Misanthropic Californian

Bill O’Reilly pretty much always refers to Media Matters as a “left-wing smear site.” Granted, I don’t take his accusations seriously — and I highly doubt he’d be having similar complaints if there’s a right-wing site that posted up things said by Keith Olberman and Michael Moore — but I do take it with a grain of salt nonethless. That what you have to do with any source of information these days.

Nonetheless, I took notice of this article about Rush Limbaugh. MM’s headline is “Service Men Who Support Withdrawal Are ‘Phony Soldiers.’” Depending on who you believe that comment could have been taken out of context. The part that bugs me, which I don’t think could have been taken out of context, came well before it in the transcript. You can read it for yourself if you’re so inclined, but a caller said:

CALLER 1: Good. Why is it that you always just accuse the Democrats of being against the war and suggest that there are absolutely no Republicans that could possibly be against the war?

The caller goes on to explain how he’s a Republican yet he’s against the war, and Rush just can’t handle the idea. (I overcame the temptation to type that last bit in all caps, barely).

 

LIMBAUGH: Mike, you can’t possibly be a Republican.

CALLER 1: I am.

LIMBAUGH: You are — you are –

CALLER 1: I am definitely a Republican.

LIMBAUGH: You can’t be a Republican. You are –

CALLER 1: Oh, I am definitely a Republican.

LIMBAUGH: You are tarnishing the reputation, ’cause you sound just like a Democrat.

So, this is what I’m always going on about in terms of divisive politics and tainted discourse. In Rush’s world everyone who wants to call themselves a Republican has to support the war in Iraq, and by extension everyone who wants to withdraw even remotely soon must therefore be a Democrat. The whole spectrum of possible opinions on the matter, reduced to red vs blue. I’m not saying that liberals never do this kind of thing, just that, god dammit, here’s an egregious example right in front of my face. Not only are people allowed to believe what they want on the issue, but there are a zillion other issues to talk about that matter at least as much to everyone. Is it really that hard to believe that an intelligent human being, after examining the available information, might come to the conclusion that we should leave (or stay in) Iraq, regardless of that person’s stated political affiliation?

The other day I came across this article about NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” thing, and I think it articulates a lot of the reasons why I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. Whenever the show comes up on Digg or Reddit, people inevitably complain that there are issues with the show, and other people accuse those who take issue with it of supporting pedophiles. So, again, discourse is getting muddled. I can disagree with their methods while still agreeing that pursuing and prosecuting child predators is necessary.

Pedophilia is almost universally reviled, and in a very black-and-white kind of way. While I’m willing to go with the idea that an adult having sex with a minor is a bad thing, there ought to be a big difference in degree between a man seducing a high school girl (ephebophilia) and a man doing things to an elementary school boy, even if we definitely agree that both should be considered immoral and illegal. As things stand, merely being accused of such a thing can ruin a person’s life, and (according to the article) half of all who wind up registered as sex offenders for pedophilia are subject to harrassment and violence. It’s a serious crime — I wouldn’t even contemplate pretending otherwise — and that’s all the more reason to protect our notions of “innocent until proven guilty.” A guilty verdict isn’t just saying “you did this crime and you’ll go to jail for it.” It’s saying, “you’re going to be marked and despised for the rest of your life.” Maybe they do deserve that, but considering the stakes we’d better be damn sure.

While there’s certainly a place for ordinary people to step in to protect their community, I’m leery of letting untrained citizens do jobs normally reserved for trained law enforcement professionals. I wouldn’t hire some guy off the street to do marketing or surgery, and law enforcement does involve life and death situations at times. If Rolling Stone’s statements about Perverted Justice are true, I just plain don’t trust them, however important their work might be. Von Erck responded to one critic by basically doing everything in his power to destroy the man’s life, which suggest he’s more interested in humiliating and harming those he percieves as the bad guys than in helping the innocent kids. It may be necessary, but I’d be much more comfortable if the effort was helmed by someone who could respond to criticism with reasoned dialogue rather than petty vengeance that reads like something out of an Operation Clambake article.

And of course, I have a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that you could go to jail for propositioning a fictional 14-year-old. I know that that’s how the laws work (at least in most states) and that there are reasons for it, but still. It hurts my head.

And then there’s the issue of turning the whole thing into entertainment. As I said, you’d better be damn sure before you destroy someone’s life, and in my opinion the media ought to strive to be responsible in that regard every bit as much as the justice system. Fortunately NBC and the public have limits, and the show is on its way to being canceled.

This morning BoingBoing posted this, a fun game called “Hitler or Fallwell,” where you look at quotes and try to figure out which of these two men said them. I don’t even know what to make of the guy, because he was just that out there. He was like a culmination of all of the worst kinds of bigotry and hate ever perpetrated in the name of American Christianity. The Wikiquote page on him has plenty of icky quotes.

