I’ve explored many different genres of music over the past couple of years trying to decide what my favorite was. I’d like to announce that I’ve finally come to a conclusion. I now have a favorite genre of music.  To put it simply:

I likey the silly music.

What do I mean?  Well let’s show some examples.

Continue reading →

This is a really interesting video:

Amy Goodman – GreenFest ’10 from ShantyMinister on Vimeo.

It’s unclear what defines a friend, but one thing that is absolutely certain is that this thing we call “friend” on social networks like facebook, myspace, and xanga is radically different from what we have generally considered the word “friend” to mean.

An interesting presentation of this rather obvious fact comes in what’s being call a “social experiment” that’s been getting a lot of press lately called the Kin project.  I put “social experiment” in quotes because it’s more of an advertising stunt (albeit a brilliant one) for Microsoft and Verizon’s new phone called the Kin than an experiment. But nevertheless it is interesting. Basically the idea is that a girl was chosen to go around the country and try and meet some of the 800+ people listed as her friends on Facebook. Then they are filming the interactions and editing them down into short webisodes to create a kind of reality show. http://www.youtube.com/KIN

The way they are billing it is that she is going to find out if her friends are really her friends.

But isn’t that a strange characterization?

Back in the old days I tried to keep my facebook list reserved to people I really knew and knew at least well. That is, people that I might consider friends or family. But it quickly grew into people that I had just met once or people who I attended an event with or took a class with or people who had just read my writing and requested that they friend me. Then I got involved in Facebook gaming and the list grew out of control. But even if we disregard that last, I wouldn’t consider most of the people I link to on Facebook friends. I never thought of clicking the “friend” link as making a new friend or even marking an existing friendship.

Xanga is the same. That I “friend” someone is more of a matter of I want to see their posts and recommendations pop up in my universal feed so that I might consider reading them sometimes. It was never really a strong marker of friendship. I always imagined that those who were “friending” me felt pretty much the same. Leastwise you’d expect that if someone sent a friend request because they wanted to really BE friends they’d I dunno, send you message? Try to interact with you in some kind of meaningful way?  But by and large most don’t.

I used to actually do that when I found someone’s blog that I thought would make an interesting person to become a real friend of.  Now I don’t. I’ve discovered that people are really super cautious and un-trusting of attempts to forge connection. People are quick to assume the worst of new acquaintances and I think people like the distance provided by the loose connection of the reader/writer relationship. That doesn’t bother me. But it certainly seems evidence that most people like me see the “friending” button as nothing more than describing a technical relationship in terms of how the software manages visibility of content. So strong is that implicit understanding that people are shocked or surprised when someone reaches outside of that norm to try to forge a real connection. So our shields come up quickly, just as they would if a stranger came up to you on the street.

From this we can conclude that in the online world, the word “friend” no more means an actual friendship than the word “folder” represents an actual folder.  (and no doubt one day people will forget that there was once a physical object called a folder)

Which makes me think, okay, let’s say you wanted to judge how sort of “real” your friend list connections was. Are your friends all strangers that have very little chance of becoming real friends with you? Or are most of the people on your friend list pretty close to friends if not actual friends? Can we create a metric for how close the friend list you keep is to what might be considered a real representation of people you are friends with that you are connected to through the platform you are using?

Well one thing we do know for certain is that in order for anyone to even be a candidate friend, there has to be some kind of interaction between you and that person. So perhaps a good first step in such an analysis would be to create an Interaction to Friend Ratio.

To do that, you would go through your friend list on a platform and count the number of people on that list that are people that you at least sometimes interact with in some kind of meaningful way that matters to you either on that platform or on other online or offline platforms, ie via email, IM, twitter, real life, telephone or what have you.  To put a reasonable limit on it, let’s say we will only include people we’ve interacted with in a meaningful way within the last six months. You might object that that, but let’s just use it for simplicity’s sake.

Then of course you divide that by the number of friend connections you have on the network.  That gives you your interaction to friend ratio. Simple.

For me, on Xanga my interaction to friend ratio is:  0.0314. WOW! It’s pi!  No. I’m not making that up. I have 254 friends only 8 of whom I’ve had significant interactions with in the last six months.   On Facebook my ITF is 0.0221. So I’ve interacted with a bit over 2% of my total friends on facebook within the last six months.  That suggests that my Xanga network is slightly more potentially “real” than my Facebook network but not by very much.

It’s an interesting exercise. But I have no idea how to judge whether these are small or high values for the ITF. In order to know that I need to compare them to other people’s ITF and try and see what the average is. For that I need your help.

So what’s your ITF?

Recently there’s been a slew of controversy’s involving Apple.  Amongst them being:
- Their closed App Store where they insist on approving all apps before making them available.
- Their statement of their refusal to allow Flash on iphones and ipads
- Their change in the terms of service to not allow apps that were created using software suites that translate code from any other languages (most notably Flash, but also .Net) into code that will run on the iphone OS.
- The controversy involving the iphone 4G that they lost which was then purchased by Gizmodo which in turn resulted in Apple calling the police which broke into and seized the computers of one of the employees of Gizmodo.

I have mixed feelings about all of these issues, but it’s clear that each of these controversies resulted in many people questioning the morality of these practices. Some argued that they were wrong outright. Others argued that they didn’t have a right to do these things. Still others argued simply that these actions would or could have negative consequences.

But many more came out to defend Apple. And their primary argument as is Apple’s can be summarized thusly: “It’s our platform. We can do what we want. If you don’t like it, use something else.”

Facebook has faced a number of controversies as well. Most of which are surrounding Facebook’s privacy settings. Many complain that Facebook has changed its terms of service continuously in a manner that is disingenuous to its users. Users of Facebook thought they were getting into a private-first social network only to find that the new default has become public-first. This graph illustrates the changes over time.

Those who defend Facebook offer an argument almost identical to the one offered by Apple defenders.  Facebook’s platform is their platform. They can make whatever changes they want to suite their purposes. If people don’t like the new privacy settings they don’t have to use it.

The argument obviously has some kind of compelling force in people’s minds since it’s invoked perpetually whenever there is a moral conflict involved with a company’s behaviors. I think it invokes our overall sense of the importance of individual freedom. Human beings don’t like being told what to do especially with things that are their own property.  Further it ties right in with that idea of market self-regulation. It’s this idea that people will collectively choose the best outcomes through their actions.

Too bad it’s a nonsense line of argument.

Think about it. This line of argument in no way refutes or counters any of the moral force behind an argument. Something doesn’t become any less wrong because you happen to own the area in which you are doing that wrong thing. Bad consequences don’t disappear just because you own the platform that creates those bad results.  It’s absurd on the surface.

Think about it this way. Imagine if you tried to apply this argument universally. Let’s say for example we applied it with respect to oil companies. If someone said to BP that their poor safety choices on their oil platforms were wrong and could lead to catastrophic consequences, would it be okay to say to that critic something like: “well if people don’t like how we do safety they can buy oil from some other company!”?

Or consider this, today there’s a controversy involving Rand Paul. On the Rachel Maddow show he made an argument that sounds perfectly reasonable. Basically, he argued the libertarian argument that although sure discrimination and segregation are wrong and sure he would be against both, but nonetheless the Civil Rights Act was wrong because government has no right to force businesses not to discriminate.

The idea is pretty similar to the “We Own It” Argument. Basically, business owners can choose to do whatever they want with their businesses, including allow or disallow segregation, because they own it. If users don’t like a business’s policies on segregation they can just show at another business. Right?

Of course had this policy been in place, most scholars believe we’d still have considerable segregation today and it might be another hundred years before we finally stomped it out. The “We Own It” argument must assume that that outcome is right. That that’s a more Just outcome because it adheres to people’s choices and doesn’t impose things upon people. 

But doesn’t it? What about all those people who don’t own businesses and the only businesses near them were places that segregated? What about the people segregated against who had no ability to choose whatsoever?

Imagine if we used the “We Own It” argument with regard to slavery. The logic works exactly the same there too. It could justify keeping slaves, abusing slaves, mutilating slaves. The slave owner could argue “what right do YOU have to tell ME what I can do with MY property! If you don’t like it, get your own slaves and treat them better or hire employees or do whatever you want.”   Or a slave owner who runs a plantation could say “well if you don’t like how I run my plantation, buy crops from someone else.”

These kinds of arguments sound so reasonable but under any kind of close analysis they fall apart. “Owning” something does not grant you universal exclusive inalienable rights to the things you own. Many things individuals own have consequences that reach far beyond the thing itself. And you can’t abrogate all responsibility for those consequences just because if things get really bad there’s a chance that market forces might force you to change your policy.

It seems utterly obvious to me that to answer moral objections to your actions you have to actually answer those objections. You have to show why the things they are saying aren’t as bad as they are saying they are or why they should not be objectionable.

If there’s a moral ambiguity about something, the market might or might not show us where society stands on the moral issue. But it can’t show you what is actually right or wrong. For that we actually have to think.

Note that this is entirely different from the legal question. I don’t believe the law should be over zealous in policing companies on the mere rumor or speculation that something might be dangerous. There should be a clear and present danger that effects a substantial number of people before we should change laws in ways that might negatively effect businesses. Because otherwise you risk creating really specialized laws to work against particular companies choices and those laws themselves can have numerous negative unintended consequences. If that’s your argument then I am highly sympathetic. But a sober honest assessment of that fact alone should not be enough to justify entirely ignoring a moral argument in favor of business autonomy.

So the other day I heard a story about a company that got into some serious trouble. The whole web society came down on them like a ton of bricks and rightfully so. Their crime? They created an aggregation service that took the full content from blogs and websites across the web displayed them in full on their site.

Clearly this is horrible.  I mean, that company was effectively stealing other people’s content and using it to expand their own advertising revenue! Plagiarism!  Piracy!! Never mind that full attribution was given to the original content producer and a link was posted back to the originator’s site. Small consolation for the writer who has their words cruelly seized by a vile company that has no sense of basic web ethics!

The company changed its tune and made it so that only excerpts of the original works appeared in the aggregation and that the link back to the original site was made bigger and bolder and more visible. This, the web powers that be, grudgingly decided was acceptable.

