tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12999164544144959172024-03-12T17:26:00.887-07:00Drip Drip DripJameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11016802159573871360noreply@blogger.comBlogger24125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1299916454414495917.post-77577782118634743112018-06-18T08:56:00.002-07:002018-06-18T08:57:13.833-07:00Rocket<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Jameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11016802159573871360noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1299916454414495917.post-55843470897364983322018-05-18T12:16:00.003-07:002018-05-18T12:20:59.941-07:00Justice League Searches Their New HQ<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<b>Click for full view.</b></div>
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<br />Jameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11016802159573871360noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1299916454414495917.post-77652900032892863112017-02-09T07:52:00.000-08:002017-02-09T07:52:04.693-08:00Assessing the Requirements and Likelihood of Secession<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I'm really not hostile to the idea of secession. Once one state successfully does it, there will be a mad rush for the door. The Union would be over. Unlike 1860, I guarantee Federal government will not take part in a war to stop a state from doing it. There might be one within the state and then the Federal government *would* step in. But if they had a referendum a clear mandate... they'd probably pull it off. Especially a big state like California, Texas, or New York. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">But I don't think people recognize what an temporary economic catastrophe it would be. We have a lot of national debt, but most of it is held by Americans. That Federal debt counts as an asset for a lot people and organizations. If the Union dissolved those assets vanish from the economy. Destroyed. Social Security, Medicare, Disability... these are all personal assets. True, they are drawing those assets from their great grand children and beyond. It's a Ponzi scheme. But people can't see that at an individual level. All they see are subsidies that they see and treat as assets. When Ponzi schemes collapse, the "investors" do actually suffer. Ultimately, the sooner our reliance on debt and debt supported assets is taken from us, the better for us economically, but the pain is so great that no one would choose it. They would only do it if it collapsed suddenly unexpectedly and then the government would be expected to DO something to remediate it.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">So the debt will have to get a lot worse before the states will be willing to bite that bullet. On the plus side, over the next 100 years, the benefits of a large, involved central government will greatly decrease. This will be especially true if that government is broke and largely devoted to transferring wealth. I predict that at some point, the disruption of a presidential election and the fight over the Supreme Court nominees will not be worth it for a losing side and the Union will crack up. Nothing lasts forever. </span>Jameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11016802159573871360noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1299916454414495917.post-31112441964465866572016-11-03T16:42:00.006-07:002017-02-08T11:35:25.116-08:00Weighing My Choices Between Trump and Hillary<h3>
On Trump</h3>
There is no conservative or libertarian case for voting for Trump. There's no Republican case for it either. He's never been conservative and he represents a screw-you to the Republicans. A President Trump would represent the end of the Republican Party as we know it and he'll probably spend the next 4 years running against Republican Congressmen and Senators. He would not be comfortable with the party until it were re-branded as a channel for his twitters.<br />
<br />
But... although it might be bad for conservatives and Republicans, a President Trump <b>might </b>be good for America. You see, Trump will never have the full support of his party and will always have full opposition of the Democrats. He will always be one major scandal away from impeachment. This is good. A democracy is not well served by high-trust in the government or leaders. It is very possible that starting in February 2017 or earlier, the Republicans and Democrats will unify to lock away the considerable tools of the imperial presidency forged over the last 15 years. That will simply not happen under President Hillary Clinton.<br />
<br />
Consider why the US Constitution was so singularly successful among other republics formed near the same time. As it was constructed, Americans were greatly concerned that some leader in another state would attempt to become a dictator. Consequently, they nailed down all the rules of power in a true <b>legal </b>document with lots of trip-wires against the unidirectional implementation of power. They created a constitution that did not require angels for it to work as intended.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, compare the constitutions of the new French Republic or the one in Haiti or Columbia. Those republics did not have to unify various state powers with a significant degree of mistrust. The designers of those constitutions trusted each other and did not need to win over the trust of anyone else. Consequently, their constitutions were not so much legal documents as grand statements of high principles and general rules of procedure. But there was no actual delineation of what the government could and could not do -- no clarification on where public supervision ends and where private organization is sacrosanct.<br />
<br />
America could benefit by having a president that a majority of our political class believes to be intemperate, of limited intelligence, morally and intellectually weak. It could motivate them to redesign the presidency so that it would not require a genius-saint to reliably perform the job for the best of the American people.<br />
<br />
True, Trump has made a lot of nonsense promises, but they are promises he will never be able to do even if he had the discipline to see them through. On the up-side, they will almost certainly never happen. On the down-side, this fact can only deepen the Americans cynicism regarding its political class.<br />
<h3>
On Hillary</h3>
Just like Trump, Hillary will rot away the Democratic Party with her touch. They'll have two years during which Hillary will certainly devote most her time paying back Goldman-Sachs for their investments. After that, President Hillary will have done more to patch up and rejuvenate the Republican Party in the eyes of voters than any wise inspiring leader could. While the Republicans will have an opportunity to reform in the face of the quickly changing political alignments, the Democrats will spend the next four years shorting up a 30 year old ideology and litigating the last 16 years of Clinton Foundation shenanigans.<br />
<br />
Unlike Trump, there nothing about President Clinton that would be palliative for the country or beneficial for her party. If you are looking forward to Hillary picking Scalia's and Ginsberg's replacement or harassing firearm manufacturers (just as 3-D printing is on the verge of rendering them obsolete), then she could rightly be seen as kamazi flying the country and her party into the Republican obstructionists.<br />
<br />
If Trump is cytokine storm in reaction to a chronic wasting disease in our democracy, Hillary is the personification of that disease. Self-dealing and entitled, she shares the human weaknesses typical of our political class but, by far, Clinton Inc has been <b>the </b>most virulently successful in those anti-virtues. The Clinton's are a super-virus against which, apparently, our democracy has no natural immunity. And as with Trump, Hillary will be bone cancer to the Democratic Party. The Republicans will have an opportunity to reform in the face of the (self-evidently) changing political demographics. The Democrats will spend the next four years implementing 90s ideology and litigating the last 16 years of Clinton Foundation shenanigans.<br />
<br />
However, Hillary does have certain weaknesses that can prevent her doing serious harm. First, she is an unpleasant person. Her party will never mythologize her. They will always find her embarrassing. Also, she's corrupt and shady and contrived, but without any glossy veneer. If a Bond villain strokes a beautiful white cat in his lap, Hillary would have a scaly kobold. In the 90s, prosecutors sought for years certain records from Hillary's Rose Law Firm work. On the day, after statute of limitations expired, the records were mysterious discovered in the to public room adjoining the First Lady's offices. As the magician Raymond Teller, of Penn & Teller, said to NPR of the event,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In magic, we usually employ some kind of distraction so that it will appear to the audience that something is happening besides what is actually happening. That doesn't seem to have been done in this case. [paraphrase]</blockquote>
Hillary is the brutalist architecture of retail politics and public corruption. She will always be scrutinized. At the same time, she will have new powers of the Executive to hide her misdeeds and gain increased immunity from prosecution for it. It would be nice if -- as with Trump -- President Hillary's naked venality would result in the Democrats and Republicans unifying to reform the presidency so that a corrupt president would have limited capability to do mischief in the job. Unfortunately, I don't think that is in the cards.<br />
<br />
But as <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441229/hillary-clinton-gun-control-advice-prosecute-straw-buyers" target="_blank">Kevin Williamson said in National Review</a>, there is still an upside to be gained from Hillary's temperament and character.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
there is one thing about you [Hillary] that gives me a little hope: You are a coward. You are so risk-averse politically and personally that you have a natural tendency toward what might be described as a kind of conservatism — not conservatism of the Buckley–Goldwater–Reagan variety, but a certain conservatism of disposition</blockquote>
This is the same up-side with Trump's worthless promises: Many of her promises will likely never happen. Unfortunately, it would have the same downsides: It will deepen our general cynicism. But, given the effect of a President who would have been indicted were she not in office, that effect would hardly be noticed.<br />
<h3>
Conclusion</h3>
Hillary has no upsides and lots of downside. Trump does have upsides - at least temporarily. At this point, I suppose it is only what is left of my pity for the Republicans and my personal disdain at hearing him say anything that keeps me from going for Trump. I don't think I'm patriotic enough to do it.Jameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11016802159573871360noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1299916454414495917.post-1143501330496013062016-09-14T16:55:00.127-07:002021-11-07T14:42:55.868-08:00A List for Watching Westerns for People Who Haven't Watched Westerns<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">If you aren't fairly familiar with the Bible (Torah, Writings, New Testament) you will be face-blind to the whole of Western history, philosophy, and literature before about 100 years ago. By the same token, if you aren't handy with the peaks and feel of Westerns, you will not understand cinema before the 1980s or cinema by people who came to love film during that time. </span><br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">Westerns pre-80s were just a vehicle for all the other genres of the time. There were kitchen table dramas, romances, cultural-political examinations/commentaries, detective stories, revenge stories, bright lights big city stories. It would be more reasonable to lump Star Wars and Gattaca together as "two common examples of SciFi" than to willy-nilly lump any movies with a horse in them as a "Western".</span><br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">All Westerns share a similar stereotypical setting: They are set at a time </span><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">before the pre-eminence of the automobile (City Slickers isn't a "Western") and in a place west of the Mississippi. That said, t</span><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">here are, very broadly, two kinds of the Western: First, there's the </span><i>Mythos Western</i><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">, the default. It has heroes not far divorced from those of the serials of the 20s and 30s. There are standard heroes with a close relationship to law and order, as well as anti-heroes who nevertheless land on the right side of morality. Such law that exists is embodied in a few men (and fewer women) who stand up to enforce it - either with or without a badge. So, Revenge Stories are pretty common. But so is the story of the hero who stands up for the Right even though no one thanks him for it. </span><br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">But, at least as early as the 40s, a new kind of Western began to appear that was created for people who grew up on <i>Mythos Westerns</i>. The <i>Anti-Mythos</i>. They were complex people, often on the wrong side of the argument. These movies turned a mirror on the Mythos heroes to consider their problematic facets. They often considered what a true <i>hero</i> is. </span></span><div><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-family: inherit;">The protagonist in a Mythos Western might say "There are some rocks a man can't ride around." Anti-Mythos Hero will often tend to have approaches and motivations that are more like villains in a Mythos Western.</span></div><div><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">But to appreciate the Anti-Western, you need understand the feel of the Mythos kind that they are playing against. There's no hard recipe for the latter. You have to stew in them for a while. So my list starts with the Mythos stories and then moves on to the ones calling out and riffing on the Mythos stories.</span><br />
