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Monday, December 8, 2014

7 Reasons the 21st Century is Not as Miserable as You Think

I should really just call this David Wong is a Fucking Idiot, Part 2 of a Series.  It's short, sweet, to the point.  When I called him a repeat offender of a doucheking in my last post about him, it's precisely because of articles like the one I'm about to rip apart here.  For today's shitshow, we have this little gem from 2007: "7 Ways the 21st Century is Making You Miserable."  Again, presumably because "When I Was Your Age We Had to Walk Barefoot in the Snow Both Ways" and "How Do I Set This Fucking DVR to Record All of Mad Men, Dammit?!" were too long.

First, I wish to make it perfectly clear that as a technophile, I fucking love the 21st century.  I love all of the crazy shit we're able to do with phones, computers, and the internet.  When I can ask my phone for directions instead of a gas station attendant and actually get directions I can understand, when I can talk to somebody halfway across the world who is living the events I'm seeing on the news and get real-world perspective, when I can do all the research I need for a project in a single evening instead of having to wait for someone to return the book I need to the library, it's a great time to be alive.  So obviously, this post is going to be somewhat biased toward the "technology is fucking awesome" side.

But I also want to make it clear that I'm writing about the 21st century from a completely opposite perspective that Wong did.  Wong is a straight white guy (that pretends to be Chinese-American on the internet) who is just hitting that age when men feel the need to buy overpriced sportscars so they can re-live their 20s, while I'm a gay woman who is just hitting the age where she's trying to get her shit together and stay out of Old Economy Steve's basement.  I love the 21st century because technology and changing social norms have granted me the ability to rant like this.  Wong hates the 21st century because people are starting to value the opinions of straight middle-aged white guys less and less.

The difference in these perspectives is immediately apparent when Wong opens his article with a lamentation that 25% of us would fail the "Naked Photo Test" -- that being the number of people you would trust with a lewd photo of yourself.

Maybe you've heard of a little phenomenon called "revenge porn."  If you haven't, let me explain it as plainly as I can:

1) Girl meets Boy
2) Girl dates Boy
3) Boy asks for nude photos
4) Girl sends nude photos because they've been dating for years and she trusts Boy
5) Girl and Boy have a fight, break up
6) Nude photos Girl sent Boy end up on porn sites because Boy is an asshole
7) ???
8) Profit

Revenge porn has been around since Hustler started their "Beaver Hunters" section in the 1980s (and got sued for it).  And even as far back as 2000, it was a thing on Usenet.  So 1) I'd be interested to know how many of that 25% who wouldn't trust anybody with a nude photo happen to be female, and 2) anyone lamenting that people don't trust others with naked photos is kind of an entitled douchebag anyway, because you don't get to dictate how trusting other people should be with their private shit.

And that's only the beginning.  His real lamentation is that we have fewer and fewer close friends today than we did years ago.  And to be honest, that's such a bullshit statement because "close friend" is a 100% subjective term.  To David Wong, a close friend is someone he can send a nude photo to and not have it wind up on StudMuncher.com.  For a straight white guy, this is not a very high bar at all.  To me, a close friend is someone whom I can tell that I've been struggling with suicidal thoughts since I was eight years old, and they won't spout some horrible ignorant platitude at me.

So without further ado, the 21st century is less miserable than you think because...

1. You Have Fewer Annoying Strangers In Your Life

Wong's argument here is that technology which lets us avoid annoying people makes us less able to deal with the ones we do run into, and being forced to deal with these idiots makes us miserable.  That when people did have more annoyances in their lives, they were happier somehow because they were able to ignore it.

The problem with this logic is that again, as a straight white guy, the annoyances he's describing are laughably petty: a fat lady who can't operate a shopping cart.  A toddler kicking in his seat at the theatre.  A confused cashier at Blockbuster.  The smelly old man at the doctor's office.  Shrill voices.  Clunky jokes.  Body odor.  Squeaky shoes, for fuck's sake.

I wish those were the kinds of annoyances that I use my iPhone to filter out.

Instead, I use my phone to avoid the creepy old guy on the bus trying to hit on me.  The religious nut trying to convert me to Mormonism.  The teenage girls muttering in quiet tones about my weight.  The middle-aged douchebag telling me to "smile more."  The old woman telling me I'm a slut for wearing stretch pants in public.

And I'm white.  People who don't have the good fortune to be born white use their technology to filter out even worse bullshit.  If all it takes to send David Wong on a screaming crotch-punching spree is a pair of squeaky shoes, I think that says more about his ability to tolerate strangers.

Furthermore, the "happier time" he's hearkening back to is "fifty years ago."  So in 2007, that would've been 1957.  Let me tell you a little bit about 1957.  The reason it seemed like a time when people were more tolerant of annoying strangers is because up through roughly the mid-60s, the U.S. was a culture of fake politeness that didn't tell annoying strangers that they were being fucking annoying.  People dealt with the horror that was post-World War II by simply pretending bad shit didn't happen.  It was all manners and niceties and putting on the cheerful face to hide just how much you actually wanted to punch that guy in the crotch.  You didn't talk about your problems.  You kept up appearances.  You maintained that idyllic veneer of Norman Rockwell paintings no matter what.

Not to mention people old enough to remember 1957 would be pushing their 70s-90s today.  If you poll them now?  Of course they're going to say life was better back then.  They still had their own teeth and didn't need dialysis and weren't punching in phone numbers of friends they forgot were dead.

Plus, the economy was in a lot of ways better (at least for white people).  A family of four could make it on a single income, and the job didn't require more than high school education (often not even that).  Today, because of stagnating wages and even the shittiest jobs requiring at least a 2-year degree, people are forced to go into shitloads of college debt -- which can't even be discharged in bankruptcy -- for a job that can barely support one person, nevermind a family.  But that isn't technology's fault.  That's the fault of sheer corporate greed.

Anyway, with the 1960s counterculture movement came the notion of foregoing the turd polish and being honest.  It was now both okay and encouraged to tell your out-of-town relatives that they'll need to book a hotel this trip because you do not feel like having them invade your house for a week.  You could now tell that asshole at work to quit showing you pictures of her kids and asking when you're popping out your own because you don't fucking care and it's none of her goddamned business.

People weren't any more tolerant back then.  They just pretended to be, because it was bad form to tell people to stop pissing you off.

Today, with smartphones and hand-held gaming consoles and iPods and e-readers, we're able to get to and from work and endure layovers at the airport (and flights) and not get harangued as much by random annoying strangers.  Because to most people, being engrossed by an electronic device is visual shorthand for "don't fucking bother me."  Not being bothered as often by creepy-ass people makes me the absolute opposite of miserable.

2. You May Have Fewer Friends, But They're Better Friends

Here, Wong makes basically the same stupid argument as above, but with the twist that putting up with annoying people got you more friends.  Somehow.  He doesn't really explain that very well, except to say that "technology is bad."

And again, having more friends doesn't mean people back then had more close friends.  People didn't share their dark, horrible secrets with each other, not even their so-called "best friends."  Apparently in David Wong's world, just tolerating somebody makes them a friend.  Right after lamenting that we don't tolerate people enough to send them nudes.  Which is it?  You can't claim people don't have enough friends these days if you're constantly moving the goalposts that define "friend."

It also bears mentioning that again, what Wong is classifying as an "annoying friend" is only annoying in that petty straight-white-guy way.  The example he gives of an "annoying" friend?  Someone who listens to different music than you.

Really?  If that's the most annoying friend you've ever had to deal with, I'd say you're doing pretty fucking well for yourself, Mr. Straight White Guy.

Try having friends who regularly made sexual comments and jokes about your body.  Or who didn't just not share your interests but belittled you for having them.  Or who teased you about being a lesbian before you even knew what the word meant (which made it so much fun when you had to accept later that they were right).

The 21st century doesn't just allow people to find those with common interests.  The internet provides a nice cloak of anonymity and the ability to literally change your identity with a few mouse clicks.  As such, people are often more open and honest about themselves online than they are face-to-face, because there are fewer reasons to lie.

People lie when they feel threatened, mostly.  When they fear what others might think if they knew the truth.  That social filter that Wong detests so much?  That's actually working in our favor online.  If people don't like the truth or judge us harshly for the truth?  We can avoid them, rather easily.  We can almost guarantee that we never have to hear from these Judgey McJudgersons ever again.  Being able to filter out that threat gives us less incentive to lie.

Which means that the friends we do make this way end up being better friends.  Because they are friends with us rather than with the well-adjusted act we put on.

Case-in-point: none of the (very few) meatspace friends ("meatspace" being the edgy new term for "not the internet") that I have ever made have been particularly close.  Most of them I don't really talk to anymore after figuring out they were kind of huge dicks.  And the ones I do still talk to are kept at arm's length.  I still put on the well-adjusted act, and there is deeply personal shit I will not tell them for my own sanity.

