Friday, November 30, 2012

Anonymous

I am having a hard time deciding if I want or need to start writing online using my real name.  The argument, which is strong, is that I am less likely to be pointlessly offensive or hyperbolic when I attach my real name to something, and writing is more interesting and carries more weight when someone cares about it enough to sign it with their actual identity.  I honestly find these compelling arguments, but I still have my reservations, which I will not go into right now.

I think a lot of my pseudonymity during my 20s was due to approaching my life almost entirely from the perspective of, "no one has to know who I really am."  And I'm not sure that's true anymore.  I am increasingly ready to shed my old identity, including the one associated with this blog, and I'm increasingly ready to just be who I am without any attempt to hide it, regardless of the impacts to family and work relationships.  And if I'm not attacking people or being insensitive, I can't be responsible for their reactions to who I really am.  So at this point, I guess it's not so much a matter of "will I?" but "when will I?"

I doubt I'd link my real name blog to this one, because obviously, but if I do switch I should probably make it my main blog, if there's going to be any point to it.  I promise to leave some kind of note here should I ever go public with a new blog.  I guess we'll see.

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

sigh

I really should have slept on that last post.  That's what results from not writing on a regular enough basis and trying to cram it all in to one post while half asleep.  Save as draft is a thing.

For my own sanity, I will try to focus future posts on grappling with specific topics, although I can't promise there won't be navel-gazing.  Hey, it's my process blog and this is my process.

Still, I should probably write about things relevant to people other than me.  What a crazy thought.

Status Update - Late to the Party

My favorite quote from Madmen recently occurred after Roger went on an LSD trip which sparked a lot of mini-epiphanies and personal growth in the character.  A large part of Roger's entertainment value lies in his lack of a personal filter or introspection.  So it's entertaining to see him walking around the office, smiling, happy, sharing the new ideas that erupted from a crack and shift in his perspective, until he gets to Don.

Roger:  You know, it's very interesting, but a lot of times you think people are looking at you but they're not.   Their mind's elsewhere.
Don:  Lots of people who haven't taken LSD already know that Roger.
I'll be honest, I've had more of these moments than I'd like to admit in the last couple of years, so I empathized strongly with Roger for this particular episode.  The thing is, even if I, or Roger, are late to the party on some important ideas concerning basic human interaction, those moments where you realize the story you've built up about who you are and how the world works is malleable and open to revision are genuinely amazing.  And while some drug use (like pot for instance, he said randomly) can lead the user to believe they have descended a bit deeper philosophically than the sober observer would agree, it can also lead the user to question life assumptions, that are, in all likelihood, long over due for re-assessment.  So, fresh off my own and ongoing series of mini-epiphanies, while I still feel late to the party on some basic realizations about human interaction ("Oh, I DON'T have be the person other random people want me to be."), I continue to be excited about the process.

I think I thought after I came out to my parents, that that was more or less the end of massive changes in my life, which now makes me laugh.  Because it has of course dawned on me that personal growth is a life-long process, and also because that was only one of the big messes I'd been ignoring in my life for over a decade.  And while I'm glad it's more or less sorted, I have reluctantly recognized I still have a few messes to clean up before I can march forward with confidence and ease.  One is work, which is just this whole other thing.  Another is the stuff I have accreted in my time here.

I spent the weekend, paring down my comic book collection from 13 boxes or so to 4.5, and it was kind of a relief.  I had terrible taste in many things in my 20s, and it was good to recognize that, identify books that no longer reflected my tastes and just trash them.  No, they were not worth anything.  It was interesting to note, as I assessed stack after stack of comics for basic quality and goodness of fit, just how many old memories were tied up in those things.  So in a completely bizarre and unexpected way, I ended up letting go of some personal baggage along with the physical junk.  I'm just not that guy anymore, I want different things, and I don't need to fill every second of my conscious hours escaping into nostalgic minutia, even if I still find some of it fun, beautiful and worthwhile.  I am surprised at how often I relearn the idea that getting rid of unwanted stuff also gets rid of unwanted psychic baggage.

It takes a surprising amount of energy to try to change from the person I have been, to the person I want to be, and I struggle with that quite a bit.  I brim, I froth, I overflow with music and writing ideas that I almost salivate at the thought of pursuing, but I'm still too dysfunctional to let myself proceed on those fronts except in fits and starts.  I still can't quite imagine who I am if I'm not who I was, but my impatience with myself has been growing steadily and it's becoming clear I need to prioritize cleaning up the stuff in my way now so I can take care of it in a more thoughtful way, rather than just waiting for my impatience to turn into impulsive, reckless decisions.  I am trying to create an environment that fits who i want to be, rather than who I have been.  And I'm still kind of embarrassed how long it's taken me to figure some of this stuff out.

