Saalon Muyo

Sometimes life hands you all the commentary you need wrapped up in one package.  Today is such a day. Rejoice,  just before you cry.

Journalism is dying.  And if it isn’t, it’s only because it’s already dead.  There are many reasons for this, most of them due to corporate entities merging news divisions with entertainment divisions and the consolidation of these new entertainment-news divisions under a handful of large, corporate umbrellas.  This kind of consolidation involved budget cuts, staff reductions and a shift in focus to ratings measured in 30-60 minute blocks.

Once the newsroom was pared down into a poorly funded, undermanned journalistic machine, it was all but fated that an industry meant to be our watchdog would no longer be able to watch much of anything.  In the years since, our media has traded investigation for access.  They allow any organization, any interest group, to give their side as if reading a press release without fact checking getting in the way.  Opposing sides are brought on and given equal time in the name of balance, whether or not the opposition has anything other than opinion on their side.  And the powerful in our nation, the ones most in need of scrutiny, are given softball questions so as not to offend them and lose the network its coveted access.

It’s a disgrace.

Over the past week, Jon Stewart of The Daily Show has been in a back and forth over some unkind words spoken of CNBC.  In it, Stewart mocked CNBC for its lack of foresight and its gentleness to CEOs and wealthy insiders who – it was later discovered – were outright lying to their interviewers.  Stewart was speaking in response to a rant made by Rick Santelli, one of CNBC’s reporters, over “loser homeowners” who were being bailed out by the federal government.  Stewart’s point was simple: CNBC, the network of financial professionals working to give you the inside scoop, were telling their viewers that everything was fantastic right up until the moment things fell apart.  So, Stewart asked, who were the losers?

Things got a little ugly after that.  Mad Money host Jim Cramer took personal offense at some of what Stewart said, and after some more traded barbs, Cramer agreed to come on to The Daily Show to talk to Stewart.  That happened last night.

The interview was great, and in it Stewart raised a lot of points which I won’t bother to summarize. He’s smarter and funnier than I am and you can watch the video.   Here, go for it, then we’ll keep talking:

One of my favorite sources of financial information, Planet Money, posted the video today, and I’m sad to say their post was a massive disappointment, demonstrating what I can only describe as an utter lack of awareness of what was going on in the interview.  For instance:

What did you think? Did Stewart (backed by his studio audience) come off as a bully? Was Cramer’s contrition believable or did it come off as staged? Will it change anything about Mad Money? Do you want Cramer as your financial watchdog?

Oh?  That’s your response?  Did Steward come off as a bully? Welcome to recursion!  Witness an uncritical and superficial media become the target of incisive commentary, after which it is discussed by an uncritical and superficial media.  The post addresses the interview like the media addresses every debate: as two equal forces presenting balanced sides.

This is not what was going on.

Watch the interview again if you must, but note specifically the video Stewart uses of Cramer from 2006.  In the first clip, Cramer addresses the practice of creating false rumors to bring down the price of a stock so that you can make money by short selling it.  When the clip is over, Cramer tries to suggest he was trying to educate people about the practice, not advocating it.  So Stewart shows more of the clip, and in it Cramer then says, basically, “It’s easy and you should do it, too.”

So holding people accountable to the things they’ve said is now bullying.  Or at the least, is debatably bullying. Stewart doesn’t shout at Cramer, or call him names or use any of the other typical news commentator tactics.  He stays calm but does not let Cramer off the hook.  And what does Planet Money, a serious financial news program, ask?

Do you think Stewart was bullying Cramer?

No discussion of what the facts of the debate were.  No mention that facts have any place in the argument at all.  It’s just your average, uninsightful blog-style commentary that turns every story into a WWE wrestling match.

Journalists are not supposed to be color commentators for a sports game.  Instead of asking if Stewart was bullying Jim Cramer, perhaps you should be asking why no one else – including yourselves – put this story together.  CNBC is a major network, and people touted as experts are lying or misleading their audiences about the markets they are supposed to be illuminating.  And a comedian had to give us the facts.

And what do you do?  You ask if he’s bullying.

Shame on you, NPR.  You should be doing better.  We deserve it.

But maybe the lesson is that we need less regulation. The attempt to reduce risk to zero is an illusion. Maybe it is better to have the risk more out in the open where investors are much more cautious because the government is not the backstop.

- Russell Roberts, “The Shadow Banking System

As I see it, the crux of the Chicago & Austrian schools of economics’ arguments comes down to two things.

