digital goods. My personal theory is that it owes to the ephemeral and semi-disposable nature of the experience. Unfortunately, service providers require some fairly major back-end equipment in order to maintain a product that users are resistant to paying for. Twitpic recently changed their Terms of Service, in a way that gives them limited co-ownership of anything a user uploads to their servers. This actually does strike me as good revenue model for the company, thought I’d like to see a way for high-end users to buy their way out of this part of the contract.
Books have become the most recent cultural artifact to be digitized. The book industry is, I think, handling the transition fairly well. They’re still in the experimental stage of trying to figure out the best model to derive maximum profit with minimal loss, but the fact that they are willing to experiment at all is a significant change from what we saw from the RIAA and MPAA. Books are also the only cultural good that people have had centuries-long expectations of getting access to for free. There is some thinking about how to meet that expectation in an era where books are no longer physically bound.
I recently watched Citizen Kane, which made the startling claim that running a quality newspaper would require it’s owner to lose about $25 million every year (in inflation adjusted 2010 dollars). Now that journalism has become digitized, we can see a significant lowering of the barrier to entry into journalism. Printing presses can be replaced by wordpress.com, and youtube. A good friend of mine is trying her hand at breaking into this, and she’s got her first attempt up and running. She’s asking the right questions, and getting some good answers.
A tiny computer can be created for $25. I literally cannot even begin to overstate how important this could end up being. These are inexpensive enough that every 7th grade child in America could be given one, thus helping ensure that even the poorest child can become literate in the basic skills of the 21st century.
Granted, America probably won’t want to spend that money money on children. Republicans are in a budget cutting mood. That means America should slash the money set aside to buy nuclear weapons from naughty people. That’s ok, I guess. It’s fine if terrorists have nukes, right?
people instinctively recoil from poor spelling and grammar. Since Chrome and Firefox both have built in spell check engines, I wonder if comment-leavers are ignoring the proof of their crimes against coherence? Or if internet explorer is actually so popular that most people don’t realize the carnage they’re doing? For point of reference, I have to stop what I’m writing every few words, to clean up my own terrible, terrible spelling.
As long as incoherence has been brought up: Michele Bachmann. She has been challenged to a duel of wits by a high school student. I’m impressed by the student’s feeling that she has to defend women, america, and Midwesterners from being unfairly stereotyped in response to Rep. Bachmann’s statements.
The citizenry hires a government to watch the citizenry, to make sure that we’re not doing terrible things to one another. The citizenry then hires the ACLU to make sure the government isn’t doing terrible things to the citizenry. So: have you donated to the ACLU? Democracy sort of depends on doing so.
I’ve just started the latest Michale Lewis book (The Big Short). So far all I know is that it is written in his customarily wonderful style. The book’s thesis is that the people who run Wall Street are very bad at their jobs, and should not have been allowed anywhere near the levers of power. The rich and powerful of the world, on the other hand, try and explain that if we citizens weren’t such monumental screwups, we wouldn’t be in this mess. Paul Krugman (who got his Nobel Prize by basically being America’s economic Cassandra) sides with you, me, Lewis, and against the rich and powerful. In a class war, Krugman is worth an army corps.
It isn’t always easy to see the party against whom power is arrayed, as our vantage points are purely subjective. White people and black people have wildly divergent ideas about who is being discriminated against. My instinct is that the group which has wildly high incarceration, poverty, and childhood mortality rates is the group who’s claims to discrimination is the one we should take the most seriously.
An FCC member who voted to allow vertical monopolization has taken a job with the company she voted in favor of. This not only ought to be illegal, it ought to be a jailable offense. Even if there was no explicit quid pro quo, her actions send a signal to every regulator that if they are friendly enough towards the industry they regulate, there is a potential for a large reward. When we arrive at the point when a regulator can just assume that their personal interest can be best served by agreeing with the interests of the industry they are to regulate, effective regulation becomes impossible.
When it comes to the American cultural heritage being well-served by the American government, the Library of Congress is fantastic. They’ve women ought to be seen in public, and will go so far as to edit the memory of humanity to make sure that their point is made. That is certainly not an example of hatred towards women.
As much as I hate to set anecdotal evidence against research, this research is- frankly- wrong. At the very least, at the restaurant I work at, servers believe that they will make about the same amount of money per person for the same amount of work per person regardless of the size of the party. Regardless of this being factually accurate, as long as it is believed, it is the what we will act on. As far as quoting too high, we hosts are terrified of going over on quote– people get very upset about it, and there’s very little we can do.
