Real Life

The Vicious Hamster Wheel of Credentialing

by
The Vicious Hamster Wheel of Credentialing

…and how it impacts the publishing industry, the economy, and the rest of the world in general.

Okay, I swear, I am so not cyberstalking Cedar even though whenever I see that she’s posted something I drop whatever I’m doing and go read it because I’m beginning to wonder if she and I get messages from the same s00per s3kr3t radio station or something. We’re both evil unicorns (which is cool) and we’re both writers (though I think she’s more experienced than I am since I’ve only been in the game a few years) and we’re both nerds so there’s going to be some overlap. But when I read her post on the topic of credentialing, I had the strangest physical reaction (think full-body shiver and skin crawling) because I was thinking about this exact topic last night.

Eerie.

So, without further ado…

We live in interesting times. Really interesting times. In the past two hundred years, the world has flipped around in a lot of ways and some groups haven’t quite had a chance to catch up. The rate of change isn’t going to slow down anytime soon (if anything, the rate of acceleration is increasing) and it’s created rather a lot of chaos that makes it difficult for everyone. This started back with the Industrial Revolution but has really kicked into high gear with the Digital Revolution. However, for now, I want to focus in on one particular trend that’s been a particular nuisance in recent years and that’s the vicious hamster wheel of the credential chase.

Long ago, a young man would purchase an apprenticeship, serve a set number of years under a master craftsman, become a journeyman, then prove his skill as a master and be free to set up his own shop and take on apprentices himself. Credentials were reserved for things like the clergy (and thus controlled by the Church) or the universities (which meant they were for the aristocrats’ second or third sons). Very few people had them or needed them and thus, they were quite valuable. Then along came the Industrial Revolution and the modern education system with its assembly-line cookie-cutter approach and, for a short time, a high school diploma was sufficient for entry into the modern work force and could get a person a job at a factory or as a teacher, secretary, bank teller, or other office worker. College was for those who were going into more advanced fields.

But when everyone could get a high school diploma easily, the value of having one was lower and the credential was less valuable. Factor in that unions with their work rules, refusal to consider the impact of their demands on the business’s bottom line, and refusal to police their members and maintain high standards in work ethic to justify wage and benefit increases helped drive manufacturing jobs overseas; that globalization came in and cut out a lot of the protectionism the Industrial Era institutions relied on; and that things like the G.I. Bill started a very perverse incentive for colleges, lenders, and the government to feed off each other (and the taxpayer) and the credentialing hamster wheel started spinning. Suddenly jobs that once barely needed a high school diploma to be done now require a Bachelor’s degree. There are hundreds of professions that people used to freelance out of their homes that now require expensive (and extensive) licenses to perform (hairstylist, barber, masseuse, babysitting, tutoring, music lessons…) I’ve worked in the tech world for over a decade now and credentialing there is getting insane. Techies like to pride themselves on valuing knowledge over shiny badges but it is very hard to break into different fields without certain credentials these days and it’s very hard to obtain those credentials without already being in those fields because the certification tests are expensive.

I’m waiting for the day when the Bachelor’s degree I worked my butt off to get (I did a four-year in three) is as worthless as a high school diploma because everyone is required to have one. I’ve looked into getting a Masters degree but can’t afford one. And, to be honest, none of the jobs I’ve ever held have required me to use any of the crap I learned in college. I’m not saying that college was useless for me; I enjoyed it and learned a lot of valuable research information. I’ve just never really used any of it professionally. No, all of the skills I’ve used professionally are things I’ve either taught myself, learned on the job, or learned in high school and built upon in college.

Frankly, in the constant chase after credentials, the only ones coming out ahead are those who grant the credentials. Employers can’t be happy with it because the greater a credential they require for a job, the more they’re going to have to pay that person (and that’s another vicious cycle all its own). Regular folks aren’t happy with it because it gets tiring having to chase credential after credential just so we can check off boxes from an HR flunky who doesn’t know what she’s doing (really — I filled out an application a week ago that had listed as a requirement for the job “10+ years experience in PHP5 and HTML5” when PHP5 just celebrated a decade this year and HTML5 isn’t even a year old. Topping that, I’ve seen requirements for “At least 10+ years development in Ruby on Rails” when the framework is only nine years old!)

