Stooping To Their Level April 3, 2009
Posted by naughtwirthreeding in Entertainment and Media, Family Life, Humor, Life, News & Events, Politics.comments closed
“Don’t do that, you’re just stooping to their level.” — my Mom
Once again, I find myself in the unfortunate position of quoting my mother to explore an idea of great practical and moral consequence. And though Mom’s words do carry some weight, I am actually going to argue that stooping is precisely what should be done to more quickly rid ourselves of some of the world’s problems.
Exhibit A: My best friend Alec’s older brother punches me in the mouth. I should:
- Act surprised
- Reply, “It’s okay, I realize you’ve had a troubled upbringing, and I forgive you this reprehensible act of unprovoked aggression
- Take off after him in a tear-soaked rage, sending him on a mad dash for his life back to the safety of his mother’s embrace — never to lay a finger on me again
Despite the effectiveness of option 3, which was my chosen course of action in this instance, many if not most of us are counseling our children to lean towards option 2. What do we gain by doing that? Why should a remorseless bully be treated with compassion, understanding and negotiation, when the presence of a credible threat — I never did get to give him the knuckle sandwich he so richly deserved, more’s the pity — was enough to make him think twice about violence as a solution to his disputes?
The reality of the matter is that a bully will only respond to a bigger bully. The fact that he forgoes non-violent actions and immediately resorts to using threats, intimidation and fisticuffs as his primary means of conflict resolution tells me that he is not worthy of such consideration. Using his own weapons against him is an expedient means of deterring his behavior.
So, back to Mom’s statement. It is my feeling that the immediate, and arguably excessive use of retaliatory force is a necessary component of bringing a bully to heel. Furthermore, the sooner such a strategy is implemented, the fewer people will be negatively affected by the bully’s actions. Ergo, I believe that “stooping” is an inappropriate and inaccurate term.
Stooping would be finding a kid two years younger than me, and punching *him* in the mouth. That’s an equivalent (and because it was precipitated by my own previous abuse at the hands of another, even more heinous) offense, and more deserving of the descriptor “stooping.” But chasing the bully himself scampering away in fear of getting his lights knocked out, that isn’t stooping. We need a new term for that.
To that end, I propose that “self-sacrificing escalation” would be more appropriate. In recovering from my stunned and injured state to mount a strong counter-offensive, I am, to at least some degree, compromising the compassionate doctrine of enlightened non-violence which I hold so dear.
Those of you who know me well, shut up or I’ll kick your asses too…
I am also risking further harm by continuing and even escalating the conflict. Beyond that, I have no guarantees of success. If he had run the opposite direction to where Robbie Spicer was skateboarding in his driveway and employed his assistance in pummeling me to a crimson stain on the pavement, I would be much worse off than merely taking my original beating and calling it a day. But that was a calculated risk, and one I was willing to take. Besides, I could have taken the two of them, easy.
Exhibit B: Flyers center Eric Lindros is being mercilessly pestered by Red Wings defenseman Vladimir Konstantinov. Lindros should:
- stay away from him
- focus his positioning to ensure he is more frequently seen by the referees, in the hopes of drawing a penalty on Konstantinov
- deliver a check so crushing that Konstantinov has difficulty regaining his balance for several minutes afterward, and does not venture near Lindros again
Exhibit C: A millionaire businessman enters the Illinois Senate race and threatens to essentially “buy” the election by outspending the Democrats from his private fortune. The Democrats should:
- run a clean campaign and hope for the best
- try to mobilize grass-roots groups and increase fund-raising efforts
- convince a judge to un-seal the transcripts from his divorce trial, contained in which is testimony from his ex-wife indicating the supposedly family-values candidate has an affinity for sex clubs, forcing him to quit the race
Which is where we come to the heart of the matter. The Democrats have embraced a philosophy of enlightened non-violence for as long as I can remember. Every despicable tactic that the GOP has pulled out of its bag of tricks, we see little or nothing in the way of response. Fortunately, right now things are going their way. The GOP is in such disarray that I would be surprised if any of them could find shoes in a shoe box. But this will not last.
The Republican Party is a cadre of angry, bitter, morally-bankrupt well-financed, ignorant scum-sucking bottom-feeders. On top of that, right now they are wounded and demoralized, and as a result they are desperate and willing to do literally anything to restore themselves to power. No dirty trick will be too outrageous, no lie too abhorrent, no tactic too shameless. When they finally get themselves organized, make no mistake: the next fight is going to be brutal.
