I may have posted on this before. If so, I apologize for the redundancy. Every now and again I hear (generally urban, generally liberal, almost always one or the other) types talk about how the suburbs are unsustainable in the long term and when energy prices start rising, people are going to move back to the city. They won’t have much of a choice.

This could be, but it isn’t nearly so imminent as many believe. They tend to look at things through the lens of two options. The option of living the right way, in densely populated cities, and the other, wrong option, which is the current suburban model. The latter, they say, will be unsustainable in the long term and therefore we will Manhattanize while the suburbs become slums as is the case in Paris and many other world cities. Often though not always attached to these beliefs are the following assumptions:

• People don’t actually want to live in the suburbs. They live there because the suburbs are subsidized by public policy. Because…
• Suburbs are dreadful places to live. They often make statements and suggestions that are empirically untrue such as that the suburbs are socially isolating. In fact, suburbanites are more likely to know their neighbors than urban apartment-dwellers. What is lost in distance is made up for in continuity. Also, parents with children are more bound to their neighborhoods and more likely to want to make sure they know who their neighbors are so that they know their kids are safe. It is possible (maybe probable) that you put these same people in a downtown condominium together you will get even better results, but it is not the case that suburbs are inherently isolating in a way that our cities are not.
• If they do want to live in the suburbs, it’s for stupid reasons like racism or because they’ve been duped by capitalism. Nevermind the advantages of larger houses and larger yards and the peacefulness of being at a little distance from one another. No doubt some of the rationales can be tied to racism if looked at in a particular way (they’re worried about crime and/or want good schools, ergo they hate minorities), but it’s a rather myopic view in my opinion. But they kind of get away with saying it because most of the logical responses to it are politically incorrect and not things that people like talking about.
• Living in cities is more environmentally sound. This assumption is not particularly faulty except to the extent that suburbanization in some parts of the country lead to irrigation and forest-planting that turn deserts and otherwise barren places into towns where developers believe that people want to live. But on the whole, the urban planners are right insofar as something can be designed that’s easier on the environment than the current model. But as The Onion has pointed out, people want public transportation and the like for other people.
• People are irrationally addicted to cars. Once you put them in walkable neighborhoods, they will prefer them. They have studies to back this up and often their own personal experience. But… cars are convenient, man, and people like “walkability” in the same way that they like “lower taxes” or “more government services.” People like walkability, but once you start talking about the costs involves (taking away their cars, living in a smaller place) I think you start to see a different picture.

So while people say “they won’t have a choice,” they are often operating under assumptions that minimize the resistance to re-urbanization that would develop.

But underneath it all, I believe people will have a choice. Some choices that are not great, but choices nonetheless. It strikes me as far more likely than everyone packing up and moving back into the city that the features of the city will instead follow them to suburbs. As it stands now, there are a whole lot of people in the suburbs that actually don’t pay all that much in gasoline costs. My father commuted less than five miles to work every day. One of my brothers does the same and his wife commutes less than twenty. I barely knew anyone that actually commuted to the city. My other brother commutes over an hour, but he doesn’t commute to the city. Rather, he commutes from one suburb to another suburb.

And that is the case far, far more often than people realize when it comes to cities like Colosse that cover a wide geographical area. Nearly every job I’ve had has been in the suburbs. In Colosse, I ended up driving from the outskirts of town to the suburbs or from one suburb to another. In Estacado and Cascadia, I actually drove from a city core to a suburb or exurb. My ex-roommate Hubert commutes from one suburb to another, well over an hour away. When people start really feeling the pinch, one of the things you’re going to start seeing is people relocating to live closer to the suburb that they work. Right now it’s lost time and some lost money, but once it starts hitting their pocketbooks more heavily, that’s what you’re likely to start seeing.

None of this is to say that nobody commutes to the city. I know a number of people that do (including Web), even if they’re outnumbered by the suburban workforce. Besides, you start driving on an inbound freeway during rush hour, the fact that a lot of people live in the suburbs and work downtown is patently obvious. But as people start feeling the pinch, what do you think is more likely… people giving up their space and their yards and all that to spend ten times as much on half the space (the strength of the suburban housing market keeps urban housing markets more manageable than they otherwise would be) or more businesses opening up satellite offices in the suburbs or relocating there entirely? You have to make the assumption that people would really prefer to live in the city for it even to be a contest.

It does strike me as likely that more people would indeed move closer to the city, but nowhere near enough to make the suburbs some sort of wasteland ghetto. It also seems likely that a number of people will start doing things that urbanists and liberals both love like carpooling and utilizing public transportation. Commuter rail will probably garner support, for instance. And park-n-rides will probably increase ridership significantly. Maybe private busing* companies will be able to turn a profit by keeping poor people off their buses*.

There is at least one major hole in my argument, though. Energy prices are not limited solely to gasoline. In addition to commuting expenses, in places like Colosse you can also have extensive electricity bills and the like because keeping these places hospitable during the summer can be expensive. In this sense, you might start seeing a decline in the size of the average house. Or you might start seeing smarter air conditioners where the goal ceases to be keeping the whole house cool and instead becomes keeping portions of the house cool. On the other hand, household energy is also a lot more amenable to alternative forms of energy that will start to look a lot more attractive when/if peak oil occurs.

Of course, this is a different subject entirely that I’m not going to get into, but my views on peak oil are rather out of the mainstream. It really strikes me as one of those things that is going to be “right around the corner” for my entire lifetime and probably my children’s. So this is, to me, a mostly academic argument. Or an argument about what happens if we start leaning more heavily on heavy commuters through gasoline taxes and the like. I am actually quite amenable to gasoline taxes and tolls as a way of paying for the roads and to reduce wasteful driving. But I don’t see it doing what a lot of people argue it will.

