Election 012

As election time draws nearer in the USA I question whether I should register to vote yet to participate in this one or not.

I don't like or feel good about any of the candidates so if I did I'd be trying to pick the one I thought was the least horrible of them instead of the best. I feel that they are all bad.

CISPA

So CISPA is the new bizarre law that lawmakers want to have passed to allow the government to turn all big brothery to do more warrantless wiretaps on people 'just in case' for not just to counter cyberterrorism but a bunch of other reasons too.

Some people are fighting to limit the "other reasons too" part.
The House passed it with a strong majority. The Senate is going to put it off til some point next month (which means in a week or so). The President had already threatened to veto it but the House members who were for it are gloating that it passed in the House and are making fun of people in the White House for disliking it.

I really hope they don't use it as an excuse to go after everybody who ever did anything questionable or gray on the Internet because that happens to be basically most of the people on the Internet.

It would help if our politicians would set a concrete and limiting definition of terrorism as "political violence in the form of crimes committed against the state" but nobody will, and they like using it as a sort of an umbrella to also categorize a bunch of other crimes, dodgy behaviors, etc. which are not politically motivated violence and/or do not involve crimes committed against the State. Also, what makes CISPA bothersome is that whole set of "and other reasons too" that are allowed. If it's for security and to combat terrorism then technically it should not be also touted as a solution to the war on online piracy, since links between the two are tenuous at best. But hey, I'm not Washington DC. I don't think like them. I'm not allowed to make laws. I am allowed under the First Amendment (still, so far) to comment and critique them though so long as this does not encourage breaking of the laws or doing other illegal activities. Until such a point as criticizing a law becomes a crime. At this point it would be safe to go: "Okay, I guess we aren't a democracy/republic anymore." I mean it wouldn't in that scenario because that would be something bad to say too, but to evaluate it as being so, would not be horribly inaccurate.

The talking heads are attempting to say that all hackers are terrorists. I think if you are trying to sabotage government computers and equipment that would count as trying to harm the State but somebody being a hacker or not doesn't mean they necessarily will or do that. Only some do. And those ones do get punished. I forget what the sentence/terms usually are but, don't they have to go to jail, and aren't allowed to use the internet or computers or cellphones for a really really long time, or something to that effect? I mean yeah, when people use technology to commit crimes, that does count as cybercrime but I think in our overzeal we may go after too many little bad things we dislike people doing and neglect to go after enough of the big scary things. I mean, it's just way too convenient to use appeals that it will go after the big bad stuff to justify going after all the little stuff. Who am I to say though. If you attack machines belonging to a business, they can sue you and you can have a very nasty fine and/or some jailtime on your hands too. That's how it already was before. So if messing with computers and equipment that belong to the government or businesses are both already considered crimes with punishments, then why CISPA?

Election time is coming:

Like clockwork, the candidates shift from vaguely hinting they might (but never specify) quite how they plan on fixing the economy or getting our jobs back they pull up moralistic crusade red herrings about their personal religious beliefs and emotional hot-button issues that have little if anything to do with the practicalities of "if elected, how I and my administration plan on making the economy suck a bit less". Then they get more heavily into namecalling each other. This behavior disgusts me to an extent but what's worse is how they all act so smug and after awhile appear to all have nearly the exact same stances and opinions on every single issue. The diffences go away and they blend into a big ugly bureaucratic chimera or hydra. The democrats and republicans start to sound alike and it's this big dumb amorphous blob of people being emotional and spouting their mouths off without bothering to thoroughly fact check, and so on and so forth.

Untitled:

Why do segments of society seem to take great delight and gusto at blaming science for things?

There are certain flaws in positivism.

However, you never really see that many examples of a "science hero" these days anymore as an archetype in stories. You do still see the science villain. unless it's a period piece set in the past of a bygone era where both the hero and the villain employ feats of logic and gadgetry you don't see science being used by the good guys as much.

