Today was my birthday. Well I’m writing this yesterday actually and using future post, but as you read this today was my birthday.

Birthdays are days to look back and reflect. I guess.

Reflect…

Reflect…

Reflect…

hmm. Nothing to think about.  It’s been a boring year. Nothing much interesting happened since my last birthday.

I moved to a new place, got a new job, made new friends. But not much besides that.

It was all predictably boring….

The next year will probably be the same. Every day is just another day. Nothing bad enough to be a disaster or good enough to be a glory. Life goes on.

Today I watched Cirque du Soleil:  Quidam.  I was told this was the easiest of the Cirque du Soleil’s to follow the story of and get the meaning behind it.  Guess how much I understood of it?

Nothing. Zilch. Nada.

I had a theory of what was going on and it turned out to be dead wrong. So far off the mark that my roommate laughed at me for having thought it up. 

Oh if only this were an isolated incident.

Last year I remember discussing a couple of short stories with a friend of mine. They were heavily imagery and symbolism intensive. REally more metaphorical than anything else. Guess how much I understood of them? Not a damn thing of course. My friend ended up having to lead me by the nose through the stories step by step before I could understand. And during the entire process I kep coming up with these theories about what was going on that proved wholly and utterly false. Just like with Cirque du Soleil.

I remember in school it was similar. The one aspect of English classes I had the hardest time with was the Poetry. In particular, the highly symbolic poems, dripping with imagery, seeped in metaphor. THOSE kinds of poems. The kinds that didn’t make a lick of sense to me. They just came out as a jumble of disconnected words in my mind.

I was a decently skilled writer for that age and my theories were at least plausible so I think my teachers gave me credit most of the time. Not top marks of course but decent. Hence I was able to pass the classes. In a way though I think my teachers were kind of humouring me though. Cuz they knew as well as I do that what I was saying about the poems were radically far from what the poems actually meant. I was just drawing weird connections and pulling random ideas out of my nether regions.

I think it’s just the way my mind works. I can understand things that have a logical structure to them. When things flow from idea to the next. When there’s a defined story with definied characters and images and symbols that have concrete meanings releated to that story and those characters I do fine. But go a little more abstract and I fall apart. If you say that these colors and these images are supposed to represent this or that I have no idea what you are talking about. I shrug and say something like, if you say so. But deep down, I just don’t get it. 

What is symbolism? What is metaphor? What is allegory? Nobody has ever given me a definition sufficient for me to apply in all circumstances to solve the puzzle being posed to me. Therefore I am unable to ever “get it” the way other people do. I don’t forge the connections instinctively and when I try to apply discipline I just jumble it all up. My brain just doesn’t work that way. I guess Symbolism is sort of my Kryptonite.

And that’s just FINE with me. I like my Concrete world where things are simple. Where things make sense. I suck at symbolism. I admit it. But who cares. Nobody’s perfect you know. Not even me.

You know what? President Obama is black. Yes. He really really is. I’m not really much for posting pictures, but perhaps you need visual aids to help?

See?

Or maybe he looks more East Asian to you…?

Assuming your eyes function I should think the empirical evidence is unassailable on that point. Now I can see you about to get into an argument of semantics with me. You’re going to say “no no his father was a Black man from Kenya and his mother was White that means he’s Mixed. Not Black.” 

Yes. Your description of his heritage is the truth. But that doesn’t mean he’s not Black.  He IS Black. If someone is half Italian American, would it be wrong for him to call himself Italian American? If someone is half Chinese, is it so fundamentally wrong for him to call herself Chinese American? Or Asian American?

He considers himself black and pretty much everyone else does too. Doesn’t he have a right to call himself whatever he wants? Isn’t he allowed to identify with any group with which he reasonably identifies? That doesn’t mean he doesn’t honor his white heritage too. That doesn’t mean he denies that he is Mixed. All are true statements.