So, what is to be done about it? Well, first of all, fire all the HR departments. Then fire all of the politicians. Maybe consider setting them on fire while firing them? Or fire them into an orbital trajectory or something. Regardless — fire them a lot. Then shut down the entire education system, redesign it so that it actually creates a literate society instead of turning out factory workers, re-instate vo-tech-like schools for skilled trades and quit looking down on people who do that work because they’re cool people and smart as hell. They’re just smart in a different way like we’re smart in a different way, okay? To them, I’m as dumb as a box of rocks because I can’t unstop a toilet and I’m weird because I remember a particular cardio-arrhythmia that I read about and was able to deduce someone’s wife had based on a conversation they were having with the check-out clerk when they were at the grocery store the line ahead of me.

Not everyone needs to go to college. Not everyone is smart the way I’m smart and that’s okay. But we’ve really got to end the constant credential chase because, if we don’t, eventually Ph.D.s are going to be required to work the drive-thru at McDonalds. Unless, of course, we’ve replaced the entirety of the McDonalds staff with a robotic restaurant and the drive-thru is a voice-activated kiosk with a debit/credit card reader which is a distinct possibility.

— G.K.

Politics and Television

by
Politics and Television

Or “Why G.K. Didn’t Watch The Debate.”

Oh dear Lord, we’re going into another active phase of the perpetual election cycle, aren’t we? Last week we got to see the spectacle that was the GOP debate and, while I didn’t watch it live because I knew that, even with it being on Fox with supposedly “friendly” moderators, the talking-heads weren’t going to be able to resist their chance to ham it up for the cameras and that the entire thing was going to be more about ginning up the ratings for the sponsors than it was going to be about the candidates actually, you know, talking about the issues and debating different approaches following set logical rules and avoiding logical fallacies such as strawman, reductio ad absurdum, tu quoque, ad hominem, appeals to (false) authority, special pleading, No True Scotsman, post hoc, and more while presenting actual evidence and solid reasoning for their beliefs or policy.

Can you tell I’m a bit of a throwback and a cynic? Television has ruined a lot of things and debate, argumentation, and critical thinking are among those things. It’s a great medium for entertainment and it can be used for education, yes, and story-telling. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not one of those who thinks that television is completely evil and has no redeeming qualities. I enjoy it — I have an active Netflix account and I’ve got Criminal Minds playing in the background. But, when it comes to journalism, television is the worst medium that could be used. It doesn’t allow for truly in-depth coverage, cross-referencing, citation of sources, or deep thought. Newspapers are the best medium for daily coverage and bi-weekly or monthly magazines are great for bigger events or more thorough coverage of events or technical issues. Radio can be a passable medium so long as the moderators and the debate format are agreed to in advance and the topics are adhered to. Television, however, will never make a good medium for political debates or journalism.

Why? Because it’s commercial. And, that’s good for entertainment. Hell, it’s great. It means that businesses and consumers are free to reward shows and sponsors and channels that entertain them or tell stories they like or support or whatever without having to directly own the studios or airwaves or whatever. There’s no real need for government intervention, censorship, or anything like that other than “truth in advertising” laws (you can’t advertise that your wooden spoon is actually made out of marble) and possibly some kind of daytime/child-safety advertising laws (you can’t run alcohol ads or other adult ads during certain hours or on channels aimed at children — not that most marketers would sell or buy there anyway because it’d be stupid). However, it’s an undeniable fact that you don’t piss off your sponsors and you don’t piss off your core audience. Just look at GamerGate. Intel pulled their ads from Gawker when Gawker’s articles pissed off a sizable portion of the GamerGate audience and they threatened to boycott Intel. And that kind of pressure is fine for entertainment shows and even educational shows. But it is not fine for journalism. It leads to worries about offending the corporate sponsors or the consumers which leads to spin, blacking-out of stories, and a focus on feel-good stories or the promotion of news items in a way that is guaranteed to keep the money-spigot opened.

