Women go on strike for a day and a country panics...

...men go on strike for...okay, probably for the most part men will founder on trying to cook and do laundry and manage kids a la "Mr. Mom" for a day more than anyone will suffer, with some possible exceptions, if men go on strike for a day.

But what if it's a week?

People who work outside the home and have no homemaking skills may panic immediately if they don't have someone to have their food and clothes ready--we clothe ourselves daily and eat every few hours, after all.  But these are skills than can be learned to subsistence levels quickly.

What about the stuff guys do that keeps them from being smarter about reading recipes or care tags on the back collars of shirts?

Over three quarters of professionals in transportation (something similar happened in Australia recently, so little need to speculate) and utilities, and five sixths of mineral extraction (including oil and gas, so that's almost all our electricity) are male.  That won't have much of an immediate effect in lower population density parts of the US, but in NYC where public transit is the norm, most people aren't going anywhere except on foot.  How long can you live on "I'll stay home today" when your electricity and water are in the same state as taxis, buses, and subways?

Sure, some of these jobs require certifications or formal training, so it might violate a business's insurance policy or accreditation or actually be illegal if women just stepped up to fill in the gaps..but considering almost 90% of the US police force is male, maybe there wouldn't be enough law enforcement around to stop women with pluck but no experience from flying 747s or doing thoracic surgery or taking to the streets as unregulated militia on top of juggling cooking, laundry, kids, and a day job.

But losing nine tenths of your law enforcement strength brings other problems, so good luck with that.

Stolen from a comment on YouTube:

"So I take it that the next time a black man who is wearing a uniform or flashing a badge follows me not just around the store, but OUT of the store and down the block, I should tell him 'You can't do this, because you have no institutional power over me.'"

This in response to the notion that racism is "racial prejudice" plus institutional power, therefore minorities can't be racist; that is, because a minority bigot doesn't have the collective social power to oppress anyone else, there's really nothing wrong with their attitude or the shitty way they might treat people on a personal level.

Except Kanye.  He crossed a line by agreeing with a different subset of white people, so the narrative would insist you believe, and now he enjoys not just the perquisites but all the collective guilt of white civilization.  So the narrative would insist you believe.

Of course, it also neatly obscures a double standard: whites are personally guilty of racism because of demographics and collective, historical racist stuff whether or not they personally wield or enjoy any advantage of a biased system, just like how minorities are not guilty of racism because they don't have the advantages of a large, widespread system invisibly codified to help only them, no matter how hostile they are in person to people of a different demographic or how coordinated they and others in the same demographic are in their efforts to make their encounters with a majority out-group difficult or dangerous.

And this is deliberate.

The point I'm going to make is worth its own post but I riff on it a lot these days.

Trump wants to regulate immigration, to stop people from illegally sneaking into the country and working for less than minimum wage and not paying taxes, and voting just because they live here most of the year, just like we've been talking about for decades.  These are all legitimate concerns: voting is a right and duty of citizens but not of foreign nationals who are only here for their jobs and not interested in becoming US citizens (and obviously this doesn't include the ones who do, but I shouldn't have to point that out), and other countries recognize that when Americans go abroad for work; people who work and get paid under the table make it harder for people on the IRS's radar like US citizens to get jobs, and that really sets a double standard for minimum wage arguments, and "lettuce will become expensive" is really not a compelling counterargument.  But what does everyone say about Trump?  That he just hates immigrants, and it's just because he's racist, and he's wrong because it's ironic since he's of European extraction.

This is not an argument.  This is an obfuscation.

It's also why they say Trump is "literally Hitler" even though Hitler died before he was born and Bush was Hitler before him just because he was moderately conservative by the standards of the day.  It's why they try so hard to show how there's no difference between the National Socialist German Workers' Party and moderns who either consistently vote conservative or actually are racists who just don't happen to be patronizing about it (depends on whom you ask), to the point where if Hitler were alive they'd be telling you he's secretly on the lecture circuit in Mississippi and Indiana--and the only reason alleged modern Nazis of today (not official neo-Nazis, but the ones who just get called Nazi online) get away with their attempts to distance themselves from the German political movement of the mid-20th century is Nuremberg made sure there wasn't anybody left to say today "Yeah, he's one of us."  It's why they have someone volunteer to show up at an NRA function wearing a rifle with a plastic stock and black backpack with the Stars and Bars draped over it to give the impression that the KKK was a branch of the NRA, rather than the NRA being formed partly in opposition to the KKK--you can tell it's someone doing a false flag operation because in his attempt to make a recognizable caricature of conservatives, he's the only one openly armed and is obviously trying too hard to fit in.

When they say "literally Nazis," they aren't just exaggerating.  They want you to believe that's actually true, and maybe they believe it themselves.

Even this post is going to end up used as an example of being insufficiently opposed to Nazi practices (i.e. that not being zealously opposed enough makes me one of them, like in the dying throes of every totalitarian regime of the 20th century would have it--which should tell you something about the nature and danger of their political motivations), by focusing on the argument that Trump and his voters are not all wrong, and skipping over the part where I argue that they're not literally Nazis.  They'll show a picture of Hitler saluting next to a picture of some Republican waving to a crowd and think they've made an airtight argument, and then either use that as evidence for "literally a Nazi" or use "I've proven you're literally a Nazi by ignoring all facts and logic to the contrary" as evidence that the aforementioned juxtaposition is, in whatever sense they put stock in such a thing, the truth.

The most annoying—and I mean merely annoying, but it’s high on the list—about the early 21st century is that everything is labeled as terror.
Unless it’s racism or sexism or some such, but I think terror sums it up best. 
Bully defends himself by saying it’s a joke, and you say “if the mark didn’t agree to it, it’s not a joke, it’s terror?”  No it’s not. What planet do you live on where people have to get informed consent before engaging in any interaction? How could they if attempting to request consent is unsolicited contact in the first place? It’s also not funny if you explain the joke first. Human beings know this.
But this is a bully so we don’t have to give him the benefit of the doubt. Fine; He’s not on trial. But it’s bullying; it might be abuse, it might be harassment, but it’s not terror. He’s not trying to intimidate you to get something else he wants. Or maybe he is, but he’s also treating you like shit because that in itself is what he does to enjoy himself. He’s not trying to oppress you, he just wants your lunch money. Your human dignity is so far down his list of concerns it never occurs to him that you might have any to violate
A guy shoots up a crowd?  It might be terorism, but “what else do you’d call it?” Is a dumb question. Maybe he just wants 26 people dead. Maybe he wants those 26 people dead. Maybe he’s mentally ill and his shooting up a crowd has nothing to do in his mind with 26 people dying.  Whatever his intentions, it's a mass shooting.  Calling everything an act of terrorism, domestic or otherwise, doesn't open people's eyes.  It just makes it easier for real terrorists to hide in plain sight because they don't stand out in a crowd of random people who all are stuck with that label.
Of course, that could be the point.  Try to make everything sound like the problem that everyone wants to solve and then get broad laws passed to address a now-nebulous and omnibus crisis, and profit over the disintegration of society.

If a double standard for you is a double standard for me....

So I'm watching TV and start seeing commercials for some new injustice called the pink tax.

