Category Archives: Law and Politics

Law and Politics, Logic and Reasoning

#115: Disregarding Facts About Sexual Preference

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #115, on the subject of Disregarding Facts About Sexual Preference.

I am aware that it is “politically correct” to regard homosexuality as normal, and to assert that homosexuals are born that way and cannot help being as they are.  It has already been established that I do not believe that, and if being politically correct means pretending that lies are true I am going to have to be politically incorrect (a phrase I was using before it was commandeered by a comedian for his talk show).  Opinions are fairly set on this issue, and the battle is going to rage for most of the next generation.  I don’t mind that people disagree with me.  There are facts on the other side, just as there are facts on this side.  What I dislike is when people ignore the facts that support the position with which they disagree.

img0115lesbian

I was moved to consider this by a television show.  It has become extremely common for television shows to give us likeable homosexual characters, in an effort to make homosexuality seem normal.  It’s a mistake, I think, but people in media recognize that they have a lot influence and attempt to use it.  I remember that my wife had a favorite television show featuring a favorite actor, and then the lead character’s girlfriend got pregnant and (over his objections) chose to get an abortion.  My wife never watched the show again, because she could not look at a woman who would do that to her baby without crying, and so the show lost its entertainment value.  It must not have been only her, though, because within a season the girlfriend, a regular from the beginning, was written out of the show, and the series failed by the end of the next season.  People were offended.  I tried to continue liking Buffy the Vampire Slayer after they decided to make Willow homosexual, but I it just upset me too badly that her life was being so destroyed, and the more so that it was done for a political message.  There was a show launched a year or so ago which sounded really interesting and I started watching it rather faithfully, but I couldn’t get past the excessive homosexual sex in it despite the truly fascinating ongoing mystery that was the primary plotline.  If you want to lose audience for an entertainment show, make a bold statement that is bound to offend a large number of viewers, and stick to it.

In the particular show which inspired these current thoughts, there is tension between an elderly widow and her homosexual daughter.  The resolution of the show came about when the mother came to understand that her daughter’s sexuality was not the mother’s fault, that it did not work that way but she was simply born homosexual.  Maybe she was; the jury is still out on that.  However, a picture had been painted of her parents as a couple who possibly never loved each other, the mother terrified of the father for their entire marriage.  How can this not have impacted the daughter?  We are wrong to imagine that our future marriages will be just like those of our parents, but we do it anyway even when we want to make it different, and a girl growing up in such a house would stand a very good chance of being conditioned to fear men and turn elsewhere for affection.  I don’t mean to blame the mother–“fault” for harming someone when acting with the best of intentions but limited knowledge does not always mean “culpability” for the outcome–but I think we’re ignoring a lot of facts when we assert that the environmental factors were irrelevant.

Of course, it’s only a television show, and in fiction the writers can always tell us that things are the way the show says they are.  That the daughter of this fear-filled loveless marriage becomes a lesbian proves nothing, because it’s only what the writers decided.  Still, just as the characters in the story seem to be ignoring the obvious fact that the child grew up to fear men, those who assert that homosexuality is entirely genetic and not at all environmental seem to be ignoring similar facts in reality.

Decades ago I worked with a young man who in his spare time often visited lesbian hangouts and got to know the girls.  He said he never met one who had not been badly hurt by a man at some point–a father, brother, husband, boyfriend, rapist, someone who left her fearful of or angry at men.  There are easily a thousand plausible explanations for that.  He might simply never have met one who didn’t fit the pattern, or he might have assumed that those who didn’t tell him of such a history did not want to discuss it.  Yet it is data:  many lesbian women appear to have rejected men because of abuse or hurt in their past.  It is at least plausible that environment, and not heredity, is the cause of their homosexuality.

I agree that there might be hereditary factors.  As with alcoholism, some might be born with a genetic predisposition to this particular temptation, and as with alcoholism experimentation might trigger it more quickly in those who are more susceptible.  But when those who want it to be entirely hereditary attempt to deny that there are any environmental factors, that those who are sexually attracted to members of the same sex could not possibly not have been, it is almost certainly because that is the answer they want, not the answer the evidence supports.

Believe what you think the evidence supports; defend your position.  Don’t suppose that you can ignore evidence and still make your position credible.

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Law and Politics

#108: The Value of Ostentation

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #108, on the subject of The Value of Ostentation.

As sometimes happens, one of my political web log entries got me involved (I hesitate to say “embroiled”) in a discussion.  This time the post was mark Joseph “young” web log entry #105:  Forced Philanthropy, and the argument was carried on Facebook.  In that discussion, someone said

I would just rather live in a world in which people don’t starve while others walk around with $5000 purses and $25,000 watches.

My gut reaction was to agree with that–but then something in my brain started nagging at me.  Why?  That is, what does the one have to do with the other?

The half million dollar Audemars Piguet Diamond Fury ladies' wristwatch
The half million dollar Audemars Piguet Diamond Fury ladies’ wristwatch

I got to thinking about that expensive purse and that expensive watch.  The very definition of “expensive” means that our ostentatiously wealthy person parted with a large amount of cash to obtain it.  I expect that somewhere there are designers who themselves are becoming ostentatiously wealthy from the sales of their products, but ultimately someone–undoubtedly several someones–is getting a paycheck.  I don’t know that it matters whether that money is funding a few very healthy paychecks of skilled craftsman or a lot of factory wage checks for employees–it is moving the money from the bank accounts of very rich people to the wallets and pocketbooks of ordinary working-class families.  It is creating jobs.  That expensive bauble is proof that that wealthy person parted with a large sum of cash.

So it seems that in some sense the purchase of those expensive purses and watches is money going to feed someone other than the very wealthy owners of said baubles.  It is in that sense communicating exactly the opposite of what the critic perceives–not money wasted that could have fed people, but money spent to provide paychecks so people can eat.

Sure, some of it goes into nonsense like all those diamonds that stud the watch, but ultimately we’re still talking about money moving away from the wealthy bauble purchaser toward the working classes.

The objection seems rather to be that the wealthy person is showing off how much money he has by spending it on severely overpriced merchandise.  Why should anyone spend that much money on a handbag?  Indeed, our wealthy person could have walked into Walmart and purchased a perfectly functional handbag for under twenty dollars.  My wife does so frequently.  It seems that the only reason to spend more than that is to have something that will say, “Look at how much money I wasted on a handbag, because I am so incredibly rich that I can.”

Of course, the makers of those expensive products will argue that the price is justified by the quality.  The purchasers, likewise, will say that the products they bought are genuinely better in real ways than the ones everyone else buys cheaply.  After all, “cheap” generally means both that something doesn’t cost much and that it isn’t worth more.  What we have a hard time imagining is that the expensive handbags and watches and other baubles are really worth what the wealthy pay.

That may be something we cannot genuinely or fairly assess.

I have never played a Stradivarius; I have heard a few of them played, but only reproduced over computer sound systems.  They’re said to be priceless, and those few people who have the opportunity to play them believe them to be worth every penny paid for them.  How can I know?  I’ve played a few violins of varying quality, and would say that some are worth more than others, but I cannot really imagine one being so much better that it would be worth as much as that.  I have played a couple of Fender Stratocaster guitars.  They’re good guitars, but I’ve always had the feeling that they were way overpriced–you can get a decent electric guitar for a tenth of what some Strats cost.  Yet there are professional musicians who won’t play anything else, or at least who insist on having one in their collection for use when they want it.

I agree that some instruments play better than others.  When I was in high school, tenor saxophone was one of my instruments.  I often wondered whether I could play alto, and one day I saw an alto sax lying around and tried it, and was impressed with how nicely it played so I looked at the stamp–and discovered that it was the band director’s instrument.  I once picked up a Rickenbacker bass, and it was also very nice.  I’m not sure what these instruments cost, and I’m not sure I could justify spending that much on one.

On the other hand, when I was in The Last Psalm I purchased recording tape for every concert.  RadioShack® then had three grades, and I bought the cheapest for the first few years–and told the sound engineer that as soon as I could hear the difference, I would upgrade to the better grade.  I did so for the final years of the band’s run, because my hearing was better.  I wonder today whether the costs of producing high-quality recordings are worth it, because most people listen to low-quality mp3 copies on low-fidelity equipment.

The point is, an assessment of the quality of a product and the value of that quality is an essentially subjective question.  I can’t imagine a watch being worth as much as that, but some people see it as a quality issue.  If someone puts that kind of effort into producing a product that is in some way better than the norm, and can persuade wealthy people to pay that much for it, that is probably overall better for the economy than having the wealthy people buy the ordinary quality products at the ordinary price.

