Re: Communication

This is a post in response a blog post from a friend of mine.  Check his blog out here: wefearthefuture.blogspot.com

Please, read his post first, before you read mine!

Hey there Wayne,

First off, let me begin by saying that it’s awesome to see somebody I know getting into blogging.  I think it’s a great way to learn and grow intellectually, as well as foster debate in a friendly and well-thought out manner.  So, keep it up, I’ve enjoyed reading your posts!  I hope you don’t mind me playing devil’s advocate a bit, and feel free to do the same on my blog as well!

I’d like to talk about your second post mainly, the one I’m commenting on.  I answered your question in typical law-school fashion in the beginning of your post.  In response to, “Are people smart?” I said: it depends.  I know you said you didn’t want to spend too much time on whether people are smart or not, but I think not to do so is leaving out a big part of what you’re talking about.

I understand your assumption “Being smart doesn’t exist”, but I also disagree in part.  I think maybe the concept of “smart” versus “not smart” is a bit lacking.  You touched on this when you mentioned that some people are simply better at certain things than others.  I think this is really important, because in a way this can be interpreted that everybody is smart at something.  It essentially means that, if one plays to one’s strengths, others will regard that person a “smart”.  Take me for example, I know I enjoy the law (even while I’m writing this on my half-hour break from work between classes) and therefore I focus intently on it and do my best to excel. 

However, throw me in an operating room, or even an artistic studio, and I quickly look like the dunce.  I think the most important takeaway is that in each of these situations, other peoples’ perception of me is vastly different.  On the one hand, I come across as intently focused on my goals, and on the other, as someone who clearly does not belong.  Does that effect whether I am smart or not?  I don’t think so.  I simply believe that all people have a “place” in life, and we , as humans, need to realize and accept that.

I think this also ties into your clean slate statement.  It’s a very popular philosophical ideology, and one that is firmly tied to the American perception of justice and democracy (in brief, in one is a clean slate then one is responsible for one’s actions, good or bad.  Therefore, we can justify capitalistic economies and prisons with individual freedoms and rights).  I think you may, however, be giving a little too much weight to effect of parents.  I think parents have a huge impact on mental, physical, and social development, but what about friends, school, teachers, mentors, and role models?  All of these factors (and more of course) effect who we are and change what we believe. 

                I do agree with your assessment of determination and will though.  I think you’ve pretty much got the nail-on-the-head.  Humans are capable of accomplishing amazing deeds when we set our minds to it, and this is something that is so often ignored in today’s busy electronic notification life.

As per your examples:

Example 1: If any non-German speaking person were placed into Germany, that person would begin to pick up on the language.  They would not starve to death as you suggest, communication is only very slightly words, and much more tone of voice, inflections, and body language.  You would actually become quite proficient in German once you spent enough time there, after all, that is how you learned English.

Example 2:  I’m not sure exactly how this would play out, and as you say, a lot of factors are omitted (what level of business are said employees engaged in, are they managers? Mid level managers? CEOs?).  However, I think that this example is more of a description of the volatility of human emotions, rather than the inability to communicate.  In fact, they’re communicating quite well that they’re extremely upset, so obviously (hopefully) whatever they’re arguing about is actually quite important.

I happen to agree with your youtube comment assessment. I try to avoid reading those comments like the plague.

Finally, I was surprised by your ultimate conclusion to simply read.  I very much support that.  If more people read, minds would expand and viewpoints would shift.  It’s so hard to convince people to read when they can check out and watch TV or sit on facebook.  I find myself guilty of exactly that type of mental check-out when I’m super tired from working all day.  I don’t want to sit down and read, I just want to “veg out”.  I’m not sure how we address this as a society though, and it’s an interesting topic for future discussion.

I have to run to class now though, so hopefully you enjoy/appreciate my comment!  Have a good one,

Tim

The Fourth Branch of Government

I've been watching HBO's The Newsroom TV show lately, and I find myself wishing more than anything else that it weren't fiction.

The time has passed when reporters believed themselves to be serving the public, and instead the time has come when they serve the advertisers.  Nothing is more damaging to the democratic process and society as a whole than a misinformed public.  While a representative democracy, where citizens vote for people to represent them instead of voting directly on issues, is supposed to provide a remedy for a misinformed public in a democracy; the problem still remains.  If the people voting have no idea who to vote for because they have no idea what they actually believe on key issues, then the representatives themselves are forced into voting certain ways on issues that have absolutely zero relevance to the well being of a country.

There is an unfortunate disconnect between the political process and the information process.  We find ourselves more concerned with the new name of a "royal" baby across an ocean than with the interest rates and fiscal policies of the Federal Reserve.  We find ourselves even more interested in Taylor Swift's new song or Kayne West's new baby or Lindsay Lohan's most recent slip with cocaine, than we do with the fact that all of our electronic communications are being monitored by an insanely illegal system which logs any and all email traffic through the United States (which, is most email traffic through the world due to the US psuedo-monopoly on the internet).

