I wasn't going to post about this, but I just cannot keep silent on this topic any longer. Every day I scroll through Facebook and I begin to fear, distrust, and even hate some of the people I once thought of as friends. I cannot stand the absurdity of this whole situation any longer.
Let me start at the beginning. There was an attack on Paris orchestrated by terrorists under the orders of ISIS. Not one of the attackers was a refugee from Syria, but due to a fake passport, it was originally believed that at least one was. He may have followed the same path as the refugees, but he was obviously planted there by ISIS, and his passport did not stand up to any level of scrutiny.
What has upset me most is the people now calling for an immediate end of acceptance of any new refugees from the Middle East. These people are calling for the US to turn away those who are fleeing their war torn homes. The United States is not a European nation, and thus can be a lot more stringent about its screening process for refugees. In fact, since 1980, not one refugee admitted to the US has committed an act of terror. We admit around 70,000 refugees each year. That means that in the last thirty five years, nearly 2.5 million refugees have settled in the United States, and a resounding none of them has committed an act of terror since settling here. Let's stop worrying about terrorists among the refugees.
Seriously, these are human beings who deserve all the love and compassion we claim to want to give to any homeless person. All I am asking for is to allow them to enter the country and be taken in by those people and groups willing to care for them until they are able to be assimilated by our economy. If history is any indicator, our economy can handle a flood of refugees like the Cuban flood in the Mid-Twentieth Century. Since I bring up the Cuban refugee flood, I might also point out that back then, Americans understood that we should take refugees from Cuba, even given the potential theat of communists insurgents.
Now, moving on to the other point that I'm honestly tired of seeing on Facebook, the gist of which is "we need to feed and house all of our veterans before we give any help to a bunch of brown people." I barely even know where to start with this. There are numerous programs in place to assist veterans on all stages. A quick Google search is enough to verify this. There's even an initiative in place at the US Department of Veterans Affairs to end homeless for all veterans. We're already doing that through the government and through various charities, so the argument that we need to "take care of our own first" is basically garbage. Anyone making this argument is just attempting to justify their xenophobia, and it's disgusting.
Finally, I am outraged by comments made this week by Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio that basically call for everyone to forget all the important strides we've taken since the first leak by Edward Snowden and go back to allowing NSA to unabashedly spy on American citizens. I try to avoid the whole "outrage" thing because very few things that people get worked up over are truly outrageous, but in this case I feel justified. These two men are calling for the government to completely stomp on every person's right to privacy. Every one of us has the right to live free of government spying and meddling. The argument about having nothing to hide holds no water, either. Even though I have nothing to hide, I don't want random government employees to be able to access my call records, emails, etc, basically on a whim. My correspondence with my friends and family is no one's business but those people I choose to correspond with, and if I wanted to make it the government's business, I would post it openly online as I am doing here. Edward Snowden basically gave up his life here to bring about the meager changes that were able to get passed through Congress. Let's not take that back now just because of a tragedy that no one could have foreseen and the program probably wouldn't have helped with, anyhow.
We are all human beings, and refugees just need to be shown a little compassion. They're not terrorists and I'm not asking you to do anything but let them come and let those of us willing to care for them take them in. Put aside your xenophobia, your hatred of Muslims, or whatever it is that is making you push these downtrodden people away, and allow those of us who are willing open our hearts to them.
Wednesday, November 18, 2015
Saturday, November 7, 2015
11/7/15 - Privilege
I know I've been inconsistent about these, but this particular topic has been sloshing around in my head for weeks now and I've honestly been a little intimidated by it. I knew this had to be my next topic, but I just couldn't seem articulate my feelings appropriately, so I kept thinking about it, listening to others, and questioning. I'm still not sure I'm ready, but I'm going to give it a shot.
This all started before even my last post, when I listened to a particular episode of the Tom Woods Show when he talked about Social Justice. Since, I've heard many podcasts about the ideas of social justice, privilege, and oppression. I've listened to people I know speak about things along these lines. I've asked questions where I can. I've even read a few blog posts about the ideas. I wasn't ready to do this post, though, until I was driving to Houston, TX to deliver a last minute order for my company. I was in the truck for 23 hours one way, all by myself, so I was able to go through some of my back catalog of podcasts that I had wanted to listen to but had never had the chance because so many new episodes come out all the time. I spent a good 30 hours or so listening to the entire catalog of The Uncontrollables podcast, and one of the last episodes really hit a nerve.
Episode 29 of The Uncontrollables was all about privilege and oppression, and I spent the greater part of the podcast shouting at the radio in the truck. It was also probably one of the few episodes in which I spent the majority of the episode actually agreeing with Miah.
In the episode, Miah's guest Laurelai Bailey talked about how White, cisgender, heterosexual males of the Christian persuasion generally receive privilege due to the systematic oppression of all other groups. Now, I will be the first person to tell you that, as a white, cisgender, heterosexual male who grew up in the Christian tradition, I have received my fair share of privilege. I cannot deny that I live a life that's been relatively blessed and fairly easy compared to many, many other people. I can also tell you that I have witnessed oppression with my very eyes.
In fact, while I was listening to the episode, I was stopped at an unconstitutional immigration checkpoint (which I'd love to get into at some point but instead I'll just send you here). I was actually stopped at one of these checkpoints every time I passed into a new state given my proximity to the Mexico border. This one, however, was interesting to me because I was not the only person at the stop (all the other times I had crossed borders rather late/early and no one else was really on the road). When I crossed into Arizona from New Mexico, however, it was right around rush hour traffic time, and every single car was being stopped. Literally the highway was shut down to force everyone through this stop. The car in front of me was full, and at least the driver from what I could tell was Hispanic. This car was stopped and the driver was harassed for 15 minutes. There was a drug sniffing dog brought out. The officer shined a flashlight into the backseat. All in all it was an incredibly ridiculous proceeding, but in the end the car was allowed to pass. To contrast that, when I drove up in my empty pickup sitting in the cab by myself, the officer waved me on without even questioning if I was a citizen.
Here's my point: oppression exists, but, by and large, the government perpetuates it more than any other group.
Why is this important? Well, for starters, because most groups that rail against privilege and oppression go to the government for support. There are all sorts of laws on the books right now to "protect" certain classes of people. There are plenty of laws and programs currently in effect with the sole purpose of lifting up those who are members of these protected classes so they can overcome their oppression. These laws and programs range from forcing employers to meet certain diversity requirements to giving out grants and scholarships to minority groups disproportionately to allow them to get into colleges. Many of these programs have been in effect for years. What have we learned in this time? I can tell you that I've learned that government cannot love you. If everyone else would learn this, we might not have so many of the problems we do now.
Government promises to bring about "social justice" by bringing down those who discriminate and uplifting those without privilege. Instead, all that the government has done is hold down those who would have been accepted and prolong prejudices. Let's use my example of the immigration checkpoint above. The United States Federal Government has decided that, for whatever reason, only their arbitrarily chosen number of people can immigrate to our country each year, and anyone else is forced to "get in line." I won't get into the absurdity of the line metaphor, but I will say that, if someone wishes to live in our country, I have yet to see a rational explanation of why anyone should stop them. Instead, we spend untold amounts of money "protecting our borders," which, as in the example above, generally leads to discrimination against anyone who is even vaguely Hispanic. This discrimination is then spread to the general population through scare tactics that politicians use to campaign.
What about drug policies? There's documented evidence, as I discussed on a previous post, that many drug laws were originally passed with racial motivations. Now, years later, we see police in inner cities singling out black people as more likely to be drug users or dealers, and so police are much more likely to harass black people on the streets than white people. In fact, I can think of a particular instance where the police killed a man simply because he was black and had run-ins with them in the past over a stupid law. Then these policies are pushed on the general population and people are taught to fear any black people they meet because they're probably criminals.
Even policies intended to help generally do more harm than good. Let's look at all the subsidies, grants, and scholarships available for minority students. The government has become more and more involved in colleges across the nation, and as a result, college tuition has increased over 1000% in the last 30 years. As I mentioned in a post about Bernie Sanders, for every dollar the US Government spends on colleges, tuition costs increase by 65 cents. Now, I'm not saying that minorities shouldn't go to college. I'm also not suggesting that 30 years ago there was no discrimination against minorities while entering college. I will also admit that many minority children are disparately affected by poverty (which is also caused by government meddling), making the cost of college out of reach for many of these people. However, as I discussed before, not everyone needs to go to college. I met many, many people in my school who had no idea what they even wanted to get out of college. Why should anyone, government or private, waste money on spending time in school for almost no reason? Before I go ranting on that for three pages, though, I'd like to get back to my point: college cost has increased exponentially because of government intervention, and that's hurting everyone. The biggest reason most colleges site needing to increase tuition is increased administrative costs necessary to comply with regulations, such as the diversity mandates.
On and on it goes. However, if you look at a group like the LGBT community, you'll see that, by and large, public opinion has shifted well before government changed it's policies. You just have to look at examples like the pizza shop that went out of business because they refused to cater to a gay wedding. The law was on the side of the shop owners, but they still had to close their business because public opinion was not. Why do we need a government to get in our way and slow down our movements to include everyone?
Lastly, I'd like to touch on those who speak out against privilege. Just as those who are oppressed cannot help the fact that they are born that way, I cannot help the fact that I was born a white, cisgender, heterosexual male in a Christian household. That's my lot in life, and unfortunately that means I won't get harassed by police or border patrol agents. I'm thin and able bodied, so I won't get discriminated against when I shop or apply for work. My body type and facial features fall within societal norms, so I don't get strange looks in public.
However, for those claiming that social movements aren't "about me," I'd like to take the time to tell you that you're wrong. As I said above, many so called social movements force themselves into my life by getting the government involved, or simply attacking people like me on social media. I once heard the statement, "The way to promote tolerance is to be intolerant of intolerance." Does no one else think that's kind of like saying the way to promote peace is to go to war with anyone who's not peaceful? The point is, when you're being "intolerant of intolerance," the first thing you're being is intolerant, which seems to me to be the exact opposite of what you're attempting to promote. Don't attack people for having different views; talk to them or debate with them. Try to convince people that you're right. You won't win everyone, and that's okay. I don't expect everyone in the world to agree with what I say on this blog, but I put it out there because some people may agree. Hell, my wife doesn't even usually agree with me, but that doesn't stop me from arguing with her.
Finally, all I ever really ask for is a chance to be left alone. If you want me to change, talk to me, and I'll adjust the things I think need to be adjusted. By and large, most people are fairly reasonable and if you tell them they're being honestly offensive (and not just that micro-aggression garbage), they will adjust their actions to avoid offending you. Don't get the government involved. Don't force people to do what they don't want at the point of a gun. That's the best way to bread contempt and prolong discrimination, and any government intervention suddenly takes a movement that is not "about me" and makes it my business.
This all started before even my last post, when I listened to a particular episode of the Tom Woods Show when he talked about Social Justice. Since, I've heard many podcasts about the ideas of social justice, privilege, and oppression. I've listened to people I know speak about things along these lines. I've asked questions where I can. I've even read a few blog posts about the ideas. I wasn't ready to do this post, though, until I was driving to Houston, TX to deliver a last minute order for my company. I was in the truck for 23 hours one way, all by myself, so I was able to go through some of my back catalog of podcasts that I had wanted to listen to but had never had the chance because so many new episodes come out all the time. I spent a good 30 hours or so listening to the entire catalog of The Uncontrollables podcast, and one of the last episodes really hit a nerve.
Episode 29 of The Uncontrollables was all about privilege and oppression, and I spent the greater part of the podcast shouting at the radio in the truck. It was also probably one of the few episodes in which I spent the majority of the episode actually agreeing with Miah.
In the episode, Miah's guest Laurelai Bailey talked about how White, cisgender, heterosexual males of the Christian persuasion generally receive privilege due to the systematic oppression of all other groups. Now, I will be the first person to tell you that, as a white, cisgender, heterosexual male who grew up in the Christian tradition, I have received my fair share of privilege. I cannot deny that I live a life that's been relatively blessed and fairly easy compared to many, many other people. I can also tell you that I have witnessed oppression with my very eyes.
In fact, while I was listening to the episode, I was stopped at an unconstitutional immigration checkpoint (which I'd love to get into at some point but instead I'll just send you here). I was actually stopped at one of these checkpoints every time I passed into a new state given my proximity to the Mexico border. This one, however, was interesting to me because I was not the only person at the stop (all the other times I had crossed borders rather late/early and no one else was really on the road). When I crossed into Arizona from New Mexico, however, it was right around rush hour traffic time, and every single car was being stopped. Literally the highway was shut down to force everyone through this stop. The car in front of me was full, and at least the driver from what I could tell was Hispanic. This car was stopped and the driver was harassed for 15 minutes. There was a drug sniffing dog brought out. The officer shined a flashlight into the backseat. All in all it was an incredibly ridiculous proceeding, but in the end the car was allowed to pass. To contrast that, when I drove up in my empty pickup sitting in the cab by myself, the officer waved me on without even questioning if I was a citizen.
Here's my point: oppression exists, but, by and large, the government perpetuates it more than any other group.
Why is this important? Well, for starters, because most groups that rail against privilege and oppression go to the government for support. There are all sorts of laws on the books right now to "protect" certain classes of people. There are plenty of laws and programs currently in effect with the sole purpose of lifting up those who are members of these protected classes so they can overcome their oppression. These laws and programs range from forcing employers to meet certain diversity requirements to giving out grants and scholarships to minority groups disproportionately to allow them to get into colleges. Many of these programs have been in effect for years. What have we learned in this time? I can tell you that I've learned that government cannot love you. If everyone else would learn this, we might not have so many of the problems we do now.