When you do have a good doctor or scientist character in the supporting cast they usually die because of their research or trying to figure out some forbidden thing to help advance the plot which gives the actual hero who is a regular action hero or so a tool to defeat the evil badguy or horrible device/scheme or monster he or she has made.

For all the faulting of empiricism for disrespecting magical beliefs or not supposedly accepting the allegedly equally equal subjective feelings based perceptions of each and every person if they temper tantrum enough you have to also understand that alternatives don't really seek out to understand through finding out and examing things the way experimenting through the scientific method does. Always question everything. Part of the beauty in the scientific way of doing things is that unlike the dogma of religion and politics you start out assuming you do not already know everything and seek things out to understand more. Do politics manage to creep into the scientific community? Yes because scientists are people too but when it comes to organized methods to try and understand physical phenomena, I still think science is pretty much our best piece of equipment in the toolbox. Without it we would still be attempting to attribute susceptibility to diseases or birth defects to individual moral foibles or flaws in character. Unfortunately some people still try to. That's not a value neutral way to look at things. Yes, there are some flaws in trying to be 100% objective but throwing it out the window to embrace a standardless subjectivism seems nonsensical to me. I do think there is some merit in use of bias minimization techniques. Is it 100% perfect? No. Yet, one WOULD figure that it's better than not trying at all.

Yes I just dissed postmodernism, anarchoprimitivism and extreme feminism somewhat. All in one blow.

I'd like to see at least one movie set in modern or future times where a belief system was part of the villain's arsenal or regular society was the badguy and learning or a scientist were the good guys. I don't think in our anti-intellectual society and the current political atmosphere this would ever gain mainstream traction anytime soon though.

Risk misManagement:

You realize of course that nothing in statistical reality is ever 100% safe at all times to all people around or using it, yes? A person could theoretically choke to death on a textureless boiled soggy piece of broccoli if they were breathing heavily in the midst of arguing and eating at the same time. That doesn't mean everybody should skip eating boiled vegetables in order to be safe though. Likewise, there's a statistically infinitesmally small chance of the occurrence of a rare but lethal microbe landing on you that got carried over from someplace else and blown onto you by the wind while you are just minding your own business outside in a regular place under regular circumstances but that doesn't mean we should all never again go outside and only do so in protective clothing with masks and rebreathers or sealed air tanks!

It is then much to my worry that people walk around demanding absolutely NO RISK in ANYTHING EVER. That things be proven 100% SAFE. That NO RISKS OR EVEN POSSIBLE POTENTIAL RISKS ARE EVER ACCEPTABLE.

The most well engineered vehicle or tool ever designed and built might only have 85-92% safety to it. There is a rough, small CHANCE OF MECHANICAL FAILURE, NATURAL DISASTER, SABOTAGE OR "ACTS OF GOD" no matter how well planned or made something is. That's how real life in the world works and the laws of the universe and of motion that seem to govern everything outside a committee room or concerned citizens group town hall meetings seemingly function. You have disaster and safety procedures to deal with containment or cleaning up of accidents when they occur but you do not try to sell people on that they should expect nothing bad to ever happen. Not unless you want perpetually unskilled helpless losers who are always hurting themselves on things all the time and panicking about garbage happening...

Rather than tell people to expect things to be good or always be horrible, is it not more sensible to give them disaster plans, accident procedures and safety protocols for things that are dangerous or when things do go wrong?

Life, liberty and pursuit of offshore tax-sheltering:

We are to live in a government for the people, of the corporations and by the corporations.

This year a whole string of rather ugly "Internet blacklist bills" keep being motioned in Congress. <- Allegedly, to combat online piracy and as part of this whole "getting tough on crime" shtick politicians still can never seem to quite get enough of. Now, far be it for me to actually directly state something in support of bootlegging (because hey if you're a content creator and somebody pirates your ideas or intellectual property then yes, they will be on your people to sue the crap out of shitlist) but as long as the part of the First Amendment's freedom of speech and part about loosely interpreted freedom of expression that cover political cartoons both remain intact... well, I can still make some to take the piss out of bad legislation I dislike.

