“The world sends us garbage. We send back music.”
The Wolverine Is Not James Bond
I saw The Wolverine on Friday night, and I really enjoyed it. At their best, comics are the mythology of the 21st century: reflecting our deepest questions and values. They combine great action with something deeper, and The Wolverine did that. Mostly. [Moderate spoilers ahead.]
GMail’s New Inbox: Close, But Not Quite There
For those of you who use GMail, you may have noticed that your inbox has been changed. (For those of you who don’t, this post might not really be as enthralling as my usual fare.) Up until yesterday, I’d been using multiple inboxes which is a feature in Google Labs that lets you sort of set up more than one view of your inbox and then you can send different emails into different views using filters. It’s nice if you’re managing a lot of different kinds of email in one location, but it’s definitely not a finished product. For example: it only really works if you have your browser in full-screen on a high-resolution monitor.
The new feature that Google rolled out could be so much better. What they did is create categories for email (Primary, Promotions, Social, Updates, and Forums) and automatically send your incoming mail to the different categories so that you don’t see everything in your inbox. Thus, all those Facebook emails you get every time someone mentions you in a comment get diverted to your Social category, most of your spam that isn’t quite spam gets sent to Promotions, and then Updates handles things like daily news from various websites and even shipping notices for shopping orders. That’s how mine has worked so far, and it’s a great feature.
But there’s the problem: you can’t create your own tabs. I’d love to have a tab for all the emails I get related to a non-profit I’m working with and another one for the consulting I sometimes do on the side. I can designate one of the category tabs I’m not really using (like Forums), but you can’t even rename it and that’s just a little too hacky for me.
So, this is a really cool innovation for my inbox, but I’m disappointed that Google hasn’t offered any additional flexibility with it.
Too bad.
Monday Morning Mormon Madness: Sin
Today at Times And Seasons I went back to Grossman’s On Killing for a second post. This time I used his model of wartime atrocity as a vehicle for exploring sin. The short version? Acts we consider sinful are generally committed under some degree of mitigating circumstance, such as partial coercion and ignorance, and so in a sense are less important than our reaction to our own behavior after the fact. It’s at that time that we choose to either protect the ego by rationalizing our bad decision–and thus fully internalizing the implicit immorality of the action–or “lose ourselves” and sacrifice the ego in order to reject sin.
For the most part, we choose the former, unfortunately, and in so doing construct our own individualized Hells.
Edit: Nate pointed out that I left off the link the first time around. Oops! Here it is.
Fear the Future: Car Hacking
Forbes has a rather alarming article about all the fun ways two researchers (funded by DARPA) have found to hack your car:
As I drove their vehicles for more than an hour, Miller and Valasek showed that they’ve reverse-engineered enough of the software of the Escape and the Toyota Prius (both the 2010 model) to demonstrate a range of nasty surprises: everything from annoyances like uncontrollably blasting the horn to serious hazards like slamming on the Prius’ brakes at high speeds. They sent commands from their laptops that killed power steering, spoofed the GPS and made pathological liars out of speedometers and odometers. Finally they directed me out to a country road, where Valasek showed that he could violently jerk the Prius’ steering at any speed, threatening to send us into a cornfield or a head-on collision. “Imagine you’re driving down a highway at 80 ,” Valasek says. “You’re going into the car next to you or into oncoming traffic. That’s going to be bad times.”
Japanese Commuters Tilt Train to Free Woman
NPR reports that when a woman fell between the train and the platform, “about 40 commuters and railroad employees worked together to tilt the 32-ton subway car enough to one side so that she could be pulled to safety.” Always nice to be reminded that people do good things, too. (I’m not sure how, but the woman only suffered minor injuries.)
NYT Remembers How to Say “No”
After growing increasingly frustrated with Mark Sanford’s successful return to politics, I was grimly resigned to watching Anthony Weiner set a new low for what we’ll tolerate from our politicians. It seemed more and more like what is often taken as a willingness of American citizens to forgive wayward politicians was morphing into limitless permissiveness. Imagine my surprise, then, when the New York Times, finally told a politician “no”:
At some point, the full story of Anthony Weiner and his sexual relationships and texting habits will finally be told. In the meantime, the serially evasive Mr. Weiner should take his marital troubles and personal compulsions out of the public eye, away from cameras, off the Web and out of the race for mayor of New York City. [emphasis added]
Now, I would have preferred this to have come before Weiner had to hold another press conference and apologize again for even more sexual impropriety, this time from months after he resigned from office for the last (publicly known) round of sexting, but it’s comforting to know that there’s still some limit to what the NYT Editorial Board will tolerate from our elected representatives. On the other hand, this might no really be so much as a stand against immorality as a stand against sheer idiocy. A man with this little self-control and common sense shouldn’t be trusted with neighborhood dog-catcher, let alone mayor of New York City. Then again, the NYT does specifically call out his “arrogance” and question his integrity, so I’m going to remain optimistic call this one a win.
