Uncertainty

With far too much of the world gripped in a panic induced by a pandemic, I've been contemplating how poorly the vast majority of humans deal with uncertainty in life. The following ramble came out of that exercise.

Fear of the unknown has been considered the most potent of fears experienced by humans. A microscopic virus cannot be seen by the unaided eye with only its casualties left behind to be witnessed as evidence of its passage -- unless you work in a lab analyzing test samples. For all intents and purposes it is almost supernatural to the lay person, resulting in an intense primordial fear being felt by more than a few and far too many.

The most dangerous problem with intense fear is that it is intrinsically irrational and furthermore generates deeply irrational reactions that really can't be called thoughts. Feeding into that is another fear that is common and lurks below the surface in a constant fashion: uncertainty. Often manifesting as anxiety over change, it can be debilitating all by itself.

Now add the normal fear of death and you have a cocktail of genuine madness that is capable of being spread more quickly than any virus. If that wasn't enough, the continued political actions based on Rahm Emmanuel's famous line, "You never let a serious crisis go to waste," has generated genuine fear of government infringement of civil rights here in the United States. Since the upper middle class to wealthy so far aren't affected by job loss the way middle and lower class voters have been, a huge disparity in economic impact is exacerbating the situation.

There is a terrible social and economic disconnect between the highly educated classes and everyone else being fully revealed by this. Not only is there no empathy, there is zero sympathy exhibited toward the struggles of the poorer as they suffer economic devastation. Instead, vilification is the order of the day as the lock down turns into an open class struggle.

When people are oscillating from fear of death to fear of losing their homes to fear of having their rights taken away to fear of anyone disagreeing with them, you have truly reached uncertain times. The uncertainty is inescapable, not even through binge streaming television as has become the big thing to do -- with so many trapped at home now.

It's driving people crazy and making them meaner.

To Blog, or Not to Blog, that Is the Question

For some time now I’ve been dealing with my evolving view of the Web and in particular its benefit to mankind. What began as a wonderful way to freely put out and find information, it looked like one of humanity’s greatest inventions, perhaps even something that would bring the world together.

Alas, it has turned out to do the opposite more often than not.

Hate: My Personal Origins

A continuation of my essays on hate, this time focusing on how I learned to hate with every iota of my being when I was young. As I’ve grown older, it has become apparent that nurture overwhelms nature to a great degree and looking back at how being bullied changed me I can see that now. Why? Because one can change back after being changed…

I was a cheerful, happy kid who got criticized for talking too much in my early years. The world was so fascinating and a source of constant wonder, so I wanted to share that with others. Born into a family where my siblings were half-brothers sixteen and twenty years older respectively, that meant I was dealing with adults full time and they don’t like to hear from kids. They were also more concerned with extending their adolescence or reliving it, so that had something to do with it.

To be clear, I was never beaten, abused, or mistreated. Instead I was pretty much left to do whatever I wanted -- which could have been disastrous. Fortunately for my parents, I was a relentlessly good kid enamored of heroes and acts of valor. Sadly, I never had the kind of health or physical strength to do much with those impulses.

Mass Effect 3, Entitlement Culture, and Endings

Over at Bioware’s Mass Effect 3 forums there is a considerable uprising in protest of the grim ending to the game. Without going into the merits of the how the ending was written and presented (there is very legitimate and not legitimate criticisms), what strikes me is the rage at not having a happy ending possible. There is sloppy writing involved and the ending was rushed along with other parts of the game, no doubt about that. But it is a cohesive and logical ending despite what those who are angry are writing.

Part of what I like about the Mass Effect series is that it does not shy away from hard choices and painful outcomes.  The idea of sacrifice runs through the entire series, starting with the Virmire mission in the first game where you have to choose which one of two main companions dies. At the beginning of the second game, the death of your character, Shepherd,  was a red flag that you would probably die when all is said and done, despite the resurrection after the opening titles. I took it as meaning Shepherd was on borrowed time from then on out.

