4 May 2005

Volume Two

One month later, I've finally gotten around to setting up "volume two" of the "God's ex-Boyfriend" site. From now on, all new entries in this category will go there.

Whose Ten Commandments?

With all the Christian legislators, judges, and busybodies trying to get the Ten Commandments of Moses into permanent public displays at places of government, I thought a review of them would be in order. After all, they're supposedly an important part of our cultural heritage and the basis of our legal code.

So let's check them out one by one, to see if they're something I really agree with, and if they're really the basis for U.S. laws:

1: "I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me."

OK, we're already in trouble here. For one thing, he's not my God. I'm not Hebrew, so my people were never in bondage in Egypt. And that bit about other gods stands in direct contradiction to the anti-establishment clause of the First Amendment. So we've got a conflict with my my own personal values, and the law of the land.

2: "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain."

Again, he's not my God, so the commandment is meaningless to me. And this one conflicts with the free-speech clause of the First Amendment, which guarantees the right to say things like "God this cheeseburger is heavenly!"

3: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them."

Taken literally, this forbids making any kind of respresentational sculptures or even illustrations, which is definitely not consistent with my own beliefs. I'm a practising likeness-maker. I'm not the sort to bown down to these things, but I'm not going to stand in the way of anyone who wants to. And it's pretty clearly inconsistent with the free-expression-of-religion clause of the First Amendment, because it says that idol worshippers... can't.

4: "Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy."

No day of the week is holy to me. Not even Fridays. Although there are laws on the books that try to enforce such a thing (like those prohibiting the sale of alcohol between 2am and noon on Sunday), they really are nothing more than thinly-disguised attempts to establish a particular religion.

5: "Honor thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long."

OK, finally here's one I'm OK with, personally. I'm all for treating one's parents with respect. But there's precious little in U.S. law that actually reflects this principle. Once a person reaches adulthood, they're free to disobey and disrespect their parents all they want.

6: "Thou shalt not kill."

Another I agree with. And our laws are pretty solidly behind it as well (albeit with exceptions for circumstances). But the notion that this is where civil laws against killing came from is pretty ludicrous, because there were laws against killing in civilisations that pre-date the time of Moses.

7: "Thou shalt not commit adultery."

They're starting to lose me again. I agree with the principle that if someone pledges not to have sex with anyone else, he should live up to that. But I'm really not that keen on monogamy, for myself personally. And I think any broken promises of fidelity are a matter between the two people involved, not the state. Nonetheless, there's a long tradition of prohibiting adultery in our legal system. But of course it too goes back to sources other than Moses.

8: "Thou shalt not steal."

See "Thou shalt not kill."

9: "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour."

I'd say that's a good rule. (Especially since it doesn't say "Thou shalt not lie", which would be a whole different kettle of fish.) And since perjury can result in someone going to jail or receiving some other legal penalty, I'd say it's appropriate for the law to enforce this rule, as it does.

10: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor's. "

I'll covet my neighbour's ass all I want. Seriously, while coveting isn't exactly the most admirable thing to do, and I generally avoid it myself, I don't see any great harm coming from it. Interestingly this one is at complete odds with our society, in which coveting the Joneses' house and car and other possessions is the engine of our economy. There certainly aren't any laws against coveting.

So there we have it: Only 4 out of 10 (# 5,6,8,9) are things that match my own personal beliefs. Only 4 out of 10 (# 6,7,8,9) are actually consistent with the laws of the United States. And the three that actually stand up to both tests are the no-brainer commandments against killing, stealing, and perjury. Like anybody really needed those handed to them on stone tablets.

All of which goes to shows that: A) Promoting the Ten Commandments is shoving a religion I don't believe in down my throat. And: B) They're very thoroughly un-American.

Of course a huge majority of Americans favor putting these commandments on display in government buildings. Because they happen to believe in them. But that's whole damn point of putting protections in the Constitution for religious freedom: to protect the minority from the tyrrany of the majority. And the majority who want to override that are welcome to go fuck off and establish their theocratic dictatorship somewhere else.

The Irony of Product Liability

Today a co-worker sent me one of those ha-ha-snicker e-mails that get passed around the 'net like the sniffles. It was a list of warning labels and disclaimers found on various products, the point being to show how stupidly obvious some of them are. Things like a package of peanut brittle saying "contains nuts".

Of course the real purpose of these warnings is for businesses to avoid any and all legal liability, but more often they're the result of stupid executives listening to stupid/dishonest lawyers scaring them with outlandish tales of how dangerous civil courts are. After all, nobody's really that stupid... are they?

