Oh, How I Wish To Live In That Conservative Shangri-La

I've often joked that I really want to live in the world conservatives think we live in now -- a socialist utopia with free healthcare and abortions on demand, where crossing the border is as easy as ordering lunch, and where women and people of color have long ago achieved equality and there are no pressing social problems of any kind. It really does sound like a great place to be.

I was reminded of that when I saw this graffiti scrawled near a handicapped parking space in the lot outside of my building. Although it's obviously only the grammatically incorrect, misspelled rant of one person, it very much encapsulates so much of the conservative world view. If you can't tell from the picture, this person believes that those using the handicapped spot are not only not suffering from a physical handicap that necessitates a special parking space, but are in fact overweight and driving an SUV paid for by the presumably honest, hard-working graffiti-er's taxes.

This kind of worldview makes me feel something between knee-slapping laughter and infuriating rage. Although it's insane, it seems to be one of the cornerstones of contemporary American conservatives -- that somehow, there's an army of lazy people who have figured out that instead of working, they can get large checks from the federal government by faking some sort of malady, thus allowing them to live in luxury by doing nothing but collecting the tax revenues of their hard-working countrymen.

Of course this is laughable. Anyone who knows even the basics of government programs knows that any benefits you may receive are going to be so small as to barely allow you to have the necessities of life. Literally no single private individual is driving an SUV paid for by someone else's tax money. It simply has never happened and will never happen at any point in the future. Making it even more emblematic of how absurdly fantastical the conservative worldview is would be the fact that simply having a handicapped parking permit in no way even implies that person is getting any sort of government benefit. And again, even if they are getting some sort of disability benefit, they would have to save every single cent of it for years on end to have enough to buy even a moderately-priced vehicle.

But I think what makes this the most infuriating is that there are entities out there receiving absurd amounts of federal tax dollars they neither need nor deserve. They're multi-billion dollar multinational corporations, usually defense and energy companies. And yet, I've yet to see any conservatives getting upset about those government handouts, despite the fact that they dwarf payments to the indigent by several orders of magnitude.

Or maybe I'm simply wrong, and am too much of a sheeple to realize there are secret government programs designed to hand out millions to handicapped people for the purpose of...well, ok, I can't even imagine where the argument goes from there, but I'm sure it's damn entertaining/horribly offensive.

Is Being Funny Enough Good Enough?

I've written before about rape jokes and how, similar to racial jokes, they walk a very fine line; even if they're funny, they need to be constructed carefully to make sure they're punching up and not victim shaming/blaming, or they become really shitty really quickly. If they're unfunny, they come across terribly even if they're not really that offensive per se.

Being a comedy nerd, I've had a lot of conversations about this sort of thing. One of my friends I've discussed this at length with maintains that you can really get away with joking about anything, as long as it's funny. I don't know that I completely subscribe to that viewpoint, but I do feel that if you laugh at something you can't simultaneously claim it has offended you, because you don't laugh at things that offend you (well, maybe in some really specific situations, but you know what I'm getting at).

But the longer I think about it, the more I come around to the "if it's funny enough, you can say anything" position (though this is probably my white male privilege showing through). Case in point: I've been sitting on this awhile, but last month when murder charges were announced against former Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez, mock sports fan/terrible human being Pro Football Talk Commenter was on a damn roll.

(To the unfamiliar, Pro Football Talk is terrible sports news website. Its comment section, like on so many sports sites/websites in general, is full of typo-ridden racist, sexist, uninformed garbage. PFTCommenter is a sort of meta parody of these, and often contributes to Kissing Suzy Kolber, a pretty good football-centric blog. Check out his awesome White History Month series to get a taste of his general ouvre.)

Anyway, at this point, all anyone knew was that someone had been murdered and Hernandez was the center of the investigation. And of course, no one is more idiotic nor prone to grandstanding than sports reporters, so PFTCommenter had a bit of a field day taking them on. First, he took down Peter King's always shitty logic:

Not only funny in and of itself, but really pokes a great hole in King's grandstanding logic; either teams somehow magically knew Hernandez would become a murderer (in which case, they probably shouldn't have drafted him), or this is something no one could have predicted and the fact that he fell in the draft because he smoked weed in college is probably irrelevant (especially when you consider somewhere between 30-40% of college students smoke marijuana).

So that one is less offensive funny that just plain funny. But the post that made me laugh heartily and then feel kinda icky about laughing so hard was this one:

(For those unfamiliar with the acronym, MFK stands for "Marry, Fuck, Kill," an game in which three people are named and one has to say which they would prefer to respectively marry, fuck, and kill.)

So this is definitely a tasteless joke somewhat made at the expense of a man who had just been murdered, which if not totally offensive, certainly comes across as somewhat wrong. Yet, at the same time, I almost spit out my coffee when I read it I was laughing so hard.

So I guess I don't really have any greater conclusion on the subject, but I am probably going to hell for laughing at this stuff. But hey, at least I'll be laughing on my way there...

Listen To This

Hey look, it's an exclusive new track from Robbie Fulks' new album.

If you don't currently listen to Robbie, you're missing quite a bit. It's what country music is supposed to sound like, and nearly always my go-to rebuttal for people who listen to "everything but country." Because that is stupid position to take, as country music kicks ass. Well, really, dismissing an entire genre is pretty much always stupid. But especially so with one so entwined with the history of our nation and with such a massive, varied, and influential catalogue. Why doesn't anyone ever say they listen to everything but Norwegian Death Metal? That would at least make some sense.

Anyway, listen to it. And if you're a fan of smart-ass takes on music and life in general, I also highly recommend his blog.

...And I'm Back

There's something about driving half-way across this gigantic nation in this day and age that feels like it's just missing something. Sure, the well-maintained intestates undoubtedly move traffic along much faster than in days past, but it seems like all the local color is gone. Especially on the toll roads, in which the only options for gas and food are identical "oases" every 50 or so miles. But even on the more open roads, it seems every exit is just about the same.

As a veteran of numerous minivan trips across the nation, I remember there being a lot more local color, at least in terms of interesting little local restaurants or oddly-themed gas stations and the like. But now you really have to search for those things, if they even exist to be found.

