This past month, there have been cases of people retaliating against bullies--such as Casey Haynes (aka Zangief* Kid1) --and people asking for help in dealing with them (Alye2). There was a tragic case late last year about an elementary school girl who was bullied for enjoying Star Wars3. And then there are the many tragic cases of gays being bullied, and Dan Savage's brilliant and heroic "It Gets Better" campaign.
In the CBS interview regarding Alye's video, the superintendent of the school claimed her video took him by surprise, despite the fact that she says she's in therapy more than she's in class4. The superintendent was reluctant to talk about what was going on--even a calculated "we're doing all we can" would have been sufficient.
I have to wonder if public schools are doing the right thing: Are they trying to protect the victims, or are they trying to protect themselves?
I am not exactly naive here: I understand that an institution's primary directive is its own self-preservation. But a public school, one would at least want to think, holds the lives and well-being of its students as a primary concern. But here we have a problem: Does Alya attend an affluent school in an upper-class community in which the image of the school is more important than the safety of its students? Is this an Our Guys situation in which her oppressors are on track for prestigious sports teams (a book I read in college that I recommend to absolutely everyone) and therefore will get away with little or no punishment? The school administration would probably be reluctant to address the psychological well-being of its students, as psychological torment leaves no obvious visible evidence.
Even if a state passes anti-bullying legislation, it appears that school administrations seem reluctant to get on board, and are always reluctant to risk its image. So what went on in that administrator's head when Alye's video hit the web? "Oh shit..." This is one of the many reasons I love the Internet: It forces institutions to act. There is no effective damage control.
And now bullying has been acknowledged as a national problem. Perhaps, contrary to one of my previous essays, in which I lambasted school curricula and advocated disenfranchising parents, it is perhaps a good thing in this way that schools are beholden to them, to hold school administrations accountable for the treatment of their children [before you get any ideas, this does not compensate for the idiocy which parents have injected into curricula].
Can we have both? Can we let the teachers decide what to teach, and leave the administration beholden to the parents, without having parents take control of the act of teaching? Sure we could. It would be entirely possible to redraw the lines between dependency and autonomy between the community and the school system, much like between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government and the powers allotted to each.
Teachers would have the power to devise curricula in the same manner as I described in that previous essay. The administration would be responsible for protecting the teacher from the parents in curricula decisions, but in cases of bullying, it would have to prosecute students on parents' and other students' behalf.
There is one guiding principle through this process: The students come first. Do whatever would benefit the individual student most in the long term: That is, teach evolution and literature that parents find questionable precisely because it teaches them to be true to themselves, and protect them from the oppression of other students, for no student has a right to oppress another, much like no person in greater society has a right to rob, murder, or harass another.
1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEGQUAxlY5k
2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37_ncv79fLA
3) http://www.chicagonow.com/blogs/portrait_of_an_adoption/2010/11/anti-bullying-starts-in-first-grade.html
4) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deS3Nsuw6iE
*"Zangief Kid" is an affectionate nickname. Zangief is a wrestler character in one of the most popular fighting games of all time.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Monday, March 28, 2011
The Infinite Web of Conflicting Orders
My dad's pastor sent me an article the other day that was very interesting in the way it contradicted itself, and offered a kind of half-solution to the problem of "theodicy", or, rather, the Problem of Evil1.
The Problem of Evil basically asks, "If God is good, how can there be evil in the world?" Many have answered this question by blaming free will, but this does not really solve the "creative" problems, those that arose by creation: Natural disasters, disease, Brazillian Wandering Spiders, parasites in the Amazon, etc.
But if God exists, and is everything that Christians say about him, and yet evil exists, then God himself cannot protect even his Own from disaster, then, what is the point of believing i
n Him? Perhaps worse is that the author brought up the Book of Job, which is an egregious mistake on his part, because as I've explained earlier the evil in the story comes directly from God himself when he agrees to Satan's wager, and later when he confronts Job as the Whirlwind2.
But we can at least say that God that learns from his mistakes: He expressed regret to Noah after everything on Earth drowned from his Word, and he rewarded Job for his steadfast commitment to Justice.
So if more than 2,000 years ago, God learned to control his Warrior half, why should he repeat those mistakes again? The only answer open to us is to admit that God either was never involved in the first place and was a religious expression of the Israelites' collective will--a distinct possibility which underpins the entire Bible and especially in the Book of Esther, when she rescues her people from a situation similar to that of Egypt (Exodus) without God's help--or has since lost interest (The Tanakh places Job as the very last book in which God directly speaks to humanity).
In a broader context, the problem of good things happening to bad people and vice-versa is probably even older than Greek philosophy, and no one has ever come up with a truly satisfying answer that does not rely on belief in supernatural forces, even though the answer is right in front of our faces.
The world is simply a web of infinitely conflicting orders. We have seen in the past 2 and 1/4 years the entire global economy collapse because of the avarice of a few, we have seen a nation face an extreme natural disaster and nearly nuclear holocaust. We have seen the few wield power with a complete disregard for the many. Why? The movements of the Earth's tectonic plates, the apathy of those who know right from wrong toward our political process. There is a famous quote that has been attributed to many people: "All it takes for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing." We did nothing, and the Tea Party took control. How come it's just Representative Wiener who is making the Republicans look foolish when it is incredibly easy for all of us to do so? How come no one else is standing up for what is right?
