I keep hearing a lot of talk about class warfare these days, but as of this day, I have yet to see an actual class battle take place. But the signs of impending doom seem to be all around, and yet it’s almost as if no one seems to believe such a thing is possible, so they don’t prepare for any such thing. Yet, it’s so hard not to see all of the signs of problems all around us, and then wonder if people are just jumping over backwards to do everything to avoid the inevitability of calamity. I don’t know. It just seems like it should be so obvious, but people are so not interested in changing their status quo, that they’ll do anything to avoid thinking about it.
But things are bad all over. We know that the power and all of the goods are quickly being hoarded by very few who pretend that it’s the “natural order of things”. And whenever people point it out, they’re accused of being socialists, communists or what ever “ist” can be thought of at the time.
But things are really bad. I don’t just mean the economy. I mean the economy ebbs and flows. That’s what economies do. But there are so many people who are falling to a hopeless despair and giving up. At least during the Great Depression, there was a sense that after people hunker through the hard times, at least there will be a sense of good times to come. Now, you don’t feel that. You get a sense that a few very rich people want all of the resources, and if they don’t get it, then they’ll do whatever necessary to put down anyone who gets in their way. The ones who are suffering don’t see a future sense of prosperity. They see either eventual death, a moment of respite that might last until they die, or despair. You don’t really see that much different than that.
In the past, you used to be able to at least see another place you could go where things are better, but when you’re in one of the most powerful countries in the world, where are you supposed to go instead? Europe isn’t doing that well. Anywhere else is a cesspool, filled with people killing each other over stupid, little things that make no sense other than to brutal people who live in brutal times.
It seems like there’s a class war about to begin, but everyone keeps waiting for someone else to make the first move. I’m not even looking for a future leader to make things better. I’ve pretty much given up on that. I’m waiting for something else, something that resembles Mad Max and Tina Turner singing about a place called Thunderdome. At least they had cool cars that chased each other back then. I guess it’s something to look forward to.
Recently, the Casey Anthony trial took all of the breath out of America, as people focused day and night on whether some young woman killed her kid. Personally, I wasn’t all that transfixed by the trial, but I do pay a lot of attention to what other people obsess over. I am a communications scholar, after all.
However, one thing that caught my attention is the crime she was eventually convicted for, in lieu of the major ones for which she was exonerated by the jury (as long as Nancy Grace isn’t considered one of her peers, as that woman doesn’t know the meaning of the word “impartial”), was lying to the police. They couldn’t get her for murder, neglect or bad parking, but they got her for lying to police.
Personally, I have a real problem with this. I’ve always been a strong advocate to not liking whenever government tries to get a foothold in control over its people, ever. And one area is the crossroads of compliance and truth. I don’t think people understand what a trauma it can be to have the police questioning you, trying to get you to slip up in a conversation so that they can use it against you in a court of law. The police are not your friends, your allies, or anyone with whom you have any allegiance. Yet, somewhere down the line, there’s this belief that if the police ask you a question, you have to answer truthfully.
I disagree. If I’m ever accused of anything, I would like to think it is in my personal rights to do everything possible to keep the government from suppressing my personal rights of freedom. They may have a responsibility to figure out the truth, but that doesn’t equal a responsiblity on my part to help them do that. Government is NEVER on your side, no matter how many political ads try to say otherwise in hopes of getting another corrupt politician elected. The police work with the sole purpose of convicting people who they suspect of crimes. When you are in their headlights, you stopped being protected by the government and become a target for all sorts of abuse. And historically, government and police are well known of doing everything possible to take advantage of that abuse. Lately, the Supreme Court has been siding with them on quite a few cases, meaning that if you’re ever suspected of anything, kiss your ass good bye because there is no one left to protect you from the system itself. Certainly not the truth.
I’ve seen the truth manipulated in ways that would make a politician spin. As an investigator, I remember working on cases where very directed investigators would go after a suspect with such a zeal that you wonder what kept them from launching it in the first place. I’ve seen people who could have been very innocent who were railroaded because some inquisitor “felt” that was his target, and all other logic was irrelevant. I remember having a conversation with an investigator when I pointed out that the “suspect” couldn’t have been guilty because of the logic of the facts, and being told “Well, I’m sure she’s guilty of something.” That’s the mindset that leaves me realizing that in no circumstance would I ever want to have to rely on the “truth” as being the difference between my freedom and my incarceration.
