In the 50s world in which I grew up, moral thinking started with "paying your dues"

When I was growing up, it seemed that the most important “moral issue” in the world was whether someone a bit “different” like me would learn to perform “for others” according to gender, even when openness to sacrifice was required and even when it meant giving up any edge in my own abilities.

  

Everyone shared in common sacrifice. Everyone paid his dues.  All men shared in protecting women and children for the survival of the community.

I was in that "transition zone", where I could draw attention to myself in other ways and create a stir.  So “re-educating” someone like me was seen as essential to the community, even an national security issue for warding of enemies.  It was the “pawns ahead of pieces” theory.

  

In a few of my drafts of novels, the “me” character gets sent to an “academy” where he learns to “become a man”. In that sheltered environment, he meets and interacts with one of his own “role models”.  In the meantime, while he is there, something catastrophic happens to the outside world to make it dystopian.

The moral theory of the mental health world of the 1950s was that gender conformity would lead to a growth process where permanent marriage and family would happen, and where a healthful and appropriate relationship with others outside family would develop.  This was certainly a speculative theory at best, and was pretty easy for those in power to abuse. 

  

Yet, I tended, ironically, to develop the same attitude about others that had been shown about me.  I tended to see people as inherently “worthy” or not, partly based on notions or appearance and performance associated with gender.  Since real relationships were difficult, I tended to move into an area of fantasy.

  

The rub, of course, is that if someone has real talents and is able to focus on them and deploy them publicly, especially in a global world, he may wind up able to deal with other people in the world on is own terms.  That sounds healthy – to have something to offer first (as in the area of music composition or writing).  But it also depends on being “fortunate” and depending on the hidden sacrifices of others. 

  

In the latter part of my life, after retirement, I’ve faced a different kind of “conscription”.  That is, in addition to the eldercare that I’ve chronicled, real calls to become involved with the needs of others.  Now, I don’t like to be solicited and fight off sales calls .  I can’t change course for what I’m doing, even though I understand at a certain intellectual level that others have to make a living, too – sometimes by selling things on commission, including to me.  I don’t like to be approached to fight for other people’s causes. 

  

There is something about doing something for other people.  When what I do comes out of my own talents, I’m not very concerned with what :”I think of” the person I do it for.  That sounds healthy enough.  But in real life, that often isn’t good enough.  So much in life does depend on “fortune”.   A lot of the calls for volunteerism sound unfocused – a willingness to join teams, respond to emergencies, or pledge “hours” as well as money, into bureaucracies controlled by others.

  

I heard a plea from NBC-Washington’s “Wednesday’s Child” Sunday morning..  A young man was presented who had unusual artistic talents.  I won’t even get in to the suspicion people could come up it I expressed interest (in practice, it’s a by downer).  But adoption raises a question:  would I be willing to nurture talent in someone else rather than put so much emphasis on deploying my own?  I used to hear about that kind of question even in adult relationships.  (See TV blog entry on the NBC series Nov. 13, 2012;  another ethical question would be expecting to be able to hand-pick a child for abilities. .   A lifestyle that put's one's own accomplishments is certainly double-edged.  But maybe, despite Rick Warren, sometimes " it is about you."  

A review of my time in Army Basic Combat Training (1968); I don't want to go "Back to the Bay"; the draft can still come back

As I’ve noted here before, I’m planning to issue a “formal” commercial version of my “Do Ask Do Tell III” booklet (Books, Oct. 1, 2011).  I’m seriously considering adding to it, as an appendix, the original “Chapter 4” of my fiction manuscript, titled “The Proles”, which I wrote by hand in 1969 while in the Army at Fort Eustis,  That chapter gives the excruciating details of my experience in Basic Combat Training at Fort Jackson, SC, from February 1968 through May 1968.

  

Yes, you can tell from the elapsed months, I did get recycled.  One of the lowest points in my life occurred on Sunday, March 31, 1968, when on KP in Special Training Company, when the cook made me scrub out the grease pit with a tooth brush.  That evening, LBJ would announce that he would not run for re-election that year.  And LBJ had escalated the war in Vietnam, leading to 50000 GI deaths and 500,000 troops “over there” about the time I was in.

  

In my 1997-2000 “Do Ask Do Tell: A Gay Conservative Lashes Back” I did “summarize” my experience Basic.  (Author Peter Tauber had done the same with his 1973 book “The Sunshine Soldiers”, and I spoke to him once by phone around that year.)  The book make the language a little more polite and tended ti stress the political and social significance of the Vietnam era military draft in policy terms.  It mentioned a few things worth noting again.  One is that the Army did check with NIH twice about my security clearances, resulting in some bizarre communication where the Army seemed to be passing the buck on my suitability to civilian “professionals” in an area where the military usually wants its own judgment (as we remember from the 1993 debate on gays in the military).  Another is a general observation that the military draft was seen as an essential prong of national security, the way pawns are indispensable in a chess game.  Nuclear confrontation was less likely if the US could deploy sufficient troops on the ground anywhere.  It reminds me of a certain approach to chess, as in the “Queen Pawn” openings where the pawns are advanced in front of the major pieces before the pieces come into contact.  (Chapter 2 of the book also discusses my plot for “The Proles”, which the reader can check online or in the book itself; I’ll come back to that another time.)

  

But the fifty typewritten pages about Basic from my 1969 original (of “The Proles”) communicates a much more disturbing concept.  The text is excruciating, as it details my difficulties in adapting to what was demanded of me in military life.  There could be serious consequences for me, for the rest of my life, if I eventually did not do so.  I could become a burden on others in the unit.  There is particular attention to the idea that, if I finished Basic successfully in reasonable time, that I  would be “sheltered away” in a safe position (like a King in a chess game after castling)  whereas others, with less education but more street smarts, became the cannon fodder in Vietnam.  There was even the spectacle of my Direct Commission application, while I was in Special Training, and the bizarre interview I had with a board of officers at the end of Basic, just a few weeks after an equally bizarre conversation with a “mental hygiene professional”.  It’s the stuff of independent film today.

  

There really wasn’t much sexual tension  -- homosexuality itself was not a direct issue  in such a regimented world – but the lack of social skills was. This was more like Asperger’s Syndrome in the military, or even mild autism.

