Twitter right now is aflame with the news that Kevin Clash, the voice of Elmo, has resigned from Sesame Street after multiple allegations that he had sex with underaged boys. And, to be honest, some of the reactions to the news worry me, because overwhelmingly what I am reminded of, more than anything, is how Jerry Sandusky’s defenders reacted when he was accused of sexually abusing boys while at Penn State.

Now, before we go any further, I want to be clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying the allegations prove that Clash did in fact have sex with teenagers. I am not saying that Kevin Clash is morally equivalent to Jerry Sandusky. I am not saying the allegations against Clash are equivalent to those against Sandusky. After all, Sandusky was caught in the act of molesting children, while the allegations against Clash come from the supposed victims who are now adults, and the allegations against Clash appear to be at least potentially questionable. (But I don’t know if they’re true or false. Neither do you.)

But what I am saying is this: the overwhelming flood of reactions that are defensive of Clash are exactly the same in tone as those who defended Sandusky last year. There is the same mix of denial based on defamation of the accusers (the “they just want to get rich/famous” slam), the same wish-fulfillment in place of reason (we’re talking the “I love Elmo so therefore Kevin Clash must be innocent” line of reasoning, the same resentment of the media for reporting what is, by any reasoning, a newsworthy story. The only difference is that this time it’s coming from fans of the Muppets rather than fans of Penn State football.

That last one particularly bothers me because it is a reminder that people are all basically the same when it comes to bad news, which is to say that, at gut, we never really want to hear it or engage with it. It is quite possible that Clash is innocent of the accusations made against him, and frankly I hope that is the case, of course, because how could I not? But I have to admit the possibility exists that he did in fact do these things, and the fact that he is a beloved performer for children does not weaken that possibility. (Frankly, if anything, it strengthens it: child predators so often work with children for the same reason lions like to hang out where the antelope are, and since we all at heart never want to believe that someone who is good with kids might have become so charming in order to take advantage of them, it sometimes feels like every molestor is described as being a really good person.)

And it would be nice to think that a thorough investigation which exonerated Clash would make the problem go away, but of course we all know that that wouldn’t happen. And that’s another problem with humans.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

And if you like, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

You know, it may be hard to believe, but I don’t always want to talk about feminism in the geek community. I don’t seek out fights with angry misogynists. I’d be perfectly happy to talk about Episode VII, and why I’m looking forward to it even though I have a sneaking suspicion it’s going to suck.

But then shit like this happens.

For those of you not clicking through on that link, it’s a post on John Scalzi’s blog about Tony Harris, former artist on (among other things) ‘Starman’, and his misogynist, semi-literate, possibly (hell, hopefully) drunken Facebook rant about girls “preying” on male geeks by showing up at conventions in costume while being attractive, and not always knowing that much about the character they’re portraying. Because somehow, this is predatory behavior. (Presumably, he bases this off of the African veldt, where lionesses are known to dress up as Wonder Woman to attract the attention of antelopes even though spotty distribution and poor literacy rates in the region mean that they’ve never even read a single issue.)

Naturally, Scalzi eviscerates this stupidity with ease, because even though he is wrong wrong wrong on which Star Wars movie is the best (hint: it’s the original) he is almost never wrong on matters of real consequence and is excellent at expressing himself. And because he is confident in the rightness of his opinions and is willing to defend them, he has a comments section. Said comments section, for those of you not willing to read several hundred comments, is filled with women saying, “Hell yes. I am sick and fucking tired of having to prove my geek cred to every fucking man at the convention, one by one, simply because I’m a woman who is moderately attractive. I’ve been active in fandom my whole life and legitimately enjoy geeky things, and the sexist disbelief I experience is obnoxious almost past the point of endurance.”

This is promptly followed by someone clueless saying, “Oh, we weren’t talking about you! I totally believe that you’re a real geek girl. We were talking about all those other girls out there, the real poseurs who are just impersonating geeks in order to gain that all-important cachet of social acceptance from the now-dominant geek sub-culture. Those are the real enemies out there, as I’m sure you’ll agree. They’re the ones who are just trying to ‘belong’, and don’t really ‘get it’. They’re mainstream people who think they’re geeky even though they’ve never seen an episode of the original Battlestar Galactica!” Usually, this is where they bring up ‘The Big Bang Theory’ and use the phrase “nerdface” unironically.

