JHUS Staging

Tag: 2010

  • How Facebook Is Destroying Democracy (2010)

    This was a fairly exceptional find; I’d honestly forgotten about this article, written in March of 2010. Of course when it was written I was jeered and rejected as a handwaving extremist – how could you possibly think Facebook is destroying democracy, that’s just ridiculous – by all right-thinking people, with a healthy chorus of helpful disdain and ridicule from the usual gang of trolls.

    President Obama has proposed a 1.4% pay increase for active duty military in 2011. This is THE LOWEST SINCE 1973! Nice to know that during a time of rampant inflation, while war is fought in 2 theatres, our men and women in uniform get A LOWER PAY INCREASE THAN WELFARE RECIPIENTS!!! Please repost if you support our troops….1 Term say good bye

    This is the second time in a couple of days I’ve seen this, yet I’m not having a lot of luck finding any objective source that discusses these events, just a FB meme claiming it happened. [2023: This was originally written on March 8, 2010. The claim has since been broadly debunked as the nonsense that it is; military pay is tied to the Employment Cost Index and the president is required by law to propose pay increases tied to this index to ensure military pay rises in line with consumer product price inflation. Much of the related information which follows was written without that knowledge in hand at the time. -jh]

    I’d like to see more facts, including a broad discussion of the considerations which go in to making such a decision.  For example, what if the rate of increase among military personnel has been 10x the cost of living, while welfare payment caps have dropped, for all of the last ten years except this year in which an adjustment is being made to compensate for decreased military need and increased public assistance need? [2023 – this is where I basically cited the true mechanics of military pay raises without realizing it, in spite of using an extreme example. The underlying reasoning is why military pay is tied directly to ECI. -jh]  Obviously this very extreme example is not the case, but the underlying point remains: this is a complex series of issues, and the idea that posting some hyper-patriotic status message with a guilt-trip/us v. them tagline is going to solve anything is not only ridiculous, it’s incredibly destructive – and that’s the point of this article.

    It’s not that I reject out of hand the assertion of this latest rabble-rousing meme [2023 – and again rightly so, as the raw numbers were correct, so rejecting the assertion out of hand would’ve been wrong. -jh]. Rather the problem is that I have serious concerns about the direction we are being taken by our collective will to participate in such things without first determining their objective accuracy. 

    It seems to me that this kind of thing, while usually well-intentioned, represents the same sort of shallowness of thinking that led to the Iraq war in the first place, to some 60% of the US still believing as late as 2006 that Iraq was directly involved with 9-11, to the gigantic stimulus package [2023: this was the enormous bailout of Wall Street banks in 2008. -jh] that regardless of necessity was passed with such haste and sloppiness that it’s an iron-clad certainty that it’s not going to work as well as it could have.  We get all revved up over something and we just pounce, with little regard for the long-term results or the bigger picture.

    Look around this country, this world, your own mind. 

    Are you one of the people who thinks it’s perfectly reasonable to continue beating the “Obama’s citizenship’” horse? 

    Are you someone for whom “because the Bible says so” is a reasonable basis for laws to be made? 

    Are you someone who doesn’t throw up in their mouths a little bit every time you see a well-intentioned friend post a status message that suggests that if you don’t do the same, you are a traitor to your country and you want soldiers to die?

    Then I am sorry, but even if I love you from the very bottom of my heart, you are a Part Of The Problem. 

    How DARE any human being undertake to pass judgment on my love of country or fellow man – to suggest that I lack ‘patriotism’ or commitment to country or respect for those who volunteer their lives to defend it regardless of whether I think they’re ultimately being conned in 90% of the cases when this is their motivation for enlisting – based on my willingness to endorse with my name and supportive repetition a poorly-constructed paragraph full of – at BEST – emotively presented para-facts intended to do nothing more than stoke the ire of conservatives and further create a society of code words and passphrases by which we can identify “them” and “us” as defined by some arbitrary and subjective standard of political adherence that ultimately exists only in the mind of the person passing judgment?  How terribly disrespectful and presumptuous. 

    Frankly, I wouldn’t post that paragraph in my status message even if I believed every word.

    Why not?

