Criminal Culpability in Urging Someone to Commit Suicide

A teenage girl has been criminally charged with encouraging her “friend” to commit suicide:

Teen Charged with Allegedly Urging a Friend to Kill Himself

Seeing the photos of the two friends, I assumed (before reading the article), that the boy egged on the girl to kill herself. Actually, it was the other way around, and the girl allegedly urged the boy to commit suicide (seemingly by carbon monoxide poisoning). As the article notes, she was an honor student, as if that would normally qualify her for good behavior awards. She was charged with involuntary manslaughter and faces significant time behind bars if convicted after not only egging him on to “do it” but also for sickeningly decrying on her social media accounts that his suicide was such a terrible tragedy. No doubt, if the story is accurate, that she’s an awful person with a lack of empathy but a dollop of solipsism that mark her as a potential sociopath.

But should her behavior be illegal and punishable by law? Many people do heinous things to others including lying, cheating, teasing, belittling, etc. but they don’t get arrested. Should make we illegal all this boorish behavior? Should someone be held culpable for someone’s suicide when suicide itself is, by definition, a solitary act? What about when someone commits suicide after a romance unravels? Or after a friend betrays a friend’s secrets to others? It is reminiscent of revenge porn, where a boorish and tacky act is increasingly outlawed by criminal law (when this type of behavior would previously have fallen under civil law). If we are going to be held responsible for every single word we say or publish, then we are all going to be held to a very high standard for our own words, all the time. And if we hold young people, who are not the most rational or filtered before communicating, then almost everyone growing up today will be guilty of some kind of “thought-to-speech crime.” What we need is not more laws criminalizing behavior (even if it is repugnant) that results in individuals (or his/her families) running to the state to solve every problem and issue they face, but an emphasis on developing and maintaining a resolute stance when faced with a nasty jerk. When you commit suicide, you allow the bastard who egged you on to feel victory. Don’t succumb and let the bastard win, fight back and persevere while standing on your own as a resolute individual. Don’t get mad, don’t get sad, get even.

Same Old Story: Lack of Agency and Narrative Drives Young Men to the Extreme

A young immigrant man in New York was arrested at JFK Airport on his way to Syria to join ISIS:

In Brooklyn, Eager to Join ISIS, if Only His Mother Would Return His Passport

Aside from the comical implication of a mother taking away her son’s passport so he couldn’t join the world’s most notorious terrorist organization, the larger issue is what drives young men around the world to seek out and join ISIS (women also join but I believe their motivations are different from the men). The New York Times story sets up the subject as a kind of a “loser” relegated to a job chopping onions and tomatoes in a basement, while quietly seething about the permissive moral culture around him. The article posits that this combination led him to want to join ISIS, but I believe there is something else driving these men because not all of them were “losers and misfits.” The story broke yesterday that the so-called “Jihadi John” who ostensibly beheads captives for ISIS is a Kuwaiti who used to live in London with a middle class lifestyle. The NYT ran a video story a month ago of a Malaysian imam who enjoyed a good, stable life with the respect of his community, who left it all behind to join ISIS (and eventually died in the fighting):

The Jihadist In Our Family

They all came from different backgrounds but ended up in the same place fighting for an organization that most of us consider heinous and troglodyte. This is actually nothing new, but has happened throughout human history where men of fighting age (and some too young or old) go off and join an outfit fighting for a cause. And that’s the key here, it’s for a cause that has established a grand narrative at odds with the prevailing one (democratic capitalism in today’s world). All these men felt their life had little or no cause, and that their agency was limited to effect change. From a young age, we are taught that we can be anything we want but then when reaching adulthood, we realize that many of us will not be able to reach that rarefied air  where agency, wealth and power reside. Instead we can only reach a middling level for not everyone can reach the highest rung, even if we try our mightiest and best (not everyone can be above average). ISIS gives a sense of purpose to these men that they cannot or can no longer find in their home cultures/countries. There is no grand narrative for them to live out, no sense of higher purpose to achieve or strive for. Instead ISIS preys on this insecurity and provides a disturbingly twisted but attractive and romantic narrative. Young men in other countries rushed to join the Communist revolutions in Russia and China in the 20th century, even though it proved disastrous. ISIS does the same, and when ISIS fails (which it will), there will be some other grand narrative to take its place for young men to “escape” lives that they perceive to be without or with little meaning, agency or value.