Ask yourself instead, why is it so important to yourself that you assert that he is NOT Black? To my ears, that sounds like a much more prejudiced position. It’s as if to say he’s not allowed to be one of those scary Black People. Let’s make sure to call him Mixed or to say he’s also White that way we know he’s not so bad as all that.

But people seem to see it the other way. They assert that all this focus on Obama being the first Black President shows how terribly racist our country is and how far we have to go. People say that we shouldn’t even notice Obama’s Race. It should be no big deal. They say that calling Obama Black is proof of how Racist we all really are.

This is absurd.

Let me ask you, do you believe that firsts matter? 

Did it not matter who the first person to walk on the moon was? Did it not matter when the first person was liberated from the concentration camps of Nazi Germany?  Do you not care who was the first person to beat Babe Ruth’s home run record?  Should we ever care about firsts?

If you think yes, then what’s so wrong about celebrating this first. Because it is a first. Just like the first Black person liberated from slavery was a first. The first Black person to attend integrated schools was a first. The first Black person to be Governor of a state was a first. The first Black person to become a Senator was a first. The first Black person to be Secretary of State was a first.  The first Black person to become a Supreme Court Justice was a first. All were remarked. All were praised. As were the first women to achieve the same things and likewise with other minority groups.

Do you really not believe in these kinds of firsts? Do you think they shouldn’t matter? That we should ignore them. Never praise them. Never remark upon them. Go hohum it’s just another President being sworn in? If you believe so then you should believe so universally. Don’t say anything about when we had the first Catholic President. Don’t say anything when in the future we have the first Mormon President, the first Asian American President, the first Native American President, the first Hispanic President, the first Female President, the first Gay President. Don’t say anything. Ignore the oldest president ever elected or the youngest president ever elected. Don’t make note of it. Same with every other position of significance. After all firsts don’t matter.

But if you’re like me, and you think that just maybe saying something is a first doesn’t make you a racist prejudce bastard, maybe you’ll take the time out to actually cheer along side the people who says “YES! We have a President who is NOT a white protestant male, a black man of mixed heritage whose father wasn’t even born in the United States.” That’s a significant set of firsts. Why not praise him for it?

And remember this is the highest office in our Country, possibly the world at this time. If there is such a thing as Historic First, then I can’t think of anything more fitting. If you believe in praising firsts at all, then I think it just makes sense to proclaim Obama as the first Black President. And yes. That IS something to praise.

Maybe you are just annoyed with how excited black people are about it. You think maybe they should exercise a little bit of restraint. Maybe you think weeping openly about it is just being overdramatic and that it’s all just blown way out of proportion for the scale of this first. You think, it’s not THAT significant.

But here’s the thing, who are you to say how significant it ought to be to someone else!?!? When we have an Asian American President or a Hispanic American President will you go into their communities and tell them “don’t you go over board, this is NO BIG DEAL.”? But it really WOULD be a big deal to them. Why such bitter dislike of that proposition?

Try and understand why this is a big deal to black people. Really think about it. Most of the black people you know can tell you stories of their parents facing real significant prejudice. Most you know can tell you stories of their grandparents having to take crap jobs, devoid of opportunity, unable to go to the same restrooms as white people, actively prevented from voting. Treated like they were nothing. Many others have stories of lynchings, of beatings, of Black people being shot and murdered and the crimes being univestigated. Stories of Police killing black people. Stories of black people arrested and held without trial or locked away by white juries only to discover dozens of years later that they never commited the crimes in the first place. It’s not too far back in the minds of some of a time when blacks were in chains and under the dominion of the whip. In more recent years there is a history of gang violence, a history of drug excess, a history of a large and growing black/white achievement gap.

50 years is not a long time you know. It really isn’t a long time at all.

Yet a Black President happened. Every older black person I’ve ever met has said something along the lines of “I never thought this day would come.”  And you want to say they shouldn’t think it’s SIGNIFICANT? You want to tell these people who fought and bled for this day that they shouldn’t CELEBRATE? That it’s NO BIG DEAL? Give me a break. To them it IS a BIG DEAL. Perhaps the BIGGEST DEAL in their lifetime.  And yes, that really is because of the color of his skin. Because of his heritage. They had good reason to believe it was impossible.  But the people of the United States surprised them. Let them be happy about it. After all THEY ARE PRAISING YOU. They are praising all of us for being able to look beyond race. Why not let them?

