Right Wing Ideology:Reactions to Newtown

While I could probably be charitably be described as a liberal firebrand, I'd at least like to believe that I'm moderate enough to recognize when my own position is flawed. I try to make a habit of self-examination (as I've mentioned before) and dispense with ideas that have been proven not to work. It's probably arguable as to how successful I am in that respect, but still.

I'd also like to suggest that at least this sets me apart from the right-wing ideologues. Because even in the wake of Newtown, with over two dozen dead and most of those children, numerous members of the extreme right wing have doubled down on the same gun control policies (or rather, the lack thereof!) that brought us to this point in the first place. One would think that this would at least give them a moment's pause!

Of course, the arguments take two positions, the religious and the anarchist. The former is embodied in the first two links, people like Huckabee or Dobson saying that this is the inevitable result of our culture turning its back on God. This, of course, ignores the fact that President Obama made open reference to Christian scripture in his speech in Newtown; that Christians of some type are still the majority in this country - we're clearly in the wrong for daring to support birth control, and abortion, and gay marriage.

I think it's worth noting that this is exactly the same as the Westboro Baptist Church's position: events like these are God's wrath on our sinful nation. And as far as I'm concerned, if that's the way God actually works, I'll burn in hell for eternity before I offer one word of prayer or thanks to Him, much less work to shape public policy to bring it in line with His dictates. Assuming I believed in the Christian God in the first place, which I do not. I'm just grateful that most of the Christians I know don't actually agree with that view of God's will. (I hope.)

More worrisome to me, though, are the anarchists, the latter four people I linked. I'm sure they would not appreciate being labeled with that term, but what else am I supposed to believe? These are the people, after all, who believe that yet more guns are the solution to this problem. Who dare to say that the American people should be prepared to take on their own government, and argue that gun rights are an important shield against the tyranny of the government. Who seem to think that the only way to stay safe is to protect yourself, preferably with as much firepower as you can possibly get.

This really kind of disturbs me. Isn't part of the point of having a government to "provide for the common defense", to quote the Constitution? If I can't trust the government to protect me, why do we even have that government in the first place?

Now, even if I didn't trust the government in that respect (and for the record, I do), obviously I can think of a few other things that the government should be responsible for, given my position on the political spectrum. But those mostly work out to social welfare, which means that your average right-wing ideologue would hate them even more than providing for the common defense.

Given the way these people are reacting to Newtown, I'm left with nothing to do but wonder. What is the government supposed to do in the ideal world of the right wing?

In the Wake of Violence

I am really fucking tired of having to read this kind of story...

Multiple people — including children — were killed on Friday morning when at least one gunman opened fire in an Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, CT.

I could go ahead and chart out the course of our national dialogue over the next few days. I mean, it's already begun. Although I think in this case the "now they're going to 'exploit' the tragedy to try to push gun control" refrain actually began before anyone on the left actually started calling for stricter firearm laws - indeed, after the president's press secretary specifically said that today isn't the day for that discussion.

For my own part? I'm tempted to ask when the hell is the day for that discussion. I could remind everyone of the utter bullshit that it is for the right wing to whine about 'exploiting' the tragedy, given their past behavior when the guns were aimed at them instead of someone else.

Mostly, though, I'm just tired of this. There are other nations that have actually banned guns outright, you realize. Last I checked, Japan wasn't filled with gun violence to anywhere near the same extent that the U.S. is. China bore witness to an attack on a school this very same day - one in which the perpetrator used a knife. Dozens of people were injured, not killed. And yet banning guns will only make us less safe, we're told.

There was a time in this country when guns were more strictly regulated - when assault weapons were banned, reducing the amount of destruction that someone could cause all by themselves. I haven't found a clear picture yet of what the perpetrators of this mass shooting were armed with yet, so perhaps reinstating that would have done nothing about this incident. And before I even finish writing this, we've got confirmation that an assault rifle was indeed involved. Because it's critical that we be allowed to 'defend' ourselves with weapons that are better suited for mass annihilation, right?

Above all, though, I'm tired of slamming into the same brick wall over and over again, for a discussion that isn't even the one we need to have.

