Zephyr Dear

I wrote last time that I would come up with an example of a way in which applying the principles of market competition to the fields of art and the humanities is, in Peter Sloterdijk’s terms, conducive to barbarism. So here is my example.

Consider the Ph.D. dissertation. My academic readers will probably be able to relate to this example, and for them some of what I have to write is a bit obvious. But for those who have never undertaken a Ph.D., I will spell out just what this means. You have to write a book-length study of some problem or idea that no-one has ever figured out before, or even thought to suggest. You might write about something others have considered before (if you’re a musicologist, maybe you decided to write about Wagner’s Ring or something), but you will consider it in some way, or consider some aspect of it, that has just never occurred to anyone before. All on its own, this is amazingly hard.

But that’s only the beginning. Whatever your thing is, your interpretation or hypothesis or whatever, if it’s going to be any use to anyone it will have to be neither obvious nor pointless. Most undergraduate writing leans heavily on obviousness (“Wagner’s Ring uses leitmotifs for symbolism”); most people learn in graduate school that you can avoid obviousness if you make a careful study of some point too minute and inconsequential to have attracted anyone else’s interest. But to say something that’s new and worth saying, that’s the trick. And while you have spent years taking courses to prepare you for this new trial, you discover that in fact nothing prepares you. Once you pass your qualifying exams, it’s just you and a library full of stuff that may or may not be relevant to your idea, whatever it is. And because every idea is unique, the proper manner of its unfolding, the research and organization and shape peculiar to it, is likewise unique. You cannot know in advance what it is, and you cannot learn it from anyone; you can only discover it yourself. No-one can tell you what it is, because by definition no-one has been down this road before. So while you can look around for models of how you might want to write this thing, you’re pretty much on your own.

It’s often said that writing a dissertation is a lonely business, and it is, because you’re not in classes anymore and you probably don’t have anything approaching full-time employment either. So you spend a lot of time on your own. But it’s lonely in another way, too: at a certain point while you’re working on your dissertation, you will want to have someone, anyone, tell you what the hell is going on and what you’re supposed to do next. And if your advisor is being honest, s/he will say “I don’t know. Only you can figure that out. I can’t do it for you.” And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a lonely feeling.

But let’s say you’ve conquered all the necessary demons, at least for now, and produced the first draft of a dissertation, or at least the first draft of a sizable chunk — the first stab at continuous development through some major portion of your larger argument.  It’s the hardest thing you’ve ever done. It’s cost you months, nay, years of work in which you’ve been unable to work enough hours to support yourself fully and have either been dependent on someone else’s largess or else have been “living like a graduate student,” with the crummy food, roommate drama, and second-hand futon-couch lifestyle implied by that dread phrase. You have no guarantee that your labors will land you a job, regardless of how well you perform. You’re in debt, maybe, or at least have paid heavily in the opportunity cost that goes with choosing to study tiny brown fish or the early organ works of Max Reger or whatever instead of getting a normal-type job, working off a mortgage, starting a family, etc. So when you come into your advisor’s office with a first draft, it’s a fraught situation. There’s a lot riding on it.

And yet that first draft is almost certainly bad. You know those proverbial expressions like “as mad as a hatter” or “good as gold”? I would commend “as bad as the first draft of a doctoral dissertation” to the canon of proverbial utterances. Everyone who has gone through this process, even the most senior of scholars, will recognize (with a groan) what I’m talking about. We’ve all gone through it. You have to suck before you can get better. 

Obviously, you don’t want to hear that your draft sucks, but if your advisor is keeping it real, s/he will tell you. Your advisor knows what kinds of publications are coming out of doctoral research in the field and can measure the distance between the best of them and what you just wrote. And that can be a pretty wide distance. You’re at 90%, and the young scholars who are publishing chapters of their dissertations as peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, the best of them, are at maybe 92%. And you need to reach that 92%. That’s your job now. All that stress and sacrifice, and you are still only at 90%. (And keep in mind, 92 is an order of magnitude greater than 90.) You have to work even harder now. It’ll take more time, to be sure, but it will also demand that you make the kind of plateau jump that David Foster Wallace describes in Infinite Jest, and no-one is quite sure what that will take, least of all you. And I think for a lot of doctoral students this is the real dark night of the soul. The advisor is standing there, pointing to the plateau you have painfully scrabbled your way onto (leaving bloody claw-marks all the way up) and saying, this isn’t good enough. You need to be over there – pointing to an impossibly distant and lofty ridge with no visible paths leading to it — and no, I can’t tell you how to get there.*

But let’s not forget, the student with even the worst first draft of a doctoral dissertation has really accomplished something. For my hypothetical graduate student, this draft reflects a level of accomplishment that she could not even have imagined a few years ago, when she was writing that lame Wagner leitmotif paper to get into graduate school. It’s 90%! That’s amazing! How many people have even gotten a glimpse of 90% in anything? And it’s not as if you need to attain perfection in a doctoral dissertation. Everyone in the biz has probably met someone who allowed perfectionism to ruin their chances of even finishing the degree. So you need to aim for a reasonable balance: it has to be good enough for you to hold your head up in the field, ideally good enough to impress someone enough to get a job, but done quickly enough that it doesn’t ruin your life. There really is a point where you have to be able to say, “it’ll do.”

But the decision-making process of how to attain that balance is an individual thing. You’re on your own there, too. And (here’s my point) if you’re letting instrumental rationality control your decision — if you’re going by what makes bottom-line economic sense — there’s no reason whatsoever to push onto that next plateau, unless your professors just won’t let you get your degree otherwise. But if 90% is good enough, you’ll take it and go. If you are making a decision on the model of market efficiency, the smart thing to do is to fix the typos in the first draft and call it a day. It makes no rational economic sense to stay in school another year or more getting from 90 to 92; if you can get away with 90% now — if your professors will pass your dissertation and give you your degree, even if they have to hold their noses to do it — then why would you stick around and try to improve? It makes no sense. If people will grudgingly accept an inferior product that has been cheaply made, it makes more sense to offer them one than to expend the absurd amounts of effort necessary to give them something really excellent.

But for the most part, that’s not what graduate students do. The students I’ve worked with maybe kind of hate that last climb up to that last plateau (sort of like Frodo’s last weary climb to Mt. Doom, though usually without a hostile imp jumping you at the last moment and eating your hand) but they do it, because that’s what we do. These are our values. It’s not “perfectionism”: it’s the spirit of practice, the spirit of “you must change your life,” the movement towards the vertical. And that spirit doesn’t have much to do with whatever entity embodies the capitalist marketplace.

Don’t get me wrong: capitalism has its place. It has its uses. It’s not without its charms. But you wouldn’t want it to marry your daughter. It isn’t the answer to everything, and it’s a terrible model for academic endeavor.

It’s not as if I’m the first person to notice any of this. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote the same things about the kinds of art cultivated in a democratic system almost 200 years ago. I’ll write more about this next time.

*Trust me, your advisors are dealing with plateau issues of their own. What are the articles and books of even the brightest of young things when seen against the totality of publications in the field? Or against the totality of humanistic scholarship in the present day? Or (a yet more lofty horizon) the humanities of the past 500 years? Ultimately, we all fade into insignificance.

Since the Newtown shooting, Slate has tried to record every gun death in America:

Why it failed:

Suicides, it turns out, are this project’s enormous blind spot. Most every homicide makes the local paper, even if in large cities these stories are sometimes relegated to a mere news brief. Accidental shootings are usually reported upon, as are shootings by law enforcement and incidents in which civilians kill in self-defense. But suicides are mostly invisible. And the fact is that suicides make up 60 percent or more of all deaths by gun in America. In our interactive, misleadingly, only about 10 percent of recorded deaths were deemed suicides by our crowdsourced categorizers.