And the rich person who spends five thousand dollars on a designer handbag instead of twenty dollars on a practical Walmart model has parted with an extra four thousand nine hundred eighty dollars that has gone into paychecks that feed ordinary people somewhere.

So what is it that bothers us about these ostentatious baubles?  Perhaps more precisely, what is it that we want instead?

Some of us want there to be no wealthy people in the world.  Of course, as one of the people in the referenced conversation reminded, half of everyone is below average.  He was speaking of intelligence, but it’s true of wealth as well, and so is the converse:  half of everyone has more than average.  I might feel it unfair that Donald Trump owns his own hotels or Hillary Clinton can jet to Europe on a moment’s notice without checking her bank balance, but I might as easily object that my neighbor could afford to install automated lawn sprinklers or an enclosed garage.  Some people will have more, some will have less.  It is the nature of such differences that they form a bell curve, and it is the nature of natural bell curves that the extremes are extreme–fewer and fewer people having more and more (or less and less).

We can, of course, try to alter that unnaturally–perhaps create a tax that takes 100% of all income or assets over a certain amount.  That is problematic on so many levels.  A fixed amount means that the inflation which drives down the value of a dollar correspondingly drives up the amount of money that is needed for the same standard of living, and so more and more people will hit the ceiling.  It is also detrimental to the economy:  if after this point I am not making any money, why should I work?  That also applies to questions like why should I invest–I won’t hire the people to build the new hotel if once it is finished I make no additional income from it.  No, putting a ceiling on income is not a good plan for the economy; the fact that people can become incredibly wealthy is one of the incentives that drive economic progress.  It is also one of the incentives that drive technological progress:  people invent new devices in the hope that it will make them rich.  It also drives people into popular culture, giving us movies and music and other art forms, as well as star athletes.  You can’t both have the incentive that people work hard to make a lot of money and the limit that no one can be ostentateously wealthy.  That part does not work.

Perhaps we feel like there shouldn’t be anything we, ourselves, cannot afford if we want it.  That is, if I admire your car, I should be able to afford to buy a similar car–maybe not today, but within a few years if I work at it.  Everyone should be able to afford a basic standard of living much higher than everyone can afford–a car, a house, a college education for his children.  What about a boat?  What about an indoor swimming pool, a private indoor gym, a personal jet?  What defines this minimum standard of living?  The reality is, and has always been, that some people will have more than others, and those who have less will be envious of those who have more.  It does not really matter, as we just noticed, how much more or less; the envy exists because it is never exactly equal.

Perhaps that aspect of things we cannot afford goes the other direction:  handbags and wristwatches should not cost that much, no matter how good they are.  How much, though, should they cost, and how do we decide this?  If I can sell the rights to a song I wrote for thirty dollars, is there a reason why I can’t sell the rights to a song I wrote for thirty thousand dollars?  J. K. Rowling sold the rights for the first printing of the first Harry Potter book for a paltry sum; by the time she finished selling the movie rights for the seventh book, she was (literally) richer than the Queen.  Can it be said that the books were not worth that much money?  Obviously the movie producers thought they were, and presumably made much more on income from the movies than they paid her for the rights.  Would we be screaming that she got shorted if they paid her a lot less?  And why, then, should it be different for a handbag or a wristwatch?  Pricing is not arbitrary:  it is based on what people are willing to pay.

So why are wealthy people willing to pay so much for baubles which perform functions suitably managed by considerably less expensive items?  Perhaps that is our objection:  they do it to get attention, to display their wealth, in essence to be ostentatious.  Is that what bothers us?  What is interesting about that is that it only bothers people who care about it.  I would not know the difference between a five dollar pocketbook and a five thousand dollar handbag.  I might be able to tell if I examined it closely that one was better made than the other, but at a glance it means nothing to me.  It only means something to two groups of people:  those who can afford such expensive objects, and those who wish they could and so read about them and drool over them.  The cost of these baubles only matters to people who want to show off and to people who are impressed by them.  The rest of us don’t really care how much it cost.  If I knew how much the handbag cost, my impression would be that had I that much money, I would spend it on something I would enjoy a lot more.

But then, I don’t have that much money, and I don’t really know what I would want to own if I had it.  Would I buy a Stratocaster?  A Stradivarius?  And that raises the question of what we want these wealthy people to do with their money instead.  Should they hide it in storehouses like King Midas?  Should they spend it on armaments or their own personal armies and fortresses?  Should they buy companies, and so make more money?  However they spend their money, it is going to be ostentatious in the eyes of someone.

We would rather have them give it all away to people who have less.  Even when that doesn’t mean “including me”, it is still asking them to spend their money for our benefit:  if they give their money to aid the poor, we don’t have to part with so much of ours and don’t have to feel bad about not being able to do more for the poor without suffering more ourselves.  We don’t have “enough” money for ourselves.  However, a long time ago I learned about the concept of rising aspirations:  the more money you have, the more things you perceive as necessities.  Does anyone really need two televisions?  Two cars?  Two warm coats?  We complain about ministers who own their own personal jets, but these are people who have to travel to the places they have been asked to speak and arrive comfortable and refreshed, so they see these as needs.  No one has “too much” money; everyone can think of what he would do with a little more.

And if we get wealthy people to spend money on ostentation, we get that money into the hands of poorer people as surely as if we were to tax it or coerce them to contribute it to charity.  We get them to part with that money voluntarily, not under compulsion; and we do so in a way that creates jobs instead of making more people dependent on our generosity or pseudo-philanthropy.

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Elections, Law and Politics

#105: Forced Philanthropy

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #105, on the subject of Forced Philanthropy.

Somewhere in the archives of Charles Schulz’ wonderful Peanuts comic strip is the one (shown below) in which Linus says, “When I get big, I want to be a great philanthropist!”  Charlie Brown observes, “You have to have a lot of money to be a great philanthropist…”.  After a moment of consideration, Linus clarifies, “I want to be a great philanthropist with someone else’s money!”

We laugh.  It is funny because it is absurd.  There is nothing particularly charitable about giving away money that belongs to someone else, regardless of who benefits.  It is completely absurd.

img105Linus

Yet when politicians say it, for some reason no one laughs.

That’s probably because politicians have demonstrated that they are quite able to do exactly that:  They have the power to take money away from some people and use it to help others.  We have given them that power, and there is a degree to which we are pleased with the outcome, as programs like food stamps and medicaid have reduced poverty in this country to the point that very few Americans are really truly poor.  That is, the kind of poverty we see in Third World countries including India and parts of Africa just does not exist here; we have relatively isolated cases of people “falling through the cracks”, not cities packed with homeless people mobbing the streets and refugee camps bursting at the seams.  We could do more, and we are doing more, but what we have done has been accomplished in significant part because politicians have decided to be philanthropists with our money, and we have approved that.

Yet when Hillary Clinton starts talking about how she would use Donald Trump’s money claimed by the Estate Tax he wants to eliminate, it bothers us.  As Mitch Album (Detroit Free Press) says,

The whole image of the government rubbing its hands as you take your dying breath should creep you out.

We have seen it in Blackadder, as the wealthy nobleman is dying and the King and the Archbishop are drooling over who should get his estates.  Hurry up and die, Donald:  Hillary is already counting the share of your money she is going to give to the less fortunate.

Let’s be clear on this.  It’s one thing for us to agree, however reluctantly, that all of us who are scraping by will sacrifice a little money we could really use for something else, and let the government use it to help those who are not scraping by.  It is entirely different for all of us who have enough to be comfortable to decide to gang up on the few who have more than we do, take their money, and give it to the less fortunate.  The former is almost altruistic, and with bit of stretching can be made to appear as if it is our generosity helping the poor.  The latter is simply criminal–and however much we want to admire Robin Hood, we would have little sympathy for a modern criminal waylaying everyone driving expensive cars and giving the money to farmers who feel their tax burden is too high.

However, somehow politicians have persuaded us that it is a noble idea to rob from the rich and give to the poor, that in doing so they are being charitable.  Like Linus Van Pelt, though, they prove to be philanthropists with someone else’s money.  It is not admirable to take money from the rich and give it to the poor when it is not your money.

I don’t know what Donald Trump has done that counts as charity.  I’m told that Hillary Clinton and her husband own and operate a major charitable fund, and accept contributions from many very wealthy donors.  I gather, too, that they have both personally profited substantially from operating that fund.  She seems to have demonstrated a talent for taking money from other people and making it appear she is a philanthropist.  I suspect she has made more money on her philanthropic activities than she has contributed from her own independent income.