  

The “DADT I” book also relates my time in graduate school before I entered the Army.  In fact, to “redeem myself”, I took the draft physical three times (in 1964, 1966, and 1967), going from 4-F to 1-Y to 1-A.  By 1966, in fact, the draft physical had stopped “asking” about sexual orientation – a little known fact, but logical in a world with a military draft.  When in graduate school, I was also an assistant instructor, with the “power” to give exams and grades (in that dreaded algebra).  I recall grading finals on a bus (out to see a grad school friend in Colorado) and turning the grades in (about half the grades were D’s and F’s) the day I would catch a plane home from graduate school, about the enter the Army very shortly.  I was passing judgment on others, in a way that I would soon be subjected to myself.  That transition was ironic and curious.  Some will say that I “abuse” the power and was an a-hole.  Perhaps I had comeuppance due.
  

After Basic, there was the stint in the Pentagon, and the mysterious transfer to Fort Eustis.  In Chapter 5 of “The Proles” I relate history saying that the “sheltered MOS” (“01 E20” for those who remember_ were phased out, and some “sheltered” people with more time left were sent to AIT and Vietnam combat after all.

The Selective Service System still exists (link)  and young adult males are still required to register.

Sometimes, since 9/11, there have been political calls to resume the draft, out of fairness and shared sacrifice.  Charles Moskos took that position after 9.11, even as he backed away from his original support of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” which he had helped author in 1993. I actually talked to Selective Service and got documents from them when working on the first book in 1996. 

But the real value of the “Basic Training” chapter is to pose a certain moral question.  That is, what behavior and performance is expected of someone when an outside force compels him to serve the needs of others, in a manner outside of his normal skillset and function in a “free market” world?  One could use the word “cowardice” regarding my issues in Basic at times, even though that word is no longer used that way today in polite company.

  

This was no small issue.  The rifle range did damage my hearing, at least on the right ear (the “coaching side” on the Rifle Range), resulting in some sacrifice for someone who had intended that music would be a big part of his life. 

There’s another angle.  I was totally helpless for about six weeks, and then after about two weeks in Special Training Co0mpany I suddenly got better, but not because of unusual coercion from the cadre.  I just did.  I passed the PCPT on the fourth try with a score in the mid 300’s, and later made sharpshooter on the Rifle Range.  It was possible for me to perform physically, more or less in accordance of my not-chosen biological gender, if pushed hard enough.  As a moral matter, should I have been?  The problem is that if I didn’t step up, others would sacrifice in my place.  That kind of tension can generate wars.

I have to account for the fact that I am rather clumsy with a lot of mechanical, practical things.  I have a lot on my plate doing what I do, so I have to remain focused, and not make “changes” that could break things.  (That sounds like “moves” in an IT workplace.)  The brain has finite capacity, though it can gradually increase.

I suppose I have a moral duty to find out why I was “behind”, since it could lead to more sacrifice form others.  In my world, as I grew up, “disability” was perceived through a “moral lens”, and I tended to reflect that value as I judged others in turn (as I already had in grad school as a math teacher).  Based on modern neuroscience, it sounds like some of the issue might have been premature “pruning” of brain circuits, cutting off distractions so I could focus on what I would be good at.  This may be a residual of some sort of epigenetic  autism.

One could apply this sort of analysis to any situation, where someone has to function under someone else’s authority, survive, and yet not jeopardize others.  One could even imagine this analogy with the Holocaust.
  

And I think we are “judged” by how we step up to these individually tailored (maybe not so random) challenges, that seem to vary among generations but have a tendency to be forgotten and then to come back. Even so, I remember my own questions about the public morality of the Vietnam war later, and getting a letter from my own church that we had to "trust our leaders".  We know where that went. As a general matter, people can share moral culpability for what their countries do, too.  
        

I can relate the experience to today’s calls about service and volunteerism.  I don’t like being “conscripted” into serving someone else’s agenda, and I cringe when I see calls to pledge “hours” as well as money to “other people’s causes”.  Service seems more valid when it is related to one’s own special skills, and when the recipients have some specific connection to how one has already lived one’s life. In these circumstances, I don’t get too concerned  about judging the “worthiness” of others.

  

Yet, the ability to find satisfaction from connection to others, without their having to be judged the way I think I have been sometimes, still remains an issue for me.  

I am left with another impression, though, of what happens if we don’t take care of our infrastructure (May 13 posting).  It comes right out of the Army, the military mind.  “The whole world will go Back to the Bay”.

Wikipedia attribution link (p.d.) for modern picture of BCT at Fort Jackson (second image).  

Does the future use of social media portend an expectation of whitelisting?

One of the important concepts in the use of social media is “whitelisting”, the idea that content is posted for the eyes of people already “approved” as “friends” or “followers”, or, in the older Web 1.0 environment, recipients on a listserver.  Of course, digital communications are “permanent” and can be forwarded to others in ways not controlled by the sender.  In practice, this has been a real problem for the “privacy” many people, especially teenagers and young adults.

"Friend-specific" applications processing has gone quite far.  I think it's a little creepy to want to check a seating chart for a concert against social media to see who might be sitting near you, but that's how far it has gotten.  

  

It sounds like there is a chicken-and-egg problem here.  Are “we” supposed to make our “friends” in the real world (through work, church, volunteerism, socializing in bars, courtship, and anything else) first, before we decide who should receive our communications? That would seem to give a “purpose” to communicating material that might seem provocative or a sign of recklessness or bad judgment if released into the wild (as I found out with my substitute teaching fiasco in 2005, noted here July 27, 2007).  I can see how this concept could become important in some quarters, for example perhaps homeowner’s insurance, as well as the job market and exposure of other family members. (But oversharing with loosely screened "friends" of daily activity details leads to security and reputation problems, too.)

That’s not the spin, however, of the book “The New Digital Age” (mentioned in yesterday’s post).  The early chapters suggest that people will evolve digital identities that parallel their “real” ones.   Everyone will live a “Second Life”. 

  

In fact, my self-publication, and leveraging of the free and generous (perhaps gratuitous) search –engine indexing in the early days of my web presence (the late 90s, when I put my first “Do Ask Do Tell” book text online) helped me to find interesting people in the real world.  It worked in the reverse of the way Facebook is supposed to work now. 

  

There are even deeper questions that follow: like what “you” value in other people. When will meeting real needs first be emotionally satisfying?