What goes unsaid:

> Being poor is a crime!
> Everybody should give those who already have more, even more, because that is the pattern of how things have worked.
> Forcibly redistributing things also has pitfalls!
> There are often more than just two sides to any given story!
> Questioning things even though it is sometimes dangerous and can be socially frowned upon can be good for you and society!

> We will exclude those who do not behaviorally and physically (with fashions) conform to norms which are for the most part dictated by or encouraged by large businesses.

> We will say things are better for being new, not necessarily because they are better in terms of functionality, but simply for being new and because forcibly changing things in extreme ways keeps an appearance of progress... (even if doing so may turn out to be a step backwards in functionality).

>An average person may to an extent mistakenly associate branded content as being superior to other branded or nonbranded content on face value in an unquestioning way.

>We will pretend that attempts at large scale outsourcing do not negatively impact local small businesses.

Overmoralistic:

On the one hand I experienced the whiny neoliberalism that took away my city's choice whether have plastic or paper grocery bags and forced everyone to use reusable cloth sacks (and instituted a sintax on if you chose paper, not a large tax but a bit of an annoyance) but at the same time on aesthetic grounds opposes people hanging their laundry out to dry on account of it looking tacky and how nobody else wants to see somebody else's sundries hanging out to dry.  On the other I see Neocon hardliners sticking their noses in where they don't belong trying to pass moralistic based legislation that criminalizes certain shady but previously ambiguous behaviors or practices because the idea of an even sometimes shades of gray world that isn't entirely just black and white is to be found appalling.  I find it ironic that some of the same people who would complain about taxes and large government feel it so imperative to spend large sums of money on task forces to police and micromanage the behavior of others in society.  I am also sick of liberal whining.  I don't like how every time I go onto a certain public web encyclopedia (which I am avoiding naming because I'm unsure of its copyright status) I get shown ads with mugshots of the owner imploring people to donate money.  When it isn't doing that it's trying to redirect me to vote for or against certain pieces of legislation (while I do agree that some of those proposed laws are terribad and should be petitioned against I don't like being told to do so by something I go to for looking up information on various errata).

It bothers me how racist and xenophobic some of the right wing groups are too and [I] do feel like this fearmongering hysteria about this, that or the other moral-thing-to-be-upset-about of-the-week ^TM is going to be a great excuse to have another sort of a red scare -like witchhunt with HUAC-esque committees to bully and interrogate dissidents or rivals into shutting up. Stick to your guns (sorry for the crappy figurative pun there people!). If you say you are for less taxes and smaller government then don't waste gobs of cash micromanaging and trying to police the moral behavior of the rest of society at large.

Every historical instance of implementing such moralistic kinds of laws I can think of has correlated in an increase in organized crime (look at prohibition, and the war-on-drugs).
Also, hypocritically some substances which are fairly bad for you are made okay because the consumer must pay a sin tax for purchasing them whereas other things (also bad for you) are contraband. If you over-regulate the hell out of everything I think businesses and the economy are to suffer the most bluntly from it in addition to this becoming a much less fun place to live.

Though I will not express support of piracy I do have a want to take the piss out of big media for their current moralistic war on online file sharing, use of torrents and crusade against anonymity by which they are attempting to forcefully tame the untamed frontier that is the Internet. It is this: "I am led to believe that record executives are upset they will get to have cocaine (+expensive champagne and exotic hookers) a day or so (a few days) less a week than they currently do."

The lie perpetrated on the general public that digital online distribution through a large online content distributor (of which there are sadly only a handful, & of those - perhaps somebody ought to look into that with some antitrust or to see about if it otherwise encourages anticompetitive practices, which if their lobbying groups weren't so large perhaps some legislators might have the backbone to do) benefits anyone other than the content distributor has been so thoroughly touted by advertisers that most consumers don't even bother to question it anymore. The fact of the matter is artists and musicians make less money per sale of MP3s than they do or did with albums and the bulk of any profits go to the vendor. This remains sadly true with authors trying to electronically publish (for the most part) & it's not a pretty picture.

