BROADSIDE: [hate speech]

ALL-PURPOSE* BROADSIDE: Or, HOW ALL HATE SPEECH IS THE SAME.

Dear [person #1].

You are hereby being served notice of the unconstructive nature of your discourse.  What that means in English is that YOU’RE NOT HELPING.  The vitriolic enthusiasm with which you attack [entity] is NOT going to help in fixing [problem].

You are a [self-identification].  You are not alone; there are many who share your belief, who also are [ideological group].  You have a view of the way the world should be, and it is seemingly incomprehensible to you to suggest that another rational being would ever think differently.

But here’s the thing.

If you have a complete, ironclad view of the way the world should work, that dictates what each person needs to have a flourishing and happy life, YOU’RE WRONG.

Because there are BILLIONS of people on [planet].   You are only one of many, the crossroads of unique individual and unique circumstance.

To presume to condemn [ideological group] as a whole based upon your own individual thoughts and desires is WRONG.  Induction: You are failing at it.

There are [quantity greater than zero #1] of individuals who are also [title of member of ideological group].  They live perfectly happy lives, because they function in a way entirely different from you, because there is a very definite degree to which, thanks to culture and individuality, we are not all ‘basically the same.’  Different things are fulfilling to different people, and if you fail to respect that, you are being just as intolerant as the [ideological group] you claim to condemn.

Yes, [ideological group] has its flaws, and like any human organization other than In-N-Out Burger, they are many.  They can be fixed.  And, more fundamentally, [ideological group] is made up of PEOPLE.   People can change, and we tend to believe that people have certain RIGHTS, such as the right to a certain degree of SELF-DETERMINATION.

[ideological group] DOES NOT EXIST FOR THE SOLE PURPOSE OF DESTROYING ALL THAT IS GOOD ON THIS EARTH.  And to suggest that all those who participate in [ideological group] are ignorant, hateful, brainwashed, or better off dead is abhorrent.

Finally, and in closing, CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING.

DON’T MAKE GENERALIZATIONS WHEN YOU SPEAK OF HATE.  Do you know what that leads to? That leads to GENOCIDE AND ANGUISH.  I am not exaggerating.  When you hate blindly, you are blinded.

You are BETTER THAN THIS.  I know this for certain, because you are A HUMAN BEING, and human beings are ALWAYS capable of allowing one another to live peacefully.

You live your life, that’s fine. But don’t assume that the only way to live is YOUR way.   It is HARD to be tolerant—I know.  It’s HARD to let people self-determine, hard to take the SLOW way.  But to fight hate with hate, to condemn all who support [ideological group] alike, to make enemies of people who are PERFECTLY DECENT HUMAN BEINGS, and indeed, some of whom are probably BETTER human beings than you and I—this path is misguided, and beneath you, and I know you can do better; I know you can learn how, and I wish you the best of luck.

If you want to spread the poison of intolerance, and write off any person as a loss based SOLELY on their membership in a group that also contains poor examples, then I’VE GOT BAD NEWS FOR YOU, CUPCAKE, because if that’s how you roll, you’re a HUMAN BEING, and GUESS WHO’S COMMITTED EVERY MAJOR HISTORICAL ATROCITY IN ALL OF HISTORY?

That’s right, you’ve got a bigger category of hatred to work on—because each of us are connected to thousands of others by thousands of similarities, and blind hatred for any one human is blind hatred for HUMANITY.  So rein it in, [equestrian celebrity reference], you’re riding too hard.

But if you want to work with us, with all of us, all the good people on [planet] who want their ideological groups to be better, who hold ourselves and others to a higher standard, who are willing to fight—and to forgive—for the sake of harmony and a flourishing life, then join me, and we’ll learn tolerance together.

Choose well.  Choose as I know you can.   And I, in turn, will forgive your rashness, for I understand where you’re coming from, because I have my own blindness as well. And you, like all the rest of us, are only human.

And you, like all the rest of us, must struggle with that.

*This will serve as a response to anyone condemning a particular group, religion, or behavioral practice, subject to the following constraints:

• [quantity greater than zero #1] is greater than zero. (example, 1, and not 0)
• By ‘condemning’ I mean aggressively.  Hell, or even passively.  The casual jokes of annoying atheists.  The bombastic rhetoric of annoying religious figures. The outdated ideas of annoying, sexist political figures.  A #misandry-tagged post that isn’t obviously sarcastic or made by a misguided MRA.
• [ideological group] is not an organization created and maintained for the sole purpose of oppressing, disenfranchising, repressing, injuring, or otherwise harming anyone. (example, the Grand Old Party, and not the KKK or a similar hate group) Aside from this constraint, [ideological group] can be anything; a political organization, a country, an ethnicity, a gender, a faction in WoW…
• [person #1] is a person with thoughts and feelings.

             PEACE, NERDS. 

Aristotle’s Toolbox

So today we started talking about the idea of the elusive “liberal arts education,” and exactly what that meant.  And people started talking about things like “building skills” and “learning a work ethic,” and I got slightly agitated, because—well, let me back up.

This was in class—actually the last day of class—in a philosophy course.   Over the course of one semester we had read Plato and Socrates (or…you know, Plato), brushed over some secondary literature, and spent a good deal of time reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics.  Now, with these in mind (especially his Ethics), we were thinking about how this class (or, more specifically, how Aristotle) affects our lives after the course is over.  Which is now.

The customary apologetic defense of philosophy was offered: that philosophy doesn’t actually help your life directly, but that reading philosophy builds skills and shit, and makes you a better logical thinker, and all of that rubbish.  Which is all completely true, but that’s pretty much like saying “I go to lifeguard training so that I can learn how to swim.”

YOU CAN LEARN TO SWIM VERY EASILY. IT’S NOT ROCKET SCIENCE.

SIMILARLY, ANALYTICAL THINKING IS NOT VERY DIFFICULT.  It’s a skill, and you can train a skill by doing other things beside philosophy.

So what does this mean, then? Does it mean that philosophy is not useful?  WHAT THE HELL IS MY POINT?

Well, what exactly is “useful?” We are discussing no small matter, but how we ought to live.  The great philosophers—especially the ancients, the ones who hover outside of the analytical tradition—don’t just talk about one sphere of life.  They talk about all of life.  When they talk about one thing, they do it by talking about everything, because they have a concise view of everything that can be easily used to explain just one thing.  I believe Chesterton wrote some words on this subject, but since he already said them, there’s not much point in me waxing eloquent here.

THE POINT I’M TRYING TO MAKE IS: you can apply Aristotle directly to your life, straight away.  You must apply Aristotle directly, consciously or unconsciously, if you live a productive life, because Aristotle’s theory encompasses what happens when you live a productive life, and thus if you live a productive life you can explain that in terms of Aristotle’s theory.

Apply directly to the forehead!

LET ME BACK UP HERE AND EXPLAIN.  Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is possibly one of the more famous and influential works ever written by anyone ever.  It can be quite literally said to be the foundation of Western conceptions of morality and a pillar of philosophy in general.

What is the Ethics about? It is about ethics.  About making the choices of your life.  It is a book written for the education of young adults, with the intention of teaching them not to be so goddamn stupid all the damn time and showing them how to not fail at life.  And if you read it that way—if you listen to what Aristotle says and think about how you can apply that to your own life—then you get a whole hell of a lot more out of the book than just learning to “think critically,” FFS.

There is this banausic trend in the west to ask “what good is this?” as if every bit of knowledge learned had to be a new cog in a mechanical man.   A paragon of this trend is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original Sherlock Holmes, who you may remember was retroactively inspired by the BBC miniseries of the same name.

We might not remember, and by ‘we’ I mean ‘you’ because I read the book, thanks very much, but Sherlock Holmes was the penultimate scientist and a terrifyingly mechanical thinker.

“I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic,” Sherlock says, in A Study In Scarlet (our introduction to Sherlock Holmes) “And you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it.”

“Now pass me a credit card, Watson, it’s time for me to do my morning line.”

In contrast to the average man, Sherlock proudly says that his attic is in the very best of order, that he takes into his mind only those facts and theories which can help him in his daily life.  When we first are introduced to him, he has not even been bothered to learn that the earth revolves around the sun (oh, for the days when you could avoid learning that!), and when he is told this fact he promises to forget it as promptly as possible.

Sherlock Holmes is problematic.

This man operates only on what he can know for certainty, and knows nothing outside of his field.  He is mechanical, scientific in the extreme, highly specialized.  He can provide a citation and a justification for everything.

So why am I talking about Aristotle and Sherlock Holmes in the same post?  Because there is an upsetting push toward the ideal of Sherlock Holmes—toward the ideal of the consummate scientist, in every field.  Everything is being reduced to a science, to a formula, to a specialization.  For psychology it is already looking grim—for anthropology some hope remains.  Anthropology gets it—because anthropology can never be an objective science again.  The question has already been asked “what is objectivity?” and with that we plunge off the precipice, never to look back, because NOTHING IS OBJECTIVE.  Anthropology gets it in a way that few other sciences really do.  Try bringing up “nothing is objective” with a biochem major.

Even philosophy has become scientific.

Analytical philosophy has risen in the west like a Barad-Dur of tinker toys—intimidating, needlessly complex, and unassailable.  It is the process of jumping through hoops with logic for the purpose of reaching a conclusion on a specific subject—for example, the ethics of war, or of abortion, or of assisted suicide.  These conclusions are supported by citations, links to things which have already been proven, and they are mostly applicable—although a number of these conclusions in turn have points at which they break down.

Why do we seek these conclusions?  Why answer such specific questions? So that when we have a solution we can declare a question answered and move on? Are we then building a comprehensive theory of the world even in philosophy?  Why do these conclusions break down?

