QBQ! Chapter Five: The Victim

Take it away, Johnny:

I received an e-mail from a gentleman who wrote that during his ten years in the military, whenever something went wrong, the only acceptable response was "No excuses, sir!" He accepted it, he believed it, and he lived it.

He also murdered people for a living, but to all right-thinking people that is supposed to be irrelevant to the point of being untrue. I would tend to think that an organization, particularly one as large as the US Military (Ha ha! I joke! There are no organizations as large as the US Military!) in which "the only acceptable response" to something going wrong is "No excuses" is one in which things are going to go wrong an awful lot, and in which nothing is ever going to be learned from this.

When he returned to civilian life, he started working as a territory manager for a large firm in the food industry. He wasn't doing as well as his company expected, and he wasn't pleased with his own performance, either.

Because how in the hell could any human be pleased with their performance as "a territory manager for a large firm"? It isn't possible. Not even for bureaucratic murderers of the type the military produces. Not for anyone. I am as certain of this as I am of anything in this life (which is to say, not very certain at all, but I hope I'm right).

Miller goes on to tell us that this "gentleman" asked all kinds of Incorrect Questions of his manager until "he went through an in-house training program on personal accountability and the QBQ," after which he

closed his e-mail saying, "I realized when I learned the QBQ that from military to business, in just a few years, I had become what I hated the most: the victim."

This quote could not be more perfect if I had made it up. It's entirely possible that Miller made it up, of course, but if he did so he made it up in order to agree with it, to praise it. This is the kind of insane, hate-filled drivel we're dealing with here in the guise of an inspirational text. The thing you hate the most is the victim? Good god.

"Hating the victim" is perhaps the most pernicious pattern of thought there is. In the context of the military, it certainly explains a lot--for example, how people learn to live with themselves, not thinking of themselves as mass murderers even when they go into poor communities in poor countries and kill the shit out of defenseless poor people, in order to rain profits down on their betters. Closer to home, it explains the prevalence of rape in military communities, and the even-worse-than-usual treatment of its survivors. In a larger context, it's responsible for, among other things, the hate and fear white people have for Blacks, as well as the general sense of disdain most of us feel for anyone of lower class than ourselves. We hate those we have victimized, because otherwise our only option is to hate ourselves.

This military man, having been placed in the position of victim rather than victimizer, had two options: he could grow a sense of empathy, or he could pretend not to be a victim. He, with the QBQ as facilitator, chose the latter, because the former would have required him to question everything he had done up to that point. The latter requires only submission--something a military man is well-trained in.

The irony, of course, is that by submitting he is participating in his own victimization, whereas by learning empathy he would be taking the first steps in combating it. As Annie Hall would say, la-dee-da, la-dee-da.

QBQ! Table of Contents

Things that disprove Intelligent Design

1. Farts
2. The inability of the sweat glands to switch off when not exposed to air
3. Hypothermia
4. Incontinence

Pith

In a comment to this Tiny Revolution post, Phillip Allen says:

 

To the extent that those who buy and control the electoral process manage to convince voters of their preferred narratives, then I suppose you could say that voters are expressing their will -- in the same way the victim of a scam can be said to express their will when they hand over their life savings to a con artist.

 

Thumbs up or whatever.

Actually

Damn this email posting. I do have something to say about Zinn. Wish I could update that first post now.

 

Stop Me Before I Vote Again's Michael J. Smith mentions giving A People's History of the United States to a historically minded but in many respects unaware 16-year-old, which: yes, do that! The two books most formative to my political consciousness were Orwell's Homage to Catalonia and A People's History, read, if I remember correctly, in that order, one after another, cover to cover, when I was in tenth grade or so. I wish I could remember why I read them; I think my mother or father may have suggested Zinn after I was so interested in Orwell, but I don't remember what made me pick up Homage in the first place, particularly since a misguided ninth grader's brain had made me hate 1984 a year earlier (since rectified, multiple times).

 

From Orwell I learned to distrust what I was being told in school and in the news (well, maybe that's close enough for a memoir, but it's not entirely true; I remember being disgusted by the obvious lies in the American history textbooks at least as early as 8th grade, a benefit of growing up with Indian influence, however minor mine was, and generally of being raised by my parents, as I mentioned recently). From Zinn, I learned why, and I learned (a little of) the truth.

 

My father and my brother have been bugging me to read Dostoevsky (bear with me) for a while now. About a month ago, I made the mistake of starting with The Gambler. I didn't get much out of it, and my father says it's not one of Fyodor's best. It struck me as not much different from any other comedy of manners, a mildly entertaining but largely pointless narrative of rich people panicking over how best to fritter away their money (I'm well aware that I'm probably missing something there, much as the tween version of me missed everything in 1984, but that's irrelevant to my point). The only way I could see the book being interesting to anyone was in terms of the history of Russia's relationship with western Europe, which I know some people are interested in. A great deal of the book deals with the Russian characters' discomfort in Europe, their conflicting urges to remain proudly Russian and to assimilate, to be ashamed of their insufficiently European culture. I remember learning actually quite a bit about that in middle school (or maybe early high school) history. And even though ever since that first encounter with Zinn I have been aware that the history we learned in school is not the history of anything other than rich people, it had never occurred to me before that this whole identity anxiety was really just a problem of the aristocracy. While I'm sure that much of the Russian peasantry had some elements of patriotism, they weren't spending their time learning French and playing European composers on their harpsichords or whatever, as an effort to Westernize. They were farming and trying to survive.

 

As obvious as this seems to me now, it wasn't always that obvious, and it isn't obvious to everyone. We learn so early and so intensively that what matters is what matters to the rich that it's very difficult to break out of that habit of thought. That is why Zinn's History is so important, and that is why all of us who know people whose brains are still forming owe it to them and to the world to introduce them to it, as early as possible.

Ah, shit

Howard Zinn, RIP. I have nothing to say.

I said I'd stop doing this, but...

Melissa McEwan: "I really have no fucking idea what is going on in the Obama administration."

 

Uh...no shit?

 

Hey, 'Liss: Read my previous post. Follow the link. Read that. Learn from it. ((((hugs)))) if they're wanted, lololololz.

Keep this in mind, liberals

Chris Floyd:

Many...seem to be operating on the assumption--or under the delusion--that Obama actually had some kind of political-economic-social agenda that he wanted to enact as president, and that he is now "failing" to enact it, "squandering" his opportunity. There still seems to be a belief that he ran for president because he wanted to do something with all that power.

But Obama is not "failing"; he is doing exactly what he set out to do: be the president. That's it. That's all he wanted to do. And he's doing it.

And by the way

To all advocates of endlessly voting for the Democrats because "the alternative would be worse":

We've tried doing it your way for long enough. It ain't working. Let's try it a different way.

UPDATE: In other words.

After a pleasant evening spent with my parents

I'd like to take this opportunity to express how extremely grateful I am to have been raised by the specific people I was raised by. My mother is a rational atheist, a humanist whose utter lack of spirituality and religion gives rise to a deep concern for humanity in the real world; she is a scientist. My father is more what could, but should not, be dismissed as a bit of a kook: he has a sense of the cosmos as a unified, spiritual whole (with none of that "The Universe will make you a billionaire if you just say pretty please" Secret bullshit), and also a deep devotion to community and just in general to values entirely alien to Western capitalist society; he's something of a mystic. The combination of these two worldviews, and the entirely open-minded interchange between them, was, and continues to be, essential in my intellectual development. I always return from time spent with them invigorated.

Plus, my mom knitted me an awesome hat.

Pedometers

Have you ever worked in an office where they hand those things out? And then they try to have a "fun competition" to see who walks the most steps in a given day? To encourage physical activity and health? Yeah. You're not fooling anyone, employers. If you wanted your employees healthy and physically active, you would a) provide better health plans and b) not tether your employees to desks all day long. Human beings are built to be active all day long. Forcing people to try to partition off a small portion of their limited free time as "the time I move" is fundamentally unhealthy, and then using a wide array of tactics, from these pedometer things to pop cultural messages all over the frickin' place, to make them feel bad about not doing it, is just cruel.

 

Speaking of which, I think I'm gonna get back to running every day after work. It really does make you feel more human. And hell, it's warm enough.

Climate

The weather in Rhode Island today would best be described as "monsoon season." It got up to near 60 (degrees Fahrenheit, I mean), gusts of wind as high as some ludicrous number of miles per hour, rain all over the place, isolated flooding, and so on.

Now, it's entirely possible that this weird January weather is just a fluke, not indicative of any larger pattern. But when you have to say "It could just be a fluke" almost every goddamn day, it's not a fucking fluke. It's a pattern.

I have a friend who refuses to accept the science behind anthropogenic climate change, specifically, to hear him say it, because Al Gore is profiting off of talking about it. Similarly, I refuse to believe that oil gives off energy when burned, because Texaco makes money off of it.

