How To Not Be An Asshole During Political Debates: The Easiest Method

One of the best tricks the conservative troll ever learned was the Kobayashi Maru of troll tricks: the “You’re supposed to be inclusive!” cat-call.  Which is to say that the conservative troll becomes increasingly abusive, occupying your time with shoddy arguments and half-assed insults.  Just as you’re declaring this argument to be a waste of time and energy, they say with glee:
“Hey!  I guess you can’t really deal with other people’s world views, huh?  You’re so closed-minded!”
Thus, you’re left with two options: continuing to engage someone who’s patently insane…. or blocking them and reinforcing their world view that yes, those Democrats are sheltered and unable to deal with real argument.
But there is something even worse you can do in the course of a political argument, and here’s where I encourage you to strenuously avoid it.
It started with a debate with a usually-sane conservative friend of mine, who irrationally complained that Obama was “trying to lock [Ryan] fast into a box defined by what they think they can beat most easily.”  To which I replied that this was politics, not liberal politics, in that trying to lock the opponent into a box is what you do, even if the Republicans are usually better at that locking.
*Cue the sound of troll feet jumping into the argument*
The troll in question then said, quasi-reasonably enough, “They DID make hay with Bush’s past. They even invented some when that wasn’t enough (Texas Air Nat’l Guard smear).”  To which I replied that “And Republicans haven’t? Obama’s a Muslim/Kenyan/lazy. The point is, both sides try all the time; only some sticks.”  Not a terrible interplay.
At which point he said, “Muslim/Kenyan/lazy is an accruate reflection of his origin. He is certainly not culturally African American.”  So I replied, “If you believe he’s a Muslim, then you’re sufficiently removed from reality that I don’t see a need to engage. Enjoy.”
Cue flurry of angry responses, because what he meant was that Obama wasn’t a Muslim, but he had Muslim origins, and he’s an Arab and you’ll find virtually no one named Hussein who isn’t from a Muslim family, and how dare I misintepret his Tweet to say that he thinks Obama is a Muslim, and “His origins aren’t an issue. His socio-economic ideology is, and it’s based in a failure and is alien to American culture” and “Having lived in E.Germany, I know his core group’s methods: demagoguery, phony class enemies, strawmen, vote-buying.”
Which is a sucky argument, since my point was that the right has smeared Obama as a Muslim – not a man of Muslim origins, but a fucking Muslim now, with around 15% of the population thinking it despite it’s not being actually, you know, true.  And I called him on it, saying that “your own dismal ability to process is the issue, not my unworldiness” and exited the argument.
At which point, over the next couple of hours, he kept leaving increasingly insulting messages to me – “is baiting people all that your political view amounts to? Stay in your ethnographic bubble, sparky” – and finally ending with “Hey, have you called anyone ‘Chimpy’ lately?”, referencing the calling of Dubya Chimpy McFlightSuit, at which point I moved towards the “block” button.
Now.  Here’s how you avoid being a political asshole.
You might suspect that the problem here was his argument, but that’s not it; it was a shoddy argument that relied on the disjunct between “I believe Obama has Muslim origins” and “the conservatives have successfully caused a large percentage of people to believe that Obama is a Muslim,” but that could be explained away by Twitter’s crappy 140-character limit.  I might have engaged more if this had taken place in my journal, where there was more space to talk.
The assholeness was assuming that since I was a Democrat, all Democrats do this.
I blocked him because I personally find it offensive to call Dubya “Chimpy,” and have never been thrilled with those who do.  I have a friend who posts all sorts of Photoshopped images of Romney and Paul on Facebook, making them the Ambiguously Gay Duo or the Munsters or whatnot, and to me it’s disrespectful.  Romney and Paul’s policies are so offensive that frankly, that should be enough – and calling them silly nicknames just makes it harder to actually get across the point that these guys are terrible for America.  As a Democrat, I’m against it.
But to this dude, because I’m liberal, this is naturally what I do.
That’s how you become an asshole.  Pigeonholing.
I’ve seen it time and time again – “Oh, you’re a Democrat?  You fucking hate guns!”  Well, no, I don’t.  “You’re a Democrat?  All you want to do is tax small business-owners!”  Well, no, actually, I think encouraging low business taxes is what makes America great.  (In fact, one of the main reasons I want socialized health care is so it’s that much easier for people to start their own business and not having to worry about paying exorbitant COBRA rates to protect their families.)  “You’re a Democrat?  Aww, you atheist scumbag!”
Look.  As a Democrat, I’m a unique person, not some fucking stereotype who chugs all the Democratic Kool-Aid.  I have serious problems with liberals, and I’m not down with everything they do – but there’s only two parties in this country that have a reasonable chance of getting elected, and the Democrats have more of what I want.
Treating me as though I had all the traits of your stereotypical Democrat just because I’ve expressed one wins you no points.  It tells me that you have demonized the enemy to the point where they’re a homogenous slur, where you don’t interact with the real world because to you, anyone who disagrees with you must adopt all the opposites to your world view.
That makes you a dick.
And Liberals!  You’re not exempt!  Time and time in this journal, I’ve seen people leave comments about their desire for lowered taxes – and idiot liberals have assumed that because they’re for low taxes, they hate gays and are die-hard Christians who want to put women in chains and hey, you fucking Reagan lover!  And that’s not cool, either.  I suspect many Republicans are in the same state that I am – which is to say, hey, I’m not entirely happy with the way my party’s going, but at this point in time there’s slightly more to like on my side… so reluctantly, I stand over here, wishing there was a third party who had what I really believed in. (And could, you know, get elected.)
Want to not be an asshole in a political debate? Don’t assume.  Ask what their take is on something, and then debate that.  But don’t debate people like they stood for the monolithic and ill-defined strategy of an entire political movement unless they’re actually leading that movement.  And don’t assume that any one person automatically has all the worst traits of the people you loathe.  They don’t.
In short: when debating, remember that people are unique. Thank you.

