Lean Out, Lean In, Lean Out, Then Shake It All About

Sheryl Sandberg has been making noise ever since the release of her book Lean In which encourages women to be more aggressive in their social attainment. I have nothing against Sandberg and think that her heart was in the right place, but her Lean In movement is total horseshit and it has long since worn out its welcome.

First, let's ignore the white, hetero-normative, cis-gendered focus of her book. This is a problem that could fill a book and others have come close to doing so. I actually think that this criticism effectively negates Sandberg's arguments entirely, but it's not the biggest problem that I have with her work.

I also want to point out that while the core argument she is making is nonsense, she makes tons of great points about equality and sexism that are worthy points. If these were novel points or analyses, it would be a bigger deal, but they aren't. These are data points that have been known for a long time.

The biggest problem that I have is that Sandberg further reinforces socio and econo-normative behaviors and values. For Sandberg, success in life is found in a nuclear family, money, and property. Again, this is utterly without merit. Research has shown that economic stability is critical to happiness, but economic stability is relative, and that once stability has been reached, property and money do not correlate with happiness.

If the world were different, she would just be another author saying less-than-correct things, but the world is not different; the world is the world. And the world is one which is filled with damaging and counterproductive value programming that encourages people to try to find happiness in money and status. As such, her message is actually dangerous.

There is no inherent value to climbing the proverbial ladder (or jungle gym as Sandberg rephrases it). As far as I know, she never once addresses the underlying assumptions of value that undergird her thought. For her, they are taken for granted.

Well I don't take them for granted. Money is not inherently valuable. Success is not inherently valuable. Our national discussion rarely focuses on these subjects because it is the last thing anyone wants. Our economy is based on people not believing these things. Businesses are based on people not believing these things. Governmental power is based on people not believing these things.

People who addresses these underlying issues and try to discuss them and not simply the icing on the capitalist cake are labeled as fringe or fanatics — people with their heads in the clouds. By belittling these people, we can avoid discussing things that are, on a societal scale, very scary.

Sandberg would have been much more groundbreaking if she had used her privilege and position, the bully pulpit, to discuss our underlying values. Because it is these values that are the wellspring from which our prejudice flows. The patriarchy and all its concomitant misogyny and sexism are products of these very basic values.

(There is actually a term for this, mores: folkways of central importance accepted without question and embodying the fundamental moral views of a group. These are deep-rooted assumptions. They are like the id and ego of a society — the reptilian hindbrain of a nation.)

Sandberg didn't do that. She produced a digestible little nugget of fluff. And funny enough, this perfectly embodies her underlying values. Her fluff sold hundreds of thousands of copies and earned her spots on talk shows. If she had written a truly trenchant and piercing analysis of society, no one would have bought it.

She did precisely what she said we should all do: she leaned in... straight into the top of the best sellers list.

We Are All The Same

Science Proves: Avoid Politics If You Care About Your Sanity

A study came out awhile back showing that politics kills your ability to effectively analyze data. For most informed people (and informed is a label that could be correctly applied to a very small percentage of the population), this was a total well duh! moment. Still, it's always good to have some rigidly-created data to back up anecdotal observation.

Every time I see something like this, I get depressed. As someone who loves science and philosophy, history and literature, the predilection for humanity to just revel in its own prejudice and stupidity is enough to send me off a bridge. To combat this suicidal drive, I read Machiavelli. While I think that The Prince may have been dark satire, its cold, cruel views of humanity always make me feel that if humans want so desperately to be tricked, then goddamnit, trick them.

Conservatives Own Their History

I have often argued that to accept a worldview requires you to accept the history of that worldview — its genesis. You have to own that history. Frequently, this can be painful. Lots of worldviews have some nasty underpinnings. For example, the history that I must own because of my education in psychology is pretty dark. Indeed, many of my classes dedicated significant amounts of time to discussing the manifold failures of science and ethics that peppers the history of psychology and psychiatry. Owning, understanding, and thus learning from that history was a primary element of our education.

Not owning one's history generally requires revisionist history, whereby the nasty elements are either ignored (denialism), reduced in significance (reductionism), or reframed in such a way that makes those who enacted the bad stuff seem less bad — sort of a reverse ad hominem attack. Most of the time, these forms of revisionism don't hold up to even the slightest analysis. How, then, can people possibly believe them?

I don't think that they do.

Almost all revisionist history is found on the extreme ends of the spectrum. I don't want to say conservatism exclusively, because forms of extreme liberalism can be similarly insane. In the U.S. at least, "conservatives" are almost wholly responsible for this sort of behavior.

A funny thing happened on the way to the Capitol, recently. Conservatives are giving up on the revisionism publicly. Previously, they would vociferously deny racism and jingoism and try to fight on the same terms as the liberals and progressives. It doesn't take too long on a well-known progressive website like Alternet or Mother Jones to find extensive analysis of the inconsistencies inherent to this strategy. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it generally turns out to be bullshit.

It results in the Republican party currently trying to argue that their strategy will increase racial quality, increase tax revenue, increase good, decrease bad, and so on. Of course, as I mentioned, it takes little effort to find inconsistencies in this rhetorical strategy, but the current conservative movement is relying on its adherents not doing research. That works in the short term, but the slow death currently being suffered by the American conservative movement shows that it doesn't work in the long term.

Thus we have a few Republicans coming out saying that Republicans need to, for lack of a better term, stop being stupid. The most notable one that springs to mind is Bobby Jindal, Governor of Louisiana -- a state that has taken full advantage of Bush's school voucher program to send its children to dozens of newly opened fundamentalist Christian schools.

Unfortunately for the future of the party, the majority of them are not doing this. They are reacting to the changing political landscape, though, and this is coming in the form of cracks —  cracks in their public facade behind which hides all of the nasty stuff that has been festering under the surface for the past seventy-five years. Overt racism, misogyny, fear, and intolerance were all more or less obvious, but they were hidden behind euphemism and circumlocution, and if those speaking the hate were ever called out on it, they would fall back on said euphemism and circumlocution to say that their attacker was "seeing things."