Government promises to bring about "social justice" by bringing down those who discriminate and uplifting those without privilege. Instead, all that the government has done is hold down those who would have been accepted and prolong prejudices. Let's use my example of the immigration checkpoint above. The United States Federal Government has decided that, for whatever reason, only their arbitrarily chosen number of people can immigrate to our country each year, and anyone else is forced to "get in line." I won't get into the absurdity of the line metaphor, but I will say that, if someone wishes to live in our country, I have yet to see a rational explanation of why anyone should stop them. Instead, we spend untold amounts of money "protecting our borders," which, as in the example above, generally leads to discrimination against anyone who is even vaguely Hispanic. This discrimination is then spread to the general population through scare tactics that politicians use to campaign.
What about drug policies? There's documented evidence, as I discussed on a previous post, that many drug laws were originally passed with racial motivations. Now, years later, we see police in inner cities singling out black people as more likely to be drug users or dealers, and so police are much more likely to harass black people on the streets than white people. In fact, I can think of a particular instance where the police killed a man simply because he was black and had run-ins with them in the past over a stupid law. Then these policies are pushed on the general population and people are taught to fear any black people they meet because they're probably criminals.
Even policies intended to help generally do more harm than good. Let's look at all the subsidies, grants, and scholarships available for minority students. The government has become more and more involved in colleges across the nation, and as a result, college tuition has increased over 1000% in the last 30 years. As I mentioned in a post about Bernie Sanders, for every dollar the US Government spends on colleges, tuition costs increase by 65 cents. Now, I'm not saying that minorities shouldn't go to college. I'm also not suggesting that 30 years ago there was no discrimination against minorities while entering college. I will also admit that many minority children are disparately affected by poverty (which is also caused by government meddling), making the cost of college out of reach for many of these people. However, as I discussed before, not everyone needs to go to college. I met many, many people in my school who had no idea what they even wanted to get out of college. Why should anyone, government or private, waste money on spending time in school for almost no reason? Before I go ranting on that for three pages, though, I'd like to get back to my point: college cost has increased exponentially because of government intervention, and that's hurting everyone. The biggest reason most colleges site needing to increase tuition is increased administrative costs necessary to comply with regulations, such as the diversity mandates.
On and on it goes. However, if you look at a group like the LGBT community, you'll see that, by and large, public opinion has shifted well before government changed it's policies. You just have to look at examples like the pizza shop that went out of business because they refused to cater to a gay wedding. The law was on the side of the shop owners, but they still had to close their business because public opinion was not. Why do we need a government to get in our way and slow down our movements to include everyone?
Lastly, I'd like to touch on those who speak out against privilege. Just as those who are oppressed cannot help the fact that they are born that way, I cannot help the fact that I was born a white, cisgender, heterosexual male in a Christian household. That's my lot in life, and unfortunately that means I won't get harassed by police or border patrol agents. I'm thin and able bodied, so I won't get discriminated against when I shop or apply for work. My body type and facial features fall within societal norms, so I don't get strange looks in public.
However, for those claiming that social movements aren't "about me," I'd like to take the time to tell you that you're wrong. As I said above, many so called social movements force themselves into my life by getting the government involved, or simply attacking people like me on social media. I once heard the statement, "The way to promote tolerance is to be intolerant of intolerance." Does no one else think that's kind of like saying the way to promote peace is to go to war with anyone who's not peaceful? The point is, when you're being "intolerant of intolerance," the first thing you're being is intolerant, which seems to me to be the exact opposite of what you're attempting to promote. Don't attack people for having different views; talk to them or debate with them. Try to convince people that you're right. You won't win everyone, and that's okay. I don't expect everyone in the world to agree with what I say on this blog, but I put it out there because some people may agree. Hell, my wife doesn't even usually agree with me, but that doesn't stop me from arguing with her.
Finally, all I ever really ask for is a chance to be left alone. If you want me to change, talk to me, and I'll adjust the things I think need to be adjusted. By and large, most people are fairly reasonable and if you tell them they're being honestly offensive (and not just that micro-aggression garbage), they will adjust their actions to avoid offending you. Don't get the government involved. Don't force people to do what they don't want at the point of a gun. That's the best way to bread contempt and prolong discrimination, and any government intervention suddenly takes a movement that is not "about me" and makes it my business.
Wednesday, October 21, 2015
10/21/15 - Feeding the Stupid
This will be the second segment of Arguing With My Wife. This weekend she and I were driving around southern California listening to podcasts, specifically at the time Episode 128 of We Are Libertarians. There are very few podcasts that I listen to that my wife also enjoys, but she and I both enjoy listening to Chris and the others shoot the breeze and sometimes even talk about news and politics.
The episode ended with a discussion of the Democratic Primary Debate. I can honestly say I did not watch it, just as I did not watch the Republican Primary Debates. I've heard some commentary on it now from three or maybe four different sources, but they're all Libertarian or right wing leaning sources, so I cannot give any kind of objective commentary on it.
What I can say is that the discussion on We Are Libertarians about the debate caused a discussion in my vehicle with my wife. She, who is absolutely not engaged in politics at all, decried both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton as awful candidates. I would follow that up by saying that the one time she did vote in 2008, she voted for current President Barack Obama. Her family generally votes Democrat and she really hated former President George W. Bush. Apparently none of her friends on Facebook have anything nice to say about Senator Sanders, and she feels that Hillary Clinton is a disingenuous person at the very least.
I was fairly surprised to hear her speak of the two front-runners for the Democratic Party nominee given her background, and also given the fact that I had no idea at all that she's paid any attention the politics what-so-ever. I told her that one of those two was likely going to be the nominee unless Joe Biden enters the race (and as of today he says he will not), and asked her which of the two she'd rather see selected. She didn't want to answer, so I told her that, even though Rodger Paxton of the Lava Flow Podcast (who was on this episode of We Are Libertarians) thought it would be Bernie Sanders, I was sure it would be Hillary Clinton. During the discussion on the episode, it was said that if the nomination went to Hillary Clinton, she would be very beatable in the general election. My wife agreed with the podcast on that point, but once again, I disagree.
This is where the argument began. I believe that the odds of Hillary Clinton being the next president of the United States of America are much higher than most of the commentators on the right are willing to admit.
My first election that I was able to vote in was in 2008. I spent a lot of time researching the candidates and deciding who I agreed with the most before voting. Honestly, I hated the idea of voting for either the Republican Party Candidate (John McCain if I remember correctly) or the Democratic Party Candidate (now current President Barack Obama). I also spent a lot of time talking about these candidates to both the students in my high school, and later to my classmates in college. This is where I learned that "it was time for the United States to have a black president." I also learned that I was actually racist for not wanting to vote for Barack Obama even though I completely disagreed with him on nearly every issue. I also believed that his campaign had very little substance and was riding on the vague Hopes of people everywhere, but neither of these things were apparently as important as the fact that I was racist.
I explained this to Megan and told her that I am already seeing things online about how "it's time for a woman president." I absolutely cannot wait for the discussion about how misogynistic people are for not wanting to vote for Hillary Clinton just because she's a woman. I swear my wife had the absolute best come-back to this. She looked me square in the face and said, "Politics is all about feeding the stupid, isn't it?"
Needless to say I nearly peed my pants.
I wish I had insights as beautiful and hilarious as that. The discussion kind of died after that as I laughed for a good long time and then we were almost home, but I wanted to tell the story of that fantastic insight.
I can say, though, that if the Democratic Party puts forth Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders as their candidate (which they will), and the Republican Party puts forth some worthless establishment candidate like Jeb Bush, I may actually be able to convince my wife to vote Libertarian this year. Though there's also the very possible chance that she'll refuse to vote at all.
The episode ended with a discussion of the Democratic Primary Debate. I can honestly say I did not watch it, just as I did not watch the Republican Primary Debates. I've heard some commentary on it now from three or maybe four different sources, but they're all Libertarian or right wing leaning sources, so I cannot give any kind of objective commentary on it.
What I can say is that the discussion on We Are Libertarians about the debate caused a discussion in my vehicle with my wife. She, who is absolutely not engaged in politics at all, decried both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton as awful candidates. I would follow that up by saying that the one time she did vote in 2008, she voted for current President Barack Obama. Her family generally votes Democrat and she really hated former President George W. Bush. Apparently none of her friends on Facebook have anything nice to say about Senator Sanders, and she feels that Hillary Clinton is a disingenuous person at the very least.
I was fairly surprised to hear her speak of the two front-runners for the Democratic Party nominee given her background, and also given the fact that I had no idea at all that she's paid any attention the politics what-so-ever. I told her that one of those two was likely going to be the nominee unless Joe Biden enters the race (and as of today he says he will not), and asked her which of the two she'd rather see selected. She didn't want to answer, so I told her that, even though Rodger Paxton of the Lava Flow Podcast (who was on this episode of We Are Libertarians) thought it would be Bernie Sanders, I was sure it would be Hillary Clinton. During the discussion on the episode, it was said that if the nomination went to Hillary Clinton, she would be very beatable in the general election. My wife agreed with the podcast on that point, but once again, I disagree.
This is where the argument began. I believe that the odds of Hillary Clinton being the next president of the United States of America are much higher than most of the commentators on the right are willing to admit.
My first election that I was able to vote in was in 2008. I spent a lot of time researching the candidates and deciding who I agreed with the most before voting. Honestly, I hated the idea of voting for either the Republican Party Candidate (John McCain if I remember correctly) or the Democratic Party Candidate (now current President Barack Obama). I also spent a lot of time talking about these candidates to both the students in my high school, and later to my classmates in college. This is where I learned that "it was time for the United States to have a black president." I also learned that I was actually racist for not wanting to vote for Barack Obama even though I completely disagreed with him on nearly every issue. I also believed that his campaign had very little substance and was riding on the vague Hopes of people everywhere, but neither of these things were apparently as important as the fact that I was racist.
I explained this to Megan and told her that I am already seeing things online about how "it's time for a woman president." I absolutely cannot wait for the discussion about how misogynistic people are for not wanting to vote for Hillary Clinton just because she's a woman. I swear my wife had the absolute best come-back to this. She looked me square in the face and said, "Politics is all about feeding the stupid, isn't it?"
Needless to say I nearly peed my pants.
I wish I had insights as beautiful and hilarious as that. The discussion kind of died after that as I laughed for a good long time and then we were almost home, but I wanted to tell the story of that fantastic insight.
I can say, though, that if the Democratic Party puts forth Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders as their candidate (which they will), and the Republican Party puts forth some worthless establishment candidate like Jeb Bush, I may actually be able to convince my wife to vote Libertarian this year. Though there's also the very possible chance that she'll refuse to vote at all.
Sunday, October 4, 2015
10/4/15 - Why I'm Optimistic
There are a ton of horrible things happening in our world every day. It would be easy to watch the news and come the conclusion that we're all going to be killed by terrorists, shot by a madman, die of some rampant disease, etc. Every day there's some new calamity, and if I paid attention to nothing but these horrible things, I would shut down, curl up in a ball, and never move again.
However, I have been lucky in that I don't see most of that as I do not have television service in order to watch the news, and what news I catch on social media I can skim through to get the basics without spending too much time on things that aren't actually that important to me. I know it sounds heartless, but I haven't read an entire article about the shooting that happened in Oregon earlier this week. It's all over my Facebook and Twitter feeds, but there's literally nothing I can do about it, so I didn't spend much time on it. This is an attitude that has served me well, and allowed me to spend my time thinking about the future.
The future is bright, as they say, and I, for one, believe that to be true. Just a few days ago I read about the possibility of using carbon nano tubes to create high efficiency, low power transistors that could once again put us on track to increasing speeds and abilities of computers. Every increase in computation power increases the well being of people, everywhere, so this is very exciting news. This is why I'm optimistic about the future: people continue to push forward and, in doing so, raise the standard of living of everyone.
I know I've spent my fair share of time complaining and otherwise being negative, but I don't think that's really a path forward. We all need to vent from time to time, but in order to move forward, we need to deal in solutions, not complaints about problems. Technology increasingly makes finding a solution easier and easier.
In 2015, thanks to increases in technology, GDP per person in the U.S. reached an all time high, despite the lackluster recovery and the possibility of a rate hike from the Fed. In fact, GDP per person worldwide has almost doubled since 1950. People are living better now than they ever have, and still wealth continues its upward trend. This is why I'm optimistic.
So, I know this is a short post, but I just wanted to say that the future is bright, and the facts are on the side of the optimists. Despite all the media coverage, crime is on a downward trend, and standard of living is on an upward trend. If we continue to push forward and embrace the future with open arms, we may see a world in which gross poverty and undernourishment are abolished. Already it's down from 18.7% to 11.3% just in the last 20 years. Despite everything bad happening in the world, there is still plenty of reason to hope for a better tomorrow.
Saturday, September 26, 2015
9/26/15 - PC Outrage
I apologize for the few missed posts. I've had a lot happen this month and I didn't have a ton of control over my schedule. As such, I just wasn't able to find the time necessary to sit down and devote myself to writing a good post. For more on at least the biggest of those events, you can check out my other blog.
What I've been wanting to talk about, though, is PC and Outrage Culture. I had heard people complain about this kind of thing before, but until sometime last month, I had never truly come into contact with it. Unfortunately, my contact came in the form of my younger sister.
I'll start with the background. My youngest sister and I have never exactly had a "normal" relationship. She's five years younger than I, so we never shared a school, nor did any of our social circles overlap. She is, however, probably a lot more like me than probably either of us would be willing to admit regularly. While she's intelligent and fairly talented in certain respects, she tends toward shyness and the need for shelter due to being the youngest child and because of the way my parents' relationship played out after their divorce. To this day, I find it difficult to treat her as an adult even though she is only five years younger than I am.
That leaves me with how I came into contact with this society that I honestly believed couldn't really exist. My sister and I have always addressed each other by calling one another names. Up until last month, it was funny and playful, but last month I addressed her, "Hey hoe" on a text message, and that's when the dynamic suddenly changed. I literally received around 1000 words in response on why I shouldn't use terms like that because it degrades women and punishes them for their sexuality. I argued that the term hoe actually refers to a pieces of gardening equipment, so how does she know I wasn't making reference to that. She shut that down fairly quickly (which was correct but none-the-less annoying), so I made a simple argument that she either couldn't refute or, more likely, completely refused to hear. I said, simply, that if I was actually attempting to insult someone (which in this case I wasn't but it's always fun to get a rise out of her), why would I go out of my way to ensure that my insult wasn't too insulting?