Sure.  Make it sound like it's some institutionalized/systemic/patriarchal policy that the ever-male-dominated Congress has signed into law under Trump or some such rot.

As it goes, the notion is that women spend $1351 a year, typically, more than men do on personal stuff like bath products and underwear.

They complain that it's not fair, insulting.  Sounds unjust, doesn't it?

Funny.  A few months ago, I was hearing all about how the fragile male ego forced me to buy deodorant that didn't have pink teddy bears on them.  Now I'm hearing that, while we're all buying the exact same thing, the stuff with pink teddy bears is more expensive.

Maybe we're just being frugal.

I've seen women's bathrooms and you've seen men's bathrooms, so we both know "we buy the same stuff" is a lie.  I see cream rinse in some showers, none used solely by men, and I have no idea what it's for because I choose not to buy it and don't need to.

Are the pink teddy bears exactly the same as the blue ones?  Then buy the blue ones.  You can choose to.  No one is putting a gun to your head, or threatening jail time as if this were a real tax.

I mean, how do you think you're going to "repeal" it when it's not actually a tax on just the stuff you want?  It's just you buying more, and more expensive, stuff. How do you think you can fix that without destroying everything else? You’re talking changing prices by force of law, interfering with buying patterns, controlling what bathroom products are made and sold.

That’s going to cost society more than $1351 a head.  And I don't mean just in the pocketbook.

Was browsing Pinterest and found something vaguely political I thought I might agree with partly but seemed nuanced enough to make me willing to consider some contrary opinions. Something that I thought showcased well the inherent problems of a large and intrusive government, even if you thought such a government was a good idea in general. Usually these opportunities are in the face of half baked arguments I could have countered in high school (even considering that was decades before the current situations developed) and I hope these people pushing them also do.

So I click through to the site and discover that it was icing on a shit cake, written by someone who apparently without any sense of irony thought those particular problems were in fact the desired outcomes: the rest of it was what I was used to and what I try to avoid just to keep the anger and frustration in my life at tolerable levels.

Then I saw the caveat: no conservative opinions allowed, go to some anti communist site to bitch about us instead; liberalism is an inherently inclusive philosophy.

Oooh....yeah, swing and a miss, buddy. Maybe you got burned by some rude or angry conservatives, but this wasn’t even pretending to honor your principles.

Another case of dishonest eisegesis

Saw a video on YouTube recently about pirate trivia. A lot of it was interesting, including an item about how pirates practiced gay marriage. This surprised me a little bit because I didn't think "practicing marriage" was on the list of typical pirate activities at all. So they went on for a minute about how two pirates might decide to throw in together: they might pool their share of the spoils, if one died the other would get something for it and was responsible for making final arrangements...and they, I kid you not, would occasionally share a prostitute when they were in port. They'd share a prostitute? Kinks aside, that doesn't sound like anything that should be described as a marriage, gay or otherwise. What it sounds like is a mutual power of attorney compact between two close friends. It wasn't long ago that two men could be friends without being presumed to be lovers, and even something as seedy as splitting a prostitute wouldn't have cast doubt on that. But, anything to muddy the waters, eh? Keep this in mind next time someone makes a similar claim.

On the value and limits of emotional argumentation

This isn't supposed to be about guns so much as something I saw on social media regarding last week's shooting inspired me to write this.  I will use some relevant examples, but this is not going to be a rant against people who do nothing but pull on others' heartstrings in order to achieve some goal that makes them feel safe or righteous or wealthy and powerful.

As I said in my last post, logic and facts aren't the only vehicles to truth; you just haven't arrived at it if right reason contradicts whatever your epiphany is (setting aside cases where maybe you just don't have enough data or brainpower to navigate some conundrums; I mean no insult or condescension as this world is big and complicated enough that even our brightest sometimes disagree and even get shown up by more humble minds), then maybe the revelation you had wasn't so fully true after all.

On the other hand, it can cut through a lot of the sophistry we use to lie to ourselves to make life a little easier to bear or our sins a little easier to ignore.

That's what people are feeling when they they experience a sort of mental "waking up" after some major life or society changing event.

The only problem is, it's often misdirected or just wrong.

Actually that's not the only problem.  In a phenomenon related to confirmation bias, if one relies too strongly on emotional revelations to take shortcuts around empirical analysis and logic, one will be inclined to take shortcuts around everything, and any effort or meme that resonates with the original emotional experience will be used to attempt to further whatever the goal is.  Thus we have widely circulated "statistics" like "there have been 18 school shootings already in 2018," but you only get that number if you include shootings in the same neighborhood and shootings between people who are neither faculty nor students at times that are not during school hours but happen to be in the parking lot (how such an altercation is supposed to meaningfully contribute to students' collective sense of fear is based entirely on empty, forced association, like if I say "Ivanka Trump" and "Founders Brewery" a lot people will start connecting the two in their minds just because I did it so many times first).  The real number of school shootings in 2018 so far is 7, and 5 have resulted in casualties (not all fatalities).  That's still horrible, but it's not the epidemic people want us to think it is.  Three thousand people died on 9/11, but you don't hear anything about an epidemic of religion-motivated terror attacks, even though those still hit the news, do you?

But I digress.  I was talking about how these epiphanies people have when they're smacked in the face with a tragedy often motivate people to espouse or do something unhelpful or counterproductive or useless.  Well, I was about to make that point, anyway.

The morsel on social media that stirred me to post yet again this month went something like this:

"When I have to wonder as I put my kids on the school bus if I'll ever see them again, it's time for things to change."

So, what's your plan?  To drive the kids yourself?  Gun homicides are competitive with vehicular homicides.  Homicides in general are the cause of death for school aged children roughly one fifth as often as accidents.

Ah, but that's not really what you meant, I know.  Like I said Thursday, gun deaths are offensive, but children's deaths by other means, in any quantity, lie somewhere between acceptable and unremarkable.

When I point something like this out, the only I answer I get is something in the shape of "it's easier to ban unnecessary and dangerous things like guns than stop everyone from using the cars they need because some people can't bear the responsibility."  There's some irony there I won't unpack today, but what they're doing is describing the problem and its solution as very simple things, and then hoping you'll confuse "easy" for "simple."

So, sure, there haven't been school shootings in the UK since guns were banned.  But knifing deaths (and survived injuries) are up.  And the homicide rate is lower...wait, no it's not:  the UK reports murder rates for these things, not homicide rates.  Murder is a homicide that a court of law has conclusively determined was unlawful, and thus is a significantly smaller number even if the total death rate is comparable or potentially higher.

So, like I would ask a slacktivist who puts a Hillary 2018 sticker on his car and goes to an election party to celebrate the historical inevitability instead of participating in it at the poll:

How do you think, if someone put you in charge or asked for your suggestion like I'm doing now, we could get as a country from where we are now to a place where people prone to mass murder are unable to get this one type of tool for scratching whatever crazy itch they have that makes them do this?
Do you want the police to be armed so they can use decisive force to protect you from someone attacking you with a bat or a knife or a jar of battery acid or their brute strength and gang members?
Do you think they will be available to help you any more than they are now?  What would you do to make that happen?
If you want the whole country a gun-free zone, what are you going to do to prevent something like when Prohibition fomented a lively black market for liquor and organized crime?  Why do you think any efforts you made now for this would be more successful than what turned out to be the only Constitutional amendment to be repealed?  Sure, gunsmithing is harder than brewing beer or distilling, but there are lots of other necessary things to society that require machining equipment, and if you've got that and the raw material you'd be using anyway and a little expertise, you're a week away from arming a small militia.