Like Chesterton, I stress the importance of a worldview.  But a worldview cannot be specific, because every specific theory breaks down at a certain level of detail. The world is not our theory, and our theory is not the world.  Sometimes we forget that fact—that modern science and the entire intellectual basis of Western knowledge is a massive construct built to model reality.  Theory is not reality itself, and thus, as Hume also points out, we can’t actually ever be sure that our experiment will go as predicted, because they universe doesn’t run on zeros and ones.

Aristotle gives us detail, and a lot of his details are wrong, yes, but we can forgive him that, because through and around that detail run sweeping generalizations as broad as rivers.  His warning in the beginning of the Ethics should be written in stone.

“Our discussion will be adequate if it achieves clarity within the limits of the subject matter.  For precision cannot be expected in the treatment of all subjects alike, any more than it can be expected in all manufactured articles.  Problems of what is noble and just, which politics examines, present so much variety and irregularity that some people believe that they exist only by convention and not by nature.  The problem of the good, too, presents a similar kind of irregularity, because in many cases good things bring harmful results.  There are instances of men ruined by wealth, and others by courage.  Therefore, in a discussion of such subjects, which has to start from a basis of this kind, we must be satisfied to indicate the truth with a rough and general sketch: when the subject and the basis of a discussion consist of matters that hold good only as a general rule, but not always, the conclusions reached must be of the same order.  The various points that are made must be received in the same spirit.  For a well-schooled man is one who searches for that degree of precision in each kind of study which the nature of the subject at hand admits: it is obviously just as foolish to accept arguments of probability from a mathematician as to demand strict demonstrations from an orator.”

“Now calm yourselves the hell down and let me finish my goddamn lecture.”

My philosophy teacher used to complain because people would ask her stupid questions when they learned she was getting a Ph.D.  Apparently at least one person asked her “What’s your philosophy?”

Which is hilarious because let’s be honest, that’s a REALLY DUMB QUESTION.

But in a way…it’s also not, because in my not-so-humble opinion philosophy is not just about logic.  It’s not just about thinking analytically and understanding when someone is making a stupid-ass argument based on logical fallacies.

Reading philosophy is about having a philosophy.  It’s about reading Sartre and hating him and then UNDERSTANDING WHY.  It’s about reading Aristotle and loving his ethics and hating his weird treatment of slaves and understanding WHY.  It’s about taking that understanding of WHY things agree with you and internalizing it, of developing the practical ability to recognize what fits into your worldview and what doesn’t, cultivating that phronēsis to the point where you have a coherent, functional view of the world.

So what do I take away from a philosophy class? Yeah, I take away analytical skills and all that bullshit, but that’s sure as hell not why I took the class.  I take philosophy to understand my way of being-in-the-world.  And what I take away from Aristotle’s Ethics isn’t “an understanding of the framework of modern ethics in the western world,” it’s a knowledge of the fact that I agree with Aristotle in many points—including his definition of virtue:

Action.

With.

Intention.

And THAT is something I can (and will) use, every day of my life.

 

“Word.”

Einfühlungsvermögen.

SUP INTERNET

Sometimes I really don’t understand people.

SO I’M GOING TO YELL AT YOU ABOUT BEING NORMAL TODAY

We’ll start with empathy.

Or, to go etymologically:

Einfühlungsvermögen.

 [I love German words]

Wikipedia tells us that Empathy is the capacity to recognize feelings that are being experienced by another sentient or semi-sentient (in fiction writing) being. Someone may need to have a certain amount of empathy before they are able to feel COMPASSION.

So how do you EMPATHIZE?

Well, one theory connects empathy to MIRROR NEURONS.  Mirror neurons, as many of you may know (and some of you may not) are part of the brain.  As their name might suggest, they are involved in neurological processes.

SPECIFICALLY, mirror neurons fire when we perform an action AND when we see someone else perform the same action.  The mirror neurons in our brain fire when we open a door and when we see someone else open a door, when we watch someone do a parkour vault and then when we do a parkour vault.

We can take this in a very interesting direction and explore the mirror neuron as a subjective projection of the self into objective reality but I DON’T THINK WE REALLY NEED TO DO THAT RIGHT NOW.

No, what I think is in ALARMINGLY short supply nowadays is the ability to be A DECENT HUMAN BEING.

Now OBVIOUSLY my blog post is not targeted specifically at anyone (a) because I DON’T DO THAT because it’s a GENERALLY SHITTY THING TO DO and (b) because I don’t really think that most of the people who are likely to read this aren’t decent human beings (NAMELY ALL MY FRIENDS BECAUSE I KNOW YOU’RE ALL AWESOME).  BUT IT’S NICE TO HAVE REMINDERS ONCE IN A WHILE, ISN’T IT?

SO what is the first part of being a decent human being?

IN MY MIND it is NOT EMPATHY, but I’ve already started talking about empathy so we’ll go through that first.

So what is EMPATHY really? I feel as though I’ve talked about this before, but it is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes.  To try to put yourself in their place and understand where they’re coming from.  Some people can’t do this, or don’t do this, which always confuses me in the same way that people would confuse me if they walked around with their nose plugged all the time.

SO let’s get all ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY UP IN THIS and create a MODEL that MAY BEAR NO RESEMBLANCE TO REALITY.

Let’s imagine a man named BOB.

NOW, BOB has a friend named TED.  And TED has a cat.

BOB really likes to shoot things.  Especially living things.  He’s kinda crazy.  At this point it’s only a matter of time before he snaps and does something that I could make a really offensive joke about but won’t, because I’m a very good person and I don’t do that.

Now, TED, who is a very trusting and innocent soul, asks BOB to catsit for him.

So BOB does.

Now, it’s about six hours in and BOB is bored. He’s watched Snatch, Pulp Fiction, and Boondock Saints and now he’s all out of DVDs.  So he starts thinking about shooting Ted’s cat.

NOW IS WHEN EMPATHY KICKS IN.

If Bob uses his sense of empathy, his ability to understand where other people were coming from, he would imagine what it would be like to care for a small, furry animal and love it unconditionally. He would realize the sense of attachment that Ted must have, and understand the feeling of heartbreak that would come if anything were to happen to the little kitty.

LUCKILY FOR BOB, Bob is a sociopath, an individual DEFINITIONALLY INCAPABLE OF EMPATHY, so he shoots the cat and goes home to watch Tron.

…well.  That didn’t turn out to be quite so lucid of an explanation as I had hoped.  We’ll try again later.

IN THE MEANTIME

I mentioned that EMPATHY is not necessarily top of my list on HOW TO BE A GOOD HUMAN BEING.  It is however arguably impossible to disconnect from the quality that IS on the top of my list, which is, namely, and I quote, THE ABILITY TO MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS.

Let me flesh that one out a bit.  What do I mean by this? Well, I could go to Plato/Socrates and say JUSTICE IS EVERYONE MINDING THEIR OWN BUSINESS but I don’t really like agreeing with Plato (it makes me feel a bit funny inside) and Socrates doesn’t always convince me as much as he does Glaucon.

FIRST AND FOREMOST is the ability to RESPECT LIMITS.  Everyone has limits.  Some people don’t like to be hugged.  Some people don’t like to be bothered during certain hours.  Some people don’t like to be SHOT IN THE FACE.  To each their own.  The ability to MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS is the ability to UNDERSTAND the relativist nature of personal limits.

WHICH IN ENGLISH MEANS the ability to RECOGNIZE that there is no UNIVERSAL STANDARD for PERSONAL DECISIONS.

Which basically means that if someone doesn’t want to high-five you, it doesn’t matter if you’re THE GODDAM POPE, you still have no right to claim that they are in the WRONG.

Because this is a fundamental thing that I believe about BAD SHIT that happens to PEOPLE.

When someone SHOOTS YOU IN THE FOOT, it’s bad because BULLETS HURT.  But would we think anything was wrong if you ASKED someone to shoot you in the foot and they complied? Well, yes, we would, because WHO THE HELL GETS WILLINGLY SHOT IN THE FOOT, but we wouldn’t think that the shooter was necessarily morally culpable.

NOW OF COURSE YOU CAN MAKE BAD personal decisions.  People do it ALL THE GODDAM TIME, and it’s INFURIATING.  BUT, there’s not really anything you can DO about that, IS THERE?

If it’s a BAD ENOUGH decision, SOCIETY will provide the backlash and the countermanding force.  For EXAMPLE, the decision to stay up until FIVE drinking shots of vodka with peanut butter ice cubes may have been a POOR ONE, but the REAL punishment for that decision is not going to be provided by a friend who gives the drinker a tongue-lashing, it’s going to be provided by the BOSS or TEACHER who waited for them for SIX HOURS and didn’t get the REPORT they wanted.

THIS ESPECIALLY APPLIES TO RELATIONSHIPS, BY THE WAY.

Because a relationship is FUNDAMENTALLY about TWO PEOPLE who RELATE to one another.  A relationship can be INDEPENDENT of the two people in a certain emotional way, but it is nonetheless INEXTRICABLY LINKED to their CONTINUING DECISIONS.

WHICH MEANS of course that a RELATIONSHIP is always subject to personal decisions, because as soon as one individual makes the decision to NO LONGER RELATE TO THE OTHER PERSON, it is then NOT A RELATIONSHIP, somewhat by DEFINITION.

SO A VERY BASIC POINT, and one I follow perhaps too well sometimes, is RESPECT PEOPLE’S PERSONAL SPACE, and that means IN ALL CONTEXTS.  ALL OF THEM.

NOW we can return to EMPATHY.  While I will concede it is POSSIBLE to respect someone’s personal limits without empathy (for example, the majority of sociopaths can generally control themselves as long as it is made clear that a limit is a rule; sociopaths do very well with understanding and following rules), I will say that once you have empathy you are much, much, much more likely to respect a person’s limits.

