The approach of the 4th of July seems like an ideal time to delve into an obscure part of American history. The founding fathers were rabid video game players. Fittingly, they didn’t generally have the same tastes.
Benjamin Franklin: Ben had lived most of his life with nothing but casual contempt for video games. Instead, in the age of dueling, he preferred the most dangerous game, sleeping with married women. One day, a charming lady on Facebook asked for help raising a barn in farmville. From there, he became branched out to the Bioware oeuvre, exploring every romance option available. Franklin died impoverished, the first victim of the microtransaction payment model. Gamer Tag: EarlyRiser69
George Washington: First in War, First in Peace, first in line for the new Total War games. An indifferent-at-best player, he was mainly hobbled by an ability to manage troop morale. Gamer Tag: HisExcellency
John Adams: Noted forum troll John Adams was under the mistaken impression that he enjoyed cooperative games. He was actually VAC banned from Left 4 Dead after screaming “All the perplexities, confusion and distress on this team arise, not from defects in us, but from [player's name]‘s INABILITY TO CR0WN THE f***ing WITCH!” Adams went on to have a successful League of Legends career. Gamer tag: FirePaladin1030
Thomas Jefferson: When asked, this laconic founder said only “The Sims. Words with Friends.” Gamer Tag: LoverNotPatriot
John Jay: Most historians will claim that Europa Universalis was his game of choice while Jay unwound from a long day of founding the Federalist party. In fact, this is exactly backwards. Modern evidence indicates that Federalist number 2 was intended as an After Action Report of a particularly heinous outing. Gamer tag: PUBLIUSdipLOmat
James Madison: The British Admiral Cockburn was so incensed at the constant tea-bagging done by James Madison after every Halo kill that he burned the White House specifically to destroy Madison’s XBOX. Dolly handed the console over in exchange for allowing her to save other valuables. Gamer tag: PUBLIUSrighter
Alexander Hamilton: Apologists for this founder claim that he simply held himself to a higher standard of sportsmanship than the average online FPS gamer. Others claim that he was simply a lousy shot. Either way, Hamilton was always a welcome sight on an opponent’s roster, or good for free kills in a free for all. Eventually, he moved over to StarCraft 2, where he climbed to the 1V1 Diamond League (Protoss). The famous duel with Burr was sparked when Burr claimed that he had “totally typed GG, my connection must have dropped before you saw it”, and Hamilton “called bullshit”. Gamer tag: PUBLIUSking
I’d never seen an armadillo before. they’re sort of adorable, aren’t they?
It’s Sunday Morning. Sundays- I assume- are for proposing to your significant other because you live in New York, and it’s legal now. Sundays are for heading to work and saying goodbye to someone who helped train you. Sundays are for laying around in bed and enjoying the time to yourself.
This week Facebook decided to eliminate access to it’s information except from within it’s platform. This week New York State became the Second US state to recognize that marriage is about love between consenting adults. Also this week LulzSec claims to have disbanded itself. Also also: the US took one more step towards ultimate executive power by refusing to condone or condemn President Obama’s use of force in the Libyan war.
Let’s start this week on a triumphant note: Neil Patrick Harris is now engaged to be married. In order for this to happen, the State of New York had to recognize the same thing that many churches had come to understand: marriage is an important human institution, and it should not involve the subjugation of one half of a partnership by another half. Once New York State came to that realization, it was a small leap to recognize that love, ought to be the sole determining factor governing which two people may shed part of their individual identities in order to form a new- legal and moral- identity as a partnership.
Women- from my admittedly privileged vantage point- seem to have full legal equality with men. Cultural equality is shockingly absent, and the enforcement mechanisms for when that cultural inequality smacks into legal equality is either thin, or non-existent. Slut walk exists to force the culture to change. It’s a simple and vaguely funny thing to suggest that the key to stopping rape is to “teach men not to rape”- but we live in a culture that still very much assumes that a woman’s body is a man’s to do with as he pleases. Men have to be trained- one at a time- that this is not the case.
