Entry 271: I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

Well, it's a good thing I've made it a point to not discuss sports much on this blog, because that loss on Sunday was about as brutal as it gets -- an absolute soul crusher.  I went from not caring that much about the Super Bowl, to being completely absorbed, to being completely confused (the halftime show), to being giddy as a toddler on a sugar high (the Kearse catch), to being completely distraught (the end) in the span of four hours.  It was one of those games that makes me question why I'm a sports fan at all.  Why partake in something that I know has a decent chance of making me feel so miserable in end?

My usual fallback answer to this is twofold: 1) It's not my fault; it's something I learned as a kid and would be very difficult to change.  2)  When I get into something I get into something -- and it's better to be passionate about things, even stupid things, than to be completely soulless, right?  But when I -- a damn near middle-aged man -- find myself still dwelling on a stupid interception (they were on the one-yard line!  the one yard-line!  to win the Super Bowl! the one-yard line!) five days after it happened, these justifications ring hollow. 

A friend of mine, a one-time die-hard Bears fan, actually gave up the NFL altogether this season.  I must say this has it's appeal -- more free-time on Sundays, less beer drinking, better husband-wife relations, the NFL is an unscrupulous Leviathan of a corporation, etc. -- but I'm not ready for such a drastic move.  I am, however, quitting sports for one-month: no sports media of any sort until March.  That's about as far as I'm willing to go, at the moment.  And it should be noted that aside from the Super Bowl, February is a very boring sports month, anyway.  Also, my self-imposed moratorium just so happens to expire right in time for the start of March Madness.  Convenient that.

[Yep, this expression pretty much says it all.]

So, suddenly I find myself with a bit more spare time on my hands, especially so this week as S is in Africa for work, so once I put the little man down for bed around 8:00, the night is all mine.  (This weekend isn't going to be fun, though; S doesn't get back until Sunday night.  Why can't daycare be seven days a week?)  What have I been doing with my extra time?  Well, for one, I picked up my brother's last novel again.  After proofreading the first few chapters, I set it down like a year ago and didn't pick it back up until now (sorry, bro, if you're reading this, you know fantasy isn't my thing).  And I must say, it's gotten pretty good.  It was slow in the beginning (probably due to the proofreading), but now it's quite compelling.  I'm "dying" (because it takes place in the afterlife, see) to find out how it ends.  You can find it on Amazon, along with his first book, if you're interested.

Also, I've been hitting the non-sports news pretty hard.  Jonathan Chait wrote a good (if overly verbose) piece on why p.c. culture is a counterproductive agent to progressive thinking.  He got a lot of flack for it, but I mostly agree with him that.  (Of course as a white man I would say that, wouldn't I?)  There are certain topics -- race, religion, feminism --  on which many liberals don't speak honestly for fear of using the wrong nomenclature and being labeled a bigot out of hand.  I think, in general, people, especially people on the left, focus way too much on language, which is often superficial, and not enough on the content behind the language.  It's a very weird phenomenon, and it's very counterproductive to actual progress because you end up alienating people who could be -- and often want to be -- allies in the cause.  Yes, it would be great if everybody used the right term for all things at all times, but we're humans, that's not going to happen...  And actually, come to think of it, it wouldn't be great, it would be extremely boring.  Being p.c. is kinda lame.

As an example, of what I'm talking about, Dan Savage (great podcast, by the way) the sex advice columnist, came under "attack" recently for using the incorrect pronoun in addressing a trans person.  In general, Savage gets heat from time-to-time from certain groups for making the mistake of talking like any actual person.  He says things like faggot and tranny (though he did put the kibosh on that one) and bitch and slut.  He makes fun of the ever-growing initialism to describe queer people (I believe it's now LGBTQIA). He says things that, out of context, people could find offensive.  But -- and this is gigantic but -- he's a huge advocate for the rights of gay and trans people ... and sex workers ... and promiscuous women ... and pretty much any other group of people outside the traditional norm of sexuality and gender.  He supports them and brings attention to their plights and constantly speaks out against their harassment and marginalization.  Shouldn't that be the big point, instead of the fact that he occasionally strays from the holy p.c. dictionary when delivering his message?  Of course.  