But perhaps you think there’s a point where praise and celebration turns the line and represents some sort of more sinister kind of Racism. I can see two possible arguments for that.  The first argument might go like this:

“It isn’t that people are referencing President Obama being Black, it’s that that’s ALL people talk about. They talk about it as if Obama’s being black is the only thing that matters.“

It’s an interesting argument but it falls down under empirical observation. Honestly I can’t find A SINGLE CASE of someone in the media referencing Obama’s skincolor as the only thing that matters. Not one. I’ve been listening to the new. Watching the news. Reading hundreds of blogs. But never have I seen this. Usually people reference his skin color first, sure, and maybe you stopped reading or listening to rest of the broadcast after that, but generally people talk about the issues, about the economy, about what Obama is going to do. They also talk about much stupider stuff like what Obama is going to wear, and how much kids look up to Obama, and how long it will take to Obamas to move in.  People talk about all kinds of stuff with regards to Barack Obama. His race and what it means to black people and minorities and non-minorities to have the first black President is certainly a part of the stories, but it is not the exclusive story. Not by a long shot.

The second argument  might go like this:

“It isn’t that people reference that Obama’s skin color is the only thing that matters, it’s that people talk as if Obama will be successful because he is the first Black President“

This, I would say is possibly even dumber except that I have heard stories of people who talk like this. They sound like really incredibly isolated incidents of certain enthusiastic black people’s words interpreted by the listener. Presumably the black people say something like “Obama will be a good President because he’s ‘one of us’”.  And yeah, on some obvious level that is ridiculous. Being Black alone doesn’t impart unto Obama any kind of magical powers to fix the world. Neither does being tall or charismatic or a good speaker give him that ability. There’s no way to know what kind of President he will be right now so yeah you can say those people, anyone, who proclaim his certain success right now is being a fool and all the more a fool if they say he will be successful because he is black.

Still, in the media this is a rare to non-existent perspective. Seriously no serious Journalist would make such an elementary miss-judgment of reasoning. Words taken out of context might incorrectly suggest that, but most Professional people are too smart to be carried away by the pixie dust view of an Obama Presidency. In fact most real people are that way too. Even the most uneducated.

No… This is not a case of stupidity. Rather it is a case of misinterpretation. When someone proclaims that Obama is going to be a great President they are not asserting an absolute truism that much come to pass.  Not at all. Instead they are stating their HOPE.  That is they WANT Obama to succeed so they say he will. That’s not uncommon in politics or anything else. It’s no different from rooting for your team in a sporting event. And sure there’s a lot of silly superstition related to such things, as if saying Obama will fail will JINX his administration just like saying the same thing for a sports team might, but most people if you press them on it will tell you outright that they don’t think Obama is the Messiah and that they know he’s a normal fallible man. It’s just that they WANT to believe in him. Is that so wrong!?!?

But it’s the racial component! The racial component! You proclaim. Again I have to ask you to re-examine your opposition. You think that these people are saying that being Black makes Obama Great. And you’re right that IS Prejudice. It’s exactly the same as saying if he were White he wouldn’t be as Great. And that’s almost exactly like saying that White people are lesser kinds of people than Black people. The exact opposite proposition as those who have proclaimed that Black people are lesser kinds of people than White people throughout history.

Oh sure there are certainly cases of Black Prejudice toward whites, hispanics, and other groups. There have even been hate crimes perpetrated in that direction (not nearly as many as are STILL perpetrated against blacks by whites according to the statistics). So maybe there are some black people who really do mean it that way (generally though black-prejudice against whites tends to center around an idea that whites are less moral than blacks, not less capable or less intelligent).