When I look at rapidly escalating gasoline prices, though (either through taxation or supply/demand) it’s not actually our driving and housing habits that I think will be most important. Rather, the bigger issue, I think, will be that commodities will suddenly start becoming noticeably more expensive due to increased shipping costs. This has its pluses and minuses. Even here, the urbanists argue that their way-of-life will be vindicated when places like Walmart won’t make sense anymore. For better or worse, I think the opposite is true. As gasoline prices increases, it will be the Walmarts of the world with their own distribution networks that will likely be at the greatest advantage. And the sort of one-stop shopping that places like Walmart and Target supply will probably become more rather than less desirable compared to having something shipped (really expensive) or driving all around town to get this and that in lieu of being able to get most of them from a single location.

* – Gawd I hate the spelling of these words. It should totally be busses and bussing.

Per Phi, premarital sex causes divorce! Well, it correlates with it, anyway. Basically, there is a positive correlation between the number of partners a woman has had before getting married and the likelihood of a divorce when married. Am I surprised? Not particularly. The virgin-married tend to be particularly religious, are actually observant of their religion, and likely to have significantly more impulse control and self-discipline than others. Of course, I wouldn’t have been particularly surprised the other way, either, given the correlation between young marriages and failure rates.

Here’s where you can say “Ah, but correlation does not equal causation!” While true, this is a bit of a copout. The correlation itself is significant especially when observed with overall trends of divorce rates and premarital sex over the decades. If the main goal is to prevent divorce, the casualization of premarital sex is pretty likely contrary to those aims. For the broader public, though, I question how realistically you can expect people to wait until their mid-to-late twenties before having sex. Some can do it. Most won’t regardless of the public pressures to do so. In order to attack B, you have to address A. It’s possible that without sex people would marry younger, but you have to re-order things around like the Mormons do in order for it to work. Hard to do outside a relatively insular religion.

But what does this mean, practically speaking? It might mean that, contrary to my outlook when I was single, that you should seek out people with fewer sexual partners. Or not have sex yourself. I have stated in the past that when I was single I would become concerned upon finding out that a person I was dating was a virgin. At least a couple were. The question for me is whether they were so due to a deeply held religious conviction or if they were off-put by the idea of sex generally. I was concerned of a woman in the latter category pretending it was the former. However, in the event that I was convinced otherwise (and in one case I was) I wouldn’t let the lack of sex prior to marriage stand in my way. Logistically speaking, though, my theory from having been burned is to look skeptically at women that are great for finding reasons not to be intimate with you (not just sex in this case). In particular, beware those that are “putting sex on hold for a while.” That’s something women often say when they are just trying to justify no sex with you. No sex with you is, of course, their right, but everybody needs to be clear on the “why” and not say “it’s not you, it’s me” when that’s not what they mean. Women may have to fear retaliation, but stringing a guy along (even if not being forthright about why she doesn’t want to be with the guy) is not a winning or fair strategy, either.

Of course, I am talking about two different things here. Back to the subject of genuine virgins. The biggest problem I faced was that those I knew were deeply religious and since I am not that is a problem in its own right. Carla met me at the apex of my religiosity, and even then I felt like there could be some problems in that area. And so if you’re a secular guy, your options are kind of limited as far as that goes. The middle-case scenario almost is somebody who has never had sex simply because they’ve never had access to it. Even that presents problems, unless the underlying reason they had such trouble with men (extreme introversion, anti-social tendencies, excessive weight) has been taken care of. Since men are less particular about sex (as opposed to actual relationships, where men can be just as particular or moreso), the reasons for a (non-religious) virgin woman are fewer than the inverse. The best-case scenario is a woman that has never had sex because she won’t have it outside a relationship and it’s the relationship she’s had trouble obtaining. I’ve not seen it since early college, but presumably it’s happened somewhere.

A while back a woman sued a wireless telephone carrier because they accidentally blew the lid off of her affair:

The husband became suspicious when he noticed a number frequently called on the bill and, after dialing it, was told by a man who answered that he recently had a three-week affair with Nagy. He left Nagy and their children in August 2007.

“The affair was over,” Ms Nagy told Canwest News Service. “The thing that really hurt me is that it all came out not through my own doing.”

She blamed Rogers for the breakup, for having “breached my privacy.”

It’s pretty obvious that Rogers did in fact screw up when they started sending the bill home against her wishes. She may well have a legal case depending on the fine print. But… well… her culpability in what happened all but goes without saying.

Generally speaking, though, I am unsympathetic to the notion of privacy-amongst-spouses. Before getting married, I had assumed that I would have more rights than I apparently do when it comes to Clancy. It’s not that Clancy is a secret-keeper, but rather it’s dealing with third parties that the problem comes up.

Several years ago we got a call from a bill collector that said that Clancy owed them money. However, when I asked what it was about, they couldn’t tell me due to “privacy regulations.” At first, I didn’t really know what this meant because as far as I knew they were under no obligation (generally speaking) not to tell people about your debt. In fact, I’d read articles about collection agencies telling neighbors and others about the debt in order to shame them into paying. So why couldn’t they tell me what this debt was about? The answer came pretty quickly after thinking about it. It wasn’t so much debt collection regulations, but rather HIPAA regulations. It related to medical care and they couldn’t tell me that she had sought medical care. I asked this point-blank and the collector essentially confirmed that it was medical in nature.

She couldn’t tell me more than that and she wasn’t the only one. I tried to take over the task of paying the power bill when we were living in Cascadia and I couldn’t. They wouldn’t let me. It didn’t matter whether I was her husband or not.

In my view of marriage, this really shouldn’t be. Unless there is a legal separation in place or something like that, I believe that Clancy has the right to know what I owe and to whom. I believe that she has a right to my medical records. When it comes to her, I think that I waive rights of privacy.