But a lot of people reject that concept and are demanding a new ending be made and released. Thanks to the afore mentioned sloppy writing, there is an accidental out for Bioware and EA if they choose to use it. Yet I find it amazing that gamers believe they have a right to a happy ending. Long have gamers clamored that games be taken seriously as art, alongside movies and novels. So when a game takes an artistic chance and reaches for that brass ring, this happens. Sigh.

There is additional anger that the vaunted choices imported from the previous games do not effect the ending. My reply to this is that Mass Effect 3 is a final act in a larger story and those choices are shown to have large repercussions for the galaxy. Entire races can live or die depending on the choices you have made. Conflicts between races can be ended and paths for their cultures changed. That is not small in scale, is it? So a great deal of the reward for past choices is delivered well before the ending sequence and I consider that argument a nonstarter.

It speaks a great deal about how well written the characters are when players get this emotionally wrapped up with them. A lot of this ire has to do with failing to get a happy ending and seeing your Shepherd happy with his or her love interest as a reward. Life is messier than that and these games have always reflected that.

Currently, the people in most industrialized/Westernized nations have come to believe that happiness is a right to be guaranteed by their governments. Usually that takes the form of a welfare or socialist system of some variant. Expectations are high that failure will always have a safety net. Economics and demographics are starting to assert their terrible and unstoppable refutation of such systems being sustainable in the long term. Watching the riots and demonstrations in Greece has been informative as to how people will react when such nets begin to unravel.

By the way, “happiness” is not guaranteed in the Constitution of the United States of America. The word is not even found in it or the Bill of Rights. So where does that mistaken belief come from? It comes from the Declaration of Independence. To make things even clearer, that statement of intent (which is not legally binding) had “the pursuit of happiness” as a right. Last I checked, pursuit is not a guarantee you will catch the thing chased after.

But back on topic. So what does that have to do with a silly video game, you ask? (Or at least I ask for you.)

Well, people had the expectation of getting their way at the end and when that was dashed, they became disenchanted, bitter, and often furious. So now petitions have begun and an organized movement to force Bioware to release a free happy ending patch or DLC is well underway. This is not too different from protests seen in Greece and soon to be seen in other parts of Europe.

Somewhere along the way, great swathes of people began to believe happiness could be guaranteed. Reality and history say otherwise, but we have so much that we have become spoiled rotten. Thanks to the melodrama playing out over Mass Effect 3, some things I have been pondering have come into better focus. Too many people are utterly unprepared for worst case scenarios, at least emotionally. This is not good, given what is coming.

Odd that a PR disaster for a game is giving me a better grasp of some societal mechanics, but hey, I take my inspirations whenever and wherever I get them.

I wish to note that this is not meant as a full blown apologia for Mass Effect 3’s ending. There are plenty of flaws to it and to the series in general. I cannot present the trilogy as a paragon of storytelling or game making, for it does have plenty of warts. While I do not like how it became a gay rights propaganda platform, a player had the choice to avoid it for the most part – until this installment when it was rammed through with all the subtlety of a wrecking ball. Still, it is an entertaining and interesting science fiction property that might be best served in other media than games in the future.

Something occurred to me while playing through it the first time. The sensation was much like when I saw Return of the King and it can be described as a feeling that nothing will top what I just viewed. For me, Mass Effect 3 is the last video game I will ever get excited about, much like the conclusion of The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy affected my movie viewing. Oh I will get the DLC’s and play out all the bargain games I have gotten on Steam over the years. But it feels like the end of an era in my life and the enthusiasm will never be the same, not due to disappointment but completion.

For me, that is the biggest and perhaps best ending.

An Era of No Trust or Too Much Trust?

I find myself pondering on how we live in an increasingly confusing time for most people. With trust in governments foundering world wide and growing here in the United States, uncertainty in the future is increasing the distrust of authorities. Well, that and their corrupt actions with Weiner being only the latest public figure to go down in flames. But on the other hand, there is still too much trust in the wildest of conspiracy theories and even more insidious to my thinking, the so called “experts” on any given subject.

The inability to sort fact from fiction has become something of a hallmark of our entertainment driven culture. Reality television is often very scripted (often at a pro wrestling level of sophistication) for one example. Hollywood has always distorted history in favor of drama and that has continued unabated in its junior sibling, television. 