The best friends I have ever made can all be counted on one hand and I have met them all through the internet.  I've been talking to these people for over a decade in some instances without ever knowing what they even look like.  I have told them the deeply personal shit I don't tell the meatspace crew.  They know the type of person I really am and they haven't run away screaming, and that means way more to me than having a bunch of "friends" who are utterly fucking clueless.

3. There Are More And Better Ways to Communicate (Including Texting)

In this point, Wong contends that if 40% of an e-mail is misunderstood, then that means text is an inferior form of communication because most of our cues are nonverbal.  There are a few problems with this.  Not the least of which is that the article he quoted for that 40% study was in The Christian Science Monitor.  You know, the same people who look to prayer to heal cancer rather than a hospital?  Yeah, those guys.  And the study was not even in regard to the e-mail medium itself, but how racism and sexism affect how people read e-mails.  Thing is, nonverbal cues are just as easy to misinterpret because emotions are inherently unstable and fickle anyway.

Just as an exercise, read the following sentence:

"I didn't say you stole my money."

Now read it again, and place the emphasis on a different word.  It's the same fucking sentence, but it will have seven different meanings depending on which word is stressed.  Back when I worked in Call Center Hell, where the only form of communication was your voice, this was noted as something to be careful of.  Tone and inflection can very easily set off an already agitated customer purely because they're viewing your emotional cues through their own red-hazed brain.  Likewise, we are quite capable of giving off the impression that we're angry, stressed, or scared even when we aren't.  Especially when patterns of abuse have skewed the way we interpret nonverbal cues.  And this doesn't even count people on the autism spectrum, for whom nonverbal cues are inherently useless.

The idea that you can't properly convey emotion through text is fucking insane.  If that were true, we wouldn't have books at all.  We have not only a myriad of punctuation marks and formatting to tell us exactly how a sentence is intended to be read, but we have connotations of words themselves that convey emotion.  That's kind of what writing is.

Which of course begs the question: if writing is such a bad way to communicate, then why did we invent it in the first place?  And why have we been increasingly relying on it for 5,000 years?

See, inventions don't hang around that long unless they serve a need.  And the need that writing serves as a form of communication is twofold: record and privacy.  The brain is actually pretty shit at remembering details, and has a nasty habit of making up its own to fill in the blanks.  So we invented writing as a way to keep our shit straight.  We're much better communicators when we have a record to refer back to and keep our messages consistent.

Face-to-face also has the disadvantage of conveying information (badly) to third parties who may be watching and listening.  One perusal through Overheard in New York should demonstrate why this can be a bad thing.  Writing it down and giving the message to somebody keeps it relatively private.  This is why coded messages all throughout history have been passed along largely through writing and inscription rather than orally.

The problem is not that texting is a shitty form of communication; it's that people are shitty communicators, and writing is a skill that's being taught less effectively in schools than it used to be (because steady budget cuts and stagnating pay have driven the good teachers into careers where they can put food back on the table).

But it's especially telling that the example Wong uses as a reason texting sucks is a friend of his not wanting any of the chili he made, and (if he isn't exaggerating) Wong getting so offended that he didn't speak to him for six months.  Because this pretty much illustrates just how bad Wong is at following his own advice.

Even if "no, thank you" is a phrase said friend uses sarcastically a lot and you are really that proud of your culinary skills, how close can you possibly be as friends that you can't tell he's not being sarcastic this time?  And that you would drop communication altogether for half a year over a bowl of fucking chili?

Oh, but Wong then admits that he did that because he was already in a bad mood when he read that text.  So really, he made a ridiculous snap judgement about someone he supposedly called a friend, and then blamed texting for it.  It's almost like this was one of those "annoying friends" he says we're supposed to have more of, that he got pissed off at for a stupid, petty Straight White Guy reason, but it's just easier to blame newfangled technology than admit when you're being a douchebag.

The reason texting, IM, and e-mail make us less miserable is because we now have yet another form of communication, and one that we don't feel pressured to answer right away.  You can put away messages up on IM if you're busy doing stuff or just don't feel like talking.  You don't have to answer a text or an e-mail as soon as you receive it.  There are no awkward silences to worry about.  Communication through writing is a godsend for introverts because we can take all the time we need to recharge between interactions so that we're not cranky as fuck because we want some alone time for a few hours.  Having that option has made a whole lot of people way less miserable and lonely.

4. Online Company Lets You Know You Aren't Alone

Here, Wong tries to tie all three previous points together with a little bow of smug superiority: because we're communicating badly and only to the few people that don't annoy us, that makes us lonelier.  Somehow.  His reasoning seems to be that because you can't convey emotion through text, you filter everything through your own shitty mood instead.

But as said before, you most certainly can convey emotion through text if you know what you're doing.  It's especially weird for a writer to say that you can't effectively communicate emotion through words alone.  You would think somebody whose livelihood depends on such an ability would realize just how fucking stupid he sounds.

The reality is that online interaction, especially mobile, has exploded in the last decade because it fills a need.  People work crazy hours.  They have families to take care of.  Many just don't have time for good old-fashioned hanging out in person.  Face-to-face outings are becoming more of a luxury from a bygone era in which one full-time job could provide for a family of four.  Now with people's schedules all over the place, texting and e-mailing are the preferred methods of keeping in touch because you can respond at your leisure.

Fine, so you can't both get the same night off work to go see The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies.  Instead, you can see it separately and squee at each other.  Which is pretty much the same thing you'd be doing if you met up to see it in person anyway.

Either way, the important thing about online company is that it's company.  Like I've said before, the friends I've made online have made me feel less alone than anyone I've ever met in meatspace.  These are friends who have talked me out of a mental breakdown at two in the morning.  Friends who have simply checked in on me when they hadn't heard from me in a couple days (and I've done the same for them).  Friends who let me know that there are real, living, breathing people out there who give enough of a shit about me to ask if I'm all right.

That is more than any meatspace friend has ever done for me.

Even if we don't necessarily talk every day, we still see each other in our buddy lists.  We see that we're logged on, and not seeing that name there for an unusal amount of time makes us concerned for each other.  We know we aren't alone, and we know there are people out there who care.

Gee, it's almost as if it's easier for Wong to blame technology for loneliness rather than a complete lack of people skills...

5. We Get Criticized Now More Than Ever Because We're Encouraged to Be Honest

Remember what I said before about 1950s culture being all about the politeness and not telling your friends and family when they're pissing you off?  Yeah, we're revisiting that again.  It's funny that Wong should make this point about not being criticized enough in the 21st century as opposed to past decades, because the reverse is reality: not criticizing people is at the heart of old-timey culture.  "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all."

And of course, here's the hilarious irony, straight from Wong's own mouth:
"And none of it mattered, because none of those people knew me well enough to really hit the target. I've been insulted lots, but I've been criticized very little."
No shit, Sherlock.  That much is fucking obvious.  Because if you had any real friendships built on real honesty and real criticism, you wouldn't be talking like such a complete fucking tool.  You wouldn't be making the most mundane, stupid problems into world-ending crises.  You wouldn't be wanting to go on a screaming crotch-punching spree over a stranger's body odor.  You would realize that maybe, just maybe, it's you who is miserable in the 21st century because you choose to be.

And yes, this goes right back to being Mr. Straight White Guy.  People have been loath to criticize straight white guys for much.  See, when women act like straight white guys, they get death and rape threats hurled at them from all over the world.  When brown people act like straight white guys, they get shot and choked to death by police officers who shouldn't have badges.

When a straight white guy acts like a straight white guy, he gets to hold seminars telling other straight white guys how to assault women, and gets paid handsomely for it.

So the fact that David Wong hasn't been criticized much in his life is less a product of 21st century technology and more to do with him being born into the most fortunate demographic in the country.

E-mail and texting are actually the perfect tools for incisive, brutal honesty, because the person you're sending them to can't shout you down and punch you in the head for saying shit they don't want to hear, but desperately need to.  You are free to speak your mind without interruption.  Sure, they can delete them.  They can just not read them.  But guess what?

They can do the same fucking thing in a face-to-face or phone conversation.  They can hang up.  They can walk away.

And the thing is?  With e-mail and text, people are actually more likely to take it in than ignore it.  Or at least that's been my experience.  Precisely because they aren't being put on the spot.  They have time to read it.  More importantly, because of that recordkeeping ability that I mentioned earlier, they've had time to re-read it, to stew and simmer and anguish over it until they finally came back to me a week later and said "you know what, you're absolutely right."

Because often their first reaction is going to be to go on the defensive, and when you're in real-time, that gut reaction of "how dare you" is all you have.  You don't have time to settle the fuck down before you're expected to respond.

And that's really one of the reasons people are far more honest with each other today that they were in 1957.  If you wanted to give someone a piece of your mind back then, you had three choices: 1) write a letter, which required you to spend money for paper, ink, and postage, 2) phone or telegram, in the days before free nationwide long-distance, or 3) in-person confrontation, which risked everything from getting beaten bloody to simply getting shouted at so you can't get a word in edgewise.  Besides the old-timey notion of pretending nothing's wrong and hoping one day it will actually be true, it also cost money, time, and the chance of incurring bodily harm to tell somebody they were being a shithead.

