A friend of mine sent me this link to a website that has a test that tells you which of the current presidential candidates you should support based solely on their positions on the issues. It isn’t very nuanced but it is fascinating.

When I took the test I got Kucinich as my top scorer, followed closely by Gravel.  After that there’s a huge gap and then all the other Democratic candidates are really close to each other in this order: Obama, Clinton, Richardson, Edwards, Dodd, Biden.

I’m a little surprised that Edwards and Richardson weren’t higher since I tend to favor them, and I’m not really a fan of Gravel despite his alliance with my opinions. But overall it seems pretty consistent with my perspective on the candidates.

On the Republican side I end up with Ron Paul far and above my highest scorer. No surprise there. But in truth I’d support him over many of the higher scoring Democrats on my list. After that is McCain and that also seems dead on. Those are the two on that side I would have the least problem with being president.  After that though it is weird. Cox who I don’t really know at all is next and then Giuliani who I wouldn’t vote for if you threatened to torture me for all eternity if I didn’t. I just really really don’t like that guy. Fred Thompson is next, followed by Mike Huckabee. Those two sound right, but I would have flipped them. Huckabee is next after McCain for me. Then there’s a gap and you get Brownback, Romney, Hunter, and Tancredo in that order and yeah it’s true I don’t agree with those guys on just about anything.

But of course, my real favorite candidate is Stephen Colbert.

Anyway, it’s interesting. Give it a shot.

Lets see, we take a quick look around the
Internet and we can find all kinds of people complaining about the
biased right wing media outlets such as talk radio, fox news, and the
likes. Turn the corner and look around and you’ll find equally vehement
persons complaining about the liberal media bias that  they claim
permeates network television, NPR, and the likes. Both could be true,
but neither side thinks that both are true. Rather each believes that
the other doesn’t have a leg to stand on.  So who is right?

The
problem is the bias liberals are referring to is not the same kind of
thing as the bias conservatives are claiming. They are looking at two
different things and to no surprise finding exactly what they are
looking for in the thing that they are looking at.

When
conservatives talk about “biased” media they are referring to inherent
inbred biases that influence the way in which the media entities go
about reporting the news whether they want it to or not. That is, they
are saying that liberalism is institutionalized into every aspect of
our media system. Reporters, anchors, writers, cameramen, executives,
editors, all are trained in the same institutions the claim goes, and
trained to think in a certain way. A way that is inherently not open to
religious and conservative positions. The problem isn’t that they are
trying to convince everyone that liberal ideas are correct, it’s that
even when they try their best to be as nonpartisan as possible they
can’t help but bring their own inherent biases to the table and that
influences how they go about approaching the issues of the day. Other
positions get shut out and many conservatives feel that as a
consequence they are disenfranchised, left without a voice in the
public debates of the day.

The liberal complaint about
right-wing outlets is the exact opposite. They are claiming that these
right-wing outlets aren’t even trying to approach the data available in
a non-biased manner. Rather, they are in fact looking for information
that supports already predetermined notions and principles and
reporting and talking about that data primarily. Their goal is quite
intentionally to make the conservative positions they hold more
palatable to the people by bringing it to the forefront. They are
pretty directly trying to convince people to believe certain positions,
rather than accidentally or unintentionally ending up convincing people
to hold certain positions.

So the liberal media in its self
assuredness sometimes forgets that there could even possibly be other
positions that are equally viable to the ones they hold and so they
forget to cover or give credence to the alternative perspectives. And
the conservative media in its zeal sometimes covers material that is
neither newsworthy nor true simply because it appears to support their
ideals.

Now you might think that maybe possibly both sides could
come to understand one another’s positions and try to change themselves
to be more balanced. But no, this is America. That’s not how it works!
Instead the discussions quickly breakdown to this:

“You arrogant blowhard!”

“You stuck-up prick!”

And
that pretty much sums up the conservative/liberal divide in this
country. It’s High School politics really. Jocks vs nerds. Nobody grows
up.

But here’s an interesting thought. If you look at both
criticism, there is a component of them that is remarkably similar.
Both sides are claiming that the other is too sure of itself, too
convinced of its own rightness, too certain that it has the moral high
ground, too closed to alternative positions. In short both sides are
claiming that the other is too arrogant. We are all calling each other
out for our excessive pride and hubris. Isn’t that fascinating? Maybe
we’re all right. Maybe we are all just waaaay too arrogant for our own
good.

I am reminded of a quote from my new favorite book: A Man Without A Country, by Kurt Vonnegut. In it he writes:

“Foreigners
love us for our jazz. And they don’t hate us for our purported liberty
and justice for all. They hate us now for our arrogance.”

And
that’s just it isn’t it? America is a nation founded on arrogance, born
and bred and raised in our supreme pride. We are so sure of ourselves,
so certain that we are not only right right now but that we are always
the best ones to figure out what is and will be right and best. 

And
nobody likes that about us. It’s totally true. International politics
are high school politics too and nobody likes the kid sitting in the
corner keeping to himself who thinks he knows more than everybody else
in the class any more than they like the preppy kid who acts like he’s
god’s gift to the world. We sometimes come off as both. But everyone else wants to be taken seriously, to be
considered as an equal to everyone else. Nobody wants to be talked down
to. Nobody wants to be told “don’t worry, just follow our lead. We know what’s best for you.”

And
yet that’s what the US does all the time! To take the relevant issue of
the day, the Iraq war as the obvious example. Look at the two
perspectives. One side says something like: “What’s obviously best for
America and for the Iraqis is for us to get the hell out of there and
save our troops and our money and let them stand on their own.”  The
other side says: “What is obviously best for the Iraqis is for us to
stay until their country is stable since that will help stabilize the
region and keep the terrorists from coming back here. It’s worth the
cost to us in money and lives.” 

