tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19066986957813927992024-03-13T19:10:21.040-07:00Chris RobertsonEssays, Articles, and OpinionsC.B. Robertsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04161710878332823421noreply@blogger.comBlogger91125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1906698695781392799.post-34674487385035791302022-06-05T19:34:00.002-07:002022-06-05T19:34:17.068-07:00Bull Painting<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmKsrLczwzaVMcMmOi5IeAmKINiPXgv32zk6R62fULhTZibwoLLxrxcqYafGuPz-Huj9huKWXeUXmkbD_w4omVphta-svXrraDMiBiya46Po2dJwNkaPYQzWDHYQh64paflF0rtzh8iY3y4AOLBYCyvRGR_TT0hASjivJRVnN5V7RlMFz4lfXBNWBtXQ/s3264/20220605_192545.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2448" data-original-width="3264" height="405" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmKsrLczwzaVMcMmOi5IeAmKINiPXgv32zk6R62fULhTZibwoLLxrxcqYafGuPz-Huj9huKWXeUXmkbD_w4omVphta-svXrraDMiBiya46Po2dJwNkaPYQzWDHYQh64paflF0rtzh8iY3y4AOLBYCyvRGR_TT0hASjivJRVnN5V7RlMFz4lfXBNWBtXQ/w539-h405/20220605_192545.jpg" width="539" /></a></div><br /> <p></p>C.B. Robertsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04161710878332823421noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1906698695781392799.post-46876425691185664932016-07-02T17:02:00.001-07:002016-07-02T17:03:25.485-07:00On Data and Science<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The irrepressible Justicar recently <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDTe5vxv3io" style="border-bottom-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.0980392); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #bb0000; text-decoration: none; transition: none;">exposed</a> a fraudulent study published in the <a href="http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2530362" style="border-bottom-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.0980392); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #bb0000; text-decoration: none; transition: none;">Journal of American Medical Associates</a> linking Australia’s 1996 gun-restriction legislation to decreases in mass shootings, in which “mass shootings” are bizarrely and uniquely defined as having 5+ fatalities, rather than the usual 4+ used by the FBI and virtually every other serious organization studying the issue. This allows the study authors to tap in a triumphal “0” in the 1997-2013 mass shootings list, and lends credibility to the juxtaposed 1979-1996 firearm homicide mean (0.56/100,000) and 1996-2013 firearm homicide mean (0.2/100,000).</div>
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Off the bat, the minute scale of the increased safety achieved should be noted, even if the data <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">is</em>taken at face value. This is like banning vending machines in order to save the 13 people killed per year in the United States, on average. At some point, even convenience is worth a few lives on scale. How much more important than vending machines are firearms? They are not merely a hobby, a source of personal protection, and provider of food, but are enshrined in our Constitution because they are a doomsday provision against a tyrannical government. (No, superior military technology does not make defense against the government moot, or else we would not still be fighting illiterate shepherds with Kalashnikovs in the hills of Afghanistan).</div>
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But the data <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">shouldn’t</em> be taken at face value. Let’s break the firearm homicide rate down slightly more honestly:</div>
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1979-1981 – 0.65/100,000<br />
1982-1984 – 0.68/100,000<br />
1985-1987 – 0.68/100,000<br />
1988-1990 – 0.46/100,000<br />
1991-1993 – 0.47/100,000<br />
1994-1996 – 0.44/100,000<br />
1997-1999 – 0.32/100,000<br />
2000-2002 – 0.27/100,000<br />
2003-2005 – 0.14/100,000<br />
2006-2008 – 0.16/100,000<br />
2009-2011 – 0.16/100,000<br />
2012-20013 – 0.17/100,000</div>
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Wouldn’t you know it, there was a downward trend <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">prior</em> to the enacted legislation.</div>
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It is tempting to see the 0.0001% increase in the rate of the preexisting decline, which does appear to be possibly attributable to firearm restrictions. This would, of course, involve trusting the data itself, provided by these dishonest scholars. I’m using it above for convenience and demonstration but otherwise wouldn’t bet my life on its veracity. But this itself excludes the very important issue of <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">non-firearm related homicides</em>. If you’re interested, feel free to study the data for yourself. Suffice to say, firearm restrictions did not meaningfully reduce homicide generally, certainly not beneath the downward trend it was already on. Those too eager to jump from data correlation to causation with the immediate decline might also find themselves in the awkward position of trying to explain a suicide spike in 1997-1998, immediately after the 1996 gun bill. I’m not saying this is in any way related to the gun restriction bill, of course (unless you believe that the gun bill reduced rates of violence, in which case, stop hating depressed people, you murderous psycho). I am simply saying that when culture, pathology, violence, politics, income, and happiness are influenced by more factors than we can possibly account for, and when large, preexisting historical trends are already at work, it is very easy to manipulate statistics and “science” to fit one’s own position.</div>
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This is not an argument <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">against</em> science or statistics, for the record. On the contrary, I am in fact making an argument <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">for </em>science, and, a bit more begrudgingly, statistics. What I am arguing against, however, is the tendency for people to allude to other people’s conclusions allegedly based upon science or “hard data” instead of actually making an argument (these people are, almost without exception, never scientists or statisticians themselves). <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">The argument is the essence of science. </strong>The reason that scientists follow the “scientific method” is not because God came down from the mountain and told Moses “thou shalt divide thine research subjects into two categories, and thine shalt name the first ‘control’…” The scientific method has evolved into its current form because the results are (ideally) very high quality clay with which a scientist can form a robust argument. The possession of the clay, however, does not in any way relieve the scientist or the ideological champion from the responsibility of actually <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">making the argument</em>. And once the argument is made, it is <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">always</em> open to criticism and rebuttal. The strength of an argument is its ability to withstand this inevitable and never ending scrutiny, and the moment a conclusion is held to be above challenge, it is to that degree not a scientific conclusion any more, but an ideological one.</div>
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This means that appeals to science and data are, ironically, unscientific. When an actual scientist is asked a question challenging his own beliefs within his field, what you will almost always see is an argument. He will offer an explanation that utilizes the data and research, of course, but he doesn’t just say “here’s the data” or “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfsQhtEvH7g" style="border-bottom-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.0980392); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #bb0000; text-decoration: none; transition: none;">I can read a graph</a>.” Those who appeal to science <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">without </em>bothering to make the argument don’t understand the nature of science, let alone the science to which they are referring.</div>
C.B. Robertsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04161710878332823421noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1906698695781392799.post-58427783081909049392016-05-05T21:21:00.001-07:002016-05-05T23:18:23.426-07:00A Summary of Nietzsche's "Antichrist"<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/friedrich-nietzsche-watercolor-portrait1-fabrizio-cassetta.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/friedrich-nietzsche-watercolor-portrait1-fabrizio-cassetta.jpg" height="320" width="209" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Source: <i>The Imaginative Conservative</i></td></tr>
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Summarizer's note: the following is my interpretation, and is neither a complete nor a pure summary of Nietzsche's position alone. If that's what you are looking for, it's a short read, so read it. <a href="http://archive.org/stream/theantichrist19322gut/19322.txt">Full text, translated by H.L. Mencken</a>.<br />
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Nietzsche begins, as all philosophers ought to, with definitions.<br />
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Good: "Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man."<br />
Evil: "Whatever springs from weakness."<br />
Happiness: "The feeling of power increasing, and the overcoming of resistance."<br />
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He later goes on to define Corruption in an animal, species, or individual as when it "loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it <i>prefers</i>, what is injurious to it."<br />
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To understand this odd definition of evil, we can look to previous works by Nietzsche (<i>Beyond Good and Evil, Genealogy of Morals</i>) wherein he differentiates "master moralities" from "slave moralities." Masters--those who rule themselves--have no need for the term "evil." They have only "good and bad." "Evil," as a word differentiated from "bad," only makes sense as a philosophical hammer used by the weak against the strong.<br />
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The history of this concept of "evil," as opposed to "bad," begins with the Jews. The Jews are arguably the most interesting race in human history. They have been persecuted, hunted, and oppressed for longer and more vigorously than any other peoples, and have emerged more resilient for it. But the resilience has taken a peculiar form... they are not the strongest, the most skilled warriors, nor the toughest, but have instead developed an unprecedented <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence">verbal intelligence</a>.<br />
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Nietzsche notes that the Jews, facing this historically difficult question "to be or not to be," decided that their answer would be "to be <i>at any price.</i>" And the price they paid was high indeed; their soul as a nation, one could say.<br />
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Prior to Christianity, religions were matters of tribal ownership. Clans and cities and nations did not believe "only our gods exist" per se, but "our gods are <i>our </i>gods; we serve them, and they serve us." The religion was fundamentally a <i>national</i>, and not an <i>ideological</i> matter.<br />
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The Jews sacrificed this and made Jehova a god for <i>everyone</i>. In the face of Roman persecution and oppression, out arose a <i>universal</i> God which put to use all of the verbal intelligence--manipulative intelligence--which turned "bad" into "evil." This faith was Christianity.<br />
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For slaves, what is "bad" is "the master," and so the ultimate theological weapon would be a system of morality that makes "evil" (bad to God? it will do) what is "good" for the master--increase in power.<br />
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Christianity is, at root, a religion of pity. It is by pity that God saves us (a condescending "love" expressed in pity), and it is pity that God expects of us towards others. Jesus upon the cross, even, is a sight of pity. The beatitudes are an exaltation of the "virtues" of all that is pitiable, and it is by <i>accepting</i> the pity of God and of others that we are made "holy." Weakness is strength, and strength is weakness in the eyes of the Lord.<br />
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"A man loses power when he pities," says Nietzsche. It is a vicarious, empathetic opening of oneself to the contagion of weakness, and an uplifting of what is weak while condemning what is strong, vital, admirable, and pro-life. Pity, in short, a denial and a corruption of human life. The theological justification of this is an inversion of values; that which is <i>real</i> does not matter; it is the <i>hereafter</i> that truly counts. The illusion, Heaven, is real, and the reality--this temporal world--is an illusion. The very nature of God as a <i>spirit</i>, rather than as a sort of man living in the <i>world</i>, confirms this.<br />
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But the reason that increase in power is good for the master is the same reason that it is good for humanity. Within it lies all the noble virtues--and the <i>genetics</i> for them--of <i>life,</i> that inspire strength, joy, fertility, and the continuation of life in human kind. When the will to power declines, there is a physiological decline which accompanies it. A condemnation of the will to power in man is a condemnation of mankind to <i>corruption</i>, the perversion of the instinct against the joy, strength, and continuation of life. This is not merely in the culture, but in the very coding of man. It's manifestation is most pure in the priestly class: decrepit, weak, prone to illness, monotony and decay.<br />
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This tendency of corruption from Christianity not only corrupts the individual, but the will of nations, and not merely in sense of the embodied collection of individuals. "A nation that still believes in itself holds fast to its own God." It may follow that for those who no longer believe in their nation, the time has come to seek out new gods<br />
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The God of all and none is as antithetical to the will to power of nations as it is to the individual, and for the same reason: the desire for self-annihilation in the greater whole. In other words, corruption.<br />
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Buddhism is nihilistic like Christianity, but is interesting because it has the merit of being <i>true</i>. Moreover, it does what it claims to do, which is to provide happiness and that sense of ignorant bliss to its' proponents. It is superficially similar to Christianity, but remains in the land of the real, for instance, replacing a "struggle with <i>sin</i>" with a "struggle against suffering." Like Christianity, Buddhism is corrupt in its pursuit of escape from suffering, from <i>life</i>, but it is at least honest, and this comes from the fact that it does not come from slaves, but from the <i>bored</i>.<br />
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The general pursuit of the teachings of Jesus by himself make far more sense when viewed in light of Buddhism, as a pursuit of happiness <i>in the here and now</i>. "Think not of the morrow" refers not to heaven, which the power-seeking manipulator Paul clumsily adds to the doctrines of Jesus for all the reasons described, but to <i>now</i>. Dying on the cross makes more sense as a <i>demonstration</i>, that the "kingdom of heaven"--Nirvana, happiness, disconnection from suffering--can be had anywhere, than it does as a sacrifice by God, <i>of</i> God, <i>to</i> God, on behalf of people made in the very image of... God.<br />
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The cumulative result of this theological, ideological weapon is a weakening of man. It instills an aversion to what is real in favor of preference for what is "to come"--what is <i>unreal</i>. An instinctual <i>hatred</i> of reality. Guilt, pity, gullibility, weakness, poverty, illness, dishonesty, resentment, and death are the virtues of Christianity.<br />
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One need not believe this was a Jewish <i>conspiracy</i>, but merely a convergence of interests. This pattern has continued since, wherein Jews have collectively and prominently advocated for an end to tribalism for all but themselves; open borders for all but themselves; multiculturalism for all but themselves; Communism, for all but themselves. A weakening of everyone... everyone but themselves. One cannot fault them for taking advantage of the gifts that history and biology have given them--the gift of gab greater than the Irish ever dreamed of. If anything, it is cause for both admiration and emulation. But it is also reason enough to be wary of them, especially of their ideas, philosophies, and theologies, especially the ones they themselves do not emulate. Notice that the God of Israel is not merely tribal, but <i>geographic </i>and <i>ethnic</i>.<br />
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In short, Christianity is the product of slave-morality re-sentiment--resentment. It is a Greek Gift of the servant to the master, a slow poison destroying the soul <i>and the body</i> of those who drink it... slow enough to take generations to feel its' full effect. In this way, the spread of Christianity marks not the success of man via Christianity, but the success of <i>Christianity via man</i>, which is to say, the success of a runaway attitude originating in the desperation of slaves backed up against the wall of extinction. Think of the races that have taken up Christianity; there was success--political and military, yes--for they ran under the alliance of a universal God. But what happened to the people as that God of all and none took it's toll? What of the heroes and conquests of the men of old? What of those once great and glorious countries now? Greece? Rome? The "Holy Roman Empire?" What of Germany, England, and Spain? What of France, the nation once known as the home of the greatest warriors in the world, now--having internalized the inverted values of Christianity--a military joke? America is going the way of it's Etruscan predecessor. Who are the new rising nations? Russia and China, who have lived in horrendous pain, but without Christianity for nearly 70 years. Eastern Europe, the same.<br />
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This runaway attitude has taken a life of its' own in faith, and the sophistry of the Jews, born of dire need and circumstance, has taken on flesh in the form of an idea beyond their control. This idea, Christianity, perverts the natural values into their opposites, and is anti-truth, anti-health, anti-strength, anti-nation, and ultimately <i>anti-life</i>. Because it cuts off what is good, and replicates all that is properly evil, it is a corruption of mankind, a weakening of the spirit and of the flesh.<br />
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Christianity is, in the purest sense, <i>evil</i>.C.B. Robertsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04161710878332823421noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1906698695781392799.post-40276874275982955622015-12-02T18:52:00.003-08:002015-12-02T19:26:03.564-08:00Revisiting the Endlessly Changing Horizon<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Nevada is the Asiatic Steppe of the North American continent. Vast expanses of open space bring different arms of the Sierra Nevada and Rocky mountains together under one enormous sky. It's a barren place, and cows, horses, and crows seem to be more common than people (cars and trucks excepted) on the long ribbon of concrete stretching out across the valley floor: I-93. The land was shaped by meteors and mega-fauna, by volcanic heat and by colliding ocean plates, jutting limestone thousands of feet into the heavens. You could lose yourself in yourself, in a place like this.</div>
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As the long day came to a close--beginning at 4:30 in Lake Havasu, Arizona and cruising 487 miles north to Wells, a tiny town in the Silver State--my trainer and I found ourselves racing an ominous, snow-filled anvil cloud to our destination. It was cresting over a mountain, blowing directly across our path.</div>
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"Looks like we might be in for some weather," said my trainer.</div>
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"It's a race! Actually, I think we might win this one. We're only twenty miles out." We had been cruising at a steady 65 MPH since Los Vegas, and I was in a good mood.</div>
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He nodded, and smiled. The former green beret didn't usually smile. He must have been in a good mood too.</div>
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Two years ago, I wrote about the <a href="http://cbrobertson.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-endlessly-changing-horizon.html">spiritual benefits of truck-driving</a>, in the context of the sentiments of the late Christopher McCandles. Since then I have: fallen in love, worked in carpentry, climbed out of heartbreak, worked in marketing with Microsoft, re-immersed myself in socio-political debates, quit my job with Microsoft, and--finally--returned to the road. It's been an eventful and instructive two years, but now here I am, in the snow-crusted mountain-heart of the country. I love it. </div>
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Out of this enjoyment, I want to return to the theme of my previous short essay, not to brag about how awesome my job is (I suspect most people would not enjoy it), nor to self-indulgently reflect for the sake of reflection. My choices were the results of ideas that others had written down as distillations of their own experiences. These ideas, and my subsequent choices, have not so much "enriched" or "improved" my life, so much as they have impelled me into a completely new dimension. By that, I mean living with a standard for prioritizing what comes first, and how low I may be willing to go in order to pursue a life in accordance with this radical re-orientation of where "true north" is. Few people desire such a radical re-arrangement of life, but for those who feel something vague telling them that something is wrong for them in their lives, but cannot put into words exactly what that is, I hope my thoughts may be helpful.</div>
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First off, why on earth would such a re-orientation be desirable? The answer is that our values are mostly inherited, as is our standard of what "normal" is. We did not choose them, and a few of us more arrogant types may look back in history, or even have the gall to study philosophy and look for themselves, and declare that the life they have inherited is not the best life they can live. Consider, as an example, the expectations and goals of the middle-class, white suburbanite. For me, this inherited end-state included the following: </div>
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<li>suburban house</li>
<li>two cars</li>
<li>dog and/or cat</li>
<li>white-collar, $85,000+/year job</li>
<li>wife, maybe kids</li>
<li>retirement</li>
<li>be liked</li>
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Overarching all of this was an aesthetic, one of non-threatening respectability and monetary success (defined among upper-middle-class suburban whites as monetary over-achievement). More than anything else, security and stability. This was the life laid out for me, by my parents, but not only my parents. My schools, my sports teams, my churches, my martial arts instructors, and nearly everyone else I came into contact with all modeled and advocated this culture of stability, suburban sophistication and domestication. Not only that, bu all other ways of living--including those who earned <i>too much</i> as well as earning too little--were criticized, dissociated from, and even mocked.</div>
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One of the things you see while driving across the country is the incredible number of people living in small towns, spattered across the landscape. These people, when you talk to them, do not seem any more depressed, anxious, or jaded in their manner than those living the authorized lifestyle. Some seem bored, certainly, but the majority seem more psychologically healthy than your average hipster or basic bitch. The important revelation here is not the virtues of small-town life, but the viability of lifestyles other than the one I was raised with.</div>
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<br /></div>