    For starters, it’s written with all the intellect and critical thought of a rambunctious sixth-grader.  I’m 40 years old, and I’d be embarrassed to lay claim to the “logic” and “patriotism” presented here.  Look at it.  The SCREAMING CAPITALIZATION AND ABUSE OF PUNCTUATION!  The saccharine exhortation to “patriotism” that’s really an exhortation to look down our noses at those un-American liberal commie heathens who Don’t Support Our Troops (and in the process of that coercion, an exhortation to frankly piss all over everything that actually makes this country worth fighting for).  The snide, unspoken undertone that of anyone in Our Great Nation who might need some money from the government, them welfare leeches (read:  ethnic minorities, brown people, and white women who have sex with them; these folks never care that the vast majority of welfare recipients in this country are white people in heavily Republican/right leaning states) better be the LAST in line.  The suggestion that “supporting the troops” must necessarily entail supporting their orders.  The relentlessly stupid and continually increasing attempt to lay the results of 8 years (and more) of utter mismanagement and malfeasance at the feet of a president who has been in office less than a year and a half. 

    The whole thing just plain sucks.  It’s an intellectual void.  I’m sorry that some people will take that personally, but let’s be real here:  as much as I complain about people, I wouldn’t waste my time trying to point these things out if I didn’t love and respect them.  I’m sorry that it hurts some people’s feelings or moves some people to drop me from their friends’ list or what have you, but remaining silent is not an option. I’d certainly rather your feelings be hurt by me rattling you out of your comfort zone with the truth than they be hurt twenty years from now when you realize it’s too late to stop the decline and part of the reason for that is you were allowed to continue believing things that aren’t true.

    There are a lot of times when I’m writing that I feel like the guy at a party just sober enough to try and tell a friend that they’ve pissed themselves, only to get punched in the mouth for saying bad things.

    America…you’re drunk on fear and you’ve voided hate and xenophobia all over yourself.  Go sober up and change your pants. [2023 – spoiler alert: we not only didn’t sober up, we didn’t even bother changing our pants. We just drank more and more and insisted that anyone who didn’t void themselves in their Levi’s was an unamerican traitor in thrall to the illegitimate Kenyan non-citizen President. And it worked on about 70 million of us, and it’s still working. -jh]

    All I’m saying is that if you want to have something to say, try to make it something meaningful and fact-based if you’re going to complain about the government.  There are plenty of legitimate reasons to gripe without relying on this kind of unsupported hyperbolic hang-wringing panic-button nonsense, and in many cases (like this one) the unspoken messages tend to ring much louder with the coherent observer than the spoken ones do.  When I see a message like this, all I read is “I’m really worried about the economy and my position in life, but I can’t be bothered to find an effective way to improve things for myself so I’ll just whine about the evil gubmint.”  In the mean time, people are continually manipulated into cheering for the defeat of a health care bill that would, without question, save their lives or the life of someone they love in reasonably short order. [2023 – this was, of course, what became “Obamacare” after it was watered down and compromised to the point of being only slightly less odious than the godforsaken trainwreck of a health care system we had in place already. Obama’s compromise on this remains one of my greatest disappointments in his presidency. -jh]

    But instead the politicians play on our fears and prejudices, and we continue buying in.  It’s not health care reform people are rallying against, it’s the notion that they might have to pay for someone else’s care…which, if people were really angry about it, would be the absolute end of the insurance industry (and would also result in a 20-year drop in our life expectancy in a matter of a generation or two) given that’s the entire basis of the idea of insurance. 

    The problem in this country, quite frankly, is that we’ve become a nation of selfish, greedy, avaricious, entitled, lazy, ignorant, jerks. [2023 – and it’s only gotten worse since I wrote this in 2010. -jh]  Until we get it through our heads that we are ALL in this together and when one person fails we all fail, we’re going to continue these silly, pointless arguments, and people will continue to die senselessly and our nation will continue to erode as our best and brightest are continually prevented from reaching their full potential by the efforts of those who hold the cash to avoid sharing it with anyone.

    These snarky, factually void, and often logically broken memes are a huge part of the problem.  They play on mob mentality and the human need for acceptance in order to manipulate people into rallying against the very things that would improve their lives.  We get the leadership we get because we consistently refuse to educate ourselves to understand what real leadership and real solutions look like.  These kinds of memes make this refusal not just okay, but popular and easy – why bother knowing what’s going on in the world when we can just get it from our friends’ status updates?