Here’s the thing, everyone who insists that while each individual incident of rampant misogyny and asshatted stupidity is obviously terrible and should be condemned, there’s still a principle that’s worth defending here and you’re going to defend it…it is not your principle that everyone is arguing. It is your facts. Because there are no women out there who do this. Women do not treat science fiction conventions as some sort of four-day singles bar, where they can pick up a guy for only the price of having to dress up in a random skimpy outfit that they found on the Internet and pretend to be interested in boring shit about elves. It does not happen. When you think it is happening, you are either a) imposing your own frame of geekery onto the woman in question, or b) confused and imagining that your lack of social skills, your sexism, and your unfortunate history with women in high school is somehow the fault of the person you are talking to.

Being a geek does not automatically mean “being into everything you are into and having an encyclopedic memory for trivia.” Many cosplayers are costume geeks. They have as much interest and obsession with the details and minutiae of costume-making as you do for Star Trek, or (slightly more accurately) as rocketry geeks do for rockets. They may very well be choosing that costume based on its aesthetic appeal and challenge, not because of an attachment to the character. Does that mean they’re not real geeks? No, it means they’re geeks about something you don’t care about and instead of taking the time and effort to get involved in their fandom, you’re berating them for not getting involved in yours. This is not defending a principle. This is being a jackass.

Which is the other important thing. A lot of the time you’re just being a jackass. The woman who’s dressed as Death, but doesn’t respond when you say to her, “Chim-Chim-Cheree!” It’s not that she’s a fake geek girl who didn’t even read the character’s first appearance; it’s that she’s at the convention to have fun, not to participate in a fucking trivia contest…especially not one where the prize is you looking down her shirt for the next six hours. When she nods politely at your comments about ‘American Gods’ and walks away, it’s because she has someplace to be, not because she’s secretly one of the cheerleaders who turned you down for a date in high school and she doesn’t really love Neil and she’s laughing at you when you’re not looking.

If your response to this incident, or any of the other incidents like it, is to say, “Yes, but the principle of keeping out the poseurs because they’re really just bullying real geeks with their condescension, that needs to be defended,” then remember this: It is not the principle that the other side is arguing. It is the data. If you claim that squirrels are secretly stealing your underwear, the question involved is not whether or not theft is wrong. That question is moot, because there are no underwear-stealing squirrels in your home. And even if you find a YouTube video out there of someone sitting at a park bench with their gym bag partially unzipped, and a squirrel runs up to the bag and pulls out an item of clothing and runs off with it to use it to line their nest, that does not make you right. The plural of anecdote is not data. The existence of this video does not make pointing at random squirrels and shouting, “Stop stealing my boxer shorts, you bitch!” any less insane. Please, just let this ‘fake girl geek’ bullshit go. Because you’re not doing yourself any favors when you defend it.

Since I don’t read Hellblazer I don’t have any strong feelings about the Vertigo series ending at issue #300 and being replaced by a Constantine series about the DC Universe version of the character.  But I do find it interesting that the news led to a surge of articles about comics being relaunched and renumbered, since I figured the issue was largely dead.

First, let me say that I prefer for a comic series to have a long, sequentially-numbered run of issues.  This has less to do with nostalgia for things past than with practicality.  It is easy to figure out where, for example, Savage Dragon #147 fits into one’s collection and the history of the character–it goes between #146 and #148, and it’s about 35 issues before the most recent one.  It is hard (or at least harder) to do the same thing with Iron Man #7–for one thing, I’d need to figure out which #7 we’re talking about, as there have been at least five that I know of, and there’s no pattern to when they occur.  Moreover, I fail to see any lasting benefit to renumbering a series as a means of boosting sales and attracting new readers.  If it was such an effective gimmick, no comic would need to do it more than once, let alone three times in a decade.  So, if it were up to me, various long-running series would be numbered sequentially without interruption, and it’d be a lot easier to keep track of them, and that would be that.