What does it mean to “love” America (or any country)?

A few days ago former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani said that President Obama does not love America in the same way that he does. It was a fascinating comment that, of course, the media jumped on creating its usual noise with no substance so let’s be better than them and look at this comment a bit closer. Giuliani says he loves America, but what does that really mean? What does he really love? Is it the culture? The culture of America is so variable and wide that it’s too hard to pin down. Perhaps he’s just being selective to the parts he likes (baseball, opera, etc.) as Giuliani doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would like gangsta rap or rodeo. Nothing wrong with that as everyone has their cultural preferences but the point is that American culture is writ so broad (which is a strength), that I don’t think he could be referring to the culture since there is no one American culture. Is it the Constitution? As a former prosecutor, he’s certainly a law and order type, but Obama was a constitutional law professor (adjunct), so I don’t think Giuliani was making that distinction either.

My guess is that Giuliani wasn’t really referring to “love” of country and just chose the word incorrectly to express what he really meant. Giuliani believes, whether we agree or not, that the US should be much more aggressive and in front fighting ISIS and terrorists around the world, and he believes that Obama is not taking the fight to them directly enough. By Obama not taking the fight in such a direct and visceral manner, Giuliani believes that Obama does not love America like he does. And I use the word “visceral” because Giuliani pointed out Obama’s cool manner when discussing ISIS, and his emotional response to Ferguson. Giuliani believes that Obama’s handling of ISIS and terrorists is not only not strong and tough enough to show that he “loves” the country, that is, going on offense directly to protect the defense of the continental United States, but also that Obama simply isn’t angry and outraged enough. Giuliani believes Obama should be more emotional in his speechifying on ISIS and terrorism to demonstrate a true love of the United States.

When to be project logic and rationality, and when to project emotion and anger is the issue between them.

Jeb Bush and the Failed Neo-Con Worldview

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who is almost certainly running for President next year, made a self-styled major foreign policy speech outlining his vision. As the Washington Post pointed out in an insightful Venn diagram, most of his foreign policy team comes from the same circle that his father and brother ran in:

Jeb Bush’s Foreign Policy Team is Eerily Similar

There were practically no specifics in the speech except he would increase war spending, which is the last thing the US needs. The US war budget is already incredibly bloated and can easily be slashed, but that’s a subject for another column. Bush said he would be tougher and stronger than Obama in projecting US power, but what does that really mean? If one looks at his team of advisors, some names such as Paul Wolfowitz stand out. Wolfowitz is one of the prime architects and proponents of the 2003 Iraq invasion, which 12 years later can clearly be seen by any honest-minded observer as a complete disaster. That war wasted countless lives, from American soldiers to over 100,000 Iraqis. That war wasted well over $1 trillion from US taxpayers, which could have been used in so many other useful ways, or just given back to the people. That war took a relatively stable country with a dictator that posed no threat to anyone except its own people, and completely destabilized the region, helping give birth to ISIS today. How could anyone in his/her right mind want to give a team that blundered so badly another chance at the reins of foreign policy? Why is Wolfowitz given any media slots as a talking head except if it’s as a lesson of abject failure? The Neo-Cons are/were a bunch of idealists who believed in their own pie-in-the-sky fantasy world, but they’ve been proven wrong. It is unconscionable that Bush would want to make the same mistakes that his brother made, especially when he claims to want to be his own man.

Originally posted: http://www.mccarthyism.com/2015/20150219_Jeb-Bush-and-Failed-Neo-Con-Worldview-Foreign-Policy.htm

Will We Enter a Digital Dark Age?

One of the ‘founding fathers’ of the Internet, Vint Cerf (co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocols), warns that most of the data being saved today in the cloud, USB drives, hard drives, discs, etc. will be inaccessible in 100 years due to advanced technology of the 22nd century making today’s technology obsolete. The 21st century will become a dark age due to all the data being lost.

Vint Cerf Warns of Digital Dark Age

Certainly a lot of data was lost during the transition from 3.5 inch floppies to CD-ROMs, and, yes, I know this from personal experience. But many of us learned that lesson and have become better stewards of our digital files, regularly backing them up and transitioning them from one new technology to the next. Surely some data will be lost along the way like a crumbling cookie, but it will be mostly the careless and ill-planned who will lose their digital past. Yes, technology available 100 years from now will be completely unusable with today’s ports and drives, but most of us who are responsible will make the necessary transfers along the way.