See the problem? Both sides
are, without exception, completely and totally sure that they *know*
what is best for Iraq, what is best for the region, and what is best
for the world.  Why are we so sure? Because we’re Americans! We always
know what’s best! Nobody would even conceive of asking for advice,
ideas, or opinions from the United Nations, from other major powers,
from other powers in the region, or even from the Iraqi people
themselves.  And certainly no one would ever imagine actually
acquiescing to their wishes even if they should happen to be opposed to what we want. That’s crazy!. How could any of them possibly know better than we know?

And
hence we are seen as arrogant. And it’s that way for every issue, from
environmentalism to nuclear proliferation to genocide. If you listen to
the current crop of presidential candidates speak many of them talk
about “leadership” on the global stage. How we have to take our
predetermined position as the leader of the world in all these areas
and more. Nobody ever asks what gives us the right to be the leader.
Nobody ever says well what about all those other countries, couldn’t
they take the lead too? Might they not have their own good ideas that
maybe we should be following suit with? No. Of course not. We’re the
superpower! America leads. Others follow. That’s the right and just
order of the world. That’s how we think.

You might wonder where
this arrogance comes from? And you might point to the way in which the
last few generations of Americans have been raised being told
repeatedly that they are great and wonderful and capable of doing and
achieving anything and everything we put our minds to. Maybe that’s
why?  Or you might point to our recent history of extraordinary
successes, say in World War II, in the Marshall Plan, in the Civil
Rights Movement, in the Cold War, and so on. Maybe that’s the reason?
Not to mention our rise to economic preeminence due, of course, to hard
work and diligence (it couldn’t possible have had anything to do with
our lucky access to such easily obtainable oil or any of the other
resources we capitalized on in the North American continent, or on the
severely weakened state of most other nations after WWII, or on any of
the policies we enacted to exploit these advantages, of course not.
It’s all hard work and dedication and nothing else!)

But no, a
look back at history shows that this is not the case at all. I’m sure
there were many a English citizen who was thinking back during WWII
something along the lines of this:  “Yeah I know we desperately need
the Americans to help us out here. But man after this those Americans
are just going to be insufferable.”  And coming from the British, not the most humble of peoples themselves, this is saying something.

You
see, history suggests we already had a reputation for being way to sure
of ourselves long before we helped smash Hitler’s armies. We blasted
and smashed our way to the west of our continent on the grounds that we
were divinely destined to rule the continent from coast to coast? Why?
Who said? We said! And you look at the history of every single war that
has been fought in American history you see much the same pattern. We
dismiss the opinions and even the humanity of the entities we are
fighting and we take on the position that we were always meant to rule
them and lead them and bring them to the wondrous light of American
civilization.  Native Americans, Africans, they’re just uncivilized
brutes, who cares what happens to them. And those other European
nations are just old and weak compared to us. They don’t believe in
freedom and equality like we do. They didn’t fight for their
independence in blood and glory like we did (let’s completely disregard
the French revolution and other similar conflicts). And that’s just the
way it goes.  Even the Civil War, arguably the most Just war we ever
fought was really not fought for any good reason but because the South
was too stubborn and arrogant to admit that it might be time for it to
change and the North got ticked off that anyone would dare oppose them.

Even
the way we tell our stories after the fact reflects this culture of
self certainty. WWII is an altogether heroic affair, the fire bombing
of Tokyo and the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki totally
justified.  Vietnam is the heroic triumph of the anti-war movement
keeping our nation on the right moral track. The Civil Rights Movement
is likewise our victory over bias and hatred through our just
determination. (We ignore the fact that had people actually been
abiding by our laws no movement would have been necessary) It doesn’t
matter what the conflict. We win. In all the stories somehow,
magically, we always win, even when we were in the wrong.  The only
exception being perhaps the annihilation of the native American peoples
which I guess can’t possibly be cast in a positive light, so we just
say “Oh that happened so long ago” and promptly try as hard as we can
to forget it.

Am I too cynical you think? Maybe. I’m in a
cynical mood today.  But let me make a wager with you, any of you who
had the stamina to read for this long.  I’ll bet anything you want that
no matter what happens in Iraq the story we’ll hear, the story that
will end up being told to our children and our grandchildren will be
that we, the Americans, won.

If we stay and the country ends
up becoming stable, the story will be a WWII-story. We came in as
liberators, saved them from their cruel dictator, rebuilt their country
and ousted the terrorists, creating a beacon for democracy and freedom
around which the rest of the Middle East can rally. And if we withdraw
instead the story will be a Vietnam story, how the Americans heroically
fought against tyranny at home and abroad, bringing our troops home
from a foolish endeavor, and letting Iraq grow on its own.

And
what you’ll see is, that every where else in the world you’ll hear a
very different account than either of these. The story will be, that
Americans used trumped up charges to engage in an illegal war to oust a
dictator in Iraq in order to secure access to Iraqi oil for the global
markets and create an ally in the Middle Eastern region that would help
us to have greater influence over the region. They will say that  the
primary reason this war was able to occur is because the American
people were angry and afraid over 9/11 and not thinking clearly and
were directly manipulated by their leadership and faulty intelligence.

Further,
in other nations, they will tell the story of how regardless of the
reasons we went to war, whether we were justified or not, we screwed it
up royally. Our presence and our incompetence created a near anarchic
situation filled with with violence and death and refugees and illegal
torture. They will tell the story of how we, through our actions and
our folly helped destabilize Iraq and helped Al Qaeda to use the
country as a recruiting ground and a rallying cry against American
interests. They will tell of how our troops ended up stuck in a
quagmire uncertain of what to do to rectify our mistakes and dealing
with an increasingly disillusioned populace at home.  And then… What?
Will they tell of how we somehow managed to stabilize the country
anyway or will they tell of how we retreated and tell of whatever
happened in Iraq afterwards, which no one can effectively predict right
now? Who knows. Either way, the story won’t be kind to us. We won’t
look like heroes. At best we will be the guys who successfully managed
to finally clean up after our own mistakes or let others clean up after
us.