Today?  We have lost our patience for bullshit, and e-mail and texting don't really cost you anything extra, and the person you're telling off can't beat the tar out of you for doing so.  And if they break off the friendship?  Their loss.  So there's far less reason to keep our grievances to ourselves.  We aren't suffering from a lack of the ability to suffer fools.  We're simply less tolerant of shitty behavior, and less afraid to say when we've had enough.

6. There is Way More to Be Outraged About, and We're Better Informed of It

Here, Wong essentially sweeps every major event of the past 20 years under the rug because people in 1957 had it worse, but somehow seemed to tolerate it better.  Which means we're miserable about nothing today because we're told to be miserable by the news we consume.

Again, he's missing the bigger picture because he's viewing the decade through the rosy pink nostalgia goggles of Grease and I Love Lucy and every musical Rogers and Hammerstein ever wrote.

This ability to suffer horrible tragedies while seeming to not be outraged by much of anything is again fueled by the 1950s training to keep up appearances and pretend everything is fine.  It's also funny that he mentions Vietnam, but completely forgets about the shitloads of protests against it.  Including the one where the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four unarmed college students.

Instead, what example of purposeful bad news does he use?  Conflicting reviews of Fall Out Boy.  Not even facts, but an opinion.  That only a straight white guy would get outraged over.

Not the tanking economy and burgeoning global credit crisis.  Not the epic clusterfuck that was the handling of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath.  Not the commuter train bombings in Mumbai.  Not anything remotely relevant that was going on in the world at the time.

It's almost as if because David Wong doesn't think the current bad news is worth being outraged over because it doesn't affect him personally, nobody else should be outraged over it, either.  And if they are, it's only because they're sheeple who have it so good that they have to find ways to be miserable now.  Which, you know, kind of negates all his previous points about how everything was better in the 1950s.

Even in 2007, we had the war in Iraq, which unlike World War II, was both completely unnecessary and making literally half the world angry at us.  And unlike Vietnam, we knew the weapons of mass destruction were a fucking lie and we ran in there anyway.  And we knew that the Bush administration had absolutely no plan to get out once we were in.  And we knew it was quite literally a war for fun and profit.  We did it anyway.

So yes, people were pissed off and rightly so.

We aren't "victims" of an "outrage machine."  We simply have a lot more to be pissed off about.  We did in 2007, and we have even more now.  And we know more because unlike in 1957, we don't depend on the ad-driven media to give us our news while they fight for ratings.  We have social media that can tell us exactly what is happening on the ground, from people who are living it.

We aren't pretending everything is fine anymore when we know it's not.  We're no longer lying to ourselves about the state the world is in because we can no longer afford to, and we're out of excuses.

And why does this make us less miserable?  For the same reason an abused child finally telling their school counselor about their shitty home life is less miserable: keeping up that facade of happy-go-lucky when your existence is anything but is draining.  Physically and mentally.

We don't have to do that anymore.  The ability to speak our minds and let the world know just how angry we are and that we're not going to take it anymore is cathartic.  Therapeutic.  We aren't bound by a culture of bullshit to pretend we're fine anymore.  Moreover, admitting things are bad is the first step to changing them.  It makes us feel we can actually do something about our problems besides endure them gracefully.

7. We're Finally Taking Mental Illness Seriously (Unlike This Asshole)

So according to David Wong, we're more miserable today because due to the ability to have friends that are not local or at the very least don't know exactly where you live and can this dig through your trash for your printed work schedule, we don't have to be burdened by their mundane problems.  And that makes us literally worth less as people.  It doesn't matter if we're there to talk them out of a suicidal funk at four in the morning, if we don't have to drive them to work, we mean less as a friend (it also bears mentioning before I go any further, that this reasoning is going to quite literally fly in the face of everything he says next).

I'm not even sure where to start with this mountain of bullshit and Straight White Guy Problems.  Except to say that if fixing computers or being interrupted from a marathon of your favorite TV show is a bigger issue to you than being talked out of suicide, can I have your life?

This goes right along with his "make assholes like me think you're a better person" article in that his solution is that you can only learn to like yourself when you do stuff that makes you worthy to other people.  And in David Wong's world, that means fixing his computer.

But here's the rub: he unwittingly admits his entire reasoning is bullshit right here:

You can't bullshit yourself. If I think Todd over here is worthless for sitting in his room all day, drinking Pabst and playing video games one-handed because he's masturbating with the other one, what will I think of myself if I do the same thing?
Well yes, douchebag.  And the trick is to stop thinking people are worthless just because they spend their time doing shit you don't approve of.  When you label any pastime or preference as something that devalues a person, you are creating a way to hate yourself if your tastes happen to change.  And yes, there is a difference between thinking the act is worthless, and thinking the person is.  Case-in-point: I think organized sports are pretty worthless.  But athletes are still people, and thus they still have inherent value, just like everybody else.  In David Wong's world, value as a person is defined purely by how useful he finds you.  Something the worst people in the history of the world -- Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot -- adopted into national policy at various times, and the results were not pretty.

His solution to combat this feeling of worthlessness?  Not counseling.  Not medication.  Just "doing stuff."  Being "useful."  In fact, he flat-out says counseling is useless if you don't make yourself useful and likable to other people.  If you don't do something with a "tangible result."

So wait a sec...  Wouldn't "doing something" include fixing your own fucking computer?  Or finding other ways to amuse and feed yourself rather than dropping in on your friends unannounced and nagging them for their sandwiches?  Taking the bus to work instead of bugging people for car rides?

But that's not the worst of it.  The worst of it is his insistence that we're miserable because we don't work enough on things that we can see.  That we don't struggle to survive by having to hunt and gather our own food.  That office jobs make us miserable because we don't get anything physical out of it.

No, that isn't why office jobs make us miserable.  Office jobs make us miserable only when we feel undervalued by our bosses.  When we feel we aren't getting enough in return for what we do (not just pay, either, but even acknowledgement of a job well done).  And when our bosses implement company policies that make it frustrating as fuck to do the work we're required to.

Yes, accomplishment is great.  But I wasn't miserable doing call center and retail because it wasn't anything physical (retail was actually very physical).  I was miserable because I had to lick the boots of and wait hand and foot on asshole customers, and apologize and take the blame for shit that wasn't my fault while getting paid a near-starvation wage.

People don't cut themselves just to make their pain and healing real.  There are as many reasons for self-injury as there are self-injurers.  For some, it is the physical manifestation of pain that has no name.  For others, it's to punish themselves for feeling things they think they aren't supposed to.  And for still others, it's a way they ground themselves out of dissociation and remind themselves they're still alive, still people.

Thing is, suicidal teens and self-injurers have been around forever.  We just didn't fucking talk about it the way we do now.  Because 1950s culture said we weren't allowed to.

See, 1957 was only five years after the publishing of the DSM-I, the first standardized manual on mental illness.  And while the DSM-I is absolutely horrible by today's standards, it was still better than what came before it, which was essentially "stop whining and do something with your life."

Which is exactly what David Wong is advocating.

While our mental health system is still a far cry from adequate, people are less miserable today because these problems are finally getting taken seriously.  Because we have a better understanding of them than we did fifty years ago.

Modern technology has given us myriad ways to break out of the pit of self-hatred.  Hell, there's even counseling chat services out there (perfect for people who can't talk on the phone because they're physically disabled or they just have terrible anxiety about it).  We have new ways to make friends we would never meet otherwise.  We're not expected to put up with toxic bullshit anymore.  We're allowed to tell people what kind of day we've actually had instead of pretending it was fine when it wasn't.  Moreover, this same technology has allowed people who aren't straight white men to be heard over the droning, petty complaints that privileged fucks define their world by.

The reason David Wong is miserable in the 21st century is because he is the exact type of toxic douchebag and annoying friend and stranger that we invented iPods and tablets and smartphones and Nintendo DS and PlayStation Vita to filter out.  And because he's miserable, he assumes everyone else must be miserable, too.  And if they're not, he's going to try and convince them that they are because he's just the kind of shithead who can't stand anyone else having fun when he isn't.

See, technology is an inanimate object.  It can't make anybody miserable.  People like David Wong choose to be miserable despite all these advances because they're pining for a decade they didn't even live in, where nobody questioned their privilege.

It's not us that need to get out and reconnect with the world.  It's David Wong and everyone like him who need to get out of 1957 and accept that straight white guys just aren't as important as they used to be.  And that that's made everyone else a lot happier.

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

6 Simple Truths That Will Actually Make You a Better Person

For the most part, I love Cracked.com.  It's a funny, pseudo-informative timewaster that makes my lunch break at work awesome and therefore the rest of my day more awesome.  But occasionally, they post an article by some self-important doucheking who thinks he's discovered the secret of the universe that just makes me wonder how someone can have their head that far up their own ass and not suffocate.

