This is a conversation that we’ve been having a lot lately, due to the shootings in Roseburg, but I want to make it clear: It is not only in the context of a mass shooting that I object to journalists describing people as “mentally ill”. In fact, part of the problem is that we only talk about it when we’re discussing something that cannot, under any circumstances, be seen as a sane and rational act. It’s hard to stand here and say that Chris Harper-Mercer should not be described as a mentally ill individual when he did something that seems like it could only have been motivated by suicidal depression combined with a narcissistic demand for attention and a sociopathic disregard for other human lives.

But I can’t say for sure that was the cause. I am not a trained mental health professional. What I did in the previous paragraph? It was an armchair layman’s diagnosis using terms I’ve picked up from reading about the field of psychiatry. Understandably, we all do that to some extent; the jargon of psychiatry has increasingly become part of the language of modern life. But I remain a layman, as do the journalists reporting on Umpqua. Diagnosing someone with a mental illness without proper training and without direct interaction with the patient is always a mistake, and reporting that armchair diagnosis as fact is criminally sloppy reporting.

But most journalists are even sloppier than that. I made a guess that the shooter was depressed because he killed himself; I made a guess that he was narcissistic because he wanted to draw massive amounts of attention to his death. I made a guess that he lacked the ability to empathize with others because he chose a method of drawing attention to his death that hurt others without any apparent regard for their suffering. Again, layman’s guesses, not a diagnosis. But most journalists probably made similar guesses, and what was reported? That the shooter was “mentally ill”.

“Mental illness” is as vague a term as “physical illness”, but the latter is never used in modern journalism. No reporter would ever describe someone in a news story as “physically ill”–they would clearly report that the cause of the symptoms was unknown, and promise clear and specific updates as more information was available. They would then update with the opinion of a medical professional who had studied the specific symptoms and treated the patient (and was able to speak on the record regarding the issue), and from that point on they would refer to the person as “suffering from” the specific condition. Chris Harper-Mercer? He’s “mentally ill”, and that’s all there is to it.

That kind of reporting lumps a sociopathic mass murderer in with a compulsive hand-washer, or an agoraphobic. It contributes directly to the social stigma that people who have a variety of mental health conditions have to deal with on top of their health issues–bad enough that they may have clinical depression, now if they talk about their health it sounds like they’re one bad day away from shooting up a college campus. Mental illness is every bit as common as physical illness, and sometimes just as treatable, but we’ve turned it into something to fear rather than something to treat. It has to stop.

Journalists aren’t the only ones to blame, of course. Part of our problem may be that we only discuss our mental health when something’s wrong with us. (If we get a yearly physical check-up with a physician, why not a yearly mental check-up with a psychiatrist?) But as long as journalists persist in the lazy habit of making armchair diagnoses without consulting with professionals–professionals with knowledge of the specific case history involved–and as long as they continue to treat “mental illness” as a blanket term that can be applied to all diseases equally, the problem can never be fixed. I know I’m not saying anything new, here. Many people reading this will probably be rolling their eyes that it took this long for me to write something this obvious. But I have to say it, because every voice helps.

I was reading this morning about Tom Selleck (for those of you unfamiliar with any reasons why anyone would still care about Tom Selleck some seventeen years after ‘Magnum, P.I.’ went off the air, he’s been in the news for water theft in California) and I found myself thinking that if you were a writer of fiction, you could not have created a more unintentional metaphor for the global warming crisis than California.

It’s the perfect recipe for an allegory. You have a marginal environment that is slowly sliding into catastrophic uninhabitability (and of course, unspoken in your novel is the idea that it’s doing so primarily because of the macrocosmic problem that you’re replicating in microcosm here, which is always nice thematically) and a cast of characters who are so wealthy, so powerful, so utterly solipsistic that they’re simply unable to adapt to the changes because it involves them being told “no” and they don’t understand what it means anymore. And so droughts and wildfires gradually become endemic, turning into the new status quo, but the movie stars and big-name agents and Hollywood producers don’t understand why they have to ration their water just like the little people. Surely all that money counts for something, doesn’t it? Surely they’re just purchasing a commodity, and as long as they can afford the premium that results from high demand and limited supply, they should be allowed to use as much as they want however they see fit?