There have been a few cases recently where politicians have been brought down strictly on the lying crime. Most of them I didn’t like because I generally don’t like politicians anyway, but at the same time, I’ve liked the whole “crime of lying” thing even worse. I think we have something really to worry about when we’re more concerned about putting someone in prison because our interrogation tripped someone up into saying something he or she may not have meant, or we threw so much information at someone that 1 + 1 doesn’t equal 2 to them anymore. I’ve seen it happen, and it’s a sad day when we put someone away because we didn’t like them (like Casey Anthony) but said nothing about the way we did it because we didn’t like them in the first place.
I figure most people will disagree with me because of how they feel about the Casey Anthony case. That, unfortunately, is practically my point, but people stop listening once they let their passions do their thinking for them.
The Ivory Tower I live in where everything makes much more sense
Unfortunately, whenever it comes to political topics, almost every article or piece of analysis is so tied into someone’s personal political perspective that very little information is ever shared. The 2012 Presidential election is no different. If someone is a diehard Republican, the person probably doesn’t like President Obama and will argue all sorts of things negative about him, his current administration and his future prospects. If someone is a diehard Democrat, chances are pretty good that the person will see only great things about President Obama and horrible things about any conservative, and blinders will lead the conversation that way. Almost always, someone on one side of the fence will see any analysis that favors the other side as biased, and everything that favors his or her side as on the level. Some things rarely change.
I’ll come straight out and say it. I don’t really care who wins the presidency in 2012. If Obama wins, great. If a random Republican wins, I’m fine with it. If Zippy the Wonder Clown wins, I’ll dust off my clown shoes and laugh right alongside him. Again, I don’t have a stake in this race.
What I do have is a perspective that is seeing where things are starting to come out right now. And two factors will make the biggest difference for 2010. Not really anything else, aside from some cataclysmic event or great deal of fortune that no one has anticipated. Those sorts of things always make a difference, and as I can’t predict those sors of things, I’ll just leave it at that. So, let’s talk about the two factors.
1. The Economy and Jobs. Right now, this is probably the one factor that will make or break a reelection for President Obama. And unfortunately, most economists don’t seem to have a clue on this one, so I’ve stopped listening to them because most of them are myopic tunnel breathers who are so stuck in their own thoughts that they haven’t come up for air to realize what’s really going on. First off, the economy is not the stock market, or even the housing market. It’s not the banks. It’s not the future of Google, Best Buy, IBM, Microsoft, GM, Ford or Texaco. What really matters right now is the perception of jobs. And I don’t mean Steve Jobs. People are out of work, and the job outcome is getting worse, not better. Just as the Bush Administration tried to lie its ass off and pretend that it was creating new jobs, the Obama Administration is doing the same thing. And like before, people don’t buy hype and crap for long. When people are out of work, see other people losing their jobs, hear nothing but horrific stories of the job market, a Wall Street economist talking about how great the job market is means very little.
Just today, the Navy announced it was going to be letting sailors go and not approving as many for continuing their careers. The Air Force is about to do the same thing. The Army is about to move into a wind-down with its conflicts, and the obvious next step is going to be the same kind of layoffs there as well. Government has decided the military is no longer off limits for cuts, so cutting is exactly what’s going to happen. More people are going to lose jobs and be tossed out of the military when their tours are complete. This means a whole bunch of young people are going to be pushed out into an already depressed job market. More people are going to be competing for the same soft labor jobs that have been so scarce already.
What exactly does that mean? Well, let me ask you this. Do you really want thousands of people who just came back from war put into no-win labor markets where they trade stability for dispair and uncertainty? I’m not sure I do. But then no one really asks me these things. I’m not exactly sure I feel all that comfortable with discouraged, out of work, young men who have been carrying around guns for the last few years with people who hated them shooting at them as their former career. I don’t see a lot of good things coming out of that mix.
But the point is: If Obama doesn’t find himself in a situation where jobs are being created left and right, his reelection chances are pretty slim. All other factors are irrelevant. Much as the first Clinton election proved, it really is all about the economy. The economy took a previously popular war president and made him unemployed. Without something changing quickly, Obama doesn’t look like he has a great chance at a sure-fire reelection.
