We Won't Pay You For Your Work (But You Can Pay Us!)

I received a letter yesterday from the University of Minnesota Foundation, in which they were attempting to solicit an alumni donation from me. Ignoring the fact that because my pay as a grad assistant during my time there was so low I'm still paying off my debts (thus leaving me no money to donate), I found it especially surprising that the College of Liberal Arts would reach out to me through this third party.

Because when I was part of a movement to unionize grad students, the university repeatedly explained to  us that giving any slight amount of money to, or even ever listening to, such a third party would destroy the very fabric of the university. Instead of doing silly things like unionizing (what's that ever done for anyone?), we should rely on the one-on-one relationships we have with faculty. It's pretty unimpeachable logic -- when in recorded history has someone's boss ever not listened patiently to all of their problems? Especially when said problems are that boss illegally over-working that employee? Never. Never is the answer.

Anyway, I felt the need to respond to their funding appeal, using the language I learned from the university administration. Below is the text of my response:

To whom it may concern in the College of Liberal Arts:
 I received your letter asking me to make a donation, sent on behalf of the University of Minnesota Foundation, with some sincere puzzlement. You see, I was heavily involved in the campaign to unionize graduate assistants when I was enrolled at the U of M. You might remember us; we were the people with the funny acronym who kept angrily insisting on things like cost of living increases, protections from the capricious whims of administration and faculty, and truly outrageous demands like basic dignity.

 To try and achieve these ends, we formed a collective that eventually partnered with the United Auto Workers. We mistakenly believed that by coming together (and with the assistance of this much larger organization that has experiencing in achieving exactly what we were trying to achieve), that we could then negotiate with the university on equal footing.

 Thankfully, the university administration was willing to patiently explain to us why our logic was so very wrong. We didn’t need a union, we were told, because the university is looking out for us. Maybe not by giving us adequate pay above the poverty level, but somehow. Besides, we most certainly did not need a third party like the UAW getting involved, the administration helpfully explained. Instead, we were told, we should settle these matters in the one-on-one relationships we already have with faculty.

 And, again thankfully, we saw the error of our ways and voted down the union. Mostly because we accepted the unimpeachable logic that speaking as a collective was useless, especially when it involved a third party in any way, and that instead it would be far more effective for us to use those vaulted one-on-one relationships.

 So you can understand my confusion when you, the College of Liberal Arts, reached out to me for a donation through the University of Minnesota Foundation. Why are you trying to bring an outside third party to interfere in the relationships I have with faculty in the College of Liberal Arts? It’s not that I don’t want to give you money, it’s just that I fear the Foundation will come between me the faculty I spent so long cultivating close relationships with.

 I understand that in reading this letter, you may be inclined to think I never actually intended to donate to the University, and that all of this language about the Foundation coming between me and the faculty is just a thinly-veiled excuse to not give you any money. That, of course, could not be further than the truth. Just as the administration was certainly not lying to us or trying to prevent us from unionizing, I am genuinely concerned about a third party organization I have no history with and can’t be certain about the motivations of (is my money really going to go to support the innovative work of the College of Liberal Arts, or is it going to go to some foundation office, full of people who aren’t even in the liberal arts?).

 So I have to regretfully inform you I simply cannot donate any money to this strange third-party organization, because I whole-heartedly believe the administration of the University of Minnesota has my best interests in mind, and they spent a significant amount of money and personnel hours to convince me that doing so would ruin the university. And how could I dare participate in something that would ruin my beloved university?

 I am saddened the university does not follow its own advice. I would happily donate on a one-on-one basis if any of the faculty were to reach out to me and explain why they, as individuals, need my alumni donation. But until then, I’m going to have to vote no on giving my money to a third party, just as President Kaler taught me.

 Sincerely,
Jesse Wozniak, Ph.D. 2012

Everything is Social (Scary, Scary Drugs Edition)

Happened to come across two unrelated articles making the same point this morning: drug use, and specifically addiction, is much less about the physiological science of neural pathways and connectors that we've been told. Instead, as warms this sociologist's heart, it's far more about the social conditions in which that drug use takes place.

First there's this follow-up to the classic "rats will drug themselves to death given the option" study. The short version is that there was a classic old study in which rats in a cage had a lever they could push to get a dose of heroin. Once the rats started, they never stopped; they would keep pushing that lever until the OD'd or died from doing nothing but taking the drug, slowly wasting away as they ignored food and other stimuli.