YOUR KIDS ARE DOOMED

Middle-school kids have been excitedly whispering "Did you know you can get high from being strangled?" to each other at least since the early 90s, when I was at that age (and if it got to out-of-touch, oblivious 12-year-old me, it was surely common knowledge), and presumably much longer. Someone finally got around to telling the New York Times, and they are shocked.

According to the recent survey of more than 10,642 eighth graders in Oregon, 36.2 percent reported having heard of the choking game, 30.4 said they had heard of someone participating in it and 5.7 percent said they had participated themselves. The survey was conducted in 2008 and reported by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week.

“We’re concerned that this many kids have reported they’re actually practicing this behavior,” said Robert Nystrom, adolescent health manager at the Oregon Public Health Division and one of the authors of the report. “It seems like one in three eighth graders know about this activity, and we have no idea whether they know how dangerous it is.”

The C.D.C. reported in 2008 that an estimated 82 deaths had been caused by the choking game from 1995 to 2007.

Let's go through this step by step, shall we?

So a little over a third of the "more than 10,642 eighth graders" surveyed (does this mean they actually surveyed 10,643, or what?) have heard of the choking game. A little under a third of them (i.e., for all practical purposes the same amount as have heard of it at all) have heard of "someone" doing it. And about one in twenty says that they themselves have done it. You know what? If you surveyed all Americans on any ol' urban legend--say, the one about gang members driving around at night with their lights off so that they can kill the first person who flashes at them--you'd get fairly similar results. "Five percent of Americans say they have killed people for flashing their lights!" Yeah, you know what? I'd be willing to bet that about five percent of middle school students are gonna lie on a survey like that no matter what it's about. So basically what you've done is shown that 30% of them have a friend whose brother did the choking game. Congratulations, you've confirmed that it's an urban legend. I think we knew that already.

In an intelligent publication, that last sentence would be a punchline. You quote this guy trying to catch his breath, panicking that these kids "don't know how dangerous" choking themselves is. For one thing, yes they fucking do: they're animals, and all animals know that not breathing is dangerous. Jesus. But anyway, then you immediately follow it up by revealing how extremely not dangerous it is: nationwide, over thirteen goddamn years, 82 deaths have resulted from the choking game. In other words, again, nationwide, about six deaths every year. Come on. More deaths are caused by untied shoelaces, I can guarantee you. If I had a kid, I'd be more worried about Marlee Matlin personally targeting them for murder than about the choking game.

But this is the New York Times we're talking about--the American media--and so the moral of the story is, as usual: "Be terrified! Lock up your kids!" After all, we have to start training them to be overly credulous and docile in the face of made-up threats sometime.

PS If you read the article, the last paragraph is truly priceless.

Math with the details blurred out

I'm not giving any specifics here, not because I don't want to, but because it's best for job security. Hey, hey.

I'm about to start a new job, making a bit more money than I'm making now. I'm not going to be fantastically wealthy or anything, but for my lifestyle (no kids, no debt, few expenses), it will be noticeably above sufficiency.

Out of curiosity, I looked up the President & CEO of my new company to see how much he made. I was able to find his total compensation for 2008, in salary, bonuses, stocks, options, and "other" income, whatever that is. So admittedly, this figure is slightly out of date, but I'm going to use it anyway, because I'm sure it's accurate enough.

I divided that figure by 365, giving me the amount he makes every day (every day of his life, mind you, not just days he works--whatever "working" actually means for him). Then I divided that number by 24, to give me how much he makes every hour of the day, and again by 60, to give me the amount he makes every minute.

The number I got is only a small amount--under a dollar--less than the hourly wage I'll be earning when I start the job with his company.

In other words, what I will make in an hour of working for this man, he makes almost the same amount every minute of his life. Working, not working, waking, sleeping, whatever. And, remember, this job I'm about to be starting is, relatively speaking, pretty well-paying for your average not-CEO American. This is a state of affairs that apparently most people are perfectly OK with. Including me, I guess. Because, y'know, it's not like I'm planning to do anything about it.

I like TV too

For people who like LOST:

Some obsessive fan took scenes relating to the plane crash that we've seen over the past five years and rearranged them into chronological order (with some irritating 24 style thrown in, but whatever), and it's amazing. My favorite parts are when we see several different perspectives on the same scene at the same time (like when Charlie brushes by Jack on his way to the restroom, at 5:23), with the overlapping dialogue honestly reminding me of something Steve Reich would do (just listen to Cindy telling the passengers to remain seated, starting at 5:52). And watching the plane break up from both the passengers' and the Others' perspectives at the same time is fantastic. If you watch the show and have ten minutes to spare, it's worth it.

Oh

Huh, so apparently Tristero really does hate transgender people, and that weird comment the other day wasn't just a fluke. I mean, I already thought he was reprehensible and a moron, but I guess this is just another way he fulfills those roles. Good to know.

Yep, still don't get it

Every couple of years or so I'll break out Exile on Main St. again to see if I understand what the big whoop about it is yet.

Nope, not yet. I love the Rolling Stones, and there's some good stuff here (though frankly it's pretty much all downhill after "Rocks Off"), but give me Between the Buttons or 12 x 5 or Their Satanic Majesties Request or Aftermath over this bloated nonsense any day.

Belated, as usual

So I knew that Martha Coakley was not someone I particularly cared to see in office (who is?), but I didn't realize until today that she's the nasty piece of work who made her name by first winning a conviction in the Louise Woodward au pair case and then hounding a bunch of almost-definitely-innocent people into jail, where many of them still are, on trumped up child molestation charges. More cases of "protect the children" being used to utterly destroy lives, all for Coakley's personal gain and the American public's sick entertainment.

Knowing this, all the liberal panic* over her loss is even more hilarious. This election, we're being told, is going to usher in fascism in America! As if, a, we didn't have it already, and, b, Coakley herself weren't at least as much a fascist as Brown! Are you kidding me?

In other news, the Supreme Court said corporations can buy elections now. This is apparently new.

*Note also the weirdly unnecessary casual transphobia. Tristero, always a winner.

Holy shit!

Courtesy of ladypoverty's JRB in comments, this interview, in which John G. Miller reveals that he is personally accountable for paying fifty-seven thousand dollars* for Sarah Palin's jacket, is wonderful.

*Also known as several years of most people's lives.

QBQ! Chapter Four: Don't Ask "Why"

This is the chapter where La Miller stops merely giving advice and starts being a full-fledged activist. It's something to behold; let's watch how it happens. The chapter begins with a dramatic list, allowing for a lot of line breaks that take up a bunch of space:

Ever heard these questions?

"Why don't others work harder?"
"Why is this happening to me?"
"Why do they make it so difficult for me to do my job?"

Say them aloud. How do they make you feel? When I say them, I feel powerless, like a victim.

This is clearly bullshit. John G. Miller, I can assure you, has never been powerless in his life. He has no idea what it feels like. His privilege allows him to feel perfectly comfortable lecturing us that "Questions with a 'Why me?' tone to them say, 'I'm a victim of the environment and the people around me.' Not a very productive thought, is it? But we ask them all the time." A dreadful prospect: people having unproductive thoughts all the time. Don't you people know we live to be productive? We have to produce...no, not for ourselves, our families, or our communities, don't be ridiculous. For our bosses.

Now, I will admit that many people do go wrong with the kind of thought that Miller is criticizing. When this happens, though, it is not because of the form of the thought but because of its direction: downward. The example that leaps to mind is the many working-class American whites who, casting about for someone to blame for their shitty situations, direct their frustration and rage upon working-class American Blacks and immigrants rather than against the capitalist pricks who are actually responsible. To reiterate, the problem here is not, as Miller would have it, that whites think someone besides themselves is to blame for their powerlessness; rather, the problem is that they blame those even more powerless than themselves, instead of the people who in reality have seized every ounce of power anyone else may have had and taken it for their own.

However, in the real, non-corporate fantasy world, and away from the sad delusions of understandably angry and confused white people, actions take place in a context, and that context is one of vast inequality. For people who live their entire lives on the bottom rungs of our economy, "Why is this happening to me?" is one of the most empowering questions to ask.

So, what was I talking about with that activism comment at the beginning? Johnny cleverly uses an anecdote to cover the shift:

I was on a long flight, sitting next to a man in his mid-fifties. We introduced ourselves...[blah blah, guy's very wealthy]...he went on to say that he lives in New York City and works on Wall Street. Guess what he does? He's not a broker. He's a personal injury attorney.

When he asked me what I do [I told him I'm a speaker on the subject of] "Personal accountability," wondering if he'd see the irony--and the humor...He fidgeted a bit. Finally, just to be clear, I added, "What I really do is help people--including myself--eliminate victim thinking from their lives." He must have understood me because he got up and moved and we never spoke again!