Another reason television is a terrible medium for journalism is because it’s a visual format which leads to people judging based on appearances instead of based on the actual argument. Have you ever noticed that all of the news anchors are good-looking? And that none of them are terribly intelligent or creative? If they were trapped in the middle of a desert, they’d be screwed. Hell, if they were knee-deep in a river, they’d die of thirst. They went to fancy universities, yes, but that means nothing. Unless they graduated from CalTech, Standford (with a degree in hard sciences), or MIT, it’s worthless. These people were hired for their ability to look good on camera and read from a teleprompter or from cuecards. They were not hired for their ability to think critically, reason, ask difficult questions, or for their finely-tuned bullshit detectors.

A final reason television is the worst medium for journalism is because of its shallowness. Television is a very shallow, very short-form medium. Since it’s so visual and auditory, it’s easy to get overstimulated which makes it difficult for long-term memory to be engaged (which is why visual tricks and cut-aways can be used to deceive so easily — see below). The set-time format makes it impossible for any topic to be covered in real depth and the inability for there to be hard, permanent reference points for citations or notes makes cross-referencing difficult, if not impossible. Add in the general passivity it requires of the audience and it’s just a terrible medium for something as serious as news journalism and political debates.

There are other reasons television is a terrible medium for serious topics — it’s untrustworthy because it can be deceptively edited without the viewer being aware of it at all and, unless there are other recordings made, there’s no way to prove it (and there are never other recordings because of technical and legal reasons — no sound studio is going to let an interview subject bring in his own film crew and sound crew because not only will that cause phase cancellation issues, energy, and temperature issues but it sets them up for liability and insurance nightmares. The studio and journalists also won’t go for it because then they won’t have the sole copyright, there will be a plethora of distribution issues, and it would force them to be too damned honest).

Television — great for entertainment but a terrible way to receive information and select our leaders. Just FYI.

— G.K.

Techies And Writers And Herds of Cats

by
Techies And Writers And Herds of Cats

One of my daily reads is Sarah Hoyt’s blog and recently I’ve been going through some of her older entries (I’m looking for a post where she was talking about the review submission process…don’t ask) and I stumbled over several mentions of how getting us writer-ly types to organize and do anything in a uniform fashion is kind of like herding cats. Especially those of us of what she calls the Odd bent (and what I call the “awesomesauce” bent because, yay, more fellow NTs!) I’ve noticed this myself — especially back when I was submitting to agents and traditional publishers before I realized that was a chump’s game and decided to go indie. Each agent or agent house and each publisher has their own guidelines for receiving query letters and manuscripts and none of them are the same.

Considering the uniformity of the end product (mass-market paperbacks have very specific cover and print-set specifications) and the general consistency of editing software and screen-readers, you’d think that there would be some consistency. But you’d be wrong.

The only other area where I’ve encountered such a dizzying array of sheer anarchy is…the tech world. I still keep a foot in that realm (because it’s fun) and anyone who’s actually delved into code very far knows what I mean when I say that reading someone’s code can tell you everything you need to know about them. If it’s not human-readable, you know that they’re using a graphical interface to drag’n’drop elements into place and that they don’t actually know what they’re doing. They might have a cursory understanding but they don’t grasp the fundamentals and the principles. Or, they’re not a coder (and they’re not pretending to be — I had this happen a lot in my professional life) and you get the fun job of digging through a single-line (that is actually several thousand lines) of nested HTML menu items to find the one that isn’t closed properly so you can make the document strict XML compliant.