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What is so bad about the suburban, white-collar culture?</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
McCandles started the point adequately enough:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"[T]hey are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future."</blockquote>
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[<a href="http://mjphillip.blogspot.com/2013/10/letter-from-chris-mccandless-to-ron_18.html">Full text of McCandles' letter to Ron Franz</a>]</div>
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Further elaboration is needed here. For starters, "the adventurous spirit" is imprecise, and as a result may sound untrue to the careless reader. But it is close enough to the truth to be worth taking seriously, and that truth is the search for <i>purpose</i>. The white-collar world of security, conformity, and conservation are all designed as efficient means to achieve some purpose (usually family), but have become so universalized for our global, consumer culture that two things have happened. First, it has become wrapped up in an ethic of consumption--TV, clothing fads, sports gear, computer games--that people often begin to feel like they're on a treadmill. There is no <i>purpose</i> in consumption, except as a means of sustenance to some other end. What do we do when consumption <i>is </i>the end? Consume more, to escape from the emptiness of purpose, mostly. Secondly, this suburban culture has become so global, so universal, and ubiquitous that some of us can derive no sense of accomplishment from achieving it, or even of purpose in striving for it. In other words, it can be a recipe for mediocrity, for banality, purposelessness, and lifelessness.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
Our jobs are broken down into component parts that require little to no skill, and it is impossible for us to take them particularly seriously. Our friendships consist of a broad network of shallow connections, full of superficial smiles without the mutual trust necessary to really speak our minds about things that matter to us. How many friends do you have who you could, without external prompting, have a conversation with about the difficult parts of your childhood, parts that seem to still impact your thinking and behavior today? Our houses are gaudy, far larger than necessary, especially given the little time we spend there, and yet we buy them anyways, going into debt for decades... because it's respectable. We crave the respect of friends who don't care about us, sell our lives and our souls to buy that respect by showing how successful, how good, how not-a-fuck-up we are, and go to school to work a high-paying job to make that happen, both of which requires us to reshape our values and our morals to better fit in to this factory-warranty life.</div>
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<div>
Many people feel this but carry on. They know that <i>other </i>people live in all kinds of fantastic, exotic ways, but they never really contemplate <i>themselves </i>setting out for a new horizon, one with a brighter sunset and starry skies than their own. They've been conditioned all their lives to view their family's way, their school's way, their society's way, as <i>the</i> way. Nothing short of a nagging compulsion will pull them out, and compulsions, as we all know, are "dangerous," "irrational" things.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
If the emptiness of suburbia, as I have portrayed it, speaks to you, and you feel the need for adventure in your life, but the compulsive, "irrational" nature of the thought makes you hesitate, I want to remind you that conservative patience is no inherent virtue. The whole of white suburbia, more or less, is waiting for Godot right now, waiting for that sense of purpose to waltz in and provide for them the accomplishment, the deep relationships, the purpose, that their current life has yet to provide. They aren't coming. Such things are bought with risk, with pain, with boredom, loneliness, and fear, and the culture we inherited is purpose-built to shield us from these things. It denies us the dangers, and by extension, denies us the character, the competence, confidence, and stories of adventure that come only from risk.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
This is the danger of stagnation, and the reward of pursuing the endlessly changing horizon. If you feel the desire, buy a bus-ticket to a faraway place, pack your bags and go. Don't leave yourself an out. Don't explain yourself to friends and relatives, who will try every delaying and discouraging tactic they know to protect you from yourself. The day will come where you wake up in your mid-40's and you will be in one of two places. You will either be confident, possessed of your accomplishments and sense of who you are, surrounded by a small number of deeply trustworthy friends who you love. Or you will realize that you've "made it," and have a BMW in your garage, but live under the gnawing tyranny of insecurity, self-doubt, dangerous questions about what your life is <i>about</i> (which you've pushed to the side out of fear, and by extension, barred yourself from all interesting conversation about things that truly matter), and surrounded by an enormous circle of Christmas-card acquaintances. There, you may look back and realize that the opportunity to test yourself, to find out what you're truly made of, is mostly diminished, and that sports cars, cigarettes, and extramarital affairs are a poor way to make up for lost time.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Of course it is never too late to answer the call, at least until you die. But the sooner you do it, the longer you will live with the benefits of having gone out on your own. The longer you wait, the greater the chances are that you will never get these, or worse, construct a delusional facade, precariously covering over a well of regret and uncertainty.<br />
<br />
Or perhaps adventure isn't even your thing, but something else is missing in your life. The true point is that those who have laid the path of life before you may well not know what they are doing, or else might know what they're doing and do it for <i>their</i> interests and not yours. It is better, and more beautiful, and more purposeful to live your life of your own accord, even if it is all a mistake, because then it will at least be truly <i>your</i> mistake. Nothing is worse than living on the advice and urgings of others, only to find out that your life has been nothing but someone <i>else's</i> mistake. The converse is true if you succeed (and you are more likely to, with the virtues and confidence of someone who has failed enough to make it on their own). Success built solely on the backs of others, with no thought, no risk, no great leap of your own, will always carry nagging self-doubt and latent uncertainty. Success from great risk is not accomplished alone either; on the contrary, it builds--demands--the deepest of relationships. It does give true confidence, a true sense of purpose, and is the road to improvement, ever nearer to (though never quite reaching) perfection.<br />
<br />
So as you learn, and think about what is good, what is beautiful, what is noble, what is pure, and what is true. If, in your thoughtful inquiries, you hear the call of the wild, go off on a vision quest. If you feel compelled to start a business, or become sculptor, or take up truck-driving, go do it. Let the impulse of great emotional purpose drive you. It's all that ever drove great people anyways.</div>
C.B. Robertsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04161710878332823421noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1906698695781392799.post-39642346264456436052015-02-25T16:59:00.001-08:002015-02-27T14:07:23.706-08:00The Media HugBox: A Collegiate DemonstrationSeveral weeks ago, curiosity brought me to read the most recent weekly paper of my former employer, The Watchdog. Inside, I found an article by one <a href="http://www.thewatchdogonline.com/crossing-the-line-with-freedom-of-speech-20043">Ghina Mubin</a> which argued that while what the murderers of Charlie Hebdo did was deplorable, a portion of the blame lay squarely on the shoulders of the content creators of the French publication. The heart of the Op/Ed--if one could say it had a center somewhere in the meandering path of assertions--read as follows:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;"><span style="color: #444444;">"What the Charlie Hebdo magazine did was extremely inappropriate. France should not have been OK with publishing the images. Muslims see the prophet as a living example of how they should live. Frankly, even drawing the prophet isn’t OK. By portraying him in a negative way people could get a different image of who the prophet is, and be even more confused on what the religion contains, Islamophobia is prevalent in the modern day world. When the cartoon was published, Charlie Hebdo encouraged ignorance and bigotry towards Islam. Shooting people is completely wrong and the shooters should be apprehended, but we must fix the causes and address the motives of these criminals. We should learn from tragedies like this.</span></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;"><span style="color: #444444;">It’s not a surprise that the cartoon was published in France. France has been popular in the media for their secular campaigns such as trying to ban women from wearing the veil. This totally violates the right to practice whatever beliefs they hold. Lately, people have been using this tragedy to justify this propagandic “freedom of speech.” This is the same propaganda the Nazis used during World War II to make the citizens believe they were doing right. Freedom of speech and hate are two different topics; mixing the two together creates tension. The gray area in between is where people start to argue. To me, this sounds more like “freedom to hate” or “freedom to be prejudiced” which sounds like a trigger to more violence, hate crimes and conflict. If France doesn’t acknowledge the “right to practice your religion,” then how can they be responsible to determine “freedom of speech” versus hate."</span></span></blockquote>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;"><br /></span>
Behold, your tax-dollars at work, incubating the future of our great nation.<br />
<br />
Initially, I was actually less appalled by the author's conclusions than by the almost satirically poor structure of the argument (if only slightly), and the reflection of this on the paper as a whole. As a point of reference and comparison, I remember that <a href="http://www.thewatchdogonline.com/anti-islam-film-sparks-controversy-11345">the very first piece I wrote</a> as a member of The Watchdog staff was heavily vetted and fact-checked before being published, and the Editor in Chief had strongly suggested that I changed a word so as to soften the impact on Bellevue College's "diverse student body." I forget which word was the offending one, but the paper went so far as to add a disclaimer to the bottom of my article when I declined to make the change, redundantly distancing itself from what were mostly just statements of fact. This is a step noticeably missing in Ms. Mubin's train of mostly fact-free opinions. Her journalistic failings, however great or maybe because of their grandiosity, were shorter in stature than its' entertainment value was tall, and so I did the only ethical and moral thing: I shared it for the enjoyment of my friends and acquaintances.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTuoWbm7MwMk8h56E0xSwt5lcUgRLJwuEhiGvPZRxhXCTe4FTGwRb5WhKAQGUYfMajpW6yLx7rzzV_62Cc5MARYN3klAB7MumLhAEa4IO9-ZLk2_Es3eu-XaSmsONpwjaXypCwP4vmbut0/s1600/OpEd.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTuoWbm7MwMk8h56E0xSwt5lcUgRLJwuEhiGvPZRxhXCTe4FTGwRb5WhKAQGUYfMajpW6yLx7rzzV_62Cc5MARYN3klAB7MumLhAEa4IO9-ZLk2_Es3eu-XaSmsONpwjaXypCwP4vmbut0/s1600/OpEd.png" height="271" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Additional comments edited out (This was the complete and total extent of my communication with Tockey on the subject; my views are my own, and do not reflect his, so please don't fire him)</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Among the entertained acquaintances was Brian Tockey, whose name is not redacted because he is a <a href="http://www.thewatchdogonline.com/author/brian-tockey">writer and editor</a> for the star publication of this post. He is also among a small number of contributors for whom I have tremendous respect, both for his intelligence and his writing abilities. Although I am proudly no longer a student at Bellevue College, the suggestion stuck with me for a few days. Ultimately--motivated equally by boredom and by the sheer will to exercise my right to join the conversation in the paper that I was paying for with my taxes--I decided to write a response. The paper states in its' print version that it <i>will</i> publish all letters to the editor, and under such a promise of inclusion, how could I resist, especially after personal send-off letters <a href="http://www.thewatchdogonline.com/letter-to-the-editor-white-privilege-15739">like</a> <a href="http://www.thewatchdogonline.com/letter-to-the-editor-in-response-to-robertson-16262">these</a>?<br />
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<br /></div>
<div>
So here is the Letter to the Editor, in full:</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #444444;">"Unlike the Fatwa against author Salmon Rushdie in 1989, or
the murder of Theo van Gogh in the streets of Amsterdam in 2004, the attack on
Charlie Hebdo has received an avalanche of publicity and outcry from the public
at large. The majority of this outcry has been leveled at the violence carried
out by Muslims against the secular publication, and a wonderfully large portion
of that anger coming from the Islamic community itself. But there is another
outcry aimed against the satirical editorial; the cartoons, this group says,
incite the violence.</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #444444;">Among the latter group, I’m unsurprised to see The Watchdog
staff in their editorial from January 27th. They are a professional group of
media students, after all, and the media has placed itself mostly in the
company of the censors, refusing—in this age of visual journalism—to show
exactly which cartoons were causing this crises, all the while publically
pondering if they had “gone too far this time.” Exactly like the
Jyllands-Posten Cartoon riots and murders from a decade ago, and exactly like
the Salmon Rushdie affair. </span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #444444;">I am pleasantly surprised to see that Ghina Mubin personally
opposes shooting people (a view not shared by Mohammed, who himself had many poets
like Abu Afak and others who mocked him killed). But the issue at hand is not
the moral quandaries of murder, nor is this letter addressed to Ms. Mubin. It
has rather to do with the subject of freedom of speech, which Ghina correctly
points out sometimes includes “freedom to hate.” How else could a tolerant,
liberal school like Bellevue College permit, let alone support, an ideology
that preaches that homosexuals are transgressors and abominations? Or that
unbelievers are to be fought until they willingly submit to a peaceful,
second-class citizenship? I am no theologian, but I have read the Quran. For
myself, the explicit calls to hatred, condemnation, and violence towards
unbelievers should be a far greater outrage against our finely tuned moral
sensitivities than any cartoon imaginable. </span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #444444;">The experience of being hated, for gays, Muslims, atheists
like myself, or anyone else, is a subjective one. Two years ago, for example,
BC’s own Yoshiko Harden talked to students about how calling a black person
“articulate” was actually a racial micro-aggression, regardless of the intent
of the speaker or the most obvious meaning of the sentence. In a world where a
simple compliment can be racist, a cartoon can be “Islamophobic,” and—one can’t
ignore the corollary—a religious text can be homophobic and sexist, freedom of
speech and freedom of religion both necessarily imply a freedom to hate. And
why shouldn’t it? I happen to hate rapists and murderers myself, and reserve
the right to say so. </span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #444444;">As Ghina’s failure to research reminds us, Nazi-style
censorship—not free speech—is the first step towards tyranny. To the Watchdog
staff, I wish to remind you that freedom of speech and of the press is the
platform on which you stand. Tread carefully when undermining yourself."</span></blockquote>
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"Why," you may ask, "are you publishing this on your own blog? Why not wait for the paper to post it like a normal person? They <i>do</i> promise to publish all letters to the editor, after all." True, and if their promise (unfortunately only verifiable in person or print, not digitally) were kept, than this post would not exist, or at least not in this lengthened form. But--and I'm sure you will be shocked and surprised by this--they appear to be dragging their feet on actually following through. And to clarify what feet-dragging looks like here, I submitted the above on February 12. One cycle passing would be understandable enough. Space fills up in an Op/Ed section; I know, I used to organize and edit them. Two, however, shows either incompetence or put-on forgetfulness, perhaps motivated by political disagreement, but more likely motivated by fear. Who knows for sure. But the most important character trait for a news story or an Op/Ed is timing. Writing a mediocre piece at the cusp of the subject's relevance is far better than writing a masterpiece well after it has died down. The Watchdog staff's failure to grasp this would be just as condemning as their understanding, so I won't bother speculating. I'm not waiting anymore in any case.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3q_HgtLoOmjZweJLDGY4ZK0tN_-fxho7-DvYD6EV1a_Z5uhLWOh-HQojItg7rV3Qh7OyyjSMVVr5Pne3gGWYmIaxC7HOMGdmHxCm8DZekwWppI37Fe2h_OZYAp1-sNOAOBCwsRf5XqN0z/s1600/Email.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3q_HgtLoOmjZweJLDGY4ZK0tN_-fxho7-DvYD6EV1a_Z5uhLWOh-HQojItg7rV3Qh7OyyjSMVVr5Pne3gGWYmIaxC7HOMGdmHxCm8DZekwWppI37Fe2h_OZYAp1-sNOAOBCwsRf5XqN0z/s1600/Email.png" height="250" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>"Bueller?"</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div>
One final observation: in the extraordinary lag-time between my submission of the letter and its non-publication, another headline related to violence and Islam came, this time in the reverse form from the usual. Three Muslims were shot to death by an atheist man in Chapel Hill, NC. Here, if there ever was one, is the perfect "man-bites-dog" story the media so craves. How did The Watchdog choose to cover it? See if you can guess the direction they take before you read <a href="http://www.thewatchdogonline.com/chapel-hill-north-carolina-shooting-20461">it</a>. In case you need a hint, here's a star quote:</div>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">"Movies such as “American Sniper” are promoting this type of bigotry and hate towards Muslims."</span></blockquote>
<br />
Indeed. Anyone who watched the film knows it's basically pro-atheist propaganda too.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
---</div>
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<i>*Update: Within several hours of posting this, Aaron did get back to me with the intent to publish my letter. I informed him that I had already published it elsewhere (here), and would completely understand if The Watchdog chooses not to publish it.</i>C.B. Robertsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04161710878332823421noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1906698695781392799.post-59823885875098845552015-02-03T11:45:00.000-08:002015-02-04T00:41:35.345-08:00Diversity Delirium<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Ferguson_Day_6,_Picture_44.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Ferguson_Day_6,_Picture_44.png" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>"Ferguson Day 6" (Wikimedia)</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Forbes began an <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/ekaterinawalter/2014/01/14/reaping-the-benefits-of-diversity-for-modern-business-innovation/">article on the benefits of diversity in the workplace</a> with a line from author Steven Covey: "Strength lies in differences, not in similarities." This is certainly true when differences function as compliments, like having a full array of skills on a football team rather than a whole line-up of quarterbacks. But is this true when differences exist for their own sake? Diversity is "critical" and "essential," says Ms. Walter of Forbes, because it breeds innovation. That it certainly does, but that's not all it breeds. Methinks in our exuberance we have forgotten <i>why</i> diversity is valuable.<br />
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1859 was a great year for diversity, being the year that John Stuart Mill published his famous essay <i><a href="http://www.bartleby.com/130/">On Liberty</a></i>. His defense of free expression was, at its core, a defense of diversity. But it was full of rhetoric and metaphors about battlefields and war. His imagining of "diversity" was not a rainbow of opinions about government, wealth-distribution, and foreign policy all sitting around a campfire singing <i>kum ba ya</i>. Diversity meant bloody combat between ideas, often to the death. His philosophical purpose in opposing censorship within his polemic was simply to <i>even the playing field so that the strongest argument would more consistently crush the weaker ones</i>. This has been a wonderful innovation for humanity because before Mill's proposal to throw ideas into the meat-grinding melee of public debate, the ideas were attached to tribes of real human beings. Differences--"diversity"--meant war. Now the ideas could die instead of us, so long as we were willing to accept the winning idea. In other words, diversity is valuable in a Darwinian sense; it speeds up the process of evolution by turning up the speed of natural selection (not a pleasant process for the ill-adapted and the weak). But if ideas are tested instead of humans, and we allow our beliefs to go through the furnace of natural selection, it means that, other factors notwithstanding, <i>we</i> don't have to, and we get peace and better knowledge in exchange for our wisdom.<br />
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Unfortunately, our feel-good friends on the left have forgotten that diversity is a fundamentally bloody affair, and in their forgetfulness, have replaced ideas with people again in the glorious gladiatorial bloodbath that is evolution. Instead of diversity of thought, it is diversity of race, gender, sexuality, religion, and culture that they're striving for. This has happened because, in a truly acrobatic feat of logical inversion, diversity has become associated with peace.<br />
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The logic goes more or less like this: diversity is good (assumption), but more importantly, racism and cultural bigotry (like "Islamophobia") are bad, and diversity fights against bigotry by getting people used to being around other. This works because racism and bigotry, which are prevalent problems in our society (assumption), is caused by unfamiliarity and fear (assumption).<br />
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In this way, diversity becomes a path to happy and cooperative coexistence, a view that is held with religious zeal, and in the name of this view, heretics are publicly crucified. If only their assumptions were true...<br />
<br />
Thinking that <i>diversity itself</i> is the goal, rather than a means to the goal, they make matters even worse and insist that people <i>not change </i>from their religion and culture of ethnic heritage. <a href="http://www.thewatchdogonline.com/dont-embrace-multiculturalism-under-the-guise-of-diversity-13273">As I've written before</a>, freezing people in their natural cultural state and proactively treating them differently is all that multiculturalism is. What would happen to their beloved diversity if we rejected "inferior" cultures and religions? Here begins the unraveling of Mill's vicarious conflict of ideas, and the return of conflict between actual people.<br />
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There is one way that this utopian rainbow-world can work, of course. We can refuse to take our own views seriously. You know, the ones that have been personally entwined with us through race, gender, religion, and whatever other identity-marker that can be concocted for the fetishization of diversity for diversity's sake. The conflicts between people then become mere "differences" of no significance or importance. So all cultures are equally valid; all religions are equally true, and atheism is just another religion. Morality, values, even truth are subjective. Nothing really matters, except for nothing mattering (for diversity). But even if this nihilism could be universally enforced--a prospect that I shall generously call "highly unlikely," particularly when certain religions are involved--then the value of diversity in the pursuit of higher experience and productivity becomes a moot point anyways. Why care about diversity if all values and cultures are equally valid?<br />