But this view accounts for much less, also. Bus routes, for example, are an order. The hiring process is an order, a Kafka-esque one to be sure, but an order nonetheless. Anything anyone does or creates is an order, and these nearly infinite orders collide to either create or destroy.
My favorite example to use is traffic patterns: Traffic lights are on a timer, and school buses are on a schedule. You left the house at 3:10, and you know that the school gets out at around 3:00, so when you blame God for being stuck behind a school bus breathing in diesel exhaust, you can blame only your bad timing.
But the existence of these orders does not negate the existence of free will. Given the existences of these orders, we can make decisions and influence them towards what we want. In the job search, the organization my dad belongs to claims that job seekers should form some kind of relationship with people who work where they want to work and attempt to indirectly influence the hiring process. We are also capable of direct action: Talking to someone at a party could lead to a new friendship or romantic relationship.
Psychology has attempted to dissect--for better or worse--the motivations that drive us to do what we do and believe what it is that we believe. We cannot escape who we are, but in the process of growing up, we can shape ourselves to who it is we want to be. This is, granted, inextricably tied to who we were as children, but we can make conscious decisions to avoid bad outcomes. I was heavily bullied in school, and in middle school, I sketched really bad things in my notebooks, and I grew up on Duke Nukem 3D, a game much, much worse than Doom. I myself, because some kid told the teacher what I was doing, was almost a victim of the draconian policies that emerged after Columbine. But I knew from the outset that I never ever wanted to take revenge, even in high school where it was worse. It was a conscious decision, because despite the incredibly violent media I consume, I am actually an incredibly non-violent person*.
But there is an underlying reason for this: I have always learned from the consequences resulting from others' actions. I've always been a people-watcher, and I always watched when people would get in trouble for doing things that were reckless. Imagine if I became a bully myself, or that I had brought a gun to school? Where would I be? If I had become a bully in turn, I would be no better than those who oppressed me, and if I had brought a gun to school, I would be dead.
So while we do not have total control over our lives, we do not have no control, either. Our ability to make conscious decisions, even if these decisions are heavily influenced by who we are as persons, counts for free will because we have the power to shape who we become.
The process of becoming is a complicated one, but it is primarily influenced by the drive to learn and what we learn. People who read different things are almost entirely different people. Someone who reads economics textbooks and Atlas Shrugged is going to be completely different from someone who reads Plato, Heidegger, and Mill.
Back to the subject at hand, the overriding orders and their constitutions change as other orders expand and contract in response to those orders that are currently dominant. Politics is an excellent example of this kind of play. For 11 years, the Republican party had enjoyed prominence, despite Obama's landslide election, which only further incited the GOP, culminating in the election of the Tea Party to legislative and state executive positions. But by abusing the power lent to them, a competing order is gaining momentum against them, and will hopefully overtake them.
These orders and who they hurt or help is not at all dependent upon the beliefs or moral structures of individuals. I'm sure many of those who were killed in Japan believed in God, as did many of the 3,000 who lost their lives on 9/11. I'm also sure that many of those who lost their parents and siblings and friends to AIDS in Africa believed in God. I'm sure that most Tea Party Patriots do sincerely want what they think is best for the country, even though the movement they joined of their own free will will leave all of us poorer, less educated, and less free than before.
In Plato's Republic, Thrasymachus, a nihilist, believed that being unjust was more profitable than being just. Socrates disagreed because he believed that those who were unjust would eventually be punished. On a much smaller scale, this view commonly holds true, but not always. Aristotle took up this theme in Nicomachean Ethics, when he discussed The Golden Mean. We have certain agency within a relatively small sphere of influence to receive our just desserts. But we have to act. A good person will largely find himself good friends, whereas a bad person will have to rely solely on financial resources to find friends, but these friends will not be true friends and will leave him when he can no longer pay for them.
However, most of the time any kind of moral retribution relies entirely upon individual or collective human action. A serial killer is brought to justice because of police investigation, a witness, and a resolute jury. But most of the time, people whose malevolent influence stretches far beyond any serial killer are let free, because these criminals are able to fight the order against them with their vast financial resources. Bernard Madoff and the collective will of Wall Street bankers and oil industrialists, despite having impoverished society and compromised national security (as well as poisoning the environment), respectively, are able to maintain control by manipulating both the people whom they are disenfranchising and the very government. It is to the point now where it is uncertain if the collective Will of the People could ever reestablish itself and mete out appropriate punishment to those who have wronged it.
There is no room for any God here, who, ironically, has only five times exerted his "godlike" powers over the Earth independent of human action (Creation, The Flood, Sodom & Gomorrah, the Plagues, and the Parting of the Red Sea). For his dealings with Israel and its neighbors, God has exerted his influence entirely through human action. This is no different, except that God is removed from the equation.
There is nothing guiding us, nothing mitigating the damage we might do to one another, nothing influencing orders to maintain Good in the world. Only our own orders and the orders of the natural mechanisms of the planet and the animal and plant kingdoms exist. Evolution is a response with survival as the goal; humanity has a little more to worry about, and our competing orders express our needs and wants, and most of these compete with one another.