But most I think are just expressing a different kind of HOPE. It’s not a hope that the color of Obama’s skin will give him magical “fix-it” powers, but a hope that the experiences he’s had, of being a member of the minority in America, of being mixed, of being looked at as different, of having to figure out who he was and what is place was in the world, of not being born into wealth and of having to work himself up through the ranks to become President, will give him a UNIQUE perspective.

For people who have experienced things like this, they want to believe that Obama is more “one of us” than not. They want to believe that Obama will understand the minority plight and the plight of disadvantaged and understand in such a fundamental way that he’ll be able to do what is necessary to help people. To help heal the wounds and close the divides that separate us as a people.  To get people to get along, to have opportunities, to be able to succeed. And people believe that he will be more likely to be able to do this because he grew up Black and all that that in their minds entails.

——

There’s just this fundamental disconnect in these kinds of discourses.  Some people seem to really believe in a world where racial difference doesn’t exist. A world where history is forgotten and ignored and never remembered. For them that’s their paradise. In their minds that’s the only way Racism and Prejudice will ever disappear. That’s their idealism.

My idealism is different. I see a world where difference isn’t gone but right there will us, all the time. A world where we recognize and acknowledge and accept our differences but still treat each other FAIRLY and with RESPECT. I believe that should be the dream.  Or differences can be beautiful. We can learn from them. We can grow from acknowledging them. We should let ourselves grow by taking in everyone exactly as they choose to be.

The dream should not be one where Black people see a black President and *shrug*, and refuse to even mention the fact that he’s black. But a world where black people and white people and people of all races and persuasions accept and praise a Black President in exactly the same way that they might a White President or a president of any othe race that they respect while also acknowledging that he IS Black and that he has a history and a tradition related to that and a perspective informed by that aspect of his character. You can support him because of those aspect or reject him because of those traditions and neither should be seen as wrong. The only thing that should be rejected is treating him direspectfully or unfairly because of the color of his skin.

Because differences DO MATTER. And so do firsts. They do to me.

I’ll put my cynicism aside. I’ll set aside my doubts, my fears that this guy can’t possibly live up to the absurd expectation of his fans or the legacy he is supposed to fulfill. I’ll even set aside my disgust at the dark places in the world, the crises that go unanswered and ignored. I’ll even stop thinking that the human race is standing on the edge of a precipice with doom just lying on the horizon.

I’ll put all that aside. Just for today. I’ll try to have *hope* as Obama says we should. I’ll believe in change, no matter how unlikely it seems. And I’ll let people celebrate. Cheer. Hope. Have fun! Enjoy the inauguration. Believe in America. Believe in humanity.  Go ahead. 

Let today be a triumph for race relations, a triumph for foreign policy, a triumph for economic equity, a triumph for democratic principles. Let’s pretend it is so at least even if we have our doubts. Let us think that today is a day of wonder and a day of joy.

So go ahead. Party on! Have fun on this Inauguration day.

But just remember. No matter what happens today, Tomorrow will be just another day.

I’m gonna be unsubscribing to pretty much all of my subscription list. Please do not be offended if I unsubscribe to you and feel free to friend me if we are not already friends. I am doing this because my subscription list has grown so large that I’ve been missing important posts from some of my closest xanga friends and real life friends. That’s no good.

Something quick since I don’t have time to write a full  entry today.

There’s this really bad argument I’ve heard a lot in my life and weirdly more often now than in the past. It goes like this: “Programs that promote equality are sutpid because there is NO SUCH THING AS EQUALITY. People are naturally different… blah blah blah… something about genetics…. blah blah blah… maximizing society by developing skills and talents… etc. etc.”

The argument is usually leveled at things like Welfare programs, affirmative action, medicaid, aide to foreign countries, or anything that actually helps someone in this sad messed up world we have.

It’s so STUPID.

