In which I ramble on about politics and never get to the point.

My country has a seriously fucked up budget. China, Japan, and the UK hold over 2315 billion dollars in US treasury securities. We’re currently $127k in debt per tax payer. And we’re still cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy because it’s supposed to increase tax revenue, even though I can’t figure out how such an approach is supposed to work. (Probably because I’m not an economist and I don’t really care enough to do any deep research.) (What. It’s an opinion piece. Shuddup.)

“As of January 31, 2011, the Total Public Debt Outstanding of the United States of America was $14.13 trillion and was 96.4% of calendar year 2010’s annual gross domestic product (GDP) of $14.7 trillion. Using 2010 figures, the total debt (96.3% of GDP) ranked 12th highest against other nations.”

Congress is trying to balance the budget. Since they’re GOP-heavy, they’re threatening to kill stuff the GOP traditionally doesn’t like, little things like Planned Parenthood and PBS and NPR. I’m upset about these threats because I find these agencies to be both important and useful, and as a citizen I want some of my tax money to go to fund these things.

Continue reading Hey! GOP! You're freakin' out. Knock it off. →

In which I tell feminism to take a chill pill. Again.

Okay, so there’s this gay guy, okay? And he’s famous and a lot of people really like him because he’s charming and funny and intelligent and gregarious and because he’s Stephen fucking Fry, okay? Continue reading In Defense of Stephen Fry: A Woman's Viewpoint →

In which I finally googled the Tea Party because I wasn’t entirely sure what its deal was.

I’ve heard some great arguments from intelligent, white, upper-middle class males about how pretty much everything is skewed against them: they’re literally the only segment of society not protected, somehow, from something. Everybody hates them because they’re white, male, and not poor. I can see how that might be a drag, to be forever the bad guy just because you’re succeeding and you’re not somehow handicapped.

That said, this makes me somehow nervous:

The 18 percent of Americans who identify themselves as Tea Party supporters tend to be Republican, white, male, married and older than 45, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll released in April 2010. They are wealthier and better-educated than the general public.

Why does this description frighten me? Am I just socialized against rich white men, or do I really happen to think that they’re kinda bad people? Especially when they seem pissed off?

Tea Party supporters’ fierce animosity toward Washington, and the president in particular, is rooted in deep pessimism about the direction of the country and the conviction that the policies of the Obama administration are disproportionately directed at helping the poor rather than the middle class or the rich.

Why should the government be helping the rich? Have we not come to believe that there is something inherently unbalanced about the distribution of wealth on this planet?

The overwhelming majority of [Tea Party] supporters say Mr. Obama does not share the values most Americans live by and that he does not understand the problems of people like themselves. More than half say the policies of the administration favor the poor, and 25 percent think that the administration favors blacks over whites; compared with 11 percent of the general public.

They are more likely than the general public, and Republicans, to say that too much has been made of the problems facing black people.

I don’t know who these “most Americans” are. Mr. Obama seems to me to share my values, and the values of many of the people I know. Maybe if I were an old, rich, white male I’d feel differently? (Maybe if I had something to lose, I’d be upset if I felt that it was threatened. The nice thing about not having much is that you’re not worried about losing it.)

When did racism become fashionable among rich married white dudes?

And what, exactly, are “the problems” of rich, white, educated men? Why should the government care about them more than the problems of, say, people who are without resources?

Tea Partiers embrace arguments that government should not provide what individuals can provide for themselves. So, police and public safety are acceptable functions of government, but government should not take from one person’s income to provide for another’s health or well-being.

And when Mr. Paul and his Tea Party supporters espouse “constitutionally limited government,” they argue that much of the New Deal, as well as social programs like Medicare that were enacted later, were a gross violation of the founding document. Those ideas may be hard to sell in a general election, even to Republicans. – “Tea Party Movement,” New York Times

The government should not be the vehicle by which poorly-distributed wealth is redistributed. Well, I can kind of understand that:

G’ma is of the opinion that a lot of what we term societal problems are directly due to things like welfare; in the old days, she says, no nice girl got knocked up, because there was no one to take care of her if she did. Such things just weren’t done, because you had to face your family. Now days, you can get knocked up, go on welfare, live in a subsidized apartment… you can move halfway across the country, if you want, and let strangers take care of you. Hence the broken family, she says, and from there a general societal deterioration resulting in a culture obsessed with spending money it doesn’t have on cheap crap it doesn’t need, an inability to save and/or live within its means, and vast armies of homeless with no one to care for them but the government. All of these symptoms are, she believes, directly traceable to welfare programs.