At that point she shut down and I didn't hear back from her for a while, so I had to dig around a bit. I knew she had been keeping a blog, so I found it and starting reading through it. The first thing I noticed was it's location: Tumbler. I'm not anti-Tumbler for any particular reason, but most of the people that I had heard complain about this PC ridiculousness and the growing Outrage Culture seem to point to Tumbler as the source. Being a blog site, I never imagined it would be any different than just about any other blog site, and I've used and referenced quite a few in my time, so I never believed that Tumbler could create some horrific culture.
I still don't know if Tumbler is at fault, but I do know that within moments of scrolling through my sister's blog, I was staring straight into the face of the PC Outrage Culture. I clicked on her most recent post and the first two words in all caps, bold faced and underlined, were "TRIGGER WARNING!!" Then there was an entire disclaimer that said that she was going to talk about sex and rape and all sorts of other things that any normal person would have discerned from her title and, if she knew how to create one, her opening paragraph. The whole disclaimer really, really bothered me, especially since the post was intended as a review of the book, Fifty Shades of Grey.
I read on though, becoming more and more disturbed as I went. I had heard these arguments about the book being all about rape and the perpetuation of the rape culture before, but I never expected to see them all tossed together on a single page, and by my own sister. By the end of the post I realized that my sister was a Social Justice Warrior, and I wasn't exactly happy about it. I started digging around and tried to learn more about this whole subset of my generation that I never could bring myself to believe actually existed, only to find myself more and more disappointed.
I've come pretty far without defining a few terms, but that was all to give the necessary background. The PC and Outrage Culture is simple to define; this is a subset, mostly of my generation (millennials), who believe that whether you mean to be or not, just about everything you say or do could be construed as offensive to someone, and that people have a right (or perhaps a responsibility) to be completely outraged by these micro-offences.
There are many things about this kind of ideology that I have trouble with. For starters, generally the people who cling to this kind of ideology actually grew up with the internet, so it's not like they haven't been exposed to all sorts of violence, cruelty, etc. I mean, personally, I can remember not only playing Grand Theft Auto while my sister watched, but also watching her play Grand Theft Auto. How sensitive can people honestly be after growing up with all these things that should have at least introduced them to the fact that the world isn't always sunshine and roses? Are there honestly people that go around being outraged at the prospect of a book that is all about strange sex going somewhat mainstream?
What upsets me most, though, is that these people are generally the ones that go out and tout how "all about" free speech they are, until they decide they want to censor you. Again, going back to my personal situation, but my sister gets upset if I say anything to her about how much profanity she uses, but the moment I use the word "hoe" in a text message, I received a lecture about why that's wrong. This isn't an isolated event. If one were to make a post to any of these Social Justice Warrior's blogs asking them to shut up, one would receive in response how they have a right to free speech and can say anything they want. The next day, though, one would be apt to receive all sorts of hate speech from multiple SJWs with the intention of silencing one for rude and Outrageous behavior.
I tend to believe that the world is actually a fairly amazing place. I look at all the different peoples, ideologies, and cultures, and I'm taken aback at how, given all this diversity, human beings are able to come together and advance the welfare of all people. That's the reason Freedom of Speech was identified as a right that all people should not have infringed. Trying to be politically correct and avoid outraging someone with a micro-aggression will only silence people who may have good ideas to share. If people want to be outraged, at least find something worthy of outrage. Personally, I am outraged every time I hear of a dog being shot by a police officer with little to no cause, not because someone used the word "hoe" or gave me a strange look.
Most importantly, as a Culture, these people need to learn the difference between an argument and a screaming match. Dissent is actually a good thing: if everyone agreed all the time, we'd never have computers, television, motorized transportation, and a host of other innovations that have given the lives of every person they touch new meaning. Yet dissent to a SJW just elicits outrage and receives in response a call to arms. I've seen accounts go dark on Twitter due to an onslaught of "outraged" individuals voicing their contempt for some minor transgressions. I see the way arguments are made against books that don't fit into the standards of political correctness. Any dissent is considered a personal attack, and treated as such.
Let's come together and learn that arguments are not necessarily personal attacks. We can continue expanding and improving the lives of people everywhere, but only if we can sometimes agree to disagree.
What I've been wanting to talk about, though, is PC and Outrage Culture. I had heard people complain about this kind of thing before, but until sometime last month, I had never truly come into contact with it. Unfortunately, my contact came in the form of my younger sister.
I'll start with the background. My youngest sister and I have never exactly had a "normal" relationship. She's five years younger than I, so we never shared a school, nor did any of our social circles overlap. She is, however, probably a lot more like me than probably either of us would be willing to admit regularly. While she's intelligent and fairly talented in certain respects, she tends toward shyness and the need for shelter due to being the youngest child and because of the way my parents' relationship played out after their divorce. To this day, I find it difficult to treat her as an adult even though she is only five years younger than I am.
That leaves me with how I came into contact with this society that I honestly believed couldn't really exist. My sister and I have always addressed each other by calling one another names. Up until last month, it was funny and playful, but last month I addressed her, "Hey hoe" on a text message, and that's when the dynamic suddenly changed. I literally received around 1000 words in response on why I shouldn't use terms like that because it degrades women and punishes them for their sexuality. I argued that the term hoe actually refers to a pieces of gardening equipment, so how does she know I wasn't making reference to that. She shut that down fairly quickly (which was correct but none-the-less annoying), so I made a simple argument that she either couldn't refute or, more likely, completely refused to hear. I said, simply, that if I was actually attempting to insult someone (which in this case I wasn't but it's always fun to get a rise out of her), why would I go out of my way to ensure that my insult wasn't too insulting?
At that point she shut down and I didn't hear back from her for a while, so I had to dig around a bit. I knew she had been keeping a blog, so I found it and starting reading through it. The first thing I noticed was it's location: Tumbler. I'm not anti-Tumbler for any particular reason, but most of the people that I had heard complain about this PC ridiculousness and the growing Outrage Culture seem to point to Tumbler as the source. Being a blog site, I never imagined it would be any different than just about any other blog site, and I've used and referenced quite a few in my time, so I never believed that Tumbler could create some horrific culture.
I still don't know if Tumbler is at fault, but I do know that within moments of scrolling through my sister's blog, I was staring straight into the face of the PC Outrage Culture. I clicked on her most recent post and the first two words in all caps, bold faced and underlined, were "TRIGGER WARNING!!" Then there was an entire disclaimer that said that she was going to talk about sex and rape and all sorts of other things that any normal person would have discerned from her title and, if she knew how to create one, her opening paragraph. The whole disclaimer really, really bothered me, especially since the post was intended as a review of the book, Fifty Shades of Grey.
I read on though, becoming more and more disturbed as I went. I had heard these arguments about the book being all about rape and the perpetuation of the rape culture before, but I never expected to see them all tossed together on a single page, and by my own sister. By the end of the post I realized that my sister was a Social Justice Warrior, and I wasn't exactly happy about it. I started digging around and tried to learn more about this whole subset of my generation that I never could bring myself to believe actually existed, only to find myself more and more disappointed.
I've come pretty far without defining a few terms, but that was all to give the necessary background. The PC and Outrage Culture is simple to define; this is a subset, mostly of my generation (millennials), who believe that whether you mean to be or not, just about everything you say or do could be construed as offensive to someone, and that people have a right (or perhaps a responsibility) to be completely outraged by these micro-offences.
There are many things about this kind of ideology that I have trouble with. For starters, generally the people who cling to this kind of ideology actually grew up with the internet, so it's not like they haven't been exposed to all sorts of violence, cruelty, etc. I mean, personally, I can remember not only playing Grand Theft Auto while my sister watched, but also watching her play Grand Theft Auto. How sensitive can people honestly be after growing up with all these things that should have at least introduced them to the fact that the world isn't always sunshine and roses? Are there honestly people that go around being outraged at the prospect of a book that is all about strange sex going somewhat mainstream?
What upsets me most, though, is that these people are generally the ones that go out and tout how "all about" free speech they are, until they decide they want to censor you. Again, going back to my personal situation, but my sister gets upset if I say anything to her about how much profanity she uses, but the moment I use the word "hoe" in a text message, I received a lecture about why that's wrong. This isn't an isolated event. If one were to make a post to any of these Social Justice Warrior's blogs asking them to shut up, one would receive in response how they have a right to free speech and can say anything they want. The next day, though, one would be apt to receive all sorts of hate speech from multiple SJWs with the intention of silencing one for rude and Outrageous behavior.
I tend to believe that the world is actually a fairly amazing place. I look at all the different peoples, ideologies, and cultures, and I'm taken aback at how, given all this diversity, human beings are able to come together and advance the welfare of all people. That's the reason Freedom of Speech was identified as a right that all people should not have infringed. Trying to be politically correct and avoid outraging someone with a micro-aggression will only silence people who may have good ideas to share. If people want to be outraged, at least find something worthy of outrage. Personally, I am outraged every time I hear of a dog being shot by a police officer with little to no cause, not because someone used the word "hoe" or gave me a strange look.
Most importantly, as a Culture, these people need to learn the difference between an argument and a screaming match. Dissent is actually a good thing: if everyone agreed all the time, we'd never have computers, television, motorized transportation, and a host of other innovations that have given the lives of every person they touch new meaning. Yet dissent to a SJW just elicits outrage and receives in response a call to arms. I've seen accounts go dark on Twitter due to an onslaught of "outraged" individuals voicing their contempt for some minor transgressions. I see the way arguments are made against books that don't fit into the standards of political correctness. Any dissent is considered a personal attack, and treated as such.
Let's come together and learn that arguments are not necessarily personal attacks. We can continue expanding and improving the lives of people everywhere, but only if we can sometimes agree to disagree.
Saturday, August 22, 2015
8/22/15 - Arguing With My Wife
I've decided to start a new segment on this blog. My wife and I don't exactly have the same political views. She took the World's Smallest Political Quiz and her results were closer to Constitutional Conservative than mine, which were 100% Libertarian. As such, there are many things we agree on, but a few that we disagree on very passionately. I've been thinking of doing this segment for a while, and I finally got her permission this week.
I'd like to start with the drug war. The reasons for starting here are fairly simple: last week I watched a documentary called The House I Live In, which is all about the negative consequences of the war on drugs. This is a topic I've been mulling over for a while (I'm sure you can remember me mentioning it way back in my first post about Orange is the New Black), and finally setting aside time to watch that documentary solidified my desire to write a full post about it. Why call it "Arguing with my wife"? That's simple as well: she has completely different ideas on this topic that I'd like to also present in this forum so that I can deal with them a bit more eloquently than I ever can when the two of us are arguing.
As many of you know, there were drug laws before the "official" start of the drug war under President Nixon, but most of them were racially motivated and most were ignored if you were a high class white person. Until the 1930s, marijuana wasn't even illegal in the United States. In fact, hemp production was encouraged in the 19th century. You can see in the timeline that the reason for banning marijuana use was largely motivated by the influx of Mexican Immigrants in the 1920s and people's fear of these immigrants. Today, marijuana is largely recognized as less dangerous than alcohol, which has been legal to use for anyone over the drinking age since the repeal of prohibition.
Other drugs follow a similar path: opiates and cocaine were outlawed around the turn of the 20th century due to fear of Asian and Black communities, but their recreational use continued with high class society mostly unabated. Prior to those bans, many products used these drugs as ingredients, including Coca-Cola, which originally was made with cocaine.
Now, whether there were dangers to these products should have been for people and markets to decide, or at the worst these products could have been subject to age restrictions and labeling regulations as we have now with tobacco and alcohol products. Instead, the government instituted an all-out prohibition against many psychoactive drugs.
This is the point where my wife and I begin to disagree. I see this idea of prohibition as ludicrous. For starters, we already tried prohibition with alcohol, and I don't need to go into details about just how much of a terrible idea that was. Why then would anyone think that drug prohibition wouldn't garner similar results? Almost a century later, and what do we have to show for all of our efforts to ban recreational use of psychoactive drugs? We have hundreds of thousands of people currently in prison serving some drug related sentence. How has that affected usage rates of drugs in our country? It largely hasn't. What I can't understand is why we would treat psychoactive drugs any differently than tobacco products, or alcohol? The recreational use of the drugs is harming no one other than the person using them, yet we seem to think that it is the job of the federal government to protect people from themselves by ripping them away from their families and putting them in prison just because they wanted to get high.
My wife, on the other hand, believes that this is fairly simple. People make choices knowing full well the consequences, and if they get caught and put in prison, that's their own fault. She completely refuses to here my argument that the laws are ludicrous in the first place. In fact, I used the analogy of chocolate ice cream because it's one of our favorite desserts to share. I asked her if chocolate ice cream was banned tomorrow if she would continue to consume it, to which she said, "Yes, probably." She then clarified that, if that were the case and she were caught, she would expect to be put in prison. Frankly, I don't know how to argue with that kind of logic.
That being said, I attempted to appeal to her in a different way. What if the people who are using or selling drugs have few, if any, other choices? People who grow up with parents who were put in jail because of the drug war are often trapped in low-class neighborhoods with little to no economic prospects. They may have gone to the local government schools where they received incredibly sub-par educations (maybe next time I'll cover this topic as it's fairly huge). Many will drop out well below the functional literacy rate, leaving their job prospects incredibly impaired. Even those who graduate will find it difficult to escape the neighborhood as few colleges will accept them and their schools likely have no vocational tech programs. These individuals are left with no real choice but to turn to what they know: drugs.
