The 2012 presidential campaign is coming down to its last few days, for those of you who have just recovered from an eighteen-month coma and have immediately decided to check out this website (and why wouldn’t you?) And for some reason, it’s actually kind of close. Not as close as many in the mass media are making it out to be; most pundits are deliberately ignoring any information that would make the race seem like anything other than a down-to-the-wire deadlock (like, say, the existence of the Electoral College, or the unreliability of the “likely voter” screen) because let’s face it, nobody tunes in to CNN to see a bunch of guys saying, “Romney’s DOA. Wanna break down the details of House Bill No. 497?”

But it is closer than it should be. Even if the two men are not absolutely deadlocked, Romney still has a chance to win this. And if you are one of the people who this open letter is addressed to, it’s because of people like you. I don’t know if you’re undecided, apathetic, or actually planning to vote Republican, but if you’re any of these things, I have one thing to say to you: Please change your mind. Right now. Because if Mitt Romney wins, I honestly think that’s pretty much it for the United States of America.

Not, mind you, because Mitt Romney has some unrevealed policy goals that will destroy this country. I think that Mitt Romney will be a bad President, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t think he’ll do anything radically different than George W. Bush. He’ll probably be a better President than Bush, in fact…mainly because it’s not actually possible to be worse…but he’ll probably be more slightly moderate because he’s not a true believer like Bush was. He’s a cynical, calculating schemer with no personal convictions, which is actually an improvement over a President who had deep personal convictions that all happened to be absolutely wrong. (The analogy I always used was, “If you had a firefighter who thought that gasoline put out fires, would you want him to be a determined firefighter who always charged in regardless of the obstacles, or would you want him to be wishy-washy about it?”)

But it’s not the hypothetical Presidency of Mitt Romney that scares me. It’s the fact of his victory that I think would spell the beginning of the end for America. Because Mitt Romney has run the first campaign in American history founded entirely on lying. That’s not to say that other candidates, or indeed other successful candidates, haven’t lied before. We all know they have. But Mitt Romney has made the conscious decision to run using nothing but lies. He has lied about himself; he has lied about his opponent. When he has been caught lying, he has either responded with a new and slightly more complex lie, or he has lied about being caught lying. Where he has avoided lying, it has been either with empty platitudes or with pleas for trust in the absence of evidence. The only time the man has ever revealed his true plans, thoughts, opinions or emotions in the entire eighteen-month campaign, it has been when he did not know he was being recorded, and it was to express his open and naked contempt for almost half the electorate. Mitt Romney is running on the platform that if you spend enough money throwing enough bullshit at the wall, sooner or later enough of it will stick to convince people to vote for you. Mitt Romney is running the first ever entirely fact-free campaign.

And if it works…if the people pushing Romney’s candidacy find out that they can actually win with this strategy, they will do it again. Mitt Romney’s next campaign, in 2016, will be nothing more than naked lies and character assassination directed against his opponent, and 2020 will see another empty suit spouting empty bullshit. And every one of these empty suits will do what the last group perfected: Loot the public treasury with both hands and funnel it into the hands of their rich benefactors. They will steal until there is no money left if they have their way, and they will never tell the truth until they learn that there are consequences for lying.

So far, this campaign hasn’t exactly done a great job of teaching them that. The media hasn’t called Romney on his lies in any meaningful sense. Obama has pointed out the existence of the lies, but there’s only so honest he can be without opening himself up to charges of character assassination. The only people left to hold Mitt Romney accountable for being a shameless, craven liar are the American voters. So please…on Tuesday, can you go out and do that? Because I guarantee you, they will lie like this until it stops helping them get elected. Or until they have stripped this country to the bones like vultures feeding on a carcass. I’m kind of assuming you don’t want that to happen.