Apple tends to to a great deal of work to make it’s products simple. Things “just work”. In exchange for this, end users give up a certain degree of freedom to customize their experience. The problem is that Apple will tend to restrict things end users will do not merely to improve end-user experience, but also to improve the Apple bottom line. These sort of shenanigans, if you’re wondering, are why I will never again buy an Apple product.
It sucks to be on food stamps. Being on foodstamps means that you have basically failed to be able to afford food for yourself and your family. The sting of pride will keep someone from getting the help they need. Once you do, America is stingy and moralizing. In some sense, America as a whole is paying the price for this lack of concern for those too poor to buy food– food stamps provide a return on investment of $1.73 for ever $1 the government spends on them. If we had doubled the per-person spending on food stamps back in 2008, the recession might well have ended by now.
Starting assumptions can be very difficult to shake. As can the sorts of selective bias that creep in when an observer is wildly out of touch with the way most people are experiencing a phenomenon. Washington DC has very little unemployment, and therefore the policy makers and commenters who live there believe that the recession is over. In a similar fashion, people who talk about games for a living tend not to play games on the Nintendo Wii. They therefore have missed that it’s the best-selling console of it’s generation.
A new flavor of the week shooter came out last week. I’m not really a fan of the genre, so I won’t be picking it up, the claim that there were literally 100 quadrillion character variants certainly caught my eye. Apparently all of those variants are male. It seems that they would have had to cut out too many of those male variants if they wanted to include the female half of our species. When we talk about “the second sex”, or the “otherization of women”, this is exactly what is meant.
I totally disagree with James Bishop. It’s not that he’s wrong, rather, I find different things to be meaningful. His claim is that a game choice that is reflected in a change in game mechanics is meaningless– players will tend to make choices based on how they want their stats to end up. You don’t have to chose who you want to be, just which collection of numbers follows you around. For me, it’s the opposite. I want to see my choices reflected in the game world. If all I’m given is the chance to feel good or bad about myself as a player, I don’t really care.
Troy is back with a brand new edition! Germans, Germans baby. It is fascinating to see America’s view on other cultures reflected in this series. It would probably be more historically accurate to let bonuses accrue to players based on choices made during gameplay, and some random historical events. Since humans have these odd notions of race, however, it becomes a convenient hook for a bundle of premade choices.
One of the more interesting things about studying classical Greek plays is the way multiple authors would take on the same subject matter, using different assumptions. For instance, in some versions of Medea her children are said to have been killed by Corinth– the state that Athens was at war with during the time when that telling of the story was popular. Similarly, tracing the arc of American comicbook heroes reveals a great deal about what America thinks of itself. Yes, I am the latest in a long line of people to assert that comic books are for America what mythology was to the Greeks.
I just finished reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. The writing is wonderfully superfluous, without wasting a single word. It’s a novel which explores the relative merits of reason and madness. I simply cannot recommend it highly enough.
If you read just one thing:
I am not in the habit of being happy about death. There have been three people in my life who’s death made me dance with joy. The first time was when I received news that my mother’s stepfather had died. The second was when I heard about Slobodan Milošević’s death. And the third was earlier this month, with the death of bin Laden. Ta-Nehisi Coates talks about his joy at bin Laden’s death, and how scared that makes him.
This week’s theme has been your co-humanity with those motherfuckers. So leave a comment about your least favorite grammatical issues. Grammar problems always bring out the commentariat.
One day in the tenth grade, I suddenly needed glasses.This was back in the dark ages, when chalkboards were still in use, and I was no longer able to read one while sitting in the back of a classroom. Convincing my mother of this was difficult, but after a week or so she consented to take me to an opthamologist.
After about half an hour of the sort of fiddling and fussing that eye doctors do, he gave me a prescription. I don’t know that my mother looked horrified- I couldn’t see her very well given my lack of eyewear- but her reaction was disbelief. She argued with the doctor. Finally I asked the doctor if there was any way, given all his machinery, if he could invert my prescription, and let her see the world I as saw it. He blinked, fiddled a bit, and invited my mother into the chair.
I got the glasses.
I have Attention Deficit Disorder. This is a fairly recent diagnosis, and one that I myself didn’t really believe until medication for it was prescribed for me. Actually, I didn’t really believe it then, either. But I trusted that the doctor knew more about brains than I did, and so I took the medication.
In talking with people, I find that they misunderstand what ADD is. “That must make multitasking really easy!” is a common response. That’s not quite it. Let me try to do for ADD what I did for my nearsightedness. I will attempt to show a bit of the world, through my eyes.
(Click play on both of them at about the same time.)