Recently, I rediscovered one of these self-indulgent tubesocks by one David Wong (a repeat offender of a doucheking) called 6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person.  Presumably because "6 Pieces of Terrible Misguided Philosophy That Will Make Assholes Like David Wong Think You're a Better Person" and "I Missed the Entire Point of That Movie I Keep Praising" were too long.

The whole steaming pile of Ayn Rand-inspired nonsense reads like the manifesto of a Reformed Nice Guy who decided that rather than complain about the assholes who get all the hot women and good jobs, he'll just become the asshole he thinks pretty girls date and rich men hire.  That's only "self-improvement" if being a rich sociopath with no real friends and a trophy wife is your ultimate goal in life (and really, what else do you expect from a pasty white dude who pretends to be Chinese-American on the internet?).

If that's not your goal, then every point he makes in that article is shitty advice that's going to leave you even more friendless and miserable with a bunch of meaningless "successes" that will not give you even a stitch of satisfaction in your life.

Instead, here is some actual advice on how to be a better person in the truest sense of the term:

1. Human Nature Is Selfish, But You Can Be Better Than That

We have all heard at some point the adage that "kindness is its own reward."  When we're kids, teenagers, and self-righteous Nice Guys, we tend to interpret that statement as "kindness is its own reward because people will reward you when you're kind."  This mentality is what separates children from adults, and Nice Guys from the women they want to fuck.

Because it misses the entire point.  "Kindness is its own reward" doesn't mean that you will be rewarded for being nice.  At least not by other people.  The true reward for kindness is the feeling you get when something you've done has made another person happy.

There was a doctor in my city who died a few years ago, but while he was alive, every Christmas he transformed the front lawn of his house into a literal winter wonderland of animatronics, fake snow (because Florida), and literally thousands of Christmas lights.  He spent what had to be thousands of dollars and man-hours putting it together.  It was a real treat as a kid to drive past it and try to figure out what he added every year.

He did this for no other reason than to create something beautiful for the neighborhood.  He never expected a thank you.  He never charged admission to make back the cost of putting on the display.  The most he did was stand out there and watch the reactions of people.  The only money he ever asked for was donations from the passersby to the American Heart Association.

On the flip side, in Wong's article, he mentions the "speech that changed his life" as coming from Alec Baldwin's character in Glengarry Glen Ross.  A speech that he keeps referring to throughout the piece by repeating that one line from it: "If you want to work here, close."

Like "kindness is its own reward," Wong also misses the entire point of the film, and why the play won the Pulitzer and Tony Awards.  Glengarry Glen Ross was written in 1984, at the height of the Reaganomics-driven corporate cutthroat economy.  Mamet, when he wrote it, intended it to expose the inherent cruelty of such a system on the people it employs.  Much the same way Wall Street did.

Like Gordon Gekko, Alec Baldwin's character is not the guy you're supposed to emulate or even like.  His infamous speech that "motivators" like Wong keep quoting was meant to showcase the sociopathic nature of corporate philosophy, and the actions of the real estate agents -- everything from lying to bribery -- was meant to illustrate exactly what kind of shit happens when money, success, and power become more important than basic human decency.  And that desperate people can be driven to do terrible things when their livelihoods are at stake, and those in power see them only as "assets," no different from the fax machine or a box of paper clips.

When you use people as tools, when you only do good things for them with the expectation that they will reward you with the very same deeds later, you are not "improving" yourself in any sense.  Because, like Williamson in the play, the people you're using will figure out how much of an asshole you are, and they will not want to work there.

People don't want to merely "close."  That is, work and take home a paycheck.  They want to do what they love doing already and get paid for it.  One of the biggest reasons customers stop dealing with a company is "perceived indifference."  That is, the customer's perception that the company sees them only as a source of revenue and doesn't care about their needs.  The same largely holds true for employees.  The biggest reason employees leave a company is much the same; they feel their employer doesn't care about their needs as a worker, and sees them only as a warm body in the cubicle.

This doesn't just apply to the workplace, either.  If you wouldn't want to be friends with a guy who sees you as nothing but a source of beer money and bad jokes, then don't be the guy who is friends with other people solely for their beer money and bad jokes.

If you want to be a better person, the truth is surprisingly simple: treat kindness as its own reward.  Make other people happy whenever you can.

Why?  Because.

2. You Can't Fake Empathy, So Don't Try

It's butt o'clock in the morning.  You have to be awake in two hours to get ready for work.  Your cellphone blares to life.  The display says the name of one of your good-but-not-really-close friends.  This friend never calls you at this hour, so you know it's gotta be important.  But you're also half asleep and you really want to finish those last two hours before your alarm goes off doing literally anything but comforting someone else.

But you pick up the phone anyway, because friend.

Stop.  For godsakes, stop.

Do not pick up the phone.  Do not answer that call.  You will be doing nobody any favors.  Not your friend.  Not yourself.

The reason is because what you're about to do is the same thing every customer service agent is trained to do: use fake empathy.  Your friend could have called customer care for their cellphone company and gotten the same quality of emotional support you're about to provide.

You cannot fake empathy.  Customers can usually tell when you don't really give a shit about their problems.  Friends, no matter how not-close, are even better at picking that up.  Do not answer the phone for anybody before dawn unless you really care what they're about to say.

In the same vein, never ask your friends "how are you?" or "how was your day?" if you're not prepared to hear something other than a reflexive "I'm fine, thanks."  It will make shit awkward in a hurry when it becomes clear that you don't actually care about their answer; you just suck at social interaction and are parroting what you see everyone else do.

Only offer to be a shoulder to cry on if you like getting snot on your shirt collar.  Doing otherwise does nothing but undermine people's trust in you (because they know you're bullshitting), and make the person who asked you for help in the first place feel guilty for doing so.

Stop pretending to care.  Only say you care and you want to listen if you actually do.  Be honest about yourself and your feelings.

3. Assholes Are Made, Not Born

In Wong's article, he called Blake's speech in Glengarry Glen Ross the "greatest scene in the history of movies."  As evidence of this, he cites that Baldwin was nominated for an Oscar for that role, and it's the only scene he's in.  This is patently false, by the way; Al Pacino was actually nominated for the award from that film.  But this is Cracked.  Not exactly known for journalistic integrity, and nobody ever said a New York Times bestselling author had to be factually accurate (just look at Dan Brown).

But let's indulge David Wong's delusion for a moment and pretend he's right.  By similar logic, Anthony Hopkins was only on screen for 16 minutes in The Silence of the Lambs and he actually won Best Actor for it.  That doesn't mean Hannibal Lecter belongs on a motivational poster.  This is why when choosing fictional role models, you need to show a little more discretion than who won an Academy Award (and, you know, not make shit up).

If I had to pick that one scene in media that changed my life, it would without a doubt be the scene in Les Misérables when the Bishop of Digne tells the police that he gave Valjean the silverware (which Valjean stole from him) to spare him a trip back to prison, and throws in two very expensive candlesticks because why the fuck not:



I'm only using the 2012 movie version because the internet wasn't a thing yet when I saw the musical back in 1991.  Like Alec Baldwin's character, the Bishop is in exactly one scene.  Like Alec Baldwin's character, he motivates Valjean to become the hero of the story.  Unlike Alec Baldwin's character, he does it through compassion, kindness, and mercy rather than verbal abuse.

Here is a man of the Church who gave some stranger off the street a warm bed to sleep in and food and wine, and his hospitality gets repaid by the stranger then robbing his ass blind.  He could have easily sought -- and would have been well within his right -- to teach Valjean a lesson and turn him in and get his silver back.  After all, "thou shalt not steal" is totally one of the Commandments, right?  But he doesn't.  The Bishop instead lies to the police (also against the Commandment about not bearing false witness), and then makes good on it by actually giving him the silver and candlesticks.  And the only thing the Bishop asks in return is for Valjean to use the money to turn his life around.

To little ten-year-old me sitting in that theatre watching, that was the most powerful thing I had ever seen in fiction, before or since.

Because what the Bishop knew is that people are not born assholes.  They are made into assholes by the fucked up shit they have to learn in order to survive.  And by not learning good and healthy ways of dealing with the world.

Having grown up in 19th century France, Valjean would have learned early that when you're broke, sometimes stealing is a necessity.  That's what he went to jail for in the first place: stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister's starving child.  All the law had taught him was that no good deed goes unpunished, which was why he kept trying to escape and why years kept getting added onto his sentence.  Then when he was finally paroled, his status as an ex-con made him such a social outcast that the Bishop was literally the first person in the film to not treat him like a goddamned leper.  So it was small wonder that his first instinct was to take advantage and grab what he could.

But again, the Bishop realized this.  Which was why he did what he did, figuring that a little compassion and empathy would go a lot farther than another turn on the chain gang.

And guess what?  He was right.

Because just as assholes are made, so can they be unmade.