1. Don’t tax me.
2. Don’t legislate the market.

The opposition to any stimulus spending is that it must ultimately be paid for by taxes.  The opposition to regulation is that the market should not be interfered with by the government.  I don’t mean to oversimplify a school of thought in defense of which volumes have been written, but as advocates of the school deny that the market can be successfully manipulated (or even understood), there isn’t a lot of room for theory.  As Marlo put it, “The game be the game.”

Russell Roberts – who has caught my critical eye more than once – wrote today about his reactions to Paul Krugman’s The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008.  It’s a good read, and one of Roberts’ few posts not filled with snide remarks in place of reasoned ideas.  He doesn’t attack Krugman on the grounds that he’s Krugman.  Instead, Roberts gives a fairly clear description of his market ideals when it comes to regulation.

In explaining his views, Roberts points clearly to the problem I have with his school of economics: its success requires a world every bit a fantasy as Marx’s Communist utopia.  In the supply-side world, the lack of regulation will reshape the market into a self-policing, transparent economic machine.  It’s an idea that, if such an idealistic world could ever come to pass, might make sense.  That it requires a wholesale change in human nature is where the theory collapses, just as Marx’s Manifesto only works if the majority of human beings suddenly began to care more about community than themselves.

Roberts suggests that transparency would enable the market players themselves to gauge risk without the government telling them what they can and cannot do.  He’s right, too.  Transparency would do exactly what he’s suggesting.  But how to achieve that transparency?

Freed from regulations, how many corporations would not only open their books, but do so in a fashion that precludes stat juking or misdirection?  If a bank is losing money, what’s to stop them from hiding their losses in creative bookkeeping, just as they did in the run-up to this crisis?  The problems facing our financial systems originated in largely un- or under-regulated domains; just look at the havoc caused by the unregulated, privately traded Credit Default Swaps that the market used to hedge against risk.

The fact of the matter is, when corporations were far less regulated – such as at the end of the 19th century – they engaged in all manner of shady practices.  It’s been demonstrated time and again that short-term profit motive is one of the most common and unquenchable desires in the human makeup.  That a lie is unsustainable, that a practice is ultimately destructive, that a bonus today will lead to termination tomorrow; none of this matters if the perceived short term reward is large enough.

Roberts is suggesting that less regulation would lead the market demanding transparency so as to properly assess risk.  I think his suggestion is right, but the market demanding and the market providing are not the same thing.  If there are no legal ramifications for misleading others about the risk you represent, why would a corporation be honest?  The price you pay in the market for misrepresenting yourself is the eventual collapse of your company.  Is this punishment at all meaningful to someone who has already gotten paid large sums of money prior to the discovery of the lie?  If you’ve gotten so rich off of your deception that you no longer need to work, what leverage does the market have against you?

Being rich means less in prison than it does on St. Croix.  Effective regulation gives the public – the entire public, not just market players with enough money to make waves – the power to punish those who execute their positions improperly.  Regulation also puts the onus of investigation onto those with the resources to do it properly.  While a institutional investor has a chance at assessing the risk of an opportunity, individuals looking for somewhere to place their retirement savings  do not.

Think back to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.  What chance did an average citizen have of discovering the conditions under which their meat was stored and processed?  Even if Cargil would allow me to walk through their factories, how am I to afford making such a trip just to ensure I’m not eating rat poop with my pork chop?

Now, imagine a corporate accounting department with CPAs, lawyers and former physics students.  They’re doing everything they can to hide forthcoming losses.  How am I – a simple .Net programmer – going to have any chance of assessing the risk of any investment in that kind of environment?  Will I trust the risk assessment of a third corporation,  hoping that they are both competent and  have no vested interest in misreporting the facts? Or the media, who are now owned by the same corporate interests we ask them to watch?

I believe that Roberts is saying that our current regulatory system has failed.  I agree.  I also agree that transparency is a necessary component to risk assessment.  Here’s my question: How do we demand honest transparency without regulation of some kind?  It would be saner to demand a regulatory system that provides the transparency that the market needs to do its job without further interference.  A world where corporate interests support full transparency is a fantasy, far less likely than one in which government regulation can provide enough oversight to reduce the frequency and scope financial shocks.  Roberts doesn’t trust the government, and I can sympathize, but why he trusts corporations more is a mystery to me.

My government is flawed, cracked and sometimes utterly non-functional.  Yet, I can still vote for its officers.  I can demand changes, fight corruption and support its best efforts.  I need no money, no capital, to have this voice.  Instead, my vote is given freely to me, a right of citizenship that all possess.  Not so with corporations, who have sold the majority of their votes to high-income members of their own world.  My control over my government is weak, but it’s the greatest gift this nation has given me.  It’s a gift no corporation will ever give me, under any circumstances.  If I must choose to trust an institution – and, like it or not, we are forced to do so every day – I choose the one that calls me a citizen, not a customer.