Of course, we haven’t gotten to the third act yet. As much as it’s entertaining to watch Tom Selleck publicly humiliated and forced to cough up undisclosed sums of money, I don’t think we can really call that a “climax” in a narrative sense. Maybe we’ll get a scene where L.A. goes up in flames, all the Hollywood mansions consumed by wildfire as Ariana Grande asks her PA to “do something about this”. Or maybe we’ll get a proper trial scene, not with Tom Selleck but with a big-name, bankable movie star in the role of water thief like…oh, gosh. We could go with the “poetic justice” angle and put Schwarzenegger in there, as a member of the Republican party whose stance on global warming is to stick their fingers in their ears and shout, “LA-LA-LA, I’M NOT LISTENING!” (As well as the former governor of California, and not a proponent of environmentalism or water rationing at the time.) Or you could go the “dramatic irony” route, and stick in someone like Sean Penn to show that sometimes people talk the talk but aren’t willing to walk the walk. Or hey, you could go all “meta” and cast Kevin Costner. Either way, it’d have to end with jail time.

But ideally, our “California” story should make you think. Watching people casually ignore the slow death of their home state, simply because they can’t imagine anything really bad that money won’t make go away, should maybe make people think about what’s happening in our wider world. Because the only difference between Tom Selleck and the Koch brothers is one of scale.

There’s a lot of stuff flying around the Internet right now about “Gamergate”, a supposed scandal at the supposed heart of supposed gaming that supposed gamers are supposedly crusading against. As you may be able to guess from all the “supposed”s, there’s a lot of bullshit out there. So first, I’ll sum up what “Gamergate” is.

It started with Zoe Quinn, an independent game developer. She had an ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, and the break-up was ugly. Gjoni started airing their dirty laundry online, specifically on 4Chan, starting on a blog he created specifically to do so, posting evidence that she’d cheated on him. Naturally, people were extremely upset that he’d apparently hacked into her private chat logs that she’d cheated on him that she was sleeping with game journalists. Yes, that’s what they’re all upset about! The slight against gaming journalism! Because it’s their ethical responsibility to avoid conflicts of interest because it’s her responsibility to avoid forcing them into conflicts of interest with her sexy ladyparts.

Quinn responded by pointing out that a) her bad break-up is none of the Internet’s business, b) her ex-boyfriend is not an unbiased source for discussions of her behavior, and c) none of the game journalists ever did anything unethical as a result of these relationships. 4Chan responded, as all reasonable Internet gaming enthusiasts do, with doxxing, death threats, and slut shaming. Followed by calling Quinn a liar for accusing them of doxxing, death threats and slut shaming. Oh, and they also insisted that they couldn’t be misogynists, because they prominently backed a group of female gaming developers who weren’t Quinn (called the Fine Young Capitalists). While discussing on their boards how nobody could accuse them of misogyny if they backed a group of female gaming developers who weren’t Quinn, so they should do it as another way of getting back at her.

The Internet then exploded a bit, with several prominent gaming websites and several celebrities (including Joss Whedon, who gets special mention in all this because Joss Whedon is one of the patron saints of the Internet) pointing out that this is all a huge shitshow that gives gamers a terrible reputation. This led to a bunch of people a) claiming that this wasn’t about feminism and they weren’t misogynists, it was about journalistic ethics and they were merely concerned about the clear ethical issues involved; and b) Quinn was a lying (insert gendered slur here) who had it coming and by the way her lies and sluttiness are also a reason for Anita Sarkeesian to shut up too because they both have ladyparts so they’re in on it together!

This, in turn, led to a lot of people being banned from comments sections as trolls. At which point the cry of “FREEZE PEACH!” went out across the land, and the trolls insisted they weren’t being banned for being trolls, they were being banned because journalists hated being called out on their clear pro-sexy-ladyparts bias. Which led to Kotaku telling their journalists they couldn’t contribute money to games they wanted to see made, because hey sure why not.