Watching Citizen Kane and the accompanying documentary, talking to some friends about the new Area 51 book, and reading various stories in newspapers that spin facts into fiction has me thinking hard about people’s ability to discriminate what really is going on. I had hoped the worldwide Web would make it easier to find out the truth about things and it has to a very limited degree. With arm chair and accredited experts willing to make stories up out of whole cloth and/or lie to promote an agenda, there are far too many unsubstantiated “facts” available on the Internet. To counter this, it takes skill and an understanding of logic to sort out what is factual versus what is not. That’s a big problem.

Most people don’t make or have the time to dig deeply into a subject even if they knew how to. Human tendency is to leave work to others and then listen to an expert in the field. This is easier and far more convenient than jumping into trying to understand an unfamiliar subject. Add in the catastrophic failure that is our public education system that churns out illiterates from our high schools and colleges when we desperately need critical thinkers… Ugh.

Meanwhile, it is a big assumption to trust that an expert really does know what he is talking about in the first place. We have a lot of theoreticians espousing theories as proven facts or science all over the media. That’s how we get specious junk science such as anthropogenic global warming, mercury in vaccinations causing autism, and Keynesian financial stimulus packages. Note that all three have had proponents with a financial interest in their theory being accepted.

On a lesser, but still disturbing level are conspiracy theories that have gained considerably traction. Examples include Obama not being born in Hawaii, Trig Palin being Bristol’s child, the CIA being behind JFK’s assassination, AIDS being created by the US to wipe out Africans, and any number of chain emails that end up in your inbox. It seems like there is rarely a week that goes by that I don’t see some easily disproved thing in an email. But woe be unto you who try to counter with the truth!

The more dramatic the lie, the more easily it seems to be believed. And once that lie is believed, the harder it is to convince someone of the facts. I know a lot of good people who believe things that are completely untrue and get very upset when informed otherwise. Not upset at being deceived, but at me for challenging things. I admit that I’m burned out on trying to straighten things out and don’t try to as much as I once did.

So people are putting a lot of trust into untrustworthy things even as their trust of institutions dwindle. It makes me wonder if there is such a thing as a law of conservation of trust, where trust lost in one thing has to be transferred to another. We are choosing to trust in things we shouldn’t as a reaction to having our trust in institutions broken.

One thing is for certain, I’m seeing a lot of fear in people’s eyes these days and it really shows up when you start bringing up facts. It may simply be that people are running away from reality.  With a culture mired in perpetual adolescence, I really shouldn’t be surprised by this. So the moral of the story is that we need to be more skeptical and really devote attention to the things that matter. We have entered a time where running away may not be an option for much longer.

All I Have to Say on Rep. Weiner

Looks like the House will have more to say.

Pic and idea conveniently, if not shamelessly stolen from Ace of Spades.

Mama’s, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Otaku’s–Part 3

Pandering to an otaku audience goes to far when you make them the stars of the show.  Everything becomes too incestuous and closed to outsiders, which eventually leads to both moral and financial decline.

Part 1 can be found here.

Part 2 can be found here.

There is a great danger when any group only “preaches to the choir” whether it be in religion, politics, art, entertainment or business.  One thing that a lot of outsiders to manga/anime notice is how almost everything is currently set in high school or the protagonists are high school age.  It is as if the only valid beings in existence are teenagers.  But there are some reasons for this and it doesn’t have to do with the physical age of the audience the producers are catering to.  It has more to do with their emotional age and the curious attitude that life ends when you become an adult in modern Japan.

While young protagonists have always been part of the genre, they were often university students and you used to see more adult characters in the casts.  That’s what I remember from the 1980’s and 1990’s, so I looked through archives on the Internet to see if I was misremembering things.  It turns out that I wasn’t and that things had started changing around the turn of the century.

Perhaps this is the end result of a declining population and an entertainment driven society, but I also suspect that the pressure to succeed and conform is a major factor. Rather than deal with reality, the plethora of media to distract has become a potent drug, much like Aldous Huxley predicted in Brave New World.  The otaku’s represent this more than the average citizen, I expect.