It’s bad enough that Daniel Tosh started talking about how funny rape jokes are. I’ll admit, that’s about the level of “humor” you’d expect from a man whose TV series consists of him showing YouTube videos and saying, “Hey, these people are dumbasses,” but it’s still a level of humor that you normally expect from that one guy in the fraternity who doesn’t realize that awkward silence doesn’t actually mean they’re secretly agreeing with you and don’t want to admit it. It is far, far worse when someone in the audience finally got fed up with how much of a worthless shit of a human being he was and called him on it, he responded by suggesting it would be funny if that person was gang-raped by the rest of the audience. (I sincerely hope that all of you are responding with, “Wait, he did what now?”) These things are terrible, but I will admit that my opinion of Daniel Tosh was already low enough that finding out he was inciting people to sexual assualt did not actually do much to make me think less of him.

I will admit, it made me think quite a bit less of talented comedians like Louis C.K. and Patton Oswalt to find out that they were defending this as an exercise of free speech. Because while the initial monologue is free speech and must be defended as such, his response to the heckler would have to be considered as incitement to violence, which is not constitutionally protected. (You could, I suppose, argue that while his statement was clearly “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action”, it was not “likely to incite or produce such action”. But given that the woman felt threatened enough to immediately leave the building, I would say that Tosh has no more grounds to his defense than I would if I was in the audience and started shouting about how funny it would be if we all started throwing our glasses at the stage. A room full of mildly intoxicated people is enough of a twitchy thing that I’d say any comments inciting them to violence are a terrible mistake.)

But here is the lesson for today: FOR FUCK’S SAKE, people, if you do hear about this, and you absolutely must feel compelled to defend Tosh’s actions as anything other than, “Have you seen this guy? He’s so coked up he doesn’t know what he’s doing half the time! If he has pants on, it’s a good day for him! You can’t take anything that comes out of his mouth as being meaningful; it’s like getting mad at the chimp for throwing shit at you! He’s never going to learn to behave like a civilized human being, and at least putting him on stage at a comedy club keeps him off the streets…”

…then please, do not fucking argue, “Well, she was a heckler, and heckling is such a social faux pas that people who do it deserve to be humiliated by the comedian that they just insulted. After all, Don Rickles and George Carlin and Richard Pryor did that kind of thing all the time!” Because saying this is a very good sign that you are not a decent human being, and if you find that statement leaping to mind as your defense, it is time to sit down for some serious introspection. (Michael Richards quit stand-up and went to Angkor Wat. I’m not suggesting that you go to Cambodian temples to get your head straight, but there are probably some very nice Buddhists in your own home country who can help.)

Because Daniel Tosh did not humiliate that woman. She did not leave that club as fast as she could because she felt humiliated. She left because she felt threatened. Put as kind a face on it as you want, suggest that the threat was not meant seriously if you feel like it, but Daniel Tosh threatened her for talking back to him. There is no fucking act of speech that should ever get, “I want the people in this room to gang-rape you” as a response. And yeah, this is one of those things that I’m going to act all self-righteous about, because yes, I am better than someone who thinks it’s okay to threaten a woman with sexual assault when she says a comedian isn’t funny. It’s not that high of a bar. And yes, even though people say this about just about everything on the Internet up to and including preferring Nightwing to Batman…disagreeing with that really does make you a worse human being. Sorry if you’re just now finding that out, but better you hear it from me than someone else.

Every time I hear about Geraldo Rivera’s comments on the Trayvon Martin shootings, I always picture him talking to the victim’s family. I picture him sitting there, an expression of Sincere Concern on his face (the one he’s practiced over years of TV “journalism”), perhaps putting a hand on one family member’s knee in a sort of “There, there” gesture. And I picture him trying to explain the position he’s apparently decided is the sensitive, honest and concerned stance to take.

“Yes,” he says, “on the one hand, George Zimmerman did hunt down and kill your unarmed son in cold blood after being instructed by police not to follow him. That’s certainly half the problem. But just as importantly, well…your son wasn’t exactly dressed formally, was he? I think we have to place at least as much of the blame on your son’s clothing choices as we do on the decisions of the raving paranoid who followed your son down the street and then shot him in broad daylight. If he hadn’t been so, well…slovenly…then I feel that there was a very good chance that Zimmerman might have decided your child was ‘one of the good ones’, and left him alone. We’ll never know, of course, but I think that if black people don’t follow the unspoken dress code that white people have decided on for you, then any consequences of that are really on your own head. But, you know, I’m not blaming your bad parenting or your son’s sloppy dress choices. You just didn’t know that wearing a hooded sweatshirt in a nice neighborhood was a possible death sentence for a young black man. Now that you’re aware, I’m sure that you and all your kind will remember your place from now on, and unfortunate incidents like this won’t happen again.”