Justin Briggs and Alex Tabarrok examine the connection between gun access and  suicide:

Suicide is a leading cause of death among adolescents and young adults, and limiting access to guns during those formative, sometimes unsteady years can have a real effect on suicides. In Israel most 18- to 21-year-olds are drafted into the Israeli Defense Forces and provided with military training—and weapons. Suicide among young IDF members is a serious problem. In an attempt to reduce suicides, the IDF tried a new policy in 2005, prohibiting most soldiers from bringing their weapons home over the weekends. Dr. Gad Lubin, the chief mental health officer for the IDF, and his co-authors estimate that this simple change reduced the total suicide rate among young IDF members by a stunning 40 percent. It’s worth noting that even though you might think that soldiers home for the weekend could easily delay suicide by a day or two, the authors did not find an increase in suicide rates during the weekdays. These results are consistent with interviews with near-fatal suicide survivors, who often say their decision was spontaneous and who typically go on to live long lives.

And the psychic, emotional and human pain of suicide is immense. Perhaps because it fits so easily into a libertarian rubric that no one is hurting anyone but themselves it evades scrutiny. But its toll remains a huge one – and one dramatically affected by the easy accessibility of guns.

Here's a photo of NROL-39 being readied for launch. Check out the full gallery: http://t.co/dHrcSxXhG0 pic.twitter.com/sEHEqPYWRB

— Office of the DNI (@ODNIgov) December 5, 2013

This terrifying, betentacled vision of a globe-circling monster octopus is the actual, no fooling new logo for the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that operates America's spy satellites. A spokewoman explains: "NROL-39 is represented by the octopus, a versatile, adaptable, and highly intelligent creature. Emblematically, enemies of the United States can be reached no matter where they choose to hide."

US surveillance satellite's logo: Octopus encircling the world

One of Haddon Sundblom’s Coca Cola ads.

CREDIT: Coca-Cola Art

Much of Megyn Kelly’s mainstream appeal to viewers who wouldn’t normally praise an employee of Fox News is the idea that she’s not afraid to stand up to stupid memes or willful denials of the facts, whether she’s smacking down Dr. Keith Ablow’s fearmongering about transgender people or bowing to the evidence and calling Ohio for Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election. But last night, she provided a reminder of why she’s a good fit for the network that employs her.

In response to a piece by Aisha Harris in Slate that was half a joking suggestion that Santa Claus be replaced by a cheerful penguin, and half a heartfelt reflection on the difficulties of not seeing any part of yourself in an omnipresent cultural symbol, Kelly decided to dig in on an odd priority: declaring that Santa Claus has always been an old white guy, and an old white guy he must remain. “Just because it makes you feel uncomfortable doesn’t mean it has to change,” she declared confidently. “I mean, Jesus was a white man, too. He was a historical figure. That’s verifiable fact, as is Santa. I just want the kids watching to know that. But my point is, how do you just revise it in the middle of the legacy of the story, and change Santa from white to black.”

Where to begin? We could start with the fact that there isn’t actually a good historical case for either Jesus or Santa Claus’ whiteness, at least as Kelly seems to conceive of it. Jesus’ family was from Galilee, which is the Northern part of the modern state of Israel. That’s a set of origins that doesn’t exactly suggest that Jesus was born with the milky-white skin tone he’s been given by so many artists since his life and death. But if Kelly wants to claim him as white, that says something about the extent to which Jews, who have historically been considered ethnically distinct from people of European origins (we’ll save the distinctions between Ashkenazim and Sephardim for History Of Ethnicity 200), have been assimilated into the constructed collective identity known as whiteness.

Similarly, Saint Nicholas, the Christian saint who is the earliest figure in the Santa Claus myth, was born in the city of Patara, now known as Arsinoe, in Turkey. He’s sometimes referred to as a Greek, because Turkey was under Greek rule at the time of his birth, but the shifting boundaries of empires don’t change the fact that Saint Nicholas’ skin tone might well have such that it would have gotten him stopped and frisked while trying to enter homes in certain neighborhoods in New York City late at night.

That said, Santa Claus is frequently depicted as a white guy today precisely because of what Kelly said we absolutely must not do: “revise it in the middle of the legacy of the story.” As part of the long process of formalizing a celebration of the birth of Christ–which includes shifting the purported date of Jesus’ arrival in the world to midwinter to coopt pagan observances and then suppressing said observances–Saint Nicholas gets mashed up with other figures. These include Sinterklass, who may be a variation of the Norse god Odin, and who’s part of holiday observances in places as varied as the Netherlands and Greece. Father Christmas, the British character, has analogues in South America, most European countries, and the Caucuses. And this isn’t even including characters like Zwarte Piet, who’s part of Christmas folklore in Netherlands, Luxembourg and Belgium, who is, wait for it, of African origin. In the United States, many people and organizations have contributed to our modern conception of Santa Claus’ physical appearance, including the the political cartoonist and muckracker Thomas Nast, the White Rock Beverage company which used him to sell mineral water, and Haddon Sundblom, who drew Santa Claus for Coca-Cola’s famous 1930s advertising campaign.

The Santa Claus that Kelly wants so badly to preserve is so powerful precisely because he’s an amalgam of traditions, a concept flexible enough to incorporate and accommodate the emotional, spiritual, and frankly material needs of people of many cultures and organizations. There is no stable and unchanging tradition of Santa Claus available to be defended.

But I’m not even sure that’s the most telling part of Kelly’s decision to plant a flag squarely in Santa’s snowy beard. “Just because it makes you feel uncomfortable doesn’t mean it has to change,” she says of Harris’ post, after a number of her guests suggested that they’d been swayed by Harris’ explanation of wanting to see herself reflected in the holidays. That’s a kind of thinking that’s constantly invoked by people who don’t want to have to take responsibility for causing harm or even hurt feelings to others, because it might require them to make an effort or feel some discomfort themselves. People who make those arguments frequently do, as Kelly has here, invoke the idea that tradition must trump any sort of hurt feelings–this has been Dan Snyder’s go-to defense of continuing to call his football team an epithet.

But the truth is, being kind to other people and considerate of their bruised feelings doesn’t actually cost anyone very much. As Charles Krauthammer put it in his defense of changing the name of Washington’s football team, analogizing it to his decision to stop using the term “gyp” when asked to do so, “I stopped using it. It’s very easy to do. It has nothing to do with the sensitivities of a mass of people. It has to do with simple, elementary respect. You don’t use that word if you can avoid it.” If you cannot bestir yourself to do that small kindness and courtesy to your fellow people, that speaks volumes about your character.

And Kelly’s dismissal of other people’s comfort raises the question of whether she’s concealing her own. Beyond tradition, why could it possibly be this important to someone that Santa Claus be white? Is it as a career subsidy to Tim Allen, in the hopes that we’ll get another Santa Claus movie? It is fondness for advertising history and the work of Thomas Nast?