But back to the changing protagonists.  They are nearly always high school (or sometimes middle school) students and quite often are perverts.  By this, I mean they are into sexually deviant behavior such as peeping, collecting pornography, exhibit sado-maschistic tendencies, and collect harem’s.  This includes both male and female characters in both shounen (boy) and shoujo (girl) stories. 

To make things worse, the shounen leads usually fall into two types:  rude idiots or wimpy whiners.  Sometimes they manage to blend the two, but they are usually outcasts at school.  Gone are the strong good guys out to save the day at the first opportunity; instead they have to be dragged into taking action or doing good at all.

Does that sound like a bunch of emotionally arrested anti-social misfits?  Ah, that would be the main consumer of this dwindling market, wouldn’t it? 

If that wasn’t direct enough pandering, many series are now featuring otaku’s of both genders as leads or main cast members.  Even mangaka’s (comic book creators) have become the focus of series! I’ll give a pass to Bakuman as it has been a great expose on how the industry works while still managing to be entertaining.

So what has happened is that the pandering of the industry to its dwindling customer base has resulted in a self perpetuating limit, since more and more you need to be a die hard otaku to get all the references and in jokes. But a problem with having such closed community is that things get boring fast as only very formulaic stories get purchased, achieve high ratings, or get votes.  Yes, voting is a big factor in manga success.

Because so many stories are printed in weekly magazines such as Shonen Jump, the editors rely on sent in votes from the readers on what titles are succeeding.  At least the comic books in the United States are stand alone titles and sink or swim on their own merits.  In Japan, a tiny amount of readers hold vast sway over what lives or dies.  These are the most motivated and obsessive otaku’s who have been handed immense power over the content published – simply because they bother to vote when most readers don’t.

No wonder things have gotten to such a point.

Getting back to boredom with content being a problem; there are only a few ways to break that.  One is new and innovative stories and ideas, but the otaku’s aren’t really interested in that.  Their behavior is that of a drug addict instead.  What they want is a more intense high, or in other words, the same old tropes but taken to ever greater extremes.  So more sex, more perversion, bigger battles, and anything else that is titillating to break the boredom.

Don’t get me wrong, there are good series of manga’s and anime’s being produced.  But much like the decline in television shows here, it is like panning for gold in a sewage treatment plant.  I don’t foresee things improving at all in the short or long terms.

So parents, check out what your children are watching or reading, especially on the Internet.  A lot of people view comic books and cartoons as innocent fun, but those days are long gone.

Well, after writing this extended rant, I’ll have to be fair and do some writing about some of the nuggets of gold I’ve found in manga and anime.  But that will have to wait for another day.

Mama’s, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Otaku’s–Part 2

The amount of perverted behavior in manga’s and anime’s is astounding.  This is not healthy imagery for our children and teens to be exposed to.  Parents need to be aware of this.

Part 1 can be found here.

Diving into the world of the otaku’s was an unpleasant experience and downright nauseating at times.  I quickly learned that I was better off reading spoiler filled threads in fan forums before even sampling an anime or manga.  Explicit sex, rape, naked girls who look ten or younger, incest, sadism, bondage, bestiality, and other perversions all can be found – and is readily available through fan translations of material not imported to the United States.

Don’t expect me to name titles; I’m not going to help the kiddies using search engines to find smut.  I will, however, go into some plot lines that are out there in successful shows and comics.

And just after I posted Part 1, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government announced the first titles they state have to be moved to 18 and over categories.  One involves a comedy manga about a 24 year old married to a 12 year old and depicts child rape. Another is very popular (and one I accidently stumbled upon to my horror) about a high school brother and sister who are having an affair .  That is the tip of the iceberg for that title, as it is far, far worse than just that.  The rest all involve sex at school, rape, group rape, and incest.  Such cheerful and amusing topics.

No doubt somebody will come along and read my posts with growing outrage that these topics are considered bad or damaging.  One of the most disturbing things about reading posts in the fan communities is the amount of support for all these perversions, especially the lolicon (pedophile) stuff.  The argument of it being fiction, and cartoon fiction at that, is often bandied about with the insinuation that it doesn’t really hurt anyone.  They should have to deal with real life victims of such things and then say that.

