Struggling against the almighty tides of eventuality

I think by now it’s news to no one about President Obama’s birth certificate. Almost everyone has strong feelings about this, and I do as well. But they’re mixed.

I’m just as angry as it seems like someone should be at this sort of thing. After years of elegantly dismissing attempts to distract the agenda with moronic claims feeding off racism and paranoia, Obama appears to have caved to the shrill right. Instead of issuing a firm but polite “go fuck yourselves you god damned lunatics from hell,” the President issued his long-form birth certificate. And, y’know, it looks kind of like what any sane person figured it’d look like: a birth certificate from Hawaii.

However, part of me is a little curious at the timing. He’s been swatting at this pile of bloodsucking insects for, as I said, years. So Hairdo McBankruptcy throws his cheap rug on the stage, shrieking about the birth certificate that most Americans had already suffered ADD about, and somehow builds a campaign off that. Well, that and having a terrible show and a disgusting plastic-encased harpy of a wife. And then, just when everyone’s so distracted by the fact that he’s ineffectually sending lawyers to Hawaii to sip cocktails for weeks on end (cause they have absolutely no legal jurisdiction to get at anyone’s fucking birth certificate) that they won’t even focus on the Royal Wedding, the President drops his birth certificate.

“Look at this, bitches.”

Naturally, the people who were so stupid they were deceived this long are still in denial that a black guy had the audacity to run for President — er, I mean, that he was born in America. No, wait, I had it right at first. The birthers are quite simply racists. And Donald Trump was all too happy to play the part of the southern guy handing out the hardest American History tests to the blackest people during the reconstruction. He struts himself around and proudly proclaims what a historic douchebag he is.

And people are outraged. Baratunde Thurston posted an impassioned video response to Trump’s self-congratulatory bullshit festival. Steve Weinstein wrote an blog critical of our still-so-racist society. And these guys are right. It’s a startling thing to realize, as someone who was in his teens before he encountered the idea of racism and what it meant to other people, just how deep these veins of hatred running through our country are.  But I can’t help but wonder if  President Obama knew all this was coming as he released his birth certificate.

Think of it this way: Donald Trump has been building his campaign on jumping up and down on Barack Obama’s legitimacy for the office. Suddenly, the birth certificate’s available. He’s left sputtering about grades at Obama’s Ivy League alma mater. Not only that, but his stupid comments have incensed people who have, at times, been fairly lackadaisical since getting the President elected. I think it’s possibly simply a master stroke from a politician who’s gearing himself up for a fight to get re-elected.

And I should be angry at being manipulated, but it’s hard to be angry at being manipulated into seeing the truth. Sensible people in this country are often outnumbered, shouted down, and ignored. Americans are all too willing to throw reason and progress out the window. It’s a hard fight, but one worth winning. And you know, I hope this is the end of Donald Trump’s flickering candle in the world of real politics.

Because good God is that man a fucking racist moron.

I wrote this about a week ago, in response to a then-current news item. Fearing a tide of Charles Village people (or anyone, really) who would read into this that I just didn’t give a shit about someone dying, and come and harass me, I didn’t post it. However, I guess at this point I’m either going to have to post it or delete it, and I’m getting tired of deleting the thoughts I have. So, while no longer timely (and thoroughly unedited), here’s my thoughts:

If you’re one of the people who follows me from Baltimore, you’re probably aware of the homicide that happened in Charles Village this weekend. I definitely am; it was at the end of my street. I wasn’t made aware of it until the next morning, somehow I missed the commotion that must have been made. However, I haven’t missed, for the past three days, repeated news crews, and a press conference the Commissioner of Police himself attended. Huzzah, you might be expecting me to say, the city is responding to a violent crime in my neighborhood with a swift hand and recognizing that there’s a problem.

Except I’m not saying that.

The thing is, and I know I’ll sound callous and unfeeling for saying it, is that Stephen Pitcairn is a small number in a large statistic. Baltimore is not a safe city. There have been one hundred and twenty homicides in the city limits this year so far. And while Mr. Pitcairn was doing valuable research, every single one of those other people were flesh and blood just the same, and so few have received the attention he has. It’s partially due to who he is, and partially to do with where he was when it happened.

And that’s really the problem. I don’t want people to marginalize his death, but I don’t want people to marginalize the 119 other people who’ve died this year, either. But they are marginalized, because so many of them occurred in poor, black neighborhoods where that’s just part of the deal. We just finally caught some of the spillover in our little hamlet between multiple sections of town people colloquially call “ghetto.”