It is my fervent hope that before that day comes, the Democrats finally see the value in a strategy of self-sacrificing escalation. If this bully is allowed to feel his oats again, everything they have worked so hard for could come crumbling down. Taking that tool away from them will force the GOP into a campaign of ideas. They will have to convince the American public that their policies will be best for the country, and that’s a battle they will never win. That is the most effective way to send that bully scampering away in fear.
List of Priorities April 3, 2009
Posted by naughtwirthreeding in Life, News & Events, Politics.comments closed
There has been some enlightening activity in the Oklahoma State Legislature following a positively tragic incident involving a pregnant woman who was allegedly being beaten by her boyfriend. The woman mortally wounded him in an effort to stop the abuse, but still lost the quadruplets that she was carrying. Adding insult to injury, she was convicted of manslaughter in his death.
An advocacy group then worked with representatives in the State House to introduce legislation that would treat deadly force to protect the life of an unborn baby in the same way as “self-defense”, essentially allowing murder in those circumstances. I’m actually surprised it wasn’t that way already, and since it isn’t, it’s long overdue.
But that’s not what’s enlightening: the advocacy group was a Right-To-Life organization. A Pro-Life group is aggressively pursuing legislation that allows killing people.
And here is where I have my biggest objection to the anti-abortion movement. Well, not the biggest objection. Trying to turn my daughter into your baby-slave (never mind that an accidental pregnancy would, in fact, kill her just as surely as firing a bullet into her skull) because of your twisted interpretation of the Bible. That’s my biggest objection. But we won’t go there.
My second biggest objection is that you’re a bunch of hypocrites, and you’re hiding behind slick PR. Have the cajones to say what you really are: you’re anti-abortion — you don’t give two hoots about life. If you did, you’d be protesting every legal execution (which you don’t) and supporting gun control legislation (which you don’t) and supporting stem cell research (which you don’t). What you care about is imposing your religious beliefs on other people. You want to control people’s lives, invade their privacy, and enslave young girls. 13-year-olds who get pregnant after being raped by their uncle: you would have that child — CHILD! — carry her baby to term.
Honestly… how do you think your God is going to feel about that when he sees you show up at the gates of heaven?
No, you’re not pro-life at all. You don’t care about criminals, or murder victims, or people with crippling disabilities and degenerative diseases, or unexpectedly pregnant women. When it comes to living, breathing humans who walk and talk and think for themselves, you only care about forcing them to behave the way you think they should. Saving their life isn’t on your list of priorities.
So have enough courage to drop the ridiculous facade, and say what you believe: you don’t mind murder, what you really care about is imposing your will on others. You’re perfectly fine with letting society kill anybody they want… just no unborn babies, because you believe that’s wrong.
I guarantee none of you cowards has the stones to stand up and be counted. And that’s fine by me, it makes it so much easier to expose you for what you are.
The New Paradigm April 2, 2009
Posted by naughtwirthreeding in Future, Humor, Life, News & Events, The Economy.comments closed
In case you’ve been in a cave for, say, the last two years, you’ll notice that there has been a serious sea change in America lately. We are collectively realizing that turning the reins over to corporate interests and the government they bought was a huge mistake, and has resulted in the turnoil that we are currently experiencing. America is looking for a new direction, and has a new government to help that change come into focus.
So far that change has taken the shape of some serious money being spent, and some even more serious spending being proposed, to tackle the problems of corporate rescue, job creation, economic recovery and banking stability. Beyond that, we are looking at changes to corporate (especially financial sector) regulation, health care reform, environmental and energy policy advancement, and foreign policy repairs including the cessation of hostilities on two fronts overseas.
But today I want to take a look at the next step, the frontier that will soon be visible as America empowers a new group of prime movers to change the landscape. As corporate magnates were labeled “fat cats” following their back-alley financial indiscretions, the trust the public had in them was thrust into reverse, and their influence disappeared nearly overnight. The U.S. has a new wave of thinkers, teachers, philanthropists and social entrepreneurs that will craft the agenda for the next generation, and depending on how successful they are, perhaps the next century. Today I will present the crux of that agenda to you, as a preview of what is about to take center stage.
