What We Have Here is a Failure to Empathize

A study from a few years ago shows that college kids are forty percent less empathetic than their counterparts from twenty or thirty years ago.  This is incredibly disheartening.  Not only because forty percent less empathy is a severe drop, but because I am from their counterpart group from twenty years ago and I can tell you, there ain’t much empathy in my generation either.

There are all sorts of suggested causes for the drop:  Social media, video games, increased exposure to media, being too busy.  I don’t buy any of these.  I think if they did a study of all ages, they’d find that the United States as a whole as dropped forty percent in empathy.

The United States has developed a really bizarre form of tribalism.  We spend our teenage years torn between wanting to be an individual and needing to belong to a group.  Most of the time, the need overpowers the want and we give up our individuality and ability to be introspective in order to belong to a group.  But once we’re in a group, a strange dynamic occurs.  We don’t concern ourselves with the daily sufferings of our fellow members.  Instead, we focus all our energy on maintaining the existence of the group.  Any criticism of the group thus results in an all-out-of-proportion backlash on said critics.  It doesn’t matter how pertinent this criticism may be, a wave of anger and hatred must rise up to smash down on any mortal who dare question the group.  And woe to the member of the group who dares question her own!

The best defense against falling into this sort of tribalism is to question yourself.  It sounds like an easy thing to do, but we are best at lying to ourselves.  We have all had those moments in life where we look back on an event and say to ourselves, “What was I thinking?”  But we somehow never make the connection that we are lying to ourselves.  So, when we question ourselves, it’s also important to then ask if we are being truthful with ourselves too.

This, I believe, is where the old adage “the truth shall set you free” comes from.  It’s not learning the truth about people or places or things.  It’s learning the truth about yourself.  Know yourself and you shall know enlightenment.

Good News, Everybody!

File this one under the very worst possible good news imaginable.  Uganda has decided to not make it legal to kill homosexuals.  Instead, they’ll just put them in jail.  Yay?

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins took time out to tweet the group’s support of Uganda:

American Liberals are upset that Ugandan Pres is leading his nation in repentance – afraid of a modern example of a nation prospered by God?

This was interpreted by anyone with a brain as inherent support for the anti-homosexual bill, given that the two pieces of news came so close to each other.  FRC, though, claims that Perkins was just tweeting about the fact that heathen liberals are up in arms because Uganda’s president is dedicating the nation to repentance from god.

This is a pretty laughable claim.  First off, try finding anyone anywhere who is complaining about Uganda’s prayer ceremony.  You’ll just find Perkins complaining about the mystery complainers.  All the outcry has been about the bill.  Plus, it’s still support for a person and a country that would pass such a law.  It’s as if the FRC were to say, “We don’t support Mussolini at all!  We’re just praising him for his efficiency in getting the trains to run on time.”  Or maybe more to the point, “We don’t support apartheid at all!  We’re just praising South Africa for rededicating themselves to god by speaking some gobbledegook.”

And that’s American Christianity in a nutshell these days.  As long as you speak the right words, your deeds don’t matter at all.

There May Be Hope For the Middle East Yet

If you are not aware, Palestine is set to ask the UN to become a “observer-state“.  Basically, this means that the UN will recognize Palestine as a sovereign nation.  This is pretty big news.  What’s even bigger is that it looks like former Israel Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will support the bid.  And that, my friends, is huge!  Here’s Olmert:

 I believe that the Palestinian request from the United Nations is congruent with the basic concept of the two-state solution. Therefore, I see no reason to oppose it. Once the United Nations will lay the foundation for this idea, we in Israel will have to engage in a serious process of negotiations, in order to agree on specific borders based on the 1967 lines, and resolve the other issues. It is time to give a hand to, and encourage, the moderate forces amongst the Palestinians. Abu-Mazen and Salam Fayyad need our help. It’s time to give it.

Israel is, of course, against such a bid.  They say it is because Palestine should negotiate for peace directly with Israel and not use the UN as an intermediary.  Really, though, it’s just because it will help tip the scales closer to balance in this unbelievably disproportionately balanced power struggle.

This bid also has the unconditional backing of many European states.  England also has said that they’d back it after receiving a promise from Palestine that it would not go to the International Criminal Court accusing Israel of war crimes.  Today could be a very important day for peace in the Middle East.

What are Anthropologists Up to These Days?