I am, in some ways, late to the party.  I am getting there as fast as I can.

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

New Overdue Review

Posted my completely unnecessary but fun-to-do review of total recall at Contents May Settle last night, neglected to mention it here.  Consider it mentioned.

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

But I repeat myself

I know we're all tired of politics, and I have much more to write about in future posts, but I want to say something that I don't see said enough, for all the good it will do on my tiny blog.

Near the beginning of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, King Arthur stops to talk to one of his "subjects", only to get increasingly agitated when the peasant refuses to recognize his authority in any way.  He eventually snaps and starts shouting at him and grabbing his arm, which incites the peasant to start shouting about how he's being oppressed.  In the movie, King Arthur rides off non-plussed at the over-reaction.  But what if he, while beating his peasant, had starting shouting about how his civil liberties are under attack because peasants won't recognize his authority and won't let him beat them?  This is a little bit what the christian conservative reaction to the push for gay marriage is like.

I keep hearing from evangelicals, from churches, from family members, that gay marriage is a religious liberty issue.  This is, of course, asserted but not justified.  And honestly, I'm not sure what justification one could give.  As far as civil liberties go, the LGBT are simply asking that their marriages be recognized by the government and given the same legal rights as straight married couples.  No one is arguing that churches would be forced to perform religious gay marriage ceremonies in their churches (which would be a civil liberties issue), or that straight people must celebrate gay sexuality and find it wonderful, or that churches must now preach tolerance about gay people.  The only thing we're asking churches not to do, is push for civil and legal restrictions on people who haven't opted in to their belief system.  Especially, ESPECIALLY, since they have yet to provide a moral, logical, reasonable argument that holds up under any scrutiny as to what harm would occur to anyone if two people of the same gender chose to settle down and start a life together.  It continues to boggle my mind that the religious community in this country seems to regard two men smiling at each other and holding hands as one of the great evils of this country in the year 2012.  I would think a more steadfast commitment to marriage would include NOT blowing up wedding parties by drone overseas.

Yes, there are pushes from within their own churches to be less dickish about LGBT issues, as there indeed ample support from their holy books for tolerance and compassion for the less-than-perfect and the non-believer.  Yes, many conservatives feel social pressure and discomfort because they don't love gay stuff.  But no one in this country has, constitutionally or otherwise, promised any of us that we only get to see people who agree with us, or interact only with people with social arrangements that we approve of, or decide which consenting adults do and do not get to love each other.  And it's strange that christians ever thought they had a right to not encounter anything that displeased them or disagreed with them or offended them.  And absent demonstrable harm to society or individuals, an argument the christian right has yet to make with evidence that hasn't been thoroughly debunked by scientific studies and actual experience with gay individuals, they can't just demand civil laws conform to their religious beliefs just because.  I mean, that seems obvious to me, but there seems to be some confusion on the matter.

The fact is, no one group gets a free pass as a moral authority to dictate to the rest of this country.  If you think there is harm in a public policy, or the public good is served by restricting the rights of a minority, you have to show specifically how.  And you have to be able to explain your moral reasoning in a way that makes sense to people who don't regard the bible as moral authority by default.  And if you can't explain the moral basis for your proposed law in a way that makes sense to people outside your religion, and you can't explain the moral principle a biblical injunction is based upon, then you aren't much of a moral authority are you?  And if you think the non-religious are incapable of being moral, or that the lot of us putting our heads together can't agree on simple moral principles like "don't restrict the rights and arrangements of others unless you can show the harm" regardless  of religious affiliation, then we have a deeper problem and maybe THAT's the conversation we really need to be having.

Wednesday, November 07, 2012

Conceding Authority, Part 1

Romney's concession speech last night was pretty classy, especially as compared to the rest of his campaign.  I don't like the man much, and I certainly don't have much use for high muckity-muck religious elders that just seem to expect subservience as the natural order of things.  My feelings about him personally aside, what stood out to me as he spoke was this bit:

We look to our teachers and professors, we count on you not just to teach, but to inspire our children with a passion for learning and discovery. We look to our pastors and priests and rabbis and counselors of all kinds to testify of the enduring principles upon which our society is built: honesty, charity, integrity and family. We look to our parents, for in the final analysis everything depends on the success of our homes. We look to job creators of all kinds. We’re counting on you to invest, to hire, to step forward. And we look to Democrats and Republicans in government at all levels to put the people before the politics.

While I note at least 3 problematic elements, notice what the thrust is of the entire paragraph:  a big, sloppy kiss to authoritarianism in all it's civic forms.  Which is interesting, but not the focus of what I want to talk about today, other than to say it's fascinating that he assumes the strength in our future lies not with us and our choices individually, but in the mid-level authority figures (pastors, priests, teachers, parents and bosses) between us and God making the rest of us better.  The job creators line is also spectacularly amusing, but again not my focus today, except to say it's really amusing to frame this topic entirely in terms of the benevolent authority of job creators, and never mention other vital elements to job creation like, oh say, demand from middle class consumers.