Yes, Jacky. Because the only reason someone you speak to would never speak to you again is because the righteousness of your profession makes them feel guilty. It has nothing to do with your being a ridiculous, aggressive asshole. Anyway, G. Miller socks us with the moral of the story, and here's where it gets deep:

I have nothing against him or his profession. He's simply providing what's demanded by a culture that continually asks, "Why is this happening to me?" But even as we shake our heads about the ills of society, let's not forget that society is made up of individuals. You and me. The best thing we can do to get rid of victim thinking in our world is to get rid of it in ourselves.

Slow down, buddy. There is no "you and me," at least not when the "you" is you. Who the fuck is this "we" you're talking about? Now, I'm not going to get too deep into the realities of individual personal injury lawyers, particularly not those who become fabulously wealthy off of it, because it's clear that what Miller wants us to "shake our heads" about is the concept of protecting individuals from being harmed by capitalist exploitation. He wants us to shake our heads and think, "Gee, if a corporation makes my life unsafe, if a corporation hurts me because it's cheaper to them than not hurting me, trying to do anything about it will make me powerless. My best course of action is to deny the fact that I have been victimized, and look to see what action I can take to make my life better conform to the restraints placed upon it by the ruling class."

At this point, Miller is no longer pretending to merely advise us on how to live happier lives. He is attempting to deliberately organize us into a movement, to convince us, as a group, to be complicit in our own subjugation. I, for one, refuse.

QBQ! Table of Contents

new methods

thanks to this video i have a new metric for truth (skip to 2:14). by following this method, i now know these things:

• barack obama wrote twilight (298,000 hits)
• princess di was in avatar (1,360,000 hits)
  
• martin luther king had butt sex (1,190,000,000 hits)
• fdr could dunk (163,000 hits)
• george steinbrenner is the lindbergh baby (53,300 hits)

also - it seems like there is such a huge population of people on the internet who get criticism of world leaders about half right before veering headlong into harebrained (but amusing) conspiracy theories and perplexing nationalism.

My third workplace post of the day

If you haven't seen this Naomi Klein article on branding ten years after No Logo and the Obama administration, you should read it.

Belated

So almost a week ago apparently Rush Limbaugh said "The U.S. Military is now Meals on Wheels. It always is with Democrat presidents."

 

My reaction to this is my usual one to far-right criticisms of the Democrats: if only. Why would turning the U.S. Military into Meals on Wheels be a bad thing?

 

(Of course, in reality it is a bad thing, as Chris Floyd discusses: "a system designed for war, for death, destruction and domination, will never be a fit instrument for humanitarian relief." But, you know, aside from that, why would it be a bad thing?)

Update to previous post

I can't access blogspot from work, where I am right now, so I can't leave comments or update posts. But I do have email posting set up so I can post. And I'm feeling enough of a need to say this that I'm going to do that rather than waiting to respond in comments or update the last post ("Be a sexual flâneur") this evening.

 

In comments (which I have reading access to through email), d. mantis said this: "Would you agree that, in a simplistic way, most of our problems stem from the fact that we couldn't give two shits about anyone other than ourselves or immediate surroundings? Would you then also agree that this post could be less geared to the individual and more to the community?"

 

(Normally I'd do blockquotes, but, you know, email is weird and I'm not sure it'll work right.) So: yes, I absolutely would agree. In fact, I'd put it more strongly. I think that the one root problem that is the cause of pretty much every single bad thing that people do to one another is exactly what d. states. It comes in different forms, but the root is always this lack of empathy or compassion or whatever you want to call it. Sociopathy isn't far off.

 

I tend to forget that a lot of the time a point that seems obvious to me in what I'm writing is only obvious because I know what I'm trying to say. What I intended, and failed, to imply in the previous post is that the psychogeographical/sexual revolution I ask for should be both individual and community oriented. In fact, I have a (completely unsupported) suspicion that one major reason that "we couldn't give two shits" about others is that our psyches and our physical environments have been so thorougly colonized by economic oppressors (who want us to be sociopaths, because it is profitable to them), and that an honest attempt to free ourselves of this colonization will change that or, as d. put it, "A 'revolution' as you state, of passion and desire could lead to a more emotional existence including greater compassion." This is exactly my point, though I failed to make it adequately.

 

One reason why I have the complicated subclauses and hyphens and parentheses and footnotes in everything I write is that I'm always terrified that I'm going to forget to mention something vitally important. I need to calm down, because as this and other recent events have shown (like my neglecting to even mention race in my post about media narratives of poverty), I'm always going to leave something vital out. Even reading over the flaneur post again I realize another thing I did was treat gender identity, as distinct from sexual identity, as a bit of an afterthought, which was certainly not my intent.

 

I'm always going to leave something out. One benefit of the small readership I've gained recently (thanks, ladypoverty!) is that now there are a few people who can point out to me when I've done this. And I'm certainly lucky to have the specific perceptive people commenting that I do.

 

(PS I apologize for any lapses of editing there may be in this post. Once I submit it it's unalterable until six this evening at the earliest, and as I tend to edit posts for several hours after posting them, it's a bit nervewracking for me to be doing this.)

Be a sexual flâneur

This article is of course completely ridiculous (and written by some sort of a John G. Miller wannabe, judging from the style). But even as it buys into all sorts of ludicrous societal programming (you have to be straight to have children, if you're gay you have to sashay all the fucking time, even in writing, only straight people like "manly" pursuits, gay people have to be promiscuous, women exist solely to bear children, etc.), it does bring up something that, coincidentally, my pretty-much-gay self and my father were talking about just the other day, on the occasion of the public lesbianization of a cousin of mine.

[My friends] have seen little evidence of an interest in the opposite sex during my adult life, nor asked why. And that’s the clincher.

If there had been an interest, it became eclipsed by other more instant, carnal and deliciously taboo temptations, so it never gained light to grow. For 20 years, my life took a track that stifled the fragile stems...

etc, etc, etc, sexuality is like a jewel, made up of many facets, essentially.

Now, strip away all of the self-and-others-loathing here, and what you have left is this: without all of the programming that our society lays down on us from birth, our sexualities would most likely be quite a bit more fluid than they are now. Or, as my father put it the other night, "We'd be messing around with women, men, pumpkins, cows, everything." Now, I'm sure there's an extent to which this is not 100% true--devoid of programming, it seems likely that I'd still tend towards other men, while my father would still tend towards women, both of us tending towards humans--but to me there is a great deal of indisputable truth to it.

The Lettrists, and the Situationists after them, talk about how our physical environments, all of the geography through which we move every day, are shaped entirely out of economic factors. We go where we go in order to make or spend money, and those destinations, our homes, and every place we encounter between, look and interact with us in the way they do because they serve the specific economic purposes that they do. Trace out the path I take during any given day, and the shape you get will be entirely determined by my economic life, even if it's not a day I go to work. What Guy Debord called psychogeography was an attempt to combat this, to get us to redefine our own personal worlds as we, personally, want to define them. He wanted us to do as we desire in any given space, not to do as the space (and the powers behind the space) want; to move as we desire from space to space, not as demanded of us. It can be almost impossible to tell the difference, so a constant effort (both in intellectual reflection and in spontaneous action) is required. This is one of the most revolutionary acts available to us.

Just as much as we need psychogeography, we need...well, we need what I would call psychosexuality if the word weren't taken already by stupid Freud. We don't need Mr. Muirhead's version of it, though--in fact, we need pretty much the opposite. We need to be sexual flâneurs. Rather than basing our sexualities around a societal expectation of what those sexualities will be (which Muirhead is doing even as he scandalously "switches"), we need to stop making any assumptions whatsoever about our own gender and sexuality, and those of others. We need to constantly examine our thoughts about all forms of sexuality--including everything from the standard hetero-, homo- and bisexuality* to more controversial forms like incest, polyamory, pedophilia, bestiality, and so on, as well as various forms of non-sexuality, such as abstinence and asexuality**, not to mention the more fundamental question of the gender binary itself--and figure out why we think what we think about them, and whether or not that would be better off changing. I'm not suggesting any specific course of action here--to do so would be missing my own point. I only mean to say that we need to think about these things, and, more importantly, experiment, be spontaneous, and always, always, try to avoid doing things just because we feel a societal or economic pressure to do them. It's not always possible, but it should always be the goal.

*Despite Muirhead's apparent belief that bisexuality is The New Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name.
**And I should keep going, and expand that list to include forms that tend to be dismissed as ridiculous, like object sexuality or a predilection for yiff or yaoi. But goddamn, I'm already so fucking wordy and just this one hyphened-off sentence fragment already has several subclauses and now two footnotes. I gotta chill out.

our brave media

i tend to check cnn's website frequently throughout the day. i'm not entirely sure how i developed this habit or why exactly it persists. it could be because i find it worthwhile to see the birth of so many fabrications. another reason could be because they write some of the most unintentionally funny shit on the internet.

today i came across this article about anderson cooper rescuing a young boy from a "looting riot". (before the boy gets hit - which isn't shown - all i see is some slight rumpling and a guy that slips a little on some cardboard.) now, i am all for the protection of uninvolved parties, but the extreme level of self-congratulation and the terrible misconceptions behind the account are simply maddening.

to get a full sense of it there are a few things to take into account here:

1. the article - which is titled "Anderson Cooper assists injured boy" - is currently at the top of the "Latest Haiti news" section.