And no, this doesn't only happen in fiction.  In October of 2013, a similar thing happened to a real person.  Policewoman gets called to a grocery store because of a woman shoplifting.  After questioning, the woman reveals she was shoplifting because she had no food for her children.  Because the amount is so little -- under $300 -- the cop can choose whether to arrest her or not.  Rather than have her taken into custody, the cop instead buys her a week's worth of food and helps her get it back to her house, and only elects to issue her a court summons and a misdemeanor charge (which won't hinder her getting employment).  And the only thing she asks is for the woman to help someone else out.

And then there's this one from 2008.  Kid tries to rob you at knifepoint?  Give him your wallet.  Then offer your coat.  Then offer to get him dinner and talk to him.  Find out that he's really not a bad kid; he just never learned how to be a good one.  You get your wallet back.  Ask for nothing but his knife in return so that he can't hurt someone else with it.  He gives it to you, and you hand him $20.  While you may not ever see him again so you don't know if he took it to heart like Valjean, you've certainly done more to set him on the right path than prison ever would have.

So the lesson here?  Use your discretion, of course, but do nice shit for people whenever you can.  Because if assholes learned how to be assholes by watching assholes, they can also learn how to be good people by watching good people.  Be the good person for them to watch.

4. Love Is Not a Checklist

Ever wonder why movie stars spend such ridiculous sums of money on clothes?  Like if they make more cash than your annual salary in the minute it takes you to use the bathroom in the morning, why are they going to blow it all on obscenely expensive clothes?  I mean, they're spending $5,000 on a dress when they could literally get 250 dresses at Target for the same price.

The reason they spend that kind of money on clothes is because yo, when was the last time you went clothes-shopping at Target? How long did it take you to find an outfit that didn't cling to everything you wanted to hide about yourself?

The reason they spend that kind of money on clothes is the same reason tailoring is a specialized art that takes years to learn while the clothes on the rack at Target and K-Mart are made by machines.  Mass-produced clothes may fit, but they won't fit well.  If you want clothes specifically to make your very unique body look as good as possible?  You need someone to design them for you and no one else.

Dating advice is like the dress rack at Wal-Mart: it tries to fit everybody at once by treating them all the same, and in the process just makes everybody look and feel terrible.  And the sizes always lie.

Further on in the article, Wong tries to tie his Alec Baldwin nonsense to dating.  While he does raise one good point -- if "nice" is the only way you can describe yourself, that's why you're single -- he misses the boat entirely with this little piece of fool's gold:

"So, what, you're saying that I should pick up a book on how to get girls?"
Only if step one in the book is "Start making yourself into the type of person girls want to be around."
Because that's the step that gets skipped -- it's always "How can I get a job?" and not "How can I become the type of person employers want?"  It's "How can I get pretty girls to like me?" instead of "How can I become the type of person that pretty girls like?"

Yeah, let me put this to rest right now.  The reason all the dating advice you have ever heard and ever will hear on How To Get the Girl/Guy is bullshit is because it's all making one fatal assumption: that there is a universal "type" that pretty girls/hot guys want.

There is good news and bad news here, so I'll go with the bad news first: there is absolutely nothing you can do to make yourself attractive to the person you like.  You can be the funniest, sweetest, most interesting person they have ever met.  But if there is no spark there, there will be no relationship.  And that spark is completely up to chance.  You can't create it out of nowhere.  It's either there or it isn't.

The most you can do is eliminate things about yourself which are pretty universally unattractive.  Nobody wants to date someone who doesn't bathe and can't hold a conversation without groping them.  But "giving up your favorite hobbies" will not make you a catch.  The sexist assumption that pretty girls don't have "guy hobbies" and hot guys don't have "girl hobbies" is a rant for another day.  And even if it did, there is no partner on earth worth giving up everything that makes you happy.  In fact?  Asking you to give up your hobbies and favorite activities is an indicator of domestic abuse.

The good news is that your chances of finding a mate increase exponentially when you figure out what exactly you want in one.  Because then you can start going to places where you're more likely to meet that person. You want someone who plays video games?  Awesome.  Keep hanging out at GameStop or your local indie shop.  If you're a straight male, take extra care to not be a sexist douchecanoe to the women you're trying to talk to.  Strike up conversation and talk about video games.  You want someone you can watch the Lord of the Rings extended editions with or marathon Attack on Titan?  You should know or be able to figure out exactly where to look for them.

Of course, common interests are just the start.  To truly figure out what you want in a mate, you need some alone time to figure out who you are first, and what you need.  And no, you don't even have to stop playing Call of Duty to do that.  We all have emotional baggage regardless of gender, and when you're single is the perfect time to start sorting that shit out.  Because as previously mentioned, unless you've lived in a real-life mock-up of Pleasantville all your life, you've probably had to learn some messed up lessons of your own to make it through your life so far, and retraining yourself to deal with the world in a healthy manner will go a long way to making you a happier, more desirable person.

There is no secret to being attractive, and that is the secret that nobody wants to tell you because they don't want to admit it themselves.  But if there is one proactive thing you can do, it's this: stop looking.

You may have heard it before, but probably never heard why.  The reason why is that when you're looking for a mate, your brain automatically starts playing a game of Bang or Pass with everyone of your preferred gender(s), and it uses a really shitty sorting algorithm of first impressions and current mood.  When you're pissed off about shit, your brain will be the pettiest little pet and pick out every single flaw it sees in the person.  Purely because you're annoyed at something completely unrelated.  Likewise, when you're stoked about the new comic book movie coming out next week, your brain will overstate everyone's desirability and see a potential dinner-and-said-comic-book-movie lurking at every corner.  Purely because you're excited about something unrelated.

Basically, you start to view people through the filter of "potential mate," and you will end up getting tunnel vision in the same way you shop for clothes and exclude everything that isn't in your size.

And like the dress rack at Wal-Mart, you may be missing something that would be perfect for you just because the number wasn't what usually fit you, or walking away with something that makes you look and feel terrible because it was the best of your narrowed choices, but not what you really wanted.

5. "Kill 'Em With Kindness" Really Does Work

You remember hearing this advice in dealing with bullies, right?  And you remember as a kid thinking it was such utter bullshit because the only thing your bully understood was a good kick in the glove box?  Yeah, me too.  But while this is really awful advice when you're a kid, when you're an adult, things are different.  And applying the honey is far more effective than reaching for the meat cleaver.

Except for the truly sociopathic among us, most people will feel at least some sense of shame when someone they've been a real shit to responds with courtesy and respect.  This is something everyone who has ever worked customer service figures out quickly enough.  You let them rage at you, you apologize for the mistake, you explain the situation, and you tell them very clearly how you're going to fix it.  And you apologize again and you thank them for bringing the matter to your attention.  I cannot tell you how many times I've had a complete stranger go from cursing me out to sheepishly apologizing for doing so.

Why?  Because people are socialized to respond to emotions the way homeopathy tries to treat whooping cough.  Anger is met with anger.  Sadness is met with sadness.  Joy is met with joy.  Except emotions aren't caused by bacteria, so homeopathic principles work pretty well on it.  Basically, the easiest way to de-escalate a situation is to calm your own tits first.

I feel the need to make this point because the original article is so cartoonishly over-the-top buttmad that there are people out there annoyed at this cynical notion that you have to have some kind of use in the world in order to be considered worthy of the oxygen you're taking in.  This is evident in the very first comparison Wong makes: the world is somebody whose loved one is dying of a gunshot wound, and you are the unfortunate person wandering around with a screwdriver.

It's ridiculous because there is only one circumstance in the world that is that dire, and that is "somebody actually bleeding to death from a gunshot wound."  People may need things, but for the most part, nobody is going to die if you personally can't perform trauma surgery.  Needs can be prioritized.  So it does everybody a world of good to realize that even if you are wandering around an accident scene with naught but a screwdriver, that doesn't make you completely useless and unworthy of being cared about.  All it means is that you lack the skillset or the tools to help this specific person (that's what we have 9-1-1 for).  Eventually that screwdriver will be useful.  Just not right now.

And that's really the entire problem with the worldview in Wong's article.  Besides this absolutely cruel, borderline eugenics idea that you are only as worthy as you are useful -- don't even get me started on how this comes from a place of able-bodied and able-minded privilege -- it also fights self improvement because...

6. The World Is Only As Terrible Or Wonderful a Place As You Make It

This is the Holy Grail of all self-help advice.  Right here.  Because it says everything you will ever need to remember for the rest of your life.  How you see the world affects literally everything you do in it.  The mountain spring from which all unmotivated apathy flows is the cynicism that the world is a shitty place, so it's not worth being a good person.  It's the basis for every Crapsack World and Bad Future in every story ever.  You play the game or die in the gutter because life is cheap and no one gives a shit.

First, if you haven't seen the final episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion, you really need to.  Go watch it.  Now. There will be a quiz later.