An Idea To Help Science! SCIENCE!

In this article on “quack cancer cures,” Xeni Jardin quotes this beautiful nugget that will help us to change the face of science forever.

“It’s true that alt-med apologists dress up their beliefs in language that sounds scientific, but when you scratch the patina of scientific language off, it doesn’t take long to find the religious imagery, often facilitated by the more conventional religious beliefs (i.e, Christianity) of the believer.”

This sort of shenaniganery works because if you dress nonsense up in things that other people don’t understand, they’ll buy it.  I know!  I’m a computer programmer!  I have a magic number: the power of 2.  If I tell you, “You can only have 200 entries in your phone book,” people will whine and bitch and moan that it’s unfair.  But if I tell them, “You can have a maximum of 256 entries,” then people go, “256!  That’s like 16-bit, and 32-bit!  It’s a magic number!  It must be hard-wired!”
And they leave me alone and I get coffee.  It’s brilliant.
But then I read this fantastically entertaining cartoon on what would happen if we treated history like it was biology, and I thought: We’re doing it backward.
If idiots can use scientific language to gull over desperate people, then why don’t we use arcane religious language to placate the religious?
Look, you can say, “The theory of evolution demonstrates that a population of organisms that interbreeds and has fertile offspring will grow modifications in their genes, some of which will prove beneficial.”
Or…. you could say, “Our priests tell us that our understanding of God’s thinking shows that a population of beloved creatures that begets will cause God-inspired innovations!  Some of which cause animals to be damned to the fires of extinction!  And others which uplift them to the apex of predation!”
Look, we don’t have to believe it, any more than any number of the charlatans selling killer nostrums do.  But we just change the language a little bit to ensure that it works for us!  Watch!

It’ll take a bit to get properly formulated, of course.  And when people start going, “But that’s not what it says in the Bible!” then we’ll just have to get down and dirty, sinking into Leviticus and talking about the Metatron and the Holy Ghost, and then saying, “The will of God is very complex.”
Meanwhile, all in the background, we’re doing science, bitches.  Under cover.  And eventually, we’ll pass collection plates for stem cell research, and people will fucking praise it.