Or is it that Santa Claus is a figure who defies certain rules we teach our children? He’s a stranger who’s allowed to enter our houses without an explicit invitation, and to do so when we’re asleep and vulnerable. In setting out milk and cookies, we’re even giving him permission to stay a while. At a time when a lot of children are taught to be suspicious of strangers, especially men, and who aren’t supposed to let people who aren’t blood family, close family friends, or educators touch them, that rule is suspended for Santa Claus. Children are encouraged to sit on Santa’s lap and confide in him. That special exemption is why we find stories about mall Santas who are sexual offenders a particular betrayal of our trust. If you’re freaked out by the prospect of a non-white Santa Claus, it’s probably worth asking yourself if some of that objection comes from the fact that you might be less comfortable making these exceptions for a man of color.

That lack of charity isn’t exactly shocking. Many of the less savory parts of Kelly’s career involve stoking fears against black men, whether she’s spinning conspiracy theories about the New Black Panther Party’s influence on elections or giving airtime to a source who suggests avoiding groups of young black men as part of the scare-mongering coverage of the so-called “knockout game.”

It’s very nice, and very convenient, to have the world set up so you’re rarely asked to identify with or admire people who don’t look like you. But the very reason white folks cling to the privilege of having whiteness as a default is an argument for why we should extend our fellow citizens the same courtesy. It’s nice to see yourself reflected in media and tradition. It’s a relief. There’s absolutely no good reason, historical or otherwise, that white people should have a monopoly on that experience or that safe harbor. Christmas isn’t the only occasion on which that should be the case. But you have to be a real Grinch to suggest that it isn’t a perfectly fine time of the year to start.

The post How To Explain Megyn Kelly’s Fear Of A Black Santa appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Andrew Cohen contends that “no one who digs deeply into these grim cases ever seems to evolve from being a staunch opponent of capital punishment into being a fervent supporter of the practice.” He discusses three Supreme Court justices who changed from pro- to anti-death penalty:

The systemic problems with capital punishment that Lewis Powell mentioned in 1991, and that Justice Blackmun identified in 1994, had not been cured by the time Justice Stevens identified them in 2008 (and again in 2010, in The New York Review of Books, in a review in which he lamented the Court’s broadened application of capital punishment). Nor has the Supreme Court addressed, let alone resolved, these problems in the years since Justice Stevens retired. Just last month, the justices refused even to hear an Alabama case in which an elected judge overrode a jury’s sentencing verdict and imposed a death sentence.

Three Republican-nominated justices, three men of moderation, among the least ideological the Court has produced in the past 50 years, all came late in life to regret their early doctrinal support for capital punishment. Retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman on the Court, a nominee of President Ronald Reagan, also questioned the use of capital punishment near the end of her tenure on it. She had concerns about the execution of the innocence, she said, and she acknowledged the equal protection implications of the fact that rich capital defendants get better legal representation than poor ones.

Now let’s list the Supreme Court justices of our time, or of our parents’ time, who started out as advocates for the abolition of capital punishment but whose experience with capital cases on the High Court over decades caused them to support the death penalty. Alas, we can’t do it. Not a single justice has ever been so converted. Is that not telling? Exposure to capital cases doesn’t cause these smart and honorable men and women to gain confidence in the neutral and accurate application of the death penalty, because no such confidence is warranted—because no such application exists.

For all the launch problems with Obamacare, the political consequences of that debacle in the 2014 congressional races remain very uncertain because what Republicans are offering as an alternative -- repeal and replace -- is less popular than fixing the law and continuing to implement it.

For Democrats, the message strategy in 2014 on Obamacare is all about avoiding a referendum on the new law and instead setting up a choice for voters between the less than perfect reforms and the GOP alternative. It's not rocket science, but it's why the lack of real GOP policy alternatives on health care reform comes with a political price for Republicans.

This has been installment #462 in why Democrats are lucky to have Republicans as opponents.

Esquire's profile of Glenn Greenwald, the American-born, Brazilian-based journalist at the center of the Snowden leaks, is a terrific, insightful piece that uses Greenwald's own reflections on power, bravery, secrecy and justice speak for themselves: "I think the real Obama reveres institutional authority. He believes that it might need to be a little more efficient, but he has zero interest in undermining the powerful, permanent factions that have run Washington."

If you work for MSNBC or for CNN or whatever, you’re basically nothing more than an employee of a large corporation, and in order to thrive in large corporations, the attitude you need is somebody who gives power what it wants rather than looking to subvert it or to be antiauthoritarian. Antiauthoritarians don’t succeed in large corporations. They get expelled by them.

I think the real Obama reveres institutional authority. He believes that it might need to be a little more efficient, but he has zero interest in undermining the powerful, permanent factions that have run Washington...

...We’re social beings, we need interaction with other human beings, but we also crave privacy. It’s why we put locks on our bedroom and bathroom doors or why we use passwords on our e-mail accounts or use anonymity on the Internet. So I think we have an instinctive understanding about why privacy is so crucial to us, but it takes some work to really ingest in a visceral way why it is as important as anything else.

Even if we’re not doing anything wrong, there are certain things we want to do that we don’t think can withstand the scrutinizing eye of other people. And those are often the most important things that we do. The things we do when other people are watching are things that are conformist, obedient, normal, and unnotable.

Glenn Greenwald: What I've Learned [Tom Junod/Esquire]

(via MeFi)

(Image: Glenn Greenwald, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from gageskidmore's photostream)

When I checked my Twitter feed Sunday morning, this was waiting for me.

I don’t know anything about Editorial and I don’t know Dain Miller, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to look at his script, which is meant to return the URL of his blog’s most recent post. Last year I wrote a script that did essentially the same thing, so if his blog was running on WordPress or some other XML-RPC-based system, I could send him a link to my post. Using Python’s xmlrpclib module would be a big improvement over the scrape-and-search technique Dain was using.

I did a View Source on his blog home page and learned that it was run by Squarespace, a company whose name you might recognize if you’ve listened to any computery podcast produced in the past couple of years. I don’t believe Squarespace uses XML-RPC, but it does have an API, which I learned through the clever trick of Googling “Squarespace API.” After looking at the return value for the format=json-pretty request, I wrote this quick script,

python:
1:  #!/usr/bin/python
2:   
3:  import json, urllib2
4:   
5:  r = urllib2.urlopen('http://wrappedthoughts.com/?format=json-pretty').read()
6:  j = json.loads(r)
7:  print j['items'][0]['urlId']

put it in a Gist, and sent the link to Dain. It wasn’t everything he wanted, but I figured he could work out the rest. Which he did.

Honestly, though, I can’t say that I like what he came up with. It’s not that it has any errors, or that it’s inefficient or fragile. It’s just not to my taste, and at the risk of offending Dain, I’d like to talk about why.

Here’s the script:

python:
 1:  # Editorial Module
 2:  import workflow
 3:  
 4:  class Squarespace():
 5:  
 6:    def __init__(self, blogBaseUrl):
 7:      import json, urllib2
 8:  
 9:      self.blogBaseUrl  = blogBaseUrl
10:      self.response     = urllib2.urlopen(self.blogBaseUrl + '?format=json-pretty').read()
11:      self.jsonResponse = json.loads(self.response)
12:  
13:    def gatherLatestBlogPostUrl(self):
14:      path = self.jsonResponse['items'][0]['urlId']
15:      url  = self.blogBaseUrl + path
16:      return url
17:  
18:    def gatherLatestBlogTitle(self):
19:      title = self.jsonResponse['items'][0]['title']
20:      return title
21:  
22:  # Interface:
23:  if __name__ == "__main__":
24:    squarespace = Squarespace('http://wrappedthoughts.com/')
25:  
26:    workflow.set_output(squarespace.gatherLatestBlogPostUrl())
27:    workflow.set_output(squarespace.gatherLatestBlogTitle())

Obviously, it’s a lot longer than my script, but that’s not why I don’t like it. I don’t like it because it follows a trend I see in lots of scripts: it uses object orientation for no particularly good reason.

