Being right doesn’t help. In fact, it’s the fear that you might be right that brings out this talking-about behavior. Nobody in the camp that opposes gay marriage has a coherent argument that applies to a secular government. So they don’t listen–just blather on using trite phrases that make sense within a narrow community.

Fear of the truth, or the potential of finding a different truth than the one you cherish is a strong force. Imagine you prosecuted someone–someone who was then put to death. Imagine you live in a State where people cheer for executions. Then imagine someone produced a pile of well-researched evidence that showed he was innocent.

But let’s make it really bad. Let’s say the evidence was around at the time. No mixed up lab results or anything like that. The research pretty strongly suggests you were just too lazy or didn’t care. You, and the people who cheered at the execution, don’t want to discuss this possibility. Instead, you say something like:

“These guys are crusaders,” Schiwetz told the Houston Chronicle. “What can I say?”

That’s it. No discussion–dismiss the report beforehand. Anything else would take a whole boatload of courage, and I’m not sure how many people have that much on hand.

What if You’re a Generally Pointless Politician?

Your whole job is to impress the voters, right? Or at least the “base.” But you can’t seem to do anything for them, not nationally. What do you do? What if there was some other group that you could pick on, a group that had no way to complain. What if picking on this other group could be done in a way that your “base” would approve? So there’s this nerdy guy with no friends. Your friends are all bigger than you, but you can walk over and take this guy’s lunch money. Your friends will even back you up.

Except the nerdy kid calls you out

“Let’s go out into the hall, just you and me.”

What do you do then? If you’re a coward, you can use the same tactic. “Ha, you don’t understand. I don’t have to go out in the hall. My friends aren’t listening to your stupid taunts and I’m not either.”

Trent Franks is that kind of coward. When Eleanor Holmes Norton called him out to the hall, he said:

“Those, like Representative Holmes Norton, who oppose the D.C. Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act on the basis that its primary sponsor is from a different state simply fail to understand a Constitutional principle that couldn’t be more plain,” he said. “Congress has the seminal and incontrovertible responsibility for making legislative policy in the District of Columbia.”

That’s tantamount to saying “I’m not listening to you, na na.” Franks did not even allow Holmes to testify in a hearing about her own district.

Joining The Coward Trent Franks in legislating for DC with no input from the city is The Coward Phil Gingrey. He offered a non-binding measure that attacked DC in a way that would never be done nationally. Following Franks lead, he denied Holmes the chance to even testify.

Then, possibly because he did not want the stupid quote to come directly from his mouth, Gingrey had his spokesperson say:

 the Constitution “specifically gives Congress the power to ‘exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases, whatsoever’ over the District of Columbia. To suggest this amendment was intended to bully D.C. rather than provide relief for the 40,000 active duty military personnel who reside within D.C.’s borders is to miss the point entirely.”

Jen Talaber

In other words: “we aren’t listening to you. This isn’t about you. This is about us picking on you to impress our friends.” Coward.

I started reading through the list, thinking that the write-ups were pretty interesting–that I would end up with a somewhat better sense of who the influencers are in our world. Then I clicked next to find Pipi Middleton. Things went downhill from there.

I got angry about the meaningless celebrities. Then about the obscure activists who seemed to be there just to apologize for meaningless celebrities.

Then I got made at some of the groupings that seemed to miss some pretty key figures. Why throw in women tech CEOs, and leave out Carol Bartz? Why have Stephen Colbert but no Jon Stewart? Sheryl Sandberg, but no Mark Zuckerberg?

Then I decided the whole thing was incoherent–a fairly random collection of people who were either famous or known by Time editors. And why did it need to be more? After all, the list is only to “stimulate discussion.”

Epiphany!

Then I realized what holds the thing together. It’s not who’s on the list, it’s who isn’t. The attention comes from people being mad at the list, and people get mad because someone they think should be there, isn’t. So the people who are on the list are perfectly selected to be sort of like a bunch of others who aren’t–thus providing the biggest footprint of disappointment possible.

Here’s the New York Times doing the same damn thing. The number was never really six. That’s the pop mythology number. There’s a whole boatload of research that, depending on a more precise version of the question, place the number down near 4.3 or so. I’m not going to go look it up, but it’s widely quoted in both Connected (by Nicholas A. Christakis , James H. Fowler) and Linked, by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. Also, I’m pretty sure it’s covered by Thomas Friedman somewhere.