2. in another cnn article, haiti's infrastructure - see: our infrastructure for haiti - is blamed for delaying aid. (which, as i am typing this, the word "infrastructure" was removed from the headline.)

3. this quote from anderson, "An American businessman named Tony who owns two stores nearby barricaded one street to keep looters away. He had armed the two Haitian police with automatic weapons, and they were assisting him, but they were not able to control anything beyond their barricade."

so, what we have is a large population who cannot receive necessary items locally because of an already dominant foreign presence and are forced to accept the terms behind an even larger foreign presence. terms which will most likely marginalize haitians even more than they already were. but hey, anderson cooper's now got one heck of a vacation slideshow.

QBQ! Chapter Three: QBQ! The Question Behind the Question

The title chapter!

This brief chapter lays out the "method," so-called, of the QBQ itself. I'm tempted, however, to skip over that and jump right to the money quote, which is the penultimate sentence. Oh, what the hell, here I go.

Like a jewel, the QBQ is made up of many facets.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, right?

I feel as though, having quoted that, I almost don't need to say anything else about the chapter or possibly the entire book. No one who could write that sentence and consider it worthy of submission for publication could possibly have anything useful to say. Still, he and a bunch of corporate types think this joker does have useful things to say, so I guess I'm duty-bound to continue pointing out, in detail, that actually he doesn't.

The Question Behind the Question is built on the observation that our first reactions are often negative, bringing to mind Incorrect Questions (IQs). But if in each moment of decision we can instead discipline our thoughts to look behind those initial questions and ask better ones (QBQs), the questions themselves will lead us to better results.

Now, I must say, if you strip this paragraph of its context in this dehumanizing book, as well as stripping it of its absurd reliance on Corporate Capital Letters and Acronyms (CCLAs), this is not entirely a bad point. It's not a particularly meaningful point in most situations, but, sure, we can all often overreact to things in a negative way that, if we step back and look at them more rationally, we can change to a less negative reaction. Fine. Why don't I write a fucking book about it? Maybe I can use it to trick people into thinking it's their fault the world they're forced to live in and submit to sucks so goddamn hard.

"For starters," Miller gives us three simple rules for dating my teenage daughter constructing these QBQs:

1. Begin with "What" or "How" (not "Why," "When," or "Who").
2. Contain an "I" (not "they," "them," "we," or "you").
3. Focus on action.

Ask any human being! They'll tell you that overly specific grammatical prescriptions and utterly meaningless, vague suggestions to "focus" on abstract concepts are exactly what you need to turn your life around!

"What can I do?" for example, follows the guidelines perfectly. It begins with "What," contains an "I," and focuses on action...

Yes, and so does "What can I destroy?" or, more prosaically, "What can I complain about today?" Useless, Miller, useless. "Simple," Miller tells us. "But don't let its simplicity fool you." He then lets loose about the jewel and its facets, making us all laugh for a few hours, and then tells us that "[i]n the following chapters, we'll explore these facets and see the powerful effect asking QBQs can have on our lives." Hopefully, I will begin to explore these chapters at a rate faster than one a week. This chapter was a bit of a holding pattern, but trust me--we're in for a lot of fun.

QBQ! Table of Contents

Pornographic Priestess

It astounds me that the world's biggest band was able to sing these words in 1967:

Yellow mother custard dripping from a dead dog's eye
Crabalocker fishwife, pornographic priestess
Boy, you been a naughty girl, you let your knickers down

Irony

I just overheard a very gay man using his church affiliation as justification for his anti-abortion stance.

One more digby mock and then I'm taking a break

Just what we need? Who the fuck is we?

The products of my decadent lifestyle are insufficient

Google reader really needs to make it possible to mark items unread.

Help

I need help with an element of internet discourse. People on the internet seem to criticize things for being "Manichean" almost as regularly as they do for being "straw men" or other logical fallacies. The logical fallacies kind of irk me, but I understand what they all mean (and people tend to use them in a fairly consistent manner, though I very often disagree with their application and never understand why so many people think simply calling something a logical fallacy means that they've won an argument). "Manichean" I don't understand, and people seem to throw it around willy-nilly in any ol' context at all. I have a vague understanding of Manichaeism, the Gnostic belief that involves a kind of dialectical teleology (how's that for pretentious talk!) in which the good in the world is gradually replaced by the evil (or something like that). I don't know what kind of behavioral demands arise from this belief, though I'd be interested to because in general the Gnostics are pretty crazy and fascinating. But anyway, this vague knowledge does not at all help me to understand what the hell people are talking about when they call people/behaviors Manichean, or why it's a criticism. Can someone help me?

Most likely of no interest to anyone but me

The first four months of 1998 saw the U.S. release of three albums the teenage version of me bought (actually two of them I taped from friends, because home taping is killing music) almost immediately and loved obsessively: Air's Moon Safari (January 20), Madonna's Ray of Light (March 3), and Saint Etienne's Good Humor (April 6). These days, I don't listen to any of them very much anymore, though as coincidence would have it I have put them all on out of the blue at some point in the last few weeks. They hold up differently: Moon Safari I find a bit underwhelming now, though pleasant; Good Humor has probably aged the best and is still a damn fine listen, and Ray of Light, though a bit creaky at times, is by far my favorite of the three--there's just something to that album that makes it great, even with all of its many flaws.

The thing that confuses me about these three albums, though, is that back in 1998, and in fact at no point in the intervening twelve years, did I realize that the sound of all of them is largely identical. Seriously: take any song from Good Humor and put it on Ray of Light and the only thing making it stand out would be Sarah Cracknell's distinctive voice, easily distinguishable from Madonna's; put one of the female-sung songs from Moon Safari on there and I might not even notice it wasn't Madonna singing. It was The Sound of 1998, I guess: icy synth washes with touches of orchestration, and warm female vocals over it. Gimmicky, but it works. Sometimes.

Well-deserved

Indian Country Today has named my governor, Donald "Fuck All Of You" Carcieri, as the single individual who had the greatest negative impact on Indians in 2009. And that wasn't even the year he set stormtroopers and attack dogs on elderly Narragansett women.

Otters are cute

Nonsense

The other night on NBC Nightly News Ann Curry told me that survivors of the earthquake are using piles of bodies as blockades to "protest the slow arrival of aid." This, aside from being a horrific image and a task I deeply hope to avoid ever having to perform in my life, plainly makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. No one at all who is upset about supplies getting to them too slowly would block roads. It seems more likely that what is being protested--and, you know, what is actually being blocked--is what comes with the aid.

 

Mind you, I know absolutely nothing about this. And it was just a passing comment in one of those uesless "things are awful, things are awful, provide no context, things are awful, end on a hopeful note, preferably with a child" reports that TV news outlets love so much. So maybe somewhere outside the airtight confines of Ann Curry's mind (inside of which I imagine there is very little aside from a few slowly settling particles of dust), some sort of reality related to what she said, but different from my surmise, exists. Who knows.

 

Brian Williams, for his part, had the shameless audacity to say that, "luckily," the police were able to keep the hoardes of people desperate for food and medical attention out of the airport to keep him and the other reporters safe. Lord, let an aftershock get them and no one else.

Natural law

According to our media, some people, some places are just poor, and some people, some places just aren't. Not for any reason (Pat Robertson devil comments notwithstanding), they just are. The only major exception is when someone or some place is poor and, we're meant to believe, it's their own damn fault. Aside from that, though, it's just natural law.

They never really say this, mind you. But they never actually talk about the reasons for poverty, and why it's located where it is. It's such an ingrained assumption in everything they do that if you removed it everything they've built upon it would fall apart. And it's such a powerful subtextual message that almost everyone (including myself, when I catch myself in unthinking, atavistic moments) believes it without ever having to be told.

Remembering ourselves

Yes, yes, yes. ladypoverty:

Something I have learned from my religious friends is the importance of ritual. Whenever society is not organized in a way that respects your values, it takes willful repetition to remind oneself of what those values are. They are easy to forget, since daily life is organized in a way that undermines them.

This conflict between identities -- the one you have and the one you are assigned -- is a source of great psychological stress for anyone forced to "deny themselves" on a regular basis. In the face of total dependence on employers for a way to live -- what capitalism always demands -- we need a way to remember ourselves.

This strikes me as beautiful and absolutely vital. Unfortunately one place I run into trouble in my own life is that, done wrong, ritual can easily turn into routine, which can then lead right back to and feed into the dehumanizing process. Balancing ritual with spontaneity, which I feel is also essential to "remembering ourselves," can be extremely difficult, especially considering the severely limited amount of time we have during which we are allowed to own ourselves.