Our top priority right now: stability and security of the power grid: and it's a technical issue before it's a socia or politicall one

I’ll be reviewing a new book by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, “The New Digital Age”, and, yes, I can be swept away by the way digital space is providing a new universe for our lives. 

  

But I also think that there are a few issues we need to focus on to make sure we sustain “life as we know it”.  And a few of the issues seem to have more substance and credibility than others.

One of the most critical is the stability and security of the power grid.  There are reports from places that sound credible (the National Academy of Sciences, and Oak Ridge National Laboratories, as well as right-wing columnists and politicians, even Newt Gingrich) that major parts of our country could suffer disruptions of shutdowns, with tragic results, for years form a terrorist electromagnetic pulse strike (WMP), which could be deployed more locally in smaller weapons.  It’s not completely clear to me that it is as easy for “amateurs” to make and deploy these devices (like radio frequency and flux guns, which are all non-nuclear) as a few pundits claim – but certainly the debate following the Boston tragedy will invoke debate on the subject.   It ought to take stage with the gun debate.  (Why hasn’t it happened in the Middle East?)   Perhaps even more ominous is a danger from nature – solar storms or “flares”, with huge coronal mass ejections, on the scale of the 1859 Carrington Event.  They happen, but most miss the Earth.  Every hundred years or so, we can have a CME that hits our magnetosphere directly and is large enough to do long-lasting grid to the power grid.

A good question, or course, is, what, from a technical viewpoint, should power companies do (besides paying dividends to shareholders, including me) to harden their grids – especially huge transformers – from such events or threats.  Should homeowners or property managers do anything?  I think we should be debating the engineering and science before the sociology and  politics. I’m not prepared for a world of “doomsday preppers”.  Obviously the huge tech companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc) belong in the debate.

Of course, I grew up with doomsday debates – the Cold War.  The Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded while I was a “patient” at NIH, and I, since I went into DC to school at night, was the only one who followed what was going on.  There are reports (from PBS -- "The Man Who Saved the World" -- Oct. 23, 2012, TV blog) that one Russian submarine commander could have chosen to  ignite WWIII but there are other reports that say the historical accounts of Kennedy’s actions are overblow,   More recently, after 9.11, there was renewed debate on the idea that asymmetric actors could launch nuclear blasts (which produce an EMP effect if at high enough alitutde), or “radiation dispersion devices”.  The possibility has been mentioned in conjunction with North Korea.

But the possibility of a precipice has always influence our “moral” thinking. There is a notion that if families are weak or social capital is lacking because of “hyper-individualism”, a society is more vulnerable to attack from an ideological enemy that wants to prove something. That bears on someone like me, because those of us who are “different” but powerful in unusual ways benefit from “hyper-individualism” and perhaps tend to invite potentially dangerous indignation from those who are displaced by it. 

Global warming and climate change – and I think the science (starting with Al Gore, it you must – even if he didn’t invent the Internet) is almost beyond question.  The world will change.  But, compared to the threats above, climate change is gradual, although it can cause huge local catastrophes that can test social capital in a society unprepared for it.

But that’s one reason why power grid stability, as an issue, needs top priority from journalists and bloggers, even right now.

The “social capital” area has one huge challenge whose public debate is still diffuse.  That’s “demographic winter”.  We are not producing enough children to support our elderly, as we live longer.  Specifically, that problem produced a flap in 2012 about filial responsibility laws, (in about 30 states), which produced an uptick in my own blog stats last spring when I reported on a Pennsylvania case (John Pittas) regarding these laws.  By and large, we see the debate reflected more in “entitlement” reform (Social Security, Medicare), and even sequestration and the debt ceiling. 

From a social point of view, we’re learning something we knew 50 years ago but somewhat forgot. People have to learn to take care of one another, besides themselves.  That rises to a moral issue, but it isn’t quite the same issue as “personal responsibility” as libertarians see it, or as following through with the consequences of one’s “choices” (like having children).  There are some responsibilities (filial) we will have anyway, and that observation could have a profound effect on how we see marriage.  Yet, that point got completely overlooked in the gay marriage debate. 

I got started in publishing and later blogging over a single issue, “gays in the military” (aka “don’t ask don’t tell”), how that related to conscription in the past, and how that related to all our ideas of individual liberty and balancing those to the needs of the group.  That issue seems largely settled today (maybe not enough for complacency), but two biggies that I have found (power grid, filial responsibility) seem now centric to my attention.

  

I can reflect also on how we see the “urgency” of issues.  The power issue I mention today is partly technical, and lends itself to objective examination, outside of the parameters of group emotions or moral ideology.  That assessment needs to happen quickly.  On the other hand, we often see politicians and pundits claiming that society will collapse when some new “rights” are recognized or reinterpreted in a new way.  No, heterosexual marriage won’t collapse because of gay marriage, and neither will “society”.  But  a technological future, so promising for democracy and equality, as outlined in the book from Google’s former CEO, could take a huge setback if we don’t tend to  our infrastructure now – and in that sense, the continued sequestration (the way it plays out) amounts to a serious national security problem.  And there is a moral issue that impacts individuals like me – our resilience, our ability to step up to the needs of others when we really have to.  Without that expectation from us, “meaning” starts to become diffuse, others make real sacrifices, and indignation and instability grows, sometimes to the point of being dangerous.  

High school off-campus online "beauty" ranking content raises free speech, ethical questions

A “beauty” contest (of sorts) conducted online and “off campus” a Seattle high school (Issaquah) will be seen by some as a test of the limits of free speech.

  

It’s called “May Madness”, in which students (usually boys) “rank” photos of the high school’s “hottest” female students. 

  

At the beginning of the film “The Social Network”, a caricature of Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg is shown writing a system to do just that with Harvard co-eds (Movies blog, Oct. 3, 2010). 
   

School officials say there is nothing they can do about it, since it happens off-campus.

  

NBC Today has a story by Lauren Ina here. 

  

KING5 in Seattle offered this YouTube video:

  

The television station also offers this story. 

  

This does seem to be an example of “social combat” that leads to bullying. It would not be as much of a problem if “contestants” were asked for permission for their photos to be ranked first.

  

In a chess tournament, you can’t get rated until you actually play, and make a choice to.  (Oh, but there aren’t enough events that aren’t rated by USCF, but that’s another matter for later).

  

There’s an existential problem with the idea of “ranking” people.  Of course, that what schools do when they give grades (and remember how that used to affect the military draft back in the 1960s?)  Arvin Vohra mentioned the “ranking” issue in his recent book (see Books blog, April 19). 