However that is, though, it does appear that she is ready to take money from anyone who has it.  I can only be grateful that I don’t have enough to catch anyone’s attention.

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Elections, Law and Politics

#96: Federal Non-enforcement

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #96, on the subject of Federal Non-enforcement.

Someone mentioned recently that he and a mutual friend were planning to start a business.  The friend was going to liquidate his inheritance and together they were going to move to Colorado and become farmers.

If you’re planning to become a farmer and moving to Colorado to do it, your intended crop is pretty obviously marijuana; he did not have to say so.  I pointed out that there were some hazards with such a plan because although marijuana has been legalized in Colorado, it is still illegal at the federal level.  That has impact on a number of aspects of running a business, most notably the banking, since all banks are federally regulated and they are quite reasonably concerned about violating regulations intended to thwart drug trafficking.  It isn’t just that you can’t get loans; it is difficult to get business checking accounts.

His concern was what would happen if a Republican won in the fall, and that is certainly a concern; there is, however, another significant concern which might well matter regardless of who becomes the next President of the United States.

img0096Marijuana

The concern about the Presidential election is certainly obvious.  Federal drug laws related to marijuana production, sale, purchase, and use are not being enforced in Colorado because the Chief Executive has decided not to enforce them.  There is some merit to this decision, since we have a definite conflict of laws situation and part of the concept of the federal/state divide is that states become experimental petri dishes for solutions to problems.  In that sense, letting Colorado experiment with legalized marijuana as a solution to part of the drug trade and associated crime is a very American approach.  The next President might decide otherwise, though, and then enforcement will resume.  However, the question is raised as to whether the President can turn a blind eye to violations of federal law in any of the states.

That question has already been raised in a different context.  The same administration that has decided not to enforce federal drug law in Colorado has also decided not to enforce certain aspects of federal immigration law, and quite a few states particularly in the southwest have sued in federal court–and thus far, the states seem to be winning.  If the President can’t pick and choose what laws to enforce in relation to immigration, he probably can’t do so in relation to drug law.

Of course, the situation is not exactly the same here.  States like Arizona want the federal government to enforce immigration law, and to allow them to do so in the absence of federal enforcement, and the administration is fighting to prevent the enforcement of those laws.  Colorado, by contrast, wants the federal government to refrain from enforcing certain aspects of federal drug law within its own borders, and the federal government is cooperating with that.  Colorado certainly is not going to file suit to have the law enforced.

However, already several of the state’s neighbors have done so.  They claim that failure by federal agencies to enforce federal drug law in Colorado has resulted in illegal drugs crossing state lines more readily, and given them more trouble with their own drug enforcement efforts.  That has not progressed far, but the concept is the same:  can the President of the United States unilaterally decide not to enforce specific federal laws in specific ways or specific places?  Can the executive say no, we will not enforce federal drug policy in Colorado, and we will not enforce federal immigration policy in the southwest?  The courts are already saying no to the latter; the connection is obvious enough that they will probably say no to the former.

If they do, it won’t matter who becomes the next President of the United States:  the federal courts will decide that Colorado can’t prevent enforcement of federal drug law within its borders, and the federal executive cannot choose to ignore those violations.

It might turn around, but at this point the two policies are almost certainly going to be linked, and in a way that decides the degree to which the President of the United States can decide what laws actually get enforced and which ones can be ignored.  It is a dangerous policy to give the executive that much power, and the framers of the Constitution seem to have tried to avoid doing so, but you can never be certain which way the courts will go or on what basis they will make their decisions.

For myself, I would not bet on the Colorado experiment escaping federal intervention for more than a few years, unless Congress decides to change federal law.

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Law and Politics

#87: Spanish Ice Cream

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #87, on the subject of Spanish Ice Cream.

My sister has what I call a facility for languages.  She was, for a time, a United Nations translator.  Before she finished high school, she sometimes dreamt in French.  When she worked in Taiwan, sometimes people speaking with her on the phone would use a word she did not know, and when she explained in Chinese that her vocabulary was limited because she was an American, they would argue with her that she could not be an American because she spoke Chinese too well.  Her Taiwanese-born husband told us that we should ask her, not him, about Chinese pronunciation, because he had what he called the equivalent of a “Brooklyn accent” and her pronunciation was much better.  She also knows smatterings of Italian and I don’t know what else.

I do not have that.  Our parents spoke French at the dinner table not because they were French (my father was Nth generation Southern) but because they wanted to be able to discuss things in front of the four children without our understanding them.  I took two years of French, but when I get mail in French I reply Je parle un tres petit peux de français, and ask if they can send again in English.  I have written several articles which have been translated into French, and I can’t read them.  I remember fewer than a dozen words of Romanian from my three-week concert tour there decades ago (thank-you, you’re welcome, what does this cost), but I never knew more than a score and don’t know the syntax or grammar at all despite being rather good at the linguistic side of languages.  I struggle with Koine Greek to teach New Testament, have picked up a bit of church, law, medical, and logic Latin, know probably less Hebrew than Romanian (and to quote a character in my wife’s favorite movie, “Who would ever bother with Romanian?”).  Most of the Spanish I know I learned from not watching Sesame Street when the kids were watching it–numbers through ten, open and closed–plus a few words that I’ve picked up in funny stories.  I use to tell people that I couldn’t speak enough Spanish to say “I don’t speak Spanish” in Spanish.

In short, I understand that some people have trouble learning a new language.  I certainly do.  Fortuitously I speak what is one of the most commonly spoken languages in the world, and the language of my homeland, quite fluently.

In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Leon’s Frozen Custard, in the south side of the city since 1942, has gotten in serious public relations trouble for what on the surface seems a very foolish reason:  the owner does not permit his employees to speak to customers in any language other than English.  Hispanics and liberals called for a boycott, but current owner Ron Schneider has stuck to his guns.  Not all of his employees are bilingual, and he does not want customers to expect bilingual service.  That’s the simple response; there are a lot of other reasons why an employer might have such a policy.

img0087Leon

The protestors are certainly correct that offering multilingual service is a competitive advantage.  I joke with the guy who is probably the best person for computers in the area, because he is co-owner of a small but busy shop that does mostly cellular phones plus computer equipment, and he genuinely is the only guy in the place who is not fluently bilingual (English and Spanish).  They hire no one out front who cannot deal with both the English-speaking customers who come from outside the small city because they know he’s the best and the local Latino population who come because they can ask questions and get answers without a language barrier.  It is an advantage for the store; it translates into a marketable skill for the potential employee.  I could not get a job there, even if I learned a lot more about computers and cell phones than I care to know.  Leon’s could attract more business by serving Spanish-speaking customers with Spanish-speaking employees.  That is a choice he makes.  On the other hand, he’s a landmark, and people in the suburbs drive into the city just to get his ice cream and sandwiches, and apparently hire him to cater weddings and parties.  More business is usually a good thing, but one weighs the costs against the gain in such questions.

The protestors are also right that they don’t have to buy ice cream there.  That’s a cost against benefit analysis, too, as their protest by boycott means they are sacrificing what some claim is the best food of that category in that area, accepting lower quality in the name of principle.  By the same token, though, doesn’t Leon’s have the right to establish the terms on which they will serve customers?  If they have to allow people to order in Spanish, why not Farsi?  Cantonese?  Japanese?  Russian?  Romanian?

If I were invited to sing in a Spanish-speaking church, I am not certain how I would handle that.  On the one hand, I am of the opinion that the lyrics to songs matter, and when I sing I want you to hear and understand the words.  On the other hand, I don’t think it would enhance the performance to have a translator standing next to me trying to repeat everything I sing in another language–even if he doesn’t disrupt my focus he’s going to be talking over the music.  I wouldn’t trust myself to try to sing a translated version of my lyrics–I might wind up calling myself a jelly donut, which does not put me in bad company but is still embarrassing.  You cannot expect everyone to speak every language, or do business in every language.  To do so is to demand that those who cannot speak multiple languages not be permitted to speak at all.

In this case, though, the argument is made that Leon’s already employs some bi-lingual servers; the rule is that those employees who could talk with customers in Spanish are not permitted to do so.  What possible reason could there be for that?