WHICH, let me POINT OUT, is really NOT EVER A HARD THING.

Because EITHER it’s someone you REALLY DISLIKE even when you CAN understand their point of view and therefore you don’t actually NEED to worry about INFRINGING ON THEIR PERSONAL SPACE EXCEPT WITH A KNIFE because YOU CAN’T STAND THEM (in which case just don’t deal with that) OR it’s someone you’re ACTUALLY QUITE FOND OF in which case YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO EMPATHIZE WITH THEM, in which case you should WANT THE BEST FOR THEM AND NOT BE ALL WEIRD ABOUT IT.  Both of which should be relatively simple cognitions.

Both of those points, by the way, are things that I have experienced.  The complete profound disgust with another human being and the “OH GOD DON’T BE CREEPY” sense of self-control and extreme respect for other people’s personal space.

SO YES, I suppose in a way I am setting myself up to be a good person by my own definition.  Although you will note that I only set the bar at “decent human being,” so I hope I’m not making too bold a claim.

I’m not sure how that reflects upon my blog post, although I suppose the PROOF IS IN THE PREMISES, insofar as if I can be a good person, then what I say might be slightly true.

THIS POST by the way ushers in a WHOLE NEW AGE OF ME, wherein I tell you that I’ve got ANOTHER NAME FOR YOU.

Whereas previously IN THIS BLOG I referred to myself as TOR for reasons that were EXTREMELY NERDY and have to do with the massive unpublished novel that I’ve posted on DeviantArt for lack of a better thing to do with my time (It’s at ddllives.deviantart.com if you’re bored and have nothing better to do, which is extremely unlikely as there are many things that are better than my writing including STABBING YOURSELF IN THE EYES WITH A PENCIL), I have decided HENCEFORTH to take ONE OF THE MORE COMMON NAMES IN THE UNITED STATES and also the name of the PATRON ANGEL of SOLDIERS, DOCTORS, and WARRIORS, which I rather like, myself.

So yeah, my name’s MICHAEL now.  If you call me “Mike” I WILL END YOU. 

Greetings, earth creatures.

I’ll be posting AT LEAST ONCE A WEEK HERE, which is to say AT LEAST EVERY FRIDAY, but I will also NO LONGER REFRAIN MYSELF from posting something on a DAY THAT IS NOT FRIDAY.

YOU WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO PREDICT WHAT WILL HAPPEN AROUND HERE.

VERY ODD

COMING UP NEXT ON JUNGWILDEANDFREE

EITHER

I YELL AT ATHEISTS UNTIL THEY GET ANGRY

OR

I RANT ABOUT HOW TO BE HAPPY ALL THE GODDAMN TIME.

Business as Usual

What is politics?

Well that depends on who you ask.   A quick skim of Aristotle provides the definition of “the most sovereign and most comprehensive master science,” which is highly unhelpful as a working definition for a blog post.

So bear with me while we go through this.   Let’s say that a politician is an individual whose aim in life is to help their people.  What are they helping their people to do? Well, we could say that they are helping their people to live good lives. By good of course I don’t just mean economically prosperous; I mean really happy lives.  The politician seeks to realize their constituency at their greatest potential, to give their people the greatest possible chance to soar at their highest height.

So what is politics?

Well, in that case, politics is I suppose the art and science of raising one’s people up.  After all, the practice of a politician, I just said, was to help their people realize their full potential.

Now there we will sit our definition for the remainder of this blog post.

So what should a politician do?

A politician should represent their people.  They should have always the best interests of their constituency in mind.

Do you know what a politician should not do?

Lie.

There is this widespread delusion among the people of the world that a politician is someone deceptive, someone who will trick and deceive and yes, lie to advance their own personal motives.

No.

Just no.

A people’s motives and needs are never ambiguous.  The better course for a nation is rarely hard to discern, if you look for it—people spend their entire career learning how to figure out things like economics, international policies, and immigration procedures, and among all these experts there is a more or less general consensus about what would be good.

And just as the zeitgeist is never ambiguous, so too should the politician be honest and open.  Perhaps, perhaps, maybe, with an enemy, with a foreign power against whom the country is fighting, but not to allies and never to the citizens.

A politician must be honest about their aims, must have a clear vision of how they will best support their people.  If they lie, if they conceal, if they have any need at all of subterfuge, then it’s quite simple: they don’t deserve to represent the polis.

Americans, as a whole, do not expect their political system to aid them.

We take a semi-liberal viewpoint.  We hope that the government stays out of our way, because we want to go about our business and the government pretty much poisons whatever it touches.

But that’s not good.

Our world has become increasingly cynical.

We expect our government wants to control us.

We expect our politicians to lie and cheat and blackmail and take money from anyone.

We know and expect that elections can be bought by anyone with enough cash.

Most of us are fully aware that we’re killing the planet and that no one is likely to do something unless we all do. And we’re not really doing much about it.

People die in the millions thanks to car crashes.

Slavery is still a thing.

There is poison in our lunch meat.

We’re all aware of these things. We take them for granted.

And…that’s not cool.

THERE SHOULDN’T BE POISON IN YOUR FOOD.

YOU PUT THAT SHIT IN YOUR FACE.

LIST OF PLACES THERE SHOULDN’T BE POISON: NUMBER ONE:  

IN.

YOUR.

FACE.

 

Politicians shouldn’t LIE TO YOU ABOUT ANYTHING THEY LIKE.  If they lie to you, GUESS WHAT, it’s TIME TO GET A NEW POLITICIAN.   

There’s a psychological phenomenon known as the Bystander Effect.  When something bad happens in a crowd, the members of the crowd assume en masse that someone else will take care of it.

This is the reason people get knifed in broad daylight.  Why people get kidnapped in the middle of a crowd.  Because it’s someone else’s problem, and anyway it’s just part of modern society.

Except…it’s really not.

Imagine, just for a moment, that you have no context at all in which to evaluate the following country.

A country where leaders lie, corporations kill for money, and people do nothing.  A country where the likeliest destination for a troubled youth is in a for-profit penitentiary.  A country that is slowly squeezing the planet for resources and belching pollution into the sky.

That sounds awful, doesn’t it?

Would you want to live there? I know I don’t.

And that’s why I write blog posts and get angry about politics.  Because I do live here, in a nation that is all of the things I have listed, a nation that could be so much more, and I am struck every day by the overwhelming conviction that things are not as they should be.

I don’t care what you do.  No one has any right to regulate your actions, so long as you’re not going out and murdering people for sport.

But can’t you agree that there’s something wrong when all of the below citations are true?

And couldn’t you concede that there’s something you might be able to do?

These are huge problems, but they don’t have huge solutions. The answer is in the little things. Buckling a seatbelt and turning off the phone.  Buying fair trade and organic.  Demanding more responsibility from your politicians.

And stopping once in a while to lend a stranger a hand.

Because these are problems that affect us all, and it’s nice to have a reminder, once in a while, that we’re not alone.

And if these things piss you off as much as they do me, well…you’re not alone either.  There are profoundly decent people in the world, just as outraged as we are…some of whom are in a position to do something about it.

CITATIONS:

Distrust of government:

[2011 article documenting a point at which Congressional approval reached 9%.  As in, 9% of Americans think Congress is capable of legislating.]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/us/politics/poll-finds-anxiety-on-the-economy-fuels-volatility-in-the-2012-race.html

Environmental Apathy:

[the more you know…the less you’re likely to do.]

http://128.138.136.233/students/envs_4800/kellstedt_etal_2008.pdf

Automotive Deaths:

[Just statistics. So many statistics. Average in 2009 was 93 people per day]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year

Slavery:

[this website is big because so is its problem.]

http://www.anti-slaverysociety.addr.com/toc.htm

Dangerous compounds in food:

[some of these have been banned in many countries…but usually not the United States. Woo! Free market!]

http://www.purezing.com/living/toxins/living_toxins_dangerousingredients.html

Statistics on domestic violence:

[now this just pisses me off]

http://domesticviolencestatistics.org/domestic-violence-statistics/

Growing partisanship:

[oh, right, it’s not just your cookies. Everything isgetting more partisan.]

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jun/04/news/la-pn-pew-partisan-divide-poll-20120604

The Good Fight

HEY INTERNETS.

Sup.  I should warn you today’s article will not be quite as facetious as others have been in the past.  You may wish to skip down to a more palatable subject and maintain your peaceable torpor.  No, but seriously: this article could be a buzzkill. Have Spice Girls on standby.

So I read an article today.

Now, you don’t have to read the whole thing. I’ll condense it very simply for you.  It’s a gay man talking about his childhood and his darkest secrets: both being bullied in high school, and the fact that he was very certainly, certifiably suicidal for an extensive period of his teenage life.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/noah-michelson/sharing-three-of-my-secrets_b_1796457.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices

Remember how I said you didn’t have to read the whole thing? Well, if you’re above the age of 15, you should.  You should see and know this.  You should be aware that people who are bullied become suicidal often.  You should be aware that because of this harsh cultural backlash, people of the “alternative sexualities” (alternative to what? ‘normalcy?’ ‘Real’ sexuality? As Morpheus says, what is real?)  are more prone to depression and, yes,suicide, because of this.

You should be aware that people who are not “normal” are more likely to be murdered.  Dead.  You should be aware that every hate crime is the culmination of a process lasting decades, an endless chain of justification and deprecation reaching its dark apotheosis in a single instant of blind action.   You should be aware that every suicide is the final point in a plunge that lasts a lifetime, a string of misfortunes, poor reactions, and insensitive responses.

Because here’s something not everyone understands.

Everything is funny, yes.  Life is wonderful, and you should live it to the utmost.