Fortunately, though, on the way back home this past weekend I stopped off to stay with some friends in West Lafayette. I can't say there's a whole lot to recommend West Lafayette (though I was just there for one night), but I can say if you're ever there, you need to go the Triple XXX Family Restaurant (yes, it's written like that, although that really implies it's the 9 family restaurant) (also, don't google it at work. I learned that lesson for you).

Apparently the last surviving Triple XXX Rootbeer stand (hence the odd name), it's now a greasy spoon with some delightfully absurd menu items, all named after Boilermaker legends, or as much as such a thing exists. I had something named after Drew Brees, and while I don't really remember everything in it, it was all covered in gravy. The kind of breakfast that's perfect for a day on the road, since you won't need to eat again at all.

I feel like places like that used to be a lot more widespread, but maybe this just means I'm officially getting old now that I'm starting to think things were better way back when. Either way, I feel like an entire breakfast platter covered in gravy shouldn't be so hard to find...

So the Triple XXX actually refers to alcohol, which I guess isn't as scandalous,
but probably similarly ill-suited as the namesake for a family restaurant

The T-Shirt Turns 100

So apparently the t shirt is now 100 years old. Though I guess they technically mean the short-sleeved t shirt, since technically all shirts are t shirts, aren't they?

I felt the need to note the date, as I've long had a thing for collecting t shirts. Well, not really collecting them, it's more I have a weakness for shirts with amusing, stupid, or amusingly stupid things written on them. Plus, they're just such a great way to broadcast your political views -- take that, global capitalism! Surely my witty communist-themed t shirt will tear asunder your walls of greed!

So in celebration...uh, I guess wear a t shirt today? Though given that it's already late in the afternoon, I'm assuming you're already dressed by now. So...wear one tomorrow? Jesus, I can't make all of your decisions for you...

For instance, this is a humorous shirt I own,
although that is not me wearing it

And Now For Something Light -- Baseball!

So blah, blah, blah politics, amirite? Seems like this space has devolved into angry rants lately. Which is fine to a point (angry ranting is more-or-less what I do best), but sometimes that shit has to be tempered by the light frivolity that is grown men being paid large sums of money to play a game.

Gizmodo recently published and interesting history of the evolution of baseball equipment that's well worth the read. The funniest thing to me is that it took a long while for gloves to be introduced, and the first man to use one was mocked a fair bit for being so sissy he needed something to protect his hands. Though to be fair, at that time it still counted as an out if you caught the ball on the first hop, so maybe his bullies were somewhat justified.

Even more fascinating, though (and developed in more detail on the Smithsonian's blog) is the history of the ball itself. Originally there were no standards placed on the balls being used, but more interestingly, it was the pitcher's job to supply the ball for the game. This being before widespread automation (or at least automated production of baseballs), the pitchers would have to put the balls together themselves, carefully cutting up leather and sewing it together in just the right way. Often the balls would really only be any good for the first few innings, after which they would become misshapen blobs that would be incredibly difficult to hit, leading to what is commonly referred to as the "dead ball era" and often excluded from discussions about the statistical history of baseball.

Anyway, both of the article linked above contain a bunch more links of their own, which can send you down a rabbit hole of internet links until your afternoon is gone, which may or may not be a good thing, depending on how you define your life...

The Smaller Forms of White Privilege

So as we've seen recently (though we've seen it a thousand times before), white privilege is pretty damn powerful. It's the kind of thing that lets you kill an unarmed Black teenager, and then the resulting trial and media coverage focus on how potentially dangerous the dead kid is rather than how obviously dangerous the deranged dude with the gun who killed a child is. Nice work if you can get it, right?

But typically white privilege operates on a much smaller plane. For instance, shitty comedians often use their white privilege to make racist jokes and then jump on anyone who calls them out for it for "being p.c." (as an aside, is there any greater phrase in the English language? It's one of those really handy markers, because as soon as you hear someone use that phrase, you know you can stop listening to them right then and there, because they are a fucking moron).

Here's a good recent example -- after the now infamous incident in which a Bay Area news station reported the names of the pilots on the crashed Asiana Airlines flight as "Wee Too Low" and "Ho Lee Fuk" among others, Patton Oswalt tweeted out something to the effect of their new PR person would be "Wi So Solly."

Get it? Because Asian people talk funny! Har har!

The funniest thing about it to me is how not only racist, but completely out of touch it makes Patton look, especially for a guy who has a lot of fans who seem to think of him as hip and witty (full confession: I've never found the dude funny). When I saw the tweet, it immediately made me think of one of the all-time great Simpsons episodes, Krusty Gets Kancelled. In the episode, to demonstrate how unfunny and out of touch Krusty has become, they show him doing a bit with fake buck teeth and saying "me so solly," as their example of the ultimate unfunny, hackneyed joke. That episode premiered 20 years ago. 20 years ago people who were actually talented comics were using the "so solly" bit as an example of ridiculous, out-dated, hackneyed material. Just to put that in perspective.

Anyway, David Daley over at Salon called Oswalt out for being a racist idiot (and noted the joke wasn't funny to boot). But instead of say, pausing for a bit to think about how maybe he had just made a racist remark, Oswalt instead began firing back and eventually wrote a long missive on his website about how those P.C. prudes over at Salon just don't get his crazy edgy humor. In it, he mocks the idea that he, esteemed white comedian, could ever be racist in the first place, and that if anyone thinks he is, it's only because they're not smart enough to understand his comedy. He also claims it should be obvious to anyone that the tv station was the brunt of the joke, but I can't really see how that's the case. The only "joke" contained within the original tweet is that Asian people supposedly can't say R's, and I'm not certain how that's a joke on the tv station and not just dredging up an incredibly reductive, racist insult for cheap laughs.

But it's not just that fact that Oswalt can fire off racist tweets and not lose his job or many of his fans. The real power of white privilege is in how indignant he gets to be that anyone would dare call him out on his racism. And that instead of taking the time to reflect about how, yeah, that's a pretty fucking racist joke, he instead turns in into a rant about how anyone who sees racism in it is just spoiling for a fight and is so out of touch with reality they can't recognize his genius.