Also, yesterday at Borders I made the mistake of looking at the new releases section (a mistake in that there are lots of political books mixed in with the rest), and I saw a book called “Freedmnomics.” The book presents itself as a rebuttal to Freakanomics. I thought “fair enough,” but then the bullet points inside the book’s jacket were ALL standard Republican talking points, except for “Why the controversial assertions made in the trendy book Freakonomics are almost entirely wrong.” Lott’s main specialty has been putting together research (which many, including the authors of Freakonomics have questioned) that indicates that higher gun ownership leads to less crime. (Though according to this blogger, Freakonomics’ citations of such aren’t quite right). The fact that Freedomnomics came out after his lawsuit against Levitt makes it even more suspect. The real problem, however, is that it’s part of a huge genre of books that are written to be read only by people who are firmly at one side or the other of the political spectrum. I know these books make money, so the problem is not so much the books themselves as the cultural factors that allow them to exist, but either way it’s a problem, and the profitability of publishing these books leads to more and more of them coming out.

Think of this post as four very short posts in one. 

As cynical as I am at times, the upcoming election is shaping up to be very interesting, to say the least. In the primaries at least, we’re actually seeing (1) things that aren’t as cut-and-dry as Red Vs. Blue, and (2) the internet being a tool to empower average people. Mike Gravel and Ron Paul are both manifestations of this. These two men were catapulted from obscurity into the debates for their respective parties in part by their online supporters demanding it. Moreover, both of them are standing for what they believe in rather than simply touting the party line. I don’t know how they’d stack up against the other candidates in terms of being a good president, but they’re still a refreshing change. When everyone else was playing nice, Mike Gravel had the stones to straight out say, “These people scare me!” Ron Paul styles himself as an old-school Republican, so much so that he advocates non-intervention in world affairs. (I don’t know that I’d agree, but at least it would make the two candidates easier to tell apart).

Likewise, this New York Times article was a refreshing thing to read. We’ve all gotten used to thinking of conservatives in general as being anti-evolution and dead-set against stem cell research, regardless of the benefits for real living human beings. In the Republican presidential debate three out of the ten candidates said they didn’t believe in evolution. Apparently some conservatives understand that disparaging evolution makes them appear to be blatantly anti-intellectual. Still if only 3 out of 10 presidential candidates are anti-evolution, why do we currently have to put up with a White House that’s evidently 100% for intelligent design?

On a similar note, Bill Maher said basically what I was thinking but couldn’t articulate half as eloquently about France. The country is far from perfect and not without its issues, but amongst other things it has an excellent health care system, and its presidential candidates’ personal lives are regarded as irrelevant to whether they’d make good leaders. Next to that, not supporting the Iraq war isn’t exactly much of a strike against the country. Of course, it helps that all the French people I’ve ever met (admittedly not many, and all people who’d been living in the U.S. for a while) have been pretty cool. That may not be the best way to judge things, but at this point I suspect I’ve met more actual French people in real life than Bill O’Reilly has.

Lastly, the online news sites I frequent have been showing a lot of articles about people advocating impeachment of Bush and/or Cheney. I have no idea whether or not this is a good idea, or even a feasible one. One thing that I agree with though is that what Bush is doing with signing statements is questionable to say the least. There are about a dozen examples of bills intended to protect individual rights and maintain government transparentcy where he added a statement that more or less said “Unless the president wants/doesn’t want to to protect us from the terrorists.” I heard somewhere that he’s made more signing statements that ALL of the other U.S. presidents put together, more than 750 of them. I was of the impression that that’s not how it’s supposed to work. When it comes to bills from congress, the president either signs or vetos them, and signing statements are commentaries and opinions with no legal force behind them per se.

Jack Thompson is in the news again, rather a lot lately.  When it comes to the debate on video game violence, I think there are a couple of things that are clouding the issue:

Videogames are new. A certain amount of this unquestionably comes from the fact that video games are a new medium. Plays, books, the waltz, movies, jazz, rock ‘n roll, etc. have all been regarded as a corrupting influence on the youth of the time. It’s hard to separate out how much of this is legitimate, and how much of it is old people’s predilection for objecting to new things. It’s telling that there is a big hue and cry over kids being able to buy M rated video games, but no outrage all over the fact that it even easier for kids to walk into the Borders and by R-rated movies on DVD or books with mature content. People complain about the ESRB’s rating system, yet the problems with the MPAA’s rating system — illuminated at length in This Film Is Not yet Rated — are virtually ignored. Of course, as anyone who’s ever worked in a videogame store can tell you, a lot of parents are staggeringly, devastatingly ignorant about video games. Some parents just can’t wrap their heads around the idea that a videogame might not be appropriate for children, and some just don’t seem to care. (Not to mention the parents who doggedly insist that there are Mario games available on Xbox, and other unfounded misconceptions).