There’s such an insane disconnect here. They are using equality as in being identical to state a tautology and then using that as “proof” that programs that use the term equality in an entirely different sense are wrong.  OF COURSE THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS EQUALITY. Nobody in their right minds promotes Equality. If you mean by that sameness, identicality, 1=1, equality, you’d have to be brain dead or flat out evil to promote it.  Indeed I find it hard to imagine what kind of a system WOULD promote equality?  I think it would entail like giving mandatory labotomies to the top 49% of the population intelligence-wise and execution of hte bottom 49%.  And who knows what for physical capacities.

But welfare systems and all the rest were never ever meant to be vehicles to promote equality in the sense of sameness. They promote what pretty much everyone who isn’t a self-serving sonofabitch or completel deluded moron understands that people mean when they say they are fighting for “equality:. Fairness. Fairness is not about exactly identical circumstances or exactly identical anything. It’s about giving everyone the same rules. As long as those rules are fairly applied and all are aware of them, it’s perfectly fair for a person to not fall under the jurisdiction of a certain rule. That doesn’t make something unfair.

Think about it this way, if in playing a Chess tournament or any other game, we give everyone who loses a certain amount against higher ranked players a handicap, that’s not done to make them “equals” of you, that’s just done to make it so that all players can enjoy the game.  But fairness doctrine isn’t even about giving out that handicap. It’s about giving it out fairly to EVERYONE who loses at the same ratio against the same ranked players. That’s fair. If you give the handicap out to only a few players and not others, that’s wrong. That’s all most of these programs try to do. They level the playing field.

So whether you think these programs are Just or Not is one question. But arguing that they are unjust because equality is sameness and that’s evil is just BULL. Don’t waste my time with that crap argument.

That is the only word that comes to mind when I think about the current crises in Gaza.  Between December 27, 2008 and January 14, 2009,   1013 Palestinians have died, 4,560 have been injured.  This is compared to a whopping 13 Israeli dead and 138 wounded.  Of the 1013 Palestinians who have died at least 670 were civilians. At least 311 were CHILDREN!

Let you think that the “Rockets” fired into Israel somehow make up for this, think again. In the entire month of December, the number of Israeli killed by Palestinians in Israel was a whole 4. (1 soldier, 3 civilians) That’s right. 4. During the same month, 465 Palestinians have been killed by Israelis in Gaza. Think the historical record would show better? Nope. Just between 2005 and 2007, a mere 11 Israeli have died to rockets. During the same period, 1,290 Palestinians have been killed by the IDF in Gaza. 222 of which were children.

Israel claims to be doing all they can to prevent civilian casualties… and yet we hear reports of them firing into Schools housing refugees, into hospitals caring for the injured, shelling media towers that report the information on the ground, and attacking the United Nations buildings setup within Gaza. It’s not like they don’t know these places are there. These attacks are unforgivable. They should be condemned by *everyone* around the world. And yet they go barely commented upon in the US media.

We can bicker for a long time about the history of the Israelis and the Palestinians. Who broke what agreements. Who has the right to the land. Etc. Etc.  But we should all agree one one fundamental essential principal. THIS level of violence MUST STOP. It’s Unacceptable. It’s intolerable. This is a matter of basic simple morality. Israel must STOP.

They are calling this the Gaza Massacre throughout the Arab world. Massacre. And if only it were only just killing. Gaza only receives 28% of the Aid supplies the people depend on for basic survival that they got before Hamas was elected. 37% of the workers in Gaza are unemployed. The people there simply have no choice but to fight or wait to die.

There is this groteque sickening notion that absolutely anything can be justified by calling your enemies the dreaded word “Terrorist”. It’s like since Gaza is lead by Hamas we no longer even consider any of the people of Gaza to be human. Their deaths don’t count. We paint them all as guilty as the people who fired the rockets. And that’s just sick. Make no mistake, NONE OF THE 311 CHILDREN WHO WERE KILLED WERE TERRORISTS! Even if Hamas was strapping bombs to their chest and pushing them out there (which they WEREN’T, there’s been no reports that I’ve seen of Hamas using children to fight for them) they still wouldn’t deserve their fate.

