“Facebook isn’t real life!”

Posted on February 28, 2012 by Michael

People have this view of Facebook where they think it somehow isn’t substantial, that it doesn’t “count”, that it isn’t “real life”. I think they are almost entirely wrong.

When I write anything on FTSOS, Facebook, or elsewhere online, I make it a point to not type a single word I wouldn’t also be willing to say to someone in person. Doing otherwise betrays a false bravado and that isn’t the sort of person I ever want to be. However, not everyone feels this way. Or, at least, they don’t act this way. For instance, I have had a number of people get into heated debates with me over Facebook and then, upon seeing me in person, they try to cool things off, occasionally even apologizing. My response is to consistently say that I don’t care that they were speaking harshly or that they were being rude or whatever. My view is that the reason they said those things is because they believe them. If anything, I’m happy they spoke what they think is true. I may think their beliefs are erroneous, even stupid, but I would rather read what they really think than read what they think is the nice thing to say.

There is an unfortunate reason why people change their tone (and not just with me) so quickly when they see their ‘opponent’ in person. The Internet amounts to a comfortable buffer which insulates people from many feelings of awkwardness, distress, etc. This causes people to place less value on the words they are willing to type versus the ones they are willing to speak. In other words, people believe, as I so often hear and read, that ‘Facebook isn’t real life!’ They think there is a fundamental difference between in-person interaction and online interaction. I think they’re wrong.

I’m not about to deny that there is a clear difference in dynamics between so-called ‘real life’ interaction and online interaction. There is. But that is the only difference in non-anonymous situations and it is not fundamental (due to the lack of anonymity). What a person says on Facebook and other online places still impacts the thoughts, feelings, emotions, and mood of a person sitting at the end of another connection. Right now, I mean right now, anyone reading this post is considering what I am saying; anyone reading this post is computing in their minds what they think and how they feel about my argument. Is that not real life? Is that somehow fake? Is everyone who sees this just pretending to exist?

None of this is to say that online interaction is better than in-person interaction. I think in-person interaction has many advantages over online interaction, including a wider array of dynamics. On the flip side, I think online interaction has its advantages, including the ability to formulate detailed points and stories and arguments. However, I think the people who scream that Facebook and other online media platforms aren’t ‘real life’ would be the same people decrying the ‘realness’ of telephone conversations back when they were still a new thing. They have a ridiculous argument – ridiculousness that is just as real whether it is said over a cup of coffee or on a status update.

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The Tea Party summarized

Posted on February 23, 2012 by Michael

2009: No more government waste! Cut spending! Lower taxes! Stop giving money away to lazy (colored) people! (And please keep my social security flowing.)

2012: Taxes? lol wut? No abortion!

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At least 46% of Mississippi Republicans are overt racists

Posted on February 19, 2012 by Michael

And who knows about those too embarrassed to express their views:

When usual Republican primary voters in the state of Mississippi were asked if they think interracial marriage should be legal or illegal, a whopping 46 percent said it should be illegal, compared to 40 percent who think it should be legal. The remaining 14 percent were unsure.

There seems to be a pattern here. Roughly 40% of voters in 1998 (South Carolina) and 2000 (Alabama) voted against removing defunct bans on interracial marriage from their constitutions. I have no stats which break down how many of these people were Republicans, but who thinks they were mostly Democrats? The GOP is doing a heck of a job as solidifying itself as the party of racists, particularly in the South. I may have to throw out that old saying, ‘Republicans may not be racist, but racists vote Republican.’ The data suggests the first clause to be false.

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Flag burning

Posted on February 6, 2012 by Michael

Somebody at an Occupy location in Maine burned an American flag on his way out the door today. I’m glad. But my joy has nothing to do with the Occupy movement.

I’m all for flag burning. It irritates me to no end that we’re suppose to pledge allegiance to some piece of fabric in grade school, to show it respect before sporting events, and that everyone gets all up in arms when someone sets it ablaze. It’s an abstract symbol with which some people are going to disagree, whether in part or whole. The fact that they want to express that disagreement via theatrical means shouldn’t draw anyone’s attention any more than a person standing on the street corner gets anyone’s attention (except insofar as it may be prudent to not stand close to burning fabric).