The discussion we need to have isn't the one I laid out above, about the mechanics of gun rights and gun ownership. It has nothing to do with whether banning guns outright would be "effective". Or whether we even could manage to do so in a country with an active set of fringe movements that would no doubt rise up in revolt if the government tried to institute a policy of civilian disarmament. And yet that's always what the discussion becomes, despite the fact that no U.S. administration has ever proposed such a plan for the last century or more.

The discussion we need to have is about the definition of strength. About the society we've built: the society in which any person who refuses to deal out swift and violent death is 'weak', somehow, despite the fact that it takes far more strength to turn the other cheek and ignore provocation rather than react out of hand. Despite the fact that it would take far more strength to admit to ourselves that something is very seriously wrong when our first reaction to dozens of people dead is to say "don't talk about the problem!"

I do believe that there will be situations in this world to which the only practical response will be violence. Today, though, is a day to reflect on the inevitable consequences of resorting to violence - a cost that we have seen in every military action the United States has ever carried out. While I do believe that it is a cost sometimes worth paying, I can say with total certainty that this was not a situation in which it was necessary to use force.

Just I can say with effectively total certainty that every time we avoid this discussion - the one about what violence even is, when we should use it, and how we should react to it - we are repeating the same mistakes that brought us to this point in the first place.

Campaign RetrospectivePart 2: Connections and Confidence

Well, my first look back at the campaign trail was honestly kind of a negative one. I figured I'd take a moment to reassure my readers (particularly if any of those are the people I was working with!) that on balance, I enjoyed my time with the campaign.

I think I can trace that enjoyment specifically to one facet of the campaign. You see, back when we had about a month to go until the election, there was this team meeting that we all attended, and one of the fun things we did at that meeting was to go around and have everyone say one thing they were looking forward to in the rest of the campaign.

My answer to that question was shaped in large part by the responsibilities I was taking on by that part of the campaign - as I mentioned in the last retrospective, I was in charge of data entry, and that meant building a team of people that could work together to get that data entry done. I was just starting that task when we had this meeting, and so I said that I was looking forward to building that team.

In some respects, though, I was less specific than that. What I said was that I was looking forward to building connections with all of the people that would work to help re-elect President Obama. I was looking forward to seeing someone walk in the door of our office and being able to say "Hey, nice to see you again, how are you today?" rather than "Welcome to the Obama campaign office, can I help you with something?"

In the end, that's the kind of thing that brought me back to the campaign day after day. Even in the position that I had, there was always that voice in the back of my head that suggested I was out of my depth. And then I'd show someone else how to handle the database, fix another computer problem at the office. One of the regular volunteers would come and ask me for help with something. I'd go and find out the answer, whether that meant a search of the Internet or asking the people that we had running the office. In some respects, I was too busy working to have the time to worry about whether I could handle the job!

Now that it's after the fact, I can say with some confidence that we got the job done. Barack Obama can be called "Mr. President" for another four years. And while that goes a long way toward shutting up that annoying little voice, I can't say that it was all or even mostly my work.

So let me say that again: we got the job done. The way politics should be handled: with people coming together and working for what they believed to be the common good. In short, as a team.

Flawless Victory!

Sorta, anyway. (Link goes to the graph of my word count by day on the NaNoWriMo website.)

I mean, I think probably anyone who's ever done National Novel Writing Month has probably heard of someone who pulled off an incredible comeback. The first year I did NaNoWriMo, I was sure that the one Municipal Liason (in charge of organizing events for a given region) was going to fail, but then he wrote thousands upon thousands of words in a few days, to the point where he was beating me in word count despite my diligent adherence to meeting the expected words per day.

I've just never expected to pull one off myself. I've never seemed to be able to write more than two or three thousand words in a day, and usually I can't maintain the upper end of that pace for more than a few days at a time. This year, though, I didn't have a choice. I tried to get a few words out on November 1st, but in between helping with the Obama campaign and some dissatisfaction with the story I was trying to write, I didn't get anything else done for over a week - and when I did start writing again, I ditched the story I had started on the 1st in favor or a new one. Essentially returning me to square one in terms of word count.

The upside to this change in plans is that with the new choice of story, I was able to get fired up enough to maintain a pace of nearly four thousand words a day for the first few days, almost getting me back to par. I did hit kind of a slump in the middle thanks to a nasty case of writer's block (brought on in part by the scenes I was writing), but in the end I recovered and hit the goal line with maybe four hours left in the month.

