Either Way, You Pay For It

There's an oft-quoted statistic about how Utah has the highest rate of internet-porn purchases, and that, generally, states that were more religious and had "traditional-values" tended to buy more smut.  As the guy who did the study says, "One natural hypothesis is something like repression: if you're told you can't have this, then you want it more."

But maybe people in Utah are just incredibly unsophisticated about consuming internet-porn; after all, the only people who pay for it are people who don't know what they're doing.  You can assume that paying for porn correlates with consumption of porn, but then why not assume that paying for sex correlates with a guy's ability to get laid.

Or maybe guys in Utah, where they have polygamous Mormon traditions, pay for porn because they're so used to the idea of being made an honest man by your side-action.

Which state consumes the most MFFF?

The Better Man

I was riding my bike (a bicycle, not a Harley) alongside Blackhawk Country Club, when a golf ball came out of the sky, and almost hit me in the head (helmet).  Assuming someone must suck at golf, I chuckled a little and rode along.

About a hundred feet later, another ball comes out of nowhere, almost hitting me again, and this time it was a line drive.  I slam on the brakes, look behind me, and a couple hundred feet back, there are three fat, middle-aged fucks standing on the tee.

"WHAT!?  TWO FUCKING TIMES!?  ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!?"

One of the guys raises his hand in acknowledgement, not apparently of any wrongdoing, but almost as though he's waving from the prow of a passing boat.  For all I know, this fat-fuck is taking credit, not blame.

"THAT'S ALL!?  THAT'S ALL YOU'RE GONNA GIVE ME!? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING!?"

These douchebags do nothing, which is hard to interpret, but I can definitively say that there's no additional apology.  Still, I feel like I've fulfilled the requirements of manhood, so I start riding away, but not without a few parting shots.

"THE FIRST TIME I CAN LAUGH IT OFF, BUT TWO FUCKING TIMES?  YOU SUCK!"

The tee box is on the left, the green is to the right; the X on the left is the first shot, the X on the right is the second.

I feel pretty good about my performance, like I'd shown myself to be the better man, but that only lasts a couple seconds.  Then I start worrying that I didn't do enough.  It was like when you leave a tip, then pause with your wallet in your hand, and try to decide if you should have left more.  I worry that cussing someone out from 150 feet away is maybe not that manly after all.

I also worry that yelling "You suck!" was a bad idea, because if these are some tough-guys who tried to hit me on purpose, they'd find it hilarious that the dumbass thought it was an accident, and that his idea of a comeback was "you suck".  Meanwhile, if he does suck, and it was accidental, then maybe I'm an asshole (although the dipshit should still owe me an apology).  Which is worse, being a pussy or an asshole?  It's a difficult question, and due to my great fear of looking like a coward, my answer is to stop and stare them down.  Again, this would have been really macho, if they weren't 200 feet away.

These fucking douche-bags are still just standing on the tee; in my mind, they're probably having a laugh.  This makes me even more pissed off, so I decide to escalate things, to get gangster on them.  I wait on the side of road, which is just 20 feet from the fairway, straddling my bicycle.  If they want to act tough, they can come on down.

My strategy is to let one of these assholes hit his next shot, then to steal the ball and ride away as fast as possible.  I wait for a couple minutes, still staring at them, but they're all too scared to leave the tee box.  These fucking pussies have no idea who they just lost to.

The Humanity

In the War on Terror, most of 'Merica's recent attacks against the terrorists have been carried out by robots, specifically by Predator drones.  In classic fashion, the counter-strikes against terrorists have been met by counter-charges of terrorism, with the Taliban and al-Qaeda accusing the US of wantonly killing civilians.

The US claims that the drones are incredibly accurate, that they've killed 400-500 enemy combatants and only 20 civilians, and that those civilians only died because the terrorists used them as human shields to obtain public sympathy.  Meanwhile, by Pakistan's estimates, the drones have killed only 14 terrorist leaders and 700 civilians.  As a result, some scholars have questioned the ethics of using drones, saying they've distanced us from the human costs of war, and that we're sacrificing the lives of innocent foreign civilians in order to avoid risking our own men.  Many fear that the drones are so despised in Af-Pak, that they've become a recruiting tool for al Qaeda. 