This argument didn't work, either. She went back to, "I don't need to feel sympathy for people who make the choice to do something illegal and then find themselves in prison." I finally tried the argument that the drug war is bad because of how it enables police brutality, which I wrote a bit about a few weeks ago. I tried telling her about Radley Balko's work on the increasing militarization of police. She didn't seem to mind that local police can obtain and use tanks and armored personnel carriers, and when I tried to tell her about cops raiding incorrect houses or killing dogs for little to no reason, she simply told me that I was focusing on a few high profile cases and not the vast majority of cases that go off without any problems like that. I tried to argue on this point, but then she told me to stop talking, and now I'm here. I was thinking of doing another full post about the growing military mentality in police, but I think instead I'm just going to recommend Radley Balko's book.
I hope my arguments here were more clear and easier to follow than those I attempted to make with my wife. Let me know if I've changed your mind in any way. If you feel as my wife does, please don't hesitate to comment; I'm always looking for views that challenge my own and keep me thinking.
I'd like to start with the drug war. The reasons for starting here are fairly simple: last week I watched a documentary called The House I Live In, which is all about the negative consequences of the war on drugs. This is a topic I've been mulling over for a while (I'm sure you can remember me mentioning it way back in my first post about Orange is the New Black), and finally setting aside time to watch that documentary solidified my desire to write a full post about it. Why call it "Arguing with my wife"? That's simple as well: she has completely different ideas on this topic that I'd like to also present in this forum so that I can deal with them a bit more eloquently than I ever can when the two of us are arguing.
As many of you know, there were drug laws before the "official" start of the drug war under President Nixon, but most of them were racially motivated and most were ignored if you were a high class white person. Until the 1930s, marijuana wasn't even illegal in the United States. In fact, hemp production was encouraged in the 19th century. You can see in the timeline that the reason for banning marijuana use was largely motivated by the influx of Mexican Immigrants in the 1920s and people's fear of these immigrants. Today, marijuana is largely recognized as less dangerous than alcohol, which has been legal to use for anyone over the drinking age since the repeal of prohibition.
Other drugs follow a similar path: opiates and cocaine were outlawed around the turn of the 20th century due to fear of Asian and Black communities, but their recreational use continued with high class society mostly unabated. Prior to those bans, many products used these drugs as ingredients, including Coca-Cola, which originally was made with cocaine.
Now, whether there were dangers to these products should have been for people and markets to decide, or at the worst these products could have been subject to age restrictions and labeling regulations as we have now with tobacco and alcohol products. Instead, the government instituted an all-out prohibition against many psychoactive drugs.
This is the point where my wife and I begin to disagree. I see this idea of prohibition as ludicrous. For starters, we already tried prohibition with alcohol, and I don't need to go into details about just how much of a terrible idea that was. Why then would anyone think that drug prohibition wouldn't garner similar results? Almost a century later, and what do we have to show for all of our efforts to ban recreational use of psychoactive drugs? We have hundreds of thousands of people currently in prison serving some drug related sentence. How has that affected usage rates of drugs in our country? It largely hasn't. What I can't understand is why we would treat psychoactive drugs any differently than tobacco products, or alcohol? The recreational use of the drugs is harming no one other than the person using them, yet we seem to think that it is the job of the federal government to protect people from themselves by ripping them away from their families and putting them in prison just because they wanted to get high.
My wife, on the other hand, believes that this is fairly simple. People make choices knowing full well the consequences, and if they get caught and put in prison, that's their own fault. She completely refuses to here my argument that the laws are ludicrous in the first place. In fact, I used the analogy of chocolate ice cream because it's one of our favorite desserts to share. I asked her if chocolate ice cream was banned tomorrow if she would continue to consume it, to which she said, "Yes, probably." She then clarified that, if that were the case and she were caught, she would expect to be put in prison. Frankly, I don't know how to argue with that kind of logic.
That being said, I attempted to appeal to her in a different way. What if the people who are using or selling drugs have few, if any, other choices? People who grow up with parents who were put in jail because of the drug war are often trapped in low-class neighborhoods with little to no economic prospects. They may have gone to the local government schools where they received incredibly sub-par educations (maybe next time I'll cover this topic as it's fairly huge). Many will drop out well below the functional literacy rate, leaving their job prospects incredibly impaired. Even those who graduate will find it difficult to escape the neighborhood as few colleges will accept them and their schools likely have no vocational tech programs. These individuals are left with no real choice but to turn to what they know: drugs.
This argument didn't work, either. She went back to, "I don't need to feel sympathy for people who make the choice to do something illegal and then find themselves in prison." I finally tried the argument that the drug war is bad because of how it enables police brutality, which I wrote a bit about a few weeks ago. I tried telling her about Radley Balko's work on the increasing militarization of police. She didn't seem to mind that local police can obtain and use tanks and armored personnel carriers, and when I tried to tell her about cops raiding incorrect houses or killing dogs for little to no reason, she simply told me that I was focusing on a few high profile cases and not the vast majority of cases that go off without any problems like that. I tried to argue on this point, but then she told me to stop talking, and now I'm here. I was thinking of doing another full post about the growing military mentality in police, but I think instead I'm just going to recommend Radley Balko's book.
I hope my arguments here were more clear and easier to follow than those I attempted to make with my wife. Let me know if I've changed your mind in any way. If you feel as my wife does, please don't hesitate to comment; I'm always looking for views that challenge my own and keep me thinking.
Sunday, August 16, 2015
8/16/15 - Something More Personal
For weeks now I've been reviewing things and discussing politics, but, honestly, my life doesn't really revolve around politics. I hardly ever talk politics outside of this blog, so it works as a good way for me to express that portion of my personality, but it's not the main thing I spend my time thinking about. Therefore, today I'm going to take a break from politics and spend time talking about something a bit more personal.
I'd like to talk about something that's a still about society in general, but more about personal choices. You see, when I was young, I was diagnosed with ADHD, and that has really shaped a large portion of my life. I want to talk about how my mother and I handled this because it doesn't really fit with about 2/3 of the people who are diagnosed with ADHD. I am in no way an expert on this, and frankly, I'm going to spend a whole lot more time talking about me than about ADHD in general, but it's something I've been studying to help with my own difficulties and something I think is important to share.
I'll start by saying that, while most of my political views are shaped by my father, most of my life views were shaped by my mother. When I was ten my mother and father split up, and it took years for my father to find a stable place to live and make a stable arrangement with my mother, so for 3-4 years after the split I hardly ever saw him. This was around the time when we were just learning of my ADHD and my mother mostly determined my coarse of treatment. I don't really know her motives, but my mother has always been reticent to turn to medication, and this was no exception. She absolutely refused to have me medicated, and because of that decision the two of us really spent a lot of time learning together how to handle my behavior.
I'm not sure my exact diagnosis, but I believe I'm of the combined hyperactive and inattentive, as with most people diagnosed with ADHD. I have a very difficult time sitting still, and, even to this day, find myself overly hyper and out of control from time to time. From my understanding, it was much worse when I was younger, but the hyperactive behaviors tend to lessen with age and I've also learned how to control those urges most of the time. Without medication, I had to learn what it meant to be out of control and I spent a lot of time learning what helped bring me back into control.
For example, while I tend to zone out and day dream during a class that I find boring, I can hyper-focus on something that catches my interest. I can't watch TV these days without something in my hands to occupy a bit of my attention, but I can sit down with a book for 6 hours without so much as getting up to use the restroom. I was very lucky in that, early on, my teachers worked with me and didn't push my mother to medicate me. In third grade my teacher would allow me to leave my desk after a lecture to play on the math game machines so long as I knew that I had to complete all my work. I would often rush through any assignments he passed out just to run over and see how quickly I could answer math problems on the games or to see if I could complete harder and harder questions. In fourth grade, my teacher would allow me to wander the room and help other students if I was finished with my work. Not long after that I began to learn that what I needed was something to focus on if I was unable to focus on the task at hand.
I started reading at a fairly regular rate because a book was a quiet, acceptable form of activity that I could take with my anywhere. If things became boring in class, I would read. As the years progressed and the teachers became less understanding, I would often get scolded for reading in class and not focusing on their lessons or the assigned work. I tried doodling in a few of those classes, but I was never very good at it, so instead I would zone out and focus on a game that I had come up with in my head. Sometimes I would try to challenge myself to come up with some incredible math problem that I would then have to solve. At least then it would look like I was taking notes even though I wasn't really paying any attention at all.
The point I'm making here is that, when I find something that's actually interesting to me, focus isn't a problem. The hyperactivity goes away and I can sit still. This is something that's been noted for most children with ADHD, at least according to a the National Institute of Mental Health. Thus, one way I learned to cope was to find something enjoyable that could fill my time when I was bored but was also constructive and acceptable behavior. This one is the tough one for many children as most kids with ADHD don't find difficult math problems or reading a book to be quite as enjoyable as I do, but I'm sure something can be found for everyone.
The other thing that's been much more helpful since I've reached adulthood has been exercise. Now, don't get me wrong, my mother may have known this when I was a child as she was fairly strict about spending time indoors. As far back as I can remember, my parents restricted the amount of time my siblings and I could spend watching TV or on the computer, and would generally prefer that we spent as much time as possible outside. I have really learned to appreciate that as I've aged. I joined the Boy Scouts around the time my parents split as a way to spend more time with my father, and I found that being physically active kept me more level. These days I'm a fairly avid jogger, and I've been attempting to work out a routine so I can jog every day. This morning I awoke early enough to go jogging before the heat became too oppressive, and that is helping me to be level and focused enough to write this post. It's been noted in a number of studies that exercise helps with attention, and it's a great way for me to manage my ADHD without medication.
This brings me to my final point, and probably the reason I am writing this post. Prescriptions for ADHD medication continue to rise, and, frankly, I don't think it's a good idea to medicate children when alternatives exist. Medications only treat the major symptom of ADHD, namely the inability to focus, and neither cure the disease, nor treat the other problems that are present in children with ADHD. Medications can cause social stigma, which can exacerbate socializing problems that many children with ADHD have. There is almost no information on the long term effects of taking these medications. Finally, and this is the really personal one for me, I can't stand the idea that we're teaching children that if they have any kind of trouble with the attitudes or behaviors that they should just take medication to fix it. A few months back, one of my coworkers almost lost her grandson to an overdose of, you guessed it, medication designed to control his behavior. He was feeling out of control and he was scolded for being out of control, so he broke into the locked cabinet where his father kept his medication (children are very resourceful), and took the remaining medication in the bottle. His father noticed him acting funny soon after, found the empty bottle, and rushed him to the hospital. Thankfully, the medication was the slow release kind, so he didn't receive the full affect at once, but it was a very scary situation for my coworker and her family. When asked later why he had taken the pills, the boy told his doctor that, "He was bad, and he wanted to be good, and the pills make him a good boy." That's not the kind of attitude I think we should be promoting in children, and apparently in this case the doctor agreed with me because he immediately stopped the prescription. Beyond that, I've heard of cases where children become shells of their former selves due to the medication they're taking, along with plenty of other horror stories. Besides, I can't stop coming back to how little is known about long term effects.
So my advice is to study the problem, talk to your child's doctor, and come up with a plan for dealing with ADHD that doesn't require medication. I'm twenty five years old and have been dealing with ADHD as long as I can remember. I have never taken medication to treat my symptoms, but I am able to lead what I consider a relatively productive and successful life. Let's focus on the best outcomes and stop wasting time and money on medicating our children just because dealing with them is difficult.
I'd like to talk about something that's a still about society in general, but more about personal choices. You see, when I was young, I was diagnosed with ADHD, and that has really shaped a large portion of my life. I want to talk about how my mother and I handled this because it doesn't really fit with about 2/3 of the people who are diagnosed with ADHD. I am in no way an expert on this, and frankly, I'm going to spend a whole lot more time talking about me than about ADHD in general, but it's something I've been studying to help with my own difficulties and something I think is important to share.
I'll start by saying that, while most of my political views are shaped by my father, most of my life views were shaped by my mother. When I was ten my mother and father split up, and it took years for my father to find a stable place to live and make a stable arrangement with my mother, so for 3-4 years after the split I hardly ever saw him. This was around the time when we were just learning of my ADHD and my mother mostly determined my coarse of treatment. I don't really know her motives, but my mother has always been reticent to turn to medication, and this was no exception. She absolutely refused to have me medicated, and because of that decision the two of us really spent a lot of time learning together how to handle my behavior.
I'm not sure my exact diagnosis, but I believe I'm of the combined hyperactive and inattentive, as with most people diagnosed with ADHD. I have a very difficult time sitting still, and, even to this day, find myself overly hyper and out of control from time to time. From my understanding, it was much worse when I was younger, but the hyperactive behaviors tend to lessen with age and I've also learned how to control those urges most of the time. Without medication, I had to learn what it meant to be out of control and I spent a lot of time learning what helped bring me back into control.
For example, while I tend to zone out and day dream during a class that I find boring, I can hyper-focus on something that catches my interest. I can't watch TV these days without something in my hands to occupy a bit of my attention, but I can sit down with a book for 6 hours without so much as getting up to use the restroom. I was very lucky in that, early on, my teachers worked with me and didn't push my mother to medicate me. In third grade my teacher would allow me to leave my desk after a lecture to play on the math game machines so long as I knew that I had to complete all my work. I would often rush through any assignments he passed out just to run over and see how quickly I could answer math problems on the games or to see if I could complete harder and harder questions. In fourth grade, my teacher would allow me to wander the room and help other students if I was finished with my work. Not long after that I began to learn that what I needed was something to focus on if I was unable to focus on the task at hand.
I started reading at a fairly regular rate because a book was a quiet, acceptable form of activity that I could take with my anywhere. If things became boring in class, I would read. As the years progressed and the teachers became less understanding, I would often get scolded for reading in class and not focusing on their lessons or the assigned work. I tried doodling in a few of those classes, but I was never very good at it, so instead I would zone out and focus on a game that I had come up with in my head. Sometimes I would try to challenge myself to come up with some incredible math problem that I would then have to solve. At least then it would look like I was taking notes even though I wasn't really paying any attention at all.
