ThomStratton.com

Ethan Metzger seems to be a fine young man who’s got some things figured out that far too many never seem to get:

My parents brainwashed me in similar fashion. They indoctrinated me in their beliefs. To those who think that sounds insidious, consider the opposite. What kind of parent purposely teaches their children things they consider to be wrong? As I’ve said before, a parent’s duty is to teach their kids the best of what they’ve learned themselves, to be the best people they know how to be. It makes no sense to purposely withhold information from that child for fear of constraining the child too much or infringing on their freedom of choice.

Children are not old enough nor mature enough to make good choices. Even my own children, who we’ve taught repeatedly about healthy eating, avoiding too much “screen time”, and getting exercise wou, if allowed, eat cookies while glued to the Internet all day long. Should we just let them so that we don’t encroach on their freedom and avoid brainwashing them? Of course not! (If you truly think so, you need help and should go check into the school of hard knocks immediately!) No, you do the best you can to teach and enforce the way you think is right until they’re ready to stand on their own. There will come a point when they’ll question things and make up their own minds, and you just have to use what influence you have, hope you raised them right, and love them no matter what.

NBA MVP Kevin Durant understand this. Today he’s grateful his mother “brainwashed him” and coerced him to follow the path she had in mind. It’s easy to see now that she did right by her son, but it probably wasn’t always so clear–nor appreciated. But God bless her for being an adult, for having the strength of her convictions enough to raise her son according to what she thought was right.

Being a parent isn’t about getting it perfect. It’s about doing the best you can. And that includes teaching them as much as you can while you still can.

Writing this blog day after day has taught me a few things. One such discovery is that it’s really hard to come up with something to say every day, five days a week. Yet all the experts (the has-been-drips-under-pressure, as my father would point out) suggest that you can’t grow a following or increase your site visits if you’re not updating regulary, even daily.

Some weeks its not so hard. There seems to be a decent amount of material. Other weeks it’s a total famine. I’ve found that when the supply of topics grows short one of the easiest fall-backs is to complain about something. There’s seldom a lack of things to complain about, especially with the world population as high as it is. With over 7 billion people out there, there’s a good chance someone, somewhere is doing something to really torque my shorts. The least I can do is get some blog-fodder out of it, right?

But more and more lately I’m dissatisfied with that approach. Regardless of how amazingly flawless my arguments may be, I don’t usually come out of it any happier. I doubt I’ve changed any minds–perhaps not even encouraged anyone to consider a different viewpoint. And usually it hasn’t scratched my itch, either. If anything I’m probably more sensitive to the issue and anything related.

I’m trying to be less negative. Not only that, I’m trying to be more positive. But the Thumper Rule is the enemy of daily blog updates. I’m still trying to find the right balance. It may take time to adjust my mindset to seize more easily on positive topics while doing my best to ignore the negativity out there. Friends have suggested that I not worry so much about posting every day. I should probably listen to them. It’s not like daily posting has had that much impact on my popularity. The only impact I’ve found is negative–when I don’t write every day my page hits decrease. But as a general rule daily posting doesn’t have that marked a positve impact on page views. I may be slowly (over years) increasing, but it’s probably not enough to really worry about. Perhaps the best thing I can do to encourage long-term page view growth is to write more reviews.

Anyway, perhaps this is just my aimless, meandering way of warning you that I’m going to try to not force myself to post something when I have nothing good to post about. That may mean there won’t be a daily update at 10:00 am like usual.

I’m probably the only one who is at all bothered by that.

I woke up this morning from a dream that I was a submarine commander. Kristen Bell was my first officer (and no, she did not ask me to build a snowman, so let it go!). We were trying to get safely past enemy submarines rumored to be using a new torpedo that couldn’t be distracted by acoustic noisemakers. Not to worry, of course. The key to survival in a submarine is to not be detected in the first place. If they’re launching torpedoes things are already out of control.

Initially we were doing fine, slipping quietly down river (!?) with as little noise as possible. But then we encountered a problem. Someone had built a low concrete dam or artificial falls across the river. It wasn’t that big, and if we could find a way past it we would be able to use the noise it made as cover to slip away to the other side of the river and escape. My first officer and I got out to explore the top of the dam (because that wouldn’t attract any attention, certainly!) and realized all we had to do was climb down and get back into the river. Before I could make sense of that one my alarm went off.