In the War for Hearts and Minds, the use of drones is in large part a PR decision, and its a sticky one.  Obama (in)famously voiced concerns during the '08 campaign that we needed more troops in Afghanistan so that "we are not just air raiding villages and killing civilians"; now, under his watch, drone attacks in Pakistan are four-times more frequent than under Bush.  This Reuters article says that he chose to use drones because if we went into Pakistan with troops, we'd inflame the Pakistani populace, and jeopardize our alliance with that country.  Additionally, capturing and detaining the militants might create another Gitmo or Abu Ghraib scandal, so the best strategy is to simply kill them from afar.  Meanwhile, the Pakistani government, who are forced by local politics to oppose the strikes, are secretly "providing more behind-the-scenes assistance than in the past", helping us locate terrorist targets. 


So much of this war is fought in the theatre of public opinion, and the US has to admit that weapons like the MQ-9 Reaper Hunter/Killer have a bit of an image problem.  Looking at this picture from Slate, its easy to see why some might view them as soulless machines of indiscriminate destruction.

There's something really freaky and inhuman about the lack of windows. 

This guy was in Pan's Labyrnth.  He had no eyes on his face, and an indiscriminate appetite to devour anything he could get his hands on.  This movie was praised for the craft of it's psychological brutality.

The Cylons, even though they were fighting on behalf of robot-supremacy, had the decency to anthropomorphize their Cylon Raiders, which were arguably more sympathetic than the craggy visage of Edward James Olmos.

Anti-Faith

There's been some debate over how much liability BP will have for this fucking oil spill (for which the damages are estimated to be as high as $14 billion).  Some are focusing on the OPA law of 1990, which limits liability to $75 million; others are saying those limits are void if BP is found to be grossly negligent, and that they can be sued using tort law.  I don't know anything about the legal specifics, but I do know one thing:  I have absolutely no faith in our ability to hold these assholes to account.  In fact, I have the opposite of faith, I have anti-faith.

There are literally no existing words to express how little confidence I have, because confidence is limited to a range of zero to a hundred; anti-faith stretches to negative infinity.

Anti-faith is unshakable and transcends the plane of logic and reason.  Even if every legal scholar and politician in the country said BP would be forced to pay in full, I still believe that, no matter what, these bastards will find some way out of it.

Optimism : Pessimism 

as  

Trust : Mistrust

as  

Faith :        

I could have sworn this was a company that sold pinwheels and sunflowers.

Politics...Politics...

I keep doing these blog posts about politics, and part of me (figuratively) worries that (theoretical) people might be turned off by it, that they might find it pretentious.  Its like, "Who the fuck does this guy think he is, offering his ideas about how they should run the country.  It's like he thinks he should have some say in the matter."

I'd be willing to forfeit my claim to having a say, but only if it meant every ignorant-ass suburban-minded moron, who only reads about celebrities, and only talks in gossip and appropriated half-jokes, also sacrificed their right to vote.  But I guess they've mostly already done that.

You're going to delegate control of our government to people like this?

Fired Up!

This NYTimes posting discusses how the recession has impacted both employment and wages, saying "oddly, though, the weakness in employment hasn’t translated into anywhere near as much weakness for wages."  In fact, while jobs have gone down, wages have actually gone up; if you look at these graphs, you'll see that the two were pretty closely synchronized.  The NYTimes treats this as some sort of paradox or coincidence.

 

Job losses were at their highest rates in months nine through sixteen.

Wage growth was at its highest rate from months eight through thirteen.

This is no coincidence:  job loss was actually the cause of wage growth.  This paradox is easy to reconcile; as a response to the recession, lower-paid temp workers were the first to get axed, leaving behind a core of more well-paid permanent employees.

This idea makes a lot of sense in theory:  "Temp employment in the U.S. fluctuates wildly, by design. The whole purpose of bringing on workers who are employed by temporary staffing firms such as Manpower (MAN), Adecco (ADO), and Kelly Services is that they're easy to shuck off when unneeded. While the number of temps fell sharply during the recent recession..."  - Business Week, Jan 03, 2010.

It can also be supported empirically:  "During the 9-month course of the officially designated recession of 2001, temp agency workers - which as a group represented just 2.5% of the workforce - accounted for fully 23% of net job losses in the labor market" - "Temporary downturn? Temporary staffing in the recession and the jobless recovery", Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore.

Temps are easy to get rid of - they're 3/5ths of a person, meaning they expect to be mistreated; they go quietly, and no one bats an eye.  Firms don't even have to fire them, firms just can passively neglect to renew their employment, and if there's anything office-types excel at, it's passive-aggression.  Meanwhile, if a firm lays-off a full-fledged employee, its much more like an act of betrayal, and things get messy.  The firm has to worry about a wrongful-termination suit, workplace morale takes a hit among the survivors, and the betrayed has more ammunition if they choose to retaliate extra-legally - because they know where the bodies are buried.