But should they have? Actually Google got into trouble for the same thing and still gets a lot of heat over its Google News service which provides excerpts and its Book scanning project which only provides excerpts when the copyright status cannot be determined.  Both are examples of content theft to enrich Google’s coffers. The fact that the company restricted their theft to “mere” excerpts shouldn’t immunize them from critique.

And that brings me to twitter! Really, how horrible is twitter with regard to this? Every single time someone Re-tweets a tweet aren’t they doing exactly the same thing? The re-tweet is taking someone’s original copyrighted material, copying it to your own feed, and spreading it amongst your own followers. Doing so increases the value of your twitter account. If you then have other links on your twitter to resources that earn you revenue, it could easily be said that you are stealing that person’s content for your own gain. DESPICABLE!

Some say, “oh chill out! It’s just 140 characters”. But what difference does its small size really make? Someone could easily come up with a really awesome, incredibly entertaining statement in 140 characters. Something of extreme popularity that just naturally draws in lots of new viewers and followers wherever it is posted. Not only that someone could make a tweet that reveals some kind of deep original thought, a new invention or a new idea. For example, suppose Einstein had tweeted out E=mc2 back when he was first thinking about it. Is it not conceivable that someone could retweet it and then beat Einstein to the punch in writing an awesome physics paper showing how it works and then proclaim that they were simply “inspired” by Einstein’s tweet but that they did all the real hard work to prove it true?  Surely in such a situation, the retweeter did Einstein a grave wrong by stealing and re-tweeting Einstein’s original content.

Following this logic to the natural conclusion we cannot help but draw the conclusion that Twitter inherently promotes piracy and plagiarism in its users. Every single RT or MT is an act of grotesque piracy. We should send DMCA take down notices to all of them.  Worse, when Twitter created the Retweet button they became not just piracy and plagiarism promoters but also enablers. Their platform became a tool for piracy and should be shutdown on those grounds in exactly the same way Napster was shutdown by enabling its users to pirate music mp3s.

By our great and all perfect and flawless 21st century legal theories of copyright it’s clear what must be done. Twitter must immediately remove the retweet button. Further them must remove any Retweet not done with the original tweeter’s explicit permission given prior to the retweet.  Lastly twitter must compensate tweeters for their stolen tweets using whatever advertising revenue they’ve obtained from the twitter service.

I can’t see how anyone could possibly see things differently.

Generally, there is broad agreement inside and outside of the political arena that our Government is fundamentally broken. Part of that is probably just the general sense in which every generation yearns to make things better and tends to see the worst in things.  But part of that is also I think a correct assessment that our political system has gone wildly off track and no longer seems capable of solving the big major problems of our day. 

There’s general agreement that the last decade or two has had a plethora of serious problems that we’ve had to deal with. Amongst these include:
- Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
- Illegal Immigration
- Foreclosure Crises
- Global Warming and Climate Change
- Terrorism
- Lagging behind other countries in Education
- Lagging behind other countries in Internet Access and Speed
- An extraordinarily expensive Health Care system
- A Global Financial Crises
- Runaway Derivative Trading
- Nuclear Proliferation
- Growing gap in income and wealth and income between the rich and the poor
- Dependence on Foreign Energy
- Risks of instability resulting from global poverty, water, and food shortages
- Growing individual and government level debt
- Excessive incarceration and the failing Drug War
- Increasing ill health and obesity
- Hurricanes like Katrina
- Earthquakes like the massive one in Haiti
- The Golf Oil Spill
- The threat of flu pandemics like hte Swin Flue

I could go on and on. Most of these problems aren’t specifically caused by government. It might not even be anyone’s fault. It could easily be that we are just living in a time when social and economic problems are growing at a faster rate than our old form government can handle thanks to our growth in population and technological advancement. We might just be facing larger problems than ever before in human history.  Or it might be that we’ve just become lost and forgotten how to go about dealing with and preventing big problems like we knew how to do in ages past. But regardless of why there’s so many problems these days, there’s little doubt that they exist. And there’s less doubt that we need a government that functions far more effectively than the one we have in order to deal with them.

Meanwhile, we hear of scandal after scandal after scandal. Some big, some small, but ranging from every level of government from the local to the Presidential. It often seems that not only is our government not capable of solving our problems, it’s not even trying. Major figures seem more embroiled in their own internal sex scandals and political games and posing for the press and trying to earn a quick buck.

And then on top of all that in the news people experience their own personal crisis. Suddenly there’s a medical emergency, or a job that screws them out of their pensions, or a sudden bout of unemployment, or an injury that forces early retirement, or a death in the family, etc. etc. and they find that there’s just not any help for them. They see their investments vanishing into thin air and their homes getting foreclosed on and their neighborhoods falling apart because the State they live in is too poor to afford to pave the roads anymore. 

So yeah given all that, there’s pretty universal agreement that our government is broken and that we desperately need to get it fixed. But that’s as far as the agreement goes. We agree that we need better government: less broken, more effective. But we don’t agree on how broken the government is. We don’t agree on whose fault it is that the government is broken. And we don’t agree on how to go about fixing the broken government. We don’t even agree on what language to use to describe the ways in which our government is broken.

But I think we can make significant progress on establishing some sort of unity here if we were to simply try to come up with a shared understanding of what the CORE problems are with our government.  There’s no way we’ll ever agree on every problem and every nuance of every problem and how best to solve them. But perhaps we can get to the heart of the deepest faults that have the greatest influence on why government so frequently of late has failed to live up to its over inflated promises. Because if we can establish what those core fundamental issues are, then we can solve them first and then move on to solving the rest of our problems with a government that is at least basically functional, trustworthy, and responsive to the wishes and desires of its people. Government might still screw up after that. But then at least we’ll feel as if it’s our shared problem. WE might make a bad decision, sure. But let it be OUR mistake knowingly made that we can correct for. Don’t let it be some sort of accidental problem that arises from a dysfunctional system that we feel like we have no control over.

So there are I think probably four major popular theories that most people see as representing the core problem with government. Let’s explore them each in turn.

The Systemic Theory
The idea is basically that there’s a continuing systemic breakdown in the way government works that is eroding the ability of politicians and bureacrats to trust one another and work together and solve problems. This is the theory most commonly asserted by people actually in politics though they are certainly not the only ones espousing it. Usually adherents to this theory speak about certain methodologies and rules changes and new technologies have fundamentally changed the way politics is played resulting in a more divided society. They will claim that we’re as a society far more ideologically polarized now than ever before and that’s causing politicians to be embroiled in a kinds of rhetoric arms race in order to discredit and attack the other side. Finding “dirt” on one another to increase one’s chances to get elected is more important than actually solving problems and dishonest false statements is just part of how the game is played.

Why do I call this the “systemic” theory? Because at it’s core this about how political systems that have already existed and are part and parcel of how our government are designed are falling apart under the weight of modern sentiment. So, the system of voting for example has always been a part of our system, but recently it’s become a game of voter manipulation more than voter choice. Likewise the fillibuster has been part of our system for many years but now it seems like it’s creating an enormous incentive for obstructionism.

Advocates of the systemic system believe that change can be obtained along two lines.  1. A greater sense and willingness to cooperate amongst politicians. Basically they need to stop worrying about getting elected or their party’s standing and engage in more good faith efforts to get work done.  2. Changing the political rules so that they allow the party in power to govern effectively. e.g. eliminate or weaken the filibuster, change the stranglehold of committee heads on the crafting of legislation, improve the fact checking capacity of the media so as to keep politicians more honest and make attacks less effective, etc.  

The Influence Theory
This theory is probably the most complex because it involves many variations but in many ways it’s also the easiest to understand. The influence theory basically just asserts that there is some force or power that has more influence on what or how political leaders act than the people who elected them. There’s a weaker and a stronger form of this theory. The weaker says that the undo influence creates a conflict of influence that makes it appear as if the politicians aren’t acting in good faith. That erodes the people’s trust in the politicians and the entire system of representative politics. The stronger version accepts that but ALSO asserts that those politicians are actually heavily influenced by the outside force and thus it’s right for the people to lack in trust of them. Even amongst the stronger theory there’s a split between those who see the influenced persons as deliberately knowingly being effected by the one who influences (which starts us to get into the corruption theory, see below), or those who assert that they are unkowingly or unintentionally are effected by the influences sometimes even in very subtle but nevertheless very dangerous ways.

Influence theories have been around a LONG time and the history of them mostly involves differences in what was perceived as the agent causing the influence. So for example in the past people have theorized undo influence from: foreign powers, religions, communists, the rich, the poor, colleges and universities, unions, scientists, big party machines, the mob,  etc. etc. Probably the reason why these various theories proliferate is because there’s generally some truth to it. Lots of things really DO influence people. Our actions are in many ways a product of our many incentives and those are related to the groups we interact with.

However, in recent times, the modern influence theorist proclaims there is a much bigger source of influence that has a far more pervasive and corrosive impact on our politics than any other influence currently facing society. That influence is of course: Concentrated Corporate Power.

Corporate Power influence theorists posit that through the exercise of a lot of money by buying campaign ads, making campaign donations, and employing armies of lobbyists, a few extremely powerful corporations and other wealthy interests are able to effectively buy politicians, buy legislation, and buy reduced regulation that in turn enriches those corporations with more money that they can in turn use to further influence Congress and the President to get there way. What follows is a kind of perversion in the order of things where the Government ends up seeming to serve the corporations more than it serves the people.

All Influence Theorists whatever they believe is causing the influence, tend to think the solutions lie in three areas. 1. Campaign Finance reform. The idea is to create laws that ensure that politicians have to get their money they use to run and the perks they receive, etc. etc. directly from the people. Hence they don’t have an incentive of cowtowing to special interests in order to get re-elected.  2. Transparency. The idea here is that while we can’t always prevent all possible things outside of the people’s will effecting a person’s decision making process, at the very least we should try to make it transparent to people what those things are. Hence if you get a politician doing the will of Exxon mobile in order to get a big fat pay check from them, then well the people can find out about that and replace them with a politician who is not so heavily influenced.  3. Constitutional Protections. There is already precedent. The first amendment offers some significant protection against undo influence from religions. Similarly other constitutionally invested powers could enable Congress to pass laws protecting its own independence from special interests or forbid them from making laws that favor certain special interests or tie the government too special interests. All these things are seen as ways to ensure that the primary and chief constituent of a politician is the person who elected him or her so that that’s for whom said politicians make their decisions.

