Not one stone will be left on top of another

Fuck Baltimore.

I can't find the post now, but at one point during the resurgent riots after a Missouri prosecutor massaged a grand jury to ensure he had a fig leaf not to charge Darren Wilson, I wrote on one social media or another something to the effect that I was torn, that rioting would only be more ammunition for those who support police in their brutality, but that if I were a young black man in Ferguson, I'd probably be out there overturning cars as well.

I am no longer conflicted.

After the scripture reading, part 2

Maybe I'll make a series of this. I'm thinking this might be a fun ongoing project.

This week's scripture was Acts 16:23-34, which is the bit about Paul and Silas in jail and there's an earthquake but they don't run away and then they tell the jailer not to kill himself and then he becomes Christian and gets his whole family saved with him whether they become Christian themselves or not because woo.

Ok, that last bit was uncalled for. It's fairly standard for biblical texts to present decisions by patriarchal males as group decisions. And it does say the rest of the household rejoiced with him, so I guess it wasn't too onerous to change religions overnight.

But anyway, that's what was chosen to read in church. What comes immediately after? Is it horrible, like the two I cited last week? Well, not really, but there's a reason this passage isn't cited as much: it's Paul playing politics.

Spend your principles wisely

Missed my update earlier this week, but I have another day off today, so here's a somewhat belated post.

I mentioned in my last post the "Lost Fleet" books by Jack Campbell, which I've been rereading lately (the main reason I didn't have a post together on Monday). While I'm still not convinced that the books are 'good' by any conventional standard, they do have the occasional flash of very keen insight so contrary to the general level of the books that I wonder if they slip in by accident (example: earlier today I read a passage where a character witnesses an orbital bombardment and muses that this is what hell must be: not a place of torment, but a place where death has come and gone and human hands have wiped away any trace that life - human or otherwise - was ever here. I had to stop and think about that one for a bit.)

Another bit that has stuck with me comes from an earlier book. A central theme, inasmuch as these books can be said to have themes, in the series is the conflict and mistrust between military and political institutions and mindsets. One character, attempting to explain the latter to the former, uses an interesting comparison. While military leaders must carefully husband their forces and, if necessary, risk and sacrifice them reluctantly and only in pursuit of essential goals, a political leader must do the same with his principles, defending and stewarding them until the day comes that they must be dearly spent for a more urgent purpose. I thought that was very insightful at the time, and the more I've thought about it sense, the more it has affected my understanding of both military and political conflict and leadership.

Which brings me to the present.

Call a spade a spade

This is one that has sat, nearly finished, in my posts for a while, and it says things I think need to be said, so I'm polishing it off and sending it out the door.  How long I've sat on it, you can determine by the age of the links at the bottom.

One of my pet peeves about conservatives in general and the tea party in particular is the inconsistency with which they fuss about the national deficit.  President Bush inherited a government budget that was actually recording surpluses and proceeded to drive it straight into the ground, not only by cutting taxes on all and sundry but by starting two wars and making expensive changes to Medicare.  Did conservatives utter a peep about deficit spending and passing our debt on to our children and all that jazz?  Not so much.  They may not have liked it all that much, but so long as their guy was in charge, they sucked it up and pretended not to notice, or that a little fiscal irresponsibility was a worthy price for all the other good stuff he was doing.  It was only when President Obama took office, and started spending money on things that they weren't happy about, that the federal deficit became a big issue to conservatives.

The unfortunate thing, if we're operating under Keynsian economics here, is that right now - during and immediately after a crippling recession, when the economy is depressed and taxable revenues are low - is exactly when we should be using deficit spending to keep our heads above water.  The flip side, of course, is that during times of prosperity - like, I don't know, the early 2000's - is when you're supposed to pay off your debts, balance your books and establish a position of strength so that you can go into debt during times of need.  We, of course, bombed that, so now instead of spending the surpluses of plenty in our time of want, we're piling debt upon debt.  And I definitely agree that this is bad.  But the proper time to raise a ruckus about this was during the Bush years.  And yet, because the people who worry about deficit spending tended to agree with him on most other things, they held their peace.

All of this is very sad and cranky-making, of course, but this isn't a blog post to rant about the failings of conservative punditry.  That was just background and context.  What I need to say is that I think I, and the rest of the confirmed liberals who make up Obama's base, are guilty of the same double standard when it comes to the handling of civil liberties in the war on terror.

Political blogging and the proper scrutiny of police

I think my problem with blogging is the same as my problem with writing in general: it's not that I don't have great ideas (or at least, ideas that I think are great), but that I have difficulty making the transition from 'diversion' to 'habit' that is necessary to produce writing on a consistent basis. Weeks will go by in which I either don't think of blogging, or think, 'oh yeah, I should do that sometime' and then do something else. And yet I want to stick with it. I finally figured out how to delete an old blog, and removed the class blog I had to produce sophomore year, and might yet delete this one, but only after backing up my posts, and only if I am confident that I will be more successful at sticking to my next one. In the meantime, I have posts from April and May in various states of completion (and that's another problem; starting ideas and then trailing off and leaving them in stasis for months), so hopefully I'll get to those shortly; I'm also mulling over a future post on the gradual dehipsterization of my taste in music.

In the meantime, more and more often when I think about political topics, I find myself framing it in terms of what I would say were I an elected official dealing with such a thing. Which is an interesting train of thought my mind has been following these last few months, I think. I'm not sure it's a realistic ambition, or even an actual ambition; while I might be ok at the actual law-making part of the job, I'm not sure how someone as introverted as I would fare on the campaign trail, especial when just starting out, when meet-n-greet takes precedence over out-of-state attack ads. But it's a fun thought experiment, and who knows? Maybe if teaching jobs continue not to be found, I can start over with a law or poli-sci degree? In any case, I've already written one such post, and I rather expect I'll be writing more, and leaving them up here for future political foes to dig up and use against me. Good times.

So.

As a diligent reader of the internets, I was of course aware of the recent and hilarious legal kerfluffle involving The Oatmeal, in which a scrubby joke-compiler website hired a scrubby lawyer to make scrubby and unsubstantiated threats to extort money from the writer of the Oatmeal.  Who promptly and amusingly retaliated with massive and public scorn, backed by the full force of his large and loyal fanbase and the not-inconsiderable legions among the wider internet community who enjoy making fun of scrubs.  Things got much, much funnier when the scrubby lawyer in question, one Charles Carreon, got his undies in a wad and decided to take on Oatmeal, IndieGoGo, The National Wildlife Federation, The American Cancer Society, and pretty much everyone who made fun of him. He later backed down, although not without finding a few new ways to wallow in fail on the way out the door; the matter might or might not rest at that.

But this isn't the topic of this post; this is just background.