tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1952475627436845742024-03-05T07:50:58.889-05:00Breaking Point BlogStriving to destroy bad media, typical politics, and old ideas.Edward Carneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15705855929151669621noreply@blogger.comBlogger185125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-195247562743684574.post-69933435227180716032012-10-23T12:57:00.000-04:002012-10-23T12:57:51.967-04:003rd Debate: Mitt Romney Says Nothing, Repeatedly<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
I admit that I have a tendency to talk more about
language than about substance when analyzing political speech, but then again
there isn’t much substance to be had.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And besides, the little things matter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Failing to take note of tricks of language and Orwellian efforts at
branding can mean lowering your guard against political manipulation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So I don’t feel bad about picking at nits,
because I believe those nits have a tendency to grow and consume public dialogue
if they aren’t gotten rid of.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
There was one talking point in last night’s
presidential debate that I found exceptionally aggravating.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was the point that Mitt Romney made about
the perilous situation that the United States faces in the world because Iran
is now “four years closer” to having a nuclear weapon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Considering that that was repeated four times
over the course of the ninety minutes, it seemed to me that it relied upon the
assumption of an audience that wasn’t really paying close attention.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It grabbed my attention as an utterly empty
political slogan the first time it was uttered, and the rest of the audience
had three additional opportunities to get that same impression.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
There’s really no other impression to be had.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Saying that Iran is four years closer to a
nuclear weapon is like saying that I’m four years closer to a Nobel Prize.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Chances are pretty good that I’m not going to
get one of those.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I guess you could
argue that even if I don’t, as long as I keep working towards a relevant goal –
writing literature, for instance – I might be closer to having a Nobel Prize
when I die than I am right now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But
speaking more colloquially, if a certain outcome is never going to happen, one
doesn’t get closer to it over time.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Now, in the event that I am going to win a Nobel
Prize, then the hypothetical statement is true.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I am four years close to that outcome than I was four years ago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Similarly, if at any point in the future,
under any circumstances, Iran develops and builds a nuclear weapon, then they
are presently four years closer to that outcome than they were four years
ago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">That’s
the way time works.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Future events
get closer every day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Would a Mitt
Romney presidency unlock some secret of the universe that would allow time to
flow backwards within the borders of one country?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or was this intended as a subtle metaphor for
bombing nations back to the Stone Age?</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
At this point, I imagine a lot of people will
narrow their eyes disdainfully at me and hiss, “Oh, you know what he meant.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And in a vague sense, yes, of course I
do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Obviously he meant to suggest that
President Obama’s first term allowed the Iranian regime to become materially
closer to having the knowledge and resources required for building a nuclear
weapon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I don’t know what Romney
meant by “four years closer,” presumably because “four years closer” doesn’t
mean anything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s the vaguest and
least substantive way he could have phrased what he was trying to say, and
since it was repeated four times over, that must have been deliberate.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
If Romney had had a substantive claim to make
about a worsening Iranian threat resulting from an Obama presidency, he had
ample opportunity to make it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn’t.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s not to say that there’s no such
argument to be made, but it does suggest that Romney’s claims relied on bullshit
– a disregard for the truth value of what he was saying, in favor of whatever
would serve his ends if it happened, incidentally, to be true.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
That behavior is quite in keeping with Romney’s
entire approach to his campaign.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Typically, he seems to accomplish this exploitation of politically
convenient narratives by plainly reversing position, or by outright lying.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now, with the third debate, he seems to have
uncovered the perfect means of utilizing bullshit, which is by making claims
that cannot be contradicted because they provide absolutely no information,
even as they sound damning for the opposing party.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I suppose that in that way Romney has
succeeded in emulating Reagan.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
The public cannot allow such casual disregard for
truth or rational argumentation to stand as a relevant political tactic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We cannot allow politicians, corporations, or
anyone else to believe that they can sway us by branding and rhetoric alone,
without having to appeal to factual data or to be transparent about their own
views.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Such dialogue will only improve
if we hone our ability to parse it and separate it and call out the
bullshit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We’re failing in that
responsibility if Mitt Romney believes he can say four times in the same debate
that we’re four years closer to the future, and have that somehow count in his
favor.</div>
Edward Carneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15705855929151669621noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-195247562743684574.post-61574865528371141822012-10-12T17:07:00.000-04:002012-10-12T17:07:45.519-04:00Everyone Look at the Ignorant People!<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
I just happened upon a clip from Chris Matthews
coverage of the supporter gatherings prior to the Vice Presidential
debate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is not enormously
significant, but it is a delicious bit of video, which I have an irresistible urge
to comment upon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The roughly one-minute
clip begins with Matthews interviewing a random Obama supporter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just as he asks her about her health care
situation, an old woman interjects from off camera by shrieking the word “communist!”
in a voice that would have made it notably fitting if she had followed up with,
“burn him!”</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Everyone in frame reacts to the shout, but the
woman being interviewed shakes it off and takes a few seconds to explain that
she and her husband had recently lost health insurance for the first time in
their lives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Chris Matthews lets her finish
her answer, but the speed with which he departs when she reaches the end of her
sentence suggests an almost Pavlovian response to the shrill voice at the edge
of the crowd.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He lowers the microphone
immediately and says, “Okay let’s go over to this lady,” whereupon he seeks out
the person who yelled communist, in order to ask her what she meant by it.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
What follows is a stunningly awkward exchange in
which Matthews asks the woman exceptionally unchallenging questions,
essentially just repetitions of “what do you mean?” and she repeatedly fails to
answer them, instead chiding the professional journalist and commentator to “study
it out, just study it out,” derisively referring to him as “buddy,” and
asserting that she knows what she means.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It would be painful to watch if I had any inkling that the woman had
sufficient self-awareness to be embarrassed by it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It would be hilarious if it wasn’t such a
tragic commentary on the state of political discourse. Watch it if you like:</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/2E87gciwebw?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Obviously, our culture and systems of information
need to be reformed enough to precipitate a breaking point whereby nobody can
remain so self-satisfied in their own ignorance as this woman showed herself to
be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her willingness to gather at a
political rally and shout her views on national television suggests that she is
firmly committed to them, but even in the space of a minute, her complete
inability to explain or defend those views paints the image of someone who has
absolutely no idea what she’s talking about, but also doesn’t care that she’s
not informed and doesn’t think she has to be.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I watch this woman wag her head at Chris Matthews
and pause at length before shooting back, “You don’t know?” when asked what she
means by “communist,” and I see someone who believes that in the face of any
challenge to their worldview, a self-righteous attitude eliminates the need for
facts and rationality, every time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is
indicative of a sociopathic mindset that takes confidence and strength to trump
all else, and that mindset seems like it is breeding extensively in the modern
population.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That in turn is indicative
of a serious cultural failure in America, though unfortunately one that is near
impossible to overturn.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Far less difficult to attain is the personal
breaking point that this clip seems to point to, though I must admit that I don’t
know which side of it I ought to come down on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I must admit that in watching the clip, the thought almost immediately
crossed my mind that maybe this woman was some sort of amateur satirist aiming
to portray the Republican opposition as deluded and irrational, and even that
maybe she had been planted there by some group on the left.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I entertain those thoughts because, as with
most conspiracy theories, it’s simply easier to believe than the frightful
reality, which in this case would be that America is long on individuals who
form firm, aggressive opinions on the basis of the extracts of ether and
bullshit.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I know that my skepticism about public ignorance
is unsustainable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indeed, I know that it
can be harmful, because it’s a sort of ignorance in itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fundamental to my personal philosophy is the
idea that you can’t hope to effectively solve a problem if you deliberately
avoid recognizing the reality and extent of that problem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Public ignorance is the problem at the root
of all other problems, because it is that which allows people to avoid reality,
and thus deny solutions.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
The problem here is that I don’t know whether I
should be pushing myself towards the breaking point of taking public ignorance
for granted, or if instead I should find a way to keep from assuming that
conspiracies are afoot while still giving individuals the benefit of the doubt
as regards their level of information.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In other words, one might say that witnessing ignorance of the
proportions on display in this clip challenges me to avoid two negative
breaking points, which threaten to make me either overly cynical about either
human stupidity or overly cynical about political manipulations.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I’d venture to guess that not a lot of people have
carefully-reasoned assessments of their fellow men, so this is a personal
breaking point that others may have to contend with as well, but being
personal, it’s of secondary importance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>What this video clip has brought to mind that could be addressed on a
large scale right now is a question for the media about how to handle firm
opinions voiced by the public.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I honestly can’t decide whether to praise or
criticize Chris Matthews’ response to the political heckler.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Part of me wants to criticize just because I
used to get a lot of enjoyment out of focusing my ire for the news media
against Matthews, who, despite being a bright guy, was terrible at his job back
when I considered MSNBC a news organization.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Now that his job is “partisan” rather than “journalist,” he doesn’t seem
so bad.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Okay, it also helps that I don’t
have a TV.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But in any event, even if
Matthews remains professionally an idiot, the woman he had his brief exchange
with is an idiot in much larger terms, and to an unquantifiably greater extent.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
The relevant question, then, is, “Did Matthews
have good enough reason to focus the attentions of the microphone and camera on
this woman’s dimwittedly vociferous views?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>On the one hand, by giving her a voice once she’d asked for it, and
contributing no commentary of his own, Matthews allowed the woman to provide
her own refutation of her talking points.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The exchange conveyed the impression that extremist views are based on
no information, which of course they often are.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That’s a good fact to put on display when the opportunity arises.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
On the other hand, we have to remember the
shamelessness with which the old woman held her ideas in absence of evidence or
personal understanding.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Such
shamelessness probably isn’t much affected by having a mirror held up to its
own ignorance, and that fact threatens to let this incident stand as
encouragement for other people like her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>As I said, the greatest breaking point involved here is also all but
unattainable: the creation of a culture that prevents the embrace of ignorance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For the foreseeable future, lack of
information and presence of strong opinions will continue to go hand-in-hand
among a sizable portion of the American public.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It will take generations of concerted effort to change that fact.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But that doesn’t mean that opinionated idiots
will always be activists.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I estimate that much less comprehensive cultural
changes could prevent people who hold uninformed opinions from being so vocal
and so public with those opinions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
one thing that probably doesn’t help is giving voice to those opinions, in all
their self-righteous vacuity, on national television.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Viewers at home whose perspective on American
politics don’t go much farther than “he’s a communist!” won’t be shamed or
enlightened by their impromptu spokesperson’s self-defeated, just as she wasn’t
shamed or enlightened by it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To the
contrary, the presence on the airwaves of uninformed declarations and accusations
provides more fodder for lazy people to find something to parrot as they make
the leap from uninformed citizen to armchair activist.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
The opinions that are screeched from the sidelines
are the ones that most need to be debunked once they’re present, but they’re
also the ones that most need to be disallowed from taking the field.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Overall political discourse is cheapened not
only by their ignorance but also by their lack of decorum.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As regards ethics, I think I am so committed
a deontologist that I have internalized Kant’s categorical imperative.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I see things like this video clip and start
wondering what ought to have been done in the situation I find myself universalizing
the act I witnessed and looking for its effect on the moral system.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
In this case, what would the effect be if
journalists always turned their attention to the loudest and most abrasive commenter
on the scene as Matthews seems to have done?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He even turned his attention away from the woman who was contributing
relevant anecdotes to the public understanding, in order to give the shrill,
ancient cold warrior a chance to explain her unexplainable views.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I fear that the current state of journalism
is not far from embracing the loudest participant in any debate, because the
hypothetical result is that all of American politics becomes a shouting match,
and that is seemingly not far from the situation that we already face.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
In light of that threat of a still more corrupted
political and journalistic landscape, I’m tempted to say that although the
woman’s response was rather satisfying, the better thing to do in that
situation and all similar situations is to keep the person who’s shouting
epithets off of our television screens.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But I’d be interested to know what readers think of the effects of
either encouraging or discouraging uninformed speech.</div>
Edward Carneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15705855929151669621noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-195247562743684574.post-31475140390968504642012-10-04T16:05:00.001-04:002012-10-04T16:05:52.680-04:00Poverty Still Invisible on Debate StageWednesday’s debate made it clear to me that American politics remains tragically far from an essential breaking point in how people talk about the economy. One of the nice things about living in the computer age is the access that it gives us to transcripts and the Ctrl+F keystroke. That’s great for people who are interested in analyzing branding strategies and verbal rhetoric. It is perhaps more useful in instances where the trends are chasing, which even a casual listen to the recent debate would have revealed is not presently the case. <br />
<br />
In an <a href="http://www.andmagazine.com/content/phoenix/11843.html">article at AND Magazine</a> months ago, I criticized the American political system for tendency to entirely eschew reference to poverty except for when such reference is politically, and momentarily, useful. The entire narrative of political economy on both sides relies on the mass delusion that everyone in America is, or at least will be, middle class. Concordantly, in a ninety minute debate that was entirely about the economy, President Obama and Governor Romney spoke solely to that artificially inflated middle class, and almost entirely about them. <br />
<br />
I waited with low expectations for any mention whatsoever of the poor, and finally encountered one about half an hour into the debate. It didn’t exactly create a new trend in the dialogue afterwards.<br />
<br />
The word “poor” was used exactly four times (excluding Jim Lehrer speculating about the job he did as moderator). Each of those four instances belonged to Mitt Romney, three of them appearing in the discussion of shifting Medicare to states. His use of the term in that context, and that context alone, only furthers the evidence of federal disregard for lower class Americans and for policies that might positively affect them en masse.<br />
<br />
Said Governor Romney:<br />
<blockquote>
I would like to take the Medicaid dollars that go to states and say to a state, you're going to get what you got last year, plus inflation, plus 1 percent, and then you're going to manage your care for your poor in the way you think best.</blockquote>
In other words, addressing the horrors of poverty is not and ought not be in the purview of the president of the United State, nor even of the rest of the federal government. I would even go so far as to say that the subtext of this – as seems to be in keeping with <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&sqi=2&ved=0CC8QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Ftothebreakingpoint.blogspot.com%2F2011%2F12%2Fmitt-romneys-delusion-of-meritocracy.html&ei=-OttUOTvCujV0QGO6oAQ&usg=AFQjCNETOWBriekfgkwPM-u4NH5W9safKA&sig2=yVMFpAvDPehElyyo7r4imw">Romney’s deluded views</a> about universal economic opportunity and social mobility – is that poverty is a transient state, and something that is made more or less likely by policy. <br />
<br />
What is especially objectionable in this skeleton of a platform on the subject is the fact that he presents poverty as an affliction that calls only for “care,” which is a word that sounds decidedly passive in comparison with other alternatives, like “intervention.” But why should society intervene to create economic opportunity or to close the gulf between social classes, which is yawning wider with every passing year? Why indeed, when for the likes of Mitt Romney, staying poor is a matter of choice, or the result of a lack of ambition? Given that worldview, it is the job of the individual state to see to it that their poor don’t die for their failings, but it is nobody’s job to provide the afflicted with a hand up in their struggle to escape the circumstances into which they were either born or thrust. <br />
<br />
And Obama’s refusal to let the word “poor,” or even the phrase “low-income” pass his lips suggests that there is no ideological opposite of that perspective represented on the national stage. There is no political worldview that dares accept poverty or economic disparity as a reality in this country, much less acknowledge it as the result of policies or flaws in the economic structure of the nation. <br />
<br />
The fourth time that Governor Romney used the word “poor,” he immediately corrected himself, referring to Title 1 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act as affecting “poor kids,” then saying “or lower-income kids, rather.” The slip may have momentarily belied his message, but it also pointed to the skill with which he had trained in properly re-branding his views for the debate audience. It is difficult to think of a reason why Romney would have corrected himself via synonym, if not because he knew that he was not supposed to use the word “poor” in the context of national policy. <br />
<br />
In fact, the same training was on display in his discussion of the segment of American society that politicians are allowed to talk about. The word “middle” appeared in the debate, with regard to socio-economic status, a total of thirty-one times. Nineteen of those instances belonged to President Obama, and twelve to Governor Romney. But what’s especially remarkable is the distinct difference in corollary words used by each man. Nine of the thirteen times Romney used the word “middle,” it was to refer to “middle-income” Americans. Obama, by contrast, used the phrase “middle class” in all nineteen cases. <br />
<br />
This matters either to what each man believes about the distribution of wealth in America, or to the image that he wants to present of it, or both. With the deliberate application of a less common term, Romney, evidently, is trying to promote the fantasy that there is no social class in America, that there are those that work harder and earn more, and those that work less and earn proportionally, but no natural division between them. That narrative has underlay a great many of his public comments, though nobody but Mitt Romney can say for certain whether he truly believes it or if it simply advances his goals. <br />
<br />
Obama, by contrast, sticks to the term “middle class” throughout discussions of economic policy. Speaking about impacts of policy upon only that groups, which almost all Americans believe they are a part of, is politically beneficial, though ideologically weak. But also, speaking about them as a social class must be a conscious decision on some level. <br />
<br />
Obama heard Romney refer to middle-income Americans nine times during their exchanges, and he never modified his language to match or to directly challenge the rhetoric. Either he wasn’t paying attention to the vagaries of diction, or he believed it to be politically preferable to advance a narrative that acknowledges class divisions as an American reality. Naturally, if the latter is the case, I’m on his side. But then I wonder where, if class divisions exist, is the lower class, the poor, the perennially underprivileged? And what do the president’s – or the governor’s – policies proposed to do for them.<br />
<br />
We never hear an answer to that question. And we never have. Certainly never during this election cycle. Never even throughout my adult life. There is a clear division between the candidates and their parties in terms of how they understand the social structures of America. In the Republican narrative, economic opportunity exists in equal measure for all and income levels differ, but never according to external factors, never in a way that patriotic Americans could construe as unfair. In the Democratic narrative, government actually has a role to play in the economic lives of its citizens, because there are natural divisions and inequities that must be controlled. <br />
<br />
One of these, of course, is the groundwork for the lesser of two evils. But judging by the language of debates and national speeches, in neither narrative do poor citizens exist. And that makes each side similarly a party to the same grand delusion. Towards what end does every national candidate embrace that willful ignorance? Is it that they are afraid of acknowledging society’s evils? Is it tacit acceptance of the selfishness of voters, which guides them to turn a blind eye to that which doesn’t personally affect them? It can’t be that they’re simply unwilling to take on a problem that they know they can’t solve, because the entire process of campaigning is built on making impossible and contradictory promises. <br />
<br />
Perhaps that’s just it. The political lives of our would-be leaders are constructed around convincing voters to believe in absurd fantasies about the candidate and his capabilities. Perhaps nobody wants to mention poverty because everybody has already been convinced of the fantasy that it’s not a real problem in America. Everybody, that is, except for the poor. They exist.Edward Carneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15705855929151669621noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-195247562743684574.post-55546273835364330562012-09-04T14:36:00.000-04:002012-09-05T09:41:16.354-04:00At Cultural Attractions: Parents Don't Teach, Children Don't Learn<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The Buffalo Zoo celebrated the
traditionally-last weekend of summer by offering a ninety percent
discount on admission on Labor Day. Since one dollar is something I
can just about afford on a good week, I took a holiday-morning bike
ride around Delaware Park and then queued up with the mass of people,
mostly families with small children, who had just as readily sprung
at the opportunity for a cheap cultural activity.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Considering the lines at the gate, I
was surprised that the scene inside was not as claustrophobic as it
could have been. It took a little jostling or waiting in the wings to
get a proper angle, but everyone seemed to get their opportunity to
look at the cute, or fearsome, or comic animals. I freely admit that
I was mostly there just to take another look at some of my favorite
creatures, to watch the polar bear swim in its artificial pond, far
from the threatened environment of its natural-born fellows, to grin
down on the docile capybaras lounging in the rainforest exhibit, to
rediscover my respect for the vulture which I discovered when I wrote
a report on the species in elementary school, to look for big cats
pacing like in Rilke's description of the panther.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
But even though this excursion wasn't
exactly intended as a fact-finding field trip, I never go to a museum
or zoo or aquarium without trying to learn something about the stuff
I'm looking at. Not a heck of a lot changes at the Buffalo Zoo from
year to year, and I think I had been there about a year ago, so it's
not as if I could have expected to discover an animal the existence
of which I was altogether unaware of. But there's only so much I can
commit to memory, so naturally I find myself rediscovering things on
subsequent visits to the same places of learning. I always seem to
forget, for instance, that the Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep are
capable of running at up to fifty miles per hour. The up-side of my
disappointment at not retaining encyclopedic recollections – a
failure that seems to become ever-worse as I age – is that I
sometimes get to re-experience the joy of learning something
interesting all over again.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Even if I don't read all of the
wildlife facts, of which there aren't even that many at the Buffalo
Zoo, I do at the very least try to get the names of the animals
right. This is more than I can say of the vast majority of the other
patrons that I encountered yesterday. It having been a year since my
last visit, I found myself trying to actively identify each species,
endeavoring to commit to memory the ones that escaped me this time
around. This is natural to me, and I thought it was part of the
essential purpose of going to the zoo. I always took it to be a place
where you went not merely to look at animals as in a menagerie, but
to find out something about the wider world by discovering what they
are and from where they come. I especially thought that that was why
parents took their children to the zoo. I'd always assumed that it
was meant as a supplement to a child's primary education, a way to
instantiate curiosity and gauge the direction of nascent scholarship.
