adam.oliner.net

I’ve been asked by a number of people whether I have ever considered running for political office. I usually laugh, and confess that I have thought about it. In the end, I would make an excellent politician but a terrible candidate. My convictions are strong and well-supported by facts, I am honest, and I am indelicate in my dealings with incompetence. All the things that would make me a strong leader would lead to my demise in the arena of public opinion.

I’m a competent debater, but would not have the patience for people like Alan Keyes, whose recent debate with Democratic rising star Barack Obama would have driven me to say things that would make Howard Stern blush. “I do not say that homosexual relations are an abomination, the Bible says so,” Keyes said. My response to such a declaration would have involved such contempt for Keyes, personally, and the religious right, generally, that I would likely alienate a significant portion of the population. As I have said before, the Bible is an allegorical work of fiction with some useful lessons. It teaches that the world was created 60,000 years ago, that the earth is the center of the universe, and that slavery is A-OK. For Keyes to pretend to wash his hands of his bigoted viewpoint by blaming it on a book, as though he is compelled to treat it as fact, demonstrates either a poor knowledge of the Bible or a weak sense of personal morality. Keyes stopped just short of repeating a Homer Simpson quote, in which Homer believes that he is bound by a fortune cookie to commit adultery:

Mindy: What’s wrong?
Homer: [crying] We’re going to have sex.
Mindy: Oh, well, we don’t have to.
Homer: Yes we do. The cookie told me so.
Mindy: Well, desserts aren’t always right.
Homer: But they’re so sweet.

If I was going to have any involvement in politics, it would need to be as removed from the campaigning process as possible. I find the mindless back-and-forth rhetoric physically painful to endure. I think holding political office would allow me to accomplish many important things, but I would not want to reach that office without being true to my beliefs. My dad warned me on several occasions to be mindful of what I post on my website, as it might close opportunities for me down the road. As I told him, I don’t want any part of something that requires me to hide or camouflage who I am.

He said that politics requires you to be either a crook or a megalomaniac. I’m no crook, I told him, but don’t count me out just yet.

Continuing my recent pattern of Colin-instigated blogging, I now respond to this post on same-sex marriage. Colin argues well that the issue is rather difficult for many of us to understand. From our perspective, sexual orientation falls under the same umbrella as race or religion. To deny a loving couple the ability to marry, instead offering a civil union, is as criminally absurd as “separate but equal” during the civil rights movement. Colin asked whether I thought his argument was effective enough so that “anyone reading who is an opponent of same-sex marriage [would] change their opinion.”

The content of his argument aside, since I’ve already praised it, I don’t think any such argument exists. That is, I don’t think any rational position, no matter how well-defended, will be able to convince some people. I was watching a terrifying show on PBS that focused on the battle between the religious right and, well, reason. I watched as members of the Texas school board, whose textbook choices tend to influence the purchases of the rest of the nation, argued that health textbooks should teach only abstinence. Parents stood before the board and recited facts about the effectiveness of such a program, only to be met with obfuscation and dismissal. Below I paraphrase one part of the discussion:

Board Member: Kids are taught about condoms, but they still have sex. They still get pregnant and get diseases. Condoms fail. We must teach abstinence.

Parent: We also teach fire safety, but fires still happen. We need to teach kids how to deal with their sexual fires. Condoms fail a very small percentage of the time, but 88% of abstinence vows are broken within a year. That’s why Texas has such high rates of teen pregnancy.

Board Member: May I remind everyone that this is the same group of people who argued against saying the Pledge of Allegiance?

[audience boos, though at whom is unclear]

In the end, the textbooks shipped without mention of condom use. Without reference to homosexuality. Without line drawings explaining how to give oneself a breast exam. In another segment, I watched a conservative woman explaining why she felt homosexuality and multiculturalism should not be taught in school: “Our kids are being taught that all cultures are equal. That they all have value. That is a flat-out lie.” Another man believed that public schools are “indoctrinating” children into homosexuality.