But it’s ALL life and death.

            When you look on the television and see someone rambling about a health-care bill somewhere in Vermont? Something on the other side of the country?  Yeah, people are going to live or die based on that bill.  Babble about Voter ID laws in Pennsylvania? Those laws set a precedent: How long they survive will tell their creators whether or not they can get away with openly tweaking elections to ensure that they continue to hold power.  Those laws set a precedent that will conclude with open voter suppression.

When someone is complaining about new crackdowns on phone usage while driving?  Well, you know what? You are massively more likely to kill someone if you use a phone while you drive. Yes, even if you don’t do it that often.   It takes sixty seconds (on average) for the modern brain to fully switch tasks.  That means that if you look at your phone just for a second, to read a text message or use GPS or update your Facebook status, you will no longer be paying full attention to the road for that time and for the next minute.  That will slow your reactions and make it far more probable that you will be unable to respond to an impending collision.

But surely EVERYTHING can’t be life and death, right? Some things remain pure, right? Like butterflies and chocolate?

Well, the biodiversity of butterfly species is plunging due to our destruction of various habitats, and butterflies (along with bees) perform the essential function of pollination, which is complicated but basically IS WHAT MAKES PLANTS KEEP BEING.

Oh, and if plants die basically so do we.  As a species.  And a planet.  Though I’m sure cockroaches will be fine.

But no biggie.

At least we have chocolate, right?  Even if it’s not a six-stamp organic all-natural free trade chocolate (which costs about three times as much!).

Well, about that.

Did you know something?  After the cotton industry, chocolate production (specifically, the care and harvesting of its raw materials) is the largest industry in the world that currently utilizes slave labor.

Yes, you read that right. Here, let me put it in bold in case you missed it.

SLAVE LABOR.

There were some laws that people considered making a while ago that would regulate that.  Laws that regulate chocolate? Psh.  No biggie.  That story pretty much withered on the vine (ha, ha).

Let me outline what kind of slave labor we’re talking about here.  Just to be clear.  Specifically, I’m talking about a location known as Cote d’Ivorie, or The Ivory Coast, a region of West Africa that supplies about THIRTY PERCENT of the world’s chocolate.  Let me make perfectly clear the fact that this is not the only location in the world where this occurs, although West Africa has an especial problem.

In third-world countries, children are all over the place.  We’re talking 10-15-year-olds, mostly, but they can be as young as 7.  Abandoned kids, orphans, runaways…whatever.  They lurk in the street, play around bus stops, and hop mass transit like everyone else. When they head to a bus stop, they might get picked up by a stranger, who might be kind or might be coercive.  Alternatively, they might have desperate, starving parents, who at last are reduced to such dire straits that they sell their child to a stranger.

Either way, if they go with this stranger (and they usually do, because who’s going to help them run away?), they find themselves on a bus ride, or in a car, or on a boat.  This ride takes them, eventually, to a plantation, where they are sold into debt and set to work in the cacao field.

Their clothes are not part of the budget.  They sleep in structures we would deem unsuitable to use as garden sheds.  They are given every menial task, but the job described that I particularly liked was the one that required two children per team.  One goes down the rows of trees with a basket and a machete (a three-foot long, full-sized machete).  They swing at the cacao pods (which are large) and try to cut them loose without hacking off fingers in the process.  Frequently they fail.  While they work, another child follows behind them with a supply of pesticides.

Side note.  DDT, as you may know, was a pesticide used in the 60s.  In the early 70s, it was deemed too toxic to use in the United States and was banned.  That’s right, we banned a chemical for being too toxic.  THE UNITED STATES.  The people who invented MCDONALDS.  Luckily, we’ve since invented pesticides that are FAR MORE toxic, and THEY haven’t been banned yet! Isn’t that lucky?  One example is ROUNDUP, which sticks around in the soil long after any weeds are dead.

ANYWAY, I DIGRESS.

So the second child of the group has a supply of pesticides.  Roundup is a favorite—it’s cheap, mass-produced, and readily available.  They have a mister, and they use it to spray the trees to kill any insects, fungus, or birds.  Oh, and they also spray their partner, because their partner is nearby and they’re APPROXIMATELY TWELVE YEARS OLD.

And these kids don’t run away, because if they try, they’re beaten.  Which is also what happens when they fall over.  Or complain.  Or generally do anything their overseer doesn’t approve of.  There are more scars than clothes on these kids.

They usually die young.

They die a lot.

Most of them never see their home again.

Oh, and also, most of them never taste chocolate.  If that doesn’t convince you that this practice is heinous and wrong, I DON’T KNOW WHAT WILL.

The upshot of all this information, by the way (before I move on), is this: Those six-stamp organic chocolates? The ones that say “free trade,” and other things, and have stamps of approval from various organizations and government bureaus plastered across the label?  Those are the chocolate companies that don’t murder people.  If it doesn’t have that stamp, you might want to just take a second and think about how much you need it.

Obviously, one person not buying these non-free-trade chocolates is not going to accomplish much.  All that will do is make sure that you don’t have any chocolate.  And there is hope:  Nestlé and Ferrero are among a number of chocolate companies that have made pledges and taken action to remove child labor from their products.  So although the larger issue of child slavery remains a problem, at the very least we can perhaps have chocolate chip cookies guilt-free.  And free-trade organic chocolate is better for you anyway–it tastes better (oh my god yes), it has less unhealthy fat, and it is a significantly better source of certain important chemicals that generally promote longevity and well-being.  Including chemicals that fight cancer and help (very mildly) relieve asthma symptoms.

So let’s get this clear, okay?

When you stand up for what you believe and who you are, when you support the institutions you believe in, when you speak out or offer comfort or strike out, people live and die based on that action.

So I’m not saying agree with me.  I’m not saying agree with anyone.

But know what you’re saying.  Find the facts—it’s hard in the age of free information.  Cross-check your sources.  Make your decisions rationally (not ‘logically’—any attempt to be purely ‘logical’ while remaining a human being is banausic and deluded, but being rational—that is to say, aware of your shortcomings and emotional biases, being truthful with yourself about the reasons behind your judgement—is something that’s within everyone’s reach).   When you choose a position, don’t do it because someone says it’s right.  Demand their sources, ask questions, look it up, and only then make a decision.

But most of all, believe something.  CHESTERTON QUOTE:

“Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are least dangerous is the man of ideas. He is acquainted with ideas, and moves among them like a lion-tamer. Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are most dangerous is the man of no ideas.”

Take a stand for something.  Fight for something.  Believe something, and believe in your ability to make a difference, because make no mistake, planet, there is a fight to be fought, and it’s life and death.

It’s life and death every day.

And so begins my second year of college, not with a whimper but with a bang, I hope.  I’ll be trying to keep this blog up along with everything else, because this is my little strike out into the dark.  So to you, everyone, I say this: don’t be apathetic.  Don’t be passive.  Stand up for yourself, your friends, your family, if you fight for nothing else.  Join me in the ranks–if the front lines aren’t your place, there’s always room for healers and musicians and thinkers.

Me, I don’t like front lines.  If I had my way, I’d just go about my business of plinking on the piano and writing in my own little fantasy world, reading things, etc., but unfortunately the world is full of sh*tty people, and politicians keep doing irritating stuff that will hurt my family and friends.  And we can’t have that, can we?

LET’S PLAY.  http://jungwildeandfree.tumblr.com/post/29925289347/i-enjoin-on-you-to-act

But don’t take my word for it.

SOURCES.

http://www.johnrobbins.info/blog/is-there-slavery-in-your-chocolate/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_in_cocoa_production

http://thecnnfreedomproject.blogs.cnn.com/2012/06/29/nestle-advances-child-labor-battle-plan/

http://thecnnfreedomproject.blogs.cnn.com/2012/04/20/ferrero-sets-date-to-end-cocoa-slavery/

The Right To Laughter

SUP INTERNET

TODAY’S BLOG POST IS ABOUT MOCKERY

But in a good way.

Well, maybe.

Basically, here’s the deal.
I respect people immensely.  The idea of hurting another person is antithetical (there’s a 50¢ word) to me.  I don’t like playing PvP MMOs (although they’re growing on me as I realize that a significant number of people who pay PvP MMOs are actually assholes) because it feels like crushing someone’s hopes and dreams each time they wander through my sniper scope (which doesn’t stop me from pushing the button; it just makes me sad inside).  I sometimes get distraught over the death of innocent video game characters.

You can’t tell behind the Daedric armor, but I’m crying in this screenshot.

THIS IS WHY I fly into a completely useless and very mellow rage whenever I hear that somebody undeserving gets hurt (anywhere).  This rage usually vents itself via Tumblr posts, video of Alan Rickman flipping tables, and writing long, violent fight scenes, but it still occurs, and especially so when I hear about mockery.

Now, let’s explore mockery for a minute.

Merriam-Webster tells us that MOCKERY is “insulting or contemptuous action or speech.”  It’s from old French, if anyone cares, according to THE online etymology dictionary, from mocquer (the verb indicating an act of derision).   I like how the Internet gives me the ability to sound as though I know what the hell I’m talking about.  ANYWAY, MOVING ON.

MOCKERY is humor at the expense of something.  It is cruel humor.  It’s why we laugh at Three Stooges movies.   It’s also currently one of the more popular forms of humor, this overblown schadenfreudeal infliction of amusement.  I’m not even sure what the last half of that sentence meant.  BUT THE WHOLE POINT IS that you are ridiculing a person or thing for a negative quality which you find amusing based on its comparison with normalcy.  As in LOL HE’S GOT A NAIL IN HIS HEAD LOOK AT THE STUPID BASTARD HAHAHAHAHAHAAHHAA

NOW, I’m not a fan of mockery.  I’m good at it, (I think that around the age of 13 the sarcasm gland develops, and mine is still running on full steam, providing a natural hormonal boost to this sort of thing), but I find it mean.  And mean as in low, as in it’s a pettier form of humor.  IT’S STILL FUNNY, OF COURSE, but sometimes it also makes me sad inside.  This is why I don’t watch Three Stooges movies, or Home Alone, or those other comedies.