Now: while these videos are playing, try and play a video game. The point isn’t to try and play the game– the point is to try and pay attention to all these things at once. That is what my unmedicated brain is like. Is it, then any wonder that ADD people have a reputation for absentmindedness? Or hyperactivity? Bizarrely, until very recently I had thought that this was normal. I had believed that this was the world everyone else experienced, and that I was just… a bad human because I was unable to manage it.
My “ah-ha!” moment. I was watching a youtube video. It was about 90 seconds long. During that time, I received a pair of IMs and a text message. The flashing lights and long-duration tones did not cause me to pause the video and immediately answer the various communiques. 90 seconds of attention to a video was something I noticed as new and different.
Psychology and psychiatry deal with the mind, and both take their prefix from the Greek word for soul. The idea that the mind is nothing more than electrochemical impulses is one that makes utter sense– and is utterly rebelled against. Yet knowing that redressing a chemical imbalance can fix a major deficiency in my behavior is comforting. It means that this problem is no more the fault of a defective soul than being unable to walk would be.
Sadly, the medication has not granted me super powers. I am as susceptible to boredom as I ever was- but now I can recognize it as such, rather than merely being desirous of even more stimulation. Nor has my writing or gameplay improved. Those are skills that must be practiced.
Unfortunately, ADD isn’t the major problem with this brain of mine. For reasons hinted at above, the seat of my personality- the home to my stupendous ego- is prone to fits of depression and self-destruction. Changing the mental wiring to fix prevent those things may be as easy as introducing a new chemical to my brain. It may not be. My doctor and I will have to do a bit of experimenting. That’s a whole different topic, however.
It’s Sunday Morning. Sundays are for celebrating one’s maternal relations. Alternately, Sundays are for showing off one’s child while visiting the town you lived in before having said child. Then again, Sundays could be for going “OMG! I’m in Paris!” Also? Sundays are for moving back to the USA. Possibly Sundays are for lamenting that one is unable to be with one’s own mother, and hoping that a video will suffice.
This week: the world began wondering why the US would launch a 10 year invasion and occupation of Afghanistan to do something it takes a Navy Seal + CIA team a couple years to accomplish in Pakistan. Also this week, Singapore, held elections where the majority party won with a significantly smaller majority than it had ever previously won with. Also: the Canadians held an election where the ruling minority party was able to secure a majority. Also: the United Kingdom held a referendum where they decided to retain the broken “first past the post” system, instead of going with a far more sensible “instant runoff” system. And in other news: Americans held their annual celebration of a Mexican victory over the French Empire.
Last Sunday, American forces did kill Osama bin Laden, and I’ll have more to say on that later. Many people celebrated, and many others feel that it is ugly to celebrate the death of a human being. I’ll have more to say on that later as well. For now: I think it is fair to say bin Laden left a legacy of death. It is, I think, therefore fitting to commemorate his shuffling off of the mortal coil by giving the gift of life. I do know that for many of my readers, donating money to any cause is an unbearable financial burden. If you are fortunate enough to be comfortable, I do strongly urge you to send a few dollars to a worthy cause.
One of the most awesome and humbling tricks the human brain is capable of is the one yours is performing right now: taking abstract shapes and making symbolic meaning of them. Reading. I have been reading since the age of two, and I literally cannot imagine what it is like to not be able to read. I call it a “trick” because it is not intrinsic to the human mind, but rather something that must be learned. Neural pathways must be shaped, molded, and guided into discrete and measurable tracks that literally change not only how a human things, but the very thoughts the person is capable of thinking. In Detroit, half of all adults are functionally illiterate. This means that they are literally not capable of thinking the same sorts of thoughts that you and I are capable of– that that living-wage employers demand. This is why one of my favorite causes, when I do get the chance to donate, is adult literacy.
I’ve remarked on this before, but science fiction is one of the most-useful genres of literature. It allows the human experience to be freed from historical and contemporary constraints and- if the author wishes- lets us see the underlying truths of the human condition. Granted, science fiction is (like anything else) subject to Sturgeon’s Law (90% of everything is crap), but even crap can be revealing. For instance: how Star Wars authors deal with female characters reveals a great deal about what contemporary society feels the underlying truth of male/female relationships are like.
For a decade, Democrats had been pointing out that Al Qaeda more closely resembled an criminal organization than a governmental one. For a decade we argued that this implied a more strongly law-enforcement mentality than a military one. For a decade, we Democrats were mocked and ridiculed. Obama got bin Laden. Bush couldn’t. I bet Obama spent many fewer taxpayer dollars doing this than Bush did. Between this, Universal Healthcare, and pulling out of Iraq, I’m ready to vote for Obama again.