I’ve seen a number of extra police in the days since it happened, typically buzzing around the exact location, as though there’s a mystical significance to that specific spot and any future murders would only take place there. I do not feel safer for the over-the-top show. I don’t feel any less safe than I did last week, as a matter of fact.

Because this is Baltimore, this is one of the murder capitals of the world, and if you felt invincible cause your house had some cute paint and you can walk to a farmer’s market in a parking lot, even though you can hear the semi-automatic fire that periodically rings out from Waverly, then you’re a fool. You’re not any less safe than you were before, your eyes have just been opened to the reality of where you live and you’re hysterical. And it’s disrespectful to the people who, when murders happen around the corner from them, are ignored.

It’s a major tragedy that Stephen Pitcairn died. It’s an outrage that the people who did it were released repeatedly into the world after apparently committing other robberies. But it shouldn’t be so much more than when someone else dies senselessly. The city is dying all around us, and we can’t just draw a line in the sand and say “Not HERE. You can kill them THERE but we will HAVE our painted ladies, damn it!” Cause the problem with a line in the sand is that when the wave comes crashing down it gets washed away.

So, my blog went down for a few days. Dreamhost’s automatic scanning script detected something wrong, and disabled it. All I got in the error message was a warning to update all of my software/plugins (which everything was, except for two plugins that went out of date while the site was down), and to check the server-side code for malicious modifications. Despite WordPress being a giant hideous PHP beast, I went through it yesterday, and everything looked just about like I’d expect. I think it was triggered because I had an unencrypted/uncompressed backup copy in a subdirectory with a much older version of WordPress. I’m not sure if it was accessible, but I deleted it anyway to prevent future occurrences.

Moving on.

So, Gizmodo is apparently made up of jackasses. As anyone who’s read this is already well aware, they somehow acquired a next-generation iPhone prototype. As we all know, Apple’s ass is squeezed so tight even radio signals can’t get out, so it’s clear that Gizmodo having the device in the first place wasn’t very much on the up and up. That much was clear as soon as I read the original article.

However, they then upped their jack-assery by outing the Apple engineer whose phone it was. Now, don’t get me wrong: I have no doubt that eventually Apple was going to get their hardware back, and a simple serial number check would tell them to whom they gave it. His life at Apple, likely, was ended. That sucks for him, cause people who work at Apple tend to like it, in spite of the draconian restrictions on talking to anyone about what you do (I know people who work at NSA who are allowed to talk more about what they do for a living). Of course, that much was his own fault.

The problem for me, though, is that all of that is an internal Apple affair. In no way was it journalism to out a guy that was about to get canned. It might be a human-interest story about how evil Apple is that they’d fire someone for losing a prototype; but that might happen at any company, it’s just that much more certain at Apple. And that argument is even flawed, because if Gizmodo had simply been up front with Apple and returned the device, there might not have even been an issue. The human-interest argument, broken as it clearly is, also assumes that they were doing it for some sort of altruistic purpose.

They weren’t.

Reading through their repeated posts, it sounds like they’re trying to be funny while fingering the guy. Let me clue you in, Gizmodo: Apple isn’t going to say “well, clearly it’s this guy’s fault so we’ll just let it slide.” The whole thing reads like the following story: a nerdy guy is encouraged by his smooth-talking friends to steal his dad’s porno stash so they can all beat off in the tool shed later; the nerdy guy gets caught; the smooth-talking friends say, while snickering, “Well, shucks, Mr. Jobs, poor old Gray just made a mistake any of us could make, if we were trying to STEAL PORN MAGS TO BEAT OFF, golly goshes.” They act smugly about the entire affair, but the problem is that this wasn’t some small-time misunderstanding, and Steve Jobs doesn’t seem like the kindly hearted dad-next-door who doesn’t want to spank you with the full force of Johnny Law.

I do not like Apple’s methods of locking down all their research, the entire environment of their computers/devices, or much of anything about Apple (aside from the physical appearance and software stability of their computers, which you have to admit is sexy). However, it’s their prerogative. As a consumer, the only way you get to vote on this is with your dollars. They don’t do anything wrong legally by walling off their ecosystem, and it’s not a bout of journalistic prudence to crack open an illicitly-acquired prototype. It’s potential theft and destruction of property charges. And as much as I dislike Apple, and would relish the opportunity to know what the next iteration of their software/hardware does with out the “Apple Event” Steve Jobs/media circle jerk, it’s the way they do things, and the way they’re allowed to do things.