Now, though, not we have cracks. I suspect that these cracks represent the death throes of a fading social entity, to wit, the conservative, post-Depression social mores that defined the Greatest Generation and many of the Baby Boomers.

Some recent and salient examples of these cracks are Antonin Scalia barely hiding his homophobia and racism. We have dozens of examples of lesser people doing similar things, and while not nearly all of them are letting their defenses down enough to see all of the 'isms therein, they are letting them down enough to see the strange rationalizations that they use in private.

The example that sticks in my mind, and the example that triggered this article, was a set of comments from a variety of people in the Republican Party about how Joseph McCarthy was justified in fueling the Red Scare, and indeed, the Red Scare itself was completely reasonable. Again, this is unsupported by the evidence, but it is significant because the pretense of generally agreeing with the historical consensus has been dropped. No longer do they try to argue that the Soviet Union was a threat, but the Red Scare itself was wrong. Now they admit that they think that any charge against "evil" is justified in the righteous fire of American Freedom. They are now using the argument that McCarthyism was justified as support for whatever social crusade they believe needs to be enacted today.

The moral and philosophical ancestors of the current conservative movement are no longer being rejected by the conservative movement. They are owning their history, and I think that that is a big deal.

As I mentioned, I think that this represents the death throes of a social system. When faced with adversity, and unable to reconcile their views with the emerging mores, the movement is doubling down on their beliefs and are rejecting the rhetorical assumptions that have previously defined the arguments.

By rhetorical assumptions, I mean the set of unspoken beliefs about the definition and value of certain words that underlie a discussion. At the most basic layer, we have terms that are representative of physical phenomena: ball, cloud, rock. But anywhere above the basic layer of language, values and judgements are attached to the words: good, freedom, mother, bad. These values and judgments come from the massive and complex system that gave rise to the people using the words. The further apart two people are vis-a-vis their rhetorical assumptions, the more difficult communication becomes, because most of our higher level language is predicated on these assumptions. It can reasonably be argued that the history of philosophy has been a three-thousand-year-old process to strip away assumptions in a quest for a perfect language.

Many of today's rhetorical assumptions were defined with the last major social shift: the counter-culture. I'm using that term to describe everything that exploded post-WWII: feminism, civil rights, free love, drugs. The educated progressives of the day helped to define the values on which our modern language rests. Sixty-five years ago, a white person could casually describe a black person as a nigger in public with little fear of retribution. Today, though, doing so would be social suicide.

This is because, for all intents and purposes, we won the culture war. For a long time, the reaction of those on the losing end was to complain about "political correctness." That's the reason why that term is always used in a negative way. Political correctness is the sigh of the oppressed bigot.

Now, we have the oppression being cast off. They aren't going so far as to call anyone who is anywhere past off-white as a nigger, although I am confident that they are doing so in private, but they are complaining about how whites are the oppressed. Whites need to be afraid. Whites are under attack. They then look to a glorified past of white supremacy to show how "their" world is crumbling away.

And in their bizarre minds, this is true. They are still raging against a culture war that they lost decades ago. Rush Limbaugh has lost, as best as I can tell, damn-near all of his sponsors after his attacks on Sandra Fluke. Fox News ratings, though still easily #1, have fallen for the past many years. Gay marriage went from having minority support to majority support in less than five years. Acceptance of misogyny and the patriarchy is becoming widespread.

These are all good things from a reasonable perspective, but those who lost the culture war are not reasonable. They are angry. They are afraid. And they are going to make life miserable for the rest of us until they finally die out.

At least, as the Tea Party has put in stark display, these people are no longer pretending to be arguing the same things as us. They are openly admitting that they reject reason and rationale. They are openly admitting that they are speaking a different language from me. They are openly admitting that there can never be a common ground, and we are seeing this in Congress. There is no hope. All we can do is relax, and wait for the inevitable day when the world of the white conservative does precisely what white conservative are afraid of: pass into history.

So, my dear conservatives, roar and rage all you like. We won the war. The rest is just a waiting game. And I'm a lot younger than you, so I have all the time in the world.

Really Existing Free Markets

This is less than an hour out of your life that will hopefully change your views, if you haven't already heard this. It was a seminal speech given by Noam Chomsky and one of the most piercing bits of economic philosophy done in the past fifty years. I stress philosophy, because this is not economics. He mentions many economic studies to back up his philosophical thesis, but it is definitely logical and qualitative in nature.

Of Rapists And Nazis

The recent video, uploaded by Anonymous, of the Steubenville "Rape Crew" is suitably mind-numbing. It shows a human being, seemingly too young to even be coherently using the words he is speaking, display a lack of empathy and consideration that would make a psychopath blush.

It is coincidental that I was reading an article about The Angel of Life, Gisella Perl, who described her treatment in the death camps. Men would gleefully kill babies, throw women alive into furnaces, and beat starving, helpless human beings to death.

After the war, psychologists took up the task of studying the behavior of the Nazis. How could humans possibly become so depraved, and do so in such large numbers? Even those who were involved would look back with shock at their own actions.

The core of that depravity is on display today in Steubenville. While the holocaust and the behavior of a small town's stupid population are in different leagues, what allows the two to exist is the same. In a different environment, the boy in that video would have been a Nazi, or a mercenary, or a murderer. That behavior is simply the manifestation of an internal characteristic that I don't think I need to even bother trying to explicate. It is apparent.

What we saw, for a brief moment, is the rotten core that can take hold that is held in check by society. Yes, we do not have bands of mercenaries rampaging around the countryside like it was 1300's Europe. But just because the behavior doesn't manifest in the ways that they previously did does not mean that the Freudian motivation is gone.