2. The Republican Candidate. Now that I said Obama needs to turn around the economy before the election, there is one factor that might make the economy somewhat irrelevant. If the Republicans don’t come up with someone they can rally behind, then a bunch of ghosts yelling profanities at the president aren’t going to lead to an election that pushes the incumbent out if there’s no one there to replace him. Right now, the Republican front runners are horrifically lacking in any merit. None of them have any real charisma. None of them have a futuristic vision, aside from “Obama sucks”, and none of them have any ideas that sound any different than “stop Democrats from taxing us” and “cut spending”. Neither of those ideas are worthy of rallying a group of people towards a positive election.
As long as the Republicans continue to run around with no head and spend their energy taking pot shots from behind the barn, Obama may just win by default, even with the worst economy in recent history, even with no jobs created, and even with defaulting the government because the president is incapable of providing enough leadership to cause an actual brokered deal. There’s only so much, “the Republicans are evil” that the public will take. But again, if the Republicans (evil or not) can’t come up with a solid hitter to back for the election, none of it makes a difference.
Which leaves us with a very dismal election that might end up being the lowest turnout in many decades because people may just give up on the whole enterprise. The 2008 election caused people to become invigorated with the idea of changing government for the better, but because it hasn’t really changed, other than a new group of incompetent leaders replaced a group of previously incompetent leaders, that wave of energy may just sit out the whole next election. And that would be a horrible result, because the one thing I hate more than incompetence, corruption and narcissistic leaders is a country of people who don’t care because they don’t feel their input really matters and that things are going to suck no matter who they put into office.
Now, the funny part of this article is that if it gets any review at all, it will probably be massively negative because neither side will come away from the reading thinking I was on its side, and therefore, they will disapprove. That’s somewhat ironic because that’s the problem our country is going through right now. And no matter how much I try to point it out and push us to a better place, you can’t make a horse drink even after leading it to water. Sometimes, you have to get a new horse and let the old one starve.
I’ve had my Ipad 2 for a few weeks now, and let’s just say that every other device I bought before it has turned out to be useless in comparison. For the longest time, I was convinced that I would find no use for an Ipad, figuring that it was one of those devices that doesn’t really do anything I need. Boy, was I wrong. Let me explain the features that have made this device my daily technology “thing”.
1. Email. I can check both my regular email and my work email on the same device. In addition to this, it also updates my calendar with my work calendar, so that I am always able to check my schedule and not have to rely on my office computer to do so. That’s really nice.
2. News. I used to use a Kindle to read the Washington Post. Now, I read the Washington Post on the Ipad. It also means not having to lug around the Kindle every day. Even my Kindle books can be read on the Ipad, using the Kindle app (at least for now until Apple decides it no longer likes Amazon).
3. Web surfing. Yeah, that rocks on the Ipad. It rocks on my computer, too, but when you can do it all on one device, it’s great.
4. Movies/TV/Music. All of it is on my Ipad. I can watch or listen to anything I want. Some movies I couldn’t watch on the Ipad because they weren’t in Itunes. Well, I bought a program that converts them. We’re fine with that now, too.
5. Comic Books. I can actually read DC and Marvel comics on the Ipad using their subsequent apps. The price of the comics is a bit expensive, but it’s possible to do so, and one day I might just start buying them that way. Not sure yet, though.
6. Pages/Numbers and Powerpoint-like software. I’ll be able to put all of my school-teaching powerpoint slides onto the Ipad and bring it into school to do my lessons. It may takes some configuring, but I suspect it will make life much easier than trying to maintain other devices and flash drives and all that crap.
7. Apps Galore. There are many games, productivity software and so much more that are available for the Ipad. I found a drawing program that I’m starting to use to draw my Stickman comics. It’s making it so that I can do a lot of things I couldn’t do before, without having to be tied down to a computer.
Negatives:
1. It’s not my main computer. It’s not as powerful as my main computer. It’s not in a Windows environment, and yes, I hate all things Mac. I’m not one of the fanboys of Apple at all, so this part of the equation does not make me happy.
2. Can’t play WoW on it. Even though World of Warcraft is designed to practically play on an Etch-A-Sketch with such low requirements the game has, it still can’t be played on an Ipad. Nor do I think it ever will be. This means that I have to still use my main computer to play the game. Which is fine because even if the Ipad could play it, I doubt I’d get the processing power my PC gets when playing the game.