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<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><b>1. True Grit</b> (Coen Bros) - Since this is a getting-started list, the Coen's will ease you into it gently. Also, "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs." "No Country For Old Men" is not a Western IMO. It just has a cowboy in it.</span><br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><b>2. Tombstone</b> - In many ways, this is an unremarkable Mythos Western but Val Kilmer's performance is stand-out.</span><br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><b>3. True Grit </b>(John Wayne) - Now your ready to take on John Wayne's performance in this movie. It's a revenge story. Robert Duvall is Lucky Ned Pepper, the boss villain, and this is one of the two movies where Dennis Hopper dies in John Wayne's arms. Also, Glenn Campbell and Kim Darby. I think the Coen Brothers version is better and more authentic. But John Wayne delivers the famous line better: ("Fill your hands, you son of a bitch!")</span><br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><b>4. Gunsmoke (TV show)</b> - Just start with "Bloody Hands", "Seven Hours to Dawn", and "The Jailor" (with Betty Davis). What people forget is that Gunsmoke was launched as an "adult" drama series in a Western setting.</span><br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><b>5. Maverick (TV show)</b> - The "Gun Shy" episode with James Garner's Maverick (there were four Mavericks in the series including James Bond's Roger Moore as "Cousin Beau"). The episode makes fun of the motif's of the Gunsmoke series, such as why everything in town seems to gravitate around the four major characters, the long-view street shoot-outs, etc. This is <i>Anti-Mythos</i> but we'll put it here since this episode is so enjoyable to watch after a fresh watching of <i>Gunsmoke</i>. Essentially, the entire Bret Maverick character uses the Mythos Western hero as a foil. Think of your classic Western Hero from the serials, such as Tom Mix, or think of Gary Cooper. Or better yet think of Errol Flynn's hero in <i>Captain Blood</i>: smooth, earnest, noble. Now imagine the <i>Captain Blood</i> comedy sidekick character, Honesty Nutall, got his own show. That's Maverick in a way. Bret Maverick is lazy, cynical, conniving, and not the sharpest tool in the shed. He's competent if he has to shoot it out and he's smarter than most of his marks when he plays cards. But he's not a tough cookie per se. If he wins a physical encounter, it is by employing some tactical advantage. Garner's trailer-residing detective character, James Rockford, is a modern continuation of Bret Maverick. </span><br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><b>6. Stagecoach </b>(John Wayne) - All I'll say is that it probably is not what you expected.</span><br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><b>7. High Noon</b> - Gary Cooper is a town sheriff. Some time ago, he busted an outlaw that terrorized the town. Now the outlaw is out of jail and he and his gang are coming back for revenge. The town collectively decides they don't want to help him. As I said, This is a common example hero in Mythos Western. The one man standing for the Law when no one else can or will, and no one cares if he does or not. This was remade as a snoozy SciFi movie, <i>Outlands</i>, starring Sean Connery. </span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>8. Rio Bravo</b> - "High Noon" was a intentional comment on McCarthyism. Rio Bravo was intended as John Wayne's clap-back to "High Noon." It was so successful that Howard Hawks did the exact same movie again in "El Dorado." It's a little weak because John Wayne is getting too old to be a credible romantic lead (and he knew it). Also Ricky Nelson is too young for his part. But the success of this movie in Italy gave birth to the Spaghetti Westerns. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">This is a good point to mention some non-essential but really good John Wayne Westerns:</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Big Jake</b> - An aging gunfighter/rancher in the early 1900s returns to his family to retrieve his kidnapped grandson. If this movie had been made by different people it would have had an entirely different feel. And it probably would have been better for it. But it's still pretty good. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>The Shootist</b> - John Wayne's last Western about an dying famous gunfighter in a new age. Ron Howard also stars.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>The Sons of Katie Elder</b> - Really good movie with George Kennedy as the villain and Dennis Hopper dies in John Wayne's arms... again. <br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><b>9. 3:10 To Yuma (1957)</b> - Same heroic theme as <i>High Noon</i>. A guy is offered the chance give up his life to protect money that isn't his. A Western version of noir masterpiece <i>The Narrow Margin</i>.</span><br /><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><b>10. The Quick and the Dead</b> - Sam Rami's straight Mythos Western. Gene Hackman, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Sharon Stone (as a dead-eye gunslinger out for revenge). It's comic-booky but very watchable. </span><br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"></span>
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><b>11. The Man from Laramie</b> - Jimmy Stewart revenge story. If almost anyone else had done this movie it would be pure Mythos Western. But Stewart can never portray that sort of character. It has hints of Lee Marvin's <i>Point Blank</i>.</span><br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><b>18. Magnificent Seven</b> - Mythos Western remake of Kurosawa's <i>The Seven Samarai</i>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">Now you've got a solid grounding in the Mythos Western, so you're ready to see the Anti-Mythos movies that play against your established expectations.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>19. Red River</b><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"> - Directed by Howard Hawks, John Wayne's character is subversive to the stereotypical Mythos Western hero and the movie turns the Revenge story on its ear. This is also considered a touchstone of gay Hollywood. </span></span></div><div><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-family: inherit;"><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><b>20. Nevada Smith</b> - Steve McQueen searches the West for the outlaws who murdered his parents. However, this story considers the cost of exacting that revenge. The Red Dead Revolver video games owe almost as much to this movie as they do Clint Eastwood movies.</span><br /><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><b>21, 22, 23. Fist Full of Dollars Trilolgy</b> - FFoD, <i>For a Few Dollars More</i>, and <i>The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly</i>. These are Mythos Westerns but the first one is a remake of Kurosawa's <i>Yojimbo</i> which was a retelling of Dashiell Hammett's <i>Red Harvest</i>. which was also adapted as the unremarkable Bruce Willis film, <i>Last Man Standing</i>. Maybe the Coen Brothers' <i>Miller's Crossing</i> owes a little to Hammet.</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>24. Hombre</b> - Same heroic theme as <i>High Noon</i> but played much darker. Based on an Elmore Leonard novel, Paul Newman is a white man raised on an Apache reservation on a stage coach with really awful people. He finds himself constantly in the position of having to protect these people and the whole thing evolves into a kidnapping/ransom caper.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>25. High Plains Drifter</b> - In this movie, Clint Eastwood puts a twist on the theme from <i>High Noon</i>, <i>3:10 to Yuma. </i>I won't give any details since they would be spoilers, but it deserves its R-rating and would never, ever be made this way in America today.<br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><b>26. Shane</b> - An honoring, deconstruction, and rejection of the heroes of the Western serials. Joey Starett is a stand-in for the kids in the theater seats when those movies played. The film considers "Who is a real hero? The icon of Saturday afternoon fantasy who descends on trouble at dawn and leaves at sunset? Or is it the guy who slugs it out everyday for a woman, his children, and his community?" One of the landmark fight scenes of cinema.</span><br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><b>26. The Searchers</b> - Directed by John Ford. This is John Ford's <i>Unforgiven</i>. He had directed dozens of movies where settlers killed Indians who flung themselves carelessly into bullets. This movie examines the racial bigotry that underlied those movies. It is interesting that John Wayne - who is considered the standard for the Mythos Western hero - has so often been involved in landmark movies that directly unfavorably comment on and subvert the Mythos. To be honest, I find most John Ford movies to be a bit of a snooze and this one is too long. But it's considered <i>important</i>.</span><br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><b>20. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance</b> - John Ford reinterpreting the West again. Here John Wayne is the Old West gunslinger who takes Jimmy Stewart under his wing: an attorney devoted to bringing civilization and law to West. Again, "Who is the hero?" The guy who kills every bad guy he meets or the guy changes the whole game that allows bad guys to operate without limitation?" </span><br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><b>21. Unforgiven</b> - Directed by and starring Clint Eastwood. It deconstructs the Western (and perhaps the <i>Dirty Harry</i> movies) where all disputes are settled with guns and murder with little consequence, and revenge is mercilessly exacted despite the fact that in real life the details would be much more muddy. Tarantino and DiCaprio's recent Westerns and the Deadwood series have taken no education from <i>Unforgiven</i>. They are good in their way but they display no more comprehensive knowledge of the so-called "genre" than <i>Jonah Hex</i> comics.</span><br />
</span><h4>
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-family: inherit;">Extra Credit</span></h4>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>The Lone Ranger (2013, Disney)</b><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"> - Armie Hammer as the man with the silver bullet. Johnny Depp at his Indian friend Tonto. This movie faces an uphill battle because it can make some people of a certain worldview feel uncomfortable. Depp is an Anglo actor playing an Indian. Whether Tonto had the role of subservient side-kick or magical enabler, it was going to be a bit offensive. Depp sidesteps this by making his character insane, an object of contempt in his tribe, and maybe not even a human being at all but a sideshow manikin animated by the Great Myth of the West. </span><br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><b>Zorro (TV Show)</b> - I never got a chance to try watching this series with my kids when they were young enough to enjoy it. No streaming yet. But it might be worth it to try now. Find a grade-schooler and see if these stories have aged as well as I think they have. It stars Guy Williams, "Professor John Robinson" from <i>Lost In Space</i>.</span><br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><b>Zorro, the Gay Blade</b> - The benefit of a mild familiarity with the Zorro TV show is that it will add to the pleasure of watching this wonderful, wonderful film that is to Western serials what <i>Young Frankenstein</i> was to Horror.</span><br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><b>5 Card Stud</b> - A murder mystery starring Dean Martin, Robert Mitchum, Roddy McDowell, and - really worth seeing - Yaphet Kotto.</span></span></div>Jameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11016802159573871360noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1299916454414495917.post-20163962652138596432016-08-29T12:10:00.001-07:002016-08-29T14:19:39.735-07:00On Sally HemmingsSally Hemmings of course, was the slave and (candidly) baby-mama of six children by Thomas Jefferson, four of whom survived until adulthood. The two oldest, simply left Monticello when they became adults and moved to Washington DC where they disappeared from the historical record. The oldest, Harriet, passed as a white woman. The two youngest, who were not 21 when Jefferson died, were freed in his will. But since Jefferson's estate was heavily in debt, it took an actual act of the Virginia congress to ultimately pull it off. It turns out that being Jefferson's child wasn't all bad. (That's sarcasm.)<br />
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<br />
That issue of Harriet "passing as a white woman" is quite ironic and reveals how pernicious and corrupting was the system of racial slavery in the US. Harriet was legally a slave and "negro" because her <em>great-grandmother</em> was an African slave who had had at least one child (Harriet's grandmother) with a white sea captain. The captain allegedly tried to purchase her great-grandmother and his daughter, but the owner wouldn't sell for whatever reason (maybe the owner had children by her as well). All Harriet's grandfathers in her maternal line were white men and, of course, all her paternal grandmothers and grandfathers were white. <br />
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But it goes beyond that: Harriet's mother Sally Hemmings, Jefferson's life partner since the death of his wife, was Jefferson's sister-in-law. She was the half-sister of his wife by their father, John Wayless. Wayles was the ultimate owner of Harriet's grandmother, Betty, and her great-grandmother - his wife received Betty, as a wedding present from her father. Since it was legally stipulated in the transfer that Betty was always to be the legal property of Wayles's wife or her children, it seems that Betty was considered <em>family</em>. After his wife's death, Wayles and Betty, Harriet's grandmother remember, had six surviving children (including Sally who was inherited by her half-sister, Jefferson's wife).<br />
<h4>
All this demonstrates that slavery in US, and then in the South where it persisted, involved generations-long bondage of people <em>by their intimate relatives</em>. </h4>
<h4>
Since the importation of slaves was banned by Federal Law in 1808 (the US Constitution prohibited the government from banning it any earlier), all slaves born after were born in America. Had state laws not been imposed to prevent estates from freeing their slaves if they were not entirely debt free and other hurdles, it is hard to imagine that slavery could have survived beyond the 19th century. </h4>
There could have been good motivations for these laws as well as bad ones. Imagine an unscrupulous owner who opted to make his farm more efficient by "benevolently" freeing slaves who were too old or infirm to work. A law ostensibly intended to protect such people, however, harmed young, hale, family-aged slaves, who coincidentally were those that Southern established institutions feared most. This was referred to at the time as <em>The Problem of Slavery</em>: How to free all the slaves without <em>any</em> socio-economic-political disruption of current norms - which of course was not possible.<br />
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In the early 1830s, chronicler Alexis de Toqueville, <a href="http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/1_ch18.htm" target="_blank">encountered an owner who had spent his waning years trying fruitlessly to free his children before his death</a>.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I happened to meet an old man, in the South of the Union, who had lived in illicit intercourse with one of his Negresses and had had several children by her, who were born the slaves of their father. He had, indeed, frequently thought of bequeathing to them at least their liberty; but years had elapsed before he could surmount the legal obstacles to their emancipation, and meanwhile his old age had come and he was about to die. He pictured to himself his sons dragged from market to market and passing from the authority of a parent to the rod of the stranger, until these horrid anticipations worked his expiring imagination into frenzy. When I saw him, he was a prey to all the anguish of despair; and I then understood how awful is the retribution of Nature upon those who have broken her laws. </blockquote>
<br />Jameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11016802159573871360noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1299916454414495917.post-50216231885343873212016-08-03T07:31:00.002-07:002017-02-19T09:25:38.493-08:00At Fighting In the War Room, They Make a Mean Casserole<span style="font-size: small;">A message to the </span><a href="http://fightinginthewarroom.com/2016/08/130-potter-and-politics-in-criticism/#comments" target="_blank">Fighting in the War Room podcast</a>. Maybe my last. It's a trilogy.<br />
<br />
Hmm #1 Why would your conservative listeners prefer you didn't inject politics into your discussions?