There are quite a few possible reasons, actually.  We’ll begin with the one advanced by Leon’s’ owner, that he does not want customers to expect to be able to order in Spanish.  Not all of his servers can understand an order in Spanish, and if someone comes to the window and no one is working who can take a Spanish order, that customer has to be chased away; and if that customer does not understand enough English to understand that they cannot help him, that slows the line.  On those days, the line is further slowed by the fact that there will be numerous customers in it who cannot be helped because the servers cannot understand what they are saying, the longer line moves more slowly with fewer sales, and people driving by are less likely to stop to queue onto a long line, which is more lost business.  If Leon’s cannot serve you in English, you become a problem for the business, because they can’t serve you every time you come, and you’re scaring away real business by taking space in the line.

Of course, some days some of the servers can speak Spanish.  Why not just let them do so on those days?  Apart fromn the fact already noted, it is clear that not all of the servers speak Spanish.  If some of the customers expect to do business in Spanish, that fouls the queue when they reach the window and have to wait for the bilingual server to be available to help them while the English-speaking server is now trying to find someone else in the line who wants to order in English without giving anyone the feeling that the service is unfair.  Service is now inefficient again.

There is also the problem of management.  I don’t know whether owner Schneider speaks Spanish, but he probably does not make it a requirement for his management staff to do so.  Even the best of employer-employee relationships are a bit adversarial; your employer might be a friend, but he is not a buddy, and he is watching to ensure that you do the job right.  Customer service is a vital part of any business, and particularly in the food industry.  If I’m running the store, I want to be able to understand what my employees are saying to my customers, and it is important to do so for a lot of reasons–easily illustrated by giving a few ideas of things I do not want to hear my employees saying to my customers.

  • You’re ugly, go away.
  • Hey, can I see you Friday night?  Great movie showing, and a hot girl like you shouldn’t sit home alone.
  • That’s the large cone; pay me for the small, and later you can make it up to me.
  • You don’t want to eat here.  The food here isn’t worth what they charge; you’re better off at the place down the street.
  • My boss is a jerk and the pay is a joke, I’m quitting just as soon as I can find another job.
  • I hate this place and everyone who works here.  By the way, the AR-15 assault rifle I ordered arrived yesterday.
  • They’re going to make the deposit at three-thirty, and that blonde girl will walk across the parking lot to the bank across the street; you can ambush her by the clothing drop.

You get the point–or do you?  Remember, the store is responsible for what its employees say to its customers.  To exercise that responsibility, the managers have to be able to understand what the employees are saying.  In order both to meet the demands of the protestors and protect the interests of the business, Leon’s would have to fire any employees, and particularly any managers, who are not fluently bilingual–a mistake for any business that has been running so long, because they undoubtedly have some excellent and trusted people working there who would be out of work, and would create a lot of disgruntled employees and former employees.

And what happens when the immigrant Middle Eastern population insists that they should be able to order in Farsi or Arabic?

I saw the list a few years ago; I believe that official government publications in these United States come in over a hundred languages.  Every court of law in New Jersey has a Spanish interpreter on staff, and in most jurisdictions they earn their money translating for defendants who do not adequately understand English.

In the Roman Empire, every province had its own language, and people spoke that language with each other locally, much like Italian neighborhoods of the last century and Hispanic neighborhoods today, but on a larger scale.  Yet business was usually conducted in the international language Greek, and legal proceedings generally in the official language Latin, and almost everyone was tri-lingual.  There’s nothing wrong with being multilingual, and there’s nothing wrong with offering multilingual customer service to attract customers who do not speak English.  However, when we attempt to force people who do not speak a foreign language to use it in their business transactions, we are being unfair to someone.  The customer can always find a merchant eager to accommodate his language requirements to make a sale.  The businessman can only work in the languages he knows.  It is therefore the choice of the business what languages will be spoken in their business transactions, and if the customer doesn’t like it he can bring an interpreter or shop somewhere else.

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Bible and Theology, Law and Politics

#83: Help! I’m a Lesbian Trapped in a Man’s Body!

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #83, on the subject of Help!  I’m a Lesbian Trapped in a Man’s Body!

The new view of sexual identity has me examining myself, and wondering if I have been misunderstood all these decades.  I have always perceived myself to be a boy (well, I grew up to be a man, I think), but perhaps that’s only because in those years everyone assumed that if you had male, er, parts, you were male.  We did not then understand that you could really be one gender inside and a different sex on the outside.  Now, apparently, we do, and that might really change things for me.  I might be a girl.  I have the attestation of most of my peers in my elementary school, who repeatedly asserted that I was a girl:  I ran like a girl, fought like a girl, threw, batted, kicked, did everything like a girl.  And I liked to sing–how girly, to like music class.  I might have had a boy’s body, but I didn’t use it like a boy; I was obviously a girl hiding in a boy’s body, pretending to be a boy.

Yet even then, I was always attracted to girls.  Starting in second grade I had a terrible crush on Christina Newcomb (I’ve always wondered what became of her).  By fourth grade I was spending a lot of time at her house down by the brook on Broad Street up near Lambert’s Mill Road.  She was particularly fond of The Beatles, and had a stack of Beatles cards between three and four inches thick.  There were other girls who caught my attention before that, and many more thereafter–moving away from Scotch Plains separated us, although our relationship had fizzled by then.  No other boys were attracted to girls–in fifth grade they used to dare me to wait for her outside the school and try to kiss her, which is what I wanted to do anyway so I usually took that dare and listened to their peals of disgust when I succeeded (although at least as often she ran away laughing).

So then the conclusion is inescapable:  if I am a girl, as all the boys thought, I must be a lesbian.

img0083Scouts

I think this understanding might have changed my youth significantly–maybe not then, when people always thought that someone in a boy’s body was a boy, and to be a girl you had to have a girl’s body.  But Society has recognized, now, that this is not always the case, and the Girl Scouts of America are doing their level best to keep up with progress:  you can be a Girl Scout if you are a girl on the inside, even if you, like me, are trapped in a boy’s body.  I can’t tell you how much different my teen years might have been had I actually been able to go camping with the Girl Scouts instead of the Boy Scouts.  Not that I don’t treasure the hundreds of miles of canoeing and hiking, the places I saw and things I learned in scouts, but really, every Boy Scout I knew wished we could go camping with the girls.  I certainly saw advantages to the idea.

So I think were I that age today I would simply explain it to them.  I’m not really a boy, I’m a girl in a boy’s body, but I’m attracted to girls, so that makes me a lesbian.  Trapped in a boy’s body.  I should be allowed to be a Girl Scout.  From what I understand of their present policies, I think they would agree and let me go camping with the girls.  I think we would have a wonderful time–and since I am, after all, a lesbian, I can’t promise that other things wouldn’t happen on those camping trips, since I would be bound to find all those girls attractive, and particularly whoever wound up as my tent-mate.  She might find that she, too, is a lesbian, attracted to another girl, at least when the girl in question is trapped in a boy’s body.  I know some girls are uncomfortable, being naked around a lesbian, but it might be different if the lesbian has the body of a boy.

I won’t say more about that, because I’m sure there are millions of Boy Scouts wishing they had already thought of this.

I expect that some of the parents would object; parents can be so old-fashioned, insisting that their children be protected from such situations.  They don’t understand that the world has changed, that what you are on the outside is meaningless, it’s the person on the inside that counts, even for such matters as which bathroom you should use, which Scouting organizations you can join, for what social services you qualify, and everything else, really.  If I say I am a lesbian inside a man’s body, how can anyone argue with that?  It could well be the real me.

And if it would have gotten me into those Girl Scout tents, I could have been very comfortable with that idea.

Shame on me?  Is that because you think I’m mocking a very serious matter, that someone could be one gender inside and a different sex outside, and ought to be treated as the kind of person he or she supposes him- or herself to be?  Or is it because you actually do think that girls and boys are different because of biological and physiological characteristics defined by their bodies, and society needs to make that distinction for the protection of its girls and its boys?

I think those peers of mine were wrong, that I was never a girl at all, as much as I was different from them.  This business about really being the other gender on the inside has nothing to do with biology or psychology; it has everything to do with gender stereotypes.  We think some man might be a woman inside because his interests go in directions more common to women–because we have created definitions of male and female “personality types” and then tried to fit people into them.  We persuade people that they are really not the gender of their body’s sex because their character does not fit our stereotypes, and they believe us.  Boys will be boys and girls will be girls, and we need to recognize that the first difference is biological.  Otherwise we lose some basic structures of human interaction, and face some serious social problems.  From there, we need to understand that a man does not have to conform to what we think are manly traits, nor a woman to womanly traits, and understand that bodies are sexually defined but people are individuals.

Without that, talk of sexuality devolves into this kind of nonsense.