What The Rich Are Really Like

To the Republicans, the rich are basically superheroes: having been endowed with a superhuman work ethic and the smarts to run the world, the wealthy do nothing but good in this world by creating jobs for slovenly poor people everywhere!  Having clawed their way to the top, fighting for every dollar, don’t the rich deserve a break from the predations of those awful people who would yank the money from their well-manicured hands?  Haven’t the rich proven their worth already by being smart and cunning and persistent enough to amass all that wealth?  Haven’t the rich proven their worth already by, well, being fucking rich?
I might even believe that, had I not grown up in Connecticut.
I grew up in Fairfield County, one of the 40 wealthiest counties in all of America.   Paul Newman and Martha Stewart lived there.  Not everyone in Fairfield was rich, but it was impossible to grow up there without bumping into the wealthy on a regular basis – they bought their coffee with you, their kids went to activities with you, they went to the same movies.
Now, it’s important to notice that these folks usually weren’t the super-rich, the people even rich people envied.  They had a mansion, and maybe a yacht for a hobby if they were particularly well-off, but most of them didn’t own their own private jets.  They didn’t have a chauffeur, because it was usually easier and cheaper to drive your own car, and they’d take the train to New York where they often worked.  Their kids went to public school because the public school system in Fairfield is pretty top-notch, as you’d expect from the income level, but when it came time for college you bet your ass that Yale or Harvard were getting mentioned.
They were the 1%, which in today’s day and age means they had about $300,000 a year on their hands.  They didn’t have to worry.
And here’s the thing: their kids were often douches.
As a teenager, you could tell a rich kid not because of his clothes, but because of a certain recklessness that emanated from them.  They didn’t really understand consequences all that well, because whatever they did, it would get cleaned up.  If a rich kid’s grades were bad, they got tutors, the teachers got spoken to about helping poor Jack to his potential, there was much moaning about the need for Jack to do better, and the parents would ride saddle on Jack until he did his fucking homework.  If a rich kid drank too much, well, that wasn’t a problem – the cops overlooked the rich kid drunk teenagers, letting them have their places where people didn’t go much, and if you were dressed right they’d usually just tell you to move elsewhere.  (I once witnessed a millionaire heiress wave off a cop in her local town by telling him, “Do you know who I am?”  He did.  He knew who donated to the policeman’s ball, and moved on.)  And if a rich kid did get into trouble with the cops, usually via fighting, well, he’d be bailed out and the parents would have a talking to him, but mostly the emphasis was “You’re screwing up your future potential!  How do you expect to get into college with this record?” and not “You could go to jail.”
They lived in a different world.  If you got on drugs, well, you had a problem.  If they got caught with cocaine repeatedly, we all knew about the local detox centers they got sent to.  They’d talk about these places like it was such a burden to have to go. I remember being in more than one conversation where two rich kids commiserated about the terrible food at these places, and how you couldn’t even call any of your friends, it was so lonely there.
Here’s the thing: none of these kids had really done a damn thing to earn all of this wealth and privilege.  They just sort of had it.  And it oozed out of them, a slacker mentality that things would be all right, and they could keep fucking up until things worked out, because hey, no pressure, we’ve got the time.
Now, not all rich kids were like this.  Some of them were razor-sharp, the kind the Republicans are proud to talk about.  They studied hard, they got good grades, because they had a future they were determined to be prepared for, and they did all of the extra-curricular stuff because they already had their favorite college targeted.  You often couldn’t tell those kids from the poor kids, because they didn’t mention their wealth.  I envied and feared those kids, because I wasn’t able to be them on any level, and yet I couldn’t really bitch about them, either.
But the other rich kids, the drifters who roamed through Westport in their preppie outfits?  Well, they had a lot of money, and a lot of potential, and didn’t do shit with it.  And some of them are still rich, just because of an accident of wealth.
Some of them are me.  Hell, I drifted through college for nine years, attending endless semesters of college that I dropped out or flunked out from – and who do you think paid the bill?  Hint, dear readers: it wasn’t me.  I turned out all right, because after a decade’s worth of slacking I finally got my shit together… but I’m excruciatingly aware every day that I had the luxury to find myself.  And it was a luxury.  My parents bailed me out, and now I’m not rich, but I’m way better off than I would be if I’d had to start working at the grocery store to pay my rent.
Which is not to say that there aren’t good rich people.  My boss used to sleep in the back seat of a car, driving from town to town to sell comics out of his trunk because there was a buck in it.  He never sleeps.  His relentless work ethic has created a good company that I am proud to work for, and he’s the kind of wealthy I’d like to reward in America: a guy who, with nothing more than dedication and cunning and an insane work ethic, has built his own wealth. And created jobs for people like me.
But the Republicans’ repeated fellating of the rich, as if “being rich” was automatically the same as “being super-hard working” or “being smart,” just doesn’t add up if you knew enough rich folks.  Sure, the rich will tell you that, but why not?  It’s in their best interests to create their own monolith story, the same way that poets turnthe reclusive and horrid-paying world of poetry into a romantic, mysterious world of adventure.
Yet I think that the poor buy into it because it seems right.  I mean, if someone’s that much better off than you, then they must have done something spectacular to deserve it, right?  They can’t be that wealthy just at random.  But a significant portion are – hell, the Vice Presidential candidate for the Republican bill is – and a lot of the things people have done, nobly enough, to protect their children means that a lot of the kids who have tons of money are just as stupid and slothful and ignorant as the worst of the welfare mothers, except they’re rich enough to bail themselves out. In some cases, that richness is big enough that it’s self-perpetuating, which is to say that as long as these dimwits hire the right accountants and don’t buy a life-sized gold Ronald Reagan statue every week, they’ll be dumb and rich forever.
Yet this illusion permeates the debate in America.  The poor all see themselves as, as Steinbeck famously said, “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”  And they think that if they just did the right things, they’d all be rich themselves.
Except it’s not simple.  Some people do all the right things to get out of poverty, and can’t manage it anyway.  Some people do all the wrong things, but wind up okay because they’re wealthy.  Life is messy, and full of should’ves and shouldn’t’ofs, and any philosophy that claims a 100% correlation between an activity and a success is selling you something fetid.  And rich, I hate to say, are like us – some of them smart, some dumb, and the only difference is all that lucre they’re floating on.
When you talk about taxing the rich, realize that they’re not all superheroes.  Not all of them necessarily deserve that cash.  And maybe you should think about ways to tax to encourage the kind of wealth you want to see in the world.