This study has long been a cornerstone of conservative, bootstraps-based anti-drug zealotry. For instance, here's the conclusion of Professor Avram Goldstein, the man who conducted the study: "A rat addicted to heroin is not rebelling against society, is not a victim of socioeconomic circumstances, is not a product of a dysfunctional family, and is not a criminal. The rat's behavior is simply controlled by the action of heroin (actually morphine, to which heroin is converted in the body) on its brain."

You can just hear Rush Limbaugh cackling in delight while reading that -- "see, you god damned hippies! It's all about people making bad choices because they're stupid, not anything to do with the fact that they're living in crushing poverty while people who call them stupid deny them basic rights."

But in the follow-up linked above, they found a very simple way to avoid the rats getting addicted to the point of death: they built a bigger cage. That's it. It turns out that when the rats actually have other options besides sitting in a tiny cage all day getting high, they very much chose those other options. In a cage with other rats, large enough to have room to exercise, move about freely, raise a litter, etc. the rats didn't become addicts. In fact, they had been forced into addiction prior to being put in the large cage, and then ceased using the drug even though they were already addicted.

So it turns out giving the support to make choices in life other than drug use has a profound effect on drug use. Who could have guessed? (Answer: any sociologist. Any sociologist alive could have guessed that).

But that's rats, you say. That proves nothing (side note: it's funny how when rats prove what you want them to, it's a definitive study, but when they disprove what you want, then they're just rats). Well, enter Dr. Carl Hart. In an amazing pioneering study, he's providing free drugs (crack or methamphetamine) to people who are already addicted. These folks come to stay in a hospital for several weeks, and every morning Dr. Hart's assistants give them an unspecified amount of their drug of choice.

Then, throughout each day, they're given the option of another free dose or some sort of economic reward instead (usually some nominal amount of cash) which they would not be able to receive until the end of the study (thus proving the ability to favor delayed rewards over immediate gratification). And it turns out, the vast majority of these drug users would chose the economic incentive, demonstrating the fact that even scary, scary addicts can make logical choices (here you might point out how amazing it is that in the year 2013 we still need to prove that point, but such is the world).

You see, it turns out that just like rats, when humans have an option besides drug dependency, they'll generally chose it.

This is a classic example of confusing cause and effect, and not surprisingly, that confusion being strongly influenced by a desire to push an ideology that has little to no connection to reality. For there is a fairly strong connection between economic destitution and drug abuse (of course it's important to remember it's not ironclad, and plenty of economically comfortable people abuse all sorts of drugs). For drug warriors and conservatives, this meant stupid poor people can't understand drugs are bad for them, and thus they should be punished because they're too stupid to take care of themselves.

But what this evidence (and a lot more like it) demonstrates is that the cause and effect is backwards -- people don't do drugs and become destitute, they start using because they're destitute. And when you have nothing, it's hopefully not too hard to see why getting high and forgetting that fact for a little while would look appealing. Even in the absence of physical dependence, there's not really much of a reason to not use drugs, so why not?

So not to get too radical here, but it turns out that just maybe helping people is more effective in combating drug use than is punishing people. Though, of course, that assumes drug warriors are actually concerned about drug use and not about finding yet another excuse for shitting on the poor, but that's another post for another day...

Here, Go Read This Article

Although late to the party, seeing as how I already wrote eloquently on the subject recently, Ron Cook of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a nice piece about the concussion struggles of Justin Morneau.

You should really go read it, but the short version is that Cook makes the good point that possibly the saddest part of Morneau's whole ordeal is that both he himself and us as baseball fans were robbed of what statistically speaking, would likely have been his best years.

If I were Bob Costas, I'd say something here about the humbling nature of the game, but that just makes you sound really pretentious...

Pulling Rank (But, You Know, Not Like a Jerk)

As an anti-athouritarian and all-around dis-liker of most all forms of institutionalized power, I'm not a big fan of credentialism. By this point, it's been pretty well empirically verified that credentialing processes rarely measure the apolitical, earned merit they're supposedly recognizing, instead often simply being ways for the privileged to simultaneously claim they've earned their privilege and lock out others from their privileged positions. In short, credentials are usually bullshit and they're often used to make the world a shittier place.

On the other hand, in an abstract, ideal world, credentials would be a great idea that would help us organize and improve our world. Need a new building? Find a credentialed architect. Need to improve healthcare? Find a credentialed expert on healthcare. Need to find a third example to round out your rhetorical device? Find a credentialed...person who does that. Even in our actual, imperfect world credentialing serves some purpose; after all, if I need surgery, I really do insist on someone who has passed medical school and is licensed to practice medicine. If I need my car fixed, I take it to the person who is a certified mechanic (well, actually I mostly still take it to my dad, but he retains his credentials from being raised on a farm, making him a certified expert in most small machines and large animals).