The point I'm making here is that, when I find something that's actually interesting to me, focus isn't a problem. The hyperactivity goes away and I can sit still. This is something that's been noted for most children with ADHD, at least according to a the National Institute of Mental Health. Thus, one way I learned to cope was to find something enjoyable that could fill my time when I was bored but was also constructive and acceptable behavior. This one is the tough one for many children as most kids with ADHD don't find difficult math problems or reading a book to be quite as enjoyable as I do, but I'm sure something can be found for everyone.
The other thing that's been much more helpful since I've reached adulthood has been exercise. Now, don't get me wrong, my mother may have known this when I was a child as she was fairly strict about spending time indoors. As far back as I can remember, my parents restricted the amount of time my siblings and I could spend watching TV or on the computer, and would generally prefer that we spent as much time as possible outside. I have really learned to appreciate that as I've aged. I joined the Boy Scouts around the time my parents split as a way to spend more time with my father, and I found that being physically active kept me more level. These days I'm a fairly avid jogger, and I've been attempting to work out a routine so I can jog every day. This morning I awoke early enough to go jogging before the heat became too oppressive, and that is helping me to be level and focused enough to write this post. It's been noted in a number of studies that exercise helps with attention, and it's a great way for me to manage my ADHD without medication.
This brings me to my final point, and probably the reason I am writing this post. Prescriptions for ADHD medication continue to rise, and, frankly, I don't think it's a good idea to medicate children when alternatives exist. Medications only treat the major symptom of ADHD, namely the inability to focus, and neither cure the disease, nor treat the other problems that are present in children with ADHD. Medications can cause social stigma, which can exacerbate socializing problems that many children with ADHD have. There is almost no information on the long term effects of taking these medications. Finally, and this is the really personal one for me, I can't stand the idea that we're teaching children that if they have any kind of trouble with the attitudes or behaviors that they should just take medication to fix it. A few months back, one of my coworkers almost lost her grandson to an overdose of, you guessed it, medication designed to control his behavior. He was feeling out of control and he was scolded for being out of control, so he broke into the locked cabinet where his father kept his medication (children are very resourceful), and took the remaining medication in the bottle. His father noticed him acting funny soon after, found the empty bottle, and rushed him to the hospital. Thankfully, the medication was the slow release kind, so he didn't receive the full affect at once, but it was a very scary situation for my coworker and her family. When asked later why he had taken the pills, the boy told his doctor that, "He was bad, and he wanted to be good, and the pills make him a good boy." That's not the kind of attitude I think we should be promoting in children, and apparently in this case the doctor agreed with me because he immediately stopped the prescription. Beyond that, I've heard of cases where children become shells of their former selves due to the medication they're taking, along with plenty of other horror stories. Besides, I can't stop coming back to how little is known about long term effects.
So my advice is to study the problem, talk to your child's doctor, and come up with a plan for dealing with ADHD that doesn't require medication. I'm twenty five years old and have been dealing with ADHD as long as I can remember. I have never taken medication to treat my symptoms, but I am able to lead what I consider a relatively productive and successful life. Let's focus on the best outcomes and stop wasting time and money on medicating our children just because dealing with them is difficult.
Sunday, August 9, 2015
8/9/15 - Why Libertarianism?
A few posts back I began talking about my journey into the world of libertarianism, and today I've decided to avoid all the negativity in the news and the entire circus act of the first Republican debate and tell you exactly why I came to be a libertarian, and why I stay.
I've already explained to you that I came to learn a lot of what I know about being a libertarian through Ayn Rand's books and philosophy of Objectivism. As I mention in my post about "Freedom and Liberty vs Death and Taxes," I never could quite reconcile Rand's philosophy with my upbringing. I agree with most of what Rand said, but the idea that religion is anathema, along with a few other issues, really kept me at a distance.
As I also mentioned, my Government teacher in 12th grade suggested I may be a Libertarian, so I began following the Libertarian Party on Twitter (when I actually started using Twitter, which was sometime in college). I saw that they posted a lot of articles from a magazine called Reason, so I began following a few different Reason accounts on Twitter as well. This is what ultimately led me down the rabbit hole.
Twitter caused my transformation into a full Libertarian. As I mentioned above, I didn't start using it in high school because I thought it was stupid, but I toyed around with it in college because most of the people I knew were on it. I ended up with an account that hardly follows anything but news sources, libertarian publications and accounts, and a few politicians. As time went on, Twitter would recommend that I follow new accounts, and at one point it was recommended that I follow the We Are Libertarians account. I had been following this account for quite some time with little to no interaction before my wife and I decided to drive cross country. The day we left, I had noticed a Tweet about a new Podcast episode, which I was previously unaware of, and decided to download it and listen to it in the car. I figured I had 38 hours to kill, so what was the harm? Besides, one of my friends had been suggesting that I start listening to podcasts on my commutes for a while now, so I was already predisposed to the idea.
Well, this is really the time when I fully began to come into my ideas. I started with an episode somewhere in the 90s of their catalog (though for the life of me now I can't remember which episode it was exactly. I think it had something to do with Ferguson as that was a hot topic at the time and it seemed like something I wanted to learn more about). Needless to say, I quickly became hooked. I went back through their entire catalog and listened to every single one of their episodes. I've also started listening to the other podcasts produced by We Are Libertarians, even though the main one is the only one that's still producing new content. Once I completed their catalog, I began branching out to other podcasts recommended by them and by the Stitcher app, which I had downloaded to listen to We Are Libertarians when I heard in one of their episodes that the podcast was available on that service.
At any rate, the last 6 months of my life have really been eye opening for me. I've been reading more news, challenging myself more with different ideas, and not just libertarian ones. I've come to feel so strongly about my libertarian ideas that 6 or so weeks ago I decided to start my own blog to expound them. I know that most of the time I've been fairly negative, which I would prefer to avoid but I have trouble with because of the current climate of our country. So much going on right now upsets me that I feel the need to speak out against it.
That leaves me with an attempt to explain to you, dear reader, why libertarianism?
As I heard the other day on the Tom Wood's Show episode 461 (I think), "If I really hated poor people, I would wish Socialism upon them." I told you last week that Bernie Sanders scares the crap out of me because he speaks so loudly for Socialist ideas, and people stand behind him. We already know that Communism doesn't work, and Socialism is honestly not hugely different from Communism on paper. In fact, we cannot deny that, since the American Revolution and the idea that government should get out of the way and let people live as they might, there has been a radical shift in the standard of living of people across the globe. As explained in the Forbes article I just linked to, the increased wages, life spans, and mobility of even the poorest people can all be credited to free market forces driving up the standard of living for everyone.
I think next time I'll touch on the ideas of income inequality and wage redistribution, which are key arguments that people like Bernie Sanders make to gain support. In the mean time, I want to end this as positively as possible.
I believe in Free Market Capitalism and the libertarian ideas that follow because I know that, if left alone, people generally can make good choices for themselves. Theses choices aggregate to the betterment of all people, especially the poorest of people. The best example of this would be the people living at or below the poverty level as designated by the government here in the US: they probably have at least one TV in their house/apartment, as well as cell phones, a building to live in, more than one set of clothing to wear, etc. Poor people in many other parts of the world live in tents or mud houses without electricity, plumbing, or many of the amenities that most of us take for granted. If we as a people want to continue increasing the standard of living of everyone, we need to continue pushing for free market ideals and get the government to stay out of our way.
I've already explained to you that I came to learn a lot of what I know about being a libertarian through Ayn Rand's books and philosophy of Objectivism. As I mention in my post about "Freedom and Liberty vs Death and Taxes," I never could quite reconcile Rand's philosophy with my upbringing. I agree with most of what Rand said, but the idea that religion is anathema, along with a few other issues, really kept me at a distance.
As I also mentioned, my Government teacher in 12th grade suggested I may be a Libertarian, so I began following the Libertarian Party on Twitter (when I actually started using Twitter, which was sometime in college). I saw that they posted a lot of articles from a magazine called Reason, so I began following a few different Reason accounts on Twitter as well. This is what ultimately led me down the rabbit hole.
Twitter caused my transformation into a full Libertarian. As I mentioned above, I didn't start using it in high school because I thought it was stupid, but I toyed around with it in college because most of the people I knew were on it. I ended up with an account that hardly follows anything but news sources, libertarian publications and accounts, and a few politicians. As time went on, Twitter would recommend that I follow new accounts, and at one point it was recommended that I follow the We Are Libertarians account. I had been following this account for quite some time with little to no interaction before my wife and I decided to drive cross country. The day we left, I had noticed a Tweet about a new Podcast episode, which I was previously unaware of, and decided to download it and listen to it in the car. I figured I had 38 hours to kill, so what was the harm? Besides, one of my friends had been suggesting that I start listening to podcasts on my commutes for a while now, so I was already predisposed to the idea.
Well, this is really the time when I fully began to come into my ideas. I started with an episode somewhere in the 90s of their catalog (though for the life of me now I can't remember which episode it was exactly. I think it had something to do with Ferguson as that was a hot topic at the time and it seemed like something I wanted to learn more about). Needless to say, I quickly became hooked. I went back through their entire catalog and listened to every single one of their episodes. I've also started listening to the other podcasts produced by We Are Libertarians, even though the main one is the only one that's still producing new content. Once I completed their catalog, I began branching out to other podcasts recommended by them and by the Stitcher app, which I had downloaded to listen to We Are Libertarians when I heard in one of their episodes that the podcast was available on that service.
At any rate, the last 6 months of my life have really been eye opening for me. I've been reading more news, challenging myself more with different ideas, and not just libertarian ones. I've come to feel so strongly about my libertarian ideas that 6 or so weeks ago I decided to start my own blog to expound them. I know that most of the time I've been fairly negative, which I would prefer to avoid but I have trouble with because of the current climate of our country. So much going on right now upsets me that I feel the need to speak out against it.
That leaves me with an attempt to explain to you, dear reader, why libertarianism?
As I heard the other day on the Tom Wood's Show episode 461 (I think), "If I really hated poor people, I would wish Socialism upon them." I told you last week that Bernie Sanders scares the crap out of me because he speaks so loudly for Socialist ideas, and people stand behind him. We already know that Communism doesn't work, and Socialism is honestly not hugely different from Communism on paper. In fact, we cannot deny that, since the American Revolution and the idea that government should get out of the way and let people live as they might, there has been a radical shift in the standard of living of people across the globe. As explained in the Forbes article I just linked to, the increased wages, life spans, and mobility of even the poorest people can all be credited to free market forces driving up the standard of living for everyone.
I think next time I'll touch on the ideas of income inequality and wage redistribution, which are key arguments that people like Bernie Sanders make to gain support. In the mean time, I want to end this as positively as possible.
I believe in Free Market Capitalism and the libertarian ideas that follow because I know that, if left alone, people generally can make good choices for themselves. Theses choices aggregate to the betterment of all people, especially the poorest of people. The best example of this would be the people living at or below the poverty level as designated by the government here in the US: they probably have at least one TV in their house/apartment, as well as cell phones, a building to live in, more than one set of clothing to wear, etc. Poor people in many other parts of the world live in tents or mud houses without electricity, plumbing, or many of the amenities that most of us take for granted. If we as a people want to continue increasing the standard of living of everyone, we need to continue pushing for free market ideals and get the government to stay out of our way.
Sunday, August 2, 2015
8/2/15 - Bernie Sanders
Bernie Sanders is running for president under the Democrat Party. A lot of people have compared him to Rand Paul because, much like Paul and the Republican Party, Sanders only loosely fits into the Democrat Party. In fact, currently Sanders' roll as senator for Vermont is as an Independent. He identifies most with the socialist movement, which he has openly admitted to.
Bernie Sanders scares the crap out of me. Sure, many people on the political right want to dismiss him as a joke, and, sure, it can be easy to make fun of him. The fact of the matter is, though, Mr. Sanders is being taken seriously by a lot of people. While his gains in the polls may be slowing, he's still seeing backing by 17% of Democrats, and national polls put him ahead of Donald Trump. For these reasons and a few others, Mr. Sanders really, really scares me.
The other reason I am so afraid of Mr. Sanders, though, has nothing to do with whether he will be elected. Even though the odds are good that Sanders will not top Clinton for the Democratic nominee, what really bothers me are the sheer amount of people who parrot his ideas. I see them every single day on Facebook and Twitter. I argue with friends and family over the absolute garbage they're parroting from a man who obviously devoted his life to studying the ideas of Carl Marx and John Maynard Keynes, and not much time actually paying attention to reality.
I'd like to spend some time refuting some of those ideas that the Sanders' crowd spews onto social media on a regular basis without getting mired in an argument with someone and trying to make my point in 140 characters or less (which is to say, I'm going to be verbose).
I'll start with the one I had to argue with my own sister about: college funding. Mr. Sanders would have you believe that everyone needs to go to college and that the government should fund it all. He's even come up with a new tax in order to help fund this idea. The fact is, though, that the reason so many people are struggling with college debt is that so many people are going to college and getting government assistance. Actually, as more people get more money from the government to pay for college, costs keep going up, to the tune of sixty five cents for every dollar the government spends. So please, let's send everyone to school for free; it should work out for the middle class about as well as all that free healthcare.
That last point more than anything gets people in my age group really fired up because, well, if they're anything like me, they're drowning in student loan debt. I know that I will personally be paying off my student loans for the next roughly 15-20 years. unless something major changes in my life. Frankly, I don't use a cent of that education, but being able to tell people that I have a degree has opened certain doors for me. What I can't figure out is, why? My coworker, who was brought in from doing manual labor in our job shop at my behest, is just as good at what she does as I am at what I do, if not better. She has no college degree, and thus had to wait ten years longer than I did to get out of manual labor and into a position that is far less punishing and pays better. I could have just as easily taken the same path and be working in a job shop or retail job in Western PA to this day had it not been for the fact that some piece of paper that I paid a bunch of money to obtain was valued more than honest knowledge and hard work. My solution to the student debt problem is fairly simple: stop sending so many people to school and stop subsidizing it. The system worked just fine before the government got involved, and plenty of people without degrees were able to work their way into the middle class or beyond without a load of debt holding them back. If we stop funding the problem, schools will be forced to cut back on expenses, and there won't be the problem of people like me going into a business with a degree in advanced mathematics to write up purchase orders all day. Maybe then employers will start looking at actual qualifications again instead of putting out a line that says "Bachelor's Degree or better required."
