Month: March 2010

Balko flags this video by the Institute for Justice against civil asset forfeiture:

Bella DePaulo counters Brooks:

Studies that compare the currently married to everyone else (which is the vast majority of marital status studies) can tell us nothing about the implications of getting married for happiness, health, or anything else. That’s because the currently married are the people who are left after setting aside the 40-some percent of people who got married, hated it, and got divorced. It is like saying that the new drug Shamster is very effective, based on a study in which the experiences of nearly half the people who took the drug were discounted, because it most certainly did not work for them.

Joyner half agrees. Like many married homosexuals, I remain among the few left championing the institution.

A blogger, ahem, makes the tough transition to the MSM. This is actually very funny:

Howard Gleckman rails against the unnecessarily complex tax code and calls the need to pay someone else to help with our taxes "the other individual mandate":

[In] 2005, 89 percent of individual taxpayers either used commercial software or hired paid preparers to help them do their civic duty. Just 11 percent, according to my colleague Eric Toder, filed returns on their own.

Yet, we just shrug and pay our $59 for commercial software or pony up between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars to paid preparers. No constitutional challenges. No state attorneys general at the barricades. Many of us, in fact, are likely to spend more money hiring a human being to do our taxes than we’ll pay in penalties for refusing to buy insurance ($95 in 2014 increasing to $695 by 2016). Indeed, I’m willing to bet that more of us will pay somebody to prepare a tax return than will purchase medical coverage, despite the insurance mandate.

A reader passes along an unsettling segment on insects:

Another reader writes:

Dan Dennett gave a talk at TED a few years ago wherein he discussed a brain parasite that causes ants to commit suicide. The parasite can only reproduce in the belly of a cow, so it causes ants to climb to the top of grass stalks in a deliberate attempt to be eaten by a cow. It takes over the ant's mind.  Can you image something like that in humans?  Scary.

TNC chews over video game addiction:

I game today and will likely game to the day I die. But one thing I’m clear on is that gaming doesn’t actually make me happy, instead it offers relief from the work I undertake in order to be happy. Television plays that role for most folks, and it may do the same for me again one day. But gaming has ruined me because it offers more control. In terms of pure happiness, there really isn’t anything like working on a piece for months, or over a year, and then seeing you name on the cover of magazine. For me, it’s just unmatched.

What a puss. A commenter (edited for grammar and clarity):

Aristotle made a similar point to TNC. When Aristotle talks about happiness, he says that one thing it is not is pleasure or amusement. While receiving pleasure or being amused is cool and is definitely better than not having it- -he argues that real happiness comes from working towards and achieving your larger goals in life. Perhaps this is not true for everyone–or perhaps defeating Baal on Diablo II is part of someone’s greater goals in life–but I’ve always tended to find this analysis of happiness to be pretty spot on.

Or, more precisely, rips the bumper off a police cruiser. Footage here. The local paper adds:

Officers tried to pepper spray Winston, then to tase him, but nothing calmed him down.

A reader writes:

Call me a misogynist asshole, but I have to agree with Warren Farrell on this one. Four years ago, I made a decision to move to a new city in search of better employment. When I came to LA, I left behind a wonderful relationship with a woman who was much too good for me. In the intervening four years, I've gotten on a path towards a high-earning career. However, I have also felt more emotional pain than in the rest of my life combined.  I've hardly even had a date since working 70-80 hours a week. I recently tried crawling back to my old girlfriend, but she wanted nothing to do with me.

I don't want to address any specific person whose email you printed, because maybe some of them have encountered legitimate sexism – which does exist. But, while women have a lot of avenues to address potential earnings gaps, men like me have no means to seek recompense for the emotional toll taken out on us by the expected focus on our careers.

Should my old girlfriend be legislated to take me back? Should women be required to date me? Of course not, we would all say. I guess I'm just expected to suffer in silence as all the attractive women my age date older guys with more money and nicer cars, and I have no opportunity for intimacy. And that's actually okay with me. I've made the choices I've made, I am the person I am, and one day I'll be on the winning end of this equation, assuming I'm mentally and emotionally capable of sustaining this pace for more years on end.

But, I get sick and tired of women who want to treat the workplace as somehow separate from other parts of life. There seems to be an attitude of: "I'm going to party all through my twenties while I'm young and hot, then have a family and be a mom and have a full-time career as well, and I'm owed a dollar for every dollar anyone else makes, regardless of the priorities each of us has set up until this point in our lives." That ain't life.

I wanted better career prospects, so I gave up love to get it. If I had made the opposite decision, nobody would say that I was owed anything. But if I do get successful, it is virtually certain that I will be regarded in some circles as just another beneficiary of a system (Hollywood, in my case) set up only to promote or benefit white men. Nobody will give a shit about the sacrifices I made.

That's how I, as a man born in the mid-eighties – long after the high-water mark of sexual discrimination – perceive much of what passes for feminism these days. It's an excuse that women have that men don't. I'm forced into a box (the "earn lots of money" box) just as much as a woman is (the "have a family" box), but women are given tons of sympathy for the things they miss out on.

I'm not given any sympathy at all. Instead, to the extent that I can even bring myself to talk about my personal problems, I'm thought of as a loser for not having (or wanting to have) casual sex with multiple partners. I'm somehow inadequate. And you know what? I FEEL inadequate. I just don't have anyone to officially blame for it.

A reader writes:

Of course this has gone on for centuries; it is only the fact that we no longer blame the victim that has allowed those abused by the church (or indeed, any other institution) to come forward in the last few decades.

Did you never wonder about St. John Bosco? I sure did.

John Bosco worked extensively with working class boys. In the measured prose of the Oxford Dictionary of Saints:

"He devoted himself also to the needs of young men, especially on Sundays. His attractive, charismatic personality soon drew many to his oratory and his evening classes. Soon he resigned his post as chaplain and lived in poverty with his mother and about forty destitute boys …

John Bosco also had a reputation as a visionary, a wonder-worker, and one with an extraordinary gift for handling difficult youths without punishment but with a gentle but effective firmness. Don Bosco often used to take boys on Sunday expeditions in the country, with Mass to start with, followed by breakfast and open air games, a picnic, catechism class, and Vespers to conclude."

I read this entry many years ago and found myself returning to it with curiosity when the whole Covenant House scandal occurred. Bosco eventually established schools and vocational training houses for over 500 young boys and of course, his order specializes in schools and seminaries to this day. It gave me a lot of food for thought.

I cannot know about any particular instance. But if one believes that a celibate priesthood can be a magnet for sexually repressed and conflicted or emotionally arrested homosexuals, and if one understands that all priests, like all human beings, are sexual creatures, and if one believes that the core problem is also total authority, a closed clerical culture and no external accountability, then the question of what went on for centuries before the abuse crisis emerged into the sunlight remains. More than remains: it haunts.

Before his death Bosco wrote about himself in the third person:

"I will reveal to you now a fear . . . I fear that one of ours may come to misinterpret the affection that Don Bosco had for the young, and from the way that I received their confession – really, really close – and may let himself get carried away with too much sensuality towards them, and then pretend to justify himself by saying that Don Bosco did the same, be it when he spoke to them in secret, be it when he received their confession. I know that one can be conquered by way of the heart, and I fear dangers, and spiritual harm."

(Photo: Peter Muhly/Getty.)