Category Archives: Politics

Kavanaugh, Boys Will Be Boys, and Why This Problem Will Never Go Away

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I was watching Vice News Tonight, and they were covering some of the Kavanaugh garbage that we’re seeing on a daily basis right now, and it just sickens me that we have a bunch of men in charge of our government who apparently don’t care one iota that they’re about to empower (with enormous power and responsibility) someone who may have tried to rape another woman. And even more allegations are starting to emerge. And they’re trying to railroad him into the position so fast that NO OTHER WOMAN can possibly come forward in time to stop it.
 
One thing that was interesting was that they brought on a woman who was literally halted from testifying during the Anita Hill hearings for Clarence Thomas who ALSO had a sexual harassment story about Clarence Thomas, but she was shunted away by the people who wanted him put into power until the hearings were over. They made sure that atrocity happened, and THOSE SAME PEOPLE ARE STILL IN POWER TODAY. They’re the same people trying to push through the current guy.
 
But you know what really got me? At the end of the whole segment, four or five other women were giving their own stories of when men attacked them sexually but they were also never believed when these things happened. And it got me to thinking: How many of these types of guys have I known my entire life? The cool guy in high school. The jock in college. That guy who got all the girls. And now the weird guy who no woman ever talked to but is now in an office establishment with all sorts of other women who are forced to be around him all day long. So many people, and so many stories, which could mean this happens all the time.
 
Because that’s what I’m getting from all of these stories. These incidents aren’t rare. They’re more the norm. And if you are brave enough to hold a conversation with a group of women and just let them start talking about it, what you’ll discover is that almost ALL of them have a similar story of when this happened to them. Not one or two out of a room of 50. But 49 or 50 of them all have a horrifying story of some guy that violated them in some way.
 
And this is what we should be facing.
 
But we won’t. We’ll shuffle it under the rug, pretend it only happens with really bad people who, oh I don’t know, must not go to church or something equally ridiculous. And it will continue happening because we choose to let it happen.
 
Like people shooting up schools with guns. Because we choose to let it happen.
 
We’re all responsible, but we will blame a boogeyman who doesn’t exist, or just might exist. But we’re all responsible. And we’re responsible because we don’t do anything about it but act shocked and surprised.
 
Right now. Instead of doing something about this, the people who CAN do something are saying: “This is just a political witch hunt. Get him in the office and the problem goes away.”
 
And that’s what’s probably going to happen.
 
Or, we’ll get brave this one time (honestly, I don’t believe that will happen), but we’ll do nothing about the larger problem because it’s too hard. It takes too much work. We can never solve this. Or whatever weak excuse we will give, including my favorite: “It’s not me, so I don’t see what trying to stop it will do because there’s no way to tell who is responsible.”
 
I already told you. WE are responsible.
 
And WE will do absolutely nothing.
 
Now, I’m going to go back to killing aliens in a video game because at least there the world makes a lot more sense.

The Problems of a Young People’s Movement

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Recently, there’s been a lot of attention being paid to a group of high school students who were survivors of a horrific gun attack in Florida. While they’re not the first students to suffer from such a crappy situation, what made this tragedy even more significant was that the students didn’t remain the backdrop of the event but have now taken front stage and are literally the movement itself.

This has resulted in a number of unexpected outcomes. First, the “usual” response of “this isn’t the time” to discuss gun violence was completely drowned out by the survivors themselves who refused to allow pro-NRA pundits to dictate the terms of the conversation. And the opposite side, the political operatives who have been screaming into the wind for decades about gun violence, were also taken a bit by surprise because as much as they have wanted to do so, they’re not dictating the message but having to listen alongside everyone else who is seeing this dynamic group of young people demand and focus attention.

And this is part of the problem that I fear because as Mancur Olson pointed out in “The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups” (1965) and reinforced by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward in “Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail” (1977), getting a movement started is a lot easier than sustaining one over time. The reasons are varied, but there’s both a free rider problem (people think others will do the work for them so they sit out the movement, convinced someone else will take up the slack) and an age problem, which I’ll talk about it a moment here.