I want to emphasize that I really don’t have anything against Weiner. I believe in forgiveness. But it’s a joke to apply that to cases like these. I wasn’t personally wronged or hurt in any way by his absurd actions, and so it’s not a question of forgiveness, but of a willingness to hold our elected representatives to a minimal standard of decent human behavior. To me it actually doesn’t matter if Weiner has learned his lesson or not (which is where I disagree with the NYT). It’s not a question of justice so much as a question of properly aligned incentives. When we allow politicians to lie, cheat, and abuse their offices and then take them back we’re creating an environment where those who lie, cheat, and abuse their office are going to flourish. It’s not about punishing the wrongdoer so much as it’s about discouraging future wrong-doing.
Eliot Spitzer is probably enjoying this, but I have a hard time begrudging him that. At least he had the sense to start his political comeback running for comptroller instead of mayor.
And, on a final note, can we maybe have Cubicle Guy take over the Weiner campaign?
The Other Kind of Crazies: Frauds
So, just hours after telling everyone to muzzle their crazies because of how some ostensibly pro-life activists have taken to calling a 14-year old girl a “whore” (and so on) because they didn’t like her sign, here’s an interesting story about a woman who showed up at a pro-Zimmerman rally with a sign that read “We’re racist and proud!” An example of a crazy who needs muzzling? Not exactly.
Turns out that she’s actually from a radical left-wing organization. She was interviewed at the rally and asked about her sign, and she said “there are people here who are racist and apparently think that’s OK. I’m not one of them. I’m being sarcastic.” Sarcastic? Or just trying to help “clarify” the racial undertones of the Zimmerman controversy? In either case, it looks like it worked. Check out the caption to the photo above: her sign was taken seriously.
I guess this means there’s a third reason to muzzle your crazies: so that you can more rapidly expose the plants.
Also: I’m depressed about humanity right now. If you have to frame the opposition because they aren’t doing their part to fulfill your stereotype of them, maybe it’s time to reconsider your stereotype? Just a thought.
Two Responses to NYT Piece on Mormon Doubt
There’s been a lot of reaction to an NYT piece from this past weekend called Some Mormons Search the Web and Find Doubt. The gist of the article is that a relatively high-ranking Mormon (Hans Mattsson) found out about Joseph Smith’s polygamy on the Internet and it shook his faith. The general idea is that the Church has a whitewashed view of history, but you can’t hide stuff in the Information Age, and so now people are learning all sorts of uncomfortable truths and it shakes their faith. First, because they didn’t know, but secondly and more importantly because they feel betrayed.
There’s absolutely some truth to the description, but there’s much more to it than simply “Mormons fear history”.
Please Muzzle Your Crazies
So a young woman protesting Texas proposed abortion restrictions held up a sign that I find to be rather silly, slightly offensive, and mostly just sad. It read “Jesus isn’t a dick, so keep him out of my vagina.” There have been a lot of low points for both sides during the ongoing political battles in Texas, and this was certainly one of them.
The sign drew lots of attention, as you might imagine, and the young lady’s father took to the Internets to defend his little girl. Now, however, she is speaking out for herself, and her post is an object lesson in why being a jerk is never helpful to your cause.
1. It solidifies the resolve of your opponents. Do you think, that after being called a whore by hundreds or maybe thousands of people who disagree with her political views, this young woman is more or less likely to consider those views in a positive light later in life? How about her friends? Her parents? Her family?
2. It makes you look like a jerk. In the article, this young lady describes a confrontation she had while holding the sign in front of the capitol building:
The first day that we were out protesting at the Capitol, my friend and I took turns holding up the sign I wrote, and an older man came up to us yelling right in our faces. “You two should shave your heads! You should become lesbians! No man will ever want you! You’re ugly!”
Let me ask you this: do you want to be seen as metaphorically standing shoulder-to-shoulder with an adult man who yells and screams at young girls and calls them ugly? Do you think that this has a positive or a negative effect either politically or in terms of PR?
So here’s the thing: if you know someone crazy, try to put a muzzle on them when the foam starts to fly. It can be hard to stand up to your friends, but at least try to put a damper on it to some extent. And if you have a little too much crazy inside? Maybe try a little self-muzzling? Perhaps never reply without a self-imposed 5-minute cooldown between writing the response and hitting “Submit”? I don’t know; be creative folks. Because this kind of nonsense just embarrasses us all.