I HAVE NO PROBLEM WITH OTHER PEOPLE ENJOYING IT.  This is ME, my opinion, and it MAY OR MAY NOT BE FULL OF CRAP.

BUT I DIGRESS.

What do I find funny?

THE SILLY.

Wait, that wasn’t impressive enough.

That’s better.

So what is THE SILLY?

Simple.

It’s the insidious, creeping threat of CORN SILK, the most terrifying threat our planet has ever placed.  It’s Number 4, the Larch.  It’s Sebring Convertible potato wombat umlaut conversion neodespotism. It’s SOMETHING SILLY, DAMN IT.

It’s a ridiculous overreaction to getting the wrong kind of coffee (as in, strangling people).  It’s showing up to a black tie event in a bright pink tuxedo.  It’s a voice, face, expression, phrase, or attitude that strikes me as silly.  It’s The Marx Brothers and Monty Python.

I wish I could say that I don’t find things that hurt people funny, but I do.  Llamas with Hats is possibly the most amusing cartoon I’ve ever seen on the internet.

Few things amuse me more than ragdoll physics.  Why? Because it’s SILLY.  My reaction to watching people get flung around by Sauron in the prologue to Lord Of The Rings was approximately that of a four-year old:  “AAAH THEIR VOICES ARE FUNNY LOOK AT THEIR ARMS GO FLAILY SQUIGGLE HEE HEE HEE”

I also laughed at the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where the master swordsman gets instantly, unassumingly shot, because the sudden shift of dramatic tension and the inversion of the trope is just amusing.  That’s not how swordfights work, Indy! YOU SO SILLY.

That said, I find a lot of things silly.

Actually, I’ll let you in on a secret.

EVERYTHING IS SILLY.

It has to be.  You have to take the world with humor, because when you do you realize that there is so much to laugh at EVERYWHERE.

Because humor is a celebration.  To laugh at the silly in a gesture or phrase is to celebrate the beautiful surprise of amusement, to recognize that the Earth is not really so serious after all.

Humor can be weapon and shield, healing and illuminating. Etc.

But most of all it can just be funny.

And humor is a separate sphere from ethics, from love, from life.  I can laugh while I’m angry without being unjust, because it is the action that follows the laughter that dictates my morality.  I can laugh while I’m being deadly serious.  I can and do pause to laugh while speaking in complete honesty and earnestness.

So I don’t often feel guilty when I laugh at something silly.  Whatever it is.  Because I know the difference between right and wrong, or I hope I do at this point, because it’s pretty much too late now otherwise.

So I laugh at funny things. Like this.

 

I really, really shouldn’t laugh at this. Obviously RDJ is a terrible person.

And then, if I need to, I turn around and beat the shit out of the jerk making an offensive joke behind me, because offensive jokes are evaluated in two categories:

One: Are they funny? Did I laugh? Was it said with wit and courage and good comic timing?

Two: Are they morally wrong?  Is someone going to be hurt by this? Killed by this? Is this an insult to someone I care about?

Regardless of the answer to number one, if the answer to two is “yes,” then you’re in for an ass-kicking.  And depending on how severely “yes” the answer is, things might get pretty spectacular.  As in, I’ll make an event on Facebook and invite friends. I’ll take video, make gifs and post it on Tumblr.  I’ll laugh.  And then I’ll go to jail because that’s legally wrong, which is YET ANOTHER sphere of evaluation.

I laugh at funny things.

But that won’t save you, because I can kick your ass while I’m laughing mine off.

COMING UP NEXT WEEK…I have no idea, because I wrote this two weeks ago.  HURRAH AUTOMATIC UPLOADS.  Coming up: A blog post!

So go about your business, people, internet, with your friends and your enemies and your haters and your wonderful rays of optimism and your hilariously amoral ways.   Go about the business of life, and do what you believe in.

But I reserve the right to laugh at you at any time.

YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG

Hi Internet.

Not to be confrontational, but –

(1)        Liberals, you’re doing it wrong.

People keep arguing against religious homophobia on a religious basis.  This is descending to the level of the religious zealot—fighting them on their home field.  This is pointless.

Rational, intelligent, moral people present arguments similar to the following:  “the relevant passages of Leviticus also prohibit eating shellfish” and “you can’t cherry-pick which passages of the Bible you choose to follow.”

There’s a flaw with that:

Obviously, you can.  It’s a system of values, and each person chooses their own. This is why people run red lights.  We all abide generally by traffic laws, but each person chooses their own personal standard by which to hold themselves.  We all have our own ways of looking at the world.  This is also why there are different religions, and why churches vary on an individual basis.

It’s obvious to anyone who cares to look that the Bible doesn’t condemn homosexuality any more than it condemns certain forms of human-mollusk intercourse.  And if someone doesn’t want to embrace that fact, then guess what, it’s usually not because they don’t understand how the Bible works.

Usually, it’s due to a reason best described through scientific psychological terminology: because they’re being an asshole.

ON ANOTHER NOTE, first rule of debate, don’t engage your opponent on his/her/Uds. terms.  Disagree with one of the aforementioned religious zealots? Well, it’s unlikely, but there is a small chance that they (a) actually know their primary religious document pretty well and (b) follow all the rules of Leviticus.  Then you’ve just completely lost the argument, and you have to start again from scratch.  Don’t allow that risk.  Engage them on a higher tier.

Let’s talk about the MEDIA for a moment.  That’s always fun.  They have a practice similar to this.

Freedom of Speech is an intimidating idea.  It can make you antsy about calling someone out for anything—after all, they have a right to speak, don’t they?

Well, they might have a right to speak, but riddle me this, Batman—do we need to see it in the newspaper if it’s stupid? If the argument in favor of a healthcare plan is the thousands of lives it will save and the millions of lives it will improve, and the argument against it is fallacious, full of holes, and based in part upon outdated political principles and an education in economics acquired by reading the first chapter of a textbook on the ride over, then guess what, we shouldn’t have to suffer through the stupid parts.

The proper journalistic action is to investigate the sources and arguments and then write two articles, one about how the healthcare plan will save thousands of lives and improve the lives of millions, and the other about how there are lots of people making stupid arguments based on nothing at all.

Giving everyone equal say doesn’t equate to ‘giving stupid people equal grounds as Ph.D.s in economics.’  I don’t care how many University of Phoenix classes you attended on your Ipad, it’s still extremely unlikely that you have anything constructive to add to a debate with the foremost experts on global warming.

BECAUSE THEY’RE THE FOREMOST EXPERTS ON GLOBAL WARMING.

If you knew as much as they did, YOU’D UNDERSTAND THAT GLOBAL WARMING EXISTS.

BECAUSE SCIENCE, THAT’S WHY.

 

Mark Twain’s quote comes to mind.

“Don’t argue with stupid people: they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.”

BEHOLD A SUMMARY OF POLITICS FOR THE LAST TWELVE YEARS.

 

Now for the second point.

 (2)       Liberals, we go too far.

BACK OFF ON THE ATHEISM.  My god.  Science is the light of the world and everyone should embrace it because it will usher mankind into a NEW AGE yes that’s wonderful I totally see how that’s different from Jesus bringing humanity together in heaven STOP IT.

 

RELIGION IS NOT EVIL.

THERE.  I SAID IT.

YOU MAY GASP NOW.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE.

Rather than rant, I should clarify.  I have nothing against either atheism or religion on general grounds.  Whether you place your faith in God, Jesus, My Little Pony, or an abstract model of the universe, it’s all the same to me.

I do have problems with the following, mostly because they’re wrong.

FIRST is religious people telling me what to believe, demanding that all the world adopt their specific brand of organized spirituality.  NO.  Go away.  This musty political document that most people don’t pay much attention to says I CAN BELIEVE WHATEVER I WANT.  If I choose to worship Stephen Colbert and sacrifice stuffed Kirby dolls to his altar, THAT’S MY PEROGATIVE.  The semi-Millsian nature of our political system means I can waste my free time in just about any way that doesn’t kill people.

SECOND is atheists telling me not to believe anything, demanding that all the world adopt their specific man-made model of rationality.  NO.  GO AWAY.  The aforementioned document says I’M FREE TO BELIEVE ANYTHING.  If I choose to sing 80s power ballads to Jeff the God of Elm Trees every Tuesday, well, guess what, THAT’S MY CHOICE.

BOTH OF YOU are giving your respective organizations a bad name.  How easy it is to paint atheists and religious folks alike as rabid zealots when you both launch rabidly zealous attacks on one another at the earliest opportunity!  ONE OF YOU should grow up. I don’t care which.  Hitchens did a great thing—he also messed some things up, but he did a very great thing for the atheistic argument which many people missed: he took the MORAL HIGH GROUND.

And the rest of the movement promptly lost it again.  Well done. Hitchens’ argument was (and rightly): “We don’t need religious ethics to be rational and intelligent and caring and moral human beings.  Atheists are morally better people.”

Which leads me to my next point: If you’re better people, then hush. Let people make their own choices.  If you really are a collection of the world’s best and brightest, GREAT. When solar flares begin to rip our planet apart or Nibiru crashes into us or the zombies begin to walk among us, we’ll look to you for our salvation.