3. Apple makes the thing. Yes, that’s a negative. Apple still has its walled garden, and I fear that it’s going to end up blocking off something I like to do because Apple tends to be moronic when it comes to things like that. They’re having a fight right now with Amazon, which means I may lose my Kindle ability on the Ipad eventually. It has problems with Google, which may mean loss of access to that environment. Apple has that “can’t play well with others” problem, and because of that I’m always fearing that my device is going to be as useless as my Motorola Xoom. What a mistaken purchase THAT was.
I watched the first season of The Killing, and for a show that started off so well, I can’t help but wonder what went wrong. It started off as a Twin Peak-ish kind of show where a young girl is murdered (the girl who shows up in so many television shows these days, from Heroes as Claire’s twisted roommate to Californication as the underage girl who seduces David Duchovny and then steals his manuscript, publishing it as her own), and the detectives spend the first season trying to figure out who did it. But as so many others have already pointed out, the biggest problem with this show was that they created two characters for the detectives who have to be the most incompetent investigators in the history of detective work. There were so many times where I sat, thinking, “really? That’s the direction you’re going to take in this investigation?” It was like they hired a bunch of office workers who have never seen the inside of a police department, other than one on TV, and then gave them detective badges, letting them loose on the streets of Seattle. And then because that wasn’t good enough, they had to hire an entire city of incompetent police officers to follow their lead, doing even worse so that the two really bad detectives might actually appear to look good.
What’s sad is that I saw the ending of this first season coming from a mile away. Granted, I didn’t peg it until the final episode, but that’s not really my fault. The writers were making this shit up as they went along, so that there would have been no way to figure out the whodunit because even the writers had no clue.
For most of the story, they focused on an obvious actor as the main suspect. He’s the guy who played the antagonistic leader in the television show the 4400. He’s a great actor, and he pulls off all of the nuances really well. But because the writers generally didn’t know where they were going, his ability to go all across the map acting-wise only made the show that much more frustrating to watch.
The problem with the writing is the inconsistency. An example was the last episode where the former drug addict police officer “figures out” that the mayoral candidate (the 4400 guy) has a thing for brunettes, showing a newspaper article where the picture has all of the man’s previous affairs, and they’re all brunettes. It’s pointed out that he is compensating for the loss of his wife, who also looked just like these women. What no one has pointed out, including the stupid police detectives, is that the mayoral candidate’s main squeeze right now is a beautiful blonde. So his “usual” type is not the usual type he has been having an affair with the entire series. It’s that kind of inconsistency that stems from convenient writing that is badly orchestrated. It’s why the show has suffered so much.
There was one episdode that was so obviously filler right towards the end. The detectives are investigating a possible connection to a casino, and then out of the blue the female detective’s son comes up missing, so they spend the entire episode looking for her son. No further investigation. Just looking for the kid. And bonding. And doing all sorts of dramatic element stuff that should have been conducted much earlier in the series, not in one of the last episodes. And then at the very end of the episode, they throw in a “oh here’s some information about the case in case you forgot there was an actual murder investigation going on”.
The sad thing is I think I’ve figured out who is responsible for the murder. The girlfriend of the mayoral candidate has so easily betrayed him to the point where it feels like she’s probably killed the original girl in jealousy (thinking he was having an affair with her, which he probably was). I wouldn’t be surprised to find out in a strange episode involving a dancing dwarf in a red motel that his current girlfriend used to be a brunette in an earlier period of her life who had an affair with him as the brunette but because she changed her hair, he doesn’t recognize her as the same person, and this is how she is getting her vengeance.
Sadly enough, I don’t think I’m that far off when it comes down to crunch time and the writers don’t have any more of a clue than they did the week before.
In case you don’t know about Beautifulpeople.com, this is a site that is designed to be a singles site for “beautiful” people. The gimmick is that the members of the site rate other members, and if you’re not hot enough, you get thrown off it. I heard about this some years ago, when it was first going live, and then I thought nothing more of it. I mean, I’m not a physically attractive person, at least not under their “perfect” terms, so I figured it was a site for more narcisistic (or people who can spell the word) people than I am. Then I found out today that Beautifulpeople.com “claimed” a virus allowed 30,000 ugly people to get through onto the site, so they got rid of them. PC Magazine probably called it right in that this claim was really more of a publicity stunt than an actual occurrence. After all, no one knew that this virus was in place, so why would 30,000 suddenly show up and want to join a site that was so exclusive that they never would have gotten in before. I seriously doubt 30,000 people normally try to sign up daily and get rejected naturally without the virus.