I’m not sure what the statutes will say about any of this legally, since the device has now been returned to Apple without invoking any law enforcement thus far. However, Apple has (to my estimation) the following possible recourses:

• Do Nothing – Unlikely, to me. They rely on extreme secrecy, and if a breach of that secrecy goes unpunished, other people will be willing to say “screw it” in the future.
• Cockblock Gizmodo – This seems almost a given. While other media outlets are invited to the Apple Events to get first cracks at live-blogging/tweeting new hardware and software releases, Gizmodo may have to sit outside in the rain and wait for scraps in the trash can left over from more favored pets. Note that the following options are still available in conjunction with this one.
• Red Tape – Assuming there’s nothing that Apple can eventually legally do, they can still squash Gizmodo with long-term legal problems, overmatching them with a legal team big enough to staff an aircraft carrier, as big corporations are known for having, tying them up until their funds completely dry up and they collapse.
• Lawsuit – Like the previous one, but successful: assuming they can prove that they lost R&D money, or eventual sales due to less impact at their eventually unveiling, or anything resulting from a yet-to-be-proven-illegal “transaction” (read: theft) of a prototype, that could land Gizmodo in spicy legal waters which could prove disastrous: from major fines all the way up to jail time.

I do not like being on Apple’s side on this. If it had stopped at “they published a story which damages Apple’s bottom line,” I’d wince and look away, feeling badly as they were eviscerated and/or annihilated at Cupertino’s hands; I might even write an objection at Apple’s shitty tactics (I did say I don’t like them). But the arrogance and flippant way in which they tossed the engineer’s name out there, while still protecting the guy who sold them the phone “as a source,” like they were some sort of legitimate news organization that just happened to act like guilty 15-year-olds, makes me hope for the worst.

I’m thoroughly unsurprised to hear that the Supreme Court has cockblocked Democracy.  Whereas previously we had the illusion of a people with a voice, now we’ve got companies freed from their shackles to spend whatever ungodly amount of money crushing their opponents as they’d like.

Take a gander at some relativity on recent news.

The health care reform is an important issue; I know far too many people who work “part-time” jobs more than 40 hours a week and get health care coverage that basically amounts to “we’ll buy you some vitamins at the Safeway.”  That so many people should go without health care completely and others who have it should have such marginal coverage, in our behemoth of a wealth-generating nation, is a travesty.

Democrats being terrible at campaigning and losing at key issues when they have all the leverage is an important issue; see health care reform above.  It shouldn’t come as a shock that people are pissed off that Oakley lost, it was a deck horribly stacked against the Republicans and she couldn’t be bothered to win cause she needed some time to take down her Christmas lights or whatever.

But these issues are all passing problems; if health care reform passed in any form, it’d be repeatedly challenged.  If Democrats had won in MA, they’d still face down a hard fight in November and in 2012.  They are things that require passion on both sides; Democrats to be infuriated that their party is so impotent, and Republicans to be spurred on by their victory.  This verdict handed out by the Supreme Court is a body blow to both sides.

You see, as it was previously, there was already a value assigned to a seat in Congress, or to the White House.  You couldn’t get your foot in the door without millions to advertise and put your name out there.  With PACs and other outside donations, the latest presidential race reached astronomical financial proportions.  The only thing holding the reins back was the fact that the richest constituency, the faux people created at each and every corporation to provide a taxable singular entity, were barred from unlimited contributions.

The donations provided by individual Americans were a huge boon to the Obama campaign.  However, if you think of what sort of amazing advertising can be bought with $100 million, think about the fact that during the 2009 Super Bowl, NBC sold their spots for $209 million, and that’s not including the production costs.  Hopefully, once you realize that the budgets of all the camps in the biggest presidential campaign in history was blown for one day of advertising by the private sector, you’ll see how the Supreme Court just fucked America.

Scott Brown won the Senate seat.  ”Huzzah and hurray,” say the Republicans, “we’re once again relevant!”  Of course, they’ve been building to this moment for a year, ever since the White House was unduly upset from their hands and into a historically black President.  Meanwhile, Democrats are going nuts, or so I’m told.  I haven’t been able to care enough to check on that myself.