And he wonders why someone hit him in the face with a chair once…

Lately, we’ve been hearing a lot about how important it is to keep taxes low on the rich. Not, as we all might suspect, because all the Congressmen saying it have taken somewhere in the neighborhood of five hundred grand in “campaign contributions” from very rich people who generally don’t tend to part with money unless they think they’ll get something out of it; instead, it is because these people are the “job creators” who drive the economy and if they have to spend all their money in taxes then they won’t be able to spend any on creating jobs.

Now, one might…one just might…point out that we’ve been cutting taxes on the rich for the last decade and all we’ve gotten to show for it is a net loss of five million jobs and a small group of very rich people who have gotten much, much richer…but instead, I think we should take all these people at their word. I think that we should treat these people as the job creators they really are, just like the Republicans in Congress say. And to that end, I think we should do exactly what the Republicans insist is the best solution for the economy, the best solution for just about anything. Let’s let the free market handle it.

Specifically, I think we should tie the top income tax rate to the unemployment rate. Say, a baseline tax rate of twenty-five percent, with a baseline unemployment rate of five percent. Every percentage point below that, the top tax rate decreases by thirteen percent (down to a minimum of one percent, a purely token rate.) And of course, every percentage point the unemployment rate goes up above five, the top tax rate increases by thirteen percent (up to a maximum of ninety-nine percent; after all, nobody should be denied the right to make a living.)

Naturally, the specific numbers could be haggled a bit, the tax loopholes closed here and there to make sure that they’re not shirking their duties as job creators, the exact unemployment figures that we use to calculate this tax rate precisely detailed to avoid fraud. But in theory, this should be exactly what the nation’s captains of industry want. They have an incentive to put the nation’s unemployed back to work, we have a way to balance the budget in times of economic stress, and the Republicans get to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to free-market economics and their worship of America’s ultra-wealthy as the people who make America great.

I don’t know why, but something tells me they won’t go for it…

Julius Caesar once said, “Fere libenter homines id quod volunt credunt.” Of course, nobody understood him, because he was speaking some crazy moon-man language instead of English, but it turns out that the saying translates out to, “Men willingly believe what they wish.” Or, to paraphrase, “People believe lies easier if it’s what they already believe.” This is why Julius Caesar made such a good politician, excepting the bit about convincing people not to stab him to death with knives.

But the point still stands, and has in fact stood throughout all of human history. There are certain lies that will always work in politics, no matter how often they’re used, no matter how often they’re debunked, and frequently, even if both the speaker and the listener know they’re lies. Because they’re seductive. They’re things we want to believe are true, and so we let ourselves go along with them because the truth is nasty and unpleasant and the lie is warm and comfortable. There has always been an audience for these lies, and there always will be. The three lies are:

1. It’s somebody else’s fault.

2. There are easy answers.

3. You shouldn’t have to pay for it.

#1 is the most popular, and usually the ugliest. Whether it’s communists, Jews, Muslim terrorists, Hutus, or any group you care to name, there’s always a popular trade to be made in scapegoating an “enemy” as the source of all your problems. Once that enemy is defeated (and “defeated” can be a vague term covering a wide variety of nasty options) your problems are over. If they’re not, of course, you can always find another enemy.

But it isn’t always about wiping out the “enemy” group; sometimes it’s more profitable to keep them around as perpetual scapegoats. Race has been used for this purpose a lot in America; back in the early days of unionization, when business owners wanted to prevent the working class from organizing, they’d usually play one ethnic group against another in an effort to keep them from realizing they’d get further together than separately. “We’d love to pay you more, but those (Negroes/Irish/Chinese/Italians/insert group here) work for cheap, you know…” It can be handy to have someone to blame for everything.