Many people talk about a pendulum, swinging back and forth. But it's not a pendulum. It's an elegant, tightly-knit spider's web, with some threads bolder than others. Superficially, it appears chaotic and random, but underneath belies some semblance of order.
1) http://www.sunrisepresbyterian.org/PDFs/Lent%20Lessons%2009/Pausing%20on%20Road%20Jerusalem%20Session%203.pdf
2) http://informeddecider.blogspot.com/2011/02/book-of-job-part-ii.html
*I really enjoy martial arts.
The Problem of Evil basically asks, "If God is good, how can there be evil in the world?" Many have answered this question by blaming free will, but this does not really solve the "creative" problems, those that arose by creation: Natural disasters, disease, Brazillian Wandering Spiders, parasites in the Amazon, etc.
But if God exists, and is everything that Christians say about him, and yet evil exists, then God himself cannot protect even his Own from disaster, then, what is the point of believing i
n Him? Perhaps worse is that the author brought up the Book of Job, which is an egregious mistake on his part, because as I've explained earlier the evil in the story comes directly from God himself when he agrees to Satan's wager, and later when he confronts Job as the Whirlwind2.But we can at least say that God that learns from his mistakes: He expressed regret to Noah after everything on Earth drowned from his Word, and he rewarded Job for his steadfast commitment to Justice.
So if more than 2,000 years ago, God learned to control his Warrior half, why should he repeat those mistakes again? The only answer open to us is to admit that God either was never involved in the first place and was a religious expression of the Israelites' collective will--a distinct possibility which underpins the entire Bible and especially in the Book of Esther, when she rescues her people from a situation similar to that of Egypt (Exodus) without God's help--or has since lost interest (The Tanakh places Job as the very last book in which God directly speaks to humanity).
In a broader context, the problem of good things happening to bad people and vice-versa is probably even older than Greek philosophy, and no one has ever come up with a truly satisfying answer that does not rely on belief in supernatural forces, even though the answer is right in front of our faces.
The world is simply a web of infinitely conflicting orders. We have seen in the past 2 and 1/4 years the entire global economy collapse because of the avarice of a few, we have seen a nation face an extreme natural disaster and nearly nuclear holocaust. We have seen the few wield power with a complete disregard for the many. Why? The movements of the Earth's tectonic plates, the apathy of those who know right from wrong toward our political process. There is a famous quote that has been attributed to many people: "All it takes for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing." We did nothing, and the Tea Party took control. How come it's just Representative Wiener who is making the Republicans look foolish when it is incredibly easy for all of us to do so? How come no one else is standing up for what is right?
But this view accounts for much less, also. Bus routes, for example, are an order. The hiring process is an order, a Kafka-esque one to be sure, but an order nonetheless. Anything anyone does or creates is an order, and these nearly infinite orders collide to either create or destroy.
My favorite example to use is traffic patterns: Traffic lights are on a timer, and school buses are on a schedule. You left the house at 3:10, and you know that the school gets out at around 3:00, so when you blame God for being stuck behind a school bus breathing in diesel exhaust, you can blame only your bad timing.
But the existence of these orders does not negate the existence of free will. Given the existences of these orders, we can make decisions and influence them towards what we want. In the job search, the organization my dad belongs to claims that job seekers should form some kind of relationship with people who work where they want to work and attempt to indirectly influence the hiring process. We are also capable of direct action: Talking to someone at a party could lead to a new friendship or romantic relationship.
Psychology has attempted to dissect--for better or worse--the motivations that drive us to do what we do and believe what it is that we believe. We cannot escape who we are, but in the process of growing up, we can shape ourselves to who it is we want to be. This is, granted, inextricably tied to who we were as children, but we can make conscious decisions to avoid bad outcomes. I was heavily bullied in school, and in middle school, I sketched really bad things in my notebooks, and I grew up on Duke Nukem 3D, a game much, much worse than Doom. I myself, because some kid told the teacher what I was doing, was almost a victim of the draconian policies that emerged after Columbine. But I knew from the outset that I never ever wanted to take revenge, even in high school where it was worse. It was a conscious decision, because despite the incredibly violent media I consume, I am actually an incredibly non-violent person*.
But there is an underlying reason for this: I have always learned from the consequences resulting from others' actions. I've always been a people-watcher, and I always watched when people would get in trouble for doing things that were reckless. Imagine if I became a bully myself, or that I had brought a gun to school? Where would I be? If I had become a bully in turn, I would be no better than those who oppressed me, and if I had brought a gun to school, I would be dead.
So while we do not have total control over our lives, we do not have no control, either. Our ability to make conscious decisions, even if these decisions are heavily influenced by who we are as persons, counts for free will because we have the power to shape who we become.
The process of becoming is a complicated one, but it is primarily influenced by the drive to learn and what we learn. People who read different things are almost entirely different people. Someone who reads economics textbooks and Atlas Shrugged is going to be completely different from someone who reads Plato, Heidegger, and Mill.