And by the way, not being so p.c. about everything can actually help a cause.  I started reading Savage Love, like 20 years ago, in large part because Dan's voice was not like anything I'd read before in a mainstream (or semi-mainstream) publication.  If he wrote like political speech writer -- being sure to word things in such a way that nobody could ever take any offense to anything -- then I wouldn't have read him.  My views on LGBTQIA people changed a lot throughout college (although it was just LGBT, back in my day) .  I never thought being queer was wrong or anything, but I definitely was uncomfortable with the idea of it, and I had the bad habit of using gay as a general pejorative term.  What changed was, well, I grew up for one thing, but also I became exposed to queer people and part of that was through reading Dan Savage.  So, you know, everybody needs to stop getting on would-be supporters for using the wrong words and start focusing on the really haters out there.

In other news, the anti-vaxxers are really making waves these days.  This was a movement I was hoping would just disappear -- a fad that would go the way of Gangnam Style.  But it appears to be sticking around.  First, there was an outbreak at Disneyland, and then likely Republican presidential candidates Chris Christie decided to weigh in on the issue (get it "weigh in" ... because he's fat) in typical politician fashion, by talking gibberish.  And then Rand Paul, who isn't a typical politician, basically came down on the side of the anti-vaxxers, saying it's the parents choice because "The state doesn’t own your children".  I actually love that Paul chimed in on this issue because it beautifully illustrates the problem with his entire world-view.

See, Rand Paul, practices a particular form of libertarianism, in which we are all supposed to pretend that society functions as a disparate collection of autonomous units called human beings and that each of these units is responsible only for themselves and that when one of these units fails, the unit alone bears that burden; it's not anybody else's problem, so nobody (especially not the government) has any right to tell another unit what to do.  

The problem with this ideology, of course, is that it fails the most basic test for any ideology: it's doesn't cohere with objective reality.  The unfortunate truth of the matter is that other people's problems affect you.  That's how the world works; we really are all in it together.  And no more is this more obvious than with immunizations.  We have two choices: a) Let people not vaccinate their kids, b) Not have massive outbreaks of preventable diseases.  Because of the way herd immunity works, these two choices are very close to being mutually exclusive.  Don't blame me for this, blame Mother Nature.  Maybe she's a socialist.  

Anyway, of the two choices, b) is the obvious pick to me.  I would prefer to live in a society in which my child is forced -- yes, forced, by the state, if need be -- to undergo the tyranny of a one-second needle prick, rather than live in a society in which there is a nontrivial chance my child will catch a disease that was once all but eradicated.  Rand Paul apparently disagrees with me.  He would like to pick a) -- and if your kid gets measles because they were too young to be vaccinated and went to Disneyland, well, then maybe you should have just streamed Frozen on Netflix and stayed home.  

[I'd rather see the return of PSY than the return of the mumps.]

Now, in the linked article Rand Paul actually says that he thinks vaccines are overall a good thing.  But this just underscores what really bothers me so much about Rand Paulism: It's all this talk about government tyranny and personal liberties.  But when it comes down to it, it's really, "my rights, in theory, are more important than everybody else's well-being, in practice".  He finds forced immunization distasteful (his right), so he thinks it should take priority over society eradicating diseases (everybody else's well being).  You can draw similar analogies with his economic policies and his environmental policies.  So, as you can probably guess, I won't be supporting Rand Paul for president in 2016.

One more thing about the anti-vaccination movement: It makes for some strange bedfellows.  You've got the ultra right-wing, anti-government sect, but then you've also got the ultra left-wing, anti-big pharma sect.  Politically, these two groups couldn't be further from each other on every other issue, but when it comes to diseased babies they find common ground.  It's kinda sweet, in a way -- a very sad and disturbing way. 

Until next time ...