I'm still working towards a solution to this for myself. Suggestions are welcome.

Haiti again

To actually get significant information about what we're going to do to Haiti now that they have even less of an ability to resist than they used to, read here. It does not surprise me, but it never fails to amaze me how ready our leaders are to exploit this kind of thing. They must already have plans in place for natural catastrophes in every location on Earth.

 

To witness Digby's apparent belief that Haiti is lucky to get Bill Clinton's face shoved at it, read here. Pay attention to the way she words things, it is very revealing of her thought processes, which, again, do not surprise me, but never fail to amaze me.

Haiti

I see that Digby has taken the deaths of thousands (possibly hundreds of thousands) of people as an opportunity to make fun of FOX News.

And I see that PZ Myers has taken the deaths of thousands (possibly hundreds of thousands) of people as an opportunity to make fun of Christians.

And finally, I see that I have taken the deaths of thousands (possibly hundreds of thousands) of people as an opportunity to make fun of bloggers.

Spotted on the bus this morning

Are they really teaching high school kids The Fountainhead these days?

Try again

A coworker, after discussing the type of people who get on Jerry Springer: "No wonder people all around the world hate (Americans)."

 

You know, maybe I'm just a weirdo, but when I'm being brutally murdered, I don't particularly care about the quality of the murderer's popular culture.

Globe Sauvage

for the past few months, ethan and i have been working on some music under the name Fabrik. well, we finally have a song up ("Globe Sauvage").

to check it out, go here:

Ovwoondhaus

until we find a good place to host this stuff, we'll be uploading them there.

QBQ! Chapter Two: Making Better Choices

Man, I gotta get a move on with these things.

In Chapter Two, we get more into the real style of the book as a whole. The chapter sprawls luxuriantly over pages 14, 15, and 16, with half of page 14 taken up by the chapter heading, and only five lines of text on page 16. And I don't think I've mentioned, but the font in this book is massive, the lines are double spaced, and the margins are ludicrous. The book as a whole reminds me of high school, where fiddling with all those elements to meet the page length requirement was the norm.

Even all of that tiny amount of text is nothing more than filler, because the entire contents of the chapter are contained within its title. Miller sets up a metaphor regarding "goat heads," a type of thorn he tells us one finds in Denver, which "can really ruin your day" by getting lodged in your shoes or tires. What's odd is that this isn't really a metaphor for anything, or at least not for anything meaningful.

Each day, as we journey into the unexplored wilds of our personal and professional lives, we have countless choices to make. And what are we choosing? Not our next action but our next thought. Choose the wrong thought and we're off in the emotional goat heads of blame, complaining, and procrastination. But the right thoughts lead us to a richer, more fulfilling life and the feelings of pride and accomplishment that come from making productive decisions.

So, OK, making the wrong choices is...thorns. Remember, though, that he's not talking about what actions we choose to take, but what thoughts we choose to think. This is significant.

Sometimes people think they have no choice. They'll say things like "I have to" or "I can't." But we always have a choice. Always. Even deciding not to choose is making a choice.

See, it's significant that he's talking about thoughts and not actions because we don't have choices regarding our actions. If I choose to go to work tomorrow, I'll have about $60 or $70 that I need and won't get otherwise. If I choose not to, I won't have that money, and I risk losing my job entirely. That is not a choice. Once in work, I can choose to do what my bosses tell me to do, in which case I will maintain my employment, or I can choose not to, in which case I will lose it. That is not a choice. John G. Miller is telling me, though, that I can choose how to feel about this constriction of options--I can either oppose it, maintain my personhood, and work in my life to change the circumstances that keep me and those like me--and those worse off than me--enslaved to these optionless lives, or I can give in to it, and decide to feel that my life is "richer (and) more fulfilling" by so doing.

This is analogous to the "freedom of choice" that advocates of capitalism and free markets offer us. We can make any choice we want--as long as what we're choosing between is products that other people have decided to offer us for sale. And not just that, but products we can afford. This is not a choice.

Want to avoid the goat heads and make great things happen?

Make better choices.

(Emphasis Miller's.) In other words, if I am unsatisfied with the life offered me, it is my fault, and my only option is to accept it as is. This is not a choice.

QBQ! Table of Contents

Aftermath of a conversation I could not bring myself to participate in at work

I really wish I could figure out how to convey to people that, in a world with seven billion people in it, and all the resources concentrated in the hands of a few thousand of them, people are going to get violent from time to time, and rather than focusing your own violent urges on this hypocritical, phony, condescendingly moralistic urge to punish, you should either be refocusing it into non-violent, constructive acts or, failing that, focusing it upwards.

It's a dastardly act

in viewing pornography, which is more alienating: being placed within the role of the voyeur or that of a participant? i believe it is the second option.

voyeurism leaves the viewer with no control over the situation, but it does not duplicate and then cleave the viewer's mind. the only severe frustration caused by the medium is not being able to change the camera's perspective. the voyeur is only an eye.

on the other hand, being placed in the role of the participant makes for a more convincing illusion - an illusion that aims to consume the viewer's identity.

the mechanics: as the viewer surrenders to the film, both the sense of immersion and paralysis increase. each gesture and movement is less and less one's own. and with the general dynamic of the format, the most urgent and captivating moments belong to someone else. the viewer kills to be something they are not and cannot be!

as i see it, it is the spectacle conquering the realm of sexual desire. situations are crafted that appeal in part to the viewer, but end up just constricting the spectrum of action and thought. this mechanic is not limited to pornography. i see a similiar type of fascism in the behavior of damien hirst. and all creators who can't seem to get over themselves and what they do.

now, i do not have a lot of background in media studies. and i think that many people probably consider the Situationist International (wiki) to be lost to the past. so, if...

• you know any works about this stuff
  
• or find that what i've said is amateurish (it is) and ill-informed
• or just want to say whatcha gonna say

the club is open

Shazam

via via

Not dead

QBQ and other posting will resume shortly, I swear. I blame The Baronette--she brought her old GameCube back from her latest visit to her ancestral home, and while I don't particularly play video games myself, I'm powerfully fascinated by watching other people play them. So these days, chez The Roommates, once the work day ends, she's playing, and I'm watching. Pathetic? Perhaps. It will pass, most likely in the next few days, and then I (and maybe even the reclusive Baronette herself!) will be back in full force, whatever that might be.

I will tell you, though, that I'm now half tempted to write a book-length critical investigation into Paper Mario. There are so many levels to pry into with that game that I don't even know where to begin.

Spam filter

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In the style of Jon Schwarz

Digby, on the 2004 tsunami, December 26, 2009:

This was one of the most hideous catastrophes of a decade of hideous catastrophes. But the consensus is that they've managed to come back fairly smartly.

I recall watching the footage on the days after Christmas back in 2004 and then seeing the global response and feeling that the post-9/11 paranoia might be starting to lift a little bit. Global cooperation was in, at least for a little while. US soldiers were deployed to help not make war. It was horrible and life affirming at the same time.

Digby, December 21, 2009:

I think I need to get out my copy of "The Shock Doctrine" again.

From the introduction to Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine:

...I travelled to Sri Lanka, several months after the devastating 2004 tsunami, and witnessed another version of the same manoeuvre: foreign investors and international lenders had teamed up to use the atmosphere of panic to hand the entire beautiful coastline over to entrepreneurs who quickly built large resorts, blocking hundreds of thousands of fishing people from rebuilding their villages.

There's also an entire chapter about it. Yeah, Digby, you need to get out your copy again. Maybe read it this time.

I guess irritating atheists are my current obsession

The Friendly Atheist says, of any and all religious, spiritual, mystical, metaphysical, or whatever beliefs: "It’s dangerous because if you start believing in something without evidence, you’re more susceptible to believe other irrational things."

The Friendly Atheist needs to find me a study that shows that, otherwise I'm considering it something he believes in without evidence.

I also like his ridiculous take on the event that inspired his post: some Liberians claim that some human hunters transform into other animals. Some highly literal white asshole makes a sarcastic offer of $1000 ("Hey, I've got money to spare, why not offer it to and then withhold it from some dumb Africans!") if someone can demonstrate this to his satisfaction. A Liberian, who probably does not have $1000 lying around to glibly play with, takes him up on it, fails. This, to the Friendly Atheist, is a "Liberian Manimal Scam." Someone needs to give the Friendly Atheist a dictionary, help him look up "scam" and "friendly."

Cartooning

I rarely find xkcd funny anymore, but on rare (but frequent enough to make it worth reading regularly) occasions, it is beautiful. Today's strip is beautiful and informative, a nifty visual representation of the relative gravity wells of the various bodies of our solar system, and of how difficult it is to escape them.

Somebody lied

I say it's hip to be alive.