Apparently I was quite wrong about this as well.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Most any time that I go to places like
zoos or museums and find myself crowded by children and their adult
chaperones, I am downright shocked by the lack of interest that
parents have in conveying any information whatsoever to their
charges, or even in encouraging those children to learn anything on
their own. I fear that my disdain paints me as a killjoy and that the
average reader will see me as attaching far too much significance to
the conduct of people who are on a simple, light-hearted family
outing. But that's just the trouble. I worry that people attach
entirely too little significance to such everyday opportunities to
influence the character, values, and perspective of impressionable
children.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
As much as Americans today recognize
and lament the widespread failure of education and the failure of
modern children to live up to appropriate standards, I think
commentators and individual parents are too much inclined to see that
failure as institutional and too little inclined to consider it as
social and cultural. If the behavior of parents at zoos and museums
is indicative of their broader attitudes, it suggests that people
have widely forfeited the recognition of personal responsibility for
the education of their own children, instead handing that
responsibility off to schools as if the process of raising an
intellectually astute and ambitious child is something that can be
consolidated into a specific set of hours in specific locales.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
If that is indeed the view – if the
need for education is recognized, but only recognized as being needed
somewhere outside the home – then I can only conclude that people
don't really value education at all. That is, they don't value
education as it ought to be valued, for its own sake, as both a
public and a personal good. You can't expect children to learn well
and perform at a high level in school if the culture that they're
coming up in is one that portrays education as a sort of
obligation and something that brings good things to the learner, but
is not good enough in its own right to be worth pursuing in absence
of the social obligations of homework and exams.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
What else can I conclude from regularly
observing that perfectly middle class parents, far from exhibiting
much intellectual curiosity of their own, don't even respond to the
intellectual curiosities of their own children. But perhaps that's a
little unfair. At the zoo yesterday I did find one or two adults
expressing curiosity to the extent that they pressed their faces to
the glass and perplexedly asked of no one in particular, “What is
it?” They just didn't express a great deal of interest in actually
doing anything to satisfy their curiosity. They just couldn't be
bothered to walk back two feet in order to read the damn nameplate.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
This is entirely their own affair when
the adults are on their own and solely responsible for their own
edification or ignorance. But it gets under my skin when their own
lack of care for finding answers threatens to be transmitted to a
child who is still blessed by wide-eyed eagerness to comprehend the
world around him, whatever aspects of it should set itself before
him.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Just a few exhibits down from where I
heard one unresolved ejaculation of “What is it?” I found myself
looking at another glass enclosure that housed three wallabies
crouching at the back of their habitat, when a family walked around
me to look at the same. It was comprised of a couple with a daughter
just barely of speaking age and a son perhaps six years old. The
parents looked, glassy-eyed, into the scene while the boy excitedly
called out “kangaroos!” I had started moving away from the
exhibit, but noticing the boy being met with silence, I said simply
“wallabies,” partly in hopes that his parents would hear me and
realize, if they did not realize it on their own, that their son had
made a reasonable but slightly mistaken assumption about what they
were looking at.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
However, I was essentially met with
silence, too, except in that the boy, perhaps hearing me or perhaps
just seeking acknowledgment from his parents, repeated “kangaroos.”
Noticing that they weren't going to say anything and that their eyes
had apparently still not passed over the signs that clearly stated
the name of the species, I repeated, with the boy more specifically
in mind, “wallabies.” Now looking squarely at me, and
inquisitively, the boy again said “kangaroos.” It could not have
been more obvious that the child was interested in being corrected.
He wanted to learn, as most children do when simply presented with
the opportunity. This child was young, but most likely old enough to
sound out the word “wall – a – bye” if he knew where to look,
and if he was made to realize that he didn't know the answer without
looking. But to do that, he would need an example to follow, a pair
of parents who had the tools to find out answers for themselves, and
cared to give their children the same.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The child looking to me instead of his
parents for that meager bit of instruction, I addressed him directly,
explaining, “No, these are wallabies. Kangaroos are big; these are
smaller.” And at that he turned to his parents and his younger
sibling to repeat it to them: “These aren't kangaroos, the man
says.” At that I was walking away, and I can only hope that their
son's claim finally prompted them to look at the sign and sound out
“wall – a – bees.” It was up to them to take an interest on
their own, but it seemed to me that the child, being a child, not
only wanted to know about these things in the zoo, but wanted others
to know about them to.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I experienced the same thing elsewhere.
In the crowded rainforest exhibit, I, being a nerd, spoke straight to
the capybaras, telling them that I just wanted them to know that they
are the largest rodents on Earth, and that that's awesome and they
should be proud. A young girl just beside me asked, seemingly of no
one in particular, "What are those called?" It could be that she heard
me demonstrating some knowledge of them and figured that I had the
answer, or it could be that she, like so many young children, thought
her parents would have all the answers she sought.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
She had not spoken straight to me, and
that being the case, I would think that a scientifically interested
parent, one familiar with zoos, would say something like, “I don't
know, let me look at this information card over here so we can find
out.” The parents did not move, of course, so I turned to the child
and told her, “Those are called capybaras.” Naturally, she then
looked back to her parents and sought to inform them of what they did
not inform themselves: “They're called capee-bears.” The parents
did not repeat the information; they did not move to confirm it or
commit it to memory; they did not give her any indication that she
should feel proud of having learned something, that she should be
thankful for the knowledge, or that she should seek to learn other
things as well.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The desire to learn is so natural and
so passionate among children. How poorly we must regard it as a
society that students evidently end up so thoroughly dissuaded from
eager learning long before reaching the lower threshold of adulthood.
What standards can we possibly expect students to meet if we handicap
them in all the faculties that might prompt them to aim above the
mark. If this culture persists, the most likely solution is simply to
expect less of students, as has already become the defining feature
of decades in the devolution of higher education.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In the future of this culture, we may
as well just rename familiar animals to match the absent
understandings of parents and their children. Having been to a couple
of zoos and aquariums in recent years I've found that as far as
doting children and intellectually incurious parents are concerned,
every lemur is called King Julian and every clownfish is Nemo. This
really aggravates me. My best friend is terrifically fond of the
Niagara Aquarium, so I have gone there with her on several occasions.
Upon every visit, without fail, one can hear at least half a dozen
parents exclaiming, “All right, let's find Nemo,” or, “There's
Nemo.” I think I've heard the word “clownfish” used by a parent
to a child exactly once.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I have no doubt that some of these
parents are just lazy and find “Nemo” easy to remember, but I
warrant that a number of them may have good intentions. They're
probably trying to use pop culture as a way to facilitate their
children's interest in the natural world. But there's more than one
reason why this is misguided. For one thing, having been to the
aquarium several times, it's clear that children don't need some
secondary point of reference in order to take an interest in the
natural world, because the natural world is terrifically fascinating.
And that's especially obvious when you're a child.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
So using an animated film as a way of
connecting with an aquatic exhibit is extraneous, but far worse than
that it obfuscates children's understanding of what they're actually
looking at. It disregards the separation between fantasy and reality,
it suppresses knowledge of the actual species name, and it encourages
children to understand the creature through an individual depiction
and not through objective facts. And then on top of all of this, for
many families the fixation on something that is recognizable from
fiction overrides the significance of everything else that's on
display. People walk in the door and say, “Find Nemo!” and they
breeze through ninety percent of the aquarium to get to something
that won't teach a child very much that he doesn't already know. If
they didn't immediately put that idea in his head, they might be
astonished by how much he doesn't care about the clownfish once he's
seen the solitary-social penguins, the balloonfish with their
glittering eyes, the sharks skulking past viewing windows, the
challengingly camouflaged rockfish, and so on and so on.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
When parents almost thoughtlessly
constrain the purpose of visits to zoos and aquariums and museums,
they probably think, more often than not, that they are doing it for
the benefit of their children, that they are moving to retain a young
attention span and provide its owner a quick shot of enrichment while
they can. In fact, I think such parents and caregivers should
consider that they might have it all backwards and that the feelings
of stress and impatience are all their own, and merely projected onto
their children. They should concern themselves less with what their
children are looking to get out of the experience, and more with what
they themselves are after. If the answer isn't “knowledge, and lots
of it,” they can probably expect much more of their children's
interest in the moment. But they likely won't be able to go on
expecting it as those children age in the presence of a society that
doesn't care particularly much for learning.</div>
Edward Carneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15705855929151669621noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-195247562743684574.post-39374831233850409672012-08-29T22:30:00.000-04:002012-09-05T13:19:31.189-04:00Employer Culture<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I recently applied for a job in
Wyoming. It was an entry-level reporting position in a small town,
and it was advertised via an unusual posting that seemed to encourage
a unique cover letter from me. I delivered that, received a response
that may or may not have been a form letter, and, on its request,
replied with a confirmation of my sincere interest in the position.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The original ad put more emphasis on
the setting of the job than on the job itself, and the response
really drove that home, emphasizing that the remote location was “not
a romantic getaway by any means,” which “might not suit
everyone.” My cover letter clearly outlined how I had always hoped
to live and work in a remote location after graduating from college
in the big city, and that the job seemed perfect for me. In my
confirmation of interest, I disputed the notion that it wasn't a
romantic getaway, and made it clear that in any event it was a place
I could see residing happily, especially if I had a career to build
upon there.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The editor sent a form letter to all
still-interested applicants to the effect that she would have more
time to go over the applications after a specific date. A week after
that date she wrote to me directly to confirm that I was not
to be interviewed, and in that brief message, she emphasized yet
again the apparent insecurities of her entire organization regarding
its setting, and explained that she had found someone who she thought
would bring a lot to the paper while also enjoying the surroundings.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
When I actually hear back from
no-longer-prospective employers these days, I am no longer shy about
pushing them to the limits of their patience in pursuit of
explanations, and in this case I was really confused. I wrote to ask
her if I had somehow given the impression that I wouldn't have been
able to tolerate living in the sort of remote region that I had just
used two sincere letters to explain that I specifically wanted to
live in. She kindly pointed to a specific line in my second message.
This was the comment that sunk my application:</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i>Speaking more generally, I'm not so
concerned with what the job or its surroundings can bring to me, as
with what I can bring to them.</i></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Am I crazy for
being nonplussed by her reaction? That line came after two solid
paragraphs of explaining why the job and its surroundings appealed to
me, which followed upon an entire prior letter of the same, and yet
all of that was apparently wiped from this editor's short-term memory
by my decision to make the point that my values make me more
interested in doing a perfect job than having a job I consider
perfect.</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
I can't interpret
this in any other way than that I was refused an interview for yet
another job that I would have done fantastically well because I was
insufficiently selfish. The briefly-prospective employer has given
me the distinct impression that the job went to somebody whose
application placed more emphasis on how much he wanted someone to
give him that job, and less on how well he would perform its duties.</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
It's another
example of the seemingly backwards hiring practices that have been
dogging me for six goddamn years, and I took the opportunity to press
this person on it, writing back:</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i>I've gotten a certain impression
many times over from people responsible for hiring. In your capacity
as such a person, which goal would you rank ahead of the other, if
you had to choose between them? 1) Finding someone who will do the
best job. 2) Finding someone who is least likely to leave the job.</i></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
I give her a lot of
credit for having been so communicative with me overall, but her
response to this question was pathetic:</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i>It depends. I try to find a good
balance between the two.</i></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Did I not make
myself clear? I know she tries to find a good balance between the
two. What I asked was which one was more important, and she simply
dodged the question, avoiding any acknowledgment that there is a
fragile value system at play in hiring practices. And though I can't
wrest a confirmation of this from anyone in a position to give it, I
consistently get the impression that human resource departments and
hiring managers are interested in finding people just good enough for
the open position that the company won't have to do anything to keep
that employee on board, because they'll probably never get a better
offer.</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Other people that
I've known have been crippled in their job searches by this employer
culture, as well. Acquiring more qualifications often seems to harm
job seekers more than it helps – such as teaching at the college
level when one is looking for a career in early childhood education.
It's evidently not worth taking the risk on hiring a good educator, a
good writer, a good anything, if there's a good chance that their
ambitions extend beyond the position one is looking to fill.</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">Obviously
no one has admitted to this outright, but this most recent editor
rather distinctly suggested it. Her rejection of my application was
phrased so as to directly contradict the line that sunk my
application, the one in which I said it was most important to me that
I bring value to the organization that hires me. She wrote, “</span>The
job and its surroundings are to me much more important.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Much more important than what? Than
the person you hire being a good worker, a talented writer, a
committed journalist, a person of decent character? All of that
takes a backseat to believing that the job and its surroundings are
exactly what the applicant wants and that nothing will tempt him away
from whatever you're to offer him?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Anecdotal evidence doesn't count for
much – you can always find some example that supports what you
believe about the world – but at the same time that I and others I
have known seem to absorb the damaging effects of these employer
practices, I know of one person who appeared to be decidedly on the
good side of them.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
My ex-girlfriend never graduated high
school, having gotten a GED instead. When I met her she had not been working for a longer period of time than I. During the time that I
knew her, she routinely quit jobs without notice. I later found she
took the same approach to relationships – find something better,
sever ties immediately. Despite the fact that her resume didn't
suggest impressive qualifications and the fact that she probably
didn't have great references from prior employers, she had little
problem walking out of one job and into another.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Why on Earth was she capable of being
hired immediately, whereas if I applied for the same jobs my resume
would be rejected without so much as a phone interview? The only
logical conclusion I can come to is the same observation about
employer culture. I can easily imagine hiring managers looking at
her past history and deciding, “this girl doesn't have a lot of
prospects in front of her; we'd be offering something that she should
be truly grateful for.” They may have been wrong on both points,
as to her graditude and her future outlook, but her mediocre resume
gave them good reason to believe that hiring her wasn't a gamble.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
With every job I've had, my managers
have regarded me as having a work ethic that exceeds that of my
coworkers. My performance and responsiveness to training have been
roundly praised. The one time in my life that I got to work in an
office, I received a year-end bonus that exceeded that of the person
who had been promoted out of my position, even though I had only been
there for six months. Despite all of this, actually finding a job is
damn near impossible for me. I don't have a bit of doubt that I
would perform the responsibilities of any job that I applied for with
more competence and conviction than just about anyone competing with
me for it. But I'm nearly as confident that that's not primarily
what employers are looking for.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Of course, it could be that I'm taking
too positive a view of myself. It could be that I'm just a terrible
applicant. But I'm not about to assume that explanation in absence
of evidence for it, and I'm certainly not getting any from the sorts
of employers from whom I'm seeking jobs.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Previous to applying for this job in
Wyoming, I was rejected without interview for another one that I was
even better qualified for, and which was also out of my area. When I
asked why, the editor did see fit to get back to me, but her response
was utterly meaningless on point of qualifications. She said only
that the person she hired "had what she needed." But she also pointed
out that he had grown up in the area of the job, so I rephrased my
question and asked whether, if I'd had the same qualifications I do
now but had grown up in that region, I would have been at least
interviewed.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Her response still makes me angry, and
I expect that it will for as long as I struggle to have a legitimate
career before the end of my twenties. She wrote back with one line:
“Ed, I'm sorry. I'm not going to break it down.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I had asked a straightforward yes-or-no
question. I was looking for some indication, even if perfectly
vague, as to whether my inability to secure a simple interview was
attributable to being underqualified, overqualified, or simply having
qualifications different from those that match the sorts of jobs I
apply for. I didn't ask her to answer to any of that, though. All
she had to do was say “yes,” “no,” or even “maybe.” To
do so would have taken less effort than it took to type what she did.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
To date, I can't conceive of any reason
why she would respond that way, other than to be deliberately rude.
This is my entire life we're talking about, and all that a person
like her needs to do to give me a little more insight into why it
remains so far off the rails is to say either “yes” or “no,”
and she couldn't even do that.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I guess in light of that I should feel
very pleased with the Wyoming editor for putting forth the effort to
dodge my question in a way that at least seemed like an answer.
