Ethical Dilemma Case Study: Christopher Thomas Knight

Ironically the week we look at ethical dilemmas in the English 301 class I'm teaching this semester, I start reading Michael Finkel’s book “The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit,” which focuses on the life of Christopher Thomas Knight, a man who lived for more than 25 years on his own, in the woods, using food and supplies he stole from nearby cabins and a summer camp for disabled children.

(If you haven’t read the book but want to, warning: Spoilers ahead.)

Finkel opens his book with the story of Knight’s last burglary at Pine Tree Camp, the night he’s caught by fish and game officer Terry Hughes, thus:

The hermit zigzags across the camp and stops at a specific rock, turns it over, brags the key hidden beneath, and pockets it for later use. Then he climbs a slope to the parking lot and tests each vehicle’s doors. A Ford pickup opens. He clicks on his pen-light and peeks inside.

Candy! Always good. Ten rolls of Smarties, tossed in the cup holders. He stuffs them in another pocket. He also takes a rain poncho, unopened in its packaging, and a silver-colored Armitron analog watch. It’s not an expensive watch – if it looks valuable, the hermit will not steal it. He has a moral code. But extra watches are important; when you live outside with rain and snow, breakage is inevitable.

The hermit has a moral code. He steals, but nothing valuable. His thefts – he estimates he committed more than a thousand burglaries in the time he spent living in a clearing in the tangled woods not far from his boyhood home in Albion, Maine – small things for the most part, things people would be embarrassed to contact the police about: D-cell batteries. Packaged food. Used books. The occasional pair of jeans or a sleeping bag. He stole mattresses and propane tanks and portable radios. He stole hand-held gaming systems, but never anything that looked new – he didn’t want to steal any kid’s new birthday or Christmas toy – and figured he’d steal them in a few years when the newness was worn off a bit.

He admits, Finkel writes, that with every theft, he felt a burning shame.

But he stole to live.

Thus the dilemma.

Victor Hugo, famously, wrote an entire book about such a dilemma: A man sent to prison for the crime of stealing bread to feed his family.

What to do?

I’m still reading the book. When I finish, I’ll share any ethical discussion that comes of it. But my preliminary conclusion: It’s hard to be good.

Also this:

Re: That Previous Post; or, “But I’m Feeling Much Better Now”

Clearly, whatever is ailing me at the moment bubbled to the surface, viz. But thanks to Night Court, I’ve got a catchphrase that should put some reassurance into your heads, if you forget it’s coming from man recently released from a psychiatric institution:





It’s stress. I’m dealing with the stress right now. It’s part of my long-term strategy of becoming Wally. Or an early death, whichever comes first.

The source of said stress? Legion:

1. Full-time job. Remember the Big Failure from a while back?  It kind of revisited under a different form, but that, too, appears to be on the mend. And there was a drill today that I had little time to prepare for, but that’s over.

2. Part-time job. Which is what I do, or at least which is what it feels like I do, whenever I’m not at the full-time job.

3. Church. That explains the previous post quite a bit, in vague and scary terms. But I’m coming to grips with things better now, as Buddy might say. Also Liam is preparing for his mission call. We had a visit with LDS Family Services about a week ago, in which we discussed his position on the autism spectrum. I personally think he’d struggle on a teaching mission. But we’ll see where the Lord decides to send him. At least this is something completely out of my hands. Then I have my own inadequacies, to which I’m slowly getting a fix on how to fix.

4. Schedule. I’m always a bit discombobulated when the days shorten and I get a lot less sun in my eyeballs. With the passing of Daylight Saving Time, that means I’m full into the phase when I get up before the sun rises and don’t get home until after it sets. That piles on the stress.

5. Book. Doleful Creatures still calls to me. I have no idea how to fix it.

So that all kinda came to a head when that last post hit. Which is fine; it shouldn’t be all good news that comes to the surface. There are struggles that all of us go through.

The Dilbert Principle

If you want to read a funny, eye-rolling book about business and the silliness people get up to when they’re supposed to be working, read Stanley Bing’s “What Would Machiavelli do.” Or else read the reader-submitted emails in Scott Adams’ “The Dilbert Principle.”

But Bing’s book is funnier longer.

I’m sure some associate of Adams’ either re-read or remembered Laurence J. Peter’s “The Peter Principle” and suggested Adams write a similar book, based on his Dilbert comic strips. Such an endeavor could have been great. But it feels like Adams slapped this book together rather quickly and decided snark was a substitute for the sly wit and thought Peter put into his book.

That’s not so say this book isn’t funny. I’m almost always amused by Dilbert (and a little disconcerted that the character I find the most common ground with is Wally). But this book feels phoned in.

And the Dilbert Principle itself is basically a retread of one of Peter’s ideas.

Adams argues that companies move their least competent employees to middle management in order to limit that amount of damage they can do to the company.

Peter describes that as a “percussive sublimation,” a pseudo-promotion moving an individual from one unproductive position to another.

Oh well.

Ooga

I have become Mordac, Preventer of Information Services.

Or at least his less-competent minion, The Guy Who Maybe Gets Stuff Done If You Ask Him Enough Times to Do It.