This excessive mollycoddling toward offended people by increasingly censoring things is worrisome to me too. If people are never previously exposed to something "bad" or upsetting, you are increasingly ensuring the likelihood that they will be very shocked and not know how to cope (instead of being able to ask questions about it and in doing so, learn something valuable!) the very first time they are exposed to it. I say there needs to be some controversy and decent things for people to get angry about or be upset with... otherwise it's just a bunch of silly stupid little mindless things that don't deal with the real issues and we as a whole as a culture are not going to mature or progress past the puritan colonial days, McCarthyism, and dark age superstitions.

Not knowing about something doesn't make you safe from it. On the contrary, it leaves you ill-informed to deal with it later on when it does rear its unpleasant head. But not knowing about things makes people feel content instead of ill-at-ease so they'd rather purposefully be unsafe than rationally approach problems to acknowledge they exist. Fighting superficial problems gives the satisfying appearance of doing something about things without dealing with the larger underlying issues plaguing people which could be sticky and unpleasant or involve being self-critical just a tad. The illusion that we are all good people most especially when we do bad things is something that groups have used for centuries to keep their padded ego (although psychologically what we call the ego in informal day to day use usually is what they call the id) intact*. When will somebody propose a different and novel set of tactics to deal with unusual situations?


*Social psychologists call the phenomenon of behaviors being used to do that cognitive dissonance reduction.

A renewed attack on superficiality:

I honestly feel like sometimes maybe you could probably show up to a meeting with absolutely nothing of meaning or interest to contribute or bring to the table and still get positive marks for being on time or early to it.

I also am coming to the notion that you could turn in pages of complete shlock and drivel and as long as everything was perfectly exactly formatted to the anal-retentive specificity of the person reviewing it,- if not your boss or instructor & graders,- many people would think it was the best essay/homework/assignment ever and give it a good score because they had an easier time understanding it.

More disturbingly I noticed (not to be classist but this shows up alot more in predominantly blue collar and no collar environments) that there are a decent proportion of people who are SO VERY FEELINGS GUIDED that they will rationalize and justify in a perfect textbook case cognitive dissonance reduction manner doing all sorts of horrible and rotten things to you under the table because you momentarily made them feel awkward or rubbed them the wrong way during a brusk interaction or by an offhand remark. Some of these people will use that as a reason to exact retribution and attempt to see to it to if not ruin your life or career in what manner they can,- to be a roadblock and speedbump to impede progress if you need to request something from them or some assistance. Not the most highly mature reaction to being made to feel slightly uneasy during some interactions but hey...

Lastly, you can be a smug and smarmy bastard and lead people down a course of action that leads to large amounts of unnecessary death and/or ancillary destruction but people will gladly sacrifice their lives or livelihoods to support your corrupt and inept idiotic plans because you seemed overly-confident about the likelihood of the success of your actions if implemented.

My, my - how unimpressive in the morning: (In progress):

I've been having an interesting conversation with my coauthor about how part of the decay in society or its dysfunction surging may stem from the replacement of social values with market (driven?) values and thought a topic as rich as that deserves some fleshing out. 

In the meantime I noticed that perhaps our values are skewed and backwards in that regard but perhaps taken a different way.  Specifically I observed out in the public discourse collective/sphere making fun of individuals seems to be all fine and good but as soon as you start making fun of products sooner or later a brand-loyalist fanboy (who seems to derive an almost sort of tribal sense of self-identity associated with preferring his or her brand of thing A, B, C of choice and how much better he or she thinks it is than all X, Y, Zs) will blow a gasket.

P.S.: The snide sounding title refers not to his conversation I picked up bits and pieces of that stuck with me but to the latter observation where (some) people will go "How dare you suggest my favorite ______[insert blank brand thing] isn't the very best in the world and furthermore, why won't you agree with me on my opinion that everything else that isn't that one sucks mightily?"