Possibly because, at best, you end up talking about them like they belong in a zoo (you guys know that half the country voted for Romney, right?). I mean you've run across a conservative or two and it was nice, but not the *crazy* ones! (Given your attitude, do you think they'd tell you what they really think?)<br />
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Because you laugh at how conservatives are blacklisted in Hollywood and Journalism because progressives are so intolerant - especially toward social conservatives. Ha ha! Lighten up, everyone!<br />
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Have you considered that your conservatives listeners kinda like you and would prefer you didn't portray yourselves in that light?<br />
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#2 Why is it painful for conservatives to listen to you guys mix politics and pop culture since Joanna has a token conservative friend with whom she enjoys discussing the political angle of movies? Because when the 4 or 5 of you talk politics, there is no discussion. You all essentially agree. You're just nodding at each other. It makes you sound smug. Apparently, David E. couldn't even HAVE a civil conversation of any sort with a social conservative. Joanna said it would break her heart to learn that an artist she likes doesn't agree with her about Hillary. Free your minds.<br />
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#3 How do your conservative and libertarian audience engage with pop culture? They appreciate music as music, literature as literature, film as film. They regard artists as artists. They don't reduce people (no, not even the black ones or gay ones) to a political cypher. They take their arguments -- even ones they disagree with -- at face value rather than reducing them to "Democrat B.S". I recall Bob Dylan answering critics (haters) who objected to him playing songs on his radio show from time to time with religious content. He told them , "Try just appreciating it as music." When I listen to Spoon's "Don't Make Me a Target," I know it's about George W. Bush and his foreign policy. So what? Doesn't he deserve his point of view? I enjoy it as a song. When I listen to Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land," I know more than most people that he intended it as a Marxist argument against private property. But when Obama shut down the national parks (and the ocean, and roadway views of Mt Rushmore and Mall monuments that didn't even have government minders) to win a political argument with the Republican Senate by holding America's heritage hostage, that song resonated WITH ME. Good art outlives contemporary politics. Guthrie's music transcends any politics, even his own.<br />
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Your conservative listeners don't discount the work of an actor or director (or put an asterisk by their praise) based on her political opinions. They certainly don't see it as the righteous choice. I know some conservatives do that. If they're listening to your podcasts, they don't.<br />
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For a movie like "In the Valley of Elah" with an overt, tired political agenda? Yeah, that's tougher. But progressives don't line up to see that kind of movie either. When conservatives in your audience are aware that a movie is oh-so-not-so-cleverly injecting a progressive social message like the "X2" movie (not as a discussion but as a sermon), it's tiresome but conservatives deal with it the way <em>most</em> of them deal with YOU GUYS when you can't resist a political aside during your podcasts: How's that? Well...<br />
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Pretend you're black (I know this is a stretch) and you go with a white friend to a party of all white people. You hear them talking about the recent shootings of police and they are (reasonably) horrified. But it never occurs to any of them to discuss it in a wider context. Because they don't recognize that there IS a wider context. Not a legitimate one. But these are nice people. They welcomed you to their party. So you make excuses for them. "Well, I'm not going to stir things up because they just don't get it. They can't get it right now. They make a mean casserole though."<br />
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Conservatives FORGIVE you guys for being limited in your perspective and occasionally even small-minded. Even though your world is so small that you assume only ignorant people think Hillary Clinton ought to be in jail and that she ran around shutting down women after Bill harassed and raped them and she's been incompetent-to-a-non-entity in every job she's had and that all that disqualifies her from leadership.<br />
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I have a lot of very conservative friends (and progressives ones too! Crazy, I know) but I'd be appalled to have any of them say they couldn't be friends with someone who disagreed with them about abortion. I've never met one. I'm stunned to discover that David E. is so crabbed and narrow-minded. That's not sarcasm. I'm really surprised. Give that guy power and he'd be Robespierre. He makes a mean casserole though.<br />
<h3>
Addendum</h3>
I can understand anyone down-voting "The Passion of the Christ" on it's merits. Slow. Relentless. But then don't tell me what a master Werner Herzog is.<br />
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Bob Dylan's "Hurricane" is an amazing song. That violin makes you feel like you really are in a horrifying storm of injustice. The pacing of the story-telling is unsurpassed. Of course, the details of the story are completely unrelated to the facts of the actual murders and the case against Rubin Carter. It smears the bleeding-heart Liberal judge in the case. "The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd" also makes no attempt at being historically accurate. Who cares? I don't have to actually buy in to the belief that C.A. Floyd was a great guy to enjoy hearing the Byrds sing it.<br />
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David, check out the articles by the progressive Kristin Powers in the Daily Beast regarding Wendy Davis and Kermit Gosnell. You'll learn that not only is the circle of good people wider and more varied than you supposed, *progressivism* is too.Jameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11016802159573871360noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1299916454414495917.post-5473594456276849642016-07-21T07:18:00.002-07:002016-07-21T07:18:53.811-07:00The Traveller has come! What did you do, Joanna?!<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://fightinginthewarroom.com/" target="_blank">Fighting In The War Room</a>, a podcast I like, has done it again. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://jameswynn.blogspot.com/2015/11/one-of-filmpop-culture-commentary.html" target="_blank">Previously</a>, I used them as a foil to rant against an irrational obsession with Girl Power when critiquing pop culture. Their consensus, at that time, was that we should cheer the work of female directors even when their work is <i>not so great</i>. Why? Because there aren’t enough female directors (by some weighted model) so any movie directed by someone identifying as female is a definitive Good based on that criteria alone. Ugh.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This time, the topic was the Ghostbusters all-female cast and the offender was the onliest <a href="https://twitter.com/jowrotethis?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor" target="_blank">Joanna Robinson</a> of <a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/contributor/joanna-robinson" target="_blank">Vanity Fair</a>. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Joanna -- who didn't seem to like the movie at all -- expressed concern that the failure of this property would undermine support for genre movies with an all female cast. So, even though she says it’s not a good movie, she advised audiences to “Go see it!”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Now, before I say anything else, I haven’t seen the movie. For all I know, I’ll love it when I rent it on Redbox. At the least, I’ve liked the work – to varying degrees -- of most of the core cast. The actual merits of the movie are not relevant to me at this point. This issue here is that the inestimable Ms Robinson thinks it’s a bad movie but never-the-less is recommending the poor and down-trodden common people support (</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">with their inequitably distributed time and money)</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> a product of a wealthy, powerful, cold-hearted movie corporation ONLY because they cynically remixed an old successful property with an all-female cast. That’s crazy. And it devalues the overall recommendations of this prominent female pop-culture columnist. That can’t be good. I suspect such writers slant heavily male. Can we really afford to sacrifice Joanna Robinson for the sake of the profitability of a major patriarchal media empire?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Secondly, her premise is dubious. Is it really believable that a production company would pass on a vehicle with an ensemble cast of proven bankable female stars because Ghostbusters didn’t do well? No. However, it <em>might</em> be a valid warning regarding lazily rebooting a franchise thus: </span><br />
<div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“Lets revive a thirty-year-old property with an all-new cast. Now how do we make it fresh? Let’s reverse the genders of the cast. Done.” </span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Arguably, Ghostbusters is <em>contemptuous</em> of female-core casting. The Female Ghostbusters compels proven funny women to slavishly service in a novelty homage to a story written for male actors decades ago -- a time (the 80s) when male-female roles were far more backward than they are today. Why couldn’t these women have been employed in a NEW genre movie that isn’t tied to a property invented, designed, and well-worn by MEN? We wouldn’t have watched these four female actresses in that?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And in joylessly converting Ghostbusters to an all-woman cast, the writers have locked every other aspect of the thirty-year old movie in place. We need one –and only one—black ghostbuster because that’s what the original had. A Polynesian-looking ghostbuster? An Indian ghostbuster? No! That would be nuts! We can change genders but there needs to be four ghostbusters and three of them must be white! </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Assuming Joanna is right about the quality of this movie, the fanboys who reflexively denounced this movie’s concept on social media were right…100% right. </span><br />
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Jameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11016802159573871360noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1299916454414495917.post-68981656283863453392016-05-29T17:23:00.000-07:002016-05-29T21:12:22.985-07:00Blogger Reimagines His Family as Disney Princesses<h3>
Snow White and Aurora</h3>
These orphan girls (Aurora thought she was an orphan) were forced to take their naps by baddie old ladies. Not dirt naps, but nice comfortable feather bed naps that came with handsome man alarm clocks.<br />
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<b>IF THEY WERE MY NEPHEWS</b><br />
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They would be a gruff but lovable Middle School teacher and a scarlet haired hipster. And check out those beards. Watch out for chaffing, princes<br />
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<h3>
Belle, Jasmine, and Pocahontas</h3>
These strong-minded young women were put in perplexing situations by their family meddling in their romantic choices.<br />
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<b>IF THEY WERE MY DAUGHTERS</b><br />
They would have left a trail of thousands of bodies behind them on Xbox. Disney offers lots of opportunities for kids to interact with princesses online. But if these princesses were my daughters, you would never want to meet them online. Online, they would be serial-murdering psychopaths.<br />
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<h3>
Rapunzel</h3>
This coiffured lass was locked in a tower by an evil witch and had to turn her own hair into a stairwell.<br />
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<b>IF SHE WERE MY BROTHER</b><br />
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She would live in a fourth floor walk-up in West Harlem which, it turns out, is a good deal harder to get in and out of. And if Rapunzel ever did without hot water for half a year while her witch landlord secured the proper permits to fix it it and then trudged through small claims court for the rest of the year to work out the rent, that part ended up on the cutting room floor.</div>
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<br />Jameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11016802159573871360noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1299916454414495917.post-45033455489391031532016-05-27T06:47:00.002-07:002017-02-18T13:06:48.835-08:00Corporations Are PeopleYou say corporations aren’t people. If corporations aren’t people then they don’t have Constitutional rights. Only people have Constitutional rights.<br />
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In that case, the New York Times corporation doesn’t have First Amendment rights. The NAACP doesn’t have standing to file law suits for civil rights violations. In that case, the government doesn’t need a warrant to enter the property of the Sierra Club and peruse their membership files or bug their phones. If corporations are not people then they can’t own property. They can’t enter into contracts.<br />
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English Common Law has always treated corporations as people for the purposes of the law. Boston and other colonies were founded by corporations. If corporations are not people, where did all the people in the Massachusetts Bay Colony come from?<br />
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Typically, no one claims corporations don’t have *those* rights. They usually argue that they merely don’t have the rights (especially free speech rights) that they don’t want them to have. It’s very picky-choosey.<br />
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And it is no use saying "Well, the New York Times is mentioned in the Constitution." It's not. Neither is CNN. Neither is a guy with a printing press in the basement or a blogger who has bought his own domain. When the 1st Amendment references "abridging freedom of speech or the press" it means that we have the freedom to speak and to WRITE AND DISTRIBUTE. "The press" in this case are the actual physical 18th century printing presses (regardless of who owns them) which the government does not have the authority to regulate. Calling the New Times or CNN "the Press" is a metaphor - an appropriate one, but they are no more "the press" than I am as I type this.<br />
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<b>But what is a “corporation?”</b> Where do they come from? Do they condense from the morning fog or spontaneously generate from rotten meat? Answer: Corporations are PEOPLE who have combined their after-tax labor, resources, and stored labor (money) in order to accomplish some endeavor, such as making a profit, performing some public good (as they see it), or effecting political change.<br />
<br />
<b>Corporations are legal fictions representing actual, distinct people. They inherit their constitutional rights and the right to act in the political sphere (as when the New York Times endorses a candidate) from the people they stand for.</b><br />
<br />
If we revoke our own ability to cooperate together in the political sphere, we hand control of our government to whoever has taken its reins at any time. Because <i>those</i> people certainly act in concert with privileges and powers not available to any other human association. And <i>those</i> people are not disembodied parties or departments, nor esoteric goals, nor angels descended from Heaven. They are politicians and bureaucrats who have very particular ideas of what is best for the rest of us formed from their own PERSONAL interests (it’s THEY the People; not WE the People). <br />
<br />
As De Tocqueville said in “Democracy in America”:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Among democratic nations it is ONLY by private associations that the resistance of the people to government can ever display itself; so [governments] always look with ill-favor on those associations that are not under its power. And it is remarkable that among democratic nations, the people themselves often entertain a secret feeling of fear and jealousy against these very associations which prevents the citizens from defending the very institutions that they so greatly need.”</blockquote>
<h4>
The “Citizens United” Decision</h4>
“Citizens United” was a small media company that wanted distribute a film that would influence political debate just as Paramount and Miramax do and have done; just as national newspapers do. Unfortunately for them, they were not powerful, wealthy, connected big-shots like those corporations. They were a small media company. So when they tried to distribute a film about the politician Senator Hillary Clinton, the FEC prevented them from doing so. The FEC ruled that advertisements for the film constituted a violation of the McCain–Feingold Act that prohibited broadcast, cable, or satellite communications that mentioned a candidate within 60 days of a general election or 30 days of a primary (essentially everything any network or cable news organization does). Senator Clinton had not yet officially declared that she was a candidate in the primary, but the FEC ruled that the law applied because they *assumed* she would be.<br />
<br />
To understand the degree to which the Supreme Court’s final decision protected American civil rights it is important to note that the Obama administration’s Solicitor General argued that the FEC could ban print books published or distributed by a corporation or union that had a single sentence expressly endorsing or calling for the defeat of a candidate. Further, he said that the government could ban the digital distribution of political books over the Amazon Kindle or prevent a union from hiring a writer to author a political book.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
Jameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11016802159573871360noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1299916454414495917.post-8494897707476592652016-03-04T09:44:00.000-08:002016-03-04T09:44:34.144-08:00The Crucifixion of the Executive<h4>
Subtitle: Time Is a Quagmire</h4>
<br />
This is post was initiated upon reading <a href="http://time.com/4140050/donald-trump-muslims-japanese-internment/" target="_blank">Donald Trump's interview in Time</a> where he said he couldn't say for sure whether he would have done what President FDR did and interned American citizens of Japanese-decent during World War II.<br />
<br />
The legal argument is easy: There is no Constitutional authority for the US government to imprison Americans when they have done nothing wrong.<br />
<br />
But, of course, FDR didn't really give a hoot about the Constitution and that's how we got the New Deal. And if I read Mr Trump right, he's probably the same. He'll come up with <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/12-307#writing-12-307_DISSENT_5" target="_blank">argle-bargle</a> to justify whatever he decides wants to or has to do. It is a contemporary political quirk that the interment of Japanese in WWII is a such a dangerous third rail, but <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki" target="_blank">President Obama does not suffer for assassinating/executing an American and his 16 year old son in Yemen</a> because that American was speaking his mind in ways that was punching holes in the current administration's foreign and domestic security policy. So... so much for the the Constitution.<br />
<br />