Tidings of the season or whatever

Aside from the fact that I have an aesthetic appreciation for spiritual mystery, and aside also from the fact that I have a fairly strong desire to have, or at least understand, what people call a religious experience, I'm an atheist. Even if those two asides wouldn't eternally separate me from the bulk of Internet atheists, their absolutely insane failure to engage with the world as it is, while claiming that they're the rational ones, would do the trick. Like, whenever they act like the 9/11 attacks wouldn't have happened without religion, I feel like stabbing. Religion wasn't the motivation--it wasn't even the stated motivation. To believe so is to ignore a trillion facts, American imperialism being a big honkin' one of them. That's just one example; they exhibit the same fanatic blindness on a huge number of fronts. Another that's been pissing me off a lot recently is their assertion that religion, and religious organizations, have been holding back human progress for millennia--an assertion made in the absence of a control (i.e., an alternate universe where human civilization developed without religion), resting on the unquestioned assumption that human progress is in itself necessarily a good, and ignoring entirely the role that many religions have played in advancing knowledge to focus only on their role in suppressing it. In other words, a completely unscientific assertion.

Anyway, I bring this all up because PZ Myers pissed me off the other day. He links to an article about this Reverend Tim Jones, an almost completely awesome (judging by the article*) C of E priest in England who recently gave a sermon saying that if your financial situation leads to a situation where you have to steal, make sure you steal from large corporations rather than local businesses. For some reason that Myers apparently does not feel the need to explain (I'm guessing it's because a religious person said it), he thinks this is terrible advice. I suppose he wants the poor of North Yorkshire to starve rather than steal from multinational corporations.

As for me, my only complaint about the sermon is that it doesn't go far enough. Father Jones should be actively encouraging his parishioners, even those who don't need to, to steal from large corporations. They fucking steal from us enough. It's the only moral thing to do.

Merry Christmas! I should be back in a few days, ready to tell you all about the beautiful acts of consumerism my family will have engaged in on my behalf.

*I don't share his concern about Playboy stationery being marketed to children, but seeing him throw it on the ground in the stores was at least probably pretty hilarious.

Barf

My contention has always been that Kanye West is actually a vehemently racist white man in blackface making fun of his ignorant concept of Blackness in general and hip-hop in particular. Meanwhile, Lady Gaga's vaunted feminism has always seemed fake to me, just another emptily ironic hipster gesture (I'm all for irony, but only in the service of something, rather than the nothing that is Lady Gaga). Somehow, this picture doesn't do much in the way of convincing me that I was wrong about either of those things.

QBQ! Chapter One: A Picture of Personal Accountability (part two)

Part One, in case you missed it.

Before I take the polar bear plunge back in to the icy waters of John G. Miller's psychotic book, I would like to point out that in comments on the first installment the indispensable JRB pointed me in the direction of John G. Miller's Amazon page, whereupon I had to immediately change my pants. First of all, I was startled and intrigued to learn that he has a photograph of himself there without a mustache, which blew my mind. And before I had fully recovered from that, I learned that, dude, he has a blog there. OK, there are only three entries in it since the first in November of 2007, but each one is a perfect little morsel of inanity (sic, or you can put an s in there if you'd like). JRB pointed out the second blog entry (blentry) in particular, and I cannot recommend it to you highly enough. To summarize, in this blentry Mr. Miller responds to a reader writing to praise a particular bank for avoiding the risky behavior that has landed a lot of banks in trouble recently (the words "risky," "landed," and "trouble" should be interpreted as comedy on my part, so laugh damn you). A questionable sentiment to be sure, but at least well intended. So how does Mr. Miller respond? By making fun of foreclosed-on homeowners for blaming anyone but themselves. Ha ha ha! I want to listen to what this man has to say!

So here I go.

When we left off, we were about to "take a look at (our occasionally mustachioed hero's) server's thinking and the choices he made." So let's take that look. Johnny Boy summarizes the situation for us again (lunch rush, busy, customer not in his section, guy goes out of his way for some reason most likely having to do with his estimation of potential tip quantities, though Miller would never consider that because he probably doesn't even tip, the bastard). Miller gives us an exciting list of questions that he thinks "many people" would have asked in this situation:

"Why do I have to do everything around here?"
"Who's supposed to be covering this area, anyway?"
"When is management going to provide us with more products?"
"Why are we always so short-staffed?"
"When are the customers going to learn to read the menu?"

Aside from the ludicrous third one, these all strike me as reasonable questions (and even that third one has a kernel of sense in it, namely, why doesn't management allow us to have what we need to do what they demand we do). According to Miller, though,

these are lousy questions. They're negative and don't solve any problems. Throughout the rest of the book we'll refer to questions like these as Incorrect Questions, or IQs, since nothing positive or productive comes from asking them [Ethan interjecting here to point out that no dictionary reads "incorrect, adj. having no positive or productive result"]. They're also the complete opposite of personal accountability, because in each one, the implication is that someone or something else is responsible for the problem or situation.

More specifically, John, they implicate our betters in the problem, which is unforgivable. We must always focus our problems, our anger, inwards or, failing that, downwards--never upwards. Luckily, JG is here to tell us how to do that. After lingering lovingly on that worst of all words, "opportunity," he begins the downward slide to the bolded sentence-fragment paragraph that has been a stylistic inevitability since first we saw the book's cover.

The moment the IQs pop into our heads, we have a choice. We can either accept them--"Yeah, when are we going to get more help around here?"--or reject them, choosing instead to ask better, more accountable questions such as "What can I do to make a difference?" and "How can I support the team?"

This, in a nutshell, is the essence of the QBQ:

Making better choices in the moment by asking better questions.

You'll notice that he has yet to define what better means in this context. This is because if he did, no one would be able to avoid realizing that he does not mean better for you. He means better for the masters, the bosses. After all, if we're not questioning our unreasonable work environments, but rather working ourselves to death within them to "support the team," then we're not organizing, not unionizing, not working together to better our situations; rather, we're staking ourselves against one another to better their profits.

The chapter ends with an unreadable anecdote about the author returning to the restaurant a few months later, asking for this same server by name, and learning that he's been promoted to a non-server position. The conclusions Miller draws from this are obvious (why he assumes that the server is now "on his way toward his chosen goals," emphasis mine, is less obvious), but I'm more interested in this: in the anecdote, Miller refers to the poor guy as "my own personal server." Which leads me to a very, very practical, immediate, and non-political reason why those unfortunates who work in customer service should never go out of their way for a customer: if you do it, ever, for any reason, that customer will think they have a personal relationship with you. They will always expect the same in the future, no matter what, and frequently will tell friends that they can expect it, too. These people will, almost without fail, become very angry and demanding when they don't get what they want, every time. Anyone who has worked in any service position knows this, and it is the most certain way to make an impossible work situation a thousand times worse.

QBQ! Table of Contents

Where it's due

I make fun of Melissa McEwan and her creepy creepy cult from time to time, so I feel like it's my duty to point out that she and the rest of them actually make really good points on rare occasions (though they are generally still surrounded by overly cutesy, trite, groupthink internet talk). Like this:

I know I'm a big poopypants and everything, but I hate gendered anthropomorphized toys, because they're almost always male. It's "Chuck the Truck" and "Thomas the Tank Engine" (yeah, I know it's a cartoon, but a cartoon obviously designed with marketing toys in mind) and blah blah, which reflects little boys' male personhood back to them, whereas the EZ-Bake Oven isn't "Shirley the Oven" -- "girls' toys" just underline girls' need to engage in service and don't reflect back any personhood at all, unless it's a babydoll, which is a person that the girl needs to care for.

So kids who play with "boys' toys" get the message that being male is being a person, and kids who play with "girls' toys" get the message that being female is being a servant to chores and other people.

Disturbing, right?

Yep, it is disturbing. It's amazing that no matter how many deep-rooted carriers of our culture's misogyny one becomes conscious of, there are always more waiting to jump out at you. I mean, the only major exception to this rule that I can think of is that Barbie is also a person, and really, if the best thing you've got going for you is Barbie, you're pretty much screwed.

My city in the snow

Beautiful. No shots of my part of town, sadly, but those buses are a big part of my life. 1:59 to about 3:03 I hope conveys a bit why I don't mind being a bus person, even in the cold, even when I complain about it.



(source)

Planetary systems, as they form

We can look at them. Each one of those blown up squares is what's called a proplyd, which is a disk of dense gasses circling a star. Many of them will eventually coalesce into planetary systems, like our own or any of the hundreds we know of, and countless billions more that surely exist. That we can just look at this happening is beyond all words.

Also beyond all words is the fact that each of those tiny little squares in the larger image is alone larger than the human mind can comprehend.

YEMEN!!!

So we're bombing Yemen now, huh? You know, the Bush administration called it a Global War, but they at least just picked a small handful of countries and stuck to them, at least in terms of really active killing. Now we're really, truly taking it global.