You’ve got to love an argument in favor of sweatshops set beside a picture of the author in a business suit. It’s almost all the argument against itself that the column needs. “Look at me,” it says, “wearing a suit made by people working in almost slave-like conditions. I’m paying for it by writing that making it was good for them. Symbiosis!”

The article is by Nicholas D. Kristof and it’s worth reading before you plow into my commentary. It’s well written and, despite my tone of derision, not completely insane. It just conveniently ignores one of the main reasons these sweatshops exist.

Here’s the thesis, more or less:

[W]hile it shocks Americans to hear it, the central challenge in the poorest countries is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don’t exploit enough.

…

I’m glad that many Americans are repulsed by the idea of importing products made by barely paid, barely legal workers in dangerous factories. Yet sweatshops are only a symptom of poverty, not a cause, and banning them closes off one route out of poverty.

What Kristof is saying is that sweatshops, as bad as they are, are better jobs than the other options available to people subjected to crushing poverty.  In this, he’s right.  Certainly the factory jobs pay better than much of the employment available to them; it was the same story during the Industrial Revolution in Europe and America. Those factories were brutal, injuring and killing the workers it didn’t simply beat down.  At the same time, they helped create a middle class that may never have existed without them. With a little help from violent labor strikes and government intervention against greedy corporate robber barons, anyway.

That sweatshop jobs are better than, as Kristof says, pulling a rickshaw, but that doesn’t justify his point that we shouldn’t address the terrible conditions at the factories that make our stuff.  Kristof never mentions the elephant in the room, the people who pay the sweatshop bills and demand that their goods come in at the lowest price point possible: American corporations and their consumers.

I think it’s informative to listen to another side of the story, especially since Kristof mentions Cambodia and its attempts to pay better wages to its workers.  It’s a topic This American Life addressed in 2005, and unlike Kristof they talk about how important the corporations’ willingness to pay for these higher priced goods is to their success.  There are some companies, like The Gap, that have made sourcing only from countries with fair labor standards a priority. They’re in the minority.

We live in the richest country in the world, and yet our consumer binge of the past two decades demanded that we pay as little as possible for every single item.  We penny pinch on our clothes and electronics, never connecting the cheaper prices to what those prices require: cheaper production.  Given the choice between a $15 pair of jeans and a $20 pair, most Americans would buy the $15 one, choosing a small savings regardless of the human cost of their savings.

But don’t let this all be put at the feet of the consumer.  What of the corporations, who look to keep production costs low not just because of consumer thriftiness but because they want to increase their profit margins as high as possible?  If Walmart’s customers are willing to pay $15 for a pair of jeans, and they can cut the cost of production 10% simply by moving production from Cambodia to Vietnam, who benefits? The consumers? Unlikely; they’ll still be paying $15 for the jeans.  Instead, the savings will appear in Walmart’s increased profit margin, in their share prices  and in the bonuses of a few executives.  Reign in the insatiable greed of corporate America – not eliminate, just reign it in – and the workers in those sweat shops would see their conditions improve.

As embarrassing as it is to admit, a lot of my generation got our morality tales out of comic books, and there is none better known than the tale of Peter Parker.  When bit by a radioactive spider, Peter was given strength and speed beyond that of a normal human.  And yet, after being cheated out of his pay by a wrestling promoter, Peter allowed a criminal who had robber the promoter to escape.  The criminal fled the scene and came across Peter’s uncle Ben.  In the ensuing struggle, Ben Parker died.  If Peter had used the strength he had been given, the powers that were now his, he could have stopped it from happening.  His uncle’s most important lesson sunk in: With great power comes great responsibility.

With all our wealth and power, to allow ourselves to be convinced that we can just let the indignities of the workers who clothe us slide is to renounce the responsibility our power brings. The other side of the coin, the side Kristof neglected to examine, is that the profits of American corporations are inversely proportional to the standard of living in the countries that make our goods.  To compete for work, these factories must lower wages and reduce standards. We are, in no uncertain terms, responsible for the poor conditions in these factories.

Kristof can argue that a sweatshop is better than a rickshaw, and he might be right.  We can’t stop there.  Not when we’re the richest, most powerful nation in the world.  Not with all the responsibility that power brings.   If a sweat shop is better, then better is not enough.

I feel like these come out once every couple of months, but another study into the effectiveness of abstinence focused sexual education has hit, and its results are entirely unsurprising.

In true journalistic fashion, the Washington Post article uses the inverted pyramid technique and puts the money statement right at the top.