See, the assumption that the world is a shitty place and that all people are selfish and use you for however you benefit them by default is Wong's first mistake, and it's what leads to all the others.  If you believe that nobody cares about you as a person and only about what you can do for them, then it's natural that you will feel unmotivated if you don't think you have anything to offer.

David Wong's solution is to come up with literally anything to offer the world in exchange for a job and a girlfriend.  But the reality is that if everyone is that much of an asshole, then what exactly is the point of meeting their needs when they don't care about you?

That should be the first crack in the mirror.  Your first clue that maybe Wong's advice isn't really about self-improvement at all, and more about airing his own insecurities by tearing down other people (kinda like Asuka).

Because if the world is full of such terrible, uncaring people, then how exactly is "improvement" even defined?  By being that one turd in the bowl that refuses to flush?

Yeah, I realize that episode of Evangelion is a mindscrew on acid.  But once you're done cleaning your brain off the wall, the most important point it makes is this: when you only see people as useful skillsets and erase all other value that they have, you make the world that much shittier a place for yourself and others.

Because skillsets are not forever.  You can lose them.  They can become obsolete.  And if your entire identity and self-worth is based upon That Thing You Do -- which is what Wong's article advocates -- then your identity will crumble the minute That Thing You Do is no longer relevant or you stop being able/willing to do it.

Because see, you don't hate yourself because "you don't do anything."  You hate yourself because you see people as inherently selfish and horrible and "people" includes "you."  If you start with changing your thinking in that regard, everything else falls into place, for one very simple reason: your view of the world is really your view of yourself projected onto everyone else.

You are not truly capable of being a good person if you don't think people can be good in the first place.  You hate yourself because you assume everyone else does because you don't do anything useful.  In reality, it's the reverse: you think people who don't do anything useful are worthless, so you assume others do as well because you can only see the world from the one vantage point you choose.

The biggest motivator you will ever have is changing your vantage point.  Seeing things from another angle.  Flipping the chessboard.

The ultimate secret to being a better person is believing that the world is worth improving because there are good people in it.  As long as you believe that, there is no force on earth that can stop you from being the best you can possibly be.

If you want to work here?  Don't close the sale.

Open the fucking door.

Monday, August 4, 2014

Why "Mary Sue" is Not Literary Criticism

So, we have a character.

She is considered the greatest spy in the department.  Has whatever gadget she needs to get out of the death trap of the day.  Causes millions of dollars worth of collateral damage but never has to pay any of it back or worry about losing her job as a result.  Manages to bed every attractive member of the opposite sex she comes across, and even gets a few of them to defect after falling in love with her.  Can handle any firearm with instant expertise, and can operate any vehicle she happens to find herself in well enough to avoid getting her butt shot off.  Oh yes, and she's still considered the world's greatest secret agent despite not being able to go five minutes without being identified (and subsequently setting off a chase and explosions).  Has fiercely loyal companions no matter how much of an egotist she is.  Has a trail of men willing to die for her despite knowing they're little more than a notch in her headboard.

Sound like the worst Mary Sue ever written?  Who the hell could sell a story that bad?  Who the hell could read something that bad without going all MST3K on it?

...Guess what, guys?

I just described James Bond.  Only, you know, if he was female.

This is why "Mary Sue" is at best a useless critical catchphrase, and at worst a symptom of the misogyny inherent in our culture.

There is no denying that there are badly-written wish fulfillment characters out there, and one trip through the first two pages of Fanfiction.net in virtually any category will turn up pleny of them.  But here's the thing: if you are legit criticizing the writing, a badly-written wish fulfillment character being female and fan-created should not make the writing so much worse so as to deserve its own gendered insult.  Especially when we have just as many cheesy wish fulfillment characters in published fiction who are lauded and loved while doing everything the Mary Sue is demonized for.  They just happen to be male.

When you throw around the term Mary Sue as a pejorative, what you're effectively saying is that women's wish fulfillment is inferior solely because it comes from women.  Especially when male characters who are obviously the same kind of wish fulfillment power fantasy -- Superman, Conan the Barbarian, James T. Kirk, Tommy Vercetti, Simon Templar, and yes, James Bond, just to name a few -- are given not just a free pass, but national and/or worldwide acclaim for being such flawless badasses.

This begs the question of why the vast majority of bad original fanfiction characters are female, while the vast majority of just-as-bad published characters happen to be male.  And there's a very simple answer, there.

The fiction market, from books to video games, is driven primarily by men.  Most writers in the industry are male, and they cater to male audiences.  They are men writing stuff for other men.  And not even all men at that.  They write for a specific subset of men: straight, white, insecure, and with disposable income.

And thus, they either ignore the interests of women and girls wholesale, or superficially pay lipservice to them.  So as women, we go on and do what we do best: tell them 'screw you' and we write the stuff we want to see.  That's really what fanfiction is.  It's women filling in the blanks of published media for other women.

This is why men have no need for fanfiction at best, and find it silly, stupid, weird, and even threatening at worst.  Because women exercising agency and doing things entirely for ourselves and making our wants public without caring what men think has always been the subject of ridicule.  But that's another rant entirely.

So with most fanfic writers being girls, it's only natural that most characters created by those fanfic writers are also going to be girls.  Girls who get to do all the cool shit they see boys do in media.  Girls who get to be flawless badasses and steal the show the way the boys do.  Girls, like the boys they watch, whom everyone wants to do or be, and the only people who hate them are just jealous.

And they're doing it for free.

So if you want to keep feeding the patriarchal system and dismissing women's wish fulfillment fantasies as Mary Sue drivel?  Fine.  Just remember that your fantasies are just as shallow, just as stupid, just as ridiculous, and just as badly written.

But unlike Mary Sue? You're paying money for them.

Monday, July 14, 2014

Common Core Is a Better Way of Teaching Math Because It Actually IS Math

This is a post for math nerds, and for those who wanted to be math nerds, but sucked at it.  But it's especially a post for those who discovered as adults that they weren't nearly as bad at math as they thought.

Let's pretend for a minute that you're at a store and you only have cash.  You have to buy stuff for dinner, and it has to be under $20 because that's all you've got, so you start keeping a running total.  You don't have a pencil, pen, or paper, and you also left your phone on the kitchen table at home so you don't have a calculator.  The items you choose are $6.99, $5.99, $1.25, and $3.99.  You've always sucked at math, but you somehow manage to add up the prices of the items you want in your head and not wind up mortified at the register or out your proper change.

So how do you do it?  Lay out the numbers in your head and carry from column to column?  Hell no.  That takes too long and it's too hard to keep it all straight without writing it down even if you are a visual learner.  No, instead, you reflexively start counting them.

You round up the first two items to $7 and $6, respectively, so you get $13 so far.  You round up the $3.99 item to $4 and add it, so that gives you $17.  You add the $1.25 item to get $18.25.  Then you count back $0.03 because of the rounding to get $18.22.

Now, to know that the cashier isn't shortchanging you, you figure out how much you're supposed to get back.  You work with the cents first.  From $0.22, it takes $0.08 to get to $0.30, and then $0.70 to get to the next whole dollar, which is $19.  $20 less $19 is $1, so you should get $1.78 back in change.

This is what common core math is.  It's the way we learn to do math as adults after we figure out the way we learned it as kids is bullshit.

The problem with the Old Way of learning math -- in particular, the borrow/carry method of addition and subtraction -- is that it's not math at all.  And because of that, all it does is reinforce bad number theory, and teach kids principles that later turn out to be completely wrong.

See, borrow/carry starts off on a bad foot because it uses the "column" theory of numbers.  That is, separating multi-digit numbers into valued columns: ones, tens, hundreds, etc.  When you're a kid, this kind of visual explanation holds water at first because it's easy to remember and it makes big numbers not seem so scary.  But it falls apart like a bad game of Jenga when you start throwing zeros in there.  Because you're taught that there's nothing in that column, and the zero is just a placeholder.  But we don't do that for every column, because Reasons.  And if you're a kid like me, you start thinking that the difference between 13 and 1,300 is a couple of zeros (rather than "1,287").

Borrow/carry continues on an even worse foot because in the course of learning it, you're taught that the reason you have to "borrow" a 1 from the next column over is because you "can't subtract a larger number from a smaller one."  That very principle turns out to be bullshit later when you start learning integers and negative numbers.  And again, if you're a kid like me, at that point you don't know what to think, because you don't know why the stuff you were taught before is complete lies now, and you're afraid to learn anything new because that will turn out to be more lies in a couple of years.  And while you're passing classes, you're only doing so because you're good at memorizing rules, even if you have no clue what the hell you're even doing and wish somebody would teach you something consistent.  You start to hate math, not because you suck at it, but because you can't trust it.

Common core, on the other hand, uses the far more sound set theory of numbers.  There are no columns; each number is its own set.  It's the exact same way we learned to add and subtract single-digit numbers: by counting.  Counting doesn't change or become irrelevant just because the numbers get bigger.  410 is 410, not 4 hundreds, 1 ten, and no ones (but we put a zero there anyway, because Reasons).  Thus, adding to it or subtracting from it is simply a matter of counting forward or backward (in other words, adding to the set or taking away from it).  Common core simply teaches kids to do so in large, easy blocks since they don't have nearly enough fingers.