What society has done, and especially what the progressive movement of the past one hundred years has done, is make the display of this behavior incredibly unacceptable. It is the genesis of the term "politically correct" in the pejorative sense. People who use the word "PC Police" or something equally negative are essentially saying that they are angry that they are not allowed to be aggressive, violent, or bigoted in public.

But what every oppressed group in the country knows full well is that this rot, this toxin, is in full effect behind closed doors. This monster, this animalistic man-child, would have never dreamed of saying these words in public, but he did so in private. He even defended himself to those in the room who made wan efforts at arguing with him.

This is only the most recent case of the festering underbelly of our society bursting out into the daylight like some pus-filled boil. Apologists for this sort of behavior love to point to the very consequences of their loathed politically correct movement -- the lack of public behavior of this sort -- as proof that it doesn't exist. They claim that those who pull the racism, sexism, or classism "card" are simply paranoid and themselves bigoted.

No. This rot exists, and pretending that it doesn't because we have brow-beaten those that would act this way into some semblance of submission fails to address the wellspring of the poison. We must chase bigotry and anti-social behavior wherever it hides. There can be no apologies. There can be no toleration. We must go after it with a righteous fire and the profound desire to see justice done, no matter how painful. Because until we do, we will continue breeding those who would be well at home stoking the fires of Auschwitz.

When Values Collide

I like Bill Murray. At least, I liked Bill Murray. When I was in second grade, our teacher asked us to tell the class who our hero was. Most kids said one of their parents or a sports star. I said, much to the amusement of my teacher, Bill Murray. I was seven. Whadda'ya want?

So Bill Murray gives me a good perspective on people who apologize for rapists, attackers, murderers, and otherwise antisocial people. We don't want to believe that people are capable of these crimes. We have never experienced these crimes. Nothing in our experience tells us that a particular person is capable of these crimes. It's why men who have experienced sexual assault are much more likely to accept that it happened than men who haven't.

I'm sure that you have figured out without my saying that Bill Murray is a thundering asshole. He's abusive and mean. And while no one escapes his wrath, he is especially mean to women. There are dozens of people in entertainment that have managed to get something of a free pass for their abuse because they are good at being entertainers. As this article at Cracked, a website that produces articles far too good for its name, points out regarding Sean Connery,

It's always interesting to see the double standard we have for different categories of celebrity. If Sean Connery had been, say, a pro athlete or a politician, he'd get tarred with this reputation until the day he died. But he's so fucking suave. His accent wears a tuxedo. It's so impossible to connect that voice with the image of a drunken man slapping around a woman that we wouldn't believe it even if we had it on video.

Precisely. We wouldn't believe it because we don't want to believe it. It so clashes with the rest of our programming that we simply reject it.

For someone like me, it's a slightly different problem. I've more or less managed to push my social biases into the background. They are still operating, and likely will for the rest of my life, but I've overpowered them. This isn't a brag. It's not something worth bragging about. It's something we should all do, and as such, bragging for doing something any decent human would do seems rather counterproductive. It's like demanding recognition for not being an asshole.

My problem is that there are certain characteristics that, for lack of a better phrase, make a person dead to me. Being an asshole is fine, but being aggressively abusive to other people is not. It's the primary reason for not finding out too much about your favorite artists or actors: they are frequently such mind-blowing jerks that it negates one's ability to enjoy their work. Woody Allen, Quentin Tarantino, and Mel Gibson all come to mind.

It doesn't necessarly even need to be artists or actors. It can be anything. And so it is with The Salvation Army. In these contentious times, there are many things that can make an entity dead to me. Misogyny, racism, global warming denial. Homophobia is another. It indicates both ignorance, fear, and hatred, but also blind religious dogma. And boy howdy, has The Salvation Army dropped the mother of all homophobic bombs.

They have literally said that homosexuals deserve to die. An organization built on feel-good concepts of caring and helping has said that homosexuals are not just second-class citizens, but they actively need to be killed. Obviously, the organization on the whole has distanced itself from these statements, but it would be foolish to think that this kind of behavior coming from one regional director isn't representative of wider views held within the Army. Those at the top realize that what they say must be more measured, and it becomes a minor catastrophe when someone actually says what everyone thinks.

This is a difficult thing for me to digest. About a decade ago, when my family was in seriously bad shape and had been evicted from our house, the Salvation Army paid our medical bills, which were not insubstantial. I like the Salvation Army. Even though I'm an outspoken atheist and they are an explicitly religious organization didn't much matter to me. They helped me, and I tear up even now thinking about it.

This is causing serious cognitive dissonance. There is basically no way for me to reconcile the problem. With artists and actors, I can at least say that their work is distinct from them. There are many artists who created great art while also being psycho-arsonist-sheep-rapists. But for people and organizations where their actions are so tightly intertwined with their views, I cannot ignore it. I want to!

I know how it feels to want to apologize for the behavior of someone or something you like. You don't want that conflict in your mind. It doesn't matter. Bigotry is bigotry. Violence is violence. Nothing in the past changes that.

Whither The Male Feminist

Earlier this year, there was something of a blow-up involving Hugo Schwyzer, a well known male feminist writer and professor. Essentially, he did a lot of really nasty stuff in his past. He directly covered up some of it and chose to cast other parts of it in edifying terms. This information was revealed late in 2011.

Apparently, many a writer and thinker in the feminist and gender community have had mixed feelings on Schwyzer for some time, and for them, this was the straw that broke the feminist's back. Websites that had previously been running his work pulled it, and he was largely cut out from the larger feminist conversation.

I don't want to talk too much about Schwyzer here. In fact, while I've felt that his voice wasn't necessarily a bad voice, his strong religiousness hinted at deeper personality layers that I suspected I would find distasteful if found out. Indeed, I have no idea how someone can call themselves a feminist and a Christian.

Instead, the point that came out of this that I found most interesting, and the one that I want to discuss, was the question of how men can be involved with feminism. There is a boat-load of complex variables hidden in this question, each one of which would take an entire book to adumbrate, and all of them have bearing. Obviously, I could never do them all justice in a blog post.

