Additional thought on writing about politics:

As a writer, it is doubly bad to say "this isn't my topic" when faced with politics: from the outside, interaction with a writer is, in essence, "push button, receive opinion." There should never be anything involving people you cannot form an opinion on. The grand questions of life, of honor, of codes of social conduct should be themes you have encountered: it is harder to avoid writing about these things than it is to write about them.

To paraphrase Warren Ellis - the entire job is writing. As long as you have a topic, you should be able to write something. If you cannot write because you need the planets to align or you need a jolt of inspiration that you have no control over, I'm sorry, but you are not a writer.

This is precisely what is wrong with politics these days.

The tragedy of the commons refers to something which everyone benefits from that requires maintenance. There's no pay associated with performing the maintenance, so people tend to slack off, assuming that other people will keep everything up to date and running. That way, they reap the benefits but don't have to spend any time and don't get blamed when someone screws up. Eventually the people who start out conscientious about it realize that nobody else gives a shit.

If you live in a democracy, politics should never "not be your topic." If you're so bad at it that you can't write anything coherent about it, that is not a free pass: it is a sign that you ought to learn a little about the subject so that you can exercise an informed opinion when you vote.

(Insert self-justifying below.)

I have often identified myself as a radical feminist. But these days, it is necessary for me to modify that somewhat: I am a radical classical feminist. In short, I believe in feminism as explained by Liz Phair:

Be yourself. If you can get away with it, that is the ultimate feminist act.

Classical feminism is the campaign for equality between men and women, even as the classical civil rights movement was the struggle for equality amongst races in the eyes of the law. To me, this represents a sane and logical development in democracy: the right to self-determination should extend to both genders.

What passes as feminism nowadays, however, is a far cry from any of this. When I hear of “feminism” now, I hear of things like a circle of bloggers taking offense that Penny Arcade went “too far” in their joke about the inherent amorality of games: many games with “collection quests” require you to do a task X times, and then abandon it. The example involved was the freeing of men kept prisoner and used as forced labor. Penny Arcade’s joke was that, in a quest to free five such men, the sixth is callously ignored by the player character, and left to be raped by his cruel jailers.

To be sure, Penny Arcade is very often not what we would call tasteful. However, does this actually have anything to do with feminism? Note carefully how there weren’t even any women in that comic: it was about a male jailer raping a male captive. If anything, it was crude prison humour. It certainly was not a call to rape women, and it certainly did not glorify rape. Yet the simple inclusion of the concept of rape – not even male on female rape, but male on male rape – was enough to set off alarms and cause “feminist” bloggers to raise a fuss.

Why?
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She was a perfect form of stillness, a supine shadow. The cracked hilt of her belt knife jutted out from amidst her ribs, and her two hands were closed gently, almost innocuously, over it.

"Help her," they said.

I made no sound, but my lips formed the word. "NO."

"You can heal her," they said. "You are the Drawer of the Veil, the Arbiter of Form. By your pronouncements live or die the thousand petty curses that lift empires out of nothing or reduce them to rubble. Help her."

And I shook my head.

"Help her!" The voices grew wrathful, malevolent. "Heal her or we will find a way to make you suffer! Heal her or we rescind our fellowship, now and forever more!"

"It is her place," I said simply.

They withdrew.

It was my hope, going into journalism, that I would get to see a bit more of the secret face of the world. I would get to see how the truth was cut and shaped into palatable bits for the public to consume.

Sadly, having seen journalism in action, I must report that mostly I've learned disturbing things about the public. People love useless information. They are addicted to hearing about things with no real bearing on their lives, and things they cannot change. They are easily distracted from serious political, legal, and economic issues, and focus on trivial bits about miraculous cats, women who clone dogs, and so forth. They ignore inconvenient truths to champion their pet causes.

The Silver Age of the media is upon us, with the potential to finally tear asunder the veils that politicians, crooks, and businessmen have hid their secret dealings behind for so long. On this, the eve of our triumph, we find that people simply don't care.