Speaking of a failure to enforce legal equality when it runs into cultural inequality: the US Supreme Court held that it isn’t the government’s job to keep individual WalMart store managers from hiring only men. Because the company is not issuing a formal, written instruction to discriminate against women, they are absolved of responsibility towards their employees of protecting them from discrimination.
I love Amazon. They offer me a tremendous set of services, at prices that wildly undercut just about everyone else on the market. One point that has always struck me as a bit off, however, is that we Amazon shoppers can get away with not paying sales tax. Given the already-regressive nature of the sales tax, and generally-affluent nature of Amazon’s shoppers, this places an even greater burden on those least able to afford it. The fact that Amazon is working to make it even easier for it’s customers to be tax dodgers is, frankly, a bit sickening.
There was a recent US Supreme Court decision in which- in order to be plausible- the Supreme Court has to believe that the average American job-seeker can dictate the terms of their employment on at least an equal footing with their employer. While this claim is laughable to the vast majority of us, it is probably true for Supreme Court Justices, and everyone they know. That sort of insularity probably helps explain decisions like this. Class warfare? Oh yes indeed.
I once worked for a company that had performed a study trying to figure out how incredibly successful companies managed to become so successful. The counter intuitive finding suggested by their data is that companies which allow people to follow their passions tend to do a whole lot better than companies in which “make money” is the guiding principle.
Every Sunday, it seems, I link to something Fred Clark has written. The man is a wonderful writer, an interesting thinker, and the opposite of a misanthrope. Perhaps- though probably not- because he tried to negotiate his way out of a binding arbitration clause, his newspaper no longer needs his services. He has been laid off. If there is any hope for the future of American letters, this man will be hired by someone, soon.
Medicare delivers better healthcare than most insured-Americans are able to buy. Medicare costs less than what most Americans can buy insurance for. Getting more Americans onto Medicare would leave Americans healthier and wealthier. Naturally some class warriors are rather upset that more Americans are eligible for the program than ever before.
I know you’ll all tank me if I avoid the obvious pun. Fortunately, I’m armored against abuse.
Republicans have spent years talking about “voter fraud”- people casting illegal votes. This is a problem that simply doesn’t happen. The “solution” to this non-existent problem has been to reinstate the poll tax in a form likely to avoid sanction- and also likely to keep Democrats from being able to vote. Since this is too subtle, Republicans are engaging in misinformation campaigns aimed at suppressing African American votes.
I find disaster hilarious. I was once broken up with hours before I went in for oral surgery. I started laughing uproariously. That’s me, though. I’m sure it say something interesting about my psychology. Knowing who the audience is, and who the victim of the joke is says a lot about a person, or an organization.
The US immigration system is a bad joke. The border is secure enough to force people to sneak over, and porous enough that anyone who wants to sneak over, can. The tired/poor/hungry people of the Earth who yearn to breath free are still coming- but they’re doing it without legal protection or sanction. When people show at America’s border, full of ambition, intelligence, and drive, we shackle them with petty bureaucracy at best, and threaten them with slavery at worst. If America is to have it’s best possible future, we nee to reopen our borders.
The key to Netflix success is that it does exactly what consumers want it to do. Netflix instant watch has so much good content that if I’m looking for a show which isn’t available, I can find something else just as good. Any network executive who is actually confused about this is admitting that they are incompetent, and ought to be fired. No single network can break out of this without taking significant damage. No network can really trust it’s competitors to work with them in a joint venture. Consumers can’t be bothered to remember which network Big Bang Theory is on. So Netflix- or something like it- is going to be around for a while.
Speaking of models which will be around for a while: Steam is a marvel of the invisible hand in action. Brick and mortar video games retailers stopped dealing with PC games, and left a tremendous unmet demand. VALVe created their Steam client and it was quite bad. Since even “quite bad” was better than nothing, gamers began using it long enough for it to get very, very good. Now that they’ve proven the market exists, other distributors are trying to get into the space. There is probably room for a second major player. Probably not room for a third.