I shall thus put it in its coarsest formulation: can the person who is the beneficiary of an unequal society be a voice for those oppressed within that society? Can a straight, white, well-bred male talk with any meaningfulness about feminism (or any 'ism for that matter)? There were many women, and some men, who said "no." For them, the ideal scenario is a feminist movement essentially devoid of men. Most of them didn't frame this in misandristic terminology. They basically said that the purpose of feminism is to give a voice to the oppressed, not to give yet another stage for those who are not oppressed. This is the more extreme of the arguments.

The milder, and I think better, argument in favor of "excluding" men was to say that men should not be wholly excluded, but instead just not be given the spotlight. Men should never be the focus of feminism, and the superstars should always be women, since only women can fully understand other women.¹

I think that both of these arguments are incorrect. That doesn't mean that I cannot appreciate the perspective, though. I am a straight, tall, white, man living in America. I live a life of, sometimes, invisible privilege. I truly have little idea of what it is like to be oppressed and victimized by prejudice and bigotry. But I can grow to understand it, and it is important to recognize this ability and not denigrate the human potential to understand a great deal without needing direct experience. As a man, I can grow to understand things by reading accounts of women and the sexism they must endure. I can learn to identify it. I can experience it empathetically. That is real, profound, and useful.

Moreover, even if we were more limited in this regard, even if I didn't have mirror neurons churning away to help me feel other people's pain, it would be important to have men in the discussion (sympathetic, well-meaning men, of course. Not trolls.). I have never been oppressed, but I have fallen victim² to gender normative behavior and felt the drive of bias and sexism. I've been in groups of men expressing all kinds of sexist ideas and been made to feel profoundly uncomfortable about my behavior and thoughts. If I and others like me are not given the stage now and then, these valuable experiences will go unspoken. That would be a terrible thing.

The argument for male exclusion may have held more water if we were talking exclusively about sexism against women, but it's much more than that. The problem is not just female oppression, it's sexism and gender norms in general. All men are not the beneficiary of an unfair society. The patriarchy sucks for everyone except those on top. Being a white male may be easier than a black female, but that doesn't mean that my life can't suck in unique ways, and these are issues that need discussing.

As I mentioned earlier, there is a large complex of psychosocial variables hidden in this noise. If we focus on one thing, we miss the various ways these other variables can manifest. For example, homophobia is essentially misogyny in a different guise. Men are never penetrated. Men are the penetrator.  To be penetrated is to be a woman, which as we all know is the worst thing ever. And any man who is willing to be penetrated is not only broken and corrupt, but also dangerous since he may, like some kind of zombie, try to turn others into women.

The whitest, straightest, most cis-gendered man in the world can fall victim to this prejudice. He can be suddenly declared a persona non grata by his peers and ostracized. Or if the man is gay, and is afraid of this reprisal, he must remain hidden and fearful. Or a family that is "shamed" by the "abnormal" behavior of a child or parent that feels trapped in their neighborhood. All of this has its root in sexism and misogyny. All of this needs to be analyzed within the larger discussion.

To try and categorize that as gender studies and not feminism is to, I think, understate the breadth of feminism. We discuss racism through the lens of minority groups. We should discuss sexism through the lens of those most oppressed and analyze all of the ways that this prejudice infects other areas of life. I don't think we should look at this as a zero-sum game of superstars and celebrities. We should look at it as a network of people, all of whom have had different experiences, colored and affected by the same thing. These people all deserve an equal voice. To say that feminism is only about women is to deny this complexity.

I am a feminist. I seek no stage. My voice is only one of many, and many have suffered far worse than myself. But I am still a feminist, and I want to be a part of the discussion.

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1: That latter assertion may seem a bit sweeping of a statement, but I completely agree. When the lives of men and women are so demonstrably different, unless a man pretends to be a woman for a couple of years, or is transgender, he will never be able to fully understand the gestalt of being female. It requires a woman. Although even then, not every woman gets it. We only need look at Michelle Bachman or other such wackados for examples.

2: I don't think that victim is too strong a word. I feel like a victim because I feel that society essentially poisoned me with deeply emotional programming that has taken years to untangle. It undoubtedly colored my interactions with people from a very young age, and lord knows what kind of damage it caused in friendships and family relationships. That said, I don't mean to take away from the significance that the word implies in many areas of sexism. I do not feel victimized in the same way that someone who has ever been assaulted, raped, or vilified would feel victimized.

A Shift In My Perspective

My views on society evolve constantly. Sometimes, as they did recently, they evolve in some massive burst of punctuated equilibrium... or something. See, I use big words. I'm smart.

As a militant-atheist, I felt that the best way to expunge religion from society was to simply make fun of it. I now see that this gets us nowhere, fast. I'm still a quasi-militant-atheist, which I will discuss in a bit, but my world view has become so complex as to make a naively simplistic view untenable.

I think that militant atheism fails because most people are actually operating under the assumption that the atheists are correct. I see it everywhere; hear it from believers; read it in magazines. Defenders of religion ask atheists to stop rubbing it in their faces. Stop being so arrogant! Stop showing off! In all of this semi-defeated language is a tacit recognition. This language is especially apparent in the sort of theological fence-sitters who exist in such large numbers in media. They kinda' sorta' believe, but you rarely if ever catch them in church.

From those true believers who don't have a militant streak, or have never been exposed to well-formulated atheist thoughts, I hear lines such as "so this is what smart people do," or "you've thought about this a lot." They separate themselves from the atheist. They actively, and self-deprecatingly, place themselves on a lower intellectual level. The actual truth value of their belief structure is never analyzed.

And that's the thing. What these people want to believe can't possibly be true. Define truth. Define existance. Define God. There is no way that these concepts can be defined in such a way as to make sense. And that's expected!

Words do not mean anything transcendent. The belief that they do is essentially metaphysical and, thus, useless. Words mean how they are used. So how are we using religious terminology?