The medical records question is a bit stickier, though, in practice. In Estacado, Clancy would have patients that were on birth control without the knowledge of her spouse. A combination of Catholicism and macho immigrant culture. I am extremely sympathetic to these women who don’t want to bear any more children but also don’t want to run headlong into her husband’s ideology. If she gets a shot and he doesn’t know about it, it helps keep the peace. A peace based on dishonesty, but a peace nonetheless. His having access to her medical bill compromises that. I’m not comfortable with that, but I am not sure that sways my thinking all that much.

Of course, I say all this and often there are things that I don’t want to know. While I would try to talk a girlfriend out of having an abortion, under the assumption that I couldn’t it would probably be better off for everyone if I simply didn’t know about it. The same would probably apply to a wife, though Clancy and I are of a similar mind on the ethics of the issue and so it isn’t quite so much an issue. Had I married staunchly pro-choice Julianne, it might be more of an issue. Then again, pro-choice as she was, it’s unlikely she would have aborted a child in marriage the same way that she probably would have if one of our pregnancy scares had turned out to be the real deal. Would I want to know about it? Probably not. Should I have no right to know about it? Murkier. Keeping in mind here that the question is not whether abortion is some sort of special thing that a husband should have the right to know about but rather whether it would constitute some sort of exception to what I generally believe a spouse ought to be able to know about.

Also murkying the waters here is the question of STD testing. Now I believe that a spouse should be able to know if he or she is at risk of an STD from his or her spouse. However, what if a test comes up negative? Does a wife have the right to know that a test was run? It would certainly raise questions. On one hand, I don’t think that a husband or wife has a “right” to keep infidelity a secret. On the other, if getting testing means his affair is more likely to be discovered then he is less likely to get tested to begin with and who does that serve? It’s not dissimilar to the question of STD testing in general. If someone knowingly spreads HIV they can be tried to murder and it’s hard to argue that they shouldn’t. However, does that then mean the secret is not getting tested?

During the whole Schiavo mess, one of the reasons I came down in favor of pulling the plug had nothing to do with a “right to die” (though I support one) and a lot more to do with marriage. Her husband’s motivations may have been suspect, but she signed over that sort of decision-making to him when she married him. I’m even tempted to say that a spouse’s wish ought to preempt a living will, though I would need to think more on that.

Anyhow, for non-medical issues such as paying the power bill or even paying off a medical bill even if the spouse does not know what for, I lean pretty strongly in favor of a spouse being given the authority to pay bills whether overdue or current. And I think that the husband has a right to see if she’s been calling a lover. The legal question of whether or not Rogers’s policy gave her a reasonable expectation that he would not find out and if that has some sort of standing… well, that depends on what the law is and not what I think it should be.

“It’s not my fault” is still, of course, a pretty lame cop-out, regardless of what the law is or should be.

Back when I was working at Mindstorm, a coworker of mine was talking to another coworker in earshot and was saying some things that are pretty blatantly untrue. Not untrue in the sense of “I have a different opinion” or “you’re skewing the facts” but things that are immediately and verifiably untrue. In this case, he was saying that the IRS is actually a corporation that collects money from the government like a debt collection agency as opposed to being the government entity that it is. It was all I could do not to insert myself into the conversation, but it was a good thing that I didn’t since people don’t like to be corrected and since I had just started it would have gotten us off on a bad footing. We became friends, of sorts, and he actually turned out to be a really smart guy. Just misinformed.

Right now I’m at The Copper Cafe, my favorite coffee shop in Redstone. Apparently, behind me is some sort of meeting of a group of Christian-Marxist-Greens. I’m not kidding. This was obviously a very intelligent group of people that talked about weighty things. Politics aside, it’s a group that I have typically become friends with. But as intelligent as their ideas were and their ability to consider different points of view and so on, they were operating off some pretty blatant misconceptions. Again, not wrong in the sense that I disagreed with what they were saying but rather that what they were saying was objectively wrong no matter what your ideology.

To pick one example, there was a consensus that the United States was one of the worst offenders in the world when it came to human reproduction. We are, as one of them put it, “a nation of breeders”. Now, we do tend to reproduce at higher levels than a lot of western countries, but last I checked we hovered pretty close to replacement rate and not above it. So we may be “part of the problem” if you believe that the Earth’s population should be 3 or 2 or 1 billion, but

Now, my coworkers was actually a pretty smart guy and we would become pretty decent friends. I do not hesitate nearly as much when it comes to correcting people that know me. Among other things, they’re more likely to take me seriously since they know that I am not the sort of guy that makes up things in order to win an argument. Of course, even there I can hedge somewhat. Instead of making a statement declaratively, I will say something like “My understanding is…” and, depending on the individual, we will sometimes “compromise” on something I know to be untrue but at least closer to the truth than their initial statement. I am not one to make the perfect the enemy of the good.

Of course, another factor in all of this is that you can get derailed on facts that are not central to the argument. For a whole lot of people, facts are something to support the thesis rather than a thesis being the result of a careful evaluation of all the facts. A fact that doesn’t fit is then often replaced with a new (sometimes weaker) fact that does fit. To take the above example, even if I could indeed demonstrate that American breeding patters are not an outlier on the aggressive side, her point would have remained intact. Environmental damage is being done. The United States is a heavy contributor in said environmental damage (as are developing countries, which all of the CMG’s noted). These are arguments that I am not prepared to contest as environmental issues are not generally a subject of interest.

One of the more difficult things I have had to learn over the last several years is to simply let people be wrong. Both on the Internet and off of it. I tend to choose my battles very cautiously. This is such a far cry from who I used to be it is pretty ridiculous. I was an opinion columnist in college who lectured everyone on The World According To William Truman. Dad used to have to shush me when I was in high school to prevent me from spouting off on some subject of another. I’m really not sure what to attribute this personality shift. It’s partially a product of having been wrong about some things I used to be so sure about. Some of it just calming down with age.