The first problem is not easily overcome. People organize because of personal motivations, and they quite often are faced with the belief that they’re climbing a mountain that has no footing. When they realize there’s a group of others with similar goals, they become motivated and feel the sense of belonging that makes them put themselves out there for hopes of a solution. What can often happen is that solidarity may actually lead to a limited success because their opposition is also overwhelmed by the numbers gathered in such a short amount of time. So, they go home, armed with the knowledge that they succeeded. But they don’t often get everything they wanted, so when they take to the streets again to achieve the rest, they find that a fraction of their comrades appear the second time around due to that pesky free rider problem.

Which brings me to the second problem: age. One of the advantages of the current movement is also its biggest liability: Children eventually stop being children. Right now, young high school students are rallied around the idea of wanting to fix things for the youth of America. But there’s a time stamp on how effective they are going to be because of the fact that once they stop being high school students and are then perceived to be adults, their message practically disappears overnight. People tend to care when children are affected, but when those children grow up into adulthood, it’s amazing how society quickly turns their backs on those same people.

Which means, if anything is going to happen, it’s going to have to happen really soon. The NRA, conservatives and those who like the status quo are very, very good at kicking cans down the road. This is kind of the origin of the phrase “thoughts and prayers”. The term “thoughts and prayers” has only recently been debunked to reveal it means “we’re not going to do anything about this now, so all we’re willing to do is pretend we’re thinking about it, but we’re not.” Historically, they’ve been really good at ignoring huge calamities with infamous responses of “now’s not the time” and all sorts of other bags of wind, knee jerk reactions. Therefore, if anything is going to happen, it’s going to have to happen during the next few weeks, or at least before the next atrocious event occurs because once the next geographically named event occurs, Florida will be yesterday’s news, and those who want to do nothing will breathe a sign of relief that they never actually had to do anything to make things better.

The Hidden Ramifications of the #metoo Movement and the “Funnel of Male Response”

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Yesterday, Rob Porter, a top White House aid, resigned from his position due to allegations that he abused his former wives. So far, Chief of Staff John Kelly has mistakenly thrown his political clout into defending Porter, and conservatives are starting to feel the negative effects of having stood behind an abusive person for so long (and even after discovering the revelation of abuse). What’s interesting to me is what no one seems to have really noticed: The response has been the same response we’ve always gotten, but the results are turning out to be completely different.

That needs a bit of unpacking, specifically to explain what it is I’m talking about. The reason for that is people want so badly to turn this into a partisan issue because it looks so good as one to people who might benefit. But in reality, it’s anything but a partisan issue. It’s one of gender.

And that’s something that a lot of men don’t really want to talk about. So, let me explain.

In the past, when allegations come forward about a man abusing a woman, it’s had to make its way through a really weird news cycle I like to call “the Funnel of Male Response.” Men have historically held the reins of power in both government and news media, so when a woman made a claim of abuse, there was always a male decision maker who either had to decide whether or not to run with the story, or to respond to it legally or politically. Whether through backroom deals, collusion, or straight out incompetence, the issue was often ignored or given so little attention that it was like there wasn’t a complaint made in the first place.

In a really interesting tweet from Emma Evans, she points out that her mother needed her father’s permission to open a checking account and his permission to keep her checking account after they were married, even though she actually worked at a bank herself. So, just one generation ago, a spouse of a man pretty much had no permission to conduct business in society without the direction of a patriarchal figure.

Fast-forward to today, and you start to see why a woman being abused by her husband is probably getting very little attention from a very male-dominated media and male-dominated political environment. Using that “Funnel of Male Response”, think about how practically every political issue involving violence against women has been handled in local, state and national government. First, there’s a claim of a male having done something abhorrent to or towards a woman. And then the male response is almost always one coaxed in the blanket of how it affects that specific male rather than the woman who made the claim. How many times did we hear a male politician say something like, “I have daughters, so I wouldn’t want that sort of thing to happen to them”, “I would never want to see that happen to a woman I love,” or “As a father or husband, we must enact this legislation to make sure this sort of thing doesn’t happen to women.” Basically, the commiseration in most of these cases or types is that a male patriarchal figure is responding as a male effected because of his proximity or relations to women.

This is why when we hear a response from John Kelly, stating “I can’t say enough good things about him” and urged Porter to remain in his position, we’re hearing the kind of response we typically hear about these types of circumstances. Senator Orin Hatch kind of sums up the problem by his own responses to this story in which he started out defending Porter (and calling the accusers “character assassins”) before realizing the political ramifications of being on the wrong side of this issue and then started talking about how such behavior is not acceptable, if it happened.