It's social, I argue. Religious terms can't mean anything, and believers don't really use them as such. It's why you can have believers of Islam who are totally normal humans who go the market twice a week for groceries, watch TV at night, and play video games, but when asked indicate that suicide bombing is a completely viable form of conflict resolution.

They don't actually mean that. If they witnessed a suicide bombing, they'd be scarred for life. The conflict comes from the fact that arguing with them reveals one to be of the out group, as opposed to the Muslim's in group. Religious terminology is used as an identifier. Everyone agrees on certain usages of terms as a form of social glue.

And that is why militant atheism doesn't work very well. It makes the grander point: religion is silly; but does little beyond that. It's because it opens the dialog with the declaration that the atheist is part of the out group. I suspect that is why atheists are among the least-trusted people in the country. It's not because the entire country has thought about moral maxims, subjective and objective morality, punishment, and natural law. It's because our primal, emotional drives ascribe negative characteristics to those who are in the out group.

As such, branches of atheism I think will do a better job if they leave behind a great deal of the militancy and instead focus on social concepts like equality, justice, and righteousness, which religion has never been very good with. These concepts will speak to those who not only have never thought about deeper philosophical concepts, but frame themselves in a way that makes thinking about these concepts antithetical. They assume that they aren't smart enough.

If we speak kindly to these people, we can convince them that, no, they are smart enough. Truth, real truth, is not for the elite. Making fun of them is not right way to achieve this acceptance.

That said, I am still a quasi-militant-atheist, as I mentioned above. I still understand the militant mindset because dogma is, literally, dangerous. It causes violence, breeds hatred, and encourages in and out groups. Just because forming social groups is natural doesn't mean that it's good. It defines us as "same" and "different," even when we are all pretty much the same. It breeds racism, ethnocentrism, and inter-group violence.

Dogma, in all forms, is bad.

As such, while I won't specifically attack it, I am not willing to accommodate religious belief. An example that sticks in my mind is a Jewish girl who graduated as her high school's valedictorian, but was unable to give her speech because microphones use electricity, and that is seen as "work" according to her weird interpretation of Judaism.

In the grand tradition of the religious getting around a rule by ignoring its spirit in favor of contract negotiation with God, she recorded her speech the day before, then stood on stage, smiling like an idiot, while it was played on speakers.

This may undermine my previously-stated goals of achieving dialog with believers, but it's on this point that I do not care. I would not have accommodated her. I would have simply given her speech to the salutatorian and then given the salutatorian's speech to the third in line. When abjectly silly religious belief gets in the way of other people doing things, that's it. Get out of the way and make room for others who won't let their dogma impinge upon the functioning of the world.

Chairman Mao is aware that
he needs a hair stylist.

As such, I think that there is always a place for aggressive atheism, or perhaps aggressive intellectualism is a better moniker. Because while religion is a major focus of the modern debate, dogma also brought us the Soviet Union, North Korea, the Nazis, the Cold War, Eugenics, and any number of other large-scale, baseless beliefs.

Dogma brings us gay bashing, the KKK, conspiracy theories, and survivalists. It damages people, families, and companies. It makes people act against their own self interest and against the interests of others. It poisons rational thought. Religion is only one example, and because of its positive framing of dogma with the word "faith," it becomes even more manipulative and dangerous than most other forms of dogma

Dogma is incredibly dangerous, and I think especially so in religious form, and having a group of vocal people who act like merciless, mocking & squawking crows on the sidelines, making sure to demolish anyone who gets out of line, is probably a good thing. It reminds everyone that they are actually being very silly, and to make sure to not let things get out of hand.

So in that sense, the fact that so many tacitly admit the accuracy of the militant atheists by telling them to stop showing off can be seen as a victory, and while it's not my modus operandi, I'm glad that it's there.

Are You A Creep? (UPDATED)

Jezebel has a great article by Hugo Schwyzer about "creep-shaming." This is only one part of an expanding online discussion on the subject and is fantastically enlightening.

First, before going any further, let it be said that creep-shaming is total nonsense. It's yet another game for men's-righters to play, and as we all know, they are essentially a hate group. I will admit, though, that it would sting much more if someone called me a creep than any other particular name. Why that is is worth addressing.

If I call a black man an asshole, that's behavioral. But if I call him a "nigger," that is qualitative. Ignoring the fact that racial epithets have buckets more emotional baggage than simply a qualitative insult, and as such add to sting, there is nothing that a black man can do about being black, and I am insinuating that this fact makes him less-than.


I think that creep is the same thing. It's not just that "creep" communicates the mental state of a woman, but that it qualitatively jabs the man. A man who is an "asshole" simply knows to stop acting like an asshole, because the statement is generally about behavior. But "creep" is not something where a man can simply stop acting in a particular way. He is a creep.

They hit on something very important in the other articles, and that is the reason why the word "creep" is qualitative. It's because unlike "asshole," which has pretty well-defined behavioral patterns attached to it, "creep" does not. As such, the men who are called creeps may not even fully understand why, and thus, it becomes something they are as opposed to something that they do. In an absence of understanding, it's not surprising that many men become angry.

That doesn't mean that quantifying the behavior is entirely impossible. I think it can be done (I think it has to do with those who copy the gross aspects of confident behavior and those who behave in a certain way because they are confident), but for the sake of this article, we won't try to do that.

Moreover, men who are "creeps" are setting off warning bells with women. People are good at detecting micro-behaviors as a way to interpret someone else's mindset. Facial expression, body positioning, hand movements, eye contact: all of these things come into play in interactions not just for women, but for all of us. These are not things that are easily controlled, which is why when people go into an interaction with someone and try to be a particular way, it seems off. The gross behavior does not line up with the micro-behavior, and thus, we have a creep.

For men who don't want to be creeps, it requires more than behavioral changes, it requires a deep analysis of one's mindset at the beginning of an interaction. This is not easy, but the ease with which it can be done has nothing to do with men's anger. It is the fact that many of them aren't even aware that this is the case.