   

But what is supposed to happen to those who wind up in “the second division” (to borrow a Major League Baseball term from the 1950s)?  Do they do what others tell them to do?  Is this about power?  It sounds like the roots of authoritarianism.  

Ninth Circuit deals blow to copyright trolls (Righthaven cases)

Tech Dirt (and other sources like EFF) reports that an appeals court (the Ninth Circuit) has ruled that a copyright owner could not simply transfer the right to sue over to a law frim (Righthaven) without transferring over other rights, to publish and distribute.  That means that the “copyright troll” business model of Righthaven cannot stand up in court, at least in the Ninth Circuit.  I don’t think there are any other conflicting rulings in other circuits, and it is very unlikely that the Supreme Court would disagree with the Ninth Circuit in this case. ‘

  

Just saying you own the copyright doesn’t make it so.  You really have to own all the rights  A secret back-door agreement can invalidate your rights.

   

Tech dirt has the story here. 

Can we get a similar ruling for patent trolls?

   

The court did invalidate a finding that reproducing a whole article could be “Fair Use”, because it said that it did not need that finding.  It does not preclude that finding in another case where it might be procedurally necessary.

Here’s a panel discussion from the Media Bloggers Association lawyer Ron Coleman a year ago.

  

Bloggers can’t file amicus briefs on their own, but need a legal group to do it for them.  I can’t find an active site for MBA right now, but it does have a Facebook site, here. 

New York Times modifies paywall to exempt videos; Dish and Washington Post go to paywalls

Newspapers are starting to experiment more with their paywalls. 

  

The New York Times has tightened loopholes (“NYClean”, regarding “bookmark-lets”) but will soon exempt video from the paywall, as it tries to become a more video friendly outlet.  It says it will build franchises around brands connected to the paper.  The content will be developed by Acura and Microsoft (and Bing).  “Paid Content” has a story here. 

  

Andrew Sullivan has started a $1.99 a month content payment policy for his site, The Dish, and says that the Dish actually needs to raise $900,000 to operate.  It appears that when individual journalists have columns on corporate sites, their "sponsors" expect them to bring in certain specified amounts of revenue -- that's how it works.  You can find the subscription link at the top of the page, here. It’s also “only” $19.99 a year.

   

And The Washington Post has announced it will launch a “leaky” paywall this summer.  The paywall will not count visits that come from Google or social media, and exempt some categories of people.

The Post has its story here. 

The start date for the paywall policy was not provided yet.

The Post does charge for some archived articles, as do many papers. 

According to the video above, the New York Daily News is also considering a paywall.

As a practical matter, paywalls don’t matter much to people with paid home subscriptions, because they are usually included in some sort of arrangement.  But some people don’t like home subscriptions because of the potential security problems – of having to stop them to go away, and with recent stories (in the LA area) of vacation stops leaking to burglars through distribution channels.  Some papers have tightened their procedures for handling stops for this reason, requiring sooner notification.  Some authorities  think it is important to have the social neighborhood connections (“social capital”) to get neighbors to remove newspapers or unwanted  commercial or political fliers from homes. (USPS stop mail delivery seems very secure.)

Many smaller town newspapers have put in paywalls, which sounds self-defeating as major stories are usually available from larger news organizations. One problem is that most people cannot reasonably subscribe to many smaller local papers, so it is harder for anyone to keep up with local news in many different areas. 

  

My blogs to link to papers that have paywalls.  Users are responsible for being able to access the links, either by staying within a free limit, or having paid the piper. 

  

Youtube embeds are usually free, however, except for some complete motion pictures which can be rented for low fees for viewing,  

I'm in "no position" to consider the same measure as Mr. Sullivan.  But after I get farther in my own content plans, it seems possible I could "join forces" with some others, and strategies could change.  But nothing now.  

Data brokers have an indirect but serious effect on "online reputation"; FTC runs a "sting"

“Online reputation”, the way pundits have discussed the problem in terms of social media exposure, may be overridden by data collection companies, according to a story by Craig Timberg on p A10 of the Washington Post on Wednesday, May 08, 2013. Federal Trade Commission employees posed as potential customers in a civil “sting”. The link for the story (“Data brokerage industry warned on privacy rules”) is here. 

The FTC has its own press release on the matter, here. 

The companies accumulate data on consumers from a variety of sources, including credit reports and public records, as well as social media.  Because of identity theft, there is a risk that much of the information is wrong.  Information is marketed to various kinds of clients, often for offers. But  it can also be used to build off-site blacklists for insurance, housing and employment.

The list of affected companies includes 4Nannies (regarded to nanny employment), Brokers Data, Case Breakers, ConsumerBase, Criminal Check, People Search, Now, U.S. Information Search, U.S. Data Corporation, and USA People Search.

  

Here’s a YouTube video by KMIR6 (Palm Springs CA) on data brokers, from March 2013.

  

Some of the reputational issues that these companies can pose would have predated the Internet.  Yet, I did not encounter problems from them myself during most of my own adult life

"Google Glass(es)" stir up more controversy, about potential photography of people (and card hands) in public places and businesses

A wearable computer (well, isn’t a smart phone practically that) can create new social and perhaps legal controversies, according to a front page story Tuesday May 7, 2013 in the New York Times by David Streitfeld.  Specifically, the device is “Google Glass”  (can be spelled as plural, but only one lens has the camera).  The title is telling: “Google Glass Picks Up Early Signal: Keep Out”, link here. 

Right now, according to the article, there are only about 10000 in circulation, 2000 for developers, and 8000 testers. 

  

The device can access the Internet and take photos. So can smart phones.  But it’s much harder for someone else in a public place to notice if he or she is being photographed.

  

There’s also an auto safety question.  The “glasses” would be legal in many states, where it is illegal to operate a cell phone or even a camera if you can’t keep your hands on the steering wheel.  It could be a convenient way for someone to take landscape pictures when driving alone in a place without parking.  But it could also cause a kind of surveillance on other drivers by private citizens, although there is so much now from public cameras that it’s not clear how much that could matter.