And that sums up the majority of the responses we’ve been getting from most other political allies of Porter. After the “#MeToo” movement, there was a call to believe female complainers and to support them going forward, but as expected, the response has been to go the direction we’ve always gone, and that’s to play the “they need to prove their accusations” before we’re willing to state any sense of belief. And then, as if by script, once enough evidence is given, the powers that be will “accept” the punishment that comes and almost always there’s no approach to somehow change the environment so such a circumstance never happens again.

Which brings me back to pointing out why this problem is pervasive and almost immutable. Our society has not evolved enough to push beyond the rationalization that men still think the world revolves around them. Hell, I’m a guy, and even I realize that sometimes I fall into that sense without even realizing I have. One thing that has been so wonderful about the #MeToo movement is that it is sometimes silencing the male response and even eliminating the Funnel of Male Response in such a way that the usual mechanism of schema that men tend to rely upon don’t even get the opportunity to interject into a conversation. So, instead of a male directed approach of dealing with how Harvey Weinstein is just a symptom of a bigger problem, a wave of firings happened instead, so that Weinstein has been completely powerless in his ability to respond, which is EXACTLY the opposite of the circumstances that he used to “allegedly” cause the problems he did that ruined his life and career. What the #MeToo movement has done is provide rapid speed in responding to allegations that used to have a filter that could never be removed.

And yes, it’s going to cause problems for a lot of men who will probably get swept up in the movement to provide a new sense of accountability. But hopefully, once the first wave of this has run its course, a correction will take place, and then through punctuated equilibrium, we will achieve a new, level playing field where such atrocities against women are ever allowed to take place. For me, that is what I hope will be the true ramifications. Unfortunately, I suspect the actual ramifications will be male blow back where things sort of go back to the previous status quo again because people who have the power aren’t usually all that generous in giving it up, even if it is exactly the right thing to do.

Remaining Unknown in a Viral World: Popularity, ASMR and Celebrity Status

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Earlier today, I was examining the statistics on my website and realized that I have about 1.5 million hits on my site since I started it. That appears to be a lot, but then I started to think to myself that not a lot of people comment on it or send me messages based off of my web site (or its blog). So, this tells me that I seem to get a lot of traffic but apparently nothing seems to be going on with it. And yes, that opens up a lot of thought on a subject I’ll probably take up at another time (what do to with traffic when it gets to your site, as I don’t seem to be doing a whole of good with that area).

Last night, I was watching the latest episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, which is still one of my favorite police procedural types of shows. And in this episode, an Instagram star hooked up with a MMA fighter and was raped, but it turns out the whole thing had been set up by a young woman who was a follower of both of their Instagram feeds. The prosecutor mentioned that a motive for the set up was that the Instgram model had tens of thousands of followers, the MMA fighter had 2 million, and the young, geek girl had 6. Therefore, this was vengeance against the two well known Instagram stars from someone who felt that she had an important voice but no one was listening to her.

That resonated quite a bit with me because I think a lot of us who aren’t big stars often feel the same way. Not that we’re about to set up someone famous like the plot line of this story, but at the same time the realization that there are people who are seriously famous for a sex tape, or for just looking good in pictures, can be a hard thing to face when one is trying really hard to become known as well, but doesn’t  have that advantage those pseudo celebrities have.

Recently, I’ve been following a bunch of ASMR artists who I find to be very good at their craft. In case you’re not familiar with ASMR, it stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, which according to Wikipedia is “is a term used for an experience characterised by a static-like or tingling sensation on the skin that typically begins on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine. It has been compared with auditory-tactile synesthesia.” And even with that definition, you’d be amazed (or maybe you wouldn’t) at how many news agencies just don’t understand it, which you can see when they start to make statements that suggest watching President Trump gives “ASMR tingles” or when some celebrity posts a Youtube of her just staring at the screen and the media goes ga ga over her “ASMR video.”

In reality, ASMR is difficult to achieve and very few artists succeed at it. There’s a reason that there are a few very popular ASMR artists out there, and almost none of them are celebrities known for other things.