The Corruption Theory
The corruption theory, is similar to the influence theory, except that it’s a perception from within the institutions of government rather than without.  The corruption theory asserts not that there’s some outside force influencing politicians in general so that they make bad decisions, instead they assert that these particular politicians are themselves simply corrupt. Hence, Washington is broken because it a cess pool of vile and evil corrupt people who simply have no interest in serving the people. They are interested in the power they get from being politics and the money they can obtain from being in politics.

Corruption theorists have a few variations too. There are those who believe that Washington is inherently corrupting. This is sort of the “absolute power corrupts absolutely” idea. Basically those who believe thsi don’t believe that politicians can ever be trusted and that every few years there has to be a turn over in order to get the less corrupt people in there and the more corrupt people out.  There are others who believe that the problem is an erosion of cultural morals within the society as a whole. These people tend to think that there just a core set of “good” people out there and the key to politics is finding those people and putting those in power while avoiding the assholes.  There are others who believe that the problem is in fact a corrupting ideology. That is to say that politicians who believe in a certain kind of politics even if they personally mean well are believing in something that results in them engaging in dangerous destructive practices that will inevitably lead to destruction of our political system and perhaps even our very way of life!  Lastly there are just those who don’t think it’s anything nearly that particularly complicated. It’s just that right now we happened to have picked some bad apples and given them too much power.  Those don’t think there’s any inherent likelihood of that, just that we got unlucky and our current batch of politicians suck.

Corruption theorists present the simplest theory for how to fix the problem.  Vote the bums out. That’s it. The idea is put the people in power who are good trustworthy people with the right ideology and let them stay in place up unti if and when they start to show signs of corruption and then vote them out too.  Corruption theorists will tend to advocate short terms, more elections, and term limits. Corruption theorists are also big on investigations and police action and using the media to root out and find corruption so that corrupt politicians can be tried, expelled, arrested, or impeached.

The Fundamentalist Theory
The fundamentalist theory is the one that I personally have the hardest time wrapping my mind around. But basically the idea is this. Government sucks because government sucks. Here is the idea that it is fundamentally inherent in government that it will always make bad disastrous decisions that hurt people. Government is basically inherently illegitimate and becomes more illegitimate the more power it is authorized to execute and the more people it has sway over.

Fundamentalists see the solution to government’s inability to solve problems is to move the act of solving those problems out of the hands of the government altogether. Whose hands that responsibility goes into determines the difference between different kinds of fundamentalists.  Some, for example believe that the authority should rest in the hands of the smallest government units possible that are thus closer to the people.  Hence, the States should have more authority than the federal government, the counties more authority than the States, the local cities and towns more authority than the counties, and even the individual neighborhoods having more authority than the cities and towns.  The idea for them is that government units have to be as small as possible to be the most responsive to the people. The bigger they are the more likely they are to not represent the will of the people.

Other kinds of fundamentalists think differently though. Individualist fundamentalists think, generally, that government at any level is invalid and that all authority for solving problems should rest in the hands of specific individuals.  The idea here is  that there should be “no free lunch” and that “personal responsibility” needs to be the key principle that drives our actions. 

Lastly there are Capitalist fundamentalists who think authority has to be rested in individuals by virtual of the businesses they run. Competition then is seen as the means through which complex problems are solved. The most extreme version of this is to believe that all authority is better off in the hands of corporations than the government in effect sort of the exact opposite view of Corporate Power Influence theorists.

Regardless of their types, Fundamentalists see the only way to solve problems is to dismantle the mechanisms of government entirely. Lower taxes, fewer services, less regulation.

——————————————–

Those are basically I think the four major theories for why our government sucks.  Generally you’ll see people on the Left leaning more toward the Systemic Theory and the Influence Theory though some on the left also embrace the Corruption Theory to some extent or another.  But you can sort of define the modern Left as those who almost entirely reject the Fundamentalist Theory.  In contrast the Right is pretty much the opposite. The Right is MOST likely to be in favor of the Fundamentalist Theory. By far the second most significant to them is likely to be the Corruption Theory. Quite a large and growing number of people on the Right are embracing sort of their own brand of the Influence Theory though especially amongst the Tea Party. And there are some on the Right who also see Systemic Theory problems with government though generally they don’t think they are core.

We can look at popular figures and we can sort of see where they stand with regard to these theories.

Barack Obama is a pretty core Systemic Theory follower. Though he thinks Influence Theory problems exist, he doesn’t think they are the core of the problems with government. This is apparent in his speeches he’s given in front of or directed toward Republicans where he speaks of how the poisonous politics of the day are preventing Republicans and Democrats from rolling up their sleeves and working together to solve problems.  In fact I would make the argument that most of the leaders in Washington on both sides of the aisles are at least partly Systemic Theorists in terms of what they see as wrong with Washington, though Democrats are much more so than Republicans.

Obama judging by his actions is certainly NOT a Concentrated Corporate Power Influence Theorists (CCPIT?). He doesn’t see that as the core problem because he is willing to negotiate with major power centers in Washington in order to get things done be they banks or pharmaceutical companies or insurance companies or energy companies. That might just be his realism or pragmatism, but it’s certainly the thing that creates the greatest tension between him and most of the Left.

On said Left, you can find numerous examples of Influence Theorists. Generally many of the most famous figures on the Left outside of Washington are Influence Theorists. People like Glenn Greenwald, Larry Lessig, and Noam Chomsky speak persuasively about how corporations have effectively captured our government. Economists like Simon Johnson are asserting the same when they speak of the destructive influence of intellectual capture on politics in Washington and the Banking Industry.  Dick Durbin expressed the core principle of Corporate Power Influence Theorists when in that famous statement of his when trying to cobble together financial reform referring to Congress and the banking interests: “they [the banks] frankly own the place”.

As you can probably guess from reading my blog, I pretty strongly identify with this position. While I think there really are systemic and corruption problems, I think solving the problem of concentrated corporate power’s influence on our government is absolutely 100% essential to making government work effectively for all of us. I think it’s the problem we have to solve first before we can solve any other.

Many famous figures on the Right, most notably Glenn Beck are pretty clearly Corruption Theorists. Glenn Beck believes that the problem with Washington is that we are this slow winding road toward fascism and naziism because our political leaders, mostly the Democrats lead by Barack Obama are hopelessly lost within a fundamentally corrupting ideology of socialism and beliefs like social justice. Beck thinks you can solve everything if you stamp out any trace of any of the people in government who have become infected by this twisted line of thinking.

Most famous Republicans or republican enthusiasts be they Michael Steele or Rush Limbaugh tend to at least seem to be Fundamentalists.  Limbaugh seems to me to be a pretty clear case of pro-corporate Fundamentalism. He’d like to see the powers of government invested in companies to do with as they please and for government to butt out.  The historical classic Fundamentalist at least in rhetoric was Ronald Reagan whose persuasive speeches catapulted the idea that the government is always the problem into a position of national pre-eminence. Though in practice as President he didn’t implement as many fundamentalist policies as most fundamentalists would like.  Ron Paul is a fundamentalist as well though he, like most libertarians are the not capitalist-fundamentalists or corporate-fundamentalists (though they do believe in capitalism)  but more individualist-fundamentalists. An example of an economist fundamentalist would be the much revered Milton Friedman.

OK so now that you understand the four most popular theories of why government is broken, let’s have at it. How can we take what’s true about each of these and throw out what’s false about them to come up with a really good theory of what’s wrong with government that we can ALL get behind.  Is it possible?  Or if you can’t merge them what would you say the order of significance between them? Which of these problems should we tackle first.

Or maybe there’s another theory you think is even more significant than the ones I’ve described. Certainly these aren’t the only possible explanations, they’re just what in my estimation seem to be the most popular. There’s others like the theory of ignorance which would say government doesn’t work because we’re all just too stupid these days or maybe because the problems have become too complex for us to be able to collectively solve. Or there’s the theory of excess democracy that might say that government doesn’t work because it currently is too dependent on popular opinion that pulls it in too many directions at once. Or there’s the theory of lack of social diversity that asserts that Government can’t solve problems because the people in government are not diverse enough to represent the people and hence know what those problems are. Or there’s the theory of lack of skillset diversity that asserts that government’s core problems is that we don’t have enough rational thinking people like Scientists and Engineers and Mathematicians or just people who think in any kind of a different way than the way Lawyers, Professors, Politicians and the occasional Doctor think which is what the bulk of our political class are.

Or there’s the theory of un-representativeness which I find particularly scary. That’s the one where a society starts to think that a government is simply hopelessly unrepresentative of the will of the People because they aren’t “part of us” or “the same as us”. They’re the Other. Maybe they’re taken over by the elites, or maybe be the illegal aliens or maybe by the blacks or the jews or the nazis or the dirty poor or some other crazy nonsense. In anyway the people start to think that the government is just so far removed from what they know and think that participating in the act of politics is a waste of energy and time because it can’t change anything. Generally when that theory becomes pre-eminent you will either get an extreme wave of absolute apathy and disinterest toward politics or you can expect a major uprising of some kind, sometimes leading to revolutions or civil wars and in the worst case genocidal extermination campaigns.

So that’s my thoughts. What’s your theory?  What do you think is the Government’s core Problem that makes it not able to solve the problems that we now face and how can we correct it?

This entry is totally full of spoilers. It references the James Cameron film Avatar and John Green’s novel Looking for Alaska.

You know how everybody knows that your expectations effect how you review a movie? The theory goes that if your expectations are high then the movie you watch will have to meet a higher standard to gain your approval, whereas if your expectations are very low you’ll likely rate a movie that isn’t that great higher. The principle example of this is the reboot of the Star Wars franchise with the prequel episodes I-III. The insanely high expectations of the core group of adamant Star Wars fans totally destroyed any chance of the movies ever meeting those expectations. Hence the most vocal critics of the new Star Wars trilogy are a lot of the people who were most adamantly in favor of the original series.