I’m sure that part of my distaste is generational. There was no object-oriented programming when I took my first programming courses, and it’s never been a technique that I’ve made much use of. Don’t get me wrong—I love using well-built object-oriented modules, but I seldom feel the need to define classes in my own scripts.

I get the distinct sense, though, that young programmers believe that all serious programming must be object-oriented, that anything else is just hackwork. Which is unfortunate, because this mindset leads to colossal wastes of time.

In this case, for example, the Python json module already does an excellent job of turning the output of the format=json-pretty call into a dictionary. And a dictionary is a perfectly good object whose elements are easily addressable. Is

squarespace.gatherLatestBlogPostUrl()

really that much more readable (to a programmer) than something like

baseURL + response['items'][0]['urlId']

Isn’t it clear that this is getting the URL of the first item of the response? As long as you know that blogs display the most recent item first, you know that this is what you want.

As important, the dictionary provides a way to get at every piece of information Squarespace returns. How many posts can we get at?

len(response['items'])

When was the most recent item updated?

time.localtime(float(response['items'][0]['updatedOn'])/1000)

What time zone does the blog use?

response['website']['timeZone']

These aren’t the prettiest looking inquiries, but they are easy to read and interpret.¹ If you don’t like all the square brackets and quotation marks, you could turn the dictionary into a nested object using one of the techniques described on this Stack Overflow page. That way you could, for example, use something like

baseURL + resp_obj.items[0].urlId

to return the full URL of the most recent blog entry.

The syntax, though, isn’t what’s important. What’s important is that the Squarespace API is already providing a well-structured object in its JSON response and Python has a built-in data type that fits the structure perfectly. The script will be simpler and more flexible if it just uses what it’s been given. Creating a new class to access only a small portion of the response—and to use that small portion only once—doesn’t make the script faster, more robust, or easier to read.

I’m not arguing for a return to the pre-object days. In longer programs, and in reusable modules, object-oriented programming can bring great simplicity and clarity to a project. But there’s a time and a place for everything, and a one-off script like Dain’s is neither the time nor the place.

I assume that Dain and all the other programmers who write scripts this same way have been taught to do so. They haven’t been served well by their teachers. They’d be more productive—and we’d be getting the benefit of their talents—if they’d been taught how to design programs that fit the problem to be solved.

Political spending by public companies will remain in the dark longer, now that the Securities and Exchange Commission has said it won’t be taking up the issue as a priority for 2014.

But the amount spent on political campaigns is just one in a long list of things about a company that are usually impossible to glean from the outside. Important information about America's biggest and most powerful companies that investors, journalist, and activists would really like to know remains under wraps, despite the thousands of pages of documents a publicly traded company files for public consumption in a given year.

Here are four of the things that transparency advocates would most like to see Corporate America open up about.

1) How much companies pay in U.S. federal income taxes

Given the amount of fighting and lobbying over the tax code, it’s a strange fact that no one can tell what any given company is actually paying in taxes. Publicly traded firms list a U.S. federal “current tax provision” number in their annual reports, but that’s an accountant’s estimate used to calculate earnings, not the actual sum of the company’s U.S. federal tax bill. And although firms also list the sum of federal, state and foreign income taxes paid, it’s not broken out among the different jurisdictions.

Frustrated by what I wasn’t finding in public filings earlier this year, I asked every company in the Dow 30 to disclose the amounts of their federal tax bills for the most recent year; they all declined.

Allan Sloan at Fortune magazine has suggested that, short of congressional action, the Financial Accounting Standards Board, a private group that establishes accounting principles, should require companies to disclose the information. So far, there have been no changes announced.

2) Where employees are located

Here, again, is a case where political rhetoric — in this case about job creation — outstrips what we actually know about companies and what they do. Companies do not have to disclose where their employees work, making it hard to track how their headcounts in the United States compare with their counts in other countries, especially as firms go increasingly global.

Companies will sometimes break down their employees by region or continent, but just getting a “North America” number doesn’t help an analyst or investor figure out how many of those employees work in the United States, Mexico or Canada. When they don’t disclose their worker counts, companies often cite competitive pressure. Of course there’s also plenty of political pressure, as no company wants to get called out for outsourcing.

Without the numbers, though, it’s hard to evaluate promises from firms that they’ll create jobs in this country if they’re granted a certain tax rule change, or if regulations are loosened. In February 2012, Rep. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) introduced a bill called the Outsourcing Accountability Act that would require companies to disclose how many of their jobs were overseas and how many were in the United States. The bill was defeated in the House by a 230-to-175 vote.

3) Where earnings come from

Until 1998, companies had to disclose the geographic breakdown of their earnings, sales and assets. Now, they only have to disclose sales and assets. Why does this matter? One of the reasons companies have been able to reduce their tax bills so much is they can shift their earnings from high-tax countries to low-tax ones. This is primarily done by tech and pharmaceutical companies because they rely so much on intellectual property, the kinds of assets that are easy to move from place to place on paper.

When you can’t tell where companies earn their money, it’s hard to track some of this aggressive tax planning. Not only that, but the lower disclosure standard has actually caused firms to alter their behavior, according to some recent research. Companies that don’t disclose where they make their profits are more likely to shift their income to lower their tax burden, says a May study by a group of professors from the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and the Michael F. Price College of Business at the University of Oklahoma. The study found that between 1998 and 2004, firms that did not disclose where their earnings were dispersed geographically had worldwide effective tax rates more than four percentage points lower than firms that chose to continue disclosing that information.

With lawmakers trying to figure out how to reform corporate taxes — and regularly getting stymied in the process — the study suggests there’s an easy way to discourage income shifting that doesn’t require touching the corporate tax code at all. Just force companies to disclose the same information they used to reveal.

4) Why executives get paid as much as they do

This one’s tricky since there have been big strides in executive pay disclosure in recent years. Companies do disclose their executive pay structures. But good luck if you’re an ordinary person trying to understand a public company’s pay practices by reading its proxy statement, a document given to shareholders ahead of a company’s annual meeting.

“Governance analysts, we do this for a living, and we provide that information to major investors,” said Peter DeSimone, co-founder and deputy director of the Sustainable Investments Institute. “’But for an average investor, for a retail investor, it’s way too daunting. I couldn’t see an average investor going in and trying to figure out that information.”

“Proxy statements are written by lawyers,” said Robert Jackson, a professor at Columbia Law School who has also petitioned the SEC to force companies to disclose their political spending. “These are not meant to provide a clear sense of what’s going on in the company.”

And it’s not just the sheer complexity of the language. For all the pages spent describing executive compensation, important details are still often missing. For instance, DeSimone said, companies will say they link executive pay to employee safety, but then the firm doesn’t disclose what metrics they’re using — whether that’s the number of fatalities, injuries or work hours lost.

Banks, in particular, often describe their bonus practices in vague, qualitative terms.This can have broader ramifications for the government as it tries to monitor risks to the economy. Jackson has testified on Capitol Hill that regulators are not taking full advantage of new Dodd-Frank rules that force greater disclosure by banks on how they award bonuses. “Qualitative descriptions, in the absence of quantitative data, may well give regulators misleading information about bankers’ incentives,” Jackson testified.

Of course, with more disclosure requirements could comes more paper. But that just means it’s probably time for a clean-up of the whole process.