Public opinion polls - on topics like stem cell research, economics, cloning, foreign policy, and anything else that requires some critical thinking skills and general thoughtfulness - tend to indicate that, yes: many people really are that stupid. Just look at the 2004 election results.

The irony is that it's mostly the Republican party that's trying to use these examples of liability-gone-amok to loosen regulations on corporations. That's ironic because, if these warning labels disappear, the first to die will be the epsilon semi-morons who - in addition to, say, buying "peanut brittle" despite severe peanut allergies - are most likely to vote Republican. The commerce-worshipping troglodytes in Congress are working to drain and fill in the neanderthal gene pool that they depend upon to stay in office.

Which is why I've decided to fully support the removal of product liability disclaimers on packaging. Yes, we'll lose some good-hearted mentally-challenged people along the way, but in the long run the collective intelligence of the species will go up enough that the Republican party will lose its electoral power base, and we can get a little smarts percolating up into Congress and the White House.

Tourism: Economy of Last Resort

It seems like every time community leaders and government officials talk about the future of the local economy, they talk about tourism as one of its pillars. You hear it about cities and towns of every size, state after state, and even occasionally on the national level.

Around here the economy has always been based on manufacturing (furniture in this part of Michigan, cars in the southeast of the state), but as anyone who follows business news knows, those industries have been heading overseas. For a while they talked a lot about high technology as the source of new jobs, but since the dot-com bubble burst you don't hear quite so much about that.

(Not that they've stopped saying it, of course. Last year when a bunch of plant closings were putting huge numbers of people into the job market, the "experts" kept telling them to get certificate training or 2-year degrees in "high tech"... while, I - a laid off computer specialist with a 4-year-degree and oodles of experience - couldn't even find jobs to apply for. All that advice did was to take some people out of the job market for a little while and put some federal grant money into local schools; those people will be just as unemployed when they're done with school.)

So they keep coming back to tourism. It sounds attractive, because it's all about getting people from other places to come here and spend their money. When it works, it's great for the locals. Tulip Time has been an ongoing annual infusion of cash into Holland, Michigan for decades. Sure, the people who live there have to put up with busloads of (mostly) senior citizens cluttering their streets and sidewalks for a few weeks in May, but the money they spend makes it worthwhile.

But when it fails... it's a complete waste of resources. Back when Flint (the former auto manufacturing city in east Michigan, whose economic collapse was spotlighted in Michael Moore's first big film) was in freefall back in the 1980s, they tried to attract tourism with Autoworld, a big automobile-focused theme park. Disaster with a capital D. No one came.

Even when tourist attractions prove successful, that doesn't mean that they're succeeding as an economic tool. There's an article in today's Grand Rapids Press about who's dominating reservations at Michigan's state parks for the upcoming camping season: us. Michigan is supposed to be a great tourist destination, with hundreds of miles of sandy beaches, inland lakes for fishing, forests for hiking, etc. But instead of drawing Kansans, Missourians, Kentuckians, Indianers, West Virginians, Alabamers, and whatnot to the Great Lakes State to spend their disposable income, we're mostly just passing the same dollars around with our fellow Michiganders. That's no replacement for the money we're not getting from making and selling cars, office furniture, refrigerators, and so on.

If that's how well the tourism economic strategy is working for Michigan - a state that has some natural and obvious reasons for people to come here - imagine how badly it's going to fail in all the places that are trying to make up tourist attractions. More Autoworlds.

Tourism has been a great windfall for various Old World capitals, and for some Third World countries and island-states in the tropics, and it's been good for a few select parts of the United States. But it's not a cure-all for an ailing economy. When everyone's trying to use tourism as a cornerstone of their local business model, you'll just end up with a bunch of hotels that people can't afford to travel to and stay in... because no one's coming to and staying in their hotels. It's kind of like you can't build an all-service economy where everyone's trying to make a living serving food or cleaning houses... and no one can afford to pay them for it. Or an economy based on information and other intangible "products". You need people doing things that are actually productive: growing food, making things, etc.

So unless you live in the Carribean or next to a Disney park, the next time you hear someone discussing local economic strategy, and he starts by talking about tourism... be afraid for your future.

Legal Kiddie Porn

You hear a lot of talk about kiddie porn on the internet. It seems that every legislator on the planet is trying to eradicate it. It's the one category of material that no one on the internet permits; read the terms of service for web hosting services, and if they give specific examples of material they won't permit, child pornography and pirated copyrighted material are the two items always forbidden... but since nearly every music lover in the post-industrial world downloads tunez, it's apparent that only one of those is really universally condemned: kiddie porn.

Except that it's just as obviously not universally condemned. A review of my site logs (as I was just doing) shows that.

