Larry's Phat Page: News

So now I am a department store employee. It... has its ups and downs. I sometimes don't know exactly how to feel about it. Sometimes my customers suck when we don't have stock. They yell at me and tell me its all my fault I don't have whatever product they want as if I am directly responsible for the manufacture, shipping, and unpacking end of things too. I mean I do stock and replenishment. I have no control over what I get, only what I do with what I get. Some people just can't understand that though. Some of my customers have been awesome though. So it's not horrible. Its a learning experience.

So I work 6 straight days this week. Nothing out of the ordinary since summer. I was used to 10-14hr shifts 4 - 6 days a week, with no degree of regularity. I'm sure I can deal.

Maybe I'll get scheduled in something OTHER than shoes though. That'd be different.

I'm gonna go watch Castle and play videogames now.

The Scenario:

For this thought experiment, step into Christian or Roman Catholic theology saying that a fertilized egg is an act of creation that generates a human soul.

You are an employee of an egg/sperm bank and the power goes out, meaning that all the eggs and sperm in the cooler are going to thaw out and be destroyed. You are the only person present in the building when the power goes out.

Say that you realize that there are 100,000 viable eggs, and about a billion viable sperm in a frozen state.

It suddenly occurs to you that you can mix the eggs and the sperm, which represents, in Christian theology, 100,000 acts of creation as each individual egg becomes fertilized embryo and has a human soul.

You realize that the eggs will die shortly after being fertilized since there is nowhere to put them and they will thaw, but because you are Christian, you know that you could say a few words to dedicate them to God (a baptism) and they would all die in a few hours being committed to Heaven. Upon doing so, you would send 100,000 new souls to heaven to spend eternity in bliss.

On the other hand, by NOT fertilizing the eggs, they will die without ever having existed as souls, and the beings who now exist in thought and potential (in your mind) will never exist.

Since the government does not recognize fertilized eggs as humans, there are no legal ramifications, and anyway nobody would find out about it. You could just say you had to throw away the contents of the cooler, which is protocol in this situation, and nobody would fault you.

The Choices:

So what do you do? Say that in either situation, you are unhappy with your choice; you would prefer to allow the eggs to be implanted and become citizens. But you have the choice nonetheless. Is it...

...1) Worse to not fertilize the eggs, meaning that 100,000 potential beings will theoretically "die" in the universal sense because they do not exist.

...2) Worse to fertilize the eggs, meaning that 100,000 human beings will die in the literal sense but be immediately transferred to heaven, and spend eternity there? You are, in sense, "saving" 100,000 souls which is in some way a huge victory for God.

Remember to consider:

1) Assuming that a fertilized egg represents the creation of a human soul, does the person have moral value WHEN

a) the thought and potential for their to be a human being is there (which you definitely have in the cooler)

b) when the human being actually exists and is created

c) when the human being is born and able to choose between good and evil?

2) God's Biblical commandment is to "be fruitful and multiply" to add to God's creation on the Earth. You believe that being married and not having children is a selfish decision because it precludes the creation of life and offends God, and you understand that the general tone of the Bible is positive towards the creation of new life, especially the creation of life that is "saved" and will go to Heaven.

A second question:

With a (theoretical) time machine you could go back in time and stop a human being from being conceived. Is it worse to kill a person by altering time and causing him/her to not be born, or worse to kill a person after birth? Say that you don't have to kill him/her but could, rather, withold medical treatment that would almost certainly end in death?

...and Thomas Peters, commentator on The Corner, a section of the National Review Online, sums up the Right-wing's mind on this issue:

Guilty confession: My favorite part of last night’s election coverage was watching Rachel Maddow’s demeanor go from exuberant, to smug, to infuriated over the results of the marriage referendum in Maine.

Yeah, it's just hilarious to watch a woman whose relationship with her partner has been stingingly critiqued by a pack of bullies process the fact that a popular vote just torpedoed civil rights. Again.

Hahahahaaaaaaaa, Rachael Maddow! this commentary seems to laugh, you just lost and everybody hates youuuuuuuu.

Excuse my bitterness on this point, but I want to know if Thomas Peters also sits outside of hospital emergency wards and masturbates to doctors giving devastated family members the news that their father has died?


Fights over LGBT rights, and all over civil rights, change the nature of civil discourse. To personally inject yourself into the family and bedroom of countless other citizens and offer an unsolicited rebuke of their marriage is, by its very nature, uncivil.

To exercise the perverse power our government gives people to enforce their collective opinions on same-sex relationships is, similarly, by its very nature, uncivil.

