[[Warning: The only important part of a Transformers movie is that giant robots will be fighting one another. You know that going in. Spoilers are thus impossible. To the extent that a spoiler might be possible for this film, I will spoil it. If that keeps you from seeing this movie, say "thank you".]]

This movie is bad. All it really needs to do is give a half-decent excuse for robots to beat one another up, and it fails. It does, however, do one extraordinarily thing right: It calls Michael Bay- the movie’s director/producer!- a giant douchebag. I’m not sure he noticed.

Hollywood formulates dictates that there is a girl (Carly Spencer) in this sort of movie. She isn’t there to be an independent actor, but rather to be a Princess Peach– a motivating force for someone else to act on behalf of. Some of the minor characters in the movie actually seem to balk at putting themselves in danger so that the hero (Sam Witwicky) can rescue his girl, but they go along with the plan once they figure out that the world is also at stake.

I’m not kidding about that.

In a triumph for the say-don’t-show school of storytelling, Carly’s is presented as a intelligent, capable individual. We see her working for the White House, running logistics for a global corporation, and are told that she’s worked for the British Embassy in Washington DC. She is in every way more fit to be the story’s lead than the actual dude performing that role.

Perhaps Sam is meant to be an audience stand in. A sort of everyperson hero that we can empathize with. That would help explain his constant inability to quite nail the suave behavior that he seems to be aiming for. After all: who among us hasn’t done some really dumb things that we’d rather everyone forget about? This doesn’t seem quite right, however. Sam’s buffoonery is rewarded. It is as if Director Michael Bay doesn’t know the difference between actually awesome behavior and a parody of such. Could it be that he has mistaken Duke Nukem for something other than a cautionary tale?

In a classic display of the male gaze, through the first half of the movie, the camera reduces Carly to a sex object. When she’s in a shot, her secondary sex characteristics are on full display.

Michael Bay has had this problem with women before. Indeed, in the words of one Bay defender “Mike films women in a way that appeals to a 16-year-old sexuality.” Presumably he means “16-year-old [boy]“.

So for the first half or so of the movie, the camera is perving on the female lead. And at one point one of the characters- Bruce Brazos- actually does a double take at her. And everyone in the room reacts badly. Like he’d ruined their fun game by calling attention to it. From that moment on, the camera treats Carly as a human being. I think we can thank the editorial staff for that beautiful and wicked commentary on Transformers and sexism.

Now, if only the writers had come up with something interesting for her to say.

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.

In my last post I expressed some frustration with the protests. I wish to assure my fellow liberals that not only do I empathize, I sympathize. The math is as inescapable as it is disturbing. We absolutely need to change that math, because “not as bad as the Republicans” isn’t a bar anyone should feel comfortable making their voting line. It will, yes, require a (hopefully peaceful) revolution to fix.

Perhaps Wisconsin’s days of peaceful rage will be the first strike in a wider movement to reclaim and fix our broken institutions. Perhaps not. One way or the other, it’s the Good Fight. I can’t be there in person. But in solidarity with them, I’m leaving a live stream of the fight up on my blog.

GL HF, ladies and gentlemen. GL, HF

Wisconsin Labor Rally – Madison, WI – Saturday, Feb 26 2011 from ubiquity75 on Vimeo.

One of the more important conversations I had in my college career went something like:

Professor: So really, a paper is just an answer to a question
Me: So how do you generate questions
Professor: that’s the hard part.

The trick to writing a good paper is to think of a question no one has ever before answered, and then answer it. And you need to anticipate every possible objection– questions about your methodology, data, etc– and answer those, too. Want to tear a paper apart? The trick to that is not to attack the methodology, but to attack the thing I just glossed over in the “etc”*. Attacking the basic assumptions made by a thought process is the the most fundamental method of determining the strength of that thought process.

So: how big should government be? This isn’t the fundamental question, obviously. The fundamental question is “what is government”. Wikipedia provides a pretty good answer: “governments are the means through which state power is employed”. Employing state power sounds… unpleasant. So that brings up the next question “why would we want that?”

The very short version is this: government exists in order to facilitate positive-sum interactions, in cases where humans tend to default to negative-sum interactions.

There are a whole host of goods and services for which it is cheaper to buy them in bulk, or there are positive or negative externalities associated with their presence or absence**. It is almost always easier for government to set up rules for private organizations to provide those goods and services, but once we have a fabulous coercive mechanism in place, there is a temptation to use that mechanism to provide for some of those goods and services.

Once citizens decide to use the coercive power of the State to do things like pay for children to learn things, or keep unemployed people from starving to death, or keep old people from dying in the gutters, or create and maintain a system for removing excrement from our homes and transporting it elsewhere, or any of a thousand other things, we need to pay people to do these things, and (with some oversight and performance metrics ) get out of their way.

Vague talk about “shrinking government” doesn’t really enter into this equation. The question is “which services are we collectively over-paying for?” It may even be “which programs should we cease being responsible for collectively?” The question, in other words, isn’t about size, it’s about efficiency.