That said, there are people raising concerns and complaining about the content, not to mention the declining quality of stories as the publishers pander to the otaku’s. That illustrates why manga and anime will never be big in the United States, as we still have some of our morals intact – at least where it comes to protecting kids.  Though I’ll sadly admit that’s declining too as we have outfits like Ambercrombie & Fitch selling padded push up bikinis aimed at seven year olds.

It is the focus on underage girls that has caused the local government in Tokyo to crack down.  With the immense power of being the main market in the country, this will effect the entire industry. The sheer amount of prepubescent looking females in scanty attire in anime and manga is mind boggling.  Add that to most of the females being teenagers in the genre and it becomes clear that they are pandering to a bunch of perverts.

One of the more insidious and less obvious showcases for this is the “magical girl” subgenre.  These stories feature girls who magically transform into costumed super powered heroines fighting evil.  The most famous series would be the Sailor Moon anime adaptation that was so huge more than a decade ago.  For the U.S. airings, there was quite a bit of censorship that Americans were unaware of, including cutting the lesbian content.

Interestingly, the “magical girl” characters have changed over the years.  Originally, they were teenager who turned into adult forms to fight evil but somewhere along the way it changed to loli’s (derived from lolita) turning into teens and finally into loli’s turning into skimpily dressed loli’s.  The transformation scenes have been known to have hidden frames with the character completely nude.  Since the producers of this material are pandering to their audience, it says a great deal about said audience.

Yet otaku’s wonder why they have such a bad reputation.

Personally, every time the Governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, slams the industry it makes me smile. Those who do the right thing will always be vilified and he is truly hated by the otaku’s worldwide.  He may be a bit of a loud mouth, but he gets it.

Part 3 will wrap things up and cover how the pandering has hit ridiculous heights as protagonists have changed over the years.

Mama’s, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Otaku’s–Part 1

If you are a parent with kids interested in Japanese anime (cartoons) and manga (comic books), you need to be looking very closely at what your kids are into.

What is an otaku? Simply put, they are obsessive fans of pop culture, but I’m specifically writing about the ones involved in manga, anime, and video games. Of late, otaku has assumed negative connotations due to just how extreme the subculture has gotten. This is for very good reasons, which I will go into later. In the United States, the word mainly self-applied by fans of Japanese culture and hasn’t become such a negative term. Hopefully, it will become a negative term amongst parents given what I’ve run into online. There are far too many anime’s and manga’s that are pure sleaze masquerading as comedy or action.

I always wondered if the Japanese comic books and cartoons were really more intelligent and sophisticated than American efforts as their fans claimed.  The other point I’d read and heard since the 1990’s was how more accepted they were in the culture and were, in fact, respectable.  So as an ex-comic book collector and aficionado of things foreign, I decided to delve into the otaku world while going through two bouts of bronchitis earlier this year.

It wasn’t like I was a complete stranger to the genres involved, since I remember Robotech from the late 1980’s and Battle of the Planets from a little earlier.  Due to glowing reviews everywhere, I watched Spirited Away and became an instant fan of Studio Ghibli. Younger friends had introduced me to Bleach, a typical fighting anime that at least had interesting characters.  While I had Netflix, I sampled some anime series to get an idea what teens were into and did find some quality productions.  In fact, that led to an automated recommendation that became the first anime box set I purchased, Area 88.

So I don’t come into this with a hatred for anime or manga as a format. Well done comics and cartoons can be just as emotional or complex as a novel or theatrical movie.  In fact, I dare anyone to watch Grave of the Fireflies without shedding tears. But most of this, just like American comic books, is no longer for children. The main audience has become terminally arrested adolescents in their twenties to forties.

It is also a dwindling audience both here and in Japan.  With the Japanese birth rate well below replacement rate, there simply aren’t enough children being born to keep things afloat and industry sales have decreased.  Here in the states, the manga and anime boom peaked around 2005 and has imploded since then.  Unlike Japan, those who consumed anime and manga outgrew it in their later years.  So the great dream of mainstream acceptance went up in a puff of smoke.