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Law and Politics

#80: Environmental Blackmail

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #80, on the subject of Environmental Blackmail.

Augustine has been quoted (by C. S. Lewis, somewhere) as claiming to be “one who by writing profits and by profiting writes.”  I have that experience as well.  I had been musing on a completely different subject (for the Christian Gamers Guild Bible study) and suddenly saw how it applied to the massive global warming controversy, and thus I am writing about that here.

First, let me establish a few bona fides.  I am indeed a somewhat conservative moderate, but have also always been involved in environmental issues.  As a Boy Scout I cleaned up and repaired trails and wilderness areas as well as working with early recylcing efforts, collecting paper, glass, and aluminum in a time when it was voluntary and someone had to make an effort to make it happen.  I am in favor of policies that really do improve the environment; I am not in favor of policies which severely impact other areas of life such as economic growth but whose benefit to the environment is at best minimal or dubious.  I also favor policies that would shift the costs of environmental impact to those responsible for it–if the “cost” of a product includes that it damages our waterways, that cost ought to be covered in the sale price.  However, I also think that there is a great deal of alarmist talk in this field (see mark Joseph “young” web log post #45:  The Math of Charging Your Phone for an example).

img0080Earth

I am old enough to be skeptical of current scientific opinion simply because it is current opinion, and the fact that it is scientific does not much improve its credibility.  I remember when we were all being moved away from butter to healthier margarine for the sake of our hearts, and now it seems that margarine is much worse for our hearts and we should prefer butter (or some other heart-healthy spread).  Smoking was once encouraged for its supposed antibiotic and antiviral effects, and it was a slow road to persuade everyone that it was a major health problem.  The majority of scientific opinion has often been wrong in living memory, and it is a fool who believes that because he has corrected certain errors in his thinking he must now be completely right about everything.

I am also not so foolish as to be persuaded that all the scientists on one side of the issue and none of those on the other side have a vested interest in the outcome.  That is, we are told that those of the minority opinion, those scientists who either do not believe that climate change is occurring or do not believe that human activity is a significant factor in it, are largely funded by industries who want the outcome to support their continued exploitation of natural resources, and thus that their research is tainted.  We are not told that those who believe human activity is creating climate change which will occur on a rapid and global scale at devastating levels are largely funded by environmental groups who want more money invested in environmental activities, and thus also have an economic interest which potentially taints their research–not to mention that they get publicity and sell books and media based on it.  That blade cuts both ways.  Besides, saying that oil companies support scientists who agree with the position that benefits them (or that environmental groups do likewise for those whose work benefits them) is a bit like arguing that the resurrection of Christ must be a lie because everyone who claims to have seen Him after His resurrection was a believer:  if you actually knew you saw Jesus alive after you knew He had been executed, could you reasonably not become a believer?  It is quite natural for groups with an interest in the outcome to fund those who appear to be producing data that supports their preferred outcome, and to promote that data which does; that is equally true on both sides of this debate.

I think that there is evidence of climate change.  I think that it is a bit less clear to what degree it is because of our contributions rather than because of natural climatic shifts.  The fact that it cannot be demonstrated that we are having a serious impact on the environment is not, to my mind, a sufficient reason not to take steps to reduce our impact on the environment; it is sufficient reason not to do so in ways that are going to strangle an economy that desperately needs to grow and create jobs.  Some are arguing that jobs now are not as important as the future state of the earth, but they have jobs now and probably are not in much danger of losing them.  It can as easily be argued that the state of the environment in a century is not going to matter much to people who starve and freeze and die of heat stroke today because of a collapsing economy.  (Minimum wage increases will not help this; the only way to increase everyone’s share of the pot is to make the pot bigger.)  We must take reasonable steps to improve the environment; we must not take unreasonable ones.  Our debate, then, comes to identifying those reasonable steps.

My complaint, though, is that in the current debate the threat of global warming is being used as a weapon to promote environmental policy and quash intellectual exploration.  I am particularly concerned, because it is not clear to me whether human activity is impacting climate, and it is also unclear that any such impact is negative.  In 1991, the science fiction author trio of Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn wrote a Prometheus Award-winning novel entitled Fallen Angels in which an essential element of the premise was that the world has been headed into an ice age for several hundred years which has been kept at bay by humanity’s production of greenhouse gases warming the planet, and that were we to stop that production we would within a very few years see glacial sheets descending southward on the continents of the northern hemisphere.  The appendix in that book explained this in some detail.  A Nova production a few years later explained how greenhouse gas levels fluctuated naturally, through a process in which rain washed carbon gases from the atmosphere, briefly became dilute carbolic acid, and either soaked into the ground and released the gases back into the atmosphere or landed on calcium-based rock usually upthrust by contintental drift, creating calcium carbonate that washed down the waterways to settle on the bottoms of seas and oceans out of the environment for centuries.  All of that is complicated, but the gist of it is that there was then–about twenty-five years ago–perceived to be a real danger, scientifically, that a significant reduction in the human production of greenhouse gases would result in a catastrophic climate shift.  Now we are being told that the failure to reduce the human production of greenhouse gases will have such a result.  Forgive me for feeling like this is the fad of the moment, like whether I should be eating butter or margarine.  I accept that there might be a problem, and it might need addressing.  I object to the hyperbole.

For example, there was a terrible storm on the east coast in 2012 known as Hurricane Sandy, a category 3 storm.  We were told that it was a harbinger of worse storms to come–but it was not as bad a storm as Hurricane Katrina, a category 5 storm in 2005.  The destruction from Sandy was because a rather ordinary storm was funnelled in an extraordinary way so as to be focused into a very narrow highly populated area.  The storm itself was not so severe; it was the vulnerability of the target that made the difference.  We have records of hurricanes using modern rating systems going back perhaps one and a half centuries, and there was a category 5 storm in 1928 and another in 1932.  Storms are not getting worse, and we’re not having the severe ones more frequently.  New England’s blizzard of 1978 was unprecedented and has not been matched since.  Yet every time something happens with the weather that people don’t like, the specter of climate change is paraded to scare us into environmental consciousness.

Scare tactics do work on some people, but intelligent people usually respond negatively to them.  Let’s address our environmental concerns sanely and sensibly, and stop trying to incite people to extreme action which might have worse consequences than what we already fear.

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Bible and Theology, Law and Politics

#79: Normal Promiscuity

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #79, on the subject of Normal Promiscuity.

A few weeks before his death, my father forwarded a link to an article which seemed to bother him.  It included interview excerpts from young women, and put forward the notion that now that the governmnent was providing full coverage for birth control they felt free to sleep with as many men as they liked, and were taking advantage of this new-felt freedom by doing so.  His comment to the link was a question as to whether this was really happening, and I was not at the time certain (and never did determine) whether he realized that the article was from one of the sites that rather poorly attempts to do what The Onion does so well:  create parody that looks like news.  They weren’t seriously suggesting that the availability of free contraception caused an abrupt upswing in the sexual activities of young women; they were rather facetiously suggesting the reverse, that those who thought this might happen were being foolish.

Yet the notion returned to my thoughts periodically.  There was something there that bothered me.

L0059976 Model of a contraceptive pill, Europe, c. 1970 Credit: Science Museum, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org
L0059976 Model of a contraceptive pill, Europe, c. 1970
Credit: Science Museum, London. Wellcome Images
images@wellcome.ac.uk
http://wellcomeimages.org

Some years ago one of my then-teenaged sons was dating a girl in about as serious a relationship as teenagers have.  On his first visit to her home, her slightly older sister gave him a tour of the house which included what I gather was a laundry and utility room in a finished basement, identified by the sister as the room where you go when you want to have sex.

I was not present; I heard this second or third hand.  I suppose it might have been the sister’s idea of a joke:  “I know you want to have sex with my little sister, well, this is the place for it.”  Somehow I did not think so at the time.  I was a bit upset, but did not know whether it should concern me more if their divorced mother did not know that her teenaged daughters were so open about having sex with boyfriends in the house, or if she did.

That latter possibility reminded me of another woman I had known some years before, a friend of my wife, who had a daughter.  I never had a high opinion of her.  From what I gathered she was certainly no virgin when, in high school, she seduced the boy she hoped to marry and then reported that she was pregnant with his son (it was sometimes questioned whether it was his child), but having failed thereby to induce him to marry her she decided to live with him.  She was believed, even by him, to have had a series of affairs, but when their relationship was struggling she got pregant again and had the daughter (no one doubted that she was his) and finally got the marriage certificate.  (That might be an oversimplification and I might have the wedding in the wrong place; it’s been a couple decades by now.)  Again in what is second-hand knowledge I gather she had a talk with her daughter about having sex, when the girl was about twelve or thirteen.  The gist of it was, “I know you’re going to have sex, so I want to make sure you do so safely.”