I mentioned the dream to my wife later, discussing how our subconscious can put so much work into making some parts of our dreams realistic while totally ignoring the incongruities in other aspects–like what submarines are doing in a river in the first place, or how having two officers climb down the front of a dam would somehow transport the entire submarine. She told me she’d heard that dreams were our subconscious trying to work through problems, but that explanation has never made much sense to her considering how her dreams have so little to do with anything recognizable.

I’d have to agree. I’m wracking my brain trying to figure out how that particular dream corresponds to anything in my life, even as an analogy or symbolism. The best I can come up with is this is Dr. Suess’ fault. I’m still harboring intense emotional trauma from having read McElligot’s Pool as a child. The only way to release that subliminal trauma is to safely navigate the length of that river, but being McElligot’s Pool, I’ll need a submarine. And Kristen Bell, as the voice of Anna in “Frozen”, represents that child-like innocence I’m trying to save, but also holds the key to reaching the end of the river safely. The relentless pressures of adulthood are represented by the enemy submarines–their jaded maturity will make it difficult to simply make a lot of noise to distract them. The dam represents the threshold of adulthood; it’s not something I can get around with my submarine. But if I’m willing to risk vulnerability while keeping my inner child close at hand to cross that barrier alone then I’ll be able to somehow retain my submarine and, using adulthood as camoflage, escape the pressures of adulthood.

Or something like that.

Somehow I don’t feel any wiser here. Rather than dreams being my subconscious’ attempt to sort out my problems for me, I suspect they’re really more of just a subliminal writing prompt where you go through your purse (or brain, in this case), pick five things at random and make a story out of them.

Either that or it’s some sort of oracular vision, and I need to call Kristen Bell and convince her to join the navy. She’d make a darn fine officer!

It’s easy to forget sometimes that our scientists aren’t stupid. Unfortunately, their work is often reported to us by people who have no clue about science, casting their efforts in a ludicrious light. Case in point, the lead paragraph from this article in The Telegraph:

Women who never sunbath during the summer are twice as likely to die than those who sunbathe everyday, a major study has shown.

Now, I could be wrong here, but last I checked, pretty much everyone’s chances of dying are 100%. It’s kinda hard to get any worse. Unless Highlander was true after all!

Of course if you read a little deeper it becomes clear that they’re really talking about their test population during the period of the study. If maybe 3% of the women studied died during the duration of the study, evidently two of them would be non-sun-bathers, and one would. (They studied nearly 30,000 Swedish women for 20 years, during which time 2545 of them died.) It appears, however, that they included all causes of death.

Fortunately there are scientists consulted for the article who maintain a healthy skepticism about just how far you can trust the implications of the study, which is very little. It does seem that some sun exposure is better than no sun exposure, but there are other factors involved that should be explored and accounted for before we all start becoming sun-worshippers.

It’s articles like this that keep me skeptical of science reporting in general.

I encountered a post on Facebook recently that did not make me particularly cheerful. The cartoon depicts two panels, each showing the same thing: a man speaking to a child. The first panel, labeled “Fundamentalist”, shows the man saying something along the lines of, “Be nice, or you’ll violate commandments causing you to go to hell, disappoint Jesus, make a mockery of His crucifiction…”. The second panel, labeled “Secularist”, shows the man with a different speech balloon saying simply, “Be nice.” The point is clearly to show how much better secularists are because they teach the same morality without all the religious guilting and threats.

The comments were a mixed bag of responses from “We should all be nice,” and “We don’t need religion to teach us to be nice,” to “Those stupid religionists should be considered child-abusers for such indoctrination”.

As a religious person, I object to such mis-characterization of my beliefs. Even so, I’m not so certain that giving children no reasons for being good is any better than wrong reasons for being good (and “wrong” is certainly open to interpretation–as is “nice”, for that matter). I was irritated to see yet another attack on me and what I believe just because others want to believe something else but are too insecure to simply believe what they want and allow me the same privilege. Sure there are religious jerks who abuse their religion. But there certainly are enough secularists who abuse their secularism, too.

But then it struck me just how ironic the cartoon was in the first place. Here is a cartoon using the moral ideal of “be nice” to be mean! Because any definition of “nice” that doesn’t include not putting others down or twisting their beliefs to prove your own superiority is an incomplete definition.

Look, it’s tough enough to be nice for any reason, period. Heaven knows I’m not a nice person, even by my own definition. And though my religion encourages me to “turn the other cheek”, I don’t do so well with that. But while it’s no excuse, it’s certainly not helping to have people regularly calling me names, putting me down, and mocking my beliefs. That does not encourage me to be nice, thank you very much. But it also does not justify my being mean back because someone else was mean first.