That said, this is an argument I lost many years ago.  DC renumbered most of its long-running series before I even got into comics, and Marvel started doing the same shortly after I showed up.  In the mid-2000s the trend went the other way, and we got Fantastic Four #500 and Superman #650, and I had hope that the Big Two learned their lesson and would stop it with the silly counting tricks.  But by now Marvel has settled into a pattern of relaunching, re-titling, and restoring a series willy-nilly, while DC has reset virtually all of their books.  Obviously, chances are good we will nevertheless see, f’rinstance, Action Comics #1000.  But we’re probably not going to see Action #905-999 or #1030-1099 in any meaningful sense, so there really isn’t any point anymore.

Uninterrupted sequential numbering of corporate superhero comics is a lost cause, and going forward I would be very surprised to see a Marvel or DC title go for more than 50 consecutive issues without a silly stunt.  At this point I’ve made peace with it, so it surprises me that anybody was clinging to the idea that Hellblazer would go untouched, as if Dan DiDio might somehow fail to notice he’s publishing a series he hasn’t micromanaged yet.  Personally, I am resigned to buying Captain America #1 over and over, as long as the story’s good.

What’s more important to me now is that Marvel and DC figure out when to do these inevitable relaunches.  The current Marvel Now! program rubs me the right way, because each of the series being relaunched seems to have some fairly good justification.  That is, I don’t think there’s a great reason to restart Avengers at #1.  But if you’re bound and determined to do it, I think “The writer is somebody other than Brian Bendis for the first time in eight years” is at least a halfway decent reason.  On the other hand, DC relaunched Green Lantern last year for no other reason than a) it was September and b) Sinestro replaced Hal Jordan as the title character for about two and a half issues.

In this renumberiffic landscape, there needs to be some vague rules about when you ought to or ought not to start over with a new series.   Marvel probably should have launched the current Dark Avengers with a #1 instead of #175, but it certainly doesn’t need to renumber the book now as it is still mostly continuing the same storyline.  On the other hand, Journey Into Mystery #646 will start a new Sif storyline that probably won’t be all that deeply connected to the previous Loki feature, so  there’s not much reason to maintain any continuity with the numbers.  Given the decision to reset the Legion books at #1, it made sense for DC to end Adventure Comics altogether and replace it with Legion Lost, since the only purpose of the Adventure brand was tradition.  In contrast, I have no idea why DC didn’t use the opportunity to replace Action and Detective with new books that actually have Superman and Batman’s names in the titles.  A Batgirl storyline reintroducing Barbara Gordon is a sensible place for a new #1; a new series about the Red She-Hulk is a rather silly place for a #59.  And so on.

It may seem absurd to be worrying about how to get these relaunches right so soon after the Big Two have relaunched virtually everything they publish.  But it’s sillier to think the New 52 or Marvel Now! will stand the test of time, given that both initiatives are based in the idea that no previous initiatives need to stand the test of time.  By 2015 or so we’ll be seeing this topic come up again, and it would be nice if Marvel and DC learn something by then.

Almighty Kfish: Any thoughts on the cancellation of Hellblazer?

I, personally, am looking forward to the PG-rated adventures of John Constantine! I cannot wait for John Constantine to start talking like a mid-90s Pete Wisdom and call baddies “ruddy plonkers.” Also, when he defeats the Devil with the power of friendship, and then he and Superman go out for waffles and talk about their women problems. “How do I tell Wonder Woman – who I am dating – that I do not get the point of her invisible plane?” “Oh, Supes, you plonker, you don’t know nuffink, cos my lady Zatanna, she wears these fishnets all the time and then when it is time for romance, she takes them off!” Seriously, who will not love this?

Andrew Miller: Or – for something off the wall – a discussion of why Western pop-culture audiences find tropes taken from medieval Japan – ninjas, samurai, etc. – appealing, while tropes taken from other times and places – India before the English, sub-saharan Africa, the Aztec Empire, etc. – find so little traction. I have a pet theory it has to do with Japan being the one place where European imperialism was felt the least, but I wonder what your thoughts are.