It is this underlying presumption that bothers me, this belief that everyone is having sex.  What we once somewhat derisively called “promiscuity” is now regarded as normal.  It was previously regarded as abberant, and I think that in an historical context we might have good reason to consider our age abberant in this regard.  Of course, the majority in any era considers itself normal, its ancestors in error, and its future descendants extensions of its own values.  The third being demonstrably false on the evidence of the second, we should doubt the first.

I understand the logic of the situation.  It is asserted, correctly, that teenagers have always engaged in sex, hidden from their parents, and that single adults have similarly managed secret sexual liasons.  Too, there have always been extramarital affairs, infidelities, as husbands and wives have taken lovers, either those single persons who are looking for sexual partners or the spouses of others.  It has always been so; it is the norm.  The difference, we are told, is that today we admit it and in most cases no longer attempt to hide it.

The error in this logic is evident when you realize that the statement “teenagers have always engaged in sex” is then taken to mean “all teenagers have always engaged in sex.”  That was a misperception when I was a teenager.  I think–I do not know–that there were among my peers some who were having sex, perhaps sporadically, perhaps frequently or even regularly.  For any who were, I suspect that they thought everyone was doing it and they were thus no different; for those of us who were not, I think we thought that everyone else was doing it save for a few of us unfortunates who had been excluded.  In retrospect, the facts of the case then were that very few of my peers were engaged in sexual relationships or activities despite the fact that we were in high school on the tail end of the “sexual revolution”, had regular “sex ed” classes explaining how it worked, and knew something about how to obtain and use birth control.  I don’t know what percentage of us were virgins, but I gather it was considerably larger than even we thought, and that the majority of those who were not had very little actual experience.

I cannot say that my experience even then was typical in a country in which there are so many social and economic variables; I know it was not atypical.  I also know that the idea that “all teenagers are having sex” is not true now.  Nor is it true that all single adults are engaged in sexual activities, or that all married people are having or even have had sexual liasons with other partners.  The supposed facts are untrue.  Yes, there have always been some who have been what we called promiscuous.  It may depend on how you count, but it was certainly not a majority in the past.  It is not even certain whether it is a majority in the present.

However, because of the general attitude in the present, it is likely to be a majority in the future.

We once told our children that sex was a very natural part of being married.  Then somehow we decided that this was too prudish, and started telling them instead that sex was a very natural part of being in love, and that if they were in love they should not be embarrassed about sex.  There are good reasons for the old idea, that sex was part of being married, quite apart from the legal issues of responsibility and legitimacy.  We, as a society, forgot them, and promoted a lesser standard, that sex was fine between any two people who were truly in love.  Then that became too limited–as the Tina Turner song demanded, What’s Love Got To Do With It?  Sex became a recreational activity, something people did for fun, and any suggestion that it was other than that was considered prudish.

Barry McGuire spoke somewhere of his own youth.  His generation was raised by adults who had long lists of things one did not do, who were never taught why you did not do them.  Thus he and his peers were told you do not do these things, and when they asked why not no one had an answer beyond, “You just don’t.”  That being an entirely inadequate answer, he said, “we went out and did them all–and we discovered that you don’t do them because they end in death.”  That has literally been the outcome for many who have lost control of their “recreational” drug use or their “social” alcohol consumption, and of many infected by the human immunodeficiency virus or other sexually transmitted diseases.  It has also been true of many who live in the shadow of death, whose lives have lost meaning because they are so destroyed by these misperceptions–the world teaches them that alcohol, drugs, or sex will make them happy, and when it does not deliver beyond a moment of pleasure (and momentary pleasure is not at all the same as happiness) they wind up seeking the pleasure and abandoning any hope of anything more.

And so today we are teaching our children that sex is nothing more than a recreational activity they should feel free to enjoy carefully–like drinking alcohol or using drugs.  We have lost the moral compass, the moral foundation, of a world in which some things were disapproved because they were ill-advised, hazardous, and thus wrong in the same sense that it is wrong to stick tableware in electrical outlets.

So we have created a world in which promiscuity is normative.

I mentioned earlier that it is a mistake to believe that our descendants will be extensions of our own values.  We cannot predict what will happen even in the next generation.  Perhaps the world will realize its mistake, and some sense of decency will return; perhaps, as with other cultures before ours, the deterioration will continue to snowball and the world as we know it will collapse into chaos from which some new order will arise.  What we do know is that the future will be different.  Our best hope is that we can inform it with values that will make it better.  They are not likely to come from the mainstream of our present society.

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Bible and Theology, Books by the Author, Games, Law and Politics, Logic and Reasoning, Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel

#72: Being an Author

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #72, on the subject of Being an Author.

One of my sons was in some sort of meeting or interview and was asked what his father did.  “He’s an author,” was his reply.

I wasn’t present, so I don’t know what was said or done at that moment, but my son got the distinct impression of disdain, a sort of, “Right, he’s a layabout who does nothing and thinks that people should give him money for scribbing on paper, but what does he have to show for it?”  My son, at least, felt that I was being insulted by the questioner’s attitude.

What strangers think of me is of no consequence, although I am concerned about the opinions of my readers and other fans (I am more than an author, being also a game designer and a musician and a Bible teacher).  I am more concerned that one of my other sons seems at times to be of the opinion that I waste my time trying to succeed at such a career, that I should have a “real” job that makes enough money to support the family.  He is not old enough to have known our lives when I was not making enough money to support the family working as a radio announcer, a microfilm technician, a drywall installer and painter, or a health insurance claims processor.  I suppose perhaps there are people who claim to be authors who lack any skill or talent in the field, and I think everyone in creative fields faces some self-doubt, some uncertainty as to whether they are really “good enough” to do this.  However, I think the notion that someone is not an author, or that this is a foolish idea, a flawed self-perception, is difficult to justify.  I am an author; I might not be terribly successful at it, but there are good reasons why the latter is not a good measure of the former.

img0072Novel

This is not really about whether or not I am an “author” so much as about what it takes to qualify for that title.  For my part, I thought I would be a musician, and had the idea of being an author on a distant back burner–in college, circa 1977, I took a class entited Creative Writing:  Fiction, and began work on a fantasy epic that quickly bogged down into trouble and wound up on that same distant back burner.  Either the Lord or happenstance, depending on your viewpoint, landed me at WNNN-FM, a contemporary Christian radio station, first as a disc jockey/announcer, working my way up ultimately to program director, with a side job editing (and largely writing) the radio station newsletter.  Along the way I developed a relationship with the associate editor of a local newspaper (The Elmer Times), which at some point published a couple of pieces of political satire I wrote, about 1983.  I was published, but I was not yet thinking of myself as an author.  I also started putting together some notes about the controversy over Dungeons & Dragons™, and somewhere around 1991 composed a draft of an article which I tried unsuccessfully to farm to a few Christian magazines, impeded perhaps by the fact that I didn’t actually subscribe to or regularly read any magazines.

Late in I think 1992 Ed Jones approached me about co-authoring his game idea, “Multiverse”, which was ultimately to become Multiverser™.  I had been running original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons™ since 1980, and he had been playing in my game for perhaps a year (and I for a slightly shorter time in his) during which we had had discussed role playing games generally at length and I had become one of his Multiverser™ playtesters; he had read the unpublished article.  In the spring of 1997 he withdrew from the project due to complications in his personal life and left me to finish the work and publish the game later that fall.  I now had two books in print (the Referee’s Rules and The First Book of Worlds), but did not think of myself as an author so much as a game designer.  I started half a dozen web sites (now all either gone or consolidated here as various sections of M. J. Young Net) primarily to promote the game; that defense of Dungeons & Dragons™ article I’d drafted a decade before became one of the founding works under the title Confessions of a Dungeons & Dragons™ Addict, along with web sites on time travel, D&D, law and politics, and Bible.  Still, the publication of Multiverser led to invitations to write for role playing game related web sites–starting with Gaming Outpost and extending to include articles at RPGNet, Places to Go, People to Be, The Forge, Roleplayingtips.com, and perhaps half a dozen others which no longer exist.  I was also asked to become the Chaplain of the Christian Gamers Guild, and contributed to their e-zine The Way, The Truth, and the Dice, and wrote a few articles mostly about such subjects as business, e-commerce, and morality in politics, which appeared on various sites around the web.  Multiverser:  The Second Book of Worlds went to print, confirming my authenticity as a game designer.