The other thing that Mr. Sanders supports that I just can't get behind is the idea of expanding workers' benefits. Mr. Sanders is a staunch supporter of raising the minimum wage, which is an idea discussed by so many people and refuted so fully that I need only link to one or two and not attempt to expand on some very well written rhetoric. He supports many other expansions, though, including expansions to Social Security, and increased parental leave for working people.
I can say that, as someone who is only a few years removed from making minimum wage, and who has many friends who make minimum wage or just about minimum wage, I can understand the allure for people my age. When I was 16 the wage minimum in the United States was increased from $5.15/hour to $7.25/hour. Anecdotal evidence, at the very least, would suggest this was not a benefit to me, though. I was making $5.50/hour before the wage was increased, but with the increase I did not increase to thirty five cents above the new minimum. Instead, I was only increased as much as legally necessary. The small restaurant I worked for immediately stopped hiring, squeezing as much work from as the least number of people as it possibly could. Finally, when that wasn't enough, I watched as, seemingly overnight, prices for our food increased by roughly 12%. I was only eligible for a certain discount on my meals, so eating at work suddenly became more expensive. At the same time, the cost of gasoline and other goods that I provided for myself and my family (assorted clothing and food items) showed increases as well. Sure, I was making roughly $50-60 more a week, but I was not really any better off financially. However, at that time, I wasn't drowning in student loan debt (see above), so I really didn't have that as a consideration. Many of the people posting on my various social network feeds are in a similar situation as I am, and a sudden raise would seemingly do wonders when it comes to attempting to pay off student loans and also attempt to find a way to have a life outside of one's parents' house. I only hope they'll reflect on my experiences and the two articles I linked to above and come to a difference conclusion.
Now, Social Security is not a huge concern to most people my age. We're (at least) 40 or so years removed from the idea of retirement, and most of us are more concerned with starting our lives than ending them. That doesn't change the fact that the program is already likely to become insolvent in twenty years or less. Increasing benefits will only increase the timetable for insolvency, leaving more people who are expecting and maybe relying on those benefits at a loss. For a great podcast on this topic, I suggest Free Thoughts most recent episode, "Going for Broke." The podcast discusses the Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid problems in much greater depth than I'm going to here, but they conclude by saying that we either need to tax more (to the tune of 18-19% compared to the current 12.5%), or pay out less. Now, I could see Mr. Sanders advocating for higher taxes, but the fact is, he's asking us to pay out more in Socials Security benefits, not less.
Many of my friends are recently becoming married and/or having children. I myself was married just two short years ago and my wife and I have been trying to have a child of our own. The idea of having time to spend with my newborn child is something that I look at as a beautiful dream. I live in California now, so I could realistically take 6 weeks of "paid" time off (paid at at rate of 50-70% of my normal pay depending on which program I am going through) for raising my newborn child. Now, much like the people that Mr. Sanders discusses in his campaign adds, though, I could not afford to do this even though I am eligible for this leave. I'm going to go anecdotal again here, so bear with me. Last year when I began my new position here in California, I had requested the services of a young woman who had previously been working in our job shop (see above). She was, unfortunately, due to have her baby just after I arrived, and I was only able to work with her for a few days before she left on maternity leave. (I might add here that, if not for her pregnancy and being required light duty work, my supervisors may never have seen her promise in her current position and I would likely never have had the chance to request her aide.) Putting that aside, though, between two different programs she was able to take approximately 12 weeks off work to be with her newborn child. Now, on one level, good for her. I'm glad she was able to afford that and to spend that very important time with her child. In fact, one of the programs that allowed her to take half of that time at a reasonable rate of pay was a private program endorsed by our employer, and as such I wouldn't have had a major problem with it. If she had returned after 6 weeks, I would have complained, but I wouldn't have been quite so worn thin. As it stood, though, being without her services for 12 weeks left me pulling the weight for what was obviously two people, and much of my work was half-done or neglected entirely. By the time she returned I was completely beaten down and it took me months to recover fully. If my wife were to get pregnant and I took that kind of time off, I honestly believe that much of the progress my coworker and I have made in the past year in our fledgling department would be completely lost.
Companies that can afford to offer these benefits to their employees, do. Much like the company I work for, there are private insurance plans that allow for leaves up to six weeks at some percentage of your regular wage that you pay into (or in my company's case, is paid into for you) and you can use at a time of need. I've worked for smaller businesses, though, and if I had requested six weeks off, my leave would have so crippled the business that I would have been replaced as soon as reasonably possible. My problem comes with the idea that a government can not only force an employer to keep my position open to me even if my leaving for that time period would cripple the regular business of the company, but can also take money from my wages and my employers' earnings to pay for me to take this time off. We could continue down this path until families are afford over a year of parental leave like in Sweden. We could also pay 49-60% of our wages in taxes, but I think most Americans would oppose that idea. Which begs the question, why are the Swedes okay with such high taxes, and why can't we make that work here? The fact is, we could never make such high taxes work in the United States, as even people like Mr. Sanders can only advocate collecting more taxes from the "well-off" without committing political suicide.
Mr. Sanders, please go back to Vermont and stop influencing the very influential youth. If you don't, I fear that soon we'll end up like Greece.
Saturday, July 25, 2015
7/26/15 - Police Brutality
Sandra Bland was in the news this week when video of a traffic stop gone wrong surfaced after she had been found dead in her cell after having spent three days in jail.
This has been a theme far too prevalent in the news for the past year or so, ever since the death of Michael Brown at the hands of police in Ferguson, Missouri last August. The death sparked outrage, protests, and shed new light on the state of police brutality in our nation. Since then many other stories have surfaced of police killing unarmed people and dogs with seemingly no provocation.
The Sandra Bland story is, thus, just the latest salvo in an ongoing war against police brutality in our nation. Now, if you've seen the video, or simply read the story, you probably agree with me that the officer had absolutely no reason for arresting Ms. Bland, putting her in a jail cell, and requesting a $5,000 bail bond against her simply for refusing to signal when changing lanes. This is the kind of garbage that people like Ayn Rand have been warning against when they say things like, "The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws." That kind of insight is why libertarians have always fought for fewer laws and less government to allow people to be free to live their own lives.
What's the point here? I happened to be listening to Glen Beck's program from Thursday of this week and I heard the three fill ins (I'm sorry, I don't know their names) talking about the Bland case. Now, whether she killed herself or not is a story all unto itself, and at this point the evidence is not in Ms. Bland's favor, but I'm not going to get into that today. I am far more concerned about the fact that she was in prison in the first place. The way they discussed the situation, though, bothered me because it seemed like they were blaming Ms. Bland for being arrested. Yes, she failed to signal as she was changing lanes. That's usually cause for, at worst, a minor fine. I can say from personal experience that plenty of people fail to signal when they're changing lanes every time I'm on the road, and I've never actually seen someone get pulled over for it.
The point of contention in the confrontation seems to be Ms. Bland's cigarette. She was smoking (probably because she was stressed out for being pulled over for such a minor offence), and the officer asked her to put out her cigarette. Now, I'm given to understand that this is a fairly regular procedure because the smoke can cover the scent of alcohol on a person who has been drinking. I understand that, but the officer didn't explain that; he ordered Ms. Bland to put out her cigarette, then got combative with her when she refused. This is probably my biggest issue with police lately: whenever you refuse to follow their orders, they get combative. Police treat failing to follow their orders as a crime, even though that's not the case. Does that mean that you shouldn't follow police orders? Not necessarily, but it does mean that the police are not the ultimate authority and everything they say is not law.
What happened to Sandra Bland? She was pulled over for a minor offence, then a petty police officer ordered her to put out her cigarette. When she failed to comply, instead of telling Ms. Bland his reason for wanting her to put out her cigarette, he ordered her from the vehicle and pointed his taser at her. He threatened to "light her ass up" if she continued to fail to comply with his orders. He then arrested her and put her in prison for "assaulting an officer," which he claims happened off camera. As an aside, there is video evidence from a bystander that the officer assaulted Ms. Bland, but there is no evidence that she assaulted him.
In the end, Sandra ended up in prison with a ridiculous bail bond set for her release, and three days later she was found dead. Even if she had committed suicide, is she to blame? When a person is in prison, they're in the state's care. She was not being monitored, even though the prison had evidence that she may be depressed. How is this different from a person whose medical care is mismanaged so badly by the prison they end up dying?
I've been bothered by the growing police state in our country for years. We've seen massive police maneuvers like the one in Boston after the bombing at the Boston Marathon. We saw the ridiculous response to Christopher Dorner in southern California (where I'm currently living but was not living at the time). They both showed just how much force the police are willing to use when they want to "catch a criminal." These are just the most well known cases. Has anyone heard of the police response to Erin Frein shooting a police officer in Pennsylvania last year? Officers were flooding in from all over to hunt for this man. Federal Agents were searching for him. It's incredible.
The point is, we're living in a police state. If one does something "illegal," no matter how minor, one is subject to any amount of police force the officer on duty deems necessary. Until recently, officers were free to beat suspects without remorse and without any expectation of back-lash. An officer's word was held as more important than video evidence, and often an officer's use of force was written off as justified because a suspect was being "non-cooperative and combative." I don't know about you, but if I was being arrested for something that I felt was unjustified, I'd probably be non-cooperative at the least, and likely combative as well if officers were hitting me, shoving me, and handcuffing me without cause.
What can we do about it? We can know our rights, and we can report police abuse. Remember, the point of any law is to make someone a criminal for not following it. If we continue to learn what rights people actually should have and promoting politicians who support these rights, we might be able to make a change and reduce the scope of the government, thereby reducing the police state.
Sandra was recorded on a voicemail as having said, "How this switching lanes with no signal turned into all this...I don't even know." That's what I want to know, too. #whathappenedtosandrabland?
This has been a theme far too prevalent in the news for the past year or so, ever since the death of Michael Brown at the hands of police in Ferguson, Missouri last August. The death sparked outrage, protests, and shed new light on the state of police brutality in our nation. Since then many other stories have surfaced of police killing unarmed people and dogs with seemingly no provocation.
The Sandra Bland story is, thus, just the latest salvo in an ongoing war against police brutality in our nation. Now, if you've seen the video, or simply read the story, you probably agree with me that the officer had absolutely no reason for arresting Ms. Bland, putting her in a jail cell, and requesting a $5,000 bail bond against her simply for refusing to signal when changing lanes. This is the kind of garbage that people like Ayn Rand have been warning against when they say things like, "The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws." That kind of insight is why libertarians have always fought for fewer laws and less government to allow people to be free to live their own lives.
What's the point here? I happened to be listening to Glen Beck's program from Thursday of this week and I heard the three fill ins (I'm sorry, I don't know their names) talking about the Bland case. Now, whether she killed herself or not is a story all unto itself, and at this point the evidence is not in Ms. Bland's favor, but I'm not going to get into that today. I am far more concerned about the fact that she was in prison in the first place. The way they discussed the situation, though, bothered me because it seemed like they were blaming Ms. Bland for being arrested. Yes, she failed to signal as she was changing lanes. That's usually cause for, at worst, a minor fine. I can say from personal experience that plenty of people fail to signal when they're changing lanes every time I'm on the road, and I've never actually seen someone get pulled over for it.
The point of contention in the confrontation seems to be Ms. Bland's cigarette. She was smoking (probably because she was stressed out for being pulled over for such a minor offence), and the officer asked her to put out her cigarette. Now, I'm given to understand that this is a fairly regular procedure because the smoke can cover the scent of alcohol on a person who has been drinking. I understand that, but the officer didn't explain that; he ordered Ms. Bland to put out her cigarette, then got combative with her when she refused. This is probably my biggest issue with police lately: whenever you refuse to follow their orders, they get combative. Police treat failing to follow their orders as a crime, even though that's not the case. Does that mean that you shouldn't follow police orders? Not necessarily, but it does mean that the police are not the ultimate authority and everything they say is not law.
What happened to Sandra Bland? She was pulled over for a minor offence, then a petty police officer ordered her to put out her cigarette. When she failed to comply, instead of telling Ms. Bland his reason for wanting her to put out her cigarette, he ordered her from the vehicle and pointed his taser at her. He threatened to "light her ass up" if she continued to fail to comply with his orders. He then arrested her and put her in prison for "assaulting an officer," which he claims happened off camera. As an aside, there is video evidence from a bystander that the officer assaulted Ms. Bland, but there is no evidence that she assaulted him.
In the end, Sandra ended up in prison with a ridiculous bail bond set for her release, and three days later she was found dead. Even if she had committed suicide, is she to blame? When a person is in prison, they're in the state's care. She was not being monitored, even though the prison had evidence that she may be depressed. How is this different from a person whose medical care is mismanaged so badly by the prison they end up dying?
I've been bothered by the growing police state in our country for years. We've seen massive police maneuvers like the one in Boston after the bombing at the Boston Marathon. We saw the ridiculous response to Christopher Dorner in southern California (where I'm currently living but was not living at the time). They both showed just how much force the police are willing to use when they want to "catch a criminal." These are just the most well known cases. Has anyone heard of the police response to Erin Frein shooting a police officer in Pennsylvania last year? Officers were flooding in from all over to hunt for this man. Federal Agents were searching for him. It's incredible.
The point is, we're living in a police state. If one does something "illegal," no matter how minor, one is subject to any amount of police force the officer on duty deems necessary. Until recently, officers were free to beat suspects without remorse and without any expectation of back-lash. An officer's word was held as more important than video evidence, and often an officer's use of force was written off as justified because a suspect was being "non-cooperative and combative." I don't know about you, but if I was being arrested for something that I felt was unjustified, I'd probably be non-cooperative at the least, and likely combative as well if officers were hitting me, shoving me, and handcuffing me without cause.