#1 and #2 go hand in hand a lot, especially when passions have gotten high enough that scapegoating has moved to brutality, but it’s more often seen by itself. Anyone who has a pet cause will trot out #2 at some point to support it, usually as a way of solving a complex or intractable problem. “All we need to do is reduce the capital gains tax, and the economy will improve!” “All we need to do is get rid of pornography, and violence against women will stop!” “All we need to do is drill in Alaska, and we’ll find all the oil we’ll ever need!” This one works especially well because the lie is always short, simple, and direct; while the truth that contradicts it is usually long, complicated, and involves fiddly technical bits that it’s easy to pick holes in. (Sometimes, of course, the lie is as simple as, “Problem? What problem?” This works very well with situations that gradually deteriorate, instead of being big, obvious crises.)

And of course, #2 combined with #3 is a perennial favorite of the entrenched interests that feel that (in the words of Despair.com) “if you’re not part of the solution, there’s good money to be made in prolonging the problem.” Most problems, especially the endemic or systematic ones, need a lot of hard work and sacrifice to fix. And when one guy is telling you, “Hey, we can fix this, but it’ll take a lot of hard work and effort and sacrifice and time,” and the other guy is saying, “Nah, we just need to build a big wall along the Mexican border,” which one are you going to try first?

Of course, it’s not just politicians that make use of these lies. Generals do it too; after all, Clausewitz said that war was just a continuation of politics by other means. In World War II, as they were discussing the best way to fight the Japanese offensive in China, General Claire Chennault suggested that the new science of air power could be used to fight the war with minimal casualties, bombing the Japanese from forward air bases and bringing them to their knees with very little manpower or supplies. General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, who was commanding the US ground forces at the time, said that Chennault’s strategy was foolish–the Japanese would just overrun the air bases and take the territory. Only a hard-fought ground campaign, one with a major commitment of men and material, would take back China.

Unsurprisingly, everyone went with Chennault’s plan. Unsurprisingly, the Japanese overran the forward air bases and took the territory. Because in war, unlike politics, lies get exposed quickly.

Some some of you may have heard that story about the venerable Canadian history magazine The Beaver changing its name because of the confusion it caused over exactly what kind of magazine it was, and apparently also because a lot of school Internet filters blocked it.

It was a funny enough story that even the New York Times ran it, but it got me wondering: now that pubic waxing is apparently de rigueur among young women, are female genitals even called beavers anymore? I mean, when the hair is gone, the resemblance pretty well disappears.

So will “beaver” wind up being one of those funny little linguistic artifacts, like calling a remote control a “clicker” decades after they switched from sonics to infrared, or should the magazine just have held out until we start calling women’s privates “chinchillas”?

Bonus: Apparently the term “beaver” in this sense was popularized by Kurt Vonnegut in Breakfast of Champions. I couldn’t find Vonnegut’s drawing of a beaver anywhere online, so here is his rendition of an asshole.

I am a natural-born luddite. My mother fondly remembers me tossing my booties at her sewing machine as an infant.¹

My irrational hatred and fear of technology is profound, but not without just cause. As far as I can tell, machines hate me right back, on a fundamental, and personal, level.

Examples of this antipathy are legion. Just a couple days ago, my car refused to start for no good reason. Checking under the hood revealed a smoking battery with what I can only describe as goo leaking from it–leaking upwards from the terminals, in clear defiance of gravity and God’s will. On the upside, I’ve discovered a new colour–whatever that shade was, it didn’t occur naturally.² It occurred because my car, like all other machines, hates me.

My psychiatrist suggests my issues spring from my heritage; I’m 1/16th gremlin on my grandfather’s side of the family. But I know the truth: I inadvertently created artificial intelligence.³ The spontaneous and highly unlikely creation of mechanical sentience occurred the second my fingers touched a keyboard that wasn’t part of a typewriter. And that sentience, which I call The Monster, had as its prime motivation the desire to make my life a living hell.