The End is Annoying:

Noticed an increase in the number of sandwich board style street preachers outside the college and library.
They like telling us how the Bible should be the only book a person will ever need. I am tempted to ask one if there is a patron saint of calculus. Everything which is not part of their ideology but still exists causes these people to become uncomfortable enough they feel a need to rant and rave in public spaces about how everybody is a sinner and how there are all these debauched depravities they project onto us from their imaginations (uh, a good chunk of people go to colleges to learn and teach things... these guys maybe need to watch a bit less TV).

It is perhaps ironic that the only people who seem to really give a damn about things also come across as stark raving nuts.

The Bible itself has something to say about public preaching.

Matthew 6:1-7 (21st Century King James version):
   1 "Take heed that ye do not your almsgiving before men, to be seen by them; otherwise ye have no reward from your Father who is in Heaven.
   
 2 Therefore when thou givest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, they have their reward.
   
 3 But when thou givest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth,
   
 4 that thine almsgiving may be in secret; and thy Father who seeth in secret, Himself shall reward thee openly.
   
 5 And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are. For they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the corners of the streets, that they may be seen by men. Verily I say unto you, they have their reward.
   
 6 But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father who is in secret; and thy Father who seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.
   
 7 But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions as the heathen do, for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking."

I'm going to interpret this passage as saying that if you are praying to try to materialistically show off how religious you are to other mortal people then this is probably doing it for the wrong reasons. I believe it to be saying one should strive to be humble and try to keep it between you and God.  It also might be suggesting that it is the quality of spirituality and not the quantity of religiousity that should make up a person's faith?

Then in Matthew 6:8 it goes a bit further by saying:
 "Be not ye therefore like unto them, for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask Him."
 See? The Bible itself is saying you don't need to show off to other people what it is you are praying about because God already knows and He isn't particularly impressed by that. Or at least that's how I'm choosing to interpret it.

Misogyny and Misandry: Misanthropy?

Men and Women can have different socioculturally ingrained ways of thinking about the same things. This doesn't mean that either of them are necessarily always right but also means that neither one is necessarily always wrong.

It is this author's belief that subjecting members of the opposite sex to a battery of increasingly horrific and difficult MINDGAMES and psychological tests is not a good way to try to enjoy each other's company. If you like someone, then say so. If you are okay with just being friends, yes, do that. If you are mature enough to understand that people can still flirt even without being sexually attracted to you then good for you, you get to have a cookie (yes, sometimes this is easier said than done, particularly when it is someone you find yourself possibly attracted to, but it is possible,- everybody just has to be mature, reasonable and civilized adults... which is part of the problem).

Trial and error taught me to never apologize to someone for liking them if you tell them that (yes, even if it turns out they do not like you in return). This, you see, is a compliment. What it means is that you find the other person likable and a worthwhile human being. Do not pester them about liking them however, as this will drive them away and lead to much misery for all parties involved.

In closing: MEANINGFULNESS is a salve to the MEANINGLESSNESS of this SHALLOW AND SUPERFICIAL CESSPOOL. I DON'T RUN FROM MEANINGFULNESS, I EMBRACE IT.

Why Marx was wrong

Corporate Overlord here. Yes I’m a capitalist ideologically… Of sorts anyway. Maybe a reluctant capitalist. I can see where capitalism produces inefficient and non socially optimal outcomes. (I’m an economics student, remember?) When I was younger I was very into Marx. Reading Marx can in fact be enlightening. But Marx was wrong on many points. The biggest point being his labor theory of value. Marx believed that a product has value based on the labor put into it. If one expands on this idea they come to the conclusion that any profit made by the capitalist (Capitalist can mean two things: one who owns capital, and one who holds the view that economically capitalism works the best. I hold that view, but now we are talking about an owner.) must be the result of exploitation, for profit must come when something is sold for greater than its value.