“Regulations have just been added ad hoc over the years, and you have a million and one lawyers and accountants running around,” said DeSimone. “Nobody’s really sat down and gone through the exercise and said: ‘Look at the mess we’ve now created. Let’s look at all of this and wipe the slate clean and come out with a framework that’s a lot more manageable for investors and a lot more reasonable for companies.’”

Scale matters.

transsatan:

prototran:

grossfemme:

””“Being trans is a medical condition”“” wow fuck you for pathologizing my identity.
I don’t need surgery I don’t need a diagnosis I don’t need to define myself by your stupid binaristic construction of gender

It is a medical condition though. You may not need surgery, as you say, but you most certainly require dysphoria.

””“being trans is an identity”“” wow fuck you for appropriating my medical condition.

the above is a perfect encapsulation of why i dont participate in “the community” anymore, even though i’ve donated literally dozens upon dozens of hours maintaining a medical resource for trans folks. :/ it’s been years now since i’ve found the gender identities or transitions of other people as relevant to my manhood.

i wish i knew other post-transition men like myself that were comfortable with non-medical narratives of transition (even if they subscribe to that model themselves), and more expansive notions of gender, even future abolition from it.

now this is going to be hard so brace yourself.

dysphoria is not even necessarily gendered. there are cisgender men with “normal” penises that experience dysphoria about their genitals and still identify as men. there are cisgender men that have altered their genitals to be “not normal” for myriads of reasons, including dysphoria; and they have even done so without dis-identifying as men.

the brain-body mapping isn’t inherently gendered, and this is part of why i assume there will be transsexual people long after gender (in the form of sexual dimorphism) is obsolete.

anyway, the alienating conservativism of cisgender manhood is not something i aspire to, because it kills men. and as much as y’all annoy the everliving shit out of me with your nastiness towards each other (and me), i’d like to not read as many obituaries in 2014.

i feel like men often play chicken with each other to see which one will actually discuss something emotional

i know at least for myself in many interactions i am like “jeez if i say what i really think this dude is gonna get misogynistic or homophobic in my face” and if not that explicitly, there are definite status penalties

not that i’m trying to be a men’s rights activist (lollll) but hegemonic masculinity is pretty abusive imo

& i often wish i could have dude friends that i really felt emotionally safe around

Kathryn Joyce interviews members of the ex-homeschooler movement – which consists largely of individuals who where raised by fundamentalist families:

The closest parallel to transitioning from strict fundamentalist families to mainstream society may be an immigrant experience: acclimating to a new country with inexplicable customs and an unfamiliar language. “Mainstream American culture is not my culture,” says Heather Doney, who co-founded Homeschooling’s Invisible Children with [Rachel] Coleman. Doney, who grew up in an impoverished Quiverfull family in New Orleans, felt for years that she was living “between worlds,” never sure if her words or behavior were appropriate for her old life or her new one. She didn’t understand what topics of discussion were considered off-limits or when staring at someone might be disconcerting. She couldn’t make small talk, wore “oddly mismatched clothes,” and was lost amid pop-culture references to the Muppets or The Breakfast Club. When public-school friends talked about oral sex, she thought they meant French-kissing.

More than a decade later, Doney still finds herself resorting to a standard joke—“Sorry, I live under a rock”—when people are taken aback by her. “It’s a lot easier to say that,” she says, “than to explain that I was raised hearing that you’d be allowing demonic influences into your house if you watched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I feel like an expat from a subculture that I can never go home to, living in one that is still not fully mine.”

Chris Jeub disputes Joyce’s “hasty generalizations”:

Joyce’s book Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement (which I’ve read) attacked Bill Gothard’s ATI, Doug Phillips’ Vision Forum, and other groups who saw it their duty, I suppose, to populate the world with a patriarchal society. Her latest book The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption (I haven’t read this one) apparently exposes abusive adoptive parents and builds a sinister case against the adoption movement.

I see a routine here. It appears that Joyce generalizes an entire population of people by focusing on the heartbreaking abuse of some. A skilled debater sees through this. In debate lingo, this is called anecdotal evidence, poor argumentation that is only surface deep in proper persuasion. Emotional appeals will work for some, but to really persuade most people, debaters know enough to dig deeper, gather evidence with substance to help build the case that will change minds and hearts and even influence legislation.

Joyce’s article has no statistics, no cited convictions, no vindictive story beyond one-sided testimonials. She digs deep into the “extremist roots of fundamentalist homeschooling,” as if public education didn’t have its own extremist roots in its history. At best this article uncovers civil unrest in homeschool families. Civil unrest is a worthy topic, by the way, but this article can be read as an indictment on the entire homeschool movement.

Virginia Hughes marvels at a new paper that compares how 46 species – including humans – grow old:

For folks (myself included) who tend to have a people-centric view of biology, the paper is a crazy, fun ride. Sure, some species are like us, with fertility waning and mortality skyrocketing over time. But lots of species show different patterns – bizarrely different. Some organisms are the opposite of humans, becoming more likely to reproduce and less likely to die with each passing year. Others show a spike in both fertility and mortality in old age. Still others show no change in fertility or mortality over their entire lifespan.

That diversity will be surprising to most people who work on human demography. “We’re a bit myopic. We think everything must behave in the same way that we do,” says Jones, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Southern Denmark. “But if you go and speak to someone who works on fish or crocodiles, you’d find that they probably wouldn’t be that surprised.

What the new study didn’t find, notably, is an association between lifespan and aging.

It turns out that some species with pronounced aging (meaning those with mortality rates that increase sharply over time) live a long time, whereas others don’t. Same goes for the species that don’t age at all. Oarweed, for example, has a near-constant level of mortality over its life and lives about eight years. In contrast, Hydra, a microscopic freshwater animal, has constant mortality and lives a whopping 1,400 years.

This is a problem for the classical theories of aging that assume that mortality increases with age, notes Alan Cohen, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec. “The traditional idea is that this is what most things do, and that there were a few weird creatures out there that were exceptions,” he says. “But there are actually a lot of exceptions.” The question that the classical theories try to answer – How could aging evolve? – is no longer the most interesting question, Cohen adds. “What we really need to explain is why some things age and some don’t.”

(Photo by Stephanie Carter)

Photo Credit: eric Hews

When we ran BaconBizConf, here’s just a smattering of the “crucial features” we left out:

• badges
• goodie (aka junk) bags
• a conference hotel
• multiple tracks
• a green room
• a hallway track (or even a hallway)
• a stage
• projectors (we used a big TV)
• wifi (yes, really, we offered no wifi)
• more than 2 free drinks
• the circus of related “fun” events

We sold out, and lots of people told us it was one of their very favorite events ever.

We did have an “after party” (on the first day, to save money) — but that was sponsored 100%. If we hadn’t had our lovely sponsors, we would’ve just rolled up to one of our local bars & it would have been pay as you go.

When we launched Freckle Time Tracking, here’s just a sampling of what we left out:

• password recovery
• invoicing
• a timer
• reporting, except the barest of bare (pathetic) functionality
• a freelancer plan
• permissions
• a back end for us
• a way to cut off people’s accounts if their CC didn’t work
• … a way to automatically bill the credit cards people gave us
• special support channels

… among many, many other things.

The greed for “features” is a psychological trick:

If I don’t know what’s important, ALL THE THINGS MUST BE IMPORTANT.

Corollary: If you don’t deliberately do the work to find & set priorities, it’s your fault and yours alone.

It’s nice to blame customers… or imaginary customers… or competitors… or imaginary competitors… It’s nice, to be able to say, “We have to have this feature, our competitors have it” — but it’s just not true. That’s just the post-hoc justification.