I don’t like paying taxes either. I don’t like paying for anything, but the people who create the goods and services I want would like some recompense for their labor. It doesn’t really matter if I’m paying a private organization or a public one– I’ve still got to pay for services rendered.

*see what I did there?
**Yeah, I’m repeating stuff I said yesterday

The thirteenth amendment reads in full:

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

There’s an odd clause in there, seemingly allowing slavery to exist under certain circumstances. I don’t think it was the intention of the Abe Lincoln– or whoever wrote the actual text of the Amendment (possibly Lyman Trumbull)– intended to create a loophole allowing for slavery to exist. I’m not psychic, so I won’t pretend that I have time traveling mind reading powers, but it seems unlikely. Rather, I think it’s simply impossible to draw a bright line between prison and slavery.

Which is why this article about prison labor is so scary. There is nothing inherently wrong with prison labor, per se. The feeling of utter uselessness is perhaps the most depressing one in the world, and the ability to do something probably keeps at least a few people from going stir crazy.

So that’s one thing. Stacked against that you have “wet-suit-clad inmates repair[ing] leaky public water tanks”. I’m not sure how much it costs to hire someone to to put on a wet suit, re-breather, grab a welding torch and get to work, but I’ll bet it’s more than $29,000 a year.

This creates some awfully perverse incentives for society to create more prisoners than it otherwise might. It might sound like cartoonishly evil to imagine that a judge would accept payment in order to convict children, but such things happen.

If we’re using prison labor as free labor– if we’re selling that labor off to private companies (as is strongly implied by the article), that means that there are two people being deprived of the value of their labor: 1) the inmate and 2) the person who would otherwise be getting paid to do the job in lieu of the slave.

This is what we mean when we say that labor has dignity. The dignity of labor is one of the major differences between a slave society and a free one. It may not be the case that organized labor is the only force capable of standing up against the reimposition of slave labor– not even I will be that hyperbolic– but it is the case a well organized labor movement is capable and incentivized to stand up against the encroaching prison state.

This is what they are fighting for in Wisconsin. Not a particular wage and benefit package, but the right to stand up and say “we are worth more than slaves.” If they can’t do that, then who will?

That party wasn’t pushing for voter intimidation, not exactly. Just an extra bit of grit in gears of an election. Special grit that only effects people who don’t drive. You know– poor people. It was one more obstacle between citizens and the vote. Just one more thing preying on my mind as I saw empty lines.

The other party– my party– looked at those hours-long lines and shouted out “Never Again!” Well. Alright. Democrats never shout. Shouting is for socialists like Bernie Sanders. But we did sort of hint around the edges that we wouldn’t really like to see that sort of thing ever again. So we had some people sit down and draw up plans. My job was to implement those plans. But my lines were empty.

An hour before the polls closed and my lines were empty. That’s when the van showed up. 30 people in SEIU purple spilled out. Running. “Who’s in charge of this staging location” came the shouted question. I grabbed my crutches and hobbled over. I handed them some walk sheets, watch them work out logistics, grab sandwiches and hustle out to find voters to fill my lines.

There are a lot of lessons from that story. Perhaps most importantly: early voting wins elections. But the great moral lesson is this: whenever poor people need a hand, wherever working people are getting a raw deal, whenever you see someone who would like a job but is being denied, whenever money and power are being used as a tool of oppression, you will see a union fighting against that injustice. Because an injury to one is an injury to all.

Today I stand with the Dropkick Murphys (seriously, take a listen to that song!), Bruce Springsteen (He’s a fair boss), and Martin Luther King Jr. (who was murdered while helping organize an union),and the people of newly-freed Egypt in solidarity with the Workers of Wisconsin.

Without unions, the arc of history is bent less steadily towards justice. That’s everything you need to know.

Imagine an American in which unions hadn’t gone into decline.

In that world, workers would have had the leverage to bargain. So instead of flat compensation for 40 years, we’d turn some of that Ever growing executive compensation into higher wages for labor.

In the world where workers have more money year over year, they don’t need to borrow money against their houses in order to afford their lifestyles.

In the world where second mortgages do not become normal, Wall Street lacks the raw material to create the CDO, and the synthetic loan.

In the world where Wall Street cannot do that, the housing crisis doesn’t happen, or if it does happen it’s effects are minimized.

In a world where the effects are minimal or non existent, We’re not facing 10% unemployment that’s causing the US government to borrow even more money.

I could go on. But you should get the point. Unions are the key by which America unlocks prosperity. We let managment break that key, but a new one can be forged. They’re doing it right now in Wisconsin.

Hurrah, hurrah, I have a new job. I’m working at a restaurant. This is not the sort of thing that’s considered a “real” job– management was shocked when they saw someone with my resume applying. Put a pin in that thought for a moment.

During the orientation, I was given a bunch of paperwork to fill out. Many of the forms I was required to sign were certifying that I had “read and understood” things like tipping laws, and the employee handbook, among others. After I had signed these forms, I was given the opportunity to read the documents I’d already sworn I’d read and understood. If I don’t like it, I can join the 10% of Americans looking for work.