A huge factor is the Internet itself. Back when I was so sure of myself, I was never confronted with the best arguments before or against something. Now, with enough investigation, just about every QED I ever had is challenged by somebody that actually makes a pretty good point. Either they consider an angle that I hadn’t or, just as often, I discover that they are simply operating under different assumptions than I am. From those assumptions come facts that support the assumption and reasons that the facts that don’t support that assumption are either irrelevant or something that doesn’t take the proper things into account.

“Cut off your head / Don’t hesitate / Do it today / It’s great / Throw out your brains / They’re a disease / Cut off your head / Think with your needs”

A while back Katherine Mangu-Ward wrote an interesting piece in Reason about tattoos and criminals:

Unlike a legal trademark, an underworld brand can’t be defended with little more than an expensive attorney. If another gang steps into your turf, you can opt for a violent defense of your signal of choice. But gangsters who previously relied on large gaudy tattoos to get a message across can hardly go around roughing up every 17-year-old with a tramp stamp on her tailbone.

As tattoos go mainstream, criminals have to adapt. These days, even art on your neck, collarbone, and wrists is barely enough to signal your commitment to subcultures that are totally legal.

But there are still some kinds of tattoos—including those inky eyelid admonitions and the homespun variety created with a shard of a ballpoint pen during long hours behind bars—that retain their signaling power, demonstrating a commitment to the criminal way of life. A guy with extensive Aryan Brotherhood facial tattoos is unlikely to snitch on his buddies. The only thing worse than getting an eyelid tattoo is having one removed. What’s he going to do, go into witness protection and start a new life as a kindergarten teacher in Ohio?

The criminal world is an extreme variation of what goes on in regular society and cultures and subcultures within it. The criminals are having to adapt to non-criminals using similar markings to express solidarity with non-criminal activities. The more interesting aspect of this is that non-criminals are doing it. With tattoos, it’s counter-culture that comes to mind, but that itself is a variation of what goes on in more mainstream culture, particularly among women.

Half of social organization is about differentiation. Setting up a hierarchy. Declaring yourself outside of the hierarchy. Setting yourself up within an alternate hierarchy. With tattoos and the like, it’s relatively simple and in-keeping with the motivations of Aryans in prison. The more difficult you make it to go back, the larger sacrifice you are require, the easier it is to prevent everyone from merely copying you. Having a tattoo on your shoulder that is hidden while wearing a shirt is relatively easy. My clean-cut brother Mitch has one. Counter-cultural types don’t want to be a part of any group to which Mitch belongs, so they have to do what Mitch won’t do. Though he and I haven’t talked about it, I suspect that he would think twice about putting a tattoo where a shirt wouldn’t cover it. I’ve lightly (very lightly) dallied in the idea of getting a tattoo in the past, but would never ever consider getting one that I couldn’t hide.

Which is part of the point. You have to draw a line that people like me won’t cross in order for your self-marking to be worth anything. Half of the point is to separate poseurs like Mitch and me from the people who really want to make a statement. So you replace shoulder tattoos with arm-sized ones. You replace ear rings with those ear-spacers that deform the ear. And on and on.

Even more interesting to me than this is how mainstream female fashion seems to do it in more subtle ways. Make the clothes insanely expensive so that the non-dedicated and non-wealthy can afford then. Make the shoes so uncomfortable that the non-dedicated won’t bother. Make the clothes accentuate any and all body fat so that those that aren’t a perfect size two can’t get away with wearing them.

The combination of what women to do themselves and the increasing acceptability of body markings and piercings and other things on men make me wonder if we are headed down the same path. With prole creep and tattoos becoming more and more acceptable, will mainstream male society follow-suit to the point that those of us that don’t have any markings that can’t be covered up with a t-shirt will be considered hopelessly square? Not an uplifting thought.

There is a school of thought that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Namely, that physical attractiveness is subjective and a product of cultural norms and personal taste. This is technically true insofar as people do have different tastes and everybody is attractive to somebody. There are even freaks out there that are particularly attracted to things generally considered unattractive. But there are limits to this, of course, as a lot of folks in our corner of the sphere are quick to point out. Certain attributes, facial symmetry is typically used as an example, transcend cultures. There are arguments for curves and for slender, but there is a level of fatness that is generally not considered desirable. And while there are people that have abnormal attractions, they remain exceptions and some physical features are naturally going to be more attractive to more people.

I fall more in the second camp than the first when it comes to pictures and immediate impressions. I also believe that inner beauty (subjective, typically) affects outer in that when you love someone, you view them as being more physically attractive than others you might have rated higher from a photograph. Further, some people take universality of beauty too far, I think. They make it less a general truth and more an pavlovian sort of thing. I just don’t think it’s that exact.

One of the things I find interesting is how our tastes develop within the general hierarchy. For instance, by real-world standards Taylor Swift is a really attractive young lady. So is Kristen Stewart. Yet when I look at pictures of them or see them on TV, there is simply no doubt that I think Stewart is remarkably the more attractive of the two. Others would swear that Swift is. In the land of Hollywood, where nearly everyone is quite attractive, we almost have to take our cues from relatively subjective or even arbitrary criteria. I don’t know why I find Stewart to be the more attractive of the two. But I think it has repercussions in real-life attraction amongst people in my station. Stewart has a more steely demeanor. Not cold, exactly, but sort of determined and tough. I married someone with a similar demeanor. I don’t think that’s entirely a coincidence. Nor is it a coincidence that among all of the really attractive women on the TV show Las Vegas, the one that garnered the most of my attention was Sam Marquez (Vanessa Marcil). Same sort of steeliness in comparison to the flightier Delinda (Molly Sims) or sweet Mary (Nikki Cox). Of course, also notable is the fact that Marcil, Clancy, and Stewart have dark hair.