Back to the subject at hand, the overriding orders and their constitutions change as other orders expand and contract in response to those orders that are currently dominant. Politics is an excellent example of this kind of play. For 11 years, the Republican party had enjoyed prominence, despite Obama's landslide election, which only further incited the GOP, culminating in the election of the Tea Party to legislative and state executive positions. But by abusing the power lent to them, a competing order is gaining momentum against them, and will hopefully overtake them.
These orders and who they hurt or help is not at all dependent upon the beliefs or moral structures of individuals. I'm sure many of those who were killed in Japan believed in God, as did many of the 3,000 who lost their lives on 9/11. I'm also sure that many of those who lost their parents and siblings and friends to AIDS in Africa believed in God. I'm sure that most Tea Party Patriots do sincerely want what they think is best for the country, even though the movement they joined of their own free will will leave all of us poorer, less educated, and less free than before.
In Plato's Republic, Thrasymachus, a nihilist, believed that being unjust was more profitable than being just. Socrates disagreed because he believed that those who were unjust would eventually be punished. On a much smaller scale, this view commonly holds true, but not always. Aristotle took up this theme in Nicomachean Ethics, when he discussed The Golden Mean. We have certain agency within a relatively small sphere of influence to receive our just desserts. But we have to act. A good person will largely find himself good friends, whereas a bad person will have to rely solely on financial resources to find friends, but these friends will not be true friends and will leave him when he can no longer pay for them.
However, most of the time any kind of moral retribution relies entirely upon individual or collective human action. A serial killer is brought to justice because of police investigation, a witness, and a resolute jury. But most of the time, people whose malevolent influence stretches far beyond any serial killer are let free, because these criminals are able to fight the order against them with their vast financial resources. Bernard Madoff and the collective will of Wall Street bankers and oil industrialists, despite having impoverished society and compromised national security (as well as poisoning the environment), respectively, are able to maintain control by manipulating both the people whom they are disenfranchising and the very government. It is to the point now where it is uncertain if the collective Will of the People could ever reestablish itself and mete out appropriate punishment to those who have wronged it.
There is no room for any God here, who, ironically, has only five times exerted his "godlike" powers over the Earth independent of human action (Creation, The Flood, Sodom & Gomorrah, the Plagues, and the Parting of the Red Sea). For his dealings with Israel and its neighbors, God has exerted his influence entirely through human action. This is no different, except that God is removed from the equation.
There is nothing guiding us, nothing mitigating the damage we might do to one another, nothing influencing orders to maintain Good in the world. Only our own orders and the orders of the natural mechanisms of the planet and the animal and plant kingdoms exist. Evolution is a response with survival as the goal; humanity has a little more to worry about, and our competing orders express our needs and wants, and most of these compete with one another.
Many people talk about a pendulum, swinging back and forth. But it's not a pendulum. It's an elegant, tightly-knit spider's web, with some threads bolder than others. Superficially, it appears chaotic and random, but underneath belies some semblance of order.
1) http://www.sunrisepresbyterian.org/PDFs/Lent%20Lessons%2009/Pausing%20on%20Road%20Jerusalem%20Session%203.pdf
2) http://informeddecider.blogspot.com/2011/02/book-of-job-part-ii.html
*I really enjoy martial arts.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Rebecca Black and the Death of Music
Two weeks ago, a certain song hit the Internet. There was nothing particularly unique about this song, except that it was really, really bad. I'm talking, of course, about Rebecca Black's "Friday."
But Rolling Stone brought up an interesting possibility, one that is confirmed in a very dark and misanthropic way by Ark Music Factory's website itself. "Friday" is an "unintentional parody of modern pop." But hang on. On Good Morning America, we are told that Black is not responsible for the lyrics of the song, and that her mother thought they were dumb. This means that someone at Ark Music Factory wrote the song and simply had her perform it.
This is what happened with Justin Bieber, who, along with 4 other songwriters (as a 13-year-old kid, how much creative control would they give him?), composed "Baby." In fact, this happens also with American Idol winners, like Adam Lambert, who is only once listed in the song credits for his debut album.
So what makes Ark Music Factory so bad? Ark Music Factory is an independent--dare I say--amateur record label based in California, and...hey! They removed their About page! That's weird. When the About page existed (because I checked it out after watching Black's video), it basically claimed that they support artists of all genres. This might be true, but the 8 artists they feature are either pop or rap (the creepy 30-year-old black dude cruising behind the school bus waiting to have fun on the weekend in the video is named Pato, and is the only male artist listed. He also looks to be twice as old as any of the female artists, which is why I find him creepy in the Friday video). Furthermore, the seven female artists look quite young and basically seem to sing the same kind of music that Rebecca Black did.
Now here's the really creepy part. If you click on any artist's profile, you see what looks like a failed MySpace template, and it's hard to imagine who these "friends" are, especially because no one's really heard of Ark Music before "Friday", and my best guess would be that most of these "friends" are record company employees or schoolmates. Most of them also do not have profile pictures.
The irony here is that Ark Music appears to me to be more callous and finance-driven than even the big-name members of the RIAA.
We are free to lampoon "Friday" and Ark Music as much as we wish, but this whole situation, as Rolling Stone claimed, tells us a lot about how we consume music. Some speculate that the entire idea behind Ark Music and Rebecca Black was that if Justin Beiber could do it, they could, too. And to a degree, they could. It's fairly easy, especially with a poorly-written song and epileptic flip-book animation to boot. We just ate it up, and my writing about it only increases its fame (infamy).