But who cares about the virus? What I find more significant is that the site exists regardless. I can’t even imagine ever wanting to join a site that requires you to have to look hot in order to become a member. What’s funny about that is the shitload of studies that indicate that women are attracted to men for reasons other than the reasons men are attracted to women, and NOT A SINGLE REASON ever listed has anything to do with looks. In other words, women tend to be attracted to men because of intelligence, things they do, things they say, and other things that don’t get included in pictures. It’s why people kept saying that taking pictures of your private parts and sending them to women is NEVER an attractive thing to do, yet so many guys would love to be the recipient of women taking naked pictures of themselves and sending them forward. By the way, I’m not one of these guys, so this isn’t an attempt to get women to send me naked pictures of themselves (I’m more like women; I want to know what’s inside their minds, not under their clothes).
Is this a thing that younger people are now thinking is important, this whole look hot thing? I mean, I understand the desire to see someone who is attractive, and every television show seems to be about how guys are looking for “hot” women, but what is the selling point of a web site dating service that wants only hot people? Wouldn’t they be able to find partners for themselves without having to go through a site in the first place? If not, wouldn’t a vain site like that just provide them with the opportunities to meet really vain people who you wouldn’t want to spend fifteen minutes with in public (or in private) anyway?
I just don’t seem to understand it. Maybe that’s why I wouldn’t be welcome at their site.
But I suspect they’re not doing well, which would explain the really insidious attempt to get attention by creating an allegedly false stupid story about a virus that most likely didn’t happen. I mean, beautiful people don’t get viruses, right?
Hackers are a strange breed. To begin with, there’s really no one central reason why they do what they do. Some are altruistic, some are assholes, and some are just nuts. Others, well, who knows why they do what they do, other than the thought of trying to do something that others think can’t be done.
Recently, a group of hackers, the Lulz crowd, have decided to hack for the sake of hacking. I don’t know what their rationale is, although there is a sense that they have some kind of foundation behind what they do, as they vowed to protect Sega because of its business practices, while going after pretty much everything else. However, for the common person who is just using the Internet for the simple purpose of exploring all there is to offer, hackers are making the Internet a less attractive place than it was only weeks before.
Recently, they went through antics of hacking some database and then posting the passwords of people all over the Internet. What purpose does this serve, other than to show that passwords can be broken, and that people generally don’t choose the greatest passwords. Well, to be honest, most people don’t seem to be password protecting stuff that is critical or crucial. They’re password protecting a message board that forced them to create a password, and to be honest, when you have to keep making passwords for everything you access, you tend to get lazy and choose very simple to remember things. That’s where “Omega” becomes an option for a password instead of H78j738gckzh9peK>L;c. Yeah, that last one might be a lot harder to crack, but let’s be honest here. Most of the hacking that has been done has been because a database was broken into (one that most people don’t have the password to anyway), so that their passwords, which could be the greatest password EVER created, are automatically given to the hacker. So, it doesn’t matter how well you come up with a great password. If the infrastructure that you use the password on is stupid, so then is your password.
What has been happening is that these people are using their skills as cracking codes and making life miserable for common people, just for the sake of showing it could be done. I’ll let you in on a not very well kept secret. I’m an expert at killing people. Got trained by the Army and everything. But that doesn’t mean that I spent my free time hunting down people and killing them in order to show others how easy it is for me to do. There is some point where the common sense in people should show through, and with hackers the lack of restraint has made that almost impossible.
To make it worse, hackers are now to the point where any thought used against them automatically results in a group of hackers targeting someone who has nothing to do with them. Some years back, I was an opinion editor of a newspaper. When we ran an opinion column that made a couple of stupid arguments against moped riders, a group of glorified moped riders started point of service attacks on the newspaper and then on my own personal account. Rather than engage in conversation with other people, they took it upon themselves to attack people who disagreed with them. It actually took a member of their group to call for sanity before the attacks stopped.
This is the mentality of the hackers today. And they’re making it so that people don’t trust the networks with whom they do business. Right now, I have no desire to turn on my Playstation 3 and deal with Sony, mainly because I can’t trust Sony to stop hackers from stealing my personal information. I don’t blame Sony, but at the same time, I find it foolish to trust their network. This is an easy way to create a chilling effect on entire industries, as I also don’t trust a lot of other technology companies with whom I might have also wanted to do business, because this anarchic approach to business has made it so that I just don’t want to waste my time having to deal with the ramifications of stupid, evil people.