As much as PZ likes to Maloney-censor, I still agree with him on the Catholic cracker ‘incident’. There is no good reason to pretend as if anything is really all that sacred. Of course we are going to place value on various things, whether ideas or material, and we should want to defend those things – but in proportion. Vehement disagreement with ideals one holds should garner the same response no matter how that disagreement is expressed, bar violence. I have read epic disagreements which make flag burning look like nothing special, yet high-end prose rarely inflames passions like symbolic fabric in flames.

I find all this devotion to flags downright absurd. The only way I can see a person being offended by its destruction is if they have values which border on nationalism – values which are themselves almost always arbitrary. Who doesn’t believe that the average flag-totting American wouldn’t gladly tote the ol’ green, white, and orange if he was from Ireland instead of the U.S.? It’s as happenstance as the majority of religious beliefs.

People don’t hold their particular flag in high honor for very many rational reasons, if any. They hold it in high honor for the same infantile reason people think their daddy is better than your daddy.

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Prison

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Michael

I was perusing the letters to the editor for my local paper when I came across one about the treatment of prisoners. It was a response to another letter, but it isn’t necessary to get bogged down in details. The gist is this: Some people think prisoners have it too easy and should get no privileges (such as TV) whereas other people believe it is better to use the carrot instead of the stick. Here is the response I left in the comment section:

[Letter writer] Kevin Tardiff makes some very salient points; I agree with his position.

The point of prison is not to merely punish. Punishment is the vehicle we use for two more important purposes: the safety of society and the rehabilitation of the offender. We cannot achieve these goals if we mistreat those we place behind bars. Isn’t it obvious the U.S. prison system is a failure? Countries which treat their prisoners with a certain level of human respect have lower recidivism rates, less crime, and less violence behind prison walls.

It’s clear there is an underlying desire among many people to get revenge. This reflects the false view that prison is for the primary purpose of punishment, and it’s a petty perspective to have. Aren’t we supposed to be better than those we imprison? People will argue (and some here already have) that violent offenders have mistreated their victims, so we shouldn’t give them any decent treatment in return. This is a bogus, inhumane position that promotes the exact sort of thing we wish to deter. People who make that sort of argument should be ashamed and embarrassed – ashamed because they are seeking hypocritical revenge, and embarrassed because their argument is logically incoherent. Should we also rape rapists in an act of tit-for-tat?

No one is arguing prison ought to be a cakewalk. And, the fact is, it isn’t. That’s why no one wants to be there. But we should have societal safety and rehabilitation in mind when we design prison programs and procedures. Treat the animal in the cage nicely and it won’t bite you when you let it out. Treat it poorly and you get what you deserve.

We’ve tried the macho tough-on-crime bullshit for a few decades now. It hasn’t worked. It has been an expensive endeavor that has only trained people to be better criminals. It’s time we start looking in the other direction. I know people are interested in abstract ideas of justice, but we have to do away with some of that. Let’s hold onto our ideals, of course, but let’s not pretend like we’re actually making anything better in the world by doling out a sort of government-endorsed karma. That might make us feel better in the short-term, but it doesn’t make us any safer or productive as a society.

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Colorado considering trans-fat ban in schools

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Michael

I hope they follow through:

The nation’s leanest state is taking aim at junk food in school cafeterias as it considers the nation’s toughest school trans-fat ban.

A Colorado House committee was scheduled to hear a bill Thursday to forbid any trans-fat in school food — not just the food served through regular cafeteria lunches.

That would mean vending machines, after-school bake sales and popular “a la carte” items on lunch lines such as ice creams or pizza would have to be produced without artery-clogging trans fats.

This would constitute one of the broadest bans in the nation. I fully support it. There is no reason we should be practically trying to produce unhealthy children. It isn’t merely the improvement of their minds that should be our concern.

Colorado has a decent track history of creating good public healthy policies. It also is usually in the top ten in income, so when that is coupled with its expansive outdoor recreational options, the results are generally positive. For instance, as the article states, Colorado is the “leanest” state in the Union. It still has an incredible 19% obesity rate, but this is pretty decent by American standards. (When looking at other health factors, New England tends to dominate the positive ranks.)

I hope to see more aggressive steps by Colorado in the future. It isn’t a polarized state in the eyes of the nation like a Mississippi or a California is, so it has a real chance to be a leader in health.