As for public data on the web, the Way Back Machine at Archive.org already copies and stores most well-known websites today. Researchers in the 22nd century will be able to see how Yahoo! looked in 1996 until its inevitable demise this century. On the marco level, so much is being archived that little will be lost. On the micro level, many individuals will lose their digital history but that will be their own fault for not preserving their past. And, in a sense, this is no different as it has ever been with failure to store film photographs and/or paintings in cool places and out of direct sunlight. The method of preservation changes, but ultimately it’s the human will and foresight that determines whether it will be saved for posterity.

Originally posted: http://www.mccarthyism.com/2015/20150218_Vint-Cerf-Warns-of-Digital-Dark-Age.htm

Advertisements as Content on the Front Page of Forbes Magazine

We know the slogan of Forbes magazine is that it’s a capitalist tool, but putting advertisements disguised as content on the cover might be taking that concept a bit too far:

Ads, Editorial, It’s All #Content

Print magazines are desperate to generate revenue any way they can as ad dollars from agencies and companies increasingly chase new media outlets, but disguising an ad as content is a bridge that no large, mainstream media outlet has crossed before. Readers should be able to delineate clearly the difference between an ad and content. The latter is generally perused, while the former is scanned. The utility of a magazine decreases when the two are conflated as it confuses the reader. Perhaps this is a just a death knell for Forbes magazine. Though I never regularly read Forbes, it’s always had a nice nostalgic note for me by cracking the fabrications of Stephen Glass the fabulist at the New Republic in the late 1990s. Jukt Mirconics forever!

The death of print magazines is sad as it is a print medium I still enjoy reading. I like the convenience of flipping through the pages of a magazine as paper/ink than as pixels/slides on an iPad screen, or as a bunch of links on a website. But if print magazine’s path to survival includes ads disguised as content, then you can count me out.

Originally posted: http://www.mccarthyism.com/2015/20150217_ads-as-content-on-forbes-magazine-front-page.htm

David Carr’s Boston University Syllabus

As the final Media Equation column with David Carr, the New York Times discussed and put a link to his Boston University journalism course on Medium.com:

David Carr’s Press Play Syllabus on Medium

As someone who has done some university teaching in the US and abroad, I was impressed at how Carr’s syllabus was content-rich with little fluff and tedium, and its attractive presentation on Medium.com (not as a Word doc or PDF). At other universities I have taught, a template is provided not only for the syllabus format, but even much of the content is already provided. There is little ability to make the syllabus one’s own personality, and looking at Carr’s (whether you liked the content or not), it definitely had his personality. When I was an undergraduate, my favorite professor’s syllabus was never more than a page. It had his name, office location, course reading list, brief research paper description, and exam dates. He was also a bit of an anarchist who believed a good university only needed three things: great teachers, students and library (everything else was superfluous and beside the point). Homogenization is the byword of university education today with little room for personality, innovation or creativity. Education as bureaucratic tedium, with accreditors setting up phony assessment tables and charts to “prove” that students are learning is the norm. The students might be passing the tests (which they are taught to pass or set up to pass), but they have little passion for learning. The course and professor are simply obstacles to pass on the way to a degree and a job, and university gets the money from students who cannot default on loan repayments.

Maybe because of Carr’s star power, he was able to write the syllabus and teach the class the way he thought it should be done. Maybe behind the scenes, the BU journalism program rewrote and formatted his syllabus to make the accreditors and assessment administrators satisfied, but in his classrom Carr was presumably able to teach… truly teach. And his students were surely better off for it. If students want better teachers and a valuable education, then they need to “vote” with their wallets and go to schools that value inspired teaching and service. Unfortunately, those are very few, until students demand better.