People like that are not interested in having a discussion. They don’t want to hear a rational argument, even if it withstands close scrutiny. Their views are based on something other than facts; instead, it comes from what they call “faith”. By my definition, faith is something you have when you don’t have facts or evidence. I choose to believe in God because I have no evidence one way or the other, and it makes me happier to pretend there’s some uber-powerful dude keeping me company. But when people attribute to faith something that amounts to ignorance, they do themselves and their communities a disservice. To many others, they do great harm.

If I was forced to distill my opinions on correct human behavior to a single phrase, a litmus test for good or evil, it would probably be a respectful nod to the Hippocratic Oath: first, do no harm. Homosexuals are called fags and denied the joy of marriage. Valuable knowledge about safe sexual practices are hidden from children, permitting the spread of deadly diseases. Scientific theories of the Big Bang and evolution are suppressed, while baseless theories like Creationism are pushed on an increasingly ignorant younger generation. Women are denied control of their own bodies, with disregard for their safety. Children are taught that Jews, like me, are going to hell. From what I see in the world, and on the news, this so-called “faith” of the religious right is an evil of the grandest sort.

Before I get down to business, I want to make sure all of you saw that my group at IBM recently publicized that the US has (unofficially) reclaimed the title of world’s fastest supercomputer. A portion of BlueGene/L successfully surpassed Japan’s Earth Simulator on the Linpack benchmark, which is essentially a bunch of linear algebra problems. BG/L managed to sustain 36 trillion floating point operations per second, which means in layman’s terms that it’s really, really fast. So, congrats to my co-workers, and woot for me, because now I can say that I was part of the team that made the fastest computer in the world.

In his latest entry, Colin presented his opinion on three important issues; my response follows. His comments were made in the context of the recent attempts by Congress to restrict the constitutional issues on which the Supreme Court can rule. As Colin correctly pointed out, this action was grossly in excess of the powers of Congress. I will talk about them in the same order: flag burning, gun control, and the “War on Drugs”.

I agree entirely with Colin’s sentiments. This is a stupid issue. Of course, people can burn the flag if they want to. It is protected political speech, which hurts no one and… you know what? Colin said all this, and I don’t have anything insightful to add.

Colin and I diverge somewhat on the subject of guns. His opinion is as follows.

The 2nd amendment, contrary to popular belief, is not an antiquated policy. It gives every U.S. citizen the right to protect themselves and their family. And there is no reason that any law-abiding and responsible citizen should [not] be allowed to own a firearm.

I added the “not” because I think that’s what he meant to say, in which case I agree. While the amendment itself is not antiquated, I want to emphasize something very important: the letter of the law is superceded by the spirit of it. That is, we must consider the intent of the amendment in order to interpret it. The way I understand it, the purpose of the 2nd Amendment was to give citizens the ability to protect themselves, their family, and their property. Specifically, this was geared toward allowing citizens to set up militias. Power to the people.

The right to “bear arms” is a rather vague statement, without reference to this intent. After all, by the letter of the law, one might argue that I have a right to own nuclear arms or assault rifles. Did some of you cringe when I put them both in the same sentence? My point is that the intent of the 2nd Amendment is served without giving citizens access to such powerful and dangerous weapons. A handgun, rifle, or shotgun is sufficient. Colin goes off the old sanity cliff right about… here:

To take it one step further, would you feel more comfortable and safer if you were allowed to carry a concealed weapon? Even better, if you were a mugger, or rapist, or robber, wouldn’t you be less likely to commit a crime if you believed everyone was carrying concealed weapons?

I think letting Joe American walk around with a concealed weapon is a terrible idea. First of all, I simply don’t trust most people with guns. Arguments get out of hand, tempers rise, impulses take over; having a gun on hand provides an outlet that neither of us want people to use. The next time some lunatic cuts you off and you just want to run him off the road and stomp on his mangled corpse, ask yourself what you might have done if you had a gun in the glove compartment. When it’s in your home, locked in a closet, there is an inherent cool-down time before a confrontation escalates.

Furthermore, as a robber/rapist, if I expected my target to be carrying a gun, I would not be discouraged from committing the crime. I would shoot the person before they had a chance to see me. I would hit them from behind and rob them with their own gun. I would not give up crime; on the contrary! I would have easy access to a weapon no matter where I was. There was a fantastic comedy skit, which Colin may remember us watching in Hotel Pennsylvania years ago. The comedian suggested that everyone should carry a gun, loaded and cocked, and pointed at other people, at all times. He joked that everyone would be super-careful and polite, something like mutual assured destruction for the suburban world. But it was a joke. Everyone would die.