This SHOULD be THE news of the day. The world should be protesting. Not just the Arab world. Not just the UN. The ENTIRE WORLD. Obama should make an unequivocal public DEMAND that Israel stop the war backed by the full force of the United States Military and supported by virtually every nation in the world. Instead we have the Palestinian Prime Minister boasting about how he has President Bush wrapped around his little finger and a nation preoccupied with a big stupidly extravagant Inauguration Party most of which don’t even realize that anything is happening in that part of the world or probably wouldn’t care even if you told them. To them, it’s “Just another Middle East Conflict”.

In a world that made sense, Xanga would be litered with blogs condemning or at least DISCUSSING this conflict. But I have seen none. We care a thousand times more about debating trivial changes to the Xanga User Interface or meaningless rants about age-old unaswerable questions about religion than we do about a real life massacre unfolding before our eyes.

I don’t usually ask this, but if you care about this issue at all, please recommend this post. Star this post. Promote this post. Or please by all means study the facts and then write your own post about it.  And then let’s all star and recommend those posts too. Let’s Start talking about THIS. Let’s start debating it. This is Important. It really is.

For how can we ever expect to have peace in that part of the world, if we treat their tragedies and their wars as if they aren’t even worth a smidgen of our attention?

Several proposals have surfaced that attempt to gain control of what people perceive as a marked increase in the amount of timestamping Xangans have been doing. In case anyone doesn’t know, that’s the process of updating a entry to the current datetime by editing an existing post and clicking edit under Time and then clicking the hyperlink that appears saying “Update to current time”.

Two classes of proposals seem to have the most momentum. They are, proposals to eliminate the timestamping feature, and proposals to create some kind of additional cost to timestamping.  So far the extra cost idea has been mainly talked about in terms of a credit cost, but we can easily imagine the price being set through some other kind of xangan currency such as comments or reputation.

I think both approaches are terrible ideas. Not in so far as they do nothing to correct the problem, but in so far as they do worse than correct the problem. They make matters worse.

This may be a case where the Xanga “government” hits the wall of over-regulation of the private industry of the blogging industries it polices. And we know, that too much inefficient government interference can have a devastating effect on economies around the world. Most notably in terms of tarrifs and trade barriers prolonging and extenuating international wealth disparities. Whether Xanga bans or taxes timestamping it will have much the same effect as such efforts would in the international community. It will drive people out of the economy and at the same time it will create a black market for it.

By driving people out I mean this. If you are restricting a feature of Xanga or making it cost more you are creating a competitive incentive for an alternative business to undercut you by providing that feature for free. If people feel they lack the effective tools to advertise their blogs within the Xangan landscape they have every incentive to look for a blogging platform that enables them to advertise more effectively, increase their traffic and their reach.

Sure Xangan loyalists will stick with Xanga, but on the margins you’ll see resource flight. Talented bloggers may well find it in their interest to look elsewhere to blog. 

There’s just a fundamental disconnect here. If your goal is making more people use Xanga, adding a Tax on existing Xanga features is the absolute WRONG strategy. If anything you want to create more incentive to move to Xanga, not incentives to leave. If anything Xanga should either increase the amount of credits people get or give them more things to buy with credits increasing their relative market value or preferably BOTH.

The blank market issue is perhaps even more devastating.  To a certain extent this whole issue is kind of about Plugz. What do I mean? Well Xangans have an arsenal of resources to try and float their blog in front of the Xangan public to increase views on any particular blog entry. These include, tagging, mass messages, timestamping, posting to blogrings,  the process of leaving multiple comments or footprints on lots of peoples blogs (often called comment whoring), asking for recommendations, self-starring, and plugz. These are the methods Xangans have direct control over. Plugz is one of the very best of these. The problem is plugz costs money. Every other method is free.

The issue here is that if there is a stigma about timestamping, then the person who timestamps can achieve an approximation of the phenomenon of a plugz by repeatedly timestamping.  It can have much the same effect. For free. As long as you are in the minority of the timestampers for whatever reason, you will radically increase visibility if you timestamp. And it’s one of the easiest ways to do that. Much easier than setting up a plugz in fact.

