One of the dilemmas of trying to be well read

Book Reviews, Books, Memoirs, Relationships, , , , ,

First off, this isn’t a post that’s designed to glorify how much I’ve read. Posts like that have a habit of being a bit condescending, boring and painful to get through. Yes, I’ve read a lot of stuff. But so have so many other people. This post really isn’t about that.

What this post is about is one of the consequences of reading a lot of stuff. As a social creature, I really love to share great literature and nonfiction with other people. The problem is: Most people don’t care.

An example: I just finished reading Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit, a brilliant writer and thinker who also wrote A Paradise Built in Hell, which I love for its alternative approach of explaining history and the ramifications that occur during history. Both books are chalked full of history, so because I work with a couple of history people, I thought about recommending those books to them. The response I generally received was a blank stare, almost an admission of “your review to me didn’t convince me that I should waste my time reading what you were talking about.”

And that’s the problem right there. Over the years, as I’ve read more and more brilliant stuff, I’ve often recommended it to other people. What I’ve discovered is that so few people take up the gauntlet and decide to read those books. Instead, they listen to your explanation of that book and then because you’ve explained everything about it to them, they decide not to read it, possibly thinking that they’ve already absorbed the knowledge of that book by the mere moment you spent explaining it to them. And then they go on with their lives, only reading the things they find significant.

This reminded me of two things. First, Rebecca Solnit’s book Men Explain Things to Me, in which she details an encounter she had with a boorish man who found out she was a writer and had written on a particular obscure topic so spent the next hour or so telling her she had to read this book about her subject if she was ever going to understand it like he did. Turns out, she wrote that book he was talking about, and as men behave like men, he took forever to acknowledge that once finding out, and then still managed to talk down to her regardless of realizing that fact.

Second, the concept of knowledge and literature requires a modern scholar to actually read the texts himself or herself and not just the cliff notes version (and especially not just the conversation about it from someone who read it instead). Imagine discussing Plato with someone who has never read it but watched a lecture on Plato once. That works great if neither of you have read it (you can be clueless together) but when you’re the one who has read him, discussing it with someone who has no intention of reading it is a complete waste of time.

That’s how I feel when I talk about literature with people and discover that they’re not going to read it, condemning it because they didn’t read it first. I talked about Solnit with one person and actually saw his face turn negative, like he was disgusted by the fact that he’d never heard of her before, and thus, she was unimportant in his mind. That’s the kind of emotional response I receive a lot when I talk about literature that is important yet obscure.

It’s almost gotten to the point where I may not discuss literature with people any more. I remember bringing up Haruki Murakami to one colleague recently and received that “I haven’t read him, so obviously he’s not significant” response. Keep in mind, Murakami is probably among the most respected authors living in the world today. But because he’s not “known” to some individual, I end up having to explain his significance, which finally ends with a sense of “well, if I should find myself on a deserted island, am already bored and his book is all that’s there, I might read it.” Again, I find myself thinking, screw you and I hope you remain uneducated for life. But fortunately, I’m not that elitist. Well, not after I’ve had my first morning diet Dr Pepper.

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President Obama Believes That Compulsory Voting Will Counteract the Role of Money in Politics

Healthcare, Politics, , , , , , ,

Quite often, when discussing politics and the long-running issue of how the majority of Americans don’t ever vote, the suggestion of compulsory voting is brought up as a solution. The argument is simplistic, indicating that because money is such an influence on politics that if more people participated, it would somehow negate the effect of the money people on elections. There are a couple of false causality loops playing into this theory, in that an argument is made that (correctly) points out that younger people tend not to vote, younger people’s issues are generally not entertained by politicians who follow messages put out by money (generally older and richer voters) (correct), and that if we enable more of those younger citizens to vote, we’ll see change (which I will sadly state is a falsehood, no matter how much I wish it were otherwise).

You see, part of the problem with elections in the U.S. is that our field of choices for who to elect is extremely limited, and ironically enough, limited to those who have money to get their message out there. If you’re not a representative of either of the two national parties (Democrat or Republican), you’re most often a marginalized candidate that is seen more as an outlier, or, worse, as a joke candidate. An example is Jimmy McMillan of New York City, who was the leader of The Rent Is Too Damn High Party. As you may suspect, his party had one issue, specifically rent being too damn high, and pretty much a list of other thoughts that no one paid any attention to. He was completely marginalized, and even though he might have had a real message that people should have listened to, he was considered a joke candidate, and his party as well.

If you consider that type of party to be a joke and think that more realistic third parties are better, just remember the examples of both the Reform Party (led by Ross Perot) or the Green Party (led at one time by Ralph Nader). Both candidates (and their parties) were considered disruptive to the mainstream parties, and thus, both men have been completely ostracized by their original parties ever since, unless they endorse the majority candidate of that party, and then they’re ignored again.

So, the point is that if you’re not voting for one of the two main parties, then you’re basically wasting your energy because very little gets accomplished outside of that sphere.

But those who are part of those parties will tell you that you should contribute because somehow those two parties will somehow represent you. But do they?