So, what matters for a conference? It varies, but for us it’s:

• focused, actionable talks
• lots of opportunities to meet & learn from each other

That’s it. Anything else is a nice bonus (or maybe even a distraction), but far from necessary.

That’s why we spent tons of effort on coaching speakers — assigning topics, giving feedback on focus, ordering talks in a ‘narrative’, demanding slides ahead of time — and zero time on “fun.” That’s why we catered meals, instead of letting people go out — so they’d stay, and chat.

That’s why we told our attendees: DO NOT BE LATE. The door will be locked.

What matters for people who fucking hate their time tracking?

• to enter time without pain or stress
• … to kinda see where that time is going

Bam. Done.

That’s why I spent 95% of my interaction design time working on making the time entry process the most friction-free, fastest anywhere. That’s why we had so many fanatical early customers, even though Freckle wasn’t even “half a product.”

That’s one of the very real, boring secrets to success:

Know what matters. Two to three priorities, max.

Ruthlessly drop everything else.

And the best thing is… people often complain about what’s in front of them (“The wifi doesn’t work! JEEEEEZ WHAT IS THIS, AN AIRPLANE?”) but rarely complain about what they don’t have at all.

Eric Crinnian, a lawyer in Kansas City, Missouri, says that a police officer threatened to destroy his possessions and shoot his dog unless he was permitted to enter Crinnian's home without a warrant. The officer was apparently seeking two men who'd violated their parole; when Crinnian said he'd never heard of the men, the officer asked to come inside to verify that they weren't there. Crinnian told him to go get a warrant, and the officer said that, in serving such a warrant, he would be sure to destroy Crinnian's possessions and kill his pets.

Making such a threat is apparently legal in Missouri, if you are a police officer.

They wanted to know where two guys were, and Crinnian later found out police believed they violated parole.

“I said, ‘I have no idea who you’re talking about I’ve never heard of these people before,’” he said.

To prove it, he said police asked to search his house, Crinnian refused multiple times. He said they needed a warrant.

Then he said one police officer started threatening him saying, “If we have to get a warrant, we’re going to come back when you’re not expecting it, we’re going to park in front of your house, where all your neighbors can see, we’re gonna bust in your door with a battering ram, we’re gonna shoot and kill your dogs, who are my family, and then we’re going to ransack your house looking for these people.”

Man says police officer threatened to kill his dogs [Abby Eden/Fox 4 KC]

(via Techdirt)

i wish there was a source for all this, but it seems plausible

The Guardian carries David Simon’s remarks on the “horror show” that is modern America. These were, evidently, impromptu comments, so no fair, I guess, critiquing them too closely. But it’s hard not to note that Simon has lumped in “I’m not a Marxist but” with the other unpersuasive disclaimers, “I’m not a feminist but” and “I’m not a racist but”.

The political landmarks are implicit in his dates – 1980 was when things began to go seriously wrong, after having taken a turn for the better in 1932.

We understand profit. In my country we measure things by profit. We listen to the Wall Street analysts. They tell us what we’re supposed to do every quarter. The quarterly report is God. Turn to face God. Turn to face Mecca, you know. Did you make your number? Did you not make your number? Do you want your bonus? Do you not want your bonus?

And that notion that capital is the metric, that profit is the metric by which we’re going to measure the health of our society is one of the fundamental mistakes of the last 30 years. I would date it in my country to about 1980 exactly, and it has triumphed.

And yet, Simon notes, we are not pure profiteers. We understand socialism. It’s just, we only understand socialism for a small group of people very like us.

And the argument comes down to: “Goddamn this socialist president. Does he think I’m going to pay to keep other people healthy? It’s socialism, motherfucker.”

What do you think group health insurance is? You know you ask these guys, “Do you have group health insurance where you …?” “Oh yeah, I get …” you know, “my law firm …” So when you get sick you’re able to afford the treatment.

The treatment comes because you have enough people in your law firm so you’re able to get health insurance enough for them to stay healthy. So the actuarial tables work and all of you, when you do get sick, are able to have the resources there to get better because you’re relying on the idea of the group. Yeah. And they nod their heads, and you go “Brother, that’s socialism. You know it is.”

He goes on a nice riff about how the real end of history is the mixed economy. It’s not something we can all rally around, exactly, but it works; its provisional and limited triumphs are what make life just about bearable.

It reminds me a little of another impromptu set of remarks about a divided America.

This shit wouldn’t be any less true if it was coming from a crack dealer, tho.

UPDATE: Hell of people writing in to correct the assertion that crack is not worse than cocaine. The drug laws behind the differential sentencing are still racist as fuck.

As of yesterday, you can download the newest version of a mod called Project M for Super Smash Bros. Brawl that improves the game so much, it practically seems new. But how do you get it to actually run on your Wii? Good question.

Read more...

Yesterday, the administration called Sy Hersh’s latest report – turned down by the Washington Post and the New Yorker – “simply false.” Money quote:

“The intelligence clearly indicated that the Assad regime and only the Assad regime could have been responsible for the 21 August chemical weapons attack,” Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the Director of National Intelligence, said in a statement to The Hill. “The suggestion that there was an effort to suppress intelligence about a nonexistent alternative explanation is simply false.”

Count me unsurprised that the US intelligence establishment refuses to accept that its findings might have been cherry-picked by those in the administration who had long wanted to go to war in Syria anyway. Count me also unpersuaded by the push-back.

Check out, for example, this blog on the circumstances surrounding the August 21 attack. It really does what the new media does best: it takes you through the evidence, with links, to a conclusion that the al Nusra front might very well have been the instigator. It convinced me, at the very least, that this remains an open question. Liberal internationalists are just as likely as neocons to see things they want to see and ignore those things they don’t. The need to meddle in other countries finds its justifications as it goes along. A reader adds:

If you look at the Russian presentation of facts and evidence, especially as put out by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, it was far more accurate and more candid than was the American presentation of facts and evidence.

In the end the Russians played a key positive role in defusing the situation. But what’s really remarkable, they were also consistently far more honest about what they were up to, and what was going on on the ground in Syria, than was the United States. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be.

I come away from this thinking very poorly of our intelligence establishment. They’re bloated, lazy, stupid and increasingly dangerous to the United States and the world. It’s a clear demonstration of the fact that throwing billions of dollars at it doesn’t get you better intelligence.

The GOP rails on about this moronic Benghazi “scandal.” But this is a real scandal. Watch official Washington just ignore it.

(Photo: An image grab taken from a video uploaded on YouTube by the Local Committee of Arbeen on August 21, 2013 allegedly shows Syrians covering a mass grave containing bodies of victims that Syrian rebels claim were killed in a toxic gas attack by pro-government forces in eastern Ghouta and Zamalka, on the outskirts of Damascus. The allegation of chemical weapons being used in the heavily-populated areas came on the second day of a mission to Syria by UN inspectors, but the claim, which could not be independently verified, was vehemently denied by the Syrian authorities, who said it was intended to hinder the mission of UN chemical weapons inspectors. By DSK/AFP/Getty Images.)

Beinart criticizes the media for glossing over it:

Mandela refused to grant legal absolution to the perpetrators of apartheid’s crimes until they publicly confessed their guilt. In the run-up to South Africa’s first free elections, de Klerk granted clemency to 4,000 members of the South African police and security services. But after winning those elections, the ANC overturned de Klerk’s action and created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which required detailed, public confessions by anyone seeking amnesty. In the words of Mandela ally Bishop Desmond Tutu, who ran the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the hurt, the truth…because in the end only an honest confrontation with reality can bring real healing. Superficial reconciliation can bring only superficial healing.”