Sometime in 1998 Valdron Inc started discussing publishing a Multiverser comic book series, and since I was the in-house writer it fell to me to create the stories.  I began these, working as if they were comic books, writing individual panels.  I actually did not know that many authors who wrote books also wrote comic books and “illustrated novels”, but it was a short-lived endeavor–I wrote three issues, two episodes for each, and then the in-house artists said that there was no way that a comic could be produced on the kind of budget we had, and everything went onto that proverbial back burner, where it simmered.  However, this one started to boil over, and after consulting with Valdron’s people I rewrote those episodes and created Multiverser‘s first novel–my first novel–Verse Three, Chapter One.  Valdron put it into print, and we sold a few hardcover copies; I have no idea of the number.  However, at this point I thought of myself as an author:  I had a novel in print.

When I was in high school I worked stage crew (yeah, you probably guessed that, right?), as a sophomore for the junior class play.  At one point one of the characters questions another about a book he’d written.  It wasn’t a big deal, the author says; it only sold three hundred copies.  I’d like to read it, the questioner continued; where can I get it?  From me, the author responded; I have three hundred copies.  In the trade there has long been what is disdainfully called “vanity press”, the ability to write your own book and have it printed for a few thousand dollars, receiving a few hundred copies which you then can sell entirely on your own.  In the digital age that has become more complicated.  It is now possible to go through companies like Lulu.com and print your book at very little cost, get an international standard book number (ISBN), and have it listed through Amazon and other retailers.  That is not how those first four books went to press, but some might think they were “vanity press” anyway.  Having been through law school, I undertook the necessary steps to create a corporation, sold stock, got the stockholders to elect a board of directors who in turn appointed corporate officers, and spearheaded the effort to publish and promote the Multiverser game system and supplements.  I would say that none of us had a clue what we should do, but that’s not quite true–we all had a few clues, and we proceeded to stumble through the effort.  It would be wrong to say that the company was entirely comprised of my friends and family.  Many of the stockholders were family or friends, and most of the rest were friends of family or friends of friends, and of course it being a small company I ultimately met all of them, chatting with them at stockholder picnics and such.  My next few books were closer to the “vanity press” sort.  I wrote What Does God Expect?  A Gospel-based Approach to Christian Conduct, and when Valdron decided they did not want to be more closely associated with Christian book publishing I asked people for ideas on getting it in print, and thus was introduced to Lulu.com.  That was also the venue I used to release About the Fruit, and I have not quite completed the process of releasing a book entitled Do You Trust Me? due to a failure on my part to stick to the process.  Valdron released a book version of what might be called the first season of the Game Ideas Unlimited series from Gaming Outpost; at the same time I did the same for the series entitled Faith and Gaming that had been published at the Christian Gamers Guild web site.  Some time after that Blackwyrm Publishing approached me about permitting them to publish an expanded edition of Faith and Gaming, and thus one of my books is in print through a publishing house in which I hold no interest otherwise.

The question, then, is not really whether I am an author.  Depending on how you count them I have between eight and ten books in print (two titles were published in two different editions); some of my online articles have been translated and printed in the French gaming magazine Joie de Role, and I was for quite a few years paid for regular contributions to TheExaminer.com.  The question is at what point I became an author.

In this I am reminded that many authors struggle for many years.  Steven King’s financial problems were so great that even after he was famous and made a television commercial for them, American Express would not authorize a card for him; he kept a day job as a teacher until he sold the movie rights to Christine, which is when the tide turned for him.  Was he an author when his books were not bestsellers and he had to teach to support himself?  J. K. Rowling struggled as a single mother, and reportedly received a mere six thousand pounds for the rights to the first printing of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone; she is now reportedly wealthier than the Queen of England.  Was she an author when she was writing the book that started it all–and if so, who knew?

I have always been a musician; I have never made much money at it.  I have composed hundreds of songs, performed thousands times, been part of dozens of bands, choirs, combos, performing groups, and accompanist groups, and had some avid fans (in college some wanted to print Bach and Young T-shirts, but it was not so easy then).  I have one album, Collision Of Worlds, on the market.  Am I not a musician because I don’t make a living at it?  There are thousands upon thousands of singers and instrumentalists who play bars and nightclubs, weddings and parties, who hold regular jobs; it is a joke in the music industry to say to a young musician, “Don’t quit your day job.”  Are those not musicians, because they cannot support themselves doing what they love?

I am not an artist, but it is typical in the art world that painters and sculptors struggle for decades to make a name for themselves, to make a living creating artwork, only to die penniless–and then suddenly to have everything they ever created leap to new values.  Were they not really artists during their lives, but became so the moment they died?

In the creative world, people create, and it is that aspect of creating that makes them authors–or poets, artists, musicians.  Some authors eke out a living; some become incredibly wealthy; some spend more than they earn trying to become known.  That is true in all the creative arts, including filmmaking–for every Robert Townsend Hollywood Shuffle success story there are dozens of good but failed independent films.  Herman Melville was not well known prior to writing Moby Dick, despite having written for newspapers and magazines.  Being an author is not primarily defined by commercial success; it is defined by creative product.

I should footnote this by mentioning that that first novel has now been released on the Internet, and the second is following it in serialized format beginning today.  I am an author, even if I give away my product.  Your support through Patreon and otherwise helps make it possible for me to publish and you to enjoy some of that.  It does not change whether I am an author, only whether I am viewed as successful.

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Bible and Theology, Books by the Author, Elections, Games, Law and Politics, Logic and Reasoning, Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel, Time Travel Movies

#70: Writing Backwards and Forwards

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #70, on the subject of Writing Backwards and Forwards.

When I was at TheExaminer, I eventually took to creating indices of articles previously published; when I moved everything here last summer, I included those indices, and finished one that covered the first half of 2015 (through July).  On the last day of December I did a review piece indexing the rest of that year, as #34:  Happy Old Year.

It may seem premature to do another index; it is not even falling on a logical date (although as I write this I am not completely certain on which day it is going to be published).  However, some new “static” pages have made it to the web site, and quite a few more web log entries, and it seems to be a time of decision concerning what lies ahead.  Thus this post will take a look at everything that has been published so far this year, and give some consideration to options going forward.  You might find the informal index helpful; I do hope that you will read the latter part about the future of the site.

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Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel

The most popular part of the web site is probably still the temporal anomalies pages.  It certainly stimulates the most mail, and the five web log posts (including those in the previous index) addressing temporal issues received 30% of the blog post traffic.  We added one static page since then, a temporal analysis of the movie 41.  We also added post #56:  Temporal Observations on the book Outlander, briefly considering its time travel elements of the first book in the series that has made it to cable television.  We’d like to do more movies, and there are movies out there, but the budget at present does not pay for video copies.

This part of the site has been recognized oft by others (before it was a Sci-Fi Weekly Site of the Week it was an Event Horizon Hotspot), and the latest to do so is the new Time Travel Nexus, a promising effort to create a hub for all things time-travel related; we wish them well, and thank them for including links to our efforts here.  They recently invited me to write time travel articles for them, although if I do it will have to be something different, and we have not yet determined quite what.

Legal/Political

By sheer number of posts, this is the biggest section of the web log.  Although since the last of these indexing posts it has been running even with posts about writing and fiction, it has a significant head start, with half of the articles in that index connected to law or politics primarily.  Some of these have religious or theological connections as well–that can’t be helped, as even the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights recognizes that the protection of your right to believe what you wish, express that belief, and gather with others who share that belief is both a religious and a political right, and cannot always be distinguished.  (Anyone who says that religion and politics should always be kept separate misses this critical point, that they are really the same thing.  It’s a bit like saying that philosophy and theology should be kept separate–the difference is not whether God is involved, but how much emphasis is placed on Him.  So, too, politics is about religious beliefs in application.)

Trying to sort these into sub-categories is difficult.  Several had to do with legal regulation of health care, several with discrimination, and we had articles on freedom of expression, government and constitutional issues, election matters.  These twenty-seven articles together drew 35% of readers to the web log, but a substantial part of that–13%–went to the two articles about the X-Files discrimination flap.  One article on this list has received not a single visit since it posted.  Thus rather than attempt to make sense of them, I’ll just list them in the order they appeared, with a bit of explanation for each:

Bible/Theology

As mentioned, some of the political posts are simultaneously religious or theological, and I won’t repeat those here.  There is one post that is really about everything, about the very existence of this blog, but which I have decided to list as primarily in this category:  #51:  In Memoriam on Groundhog Day, 160202.  This is a eulogy of sorts for my father, Cornelius Bryant Young, Jr., who is certainly the reason for the existence of the political materials, as he significantly supported my law school education and then regaled me with questions about whether Barrack Obama was a legitimate President.  He is missed.