Another interesting bit of paperwork I was required to sign was one waiving my right to a civil trial if I had a litigation-requiring dispute with the company. I am, of course, free to not sign these papers. Of course, most every employer requires the waiving of such rights, and individuals nearly always lack power with which to negotiate. So I signed. And generally hope that those clauses are unenforceable.

The boss told myself and my fellow trainees that “the restaurant gives you two holidays ever year. You should be happy– some restaurants are open on Christmas and Thanksgiving” That prompted me to ask “But we get overtime on Federal holidays, right?” The response is worth emphasizing:

“No. That’s only for places that have unions. We don’t have unions around here”

So about Wisconsin.

They’re not striking for wages and benefits. At least, they’re willing to negotiate and make concessions. We’re in a time of major economic difficulty, and we can’t ask rich people to foot part of the bill, so Unions need to do their part. Seems fair, right? Certainly part of the landscape in 21st century America. That’s not what this strike is about.

This strike is about the fact that every job is a “real” job. The strike is about the basic right of workers to form organizations that leverage the only power workers have: their ability to collectively walk off the job.

The thing is, most workers have enough human capital to do a whole lot of jobs competently. Which means the bargaining power of any given worker is pretty small. An organization that lacks a single person can fill that hole. An organization that lacks all workers is in a whole lot of trouble. Thus the only real power that workers have is en mass.

This strike is about the fact that your boss might care about you, but your organization cannot , does not, and is not allowed to.
The only organization which does care, can care, and must care is a union. This strike is about the fact that the governor wants to take away the only power workers have, and workers cannot let that happen.

Remember what I said a earlier about arbitration? That’s when a worker thinks an employer has harmed them in some way that isn’t illegal, and so they sue. Except that instead of going before a disinterested judge, the corporation will hire a judge– and that judge knows that if they wants to get hired again they will find in favor of the corporation. When workers are unionized, unions help pay for the judge.

And about negotiating pay? Who has the stronger bargaining position: 1) an individual and replaceable worker, or 2) an entire workforce? (hint: 2).

And finally, let’s not forget what my new boss said about federal holidays being for people in unions. In Wisconsin, they’re fighting for the basic right to wave a flag and have apple pie at a 4th of July barbecue.

What interests me is this: there are at least 10 million, and perhaps as many as 27 million, people in the world for whom panel 2 is nearly-literally true*. In this entire conversation, we seem to have ignored or forgotten the slaves. No one is speaking of them, or for them. In 2011, slavery is as real as a punch in the gut. This is not a problem confined to the 3rd world.

What shocks me is the fact that I didn’t think about the slavery implications of the comic. Slavery is a fairly major hot-button of mine, both in and out of games. I don’t ever talk about “p0wning” people, and I’ve never been one to turn away from a “free the slaves” quest. Slavery is something I’ve spent a lot of time reading and thinking about in my life. Yet when it came up in this context, I allowed myself to forget about it.

That ends right now. If you’re reading this, and you both have money and give a damn about your fellow human beings, donate some money to an anti-American-slavery organization. Or perhaps to an organization that helps fight against slavery world-wide.

*I say “nearly”, because there is no such thing as a “dickwolf”.

Jamelle Bouie has some thoughts on atheists in Congress. Specifically: why there are none. The whole thing is worth a read, but I’ll just yank a sample section:

For an “unaffiliated” House candidate, the landscape is a little less harsh. Since nonbelievers tend to live in urban areas, it’s conceivable that an openly atheist candidate could find a large enough base to support a primary or general election run against more religious competitors. Even still, given the relatively small number of unaffiliated, this isn’t very likely.

I think this partially ignores– or forgets, or is ignores of– the mechanics of running for office. I don’t think Jamelle is wrong, but I think there’s something he fails to consider.

People don’t simply decide one day that they’d make a great politician. They see a problem, they talk about it, they fume about it, and eventually one of their friends and neighbors tells them to shut up and fix it already. But to get there, they need a network of friends and neighbors. Politicians are invariably the most connected members of their community. The major function of a religious organization? Connecting people. Churches are a major source of community building. Synagogues will hold singles mixers. Churches do charity dinners, and mosques will, um, do music nights*. Even most of the pagans and atheist I know will choose to get married in a Church (usually Universalists Unitarian) because the infrastructure is pre-existing.

It’s not that atheists and agnostics don’t have strong networks of friends, but campaigns- especially local ones- are won and lost by meeting people. If a church attender and a non-church attender square off for city council, the attender will have just a few more people to meet every week, one more avenue of attack, one more tie to the community. That adds up. And who tends to win congressional elections? People who hold local office. A small difference in community support can utterly demolish someone’s chance for higher office.

All of that, before we even mention the self-described anti-atheist bias of the American electorate.

*Yeah, I stretched that alliteration to the breaking point. Sorry.