(in)humanity

So I was goofing off and taking silly quizzes on the web when suddenly I came across a question that wasn’t so silly. It went a little something like this:

If you had to make an important decision about something that would affect others, which of these factors would you consider most strongly?

• Justice
• Compassion
• Practicality
• Self-interest

I sat here for about 5 whole minutes mentally kicking this one around. I immediately eliminated Self-interest - it’s a perfectly worthwhile answer, but given that my judgment is going to carry repercussions for many others it automatically feels least important to me. In the broader scheme of things I’m not sure that this tendency is such a plus; it’s often been suggested to me that I am by nature too unselfish for my own good… but I digress.

After another minute or two I eliminated Practicality. A course of action, I reasoned, shouldn’t be considered more right because it’s the easiest or most practical way to go. Here again, I like my decision but readily admit it as evidence that I’m a lousy capitalist.

I finally settled on Compassion, mainly because I’m a big fan of it. If you’re surprised, hear me out.

Justice seems like the obvious answer. Everyone loves Justice, me included, but the problem is that no two people’s notions of Justice are quite the same. For only one example, If you’re deciding what to do with a confessed murderer, the victim’s family is most likely going to have a different idea of justice than the murderer’s mother would have. This, of course, is a single specific example, not necessarily correlative to the hypothetical decision I’d be making.
Read the rest of this entry »

Memo to Sen. Dianne Feinstein: thanks a whole big bundle.

Too well I recall the morning last November when I read your stated intention to vote in favor of confirming Michael Mukasey as U.S. Attorney General. It made what would have been a pleasant breakfast at a local café go down quite a bit less easily. I narrowly averted embarrassment, because your characterizations of Judge Mukasey as independent-minded and repulsed by the idea of torture were such stuff as spit-takes are made on. I couldn’t believe that you, my home state’s senior senator, had watched the same confirmation hearings as I had and not come away similarly disgusted at Mukasey’s craven dodging of the torture issue.

Your op-ed included a desire to see Judge Mukasey come before the senate panel again to have another chat about the whole Jack Bauer-iziation of American justice thing. Well, who’s back on the Hill today but your guy Mike the AG, front and center, talking waterboarding and destroyed CIA interrogation tapes. You must’ve been geeked, armed with a bucket of popcorn and ready to see The Muke torque up and bring the outrage, huh?

There are times when a mere “I told you so” doesn’t seem to cover it.
Read the rest of this entry »

Put down that cup of coffee, unless you like a mess. Courtesy of TPM Muckraker:

Gitmo to Stay Open as Human Rights Sanctuary

Turns out it’s more than just a catchy headline. The story is that the good ol’ Bush administration wants to slim down the prisoner headcount at Gitmo from the current 360 to 150. So good news for 210 wrongfully-imprisoned and even-more-wrongfully tortured detainees? Actually, no. We’ve still got one more level of wrongful to go: there’s nowhere to drop them off. Their home countries and all of the possible foster-home states that have been asked either won’t take them, or won’t take them without promising not to torture or kill them. So they get to stay in Guantánamo, where their human rights will be, uh, protected.

I wonder if they’d take any consolation in not being among the other 150 prisoners - the ones the Bush DoD doesn’t want to get rid of. Of those 150, Bush & Co. have selected 80 finalists whom they want to [beverages down again...] charge with war crimes. I shit you not. The Bush administration, having exempted itself from international accords and the U.S. Constitution in order to avoid being charged with war crimes, is gearing up to charge some of the victims of its war crimes with war crimes. Yes, some of them are surely guilty of war crimes, but we’ll never really know with the kangaroo-court military tribunals that will try them.

What about the 50 semi-finalists? The Bush junta says that they’re too dangerous to release from Gitmo, but not bad enough to put on trial. Um… I have nothing to add to this point. I guess my digust has reached critical mass, at least for the moment.

The thing that’s saddening me the most right now is that after 6+ years of Bush, this level of absurdity doesn’t even seem unusual anymore. It’s like a ghastly, global-scale version of one of the “Cowboys and Indians” games I participated in during my single-digit years: the ones where the biggest kids make up the rules as they go along, and their manipulations become more and more illogical until chaos and disillusionment set in and the game collapses.

Would that I could just say “I’m not playing anymore,” quit the war on terror and walk home.

About a year ago I wrote that punditry was dead. It seemed pretty final at the time, and it was. Punditry is still dead - in fact, it’s getting deader all the time.

How dead? I don’t mean to set off a panic, but I feel duty-bound to report that punditry have made a terrifying transition. No longer is it merely dead, it is more than that: Punditry is undead. Hollow-headed pundits roam our airwaves even now preying upon the uninformed, the ignorant, and the credulous. These unsuspecting targets are guilty of nothing more than having lost track of the remote, and for this they are damned to a netherworld of petty, bloviating irrelevance.

Think I’m nuts? Consider Exhibit A, a clip of the show that someone funnier than I aptly nicknamed The Oh-Really Factor, in which Papa Were-bear lobs a smear at The Daily Kos by way of the Hillary Clinton campaign:

I love how he literally ends up sounding like a parrot at the end. “Bill, The Daily Kos is one of the most heavily-trafficked sites on the web.”