Teenagers who pledge to remain virgins until marriage are just as likely to have premarital sex as those who do not promise abstinence and are significantly less likely to use condoms and other forms of birth control when they do, according to a study released today.

I know it’s not any surprise that I’m skeptical of most abstinence programs, but this article highlights one of the reasons for my jaundiced view.  Regardless of how you view the morality of sex before marriage, these programs just don’t work.  The range of study results runs the tiny gamut between “does nothing to reduce sexual activity” to “does nothing to reduce sexual activity but does reduce practice of safe sex.”  Why there is even a debate in any government anywhere about instituting these programs in our public schools is beyond me.

I think what this study makes clear is that there’s a certain percentage of the teenage population that’s going to have sex regardless of what you teach them.  Pretending like a promise to your pastor and a piece of jewelry are going to mean anything in the face of, say, a suddenly topless girlfriend is silly.  Not everyone has sex before marriage, but study after study shows that abstinence vows have nothing at all to do with it.

I have two close friends who are pastors.  Of the three of us, only one was never promiscuous.  By promiscuous I mean only one of us had sex only with one partner, and that partner is now their spouse.  That would be me, the agnostic who never attended an abstinence program and stopped going to any gathering held  in a church by 9th grade.  My friends, on the other hand, did a fair amount of fooling around through high school and college despite regular youth group attendance.

What does that mean?  Absolutely nothing.  It means that some people have a lot of sex and some people don’t.  There are a thousand reasons for it, but it’s a fact that no amount of education is likely to change.  We’re programmed to have sex.  Our bodies and minds are built to seek it out as often as possible.  Teenagers have it the worst, as a flood of hormones overwhelms what little ability to reason they have.  People talk about teenage sex being some kind of crisis, and the idea is just ludicrous to me.  Biologically, that’s when we’re supposed to start having sex.  Thousand of years of 14 year-olds getting married should be proof of that.

I think that the delayment of marriage into adulthood is a good thing, and I think trying to keep teenagers from getting someone pregnant or catching the clap is as well.  We’re living a lot longer than we did when Romeo and Juliet consummated their teenage  marriage, and because of that we’ve extended adolescence out further and further.  Creating an environment in which our kids can grow up unburdened with the consequences of a stupid hormonal mistake is exactly what we should be doing.

But we have to do something that works.  That’s my biggest problem with abstinence vow programs.  Every study finds that “ineffective” is the best case scenario.  More likely than not, they’re actually dangerous.  They either ignore protection or lie about its effectiveness, so that when their students inevitably end up in bed they’re more likely to get pregnant or sick  because of it.  We need to accept that by pushing marriage into adulthood, we’ve inserted a decade between our sexual maturity and when we’re supposedly allowed to have sex.  Abstinence vow programs ask our kids to hold off biology for years, but refuse to point them towards protection should their resolve fail.  This, I’m sorry to say, is just plain wrong.

If I have children, I’ll do what I can to teach them to restrain themselves, but I’ll also teach them to protect themselves.  You can recover from having sex with the wrong person.  AIDS not so much.  If premarital sex will send you to hell, you still might as well wear a condom.  No reason to catch that train any earlier than necessary.

I don’t usually get flack on my posts, but when it’s happened, it’s mostly been on one topic.  It’s a religious one, so if this gets you fired up, feel free to exit now.

I’ve argued a couple of times now on what I consider to be the biggest hypocrisy in the practice of mainstream Christian faith: its exclusion of people from the community based on a couple of hot button social topics while it turns a blind eye to equally biblical but less politicized religious issues.  I think these posts may have been written in the days before my last host ran a magnet over my servers, but I’ve talked about both homosexuality and abortion in this context and gotten flamed by close friends both times.

My point is simple: I don’t buy the “X cannot be tolerated because it’s in the Bible” argument because there are plenty of behaviors denounced in the Bible that are most definitely tolerated because they’re harder to single out or are written off as a part of human nature.  I’ve made a variation on this in discussions with friends about Christianity’s single-minded obsession with abstinence at the expense of a number of other, in my opinion more important, ethical issues.

I’m going to make the point again, if nothing else than to give an example.  If it gets me flamed, so be it.

Rick Warren runs the Saddleback Church, which may sound familiar to you if you followed the presidential election this year.  President-Elect Obama and Senator McCain went there for a town hall symposium on moral issues and to kiss the ring of this very influential pastor.   He also wrote a book I have not read but know for its popularity amongst my religious friends: The Purpose Driven Life.

Andrew Sullivan in the above link gives a snippet of an interview with Warren where President Bush’s authorization of torture is discussed:

BELIEFNET- Did you ever talk to President Bush to try to convince him to change his policy?