So in general: credentials are stupid, they don't necessarily signify any particular knowledge or access to knowledge, they're often used simply to exclude, and I hate them and wish they would go away. On the other hand, sometimes they're necessary so you don't have a mechanic operating on your heart and a cardiologist operating on your car.

Now that's all well and good at the grand level, but where I really struggle with credentials is at a smaller level. Specifically, the level of me.

One of the big things I try to teach all of my students is that very little about our criminal justice system is a settled fact. Instead, there are a lot of different theories about people, how we should use resources, what crimes are most important, etc. But I also try to emphasize the difference between a scientifically-informed opinion and everyone's own personal opinion. As the old saying goes, everyone has a right to their opinion, but that does not make all opinions equal.

As a Ph.D. criminologist, I technically have a scientifically -informed opinion about, say, policing (this is what I study in particular, so I feel most comfortable claiming some expertise there). Now, of course, mine is just one opinion among many and is by no means the most valid opinion on the subject. But it is a hell of a lot more valid than the opinion of people who have never studied policing at all.

And this matters a great deal. Not just for my own feelings (though, hey, those are important), but because most of our policing policy is set by people who have no scientific understanding of policing, while people who do are routinely ignored. This leads to...well, pay any slight amount of attention to the police and you'll see the problems this leads to.

Yet I think most people would see the obvious problem with not weighing people's opinions based on their credentials on major public policy issues, so this shit becomes a real struggle for me at the personal level. Because I often get into arguments about policing and criminal justice at bars, parties, family gatherings, etc. (I get into a lot of arguments). And while I'm not trying to posit myself as smarter than anyone involved, I am almost always the only criminologist in the discussion. And as much as I hate credentialism, that stands for something. I spent the better part of a decade earning a degree that specifically grants me expertise in this field. You read a facebook post. These are not equal sources of knowledge. The point isn't that I individually know more about this issue than you do (though make no mistake about it, I empirically do know more than you about this subject), but that if an opinion based off a years of rigorous scientific study is given no more weight than an opinion shaped by random facts and personal prejudice, then what point is there to the study of anything?

I guess the cynical/probably true answer to that is there is no point to studying anything, because we live in a political and economic climate that has long since demonstrated a complete disregard for things like "truth" and "reality." But the naive optimist in my would like to think it counts for something. At least enough so that the guy who spent years studying this one particular thing would be granted slightly more respect in that area than the cousin who read a facebook post that doesn't even make sense by its own logic.

The Difficulty of Being a Sports Fan

As the old saying goes, being a sports fan essentially means rooting for laundry. Or as I saw someone put it the other day, cheering for paid professionals employed by the corporate conglomerate located in the closest physical proximity to your childhood home. It's essentially a silly activity to get wrapped up in.

Being a small market fan comes with a whole separate host of silly issues. I wrote about this way back when KG left the T'Wolves for greener pastures in Boston -- when you're a small-market fan, you feel much closer to the players, because they're celebrities only in your area. You feel like they're an awesome secret most of the sports world doesn't know about. But you also generally get stuck with an ownership group that's cheap as all get out, meaning when you luck into a superstar like that, they're usually surrounded with shitty players and have to carry the team themselves. That's why there were such mixed feelings when KG ditched Minny; on the one hand, you're losing your best player. On the other hand, he had given us everything and the best support he ever got was Latrell Sprewell (note to non sports fan: this means he had no support). So you had grown to love him and it was hard to begrudge him the chance to actually win a championship, which was clearly never going to happen in Minnesota.

But sometimes players don't leave because they're going somewhere better, sometimes you have to jettison players you love because they're old, expensive, and not performing as well (it's a business, after all and other such cliches). This is generally just as sad, but for very different reasons.

Take the case of Justin Morneau, the Twins' formerly-amazing first baseman. As this excellent write up in Grantland points out (as have many other people, but this one is succinct and on-point), Justin is too expensive for the Twins for his level of production, and besides, they're going to be terrible for a few years waiting for all the amazing players in their farm system to get to the majors (and they have some fucking incredibly guys down on the farm right now). So from a business standpoint, it makes total sense to get Justin out the door as soon as we can.