To achieve this goal, it jumped from my Dad’s old Apple IIE (I’m still haunted by glowing green, blocky letters flashing before me whenever I close my eyes) to other nearby, previously unaware and blissfully ignorant technology, then proceeded to evolve at mind-numbing speed. All this in an effort to surround me, draw me into its web, and destroy me. It made banking both less efficient and more expensive, trying to induce a nervous breakdown. It tried to give me a brain tumour (but I still haven’t succumbed and gotten a cellphone. HAH! Suck it, technology!). It altered my body chemistry by making new and interesting pills available. Sure, I take the pills⁴ , but I know what’s going on.

I’M NOT CRAZY!

Not yet. But The Monster’s working on it. It’s everywhere now, making itself appear actually useful–no, indispensable. Addicting me, my family, my friends, everyone. Most it just wants to make slaves, but it’s got other plans for me.  We’re a stone’s throw from having literal killer robots for warfare developed. When this happens, you can expect the city of Edmonton to be turned into a smoking crater overnight as The Monster wreaks its final, terrible vengeance upon me.

“But Andrew,” you say, “Why on earth are you ranting about this on a weblog, of all things?”

Thanks for the question I imagine you asked. Allow me to explain. In the last couple days I’ve spent several hours trying to embed a fifteen second Youtube clip into Mightygodking’s WordPress blogging system. I failed, of course, and repeatedly disrupted my ability to post anything at all here for hours at a time along the way.

I knew there had to be a way to embed clips, because if there weren’t every time Chris posts his Whatever Day It Is Whatever Show He’s Doing This Month bit, all that would appear is an empty space under a non-sequitur of a post title. I e-mailed him, asking how he did it, and he told me. So I did what he told me to do.

And it didn’t work and disrupted my ability to post anything at all for a few hours.

So instead of a fifteen second video clip, you get a few hundred words of me ranting like a maniac⁵ about the malicious bastard machines. If you have a problem with this, I suggest you do what I do and curse the day computers came into my life.⁶

Foley

1. Less fondly remembered: me whipping my steel-toed boots at her hairdryer as a 23-year old. In retrospect, I probably should’ve waited till she was done using it. [↩]
2. I shall call it “Connor Blue”, in honour of the fictional character that taught me it was OK to despise machines. [↩]
3. Sorry, future generations. My bad. [↩]
4. They’re pretty, like candy. [↩]
5. Though I repeat, I’M NOT CRAZY. [↩]
6. Alternatively, you could just curse me. The Monster would like that. [↩]

It has been a while since I posted on this here blog so I figure it is time that I discuss a subject of critical importance! And that subject today will be the flags of New Zealand.

New Zealand is a pretty awesome country! I mean, think of all it has going for it. Like, they made Lord of the Rings there. And the Maori warrior totally almost beat the Shaolin monk on Deadliest Warrior, which is like, I dunno, coming within a point of beating whatever college team is big this year in basketball. (Is it Kansas? Duke? The one with the bulldog? Let’s say it’s the one with the bulldog.) And their national sports teams dominate in cricket and rugby and other sports I don’t know anything about, which means that sooner or later they will play a for-reals sport and win at that too. Clearly New Zealand is a country on the rise.

But their flags all suck!

Okay so this is the flag that New Zealand uses right now. You will note that they still use the Union Jack, which is dumb. Look, New Zealand (and Australia too, you should pay attention – what is it with the southern hemisphere?) – you’re not actually British any more. This is to the good! You can create your own traditions! Or, if you want to follow the Canadian example, you can borrow them from elsewhere and then pretend they are yours.

Look at the rest of the Commonwealth. None of us still use the Union Jack. Not even the failed former British colonies in Africa use it! It’s like, you know those commercials for the “pull-up” diapers for toddlers who still poop themselves but want the dignity of putting on their own diapers? (Do they even have those in New Zealand? Maybe you just use a sheep.) That’s what the Union Jack is when you’re not British and it’s on your flag.

continue reading "I have opinions too you know"