Which will it be? Who knows. But here in the US it will be
neither. Here we will be the heroes, the victors, the winners! We
always are.

I think it’s better not to have an answer to this question. Too often we come to think that x or y will make us ‘truly’ happy and then we exert all kinds of energy to obtain x or y only to find that once we have it we still aren’t fully satisfied. Even to presuppose that there is something that will make you truly happy is sort of to jinx yourself. You build it up so much in your own mind that it is almost bound to not be able to measure up.

Better to have constant variation. Ups and downs. Good times and bad times. Enough so that you feel at any given moment that you are living your life to the fullest.

I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too!

My wrist watch never made anyone more isolated. Ok, maybe an argument can be made for the wrist watch, but my pencil sharpener certainly never made anyone more isolated. 

So, since it is apparently absurd to think that technology inherently breeds isolation, the question I guess is, have certain technological developments of late breed isolation.  Things like printing presses and televisions and radios and video games and telephones and cell phones and mp3 players and guns and computers and the internet. Those are the usual suspects and people have been saying that they were making us all into lonely isolationists for years and years and years.

Well, it is certainly true tha some of these technologies can be used to substitute direct person to person interaction. You can call someone up or have a teleconference rather than meeting face to face. You can do you research through the internet rather than having to go to the library, and you can shop online rather than having to go to the store.

But is the thing we are replacing direct human interaction with properly called isolation? I wouldn’t say so. I mean people are connecting and interacting with one another in lots of new and fascinating ways. They are connecting and interacting with people all over the world whom they otherwise would never have met. Is this isolation? Youtube and facebook and xanga and myspace and secondlife and world of warcraft? All these resources are called online communities for a reason. People interact. The interaction just takes place in a different way than normal face to face communication.  To call a world dominated by these resources a world of isolation suggests a bias in favor of direct human interaction. And I think that’s simply unjustifiable.

In the future we will see these interaction mechanisms become more and more ‘like’ direct human interaction anyway. Everyone will be able to communicate through visual and verbal interfaces in real time. We may even be able to create holographic interfaces and possible even simulate smell and touch. Then will people still say of these interactions that they aren’t sufifciently ‘real’? Will people demand that people go out and talk to people in person despite the fact that all relevant details about the interaction can be completely simulated online? That strikes me as nothing but a prejudiced pro-”real life” position that has no place in the future we are building.

Technology simply empowers. It increases our capacity to do whatever it is that we do. If we choose to use technology to isolate ourselves it isn’t technology’s fault.  But from what I can see, we, as a society, are doing the exact opposite.We are using the power of technology to improve our capacity to interact socially, to enable us to forge more and stronger connections with a more diverse community of entities. This should really be no surprise at all though. We are inherently social beings, why would anyone think that we would use our enhanced powers to act against our very nature?

btw, the two most often sited culprits: “the internet” and “video games” were always conceived of as means to enhance social interaction. Video games originally were designed in the model of amusement parks. The idea was that people would get together and go places (arcades) to play games together with friends and strangers alike. When the home console developed the idea was always as a means of home entertainment involving people getting together and playing games together at each others houses.  That was the idea. It was always meant to be a more immersive, more interactive, more social experience than television and movies.  The internet during its early days of course was all about people sharing information with one another as quickly as possible, via email, newsgroups,  bulletin boards, and web sites.  How people have managed to give these tools such a bad reputation as isolating mechanisms despite their distinguished history of doing the exact opposite, I doubt I’ll ever fully understand.

I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too!

My friend and I were randomly talking the
other day and the subject of Liam Neeson’s role in the movie Batman
Begins came up. My friend said something along the lines that it was
somewhat unsettling to have the mentor character turn evil.
He said: “It was like basically having Qui-Gon suddenly turn on you and
betray you!”  I responded almost without thinking: “That would have
been so cool!”

And the more I think about it, the more I really do think that. It
would have been the perfect alteration to the plot of the three prequel
movies. It would have been so awesome it may even have redeemed those
movies from being the deplorable wretch of a film trilogy that they
turned out to be.

Really, if you think about it, one of the biggest of the many flaws in the prequels
is that there aren’t any surprises in them. You don’t get that “Luke, I
am your father!” moment that was so poignant in episode V. And nothing
is really all that new to you. You meet Yoda but you’ve already met
Yoda. You see the emperor, but you already saw the emperor. So it’s all
a little bit old hat. The special effects are cool and sometimes
unexpected, but plotwise you’re just sort of watching the story you
always knew would unfold, unfold before you. Another problem with the
prequels is that episode I has so little connecting it to episodes II
and III.

But if they had turned Qui-Gon to the dark
side, oh what a different story it would be! You could fix both these
problems. You would have Darth Maal appear to kill Qui-Gon in episode I
in such a way that you the viewer really believe that he is dead. Then
throughout episode II you’d see this shadowy jedi figure dealing with
the enemy rather than Count Dooku, only you never see his face. Then at
the end, as he confronts Anakin and Obi-Wan voila! Oh my god, it’s
Qui-Gon!  Can you imagine the shock and amazement? I would forgive
episode II all of its other sins just for that one incredible kickass
moment where you find out the utterly unexpected truth. It would be so
damn good.