So, what happens now? Well, in the end I wrote fan fiction. That's another thing I never expected to do; I've seen more than one story on Fanfiction.net that's over 100k words. Never did understand how people managed that kind of thing, but at this rate I'm going to be writing one of those myself. Yeah, the story's not done. Actually, the story before that story isn't done, since what I wrote is essentially a sequel to Midchildan Music, a story I started a while back.

It does simplify my goals a little. I need to clean up Midchildan Music's final chapter, post that, deal with some retcons that need to be done to Midchildan Music as a result of inconsistencies that I introduced in the story I wrote over the past few weeks (and things I don't like in Midchildan Music), and then work on finishing the story that was this year's winning NaNoWriMo project.

And somewhere along the line, I'll probably try to go back to last year's NaNoWriMo. That one didn't end successfully, but it's also a work of original fiction, and I can still try to finish that up sometime...

Campaign RetrospectivePart 1: Personal Barriers

I did mention that I was helping out with the Obama campaign just recently. Well, I'll share with you... I guess it's not exactly a secret, but one would think I wouldn't want it shared widely.

I really wasn't very good at campaigning.

That isn't to say that I wasn't helping out that much. In the role I eventually found myself in, I was doing a great deal of work! Then again, the role I found myself in was to be in charge of data entry for a specific (fairly small) area. It was an important job, there's no doubt about that, and it meant that I had to be an effective manager as well, unless I wanted to be doing all of the data entry myself.

I wouldn't call it "campaigning" though. Not in the sense of going out and talking to people about how they're voting, or whether they'd be willing to volunteer for the campaign. I did small amounts of the latter, with people who had already expressed an interest with data entry, getting them connected to the team I was building and ensuring that they were trained in the system we used. There's quite the difference between that and calling people who have perhaps expressed an unspecified interest in maybe volunteering sometime in the future. The days I tried the latter, earlier in the campaign...? Let's just say they were not pleasant ones.

Admittedly, talking to people about how they're voting went a little better. It helped that the area where I was working was heavily Democratic to begin with; there was very little of trying to convince people to vote for Obama and a lot more of making sure that people already predisposed towards voting for Obama actually got out and voted. As far as I'm concerned, the latter is a lot easier than the former. Either way, though, while it wasn't as wildly uncomfortable as asking people to volunteer, it had all too many unpleasant moments as well.

I think part of this has to do with my personality. I'm a lot more comfortable supporting from the rear line, so to speak. I'd rather work to enable everyone else to do their jobs more effectively. Certainly I'd take that over chipping away at a job which I'm simply not as good at. Which is how it ended up working in the end; my focusing on getting data entered left everyone else with more time to handle the rest of the things that needed doing. (I think, anyway!)

The other part of it, though, is the way in which the campaign conducted these operations. This is something which I'm a little more reluctant to talk about, in part because I'm not sure if I'm allowed to. The kinds of information connected to the campaign that were not to be shared honestly surprised me a little. Whether it should be proprietary or not, well, that's a matter for an entirely separate post. For what it's worth, there were good reasons for all of those decisions, to the best of my ability to tell at least. (And lest anyone think "the election's over, it doesn't matter anymore", I have no doubt that there are people already preparing for 2014 and 2016.) It is possible that I'm being overly cautious in this respect, but I'd rather err on the side of caution.

Re-framing it as a matter of my personality, though, I will say that I find it very hard to ignore it and keep going once someone's told me "no". There are a lot of reasons for that which I think probably should be much more widely held, in all honesty. The most basic way to put it, though, is this: that a person who says "no" is establishing a boundary, one that the rest of us are obligated to respect, not tear down or ignore.

Obviously someone's personality will play a part in determining at what they are and are not effective at doing. Just as there are times when it's a good thing to step outside of your comfort zone and try something new. In the end, though, I think the line I just laid out is an absolute one, not to be crossed under any circumstances, as far as my personality is concerned. And I don't regret the effect that had on my role within the campaign. Indeed, in some respects I'm more disappointed that I would be asked to cross that line in the first place.

A Little Housekeeping

So... yeah.