What can we do about it? We can know our rights, and we can report police abuse. Remember, the point of any law is to make someone a criminal for not following it. If we continue to learn what rights people actually should have and promoting politicians who support these rights, we might be able to make a change and reduce the scope of the government, thereby reducing the police state.
Sandra was recorded on a voicemail as having said, "How this switching lanes with no signal turned into all this...I don't even know." That's what I want to know, too. #whathappenedtosandrabland?
Sunday, July 19, 2015
7/19/15 - Freedom and Liberty vs Death and Taxes
I was listening to Friday's Tom Woods' show, and I heard Scott Horton say something curious. I actually decided to make an entire post about the idea: What is Libertarianism, and how can I apply that to my life?
I can't remember Scott's exact words or how he came to say this, but I do remember very specifically that he said "Freedom and liberty versus death and taxes." For the full episode to hear it yourself, you can find it here. Personally, though, this line resonated with my so much that I had to stop walking my dog and write it down immediately.
Why is this important? I guess this requires a bit of my back story. I grew up in an old steel town in Western Pennsylvania whose population has been on the decline since the fall of the steel industry in the area. Most people in the area vote Democrat, if only because that's how they've always voted, or that's how their parents voted. Most of them spoke and seemed to agree with modern Republicans, but would never vote for a Republican. My father, being from a more rural background, was a registered Republican. He was my biggest influence. After a few years of learning libertarian ideas, I now understand that he's a lot closer to a Constitutional Minarchist than anything the Republican party stands for now, and he has always been an outspoken critic of government over-reach.
In high school I was required to read Atlas Shrugged, where my journey into Libertarianism really began. I read the book three times before I graduated, and once since. I've already read most of Rand's other works of fiction and a few of her non-fiction works. For a while I was a devout Objectivist, but for some reason I could never seem to reconcile this with my upbringing and this caused some internal struggles. I don't know if this is the only reason, but between this and the fact that I was 18-23 years old, I was not particularly politically involved during that time period.
The first time I heard the word "libertarian" was from my Government/Economics teacher in my senior year of high school. He was just bright enough that most of us knew he had no business teaching at our crap little school (though a little time attempting to become a teacher leads me to believe he may have been there in an attempt to not have to pay back some grants the government gave him). He had little time or patience for the disengaged students that mainly populated our school, and it was obvious. For those few of us (we pretty much all hung out) who actually gave a crap about learning anything, he treated us like gods among men. He acted like my older brother, directed me to look into certain things and read different books, and he's the first person who told me I might be a libertarian.
I bring this up because, unlike most people my age in the libertarian movement, I had honestly never heard much at all about Ron Paul until recently. Being in PA, and given that our primary is one of the last, his name wasn't on the ballot by the time I was ready to vote, so I didn't know about him. I didn't even vote in the primary for the 2008 or 2012 election because it was basically decided by the time it came around to my state. I then spent my college years almost completely disengaged with politics except that I was deeply distraught that Obama had won the white house. I spent a year or so after school listening to Rush and Hannity, but I wasn't happy with what I was hearing and I couldn't seem to find a reason to really care about politics. I even skipped the midterms in 2010 because, well, why bother?
2013 changed my views more than any other year. That was the first time I really had cause to fear my government and their over-reach. When Edward Snowden leaked to the nation just how far from freedom and liberty we've allowed our government to get, I realized that this does affect me and I need to care. That was also the time I first heard of Rand Paul. I knew nothing of his father at the time; remember, I had probably never even heard his name before that. Rand drew me with his filibuster and his stance against the NSA. I followed him on Twitter. I signed up for his newsletter. I even donated money to his campaign and hoped against hope that he would run for president in 2016.
Now, before I get into that, I need to define what I alluded to at the beginning. Libertarianism is different for every libertarian, but for me, it's the last bastion of Freedom and Liberty in the fight against Death and Taxes, and Scott Horton summed that up perfectly with those words.
So, back to Mr. Paul: On which side of the battle does he stand? Lately I find myself every day questioning why I wanted for him to run for president in 2016. He's now running, and I almost wish he wasn't. Whose side is Rand Paul fighting for? Does he fight for Freedom and Liberty? Many would tell me he does. Now that I've learned about his father, I could understand why they would think that. My father was a huge influence on my political leanings, and though I edge closer to anarchy daily, I still find myself clinging to the last vestiges of minarchy that my father taught me growing up. My father's views, though, are not exactly the same as mine. Rand's views do not appear to mirror his father's, either.
The real problem I have is that I have no idea where Rand even stands. His namesake, Ayn, would roll in her grave to hear him flip flopping so much while still trying to throw out how he stands for Freedom and Liberty. Can't he take a principled stand on anything? Could he at least tell us what his principles are? I honestly don't know.
Here I am, a young libertarian of a mind to vote for Mr. Paul if he would only tell me that he stands for even a portion of what I stand for, and yet I feel as if I will be voting for a Libertarian come November. At least Gary Johnson, or whoever the nominee for the Libertarian Party ends up being, will certainly have no problem telling me that they stand for Freedom and Liberty, not Death and Taxes.
In the mean time, I will keep searching for ways to forward the cause on my own front, however small my contributions may be. I hope you all do the same.
I can't remember Scott's exact words or how he came to say this, but I do remember very specifically that he said "Freedom and liberty versus death and taxes." For the full episode to hear it yourself, you can find it here. Personally, though, this line resonated with my so much that I had to stop walking my dog and write it down immediately.
Why is this important? I guess this requires a bit of my back story. I grew up in an old steel town in Western Pennsylvania whose population has been on the decline since the fall of the steel industry in the area. Most people in the area vote Democrat, if only because that's how they've always voted, or that's how their parents voted. Most of them spoke and seemed to agree with modern Republicans, but would never vote for a Republican. My father, being from a more rural background, was a registered Republican. He was my biggest influence. After a few years of learning libertarian ideas, I now understand that he's a lot closer to a Constitutional Minarchist than anything the Republican party stands for now, and he has always been an outspoken critic of government over-reach.
In high school I was required to read Atlas Shrugged, where my journey into Libertarianism really began. I read the book three times before I graduated, and once since. I've already read most of Rand's other works of fiction and a few of her non-fiction works. For a while I was a devout Objectivist, but for some reason I could never seem to reconcile this with my upbringing and this caused some internal struggles. I don't know if this is the only reason, but between this and the fact that I was 18-23 years old, I was not particularly politically involved during that time period.
The first time I heard the word "libertarian" was from my Government/Economics teacher in my senior year of high school. He was just bright enough that most of us knew he had no business teaching at our crap little school (though a little time attempting to become a teacher leads me to believe he may have been there in an attempt to not have to pay back some grants the government gave him). He had little time or patience for the disengaged students that mainly populated our school, and it was obvious. For those few of us (we pretty much all hung out) who actually gave a crap about learning anything, he treated us like gods among men. He acted like my older brother, directed me to look into certain things and read different books, and he's the first person who told me I might be a libertarian.
I bring this up because, unlike most people my age in the libertarian movement, I had honestly never heard much at all about Ron Paul until recently. Being in PA, and given that our primary is one of the last, his name wasn't on the ballot by the time I was ready to vote, so I didn't know about him. I didn't even vote in the primary for the 2008 or 2012 election because it was basically decided by the time it came around to my state. I then spent my college years almost completely disengaged with politics except that I was deeply distraught that Obama had won the white house. I spent a year or so after school listening to Rush and Hannity, but I wasn't happy with what I was hearing and I couldn't seem to find a reason to really care about politics. I even skipped the midterms in 2010 because, well, why bother?
2013 changed my views more than any other year. That was the first time I really had cause to fear my government and their over-reach. When Edward Snowden leaked to the nation just how far from freedom and liberty we've allowed our government to get, I realized that this does affect me and I need to care. That was also the time I first heard of Rand Paul. I knew nothing of his father at the time; remember, I had probably never even heard his name before that. Rand drew me with his filibuster and his stance against the NSA. I followed him on Twitter. I signed up for his newsletter. I even donated money to his campaign and hoped against hope that he would run for president in 2016.
Now, before I get into that, I need to define what I alluded to at the beginning. Libertarianism is different for every libertarian, but for me, it's the last bastion of Freedom and Liberty in the fight against Death and Taxes, and Scott Horton summed that up perfectly with those words.
So, back to Mr. Paul: On which side of the battle does he stand? Lately I find myself every day questioning why I wanted for him to run for president in 2016. He's now running, and I almost wish he wasn't. Whose side is Rand Paul fighting for? Does he fight for Freedom and Liberty? Many would tell me he does. Now that I've learned about his father, I could understand why they would think that. My father was a huge influence on my political leanings, and though I edge closer to anarchy daily, I still find myself clinging to the last vestiges of minarchy that my father taught me growing up. My father's views, though, are not exactly the same as mine. Rand's views do not appear to mirror his father's, either.
The real problem I have is that I have no idea where Rand even stands. His namesake, Ayn, would roll in her grave to hear him flip flopping so much while still trying to throw out how he stands for Freedom and Liberty. Can't he take a principled stand on anything? Could he at least tell us what his principles are? I honestly don't know.
Here I am, a young libertarian of a mind to vote for Mr. Paul if he would only tell me that he stands for even a portion of what I stand for, and yet I feel as if I will be voting for a Libertarian come November. At least Gary Johnson, or whoever the nominee for the Libertarian Party ends up being, will certainly have no problem telling me that they stand for Freedom and Liberty, not Death and Taxes.
In the mean time, I will keep searching for ways to forward the cause on my own front, however small my contributions may be. I hope you all do the same.
Saturday, July 11, 2015
7/11/15 - Is California the Next Greece?
Greece is broke. They missed their payment to the IMF earlier this month, and news of this has spread globally as its implications are profound.
I won't spend much time talking about Greece as there are plenty of other places where information on their failed policies and pending default can be found that will be much more informed than I am capable of being. However, I do find myself as a resident of the State of California, which may find itself in a similar situation if serious changes are not made, and soon.
I've been living in California for nearly two years now, and I've noticed some striking tax differences between California and my native state, Pennsylvania. Unlike in California, though, I never heard people discussing how much debt Pennsylvania carried and how broke the state was. Now, don't get me wrong, PA does actually have a substantial debt of upwards of $121 billion, but that pales in comparison to the wall of debt that CA has to overcome, estimated at $433 billion.
What I find striking, though, is the amount of revenue the CA state government should be able to rely on yearly. Granted, through some accounting gimmicks, the government has been able to pass "balanced budgets" these past three years, but they don't seem to be chipping away at the massive debt, like the pension funds that are eating California.
On an anecdotal level, I'd like to compare living in PA and paying taxes to living in CA and paying taxes. First, I'll start with the most obvious tax, the income tax. In PA, every individual pays a flat tax rate to the state of 3.07% of their wage, right off the top. They are also required to pay their locality, usually 1-2%. In my case, my locality took 1%. In CA, there's no locality income tax, only the state, but the state income tax is not flat. The tax rate is progressive, much like the Federal Income tax, and one can expect to pay between 7-12.3% as an individual. Right out of the box I'm already paying probably double in taxes to CA than I was to PA and my locality. I also pay an Unemployment Insurance tax and State Disability tax to CA that I also paid in PA. However, in PA, this tax was never more than a couple of dollars at .09% of my wages. Here in CA, I pay a much higher .9%, which is a full ten times more.
Now that the CA state government has wreaked havoc on my paycheck, you'd think my tax burden would decrease compared to PA elsewhere. Unfortunately, that's wrong. I'll start with the easiest, namely, property taxes. I don't own property (mainly because the government taxes me far too much and I can't save any money to make a down payment on a house), but if I did, I could expect to pay between 1-1.75% of the property's value straight to the government of CA and San Bernardino County. The average tax rate in my native Beaver County was actually a bit higher than the average in San Bernardino at 1.7%. I would celebrate CA on this lower tax rate if it weren't for the fact that house values in Southern California make most of the rest of the country look like a cheap place to live. In San Bernardino alone, the median house value sits at $263,400, which is more than double Beaver County's $120,800. Add to that the huge difference in populations (170k in Beaver County vs 2.088 million in San Bernardino), and you're set to expect a windfall in extra property tax revenue here in San Bernardino that Beaver County could only dream of ever having.
This post is getting a little long, so I'm going to run through the rest. Want to get your vehicle registered in CA? Prepare to pay upwards of $200 a years instead of the measly $35 PA charges. Need to purchase something that's not food related? I hope you're happy with the 8-12% sales tax rate as compared to the 6-7% rate from PA. Find yourself pulled over for speeding or some other traffic violation? Expect to pay at least $300, which is about the lowest figure I've heard from anyone I've met who's been given a fine for a traffic violation around here. In PA, where my father-in-law always complained of how expensive speeding tickets were, I never heard anyone tell me about a fine above $200. Anecdotal, I know, but it gets my point across. Buying gas? I hope you don't mind paying 50 cents to a dollar more than most other places in the country.
The list goes on, but I believe I've made my point. Between the literally millions of people living in California and the much higher tax rates on nearly everything, California should be bringing in plenty enough revenue to avoid budget deficits and debt. What we see, however, is completely irresponsible spending and complete refusal to admit this to their constituents. Just look at the claimed percentage of the budget devoted to payroll and benefits of government employees vs the actual percentage, where we see government officials outright lying to us. I mean, 10% and 67% are a little different. And, yes, CA government employees may have relatively lower salaries compared to private employees, but they still see an effective wage jump of 30% over private employees when you count all of the benefits of being a state employee. Tie that to the fact that nearly 15% of all employed individuals in California work directly for the state (and I don't believe that number counts any teachers or medical professionals paid by the state), and you see why the government's payroll is just out of control. During the recession, CA private employers cut 6.22% of their labor force. I'm impressed to see the government's labor force actually dropped, too, but only by 1.17%. To make things worse, I haven't even touched on social welfare programs, of which California is the number one state in the country in terms of caseloads.