Similarly, expectations might explain the whole “sequels” phenomenon that causes people to generally judge the second movie in a trilogy worse than the first. I’ve heard many people describe “middle” movies as generally worse in trilogies than the first and last movies.  On the other hand, if viewers see the second movie as a worthy sequel to the first then the third movie in turn tends to take an extreme the ratings dive. The idea is clear. Expectations are set higher on the first movie, making it harder for subsequent movies to measure up. The more successes in a row, the higher and higher expectations are built.

Of course this is all anecdotal. I don’t have any numbers to back up those ratings shifts as a general phenomenon. But I think it’s an idea commonly enough expressed that most of us can at least posit it as possibly true. Certainly there seems to be some kind of relationship between expectations and reviews though that relationship might not be as simple as I’ve expressed here.

Anyway, now back around Christmas time last year I saw the movie Avatar for the first time.  My expectations were more or less average. I had heard some good things about the movie, especially about the “amazing” 3D technology, and I knew it was likely to be one of the top selling movies of all time. But I’d also heard that the plot was fairly simplistic. But as always I tried to go into the movie with as neutral an attitude as I possibly could. I tried to not have out of whack hopes or expectations nor overwhelming cynicism. I really don’t think there was an expectations-bias that influenced my opinion of this film.

But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t biased.

Think about what the existence of an expectations bias really means. It’s saying that how you feel, at the moment when you consume a work of art has a non-negligible influence on what you think is your objective assessment of that art. That is to say when we try to measure the “quality” of anything we are often heavily influenced by whatever emotions we happen to be feeling when we made our determination.

That of course can easily be universalized to apply to emotions more than your emotions like expectations that re related specifically to the art work in question. So yeah if you’re really hyped up and get your hopes dashed when you see a film you might be likely to think it’s a worse movie. But also if you’re just feeling down because you got a phone call just before you went in to see a film telling you that your significant other broke up with you and you lost your job and your house is being foreclosed on, etc. etc. well then you might also think that movie is a worse movie than you otherwise would.

Don’t get me wrong. I understand that people can be aware of these biases and try to correct for them in order to give a truly objective opinion. But it’s unclear whether or not you can ever be completely successful in such an endeavor. The very fact that you were in a certain mood determines what you see and what you remember about a piece of art. Flaws that exist in a film might be more visible and more jarring for you if you’re in a bad mood when you see it, and virtues that exist in a film might stand out better to you if you’re in a good movie.

That makes movie reviewing, or any reviewing process a somewhat questionable process altogether. Can we ever really objectively measure even our own opinions about the art works we experience relative to one another? Or are we all bound by our many very emotional reactions to lots and lots of things that have nothing to do with the art work which we critique? In the worst case, just how you react to the other people in the theater could be more relevant in terms of how you judge a film than the director’s vision.

Of course a natural consequence of this realization is that your interactions with other works of art can also influence your opinion of a piece of art. That is, there can be a kind of artwork clash. You could experience one piece of art, just before experiencing another and that could totally ruin your ability to enjoy the second piece of art or vice-versa.  Don’t believe me? Try watching a movie that you don’t just think is bad, but one you absolutely hate just before you watch a new movie that is highly rated you haven’t seen before. You will have one of two reactions, either you will feel relieved to see the better film and that will make you think higher of it, or you’ll be unable to extricate yourself from the bad mood created by the first film making it impossible for you to enjoy the second film. With such an extreme example, I suspect you will be able to notice your emotional reaction and how it impacts your opinions fairly easily.

All of this might seem like crazy obvious stuff that everybody knows instinctively, but I believe people don’t quite grasp the degree to which this kind of thing might influence your opinions and evaluations.  I didn’t. I mean sure I was aware of the concept, but it wasn’t until I saw Avatar that I had an extremely striking experience with this Art-Clash phenomenon that drove the point home in my mind far harder than it ever had before.

You see, right before I went to see the movie Avatar last year I was reading a book. It was itself a powerful piece of art called Looking for Alaska by famous young adult author John Green.  I’d been reading it for a while somewhat entertained, starting to get a bit bored with it, though obviously intrigued enough to read pretty diligently whenever I could find time to spare.

The book has an interesting time structure to it. The first half of the book counts down to an unknown upcoming event. This encourages you to read more and more to try and get to that event to figure out what the heck the count down was for. The second half then counts up from that event and deals with the aftermath.

Have you noticed in our society that countdown almost invariably mean something bad is going to happen? Nobody ever counts down until moments of joy and happiness or world peace. It’s always like the timer on a bomb. Something explosive and unexpected happens at the end of the countdown.  Looking for Alaska is no exception. While you could argue that there’s a lot of foreshadow leading up the zero time event, it’s still an explosive extremely dramatic set of events. For me, who is generally oblivious to such pesky abstract concepts like “foreshadow”, it was shocking, devastating and utterly despair inducing.

My reaction to the middle of Looking for Alaska was extreme. It felt like someone had decided to randomly beat the crap out of my emotional psyche for sadistic pleasure. I can honestly say I was doing everything I could not to cry in public where I was reading it waiting for my movie to start. It was something about the way John Green wrote that part that made it feel like it was happening to me. It felt like I’d experienced those changes in my life and had them so cruelly snatched away from me.

I read on and as I read, the chapters of the aftermath showed all the major characters falling apart and that just caused me to spiral deeper and deeper into a sense of depression. It was like I couldn’t stop shaking as I read.  A part of me, abstractly, realized that I was taking this story way too seriously. A part of me said that this shouldn’t really strike me this profoundly, that this emotional reaction was just plain odd. I’ve read many a story where darker things happen, some even written by, with all due respect to John Green, more skilled writers. (Though John Green I think is highly underrated overall) But this story hit me harder than any I can think of even though I haven’t experienced personally anything like what the main characters in Looking for Alaska experienced. And even as I read there was a part of my thought processes going over my own life and reliving things that happened to me and trying to connect them to the emotions rampaging through my mind as I read. But this self examination only tended to inspire in me a deeper sense of misery and despair.

And so this was my mental state. The last scene I read just before I left was a scene with the main character and his roommate’s relationship breaking down and their getting into a fight. It was a dramatic and heart wrenching scene, and strangely it was so even though I didn’t feel as if I really knew either of the characters that well. Seeing their friendship starting to disintegrate was painful especially given in the process they slung out the most hurtful truths to one another that they could find to state. I didn’t read through to the end of the scene. I had to get up because it was time. Time to watch a new movie. Right out of the depths of Alaska I went to see Avatar.

Even as I walked toward the theater I knew it was a bad idea. I’d already bought my ticket but I seriously considered just burning it and not watching the movie. I really wasn’t in the mood to see it. I knew what I really needed to do was sit down and finish reading Looking for Alaska because I knew the author wouldn’t leave his reader like that straight through to the end of the book. There had to be more to the story and I desperately needed to get that story.

But I’m really a big cheapskate and I’d already told people I was going to see it. I didn’t want to explain to people that I hadn’t bothered because the book I was reading just turned out to be too depressing so I needed to finish it first. I doubt anyone would even understand that explanation.  Plus there was a chance that in watching Avatar it might help. It might cheer me up and make reading the rest of Alaska an easier endeavor. So I went.

Of course my reading until the last minute meant there were no good seats in the center so I had to sit off to one side of the theater. I really hate that, so maybe that effected my opinion as well. I waited listlessly through the uninteresting unimaginative trailers my mind’s voice demanding that the damn movie just start already. I wanted to get over with it.

And then it started. And I saw it. And… it was… okay.

The movie didn’t easily dispel my morose feelings, nor did it drive me into a deeper funk. I watched it with sort of a detached sense of awareness of the film while my mind was drawn toward other thoughts. For a while I found the film somewhat boring, but slowly but surely, the film dragged me into its narrative with its skilled story telling and immersive 3D to the point where I started to care about the characters and care about the outcomes. Avatar has a sort of deliberate entrancing effect wrought by the combination of extraordinary graphical technology, skilled directing, and carefully chosen musical accompaniment. The movie tries to give you nothing that would break you out of the spell it casts over you. So that means it avoids offensive rhetoric, poor puns or crass humor of course. But it also means it avoids deep or thought provoking dialogue or complex moral quandaries. The very story itself is meant to be simple and easy for the mind to follow so that you aren’t driven by any distractions to any kind of strong emotions outside of those the story intends for you to have.

Nevertheless, as I watched, almost certainly because of the book I had been reading before the movie, I managed to remain detached from the film.  Part of me couldn’t let go and get drawn in and this inner cynical voice within me remained a constant running dialogue throughout the film.

And what did this cynical voice tell me as I watched? Well many things but the core of its fundamental critique of the film can be summarized in just four words:

These people are doomed.

Even after I finished watching the film and even weeks later and even to this day I cannot find fault in that critique. My inner cynic I believe to be absolutely correct in its assessment. The Na’vi people really do have no chance of survival. The entire movie is, largely a expression of false delusional hope. Worse, it encourages people to make bad decisions in the face of insurmountable odds and then gives validation in the delusional belief that some mystical force, ie God, will suddenly appear to solve all their problems for them. And that, I felt and feel is grossly irresponsible and extremely disturbing.

There is simply no way that a people with bows and arrows and knives can stand up against even a modern military apparatus. To say then can stand up against a futuristic military capable of space travel and giant heavily armed mech machines is beyond laughable.  The fact that these people happen to be somewhat bigger than normal humans and have some decent sized animals and birds to fly on does little to alleviate that enormous power gap.

Think about it. Native Americans were crushed. And that was using the technology that existed from 1492 up until the late 1800s.  So get that straight. That’s before we had automated machine guns and sniper rifles and tasers and body armor and radar. That’s before we had nerve gas and tanks and sound cannons and airplanes and apache attack helicopters. That’s before we had nuclear weapons and unmanned drones. That’s basically before we had ANY of the regular things we think about when we think of modern warfare. And the indigenous population never stood a chance. I have never heard anyone suggest that there was ever a serious possibility that the native population might have won the day.

Other popular struggles between vastly outgunned population show a similar story. Modern gorilla warfare can help even the odds in a battle but only when there is a comparable weapons base. Would Iraqis be able to mount nearly as effective a resistance if they had bows and arrows rather than AK-47s and giant horses rather than IEDs and Rocket Propelled Grenades? In every major war that lasted both sides had access to modern technologies. I can think of none where one side was deprived of it entirely and still somehow magically managed to mount a significant resistance.  Indeed, by and large conflicts with indigenous populations with primitive weapons wouldn’t even be considered a war these days. That’s usually a kind of police maneuver.

