The Toughest Talks

    Every conversation has its tougher elements to talk about.  Sometimes it’s because the subject hits too close to home and sometimes it’s because you can see the valid arguments on all sides.  Today, however, I want to talk about a subject that almost never makes it to light, because by its very nature it is so repugnant.  To talk about it with any kind of hope of fairness you have to be willing to forgive the unforgivable and empathize with people who are universally reviled, and not without reason.  Today I want to talk about one of the toughest issues I can imagine, because it means in some ways defending people whom I might otherwise rather see rot behind bars.  Today we’re talking about pedophiles.

    Before I go on, we need to clarify that there are actually three distinct groups in this camp and although the conversation sometimes refers to all at the same time, more often than not the division between the three is important.  In camp A are the people who for one reason or another find minors attractive, but do not indulge in child pornography.  Camp B which is similar in the attraction sense, but who do indulge in child pornography, and who otherwise do not directly abuse children.  In camp C are the people who go that last step, whether for attraction or not.  I wholeheartedly believe that there should be every provision to fight the production and distribution of child pornography as well as punishments for those who consume such media, which should seem like the basic first step.  Furthermore I don’t think a rational person could argue that a person who violates a child makes society safer by remaining in it and should, therefore, be sent to a prison for a term long enough to be rehabilitated.  But just like in the discussion of the hypocrisy behind the “tough on crime” movement, I think we need to be careful that we don’t go so far as to dehumanize ourselves in the hunt to make our children safe.

    And the reason I clarified the difference between these groups is because there are different conversations that need to be had at each step.  For the first group, although I almost feel hypocritical given the way people have referred to gays, the matter concerns inhibiting those thoughts if possible and if not to ensure that they are never acted upon.  This group deserves our empathy most of all, because they live in that awkward place that so many of us in the gay community should recognize of being in fear of your own attractions.  The difference of course being that the feelings of this particular, if acted on, take away any level of choice or consent from one party, and thus really are dangerous.  We need to make sure that in our defense of children, we recognize the humanity of all people and be ready to defend those who are fighting their own personal battles, and what’s more provide services to help them never make the next step into camp B or C.

    Camp B is quite similar in what we need to do to help those consuming such media, but the fact that they are consuming something like this, that so clearly came at the direct expense of the rights of minors needs to be addressed.  Law enforcement needs to continue hunting out those who produce, distribute, and consume these materials, in part because that is what’s in the statutes, but more importantly because children are being exploited in the worst ways by this.  And the consumer does have at least some responsibility in creating the demand that drives the industry.  But again, our goal needs to be on forgiveness and empathy in trying to prevent our children from being put in harms way, while at the same time recognizing the humanity of pedophiles.

    Camp C is where, I believe, the conversation becomes almost impossible for many people.  Any person who would so perversely and selfishly take, from an innocent child no less, another’s consent, security, health, etc is someone clearly not able to live in the greater society.  But, and here is that truly hard part, we cannot pretend that these people did not have parents or a childhood of their own, that they breathe the same air as we do, that they are human beings.  As human beings are they not also endowed with certain unalienable rights?  As easy as it would be to give in to our inner demons and condemn them to death, or life in prison, this cannot be our response.  We need to do the right thing, which like so many right things is the hardest path to trod.

    People with a history of child abuse should, obviously, not be put into a situation where they have prolonged, unmonitored encounters with children, but neither should we build up society in a way that they can’t rebuild their lives after prison.  Like any other felon, once they leave the prison they are marked for life: incapable of receiving government aid, unlikely to find gainful employment, and unwanted in any community.  Again I can’t say that I find any of these responses to be without solid reasoning behind it.  Why should the government provide assistance to people who have proven themselves unwilling to properly participate in society?  Why should an employer be forced to hire someone who has proven themselves to be incapable of following the rules of society, let alone morality?  Why should people be forced to live in such close proximity to others who have proven themselves to be dangerous?

    The answer is because we have to believe in redemption as a society, within reason of course.  I don’t think anyone is arguing that convicted sex offenders should be allowed to be au pairs, nor does anyone outside of NAMBLA argue that these crimes were moral.  But we live in a society that presumes innocence until guilt has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, even for those who have been guilty in the past.  We live in a society that allows for people to utterly fail and to rebuild themselves and to try again to prosper in society.  And for those who believe we live in a Judeo-Christian society, then surely you must believe that it is our duty to live a life of forgiveness even against your greatest enemies.  “But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” Matthew 5:44-45

    These are the truest tests of our society, how we treat the worst among us.  We could kill anyone who so much as puts “child pornography” into a search engine, but what would that make us?  We could lock away forever, the people who abuse children, but then we’ve only added ourselves to the defiled.  If we want to stand up as an exceptional nation, then we must be exceptional.  We must stand and defend our children, without a doubt, but we must also be willing to stand up for the worst of our brothers and sisters.  We must be better in action than what came before us if we hope to earn the rhetoric, which claims that we are.  These are the tougher elements of a society built on liberty and justice for ALL, and something that we need to rehash and relearn until we get it right, if we ever get it right.

As the Tragedy Becomes a Statistic

Well, I’m sure that most people who are reading this have heard about the recent tragedy that befell California State University.  Another American university like NIU and Virginia Tech has been added to the number of schools that have had to see their students’ lives cut short.  And as we lay even more of our nation’s young to rest and remember the other tragedies that have occurred in our schools.  I wanted to give name to all the people who have died or been injured just in the past decade, but even that is just too grim a list for me.  What’s worse, I feel, is that in an effort to give a name or a face to so many people, they just become dehumanized pictures and words, not unlike reading from some disturbing corporate spreadsheet.

Today I don’t want to talk about gun legislation, though that is undoubtedly where many conversations lead.  Furthermore I just don’t fell like going the full twelve rounds talking about how much blame should go to the guns versus the blade versus the car.  I’m just so tired about how we keep having this moment as a nation of grief and false promises of having the real conversation.  I’m so sick and tired of having to hope that things like this might become history and knowing in the deepest part of me that it just won’t, we won’t.  I’m fed up with comparing policies and seeing the despicable rhetoric and at the end of all of the time and money and effort spent on the issue we go nowhere, simply awaiting the next tragedy to start the whole cycle up again.  And I’m sick, no, I’m sickened that this ceremony surrounding tragedy is so commonplace that we could essentially do it blindfolded.