Kinda like how Trayvon Martin was so out of touch with reality he couldn't recognize that he should just sit still while a crazed gunman chased him down the street...

The Biggest Tribute to Trayvon is Not Forgetting

So George Zimmerman was found not guilty, despite, you know, shooting and killing an unarmed teenager who was doing nothing illegal. Predictably, as such things tend to go in a nation and criminal justice system that both have serious problems with young, Black men, it really seemed as if Trayvon was on trial much more than Zimmerman. After all, if you're going to do a toxicology report after a  murder, it makes a lot more sense to test the victim than the perpetrator, right?

But I'm not going to get into all of that, mainly because a million other people much smarter than I have written much better responses than I can come up with. Like a lot of people, I spent the better part of Sunday in shock, alternating between reading about the trial outcome and just staring off into the distance in a mixture of rage and sadness.

So I don't need to go on about how stand your ground laws are incredibly racialized in outcome (and yes, I'm well aware Zimmerman's defense team did not appeal to syg for their defense, but it's basically the same argument). I'll give you three guesses on who you can murder and claim a stand your ground defense and get away with it, but you'll only need one. Because this is the kind of thing we frankly didn't really even need the research to tell us -- we've known for years that if you want to get away with murder, you should murder a young Black man. This trial was just another sad chapter in a long, long history of Black Americans not receiving justice.

But I think the saddest thing of all is just that -- that Trayvon's death is just another young Black man being murdered. Although it's all the talk right now, this piece by Tim Wise got me thinking about how long it is until everyone else moves on. In the article (well worth your time, by the way), Wise talks about the Bernhard Goetz case from 30 years ago. Goetz famously murdered or wounded 6 young Black men in the subway just because they were young, Black men. And much like in Trayvon's case, the jury accepted that those boys having the audacity to be young and Black in public makes them justifiable targets of paranoid murder.

And yet, how many Americans alive today even remember the Goetz case? Outside of historians, lefty agitators, and people with pretty sharp memories, I'd guess very few. And once the next few national tragedies happen and everyone's attention turns elsewhere, who will remember Trayvon?

This lack of collective memory is important for so many reasons. For one, our schools certainly don't teach us these things -- I had never even heard of Emmit Till until I was a sophomore in college. Forgetting these events is what allows people to continue ridiculous narratives of race no longer being a problem in America, and to paint each of these events as an isolated incident. It's important to remember that Trayvon's murder wouldn't have even been investigated if there hadn't been such a huge public outcry. But there are many, many more like Trayvon who don't end up becoming public causes, and instead are just left dead and their families without any justice or even closure.

So like many across the nation, I'm headed out to a rally tonight to demand justice for Trayvon, and here in Minneapolis, to demand justice for Terrance Franklin, who was murdered by an actual cop instead of a wanna-be cop. And these rallies are important and necessary.

But I can't help shake the best tribute to Trayvon is to not let his memory, or the memory of the many young, Black men slaughtered because of the color of their skin, to die along with them. Maybe if we remember enough of them, we might finally all decide to do something about it...

Traveling!

While I don't have a wife and children, I will be traveling with
 a dog and a map with only the word "map" crudely written on it

No new posts this week. I've been busy packing and getting my shit in order to follow my Midwestern instincts and flee North for the summer.

So bright and early tomorrow morning, I'm packing a bunch of stuff and a lazy dog into the car to drive 16 or so hours across this great nation of ours with neither cruise control nor air conditioning.

It will not be a pleasant trip, but at least I'll get to experience the local color of America through the magic of A.M. radio...

Why I Don't Hate LeBron

Eh, not that much

The greatest thing about sports is hating. Hating people, hating teams, hating geographical locations in their entirety just because they house a team you hate just because that team beat your team that one time. Sports, and the hate they facilitate, are one of the few ways one can show how their area is superior to another.

I hate all sorts of people and places due solely to sports. I hate the Chicago White Sox, I really fucking hate the Yankees, and the list of individuals I hate due only to sporting reasons is far too long to publish. Hell, I often use Alex Rodriguez as an example in class when I describe the hypothetical existence of a douchebag scale (it makes sense in context).

So I get the desire, nay the demand, to hate. I really do. But I just can't understand why so many people so desperately hate LeBron James. Not only hate him, but think him to be the biggest cocksucker in all of sports. As far as star athletes go, he seems to be one of the least objectionable to come along in a long time. There's really only two reasons I can seem to come up with for why he draws so much ire, and they're both stupid.

The first is that he's no Michael Jordan, and to be fair, this is empirically true. But I think the people angry about this don't quite actually remember the real Jordan, but instead what they want Jordan to have been (and LeBron to currently be). There's this conception that Jordan won 6 championships by himself, and LeBron's a cheater/quitter/coward for going to team with other actual basketball players on it instead of repeatedly bashing his head against a wall in Cleveland. Even ignoring the fact that every sane person in existence would jump at the chance to move anywhere that isn't Cleveland, this also ignores that Jordan had a shitload of help, like playing with multiple Hall of Famers.

It's also weird that people are so upset about the move from Cleveland when only a few years earlier, the exact same thing happened, but was received the exact opposite way. When Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen ditched their teams to meet up with Paul Pierce in Boston, they were lauded as good team-first guys who were so unselfish they took pay cuts so they could achieve team glory. I don't remember reading any angry rants about what a traitor KG was for leaving the team that drafted him without single-handedly winning multiple championships. But when LeBron took a pay cut to team up with other talented players to win team championships, this was apparently the most cowardly move since Robert Ford shot a dude in the back while he was hanging a picture.

The only obvious decision between the two is The Decision, the idiotic hour-long special on ESPN James used to announce he was leaving Cleveland for Miami (again, remember that people are criticizing a multi-millionaire in his early 20s for wanting to move from Cleveland to Miami). And yeah, it was a stupid thing to do, but like so many things young black men are accused of being monsters for doing, it was actually conceived, engineered, and packaged by a bunch of rich white dudes who more-or-less talked LeBron into it. Again, James probably should have had the good enough sense to not do it, but come on, that's one bad public decision made by a guy who was a millionaire before he even graduated high school. I guarantee I would have done a lot more stupid shit than that if you gave me triple-figure millions before I could even legally drink.