Sometimes they have answers to a few of these questions, but they're all solutions that are worse than the problems.  It's someone else's job to do the hard work.  But usually that doesn't get done either; we get something slipshod hypothetically run through Congress and then everyone clutches their pearls when unrefined details turn out to be show stoppers.  Then we're buying pre-owned AKs from Mexico and pulling contraband of various calibers out from the floorboards, because we knew the bad guys were already doing that.

But that's another problem they're hoping will just go away in the sweep.

No, it actually isn't about guns.

I know they keep saying it is, and telling people who weren't there hiding or wringing their hands that they're not sympathetic enough to have a valid (let alone voiced) opinion.  But that's because describing the experience of fear is easier than being rational.

Sure, logic and facts aren't the only way to apprehend some truths, but truth and right reason cannot contradict, so if you are struggling with a contradiction, check your facts, check your logic, and check your gut; at least one and possibly all three are wrong.

I normally avoid hot political issues--okay, not abortion, but that's an old controversy and everyone is used to it from a political perspective--because it's an opportunity for social media to go crazy that am no longer young enough to find anything but tiresome and annoying and wrong, but I will make a rare exception and hopefully have the self discipline not to violate my policy...well...a third time.

I'll expand on my next point in the relative future, but without demeaning their horrific experience this week, as long as everyone is being political instead of remember our own and each other's humanity, these kids today, I tell ya...are just as dumb as we were at that age.

"A gun killed 17 students.  A gun caused all this fear."  Bullshit.  A disturbed teenager--I'll restrict my opinion about his mental health versus his snowflake status to watercooler chat at work--killed 17 students.  Or would it really have been okay to you if he just burned the school down?  Probably would have achieved a significantly higher body count; is that a fair trade in your eyes?  And fear?  Okay, the prospect of a shooter is more alarming than that of someone with a machete, Florida schools largely not resembling slasher flicks, but one generally doesn't see honest and well-adjusted people going around crying at the sight of a pistol on a cop's hip or unable to sleep because speculation about how many neighbors might have guns--even field stripped, unloaded, and locked away--in their own houses!

No.  They trot out the fear and hard cases to make hay while the sun's shining, but when the dust settles it's back to normal.  And in the end, no one cares that it was a sick young man who killed 17 children.  No one cares that Congress does not actually have the power to stop a distraught youth from coming unhinged.  But people will keep thinking it does, because they keep listening to people who keep saying it does, because they don't care about murdered teenagers or teenage murderers, they only care about what what they're going to get out of trying to corral public sentiment.

Just so we're clear...

...if someone points out that health care should be non-profit, it would behoove them to be reminded that:

1. Actual hospitals in the United States already are
2. "Non-profit" does not mean "government-run," except in the case of VA hospitals, which (alas, tragically, for our vets) are something nobody should be striving for.

A metaphor for abortion

“After my folks died," one apologist for abortion once said, "they left me their house, but I liked living in my townhome downtown; it was close to work and the grocery store so I didn’t need to drive much, and it was cozy.  I knew I would never want to live there—at least, not at that point in my life.  But I still had to go through the neighborhood a lot where the house was, and I didn’t want to be reminded every time I saw it that my parents were dead.  So I burned the house down.”

Okay, she didn't exactly say this, but this argument was identical in shape and logic to the argument she used.

Setting most other considerations to the side for a moment--such as the problem itself--does this not sound at least like one of the less responsible solutions, not more responsible, to her problem?

Fragile male ego?

No, just marketing. Note that the dark shape on the bottom right of the white antiperspirant spray is the proverbial little black dress. That tells you it’s a product for women. So don’t go off about sauce for the gander isn’t sauce for the goose.

j'ever notice...

...Young single men and women will move to a new town for work or school and go on Craigslist or whatever to find a roommate, find one of the opposite sex, and make plans they swear up and down will be platonic as if they honestly believe it (or maybe it’s a friends with occasional benefits thing; I’m not sure how the younger generations rationalize such things these days)…

…but then when they talk about sources of angst in their lives, the men are like “I’m afraid a woman will make fun of me” and the women are like “I’m afraid a man will kill me?”

Really?

Not to trivialize violence and murder, and not to blame the victim—and not to even talk about how or if potential victims could or should protect themselves, and not to deny the asymmetry in what men and women fear from each other, but:

1. If your first thought whenever you meet someone is “I wonder if he’s going to kill me,” your biggest problem probably is not the potential violence of that person.  Your biggest problem is probably much more immediate and compelling, like the actual death threats you have already received that, yes, compelled you to consider the question so promptly; or your pathological distrust of all men, most of whom (let’s not trivialize this with a “don’t say ‘not all men’” counterrebuttal, shall we?) are not in fact prone to whatever flavor of violence you’re worrying about.  Sure, men are more violent than women, in terms of quantity and severity of injuries (not counting the woman who think it's okay to throw shoes at her beau whenever she's angry at him, on the grounds that her fists are small and his counterarguments are sound), but killing is rarely at the top of the list of intentions.
2. You don’t get to willingly enter living arrangements with complete strangers and then claim victim status just on principle.

I mean, not for nothing, but you can’t shoot yourself and then blame society for making you a victim of gun violence.

It’s awful that bad things happen like you talk about, but honestly:  what were you thinking?  “that’s not fair” and “you don’t understand” and “I’m sick of hearing that” aren’t answers.

This is why you hear more about how potential victims can avoid becoming actual victims, and less about how bad men can be less bad.  It’s not an either-or zero-sum game.  There are already laws and police and punishments that are supposed to limit that kind of behavior—setting aside the sufficiency or effectiveness of such measures for the time being--but not a trivial amount of that is to stop criminals from taking advantage of the people who not simply cannot but will not learn to take measures to avoid becoming a victim.

A lot of that is earmarked by soliloquies that start with “I should be able to….”  Well, yeah, you should, in a perfect world, and maybe even in a possible world, but it's not this world and we all need to learn to live in it…and sometimes that means learning to avoid criminal behavior and sometimes that means learning not to commit criminal behavior.

I repeat:  it’s not either-or, it’s not zero-sum.

The Orwellian language of inclusive corporate policy

So my employer was recently bought by a very large corporation.  One of the new perqs I enjoy *cough* is regular news e-mails from corporate.  A lot of it's just press releases or discussion of proxy fights, but sometimes they throw in something cultural.

All well and good, but it's usually about drumming up interest in one of their "employee resource groups," which interests me for almost two seconds before I realize there's no news there.

To be fair, they don't insist on joining any of these groups.  Some of the our-plant-only committees are always eager for fresh blood, but you can say no to their face and there are no repercussions.  I've heard of other large companies that take a dim view of people who hesitate too long before joining their more progressive employee groups, and I don't see that happening here.

Which is good, because the only groups are for veterans, professional women, Hispanics, and homosexuals.

I only need to point out that I don't really need to point out how odd this juxtaposition is.  I'm also a little surprised there are only four, but that's another matter.