That scene would have perfectly echoed the first trilogy. We
can imagine that in this scene Obi-Wan would refuse to fight his old
mentor, much as Luke a true Jedi refused to kill Vader. Only when
Qui-Gon tries to kill him, Anakin would save his life and the fight
would proceed much the same as it actually did in episode II, except
this time its Qui-Gon taking on both Anakin and Obi-Wan at the same
time.  Why is he so awesome as to be able to do that? Well Qui-Gon
always was pretty badass and now he’s gotten power ups due to releasing
the dark side of the force and getting cybernetic enhancements plus
training under the emperor for all the intervening years. So he’s
owning Obi-Wan and Anakin in much the same way that Dooku did only this
time the  dialog is soooo much cooler.  Qui-Gon would be imploring
Obi-Wan and Anakin with phrases like: “Join me, and together we can
bring balance to the force!” and “You are the chosen one Anakin!” and
“It is your destiny” and “I have foreseen it.” And Anakin would be all
like “I’ll never join you!” You know cool lines like that which would
echo exactly the happenings of the original trilogy.

And when everything looks bleak, and Anakin
has lost a hand, Yoda shows up and oh what a cool verbal exchange that
would be! Qui-Gon would be arguing how the Jedi council had become
arrogant and weak and needed to be purged in order to bring order to
the galaxy. Yoda would be all his quiet wisdom, telling Qui-Gon how he
had succumbed to fear, and that the Qui-Gon he knew had died a long
time ago. And they’d fight and it’d be badass just like the fight
between Dooku and Yoda was, only this time you’d care a lot more
because you like both fighters and aren’t entirely sure who you should
be rooting for.

Throughout it all you’d get that whole moral
ambiguity thing going. Viewers would be wondering, is Qui-Gon really
evil? Why did he turn? What did he see? What is the prophecy? The
viewer would still think he is basically the good guy we met in episode
I, it’s just that he has come to believe that the only way to really
save the galaxy is to join the Emperor and fulfill the prophecy
involving Anakin that the Jedi Council is too afraid to do. Much like
the Harry Potter Snape thing, after episode II debates would rage
through the world over whether or not Qui-Gon should be considered a
bad guy or a good guy.

Then in episode III you’d have a confrontation
very much akin to the Luke vs Vader + Emperor moment only it’s Anakin
vs Qui-Gon + Emperor and it happens much earlier in the film. And this
time, unlike Luke, Anakin gives in to the dark side and kills Qui-Gon
releasing his hatred and turning fully to evil. The killing of Qui-Gon
who was the only Jedi who believed in him and was willing train him and
was like a father figure for him would be a poignant and powerful
moment in the film.There’d even be a sense of Qui-Gon letting Anakin
kill him in much the same way Obi-Wan lets Vader kill him in episode
IV. He’d die apparently at peace, believing that he has sacrificed
himself to necessarily bring balance to the force. And the Emperor
would cackle with evil glee at his triumph in turning the man destined
to be the most powerful Jedi ever.

Then the movie could proceed almost exactly the same way as it did,
even with Qui-Gon in spirit form witnessing Anakins slaughter of the
Jedi knights and being horrified by it, and imploring Anakin to stop,
proving he wasn’t totally evil after all. In the final battle between
Obi-Wan and Anakin there would be even more tension because Obi-Wan
would blame Anakin for having killed the man they both saw as a father
figure. And maybe at the final attack where Obi-Wan defeats Anakin,
Obi-Wan is assisted by the voice of Qui-Gon in spirit form giving him
this one last piece of advice in sort of penance for his evil acts that
brought them there.  

Now tell me, wouldn’t that have made for a better story?  Wouldn’t that
have made for a more interesting trilogy? It’d be so different as to be
almost unrecognizable from the story we were actually presented with.
And it’d be better. Pretty much just strictly better in almost every
way.

It’s sort of scary that on such small little ideas can the entire quality of a story hinge.

If I say something nice to someone it makes me feel good…

If I say something mean to someone it actually makes me feel good too but in a different way…

If after I say something mean to someone I see the hurt in their eyes, then I will feel bad too…

If after I say something mean to someone I see the hurt in their eyes and that for some reason doesn’t make me feel bad, people will say mean things about me like “you monster!” and “you don’t have a conscience!” and that will surely make me feel bad….

Therefore I would rather say nice things to someone than mean things.

P.S. I am not a relativist.

I wanted to answer the comments I got in response to my first response
to FQ75, but my response got a little long so I thought I’d just make
it another post. And I feel my last post wasn’t entirely clear so I
thought I’d use this opportunity to try and clarify what it is that I
am saying.

I agree with everyone that is saying that parenting and education
is the real long term solution to problems of underage pregnancy. Birth
Control access is a stopgap measure that doesn’t directly address the
real problems. That’s true. I just think we have to do it anyway.

I also agree that part of the problem is that society is afraid that it lacks parental skills. That’s a big part of what makes this issue so touchy for people.

But this is a delusion. Parents have not gotten inherently worse at
parenting. Sure you always hear about the worst examples in the news,
but these are just sensationalist B.S.. A few examples does not show a trend. It just isn’t the reality. The
reality is quite the opposite. The task of parenting has just become
exponentially harder. The challenges we face as a species are much
harder and in order for children to be prepared to meet those
challenges their education in matters both social and academic has to
be supercharged.  And it’s not just that. Here in
the US we’ve eroded communal connections and separated extended
families, meaning that parents now, more than ever are taking on this
all important task of raising children all alone.

It is extraordinary that parents are managing to meet these challenges
without going postal and yet they are and IMO doing a pretty damn good
job of it. Parents aren’t worse at parenting. They’re probably in many
ways much better at it. It’s just that  the perceived increase in
difficulty has far outpaced the perceived increase in skill. So it is
perfectly understandable why people are afraid and why they are
clinging to issues like these as the symbol for their feelings of
helplessness.