If the code has function names that are the same as variables, you know you’re deal with someone who has some experience but is still new to the game. Their comments and documentation will tend to be hit-or-miss but at least it will exist. If the code has function names that are purposeful and unique, you know that the commentary and documentation will be fairly good (or they will have outsourced it to someone who will be better at it, you hope) or it will be non-existent. If the function names are vindictive and the documentation has you going in circles, you know that you’re probably better off removing everything and rebuilding from scratch because someone high up pissed this person off and you’re dealing with a BOFH type who has decided to extract a pound (or ton) of flesh. In this case, there’s only one thing to do:

The issue is, some techies are going to be die-hard Perl scripters and everything is going to be in that. Others will prefer Python. Some never moved past C++. You’ve got your K-shell users, C-shell users, Z-shell folks, and then a quick shout-out to my peeps out there in Bourne-Again land (BASH FOREVAH!). There’s the Xwindows folks who are all about some KDE while others are hung up with their Gnomes and the rest of us are wondering why in Torvalds’ name you’re running Xwindows on a server — it’s not secure. People will cling to their text-editors and bitter fights will break out over vi versus emacs versus pico versus nano at which point G.K. boots to Windows (hey, if you’re going to run a desktop, run a freaking desktop) and opens up Scrivener. PHP devs will say you can do everything with PHP and seasoned HTML coders will snort and think about all the times they had to implement HTML/CSS/JS fixes to deal with a PHPlib error. SQL DBAs will laugh at all of them while they work on their next round of fiendishly difficult certifications.

As you can see, though…techies and writers — none of us can agree on how things should be. Oh, we all have our opinions on how they should be. Techies will even form consortiums, conventions, conglomerations, conferences, and write out long RFCs about How Things Should Be. Enough others will agree and we’ll wind up with this situation:

Which, come to think of it, is probably what happened in the publishing world.

Now, do I think that writers are going to eventually get together and decide on a uniform submission process? Hell no! Do I think publishers will eventually decide on one? Nope. What will probably keep happening is what’s been happening. It’s just interesting to see that two groups of people the average Joe Public considers diametric opposites (writers and techies) are actually very much alike.

And it’s cool to be both of them at once, yo.

— G.K.

Friday Review: A Demon-Haunted World

by
Friday Review: A Demon-Haunted World

If you get very deep into sci-fi — especially if you’re an INTJ — eventually you’re going to start getting that itchy-brain sensation where your mind starts going a million miles an hour, your neurons kick into overdrive, you start trying to grasp concepts you’ve got little background for understanding until you finally break down and say “is this really possible or is it a load of complete and utter horseshit?” Your intuition (N) will kick in and tell you most of the time but sometimes your thinking (T) will say “uh, wait, sometimes the counter-intuitive is actually true” and when that particular mind-screw happens the phenomenon of dog-chasing-its-own-tail-ad-infinitum-ad-absurdum really goes into overdrive and…well…if you’re anything like me, you prove that it is possible to go two weeks without sleeping and five days without eating (you live on the staples of your best friends C8H10N4O2 and C10H14N2) until you get enough of a grounding in the subject to determine that yes, it is possible or no, it’s not. Then you crash like Windows 3.1 encountering the Internet.

However, not everyone has the finely-tuned, well-used BS detector that comes built-in to the NT’s brain. Which is why God/Buddha/Fate/the Universe/the Flying Spaghetti Monster/Vectron/Zarqon/*insert whatever here* sent us Carl Sagan who wrote A Demon-Haunted World. This book is great at helping those who lack the BS-detector that comes standard among NTs/Rationals/Analysts to avoid being taken in by the latest hoax du jour or journalistic misunderstanding of a scientist’s finding (of which there are many).