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What's wrong with war, for example? What's wrong with exclusion and hatred? Aren't those just a different but equal value? Or are we playing fast and loose with circular reasoning, and not thinking things through?<br />
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To be fair, there is a kind of enjoyment in the raw experience of variety. I suspect that this is what most college students are referring to when they talk about the "experience of diversity," particularly in their first few years or in their tax-funded party-trips abroad. Different food, different clothing, different languages, different customs, different architecture, different geography; all of these things are exhilarating because they are new. But in these moments of exhilaration, we aren't sitting down to haggle over how to deal with the Middle East, or tackle the root causes of poverty, or even make a business decision or finish a team project. More often than not, differences in values and culture create conflict in these circumstances, obstructing rather than assisting the creation of a better final product or decision. This is not to say that we cannot be inspired by other cultures; to the contrary, we should actively seek them out, and traveling has always been considered a vital part of the classical education for this reason. But inspiration from another culture is an acknowledgment of <i>value that the culture contributes</i>, not value for mere existence. This is, by definition, at the expense of some other culture, at the very least by exclusive act of discreet selection. Taking the best of all cultures and rejecting the worst is precisely the goal of Mill's combative vision, and the antithesis of universally respectful multiculturalism (you often see this laid bare in charges of "cultural appropriation" from the acrobatic abstracticians of academia). Acceptance of another culture's ideas is not so much "diversity" as a victory on the etherial battlefield of ideas. "Diversity" means there's still two or more conflicting values or beliefs, engaged with each other or staring each other down over the innumerable corpses of previous ideas that didn't quite make it.<br />
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In short, <a href="https://heartiste.wordpress.com/2011/06/29/diversity-proximity-war/">Diversity + Proximity = War</a>. This we cannot change; what we can change is what kind of war we want it to be: one of ideas, or one of guns.<br />
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This thesis has matched my own observation at College, where the Associated Student Government was a balkanized archipelago of various identity interest-groups, often distrustful of each other, however held together in solidarity by the promise of school money and perks in return for playing nice with other children. It also matches <a href="https://www.msu.edu/~zpneal/publications/neal-diversitysoc.pdf">recent</a> <a href="http://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2013/study-asks-is-a-better-world-possible/">research</a> on the subject, and follows the observations not only <a href="http://www.fredoneverything.net/Multi.shtml">journalists with the honesty of retirement</a>, but of virtually every thinking statesman and intellectual prior to John Stuart Mill.<br />
<br />
And here's the thing: <i>war is okay</i>, so long as the soldiers getting systematically dismembered and disassembled are the ethereal kind, rather than the corporal. It's even good; it makes us wiser, mentally agile and smarter, and does this very quickly, all with no cost to us but our emotional connection to bad ideas. But "diversity" is coming to be accepted as good for its own sake, in pursuit of a multicultural utopia of acceptance. Today's diversity-advocates tie people to what makes them different and locks them there, making conflicts between ideas necessarily into conflicts between people and arguments that were once causes for mere disagreement and debate into causes for violence. Resentment and distrust are building between religions, races, and cultures, and the priests of multiculturalism can't see it, partially because most Americans have been <i>extraordinarily</i> gracious in pretending not to really care about their own values in mixed company. But the predictable repetition of events like the Ferguson riots and the murders of the writers at Charlie Hebdo force ordinary citizens into an awkward position: the academia-media-government Leviathan is fanatically insisting that diversity is a great strength, while reality is saying the opposite with gunshots and fire. The double-think can only last so long.<br />
<br />
The way I see it, we basically have four options:<br />
<br />
1. We can reject "multiculturalism" and re-learn the functional kind of diversity under the lost guidance of JSM.<br />
2. We can reject diversity and enforce a culture of nihilism.<br />
3. We can reject proximity and join sides with the various racial and religious nationalists.<br />
4. We can go to war.<br />
<br />
I'd personally love to go with option one, but progressivism seems dead set on the path towards either nihilism or war in pursuit of a non-existent option five (universal peace, prosperity, fairness, wealth, and fulfillment to all people and otherkin). At this rate, they might manage both in our lifetimes, but you can be sure they'll be the last to know.<br />
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<tr><td><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/Coexist-bumpersticker.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/Coexist-bumpersticker.jpg" height="97" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;"><i>"Getting it Wrong" (Wikimedia)</i></td></tr>
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C.B. Robertsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04161710878332823421noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1906698695781392799.post-71560064414989353382014-10-21T20:00:00.000-07:002014-11-09T11:48:03.280-08:00Feminism and I<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://rack.2.mshcdn.com/media/ZgkyMDEyLzA0LzEzLzE4XzE3XzAyXzUzNV9maWxlCnAJdGh1bWIJMTIwMHg5NjAwPg/e1674459" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://rack.2.mshcdn.com/media/ZgkyMDEyLzA0LzEzLzE4XzE3XzAyXzUzNV9maWxlCnAJdGh1bWIJMTIwMHg5NjAwPg/e1674459" height="220" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Courtesy of Mashable.com</i></td></tr>
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What is it she needs?<br />
<br />
The above photo is not a stand-alone picture of a girl who has come to believe all on her own that she's been shorted by our culture. In the bottom right hand, you can see the reference to a Facebook group called "Who Needs Feminism[?]," which is itself part of a much larger trend of people taking pictures of themselves holding descriptions of why they need Feminism.<br />
<br />
Remember this phrase: "I <i>need</i> Feminism."<br />
<br />
What is Feminism, exactly? The snarky answer proffered to us by many self-proclaimed feminists is that it is "the radical notion that women are people too." But "what is a person?" is a complex, abstract question, let alone the even more complex question of what person-hood means about how we ought to treat them. More to the point, you'd be hard-pressed to find this elusive foe who <i>doesn't</i> think that women are actually people, which is especially shocking when we're repeatedly told that we live in a society dominated by such people and attitudes. No, this won't do.<br />
<br />
Google's default definition is that feminism is "the advocacy of women's rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality to men." This one is not quite as blatantly unhelpful, as it gives something concrete. But concreteness means falsifiability, and women already <i>have</i> the same rights as men do in the United States, politically, socially, and economically. <a href="http://thoughtcatalog.com/janet-bloomfield/2014/08/5-legal-rights-women-have-that-men-dont/">More, in fact</a>, especially when it comes to family courts, the draft, and defining sexual assault. Google's definition won't help us out either.<br />
<br />
Feminism is extremely difficult to pin down precisely, but we get the idea that it has something to do with equality and empowering women.<br />
<br />
Meet the ultimate empowered woman: Ayn Rand.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/32/Ayn_Rand1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/32/Ayn_Rand1.jpg" height="320" width="257" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Courtesy of Wikipedia</i></td></tr>
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Whether you agree with her philosophy or not, Ayn Rand was a female force of nature. When readers rate the best novels of all time, Rand's works occupy <a href="http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/">four out of the top ten slots</a> (including first and second place). The protagonist in her masterpiece <i>Atlas Shrugged</i> was as self-confident, successful, and inspirational as the author herself. Her message of self-reliance and the worship of competence and creativity is a message of equality and empowerment.<br />
<br />
So why do feminists ignore and <a href="http://jezebel.com/tag/ayn-rand">even criticize</a> her?<br />
<br />
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<i>"The question isn't who is going to let you; it's who is going to stop you." --Ayn Rand</i></div>
<br />
Because Ayn Rand doesn't <i>need</i> Feminism. Ayn Rand is not dependent on Feminism (or anyone else, for that matter), which deprives Feminism of it's power.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/eKzdW7kVOIs?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
<br />
<i>"They're asking for government power and government handouts."</i> Unlike our first two examined definitions, Feminism defined as a movement seeking power by appealing to the needs of women perfectly matches their actions and attitudes.<br />
<br />
But I think the main reason why Ayn Rand annoys feminists so much isn't her disagreement with the doctrine itself, nor is it her independence. It is because she perfectly embodies everything that Feminism claims to be about but isn't, and exposes the deceit in their stated intentions by the black-and-white contrast between Rand's independence and dependence of Feminism.<br />
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1906698695781392799" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="" /></a></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://shrink4men.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/paulelam.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://shrink4men.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/paulelam.jpg" height="320" width="284" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Courtesy of Shrinks4men</i></td></tr>
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Paul Elam, host of "A Voice for Men," describes the effects of such dependence and externalization of problems from his own past as a former feminist in the mental health and addiction treatment industry:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>When I first saw it, I really thought that it was just the next logical step in a society that was looking for equity and looking for fairness and justice. But as time passed, even as I was involved with it myself, I noticed a lot of animosity, a lot of vitriol, a lot of the ideologues that were supposedly looking out for the interests of women actually expressing a message that was targeting men as their problem. I witnessed, in the mental health field, the idea that we were treating addictions, and maybe adding information about special populations in order to enhance our ability to help people, [turn] to something entirely different. It became a blame-game. <b>Women came into treatment and were basically told by a lot of people that all of their problems were rooted in men</b>, which is of course the complete opposite; the idea of good chemical dependency treatment is that we treat people with accountability for their problems, that we acknowledge that they must take responsibility for their lives if they're going to address a problem that involves their own choices, which addictions certainly do. [<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ISrjNNFcGA&index=7&list=UU7iaZh8Nk5i-5NuMOhk6jKA">Full interview with Janet Bloomfield</a>]</i></blockquote>
The test of a good theory is its ability to explain reality. Why would Feminism want to go against standard industry knowledge about mental health and hurt women by convincing them to externalize their problems and blame men? This would make no sense if Feminism was a movement about helping and empowering women, but would make perfect sense if it was actually about using women's issues as a lever to gain power.<br />
<br />
Simply defining Feminism as a gender-wedging grab for political power and resources would make it bad enough; it's nature is why I distance myself from it and oppose it in principle. But those aren't sufficient to justify my loathing for it and my opposition to it <i>in practice</i>. For me, it's more personal.<br />
<br />
Baptisms that spark the intellect can happen in different waters. For some, it's politics; for others, economics. For me, it was religion, or, to be more precise, atheism. I read Dan Barker's book "Godless" and was hooked. I read Dawkins and Harris, and then I discovered Christopher Hitchens... It is said that ninety percent of people fall somewhere on the scale of bisexuality. I'm in the ten percent who don't--I'm completely and absolutely heterosexual--but I feel no shame or dishonesty in saying that Hitchens was, in a way, my first real love. While these encounters opened me up to the doors of politics, economics, philosophy, and literature, I always felt a special interest in studying religion and an attachment to the atheist community.<br />
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<a href="http://www.quickmeme.com/img/2c/2c7442117aef88e60b3735fe5cbb945746b3b83e7a965bf903a2b96e04dc80b9.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.quickmeme.com/img/2c/2c7442117aef88e60b3735fe5cbb945746b3b83e7a965bf903a2b96e04dc80b9.jpg" height="225" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
Then, in July of 2011, Feminism began taking over the Atheist community.<br />
<br />
It began with the incident obnoxiously and misleadingly dubbed "Elevatorgate," in which Rebecca Watson, a speaker at the conference, was complimented by a man in an elevator at the hotel for her work and asked if she wanted to join him in his hotel room for coffee. In her vlog about the event, Watson said "guys, don't do that." Both the man's non-confrontational proposition and her unequivocal rejection were, by any reasonable standard, reasonable. The response, however, was not. A few men stated that it was unreasonable to tell people not to flirt at conferences, and they, in-turn, were told that the Atheist community needed to be a safe place for women. As <a href="http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Elevatorgate">rationalwiki describes</a>, the incident became a "kerfuffle touching on feminism, privilege, conference creeps and the social makeup of the skepticsphere."<br />
<br />
As the back-and-forth escalated, a schism formed within atheism, between those self-identifying as feminists, and those who did not. In December of 2012, it reached the point where atheist blogger PZ Myers said: "Right now, for instance, the internet community is racked with these paroxysms of argument over--of all things!--the status of women. We're trying to decide whether women are eye candy and fuck toys and eye candy for privileged white men, or whether we're colleagues together in this movement." People who did not join the Feminist side were ostracized and demonized: the blogger and creationism-debunker extraordinaire Thunderf00t was kicked out of Freethought Blogs. Notorious vlogger TJ Kirk, The Amazing Atheist, was shunned and attacked for his criticisms of Feminism. PJ Myers casually accused Michael Shermer--another non-feminist--of <a href="http://www.freezepage.com/1376039041HQQMDPRCAF">raping a woman</a> at a conference (<a href="https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/michael-shermer-legal-fund">libel charges are still pending</a>). Even Richard Dawkins has been variously accused of being a misogynist within the world of atheism for laughing at the pettiness of women's complaints in comparison to the harms women experience from religious abuse worldwide.<br />
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<a href="http://i.ytimg.com/vi/8gGzn0jSsdA/maxresdefault.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i.ytimg.com/vi/8gGzn0jSsdA/maxresdefault.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
In the end, Feminism won. As of my writing this, <a href="http://freethoughtblogs.com/">Freethought Blogs</a> writes as much if not slightly more about "Feminism, gender and sexuality," than it does about "Atheism and Skepticism." They froze the community, divided it, and conquered it. They appropriated much of the influence and community that decades of work from atheists and skeptics built to advance atheism and skepticism.<br />
<br />
They did it in academia. They've managed it in the mainstream news (except for FOX). They pulled it off in my community, atheism. I'm sure they're doing it in plenty of Churches as well. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy">Now they have their sights set on the gaming world</a>.<br />
<br />
This is the main reason why I hate Feminism. Sure, I hate it because it is dishonest. I hate it because it insults the individual capabilities of women and it insults the moral integrity of men. I hate it because it's so impossibly stupid, particularly when it comes to explaining gender differences. And while they do all of that, they'll tell everybody who isn't a transgender, asexual, gay black woman that they're privileged, that they're subconsciously perpetuating some systemic culture of bigotry or other, and we ought to feel ashamed about it. I feel no shame in saying I hate that part of it too, both for its hypocrisy and stupidity. But if that was it, and they left me alone, I wouldn't care <i>that</i> much.<br />
<br />
But they won't leave us alone. Feminism is a leech. It wants to take the power and resources that other people have made as their own God-given right, and they have no qualms about destroying those creations in the process. This, I submit to you, is an unpardonable sin. I may not be able to do much, but I take great pleasure in what little vengeance I can visit back in return upon this poisonous ideology that is taking over the minds of my generation, by way of breaking people's illusions that they are morally better for calling themselves "feminists;" far from it.<br />
<br />
This is why I call myself an egalitarian and an anti-feminist. I'm going to fight against Feminism to the extent that I can, and if you have any self-respect as a woman or any self-worth as a man, I encourage you to join me and do so as well. You don't need Feminism; it needs you.<br />
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C.B. Robertsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04161710878332823421noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1906698695781392799.post-20595091750816190642014-10-12T18:52:00.003-07:002014-10-12T18:54:14.028-07:00Noblesville, Indiana<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<i>If you're reading this, thank you S.</i></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOI4V2umnaEONvh-L0AXUcZ_XTbz1r48HaMTkjN2wdDyoyiMs7yEJ0LU4kbA4NOg1ZKDs81Fw3YzEz0f1bpQwpgQdI8vLxpfNRoFFXwBZsO7N8Vu_RbR4MImzbWvcM68n22ejACCg9ETNg/s1600/Noblesville,+IN.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOI4V2umnaEONvh-L0AXUcZ_XTbz1r48HaMTkjN2wdDyoyiMs7yEJ0LU4kbA4NOg1ZKDs81Fw3YzEz0f1bpQwpgQdI8vLxpfNRoFFXwBZsO7N8Vu_RbR4MImzbWvcM68n22ejACCg9ETNg/s1600/Noblesville,+IN.png" height="276" width="320" /></a></div>
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It was a quiet Tuesday evening as Bill walked out of his aging, black car to the Denny's, the one near Our Lady of the Snow Church. The lights of the gas-station pierced through the darkness like those bright lone stars shining through on a cloudy night, and the faintest of winds pressed the cold through his clothes, his skin, and into his arthritic bones. The light dusting of snow had hardened the night before, and it crunched like gravel under his slow, uneven step as he walked up the gently winding path towards the golden, glass door.<br />
<br />
Kurt and Frank were already inside, their wispy silver hair covered by the same hat Bill wore. He brushed his shoes off on the mat and walked over to sit down with the other two at a table for four. The waitress glanced at the trio, the corner of her lip rising slightly before she returned to wiping down a table on the other side of the brightly-lit room.<br />
<br />
The empty chair sat heavily to Kurt's left.<br />
<br />
Bill took a seat next to Frank, who was already in a deep discussion with Kurt about flying. All retired now, Kurt had been an investment banker, Frank was a cattle farmer, and Bill had done logistics for an oil company not far from Indianapolis. But here in the quiet evenings of their bright cafe, they were neither retired nor civilian workers, but the soldiers they'd been, together in Vietnam four decades ago.<br />
<br />
Robert Frost suddenly came to mind in Bill's brain. It had been four decades since he'd heard it uttered aloud.<br />
<br />
<i>Nature's first green is gold</i><br />
<i>It's hardest hue to hold</i><br />
<i>It's early leaf's a flower</i><br />
<i>But only so an hour</i><br />
<i>Then leaf subside to leaf</i><br />
<i>So Eden sank to grief</i><br />
<i>So dawn goes down to day</i><br />
<i>Nothing gold can stay.</i><br />
<br />
Four decades. The voice had been Barry the poet's, whose ghost now sat with them in that orange and yellow diner, accented with green walls and brown shades. Barry had been the machine-gunner in Bill's team. For a machine-gunner, he had been an incongruously tall and lanky man with a narrow face and an appetite for literature, unbecoming for a marine in the group. He hadn't even done the platoon the courtesy of dying in combat so they could helplessly blame it on his intellectual preoccupations. It was a radar accident; he'd been fried when a radar technician accidentally turned on the system while Barry was cleaning of the crap and corpses of seagulls from the upper heights of their destroyer.<br />
<br />
Kurt and Frank's conversation veered from flight to Barry. Kurt, the old Navy pilot, and Frank, the aviation technician, would talk radios and planes for hours, but Bill the Marine couldn't keep up with the more technical tone the conversation inevitably took when technology was involved.<br />
<br />
"Well, Barry, it's good to see you again," said Kurt in a thick German accent. His eyes pointed to the empty chair, but his voice was aimed at his two living compatriots.<br />
<br />
"To Barry! And to us, who carry his ghost along, at least for a little while longer."<br />
<br />
"I'm not sure about you Kurt, my cogs and wheels aren't spinning like they used to," piped Frank in a chuckling Tennessee drawl.<br />
<br />
Bill smiled and sipped his coffee with the rest of them. The light brown invigorated him, not in chemistry, but in experience. It flowed through his arms like heat, radiating from his chest. The supernova of a dying star. The other two men sipped their coffee too. Kurt coughed suddenly, with the ragged, guttural cough of the sick elderly. He smiled, then resumed sipping his coffee.<br />
<br />
It's been a ride, thought Bill. He had no family; no children, no relatives. His wife had died two years ago. Now he was mourning his wife's death as well as Barry's death. But together, and with his aging, dying friends, it was his death they were mourning--no. Celebrating.<br />
<br />
He smiled again, then chuckled aloud. The warm yellow lights glowed over them.<br />
<br />
"I have Barry's poem. I know you old farts probably don't need to hear it again, but I'm going to say it anyways, because the odds of one of us chasing after Barry increase with every month."<br />
<br />
The others nodded somberly, but smiled then smiled in anticipation of the old ritual. Frank leaned back in his chair a bit, as if relaxing while listening to music.<br />
<br />
"Gold need not stay: A rebuttal," began Bill. "By Barry Swanson."<br />
<br />
<i>Though tarnish dims with grey</i><br />
<i>Gold's lustrous yellow ray,</i><br />
<i>And time will, from my mind</i><br />
<i>This beauteous image grind,</i><br />