It doesn't stop there.  Some news organizations try to foster healthy debate, but because their bosses don't let them remain neutral because nobody is neutral; therefore nobody wants to watch neutrality, they must slant everything one way or the other.

But what does this all lead to?  Well, for starters, I've been trying to follow a news organization on Twitter in order to stay up-to-date with news, but I end up unfollowing within a week because their absurd tweets infuriate me.  These companies will stop at nothing to get a buzz-following, and it's disgraceful.  One of the points made in The Newsroom is that advertising should not fund the news.  It's so simple.  If a regulation were put in place that advertisements could not be ran for one hour during the news, then the news wouldn't have to cater to rating.  If you wanted unbiased news, you could switch to a channel, and know that they are not concerned at all with gaining viewers to attract ad companies to generate revenue.

Granted, this would cut a severe portion of profits from the cable companies and broadcast organizations, but most people pay for TV.  And that's the thing, most people pay to watch 30% commercials or more (why are people okay with this?).

America is at what I like to think of as a "pivot point".  We're engaged in one of the most fiercely competitive economic races of history with the rest of the world.  Our tax code has exponentially grown to the point where even tax lawyers don't understand everything, they have to specialize in certain areas.  Our healthcare system has been standing on the precipice of reform for nearly 5 years now, and our military research and defense spending has continued to grow.  Our national debt has surpassed our national GDP.

Let me say that again, in different terms.  The amount of debt our country is more than our annual economic production.

The national debt is $16 trillion. in 2012, our GDP was $15 trillion.

But, if you ask the average American what the debt is, or even what our GDP was for 2012, they'd probably provide you an inaccurate number.  However, ask them what Trayvon Martin bought before he had an altercation with George Zimmerman.

It's a disgrace, you cannot have a functioning democracy with a brain-dead population.  We are so content to just coast through life and ignore the problems because we're invincible, but the people who try to fix anything are shunned as naysayers and doomsday prophets.  It's not the end of the world, but we are absolutely nearing the end of an era.  The American Era.





(Sources for National debt/gdp:
 Debt Clock: http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
World Bank GDP: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD)

Driving in the city

Well, I haven't written on this blog in quite some time.  In fact, I haven't done much writing lately.  I've been spending my last free summer relaxing and taking some time for the things that, during every other time in my life, I would think "I wish I were doing".  So, naturally I've watched more TV shows, played more video games, and read more fun books than I probably should have, but oh well.

I've been planning on updating this blog for awhile, I even thought of it as my "summer job" of sorts... that didn't pan out as I thought it had but, better late than never.  I worked a little bit on an outline because I wanted my first-post-back to be thoroughly thought-out and detailed.  There's so many interesting things going on this summer with Supreme Court rulings in June, the George Zimmerman verdict, the NSA PRISM leaks and many others.  Hopefully I'll get to write a bit about each of those, but, as you may have guessed from the title, none of those will be mentioned again in this post.  Hopefully, you'll understand why.

I had an interesting experience this weekend; as I was driving to my friend's graduation (from college, the same one as me in fact) party, I came upon an intersection where there was a person holding a sign written on a poster board.  I'm no stranger to city driving, so I usually callously ignore people walking through traffic with panhandling signs.  I was wearing sunglasses, however, so I took a quick look at his sign out of pure curiosity.

All I saw was: "Please make a small donation / high school basketball uniforms".  Then, he moved on.  Somewhere inside me something stirred.  I noticed that the man holding the sign wasn't a man at all, but rather a teenager.  He wasn't wearing rags for clothes, but instead a normal inner-city teenagers large shirt and basketball shorts.  For the first time in my life, I rolled down my window and gave him all the 1-dollar bills I had in my wallet.  It was only $4.00.  I noticed, as I put my money in his plastic jar that I was the only person who had even put cash in; everything else was change.

The light turned green, and I drove on.

This moved me more than I expected.  Of all things to ask for, basketball uniforms for high school seemed to resonate with me for some reason.  A uniform is more than just sweat clothes, a uniform instills pride in the wearer, and generates respect in the eyes of a spectator.  It provides identity to the players, it gives them a sense of unity and motivates them.  And of all things for a, presumably state-funded school, to cut costs on, uniforms should not be one.  Now, public education financing is a messy, often hairy, business.  However, it is likely one of the most important state expenditures as it is quite literally an investment in the future with immeasurable possibilities of returns.  I don't claim to be an expert on state-funded education but part of me wants to make this a very indignant post about the failures of our public school system.  Although, I do know that after school activities have many measurable positive effects on society, especially reducing gang involvement and after-school boredom.