So it goes.  We are, as a nation, in the same place that we were after Sandy Hook, in the same place we were after Columbine.  We want so badly for there to be an easy answer, a silver bullet that we can use to end this problem.  And yet we are unwilling to do anything to actually change things.  What’s worse, over the years we’ve done little to actually solve the underpinnings of all these tragedies, and at this point I’m not talking about guns, though we still need to resolve that issue.  We are utterly uncaring when it comes to helping our neighbor if he or she struggles with mental illness, and we are so quick to abandon those who need the most attention, our children.

So it goes.  It used to be that the mentally ill were sent to hellish asylums where they could scream far away from the ears of the rest of society, and give the family the freedom to continue with their lives.  We recognized the horrors of those old establishments, thanks at least in part thanks to the work of Nellie Bly, but we made the wrong decisions in response to the problem.  We saw that it was horrifying and naturally were repulsed and ended it, but still there were mentally ill in our society.  We told ourselves that it would be ok because we were going to make new psychiatric hospitals and wards, but it was an empty promise.  Over time we defunded and closed nearly every resource that might help the mentally ill, and above all we continued to treat anyone with mental illness as an outcast.  But don’t you see the beautiful logic of all this?  As the resources went away, we created a society that forces people to hide away all their problems and thus avoid “needing” those very resources.  Brilliant, if altogether terrifying.

So it goes.  We made huge advances in medicine to treat schizophrenia, manic depression, phobias and disorders of all stripes.  And all along the way there has been the demonization of these advances by the cynics and the well intentioned.  For example electroconvulsive therapy has been derided in popular media because it is so dramatic and people want to help the poor unfortunate who undergoes it, but it has been proven to be incredibly effective in the right circumstances and is almost always done under anesthetic to ensure comfort.  On the other side, “skeptics” of medicine have attacked nearly every pill and other medicine in favor of homeopathy if anything.

So it goes.  We have forced the families to bear the brunt of every hospital bill, every session of therapy, because we know that parents won’t be so callous with their own children as society is.  And the parents, under pressure to make the money to cover treatments, are kept from their children for longer and longer times.  People want to frame the issue of time off as a question of laziness, but it is on the weekend and vacation that children get even the short amount of time to get the attention from their parents that they crave.  Our long work days and weeks, along with low paying jobs, along with a lack of benefits mean that our children, particularly those suffering in silence with their own demons, seek to find attention elsewhere.

So it goes.  In popular media, children are exposed at early ages to extreme violence, but not so with love.  On the news we make antiheroes of all the people who slaughter their classmates or else turn against themselves.  In religion there is often no respite from violence, no bastion of love as children hear only of end times, violence and punishment, weeping and gnashing of teeth.  How surprised, in such a society where children are surrounded on all sides by violence and hate and militarization and neglect, can we be when the children end up like this?

So it goes.  At this point there may be one or two among you who have noticed the repeated refrain, but can’t remember the source.  So it goes is the repeated Tralfamadorian phrase that echoes in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five.”  It’s an exclamation of detachment from what goes on around you as a way of living in this horrific world.  It can be too painful to imagine why these things happen, or if there was something you could have done to prevent it, but didn’t.  The world will keep turning, until the Sun consumes it in flame.  The universe will keep expanding, until it doesn’t.  And when we do reach those endings, so it goes.

It may be easier to accept the world as it is, to believe that what will be, will be and we have no effect on it.  In the same way that we want so badly for there to be an easy answer, so many of us want simply to pretend that there is no answer and by accepting that continue on without the full pain and pressure of the world on you.  And although we do need to have perspective and accept that we cannot change everything, we should not, we cannot accept this as a call to change nothing.  I find it hard to believe that a nation as great and powerful as the United States has done so by rebuking everything that makes us human.  So I will get up in the morning, amid the pointless debate, and add my voice to it.

By adding one voice of reason, maybe someone else will hear it and start speaking it as well.  Perhaps as the days and weeks go by reason and compassion will start to ring out and we can have a real conversation.  Perhaps then it won’t feel like false hope to believe that we can change for the better.  We have done, and are doing so much to make the world a better place.  There is, as there always will be that light in the distance beckoning us to be better than we were, better than we are.  Let’s march forward to that light, together.

Vote Or

Since I’ve already started talking about the incredibly boring subject of election rules I might as well double down and get it out of the way for now, because there is another subject that we really need to talk about.  As mentioned in a previous post there is a stunning gap between the rhetoric we use to describe our commitment to a rule by the governed and reality.  America has an appallingly low record of turn out, and the system is really set up to make sure we have as low a turnout as possible.  From holding elections on work days, to confusing and inconsistent forms, to unreasonable restrictions on who’s allowed to vote, to accusations of voter suppression and fraud, America doesn’t seem to live up to our creed.  But there is an answer and it’s really quite simple.  

Every year, if not every day, Republicans cry foul of elections: claiming that people are voting multiple times, saying the dead are remaining on voter rolls, and maintaining that it’s not difficult enough for the disadvantaged in society to get to polling stations and cast their votes.  Well the answer to me then seems quite simple.  Mandate voting.  By making it a requirement of citizenship, over penalty of a fine, we can ensure near universal turnout.  Countries like Australia have implemented such policies and now it is a common part of their culture that as a citizen you are expected to fulfill your civic duty every once in a while when an election comes up.  

It would really be quite simple to do, especially in the interconnected society we inhabit today.  All a citizen would need to do is enter in their social security number, something everyone has at birth, and confirm their identity with a form of ID that matches the name to the number and cast their vote.  No person would be able to vote twice, if someone tried to vote under a different number the requirement of universal voting would result in a flag saying that there was an attempted double vote, which could be easily resolved.  Instead of putting the onerous on the family of voters who die to inform the district that they need to be removed from the voter rolls, once the report has gone through social security of a person’s death their number would be removed and you don’t have to worry about voting from beyond the grave.  I mean really, this whole system could be run on a large Excel spreadsheet.  The only small issue is with local voting, but if we commit to a national standard of ballots it really becomes an easily solved detail.

What would the results of such a system be?  Well if we look at national polling and not just polls done of “likely voters,” we see that the Republican Party would be run into obscurity if they don’t change their platform.  I’m just being honest here, when I say that the only way the Republicans survive is by limiting the number of people who actually turnout to as low of a figure as possible.  It’s only when polls are limited to middle class and up, white men that the Republican Party proves to have any teeth, but this isn’t representative of the makeup of our country.  This is what puts them in an odd spot, because they run on a so called populist narrative but would be destroyed in a true popular election.  But I remain convinced that this would be for the good of the Republican party as they would finally have to shed the scales from their eyes and start acting as if they existed in the United States as it is.