Suffice it to say I'm not interested in any of them because I don't belong and I'm not much of a "join to cheerlead" type.

But then I saw one of these e-mails go out and while explaining how these groups are critical to our vitality as a company, they presented the statistic that 50.2% of employees' children are diverse.

What?  "Diverse" is a quantifiable thing that an individual person can be?

Uh, no, it's not.  You might say the group comprised of all employees' children is diverse, but I am suspicious of whatever survey they did that enabled them to calculate that 502 out of every thousand children raised by my coworkers wears some kind of "diversity" badge.

And when it's over half, aren't we getting to the point that whatever makes them distinctive from the traditional white male workforce no longer qualifies as a diversifying characteristic?  If they were all Hispanic lesbians, the group wouldn't be diverse at all.

For that matter, what are these criteria they're using?  50.2% might just be how many of the children we're talking about are girls. Not saying that doesn't count, but it is mundane.

My sneaking suspicion is that, if they're not just using the number of girls as a shortcut around statistical sampling, they're looking at race and making sure we know they mean homosexuals too when they say "diversity," so we have one more thing to look for in our own children, even if they're too young to know how they're oriented or what claiming to know really means.

I wonder what the veterans group thinks about that.

postscript:
Actually, I have more than a sneaking suspicion.  Some of the more recent postings have some nice, neutral jabber about how inclusiveness helps make sure ideas and perspectives we might not otherwise consider get brought to the table, as if this were an elementary school where that was a lesson that needed to be taught and was willing to be learned; but just so you know what they mean, the postings are all decorated in rainbows.

Can't just put the bullhorn down once so we can give your intentions the benefit of the doubt for a second, can you?

The cost of social programs

Half a century ago, give or take, the Second Vatican Council normalized the use of the vernacular language in Mass for the first time in centuries in the Latin church.  This was accepted, if not always happily, but many were so excited about that and the other rumored changes that we saw abuses on the level of priests in seminary switching to street clothes and taking girlfriends because "celibacy will be out with Vatican 2."

More recently, the order of the mass was retranslated into English because the previous "dynamic equivalence" attempt had proven itself to have some weaknesses that led to some liturgical abuses and other pastoral problems beyond what seminarians were getting desensitized to.

This was less accepted, by the argument that the fifty-year-old translations were deep-set and had become too familiar to change; but mostly because the people who benefited from or caused these abuses and problems did not want to give it up.

And so, I see the same thing on a much shorter time scale with the health care debate.

Lots of hope about finally bringing all the uninsured masses in from the cold, and lots of drowning out of concerns from people who realized the financial numbers weren't that solid, and it was going to help some people who needed it but only at the expense of other people who belonged to the demographic that already has the lion's share of the tax burden, and that there were some legal irregularities that portended nothing good.

But, Obamacare was pushed through with suspicious ease, and none of the criticisms have proven false.

What do we hear, though?  "We can't repeal it!  Trumpcare will hurt the weakest amongst us!  Your pie in the sky constitutional objections are pure selfishness!"

Well, there were evils attached to it, and both before and after it was signed into law, people suspected Obamacare was designed to fail so the sense of emergency would allow a radical expansion of government control over the health industry and people's well-being.

"Look at how much it would hurt...oh, people over 60!"

Never mind how much it's already hurting, oh, employed middle class people in their 30s and 40s...and would hurt 20somethings if they didn't strategically opt to take the penalty--which they have done, since the loophole was big and obvious enough to fly the Moon through, to the insolvency of Obamacare.  

What's funny is whenever a bill to dismantle or replace Obamacare gets introduced, the talking heads on cable TV and on newsprint start talking about how Trump has already taken away health care for various demographics. Chicken little much?

Look at what you achieved in your year fighting for Obamacare!  All you had to do was pass a black-box law, corrupt the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, and rape the largest demographic in the country.  What could go wrong?

"You're metaphorically taller than the rest of us, so you should recognize your obligation to get stuff off the highest shelves for us, even if you don't recognize our entitlement to them!"

Who's this 'us' you're claiming to be a part of, Hollywood?  We're taller than some but we're not the tallest, and we sure as hell aren't taller than you are.  There are just more of us middle classers for you to nominate to carry the burden of hastily developed social programs, so it will just take longer for a different crisis to emerge when you run out of our money.  Surely you realize that's the real reason we're the ones expected to foot the bill for...well, everything.  And yes, I caught that bit where you insinuated that we owe payment because we can make a payment, and you have a rightful claim on behalf of the people who couldn't make a payment--and thus, your behalfism forgives you of any obligation you yourself have for having bank accounts larger than my house.  

Nice try, but false.

No doubting their priorities anymore

Remember when certain parties and entities used to tug at our heartstrings after a tragedy like Las Vegas in order to motivate us to go along with their political agenda--or better yet, get motivated to do some grassroots activism on your own?

Oh, the shift started at least as far back as the Orlando shooting.  I was seeing in social media hashtags that expressed vulgar opposition to the NRA and nothing about the shooter, but there was still sympathy for the victims mixed in.  Of course, the shooter was a Muslim, so any motivations related to that were off limits, but they spent very little time speculating about how he may have been more mentally ill and less a fitting representative of Islam.  Not much of a fig leaf.

Five to one the next terrorist attack they can't write off as simply "workplace violence" they attribute to the neologism "white Muslim."

But back to Vegas.  The blood was still wet on the ground when people jumped on the bandwagon faster than they took a knee to fill the vacuum of Colin Kaepernick.

I've been seeing blurbs since day one criticizing Trump for expressing sympathy instead of banning guns.  Really?  If you can't even see the humanity in the victims--I'll let the humanity in your political opponents slide for the nonce--clearly enough to add even a drop of compassion for the victims and their families into the mix, is there anything about the victims that motivates you at all?  Anything?
I saw one tweet express that sentiment in 25 characters.  That left 115 to say something human instead of merely political.  There's a time and a place for focusing on the message, sure, but the bodies in the street were still warm; can we at least talk about that and be humane for a minute?

This is why you get knee-jerk slacktivism like celebrities posting selfies and issuing platitudes that could have been written by a kindergartner but then not doing anything to actually fix a problem--no, the real work is for someone else.  The real work isn't even for the mediocre unemployed athletes who touched off the whole thing and now have enough time on their hands as well as money to make a difference.

J'ever notice...

On TV and in movies these days, there's never a question about a guy and a gal being platonic friends, no jealousy, no temptation, no confusion, no doubts, no conflicts, no unrequited hopes, no complications arising from crossed boundaries...

...but if it's two guys, there has to be a homoerotic element, even if it's just waiting to be eisegeted by some cultural gatekeeper Who Really Knows What's Going On?

Edit: Really not impressed with Blogger guessing at the formatting I want to use but not showing me the tags until I see the post looks stupid.....

And without a whiff of irony...

Tweets from earlier in the week, courtesy of one of those "alt/rogue government" Twitter feeds:  "We're not going to let politics get in the way of getting the truth out."  Fine, it's still a free country, and unlike the president you should have things other than politicking to do on company time, so it's great to keep them separate whether or not you were being above board.

Tweet from yesterday, from one of those very same feeds:  "...so now we're handing the reins over to some journalists and activists."