    It is the fundamental obligation of a free citizen to make every possible effort to understand the issues and candidates that are spread before us at election time.  It is a direct assault on that obligation, and on freedom itself, to reduce this obligation to a copy-and-paste lynch mob.

    93% of people won’t have the guts to tell their friends to quit trying to manipulate them (and to quit allowing themselves to be manipulated!) via status messages….will YOU?

    [2023 – you can see in this article some of the roots that led me to start attending university to major in communication and minor in political science about five months after this was written. While it’s not bad, I generally failed to make the points I was reaching for, in large part because my abilities were limited by my lack of formal education in the subjects under the review and criticism of qualified professionals in the field. Still, I prefer being honest to stroking myself with ego-gratifying lies, and the honest thing to do is let it sit as written and accept that while I did a competent job of explaining my position, it’s a far cry from the level of expertise I could’ve brought to the conversation even a year later, let alone now nearly a decade and a half in the future. Among other major issues, I failed to clearly make the point that absorbing our political information in memes and snippets crafted primarily to appeal to our egos is poisonous to our democracy and we not only need to stop doing it, we need to pressure social media companies to enact stronger protections against the propagation of disinformation. It’s a good article, but it didn’t make the case I wanted it to as strongly as I’d hoped, in retrospect. -jh]

  • Tebow, Dobson, and God

    Curated post from 2010, using the controversial anti-abortion ad aired during that year’s superbowl featuring Tim Tebow as a frame to discuss the larger abortion issue.

    (See original article: ‘Miracle’ Tim Tebow Super Bowl ad puts hit on critics – Faith & Reason [archive link verified working, Oct 2023])

    The debate over abortion in this country, and around the world, has raged since the first miscarriage.  In the main, the debate has been characterized by an overabundance of emotive outbursts, handwringing, ad hominem attacks, and a paucity of facts, balance, and clear, rational thought.

    One of the manifest expressions of the former list of attributes is the rise of hard-right “Christian” groups such as the American Family Association and Focus on the Family.  As a part of their overall fundamentalist diet of exhortations to donate money, condemnation of everyone who “ain’t like us,” and rampant, cynical fear-mongering for profit, these “faith-based” organizations routinely seek out hot-button issues like gay marriage, free expression, and abortion with which to stir up their marks and generate donations. 

    The Super Bowl 2009 advertisement featuring football star Tim Tebow and his mom making vague statements about family has stirred up some debate, but for me it’s not about the abortion issue.  The abortion issue is settled as far as I’m concerned; I don’t like them – and I know from the closest experience a man can that they’re not exactly a trip to the fun park – I wish they weren’t necessary, but until steps are taken to ensure that there is never a valid reason to terminate a pregnancy (steps that are currently well beyond the capability of our technology and our social evolution), they are.  Since they are necessary, the solution is to reduce their necessity while also providing a safe and reliable means of abortion for women who need it.  As need decreases, so will incidence.  Period.  There is no other logical solution to the “problem of abortion.”  So that argument’s done.

    My issues with the Tebow ad are not with his, his mother’s, or anyone else’s opinion about abortion.  I want that made clear. Everyone’s entitled to hold an opinion, regardless of how ludicrous I think it is.

    My issue is, first and foremost, with a group like FotF insinuating themselves into national discourse in the first place and secondarily with the stealthy way they’ve gone about it.  Frankly, I’d have had less problem with the ad if Tebow and his mom just walked onscreen and said “This man almost didn’t exist because I seriously considered terminating my pregnancy with him.  I’m glad I didn’t, and I believe you will feel the same way if you make the same choice.  Thank you.”  This heartwarming and light-hearted little diversion leads you to FotF’s website…where the indoctrination process begins.  “Oh, look honey, they don’t like abortion!  We don’t like abortion either!  We should sign up for their mailing list!”  And next thing you know FotF has a few hundred thousand more “members” that they can use to bully the media into covering them, and you as a member are suddenly being regaled with tales of doom and woe in which a vote for Barack Obama is a vote for mandatory gay marriage, mandatory gender education in first grade, the end of adoption agencies, nuclear war in the middle east, terrorist attacks in the US, a new Russian imperialism unchecked by a weakened and apathetic US military, [2023: and boy oh boy is that an entertaining read here in 2023, give that its premise is to predict the horrible, broken future of 2012 under the Obama presidency! It’s long and dull and enraging when you remember people actually think like that, but beyond that it’s hilarious. -jh] and all manner of other Terrible Things including a massive series of job openings when every good-thinking Christian quits their jobs and shuts down their business because they’re now being “forced” to act “against their morals” by (for instance) helping a gay couple adopt a child.