After the temps are gone, the next to go are often the more junior long-term employees; by honoring seniority, firms maintain the illusion of fairness and therefore morale.  Then firms are left with the highly-paid senior staff members, typically these are more productive workers, which is part of the reason productivity has risen during this recession (up by 6.9% in Q4 of '09).  For firms, this lessens some of the pain of paying higher average wages, but you know for a fact that if firms could cut these workers' wages, they would. 

Unfortunately for the firms, it's hard to cut someone's pay, because then they'll become disgruntled.  Of course, they'll be even more disgruntled if you fire them, but that's why after they fire a guy, they make sure to escort the him out of the building, rather than letting him find his way out on his own.  The guy's worked there long enough, surely he knows how to find the exit, but he also knows how to throw a spanner in the works:

"6. Do not let the employee linger. Unless there's an urgent reason to keep the employee around for a few days, tell them that they're to leave the business premises immediately, after a short stop at their desk to pick up any personal items. Escort the employee to the door, so the employee doesn’t have the chance to steal any company files, trash any computer data or change any computer passwords without your knowledge. Better yet, have another employee change these while the other employee is in your office, so they can’t go back to their desk and wreak havoc with your computer system. Collect any office keys and company credit cards this employee might have." - "The Right Way To Fire Someone", entrepeneur.com.  

If you cut someone's pay and keep them on staff, you might be creating a saboteur - one who has the run of the place.  Of course, for firms, the long term solution to all of this is to replace all permanent workers with lower-wage temps; from that point on, you can "let them go" at your leisure, then hire replacements at even lower wages than the previous dupes.

This picture is from iStockphoto, under the keyword category of "Human Resources".  You don't have to read an HR manual to know what goes through the minds of these assholes - it's all pretty plain to see.

Hate Mail, Vol. 2, I Challenge You To a Dialectic

This post is the second in a series of (selected works of) the (jealousy-fueled?) hate mail I send to professional writers.  This, and all other hate mails, can be interpreted:  a) as a cathartic purging of un-sublimated sexual aggression  b) through the metaphor of a dog shitting on the bed.

Today's target is Simon Critchley, an author and a professor of Philosophy at the New School in New York.  Critchley is curating a series about philosophy in the NYTimes, and he starts things off with an essay titled "What is a Philosopher?"  Critchley, channeling Plato, opens by feinting in the direction of self-deprecation, joshing about the philosopher's reputation as a man who dawdles around with his head in the clouds, but this quickly proves to be false-modesty, as the essay pivots towards self-aggrandizement.  

According to Critchley, the philosopher is not one who dilly-dallies, the philosopher is one who deliberates, while the rest of the world bustles through their daily routines.  The philosopher isn't oblivious to society's conventions, the philosopher is immune from their restrictions; free in mind to notice and criticize the faults of anyone and anything.  This makes the philosopher a danger to the status quo, and this is why so many philosophers have been censored and executed throughout the course of history.   It appears that, in Critchley's mind, the philosopher is like Tupac.

. . .

Hello Simon Critchley,

I challenge you to a dialectic.  I posted the following in the comments thread of your NYTimes article, as well as on my own personal blog, http://trivialpursuittheblog.blogspot.com/.

Society doesn't censor or execute philosophers, instead it gives them unlimited time and freedom to speak their minds.  This is called tenure.

The catch is, no one actually listens to what they have to say, because no one (except other philosophers) actually cares.  There's little point in killing these people when you can stick them in a tower, tell them it's status and freedom, when in fact it's a quarantine of pariahs, where they'll trifle away, arguing only over things that can't be proven.

This is, of course, only one view, and you're free to challenge it, at your leisure.  Such is the nature of your existence.

Ken Drinkwater

. . .

Go to hell, Simon Critchley.

. . . 

Mon, May 17, 2010 at 7:06 AM

Update:  Simon Critchley Responds

thank you ken,

i wish i had the time i described in my article to answer in full, but i have to get my son breakfast.
but basically you're right.
best

simon

. . .

On the surface, he concedes the battlefield and lays down his weapon, admitting, not only that I'm right, but also announcing that he is not really a philosopher, because he doesn't have the time.  

Under the surface, he subtly shifts the war to a broader theatre, making stealthy, passive-aggressive personal attacks through insinuation.  By taking a polite tone and making a joke, he pretends to the high road.  By mentioning his son, he points out my evolutionary failure while understatedly asserting, "I have a life, you do not, and I don't deign to debate you".  The artfulness of this passive-aggression is that I can't prove any of it.

  

 Fuck you, Simon Critchley.