Where I'll Be At WorldCon

If you’re going to be in Chicago come the end of the month – and why not? it’s a great town – then you should probably show up at WorldCon, which is a fun convention where I will be with Gini and my friends the Substelnys.  It’s one of the largest sci-fi cons, with tons of good writers, and I’m pleased to be in their company.
Where can I be found at WorldCon?
Doing A Reading. 
This is the big one for me – I’m always paranoid that I’ll do a reading and no one will show up.  (Which has happened; it’s always embarrassing reading to three people, two of whom you’re dating.)  So if you’d like to hear me read one of my stories, and I’m told I perform well, I’ll be reading “Shoebox Heaven” at 5:30 on Friday evening.
“Shoebox Heaven” starts thusly:

Andy found Oscar, his fur clotted with lint balls, behind the dryer.  Oscar’s body was still warm because he had curled up underneath the exhaust vent, but Momma told Andy that Oscar had been dead for hours — it was just old age, was all.  Andy wanted to pet Oscar, because Oscar’s head was still tucked underneath his paws.  It was like his cat was playing a game of hide and go seek.
Andy couldn’t understand why Momma was crying.  “Let’s go to the airport,” he said, “And fly to heaven, and get Oscar.”
So they did.

It’ll make for a good performance, with lots of emotion and a dash of crazed humor, so I think if you show up you’ll be rewarded.  At least with hugs from me.
Dissecting Ideas.
At Saturday at noon, I’ll be talking about where writers get their ideas.  This should be an interesting exercise, because the panel will devise an idea and we’ll each discuss how we’d flesh that out into a short story.  I may write and plot something entirely on the fly!  And you’ll get to see how others shape a plot from a plot-bunny! This should be entertaining.
Discussing Short Stories. 
At 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, I’ll be on a panel discussing whether authors can still break in with short stories.  I’m not sure what “breaking in” means – I mean, I’ve got a number of published short stories, and am not a household name – but I’ll be on the panel with my old Clarion classmate Gra Linnaea, who literally helped me write the most useful entry I’ve ever written on how to submit short stories.  This ought to have a lot of useful info.
Feeling Intimidated By Series.
I’m not entirely sure why I’m on this panel, as it features Eric Flint (1632) and Jack McDevitt (who’s written two Nebula-nominated series), but I’ll be discussing how to keep series writing fresh.  I must have been feeling adventurous when listing panels I felt I could talk about, and they foolishly took me at my word.  But here I will be, and probably too stupid to keep my trap shut!
 

The Wild, Wild New York

One of the books that changed my life was a pop history tome called “The Good Old Days… They Were Terrible!”  In little, bite-sized chunks, it discussed how awful it was to live in 19th century New York – being amazed at how much higher the crime rates were back then, how filthy the streets were, how likely you were to die of disease.
That, in turn, led to me discovering Luc Sante’s “Low Life,” which delved deeper into what it was like, living in old times, and from there I’ve read probably fifteen different books on New York in the 1860s-1890s.  They all tell the same stories: gangs pretty much dominated the streets, rarely killing but beating people up at a moment’s notice, causing riots on a regular basis, tearing life apart.  The politicians paid lip service to fixing the problems but were really terrified of the gangs, and when they were serious about it on occasion, their solutions tended towards “Jail them all and make them miserable,” overlooking the fact that they were pretty miserable to begin with – that’s why they turned to crime.  Sans education or any opportunities to better yourself, mugging and crime was at least an option to feed yourself.
But people who I’ve told these stories to always wondered: “How did people put up with this shit?”  I mean, you’d think people would wake up and say, “Holy crap, the continual terror of living on unsafe streets, the worry of being assaulted by some maniac for your wallet – that seems like the kind of thing folks would eventually rebel against!”
But no.  If anything, history shows us that when violence happens, we just get used to it.  We say, “Well, that wasn’t me” and we cluck our tongues and go, “That’s horrible” and our shoulders hunch in a shrug of, “Well, what can we do?” And the people with simple, satisfying solutions ram them through and they don’t do anything to fix it at all, and the real solutions – which are complex and not very satisfying or popular – take years to get enacted, if they do at all.
And all the while, we start to take it for granted.  This is what happens.  It’s just the way things are.  The horror fades and we start to just accept it all as a cost of life here.
I bring this up because for the third time in a month, there’s been a public shooting.  And the Onion gets it right: “Sadly, Nation Knows Exactly How Colorado Shooting’s Aftermath Will Play Out.”
We do.  Over, and over, and over again.