The <b>easiest </b>attack on any executive decision is to wait for something bad to happen that can be tied to that decision. The context of the decision will be mostly lost. The bad events will be viewed within the narrow perspective what what historically happened. Not with the uncertain future that was faced when the decision was made. The <b>best </b>defense in that case of any person given the responsibility of Decision-Making is the one that is so hard it is almost pointless: <i>What would have happened if we had not done it? </i>This is especially vexing for the executive when there was no vigorous resistance against the decision at the time (or even general, positive approval ala The Iraq War).<br />
<br />
So, that's a question I want to ask here, <i>What was the possible downside to not interning Japanese? What might have happened?</i><br />
<br />
Nobody at the time knew of the event that probably had the greatest single impetus for the decision to intern all Japanese: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niihau_incident" target="_blank">The Battle of Ni'ihau</a>. In summary, a Japanese pilot was shot down during the Pearl Harbor Attack. He landed on the tiny remote, rural Hawaiian island of Ni'ihau. The residents had no direct contact with the mainland and didn't know initially about the attack. On this island there were exactly three people of Japanese descent, the only people who could directly converse with the pilot and knew immediately about Pearl Harbor. Two Americans and one immigrant. All three quite quickly began to conspire for the pilot -- eventually, violently -- against their neighbors.<br />
<br />
Why did the Federal government keep the details of the event secret until 1956? Likely, because revealing that 100% of Japanese on the island of Ni'iahu quickly turned against the US it would have led to a panic that would have then led to an effective genocide of all people of Japanese heritage in the US -- maybe of all Chinese and anyone who looked like they might have been Japanese.<br />
<br />
What if the Defense Department had considered the Constitutional rights of Japanese Americans and opted to not treat Japanese Americans as an active security threat? And then suppose (as was almost inevitable) a Japanese American was caught conspiring with the enemy to do something that cost American lives? What would have been the public reaction then? Would you have wanted to be one of the tiny minority of Japanese-descended people in America in that case? This happened with German Americans in both WWI and WWII, but if you were an American of German descent, you could just change your last name and move. Japanese couldn't just Americanize their names and manners and move on. There were other reasons I think for why German Americans proved to be view as less of a risk than Japanese immigrants and citizens.<br />
<br />
But the question remains, <i>Did FDR's decision prevent an event that would have led to an irreparable stigma on all Japanese within the United States?</i><br />
<br />
The problem is that the answer is unknowable. FDR's illegal act might have had a better practical result than following the Constitution. Or it might not. It is more that merely arguable that the Japanese on a remote island (technically American soil but it probably didn't feel that way) were not a good proxy population for the Japanese living in San Francisco. The reason we have a Constitution that is not supposed to be malleable to contemporary events is that it will constrain the government from acting (without the difficult process of obtaining an Amendment) when certain authoritarian courses of action <i>seem like such a good idea</i>.Jameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11016802159573871360noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1299916454414495917.post-12114437735587305872016-02-11T10:16:00.001-08:002016-02-23T11:22:08.440-08:00False Dichotomies v Real DichotomiesI listened to the <a href="http://youarenotsosmart.com/podcast/" target="_blank">You Are Not So Smart podcast</a> today. It was <i>episode 69: The White and Black Fallacy</i>. I'm subscribed to it so I guess it is obvious I enjoy the show. But it was hard to listen to this one and I knew immediately it would be hard because of the first example they used: the quote from George W <a href="http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html" target="_blank">Bush's Nov. 9, 2001 speech</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. </blockquote>
I knew, when this quote led off the discussion that the analysis of this fallacy would be at least a little bit muddled. Unfortunately, the episode confirmed...well not the worst of my potential expectations, but definitely my more pessimistic ones.<br />
<br />
On the good side, the panel gave an accurate definition of the fallacy: "Presenting an argument as if it offered only a specific limited number of choices when in fact there are more." They also pointed out the limited number need not be only two. And they gave the other terms for the fallacy: The False Dichotomy and The False Choice. After that, the episode was a woeful mess.<br />
<h3>
1. An argument does not fall into the False Choice fallacy simply because it only offers two or some other limited number of choices.</h3>
This point must come first. If a woman tells you that in order for her to marry you, you must join the Methodist Church, that <i>might not</i> be a fallacy. Those might well be your only choices: Join a Methodist Church and marry her or not marry her.<br />
<br />
Consequently of all the potential titles for this episode, the one they chose was the worst. The term <i>False Dichotomy</i> is a bad term for the fallacy because, as the panel pointed out, it need not be limited to two choices. The arguer could offer 3 or 4 choices when in fact there are 5 or 20. But the term <i>White and Black Fallacy</i> doubles-down. It carries an implication that an argument is fallacious because it <i>only </i>offers two choices: "You are saying we only have two choices, therefore you are making a White and Black error. Life is not only white or black."<br />
<br />
This is the fraternal twin of the False Choice: <i>The False Equivalency</i>. A statement offering two choices is not in error if only two choices exist. This is an important caveat that the panel failed to point out.<br />
<h3>
2. George W. Bush's statement was not a False Choice error because he was not making an argument. </h3>
Fallacies only apply to logical statements -- not declarations of intent. The panelists made a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_mistake" target="_blank">Category Error</a>. Pres. GWB was not making a persuasive argument. He was announcing a policy. He was not engaging in moral philosophy. He was a president with an actual military that dwarfed every military on the planet by many fold. He was not at that point attempting to convince anyone that what he was saying was <i>metaphysically true</i>. He was saying that his administration would <i>act as if it were true</i> going forward and nations who harbored international terrorist organizations should set their expectations accordingly. The following is the quote in context:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Our response involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated strikes. Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success. We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place, until there is no refuge or no rest. And <i>we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism</i>. Every nation, in every region, <i>now has a decision to make</i>. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. <i>From this day forward</i>, any nation that <i>continues to harbor or support terrorism</i> will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime."</blockquote>
Remember that the United States was, at the time, toppling the Afghanistan government known as the Taliban that had refused the demands from the United States to turn over the Al-Qaida leadership based in their country -- who were <i>effectively</i> operating as the head of the Taliban's army. The Taliban's response was essentially "Very sorry hear about your problems in New York City, the Pentagon, and Pennsylvania. But stay out of Afghanistan. And, no, we're not going to do anything about the AQ organization operating more than freely within our domain." Previously, the foreign policy of the US government was to openly treat this as, to some degree, an impediment. GWB was declaring that he was eliminating that wall as even a public policy.<br />
<br />
But even for less morally supportable contexts, this has nothing to do with the False Choice error. When Captain Hook offered the Lost Boys the choice of joining his crew or walking the plank, that was not a false choice. It was a real one. Many child soldiers were offered a similar choice by the pirate African armies. In this case, they are offered practical choices, not classically logical ones. Yes, there might be a world of other choices, but those are the only ones available to them at that moment.<br />
<br />
A forced choice is not necessarily a False Choice problem. There comes a time in almost everyone's life when they are offered a chance to commit to some course or action or to ally with a particular side or employer -- a situation where if they opt to reject the offer, a middle-option is not available. That is not a submission to irrationality.<br />
<h3>
3. Even if George W. Bush's statement <i>was </i>intended as a logical statement, it would not have been an error simply due to its construction.</h3>
<div>
<b>a. </b>Again, see False Equivalency. "You are with me or against me" is not the same thing as "You are with us or you are with the terrorists." There might have been a <i>practical equivalency</i> (as opposed to a logical one) or there might not. But if the panel was aware of this, they didn't say so. The podcast even said that GWB's statement was a mere reformulation of that well-known choice, and presented Annikan Skywalker's quote from Star Wars Episode 3 as an example:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Darth Vader: "If you're not with me, then you're my enemy."</blockquote>
<div>
-- a quote which Lucas wrote with the intention for it to be an unsubtle reference to GWB's speech.</div>
<div>
<br />
To which Obi-Wan responds, paradoxically, with an absolute of his own: </div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Only a Sith deals in absolutes."</blockquote>
<div>
And lets not forget that Yoda said <i>"Do or do not. There is no try."</i> The lesson here is that if you are going to George Lucas's screenplays for positive examples of classical logic, you have truly gone over to the Dark Side.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>b. </b>And again, the statement "You are with me or against me" or some superficially similar statement is not necessarily an error. The panel made a very strong implication that it was. Disproving this sort of statement might not be as easy as the panel implied. This is especially true if the statement is "You are with me or you are <i>effectively </i>against me."</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
For an example, I'll offer <a href="http://orwell.ru/library/articles/pacifism/english/e_patw" target="_blank">George Orwell's argument</a> that the British pacifists in World War II were effectively supporting the causes and gains of the Axis Powers:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "georgia cy" , "georgia" , "times cy" , "times new roman" , "palatino" , "palatino linotype" , serif; line-height: 15.36px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 40px;">'Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘<i>he that is not with me is against me</i>’. The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security. Mr Savage remarks that ‘according to this type of reasoning, a German or Japanese pacifist would be “objectively pro-British”.’ But of course he would be! That is why pacifist activities are not permitted in those countries (in both of them the penalty is, or can be, beheading) while both the Germans and the Japanese do all they can to encourage the spread of pacifism in British and American territories. The Germans even run a spurious ‘freedom’ station which serves out pacifist propaganda indistinguishable from that of the P.P.U. They would stimulate pacifism in Russia as well if they could, but in that case they have tougher babies to deal with. In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Georgia CY', Georgia, 'Times CY', 'Times New Roman', Palatino, 'Palatino Linotype', serif; line-height: 15.36px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 40px;">against</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "georgia cy" , "georgia" , "times cy" , "times new roman" , "palatino" , "palatino linotype" , serif; line-height: 15.36px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 40px;"> those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.'</span></blockquote>
Do better, You Are Not So Smart podcast. Or do not. There is no try.<br />
<br />
<b>UPDATE</b><br />
David McRaney, the host of YANSS podcast, responded over email very nicely regarding my problems with the podcast and thanked me for my feedback. The following was part of my re-response to his email:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
...I don’t think ["You are with me or against me] is a good example for a White and Black fallacy. And White/Black is tricky. Although a <i>False Choice</i> can be easy to counter (as the panel explained), whether or not the
final solutions to a question are <i>effectively</i> white and black is not so easy. Even though the real world is full of gray, it is also persistently binary as well – in aggregate and in the particulars – as those logicians, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2HvzRUauoo">The Lovin’ Spoonful</a>, taught us. Even natural selection, with all its potentially diverse results, has a binary solution for traits that are eliminated. Much of the process of
producing well-formed arguments (or coming to a rational decision) boils down to drilling far enough into a question until the positive-negative elements reveal themselves. </blockquote>
Jameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11016802159573871360noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1299916454414495917.post-39774325553728509852016-01-15T09:53:00.000-08:002016-01-15T11:14:20.892-08:00Systemic Ideological Segregation vs Systemic Racial Segregation<a href="http://jameswynn.blogspot.com/2015/12/white-privilege-is-racial-slur.html" target="_blank">In an earlier post</a>, I explained that while a white-looking person is less likely to be discriminated against for their skin-color, that doesn't prevent her from from being discriminated against for every other possible reason in the world.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-01-07/academics-are-so-lefty-they-don-t-even-see-it" target="_blank">In Megan McArdle's recent Bloomberg column</a>, she demonstrated how impacting this can be by presenting a woman likely rejected for a doctorate program, at least in part, because she was home-schooled and went to a Christian college which the reviewers derided as <span style="line-height: 1.6;">an institution of “right-wing religious fundamentalists” that was “supported by the Koch brothers.”</span> She opened this by telling the story as if the woman grew up in a high poverty neighborhood and went to a small, historically Black college. She framed the issue the way "white privilege" is typically outlined (remember she is actually talking about a white <i>ideological</i> minority in academia):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
No, no one said “we don’t want blacks in this program”; they don’t have
to. They just have to decide that traits common to black candidates,
like growing up in a high-poverty neighborhood, or attending a
historically black college, disqualify you from being “one of us.”</blockquote>
But the paragraph the that resonated strongest with me was her assessment of stereotypes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[T]he problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue. (Lee Jussim has done a lot of work showing that stereotypes are often <a data-web-url="http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jussim/unbearable%20accuracy%20of%20stereotypes.pdf" href="http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/%7Ejussim/unbearable%20accuracy%20of%20stereotypes.pdf">quite accurate</a>.)
The problem with stereotypes is that people use them instead of other,
better information. Women are, on average, less likely to be interested
in science, technology, engineering and math. That wouldn’t make it a
good policy for a STEM program to discard the applications of all women,
on the grounds that most women don’t want to be engineers.</blockquote>
As I said in the earlier post:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[The bigot's] error is that ancestry is a useless proxy for weighing the human soul or guessing the path of a human life.</blockquote>
Jameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11016802159573871360noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1299916454414495917.post-18744882008535806072016-01-14T09:51:00.000-08:002017-09-13T10:58:52.772-07:00On how price gouging benefits you<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/h9QEkw6_O6w" width="480"></iframe><br />
<br />
I often offer this video as an explanation for why "price gouging" should be allowed, especially after a natural disaster. One reason I like it is that it sets up the question under the most dire circumstances:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
There's a natural disaster and a mother goes out to find a generator to run the refrigerator that keeps her daughter's insulin. She finds that the only generators available are now 3x the price.</blockquote>
The best argument the video makes for allowing prices to rise freely as scarcity increases is that it allows people who need the item the most to stake their claim for it over people who need it the least. When a limited resource is under-priced (relative to its scarcity), it is only natural that
consumers will use up every little bit of it so it will not be
available at all to more people who need it the most. As the video points out, settting a low price ceiling on resource when it is limited means that people don't have to be stingy in using the resource. Before that woman who needed a generator could find the seller, the odds are that he has sold his supply to other people who might have only thought a generator was "a good idea". Maybe one guy bought three generators "just in case". More of this in a minute.<br />
<br />
This question is related to a previous post I wrote, <a href="http://jameswynn.blogspot.com/2015/10/price-is-no-obstacle.html" target="_blank">Price is No Obstacle</a>. There I tried to demonstrate that price is not a problem to be overcome. Scarcity is the problem and price is only the quantification of the current scarcity. A law that outlaws selling items above a price ceiling cannot eliminate the scarcity that has caused the market price to be increased. A government policy has the ability to create scarcity, but it has no ability to legislate abundance. Only if there is a policy that is causing artificial scarcity (as I analogized before, artificially building a mountain between its citizens and the services they want) and that policy is removed can a government action be described as increasing abundance. In that case, the government action is Get Out Of The Way.<br />
<br />
This is why centrally planned economies are subject to scarcities that do not exist in freer economies. Ironically, scarcity (such as the cost of the highest speed Internet) is typically the justification for more government involvement.<br />
<h4>
"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand." <br />~ Milton Friedman</h4>
Libertarian consumer reporter, John Stossel had a famous argument against price gouging laws on ABC News. <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Stossel/story?id=1954352&page=1" target="_blank">Here</a> he took on a real world example of exactly the situation in the first video above. There was a hurricane in the Gulf. The citizens of the town sent out an appeal for more generators.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div itemprop="articleBody">
John Shepperson was one of the "gougers" authorities arrested.