She’s also told me about some of the charities she’s been involved in for fifty or sixty years and how they don’t really do much any more. One used to collect and distribute food to the poor; now they can’t due to various safety laws (food has to be professionally prepared or packaged or it can’t be donated to the poor). With welfare, charity stopped being an individual’s duty and became the government’s job.

Making government smaller, cutting the programs that make it more father than a function, well, it does seem like a good idea. But when I take the World’s Smallest Political Quiz, I’m still a liberal, so maybe I haven’t yet made my peace with that. After all, I’ve always lived in a welfare state and I don’t know any different. (On the other hand, I score 54 – “You are a medium-core libertarian, probably self-consciously so. Your friends probably encourage you to quit talking about your views so much.” – on the Libertarian Purity test.)

I can’t help but wonder if it’s even possible to go back. Furthermore, I’d really rather cut military spending than social programs first. (How does it make any sense at all that the U.S.’s military spending is this fucking high?)

Anyway, in conclusion: I agree that the government is too big. I disagree that it should be more concerned with the problems of rich white men, but only because I’m not a rich white man. And I still can’t believe that people like Sarah Palin and that Qur’an-burning fruitcake get any press at all.

“Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals—that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government—that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizens’ protection against the government.” – Ayn Rand in “The Nature of Government,” from The Virtue of Selfishness

In which I tell a world full of “SEO Experts” that they’re all fucktards and that the loss of net neutrality, when it happens, will be their stupid fault.

Last week, my bro mentioned a jobs website for freelancers, said I might want to check it out.

So I did. And I signed up, and I bid on a job moving a WordPress site and the guy and I exchanged five or six messages. His last message said he’d be getting me my down payment and the server logins so I could begin the work…

That was Sunday. Haven’t heard from him since. Oh well.

Meanwhile, I get about seven messages a day from the freelancer site, telling me of work I might be interested in.

~+~+~
Okay, so, you know how sometimes you stumble across a website that offers you something for free, and maybe you’re under-caffeinated or you’ve just been lobotomized or you’ve never been on the Internet before or you’re just plain stupid, and you click on the free thing – like a button that says you can watch a movie that you know, if you think about it, isn’t even out on DVD yet – and on the next page it says you have to “click on one of these offers” before you can see your TOTALLY FREE MOVIE and so you choose something like, “Have you ever shopped at Home Depot?” and a new window opens, and you’re supposed to sign up for a Home Depot account, and after you do the movie page comes back up and says “Offer Completed! Click here for your FREE MOVIE!” and when you do, about five windows full of ads launch and you end up watching a video about the power company and there’s no way to see the movie online because it was never there in the first place because it’s still in the fucking theatres and you knew that and now you’ve signed up for something you don’t even want and somebody’s going to get paid for tricking you into doing that?

Well, I always wondered where the fuck those websites came from. There are millions of them, maybe billions, and they come from somewhere. Someone had to buy the domain and set up the hosting and install the CMS and design the theme and write the copy and build and place the ads to drive the traffic. These things, ugly and stupid and irritating as they are, don’t grow like weeds: they’re made. And they must be worth it or people wouldn’t do it.

~+~+~
In the past few days I’ve found out where they come from. Some asshole in the US or the UK, some self-styled “SEO expert,” pays people in India and Thailand to build them. Somebody like this douche, who says his areas of expertise are in “advertising, branding, Facebook, Internet marketing, PHP, SEO, Twitter, and website design,” and whose latest job posting says this:

I have set up a wordpress theme very similar to this one watchmovieonlinefree.com. I just need someone to copy paste the last 35 posts text and pictures from watchmovieonlinefree or other sources, and add 5 new ones from my choice.

This job can be done in one day, if you focus on it. I would prefer to change the content of each post, or at least add on it from other sources.

Please bid and be ready to start working on the project, give your time frame, that you will need to respect. Payment will be released once the job is done.

Yeah, he says right there that he intends to copy a site verbatim, and then “change” or “add to it a little.” Isn’t that, like, plagiarism? (Not that it matters, since the original site was built by a fucktard just like the guy who intends to steal it.) And he won’t pay until the job’s complete, even though the site’s standard is a percentage up front, a percentage at halfway, and the remainder on completion? Yeah, real honorable, buddy.

The target site itself is a lie; the movies aren’t available. They don’t exist. People fill out the offers and get bored after being bombarded with ads and crap, and they wander off to do something else because they have no recourse. They can’t complain about the fact that they were mislead, because there’s no one to complain to, and THIS IS THE SHIT THAT’S GOING TO LOSE US OUR NET NEUTRALITY. This crap – this confusing, unregulated crap – is going to cause people to think, “Oh, yeah, it would be great if there were some way to stop those guys. We need regulation.”