This book is also great for us INTJs and other NTs/Rationals/Analysts because it can help us to understand why so many people get taken in by fads, hoaxes, things that are too-good-to-be-true, tricksters, half-truths, or other things of that nature (crop circles, UFO stories, alien abductions, the Satanic cult scare of the 1980s). And, believe me, if there’s one area where we fail epically, it’s in understanding why other people don’t get what we get so quickly and easily. I mean, for us, it’s normal to be able to figure out that there was no way that the crop circles were anything other than man-made, that Nessy was a trick of photography, that Bigfoot is a myth, that the pyramids really were an Egyptian engineering feat (and Stonehenge was the same for the Britons), that there was a natural explanation for the “canals” on Mars, etc, etc, etc. We’re hard-wired to be skeptics. Having better-than-average recall is an inborn ability for us. Learning new things is just what we do. But for the other 99% of the world, reality is totally different and we have a hard time getting that. We have a hard time walking in their shoes and this book can help us see things from their point of view.

    

Five rainbow-farting zebricorns. Everyone needs this book in their library and should read it at least once a year. If they did, the world would be a much better, more rational place.

— G.K.

Throwback Thursday: G.K.’s Vulcan Nerdcrush

by
Throwback Thursday: G.K.'s Vulcan Nerdcrush

I think it will come as a surprise to absolutely no one at all that I have always been a Trekkie. I started watching it when The Next Generation began airing. My dad was a bit of a nerd and it was considered family entertainment so we watched it together. Of course, I got far more into the show than he did so I kept watching it even after he lost interest.

Now, I know what everyone’s thinking. No, I didn’t have a crush on Wesley Crusher. Ew. ST:TNG started airing when I was six or seven years old. I also didn’t have a crush on Data (though he was a favorite of mine) or Picard (though I thought he was awesome) or Q (though I thought he was hilarious if a little mean sometimes). It wasn’t La Forge, either (even though I liked Levar Burton because I was also a big fan of Reading Rainbow).

I’ll give you a hint: it wasn’t anyone on the senior staff and it wasn’t anyone who was a regular guest or recurring character. At least, not on TNG. He also didn’t make an appearance until late in the series when I would have at least been aware of boys and mildly interested in them (albeit more in the academic sense because it took me a while to get into the whole “dating” thing and that was more the result of succumbing to peer pressure than any actual interest in the paradigm. Yeah, I did have interest in a couple of boys during my teenage years but it was always more a mental connection than physical or emotional. Kind of still is, now that I think about it).

And if that hasn’t given you all of the clues you need to figure it out, I don’t know what to do other than just tell you that the second major crush I had (the first being Haplo the Patryn from the Death Gate Cycle) was on Ensign Taurik from The Lower Decks (S7:E15) which aired when I was 13. The same actor who portrayed Taurik was cast as another Vulcan in Voyager — Vorik — who is also a character I really liked (though I didn’t have a crush on Vorik because, by then, I was way too busy with school and dealing with the soul-crushing grind of social norms that were alien to me to have much energy to spare developing a crush on a character from a TV show I was only half-watching while trying to wade through the mountains of homework I had. Yay for honors and AP courses that no colleges actually bothered to honor even when I aced the exams!)

Tell me he’s not at least a little bit cute. The actor is definitely not hard to look at. He’s probably married to some super model or something. That’s Alexander Enderberg, btw (and no, I don’t have that memorized. I just have amazing Google-fu).

So, there you go. For Throwback Thursday, one of my more embarrassing secrets revealed. I had a major nerdcrush on Taurik from ST:TNG when I was younger (kind of still do a lil’ bit). Nae worries, though. G’s Code is still in force (I will never go anywhere near anyone famous I like, admire, or respect unless I have legitimate business or financial reasons to do so which are beneficial for them because these people have enough fans who want a moment of their time and I refuse to be one of them). So help me Bob, we’ll never be in the same ZIP code and once I get my particle accelerator up and running, we won’t be in the same solar system so the chance of accidental interference will be less than negligible (I have done the math!)

— G.K.

What Is Power? What Is Real?

by
What Is Power? What Is Real?