For some reason the chattering classes take one look at the amazingly low interest rates being offered to the American government, a huge population of unemployed people, and are unable to do the basic math that says America must borrow money now to put people to work. Instead those chatterers are suddenly in a moral panic about debt, insisting that the only way to solve this non-problem is to slash the social services that make America a great nation– and have incidentally kept America’s economy from falling directly into the toilet. Rarely is the question asked: is our media knowing where the deficit came from? Nixon may have been our most evil president. Bush was easily the least-competent. The fun part? Proposed solutions to the deficit would basically amount to a major transfer payment from the poor to the rich. That’s right: rich people are arguing in their own class interest.
It is very easy to come up with rules for, commandments about, and prohibitions on behavior. By crafting a set of instructions for the human condition, we reduce the amount of thought needed to perform a given action. Please understand when I say that I understand and agree with the impulse to create rules for behavior. We must also very much understand that rules are but shadows on Plato’s cave. They are not in themselves proper behavior, but merely guide posts to what proper behavior might be. Thinkers ranging from the Christian prophet (“The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath”), to Eric Blair (“[...]correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one’s meaning clear”) have made this point. The only real counter to the lazy habits of thought and writing imposed by glue-stick adherence to rules, consciously think about each phrase before fingers and keyboard engage in the modern dance. Put differently: one must engage in self-criticism before criticizing others.
Speaking of self-criticism: I used to work as a field representative for an elected official. That official’s district had (shamefully) began as a red-line zone for whites to flee to. This report detailing the racist manner in which cross-race constituents were treated by their elected officials made me wonder how well I did with my own responsibilities. No one likes to think of themselves as a racist– that doesn’t change the fact that a lot of these negative actions permeate society.
Speaking of race: I’m not sure what, if anything, we San Franciscans can or should do about this.
A common complaint about the space program is that there are many millions of hungry people to feed here on Earth. I do very much understand this line of thinking, though I consider it almost criminally short sighted. It seems to have taken us 95 years and a baker’s dozen new technologies to confirm a theory Einstein dashed off between grading papers. I don’t know what those thirteen new technologies are. I have a very good idea that at least one of them will lead to an idea that will feed a very many people who would otherwise have gone hungry.
Osama bin Laden used his natural charisma, organizational genius, and inherited money for no better purpose than mass murder. Before his death, he had built nothing, and yet had filled graveyards. I think that the greatest testimony I can give to the humanity I share with the man is joy at his death. And yet. I do wish that we had put the psychopath on trial. To my way of thinking, justice cannot be served unless someone is allowed to stand up and defend their actions before the world. Without a trial, without some attempt at impartiality, we are left with nothing more than vengeance and slaughter. Sometimes- and it seems that this is one of those times- vengeance is all circumstances will allow for. And yet. I do wish for a different set of circumstances. The Slactivist looks at the hunting and killing of Osama bin Laden from a different point of view.
If you read just one link:
Rob Zacny is introspective. I think saying anything else would be a spoiler for the post, and take away from some of it’s inquisitive mastery.
Fittingly, for a post written on Free Comic book day, this week’s theme was truth, justice, and the American way. I didn’t even plan that. In the comments below, let me know why Batman is more awesome than Superman.
And the final bit of moral instruction can be found here:
It’s Sunday Morning. Sundays are for writing blog posts while on Adderall so that you can figure out if it helps you become a better writer. Sundays are also for getting together with friends to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer and try out the boardgame. Alternately, Sundays could be for being sheepish in the Greater Tacoma Area.
This week a major tornado ripped through Alabama, killing hundreds. Also this week: the British government shut down the United Kingdom because a non-citizen married a citizen. Also also: The current Catholic Pope took the first step in canonizing the his immediate predecessor. Also: the “president” of Yemen refuses to step down, even though everyone has asked him rather nicely.
One of the major stories in the electronic world over the past few days has been the destruction of the Playstation Network. Hackers were able to seize control of network, steal every password, (possibly) every credit card number, and probably every home address that anyone had ever registered on the site. Then they shut it down. The scary thing is that most people use the same password for damned near every site on the web. Now is an excellent time to change your password to something secure. There are simple ways a person can create secure passwords. Try one out.
Obviously- obviously!- the language a person uses to describe a circumstance will shape the way that circumstance is perceived. Obviously- obviously!- we wish to use inclusive language at all times so that everyone is allowed into the conversation, and that no one will feel that the conversation-space is unwelcoming to them. Unfortunately, it is rather easy to use the insistence on “correct” language as another tool for privilege to propagate itself. Given that my own demographic is how the patriarchy is usually defined, I am not well placed to tell other people they’re going too far in demanding certain words be used or not used. So instead I’ll point out the linked article and allow the conversation to happen around me.