I literally can’t stand the advertising/marketing/SEO people. They’re making money where there is none, simply because they’re immoral fucktards and they’re capable of badgering people just to make a little ching. They’re paying overseas workers crap wages to do technical work that is immoral if not illegal, and they do it simply to make money.

Now, I like money, don’t get me wrong. But there’s a limit to what I’ll do to get it.

These people are designing misleading ads to drive traffic to sites that outright lie, and they do it in such a massive way that it’s somehow worth it to them to get a cent or two for each completion. They outsource the grunt work to India and keep the click-thru checks from big advertisers for themselves… NO ONE is getting anything decent out of it. It’s real money for imaginary services rendered. The advertisers are serving ads to badly targeted and/or confused demographics. The survey info is untargeted. The signups are full of errors and lies (I always make up information when presented with a demand for personal information). It’s all crap. It’s all greed.

I opened a ticket with the freelance site to find out what their standards are; I know I’ve seen several job listings disappear so there’s some kind of surveillance. I mean, you can’t just ask people to build you illegal automatic voting programs in public.

~+~+~
Is it some kind of mental imbalance, then? What makes the vast majority of people do real work for real pay, but misses a few immoral freakazoids who can somehow manage to sleep at night after doing what is, obviously, total crap all day long?

It’s like self-mutilation: there’s a line, but nobody can say exactly where it is. If an intelligent, competent person gets their ears pierced, nobody blinks, even though piercing one’s body hurts and carries a risk of infection or worse. Tattoos, ritual scarification, forked tongues, implants: we accept these things.

But if someone decided to, say, castrate himself, we’d all think that was going too far… but is it? Really? It’s no more extreme than the body mods you see on your typical tattoo parlor employee, in terms of pain and risk.

I think there’s a type of salespeople who are crazy like that. They act pretty much like normal people, but they’re psychologically stunted in some way that enables them to do wrong things for money and think it’s not only okay, but that it’s good. Exciting. Challenging. They’re incapable of knowing that some things just Shouldn’t Be Done.

You’re going to say, “But it doesn’t really hurt anybody.”

And I’m going to say, No, of course it’s not life-threatening to corral someone into filling out a form or taking a survey so that you can earn your couple of cents per completion… but it’s still wrong. That you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it.

It’s lying, plain and simple, and lying is wrong. And making money out of nothing is also wrong. There’s an entire industry now based entirely on lies and greed. Advertiser’s greed, who think they can get real data for a couple of cents per database record. “SEO Experts'” greed, who think it’s okay to build all this crap to entrap people. End users’ greed, who want to see a pirated movie online for free.

And no, “SEO Expert” person, you don’t get to snicker and think to yourself that only the stupid end up in your trap. They’re not stupid; YOU’RE just a DICK.

And because you’re a dick, you’re going to lose the Internet for everyone. You’re going to pester and confuse the unwashed masses, and they’re not going to want a free and open Internet, and then you’re going to have to go back to scamming people in person. You fucker.

~+~+~
I applied for a couple of virtual assistant positions that looked like they might actually be real. Maybe somebody will hire me and give me something to do for the next few weeks.

~+~+~
A friend of mine told me a few days ago that he’s starting a new job soon, and will be team-building immediately after that, and asked me if I would be interested in working on a QA team? I said something along the lines of omgwtfbbq!!1 WOULD I EVAR and he said “I know you were looking forward to school” and I was all planz change omg srsly d00d.

And now I’m trying not to think about it. It was an idea, not an offer, and who knows if he’ll even get to make his own hiring decisions, or if I’m qualified (or if I’m clever enough to make myself sound like I am), but the point, I guess, is that as totally fun as school sounds I’ve just discovered I’d be way more stoked to get an interesting job.

If no interesting job presents itself before September 20th, however, I will be going back to school with a bunch of 20-somethings to study freakin’ LAN architecture. Which should make for hilarious blog posts, at the very least!

In which I argue with our collective conscience.

Everyone’s pissed off at BP.

They’re so mad they want to put the company out of business right this goddamned instant. At protests, their posters say things like, “BP gets rich, the people and the planet pay the price” and “Seize BP’s assets!” ⁽¹⁾

The heartbreaking images of birds covered in muck stir them to a seething rage. They’re instigating anti-BP groups all over the net⁽²⁾. They’re pissed off, and they want you to do your part and boycott BP stations beginning right freakin’ now.

I humbly submit that these people are all being ignorant asshats.

What? What?! You’re wondering how I, your friend and previously non-insane person, could possibly think that? Well here’s the deal, people:

BP is our fault.

A 42-gallon barrel of oil⁽³⁾ only produces about 20 gallons of gas. The rest of the barrel is used to make virtually everything in your home. And I mean everything: umbrellas, pillows, thermometers, Scotch tape, snorkels, ear phones.