Maybe that counts as progress.</div>
Edward Carneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15705855929151669621noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-195247562743684574.post-59175515825214732102012-08-08T22:17:00.000-04:002012-08-08T22:17:32.286-04:00Towards the Shrinking of Education<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
Last week’s issue of the New Yorker included an
article by Andrew Marantz in “The Talk of the Town” that I found unusually
inspirational.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That article also
included reference to a fact that I think is deplorably neglected and
under-explored: “… the Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported that in
the past few years ‘the percentage of graduate-degree holders who receive food
stamps or some other aid more than doubled.’”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>People who are relatively familiar with my views on institutional
education will recognize this as fodder for my ire over the socially endemic
assumptions about the economic value of college education.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
(If you want to get acquainted with those views,
please read <a href="http://tothebreakingpoint.blogspot.com/2011/06/what-right-question-is-really-worth.html">this</a>,
and <a href="http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-02-20-12.htm">this</a>, and
<a href="http://tothebreakingpoint.blogspot.com/2012/02/simplistic-thinking-from-educated.html">this</a>,
and <a href="http://tothebreakingpoint.blogspot.com/2009/05/correlation-vs-causality.html">this</a>.)</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Marantz went on to connect this situation to what
he says has been called the crisis in the academy, defined by the very
situation that I have been watching develop for years, in which the academic
labor market is so glutted with highly educated people that terrific scholars
are sometimes shouldered out of any sort of employment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Actually, Marantz – I think just by way of a
slightly clumsy transition – identifies the two issues with each other, as if a
need for public assistance and the absence of a high-profile academic post are
equivalent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is a middle ground
that is being needlessly excluded, there.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Still, both issues desperately need to be
addressed in their own right, and Marantz highlights two individuals who have
taken steps to combat the lesser crisis among would-be academics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ajay Singh Chaudhary and Abby Kluchin
recognized a demand for education among people who could not afford either the
time or the money to take the relevant courses at universities, and they
responded by teaching their disciplines in cafés over the course of several
weeks, at a cost of a few hundred dollars.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Marantz calls their business venture, the Brooklyn
Institute for Social Research, “a locavore pedagogy shop,” and I think that’s
as good a term as any for what I expect is part of a trend in education which
will increasingly challenge the large, money-driven institutions that so many
students are finding deliver little in the way of outcomes aside from a
crushing debt load.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I can still recall how excited I was years ago,
when my disdain for institutional education was still in its childhood – not its
infancy, mind you; that disdain actually predates my NYU enrollment – when I
heard a story on the news about private genetic engineering labs that people
were running in their basements.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After
my graduation, I began to advocate with particular verve for the outright
rejection of the formal institutions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
wanted, and still want, people who legitimately care about education, to show
that commitment in their private lives by educating themselves and one another
and exploring in private settings those new ideas which might be suppressed in
the academy, in favor of the status quo.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
At the time that seemed like an easy thing to
accomplish with the social sciences and humanities, but the idea of moving
physical sciences out of the institution and into more intimate settings seemed
quite challenging.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Seeing evidence that
not only were people up to the challenge but that they were actually doing it
thrilled me and gave me great hope for the future of smaller scale scholarly
structures.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
It’s been a long time, but Marantz’s article
finally gives me hope that the trend is continuing, and that it’s embracing not
only private experimentation and scholarship, but small-scale education.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With formal tertiary education demanding more
and more financial investments from students and delivering lesser and lesser
financial rewards, as well as questionable educational outcomes, I expect
people to gravitate in growing numbers towards alternative forms of both
teaching and learning.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
There are others in addition to the Brooklyn
Institute, of course.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The internet
provides curious individuals with many opportunities to absorb lectures for
free and in their own time through uploads of actual college courses, video
channels designed for broad-based education, TED Talks, and so on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At least one company that I know of sells
entire college courses on DVD for students to acquire at a fraction of the cost
of tuition.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I fully expect more competitors to join in this
trend, and so I expect that education in the future will look much different
than it looks under the formal structures of today.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unless the costs or the benefits of colleges
and universities dramatically shift gears, the schooling of the future will in
large part be much more local and much more collaborative.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The alternatives that provide that character
have about as much knowledge to offer as the status quo, given the volume of
unemployed scholars.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The only thing that
they decidedly lack is accreditation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But if degrees from accredited schools continue to deliver such dubious
prospects for employment and financial security, what value will accreditation
really have?</div>Edward Carneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15705855929151669621noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-195247562743684574.post-13629428522973274602012-08-06T21:43:00.000-04:002012-10-24T18:51:31.724-04:00Aging in Buffalo: A Personal Invective<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
I turned twenty-seven on Friday.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I know that most everyone has the experience
of reaching an age at which birthdays cease to be causes for celebration, but I
don’t think so many people find them to be the cruel reminder of lost time that
they have been for me roughly since I became a full-fledged adult.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is, if I could ever be called that in
the first place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m sure that by some
people’s standards, I never grew up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m
inclined to agree; I’m just not inclined to blame myself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s why birthdays are so awful.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They remind me of the speed with which time
is marching on even as I remain stuck firmly in my place.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
It’s interesting to be a resounding failure
starting in your very early twenties, and an educated, ambitious one, who
simply never had the chance to even screw up an opportunity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s interesting to see the evidence of that
failure every time you look out your front door on a hateful city that you
never thought you’d have to return to, but then were never able to leave.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Buffalo that I see every day is a place
where no one seems capable of living with purpose, achieving social mobility,
or bettering their personal character.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
It’s actually terrifying to be aging here, because
everywhere I look I see reminders of all the different people I don’t want to
become.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet in absence of evidence of
any alternatives, it seems increasingly likely that I will become just like
some of them if this environment continues to hold me so close to its rust-pockmarked
bosom.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I used to have more fire in me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Twenty-seven shouldn’t be associated with
this kind of tiredness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Often, I feel
numb enough to tolerate the intolerable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Honestly, there was a time not long, and yet too long ago when I came
close to vowing to kill myself if I wasn’t out of this town by a certain
date.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The trouble now is that I can’t for
the life of me remember when that date would have been.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Was it the start of this summer?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Next January?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The previous January?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My
twenty-seventh birthday?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I can’t
remember.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It doesn’t seem to matter
anymore.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am exceptionally
well-distracted with the ceaseless struggle to find each day’s work and survive
the week, and I am exceptionally well-deluded into thinking that therein,
somewhere, lies a future change of life.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
But then when I venture out of my home office, I
see the change of life that comes over time, in absence of a transformative
moment, a firm knock of opportunity, a breaking point.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Who shall I become, among these?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps by the time I’m in my mid-forties, my
home business will be truly legitimate, and I can be like the shop owner around
the corner, working irregular, overly demanding hours for a success so modest
that in the fullness of middle age he is still living without health insurance.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Or maybe I need not look so far into the future,
and instead I can aspire to be like my close peer and lifelong resident of the
Blackrock neighborhood, who is consistently and profoundly more successful than
I, which means at present that he’s been tasked with managing and fundamentally
reorganizing a nearby gas station for eight dollars an hour.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps I can aspire to that without waiting
to decay with age, though I doubt it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Given my past history, it seems that even to be willfully exploited is
too much for me to ask of prospective employers.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
If, however, I could by some chance succeed in
letting myself be exploited, then I can look forward to being like my brother,
seven years my senior, slaving at management of a kitchen in exchange for a
salary far short of the absolute minimum threshold for middle class, and too
beat-down and molded into complacency to seriously seek a better way of life,
while middle age looms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then, if I
succeed in emulating that image, I can look forward to also becoming like my
parents, both lonely people whose lives have apparently lacked any efforts at
positive change for years on end.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I have to get away from these people, and I’m
losing the capability to even imagine how that would happen, which is in turn
inching me closer to the terrible outcome I want to flee from.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it’s not family that I most fear
becoming.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s all the little bearers of
shattered lives or simple minds that shuffle about me day after day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The few who possess the means for a decent
life still seem either desperately adrift or else aloof and arrogant behind the
bitterly ideological walls they’ve had to build for themselves to keep the
tragic reality of this rust belt hellscape out of their emptily contented
little lives.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
The rest are a tragedy unto themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yesterday, I heard shouting outside my home
and went out to make sure nobody was being hurt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the end of my street, a young woman was
ranting and throwing things at who I presume to be her boyfriend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I walked in that direction to make sure
everything was all right, my phone in hand, ready to call the police.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For all I could tell, the woman was just
throwing a tantrum, and the man was not returning the physicality, so I didn’t
really know at what point to intervene.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In my uncertainty, I just ended up sitting nearby, next to a man who
shook his head at the fighting couple and started talking to me as soon as I
arrived.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
If I spend time outside, I can generally count on
finding half a dozen people in the course of an afternoon whose social status
is wildly indeterminate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I still
remember my first encounter with the deplorable Eric Starchild, who wanders the
streets of Buffalo selling single plastic beads on black strings for exorbitant
prices.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When first he spoke to me, I
thought for sure he was homeless and that that was his way of getting by and making
the most of the hand he had been dealt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Years later, I found out that he comes from an upper-middle class
background, and after putting up with his attempts to advise me on how I could
easily fix my life and have a career, I now have to restrain myself from
punching him in the back of the head every time I see him walking somewhere
ahead of me.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
The fellow I encountered yesterday was of a
similar sort.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He specifically described
himself as coming from a wealthy family, but also as not being rich
anymore.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That still left some doubt in
my mind, as he sat there with his grocery cart and half-empty forty ounce
bottle of beer, as to whether he was homeless, poor like me, or just another
pretender who has still holds the financial means to do something with his
life, but chooses not to.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I had a pleasant enough conversation with the
fellow, though I could tell from the start that he was just slightly
crazy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It took about thirty seconds of
conversation for him to reference mechanisms of government control, and another
minute to get to his pronouncements about chemtrails.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was perfectly coherent by and large, even
relatable, but he’d filled the gaps in his worldview with self-assured
paranoia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He quite reminded me of a
fellow I met on a Greyhound bus once, who talked to me with great clarity about
many things, but occasionally told stories about how the FBI had been sending
agents to monitor him in the guise of such people as his ex-wife’s new
boyfriend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I quite like talking to these
people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s intriguing to see how a
person creates a consistent mythology to explain the tragedies of their lives,
and how in the best of cases, this can seemingly avoid seriously impairing the
person’s perception of reality in other areas.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I am especially interested to talk to these people
now, because a spent a solid couple of years cresting toward the edge of
insanity, and communicating with people who have inched past the barrier is the
only thing that suggests the possibility that I am not irreversibly headed
towards the hideous outcomes that have been realized in so many of the people
that surround me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the other hand,
most of the people I’ve spoken to who have embraced such paranoia have been
roughly twice my age.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How many times did
they near the edge and draw back while they were still young?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How much longer do my inexplicable and
inexpressibly crushing failures have to persist before I manufacture conspiracy
theories to make sense of them?</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I may have already been suffering under the weight
of those failures for six years, but conceivably there could be decades still
to come.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nothing, after all, exists to
give me confidence that it will ever change, unless I can count the fact that I’m
feeling pretty stable in my advanced age.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But as it happens, it was actually the instability that served to make
me feel like I had it in me to fight an intolerable situation, to literally run
away from this town with thirty dollars tucked into my shoe if the future here
began to look bleak enough.</div>
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<br /></div>
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I fear the sort of person I will become if I
remain as invisible as I am for much longer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I fear it all the more because I no longer have the same confidence in
my resistance, yet I still see every bit as much to resist, everywhere I look.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In five horrendous years in Buffalo, I don’t
think I’ve met a single person I genuinely respect.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those older than I are chilling images of the
things that this town does to a person.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They are vessels for the display of various unique admixtures of hopelessness,
paranoia, ignorance, unjustified arrogance, complacency, prejudice, and greed.</div>
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<br /></div>
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To date, the only person I have seen with any
regularity whom I can say does not make me intensely sad is, oddly enough, a
toothless old woman who sits smoking near the bus stop by the old Showplace
Theater.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She has been as vividly damaged
by her own life as all the rest of them, but somehow she is wonderfully
pleasant to everyone who passes by, and it is a pleasance unpolluted by the relentless
ego that motivates so many other local people to reach out to one another.</div>
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<br /></div>
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This woman, alone among all the others, seems to
have found a way to inhabit this place with a character of quiet dignity, and I
applaud her for it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But still it is not
good enough for me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If, God forbid, I
reside here when I am near to her age, I would never want my own dignity to be
quiet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I want it to rage against the
systematic theft of lives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I pray that
this silence in me now is just a passing phase, and that age is not taking the
fire from my blood. </div>
Edward Carneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15705855929151669621noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-195247562743684574.post-13811690206937961482012-08-04T04:39:00.003-04:002012-08-05T18:27:03.765-04:00Carl Paladino is a Goddamn Sociopath<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
When Buffalo-area businessman Carl Paladino ran for
the New York State governorship in 2010, his supporters put up campaign signs
that explained the motivation for their choice of candidate with the slogan
“I’m mad as hell too, Carl!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After
hearing the man speak a few times, and seeing the constant evidence of
passionate, irredeemable instability in his eyes whenever he appeared on
television, I considered printing off a series of satirical reproductions of
those signs, which adopted the same color scheme and design but changed the
slogan to the more straightforward “I’m crazy as hell too, Carl!”</div>
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<br /></div>
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Last April, for no apparent reason, I began
receiving mass e-mails from the former gubernatorial candidate and perennial
conservative activist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have no idea
how I got onto his list of contacts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I’ve never communicated with the man, and I never expressed interest in
his campaign.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I can only assume that my
e-mail address was passed to him by a third party, and despite my distaste for
Paladino’s politics and personal behavior, I wasn’t about to protest that
connection, however casual and tenuous.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The man is certainly a financially and socially powerful presence in my
region, and it’s good to both have access to such a person and be able to
basically keep tabs on his activities.</div>
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<br /></div>
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In keeping tabs on Paladino by reading the e-mails
that he’s directing to fellow Republics, sometimes en masse and sometimes
individually while copying to his entire contact list, I’ve had ample
opportunity to confirm previous suspicions beyond a shadow of a doubt. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Carl Paladino is a goddamn sociopath.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His formal communications paint the picture
of a man who is utterly incapable of seeing another person’s point of view,
incapable of empathy, having no impulse control and no sense of self-restraint.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The tone of every one of his letters is so
cocksure and combative as to suggest no genuine motivation other than a
personal display of red-faced plumage.</div>
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<br /></div>
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In a recent letter to New York State Senator Tom
Libous, Paladino starts out:</div>
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<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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“I heard you are angry with the grassroots/tea
party taxpayers and I over our comments about your alleged criminal and
otherwise pathetic behavior as a Senator.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Tom, we don’t care.”</div>
</blockquote>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
He then demands that the Senator resign unless he
comes over to Paladino’s way of thinking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Evidently, Paladino’s means of trying to convince the senator to accept
his demands include describing Libous as “an incorrigible, arrogant, greedy and
deceitful person comfortably in bed with the unions and other special
interests.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Later he refers to Libous as
“Tommy boy” before calling him “a little conniving sneak.”</div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">By way of reiterating
his self-important demands, Paladino later says “<span style="font-family: "ArialMT","sans-serif";">You're a grown
man. You</span><span style="font-family: "ArialMT","sans-serif"; line-height: 115%;"> should
acknowledge and apologize for your bad actions. That's what men do. They don't
cry and whine.”</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">To date the densest example of
Paladino’s unrestrained aggression is a message that he directed at long-ago US
Senator Alfonse D’Amato.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The message
announces that it was sent via Paladino’s iPhone, which leads me to wonder
whether some momentary spark set him off as he went about his daily business,
compelling him to deliver this colorful vituperation in sight of absolutely
everyone he knows:</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">“Al, keep your nose out of WNY
politics or I will expose your underbelly. You are a spineless fraud and you're
going down with Skelos. Did you have fun at Andrews $50k party? You are
such a low life parasite. It's all about money and you could care less
about the people and republican principals. What are you going to do when
I tell the people that you were the prime mover of Andrew's gay marriage bill
so he could pound his chest as the most powerful governor the state has ever
known and you could have access as a lobby for the big buck clients you extort.”</span></div>
</blockquote>
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<br /></div>
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This sort of language and the completely shameless
way in which Paladino uses it makes me wonder about people like him, who have
consolidated wealth and power over the course of a long career in
business.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is tact a skill that Paladino
has never had to utilize in his life?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is
he actually used to getting his own way simply by forcefully demanding it and
trash-talking his opposition?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is that
the way goals are achieved in the world of business development, or is it just
true of Paladino’s own private world?</div>
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<br /></div>
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In government, even a person identified as a
political firebrand doesn’t approach a fraction of the divisiveness or
resistance to compromise showcased in Paladino’s writings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And this is true even in the current
political climate where divisiveness and non-compromise is the order of the
day, especially among Republicans.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To
Paladino, anyone on his side of the aisle who strays in the least measure from
his vision for the party is a target for being branded, in his terminology, a
RINO (Republican In Name Only).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And woe
unto he who is marked by Paladino’s scarlet letters, for Carl Paladino speaks
for the “grassroots/tea party” base of the Republican Party, and without them,
as he threatens to Senator Libous, “your career as an elected official will end
this year.”</div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Indeed, Paladino’s messages are full
of intimations of a kind of political insight that extends far beyond the
observational and into the prophetic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“The
Albany establishment is on its way out,” he writes without a trace of
uncertainty. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“In a few years it will be
gone.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The man is so blindly assured of
his viewpoints on everything that he has apparently convinced himself that he
can tell the future.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">But in view of the rest of his remarks
in a number of letters, I’d say that that’s not just an outgrowth of his
unquestioning convictions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather, it’s
part and parcel of a severe messianic complex.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>His letters are permeated with unrestrained anger, but they are also
paradoxically peppered with slightly religious language.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Apart from painting himself as the sole
arbiter of judgment as to one’s true allegiance to the Republican Party, which,
incidentally, he formally joined only seven years ago, he also takes up the
mantle of a priestly dispenser of political absolution.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">What is it that Paladino says men do
instead of “crying and whining?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“They
atone and ask for forgiveness.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Only
then will the angry prophet, in his power as private representative of an
entire constituency, allow a Republican’s political career to proceed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Helpfully, the savior of true Republicanism
tells Senator Libous exactly what he needs to do for penance: </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">“…you must tell the grassroots/tea
party taxpayers in writing that you have had an epiphany, ask them to forgive
your past transgressions and promise that you will advocate for and defend
Conservative Republican interests…”</span></div>
</blockquote>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Notice that to accept Paladino’s
demands is not to capitulate, nor to agree, but rather to have an
epiphany.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Such language suggests that
there are never two ways of looking at an issue, never legitimate alternatives
in the service of the public.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
suggests access on Paladino’s part to some absolute political Truth, which the “RINOs”
that dominate state government are sinfully resisting.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">There is a frightfully evangelizing
quality to all of this, a “recant or be damned” mentality, which is fascinating
to me as someone with a background in religious studies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The impulse to drive a wedge between
Republicans deemed either orthodox or imposters appears not unlike the
evangelical assertion that Catholics, for instance, are false Christians.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Similarly, his appeal to the true-Republican
imperative as an explanation for everything that is wrong with New York State
reminds me of the tendency of certain evangelicals to assert the nation’s
rejection of traditional Christian values as an explanation of everything from
9/11 to the Aurora theater shooting.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The picture that Paladino paints is
one in which the state of New York is headed towards nothing less than a
localized apocalypse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it is entirely
the fault of those who fail to adopt the very specific messianic message of the
Paladino-party line.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“If the brainpower
and time wasted on theatrics, illusion and game-playing were invested in real
responsible government,” he writes to Libous, “New York would still be a great
place to live and raise a family.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As it
stands, the state is not such a place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
it’s not enough for Carl Paladino to suggest that he would do things
differently in order to promote better outcomes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No, no; in absence of the embrace of his
guiding wisdom, the entire state, as he writes in the first sentence of an open
letter accompanying the one addressed to Libous, “continues down a slippery
slope into the abyss.”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Now, lest I be accused of quoting him
out of context, Paladino does not explicitly say that that abyss looms because
of the rejection of his governorship.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
fact, in response to an e-mail from Albany County Republican Committee Chairman
Donald A. Clarey, requesting removal from Paladino’s mailing list after his “pathetic
screed” against Libous, Paladino tells the Chairman, “I have no ego to fulfill,
sir.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course, I find that laughable,
and I don’t think it unfair to conclude that Paladino truly perceives himself
as the sole salvation of the New York State Republican Party and the state itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Though he never says such a thing outright,
he does invest himself with the power to set an unquestionable agenda for the
entire conservative wing of New York politics.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The final ultimatum and source of
absolution that he presents to Senator Libous is this:</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">“Endorse our slate of Republican
primary candidates for the Senate, Assembly and US Senate and House of
Representatives and withdraw any prior endorsements of their opponents.”</span></div>
</blockquote>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Taking all of this together, I’d say I’m
actually impressed with Paladino’s ability to delicately blend, in his political
activism, the typically-American culture of evangelical Christianity and aspects of his Italian
Catholic background.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After all, at the
same time that he cries doom for the forsaken state of New York lest it repent
of its evil ways and be born again, he also demands strict adherence to a hierarchy with himself in the role of pope.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Again, I’m not asserting these things
baselessly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m extrapolating from his own
sociopathic commentary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By presuming to
speak for the entire grassroots base of the New York conservative movement,
separating tea partiers and RINOs like sheep and goats, and making unilateral
demands of duly elected officials, it seems clear that he is aiming to position
himself as a solitary guiding force behind the entire Republican state government,
even in the wake of a sound electoral defeat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He even makes this fairly chilling remark in
his message to Chairman Clarey: “Running for office was only the beginning
statement for me.”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">On the other hand, I’m not sure whether Paladino is jostling for
the position of Republican pontiff or conservative Christ.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The messianic language that he relies on is
pretty strong.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Still addressing Clarey,
he says, “If I had tried to do something, the likes of you wouldn’t stop me.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unless Carl Paladino actually has been sent
by God to save the Republican Party from itself, in light of comments like that
I worry that the non-fulfillment of his goals is the only thing dividing
Paladino the property developer from Paladino the super-villain.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Is my analysis here overly rhetorical?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Doesn’t it take a pretty seriously unstable
person to say, essentially, “I am a greater force than so puny an individual as
you can reckon with”?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even if I’m just
half-right about that, it isn’t the craziest ranting one finds in a Carl
Paladino letter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The really unsettling
stuff is the goddamn conspiracy theories.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="mso-add-space: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">To hear Paladino tell it, nothing that is done against him, or
even just against his preferences, is done individually or on the basis of
innocent motives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everything is a
coordinated attack.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When Clarey wrote
back to basically say, “you’re an irrelevant loon; stop e-mailing me,” Paladino’s
verbose reply included the paranoid statement, “If the best that Libous can do
is to send a washed up politician like you after me it illustrates just how
weakened and insecure he is.”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">To his credit, if Paladino believes that every private e-mail
communication of Republican officials is directed from on high, it goes a long
way toward explaining why he believes that there’s a position of puppet master
for which he is a viable candidate.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">If such a position existed and Paladino occupied it, he would
evidently deliver the New York State Republican government from a culture in
which absolutely everything is done for reasons other than those stated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He likes to go on in pretty much all of his
messages about oil drilling in the Marcellus Shale, a process which very well
might threaten the drinking water of residents of Western New York and
Pennsylvania.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His readers are tacitly
encouraged to take it for granted that Paladino’s advocacy comes sans any ulterior
motives whatsoever, while simultaneously rejecting every public claim on the
part of his opponents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In his open letter
regarding Tom Libous he says of the state Senator:</span></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">“He has the power to bring 25,000 – $75,000/year
jobs to his area of the state by permitting the drilling of the Marcellus Shale
but instead he argues environmental concerns to mask the good old boy two-step
where the defer decision until the drillers figure out how to bring Mr. Green
to the tables of Al D’Amato and the other parasitic lobbyists so they can line
the campaign bank accounts of the establishment boys and play their gay
marriage chips.”</span></div>
</blockquote>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Leave aside for the moment the weird inclusion of gay marriage in
this narrative.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(We’ll come back to it
in a moment.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That aside, you see the
situation?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The prospect of methane
spewing from people’s home taps is just a distraction, and the ongoing citizen
protests against extracting natural gas through hydraulic fracturing are, I
suppose, a smokescreen masterminded by lifelong Republican Alfonse D’Amato who
has personal control of environmental impact studies and can reverse their
results once the proper sum of money is delivered to his office.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or something like that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I don’t know, I’m confused.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">But what’s important is that Carl Paladino knows beyond a shadow
of a doubt that there are no environmental threats connected to the Marcellus
Shale drilling proposals, and if he was in charge and impact studies showed
clean projections, those claims would be trustworthy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After all, no lobbying organizations or
political operatives stand to benefit financially from the drilling going
forward.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Right?</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If that’s the kind of high
profile conspiracy that operates among those on Carl Paladino’s side of the aisle
(though in name only, mind you), then you can imagine what kind of political
sorcery is operating among Democrats and liberals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Labor unions are especially guilty, and
especially capable of the most elaborate public misrepresentations of their
beliefs, attitudes, motivations, and activities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Going back to the letter addressed to Tom
Libous, we find Paladino saying:</span></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">“The pension reform and union contract
deals were toothless sellouts to the unions, who play-acted for a week
afterward that they were so outraged with Andrew Cuomo…”</span></div>
</blockquote>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Get it?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even if it looks like a political agreement
was a compromise that was actually <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">dis</i>advantageous
to the progressive faction, it was really exactly what the progressives
wanted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How do we know?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Well, because it wasn’t the way Carl Paladino
would have done it, I guess.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Carl
Paladino knows how to get everything that the Republican base wants out of
every situation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Carl Paladino knows how
compromise works.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>According to his reply
to Donald Clarey, “</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">As long as the
Republicans control 1/3 of the vote in Albany they can veto anything.