Which brings me back to my original subject, and that’s that viral popularity has a bad habit of creating an atmosphere that wasn’t intended in the first place. For those not completely familiar with ASMR, it’s pretty easy to fall into the trap of thinking ASMR is nothing but people whispering and making sounds with inanimate objects. And that’s because a lot of it comes from doing exactly that. But it also comes from a stronger understanding of how those actions can trigger the audience into feeling something more than just simple reactions. As a result, quite a few artists sometimes push the envelope and create what I’ve started to characterize as PG-13 ASMR. What I mean by that is ASMR that is designed to arouse rather than “tingle”, and for those not initiated in what ASMR, it can be very easy to mistake one for the other.

This happens quite often because the models who do ASMR are almost always attractive. Both male and female ASMR artists are generally above average in attractiveness and in their social tools for attracting others. This should be expected because this is a video environment where an unattractive artist is going to be avoided or ignored, and an attractive one is going to cause people to click the image being presented on the Youtube reception screen. This often resonates in the comments section of their videos where the anonymous nature of the Internet can cause trolling behavior you’d expect in a darkened strip club environment. To make matters worse, a number of ASMR artists chase the elusive crown of traffic and subscriptions (people subscribe to their personal channels), which leads to a revenue stream from Youtube. This causes the perpetrators of the more adult environment to keep pushing the adult envelope and the non-sexual artists to feel the need to participate because of loss of viewer clicks.

Youtube has somewhat cracked down on this phenomenon, but has done so with broad strokes that hurts mostly the non-sexual artists because they demonetize mostly based on viewer feedback, and the business has become somewhat cutthroat with an almost mob mentality towards those who are actually trying to comply and do the right thing. As usual, those are the ones who suffer the most, whereas the ones who are crossing the line are rewarded because none of their fans are ever going to turn them in for breaking any of the rules.

Which kind of brings me full circle in what I was originally talking about, and that’s the problem of trying to achieve any level of popularity in a bread and circuses environment where controversy, sex and violence are the things that attract the largest audience. How does the unknown artist achieve notoriety in a mostly celebrity driven world? In a free market mentality, one would think that the quality rises to the top and everything else remains at the bottom. But that’s rarely the case. Quite often, celebrity status is more than enough to create buzz so that its products remain at the top and everything else is left grasping for scraps. As a writer, I find this problem emblematic in the field because some really bad celebrity fiction gets serious attention when it’s not very good and it’s written by people who have about twenty years before they’ll actually ever write anything significant (if they were to work on it full time and not just in between movies or photo shoots). But the people who put in the work in hopes of one day becoming discovered may do so their entire lives and never get a nibble beyond a table scrap thrown their way.

So, the question is: Is there a balance, or is it just not worth the effort? I’m kind of on the cusp of this myself, as I’ve been writing for most of my entire life, creating computer games that were popular but too early for the industry to ever recognize, wrote music back in the day when such music was seen as too experimental, and any number of other creative tasks that have fumbled, fizzled or just never took off. People keep saying “Just keep at it and your day will come”, but part of me wonders if it’s just a crap shoot and my time might better be spent catching up on the latest season of The Walking Dead.

The Gender Problem: Being a Beta Male Has Always Been Seen As Bad

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My ivory tower where the world actually makes sense to me

There’s a current dilemma going on right now that seems to have origins dating way back in time, but for bizarre reasons, people are convinced the problem has only recently emerged. The problem stems from revelations that Harvey Weinstein ruled his Hollywood perch by forcing women into sexual relations with him without women’s consent. It comes from our current president bragging about grabbing women in sensitive off-limits areas and referring to it as “locker room talk”. It comes from politicians running for office, oblivious to the fact that dating 14 year old girls and then demanding those girls be tried for the crime of not reporting this crime until years later is not all that cool. Anyway, the dilemma is caused from men being called out for these types of things, including catcalling, sexual discrimination, hostile work environments and no end of other horrible circumstances. But what it really stems from is a sense of cognitive dissonance (ignoring) these things for so many years and then just casting such things off as “oh well, boys will be boys.”

But there’s no lack of conversation of this dilemma going on right now. Everyone is talking about it. But what’s lacking is a discussion about why this behavior is so prevalent, and, even more important, why it’s probably never going away.

You see, our society has done a miraculous job at making sure that guys who don’t participate in the one-sided sexual politics against women have been basically neutered or removed from the equation in any way whatsoever. We even have terms for guys who aren’t participating in this behavior. Guys call them “emasculated” or “pussy-whipped”. Women don’t call them at all; they’re basically invisible to the female half of the species.