Poker chips, insulated boots, Q-tips, prescription glasses. Bubble bath. Coffee pots. Glad Ware.

Vacuum bottles. Patio furniture. Garden hoses. Caulk. Brake fluid. Crayons.⁽⁴⁾ I don’t care how crunchy and “green” your life is. If you’re in society at all, you use oil every single day of your life.

So this BP disaster is our fault, because BP exists to obtain the oil we need to make the items we buy every day. We buy a lot of toothbrushes and Crayons, because we’ve increased the world’s population by over two billion people in the last forty years⁽⁵⁾. BP didn’t make us do that.

This event is not only a terrible environmental disaster, but it’s arguably the mother of all public relations problems. BP is losing money hand over fist, something I feel safe assuming they don’t like to do. This was an accident, not a calculated insult to the world’s ecology.

Most sadly, it’s simply one more accident in a long, long list of horrible accidents⁽⁶⁾ that we’ve all ignored.

The reason us rich white folks are galvanized right now is because this disaster is in our rich, white backyard. We don’t even know that Nigeria is a toxic wasteland due to our endless need for oil⁽⁸⁾.

The insult we’re perpetrating on the world, in my opinion, is that we’re not even smart enough to use our extensive education and wealth to do this indignant reaction thing right, we’re just slapping up toothless boycottbp.org websites and feeling smug about our FB groups and about how committed and pro-active we are, and then we go on using all the petroleum-based products we always use, and don’t even bother to learn that they ARE petroleum-based products or what they cost the rest of the world.

People are standing around in their clothes made of oil derivatives in their houses made of oil derivatives with their oil-derivative toothbrushes in their mouths screaming, “Fuck BP, those motherfuckers, look what they’ve done! They’re evil!”

Well, they’re not evil. Greedy, maybe, and lazy, and rich, but they hardly did this on purpose. They’re a big goddamned nasty clusterfuck of companies, sure, but what they’re doing is getting oil out of the earth so you can live the way you like. Your sputtering outrage and indignation makes you look foolish, don’t you see, because you choose not to understand that you’re culpable, you yourself. It’s not a them-versus-us issue here: BP is not the villain in some kind of thin little morality play. WE’RE ALL THE VILLAIN, everyone who buys pretty much anything, ever.

Of course we didn’t mean it, of course we didn’t mean to destroy 120 miles of gulf coast, but it happened. Of course we want to do something about it. But. Boycotting BP is a horrible idea because it lets people believe that they’re making a difference when they most assuredly are not. Boycotters will buy their gas across the street from their local BP franchise, and then they’ll go shopping at Walmart, not even knowing that most of what they’re buying has some oil-derivative component in it. Then they’ll go to bed at night feeling smug, while small franchise gas stations have to lay off their staff. What steps are we taking, with this boycott, to reduce or oil consumption? Um, none.

The salient point is that BP doesn’t even own the majority of its gas stations. They’re all franchises⁽⁷⁾. Come on, people, you’re boycotting your community members and neighbors. During a recession. In what universe does this even make sense?

The screamers and the outraged ones seriously need to go home, shut up, and take an honest look at how oil affects their lives. If they want to give up all that stuff, fine: they need to find a way to do so and thereby change the market. I’m all for that. If they don’t, they need to knock off the bitching and vitriolic language and figure out grown-up ways of expressing their grief over the gulf, like getting trained and going there to help, or helping to draft new safety regulations and responsibility caps, or deciding where not to drill, or giving their money to brain trusts who can figure out how to replace oil’s ubiquity in modern life.

I don’t have the answer. I don’t know how to fix it. I live as lightly as I possibly can: I don’t own a car; I consume less than the typical amount of resources most Americans do; I don’t eat 200 lbs. of animal flesh every year; I reuse my baggies and Ziplocs and even take-out containers… that’s what I do. That’s all I know how to do. But most people don’t live like me [seriously, I don’t blame them]. Most people need Crayons, and insulated boots, and refrigerant, and Glad Ware. Who the hell am I to take it away from them?

Nobody. That’s why I don’t try to. Besides, it’s not like I don’t have a netbook, and earphones, and CDs and DVDs and prescription glasses and contact lenses and toothbrushes myself.

Yes, it’s a mess. We all get that. Now: since we’re done with our silly “Boycott BP” thing, how do we fix it?

¹ BP Oil Spill Protests
² Boycott BP
³ Barrel
⁴ A partial list of products made from Petroleum
⁵ Total Population of the World by Decade, 1950–2050
⁶ Oil Spills and Disasters
⁷ Punishing BP Is Harder Than Boycotting Stations
⁸ Nigeria’s agony dwarfs the Gulf oil spill. The US and Europe ignore it