So what does Rebecca Black say about pop culture? Rebecca Black betrays the increasing reality that creativity as an attribute is no longer necessary for any kind of recognition or fame. Take the most mundane and the most absurd activities--deciding which seat to take, for example--write a song about them, hire a naive 13-year-old girl to perform it, and voila! You have a hit.
By this point, I would think that writing a pop song could be done by reprogramming Watson: Have Watson analyze the lyrics from every pop song from the 80s to today, and have it compose lyrics using elements from previous songs. Someone may have to correct his grammar and syntax, but then again, maybe not.
In fact, it could be that this depersonalized and ultimately meaningless transformation can be transplanted onto other genres as well, so long as nearly every artist in a given genre sings about the same thing.
The crux of the problem is that many of these artists, especially contest winners and 13-year-old children, do not have creative control. The quality of the music to a degree depends upon who has creative control. But could we expect Rebecca Black to write something better than "Friday"? Nobody has ever asked her, but surely her life cannot be as vacuous as the song she put on the Internet.
In fact, in all of this, despite the tragedy of the song she sang, Rebecca Black is a nice, normal little girl. And she has a decent voice when put to the national anthem. While I doubt Ark Music would ever give her the chance, I'd like to see her write something on her own.
The irony is that her song would probably not make any money because I don't think she knows how to manipulate the lyrics to a tune that hypnotizes her classmates to buy it. But it would be her own, and that to me is what's important.
But Rolling Stone brought up an interesting possibility, one that is confirmed in a very dark and misanthropic way by Ark Music Factory's website itself. "Friday" is an "unintentional parody of modern pop." But hang on. On Good Morning America, we are told that Black is not responsible for the lyrics of the song, and that her mother thought they were dumb. This means that someone at Ark Music Factory wrote the song and simply had her perform it.
This is what happened with Justin Bieber, who, along with 4 other songwriters (as a 13-year-old kid, how much creative control would they give him?), composed "Baby." In fact, this happens also with American Idol winners, like Adam Lambert, who is only once listed in the song credits for his debut album.
So what makes Ark Music Factory so bad? Ark Music Factory is an independent--dare I say--amateur record label based in California, and...hey! They removed their About page! That's weird. When the About page existed (because I checked it out after watching Black's video), it basically claimed that they support artists of all genres. This might be true, but the 8 artists they feature are either pop or rap (the creepy 30-year-old black dude cruising behind the school bus waiting to have fun on the weekend in the video is named Pato, and is the only male artist listed. He also looks to be twice as old as any of the female artists, which is why I find him creepy in the Friday video). Furthermore, the seven female artists look quite young and basically seem to sing the same kind of music that Rebecca Black did.
Now here's the really creepy part. If you click on any artist's profile, you see what looks like a failed MySpace template, and it's hard to imagine who these "friends" are, especially because no one's really heard of Ark Music before "Friday", and my best guess would be that most of these "friends" are record company employees or schoolmates. Most of them also do not have profile pictures.
The irony here is that Ark Music appears to me to be more callous and finance-driven than even the big-name members of the RIAA.
We are free to lampoon "Friday" and Ark Music as much as we wish, but this whole situation, as Rolling Stone claimed, tells us a lot about how we consume music. Some speculate that the entire idea behind Ark Music and Rebecca Black was that if Justin Beiber could do it, they could, too. And to a degree, they could. It's fairly easy, especially with a poorly-written song and epileptic flip-book animation to boot. We just ate it up, and my writing about it only increases its fame (infamy).
So what does Rebecca Black say about pop culture? Rebecca Black betrays the increasing reality that creativity as an attribute is no longer necessary for any kind of recognition or fame. Take the most mundane and the most absurd activities--deciding which seat to take, for example--write a song about them, hire a naive 13-year-old girl to perform it, and voila! You have a hit.
By this point, I would think that writing a pop song could be done by reprogramming Watson: Have Watson analyze the lyrics from every pop song from the 80s to today, and have it compose lyrics using elements from previous songs. Someone may have to correct his grammar and syntax, but then again, maybe not.
In fact, it could be that this depersonalized and ultimately meaningless transformation can be transplanted onto other genres as well, so long as nearly every artist in a given genre sings about the same thing.
The crux of the problem is that many of these artists, especially contest winners and 13-year-old children, do not have creative control. The quality of the music to a degree depends upon who has creative control. But could we expect Rebecca Black to write something better than "Friday"? Nobody has ever asked her, but surely her life cannot be as vacuous as the song she put on the Internet.
In fact, in all of this, despite the tragedy of the song she sang, Rebecca Black is a nice, normal little girl. And she has a decent voice when put to the national anthem. While I doubt Ark Music would ever give her the chance, I'd like to see her write something on her own.
The irony is that her song would probably not make any money because I don't think she knows how to manipulate the lyrics to a tune that hypnotizes her classmates to buy it. But it would be her own, and that to me is what's important.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Dystopian Politics
I usually let a news story simmer for a few days before I sit down and write about it, but there is something happening in Michigan right now that has me shaken, and because of what is happening in Japan, it may not get the media attention it deserves.
