Indignant Desert Birds

Sunday Morning Reading Material: Second Sunday in June 2011: The legend of Laura Secord Edition

Posted on June 12th, 2011 by Punning Pundit

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.

Non Sequitur? How to recover your Gmail account if it gets hacked.

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.

Important tips for fiction writers. My failure to be able to live up to any of these tips is why I write essays and not novels.

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.

Somethings are just a universal part of the human experience. I admit to being surprised at the existence of ice cream trucks in 1940.

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.

We live in a world where, if you neglect your facebook pricacy settings, 1500 people might invite themselves to your birthday party. That’s both awesome and terrifying.

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.

Aperture Science, like all large companies with legal departments, does what they must, because they can.

If you read just one link:

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.