We need to relax and have more faith in ourselves. We can teach our
children to make good decisions. We can help our children learn how to
be happy in this chaotic world in which we live in. As they say, we
have nothing to fear but fear itself.

But none of that has much to do with birth control. My argument for
allowing access to birth control is pretty simple really. It is
unconscionable under any circumstances to deny anyone the mechanisms to
protect themselves if we have the means to give it. Certainly we have
no right to refuse them that means on the basis of some twisted
principled moral position that they have no say in. Don’t you dare tell
me I can’t have a means to better myself because it doesn’t fit into
your vision of how society should be and how people ought to behave.
Don’t do that to me when I’m fifty and don’t do that to me when I’m
ten. It is just plain wrong.

Think
about it this way.  If you see people out there right now who are
suffering and you have the means to prevent others from having to go
through the same thing and all you have to do is accept that the world
isn’t the way you’d like it to be, wouldn’t you still have to do that?
And that’s the way it is right now. Today. There are people out there
right now, children, who will
very soon be terrified and afraid and alone and knowing full well that
they may have just made a mistake that could ruin the rest of your
lives. We don’t know why they will get into that situation. We don’t
know how they will end up that way. But we know as sure as the sun
rises that they will. The statistics don’t lie.

But we can
give some of them a way out. We can keep many of them from getting
there. And its cheap and easy to do so. All we have to do, is give up
our preconceptions about what childhood should and ought to be like and
give them the means to make a wiser choice. It doesn’t cost us anything
except a moments emotional discomfort at the thought of the very young
having sex. Isn’t that worth it? How could we possibly have a right to
choose otherwise?

Or will we say instead, screw those children! Their parents should have taught them better! Will we say: “Well my
children would never end up in such a situation. I taught them too
well. So what do I care bout all those other children who will?”   Are
we that callous? Are we that cruel? How will we live with ourselves in
the face of the condemning eyes of all those children whose childhood
will be blasted away in an instantaneous revelation? Will we have the
good grace to say to them that we’re sorry? “We are so sorry. We didn’t
create your hardship, but we could have prevented it, but we didn’t do
it because it made us too uncomfortable.” Can we say to them with a
straight face? Can you? I know I couldn’t.

And that’s just all there is to it. Nobody wants the world to be the way it is. But it is the way it is. And we have before us the ability to make a choice that will actually
help people. It will make real people’s lives better in easily
quantifiable ways. It isn’t some hypothetical. The choices before us
are to help or not to help; to do or not to do.

 It isn’t that I think it is a great thing that middle schoolers
should have access to birth control. I just can’t imagine in good
conscience making another choice. This is one of those rare cases where
utilitarianism rules the moral day. Doing good for some is better than
doing good for none. If we take out our emotional attachment to the
problem, it’s as cut and dry as it gets.

And as for parental
notification, I think it’s trickier. It always is. I see both sides.
That’s why I chickened out of talking about it in my first post.

Children
can do greater harm to themselves if they are allowed to sneak about
behind their parents back. Their parents might be able to help them and
teach them but how can they if they don’t know what is happening in
their lives? That isn’t exactly fair to the parents. On the other hand,
if children know that their parents will have to be told, isn’t there a
chance that they would avoid seeking out help that they actually need?
Without the possibility of anonymous requests, making available birth
control might be nothing but an empty gesture that changes nothing
since so few children would ever bother to exercise it.

So I
generally think the children should have a default option of privacy,
but in exchange they should have to go through counseling and the
counselors should have the ability to override that privacy option in
extreme situations  where they feel the parents really do need to be
notified. But in a vast majority of cases the counselors should not
exercise that option. Instead they should try and help the children
make the choice to confide in their parents themselves and if the child
should choose to do so be willing to be there when they do and help
their parents understand whatever it is that the child is going through. I think that’s probably the best balance you can come up with.

Anyway,
I feel I should apologize to any potential readers for ranting so much
about this. I’m sure that I have written has offended some of you and I 
am sorry about that. I didn’t realize how much this subject mattered to
me until I started writing about it. But this is one case where the
prevailing opinions run so counter to my moral intuitions that I just
couldn’t help but rant about it. I hope I wasn’t too harsh or
incoherent. And if anyone out there can convince me that I am wrong in the way that I am thinking about this, I will be eternally grateful to you for enlightening me.

Access should be a no brainer. Of course they should have access. If it is safe and healthy and carefully administered, and it has been demonstrated that the phenomenon of pregnancy in middle school is large enough that there is a need, then sure they should have access. Parental notification is a much more difficult and tricky matter. Fortunately that wasn’t asked so I can chicken out and not bother to answer it.

I don’t get the arguments against access.

One argument people are making is that because children aren’t capable of making informed rational decisions we should not give them access to birth control. I don’t get that argument at all. If you make birth control not accessable to them aren’t you making it harder or impossible for them to make an informed rational decision? Aren’t you in fact removing the very possibility of making a particular choice in such twisted hope that they will act in accordance with your expectations rather than in accordance with your fears? What happens when they then act in accordance with your fears anyway? Will you blame them for being so foolish or blame your own damn selves for not even giving them the means to make a better decision?

The other argument is that this availability of the birth control serves as tacit approval and encouragement of sexual activity. People spout on about it making a value judgement or some such nonsense I can’t even comprehend. All we’re talking about is access right?  We aren’t talking about going down the halls shoving pills and condoms into childrens hands and telling them to go get laid. Access does *not* in any way implicitly imply approval or encouragement. It is not  at all contradictory to have birth control accessible and have children be taught abstinence. Both can exist.  (Though to be perfectly honest, I never quite understood what it meant to ‘teach’ abstinence anyway. Isn’t that like a one sentence lesson? Anyway, if such a thing exists, it can certainly coexist with birth control access)

So what you must be saying is that word will sort of get around the block in middle schools. Kids who might have been too afraid of stds and underage childbirth will refrain from having sex when they can’t get a hold of the tools to prevent those occurrences but if they find out that they can just go to the nurse’s office and ask for the tools they need to make it easier on them they’ll consider it a worthwhile risk. The only thing keeping them back is the fear. Not immaturity. Not unawareness. Just fear. Once we alleviate that fear the floodgates will open and it will be armageddon!