I find hackers to be one step below the screamer in a press conference who wants to shout down everyone who disagrees with him. The reason I put it one step below is that at least the screamer has a reason he’s doing what he’s doing, that’s not as simple as yelling just to stop people from being heard. A hacker, in this context, is a screamer who yells for no reason, wanting ONLY to make sure that no one can be heard and then demanding credit for being the one who yelled the loudest.
Unfortunately, businesses have almost no way to counter this type of behavior, which means that fewer and fewer of them are going to risk the chance of being destroyed by some malicious individual who only wants to create destruction in his path. They’re a lot like spammers who sent out millions of emails for the sole purpose of trying to scam one individual out of hard-earned savings.
For awhile, I was on the fence about hackers, especially when they worked to undermine oppressive regimes like Iran and China. But when they then turned their talents on the average person for no reason other than to see if they could do it, I stopped being a potential fan. I’ve seen too many good people who have been seriously hurt by people who thought it would be fun to disrupt the status quo.
You see a lot of this in online gaming communities these days. Some games have been completely obliterated by this attitudinal attack. They’ve even started to go after some of the biggies, like Eve Online. Why? Because they can. No other reason than that. Someone tried to make an obscure connection of a link to Sony, but even that was really weak. It looked like they attacked Eve Online just because it was there. And that’s pretty sad.
Unfortunately, I believe the problem is going to get a lot worse before it gets–no, actually, I don’t believe it’s going to get any better. As long as they remain anonymous, they can take the cowardly route of attacking people behind masks. And that’s been the problem with the Internet since the beginning. What was its one fundamental strong point, its anonymity, has also been its weakest as well. From Internet chatroom fights with flame wars started by anonymous big mouths to where we are today, as long as this element continues to dominate the field, it might bring about the demise of the usefulness of the Internet itself.
I watched Super 8 last night at the movie theater. Rarely do I get a chance to see a movie when it is released on its opening weekend, but I had this strange feeling that I was going to be innundated with information about this movie constantly until I finally saw it, so I decided to just go see it for myself and then see if all of the hype lives up to its, well, hype, or if it turns out to be not worth the effort.
First off, the movie wasn’t bad. It was a typical Stephen Spielberg type of movie, if he had made it twenty years ago. Basically, it felt very much like an attempt to blend Stand by Me with E.T. and then with District 9. The only problem was that it didn’t have the writing of a Stand by Me (sorry, but the Stephen King power of Stand by Me will never be achieved by someone emulating him), the cutesyness of E.T. or the raw power of District 9. Instead, it was one of those movies where you watched it and thought, “yeah, they did what they were supposed to do.”
As for the Stephen King attempt, one thing that the movie was lacking was characterization. The two kids who did well in the movie were Ellile Fanning and Joel Courtney (who play the main two kids). The rest of the cast really just kind of blended together in a mass that didn’t really make much of a difference. As a matter of fact, I found myself thinking, who was this again? whenever one of the other kids was on screen, even though they were distinctive enough that that should never have happened. The adults in the movie were irrelevant, even though they were also really important. Even the alien seemed, well, very alien and cloaked way too much in shadow. I don’t think I ever really got a good glimpse of it, and when I did, all I kept thinking was, um, okay, that’s an alien. Where’s my popcorn again?
But having said all of that, it wasn’t a bad movie. It just wasn’t great. It’s receiving all sorts of accolades for being the “in” movie, and I can see how that would happen as it is a combination of JJ Abrams and Stephen Spielberg. There were just too many times where I felt it was a scarier version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But I’m glad I saw it on the opening weekend. That way, I won’t have anyone telling me I NEED to see this movie without me being able to laugh hysterically in his face as a response. Again, not a bad movie, but not the greatest either.
There’s been a lot of talk about cheating lately, mainly because there have been some big stories about cheaters lately. We had the big story of Arnold Schwarzeneger who fathered a child with his housekeeper, the story of the IMF leader who decided to “allegedly” rape a housekeeper at a posh hotel (I say allegedly because legally we have to keep saying that until he is convicted, not because I believe any which way), and the ridiculousness that emerged from the whole Congressman Weiner Tweeting scandal. As a result of a lot of these kinds of stories, we’re now falling into the inevitable lazy news stories where reporters make arguments that “men are naturally cheaters” and “there’s a lot more cheating happening these days”. I’m going to go out on a limb and say nothing’s really changed, and that the latest news is really a lot about nothing.