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Conservatives may not be dumb…

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Michael

…but dumb people tend to be conservative:

The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an email to LiveScience.

“Prejudice is extremely complex and multifaceted, making it critical that any factors contributing to bias are uncovered and understood,” he said.

This matches up with the old saying, “Republicans may not all be racists, but racists vote Republican.” And though this confirms suspicions of liberals/the rest of the world concerning the general intelligence of conservatives, I think it should be clarified that this is talking about social conservatives. Going hand-in-hand with that is economic conservatism (at least in American politics), but that’s probably more a quirk of history and shitty political polarization than anything.

People with lower cognitive abilities also had less contact with people of other races.

“This finding is consistent with recent research demonstrating that intergroup contact is mentally challenging and cognitively draining, and consistent with findings that contact reduces prejudice,” said Hodson, who along with his colleagues published these results online Jan. 5 in the journal Psychological Science.

This matches up with the fact that large cities tend to vote more liberally. Using my home state as an example, independent 2010 candidate for governor Eliot Cutler – by far the most intelligent candidate the state has seen in quite some time – was doing very well according to early results. Unfortunately, those results were indicative of southern Maine where the technology and methods for reporting vote counts is more efficient due to more money as a result of a denser population. Once the results started coming in from rural northern Maine, our current shit governor [Waterville-R] started to take over. We saw the same pattern with the voting down of same sex marriage in 2009. Bigots like their rural atmospheres.

Of course, it has to be noted that this is all correlation. It matches up with a number of trends, yes, but that does not mean causation. In fact, since plenty of conservatives are intelligent, it’s obvious that believing in dumb ideologies does not make a person dumb. But still. Dumb people do tend to believe stupid things…

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State of the Union

Posted on January 24, 2012 by Michael

Cons: I appreciate corny jokes more than the average person – I actually really liked the salmon one last year – but that milk joke was just awful.

Pro: That ending was pretty epic.

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Whites favored over blacks? When has that ever been racist?

Posted on January 22, 2012 by Michael

Gov. Haley Barbour recently pardoned a whole bunch of prisoners on his way out the door in Mississippi. Many of them had served out their sentences, so those pardons amount to little more than making it easier for the people in question to get jobs. (And, of course, if they commit more crimes, their punishments will be less in all likelihood.) A few of them, though, were given to people still serving time for crimes such as murder. Needless to say, the issue has been controversial. Overlooked, however, has been the racial makeup of those pardoned:

Barbour granted 222 acts of clemency in his tenure to 221 individuals: one convict’s sentence was initially suspended in 2008 and he then received a full pardon last week.

Of those, roughly two of three were white, according to data from the Mississippi Department of Corrections and a search of public records. The racial makeup of Mississippi’s prison population is the inverse: about two-thirds’ black.

Whites make up about 59 percent of the state’s population as a whole and blacks about 37 percent.

Barbour is saying race played no role, and in fact, it wasn’t even listed on relevant applications. It sounds like he may be off the hook on this one, but the Parole Board isn’t. The people who run that are responsible for most of the recommendations for pardons and it’s hard to believe they’re all blind.

But, hey, maybe it’s just a coincidence, right?

“The odds of a random sample of the prison population coming out with the same or greater disparity in racial proportions as the pardons list is less than one in a trillion, if race were truly unrelated to pardons.” [said University of Georgia statisticians Kim Love-Myers]

I know most conservatives will be apt to say race really isn’t a factor here, presumably because they want to make my brain explode, but it’s obvious that there are pervasive racial issues at play. There are some mitigating factors, of course. For instance, just as money equals power outside prison, it equals empowerment inside prison. Whites will tend to have more money to explore all their legal options. But this is a relatively trivial issue in this context. The fact is, whites are inherently more favored than blacks when requesting pardons:

Love-Myers and Reeves also found that based on Mississippi’s prison demographics, white prisoners were about four times more likely to be pardoned than black prisoners. That echoes a recent examination of presidential pardons under President George W. Bush by public interest non-profit news organization ProPublica.

In an analysis released last month of 1,918 applications for pardons during Bush’s administration, ProPublica found that white criminals seeking presidential pardons were nearly four times more likely to get them than minorities.