    Focus’ tactics and methods are execrable and well-known.  Any reasonably sentient mind can read the letter I linked to in the above paragraph and quickly note how often subtexts of pedophilia and homosexuality are both invoked and conflated.  In paragraph after paragraph we are told that the evil liberals, “the gays,” the ACLU, and of course that old standby the Commies, are just waiting for President Barry to welcome them in the door and transform America into a nation of roving homosexual pedophiles, anti-religious violence, and a new pot-smoking effete bourgeoisie that revels in the sight of Evul. 

    Organizations like Focus on the Family are brutal and terrorizing manipulators of public ignorance.  They rely on our inability to separate emotions from objective facts in order to push their dream of theocratic totalitarianism on the rest of us.  “Dr.” James Dobson and his ilk, each and every one of them, wants to be Nehemiah Scudder when they grow up.  This is the method behind their madness of the seemingly silly and naive attempts to influence education in this country; if we get ‘em while they’re young, they’re WAY easier to keep when they grow up. [2023: this isn’t just flowery prose; even as a firm atheist of some dozen years following decades of agnosticism, I still can’t – and never will – shake the brain-image of ‘God’ as an old white guy with a big white beard and flowing white hair. It was programmed into me before I could read, and I started reading when I was two. -jh]

    I appreciate anyone standing up for what they believe in [2023: given what I’ve seen people standing up for since writing this article, I can no longer stand behind the statement. -jh], but I think anyone who chooses to do so has the duty to ensure that they are fully aware of the implications of who they’re standing with.  I’m sorry, but if an organization like Focus on the Family came out hard in favor of anything I agreed with, I’d have to take a hard look at what I’m agreeing with.

    I’d respectfully suggest that those of you who are applauding Tebow here, or who think that your “support” for this advertisement or for Focus on the Family is going to prevent ONE abortion in the world today, tomorrow, or ever, may want to reconsider who you’re hanging out with.  Those groups are sick, endlessly focused on sexuality (and that often with a specific focus on children – EVERYTHING is a “threat” to “innocence” WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!?! gimme money…[2023 and this con is also working better than ever, 13 years later. -jh]) and ultimately existing for the sole purpose of enriching themselves at the expense of the credulous, the frightened, the ignorant, the superstitious, and the confused…every one of whom are good people with kind hearts and the best of intentions, just like you.

  • Dress Codes? Seriously?

    While this curated article was originally written in 2010, the subject of school dress codes continues rearing its ugly head – if anything even more frequently now as the Trump-empowered autocratic-fascist contingent in our culture feel confident in their victory over the evil forces of individual identity. There are few more overt and clear mechanisms of deranged, malicious powermongering than bullying a little kid for how they look. While this odious, evil behavior is most often directed at young women showing “too much skin” they’re not the only ones targeted. Anyone who gets behind this particular type of oppression and suppression is a mortal enemy of everything good in the world.

    Now here’s a story that’ll get you raging against the machine like a gutter punk in short order.  It seems that a four year old boy in Texas has been suspended from school…for having long hair.

    The school district responsible for this pornographically obscene attempt at powermongering, mandatory indoctrination to the status quo, and non-consensual behavior modification is Mesquite, Texas.  According to the news story from the AP, their dress code is justified as follows:

    “students who dress and groom themselves neatly, and in an acceptable and appropriate manner, are more likely to become constructive members of the society in which we live.”

    I have a whole list of problems just with this sentence and the thought processes behind it.  Who is to decide what constitutes “neatly,” “acceptable,” “appropriate,” and “constructive?”  Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Jim Jones, and Bill O’Reilly all dress well.  I would hardly call any of them ‘acceptable,’ ‘appropriate,’ or ‘constructive.’