Now in Avatar, you’re supposed to believe that the chosen one is able to rally the people together from all the tribes so that they can FIGHT BACK! It’s supposed to be a glorious inspiring kind of thing. They aren’t going to give in to the greedy and arrogant invaders who are destroying not just their homelands but the spirits of their ancestors.  So they put aside their petty differences (which are never explained or explored by the way) and unite for the greater good!

Only… to me it seemed grotesquely reckless.  Basically all our “hero” managed to do was bring people from all around the world to come and die with the first tribe he met.  It was an insanely irresponsible thing to do to sentence all those people to death and in my head I was screaming in my head “don’t do it!” as I watched.

So when the battle turned south, not only was I not surprised, I thought it was probably unrealistic how much damage they were able to do.  The tactics employed by the Na’vi even under the great Jake Sully’s leadership were rather simplistic. Basically a single ambush followed by a pitched battle. There was no chance in hell that that was going to work in the long run.  I wouldn’t have been able to forgive the movie for its utter unserious portrayal of the events had the Na’vi somehow managed to beat back the invaders thanks to their newfound unity and the awesomeness of Jake. That would have been a ridiculously unreleastic story. Luckily Cameron didn’t go there.

But what we got instead was almost as bad.  The Na’vi are rewarded for their bravery and determination and willingness to throw thousands of lives away by the great awakening of the planet itself to come to their aide. Animals all across the lands go on a rampage, totally beating the crap out of the invaders making the eventual conclusion a kind of fait accompli. We see a few more battles with our main characters that are only relevant because movie goers like to see the major villains die and want to be sure their favorite heroes and heroines live (though my favorite character, Grace apparently wasn’t so lucky).  And that wraps up the whole movie.

Yaaayy! God saved us!!

Aren’t you glad we were such brave fools?

The idea repulses me. It’s not that in this fictional world it’s impossible for Cameron to posit a living planet, that is, a real God that actually exists, and really does have the power to save people. Sure, that’s fine. But the problem is that this story suggests that all you have to do is be brave, faithful, and foolhardy in order to gain the respond of God and then all your problems will be dealt with. That’s the overarching message of Avatar. It’s faith, not reason. There’s no rational assessment of risks and benefits. It’s be brave and fight! Be like Jake Sully! He doesn’t let being cripple keep him down!

The emphasis on courage in this movie is sickening. There’s no sense in which skill or reason or intellect or realism or caution or even patience are admirable traits. There’s bravery. That’s it. That’s what the movie values. That’s the characteristic that Sully presents that makes him the “chosen one”. That’s what he shows throughout the film.  The only times his recklessness seems to cause trouble somehow magically “work out” in the end. It sort of what makes him capable of achieving his predetermined destiny. It’s apparently what makes him able to outdo all the native peoples at their own skills in just a few months time, eventually even becoming a warrior of legendary skill the likes of which the planet has not seen in generations.

And why is that exactly? The brilliant comedian W. Kamau Bell covered this particular critique much better than I ever could. Basically he connects the story of Avatar to the stories of Dances with Wolves and The Last Samurai and others all of which involve a white guy going to a native culture and learning to do what they do far better than they do. There is something fundamentally disturbing about this narrative that bothered me as I watched Avatar as well. Why is it that the heroic figure is never a part of the native culture? It’s always the outsider who saves them from his or her own people out of sheer awesomeness.  Is this really a realistic story we should be telling? Is it really fair to these native cultures?

But that wasn’t the big thing that bothered me either.  The big thing that my mind kept coming back to is still the fundamental facts of the situation.  The people are still doomed.  You’re supposed to believe that the invaders were successfully repulsed, the bad guys killed, and the remaining humans sent home humanely.

Right. Sent home where they can share what from their perspective must have seemed like a horrible monstrous slaughter of their people by wild crazed animals on an exotic planet.   That will play super well in the press.

OK, probably not everyone thought that way, but some probably did. No doubt they were all traumatized by the experience. How would the media on Earth funded by the most powerful corporation on the planet made rich by mining this ultra mineral with untold value cover this story?  It would be a tragic attack by dangerous evil monstrous alien invaders.  There’s no doubt in my mind of that.  And the people on Pandora have no way whatsoever to wage that propaganda war and convince the people of Earth that they are in any way shape or form, human enough to be worth bothering being sympathetic to.

So what happens next? Perhaps the evil company tries again with a bigger, stronger military force. Sure that’s possible. And it’s possible even then that having the whole living planet behind them enables the Na’vi to somehow achieve another resounding victory in spite of all the people who died in the last battle and their sparse population to begin with.  They can just keep on doing that too. Eventually by attrition the Na’vi will be defeated. The question only is how long does it take to mass and send an army to Pandora and whether it is worth the cost. Judging from how the movie portrays unobtanium, yeah it probably is worth it. If a corporation is ruthless enough, why would they EVER stop sending forces? The only way they wouldn’t is if public opinion somehow turns against the endeavor and forces a change. I just don’t see how that would happen unless you can get avatars into the hands of regular people on Earth so that they can know and understand who the Na’vi are. Or at least video cameras observing their lifestyle. Even then it’s not a sure thing. Not by a long shot.

But the sad humans don’t even have to risk any of that. They totally don’t. What they are after on Pandora is a ROCK. That’s it.  So what reason do they have, at all to preserve the environment.  Before they were willing to destroy a tree regardless of the cultural significance that tree had to the indigenous population. Next time, maybe they’re willing to destroy the atmosphere. Maybe they just bombard the planet with orbital armaments that are more powerful than our nuclear weapons, radioactive or not. Thje planet is already unlivable for humans without a suit, what difference does it make whether they make the air more un-breathable or make it so that a radiation suit is needed in order to do the mining?  They can just do that. It’s easy. Probably far cheaper than landing and mounting land missions to try and push the indigenous people away. And then you just mine the damn rock. They could use all kinds of massive robotic machines to mine the rocks faster once the planet has become a barren lifeless wasteland.  And that’s what they’d probably do.

The only reason really this corporation probably didn’t do that to begin with is because they likely thought they would later be able to gain value by studying the plant and animal lifeforms on Pandora. That’s why they had scientists on staff no doubt. The possibility of new drugs or materials or other ways to exploit Pandora’s resources was probably too great. Likewise they could learn a lot from native Pandorans. Maybe they even imagined selling trips to Pandora and stints in avatar bodies to humans so they can go amongst the Pandorans for a vacation. The possible ways to make money off of a new planet full of life like Pandora are unquestionably endless.

But apparently none of those other ways were worth more than the unobtanium. If it were then the company would have been more cautious in upsetting the natural balance on that planet and would have worked more closely to formulate a treaty with the Na’vi. Why be in such a rush really? Their communication strategy was basically working. There’s no logical reason they couldn’t have worked out an agreement whereby they tunneled under the damned trees to get the rock. Possibly they could have even had the Na’vi do the work to ensure that the mining operation didn’t interfere with the trees themselves. The only explanation is that the unobtanium is just THAT much more valuable than anything else they could get out of the planet so getting it fast was the priority.  That only supports my theory that the Na’vi are destined to be firebombed out of existence for their insolence.

Now don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I don’t believe in the importance of bravery and faith in a struggle for indigenous rights against a superior force. I’m not a fatalist.  I really believe people can make a difference if they are willing to fight for what they believe in. I’m all for people chaining themselves to fences, standing in front of bulldozers, and going to jail for what they believe in. And I know full well that doing things like that takes extraordinary courage, much more than your average person has. Indeed it’s often a gargantuan feat of courage for an ordinary citizen these days even to just choose not to go to work one day in order to attend a protest. So yes, spotlighting and stressing the importance of bravery is very important.

Faith too I believe in, though not necessarily faith in a God per se. I think in order to be able to fight credibly for significance change you have to have faith in your movement. You have to really believe in what you are doing and that things can get better. That’s the kind of belief system that compels people to join you and fight with you. It was as much Martin Luther King’s dream as his methods that people followed. And that was a dream based on faith not fact. It was a hope of what might one day be, not a guaranteed inevitability.  I think that’s important. You have to have that kind of dream, that kind of vision in order to make real change a reality.

But what I don’t believe in, what I cannot and will never accept is faith and bravery superseding reason. I don’t believe in people just recklessly throwing their lives away. That’s when you get crazy movements that lead to disastrous consequences, or false pointless movements that just get a lot of people hurt or killed with no gain. You have to think first. You need a strategy. It’s not enough to have the right ideas and the right principles and the courage to fight for them. There has to be a realistic path from those principles and beliefs to bring them into reality. Saying I’m going to boycott company X because they are doing Y doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have a way in which you can see your choice to boycott company X will lead to company X actually STOPPING doing Y.  There has to be a plan. Otherwise you’re just tilting an windmills. At best you only hurt yourself. At worst, you hurt a lot of other people along with you.

That’s the core problem I have with Avatar. The Na’vi people given what they knew at the time could not and should not have fought back. That was the worst possible thing they could have done.

It’s possible that the Na’vi people weren’t in a position to know or even understand how badly they were outgunned. They could have been choosing to fight back out of ignorance. But the problem there is, that Jake Sully should have known. Really it’s absurd for him to think that the tribes of the Na’vi stood a snowball’s chance in hell. The fact that he was instrumental in convincing the Na’vi to fight anyway makes him extraordinarily callous, irresponsible, and reckless. Someone should have smacked him upside the head and said “what’s the matter with you? Do you want all these people to DIE???”

But nobody did. And what followed would have been a complete and total bloodbath. The Na’vi forces would have been annihilated. They very nearly were. But, thanks to the magic of hollywood, Jake Sully and his Na’vi forces got lucky. The earth rebelled and fought the invaders saving Sully’s stupid butt. Yay Pandora! I can’t think of anyone who deserved it less.