Originally posted: http://www.mccarthyism.com/2015/20150216.htm

One Gaffe on Social Media Will Cost You Your Job

Modern life is unforgiving, and social media only exacerbates this harsh reality. People have always said stupid things, but now that one stupid thing can cost you your job:

Justine Sacco’s One Stupid Tweet

What Sacco said was stupid, insenstive and offensive, but the question should be asked whether this one tweet was truly reflective of who she was as a person. Was this part of a pattern of stupid, insensitive things she said, or was it a one (or two) off, shot from the hip, while waiting in the airport. We are under constant pressure to sling snark because others find it funny and will like and follow us more. Sometimes the line of public proprietary gets crossed, and then a person is pilloried for bad taste, insensitivty, racism, etc. If you haven’t realized it by now, this site positions itself as reasoned argumentation in irony to the connotative meaning of the site’s address moniker. But at some point, no matter how careful, something will end up getting written that will offend someone in some way that not have been anticipated. And then jobs will be lost because of it. One of the most horrendous examples from the article is the guy making an off-color sexual joke about dongles at a tech conference, and then a woman takes it upon herself to take his photo without permission and outed him as a misogynist to the planet. He promptly lost his job, and then so did she. Companies are wimps that fire employees who stray even a bit off the line into the slightest whiff of controversy. These companies should be boycotted as they are chilling the speech of everyone who works in them by firing employees who make one mistake in their private life.

The problem is that all our different selves at home, work, shopping, school, have become conflated for everyone to know every single facet. The joke Sacco told was meant for her good friends, but it spread globally because it is much more difficult to keep our private self under close wraps.

Originally posted: http://www.mccarthyism.com/2015/20150215.htm

Record Number of US Citizens Giving Up Citizenship

And the numbers of US citizens renouncing citizenship reached over 3,000 last year, even though the fees to do so went well over $2,000:

Americans Ditch Their Passports

Whenever you read the message boards to this type of story, the common reaction of US-based Americans is “good riddance” and “don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” This is a churlish, childish and counter-productive reaction. These Americans are not traitors, they are simply tired of double-taxation (yes, ironic, considering that is why the original colonists fought for independence). Americans are some of the only citizens in the world (though China is starting to do this as well) that pay taxes in their country of residence, and to the US government as well. Now, they do not have pay US taxes if their income is under about $95,000 but they still have to file and, for many, that is an expensive proposition. Many US expats are not bankers or financiers; instead many are teachers, middle managers for global companies or small business owners. They make well under the threshold but requiring them to hire an accountant (usually back in the US because there are few licensed CPAs overseas) means paying anywhere from $400 to $1000. That’s just unfair, and there should be a simpler way for these Americans such as a simple one-page waiver form to file.

In principle, when living overseas you are not using the services of the government so you should not be subject to taxation to one’s home country. Europeans are astounded to learn that Americans have to pay tax on their overseas salary. Then again, Europeans get national health insurance if they pay home taxes, while Americans get nothing except an order to pay and register for Obamacare.

It used to be $400 to renounce citizenship, and now it’s $2,400. There’s no reason for it to be that high except to fleece an about-to-be former citizen one last time. It should cost $40 to renounce citizenship, or even be free. It’s petty and tacky to charge so much for trying to leave a club. It bespeaks more about the crassness and coarseness of the US government than of the citizens trying to leave US behind for greener pastures elsewhere. Just let them go with minimum fuss, and let go of the currently vindictive system.

Originally posted: http://www.mccarthyism.com/2015/20150213.htm

US Colleges Giving More Money to Foreign Students

American colleges are looking to provide more scholarship and grant money to foreign students, particularly from China, in order to economically diversify their international student population:

US Colleges Seek Economic Diversity Internationally

In the Associated Press article, there is only one reader comment at the bottom but it tells the other side of story, “what about the poor American students?” It probably sounds great in principle to give more money to poor students in other countries to study in the US, but considering how huge the student debt load is for American college students, one would think there would be some kind of uproar from US students to get a larger piece of the financial assistance pie. Instead, it doesn’t seem like any students are complaining perhaps because they figure they will be able to pay back all those loans one day after they find a well-paying job (good luck). American students at most US colleges and universities are a pretty cowed bunch when it comes to challenging their administrations on boondoggles and runaway spending on useless administrative and staff positions. It’s still a bit shocking that even money does not motivate them to speak out and question administrative decision-making. Perhaps because they see themselves as such transient populations that they will be gone soon enough before any substantive changes would be made. That is a pity. It may be noble to give more money (and precious seats at prestigious institutions like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etc.) to foreign students, but American students could use more help as well. In essence, US college financial magnaminity should not come at the cost to US students who foot an ever-increasing tuition bill.

Originally posted: http://www.mccarthyism.com/2015/20150209.htm