Historically, we have called them “beta” males, and with that designation comes all sorts of negative connotations. Every dating site appeals specifically to the “alpha” male, specifically a guy who is aggressive, take charge and one who leads the pack (whatever that means). The “beta” male is seen as the follower, the one who makes room for the aggressive male and most often is seen as the “friend” to a woman rather than the potential mate. Having said that, there are those who argue that this isn’t the fate of a “beta” male, but way too often it becomes exactly that. And that’s mainly because of societal expectations and norms.

Think about it. You don’t see self-help books for guys that help them to embrace their “beta” side. Instead, what you see are all sorts of crap about how to best be an “alpha” male, the guy who gets the girl, the guy who gets the job, the guy who gets, well, pretty much everything that the “beta” male guy will never get. Instead, we get dating books with advice from guys who argue that it’s better to make your move and apologize after than to do nothing and never get the opportunity in the first place.

And that’s where we are right now. “Alpha” males have gotten themselves into serious trouble with society because they felt it was acceptable to do all sorts of sexual behavior that favors dominance and control from the male perspective. Women have been seen as something to be conquered, and thus, the ramifications have always been a) conquer and win, or b) fail to conquer and lose. We have so incorporated this behavior into our societal norms that when we challenge those behaviors we’re seen as sending misleading signals, and thus, doing the wrong thing by questioning such actions in the first place.

We’ve been doing it so long now that we have started to make arguments that it’s basically in our nature, that what is happening is because of anthropology, not psychology. If women don’t like it, then the argument is that they shouldn’t have rewarded it in the first place.

But we never gave any other option a chance. Equality has never been a part of our social fabric. Ever. When women were given the right to vote, we argued for it because it would allow them to address fundamentally female issues, like health care and children. Hell, in some cases we even argued that “feelings” come from the female side of the audience, like every man is some kind of binary computer algorithm.

But think about that last paragraph for a second. How many people even questioned the terminology of “women were given the right to vote”? Why should that have EVER been a choice given to men as to whether or not women were authorized to make democratic decisions for themselves? Yet, that’s a decision we only made about a hundred years ago. It’s not like we’ve had centuries since then to see how much more we might have evolved. On the grand scale of time, we made that decision ten minutes ago. We’ve been thinking that way for about as long as we’ve been able to think. Even now we’re still nowhere near where we should have been in the beginning. And we justify not making any further strides for all sorts of reasons, including history, tradition, science, religion, hatred and racism.

Which brings me to the original point I was trying to make because yes, I will admit it. I’m a beta male, and I’ve always been one. Over the years I’ve been humiliated, talked down to, laughed at, dismissed, looked past, friend-zoned, threatened and ignored. What’s interesting about this dilemma is that this attitude is one that a future male species appears to be heading towards if we’re ever going to see gender equality, but I suspect that we’re so very far away from achieving this that comfortable acceptance of this status is not going to be in our lifetimes.

So, expect this conversation to continue as it has for many years to come. Hollywood won’t be cleaned up with the alienation of a few producers and actors. Politicians won’t clean up their ways with a few of their numbers being sidelined. Expect to see these same people re-emerge as comeback stories and overcoming past indiscretions (but changing nothing but the optics); we’re really, really good at wanting to forgive people who used to be in our corner, even if they’ve done nothing to deserve such forgiveness. And if you’re ever looking for a reason why none of this will ever change, THAT alone is the reason. As long as there are Weiners, Bill Clintons, Roy Moores, Jerry Falwells, Mel Gibsons, Woody Allens, Kevin Spaceys, Ubers, Trumps, Thomas’s, etc., we’re never changing our ways.

And if you looked at ANY of those names and thought “I agree with one of those but not one of the others,” then you’re the reason why.

So, Hillary thinks that if the election was held today, she might win. She’s wrong.

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It was reported today on CNN‘s site that Hillary Clinton believes that if the presidential election was held today, she might win. I have bad news for her. She’s wrong.

And it’s not because I don’t like Hillary Clinton, which is usually where these kinds of stories and posts go. It’s because of something much deeper that for reasons that make complete sense, NO ONE IN THE MEDIA UNDERSTANDS.