So this is all to say I'm probably the only guy outside of Miami-Dade county who was actually kinda happy LeBron and the Heat won last night. Mostly so I don't have to listen to idiot sportscasters talking about how he's no Jordan, but also because he seems to be not that bad of a dude, or at least not nearly as deserving of all the shit he gets.

But Alex Rodriguez? Fuck that guy. Seriously.

I'm Like The Jonny Appleseed of Sociology Online

So some website has come out with their rankings of the top 30 sociology blogs, and two of them are blogs (well, one is technically a podcast, but casting a wide net I guess) that I was very involved in the creation of. For those who don't follow my career as closely as such eminence would demand, I'm specifically talking about Citings and Sightings and Office Hours, both part of the greater Society Pages family, which you should really be following anyway (though at this point I want to make it clear that I was decidedly not involved in the naming of these, and strenuously objected to what eventually became the name of all three of these).

Now, granted, this isn't exactly an honor or anything, as I'm pretty surprised there were even 30 separate sociology blogs in existence. Yet it's still pretty cool, if for nothing else than to see some things I put a lot of effort into have continued to exist long after I left.

If nothing else, it makes me at least look qualified to host the panel I put together for this year's Society for the Understanding of Social Problems meeting on the future of sociology in new media. In fact, pretty much everyone on the panel is involved with or created a blog listed in that top 30, so I feel like I should print that out and carry it around with me as proof I apparently occasionally know what I'm doing...

Race and the Criminal Justice System, Explained With Wine

Here's a good overview of something most of us have long suspected: wine descriptors and reviews are complete and utter bullshit. In every possible way. Go ahead and read it; the linked article is both short and entertaining. But the highlights are that in one study when wine experts were served the exact same glass of white wine twice in a row, with the only difference being that one was dyed red, none of them knew they were being duped, despite all the flowery language they put in to describing the two "different" wines. In another study, experts again gave dramatically different rankings to the same wine depending on whether it was served from an expensive-looking bottle or one that appeared to be generic and low-cost.

There's a lot more evidence offered in the article, but these two examples suffice to make the point -- it's clear that what these supposed wine experts are really basing their judgements on have nothing to do with the wine itself. Rather, it's obvious their judgements have everything to do with perceptions of the "class" of the wine (how expensive, and therefore, how supposedly good it is) and with various other stereotypes about what certain wines are supposed to be like.

This in and of itself isn't too shocking -- obviously people are going to be influenced by their perceptions. But where it starts to get really informative is in examples like this when their perceptions are demonstrably and empirically false, and yet still trump their actual experience. That is, in the same wine/different bottles experiment, the experts' opinions of the wine were shaped entirely by their perceptions of the wine's trappings, even when these were directly contradicted by the actual wine. In other words, what they actually experienced had far, far less impact on their pronouncements than what they (consciously or not) felt like they were supposed to be experiencing.

So what does this have to do with the criminal justice system? Well, this is exactly how race operates in our criminal justice system. It's not that there are a bunch of incredibly racist cops, prosecutors, and judges all thinking "gee, how can we fuck over people of color today?" Instead, the supposed experts of our criminal justice system are acting in the exact same manner as the supposed wine experts -- they're basing their judgements not off of any form of empirical reality (indeed, said reality often directly contradicts their judgements), but instead basing them off their socialized beliefs about how groups of people act or conduct themselves.

And it's a pretty easy process to document. Most people probably already know that a black defendant is more likely to be prosecuted and more likely to receive a harsh sentence than a white defendant, holding all other factors equal. But the fact that such decisions are strongly based on skin color becomes even more obvious when comparing the prosecution and sentencing of black men to one another; black men with very dark pigmentation get the worst sentences of all, and it proceeds up the color spectrum to the point where very light-skinned black defendants are found guilty and sentenced at rates fairly comparable to their white counterparts.

There's about a million more studies I could cite here, but the point is, whether it's judging wine or judging people, it's clear most people, even experts, base their decisions far more on their socialization than on the pertinent facts of that particular case. When that happens in wine tasting, it just leads stupid people who follow wine rankings to waste money on expensive wine. When it happens in the criminal justice system, it's a fucking travesty.

Happy Birthday and Basic Marxism

Have you ever wondered why movies and tv shows never actually have people singing the happy birthday song? Or why restaurants always make up their own incredibly stupid version of it to sing while they bring you your free fried ice cream? It's not because any of these people are interested in creating a new version of the song. Instead, like almost all explanations for the life's oddities, it comes down to a corporation well over-stepping its legal rights to quash the rights of the rest of us.

The funny thing about this is that no one really knows who wrote "Happy Birthday To You," or even when it was written.  But this hasn't stopped Warner music from claiming they have the copyright to the tune, though they can't demonstrate how they got it or why it's theirs. But fortunately for them, if anyone wants to stop them from claiming copyright on one of the most-used songs in the world, they need to have the time and resources to challenge a major corporation in court. Not a lot of people have that.

But fortunately for shitty chain restaurants everywhere, someone is finally trying to get Happy Birthday's day in court. Good Morning to You Productions (named for what many believe is the original tune happy b-day is based on) is suing Warner, arguing that even if they ever had a reasonable claim to the copyright (which is questionable enough in and of itself), it would have expired in 1921 at the latest. Good Morning to You is not only suing to end Warner's copyright claim, but to force them to pay back the millions upon millions they've collected over the years with their fraudulent copyright. While I can't believe any court will ever order Warner to pay the money back, there seems to be a pretty solid case that Warner can't claim the copyright any longer.

Really this is all just a somewhat updated version of what Marx called the primitive accumulation that preceded capitalism. While once people all more-or-less shared common spaces, eventually groups of power-hungry people decided to claim them as their own and declared they somehow now had the right to charge rents and exclude people from what was once communal property.

The whole Happy Birthday saga operates much the same way -- the tune had been a traditional one for a long time, and then eventually someone (it's still disputed who) put the current lyrics to it. More than likely, multiple people came up with the lyrics (not hard to see how many could have switched "good morning" to "happy birthday" all on their own), so it really never belonged to anyone. That of course did not stop Warner, who more-or-less just looked around and noticed no one was claiming the copyright, so much like the explorers of old, they simply planted their flag and claimed it as theirs despite having no hand in its creation.