Shepperson and his family live in Kentucky. They watched news reports
about Katrina and learned that people desperately needed things. </div>
<div itemprop="articleBody">
<br /></div>
<div itemprop="articleBody">
Shepperson thought he could help and make some money, too, so he bought
19 generators. He and his family then rented a U-Haul and drove 600
miles to an area of Mississippi that was left without power in the wake
of the hurricane. </div>
<div itemprop="articleBody">
<br /></div>
<div itemprop="articleBody">
He offered to sell his generators for twice what he had paid for them,
and people were eager to buy. Police confiscated his generators, though,
and Shepperson was jailed for four days for price-gouging. His
generators are still in police custody. So did the public benefit?</div>
</blockquote>
<a href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/2008/09/15/in-defense-price-gougers.html" target="_blank">John Lott offered a argument</a> he hardly invented against price gouging laws directed at hotels:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Stamping out "price-gouging" by hotels merely means that more of those
fleeing the storm will be homeless. No one wants people to pay more for a
hotel, but we all also want people to have some place to stay. As the
price of hotel rooms rises, some may decide that they will share a room
with others. Instead of a family getting one room for the kids and
another for the parents, some will make do with having everyone in the
same room. At high enough prices, friends or neighbors who can stay with
each other will do so.</blockquote>
Jameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11016802159573871360noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1299916454414495917.post-12166680798113612712016-01-14T08:49:00.000-08:002016-05-30T19:07:57.753-07:00The Insidious Beauty of Capitalism<br />
Capitalism is a loaded word. It means a lot of things to a lot of different people. In a practical sense, Capitalism is the freedom to do what you want with your own property, your own labor, your own intelligence. In it's purest form, you can do this without anyone (church, mayor, social justice warrior) looking over your shoulder to see if what you are doing is "fair". In a free trade system, the only people deciding whether the deal is fair is the buyer and the seller. I<i>'m going to leave aside the question of whether oversight is necessary in practice. I'm going only talk about a benefit that free trade produces in a society.</i><br />
<h4>
How many, for the sake of charity,
would serve refreshing beverages to strangers -- not just for a weekend,
but for scores of hours every week for years. Yet Starbucks has enticed
people to do just that for the sake of ...what shall we call it? Greed? Ambition? A desire to thrive and to take part in the luxuries of modern life? Also for a flexible work schedule that allowed the freedom to go to auditions. An 18th century economist used the Biblical term
"<a href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/concupiscence?s=t" target="_blank">concupiscence</a>" which is a term I like. Whatever it is, the physically and mentally hale panhandlers I encounter everyday are apparently immune to it. </h4>
Free enterprise <i>entices</i> us to serve the needs and desires of our fellowman, including the majority of us who would never do it otherwise. To extend Don Henley's observation, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Rnko5p25Ws" target="_blank">there's just not enough love in the world</a> to dependably have access, by charity alone, to the basic needs of survival. <br />
<br />
As I said, I'm not going to address whether free enterprise needs
oversight. But we should recognize that it does provide a public good --
it does, in its way, cause us to be better people. And it is
inevitable that every control policy designed to soften its edges
undercuts its effectiveness in making us better in that way. <br />
<br />
To whatever degree we lessen the NEED to have a job and cow-tow to a boss or customer, we will lessen the greatest natural compulsion available to us to serve each other. If we had "free" housing, "free" cable, "free" Internet, and a budget for food, we would then be able to have our needs delivered and never interact with other people at all. It is Utopian to believe that an unsustainably large segment of us, if not most of us, would not end up taking that offer. If the government provided a minimum salary
that was anything but miserably insufficient, a significant number of us would learn to live with that. The recent growth of
Social Security Disability applications demonstrates that people will
accept a very low standard of living if it can be had without a work
schedule. This is the <a href="http://lifehacker.com/5762813/how-the-power-of-free-can-manipulate-your-decisions-and-how-to-beat-it" target="_blank">compelling power of "free"</a> on the human psyche. <br />
<br />
Yes, Capitalism has sharp edges. So does a saw. That is how they are effective.Jameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11016802159573871360noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1299916454414495917.post-80799203839317073342016-01-11T13:26:00.000-08:002017-03-26T15:34:37.580-07:00What does the saying mean "The exception that proves the rule"?How can an exception to a rule prove it?<br />
<br />
The meaning of this saying is rooted in an important principle of Information Theory which says that "Knowledge only progresses when an experiment fails." Or inversely, "We don't learn anything from our successes." Here is an example:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Teacher: I'm going to give you a series of four numbers based on a pattern. You can give me three test series and I'll tell you if they match the pattern. Then you must tell me what the pattern is. Ready? "12, 14, 16, 18". Okay give me some test series, and I will tell you if they follow the actual pattern or not.<br />
<br />
Student: 20, 22, 24, 26<br />
<br />
Teacher: Correct.<br />
<br />
Student: 32, 34, 36, 38.<br />
<br />
Teacher: Correct.<br />
<br />
Student 2, 4, 6, 8.<br />
<br />
Teacher: Correct. What is the pattern?<br />
<br />
Student: Consecutive even numbers.<br />
<br />
Teacher: Incorrect. The pattern is this: "Each number must be larger than the previous one." 31, 45, 122, 123" would have also followed the pattern. Or even "1, 2, 3, 4."</blockquote>
This is a well-known example to demonstrate the seductiveness of Confirmation Bias. The student presupposed she knew the pattern and only tested to see if her presupposition was correct. Since all her tests pointed in one direction -- the direction she expected them to point -- she assumed her presumptions were right. Consequently, she learned nothing about the actual pattern. If she had inputted random numbers or if she had inputted numbers she was certain would fail the test, she would have learned at least <i>something</i>. She could have offered the original pattern in reverse order ("18, 16, 14, 12") and learned that the numbers needed to be in ascending order. There was actually very little value to her in offering number patterns that she fully expected to test positive. <br />
<h4>
And so you see that it was only by discovering patterns that DIDN'T follow the presumed rule (exceptions) that she could PROVE the rule to be correct.</h4>
This is a very important wider principle. In life, we only progress by failure. Naturally, it is our desire for our choices to always come up aces. But if they do, we will be the same person in 10 or 20 years that we are today. Why shouldn't we be when the status quo is so successful? We want our children to always succeed, but unless we believe they are fully realized, mature, ideal persons at birth, we should not attempt to ensure that outcome. It can be scary and even risky. But, generally speaking, it is a necessary risk.<br />
<br />
In economics it is the same. People deride "Market Failures". But in fact, the value of an undirected, private market over centrally planned economies is not that it never fails. It is the opposite. The value is that it fails over and over, thousands of times simultaneously and often in very big, demonstrative ways. Government planned initiatives almost never fail even if they do not produce positive results. Or, at best they fail in slow motion, over a generation or two, and no one is ever held accountable for it. And that is why they are inefficient. Even if a government planned solution is PERFECT at the time it is designed and implemented, it will not be so in the near future and since it cannot fail, it cannot progress or adapt to change.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; position: relative;">
“Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.”<br />
~ Joseph Schumpeter</blockquote>
Jameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11016802159573871360noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1299916454414495917.post-32086106478756538942016-01-08T10:27:00.002-08:002016-09-23T09:55:32.558-07:00"societally we can't seem to grasp the idea that even if a woman's body attracts attention, it's NOT an open invitation"<div id="fb-root">
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<blockquote cite="https://www.facebook.com/StuffMomNeverToldYou/videos/1204265732934408/">
Tattooed women's experiences of nonconsensual touching, grabbing and commentary demonstrate how societally we can't seem...<br />
Posted by <a href="https://www.facebook.com/StuffMomNeverToldYou/">Stuff Mom Never Told You</a> on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/StuffMomNeverToldYou/videos/1204265732934408/">Tuesday, January 5, 2016</a></blockquote>
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Woman posts on problems women with tattoos face with inappropriate attention, comments, and touching. Of course, women without tattoos face the same problems. But what drew my attention to her video was her claim that this has to do with a problem WE have SOCIETALLY. I don't have a problem like that even though I consider myself part of society.<br />
<br />
The term my daughters use for people that do have problems like that is "creepers". I like that term better than "creeps" because it identifies them by what they do in a specific situation rather than assuming to know what they "are". If a guy who "generally means well" is creeping, then he's a creeper. You don't need to know his backstory. I don't think any creepers will be turned around by this video. Some people might get new ideas for creeping from this video, though.<br />
<br />
But back to the question of "we as a society". I think some people use the word "society" when they are actually referring to "the real world". Because if Society is bad in some way, it's on them (somebody) to fix it. But if it is the Real World that is discomfiting us then WE are the ones who need to adjust (either our behavior or our attitudes about what follows after we make our choices). We don't like to adjust.<br />
<br />
Society is supposed to be nurturing and accommodating. The Real World is harsh, unforgiving, and doesn't care about our preferences, nor do we expect it to. </div>
Jameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11016802159573871360noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1299916454414495917.post-5355341016739952992015-12-08T10:44:00.000-08:002017-05-02T21:30:56.936-07:00"White Privilege" Is a Racial Slur<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Sorry. But it is.<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> Thi<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">s <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">is </span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">obvious if we think of how other racial/ethnic slurs are used</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i></i></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i>A definition of White Privilege/Entitlement (n): <br />[W]hite men [...] carry the absent mark which grants us the invisible power of white privilege. Everyone else gets discrimination. [...] White privilege is the right of whites, and only whites, to be judged as individuals, to be treated as a unique self, possessed of all the rights and protections of citizenship. I am not a race, I am the unmarked subject. I am simply, whereas you might be a black man, an asian woman, a disabled Native [American] man, a homosexual Latina, and on and on the qualifiers of identification go. <br />~Michael Mark Cohen </i></span><br />
<br />
<div style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); letter-spacing: -0.02em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 0px; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;">The Internet has proven again to be a nearly perfectly efficient rendering engine. That is, it outputs whatever you look for before you know you want to look for it. If you think of a snarky comment or the most outlandish point of view, the odds are that someone has already posted it --seriously or not-- on some social network. Exhibit #1, </span><a href="https://www.change.org/p/billboard-potus-adele-adele-needs-to-publicly-recognize-her-white-privilege" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;" target="_blank">a petition has been proposed at Change.org stating</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;">: </span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;">"We demand that Adele publicly acknowledge that although she has a little bit of talent, it's her white privilege that is selling her album. We also demand that Adele donates her money to African-American causes such as #Blacklivesmatter."</span></blockquote>
<div class="graf--p graf-after--blockquote" id="57a0" name="57a0" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In case you don't know, <a href="https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=adele+someone+like+you&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAONgFuLSz9U3MKoySYq3UAKz0y0qks3TtMSyk630c0uLM5P1E4tKMotLrIrz89KLHzEGcgu8_HFPWMpj0pqT1xiduHAoFNLgYnPNK8ksqRSS4-KTQrJGg0GKhwuJzwMAZASbD4YAAAA" target="_blank">Adele</a> is a super-popular singer-songwriter who initially got attention from demos posted on MySpace that she had recorded for a class project. Is this "Rhianna Jones" serious or is this satire? I don't know. Who is this person? I don't know. Googling "rhianna jones", the first 10 hits gets me a person who labels herself a "fashion creative" but I don't know if this is the same person. Let's assume not. However, although the Internet has rendered little support for this petition (this is <i>Adele </i>after all), there's not much discussion whether the actual labels being applied to this recently wealthy young woman are acceptable language in any frame. In fact, this is an excellent example of how vile the term "White Privilege" (or its A.K.A "White Entitlement") has become. It is simply another racial slur. <span style="letter-spacing: -0.048px; line-height: 20.224px;">I'll show you<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">, but <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">f</span></span>irst, let's step back a few paces. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: -0.048px; line-height: 20.224px;">Some time ago, Michael Mark Cohen -- believing that the world lacked an essential racial slur -- wrote an article in Medium entitled "</span><a href="https://human.parts/douchebag-the-white-racial-slur-weve-all-been-waiting-for-a2323002f85d#.4dfledxs5" style="letter-spacing: -0.048px; line-height: 20.224px;" target="_blank">Douchebag: The White Racial Slur We've All Been Waiting For</a><span style="letter-spacing: -0.048px; line-height: 20.224px;">". </span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.048px; line-height: 20.224px;">Yay! A racial slur for white people! The universe is just a bit better now. </span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.048px; line-height: 20.224px;">But there was a weakness in that awesome new toy for hateful people. Cohen identified it in his article when he explained what is a white person is to do about their Original Sin of being white:</span></span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.048px; line-height: 20.224px;">"It’s a long argument, and an endless series of principled choices, but the short version is simply: don’t be a douchebag."</span></blockquote>
<div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">That advice shows that "douchebag" is a lousy racial slur. A white person can opt to not be douchebag. And anyone else can presumably opt to be one. The qualifications for a proper racial/ethnic slur cannot be expunged and they can't be adopted. <span style="letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;">A black one-percenter investment banker or neurosurgeon, regardless of her accomplishments and life experiences, can never be above being called </span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;">any of many derogatory slurs. When she is, the implication is “Yes, you might have risen to impressive heights from your roots. But </span><span class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="-webkit-font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;">[insert term]</span><i class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="-webkit-font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;"> </i><span style="letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;">is who you really are. You are merely punching above a weight class that nature has designated for you.” </span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.048px; line-height: 20.224px;">For those who use such terms </span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.048px; line-height: 20.224px;"> a Jewish person is always a “</span><i class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="-webkit-font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">heeb</i><span style="letter-spacing: -0.048px; line-height: 20.224px;">” or maybe an Arab is always a </span><i class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="-webkit-font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">terrorist </i><span style="letter-spacing: -0.048px; line-height: 20.224px;">under the skin. </span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;"> It doesn't matter what they do or what they overcome. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;">Conversely, if someone were to call me (a white guy) an "eggplant" I'd only be befuddled. You cannot apply someone else's slur to me. This would be true even if I were to go about disguised as a black man as the author of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Like_Me" target="_blank">Black Like Me</a> did in the late 50s. Knowing that I was not truly a black man would exempt me from any personal offense. </span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.048px; line-height: 20.224px;">If a white person can opt out of his assigned racial slur by a choice of mindset, </span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.048px; line-height: 20.224px;">I guess white people win again. But…maybe not. Maybe there is a slur we can apply to white people that they </span><i class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="-webkit-font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">cannot</i><span style="letter-spacing: -0.048px; line-height: 20.224px;"> escape. And Cohen and Jones both used it<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">: <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">white privil<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">ege.