The GOP exists, at this point, only to maintain any and all remaining privilege for straight, white, Christian men.  There is a tenuous alliance with the libertarians in the party only in as much as it can maintain the status quo of defending those already at the top, of course they wouldn’t phrase it quite that honestly.  But the outreach to the libertarians seems to be the only place where the GOP is willing to actually listen to other people beyond simply their base.  By focussing on the whole of the American people and not simply the much smaller base that turns out currently, the GOP would be forced to enter into a world where conversations don’t only consist of the word “No,” where people of all races, ethnicities, religions, genders, sexualities, backgrounds, etc are welcome, and where good governance is the goal and not the target of opposition.

But now I’m getting ahead of myself, because there actually are some good points to be made against compulsory voting laws, and it has little to do with voter fraud or the GOP.  The first point that is often made is that there are people who do not vote because of moral of religious objections against it.  Having done some campaign work I am only too familiar with the fact that Jehovah’s Witnesses cannot vote, as well as the irony at how angry they get when people show up at their doorstep and start spouting off on subjects that matter very little to them.  I think the easiest way to solve this is simply to have a voter abstention form to be filled out giving people willing to put in that minimal effort to not be included in the election, but the standard should still be to expect anyone of age to vote.  The other point that gets brought up is a little trickier to answer.

It’s one thing to say that a citizen should live up to his or her civic responsibility and vote, quite another to say that they must vote for the lesser of two evils.  There are many other ways our voting system could be improved, not the least of which involves rethinking the first pass the post system, but one problem will always remain, what if the candidates are awful.  I think that most every ballot that I’ve seen in the US has a solution to this problem and it is the write-in slot.  No one should be forced to vote for a candidate or party that they don’t agree with, but it is vital that those voices be heard.  The only change I would make is that the write-in votes, even for higher office, should remain a part of the total count, thus ensuring that a candidate is really wining the majority and not simply the plurality of vote.

But here we get to the nub of it, the system we have already solves the problems of having near universal turnout, but we don’t have anywhere near that.  In our best years we just barely climb over the 60% threshold and then act as if “America has spoken.”  I’m sorry but when elections are held on a work day and states do not allow for early voting and voters are forced to jump through extra hoops just to get registered in time and with the appropriate identification, to name a few issues, we are never going to get close to the real voice of America.  I’ll acknowledge that mandatory voting is not necessarily the best answer to the problem, but considering the fact that many politicians are going out of their way to make voting harder and not easier, it’s an argument worth airing.

Tough on Crime

So, in my previous post I talked about the facades and lies inherent in the political conversation about the debate on how to respond to crime and criminals.  I decided to do so by starting with a discussion about a culture that remains anathema to so many Americans and today that’s where I will be ending.  To get there, however, we need to discuss what does and doesn’t work in solving crimes and furthermore what prices we’re willing to pay to get those results.  From there we can talk about the stated goals of our justice and prison systems and how we choose to live up to them.  And only then can we go overseas to a country that very few Americans seem to know about, save for the state where I attended college.

Anyone who is or has been alive, has felt the fear that comes with maintaing their life, although clearly some people have more compelling reasons to feel those fears.  Needless to say, we like to feel safe if at all possible, with the possible exception of the most extreme thrill seekers.  In our pursuit for security we can choose to invest in personal protection, come together as a community, form a government with an army and police force, etc.  And in our efforts to gain security we have implemented all sorts of different strategies, schemes, and policies, so now we can start to look at which of these have been effective in making society safer.  From the onset I will discount any policy that advocates long term quarantines and/or curfews, as these may indeed keep people safe but utterly erode any true sense of society.

New York City was once the murder capital of the United States, but has become over time a relatively safe tourist trap, in spite of the continued legacy of less than friendly New Yorkers.  Think Paris, but with fewer culturally important sights and a worse stench.  But the purpose of this essay is not to insult New York or Paris, too easy, but rather to see what lessons can be gleaned from law enforcement policies over the years.  The single most effective strategy against crime has been and will be decreased poverty as has been proven by the United States crime statistics in general and by the contrary by cities like Detroit that show what happens with a decrease of wealth over the same period.

It should also be noted though that we’ve been shown that the larger a gap between the richest and poorest in society the more likely societies will turn to violence, crime, and in the most extreme cases armed uprising. But crime rates in New York were so high up until the 90s that simply the decrease in poverty is not an adequate explanation.  The economists who wrote Freakonomics, who also make a very fin podcast, have pointed out that there is a decent case to be made for the greater access to birth control, particularly abortions, have also contributed greatly to the astounding drop in crime.  But now we come to the last bit, the part that differentiates the drop in crime in New York against other cities like Chicago, the current murder capital of the US.

It has been said that America’s strategy, like many other countries, in fighting crime can be summed up in three thematic responses: punishment, deterrence, and correction/rehabilitation.  Now our Constitution would imply that in order of importance these three things should be in reverse order, but given the reality of what’s going on, it would seem this is more accurate.  The first two seem to be quite interlinked, and I’ll get to the problems of punishment first, but it would seem deterrence is the most important for this discussion.  The New York Police force was given a huge boost in funding to go after, even the pettiest of crimes.  Some have said, and I would count myself among them, that the police force has gone too far in this pursuit.

And I’ll grant you that the drop in crime in New York is astounding and I’ll grant you further that these “tough” policies had something to do with it, but at what cost?  Officers are routinely put in situations where they need to pad their numbers and do so by enforcing ridiculously petty crimes, like jaywalking, as well as by presuming guilt in the face of our very legal system, e.g. “stop and frisk.”  The cost of this are more than the added price of funding a large police force, but the destruction of trust between the people and the police, leading to less safe communities.  And all we had to do was abandon all principles concerning equality, liberty, justice, presumption of innocence. You know, nothing important.

The goal of our justice system was supposed to be the security of our society, yes, but also the just treatment of our criminals so that they may avoid cruel and unusual punishment and perhaps rejoin society as reformed citizens.  But despite the fact that we call our prisons correction facilities, the last thing we actually do is set up facilities to correct or reform our fallen citizens.  And here I stand as an atheist having to remind this “Christian nation,” that Christ called his followers to forgive trespasses 490 times per person, 70 times 7 if you feel like doing the math yourself.  Mandatory minimums ensure that nonviolent, first offenders end up in the corrupting influence of the US penal system, thus creating real criminals.  The three strike policies ensure that when these people do their next offenses they will pay an even greater price.  And stop and frisk ensures that those first time offenders make their way into this unfortunate system.  So now, finally, we get to take that little trip I promised.