Some of it probably relates to the projection of personality. Easier to do when it comes to Las Vegas, where they are all playing characters with personalities, though I also think that Marcil and Sims were chosen precisely because they looked the part. I’ve never seen Kristen Stewart in a movie and I’ve only seen one Taylor Swift video, so it’s less a factor there. It’s more about the way that they smile for the camera and in Stewart’s case a slightly prominent chin and narrow features that I think I associate with a sort of inner toughness.

Why I would be attracted to a steeliness of expression I have no idea. It’s not like I like cold people. When I met Clancy, she was in a very comfortable element and surrounded by friends. She was smiling a good portion of the weekend. I was attracted to that… but I also don’t think that it’s a coincidence that it lines up with what seem to be particular biases. I have two “types” that I’ve historically been attracted to and Clancy (and Julianne, for that matter) falls into one. Conventional in appearance, conservative in demeanor, and relatively strong-willed or exuding a quiet strength. All of this has to do with personality more than appearance, but again, I think when we are looking at people we are looking for cues on personality matching.

All of this brings me to the inspiration of my post, which is Phi’s post on the comparative virtues of Meghan Fox and January Jones. As Phi and the commenters there note, regardless of who she actually is, Fox exudes a certain kind of sexiness that makes her the sex symbol that Jones is not. It’s that projection that makes her as attractive that she is to a lot of men. That projection is largely an object of not just personal preference but cultural preference. The same cultural preference that inexplicably made Angelina Jolie somehow considered attractive. The tastemakers, as far as such things go, have decided what is attractive and we take our cues from society.

Not because we’re mindless drones of corporate-enforced tastes, as some folks who swear in some aboriginal or African culture droopy breasts are considered hot and thus it’s all subjective. Rather, because people like Jones and Fox are both attractive by any normal criteria and thus choosing between them (and the thousands of Hollywood actresses that are similarly attractive) is susceptible to relatively insignificant criteria. Likewise, in real life when I would see two women at a bar or church or wherever else, if they’re comparatively equal, it comes down to relatively silly criteria such steely-demeanor or wearing glasses or something else that either indicates (a) this person’s personality could be compatible with my own (or more attractive to me) or (b) if I got together with her it would be more impressive to my friends.

The local two-drop theater showed Scott Pilgrim vs The World a couple weeks back. I really didn’t know much about it other than that it starred that nerdy guy from Juno and that it was based on a non-superhero comic book. One of my favorite movies of all time, Ghost World, was similarly based on a comic, so that was a point in its favor. But mostly it was just about time I saw a movie at a theater again. I’m really, really glad I did.

Back when I was single, one of my habits upon meeting someone with whom I might have a future was to run up a catalog of the guys (and sometimes not-guys) they had dated. I’m not positive why this held such a fascination with me, though I suspect it had to do with an insecurity on my part that I was somehow illegitimate compared to most guys. I could write a post on that alone and maybe at some point I will. But I, like a lot of you, went through junior high and much of high school never really garnering much interest from the opposite sex while those around me seemed to be having a better time of it. And when I finally did get a girlfriend, it lasted for years. So in addition to my insecurities, it was also somewhat alien to me the notion of having a series (large or more often relatively small) of people in your past. Anyhow, so I would tally up her exes and then invariably compare myself to them. Were they more legitimate guys? Were they more or less attractive than I was? Why did their relationship fail? Am I at risk of having a relationship fail on similar grounds? Am I able to overcome what guilt or hurt the other guy (or not-guy) caused her?

It was through this prism that I watched Pilgrim. That was the metaphor that pervaded my viewing of the movie. For those of you unfamiliar with the film, it involves protagonist Scott Pilgrim meeting a girl, Ramona, and getting into a duel with her League of Seven Exes. Her ex-boyfriends. Some have looked at this movie as a geek fantasy about “protecting the girl,” but I almost entirely watched it through the lense of the above metaphor. It wasn’t about the exes. In some ways it wasn’t even about Ramona. It was about his insecurities regarding her more lengthy romantic past than his and the baggage that she told him about almost immediately. On a sidenote, one of the lessons I learned the hard way is that when a girl tells you first thing that she has baggage, believe her. At the least she is being very honest and she has baggage, but also it’s frequently the case that she is laying the groundwork for “I warned you!” when things fall apart as a way of evading responsibility.

This particular insecurity dogged me from most of my early relationships. Julianne only had two or three exes and only one that lasted more than a month or so. But the guy – whom she dumped – was an instant topic of interest to me. It took me less than a week to determine that I had nothing to worry about from him and it took me a month or so to determine that there was simply no way the guy stacked up against me. Julie and I were right for one another in a way that they weren’t. He made a play for her early in the relationship and she shot him down cold.

This tendency of mine became most pronounced when it came to Evangeline. Eva had a more substantial romantic history and a more dramatic one. She had more baggage. The figures from her past loomed particularly largely. I didn’t even have to ask about them the same way that I had to ask Julie about her ex. She unloaded on me the first week I knew her as I unloaded on her. And immediately the cataloging and appraising began. Unlike with the others, this actually turned out to be very helpful in seeing what was to come. Before we were ever even officially together she ended up back with Shane, the ex that I had immediately focused in on as the most likely to cause problems (despite the fact, at the time, she hadn’t spoken to him in two years). I wasn’t even worried about the guy that she was dating and leaving at the time, but I was worried about Shane. And I was right.