So the idea of charging people for timestamping is that it will in effect equalize the playing field. No more free rides as it were.  If it costs to plugz, it should cost to timestamp too. This will presumably increase the usage of plugz meaning more credits are spent, and ultimately credits translate into money for Xanga.

But here’s the problem. Timestamping isn’t like plugz.  If whatever pressuring are pushing people to use timestamping to compete for viewership aren’t reduced, people will ignore any legislation placed on timestamping. At least the unscrupulous or the desperate amongst us will.  And it is in fact trivially easy to do that.

First you can increase your usage of any of the other free means of advertisement. That means more tagging, more comment whoring, more mass messages saying to read your blog and pulses pointing out a particular blog entry, etc.

Second it is in fact trivially easy to “timestamp” without clicking a “timestamp” button.  You can use future or past posting to specify the exact time. Or maybe just a bit in the future. Even if you make this cost more or ban it as well (not sure how you’d do that short of disabling the feature altogether), you can always just REPOST an entry. Copying and pasting isn’t hard. Admittedly doing that has a disadvantage of splitting up your comments and your recommends and stars. But for many this will still be better than nothing.

Think about it. If you ban timestamping, if it’s important to people, they will either enter try to substitute for it, or will jump ship on Xanga entirely. If you add a tax on timestamping, and it’s important to people, either you tax a little in which case it has no appreciable effect on the amount of timestamping, or or you tax it a LOT in which case it’s effectively similar to banning it. Again, people substitute for it. If timestamping doesn’t matter to people that much, why are we wasting all this time and effort talking about it in the first place?

This is not of course a guaranteed analysis. Since this kind of market doesn’t exist anywhere else, we don’t have empirical evidence to back it up. It’s possible the very fact that timestamping is taxed or banned will increase the stigma against it and make people use it less even if that means less traffic for their sites. I personally highly doubt that.  People are far too selfish.

So what I see happening is a slippery slope. After the timestamp complaint is “rectified” by adding an extra price, the mass messages and tagging will grow out of control and people will complain to see an end to that. A price will be put on that and then people will try  pseudo-timestamping. Then, if draconian methods are put into place to curb that too, people will get discouraged. Over time they’ll use xanga proper less and less since they can’t seem to get appreciable traffic from it. Maybe they’ll focus on the xangan-subsites. I don’t know.

Even if my predictions prove to be false, I still have a philosophical objection to this kind of a tax. I honestly think it’s a matter of freedom. It’s always better to preserve freedoms wherever possible rather than inhibit them.

Let’s not legislate timestamping. Let’s talk more in depth about what has caused the increase in timestamping and why people dislike it so much. Then let’s figure out togther what kinds of REAL changes we can make to make both of these situations better.  It may be more challenging than just slapping on a timestamping tax, but in the long run I believe it will be far more effective at improving Xanga as a whole.

What do you think?

Sometimes I wonder…

If we aren’t doing something, anything, that helps or saves at least someone or something, what is the purpose of our existence? Are we wasting our lives?  What right do we have to exist if we don’t at least try to do something to make things better for others?

There’s a bully in the playground. He says he owns the playground. You get to play in one pitiful corner of the playground with one swing and a rundown slide but only for two hours each day. 

Then over time the bully reduces the time frame. It become 1 hours 55 minutes, then 1 hours 50 minutes. One day he even takes away your swing leaving you with just the slide. You complain, of course. You say we had a deal didn’t we? But the Bully laughs at you and beats the crap out of you when you do.

1 hours, 40 minutes. 1 hours, 30 minutes.

So you try to get the support of your fellow playground dwellers an you start saying “The Bully has NO Right to be in this playground!”, “The Bully should not exist here!”  “We have to fight back!” Many support you. Many hate you. But what can you do? If you don’t fight back soon you fear you won’t have a playground left to play in at all!