Where can we find a justice and prison system that lives up to American principles and Christian values?  Norway, land of gnomes and trolls.  In this land of the North there is no death penalty and even life imprisonment is not exactly on the books except for military matters and a slight exception in the civil code.  Even the most infamous criminal in Norwegian history, Anders Behring Breivik, has the opportunity to come out of the Norwegian prisons a better man than he went in.  Imprisonment is contingent on the prisoners ability to be reentered into society and so the recidivism rate is incredibly low.  And compared to how much money we spend on prisoners every year, on the scale of hundreds of thousands of dollars per prisoner, it seems to be doing quite well for them.

I know it’s not a perfect example to be comparing a small and relatively homogenous nation like Norway to the US, but there are important lessons to learn.  First of all, DON’T PRIVATIZE THE PRISON SYSTEM.  Second, justice must be tempered with merciful rehabilitation if we wan’t to fight crime and not criminals.  Third, we can only be tough on crime insomuch as it protects a real community.  Fourth, we can spend smaller amounts of money in corrections or we can continue to spend large amounts of money ad infinitum, or at least until we run out of money.  Fifth, atheists do the whole Christian forgiveness thing a heck of a lot better than actual Christians, and it actually works.

To Be or To Seem To Be

Japan is always considered to be an utterly foreign nation to Americans.  Sure we are now in a beautiful period of cross pollination where Japanese entertainment and cuisine can found in a relatively normal American life, whatever that means, but the underpinnings still shock and amaze the casual observer.  We are still impressed with the notion of sushi, and slightly taken aback that the dish refers to the rice and not, as so many persist in believing, to raw fish.  Japanese game shows and, how to put this lightly, affinity for specific depictions of tentacles continue to confound the masses.  But I think that the most fundamentally Japanese thing is both utterly foreign to the great majority of Americans and yet utterly natural to a specific group.  “Tatemae.”
    
    For those who haven’t heard this term it is half of a pair of words that end up in every book about Japanese culture and for a very good reason.  The first, tatemae, is an phenomenon that I believe most Americans understand at some level, but that we are less aware of in a day to day sense.  Generally speaking it means “the way things appear to be.”  And this is so incredibly important to anyone who goes and visits Japan for the first time to understand.  The culture and people of Japan are on an endless quest to put up a facade of polite, calm, rational, and respectful stoicism.  Everything about Japan, on the surface, is profoundly happy and this can have very little to do with the second half of this duo, honne, “The way things really are.”  Now, I could do a full post about Japan’s relationship with these two concepts, or why it is actually the influence of America that has spawned some of the odder characteristics of the culture, but this is really just my odd way of getting to a much more profound issue back home.  “Tough on crime.”
    
    In American politics there is an eternal battle to ensure that a politician is seen to be tough on crime and therefore a responsible steward of the country.  So much do we value the presentation of the idea of toughness on crime that we have embraced policies that are not just bad, but more dangerous to the sanctity of this republic than the criminals it purports to stop.  The quintessential example of this unfortunate practice in American politics is the “three strikes policy.”  For those few who haven’t heard of this policy, many politicians have come to believe that the way to be tough on crime is to treat it like a game of baseball.  The moment you get three strikes on your record, regardless of how trivial that third strike may have been, you will be sentenced to a much harsher penalty than the usual maximum for the crime and usually consists of life in prison.  Now I understand that the proponents of said policy maintain that the normal person wouldn’t commit even a single crime, let alone three, so it only makes sense that we stop allowing people with a repeated record of criminal activity to be put in the greater society where they can cause even more damage.  This however is being tough on criminals and not on crime, a mistake that a society based on the rule of law cannot long suffer.
    
    We live in a society of very decent and just values, but it seems that for so many politicians specifically the goal is not to actually live up to those values but merely be seen as doing so.  We want to live in a safe and free society, but those two values are sometimes at odds with each other.  So, despite the complaints of such notable figures as Benjamin Franklin, we do need to make certain compromises between the two, but certainly we should always choose freedom first if it is a viable option.  The politicians who claim to be tough on crime are actually choosing security as the primary choice and the result is an overly inflated prison system, full of people who have never committed a violent crime, and worse people who only committed a violent crime after being sent through the “correction system.”  Our prisons and our commitment to seeing certain people as less than are what are creating the worst criminals and so the only option, as far as politicians are concerned, is to lock them all up indefinitely so that the public need not find out how corrosive their policies are.

    And I have to assume that by this point in time all the people who implement these policies are fully aware of just how destructive these policies are and how limited the positive effects have been.  Statisticians have analyzed the drops in crime rates all over the country and how areas that have implemented such “tough on crime” policies have fared in comparison.  The assessment has bee that these policies can only claim to be responsible for less than a quarter of the drop in crime, all at the cost of the local societies that lose potential contributors, the lives of people who receive far harsher punishment than they deserve, and much higher spending and thus taxes than should be necessary.  But there are few people calling out these people on any meaningful level, which leads me to believe that Americans have been taken in by this despicable tatemae.

    We’ve come to expect so little from our politicians, so why shouldn’t they live down to those expectations, after all it takes some actual work to research what policies do instead of simply grandstanding for the public recognition of how “tough” they are.  I mean the only substantive difference between this and the photo ops of Vladimir Putin wrestling a sedated tiger, shirtless is the scale, and even then it seems that Americans are only too willing to buy the narrative that Putin is actually some tough, magnificent leader and not the insecure KGB agent he actually is in practice.  And the problem really lies more fundamentally with us the electorate than the politicians on this one, although the news media that’s supposed to give adequate context could certainly shoulder some blame as well.

    We need to be the ones who are willing to demand our politicians actually be tough on crime and not simply act like it by being tough on supposed criminals.  They’re going to continue doing so, so long as there is an incentive to doing so.  Politicians do a lot more public events than, I think, most people believe.  Particularly in election years like this, politicians are counting on their appearances to convince the electorate that they are something that, for most of them at least, they are not.  So go to the town hall meetings, the moose lodge events, the public forums, etc and when they claim to be “tough on crime” ask them how they are?  Their knee jerk reaction to this will be to expound on their support for unfair and ineffective policies that fight people and not crime, and when they do simply ask them again, “No, my question was how you are being tough on crime, not how you are acting tough on crime.  So I’ll ask again, how are you tough on crime?”

    Next time we’ll cover how to actually be tough on crime, and it has nothing to do with mandatory minimums, three strike policies, and life or death sentences.

Tolerance of Opinion

Is the new generation of Americans becoming less tolerant of differing opinions?  Well this can be answered basically two ways: a no with a but, or a yes with an if.  Because the answer could be yes we are less tolerant of differing opinions, if by opinion you refer specifically to political opinions and those opinions are based on spurious logic or preach hate.  The answer could just as easily be no we are as tolerant as any other generation, but we aren’t willing to pay the lip service that says all opinions are equally valid.  And this is where I get to thinking that it’s not that the Millennial generation is any more or less tolerant of differing political opinions than other generations, it’s just that now that we live in a world so consumed by the internet we are seeing the collapse of opinion based groups that rely on doubt and ignorance.