I got just a teensy bit caught up in the recently-concluded political campaign here in the United States. As in, full-time volunteering kind of caught up. Oh, and when I say "full-time", that actually worked out to be ten-hour days more often than I might have liked!

Not that I have any regrets. As it happens, I don't regret it at all. Not one bit. In some small respect, the work that I did with the Obama campaign probably helped contribute to his successfully winning Virginia for the second time in two presidential elections. Which, even if Ohio was the state that "decided" the election, was certainly part of the dominant electoral victory that ended the presidential race (very) early on the morning of the 7th, rather than weeks later after all the recounts were in. I'll take that.

Anyway, posting's been nonexistent because of the amount of time that's been demanding from me. Hopefully that will change now that the campaign is over... but then again, it's National Novel Writing Month, which is also one hell of a time sink. *sigh* Well, at least I won't be short of things to talk about. And I'll probably try to look back on the campaign in more detail, too, although given my track record on that kind of promise, I wouldn't blame anyone for not believing that that will ever happen.

About the only other thing I'm changing is the sidebar, where I'm cleaning up the list of tags a little to make that easier to navigate and adding a list of blogs that I read. I can't control the content on any site other than my own, of course... and at any rate I need to work a little harder on adding content notes to my own blog, much less keeping an eye on anyone else's.

Well, that's about it for the moment. As always, thanks for reading my blog.

Internet Society

I am, perhaps, one of the few people of my generation to have never touched Reddit. And I do mean never. I've found my way there from the occasional link, but only in the context of another story, and I've not spent any time looking around Reddit, itself. Nor do I have an account there. So perhaps I'm not the best person to be commenting on this story, seeing how the vast majority of it took place on Reddit.

But, it is a story about someone's online identity. Or rather, it's a story connecting someone's online identity to someone's offline identity, attaching a real name and face to what was formerly nothing more than a line of text, a pseudonym. And given what this particular online persona (Reddit's Violentacrez) has been responsible for, there can be very little doubt that this particular revelation is intended in large part for its value as intimidation or punishment. That's what's known as "doxing" (a word I had not known until I read that article), and to Internet society, it is a severe crime.

It's not something I, personally, have worried too much about. By and large, I go by two pseudonyms on the Internet - older accounts as Counterpower, newer ones as Zankou. I don't go to any great lengths to hide connections between those names and my real one, or between those names and my appearance; if Gawker wanted to do an expose of me (highly unlikely at best!) the necessary research would probably take about ten minutes. I haven't (yet?) openly revealed my real name here on this blog, but that's really the only concession I've ever made to "hiding" my real identity.

By and large, that's because of one simple reason. It's because I try to conduct myself, in any public space, in a way that I would not be ashamed of, were it to become widely known. As far as my online persona is concerned, that mostly means this blog - when I post here, I think about what I'm posting, and why. More than that, I think about how it will be understood, how those whose opinions I respect would react to what I write. And whether or not I would like those reactions.

That doesn't mean I haven't made my mistakes. We all have. That's what apologies and changes in the way I act are for.

Nor does it mean that I don't do things that some people might find questionable. I don't talk about them online. Or, you know, at all. Mostly I examine myself (internally) and what I'm doing, comparing my actions to my principles and determining whether or not they're in conflict. Sometimes they are, at which point I've determined that I've made a mistake in the way that I act... and then, well, see above. (Or, more rarely, that I've made a mistake in formulating or holding a given principle.) Sometimes, I decide that they aren't, despite the disapproval of those whose opinions I would otherwise respect.

But you know... if the day ever comes when I am called to account in public, I'm not going to complain about how I should be allowed to carry on without censure. That isn't how society as a whole works. I am accountable to the people around me for the way I act, and as long as their responses are in and of themselves legal, they may react as they desire.

Apparently the rules change on the Internet. As the Daily Dot puts it, "At Web communities like Reddit, which thrive because users are free to say and do anything they want, doxing is a severe crime, both to users and the site’s staff." (Emphasis mine.)

I don't agree. As it happens, I think Reddit can thrive perfectly fine without its jailbait subreddits. I don't think that the freedom to do anything you want is an integral part of Internet society. And I'm going to go out on a limb and say this: if Reddit in specific or Internet society in general does actually rely on its users' ability to say whatever they want without being called to account for it, it should not exist.