Oh, and did I mention the famous high speed rail that the governor keeps pushing for?
So, how does this relate to Greece? I am sure that the reason Greece is broke is similar to the reason California is broke. Out of control spending, burgeoning pension and welfare programs, and a complete departure from reality in terms of taxation and regulation.
Businesses are not flourishing in California, where tax rates are high and tax codes are convoluted. I've personally met businessmen who have moved from California to neighboring Nevada to avoid some of the convoluted regulations and expensive tax burdens of California. Add to that crushing regulations about "employee protection" and I find myself driving past hundreds of empty buildings every week that may never be filled in my lifetime. Again, I'm going anecdotal, but my point is clear: California is driving away business with its horrible and expensive policies, which, in the end, will only make government spending increase as more and more people find it difficult to find work outside the government. Already California's unemployment rate is over a full percentage point higher than the national average at 6.4%.
Being the world's 8th largest economy will not help California from becoming Greece if we don't learn some lessons from Greece and start making serious changes to the state's spending and regulations. Let's hope our leaders can start making the difficult choices, or that we can elect some new ones that will.
I've been living in California for nearly two years now, and I've noticed some striking tax differences between California and my native state, Pennsylvania. Unlike in California, though, I never heard people discussing how much debt Pennsylvania carried and how broke the state was. Now, don't get me wrong, PA does actually have a substantial debt of upwards of $121 billion, but that pales in comparison to the wall of debt that CA has to overcome, estimated at $433 billion.
What I find striking, though, is the amount of revenue the CA state government should be able to rely on yearly. Granted, through some accounting gimmicks, the government has been able to pass "balanced budgets" these past three years, but they don't seem to be chipping away at the massive debt, like the pension funds that are eating California.
On an anecdotal level, I'd like to compare living in PA and paying taxes to living in CA and paying taxes. First, I'll start with the most obvious tax, the income tax. In PA, every individual pays a flat tax rate to the state of 3.07% of their wage, right off the top. They are also required to pay their locality, usually 1-2%. In my case, my locality took 1%. In CA, there's no locality income tax, only the state, but the state income tax is not flat. The tax rate is progressive, much like the Federal Income tax, and one can expect to pay between 7-12.3% as an individual. Right out of the box I'm already paying probably double in taxes to CA than I was to PA and my locality. I also pay an Unemployment Insurance tax and State Disability tax to CA that I also paid in PA. However, in PA, this tax was never more than a couple of dollars at .09% of my wages. Here in CA, I pay a much higher .9%, which is a full ten times more.
Now that the CA state government has wreaked havoc on my paycheck, you'd think my tax burden would decrease compared to PA elsewhere. Unfortunately, that's wrong. I'll start with the easiest, namely, property taxes. I don't own property (mainly because the government taxes me far too much and I can't save any money to make a down payment on a house), but if I did, I could expect to pay between 1-1.75% of the property's value straight to the government of CA and San Bernardino County. The average tax rate in my native Beaver County was actually a bit higher than the average in San Bernardino at 1.7%. I would celebrate CA on this lower tax rate if it weren't for the fact that house values in Southern California make most of the rest of the country look like a cheap place to live. In San Bernardino alone, the median house value sits at $263,400, which is more than double Beaver County's $120,800. Add to that the huge difference in populations (170k in Beaver County vs 2.088 million in San Bernardino), and you're set to expect a windfall in extra property tax revenue here in San Bernardino that Beaver County could only dream of ever having.
This post is getting a little long, so I'm going to run through the rest. Want to get your vehicle registered in CA? Prepare to pay upwards of $200 a years instead of the measly $35 PA charges. Need to purchase something that's not food related? I hope you're happy with the 8-12% sales tax rate as compared to the 6-7% rate from PA. Find yourself pulled over for speeding or some other traffic violation? Expect to pay at least $300, which is about the lowest figure I've heard from anyone I've met who's been given a fine for a traffic violation around here. In PA, where my father-in-law always complained of how expensive speeding tickets were, I never heard anyone tell me about a fine above $200. Anecdotal, I know, but it gets my point across. Buying gas? I hope you don't mind paying 50 cents to a dollar more than most other places in the country.
The list goes on, but I believe I've made my point. Between the literally millions of people living in California and the much higher tax rates on nearly everything, California should be bringing in plenty enough revenue to avoid budget deficits and debt. What we see, however, is completely irresponsible spending and complete refusal to admit this to their constituents. Just look at the claimed percentage of the budget devoted to payroll and benefits of government employees vs the actual percentage, where we see government officials outright lying to us. I mean, 10% and 67% are a little different. And, yes, CA government employees may have relatively lower salaries compared to private employees, but they still see an effective wage jump of 30% over private employees when you count all of the benefits of being a state employee. Tie that to the fact that nearly 15% of all employed individuals in California work directly for the state (and I don't believe that number counts any teachers or medical professionals paid by the state), and you see why the government's payroll is just out of control. During the recession, CA private employers cut 6.22% of their labor force. I'm impressed to see the government's labor force actually dropped, too, but only by 1.17%. To make things worse, I haven't even touched on social welfare programs, of which California is the number one state in the country in terms of caseloads.
Oh, and did I mention the famous high speed rail that the governor keeps pushing for?
So, how does this relate to Greece? I am sure that the reason Greece is broke is similar to the reason California is broke. Out of control spending, burgeoning pension and welfare programs, and a complete departure from reality in terms of taxation and regulation.
Businesses are not flourishing in California, where tax rates are high and tax codes are convoluted. I've personally met businessmen who have moved from California to neighboring Nevada to avoid some of the convoluted regulations and expensive tax burdens of California. Add to that crushing regulations about "employee protection" and I find myself driving past hundreds of empty buildings every week that may never be filled in my lifetime. Again, I'm going anecdotal, but my point is clear: California is driving away business with its horrible and expensive policies, which, in the end, will only make government spending increase as more and more people find it difficult to find work outside the government. Already California's unemployment rate is over a full percentage point higher than the national average at 6.4%.
Being the world's 8th largest economy will not help California from becoming Greece if we don't learn some lessons from Greece and start making serious changes to the state's spending and regulations. Let's hope our leaders can start making the difficult choices, or that we can elect some new ones that will.
Saturday, July 4, 2015
7/4/2015 - Orange is the New Black
Today is Independence Day, but I'm sure everyone has had their fill of that by now and frankly I don't want to talk about it.
I've decided to start anew. Once upon a time I fancied myself a writer, but as my life became both more busy and less interesting, I found myself less and less able to put words to the page. I attempted to talk about myself on a blog, but I quickly became bored with myself, and frankly, who really cares about me, anyhow?
The focus of this blog, therefore, will be less about me and more about the world around me.
I'd like to start with a topic I've been pondering for a few weeks now and would really like to share.
Sometime in the middle of June the newest season of Orange is the New Black was released on Netflix, and my wife and I watched all 13 episodes in about 4 days. It took us that long mainly because this season was more difficult for me to watch. Part of that is because of all the flaws that I'm sure you can read about on other sites where plenty of reviews exist, but the main reason I found this season so difficult was because of how much it illustrated the absolutely failed ideas of the federal government's criminal justice policies.
For starters, if you remember back to episode 1, Piper was imprisoned because she was involved in trafficking drugs across international lines...10 or so years prior. During this time, Piper did not actually hurt anyone or transgress against any other individual's rights. Since that event occurred, Piper had found herself "reformed" in society and was on her way to becoming a good taxpayer. Instead of allowing Piper to remain free and productive in society, our government instead chose to imprison her and send the bill to the taxpayers for her housing, food, and healthcare over the next 18 or so months of her sentence,
In season 3, Piper finds herself at the head of an illegal organization within the prison. We've progressed less than 18 months and suddenly Piper, who before was on the path to being a responsible adult, is now learning how to run a criminal enterprise. Now, don't get me wrong: I think it's also ridiculous that her selling used panties is considered a criminal activity. Frankly, I generally applaud the idea of a market that exists in defiance of the state's apparatus against such, but the point is whether what she was doing should be illegal, but simply that it was. We now find Piper willing to do things like commit a woman to solitary confinement for betraying her trust when just two seasons prior Piper was incapable of standing up for herself and ensuring that she be fed properly. The prison system has corrupted this otherwise reasonable individual and taught her how to be a better criminal. This is the sort of problem that advocates against stupid drug policies have been discussing for years, and there it is for all to see perfectly illustrated by a Netflix Original Series. Let's just send people to prison for non-violent activities and see if we can't make violent offenders out of them...
As I moved through this season, I saw all sorts of examples of how stupid the United States drug policies are. There was the quip when Nicky's mother was "Glad they didn't find any drugs on her" when she was caught burglarizing a house because then it would be "impossible to avoid jail time." You're telling me that breaking into another person's private property and stealing from them is considered less of a crime than the simple act of having drugs in one's possession?! What kind of idiotic law would make it more criminal to possess drugs that are completely non-harmful to any non-consenting adult than to break into another person's home and steal from them?
Then there was Leanne, who, like Piper, had decided that the path she was on was self-destructive and wanted to find her way back into the society that she had grown up in. She was reforming and moving on from her days as a drug addled youth, only to be thrown into prison because of a bag found with her ID and drugs. On top of that, she was asked to help imprison those people in her old community on similar charges in order to attempt to reduce her ridiculous sentence.
If we move on to Sophia, we see a complete mismanagement of her personal care from the beginning of the series. In season 1, the prison system reduces her hormones because the cost of them is "too much for the prison to bear" and they are deemed as non-essential. Finally, in season 3, Sophia is put into solitary confinement "for her own safety." This kind of garbage happens all the time in privately run prison systems. Sometimes a person's care is mismanaged so badly that they can die because of it. The prisons don't face any consequences for these mismanaged situations, either.
I'd like to wrap up with something from Taystee's story earlier on in the series. If you really want to see how prison destroys lives, look at what happens to Taystee when she is released. She has a very heart-wrenching soliloquy when she is returned to Litchfield in which see decides that prison is better for her than the world outside. If there is a better indictment of how awful our prison policies are, I've not seen it.
I've decided to start anew. Once upon a time I fancied myself a writer, but as my life became both more busy and less interesting, I found myself less and less able to put words to the page. I attempted to talk about myself on a blog, but I quickly became bored with myself, and frankly, who really cares about me, anyhow?
The focus of this blog, therefore, will be less about me and more about the world around me.
I'd like to start with a topic I've been pondering for a few weeks now and would really like to share.
Sometime in the middle of June the newest season of Orange is the New Black was released on Netflix, and my wife and I watched all 13 episodes in about 4 days. It took us that long mainly because this season was more difficult for me to watch. Part of that is because of all the flaws that I'm sure you can read about on other sites where plenty of reviews exist, but the main reason I found this season so difficult was because of how much it illustrated the absolutely failed ideas of the federal government's criminal justice policies.
For starters, if you remember back to episode 1, Piper was imprisoned because she was involved in trafficking drugs across international lines...10 or so years prior. During this time, Piper did not actually hurt anyone or transgress against any other individual's rights. Since that event occurred, Piper had found herself "reformed" in society and was on her way to becoming a good taxpayer. Instead of allowing Piper to remain free and productive in society, our government instead chose to imprison her and send the bill to the taxpayers for her housing, food, and healthcare over the next 18 or so months of her sentence,
In season 3, Piper finds herself at the head of an illegal organization within the prison. We've progressed less than 18 months and suddenly Piper, who before was on the path to being a responsible adult, is now learning how to run a criminal enterprise. Now, don't get me wrong: I think it's also ridiculous that her selling used panties is considered a criminal activity. Frankly, I generally applaud the idea of a market that exists in defiance of the state's apparatus against such, but the point is whether what she was doing should be illegal, but simply that it was. We now find Piper willing to do things like commit a woman to solitary confinement for betraying her trust when just two seasons prior Piper was incapable of standing up for herself and ensuring that she be fed properly. The prison system has corrupted this otherwise reasonable individual and taught her how to be a better criminal. This is the sort of problem that advocates against stupid drug policies have been discussing for years, and there it is for all to see perfectly illustrated by a Netflix Original Series. Let's just send people to prison for non-violent activities and see if we can't make violent offenders out of them...
As I moved through this season, I saw all sorts of examples of how stupid the United States drug policies are. There was the quip when Nicky's mother was "Glad they didn't find any drugs on her" when she was caught burglarizing a house because then it would be "impossible to avoid jail time." You're telling me that breaking into another person's private property and stealing from them is considered less of a crime than the simple act of having drugs in one's possession?! What kind of idiotic law would make it more criminal to possess drugs that are completely non-harmful to any non-consenting adult than to break into another person's home and steal from them?
Then there was Leanne, who, like Piper, had decided that the path she was on was self-destructive and wanted to find her way back into the society that she had grown up in. She was reforming and moving on from her days as a drug addled youth, only to be thrown into prison because of a bag found with her ID and drugs. On top of that, she was asked to help imprison those people in her old community on similar charges in order to attempt to reduce her ridiculous sentence.
If we move on to Sophia, we see a complete mismanagement of her personal care from the beginning of the series. In season 1, the prison system reduces her hormones because the cost of them is "too much for the prison to bear" and they are deemed as non-essential. Finally, in season 3, Sophia is put into solitary confinement "for her own safety." This kind of garbage happens all the time in privately run prison systems. Sometimes a person's care is mismanaged so badly that they can die because of it. The prisons don't face any consequences for these mismanaged situations, either.
I'd like to wrap up with something from Taystee's story earlier on in the series. If you really want to see how prison destroys lives, look at what happens to Taystee when she is released. She has a very heart-wrenching soliloquy when she is returned to Litchfield in which see decides that prison is better for her than the world outside. If there is a better indictment of how awful our prison policies are, I've not seen it.
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