There are consequences to shrinking markets in entertainment and one of the most interesting is what happens to a niche market.  Just like comic books in the U.S., it shrinks to specialty shops and a ever smaller and more hardcore clientele. At some point,  the whims of that small group begins to exert more and more control over the product put out.  While not nearly as bad off in Japan as it is here, other cultural factors have produced an even more disproportionate influence by the hardcore fans over manga and anime.

I should note that video games are very intertwined with manga and anime.  Many properties are adapted back and forth between all three media types.  The peculiar popularity of dating and pornographic romance simulators in Japan is something we don’t have here in the States.

Why am I bringing this up?  It has to do with many Japanese males dropping out of adult society, ones who have no real social lives, no wives, and no girlfriends.  They spend their days as NEET’s, playing video games, reading manga, watching anime, and avoiding growing up at all costs.  I’ve always liked the saying that “idle hands are the devil’s plaything” for good reason.  Too many men with nothing to do is never a good thing. Combine a culture that is far more permissive in regards to sexual mores with pornography centered around school girls and you may get an idea of what I’m talking about.

To be a little more clear, we are talking about arrested adolescents who fantasize constantly about teen and, appallingly, preteen girls.  With their disproportionate influence as very vocal consumers, the producers of anime and mange pander to this group constantly.  This is called “fan service.”  Jiggling breasts, sex jokes, nudity, and the ever popular camera shots of highly detailed panties are a staple of the medium. 

But that’s just the beginning of the problems. 

In the next post, I’ll go into how the themes of misogyny, incest, and pedophilia have become mainstream.  Thankfully, the Japanese government has finally moved to do something about this but it still applies to what has been put out.

Odds and Ends

Will be working on a post about the Tea Party in Winona last week and about the Republican Congressional District 1 endorsement convention this past Saturday to put up this week.

In the meantime, a few items that caught my eye the last two weeks:

A follow up on the couple beaten in New Orleans last week by leftwing protesters.  The Palin pin part of it has been debunked, but it is very clear this was a politically motivated attack. The mainstream media shows that they are well beyond simple bias by ignoring this one.  If conservative protesters had done this to a pair of Democrats it would be the overkill story for weeks.

Dr. Helen aka the Instawife has an interesting piece up about how psychologists are moving to social activism in their therapy.  This is damning stuff and worth checking out. The desire to control other’s lives is getting to be the hallmark of the left.

Speaking of controlling people, the FDA is going to start regulating salt in prepared foods.  This serves two goals:  controlling the population even in the most miniscule way and to inflate the number of government employees (they’ll need to hire more to administrate this, of course). Idiocy. Look for more of this under the guise of lowering the government’s cost of providing healthcare.

There is no way ObamaCare can be funded, it is simply impossible.  But the Democrats will keep trying and one way they want to raise taxes is by adding a VAT (Value Added Tax). That hasn’t worked out so well for the Europeans and is yet another way to retard the growth of an economy.  In our case, it would kill it dead. Best quote:

In 2008, the average resident of West Virginia, one of the poorest American states, had an income $2,000 a year higher than the average resident of the European Union, according to economist Mark Perry of the University of Michigan, Flint.

Oh yeah, we really need to emulate those Europeans.

Denial of reality seems to be a big part of leftwing big government.  Over in California they are doing their best to be like Europe and ignore the financial catastrophe they are in.  Entertainment comes first but the piper will have to be paid eventually.

Meanwhile, that unpronounceable volcano in Iceland is still hampering flying and a bigger eruption is possible.  But just how unsafe was it to fly?  Turns out that the grounding was based exclusively on computer models and nary a single weather balloon was sent up to get real data. The religion of computer models has already given us the fraud of man made global warming and now this is going on. Once again reality is being ignored in favor of theory.  I’m afraid science is dead.