But weren’t we just saying that kids will be too stupid to make rational decisions? Why then do you presuppose that the fear will keep them away from illicit activities in the absence of access?  Do you really think it will? If it does, then why is the number of underage pregancies increasing and the average age decreasing nationwide when we *aren’t* providing access to birth control to middle school aged children in most places? Could it be that there are other influences much more salient to the choices of the teenage mind than the availability of birth control?

If we really are deeply concerned about the frequency of underage sex we’ll focus our attention on things that actually influence our children’s choices (can we say “popular culture”?), not on something that actually helps them to make better choices. Not on something that improves the quality of lives that might otherwise have been made far more difficult. Not on something that helps *reduce* the problem of underage pregnancy.

Maybe rather than trying to control our children through a tyranny of fear, we’ll try and educate them better about the nature of the world in which they live in now, about the choices that they face now and make sure they are aware of the opportunities available to them to make better choices.

The reality is what it actually is. And you have to prepare for a future that is coming whether we want it to or not.  Children have to grow up faster now and they’re going to have to grow up faster still in the near future. That’s just the truth of it. We can’t shelter them. We can only try to adapt to the changes as much as possible and educate our children to the best of our ability to be prepared for this incomprehensible new future they are going to soon have to face.

Clinging to the past doesn’t help anybody. Wishful thinking doesn’t make anybody’s actual lives any better.  So you do the analysis and make the decisions that actually help real people to live better lives. This seems to me to be one such  decision.  So let it happen and stop being so afraid. Let the future work itself out.

I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too!

I wonder if there are lots of different ways in which someone can be
shallow?

Generally we think we can all identify the shallow people in the world.
They’re the people who rag on you for wearing the wrong clothes or look
down upon you for not driving the right kind of car or whatnot. The
shallow people generally are concerned with trivial things associated
with appearances to the exclusion of all else. That is, things
generally affected by wealth and beauty and not determined by any other
virtuous capacity or feature.  So the shallow person would be friendly
to you if you are rich and gorgeous even if you were otherwise the scum
of the Earth and likewise would not give you the time of day if you
were a Saint but happened to lack a fortune or have been born without a
certain requisite degree of symmetry in your facial features.

But is this the only kind of shallow that there is? If we think about
it, the thing that makes this idea of shallowness distinctive is that
the person privileges these features to the exclusion of all other
features. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with caring about
appearances, not really. But if appearances mean more to you than
courage and honor and honesty and wisdom and integrity and ambition and
kindness and justice and intellect and humility and every other
relevant characteristic of man, well then you have a problem now don’t
you? You’re being irrational, and irrational in such an absurd manner
that we in society rightly ridicule you for your shortsightedness.

However, we can easily abstract this idea can’t we? Couldn’t it be that
someone could be equally overly concerned with some other feature of
humanity in their social interactions to the exclusion of all others?
Maybe instead of speaking of just being shallow we should specify what
kind of shallow a person is. That is, a person could be X-shallow where
X is any characteristic. Hence a wealth-shallow individual is a person
who judges on the basis of wealth to the exclusion of all other
characteristics. And so on and so forth. 

Does that concept make sense? Perhaps. If we look in television and
movies we can sometimes find examples of unusual kinds of shallowness
that are depicted. For example you sometimes see someone who is
Vegetarian-shallow, meaning they would only really ever consider going
out with someone who is not a vegetarian, or someone who is Smoking-shallow
meaning they avoid any and all people who smoke.  These kinds of
shallow certainly exist sometimes but they aren’t that interesting. I wonder if the people who demonstrate such trivial kinds of
shallow really really deep down hold to these beliefs? When faced with
a person who is otherwise perfect in every way, would the fact that
they smoke or are not a vegetarian really prevent them from interacting
with such a person? There are thousands of other X-shallow’s that have a
similar vibe to them. Its conceivable that there are people who really
are shallow in these ways, but it just seems unlikely that there are that
many of them.

But what about something even more unexpected and yet much more
serious? Is it possible to be shallow with respect to certain features
of humanity that we consider to be good? Can you be shallow with
respect to a virtue? Is it possible for a person to be honesty-shallow
or honor-shallow or courage-shallow or justice-shallow? What about
something defining about who someone is? Can you be
intelligence-shallow? Can you be kindness-shallow? What about something
that is more of a vice? Can you be cruelty-shallow, or hatred-shallow,
or hypocrisy-shallow?

The idea of the existence of these kinds of shallow fascinates me. If
they do exist they could serve as a profound tool for understanding
human interactions, what causes people to connect to one another and
perhaps more importantly why sometimes they reject one another. For
example say in a work environment you observe that two equally capable
persons hate each other and can’t get along at all despite the fact
that to your mind they are both decent people. Perhaps the only
difference that you can tell between them is that one is very neat and
organized whereas the other is messy and chaotic, yet they developed
and disliking to one another right from the start and no matter what
you try to do to resolve the conflict between them or point out to them
the good features of the other they just never develop any sort of good
will toward one another. It’s just impossible.  Why would that be? 