That’s where the bargaining comes in, Tit for tat.”</span></div>
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">That’s
where bargaining comes in.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You know, in
not bargaining, even when you’re in the minority.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or is that called “stonewalling the
democratic process”?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I can never
remember these things when I’ve been sucked down the rabbit hole of Carl
Paladino’s furious insanity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The man
represents the absolute worst of today’s Republican praise for tribalist
non-cooperation, if only because his allegiance to it is inflated by a
conspiracy-theory mindset that regards any compromise whatsoever as a
deliberate and complete giveaway to the opposing side of the issue.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Oh, and
just wait until you see how endemic that RINO betrayal is, according to
Paladino.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To date, the fucking craziest
thing that he has sent me is a message bearing the subject line “FW: Al D’Amato,
the predator.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s such an exquisite
work of paranoia and self-indulgence that I can only do it justice by copying
most of it directly, with interspersed paraphrases and commentary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The mini-essay starts as an explanation of
the context for the tirade against D’Amato that was quoted near the beginning
of this post.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He writes:</span></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Al
D’Amato, in concert with his surrogates Dean Skelos and George Maziarz were
approached last year by Andrew Cuomo and his minions to make a deal.
Cuomo wanted to show everyone in the State that he could do anything with the
complicit New York State Republican led Senate… including getting legislative
approval for the extreme left issue of gay marriage. Getting that law
passed would allow Cuomo to… payback the gay community for their 2010
unwarranted but effective bashing of my candidacy.”</span></div>
</blockquote>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Right
off the bat, Paladino takes the ambitious step of making the conspiracy equally
about him as an individual and the issues that he thinks no ordinary person
could support, since he doesn’t support them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Could it be that Paladino’s political opponents just have different
opinions about what’s best for the state?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Not a chance!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are evil
masterminds who wish to instill chaos upon the state of New York because they
have the power to do so, and Carl Paladino has not yet saved us.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I
must say, though, if you identify gay marriage as an “extreme left issue,” it’s
pretty bold to describe gay opposition to your candidacy as unwarranted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For those who don’t remember, one of the things
that helped to sink Paladino’s gubernatorial campaign was his having delivered
a speech in which he chastised Andrew Cuomo for having marched in a gay pride
parade, and described teaching acceptance of homosexuality as “brainwashing.”</span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">But
now that Paladino can identify homosexuals as a convenient scapegoat for his loss
of the election, it has made it easy for him to place them in a diagram of the
elaborate behind-the-scenes power structures controlling state politics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Think I’m being hyperbolic?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Keep reading.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“In
return D’Amato, the prime mover of the effort, would get access to Cuomo on
initiatives that he needed for his lobbying clients who pay big bucks.”</span></div>
</blockquote>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I
hope you’ll agree that this is already getting a little convoluted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now it wasn’t just the gay community
attacking the Paladino campaign out of sheer ill-will (Paladino never
entertains the notion that it had to do with policy in the first place).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather, the gay community acted at the masterminding
behest of Alfonse D’Amato for some unspecified reason.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">And
here we leap to the Marcellus shale issue again:</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; mso-add-space: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Anyone
who thinks that the holdup of the Marcellus shale drilling permit has anything
to do with the merits being argued in public is a fool drinking cool-aid. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s all about Mr. Green showing up at the
doors of the likes of D’Amato the lobbyist.”</span></div>
</blockquote>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">It
cannot be stressed enough:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Policy
differences never have anything to do with policy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Carl Paladino’s mind, there is only one
legitimate opinion on any topic, and every alternative is invented to make
money.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Christ, obviously I feel that the
influence of money in politics needs to be vastly diminished, but I also believe
that lobbyists contribute money because they actually want certain policies,
not, as Paladino seems to imply, because they simply wish to toss a monkey
wrench into the workings of democracy and trade cash in the process.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lobbyists or no lobbyists, the workings of
democracy consist of multiple opinions, and that appears to be something that
Carl Paladino cannot accept.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; mso-add-space: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Knowing
that Skelos and Maziarz… were spineless and could not vote for the bill, the
cabal picked 4 republican senators… and promised they would each get
$500,000 in contributions from the gay community and future favors from the cabal
including campaign support.”</span></div>
</blockquote>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; mso-add-space: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I
really like Paladino’s choice of the word “cabal.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It truly emphasizes the paranoia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I also like how he impugns the integrity of
Skelos and Maziarz for fucking agreeing with Paladino’s position on the gay
marriage issue.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It implies that Carl
Paladino lives in a one hundred percent trust-free world in which no one on
Earth ever acts according to their personal principles or stated motives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Also, I didn’t realize that the entire gay
community was a lobbying organization.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>No wonder they were able to single-handedly sink Paladino’s campaign for
governor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a good thing they had
Alfonse D’Amato to direct their actions for them.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; mso-add-space: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Freshman
Senator Grisanti from Buffalo intended to do the right for his constituents
when he got in office. Cuomo, Maziarz, Skelos and D’Amato brought
heavy pressure on him to sell out and at the last minute he threw his integrity
under the bus, broke his promises to the people who donated to his campaign and
voted for the law.”</span></div>
</blockquote>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I
hope readers will recall Grisanti’s surprise vote in favor of gay marriage,
which saved gay marriage from defeat in New York State.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Well, now, thanks to Carl Paladino, those
same readers know what the real reason for his change of heart was.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It wasn’t for his stated reasons, that he
could find no legal reason to deny other people rights that he himself
had.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nor does it have anything to do
with the capability of human beings to change their opinions sometimes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Carl Paladino wouldn’t know anything about
that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’s probably never changed an opinion
in his life, even when he changed political parties.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hell, he seems not to understand that other
opinions <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">exist</i>.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">To
hear Paladino tell it, Grisanti’s vote was actually the result of a nefarious
plot by Governor Cuomo and an aging lobbyist to do pass an initiative that they
didn’t believe in, for no other reason than because they thought it would go
against the public will, with the help of a series of bribes bankrolled by a
sprawling, well-organized secret society of fabulously wealthy homosexuals. Oh,
and they only got away with it because they all first conspired to keep Carl
Paladino out of office, which had nothing to do with Paladino being vehemently
anti-gay, as well as a goddamn sociopath.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Paladino
concludes:</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; mso-add-space: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“I
believe that if Mark came out and told the truth about what happened to him and
revealed the hypocrisy of the cabal’s complicity the people of his district
would be forgiving, but that will not happen because the cabal continues to
stroke and intimidate him with false hope.”</span></div>
</blockquote>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; mso-add-space: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Wait.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Grisanti hasn’t come out and told the truth
about this?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then how the hell do you
know the truth about it, Carl?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is it
because you have a prophetic access to all truth at all times, or is it perhaps
because you’re just making shit up with your diseased mind?</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Little
doubt he believes the former, which sort of explains the religious overtones of
his final comments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You see, Senator
Grisanti, salvation awaits you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you
repent you will be forgiven, and you must repent, for the promises of those who
reject the Republican messiah are empty promises, and the hope they offer is
false hope.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is only one political
Truth in New York State, and it is yelling “fuck you” at its opponents as
loudly as it can.</span></div>Edward Carneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15705855929151669621noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-195247562743684574.post-21711222676469831512012-08-01T20:06:00.000-04:002012-08-01T20:06:09.899-04:00Humans Made Better With Technology<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
It is often interesting to watch the future unfold
in real time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In many areas of human
development, the small changes accumulate casually, soundlessly, but add up to
one grand spectacle when one take the time to observe it and realize they’re
looking at something that just a little time ago would have appeared to be the
exclusive domain of science fiction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
recognition of that progress can be a subtle personal breaking point.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It can be either a negative breaking point –
jarring one with the realization that the world is morphing by a series of huge
steps into something virtually unrecognizable; or it can be a positive one –
welcoming a sense of exhilaration as one comes to gain a clear perspective on
the lovely places his world seems destined to go.</div>
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<br /></div>
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I’ll be the first to admit that I am prone to be
threatened by changed, including and especially technological change.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am terrified of the myriad ways in which we
seem not only willing but eager to throw our humanity away in an endless quest
for convenience, and easy security, and ephemeral connections to an
increasingly impersonal, electronic world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But several recent events have given me a sense of the other side of
that coin, the exciting promises that come of our eager, whole-body embrace of
new technology.</div>
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<br /></div>
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As much as technology swaddles us with petty
conveniences and frivolous distractions, the multiplication of those things
goes hand in hand with the growth of technologies that demonstrate potential to
really transform not just human experience, but human beings themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While the trends have certainly been building
for some time, with the rapid development of prosthetics, and of personal
electronic devices, and the social acceptance of a constant technological
presence in individual lives, it rather seems to me that in the blink of an eye
we were on the verge of the widespread technological enhancement of human
beings.</div>
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<br /></div>
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That trend is realized in ways that may lie
anywhere on the spectrum from subtle to unmistakable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the side nearer to familiarity there is
the 2008 Olympics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While the nation and
the world were busy watching Michael Phelps make history by scoring eight gold
medals at the Beijing games, they may have missed the fact that it wasn’t just
Phelps, but also several of his competitors who were systematically shattering
former world records in each event.</div>
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<br /></div>
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This wasn’t just a result of that year’s
competitors having been a particularly exceptional crop of swimmers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Advancements in swimwear technology, led by
Speedo, effectively made times before and after 2008 incomparable by quite
literally reshaping the actual competitors into something more hydrodynamic,
squeezed tight in all the right places to make them glide through the water
with reduced drag.</div>
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<br /></div>
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It might be hard to conceptualize mere garments as
high technology, but however you look at it, the <a href="http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/127/innovation-of-olympic-proportions.html?page=0%2C2">gear
that modern industries have produced</a> for their athletes have served to
dramatically increase performance and raise the bar for “personal best.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Technology doesn’t just aid natural
abilities; it enhances them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is
true in other events, as well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Running
shoes have steadily collapsed the ratio of strength to lightness, with Adidas
having developed a shoe that redirects power into the turn for long distance
track and field competitors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In that
same category, the design of javelins has both increased outcomes and decreased
risk of injury by premiering innovative design materials to limit the wobble of
the pole upon release without transferring that force into the thrower’s
shoulder.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In every one of these
instances, if the competitor is capable of performing at a higher level in a
high tech outfit than he could do naked, or if different individuals can
perform differently based on the design of the object they’re holding, then we’re
effectively enhancing the natural capabilities of a human being, even without
drugs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In a way, we’ve been doing this
for decades, but it has gotten far more dramatic very quickly, especially in
light of the outcomes of the 2008 Olympic Games.</div>
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<br /></div>
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The current Olympic Games showcase something rather
more interesting, albeit something that requires a little more speculation to
see how it supports my thesis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>South
Africa’s <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/sports/2012/08/01/double-amputee-runner-has-realistic-shot-at-olympic-medal/">Oscar
Pistorius</a> has qualified and been permitted to run in the men’s 4 x 400
meter relay.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pistorius is a
double-amputee who will be running on two prosthetic legs against able-bodied
opponents, and he purportedly has a real chance of taking a medal.</div>
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<br /></div>
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This probably comes across to many observers as a
nice human interest story, but to my mind this is a terrific portend of things
to come.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The significance of the story
is arguably more social and technological than it is personal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Olympics are the ultimate testing ground
for the quality of prosthetics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If false
legs are now capable of holding their own in direct competition with the real
limbs of athletes in their prime, there can be little doubt that we’ve designed
technology capable of replicating the fullest capabilities of the human body.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If we’ve managed that so early in the
twenty-first century, how long can it really be before we have prosthetics that
actually exceed human abilities?</div>
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<br /></div>
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Unless Pistorius’ prosthetics fail
catastrophically, there is simply no way that he will stand alone for long as
an example of a formerly-disabled world-class athlete.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Again, with this development, technology has
plainly shown itself to be capable of dramatically enhancing the abilities of un-equipped
human beings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Granted, in the present
case, it may only be serving to bring a disabled man’s abilities back up to the
baseline, but that in itself is truly remarkable, and it leaves it easy to
imagine that the technology of the near future can amplify the performance of
already able-bodied individuals in similar measure.</div>
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<br /></div>
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All right, let’s not mince words; there’s no more
sane way to say this.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m talking about
cyborgs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We’re close to having cyborgs
among us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Depending on how you define the
term, we may already have them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I feel
downright silly typing that, as the concept still seems far-fetched to me, but
I have to reconcile that with the fact that I read a week or two ago about the <a href="http://www.livescience.com/21651-human-cyborg-mcdonalds-employees-assaulted-me-for-wearing-my-gear.html">human
cyborg</a> Steve Mann, who has apparently been experimenting with wearable technology
since the early 1980s.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Mann made headlines in mid-July after he was assaulted
by employees of a Paris McDonalds for wearing his EyeTap Digital Glass camera,
which is permanently attached to his head and cannot be removed without special
tools, leading the website io9 to brand the attack as the “world’s first
cybernetic hate crime.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Overstated or
not, that puts the immediacy of such seemingly futuristic technology into sharp
focus.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Technologically-enhancement of
human beings is a definite reality, and not just as one-off experiments in
distant government labs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is at
least one individual who is living with such enhancements on a daily basis,
blended in with mainstream society.<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
</div>
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Taking all of these indicators together, I can’t
help but wonder what the future holds and when it will show it to us denizens
of the present.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps it will still be
a generation or more.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then again, Steve
Mann’s developments went on in society’s background for thirty years and when I
came aware of them I felt they had snuck up on me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And while I knew how well prosthetic
technology was developing, I never anticipated seeing an amputee run in the
Olympics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That too, snuck up on me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The pace of change is stunning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you’re not paying close attention to the
patterns, it’s easy to underestimate what the future holds and how soon the
future comes.</div>Edward Carneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15705855929151669621noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-195247562743684574.post-78569298172215296732012-06-20T23:43:00.000-04:002012-06-20T23:43:23.149-04:00How Faith in Meritocracy Undermines Meritocracy<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
I spent some time this morning involved in another
debate at Ethics Alarms, once again arguing that it might be wrong to tell people
who are struggling to find employment that their problems can only be the
result of their being stupid, or lazy, or just plain not knowing how to look
for a job.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet precisely those kinds of
accusations continue to fly freely in the commentary of people who have no idea
what the conditions on the ground are like for young people today.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>People like Jack Marshall have no qualms
about casting aspersions on the character of bright, earnest, committed,
hardworking people, because as far as the accusers are concerned, if you’d done
things right you would have gotten what you wanted.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
It’s not as though such people – generally middle-aged
and middle class – start out with the conviction that their younger and poorer
targets are good for nothing, and then construct the meritocratic myth as an
explanation for why.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Quite the opposite;
they believe so firmly in the perfection of the system through which kids
acquire training and education and employment prospects that it only allows one
explanation for most people’s failure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That’s the very problem with their view.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>If you are to convince them that an unemployed law school graduate is
unemployed by no fault of his own, you must first compel them to abandon their
entire way of perceiving American society.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
People who are currently in their forties or
fifties and have attained middle class status came up through a much different
reality than what is faced by young adults in the twenty-first century.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So it is with every generation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The trends, experiences, and rules of one can’t
be expected to apply to the next.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That
doesn’t stop anybody from judging the present as if they were interpreting the
past.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Yet obviously there are some things about the
circumstances surrounding today’s graduates that are wildly different from the
situation that was faced by graduates twenty or thirty years ago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For one thing, there’s a goddamn lot more of
them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For another, they’re carrying a
staggeringly higher average debt load.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Obviously, the current global economic crisis is of issue, as well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Add to that that between then and now, the
overall structure of the economy has been transformed, with the death of
manufacturing industries, the consolidation of corporate ownership into fewer
and fewer hands, and so forth.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Whether the United States has ever possessed a
true meritocracy is up for debate, but even if it has, amidst all those changes
it can’t rationally be asserted that the same merits today gain the same
outcomes that they would have a generation or two prior.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, most people seem to acknowledge
this.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There’s little doubt that the
Bachelor’s degree has been devalued by its ubiquity, and it seems like this is
common knowledge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet that doesn’t stop
the accusations of laziness and stupidity from being thrown at unemployed
graduates either.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I’ve tended to think that such accusations are
just insulting and oblivious to the reality faced by many people like myself
today.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But having given the perspective
of people like Jack Marshall more thought today, I think it quite possible that
negative attitudes towards struggling graduates are much more than that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They may actually be indicative of a significant
part of the reason why all the nation’s unemployed lawyers face so much
hardship in the modern job market.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
It’s worth considering with what kind of people I
and other bright, yet invisible job seekers are applying.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Who is in charge of corporate human resources
today if not middle-aged, middle class individuals who came up through life in
a time when college degrees were rare and valuable, and the world prosperous
for people who held them?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I dare say
that most of these people have perspectives like that of Jack Marshall.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m sure that most of them believe that today’s
America is a perfect meritocracy, because that’s what it was when they were
kids, and as far as their concerned that ‘s all that it ever was or ever could
be.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
That perspective can’t be undermined by anything,
no matter how many over-educated applicants come slinking to their offices in
pursuit of entry level jobs outside of their chosen fields.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Based on all the anecdotal evidence I’ve come
across, certainly including depressingly much of my own, these people are
almost universally turned away.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I had
long supposed that the reasons for this are that employers expect such people
to want too much money, not take an interest in the job, and leave as soon as
something better comes along.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I still see it that way, but with new and potentially
meaningful nuance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Low-level employers
are probably right when they assume that NYU grads, or engineers, or lawyers
who apply with them aren’t pursuing what they want.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If American society is a meritocracy, then
intelligent, talented, qualified individuals who pursue what they want get what
they want.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Individuals who believe this
and are in a position to hire an overqualified applicant won’t accept that the
application is the result of them being genuinely short on options.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead, they will assume that something must
be wrong.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I shudder to think how many people have been shut
out from gainful employment because of the reasoning that says, “With this