“Squawk! Hate site! Squawk!”

The problem with having an insatiable thirst for ignorance is that you are what you eat. It’s one thing to be a little out of touch… but to still somehow be unaware that there are a lot of random nutjubs and lowlifes on the internet? That level of inattention is just plain freaky. To say that it’s inhuman doesn’t cover it - I mean, even my dog knows about internet trolls.

Compounding the indignity of getting served by Hillary Clinton’s campaign spokesman, our Faux News friend was subsequently undercut by his own legions. AMERICAblog’s John Aravosis pointed out comment threads on Mr. OhReally’s own blog that contained hateful rantings and death threats against Sen. Clinton. Well, knock me over with a feather. The essential detail:

…while O’Reilly holds others responsible for the words strangers leave on their Web sites, on O’Reilly’s Web site, he’s not responsible at all for the hate and threats his readers leave behind… and I quote:

“BillOReilly.com will not be held liable for any user activity on the message boards. We do not actively monitor user-submitted content.”

I’d wager that Bill O’Reilly himself doesn’t even passively monitor user-submitted content. Having demonstrated a knowledge of the internet roughly equivalent to Sen. Ted “Series of Tubes” Stevens (R-AK), it’s safe to assume that he scarcely, if ever, has monitored any part of the site that bears his name. Not that there’s anything wrong with that - most famous people hire lackeys to run their web sites. The difference is that most of them are sensible enough to readily admit doing so, and don’t claim to understand much about their sites. In other words, they can afford to pay someone else to be accountable for this part of their public presence, allowing themselves to remain blissfully ignorant.

For the pundit undead (or “pundead”), though, ignorance is not blissful. At least, not in any lasting way Ignorance is the virus that they exist in order to spread. And spread it they do - a quick flip through the TV or AM radio dials shows what a contagious little bastard it is. The good news is that you can defend yourself from the pundead and their orgy of ignorance. In a post (or maybe two) that will appear here at C&B in the next few days, I will provide practical information about how to identify the pundead when you see them, and about how to repel their attempts to ignoramucize you or others. Until then, just try to avoid televised news and AM talk radio.

All I thought I’d do was reply to this email, and the next thing I knew I just got all into it. I guess I’ve had some angst built up around the issue of shopping at Home Depot - you be the judge. Afterward I figured as long as I typed that much, it might as well be a blog post.

The author of the original email is Pete, a member of the Fantasy Football league I’ve been in for the last six years. The email conversations between the ten of us in the league aren’t just your average profane trash-talk. I doubt, in fact, that one could easily find such creative, unpredictable, even erudite trash-talk anywhere in the world of fantasy sports. Pete, for his part, regularly cracks my shit up with a style of obscenity unlike that of anyone else I can think of. As you’ll see, he doesn’t always limit himself to fantasy football-related subject matter:

SUBJECT: Re: complaint

Seriously, Home Depot and Loew’s suck moose knuckle.

I’m just trying to find a nice simple roll of Teflon pipe thread tape, and neither of those cockmeister companies carry it. Lowe’s even has an online “project center” where several plumbing-related projects call for the use of Teflon tape, but you can’t buy it from them. Fucking assbags.

P.
–
“I just beat the asses of three thousand men. The hell you leave me alone” - Rodney Leonard Stubbs, Great Outdoor Fight Champion, 1973

My reply:

They have it at the Home Depot on Balboa and Roscoe in Van Nuys*… at least they did a couple of weeks ago when I needed to put on my new shower head. It was kind of on one of those little afterthought-like consoles that they put onto the end of the aisle - the end by the aisle halfway back in the store, so it’s not like you can just walk in, go 15 feet over to the end by the cash registers, grab your teflon tape and turn around. Because that would just make our life too goddamned easy.

Of course, then you have to try to guess which fucking line might move fast enough to get your 1 item rung up in less than half an hour. And don’t think it’s the slick new self-checkout registers, either - at least two, if not three of the four always have an “OUT OF ORDER” sign taped to the screen, and the one remaining LCD panel has some clueless geriatric standing in front of it, brow furrowed, index finger held semi-motionless in midair eight inches from the screen, as though it’s some kind of fucking transactional Ouija board whose unseen force will any moment now magically guide their finger to select the right form of payment. This withered stooge still hasn’t figured out how to use the DVD player he got two years ago, and yet he’s rolled his cart straight into the self-checkout line, because darn it if he won’t get a kick out of making that barcode scanner thing do that “BEEP” noise. Dear God, deliver us from Depot. You can forget about the self-checkout-register-monitor kid in the orange apron untangling this situation anytime soon - she might as well get out her Sharpie and and start making her “out of order” sign. I swear, the lines at Costco might be longer but at least they fucking MOVE.

Hope you have a super rest of the day anyway, Pete. Is there a True Value nearby?

Best of luck!
Derek

^* Pete lives in Florida; I live in Los Angeles