<i>Still wondrous is it now</i><br />
<i>Before my vessel's prow,</i><br />
<i>This one-way trip to sea</i><br />
<i>Is gold enough for me.</i><br />
<br />
"Crazy he wrote that at only 24 years old. Gets me every time," said Frank slowly, several moments after Bill finished. "And by that, I mean, he really gets me! Ha!" He slapped the table enthusiastically. "He writes like an old man looking back on the middle age he never knew."<br />
<br />
The trio talked and joked into the night--only another forty minutes or so. The time together decreased every year, but felt long enough for them. Conversation shifted around, from Barry to planes, then to football, then to Frank's grandchildren, then to their respective vehicles and their problems, then finally back to Barry.<br />
<br />
As Bill walked back out the golden door and into the cold night air, he glanced appreciatively back at the Denny's--it's young waitress, the bright lights, the comfortable tables and good food--as though for the last time, turned, and walked to his black Lincoln Town Car. It looked eminently hearse-like, but the semblance didn't bother him as it might have in his youth. The car itself was suffering the effects of age, and likely only had around ten thousand miles left before it'd need an engine rebuild.<br />
<br />
Bill climbed in and took off his hat. He placed it ceremoniously on the passenger seat and turned the ignition key. The old Lincoln sputtered, coughed, and then came to life with a chuckle. "All right Lincoln. Let's go home," he said aloud. He backed up, turned, and, waving out the window to Kurt and Frank, drove off into the night.C.B. Robertsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04161710878332823421noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1906698695781392799.post-15844816784184411232014-09-28T20:49:00.001-07:002014-09-29T00:02:30.069-07:00The Hunt<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It was on the way down, moving down into that black gulch, that I saw the stag in the dappled light sifting through the aspen foliage. How the light faded! From the sunlit ridge, up, above the shadow of the surrounding hills, to the bone-white stripes of the gloomy wood, I was nearly surprised I could see anything at all. The scattered beams of sunlight penetrating the forest canopy had the effect of camouflaging everything beneath its gaze. And yet there it was. Standing, perfectly still, doomed as I did not then know, a ten-point buck.</div>
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Were my doctor more agreeable to my condition, and were my left arm not so numb (much to the good doctor's ignorance, thank god), I would have certainly brought my rifle along; a steady if brutish Marlin 30-30 with a kick almost as ferocious as that of its intended target. Unable to leave the house entirely unarmed, I brought a pair of binoculars and a pen and pad of paper. This close to the Dark Valley, that old aphorism about the pen and the sword really loses it's feeble obsolescence.</div>
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So too, as I walked down into the black gulch, did the sights around me seem more invigorating and enchanting than they used to be. In my mind their descriptors simply appeared in flowery language, and for that, dear reader, if you are indeed reading this, I sincerely apologize. I am no artist, or never have been before, that is, but I have always had an untapped gift with words. But I fear I would risk the dishonesty of downplaying the divine, were I to pretend the sights around me, and my own experience of them, here, on the cusp of light and darkness, were not so desperately fantastic. Desperate is not quite the right word, but no other adverb will do.</div>
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The stag was patient in its movement; I had the sense that it was quietly aware of me long before I noticed the handsome brown creature, so steady was his offset gaze. After a few moments of mutual awareness, he dropped his head back down to the small patch of grass in which the animal stood. Everything about it seemed graceful--believe me, reader, when I say that ordinarily such descriptions irritate me and strike me as spiritualist muck, grey in every way, but most especially in its put-on profundity. But here it seemed so true; the deer's muscles and shape, perfectly etched in tawny fur that looked, to the touch of my eyeballs, for all the world as the texture of silk feels under the fingertips.</div>
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Such was my bliss in that moment that everything was already over before my consciousness and credulity could catch up. A flash of movement in the brush behind the stag; the faint thud of impact as a mass of blonde fur collided with the deer; the ensuing entanglement; the kicking of the deer. I, as desperate for the deer's survival as the deer's flailing legs.</div>
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Somehow, the deer managed to right itself, but the mountain lion--as I now saw that flurry of death had been--still hung about its' neck. The mortally wounded creature, stepped, staggered, then spread its legs and stood, trying to remain upright. I could practically feel the life ebb out of the princely beast, from a hole somewhere in my chest. Its head hung down, and the mountain lion hung, quite still, about its' shoulders. It was nearly sunset, and the deer had mere minutes, perhaps seconds, before death would finally claw out its' throat in that black gulch.</div>
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In the most peculiar fashion, I found my sympathy (the source of which I still can't justify, except to say I felt a desperate necessity to sympathize with something), shift from the soon-to-be-deceased to its murderer. The great cat was, in fact, anything but great. It's sides were lean enough to see the individual ribs outlined beneath the blonde fur. There were the scars of healed gashes in it's tawny side. Perhaps the wounds of a lost fight, perhaps a brush with a bear, or perhaps the death throes of a recent victim. Or, more likely, the reminder of the successful defense of an elk or caribou, still roaming the forest somewhere.</div>
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Perhaps it too was near death, more knowingly, when it collided with that ill-fated dear in the black gulch, beneath the ridge-top I was now descending.</div>
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The various possibilities of the situation were unavoidable to me, and they charged into my head like a desperate blonde ball of death. Were the deer to have escaped, I noticed, the death of the feline would have been assured. Is that too murder? And starvation, what an atrocious, helpless death too! Were I armed, both the deer <i>and</i> the cougar, by indirect extension, would be doomed. Or perhaps the deer, by jaws, and then the mountain lion, by Marlin. And then I realized I had forgotten an important possibility: were the deer to have escaped, the desperate cat <i>would</i> have another last-resort option for survival, descending like a fated fool into that black gulch.</div>
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The source of my agony--watching death descend like a twilight shadow upon everything in the gulch--was not apparent to me in the moment, as the folly of my motives had not been apparent to me in all of my previous trips up to the ridge. There I came armed with death, and the life around me felt peripheral, uninteresting. It could wait, would wait for another day for my attention. And here I was, on that other day, looking with the insanity of a poet for life. And with the justice of a poet, nature has denied it to me.</div>
C.B. Robertsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04161710878332823421noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1906698695781392799.post-27490472393099597052014-09-26T14:40:00.004-07:002014-09-26T14:40:50.700-07:00Aaron Peleides, the Bully<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I never thought I'd punch him.</div>
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I never thought I was even capable of punching anyone, in fact, let alone sending John Baker Jr., the tall kid with blonde hair and a vicious laugh, to the hospital with a broken jaw and a fractured cheek. I'm not really a violent person, though I do have my moments of quiet anger. I sort of thought we all do. But here I am, sitting at Camp Clarity for Social Rehabilitation in the wilderness of Montana, being told to journal about my feelings. Most people don't end up in Montana like this. Most people aren't bullies, and I'm a bully, so they say. I guess maybe I do experience it a bit more than most people.</div>
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When I'm angry, I can't think straight. All the ideas I'd have about what I was going to say if John teased me about some bruise on my arm, or about the comic book I was carrying, all those pre-planned, witty comments I had would simply vanish. I'd draw a blank if I tried to remember them, but usually I'd forget to try. And his comments always seemed controlled, calculated to maximize the humiliation, but to minimize the appearance of any effort on his part. They were so intentionally casual, so wickedly offhand, that any response I made felt--and would certainly appear--to be an emotional overreaction. Usually his comments, if written down and taken out of context, would even sound kind. But if I didn't respond, it would look like a tacit submission and acceptance of his dominance, of my submission.</div>
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Any parent or teacher would hardly recognize John's laughter as vicious, or even recognize his comments as the eroding droplets of water on the face of a chinese water-torture patient. There was no "hey faggot!," or "you smell like shit!," or anything so obvious. It was always something much more casual. "Hey, what'dya got for lunch for me today?" "Hey, you're not gonna come hang out with us?" No, of course I'm not going to come hang out with you, and you know I wouldn't want to, which means I know why you're asking. "Hey man, really, I got nothing against gays; I can help you find a good boyfriend if you want." Such an evil, sympathetic-sounding voice, Of course the girl I liked most would never spend time with a doormat like me, and John knew it too. He'd seen me watching her at lunch, and commented on it at the time.</div>
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But of course, no teacher would ever put the whole picture together; they simply weren't around enough to hear him contradict what he'd said to me a mere two days ago, and by itself, it all sounded inclusive. Kind. Sympathetic. John was a good person to them. Popular, good at sports, reasonable grades, and involved in community service projects (where he mainly just goofed off with his friends). If I ever did respond from my heart, I'm sure whatever might have passed my lips would have sounded as unjustified, vicious, and bullying as John's comments actually were.</div>
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That was the diabolical beauty of his bullying. He kept his head and his wit, while draining away mine. He was an absolute vampire.</div>
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I'd dream sometimes about beating the living shit out of him. In fact, I was almost ashamed, even as I was having them, of how brutal I could be in the world of sleep. I fantasized about punching him in the stomach until he doubled over, then punching him in the kidneys and face until he fell down. I imagined, with horrible glee, pulling out a knife and kneeling on his arms, pinning him face up under me. The knife moved towards his face and I would slowly, deliberately press the edge to his lips. Only in a dream-world could I cut off his lips while he thrashed and screamed. Without any emotion on my face, I cut out his tongue. And with a final feeling of triumph, I stuffed his tongue in his right ear, and his lips in the left. I felt like a cop handing out a speeding ticket, such was my feeling of the pettiness of the justice being dispensed. Such was my feeling of justice. Such was my ruinous rage.</div>
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I challenge you, Ms. Robinson, if they photocopy this and send it to you, to tell me you've <i>never</i> dreamed of something this brutal yourself. Tell it to my face, so I can see your eyes as you tell me I'm abnormal for thinking these thoughts. I'll bet you can't do it. You'll say "but I never punched someone," as if that answers the question. As if all of our shared dreams, our subconscious understanding of the injustice of everything, of how we protect the bullies and the sociopaths and then rain down condemnation, ridicule, and hatred on those of us who don't have the social savvy to twist your stupid rules back on themselves and make balloon figurines out of them.</div>
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That's what makes me the bully from all of this. Where John was wise in the ways of navigating the ins and outs of cliques, etiquette, etc, I had the social dexterity of a blind elephant. Where John could lie with the grace of an angel, I had no poker face. Nothing but the truth could sound plausible from my lips, and even that was sometimes tricky. I hated liars, and I was proud of my disability.</div>
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My advantage would have been in the realm of honor and virtue, since John had none to speak of, and it's far more difficult to fake. But honor has long since been replaced by rules, laws, and policies. That's what my dad used to say anyways, and I believe him. There was no rule that someone like John could not flip and use for his own purpose. No policy to oppose bullying that he could not use as a shield for his own behavior. His words flew in below the radar, below the threshold of what we defined as bullying. Redefine it, and he'd simply ratchet back a bit. They could have made all speech against the rules, but no law could stifle the evil in his heart and his ability to communicate it, someway or another.</div>
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That's why, Ms. Robinson, you'll never understand that when John asked how my day was going, and whether or not I planned on asking Rebecca out (right in front of her! he was saying this to me, before I was ready, humiliating me, right in front of her!), you may well never understand that <i>you</i> can't put a label on bullying, and that what John was doing was vicious, not kind. Evil, not friendly.</div>
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That's why you'll think I'm a psychopath, that I'm unbalanced, that I'm a loose cannon, who needs counseling and therapy to control my anger for turning around to walk away, then spinning back and throwing all of my weight down my arm, into my closed fist, and onto the side of John's sympathetic, smirking face. Maybe I need drugs to drain my passion, which could have fueled my progress on the clarinet or drawing, but turned to this instead. I never thought I'd punch him, never thought I could be driven to do that, and then driven all the way out to Camp Clarity for Social Rehabilitation in the wilderness of Montana, and being told to journal about my feelings. I never thought I, Aaron Peleides, would be a bully,</div>
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But here I am.</div>
C.B. Robertsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04161710878332823421noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1906698695781392799.post-79482299297854940532014-09-23T12:57:00.002-07:002014-09-23T16:03:15.585-07:00The Wraith Watch (tentative Prologue & beginning of Chapter 1)<div style="text-align: center;">
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<b><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Prologue</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">A</span> laser of moonlight pierced the darkness in the old Scottish cave, coming to rest on the closed eyes of the man sleeping there. They opened.<br />
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The stone walls were musty, and they sweat droplets down their ancient faces, tears of condensation dripping down the fine masonry in the cool night air. Frost clung to the grass outside, had begun forming on the flat surfaces inside too, and as the man's exhalations increased, the puffs of vapor from his mouth lit up like billowing clouds in the ray of light illuminating the dark chamber.<br />
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The man rose up from where he had been laying. He knew what time it was, but he peered down at a primitive-looking pocket watch suspended from a leather necklace, just to be certain. The workings of his body were like those of his time-keeping devices, and they moved together. Even as he rose, the beam of moonlight vanished as the moon passed its mark in the sky. If his calculations were correct, the beam would return again in fifty years time.<br />
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The man wore nothing save the watch and a beard of fantastic proportions; although he would have only looked to be in his fifties clean-shaven, the long grey and white strands added a good twenty years to his appearance. After a few long moments of waking up, the smell of the matted hair seemed to disturb even its owner as his movement wafted the years of neglect in the stone dwelling up through his protesting nostrils.<i> First order of business is shaving,</i>he thought<i>.</i><br />
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<i>After food, of course.</i><br />
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The man set about waking up slowly, knowing that the muscular atrophy wouldn't permit prolonged activity as he used to do. He massaged and stretched his limbs as he started the fire. The familiar embers danced and crackled as the hearth was brought back to life from its owner's slumber. The copper rods running beneath the stone floor glowed where the ends protruded into the flames, emanating warmth up through the flagstone. It warmed the wiry sinews in his legs, the calloused bottoms of his feet.<br />
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The fifty years had been an approximate. There was no way to be sure if he was a year or two off, and in which direction, but he knew the time was close. The patterns sometimes rushed or delayed a bit, but they never failed. The old calendar room hadn't been calibrated for the time he needed when it was originally built three thousand years ago, of course, and he'd had to do a bit of architectural modification to get the alignment suited to his needs, but it still functioned essentially as it always had. About as effectively too. As far as the man could tell, the alignment had been about one and a half seconds early.<br />
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The man packed a leather rucksack as the water boiled: dry food, a blanket, a double-edged knife, and a small collection of gold ornaments and coins. It wasn't much, but it should be enough to purchase a boat-ticket across the Atlantic. The man pulled the knife back out of the rucksack and gripped the handle. The blade felt familiar to him as he drew it and examined the edge, touching it lightly with his finger. A drop of blood formed where the iron had touched. <i>Excellent</i>.<br />
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He took one more look at the carefully aligned hole in the wall, where the moonbeam had pierced his eyelids. The faint light of dawn was filtering in, pink and yellow against the black and grey walls, flecked with flickering orange light from the fire. The time had not yet come, but it was approaching.<br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Chapter 1 - Obituaries</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">R</span>eading the obituaries in our local town newspaper had never particularly bothered me. At least not the way I felt that it should. It was always some old strangers passing along, some old stranger with breath that smelled of leather, incorrigible driving habits, a fine taste in literature, who spontaneously sang aloud. Some old stranger who would be greatly missed by their family, their church and (usually quite elderly) friends. The printed praising of the departed made sometimes made me wonder if bad people ever took their turn for a change and died of with the rest of us. Reading the obituaries, it didn't seem so. Reading the obituaries was a train of kind old grandmas with cancer kicking the bucket, making room for their grandchildren, who would deeply, deeply miss them. I know that last part is true because I read it in the obituaries.</div>
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But the Koschei family slaughter really was different. This was no story about a stroke finally taking down a beloved family patriarch with one leg already in the grave. Young couple, successful, beautiful, immigrants by the sound of it--Ukranian father and Scottish mother. Beautiful couple, gunned down by bank robbers. Their six-year-old son was in the hospital, a bullet lodged in his heart, but still alive somehow. Adam was his name.</div>
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It wasn't their death, I slowly came to realize, but their lack of life that bothered me. Sure, all the old strangers that ate candy and shopped at the farmer's market lacked life when they died, but they had followed their trail all the way. They'd had their allotted time, and were politely passing the baton on. I thought, <i>these deaths shouldn't bother me</i>. I thought: <i>they just finished up their time a bit early. Some take the long road, some go home early</i>. "Go away," I corrected myself. I tend to extend my metaphors a bit too far when I'm thinking.</div>
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But something about the theft of these two tugged at something between my shoulder blades and inflated my lungs with hot indignation. The news piece that correlated to the story did make me feel bit better, of course. I didn't need to read it, having written it yesterday myself. The details still came to mind at my command: "two gunmen chased by police... quarter block... gunned down by law enforcement agents, one in critical condition, charges pending..."</div>
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One of the clumsy duo had tripped and accidentally sprayed Mr. and Mrs. Koschei with his automatic weapon. Anatol, the tall Ukrainian professor, had been hit five times in the chest, once in the arm, once in his hand, and twice in the neck. He'd bled to death through his carotid artery. Evalyn, the brunette Scottish beauty and advertising guru, had been shot twice in the stomach, once through her left breast, and two more times through her face. The policeman I talked to said even with the bullet wounds in her forehead and cheek, she looked beautiful.</div>
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And poor Adam took one in the chest, straight to the heart. I couldn't stifle a black chuckle at the time when I was told the boy was in "critical condition." The phrased seemed so inadequate, describing the state of the boy that once had been Adam Koschei. God knows who he would become after all of this. But if the boy did die, I thought, at least the robbers had shown me that the scales were even with a broad enough picture frame through which to look at the world. The bad guys do die, occasionally. Inevitably. We all have to die. No one escapes.</div>
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With that, I finished my coffee got up to go shower.</div>
C.B. Robertsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04161710878332823421noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1906698695781392799.post-32580040912575193932014-09-23T00:24:00.001-07:002014-09-25T20:23:02.191-07:00Enlightenment <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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"Grandpa, what does enlightenment mean?"<br />
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Frank carefully turned the prickly question over in his old mind, grey eyes steady on the road.<br />
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"Well, young Killian..."<br />
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He paused for dramatic effect. <i>How to answer this question...</i><br />
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"Enlightenment... where'd you hear the term?"<br />
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"Joey at school."<br />
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"Oh, well..."<br />
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Another pause, this time noticeably less dramatic. Killian waited patiently, his eight-year-old ears perked.<br />
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"Enlightenment is a kind of happiness, but not all happiness is enlightenment."<br />
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Frank's hopefulness in his vague answer fell away as he saw that Killian's waiting attention showed no sign of satisfaction.<br />