person’s background, either he’s too unmotivated to apply for a job in his
field, or his despicable character prevents him from being a good employee
anywhere.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s not a malicious
sentiment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Quite the contrary, it’s
perfectly altruistic; it emphasizes that if the person is good he will find his
way to the better job that suits him, and need never waste his time on
something that he doesn’t want to do, is overqualified for, and will not make
enough money doing.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
On some level, I’ve always recognized that about
my situation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve gotten the sense that
many of the people who slip my resume soundlessly into the trash imagine that I’ll
be fine, that I didn’t need their job, that the right alternative will be just
around the corner if I’m willing to look for it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It simply isn’t the case.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are times when bright men and women
have to settle for less.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are times
when talents have to be misplaced just to get oneself out of an awful
situation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You can’t recognize that if
you believe that America is, always has been, and always will be a pure
meritocracy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And yet you have to recognize
it if you’re in a position to help people by hiring them into just such a
situation.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Young people’s fates are held now by people who
cannot recognize that which they must recognize in order to handle those fates
properly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this way, faith in
meritocracy undermines meritocracy.</div>Edward Carneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15705855929151669621noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-195247562743684574.post-61130473188847622712012-06-07T00:08:00.000-04:002012-06-07T00:08:09.143-04:00Causes Can Have More Than One Effect<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<![endif]-->
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Before the night is over here, I want to make an additional
comment on the same <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Morning Edition</i>
segment that I posted about earlier.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Thinking back on it, I realize that while my incredulousness about the
use of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Death of a Salesman</i> to
illustrate the concept of the American dream was well worth emphasizing, I
missed the opportunity to remark on another, possibly more significant aspect
of the story.</div>
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The subject of the story and its authors all make
terrible assumptions about the American dream, but they make equally terrible
and even more common assumptions about education as the pathway to it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They pretend at compassionate liberalism but
are seemingly guilty of very subtle acts of blaming the victim.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After outlining Juan Carlos Reyes’ triumphal
narrative, they emphasize the fact that he is aware of the fact that the vast
majority of people from his neighborhood didn’t make it out, and that he
wonders why.</div>
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<br /></div>
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The story goes on to quote Jim Cullen, the author
of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The American Dream: A Short History of
an Idea That Shaped a Nation</i>, as saying “A college degree has become, in
effect, the lottery ticket of American life.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I very much agree with that remark as it appears on the surface, but
apparently in context it was meant to refer not to the value of the degree
itself but the likelihood of obtaining one in the first place if you come from
a challenging background.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everyone
involved in presenting his story looks at Reyes and makes the same mistake of
confusing correlation and causality that I see at every turn in topics of
education and employment.</div>
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As it’s presented by NPR, it was the act of
getting a college degree that turned Reyes’ life around; nothing else.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet the actual story that’s presented of him,
if one pays attention to it, focuses on the interventions of a committed high
school teacher who pushed Reyes to pursue and achieve more, and who took an
active interest in Reyes’ future.</div>
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<br /></div>
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It may be presumptuous, but I feel confident in
assuming that she wasn’t the only presence in his life that offered
encouragement, advice, and more importantly, support and assistance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It seems to me that it’s an exceptional
mistake to say that this man was destined for nothing until he got a college
degree, at which point his future opened up wide for him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It seems like a mistake in light of the fact
that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Morning Edition</i> and Reyes
himself wonder aloud about what it could be that differentiates him from other
people who came from his beginnings but didn’t dream big, didn’t go to Baruch
College, didn’t become a senior manager in the Office of the President at
Columbia Teacher’s College.</div>
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<br /></div>
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It’s as though the program comes right to the
brink of asking the right question but then falls back on the assumption that
there must be something wrong with all the Hispanic kids who didn’t make it,
even if it isn’t their own fault.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Morning Edition</i> entertains the notion
that there’s some specific set of tools that lead a disadvantaged youth to
college, but it oddly fails to consider whether those tools are important
beyond simply compelling a student into higher education.</div>
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<br /></div>
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If there are certain circumstances that contribute
to a person like Reyes going to college, isn’t it just possible that those
circumstances, and not merely the presence of a college degree, contribute to
such a person’s success?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe for some
impoverished youths, the lack of a social support structure and connections
within the middle class does more to limit their prospects than the lack of an education.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Conversely, maybe a person who pursued higher
education but lacked any external influences that ranged beyond their
impoverished background wouldn’t get as far as Reyes, who had at least one
experienced and well-connected teacher actively supporting his trajectory in
life.</div>
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<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Morning
Edition</i> further quotes Jim Cullen as saying that some would look at Reyes’
story as proof that the system works while others would see the fact that he is
only an exception as proof that there is something seriously wrong with that
system.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For my part, I would take it as
further evidence that we are aggressively focused on entirely the wrong system
in trying to explain the source of economic opportunity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet the possibility that status and social
influence might have something to do with economic outcomes seems as obvious to
me as the fact that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Death of a Salesman</i>
is not a happy story.</div>Edward Carneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15705855929151669621noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-195247562743684574.post-40525506876133659432012-06-06T09:14:00.000-04:002012-06-06T09:14:24.770-04:00Death of an AcademicToday, Morning Edition featured, as part of their series on the American dream, a story about a man named Juan Carlos Reyes, went to college in order to work his way out of poverty in the South Bronx. They said that Reyes was introduced to the notion of the American dream via Arthur Miller's <i>Death of a Salesman</i>. Reyes describes the idea as that "with hard work and dedication you'll get a nice house, a nice car, and enough money for your kids to go to school." Afterwards, the program transitioned to its next segment by pointing out that Miller's play was one of many examples of the American dream being a theme of literature.<br /><br />I find it amusing that no one involved in the segment seemed to recognize the irony of using that particular piece of literature as an illustration of the topic of the series. Yes, the protagonist, Willy Loman, was a successful person, but his success came at the expense of his happiness and peace of mind. Is that fact irrelevant to our understanding of the American dream? Miller conveyed the impression that Willy Loman pursued the surest path to more money and possessions despite the fact that there was another livelihood that would have suited him better and perhaps led to a happier marriage and a better upbringing for his children, even if in a smaller home.<br /><br />For a long time, I have had the sense that people would understand Miller's play better if it was updated for a modern audience. I've considered the idea of writing a version called <i>Death of an Academic</i>. In the social circumstances in which Miller was writing, a man was generally expected to pursue the molded image of the American dream by committing himself early and completely to sales. Today the assumption is that the more you devote yourself to formal education, the more money you'll acquire, and thus the closer you'll be to the American dream. Young men and women are expected to follow that path regardless of resources, personal interest, or aptitude.<br /><br />The Reyes story presents him as having been saved from the unacceptable fate of following his initial ambition to become a doorman. Before being steered toward higher education, he reasoned that people in that position made sixteen dollars per hour and that that would suit him fine. He may be better off and happier now than he would have been if he'd acceded to lesser ambitions, but that's not the main idea that I get from the way the story is presented. Instead, the message seems to be that sixteen dollars per hour is simply not enough.<br /><br />I graduated with honors from NYU. In the years between doing so and becoming a full-time freelancer, I never had a job that paid more than nine dollars an hour. It was a meager existence, but still I was able to support myself - or at least I would have been were it not for the crushing debt I incurred in going to school. How much more resentful I would be of that fact had I gone to college merely as a means to an end, and not because I was genuinely, passionately interested in my education.<br /><br />With each generation, we slightly change the shape of the American dream. But we don't change the notion that one size fits all, that that dream looks the same and feels the same for every type of person. In fact, some people are better off becoming carpenters than traveling salesmen; some people are better off becoming doormen than graduate teaching assistants.Edward Carneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15705855929151669621noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-195247562743684574.post-47883848843973575032012-05-29T16:17:00.001-04:002012-05-29T16:17:12.762-04:00Protestors Demonstrate Against Preacher's Homophobic Remarks<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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Sunday, May 27th saw a massive protest in the town
of Maiden, N.C. against the Baptist preacher whose aggressively homophobic
sermon went viral earlier in the month.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Reverend Charles L. Worley of Maiden’s Providence Road Baptist Church
delivered a sermon on May 13<sup>th</sup> after President Obama’s endorsement
of gay marriage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In a two minute clip
that was pulled from the church’s website after the outcry began, but that
spread on YouTube and other outlets, Worley declares that he, God, and anyone
with sense are against gay marriage and then proposes his own appalling
solution to so-called problem of homosexuality: build a 150-mile electric
fence, inter all gays and lesbians behind it, and air-drop food until the
population dies out as they fail to reproduce.</div>
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The viral spread of the video led to the
organization on Facebook of a “Love, Not Hate” rally in opposition to Worley
and the sort of intolerant rhetoric he has espoused.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The protest drew a geographically diverse
crowd of as many as 2,500 people to the Catawba County Justice Center twelve
miles from Maiden.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Organizers placed a
good deal of emphasis on the peaceful intent of their demonstration, and local
law enforcement handed out no citations for anything other than minor
offenses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s not to say that there
was no antagonism, however, as the rally drew some counter-protesters who were
on hand to show support either for Worley or at least for the sentiment that
homosexuality is a grave sin under Christian dogma.</div>
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Interviewed by Charlotte-based NBC affiliate WCNC,
longtime Providence Road Baptist Church member Geneva Sims asserted that her
pastor had every right to say what he said about homosexuals, adding, “The
Bible says they’re worthy of death.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Other congregants defended Worley’s remarks by suggesting good
intentions on the part of the preacher.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Some assert that he was attempting to scare homosexuals straight in
order to save them from the torment of Hell.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Others lodged the feebler defense of reminding critics that Worley’s
plan involved feeding the would-be prisoners, as if to suggest that leaving
someone to die is morally defensible in a way that simply killing them is not.</div>
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Among reasonable people, who evidently are not
present in Providence Road Baptist Church, there cannot be the slightest bit of
doubt about the moral status of Worley’s remarks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What may be less obvious are the possible
legal consequences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the beginning of
the clip, Worley refers to President Obama directly, and uses the gay marriage
endorsement as a starting point for his homophobic rant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Towards the end, he mentions being asked whom
he is going to vote for, and Worley loudly declares, “Not for the baby killer
and homosexual lover.”</div>
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<br /></div>
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Some protestors are focusing on the partisan
nature of this commentary from the pulpit in trying to combat the potential
effects of Worley’s vicious attitudes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The New Civil Rights Movement website, for instance, has reminded its
readers that Worley’s Church, like all other churches, has tax-exempt status,
and as such should not be engaged in political advocacy of the sort seemingly
on display in the YouTube video.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Several
readers of the site have reportedly contacted the IRS in response, as has
Pastor Barry W. Lynn, the executive director of Americans United for Separation
of Church and State.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Federal tax law clearly forbids any 501(c)(3)
organization from intervening in any political campaign for or against a
specific candidate, or from making partisan comments in official publications
or at official functions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It could be
argued, then, that on the basis of his fairly explicit encouragement that his
congregation vote against Barack Obama in the coming election, Worley’s church,
and any church that makes the same mistake, ought to lose its tax exempt
status.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But that is perhaps beside the
point.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the basis of the horrid
intolerance and immorality of his remarks, what Worley’s organization ought to
lose first and foremost is its designation as a place of worship.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
As protestor Liz Snell was quoted as saying at
Sunday’s demonstration, “I just can’t believe that Jesus Christ would be about
the kind of hate that we were hearing. It’s important for all of us to stand up
against that.”</div>Edward Carneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15705855929151669621noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-195247562743684574.post-60096497274525187152012-05-29T16:15:00.000-04:002012-05-29T16:15:56.371-04:00Uncertain Scrutiny in Google WiFi Spying Investigations<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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In the wake of the release of an FCC report
concluding a seventeen month investigation of alleged spying conducted by
Google on unsecured wireless networks nationwide, the company may face
additional scrutiny from Britain’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO),
which originally investigated and came to an agreement with Google in 2010.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Between 2007 and 2010 Google used its street view
car to collect 600 Gigabytes of payload data along with the street-level images
that the car is intended to generate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This data included e-mail correspondence, text messages, passwords, and
web histories.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Despite this, the ICO
concluded that the data was free of any “meaningful personal details,” and took
no official action, though Google did agree to allow the ICO to audit its privacy
practices in the future.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
One such audit was published last August and will
be reviewed sometime this year to make sure their recommendations are being
followed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The results may affect the ICO’s
decision on whether to take further action, which is an open question
considering that around the time of that audit, the Information Commissioner
decided that contrary to the absence of actual charges, Google had in fact
broken the law.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The ICO’s inaction and
handling of the investigation have also faced some criticism in British
Parliament, so there may be some pressure to act more aggressively now that the
FCC report has the ICO reconsidering the case.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
The FCC has not, however, stated that Google is to
face prosecution or even that it broke the law.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Google has maintained that while the wireless information gathering did
indeed occur, it was attributable to one engineer who wrote the relevant code
and installed it in street view cars, but did so without the knowledge or
consent of the street view team or the company at large.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The FCC report casts doubt on this claim,
finding that other engineers reviewed and modified the code, and several more
installed it in cars and extracted the data it collected.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One senior manager of the street view project
was purportedly informed of the intention to collect payload data.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Yet no litigation is forthcoming in the United
States, presumably because the FCC report also points out that even if Google
was aware of the data collection, and even if they had ordered it, harvesting
masses of data from unsecured networks may not be illegal at all, as per the
Wiretap Act, which grants that anyone may access any communication that’s
configured so as to be publicly accessible.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Consequently, the only definite trouble faced by Google with the FCC has
been a very modest fine of 25,000 dollars for impeding the investigation by
failing to respond to repeated requests for information.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
That in itself casts some measure of suspicion on
Google, even if it doesn’t present any further legal problems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their claim that they never intended to use
the payload data is automatically suspect in light of the fact that Google
seems eager to collect all manner of personal data in other contexts, and to
use it to target advertisements and content more effectively and more
manipulatively.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I stopped using Google as a search engine and news
aggregator when I discovered the extent to which content was modified from one
user to the next, even in web searches for quite basic terms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Google evidently uses fifty-seven different
factors, including your location, operating system, and browser, to personally
tailor search results to the individual user.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This is particularly objectionable when one is searching for current
news, which ought to be presented objectively, and with a universal sense of
importance, not personally structured to align with each individual’s likeliest
consumption patterns.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
The accompanying invasions of privacy, and
particularly the ways in which they are used, are socially poisonous trends,
even if they are not illegal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But being
as they are not illegal, governments cannot be relied on to do much of anything
to counter that trend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Little has been
done in the United States, the case in Britain is shaky, and Australia has
decided against investigating the same issue.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
But in each of those places, the citizenry still can
take it upon itself to use against Google that very thing that they are so
fixated on: consumption patterns.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I fear
that the reason why privacy invasions of this kind have become so endemic is
not that entities like Google have been so prone to engage in them but that we as
a society have been so prone to accept them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>When we can demonstrate that the new convenience we enjoy is not worth
what we trade away for it, then perhaps the rampant misuse of information will
be avoided more often, even if it isn’t technically criminal.</div>Edward Carneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15705855929151669621noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-195247562743684574.post-81687079277726732492012-05-24T17:42:00.000-04:002012-06-20T11:00:54.788-04:00Don't Answer the Question of the Day<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
Despite his conservative bent, lawyer and
professional ethicist Jack Marshall authors what is consistently one of my
favorite blogs, Ethics Alarms. A <a href="http://ethicsalarms.com/2012/05/24/insidious-bias-cnns-question-of-the-day/">recentpost</a> of his attacked the “Question of the Day” posed by CNN’s Carol Costello on
Thursday morning. She asked her viewers
to contact the show with their answer as to the rather nonsensical question “Do
CEOs make good presidents?” She went on
to cite Donald Trump, Ross Perot, and Herman Cain as examples of CEOs. Astute observers will notice that none of
them were presidents, and they might also realize that no CEOs have ever been
presidents. But as long as Costello had
to choose purely hypothetical examples, she certainly could have come up with a
more balanced list.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Jack Marshall sees this as proof positive of
liberal media bias, and an effort on the part of CNN to torpedo the Romney
candidacy by any means necessary. It’s
honestly hard not to agree with him on that latter point, although I don’t for
a moment believe in the myth of the liberal media. The loaded question presented by Costello on
Thursday morning was undoubtedly in Obama’s favor, but the overall bias of the
media is not towards liberal viewpoints or personalities. The overall bias is in favor of viewership
and profitability, and outside of Fox News and MSNBC, where this is
accomplished by a commitment to conservativism and liberalism, respectively,
the result is a good deal of duplicity buttressed by base pandering and bad
journalism.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Those are the things for which the media must be
most vigorously criticized. And what are
more crucial than any particular bias are the elements of laziness and
stupidity put on display by this and virtually any other CNN Question of the
Day. I’m not especially bothered by the
fact that Carol Costello was trying to not-so-subtly impugn the qualifications
of candidate Romney. What aggravates me
is the fact that she was asking her viewers to do it for her.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
So we live in a representative democracy. It’s wonderful; we’re all proud of that
fact. That doesn’t mean, however, that a
seemingly democratic process is appropriate for every single social
institution. The fifth estate is
supposed to be independent of the ebbs and flows of public opinion, as well as
the influence of government. Indeed,
it’s crucial to a well-functioning democracy that the populous be informed by a
media which deals in facts and expert dialogue rather than being an aggregator
of private, uninformed opinion.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I’d be hard pressed to think of a more uninformed
opinion than any response to the question “Do CEOs make good presidents?” Whether you answer yes or no, your answer is
as meaningless as if you had stated your opinion about the financial management
skills of the tooth fairy. There is no
information on either topic, so to answer the question is to construct a purely
speculative fantasy. And even if there
had been CEO presidents in the past – even if there was a tooth fairy – it
wouldn’t make a poll of private opinions any more informative. As politically engaged citizens, we’re
supposed to be able to refer to the news media for information <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">before</i> we form our opinions.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
If CNN believes that CEOs, in theory, would make
terrible presidents, that’s fine; let them say so. But let them say so by referring to
historical facts and correlating business activities with the challenges that a
person can be expected to face in political office. Completely unbiased journalism is widely regarded
as a fantasy, but there’s a clear distinction between responsible and
irresponsible bias in reporting. Framing
one’s claim as the question of the day is decidedly irresponsible. It just allows the network to hide its
opinion behind unaffiliated responses to their hideously leading
questions. It parrots the common
argumentative tactic of dodging criticism by insisting, “Hey, I’m just asking
questions, here.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Asking questions is indeed a crucial part of the
media’s job. But when it comes to political
topics, many so-called journalists seem to have forgotten that other, equally
crucial part: providing answers. If you
as a journalist think a question is essential to the public understanding, then
it’s your responsibility to bring to bear facts and logic on that question to
help the public to resolve it in a way that’s consistent with reality, not just
with their preexisting points of view.
And if you find that the question you want to ask can’t be resolved in
that way, say because there are no relevant historical data, then you’re
probably asking the wrong question.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
The modern news media is rife with examples of
behaviors just like the CNN Question of the Day. Instead of listening to the news and being
informed, consumers are not encouraged to tweet at live broadcasts, to vote for
their favorite stories, to sound off with their views in absence of substantive
information that might clarify those views.
When did the media decide that its job is to provide a popular outlet
for every individual’s point of view?
And perhaps more important, why does the public seemingly accept this as
a good thing?</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
We all want to have our voices heard. Of course we do. But a responsible citizen also takes care to
recognize when his voice is actually needed, and when, on the other hand, he
needs to keep quiet and listen.