Why, in recent days, has the American media focused so much more on Mandela’s capacity for reconciliation than his demand for truth? Perhaps it’s because, all too often, America wants reconciliation without truth itself. Americans want Iran to give up its nuclear weapons program, halt its support for terrorism, and embrace democracy, but when President Obama acknowledged America’s role in subverting Iranian democracy during the Cold War, conservatives flayed him for apologizing for America. In 1995, the Smithsonian was forced to cancel an exhibit on the bombing of Hiroshima when politicians and veterans’ groups called it unpatriotic.  In 2010, Obama slipped an apology to Native Americans into that year’s Defense Appropriations Act but didn’t hold a public event to announce it or even issue a press release, presumably because he feared the political consequences of being accused of running down America again.

argentconflagration:

i made a thing

okay this probably makes more sense than my thing so here, everybody, have the thing

This morning, the Wall Street Journal described China's explosion in nickel pig iron production, which has sent global prices reeling by introducing a glut of cheap supply. But it's not just nickel, the Journal reports. It's all kinds of commodities that we thought would start to disappear, and have instead started flowing even more freely, as producers found higher-tech ways of extracting them from the ground:

Economists for years warned that rising demand for natural resources by China and other emerging markets would outstrip supply, leaving the world short of everything from nickel to coal, copper and corn.

But a remarkable period of innovation and investment has produced a far different picture. Expanded supply has helped moderate commodity prices over the past year after a decade of demand from China helped push many prices into the stratosphere.

... Of course, price declines are also driven by weaker demand, especially in China, where economic growth has slowed. And prices for many commodities, including oil, remain far above their average from 10 or 15 years ago.

But the global supply picture is the best in years. "It's kind of basic econ 101: Scarcity induces some sort of innovation," said David Jacks, an associate professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada, who has studied commodity cycles over the past century.

Think about the fracking techniques that have turned American prairies into fertile oil fields, improvements in crop breeding that have increased agricultural yields, chemical processes that extract minerals from waste rock, and drill bits that reach ever further into the ground. Every time we stare at a potential shortage, like rubber and latex in World War II, some scientist figures out a new way to make it more cheaply. So should we ever worry about scarcity again?

In case you're not convinced, here's what production is looking like for a few of those commodities.

Silver is steadily ramping up, according to the Silver Institute:

Wheat, coarse grains and rice production are all rising, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations:

It's also clear that China is largely responsible for jumps in aluminum and nickel production, according to data from David Humphreys:

And here's natural gas production, now surpassing its 1970s highs:

We could go on. The point is, even as one method of extracting resources starts to look difficult, humanity seems to be pretty good at inventing others, to get at pockets previously thought inaccessible. The graphs make it appear as if the upward trajectory could just continue indefinitely.

But there are a few big caveats to keep in mind.

The first is the environmental downsides to new methods of extraction. Some new commodity refining techniques are cleaner and less energy-intensive, but not all. In fact, many are more invasive and polluting — the new era of abundance should not be considered free of cost.

Second, extraction does get more difficult and more expensive as you dig deeper to find it — as energy analyst Chris Nelder told my colleague Brad Plumer this year on the subject of oil production, at a certain point the cost of mining the stuff approaches the value it produces.

Third and most importantly, finite resources (i.e., not so much agricultural crops) are still finite: The Earth isn't making coal, gas or metals fast enough to keep up with human demand, and at some point they have to run out. Relying on science to find more of that stuff forever, instead of forcefully transitioning to ways of making things and powering things with renewable materials and fuel, is always going to be a losing long-term bet.

So Tom Daley has finally come out, good on him but he says he still likes girls, OI DALEY, NO! That's just greedy!—
John Lenihan (@JohnLenihan4) December 02, 2013

Ann Friedman is distressed by some of the reactions to Tom Daley’s coming out:

“Of course I still fancy girls,” said British diver Tom Daley last week. “But, I mean, right now I’m dating a guy and I couldn’t be happier.” There were some standard-issue homophobic reactions (which Buzzfeed and HuffPost obligingly collected), but Daley also elicited a more specific sort of disapproval from certain fans – biphobia, the Advocate called it. These were the people who assumed Daley was gay but unable to fully admit it, or unwilling to relinquish the privileges of being straight. He was called greedy and accused of trying to have it all. (Which is baffling. It’s not as if he’s dating six people at once.)

By contrast, a few days before Daley’s announcement, actress Maria Bello published an op-ed revealing she was in love with a woman after years of dating (and marrying) men. While the headlines were conflicted – some said she’d come out as gay, other said she was bi – her son summed it up best: “Mom, love is love, whatever you are.” The idea of a woman being legitimately attracted to both men and other women was heartwarming rather than confusing.

Let me place a bet with Friedman: Daley will never have a sexual relationship with a woman again, because his assertion that he still fancies girls is a classic bridging mechanism to ease the transition to his real sexual identity. I know this because I did it too.

Maybe we’ll check back in in a few years’ time, and see which one of us has turned out to be right.

Her broader point is the rather tired and utterly uncontroversial notion that “a tiny multiple-choice list of sexual identities doesn’t capture the breadth and depth of the human sexual experience”:

I know women who married men, then divorced them and are now partnered with women. I know women who were in serious relationships with women throughout high school, college, and their twenties, only to meet and marry men in their mid-thirties. I know women who get off on lesbian porn but only sleep with men. I know women who are happily married to men but have an open relationship that allows them to sleep with women occasionally. Some of these women call themselves bisexual, but many don’t.

I know far fewer men who transcend traditional sexual categories this way, but I don’t think this will be the case forever. Traditional definitions of masculinity – which tend to go hand in hand with homophobia – are going through a real shake-up. More hetero men are tentatively admitting that they’re turned on by certain sex acts associated with gay men. And Daley’s ambiguous coming-out had some mainstream sports sites sounding like a Gender Studies 101 classroom. “In truth, there should be no need for him to declare his sexuality,” wrote a blogger at BleacherReport. This is progress.

Not much evidence of fluid sexuality among men there, is there? And a reality check: just because straight guys would totally be into rimming their girlfriends (I can write that on the Dish) doesn’t mean they are somehow in any way gay. They’re just using gay men’s sexuality to get their hetero on. And there’s nothing wrong that that either.

I suspect, pace Friedman’s dreams, that there will always be far fewer men who transcend traditional sexual categories – because male sexuality is much cruder, simpler and more binary than female. It’s much more nature than nurture, even though the precise balance has always been close to unanswerable. So, as the cultural constraints recede, we may soon find out a lot more. Or not very much at all, as I confidently predict.

Read our popular thread on bisexuality here.

Yes, “the” Borderlands. The relentlessly silly blast-fest from Gearbox, as opposed to, um, that other Borderlands. Telltale might not seem like the most natural fit for a spinoff of the action-heavy RPG (which is less conversational and more often gunversational), but it’s happening, per Spike’s abysmally awkward VGX “award” show over the weekend. Also fired from the dudebro-centric network’s Big Fucking Announcement Gun: a Telltale Game of Thrones series, which was first rumored last month. Scant details on both below.

(more…)

“Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Proceed with confidence, generating it, if necessary, by pure willpower. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going.”

Words of wisdom from William Zinser. And so true. The very idea that we might have something to say in a story is an expression of ego.