</span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">[An<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> a<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">side: </span></span>To define douchebaggery, <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">w</span></span>hat </span>Cohen me<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">ant <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">when he said</span> "W<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">hite peop<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">le, d</span></span>on't be a</span></span> "douchebag" <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">was</span> "D<span style="letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;">on’t imagine you <i>deserve</i> <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">your social or e<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">conomic </span>status</span>." But<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">, to the ex<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">ten<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">t this is valid, it is </span></span></span>good advice to any<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> </span>American</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> </span><i class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="-webkit-font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">whatever his background or heritage</i><span style="letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;">: We are all the winners of life’s lottery here. If you are at the bottom 20% of American income earners, you are still in the top 20% of income earners worldwide—not including any additional subsidies you might get from the government, not including the many free social benefits we all have just for being here. And by at least one measure, if Western European countries were US states <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/08/25/britain-is-poorer-than-any-us-state-yes-even-mississippi/" target="_blank">many of them would be the poorest states in the Union</a>. Poorer than West Virginia. Poorer than Mississippi. On the other hand, a presumption of entitlement — the default attitude of </span><i class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="-webkit-font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">all</i><span style="letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;"> Americans, relative to people worldwide, regardless of income bracket— is a luxury and it bears significant costs over the course of a lifetime and over the course of generations. I suspect this is why <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/asian-americans-set-surpass-whites-median-family-wealth-n314341" target="_blank">Asians in America on average have been improving relative to Whites on average</a>. It’s why Black immigrants tend to do better on average even though they are subject to unwarranted traffic stops as frequently as American-born Blacks. They or their parents have only recently come here and have not yet forgotten to be grateful. They do not take it for granted.]</span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;">For "white privilege/entitlement" to be a racial slur, it must make implications that are devoid of <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">personal </span>facts that might exempt the target. And, indeed, it is incorrect and unsupportable to say that Whites are immune from discrimination based on crude, ignorant categorization. The belief that they <i>are </i>so immune is founded on the same blindness as any bigot when he meets an accomplished, honest, hardworking, intelligent black woman and only sees a “</span><i class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em;">jigaboo</i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;">”. His error is that ancestry is a useless proxy for weighing the human soul or guessing the path of a human life.</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em;"> </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redskin_(slang)" target="_blank">Per Wikipedia</a>, Prof. Luvell Anderson (University of Memphis) argued that "for a word to be a slur, the word must communicate ideas beyond identifying a target group, and that slurs are offensive because the additional data contained in those words differentiates those individuals from otherwise accepted groups."</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em;">In the case of a white person, it is true that if your skin color is classified with 70% of the population, it is unlikely (but not impossible) that anyone will discriminate against you </span><i class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em;">because of the color of your skin</i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em;">. You’ll never stand out because of that. But that just means that you will only face discrimination for other things instead: Because you’re a “hippie” and people stereotype you as flaky and drugged-up, or a Mormon and people think you are weird and narrow-minded, or because you have Southern accent and people assume you are stupid and racist, or because your car is an older model than what is common in your neighborhood so the cops stop you all the time.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/adele-talks-about-her-body-image-and-weight/" target="_blank">Or it could be that people think you are too FAT to be a female pop star of worldwide acclaim.</a> Heaven, knows that having 50 pounds over the ideal makes you worthy of all the approbation people might throw at you. You did it to yourself, after all. And you're a burden to society to boot.</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;"> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;">Or maybe it is that (despite your white privilege) you are socially awkward and you don’t have any valuable social connections because you were raised by an alienating, clinically-depressed, alcoholic single mother in a small, unfashionable town and your academic scores were lackluster, and your household had just enough reportable income to not qualify for enough meaningful university grants to make a difference. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;">Yes, people of all races might face these same sorts of disadvantages as well. But white people encountering them do not have a secret superpower called White Privilege that they can whip out to overcome them. They have to overcome them the same way anyone else does, or not<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-weight: normal;">When Adele grew up in relative poverty, the daughter of an alcoholic who abandoned his wife to raise their a two-year-old alone, she couldn't make that go away by asserting White Privilege.</span></div>
</div>
<h4>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In the real world, your White Privilege and a dollar will buy you a pack of gum—although in a high crime neighborhood, maybe you won’t have an immigrant store owner following you around while you pick it out.</span></h4>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;">There are at least two false beliefs about that mysterious Race of White People that underl<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">ie</span> this idea of White Privilege. </span><b style="background-color: white; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;"> </b><br />
<br />
<b style="background-color: white; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;">1) </b><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;">If you are not white and male, you might well believe that there are lots of secret benefits </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;">those people</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;"> confer on each other when you aren't around. Benefits that are apart from good looks, social affability, intelligence, health, wealth, or connections, or the college you went to, the organizations you joined, the church you attend. But I can report from the other side that that it isn't true.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;">This notion reminds me of a </span><a href="http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/white-like-me/n9308" style="background-color: white; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;" target="_blank">1984 Saturday Night Live mockumentary where Eddie Murphy disguised himself as a white man</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;"> and discovered that when no one was looking white people give each other things for free. When there is only white people on public transportation, suddenly, it becomes a party bus. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;">[And, lo, the Internet renders again. Because less than two months ago, a writer for the New York Daily News asserted that this very Eddie Murphy humor skit </span><a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/eddie-murphy-1984-snl-skit-white-privilege-article-1.2409222" style="background-color: white; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;" target="_blank">had "got it right" on White Privilege</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;">.]</span><br />
<b style="background-color: white; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;"><br /></b>
<b style="background-color: white; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;">2)</b><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;"> The other false belief is that, I, as a white man somehow receive a </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;">benefit</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;"> every time anyone who is not white is hassled by the police or is </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;">microaggressed</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;"> in hundreds of little ways each day. To think that is to adopt the most wooden, simplistic concept of the complex world of human interactions that... well, now that I think of it, that sort of thinking is probably near the heart of all bigotry.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;">Now, it is true<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> that <i>class</i> </span></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;">privilege is a valuable thing. A child of a household in the top 5% of income earners probably has a statistically better chance in life with only a high school diploma than someone raised by the bottom 25% has with an undergrad degree <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">(</span><a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201310/the-problem-rich-kids" target="_blank">that is by <i>some</i> <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">measurements</span></a>). It is not a crazy anomaly when a <i>white person</i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> is</span></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;"> in the bottom 25% of income earning households, but the belief that that is at least </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;">relatively</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;"> rare is an underlying assumption among those who conflate class and race. But even class privilege doesn't trump </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;">everything</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;">. In the 50s lots of white, high income, leftist artists in the movie industry were discriminated against for associating with Communists, and even more feared they would be. To many of their peers, they were just another <i>pinko</i></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">.</span> When the </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;">Internet rendered</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;"> the fact that Mozilla CEO and co-founder, Brendan Eich, had contributed money to an anti-same-sex-marriage initiative in California, his corporate peers and employees turned their backs on him until he was sufficiently pressured to resign. To them, despite knowing him for years, Eich was suddenly just another<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> <i>teabagger</i>. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">"White Privilege" is a label that denies the individuality of the target and forces him to into a set of predefined stereotypes. That's what slurs are for.</span></h4>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">There is nothing the target to can do to exempt himself. It is beyond achievement, effort, or choice. You just <i>are</i> Black or Latino or Jewish or White Privileged. Definitively, a person of Euro-Caucasian descent can never stop being <i class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="-webkit-font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">white privileged</i> for to be white is to be white privileged. The most degraded white man sleeping on the streets in a 10 degree blizzard at least has white privilege in his pocket.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> And just like those other racial slurs, being "white privileged" undercuts anything a person accomplishes: past or future. Maybe he can be the nicest White Privileged chap that his Black and Latino friends know. Maybe he can be “one of the good ones” who “knows his place” as the beneficiary of American institutional racism. But he can never be other than white privileged. If you are white privileged, it means that — although you might have never treated anyone inequitably based on their race, creed, or national origin, although you might have even shown a degree of <i class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="-webkit-font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">favoritism </i>to races different than your own, although you might have had no valuable socio-economic connections when starting out, although you might have worked very hard and risked much to achieve whatever you have — but <i class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="-webkit-font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">still </i>you vicariously share in the sin of every cop (white or black or brown) who stops and tickets a black man in an expensive car because he stood out on the highway. And it asserts you have even reaped unspecified <i class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="-webkit-font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">rewards </i>from those encounters—rewards not shared by anyone in another category...<i>even if someone in that category has never been similarly <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">harassed</span></i>.<span style="letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;">It does no good to say "Well, other slurs </span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.048px; line-height: 20.224px;"><i>denigrate</i></span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58;"> a person, but the label "White Privileged" merely says the person is better off." If you imply that a Jewish family has secret hoards of wealth in their basement accrued by cleverly manipulating naive gentiles or that their causes benefit from Jews controlling the media, that is still a slur. "White Privilege" is intended to denigrate a person morally and on merit.</span> </span></div>
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">As a racial slur <i>White Privilege</i> is far more offensive and derogatory than "honky" or "cracker" (which white people never really cared about), and no one has shown the least embarrassment in throwing it around. It is used the same as any other racial slur: To deny the target his individuality, to brand him with the failures of the worst member of his category and with the stereotypes in the minds of others, to disparage the quality of his achievements and potential, and to implicitly demand more from him than others.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">[A version of this article was originally published on Medium.com.]</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><b><i>Addendum</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">How Can You Say That White Privilege Is Not a Real Thing At All?</span></h4>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I don't say that. I don't have to, because it doesn't a matter if it exists or not. As I said, stereotypes have a high degree of accuracy in some aggregate form or did at some time. Are Jews and Scots especially frugal? Probably many were once. Having to thrive in hostile economic environments means you have to watch every penny. Are blacks lazy? That stereotype started during a time of slavery. Slaves and otherwise economically exploited people probably appear lazy to their task masters. Why should a slave work hard unless there is a whip driving them on? What benefit would they gain? And malingering is often the only resistance available. But a stereotype is unreliable when applied to any single person or instance. In real life, when the special circumstances are not in play -- circumstances that would lead the stereotype to be true for anyone (social ostracization, economic exploitation, benefits of class)-- the stereotypial behavior parts like fog at noon. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And, anyway, in an incredibly rich country like the US, most specific discrimination is a small issue for success relative to other factors (save for a few very limited fields and circumstances). Life is full plusses and minuses. Just because one of those values *exist* doesn't mean it is relevant in the totality of your experience:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">For example, if you live on the beach, the wind will frequently whip up sand in your eye. This is incredibly painful. If you don't live on the beach, you can see that a decreased possibility of this happening is a <i>benefit </i>for you - that is your <i>Inland Privilege</i>. But that doesn't mean that sand in eyes is even in the<span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline;"> top 10 downsides of living on the beach. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline;">Your happiness in America --where, again, the poor are well within in the top 20% of income earners worldwide and where if European countries were states almost all would be among the poorest in the Union -- is influenced by the quality of your family, your physical ability and attractiveness, the affluence of your parents, your connections to church and other secular organization, your natural charm, your curiosity, your skills and the degree to which those skills are esteemed and capitalized by others. Race and where your ancestors were born is a factor just as anything has a theoretical butterfly effect, but they are behind all these others. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline;">Attributing significant power to things beyond your control is destructive and self-fulfilling.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline;"></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><b>More on this subject in this new post</b> <a href="http://jameswynn.blogspot.com/2016/01/systemic-ideological-segregation-vs.html" target="_blank">Systemic Ideological Segregation vs Systemic Racial Segregatio</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://jameswynn.blogspot.com/2016/01/systemic-ideological-segregation-vs.html" target="_blank">n</a>.</span>
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Jameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11016802159573871360noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1299916454414495917.post-73637844832385588702015-11-18T12:51:00.001-08:002015-12-02T12:39:22.280-08:00Femme Fatal<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">One of the film/pop culture commentary podcasts I listen to
regularly is </span><a href="http://fightinginthewarroom.com/" style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" target="_blank">Fighting In the War Room</a><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">. I'm about to be contrarian about </span><a href="http://fightinginthewarroom.com/2015/11/96-allourpodcast/" style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" target="_blank">their last episode</a><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">, but you shouldn't take that as general disparagement of the show.
I like it. I'm subscribed to it. If you like this sort of podcast, you should
be subscribed to it too.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">One horse corpse that this group regularly thrashes is the
terrible, awful plight and dearth of female directors. It's not enough that
there are lots of female directors working on critically acclaimed films (they
whinge). We need lots of female directors working on big, franchise, spectacle blockbusters.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Poor Colin Treverrow. The well of contempt for this guy for being
hired to direct Jurassic World after only directing the critically and
popularly embraced Time-travel movie, "Safety Not Guaranteed", has no
bottom. I guess he should have died or at least got a sex-reassignment when he
accepted the job. And the nerve of the guy <a href="http://deadline.com/2015/08/colin-trevorrow-star-wars-episode-ix-women-hollywood-1201503834/" target="_blank">for not framing female directors et al as helpless princesses chained up in the dragon's cave of the impersonal Hollywood System</a>. And when I say impersonal I mean it is literally as if no
specific people, or valid individual business decisions are involved in the
selection of directors in big investment film projects. When Treverrow points out that in many cases the reason big budget movies weren't ultimately helmed by female directors is that a female director removed herself from the project...well Colin just doesn't get it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And there's obviously nothing but sexism at play if a female
director of a successful film is replaced by a male director in the sequel (as in the Twilight franchise).