Think about the message this sends people. Should the indigenous people of our planet who are fighting desperate wars over resources against overwhelming odds pray really hard and then launch an all out fight to the death with sticks and stones and teeth and nails if need be to save their lands? Is THAT what you think the Palestinians should do? Of course not. It’s an absurd proposition. It would only get them killed in the millions. God will NOT strike down your enemies no matter how faithful and sacrificial you are. Leastwise it’s utterly irrational to depend on that as your main liberation strategy. That’s the kind of lazy nonsense that Osama bin Laden spouts. It’s dumb. That’s the thinking of people who have given up not people who have real hope for a better future and a chance of bringing it about.

Now you might say to me: “well what should the Na’vi have done instead, just turned tail and run?”  And I know this will sound utterly repulsive to some of you but the answer is absolutely clear. YES.  The Na’vi did not know that Pandora would help them. They had no reason to believe that Pandora would suddenly help them. They had no reason to believe that there would be anything other than two possible outcomes. One is they leave and flee and lose their ancestors, but most of them live. The other is that most of them die in a bloody brutal war and then they lose the spirits of their ancestors anyway.  It’s a hard, harsh reality. But it’s the truth. Nobody sane or rational would choose to fight anyway. It’s certainly NOT reasonable for a leader to ask their people or demand that their people do so. And certainly not if you are doing so based on your sense of faith that some miracle will happen to save you in the end. That’s fundamentally immoral. And Jake does worse than that. He brings in more people from all around the fucking moon so they can join in on the slaughter! No. Jake Sully is no hero. He’s a monster nearly as culpable for the destruction of the Na’vi as the military forces that attacked them.

It would be somewhat different if there was a way in which this last stand had some kind of value for the Na’vi. Like if it were all televised around the galaxy in real time so that peoples across the galaxy might react in outrage and some good might come of it. Then maybe fighting would be worth it.  Likewise, if the Na’vi knew that the planet might come to their aide and they knew that shedding enough blood in brave acts of sacrifice might increase the probability of that happening, then maybe at least an argument could be made for fighting. But there’s no such justification given for the Na’vi psychotic resistance movement. They fight only because Jake Sully manipulated them using their own superstitions into thinking they can win an un-winnable battle. And that’s just sick.

And I do not and cannot forgive Jake for that just because things happened to work out in the end for them at least for the time being. 

That was the overarching impression I left the theater with. I was entertained but I was angry too. Excited and repulsed at the same time. I felt like I loved and hated the movie all at once. I wanted the Na’vi to live. I wanted everything to be okay and work out and for everyone to be happy in the end. I just couldn’t bring myself to believe that things would.

Only here’s the thing. I completely believe those thought I had and as of yet I haven’t read an account that would persuade me to think otherwise, but I also know that I shouldn’t have had those thoughts. At least not as strongly as I did. I’ve seen other movies with similar themes and similar events and by and large they don’t bother me. I can accept that certain elements of the film are stupid or biased or irrational without having that taint my overall appreciation of the film. I don’t think Avatar was a particularly egregious example. If anything it was just a run of the mill example.

Which brings me back to the idea of how attitude effects our perceptions of art. All those flaws that stood out glaringly in my mind when I saw Avatar probably would not have stood out as glaringly had I not been reading Looking for Alaska first. In fact, it makes perfect sense.  Avatar is a movie about winning against all odds. It’s about getting lucky and having things work out even in an unlikely circumstance where it ordinarily would not. Looking for Alaska is the exact opposite of that.  It’s a bout an utterly normal circumstance where something totally unlucky happens and things completely don’t work out. Avatar is about bravely rejecting the tragic inevitability in front of them. Alaska is about coming to grips with and moving on after a tragic unpredictable life event.

Do you see what I mean?  Reading Alaska got me into this mindset of thinking about the bad things that happen that we can’t change and we can’t undo no matter how much we might like to. They are so often unfair, so often cruel, so often despair inducing. But they happen. They happen to all of us eventually. And then I see Avatar and it blithely goes along showing its hero totally oblivious of the dark consequences of his actions, consequences he could prevent, things that didn’t have to happen. And yeah, it TOTALLY pissed me off. A part of me absolutely hated Jake Sully and indeed the entire cast of stupid stubborn idiotic characters in that movie that have to be such morons about everything. Can’t they see that life is already hard enough? Why bring about more death and misery when you don’t have to?

Furthermore, that sense of inevitable unstoppable loss that Alaska inspired in me, permeated my every reaction to the film. That’s why at every step of the way I was incapable of seeing the Na’vi as having a real chance to get out of this situation in one piece. And even after the victory, that’s why all those thoughts of what a terrible future the Na’vi likely have in store for them came immediately to my mind. You’re supposed to be in a celebratory mood by the end of the film. The goodguys won! Yay!  But the mood I was in, I just couldn’t celebrate. It just wasn’t right to me to celebrate. At that time, this fucked up life we lead just wasn’t a thing worth celebrating.
 
But then I went home. I finished reading Looking for Alaska either that night or the next day I can’t remember which. And as I expected it didn’t leave me in that state of absolute disenchantment with all things good in life. The story carries you through along with the main character as the events that happen to him change him and he grows along with them. Eventually he is able to accept what happened even though he’ll never forget.

The thing about Avatar and Alaska is that Alaska although marketed toward the Young Adult fiction is far more adult than Avatar. Avatar sort of lets you be a kid and believe in glorious struggle for the greater good against the obvious “bad” people. Alaska doesn’t let you off that easy. It starts off with pranks and silliness but it forces you to grow up. You have to learn to accept the complexities of this world and the people in it who we think we know but we really never knew at all. For good or ill.  And as the book forces you grow as you read, so too did it lead me to accept and resolve my criticisms of Avatar as well. I can see now the value of the film and sing some of its praises. Such as I’ll always be glad that Cameron wrote a film that does bring attention to how overwhelming powers can try to exploit the resources of poor people who have no means to fight on their own. I can respect that. And I can respect Cameron’s usage of the films popularity to fight for indigenous rights around the world.

But in truth, I’ll never personally like Avatar. Those flaws stand out too fresh in mind like unhealed wounds. But I can’t bring myself to think of Avatar as a good movie. It isn’t even a movie I want to see again. It’s an acceptable movie. It may make a lot of money and it may bring a lot of joy and it may even have good effects. But that’s as far as I’ll go. In my mind it’ll always be a very sad movie with an underlying message I could never sanction.

Copyright law is the wrong solution to the right problem.

The problem is that artists need to be paid for creating art. It totally should be possible for a popular artist to make a decent living either partially or completely through the act of creating art works that people enjoy and utilize. That’s the right problem. That’s totally what we as society should be focused upon. Copyright solves that problem… sort of.

It is an enormously flawed solution in many ways. Nor, do I believe, can it ever be fixed to the point where it can solve this problem well. Hence, what we call copyright today is ultimately doomed. Why would that be?

Copyright was designed to solve a problem of content distribution in an era where creating copies of content was a slow and arduous process. We didn’t need to regulate most generation of “copies” because they were either innocuous (fair use) or it was so prohibitively expensive in time and energy to create the copies that doing so was so rare it wouldn’t really strongly interfere with the major content producer’s ability to make a profit.

Today, thinks are radically different. Copy generation is cheap to the point that it is trivial. Every computer view of well anything generates a copy instantly which you can capture and do with as you please.  Indeed, in truth when you view something over the web, numerous unauthorized copies are being generated all along the path of distribution. People can make and share copies of songs and videos at light speed. They can alter those copies, adjust them, change them, merge them with near the speed of thought.

But it’s not really today that you really have to worry about for copyright law. Imagine the future. Imagine an era where bandwidth and storage are a thousand times or a million times what it is now.  Imagine an era where everyone can contain the whole of human generated content on their own cell phone’s hard drive. Imagine you can give that knowledge to anyone else anywhere in the world in an instant.

Imagine also that you can capture information with similar ease and add it to that store? You can in effect simply point your cell phone at a book and scan its entire content into a digital format in a second. You can point it at a television and record whatever is playing it with perfect quality and with a few taps you can instantly remove commercials. You can record conversations,  music, take pictures all rapidly into a format of near life-like realism.

Surely we can see that in a world like that, copyright cannot be enforced. If even one person rejects the social contract that requires people to pay for content then effectively everyone has instant access to all the content that person acquires in violation of copyright law. And we know from human nature and from experience it won’t be just one person. Lots and lots of people are willing to break this contract whether it be out of greed or need. In effect there would be an inherent social disadvantage to playing by the rules. Your experience of culture and ability to experiment with culture would be radically reduced relevant to everyone else due to your adherence to your honor. Competitive forces will soon take over.

Now copyright people try to solve this problem by crippling these two constantly growing areas of technology. Bandwidth and Data Capture. On bandwidth they launch an attack on net neutrality to try and give major companies the right to charge different prices for different content. If they can do that then there will be little need to expand the size or scope of bandwidth access. They can stop at a level that strikes them as good enough and simply charge more for the highest demand content. Indeed it would be in their best interest NOT to maximize bandwidth since it would be the scarce resource on which they base their profit.

For data capture the solution has been the vaunted DRM. The idea is that at the point of capture, information can be encoded or encrypted in such a way that it effectively can’t be “copied” or so that it phones home to let the content producer know when an unauthorized copy has been made so legal actions can be taken. Basically this attempts to cripple what users can do with content. Which means you can’t transfer it to different devices, can’t share it easily with friends to discuss and interact, and if DRM were capable of achieving its ideal you wouldn’t be able to mix and match up content to create new works based on copies of existing work.

But the overarching flow of technology will eventually overwhelm these two solutions too. We already see DRM suffering hugely. Streaming services make it possible to share “copies” in such a way that people don’t feel like they are violating copyright law and which get around possible drm.  And people general outrage at the idea of not being able to use content that they paid for as they please has lead companies to be wary even of attempting to DRM their works.

Even if DRM were popular, it is a hackish solution at best. It would still be very easy to effectively record anything you perceive online into another DRM-free format. And even if someone how you could prevent that by building into every content capturing device an auto-drming feature, if bandwidth were high enough everyone could effectively make their own, albeit drm-ed, copies instantly for free with minimal effort for anything they perceive. In effect DRM would be useless.