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"Englightenment..."<br />
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Another pause. When he spoke again, his voice came from the mountains far ahead of them.<br />
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"It's the happiness that comes after you've felt pain and overcome it. Enlightenment comes after you've sang the saddest songs you know off-key, mouthing the words because you can't actually speak, when you can't even breathe you're crying so hard from the pain. When you've cried so much that you feel like vomiting, and simply cough up tears that aren't there, when you reach that point where the person you value most--"<br />
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His voice caught. "--or thing you value most, of course.<br />
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"When that leaves you, then you find yourself with nothing but the worst pain you can imagine, then you eventually come out the other side and realize that you're still alive. What's more, that even though you lost what was greatest to you, some things in life still make it all worth it.<br />
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"After a time, you come to understand that nothing can keep you down forever, because there's always good out there, no matter how small."<br />
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He turned back and looked at Killian. "That understanding gives you strength and gives your happiness endurance. That's enlightenment."<br />
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"So enlightened people can't be unhappy?" Not a beat was skipped.<br />
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"Oh, yes they can." Frank's eyes returned to the hills in the distance. "But it takes the edge off to know that you can be happy without... whatever it is that you miss, even if it feels like you lost the whole world."<br />
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Killian began to grasp that his questions were hitting Frank just below the sternum, but not that this meant good graces called upon him to cease.<br />
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"Are you enlightened Grandpa?"<br />
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Frank chuckled at the suggestion. "No my boy, not by a long ways."<br />
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Killian paused for a moment, feeling a connection but not understanding its' full nature.<br />
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"Was Grandma enlightened?"<br />
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A minute passed by silently as the pair drove on. The mountains loomed, ancient and ambivalent before them, and the road trailed away into empty farmland behind them. Frank's mind raced like their car towards the ominous, dark cliffs rising up ahead, nearly leaving Killian behind. But after a moment he remembered the boy and came back.<br />
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"Yes Killian. I think so."C.B. Robertsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04161710878332823421noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1906698695781392799.post-11465967913389242392014-09-17T22:02:00.001-07:002014-09-18T13:37:46.125-07:00Leaving Graywinter<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It was a quarter till midnight when George finally arrived at John's apartment, pulling through the mud and snowy slush at the Graywinter complex. He trudged under the black security cameras, up the white snow and pushed on the grey door to number 203.<br />
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Rick spoke first as the door opened. "Ah, here's George. John, tell him about the notice from Graywinter management you were telling me about."<br />
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The young men were sitting down for a few drinks after their Thursday of retail and monotony. Still at the age when the freedom from schools and parents was a novel, exhilarating sensation, their shared evenings at the two-bedroom, two-bathroom on the second floor were what made life worth living. This was the breath of wind through the pine and cedar after two decades in a sterilized hospital ward. They called it John's apartment even though it belonged to all three of them, simply as a matter of habit. John had found it and moved in first.<br />
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"Oh! So the fucking rent lady sent us this notice that says from now on, they need the password for our internet hotspot to make sure we're not doing anything illegal online on their property. <i>And </i>they want to be able to view our email and facebook profiles, supposedly for the same reason. Isn't that bullshit?'<br />
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Rick jumped in. "I don't even know why they'd need that. It's not like there's been any issues with illegal activity online in the past, so it doesn't even make sense. Besides, it's not like they'd be liable for any illegal shit we do anyways."<br />
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John turned to look at George.<br />
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"Dude, can they even do this? I'm not even sure it's legal."<br />
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"It probably is, somehow. They have lawyers check all this shit." Rick spit the words as if in contempt. The contempt itself wasn't quite there. "It's bullshit in any case," he threw in, just for good measure.<br />
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George sat for a few seconds.<br />
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"It doesn't matter if it's legal or not. It's wrong, and I won't put up with it."<br />
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"You won't put up with it? What does that mean? It's not like there's anything we can do about it."<br />
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John's expression of outrage noticeably softened as he spoke.<br />
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"I don't know yet. Hand me a beer."<br />
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The conversation drifted to the logistics of opening beer bottles; superior designs, whether the keychain or belt-buckle was more handy, and the optimal metal for bottle-opener construction. Outside, the winds were picking up and the snow was falling harder.<br />
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George got up and stood by the window, looking out at the black winter around them. Fifteen minutes of talking about designs for inventions that would never be built had brought his mind back to the black winter's notice.<br />
<br />
"I'm moving out," he said suddenly. The words came out and the thought formulated itself simultaneously.<br />
<br />
"Dude, what the hell are you talking about?"<br />
<br />
Rick seemed unconvinced. "Don't overreact man. It's not like they're setting our bedtimes or sending us off to a labor camp. They just want access to our internet."<br />
<br />
"Hold up! Wait a second there... if they're doing this to check for illegal activity, <i>any</i> illegal activity, that's potential leverage they could use against you if you're being rowdy, even before quiet hours. It's not like they need to actually <i>act</i> on any illegal activity they might find, at least not right away. And if they did, instead of kicking us out, they could report it to the police. So yeah, actually. They <i>are</i> setting our bedtimes or possibly sending us off to a labor camp. If they felt like it."<br />
<br />
Rick's exasperated shrug arced over his head as though George's statement had just rudely buzzed around his head on the wings of a drunken mosquito. "Alright, now you're just being ridiculous--"<br />
<br />
"None of us do anything illegal!"<br />
<br />
"Really? Do you know all the laws? How much would you be willing to bet you've lived a clean, legal life online?"<br />
<br />
John paused before responding. "Dude, you're just making shit up now. They wouldn't do that."<br />
<br />
"I'd have thought they wouldn't do something like this, but they did."<br />
<br />
"Whatever man. You do your thing. But it's not like this is abnormal or anything. Plenty of other apartments, companies, and schools have been doing this recently; I just looked it up."<br />
<br />
"That doesn't make it right."<br />
<br />
Rick sipped his beer, sat forward in his chair and pressed his fingers together as a philosopher or chess player might do before their <i>coup de gr<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.3999996185303px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">â</span></span>ce</i>.<br />
<br />
"Look Saint George, it's like this: we young, poor guys need apartment set-ups like this that give nice places for cheap. They're just looking out for their own interests when they put these crazy rules in place. Ten-to-one odds there's some liability thing with their insurance behind it.<br />
<br />
"All your moralistic crap about things being 'right' or 'wrong' is garbage. All you're saying when you say something is 'wrong,' is 'this is inconvenient to me.' Well guess what, Mr. High and Noble, you're not the only one here, and what's convenient to a lot of people might not be convenient to you.<br />
<br />
"You live in a group of guys--us--and we're relying on you for your share of the rent. You can't just leave on some moral principle that you just made up and fuck us like that.<br />
<br />
"And bigger than that, we all live in an interconnected society. You're not some lone island, who picked yourself up by your bootstraps and built yourself up with your own two hands. You have us, your family, the government, your schools, and even this little apartment complex to thank for where you are today. We're all indebted to them, so if this measly price is what you we have to pay, so be it. I'll pay it gladly. Hell, I'm not doing anything illegal; certainly not any more illegal than anyone else I know anyways, we all basically do the same thing. I'm not doing anything wrong, so I don't mind them looking through my shit."<br />
<br />
He folded his hands across his chest and sat back. John gave a little triumphant snort and smirked in George's general direction, accidentally dropping his beer as he did so. He'd strategically chuckled throughout Rick's argument, but in all the wrong places, giving the impression that he completely agreed with Rick without having properly understood any of it.<br />
<br />
"How the piper has changed his tune. Saint George now, am I?"<br />
<br />
George looked out the window again.<br />
<br />
"I kind of like it."<br />
<br />
The snow was building up on the cars now. In the short half-hour, nearly an inch had accumulated, and it showed no signs of stopping. Out in the woods--he had to press his hands and face to the glass to see beyond the glare--he saw a deer stepping gingerly across the white field and into the black forest. The faint tinge of brown on the animal was the only hint of shade or color in the blizzard. Everything else was black or white under the cover of darkness. The glare off the mirrored glass hid the black and white landscape from the other two, but standing so close, it was clear to George.<br />
<br />
Rick shifted a bit, as the harsh words hung in the air a bit longer than he'd intended.<br />
<br />
"Would you say it's merely 'inconvenient' when someone is raped or murdered? A mere violation of good taste?"<br />
<br />
George paused, thinking. The trio had had their run-ins over these issues in the past, but never so directly. It had all been passing snipes and witty stabs, never given or taken seriously because the differences between their ideas had always been abstract and intellectual. Now George had laid a real choice lay before them, and the clever comebacks, which had seemed a mark of sophistication before, made Jerry feel suddenly more unprepared for acting on his moral notions than if they'd never talked about them.<br />
<br />
"Here's the problem you're trying to wriggle out of Rick: if what's convenient--what's pleasurable or painful--to me is something I shouldn't really concern myself with, why should anyone care of yours? You obviously don't care about <i>my</i> preferences. As for the preferences of society, that's just a bunch of individual's too, whose hopes and dreams are discarded as easily as mine. Or am I special?<br />
<br />
"If you're going to say that things being <i>really</i> 'right' or 'wrong' is garbage, than you have no ground at all to be upset. I can't even ask you 'what's wrong?' because nothing could possibly be wrong. You're just being inconvenienced somehow, but we shouldn't concern ourselves with the inconveniences of an individual.<br />
<br />
"But of course, what's convenient for me does not make the moral choice, and you're actually doubly wrong because it would be more convenient for me to stay. Don't act like you're taking this position as if it's because you care about other people."<br />
<br />
Rick seethed at the insinuation, but there was no indignation in his face.<br />
<br />
"Shut the fuck up, asshole. Just pay the goddamn rent and move on."<br />
<br />
"I'm not finished yet. I have one more point to make."<br />
<br />
George didn't seem to notice Jerry, was carrying on without looking at him, without noticing Jerry's arms begin to tremble. His words flowed like cool water over his sizzling hot friend in the armchair.<br />
<br />
"I never thought I'd have heard you say it, but you did. You said you don't mind them looking through your stuff? Anyone can see through that bullshit; you're lying and you know it."<br />
<br />
Rick rose to his feet, his eyes wide.<br />
<br />
"You're defending the people who wish to spy on you, to have control over you, but not because being right in an argument with me is so important... no. You've conceded points to me before, as we all have to you, with no issues. You don't want to face some inconsistency in your past, you don't want to look at your parents, or maybe yourself, as you would have to look at Graywinter. And so you defend them. But don't you see this? Don't you see you're defending the attack against yourself? You're speaking like one fit to be a slave--"<br />
<br />
His words were cut off as Rick's fist sliced through the air and into the back of George's head. He tilted forward, and his forehead passed through the glass pane, shattering it. A shower of tinkling glass, the broken mirror of glass, fell to the floor with George. The glare was replaced by the clear black and white of the world outside, stained along the edges by their friend.<br />
<br />
John sat still in his seat, paralyzed by incredulity and comforting helplessness.<br />
<br />
Slowly, George turned on the floor. Blood dripped from his forehead and seeped from his hands. His eyes gazed steadily downward.<br />
<br />
"...and so you'll be ruled like one," he said quietly.C.B. Robertsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04161710878332823421noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1906698695781392799.post-89469484038953758542014-06-25T22:49:00.003-07:002014-09-23T15:22:18.851-07:00Five Things That Six Years Of Debating Has Taught Me<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/12/01/health/01well_lonely/blogSpan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/12/01/health/01well_lonely/blogSpan.jpg" height="204" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: right;"><i>New York Times</i></td></tr>
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This is my last blog post.<br />
<br />
I've spent the last six years arguing. I know I hold no professional title or public prestige in this self-appointed occupation, but it is nonetheless true. It began with religion, after I became an atheist in High School, and has since morphed into intense conversations about politics, economics, climate, education, philosophy, culture, history, and even literature. Some of these conversations were deeply enjoyable. Others, not so much. But all the while through, I persevered in having these conversations (and educating myself about the subjects), not specifically because they were enjoyable, but because they were so intensely important. And they weren't important for their own sake, but were important because of the way that their answers--and our ignorance of them--affect our day-to-day lives. All of the big questions are big precisely because they influence in our most basic assumptions about life, our universe, and each other. In other words, they are important because they determine the shape, structure and existence of what is ultimately the most important thing in life: our relationships.<br />
<br />
Except for the big Catch-22: short of going on a killing spree, this pursuit is one of the most effective ways of purging your life of all social ties. It's not that no one wants to talk about these issues; it's that no one wants to be contradicted. Everyone wants to be right and, what's worse, the wise and knowledgeable are aware of how little they know; the ignorant and stupid (at least in relation to the big questions) are not... which means that they are usually the ones who are more confident in their misinformed opinions and more eager to take up causes. They're the ones most actively and self-assuredly pushing the buttons that control this monstrous contraption we're all riding along in. The desire to stop them from destroying everything, or even just a few things, is difficult to control, but the cost is the very reason these issues are worth caring about in the first place: your relationships, even with the ones driving us brilliantly towards oblivion.<br />
<br />
But this is not a plea for pity, or a vain cry of anguish at an unfair, uncaring universe. I've learned a lot about what's really important in life from these conversations, and especially from losing friends over these conversations. A few of them were intelligent, funny, and intensely driven. From these losses, I've compiled a list of rules to follow in contemplating the big questions.<br />
<br />
1.) <i>Divide people into categories</i>.<br />
<br />
This doesn't mean they must be locked in, or to stereotype based on something superficial (like race), but seriously consider people's personalities and how much your relationship with them means to you. I have three categories: (A) people I love, and therefore don't want to have serious conversations with; (B) people I love <i>because </i>I can have serious conversations with; and (C) people who I don't love.<br />
<br />
Many people will have a very difficult time admitting that the third category exists for themselves. We've been taught that we must love everyone, after all. I'm here to inform you that you are under no such obligation; some people are stupid, some people are straight-up assholes, and some people are just boring, or otherwise not fun to be around. Some of these people we love anyways. Maybe they're family, or we grew up with them. But make no mistake--you don't <i>have</i> to love these people. Society functions better when we all treat each other decently, sure, but holding a door open for a person at a store doesn't mean I love them. I'd just as soon ignore them, or even verbally destroy them if they said something vulgar or stupid about someone or something I <i>do </i>care about.<br />
<br />
If this is still difficult to swallow, consider that some people hate other people. Or maybe they don't hate them, but are convinced of something that will hurt or kill others. Can you love both simultaneously? Not without doing violence to the meaning of love. If you love Fred, you can't simultaneously love John, whose hatred or stupidity will maim or kill Fred. If you claim to love John, you aren't acting consistently with loving Fred. And so you must choose. The fatuous claim to love everyone is a cop-out, an empty ego-boost, and an insult to those who really deserve your love.<br />
<br />
2.) <i>Don't debate with people you care about</i><br />
<br />
This one is slightly more complex for me, because I have a number of friends that I care about in part because they make such great conversation partners. But if you aren't like me, and don't watch hundreds of hours of debates on YouTube while debating your friends' friends on Facebook for the sheer pleasure of it, this may not be a category for you. These friends of mine are unique and extraordinarily rare in their ability to emotionally detach themselves from their own position (but not from the conversation), and so our friendship is, for the most part, safe from harm.<br />
<br />
With these exceptional individuals aside, talking about big questions with people you love is an invitation for tension, anger, frustration, miscommunication, and ultimately the destruction of that relationship.<br />
<i><br /></i>
3.) <i>Don't stop learning</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
The fact that talking with the people in your day to day life about big-question topics is generally counterproductive on several levels doesn't mean that the issues are no longer important to understand.<br />
<br />
On a related note, there will be people--journalists, statisticians, statesmen and ordinary citizens--who will still take up the flag and go on the charge. Not only do they give you the opportunity to stay informed on these most important of issues, but often do so at significant personal and financial cost, ranging from the loss of a few friends to loss of liberty or life (Edward Snowden, Salmon Rushdie, Theo Van Gogh, etc). They may not lose a limb in combat, but for some of them it may feel like it. Remember that, and remember that they're the ones allowing you to inform yourself.<br />
<br />
4.) <i>Consider that you might be the stupid one in any given subject</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
It happens to the best of us. Don't be offended when someone points it out; thank them. Odds are high that you are one of the assholes pushing the world towards death, and didn't even know it, whether it's because of your religion (or lack of it?), your politics, or your atrocious sense of style.<br />
<i><br /></i>
5.) <i>Always remind yourself what you can and cannot control</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
There's a degree of nihilistic angst that comes with the realization that the most important thing in life and the pursuit of its preservation can often be mutually exclusive. When some large parts of humanity are dedicated to bringing all of us to the afterlife together, while other even larger groups attempt to reshape economic laws that only work if we make some definitively false assumptions about human psychology and motivation (otherwise they destroy everything), it can sometimes feel like you jumped out of an airplane with fellow jumpers who packed all of your backpacks with prayer-books instead of parachutes. At 10,000 feet in free fall, there isn't much you can do; talking is no use, and nothing you can do solo will possibly save you. But suppose you <i>could</i> save yourself, while the rest of the world fell to their death--being right, metaphorically. Would a life of solitude be worthwhile?<br />
<br />
In the meantime, you're still at 9,500 feet. You can't control your fate, but you're surrounded by other people, doomed just as you are. Ask them who they are. Tell them a funny joke. If you're feeling ambitious, write a final message to your children about the dangers of skydiving with prayer-warriors. Who knows; maybe the books will save you (probably not). Maybe you'll hit water, but in either case, you have no final say in the matter. But you do have a say in how you use that time, and maybe influencing what that time looks like for your children, just a little bit. And remember that no matter how dreary our future seems, how dense our planet cohabitants may seem, the short decades we have to experience it all is a fantastic accident more improbable than winning the lottery. That's important.<br />
<br />
So...<br />
<br />
So long internet debate world, and good riddance. Fellow internet-debaters, get out as soon as you can. You're the captain of your own ship, and no one else is going to save you from the island of isolation. Sail away. Go learn a skill, drive a truck, or become a carpenter. Fall in love. Live life for yourself, don't let it lapse away for some dumb cause or other. You'll do more good, do less harm, and enjoy it all far more for it.C.B. Robertsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04161710878332823421noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1906698695781392799.post-10724875736339806682014-06-08T19:56:00.001-07:002014-06-08T19:57:26.847-07:00Who's Responsible For Your Income?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