    And let’s look at the other side, shall we?  In the early 19th century the works of Beethoven were derided as ‘longhair music.’  If our world only counted as valuable that which the Mesquite School Board finds acceptable, here’s a quick list off the top of my head of people who would not have done the things they did.  Each of these people was, at one time or another, longhaired, unacceptable, and inappropriate:

    • Beethoven
    • Edgar Allen Poe
    • H.P. Lovecraft
    • George Orwell
    • H. G. Wells
    • Robert Heinlein
    • Issas Asimov
    • Jesus
    • Moses
    • Abraham
    • Lot, and especially his daughters
    • Hippocrates
    • Socrates
    • Homer
    • Shakespeare
    • The entire musical genres of blues, jazz, rock and roll, rock, rap, hip hop, country after 1956 or so, and all their derivatives, plus half their roots, and every artist in them from Robert Johnson to Miley Cyrus.
    • George Washington
    • Thomas Jefferson
    • Abraham Lincoln
    • John F. Kennedy
    • Barack Obama
    • and thousands more

    While I recognize the need for the school district and their teachers and employees to be able to maintain order, I submit that it would be much more valuable an exercise for an educational body to work diligently at the task of teaching kids to understand WHY maintaining order is important, and WHAT actual order is (versus sullen compliance under duress), and then the kids will tend to choose and respect order to a healthy extend (and to reject it to an equally healthy extent). 

    It is very possible to have a mob of angry, well-dressed schoolchildren trash a school. 

    It’s equally possible for a bunch of long-haired, starry-eyed idealists to change the course of human history forever and create the greatest framework of human liberty ever known.

    Across our nation our schools are failing miserably to educate our children.  This has been a problem for generations, and it continues to be a growing problem that long ago reached epic proportions.  Not only are we falling behind the rest of the world in the classic “three r’s,” but five minutes on the ‘net or reviewing current popular culture trends will make clear that we’re failing to teach deductive or inductive logic, ethics, critical thinking, complex reasoning, independent thought, or genuine self-respect (as opposed to regurgitated slogans from 12-step groups that kids just roll their eyes at), and in some families we’ve been doing so for five generations or more.

    I am hard-pressed to think of any recent example that more clearly and completely demonstrates Where And How We Have Gone Wrong than this story.  “YOU!!  FOUR YEAR OLD!! YOU ARE DOOMED TO A LIFETIME OF INCOMPLETE EDUCATION BECAUSE YOUR MOM THINKS YOU LOOK CUTE WITH BANGS!!”

    The best part is the actual dress code, which you can find here. (Click the paragraph headings, and don’t feel bad – it took me a minute, too.)

    Do me a favor.  See that little “share” button up at the top of the page?  Click on it, and share this with everyone you know.  Enough is enough.  I can’t and won’t speak for anyone else, but I’m sick to death of seeing the “land of the free” usurped by a collection of self-important, mediocre failures, lacking in passion and clarity of thought and consideration of others while loudly decrying everyone else’s ignorance and selfishness.  Seriously.  Spread this around.  Enough is Enough.

    Great things are rarely, if ever, comfortable.  Nor are they generally safe, acceptable, appropriate, or neat.  The United States Constitution was conceived of, written by, defended by, and ultimately enacted by a collection of longhaired miscreants who had the unmitigated gall to think for themselves.  That gall, that drive, that chutzpah, that underdog-to-the-top dream of living comfortably simply by being who you are and doing what you do best and enjoy…that is America.  Every last bit of it.  Not one single man, woman, or child among us would be here – would even exist as we are – if it wasn’t for the long-haired, the socially unacceptable, the ones who refused to let others think for them, and this blue-nosed attempt to turn children into little automatons is child abuse on it’s face, and absolutely un-American at it’s heart.

    I will not stoop to speculating on the personal psychological defects that drive the individuals responsible for writing and enforcing this policy; I don’t know what individuals are personally responsible, and if I did know their names I know nothing about them personally.  The individuals involved should not be attacked personally by word or deed; they are merely the mindless yeast-like propagators of the failed system that spawned them.  Anything directed at them other than genuine pity is about as useful and meaningful as spanking a dog dropping because it’s on the living room rug.