When I look at these dynamics, I usually ask myself a couple of questions of the candidates and their parties. Being in serious financial debt because of student loans, I ask myself which candidate will do something about that problem. Most often, the Republican will state that students put themselves in that probem, so why should they do anything to help? So, their response to that issue, to health care, to keeping food safe, well, they generally don’t care and will throw out some feel good statement like “the market will fix itself”, “a rising tide lifts all boats” or my favorite one: “Those who need help just need to lift themselves up by their bootstraps and do better.” Yeah, those are all positive responses to real situations (yes, that’s sarcasm). So what issues DO they actually deal with I might care about? Taking care of veterans? Used to be a huge one for the Republican Party. Turns out they’re really only interested in “helping” veterans while they’re still fighting wars, and quite often not even then, as we discovered when Republicans ran companies that ripped off the Army for food supplies during the Gulf War (which was never actually accounted for), created companies that profited heavily from war administration costs, like security and logistics, and when questioned, used political leverage to stop those questions from being further asked. Unfortunately, these days Republicans seem to be mostly interested in financial things that benefit very wealthy people, so after all the flag waving, I tend to avoid a lot of their rhetoric that doesn’t actually seem to be all that productive.

Which leaves me with the Democrats that historically have been on the side of the people rather than the rich. Well, somewhere around the 1960s, it was figured that this dynamic wasn’t going to remain because those Democrats started seeing government office as a place to make money rather than a place to do good government work and redistribute the money back to the people. The Republicans, usually happy in state governments (which kept them close to home where their big businesses were) started to see that money, too, and began funding PACs that fed a machine that brought more and more Republicans into national politics. Now, we have a Congress that is completely controlled by the rich class (the Republicans) and a good deal of the other side now pretty damn rich as well. What it means is that as both parties try to compromise with each other (which they’re not very good at doing these days), they side with anything that helps big business and rich people get richer. Let’s face it. The poor aren’t being sent to Washington, and when they are, they don’t stay poor for very long as they take advantage of all sorts of avenues for fueling wealth (even stealing if the opportunity arises).

But are Democrats out to solve the few problems I mentioned earlier? Like student loans? Nope. When it came time for them to do something about this, they sided with the credit card companies and the banks, just like the Republicans did. As for students, they basically threw them under the bus. Health care? Well, the Democrats were all for Obamacare, before they were against it, I suppose, but they haven’t done anything to actually fix it, letting it just run pretty broken, patting themselves on the back for passing it without first reading it and kind of hoping that it results in good things. An example: Passing the Affordable Care Act meant more people got insurance, but no attempts were made to get those insurance companies to be a lot more useful to those now under that insurance. Like me. I am under the same insurance now that I was under last year, but for some reason my insurance company has decided that it no longer pays for a drug I need to survive. With it, my condition improved. Without it, my health is completely falling apart again. Appealing is like shouting into the wind and hoping for results. Those are the kinds of things that no one is dealing with, so yeah we’re getting health care, but not actual care about our health. And most people won’t say anything because they’re thinking they got health care, but once they need to use it, they’ll find out they don’t really have it, and probably die before anyone can determine there was a problem.

Oh well.

So this brings me back to voting. How does voting for literally the same candidates that were decided for you before you ever had a chance to input your thoughts somehow equate to more democracy? Answer: It doesn’t. Right now, the Democrats are fielding Hillary Clinton for president. I never voted for her. I never supported her. She was a secretary of state because she was previously a senator. She was a senator for a state she didn’t even live in because her husband was previously president. Before that, she was someone’s wife. Good for her, but that’s not vetting a candidate. It’s choosing the most convenient name on the docket because we’re too lazy to actually find viable candidates who stand for something.

Is she for fixing student loans? No idea. She will probably never bring them up, unless there’s a path to victory for doing so. Does she support veterans? No clue. That’s the kind of candidates we get, and Obama is now telling us we need to participate more and vote for these kinds of people to somehow become more democratic. Sorry, but I just don’t see it.

And don’t get me wrong. I don’t dislike Hillary Clinton. I just don’t know anything about her and hate that the only time I’ll find out is when she’s already deadlocked into the nomination.

In the words of the renowned philosopher Forrest Gump: “That’s all I have to say about that.”

Has Been Viewed (since August 20, 2021): 619

Getting pulled in by Amway’s Pyramid Scheme Crap

Business, Economics, Politics, , , , , , ,

wealth povertyRecently, there’s been a lot of talk about Amway (headquartered in Ada, Michigan) because it was ridiculed on the very popular Netflix show House of Cards. As a result, Amway has responded, as well as Dick DeVos (the son of one of the co-founders of Amway). Basically, what it boils down to is that the company claims it is being misrepresented and everyone who has ever dealt with the company (judging from the comments on each one of these stories) feels the representation is more than deserved and probably overdue as well.

So, obviously, you’re probably wondering what Duane thinks about this whole thing. And fortunately, I have not only an opinion, but a story that sounds a lot like many of the stories that people have been telling in the comments section of each of those stories. You see, Amway has become a really powerful company that basically sets the tone for most of the discussions over this issue. The little people, like us, rarely get a word in because we don’t have the money to pay for media access like the people who run the pyramid schemes in the first place.