It's the kind of thing that makes me wish I'd lived a couple hundred years ago -- apparently, you could just claim the rights to pretty much anything and then start charging people for using the stuff they themselves invented. Pretty ingenious move, capitalist scum...

If Only The Soviets Had Been Fighting Terrorism...

So the NSA is finally getting examined for its potential for abuse, although it's obviously happening about six or seven years too late. And it will likely lead to no changes. But hey, better than a kick in the teeth, right?

It's hard to figure out what's creepiest about the whole NSA debacle; sure, they can read and listen to anything you ever do, but what might be even worse than that is how incredibly shrouded in secrecy this all is. As recent congressional hearings have demonstrated, most of the law makers who supposedly authorized PRISM and other such plans have no idea what's going on, the extent to which these things are happening, or even what they're capable of doing.

Here it's a good time to think back to grade school civics class -- what's the point of a legislative and judicial branch? In theory, they act as, say it with me kids, checks and balances on executive power. You know, so we can't have a president who grants himself the king-like power to decide who can be executed without so much as a trial. Er...bad example, but you get the idea.

So how, I wonder, are these other two branches to act as either check or balance when they don't have any idea what the executive branch is doing? This is yet another example of how insanely Orwellian our government is getting -- "This secret program is vital to your safety. So vital, in fact, that you can know nothing about it. Hell, Congress and the Supreme Court can know nothing about it. But don't worry, we won't abuse these powers we exercise in secret which will never be reviewed by anyone else ever."

But what's funniest to me is that I remember vividly as a young child learning that the Soviets had this secret force called the KGB that would spy on people and intercept their communications, even people who had broken no laws and posed no threat to anyone. This was, of course, yet another example of how they were a totalitarian society that didn't understand freedom. What kind of sick bastards would spy on their own citizens? Especially on citizens who had broken no laws but were only advocating for more transparent government and more democratic rights? How could anyone condone such terrible atrocities? That's something that would never happen in the land of the free!

For The Practical Hipster

So apparently typewriters are making a comeback, and of course, it's due to everyone's favorite group to hate/impossible group to define, hipsters. And while hipster bashing has gotten as annoying as the very nebulous category itself, sometimes you just can't help but go back to that well.

And it's mostly in situations like the comeback of the typewriter. Because there is absolutely no justification for using a typewriter in the year 2013 unless you are a doomsday prepper or you want to look like a twee li'l pixie who's just so damn quirky PLEASE NOTICE ME.

I don't even need to point out the various ways in which the personal computer is superior to typewriters, because it's superior in every fucking possible conceivable way. Any argument anyone can make for the continued use of a typewriter is really just some bullshit they're using to cover the fact that, again, they just want to look quirky and different (which is their prerogative and all power to them and all that, but it doesn't change the fact that they're fucking morons).

In fact, the only arguments I can actually see anyone attempting to make in favor of the typewriter are those weird esoteric arguments about feel and sound that again make no sense because they're not real arguments. But anyway, even those no longer hold up because you can grab a quick and easy program to make your mac sound like an old timey typewriter.

There. No need to lug around a typewriter to make yourself look neat and precious anymore. Now if I could only find some electronic functional equivalent of the bowtie, we'd be halfway to solving most of the current generation's problems...

Explaining Basic Criminology With the NSA

Loosely defined, constructionism is an old idea in criminology that basically means things are seen as good/bad/criminal/legal/deviant/etc because they're defined as such. Essentially, it's the relatively simple idea that there are no actions or behaviors which are inherently good or bad, it's just that for a wide variety of reasons, certain actions come to be seen as "good" and are encouraged, and others come to be seen as "bad" and are discouraged and/or punished.

Sometimes this happens through relatively banal or logical reasons. For instance, murder has been labeled illegal and deviant by our society, and that makes good sense, as it would make our day-to-day lives significantly more difficult if people were murdering each other nilly willy.

But often such constructions are not neutral decisions arrived at after careful, logical consideration, but are rather the result of powerful interests attempting to (consciously or otherwise) entrench and/or expand their power, typically through enshrining their behavior as legitimate and the behaviors of others as illegitimate.

A wonderful example of how power influences social constructions can be seen in the current debates over the NSA leaks. As many spineless media commentators have pointed out in their attempts to bend over backwards providing justification for the most expansive spying program the world has even seen, nothing the NSA does/did is/was technically illegal (except for obviously directly contradicting the 4th amendment, but details, details). As the ever-on-point Glenn Greenwald explained, though, this is only the case because the very people doing this also wrote the laws governing it.

This is why the NSA is such a good example of constructionism -- Edward Snowden is currently an international fugitive for doing a much, much smaller version of what the NSA is doing. It is literally the exact same behavior, only done on a much smaller scale and arguably for much more noble reasons. For the man without power, this small-scale internet surveillance means he will likely spend the rest of his life in prison, while the people with power are allowed to continue doing that same action on a much larger scale and not only not be considered criminals, but instead have the brazen gall to call themselves security experts.

Of course, this doesn't even get in to the fact that much of the the NSA is doing actually is illegal, and that the technically illegal actions of Snowden were necessitated by the fact that there is literally no other way for this information to have been made public. And that's not an abuse of the word literally; if you read the linked article, you'll learn that multiple groups have sued the US government over the NSA, often simply to learn the extent of information gathered, not even what the actual information was. And yet they can't do that because:

In dismissing the case, the court agreed with the precedent set in two other cases, which basically said that Americans don’t even have the right to sue their government over its surveillance program, unless they can prove that their communications were intercepted. Of course, that’s essentially impossible since the program is classified and you can’t use classified documents in court, even if you somehow got your hands on them.

So to recap: leaking classified documents proving the highest levels of government have been routinely violating the 4th amendment in ways which violate both domestic and international law with no probable cause for the vast majority of their actions, and you're a terrorist who must like on the run. Set up and participate in the program which violates both domestic and international law, and you're a beacon of freedom, defending our nation from terrorists.