  

In bars and discos, the expected etiquette about photography is evolving but getting stricter than it was maybe even just two  years ago, because people are concerned about being tagged in social media and about what they have heard about facial recognition software (probably overblown).  People seem less sensitive about this in California than in the Midwest or East. (As one relatively nice person said in a bar last fall, "That's not OK" anymore.)  But the glasses could complicate things, as merely “staring” apparently is involved in taking a picture.  At least one bar in Seattle has banned the product, and I suspect others will, especially way from California and Silicon Valley. 

  

  

And casinos already prohibit photography around  gaming tables (after all, they prohibit card counting, too), but that means they would have to prohibit the glasses, too.   

  

Will the TSA have some kind of issue with this product?

     

Will the product work well with contacts?  Will it evolve to where it can be combined with prescription products (outside of Beverly Hills)?  Take it furture: Could Internet access be surgically implanted into the eye?

Are federal rules requiring airlines to "hide" ticket taxes a violation of the First Amendment?

George Will has an interesting syndicated column this morning about “commercial” vss. “political speech”.  

  

He takes to task a 2-1 DC Circuit Appeals Court opinion upholding federal rules that force airlines to hide the federal tax portion of airline tickets in the fine print. (That was the Circuit that turned down Naval midshipman Joe Steffan en banc in 1994; I was there for the hearing.)

  

It sounds like an odd rule, in a time when use of plain English and full disclosure is a public policy trend for most businesses. 

  

But the federal government doesn’t want the public to be too conscious of the taxes it pays for air travel.  The rule affects low cost carriers more than legacy  airlines.

   

The op-ed appears on p. A21 of the Sunday Washington Post, and is titled “Muzzling Free Speech about Taxes”, and is syndicated.  Other papers (like St. Louis) called it, “Why judicial activism matters”, link (website url) here. 

Will points out that there is no constitutional reason why commercial speech should be less protected than political speech.  In a sense, almost any Internet site offering political opinions alongside ads is also “commercial speech” --  an idea that gives the speech a more nuanced “purpose” when you talk about implicit content.

  

I can remember, back around 1986, when a “People’s Express” portion on an airlines trip had to be ticketed by hand, and that in the past Southwest Airlines wouldn’t interline or print regular tickets, anyway

Does DMCA require copyright owner to consider fair use before requesting takedown? Also, chilling effects in agribusiness.

Does a copyright owner sending a takedown notice under the DMCA have to consider the possibility that the defending speaker “copied” a small amount of material under Fair Use?

  

There seems to be some controversy, but in general it seems that the courts are saying, yes it does.  Otherwise, a copyright owner could use DMCA notices to censor content critical of the owner if there is even one word quoted without permission.  However, advocates of the rights of content owners have said that under the DMCA, anything can be ordered taken down if explicit permission for use had not been given.  It could then be restored if a hearing or court determines fair use.  Consider the practical chilling effects.

  

There is a posting about the matter from 2008 on “Internet Cases” about Lenz. V. Universal, here. 

  

Electronic Frontier Foundation has a post by Daniel Nazer, about a newer, medical-tinged case, between Gina Crosley-Corcoran and Dr, Amy Tutuer.  In this case, Corcoran sent a followup DMCA notice even after Tutuer changed hosts.   The link is here. 

I’ll also mention another issue that came across my email, the “Anit-AG” bill in Tennessee forcing whistleblowers to turn over evidence of agricultural cruelty within a short time; a bill that tries to silence critics with unreasonable deadlines for journalists and bloggers.  The ACLU has a petition link here. 

Update: May 4

Just want to note, the DMCA "fair use" question could be particularly important if an entire blog is removed because of one posting, or an entire site taken down because of one specific URL on the site.  On YouTube, individual videos get taken down; sometimes entire accounts are closed for repeated requests if not successfully counter.  

Craigslist tried to copyright ads submitted to it last summer

Craigslist tried to enforce a copyright claim on an ad for a three-week period in the late summer of 2012.  That means that advertisements posted on Craigslist during this period, where the customer had clicked “agree”, can’t be posted on any other services. 

  

I’ve never heard of a service provider “owing content”, much less and advertisement.  Can Ford not run the same ad in the Washington Post as in the New York Times (or the Washington Times)?  It sounds ridiculous.  And normally blogging platforms (and video platforms like YouTube) don’t claim ownership of content, and neither do shared-hosting providers.  They are, however, required to honor copyright takedown requests under the DMCA.

   

A US Court in California did uphold Craiglist’s “ownership” claim during the three week period. The archive link is here. 

  

The Electronic Frontier Foundation story by Kurt Opsahl is here.

  

The case may have been in part stimulated by a “Jesus Tap-Dancing Christ” ad, which went viral (here).

  

Craigslist did eliminate the policy going forward.

  

I may be looking at Craigslist soon for proofreading services for my “DADT III” book (previous post). 

"The Proles" (inspired by Army Basic in 1968) preceded "The Manifesto"

I’ve been preparing a “DADT III” manuscript (first draft – see Books blog Oct. 1, 2011), for official publication as an e-Book and print this summer, and in the course of doing so, I’ve reviewed my old manuscript for the novel “The Proles” that I sketched when I was in the Army (by hand in the barracks, 1969) and had typed up by 1972. 

  

The novel has a detailed autobiographical account of my time in Basic Combat Training in early 1968. I streamlined the account and smoothed out the coarse language in my 1997 book,  but I now think that the original chapter (about 48 double-spaced pages), with all its graphic, self-effacing detail and crude language common at that time in that environment, would be quite telling now.

  

The chapter presents me as a sheltered, spoiled,. “over-educated” yuppie, who doesn’t carry his weight and who could be perceived as a parasite on those who do.  In today’s world, such a self-assessment sounds like Maoism.  If everyone is brought equally low, no one can mooch on anyone else.  Isn’t that what authoritarianism exploits?

  

But, of course, I wonder how many of my problems, of being “physically non-competitive” as a male, were the result of an inborn biological problem (genetic or epigenetic, perhaps neurological [mild autism or Asperger's]or maybe circulatory), and how much of it was moral – a physically lazy disposition?  Actually, I didn’t lack energy – I was underweight, not fat. And, in Basic Training, I did get somewhat better after being recycled through Special Training Company for about four extra weeks, being able to pass the PCPT with reasonable scores after about eight weeks in the Army.  

  

A key point is that I was not aware of my underdevelopment until others forced me to see it.  And it seemed to have to do more with what others wanted to demand from me, not from what I really needed to take care of myself, excel in school, earn a living.  After all, young men are required to offer themselves to defend the country, right?