You see, I barely did any research on this whole Coakley/Brown affair.  To be quite honest, no one really made a fuss on my Twitter stream until about two days ago; and, since I’ve become quite disillusioned with our system of government, I only read the news when it’s slapping me in the face.  However, since it tossed everyone into such a tizzy tonight, I finally looked Scott Brown up on Wikipedia to see what kind of sack of crap America had bought itself this time (Libertarian-flavored, it turns out).*

About halfway down the page, I noticed a mention of a campaign ad where the Democratic candidate slammed (perhaps inaccurately) her challenger on a bill he proposed in “Massachussetes.”  That, right there, told me everything I needed to know about the campaign.  Well, that and the fact that, with the election squarely in her pocket (MA is a blue state, after all), she took a week off to let her opponent build up steam.  Democrats lost this like they lost 2004′s run for President: sheer and utter stupidity.

I’d bemoan this, but it’s just par for the course these days.  Democrats had a chance to tell conservatives to take their unsustainable tax cuts and shove them, and to give the country a chance at bona fide health care for people within our borders who desperately need it.  Instead, they wandered from topic to topic, and after some loony bins started being meanie poo-poo heads and acting like 5-year-olds at town halls and no one could muster up a single “shut the fuck up you crazy S.O.B., I’m talking,” they got scared and backed down.  Again.

I was a political idealist, once upon a time.  I thought that one of the two extremes, with enough sanity and moderation, could make things work in this country.  If conservatives gained a stronghold, we’d have a smaller government with fewer taxes, but fewer programs to suck the revenue stream dry.  That’s not my choice, I’d rather help people with government than give them the finger and say “not my problem,” but that’d require higher taxes.  Both ideas have merit, if you take into account the need for someone to balance the books at the end of the day.

But when we had conservatives in charge, we got fear.  We got tax cuts and explosions in spending.  We got a social agenda that looked like it longed for the pure and holy days where sinful acts like interracial dating were beaten out of people.  We got imperialism run amok, miring us in wars that we had no business starting.  I’d say more about the conservative years, but I think people blogged it to death just fine without me.

Then, the glorious hope from the heavens came.  2006: the great big upset.  For the first time in 12 years, congress was a bright and shining blue.  But we got nothing.  2 years of hand-wringing and complaining and the best we could get is blame on the fact that they couldn’t override a veto on Bush, they just didn’t have the numbers.  Thank whatever gods you like, then, that Barack Obama, the Champion of Change, swooped in.  After battling Hillary for Prom Queen for a year, he took Pennsylvania Avenue by storm.

But we got nothing.  Again.

Some liberal pundits talk about how much Barack Obama has done.  Maybe it’s more like Snow Leopard was to Mac OS X: it’s all under the hood.  But we aren’t treated to rousing speeches anymore.  We’re treated to meetings with the opposition, to see if maybe they’ll sell their agenda up the creek for tea and cookies.  Democrats didn’t learn from the other side of the aisle: you take the power you’ve got and you ram through your agenda, and you don’t care if half the country disagrees with you.  You won’t win them over with passionate pleas of “can’t we all just get along.”  You win them over by beating them and trumpeting the success of that which they didn’t support.

Of course, the core will never believe you.  But the people on the edges, the ones swaying on the fence, they can be won over by success.  They’ll never be won over by cowardice.  And that brings us to tonight.  After a barely-fought and not-really-particularly-contested fight for Massachusetts, Democrats lost the ability to block a filibuster (if they ever had it).  At this point, it hardly seems like the agenda will change at all.  Things that wouldn’t come to a vote before will still manage not to come to a vote.

The future does look more grim, though.  The political pendulum doesn’t seem to have stayed very long on the left.  If all that happens is fiscal conservatism, I’ll call us all lucky.  But I don’t foresee that.  The talking heads warning us of ever-impending doom and war, against the world and against each other, are still out there.  Some espouse libertarian ideals of social responsibility and fiscal conservatism, but most are willing to stoke the fires that burn us the most.  I don’t want another world where I have to fear what my government is willing to do to me to safeguard against largely phantasmal enemies at the gate, but if Democrats don’t shape up and grow a pair, that’s where we’re headed.

* Note that I’m not saying conservatives are sacks of crap.  Politicians are sacks of crap.