What onlookers consistently fail to realize is that our lives are being put on the chopping block for others to critique. For most people in politics, it is just a job, and straight people can go home to their heterosexual marriages and children to get away from all that. Gay people do not have that privilege. My very existence, according to the Right Wing, is a political issue. If I walk into a shopping mall holding hands with my boyfriend, I am being political, according to them, by "flaunting" my sexuality, and similarly, having my relationship bound by marriage is an election issue. Adopting kids is an election issue. Hate crimes protection is an election issue.

There is no "home" to go to, because even inheritance, hospital visitation, health benefits, adoption and child-rearing are subject to political cycles and whims.

This is part of the reason why my political disagreements with the Right often take on a deeply personal tone. Politics are personal when your life is consistently voted on. Whatever criticism those on the Right levy on the way LGBT people go about pursuing their rights, the truth is that there's nothing we could possibly do that is more perverse or unreasonable than breaking up other people's marriages and getting sick pleasure out of it.

When we talk about free speech and the media, we often delve into intellectual absurdities and passionate yet bizarre mentalities that derail conversation. Since I talk a lot about talk, about language, oppression, speech and pop culture, I frequently encounter conflicted views on what "free speech" or "discourse" means. The White House vs. Fox News debate is offering up a litany of examples.

That's because the Fox News agency is just aghast that the President of the United States is opposing their "free speech" by telling the world that Fox News is unfair and unbalanced. Commentators compared Barack Obama to Hugo Chavez, the leftist president of Columbia who shut down newspapers that were critical of his government.



Whenever somebody criticizes the effort or purpose of an entity that is exercising "speech" (such as a news organization, a pundit, or even just a loony person ranting), indignant self-proclaimed First Amendment advocates rise to the surface. "How dare you criticize my argument!" the self-serving defendant will say. "My opinion is my free speech! You can't oppose it!"

Which brings is to the first component of free speech, as part of a set of three components I think need to be acknowledged by all parties to frame healthier conversations about speech. That component is:

Reciprocity.

You have a right to "free speech," meaning freedom to make your controversial point or offend somebody, and to express views that are sane, controversial or even forehead-smackingly ridiculous. Inversely, others are allowed to respond to your statements, even to offend you back. People may respectfully disagree with what you say, disrespectfully disagree with what you say, tell you that they don't like you any more because you said it, tell you that you shouldn't say it at all or even say that you are a vile scum-sucking cretin and your mother was a lunatic. This is because free speech is reciprocal; their rights are equivalent to your rights, and everyone is allowed to respond to speech with speech.

People have a hard time understanding this. For example, when I posted How to Confront Hate Speech on the Internet on YouTube several months ago, I got comments and personal emails from people essentially saying "how dare you condemn hate speech, that's so totalitarian!" because I am infringing on a hate speakers free speech by responding disapprovingly, or asking others to respond disapprovingly. They said that my video was one step on the road to a fascist society because hate speech is hard to define so who knows what other kind of views against minorities could be argued against using that very video! I struggled to explain that telling somebody who made a racist comment that her or his comment was racist is hardly an infringement of a racist's rights and is considerably less antagonistic than racism itself. I also struggled to explain that telling someone her or his ethnic slurs are "not cool" is not to infringe on that person's right to use them, which I even specifically explained in the original video.

I do think that hate speech should be called out and that public misinformation should be called out and condemned. But that doesn't mean I advocate censorship; I advocate discourse. Which brings me to point two in the components of discourse.

Saying somebody should stop saying a certain thing is not "censorship."

Understanding this principle requires your ability to make a distinction between force and encouragement. It explains why telling your mother to go jump off a bridge is just frowned upon but throwing her off a bridge is murder.

Censorship entails the use of force. When censorship occurs, the language being censored is removed from discourse by a moderator on an Online forum, by a publisher, editor, or most critically, by government (government censorship of political speech is the only kind that is protected by the First Amendment). Responding to the comments and saying that they are inappropriate is not censorship, because the original comments are still available.

People have a hard time understanding this. Let me use the following reader comment on an NPR online poll over the White House vs. Fox News debacle as an example:

The "White House" and it's Czar's are Socialist....the type of people that I feared most when first learning about this type of government in my junior high social study classes. Limiting our freedom of speech and controlling the news is the first step toward absolute tyranny...

This is an example of conflation at its finest, which seems to epitomize the way wacky people of all strips (I'm choosing not to single out the Far-Right) deal with political conflict. First, the commenter conflates "socialist" (which is an economic system practiced in Norway and Sweden) with the totalitarian governments of Orwell's 1984 and Stalinist Russia. The two may overlap, but do not coincide. Second, the commenter conflates a political comment from the White House with tyranny.