Really?  That seems perfectly natural, and you can't hardly be brought even to guess why some people are skeptical of your facts when your actions run this way?

No, I guess you couldn't.

Maybe I just need to get off social media.

Teh stoopidz, it burnz.

I usually skip right over it, but I just spent twenty minutes chasing articles on Twitter looking for some sobriety.  What did I find instead?

Mockery of "deplorables" allegedly griping about the election being rigged and then backing down when a recount is proposed...but when does a faction that wins an election ever complain about corruption and demand recounts--and then, only in swing states they won, and not swing states they lost?  Red flags raised about allegedly alt-right Twitter feeds getting suspended, insinuating it's official and wannabe neo-Nazis who are getting censored but not really showing that it's not just a broad list of people who were reluctant to support Mama Hillary in her time of need, or at least not making it clear that censorship of people you mildly disagree with on some issues is bad no matter who you are.  Some doctored photos and quotes that probably also were doctored showing Obama emitting rainbows and threatening not to be so nice once he stepped down--rhetoric I haven't seen since his '08 campaign, rhetoric that was tellingly absent in '12.  Outrage about Trump doing personal deals and threatening national security, even though he's not in office.  Outrage once again at the failure of the electoral college, where eleven states can cinch the presidency...but somehow it would be okay for politicians to focus on Boswash, Chicago, and L.A., which if they thought it through would be sufficient in a strictly democratic system, because, y'know, this is modern America and we have modern needs.

Again, there's lots of stupid on the other side too, but one point I'm trying to make is these people whose security in social media seems assured don't even recognize the irony (to put it politely) of their concerns. 

And another point?  This is the status quo.  Things aren't any different from what they've been for the last, oh, eight to eighty, maybe even 190, years.  Act appalled all you want--things aren't perfect--but don't act shocked.  This goes for high level politicians as well as hoi polloi who voted for them.

Be mindful of the dangers of taking privileges that you wouldn't like your opponents also taking but in a different direction.  You can hold a tiger by the tail, but you can't hold a snake.

So, in looking for other things, I found an image similar to the one below with a caption that read something like "Can we stop telling women what to do with their bodies?"

The irony puzzled me.  This wasn't the first piece of evidence I've found that the originator wasn't intellectually all that like most post-theistic "life is a tool and we are its master" types think they are, but it didn't seem like the most insightful juxtaposition.

So, a word to the wise:


This might be a picture of a girl, but it is not a woman's body.

Bodily autonomy is not the answer that cinches it for abortion.  It is the question.

You and we might be talking about issues that are related, but they are not one and the same issue.  Both sides need to be reminded of this from time to time.  And then we can actually have a discussion.

Some wisdom from Dan Lane, commenting over at According to Hoyt:

Why with all that extra time… [saved by having students memorize knowledge] You could actually *teach* instead of indoctrinate. ... Ah, heck, we can’t be having that, now can we?

Indeed not. Children who learn their lessons are harder to lie to. Children who are afforded a richer education for having memorized important/useful facts before they are mature enough to discern them from raw data and first principles are also going to be harder to confuse and mislead. In a word, they will be less gullible sheep than what our would-be betters would prefer to "take care of." Instead of just checking your kid's homework and making sure it's done and hopefully resisting the urge to "edit" the occasional mistake to make sure he gets a good grade, look at the curriculum itself. See what they're teaching and see what they're not teaching. Keep in mind that the weird things you see and the weird gaps you don't are not all just pedagogical fads.

To be fair, I don't think highly of any of the candidates in a lot of ways; nor will I claim that they are without merit...

...but I do wonder, with the lousy "why can't they both lose?" and "they're obviously just different brands of the same party" candidates we've had the past several years: How many of the neocons, the fiscal conservatives who were socially liberal, who migrated Rightward in or around the 90s, were actually setting up a false flag operation that is coming to fruition today?

Deceptive juxtaposition

I wonder if it's just where I work.

A few years ago I moved from a red state to a blue state.  The area I live in is in many ways like where I used to be, so it's easy for me to use the mental shorthand of thinking I'm in one of those place where it's actually a mostly red state that is overcompensated by some large, ultraviolet population centers, but then someone says something that I'm shocked to hear when I'm not on the Internet.

I may have mentioned a certain coworker before; nice young lady, smart, talks about how she grew up in a conservative redneck family--and they have their issues, I won't knock her that--and then how she got to college and her eyes were opened.  I appreciate her somewhat hipster taste in restaurants and breweries in the area, but I couldn't help teasing her once about professors saying "Didn't you know everything your parents taught you was a lie?" with a straight face.

Totally lost on her.  But also only tangent to my point.

She's a minority amongst the abortion supporters I cross pass with these days.  She likes to talk about how going to third world countries to "teach them about" contraception and abortion would be a great way to help bring education to women and bring their country to modernity.

The majority?  In the abstract, I hear talk about the real hardship cases, how it's a necessary last resort for lonely and helpless women in a real bind.

In the concrete, however, "real hardship" is a little nebulous.  One suggested a few weeks ago mandatory abortion for pregnant women who contract zika.  Another said to me that if she found out her teenaged daughter was pregnant, they'd immediately take a trip to Planned Parenthood; no discussion, no negotiation, no consideration for alternatives.  "So much for being a choice," I said.  "No!  She's not old enough to know what comes with motherhood!"  That argument would have gone in a different direction if her teenaged daughter weren't just hypothetical, but I did notice a pattern.

There's a lot of talk about the hardship cases.  But mostly there's a lot of people who want to preserve some right to a certain lifestyle, and they're willing to destroy real civil rights to get there.

Try again, Hulu, Microsoft, whoever you are....

Okay, so I was going to post some gripes a few weeks ago about how Hulu replaced the Favorites list with the Watchlist, because now it was mixing all the shows I want to watch with shows I no longer want to watch (either because I didn't like them after a few episodes or because the show had ended) all in a non-list format that was harder to apprehend in a glance.

It seemed I had to click on the shows I did want to watch every few weeks to see if there was an actual new episode, and then dig around to make sure the episode that started playing by default was the earliest unwatched episode or just the most recent one.  Turns out I only have to read the green flags in the corners of the show icons a little more closely to figure that out--admittedly there's no good way for Hulu to know if I stop watching a show after ten minutes because I don't like it or because I got interrupted--but defaulting to the latest episode after I've missed three is really bad functionality, and I still have to dig to find it how soon or how long ago an episode would have expired.  I used to be able to see all that at a glance, Hulu.  I'd understand if you were pelting me with more show suggestions to try to get me to watch more things, like how grocery stores put dairy in the back to maximize the number of people who have to walk past the largest amount of product, but that's not the experience they're giving me.

It also took me a while to figure out how to get the shows I'm done with off my Watchlist, but I'm still wondering about all the defunct shows I never got around to watching that didn't make the transfer.  Maybe I'm getting too old for technology, but I don't think that explains why Primer is still on there, but "The Aviators" isn't.

Lately I've also seen a similar change in the functionality to the programs I use at work, and it seems to be based on some aesthetic that is not the convenience of the user.  Why is it that when I edit a file and go to save it, Windows defaults the save location to the last place I saved a file of that type, instead of where the file already exists?  This was a problem developers solved in the 1980s.

