Archive for the ‘Self-Righteous Punditry’ Category

Whoa There!

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007

I just got an email from MoveOn, like I do.

The gist of the message is a request for members to support a bill currently sitting in front of Congress that would make it a federal crime to price gouge for gasoline. The punishment would be up to 10 years in prison. Hmm…

I know gas is expensive. I know it effects all Americans heavily when gas costs a lot. I know that oil interests are utilizing the current political climate to price gouge. But come on. Make that specific thing a federal crime with significant prison time? That’s going too far and is certainly a slippery slope issue.

I like MoveOn. But sometimes it isn’t the best idea to support something just because it’s a chance to stick it to the Republicans.

Personally, I like to think systemically about this one. Maybe if gas does top $4 then that’s one more price point in the direction of convincing even the most grossly consumerist, SUV-driving Americans that maybe it’d be a good idea to work towards more sustainable energy practices.

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It’s Okay

Sunday, May 20th, 2007

I’ve been thinking about the ways people behave around apologies. Sometimes folks don’t really know how to express themselves well when an “I’m sorry” situation arises.

Consider the following scenario:

Sam and Sally are housemates. Sally really loves curry. Suffice to say that there is a convincing reason to treat Sally’s curry as sacred.

Sally leaves her leftover curry in the fridge one night. Sam comes home after an evening of heavy drinking, finds the curry, and scarfs it.

The next morning, Sally opens the fridge and is furious. She doesn’t say anything, though, because her general approach to conflict is to be passive-aggressive. Sam wakes up (several hours) later and comes into the kitchen, opens the fridge, and realizes with a smack to the forehead that he ate Sally’s curry and she’s going to be very unhappy about that.

Sam goes to his silently fuming housemate and apologizes. What is Sally’s response?

“It’s okay,” she says.

This doesn’t sound right to me.

Yes, Sam is doing good by noting that he has wronged his housemate and taking the initiative to apologize. However, that doesn’t make the original act “okay.” It may repair the rift in his relationship with Sally and allow them to move forward without hard feelings, but simply declaring everything to be “okay” is sweeping it under the rug. It certainly doesn’t do anything to help Sam understand how much he has hurt his roommate.

I think I don’t like the phrase “It’s okay” as a response to apologies unless it really is okay. The phrase should be reserved for moments when someone is apologizing unnecessarily — like if they accidentally bump into you.

In the scenario above, it seems that Sally would get more mileage out of saying something like “Thank you for apologizing, it makes me feel better about this whole thing.” That way she smooths over the problem between her and Sam but without creating the impression that Sam’s behavior wasn’t actually hurtful.

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Pot, Kettle, Sam Jackson

Tuesday, May 15th, 2007

Many of my fine readers know that I’m in the throes of building an advice column-blog. It isn’t quite ready yet, so no link for you1. As such, I’ve been paying closer attention to all the advice columns I read…

And you wouldn’t believe2 how many people write in all offended by secrets they found while snooping though their SOs’ email. The letters usually go something like:

So, I just happened to walk up to my husband’s computer while he was away and I accidentally glanced at his email and just happened to notice an old email from 5 months ago to his ex-girlfriend where he implied that he misses her! My trust in him is shattered! What do I do?!

It also goes the other way gender-wise. I’m not being sexist. Or hetero-sexist. It happens with same-sex couples, too.

Whenever I see these letters I feel the need to stop reading at the point where the spouse is snooping on his/her partner’s email. Ya, obviously there is a trust problem in your relationship. But maybe the cause is a little more systemic than you previously thought.

This post was inspired by today’s Savage Love column, in which the ever-wonderful Dan Savage dishes it out with a fantastic way of thinking about these situations. His rule:

Here’s a good rule of thumb—one I just made up—for e-mail snoopers, PISSED: If the transgression your snooping uncovers is a more serious transgression than e-mail snooping itself, you apologize for snooping and confront. But if the uncovered transgression is less serious, you keep your fool mouth shut.

I love you Dan Savage. Will you be my friend?

  1. but there is one in my blogroll. I’m fickle. [↩]
  2. unless you read advice columns as much as I do [↩]

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Do Power Vacuums Have HEPA Filters?

Tuesday, May 1st, 2007

I have something to confess.

It’s hard to say it… But I’m not really convinced that having our troops just leave Iraq in six months is necessarily a good idea.

What I do know is that our Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad President has gotten us into exactly the kind of nasty mess that war opponents were screaming about way back before the “Mission Accomplished” debacle went down. I also know that cleaning up after him is going to be drastically painful.

But if we just up and leave I’m not sure things will be any better. One thing I’ve learned about Iraq from all the screen time they’ve been getting is that they were never a “people” like we think of that word around these parts. It seems it’s a lot of “peoples”, some of which would be perfectly happy to see some of the other “peoples” take a long walk off a short pier, and was previously glued in place by a powerful despotic warlord1. It seems we’ve replaced said local despotic warlord with a foreign almost-despotic warlord. Funny enough, many locals seem upset about that.

Yes, the American people are really unhappy about being in this position. I imagine most of the people living in Baghdad are pretty bummed about it, too. Whether we wanted to be dragged into it or not, we’re there now. I can’t help but feel that a plan in which we simply leave would make for a serious case of abandonment. I think the most healthy plan is a lot more difficult than that. I think it would take a lot more “hard work” to get us out of President Warbucks‘ special little hole.

I don’t have an alternative plan to contribute, however. Just my opinion.