World’s most important bond trader: fixing the deficit means fixing the unemployment situation. Putting it differently: stimulating business investment isn’t going to fix the problem of people not being able to buy things. Alternately: if the 13 million currently-unemployed Americans found themselves with jobs, they’d start paying the sorts of taxes that would fix the government’s deficit problem.
President Obama gets a lot of flack from the progressive quarter. Gay rights activists claim that he didn’t move on ending DADT, but that’s now a relic of history. He hasn’t come out with strongly-worded statements in favor of marriage, yet his administration has declined to enforce DOMA. Card check died, yet he has achieved it’s aims in a different method, and fully staffed the Labor board with people friendly to working folks.
This week’s theme: Immigration and other human rights. In the comments section, leave a note about which right you’d like to see stripped from the regressive of your choice.
“What are you?” It’s a weird question, and it always refers to ethnicity. I’ve never had a good answer for it; I haven’t constructed my identity in a way that gives a meaningful response to that inquiry. I also have the privilege of not having had an identity foisted upon me by the society in which I live.
I work in a place where nearly everyone is either a first generation immigrant to America, or in the first generation to be born in America. Figuring out which cultural baggage people have brought with them seems rather important in that sort of situation- stereotypes are lazy and often cruel. But they can offer a useful shorthand.
So how do I answer that question? “What are you?” “What is your blood?” My last name gives a very obvious answer. But expecting me to behave like this because two of my grandparents were born in Sicily seems bizarre to me. Nor will it yield an accurate impression of me. (This might be closer, but it still fails.)
The other part of my ancestry– my grandparents would howl to hear themselves described as ancestors- is complicated. Mennonites who fled from Prussia to Russia to Canada before my mother’s mother snuck over the US border. So does that make me German? Russian? Prussia is now in Poland, am I Polish? That woman had 3 children (including my mother) with a man who is just native American enough to live on a reservation. Does that make me Native American?
I could zoom out and say that I’m simply “White”. That’s easy, and solves a sort of problem, but raises a whole host of other questions. By saying that I’m “white”, I put Sicilian, Prussian, and Slav into the same blender as Anglo, Celt, Saxon and Frank. If it were just a matter of once more pissing on Hitler’s grave, I’d be for it. It isn’t just that, though. The creation of a “White” race by blending together the various ethnicities of Europe was a part of a deeper American project aimed at creating explicit Others who could be exploited without qualm. By saying I’m “White”, I’m claiming not to be “Asian” (Chinese and Japanese are the same race. Only in America!), claiming not to be “Native” (Ohlone and Algonquin are the same people!), and most especially claiming not to be “Black” (No one can tell the Hutu from the Tutsi, right?).
Saying that I’m a “White” guy may be a good enough answer. It’s also a terrible one. When asked about my ethnicity, I usually claim to be an American. When I answer that my “my family is from Europe”, the important part of that sentence isn’t the noun, but the verb. My ancestors are from Europe. Your ancestors are from Central (or south) America/the Pacific Islands/Asia. And now you and I are here. That makes us coequal partners in the American project.
I also claim to be an ethnic Californian. That is a glib answer, but a true one. I value fair play. I value co-equality among people. I view identity as constructable. I eat curry on my noodles, and prefer my vegetables fresh. Those are Californian ideals. Children who grow in this soil tend to have them.
Mostly, though, I feel like a giant nerd. That’s a whole other topic.
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich knows what’s up.
It’s Sunday Morning. Sundays are for spending time with your fathers, thanking them for helping to bring you up. Or just wishing you could be with family- work demanding that you help others celebrate. Alternately, Sunday could be for having a very moving Birthday- with all puns intended. Alternately again: Sunday morning could be for getting some superfluous sleep. And of course, Sunday mornings could be for researching HTML and JQuery scripts
This Syria continued it’s Civil War. President Obama crossed the legally mandated threshold to get congressional approval for his war in Libya. Legendary Saxophonist Clarence Clemons died. And lulzsec declared war on whoever strikes its fancy. In better news: A US bankruptcy court found that federal laws against same sex marriage are unconstitutional.