Creativity emerges from the “I”. A story is a unique expression of who we are and what we have experienced.

So don’t run away from that dynamic. Rather embrace. Use it to sustain you from FADE IN to FADE OUT. As Zinser says, “Use its energy to keep yourself going.”

A good reason to remember…

Writing is an act of ego.

I encourage you to head to comments to discuss today’s questions. And for a related discussion on The Black Board, check out these topics:

• The Dunning-Kruger vs Imposter Syndrome divide
• Even William Blake needed a little prompting
• How do you get past waiting for permission?

The Quest” has entered Week 22! And so did Go On Your Own Quest, an opportunity for anyone to follow the structure of “The Quest” to dig into screenwriting theory [Core - 8 weeks], figure out your story [Prep - 6 weeks], and write a first draft [Pages - 10 weeks]. It’s a 24-week immersion in the screenwriting process and you can do it here – for free!

Today and every Monday through Friday for 10 weeks, I’ll use this slot to post something inspirational as GOYOQ participants pound out their first drafts.

Why not use the structure of this 24-week workshop to Go On Your Own Quest? That was an idea that gathered energy among many members of the GITS community which I described here.

For more information on Go On Your Own Quest, go here.

Plus you can join The Black Board, the Official Online Writing Community of the Black List and Go Into The Story, another free resource to help keep you inspired and on target at you Go On Your Own Quest from FADE IN to FADE OUT on the first draft of your original screenplay.

The labor movement has a lot of challenges forced upon it by economic conditions. Rigid, entrenched leadership is one that it's brought upon itself.

That's what appears to be the case with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, which will have to re-run its elections after the Department of Labor found it guilty of failing to adequately notify members that nominations for leadership positions were underway earlier this year. It's very rare for the Labor Department to have to intervene in elections; the IAM is the only re-run for top officers in 2012. This wasn't an aberration for the IAM, though: The last time someone got enough nominations from local chapters to land a spot on the general election ballot was 1961.

And this time, the Grand Lodge — also known as the "International," since it represents workers in Canada as well — has finally drawn some serious challengers.

Jay Cronk, who had been a staff member at the International headquarters for 21 years — he was fired a week after announcing his run — is heading up a slate calling itself IAM Reform, with a platform of a shrunken and more responsive Grand Lodge. Karen Asuncion, a 30-year United Airlines employee who works as a ramp service worker at Reagan National Airport and who filed the election complaint that prompted the investigation, is running for one of the union's nine vice president spots; they say they'll have a full slate by the time nominations are due at the end of January.

"We proudly promote ourselves as the most democratic union in America," Cronk says in his campaign video. "When in reality, it is a select few who have chosen to decide who leads the IAM, without benefit of membership input."

There's a lot at stake. The Machinists' U.S. membership has declined precipitously in recent years, and the race carries overtones of the central challenge facing the labor movement: How can you bring more people under the umbrella, while maintaining legacy benefits for those that remain?

——

Thomas Buffenbarger, who's worked at IAM headquarters since 1986 and been the international president since 1997, came into office at a much better time for the union. In June 1998, it was coming off its 20th month of membership growth, driven by a burgeoning airline industry and recruitment of women and more educated workers. Buffenbarger, the youngest president in the then-110-year-old union's history, put money into field staff and building alliances with labor groups overseas.

But then came 9/11 and the airline retrenchment that followed, cutbacks in defense spending, and the contracting out of airline services like baggage handlers and ground controllers (the "fissuring" thing). IAM spokesman Rick Sloan ticks off some of the triumphs the union has had in spite of those headwinds: Signing up workers on military bases in the mid-2000s, organizing the lobstermen in Maine, and adding 4,600 US Airways employees last July, for example. They also merged with the 48,000-strong Transportation Communications Union in 2004, which will show up in next year's membership numbers. But it hasn't been enough.

"When you lose those kinds of numbers, it's really hard to come and find organizing victories," Sloan said in an interview. "There have been lots along the way, but not at the kinds of numbers that we had before those four hits."

Sloan has nothing but disdain for the challengers.

"Anybody can say any damn fool thing, and anybody can purchase a Godaddy.com Web site for about 9 bucks a month and put anything they want onto it, but that doesn't translate into effective communications with the membership," he says. "If your strategy is to trash your own organization, not many are going to look to you for leadership."

The IAM has given them lots of fodder, though. Despite declining revenue, the Grand Lodge hasn't cut back on expenses, like a Learjet that costs $1 million a year to maintain. Instead, it's added executive positions and paid them more, topping out at $304,114 for Buffenbarger, according to filings with the Department of Labor:

Sloan points out that salaries and perks are approved by the membership at each convention, but Cronk says that the gatherings are referred to even at headquarters as a "controlled democracy," since local unions can often only afford to send their district representatives, whose salaries are funded in part by the International.

Meanwhile, the union has also been investing more in lobbying, working alongside the defense industry to avert spending cuts, and mostly holding the line on elections spending:

That's created something of a rift with the rank and file, which don't hear from the International all that much.

"The Grand Lodge, really as far as the local, is so far removed that we have no contact with them," says Darlene Williams, vice president of Chicago's Local 1487. "I think they should be more visible, more accessible."

"There's a pretty huge disparity between what I make and what some of these officers make at the Grand Lodge," says a local president who asked not to be named out of fear of retribution. "It's almost like they're corporate executives and we're paying their salaries."

The tensions came to a head last month over contract negotiations at Boeing, when a committee composed of delegates from the local and the International presented the union with a proposal that would have cut deeply into pensions and slowed salary growth for new hires. Boeing wanted the concessions in exchange for an assurance that it would make its new 777x model at its plants in Washington state, but the local membership voted it down by a 2 to 1 margin, and blasted the International for not getting something better. Buffenbarger defended the offer, saying it was the best Boeing could do in a newly competitive world.

“This was an opportunity to secure some work,” Buffenbarger told the Seattle Times. “It was unusual. It was a gamble.”

Airline analyst Richard Aboulafia says that's a fundamental misunderstanding of Boeing's situation, which suggests that even if the company was truly intransigent, Buffenbarger might not have wanted to sympathize quite so much. "The idea that this was the best Boeing could give, and that Boeing could easily move out of the state at a flip of a switch, that's complete nonsense," he said. "There's also a strong advantage to designing and building in the same place, which means you're not going to throw a Hail Mary here and say 'we're moving to South Carolina!' "

——

Even if the IAM Reform slate makes it to a vote, there's no guarantee they'll be any more successful in gaining back membership than the entrenched incumbents. Organizing airline and transportation workers is inherently more difficult than janitors and healthcare aides, for example, who are concentrated in cities; the IAMAW's membership is more spread out in different suburbs. The reform ticket's main proposal to grow membership is to overhaul the dues structure so it's cheaper for workers with lower salaries to join — especially considering the growing workforce of contractors who are paid less than the union members they replaced.

"If you're trying to organize a new group, it's usually a low-paid group, and how are you going to tell them they have to pay $70 a month, and they don't know what for?" Asuncion said in an interview. "It's the dues structure that's killing us."

That may help some, on the margins, and real organizing gains among contract work forces would send a message that airlines can't simply cut costs by outsourcing union jobs. But regardless of the IAM leadership's substantive performance, it may have shortened its lifespan by — as Cronk and Asuncion allege — going too far to maintain control. It's easier these days, Asuncion points out, to run a nationwide campaign on a shoestring budget through email and social media and make people aware of what's going on.

"It's so different," she says. "If this were 50 years ago, we'd have no chance in hell."