That's pretty much a textbook example of the social construction of deviance.

Man, I Have Missed Everything

So this blog has been pretty quiet of late, which I'm sure has the millions upon millions of you constantly checking it for updates in quite a sad state. I'll spare the boring details, but it turns out having a real job and all of the crap that goes along with it leaves precious little time for frivolities like blogging.

But finally the halcyon days of summer are upon us and I enter that rare time when academics have something approaching free time. While I plan to use most of that free time to drink beer in the sun, I've also made it a goal to get back into the blogging game for real and resume posting regularly. So this is all to say you can put off your impending suicide, for you have a reason to live again.

That being said, this is just a place-holder post to force myself to write something and publicly promise more regular content. So I've got nothing of substance today, though that's not really a problem, as the world seems pretty fucking intent on giving me shit to rant about. By the time I settle in tomorrow to write something, I'm assuming there will be another major documents dump showing how the CIA can now legally force exploratory enemas on US citizens as part of a routine traffic stop. And probably another mass shooting or two. Really what I'm saying is that America is awesome.

In the meantime, here's a picture of an adorable dog:

Hi! I'm adorable!

Summer Is Neither A Vacation Nor Exciting

Summer break is here. Well, it's here for students. I've already complained plenty about the perception that we on this side of the college classroom get the same breaks as those in the seats, so I guess there's not much new to add to that.

It's just that today is the first official day of summer break here at the University, and I didn't actually realize that until a few minutes ago. Because it's not a break; I got up and got to doing the same damn thing I've done every Monday for the past 16 weeks or so -- get up, convince myself I'm going to get a bunch of writing done today, sit down to get to the writing, become frustrated and overwhelmed at how little I've written and how much I need to do, then eventually convincing myself I've put in enough work for the day while procrastinating on the internet.

I Continue to Miss Minnesota, And IT Continues To Remain Cool

It's no secret here that I love Minnesota and wish I had never left (cure you, fortune of getting a good job in this economy!). But my homesickness only gets worse every time Minnesota decides to become even cooler than it was previously.

This week has been a pretty good one for people of conscience in the land o' lakes. First, earlier in the week the MN House gave the ok to the "Ban the Box" legislation, meaning it now only needs to be signed by Gov. Dayton, who has already promised to sign it. In short his bill will change employment law in Minnesota, most notably requiring public employers to wait to conduct criminal background checks until the interview stage of the process, and will not allow employers to discriminate based on crimes that have nothing to do with the job and/or for convicted persons who pose no risk to the public (that's way over-simplifying it, read the pdf attached above for details).

This is huge for many obvious reasons, but possibly the biggest is that it removes the permanent punishment many people receive for criminal convictions that happened years ago and bear no relevance to their current situation (statistically speaking, even ex-felons who have done prison stints are no more likely to offend than the general public after 7 years on the outside). It's also huge because, not too surprisingly, using criminal background checks as a filter has a strongly racialized affect. Both because of the racism of our criminal justice system (but that's an entire course, not something that fits into a blog), but also because of perceptions of criminality.

For example, here's a graph of results from Devah Pager's famous audit study of the impact of criminal records:

The graph measures how many people from the study received a call back after a job application. The only difference between the pairs of people who applied for a job was a (fictitious) criminal background; otherwise they dressed the same, answered questions the same, turned in identical resumes, etc. As you can see, not only does having a criminal record make on far, far less likely to get a call back, you can see that Black job applicants without a criminal record are less likely to get a call back than white applicants with one.

The other development is happening right now, as the MN legislature debates a bill to legalize same-sex marriage. Although the vote is yet to happen, it is widely believed there is more than enough support in the legislature, and again, Gov. Dayton has already publicly declared his willingness to sign it into law.

So in the span of one week, Minnesota will (likely) have dealt a strong blow to the dangerous ideologies of permanent punishment and homophobia.

Not too shabby, Minnesota.

Is This News Actual News?

The Sunlight Foundation recently unveiled a web tool they're calling "Churnalism," and it makes me both excited and sad.

It's a really awesome and simple concept -- if you suspect a news article sounds a bit too much like a press release, or like talking points which are a little too neatly delivered, you simply enter the url or paste the text into the churnalism machine and it quickly determines whether what you're reading is actually journalism or just some recycled pabulum.

On the one hand, this is super awesome -- if you pay attention at all, you definitely come across articles posing as news that sound suspiciously exactly like one of the people/organizations mentioned in the article would like it to sound. This gives you a quick and easy way to find out if it really is just repacked PR or is actually an independent opinion.

On the other hand, it's necessary that such a thing exist. Oh to live in a world where journalism actually means researching a subject and writing an original and informative take on it...

When Dealing Drugs Is Bad/When Dealing Drugs is Good

A recent news story has brought to light some ridiculous hypocrisy in the War on Terror. Normally, this is not a news worthy event, as the entire basis of the War on Terror is rank hypocrisy (remember, our definition of "terror" is using violence, or the threat thereof, to intimidate peoples in order to effect political outcomes. Which would also be the exact purpose of the Iraq and Afghan wars).

But sometimes the hypocrisy is so blatantly ridiculous it deserves some special attention, such as when the US literally gives bags of cash to corrupt Afghan drug lords. And I'm not abusing the word literally here; US officials actually gave large bags full of cash to Karzai and his associates in an attempt to purchase their favor (bonus level of hypocrisy: when Iran did the exact same thing, the US accused them of undermining international law by illegally bribing public officials.)

Many of the people receiving these bags of cash are known drug lords (most of the world's opium and heroin comes from Afghanistan, something the Taliban had actually curtailed to a great degree prior to the invasion). And no one in the State Department is naive or stupid enough to think for a minute that they're not directly funding large drug producers. They're just funding large drug producers in the name of Democracy, I guess. Well, to be technical about it, they're funding major drug producers in the name of establishing a proto-democratic dictatorial client state which will do our bidding in the region, but that doesn't flow off the tongue nearly as well.