Collectively, we need to step outside of our presumptions from time to
time, log off of our otherwise incessant Twitter feeds, and open ourselves up
to the presentation of information that exists independent of our relished
ability to talk back. When we do, maybe
we’ll take clearer notice of the fact that the people tasked with providing
such information simply aren’t doing so, and maybe we’ll use our always-welcome
voices to demand more.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
The lessons learned from Thursdays Question of the
Day almost make me want to believe that some rebel copywriter inserted it into
the script in hopes that it would spur some tiny proportion of the audience to
sit up and realize, “Hey, I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">can’t</i>
answer this question! Why on Earth are
they asking it?” Far more likely,
though, is that some researchers at CNN crafted that question so that they, and
by extension their very network, wouldn’t have to do their job.</div>Edward Carneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15705855929151669621noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-195247562743684574.post-6966434652374493942012-05-21T15:59:00.000-04:002012-05-21T15:59:36.257-04:00Everest Made Deadly By Familiarity<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
It was a fatal weekend near the summit of Mount
Everest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Three climbers are confirmed dead
and two others are missing, according to the <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/life/Canadian+woman+dies+Mount+Everest+notorious+death+zone/6654429/story.html">Vancouver
Sun</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Reporting so far identifies
various elements of the local conditions as contributing to the deaths, some of
those conditions possibly attributable to global warming.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the main culprit here seems to be
overcrowding.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So many people tried to
trek through what’s charmingly referred to as the “death zone” than people at
the back of the queue were starting for the summit nearly three hours later in
the day than experts recommend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s
an astonishing fact, and I think it calls for a breaking point in the very
concept of adventuring in the modern world.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
In a 1949 episode of my favorite radio series,
Quiet, Please, the author, Wyllis Cooper, presents a story of two men’s attempt
to summit Mount Everest, and he taps into the sentiment entertained among some
mountaineers at the time that the world’s tallest mountain might actually be
unclimbable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A short sixty-three years
later – less than the span of one human lifetime – people flock to the
conquered vertical frontier in droves, and carrying ultra-modern,
life-preserving equipment, they file to the top of the world like a line of
ants, all attempting to re-experience en masse the seminal achievement of
Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay on May 29<sup>th</sup>, 1953.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
But it is no longer possible to re-experience that
same triumph now that the world has been so much transformed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Without question, summiting Mount Everest
remains among the most challenging and impressive feats that one can achieve,
but it is nowhere near as difficult as it was decades ago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It still claims lives, as it has for as long
as men have struggled against its inhospitable environment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it is remarkable that the probability of
death upon the mountain is now more a function of the number of people making
their way up its slopes than of the amount of difficulty faced by a well-equipped
person in good climbing conditions.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
By way of technological advancement, we have
steadily made Everest easier to climb.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Yet at the same time, by way of collective pride and lack of
imagination, we have kept pace with other changes that make it as risky as
ever.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’d say that it’s time that the
25,000 annual tourists to Mount Everest start more closely considering the
economics of risk and reward in attempting to climb the mountain these days.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
The exaltation that accompanied surviving the
summit in 1953 must have been unparalleled and inexpressible.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m sure that the experience today is a
highlight of the life of every person who survives it, but for no one does it
rise to the level of what Hillary and Norgay accomplished.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rarity enhances the value of every commodity,
even human experience, and with multiple climbers reaching the peak of Everest
every year, it just doesn’t have the same august status of human endeavor that
it might have.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Meanwhile the absent
rarity increases the risk.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You can die
coming down from Everest these days not because those who went before you died
as well, but precisely because those who went before you survived to both delay
and encourage your ascent.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
The world is inspiringly long on the noble
aspirations of men and women who wish to do amazing things with their time on
Earth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I respect and admire that impulse
to the utmost.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I wish that such
people were more prone to use that ambition to pursue feats of endurance and
ingenuity that other men had not yet accomplished.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As our ability to master the once-seemingly
impossible grows, our efforts ought to grow proportionally.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Now, I acknowledge that the world is all but out
of new frontiers now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>James Cameron’s
descent into the Marina Trench proved that it is not entirely devoid of remote
places to conquer, and indeed he should stand as an example of what remains to
be had of headline-worthy ventures.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Nevertheless, unconquered places are exceptionally rare now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are still grand feats that can be
accomplished within the realms that have already been explored, but with the
climbing of Everest almost passé, and deadly now in part because of its human
congestion, the world is lacking in the sense of magic that it once possessed,
the sense that allowed Wyllis Cooper to imagine the peak of Everest as the
dwelling place of the world’s last living goddess.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
We live in a time that is more challenging for the
very concept of adventuring than it is for most individual adventurers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It will probably be several generations yet
before we have new frontiers to conquer out in space, and that will be a
brilliant time for the collective imagination regarding the possibilities of
bold, individualistic human endeavor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
the meantime, though, I hope that people with a truly adventurous spirit will
see it as their prerogative not to queue up for a re-experience of long-ago
conquests, but to find those rare frontiers of exploration and human strength
which still exist in the corners of the Earth and the human spirit, and to
demonstrate thereby that there is still true majesty in both.</div>Edward Carneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15705855929151669621noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-195247562743684574.post-68104855708667705242012-05-18T13:32:00.000-04:002012-05-18T13:33:18.453-04:00The Culture of Obesity<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
David Sirota had a piece <a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/05/16/beating_back_obesity/?source=newsletter">in Salon yesterday</a>
addressing the obviously demanding issue that is the obesity crisis. The article consists of five recommendations
for how to begin practically addressing the problem. The appeal of them is intuitive enough,
though I would put much more emphasis on Sirota’s number two recommendation, restructuring
subsidies, than on his number one, taxing junk food.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I believe that consumers do tend to act in a
rational manner, so far as their understanding of the facts allows. It seems to me that a principle cause of
obesity is the malnutrition of the poor, helped along by the fact that high
fructose corn syrup and general junk food are less expensive per calorie than
healthful food. Taxing junk food without
first dramatically altering the grocery market wouldn’t fix the element of the
problem that’s caused by poverty. Making
all food more expensive won’t make people any more likely to acquire adequate
nutrition from the food that was expensive before the fact.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
There is perhaps a breaking point to be had here,
in the same sense that there is with any instance of blaming the victim. It is unfortunately tempting to assume that
obesity and similar ill health is purely the result of poor choices, without
regard for the possibility that some people’s actual range of choices is
constrained. For my own part, I often find
myself thinking that I know exactly what I need to do in order to be healthier;
and more than that, I know that I would roundly prefer the healthier dietary
and lifestyle options that are theoretically available to me. And yet I know that I simply cannot make many
of those choices, because they are out of my price range.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
This is not to say that education (Sirota’s fifth
point) isn’t essential to reversing negative trends in food consumption, but by
emphasizing ideas that effectively punish people for their constrained choices,
we practically absolve ourselves of the responsibility to make other people’s
most healthy choice into the choice that is also most rational.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
The trouble is that things like extending the
boundaries of rational choice are tediously difficult solutions that must rely
on collective social action and firm government initiatives. This goes for a solution grounded in
education, and it goes double for ending junk food subsidies. It’s also the essence of the third item in
the Salon article, banning junk food in schools. Again, though, I would adjust the language to
“replacing” junk food. It’s more
accurate, considering that what we’re talking about is junk food that schools
had been supplying in the first place, and it’s also just better PR. The word “ban” might convey the idea that
this issue really is about limiting people’s choices, rather than changing the
rational calculations that go into making them.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
In any event, all of these potentially effective
anti-obesity measures can only be gradually and incrementally implemented. None of them come with associated breaking
points. The last of Sirota’s
recommendations, though, is a matter of impelling a breaking point for a
relatively small number of people. It’s
also maybe a solution that wouldn’t spring to many people’s minds, being as it
is hidden in plain sight. But
concordantly, it’ll be in plain sight so it might generate more rapid results.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
The recommendation is “stop glorifying unhealthy
eating habits,” and Sirota’s example of such glorification is the photo-ops
that appear throughout presidential campaigns of candidates consuming corn dogs
and cheesesteaks. For some reason, this
is seen as an essential way of connecting with voters, either because such
terrible food is considered uniquely American or because it helps to make the
politician seem like what everyone assumes Americans stupidly want their leader
to be: a regular guy. I hope there will
never been a better example of this trend than at the last Iowa straw poll when
the treat to be photographed consuming was a deep-fried stick of butter.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
But the glorification of unhealthy eating habits
extends far beyond that. For instance, I
have always been both perplexed and disgusted by the fact that an activity
known as competitive eating exists. And
until it ceases to exist, it remains indicative of a culture that has strongly
duplicitous attitudes towards healthy living and the causes of obesity. And competitive eating truly must cease to
exist, along with every other impulse to present food consumption as a source
of amusement or personal image, as opposed to what it is and should be: a
source of nutrition.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
All the more complex initiatives to address the
obesity crisis must precipitate from a change of culture, which clarifies valuation
of healthy lifestyles. Until that is
achieved, efforts to change policy and improve education are doomed to a degree
of frustration. They will not be
accepted by a population that is still pulled in two directions. They will not be backed up by uniform political
will. Every collective change starts at
the level of the individual, and yet the individual’s attitudes often have
their foundation in media.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
That’s why this is a matter of reaching a breaking
point. The most crucial first steps must
be taken by those few people who are in a position to say, no, we won’t
broadcast the hot dog eating contest this year, or no, we won’t run the picture
of Mitt Romney jamming a chicken fried steak into his face on the front page,
or no, we won’t make the fat guy the comic foil in this sitcom. People in charge of decisions like this are
disproportionately capable of changing culture, but I fear they often don’t
realize it.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I am always hopeful that something will both jog
their awareness and prompt them to take the corresponding responsibility
seriously. And I hope it takes something
less than their ceasing to profit off of American obesity, because if I’m right
that other initiatives won’t reverse the crisis without a cultural change, then
that may never happen.</div>Edward Carneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15705855929151669621noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-195247562743684574.post-16580802420142028322012-05-12T18:29:00.000-04:002012-05-12T18:29:48.264-04:00Shocking Common Financial Realities<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<a href="https://twitter.com/#%21/Bill_Cimbrelo">Bill
Cimbrelo</a> directed me to a CNN Money story titled “<a href="http://www.dailyfinance.com/2012/03/14/retirement-shocker-60-of-workers-have-less-than-25-000-saved/">Retirement
Shocker: 60% of Workers Have Less Than $25,000 Saved</a>.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To my mind, the main question that this
raises is for whom is this a “shocker”?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>If the cited fact applies to more than half of the people concerned,
isn’t it safe to assume that the majority of people should be unsurprised by
the information?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The only reason that I
see why a person would be surprised by statistics that affirm the day-to-day
reality of his life is if he thinks his own experience is somehow anomalous,
somehow out of keeping with the daily experience of other people like him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unfortunately, this is almost certainly the
situation with most lower-middle class and poor individuals.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
So here’s a breaking point that I’m looking
forward to, and it’s one that’s on my mind often, and that I’ve brought up
<a href="http://tothebreakingpoint.blogspot.com/2011/05/just-ignore-roof-over-her-head.html">earlier </a>and <a href="http://www.andmagazine.com/content/phoenix/11843.html">elsewhere</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The news media
and society in general needs to stop presenting affluence as the default state
of life in America.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s not correct,
and more than that it can be damaging to policy and social discourse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our collective understanding of income
disparity is distressingly skewed by a distinctly hopeful presentation of
American life in most media, whether fiction or non-fiction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As with all things, failure to accurately
recognize the problem makes failure to craft solutions almost certain.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>People
should never be shocked by information that’s right under their noses all the
time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If they are, then it’s pretty
clear that something had been wildly misrepresented in the past.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You might object that it’s not as though
people walk around with their total retirement savings tattooed on their heads.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why should we have any idea what sort of
figures apply to the majority.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You
shouldn’t, of course.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And if you’re not
a meteorologist you shouldn’t know exactly how much rain your area has gotten
this month.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But when somebody tells you
that figure would you be shocked?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If so,
surely you’re either terrible at estimating rainfall or you haven’t been
looking outside very much.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And if you
weren’t paying attention, in order to be shocked you have to have made some groundless
assumption about what the amount might be, which will then be contradicted by
the facts.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
There’s a lot of information that casual observers
can’t be expected to know about people, about the economy, about the
world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But learning something new is not
the same as learning something shocking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Yet I don’t dispute that the headline for the given story was accurate
and that a great many people were shocked by the revelation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They wouldn’t have been if they hadn’t
concluded on the basis of nothing whatsoever that the majority of Americans are
well prepared for a comfortable retirement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I put forth that this sort of thing reveals the entire perception of
income demographics in America to be pure fantasy.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Such a fantasy promotes a victim-blaming
mentality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it promotes that not just
among the beneficiaries of income inequality but among the victims of it, too,
as they may tend to be surprised by information that shows their experience to
be firmly in the majority.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And yet even
the recognition of that information is not in itself enough to move commentators
towards the idea that financial difficulty is an endemic problem and not a
personal one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The language applied to
stories about the plight of the masses still suggests that the simple fact of
their being a part of the masses is in some measure attributable to their own
negligence, sloth, or ignorance.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
The CNN article takes pains to spin the subject in
a certain direction that is at once optimistic about general patterns and
unfair to individuals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It points out, “While
workers' lack of saving and confidence in their ability to retire comfortably
is troubling, [Employee Benefit Research Institute director Jack] VanDerhei
said it's good that people are becoming more realistic about their financial
situations.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sure, maybe, but there’s an
enormously significant dimension of this story that stretches beyond the
personal responsibilities of the people who are negatively affected.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the same time that those people exhibit
realism about that, how about analysts, media, and society as a whole become
more realistic about the financial situations of people other than themselves?</div>Edward Carneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15705855929151669621noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-195247562743684574.post-6223921788083440332012-05-12T00:11:00.000-04:002012-05-12T00:11:28.710-04:00End-Times Beliefs Unlikely to End<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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Archeologists working in the Guatemalan rainforest
have discovered an ancient mural room evidently used by Mayan scientists, on
which extensive calendrical calculations had been written.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The newly discovered instances of Mayan
timekeeping are older than earlier calendars recovered from ruins of the
civilization – the ones that notoriously end after the thirteenth baktun, or
four hundred year cycle, and that convince some New Agey people that the world
is scheduled to end seven months and nine days from now, on December 21<sup>st</sup>,
2012.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Those expectations are ostensibly undercut by the
reporting on this new discovery of what you might think of as a beta version of
the super-long Mayan calendar.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When the
coverage of this story proves not to change anything, though, I think it will
convey a worthwhile lesson about nature of people’s beliefs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The longer false information is reinforced,
the stronger the eventual revelation needs to be to push people to the breaking
point of abandoning irrational ideas.</div>
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<br /></div>
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This Mayan calendar speculation has been going on
for so long that there are certainly people out there who accept its credence
even though they know nothing about the context of Mayan timekeeping, or even
about the Mayan civilization in general.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It’s common knowledge, or rather common bullshit, to the extent that it’s
been used without explanation in recent ad campaigns.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course, that same fact indicates that
people are immune to the reference.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By
and large, they either reject it out of hand without having to argue the point
anymore, or they accept it but have accepted it for so long that waiting for
the end of days has become about as engaging as waiting for one’s number to be
called at the DMV.</div>
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<br /></div>
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People can become absolutely committed to the
craziest beliefs just by virtue of proximity and repetition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As somebody who’s been prone to a good deal
of mythological thinking and esotericism myself, I don’t rush to judge the
so-called Mayan calendar prophecy as crazy or stupid, but it is pretty well divorced
from anything that could be construed as objective fact.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Speculation isn’t an intellectual crime, per
se, just as long as you recognize that you’re speculating and that it won’t
take much additional evidence to discount your ideas altogether.</div>
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<br /></div>
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That’s what a lot of people don’t understand, and
it is a serious problem for the entire belief structure and process of rationality
in the minds of some people who are otherwise capable of great
intelligence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m certain that some such
people still think that the world might end on the winter solstice, and I’m
equally certain that the mere fact that their sole piece of evidence for that
has been directly refuted by the same 3000 year-old dead civilization that had
been the source of it in the first place.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Breaking points are by their very nature hard
things to reach on one’s own, and much harder to bring about in others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s what makes them either so damaging or so
satisfying, depending on the outcome.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That’s also why they ought to be confined to matters of principle or
behavior or ideology, and not factual information.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is an unfortunate complication to rational
dialogue when the breaking point for one’s genuine understanding is pushed back
by the fact that he insists on stubbornly clinging to beliefs that were based
on pure speculation in absence of the factual data that is to become available
later.</div>
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<br /></div>
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In this sense, I’m looking forward to a sort of
meta breaking point in social psychological trends, one that encourages people
to dispense with their need for a breaking point in issues of pure fact.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fact, theory, speculation, and opinion all
need to be relegated to their own spheres.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>If any significant number of people persist in conflating those
categories so much that they believe that recurrent speculation is knowledge,
it is that much more difficult for the public to have effective discussions
about opinions that can’t be outright disproven but can – and should – be broken.</div>Edward Carneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15705855929151669621noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-195247562743684574.post-31140305260442131042012-05-11T13:46:00.000-04:002012-05-11T13:46:38.574-04:00The Fascinating Seventy Year-Old Virgin<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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The internet loves the news of the weird.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Apparently, a lot of web browsers are
clicking over to a brief story about a <a href="http://now.msn.com/now/0510-sexational-pam-virgin.aspx?ocid=ansnow11">seventy
year-old virgin</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This isn’t that
interesting at first blush, especially in light of the story from a few months
ago about a woman who’d remained a virgin for over 100 years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the latter case, though, I got the
impression that the woman may have simply been asexual.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She expressed an overall disinterest in sex
and suggested that her longevity could be explained by her not concerning
herself with that pursuit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This seventy
year-old woman who is in the news now, on the other hand, claims to have
retained her virginity as a matter of moral commitment, as she doesn’t believe
in sex before marriage, but never found a husband.</div>
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<br /></div>
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This story wouldn’t be that interesting except for
the fact that by being limited to a one paragraph synopsis it opens up my mind
to all sorts of speculation about the surrounding circumstances.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That speculation is made all the more intriguing
by virtue of two unusual facts:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
woman, Pam Shaw, performed for many years as a cabaret singer, and she’s in the
news now because she’s apparently hit her virginity’s breaking point at long
last, being ready now to give it up to “a tall, dark, and handsome millionaire.”</div>
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<br /></div>
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This woman seems fascinating.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The image that I get is a tight bundle of lifelong
contradictions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I appreciate that
because it’s something that I can relate to, even though there are aspects of
it that I admire and aspects that I’m eager to criticize.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>First the praise:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Good for her for maintaining her virginity
amidst a career in which she was referred to as “The Sexational Pam,” in an
industry in which loose attitudes about sex are presumably the recognized norm.</div>
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<br /></div>
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It’s a unique personality type that encourages a
person to eschew particular experiences for herself at the same time that she
flirts with the edges of those experiences and indulges an active curiosity
about them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As a deliberate virgin, and
arguably an asexual, myself, I kind of want the life that she’s led.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I felt oddly comfortable when I had an opportunity
to go to an art exhibit at an S&M parlor and when I followed a drunken
friend into a pornography store. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So I
applaud Ms. Shaw’s commitment to a strangely indulgent sort of chastity.</div>
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<br /></div>
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But here’s the thing that strikes me negatively
about her story:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She spent, let’s say,
fifty-five years maintaining a commitment to virginity on the basis of not
believing in sex before marriage and now she’s announced her readiness to “take
the plunge” if the interested part has enough money?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That seems like freakishly inconsistent morality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Doesn’t the decision to trade virginity for a
cash-rich lifestyle sort of betray the very sentiment behind Ms. Shaw’s lifelong
chastity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I would presume that if she
didn’t believe in sex before marriage, she felt that love was more important
than physical pleasure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Am I to conclude
that now at seventy years old she’d determined that money is more important
than both?</div>
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<br /></div>
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On the other hand, I can understand the impulse
underlying her statement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The longer you
retain something that requires consistent sacrifice, the more valuable in
becomes to you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus, even if you have
decided that enough is enough, it can take an awful lot of incentive to push
you to an actual breaking point.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It may
be that after years of working so close to sex, and now approaching the end of
her life, Ms. Shaw has simply decided that she wants to experience something
that she’s denied herself for so long.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She
probably feels that it can no longer be on the terms that she’d set, so instead
she’s changing the terms, compromising the rigid morality in order to cease
compromising the physical indulgence.</div>
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<br /></div>
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The woman has evidently lived her life amidst
contradictions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What’s one more?</div>Edward Carneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15705855929151669621noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-195247562743684574.post-89344693943236451912012-05-10T19:15:00.000-04:002012-05-10T19:15:04.272-04:00Endorsing Tribalism and Gay Rights<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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I submitted a brief editorial to <a href="http://www.andmagazine.com/home/">AND Magazine</a>
regarding the liberal reaction to President Obama’s endorsement of marriage
equality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hopefully it will go up
tomorrow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Having thought about the topic
a little more, I feel I would like to use this space to post something of a
supplement to my previous comments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
my AND piece, I pointed out that there was a tumblr blog launched almost
immediately after Obama’s television interview, which consists entirely of
animated gifs emphasizing celebration of the newfound vocal support for gay
marriage.</div>
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<br /></div>
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My first criticism of this sort of reaction is
that it’s making a celebration out of something that doesn’t really warrant
it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It shouldn’t have taken this long to
get President Obama to make a basic statement of support for the gay community,
and even now that he did, that is now what they need; they need legislative and
judicial action, which the President can push for and support.</div>
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<br /></div>
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But apart from the fact that their singing and
dancing is an overzealous response by some liberals to a very modest change,
what may actually be more significant is that it demonstrates a hideous
tendency in private citizens’ engagement with the political process.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The people making the gifs for tumblr and
otherwise celebrating yesterday’s announcement must be aware of the fact that
nothing has substantially changed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
celebration, then, isn’t about progress; it’s about popularity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The sad fact is that in the modern political
landscape, we are so caught up in the excitement of the process that we
consider high-profile endorsements to be tantamount to actual political victories.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
The most damnable feature of our typical approach
to social issues and governmental procedure is the impulse towards
tribalism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are few better examples
of such tribalism than widespread rejoicing over the affirmation that our ideas
have a place among the powerful and the popular.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is something much different from
cheering over the affirmation that our ideas are correct.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the more we indulge this impulse to gloat
over demographics rather than substance, the less clear that distinction will
be to us.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I hope that as gay activists continue to express
this misplaced pride in who is coming over to their side, they will approach a
breaking point whereby they realize that the fallacies of appealing to
popularity and authority only serve to make them more like their irrational
political opponents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hell, anti-gay
activists largely believe that they have Jehovah and most of human civilization
on their side.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even if that were true,
it wouldn’t make them any more correct, and it wouldn’t prevent progress
towards equality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That kind of certitude
provides nothing other than a sense of self-congratulations, which has no place
in politics if politics is to be a rational, productive endeavor.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Of course, it is thoroughly at home amidst the
sort of politics that we actually do have in this country.</div>Edward Carneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15705855929151669621noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-195247562743684574.post-21583227409690308092012-05-07T19:43:00.003-04:002012-05-07T19:43:49.349-04:00Parking for the Pious<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://media.komonews.com/images/090128_church_crash.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://media.komonews.com/images/090128_church_crash.jpg" />"</a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"What, did you want us to make him WALK in?"</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
I have lived near Our Lady of Blackrock Church for
a few years now, and throughout that time I’ve been noticing a trend that has aggravated
me more and more with each passing week.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>There is alternate-side parking on the street on which I live.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It changes over on Thursday at 6:00, and the
law is evidently suspended altogether on Sunday morning, during evenings when
bingo is being played, and any other time that large numbers of motorists might
be attending church.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Now, I’m not an enormously popular guy – and I’ll
probably be less so amongst churchgoing folks if they read this post – so I
don’t exactly have a caravan of friends and family making camp in front of my
apartment day after day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nonetheless, my
best friend and my brother have each gotten tickets for parking on the wrong
side of my street or failing to switch sides at the required time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The parking enforcement officers weren’t
exactly slow to react, either.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Each time
someone I know has been ticketed, it’s been as if an officer was lying in wait
for someone to mess up.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Yet if I walk down the street on a Sunday morning
I find that dozens of motorists flaunt the law on a regular basis, and not one of
them has ever had a ticket on his car’s windshield.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s simply not possible that the city has
routinely failed to notice the multitudes of infractions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are deliberately avoiding enforcement of
the law at times when it is commonplace for a certain segment of the public to
break it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I don’t know who is
responsible for that decision or why they’ve made it, but I know that it is
contrary to the spirit and the very purpose of the law.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
If laws are selectively enforced they are not laws
at all; they are the whims of the people charged with the duty to maintain an
orderly society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If the city feels that
alternate-side parking is an excessive burden to my neighborhood in light of
how much parking it needs during certain hours, then they should tear down the
signs and repeal the rule, or at least modify both to include hours of
exemption.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why should the burden of
responsibility be placed upon visitors to my neighborhood, but not upon
visitors to its church?</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I can imagine what the justifications might be for
the current policy of selective ticketing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Some might think I’m being mean-spirited and asking that congregants be
punished for attending church.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But this
has nothing to do with religion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m
against all double-standards, especially when it’s a matter of the police or
other representatives of government permitting the law to be broken with
impunity.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Let’s be clear:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They have no idea whether the cars they aren’t ticketing belong to
people who are actually attending church.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This unofficial immunity isn’t offered to a specific sort of lawbreaker,
but to people who break the law at specific times.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Considering that some of those times are when
bingo is scheduled, it can’t even be argued that this non-enforcement is
broadly aimed at protecting the pious.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And even if every would-be ticket recipient was fervently praying in the
pews and arranging community service projects in the sanctuary at the time they
broke the law, the fact remains that they broke the law.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
If it’s a sense of piety that motivates law
enforcement to grant such amnesty, I wonder if it would provide the same
allowances if the building was not a Catholic church but a mosque, or a
synagogue, or a Hindu temple.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For that
matter, if the law can be suspended around sacred spaces, are the police free
to decide for themselves what a sacred space is, or what kind of behavior puts
a person above the law?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Can they patrol the
area around Ralph Wilson Stadium and give out tickets only to the cars with out
of state plates?</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
If police discretion is acceptable in one
circumstance, it’s acceptable in general.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But any bias in enforcement makes the law unintelligible and unfair.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If the law doesn’t justify an equivalent
sacrifice from everyone, it isn’t a good law.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>If a cop doesn’t hold every citizen to the same standard, he’s not a
good cop.</div>Edward Carneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15705855929151669621noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-195247562743684574.post-5704989246720067582012-05-02T21:24:00.000-04:002012-05-22T09:00:32.945-04:00The Oxford Comma, Childhood Education, and Me<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
The coincidences that I encounter these days
are not as profound as they once were.