As I alluded to in my previous post, recently, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking on the nature of honor, power, and reality. The past two weeks I’ve had a lot of time to ponder over it as I spent time moving, looking for work, writing with either Star Trek: TNG or VOY in the background (or Criminal Minds), or screwing around at Khan Academy in their programming, physics, or algebra courses.

The fact that our entire society seems to have begun a psychotic break has given me even more food for thought as it were. Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen a flare up over the Confederate flag that has gotten so unhinged that several state governments as well as the federal government no longer fly the Mississippi state flag. On the heels of that came the Obergefell v. Hodges decision from the US Supreme Court which mandated legal recognition and issuance of licenses of same-sex couples in all fifty states which was okay but then, suddenly, it became a race to see who could be the sorest winner. Before people had time to process that, there were (provably false) accusations against Sir Tim Hunt that he was a sexist, then the shooting in Chattanooga that killed five Marines, the US giving Iran carte-blanche to develop nuclear weapons, and yet another salvo in the on-going war between the movie industry and the tech industry.

Truly, we live in interesting times.

But there are two thoughts that keep running through my mind right now. The first can be summed up in this quote:

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

What this means is that governments — any and all governments — derive their powers from the people. Monarchies, republics, democracies, dictatorships, whatever; they all exist only so long as the populace agrees they exist and they only have the powers that the populace agrees that they have. Governments are a kind of mass consensual shared hallucination that a nation participates in because anarchy (or the brutal rule of the strong over the weak) sucks donkey balls. So, if tomorrow a sizable portion of the US populace woke up and decided they no longer believed in the current government (effectively withdrew their consent), the whole thing collapses. Oh, sure, they can try to use force (the military, the police, the alphabet bureaus) to batter people into consenting but that really only works short term (see also the USSR and the Eastern Bloc). It also only works if the military and police go along with it (which is not a sure thing) and if the populace is unable to fight back (also uncertain).

The disbelievers don’t even have to break the law, really. Just stop believing in the government. Note that I don’t say “consider it illegitimate” or “rebel” or “secede.” I say “stop believing.” If someone claiming to represent the government approaches a disbeliever, the disbeliever will be politely confused — much like the average person will be when a conspiracy theorist starts raving about how the Illuminati is behind Everything Bad In The World.

Does this mean that disbelievers don’t pay taxes? Well, that’s the tricky part. That’s the part I’m not sure about. Why? Because:

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

The simple fact is that, whether one believes it or not, the US government exists. And, even though not all of the police and military would use force to make disbelievers fall in line, enough of them would and enough people have a vested interest in keeping the government in existence (and the current crop in power) that merely disbelieving by itself probably wouldn’t be enough. Either a truly massive number of people would have to withdraw consent (at least 45%) and actively stop supporting the government by ceasing to pay all taxes as well as recognize and respect all symbols and claims of authority, an active rebellion would have to be launched (including setting up a parallel government), a governors’ convention of states would have to be called, or an enterprising intern could introduce a “technical amendment” in a bill that would effectively repeal the entirety of the federal legal code, all treaties, all judicial decisions, and all executive edicts issued since 1800. I would suggest sneaking it into one of those really big bills that no one reads anyway.

So, what can be done then, really? Well, sit back and really think about what “consent of the governed” means. It’s pretty revolutionary, actually, and it’s the seed we’ll be building from in the future as we keep exploring the nature of power and reality.

— G.K.

Quick Update

by
Quick Update

I know I’ve been quiet lately — between looking for work and writing as well as getting The Penitent ready for launch, I’ve been a bit overwhelmed. However, I just wanted to let you all know to stay tuned for a goodly update on the story front tomorrow and that regular posting should resume next week.

Thanks!

— G.K.

Matters of Honor, Power, and Illusions

by
Matters of Honor, Power, and Illusions

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about honor and rules when it comes to combat, debate, arguing, and society. I’ve half-written about a dozen entries on this so I decided to come back and do an intro since it’s going to be a pretty lengthy subject. Others have written about it before and a lot of what they’ve said is worth reading. However, recent events — the fight over the Hugos, the issue with white-washing the entire Civil War out of American history, the Balkanization of society, and so on, has made me do a lot of thinking which starts out around honor.