The part I marked in bold is the bit that jumped out at me.  Initially, I thought he was ceding morality entirely to religion, but noticed later he had thrown in "counselors of all kinds" as a sort of catch-all.  But, as this is one of my pet topics, the language still kind of bothered me.  In my experience, at least in the Adventist church, churches do indeed believe that all moral authority stems directly from God him(her/it)self.  That all of us, as beings, are naturally fallen, and require divine intervention to be good.    It naturally follows that the elders, pastors and ministers of a church having presumably studied God's words closely, are best suited to guide you, the lowly individual, in learning how to connect with God more completely and let the goodness flow.  This is why they consider it imperative to convert the non-believers to the fold.  You can't be good without God, you see, therefore you cannot be good without THEM to tell you how to be good.  In some cases, they will graciously concede that the elders of other religions (the imams, the buddhist monks, the popes), all have some connection to God, however imperfect their particular conception of God may be.  Therefore other religious elders can assumed to still be guzzling the good from the gourd of God to one degree or another.  I'm aware that not all Christians think this way, but in Adventism at least, it's a core belief.

I view this entire philosophy as highly problematic for a variety of reasons I have discussed and will discuss another time, but the specific problem with relation to civic authority leaders, is there are many millions of people (19.6% of the country as of 2012) that identify as non-religious.  This seems problematic for a religious community intent on involving itself in politics.  How do you come together and find common ground with people you think are unwitting agents of satan, or morally unguided at best?  Granted, they won't always say this to your face, and guys like Romney dance around it from a political point of view, but having sat in church pews for many years and listening two years of evangelical political rhetoric, I can guarantee that there are a lot of christians out there who think just that.  So the question of "how do Christians relate to 'the fallen', when converting them outright is off the table?" seems interesting to me, but is also not really what I want to focus on.  I have no vested interest in how Christians reconcile this, except to hope that they would follow some of their humbler, quieter, wiser congregations in remembering that if, according to their theology, everyone is sinning and falling short of perfection, including themselves!, then they don't have much justification for a high horse built out of church pews.

The question that DOES interest me, is how is the secular community going to respond to this assertion of de facto moral authority by the religious types?  I honestly don't know, because while I've completely abandoned the idea that I need to submit to religious authority or beg a god for goodness, I haven't considered myself part of the secular community very long, and I'm not sure what particular handy book I would point someone to to assure them that I do indeed have a moral compass.  I am clearly a secular humanist at this point, which was not something I chose, just something I discovered describes my moral views nearly exactly.  But even among the 20% of the non-religious, I'm not sure even a majority of them would describe themselves as secular humanist, whether they fit the definition or not.  My point being, as a Christian, you can point to the Bible as the source of your morality, a book that has been invested with authority, if not by God, then by tradition and endless affirmation of millions and billions of people for 2000 years that it is, indeed, authoritative.  Which is to say, independent of its actual authority, a thing can be seen to be authoritative if enough people assert it is so, for a long enough period of time. And the secular, humanist or otherwise, don't have a similarly revered book to point to.  Indeed, the point of secular humanism is that having a moral compass does not require an authority of any sort to compel their goodness.

So what, then, is the secular answer to "why am I good?"  What can they say that would reassure a christian of any sort, that just because they don't believe in God, it does not mean they are 5 seconds away from stabbing the god-fearing at any given moment?  It seems obvious to me that one doesn't need to fear the gods to see the benefits of being good, to value it as a philosophy, to have a set of principles and then follow them.  But this is a lengthy conversation to have with every single believer I come across.  In the same way it becomes exhausting to re-assure every old friend that I am still an okay person, even though I'm gay, it's exhausting to explain to a whole bunch of people that I'm still good, even though I don't claim religion anymore.  For me, for now, I think the answer is going to simply be, "I'm a secular humanist" and leave it to them to look up exactly what that means.  Of course, I have heard secular humanists defined as some of the modern, deceptive agents of Satan in my time at church, so I'm not sure if that isn't just the start of a whole new exhausting conversation, but at least it's a start.

  So, while I clearly don't know what the exact answer his, I do have a couple of assertions I draw from all of this.  It's vital that certain massive segments of christianity learn to accept that the non-religious have a moral compass and values that have elements in common with Christianity.  More importantly, it's vital that the non-religious refuse to cede moral authority to the churches.  How specifically they go about doing this and how much work it might take, I'm not sure, but we HAVE to stop letting religions get away with saying they are the gatekeepers of morality, when we know that isn't true.  I think we have the edge philosophically, but this does us no good when they have such a huge edge organizationally.  I think as more and more people identify as non-religious, this will happen anyway, someone will eventually write an accessible humanist "bible" or start a non-religious community that people find appealing.  But I wish we'd get started sooner, rather than later.  I think we'll all be a little saner if we can agree that, religious or not, we have a lot in common in terms of moral philosophy.