And, Adobe?  You're guilty, too.  Let me turn off that infernal tool menu that pops up with every PDF I open and takes up a third of my window, and if you're going to bury commonly used functions under five levels of clicking instead of two, let me customize my toolbar and put it there, all right?

I weep for the electorate

I read an alarming headline for some Internet editorial a while ago about how the electoral college is "destroying" democracy.  I didn't have the patience to watch it, so I don't know what direction it really went in, but I wondered about all the people who also stopped at the headline but didn't know any better and walked away thinking "Yeah, why shouldn't my vote directly apply to presidential races?"  I wondered if the guy who did the piece also didn't know any better or like the Democrats a few years ago acted surprised when the electoral votes didn't strictly line up with the popular vote (an inexcusable display of hypothetical ignorance from a politician, in my not so humble opinion), just to try to score rhetorical points with a public that has largely forgotten its civics lessons.

Listen:  presidential voting is representative in order to be more representative, not less. In a purely democratic system, candidates could woo the top half dozen population centers, ignore the other 80% of the country, and walk into the Oval Office.  It would just be the most expedient way to run a campaign.  It would also be unfair to people who lived too spread out to be reached except by social media or snail mail.  Yeah, they have to take the bad with the good of their lifestyle, but don't talk about fair representation in a system that would consistently disregard them as bad investments.  If a president could focus on three states and skip flyover country, why would he care about the disapproval of everyone else?  So the electoral college forces them to address a broader base.

--

I have a coworker who has been saying for months, in his defense of Bernie Sanders "Socialism isn't what everyone says it is!  It's the exact opposite!"  I didn't have the stomach to probe, but recently someone else did, and hence I have some material to write about.  He wasn't satisfied when our resident lawyer read an online definition of socialism as being a system that has common ownership of all means of production and no private property.  Instead he tried to explain how socialism doesn't mean government control of businesses, just that the people get to have a say in how businesses are run.

He's not stupid, but apparently he didn't ask himself the question about how the people are supposed to "have a say" in how, well, everyone else's business is run:  basically, it would have to be either the government somehow granted authority to impose its will on the people's behalf, or something so much like that as to be practically indistinguishable.

I like Bernie; he seems to be the most human candidate still out there mixing it up with the electorate.  But some sort of large scale town hall meeting where every business decision and property variance is ratified by consensus is not going to be what any stripe of socialist would be able to bring us.

Maybe we're just not "ready for it," as yet another coworker put it.  I shudder to think of us being conditioned to gleefully accept all the baggage that comes with American liberalism, or of us being so ground down as to be willing to tolerate it as just another circumstance.

Idolatry, or not

One of the dumbest claims I've heard lately against Catholicism is that the Vatican "took out" the prohibition of idolatry or "removed the second commandment."  Sometimes they'll say it was "taken out of the teaching," as if by simply neglecting the subject, Rome could trick people into worshipping the statues (for some reason) that decorate Catholic churches.  Other times they'll actually say it was "taken out of the Bible," which they generally will explain, if you insist they justify their argument and in return show them a Catholic Bible that doesn't cite some spurious Nonalogue or have any textual gaps with the KJV, as "the second commandment was hidden between the first and third commandments with the way the text was laid out so Catholics wouldn't notice."  Basically that's saying Rome wants everyone to worship statues, so they messed with the punctuation and hoped nobody would ever look closely at the text or talk to someone with less pathetic reading comprehension skills about the Nine or Ten Commandments.  


I can only think they believe these accusations to hold any merit or possess any ability to convince anyone because their failure to distinguish idolatry from the mere presence of statuary in the argument stems from a cognitive failure that prevents them from recognizing the distinction.  Maybe they had some intent of targeting the veneration of saints as a practice, which I would understand, but when they follow up with "Where in the Bible does it say to worship Mary or the pope?" I realize I don't have a logic I can reach them with.  So, please, folks, if these are among the sharper arrows in your quiver, just please... rest in the knowledge that you're not going to win any converts by using them.
I've seen the same thing used to reject purgatory.  "It's, like, a second chance at salvation."  "No, it's not.  Only people who are saved go to purgatory.  Catholics just have a different understanding of how saving and sanctifying grace are applied to the saved soul.  If you're saved but still have some propensity to stumbling or backsliding in specific or habitual ways, purgatory is the stage or process by which that is rectified.  The damned don't get, or want, the option.  After the moment of death, you don't have anyone left on the fence who might choose a third option."  "Well, it still looks like a second chance at salvation."  "Well, 'what it looks like' isn't an argument."
Indeed, the teaching goes beyond the cliched overzealous affection for statues.  A higher standard is held out, one which should look familiar to almost everyone:
But back to that overzealous affection for statues and such:

For the record, here's the KJV's version of the first three commandments:

2 I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.  3 Thou shalt have no other gods before me.  4 Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.  5 Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;  6 And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.  7 Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.  8 Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.  9 Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work:  10 But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:  11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

And here's the NAB version:

2 I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. 3 You shall not have other gods beside me. 4 You shall not make for yourself an idol or a likeness of anything in the heavens above or on the earth below or in the waters beneath the earth; 5 you shall not bow down before them or serve them. For I, the Lord, your God, am a jealous God, inflicting punishment for their ancestors’ wickedness on the children of those who hate me, down to the third and fourth generation; 6 but showing love down to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments. 7 You shall not invoke the name of the Lord, your God, in vain. For the Lord will not leave unpunished anyone who invokes his name in vain. 8 Remember the sabbath day—keep it holy.9 Six days you may labor and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Lord your God. You shall not do any work, either you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your work animal, or the resident alien within your gates. 11 For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them; but on the seventh day he rested. That is why the Lord has blessed the sabbath day and made it holy.

If you insist on relying on the incidence of widespread failure of reading comprehension to argue that ecclesial conspirators want to go against the Bible while keeping up appearances, it's an indictment of your position, not evidence for it.

And here's the Catechism on idolatry (paragraph 2084 through 2141), which I will abbreviate for convenience:

"The first word contains the first commandment of the Law: "You shall fear the LORD your God; you shall serve him. . . . You shall not go after other gods."⁵ God's first call and just demand is that man accept him and worship him." ... "The one and true God first reveals his glory to Israel. The revelation of the vocation and truth of man is linked to the revelation of God. Man's vocation is to make God manifest by acting in conformity with his creation 'in the image and likeness of God': There will never be another God, Trypho, and there has been no other since the world began." ... "When we say 'God' we confess a constant, unchangeable being, always the same, faithful and just, without any evil. It follows that we must necessarily accept his words and have complete faith in him and acknowledge his authority. He is almighty, merciful, and infinitely beneficent. Who could not place all hope in him? Who could not love him when contemplating the treasures of goodness and love he has poured out on us? Hence the formula God employs in the Scripture at the beginning and end of his commandments: 'I am the LORD.'" ... "Adoration is the first act of the virtue of religion. To adore God is to acknowledge him as God, as the Creator and Savior, the Lord and Master of everything that exists, as infinite and merciful Love. "You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve," says Jesus, citing Deuteronomy." ... "The first commandment forbids honoring gods other than the one Lord who has revealed himself to his people. It proscribes superstition and irreligion." ... "The first commandment condemns polytheism. It requires man neither to believe in, nor to venerate, other divinities than the one true God." 