Perhaps the answer is that one of the two is organizational-shallow and
the other is messiness-shallow?  The one, for whatever reason, just
can’t accept someone who is unwilling or unable to take the time to at
least bring a minimal degree of order to his or her environment. And
the other might likewise find it fully impossible to deal with someone
who is just a little too neat and organized. In his or her mind you have to
let a little chaos into your life or they just won’t be able to stand
being near you.  And maybe that’s just the entire problem? The two
can’t see past these aspects of their nature. All other features are
just not as important to them as this one sticking point. They might
not even be conscious of it, but in their hearts that’s just the way
they fundamentally feel.

Shallow always has pretty negative connotations, but one wonders if we
use this framework if being shallow is always bad? I mean, if someone
is virtue-shallow, meaning they reject people who are not sufficiently
virtuous, how exactly is that bad? Maybe we all need to be a little
more virtue-shallow? And likewise, how much can we really blame someone
who is generosity-shallow or honesty-shallow or humility-shallow or
kindness-shallow?

The problem is, of course, from the point of view of the object it is
never pleasant to be judged by a being who is shallow with any
respect. And that’s just inherent in the definition really. Shallow, as
I have explained is the consideration of some feature to the exclusion
of all else. That means that when you are the object of someone’s
shallow perspective on you, you feel bad. Worse, you feel helpless.
Because it is as if there is nothing you can do to make up for this one
failing. It’s as if you can’t get the other person to really see you.
They only see that one part of you that is not up to their own
standards or expectations or desires? And so often, it is the one part
of you that is hardest for you to change too, a thing ingrained in you
because of the way in which you were raised or may even be inherent to
your nature. It doesn’t matter how many other good features it seems
like you bring to the table, just that one thing serves as the sticking
point. That’s why, even when the focus of such shallowness is a good
thing like honesty or integrity or humility, it feels terrible. You,
the object, are always left with that feeling of frustration. It just
doesn’t seem fair!

And that’s just it. It may well be entirely normal to be shallow with
respect to certain virtues and vices and important characteristics.
Maybe we are all shallow with respect to something. But in all cases
where we treat with people on the basis of the shallowness, no matter
how reasonable or important the characteristic we are evaluating may
seem, we are being unfair to them. We aren’t treating the totality of
their being as we should be. It may not always be wrong to be shallow
with respect to certain characteristics, but it is always unfair.
Perhaps then, even with this expanded definition of shallowness, the term
still deserves its negative connotations.

One more distinction needs to be made though with respect to being
shallow of a particular mode. There is an important question of whether
this being shallow resembles more in kind a kind of fixation or a kind
of fetish. This speaks to the idea of whether or not someone would be
able to change themselves if they are shallow and to what extent the
objects of shallowness should expect or hope for those shallow people
to change.

If being X-shallow is the result of a sort of a fixation on X we would
expect that it is possible and perhaps even likely that at some point
the person will change. Just like fixating on a shiny object, it only
takes a single moment for
you to lose your focus on it and it no longer becomes an object of your
fascination. One day you might hit yourself upon your head and say “Oh
my god, maybe X wasn’t as important as I thought it was?”  Or maybe
over time you just grow out of thinking that X is the end all and be
all of a person and start to perceive other characteristics as being as
important or more so.

The classical example of a fixation shallowness is the classical
physical beauty-shallowness in most people in which it manifests. We
would reasonably expect that over time human beings as they grow older
become less fixated on physical beauty. They grow out of that kind of
shallowness just because of time and experience and the fact that
happiness requires more than the appreciation of beauty for most people
anyway. Plus, if there is any truth to the expression “beauty fades” you can hardly be too consistent to remain fixated on physical beauty even as you yourself lose whatever attractive characteristics you may have once had.

But shallowness can sometimes be much more resistant to change.
Sometimes a kind of shallowness may be ingrained in you. Perhaps it is
genetic. Perhaps there is some kind of traumatic experience that leads
to your being X-shallow which would take years of therapy to excise if
it is even possible. An example of being shallow in this way might be a
person who was lied to terribly during their childhood and develops a
kind of honesty-shallowness as a consequence. The very act of lying to
them brings them such internal pain and arouses such terrible memories
that they can’t move beyond it. It’s the thing most important to them
not by choice but by their very nature at that time. In these cases we
would not expect a shallow person to change quickly, if at all, unless
some equally traumatic experience were to happen to them to shift their
underlying nature.

Unfortunately it can be difficult to determine whether someone’s
shallowness is more fundamental or more fictional. One person might be
honesty-shallow because of some deep childhood trauma but another
person might be honesty-shallow just because they were lied to in their
last relationship and resolved in the short term to not trust a
dishonest person in their next relationship. They later that next
relationship might reveal another different flaw which results in their
fixating upon a different characteristic to be shallow with respect to and they may well lose their honesty-shallowness.
How can you tell? Only by knowing the person better, which can be
difficult of course if they are shallow with respect to something that
excludes you from being a person with whom they choose to interact.

It’s also equally difficult to actually figure out what you are in fact
shallow with respect to and try to change yourself to be less so. I
think at one point in my life I was likely privacy-shallow. The only
friendship which I can recall purposefully ending was due to the
person’s invasions of my privacy and for no other reasons.  It didn’t
matter what other features were worth while in that person,  the fact
that they would choose to do such a thing to me was something I could
not tolerate.  

I don’t think I’m the same way anymore. Not really. Though privacy
still concerns me, I think I’ve grown out of that stage where I feel
that my privacy is my life and nobody better violate it. What changed?
Nothing really as I can see. Just time passed, experiences happened,
and I became a different person than I was before.

I’m sure there are other ways in which I am shallow, but I can’t seem
to identify them. Really how would you know until after the fact or
unless someone points them out to you? Or maybe you do realize but it
just doesn’t seem to matter since you can’t change your feelings of
rejection that arise when approached by that thing about which you
cannot accept because of the nature of your shallowness. Had I known at the time I was privacy-shallow would I have acted differently? Maybe, but I don’t think so.