Shutting down news agencies would be a step towards tyranny. Using laws or coercion to remove certain viewpoints from the public discourse entirely would be tyranny. Those are the things that the Bill of Rights seeks to protect Americans against. Censorship is, acknowledgedly, very problematic.

But the White House never made an attempt to shut down a news agency or to control news content; it issued a public statement that it will henceforth treat the Fox News Channel as a political opponent (because it is) and claimed the Fox channel's news reporting is often conflated with opinion reporting (which is not outrageous to claim, especially considering that Fox constantly accuses every single other news network of doing that). The people who work in the White House have the right to say and do that because the people who work in the White House are protected by the same right to free speech that everyone else is. You can consider their comments inappropriate if you choose to, but it's a pretty distant stretch to say it's "totalitarian" for them to make the comments. The Bush White House did the exact same thing when it maligned NBC's "liberal bias," and political leaders have always been free to criticize their critics. Any leader who could not do that would be ineffective. Yet 40% of the comments from Fox News fans on the NPR comment forum seem to carry the assumption that the White House took some form of legal action against the Fox News agency.

What the White House essentially did was say, Fox News can say what it wants, but we don't find it to be legitimate. As in, we don't find them credible, and anyone listening is invited to decide whether or not to agree.

Ironically, Fox News, which is up in arms over the Obama White House's statement, was very supportive when the Bush White House launched similar criticism of NBC. Which leads me to my third and final conversation-framing concept in free discourse.

Reciprocity, revisited.

Other peoples' rights are based on your rights, and vice versa. Think about whether you would be willing to abide by the rules you call for, or whether or not you are doing exactly what you indignantly oppose somebody else doing. Do you ever criticize people? That means they get to criticize you. It is stupid to call somebody out for being mean when you are both being mean. It is stupid to call somebody out for being violent when you are both being violent. It is stupid to call somebody out for being combative when you are both being combative, and for being critical when you are both being critical. If you want to call a "new rule," you have to stop doing the thing that breaks that rule before you can even consider holding the other person to it.

Interestingly, conservative commentators who celebrated the Bush White House condemning NBC launched scathing attacks on the Obama White House for condemning Fox News. Keith Olbermann, who had criticized the Bush Administration, defended the Obama Administration and criticized the pundits. These sorts of double standards are rampant in political discourse, and make useful bits of opinion or information particularly difficult to find.

Intellectual reciprocity is an important component of any constructive discourse. It is impossible to force compliance, but for any two sides to come to agreement they must first agree that both parties are allowed to respond to each other in analogous ways. It seems that it is the responsibility of K-12 English and Social Studies teachers to explain this concept, and where they fail, we must pick up the slack. That is why I have written this, as a free exercise of my own free speech, and critique of but not an infringement of the rights of those who claim otherwise.

Gay rights advocates hope Maine will become the first state in the union to affirm marriage equality by popular vote. Most forecasts are showing tomorrow's referendum to come very close to 50-50; pro-gay-marriage voters have the population advantage in a very liberal state, but anti-gay groups are likely to over-perform in turnout and enthusiasm since it's harder to get young voters to the polls in an off-year election.

Donations have been pouring in to the state for campaigns and advertising. Proponents of same sex marriage raised more money than the anti-gay groups, but had a higher percentage of their funds come from within the state of Maine than Conservative groups did. The Right sees Maine, like all states on the brink of affirming gay marriage, as another step in a long-term cultural revolution that threatens to sweep the country. For once, I hope the far-Right is correct.

Maine's vote will come a year minus one day after California banned gay marriage by popular vote, making itself the first state to allow same-sex couples to marry then revoke the right. In California, anti-gay groups outfunded LGBT rights advocates with huge support from Evangelical and Mormon churches across the country.

I want to post an expert from a sermon by Rev. Al Sharpton discussing Evangelical Christian churches who pour their support into major anti-gay campaigns:

There is something immoral and sick about using all of that power to not end brutality and poverty, but to break into people’s bedrooms and claim that God sent you.

It amazes me when I looked at California and saw churches that had nothing to say about police brutality, nothing to say when a young black boy was shot while he was wearing police handcuffs, nothing to say when they overturned affirmative action, nothing to say when people were being delegated into poverty, yet they were organizing and mobilizing to stop consenting adults from choosing their life partners.

We know you're not preaching the Bible, because if you were preaching the Bible we would have heard from you. We would have heard from you when people were starving in California. When they deregulated the economy and crashed Wall Street you had nothing to say. When Madoff made off with the money, you had nothing to say. When Bush took us to war chasing weapons of mass destruction that weren't there, you had nothing to say. But you come out against peoples' private lives and bust into their bedrooms.