“It is, to say the least, astronomically unlikely that Barbour’s selection was color-blind,” said Rob Warden, executive director of the Center on Wrongful Conviction. “Now whether that’s Barbour’s fault or the review board’s fault, is a different question. It was somebody’s fault. It’s not color-blind.”

What’s perhaps the most unfortunate thing in all this is that now even fewer pardons will be given out due to political pressures. Whether the percentages change in any appreciable way remains to be seen, but if things continue to trend as they have been, the fact is the sheer number of blacks getting pardons is going to decrease.

I suspect in conservative la-la land, though, none of this has a thing to do with race.

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Where Scalia and Thomas are plainly moral monsters

Posted on January 21, 2012 by Michael

The Supreme Court recently made a 7-2 ruling which favored convicted murderer Cory Maples. Here are the basics. Maples was represented by a prominent firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, following his murder conviction. He and his current lawyers contend that the lawyers who represented him during his trial were incompetent (and underpaid) and as such he should be able to appeal his sentence of death. (He is not contesting his guilt.) Unfortunately, a series of terrible events made him miss a filing deadline. His first pro bono lawyers left Sullivan and Cromwell without informing their client. Then crucial letters he had sent off were marked returned to sender instead of being passed on to other lawyers. His local counsel, needed for formality reasons, took no action because the other lawyers were suppose to take the lead. A clerk also did nothing. Maples found out about everything about a month after the deadline. State and federal courts then said they could not waive the deadlines, largely because the actions of one’s lawyers is seen to also be the actions of the client.

Clearly we have a whole bunch of horseshit going on here. Maples is the victim of circumstances beyond his control from his prison cell. He did everything within his own power to meet the deadline for appealing. Justice Ginsburg, noting that deadlines usually are not touched by the courts, said this situation was unique because Maples “lacked any clue that he had better fend for himself.” It’s obvious that Maples deserves better than this, regardless of his crime.

What makes this all especially egregious is that Maples has a pretty good claim that had he been adequately represented he probably would have avoided the death penalty. The jury vote for murder-by-committee was 10-2, the minimum required under Alabama law. Had his trial lawyers not “appear to be stumbling around in the dark”, as one of them actually said in court, then it seems perfectly plausible that the man could have convinced at least one more person that he doesn’t deserve to be murdered.

Political figure Antonin Scalia and Chester the Terrier avatar Clarence Thomas saw things differently. They believed Maples was represented just fine through the whole process. After all, Scalia notes, once Sullivan and Cromwell were informed of the error their former employees made, they took action. This makes sense. I mean, who wouldn’t want a system where post hoc representation is the norm? “Sure, your lawyer was snorting blow and banging hookers while paying alley bums to get into fist fights, but his firm took action and fired him 8 years after your conviction. I don’t see what you’re whining about, pussy.”

Scalia then takes things one stupid step further and makes this terrible argument:

“The trick will be to allege,” Justice Scalia wrote, “not that counsel was ineffective, but rather that the counsel’s ineffectiveness demonstrates that he was not a genuinely representative agent.”

In other words, this decision may open up better legal avenues for defendants, thus we shouldn’t allow it. This is why I hate this purely political piece of shit. He is more concerned with closing off doors to fair trials than making the right decision. Justice Ginsburg notes that this situation is quite specific and unique, so Scalia’s argument is moot, but I don’t see what it matters even if he is right. So what if clients can argue that they never had genuine representation? Let the courts decide if that’s the case or not – just as they did here.

This is the M.O. for Scalia. He looks down the road at results he would personally dislike and sacrifices doing what is legally right as a result. Take Lawrence v Texas. He was perfectly happy to allow anti-sodomy laws because he feared the decision would open the road to gay marriage. It wasn’t that he thought there was any real legitimacy to the government criminalizing private acts of sex. Nope, he just doesn’t want them there gays to be gettin’ married. Just the same, he doesn’t want to see Maples get a fair shake at the system if it means a lot of other people will have more options; the man wants to keep doors closed. It’s such insane logic that I can’t help but condemn this shitbag for being a moral monster. He forsakes the law and tries to bring harm to people on illegitimate grounds. I really won’t be in the least bit upset when he dies. (The same goes for the pube guy.) I just hope it happens while we have a Democrat in office.

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