Because the mark of security in one’s self is not continually dictating the actions of other people.  I’ll give you that much of a hint.  And whichever community stops this ridiculousness and just lives their own life first wins the prize for ‘Most Mature.’  I know a number of people on both sides who have this outlook, and it’s amazing how much easier it is to have a conversation with them about anything.  I know a fantastic blogger (http://lesbicrafty.blogspot.com/) who matches this description.

So to sum up: STOP BEING SO IMMATURE.  The world is turning into a religion/atheism grudge match.  WHY?  Science and spirituality are so completely unrelated that there’s not even a Venn diagram here to consider.  They don’t even touch.  THERE’S NOT EVEN VENN DIAGRAM CLEAVAGE.

(the third greatest kind, closely behind mineral)

(3)        PART THREE.

EVERYTHING IS TOO PARTISAN.  Oh my god.  Oreo supports gay marriage? GREAT. Chik-fil-a doesn’t? FINE.

Let’s make this clear.  Unless your companies are actually donating to the political process (Citizens United! Hurrah!), unless you’re actually pushing this agenda, NO ONE CARES.  Without such an action, these announcements from corporations are akin to walking into the middle of a train station and yelling “I LIKE BANNANA MUFFINS.”  A complete non sequitur, an unnecessary piece of information.

Besides, we’re not even hearing what the company thinks.  WHICH, SURPRISINGLY, is NOTHING, because GUESS WHAT, THEY’RE NOT PEOPLE.

ER

MAH

GERD

SRSLY?

I know it’s a shock, but I feel like this point needs to be hammered home: A CORPORATION IS NOT A PERSON.  It is an unfeeling, unthinking conglomerate of human minds that, in most cases, acts on basic predatory instinct.  A good example might be the Portugese Man-O-War—a stinging, predatory sea creature made up of thousands of individual creatures.  Imagine that, except you can have a beer with any one of its components.

Sup. Wanna grab a brewski?

When we hear these announcements that “so-and-so supports X,” guess what, that’s not the corporation talking.  Because CORPORATIONS CAN’T TALK.  What you hear is the result of a CEO shooting their mouth off, or a board of directors reaching a consensus and having the PR guy say something, or a group of employees taking a stand.  For every person who agrees with that stance, that company has an employee who vehemently disagrees.  Do you think Oreo has an anti-homophobia test in their hiring process? No, because THAT WOULD BE STUPID.  It doesn’t matter how a person feels about homosexuality, so long as they can squeeze soft cream between two black cookies for eight hours a day.

NOW, if a corporation is actually contributing something VALUABLE to a political discussion beyond standing up and screaming “OOH I LIKE THAT” like a four-year-old who sees a picture of a dinosaur, if they’re giving money or something, THEN GOOD.  Well, not GOOD, because CORPORATIONS ARE NOT PEOPLE AND SHOULDN’T BE ABLE TO SPEND MONEY IN POLITICS, but at least it’s SLIGHTLY LESS INANE.  Maybe with all those human resources people working away night and day we’ll actually get a coherent mission statement for one party or another beyond “I LIKE THIS” or “I HATE THIS.”

Which has essentially become our political dialogue, by the way.  One political party is being meek and calm and considerate and timid, trying to make friends, and the other one is standing in the corner with its fingers in its ears yelling “LALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU GO AWAY I HATE YOU.”  I leave you to decide which one it is, but here’s a hint: one party supporter just replied to an attack ad with the truth and was promptly attacked by her own side.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/08/andrea-saul-romney-health-care_n_1757550.html?utm_hp_ref=elections-2012

So there’s MY contribution to political discourse FOR THE MONTH.  Hopefully what it lacks in calm and rationality IT MAKES UP FOR WITH YELLING, because as Bill O’Reilly teaches us, YELLING MAKES YOU RIGHT.

STAY AWESOME INTERNET

I KNOW YOU WILL

BECAUSE I JUST YELLED IT.

And let’s have Colbert sing us out.

OLYMPIC LACEWING

HI INTERNET

You know what really rustles my jimmies?

The Olympics.

Not the athletes.  Never the athletes.  So far as I can tell, they’re pretty consistently awesome people.  They come together from all over the world, united by their passions, gather in a massive village that is essentially a single ongoing party/orgy, and do what they love for weeks straight before a crowd of millions of adoring fans.  The athletes are awesome.

No, it’s the network.  NBC.  Our American Olympics source.

Let’s just start by saying this: The Olympics stream for free in Europe.  Free.  As in, not costing anything. Over the internet.

In the U.S., Olympics are accessible in bits and drabs, ‘highlights’ tapes separated by advertisements.  They can’t be easily watched in full except over cable TV, again interrupted by commercials—and even then you’re not getting the whole picture.  Rather, you’re seeing the events in which American athletes participate, and it’s on them that most of the commentary centers. We cut into the event just in time to watch the American team run/swim/throw/shoot, listen to a bit of babble about their lives, and cut over to the next United States event. Or to a commercial.  Certain events are given more airtime and more priority, because they sell better.

And then there are the questions.

After each event, the NBC reporters descend on the American athlete, and ask questions designed to insinuate fierce competition and highly strategic, analytical thinking.  They’ll ask “how does it feel to be going up against the world champion?” “How does it feel to have successfully defended your title?” “What’s it like going into this thinking about your recent losses in (x category)?”

Each time, the answer is consistently the same.

The athletes don’t give a crap.

They’re happy to be in the Olympics.  It’s a massive honor to even compete.  They’re focusing on their own performance, not their title, not their competitors, not their losses.  Winning isn’t even on their radar in many cases.They’re trying to be the best they can be.

Watching Missy Franklin splinter a world record in swimming provides a great example.  She comes into the finish line, looking ecstatic.  The swimmers to either side—a French competitor on her right, an American teammate on her left—call her over for hugs.  All three girls are jubilant.

Then in comes a reporter, asking her how it feels to have broken a world record, netted her fourth/third/second/whatevereth medal, focusing on the competition, etc.  And Missy doesn’t care.  She’s over the moon.  She’s in the Olympics, man, and she’s certainly just beaten her personal best time.  Her teammate doesn’t give a damn either.  Both athletes look like Avenger fangirls about to have dinner with Tom Hiddleston.

TO COIN A PHRASE.

This post, rather obviously, comes on the heels of a previous rant about the American (western) conflation of achievement with self-esteem.  And here is where we can see that the athletes are way ahead of the news network.

They understand, in other words, the point that I spent an entire post making last time.  The point of the Olympics isn’t to win. It isn’t the raw achievement that matters.  The point of the Olympics, to the people who participate in it (or maybe I’m just projecting my own idealistic fervor onto them, but either way) is being the best you can be, improving yourself as a person, crushing your records and preconceptions.

The Olympics are like Fight Club!

You are not your gold medal.

I really wanted to work in that analogy.  I mean, how could I resist? Seriously.  Ahem. But I digress.  And now I’m covering ground that I’ve already covered.  Blah blah blah, self-empowerment, do what you want, don’t be afraid to ask questions in class, stick it to the man, etc.

So instead it’s time to move on to something else.

Literally.

Did you know that there are literally people who don’t understand what literally means? LITERALLY?

It doesn’t help that some dictionary definitions are shifting as more and more people use the word incorrectly.  Because popular usage defines correct usage.  Because if everyone decides that pianos should be played using the strings instead of the keys, obviously that becomes the proper way to play the instrument, and there’s no need to build pianos with keys EXCEPT NO.

Because a piano without keys IS CALLED A HARP. IT ALREADY EXISTS. And to use ‘literally’ as emphasis instead of WHAT IT LITERALLY MEANS is to turn a piano not just into a harp, but into a HARMONICA. Something it was never intended to be in the first place.

So here is your fair warning, world.  If I hear you use ‘literally’ wrong, I will call you on it.  Anytime, anywhere.  Dinner conversation, television broadcast, across the room at a party, I will literally turn around, give you the dirtiest look imaginable, and drop the most scathing comment my caffeine-maddened brain can concoct on the spur of the moment.   I will leap in through the window like some kind of grammatical Batman.  I will climb down the chimney like a wrathful Saint Nicholas.  I will go all Liam Neeson up in this and I WILL FIND YOU.

So use literally correctly.

AND NOW THAT THE MOMENT OF RANDOM INTENSITY IS OVER, LET’S TALK ABOUT LACEWINGS.

BEHOLD ITS SPLENDOR

Green lacewings are like ladybugs, but they are the Louis Black to ladybugs’ Eddie Izzard.  Infinitely meaner, more predatory, and more violent, they hunt and exterminate aphids with extreme prejudice.

They are very pretty bugs. If you live in the continental United States, you’ve probably seen them, and if you don’t, TAKE ME WITH YOU SO I CAN WATCH THE OLYMPICS.   They have pale green bodies like vine snakes, slim and muscular (for bugs).  Their wings look like living diamond, crystal traced with veins of black, white, or green, depending on the lighting, and they are held back over their abdomen like a sheath of diamonds.  And their compound eyes, set in their heads to provide binocular vision, glitter scarlet or gold and catch the light like faceted rubies.

They’re clever little things too.  Some species can detect and react to the sounds of hunting bats, taking evasive action (which usually consists of an Iron-Man-style nosedive with wings clamped tight to their body in an attempt to minimize their acoustical signature) to avoid the larger winged predator.  They also communicate through vibrations transmitted either through the air or through the surface they rest upon, in a complex system of courtship and communication unique to each species.

Also, some are admittedly vegetarians.  But we’ll ignore them because predators are cooler.

Their larvae burst from the egg, shed once, and immediately swarm up their hosting plant, devouring anything smaller than themselves.  Their hunting strategy makes up in enthusiasm what it lacks in sophistication: they walk around blindly waving their heads from side to side until they bump into something, at which point they grab it and eat it.