I had a phone interview last week with my new employer--we'll call him Bill--a finishing carpenter who works on the finest homes in the Seattle area. "I'm huffin' and puffin'," he said early on (he <i>was</i> breathing rather heavily). "We work hard here." When he asked how much I expected to make, I told him that I expected to be compensated based on the value of my work, and that I didn't have a set amount I was expecting. Bill responded by telling me a story of another employee he'd trained who had said the same thing. "He looked at his first paycheck and said 'there's been a mistake, you're paying me $15 an hour instead of the $12 we agreed upon,' but I told him that was no mistake. He got better and was doing more work. That's what we like to see."<br />
<br />
The equation is simple: the harder you work, the more you'll be paid. If you want more pay, you have to work more, harder, or both. If you feel that you are worth more than you are being paid, you can either attempt to convince your employer of their error or you can find work elsewhere. This has nothing to do with abstract constructs like "justice," "fairness," or "rights," and everything to do with mutual benefit and the subjective value of what it is you're providing to potential customers.<br />
<br />
Right before my phone interview, I'd dropped by Bellevue College, where the faculty was pasting flyers about how they could barely afford this or that commodity (usually something aiming at the gut, like childcare), and this fact proved that they were being exploited by the school. What a peculiar inversion of responsibility! Instead of the burden being on the parent to raise the child--or on any particular person to feed and clothe themselves--it is expected that your employer should pay you based not for the work that you do, but on the demands accumulated by your own choices. Choices which your employer had no say in, of course.<br />
<br />
An indirect acquaintance of mine whom we'll call Alex found himself in that precise predicament. Alex was a teacher, and didn't earn enough to support his family, so he simply picked up more classes at other schools--at last count, he was teaching at about six different schools through their online platforms, and manages to comfortably support his family of four single-handedly. Despite his busy work life, he still finds time to do independent research as well as watch TV, garden, and spend time with his family and kids. His ratemyprofessor.com score is 4.5.<br />
<br />
Is everybody as smart, resourceful, and organized as Alex, or as dedicated and hardworking as Bill? Probably not, but then again, they could be below many who are making less than they are. The key difference between the likes of Bill and Alex and the exploited professors at Bellevue College is their perspective on whose responsibility it is to take care of them. You can take responsibility for yourself, think proactively, and do some real work to improve your standing; or you can put the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of others, whereupon you can angrily decry how the universe hasn't treated you fairly as you remain stagnant right where you are.<br />
<br />
A final note: some jobs really <i>are </i>terrible. They don't pay well, and they just aren't fun. Don't these employers <i>owe</i> their employees wages that will sustain a comfortable, middle-class lifestyle?<br />
<br />
No. They don't. In fact, they don't owe anybody anything, let alone a job, let alone high wages. These employers are hiring people into positions that are generally low in both skill and responsibility. Some people do appear to be content to work in these sorts of jobs all of their lives, whether they're a cook gradually working their way into management at a fast-food joint, or if they're a janitor happy with a modest but stable income. For others who aren't so content, the way to a more comfortable standard of living is not an appeal to the non-existent right of a "living-wage" ("living" by whose standards anyways?), but to broaden and deepen your skill set to make you more valuable, either to your current employer or to a future one. Go to the library, or watch some YouTube videos. Show up to a job-site, or, like I did, just browse Craigslist and find an apprenticeship. If you can afford it, take some classes and get a degree. Maybe even start your own business.<br />
<br />
In short, it's time employees stopped expecting their employers to solve all of their financial problems for them. Everyone else is busy taking care of themselves because they're adults, and it's time BC's professors and others like them drop their narcissism and follow suit.C.B. Robertsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04161710878332823421noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1906698695781392799.post-46013682741124928032014-05-01T09:35:00.002-07:002014-05-13T12:30:09.219-07:00"American Spartan" Review<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Aristotle defined "tragedy" as an arrangement of incidents simulating real-life. Based on a chain of cause-and-effect incidents, they culminate in a climax that purges the readers of emotions like pity, fear, and outrage by bringing those feelings to the fore through the story. Complex tragedies, he said, are not just simple changes of fortune brought on by a singular catastrophe, but a reversal of intention and the eventual recognition of this reversal. Sophocles captured this in <i>Oedipus Rex</i> and <i>Antigone</i>, Mike Rowe humorously captured these concepts out of narrative structure in his <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs#">experience of lamb-castration</a>, but Ann Scott Tyson found a real-life, Aristotelian tragedy in the heroic story of special forces Major Jim Gant.<br />
<br />
The ethics of the book are complex and contentious on all fronts, not the least of which being the romantic relationship between the author and the subject, but the events are deeply informative, vivid, and heartbreaking. More important still, <a href="http://sofrep.com/33865/sof-got-screwed-conventional-force-lesson-jim-gant/">they are accurate</a>. As the story moves forward, the official answer to Gant's question, "are we really trying to win?" becomes more clear, as does the price of being passionate and being right in a bureaucratic world like the United States military. The well-written story brings much needed self-knowledge to what's really going on in our wars abroad, and how our own government threatens to lose the war against Al Qaeda and its kind that has been fought so bravely and so selflessly by our Green Berets and the Afghans fighting with them.<br />
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Major Gant was deeply inspired by Steven Pressfield's novel <i>Gates of Fire</i>, the story of Thermopylae that moved Jim to take on the Spartan warrior as part of his identity. But Pressfield in turn was inspired by Tyson's account of Gant, saying "if you read only one book this year about war or politics, read <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/American-Spartan-Promise-Mission-Betrayal/dp/product-description/0062114980">American Spartan</a></i>." Between the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq--with or without our presence--and the expanding bureaucratic government in the world of healthcare, economics and data-collection, such a poignant and prescient account could not be more important, and I agree wholeheartedly with Pressfield.C.B. Robertsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04161710878332823421noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1906698695781392799.post-58680197405364166772014-04-25T21:20:00.001-07:002014-04-25T21:24:07.174-07:00Why you should stop watching porn. Right now.<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://infidelityrecoveryinstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Internet-Porn-Cheating.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://infidelityrecoveryinstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Internet-Porn-Cheating.jpg" height="196" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>infidelityrecoveryinstitute.com</i></td></tr>
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Since I am assuming the reader is male, I want you to imagine your girlfriend (or potential girlfriend) is in another room with a friend. Despite their quiet tone, and your lack of intent to eavesdrop, you happen to distinctly hear your girlfriend tell her friend that she thinks about other men while she masturbates... which she does, all the time, while you're away. Particularly one affluent, young, six-foot-three, former football captain-turned-hotshot lawyer with a nine-inch dick. He's so unbelievably irresistible...<br />
<br />
If you are thinking to yourself "that wouldn't bother me at all, that's fine," I would suggest that you are almost certainly lying to yourself. It hurts when your partner even <i>thinks</i> about having sex with other people, and this is amplified by conscious repetition of the habit. Am I inadequate socially? Sexually? Am I not manly enough? Almost certainly not, but it damn sure feels that way. From this understanding, we're only one empathetic leap away from understanding the emotional reason why porn is toxic to relationships. This, if you are in a committed, monogomous relationship that you care about, is sufficient reason to stop watching porn, all by itself.<br />
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But it's <i>nothing</i> compared to the reasons Gary Wilson articulates in his TEDx talk from several years ago, which extend far beyond relationships to your individual mental health and capabilities. I'll leave the explaining to the speaker and his 16-minute talk, but if 16 minutes feels a bit too long, and you're tempted to pass it up, I'll try to keep your interest by mentioning that your sexual capabilities, physiologically, may be at stake. Yes, erectile dysfunction from too much internet porn. "How!" you may ask? Here's the video:<br />
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<br />C.B. Robertsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04161710878332823421noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1906698695781392799.post-65444476634739445632014-04-20T11:12:00.000-07:002014-04-20T11:16:57.504-07:00The Gun Debate<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The raging gun-debate will no doubt escalate once more, now that the shock of the Fort Hood shooting has ebbed a little bit. This time, the conversation is reaching its point of <i>reductio ad absurdum</i> termination: should we disarm soldiers on military bases? If ever there was a place full of qualified individuals to safely and effectively use weapons to protect themselves, rather than wait for armed help to arrive in a not-so-timely fashion, surely a military base would at least make the list?<br />
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A good place to begin in exploring the subject of gun-control is Sam Harris' <a href="http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-riddle-of-the-gun">blog post on the subject</a>. Harris himself is quite liberal on the matter of firearms, in modern political terms, and has stated that he believes people should need permits to own guns, permits that would be equivalent in difficulty to acquiring a pilot's license. But he isn't against gun-ownership at all. <i>Au contraire,</i> he points out that "a world without guns is one in which the most aggressive men can do more or less anything they want. It is a world in which a man with a knife can rape and murder a woman in the presence of a dozen witnesses, and none will find the courage to intervene." Harris himself is a gun-owner, as is Gabrielle Giffords, who survived the attack of a man who only managed to kill six people before being stopped by a motley crew of crowd members. One of those crowd members was Joseph Zamudio, who was carrying a weapon with him at the time, but had arrived at the scene after the initial (and only) burst of shooting had ceased. It is truly a pity he had not been there from the beginning, or that someone else in the crowd had not been armed.<br />
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It is natural for people to say "I'd rather <i>no one</i> had been armed in Arizona that day," but this is wishful thinking, not useful policy discussion. The guns are not the cause of the violence, but merely a means. People often talk about living in a "gun culture," but consider what the alternative might be if we address the means but not the cause. I would rather live in a gun culture than, for instance, a "bomb-culture," or a "biochemical-poisoning" culture. The worst mass-killing in an American school was not done with a gun, after all, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster">but a bomb</a>. Taking away guns won't merely disarm good people and, by extension, empower bad people, but could even encourage violent killers to find more creative and effective means, like poison or bombs.<br />
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What are the root causes? Some people adamantly believe that violent video games are the culprit. There's a lot to be said about video games, positive and negative, but the link between video games like Grand Theft Auto and violent action in children is somewhere between tenuous and purely speculative. Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman has contributed a lot of tremendous work on the subject of psychology and killing, and like Harris, is worth reading if you want to really educate yourself on the subject, but his assertion that <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FTV9nExiDE">video games are the only thing that's changed</a> in tandem with the rise in mass-shootings is simply incorrect.<br />
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A much more believable and demonstrable root cause is the over-medication of children, particularly from selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitors, or SSRI's, anti-depressants like Prozac. "It's been well known that adolescents and young people have an increased risk of suicide when they begin to take SSRI's," writes <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/obsessively-yours/201212/newtown-shootings-caution-about-violence-and-ssris">Lennard Davis in Psychology Today</a>. "[S]uicide is an impulsive behavior turned against oneself. But impulses particularly violent ones, can be turned against others." As it happens, almost all of the perpetrators of recent mass shootings were either taking SSRIs or were experiencing withdrawal symptoms from them.<br />
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Clearly, any conversation about violence has to tackle the over-diagnosing and medicating of children and teenagers. Most of the time, the depression experienced by boys has nothing to do with some chemical imbalance in the brain, and everything to do with our decrepit and soul-crushing government schools. Still, living in the present demands policy founded in the conditions we have, not the one's we'd like to have. What's the most effective way to curb, counter, and preempt these mass-shootings, or even smaller shootings and incidents of violence involving guns?<br />
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In addition to the observed link between SSRIs and violence, another trend is worth mentioning: every single mass shooting in the last few years except one (the Arizona shooting, among the least lethal) occurred in a "gun free zone." It's an unfortunate tendency that people who are willing to break the law by killing large numbers of people seem, for whatever reason, disinclined to obey the signs saying "no weapons beyond this point." If we lived in a world where such logic was effective, there would be no need for razor-wire fences and guard towers in prisons: a simple "no escape" sign every few yards or so would suffice. There are actually good reasons to believe that gun free zones attract violence, rather than deter it, the <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/09/10/did-colorado-shooter-single-out-cinemark-theater/">Aurora shooting</a> being the best example.<br />
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All of these are pragmatic arguments defending two points: first, that guns are a good and equalizing means of self-protection, and two, that the existence of guns has very little to do with the violence and, more importantly, the fear of gun related violence over the last few decades. I've scrupulously kept the second amendment out of the discussion so far because the second amendment has nothing to do with self-defense. As many have pointed out, the bill of rights doesn't give citizens a blank-check gun-ownership right for the sake of self-protection, hunting, etc, and restrictions on gun ownership to low-caliber pistols and Joe Biden's choice of shotguns would be reasonable and legal if the second amendment had anything to do with self-defense.<br />
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Many people feel that the second amendment is out of date. As Harris argues in his piece, "the Constitution was written by men who could not possibly have foreseen every change that would occur in American society in the ensuing centuries[...]We have since invented weapons that no civilian should be allowed to own [...] the idea that a few pistols and an AR 15 in every home constitutes a necessary bulwark against totalitarianism is fairly ridiculous."<br />
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If you look closely, you'll notice the semi-circular reasoning here: it would be silly to try to fight off a totalitarian state with a few small arms, and also, people shouldn't be allowed to carry anything other than small arms. The necessary premise that must be granted is that it would be inconceivable for the United States to gradually transform into a tyrannical state. I'll grant that it's unlikely, but given recent events--the IRS's political bullying, the ever-expanding NSA dragnet, the increasing power of police forces, schools, and government generally--is it really impossible? It would take nearly religious faith to accept that. Technology changes, it's true, but human nature doesn't, and we are, in many ways, fighting the same political battles today as we were 300 years ago in Europe, and 2,000 years ago in Rome. "It could never happen here," are the words of the unimaginative and those unversed in history.<br />
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You can think of the second amendment in the same way that anarchists often think of taxes. When you fill out your 1099 and mail it off, there is no force used, but you know that if you fail, forget, or refuse to pay your taxes, eventually you'll get notices. If you ignore the notices, you'll be visited by nice people to remind you. Eventually, they will attempt to repossess your property. If you try to kick them off your land for trespass or attempted theft, you will be arrested ("kidnapped") by men with guns. If you attempt to resist, the government has deadly force at its disposal as a last resort. For anarchists, it is from this threat of deadly force latent in that 1099 that we pay our taxes. So too is the second amendment a deeply buried but always lurking last resort that can keep a government from becoming tyrannical without requiring any exercise of force on the part of citizens. Is it really so certain that we can get rid of this right to own weapons, for the purpose of inhibiting government metastasis, with no negative consequences? Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes proclaimed that the life of the law is not logic, but experience, and experience has shown that the logical first step for a tyrannical government is to disarm its subjects. The recent Cliven Bundy standoff is not a complete vindication of this necessity, but a useful illustration of its concept. As a friend of mine recently put it:<br />
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<i>"The only reason the federal government backed down and gave in to the protesters was the fact that they had firearms. That they formed an armed guard. that they made clear demands, that they wanted a peaceful resolution to the conflict. The feds saw reason, and backed down. What would happen if those protesters were not armed? I'm pretty convinced that they would have lost. They may even have been arrested. Let's be clear, this isn't some kind of crazy call to violence. This is an observation on the true reason why Americans own firearms."</i><br />
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Indeed, though I'd argue it wasn't reason that the feds saw before they backed down. Like signs telling people not to carry guns or telling prisoners to stay in place, reason only works on people who listen to reason.C.B. Robertsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04161710878332823421noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1906698695781392799.post-21682726046796081422014-04-13T17:31:00.001-07:002014-04-13T17:41:08.419-07:00Crimea Revisited: "We've Made it Clear"<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>ABC News</i></td></tr>
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President Obama and his Secretary of State Kerry seem convinced of the efficacy of making grandiose pronouncements about consequences in the realm of international politics. They first made this policy clear in <a href="http://www.thewatchdogonline.com/the-weekly-world-accountability-in-syria-15038">Syria</a>, and are now reiterating their "speak loudly and carry a small stick" stance in the Russian annexation of <a href="http://cbrobertson.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-case-for-intervening-in-crimea.html">Crimea</a>.<br />
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In light of the best intelligence of the most sophisticated nation in the world, at least in regards to gathering intelligence, the separatist movement in Crimea (which is appearing to have likenesses in nearby regions) are the result of the rather obvious involvement of Russian special forces in those regions. Such actions violate the sovereignty of the state of Ukraine in the most blatant challenge to international borders since the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.<br />
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As laws only exist to the extent that they are enforceable, clearly something must be done. What bold and clear defense of international law will the United States take? After all, Barack Obama and Secretary Kerry "made it very clear" that there would be consequences, that there would be a very high price for Russia to pay. But what exactly does that mean? Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin (what other state could he serve with a name like that) pressed Kerry on the subject of clarity in action. What are we going to do?<br />
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Secretary Kerry's definitive answer was that we would use "tools of the 21st century" to combat "behavior from the 19th century." He didn't elaborate on what those tools were, but I'm going to assume he wasn't going to use social pressure from Facebook and Twitter, unless of course, that's now national defense policy. It wouldn't be particularly surprising. Senator Johnson's admonition that Putin "only responds to action, and not to word" is only countered by Kerry's assertion that it has been made eminently clear that the United States will act. Just like Syria, it seems.<br />
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But this in itself would hardly constitute a crime, were it not for our president's tragic misreading of Russia's character. Both Hitler and Churchill were the successful statesmen they were (Churchill more so, thank goodness) for their ability to accurately read the will and sentiments of nations; it is what allowed Hitler to predict that France would succumb to a Nazi invasion, despite every single one of his general's protestations to the contrary. France--Hitler realized--was sick of war, and lacked to will to fight, even for its own preservation. Churchill, similarly understanding Germany and it's citizens' history, culture, and predicament in the 1920's, knew that Hitler was no laughable side-show, and posed a serious threat to Western civilization. This, before accurately predicting a similar threat from Soviet Russia on its heels. Obama seems to believe that Russia doesn't plan on continuing this expansion, first in Georgia in 2008, now into Crimea. Did he not hear Putin espouse the "Russian-ness" of Crimea, and Kiev (the capital of Ukraine, <i>not</i> in Crimea), and of Belaruss? Did he not hear the shock and hurt in Putin's description of the collapse of the Soviet Union, that "no one could have forseen"? If he did hear these implicit and insidious foreshadowing of Putin's plans for Russian dominance of Eastern Europe, he doesn't seem to think the problem is serious enough to warrant immediate and visible action. But the odds are high that he doesn't grasp this at all, given his public incredulity about Russia's desire for these expansions, as they are clearly "not in Russia's best interest." Unfortunately Mr. President, it isn't our job or area of expertise to dictate what is or isn't in Russia's best interest. We can only attempt to anticipate, form theories, and react accordingly.<br />