While Michigan is certainly having a budget problem, and has a long history of financial problems, this does not at all give license to override the rule of law. The potential for malfeasance and cronyism far outweighs any benefit to be derived from such an extreme measure as this.
What is ironic, however, is that an amendment was proposed for a payroll cap of $160,000 a year for the "Emergency Financial Managers," but the amendment failed in the overwhelmingly Republican state legislature. If the Republican government isn't willing to place a limit on what they plan to pay these EFMs, then it is not a little obvious that they don't much care about the government budget after all, and it is likely that their one-party state, blessed with a fabricated "will of the people" will simply employ goons not for the good of society, but for the benefit of their private benefactors. What ever happened to the vindication of the 2010 midterm elections?
Naomi Klein appeared on Rachel Maddow's program regarding this legislation and compared it to Scott Walker in Wisconsin's attempted revocation of union bargaining rights and George W Bush's political profit from 9/11: Using a crisis for a political end in order to pass unpopular legislation. "We were just attacked! We need the PATRIOT Act!" "We're having an economic crisis! We need authoritarian control!"
We are dealing with here a situation that is one of existential proportions, that calls into question the legitimacy of some elected officials. These elected officials--namely the Michigan state executive and legislative branches--are not doing the work of the people. In fact, most--if not all--of those who believed that they were given a mandate against Obama to execute "the will of the people" are patently violating any such possible mandate by attempting to dismantle social infrastructure.
But the power-grab in Michigan goes above and beyond any and all Tea Party initiatives to date as one that is uniquely sinister and frightening. The complete and obvious lack of the possibility of government oversight for Emergency Financial Managers in the state of Michigan, despite being beholden to the legislature--by virtue of its overwhelmingly partisan and hyper-partisan nature--cannot be trusted in any capacity to act fairly and with the appropriate jurisprudence required for such an enterprise. That is, as we have seen in Wisconsin and in our federal legislature, we cannot depend on any Republican-controlled body to behave in such a manner that would respect the rule of law and the established rights of others, for though they were elected (some might suggest that they were not truly elected, given the manipulation I have emphasized continuously in previous discussions of the Tea Party), their interests and their constituents lie elsewhere.
What is happening in Michigan reminds me, as Rachel Maddow not-so-eloquently points out, of one of my favorite genres of literary fiction, but only one comes to mind that matches this real-life situation: Stephen King's Under the Dome. After an alien forcefield isolates a rural town in Maine, its Republican mayor takes the opportunity to consolidate power and persecute those who oppose him. First drafted in 1978, the book reminds me most of the people who came to power in 2010. Stephen King has perfect timing as well as compelling and wonderfully-written characters.
I do not mean to minimize in any way the immense tragedy in Japan by writing this essay. I care deeply about the events surrounding the Fukushima reactors. A note: Daiichi is pronounced Dai Ichi, "Number One," or "The First", as Ichi is "one", and Daini is Dai Ni, as Ni is "two" in Japanese.
One - Ichi
Two - Ni
Three - San
Four - Shi
Five - Go
Six - Roku
Seven - Shishi
Eight - Hachi
Nine - Ku
Ten - Ju
1) http://www.boingboing.net/2011/03/11/michigan-republicans.html Read the full article from the Daily Tribune
2) http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/03/16/6281871-michigan-house-speaker-takes-exception-gets-basically-nowhere
Republican Michigan governor Rick Snyder, along with the state's Republican house and senate, have passed a controversial bill that allows the governor to dissolve the elected governments of Michigan's towns and cities, replacing them with unaccountable "emergency financial managers" who can eliminate services, merge or eliminate school boards, and lay off or renegotiate unionized public employees without recourse. Republican senator Jack Brandenburg -- who supported the measure -- calls it "financial martial law."1There is something very, very, very sinister and scary about what is going on here, and it isn't simply the dissolution of the unions like in Wisconsin, but it extends to nearly every area of society in the state of Michigan: Society itself is placed squarely in the hands of people who are not only unaccountable to the people, but not even beholden to them.
While Michigan is certainly having a budget problem, and has a long history of financial problems, this does not at all give license to override the rule of law. The potential for malfeasance and cronyism far outweighs any benefit to be derived from such an extreme measure as this.
What is ironic, however, is that an amendment was proposed for a payroll cap of $160,000 a year for the "Emergency Financial Managers," but the amendment failed in the overwhelmingly Republican state legislature. If the Republican government isn't willing to place a limit on what they plan to pay these EFMs, then it is not a little obvious that they don't much care about the government budget after all, and it is likely that their one-party state, blessed with a fabricated "will of the people" will simply employ goons not for the good of society, but for the benefit of their private benefactors. What ever happened to the vindication of the 2010 midterm elections?
Naomi Klein appeared on Rachel Maddow's program regarding this legislation and compared it to Scott Walker in Wisconsin's attempted revocation of union bargaining rights and George W Bush's political profit from 9/11: Using a crisis for a political end in order to pass unpopular legislation. "We were just attacked! We need the PATRIOT Act!" "We're having an economic crisis! We need authoritarian control!"