Moving on to the “War on Drugs” (as Colin so correctly placed in quotation marks). It is certainly ineffective. I also agree that sentencing for drug crimes is inexplicably disproportionate to other offenses. I think a compelling argument could be made for the legalization of pot. For example, consider the damage that smoking pot does, relative to the damage inflicted by, say, alcohol or nicotine cigarettes. Alcohol can make you violent, pot can’t. Nicotine is physically addictive, pot isn’t. There is currently a violent and seedy black market for pot, but this is artificial; it exists solely because pot is illegal, like “Speak-easy”s during Prohibition. If we legalized marijuana, and taxed it like we tax cigarettes, we would get a triple payoff: (1) spend less money “fighting” pot trafficking and offenses, (2) millions in tax revenue, and (3) a happy and pacified public. I can’t say I agree that the current system is unconstitutional, but it’s certainly illogical.

Rebuttal? Also: don’t forget to watch the Presidential “debate” tonight. It’s not going to be much of a debate due to the format, but Kerry is obliged to slaughter Bush regarding foreign policy, or he can kiss his chances in this election goodbye.

If you ever notice that my blog is down, you should probably go check the news. Whenever this site is out of commission, shit tends to travel downward, as the saying goes. For example, while Eddie moved back to this side of the country, aquatica was offline. During that time you missed: a day in The City with Heather; dinner and drinks with Hung and Erik; the RNC; Anna, Alice, Andrew, and Yuuai the dog; a disturbing massacre at a Russian school; and, lest I forget, you missed me being attacked in the shower by the very spawn of Shelob herself. Most of these deserve extensive elaboration, particularly the Shelob-Spawn Incident, which could be extended to form the 7th and perhaps even 8th books of the increasingly-misnamed Lord of the Rings trilogy.

For the first time in two decades, I will not be going to classes this fall. Instead, I am remaining at IBM, presumably working on my M.Eng. thesis and applying to grad schools. There’s a lot to be done, and I am writing this from work, in fact.

I watched Bush’s speech at the RNC with Erik and Hung at a bar in NYC, which meant that my drunken commentary was complimented by the drunken heckling of everyone else in the bar. Erik had trouble sitting still for it, so offensively stupid did he find the rhetoric. It was what we all expected: he didn’t talk about the huge costs of the Iraq war, the squandering of the budget surplus into the biggest deficit ever, or job loss, yet he proposed many new and expensive spending initiatives that sometimes sounded quite nice, but that Bush can’t possibly fund without raising taxes, which he promised to cut. All hail Bush, the magical money-making machine! Or, maybe, he’s just full of it.

I’ve missed much in the way of juicy political news, so I’ll end with a bit of an editorial medley. And… go. I don’t particularly care about Bush’s military record, but is it any wonder that Bush’s supporters are desperately lying about Kerry’s military service when Bush’s looks like this? On the subject of flip-flopping, I won’t go into how many times a change of position in light of new information has been misrepresented by the Bush camp as a Kerry flip-flop. How many times must Kerry say that he originally voted for the war because Bush lied about the immediate threat and how he would pay for it, but then voted against it when there was no way to pay for it and it turned out Bush had no proof that Iraq was a threat? It’s simple, people. And now, somehow, Bush would have you believe that Kerry speaking out against Iraq using the phrases of his fellow Democrat Howard Dean is somehow a change of position. No, George, just a change of phrasing.

But let’s not think that Kerry is special, here. Recently, Bush made a verbal oopsie by claiming that the war on terror isn’t winnable. This, of course, is a reversal of all previous policies, and the Bush camp has since gone to extraordinary efforts to explain away the faux pas as an honest mistake. And just today, Cheney implied that voting for John Kerry would make you responsible for a future terrorist attack. His spokeswoman immediately backpedaled and clarified the statement, saying that his words were misunderstood and out of context; what he really meant was what she was saying, not what he said. Sound familiar?