Bandwidth is the much harder problem but I think the growing needs of technology will naturally require more and more bandwidth. People have an inherent thirst for it. Technology companies desperately need it. That’s why they vociferously lobby against attempts to restrict network neutrality. And there are competitive forces at work here too. A country or region with a better bandwidth infrastructure has a competitive advantage over other countries. In effect their children get exposed to more culture and more knowledge faster and can learn more rapidly than the people in societies that have limited bandwidth. In effect whenever a new creative popular idea that uses tons of bandwidth appears, demand for greater bandwidth will increase.

So I reiterate my original prediction. In the end… copyright in its current form is doomed. As technology improves it will become increasingly prohibitively expensive to try and police the creation of “copies”.  Actually its already prohibitively expensive as evidence by the utter lack of effective enforcement of copy generation that exists today. You can get pretty much anything online for free and it doesn’t even require you to be particularly tech savvy to do it. Really I think the only reason copyright has been able to persist is that people implicitly understand that if copyright disappears we’ll have a big gaping hole in which the question of how creative content producers get paid for their work. Hence it’s more social agreement that makes us give a slight nod to respect copyright law despite its weak nature.  But note that that agreement only goes so far. People are somewhat willing to buy mp3s from itunes for example, but people utterly reject the idea that they can’t splice and edit video and audio into new creative video and audio works. And like I explained earlier people aren’t particularly  fond even of audio files they can’t transfer (copy) from one device to another.

Ironically what’s really helping copyright survive right now is the good will of the people. That and the short term necessity of aggregate sites like youtube which have both the storage size and bandwidth that regular users currently lack. Those sites serve as lightning rods for copyright law enforcement creating a false sense of copyright enforcement viability that really only exists in the short term.

OK so what happens if I’m right and copyright does die? 

Well the cynical dark interpretation is that people would just stop producing creative content. But that’s just plain idiotic. It’s human nature to generate arts.  People will do it no matter what.  But it’s entirely possible that big budget arts that earn a lot of money would become utterly impossible. You’d have to make your money through other means and that means working other jobs, using excessive advertisement revenue, or doing things outside of the online world entirely. So for example holding concerts is still a viable way for a musician to earn money. Selling an experience like at a movie theater could conceivably be a way for movies to continue to make money, well at least until home theater experience becomes nearly equivalent to movie theater experience.  People would find creative ways. But overall the arts on a whole would see a reduction in its profitability just by virtue of the one sale to one person model for content being utterly broken.

That’s not, in my opinion, necessarily a bad thing. It could make artists more independent as there would no longer be any huge benefit of being connected to a big distributor, publisher, label, or producer. It could also reduce the “group think” mentality that arises in big budget projects that tend to try and sell to the lowest common denominator in order to maximize the number of people who experience a work.  Edgier art might thrive. More unique art might thrive.

But the life of most of the artists would be extraordinarily more crappy.

Worse there’s be less of a dream/hope element of art driving more people to be creative. You wouldn’t have much reason to hope to be that super famous rich musician. At best you could be super famous online but still have to work at Burger King to supplement your art income so you can raise your kids. How much would that reduce the amount of creative people who ever develop the will to even enter into the field? The lack of job security in the arts is a huge a problem today, it would be immeasurably worse if there were no concept of copyright at all and with nothing to replace it. If you have the choice between devoting all your effort to getting a secure job as a businessman or following your passion of art and ending up broke, some will choose the business route just out of a sheer sense of necessity and fear of what the alternative might lead.

Fortunately there are other solutions.  We don’t necessarily NEED copyright in order to ensure that content producers get paid. In fact it’s a really clunky and bad solution. We can, as a society come up with much better ones.

The best way I think would be to treat the internet as a kind of massive shared global library. That’s how it really works anyway. As such there shouldn’t be a cost to consumme material within the library. Your mere membership in the library gives you the privilege to effectively make as many copies of the content within as you want, AND to contribute copies of your own work to the global library.

So where does the money come in?  Why in advance. It should be that you pay for the access to the library. In effect similar to how we support libraries today, by maybe paying a fee for a library card and through our taxes. You pay in advance a regular amount to have access and then you have simple overarching access. No restrictions. No limits.

In the internet example it would effectively be a cost you have to pay to get online. One online you get all the tools needed to be online and contribute to the online community experience.  One way to do that is through taxes on the tools needed to get online. IE a tax on bandwidth, a tax on computer equipment. Those however are not ideal since they punish people for getting online which is exactly what we DON’T want to do. We want to encourage as many people as possible to be online to enrich the library.  A better plan would be an entirely separate creative-content tax. That is, everyone in the society pays this tax just like they pay income tax or payroll taxes. It needs to be progressive or subsidized so that low income people don’t have to pay at all. Higher and middle income people however I think it would be reasonable for it be flat for. I mean really being richer doesn’t really translate into a greater appreciation or need for the arts than a middle class person.

So the way I see it is you’d have something like, for anyone making over 50K, there’s like a $200/month flat tax for enjoying the arts online.  In effect this is the cost for making all art experienced online free. I’m just making up those numbers, it could be anything. You’d actually have to compute how much is needed to reasonably support the arts so that artists can get reasonable salaries.

Next the question becomes how do these taxes translate into money for artists?  Here’s where modern technology makes things fun.  It should remain a real competitive system. That’s really essential for art to thrive. Not just anybody who puts content on the web should be entitled to an equal share of the money collected for content producers.  No, what is needed is a system that works almost exactly like Youtube.  In effect you need to be able to mark a piece of content as “liked”. Those “liked” entries of the art all get a proportion of the money that you contributed in taxes that month at the end of the month divided evenly.  So, again with the $200 tax, if there are 4 bloggers who I think are making excellent works this month, I should be able to like them all and each would get $50 by the end of the month added to their salary.   If one blogger wrote two entries you appreciated, and the other 3 only wrote one, then the one blogger would get $80 and the rest would get $40.

As you can see with a lot of people involved in this system there’d be a lot of money spread around. And a person who is really popular can possible earn a considerable amount of money. It encourages EVERYONE to produce content through blogs, forums, video sites, or whatever since there’s a chance that people will mod-up your work giving you a nice little salary for your work.  For most people it would be chump change, at most enough to offset partially the tax that you had to pay. But the popular people could earn enough to not have to work at some other unpleasant job. And for some it would even be possible to mass considerable wealth

A system like this encourages quantity, variety, AND quality of content. It rewards people who interact with different communities because you want more and more people to see and possibly mod-up your works. Hence you’d be rewarded for being a person who makes videos, writes books, writes articles, makes comics, makes music, creates paintings, writes programs, and writes blogs. Hence the modern renaissance man or woman would thrive in a system like this.

It also encourages the YOUNG to produce and the POOR to produce content. Why? Because they don’t pay into the system (if you don’t have income high enough you don’t pay)  but they can still get money out of it. So if you lose your job one way you can help stay afloat for a while is to blog a lot while you are looking for work.

It could also be a very nice convenient way for people to help their friends out who have come across a spill of bad luck.  Say if your friend you know is really down on their luck you could during the months they are having hardship just mod their works up and nothing else. If effect you’d be giving them $200 every month to help them out, but it’s $200 you can’t spend on anything anyway.

You’d could also have ways to subscribe to certain people’s content that you like. So you could specify that this producer you want to always be modded up by you every month. It’s even viable to have the ability to specify that this producer will always get $10 or $20 of your content money every month and all other people you mod up will get the rest of your money split amongst them. That would make subscriptions sort of the holy grail for people aiming for the big bucks since that’s a guaranteed income flow.

If you don’t spend the money for a given month, that is you don’t mod anyone, I believe it could be split up amongst the remaining months of the year.  So say you don’t see any content you consider worthwhile in February, then for the remaining months the amount you provide for each Like mod is a fraction of $220 instead of $200.  If at the end of the year you haven’t spent any money, that money could possibly go into a fund for the state giving creative grants or lump sum awards to people who demonstrate exemplary success in the arts. Those awards or grants should be awarded in some kind of at least partially democratic way though otherwise they’d become a farce.

All of this would of course be supplemental income to those who have ways to generate income offline which would still be governed by old school laws such as copyright law or just plain laws of physics. So if people still want to buy a physical book from someone they totally could and that person would still get the revenue for it. However once that book is translated online then the income it generates online would be governed by the rules of the content system I described here.

This is not really my idea and it’s not revolutionary. A lot of people have theorized similar micro-payment systems to deal with the problem of funding the arts in the post internet world.  There’s at least one company that is actually already implementing it at least in a beta stage. It’s called flattr.  You can learn more about it by watching the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwvExIWf_Uc

Even with a system like this there’d still be problems to work out. Social questions would still be relevant.  For example a simple problem is say you wrote a book that you sold offline and you created an online version of it with a mod-up button in accordance with the law.  Now imagine hundreds of people who bought your book in the physical world scan your book and put it online with their own mod-up buttons in hopes of stealing some of your revenue.  How can you identify that the core creative work there is yours and that you should be entitled to the bulk of the online viewership compensation? And indeed should you get all or most of the compensation? It could very well be that those who uploaded your book and featured it on their blogs or social networks radically increased the viewership of your book beyond what it would otherwise have gotten increasing your mod ups. Should they be partially compensated for that advertisement?

Thinking through it I should think that there’d need to be a way for users to flag content as containing other content and match it up with its originating source. Then I think a modup for that work would count as a mod up for the originating source AND for the advertiser source.  In effect splitting the money one more way. But users who don’t want to mod the person who created the copy can follow the link created by the flag back to the originator’s site and mod up that one alone. Hence if you advertise someone else’s work that is good you increase the likelihood of your earning money while at the same time considerably increasing that person you are advertising’s likelihood of earning money. Viral propagation remains preserved! But at the same time, there’s a greater incentive for you to generate your own original content that itself gets popular since then you don’t have to share the revenue of the like-mods.

The last problem would be if content is really a complex mish mash of different works edited together. Should the original content producers gain any money from those? I’d  answer that simply as no.  I think good mixes are themselves valuable pieces of art that should be rated on their own. And I think bad mixes just won’t get a lot of mod points anyway so it’s not worth worrying about. I think it’s one of the great horrors of copyright law that it tries to make people who mix and mash works financially obligated to the originators of all components of their works. That just stifles creative content generation.