At this point, there are a number of people out there saying, “You know what? If this is what being a ‘gamer’ is associated with, fuck gamers everywhere. I’d rather see that particular label die in a fire.” And people coming back with long, defensive posts that can all be tl;dr’d down to “#notallgamers”. Oh, and Anita Sarkeesian had to move out of her home because she’s getting death threats from people who know her address over her latest video about women and video games, which isn’t actually related to any of the stuff with Zoe Quinn but should help you understand why people are calling gamers an entitled culture of creepy fucked up sociopaths right now.

So now that you know what’s going on, what do I have to say about it? Apart from all the opinions that I not-too-subtly encoded into the above summary, of course. Well…

1) Zoe Quinn is not responsible for this shit. Whatever went on between her and Eron Gjoni is none of my business, your business, or literally anyone’s business in the world except for her, Eron, and the other people directly involved in the break-up. I am not their relationship counselor, and am not going to pass judgment on anything either one did to cause the break-up, because I don’t know about it and neither do you, even if you read Gjoni’s posts on the subject because it is not a particularly great leap of logic to suggest that someone upset enough to hack into other people’s private communications and post them online a) may have some other relationship issues, and b) may not be self-aware enough to admit to them in public.

Either way, Gjoni’s posts are plain and simple an attempt to make his ex’s life miserable by airing dirty laundry online. This is not a “journalistic scandal” that needs to be exposed by public-minded gamers for the good of the industry, it’s an ugly break-up that some assholes have taken as a chance to pile onto a woman they already didn’t like that much due to her twin decisions to make games and be female. You know how you can tell? Simple. The gaming journalists involved are getting a free pass. They made the decision to sleep with someone involved in the industry, despite knowing that this could be viewed as a conflict of interest, and they have not suffered any consequences from their employers or from the gamers involved. If this was anything other than slut-shaming, they’d be getting fired or at the least suspended, and they’re not. Primarily because they didn’t slant their coverage to be pro-Quinn one little bit. If anyone tells you that Quinn’s bad behavior is responsible for her current position, they are either lying to you or to themselves.

2) I don’t believe 4Chan when they say they didn’t do it, and I don’t fucking care. It does need to be mentioned at this point that 4Chan insists that Quinn is faking all the harassment she’s receiving, and using them as a convenient target to make herself look good because she knows that nobody will believe them due to 4Chan’s reputation as a hivemind of vicious, unrepentant shitbags who love making people’s lives miserable. To which I point out: Hey, maybe you would be more likely to be believed if you weren’t a hivemind of vicious, unrepentant shitbags who love making people’s lives miserable. It is just as easy to fabricate evidence that other people are fabricating their evidence (“we have undoctored screenshots proving that their screenshots are doctored!”) and 4Chan explaining that they didn’t do anything wrong this time is a bit like the Joker pleading ‘Not Guilty’. (And this also goes for anyone claiming Sarkeesian, or Phil Fish, or anyone else involved is faking evidence of harassment. The claims are weak, and frankly if you default to believing the harassers over the harassed, then that should indicate that you need to sit down and have a long, hard think about what that says about you.)

3) If gamers want people to stop talking about “the death of gamers”, they need to do more than just point to all the people who aren’t harassing women. Look, I like video games as much as the next person. I like games in general as much as the next person. But the fact of the matter is, when someone is getting death threats for suggesting that video games and the people who play them have issues with women, it makes me not want to be associated with public enthusiasm for video games. Because that is the face of the brand right now. “Gamer” = “maladjusted manchild who can’t take criticism and endlessly harasses anyone who disagrees with them”. It is going to take a stronger response than “Hey, I didn’t do that!” to counteract that. It is going to take pushback. It is going to take calling out the bad behavior in no uncertain terms. If you’re concerned that you’re being rude to a fellow gamer, or that you’re not giving a fellow gamer a chance, or that gamers need to stick together? This is a good time to fall for the “no true Scotsman” fallacy. People who do this shit aren’t really gamers. They’re assholes who play video games.