For a long time, the kooks on the left have been hosting rallies and holding marches and chaining themselves to spotted owls under the banner of the following underlying concepts: corporations are evil, governments are just corporate shills, women and poor people are getting the shaft, health care sucks, the environment is decaying, and if you don’t stop eating cows you are all going to face God’s wrath… except we don’t believe there is a God, so never mind — you’re just really, really mean!
Those ideas are still alive and well in the lunatic fringe, but they have morphed into concepts that are now championed by some people with genuine practical ideas about fixing some of these problems. Young ideologues and motivated B-school grads have gravitated to a mirco-preneurial model aimed at coupling small up-front investment with highly-repeatable results to achieve long-term gains. Which problems are being solved and in what way is too lengthy to go into here, and the degree to which they are being implemented ranges from, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” all the way out to functional and successful projects in wide-scale field trials, and even successful business models.
Instead, I have identified a series of concepts that comprise the new paradigm. All of these projects encompass at least one, and in many cases all, of the concepts below. It represents a significant and world-changing transformation from the current capital- and corporate-centric framework our socio-economic structure is built upon.
Humanitarian Focus: advancing human interests in the areas of education, health care, hunger, housing, equality, human rights, employment, and circumventing corporate “non-solution” solutions
Gap Identification: finding those areas where neither the market nor governments have gone or will go, and step in to fill a humanitarian need
Empowerment: providing the tools, expertise, and seed funding to facilitate community-based self-sufficiency, and sometimes small-scale profit
Sustainable Local-Source: using the natural resources available in a given region in unique ways, either as the means of actually solving a problem, or as a crop to provide capital to fund a solution — sometimes converting corporate waste into profit for the corporation and funding for the project
Open-Source: the free and open exchange and leveraging of ideas for the purpose of alleviating dependence on expensive and proprietary corporate options
Collaboration: partnerships between not-for-profits, sometimes involving NGO’s, government agencies and even for-profit companies, with the expressed goal of achieving mutual self-interest and expanding the pie — instead of increasing the size of the piece any individual receives
Shortened Free-Market Leash: identifying and impeding corporate practices that ignore overall costs, either by legislative action, legal hindrance, direct supply- or demand-side intervention, and even collaboration or formal partnership
Hair Of The Dog: using corporate tricks to outwit corporations, and employing market-based solutions in conjunction with corporate collaborators to leverage social impact while increasing business profits
Non-Financial Rewards System: more than just barter, but also identification of non-monetary rewards that motivate both providers and recipients, and supplanting the materialist incentives — often with better success than is achieved with money
The hyper-capitalist mercenaries that are slaves to the old way of doing things will dismiss this as folly, saying the only true motivator is greed and self-interest, and predicting the new paradigm’s imminent demise. But they’re fooling themselves, and it’s easy to see why. Each of the new-paradigm projects I have caught a glimpse of has been unique and ultimately driven by an entrepreneurial spirit, but has also provided a literal template for copycat projects in other geographical regions, as well as a conceptual template for similar projects using different tools in another vertical market or social space. In other words, new-paradigm projects are well-managed, reciprocally adaptive, present low barriers to entry, and are easily replicated with non-expert protagonists in most corners of the globe. As a result they are spreading both vertically and laterally at a pace that makes traditional start-ups look like lemonade stands.
The reality of the matter is, in order to survive a for-profit start-up needs one of two things: a huge pool of cash, or a steady income stream. If those are never achieved, the project folds no matter how good the idea may be. Most of the new-paradigm projects I have looked at get off the ground and effect change with little more than an iPhone’s worth of funding. Additionally, since the retail impact is human instead of monetary, the non-financial rewards system employed by most of these projects is usually brimming over — enough to keep key players engaged and motivated even when the pool of resources is bone dry. This means that good ideas survive, and many of them thrive, even in the most desperate and bleak of circumstances. Face it: this is coming, and once it reaches a tipping point it is going to take over.
What does this mean? Many things. Will we all still have jobs? Sure. Will the economy change? Not overnight, but yes, and in two or three generations we will hardly recognize it. Will corporate America adapt to this change? They always have in the past, and there’s no reason to think they won’t this time either. We’ll just see a lot more good things come to pass, and we’ll have the opportunity to help out with, and even profit from, a transformation that will humble us all and create a world we can be proud of.
The good news is, regardless of our political disposition, there is some aspect of these new-paradigm projects that will affect everyone in a positive way. There is something for each and every one of us to get excited about just around the corner. Keep your eyes open, think about what you would like to do to fix what’s broken, and it just might be you whose dreams change the world.