Just as a reminder, if you fund the sale of heroin by purchasing even a small amount, you are due for at least a year in federal prison and a fine of up to $7,000. Our nation has more people in prison for drug offenses than the entire European Union has in prison or in jail for any charge. We imprison by far the most people in the world, whether measured in raw numbers or as proportion of the population, and most of that is due to drug-related arrests.

Yet at the same time our nation has been locking up millions drug users and dealers (well, poor drug users and dealers of color; white users and dealers face a significantly lower chance of arrest), we've also been providing millions of dollars in free money to people we know are using that money to produce illegal narcotics.

It's hard to make someone as cynical as me get upset about government shenanigans, but sometimes the "it's wrong for anyone else to do, but we can do it on a far larger and much more damaging scale for reasons we never have to explain or justify" (non)logic is just a little too on the nose...

Seriously, Though, When Do We Get To Stop Coddling The South?

Not to get all Godwin's law on the subject, but I think contrasting the continued legacies of Nazi Germany and the antebellum American South is a useful exercise; both committed horrible travesties and have left future generations to figure out how to properly remember and learn from such atrocities. As I've pointed out a few times, it's pretty embarrassing (or least should be) how much our nation simply elides over the horrible things we've done. While the German response may not be perfect, at least they've more-or-less all agreed it was not a time to proud of.

But we in America have a hard time agreeing that slavery was a bad thing (because we're terrible people, I guess) and that maybe we shouldn't have memorials and whatnot to the people who launched a bloody war (bloodiest in our history, in fact) to defend their right to own human beings. Seems like a simple thing to condemn, but maybe that's just me.

This past weekend a friend and I hit up some WV historical sites, specifically Harper's Ferry (site of the famous John Brown raid) and Antietam, a place I'd never heard of before but that was apparently the site of an important civil war battle (also the bloodiest single day of fighting in the civil war, so...uh...there's that).

While I understand both of these places are technically below the Mason-Dixon line and therefore a whole different form of logic applies, I simply could not believe how much Confederate sympathizing and glorification went on there. In addition to multiple gift shops (even state-run museum gift shops!) selling "Live Free or Die" shirts emblazoned with the Stars and Bars, multiple historical markers made the war out to be one of simple disagreement over the role of the federal government, with little if any mention of the whole genocidal slavery thing.

One monument even read something to the effect of "Erected for those on both sides who were fighting for what they believed in." Except, again, I feel the need to point out what one side believed in was their right to own human beings as property. You can't really chalk that one up to "well, everyone has their views and beliefs! Who's to say which is right and which is wrong?"

Because the answer is "All human beings with a shred of decency agree one side was wrong."

Maybe it's just because I grew up secure in my little Yankee bubble, but I really had no idea how some folks still desperately cling to historical revisionist views of the civil war, and it's embarrassing as hell, both as an American and as, you know, a human being.

Simply put: can you imagine any Holocaust memorial selling swastika t-shirts and putting up monuments that say "Jews and Germans alike both fought for their beliefs" as if it were some sort of simple misunderstanding between the two?

No, because that would be fucking horrible. But I suppose "being fucking horrible" has rarely stopped America from anything...

Boston and White Privilege

On the heels of discussing how Boston reveals what we think about America exceptionalism, it also highlights the benefits of white privilege.

Tim Wise has, as always, a pretty awesome breakdown of how the two are related, but the simple and short version is that white privilege means if the person(s) who bombed the marathon is/are white, white people need fear no retaliatory attacks, have no need to go out of their way to condemn something they were in no way involved with, white students traveling around or in and out of our nation will not have to worry about being terror suspects, etc.

But because this is the internet and things only count if they're delivered in list form, here's a handy top 10 I've been saving the link to for a long time. Here's Juan Cole's Top 10 Differences Between White Terrorists and Others:

1. White terrorists are called “gunmen.” What does that even mean? A person with a gun? Wouldn’t that be, like, everyone in the US? Other terrorists are called, like, “terrorists.” 2. White terrorists are “troubled loners.” Other terrorists are always suspected of being part of a global plot, even when they are obviously troubled loners.
3. Doing a study on the danger of white terrorists at the Department of Homeland Security will get you sidelined by angry white Congressmen. Doing studies on other kinds of terrorists is a guaranteed promotion.
4. The family of a white terrorist is interviewed, weeping as they wonder where he went wrong. The families of other terrorists are almost never interviewed.
5. White terrorists are part of a “fringe.” Other terrorists are apparently mainstream.
6. White terrorists are random events, like tornadoes. Other terrorists are long-running conspiracies.
7. White terrorists are never called “white.” But other terrorists are given ethnic affiliations.
8. Nobody thinks white terrorists are typical of white people. But other terrorists are considered paragons of their societies.
9. White terrorists are alcoholics, addicts or mentally ill. Other terrorists are apparently clean-living and perfectly sane.
10. There is nothing you can do about white terrorists. Gun control won’t stop them. No policy you could make, no government program, could possibly have an impact on them. But hundreds of billions of dollars must be spent on police and on the Department of Defense, and on TSA, which must virtually strip search 60 million people a year, to deal with other terrorists.

Boston, Violence, and American Exceptionalism

So we've all had about a day to process the horrific explosions in Boston. Grisly pictures keep coming out, and last I saw an update, there are 3 dead and about 150 wounded, many of whom with missing limbs and other catastrophic injuries. This is a tragedy, no doubt, and of course many are already jumping to racist judgements about who is responsible (though we should all of course remember we have no idea right now who is responsible, not that it excuses such vile racism even if Islamic extremists or North Korean agents are responsible).

But that's not really what this post is about. Well, kind of. Really, this post is about American Exceptionalism, the absurd belief that America is somehow better than all other nations (even when it is demonstrably and empirically not superior) for reason largely unknown (though in most variants of the belief, it's because God has pre-ordained America for greatness). This ridiculous notion is what makes it not wrong to wage a genocidal campaign against the native population, what lets the world's largest stockpiler of, and still only user of, nuclear weapons to throw a hissy fit whenever another nation contemplates building them. And it's the kind of belief that us to ignore an untold number of violent acts committed by our government (though conveniently done so outside of our nation).