WARREN – No. No.

BELIEFNET- Why not?

WARREN — Never got the chance. I just didn’t.

Sullivan notes that Warren never discussed the subject of torture with President Bush, but did talk about abortion with President-Elect Obama.  I’ll go a step further.  In the Saddleback forum, Warren asked a question about abortion (and even asked a follow-up about it to Obama), but did not ask about torture.  Feel free to search for torture in the transcript.  It’s mentioned by the candidates, but not by Warren.

When I went to an Obama rally in Pittsburgh in October, a handful of anti-abortion protesters came with their grotesque pictures and signs to wag their moral fingers in our direction.  Where were the religious protesters with pictures of Abu Ghraib torture during this election season? Where have they been for the past 4 years?  Why is abortion a critical moral issue, backed by the Bible and thus so reprehensible that millions of dollars should be spent to criminalize it when torture is not?  Would someone like to make a Gospel centered argument in favor of torture for me?

If you believe that abortion is wrong and wish not to condone it yourself, or in your household, or amongst members of your voluntary church community, that is your right.  But to make a national political issue out of it, insinuating the moral degradation of all who oppose you while you ignore a myriad of other moral and ethical issues is absurd.  People like Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly have been happy to engage in ascribing some kind of phony War on Christmas to “secularists” while paying little to no heed for the humiliation, degradation and death of human beings who they have deemed their enemies.

My point has never been that you have no right to take a moral stand on issues.  It is the pathologically focused anger at a handful of easily politicized issues coupled with complete ignorance of far more insidious ethical problems that I can’t understand.

I understand that it’s harder to address school violence than it is to tell people not to have sex before marriage, but that doesn’t make the problem of violence in our schools any less critical.  But we can rationalize the need for our kids to punch someone in the face more easily than to engage in sexy time with someone.  This despite the fact that damage does not necessarily accompany premarital sex as it does any kind of violence.  Name for me a program as well funded and sought after by churches as Silver Ring Thing that addresses the very real and regular pain our kids cause each other in school.  Show me some piece of jewelry our kids are wearing that symbolizes their vow not to degrade and harm their peers. Like maybe a popular ring that says “Jesus said to turn the other cheek” on it.

Because I’m far more concerned about producing a culture of abstinent torturers than I am of promiscuous pacifists.

Dear God am I about to get busy.

I apparently lack the ability to see past a certain point when I’m queueing up stuff, ’cause I’ve got like, 4 major projects that all start racing downhill in October.  That’s a really, terribly not good thing.  I saw this coming about a week ago and started getting scared.  I’ve done this to myself before, and it rarely ends well.

And I made this decision I’m going to regret.  I’m going to get through it.  All of it.  Even if it leaves me with fatigue fueled pnuemonia.  A couple of years ago I decided I would write a novel length thing for the web, on a three-time-a-week deadline.  I got through it and came out with the ability to write a novel and have it not suck.  Now I need a new skill.  I need to come home every day and get through a part of the pile of crap waiting for me.

Procrastination is my most familliar personal demon.  I doubt I’ll ever stake the jerk through the heart, but perhaps I can learn to evade him a little better.  We’ll see.

I go on vacation Saturday.  When I get back, it begins.  We’ll see if I can make it through.

Conventions – any conventions – are strange affairs.  They’re little bubbles of groupthink, bringing out the most extreme tendencies of whatever niche has found hotels and rooms  to hold them.  No one convention is weirder than the other.  It’s all just a matter of perspective.  I watched a bunch of Texas delegates do this awkward, phony hat raising thing at the Republican National Convention and thought “Freaks,” even though, two days before, I watched a bunch of people dress as Harry Potter puppets and sing that Mysterious Ticking Noise song and was totally into it.

What I’m getting at is that I spent the weekend at DragonCon, and it was a heck of a thing.  I’ve been to cons before, most notably Otakon, but they all seem to have their own vibe.  Otakon is much more of an Organized Convention, while DragonCon seemed like a big, fan-run party.  There were a lot more people hanging around the hotels, drinking and smoking and hanging out in their outlandish costumes.  It was pretty cool, actually.  In the way that is not cool to the majority of the outside world.  Of course.

There were too many Boba Fetts.  Too many Jack Sparrows.  Too many Stormtroopers.  Too many whoeevers from Assasin’s Creed.  Too many Darth Vaders.  And, in purely technical terms, too many Leia Slave Bikinis; though from my perspective this was not a problem in the least.

None of this killed the fun.  If anything, it just led to lots of “We should challenge every Boba Fett here to a fight!” sorts of conversations.  This is what you do when you’re walking around a bunch of people in geek costumes.  You compensate by acting like a bigger geek.