So, let’s go back some years ago when I was working as a low level executive for a major hotel chain. I was in their security department and out of the blue I received a phone call from someone who acted on the phone like he was a really good friend of mine. At the time, I had a lot of business associates who I kind of knew, so I was polite, and he then talked about a business opportunity that might benefit me in the future. As I was somewhat looking for a new job at this time (and most likely that was how the guy found me), I responded positively and ended up meeting this guy and his wife at another hotel in the city where some meeting was taking place. As I’m sure you suspect, that meeting was one of those Amway meetings. Little did I know at the time that it was just a part of their elaborate scheme. However, it did provide me with some insights into their financial toolkit.

What was interesting was that this was during the time when Amway’s name was dirt to most people. So the company being hailed was some other named company that claimed to have no connection with Amway. As a matter of fact, when this symposium started, and I heard the sales pitch, I turned to my “friends” and asked them if this was “Amway” and they said no, that there was definitely no connection. When they gave me a ride back home, all of the crap in their car (tissues and everything else, and I mean a ton of crap) all had the name “Amway” on them. In other words, the company was still recruiting people, but it was using another name to do it.

I will say that they use a really hard sale approach and those two that recruited me really used a guilt concept approach to try to rope me into their scheme. All I remember was how uncomfortable I was being in their car for the ride back (also remembering how they had thought it was a better idea to drive me, rather than me meeting them by driving my own car). They took an extra long way back to my work place (as it was literally down the street), and I remember them trying to sell me on the whole approach over and over again.

The next few days, I couldn’t get them to stop calling me. I told them I wasn’t interested, and that seemed to make no difference to them at all. They tried every foot in the door approach they could, and it got to the point where I found myself yelling at the phone, telling them to stop calling me. This was before the age of caller ID being prevalent on phones, so you’d pretty much have to answer the phone for anyone who called, and call blocking was still a decade or so away.

What I can say is that their products were mediocre at best, yet their markup was huge. When they explained the “business model” the first thing I thought was “pyramid scheme” because you had to be higher up on the pyramid in order to actually make any serious money, which meant so few people would actually be making money in this business.

The sad thing is: Amway is not the only company doing this sort of thing. Years later, I was back in school and someone contacted me about a job opportunity (I had been trying to find a job during this time, so obviously my name was found through some job site). I showed up and it was identical to the Amway meeting from before EXCEPT there were a bunch of “group leaders” who were escorting all of the marks. What I noticed was that for each male mark there, there was a hot female “group leader” who was that person’s contact. For the women (and there weren’t a whole lot of them), there was an attractive guy “group leader” assigned. I think I was the only one not assigned this way because the person who targeted me had gotten me through a business connection. But all I remember thinking was “wow, this is a freaking cult”. And its business model was identical to Amway except it felt more like it was spur of the moment, where the designer had attended an Amway meeting and thought, “hey, I can do this, too and do it so I’m on top of the pyramid when it starts”. What I specifically remember about this meeting was a computer printed sign as the markee on the main building and then driving by a week later to see that all of the signs for this “business” were gone and the place and a”for lease” sign was now on the front lawn.

I guess the point is that no matter how much these places try to pretend they’re legit, they’re basically bottom feeding and out to screw you. I remember talking to a lot of people who were at both meetings and they were almost always paycheck to paycheck or “get rich quick” thinkers. I also remember at the second meeting that one of the “group leaders” spotted me talking to other people and she quickly put a stop to it, apparently not wanting any of their marks to actually compare notes.

Now, I can’t say that these places don’t work for some people. But I’d feel a lot better if I read a lot more literature on these business models to hear successes, instead of what I do see. An example is the comments section of both articles I linked in this article on MLive’s site. Every now and then, one guy named David starts talking about how great his experiences were with these organizations. and then you realize he’s the one positive response out of 113 responders, which makes you wonder whether or not he’s not part of the organization’s PR rather than someone honestly responding to these stories.

All I can say is that had I taken the bait back then, my life would be so much worse than it is now because when people are after you only for your money, they don’t care what happens to you when you’re destitute and without options. Just look at the leaders of these businesses and their political choices. If you’re poor and without lots of money, they are certainly not the people to whom you’d turn, which is ironic because for the most part, they got rich off of people with very little.

Has Been Viewed (since August 20, 2021): 792

Dealing with companies with horrible (or lack of) customer service

Business, Computer Games, Technology, , , , , , ,

star wars satele

Recently, I’ve been dealing with one of those companies known for horrible customer service. You know, one of those corporate entities that everyone loves to hate, yet they keep doing their thing, somehow convinced that people will just forget about horrible customer service in the past, forgive them completely and even though they haven’t done anything to fix anything, their belief is everything will somehow improve.

The company we’re talking about is Electronic Arts, the monopolistic entity of the computer gaming world. Disclosure: Years ago, I worked for them when Maxis was bought by them (and I worked at Maxis Software). That doesn’t mean I have become their biggest fan (or worst enemy either). When I left them, I was lukewarm about the company. My complaint today is coming strictly from a customer, or at least a former customer if you want to be completely honest.

My problem stems from one of those game properties they have that I hate to love, but tend to return to as most gamers seem to have one or two of those kinds of titles in their back list. My title was Star Wars: The Old Republic, and I’ll be honest: It’s one of those games you can enjoy for great segments of time before you grow bored with it and put it on hold for months (or years) before picking it back up again.