Well, Western fascination with Japanese culture started out as a fad in the 1880s and never really stopped. That was when samurai first became popular with western audiences, and ninja followed shortly thereafter. This is mostly for two reasons. Firstly, samurai and ninja translate fairly simply to Western audiences because you can – inaccurately – just make them into knights and spies, both of whom were popular fiction tropes even back when Japanese concepts were first introduced. Secondly, your imperialism theory is fairly accurate – because Japan was never really conquered in the colonial era it remained exotic, whereas, say, the Mughal Empire were just the guys the British beat up and took India from, and it’s hard for imperialist cultures to really get impressed with the guys who they defeated. That was really why Japan became such a fad in the first place.

Miles: My group of friends have really enjoyed Through the Ages, if you have time for a Civilization-type game.

I don’t mind Through the Ages, but it’s not a “Civilization-type game.” Through The Ages is a tech-tree game, which is not quite the same thing. A proper civ-game has exploration, military conflict, a reasonably complex economic engine and a tech-tree. Through The Ages has a great tech-tree mechanic which is ninety percent of the game, then a very simple economic engine to power the tech-tree, dumbs down military conflict to “make sure you have roughly the same number of troops as everyone else, because the game favours the defender overwhelmingly” and has no exploration whatsoever. Oh, and of course it’s just yet another Euro that you win only by getting victory points, and although I don’t get offended by VP-racing like some gamers do, a proper civ-game should offer up more options for victory than “get the most VP.”

I much prefer the new Sid Meier’s Civilization boardgame (the one by Fantasy Flight) for when I want a proper civ-game experience. It is, to be sure, a bit clunky in terms of its rules because it tries to adapt virtually every aspect of the computer game series into a boardgame, but: it has a good tech-tree, exploration and board control is absolutely vital to winning, the military race matters a great deal, and it has multiple victory conditions. Also, it does the “each civilization gets its own distinct special powers” thing, which I am always a sucker for because I love variable player powers in games – they offer up so much additional headspace. So that is usually my civ-game of choice. (If I want something quicker and lighter than SMC for a civ-game, I will generally go for Olympos.)

Thornae: I’d like to add another vote for the webcomics thing – what are your current weekly reads?

Nothing earth-shattering – I tend to read webcomics in chunks-at-a-time rather than weekly. XKCD, Penny Arcade, Girls with Slingshots, and Chainsawsuit (which is the funniest comic Kris Straub has ever done, by far) are about the only comics I read as-they-come. No, wait – I admit that I sort of hate-read Menage a 3 regularly. I love Gisele’s art – it’s a near-perfect marriage of classic Dan DeCarlo-style blending-of-good-girl-art-with-Archie-storytelling and anime tropes – but the fact that every single character in the comic is a terrible person and the strip doesn’t seem to get that just blows me away. I mean, I admire the strip’s dedication to normalization of the broad range of human sexuality, but Gary is a pathetic, unlikeable wimp, Didi is apparently completely amoral, Zii is incredibly irritating, Yuki is basically the worst person in the entire world, and if Dillon were straight his neverending gay crush on Gary would be even creepier and predatory than it already is, and believe me I could go on at length. But the art is lovely, so I keep reading it and hating myself for it – and it’s not because it’s porn, because it’s not even very good at being porn because the decision to avoid showing genitals is distracting.

(Also, if the sound of someone blowing a guy is “mf mf mf mf” then – I dunno. All I am saying is: I have received my share of oral sex, and I would not say that “mf mf mf” is onomatopoeiacally correct.)

Al: Ever had to give a best man speech? Any good stories about it, or advice to give?

I’ve never been a best man, but I have made speeches at a few weddings as a friend of the couple, and it’s not really a forum to show off how dazzling and brilliant you are as a speaker, frankly. It’s not about you, it’s about them. Think of two or three good anecdotes in the neighborhood of “embarrassing, but not mortifying, just funny/cute” (you can invent details out of whole cloth if they make the story better, because nobody will challenge you on this), chain them together, say that you’re happy to see them together and explain why, raise your glass, done.

The Law Society of Upper Canada is currently considering whether to revise/revamp the articling system or abolish it entirely, and more or less the entire legal profession in Ontario – and by extension Canada, because as goes Ontario, so will eventually the rest of the nation – has an opinion about it.