  1. That we put there for that purpose [↩]

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Don’t Be Evil

Monday, April 30th, 2007

Here’s something nice for y’all:

The custodians of five New York pension funds, being Google shareholders, ask for the company to make policies to counteract censorship in nations such as China and Iran among many others.

I think I was talking to someone this past weekend about Google’s move away from their pre-IPO corporate tenet of “Don’t Be Evil.” After going public, they struck that phrase from their mission statement. It seemed rather telling of the ways in which being beholden to stock holders can turn a good company bad. Google ostensibly could no longer have a phrase like “Don’t Be Evil” as a guiding principle because… I don’t really know why. The SEC would get upset? A stockholder would be offended? I’m not really sure.

But this is one of those stories that gives me a glimmer of hope. As the first poster1 on this article points out, the fund performing this request holds somewhere around 0.15% of Google’s stock. That is nowhere near being a significant voting block. But it’s great to see that at least one relatively large holder is interested in using it as something more than just an income generator. If Google can no longer promise to not be evil because their shareholders may or may not desire evil, I’m glad that at least one of the few that feels differently is using their voice to express an interest in the public good.

  1. http://youtube.com/watch?v=ciG-Xs7mBwU [↩]

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Mental Illness doesn’t show up in an autopsy. No shit.

Monday, April 23rd, 2007

From a report on the autopsy of Seung-Hui Cho, the gunman who committed the murders at Va. Tech:

Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho was as mysterious in death as he was in life, leaving behind few clues for medical examiners.

…

Psychologists and criminologists have suggested in recent days that Cho suffered from a mental illness, but Massello said such disorders are usually neurological or chemical in nature and unlikely to be identified during an autopsy, even if Cho’s brain had been intact.

Um. Duh?

Among all the scrambling to find someone at fault, the scramblers seem to have largely settled on gun enthusiasts and the mental health industry. I feel a desire to make some things clear:

  • Putting a suicidal person on a hold and taking them to the hospital is not the same as arresting them and taking them to jail. When Cho was released it was because he was no longer highly likely to go kill himself. In other words, “he no longer appeared to be a threat to himself.”
  • No one in the mental health system has a crystal ball, not even psychiatrists and psychologists. They always say “the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.”1 Cho did not have a list of past behaviors including “shooting rampage.” Therefore, ipso facto, no one leapt to the conclusion that he would commit such an atrocity.
  • Mental health workers can’t put someone away for “suspicion of being screwed up.” To be truly put away in the United States, one has to commit a crime.2 I can’t imagine a judge taking too kindly to prosecutors claiming that a kid should be locked up for the long haul because “This here psychiatrist said he should.”

Of course his “mental illness” won’t show up in the autopsy. There’s no Anxiety Virus. Depression is not the result of damage to your “happy neurons.”3

Looking for some concrete, easy-to-identify sign of what was wrong with this kid and trying to figure out who screwed up won’t work. It won’t bring back the dead. It won’t heal anyone’s injuries. And it won’t do anything to stop this from happening again.

It’s absolutely horrendous what this kid did. And it’s worth spending the time and energy to see what lessons we can learn from it. But unfortunately we’ll likely never know the “why” of it, no matter how advanced and enlightened our society may be.

  1. And it’s a poor one at that [↩]
  2. There aren’t really even places where people suffering full-blown psychosis are “put away” anymore. In Oregon, a mental health commitment will only get you into the state hospital for up to 180 days. [↩]
  3. There are, of course, neurochemical components to mood disorders. But the debate over chemistry vs. circumstance is often circular and typically results in chicken-and-egg impasses. [↩]

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China Needs to Spend Some Time in the International Doghouse

Monday, April 23rd, 2007

This morning I awoke to a wonderfully uplifting story on NPR news: a region of southwest China1 has recently forced hundreds of women to go to the hospital and have abortions. Many of these abortions are late-term and one report included a woman who was due to give birth in just a few days.

Government-coerced abortions are not news in China. But this incident is different because China recently passed new laws that relax their family planning restrictions and supposedly make these kinds of atrocities a thing of the past. The report stated that this is likely happening because local officials need to lower the population growth rate for the year or risk being fired. I guess they figure their jobs are more important than the lives of hundreds of families.

China talks very nice. But they absolutely must step up to the plate of humanitarian reform. The United States is supposed to be a powerful nation that believes in the welfare of the little man. We put ourselves out as an example of human rights and democracy. And yet we do so very little to hold China accountable.

Yes, the State Department may occasionally make statements and toothless demands. That, however, is little more than politics and diplomacy. It’s like telling the school bully that it wasn’t cool to stuff the nerd in his locker but then going and playing basketball with him all afternoon anyways.

If we as a nation had as much integrity as we claim, we wouldn’t stand for this. We would place severe sanctions on China and ask other UN members to do the same. We would make it clear that China’s policy of treating human life like garbage is unacceptable. The US has the power to do this. China is certainly powerful and, to a great extent, quite scary. But they aren’t stupid or suicidal. If the US and the EU stood together on a human rights issue then China would not be able to ignore it.

Since the creation of the new family planning laws, China has ostensibly been punishing people who coerce abortions. That’s a good thing. But in this case, the likely reason why these things are happening is a government quota regarding population growth that carries with it a risk of job loss for local bureaucrats. That sounds to me like things still aren’t quite working at the national level. And the Chinese government needs to be held accountable for atrocities that occur in their nation.

  1. I couldn’t make out how to spell the name and I can’t find any written references to it this morning on the Net [↩]

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