  

When I subbed, I noticed that some students in special education probably perceived things this way.  They didn’t know why the outside world needed to demand so much from them.

In the novel, there is a preceding chapter where I finish graduate school – stumbling on my orals on an important theorem (Liouville’s).  In Basic, an officer trips me with a question on whether drawing two points on a line always results in a triangle.  Maybe I had been mediocre as a grad student.  I also gave a final to my “remedial” (or slow-track) freshman Algebra test and graded the finals on the bus on the way to Denver to spend semester break with a grad student friend before entering the Army.  I was a kind of “visiting team”, batting first, and then having to defend my right to survive in the Army.  Yet I prevailed.  I would be sheltered away in a non-combatant MOS (“Mathematician”) and let others (bigger and stronger) do the fighting.

The moral implications of all this are still quite troubling to me, even if younger generations of upper middle class kids have barely seen this.  Churches try – with exercises like 30-hour fasts.

The novel itself may seem nihilistic, although no more so that a Lars Van Trier film (like “Melancholia”, which after all brings the end of the world). In the book, a character based on me (named John Maurcek), a natural hero-worshipper, comes into contact with some young men who seem to be trying to bring about a “Second Coming”, as evidenced by a sequence of violent events and local signs.  They seem to have invented a battlefield weapon that can make an enemy soldier (or anyone) dematerialize, and be digitally encoded.  The person can be brought back to life multiple times, like incarnations, in which he will not recall other resurrections.   (All of this is a bit of a stretch of physics, but even during my late 60s Arrmy service,  I heard mention of scary weapons like flux guns, now the nightmare of conservative "doomsday preppers").  After Army service, Bill gets led on a treasure hunt, and awakens to find himself living in a world of post-nuclear apocalypse. People try to get life going again in little communities, but all the “undeserving” will get their specialized comeuppance, sometimes dispatched with a machete.  I can see that, in my late twenties, I was capable of holding some people in particularly low regard.   Old “Army buddies” (like ‘Rado Suhl” -- "collect on delivery") at Fort Eustis will remember me (“Chicken Man”) for this. 

  

I think I’ll include this original chapter about Basic Training in my DADT III book as an “appendix” (perhaps ruptured).  

By the way, one of the first songs I ever heard in a gay bar (Julisus's, in NYC) was "Bugler Boy", from WWII, with the words "You're in the Army now."
  

"The Manifesto", revisited

One moment that comes to mind crystal clear is my boarding a taxi on Broadway, suitcase in hand, around 6 PM on January 5, 1979, saying goodbye to my apartment in the Cast Iron Building and quickly flying away to a new life in Dallas, where I would spend over nine very interesting years. 

  

I did not have a compelling reason to leave my job.  True, the new one offered slightly more pay in a new city with lower taxes and living costs, and probably an opportunity for “prosperity”.  But the driving force was personal.  In 1978, as eventful as it had been, I had been given reason to contemplate whether I could stay in a relationship if something “happened” to the other person to affect his “attractiveness”.  Details don’t matter right here.  But some irony does.  The circumstances had given me a forewarning of what might happen to the community a few years later.

  

In Dallas, the epidemic (HIV-AIDS)  arrived full force maybe about two years after it stormed through New York.  That was enough time for me to adjust my “behavior” and probably save my own life.  As far as I know, I never got infected.  The “gay community” in Texas would have to survive a ferocious political threat from the religious right, which tried to ban gays from almost all occupations.  In retrospect, it seemed surprising to me that ten years later we really could focus on the “right” to serve in the military.  I had come from much more menacing lands.

  

I am going to review, in this “manifesto” posting, what I am getting at with these blogs, books, and screenplays.  But I want to backtrack to what I “accomplished” with my first “Do Ask Do Tell” book in 1997, and then show how things have evolved and flipped since then.

  

Bill Clinton’s campaign promise (in 1992) to lift the ban on gays in the military would have surprised me, were it not for the stories of people like Keith Meinhold and Joseph Steffan that had surfaced the summer before his election.  And the counter arguments in 1993, stressing “privacy” and then “unit cohesion”, seemed to have an ironic parallel with my own civilian expulsion from William and Mary in 1961 (I would get drafted anyway in 1968).  But what struck me the most, given my own coming of age, was the way the military encapsulated so many of the values that seemed to trap and threaten those of us who were “different”, like me, and how it had, until the collapse of the Vietnam war, been presumed that young men owed their country the capacity to defend it physically, risking not only life but being maimed or disfigured, and still needing to depend on the love (even sexual) of others. Likewise similar activity is often of young men (today more often of women, too, than before) in various civilian counterparts, such as police and volunteer fire departments.  The public used to believe that the “possibility” of homosexuality would undermine the ability of men to bond to defend women and children in a family, tribe, community, or country.  We all know from the history of “don’t ask don’t tell” that this turned out to be a bit of a canard.  But it was a perception a half century ago, when I was a young man.  And the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy was law for seventeen contentious years.

   

My 1997 book focused on libertarian approaches to individual rights, with the idea that the legal code and, largely speaking, the community moral code ought to focus on (Southpark-like) “personal responsibility” rather than collective purposes and trying to right aggregate differential outcomes (and “victimization”).  But I already had a sense of why “private choices” do matter to the larger community.  This notion seemed to apply way beyond to area of gay rights to most people who were in any significant way “different” (maybe to a lot more heterosexuals than homosexuals). 

  

In the ensuing years, three major things changed.  One was that the separation of “private life” from “public” tended to melt away in the age of the Internet and social media.  Personal rights tended to focus more on public self-expression (and sometimes self-promotion) than on “private lives”.  Double lives became untenable.  More recently, energy level has risen in the right to self-defense, too. 

     

Another (second) way was that my perception of “common good” became less a matter just of of economic fairness (seen as the way issues ranging from gay marriage to family leave are debated) and “equality” as to a more personal concern about the way we form and keep relationships.  People seemed to have widely varying stakes in responsibility for others, and this created a lot of intractable social tension.  This understanding grew with me during my long spell of eldercare for my mother, as well as work as a substitute teacher.