For those who are not Canadian lawyers or even lawyers elsewhere: articling is a requirement in each of Canada’s provinces (each of which has its own independent law society) in order to join the bar. The basic idea behind articling is: after you graduate law school, you work for ten months for a lawyer, and essentially learn on the job. Law school, you see, does not actually teach you a lot about the daily nuts and bolts of legal work, but rather “how to think like a lawyer.” (Which is actually a thing. We will pause the post here for all of you to get the lawyer jokes out of your system. Trust me as a member of the profession when I say we invented most of them.)

The problem with articling is that there are not enough articling positions to go around – this year, estimates are as low as there being only 80% of graduating students who will find articling positions. And of course, that 20% who don’t find them are then competing with next year’s graduating class, so you have 120% of a graduating class competing for 80% of articling positions. Except, of course, that the problem is that articling positions are decreasing in number and have been for years, so the problem just keeps getting worse. I am in my second year as a lawyer and know of at least one person from my graduating class at Osgoode who still has not found an article. That person’s investment in a law school education (sixty thousand dollars or more) has been, unfortunately, a bad one so far, and he is far from the only one.

I, on the whole, am for the abolishment of articling, as follows:

Proponents of articling argue that practical experience prior to being called to the bar makes for better lawyers, and I would say that this is inarguable. However, the question of whether articling makes for better lawyers overall isn’t a satisfactory answer to the question of whether articling is necessary – after all, no other common-law system in the world still has articling as a requirement for call to the bar. They’ve all abolished it. (I have no idea if Canada has a lower rate of legal malpractice claims than other jurisdictions offhand and Google has not turned anything up yet, but it seems like extremely relevant data.) I think people arguing for the continuance of an additional barrier to the bar that doesn’t exist anywhere else do have an affirmative duty to justify why it should remain, and that argument has not yet been made.

Moreover, I think the overall value of articling is extremely loose – there is no real guarantee that an article will provide serious legal experience worthy of the hassle that getting the article (which, even in an ideal full-employment situation, is still a grueling round of interviews more often than not) represents. (I personally was quite lucky to article with a principal who strongly believed in exposing his articling students to as many different aspects of his practice as possible.) Here, Lee Akazaki argues that the uneven quality of articles is a straw man argument because no article can properly prepare a student for all aspects of law, and the most important thing is to teach lawyers through groupwork and expose them to the demands of professionalism. Which isn’t a terrible argument, but there should exist minimums of exposure to a wide area of legal work. Effectively, this is impossible to regulate. As it stands right now it is already difficult enough for a student to bring a complaint against a principal if necessary (to say nothing of the fact that due to the inherent imbalances in the employer/employee relationship that articling has buried in its very nature).

This is to say nothing of the fact that the articling crisis is most intense outside of large urban centres where the profession is aging fastest. It’s not a surprise that cities attract more lawyers like they do every other type of skilled professional – that’s just urbanization – but articling presents a special problem because if small-town lawyers are to hire articling students, the fact that they are essentially training their competition hits harder than it would a big-city lawyer. (Which is, I think, one of the major reasons articling is in crisis at this point, although I admit this is based at least partly on supposition.) If the entire concept of articling works at cross-purposes for rural lawyers – and I think there is a reasonable argument that it does – then it’s by definition going to be a failed system.

But mostly, it comes down to the question of how many barriers to entry there should be for a new lawyer. Right now articling is simply an additional barrier on top of getting into law school, finishing it and then passing the bar exam (none of which are exactly easy) and so I would argue is effectively redundant. There are other ways to properly introduce students to the actual demands of the profession, the most obvious of which being including a large practical component in the third and final year of law school (which is of dubious value, to say the least, and Paul Campos’ experience being informed by American schools rather than Canadian does not change that much at all).

It’s time for articling to go. I understand why people want it to stick around: you want the best for the profession and it’s a safeguard. But it’s not an effective one, not any longer.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

And if you like, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

Once, long long ago, Judd Winick was viewed as one of the up-and-coming young talents in the independent comics field. His first major success, the autobiographical comic ‘Pedro and Me’, was seen as touching and funny and heartwarming all at the same time, and the art was charmingly cartoonish. He followed it up with an excellent syndicated strip, ‘Frumpy the Clown’, which he thankfully wound up before it became lazy. And then, before being hired to an exclusive deal with DC that eventually left him consigned to the hell of writing the event comics that Dan DiDio needed written to move his grand vision of the DC universe forward and to hell with character and plot log (a period of his career we won’t dwell on for the purposes of being relentlessly positive in these columns)…he wrote ‘Barry Ween, Boy Genius’.