We are dealing with here a situation that is one of existential proportions, that calls into question the legitimacy of some elected officials. These elected officials--namely the Michigan state executive and legislative branches--are not doing the work of the people. In fact, most--if not all--of those who believed that they were given a mandate against Obama to execute "the will of the people" are patently violating any such possible mandate by attempting to dismantle social infrastructure.
But the power-grab in Michigan goes above and beyond any and all Tea Party initiatives to date as one that is uniquely sinister and frightening. The complete and obvious lack of the possibility of government oversight for Emergency Financial Managers in the state of Michigan, despite being beholden to the legislature--by virtue of its overwhelmingly partisan and hyper-partisan nature--cannot be trusted in any capacity to act fairly and with the appropriate jurisprudence required for such an enterprise. That is, as we have seen in Wisconsin and in our federal legislature, we cannot depend on any Republican-controlled body to behave in such a manner that would respect the rule of law and the established rights of others, for though they were elected (some might suggest that they were not truly elected, given the manipulation I have emphasized continuously in previous discussions of the Tea Party), their interests and their constituents lie elsewhere.
What is happening in Michigan reminds me, as Rachel Maddow not-so-eloquently points out, of one of my favorite genres of literary fiction, but only one comes to mind that matches this real-life situation: Stephen King's Under the Dome. After an alien forcefield isolates a rural town in Maine, its Republican mayor takes the opportunity to consolidate power and persecute those who oppose him. First drafted in 1978, the book reminds me most of the people who came to power in 2010. Stephen King has perfect timing as well as compelling and wonderfully-written characters.
I do not mean to minimize in any way the immense tragedy in Japan by writing this essay. I care deeply about the events surrounding the Fukushima reactors. A note: Daiichi is pronounced Dai Ichi, "Number One," or "The First", as Ichi is "one", and Daini is Dai Ni, as Ni is "two" in Japanese.
One - Ichi
Two - Ni
Three - San
Four - Shi
Five - Go
Six - Roku
Seven - Shishi
Eight - Hachi
Nine - Ku
Ten - Ju
1) http://www.boingboing.net/2011/03/11/michigan-republicans.html Read the full article from the Daily Tribune
2) http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/03/16/6281871-michigan-house-speaker-takes-exception-gets-basically-nowhere
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Capitalism and Its Limits - My Theory of Business
Abstract: I explain the failure of Free-Market Economics in the wake of disastrous excesses of big business and lay out what I believe to be the proper place of business in society.
The past two years have demonstrated sufficiently that capitalism may perhaps be as--or almost as--problematic as socialism. In my view, the enormous banks have been entrusted with the guardianship of social infrastructure, and it is obvious that they have severely abused their power. Blame, at least among financial circles, has been deflected, and the people who we see are responsible for the crash of 2008 are resisting punishment and demanding more freedom even after they abused what we have given them, and cannot understand that the immense loss of opportunity is wrong. Worse is that profits are up, and unemployment in the United States is still over 9%.
Business is an endeavor through which one benefits by performing a service to society. I would not deny that the allure of financial success is an important factor in running a business, but I will expound on this later. A restaurant owner provides food, a technology company improves people's lives, an agricultural company provides society with its basic resources.
All of this is perfectly fine, but it becomes a problem when the agricultural company uses toxins on its produce, or drugs its livestock; when BP destroys an entire ecosystem and ruins the livelihoods of thousands of people in the region; when banks across the country foreclose on homes without due process; when technology companies use child labor in Africa to mine the gold in their products; when tobacco companies kill their customers and deny that their product is at all harmful despite the mountains upon mountains of evidence against them; when our government starts a war to benefit its clients and energy companies. It becomes a problem when the very businesses that sustain us use destructive means to further their ends at the expense of those they serve.
Over the past three years following the start of the recession, there has been a growing trend towards "Free-Market Capitalism." This philosophy basically allows businesses to do whatever they wish, and puts power in the hands of "the market." The problem with this philosophy is that there really is no "market" in that there will always be systemic advantage and disadvantage. No one here under this system would have any opportunity as such to succeed because the businesses that are already hegemonic would have free reign to destroy the competition as they see fit. It also depends upon people having the intelligence and fortitude to use their financial resources as a kind of activism. I fully support this idea in theory--that people should use their financial resources to make a political statement--but I recognize that as valiant and noble as this notion is, in an age where oil companies command energy policy, and when for almost a decade we were giving money to the terrorists we were fighting and the regimes that support them every time we went to the gas station, our protests do nothing to combat the volumes of legislation and contracts that give favor to Exxon.
In fact, I would argue that during that time, Americans were complacent and even willful in their support for the terrorists. To have a sticker that says "Support the Troops" on a Hummer is a truly disgusting paradox. Your tax dollars go to your sons and husbands, while your gas money goes to the Wahhabi schools that produce the suicide bombers who kill them.