This habit of voraciously consuming anything that moves makes them perfect pest control, just like with ladybugs, and they are used for this purpose as a sort of biological weapon, the perfect predator to hunt the perfect parasite, which sounds like a movie that I would totally watch.

To recap: They’re pretty, they’re beneficial to the local environment (and the odds are good that any one individual lacewing is part of the local native subspecies), and they probably don’t conflate their self-esteem with the number of aphids they eat in their life.    ALL AROUND A GOOD ORGANISM TO HAVE NEARBY.

And I’ve decided to end this blog post on a rather “Well then, that was unexpected” note, so here it is.   THE END.

Self-Worth

This blog post was inspired by a two-sentence exchange from a pair of nine-year old girls I overheard at the side of a pool.  The older girl asked the younger if she wanted to race.  The younger girl said “No. You’ll win.”

I may have said this before, mentioned it before, etc., but there’s something about American culture that really bothers me.

Well, I say American culture. I really mean Western culture.  Actually, it’s not even necessarily Western culture any more.

It’s an idea.  It’s a way of looking at things. And I rather strongly despise it.  As in, table-flipping levels of dislike.

But perhaps I should tell you what the heck I’m talking about.

When a kid learns something new, what do we tell them? Usually we call them a ‘good student.’  We say they’re a ‘great learner.’ Tell them that they’re awesome, and we can tell that because they learned that new thing so easily.  We bolster their self-esteem as a result of completing a task.  We affirm their worth as a human being each time they do something right, because it helps to build their self-esteem, right?  Well, not quite.

Kids are clever.

Invert it.

When a kid can’t learn something.  When someone doesn’t finish a task.  When someone does something wrong.  What’s the obvious implication in the inversion of this system?

Simple enough: The inversion of the system states simply that if you do something wrong, your value as a human being is diminished.  If you failed to learn, it’s because you’re a bad student.  If you failed a test, it’s because of your personal failings.

This is why people are ashamed of bad grades.  It’s why people don’t ask every question they have in class. It’s why there is a taboo against seeing a therapist, against ‘getting help,’ because getting help implies needing help which implies weakness (i.e. being unable to deal with it on your own).

Now this is by no means an all-encompassing cultural construct on the same level as gender roles or the concept of hugging.  But it is nonetheless a pervasive, unconscious force lurking under the surface of our society—affecting our actions far more than others’ perceptions of us.

Tying one’s self-image to failure is a well-documented phenomenon.  These people are often described as self-defeating, for they create excuse after excuse to explain their lack of success and then are unsurprised when nothing happens—because that’s just what they predicted in the first place. Their goals are far-reaching and not unreasonable, but are kept out of range by exterior forces.  The things they try to achieve are never quite possible, not right yet, but if they just had this much more money, this much more time, they could possibly pull it off, turn their life around, become famous, etc.  It can be frustrating to hear.

But again, invert it, and we can see the flip side of this: people who tie their self-image to success.  Just as much of a problem, but not, perhaps, as wildly condemned as the self-defeating person.  Because at least these people get stuff done, right?

They do, but that’s because they can’t afford to do anything else.  Just as the self-defeating individual can feel alienated from their self-image if they begin to succeed—if they are no longer a victim, according to some theories—so these people can crumble if they fail.  One failure is like a missile crashing into their armor, opening up a hole for all the world to see.  They can’t admit defeat, because to do so is to admit that they are fallible, and to put that into words gives it power.

These two sides are not mutually exclusive.  To a certain degree, everyone possesses these traits.  We all minimize our failures, because they link back to our worth as a person.  We’ve all made an excuse to avoid something we were scared of doing.

These two poles of behavior first came to my notice several years ago, but I never really paid attention until after my first year of college. Until I could see these forces at play not only in the people around me, but in myself, in the classes that went well and the classes that went not quite so well.  When I re-learned this stuff near or after the end of spring semester, I had a bit of a stare-into-space revelatory moment, because it’s always nice to crystallize your vague intuitions into hyperbole.

How does this tie back into the little exchange above?

Well, what’s the point of competition?  To win? No.  Watch the Olympics.  The reporters ask athletes about ‘defending’ their titles or ‘crushing’ the competition, and the athletes just don’t care.  They understand that the point of competition is to better yourself through the joy and drive of measuring your own skill against another.  This is why people compete.

The boost of good feeling we get from winning, that little outburst of “I’m awesome,” that bit of vanity, that exists to impel us towards competition.  The goal of vanity, in a sense, is to drive us onward to achieve things, so that we can feel good about ourselves and our achievements. As Montaigne rightly suggests (but never says in an easily-quotable form) in his aptly-named essay, (Of Vanity)—were we to be fully introspective, we would flounder beneath the weight of our own inadequacy.  Vanity exists to shield us from ourselves and spur us on to greater deeds than introspection.

In that little exchange, though, competition is not worth the trouble if victory is not assured.  The point of the competition is not competition itself, but victory—vanity, in a sense, has turned back upon itself, discouraging competition to preserve self-esteem.  The cycle has reversed, and rather than run the risk of success and great failure, the speaker will accept a little loss instead.

Which also ties into the concept of people with “low-self-esteem” who are self-defeating.  They don’t have low self-esteem.  Their self-esteem is just as high as anyone else.  It’s just that they defend it differently.

Rather than be praised and risk being criticized, they do not strive.  Rather than race and risk losing, they do not race at all.  Their sense of self is so strongly conflated with their achievements that to risk losing a race is to risk losing their self.

Which is all of course not a conscious truth. That is to say, it’s not a truth of which an individual must necessarily be cognizant of.  It’s not one of those ‘unconscious’ truths in a Freudian sense, either.  It is an emotional truth, a distinction I am making right now because I disagree with Freud on a lot of things. FREUUUUUUUD. *shakes fist*

So.

Knowing this, I’ve decided to disintegrate this cultural force.  I’ve decided to turn the force of a thousand raging suns against it and put it in a blender, add some fruit and berries, and turn the resulting creamy drink into a giant smoothie of self-empowerment.  There’s plenty for everyone.

My academic success is not me as a person.  Rather, I expect myself to do well because I know as a person that I can do well at such things.

Asking a question in class doesn’t mean you’re a mindless, gibbering idiot who wasn’t paying attention.  It means that you need help and aren’t afraid to ask for it.

If I can’t learn a thing, that doesn’t mean I’m a bad student.  It means that I haven’t learned it yet. That just means I need to work harder.

And seeing a therapist doesn’t mean you’re a raving lunatic.  See above.

We are an action-oriented society.  Show us what you’ve done, show us what’s happened to you, and we’ll tell you who you are.  You are your successes and failures—your college application, your resume, your curriculum vitae, your criminal record.

Well, I reject that, thanks very much.

People are more than the sum of their actions.  As Churchill says, “success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.”  That saying is only tangentially related, but I wanted to work it in anyway.

When I want to do something, I’m going to do it—which is to say, I will unleash every force in my power to see it done, throw everything possible at it to ensure its achievement.  But if it doesn’t happen, that won’t stop me either; that just means it’s time to roll on and thunder down into the next task.  And that links into my next personal belief…

Because once you hit age eighteen, there’s nothing any human being alive can do to dictate the course of your actions.   And I passed age eighteen long ago.

(that makes it sound like I’m a crotchety old man, don’t it?)

Because all other people can do is scare you, if you let them, and being scared of something isn’t a reason not to do it.  There’s a line dividing fear from intuition, and it’s a differentiation I learned to make sometime in the last semester of my life.  (my life is divided into semesters now, by the way).

And most likely this blog post will meet with resounding ‘absoutelys’ from the people I know, because I’m probably the last one in my social group to get on this bus, but that doesn’t matter, because even if you’re the last one on the bus, you’re still on the bus.  It doesn’t matter how long it takes to get to Narnia, you’re still partying hard with Aslan.   Don’t be ashamed of being the last one to get it.  Don’t worry about how you look to other people.  And don’t be afraid of failure.  As someone famous who was probably Thomas Edison once said: “I have not failed ten thousand times.  I have successfully found ten thousand ways that did not work.”

[invert this]

If something is what you really want, you should be pursuing it with all force and guile.  Effort should be going into it constantly, instead of being deferred by environmental factors.  People, wild dogs, money, and hurricanes should all fall into the category of “things that are not reasons to not do this.”  And if you don’t really want it, for some reason, even an unconscious one, don’t waste time and effort trying to persuade anyone else that you do.  Especially not yourself.

So it comes down to the corny stuff, once again, at the end of the blog post.  And I suppose this is the message I seek to beam out into the universe, radiating it in all directions like a great big beacon of glowy white warmth-light shiny things.

Do what you want.

No power in the ‘Verse can stop you. 

[there’s never a bad place for Ok Go]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vgq0Okdr6DE

…and I don’t know about you, but I don’t really care what other people do beyond a certain point.  If you’re not in my face, and if you’re not telling me what to do—if you’re not attacking me and mine, or dictating my actions, well then, I really, honestly, truly don’t give a leaping **** what you’re doing with your free time.  If it makes you happy and doesn’t kill people, then go wild.  Listen to One Direction, if you must.

Teachers like students who admit what they don’t know.

Bosses like employees who ask questions.

I like people who don’t hide themselves.

And I like chocolate milk.

…and that’s all.   ‘Till next time, Internet.

 

Know your Stuff: CITIZENS UNITED.

SUP INTERNET.

So I hear that Citizens United is going back up before the SCOTUS.  That should be interesting.

In case you didn’t read it the first time, here’s the final score (that’s what it’s called, right?):

http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf

Now, Citizens United is, like most Supreme Court issues, REALLY COMPLICATED.

And like most people who talk about legal issues, I HAVE NEVER BEEN TO LAW SCHOOL.