Of course, that was the thing. Though I often had a better idea of what was going on than she did because of my keen analytical skills and all that crap, there wasn’t anything I could do about it. It helped me see the oncoming storm, but it didn’t give me so much as an umbrella. Shane came and went and then came Vince. Vince did not have a whole lot going for him, but he was nonetheless a figure from her past and she had a little obsession with her past that wasn’t exactly of much help when it came to ridding myself of the non-productive cataloging instinct. And as soon as Vince entered the picture, that was when I knew it was time for me to leave. And she, either by virtue of seeing how crazy everything was making me, knew it was time for me to go. I used to joke that it would only be once I was out of the picture and became a figure from her past that I would become important. It turned out not to be a joke so much as the absolute truth. I was too dim to get it, but she made a play for me about eight months into her relationship with Vince. Then, after Vince when she got together with my friend Kelvin, she cheated on him with me near the outset of the relationship.

Once I was a mythical Ex, suddenly I wielded a certain power. Ramona’s exes in the movie were similar in that regard. Their powers coincided with whatever their “hooks” were – whatever made them interesting or attractive. Brandon Routh’s character was a Vegan whose awesome powers depended on his diet. Despite being a musician and looking like Routh, Veganism was his hook. It was only when he could demonstrate that he was not a Vegan that he was able to vanquish his enemy. Ramona’s ex-girlfriend could go intangible, as is the case when confronting a relationship of your partner that you can’t seem to fully gab onto or understand (except, perhaps, through pornography). The musicians had musical powers. And so on. Her Shane was a guy named Gabriel, whose success made him larger than life. And so on, and so on.

The movie doesn’t carry off the metaphor perfectly. At times it can’t decide how pseudo-real it wants to be. There is a point where one of Scott’s bandmates asks why being a Vegan gives someone special powers. In terms of reality, this is a good question. But in terms of the ethereal nature of the metaphor, it’s blatantly obvious why being a Vegas is a selling point. It’s something that Ramona or any future girlfriends can point to in order to demonstrate what makes her boyfriend special and unique. Being a Buddhist or a writer has a similar hook, I’ve noticed. Moreso than guys – though we do it, too – there seems to be an attraction among women (or the perception amongst guys of such an attraction amongst women) towards guys with a demonstrable uniqueness. Veganism, Buddhism, or writing. It’s worth noting that this is all in addition to, not in placement of, being of appropriate attractiveness, fitness, and other more superficial qualities.

I personally managed to conquer – more or less – the cataloging of exes by the time I met Clancy. I went through the usual motions of finding out about her romantic past. But she was not particularly forthcoming. She would tell me when she was ready. There was no telling when she would open up, so we would be sitting and having a conversation when something reminding her of someone would come up and the next thing I know she would be telling me all about some important thing from her past (sometimes romantic in nature, something not) and I would have to shift gears into “Information Gathering Mode.” Ultimately, though, it was the case where I determined early on that she, unlike Eva and I, did not have the fixation on her past. Even when I belatedly found out about her somewhat brief history with Rick, the friend who introduced us, I was relatively unphased. It turned out that my relationship with Clancy was best judged on its own merits. My contribution to the relationship had nothing to do with my predecessors and all to do with me.

The movie touches on this point, but it comes at a place in the movie where the metaphor is being muddled again. But despite all of this, I really enjoyed it a great deal. It’s definitely something I am going to get on DVD when it comes out. I don’t know how many of you I can recommend it to since I think my enjoyment of it revolved pretty heavily around my personal hang-ups. Though if you like oddball, you may enjoy it regardless because it is so joyfully unhinged.

I’ve been watching Grey’s Anatomy lately. I’ve finally reached the most recent season, in which Dr. Miranda Bailey and her husband separate with the intent to divorce. It ultimately came down to a desire on Bailey’s part to undergo a fellowship rather than take a (better paying, better hours) job as an attending at the same hospital. Her husband issues an ultimatum. She argues that a marriage that rests on an ultimatum is not really a marriage.

Now I am biased on this subject ten ways from Sunday. My wife is a doctor and underwent two fellowships upon graduating. What I was hoping would be three of four years of residency-hours/residency-pay turned into six (with a year of unemployment or employed in a different state). At no point did I issue an ultimatum, but had she started talking about yet another fellowship, I would have seriously considered it. I had bent about as far as I was capable of bending. After we were done in Cascadia, I did make one more gesture of six months so that she could bone up on her skills for a few specific procedures that never seemed to pan out while we were in Cascadia. Point being, if she had said “one more fellowship” I would have said “no.”

Now, Bailey’s husband was objecting to a first post-residency fellowship. But she was a surgical resident, which is five years instead of Clancy’s three. Plus, they had a kid that he was left alone with and that cost money that she wasn’t particularly making as a resident and wouldn’t make as a fellow. That’s not to say that he was right and she was wrong. They’d been on the skids often enough that I had forgotten that they hadn’t split yet. But his request was not unreasonable and that he put it in the form of an ultimatum.

But, reasonable or not, in what form but an ultimatum can somebody say “enough!” to something that is going wrong? Ultimatums have something of a bad rap because they’re supposed to be controlling. But marriage requires submission to somebody else’s desires. At least sometimes. And if you never draw a line, there’s no end to the degree that one partner or the other can do what they want regardless of what you want and you have no choice but to follow. Or you can leave without giving forewarning that the next straw is the last, as though that’s more.

That’s not to say that ultimatums are always reasonable. I think that generally speaking, it’s a bullet that can be fired maybe once a decade or so. If a person is having to repeatedly issue ultimatums, it’s a sign that there are some serious problems. It means that either one person is abusing ultimatums or the other wants to walk as close to the line as possible without going over it.

I take threats of firing someone in the same manner. If my job is in danger, I do want to be informed about it. But if it happens more than once, it more likely than not means that either I am not well-suited for the position or that they are using threats on my job as a motivation tool, which is unacceptable. I’ve never had my job threatened more than once, though, so that theory of mine has never been tested.