The problem with this notion is that a capitalist must be induced into acting. If one can only make personal profits from one’s own labor, than one will try to avoid contributing capital, for doing so would be at a cost. If ones decisions on capital only lead one to make exactly what one has put in, contributing capital is not at a cost, but not at any profit either. A capitalist MUST therefore purchase labor at a bargain price in order for the expenditure of capital to be justified. Given multiple choices between a little profit, and a large amount of profit, the capitalist will seek the largest amount of profit possible. This means purchasing labor at the greatest discount possible.

Is this exploitation? Truthfully it can be, but it depends. How free are the laborers to refuse work? If they are free to refuse work then it is not exploitation because workers will only seek employment if the marginal product of their labor is greater than the marginal dis-utility of labor. If the marginal dis-utility of labor is greater than the marginal product of labor for workers, workers will only work under coercive circumstances. In some countries such circumstances do in fact exist. Ironically they don’t tend to be capitalist countries. Providing labor when its marginal product is greater than its marginal dis-utility cannot be considered exploitation.

On Disappearing:

Only two reasons I avoid:

Maintaining friendships with some types of people.

I have repeatedly found myself defending why I'm not around, AKA online whenever the person/people in question wanted to talk to me. Over and over and over.

So, two reasons:

1.) If it's somebody who is disrupting my work, trying to distract me from it or basically shitting on the vast majority of my ideas, I may disappear to get away from that.  When you get bombarded too much, it's pretty normal to want to take a breather since this allows you to think a little more clearly.

2.) I'm a STUDENT.  We spend time STUDYING STUFF!  Like, FOR TESTS.  Which are REQUIRED.  It really helps with things like, say, GOOD GRADES.  So in fact, I may actually be doing student things, which can lead to being tied up in research or needing some time to myself.
If it's important, people do know how to reach me.  Seriously, I don't just go AWOL without making allowances for emergencies. Key words here are "important" and "emergencies." 

I have a phone, email, and this page here. This is not exactly a total off-the-grid situation where, I don't know, someone would have to start up a fire and get busy sending smoke signals.

I do remember somebody getting mad that I didn't make a superb effort to talk to her at length every single day.  Well, I didn't mean to upset her, but things do come up.
Another person got mad if they saw me spending any time with other people who weren't them. Then I had to draw a line in the middle of their rant and explain that I was spending time with the other people because those "other people" were folks I was discussing an idea with for a project.  You know, fellow students, teachers, etc?

It bothers me, this notion of being constantly connected and always available, be it through the internet, cell phones, what-have-you.
Sometimes you're trying to talk to specific people about specific stuff, which with me often involves school; and you don't want to be torn away from that to deal with somebody else being mad at you because they think you aren't paying enough attention to them at that exact moment.
Not to mention, sometimes you just don't want to talk to anybody because you need some solitude to work on something that's complicated. These are not evil things, or they weren't before instant gratification via being constantly plugged in resulted in people thinking that not being immersed at all times was wrong, even socially offensive.

I even had one person who couldn't get used to the idea that I wasn't around to chat when I was AT SCHOOL IN CLASSES.  Right, yes, because clearly the student thing is a cover story.  I must really be living in my parents' basement with a Matrix-style jack directly into the back of my skull (btw, would so not want to get a computer virus from one of those).
He got sort of paranoid and kept trying to "prove" that I was signed into my regular IM program as Invisible, when it was really just that I was logged out or not online. The way I'd find out that he was doing that would be when I finally did get out of class or finish work, I'd sign into my email and there'd be yards and yards of increasingly angry "messages that were received while you were offline."
To liken this to something "in RL," think of it as being at work or at school and having people fill up your voicemail and/or your answering machine with increasingly angry messages, all insisting that you must really be home and you need to pick up RIGHT THAT SECOND!!!1!!
This would not be considered socially acceptable behavior--in a way, it's a type of harassment.  So why is it considered OK just because it happens over the internet?  It still involves a type of verbal harassment that escalates in tone.

Sometimes I have to disappear, from anywhere from a few days up to a whole week or more at a time if I get embroiled in something exceedingly complicated. It's one of the perils of being friends with somebody who studies science and research for a living.