The big gaming convention E3 was held a week or so back, and there were a whole lot of interesting games about to be released. Oddly, there are very few coming from Japan. During their economic “lost decade”, culture was among the only things that nation exported. It could simply be a bad year for Sony (true), Square (true), and a slow one for Nintendo (semi-plausible). I have no idea what the Japanese indie-gaming scene is like, so that might well be vibrant and invisible. Alternately, it could be the Japanese gaming industry has grown stale and ossified.
E3 also saw a lot of ink spilled about the “core” gamer, and what “he” would be playing in the next year or so. Which is frustrating: the average gamer is a woman in her 30s. I hope the supreme court considers this information when they rule on whether games have 1st amendment protection.
Funranium always brings the awesome. Oh, and this might be a good time to mention: don’t let your kid sister drop your Stein of Science on the floor– they shatter.
A question I like to pose to people who are against single payer health insurance: would you be willing to pay more in taxes if it meant a lower health insurance bill? More money in your pocket at the end of the day, higher quality of care, but bigger government. Me? I don’t care who gets the money as long as it’s well-spent. Hard core libertarians do seem to have that concern, though.
The California Constitution is a mess. I’ve sworn an oath to that hairy old beast, but I do think it’s time to take it behind the barn and shoot it. It’s no shame at all in the recognition that the problems faced by a government have overwhelmed the capacity of it’s institutions to deal with. I hope that when the time comes for California to fix it’s government, we follow Iceland’s methodology.
One of the things rich societies can afford is the luxury of awesome uselessness. Impoverished societies don’t have enough money to allow someone to, say change clothes 40 times in a single day. America is, and has long been, a rich country. We can afford for a certain number of people to simply be, and have no greater purpose than their own existence.
I can’t be the only person to look at this map and think that it represents a significantly conservative part of the country. The cause and effect might be that they’re implementing conservative policies, and therefore are dying sooner. Or it could be that as they see a quality of life deteriorating, they attempt to recapture the previous (better) life by turning my conservative. Or maybe I’m engaging in the post hoc fallacy.
Comcast executives seem to have noticed something obvious: poor people would like cable internet and television, but cannot afford it. The more income stratified America gets- the further behind everyone who isn’t in the top 1% falls- the less money Comcast can possibly make. The less money Comcast makes, the fewer people it can employ. Comcast not being able to employ people is the opposite of the way to fix our unemployment situation. If America started paying poor people to do useful things (fixing schools! fixing bridges! fixing roads!), we’d get a lot of money into the hands of people who want to buy things they cannot currently afford. This would help fix the economy. Just ask Comcast.
Earlier this week, I saw the most recent Xmen movie. It was incredibly good. It’s about a set of aristocrats trying to spark a revolution- and having wildly different ideas about who ought to hold power at the end of the conflict. The truely burning question we audience members are left with: how do magnets work?
If a company wants to sell beer in the state of Wisconsin, and they’re huge, they are mandated by law to go through a wholesale distributor. I’m not sure why this is the case, but the State of Wisconsin seems think it’s a good idea. Governor Walker seems to think it’s a good idea to expand this regulation to smaller brewers. It seems to me that if there’s a good reason require MillerCoors to use a wholesale distributor, then there is probably a good reason to force the craft beers to do the same. If there isn’t a good reason, then the law ought to be abolished. The large companies didn’t lobby to have the law abolished, though. This tells me that they gain more from being protected from competition than they would lose by having to pay for the wholesaler. And once again, the public interest is perverted for private gain.
Troy Goodfellow talks about Greece. Oddly, Civilization doesn’t include “perpetually dysfunctional fiscal situation” as a faction trait.