Some thoughts.  Michael Rosenbaum from Smallville was hilarious.  I’ve never watched the show, and may never do so, but I can’t deny it.  The guy was a blast.  Nathan Fillion from Firefly was also awesome, but that was less of a surprise.  I’ve seen him on behind the scenes stuff and I knew he was a Christmas ham.  He didn’t disappoint.

I hopped on an elevator with James Callis from Battlestar Galactica and about lost my damn mind.  Good to know my star struck geek nerves are still so sensitive to simply standing next to someone from a show I watch.  Not embarrassing at all.

It may seem counter intuitive if you have a geek stereotype in your head, but there are lots of attractive people in very little clothing running around for much of the con.  I was more interested in the women, but there was, for instance, an extremely ripped dude dressed as God of War which, I’m sure, made some people very happy.  For me, though, it came down to girls dressed as, say,  Aeon Flux.  I’ve got my buttons, what I can say?

I also did some role playing, which was as hit-or-miss as you’d expect if you thought through what sitting down with 6 random people at one of these conventions might be like.  The first table was a complete disaster, ruined by a host of drunken thirty year olds cosplaying as twenty year old frat boys.  Only the DM, who wisely turned it into a drinking game for them, kept things amusing.

Finally, there was karaoke.  We went to get a drink in the hotel bar on Saturday night to discover the Atlanta Hilton’s geek hoard had descended on the karaoke machine, with the apparent intent of giving normal karaoke enthusiasts a reason to feel better about themselves.  I walked in, first, to see someone singing Styx’s “Mr. Roboto” while half the room awkwardly did the robot.  My thought: Ha!  Then, somehow, the thing turned around on me.  I watched a room full of disparate fanboys and fangirls, dressed in their own wacky costume of choice, supporting each other and cheering and dancing no matter how awful the song was.  Trekkies next to girls in gypsy/belly dancing costumes next to people in latex singlets all on the same page.  It made my heart swell a bit.  It was kind of awesome.

Still.  Next year we’re totally taking down the guy dressed in that Sauron costume, just so we can shout “Rule that, bitch!”

I love debate, and so I hate debating.

In theory, the idea of debate is beautiful.  Fencing for people who are weak, uncoordinated pansies.  Carefully dancing around defenses, looking for openings.  Occasionally goading your opponent into making a poorly considered attack.  Emotions come into play, but the point is not to get infuriated.  Winning isn’t the point.  The form is the point.  Debate is a whetstone for your beliefs.  You may not change the other person’s mind, but both of you will have honed your opinions.

In practice, people suck at debating.  I think this is largely because people think the point of a debate is to win it, or to convince the other person they are wrong.  And so as soon as an attack comes in that challenges one of their preciously held beliefs, they start responding with a mixture of stupidity and maliciousness that ruins the fun for everyone.

The Internet has codified poor debate strategy in the minds of millions.  The first real forum of conversation online was Usenet, and a cursory glance through any long thread will show you what I’m talking about.  They start with a half dozen interesting, reasoned posts that go back and forth on a subject.  And then someone comes in and kicks the damn table over and lights it on fire.

I’m discounting the truly odious trolls here, the ones who say insulting things about your mother’s anus or the lack of limits in your relationship with your dog.  It’s simple to ignore the violently abusive posters, since their only desire is to get some attention.  People like this are why all modern social networks come with a “block” button.  Use them.

No, the people of which I speak are the ones who wade into the center of a debate and derail the proceedings out of sheer obstinace.  They begin with slightly logical sounding points that are in direct contention with whatever the most popular view is, but mix in a few poison pills in the process.

It might be taking someone’s argument and expanding it well beyond the point they intended to make.  If someone says they disagree with the idea of using DRM in media, the stealth troll will respond as if you had said there is never, ever a point for DRM and those who wish to use it are cretins.  If you suggest you prefer OS X over Linux, they will paint it as if you are saying Linux is a bug ridden, trash heap of an operating system and then take you to task for your lack of knowledge.

They might “correct” you endlessly, nitpicking minute details of what you said to force you into a position of defending things sentence by sentence instead of addressing the larger point.  This is a tactic perfected online, made simple by allowing people to quote you verbatim while editing out pieces that don’t support their point.  All it takes is a “>” followed by some of your text and they’re off to the races.  Once this starts, it’s almost impossible to stop.  Your first desire is to correct them, because you loath to see your words taken out of context.  But even if you don’t take the bait, you’ll never get things back on track again.