I figured that instead of churning out some boring blog post about what I had planned to write about (those posts will probably come, don't worry) it might be more interesting for me to write about something that I've been thinking about a lot lately.  I feel passionately that society has a responsibility to those who want uniforms.  I'm not saying that society bears the sole responsibility for them, but to ignore their plight is to be cold and distant from ones community.  There are many things worth writing about, but I'm glad I chose to go with a spur-of-the-moment post.

I feel that I'm beginning to ramble, so I'll stop there for now.  If you really want me to post more of the boring-type stuff, keep checking back in the coming weeks!

See you soon,
Tim

America: The Two-Party Failure

I grew up in America, specifically in Southeastern PA, an hour outside of Philadelphia.  For this, I consider myself lucky to have been born in a country where the ideas of freedom and liberty have been valued above all else for so long.  I knew this growing up, too.  But then, as every autobiography goes, college ruined everything.  I grew up more in college, at Widener University, and began to realize a few things.

1. Politics is just a game to most of those involved.
2. The Declaration of Independence is one of the most important written documents of history.

Let's take these two realizations and really think about them.  As my father always told me, your mind is your final sanctuary.  Nobody can change who you are if you don't let them.  The first, politics is just a game.  This is, as you can probably tell, the most upsetting realization I had, and thereby the most difficult to reconcile.  I think it first started when Arlen Specter (a former US Senator for PA) switched political parties to win the election.  Everybody knows the goal of politician's is to get reelected (my Public Policy teacher just gave me the thumbs up, wherever he is), but this is inherently the biggest problem we could ever have with effective governing.

In order to see this problem you must ask yourself, "Why do we elect people"? Well, the answer is somewhat ambiguous, but in America, we tend to elect people because they look good, they can speak well, or they look like a "good person".  But there is something wrong with this.  Think about the job this person will be doing.  The decisions they have to make will inevitably be difficult, and likely unpopular.  If we elected people on their "political merits", things might be different.  I put that in quotation marks mainly because nobody really knows what political merits are (including me), nor do any politician's actually advertise their political merits (it's like obscenity, I know it when I see it, right?).

So we have all of these "good" people in office, and they play this game where they try to provide constituent services, like helping old Aunt Tessie find a low-income house, and try to vote on issues they way they think the people they represent would want them to vote.  Great.

Don't we see the issue with this though?  Firstly, we're not electing people because we think they'll be an excellent policy maker.  Secondly, those elected officials can't successfully stay in office unless they cultivate that image.  We've forced ourselves (and our politicians) into a system where if they make the "right" choice, but the "unpopular" choice, they won't get reelected, therefore they won't do it.  Take an issue like healthcare.  America spends more money on healthcare each year than anything else, including defense, and the system was only getting less and less sustainable.  Something needed to be changed.  Obviously, President Obama made changes.  Whether I agree with them or not is irrelevant (I'd rather stay away from specific issues).  These changes he made, however, are one of the hinging factors of his campaign for reelection.  Can we honestly think he was able to keep an unbiased perspective during the policy-making process (I know most of it happens it Congress), if he knew the, and knows now, that his reelection will essentially depend on the success or failure of one single bill?  No.  No, we cannot expect that from any human being, who will naturally look out for him or herself.

A lot of this stems from the two-party system we have, in my opinion.  Hence, the title of this post.  First, this is not any one persons fault.  In Political Science, we have a term "Duverger's Law", that essentially states that in any electoral system based on majority rule (as in, 51% = you win all the votes), a two-party system will eventually emerge.  Why? It's simple logic.  If you want the most votes, you want the most people, and if you're a political party you're essentially going to want to absorb and recruit as many other parties as possible.  This process will create two very large groups which are both very heterogeneous.  These two groups will, as expected, diametrically oppose each other on all fronts.  But, again, let's stop and think about this.  Is this the way to go?

If I asked to you to take a group of people and group them into two categories, you could probably do that. Male/female, short/tall, etc.  However, if I asked you to then come up with a "platform" that described them all and represented each person's individual opinions, beliefs, and experiences fairly, you'd probably scoff at me.  But isn't this what we're doing with our political system?  By giving such favoritism to Democrats and Republicans, we group ourselves into two overarching paradigms of thought which almost nobody would agree with completely.  This leaves the voter not to vote for whom he or she thinks will make the right decisions in office, but for whom she thinks will make less wrong decisions.  The lesser of two evils cliche.