You see, there’s this strange belief in the mainstream media that everybody hates Donald Trump because the mainstream media keeps reporting bad things about Donald Trump. And they keep repeating this information over and over. Then they conduct polls among the people who consume their news and wonder why the results keep telling them everything they keep reporting. YET, this was exactly what they did with their polls and reports during the election, and they were completely blindsided by the results.

What’s going on is something that the media just doesn’t want to face, or is just too lazy to admit might be happening: They’re reporting on only one segment of the population, and that population isn’t the majority.

You can start to see this when you read through message boards that aren’t one-sided or pay attention to the comment sections of stories on pretty much every other web site out there. There is an entire segment of the population that seems pretty angry and is just not being heard. And whenever they ARE heard, they’re treated as outliers, or crazy people, and then ignored. Yet, I suspect they’re a major part of the reason why Trump was elected in the first place. And they’re a major part of the reason why he’ll be re-elected, even though I still keep reading stories about how he can only be a one-term president because of how so many people hate him.

The sad thing is: I mentioned this during the election when people kept telling me how Donald Trump was a joke and how he had zero chance of winning the election. Whenever I mentioned that I thought the media was missing a large segment of the population, people just laughed at me and told me I had no idea what I was talking about. I suspect they’ll do the same again now. Oh well.

Why the BBC is so much of a better news source than CNN

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Why the BBC is so much of a better news source than CNN

The recent Charlottesville riot (get together/protest) is a really good example of why the BBC is so much more superior to crappy CNN. When watching the feed on the BBC story, it has absolutely no voice over and shows the actual protest going on. When you watch CNN’s coverage, it’s a voice over, explaining the situation, and then immediately after two talking heads starts bantering back and forth.

http://www.cnn.com/…/charlottesville-white-natio…/index.html

And I don’t think people ever even realize how significantly different the coverage is over one particular story. The alt-right will often equate BBC with CNN, calling both “liberal journalism” or, my favorite, “fake media.” What has basically happened is that the whole talking heads phenomenon that CNN projects into its coverage is bringing down other news agencies that are actually pretty damn good at being completely a reported story rather than a participant observer to a story (like CNN).

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40909547

I really wish more people would see this and that news agencies would try to be BBC rather than CNN because nothing is more frustrating than having a news agency dictate the news to you rather than report it to you.

(Unfortunately, Facebook sucks for embedding stories, as it only wants to show the first one, and not the second one, if you’re trying to make a comparison. Follow the links rather than rely on Facebook, which gets no kudos for being a lousy service for reporting the news)

Why the Idea of Celebrities on Twitter Drives Me Nuts (and why it should do it to you, too)

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For those who don’t know it, I have a Twitter presence (@duanegundrum). It’s not extremely popular, and I’m lucky if I get a “like” here or there. Mostly, it’s me ranting or making jokes, and no one in the world knowing the difference. As a writer, I have about 5,000 followers. I follow about 500 people. Not great, but not bad either.

At the same time, someone like Kim Kardassian has 54 million followers. She only follows 104 people. Compare that to the most popular writer in the world, Stephen King, who has 3.48 million followers (and follows 63 people). If you go through the lists of really famous people, they tend to have millions of followers and really don’t follow anyone else. In case you haven’t figured it out, they use Twitter as a megaphone, not a tool to communicate with their followers.

When Twitter came about, the idea was that it would be a great place for celebrities to communicate with their fans. But instead of actually “communicate”, they pontificate and there’s little communication that takes place. To make sense of that, you have to understand what communication means to begin with.

Communication, as explained by professors today, involves information exchange between at least two entities. But what’s important about that model is that it’s not just one side speaking to a listener. It’s an exchange of information, so that the receiver then becomes the transmitter and the process continues until the channel is finally closed. In other words, a telephone is used for communicating; a television is not.

When I got involved in Twitter in the early days, I had about 25 followers. They were mainly friends of mine. Over the years, fans and acquaintances joined those numbers, and now I have about 5k, which is a larger number than most people who aren’t straight out celebrities. But part of the “drug” of social media is the desire to constantly improve those numbers so that more people are listening to you or (in my case) having a conversation with you.