It sadly seems as if the exceptionalist ideal is damn hard to escape, even for those who recognize it to be the fallacy it is. For example, take this piece from Salon this morning by David Sirota. It's a fairly standard piece I've seen multiple variations on; essentially the point of the column is that now such random and violent attacks don't seen so unusual or out of the norm, and that's the scary thing -- that in a place like America we could come to accept the inevitability of random, potentially terroristic violence.

Now I'm pretty willing to bet most everything I have that Mr. Sirota does not subscribe to the notion of American exceptionalism, and would probably scoff at the idea that he does. But yet, even in a guy well known for his leftist writings, you still see the exceptionalist narrative pop up. Because if you take the time to read the article, the subtext is really "This kind of thing doesn't happen here." And such an argument only makes sense if there's somewhere where it does happen, where it's usual.

To take it one step further, the implicit comparison is to places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other "war torn" nations around the globe. That's where stuff like this is supposed to happen. That's why, say, a huge wave of bombings across Iraq leaving over 50 dead barely gets a mention in the news, while the Boston explosions, which while tragic, have claimed significantly fewer lives but are dominating every news outlet in this nation.

Sure, part of that is because this happened "here" as opposed to "over there" (although what's happening "over there" is directly attributable to the political decisions made "here"). But the bigger reason for the discrepancy is because things like this aren't supposed to happen here. They are supposed to happen over there, to those people. People who, by virtue of where they live, apparently have it coming and therefore are not nearly as worthy of our concern and sympathy as are the good people who did the correct thing by living in God's America.

Turns out violence exists in the world. And it unfortunately turns out that believing you're magically immune for some murky set of reasons about how you're better than everyone else doesn't insulate you from it. This should neither be a surprise nor a cause for hysteria.

It's So Close I Can Taste It...

May 26th, peoples. May 26th...

Check out other AD album covers here.

Teaching Sociology: Privilege Is Often The Little Things (Part something in a never-ending pop-pedagogical series)

My closet, more-or-less

Privilege comes in many forms; there's male privilege, white privilege, straight privilege, the list could go on and on. As a straight, white, middle-class (finally!), Christian male in the United States of America, I benefit from most all of 'em (if it weren't for my giant Semitic nose, I think I'd have them all).

Yet for how ubiquitous it is, it's a tricky concept to teach. Actually, scratch that, because it's so ubiquitous, it's a tricky concept to teach. Mostly because people who have it don't want to acknowledge they have it, and people who don't have it don't want to make a big deal out of it because it makes things really awkward for them when those with privilege throw their privileged hissy fits (which almost inevitably happens).

Privilege operates in some pretty impactful ways in society -- women make 77 cents on the dollar for the same work as men, in an increasing number of states women can't control their own reproductive systems, etc. Those are very big and important issues, and many people much smarter and more eloquent than I have covered them in-depth elsewhere.

But one thing I've found that has helped get the concept across to the skeptical is to save the giant, society-shaping ways privilege operates for a later date and instead focus on the tiny, micro-level ways privilege affects our day-to-day existance.

I was thinking about it this morning as I got dressed to go to campus. Today is a teaching day for me (tuesday/thursday teaching schedule ftw!), so I put on a collared shirt to show students I'm a Serious Academic™. But I really only have about 6 presentable shirts that make it look like I at least tried to put some effort into my appearance. Not wanting to wear the same one repeatedly, I've come up with a tried and true method for varying my dressy wardrobe: I keep all 6 shirts in order in my closet. Each day I need to wear one, I take it from the front of the line, and at the end of the day, put it at the back of the line, assuring I'll wear the other 5 shirts before I wear that one again.

It's an awesome system that both keeps me from looking like the weirdo who wears the same shirt every class and keeps me from having to put any through whatsoever into what I'm wearing.

It's also a system that is pretty much only possible because I'm a man.

It's hopefully no surprise to anyone reading this that women are held to a different and much more extensively proscribed appearance expectations than are their male counterparts. While women are excoriated for not putting enough effort into their appearance, men are criticized for putting too much thought into their appearance (well, not so much criticized as subjected to homophobic taunts, but sic of one, half-dozen of the other). While this is undoubtedly harmful to men who do take pride in the appearance, it works out quite well for the fellas like me.

Most women I know, even the crunchy hippies and angry punx and all other variety of kooky lefties I know, put in a fair amount of time on their appearance. Not necessarily because they want to, but because they know they'll be harshly judged for not doing so. Whereas I am not only not judged harshly for spending a total of 15 seconds getting ready for the day, if anything that makes me even more in line with the gendered expectations for men (not giving a fuck about anything is a high ideal for men).

So all-in-all, not a big, earth-shattering deal by any means, but the fact that I can spend no time on my appearance and rarely if ever get criticized for it (as opposed to being force to spend a great deal of time on my appearance and still likely being criticized for it) is a clear and measurable form of privilege...

Some Famous Lady Died

Sorry for the long break in posts -- international travel, busy time of the semester, etc.

Anyway, as you're hopefully already aware, Margaret Thatcher died yesterday (to be honest, I was pretty surprised to learn that she hadn't died a decade ago). A lot of people have wasted a lot of ink discussing her death and her legacy. And a lot of people had street parties celebrating her death. In poor taste? Maybe, but few people's death inspire street parties that didn't deserve them.

I really don't have anything terribly erudite to add to the conversation. Anyone who's spent more than a minute reading this blog could pretty accurately predict how I feel about her politics, and though I subscribe to the notion that death doesn't make one immune from criticism (here's Gleen Greenwald explaining the point beautifully in regards to Christopher Hitchen's death), I don't have any particularly meaningful or witty put downs too add to the chorus.

Though I will repeat that there have been reports of dozens of street parties across Britain (and more scattered across Europe and the States), and again note that regardless of the particulars, you have to be a pretty shitty person for so many people to be so overjoyed at news of your death.

Really though, I think nothing sums up the wretchedness of Thatcher more than the fact that "Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead" shot up to number 27 on the UK iTunes chart within a day.

Again, maybe tasteless, but pretty damn telling...

Remember, she said Nelson Mandela was a terrorist.
You know, because he didn't agree with fucking Apartheid.
Anyway, here's her and Reagan with devil horns. Also, this is a kick-ass album.