Well, I was on my third or so time of going back to picking it up again when all of this happened. I grew bored with World of Warcraft, was looking for something to scratch my gaming itch, and decided to come back to Star Wars: The Old Republic. A few times in returning back, the game is a lot different from when I first played it. You see, back in the older days it was one of those $15/month games, like World of Warcraft. But it kind of failed at that type of game and became one of those free to play (or purchase to play free, or whatever acronym you need to use). The monthly fee was now waived, although if you wanted the full experience of the game (all your characters and not feeling like you’re a toddler in an adult game), you basically had to pay the full price ($15 a month). So, I went to update my billing information and was immediately denied. For some reason, it wouldn’t take my credit card information. So I went to the Paypal option, and it denied that as well.

What I discovered, after some time on the phone with their customer support (this is SWTOR customer support at this time) is that EA has disabled my pay options because during the time I was away from the game someone tried to access my account and buy a copy of FIFA (some soccer game, or something like that). The person was denied (only because my credit card information had lapsed; not through any great action on the part of EA). But because of this, my account has been frozen.

So, I had to then call EA (not SWTOR) customer support where I went through a maze of customer support people who all promised they could take care of it, but each needed the information told to them from the ground up and then hung up and proceeded to do absolutely nothing. A few days after EACH call, I got an email from someone who said he or she was the one who could fix this if I provided more information but that person couldn’t ask me the information by email, so I would have to call back to relay the correct information. Each time I called back, I was given yet another clueless customer service person who couldn’t acknowledge the person who left the message, so they had to start the process from the beginning again. I should add that he email address of the person who wrote me each time basically went back to someone who would state that he couldn’t help me unless I contacted customer service directly.

So, this went on for weeks. All I kept asking for was someone to unblock my account so I can put my paypal information onto my account and be able to play the game again. There has been absolutely no resolution to this issue whatsoever. Fun fun.

So, as it is, I will probably never buy another game from any entity involved with EA, including, of course, EA.

This is customer service at is very worst.

Has Been Viewed (since August 20, 2021): 1,155

Why Has the World Gone Downhill? An Analysis of Violence

News, Politics, Religion, Technology, Writing, , , , ,

 

One of the common tropes in storylines, especially for fantastical fiction, is the idea of returning to a period of time when things were “the old ways”, kind of like a time travel journey to the 1950s, or even a trip to the ancient past. The main character is seen as a fish out of water as he or she tries to use his or her knowledge of that time (and his or her future time) to get through such an experience. Now, part of me was thinking of focusing this post just on the writing aspects of this sort of speculation, but while I was thinking this through, I started to wonder something, and specifically I was wondering why we became what we are today rather than having continued the way things were “back in the day.”

This was prompted by an article covering a shooting that took place in Denmark and how that community (and that country) is now having to do things to make sure that such a tragedy doesn’t happen again. In other words, they are going to become a lot like other places around the world where violence is somewhat expected. I mean, no one wants to be caught off guard, right?

And that got me to thinking about that infamous line that used to happen in the United States whenever something tragic occurred. If this was the 1950s, the response would be something along the lines of “I can’t believe such a thing like that could happen here.” Or my other favorite: “I can’t believe Bob did that because he always seemed like such a nice guy. That sort of thing just doesn’t happen here.” I think you might be getting the picture.

In the 1970s, that message, while still happening in areas where you wouldn’t expect to hear it (part of the response to gun shootings that were happening in rural areas rather than urban settings) slowly changed to “I can’t believe that happened here. I mean, it’s not like we live in Chicago/New York/Detroit.” In other words, it was starting to happen in urban environments, so we were starting to expect stories like that, but it shouldn’t happen in a place like Wheatfield, Wyoming (if that was a real place). But now, it’s happening all over the United States, so that every new story that happens is treated as a one-off case of an almost expectant event, even if where that event took place might have been speculation before it happened. It’s happened so much in the United States that we’re now starting to be surprised by these stories happening in other countries, rather than by ones that happen in the United States.

So, because of the way these trends work, we’re going to be seeing more and more of this violence happening around the world in places where we’d last expect to see it. And then we’ll have to be surprised by something worse, like the level of violence, the perpetrators of the violence, or some other factor we haven’t considered yet.

Which leaves one important question:

Why?

Why are we seeing this sort of thing becoming a norm for our communities? Are we desensitized to violence so we now accept it as a part of our natural order? Is the human species evolving into a much more violent, chaotic creature that holds little regard for fellow humans? Is that creature devolving into the types of people we used to be before we took the Hobbesian path and developed government around us to protect us from each other? Is it because our means of hurting each other have become much more convenient and useable? Or are there other factors that cause us to do the sorts of things we do to each other these days?

Desensitization

There’s a lot of theory that addresses this possibility, mainly making the point that as people are exposed to more and more sensations of a certain type, they no longer find themselves affected by it and either no longer seek such sensations or have to increase the type of exposure to reach that level of influence again. We see this all of the time with the drugs we take, from cigarettes to alcohol to both legal and illegal substances. Most of the time, the first exposure to the item causes an initial positive reaction which is then transferred into a loss that needs that input again. Continuous exposure acts as a certain punctuated equilibrium, which means we get used to a higher level of usage and continue to have to increase the dosage to provide the same “high” that we had before.