Now it tends to be more along the lines of repeated references to a film
I have yet to see, or some negative coincidence like my some last minute excuse
always coming up amongst friends. A
couple of recent, coincidental encounters have compelled me to make something
out of a topic of grammatical concern.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I stumbled onto an online discussion recently
about the Oxford comma and whether it is or is not grammatically correct, or
required. I later found that another
online writer’s personal byline declared him to be “a fan of the Oxford comma,”
and having already been given cause to reflect on it, I thought to myself, “Well,
hell, me too!”</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
For those of you who are extremely casual
grammarians or who pride yourself on a 1337 ability to avoid the conventions of
written English, the Oxford comma is the comma that comes between the
penultimate entry in a list and the word “and.”
Nouns, punctuation, and a conjunction make up a list, and there’s an
Oxford comma in this sentence. Some
writers use it, some don’t. Some style
guides require it, some reject it.
Speaking quite generally, both its use and its non-use are
acceptable. It seems to me that many
people, either because they haven’t thought about it or because they’re
naturally committed to one or the other, don’t realize this.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
That even goes for teachers of English. The reason why I know about the controversy
over the Oxford comma is that I remember it being a legitimate point of confusion
in elementary school. I’m fairly certain
that when it first came up, the teacher of what I’m guessing was my third grade
class, told us quite explicitly that there was no comma between the
second-to-last and last entries in a list.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I more clearly recall when it came up with a
later English teacher, because she didn’t seem to know which was correct, but
would not admit to that fact. She was
overseeing an assignment in which students had to add punctuation to an existing
sentence, and when she gave the answer she listed the places where each of the
commas belonged, paused, and added the Oxford comma to the mix. Even among a group of nine year-olds, the
class was bifurcated on that answer, so that I cheered to myself over my
superior understanding, and my neighbor had to correct his paper.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
At this point you may be asking what on Earth
this has to do with breaking points.
Well, having thus had an opportunity to reflect on my personal
relationship with the Oxford comma, I realize that the way I learned about it
might represent something that’s essential to the development of an
intelligent, independent child.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
You see, regardless of what I’ve become, I was
the picture of an upstanding, studious child who did with religious devotion
what he was told to do by parents and teachers, and always followed the
rules. That contributed to a marvelously
successful academic career, which paid off with a sense of pride for most of
the time that I was in school but left me with nothing once I no longer had
anyone to obey.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Now I seem to have such a contentious,
anti-conformist mindset as to give me a rather hard edge, which acts as a
social barrier. Nevertheless, I remember
well the child that always did his homework, developed an earnest rapport with
authority figures, never snuck out at night or dabbled with drugs or
alcohol. In many ways, I am still the
child, even though I have a well-developed and eagerly maintained sense of
self. So I know that if I were to
finally be injected into a corporate setting, or otherwise put low in a
hierarchy that I’m wont to accept, I will still do what I am told to do at most
every turn, and do it with sincere deference.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Knowing the kind of child that I was, I sometimes
wonder just how I would fare in the Milgram experiments, which, in the early
1960s, demonstrated how easy it is for ordinary people to do monstrously
unethical things when directed to by an authority figure. My life has been unfortunately short on
severe challenges to my own morality.
Mostly, there have just been instances where circumstances casually
flirted with a scenario in which I might be called upon to either speak up or
stand by as a witness to preventable wrongs.
And I’ve always been afraid of my apparent slowness and caution in
responding to such situations.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
In a lot of ways, I was quite unlike what one
expects in a typical intelligent youth. My
aversion to drugs and alcohol, even to sex, has been lifelong, but
psychological studies indicate that a curious willingness to experiment with
such things is characteristic of a changeable, and thus intelligent, mind. The saintly boy scout type might prove to be
exceptionally good at reciting the rulebook, but that doesn’t demonstrate any
real intellectual curiosity. Rebellion
is supposed to be a natural part of adolescent development, but I never
experienced it. My greatest act of
rebellion came at twenty-one when I refused to apply to graduate school.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
These sorts of contrasts make me wonder if I
really have the firm, capable mind that I was always praised for, or if,
instead, I am just a terrifically smooth-running machine. All those subject areas that I was so good at
in my primary and secondary schooling – did I really understand them, or did I
just repeat what I was told at the same time that I repeated “don’t talk to
strangers,” “don’t smoke,” “don’t skip class,” “don’t talk back”?</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
My worries about the authenticity of my own
intelligence are modestly alleviated, however, by the knowledge that insecurity
has been a characteristic of virtually everyone for whose intelligence I have
had respect in the past. Whenever I
question my skill at or grasp of something, I take a little bit of comfort in
remembering the Dunning-Kruger Effect – the tendency of skilled people to think
that everyone else is as good as they while deficient people think everyone
else is as bad.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Still, I’m not like the other mentally-capable
people I know, and it leaves me with the worry that all along I’ve just been
adeptly imitating them, saying the sorts of things they say, following the
rules that are supposed to lead to where they are, and generally copying
instead of thinking. After all, the best
and the worst of people are the ones who question authority. The rest are just mediocre.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Of course, what I need to keep in mind is that
an essential willingness to question authority doesn’t mean that it’s necessary
to do so. And yet it is necessary to
have that willingness, because a constant follower is not one to form his own
ideas. That’s a problem when the ideas
that you’re asked to follow are wrong, and it’s equally a problem when you have
no firm idea to parrot. Case in point,
the Oxford comma.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I was probably eight years old when I learned
how to separate items in written lists.
In retrospect, I take great pride in my reception of that lesson. More to the point, I take pride in the fact
that as a child I was not receptive to that lesson. The absence of the Oxford comma in third
grade English is the first memory that I can dredge up from my spotty personal
history of an instance in which I actively, albeit silently, disagreed with a
teacher.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I don’t know where I learned that skill so
early in life, but I believe that it contributed in magnificent ways to the
development of the person writing this today.
A year or so after that first lesson, I defied the prior teacher’s
instruction and inserted a comma next to the conjunction, because that’s what
made sense to me. I felt then as I do
now: There’s no sense in excluding the
comma from the last item in a list, because the conjunction doesn’t fully
separate one noun from another. There
are situations in which you might pair two words as a compound noun linked by a
conjunction, such as “salt and pepper,” or “soup or salad.” If such a compound comes at the end of a list
and it’s accepted that the writer omits the Oxford comma, the two nouns will be
inappropriately divided from each other.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
In a far less analytical way, I was aware of
this at eight years old, and even though I wasn’t intellectually prepared to
defend my opinion to an old woman in a position of authority, I at least had
the fortitude to let the instruction pass through my ears unheeded. When my later teacher hesitated over the
question, I was vindicated, because I knew then that it was a legitimate area
of uncertainty, and I was confident that I had resolved it correctly.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Children need the skill to resolve linguistic
and explanatory puzzles on their own, if they are to become intelligent
beings. Knowing what I do about myself,
I’m almost certain that if I hadn’t displayed that skill at an early age, I
would in fact be the intellectual automaton that I sometimes fear I could
be. In light of that, early childhood
education cannot be simply a matter of transmitting information; it must
encourage children to resolve questions that the teacher has left uncertain,
and even to challenge the claims of authority.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
In many circles, this is something that’s
explicitly rejected. We often tend to
value pure obeisance in our children, discouraging them from questioning until
they’re old enough to do so. That,
however, is not education. The creation
of loyal citizens is not the same as the development of clever, critically
thinking youths. The patterns that we
establish as children can follow us throughout our lives, and a pattern of
accepting things at face value then can make it difficult to pick up the skill
of questioning later on. When it is not
deliberately fostered, I don’t know where the impulse to reject false
information comes from, but it is enormously valuable to developing minds, and
I thank god that I picked it up somewhere.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
And I thank god for the Oxford comma. </div>Edward Carneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15705855929151669621noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-195247562743684574.post-23420333732801810192012-05-01T11:34:00.000-04:002012-05-01T11:34:28.145-04:00My Contribution to the Obama Campaign<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
Last night, I donated three dollars to the Barack
Obama campaign.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I didn’t do it because I
believe in the transformative potential of a second term for the current president,
or because I expect good things to come of an emphasis on small-donor
contributions to political causes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
didn’t even do it because I can afford it, because there’s some legitimate
doubt about that, even at the three dollar level.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
In fact, my donation wasn’t in answer to my
conscience; it was in violation of it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And given what three dollars might otherwise have bought, it was an
irrational violation of my conscience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That is characteristic of playing the lottery.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yes, I donated three dollars to the Barack
Obama campaign last night because that was the minimum amount and the deadline
that allowed donors to be entered for a chance to win a trip to Los Angeles to have
dinner with Barack Obama and George Clooney.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I put off the donation all the way to the last
half-hour before the FEC fundraising deadline, because this involved a complex
economic and ethical calculation for me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It took until after 11:30 to hit that breaking point, but ultimately, I
decided that even in the faces of virtually infinitesimal chances and the
certainty of being left with a bad taste in my mouth, three dollars was
well-worth the long shot of being chosen to be able to have a conversation with
the president.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(I wouldn’t really care
about meeting Clooney – I’d shake his hand and tell him I admire his body of
work, but I want to talk to policymakers.)</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
The economic calculation was significantly
influenced by what I know about the president.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The current occupant of the highest office in the land has an admirable
sense of empathy, to the extent that he has been responsible for some instances
of helping private citizens to get jobs when they had spoken to him of their
difficulties.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He has also been known to
occasionally write personal checks in response to letters detailing hardships
which the president felt he had no other way of addressing in the moment.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<a href="http://tothebreakingpoint.blogspot.com/2011/10/presidential-charity-is-misplaced.html">I wrote about those facts in the past</a>, and though
they still impress me with regards to the kind of man that citizen Barack Obama
is, as I expressed then, I don’t like what it says about him as an occupant of
the presidential office.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And to be
perfectly frank about my own motivations, I want to have dinner with President
Barack Obama so I can exploit the ear of the man and criticize the actions and
policies of the president.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Donating money to his campaign for the sake of a
shot at dinner in L.A. constituted an ethical compromise for me, because I
recognized that I was contributing to an unfortunate trend in American
politics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We complain a great deal about
the influence of big money in campaigns and policy making, the quid pro quo
involved.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But as with everything else,
the broader tendencies, the impulses among the powerful, have their groundwork
in private, on-the-ground attitudes.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Regardless of whether it relies on three dollar
donations from across the country or one terrifyingly wealthy Super PAC, no
campaign and no political apparatus should be set up to encourage people to
contribute their resources to it in hopes that they will be delivered some
personal reward in return.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And that’s
exactly what I’ve done.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I didn’t donate my three dollars to the Barack
Obama campaign because I believe that he represents my views and can be trusted
to carry out the policies that I think would be legitimately best for the
country as a whole; I did it in hopes of gaining access to the president so
that I could try to influence his policies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And more than that, I gave my money to the campaign in the interest of
trying to influence a private individual to help me personally.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I want to have dinner with the president so that I
can raise questions about his education policy, about the flawed common wisdom
that government cannot create jobs, and about the victim-blaming rhetoric that
dominates political explanations of joblessness, poverty, and loss.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I want to have dinner with a man with a
vast network of high-level connections so that I can impress upon him the
desperation of my need for a decent job, the reality of my qualifications and
talents, and the fact that nothing I do on my own can connect those thing to
actual employment.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I know that there have been a handful of other
people who have been in similar situations, found themselves in circumstances
that allowed them to bend the ear of the president, and acquired job leads by
virtue of his influence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think it’s
wrong that anyone gets that chance, but the fact is that so long as someone
does, I hope it’s me.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
For the time being, money in politics is a reality
that we have to work with.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the money
should follow the political causes, and the system that is accepted now by both
parties and at all levels encourages money to precede politics and to demand
that weakly malleable views on policy answer to purchased influence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I doubt, though, that my three dollars will
buy sufficient influence to demand that that system be questioned.</div>Edward Carneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15705855929151669621noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-195247562743684574.post-31419119695156793162012-04-13T13:18:00.009-04:002012-04-13T13:38:54.492-04:00Speechless: Why Citizens United and Its Critics Are Both Wrong<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:officedocumentsettings> <o:allowpng/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves/> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:donotpromoteqf/> <w:lidthemeother>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:lidthemeasian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:lidthemecomplexscript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> 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mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst"><span style=" line-height: 115%; Times New Roman","serif";font-size:100%;" ><i>[Author's Note: I wrote this essay a while ago, and I had hoped to actually publish it somewhere so that it could reach a wider audience, because I think this angle on the question of corporate personhood is important. But I now believe I'm unlikely to find a market for it, because it's too lengthy and rigidly philosophical to have a place in any popular magazine, but too brief, playful and topical to have a place in a philosophical journal, which I have no access to anyway. So I'm just putting it out as a blog post, instead, and hoping for the best. Fair warning: at five thousand words, it's longer (and perhaps drier) than blogs are supposed to be.]</i><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" ><!---MORE----><a name='more'></a>Ever since Mitt Romney made the comment “Corporations are people, my friend,” to an irate audience member at the Iowa State Fair, I’ve found that the phrase has become something of a meme, with liberal media personalities and bloggers repeating it ironically as a way of defining the modern zeitgeist with respect to money in politics.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>That’s perfectly understandable, because the idea of ascribing humanity to corporate entities is intuitively troubling.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The problem with the satirical use of the sentiment by some liberals, though, is that they all seem to be relying on their audience’s perception of the statement “corporations are people” as self-evidently absurd.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Nobody that I know of has made a serious effort to explain exactly why the statement is false and what definition of “person” proves it.</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >It has been two years since the ruling in Citizens United vs. the Federal Elections Commission held that corporate funding of political campaigns qualified as protected speech.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Since that time, the culture of corporate influence has produced a lot of revulsion and righteous indignation, but not a lot of systematic thought.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The arguments against the personhood of corporate entities are usually emotional, knee-jerk reactions that really wouldn’t be effective with people who aren’t already ideologically committed to that same point of view.</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >Not making a solid argument is understandable if the criticism is framed by satire and one’s goal is to brightly highlight the absurdity of a situation.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>So I am more forgiving of Stephen Colbert, who had this to say on a broadcast last October when discussing the signs at the Occupy Wall Street protests, which declared that corporations are not people<br /></span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="font-size:100%;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"><span style="line-height:115%;Times New Roman","serif"">“I thought we were past the point in this country where some people aren’t people just because they have different color skin, or different religion, or were born in a lawyer’s office, only exist on paper, have no soul, and can never die.” </span></i></span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >But I find that after a bit of thought even that commentary appeals to unhelpfully emotional sentiments.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The same is true in a more damning way of other attempted refutations of the personhood of corporations, which emphasize all the obvious things that are not shared in common between corporations and people as we intuitively understand them.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Corporations, they say, are clearly not people because they don’t need air or water or food, because they don’t experience emotion, and so on.<br /></span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >None of this strikes me as sufficient cause to deny them free speech rights.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>At base, that is what’s behind the defense of corporate personhood.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Someone on that side of the argument would presumably emphasize the idea that by virtue of their recognized legal personhood, corporations deserve all the same rights that people do.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>And as far as I’m concerned, the above-mentioned features of corporations are not sufficient grounds to refuse any rights to such an entity.</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >There is a further sentiment implicit in liberal emphasis on the obvious differences between corporations and organic human beings.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I expect that a lot of people in my political camp are averse to corporate personhood because they know that corporate interests often don’t align with human interests.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>By virtue of not needing air, water, or food, they will not be motivated in any direct way toward the preservation of breathable air, clean water, and overall food security.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I think that a lot of my fellow liberals feel that it’s right to resist the concept of corporate free speech because non-human entities contributing to the political process would mean powerful voices competing with the interests of persons who are fully-fledged and unmistakably human.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Unfortunately, this protectionist thinking can have no place in the law, or even in political ethics.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>No reasonable liberal would find any semblance of moral justification for restricting the free speech rights of their political opponents, even those who are deeply confused about humanity’s shared self-interest.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Why is it more justifiable when we are dealing with corporations, other than because it just feels that way?<br /></span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >Since I’m writing this from the left, but am thus far criticizing the views found on the same side, the natural question at this point is, so why aren’t corporations people, then?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Well, the truth is that in my opinion they are.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>There is no justification for restricting the free speech rights even of persons who are only persons in a legal sense.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>That said, I vehemently disagree with the Citizens United ruling.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I just think that the arguments against it have been misguided and the language used in its favor misleading.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Its defenders misunderstand the situation.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Its opponents are leveling their criticisms against the wrong elements of the problem, but they have the right idea.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Before getting to what the correct attack would be, it’s important to understand just why the aforementioned arguments are so flawed.</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >So corporations don’t need to breathe the air.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Well, so what?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Sure, people do need air, but that is not part of what makes them people.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Imagine that we found out that mermen exist and that they live in American waters.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Assuming that they look and behaving roughly like human beings save for flippers and gills and all the lifestyle differences that come with them, it would be tough to say that they didn’t count as people and didn’t deserve free speech simply because they didn’t require air to breathe.</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >Similarly, what if it turned out that ents existed somewhere in the real world, or that some x-men type of human being had evolved to breathe carbon dioxide instead of oxygen?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Their environmental interests would be very different from our own, but there would be no moral justification for saying that they should not be allowed to freely assemble, or express their opinions, including by financing ads for political candidates who would not only resist carbon regulations, but make damned sure that vast amounts of the stuff were poured into our atmosphere every year.</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >On the other hand, suppose that some alien species took up residence in the United States, claimed refugee status, passed the citizenship exams en masse, learned to communicate in fluent English, and became productive members of society.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Further suppose that they breathed oxygen like us, but obtained all their physiological needs through air and food, and had no need of water.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Would that sole significant difference mean that we ought to revoke their citizenship, deny personhood, and afford them none of the rights of Americans?<br /></span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >Looking at a different science fiction scenario, and one that is probably far more likely to come true someday, imagine that we gave rise to genuine, freely-thinking artificial intelligence.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Unless we designed their hardware in an awfully peculiar way, they would presumably need neither air nor water.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>They would also not eat, and we might be well-served to assume that they would run on fossil fuels, in which case it would be in their interest to support political initiatives that made energy security a top priority, unmitigated by impacts on carbon emissions, risks of water pollution, or encroachments on agriculture.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>These beings would seem very different from what we traditionally recognize as people, and the given list of attributes begins to align awfully closely with the decidedly non-human traits of corporations.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Still, would the fact that robot physiology places such wildly different demands on them disqualify them for personhood, considering that they have intelligence just like that of human beings?</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >The question of artificial intelligence addresses the weakness of most of the intuitive differences between corporations and people.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>A synthetic person also might not die in the sense that real human beings do.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Something mechanical can usually continue working as long as it enjoys routine maintenance and a constant supply of energy.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>In the theoretical scenario, this doesn’t even need to refer to human-designed artificial intelligence.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>What if a person’s actual, organic brain was implanted in a mechanical body and was able to continue functioning for as long as that body remained in working order?