Jack Thompson himself is the kind of figure whose absence from the debate would benefit both sides. Keeping mature content out of the hands of kids, and giving parents the tools to do so, is a worthy and legitimate cause. Considering that the notion that kids aren’t mature enough to handle violent videogames is at the heart of this issue, it’s ironic and unfortunate that Thompson has a way of coming off like a flailing man-child at times. He insists on calling violent videogames “murder simulators,” accuses anyone who disagrees with him of being in the industry’s pocket, and had no qualms about calling the head of the IGDA an “idiot” and “jackass” on national television. This does not speak well of his desire to have legitimate debate on the issue, and indeed it’s very much his style to repeat whatever he’s decided is the truth over and over. I really do wish that gamers wouldn’t threaten him with violence though. Real-life violence doesn’t solve anything.

Of course, Thompson can’t seem to comprehend why it is that he gets those kinds of threats and people like Leeland Yee and Hillary Clinton don’t. Of those involved, no one else has so consistently threatened to sue their critics, no other major public figure has behaved like a common troll in public forums (GamePolitics had to ban him from commenting multiple times), and I’m pretty sure no one else has ever had the gall to compare the release of a game developed in Scotland on a Japanese-made a game console in the United States to the attack on Pearl Harbor. In the latter case I’m not even sure who’s being insulted more, and yet when questioned about this he resolutely insisted that he was justified in saying so. The latest on him is that he is filing a civil suit against the Florida Bar, as well as Kotaku and others. This time he managed to include a “liberal conspiracy theory,” and he managed to display incompetence at being a lawyer.

I have no idea why Jack Thompson fascinates us so, but it probably needs to stop. This is an important issue for a lot of people, and his side deserves one better than him to represent it.

Race is a bizarre and profoundly touchy subject these days, when common sense tells me there’s no reason it should be, particularly. Granted, I grew up in northern California, and in terms of who I consider friends the requisite geekiness is much more important than race could ever hope to be.

Debates on race issues remind me a bit of debates on gun control in that each sides paints a profoundly different picture and, you know, it kind of depends on where you are since America isn’t as homogenous as some would like to believe. Liberals seem to be convinced that minorities are being oppressed, while conservatives are quick to dismiss that idea, yet have no problem crying foul at percieved discrimination against whites. If I assume that this works like everything else I’ve ever encountered, I’ll have to conclude that both sides are a little bit right and a little bit wrong, but mostly making a big fuss motivated by self-interest.

In terms of the things that form my identity, being “white” (which in my case means being a mutt formed from half a dozen Eurpean nationalities, some of which were enemies for many centuries) only really makes the list when it’s sharply in contrast with something else. If I go to Chinatown I’ll sometimes feel out of place, but I think not any more than I would if I was in a part of town that was predominantly Russian or German or something. That makes it hard for me to even think in terms of race boundaries; in my daily life race is more often than not utterly meaningless. Now, if I was actively looking for work, sunstantially involved in public discourse, or trying to get into big prestigious universities with affirmative action programs (California passed Prop 209, so that kind of thing isn’t supposed to be legal here anymore) I might be more inclined to have a strong opinion about such things.

I do think it’s a little odd that in terms of organizations and Ethnic Studies classes it’s okay to have stuff for minorities but not for white people per se, but then I think that’s partly out of a tendency to view white people as “geneic Americans” as it were rather than prejudice in a conventional sense. But then, considering I largely ignore any and all extracurriciular activities (I always either find them either wholly uninteresting or find that they have meeting times that are horribly shitty for my schedule) I can guarantee that if there were a “Caucasian Student Association” or whatever I wouldn’t bother. Of course, I’m also the type to roll my eyes at the College Republicans and College Democrats alike, to say nothing of the Socialists (who regularly commit the sin of passing out flyers on campus) for drawing so much of their identities from political affiliations. Still, I suspect if there were some people who wanted to start up a “CSA” it would probably be denied or otherwise screwed with. Granted there do seem to be an awful lot of groups based around promoting the interests of white people that are blatantly racist and often violent, stupid, or insane, but if we’re going to allow racially-oriented groups on campuses and whatnot, it seems dumb to keep white people out of the club.