This goes for multiplication and division, too.  Take, for example, 26 x 54.  This is the old way you would solve that one:

     26
  x 54
   104
 130  
 1404

Guess what?  This is still using the borrowing/carrying number column nonsense.  And it's still a pain in the ass to keep straight in your head without the ability to write it down (especially having to shift the second row over one, which I always forgot to do as a kid because I never learned why I had to until I was an adult).

Now, let's look at the common core method of solving the same problem.

First, let's remember what we're doing.  We're adding 26 to itself 54 times.  So the easiest way to think of it is to first work with 25 instead of 26 (we'll go back to the leftovers at the end).  So now we're adding 25 to itself 54 times.  And to make 54 easier to work with, we break that down into 50 + 4.

So first we start with the easy stuff:

25 x 10 = 250.

Now, since 10 x 5 = 50, we have to take that 250 and multiply it by 5:

200 x 5 = 1000
50 x 5 = 250

And now the 4:

25 x 4 = 100

So now we add all those neat round numbers together:

1000 + 250 + 100 = 1350

Now, back to the leftovers.  We've done 25 x 54.  So 26 x 54 would just be adding another 54 to what we've already got:

1350 + 54 = 1404

Sure, it's a few more steps.  But those steps are logical.  They make sense, and it's clear why what's being done is being done.  That's the biggest problem with the Old Way; even if it works consistently, you can't really explain the logic behind it (you have to borrow because you can't subtract 8 from 7, but apparently you can borrow 1 from 0 and get 9...somehow).  And if you don't know the logic, it's far easier to miss a step or get the order of steps wrong, and far harder to realize when you've screwed up.  And that's especially bad in math, because like all hard sciences, math functions purely on logic.

So if common core is so great, why are so many schools having trouble with it?

Because even the best teaching methods are going to fail miserably if the execution sucks.  And in this case?  Holy shit does it ever suck.  The point of common core is to simplify these lessons, so adding in counterintuitive steps just creates more confusion.  But that's where you need to come up with better lesson plans that use this method, not pitch the baby out with the bathwater because Everything New Is Bad.

Really, the idea behind common core math is that as adults, we have learned better ways of doing math than what we were taught originally.  So why on earth are we still teaching our children these same cumbersome, nonsense methods that we don't even use anymore?  Why not cut out the floundering and just teach them the better way to start with?

It's taken me way longer than it ever should have to figure out that I don't actually suck at math.  I never did.  I sucked at learning math, because it was being taught to me using faulty, kludged logic.  Using bad logic to teach any kind of science is like using water from the toilet bowl to make your coffee; even the most perfect roast in the world is going to taste like shit if shit is what you start with.

Monday, June 30, 2014

The Affordable Care Act Is the Reason I'm Alive

Warning for very frank discussion of suicide and suicidal thoughts and tendencies.

When I walked into my doctor's office last week for a baseline, it was the first time I had been able to see one outside of an urgent care center for the last decade, because I did not have and could not afford proper insurance.  Before enrolling in a Marketplace plan earlier this year, the last time I had insurance that even covered doctor's visits was when I was still on my parents' policy.  Which meant that I could not see a doctor without one of them in the room, and that one was usually my mother.

This was unfortunate, as my mother has always believed, and still largely does, that certain fields of medicine are strictly quack.  Lies and bollocks, meant to fleece patients out of their money by treating medical conditions that don't really exist.  She believes this about one certain field in particular: mental health.  To my mother and millions of people who think like her, deficient mental health is nothing more than a moral failing, and the only help a mental patient needs is a swift kick somewhere sensitive.

The first time I ever considered suicide, I was seven years old.  The first time I attempted it, I was eight.  I figured out the hard way that a telephone cord makes an awful ligature.

I do not remember much from when I was that young, except for how I felt like an instigator of terrible things, even if I had no idea how or why I caused them.  I felt guilty and responsible for everything around me.

I also remember being too ashamed to say anything about these feelings to a doctor with my mother in the room.  Because I did not need reminding that I was a moral failure.

But when I walked into my new general physician's office last week, my mother was not with me.  I could talk about anything I wanted.  I originally was not going to mention the constant guilt and worthlessness and hopelessness, and how every time I talked about "the future" I got this sick feeling inside because I did not think I had one.  I was originally not going to talk about how I was shopping around at funeral homes to get the best deal on prepaid disposal services so that my family would not have to worry about cleaning up a body when I killed myself later this year.  I was originally not going to say that my birthday a month ago was the last one I was ever planning to see.  I was originally going to keep that moral failing to myself.

But fortunately for me, I was wearing a t-shirt.  A shirt which exposed my arms, and the scars on them.  Places I had scratched skin off my wrists.  Places I had taken razor blades to them, when merely biting the inside of my mouth until it hurt to eat no longer did the trick.  Most of those scars were old, but not all.  In particular, three prominent gashes from a razor blade that I had given myself just last month.  That I blamed on my cat when anybody asked.

The doctor noticed these.  Started asking questions.  Goodness, that looks painful, how did you get that?  But with that look, that tone, that made it obvious he already knew the answer.  But in order to do anything, he needed to hear that answer from me.

I was originally going to shut up and keep it to myself.  I didn't.

While I did not tell him everything, I told him enough.  For the first time, I did not blame the cat.  I owned up to the scars.  I told him I shouldn't exist.  When he asked why I believed that, I didn't have an answer.  When he asked how long I had felt that way, I told him I couldn't remember ever feeling different.

There was more to that conversation than could ever fit into a blog post without becoming a novel, of course.  But the important part was that for the first time in my life, it was made apparent that my mother was wrong.  I wasn't a moral failure.  I was simply a sick person with messed up brain chemistry, and there were ways to treat that.

I was told, for the first time ever, that I did not have to suffer anymore.

I walked out of that office with a prescription that cost me no more than a $5 copay at the pharmacy.

But I also walked out with something else.  Something free and at the same time priceless.  I walked out of that office with hope.  With the knowledge that it did not have to end with me at the bottom of a gator-infested canal around the corner from where I worked.  Or with me hanging from the old mango tree in my backyard.  With the knowledge that it did not have to end, period.

I would not have had this opportunity without the Affordable Care Act.  Without my own doctor and my own insurance, without the ability to receive treatment without my mother in the room, without the ability to talk about this and not be judged a failure, I would still be planning to die instead of apartment-hunting.

While we still have a long way to go on mental health in this country -- nobody should have to suffer in silence when help is literally sitting three feet away, because they're too ashamed of what they're feeling to speak up -- but making it part of standardized healthcare rather than a Cadillac feature you have to pay for with a blood sacrifice and your firstborn is a huge step in the proper direction.

Thanks, Obama.

Friday, June 20, 2014

Why Both Sides of the Gun Debate Need to Pipe the Fuck Down

We do not have a gun problem.

Yeah, I said it.  This progressive does not think guns are the problem, and has a recurring pipe dream wherein both sides of the gun debate -- both the ammosexuals worshipping Wayne LaPierre as some kind of messianic Rambo instead of the corporate shill he is and the Moms Demand Action reactionaries who can't tell you how the thing they want to ban even works -- sit down and shut up like the children they are and let the adults in the middle do the talking.

"Guns don't kill people" is a stupidly irritating way of phrasing it -- because killing is what guns were originally invented to do; they are not a "misused tool" when you shoot people with them, they are doing exactly what they were built for, so comparing them to cars and screwdrivers and pencils and maxi pads and anything else that was designed for a purpose completely unrelated to killing and wounding is ridiculous -- but the sentiment behind this annoying catchphrase is valid; a gun is an inanimate object.  It can't kill anything without a human operator pulling the trigger.  But it's far easier for people to blame an inanimate object rather than a functionally broken society that encourages violence against one another, because the inanimate object can't talk back to you and tell you you're full of shit.  In the 1950s, it was comic books.  In the 1990s, it was video games.  Today, it's guns.  Tomorrow, it'll be computers.  Or porn.  Yeah, probably porn.

The problem with the NRA side is that "well just arm everybody" is not going to accomplish anything (other than making gun manufacturers rich, which, let's not kid ourselves any longer that that's really the NRA's mission and has been for a long time).  Saying the cure for violence is more guns is like saying the cure for lung cancer is more cigarettes.  Guns are not the sole and direct cause of violence, but throwing more of them at the problem sure as fuck won't help.

Because that is why the very concept of "gun control" in this country is an illusion.  There are just too fucking many of them.

Policing gun sales, especially with the advent of the internet, is like Bill Murray in Caddyshack with the damned gophers.  For a very recent and horrifying illustration of this, look no further than the Las Vegas shooters from a couple weeks ago.  Jerad Miller was a felon, thus already barred from legally buying a gun.  So what's a militant right-wing bigot to do in order to start the revolution and fight The Man?  Buy his guns on Facebook, of course!