Basically, one side believes in honor and the other side believes in “the end justifies the means.” We’re not even really fighting over the same thing here and it’s taken me quite a while to realize it. It didn’t strike me until I was re-reading We and got to thinking about dystopian literature (which, of course, always leads back to Orwell’s 1984). This isn’t about freedom vs slavery, capitalism vs socialism, statism vs dynamism, red vs blue, Democrats vs Republicans — that’s all just a front. It’s all smoke and mirrors.

It’s about power. Who has it? Who’s going to keep it? What is power, really? And does it even truly exist or is it just another illusion? Is it just another shadow on Plato’s cavern wall? I honestly don’t know but it’s got all my little INT lights just a-flickering so I’m hoping some of you will stick around with me while I knock these ideas around. They’re not going to be perfect and I welcome honest discussion on the matter because I get the sense that this is something the Founding Fathers “got” intuitively. That power (outside of actual physical power — as in “laws of physics” kind of power) is just an illusion. It’s a kind of mass mutually-shared hallucination we participate in by agreement and if enough of us decide to stop playing the game — like in the Matrix — we might be able to bring the entire system into a state of crash or some kind of kernel panic.

It’d be interesting, at least. That is if I’m even anywhere near correct on this (which isn’t a given).

So, anyone up for it?

— G.K.

And then what?

by
And then what?

Right. In the wake of recent events, I’ve seen a lot of back-and-forth from both sides over What Must Be Done to Stop Bad Things From Ever Happening Again. So far everything from removing Lee’s banner from everywhere (including monuments about the Civil War) to removing the monuments themselves (because we can’t have anything that might seem to honor, commemorate, or hell, games or maps that might teach about the Civil War — a historical event) to actually getting rid of Gone With The Wind. Big chain stores like Wal-Mart and Amazon are pulling merchandise off their shelves that has the Stars and Bars on it (and that’s their right to decide what they carry) and smaller stores like Etsy are doing the same. They’re all still carrying crap with the Sickle and Hammer and Che and Mao on it but then, genocide, collectivization, and killing over 100,000,000 people isn’t such a terrible thing as slavery for $reasons.

Oh, and of course if we all turn in our guns, everything will be rainbows and puppies and unicorns forever. With sparkles.

So, I just have to ask, if we actually did all this — let’s say that tomorrow we wake up and every single Confederate flag is gone, every Mississippi State flag has been changed to the one below, every Confederate monument has been obliterated, every American history book has been altered to remove any reference to any cause for the Civil War that wasn’t slavery (and don’t get me wrong — slavery was the primary motive and it was an extremely lucrative business). Every single gun in the United States outside of the ones owned by the police and military forces and stored in their common armories has been magically changed into Play-Doh and somehow, a magical force field has been created that makes it impossible for any gun to ever be carried by anyone who isn’t a police officer or member of the military. Not only that, but every single copy of every single book written by Mark Twain, Margaret Mitchell, or any other “racist” writer or writer who glamorized the Confederacy in any way has been vaporized. None of it exists.


The new state flag combines the power of zebras, unicorns, ponies, and pure fucking awesome

So, then what? What happens the next time Some Asshole goes on a murder spree? Some guy with a knife managed to stab twenty-nine people in China. Do we ban knives next? (Some would say yes and in the UK, there are laws on just how long a bladed weapon you can carry and yes, screw-drivers and multi-tools do count). If he’s a racist asshole, do we mandate racial sensitivity re-training for everyone? How do we monitor to make certain that everyone has the “right” attitudes? If he used a bat or club instead, do we start banning baseball bats? Regulate sporting equipment? Make it illegal to pick up heavy sticks or break branches off trees? Would you have to get a license to become a carver or whittler just in case you might make a baseball bat or club? What if he used a shovel? Or what if he rigs up a homemade flamethrower using aerosol deodorant and cigarette lighters? Do we ban those?