But from a fan perspective, it's hard to see him go. He's been with the Twins since he was drafted, coming up in 2003 and helping us win 6 division titles. He won an MVP and the season he got the concussion right before All Star break, he was having one of the best seasons ever. In the first half of that season, he had hit .345 and had an OPS over 1.050 (again, for non sports fans, those are amazing numbers. Like shoe-in for your second MVP-type numbers). And then a dude on the Blue Jays accidentally kneed him in the head, and he forgot how to play baseball.

That's what makes it even sadder and raises so many more conflicted feelings -- it's not that he's suffered the decline every ball player goes through as they age. It's that he had the prime of what was shaping up to be a Hall of Fame career ruined by a concussion he really never recovered from. It would be one thing if we were shopping him now because he's an over-the-hill slugger who gave us a good long career but now we need to move on. No, any Morneau trade would be because he got injured and was no longer able to perform at a high level, due basically only to that one injury. Basically, we're jettisoning one of the greatest players in the history of the team because he got a concussion.

Final analysis, the Twins really need to get rid of him to get any value in return, even if it's just dumping the $14 million or so they owe him for next year. But even though I can understand why that needs to happen, it's still going to be a pretty sad day when it does.

Update: Looks like Morneau will come out and join me in Pittsburgh, meeting up with former Twin Francisco Liriano and taking over first base for former Twins prospect Garett Jones.

Speaking Ill of the Not Quite Yet Dead

I posted awhile back on how I think it's incredibly stupid to hold to "don't speak ill of the dead" as some sort of ethos. Beside the fact that people don't magically become less evil because they're dead, not speaking ill of the dead is often used as a way to white-wash the horrible things people have done, especially when it comes to public figures.

For example, when Billy Graham died, he was touted as some great religious and moral leader, and not, say, the guy who told Nixon about synagogues of Satan and how many problems he had with Jews and Black people (hint: he didn't use the terms "Jewish" and "Black"). And that's important, because Billy Graham was not an upstanding moral man, but instead an asshole and a bigot.

And speaking of bigoted assholes, Pat Robertson has made some news again as he made up a story on his show about how apparently gay men have magical rings they use to spread AIDS. To spare you the time of checking, no your eyes did not explode, forcing your brain to improvise the words you thought you were reading, and yes, it is indeed the year two-thousand-fucking-thirteen.

And that last part is really important (of course, that's ignoring the magical physics that would have to be involved for these secret gay AIDS-spreading rings to work), because one of the ways people white-washed Graham's bullshit was pointing out that it happened a long time ago. Ignoring the fact that he was almost definitely still talking about and thinking those things but just wasn't being recorded, apparently his bullshit was ok because everyone was a racist, anti-semetic bigot back then I guess?

Now this is just one in a long, long line of especially stupid things Pat Robertson has said. Hell, it's only a blip in the long line of stupid things he's said about gay people (incidentally, doesn't Pat Robertson strike you as the kind of guy who watches tons of gay porn? But not because he likes it, because it's research, you see). But you can already see the explanations that will be trotted out on his death when he gets sainted -- "oh sure, he said some things that were distasteful, but the 80s were a long time ago and no one understood AIDS back then." Or something along those lines.

But this is no longer the 80s, AIDS is no longer a mysterious disease no one understands, and I'm pretty sure we've conclusively demonstrated gay people are human beings. Mostly because it's the year 2013. Yet Robertson is still spouting stupid bullshit that would have looked backwards 30 years ago.

Anyway, this is all to make a simple point -- the man is a pice of shit. He's a piece of shit now, and when he finally fucking dies (what kind of pact with Satan is sustaining his withered body at this point?), he will still be a colossal piece of shit. And if you're one of those people who thinks we should never speak ill of the dead, well, he's alive right now, so I'll just point you back to this post when he dies...

Hey Look! Someone Else Hates Something I Hate!

A few years back, I wrote about how stupid the Beloit College Mindset List is. For those of you not familiar, the mindset list is put together annually by a few professors at Beloit College, and lists a bunch of stuff that supposedly describes the zeitgeist of this fall's newly-entering college first years. It's mostly just a glorified buzzfeed list for old people, and is built on the bizarre assumption that no one understands anything that ever happened before they were born.

I was reminded of my hate-rage for this stupid list when I came across this Salon article detailing pretty much the same complaints I have. As the author of that pointed out, the very first list (of students who would go on to graduate in 2002), claimed they had never heard of the Iran hostage crisis. You know, because it happened a year before they were born. And we all know no one has ever heard of any major world events that happened that far in the past.