These people who would get mad would always choose right near my finals week or if I was doing a term paper to do their blowups. It's the damnedest thing. It would consistently happen, whether I had repeatedly told them that I was trying to study or not. If I said that I was trying to study, they'd insist that studying was irrelevant, or try to make it my fault for not signing out.  Of course, if I had signed out, then I would have gotten a ton of offline messages demanding to know why I wasn't online.  Lose-lose situation.
I do try to be patient and explain at first, but at this point it's like, YOU DON'T OWN ME. Get back to where proper boundaries are or eff off.

The other ugly thing about arguing online is when the other person insists what they are doing (religion, school, career, hobby, etc) is real, but what you're doing...well, it just isn't important on any level, according to them. And then, satisfied that they've made their points, the person goes "I'm going to bed!" and then signs out leaving you to puzzle out just what the hell they were mad at you about in the first place--that, or unable to explain your side of things because you'd be just talking to yourself.
(Because, well, talking to someone through your computer who's offline is pointless.  BECAUSE THEY ARE OFFLINE.)

One last creepy thing that sometimes people do is  passive-aggressively wait and stalk you in your IM list on stealth the whole day.  Essentially, they wait until you sign in unawares to check your inbox, flip to online, and blast you away about whatever it is that they are mad at you about (sometimes in caps--only ever had that happen twice but it's a surefire way to a quick block and delete and never being spoken to again ).

Here's a thought--if you can't behave like a decent, rational human being in public, you probably can't behave like one online.  Not to mention, some people have way too much time on their hands to spend stalking and harassing others-- and maybe they shouldn't be given a computer...

(Edited by Mary this week who is made of awesome... Go see her blog The PMS Project. DO IT).

Update 10/23/11: It said you can't use the icons from the other site externally without permission, so I removed them.

The Battle for Relevancy:

One of the ongoing difficulties in persuasive writing and education and a common complaint among professionals is trying to work with an increasingly apathetic and lazy audience. One that seems to be getting shorter and shorter attention spans as time goes on.

We are experiencing a cultural shift, a push toward increasingly visual and less textual communication. Literacy is going down! Or so they say...

People like being spoon fed why things matter more than having to piece together for themselves how and why different things are important.

Oh politics and proletariat dictatorship:

How you never fail to behave predictably and amuse.

For expressing the counter-mainstream opinion that gee, maybe I find it a bit disturbing that the only thing all parties can seem to agree on is cutting funding for programs I get called in this order: A commie, UnAmerican, a bleeding heart liberal, and an out of touch academic who needs to go GET A JOB or is wishing doom upon the United States.

For suggesting that you need to spend money in order to make money so maybe controlled spending in investments in key growth areas is still good for the economy, yes even during a recession, I get branded some sort of a scumbag and the above.

SO saying you want everything to self-destruct by there being no gov't spending and that nobody should invest in anything privately either (which btw is guaranteed to affect the economy negatively) makes for folk wisdom, and saying that trying to spur job growth is a good idea... becomes the folk blasphemy of a minor folk devil. Interesting. Oh wait, you mean we had a debacle with speculative real estate again? Really? Where have I heard that one before?... oh yes, American History. Florida. Some time around between the 1930s and the 1950s-ish, ballpark figure?

It is but all the more water off a duck's back. Let them argue and reaffirm the beliefs they have faith in that they were fed in such a way as to continue one sided conversations and stalemate arguments...

Ugh, enough politics for awhile...

Update: 8/5/11: So... they say the USA lost it's AAA credit rating. S&P got honked off and bumped it down to AA+. And still, lots of Republicans and Democrats are apparently blaming each other rather than trying to come up with ways to go about rebuilding the US economy. I keep hearing more of the same. Spending cuts on programs, tax cuts for the rich, extensions of entitlement programs... ugh. I don't think "use a bigger hammer" is going to fix it. Now, I know, in politics we take pride on being stubborn and "sticking to our guns" so to speak but this is stuff that affects the livelihoods of the American citizenry we're talking about here so doing stuff to create more jobs should not be considered such anathema. Why don't we agree that everybody is a shithead and set aside our differences and get to nation-building at home. I've been watching the infrastructure decay. I know people would howl bloody murder if somebody were to impose tariffs and issue penalties for outsourcing but I think SOMEBODY needs to address these neglected ingredients that are part of what's gotten us into this mess. We seem to import more than we export and be trying to self-destruct internally. Yuck.