Think about it: the reason kiddie porn is such a hot item on law-makers' and law-enforcers' agendas is that it's popular. This isn't just a handful of nutcases with a rare psychosis. Child pornography is something that lots of people out there are looking for. By a wide margin, the single most-hit page on this blog is one in which I prominently mentioned "kiddie porn" (in the context of snuff films, hate crimes, and other targets of recent legislation). That phrase is also the most-common search-engine key showing up in my referrer logs, despite the fact that I've written lots more about a lot of different topics. If I'm getting hundreds of instances of that phrase every month, imagine what Google is getting. And the fact that people are risking prosecution to sell it shows that it's popular enough to be rather profitable.

That raises the question of what this says about our society. The obvious response is that we're heading to hell in a handbasket, we've abandoned morality, etc. I don't buy that.

The modern obession with pornography in general isn't anything new. The only thing that the inventions of photography, motion pictures, video recorders, and the internet, have done over the past century or so, is to make porn easier to produce and distribute. People have always been attracted to images of people in the nude and especially having sex. Any student of art history can tell you that. I see no reason to assume that interest in seeing young people like that is new, either. All you have to do is look at the millennia-old traditions of adult men taking girls in their early teens as wives to confirm that pedophilia - or at least ephebophilia (the attraction to pubescents and adolescents) - has been around for a very long time. Evidently it's a part of human nature.

So what this contemporary hullaballoo over kiddie porn really says about our society is that our society is in conflict with itself. One of the most popular search subjects is also one of the most banned subjects.

I'm not trying to argue that just because it's popular, that makes it right. I understand that spouse-beating and pre-emptive invasions both have long and popular histories, but I'm definitely not advocating either of them. But by the same token, the fact that something's illegal doesn't necessarily make it pernicious, as demonstrated by the prohibition of alcohol in the U.S. in the 1920s, or laws against consensual homosexual activity. You have to look at it objectively, on its own.

The one thing that nearly everyone does agree on regarding child pornography is that abusing children to produce it is wrong. Of course there's some considerable difference opinion about what exactly constitutes "abuse", but there are also some pretty clear "wrong" areas and "right" areas. For example, if a child is physically harmed, that's obviously "wrong". If there are no actual children involved, that seems rather harmless.

After all, we let movie studios use special effects to simulate murder, dangerous stunts, animal abuse, and other things that would be horrible to allow in real life. If a video game showing a virtual soldier blasting the living fuck out of other virtual people isn't a threat to society (the only thing we question is whether children should have access to them), why is a movie showing a virtual 15-year-old masturbating? (I don't mind saying that I personally find the former a lot more disturbing.)

Out of curiosity, I did some research about this. It may surprise you (it surprised me) that the U.S. Supreme Court has said pretty much the same thing, at least as it applies to the question of "obscenity". They ruled that material that was produced without any actual minors - such as illustrations from imagination, or virtual porn - is not "child pornography" and therefore isn't automatically "obscene". (It can still be ruled obscene if it lacks artistic merit and so forth, just like any other sexually explicit material.) Which would be a relief to John Singer Sargent, who painted the accompanying image. On the other hand, other countries have taken the opposite position, and created legal concepts such as an "indecent pseudophotograph of a child", which are outlawed on the grounds that such things would promote child abuse.

If Prohibition, the so-called war on drugs, and the utter failure of efforts to get rid of sex in popular entertainment have shown us anything, it's that where there's an interest in something, you can't just legislate it away. If - as with alcohol, drugs, and porn - there are potentials for abuse and for people to get hurt, then the most reasonable course of action is to let them be... with regulation to limit their harmfulness. So why not let the NAMBLA guys draw their naughty pictures, let dirty old men make virtual-school-girl movies, and so forth... and put the hurt of the law on anyone who abuses actual boys or girls?

I'm not saying, "If you can't beat them, give up". I'm saying, "If you can't beat them... maybe you're playing the wrong game."

Gay Sex in Grand Rapids

OK, I said last week that I wasn't up for pursuing any kind of relationship, and I'd just stick to the exquisite pleasures that can be had in bed alone. But since then I've reconsidered... somewhat.

I'm definitely not in the market for a husband or even a boyfriend. But as I think about it, why not take a little effort at making contact with someone for something more casual? The habits of doing "the usual" with "the regulars" of my small social circle are OK, but I could stand to get out of the house and do some different things with some different people. Whether that's a new friend or a new fuck buddy or whatever... why not? And if something more develops... I'll deal with that when/if it happens.