    (They SHOULD, of course, be immediately removed from their positions, along with all their friends, family, college roommates, and so forth whom they have hired, and replaced with competent personnel.  That’s not a personal issue; it’s a functional one.)

    But I know that they are wrong.  Wrongest, even.  This whole situation is a perfect encapsulation of the nature and scope of our failures in education over multiple generations. 

    Dearest School Board, and all the School Boards like you:  Your job is to teach children to THINK, not to OBEY.  Children who can think, will obey any rule that makes sense to them…and if you are incapable of explaining the rules to them without falling back on “because I said so,” then you are a miserable failure as an educator and should retire immediately.  If you and everyone like you clears the system, those of us who believe that teaching should be among the highest-paid, best-rewarded, and most-respected positions in any developed society can begin making our case credibly.

    My forever longhaired, unacceptable, inappropriate, and unconstructive thanks in advance for your collective compliance.

  • Who Watches The Watchmen (2010)

    [embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUeD_ReLG6Q[/embedyt]

    In this video, filmed spontaneously on West North Street in Kalamazoo, Michigan (just west of North Park, I’ll embed a map) in the summer of 2010, we watch a police stop in the background while discussing the significant possibility that simply by recording this video, I was risking arrest.  As I write this in 2021, there is an active case in process that may make that more true.  Thanks to noted asshat and anthropomorphic suppurating rectal polyp James O’Keefe at Project Veritas and his bullshit, a court in the eastern district of Michigan has put this state’s long-standing position as a “single party consent” state for audio recording – meaning only one person, and not all of them, need consent to a conversation being recorded – into jeopardy, and the state supreme court is expected to rule on the matter fairly soon (if they haven’t already; I couldn’t find anything in a quick google search).

    The ability to record authorities in the execution of their official duties is absolutely critical to of a free state.  Honorable execution of the duties of public safety should never require hiding in shadows and forbidding an independent record.  It is absolutely incumbent of each of us as citizens to remain vigilant and diligent in holding our public servants to account, every time.

    These laws also represent something that I didn’t discuss in the video, and that is how the right wing has engaged in a long play of stuffing every possible office from president to dog catcher with fundamentalists advancing authoritarian and – as is now much less radical to say than when I was saying it at the time this video was filmed – even fascist agendas.  You have to keep your eyes open, you have to remain engaged, and even if it means running for office yourself you have to take an active and ongoing part in protecting the necessary freedoms that allow us to exist in a free nation, no matter how abridged that freedom may be at any given moment in any given circumstance.  To whatever extent American freedom is succeeding at all, it is succeeding because we, the people, keep our eyes open.

  • I Shouldn’t Have To (2010)

    [embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BfxTj7_V8c[/embedyt]

    “I shouldn’t have to press 1 for English, this is America!”  Another recurring theme that shouldn’t have occurred in the first place.  As you can see from the screenshot/featured image for this article, which was captured on 25-March-2021, it’s still occurring.

    I’m not even going to bother with all the reasons this kind of bigoted, ignorant thinking sucks; anyone with an IQ above room temperature knows the arguments backwards and forwards.  This video is pure bias reinforcement, shot spontaneously outside my home in Kalamazoo at the time.  It’s not likely nor intended to move any bigot who thinks this way.  It’s intended to be something others who feel the way I do about this ignorance can share when they encounter it in the wild, to reinforce and normalize the idea that we’re out here and not going away, and we won’t be gaslighted into hiding in a closet to please bigots.

  • Laff Riot: Partying 101 (2010)

    This is one of my shorter videos, shot after I heard about a big party and a bunch of arrests over spring break near the campus of Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo.

    A couple of interesting/fun/funny points here.  First, about six months after this I became a student at Western.  Second, I’m the spot I’m standing on is part of the Hunter’s Ridge apartment complex on West Michigan Ave.  In 2019, I ended up working for them as a “porter” (and destroyed my feet doing it, but that’s not their fault at all – age, little diabetes, little poor nutrition, etc.).

    Anyway, yeah.  Another entry in my sporadic and ongoing series of “don’t be a dumbass” media tutorials.