Now some of you may be thinking at this point that I’m attacking religion, and although I will come back to how religion fits into this equation, it’s not my main focus.  My main focus is on the news media, which should surprise no one who has read some of my earlier posts.  The way modern news networks are set up, and by this I refer to the terrible creatures that actually pretend to do real news and by no means Fox, there is no room for acknowledging that some arguments are more valid than others.  On any given show in this news sphere there are invariably issue segments where the host talks with two guests.  The implication is that these are two equally valid opinions going back and forth on the nuances of the subject, but the reality is far more sinister.

Panelist A, for example, may be defending the proposition that vaccines cause autism in children, while Panelist B refutes this claim.  The host, if responsible, would start the segment by laying out the reality of what has gone on in research about vaccines, the good vaccinations have caused in ridding the world of diseases that had been death sentences for countless children and adults, the consequences of localized communities where parents decide in relatively large numbers not to vaccinate their children, the fact that all claims about the link between autism and vaccinations are spurious at best and outright disproven in most cases.  The host would then go on to apologize to Panelist B for taking time out of their presumably busy schedule to beat a dead horse and ask Panelist A the questions that really needs to be asked.  “Do you require some help?  We have mental health staff here if that is the case, but if not then could you please try to justify having put so many children’s lives at risk by maintaining and promoting this ridiculous belief?”

But this would not be viewed, by people working in the news media, as an objective way to conduct an interview.  Somehow the idea has grown that the only way to produce objective journalism is to promote the idea that there are two sides of any issue and they are always equally valid.  First of all I can think of very few issues that have such a black and white two sidedness that it could be set up into two camps.  I understand that realistically it’s difficult to have an effective debate with many voices all vying for the two minutes of the segment, but that’s just another issue that networks need to start dealing with.  I understand even more so that our society expects conversations to be two sided: Republicans vs Democrats, Socialists vs Fascists, Activists vs Pacifists, Cats vs Dogs, whatever.  But it is the role of journalists to inform citizens not enable inaccurate world views.

And more fundamentally than simply the two sided business is the issue that all sides are equal and deserve to be treated as such in a debate.  I’m sorry but this too is just an outright farce of an argument.  The Flat Earth Society does not carry the same weight on matters of astronomy as actual scientists, ditto climate change deniers against actual scientists.  John Oliver actually had a clever bit on his new show where he presented the idea of giving climate change deniers equal representation based on the percent of scientists who agree with them.  For those who haven’t seen it, John Oliver invited three “climate skeptics” as well as Bill Nye and 96 other scientists who affirm climate change.  As he repeatedly said this was a mistake, because his studio was jam packed to the gills with scientists all shouting about the lunacy of climate change denial that nothing was really audible.  Even as big a mistake as that clearly was it is still far less devastating than convincing people that climate denial is a valid political opinion.

But now we get to the meat of the issue that should be the subject of multiple news programs, “how do we decide what’s a valid opinion?”  This is clearly not an exact science because the fact that a majority of people, even experts, believe a thing is not a guarantee that it is completely accurate.  What’s more people may have something important to add to the larger conversation even if they’re mostly wrong, and so we do need to remain open to the potential of anyone to contribute.  I don’t have a steadfast rule to judge all future discussions, but I think the first step would have to include agreeing on the facts.

My problem with climate deniers isn’t that they’ve come to a different opinion than the scientific community, it’s that they’ve done so by ignoring the facts and supplanting it with rumor, lies, and red herrings.  Climate deniers like to say how cold it is in winter, ignoring the fact that even with extremely cold and snowy winters the climate is growing hotter and hotter on an annual basis.  This is an example of a community that chooses not to acknowledge pictures of the earth from space as a spheroid and maintain that the photo itself is flat therefore so is Earth.  And if they can’t bring themselves to acknowledge a duck as a duck, a sphere as a sphere, and climate change as a problem, then they have forfeited their right to have their opinion treated as an equally valid one.

So yes it could be said that me and my generation are growing more intolerant of some dissenting opinions, but only the ones that are objectively wrong.  We are not willing to force ourselves to see the world as a binary state of completely equal ideas.  We were brought up in a world where every idea was available to us on the internet so we had to learn quick what’s real, what’s not, and what’s spam.  But here I come to the part that brings religion into the picture again, I don’t think this makes us intolerant of personal beliefs and opinions.  We understand that personal beliefs are just that, personal.  There are incredibly intelligent, well spoken, kindhearted Christians and atheists, just as Jews, Muslims, Hindus etc.  There are also incredibly stupid, boorish, despicable people of all backgrounds.  To be quite frank, we don’t care what you believe, what makes your life worth living, so long as when you come to the public sphere to discuss and debate issues that you recognize what’s fact, what’s faith, and what’s bull.

Trigger Warning

A little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing, especially if the person who has it is convinced that it’s actually complete knowledge.  I don’t think that this story has been making huge stories in the news, surprise surprise they’re too busy talking about nonsense issues instead, but I have heard it mentioned a few times in as many days so I might as well put my two cents in.  At certain universities there is a push to include something called a “trigger warning” on books, movies, basically anything that a student might encounter in their studies.  I have found that regardless of where you actually fall on the issue when you have all the facts, at least 90% of commentators have only heard the barest details and have decided to go overboard with their dismissal of this push.

To give a general framework of what I’m talking about, I am going to give the basic headline that caused the minor uproar and then I’ll give the full details that give appropriate depth to the issue.  Essentially the story that everyone heard was, “Universities moving to remove unpleasant content from curriculum.”  The claim being that trigger warnings describe the contents of the books(or whatever material) that may be unpleasant to readers: violence, racism, sexism, rape, slavery, etc.  These trigger warnings would be placed on all books including classics like “The Great Gatsby,” which includes scenes of violence against women; or “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” which includes unvarnished scenes of racism.  

The assumption made by conservative critics was that this was hypersensitivity gone mad.  They would say that kids these days are entirely too sheltered from the realities of the world, and this typifies the movement that wants to ensure that every kid gets a little league trophy, everyone gets to believe what they want, and any resemblance between the university life and the real world is purely coincidental.  On the liberal side of the spectrum, critics would claim that this is a strike against free speech and a way to allow people who grew up in bubbles, most especially conservative ones, would not be exposed to new ideas. Their contention would be that students with firmly held religious beliefs, for example, would use these trigger warnings as a way to divine which books they would feel comfortable reading, and avoid anything that might cause them to question their firmly held beliefs.  There’s a further argument made by critics that fall somewhere in between these two extremes that say this is typical of the lack of intellectual tolerance from young people today, and I want to spend a whole post just on that, so we’ll save it for the next one.