The relationship between Israel and the United States is on life support as well.  The hostility of Obama and his cronies toward the Israelis  has been palpable of late and has generated a great deal of concern. I’ve been warning people he is slowly building a case for armed conflict with Israel and been greeted with dismissal.  Better look again, as this refusal by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to rule out shooting down Israeli planes crossing Iraqi airspace to hit Iran. The ghost of Jeremiah Wright is alive and well in the Obama administration.

Another False Flag Operation

In Denver, the Democratic Party Headquarters had its windows smashed in and efforts were made to blame Tea Party protesters.  So who actually got arrested?  Someone who had been on the payroll of an SEIU front group.  That vandal is no conservative and the question is being raised over what the local Democratic chair new about this.

Part of the problem the conservatives and libertarians have had understanding the opposition is comprehending that the end justifies the means to the left.  To some degree, they intellectually get that the other side lies and even the relativism involved, but they fail to understand just how far they will go to achieve their goals.  When you suffer from ethical relativism in addition to moral relativism, anything goes to win.  That includes posing as the other side to frame them for bad behavior.

Ironically, it would be a relief if Maurice had a grievance with the Democrats and did this for revenge of some kind, but I doubt that will be the case.  Instead, the political situation in the country continues to deteriorate and I think we'll be seeing a lot more unrest as the far left get frustrated.  Opposition is not something they handle well, much like adolescents.  With generations never growing up and raising following generations to be perpetual teenagers, we'll be seeing a lot more stupid acts such as this one.

Internet Socializing and Loss of Community

Be warned, rambling be ahead.

Much has been made about the rise of the Web 2.0, focusing on the changeover to emphasizing social networking over knowledge or commerce in content. The rise of MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites has garnered a great deal of virtual print. Most kids have adopted living on the Net and so have young adults, but where does this take us as a society?

Back when AOL ruled the roost and Compuserve was still around, the World Wide Web was just getting going, with a little program called Mosaic being the first widely used web browser. It was followed by the dominant Netscape, which was then destroyed by Microsoft's late and desperate entry into the Web, Internet Explorer. Heady times, I remember when Yahoo first appeared and challenged my use of WebCrawler for a search engine. It was amazing, there were thousands of websites out there to search through. Seems silly to those used to tens of thousands of hits to a search these days, but at the time it was like looking at a newly opened frontier that was ready and waiting to be explored.

There was a fear that the newly popular form of communication, email, would turn us into anti-social shut-ins, never seeing the light of day for fear of bursting into flames. Then came a few studies that said people were communicating with each other more than ever thanks to the Web, families were being brought together, far off friends re-connected and we breathed a sigh of relief. Soon we had ICQ, then AIM, then YM and eventually MSM filling our quota of acronyms as the rise of instant messaging began to displace email. Writing emails became passe and the art of composition was sacrificed for LOL, BFF, IMHO and the other LOLspeak abbreviations and acronyms. Apparently the quota hadn't been fully met after all.

This still wasn't enough. No, we needed embarrassing pictures for future employers to see, connected to hordes of people across the globe on your very own personal networking sites. After all, reality television showed that we should all aspire to fame or infamy, attention is all that matters in life. Now everyone has their chance to be seen by an adoring world. Forget Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame, fifteen seconds on YouTube is where it is at. So the Web 2.0 is born, with people living their lives out there for everyone to see. Well, except for those hopelessly stone age parents who aren't hip enough to find out what their kids are doing online.

Is this a great advancement for humanity, with all this unprecedented connectivity between people from all around the globe? I have to wonder.

My experiences on the Net over the years have taken me from thinking it would civilize humanity more to the suspicion that it is achieving the opposite. While we have instances of atrocities being better documented in totalitarian states despite a mad scramble to censor and control information access, we are also witnessing the rise of the rude and uncompromising in every day discourse. The flame wars on message boards of the past have given way to deliberate segregation into cliques on the social networking sites. That way you don't have to worry about dealing with people with opposing viewpoints, don't have to practice manners. Not that people on message boards were much better about it, but now no attempt has to be made.