Relationship-wise, I don’t think that I have ever had an ultimatum issued against me. I issues some vague ultimatums while with Evangeline (“Things are going to need to start changing or I’m outta here”, things like that”), but I’m not sure if those count and they were indicative of a relationship in (constant) trouble. A slightly more “real” ultimatum came towards the end when I put a deadline on it. The deadline was a month and about three weeks into that month I found out that she was becoming romantically involved with someone else.

Anyhow, everyone on the show seemed to simply accept that ultimatums were unacceptable. This included Richard Webber, the big boss man. What’s notable is Webber’s wife gave him an ultimatum that he would give up medicine entirely. I don’t recall it being presented in quite the same harsh light. Perhaps because male ultimatum’s about a woman’s career are considered unduly controlling, perhaps because Webber had been unfaithful early in their marriage and she could use that against him, perhaps because we kinda knew and liked her while Bailey’s husband only seemed to show up when something was very wrong.

It’s often said that people that cannot pay their own way should not have children. This is something I used to believe very fervently. I still do believe it, but I have come to believe it’s a lot more complicated than people make it out to be. This post is about the problematic nature of that broad statement. For the purposes of this post, I am going to rely on the following assumptions:

1. If we restrict trade imports, it will lead to a decline in outsourcing and an increase in American jobs. As a result, there will be more jobs and the wages of those jobs will be higher than they currently are because the workers will not be competing with Asians willing to work for pennies on the dollar.
2. If we restrict immigration (legal and illegal), it will lead to fewer candidates for each position. As a result, there will be more jobs available for actual Americans and the wages of those jobs will be higher than they currently are because the workers will not be competing with immigrants who do not have the leverage to ask for better pay.
3. If we increase the minimum wage to a livable wage, it will lead to higher wages that allow more people to make a livable wage and fewer people will rely on welfare.
4. If we increase the Earned Income Tax Credit, it will lead to more people making a living wage through the pay they receive from their employer and the tax breaks and credits they receive.
5. Government works programs have the ability to create jobs that result in a net increase in the total number of jobs. As a result, the worker-to-vacancy ratio decreases, more people are working, and wages increase.

Whether these assumptions are actually true or not is subject to debate. I don’t believe they are all true (though some are at least partially true). For the sake of tihs post I assume these things simply to avoid the discussion getting sidetracked. Most likely, each of you (except Larry and other fervent libertarians) believe that at least one or two of the above is true. That’s all that is important. Now, back to the subject at hand.

Whether one is actually paying their own way depends on a number of factors. It depends on the talent or intelligence someone has, the skills they are willing and able to develop, their personal drive, and (this is the important part) the opportunities available to him or her. While the overall strength of the economy is also important, that last part is crucial because in many cases the opportunities available to them depend on the very same government that, in the absence of their ability to find a job, will help them get by through more direct support.

If one is a hard-core, cut-throat libertarian and does not believe that any of the above are legitimate, then the number of people that are truly paying their own way may be very small indeed. To some extent, it means that everyone whose job is under threat because of immigrants or outsourcing but whose job is saved is actually dependent on the government for their livable wage. This is not to argue against these policies. From a non-libertarian’s perspective, the fact that the government might have needed to intervene in order to protect jobs elicits a strong “So what?”. People who are given a job to do (that pays a livable wage).

But that’s the rub. Those that are not given a job to do because the government has declined to intervene or those that do not take jobs that would not support their families or those that have to take jobs and can’t support their families on them are not always going to be substantively different – from an ethical perspective – from those of us fortunate enough to have the skills, connection, and luck to find jobs that do pay well enough to support oneself. Now, we could argue that things in the US are good enough that anyone with a degree of intelligence and werewithal can make a living wage if they so chose. That may be true, but it is not necessarily so.

What do we do about the cases of people that are perfectly willing to work and would prefer to support themselves if given the opportunity but simply lack the opportunity? Do we say that these people should not reproduce? Simply because society has not found a way for them to contribute? Maybe you’re thinking “it’s not society’s job to help people find ways to contribute”, though if you believe any of the Six Assumptions are true and support those policies on that basis, you have to some degree determined that it is indeed the government’s domain to help people find ways to contribute. Maybe you’re thinking “well, to some extent maybe, but not to help everybody.” If so, you’re determining the ability to reproduce based on who you think should be assisted in supporting themselves and you’re using the fact that they can support themselves (with our assistence) to justify their reproduction over those that cannot support themselves without our assistence. (Keep in mind, I am not talking about people that refuse to work or have no interest in working.) It’s a lottery, of sorts. And maybe from a government perspective that is a good idea if you can only help some but not all of those that would be able to support themselves with job protection or assistence, but in terms of fairness or morality towards and between individuals that do not have the right skills in the right economy, it doesn’t hold much water.

To repeat an important point, the question of whether the position that only people that pay their own way should be reproducing is a fair and reasonable one to take is also dependent on how one views the American economy. If you believe that people are being left behind due to circumstances outside their control and their abilities and that the only way to rectify this is through some of the Six Assumptions, you’re standing on weak ground. If you look at the American economy and believe that anyone that wants to make it here can, then that position makes a good deal of sense.

However, even if that was the case yesterday and is the case today, (or if that would be the case if we would just change some policy or another) it is not necessarily the case tomorrow regardless of our policy decisions (unless we go Luddite). One can easily imagine a future in which automation results in an increasing number of Americans being made redundant. That our manufacturing employment sector is struggling is hard to dispute, but our manufacturing output is actually quite strong. The difference is that machines are making things more than people are. This could continue to the service sector as well. Then, by the end, we have a whole lot of engineer-types that are still useful and only menial-types (and artistic-types) that have the connections to get one of the very, very few jobs in their sector. So imagine for a moment where we reach the point where 40% of the population would be better off if the bottom 60% disappeared tomorrow. Does that mean that the bottom 60% should not be reproducing?