Gun sales are against the TOS, but who reads that shit anyway?

My point is that stricter gun control laws would not have stopped Jerad Miller from killing 3 people, because the existing laws had already covered him; he just found a way around them.  Granted, that has not been the case for a frightening number of mass shooters, many of whom purchased their weapons legally (not included in the linked article: Elliot Rodgers, the UCSB shooter, who also purchased 3 handguns completely legal), so the "well, crazy people don't care about the law anyway so why bother?" argument doesn't hold up, either; James Holmes and Jared Loughner obviously cared to play by the rules long enough to obtain their weapons clean.  And I agree that we shouldn't make it easy for people like them.

But the problem is twofold: 1) we don't enforce the laws we've already got, and 2) we have a far bigger problem of too many people who want to kill other people in the first place.

You want to know what would've actually stopped James Holmes?  If the cops had listened to the psychiatrist who was treating him when she told them he was dangerous a little more than a month before the shooting.  The Columbine shooters?  Parents attentive enough to know what their kids were doing (spoiler: building explosives in the garage).  Adam Lanza?  A better and more informed diagnosis (we can start with not blindly using Asperger's as a catch-all for every awkward kid that walks through the door).  Jared Loughner?  Wade Michael Page (the Wisconsin Sikh temple shooter)?  Better access to mental healthcare (Loughner was an undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic at the time of the shooting), and in Page's case, a crackdown on the white supremacist echo chamber that fed his rage machine.

In virtually every shooting of this kind, you'll find warning signs.  Signs which went ignored.  In Elliot Rodgers' case?  A string of Youtube videos and a 140-page manifesto detailing how he was going to get revenge on society for denying him his hot blonde sorority girlfriend.  In Lanza's case?  A fascination with shootings and killing (particularly his obsession with Columbine).  And in Jerad Miller's case?  That he was at the Bundy Ranch supporting the waving of guns at BLM agents was a pretty big clue something wasn't right (his begging for a gun on Facebook to start the revolution was the giant neon signboard).  Warning signs that, had they been heeded, would've allowed law enforcement and/or the mental health system to intervene before something bad happened.

Problem is, we don't care enough about solving the reasons people kill each other.  Caring about who is "right" and how much control they get over people who are "wrong" is a lot easier and more satisfying precisely because it doesn't do jack shit.

That's why we're obsessed with locking up criminals rather than preventing crime (and because the for-profit prison system creates a demand to fill jails, but that's another rant entirely).

Which brings me to my next point: more gun control isn't a magic pill that's going to reduce violent crime rates, either.  It may make it slightly harder for people to commit crime with guns, but it won't really stop anyone.  Because of the aforementioned problem of having too many guns in circulation to effectively police sales.  And because guns do not cause crime; guns are tools used in crimes.  Expecting gun control to reduce crime is like expecting Prohibition to reduce alcoholism, and we all know how well that worked out.

If you want to effectively reduce crime, you have to attack that shit at the source.  People who point to gun bans and lower crime rates in places like Australia, the United Kingdom, and Japan tend to forget that those countries don't just ban guns.  They also have a much better and better-run social safety net than we do here.  All three have universal healthcare.  Australia has a minimum wage more than twice that of the U.S.  The United Kingdom spends the same percentage of its GDP on the health and welfare of its citizens (pensions, education, healthcare, and welfare) that the U.S. spends of its GDP on everything, ever.  In Japan, not only are public universities far more respected than private ones -- the University of Tokyo is #23 worldwide -- but the cost is dirt cheap compared to the U.S., and the student loan structure doesn't leave students broke for life.

Bottom line is that countries with gun bans and some of the lowest homicide rates on the planet are also looking after their citizens far better than we are.  And when people aren't starving, uneducated/barely educated wage slaves, they tend to have fewer reasons to be violent.

Stopping gun violence isn't about stopping guns; it's about stopping violence, period.  If you can curb that, it won't matter who owns a gun because they'll have fewer reasons to point it at anyone.

You want to stop violence?  Stop poverty.  Stop hatred.

Handing out or taking away a gun will not stop either of those.

If you want to stop poverty and hatred?  Don't hand out guns.  Instead, hand out living wages.  Hand out education.  Hand out healthcare.  Hand out mental healthcare.  Hand out birth control.  Hand out compassion.

Don't take away guns.  Instead, take away fear.  Take away uncertainty.  Take away that which makes people feel threatened and rejected.

If you don't want to do that?  Then shut up and get out of the way so other people can.


Thursday, May 29, 2014

Can We Stop Confusing Remorseless Hatred With Mental Illness?

Unless you've been living in a missile silo the last few days, you've likely heard about how one Elliot Rodgers spent his Friday night on May 27 (spoiler: he killed six people).  And you've likely read his 140-page wall of text or seen his videos, or at least heard about their content.  And I'm sure you've likely heard everyone who has uttered a single word about this tragedy use six dead people as props for a useless gun control debate (because California has some of the strictest gun control laws in the entire country and that obviously didn't stop this guy) before they've even been embalmed.  Or worse yet, as props for a debate on mental health, because clearly a guy who murders six people in cold blood has got to be nuts.

Well, this isn't a rehash of any of that, so pay the fuck attention.

Elliot Rodgers was not crazy.  Elliot Rodgers was pure fucking evil.  Do not contribute to the stigma that those with mental illness face by confusing the two.  Because it's entirely possible to be a violent, dangerous person and still be perfectly sane.  As in you are perfectly aware of reality and perfectly aware that what you're doing is wrong, you just don't give a shit.

Rodgers made the motivation for his killing spree more than obvious.  He didn't think the people he killed were demons or space aliens or government spies.  He didn't think there was some vast global conspiracy out to get him.  He planned his killing spree as revenge on others who had what he did not, or who didn't give him what he thought he deserved.  He hated women for not finding him attractive.  He hated men  for being attractive when he wasn't.

That doesn't make him mentally ill.  That makes him vindictive, self-absorbed, and violently petty.  It speaks not to a sickness of the mind, but to a sickness of the society that taught him to be vindictive, self-absorbed, and violently petty.  It speaks to a toxic culture of privilege and entitlement that, when unchecked, produces those with the inability to empathize with others, or to care about anything but their own wants and desires.

Rodgers was rich, the son of an assistant Hollywood director behind a very lucrative film franchise (The Hunger Games).  And if you have the stomach to read his rambling manifesto, it becomes apparent that he didn't hear the word "no" a lot as a child, at least in regard to material possessions.  So when he got to high school and college and started getting the word "no" from women who didn't want to date him and men who didn't want to hang around with him, he eventually heard it one too many times and decided he'd had enough.

Because to Elliot Rodgers, there was no difference between people and possessions.  A girlfriend was no different than a sportscar.  That's why he didn't want just any woman to find him attractive.  He wanted a hot blonde sorority girl.  She would be as much of a status symbol as a pair of Armani shoes and nothing more.

No doubt you've heard many feminist blogs talk about the issue of misogyny in Rodgers' motives.  And yes, to a point they're right.  He was raised to see women as objects and trophies, and hated them when they defied his will by rejecting him; he took it as an insult to his entire being that they didn't act like the characters in his father's movies and throw themselves at him because he's The Hero.

But his pathology went beyond simple sexism and rape culture.  Hollywood is also the epicenter of toxic human consumerism, where people are used and thrown away daily like condoms in a nightclub restroom.  Thus, Rodgers rejected the idea that human life has value beyond amusing and entertaining him.  If you could not (or would not) pump a neverending supply of air into his bloated ego, he had no use for you.  Why shouldn't he kill you if you pissed him off?

We might be quick to call him delusional or a sociopath, but we would be wrong.  Because to do so is to remove his agency.  And with it, his responsibility for what he did.

And worse yet, when we dismiss people like Elliot Rodgers as "crazy", we inadvertently tar all the mentally ill with that same brush.  We punish everyone else for the sins of this waste of oxygen.  We reinforce the idea that mental illness inherently causes violent behavior, when the opposite is true; the mentally ill are more likely to be victims of violence, not perpetrators.

And all this tarring strengthens the stigma that mental illness already has and makes those who do experience these problems, from depression to schizophrenia, less likely to seek help.  Because doing so is admitting you have a problem in the first place.  Admitting you're "crazy."  Admitting you're a time bomb.  Admitting you are all of the things that we associate with Elliot Rodgers.

So please, the next time you see someone refer to Rodgers or anyone like him as "a nutcase", do kindly correct them.  Take that brush away from them and call people like Rodgers out for what they are: products of a toxic culture that devalues people -- all people -- into playthings and tools of amusement, taken to its extreme logical conclusion.

Elliot Rodgers wasn't crazy.  He knew exactly what he was doing.  He knew it was wrong.  He knew why.

He didn't give a shit.