Essentially, what I have witnessed is things getting cruder, ruder, and more narcissistic with each passing year. People band together only with like minded thinkers and with the ability to filter out those who don't hold the same beliefs, basic discourse of the past is vanishing. Often politics has been criticized for becoming groups of people shouting past each other. That applies now to almost every facet of Net socializing, whether it be about politics, hobbies, sports, or movies.

Enabling one another, those who share a viewpoint begin to ignore or demonize those that disagree in a most high school manner. There is no need to interact with those that don't agree with you and soon you inhabit a nice little echo chamber, divorced from the rest of the world. At the same time, I'm witnessing this happen in real life as people are becoming less community minded and the decay of organizations such as the Knights of Columbus and various lodges comes to mind. Those were places where people from various incomes and walks of life could get together as equals, something valuable for any healthy society.

So we have these sites dedicated to creating "communities", but are they helping to build a sense of community? Or are they falsely encouraging a sense of elitism and entitlement? My suspicion is that they are assisting the break down in society by allowing people to escape the social obligations of dealing with the "other" in real life. After all, nobody likes being disagreed with and everyone who has a differing opinion is an idiot.

But it is dealing with those that we don't agree with, don't get along with, or don't usually run into that helps us mature into adults. A big part of adulthood is realizing that we can't get our way all the time (usually most of the time) and that the world is a much bigger place than what goes on inside our heads. That means cultivating manners and the ability to interact with people unlike us are necessary to keep the wheels of civilization turning, not to mention survive. Perpetual adolescence with its accompanying self absorbed personality and short fused temper is not desirable. It invariably leads to conflict and friction. Too much friction and the gears bind, followed by watching the wheels come off as you veer over a cliff.

There are other forces at work, of course. Western culture is increasingly adolescent for a variety of reasons, but I've rambled on enough as it is. Perhaps that will be a topic for another day.

Musings on Volunteer Work

For some time now, I've been pondering how to get people more involved in helping others out through volunteer work. So far I've come up with nothing that actually works. Guilt, pressure, enthusiasm, begging -- none of them work. A wise man made a comment that caught my attention recently, "Two percent of the people do ninety percent of the work." That's a disturbing thing to think about, especially since it is very true from what I've seen. No wonder so many burn out after doing everything short of bleeding for a cause.

The problem is aggravated by the fact that the two percent in the area I live in are getting too old to do as much as they used to. There are very few, if any, younger people volunteering these days. By younger, I mean the under 60 crowd, not teenagers. The excuses I hear from that age group is that they don't have time, both spouses have to work just to make a living, etc. Some of these same people have no trouble finding time to golf, go to concerts, take multiple vacations a year, or spend time on other recreational activities. Most volunteer work wouldn't take that much time up a week, especially if we had enough volunteers.

I blame the rampant materialism of our time, this keeping up with the Jones is simply out of control. There is also a lot of money spent on expensive toys we really don't need, but hey they kill a lot of time, don't they? Selfishness is a way of life now, which is a worrisome sign of the times. How to overcome that, I wonder?

Looking back at past generations, I see the big break from charitable work beginning with one generation -- the Baby Boomers. It is no coincidence that they were spoiled rotten by parents who went without during the Great Depression, for it is the spoiled who tend to be the least altruistic. They were the first generation to be marketed heavily to from cradle onward, besieged by TV commercials at their most impressionable age but without the jaded cynicism of later generations to offset the influence. They are still the most voracious consumer generation known and soon will be hitting retirement age. But I don't see them helping others out then, the obsession with staying young and affluent runs too strong there.

Of course, there is a possibility they won't retire permanently, as Social Security will not be able to handle entitlements for the entire generation. Those at the end of the Boom will be in the same boat with all of us who came after, a boat with no Social Security lifesavers.

Perhaps I'm sounding too pessimistic about it all, but I suspect there will be some serious hardship for the USA in the not too distant future and that will change the equation. It is hardship that brings forth the best in us humans, not times of prosperity. As things such as regular long distance travel becomes expensive again, we'll see a rebirth of the concept of community. Often, very good things come out of very bad things and I think the pendulum will swing that way.

Of course, I may be too optimistic about that! But I've been a pessimist and I can say being an optimistic realist is a lot more fun.