But perhaps worse, under this philosophy, is that the body of regulation that protects us from chemical contamination, while already inadequate, would be dissolved. Ever try to light your tap water on fire1? We have made enormous scientific and wider social progress when it comes to recognizing and banning hazardous chemicals, but here the United States is beginning to lag behind. Canada in 2010 banned BPA from canned foods and baby bottles. "The primary health concerns center on BPA's potential effects as an endocrine disrupter, which can mimic or interfere with the body's natural hormones and potentially damage development, especially of young children2." The United States has not, and a study was done that found high levels of BPA in canned food, due to the epoxy that lines the inside of the tin can3. What is truly frightening is that Dr Sanjay Gupta testified before Congress and stated that a fetus is exposed to over 3,000 dangerous chemicals through its mother before even being born4.
Under the Free-Market system, there would be absolutely no way a disinterested party would be able to declare what is or isn't safe for companies to use, and there would be no way to ensure that companies were telling the truth about what is in their products, even less than there is now.
This is symptomatic of unmitigated avarice, the greatest vice a businessman can fall victim to, where he exploits and harms society for his own gain. In the 1940s-50s a woman named Ayn Rand gave justification to this avarice, and labeled it a 'Good'; she equated a man's worth to the size of his paycheck as a measure of his productivity. If he is making a lot of money, she surmised, he must be doing something right. Not so fast, Mrs Rand. If he is making a lot of money, I would argue in turn, he must be doing something wrong. Granted, this is not indicative of every wealthy person ever, for there are a few people who are doing exactly what they should be doing, such as Warren Buffet and Bill Gates. But this is an instance where these two paragons of philanthropy and social responsibility set an example that few others in their position are following. The exception proves the rule. Where Bill Gates builds an empire upon forcing human progress forward at the speed of light and uses his fortune to eradicate disease in very poor countries, our financial institutions fabricate fragile systems upon which they amass great fortunes, deliberately blind to the possibility that their systems could collapse, and when they did, they pulled all of society with them, and then denied that they did anything wrong.
There are few better arguments that illustrate that there exists a limitation to capitalism than these, and it is upon this body of evidence that I suggest that business interests are to be subjected to the needs of society. I am not advocating here the absolution of private enterprise; I am stating that because businesses provide a service to society, they are beholden to it, and must be strictly regulated, lest these disasters continue. Businesses are only useful and should only exist if they perform a service to society. If it becomes that the business does harm to society in the process of performing the service, the business should be dissolved and held accountable. What makes no sense under this model is for businesses to not have to pay taxes. If I hold that businesses are to be held accountable to society, it would follow that businesses, in order to exist, should have to pay taxes. Most corporations in the United States do not pay any income tax, and yet they have an incredible hold on public policy6. The system is entirely backwards.
There is a possible balance to this equation, it isn't as absolutist as it first appears. Businesses, in running their affairs, should consider the treatment of their employees and society, but employees should understand what it is possible for a business to reasonably do. I would say, however, that the vast majority of legislation to come out of the Gilded Age is fair and necessary, and in instances where avarice cannot be curbed, still further regulation may be necessary.
The bottom line is that businesses are created in order to make money, but the goal is to not do business with the intent to profit at the expense of others. That is, to not be dishonest and do no harm to greater society. I would argue that a corporation that truly wishes to follow this principle would cooperate to the best of its ability with government regulators.
It is also true, on the other hand, as the current trend among some corporations that they could stand to benefit from social responsibility. People are more likely to support a business if it is seen to be doing something good for the greater community. This goes all the way back to that important and agreeable principle maintained by Free-Market Capitalism, the only problem being that this model does not do enough to ensure that the companies that do us harm disappear.
Businesses are confronted with the age-old problem mentioned most famously in Plato's The Republic: Does it benefit me more to be unjust, or does it benefit me more to be just? This argument, quite frankly could go either way, depending on a company's ability to cover itself. Included with that is the availability of an advertising budget of considerable size, so long as the company doesn't do anything so catastrophic. But even BP appeared to recover after the Deepwater Horizon disaster. I know that BP is anti-social, I know the corners they cut on that rig, and I'm sure that there are far more people who also understand that. But BP still exists, and continues to be at least moderately successful. Tobacco companies are an even more egregious example. It has gotten to the point where cigarettes are all but contraband, the warnings on packages are becoming more graphic, and yet people smoke. This has more to do with the psychology of addiction, but that does not exactly explain why people start smoking in the first place, nor does it particularly account for the continued success of tobacco companies. Tobacco companies, much like the Catholic Church, have a long and rich history, and continue to exert influence, though that is being diminished by mounting evidence against them, over health and environmental policy in the United States. With a vast advertising budget, a company can do almost anything, and therefore it only pays to be just if you lack sufficient resources to compensate.
In a fragile democracy such as ours, we have seen the danger presented when business interests compensate for The Peoples' apathy. Two days ago, it came out that Democrats stayed home on election day in Wisconsin5. When we do not participate, we give consent to be governed by interests that are not ours. It can certainly be argued that We the People have significantly less of a say in our affairs, but to use that as a justification for not participating is to cede even more ground to alien and potentially destructive interests.
1) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/21/gasland-documentary-shows_n_619840.html
2) http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/10/14/us-bpa-idUSTRE69D4MT20101014
3) http://news.discovery.com/human/canned-food-bpa.html
4) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_TXrYHIj38
5) http://publicpolicypolling.blogspot.com/2011/02/do-over.html
6) http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2008/08/13/study-tallies-corporations-not-paying-income-tax/
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