The premise is not, on the face it it, particularly original; it’s about a pre-teen boy (the titular Barry) who actually is super-intelligent and has a secret laboratory in his room, where he invents super-science stuff and hangs with his best friend Jeremy (who is not a genius, but is in on his secret.) ‘Dexter’s Laboratory’, to pick a predecessor at random, has essentially the same premise. But where ‘Ween’ differs is in its treatment of the idea. Winick said that one of the reasons he quit doing ‘Frumpy’ was that he felt that he had to tone down his ideas to the mainstream sensibility of the funny pages, and he definitely shows that in ‘Barry Ween’. This is really a series that could only be done in the medium of independent comics, because it’s the product of a single artistic voice with no intention of pulling punches to get onto Cartoon Network.

‘Barry Ween’ takes as central to its premise the idea that geniuses in real life are rarely what you’d call well-balanced, sociable individuals. They are all too frequently prone to problems fitting in with the rest of society, and that’s before you factor in the fact that as a ten-year old, Barry is even more out of step with his peers intellectually than even an adult John Nash. Barry is a cranky, irritable, impatient misanthrope, trying to force himself to fit into the world not to preserve his secret (it’s suggested at one point that he could easily invent a robot to attend school for him) but to keep himself from sliding off the deep end into madness. His friends and family are there to ground him and humanize him, something he knows he badly needs.

And yet, that never gets in the way of utter hilarity. A cranky, irritable misanthrope with awesome technology that makes him a modern-day wizard, hanging out with a normal ten-year old who’s kind of clumsy and doesn’t understand a thing his friend is doing or saying, is a recipe for comedy gold. Winick has a gift for using profanity as a sort of perverse, mellifluous poetry, giving his characters lines like, “Color me nine different shades of not giving a fuck!” and “Now you, my friend, will see how we kick ass in the suburbs.” The scenarios he depict unfold with the slow, gathering momentum of a freight train on a steep slope with bad brakes; what starts with Jeremy fiddling with some purple goop winds up with Barry having to erase someone’s memory because he’s collecting hair samples from the swimming pool to clone a new body for someone rapidly turning into a dinosaur. Time travel, dimensional portals, centaurs, super-intelligent gorillas from another universe, ebola-infected monkeys…pretty much every plotline sounds like it could be serious, and the series flirts with it at times, but all of them will leave you laughing. (Um, unless you’re easily offended by profanity. In that case, this is not the book for you.)

And all of this is illustrated by Winick as well. He’s not a realist; he’s never going to be confused with Frank Miller or John Byrne. But as a cartoonist, Winick is gold. His faces are hilariously impressive, and his art has a sort of claymation quality to it that suggests a world just slightly off-kilter from reality. It’s the perfect art for this story…or, perhaps, Winick came up with a story idea that perfectly suits his artistic sensibilities. Either way, it looks great.

A lot of people are frustrated by the substandard work Winick has turned out in his time at DC; for myself, I think his only real crime is being the hired gun who’s been asked to execute a lot of bad ideas. But I’ll admit, I’d still like him to leave DC. Not so much to see him avoid another ‘Titans East Special’, although that’d be a plus…I want to see him do some more ‘Barry Ween’ comics.

Unless you really, really need to know what a plot-by-numbers Very Special Lifetime Channel Movie About Alcoholism would be if it starred heavyweight acting talent (answer: better, but still not actually good), you can leave after the first thirty minutes because after that there is no more planecrashing, and the planecrashing is really the only reason to bother seeing this.

So it has come time, once again, to pay my web-hosting fees. I am not saying all of you should feel obligated to hit the Paypal button on the right-hand sidebar; far from it. I don’t put up ads because I don’t think my readers should be forced to pay anything; this is my place, after all.

But – it would be appreciated, certainly.

And for everyone, donors and not: requests for posts/discussion in the comments! Usual rules apply.

7:01: Shockingly, Romney ahead 66/32 in Kentucky. I know, I know!