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The problem is with Obama's foreign-policy ideology and its evaluation of the character of nations and its leaders. Sometimes, people don't reciprocate kindness. Sometimes, generosity and giving the benefit of the doubt is--rightfully--thought by other heads of state as signs of weakness and permissiveness in matters of international law. Our current administration has tried its best to champion diplomacy as its primary tool, rather than violence, and it has already strained this in Iraq and Afghanistan. But here, words are empty. As Senator Johnson said, Putin doesn't respond to words, just as Bashar al Assad learned he need not worry about the big words of what was once the world's greatest superpower, since we don't have the will to follow up on our promises when they become politically inconvenient. We need action if we wish to avert a second Soviet empire with theocratic tendencies, casting a pallid shadow over Europe and Asia, but words are not real action, and "making it clear" that we're going to do "something" is not actually doing anything at all.C.B. Robertsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04161710878332823421noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1906698695781392799.post-89336491684501690162014-04-09T08:22:00.002-07:002014-05-01T10:04:24.398-07:00Against Circumcision<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Edit: Based on recent revelations that the Norwegian study observed men who were circumcised in adulthood, rather than as children, and on a number of referred articles (<a href="http://www.cirp.org/library/general/richters1/">1</a>, <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1758146/pdf/v074p00368.pdf">2</a>, <a href="http://www.foreskinrestoration.info/images-Foreskin%20Restoration/Touch%20Test-BJU.pdf">3</a>, <a href="http://binik-lab.com/pdf/paynejsm.pdf">4</a>), I've changed my stance to neutral on the subject of infant circumcision since originally writing this post.</i><br />
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Why is crystal meth so bad?<br />
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It isn't as though Walter White's product is the equivalent of pot or alcohol with more legal restrictions. Alcohol ups your brain's levels of the neurotransmitter and "pleasure chemical" dopamine by about 2.5 times (above normal), while THC, the active chemical of cannabis, increases it by around 3 times. This is less than sex, as a point of reference. But methamphetamine floods your brain with up to 20,000 times your baseline levels of dopamine. The saturation and marination of a thirty-something-year-old's brain in dopamine that high resets your body's dopamine baseline, and a healthy, sober level is suddenly far below the new norm. The result is a condition called <i>anhedonia</i>, the inability to experience pleasure, even from highly pleasurable past-times like eating, sex, and old hobbies. Crystal meth semi-permanently rewires the brain for the worse.<br />
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There is another natural body chemical called cortisol that has a tremendous impact on our brains. Released in response to stress, cortisol changes the body's natural metabolism and suppresses the immune system, an ordinary and healthy response for an adult in a fight-or-flight situation, but otherwise detrimental to our overall health.<br />
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Our crystal meth example of the chemical rewiring of the brain is true even of people who are cognitively fully-developed. Imagine the effects of chemical saturation--even comparatively milder saturation--on the mind of an infant within the first days or even hours outside the womb. At some level, everybody understands this concept: we encourage pregnant mothers-to-be not to drink or smoke for precisely this reason. But cortisol is a powerful chemical as well. A family-member of mine severely broke their elbow in their early teens, and subsequently had seven surgeries and an extensive physical therapy program in order to regain some degree of movement. But more interestingly, and importantly for this discussion, their pain-tolerance shrank to near-oblivion. The sensation of touch on any part of their arm was excruciating, as were minor pains on other parts of the body; stubbed toes and the like.<br />
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Is it possible that subjecting newborn boys to lacerating the most sensitive part of their body and dousing their sponge-like, developing brains with a hefty dose of cortisol may produce permanent, adverse effects? The jury is still out, as the subject has (strangely) not been very well studied. But circumcision is excrutiating without proper anesthetic, <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/moral-landscapes/201109/myths-about-circumcision-you-likely-believe">which is usually not used</a>, and the data that has come out [<a href="http://www.cirp.org/library/pain/gunnar/">example 1</a>, <a href="http://www.circumcision.org/response.htm">example 2</a>], does strongly support this hypothesis. The more we learn about the brain, the more obviously important those developing years appear to be. From sociopathy in Romanian orphans from childhood neglect to language development, the early years, and especially the early months, of a child's mental development are crucial to their character later in life. Whether or not circumcision makes people more or less sensitive to pain than they should be--or otherwise affects their brain more generally--will have to be a subject for further investigation, as we simply don't have enough data to make conclusive pronouncements.<br />
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Whether or not circumcision negatively effects sensation in the penis, however, is already an <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23374102?dopt=Abstract">academically agreed-upon fact</a>. [<a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17378847">Second study</a>].<br />
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"But wait!" says the post-hoc apologist, "doesn't decreased sensitivity mean guys will last longer in bed? See, it was a good idea after all!"<br />
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Not only is this unwitting defense of barbaric religious prudery completely dismissive of <i>men's</i> pleasure and focusing oddly on women's, when the subject is the removal of half the nerves on the penis (a male organ, in case that wasn't clear before), but happens to be false as well. Actually, it isn't just false: it's backwards. A 2011 study found that <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21492404">circumcision was associated with premature ejaculation</a>.<br />
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And speaking of sexual dysfunction, another <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=21672947">2011 study from Denmark</a> found that "Circumcision was associated with frequent orgasm difficulties in Danish men and with a range of frequent sexual difficulties in women, notably orgasm difficulties, dyspareunia and a sense of incomplete sexual needs fulfilment[sic]." The following chart was created from their compiled results.<br />
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Hardly a ringing endorsement for the benefits of destroying part of the penis, unless you happen to be a believer in the ancient and original purpose of the practice: to curb sexual desires and habits. In that regard, it is indeed a modestly but reliably effective operation.<br />
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In the face of all of these downsides, any petty health benefit like a slightly decreased chance of male UTIs--easily treated with antibiotics, which I would like to point out are <i>slightly</i> less invasive than partial removal of a body-part--shouldn't even be discussed, but nevertheless, circumcision still has its defenders. "It helps prevent AIDS," they say. Penile cancer too.<br />
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While the dangers of AIDS and penile cancer can be preemptively tackled without resorting to a knife, that misses the deeper psychological problem here. Do you think these people would suggest or support the idea that women, after having their last child, should have their breasts surgically removed? Breast cancer is FAR more common than penile cancer (the AIDS-deterring effect of circumcision is marginal), and yet no such suggestion has been seriously brought to the table. The difference in attitudes over the health question--regarding the efficacy of removing body-parts willie-nilly, so to speak--suggests that these justifications have less to do with the actual medical benefits, and more to do with how people want to think about themselves. This is especially true of two groups of people in particular: parents who have circumcised their children, and men who have themselves been circumcised, because it is painful and difficult to imagine yourself as a cause or a victim of senseless mutilation. The implications are uncomfortable to contemplate for both group. But comfort is a poor guide to truth (to put it mildly), and the validity of that discomfort that should be a stronger reason for solidarity in being done with this atavistic and barbaric carry-over from the bloody superstitions of the pre-scientific ages, rather than a tranquilizing excuse for the continuation of this ritual cut.C.B. Robertsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04161710878332823421noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1906698695781392799.post-3839097980231827542014-04-06T17:25:00.000-07:002014-04-06T17:32:01.267-07:00How the Crucifixion of Brendan Eich killed my support for the LGBTQ movement<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In the last two years I've been writing, and in all of my life prior to that, I've been a staunch supporter of equality for gay couples. Not just for gay people, as some more religiously-inclined conservatives cleverly argue, as though one's sexual preference were merely a lifestyle choice, but for the affirmation that, as Hitchens so eloquently put it in his defense of homosexual relations before a jeering Catholic crowd, "it isn't just a form of sex, but a form of love." Not merely in culture, but in law.<br />
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But for all of that to matter, the law has to be respected, and culture, if it is to be changed, rather than simply destroyed, must be respected as well. While it began as a movement for that kind of humble, rational change, the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bi, trans, and queer) bloc has found itself in a position of political power and influence, and has turned into the very oppressive bully it once fought so rightfully against.<br />
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The boycott of Mozilla Firefox led by OKCupid and subsequent firing of its new CEO, Brendan Eich--the inventor of JavaScript--for the crime of donating a measly $1,000 to the California campaign for proposition 8 is only the latest of these exertions of new-found might. The campaigns against Chic-Fil-A, Hobby-Lobby, and various other groups with different political opinions about the definition of marriage were prominent forerunners, but I myself had an experience with the intolerance of the community that expects it the most.<br />
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While at Bellevue College, I wrote a number of articles praising the college's rendition of the anti-Proposition 8 play "8," supporting Referendum 74, and was a participating though inactive member of our campus's LGBTQ resource-center. But when someone snuck in to the resource-center and wrote "fags and homos" across the calendar, I proposed that the incident, while reprehensible, was <a href="http://www.thewatchdogonline.com/strangled-with-protection-15644">largely overblown</a>, and <i>certainty</i> not a felony, as the school was purporting it to be. Little did I know that I was defending the bisexual head of the resource center, who school officials later revealed was the only person to have used the door-code to enter the offices between the last administrator checked and left the room (with a slur-free calendar), and its opening the next day, when the anti-gay epithets were found. It was a cut-and-dry case of false-flag offensiveness, and the school found itself in an awkward position.<br />
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When I questioned the director herself and the director (who had repeatedly requested I be fired from the Watchdog for my absolutist position on free expression) sent an email to the faculty adviser over the conversation. For that investigation of the subject, along with the editor-in-chief's attempt to interview the head of security, the paper was accused by security of interfering with an investigation-in-progress. Within the fray, I received an email informing me I was being formally reviewed for having possibly "detrimentally affected the Watchdog staff," thus "undermining the educational experience." When the meeting eventually did come around, none of the original charges were actually used, but a new set, in response to a written preview of what my defense to the original allegations was to be, resulted in my termination.<br />
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It was a long case, and many parties were at fault for the confusion and hard feelings (my own probably not being the least of them), but the censorial nature of leading members of the LGBTQ movement shine bright through the smog.<br />
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These are not one-off cases, nor are they small details curling the edges of a larger, more important, and still morally righteous issue. Suppressing and harassing dissidents <i>is the issue</i> being decided, and the LGBTQ movement has transformed itself from the victim to the victimizer. By destroying people's lives through bully-tactics and demonizing whole businesses over the politics of its executives, they are cutting down the scaffolding that supports not only their ideological opponents, but themselves as well. Needless to say, this by no means implies that all individual members of the LGBTQ community are little inquisitors looking to squelch opposition, but the effect of the movement as a whole is moving that way, as Jonathan Rauch predicted and alluded to in his appropriately titled 1993 book, "Kindly Inquisitors." Indeed, Rauch himself is gay--a gay Jew, no less--and more recently, the gay <a href="http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/04/03/the-hounding-of-a-heretic-ctd/">Andrew Sullivan</a> has been the most prominent critic of the Eich affair.<br />
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The gay movement is perfectly within its legal rights to do what it is doing; no one, to my knowledge, is suggesting anything contrary. But for a movement based on broad public support, the threat that at any moment the gang may descend upon you with verbal acid over twitter, facebook, Salon.com, or the Huffington Post if one does not walk with sufficient caution upon the field of eggshells cast out before you, exerting its power like this has costs, and the lost support of people who don't like your bullying tactics is as perfectly legal--and probably more justified--than the illiberal hounding of the religious conservatives that have now found themselves in the minority. I will continue to vote for bills that give equal marriage rights to gay and trans citizens, but the LGBTQ movement has lost my vocal support. I won't show my solidarity with you on social media, and I will go out of my way to buy products from the companies you try to destroy for failing to conform to your ideology. Such a populist method of asserting your group's power is precisely the criticism of raw democracy and its' demagogic tendencies argued since ancient Greece and Rome, and it's nasty side is no less apparent now than it was then.C.B. Robertsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04161710878332823421noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1906698695781392799.post-39671408482090887472014-03-27T08:07:00.000-07:002014-04-01T00:27:38.927-07:00The Case for Intervening in Crimea<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Business Insider</i></td></tr>
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It is curious how, in all matters of international affairs, a reasonably large and influential portion of our population reflexively chooses to defend the position of America's enemies while ruthlessly criticizing America's own policies. They reach back in the the long-lost depths and annals of time to find historical ammunition with which to vindicate their default defiance with self-righteous certainty, or sometimes they know enough about current affairs to overgeneralize a more recent failure of our government, always infinitely more complex than the simplified theories of intentions imply, and thus prove that the war-hawks running our government are basically a group of psychopaths, gleefully lining their pockets as, with equal glee, they watch the havoc and carnage their plans affect.<br />
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The most irksome thing about this group is that I very recently would have counted myself among its number, a symbiotic combination of progressive, libertarian, anti-war sentiments enmeshed in the political psyche of some of our generation. No doubt, there is a romantic attraction to the position of the dissident and the rebel, but notions of civic aesthetics have little to do with the nature of the problem so impulsively opposed, let alone the rightness or wrongness of any proposed action. In this case, the problem is Crimea.</div>
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I say the vehement reaction is impulsive and reflexive because the first argument that comes up in casual conversation, without fail, has nothing specific to do with the issue itself. The argument has many names, but equivocation is the most generally accurate one. Sometimes it reaches back to Vietnam, or the Phillipines, or even as far back as the Native Americans. Sometimes the argument is made that Iraq or Afghanistan are essentially Imperialist wars (an untrue statement), which is bad (also untrue, were they correct on the nature of the war), and that therefore we're essentially no better than Russia (granting Russia's guilt on the allegations leveled at America, falsely), and that therefore, we have no right to throw the first stone (pure idealistic nonsense). A straw man this may be to the more sophisticated anti-war intellectuals, but this is roughly the level of dialogue making the rounds on social media in meme form, and actually making a substantial impact. Even if the fatuous premise of equivocation--that only the sinless may throw the first stones--were granted, I don't think America has much to compare with killing off 20 million citizens in a mere few decades, so the anti-war equivocator loses either way. I'm not sure when they stopped teaching the difference between bullying and self-defense to children, but they ought to start again.</div>
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The most astonishing argument is the notion that since Crimea voted on who their government ought to be, and 95.5% of the population voted they preferred Russia to be their sovereign owner, we would, in fact, be <i>infringing</i> on democracy in action by intervening on behalf of Ukraine.</div>
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Let us be clear here: we do not live in a classical democracy--little more than mob-rule--and we do not support raw democracy in the United States. We live in a particular kind of Republic, a blend of monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy, with the intent of maintaining as many of the benefits of these three different forms of government while minimizing the detriments. This is a very old concept, first put into practice by Lycurgus of Sparta and expounded upon by Cicero at greater length. Ukraine is a Republic too; specifically, a "unitary, semi-presidential Republic," and defending pure democracy as a stand-alone value against the most effective precedent for nations and their society--which happens to include sovereign maintenance of borders, beyond reach of the flimsy and susceptible whims of popular sentiment--is hogwash.</div>
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But there's a more telling side of the story: when Crimea voted for the change in leadership, Russia won by 95.5%. <i>No one</i> legitimately wins a 95.5% majority in politics. Sure, Crimea's government is imperfect, and suffers from corruption and mismanagement, but turning administration over to Russia hardly constitutes a step-up on those issues. Such an absurd landslide victory would hardly be more suspicious if the vote was absolutely unanimous.</div>
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In a private moment, Vladimir Putin once asked George W. Bush why he doesn't run for office a third time. Bush was, understandably, momentarily speechless at the abject disregard for political ethics and respect for precedent, but more importantly than Bush's lack of speaking (which we all probably wish we had experienced a bit more of in previous years) is the former KGB agent's revealed attitude towards notions of sovereignty, law, and national precedent.</div>
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A significant reason why the world is as peaceful as it is right now--arguably among the most peaceful times in history, according to Steven Pinker--is that the United States looms like... well, a hawk, over the world, willing to cut down aggressors who infringe on the sovereign rights of other nations. It would be wonderful if other countries helped us out in this because contrary to the oil-theft hype and speculative garbage half-articulated by some, it's really an enormous economic drain to maintain the largest, most advanced, and most deployed military in the world. But they don't, so we continue because it isn't in anybody's best interest to see a return to pre-Cold War methods of resolving international disputes. Deterrence works, because not everyone else out there has the same libertarian notions of love and peace that you and I do. In fact, many enemies (most recently Bin Laden) are all too happy to take advantage of our magnanimous inclinations and leverage it to attempt to destroy us.</div>
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In his writings, Bin Laden told his followers and the world that fighting the Russians had been hard. Fighting the Americans, he said, would be easy, because we didn't have the will to resist. Hitler made the same prediction of France in WWII and won an easy victory because he was correct, in spite of superior French numbers and the advise of all of his own generals not to engage on such a suicidal goal. Unlike France, however, we proved our own bearded Hitler wrong. But it's taken a toll, and our will to fight is diminishing. We have to remember that our security and the relatively peaceful state of the world is very much contingent on our willingness to fight, and when the time arises, we have to demonstrate our willingness by fighting. It is paradoxical, to be sure; to achieve peace by amassing arms. It's easy to see how hippies could conclude that it is roughly analogous to "fucking for virginity," however shortsighted their vision. And there are latent dangers if we do not sufficiently check the military itself. But these claims are not true because they "make sense," but because history has demonstrated that they work.</div>
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Vladimir Putin's assertion in the Crimea is not a particularly bold move, but neither is it timid. Imagine a child, carefully and watchfully putting a toe over the line he was told not to cross. Whether we should have gone into Syria or not, we failed to act when we claimed we would, and now our bluff is being called once more. Will we step in and protect little countries from big neighbors? If, in the future, we want our word to be taken seriously, and thus hold violent combat off at superior arm's length, we have to regain the credibility we've lost and reassert our willingness to fight. And our willingness to fight doesn't begin in Congress, but in the people. It's a hard-sell to convince enough of a nation that the willingness to go to war has a pacific effect on the international community, but the alternative is a lot more murderous and bold toe-crossing in the future, when it becomes more certain the the lesser parts of humanity that, no matter the illicit and murderous nature of their actions, no one will stop them because no country has the stomach any longer to do what is necessary to preserve peace.</div>