Things change, and sometimes the smart thing to do is to change your mind. People make mistakes, and sometimes the only thing to do is retract your statement, apologize, and move on. But this is a two-way street. Bush has attacked Kerry on these points far too many times, and they have no choice but to retaliate in kind. Fire with fire. Kerry has been working really hard to keep the campaign a positive one, letting Edwards and his crew throw the punches.

The most bothersome bit about everything that I said above is that I agree with Bush’s accidental characterization of the War on Terror as unwinnable. Of course it’s unwinnable; there is no political body that can surrender to us, no person who we can kill, or government we can replace such that the battle is over. And with every bomb we drop on a civilian house in Iraq, we give birth to another potential terrorist. This is a subtlety beyond the reach of most people, and so Bush and Kerry have both taken the stance that victory is within our grasp. So, what to do?

There is an expression, that I regettably cannot cite, which says, “If your opponent is determined to take off your nose, get ready to lose your nose.” If a terrorist is determined to kill people, no matter what the price to himself, he will succeed. This so-called war is a war of hearts and ideas. It requires economics and diplomacy and communication. John Kerry is the only candidate who understands this. Bush has made it clear in the last four years and in his rhetoric that war is his solution. War should be a last resort, and will not bring us “victory against Terror,” if anyone even knows what that means. Register to vote now. Tell your friends why Kerry is the best man for the job. This is not a war that I wish to pass on to my children.

SARCASM: Presidential candidate John Kerry would like to arm our soldiers with flowers instead of guns, and teach them how to talk about their problems instead of fighting all the time. He wants our military to be more tender and generally cutesy. Thank God we’ve got Vice President Dick Cheney to stand up and say, “A sensitive war will not destroy the evil men…” Ignore for a moment the fact that President Bush said “we must be sensitive about expressing our power and influence,” and that Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Wolfowitz, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Richard Myers, and even Cheney himself have all used the word “sensitive” to describe our military actions. Please forget about that for a moment, because you are completely unable to comprehend the concept of hypocrisy, and should focus on trusting everything I say. break SARCASM;

I am slowly being numbed to hypocrisy of this sort, and am becoming more upset by the condescension. Cheney doesn’t care if he’s used the word “sensitive” before, and he doesn’t care if you realize it. He wants you to believe that Kerry is a tree-hugging liberal lunatic, and he’s willing to twist Kerry’s meaning beyond recognition to do it. Of course Kerry doesn’t want our military to be all huggable and soft, he meant sensitive as in sensible, responsive, and able to acutely perceive information available to it. That’s not liberal craziness, it’s intelligence. Cheney thinks so little of the American people that he takes this word, picks a connotation of it that he can attack, and describes an imaginary person that he knows will frighten most voters. How many people would take the time to look up the original transcript for context? How many people would be skeptical enough of Cheney’s comments to think about what Kerry may have meant or to look up the word? After all, isn’t it much simpler to think that Kerry didn’t mean our military should be “tender”, but rather should “have quick and acute sensibility” or be “readily affected or changed” in response to external events?

Now wait a minute, those last interpretations seem familiar. Where did I hear them? Oh, that’s right, today’s announcement by the Bush administration that it would be moving more than 60,000 troops closer to home so that the military could be “more mobile, more available” and more capable of responding to new threats. So it seems that Kerry wasn’t so much spouting crazy ideas, but really suggesting a mentality strikingly similar to Bush’s. Could that have provoked the insultingly patronizing reaction from Cheney?

Kerry’s comment was a simple truth; not particularly profound, but safely accurate. But since each side must childishly oppose the other on every point, the Bush camp was obliged to slam Kerry in no uncertain terms. I don’t think the troop movement is a particularly logical manifestation of that strategy, by the way. It’s not clear to me how moving many of our troops to one place will make them more available “at other places all over the earth,” nor is it clear to me why having them at home makes us safer. Are there enemy tanks thundering through your home town? Enemy jets buzzing your bedroom? I’m no military expert, but I can only conclude that the move was a political bribe to get the families whose children will now be closer to home to remember Bush come election day.

But, I don’t want to suggest too loudly that the Bush administration might be primarily motivated by political factors. They’re very sensitive about that.