7:02: I may just start watching the Raptors/Thunder game at 8 and liveblog that instead. Or possibly both. This may get confusing if Kyle Lowry ends up dunking 51/49 over Romney in Virginia.

continue reading "Don’t Call It A Liveblog, I Been Here For Years"

In John Seavey’s post from yesterday – and may I just say that everyone saying that John’s post was too lecturing or self-righteous needs to cool that crap, because believe me, had I written it, the title would have been “If You Vote For Mitt Romney, You Are Either A Tremendous Dipshit Or A Rich Bastard, And Possibly Both” – Farwell3D, in comments, writes

The problem, John, is that I cannot vote for Barack Obama with a clean conscience.

And, not to be blunt, but sentiments of this sort deserve a sad trombone noise and little else.

Voting is not a purity contest. You do not get a prize for Best Liberal by refusing to vote for Barack Obama except in your head and possibly in the head of that cute hippie you were hoping to nail over a round of pot brownies and Phish songs.1 Voting is an exercise of your franchise as a citizen, and in a first-past-the-post system that means picking from, essentially, two parties. Jill Stein is not going to be President. Gary Johnson is not going to be President. There are plenty of good explanations why third parties are futile in a first-past-the-post system so I won’t rehash them here. But your third-party vote is a waste.

(Speaking as a citizen of a country with first-past-the-post in a parliamentary setting, the big difference is that you still basically have a choice of two parties, but said parties differ on a regional basis and change from time to time. This is much less ideal than you think it is. If America had a parlimentary FPTP system it would probably have a Republican party with seats dominating the rural Midwest and South, a Democratic party dominating the coasts and Northeast, and maybe a Green party and Libertarian party with a few seats here and there, except that the Republican political strength would now be even more geographically concentrated before, which is not really a good thing – just ask Canadians about the Bloc Quebecois sometime.)

The problem with voting third-party as an American is simple: it prizes principle above result. Farwell3D’s promise to vote for Jill Stein is a good example of this: he cites Obama’s defense of the NDAA provisions as a dealbreaker. And yes, I will freely agree that Obama’s civil rights record is not good at all (to say the least). But voting for Jill Stein will not make this in any way better, and more importantly will not improve civil rights in the United States. There is zero chance of that happening. Voting for Jill Stein arguably makes it worse, because a vote for Jill Stein is, essentially, a proxy vote for Mitt Romney when the election is so close. (I don’t care if you’re in a safe Obama state – popular vote in this election is likely going to matter for rhetorical purposes at least.)

By any reasonable metric, Mitt Romney is going to be much, much worse on the issues F3D is angry at Obama about. All of them. Much worse. Here we are looking at the utilitarian argument, which is that if you withhold your vote from Obama – who is the only potential choice for President who A) can win and B) might make things less bad – you are at least declining to vote for “less bad things” and at worst proxy-voting for “more bad things.” (Which of these two is more accurate, I leave up to the philosophers. But neither is especially good.)

This, incidentally, is one of my gripes about liberalism, which is that this purity fetish is something only liberals really do. Liberals love to complain about the conservative ascendancy in America and how conservatives took everything over, but one of the reasons this happened – after conservatism got basically massacred in the 1960s – is because hard-right conservatism took a look at the system and decided it was going to work one of the parties until it bled, which is why the Party of Ike is now the party of Supply-Side Jesus and every political debate is now between reality and what some jackasses wish reality in fact was. Conservatives did this by patiently and endlessly working at the local and state levels, which is something liberals, by and large, do not do, because it’s way easier to whine about how the leader of the party doesn’t do what you want him to do rather than put yourself in a position to make him do what you want to do.2

But I digress. If the most important thing about your vote is ensuring that the American government kills the least number of people and violates the least number of civil rights – then I would argue that you have an affirmative duty to minimize the harm it can do, where you can. Voting for Jill Stein will not do this. Voting for Barack Obama will.

1. Yes, the hippie stereotype is completely inaccurate and totally broad, but look, it wasn’t my idea to come up with an entire subculture that looks hilariously like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo, so allow me my cheap gag. [↩]
2. And it’s the same in Canada, more often than not. [↩]