Tuesday, November 06, 2012

Counties are for Counting

Thank god election day is here.  I'm so tired of politics and the election right now.  Specifically the massive stupidity with which we conduct most of it.  Leaving, for now, the inherent stupidity of a 3-year election cycle, which leaves our politicians somewhat less time to focus on actually governing than I think most people are willing to admit, for the best, greatest, most compelling, handsome and intelligent democracy that has ever, or will ever exist, we are curiously poor at the thing central to all of it: counting the damn votes.  David Frum, of George W. Bush speech-writng fame agrees, we do not proceed with our elections in a robust or trust-worthy manner.  And as nostalgic as it can be to wistfully deify our messy, chaotic, glorious democracy we may want to consider whether it's actually necessary that the act of voting and counting votes be the subject of too much messiness and chaos.  In fact, there's no reason at all, that it can't be extremely easy, transparent, fair and tamper-proof for every county in this country.

I don't know why we wouldn't want every county, both rich and poor, to have access to safe, expedient, reliable voting.  I know we're allergic to taking ideas from other countries (we're the best!  we have nothing to learn from anyone!), but other modern countries have managed to bring reliable, trusted voting systems to their citizens and we, at the very least, could start there.  But the way we're currently doing things, is actively fueling our partisan woes, and it flat out doesn't need to.  We have officials in some counties trying to extend voting hours in republican districts, and limit them in "urban" ones.  We have absentee ballot shenanigans.  And widespread distrust on both sides that voting is being handled fairly and accurately.  There's no reason to leave vote counting to highly partisan elected officials, and every reason to think that's a terrible idea (in that highly partisan officials are increasingly showing themselves unable to put partisanship aside in the performance of what should be non-partisan duties).

Look, voting is something that should be simple, and that fact that it isn't implies that we are dangerously close to being so disfunctionally partisan that we can't agree that one plus one equals 2 anymore.  That's a problem.  Here's the simple, for the love of god, solution to all of this.  If we can agree that all citizens should have the right to vote, and that we should minimize any roadblock that keeps voting from being free and easy, and that partisan elected officials should not be able to use their power to corrupt the vote counting in their party's favor, then we HAVE to do the following to make sure that's true:

1.  No poll taxes.  Voter ID of some sort is a fine anti-fraud device, but ONLY if a legal voter ID is absolutely free and relatively quick to obtain.  Yes, people should be able to verify they are who they say they are, NO this should not be an expensive or multi-week process.  Not if we're making it the basis of tamper-proof voting.

2.  Standardized election counting machines/systems.  There's no reason people in poor counties should  risk not being able to vote because the county is too poor to afford voting machines that work, or the voting machines are so broken that votes are hard to even read.  There's also no reason to leave the specific methods of vote counting to the whims of local officials, who may or may not be capable of putting their partisanship aside and count the votes accurately.  Either give the counties guidelines, and the funding to meet them (and the oversight to make sure it's followed), or just federalize the whole damn thing.

3.  Provide a transparent system of checks and balances (this would be extremely necessary if we federalized the system).  All parties should be able to inspect the voting machinery, and the process of voting from start to finish should be entirely transparent.  If people insist on using electronic voting machines, THEY must have a paper trail, and publicly available computer code to meet this standard.  Any code-literate citizen should be able to read voting machine code to make sure it's fair, and parties should be able to check that the code on each machine matches the code example for each machine that has been released by the manufacturer.  There's no national security reason any part of the voting process, except for the identity behind each individual vote of course, should be secret, and anyone wanting to keep any part of the process secret, should be viewed with immediate and deep suspicion.  Your vote should be secret, the counting of it should not be.

4.  Make voting day a holiday.  No one should be unable to vote because of a work shift.  Or a double-work shift.  Or even to leave a voting line because they have to get to work.  Everyone gets to vote.  And election day, the day most fundamental to our democracy, has ample reason to be a holiday anyway.  Celebrate the vote by making it easy for everyone to vote.

These things aren't hard to do.  The fact that we haven't done them yet indicates that the people in charge either don't think there's a problem or don't think confidence in the voting system is a high priority.  We should disabuse them of that notion.  And if we're really at the point where we can't agree that 1 + 1 = 2 when counting votes, then the greatest, best most heavenly-scented democracy that God has ever put on this earth is kind of in trouble, don't you think?  We seem to have a great deal of trouble agreeing on objective reality at all any more in this country.  I humbly submit that voting reform that generates confidence in objective reality and our ability to count would be a great start to turning that around.