I'm pretty disillusioned with public dialogue these days.

It mostly consists of, "You are like me, and we are more moral than other groups! Let us rejoice in our narrow-mindedness!"

Why do people who insist on the right to not be judged, to not be subservient to other peoples' morality, insist on sitting in judgment over other people and sometimes other cultures in their entirety? Isn't that obviously hypocrisy?

There are several specific incidents that have set me on this train of thought. Time permitting, I will elaborate over the next few days.

I hear it's epic.

12:11:30 AM moritheil: Oh, Internet.
12:11:40 AM moritheil: Making idiots think they have the chops to be pro lawyers.
12:11:58 AM moritheil: There's this guy that I just found out is going to law school
12:12:02 AM moritheil: and he can't argue for shit
12:12:09 AM Gakar: hey, let them think it. nothing teaches better than the consequenses of being wrong
12:12:10 AM moritheil: but basically he "wins" internet arguments
12:12:18 AM moritheil: because he's too stubborn to ever give up.
12:12:37 AM Gakar: well, he will learn or he will waste a lot of money failing
12:12:45 AM moritheil: I'm fucking disturbed by the suggestion that he might make it
12:12:48 AM moritheil: I mean think about it
12:12:57 AM moritheil: he's going to go in; they're not going to want a too high failure rate
12:13:15 AM moritheil: I doubt he's going to go to Yale Law or some place where they really balls-to-the-wall fail people out.
12:13:49 AM moritheil: So he is in the end going to be a lawyer, and his particular brand of failure will live on to stain the lives of his clients.
12:14:21 AM Gakar: but the up side is that you know him, and therefore know better than to become his client
12:14:45 AM Gakar: he will be the Zoidberg of the legal world
12:14:56 AM moritheil: Yeah. On the other hand this explains a lot about some of the vastly incompetent lawyers I've seen.
12:15:15 AM moritheil: It's like I'm seeing it from the other side now: "Oh, they were just fuckups who never should have gone into law in the first place."

Him: I just watch my friend use an elephant for a proposal
Me: I don't want to hear that
Him: I'm sorry you can't be happy for my friends. You shared good news and so did I.
Me: Good news for whom?

I'd like to clarify that I don't even know his "friends" from the circus and how am I supposed to be happy for them when they're getting what I want out of life: a marriage. He and I have been together for more than four years and have been engaged before but I broke it off because we'd been engaged for over two years and he kept making new stipulations e..g I had to get a job, we had to live together for at least a year before we got married. And we kept pushing the date back and back. So I decided that I didn't want to be engaged for 8 years while everyone I knew was actually getting married. And now that he plans on being on tour with the circus for at least another year or two, I can't move in with him. I can't plan a wedding without a fiance. What the hell is he waiting for? He keeps making excuses and they're such bullshit excuses. It physically literally makes me nauseated; sick to my stomach and consumes me so much that it makes me physically weak and all I want to do is cry and sleep so I can sleep through my shitty life. I don't have the physical or mental strength to do anything but that. I just want to forget about life.
- explosive

It can be soul-crushing to see other people get what you want. On the other hand, it's socially considered bad if you can't be happy for other people.

In this specific case, it sounds like your bf is hiding behind social rule to try to make you feel bad and divert your attention from what you want. That's really not cool.

If he makes you this miserable, why are you with him? Inertia?

It's really hard for me to start over after I've been in a 4+ year relationship. And he's the best I can do; I don't want to be alone.
Posted 7/25/2010 4:26 PM by explosive

That's terrible. I know it's easy for me to say it, but don't think of it as judging you. It's an observation, just as if I were to watch someone throw themselves into traffic and say the same thing. It is a terrible thing that you are doing to yourself.

See, it doesn't matter how "great" someone is if they are not good for you. You do not get some kind of credit hours for being in a shitty relationship. Either they are helping, or they are in the way, and if they are in the way for too long, too much, you just can't be having this relationship. Unless you're deliberately trying to ruin your life and ensure that you will be miserable in the future, get out ASAP.

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