There are few people on Twitter I’ve come across who are actual convervationalists. They write stuff, and they respond to stuff. Generally, they have a lot of people who they follow. Others tend to have fewer people they follow but they respond quite often to people who respond to them (which is actually a pretty healthy conversation). George Takei (of Star Trek fame) is one I’d consider in this category (@GeorgeTakei, 2.44 million followers and follows 643 people).

This has often left me wondering how to break into this category of actually making my voice heard. And then I reached a crappy conclusion as an event occurred that I didn’t even realize was happening to me.

I often respond to celebrity posts that are of interest to me, specifically anything that is communication-related, political, or involves writing topics. One pretty famous celebrity (known for his role as one of the current crop of superheroes) posted something about media, and I responded with a Twitter message, basically pointing out how certain messages are put forth by media outlets by using specific phrases, like “some people say”, which is a common vernacular of “Fox News”, brought up often by Jon Stewart of the Daily Show during his years heading that show. The celebrity responded with something like “that’s like what they do on Fox News”, as if it was a new insight. That response received no small number of “likes” from his fan base.

So, since then, I’ve been receiving nonstop “like” notifications of his response while not a single one of them has actually come across from my actual post, meaning that the likes weren’t for the idea but for the fact that someone famous repeated it after me. It’s like the old infamous adage in the science community of how a great idea is irrelevant; communicating it, however, is what’s more important.

So, for all of you out there trying to get your voices heard, this is somewhat of a sobering thought. You can have the greatest ideas and insights that have ever existed, but if you don’t have a megaphone to let anyone know, your idea will never be heard. McLuhan’s idea of “the medium is the message” couldn’t be more significant than today because it may be the only way you will ever be heard. And with all of the noise of Kardassians and reality star driven, your chance of being heard is only going to get that much harder.

 

Hate crimes that seem to sneak in under the radar

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We all know there are some hateful people out there. We see the evidence in the news each and every day. What often escapes us is the fact that a lot of this stuff is happening around us, or in places we’d least expect it.

Take Thunder Bay, Ontario for an example.

You may wonder why I’m discussing Thunder Bay, as I suppose quite a few of you are probably wondering where is Thunder Bay, as in you probably have either never heard of it, or you just never gave it much thought. For me, however, when I saw a recent article, all sorts of memories came to mind. My family (on my mother’s side) is from Thunder Bay.

Every other summer or so when I was a kid, what little there was of my family used to drive from California to Thunder Bay, Ontario. Each time we took the trip, my mom would point out that it used to be called Port Arthur, and that she was born there after her father moved to Canada from Poland after the war. And then during one summer, she and two of her friends took a road trip across the United States and settled in different locations (her best friend in St. Cloud, Minnesota, her other friend in Florida, and she in Santa Monica, California…where I was born).

When we used to take this trip, one of the things that used to fascinate me was the local lore, and specifically the tale of “the Sleeping Giant”, which was the story of a giant Native American who fell asleep on a mountain until one day he would be woken up to aid his people again. It’s a natural rock formation that looks like a sleeping giant, and I remember being able to see it from most areas of Thunder Bay.

Anyway, so years later, I’m reading an article and discover that Thunder Bay is back in the headlines. Except, this time, it’s because some racist moron threw a trailer hitch at a Native American woman walking down the street. What the article doesn’t tell you is that the woman eventually succumbed to her wounds and died. The local Native Americans refer to the crime as a “hate crime” but in all that I’ve read, law enforcement is treating it as a general crime that was originally being treated as an aggravated assault, and now that she died, are “considering” changing the charges. There’s a certain amount of dismissing of the crime in the rhetoric, and one can’t help but wonder if it’s because it was “one of them” that died, rather than “one of us” as so often happens in these types of circumstances.

Which brings me to ask the question: What must be going through someone’s mind that thinks this type of behavior in the first place was either acceptable, or that it was something that might be fun to do? I remember when I was young, and I heard that some of the older kids were going to be “heading into town to do some gay bashing”, and never gave much thought (back then, at least) to what that probably meant. Those young people back then thought that was a completely acceptable thing to do, just as much as this guy driving around in the passenger seat of his car thought it was a pretty appropriate thing to do to just throw a trailer hitch out of a car window and laugh when he said “got one!”.

What no one really talks about is that our communities brought these people up to feel that this sort of thing was okay. We defend ourselves by saying that we would never do such a thing, but then we’re shocked when someone who lives next door to us is charged with doing just that.