UPDATE:

A study has been released essentially confirming this. "Creeps" elicit a physiological response that literally gives people shivers.

The Technology World Without Steve Jobs

Many people are asking what the world will be like without Steve Jobs. Many people are saying that everything is fundamentally different. This is, of course, stupid.

Obviously, it would be equally stupid to disparage Jobs. He was a consummate artist and Apple is as much a corporeal manifestation of his internal world as it is a company. But overly exalting Jobs ignores reality. No one exists in a vacuum. Everyone is a reciprocal entity.

In much the same way as the world of philosophy, a thinker's viewpoint as much represents sentiment of the time as it does his or her own, unique thoughts. They exist together. One does not guide the other. The thinker and the world, the creator and the created, stumble into the future together.

The whole of the market is like a giant game of Ouija, where thousands of hands are guiding things. Not seeing the forest for the trees, looking at things in a quantum way, leads to an inaccurate perception of history as a linear narrative. This person caused this, this person caused that.

For example, do you think that if Newton hadn't come around, the truths of gravity would have never been discovered? If Watt hadn't invented his steam engine, do you think that large-scale steam power would have never been created? Of course they would have. Gravity would have been formulated, steam power would have created the industrial revolution. Aside from large-scale structural differences, the world would look fundamentally very similar.

Great inventions have a weird habit of being invented at the same time, independently, by completely isolated groups or individuals. It's amazing how few people realize this. If the telephone was invented by multiple people, all within a month of each other, why do we hold up Alexander Graham Bell as some shimmering example of human ingenuity?

I admit that many artistic achievements would never have happened if not for singular people. Same goes for stories, or movies, or songs. But in creations bound by a physical reality or the needs of a physical reality, certain attributes of any creations are necessarily guided by the nature of the time. The computer and technology world would not look exactly like it does if Apple had never been around, but it would certainly be recognizable.

This perspective is never popular since it reduces our heroes. It forces us to recognize that no matter how great a person might be or have been, the world would have chugged along perfectly well without her. It also reduces us and our fantasies. We all have fantasies of being someone of great import, but if people are only ever important vis-a-vis other people, and not in regards to some grand, cosmic standard, how can we maintain that fantasy?

Truly, western culture specifically seems obsessed with the heroic, singular person. Look at Ayn Rand. Her philosophy and explicit formulation of a person as a heroic entity is the absolute manifestation of this ideal. Again, we see this in the modern right-wing movement. One hundred years ago, at least those who thought they were the elite were actually the elite: robber barons and whatnot. Today, it's Mississippi.

We can see it again in the wholly Western focus on lost civilizations. Why are we so obsessed with Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu, and their ilk? Because all of them were "advanced," even beyond what we have today. It is yet another thread from the underlying belief that great things can happen in a vacuum. All it takes is that "spark."

Did Steve Jobs and Apple change the world? Yes. Would the world have changed without them, simply in a different way? Also yes. His mark is indelibly placed on this planet, which I consider the goal of life. As the world was shifting, he molded part of it to suit his vision. He etched "Steve was here" into the sands of time. But to say that the world would still be in the technological dark ages without him is absurd.

Civilization: Is The West History

Niall Furgeson, who has said some really stupid stuff in the past, has produced a 6-part documentary series that I think is rather good. As far as British productions go, it's not up there with Connections or anything, but still very much worth a watch.

He makes a lot of sweeping declarations in this series with which I completely disagree. I also don't like his usage of the terms "killer apps" and "west." The former sounds too much like a desperate attempt to be hip, and the second term is one that I find incorrect at its core. How is he defining the west? Are we just a group of people? He seems to indicate that the west was defined by ideas that allowed it to dominate. But now, large parts of the world have appropriated those ideas. So isn't the west still winning?

If we are simply talking about groups of people, then the fluidity of population groups that's allowed in the modern world renders labels difficult. And if ideas are equal, saying that China will "defeat" the United States is silly. Whichever country has the largest population will necessarily have the largest economy.

We can extend the argument even to "western" civilization, today. For example, is the United States defeating Japan, Sweden, or Germany? We have the bigger economy. We're producing the most shit. But it's absurd to say that we are beating them.

My argument is in essence semantic. The West could never be consigned to history if the West's ways are what dominate the entire planet. That is unless we're defining the West as nothing more than a group of people, and today, defining culture, country, and society as simply a group of people is ignorant.

He starts the series with some sweeping statements which I think are unsupportable, but then backs off a bit and it becomes much more an entertaining journey through history. He then returns to sweeping statements in the last episode, where he argues that the Protestant work ethic, work hard and don't spend it, is what put England, the US, and Germany on top of the world.

I find this thesis absurd. I think the "killer app" for America, Britain, and Germany was the abandonment of royalty. This fosters a belief that you too can succeed and reach that brass ring. The more hope people have for being rich, the harder they're going to work to reach that goal. It's this that helps to explain why the biggest difference between the US and Europe, the sheer number of our successful start-ups, are done by those who are not religious.

It also explains why so many movers and shakers are Jewish. Or why Japan, once stripped of the focus on the group and the emperor, became an industrial powerhouse in twenty-five years, and why China is doing the same thing. It wasn't protestantism, it was a belief that you can succeed. People in China worked their bloody asses off long before the west came 'round, only now, that work helps them and not others.

I also laughed at is claim that China is importing Christianity. About 12% of believers are Christian, which works out to about 3% of the population. And since we have no data, we don't know when these people started believing. Religion was once banned, and Christianity has a habit of being strongest when it's under attack. Chinese religion is wildly difficult to measure, but the one thing we can be sure of is that Christianity is dwarfed by Buddhism, Taoism, and even explicit atheism.

I do find his insight about multiple churches competing for followers compelling, though. The only addition that I have is that protestantism had little to do with it, it was the huge expanses of land that frequently separate settled areas. This allowed multiple types of churches to spring up. In Europe, the population was much denser. Again, this helps to explain why religion is strongest in the more rural areas of the US; areas with farms, and the out-there areas of the American South West.