The only thing I can think of is that we just need to keep on
struggling to keep our minds as open as possible. To in all cases try
and see everything that a person is and understand all that there is
about them that is worthy of remembrance. We may not change our
opinions. We can’t always change ourselves. But at the very least we
can be more fair to others if we understand the nature of where our ill
feelings are coming from and we try our hardest to see people for who
they truly are.

About a week ago I was in a strange state where I felt I really couldn’t write anything. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to write anything or that I couldn’t find the words or the inspiration. No, my mind was a flood of words and thoughts. My heart was filled with ideas and dreams. And yet I couldn’t write. Everything that mattered to me to say was too hard to say and everything that didn’t matter made me feel terrible to say it. I felt lost and upset and it hurt. Writing is my escape. It keeps me sane. To be in a state where the pleasure of writing alludes me is a painful thing. But I just… didn’t want to write. I had started to doubt the very value of writing or its point. Writing never changed anything real in this world I thought. People do and we suck at it.

Somehow though as sure as the sun rises I started to write again a few days later. I didn’t write anything super important or super significant to what had been bothering me, but some thoughts came to the forefront of my mind as if beating upon my brain trying to get themselves out and I couldn’t help it. I had to write it.  And so I did.

It was hard. So hard. A part of me didn’t want to write, didn’t trust what I was saying. I was afraid of how it could be taken and terrified of its effect.  Worse, it bothered me that I was writing what I was writing and not all the other things I wished I was writing, all the other things I needed to write. I felt twisted between doing too much and too little, between caring and not caring, between wanting and fearing.

And yet, somehow I wrote it anyway, and after that I found the block was over, I could write again, about anything and about everything. It still wasn’t easy. It has never been easy. Each moment I set my hands to my keyboard I feel it is a struggle to bring the right words together, to make it matter. It’s hard work. There’s just no way around that. For me, writing doesn’t come easily.

I looked and it was only Tuesday. It felt like a life time, but it was barely three days. However, at the end of it as I wrote that first real piece I remember having this thought as clear as day. This is the right kind of hard for me. That’s what I thought. That’s what I think now.

There are all kinds of hard things you do in your life. Sometimes you do physical labor. Sometimes you face embarrassment and social awkwardness. Sometimes you do endless sleepless activity. Sometimes you face mental challenges of extraordinary difficulty. But these tasks, though all difficult, don’t mean the same things to everyone.

Some are perfectly at home striving to solve a particularly tricky puzzle. They love it. It’s hard, it could take them weeks, but they strive on the challenge and triumph in their victory. Solving a mental puzzle is the right kind of hard for them. It’s a challenge that matters to them.

Others are at home when they are incredibly busy. The work need not be particularly hard to comprehend nor any particularly task hard to complete. But the constant exhausting activity is what makes them feel successful. Being the person who is always there, always available and willing to go the extra mile above and beyond the call of duty, that’s what makes them happy.

So I wonder if life is about finding that thing that is the challenge that is right for you. You don’t want to do things that are too easy of course. You rarely get lasting satisfaction from floating through something. But at the same time, mere challenge for challenge’s sake doesn’t really complete you either. Just because something is hard for you, doesn’t mean you feel as if it is worth your time to do, nor does it mean you’ll feel good doing it.

No. You have to find something that is hard but in just the right way. You are looking for something that pushes you but in the directions you want to go. Something where you feel good about your successes and feel complete while struggling to overcome your weakesses. Something that makes you feel as if you are growing each and every time you do it.

I used to say that I don’t feel as if I’ve ever done anything really hard. But when I look back honestly I see now that that just isn’t even half way true. I’ve done all sorts of hard things. I’ve faced complex challenges in math and programming that I could barely wrap my mind around even after hours of effort. I dealt with twisted philosophical problems that were a struggle to comprehend much less explain. I’ve done the all nighters. I’ve felt the feeling of working through the early mornings to fix weird problems with osbscure difficult to identify solutions. I’ve faced challenges with dealing with weird personality conflicts, and helped mediate resolutions of minor social disagreeements. I’ve done the physical labor thing too, pushed my body to the point of exhaustion. I’ve done all kinds of hard things. All kinds.

Just never for very long. I start a challenge and for a while I meet it. But then I feel no satisfaction or joy. No completion. No anything at all really. Whether I succeed or fail I just can’t find myself caring at all. And then I just stop doing it. Or I continue to do it in such a lackluster fashion that I might as well have never done it at all. Sure it’s hard, in a way, but that isn’t enough. I just feel empty. I find myself hating it and then hating myself for being unable to follow through with it too.

And when you try to explain this to people you get the weird looks. People don’t get it. Work ethic is work ethic to them. Hard work isn’t the goal, its the means to obtain the goal to them. And to them, whatever hard work they are doing now that helps them achieve their goal is what you should be doing. Many don’t even realize that they’ve already found the right kind of hard work for them and that they are doing it. It never occurs to them that one’s work could be challenging in an unsatisfying way. Or perhaps they haven’t found it, that right kind of challenge, but they’ve lived a life such that it never occurred to them that there could be a hard work that is satisfying of its own account.

But the truth is some kinds of hard work fulfills us and others just don’t. And everybody is a little bit different about what constitutes which.  But we’re all the same in that as long as we are still looking for the kind of hard that does that for us, we can’t really be completely satisfied. We’ll always feel a little bit empty, a little bit incomplete, no matter how capable we are at meeting the challenges put before us.

Sometimes when I write, it feels like I may have found that kind of hard. It isn’t something I can ever stop because I am bored or because I am unsatisfied or because it hurts too much to do it. No matter how hard it gets I just keep wanting to do it. I keep needing to do it. And so I do it. Writing is like that for me. Sometimes. That’s why I write.