  • Conspiracies: The Truth Is Not “Out There”

    (This is a curated combination of two different related pieces; the video, “See Oh En Spiracy,” and this article which originally appeared at https://web.archive.org/web/20100816230908/http://www.lowgenius.net/post/2010/08/15/The-Truth-Which-Is-NOT-e2809cOut-Theree2809d.aspx. A few minor edits have been made; the only substantive change is the addition of information relating to “Heinlein’s/Hanlon’s Razor.”)

    We as a nation have become seduced by conspiracies. The latest: That BP is actually showing a *second* well in the gulf on their cameras, because the first is still leaking and they don’t want us to know.

    Bullshit. We have to stop passing on bullshit information like this when there are important things we can be doing that actually matter and will make a difference to our ultimate survival.

    “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” Known variously as “Hanlon’s Razor” and “Heinlein’s Razor,” this basic idea forms a solid line between healthy skeptic and frothing whackjob. (On the ambiguity of sourcing; I first read the phrase, in precisely this working, in Heinlein’s “Time Enough For Love,” published in 1973; the Wiki article that insists on attributing the phrase to Robert J. Hanlon cites his first publication in 1980. While in fairness it must be said that the basic formulation is at least a couple of centuries old, if the choice is between Hanlon and Heinlein, Heinlein clearly gets the nod.)

    – The wells in question are less than 250 feet from each other. Not “miles” as has often been asserted.

    – Several of these videos tie everything back in with “The global banking elite.” This phrase inevitably proves, when one follows the trail of paranoid conspiracy theorism back from the person who utters that phrase to the identity of the “global banking elite,” to be “OMGJOOZ!” This has been so consistent that I don’t bother following the trail anymore when I see this phrase. I know where it’s going – to THE J0000Z THE EVUL JOOOOZ WHO CONTROL EVERYTHING IT’S THE JOOZ THE JOOZ THE JOOOOOOZ ZIONIST ROTHCHILD BILDERBURG CITY BANK OF ENGLAND FREEMASONS UFO’S BLACK HELICOPTERS AND JOOOOOOZ. F’n ridiculous bullshit is what it is.

    – Nobody has managed to explain what purpose there would be to this GREAT BIG CONSPIRACY, nor have they explained how enormous companies with the power and resources to push governments around and demand carte blanche to destroy the planet at will for profit are suddenly so inept that a couple of rednecks and slackers with nothing to do but stare at a live fed of the ocean floor all day can see through their clever ruse…a ruse which is designed to what, convince us there’s no oil spill? If they were going to do that, why not do it two months ago? You know, before everybody started worrying about Armageddon, before BP took a multi-billion-dollar stock hit and destroyed their brand name, before people were pissed off and scared to actually start getting off their asses and thinking about how to reduce their dependence on oil? Because you know, THAT kind of conspiracy would have made sense. This is like a conspiracy to go close the barn door after the horses have escaped.

    This horrendous catastrophe has emphasized, in the strongest terms possible without causing immediate profound loss of life, that we must eliminate our dependence on petroleum.  Not on “foreign oil,” on oil period.  It has shined a bright light on the stark reality that we must find alternatives to petrochemicals, and we must, immediately begin doing everything that we haven’t but should have been to reduce consumption, or these kinds of things will keep happening and building on other things until this planet is no longer suitable for human life.

    People don’t want to deal with that. At ALL. They’d rather ignore it and fiddle while Rome – or Moscow – burns. Tell you the truth, I’d rather myself. I’m sure you would as well – who among us wouldn’t rather have fun than worry about all these heavy issues? I understand and I sympathize…but that attitude is so dangerous and so hypnotizing. You can already see it – the discussion has already begun to shift away from “we must reduce our consumption” to “we must find someone else to blame.”

    Because we don’t want to blame ourselves. If we do that it means we have to give up our comforts and go through the difficulty and expense of learning new habits. It’s almost a really gigantic, society-magnitude manifestation of the suicidal hopelessness response. I’m sure you learn of this in Finland – the danger of being lost out in the cold and thinking “I’ll just lay down for a minute, a nap would be so nice,” and then you wake up with your ass frozen to death.

    I’m afraid that’s what we’re seeing right now in many people, this kind of response. Ignore it and it will go away. Stop thinking about what I have to do to make my little difference and start trying to force the Big Evil Oil Company to solve everything. If we can just be angry enough at them we can make them fix it with their Big Evil Company magic and we’ll still be able to drive our Humvee’s and Escalades in the suburbs, we won’t have to change our own behavior.