Before we do go on, I would like to point out how it seemed that neither the conservative nor liberal commentators seemed to notice that though they agree on the face of it that they are against this policy, their reasoning is oddly parallel.  For all these pundits it seemed that they assume to have all the facts as it is and that the limitation on exposure to controversial material would arrest the development of students to their own side.  But irony is not a new story, so I’ll get on to the meat of the issue, that being the fact that all these opinions are heavily based on bullshit.

Trigger warnings, at least by their intent, are not there to stop people from exposing themselves to “difficult” material.  In fact they aren’t there for the sake of the majority of people and we’ve already seen them in play today.  Does anyone remember the stories that came out about a number of Japanese children who went into an epileptic fit after seeing an episode of Pokemon?  Well that caused the episode to not be shown at first in America, but later it was released, along with other episodes, containing a warning for people that might want to avoid the material for health reasons.  It’s not that Pokemon is a harsh look at the treatment of animals in society or something, it’s just that some of the bright flashing lights could induce seizures in some viewers and they deserve a fair warning that this could trigger it.  In the same way, the trigger warnings that are proposed for class materials are there as a warning to people who may be triggered on a different level.

On many campuses there is a growing number of students who have served in the military.  They come home and are promised that they will get a top notch education sponsored by the taxpayers, as they should.  But let’s not pretend that soldiers come back from the battlefield without any scars, physical or psychological.  Trigger warnings about scenes of military violence, for example, are just basic decency to give soldiers who may be suffering from PTSD a heads up about what’s ahead.  The vast majority of students would read the material regardless and the same is true even for soldiers at risk of problems related to PTSD, but just as a common courtesy they deserve some kind of notice.

In the same way, we know the statistics about rape in this country, especially as they pertain to women.  There is an incredible likelihood that in your average classroom there are one or two people who have been assaulted in their life.  As much as “The Great Gatsby” is a very good book, there are definitely scenes in it that could trigger a very violent reaction to people who are already dealing with depression due to problems of abuse.  People who have gone through these courses that have trigger warnings on the material almost never choose to opt out, which shows the fortitude of even the possibly at risk students, but that shouldn’t be taken as saying that it’s not a worthwhile step to give fair warning.

Now having given, what I believe to be, fair context to the issue I want to say that I don’t think that putting trigger warnings on material is a good thing.  Putting a warning label on a book does have the potential to turn into something far uglier than simply a trigger warning.  I think that when going over the curricula with their classes, professors should mention that there are certain aspects of specific materials that could trigger something painful.  I think that students should go over what they are going to be reading, even briefly on wikipedia, over the course of their semester to find out if what they are going to be reading may be traumatic for them to experience and they should be free to talk with their professors about this.  But above all, the reason I am against putting trigger labels on class materials is that it puts professors, especially untenured professors, in a very odd spot.

We can’t know every thing that might cause a violent reaction in every student, but by putting labels on these materials there is an implicit assumption that the teacher should know better.  It’s unfair to put the teacher in a situation where they need to be constantly on guard for materials they bring to class, things they might say in a lecture, being used as a critique of their lessons.  There should be a conversation between students and their teachers about potentially “difficult” materials and how some students may react to them, but that’s a conversation that should be had between people and not abridged and slapped on the cover.  We do need to consider the mental health of students, but we don’t need to be cheapening this consideration by making it the professor’s job to consider every possible outcome of however they choose to best teach.

Good Idea: Poor Execution

If I’ve said it once I’ve said it, oh let’s say five times, this is an election year.  Perhaps I wouldn’t feel the need to preface so many of my posts with this if America had a track record of showing up to the polls, which time and again we’ve seen just isn’t the case.  I mean really for a country that pats itself on the back as much as America does for being the leader of the free world and the defenders of democracy, we do democracy a terrible disservice.  How can we claim to have a rule of and by the people when less than 40% turns out on a good year, not to mention all the people we intentionally keep from the polls.  But this really isn’t the focus of today’s post.  Today we’re talking about a different aspect of this great democratic republic, an aspect that really doesn’t come into play until 2016.  And I would be the first person to say that it is entirely too early to be speculating about elections this far out, particularly when we are in an election year as it is, but this isn’t about speculation.  This is about one of the least sexy subjects of them all, the electoral college.

For those in a bit of a haze about their civics lessons, let’s recap.  You and I and indeed every person that does show up to vote in the presidential election, we do not vote for the president.  I’ll acknowledge the possibility that among the three or so readers of this blog there could indeed be a member of the electoral college, the select few who hold the distinction of casting the votes that actually determine who sleeps in the White House for four years, but considering that even that is basically a ceremonial position at this point I’ll let it go.  Anyway back to the main point, back in the good old days when the founders were putting together what would eventually become the Constitution, there was an important problem that needed addressing.  The leader of the republic needed to be elected somehow, but god knows we couldn’t trust it to the citizens who would be governed by that guy.

To put it in slightly more courteous terms, there was an issue about how much power we would give, as a republic, to the will of the majority.  It is an important issue to consider if you lived in say Rhode Island and you were worried that the Virginian electorate would essentially pick the president every time.  Considering that Virginia holds the distinction as the state that has produced the most president’s I’d say the solution came as a mixed success.  To further compound the problem America was, and still is for that matter, a very large country.  And although now we have technology so that we can communicate with anyone in an instant, to the point that we are inundated with information about who’s running, this was not the case when your fastest form of communication was the, as yet uninvented, Pony Express.  So more than likely the voters would never have heard of the candidates, with the exception of course of George Washington.  For a very long time even the idea of national parties wasn’t even considered a possibility, so more often than you’d think the winner may not have even appeared on your ballot.

The solution that was developed was the electoral college, or voters chosen to represent the states in the real presidential election that happens a month after the national election.  Each state is given one elector for each representative in Congress, meaning the minimum a state as small as Wyoming still gets three votes even though there may only be as many people living in the state.  On election day each state counts the votes of its citizens, who showed up, and the winner gets all the electoral votes of the state even if they win by a single vote.  On the day that the “real” election happens the electors cast their votes, but at this point most states have rules mandating that they have to vote the way the state went to avoid a coup.  Defenders of the electoral college say that this is the best idea that has ever been hatched because it forces candidates to visit all the states in person, to pander in the local dialect, and act like they want to represent the United States.  And that’s the key to the flaw of this, the leader in reality represents the States in this system and not the people.