Dollhouse

So on the show the Rossum Corporation serves as a stand-in for pretty much all of human society as it is today--programming us in ways that keep us down, essentially. And we also know that it's going to bring about the end of civilization within the next ten years.

And then there's the main characters on the show, who are fighting the Rossum Corporation (aka society, remember) from within and trying to gain an independent identity--in other words, trying to bring about an end to civilization from inside of it. In so doing, they are fighting to prevent the end of civilization.

I don't really understand how corporate media manages to produce art that is not only good but important and actually relevant, but every once in a while it does. Dollhouse is one of these times.

Benadryl blogging (100th post!)

I was going to do the conclusion of chapter one of QBQ tonight but this stuff has me higher than a kite. It could be used recreationally, I mean it. So, raincheck on that. Happy postiversary to blog!

Enemy combatants

Chris Floyd points out something very important that I haven't seen anyone else mention: our first Black president has brought back the concept of people who aren't legally people. He's also successfully argued that torture ain't no thang. Dr. King would be so proud of his legacy.

R.I.P. Dan O'Bannon

The effects in Dark Star are pretty amazing, even if half the movie isn't, and the other half of the movie is pretty great at times, too. He also did Alien and Total Recall, without which I would not want to live. Rest in peace.

tomorrow's worlds

i for one am thrilled about the recent discovery of a nearby super-earth that potentially has one of the requirements for life. (12 parsecs away, 1974 - 1980. should be getting there soon.) here are two specific reasons why:

1. it further promotes public interest in space. even if only for short time.

2. it opens up the possibility for me to witness one of our future geniocratic leaders yell, "SEND HIM TO SUPER EARTH!" when dealing with those opposed to the Solution.

ovwoonderhaus

this is for us. mostly us:

http://ovwoonder.tumblr.com/

Wait...

The Lou Reed?

Climate change

Digby has had an embarrassing series of posts (one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight) recently where she tries to figure out just what the dickens could possibly cause anyone to engage in climate change denialism. The usual complaints the liberals trot out against their traditional rival team, the Wingnuts, are once again trotted out, and as usual it's a hilarious bunch of narcissism. My favorite is probably the second one, where she approvingly quotes the reliably narrow Amanda Marcotte ("I think she nailed it") saying that it's all about pissing off liberals. Honestly. And I suppose, Digby, that you support gay marriage just to piss of conservatives? What a load of self-adoring nonsense.

Now, I am not by any means a climate change denialist. I'm pretty much 100% sure that anthropogenic climate change is going to severely wreak havoc on human (and other) society within my lifetime. Millions will die, many more millions will be displaced, starve, suffer, and eventually also die. It's going to be very, very bad. The science overwhelmingly indicates this.

However, the people who deny all this (and I'm talking about people, not creatures like politicians and businessmen), though they are wrong, have very good reason to think it's all a bunch of shit. Many of the most vocal climate change celebrities (as opposed to scientists; I'm talking now about creatures like Al Gore here) stand to profit immensely off of the systems they propose to combat this catastrophe--systems that deniers and intellectually honest advocates alike readily recognize are wholly inadequate. And really, what are any of us to make of Al Gore, who claims that this is the struggle of his life, but who was a member of the administration that neutered and neutered and neutered the Kyoto accords before they refused to sign them, essentially forcing a worthless (but expensive) treaty on the rest of the world? And this is one of the less shitty things he's been involved in. The whole "green" movement has been turned into another corporatist, consumerist, and potentially militaristic profit machine, just like everything else in this shithole of a world we've made for ourselves. It's about as good for our ecosystems as the "(red)" nonsense is for the AIDS-ridden nation of Africa (what do you mean, it's not all one country?), which is to say that it is at best no help, and probably worse than that.

Unfortunately, none of this means that climate change isn't happening. It is, and every single goddamn thing any of us does makes it worse. Trying to fight it on an individual level is like trying to buy anything from anyone without in some way supporting the military: it ain't gonna happen. Unfortunately, again, the individual level is all we have, because our only influential collective systems are government and corporations, and look at all the good they're doing.

Basically, the deniers fall victim to the false belief that the truth of the science is in some way dependent on the honesty of the celebrity messengers. Unfortunately, many of the liberal climate change believers (and "believers" they are, with all that that word implies) fall victim to exactly the same belief.

to all you volks out there

through a series of closed-door sessions, i've been granted access to this fine blab-stand.

thanks ethan. i promise to push our vile agenda in any manner possible.

QBQ! Chapter One: A Picture of Personal Accountability (part one)

The entirely of the two opening pages of this seven-page chapter (don't worry, they get much shorter as the book progresses and John G. Miller loses just as much patience with this nonsense as we do) is wasted on inept, and not coincidentally pointless, scene-setting. "It was a beautiful day in downtown Minneapolis when..." That kind of thing. The point is, our mustachioed hero has stepped into a busy restaurant and demanded (or, as he would have it, asked, politely, "with a smile," for) a Diet Coke^®; upon learning that the restaurant lives on the Pepsi side of town, he changes his request to water. Some time passes and then:

Suddenly, there was a blur of activity off to my left, the "wind of enthusiasm" stirred behind me, and then, over my right shoulder stretched "the long arm of service," delivering a twenty-ounce bottle, frosty on the outside, cold on the inside, of--you guessed it--Diet Coke!

First of all, let me assure you that I am not fucking kidding you about that style. That is a direct quote. Much of my objection to the style is I'm sure obvious, but I do want to explicitly point out one thing: normally the construction "____ on the outside, ____ on the inside" is used to describe contrast; if a bottle is frosty on the outside, what else would the contents be but cold? Anyway. I should get to the point, lest I waste more words than Mr. Miller himself.

So what it boils down to is that this waiter, I can only assume in a temporary lapse of judgment, decided that this guy really needs his Diet Coke^®, rather than the indistinguishable Diet Pepsi^® they serve or the infinitely smarter choice of water that he ended up ordering, and so takes one of his own personal dollars and purchases him a bottle of soda from the "grocery store around the corner." "My first thought was 'Hire this man!'" John G. Miller tells us; my first thought would have been more along the lines of "why the hell would he do that," but OK.

Now we come to some hilarity. Apparently, the waiter did not go to the grocery store himself:

By then I was thinking profound and professional thoughts like "Cool!" But what I said was, "Come on, you've been awfully busy. How did you have time to go get it?" Smiling and seemingly growing taller before my eyes, he said, "I didn't, sir. I sent my manager!"

I couldn't believe it. Was that empowerment or what?

Given the options, Mr. Miller, I'm going with "what." If we have defined "empowerment" down to the level of asking our master to help us better prostrate ourselves before rich fuckers, then we might as well empower ourselves with nooses.

The next part of the chapter (I believe this is the only chapter long enough that it can be considered to have "parts") "take(s) a look at my server's thinking and the choices he made." In order not to make this post nine thousand words long (I wish I could avoid being overly wordy and digressive, but I seem to be incapable), I will cover that part of the chapter, and what I consider a more likely interpretation of the event than the one Mr. Miller presents us with, in the next installment.

QBQ! Table of Contents

A convincing argument

The end of capitalism would mean the end of spam.

ACLU

The ACLU has lost its single biggest donor, which they say has left them without 25% of their annual operating budget. My own tough financial times have led to my letting my membership lapse in recent years, but my finances are not nearly as important as the ACLU's. I just donated $20. So should you.

Female mice turned into male mice...

...by switching one gene.

"It's still very speculative, but it's possible that this approach could produce an alternative to surgery and the removal of gonads -- ovaries and testes," one of the scientists says.

Awesome. This is obviously years and years and years and years and lots of work and theory and research and speculation away from being applicable to humans, if it ever is, but my god, is it promising.

Gil Scott-Heron has a new album coming out soon!

Crazy! This shit is gonna be amazing.

I discovered this startling fact on Zamboni Soundtracks, which, silly name notwithstanding, is probably the best music blog I've ever come across. Ian consistently posts great, interesting, important, and overlooked music, often stuff I've been looking for forever. Case in point: he's currently undertaking a long-term project of posting as much of Throbbing Gristle's massive live box sets, TG24 and TG+ as possible. And, oh my god, so many beautiful John Carpenter soundtracks the other day! In fact I try really hard not to look at the site more often than once a month at most, because I have such an enormous backlog of exciting music to listen to* that seeing more and more and more of it all the time is just overwhelming and, as exciting as it is, it can get frustrating, wishing I could listen to it all at once.**

Ian compares the sound of the Gil Scott-Heron track that's available for download to Scott Walker's The Drift, and he's right--it really is very reminiscent of that masterpiece, though it's still very much Gil Scott-Heron. God, I'm excited.

*And I mean enormous. My external hard drive currently has 373 albums on it (down from a peak of well over 400 a month ago), organized into various folders, that I have yet to listen to. And I'm now going through some of what Ian posted recently on Zamboni and that number may well break 400 again.
**Like Data!