Do I have a solution to this?  No.  Not really.  It's a philosophical question unfortunately, and as those questions go, the answer may elude us for quite some time.  I don't think the answer is a representative system (as in, each member gets the votes they won, like Brazil's parliamentary system), because then the parties simply form coalitions to get as much power as possible and it results in effectively, the same thing.  Or very similar.  I want nothing more than to see the end of the two-party system in America.  I think it's damaged the legitimacy of our government, and impeded our nations growth.  It worked for a time, but it's run its course.

2.  Let's talk about history a little bit here.  One thing I've always been fascinated by is the ability of a few good men (people) to leave their mark on history.  When you take a history class, you generally start off by learning influential people and their ideas, not influential ideas and their people... if that makes sense.  These people are often categorized into the different areas of thought they align themselves with.  The authors of the Declaration of Independence, mainly Thomas Jefferson, fall into what is known as the "Enlightenment" Age.  Now, I put this in quotes, because it was only Enlightenment for the white property owner, but it was a baby step.  History loves baby steps.

So why am I even talking about the DoI?  Well, even though it is not a formal policy or ratified charter of the U.S., it holds a lot of our core beliefs, and politicians and speakers often refer to it as if it were an official law.  The DoI is essentially the culmination of enlightenment thought, it eloquently speaks to the rights of man, and the roles of government.  It also lists a huge chain of grievances which sounds a lot like the authors complaining about King George.  These complaints, however, were necessary because they needed to justify the American Revolution, and so they did.

The DoI also makes an interesting comment, "Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."  This, to me, is an amazing observation.  Thomas Jefferson looks at the world he lives in and sees the exorbitant amount of suffering among people around the world.  He also sees the seeming lack of action to change that suffering.  Because, as he says, man is much more likely to suffer something he is accustomed to than to revolt and change the system.  This is humanity's greatest flaw.

This flaw is what let atrocities like slavery, segregation, the holocaust, and the "ethnic cleansing" that takes place or has taken place, like in Russia under Stalin, happen.  Why is it that we are so much more inclined to simply sit by and watch pain, and even experience pain, than we are to stand up and fight for "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"?  Or more accurately, to stand up and change a government that no longer protects its people and provides for them the opportunities that make those fundamental unalienable rights achievable.  I cannot understand this.  Of course, there have been times in history where man has stood up.

Look at the civil rights movement here in America.  But this brings the question, does it have to get that bad before we'll stand up?  Why does it take such abuse to unite us against a common cause for good?  Why is it not the better human nature to simply stand up and say "enough is enough"?  I think this is where I will leave this off for now.  This will likely be a recurring theme in my thoughts throughout this semester.  I want to find out why man is so much more inclined to sit by and watch evil than he is to stand up and fight it.  Maybe together we can find this answer, I think the human race would be better off if we could figure out why we're so subservient at times.

P.S.  I've allowed comments for a reason, use them if you want!  And thanks for reading.  Really.

What is this, and who am I?

Blogs are something I've read a lot about, and spent a lot of time reading myself.  I've always enjoyed the way they have a clear, concise format and generally get right to the point.  After about four or five years of spectating in the blogosphere, I've decided to try my hand at one.

I guess the first thing I should really say is why I want to start blogging.  I'll be blunt, and maybe a little cliche.  I've been studying the world around me (I'll get to that) lately and have really become somewhat disillusioned by the...world.  I know what this sounds like, I'm young, and I've heard "you're too young to be cynical" a lot.  But I'm not cynical.  I think of myself as realistic and pragmatic.
So, what would a realistic and pragmatic senior college student do when he sees a world that is changing constantly, and often negatively?  He blogs about it.  This, my friends, is why I'm trying my hand at the blogosphere.

You're probably saying, "Okay you want to change the world, cool, but who are you?"  Well,  I'm nobody special, that's for sure.  However, I do describe myself as a firm believer in the ability of the human being.  I think we can do just about anything, our only limitation is Physics.  Outside of that, one man (or woman) with the willpower can do just about anything.  Look at history, Gandhi, Caesar, the Rockefeller's, and many many more have left their stamp on time through actions that amaze the rest of us.  I'm not expecting to elevate myself to the status of these individuals, instead, I'd like to challenge a few people I've never met to stop and maybe think a little bit differently than they usually do.  Debate grows the mind, it's how Plato taught, and obviously Aristotle got something from it.

Finally, I'd like to explain the name of my blog, "Break the Chain".  For my Values Seminar (yeah, I know), one of the required readings is a compilation of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s writings.  In one of these writings he makes the comment, "Along the way of life, someone just has to have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate".  I guess you could say this particular line inspired me to do something.  I always found myself sitting and brooding over the goings-on in the world that make me upset, but I never really do anything.  Well, here I am trying to change that.  I'll be working on a post soon that should be interesting (at least, I hope you find it interesting or else we're both wasting our time), the title might be something like "America: The Two-Party Failure", or something.