Students of history will well recall that although by no means common, it is not unheard of that a person can win the popular vote and still not become president.  To the other 99% of Americans just remember what happened with Bush v Gore, where hanging chads and the Supreme Court decided who would be our president and not the voice of the people who had voted for Al Gore.  But you know what, even if you don’t think it’s a disgrace that we don’t get to choose our most powerful representative, and you think that the key issue is that the President represent all the States and not just, oh let’s say the people within them, then you should really reconsider this whole electoral college thing.

Now critics of President Obama will surely remember his flub when he said that he had visited 57 states in his campaign in 2008.  And even if you don’t want to cut him some jet-lagged slack, you must surely feel a swell of pride that he at least tried to go to all corners of this large country in his bid for the White House.  No?  Well fine then, let’s just talk about the logistics of campaigning.  No candidate for president gives a rats ass about visiting Wyoming so it really doesn’t do that much good for the small states.  Unless there is a particularly close House or Senate race in a solidly party state(either way doesn’t really matter), they’re probably not going to waste they’re time there.  No, the money is in visiting the fewer than eight states that are ever really up for a contest: Ohio, Virginia, and Florida pop into mind immediately.  The other states would either be a waste of resources or a huge waste of resources.  This is why, among a few other details like fear for his life, you don’t see President Obama doing more than flying over Mississippi.

But still the idea is that in the alternative system all a candidate would have to do is visit New York, LA, Chicago, Sacramento, Boston, Miami, and a few other large cities and then it’s all over.  Except, and I know there are some people whose heads explode at the mere mention of it, math.  See, these are indeed big cities and if you could win all of them you’d be well on your way, but even if you won 100% of voters in the top 100 biggest cities in the US, you still wouldn’t be close to 50% of the electorate.  As a candidate for president you’d actually be forced to get creative and turn out votes in areas where people feel disenchanted with the system if you wanted to get close to a majority of people.

And that’s the key to this whole thing, because in the electoral college it’s winner take all, with a slight exception for Nebraska and Maine, which means that for the majority of Americans their votes don’t matter at all.  It doesn’t matter if you vote Republican in California or if you vote Democratic in Texas, your vote won’t count in the big race.  In this day and age it makes no sense to have a system that falsely equates the technological limitations of the 1700s to today, what’s more it actively instills the feeling that so many people already have that their vote is worthless.  The electoral college is a relic of a passed age an should rightfully be put in the garbage heap of history along with the indirect election of Senators.

And for those of you who made it this far, please enjoy this video by CGPGrey, who expresses a similar opinion more succinctly and amusingly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wC42HgLA4k

Engine of the Economy

The free market has been called, by some, the engine of our economy.  This statement is meant to evoke a certain emotion in favor of a completely free market, and although I greatly disagree with the way people use this statement as a way of justifying any policy that strips the government of regulatory power or the people of their ability to try and keep certain laissez faire policies from steamrolling them over, I had been kind of stuck as to why the statement itself just doesn’t quite work.  But today I heard a commentator on the radio make an offhand remark that perfectly completed it.  It’s true that the free market is the engine of the economy, but it’s not the steering wheel.  This is not only one of the many reasons to listen to NPR, but the perfect analogy of the role of the free market in our economy and our country.  I am only sad that I didn’t catch the name of the commentator, it’s a little tricky to take notes while you’re driving.

The free market really is the engine of our economy, it is powerful and unthinking in pursuing its end, i.e. profit.  And I know that this isn’t a particularly new topic for me on this blog as I’ve referred to free markets as a gun for much the same reason and I did a multiple part series on the limits of the free market and why those holes are best filled by a government, but here we get to a concrete and current example of just why the engine of the free market needs to be steered in a different direction from time to time.  And that example is climate change, global warming, or however you’d prefer it labeled.  The free market is not concerned with such longterm concepts as the global temperature 20-100 years from now, all that matters is that profits are being made in as great a quantity as possible.  And although I certainly feel for business men and women who may miss out on a few extra bucks if we say create regulations that raise emissions standards, it really makes it difficult for anyone to make a profit in 20 years time if New York City is under water, literally.  

You see there are certain people out there who have made a lot of money from industries that are not what one would call clean.  These people have set up successful businesses that employ many people, who are therefore dependent on these industries continuing.  But it is paradoxically the success of these individuals and their companies that are guaranteeing the loss of any real wealth in the long term.  The biggest problem is that the vast majority of these individuals are fairly old, like the Koch Brothers, and so won’t be alive to feel the worst effects of global climate change.  They have families like everyone else on this planet and have children who will have to live in the world they leave behind, but they clearly don’t care a toss about their children and grandchildren by the way they act.  It’s not enough that they have more money than most people could even comprehend, they need to ensure further short term profits at all costs.  They are the engine in full gear, heading nonstop into a wall.

The Koch brothers are obviously not alone in this endeavor, but they are a very easily identified example.  Koch Industries, Inc. is one of the biggest heavyweights in world economics and has vested interests in petrochemicals, mining and refining; energy production, again mostly focused on fossil fuels; and finance, at least partially as a means of securing further rights over oil and gas.  They will use whatever means necessary to ensure that these fields remain as relevant as possible and therefore as profitable as possible.  This has undoubtedly added to the wealth of the world economy, but it comes at a great cost.  Just like drug dealers can make a lot f money, employ a lot of people, etc these industries are not worth the monetary benefit in the longterm, and it is that longterm that affects the great many of us who expect to live a few more decades.

We need our politicians and our electorate to be able to understand that all the money in the world doesn’t do you any good if you are dead.  It would seem such a simple concept, but something I fear needs repeating in the atmosphere of American politics and economics.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, it is unclear just how fucked we are in terms of climate change, how much of an effect we can hope to have on it at this point.  Certainly the task becomes impossible if we believe that it can be tackled by the US alone, but there is still hope that by the global consciousness that we can’t fight our enemies when we’re dead will inspire some international cooperation.  This cannot happen if the wealthiest and most influential representatives of the engine are the ones in charge of where the car is going, because it’s quite simple to see the horrid destination.

What’s more the Koch brothers are holding on to the untenable position that the free market is the strongest force in the universe and at the same time absolutely impotent in the face of cap and trade.  The beauty of free markets is in its flexibility and efficiency in changing with the times.  By creating profit incentives for companies that run greener, produce better products more efficiently, help in fixing the environmental damage of other companies, etc we will see just how the market rises to the occasion and surpasses even our greatest expectations.  And see this is the part of the argument that the proponents of purely free market capitalism will never acknowledge, markets will work under whatever constraints they are put and although you may be able to limit the absolute cap that can be made off of an economy with regulation, you can never kill the spirit of innovation to make a buck.