I suspect if we’re really interested in supporting others in their efforts to become better people there are more helpful ways of going about it. And if we’re not really interested in supporting others in their efforts then perhaps we should just leave them alone and not make it any more difficult.

Or to coin a phrase, “Be the nice you want to see in the world!”

I knew elephants can paint, but they are evidently jazz fans as well. They seem to lack the trunk dexterity for anything other than cluster-chords, but they’ve definitely got rhythm. Check out this video and see if it doesn’t make you smile:

And speaking of painting, here’s the proof on that one:

I had a conversation over the weekend with a friend who finds social media as frustrating as I do. We both regularly encountered people who share far too much, far too frequently, with far too little consideration for the feelings of those who might be seeing it. We decided the old Bill Cosby joke is fully applicable to social media. He mentions speaking to someone who defends their use of cocaine, because it “intensifies your personality”, to which Bill Cosby replies, “Yes, but what if you’re a [jerk]?”

In that light, social media and cocaine have that in common. It intensifies whatever your personality may be because it’s so easy to just blurt out whatever comes to mind. It breaks down inhibitions. It makes you believe everyone has a right to your opinion. This is okay if you’re the type of person who doesn’t like to be controversial or negative, or pick a fight. But there are those who enjoy social media as a full-contact sport.

If the trendiness of social media continues we might be well-served to teach our children courses on marketing. One of the basic tenets of marketing is to know your audience and tailor your message to that audience. Most businesses don’t have the money to try and target their message to everyone, nor do they need to. Why would the makers of “Depends” want to buy advertising time during kids cartoons? Would the distributor of the latest chick-flick want to buy time during a NASCAR race? Or mens razors during a soap opera?

This applies just as much to ourselves online, except we don’t usually think about who might be reading our posts. If we see a post that puts one of our beliefs in a cleverly-worded way, or strongly reinforces something we agree with we tend to share it. We generally don’t sit there first and think about who might see it and if it might have the desired response. We repost as a self-congratulatory fist pump; a virtual “my side rocks! Go us!”

It generally doesn’t cross our minds that we have people on our friends list who may not agree with that. They may not know our beliefs well enough to realize that while you may agree with the general sentiment of the post/pic, your own beliefs may be more evolved or nuanced than that. They have no reason to believe you’re not in 100% agreement with the person whose content you’re sharing.

Now, obviously there is a fairly wide variety of topics on which one may post, and a good majority are not going to cause offense. I could probably post something declaring  that, “John Tesh is the greatest musician of all time” and I probably won’t deeply offend anyone. They may scratch their heads, may tease me a bit, or may openly disagree, but chances are there won’t be anywhere near the intensity of feeling as if your post attacks someone’s religious or political beliefs. Even the dog people vs. cat people, as passionate as they can get, usually make allowances for personal taste.

But for some reason when we’re online we tend to ignore the age-old addage of not discussing politics or religion. Web-surfing is generally a private experience, so it’s easy to forget that there are people on the other side of the interface. The things we feel the most passionate about tend to get us to repost the most easily. And if we’ve seen someone else’s meme-pic blasting our beliefs, it’s an almost irresistable temptation to throw one back in their face.

In a world where internet and social media are so ubiquitous, however, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate our personal and public lives. Employers are increasingly looking at applicants’ social media presence. What are they going to see when they visit you? Like it or not, you’re building a brand with every post you make. What brand message are you putting out there? Are you advertising yourself as the “King of Jerks” or “You’re in good hands with {your name here}”?

Nothing is truly private online. Have you seen those posts about “embarrassing auto-correct chats”? How do you think those get made public? Someone gets a screen-capture and boom! It’s all over the ‘net. You may have your Facebook privacy settings locked down and iron-clad, but anyone with a print-screen button and MS Paint can share your posts, in all their intensified personality, with the world. Privacy is an illusion. Just ask Donald Sterling. Whether he deserved what he got is irrelevant. He thought he was having a private, off-the-record conversation. Now he’s a household name and a major social pariah.

So think about it. What does your social media say about you? And who are you saying it to? Is that how you want to be known?

According to Io9.com, these are 8 Great Philosophical Questions That We’ll Never Solve. I present this without comment, other than that to say that the writer seems to have already made up his mind about certain things that are also currently unsolved (that, or he needs to be more careful in his wording). Many holes can be poked in his reasoning. Still, it’s an interesting list.