Peter Watts vs. Fuckers

In general I'm not a fan of statements in the form "The only time I'm in favor of (insert reprehensible thing you're opposed to) is when (whatever)." I find them squirrely and annoying and, y'know, morally inconsistent.

That said.

The only time I'm in favor jailing anyone is when it's cops who beat civilians. Unfortunately, these are among those classes of people, and classes of actions, that will never be punished by jail time. Unlike, say, the action of being beaten by cops, which quite frequently is so punishable.

(And yes, these comments are inspired by it happening to someone whose work I admire [read the comments], someone who is a type of person--middle class, middle aged, and above all white--that this does not normally happen to. Please do not take this to mean that I only care about it when it happens to this kind of person. To me, the assumption that cops are evil assholes who deserve whatever they dish out to return to them twelvefold is as basic as the assumption that I need oxygen to breathe.)

Also: a lot of people, any time any incident like this makes the news, will immediately start going "Oh, well, we don't know what happened, let's give the cops or border guards or whatever the benefit of the doubt, he may have provoked it." Which is bullshit.

Reason this is bullshit #1, this specific case: I concede that there are occasions when one human being can be considered justified in punching another human being in the face and using pepper spray on them. I will concede also that there may occasionally be cases where it is justified for several people in a position of authority to do this to one person who is not in such a position, though we are already on extremely shaky ground with this. What is never justified under any circumstances whatsoever no matter what is releasing someone, vehicle-less, without a jacket, into a winter storm, forcing them to walk across the Canadian border, after public transportation has shut down. This strikes me as attempted murder, frankly. Even if nothing else, and that's a big even if, give the man his fucking coat.

Reason this is bullshit #2, general rule: In all cases of dispute between two parties, the default position should be to suspect the worst of the party with power and the best of the party without. Not only is this the safest assumption based on the evidence of all human interaction in all of history, it is also the fairest. The party with power already has power; don't give them more by giving them the benefit of the doubt. Never give power the benefit of the doubt. Ever.

Twenty-nine years

We're all going to die

A replacement for the glass carafe I just broke, at a discounted price, still costs more than it would to replace the whole (perfectly functional) coffee maker, full price.

In the strangest places

The time and place
Is only something your mind creates
Only boundaries your mind makes

-The Lemon Pipers, "Rainbow Tree"

Their Green Tambourine album is a pleasant collection of bubblegum psych, along the lines of the hit title track, until the last song, "Through With You," which to my ears is ahead of its time, a largely instrumental, nine minute long, startlingly krautrock-style masterpiece that I've never heard anyone talk about, ever, and I don't understand why.

Here's the album.

QBQ! Introduction: What Ever Happened To...

From a billboard towering over the Houston freeway loomed this question:

"What ever happened to personal responsibility?"

I don't know who put it up there, but it sure jumped out at me. For one thing, it seemed so clearly true. What has happened to personal responsibility?

And we're off! Ladies and gentlemen, you can tell you're in for a treat when a book begins by declaring a question to be clearly true. True or false: how old am I? One gets the feeling that Putnam has fired all of its copy editors, and also that John G. Miller is a brain-dead asshole.

Lo and behold, the second of our feelings is confirmed almost immediately. He offers us "some examples" of his conclusion that "What ever happened to personal responsibility" is true. The first:

I was looking for some coffee in a gas station convenience store, but the carafe was empty, so I said to the person behind the counter, "Pardon me, there's no coffee in the pot." He pointed at a coworker not fifteen feet away and said, "Coffee is her department!"

Department? In a roadside gas station the size of my living room?

Now, if I were making (most likely) minimum wage to work in a gas station convenience store--a relatively dangerous job, incidentally--I would not be particularly interested in going out of my way to help pushy assholes with mustaches, either, but, OK, sure, the guy sounds like he was maybe a little rude. Not rude enough to justify stewing about it for years and writing a book about it, but slightly rude. What Mr. Miller does not tell us, of course, is whether this gentleman was busy doing anything else at the moment, or whether the coworker he pointed at had a history of dropping the ball on making the coffee, or alternatively was a control freak who didn't want anyone else to touch the machine, or whether maybe the convenience store has some kind of safety regulations about who can handle the coffee maker, or any other number of things (like, say, what tone of voice Mr. Miller asked his question in). In other words, not only does Mr. Miller want his inferiors to always go out of their way for him, he does not care what their reasons for not doing so may be. Another thing we do not know, but which I feel we can safely draw conclusions about, is whether it is the nameless employee or John G. Miller who has the bigger living room.

Another: On a cross-country flight, the flight attendant got on the intercom and said, "Sorry, everyone, but the movie we promised you will not be shown today. Catering put the wrong one on board."

First of all, the o in the word on at the beginning there should be lowercase, Putnam. Second of all, I have to wonder if Mr. Miller would have preferred the flight attendant to lie to him. "Sorry! I brought the wrong movie on board!" I wonder also if this desire to be lied to would extend to more serious matters on the plane: "No, we're not crashing! You really shouldn't brace yourself for an impact! Don't worry about a thing!"

He gives us another inane example, then tells us that in addition to finding the billboard's question true he also agrees with it, and then moves on to the meat of his introduction. He gives us a list of questions that people ask that he thinks indicate a shirking of personal responsibility ("When is that department going to do its job?" "Why don't they communicate better?" "Who dropped the ball?" "Why do we have to go through all this change?" and "When is someone going to train me?"), telling us that they "go right to the heart of many of the problems we face today." Oh, along the way he pauses to tell us that he prefers "personal accountability" to "personal responsibility," simultaneously telling us that this whole thing is really about wanting to blame people for things they may or may not have actually done and rendering his whole awkward mention of the billboard pointless.

He doesn't, of course, go into any detail yet--that would make the remaining 110 page (minus all the blank space created by frequent chapter breaks) bulk of the book moot, and who would buy hundreds of copies of a book at a time to force down their employees' throats if that book was only five pages long? He does, however, make this ludicrous claim: "Once (people) start practicing QBQ thinking, things just seem to go better. People have more fun. Life is simply more satisfying and enjoyable for those who choose the way of personal accountability" (emphasis mine). This is just a guess, but I have a feeling that if our convenience store employee is going to find satisfaction in his life, it is not going to come from taking personal responsibility (er, sorry, accountability) and brewing up a new pot of coffee for John G. Miller, yessa massa.

QBQ! Table of Contents

I wish I had a readership

Because if I did, I would throw it over to ladypoverty. This guy, with almost every post, articulates, plainly and concisely, some matter of importance that, as soon as I read the post, I realize has been scratching around my brain for a long time now, trying to figure out some way to coalesce. An excerpt from his most recent:

What we give away must conform to our values. "Paying da bills" is not a value -- it is a necessity. It follows, then, that if there is to be scope for what "constitutes our real selves," it can't exist in conflict with the task of basic survival. But because we surrender that potential to the boss in exchange for "a living," we hope to anesthetize the spiritual agony which ensues with material accumulation in excess.

This is the compact of a consumer society. When times are good, many are invited along the single path which makes it work. When times are bad, fewer are admitted. But in neither case can one hope to make that investment in one's real self without, on some level, rejecting its terms.

I don't know how many people read ladypoverty, but however many it is, it's not enough. Anyone who somehow stumbles across this blog: stumble over there, now.

Pattern recognition

Humans are famously supposed to be good at it. It's remarkable, though, how quickly this ability disappears from many people the instant race or gender come under discussion.

Inspired by the largely hideous comments on this post.

Stupak et al

I've long thought that the reason Our Leaders have allowed the ridiculous abortion "debate" in this country to go on as long and as viciously as it has (aside from the fact that it conveniently distracts everyone who cares about it from realizing what else the said leaders are doing, especially as concerns the Supreme Court's rulings on corporate issues) is that the court decision that forced abortion to be legalized nationwide did so while establishing a constitutional right to privacy. In other words, I thought that those in the political/media class who are interested in overturning Roe v. Wade (I say nothing of the members of the Great Unwashed who share this interest) were interested in doing so because overturning it would throw into question this right to privacy, opening wide the door to even more widespread and omnipresent surveillance.

But this Stupak thing has me confused. Do they really, actually care about abortion itself? Right now it seems that way. Maybe it's a longer-term strategy, where they figure someone will challenge the Stupak amendment on Roe v. Wade grounds, thus giving the Court the opportunity to overturn that ruling, but I dunno, that seems overly complicated.

Incidentally, if this doesn't convince all the people who are rabidly pro-choice (among whose number I certainly count myself, as I tend to think that abortion should be encouraged where applicable, although, again, I consider things like the mass murder of brown people for profit more important, if we must rank issues) that the Democrats aren't on their side any more than the Republicans are, I don't know what will. But then, I've said that before about other things.

Correction

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

(via, though I hate to admit it, Shakesville)