If we have a system where markets are completely and utterly free from constraints, regulations, etc we will have a lot of cash, not necessarily in everyone’s hand, but a lot of cash and very little else.  Capital is made up of not only monetary wealth but intelligence and personnel, but those are not the ends that a laissez faire economy favors.  The free market is a powerful engine and will drive an economy far and fast, but it doesn’t care who get run over.  That is why there needs to be someone, or better yet, many someones ensuring that the powerful engine that provides us with so much doesn’t also provide us with a fatal accident.

Liberal Bias

Yesterday I made a brief series of observations about why Fox News is absolutely terrible, and in doing so I referenced how the mainstream media is not liberally biased so much as it is awful, just not quite so awful as Fox.  But there is an important liberal bias out there and it needs to be revealed.  This liberal bias is so profound that the number of examples that run contrary to it are so few that I can really only think of one.  This liberal bias is found, however, not in the news but in comedy.  Yes the real field that has a nearly complete liberal bias is comedy and this is an international as well as timeless truth, and it is in part due to a phenomenon that Stephen Colbert once noted.  “Reality has a well known liberal bias.”

More to the point, it has to do with the setting in which he made that tongue in cheek observation.  In 2006 Mr Colbert was invited to be the headline speaker at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.  He did an approximately 25 minute riff on all the big names in politics, most especially the big man in the room President George W Bush.  For a reminder, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWqzLgDc030

Mr Colbert has come to notoriety through his character, Stephen Colbert, not to be confused with himself, Stephen Colbert.  Stephen Colbert is a bombastic supporter of every extreme Right wing value even, and especially, if it contradicts itself.  Compare this to Stephen Colbert who is a fairly private, down-to-earth, devoted Catholic, liberal of whatever stripe he would prefer.  He is a kind and devoted father and husband as well as a regular Sunday school teacher, but above all someone who likes “to talk about people who don’t have any power.”  He does so not in a mean spirited way but in a way that gives voice to the voiceless, in a way that speaks truth to those who do have power even if that means going to where power lives.  And it is this quality that, I believe, makes good comedians, and helps to explain why the vast majority of good comedians are liberal.

Before I go on further, I mentioned that there was one exception that I could think of and it’s worthwhile giving credit where it is due.  I don’t think it should be very controversial for me to say that P.J. O’Rourke is a very funny man.  Mr O’Rourke is widely known for his comedic works as well as his political writings, which espouse a libertarian point of view.  And although this would definitely put him in the camp of more conservative politics, he shares something in common with all the liberal comedians.  Libertarianism, although I don’t necessarily agree with it, is a perfectly reasonable ideology to follow; it is consistent and well intentioned.  As I understand it, Libertarianism advocates the belief that we are better served in life through personal independence and every time we cede power to the government that makes us that much less free.  And it is this rationale for a smaller government that, I believe, separates it from other brands of conservatism, in that it is not concerned with going back to the “good old days” so much as making a society where all people, regardless of who they are, can be free.  In this way Mr O’Rourke is an advocate for those without power as well, although he comes to a completely different understanding of how that is best achieved.

See, the best humor, satire, what ever you want to call it comes from the acknowledgment that things aren’t perfect, putting it in an amusing way, and pointing out who is to blame for those problems in a way that makes them ridiculous.  This is why most comedy is directed upward and most comedy that is directed downward is considered mean spirited.  I mean just put aside the whole notion of political correctness, because I know there are more than a few people out there that believe political correctness to be a conspiratorial chain, you just don’t see many comedians making jokes about how stupid the mentally challenged are or how weak the victims of war torn conflicts are.  There are plenty of good bits about how insane the leaders of North Korea are, but you don’t hear any jokes making fun of the citizens.  Charlie Chaplin, in his great film “The Great Dictator,” made fun of Hitler, Mussolini, and all their aides but he never made light of the people in the concentration camps, beyond the mere ridiculousness of imprisonment.  Jokes are a way of taking the piss out of the things in life that keep us down.

But here’s the paradox, if it were simply a matter of attacking those on top and the institutions that keep us down, then it would seem that there should be plenty of P.J. O’Roukes out there, not to make any assumptions about Mr O’Rourke’s private life.  But it remains the case that the majority of comedians, especially the well known ones, are liberal both in their personal politics and their comedy: Jon Stewart, Conan O’Brien, Louis C.K, Ricky Gervais, Jimmy Carr, Bill Maher, Lewis Black, Chris Rock, Janeane Garofalo, Paula Poundstone, David Letterman, Harry Shearer.  And this is not some recent trend: Bill Cosby, George Carlin, Ricahrd Pryor, The Smothers Brothers, Bob Hope, Mark Twain, Voltaire, etc.  I mean no matter where or when you look the best comedy of the time says that the system sucks, especially for the persecuted few, and the system needs to be changed to help them out; at its most basic level, that is liberalism or progressivism or whatever Left wing ideology you want to talk about, even the ones that go way too far in the execution of that belief.

On the Right, aside from libertarians of course, the de facto position is that the system suck so we should go back to the way things were.  The problem there is that there was a reason we changed the way things were, the reason being that the way things were hurt a lot of people that weren’t in power like racial, ethnic, social, religious, gender minorities.  Conservatism is all about empowering those who already have or had the power in a way that disenfranchises those without.  Therefore all “conservative” humor has to be attacks downward in a much more mean spirited way.  Now don’t get me wrong, I know quite a few conservatives who have good heads on their shoulder, can be witty, know how to crack a joke, etc.  However the jokes that ring the best are always going to be the ones that point upward.  So yeah conservatives can make jokes now about Obama being in power, and they can be pretty funny, but once we go back to a conservative in power all their jokes will have to be at the expense of the poor or activists for the disenfranchised.  Whereas on the Left, just because there is a nominally liberal person in charge, which it’s yet to be shown that Obama is willing to fight for more than just the most basic liberal goals, liberal comedians are free to poke fun at the guy on top because he still maintains a system that keeps many people down.

So why is there a liberal bias in comedy?  Yes, it is in part because reality has a liberal bias and comedians deal with the real world, but it’s more than that.  The comedian will ever be the court jester, the only one who is truly free to tell the harsh truths because they go down so much easier in joke form.  The harshest truths about reality are that there are many things done by those with power that actively make the lives of those without worse.  But more than that, more than merely acknowledging the harsh truths we need liberal comedy to keep our spirits lifted that we might actually be able to change things for the better.  And hopefully that isn’t just some perversely naive joke at my expense.