I do think content producers should be able to specify if they don’t want to allow others to be allowed to create derivative works. In that case then a flagging system could then be applied as well. If someone’s work is flagged as a derivative of an unallowed work then someone could check into that and if verified some sort of resolution process could begin. It could be a legal process or something just so simple as that work will get Zero-mod points hence making the creator have little or no financial incentive to keep the derivative work up.

It’s not a perfect system but I think it would be far easier to enforce than current copyright laws and could scale effectively with growth in technology.  It would promote both the creation and the appreciation of the arts in ways copyright simply is incapable of doing in the digital world.

That’s the kind of system I’d like to see the world head toward after Copyright falls rather than hodgepodge clunky attempts to fix and fit copyright to the digital era that turn the bulk of citizens into criminals.

In my last entry I talked about the concept of Judicial Activism and how I believe it is not a useful term to describe any particular phenomenon. I still believe that though some through their comments and through a link to a video provided some interesting alternative interpretations of the term that are more coherent than the one we hear about most often today.

But my final point in that entry was that the term “activist” in the idea of judicial activism is a part of a wider long ranging effort to commandeer the language of the Left and turn it into something it is not. It’s a twisted association game deliberately engaged in as a method of social manipulation. No sooner had that point been made then someone in the comments engaged in exactly that same language shifting behavior repeatedly in an attempt to attack the people she disagreed with.

I would not ordinarily care. I get comments like this all the time whenever I write about politics. But in this case it serves as such a perfect example of the point I was trying to make that I felt it would be instructive to look at those comments directly.

Notice the strategy here?  Liberals think. Liberals believe. Liberals are. Liberals do. 

Gee, I’m on the Left. I consider myself a liberal. I never REALIZED I thought such things! Oh thank you so very much for enlightening me!

Of course, this is ALL putting words in the mouths of some amorphic undefined group of BAD people that she suggests you should have nothing but the utmost disdain for.

Notice how it’s always absolutes. It’s never “most liberals” or “some liberals”  or even “extremist liberals”. It’s ALL liberals or it’s ALL liberal Judges.  It’s also NEVER specifics unless pressed. She doesn’t specify specific Liberals and she doesn’t provide specific quotes. The closest she comes is snide insinuations without citation about Justices Stevens and Sotomayor and an extended rant  about Roe v. Wade. Even if you buy those accusations, surely that’s a far cry from showing that ALL Leftists, ALL Liberals, or even ALL Liberal Judges are anti-religious monsters out to destroy our very way of life that she paints them as.

Notice also the association game being played here. We started off talking about Judicial Activists. But it soon went something like this: 

Judicial Activists == Liberal Judges == Liberals ==  Biased/Prejudiced Liberals == Tax-Loving Liberals == Leftists == Lawyers == The God-Hating America-Destroying LEFT

No doubt had the discussion gone on longer she would have started talking about the Baby-Murdering Left or come up with some even more insulting characterization.

In the commentator’s mind no one on the left should EVER be a Judge because they are all biased, lying, dishonest, power-hungry bastards who are making up gooble-d-gook and engaging in sophistry deliberately in order to DESTROY the country, the culture, the language, and the constitution.  They HATE God. They HATE the founding fathers. They LOVE taxes. They’re as BAD as LAWYERS. No doubt she thinks the same of all liberals no matter where they come from or what their career is. They just can’t be trusted.

I didn’t include all of her quotes. She also spoke of how liberals are trying to turn the constitution into “Gumby” and were engaged in “pretzel-making” in their interpretation of the law. In the discussion of abortion that came about due to her repeated citing of Roe v Wade as her core example, she went on to strongly imply that supporting Roe v Wade makes liberals murderers or at least complicit in murder. She also called Liberal judges Judicial Disasters.

Contrast this to what she has to say about Conservatives:

Do you get the it? She might as well have removed every one of her comments and left only one.  It could have said something like this:

LIBERALS ARE  EVIL!!! CONSERVATIVES ARE GOOD!!!

It is an inherently black and white world she lives in. People aren’t complex. Laws aren’t complex. There aren’t large varieties of people with varying justifications for their beliefs. No. It’s just you’re either on the dangerous, evil, deluded, racist LIBERAL side, or you’re on the good, right, faithful, and Just CONSERVATIVE side.  The moral justifications for Left-leaning ideas never enter into the equation. They aren’t given serious contemplation. They’re all TRICKS. It’s the LEFT trying to use sophistry to DECEIVE US!   But not to worry, she’s got the religious conviction to ignore all facts and evidence, all logical arguments or alternative perspectives and stick faithfully to her firm unyielding beliefs NO MATTER WHAT!

This is, of course, EXACTLY what I was talking about in that last entry.

I don’t really mean to pick on one person too much. There’s no shame really in getting over involved in an argument and using charged language. People do it all the time. It may not be pleasant and it can certainly be rude but it doesn’t necessarily invalidate the debate. I believe that several of the commentators on the last blog engaged her constructively and good points were made.

If this were the only time I’d seen this type of argument I would have chalked it up to just someone trying to win an argument using techniques that I personally find disgusting.

But this isn’t the first time.  Indeed, you can turn on your radio any time of the day and hear a conservative talk radio host saying EXACTLY these things in almost EXACTLY these words. You can often hear it on prime time news programs on Fox News and you can even find it on popular right wing blogs across the internet.

My wish would be that this is just a decidedly odd way of thinking. But its prevalence leads me to believe that it is more than that. Indeed, I’ve come to believe that this is a deliberate strategic argument methodology.  I think it is a style of argument that is being encouraged by certain institutions and repeated again and again shamelessly because of its surprising effectiveness.

It’s like subliminal messaging. It’s a kind of propaganda.  It’s like if someone went around the world telling everyone you were a child molester and got all their friends and relatives to go around and say it too. And they in turn got their friends and family to do the same. And all of them said it with conviction and certainty as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. They acted as if anyone who disagrees with them is just stupid and ignorant. Under such an onslaught, even without a shred of evidence outside of hearsay, eventually many people will start to suspect you. People will start to doubt you. People will start to wonder if maybe those people have a reason for being so suspicious of you and they’ll start to doubt their own judgments of your character. People will start to even feel ashamed to be associated with you. At the very least they might err on the side of caution and choose to avoid you.

Of course people respond to these kinds of manipulations. People don’t WANT conflict. They don’t like having to defend themselves from cruel and dishonest accusations. They want to get along with people. It’s much much easier to simply say “I’m not a Liberal” than to try to defend yourself against cruel and baseless accusations loudly being shouted out against Liberals from all the rooftops. But of course if everyone runs away from the term Liberal than all that is left is the imposed interpretation. “Liberal” becomes synonymous in the culture for exactly the characteristics the word-destroyers associated it with.

That’s what these news outlets are doing. They are shoving down people’s throats an idea of what Liberalism means without ever asking or even interacting with a single person who actually calls him or herself a Liberal. They are making stuff up. They are re-writing history. And they are using on the flimsiest evidence in many cases to do it. Glenn Beck recently went so far as to insinuate that Liberals are in fact NAZIS, deliberately associating them with one of the most monstrous genocidal campaign in human history. 

Note how they are perfectly willing to define themselves and say what it means to be Conservative or Christian. But they NEVER give Liberals the same courtesy. It’s always pushed upon Liberals. You ARE this. You ARE that. Even though, of course, in a vast majority of cases most liberals AREN’T any of those things. Throughout history most liberals in the United States have in fact been Christians for example or at least not atheists. Certainly you would be hard pressed to find a liberal here that believes in anything remotely resembling genocide. But that doesn’t matter, a nuanced understanding of the terms, is exactly what the people engaging in this strategy DON’T want.

The idea is to make it common knowledge that being an activist or a liberal or a leftist is a shameful thing that you shouldn’t dare call yourself. Not if you want to be one of US, the good people of this world. And the rest just don’t matter.

I think we need to turn this rhetoric around. It’s the people that do this kind of thing who are the shameful ones. They’re the ones being dishonest, cruel, and manipulative. They’re the ones so bound up in their own bias that they are blind to facts, blind to reason, and blind to anything but their overwhelming religious conviction. And no, not in God. It’s to their new God, the almighty CONSERVATISM that can never and will never in their minds admit of any exception to its edicts. 

Now don’t get me wrong. Not all people who self describe themselves as conservatives are like this. Not all of them are deserving of our scorn. There have been many conservatives throughout history that are deserving of enormous respect. No. I’m not talking about engaging in the same strategy in reverse.

I’m talking about shunning the specific people who engage in this disgusting practice of manipulating descriptive terms no matter where they are coming from on the political spectrum. The people who do this are running rip shod over the Truth. They are running it into the ground and spitting on its rotting corpse. They are trying to destroy reason itself and turn us into a society of irrational unthinking slaves to their empty fact-less philosophy.

And they must be stopped.

I’ve wanted to write about the topic of judicial activism soon especially considering the newest Supreme Court Battle that is about to be waged. As it turn out I don’t have to, because in a short succinct paragraph Glenn Greenwald  said almost everything I wanted to say only better:

There is no such thing as a judicial activist Judge. The very acts required of being a Judge faithful to the tenants of the constitution are the same acts that would be labeled as “judicial activism”.

If there is a coherent concept of judicial activism I haven’t heard it. Certainly the mere act of overturning laws passed by by Congress or actions engaged in by the Executive would not qualify. Nor would simply interpreting the limits and scopes of those laws and edicts. That’s part of their job too.

Judges can certainly be wrong. They may even be dishonest or deceptive or irrational. They may even cause very great harm by their proclamations. Judges may even be corrupt. There are certainly such things as bad Judges. But can there really be “activist” Judges? I just don’t see any value in complaining about judges doing their job in accordance with their conscience by labeling them as “activists”. That to me just seems like a way for critics of certain Judges actions to wrap their critiques in a flag of democracy to make them seem more palatable.

And at the same I think it’s a way to capitalize on and expand existing measures to smear the term “activist” as a bad term. Just like “communist”, “socialist”, “liberal”, “progressive” and even “community organizer” there is an ongoing effort from the Right to try and change the terms anyone on the Left uses to describe themselves into “bad words” worthy of our scorn.