Soon you end up going on a crusade against the bully. You play pranks on him. Sneak dirt in his drink, tie his shoe laces together. You try to sabotage his games. Some of your pranks are dangerous and cause serious brusies but nowhere near the damage that you take when he beats the crap out of you. You do all kinds of various things that annoy the hell out of him, but nothing that comes anywhere close to actually stopping him. But you do it all the while continuing your taunting. Every few weeks the bully catches you and beats the crap out of you demanding that you stop your tricks. But it doesn’t stop you.

After a while, the opinion of your fellow kids starts to turn a bit in your favor, thanks you presume, to your pranks and your rants and speeches. And that worries the Bully. So the Bully switches strategy. He starts painting YOU as the bad guy. Here’s how he does it.

He starts off by saying “Listen everyone. We have to learn to share the playground.  Let’s all stop fighting and playing tricks on each other and sit down and talk about how we want to split up the playground. Already I’ve been willing to let the kid have a section of the playground for 1 whole hour and 15 minutes every day. If we sit down and talk surely we can come up with a reasonable balance.”

Everyone nods sagely listening to the bully as if he were the most reasonable person in the world.  You, however, know he’s full of crap so you continue your pranks and your speeches, trying to get support against the Bully.  That’s when the Bully pounces!

“Look at him!”, the bully says. “Now, I as much as anyone want the playground to be at peace. However, how can I do that if he won’t talk to me.”

You say “Sure I’ll talk. I’ve always been willing to talk.”

But the bully says “No you’re not! All you want to do is play pranks on me! All you do is say that I have to leave the playground and that I have no right to be here at all! How can I talk with you under those conditions?”

The crowd of kids, tricked, nods in agreement.

You say: “No, really, I’ll talk. Let’s talk. I think it’s fair that we split the playground in half. And we can each spend equal amounts of time in our respective halfs.”

But the bully steadfastly ignores you. Instead he makes a demand of you:

“You *must* swear never to play a prank on me again! Renounce pranking or fighting or any other form of violence altogether, and declare unequivocally that I have a right to the playground! If you do that, then we’ll talk.”

The day after he says this, the bully beats the crap out of you.  And the amoutn of time you can spend in the playground is reduce to 1 hour, then 45 minutes.  So you keep up your retaliatory violence and keep saying the bully HAS TO GO.  Every day you do minor annoying pranks to the bully. Every month or so the bully beats the crap out of it. Only now everytime he does, he says he’s ONLY doing it in order to prevent your cruel terrorizing pranks.

What would you do in such a situation? Do you give into his demands and “say” you renounce violence? Even at the same time that the bully commits extroardinarily worse violence against you? Do you give into his demands to acknowledge his right to the playground in spite of the fact that he’s made your life a miserable Hell so far?

And let’s take a step back here. He’s asking you for *words* whereas you are complaining about his real devastating *actions*.  Don’t you have freedom of speech to say whatever you want? Why can’t you *say* you want the bully gone? That surely causes no harm. It’s if you DO something immoral to get rid of the bully that should be rejected. Obviously your pranks are wrong and should stop, but how is it fair that you stop your pranks when the bully continues to beat the crap out of you regularly? Why doesn’t the BULLY have to renounce violence and make an oath never to reduce the time you can spend in the playground or the space you have to play any further as well as not to beat you up anymore?  Why is all the onus placed on you?

It makes NO SENSE WHATSOEVER. That’s why.   What would a sensible scenario look like? What would be fair?

Well for starters the bully should stfu about *words*  and worry about actions. There should be fundamental rules of the playground that all actors must abide by, including you AND the bully equally. These rules are about actions not words. The actions that are illegal would include beating the crap out of a fellow playgrounder, or playing pranks on another playgrounder, as well as monopolizing the playground’s time or space unfairly. Whenever either actor violates these rules they should be stopped, tried in a court of their fellow children, and if found guilty punished. Severely if necessary.  That would make sense. Any idiot can see that.

But of course it doesn’t work that way right now. Not in Palestine.