Why does a paper that once was known as the “Paper of Record” get it wrong? Or at least skip everything in between so as to create slightly more drama? I can imagine an editor saying “take all that middle stuff about other research out, nobody cares.” But I also imagine all those teachers who kept telling their students that “Columbus believed the Earth was round, the skeptics all said it was flat.” No, the skeptics all thought, fairly accurately it turns out, that it was a lot further around that Columbus did. But that’s not as neat a story, I guess.

Another thing that seems to fall into the “we don’t need it, and we should kill it with fire” category: social networks for couples. .

It’s just funny enough to forward to someone, and possibly to download or sign up for as long as everyone knows you’re doing it “ironically.”

So, there's like a real girl sitting right next to you! What the hell are you doing?

If this were a real thing, relationship-obsessed, self-absorbs teens would be the obvious market. But since it’s not, adults are more likely to pay money for something that’s “ironic,” and have a much harder time figuring how to delete crap from their phones or computers. So it makes sense that these things have (or pretend to have) more adult content.

Swapping Chores for Sexual Favors?

How could anything like this not be a joke:

Snuggle Cloud is the answer! We not only alert you when your partner is online and provide a Couple’s Dashboard for you to post anything and everything, but we also send reminders for special dates and moments, and help spark interesting conversations through daily questions and quizzes.

Kahnoodle goes the extra mile:

Intended for committed couples over the age of 21, Kahnoodle lets partners administer “love taps” – like Facebook pokes, except they refer to nookie.

Really?

There’s a Fine Line That Separates Brilliant and Stupid

But wait! Here’s the opening paragraph in the Globe’s article:

Nauseated by lovey-dovey couples plastering gushy missives on each other’s Facebook walls? Sick of reading all about their wedding plans on Twitter? Fear not: A new brand of social media networks is on the way, designed for couples to celebrate their love privately online.

Getting PDA’s off Facebook and Twitter! There’s a cause many of us would join.

I no longer want to make these things disappear, I want to make them mandatory.

It got that name because, in 1943, people finally got tired of calling it Crumville. It may have been an improvement, but Ridgecrest never seemed to have much soul, or any real connection to the community or region.

I remember a movement to change the name to Maturango. It seemed to make sense, Maturango is the name of a small but popular museum, and it seemed more unique to the area.

What I heard was the movement fizzled after someone looked up the word–and discovered it means “horse dung.”

The reason I’m talking about it on this blog is that I always “sort of” believed the story. By which I mean that I wanted to believe it, feared it might not be true, so I never looked up the actual meaning. Now, with Wikipedia staring back at me from almost every device I own, not looking something up is much more difficult. This puts a lot of pressure on my little universe of great stories that may or may not be true.

I ran across this description on Wikipedia, describing the origin of the name of Maturango Peak:

It may be derived from the Spanish word “maturrango” (an appellation used in Buenos Aires for a European, meaning a bad horseman or a bad horse), or it may be derived from the name Malarango, a chief of the Coso people

Technically, my originally story could still hold some truth. With all the dialects of Spanish floating around, a word that starts off as “bad horseman” could easily mean “horse dung” somewhere. But who cares? This is even better! Apparently:

In Buenos Aires there’s a word that means European–but really means “bad horseman” or “bad horse!”

In fact, the Entertainment Software Industry already regulates sales of games to minors. Much like the Motion Picture Association, which rates movies and prohibits minors from watching certain ones, an industry association IS given the power to limit what kids can buy. Though there is not criminal or civil liability for violating the age-restrictions, studies show that it’s harder to buy a mature game than it is to get into an R rated movie.  The Supreme Court did not change that. One might hope they discouraged the writing of vague laws aimed at non-problems that they couldn’t possibly affect even if enforceable, but that seems unlikely.

But a lot of the best celebrities weren’t. Christopher Walken was hilarious, but he wasn’t really Christopher Walken. Abe Vigoda was not really tweeting to his followers that he was still alive. Some were real. Shaq found it helpful to add the word “real” to his Twitter ID.  This article tried to list the “real” celebrities, though it included Twitter feeds that were largely staff-written.

