"My Knowledge Is Superior To Your Enthusiasm"
The latest tragic geekstorm is this: fake nerd girls. Women are pretending to be nerdy, because it’s trendy! How dare they?!
In other breaking news, my eighteen year-old self is has just flown through the time barrier to punch every one of these complainers in the nuts.
Seriously, guys? Your complaint is that comic books have become so popular that cute girls are emulating you? I feel an attack of Condescending Wonka coming on:
“But Ferrett, you don’t understand!” the haters complain. “These girls? They’re not real fans. They just watched, like, the Justice League cartoon and the only Green Lantern they know is Kyle Rayner! They don’t deserve to wear the T-shirt!”
Really, dipweed? Who decided what level of knowledge someone had to possess before they could become a fan?
The thing that constantly amazes me about minority groups is how, after being beaten up by the outside world for not fitting in, they retreat to a hidden locale where they’re accepted among others like themselves… and then manufacture reasons why other people can’t fit in with their group. Hey, we’re gay – but those creepy bisexuals are playing at their gaydom, kissing women for male approval! Hey, we’re a bunch of dominants and submissives, inflicting pain for pleasure – but those switches, the ones who alternate between dispensing pain and receiving it, well, they’re not really committed to the scene!
One of the Great Nerd Dysfunctions is that we confuse “depth of knowledge” for “depth of love.” It’s a given in many nerd communities that you can’t be a True Doctor Who Fan until you’ve watched all fifty years of the show, seen every episode from every Doctor, and can discuss the differences between the BBC audio dramas and the novelizations. Because that’s what you’re supposed to do, if you’re a nerd: consume relentlessly. Become an authority. Acquire the mantle of respectability, so when those Doctor Who Dick Wars come a-knockin’, you know exactly what happened to the footage from lost Shada, and which episode it was later reused in, and the embarrassing reason why.
And if someone doesn’t know all of that stuff and yet they claim to be a fan, well, they haven’t put in the same work as you. Therefore, they cannot love as deeply as you do.
Read: they are not as good as you.
But the truth is, knowledge does not equal enthusiasm. I’ve known Star Wars “fans” who had counted the number of shots were fired in the hallway battle in A New Hope, and they treated their fandom with a grim, possessive bullishness: I have invested my life in this, and even though I hate this new book series and this new set of toys is crap, I must have all the things or it doesn’t count. They often speak bitterly about the crappy novels they’ve read, the way Lucas is fucking things up, the way Disney will now fuck things up, showing not a love of Star Wars but a constant disappointment that it does not match up with the imaginary construct in their head.
Whereas there are people who have never heard of the novelizations, but love the fucking fuck out of the six hours they’ve invested in the movies.
So who’s better? Trick question: the answer is, “neither.” They both express love in their own way.
Point is that the real complaint of a lot of these disgruntled fanboys is, “They don’t know as much as I do!” Which is true. But that doesn’t make these fans fakers. It means they love a small part of a much vaster whole, but that love is deep and real. Maybe they’ll choose to explore more, when they get the chance. Maybe they don’t get pleasure from tracking down every last scrap of continuity. Who the hell cares? Fandom is large. I do not have to have read every last Star Wars novel to call myself a Star Wars fan. That girl does not have to know about every being who’s taken on the mantle of the Green Lantern ring to have the heroic adventures of that incarnation of Kyle Rayner resonate with her.
What you’re upset about is that they’re not respecting your hierarchy. And in that, you can fuck off. You tried to escape hierarchies when you were on the bottom, and now you’re trying to manufacture one where you’re on the top? That makes you a petty, shallow sonuvabitch.
Plus, there’s a hidden misogyny in there, in that you hardly ever see this sort of kerfluffle about guys wearing Green Lantern shirts and not meaning it. The geek refuge is all too often the He-Man’s Woman-Haters Club meeting, where any guy who wears the clothes is accepted without question, but any woman has to pass the secret test.
Why? For fuck’s sake, I’ve been playing Magic since The Dark, which puts me in the old grognard club of Magic players. I’ve edited a Magic site. I’ve been a Magic celebrity, such as it was. And when I talk to some some twenty-something college kid and discover we both play and he tells me, “I love Magic! I’m totally into it. I have, like, all the cards,” I don’t think, oh, you ignorant fuck, let me show you how it’s done. I think, boy, I’m glad he’s getting such pleasure out of it, and he’s gonna learn soon how many cards he doesn’t have, and I hope that encourages him to get all the ones he wants. It’s okay that he doesn’t have all the dual lands like I do, or that he’s never played Rochester Draft, or that he’s probably not really understanding of what Standard is or how it works.
I think he has a love. A love that may lead him down the same paths as me, or it may not. But the joy he gets in slinging cards, incompetently, with his buddies over the lunchroom table is no less true.
And that’s why yes. You can wear the T-shirt.
What Would Happen If The South Seceded?
There’s a petition being circulated in Texas by nutballs, wanting to secede from the Union. These are a minority of nutballs, rest assured. I’m pretty sure if Texas voted to secede from the Union, it wouldn’t pass.