For violence, there’s no reason this wouldn’t work the same way as well. We become comfortable with the amount of violence we’re exposed to and then seek out higher levels of violence. As exposure theory goes, it makes sense.

Or does it? The problem with exposure theory is that the influence might increase for an individual, and it would take more and more violence to affect that person, but why would this somehow translate to people in other areas now experiencing violence where they didn’t have it before? The theory doesn’t explain that, unless the idea of violence is that it’s more of a virus that spreads rather than something that occurs in pockets and then spreads out, affecting those previously exposed to it.

Another possibility involving that theory is the types of violence inherent in the system. An argument is often made about video games, television and movies that might be desensitizing people, and unlike the virus affects of spreading violence, these would feed on subsequent communities just by the appearance to where people would consume these types of media. Again, that’s assuming these activities to be a causal factor rather than as a recognition of the violence (meaning no causal effect at all, or very little at least).

But I don’t want to just ignore the possibility because from first hand experience, I remember being a fan of horror movies when I was growing up. I remember watching the very first Nightmare on Elm Street with a bunch of military coworkers, and I was shocked at the violence in that movie, and it was extremely scary (at that time). Having watched many horror movies during that period of time, I remember watching that original movie again years later and thinking how tame it was in comparison to “real” horror movies. I certainly didn’t feel that way the first time I watched it. So, there’s a bit of desensitization going on there, or it may just be a stimuli adjustment. Or it may have no connection at all to violence because if one sees it as “reaction to being scared” rather than “reaction to violence” there may be absolutely no ties whatsoever. Again, something to keep in mind when analyzing such phenomena.

Evolution of the Species

This is one of those possibilities that truly scares me because with evolution, you have the whole survival of the fittest thing going on, and if the fittest is the most violent, then we’re in for some really bad problems. But what if our dilemma is that the human condition is now one that is favored through violence rather than through cooperation? There’s a strong believe that through our evolution, we have reached a point where social communities are what propel us forward beyond the previous adaptations and around other species that didn’t achieve this level of evolutionary maturity. Okay, if that’s the case, why is violence becoming more and more a response to how we handle these social encounters instead of community and broad cooperation? If our evolutionary process made sense, there would be a strong possibility that people would find ways to get along in diverse circumstances (instead of taking a gun to work and killing the boss during an altercation) and on an even higher level, we should probably see fewer wars and regional conflicts.

But we don’t. Instead, after several wars to end all wars, we’re still as violent towards each other as we’ve ever been. Right now, our Congress is meeting to figure out how to give our president more authority to attack people we don’t get along with. For some reason, no money is being discussed for allocation that will be spent to foster peace with the people we don’t get along with. The response to this criticism is “it would be a waste of money because they don’t want peace”. And we know this why? Because we’re currently trying to kill them while they’re trying to kill us (or at least allies of us). In our present sense, we see what we’re doing as justified, yet we’re still doing the same violent things we were doing in the past, and now we just have more efficient ways of doing it.

So, the question is asked, are continuing to become a more violent people? And I don’t mean just the United States, or the west, or anything like that. I mean humans as a whole. Are we just becoming more violent?

Or were we always this violent? Except we had governments that were capable of keeping us from killing each other (except during national campaigns where they got to send people out to kill in their names)? If you’ve ever been to war, it’s a pretty brutal experience. Oh, we like to fluff it up with 21st century technology and act like we’re doing something much different than how our forefathers fought, but when it comes down to it, you still have people out in the middle of some place they don’t want to be trying to kill a bunch of other people who don’t really want to be out there doing that either. And we pin medals on the ones that come back alive (and sometimes those who didn’t), and then create celebrations for the sacrifices they made. But in the end, we’re rewarding a bunch of people who are doing things that civilized people probably shouldn’t be doing any way.

But of course, someone will say that the others guys MADE us do it, that they were out there doing atrocities. And I’m sure the other guys will say that those of us attacking them were doing all sorts of affronts to humankind, like sleeping with each other on the wrong days of religious texts, eating something that someone’s interpretation of God says people shouldn’t be eating for arbitrary reasons that someone else will defend to the death, and all such other reasons (some good, some ridiculous, and some just straight out confusing, even to the people following them).

Which kind of pushes the whole Hobbesian argument that maybe we’ve been comfortable and safe from the mannerisms of our fellow humans by a simple agreement to follow some arbitrarily chosen noble whose real purpose is to make sure that people don’t go around killing each other all in return for a promise to make sure that those who DO kill each other will be held responsible for such actions (so that might keep them from doing so). If our only reason for avoiding violent tendencies is because of some agreement our ancestors made with each other, then it might not be surprising why a civilization that tends to teeter closer to anarchy might not feel the need to follow preordained orders of a monarchical society that leads for the simple reason that those in charge just feel they should be in charge.

