Lately, my Facebook newsfeed has been inundated by this image. It is accompanied, in almost every case, by unquestioning support and assertions that the words in the image are so obviously true. How could they not be? After all, this is a big, complicated country and we’ve got a lot of infrastructure that was expensive to build and continues to be expensive to maintain. No man is an island; that’s what she’s saying, right?
Not quite. The speech the image is based on — and the idea behind it — bothers me.
The primary flaw is that it is based on assumptions which simply do not hold water. On top of that, it is patronizing, condescending, and seeks to minimize the role that successful people have had in their own success. Somehow the rest of us have now become responsible for it and deserve compensation.
Tags: Elizabeth Warren, Social Contract, Taxes
For anyone who pays even a modicum of attention to the world around them in America, the fact that Super Bowl ads are “a thing” is not a surprise. In fact, they’ve been a thing for so long that now even jokes about it1 are cliché.
They’re expensive and a great deal of attention is paid to them. Their rise to prominence in pop culture has made them even more valuable and even more watched. Hell, there are people who don’t even watch the game who spend the next day finding the ads online and watching them, if for no other reason, so that they can understand chatter around the proverbial water cooler. This makes the stakes for such an ad unfathomably high.
GroupOn has a pair of ads, one of which ran during the Super Bowl, that have created quite a ruckus. One was about Tibet, the other about Brazilian rain forests. They seem to have drawn the ire of a number of busy-body, do-gooder types.
- I watch for the commercials, etc… [↩]
Tags: Advertising, Being Offended, GroupOn, Super Bowl, Tibet
Empathy may not be a uniquely human trait1, and we may not exercise it as often as we ought to, but in my experience I’ve found that most people — when they really want to — can put themselves in the shoes of someone else. This is the same quality that allows us to see opinions other than our own from the eyes of the people making them, even if we think they are absurd.
Politicians frequently find ways to test this ability.
Take, for instance, the suggestion that Net Neutrality is tantamount to government censorship.
In her defense, she probably hasn’t the faintest idea what Net Neutrality is, or what the various costs or benefits of it are. To put you a step ahead of Ms. Bachmann, here’s a quick and dirty explanation of Net Neutrality, as the term is commonly used2.
- Social modulation of pain as evidence for empathy in mice [↩]
- Alternately, this link is a nice illustration of the situation [↩]
Tags: Comcast, Internet, Net Neutrality
Apparently our efforts to “go green” are hampered by . . . ourselves:
We drink Diet Coke — with Quarter Pounders and fries at McDonald’s. We go to the gym — and ride the elevator to the second floor. We install tankless water heaters — then take longer showers. We drive SUVs to see Al Gore’s speeches on global warming.
These behavioral riddles beg explanation, and social psychologists are offering one in new studies. The academic name for such quizzical behavior is moral licensing. It seems that we have a good/bad balance sheet in our heads that we’re probably not even aware of. For many people, doing good makes it easier — and often more likely — to do bad. It works in reverse, too: Do bad, then do good.
“We have these internal negotiations going in our heads all day, even if we don’t know it,” said Benoît Monin, a social psychologist who studies moral licensing at Stanford University. “People’s past behavior literally gives them license to do that next thing, which might not be good.”
This is all to say nothing of the token environmentalists who do it to be trendy. Listen: if you think cars are going to cause catastrophic global warming, but you drive one anyway, you’re either lying or a hypocrite.
Tags: Scout
There aren’t a lot of things I don’t have an opinion about, and which way the toilet paper roll goes is one of them:
Also, just for reference, here is an example of something else that’s stupid to do with TP.
Tags: Toilet Paper
One of the more straight-forward distinctions in contract law is the difference between bilateral and unilateral contracts. Simplified, in a bilateral contract, both parties make promises. In a unilateral contract, only one party does. A bilateral contract is what most people think of when the word is brought to mind: John promises to give Sally his couch, Sally promises to give him $100 in return. Easy. A unilateral is a slightly different thing. Think of reward fliers: “Lost Cat, $100 reward”. In that case, the cat’s owner is promising to give $100 to the person who returns her cat. Nobody is promising, in return, to find her cat, however.
It becomes more complicated when you start talking about the validity and enforceability of the contracts, but that’s the basic idea. This is all background, however, for an amusing story about what seems like a blustery trial lawyer who got caught with his mouth writing checks that he doesn’t want to cash:
Attorney James Cheney Mason put it out there on “Dateline NBC.” When Nelson Serrano was convicted of killing four people in Bartow, Fla., in 1997, the prosecution’s case had hinged on a 28-minute window. In that amount of time, Serrano is said to have gotten off an airplane at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport and made it to a La Quinta Inn, three miles away, where he appeared on security camera footage.