I am definitely not a cruise-the-crowd type, so I've been browsing a few online match-making sites: Match.com, Glimpse.com, and Yahoo Personals. Thanks to their recent advertising, eHarmony popped into my head, but since I couldn't decide whether "Man seeking Woman" or "Woman seeking Man" was the best description for me, I gave up on that constipated den of paternalism pretty quickly.

Yahoo's software seems a bit crippled, but maybe that's because I'm not using Microsoft software. Glimpse seems to work pretty well, but I've had to be a little careful using that one: on my first visit I recognised a guy I spent a few years trying to duck some time ago... not a bad person, but he's completely incompatible and completely oblivious of that fact. So no picture of me there. Match.com is my favorite, since their software not only digs up people who match your search criteria, but also lets you see whose criteria you match, and shows you profiles that are mutually compatible with yours.

Of course one can easly see the time-honored personal-ad strategy of men of age x seeking men of age 18 thru x-5. But there are exceptions, and I see a fair amount of x-15 thru x+10. On the other hand, to be quite honest, for what I'm looking for, I really would prefer someone in the 18-25 range, even though I'm well beyond that myself. If I were looking for a "soulmate" or something of that sort, I'd prefer someone who remembers the same presidents and pop songs I do, but... I'm not. {smile}

But of course, I know that guys that age aren't generally aching to spend time with guys my age. And I'm OK with that. So I'll take my chances, see what happens, and... just see what develops.

Middle-Class White Suburban Punks

There's an article in The Grand Rapids Press about some arrests today, involving a recent rash of public vandalism in several inner-city neighborhoods. You can probably picture the situation: former middle-class homes now somewhat run-down, maybe vacant... closed businesses... most of the white folks moved out a few decades ago... lots of low-income tenant and homeowners... and now the scourge of "tagging": graffiti signatures and symbols in spray paint, repeated on any blank vertical surface. There goes the neighborhood, right?

Except that it's not homies or gangbangers doing the tagging. The teenagers they arrested were white kids from the 'burbs.

They had Dutch last names (this area was settled by puritans from the Netherlands), and they were students at East Grand Rapids High School, Grand Rapids Christian High School, and Byron Center High School, so it's a pretty safe bet they're white. EGR is the traditional upper-class suburb of the area; not quite the top of the economic pyramid anymore, but still the home of moneyed powerbrokers, and the high school a powerhouse in prep-school sports like tennis, lacrosse, and golf. GR Christian is your typical Calvinist parochial school, where the Bible is considered a textbook; it's still located in the city but its students are largely white suburbanites who can afford the substantial tuition. Byron Center is the until-recently-rural suburb where a highly talented and well-liked music teacher was run out of town for having a private commitment ceremony with his male lover, died from the stress of suing to get his job back, and the school board then refused to pay up on his severance settlement on the grounds that he was dead.

Which is a long way of explaining what kind of morality these schools and these parents are teaching their children. EGR lauds hereditary capitalism and preaches against liberal social programs. GR Christian rails against evolution and other secular science. Byron Center is hysterically anti-homosexual.

But apparently none of these schools is teaching the fundamentals of respect for other people.

Furthermore, these kids seem to be getting the message - gosh, I can't imagine where - that the neighborhoods to vandalise are the ones where the residents are less white and less affluent (and middle-class white families are often all-male or all-female). They're not picking on each other, or even the middle-class Dutch or Polish neighborhoods in the city. They're coordinating these nighttime assaults on the 'hood. I can assure you they're not coming here because they're less likely to get caught; it's pretty well patrolled, certainly better than the sprawling 'burbs where GR Christian students tend to hail from, and the subdividing farmlands of Byron.

For decades, white middle-class people have been fleeing cities for the suburbs, pointing to crime rates and quality-of-life issues such as graffiti as reasons why they just aren't safe here and don't want to live here. Well evidently it isn't just the fault of the poorer brown people who've stayed; Whitey's kids are coming back to make sure the place runs down.

I just wish these kids would stick to vandalising their own neighborhoods, and keep the malaise of graffiti out of our law-abiding communities here in the city.

Amway: Cancerous or Benign?

I narrowly avoided "the invitation" again the other day. Living in West Michigan, I've received a few of them over the years, and I know what they're about, so I recognised that it was coming and managed to deflect it by explaining that I just don't have time and (lying) don't need the money, and thanking him for thinking of me.

"The invitation" is a sales pitch, to become an Amway distributor. Because Amway is based here, we probably have one of the highest distributors-per-capita ratios on the planet. That's reason enough right there for someone around here to hesitate before adding oneself to the crowded marketplace for soap and other household products. But there are more universal reasons to steer clear of Amway.