"Idolatry not only refers to false pagan worship. It remains a constant temptation to faith. Idolatry consists in divinizing what is not God. Man commits idolatry whenever he honors and reveres a creature in place of God, whether this be gods or demons (for example, satanism), power, pleasure, race, ancestors, the state, money, etc. Jesus says, 'You cannot serve God and mammon.' Many martyrs died for not adoring 'the Beast' refusing even to simulate such worship." 

"The divine injunction included the prohibition of every representation of God by the hand of man." ... "Nevertheless, already in the Old Testament, God ordained or permitted the making of images that pointed symbolically toward salvation by the incarnate Word: so it was with the bronze serpent, the ark of the covenant, and the cherubim." ... "The honor paid to sacred images is a “respectful veneration,” not the adoration due to God alone:Religious worship is not directed to images in themselves, considered as mere things, but under their distinctive aspect as images leading us on to God incarnate. The movement toward the image does not terminate in it as image, but tends toward that whose image it is."  

Thus, anyone arguing otherwise is misinformed, or spreading disinformation, be he Catholic or anti-Catholic.  You can argue against the rate of iconolatry, but don't argue about its endorsement.

I should never have given my boss my personal cell phone number....

He always could have gotten it from HR, but now it's all "Are you coming in Saturday?" and "Can you be here Sunday at nine AM?"

Granted, he's less demanding of my time than past bosses, but they just demanded long hours and didn't talk about it; now, if I say "No," then I'm the bad guy.

Caveat operator:  don't let them think you're negotiating casual overtime (if you're exempt) or on-call/no-advance-planning scheduling.

I even had to tell my boss once that I refused to work Sundays because I can normally get the work I am personally responsible for in fewer than six days ("You shouldn't have to work Saturdays," he said; "I know I shouldn't," I replied, "but the way things stand right now, I nevertheless do"), and if the people who "need" me to assist or cover for them a little can't get that taken care of in the 86% of the week I'm in the office, then they need to plan better.  He agreed, but he still asks.

Rachel Dolezal is...

...you know, I don't have the energy to attempt to peer into her soul.  She's not the first white girl to wish she were something else, but whatever.

Can we just please all admit that this emperor has no clothing, and move on with civilization?

So my employer recently got bought by a much larger company, one with deep enough pockets and enough stability that it recognizes the value in employee engagement even when we don't hit our revenue targets.

One of the manifestations is a monthly newsletter.  It's just a four-page glossy little thing written by the employees; articles range from good business and manufacturing principles to informative and acculturative stuff about the new parent company to important things about what we do at our facility.  All well and good, if often predictable enough to warrant just a quick skim.

Then there was a cover page article by our new plant manager, imported from the parent company.

Wouldn't you know it, it's about how they value Inclusiveness and Diversity.  In the opening paragraphs there even was the line"Diversity and inclusiveness is at the forefront of everything we do."

Really?  We're a manufacturing facility.  Diversity and inclusiveness may inform everything we do, but to put it ahead of production of quality product is to place the cart in front of the horse.  Are there hourly employees not getting scheduled to work because we shun them?  No.  Do employees of different races work well together?  Actually yes, because they are united in their outrage at the former, draconian owners and the hostile, dysfunctional legacy they left; although I think the new owners hoped for something a little higher minded.

Driving these things for their own sake?  You won't want to do it the way it's been done before now.  First pass yield is bad, customer satisfaction is worse.  We can pat ourselves on the back for our acceptance of each other while we wait in line at the unemployment office, if we have any more never-hit-our-revenue-target quarters like all the ones we've had since we got acquired.

The article went on with a paragraph that went something along the lines of "Diversity of talent...and apropos of nothing, we're pretty smug about our transgender employee group."

With what, two members, at different sites?  It's a big company but it's not that big.  Diversity of talent, if it means "broad base of expertise," I get; but putting this stuff together?  Props to them for coming up with a name that is a pronounceable acronym, but how does having your genitals surgically mutilated and making a wardrobe shift afford you fresh insights into our engineering problems?  And why is it anybody's business?  I'm not an especially private person, but I don't make a point of dragging my social proclivities into work discussions; apparently I act straight enough that people who would be inclined to make an assumption are comfortable doing so, but then again, I do happen to be middle aged and single, and even in this day and age you can interpret that differently.

See what they did?  It's a bait and switch, or in the political arena it would be a caption bill.  They start talking about one thing, and then take a half step to the side and make it about something related but distinct, all the while pretending they're still talking about the first thing.

This is a feature, not a bug.

Like when they say "Why don't you want gay people to get married?  They should be allowed to love whomever they want."

You can have a reason for refraining from extending legal coupling benefits to pairs who are not in a position to bring the next generation of citizens into society, and hence do not have heroic need for such benefits.  But permitting or banning how people feel about each other?  No way to control that, and in fact there have never been laws against  people's feelings, so now it seems like you're the one trying to change society for the worse, and you might as well give up trying.

I just hope our company is inclusive and tolerant enough not to fire me if I can keep my mouth shut about not changing my performance expectations of the woman from the lab who recently started growing a beard and insisting everyone call her Bill.

Although I will be interested in watching people grapple with the issue of male athletes who want to "identify" as female so they can compete in women's leagues and divisions.

Why is it that people who criticize the Church for admonishing people to help starving and destitute families while preaching against contraception and abortion, themselves never spare a second thought  for helping starving and destitute families who already have children?  Whom are they really trying to help?

Why is it that, nowadays...

...when a couple of cops beat up a witness or a suspect only tenuously tied to a crime, the media call it a human rights violation, instead of the less abstract "assault" or "police brutality?"

I actually don't prefer to focus on recent events...

...but naturally I could not resist this.

A nine year old boy was suspended for bringing "the One Ring" to school and "threatening" to make a friend disappear.
Just let that sink in for a minute
I could see administrators suspending a child for bringing a gun to school, whether or not he understood the real threat it presented; and even a ouija board at a Christian school; but a toy replica of a fictional piece of jewelry? An obviously playacting "threat" that would have caused no real harm (except to the wearer, if the administrators had the faintest grasp of the One Ring's inherent malevolence)?  Sounds like they're the ones who can't tell fantasy from reality.
This child was suspended twice before, once for referring to a black classmate as "black" and once for bringing a children's book to school that contained a sketch of a pregnant woman.  It was for an astronomy unit, but I guess the book Nazi was asleep at the switch when the kid got the book and when, presumably, his classmates looked elsewhere in the book and noticed...well, I have no idea if the illustration seemed risqué or if there were a depiction of a coherently formed fetus that seemed pro-life or something.
No wonder they're hiding behind some confidentiality policy instead of defending or explaining their actions. Clearly this boy is perfectly normal. It's the adults who have issues. 

Chincy bits from around the 'Net

So I'm minding my own business, snooping around my usual haunts, when I find a couple odd things I couldn't resist commenting on.  First:

What I find so amusing is that Christians will criticize Islam for promoting slavery, complete destruction of their enemies, etc. when the Bible says almost the exact same things.