Meanwhile, crazed scientists who have failed to grasp the central message of every robot movie ever developed robots that pretend to be human and engage people over Twitter. The robots beat out humans on the somewhat questionable metrics people use to claim “engagement” on Twitter. So being “real” turned out not to be a winning strategy.

Now, as the 2012 election cycle looms over all of social media, President Obama faced the need to provide both a lively ongoing Twitter stream and some sense of actual connection. Everybody knows staffers write most of the Tweets, but he will sign any Tweets he personally sends with -BO. So, even though most of it isn’t his, it contains just enough Real Obama to be called his Twitter account. I think it’s a great idea, though I can’t help thinking that our world is one in which someone can ask the question: “Is there really any chicken in my cream of chicken soup?” Answer? A little.

Even though copyright law has expanded far beyond the original scope given by the Constitution, it was at least partly humanized by the Fair Use provision. This blogger has already made the case that Peanutweeter is fair use, so I’ll just link to his post. I’m more concerned with how non-human life-forms have been given even more control. Used to be you’d hear about how “lawyers” from McDonalds, Disney, or Paramount were out suing the best customers of their products. It was bad–but lawyers are technically human. Iconix is a “Brand Group.” If you go to the site and click on either Management or Board of Directors under their “About Us,” you get a list of “people” (though long since soul-sucked) towards the bottom. But the image that loads first is one of those generic “Gap Kid” collections. Those aren’t people, and they are certainly not the board of directors.

Iconix is a version of the corporate life-form that we’ve inexplicably given human rights to for a couple centuries now. Soul-less though it may be, at least it had to act through humans. Until some group of idiots passed the digital millennium copyright act. With it’s automatic take-down provisions, and anti-circumvention provisions, the DMCA allows non-human lifeforms to crush human creativity automatically. No lawyer-to-lawyer arguments, just a letter to the service provider. Down comes fun, and the cost of fighting it is too high for mere humans to undertake. Victory to Iconix, without ever having to face a real person in a fair fight. Iconix (or Skynet, as it probably calls itself when it’s sitting around with other soul-less life-forms) can go back to stalking across the landscape “touching every segment of retail distribution from the luxury market to the mass market” and sucking the brains out of the crushed bodies that get stuck between its toes.

Just to disambiguate the word, here’s Wikipedia. [Side note, Wikipedia uses the word "disambiguate" incorrectly].

In the modern workplace, the career ladder is populated by people who are afraid that change and innovation will undo all those steps they’ve climbed over to get to their heirarchically-defined roll. If they see a new trend emerging, they have to either adapt or hire someone to manage that change. If the change can be managed by someone else, they can go back to their safe, slow, time-tested method of slow resume building. That “someone else,” though, has to be defined as “different.” The word “Guru” has come to fill that rule. Guru’s are protectors of non-changers. They manage the new stuff, make it less important. In the process, they make themselves less important.

If a Guru is allowed to jump onto the career ladder, though, the system has failed. The changes were obviously not managed to the point of irrelevance.

So being a Guru seems like a nice role. A lovely title. Career-ladder people will shower you with compliments. These are the same compliments you use when talking to someone you like, but would never date.

Many predict the end of the world. Nobody follows these guys around waiting to point at them and laugh when they’re wrong.

What’s fascinating is how everyone else played with the story. News outlets covered it, people on Facebook and Twitter kept up a steady stream of pre-rapture comments, and various comment boards filled up with a debate over how “they” would feel when it doesn’t happen. This particular crazy guy became a national event.

My current theory is that he’s a stand-in. For a lot of people, he’s enough like some other group, say the Tea Baggers or Evangelicals, that we are painting them with his easily falsifiable claim. Laughing at his “wrong-ness” is like laughing at them for something they didn’t actually say.

Also, it’s fun. Doomsday scenarios are exciting because they open up boundaries we normally let run our lives. Instead of thinking “I’m going to have to work hard, save, and talk my spouse into it before I buy that stuff at Best Buy,” I can just loot.

Meanwhile, the actual guy is just changing the date. He’s like 89, so eventually he’ll sort of be right.