Or perhaps they’ll demonstrate their knowledge of Latin words describing logical fallacies.  Not of the actual fallacies, mind you.  Just the words.  Sometimes they won’t even know the words themselves, but they’ll have a grasp on a handful of the words that make up the definition.  Instead of addressing the topic at hand, they simply start crying foul, citing poorly understood rules that sound important.  You could call this the “plea for sanity” defense, used when an argument has gone outside of their ability to easily control.  You could also call this “whining.”

They may also use half-truths, or simply lie.  Often, they’ll mix the two to confuse you.  This tactic has unfortunately become very common of late due, I think, to the fact that this form of discourse is now accepted on national television.  If you can stomach it, watch a television news talk show.  See if anyone is ever challenged on any data they provide, even when you and everyone involved know it’s not true.  This makes debate impossible.

The very nature of debate relies on there being some kind of standard for factual information.  Debate is, in my mind, about the rhetorical manipulation of facts to make some kind of point. Once you start mixing in untruth to make your case, and when challenged simply cite more imaginary facts, you’ve done your job.  You’ve killed it.

Congratulations.

Not that formal debate is any better at this point.  Yikes.

It’s a terrible thing to waste your time in this life, yet we are all programmed at the deepest of levels to live as if we are immortal.  We do this, I’m sure, because the prospect of death is too frightening to stare in the face.  Spending unconcerned hours Twittering or watching television or just straight up staring into space is our way of telling ourselves that death is something that happens to other people.  We’ve got time to waste, baby.

I have a deep, unmanageable fear of death.  It may be a product of my rather vivid imagination, but any thought of possible demises is usually enough to get me to play the entire thing out.  From there comes a brief but powerful depression, followed by forced ignorance of the entire issue via this blog, or whatever I’ve got handy with which to kill some time.

Most of us have things that, at some point in our lives, we decided would define us.  It might have been raising a family, or writing great American novels, or playing hockey with the Detroit Red Wings, or whatever would be today’s medical equivalent to discovering Radium.  Few of us get anywhere near our ideals.

For some, this isn’t a problem.  Their future self-concepts were either incorrect or were a product of the moment they were imagined in.  A baby comes, and then another, and you find that the family thing was potentially what you wanted all alone.

Many – most, in fact – don’t reach any ideal at all.  For the vast majority of people in the world, this is through no fault of their own.  Living in the comfortable boundaries of the United States of America, we forget just how little choice most people in the world are given as to the direction of their lives.  If you are one of the thousands of babies born with the HIV virus, existential questions about which vocation will define you are irrelevant.  If the shop you own, your very livelihood, is burnt down in a war you did not start, your first concern is not going to be finding a therapist to work you through the oncoming mid-life crisis.

Here’s an uncomfortable fact: we have no control over our own lives.  No amount of planning, self-improving or hard work will improve our chances against catastrophic collapse.  I can already hear arguments forming against this.  Wait.  Think about this for a second.  Most of what will happen in your life is based on a series of lucky or unlucky draws in which you had no part.  If you have a natural inclination towards music or law, you got lucky and were born with it.  If, one day, you find that you have contracted Alzheimer’s in your 50′s, you’ve been struck with bad fortune and not the consequences of a lack of judgment.  Most of the things that happen to you in your life are completely outside of your control.

That includes those sometimes short, sometimes long periods where things are in your control.

Contradiction?  No, and that’s why I wanted you to stay with me before getting too pugnacious.  There are absolutely periods in our lives that are safe from the cruel ravages of the world.  Some of us may spend our entire lives in those harbors, unaffected by the awful things that blindly claw at us.  When I talk about wasting time, it’s people like me in a time like this to which I refer.

We, those who have been blessed with a reprieve from the utter crap that life can be, have perfected the art of squandering that gift.

In watching the Olympics, I’ve been struck by the dedication the best of them have.  Please understand I don’t mean “winner” necessarily when I say “best,” but winning is often the result.  These are people who have spent every day in devotion to their goal.  To their ideal.  They want to be the best at what they do, and they focused.  They didn’t get to choose to have flipper-like hands or the eternal build of a 12 year old, but they sure didn’t waste the opportunity.

I’m lucky if, after I get home form my cushy desk job, I spend even an hour on my writing.  That’s my ideal.  My goal.  I do it when it’s convenient.  But I have to be honest, I’m worrying more and more.  How much longer is convenience going to be a possibility?  Have I wasted my time in the harbor without realizing it?  Or are fears glimpses of a storm at sea, warning me to move while I still have time?

Portfolio.com recently posted an interesting article about the resurgence of really bad for you food, focusing on the strategy CKE (the parent company of Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr.) has adopted over the past half decade. Go read it, but if you want to read this first, let me discuss the article in short.