But at the same time, completely dismissing any accusations of racism against minorities is just ignoring reality. It’s probably not a horrific and awful kind of problem, but, you know, when black guys are consistently pulled over by the police far, far more often than white guys, something is going on. We probably are overreacting as a nation, but then we overreact to just about everything the media calls attention to. I won’t claim to know much about where things are on this front, and I suspect that when I’m hanging out with my friends other people also see us as a bunch of geeks rather than noting our individual races. In this respect I feel fortunate to live in a quiet city in northern California.

“Political Correctness” inevitably enters into the discussion somewhere. Just like many of the things that have emerged from race issues, PC started with a well-intentioned good idea (Stop saying mean, fucked up stuff. It’s really easy to talk in a way that doesn’t make you sound like a jerk) that got misused and transformed into something stupid (In order to promote more gender equality “Manhattan” should be renamed “Personhattan”). “PC” is one of those terms (like “elite” or even “liberal”) that conservatives seem to have worked very hard to turn into a dirty word. When conservative pundits use the word “PC” they typically mean “stuff about being nice/civil to people that I disagree with.” Of course, I suspect they’d be quick to object to facing the term “Religiously Correct,” which a few have been using to be equally dismissive of (usually conservative) efforts to ensure that policy is appropriately Christian. As usual, I fall somewhere in the middle when it comes to political correctness. We may well have gotten too paranoid about such things, and too vengeful (Don Imus was fucked up, but I’m not sure he should’ve been fired over it), but at the same time I wouldn’t want to throw away the ability to call people out for saying things that are offensive.

Race should not be particularly pertinent to how we live our lives, and doubly so if we’re talking about people who are fully assimilated into American culture. Sometimes it is though, usually as a result of people being stupid or ignorant, or taking a meaningless “us vs. them” mentality towards other groups of human beings. We also have a crappy tendency to look at white people as being in a special category somehow, whether in a good way or a bad one. Awareness of race beyond something that make people more interesting through diversity is, in my opinion, an expression of human stupidity.

I don’t like guns. I don’t even like the idea of guns. I know they’re an underpinning of the modern world, but so are sewer systems, and I don’t feel any need to take a tour of the local sewage farm. I know there are people in the world who legitimately need them for self-defense, but living in Northern California, I can’t say I’ve met any that I know of.

Gun control is, ironically, one of those political issues that makes me want to go out and shoot people. Gun control advocates are convinced that banning guns will make us safer, and they have statistics to prove their point. The NRA and other pro-firearms advocates are convinced that if enough upstanding citizens have guns, we’ll be safer because criminals will be afraid to try anything, and they also have statistics to prove their point. Both are also trying to convince us that if they don’t get their way, violent crime will vastly increase. So, it’s another debate where both sides have “facts” that completely contradict each other, and no one has ever shown me anything in between.

It’s also one of those debates where people keep trying to do necro-telepathy on the founding fathers. While I share Penn & Teller’s sentiment that the Constitution is just plain awesome, we live in a very different place from the 13-state nation that narrowly avoided collapse 200-some years ago. This country was always meant to be a work in progress; it belongs to us, not those dead guys. Their sentiment that governments aren’t to be trusted and citizens need to be vigilant in case the British come back isn’t quite as pertinent anymore. We’re now a heck of a lot more powerful than the British, and for better or for worse no group of citizens can hope to overcome the power of the U.S. military. I strongly suspect that if there’s ever another real revolution on American soil, it won’t be fought with guns at all. If I could figure out how to write it, I’d do a story about militia weirdos storming the White House only to find that for the rest of the nation the guns they’ve been stockpiling are obsolete because they have no power to influence information.

Anyway, I’m in favor of the NRA insofar as they advocate safe and sane use of guns, but both they and their opponents seem to be missing something very important:

Gun ownership is cultural. Most Texans believe gun ownership is a right, and that it makes them safer. Most Californians believe guns are dangerous and best avoided. (The Supreme Court sees more shades of gray there, which to me suggests sanity). If there were suddenly California-style gun control laws in Texas, you’d end up with lots of otherwise upstanding citizens with illegal firearms. If there were suddenly Texas-style legalization of concealed carry and such in California, there probably wouldn’t be a noticeable increase in gun ownership. True safety from firearm-based violence requires basically removing them from the equation entirely — like in the UK and Japan — and that isn’t an option for the U.S., any more than it would be practical to require adults to own and train in the use of firearms.

You can tell I’m Californian by how guns make me uneasy. Everyone makes mistakes, and mistakes made with guns tend to be permanent. To me, life is too precious for that. If it reaches the point where I can’t feel safe in my own home without a deadly weapon, it’s time to move. Period. Not everyone has that luxury, sure, but I never said I was advocating that everyone take my approach. With the typically flawed, black and white (or red and blue) debate strategy that passes for discourse in this country, there’s a vacuum of hard facts that leaves a wholly emotional, personal opinion my only recourse.