My mother’s mother snuck the Canadian boarder and lived the rest of her life in America. I would like to think that her children (and, ahem, grandchildren) have been a net positive to America. I would like to think that the children and grandchildren of current undocumented immigrants would be, on average, at least as beneficial to America as my mother’s mother. A group of people made a game about the absurdity of our immigration system. Even if you’re not a fan of games, the story of this particular one is worthwhile. The interviewer works for the ACLU.
Cracked has an interesting take on E3: 6 ominous signs for the future of gaming. The writer fails to talk about any games I care about, or franchises I have played. He doesn’t talk about games that the average gamer cares about. Given that (the average gamer’s tastes, not mine personally), there is a huge market opportunity for a company to come along and seize. Given the number of indie studios, it seems likely that someone will come along and find a formula that will appeal to this under-served market. Capitalism truly is an efficient little beastie.
It’s Sunday Morning. Sundays are for recovering from surgery. Or Maybe Sundays are for attending a Rodeo- yes, we have them in California. Or Sundays might be for playing Torchlight. Maybe, though, just maybe, Sundays are for lounging around doing nothing in particular.
This week a scandal rocked Washington DC when it was discovered that a congressperson enjoyed talking dirty to people he barely knows. Also this week: a huge fire raged across the American portions of the Sonoran Desert, spreading as far as New Mexico. Also also: The internet is so big that it’s about to run out of room. To combat this IPv6 was tested on a wide scale.
Perhaps you heard about the cheerleader who was raped by an athlete. To add further injury, Her asshole coach refused to allow her to not cheer for her rapist. There was a lawsuit. She lost. Now she needs help to defray her legal costs. This is a terrible situation, perhaps you can help her to make it slightly less horrible?
Justice is supposed to be blind. That’s how you know she’s just. Justice doesn’t care how rich a person is, or who the victim is. So when there is a case where a man buys himself out of prison because he threw some money at a widow, it should be cause for outrage. For added disgust, factor in that the murderer didn’t even earn the money he used to pay off the grieving- it’s Mommy and Daddy’s money. Justice is not merely concerned for the immediate families of the victims, it is also concerned with precedent and society at large. By making murder a matter of a private financial transaction between two people, this judge has sent a terrifying message: the rich are better than you and me.
The US Federal income tax is “progressive”- the more an individual earns, the higher percentage they pay (before deductions). What this means in practice is that if someone is earning not very much at all, the government isn’t actually going to collect income taxes from that person. Payroll taxes, yes. But not income taxes. In 2010, roughly half of all Americans were so poor that they did not owe any Federal income tax. That says terrifying things about the state of the US economy. It also suggests that a tax cut is not the answer to our current economic mess. Side note: The Federal Government thinks that if an individual is making more than $11,000 a year, that person is not impoverished. That’s so far outside of reality as to be a useless number.
The brain is a funny thing. Certain chemical pathways lead inevitably to certain endpoints, but when the starting questions are even slightly nudged those pathways will lead to wildly different conclusions. “Management decisions”, for instance, will tend to give no thought as to the human dimension of the problem. I wonder if this is how blowing up mountains and poisoning rivers can come to seem like a good idea: decision makers are engaging the wrong parts of their brain.
One of the debates that rages across social justice theorists is whether private property is a “natural right”- something that is intrinsic to the nature of human freedom, or an “instrumental right”- something that is allowable only so long as it serves a social purpose. This is one of the central debates that has raged across American history, with both sides of this debate believing that the other would enslave humanity. Thomas Jefferson is considered the founder of the Democratic Party in large part because he held the instrumentalist view.
The debate about intrinsic property right vs instrumental property right tends not to matter a whole lot in day to day life. Except that it does in a thousand invisible ways. For instance: minimum wage. One side argues that forcing someone to give up their right to contract for whatever wage they can get an employee to accept is an abrogation of a fundamental human right to property. The other side has evidence that a reasonable minimum wage makes all of society work better, and is therefore necessary.