Feruson closes by voicing his fear that the west is losing its edge. He says some frighteningly Randian things about the importance of property rights, which highlights a big issue I had with his overall concept. He thinks that the United States became dominants because people could become land-owners and thus voters. He assumes that land was valuable in the US like it was in Europe, which I think is wrong. Land the US was worthless. The issue was that in Europe, there was no land. It was all taken up. Land was valuable, money wasn't, because you knew that your land would always produce more.

In the US, this was reversed. Yes, people could become land-owners, but it was what happened after land acquisition that was actually important: the vote. The land itself simply came along for the ride because people thought that land was valuable. That was of course, until they came here and found out that even being a land-owner sucked. Being the money holder is what became important in the US, which again helps to explain the rise of Jews in the US. They had a lot of money.

He takes a swipe at governments who "violate our property rights" to tax us and "waste our money." Again, sounding dangerously Randian, here. What rights? How are they violated? Is the money actually being wasted? How is it being wasted. This was a massive statement to make that he just casually tosses out there.

Property isn't important. It's only seen as important because there's so damned little of it in Europe. And by that, I mean the assumption that people need to be land owners to succeed. Are property laws important? Yes. Of course they are. But they're just as important as any law about shit that is "mine" or "yours."

When Ferguson remains conservative in his statements, the documentary is at is best and most credible. When he gets sweeping, it falls on its face.

How TV Did Nothing To Your Life

I've been thinking a great deal about How TV Ruined Your Life and its anti-consumerist message. It rips apart many of the arguably very negative aspects of our material society and highlights grotesque examples like My Super Sweet 16.

But hidden in these attacks, and truly the attacks from anyone who talks about how modern aspects of life are bad is the sociological fallacy of The Good Ol' Days. It is the same phenomenon as the World in Decay perspective that so many religions have. Essentially, now is bad, some other time is necessarily better. By almost every metric, this is wrong. That's why I call it a fallacy.

Instead, what I think the show, and all of the synonymous perspectives are lamenting are symptoms of underlying issues. Materialism, celebrity culture; these are not the problems. The problem is a society filled with shallow, half-dead shells of humans. People two-hundred years ago would have been materialistic just as they are today, only they didn't have the materials with which to do it. If anything, the only variable keeping the general population of this bygone day from turning to the perverted excesses of the the elite (who's opulence was either equal to or far greater than that of today) was a society that told them the abandon all hope.

The problem we need to address is a population of unfulfilled humans who reach out into the world for things that fulfill primal, nebulous, hind-brain type pleasures. These provide fleeting bits of happiness, and they're left unsatisfied and yearning for more, but at least they were something approximating happiness for a short time.

It's then no surprise that the things that he attacks directly in his show are all of the pleasures and fears that cater strongly to the reptilian parts of the noodle: Fear, death, possessions, and sex & companionship. We focus on these because we are animals programmed to focus on them. We shouldn't be pointing to TV and media, we should be pointing to an educational and societal system that doesn't bother to give kids an understanding of the world to inoculate them to such thinking and behavior.

Just Below and to The Side of The Influence.

A new study out of Temple University has shown that teenagers don't actually need peer pressure to do dumb shit. In fact, the mere presence of peers makes teens act in ways they otherwise would not. These peers were not saying anything, doing anything, truly, the peers in the experiment were not even visible to the experimental subject.

Anyone who actually remembers being a teenager will not find this study surprising. I did a number of very stupid things with friends with absolutely no goading on their parts. And what I hope this study helps people understand is that those god-awful, ridiculous, absolutely pointless Above the Influence PSA's that litter television and print DO NOTHING. They are addressing an imaginary problem!

I was asked if I wanted to smoke pot on precisely two occasions in my high school career. Both times, it was done in a friendly, social manner. This person was inviting me in as a show of friendship. There was no pressure. Never in the HISTORY OF TIME has the line "All the cool kids are doing it" been uttered by anyone but stand-up comics. Above the Influence fails for the same reason that Nancy Reagan and her retarded Just Say No campaign failed: it imagines an American child that doesn't exist.

P.S. The Just Say No campaign reached a point of hilarity by the mid 1990's. I have come across urinal cake holders with "Winners Don't Do Drugs" printed on them. I really don't know what demographic they were hoping to reach with that one.

Health or Education

I saw an interesting post in regards to Afghanistan asking whether it was more important for us to push for education or health. You can easily see the issue. People can't learn if they're sick, and people have a hard time not being sick when stupid.

From a foreign policy perspective, it's certainly a sticky issue. The organic growth of increasing health, education, and social stability that the west went through is something that would take multiple generations. We could wait that long, but we might not need to.

I think that it's a false dichotomy. Obviously, health must be covered first, but only for the students. If we can create an island of health in an otherwise destitute area, as long as violence doesn't take that away, we can then focus on the education of the healthy. A very small degree of health must be ensured before education becomes paramount, but after that point, education is without doubt the most important element in society building.

Love for the Nintendo Wii.

I Love the Nintendo Wii. I don't play it very often, but I love it. I love it because it is a video game system. You play games on it. You don't stream movies, or sign into massive online communities of eight-year-olds that can destroy you in Halo. You don't form Nintendo guilds of people who all play Mario together online. You just play a fucking game.

I love the success of the Wii because I see it as a celebration and vindication of the GAME. Microsoft and Sony, and even PC developers like Blizzard with World of Warcraft, have abandoned the casual gamer. The gamer who isn't willing to dedicate hundreds of hours of game time and spend stupid amounts of money on the "it" games every month.

I've felt so abandoned by the companies. I don't want to join guilds to avoid shit-head teenagers in online Gears of War matches. I don't want to spend nine hours raiding in Warcraft to get any good equipment. I don't want to play nothing but another damned first person shooter when one comes out every fucking month.