   

But the “third thing,” building on the first two, has to do with sustainability of our pluralistic, free, “global” way of life.  We all know the range of concerns:  environmental (climate change, even space weather), security (terrorism, particularly asymmetric and unconventional), and demographics (longer life spams and lower birth rates).   There are some things that have to happen “collectively” or “in significant volume” for our way of life to continue.  One of the most striking new moral expectations is “generativity” – the idea that every individual (even those without their own children) should have a real personal stake – skin in the game – in the people who will follow them.  Add to this is the idea that we want to value all human life, at a time when technology challenges us to make the personal commitments  (like to prolonging the lives of parents) that doing so would take, without inviting more government.  That is a curious irony.

  

That brings me my “main course” (at least the meat course, after the fish). I want to focus on the question as to how those of us who are “different” and perhaps less socially connected to others should be expected to behave.  The question matters in almost any society or political culture. It is equivalent to a person’s own moral character.

  

I’m trying to stay away ideology for its own sake, whether religious (scriptural) or political.  But it’s true, many religions and many authoritarian political systems seem to get a lot of mileage out of containing those who are “different” and proposing that they can bring danger to everyone.  That plays out in different ways.  In small tribal societies, sometimes you really have to count on everyone when there is an enemy or threat.  In a large pluralistic society, asymmetry (the Internet and low barriers to entry) creates its own tensions and risks.  And we’ve all seem that homophobia seems to work this way.

   

Why isn’t this kind of thinking seen as self-effacing?  I think there is a natural tendency for people to be willing to make sacrifices for others when they think everyone else will.  But moreover, I think there is a question of “meaning”.  People sometimes find the emotional commitments they make (especially in the areas of marriage and family) meaningful because they think there are certain “natural” ways that things are “supposed to be”; if the self-discipline required is “meaningful” then it can generate long-term reward and pleasure.

  

Indeed, I am a bit of an aesthetic “fundamentalist”.  I like people and things that look or sound “good” for their own sake.  That is, I tend to like what I perceive as natural “virtue” for its own sake.  I detect in myself a dislike of seeing some aspects of that virtue challenged too publicly.  Think, after all, about why societies usually have laws against too much public nudity.  They want to protect the “meaning” for private intimate settings.

  

Having migrated to libertarianism in the 1990s, I don’t like to see the government regulate “private choices”.   But it makes sense to talk about some behavioral choices as ethical matters when they are likely to compromise the ability of others to make choices needed for the “common good”. 

  

“Not all art is autobiographical”, but when I look at the narrative in my first two books, and imagine continuing it to the present (as in film or video), I see a lot of things that people could expect of me.  But what does it add up to?

  

All  this takes me back to those main areas of concern that are particularly striking to me.

   

Let’s return to the narrative stream with which I started.  Although there was no “marriage” broken up in the events I mentioned – that wasn’t expected much in the gay community in the 1970s – the implication is clear.  Couples have to remain interested in one another if something happens to one of them.  (That’s what a marriage vow says.)  That would apply to gay marriage now.  But it has always applied to traditional marriage.  Wives have to deal with husbands maimed in wars overseas (or the reverse).  But all kinds of bad things can happen here, too, ranging from the actions of others (negligence or crime) to, of course, the more familiar medical scenarios – which are more testing now because people can survive things and live longer if they have someone to love them, than they could in past generations.  The cohesion and sustainability of society could depend in part on this human resource.

  

That can provide one reason why people (roommates, therapists, NIH, etc.) were so bemused by first my social indifference and then my fantasy material (based on “virtue”, as noted above) back in the early 1960s.  At least, it could prove distracting to the values (“meaning”) for others in my environment if public and persistent enough. Call it a minor amount of subversiveness. 

  

This observation links over to a second major area of concern: that is, how we respond to adversity, most of all when imposed on us by those who decide we are their enemies.  Adversity comes from many places, especially as we live longer.  But particularly glaring is the blatant, brazen nature of much of the violence today against ordinary middle class people.  Although the recent terror attack in Boston and several shooting rampages get the most attention (from politicians, especially), the practical concern seems to be the street violence, related to gangs, domestic situations, drugs, and poverty, menacing the safety of almost everyone with potentially existential threats, often displaying a "feudal" culture based on social combat or bullying.  Sometimes this seems to be not just crime as we used to think about it, but a kind of warfare, almost as Marx could have described it.  Perpetrators often live outside the system if finance and “law and order” as we usually perceive it, because they (so they feel) were failed by it.  Right and wrong don’t come just with individual actions, but from hierarchal relationships (the gang model – but is also applies to warlords and feudalism).  In this mindset (or “revolution”, "expropriation", or “purification”, as I’ve heard some "radical" people say), a victim is a deserving “casualty” because he or she is the “enemy” (even if a child).  In a sense, such a system of values goes along with extreme tribalism, often under religious control. (see my note on "non-combatants" at the end.)

I saw this kind of thinking when I “spied” on the Far Left in 1972, in the months before I “came out” a second time.  The degree of indignation against salaried middle class professional people (like me) as “parasites” on “working people” was shocking at the time.  But I really had found the same attitude in Army Basic Training back in 1968, when we had a system “corrupted” by student deferments that left the less academically gifted as potential “cannon fodder” for Vietnam. I’ve had to fight this off verbally in person earlier in my life.

   

I am nearing 70 years old and don’t make any predictions, but the possibility that I could encounter violence myself is probably greater than it used to be, for any time since the 1960s.  I would find it difficult to accept “dependency” on others if something bad happened like this, and hope that if it did, I would be gone quickly.  I would have been “taken”.  If some calamity (like hostile EMP) suddenly destroys our way of life (something that "Doomsday Preppers" seem to want, throwing people onto depending onto their own guns), the world would have no further use for someone like me (partly because of the recalcitrance toward intimacy as I've already noted).   In a sense, in my own mind, there is no such thing as a “victim”, and I am very uncomfortable with the way the media sprays and personalizes the “word”.  There is only reality, justice, forgiveness, and Grace.  Without some of the last two of these, one winds up paying for the sins of others as part of his karma (at least, for depending on others in ways he did not face up to).  I could escape this possibility only by “changing” and giving of myself in a personal manner that would be very painful.   As a policy matter, I do feel that Congress should take care of the medical and rehabilitation expenses of anyone injured in a foreign-inspired attack – because the people affected were “conscripted” into combat. But as a personal matter, I have a hard time addressing the needs of any particular person affected (and not previously in my orbit) unless I am somehow prepared for it.