Think of it this way. If you’re a citizen of an order that you don’t believe in any more, because few in that society do, and lump that in with a belief that there’s no reason to live the life that your ancestors did because that’s only going to provide a lifetime of hardship and destitution, there are people in your life (or on the edge of it) you don’t like, and you see violence as an option rather than something to avoid, I wonder if that would explain why a lot of these events are becoming a norm rather than the anomaly they used to be.

I mean, let’s be honest. I don’t have the answers. But I do have a lot of questions, and I’m starting to suspect that people aren’t really asking questions any more but are just pontificating about what they think are the answers to a whole lot of questions that people stopped asking.

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The Importance of Dates on Modern Civilization

Memoirs, News, Politics, Relationships, Social Networking, Writing, , , , , ,

Yesterday was the official celebration of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. If you didn’t know any better, you might think that January 19 (yesterday) was the day he was born. He wasn’t. He was born on January 15, 1929. We celebrate it on the 19th because, well, because that’s when we decided to start celebrating it. During the first President Bush’s term, the decision was made to celebrate his birthday on the third Monday of January. The official day because a more convenient day, and that’s why we celebrate it when we do.

The same thing happened to two other U.S. leaders, Presidents Washington and Lincoln. The two were celebrated on their birthdays in February but because they were so close together (a few weeks apart, separated by Valentine’s Day), the decision was made to celebrate Presidents’ Day instead, incorporating both holidays into one on a date that was significant for neither one. Welcome to the way we do things in America.

So, why do we focus on the days anyway? Let’s just put aside the fact that we don’t actually celebrate the specific days, but celebrate somewhere near those days. The question still remains. Why do we acknowledge them in the first place?

You could say that it has something to do with paying respect to our elders, or even our founders. But if that was so, why aren’t we celebrating Jefferson, Adams, Monroe, Henry Ford, Rockefeller and/or Steve Jobs/Bill Gates? I mean, there is no shortage of people who probably deserve some mention, yet we focus only on very specific people and, if lucky, add someone to that list after decades of struggle over whether or not we should be more inclusive.

Perhaps an answer to this question may require us to step away from U.S. recognitions and move towards some of the memorials that happen in other countries and civilizations. In Southeast Asia, quite often certain events in history are memorialized and whenever those dates come around each year, all sorts of future events occur that can sometimes be disruptive to the people living in our time. An example is a peoples’ movement that occurred in South Korea, where protesters were killed on a particular date during an uprising in the 1960s. Whenever that year came around, common citizens would rise up and riot again, almost as if remembrance was a signal to regurgitate protest movements all over again. And then a year later, if the police struck hard enough the year before, those subsequent protests would then be added to he common memory of something to memorialize each year going forward. Kind of cool if you’re a protesting civilian, but must have been hell on the people trying to run a stable government.

So why do we memorialize in the first place? What purpose does it serve? Does remembering bring happiness? If you look at something like the Vietnam Memorials that exist in numerous states and at the national level, happiness is generally not the feeling you get from such memorials. Sadness and regret is often the reaction. But I would say that for the Vietnam experience, perhaps sadness and regret might not be a bad thing because at least then it causes people to think twice before making the same type of mistake again. That would be great if that’s what actually happens. But unfortunately, that’s not what happens. As a matter of fact, I believe that the people who should be focusing on the events are the ones who tend to ignore them most, basically putting on blinders and going forward and doing the same things next time around. It’s like the protest spheres they set up at political campaigns. The people who protested were hoarded into locations that were designed to be out of sight and ear of the people attending the functions, so that the ones listening to the politicians were oblivious to the protests of people who really wanted the people making decisions to be aware of. For a country that modeled itself on free speech, we created a dynamic that did everything possible to avoid any kind of adverse conversation, meaning that people who made decisions never had to listen to anyone who might actually have a problem with those decisions.

Which brings me back to the idea of certain days celebrating certain things, especially in a way that avoids any conversation about those things. Columbus Day is an example of one of those days that could have led to a lot of great conversations about some of the atrocities carried out in our name by our previous generations. But once the conversation started becoming difficult, it stopped being a national holiday, and now no one talks about those instances because there’s no official day that causes us to have to remember what we did. Sure, a few press junkets attempt to broach the subject, but more often than not, the conversation is flat, and we move onto the next holiday celebration quickly so we don’t have to deal with the consequences of the things we might have done. Instead, we’ll go to some foreign soil one day in the future (or maybe just a few years ago), attempt some modern day version of Manifest Destiny, and then claim that we shouldn’t be accountable for our bad actions because there was nothing in our past that should have taught us otherwise.

In other words, my fear is that our national remembrances are no longer being used for the purposes they should have been utilized, and instead we’re coaxing such days with ways to bring profit to our manufacturing and sales sectors. Instead of looking at Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday as a time to reflect on how far the civil rights movement went and how much further it needs to go, some company will try to sell us fried chicken, or on President’s Day: beds, or whatever fancies us, and in the end we’re going to learn very little about the mistakes we’ve made and how we can avoid making them in the future.

One day, after I’m famous and have cured the ills of our society, I hope they celebrate my birthday. Unfortunately, it occurred on Lincoln’s birthday, so they’ll probably never celebrate mine. And knowing my luck, I’ll end up dying on the same day as Kurt Cobane or some other known figure, and that day will forever be linked to that individual as well. If I’m truly lucky, people will remember me and some manufacturer will hopefully sell something people can use on that day, like breath mints or condoms. After all, that’s what helps one’s legacy remain within the hearts of people for generations to come.