This is refreshing if it happens the other way, but once a female director pees
on something, by golly, it can only be helmed by another female even if two of
the three executive producers making the decision are female (which strikes me
as a more substantial step forward for Womynkind).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The question of the day in this episode was especially irking. "Is it less than
righteous" (they didn't use that word but righteousness under-lies this and all
discussions of this type) "NOT to cheer whenever a female director releases a
film <i>whether or not the film produced is
particularly good?</i>" Naturally, when a female director produces
something that is objectively fine, we're going to dance with euphoria about it
even if (like the Hurt Locker or Zero Dark Thirty) it merely had a decent
script and was professionally handled without internal drama. But, according to
the FITWR panel, if a woman directs a <i>bad</i>
movie, we're still going to cheer because a) any movie directed by a woman is
an improvement and b) it means we've moved forward so much that a woman can
direct crap. Nothing, we all know, improves the professional status of women in
film like mediocre art. But! What if we could have had a <i>good</i>
movie if it had been handed to another director, who just happened to have been
male? Are we not to put that opportunity cost into our accounting? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Look, I understand the reasoning that if women are directing lots
of bad art, it's a good proxy for the professional status of female directors because
Sturgeon's Law states that 95% of everything is crap. So (the reasoning goes),
the more bad films women create, it means that women are being treated
professionally without regard to their sex -- they don't have to be Great to be
given money by investors to do film work. But that only works as a proxy IF
viewers are not judging films, good or bad, by whether they were directed by
women. So the expressed attitude of most of the FITWR panel is actually
dragging women down. The path to creating great films is not to hand it to women
who produce crap. And investors are not going to be interested in handing $200
million to someone as a vague and meaningless gesture for which there will be
NO return on investment if the person does not produce.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So FITWR does not have to be embarrassed when they pan a movie </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">simply (or in part) because the director is female </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">— they should not even
acknowledge the possibility of embarrassment or disappointment.</span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I'll stipulate here that I'm the father of three grown daughters. If Feminism is defined as believing that women are people, then I'm a feminist. If Feminism is practiced as an Identity Politics Advocacy philosophy, then I am not a feminist. I don't believe in Girl Power. I don't want my daughters to be inspirations to young girls everywhere. I want them to be inspirations and mentors to young people regardless of sex. I don't want them to thrive because they are female. I don't want them to thrive in spite of being female. I want them to thrive at whatever they put their hand to and devote themselves to in excellence. And if they were to complain about someone looking down on them for their sex (which they never have), I would not undercut them by reminding them of how limited and unentitled they are in this Man's World. I would empower them by reminding them of how fortunate they are to live in THIS country at THIS time where their opportunities and channels to make use of those opportunities are phenomenally greater than any other time and place in history. Now go forth and conquer.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br />
Whenever issues of Diversity come up, the FITWR panel stops caring about good
film itself (something they self-evidently care about a lot the rest of the
time) and start to care about something else more.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I recall an episode of Siskel & Ebert (I don't remember what
title was at the time), where Gene Siskel sensibly chastised Roger Ebert
(paraphrasing), "Don't recommend a bad movie as a good movie, because you
like the themes or the people involved." I loved Siskel as a film
reviewer. I trusted his assessments. I can remember only a handful of quotes
from their show but they are almost all his. And the FITWR panel should
remember his admonishment before naming, a movie like say, The Obvious Child, as one
of the best movies of the year –acknowledging that it isn’t objectively
outstanding -- simply because they liked its stance on a culture-war issue.
None of the panel are Christians but I have no doubt I could hear their
eyes rolling through my earbuds if someone named the financially profitable
movie God Is Not Dead as one of the best movies of the year just because
"We don't get a lot of movies like this as feature films."<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">[</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The spelling of the title of this post is deliberate. You're in the hands of an expert here. (wink)]</span></div>
Jameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11016802159573871360noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1299916454414495917.post-29898647132166450682015-10-26T09:04:00.001-07:002016-01-12T08:53:08.518-08:00The IRS FetishI thought of this upon hearing comedienne <a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/10/22/450830121/sarah-silverman-opens-up-about-depression-comedy-and-troublemaking" target="_blank">Sarah Silverman talking on NPR's Fresh Air</a> show.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"My dad raised us to respect taxes and know that its an honor to pay taxes. And it goes to people who need it, and highways, and schools, and that's what makes our country great, and the more successful you are the more you can put into the ante..into the middle..to help make our local communities and our bigger communities great."</blockquote>
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This is a new thing among Democrats, this tender soft-spot for taxes--taxes for their own sake, ignoring any specific program--because we're suppose to accept that the programs receiving the dollars are worthwhile without consideration. I've recently heard Chris Hardwick, Jon Stewart, and David Letterman apologize for making jokes at expense of the IRS. <i>The IRS!</i></div>
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To be frank, there's something <i>unAmerican</i> about that, and I don't use that word lightly as does <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2014/02/27/reid-koch-brothers-are-un-american/" target="_blank">Harry, Reid</a>, <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/08/10/tight-spot-pelosi-calls-health-care-critics-american/" target="_blank">Nancy Pelosi</a>, <a href="http://www.thetakeaway.org/story/us-corporations-eye-move-overseas-avoid-taxes/" target="_blank">Dick Durban</a>, and <a href="http://www.politicususa.com/2015/09/15/obama-calls-republican-behavior-un-american-slamming-gop-immigrant-bashing.html" target="_blank">Barack Obama</a>.<br />
<h3>
The short of it is this: This country was founded on a revolt against a two cent tax hike on imported tea.</h3>
Look. We should pay our taxes. And we should collect enough in taxes to pay for what we spend (as they do in Denmark by taxing the bark off the middle and working class). And we should be required to think before we spend --no matter how terrific the concept behind the program--because we know we'll only be able to pay for it by sequestering a greater portion of the free economy with taxes (or we'll degrade future value of the savings and salaries of people through deficit spending). But that doesn't require that we <i>love</i> taxes. The IRS has been an organization of menace since 1918 -- all throughout the New Deal and Great Society eras. What's changed?</div>
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"Honoring" the payment of taxes is becoming a kind of sacrament for Left-leaning people. They speak of it the way religious people speak of their tithes--as an act of piety, and act of submission before God. It is interesting that progressives speak such love for the ideal of paying taxes and then denounce others for pointing out that <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/05/51-of-americans-pay-no-federal-income-taxes/238329/" target="_blank">half of us don't make any net tax payments at all</a>. </div>
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They don't even defend the taxes on the basis of New Deal programs anymore, or any specific programs to that distribute the money. Instead, they talk about highways and cops (yes <i>cops</i>) and firemen and <a href="http://www2.nybooks.com/articles/s3/2015/nov/05/president-obama-marilynne-robinson-conversation.html" target="_blank"><i>the post office</i></a> for heaven sakes. </div>
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Taxes can be ethically and economically problematic. Economically, because when you tax an activity, you are disincentivizing it (which leftists comprehend if you're talking about taxing carbon dioxide or cigarettes) and that means that less of those beautiful, beautiful, all important taxes will be collected. Taxes designed to disincentivize cannot have the same design as taxes intended to generate revenue. Disincentive taxes should not be expected to support any of the wonderful things the government does for us. But since it is normal now to find a villain in order to tax him, all new taxes nowadays are created with the ostensible purpose of doing both. </div>
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Ethically, they are problematic because taxes are not donations. You are demanding it from people who might not agree with how it is spent and <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB4QFjAAahUKEwiH-fviwODIAhWCbiYKHaLyAB4&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.politico.com%2Fblogs%2Fon-congress%2F2011%2F03%2Freid-save-federal-funding-for-the-cowboy-poets-034031&usg=AFQjCNEpNRrRLSsLtWAuLgFywaYkawDgGQ&sig2=14xZYmPty-irqjJtYPmLIg" target="_blank">often the way it <i>is</i> spent is not defendable</a>. Someone is setting up his good judgement for how someone else's money should be spent as superior to his neighbor's judgement and backing that opinion with the potential of lethal force. That is a view that has been understood since Robin Hood. For this reason, every expenditure should be worthwhile and I think that the fact that progressives have begun to honor <i>the payment of taxes</i> rather than the <i>specific programs</i> that the taxes support is evidence they are feeling embarrassed about those programs. </div>
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We all agree now that that our money isn't going toward a Great Society. No one believes in that anymore. Instead it's going to powerful factions and demographics all the way down. The money is going to some guy in a leather chair in an office downtown, and we're just hoping it will <i>trickle-down</i> to the deserving. But government has become the Church of the Left because they've managed to relegate the old-fashioned churches to condescension or contempt. It's blasphemous to make a deal out of an expanding bureaucratic class with 100% job security and compensation well above comparable private sector workers. Or to mention that social security payments, single-payer healthcare, and free university benefits <a href="https://reason.com/blog/2015/10/20/bernie-sanders-hates-rich-people-wants-t" target="_blank">go to people who can well afford to care for themselves</a>. </div>
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Jameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11016802159573871360noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1299916454414495917.post-52620062769212727942015-10-23T14:06:00.000-07:002016-01-14T08:03:07.390-08:00Price is No Obstacle<br />
From...<br />
<h1 class="entry-title" style="background-color: #fff1e0; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 1.313em; font-weight: 400; line-height: 1.25; margin: 0px 0px 0.45em; padding: 0px;">
<a href="http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/10/21/2142555/self-driving-cars-opportunity-costs-and-idle-gold/" target="_blank">Self-driving cars, opportunity costs and idle gold</a></h1>
You'll have to register to read it.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"We argued...that the economics of self-driving taxis don’t necessarily make sense.Which is to say, we’re not entirely convinced (at this stage) that self-driving taxis will be any more or less affordable than those driven by humans. "</blockquote>
That is irrelevant. The economic value of self-driving cars is that people who are currently driving taxis will do something else productive that can't be automated right now... Likely something that is either not being done now or is under-served based on the desire of the public. We should hope that self-driving taxis WILL (without general inflation or legal mandates) become increasingly expensive because that means that the value (productivity) of those hired trips is increasing. People freely pay for things only if they think the money they have is less valuable than the thing they want.<br />
<br />
I think the misconception is this: The writer thinks that price is an <i>additional </i>impediment when in fact price is a proxy for or <i>quantification of </i>the scarcity of a product -- that is, how hard it is to get (or make) and how many people want the useful product.<br />
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In other words, if the cost of getting something to you from over a mountain range is high, it means...<br />
<ol>
<li>The thing you are bringing over the mountains is worth the effort of dragging it over the mountains in the first place.</li>
<li>The effort to bring it over the mountains is onerous to some degree -- it is not "easy" for the average person to do for himself.</li>
</ol>
Think of it this way: You want a doo-dad brought from over the mountain. But due to the difficulty, the cost is too high for you to pay someone to do it for you. So, instead of using capital (which might be money or it might be trading labor or resources or it might be putting up with pop-up adds.), you either expend your own labor to carry it over or do without it. This is like a Manhattanite without a car and without enough money for a taxi who walks to the train station and then walks from the train station to his final destination, or instead gets a friend to drive her (a donation of capital).<br />
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Someone who is producing enough excess capital will not waste his valuable time schlepping over the mountain for this truly valuable product. He will hire someone to do it: someone whose time is slightly less productive (that is, producing less excess capital...obviously this fellow is working very hard).<br />
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Now the person who hires is not robbing from the person who does his own schlepping. Nor is the hired schlepper hurting the self-schlepper by not doing the work for less. The self-schlepper would have done his own schlepping if a hired schlepper did not exist so he is no worse off if the hired-schlepper charges more than he thinks he can afford. The employer and the hireling are potentially better off of course. But beyond the self-schlepper's envy at the employer for getting his doo-dad without having to traverse a mountain, his nose is not trimmed at all.<br />
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If the hireling builds robots to schlep stuff over the mountain (ala self-driving cars), there is no reason to suppose that the price will go down just because it is now "easier" for him. After all, he has the same bills he did before. He had to devote extra time to design and build those robots and never received any payment for that work. If he were going to be paid less for that work, he would never have built them in the first place. So he'll charge the same amount. But now he has more time to build more robots. He can devote his time to building robots instead of schlepping over the mountains--something he didn't have time to do before. Then he can provide his service to more people who want the valuable doo-dad.<br />
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Probably, over time but not initially, the product will become more affordable because it will become less scarce on the other side of the mountain. But if the doo-dad makes people so additionally productive that demand only grows for it, the cost will not decrease at all. Same thing, if the maintenance costs, and up-front capital costs are high. In conclusion, there is no reason, in this example, why the price <i>must</i> increase or decrease. It depends.<br />
<h4>
<span style="font-size: large; font-weight: normal;">Because you might be thinking it...</span></h4>
But what if the maker of robot-schleppers was an employer of human schleppers? Doesn't that mean that his robots are ruining the lives of his hired schleppers?<br />
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Well.... Understand that those hired schleppers have been <i>profiting </i>off the problems of their fellow citizens. They had a doo-dad that was scarce and hard to get. These people profited by overcoming the mountain range for them. <i>This is not an evil. They are doing good</i>. lt is true that they are "profiting off the suffering of their fellow man". They are making their living off the obstruction of the mountain and their willingness and ability to overcome it. They are caring for the needs of their fellowman via a system that is self-sustainable since it allows them to do it all the time and have their own needs met. <br />
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But let me try another analogy: Imagine if a city is hit by a hurricane and the roads into it are destroyed. So people hire themselves to schlep goods by hand to the city. They are benefiting the city. They are doing good. They are also profiting off the suffering of the city. But <i>this is not an evil. </i><br />
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HOWEVER what if the people of the city began to repair the roads into the city. Then, what if the people employed to schlep goods into the city began picketting the repair work?<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"You are ruing us! What will we do for employment? No one in this country <i>carries </i>things any more!" </blockquote>
<i>This is evil</i>, because they want to profit off the <i>unnecessary </i>suffering of their fellow man -- suffering they are trying to personally cause to be maintained.<br />
<h3>
The robot schleppers are essentially flattening the mountains as if they were not so imposing. In this little way, they are making people more powerful. And the hired schleppers are sharing in that increased empowerment along with everyone else. </h3>