What I do think we’re seeing is a trend that has normally been kept under wraps, mainly that celebrities and politicians are not very trustworthy, and they rarely have ever been. My friend Melanie and I once put forth a political theory that never saw the light of day (because of how ridiculous it sounded), and it was simply stated that politicians don’t do what they do in order to get reelected (as a final goal), but they do what they do to get reelected as a process towards their ultimate goal, and that’s to make progress with members of the opposite sex (if they’re naturally inclined that way…I’m sure a gay offshoot of the theory would make just as much sense).
We were laughed at whenever we presented this idea to others, but if you think about it, it goes back to simple human behavior, and I guess that’s why most political scientists never wanted to deal with it. If you take the basic supposition that the natural tendency of mankind is to procreate, and that’s often seen as the biological imperative of any species, then it shouldn’t be that hard to make the argument that all goals and processes that individuals work towards all involve some basic, innate desire to procreate. Therefore, a politician whose sole goal is to procreate is really not that difficult to understand. Continued service in office actually serves as an offshoot of this theory because the more power that a politician achieves, well, the more options he or she is going to have in order to procreate.
But try selling that idea to a group of social scientists and you’ll be laughed out of academia. I’ve often wondered why. I mean, the basic premise is extremely sound, and the general idea makes serious sense. But what doesn’t fit into academic theory is the basic idea that people are so basic in needs that their main incentive to do anything can be so easily boiled down to that one social need. In other words, scientists don’t like the idea that human beings can be seen as having such basic wants and desires as any other biological creature. We like to think that we’re so far advanced that we’ve somehow transcended natural tendencies to a point that our needs have to be analyzed through higher level functions of analysis. But honestly, are we that much far evolved than we often end up observing?
Think about it from a sense of our technology. Has our technology allowed us to orchestrate war in a more social, advanced evolutionary basis? I would argue no. I mean, we’re still bombing human beings in Libya in hopes of getting its leaders to do things we want them to do. We’re still sending troops around the globe in order to kill people who we disagree with. We’d like to say that we’re now fielding a 21st century army, but how far removed is that army from what we used to do when going to war several hundred years ago? If we look at some of the most recent encounters, we’re still hearing charges of troops using rape as a tool for conquest, atrocities that need to be investigated because soldiers did things that their commanders claim could never have happened in an enlightened army, and we’re still threatening people with simple concepts as force as an instrument to convince people to do “the right thing.” Sadly, our behaviors haven’t changed much over the last thousand years. Our technology has, but that doesn’t always translate to progress.
But taking it away from war, we look at social conditioning and social behaviors, and we see that we still don’t care any more about our fellow man than we did centuries ago. Oh, we’re good at talking about caring and making all sorts of political posturing, but in the end, people are still starving to death while people eat glutonously several miles away, with little care as to what is happening down the street. We’re really good at talking about doing the right thing, but in the end we’re not really willing to sacrifice our own wants and desires in order to make sure everyone else rises to the same level of prosperity. As a matter of fact, we’re quite often happy that others aren’t as prosperous as we our, often ridiculing them for not doing as well (the infamous argument of “if they were like us, they wouldn’t suffer so”).
The concern we should note is that we have a tendency to look at statistics and then try to make it significant to our current situation. Right now, many people are suffering because of a horrible economy. Yet, the news doesn’t go into private homes and show us the suffering individuals are living through, and then telling us how to help others rise back up. Instead, the news focuses on the stock market, or on economists who tell us how a tick here or there on a chart makes the difference between progress and despair, almost as if the numbers make a difference. The president and his council go out of their way to argue that things are getting better, cooking books as politicians always do, trying to convince the average person who might be out of a job that things are actually prosperous right now. They’ll point to ticks on a chart again and say that things are better today than they were a year ago, but they aren’t paying attention to the people who are suffering. To be honest, I don’t think they care.
And it’s not just a particular party or leader or politician who acts this way. It’s anyone who tries to interpret the data for the rest of us to understand. Rather than just show us people who are back to work and showing what they did to do it, they focus on statistics and somehow make that be the news, and make it our resposibility to somehow read into the false data as relevance.