Do you ever wonder what anthropologists are doing for fun these days?  Sure, there are still plenty of ancient cultures to figure out and there are plenty of modern “primitive” cultures to study, but that’s their bread and butter.  No one would do a double-take if an anthropologist said at a party, “I’m studying the ancient Mayans’ socio-cultural relationship with the llama.”, even if they had no idea what it actually meant.

It turns out that modern anthropologists mostly study much closer to home.  One anthropologist, Gabriella Coleman, spent three years studying the mysterious hackers of the San Francisco Bay Area.  Here’s the most interesting bit:

Wired: It’s hard to tell a good geek joke because there are all these layers to them.

Often, the humor you talk about is used as a way of identifying like-minded people. I think that a lot of people from that community spend a lot of their time not being understood or talking to people who don’t care about the same things that they do. So they need a shorthand to figure out, “OK we can have a conversation.”

It’s actually a hack that allows you to connect with people who it’s worth your time time talk to.

Coleman: One of the things in that chapter that I argue is that hackers, first of all, are good at joking because to hack is to rearrange form. That’s what jokes are. That’s a pragmatic utilitarian argument, but they really culturally value it for all sorts of reasons.

Even a wonderful piece of code is up for debate, but a very funny joke, it gets affirmed with laughter and then it’s kind of indisputable.

How cool would that be?  Following a sub-culture around for a few years and figuring out how they work.  Anthropology would be an awesome job to have if I were independently wealthy.  Just sitting and studying people.  Though, I guess I do quite a bit of that now.

Urge to Kill…Rising

It’s time to play everyone’s favorite game, “What’s pissing me off now?”  It’s the game in which I tell you what’s pissing me off now.  Hours of fun for the entire family!

I am years too late to this tragedy, but it’s worth bringing it to your attention since it was brought to mine.  The book that I’m reading, “Reamde” by Neal Stephenson, had a sentence in it mentioning the killing of American soldiers by electrocution when taking a shower.  I had never heard of such a thing and it stuck with me so to the Interwebs I went.

It turns out that faulty equipment has caused the deaths of eighteen soldiers.  Eighteen!  Who do we have to thank for this completely unnecessary tragedy?  Why, KBR of course!  Don’t remember KBR?  They are a Halliburton spin-off company that is the largest support contractor in Iraq.  You remember Halliburton, right?  That company that was run by vice president Dick Cheney?  It is really amazing that all roads of governmental evil seem to lead back to that man.

And as if KBR killing eighteen soldiers wasn’t enough, they’re also trying to weasel out of paying compensation to the families.  Even in horrible tragedies, you expect a certain amount of deniability from a company even if they are obviously to blame for the tragedy.  KBR, though, takes it to an entirely new level of evil, though.  They are trying to claim that Iraq law should be used to determine the outcome because the killing happened in an Iraqi government building.  Even though the building was under U.S. control at the time.  Why?  Because Iraq law doesn’t allow for punitive damages.  Yes, that’s right, they want to make sure that they pay the grieving families as little as possible for their mistake.

It gets better.  What does our government do to a company whose negligence resulted in the death of eighteen of our soldiers?  Why, give them an $83 million bonus, of course!

Let’s sum up, shall we?  Dick Cheney starts an unnecessary war.  Dick Cheney’s company gets more contractor work than any other company for said unnecessary war.  Dick Cheney’s company does really crappy work and this results in the electrocution deaths of eighteen of our soldiers.  Dick Cheney’s company denies responsibility but is found guilty of negligent homicide.  Dick Cheney’s company tries to have Iraqi law applied to verdict to keep payments to families to a minimum.  Dick Cheney’s company is awarded $83 million in bonuses for said shoddy work that killed people.

Yes, it might be a stretch to call KBR Dick Cheney’s company.  But it is certain that he is a shareholder and the people who run it are his friends and that he has profited massively from the war that he created.

And that’s “What’s pissing me off now?”  Thank you for playing.

Rock You Like a Hurricane

If you think Earth’s storms are getting bigger and more damaging, you may want to avoid Saturn.  It’s north pole sports a 2,000 kilometer vortex.  This is all compliments of NASA and the Cassini spacecraft.  The pictures will blow you away.

What’s weird is how the fluid dynamics of the storm end up forming a hexagon.  What’s even weirder is that this storm has existed for at least 25 years when Voyager first discovered it.  Still, it’s probably better living there than in Ohio during a Presidential election.