What if he’s not racist but instead hates Jews? Or women? Or Mormons? Or Catholics? Or Baptists? Or southpaws? Or Trekkies? Which groups are protected and why? Which groups aren’t and why not? Who gets to decide? How do we monitor the thoughts the Asshole was having? Why do they matter more than the crime itself?

It’s already illegal to commit murder. Part of the definition of murder is “killing unlawfully.” The punishment for murder is one of the harshest we have on the books and yet Assholes still go out and commit it — just like other assholes go out and rape and steal. I’m not sure how many more laws we can put on the books, how many more kinds of things we can make illegal, how many more kinds of thoughts we can say are bad before we’ve finally thrown out everything we once stood for.

There were mass murders before there were guns. There were mass murders before there was a United States, let alone a Confederacy or racism or sexism or anything like that. If we get rid of of all those things, we’re still going to have mass murders. The question is this: and then what? What do we get rid of next? What do we blame after that?

And why are we blaming anything other than the person who made the decision to commit the act of murder?


All credit due to Randall Munroe, yo

— G.K.

Tom Knighton, a fellow Southerner, has some very interesting thoughts on this as well
When the descendant of an unreconstructed Unionist descended (on the maternal side) from a sternly Abolitionist Pennsylvania Quaker decides that maybe he wants to get the Rebel flag and start flying it, maybe you’ve overplayed your hand…

How To End Mass Shootings

by
How To End Mass Shootings

Or at least make them a lot less prevalent. Journalists and news reporters used to know how to do this without needing to be taught back in ye olde days when you also didn’t have to explain why scratching yourself in public was considered crass. However, those days seem to be gone so here it is for your consideration. I would like to present the new and improved “Some Asshole” method of tragic news coverage.

I can’t remember where I first saw this image and I can’t find who came up with it — my most recent encounter with it was over at Larry Correia’s place in the comment section. [EDIT 10/04/2015 — The comic is from The Non-Adventures of Wonderella by Justin Pierce. Thanks to Ian for the tip!] Now, of course, getting journalists and talking heads to quit bloviating and fixating on the latest breaking news du jour would be a bit like getting a mosquito to quit sucking blood — it is simply what they do. This is a class of people who, if they couldn’t listen to themselves talk and sound important, might actually die from it. However, they do seem to be able to understand things like the Rape Shield Law which prevents them from reporting the name of an alleged rape victim — even if that currently has its own set of problems. I propose something similar for all crimes but especially mass shootings.

Reporting on what happened is fine and while Some Asshole is at large, giving out a description of what he looks like (and, by and large, mass shooters are male) is fine. However, once he’s been arrested, the story needs to switch from being about him to being about the victims and the way the community is handling it. Speculations on his motives, things that might have influenced him, or attempts to point the finger at anything other than him being a certified member of the Giant Tribe of Big Giant Douchnozzle Assholes is out of bounds.

Plain and simple, Some Assholes are out for glory. The more glory they get in the form of media attention, focus, news stories, people speculation on “root causes,” arguments and debates over which particular psychoses they suffer from, politicians and talking heads weighing in on What Needs To Be Done, the happier they are. And, when the news cycle continues and the next member of the Giant Tribe of Big Giant Douchnozzle Assholes decides he wants to go out with a bang, he knows that the news media is going to help him achieve that goal.

Anonymizing the shooters, focusing on the victims, and telling a story of how the community is working to rebuild and move on instead of doing what we do now — glamorizing the killers, anonymizing the victims, widening the divisions, and blaming everyone and everything but the killer — will make it a lot let interesting for members of the Asshole Tribe to go out like that. They won’t be able to make their statement that way so they’ll have to find some other method — hopefully something a bit more constructive.

— G.K.