4) The Famous Young Capitalists need to be careful about who they’re getting involved with. On the one hand, I feel tremendous sympathy for them in all this. They’re pretty much just innocent bystanders who are being used as props, and they do seem to have some legitimate beefs with Quinn (that are also not anybody’s business, really, unless you’re interested in the minutiae of professional gaming development). But on the other hand, just like gamers in general, the FYC do need to realize that one of the strategies that unreasonable people use to avoid being called to account for their actions is to count on them being reasonable. They count on people saying, “Well, I believe in the principle of free speech and free association, so I don’t want to flat-out tell these people to fuck off, because shutting down conversation is the kind of thing unreasonable people like them do.” But that’s the whole point–the other side is not arguing in good faith. They are only keeping the lines of communication open to allow them more opportunities to harass. They are using the Fine Young Capitalists to make themselves look reasonable in order to continue making women’s lives miserable through threats and intimidation. And so while I won’t tell the FYC that they have to stop, I will ask them: Do you enjoy being used like that? Is whatever you’re getting out of this in money and publicity worth it?

5) Joss Whedon is not actually the patron saint of the Internet. I love his work, I think he’s a great guy, and he should legitimately be proud of himself for having spoken up in defense of Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian, because the people who are being assholes about this are making a good effort to harass and assault everyone who stands up for them in order to isolate them and silence them. (I’ll admit to a tiny, marginal amount of worry about posting this entry. But the more people that speak up, the less time and effort they can devote to any one of us. The remedy to isolation is unity.) But people like Joss Whedon are not the heroes, here. Just being a celebrity who’s willing to call himself a feminist doesn’t make him special. The people who are special are people like Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian who get motherfucking death threats and go on with it anyway, because they’re not going to be silenced when they’re doing the right thing. They’re the heroes. Joss Whedon is the sidekick.

(UPDATE: Edited to correct a factual error–Gjoni did not go straight to 4Chan, they picked up on it all on their own. This makes him look marginally better and them look marginally worse.)

I just added my name to John Scalzi’s pledge (original pledge here, place for others to co-sign here) to refuse to attend any convention that does not have a clearly defined, well-publicized, rigorously enforced harassment policy. Admittedly, John Scalzi would be refusing to attend as a Guest of Honor, while I would be refusing to attend as a paid guest, possible volunteer and occasional panel presenter, but the principle is the same.

Why is this important to me? Because I was just at CONvergence. For those of you who’ve never been, it’s a good-sized sci-fi/fantasy/gaming/general geekery convention in the Twin Cities (actually the largest entirely fan-run con…there are plenty of larger ones, but they’re all run as for-profit businesses.) And it has a great harassment policy. You don’t need to take my word for it; Paul Cornell came here and has said publicly that he thinks it’s the best of its kind in the entire world. (Not that it’s a competition. Although maybe it should be…) The con doesn’t just have a policy, it commits to it. They have posters in every public space with slogans like “Costumes Are Not Consent” (with models of both genders on the panel, just to make it clear that men have as much right to wear kilts without having jerks use a leaf-blower on them as women do to wear Power Girl costumes without inappropriate “boob window” comments.) They have officially designated “Safe Spaces” where people who are being harassed can go and find someone who will keep the harasser away until con staff can come and kick them out. They make people feel safe at their con.

And it is wonderful. It’s a wonderful feeling, knowing that everyone there feels free to be themselves and to enjoy themselves without having to worry about someone taking their self-expression as a license to attack, demean or belittle them. It creates a welcoming, friendly environment full of great people who share a common interest. It’s basically everything you’d hope for in a con. (And it’s got a great consuite. And it’s got amazing, amazing, AMAZING volunteers who make it all happen, including the harassment policy. I can’t praise the volunteers enough; cons this good don’t happen in a vacuum, and so let me take advantage of the huge soapbox for a moment to tell everyone how AWESOME they are.)

And having seen a really good con with a really great policy, I want to give everyone that opportunity. So I co-signed. My voice might not be noticed as much as John Scalzi’s, but I’ll add mine to his for whatever it’s worth.

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.

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