    We’re wrong. We will have to change our behavior. If we don’t, we will die. We must stop trying to divert our own attention from the things we need to do to stop abusing this planet.

  • Makin’ Some Noise

    Another one from just before I decided to go to college at age 40. At this point, I was still thinking of myself more as a performer who did political material, than a real political analyst or what have so, and I did a lot of these little videos just as though they were stand-up comedy bits, with a helping of pro wrestling style verisimilitude in the delivery – more “cutting a promo” than “telling a joke.”

    In this short bit, we discuss the idiocy of using traffic noises like sirens or car crashes in audio intended for broadcast on radios people listen to in traffic.

  • Shearing “Sheeple”

    Once upon a time the word “sheeple” was a clever little riposte reflecting the frustration of some parts of our culture with others who seemed to be thoughtless and easily led.

    That time was around the time Hendrix got done playing the Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock, and since then it’s usually more a like a trite contrived attempt at in-group signalling because it generally comes from a fairly well-defined range of the ideological spectrum.

    This is a snarky li’l rant about how lame it is to be saying it fifty years after the last time it meant anything and thinking you’ve just won the game.

  • Right Wing Media Is Professional Wrestling (2010)

    [su_dropcap]I[/su_dropcap] created a bunch of videos and other digital between 2009 and 2015 or so about a variety of topics, sort of the first version of my official career as a media critic and political analyst and all-around demagogue.  Much of it was just free-form ranting on whatever subject I might find at hand, as is this video from 2010, the first zombie content I’m digging up and gathering together under the heading of “JH Classic.”

    In this video, we discuss the similarities between how right-wing media builds a disinformation narrative using the same tools employed by professional wrestlers and promoters back in the days when “exhibition wrestling” was a carnival sideshow and often involved conning local men into the ring for fights, which the promoter and his assistants would take bets (“make book”) on from the crowd while suckering their hometown boy into a fight against someone who had already lost a couple of matches and clearly couldn’t fight, but then magically became a martial arts master when Local Boy gets in the ring with him…after all Local Boy’s friends have made bets on him to win.

    The scheme varied, and continues doing so to this day, but that was the core scam, the main “work” of the spectacle.  In this video I discuss how the same basic psychology is used to befuddle and mesmerize consumers of mass media – and make no mistake, although my focus here was on Fox News and the right, the rest of the spectrum is not walking the moral high ground on this either.  You may be able to rationalize some of it by noting it’s not as extreme or as misleading, or even fall into the “ends justify the means” thinking by noting that even if it’s the same tactics, the goal of the strategy is more ethically supportable from the left.

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    It really isn’t; the goal is profit, not ideology, and neither your heroes nor mine are any less susceptible to its allure than those we disagree with ideologically.

    I’m not going to re-litigate the video here.  I chose this particular video because it’s one of several I filmed while staying with my friends Vince and Kym in Royal Oak, Mi. during the spring and summer of 2010.  It was they who suggested I go to college, which I did shortly thereafter.  I’ve often discussed how I felt like I’d reached the limits of my ability to self-educate in terms of nomenclature and terminology and tools to present and defend my positions in the “big leagues,” e.g. in a context where that level of academic knowledge is expected as a sign of competence like public speaking, or being an effective activist.  Plus it gave me source content to use for playing around with filters and effects in Adobe Premiere.  So this video is kind of a snapshot of that moment, basically.

    It’s well worth noting how well this strategy has played out and how much more pervasive it’s become in the last decade; we’ve elected Donald Trump, a guy who has literally been an entertainer in the professional wrestling business, to the United States Presidency.  Maybe if his fans understood some of this stuff – or if his opponents in the “independent liberal” Facebook Page-o-Sphere understood why they shouldn’t have embraced these tactics in spite of their equal utility as clickbait to generate ad revenue – we wouldn’t have that problem.

    Enjoy, and please remember to subscribe to my YouTube channel, there’s a bunch of old content that will be visible there over the coming weeks, plus I’ll be creating and publishing new stuff there as well!

    [embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxSU-ajrcL4[/embedyt]