But what if the South did secede?
I’ve been pondering that idea over the past couple of days, as angry conservative Southerners have been all like, “Let’s secede!” and angry liberal Northerners have been all, “Let ’em go! They’re a drag on our economy anyway!” And as such, I’ve been intensely curious as to what happened if there was a peaceful Southern secession.
I mean, because I’ve been reading (and enjoying!) Daniel Abraham’s The Dragon’s Path series, which looks at a big ol’ fantasy world from the perspective of a banker. And one of the recurring themes in the book is the necessity of trade between nations, and how that affects politics. The plains don’t have mines for steel, the coastlines don’t have enough wood, nobody has enough spice. So we have to ship those things back and forth, and come up with trade routes and protect them from bandits and set taxes on them, which creates a very complex admixture of cultures.
I mean, it’s all fine and well to say, “All right, South, secede!” But Texas has the oil, and the South has a lot of the farmland, and probably a hundred other things we don’t think of as scarce now but would be if we suddenly had to trade at increased costs for them. And I wish some economist would do a big study to find out what actually would cost more, and try to map out the first-level effects of those causes to both sides, if suddenly we were split into two.
I mean, Coke is headquartered in Atlanta. Would there be a literal split, with extra taxes from a foreign corporation, where suddenly Pepsi became the drink of the North?
I don’t know. Probably not, but I want someone smarter than me to figure this out, because it would be fascinating reading.
A Plea To Liberals: Hurt 'Em In A Good Way. Overall.
There’s been a lot of talk about “the Republican Bubble” lately, and rightfully so. But a lot of my liberal pals have been discussing the Republicans high-handedly, as though liberals have a one-to-one correlation with thoughts and reality.
I sort of mentioned this yesterday, when I said, “One of the problems that liberals have is that they often think that businesses are magic money-making machines.” To flesh that thought out further, while conservatives generally think of the market as a continual force for good, liberals think of the market as an unkillable Golden Goose. Doesn’t matter how many regulations you force companies to jump through, or how many taxes you lay on them – they’re business! They’ll be all right. What matters is the people who work for those businesses!
But every new regulation has a very real cost. Every new tax puts some poor bastard out of business because he can’t compete any more. Every new nice thing that businesses are forced to do via legislation for their employees means that someone can’t afford to hire a new worker – or may have to lay people off to make his quotas.
And these are not evil. Because the other liberal bias is to think that any decision based on cash is evil. Any layoff, any cut in benefits, any restructuring is just a greedy jerk trying to stick his nose in the trough. But there are also good businessmen, people who care, people who get fucking ulcers because they’ve looked at their books and they can’t afford to keep ten people on-board any more, they have to let two go.
There are hard limits in business. And whenever you make it harder for someone to do business, you’re hurting someone’s livelihood. And that’s not cool. A guy’s sunk his entire life into making his own business, investing his life savings to try to make it in America… and suddenly thanks to a flurry of paperwork and incremental taxes nibbling him to death like ducks, he has to go to my wife and declare bankruptcy.
That’s a bad situation for anyone to be in.
Which is not to say that regulation is bad. You need it to keep businesses in check, because otherwise we’re back to child labor and sawdust in our bread.
But liberals, think of regulation and taxes as surgery – you’re going to be doing some initial damage, and risking doing more permanent injury, in order to rectify a problem. It’s something that may do more harm than good, if you’re not careful. A poorly written law can bury someone in useless paperwork, increasing costs across the board and not actually fixing what you wanted to.
With every new law you’re affecting people’s lives just as surely as you are cutting welfare benefits or cutting back on libraries – you’re making it harder for these businesses to get by. And they will not automatically just get by. Some of them may go under. Some people may lose their jobs. Some people may be heartbroken.
I’m not saying not to do it. I’m saying not to do it lightly.
Papa Johns and the Insurance Dilemma
(EDIT RIGHT UP FRONT: Within minutes of posting this, Andrew Ducker pointed out that what John said was actually riotously misquoted by the media in a ridiculous game of telephone. His actual statements are much more defensible, as he’s not enacting the consequences, but rather pointing out what his franchisees – who he has limited control over – are likely to do. It’s still an attempt to interject himself into the political scene, but he’s not the one threatening to swing the hammer. That said, I wrote a whole essay here and I’m not going to delete it, in the hopes that other people might be enlightened instead of passing along misinformation as I did.
(…but I had a link and everything! Bleah.)
So the CEO and founder of Papa Johns has said that he’s going to have to cut people’s hours to account for the rise of costs in the wake of Obamacare. And I’m of several minds about this.
You’ve got a lot of people saying, “Oh, you say you’d have to raise costs by fifteen cents a pizza to keep your employees insurance? Shut up and take my quarter.” But having to raise prices on pizza, which seems to me to be a pretty interchangeable thing, probably is damaging to their business. And the new laws of having to provide insurance to employees at locations with fifty or more employees probably hits their bottom line more than they’d like. Unlike many liberals, who view the costs as trivial, I see it as a significant expense in a business that probably doesn’t have a ton of margin.