At its heart, Amway is a pyramid scheme. It doesn't violate the various federal regulations, which prohibit scams in which there is no real product or service being sold, but that doesn't mean it isn't a pyramid scheme; it just means it's a legal pyramid scheme.

Contrary to what you might think from looking at some of Amway's "double diamond" distributors, no one ever got rich selling Amway products. The only way to get rich with Amway is to sell distributorships. You sign up a few of your friends to be distributors, and you get a percentage of the profits for every item they sell... including a percentage of the profits from any distributors they sign up. That's how Rich DeVos and Jay VanAndel became billionaires: by taking a percentage of the profits from every person who ever became an Amway distributor. It's really, really good to be at the top of the pyramid.

Despite living in the heart of Amway's operations, I've never received a sales pitch from an Amway distributor to buy Amway products. Just to become a distributor. OK, that's not quite true. I have been asked to become a customer... my own customer. I was told that I could offset my losses (the cost of starting up an Amway distributorship) with the money I'd save buying household products from myself at wholesale prices. This is clearly a standard sales tactic.

Of course Amway does sell actual products. But its flagship product line isn't their legendary biodegradable soap or any other items for the home. Its for businesses... for Amway distributorships, to be specific. Amway is quite honest about the fact that to make a lot of money, you need to be motivated to sell sell sell. (That's their explanation for the countless unprofitable distributorships: they blame it on individual laziness.) Which is why they have an entire division of the company devoted to motivational materials, seminars, and so forth.

The seminars - especially the big ones - are a lot like evangelical revivals for the religion of Mercantilism. They trot out people who became highly "successful", to tell their stories, preaching to the needy and faithful about how they made a lot of money selling Amway (the business model, not the products), and pumping them up to do the same. Of course the kind of people who need someone to tell them how to do this are the ones who'll never be able to pull it off. They just aren't the kind of extroverted Type-A glad-handing salescritters that do well at that. Instead they're the "fallen" of Mercantilism, and they need regular preaching to stay on the road to riches. Fortunately Amway has plenty of that to sell them.

Of course most Amway distributors understand that the key to making money is to have lots of other people selling for you, which is why they work so hard on those invitations to join the Amway clan. And that's my main objection to Amway on principle.

The whole company is based on the idea of turning personal relationships into commercial ones. They want to destroy the traditional family of parents, children, and siblings, and replace it with the Mercantile family of distributors, customers, and clients. They want to supplant friendship with distributorship. Neighborhoods with business networks. The founders and executives call themselves Christians, but there is nothing genuinely Christian about them. They're devout Mercantilists.

You can see this clearly even from the founders early lives. Rich DeVos and Jay VanAndel were best friends in school. So what did they do together? They formed businesses. Not "I've always been interested in ____, so let's turn that into a job" businesses, but seemingly random "I think we can make money from this" businesses: a flight school, a drive-in restaurant, a vitamin sales network, and finally a company to sell soap to their friends and neighbors. They were true believers since their youth.

Of course they've also done a lot to promote certain "Christian" principles, with VanAndel funding an institute dedicated to finding evidence to support the foregone conclusion that the world was created in seven days by God, and DeVos single-handedly prevented local Grand Valley State University from offering benefits to partners of homosexuals by threatening to withdraw millions in funding for their downtown campus. And they've both bankrolled political campaigns to advance the agendas of right-wing religious organisations. All stuff inspired by the books of Genesis and Leviticus, not by the gospels.

But they've channeled more of their cash and time into promoting their core faith... building up the downtown Grand Rapids business district, serving on the Chamber of Commerce, etc. And Amway itself has been relentless in its missionary work in the third world, spreading the gospel of Mercantilism to China especially.

Of course not all of the effects of this have been negative. Downtown Grand Rapids is a better place because of their investments. I'm sure good things are coming from the VanAndel Medical Institute, and the DeVos Center Women & Children Center at a local hospital (both of which came about after the founders started suffering from major health problems, requiring DeVos to buy an overseas heart transplant, and VanAndel to watch his wife suffer from Alzheimer's while experiencing Parkinson's himself). Their ongoing support for the arts, education, etc. - even with the strings attached - did a lot of good. But at what cost? They didn't create this wealth of theirs out of thin air; they got it from other people. And who's to say what good the people they got it from might have done? (Even simple things like feeding their families, or making their mortgage payments.)

The name "Amway" is short for "American Way", and their headquarters is built around a shrine to "Free Enterprise". Maybe that's what America is about, but I'd like to think that it aspires to something more ethical and morally defensible than the Mercantile gospel according to Rich and Jay.

Like maybe even the teachings of Jesus.

For example.