This one got my attention because the critic doesn't even go so far as to say "Well, Crusades and Galileo and the Inquisition; that's the same as 9/11 and what's happening to the Chaldeans in Iraq."  He only goes so far as to say "Sure, Christians might condemn Islam because some Muslims of dubious fidelity can justify their actions by the Q'ran, but the Bible has examples of violence and human rights violations too!"

So what?  My response was "Show me the Christians today who kill their daughters for being raped."  The Crusades didn't happen because some "warrior pope" noticed that Psalm 150 gleefully endorses smashing the skulls of an enemy's children.  They happened because--and I realize I'm grossly oversimplifying, so bear with me--the Seljuks replaced the Arab hegemony in the Levant with something that took a much dimmer view of European pilgrims and traders.

All those nasty Bronze Age values taught in the Bible?  Old Testament.  Not to say they don't have their own significance, but there was never a time during Christianity when that stuff was considered the right and proper behavior of a Christian.  Unless you count the 21st century GOP.  Maybe that's what is inspiring this critic.

So yeah, the response to people who criticize terrorism and dhimmitude doesn't even rise above "Well, your past is checkered!"  Maybe so, but we know better now.  If opposing terrorism and dhimmitude is also wrong, then what's right?  Or is it just wrong because we're the ones doing it?  Do you have some better ideas, or are you just going to sit up there and gloat about how you and your intellectual tradition have never been uncharitable to people outside your in-group?


Second:

Atheism isn't an ideology.  It is the default position for understanding the world.

Okay, so atheism is your ideology of choice.  Good to know.

All I can figure here is that this critic soaks himself in a positively atheistic scientism.  He went on to say something about how belief in an afterlife is not exempt from science, because "the soul survives death and goes to exist in some new state outside the universe" is "vaguely scientific" because it describes something that is partly in nature.

No, it isn't scientific, unless you are the one who is vague about science; and not every phenomenon in the natural world is subject to science.  Some of those phenomena can be cataloged obliquely, but science won't reveal to you what they truly are.  If you're not sure, try to calculate for me the difference between the density of boogie woogie at STP, using the van der Waals equation, and the relativistic length of umami traveling at 0.92c. 

Whether the soul occupies or animates the body during life is a philosophical question.  Scientists may see the change when a soul departs from a body, but the sciences don't.

I think this distinction gets overlooked a lot.  Most scientists, believers and otherwise, just go about their business doing research and pimping for funding and whatnot.  A few atheistic evangelists who happen to have a STEM degree or pursue science as their day job or avocation then get credit for being "prominent and well-respected scientists who don't believe in God."  Okay, that's a half dozen any American might be able to name off the top of his head, compared to thousands or millions who don't sit down each morning at their lab benches and say "Okay, I do/don't believe in God, so this is the experiment I'm going to do to prove it for my next book."

Optics and theater

"Part of this job is also the theater of it," Obama said in reference to the presidency on Meet The Press.  “Well, it’s not something that always comes naturally to me. But it matters. And I’m mindful of that.”  This all in reference to the "optics"--I presume a technical term for how the public or the media would be inclined to interpret certain juxtapositions of facts and ideas--of the president having a press conference about the circumstances surrounding journalist James Foley's brutal murder right before going out for a round of golf.

To be honest, he's right about the theater, at least to a degree.  If nothing else, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander; Dubya was made fun of for flippant remarks about the War on Terror in the middle of his backswing, and I'm glad to see that there's not a lot of "Bush did it!" noise being made.

More to the point, there's an aspect of morale to leadership, of setting an example and displaying comportment that respects the dignity of a leader's charges and the weight of his responsibilities.  People, bearing their own inherent dignity and those pesky things we call feelings, need to be led and respected as whole humans so that they can appreciate what their leaders ask of them and so that they can see they are appreciated by their leaders.

This is true in different ways for different situations.   I worked for one company where the subliminal message from management was "you're a lousy excuse for a human being and you better be grateful for the charity I show you every payday, and every day that you come to work."  It wasn't entirely ineffective because even people who don't respond well to insults recognize the implicit threat of unemployment and were motivated to stay off the radar of the more destructive managers.  I worked for another that seemed autistic by comparison but had pretty much the same dynamic; they didn't care if you had a good reason for not wanting to do something (whether it was telling somebody at three o'clock that they would have to stay until ten pm that night for a special project they decided had to be run on the second shift, or telling a rep from Quality to sign off on bad product so they could ship it), they just saw "people who help get product out the door, who help the company make its numbers, who help the company stay in business" and "people who make decisions that cost the company money."  To say this view of the world is two-dimensional would be overly generous, but it wasn't entirely ineffective because moving product is the nuts and bolts of business, whether or not anything else matters.  Even in the military, where complaining about your feelings getting hurt would be seen as even more preposterous than the nominal leaders I've personally experienced, there is some effort to instill in soldiers a sense of loyalty--of mutual loyalty--and an appreciation for what soldiers do and for what they are asked to sacrifice for their country.

Okay, I'm going off track a little.  I want to come back to Obama focusing more on his contrition for bad theater than for that just being a symptom of bad leadership.  I've had this sense for a while, especially with his presidency but on and off throughout politics for as long as I can remember, that politics is known to politicians as just the art of managing expectations and appearances, of getting people to think what you want while you go off to do something else that you want.  And again, that's true to a degree; it's difficult to do your job when it's scrutinized so closely, and especially when there's so much going on with a job like that that even today there's too much misinformation for real transparency.  But it reminds me of a line from the Bard:

If we shadows have offended,

 Think but this, and all is mended,

That you have but slumber'd here

While these visions did appear.

And this weak and idle theme,

No more yielding but a dream,

Gentles, do not

reprehend:

If you pardon we will mend.

Else the Puck a liar call.

Give me your hands, if we be friends, 

And Robin shall restore amends.

Is this where we are?  Is this how bad things are, that when the president errs, he need only apologize for providing stale bread or a circus with a lousy trapeze act, and we're content to ignore his other malfeasances?  

I didn't think we were.  I thought part of the increased hostility between the reds and the blues was that they speak different languages, indeed use language for different reasons, not so much to communicate but to persuade and manipulate.  Hence comments like "I was for the war before I was against it" or "I didn't inhale" as if no explanation for a change of opinion or position were needed once the politician had so charitably thrown a bone of empathy to voters across the aisle, or campaigning on buzzwords like "hope" and "change" instead of a platform consisting of at least a few relatively concrete ideas we would get to learn about and discuss before getting some omnibus bill railroaded through Congress.

My examples are admittedly one-sided, because I am not entirely without bias, but it takes more people than either party has to maintain a facade of this magnitude for this long, so I'm not trying to play favorites.  

I just want to know:  have we gotten this bad as a society that it's sufficient to us for our leaders to keep up appearances, and then apologize for not doing so when we fail, with little concern being paid to accomplishing things worth accomplishing?

Maybe so.  Maybe this goes hand in hand with being a society that has evolved to where it wrings its hands over straight white men acknowledging attraction to pretty women in public, whereas not two hundred years ago the same were killing natives like varmints.  Maybe we don't have Washingtons or Churchills anymore because we don't take the serious things seriously anymore.  We're still the biggest actor on the world stage, at least for now, but we don't have the stomach to win another world war and we don't have the leaders who could steel us to do it.  

I mean, yeah, before Churchill there was Chamberlain, but....