But what's even more annoying than that, I've decided, is just how fucking hacky and yet self-satisfied the damn list is. Here's some choice moronic bits from this year's list:

13. PayPal has replaced a pen pal as a best friend on line.

Hah! Get it? Kids today never communicate with anyone, they only buy things using third-party payment apps!

14. Rites of passage have more to do with having their own cell phone and Skype accounts than with getting a driver’s license and car.

Here's where I admit I know nothing about kids these days, but I have to assume getting a car is still a pretty big deal.

18. Growing up with the family dog, one of them has worn an electronic collar, while the other has toted an electronic lifeline.

I literally do not understand what this means. They only make reference to one dog, while the next sentence references two distinct things. I clearly am out of touch.

29. Java has never been just a cup of coffee

Yup, if there's one thing I hear college kids talking about all the time it's which programming language they prefer.

40. They have never attended a concert in a smoke-filled arena.

I think this one is just empirically not true. Many states still do not have indoor smoking bans, and I can't believe every arena self-imposed those before any of these kids were old enough to go to a concert.

44. Their favorite feature films have always been largely, if not totally, computer generated

Again, that's just...not true at all. The majority of films released every year are neither largely nor totally computer generated.

51. The Canadian Football League Stallions have always sung Alouette in Montreal after bidding adieu to Baltimore.

This is a great example of how fucking lazy the list is, like they just googled things that happened in a particular year. Name me one incoming first-year college student who knows or cares about the existence of the Montreal CFL team. This is not how any American college student identifies themselves or makes sense of the world.

57. Their parents’ car CD player is soooooo ancient and embarrassing.

Ok, admittedly I haven't been car shopping recently, but don't all cars come with CD players? Had they went with tape deck, I could at least see it. But can you even purchase a new car in this magical year of 2013 that doesn't have a CD player? How can it be "ancient and embarrassing" if it's still a standard feature in basically every car made?

So in short, fuck this list, and fuck Beloit College for allowing it to continue to exist.

Hilarity, The "Postmodern," and Fucking Up To Make Things Better

First seen here, the two comics below are from when The Dayton Daily News (on two separate occasions!) accidentally swapped the Far Side and Dennis the Menace captions, due to some sort of lay out error.

You may be noting this as the first time you ever laughed at Dennis the Menace, because it is one of what the incomparable Comics Curmudgeon refers to as a "legacy" comic. Legacy comics are the ones that are still inexplicably in the newspaper because the only demographic that still purchases newspapers is extremely comforted by familiarity and forms of bland entertainment in which they;re guaranteed to never be challenged or see a black person. But the people writing these legacy comics long ago gave up (often literally, as they don't actually do any of the production work anymore) and just started recycling the same 3 punchlines over and over.

This screw up, though, reminded me of two other legacy comics reclamation projects. Namely, the Nietzsche Family Circus and Garfield Minus Garfield. Both of these comics are pretty much exactly what the name implies (a Family Circus panel with the caption replaced by a Nietzsche quote and a Garfield comic with Garfield's visage and dialogue erased, respectively), but they vastly improve on their source material.

Someone much smarter and/or pretentious than me could explain how this is some sort of postmodern reclamation of stale cultural artifacts, being co-opted by a jaded generation...something, something. A much simpler way to put it is that stupid shit is a lot funnier when it's no longer stupid. And since Dennis the Menace, the Family Circus, and (present day) Garfield* are all pretty much the epitome of stupid, there's not much anywhere to go but up...

*While present day Garfield is clearly just Jim Davis collecting a large paycheck while I assume a team of flunkies is actually responsible for churning out the content, I will defend old-school Garfield to death. It was actually once an interesting, funny, and occasionally darkly brilliant strip. For proof, I point you to this series from late October 1989 in which it's hinted the entire run of the comic is actually just the fevered dreams of an abandoned Garfield starving to death in an empty house. Let's see Get Fuzzy pull off that shit.

Summer Colds Suck

Spent all of last weekend at an academic conference, and while I was actually a good li'l boy and spent most of my time actually attending presentations, having discussions with colleagues, etc., no conference is complete without nightly partying. It's what happens when you get a bunch of nerds with no social lives together once a year.

Anyway, my body is enacting revenge for my hard living, so I'm now stuck with the dreaded summer cold. It's not really terrible per se, but my head it stuffy and I'm having a hard time concentrating, which makes putting together my syllabi for the class beginning next week (!) more difficult than I had anticipated.

So I'm going to de-camp from the officer and go home where I can sit in my pajamas and mainline chicken soup until I'm better. I may even potentially get some work done, but let's not get crazy.

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!