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>If we used this method to systematically alter the physiology and longevity of most of the people in America, would we also have to go about systematically stripping ourselves of first amendment rights?</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >Death for corporations is much the same as death for hypothetical synthetic people.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Contrary to the comments of some liberal critics, corporations can die, after a fashion.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>They can die in much the same way that an artificial intelligence or synthetic body can die – by running out of their source of energy, which in the case of corporations is money.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Naturally, a corporation’s self-interest would consist of maximizing its own profits, just as a robot’s self-interest would consist of maximizing its access to electrical energy.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>For synthetic persons this might be served by either expansion of fossil fuel production or by upgrades to green technology.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>For corporate, legal persons their interests might be served by any number of business practices or legislative changes.</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >Different minorities have different interests, and different interests have different potential means of being either supported or undercut by government and society.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Respect for the competition amongst these various points of view is the very essence of democracy.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The addition to corporate voices to this contest may add to the clamor, but if having different needs means having different rights, what’s to stop those rights from being kept not just from non-human entities but also from entities that are plainly people and thus ought to possess natural, inalienable rights? <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>If we value our democracy, we should acknowledge that even being non-human would not be a barrier to participation in this competition of interests, so long as you have a way of expressing your desires and political preferences.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>From a political, legal, and even moral standpoint, personhood should not presuppose being human.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>So how are corporations different?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It’s an important question, because I promise you they are different.</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >What of being born in a lawyer’s office?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>That seems to carry more weight than the lack of physical needs and temporal limits.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Well, first of all, if that’s taken literally, then any completely human child who happened to be delivered in a lawyer’s office would be born devoid of first amendment rights.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But we’ll take it for granted that the objection means actually being brought into existence by legal action.</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >Again, think about the possible creation of artificial intelligence.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Considering the struggles for legal rights that have been faced by women, African Americans, and homosexuals, I have no doubt that there would be a long period of political contention before A.I. gained acceptance as societally recognized persons.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But I would hope that the vast majority of liberals would be on the side of inclusion, and that only stilted conservative thinking would lead a person to staunchly resist accepting a new category of person into the fullness of American society.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>And if what strikes me as the liberal point of view in that scenario gained prominence, the personhood of the first thinking robot would have to be created in a lawyer’s office or on the floor of Congress.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Prior to that, it would legally only be a collection of circuits and manufactured materials, not a person.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>As far as its rights are concerned, the person would be created by legal action.</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >We don’t need to remain so hypothetical in order to illustrate the point.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The 1857 Dred Scott decision illustrated that it could be decided in a courtroom that a human being was not a citizen, and that he was indeed recognized as property.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The emancipation proclamation effectively erased this view in most of the country via executive order.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Obviously, no action by government or legal entities is capable of impacting whether or not someone is a person in fact, but what is of issue here is whether one is a person under the law, and therefore protected by first amendment rights.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It is very much within the power of lawyers, courts, and politicians to decide this, and there is sufficient precedent for it in American history, with its several instances of minorities being denied some or all of the rights of citizens.</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >Personhood refers to something much greater than citizenship, but it also means something much different from “intuitively human.”<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Given the above hypotheticals, I would say that personhood in a legal sense, including in the sense of having first amendment rights, is much closer to citizenship than it is to humanity.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>While it is not typical for legal documents to declare individuals to be people, that or something close to it is sometimes their effect.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>In a sense, aren’t American persons regularly born in bureaucrat’s offices, insofar as the acquisition of American citizenship provides a person with new rights and responsibilities and a new treatment under the law?</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >Intuitively, declaring a non-human entity to be a person seems indisputably different, but there is a great deal of vagueness in the law, and this must be dealt with logically and not via intuition.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The rational fact of the matter is that corporations are legal persons.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>This is very well established.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>You can object to this aspect of the law and you can insist that it be overturned, but you can’t dispute the fact that it presently exists.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It is by virtue of being persons that corporations are able to enter into contracts, to sue and be sued, and as of 2010 to express support for political candidates through unlimited campaign spending.</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >The last of these may be objectionable to some people, but if their solution to the problem is to strip corporations of legal personhood, we lose the essential basis for binding them to legal agreements and prosecuting them for criminal activity.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>If that turns out to be similarly objectionable, then what rationale do opponents of corporate personhood have for limiting the rights of corporations but maintaining their responsibilities?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It seems that they must be calling for two distinct classes of person: legal and natural persons.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But if that came to be considered the new legal standard, I would be genuinely concerned that it could set a dangerous precedent.</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >Granted, none of my hypotheticals involving mutants, mermen, space aliens, and sentient robots are likely to come before an actual court of law anytime soon, but that does not mean that the questions they raise aren’t legitimate and don’t need to be resolved.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The principal question is what criteria must be met for a person to be classed as merely “legal” rather than “natural.”<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Specifically, of the easily observable differences between human beings and corporations, which and how many of them does it take to justify denying an entity the rights of a natural person?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>If it doesn’t eat, breathe, or die naturally, is that sufficient cause?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>If we were to strip a human being of the typical features of humanity one-by-one, and if we were to add those features one-by-one to something inanimate or corporate, would we be able to identify the point at which one became and one ceased to be a natural person?</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >No doubt some people will remain committed to solving the paradox intuitively.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Most of us probably believe quite strongly that we don’t need to outline criteria to determine what a person is.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>On the face of it, it seems exceptionally easy to tell that a corporation just isn’t that, even if it’s difficult to identify precisely why.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>So one might be tempted to defer to somewhat esoteric concepts and, returning to Stephen Colbert’s comment, say that corporations cannot be people because they don’t have souls.</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >Obviously, though, that can’t have any bearing on the law.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It may very well be a tremendous difference between corporations and people, but it may also be a fantasy.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It’s impossible to say with certainty whether souls exist at all, and the law cannot make its judgments on the basis of anything so speculative.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It also leaves us at risk from the same kind of slippery slope that comes of not knowing how many characteristics of corporations it takes to deny personhood to something.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>If intuition guides the first judgment, what is to prevent someone from arguing from intuition that while people on the whole have souls, certain kinds of human beings do not?</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >Then again, maybe when someone uses the term “soul” in this context, they mean it in a metaphorical sense.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Perhaps it is only a simple way of identifying an entity that is capable of experiencing conscious thought and emotions like love and sadness.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>That is a rather more concrete concept.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The actual notion of a soul remains pretty tough to pin down, but at least some of its attributes can be objectively identified.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But all the old problems then remain intact, since it’s quite easy to imagine a human being existing who, whether because of brain abnormalities or some extreme stoicism, does not experience emotion.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Also, I know I am not the only one who has wondered whether the brain activity of everyone around me rises to the level of conscious thought.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Does missing one capability or the other deprive an individual of a claim to personhood?</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >Thus, even modestly esoteric concepts don’t lessen the difficulty.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I expect that an opponent of corporate personhood would wonder at this point whether there is some obvious, concrete, and objective characteristic of corporations that prevents them from being able to be classed as persons and thus from having first amendment rights.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The only such feature that I know has been raised, and that I haven’t yet addressed directly, is corporations’ physical composition, or lack thereof.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>And again, this returns to satirical rundown of the non-human features of corporations offered by Colbert.</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" ><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"></span>The statement that corporations only exist on paper is probably the most compelling statement against their personhood, but it’s not strictly true.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Corporations do exist physically, albeit in a diffuse way.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>They are made up of an array of buildings that are located on and off of American soil, as well as all of the people who work within them.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The corporate person is housed within those structures, just as many human beings would claim that their own personhood is housed within but not identical to the structure of their bodies.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Our bodies are uniform and anchored within one physical location at any given time, but surely that doesn’t have anything to do with deciding our personhood.</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >If some mad science allowed a person to be deconstructed, with each limb kept alive and connected to a radio receiver in communication with the brain, a newly diffused physical makeup wouldn’t make the person cease to be a person, so long as all the separate parts were still governed together and functioned towards the same ends.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It wouldn’t matter if each arm and each leg were sent off to separate continents; personhood doesn’t really have anything to do with physical construction.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>A deconstructed person should still expect the full rights of a person, including rights to express political preferences through campaign spending.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>And such a person would be fully capable of utilizing those rights, even if its oral speech came from a head in Milwaukee while its letters came from an arm in Madrid.</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >But this analogy fits with the situation of corporate persons in only one respect, and it is with that observation that I finally get to my account of why Citizens United is indeed wrong.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Illustrating it will require one final analogy, because corporations are not like deconstructed people.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>They did not start as a unified whole and split into component parts, but were constructed from initially separate entities.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>And what’s more, those entities remained significantly separate even after being tied together under a shared name and corporate identity.</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >The corporation is more like a group of several complete, fully-functioning people who have been tasked with the role of operating a giant mechanical creature.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>One person inhabits each limb, perhaps one operates a mechanical heart or other synthetic organ, and one person or a committee of individuals resides in the head and directs operations of all of the other components of the robot.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Perhaps the robot can sign agreements with other robots and with comparatively tiny people.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Perhaps it can be the subject of legal action.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But since people must actively control the object in everything it does, what it cannot do is act autonomously.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Someone else must direct it to sign documents and to take legal action.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>And it is well that they do so, because no one else can enter into those agreements on its behalf, and yet all of those who make up the creature absorb some of the consequences of its legal obligations.</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >The people in the head of the mechanical creature can determine what is in its interest and direct it to act in accordance with those determinations, but they cannot claim to give voice to its opinions, because when everybody steps out of the thing, it’s still an inanimate object and can’t form opinions.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Everything that it does is in accordance with the views of the people in its head, and they are perfectly capable of leaving the mechanical creature and expressing their own opinions by whatever means are available to private citizens.</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >Essentially, what the Citizens United ruling has done is declare that while everyone who operates that creature can continue to vote for and fund whichever political candidates and causes they wish, they can now direct the giant robot to crush any politician who opposes those favored by the people sitting in its head.</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >I know this will seem like pure rhetoric, but I believe that my particular opposition to the Citizens United ruling constitutes the view that most respects the independent personhood of corporations.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I’m not bothered so much by the enormous power that they possess as I am by the fact that something so powerful is being used as a pawn for someone else’s ends.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>If corporations were capable of thinking independently and expressing their own opinions, then, God help us all, I would accept that they have every right to lift candidates up upon enormous piles of cash and try to carry them to the Congress or the White House.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>CEOs are free to support campaigns with their own private wealth.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The difference between them and the corporations that they run is not that the CEOs are people; it’s that they have voices.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Corporations, on the other hand, cannot speak.</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >The reason that Citizens United is wrong is not that it allows for corporate free speech rights, but that it allows for individual free speech rights to utilize corporate resources.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The very word “corporate” means “united into one,” so if taken at face value, that suggests that corporate free speech means that multiple individuals are united into one voice.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But we already had such unity before the Citizens United ruling was handed down: it was called “voting in common.”</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >When separate individuals vote for the same candidate or proposition, they are not really speaking with a single voice.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Our political options may be somewhat limited, but everybody has their own unique motivations for voting for, say, Barack Obama, or Mitt Romney, or Ron Paul.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It would be erroneous and terribly glib to say that every person who votes for one of these is necessarily of the same opinions on the issues, or that they are in such lock-step that they may as well be speaking with one voice.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But if we claim that corporate entities can speak, we are essentially saying just that.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>To give them not just personhood but a means of expression is to assert either that they are capable of forming thoughts and opinions independent of the people who make them up, which is absurd, or that all of the people who make them up think and believe and speak in the same way, which is defensible but simply cannot be the case.</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >The only way that it would be accurate to say that a corporation can speak is if the thoughts, beliefs, and opinions of every person who comprises some aspect of the structure and wealth of the corporation are in agreement with what its CEO or Board of Directors has to say.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The range of human opinion is simply too broad for this to be plausible.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I have no doubt that if we were to thoroughly survey any corporations recently enshrined with the power of political speech, we would find someone working within it whose choice of political candidates is at odds with that of his company’s leadership.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>And even if that proved not to be the case, it seems quite impossible that we would be unable to locate anybody who chooses the same candidates, but based on a different rationale than his colleagues or bosses.</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >The potential for vast differences of opinion is not limited to personal political attitudes, but includes individual perceptions of what is in the interest of the corporation itself.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>For instance, a certain proportion of employees and executives of a large-scale manufacturer might consider it to be in the company’s interest to oppose environmental regulations and infrastructural upgrades in order to limit overhead in the short-term, while another group sees greater benefit in investing in cleaner technologies for the sake of long-term cost-reduction.</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >So long as there is some variation in the opinions of people who comprise a single entity, there is insufficient unity within the entity for us to be able to say that it has its own opinion.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Thus, it is incapable of political speech.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Even if you give your money freely to a corporate entity for the sake of a political cause, the opinion that is expressed with that money is not your own, so your spending can’t be viewed as personal speech.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Democracy may work according to majority consensus, but individual expression does not.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Everyone’s voice is his own, and only one’s own voice is capable of expressing what he believes.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The problem with Citizens United is not simply that it gives voice to corporations, but that it gives voice to only a particular subset of the opinion within any given corporation.</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >In that way, the ruling is decidedly anti-Democratic.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Liberals may be uncomfortable with the notion of vesting rich entities with excessive powers of political persuasion, but it’s counterproductive to focus their objections on the unfair effects of that power when the real problem is the unfair co-opting of such an entity’s free speech rights for the expression of someone else’s thoughts.</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >If a corporation is to be said to speak, it must express the attitudes of every component individual in equal measure, or at least in proportion to his value within the organization.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>If it fails to do that, it is not expressing the thoughts of the corporation, but rather of some cherry-picked community of individuals within the organization.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Again, each one of these already has his own voice and his own free speech rights.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>If a corporation fails to express the sentiments of every component of itself at once because it cannot do so, then a corporation simply cannot speak for itself.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Neither can anyone speak for it, but all must defer to the preexisting capacities for individual speech possessed by the persons who make up the organization.</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >In the case of such deference, no one has to right to utilize corporate resources to express his own opinion.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>He already possesses his own resources to use toward that end.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>To utilize anyone else’s resources to express your opinion without the other person’s consent is to unjustly assert that his interests are absolutely identical to your own and that his voice would never differ from your own.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Since a corporation cannot speak, it cannot offer its consent.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>And it cannot speak because its interests are diffuse and changeable depending on the beliefs of every individual who comprises it.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>So any assertion of identity between an individual’s interests and a corporation’s is false at worst and unknowable at best.</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >Corporations are people, my friends.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Even as a liberal, I’ll agree to that.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>And as people, corporations are subject to all the same rights as private citizens, including the right to free speech.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But defending one’s right to free speech consists not only of assuring him the ability to express his own thoughts and opinions but also of seeing that no one else puts words in his mouth when he chooses to remain silent.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Granted, corporations don’t make that choice, but then they don’t make any choices.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>They are silent by necessity, being unable to speak.</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >A man with no capacity for self-expression may still have free speech rights, but his interests aren’t served by arbitrarily assigning another individual to speak for him, to write letters to Congress and sign his name, or to donate his money to political causes.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Allowing the leaders of corporations to insert those corporations into the political process is little better than that.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It permits individuals and small groups to co-opt the mute voices of powerful entities in order to amplify their own opinions.</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >Certainly, we should be thankful that corporations cannot speak, because the power that they wield is indeed excessive, but it would be an inconsistent application of democratic principles to deny free speech rights to any person that can form an opinion and express it.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Since corporations do not fall into that category, the Citizens United ruling pretends at defending free speech rights when in fact it creates a harmful imbalance in the means by which certain citizens can express their views.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It allows the individuals with the most powerful resources to copy their private political objectives onto the even more powerful template of a corporation.</span></p> <p style="font-family: georgia;" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="line-height:115%; Times New Roman","serif"font-size:100%;" >Making entire corporations into mouthpieces for their leaders is not a defense of corporate personhood.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>That, and not opposition to Citizens United, is the real assault on the concept.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>If the Supreme Court, Congressional candidates, and the nation’s CEOs believe in corporate personhood, let them stand aside and wait for corporations to think and act autonomously.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>If they are ever able to do so, I will stand aside and let them dominate our political process.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But if they remain incapable of speech, their claim to personhood is in no way supported by insistence on speaking for them.</span></p>Edward Carneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15705855929151669621noreply@blogger.com0