That’s the sort of thing that leads us back to cheating. We hear the numbers, we see the evidence of particular political actors, and then reporters try to convince us that these Neanderthals actually are relevant to each one of us. But I’m sorry that Arnold decided to have a child out of wedlock, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to be doing the same thing, or that I’m more apt to do so because some rich, priviledged individual did so. There are a lot of us out here who once we’re in a relationship are overjoyed at the fact that we’re in a relationship, and that becomes the sole incentive for the rest of things we do. We don’t start looking for other “conquests” because some actor or politician feels the need to go out and have a good time beyond one’s current relationship. Instead, we mourn those types of people for being the Neanderthals they are, and we condemn anyone else who can’t seem to be happy with whatever circumstances they manage to achieve.
Not all of us fall into a cesspool because they’re so easy to find.
My buddy Joshua as he surfs the web reading the news
Sometimes, I find myself astounded at the news that I read on a daily basis. I mean, honestly, real people, living real lives, take themselves seriously while they live their lives doing the most ridiculousness shit I’ve ever seen. Some congressman tweets naked pics of himself to constituents in hopes of scoring with hot young woman while his wife is in the middle of announcing her pregnancy with his child. Another politician reveals her blatant ignorance of history while members of her flock try to justify her stupidity with even more stupidity rather than just chalk it up to yet another stupid moment in political punditry. And practically every other nationally elected representative in the country can’t come to a consensus long enough to decide whether or not the country should default, fold or just sell itself to China. Then we have teenagers whose claim to fame is that they played someone in some movie, who are offered million dollar writing contracts to publish books about ideas that they may one day write, as if anyone can write a book, and all you need is a “good idea”. Banks are arguing with retailers over who gets to charge fees for credit cards, oil companies are arguing over how much profit they should be able to receive, while OPEC countries try to convince the rest of the world that they’re not charging too much for oil, even though they’re realizing they need to lower prices or people will get smart enough to stop buying oil and start looking for other sources of energy.
Every day, I read the newspaper, and I basically learn nothing newer than I learned the day before. Very rich people cheat everyone else, and when they get caught, they use the illegal money they received to hire very wealthy lawyers who defend them for outrageous prices (which are obviously paid for by the outrageous amounts of money the crooks stole in the first place). Because the government really never actually “gets” any of the money back to the people, the victims are made to pay the price of the cheating, although sometimes through outrageous price hikes from the companies that never really lost any money in the first place, and more rich crooks keep making more money.
And every day, people who hate other people kill them, justifying it because the day before the other guys killed their people first. If you think about it, international politics is essentially school yard politics, where grudges from recess are carried over into lunch time. And sometimes, some of the kids gang up on the other kids after school. And tomorrow, it all repeats itself. It’s amazing how little we haven’t learned from simple elementary school politics.
Yet, when it comes to racism, hatred and anger for the sake of being angry, we are no different than when we were a bunch of Vikings with spears. We like to think of ourselves as enlightened, but we’re really only slightly politically correct, based on how much we answer to the people around us. In reality, we get away with as much as we think we can get away with, and when we’re called on our stupidity, we might apologize. If we’re more powerful, we might pay off the people we beat up, but we won’t actually apologize but instead will take no responsibility for our actions but “want to get the matter behind us.” Somewhere in the background, someone will act all sanctimonious and uppity, and that’s about all of the rationalization we’ll allow ourselves. But we’ll continue to tell ourselves that we are doing what is best, and that we’re really good people, although often misunderstood or misinterpreted.
And current events just don’t change. If you really want to boil down current events to simplicity, it can be said that people will do whatever they think they can get away with, basically taking responsibility for as much as they have to, mainly because there might be witnesses. I’d like to think there’s a moral foundation, or even a moral authority, but when our moral authority relies on religion, and our religion relies on hating other people because they’re not the same religion (translation: Anyone who disagrees with our Word is worthy of any punishment we see fit and thus, no longer privy to our best behavior).
Every day, I experience so much that is wrong with the world, so much that is wrong with individuals who think themselves “above” that sort of thing, and I’m bothered because I can’t even guarantee I’m above the same behavior I want to demand from everyone else. And if you can’t demand it from yourself, and I’m almost to the point where I believe no one can, then what’s really left to pursue? Perhaps the solution is to crawl under a rock and ignore the rest of the world. I’m starting to think it couldn’t be that much worse than the alternative.