Does the Universe Have a Purpose?

What do you get when you cross Minute Physics and my man-crush, Neil deGrasse Tyson?  More reason than you can shake a stick at!

 

Department of Stopped Clocks

File this one under a stopped clock being right twice a day.  Pat Robertson is defending science!  In this case, agreeing that the Earth is actually billions and billions of years old.

 

While this is certainly encouraging, it doesn’t explain why his company still sells young earth educational materials.  Oh, yeah, that’s because Pat Robertson is still a massive hypocrite.  The world is as I remember it.

More Fun With Tax Policy

Ok, listen up, you masses that worship the job creators.  You know how you think that raising the tax rate on the richest people will doom our economy to another recession?  Would you be surprised if I told you that this is complete toro caca?

Well it is.

How do I know this?  Economic history.  Tax rates on top earners have varied anywhere from 25% to 93%.  There is absolutely zero correlation between low tax rates for top earners and good economic performance.  Zero.  Guess when income and capital gains taxes for the top earners were at their lowest?  Just before the Great Depression!  Guess when they were at their highest?  Between 1940 and 1965, some of the best economic times our country has ever had.

I don’t mean to imply that higher taxes on top earners leads to economic growth in the prior paragraph.  What I mean to imply is that the tax rate on those who make well in excess of what they are required to live has absolutely no bearing on how the economy performs.  We could raise taxes on top earners back to 90% and the economy could either thrive or shrink and it would have nothing to do with the fact that the taxes were raised.

We are still fighting at least one war and will be fighting many shadow wars for years to come.  The social safety net could use some mending.  The country’s infrastructure needs huge improvements.  All these things are known to be true to just about every American.  So why are we even arguing about raising the top rate a few measly percentage points?  That’s a rhetorical question, I know the answer.

Voter ID = Voter Suppression

Ever since voter ID laws became the latest craze with Republican voters, there has been a steady trickle of prominent Republican politicians who have let slip the real (and obvious) reason for voter ID laws: To allow Republicans to win seats that they normally wouldn’t be able to win.

First it was Pennsylvania House Majority Leader Mike Turzai claiming that voter ID laws will provide a path to victory in the state for Mitt Romney.  Now it’s two Florida Republicans.  Former Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer says that it’s state voter ID law was specifically meant to suppress Black and Latino turnout and former governor Charlie Crist echoed that voter ID only suppresses voter turnout though he doesn’t specify that it is targeted mainly at minorities.

We’ll leave aside the implicit racism of voter ID laws for now because all you get from that is a chorus of “I’m not racist!  Some of my best friends are of an oppressed minority!”  I will say this, though: If you consistently favor laws that happen to disproportionately disfavor minorities, you need to do some deep introspection because you both walk like a duck and talk like a duck so you shouldn’t get upset if people mistake you for a duck.

On the almost certain chance that you don’t think you’re racist and that in-person voter fraud is totally a thing and that it decides elections, I say learn statistics.  It is statistically impossible to win an election by in-person voter fraud.  Please note that “statistically impossible” doesn’t mean impossible, it just means that an improbable series of events would have to occur in order for in-person voter fraud to decide the election.

First, the election would have to be close.  Unless you are off-the-wall crazy and believe that organized in-person voter fraud is capable of producing more than a handful of votes here and a handful of votes there, you have to conclude that, right off the bat, 95-99% of all election decisions in any given year simply cannot be decided by in-person voter fraud.

Second, if the election is close, there is a far greater chance that the election will be decided by a counting error.  Neither machines nor people can count ballots with 100% accuracy.  Statistical models show that final tallies normally have a margin of error of between 1.8% and 2.0%.  That’s right, a close election that, by law, calls for a recount would be much better served by a flip of the coin than by a recount and would also save tax payers tons of money.

Third, “but what about the smaller local elections”, you ask?  Yes, the smaller the election, the greater the chance of fraud, but that fraud isn’t going to come from in-person fraud, it’s going to come from collusion.  You see, the smaller the election, the harder it would be to commit in-person voter fraud because it becomes much more likely you are going to be identified by poll workers as a stranger in a town where everyone knows each other.  So the only way to safely get away with it is to collude with the poll workers and voter ID laws aren’t going to stop that.

Voter ID laws are and always have been about voter suppression.  At best, they solve a non-existent problem.  At worst, they’re reminiscent of the Jim Crow era poll taxes. Please stop supporting them.