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Solving the School “Costs” Problem

Business, Economics, Education, News, Politics, , , , , , , ,

star-wars-darth-vader-senseRecently, President Obama push forward the idea of making community colleges “free” to students. This, supposedly, will give downtrodden students an opportunity to get an education and improve their lot in life.

A nice thought. A nice idea. But again, it does too little and in the wrong place.

First off, I think it’s great that our president is talking about cutting the costs of education and in a roundabout way, talking about cutting down on student loans. But this is another one of those attempts to create savings in an area that is actually not the problem. Community colleges are generally pretty cheap, and if you’re living a normal life, there’s no way that you really can’t pay your way through a community college program. Where the real problem exists is in higher level institutions and in the student loan fiasco that exists in that realm. But as I’m sure you realize, no one is doing anything about the fact that so many people who have student loans are basically screwed for the rest of their lives.

And that’s really the problem they need to address and never will. Instead, what seems to happen is you mention the student debt problems, and you get a sort of Mitt Romney response of “you shouldn’t have taken out the debt if you weren’t planning to pay it back.” Yeah, that’s true, but people took out so much debt to pay for college based on this fantasy that jobs would be prevalent after graduation. And that hasn’t been the case.

So, what should government do?

Well, for one, forgive student loan debt AND then work on making colleges affordable so that people don’t need to take out so much debt. But we’re not doing either one of these. Focusing on community colleges for savings in tuition is like going to a random soda machine and making everything half priced in one place at one time where few people are going to even know it’s happening. If you wanted to make a difference, you go to the original distributor, put all the sodas on an inexpensive rate and then notice as everyone pays less money for soda. Discounting a discounted tuition (which is what community colleges basically are) doesn’t solve anything as no new people are going to be able to pursue education because they’ve already scraped the bottom of the barrel by making those school affordable to anyone who actually has time. If someone can’t afford a community college now, their problems are probably much worse off, meaning they’re focusing on whether or not they should pay the heat bill or the electricity rather than whether or not college is affordable.

What caused the problems of today was that bankers decided that college debt should not be forgiveable, and they made Congress back that up with law. Meanwhile, they allowed themselves to declare bankruptcy if they make stupid financial decisions and had Congress back that up as well. In other words, if you make a stupid mistake like try to get an education, you will never be forgiven for that mistake. If you take billions of dollars of money that you don’t actually own and invest it in blow and hookers, you can declare bankruptcy and five years later you can do it all again. As long as that mindset is part of our dynamic, we’re NEVER going to solve the problems inherent in our system. Mainly because the people who can solve it are benefiting from the problem in the first place. In the end, it all gets paid for by the people who can’t afford to get a good job because their educational goals have stifled any future economic advancement.

So, when I hear a president say he’s REALLY going to solve the student college problem, I need to hear a lot more than “we’re going to trim a few leaves off a tree in hopes of growing a forest.”

And this is coming from someone who actually likes our president. That doesn’t mean he gets a free pass every time he does something like this.

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Sorry, but it’s not all about the bass; it’s all about the story

Computer Games, Writing, , , , , ,

Recently, I found myself back in the world of Azeroth, or to those who need more information: World of Warcraft. I’ve been playing that game off and on for years, and recently I ran out of stuff to play, deciding I’d fire up the game again and see what I’ve missed.

Now, to catch up our story, when we last left our characters in the sword and fantasy world, I was level 85, and the last expansion was Cataclysm. Since then, there have been two expansions: Mist of Panderia and Warriors of Draenor. Well, Draenor is brand new (weeks old) and Panderia has been out for a while. But to get from 85 to 90, I had to go through Panderia, at least until I could go to Draenor, where the game lets me level up to 100.

What I wanted to talk about was Mists of Panderia, which from what I’ve been reading didn’t get the most stellar of reviews. And I can understand why. As I played it, it felt very much like an attempt to parody the world of China, and to do that it introduced a new race of Kung Fu Pandas. Yeah, I’m not kidding about this.

But after all of that, I found a couple of really interesting tidbits to keep me going. And those tidbits were specifically story related. To give you an example, I was playing through the story and at one point you have to relive the incidents that a Dwarf engineer went through. Now, the voice over is a Scottish dwarf who has probably one of the funniest voices in the game, and just listening to him narrate made the game fun alone. But then there comes a time where he’s spotting for a sniper and then befriends a raccoon, which the sniper then kills. Now, this may sound kind of harsh or violent, but it was probably one of the funniest scenes in the game by far, because this poor dwarf took the whole cartoon violence very seriously and for the continuation of those missions NEVER forgave his partner for killing his pet raccoon. The whole banter was quite inspired and well worth the play through.

And that’s the point. I think a lot of games are missing the sense of fun that Blizzard tends to invoke in its games. At one point during the beginning of Draenor, you meet a new soldier on the frontier, and his name is something like Newbie Greenguy, or something like that. It reminded me of the one noob character they had running through Cataclysm who the undead npcs were always trying to kill off, just to get him out of the game and out of their hair.