“I challenge anybody to show me. I’ll pay them a million dollars if they can do it,” Mason said during an interview with “Dateline NBC” in 2006 after a jury’s finding that his client maneuvered his way through the world’s busiest airport and made it to a motel off I-85 in under 30 minutes.
Read the whole article, but the short version of the story is that a law student took him up on his offer, did it, and now wants the $1 million reward that was promised. The defense attorney doesn’t want to pay.
The primary argument the defense attorney will probably rely on is the suggestion that nobody could have taken the offer seriously. I don’t buy that for a couple of reasons.
First, we’re talking about an attorney that goes on Dateline to talk about his client’s trial. He’s probably got the money to spend. Secondly, you might think “now, why would he pay someone to prove his client could’ve done it?” The better question is this one: if nobody had come forward to meet the challenge, can’t you imagine that being used? “I offered a million dollars on national TV and not a single person was able to make it happen.”
I’ll be honest, I’m also a little off-put by the fact that the defense attorney seems unnecessarily hostile as he’s protrayed by the AJC, but I’m a fan of holding people to their word, and if you’re going to promise a bunch of money for some sort of performance, you need to pay up when someone comes through.
The PC-Police are really getting their paws into everything these days. This week, an adjunct professor of religion at the University of Illinois was fired for teaching about Catholic beliefs . . . in a class about Catholicism.
Howell said he taught the Catholic Church’s position on homosexuality. He summed it up by saying, “A homosexual orientation is not morally wrong just as no moral guilt can be assigned to any inclination that a person has. However, based on natural moral law, the Church believes that homosexual acts are contrary to human nature and therefore morally wrong.”
To show how homosexual behavior would be considered under competing moral systems, Howell sent an e-mail to the students contrasting utilitarianism with natural moral law. ”I tried to show them that under utilitarianism, homosexual acts would not be considered immoral whereas under natural moral law they would,” Howell said. “This is because natural moral law, unlike utilitarianism, judges morality on the basis of the acts themselves.”
I honestly don’t know what else to say. A student got offended because they were told that the Catholic Church doesn’t condone homosexuality, and the university actually took this person seriously. The first question that comes to mind: did this person not already know that most Christian religions are opposed to homosexuality? If not, how did such a person even get into a university? Second, the course is about Catholicism, what the hell did the person think they were going to be learning about?
Thank God I’m not affiliated with University of Illinois.
Tags: Catholicism, College, Politically Correct, University of Illinois
Earlier this week, Blizzard announced that at some point in the not-too-distant future, their forums are going to require something called RealID. This essentially means that a player’s first and last name will be displayed with every post they make to the forums. This has folks all different kinds of upset, and, in my opinion, all for something that is, essentially, no big deal.
To preface, let me start by saying: I spent three years in law school volunteering with victims of domestic violence. On one occasion, I came out of a law firm’s office with a client to find the target of a protective order sitting in the parking lot. I understand that there are a lot of people out there who have a legitimate reason to hide. More importantly, I don’t think a person’s desire to keep their name a secret needs to rise to this level before it is legitimate or worthy of consideration.
The reason I believe RealID is no big deal, however, and the bit of perspective that I believe the histrionic nerdragers are missing is this: it’s just a forum. It is not an integral part of the game. A huge number of people play World of Warcraft and Starcraft and other Blizzard titles without ever commenting on the forums. They’re just not that important. If you are concerned about your name being linked to your WoW account, the solution is dead simple: don’t post to the forums.
I think that there’s a lot that Blizzard can do to ameliorate the negative externalities of this decision, but even if they don’t, refusing to participate is an option. Take your conversations to different web forums, to in-game chat, or any number of other venues.
That’s the problem with virtually every screed, diatribe, and rant against RealID: they start and end with the risks of putting your name out on the internet, and they almost universally fail to assert and support the idea that the forums are somehow vital to the games. That, in my mind, is the threshold issue: if the forums aren’t important, adding a restriction on their use, regardless of how senseless or capricious it may seem, the impact of the decision is minimal at best.
I’d also like to state, so that there’s a record of it, that I believe that Blizzard is engaging in a bit of gamesmanship here. I believe that it is more likely than not that Blizzard intends to roll out a much less invasive form or forum restriction, but one that — offered by itself — would have been seen as outrageous. When they eventually double-back, the same restriction will be seen as eminently reasonable; they’re trying to shift the Overton Window.
Tags: Blizzard, Privacy, RealID, Starcraft, World of Warcraft