I’m not even sure if it’s called a ‘legal degree’ or a ‘legalness doctorate’ or a ‘legalitarianism major’ or an ‘outstanding legality badge.’   Does law school have laws? If two law schools join up, are their respective founders law-school in-laws? Do the law-school in-laws have to obey the law school laws?  THIS IS ALL SO CONFUSING.

You know what else is confusing? CITIZENS UNITED V.AUSTIN.  So I’m going to PARAPHRASE the long and boring legal document.  And I’m going to try my damndest to do it correctly, but please, don’t take ANYTHING I say as word of god.  Especially not Thor, because the only word he really says repeatedly is “MJIIIIOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLNIRRRRRRRRRRRRR.”

I totally think he could take out any member of the Avengers in a fight. Except maybe Iron Man.  Tony could probably design some kind of arc reactor/dimensional portal and hurl him into the endless Void between worlds, where ninjas hide and crab people build their sprawling planet-cities.  And, to be fair, the Hulk is more or less unkillable.  I mean, even Wolverine couldn’t nail him. And of course Deadpool beats Wolverine, obviously.  So wouldn’t that mean Deadpool could take out Thor? Assuming he didn’t just go all fangirl again and try and get an autograph.

…But I digress.

SO CITIZENS UNITED.   I’m going to run through it really fast and then be EXTREMELY JUDGEMENTAL of the court’s decision, because reasons.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a nonprofit group called Citizens United generated a ‘documentary’ about Hillary Clinton that was basically a massive disincentive to anyone planning to vote for her, a film that is, according to the actual document, “a feature-length negative advertisement that urges viewers to vote against Senator Clinton for President.”  Let me point out right here that Citizens United is a nonprofit group that defines itself, among other things, as promoting a ‘strong family’ and a ‘pro-life’ stance.

We’ll deal with you later.

ANYWAY.  They then attempted to put this film on-demand, available for free streaming, and were blocked by a law by which “corporations and unions are barred from using their general treasury funds for express advocacy or electioneering communications.”

So, preemptively, Citizens United went to court.  And won some points.  For example, they pointed out that people have to choose to see their “feature-length negative advertisement,” as opposed to televised ads that attack people in their homes.  They have to take, as it was described, “a series of affirmative steps,”  one of which is listed as “subscribing to cable,” because you subscribe to cable solely to watch Iron Man 3 when it comes on demand three years later.

The majority opinion declared that “substantial questions would arise if courts were to begin saying what means of speech should be preferred or disfavored.”  The situation, they said, demanded a broad, sweeping declaration—no ad hoc case-by-case law here.  The majority wanted to deal with the continued, troubling allegations on the part of Citizens United that this law was stifling their freedom of speech, both as a single entity and as a group of individuals.

A portion of the law in question provides for PACs as a means for corporations to make their voices known.  The SCOTUS majority compared this to a disincentive—citing the fact that PACs are expensive and difficult to maintain, irritating to set up, and time-consuming as a whole.  The obvious comparison is to a personal level—if you were only allowed to weigh your votes into an election every time you bought a microwave, would you spend this massive amount of money or just pipe down?  Moreover, viewed in this light, the law that Citizens United was fighting (Or the portion of that law referred to as Section 441b) took on a new and sinister meaning:

“If §441b applied to individuals, no one would believe that it is merely a time, place, or manner restriction on speech.  Its purpose and effect are to silence entities whose voices the Government deems to be suspect.”

And the majority goes further:

“We find no basis for the proposition that, in the context of political speech, the Government may impose restrictions on certain disfavored speakers.   Both history and logic lead us to this conclusion.”

IN A SINGLE SENTENCE, the majority opinion (I have no idea why they went on for so long instead of just putting this sentence and a metric ****ton of citations):

“The Court has recognized that First Amendment protection extends to corporations.”

Does this seem normal? Well-reasoned? Let me sum up.

An individual has the right to spend their money in support of whatever political message they choose.  The government cannot hinder them, nor say that one way of spending their money is better than another (so long as it is otherwise legal).  A corporation is protected by these rules, as well as a person, and has the right to spend their money in any direction they choose—to do otherwise would be to risk the sanctity and function of the First Amendment itself.

NOW THEN. 

 

You should read the dissenting opinions.  Stevens’ is hilarious.  And they also point out the massive, glaring petitio principii fallacy, the question that is begged by the majority opinion.  The dissenting opinion puts it best:

“The basic premise underlying the Court’s ruling is its iteration, and constant reiteration, of the proposition that the First Amendment bars regulatory distinctions based on a speaker’s identity, including its “identity” as a corporation.  While that glittering generality has rhetorical appeal, it is not a correct statement of the law.”

In a distinctly dry tone of disbelief, the dissenting opinion then goes on to helpfully highlight this fact for the slower members of the audience:

“In the context of election to public office, the distinction between corporate and human speakers is significant. Although they make enormous contributions to our society, corporations are not actually members of it.”

GIVE THE MAN A PRIZE

In a rather prophetic tone, the dissenting opinion tells us that “the Court’s ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation.  The path it has taken to reach its outcome will, I fear, do damage to this institution.”

WHAT? PSH. Ridiculous.

Now, with a loud crack of legal knuckles that would make any clerk run and hide behind his stack of amicus curiae briefs, the dissenting opinion tackles some of the major issues.  As it is so charmingly put: “Our colleagues’ suggestion that “we are asked to reconsiderAustin and, in effect, McConnell,”…would be more accurate if rephrased to state that “we have asked ourselves” to re­consider those cases.”

Furthermore, Citizens United brought up a challenge to an earlier section of the act that the SCOTUS majority decided to nuke—and then withdrew it.  This earlier section, §203, imposes regulation upon the electoral spending of corporations. Blah blah blah. Basically, it tells companies where and when they can spend their money to influence an election.   But §203 was never brought out by the defense—by Citizens United.  They mentioned it initially in a lower court—and then withdrew the statement.

In “exceptional cases,” the Supreme Court will examine all sides of an issue and any questions that might be raised or have ever been raised by the ins and outs of the case.  To quote again:

“The appellant in this case did not so much as assert an exceptional circumstance, and one searches the majority opinion in vain for the mention of any.  That is unsurprising, for none exists. Setting the case for reargument was a constructive step, but it did not cure this fundamental problem.  Essentially, five Justices were unhappy with the limited nature of the case before us, so they changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law.”

I just like this quote, so I’ll add it in clips.

“The Court now negates Congress’ efforts without a shred of evidence on how §203 or its state-law counterparts have been affecting any entity other than Citizens United.

Faced with this gaping empirical hole, the majority throws up its hands.  Were we to confine our inquiry to Citizens United’s as-applied challenge, it protests, we would commence an “extended” process of “draw[ing], and then redraw[ing], constitutional lines based on the particular media or technology used to disseminate political speech from a particular speaker.” While tacitly acknowledging that some applications of  §203 might be found constitutional, the majority thus posits a future in which novel First Amendment standards must be devised  on an ad hoc basis, and then leaps from this unfounded prediction to the unfounded conclusion that such complexity counsels the abandonment of all normal restraint…. The fact that a Court can hypothesize situations in which a statute might, at some point down the line, pose some unforeseen as-applied problems, does not come close to meeting the standard for a facial challenge.”

The argument posed in that long block of text: There is no evidence that the segment upon which the majority built their case was even the slightest bit relevant to the case, NOR that it was in the slightest bit unconstitutional.   The way this decision was structured rests soundly upon a pair of massive assumptions:

First, that corporations are people.  Now (you might want to sit down): They’re not.  Sorry to burst your bubble there.

Now, if you could be troubled to oblige us, Mr. Potter,   read this quote in the voice of Severus Snape.

“Unlike our colleagues, [the Framers of the Constitution] had little trouble distinguishing corporations from human beings, and when they constitutionalized the right to free speech in the First Amendment, it was the free speech of individual Americans that they had in mind.”

SECOND ASSUMPTION (which is also good in Snape’s voice):

“In short, the Court dramatically overstates its critique of identity-based distinctions, without ever explaining why corporate identity demands the same treatment as individual identity.  Only the most wooden approach to the First Amendment could justify the unprecedented line it seeks to draw.”

Actually, the entire dissenting opinion is awesome in Snape’s voice.

So, IN CASE IT’S NOT APPARENT WHERE I STAND, here’s my final point.

Corporations are not people.  They’re not.  If you create an independent airline, run it overseas free of regulation, make loads of money, and shut the company down when the JAA comes after your greedy ass, murder is not going to be among the charges brought against you. (although manslaughter might be, depending on how creative the attorneys of the people on your unregulated flights are)

Corporations don’t vote, don’t run for office, aren’t citizens.  I defy Amazon.com to show me (His? Her? Zir?) passport.  So why in the name of Saint Augustine’s thorny, music-hating knickers are we giving them the rights of a corporation? Even the FOUNDERS knew that corporations were imaginary entities, and they lived at a time when the human race still wasn’t 100% sold on the whole ‘the earth is flat’ thing.

In conclusion, I hope this case goes to the SCOTUS.  And I hope they defenestrate it.  Because it’s a part of the system that just bent Wisconsinover, if you’ll pardon my turn of phrase.  And it’s contributing to the rise of negative campaigning, enough so that this upcoming election will be one of the ugliest in history. Think about that for a minute.  And here’s a citation for that: http://nymag.com/news/features/negative-campaigning-2012-1/

So that’s Citizens United v. Austin.  And up topside is a link to the legit pdf, because DON’T TAKE MY WORD FOR IT.  Go and read it yourself.  KNOW YOUR S**T.   Did you click on it? WELL DONE.

Some men just want to watch clapping gifs.

TA FOR NOW, INTERNET.  It’s been real.