Sometimes, though, sometimes the conversation about private property is more about simple greed.
The problem with the American healthcare system used to be that it was too damned expensive for anyone without insurance. Starting in 2014, all Americans will be have health insurance. Unfortunately, that does nothing to solve the biggest problem with the American healthcare system: It’s too damned expensive for anyone to afford- and growing more expensive all the time. There is a solution to this problem, and one that has been proven to work right here in America.
Governor Rick “good hair” Perry of Texas looks around at America, and sees a nation that is hungry and hurt. Were Governor Perry a Christian, he would turn to his bible and learn that his primary responsibly to his co-humans is to feed the poor and take care of the suffering. Governor Perry, it seems, follows some religion other than Christianity. So instead of being able to turn to the Christian Bible’s “New Testament” to learn about his basic duty towards his co-humans, he is instead asking America to pray and fast. In this way his God might solve our problems for us.
Are you watching the Game of Thrones? You should be.
This is a great article about why it’s important to wash your hands after peeing. See if you can spot the oopsy-daisy sexism! (Warning! This article refrains from euphemisms)
Whenever I read about Kant’s “Cosmopolitanism”, I was confused. What, I wondered, did the philosopher have to do with a lady’s magazine? Fortunately, I’m more embarrassed by ignorance than about revealing ignorance. Oddly enough, the magazine seems well named. Also? Well fact checked!
A few months before I graduated high school, a game came out that would be a touchstone for a generation of gamers: Duke Nukem 3D. Gleefully misogynistic, and loaded with silly action, amazing set pieces, and state-of-the-art technology, the designers had one thought: to do better the next time around. The term “vaporware” was coined and and went out of parlance while the gaming world waited half a generation for 3D realms to release a follow up. Eventually the company was crushed under a mountain of expectations and declared bankruptcy. The publisher handed the game off to another developer, and this week gaming’s longest-running joke came to an end. Turns out to have been a funnier in concept than in execution.
In 2005, Time magazine did a huge story about the soon-to-be-released Xbox 360. They didn’t merely want it to be the world’s best-selling game console, but also something actively embraced by non-gamers as a media center in the living room. Looking at the platform today, I think it’s easy to see that they created a compelling feature set for non-gamers, but have utterly failed to market it that way.
Having an cultural affinity is as surely as large a part of the human condition as breathing. The food one eats, the clothes one wears, the words one chooses to use; these are all shaped and informed by our cultural peers. It can be a bit upsetting when an exemplary member of a tribe one feels part of says that membership of that tribe is not the whole of their identity. I do think that if an artist is going to have important things to say about the human condition, they absolutely must look outside one narrow part of it. At the same time, it doesn’t seem like an awards ceremony is the best time to tell a group that you’re beyond them.
Ta-Neheisi Coats is part of my tribe- tribe nerd. He’s over in the New York Times nerding up the place by using the X-men movie as a lens through which to examine the limitations of history unremembered.
My sister and I were discussing our ancestry a few days back. I’m not sure she really understands that my self-identity involves being the grandchild of a Stalin-fleeing illegal immigrant. Hers involves being the child of a poverty-fleeing group of Sicilian fishermen. The fact that we have have wildly different understandings of identical (recent!) ancestors perhaps explains why I’ve always understood that I’m part of the multicultural world. I hadn’t realized that I was fairly unique among white people for feeling this way. So: white people! We’re invited. It’s not kosher to utterly dominate the American cultural conversation, but we do get to share our voices and our stories to the same extent everyone else does.
In Italy, sexism is endemic. From everything I’ve heard, I’m not sure that Italian men really understand what misogyny is, as it would mean having a concept of women as independent actors. It may be that I’m just a San Franciscan, but the way Italian men are so utterly dependent on their women that seems rather outside my concept of masculinity. The virgin/whore dichotomy seems like something for children to outgrow.