We humans have eyes. Also? We humans have sex drives. Not all of us have either- or both- of those things, but the vast majority of us do. Naturally we humans are going to find one another physically attractive. Any philosophy which demands that we humans cease to find one another attractive will simply fail. Given these things, we humans need to learn to check one another out without causing distress to those we observe. This seems like a good beginning point to figuring out how to do that.
There are certain things that I really just don’t understand. They are so far outside of my life experience that I simply have no frame of reference around which empathy can be draped. Something I have learned is that empathy is an unnecessary emotion. I do not need to feel what another person is feeling. I do not need to understand what they’re going through. All I need to do is treat them and their circumstances with respect and dignity. Empathy is a tool for this end, but a failure of empathy does not absolve me of my responsibilities. I say all this because I do not understand being trans-gendered. But I am very glad to see that my government will no longer be discriminating against trans-gendered people. This is one of the many small things the Obama administration has done correctly.
A small slice of social history of regarding a trans gendered “person”. “Person” is put in quotes there because, well. Click the link and it should be obvious.
Children of 2083 are already mocking us for taking so long to legalize being gay gay marriage. Also: they need to get off my lawn.
Let’s toss out all the rules and reinvent chess. Because we’re eight, and the world hasn’t taught we shouldn’t.
Liberals and conservatives have a longstanding dispute about the efficacy of government involvement in society. We liberals believe that without government, society could not function. Conservatives- American ones at any rate- believe that “I’m from the government and I’m here to help” is a “terrifying” phrase. Interestingly, the former Bush speech writer who coined the phrase “axis of evil” seems to be hitting back at conservative anti-government rhetoric.
One of the weirder aspects of the American federal system is that the nation government is much more rigorously watched than local governments. CNN, MSNBC, FOX news, the BBC, Al Jazeera, and a myriad of other networks, magazines, and newspapers cover the goings-on of Washington DC. By contrast, there might be a pair of non-local newspapers which cover the California state capital, and approximately the same number of Tv stations. As a result of this, it is much easier for local bullies to create massive harm than is for national bullies to do likewise. a similar dynamic has played out throughout human history.
The Galactic Civil war happened a long time ago, in a Galaxy far, far away. It saw the destruction of at least one planet. Was that actually an efficient use of Imperial resources? The short answer is that it depends on the aims of the empire. My take? The destruction of Alderaan was the Imperial version 9/11: a massive show of strength which scared the opposition so badly that they utterly destroyed the people responsible. Strategic blunder of the highest order.
Get vaccinated or die. Not only will you die, you’ll probably kill other people as well.
Being privileged, it’s easy to give racist people the benefit of the doubt. Concerns over a president’s birth certificate certainly can look legitimate. Being privileged, it is easy to take the self-justification of other privileged people at face value. In the end, doing so only leads to the same old tired dance.
President Obama spoke at the White House correspondents dinner. The man made cruel mockery of his opponents, causing the entire press to laugh with him and at them. Sometimes we need to be reminded of the greatness of the man “who brought us Universal Healthcare”
One of the things I’ve spoken about- at great length- is that our culture is forever attacking things that appeal to women. Twilight may be a vacuous set of books, but they’re not worse than New York Times best selling author David Webber’s trashy novels. The royal wedding was a huge and noisy pageant. It was very fashionable to mock it- because it was coded for women.
There is, however, a very good reason to mock the royal wedding. As an American, we should be siding with Cromwell. Just so we’re clear: any article which-as does this one- implies strongly that Reagan is a traitor to America will get a link from me.
The economics of being a fashion model. Making a living as a model is roughly as humanity-reaffirming as eating while being a model. Shockingly Obviously, the majority of this personhood destruction is being done to women.
If you click just one link:
I’ve tweeted and talked quite a bit about my mental health issues. I am… not entirely well. The subhead for this week’s post refers to the fact that I am- on the advice of my shrink- on medication as I type these words. It is, in fact, much easier to focus with this medication. What is difficult for me (sometimes impossible (sometimes painfully so)) is to actually sit down and try to type. Unfortunately, the chemical rebalancing of my brain isn’t really meant to deal with this. This statement by Ira Glass is part of the reason why I have a hard time doing things I want to do. And perhaps part of the solution. In a week, or a month, or a year, please remind me of this.
This week’s theme has been empathy, sympathy, and privilege. In the comments below, let me know what you’ve been most privileged to enjoy over the past year. Instant messaging me or tweeting me isn’t nearly as good as leaving a comment in the comment box.