So, Baratunde suggests we need a #NewHate – Race, gender, sexuality, etc. are all “played out.”  Of course, I can see where he’s coming from; we’ve got plenty of high-profile people of various demographics now, and only the lunatic fringe (less fringe-y in some parts of the world/country than others) really has a huge problem with it.  I take it that the fires of irrational hate take energy to keep stoking and with Americans’ attentions being distracted by such activities as getting fatter by the second, we just don’t have the vitality for our old hatreds.

Of course, his solution is to hate people who wear their scarves differently.  That’s silly.  No, I don’t mean it’s not a valid reason to hate someone, I’ve seen some atrocious scarf-mountings in my day and I was this close ( |—| ) to calling Pat Robertson up to spew a vitriolic stream of moronic faith-based hate on them.  Rather, I think he’s missing one of the following two key points of irrational hatred: that it be something people have little choice in being part of, and that it be completely and utterly a stupid reason to hate someone (points for the latter, Baratunde).

My theory is this: let’s hate people based on the number of vowels in their names.  Personally, every one of my names has two vowels in it (even my nickname does, since “y” is only sometimes a vowel), and I think that’s the way it should be.  It keeps things simple, and that’s the way God intended it (he gets off the hook cause he’s God and all).  So join me, my two-vowelled brethren, as we take the world back for the righteous and the proud!

On the other side of the cloth wall of my cubicle sits a black guy.  So far, he hasn’t shown up for work yet today.  That’s unfortunate for me, cause I needed some information that only he has the skills to provide.  A few minutes ago, I heard discussion from his space, space he shares with another coworker who is in today.  Awesome!  I get my information at long last!

So I wheel myself out from behind the wall with great vigor, only to find that my coworker has not arrived, but rather a FedEx guy, who happens to be black.  “Oh no,” I think to myself, “I’ve just made a terribly racist assumption.”  You see, I recognized the voice as belonging to my coworker.  Being as they’re both black, naturally this meant it was that sole trait which registered in my brain.

Or is it really?  I know there’s a terrifically stupid assumption that “all [race] people look alike” that most racists make.  Naturally, it follows that “all [race] people sound alike” is a similarly racist statement.  Of course, I’ve never been good with identifying unseen voices.  When I first spoke with Eric and Matt on the phone, I couldn’t tell them apart, and as a white person that should be easy as pie for me, right?  They’re even from different areas of the country and have (supposedly) different accents.

So, after thinking so ashamedly of myself for a few minutes, I’ve finally figured out that maybe I’m not the worst human being ever for being voice-identification challenged.  But that leads me to wonder, how many times is it that we assume some sort of racial profiling is in effect because the person involved is of a specific race, when nothing could be further from the truth?  I realize there are plenty of instances where people do profile; but, sometimes maybe jumping the gun and assuming something is racist, i.e. taking special note of someone’s race to make that judgement, is actually the more racist part.

There seems to be a movement afoot to promote animal research; I saw this the other day, and now get to see a copy of that billboard every day on my way to work.  The thing I don’t understand is: are these people high?

I don’t particularly like animal research.  It’s not that I don’t understand that it advances medical technologies that help human beings.  It’s not that I want more people to die horribly from cancer.  But you’re still breeding animals specifically for the purpose of injecting them with or otherwise inducing horrible afflictions (or doing various other experiments to make their lives awful).  Does this mean we should stop doing it?  Well, I don’t know what alternatives there are that people will be satisfied with, and thus there’s no response I could give that is even remotely close to “yes” which won’t get me labeled as a monster; and that’s weird, cause I’d be advocating not torturing animals for our personal gain.

So, we’ll accept animal testing as a given, if only for the impossibility of stopping it.  However, I do think we can agree that it’s not something we should all be happy about.  If we suffered some horrible nuclear winter down the road, you’d probably eat your dog.  It’s unlikely you’d be overjoyed at the prospect.  As such, I don’t think it’s a good idea to make a whole god damn ad campaign extolling the virtues of dog meat.  Guess what?  You’re still eating Rex, you jackasses, and he was a part of the family.

My point is this: you shouldn’t spend time advocating a “necessary evil.”  It really makes you look like you enjoy the suffering. Ultimately, that just makes me wish you would wander in front of the nearest mass-transit bus.  Meanwhile, I’ll still think animal testing is something we put up with as a society because we don’t have better choices.  If only someone with an interest in saving more human lives had some spare money to throw at such an issue…