Social climbing:

Inspired by a combination of having gotten rejected by some climbers and by Mary's rant about stupid girls Advocate decides to go about bashing one of the things that has annoyed him since he was an angry young boy before he was an angry young man.

The myth of social climbing with upward social mobility is the one by which we tell ourselves that attempting to buddy up with or that sleeping with people who are rich, powerful or otherwise important that it is somehow going to help us become important. This is rampant in society. Both men and women do it. It's fairly transparent and obvious to actual important people though.

Everybody wants somebody who has already passed the finish line and has already succeeded. Nobody wants to take a risk on somebody who is still going through the paces and on their way. There is an almost primal and preternatural fear of being a "doctor's first wife."
Okay so you recognized they are an important person. The hell do you have to offer them? Your fake friendship and some sex? I don't think so. Eventually the climber will get dumped too by somebody who is even more ruthless about it than they are.

Cee-Lo Green humorously regales us (perhaps semi-autobiographically?) about golddiggers in the following song clip:

It was hard to find an uncensored version of the song you could still watch without having to be logged in to prove you were 18. Whatever happened to freedom of speech people? He only drops a couple F-bombs for Chrissake. Anyway...

Science:

That I should be wasting time explaining to someone that we don't sit there actually trying to make monsters and/or take over the world and that Hollywood always tends to portray it as a bad guy says something about how science gets viewed in our culture, both as the cool givers of really neat stuff (consumer electronics anyone? Materials that have special properties cool much? Thought so! Medicine convenient! You can thank science for that!) and also as "Omg aah, those freaks who seem to care more about numbers or plants or animals or germs than people! Eek! And/or want tax payer money & funding to do who knows what (because I'm too lame to try to read up on any of it so I'll sit and gripe rather than try to understand it!)."

Mysticism:

Religions attempt to control our beliefs even in things outside the physical realm.
Extreme atheist skeptics try to shatter people's beliefs.
I find funny parallels between the two at times.


One may note the conceptual attack on mysticism by our culture is multi-pronged. Religions dislike it because it suggests a lack of necessity for organized religions and has historically been rather hard to subjugate and control other than through persecution and extermination. Consumer society hates it because it's really difficult to market supernatural kinds of arcane things. Science, we'd rather just plain not deal with it given the opportunity because, as you know, the domain of science and modis operandi of science people tends to be concerned with the physical world and things you can measure empirically.

Now, before you can get your anti anything-that-isn't-empirical game on, tighten your tinfoil hat a little tighter, point at & use the drugs and psychosis thought terminating cliche that Thomas Szach (sp?) was talking about, or shove a cross at me really hard this is already going to be the last entry I am going to write on this topic for a good long while to begin with...

Our Society has Problems:

We tell people to never complain, to suck it up, to pretend everything is great, stuff is awesome and act extra super cheerful, no matter what. Then we have the gall to act surprised at the level of violence and crime.

Except, in truly schizoid fashion we also teach people to be afraid of everyone and everything most especially each other and their neighbors. Yet, we do not also teach them to properly fear themselves at the individual level. Oh, sure, religion tries but you should have a more personal reason for people to want to behave well than some giant angry deity in the sky is going to cause some really messed up stuff to happen to you eventually if you keep being a dick to people. My beef with established & organized religion shall perhaps have to go into another entry at a later point in time. We'll not get into that here and right now.

One concluding thought: Why does the news seldom ever do any spread about an investigation into the possibility of a correlation between decreased funding for social programs (which results in the shutting down of libraries, community centers and after school programs) and the level of crime in cities?