C.B. Robertsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04161710878332823421noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1906698695781392799.post-111486305566329222014-03-02T13:51:00.000-08:002014-03-02T13:51:09.621-08:00A Theory on Liberals and Conservatives<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In the American court of law, a criminal prosecution is conducted with both a prosecuting and defending lawyer. The reason both of these are guaranteed is that the guilt or innocence of the accused cannot be presumed by fiat, though we do hold people to be innocent until proven guilty as a measure against vindictive accusations and false imprisonment. An objective advocate taking the side of the client and throwing up the best possible legal defense, regardless of his guilt or innocence, is the basis for our ability to claim that the defendant is, in fact, guilty, as <a href="http://www.alandershowitz.com/faq.php#7">Alan Dershowitz acknowledges is almost always the case</a>. Nevertheless, sometimes the defendant is innocent, and the defense attorney's importance is more obvious still.<br />
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So too in politics, we can roughly think of the Democratic and Republican parties as analogous to defense and prosecutorial attorneys, respectively. As the axiomatic proponents of change, it is almost always the progressives who have come up with the ideas and defend them in the name of the advancement of society and the human condition. Conservatives conversely defend the status quo, and generally look to the potential threats and dangers of the new ideas being proposed by liberals.<br />
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Now, it would seem from this perspective that conservatives are merely holding back the engines of progress, except that just as the vast majority of the accused are, in fact, guilty, the vast majority of liberal-progressive ideas are wrong. Some of them are dangerously wrong. This does not mean that liberals are evil, are stupid, or are obstinate beyond hope. Many of them are brilliant. They merely suffer from the same problem that afflicts inventors, theorists, and creative individuals of all kinds: limited knowledge. Our narrow scope of experience and understanding makes stumbling upon genuinely good ideas an extremely difficult undertaking, and one where success is more often a factor of luck and the best measure of success is not whether it "sounds like a good idea" or "makes sense," but by the test of trial and error.<br />
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But even in this allegation--that liberals are usually wrong--lies a latent praise for sometimes being right, and for throwing out all these ideas in the first place. Indeed, all of the principles and policies Conservatives defend today, most of them being or having been "good ideas," were the one-time product of liberal minds. The men who forged the United States were, by all accounts, among the most radical progressives of their day. The fact that they are now defended by conservatives against the ideological attacks of liberals like Howard Zinn is not a betrayal of ideology, but conformity to the important role of that mindset in our system.<br />
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It therefore makes perfect sense that freedom of speech was largely a creation of the left, and is now primarily under attack from the left. It makes sense that the conservative mindset historically defended monarchy and now defends limited government. Liberals create and destroy, while Conservatives block and defend. It was a good thing that Liberals succeeded in creating our modern understanding of freedom of speech in the United States (by conservative surrogate, Oliver Wendell Holmes) in 1919. It was also a good thing that liberals succeeded in destroying the institution of slavery. So too was it a good thing that Conservatives successfully blocked the spread of communism in the 20th century, and successfully defended the same policy of free speech when it has come under attack from the same liberal party that redefined it a century before.<br />
<br />There is much confusion about who was where and which party said what, when, but the foundational attitudes are timeless. Conservatives are skeptics, cautious and mindful of the lessons of history. Liberals are dreamers, the inventors of the future. As a conservative myself, I tend to be skeptical of new solutions, as most have a tendency to make the problem worse and often come with horrendous unexpected side-effects, but I simultaneously recognize that we have these same liberals and their ideological ancestors to thank for the principles and values that we hold now. Sometimes--more rarely than they like to admit, but sometimes--they are right.<br />
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But liberals need to understand that the role conservatives play is not merely a matter of something as petty as "social justice," (an as-yet undefined or definitionally flexible term), but can be as serious as life-and-death. Take a moment to imagine what America might be like today were Communism to have successfully spread as it was beginning to, and had not been shut down as it was. There's no reason to assume it would have been <i>as</i> lethal as Russia or China or North Korea, leaving tens of millions dead from starvation and secret prison camps, but the threat wasn't a historical hallucination. The sexual and religious minorities they defend so vigorously now could have easily been the targets of populist hatred, as they were in those parts of the world they most vocally admonished the West to emulate, including that subject of liberal adoration (of the time), the socialist nation of Germany in the 1930's. Talk about a bad idea with consequences.<br />
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Multiculturalism and deconstructive theories today are close relatives of communism. Both are philosophically Marxist and aim at setting fire to the traditional order. Communism was economic, while the new radical left theories are largely social and cultural, but both result in the rejection of the principles that made the west so successful: the notions of limited government, individual rather than collective sovereignty, property rights, and an understanding of human behavior that stresses personal responsibility. More specific to modern times, multicultural doctrines of tolerance also open the gates for a theocratic Trojan Horse from the middle east in the form of militant Islam. Muslims advocating war against the West have been guest-speakers at university since long-before 9/11, and left-leaning academics at these universities have since claimed that it was the despair of economic poverty, not Islamic Jihad (as explicitly stated by the bombers themselves), that was the root cause of these attacks. If you don't believe that there is a civilizational threat lurking here, than you probably do not understand the nature of this particular brand of Islam.<br />
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It isn't a bad thing when the left fails to acknowledge that they're wrong, or even a threat to civilization, because if they were to stop coming up with ideas to push civilization forward, it would stagnate. The suppression of bad and dangerous ideas--through argumentation and refutation--is what conservatives are there for, and a good thing they do it too. The real threat is in liberals bypassing conservatives in their ideas. Imagine, by comparison, the institution of trial by one-sided litigation. The search for truth is over.<br />
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It was with this threat in mind that I chose the picture for this particular post: Marcus Tullius Cicero, one of the first and greatest orators and rhetoricians, and conservative defender of the Roman system (along with Cato the Younger, the indirect namesake of the Cato institute) from Julius Caesar. Their failure eventually culminated in failure to prevent the civic and subsequently more literal collapse of the entire civilization. Historians disagree over exactly how many centuries it took for Europe, North Africa, Western Asia and the Mediterranean to return to standards of living similar to those under Roman times, but 1,000 years is a reasonably conservative estimate. Some areas still haven't quite returned to their level of success attained under Roman rule, most notably in regions of what is now Tunisia, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.<br />
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These are the stakes, and while liberals pave the path towards a better and brighter future, they also carry the latent ability to completely destroy America (a country they themselves created in a previous life, to be fair). Their largely pure motives don't lessen that danger; destruction by malice or by ignorance are still both destruction. If conservatives can learn to understand that liberals created everything that they cherish, and that liberals will continue to give their children hope for an even better future, and if liberals can learn to appreciate that the vast majority of their ideas are wrong and that conservatives are often times the only thing between themselves and unintentional societal and cultural suicide, much more serious politics and discussions might be possible on the merits of policies, rather than on baseless allegations of evil intentions and narrow, one-sided definitions of what America is all about.C.B. Robertsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04161710878332823421noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1906698695781392799.post-67807446908255223732014-02-10T19:38:00.001-08:002014-02-11T09:11:12.099-08:00The Wild World of Truck Law<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I was driving through the heart of southern Texas, traveling--over the course of two days--from El Paso, Texas to Mobile, Alabama. I had a family reunion to attend in Gulf Shores, and the traffic around San Antonio and Houston was jeopardizing my already tenuous time table. Ultimately, I realized I wouldn't make it all the way to Mobile by the coordinated evening, and I called my family to inform them and possibly come up with a solution as that reality become more apparent.<br />
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The personal problem for me here was hours. Professional commercial motor vehicle (CMV) drivers are only allowed to drive a maximum of 11 hours a day, out of a total of 14 consecutive hours maximum of work. This itself must be punctuated by a break of no less than 30 minutes before the 8th hour of that 14, and all of this is contingent on you having available hours in the first place. A CMV driver is not to exceed 70 hours of time on duty in an 8-day rolling week... unless your company closes on weekends or travels in Canada, where you're limited to 60 hours in a 7-day rolling week. Either of these periods can be reset to the full time by taking a 34-hour break, including at least two 1 am - 5 am periods. Welcome to the DOT's world.<br />
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One option that I had considered was using what's called personal conveyance, or "PC," to park my trailer, unhook, and drive the truck as a commuting vehicle to the gathering and back the following day. But even this was shrouded in hazy and ominous regulations. After calling my trainer, my uncle (a former driver), and briefly consulting Google, it appeared that I could, in fact, legally go over my hours through PC, but only if I was traveling a "short distance" to lodgings, restaurants, etc, or if I was using it to commute to or from my "home terminal." Neither of which seemed to be precisely true in my case; I needed to drive about 80 miles from a yard more than a thousand miles from my home terminal, and 80 miles is a "short distance" only by the most generous of comparative interpretations. And here too, a driver cannot operate a CMV period if they have been "placed out of service for exceeding the requirements of the hours of service regulations." This strange and ambiguous phrase was not made any clearer when I asked about the specifics on PC rules from the safety officer at my company's yard in Texas, who essentially said "it's just a liability thing so that if you get in an accident, and you're over hours..."<br />
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Ultimately, my mom and uncle drove out the 80 miles to collect me.<br />
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What I've briefly summarized and described here is a problem related <i>only</i> to the hours of service regulations. I'm not expecting you, reader, to absorb and remember all of this, since most truck drivers only have a rudimentary and functional understanding of these laws, which seem to change yearly anyhow (for instance, the "two consecutive 1 am - 5 am periods" clause is currently being debated by congress; far more important than the national deficit). DOT has established specific and particular rules on inspection reports, the paper and e-logs, weight and bridge law, road restrictions and driving regulations, load securement, and the myriad of complications that arise from hauling hazardous material. They've even expanded into personal health, which must be maintained like any other piece of equipment on the rig. In 2010, the DOT created a scoring system for all of these codes and restrictions called the Compliance, Safety, and Accountability (CSA) program. Under the CSA program, drivers and their companies accrue points for various violations, from minor speeding and warnings to lethal collisions. The more points you have, the more of a liability you are to the company, and the less hireable of a driver you are.<br />
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Now, the point of these laws is to make trucks safer on the road. The premise, of course, is that semi trucks are the biggest safety hazard on the road. In reality, however, trucks are simply the most restrictable, giving the appearance of improved safety by government regulation policy. Both car and truck accidents have been in steady decline over the last several decades. What's more, trucks are, <a href="http://www.truckline.com/ATA%20Docs/News%20and%20Information/Reports%20Trends%20and%20Statistics/02%2012%2013%20--%20FINAL%202013%20Car-Truck%20Fault%20Paper.pdf">largely, safer than cars on the road.</a> In 2009, for instance, the overall rate of police-reported crashes for trucks was one third that of "four-wheelers." While accidents involving CMV's are more likely to result in a fatality, CMV's are significantly underrepresented in the total number of accidents, and while they're usually held financially liable for accidents, collisions between CMV's and cars are the exclusive legal fault of the latter 71% of the time. This makes sense at a very basic economic level; companies lose <i>a lot</i> of money when they lose time, loads, and drivers in accidents.<br />
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But regardless, DOT has made it it's mission to make the roads safer from 18-wheelers and their kin. How have their policies performed? It's difficult to say, because <a href="http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811868.pdf">"[i]n 2012, the Federal Highway Administration implemented an enhanced methodology for estimating registered vehicles and vehicle miles traveled by vehicle type[...]applied to data from 2007 through 2012."</a> The suspiciously large decline in accident rates at that time looks more politically self-serving than reflective of real road-safety. Aside from that leap, the rate of declining collisions is more or less the same as we've had since the 1970's.<br />
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Henry Hazlitt described the problems of policy tunnel-vision in terms of economics. "While every group has certain economic interests identical with those of all groups, every group has also[...]interests antagonistic to those of all other groups. While certain public policies would in the long run benefit everybody, other policies, having such a direct interest in them, will argue for them plausibly and persistently." It seems reasonable to hypothesize (I won't say "conclude" just yet) by the relationship between data and that law that it was public opinion and the appearance of increased safety, not safety itself, that lawmakers and the Department of Transportation have been after in the recent expansion of trucking law. The cost of this increased perception of road safety just so happens to be the increased stress and demands of following these laws by the drivers of these big rigs. "It's not the same anymore," said one old veteran trucker, describing how the job is more aggravating than it used to be. <i>It lacks the freedom.</i><br />
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But stress and pressure to make economic use of the limited time drivers have during the day (one can easily imagine how this could encourage drivers to move when they might otherwise want to stay still?) is not the only danger of compliance. According to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRVdiHu1VCc">Mike Rowe</a>, the hidden costs of compliance are "staggering," both in economic terms and in terms of safety. According to Rowe, the motto "safety first!"--a mainstay in the trucking world--is not only silly, but even a little counterproductive. "I value my safety on these dirty jobs as much as the people I'm working with," he told the audience at his TED talk. "But the ones who really get it done, they're not out there talking about 'safety first.' They know that other things come first." He went on to decry "the idea that we create this sense of complacency when all we do is talk about somebody else's responsibility as though it's our own and vice versa."<br />
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These dubious policies that seem so straightforward and well-intentioned come with hidden costs. Whether those costs outweigh the benefit--which may or may not exist--is a calculation that could feasibly come out in favor of either side, but it's a question we can't address when those costs remain hidden. They could be as important as death statistics in the thousands, or as trivial as making it to a family reunion in time, but they exist and they matter. When the benefits of these policies are elusive or underwhelming, we should take the time to ask whether the costs are worth it, especially when those costs are hoisted onto the shoulders of others.<br />
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Thanks.C.B. Robertsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04161710878332823421noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1906698695781392799.post-85734039963131751152014-01-25T19:19:00.002-08:002014-01-25T20:12:55.160-08:00It's Just BC!: A Rebuttal<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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A number of my friends (who are my best critics) have variously suggested in my criticisms of higher education that my view is too narrow, that the complaints I have are really only about Bellevue College, and that things really aren't that bad in other schools. It's an argument that my points are only anecdotal, which, of course, their responses are as well, but it also misses the way in which I came to the conclusions about higher education that I did. Allow me to clarify that here.<br />
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My concern with freedom of speech, particularly on college campuses, began after hearing Christopher Hitchens' <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtN-KjwXBH4">defense of hate speech</a> at the University of Toronto in 2006--my closer friends will have probably gotten sick of hearing references to this by now--and it was at that point, at the beginning of a class on the techniques and technology of propaganda I was involved in, that I took the issue seriously and began to research the threats to freedom of speech in the United States and in higher education generally. It became clear to me, in researching, that this was not a problem of the past or a latent problem, but a problem in American schools, now, today, and this was primarily the result of my discovery of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). From that understanding, and from various books I read--by Alan Kors and Harvey Silvergate, the co-founders of FIRE, by Greg Lukianoff, the current president of FIRE, by "Kindly Inquisitors" by Jonathan Rauch, and another book called "Let the Students Speak!," a legal history of the freedom of speech struggles in American schools--from this, I saw freedom of speech as something that was important to examine at Bellevue College, but it wasn't something I believed was a problem at the moment. My line of thinking was: "Look, here's something that's problematic in other schools. Let's try to preempt that so it doesn't become a problem at Bellevue College." I didn't think it <i>was</i> a problem at Bellevue College at the time. It was entirely because of the instances of the chilling effect and the fear of these inscrutable and often incoherent policies at other schools that I began to look into Bellevue College's own policies.</div>
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It was then that, after I had assumed that Bellevue College was actually doing okay because I hadn't noticed anything myself prior to this, that I began to notice that Bellevue College was, in fact, a very, very, very poor defender of freedom of speech, and was even a strong opponent of it. This, by the speech of the now president of the college itself, Dr. David Rule, in <a href="http://cbrobertson.blogspot.com/2014/01/bc-presidential-student-forum-with.html">response to my question at his student forum discussion</a>, and by my interviews with the Vice President of Equity and Pluralism, Yoshiko Harden, and by the school's policy itself, and the way that school rules and beuracratic systems were used systematically to keep quiet opinions that ran contrary to its own political agenda, and to simultaneously promote its own agenda, and claim to be a defender of free speech while oppressing it in a quiet, surreptitious manner. All of that came after the discovery of these effects going on in other schools, and it was this discovery in other schools that fueled my discovery of it in Bellevue College.</div>
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Now, because it's been widely acknowledged by these same critics that my criticisms are for the most part true, (though the opinion differs greatly on what we should do about it), I hope it won't be alleged post-hoc that I'm tilting at windmills here. This was a problem I first discovered at other schools, and it's not just a thing at BC. Whether it's true at this or that or the other particular school is, of course, open to discussion. I haven't been to every single school; I haven't experienced the college life at these other schools. But when people who haven't taken quite as active of an interest in the subject as me--for entirely understandable reasons--come to me and say, "but my school's not like that!," I have no way of knowing whether that's true or not because I would have said the same thing about Bellevue College to my current self, were I talking from two year's ago's experience.</div>
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In short, this isn't just a problem at Bellevue College. It's a problem all over the country, and in more schools than not. FIRE rates schools on a red, yellow and green light system. Green doesn't even mean the school is constitutionally sound, but it's close enough. It's "about right," it for the most part does a good job of protecting student's rights and you'll be safe holding a dissenting opinion about a major political subject. The yellow-light school's policies are problematic. These are not abiding by the constitution, and there's an issue that needs to be addressed in the name of the school's Amendment XIV section I obligation to uphold student's constitutional rights, perhaps to an even greater degree than those of other, non-student citizens. Red-light schools are "laughably unconstitutional," as Greg Lukianoff described them, and of the schools surveyed by FIRE's team of extremely competent first amendment law team, they found that of the hundreds of schools surveyed, nearly <a href="http://thefire.org/public/pdfs/915995dfd99e549af03cadd4b61b35cd.pdf?direct">60% of them fell into the red-light category</a>.</div>
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This is not a Bellevue College-exclusive issue we have here.</div>
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Bellevue College <i>is</i> one of those red-light schools, or was last year; they've since been removed from that list even though their policies have gotten worse with time and not better. And these are only the schools surveyed, which are the major and larger schools in the United States. So with that in mind, I think the burden is on those who say this is a one-school, Bellevue College issue, and not a greater, larger trend, to investigate their schools before exonerating them off the cuff, and to show that the resources, time and experience organizations like FIRE that have spent to evaluate these schools in dedication to this sole cause are <i>don't </i>prove that these school policies are a threat to the classical liberal society and American values that FIRE believes them to be.</div>
C.B. Robertsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04161710878332823421noreply@blogger.com2