Fast food took a bunch of hard knocks when things like Super Size Me and Fast Food Nation tore down the facade that the industry had built around its dietary offerings. The line had always been that their food was absolutely nutritionally sound, even if it wasn’t health food. Now people were realizing that junk food was bad for you (shock!) and wanted to get something healthy at the same price they were getting crap.

While chains like McDonald’s began phasing out things like Supersize options, CKE looked at the market and decided people didn’t really want health food, they just wanted to know it was available. Rather than follow the pack and start offering wraps, they did the exact opposite and wheeled out some truly monstrous burgers with a caloric content over the recommended daily amount for the entire day.

CKE’s thesis, which the article doesn’t challenge, is that the fast food chains bowing to market pressure made the wrong decision. People want to eat, as they call them “decadent burgers.” The only reason you’d put a salad or yogurt thing on your menu is so you, the hungry alpha male, can bring your wife without her complaining too much. This is thesis the other fast food chains have come to accept, leading to competing death-burgers like Wendy’s Baconator and Burger King’s Triple Whopper. People don’t want to be told what to eat, the line goes, and thus will rally to the cry of morbity on a bun and support it with their wallets.

This thesis is supported with evidence of CKE’s increasing same store sales, and it’s a compelling argument. In fact, I think there is a lot of truth there: a certain group of people do want to eat crap. They enjoy it, and are offended by the idea of a group of dietary elitists supported by the media taking away their right to murder themselves. To these people, an ad campaign that tells people that the worst food for you is right here is a breath of fresh air. At McDonalds in the 90′s, they were living in denial, pretending their Supersized Big Mac was good for them so they could fit in with a culture controlled by a health-conscious bourgeois. Now they were enabled – nay, encouraged – to purchase items called Thickburger or Baconator with pride.

I’d like to offer a counterargument. Not to the entire idea, because – as I said – it’s not entirely wrong. Where I suspect the CKE gluttony-as-a-strategy case doesn’t hold is in its suggestion that people who say they want health food don’t actually want it. CKE offers as evidence their poor salad sales, and steps right up to the line of mocking people who think health food sells.

All this proves is that the people already interested in buying from fast food places like Carl’s Jr. aren’t buying vegetables. I doubt this is evidence of anything other than that people don’t come to Carl’s Jr. for anything other than meat, cheese and fried potatoes. A more thorough analysis would probably prove two things.

First, the people who are conscious of what they put into their bodies simply do not eat at fast food joints regularly – if at all. Second, that even when people who do take care to eat healthy things go to a fast food joint, they are either not interested in healthy food at that moment, or take a look at the sickly salad being offered at too high a price and decide to indulge themselves.

I’m speaking from some experience here. I eat oatmeal or healthy cereal for breakfast most mornings. I try to get the right amount of fiber in my diet every day. I’ve cut down on meat and I keep an eye on my sodium intake. If possible, I eat one meal comprised entirely (or mostly) of vegetables a day.

When I step into a McDonald’s, that’s out the window. I get one of the most unhealthy things on the menu: McNuggets. I add in a big thing of fries, too, because I like to dip them in that Hot Mustard concoction they careful parcel out. I don’t step into a place like McDonald’s unless full-on crap is what I’m craving. That’s supremely anecdotal, I realize, but my attitude is rare. I’ll concede that a lot of people talk the talk without walking the walk when it comes to health food. We’re a fairly hypocritical culture.

Still, I’m willing to bet that of the people who say they want health food, more of them mean it than CKE’s gloating tone would lead you to believe. I’m also willing to bet some of those people, when going into Hardee’s or Carl’s Jr., purchase the Monster Thickburger with glee, not because the presence of a salad on the menu makes them feel better, but because that Thickburger is the only reason they went to the place at all. They had their salad, but now they want an unhealthy, heart-stopping treat.

(As a side note, there’s another significant factor at work here: price. I’ll need to talk about that in a separate article, but suffice to say the food to price ratio has a lot to do with fast food’s popularity, and shouldn’t be ignored.)

Which, in a lot of ways, validates CKE’s marketing strategy. They’re right, even if they overstate their case: The people who would be interested in eating at Hardy’s aren’t going to go ga-ga over a turkey wrap. They want meat, and if possible, they want it topped with something fried. McDonald’s marketing themselves as a health food chain is absurd. Their food sucks, whether it’s healthy or not. Take away the junk fried part and all you’ve got left is tasteless crap.

Running an advertisement where a girl in a bikini eats a huge hamburger is delivering your potential customers their favorite lie: Eating nothing but 5,000 calorie meals will make more – and hotter – girls want to sleep with them.