I’m actually sympathetic. You’re in a tough market, here’s some added expenses that’s going to make it harder for you to stay afloat. One of the problems that liberals have is that they often think that businesses are magic money-making machines: shut up and suck up the taxes and the extra costs and the expenses of paying the regulations, you whiner. You’ll be all right. Because if you own a business, then you just have the money automagically. It’s not like people ever go out of business because they can’t afford to keep up with expenses.
Even if it’s a multi-million dollar corporation, you can still go under. And you still have to answer to stockholders, who are effectively psychotic robbers who only care if you made more money this quarter. You’re kind of held hostage by Wall Street.
Still. I’m sure other expenses have created places where Papa Johns would lose money, and John Schnatter didn’t make public speeches about them. So what’s he doing? Basically, campaigning against Obamacare. He says it’s not political; bullshit. He’s calling out Obamacare to say, “If we lay you off, blame Obama.”
Which is fine. It’s his business. If he wants to go that route to save on expenses, so he shall. But in doing so, what he’s telling the entire world is, “I would rather these people suffer than we lose fifteen cents on a pizza. Or, you know, we come in a little lower on profits for the quarter.” And that’s the cold businessman speaking, the kind of guy who says, “Okay, well, your kids’ teeth are rotting because all you can afford is Ramen, but I couldn’t let my profit margin dip a tenth of a point!”
And at that point, it becomes battling PR. Yeah, you’ve got a right to complain. You’ve got a right to reallocate resources as you see fit to keep your business alive. But you’ve also got a right for people to look at you as some serpentine-blooded sonuvabitch, the kind of guy who actually goes, “Can you believe that you’d have to pay fifteen cents extra to keep a guy’s family insured? Christ, what a pain.”
So yeah. You can do it, buddy. But it makes you look like a callous douche. Which a lot of businessmen are, but don’t be surprised when there’s pushback on that logic.
If You Can Run A Winning Campaign, You're Probably Fit To Be President
Organizing and running a national campaign is such a monstrously complex thing that I’ve actually come to a strange conclusion: the system works. The guy who gets elected President is, by and large, the one who’s more competent.
(Not “the most” competent, mind you. Just more than the other guy.)
The reason I bring this up is because of this fascinating article in Ars Technica, describing all the technical problems Mitt Romney had in the last days of his campaign. TL;DR version: Mitt’s campaign rushed out a huge, cobbled-together piece of software to coordinate efforts, didn’t test how it would perform under crushing, constant load (like, say, Election Day), sent the wrong passwords to large segments of their people, and didn’t actually provide documentation on how to use it until the day before.
And I’m thinking: this is the businessman? The guy who’s making a series of chump mistakes that any competent corporation would avoid?
Compare to Barack Obama, who looked over the electoral map and said, “Each county is like the FBI and CIA, theoretically doing a lot of the same things but not talking to each other.” And created a large-scale infrastructure so all the Democratic local offices could share data with each other. To a large extent, Obama’s victory was about mastering IT.
But I’m not just saying this because I liked Obama! I first started wondering about it in the disastrous 2004 election, when John Kerry got Swiftboated.
Because Karl Rove was (and is) well-known for going after people’s strong points. Kerry had been warned by such luminaries as Senator Max Cleland – who lost his legs in Vietnam, and yet the Rove-managed opposition went after his patriotism, airing commercials that accused him of being soft on terror and showing his face next to pictures of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. He lost, big-time.
So when the Swiftboat accusations arrived, and Kerry’s whole war record was put into question and his medals mocked, what did he do? According to all reports, he spent three weeks staggered by the immensity of the falsehoods, not sure how to react, and by the time he finally did come out swinging the damage had been done.
And I thought: this is a guy who’s supposed to protect us from terrorists? Karl Rove might as well sent a letter to his office, saying, “I’MMA GONNA SMASH YOU WAR RECORD,” and he wasn’t prepared for this? What happens when a genuine terrorist attacks?
And then I thought: is this man even qualified to be President?
Even now, looking back at the horridness of Katrina and Bush’s slow response, I honestly don’t think Kerry would have done that much better. And Gore, well, if he couldn’t win the office coming off the immense popularity of the Clinton campaign, reducing what should have been an unbeatable lead to a scrap over 537 votes in Florida, you have to question his ability to lead.
Look. Presidential Campaigns are a gruelling, two-year-long process at a minimum – one that requires deft political skills, a significant amount of organizing gigantic groups, reacting quickly to unforeseen events, and innovation – which is, largely, the skillset needed to be President. And the guy who wins is the guy who did better at those skills.
I’m not saying that Bush or Obama is the best guy to be President. I’m saying that of the two people running that year, going all the way back to my personal memories in 1996, the guy who won deserved the victory. He was better at that skillset.
Maybe it’s a better test of leadership than we thought.