Granted, they will have to do something other than schlep things over the mountain -- a task that is no longer needed by anyone. They will meet the needs of their fellow man in ways they never had time to before. The only way that there will never be any more work for them to do instead is if all human impediments were destroyed -- that is, if humanity (including the hired schleppers) were to become all-powerful. In that case, why would they need jobs?<br />
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I don't know what the hired schleppers will do instead. But I do know that we won't find out if we use regulation and legislation to create artificial mountain ranges where they would otherwise not exist so the hired schleppers can pretend to be productive. Or if we were to pay them for being idle.Jameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11016802159573871360noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1299916454414495917.post-2719858518898490162012-02-29T06:18:00.004-08:002012-02-29T06:44:16.105-08:00wolf: n. a man who habitually pursues women<span style="font-size: 100%;">In a shocking injustice, my entry to </span><a href="http://chicagoliteraryhof.wordpress.com/an-evening-to-honor-gene-wolfe/wolf-flash-contest/" style="font-size: 100%; ">the Flash Fiction contest</a><span style="font-size: 100%;"> sponsored by Wolfsword Press and the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame did not win nor was even among the finalists. So I am presenting it here for your enjoyment.</span><div style="font-size: 100%; "><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: 100%;">The rules of the contest were to write a story that features a wolf (or a Wolfe) of 100 to 250 words (including the title).</span></div><div><span style="font-size: 100%;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: 100%;"><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u></p></span></div><blockquote><div><span style="font-size: 100%;"><p class="MsoNormal"><u>Unwelcomed Guest<o:p></o:p></u></p> <p class="MsoNormal">“Javelina Botellín? Officer Shoat, El Paso Police. Can we talk?”<u><o:p></o:p></u></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Leena opened the screen door flashing a broken smile over a whiskered chin. She wore a hokey, woolen pork pie hat, and held a spherical iron pot and a wooden spoon. “Merry Christmas, Officer. Try some chili.” The spoon was in Shoat’s mouth before she could refuse. “It’s from a barbacoa de cabeza I made for la Nochebuena.”<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Shoat could see the whole interior of the practical, one-room cinder block house: Small gas stove in the fireplace, antique butter churn filled with apples, Brad Pitt and Jason Statham on TV (muted). Eartha Kitt was singing “Santa Baby”.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">“You filed a complaint against Carlos Bailey?”<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Leena turned to drop the spoon into an oil can labeled “Finest of the Fine”. “Complaint?! C.L. murdered my ex-sister-in-law and her sister. Outside my window at night he makes sucking sounds and whistles.”<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">“He had alibis.”<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">“So that’s all, huh? Know why? When you find a crime, you make a borlote to get a confession. But if you can’t solve it right off, you give up. If you had said ‘I’ll spend just 20 minutes a day—no more than that—on this case’, then today it wouldn’t be the case you couldn’t close. It’d be the case you’re working on.”<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Shoat’s face shrugged. “Anyway, his father Vernon says he hasn’t been home or at work all week. Do you know if he went back to Mexico?”<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">“I don’t see him doing that.”<o:p></o:p></p></span></div><div></div></blockquote><div><span style="font-size: 100%;"><br /></span></div><div><br /></div>Jameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11016802159573871360noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1299916454414495917.post-41939172951895048852012-02-16T18:26:00.001-08:002017-10-16T10:03:32.287-07:00On Gene Wolfe<span style="font-stretch: normal; font: 100% / normal "georgia" , serif;">On March 17th, I'm planning to attend </span><a href="http://chicagoliteraryhof.wordpress.com/" style="font-stretch: normal; font: 100% / normal "georgia" , serif;">a special event by the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame to honor the writer, Gene Wolfe</a><span style="font-stretch: normal; font: 100% / normal "georgia" , serif;">. It's a pretty big deal--an especially satisfying deal for a lot of people, even if maybe not the greatest honor he's ever achieved. He's already been inducted into the </span><a href="http://www.empmuseum.org/exhibitions/index.asp?articleID=965" style="font-stretch: normal; font: 100% / normal "georgia" , serif;">Science Fiction Hall of Fame</a><span style="font-stretch: normal; font: 100% / normal "georgia" , serif;">, he's been acclaimed by writers you've heard of as the best living American writer, the best living writer in English, compared to Mozart, blah blah blah. All these laurels are insufficient to convince you of how good he is at what he does. </span><br />
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Imagine a friend told you about this little-known author who wrote stories about elves and hobbit-things and she tried to convince you that his work somehow transcended and redefined the medium. Or imagine this person tried to entice you to read this author of short stories mostly set in India--some of them about a boy raised by wolves and tutored by a panther and a bear. Now suppose she told you that this writer--who relatively few people had heard of-- that his name was William Shakespeare or James Joyce. That's the sort of the conversation I'm having with you right now.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;">But you still would not have heard of the guy and so you probably wouldn't be impressed. After all, had anyone made a movie of one of his books? To be convinced (without reading his stories yourself, that is), you'd have to somehow, improbably find yourself amid a small group of people like me: people who had their imaginations blown by his stories and never recovered. After an hour or so of listening to those fanatics, you'd sense that you've been missing out on something extraordinary. That is, you'd be enlightened. </span><br />
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<span style="font-style: normal;">But <i>that </i>would not prepare you for what a <i>nice </i>guy he is. Like misfortune, </span>remarkable gifts are not bestowed according to merit. But sometimes the piano does land on just the right person. And so it happens in this case that the person with exceptional insight and ability is just the sort of person you wanted him to be.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 100%; font-weight: normal;">Anyway, I received an email from </span><a href="http://www.vdlupescu.com/journal/" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;">Valya Dudycz Lupescu</a><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 100%; font-weight: normal;"> at the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. She said they were producing a commemorative program for the event and offered for me to submit a short message to Gene that would be included: "A message of congratulations, or perhaps share a special memory or account of how his work has influenced you." "How long?" "50-100 words". "Cool."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 100%; font-weight: normal;">Unfortunately by the time I finished writing it, it was almost 600 words long. I put off sending it to her because editing things down is painful to me. She said I needed to have the text by February 15th, but, somehow, I got it in my head that it was the 17th. When I saw my mistake today, I quickly paired it down to a size I thought she would accept. I hope I wasn't too late. Either way, I'm going to publish here the entire text of what I wanted to say but didn't have the space for in the commemorative program. Consider this my own commemorative program:</span><br />
<blockquote style="font-size: 100%; font-weight: normal;">
<div style="font-style: normal;">
In the early 90s a friend gave me four paperback volumes of “The Book of the New Sun”. He'd said that he’d never heard of this guy, but he’d made three unsuccessful attempts to start the books and had finally "pushed through" and was impressed by their originality and craftsmanship. When I got to the third volume, my wife remarked that I sure was "spending a lot of time on those books. What are they about?" I told her that I had no idea. "Then why are you reading them?"</div>
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"I have to find out how it ends!"</div>
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I didn't know yet that Gene Wolfe stories have no ending. Nor a beginning or middle.</div>
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It was disorienting to read an author who required from me a new way of reading a novel: To read it as people read the Bible or the poems of Blake or Cummings. It was as if an adult discovered a door in the house where he grew up that led to a new upstairs wing that he didn't know about.</div>
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Some years later, I finally got around to reading "Peace". I knew more by then. Half way through it, my wife asked, "Is it good?" "Oh, yes!" "What's it about?"</div>
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"Well, that's really the point of reading a Gene Wolfe story."</div>
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We are sometimes told that architecture is about Form and Function. That means an architect declares that he is going to build a house or an office building or whatever and then he creates a work of art beginning from the expectations of the user. Had Gene decided to be architect, his designs would not be like that. You would enter his structure and putter around and only after days of that, after multiple visits, after you had walked away from it for a week or two would you suddenly declare “Oh! That’s what he intended it to be!” And when others visited it, you would not be so presumptuous to tell them what it was for. You’d only smile knowingly as they fingered the knick-knacks and tried out the furniture. But you would be quite provoked if someone declared it was intended as a rustic summer cottage when it was obviously an apiary. “Well, okay, fine. If you want to use it as a house that’s your right I suppose but I can’t imagine why anyone would. There’s all those bees behind the walls and everything.”</div>
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Agatha Christie wrote a famous novel called <i>Murder on the Orient Express</i>. There is one corpse and twelve suspects all with motives and opportunities. There is also a detective to sort it all out, even though he ultimately doesn’t settle on a final solution. If Wolfe had written that novel, there would be no Hercule Poirot to divine clues from triviality. The <i style="font-style: normal;">reader</i> would play the role of the detective. And the characters would seem strangely unfocused on the murder altogether. There would be an on-going debate among readers about whether there was a murder to begin with. And the story would unfold from the point-of-view of a red cap who was hopelessly smitten by a waitress in the dining car.</div>
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I'm grateful for Gene's stories: Not only for their identifiable characters, subversive settings, and mind-hanking plots--but, also for their Easter eggs and substrata and references to other literature and genre. They're an enclosed garden where you start by admiring the flora and then you start digging and weeding and then you fall into researching new plants to bring in until soon it's too dark to find the way back that you came.</div>
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<div style="font-size: 100%; font-weight: bold;">
<b>Update I</b></div>
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Valya says I wasn't too late. Hurray!</div>
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<strong>Update II</strong></div>
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I wonder if my dilemma inspired this flash fiction contest:</div>
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<a href="http://chicagoliteraryhof.wordpress.com/an-evening-to-honor-gene-wolfe/wolf-flash-contest/">http://chicagoliteraryhof.wordpress.com/an-evening-to-honor-gene-wolfe/wolf-flash-contest/</a></div>
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<blockquote>
"THE CONTEST: Write a flash fiction story that features a wolf (or a Wolfe). This “theme” can be interpreted as broadly as you wish. The story must be at least 100 words but no more than 250 words (that includes the title). The story can be of any genre....Sometimes called sudden fiction, microfiction, or short shorts, the length of flashes can vary. For our purposes, the flash cannot exceed 250 words. Flashes should still contain classic story elements: protagonist, conflict, and resolution. The limited word length, however, dictates that some elements will remain unwritten or implied in the written story."</blockquote>
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<b>Other applicable essays</b></div>
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<b><a href="http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2007/gwng0704.htm"></a></b></div>
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<a href="http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2007/gwng0704.htm">Neil Gaiman "How to Read Gene Wolfe"</a></div>
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<a href="http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/peace.htm">Infinity Plus on "Peace"</a></div>
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<a href="http://www.ultan.org.uk/review-fifth-head-of-cerberus/">Robert Borski on "The Fifth Head of Cerberus"</a></div>
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<span style="font-size: 100%;">From Joanna Russ's </span><a href="http://sffbooksonmars.blogspot.com/2010/11/1970-libertarian-novel-operation-ares.html" style="font-size: 100%;">unfavorable review Wolfe's first published novel, </a><a href="http://sffbooksonmars.blogspot.com/2010/11/1970-libertarian-novel-operation-ares.html" style="font-size: 100%;"><i>Operation Ares</i></a><span style="font-size: 100%;">, but just before the publication of the novella </span><i style="font-size: 100%;">The Fifth Head of Cerberus</i><span style="font-size: 100%;"> which Russ seems to have already seen:</span></div>
<blockquote>
"Books like this are generally called "promising," but by the time you read this review, Mr. Wolfe will be as far above <i>Operation ARES</i> as Ares is above the worst science fiction hackwork."</blockquote>
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<span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">Daniel Petersen at The Silk & Horn Heresy <a href="http://silkandhornheresy.blogspot.com/2010/06/reading-wolfe-is-dream-like-another.html">makes his own attempt to explain Wolfe's fiction</a>.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><br /></span></span></div>
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Jameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11016802159573871360noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1299916454414495917.post-87208886408095357032010-06-01T10:49:00.000-07:002010-06-01T14:12:21.345-07:00Old-Style Books vs EbooksThe following are the features of old-style (OS) paper volumes that make them superior to e-books:<br /><ol><li>Look good and they encourage browsing. They offer a window into the interests of the owner. If you come to my house and don't carefully peruse my library (let alone fail to even mention it), I won't say anything, but, quietly, I'll judge you. I'd feel like a weirdo showing off my Kindle library.<br /><br /></li><li>Practically immune to data rot (that is, the inability to access information because the equipment to access it it is lost...for example try to play your old 45pm records...try to access the data on a 3.5 floppy).<br /><br /></li><li>Robust hardware. You can drop an OS volume, step on it, let it get dusty. It doesn't care. Heat, cold, sunlight, careless reading will shorten its life but any volume accepts more abuse than e-readers. With care, even a pulp paperback might last over a century. Upscale ones with good binding and acid-free paper last longer. The books printed on <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">sheephide</span> are still accessible after 1000 years.<br /><br /></li><li>Versatile fair-use. I can loan it out as many times as I like to anyone at all without violating the copyright. Also, I can resell books to recoup some of my investment in them if I decide I don't like them or lose interest in. I can buy used books -- e-books are always "new" and never show up in remainder bins.<br /></li></ol><span style="font-weight: bold;">X. </span>Portability. When it comes to carrying multiple volumes e-readers are better at this than OS volumes; but, most individual volumes are still small enough to fit in your coat pocket. An IPad could never do that which is considered an improvement over the Kindle's tiny screen. In order to do all the things we want an e-book to do, you have to increase their size until their portability is compromised. And, anyway, their delicate nature makes carrying e-readers around willy-nilly a risky venture.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">XX.</span> I might have added that you can't get your e-books signed by the author or illustrator, but then such copies often become off-limits for reading anyway. So it's a wash there.<br /><br />Things I wish my old-style books could do:<br /><ol><li>Allow me to transport my annotations (that might include interactive hyperlinks or pictures) to email, Word, whatever.<br /><br /></li><li>Include an embedded dictionary.<br /></li></ol>No e-reader yet supports feature <span style="font-weight: bold;">#1</span> the way I want it to work (not event the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">IPad</span>, I think, since it doesn't support multi-tasking). But there are some books I only use for reference that would be convenient to have in electronic version.<br /><br />One day, I hope, when you buy the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">hardcopy</span> of a book, you will automatically have access to the electronic version as well. This would encourage people (like me) to buy new books rather than used ones.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Update</span><br />It just so happens that I came across a YouTube ad to just the sort of technology I was thinking of. What I want next is the ability to apply Ubimarks to the books I already have.<br /><br /><object height="385" width="480"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/OE5Ch4NnVu0&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/OE5Ch4NnVu0&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="385" width="480"></embed></object>Jameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11016802159573871360noreply@blogger.com0