I also wrote #65:  Being Married, which is not exactly my advice but my choice of the best advice I’ve received over several decades of marriage.  I’m hoping some found it helpful.

It should be noted that five days a week I post a study of scripture, and on a sixth day I post another essentially religious/theological/devotional post, on the Christian Gamers Guild’s Chaplain’s Teaching List.  That is far too many links to include here, but if you’re interested you can find the group through this explanatory page.

Game-related

There were a couple game-related posts in the previous index, this time two of them specifically about Multiverser.  There was some discussion about some of its mechanics on a Facebook thread, and so I gave some explanations for how and why two aspects of the system work–the first, in #38:  Multiverser Magic, 160112:  addressing difficulties people expressed concerning its magic system, the second, in #40:  Multiverser Cover Value, 160114:  explaining the perhaps not as complicated as it seems way it determines the effect of armor.

There was also another game-related post, #44:  The Feeling of Victory, 160121:  which discussed a pinball game experience to illustrate a concept of fun game play.

The award-winning Dungeons & Dragons™ section of the site (most notably chosen as an old-school gem by Knights of the Dinner Table) continues to get occasional notice; someone recently asked to use part of the character creation materials for work they were doing on a different game, and someone asked if I had a copy of my house rules somewhere, in relation to some specific reference I made to them.  Although I’m running a game currently, I don’t know that anything new will appear there.  The good people at Places to Go, People to Be are continuing to unearth the lost Game Ideas Unlimited articles and translating for their French edition.  Unfortunately, Je parle un tres petit peux de francais; I can’t read my own work there.

Logic and Reasoning

Periodically a topic arises that is really only about thinking about things.  That came up a couple times in the past couple months.  first, someone wrote an article about the severe environmental impact of using the universal serial bus (USB) power port in your car to charge your smartphone while you drive, and in #45:  The Math of Charging Your Phone, 160122, we examined the math and found it at least a bit alarmist.  Then when people around here were frantically stripping local grocery store shelves of all the ingredients for French Toast (milk, bread, and eggs) because of a severe weather forecast, we published #46:  Blizzard Panic, 160124.

On Writing

I left this category for last for a couple of reasons, several of those reasons stemming from the fact that most of this connects to the free electronic publication of my book Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel, and I just published the last installment of that to the site.  You can find it fully indexed, every chapter with a one-line reminder (not a summary, just a quip that will recall the events of a chapter to those who have read it but hopefully not spoil it for those who have not), here.  There have been about seventy-five chapters since the last of these posts, and that (like the Bible study posts) is too much to copy here when it is available there.  That index also includes links to these web log posts, but since this is here to provide links to the posts, I’ll include them here, and then continue with the part about the future of the site.

  1. #35:  Quiet on the Novel Front, 160101:  The eighth behind-the-writings peek at Verse Three, Chapter One, Chapters 43 through 48.
  2. #37:  Character Diversity, 160108:  The ninth behind-the-writings peek at Verse Three, Chapter One, Chapters 49 through Chapter 54.
  3. #39:  Character Futures, 160113:  The tenth behind-the-writings peek at Verse Three, Chapter One, Chapters 55 through 60.
  4. #43:  Novel Worlds, 160119:  The eleventh behind-the-writings peek at Verse Three, Chapter One, Chapters 61 through 66.
  5. #47:  Character Routines, 160125:  The twelfth behind-the-writings peek at Verse Three, Chapter One, Chapters 67 through 72.
  6. #50:  Stories Progress, 160131:  The thirteenth behind-the-writings peek at Verse Three, Chapter One, Chapters 73 through 78.
  7. #53:  Character Battles, 160206:  The fourteenth behind-the-writings peek at Verse Three, Chapter One, Chapters 79 through 84.
  8. #55:  Stories Winding Down, 160212:  The fifteenth behind-the-writings peek at Verse Three, Chapter One, Chapters 85 through 90.
  9. #57:  Multiverse Variety, 160218:  The sixteenth behind-the-writings peek at Verse Three, Chapter One, Chapters 91 through 96.
  10. #59:  Verser Lives and Deaths, 160218:  The seventeenth behind-the-writings peek at Verse Three, Chapter One, Chapters 97 through 102.
  11. #61:  World Transitions, 160301:  The eighteenth behind-the-writings peek at Verse Three, Chapter One, Chapters 103 through 108.
  12. #64:  Versers Gather, 160307:  The nineteenth behind-the-writings peek at Verse Three, Chapter One, Chapters 109 through 114.
  13. #66:  Character Quest, 160313:  The twentieth behind-the-writings peek at Verse Three, Chapter One, Chapters 115 through 120.
  14. #69:  Novel Conclusion, 160319:  The twenty-first and final behind-the-writings peek at Verse Three, Chapter One, Chapters 121 through 126.

The Future of the Site

I would like to be able to say that the future holds more of the same.  There are still plenty of time travel movies to analyze; I have started work on the analysis of a film entitled Time Lapse, but it will take at least a few days I expect.  This is a presidential election year and we have clowns to the left and jokers to the right, as the song said, and with the extreme and growing polarization of America there are plenty of hot issues, so there should be ample material for more political and legal columns.  The first novel has run its course, but there are more books in the pipeline which could possibly appear here.

However, it unfortunately all comes down to money.  My generous Patreon patrons are paying the hosting fees to keep this site alive, but I am a long way from meeting the costs of internet access and the other expenses of being here.  Time travel movies cost money even when viewed on Netflix.

The second novel, Old Verses New, is finished–sort of.  No artwork was ever done for it, and it is actually more difficult to promote articles on the Internet that do not have pictures (frustrating for someone who is a writer and musician but has no meaningful skill in the visual arts).  More complicating, Valdron Inc invested some money into it, paying an outside editor to go through it, and they still hope to find a way to recoup their investment at least.  I might have to buy their interest in it to be able to deliver it to you, and that again means more money.

So what can you do?

If you are not already a Patreon supporter, sign up.  A monthly dollar from every reader of the site would not make me wealthy, and probably would not cover all the bills, but it would go a long way in that direction.  Even a few more people giving five or ten dollars a month to keep me live would make a massive difference.  I think Patreon also has a means of making a one-time gift, and that also helps.

Even if you can’t do that, you can promote the site.  Whenever there is a new post or page here you think was worth a moment to read, take another moment to forward it–it is easy to do through most social media sites, some of which have buttons on the bottoms of the web log pages for quick posting, and in all cases I post new entries at Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, and even MySpace, all of which have some way of easily sharing or recommending posts.  Let people know if there’s a good political piece, or time travel article, or whatever it is.  Increased readership means, among other things, an increased potential donor base–support to keep us alive here.

There are other ways to help.  Several time travel fans have over the years provided DVD copies of movies, either from their own libraries or purchased and sent directly to me, all of which have been analyzed.  I now also have the ability (thanks to a gifted piece of not-quite-obsolete discarded technology) to watch YouTu.be and Netflix videos on my old (not widescreen) television, and with some difficulty to watch other internet videos on borrowed Chromecast equipment (not as satisfactory–can’t pause or rewind without leaving the room to access the desktop).  Links to (safe and legal) copies of theatrically-released time travel movies make it possible to cover them now, for as long as the money keeps me online.  (Yes, even “free” videos cost money to see.)  One reader very kindly gave me a Fandango gift card to see Terminator Genisys in the theatre, which was a great help and enabled me to do the quick temporal survey published here, although I had to obtain a copy of the DVD to do the full analysis web page (it is nigh impossible to take notes in a darkened movie theatre, and very difficult to get all the vital details from an audio recording).

You can also ask questions.  I don’t check e-mail very often (seriously, people started using it like an instant messaging system, I have cut back to every three to six weeks) but I do check it and will continue to do so as long as the hosting service and internet access can be maintained; I interact through Facebook and (to a much lesser degree) the other social media sites mentioned, and often take a question from elsewhere to address here.  That gives me material in which you, the readers, are interested.  I do write about things which interest me, but I do so in the hope that they also interest you, and if I know which ones do that helps more.

So here’s to the future, whatever it may bring, and to the hope that you will help it bring more to M. J. Young Net and the mark Joseph “young” web log.

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