And I don't with Nintendo. They keep me rooted in the 1980's and 90's, when I simply bought a game, put it in, and played. No signing in. No leader boards dominated by guys against whom I have ZERO chance. That's what I like. You cannot just put a game into the Xbox. You cannot simply open a save file. You cannot simply jump in and out of games. Oh no! You need to create an avatar, and an Xbox Live name, and sign into the Xbox to access any save files. And if you're playing multiplayer, the person who originally signed in and pressed "start" must then be the person who signs in and presses start every time you start the game if you want to access the save file. Why not just have a simple save file that anyone can play? Because Microsoft wants to remove as much control as possible from you, because they've got designs on turning the Xbox into a set-top-box and being the Apple of the living room, where you control nothing, they control everything, and they charge you lots of money for it.

I think it no surprise, then, that Wii is outselling everyone else combined, and that I and all of my friends with whom I remember playing games back in the 80's and 90's all primarily play the Wii. I only have one friend who plays the Xbox primarily, and he is that super-gamer. He buys and sells games by the dozens every year, belongs to a gaming clan, and lives on Xbox Live. My Xbox isn't even connected to the internet and all I play is Street Fighter IV. Is the Wii for that hardcore gamer? No. Not nearly enough shooters (he says with a sly sarcasm). Obviously, Microsoft has found a model that works very well for that market. That market loves the network, the leaderboards, the sign-ins, and all of the other trappings of the Xbox. I don't. Those very same trappings do nothing but piss me off.

I could spin that market negatively. For example, World of Warcraft. The people there are similar to the people on Xbox Live. They're hardcore and the Warcraft world is their world. They derive a great deal of satisfaction, self confidence, and social interaction from this world. Is that necessarily a bad thing? Not at all. But when someone who doesn't mesh with that world comes in, they clash. Do you remember the movie Christine? It's Stephen King's evil car story. Basically, an evil car is purchased by this timid, teenaged milquetoast, and he begins to become infected by it and turns into a total asshole. One of the underlying themes is that the car didn't actually infect or possess him, thus turning him into an asshole, it's that the kid was always an asshole, he was just too much of a coward to let it come out. Emboldened with his car, we discover that the kid was never a nice kid, and our earlier empathy is replaced with disgust.

Think of World of Warcraft and other online games as Christine. There are very few nice twelve-year-olds, so just imagine the pricks that they turn into when given an epic fantasy world. As such, the consistency of this fantasy world is important. They feel badass, here, and when that is threatened, they get angry (I'm here referring to not only the tweens and teens, but anyone with that profile). I'm reminded of this trenchant comic by the guys over at Penny Arcade.


So yeah, as I think I've explained, the ever-growing online world is one that has basically abandoned me. Instead of playing World of Warcraft, I play through Final Fantasy V for the tenth time. Instead of playing Bioshock II, I play Doom II. The only new games that I'm playing are New Mario, Mario Galaxy, and Street Fighter IV. Games that have basically been around since the beginning of games.

I like games. I LOVE games. And that's why I like Nintendo. They're a game company. They make games. I appreciate that and their quasi-old-style view of the industry very much. Go Nintendo.

No Fatties

A club up in Montreal, one of my favorite planes on Earth, is receiving some flak for posting, and I quote, "NO FAT GIRLS ALLOWED!!!!!!!!!!", on their Facebook page. Obviously, the club is backpedaling, and they say that it was some planner's idea of a joke. I actually buy that excuse, it probably was intended as a joke. It was just intended as a joke at the expense of fat girls.

Lots of people are up in arms over this, and apparently night clubs have been sued for racial discrimination in the past, which is, somehow, a bigger problem. I just can't get too up-in-arms over this. Clubs? Only allowing hot people inside? No!

For Pete's sake, duh! Of course the clubs are discriminating. That is was clubs do. Clubs exist for almost entirely superficial reasons. A book store, or perhaps cafe doing the same thing sounds wrong, but a club? That's SOP. If you're fat, you know that you're fat, and you're going to a place that's a temple to shallow, alcohol-fueled physical contact. You're an idiot for getting insulted.

In much the same way that I have no problems at all with high-end designers not making plus-sizes, clubs simply work this way. These companies are selling an image as much as a product. If a club was widely known for being filled with fat and/or ugly people, no one would go! Look at club websites. See anyone who's ugly in the photos section?

Make no mistake, this is discrimination. But if you have an image to maintain, and that image is material in the continued success of your brand, you need to regulate how that image is broadcast. Remember Burberry's brand taking a hammering in the UK after the chavs picked it up? Or Coach in the US after it started going after lower SES brackets? We have direct evidence showing that a poorly managed brand suffers damage when undesirable clients are seen attached to that brand.

So get over it or lose some weight.

Club Prohibits "Fat Girls," Claims It's An "Inside Joke" (Jezebel.com)

It's the Gays!

In late 2005, I predicted that we would have nationwide gay marriage within five years. We're nearing the five year mark with nothing yet, so I was a bit early in my prediction.

But research like this indicates that I may have not been all that early. Maybe seven years.

I find this very encouraging. Generally, views like this are difficult to get rid of. Look at the civil rights movement. That was FIFTY YEARS AGO, and we're still dealing with the expulsion of those biases from our system. Of equal importance was the way some of it had to be expelled; the government had to literally force people to accept blacks. We are not a terribly smart species.

As such, dogmatic views, especially those rooted since childhood, usually die with the generation. You hate your parents, and reject a few things about them, but accept a majority. Your parents die, and so dies the few views that your generation rejected. Even seemingly massive cultural shifts end up with people who are eerily similar to those who came before. Look at the hippies, the supposed counter culture who rejected everything that their intolerant, square parents had advocated. What did we get out of that? Yuppies and people who were actually more conservative in many ways.

So it's with great happiness that I am digesting the thought that, with enough exposure, even deeply rooted bigotry can be, at least somewhat, quelled.

Gay? Whatever, Dude (New York Times)