At what point are the rest of us also responsible? I ask because I really don’t know the answer to that, and I suspect that we’ll never find out because it’s never being discussed, and I doubt it ever will.

 

 

The Problem With National Intelligence and Classified Information

Business, Education, News, Politics, , , ,

One of my pet peeves has been the concept of classified information. It’s commonly used as a gatekeeper to give some people access to information and keep others away from it. When people talk about it and think about it, it’s often considered of significant importance that this information is kept classified and away from other people who don’t have access. Strangely enough, no one really seems to think about it from the perspective of wondering why we keep all of this information classified in the first place.

In the old days, and I mean like the 1940s, classified information was important because it meant keeping it away from the Axis powers who meant to do us harm. During the Cold War, it was to keep the information away from the evil KGB and their cronies who were out to do all sorts of harm to the US people. I guess now it’s being kept from terrorists who, of course, mean to do us harm.

What I find myself asking more and more these days is why is the stuff we keep classified actually being kept classified. And almost always, the reasoning seems to fall short of any test of logic.

I was looking at the requirements for working for the State Department the other day and noticed that to be in practically any position, including a mechanic, you need at least a Secret clearance level. And this immediately started putting my thinking process through the obvious channels of one thing leads to another. I thought, why does a mechanic need a Secret clearance? And then you go through the usual Kevin Bacon approaches to connecting dots and start thinking “well, he might be working in the motorpool one day when some guy with Secret information might be talking about secret things.” And then you realize how absurd that is because the guy with Secret information shouldn’t be talking around people who don’t have clearances in the first place. And that got me thinking, what exactly would someone in the State Department be talking about that should be classified? And basically, it kept coming back to even more questions that bothered me because in each case, the “Secret” information appeared to me to be information that might be embarrassing if it got out but generally not something detrimental to the country itself.

And that’s what I’m starting to realize is the reason for most of our classifications today. We make things Confidential or Secret because we really don’t want anyone else to know what it is we’re tracking or talking about. Yet, the information we’re talking about probably shouldn’t be classified in the first place.

We live in a country that values its freedoms. But in order to truly value those freedoms, the people of that country need to know what their leaders are actually doing. But we don’t. Because they classify everything to make sure that we don’t know what they’re doing.

Does this protect our country? Not in the slight. As a matter of fact, it makes our country even more vulnerable because its people are putting others into power based on limited knowledge of what might really be going on. And we’re told that it’s better this way because what’s really doing on is too important for everyone to know what’s going on. It’s kind of one of those vicious cycles that doesn’t ever get any better.

So, who are we supposed to be protecting this information from? The Russians? The Chinese? The North Koreans? It all sounds good in theory, but in reality, so little of that information that is classified these days would make a difference if any of those entities actually knew what was going on. Well, maybe the schematics of how to build a nuclear device, or something like that, but that’s not really what we’re classifying. We’re classifying conversations between people who couldn’t build a nuclear device if their lives depended on it. They’re bureaucrats who really don’t have a lot of intricate knowledge about anything.

I sometimes think the majority of the stuff they classify is just to appear more important than they really are. And this mentality feeds upon itself and often makes things even worse.

Back when I was in the service and working in that field, I used to see things become classified that had just been printed in the New York Times. But because some bureaucrat read it, he would then type up the same article and then declare “SECRET” or even “TOP SECRET” and make sure only those with high clearances were able to read it. But the newspaper article would still be out there, being read by anyone who bought it, including parakeets who had it lined on the bottom of their cages. And as sad as this seems to admit, people were threatened with being brought up on charges because of disclosing something that they might have actually read in the newspaper but some other bureaucrat only read it in a security briefing (because of that doofus who classified it in the first place).

I’ll come out and just say what I believe here, but I think way too much information is deemed classified in a society that should be a lot more open with its information. We classify farm reports, trade manuals, articles from newspapers (as previously mentioned), financial forecasts, political meetings, patents, treatments for diseases and illnesses, phone call records, as well as so much more information all in the guise of protecting “national security.” And honestly, what’s the benefit?

To be honest, I don’t perceive this changing any time soon because bureaucrats love to think of themselves as more important than they really are. That’s never been different in our civilization. The greatest impediment to evolving knowledge is when we hoard knowledge and evidence, yet we seem to do that more and more these days.