Those kinds of funny moments are truly inspired, and I wish there were more of them in other games.

But for now, I’m happy finding them whenever I can. And sometimes you find them in the strangest of places. One of my favorites for the longest time was when I found a Dwarf Fishing Rod, which was actually a shotgun. It’s one of those jokes that takes you a second to get, but it so cool when you finally do.

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Some updates and current projects

Education, The Deck Const, Writing, , , , , , ,

caption134Well, the first semester at the new college in Texas is finally coming to a close, and let’s just say that things haven’t been all that great, but at the same time, I’m still here, and hopefully things will start to improve a bit. It’s honestly a struggle to teach at a college/university where students aren’t all that interested in doing the work, the institution isn’t all that interested in supporting its faculty and staff, and there’s just not a whole lot of money to pay debts that were actually promised.

Yeah, it’s been a bit of a struggle. We’re all being put on furlough, which means we’ll be losing 20 percent of our pay next semester, and it just makes it really difficult to want to continue coming to a place where you feel like you’re not really respected for the kind of work that you do. Oh well.

As for my writing projects, The Deck Const: Shadows & Rumors was published last month, so it’s now available on most e-readers and on paperback through Amazon.com. I was pretty happy with it.

My next project is a series of three books all involving the King Arthur legend. For years, I’ve been doing the background research for this novel, and now I’m finally ready to start putting it onto paper. The working title has been Return to Camelot, but I can’t promise that’s the name it’s going to end up having.

Not much else going on. The Christmas season is about to come upon us, so I’m hoping that means a few weeks of rest and relaxation. But, of course, I intend to write during that time, so we all know how that whole rest thing goes under such circumstances.

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Deconstructing Our History

Politics, , , , ,

A couple of years back, we started a very interesting trend, and that was to begin to question our histories of numerous different events in our past. This sort of thing started happening (more frequently) back when I was in grade school, which means about the 1970s, as this was the first time I remember having a discussion on the simple premise that “Columbus discovered America”. Back then, I remember the teacher talking about how there were already Native Americans here, so, in fact, Columbus discovered an area that was already discovered, and thus, really didn’t do anything but reveal it to the rest of European society. Back then, in the 1970s, that was the extent of our reconstruction of history. We focused on the event, and we were told to question the facts. So we did. Now fast forward thirty years later, and we’re no longer just questioning the events, but we’re now focusing our attention on whether or not these events were for the good of mankind in the first place.

The discussion of Columbus today isn’t whether or not he first discovered America, which most people no longer believe, but now we seem to be heavily focused on the horrible atrocities that were conducted in his name, and mostly because of his “discovery” of the new world. Elias Isquith argues that Columbus was so bad that 5 historical monsters in history were less evil than he was. When you’re being compared unfavorably to Oliver Cromwell, dictator Francisco Franco, Suharto, Milosevic, and Saddam Hussein, you’re losing your positive spin on the minds of most people. Not to mention a scathing report that was delivered by Jonn Oliver asking how a Columbus holiday could still be a thing, well, let’s just say that the Columbus camp isn’t doing so well these days.

During a class last week, I was trying to introduce the concept of how Columbus was currently being ridiculed where he once was hailed, a student took offense at Columbus’s name and didn’t seem to even realize that she was making the same point my lecture was doing because she was so incensed at the atrocities the guy committed that she couldn’t understand how the mention of him shouldn’t cause her to stop thinking and just be angry, even though the point of the lecture was to point out exactly what she was trying to argue. Talk about a bad reputation. It would be a lot like saying you can’t about the bad things Hitler might have done because Hitler did bad things. Yeah, I know, bringing up Hitler leads to the end of the Internet, but it’s just to make a point. Right now, people see Columbus as that bad, and that didn’t used to be the case.

What I tend to see happening is a mass effort to deconstruct a lot of our past histories. Some years back (not too many back), there was a sincere attempt to ridicule Thomas Jefferson for owning slaves. This turned into an absurd argument because where it began as “Thomas Jefferson had slaves, so he’s bad”, it eventually devolved into “but he couldn’t be all bad because he did serve as the liberal voice behind the founding of the United States, and that’s gotta stand for something, right?” Then the debate turned into one of those “well, you had to understand the people of that time to realize why they did what they did”, which is always right around the corner from “we’re so much more enlightened today than they were back then” (even if we’re talking about something that happened fifteen minutes ago).

The simple logic should tell most people that everyone is flawed. Sure, while there’s a Sister Teresa for every several thousand people, the majority of people are Donald Trumps or Kardashians, who want to get rich, famous or, for simple vulgarity, just want to have sex with more people than they did the day before. We like to think that we’re evolved, enlightened and so much better than our forefathers, but we’re really not. We see that whenever we end up in a situation where government collapses, a cop kills someone of a different racial identity, the power goes out for more than a couple of hours, or any other number of events that remind us that we’re not that much more evolved than we’d like to think we are. Yet, for some reason, we keep coming away from these situations convinced that we’re somehow better than we were before, yet we keep following the axiom of not changing anything and always being surprised at the fact that history always repeats itself, including the usage of that phrase. The only thing we’re really actually good at is not learning, which is good because it’s one of the things that we do especially well.

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