Sitting at the metaphoric intersection between government, private enterprise, and identity politics is the Pride Flag at the literal intersection of Market and Castro. For as long as there are huge swaths of society who actively encourage violence against the LGBT community, that flag is a beacon of freedom and hope. It is, of course, vital that it continue flying. Yet: who has the legitimate right to control that flag? The City ought not privilege one group over all others, and cannot afford to fly flags for each of the various subgroupings who call San Francisco home. The merchant’s council? They seem a likely group to shepherd the interests of the community, yet lack accountability.
I had a conversation earlier tonight which revolved around defining “natural rights” when “because god said so” is considered illegitimate. My friend (an atheist) is of the opinion that there really isn’t anything left. Fred Clark argues that the God of Abraham actually has a very good answer.
This week I’ve been reading a bunch of pop Sci-Fi, fun bubble-gummy stuff that will rot my brain if consumed in too large a dose. Also: this week’s theme has been intersections of adroit gaucheness. So in the comments section tell me why I should follow you on twitter.
This is basically what I see whenever I watch the 300.
It’s Sunday morning. Sundays are for noticing typos in a comment you’ve just published. Sundays are for sleeping in, playing games, or heading off to work. Sundays are for enjoying the eponymous sun, nursing a bad back so you can nurse a child, or gearing up for the world’s largest video game expo. Sundays might just be for pancakes.
This week, the President of Yemen went to Saudi Arabia for “medical reasons”- apparently someone might put a bullet in his heart if he stays in Yemen. Also this week: Sony got hacked. Again. Also also: Cell phones were declared to be at least as cancerous as pickles.
Last Sunday America celebrated Memorial Day. I’d been previously told that Memorial Day was scheduled when it was so that Americans would have no easy way to celebrate May day- the international celebration of Labor. Delightfully, I find that I’m wrong. The story of the first Memorial Day is awesome, heartwarming, and sort of makes a body happy that the Union, rather than the Confederacy, won.
I have no love lost for cliches. They’re a tool used by lazy writers to sweep under the rug their own lack of skills. In the long run, no one is served by the use of such terrible devices. Granted, there are two sides to the cliche issue, and sometimes good writing can be more honored in the breech than the observance. Overthinking it is second to none when deconstruction popular culture.
When I first studied economics, we would make jokes about the elasticity curve of heroin being a vertical line. That joke is hilarious if you’re a boring person. Petroleum prices aren’t quite as inelastic as heroin- there is a point where America simply will not pay more. Saudi Arabia, quite naturally, wants us to never find that point.
Really rich people travel, and commit sex crimes against some of the poorest people in the first world. The fact that these crimes- from simple indecent exposure all the way up to rape- are incredibly common says some very bad things about how the very rich view the rest of us. Doing it to the very poor? Say it loud: class warfare.
I have always been against giving my labor away for free. The idea that it might be expected of me is, frankly, unamerican. Perhaps more to the point: I have never been in a position of so much affluence that I would be able to give my labor away and still eat. Oddly, giving away one’s labor for free (in the form of an internship) is an important stepping stone in many careers. Faster than you can say “class warfare”, the children of the rich are given a useful set of connections and experiences that the children of the non-rich cannot afford to match. Here are some ways to make the system work better.
The American political system is terrible. It has become inadequate to the problems faced by America as a whole, and is leading to a real decline in American quality of life. A radical change in the systems by which we vote is the only way we can solve our problems. I’m not sure that multi member districts are the best way to go, but they would certainly be a step up from what we currently have.
My ancestors have always been fishermen. Men, that is, and not fisherwomen. I’m fairly sure that my last name is Sicilian for “fisher”. My grandfather got out of the fishing business, and worked for a navel yard which build ships. From the Puget sound where my grandfather piloted ships on their maiden voyages, to Bangladesh where they will be stripped down, is a lifetime’s worth of journeying. It’s an amazing photo essay.