Now, even if you do not believe that this high-tech future could come to pass for one reason or another, the policy implications on the Six Assumptions can still be there. Or at least the first two. Imagine that some combination of 30% of Americans including but not limited to most of America’s best and brightest can work it out so that they can give the remaining 70% of Americans their walking papers and be better. They can simply import talent that they can export just as soon as they stop being useful. They can outsource everything except what they do. As a result, as employers they can get by paying their employees considerably less. The products they buy and services they get are cheaper because the labor required to produce (or pick or mine) them are cheaper. Life for them – and remember that they are by and large the maximum producers and capital holders – is dramatically improved. The Bottom 70% are not paying their own way since their very existence makes life slightly less convenient for the Top 30%.

The primary counterargument would be that the Bottom 70% comprise the majority and therefore it is their livelihood, and not that of the Top 30%, that should be taken more into account. Maybe so, but it’s unlikely that this happens all at once. Most likely it’s the Bottom 20% that first stops being able to reproduce. Then it’s the next 20% (in all likelihood the next 20% – and maybe the first – includes intelligent but uncharismatic or personally difficult people). And so on and so on. But beyond that, where precisely do you draw the line. Is the Top 60% really acceptable so that getting rid of the Bottom 40% making their life somewhat better is worthwhile simply because 60% comprises a majority?

Your mileage may vary greatly, but here are my three main takeaways from this line of thinking:

First, the ability to pay one’s own way is highly dependent on factors beyond one’s control. A person that sails in one society sinks in another. Some people will sail in any society and others will sink in any society, but beyond that it’s really quite variable and dependent on matters of economy and government policy. As such, the moral distinction between being able to pay one’s own way versus not being able to is marginal unless one lives in a society where everyone that works hard can pay their own way.

Therefore, if a society is wealthy enough that it can help people support themselves that otherwise would not have a place to, it should do so. This is one of the things that I believe we have society for. I am not advocating welfare or foodstamps here, because the primary distinction ought not be between those that can pay their own way and those that can’t, but rather between those that are willing to try work hard and exhibit reasonable discipline to try to do so. It’s not about wealth distribution per se (because I am including trade policy and immigration policy, to the extent that they help). It’s an imperative to to the extent that society can, it should find a way for as many people as possible to contribute however they can and allowing them to live a respectable life for doing so.

Third, If a society simply cannot support the weight of its redundant but able workforce, then that’s a different matter but an unfortunate one for those that are ultimately excluded. And we should bear in mind that those we are excluding are often going to be victims of circumstance rather than lazy bums.

Now, this post is more political than I usually get here at Hit Coffee, but I’ve kept it abstract for a reason. I don’t want to get to debating the merits of individual proposals for How To Save The Middle And Working Classes or anything like that. Everyone has their theories. I have my doubts about at least a few of the Six Assumptions, so don’t take this post to mean that I am advocating any of those policies. I mention policies from the right and left merely to cover more ground. While I am aware that there are reasons put forth to restrict immigration having nothing to do with jobs or wage-suppression, this post is not about those other reasons. Also, this post is looking at those that cannot pay their own way that are generally well-behaved. The negative externality of crime is not applicable here as that could theoretically be addressed without regard to one’s ability to pay one’s own way.

Update: I make a reference to “Six Assumptions” in the most. I am referring to the five above. There were originally six, though I eliminated the 6th and can’t remember what it was. Also, a big thanks to Web who fixed an HTML problem on my part and made the post readable.

Update II: Maria is contesting the notion that (outside of the immigration population) there is a problem with the lower end of the economic spectrum reproducing in especially high numbers. Honestly, the Idiocracy meme is almost so hardwired it hadn’t even really occurred to me that it might be illusory. A collection of anecdotes where my intelligent but largely non-reproducing family and social network could be something of an exception and the babies that Clancy delivered or stood in the deliver room for the past decade or so might be distorting our perspective. So As it is always good to question the assumptions we sometimes erroneously take for granted, I’m going to look into it.

Update III: Okay, it took me about two minutes to find links demonstrating that birth-rate indeed negatively correlates with education (and thus likely means). What I can’t find, though, is any indication that this is a trend that is becoming more significant. In fact, according to the links I have found, we were dysgenic all of last century. Before the Pill, before the the New Deal, before the Great Society, before abortion. Anyone with any data on how this trend is accelerating or decelerating would be greatly appreciated. It appears as though it is cyclical with the economy with the correlation being strongest during bad economic times. But I’ve only seen references to that as a trend. No data references.

When I was a kid, I was raised to believe that everyone should vote. At some point in early college, I suspended this particular dogma as I found out that a lot of people – adults, even, with jobs – didn’t know squat about government and that we were probably better off with them not voting. I wrote a piece in The Daily Packer (my alma mater’s newspaper) to this effect. I’ve been reconsidering that in recent years, though, because of this study. Well actually, not because of the study itself because it hadn’t been run yet. But I knew full well that what it had to say was true after spending years hashing out political differences on the Internet:

Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.

My observation was similar: People who educate themselves on politics and government simply learn how to make more complete arguments for the positions that they held before they educated themselves. I read somewhere a couple of years back that the most educated voters tend to lean strongly to the right or left (or be libertarians, if they were statistically significant). Moderates tend to be the least informed. This, combined with my experiences debating people, lead me to the pretty simple conclusion that not only do people hear what they want to hear, as the saying goes, but they read what they want to read. Only moreso, because it’s hard to accidentally read something that tells you what you don’t want to know and it’s easier to hear it.

In the final seasons of The Sopranos, Tony Soprano’s psychologist comes to a similar conclusion (or is presented with evidence) that psychopaths actually attend therapy not to mend their ways but rather to learn how to better justify their misdeeds. And so it goes with politics.