     

The “adversity” issue of course embraces many possible threats, many (but not all) of them natural, a few of them potentially catastrophic for our way of life.  They could include not only nuclear weapons but also electromagnetic pulse devices.  Fortunately, these seem to be much more difficult to deploy than some right-wing literature suggests.  But the significance of them is obvious.  Someone like me is of no use in the world that is left.  I have no generativity.  And I have no ability to find normal layered social interactions work. Social conservatives can claim that a pluralistic society that has lost most of its ability to maintain social structures is a particularly inviting target for enemies.  But our Society in America has much more cohesion than many would think.  Despite the supposed decline of “social capital” many families are strong and volunteerism is common.

   

The third major area that is striking to me is the way we look at risk and the “morality” of risk taking has changed.  In my own experience, this may well start with my own experience with the military draft in the Vietnam era.  I have a detailed manuscript on it (part of an unpublished novel called “The Proles” that I started in the Army).  My account is quite graphic, and it is apparent that despite my rarified “book smarts”, I couldn’t deal with the physical reality of a dangerous world around me.  Is this disability (a kind of autism, or perhaps neurological in some other way), aloofness, or just plain cowardice? In this era, it was seen just in moral terms; if someone like me didn’t do my part, the risk passed on to others. 

   

We see this carry on in other areas.  For example, after the West, Texas explosion recently, townspeople noted that most smaller towns rely on volunteer fire departments. 

   

The “risk” and “burden” concept carries over into “family values” and this point was apparent in my 1997 book.  I spent a lot of space on the idea that having a children greatly reduces discretionary income to spend on one’s own expressiveness, and a willingness to pass on one’s mojo to progeny.  Do people “sacrifice” when they have families?  That seems to depend on how you perceive “desire”.  But it is apparent that in higher income families, fewer people (both men and women) want kids, and this certainly has demographic and sustainability consequences.   Likewise, as more families depend on two incomes, one-breadwinner families get “priced out”, and a whole set of cultural incentives for “socializing” men die out.

  

The opportunities of the Internet also complicate the tasks of families.  The practical reality is that social media has forced many people to live “publicly” whether they want to or not. While for someone like me, the Web has provided a “second life” after retirement, that facilitation means that kids, at least of less tech-savvy or less educated parents, are put at various kinds of risk.  This loops back to the basic question about the willingness to channel one’s life for the benefit of others and take risks for future generations.

  

I gradually developed a catch-phrase for this set of issues, which I call “pay your dues”. 

  

What would really change (and this becomes the “Fourth Thing”)  in my perception of “fairness” is how personal it can get.  Both the eldercare experience with my mother and my substitute teaching job faced me with unwanted invitations to become more involved in tender mercies with others.  This is a development that I didn’t see coming.

   

But it makes a certain sense.  I had put myself out as a public pundit, not requiring that I prove that my self-expression could actually provide for myself, let alone other people.  That sort of thinking had gotten in the way of a music career earlier in my life – it wasn’t an easy thing for a young man to go into, given the “Cold War”.  But now I had put myself out there, and suddenly people would challenge me to prove I could take care of others, that I could grow my own skin to put in the game (at the risk of losing it).  Sometimes these would come un unsolicited calls for interviews for sales (even “fundraising” or huckster) jobs of a personal nature that were totally alien to me.  Sometimes they came from pressure from service providers to try harder to “sell” and monetize what I had when I didn’t need to yet or when it didn’t make sense – because others with “real families” needed to make profits off me from commissions.

   

Eldercare, which has some aspects of being legally driven (filial responsibility laws) certainly compounds the issue of “family responsibility”.  During the “Me Generation” (since the 1970s), we’ve gotten used to the perception that “family” is optional – you need to make it on your own first, anyway. Don’t have kids too early, or have them at all, if you want to be an “influential” or “powerful” individual.  But that obviously generates a “flip side” when you have to take care of family anyway, raising questions about what marriage is for after all. 

  

I could say that this extra intimacy would be welcome only if I had “generated” my own family – married and had kids.  Them I would have my own domain, my own stake.  But that presents the classic “chicken and egg” question. Isn’t there a problem that I didn’t find any “meaning” in extending myself to someone who really “needs” me – not in the sense of surplus, but in the sense of making it at all?  I would have thought that extending myself to someone “like that” had no “meaning”. 

   

I indeed stayed socially isolated (some call it “schizoid”, some call it Asperger’s), created my own world, and had some partial success publicizing it.  I did not become socially engaged because I could not compete socially or physically.  I found conventional paths of socialization humiliating. So I went my own way and, it turned out, became productive as an individual contributor.  But I can see how it could have gone wrong, and in many ways I was “lucky” or “fortunate”. During most of my adult years, the social and political culture gradually accepted the primacy of “individual sovereignty” or “personal autonomy”, sometimes to the point of hyper-individualism, which I don’t think is wise to take for granted. 

   

Had I been more “competitive” I do believe I would have married and had children.  But there’s a good question as to whether I could have remained committed in marriage for life.  So is it better that I didn’t? It’s a question that has a two-sided answer.

   

I do have a sense of what should have been expected (and often definitely was) of “someone like me”.  Part of the moral expectation has to do with readiness to “step up” in some situations where courage (physical, emotional, or both) is required.  These situations may not occur frequently (maybe they are years apart) but when they occur you know it, even if you can’t define it in advance.  To not do so is what we used to mean by “cowardice” (a word we don’t use today the way we did when I was drafted).  If you don’t, there are consequences.  Some things follow on to this.  One is a certain openness to serving the needs of others in a succession of cohorts – starting with family, and moving out – even if it means some sacrifice of one’s own intended purposes.  It’s hard to say when this kicks in, but you know it when you see it.  There is a certain belief (especially among social conservatives) that the inclination to date, marry, and raise another generation (in one lifelong relationship, carried out with some passion based on complementarity) naturally follows this kind of socialization. (Having children, or else at least being ready to help raise other people's children in a pinch, is a prerequisite for a place at the table, in this line of moral thinking.)  Science may not support such a belief. Instead, it may support a more generalized idea of polarity, and character specialization – but these require some surplus and genuine opportunity beyond meeting adaptive needs, for self or others.  There’s another irony: you can’t enforce a system like this on others (me), without becoming a hypocrite.  But you can regulate “the privilege of being listened to”.

    

Related posts: On International Issues blog  (discussion of non-combatants) and  GLBT Issues blog (both April 26, 2013).