Shakespeare notwithstanding, Is there anything more fundamental to identity than a name? The whole history of a noun can be told by looking at what labels are attached to that noun. Even, perhaps especially, when that noun is a proper one. It does seem that African American naming conventions are more fluid than among other American ethnic groups, yet I’ve not seen any good data on the point. If this is true, I would love to see a good paper written about it- perhaps a book.
I am an unobservant fellow. Unless I’m specifically looking for something, I simply will not notice some things. This would make me a very bad artist or eye witness. That’s a long winded way of saying that I’m not sure why painting a white skin black makes for a bad video game avatar. Nevertheless, I’m told that it does. The fact that major games companies are hiring artists who are apparently as unobservant as I am is frightening.
When the Westboro Baptist Church goes head to head with the KKK, root for meteor strike.
The Republican party was founded as the party that fought for economic growth, and against slavery. Just before and after the Civil war, the Democratic party was the party of the white working man. LBJ made the Democratic Party into the party of the working man (Clinton did his best to make it the party of the working person). Between FDR and LBJ, the Democratic party was held in tension between (Southern) white supremacists and (Northern) workers. This was the glorious era of “bipartisanship”, when congress was able to look past party lines to screw black people and working people equally. Eventually Nixon seized the opportunity to make the Republicans the party of the (Southern) White man and big business, and we started to have partisanship again. There are many possible pairings to bring political power, but until America is a democratic nation, we’re going to have class warfare.
People who work hard and play by the rules can accomplish anything in America. A guy goes to school on a scholarship, excels in his chosen profession, makes millions, and starts to give it away. He has been named “a model citizen”, which shocked me- I thought that was a figure of speech. None of that matters. The cop was able to look right past the content of this man’s character and see the color of his skin. We’re truly living the dream.
Let me tell you about Py Korry. He taught me how to learn. Py Korry? That man taught me how to disagree with someone while admitting that there was room for me to be wrong. Py Korry? Before I took his introduction to Political Theory I was a “moderate” with some right-leaning tendencies. Turns out that I didn’t really share that worldview, I merely admired the attitude. Py Korry will be joining Funrainum on the faculty at Las Positas College. I am tempted to get another degree.
It was discovered that we could create partial to full immunity to diseases by using vaccinations. Childhood mortality plummeted. Disease rates plummeted. Human happiness and wellbeing jumped to all time highs. We got complacent. Some people got lied to. Many people stopped vaccinating. People are dying of diseases once thought extinct.
It’s amazing how much work a single word can do. For instance: The American/Canadian boarder is basically a 5000 mile straight line. By calling attention to that single word, I’m pointing out a fascinating lesson about American and Canadian history. With maps.
The tagline of this blog is “Class warfare and video games”. Obviously, I couldn’t pass that story up. The games industry is almost entirely devoid of unions, and also rife with tales of worker abuse and maltreatment. Probably just some post hoc ergo propter hoc thinking, I’m sure.
America is able to borrow money incredibly inexpensively, and also has an enormous unemployment crisis. Fred Clark would like to put these things together, and start paying Americans do so stuff. Sunday mail delivery? Sure! How about more baseball? Done. Not mentioned: Let’s build a library for every thousand Americans. I’m not sure how much it would cost to build 3100 new libraries, stock them full of books, computers, CDs, DVDs, and ebook readers, but I bet it would educate the hell out of people.
If you read just one link:
As mediocre writer as I am, I love words. I love great writing, grand writing, writing that is like an airplane driving down a tarmac, seconds from taking flight into song. When I’m cuddled up with a girl, reading a book, I will often become so consumed by a passage that I will pause and just start reading out loud. A great game is much like great writing in a simple respect: they both require a sense of timing and rhythm. Perhaps that is more a commentary on the human condition than it is on any specific medium.
This week’s theme? Writing, writers, and doing right. In the comments, please leave an idea for something that would be useful, weird, and would employ lots of Americans.