That’s at home, at least, where I spent a good portion of my time working to get InDesign put back on Michelle’s desktop computer.

And what a pain that was. Some of it was necessarily self-inflicted, but most of it was due to Adobe.

You know Adobe – they created InDesign, which Michelle loves. Many moons ago we bought the third iteration of their Creative Suite. They have, as is the wont of software companies, moved on. But they have moved on from an insanely-expensive product – as I recall, we paid more than $300, with student discounts for CS3 – to an even more insanely-expensive monthly subscription service for their newest iterations.

And a while back her computer crashed so I had to try to reinstall her suite, which wouldn’t work. Last weekend, I reset her computer back to factory settings – minus the removal of the Windows 10 upgrade, which apparently has its tentacles wrapped and locked – and tried again. Got to the last step, and no-go. Then had to go online with Adobe support for more than an hour for a new product key, and a new setup file. Not happy. And not, technically, sure it’s fully installed and operational.

And because we had to reset to factory, I had to reinstall a bunch of other software, printer drivers, etc. And I’m not sure I’m done with those, either. The next thirty days will tell. Or sooner, if she gets messages about any trial use and such, which I hope she does not for InDesign.

One Mordac success this weekend: We replaced two keyboards.

Mecentricity

It’s important, first of all, to remember that everything that happens in the world around you targets only one person: You.

If you don’t remember this, you’re not going to function well in this world where umbrage is preferred over understanding.

And it’s important, second of all, to shout into the empty room that is social media rather than to talk with the real flesh-and-blood entities circulating the air around you – but after all, they’re less important since, as you remember, everything that happens in the world around you targets you and you alone. Never mind that in talking with them you might find that it’s the Copernican model of the solar system that works, not the one you’ve got in mind.

Also, don’t forget a good hashtag or two as you vent your frustrations in a passive-aggressive fashion.

Yes, the irony of me posting this on an ill-read blog and then linking to it via my Facebook account does not escape me, But remember – I’m reacting to a world in which affronts to me and my personality and my beliefs are targeted solely at me, so it’s my right to lash out into the darkness in a way that helps me vent my righteous anger without, you know, actually thinking about my actions or talking before I post or tweet and maybe – just maybe, mind you – growing in understanding and then watching my anger and victimhood uselessly evaporate in the face of the evidence that the thing that offended me was not targeted at me.

But where’s the fun in that?

Because in understanding, sometimes you have to face some ugly truths:

1. The world does not revolve around you
2. The beliefs you hold might indeed be wrong, wholly or in part
3. Your actions are often deserving of consequences, no matter how unrighteous your accusers may be
4. You don’t always know others’ motivations
5. If you think you know others’ motivations, it’s more likely than not you’re only interpreting their motivations through the lens of everything in the world focusing on you, meaning the chances of your misinterpreting their motivations are high.

And if you think this doesn't apply to you  -- or that if someone appears to be selfish it is because they still think what they believe is correct, then you've missed the point. You're still centered on you.

Don’t assume this is a philosophical argument against absolutes. Because there are times when, indeed, you are individually targeted and where the empty room of social media is the last venue open to you and the hashtag your last hope of bringing attention to your case. Or indeed your religion, your ethnic group, even your age category can be summarily attacked, leaving you to feel icky.

Then again, there are times to talk to those around you. Particularly when the situation is ambiguous and those you can talk to are your colleagues.

But sometimes – just sometimes, mind you – the situation is as I’ve said. You are not the primary target.

I fall victim to this kind of thinking all the time. I’m me-centric. But they say the way to a cure is to first recognize you have a problem.

Topperism Intervention Possibly Needed

Internet Hive Mind, gather 'round.

I worry, sometimes -- because it's a hobby of mine -- that I come off like "Topper" in the Dilbert comic strips.

Question: Where is the line that should not be crossed when you're riffing on someone's Facebook joke, sharing a story similar to the one in the main post (or even in a comment). Where do sympathy/empathy and Topperism intersect?

If I DO come off like Topper more often than not, would SOMEONE please tell me so I can get into a program or intervention. It's been weighing on my mind.

And why is it so funny when Topper meets Loud Howard?

A Writer's Revenge

Conventional Thinking -- Alive and Well

Like Charlie Brown – who read about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire in the comic strip inferred in this photo – I’m fascinated with failure.

Reading right now about the failure of a Texas savings and loan, one that was steered into the ditch by greed. In the book, James O’Shea’s DAISY CHAIN, we meet a lot of unsavory characters. But one of them says something pretty apropos about Washington, DC, per Shea:

[Durward] Curlee [consultant to Don Dixon, CEO of failed Texas S&L Vernon Savings] recognized almost immediately that Washington was a company town. “Conventional thinking – not conventional wisdom – but conventional thinking dominates the place,” said Curlee. “And where does conventional thinking come from – from the staffs, the think tanks, the study groups, those kind of things. I figured it would take four years for an idea to gestate into conventional thinking. So you hire yourself a think tank and buy a study on what you want to do. It [the idea] gets into the agency, then to the staff, people start talking about it and it gets in the press, and then everyone thinks, ‘Okay, that’s it.’”

Conventional Thinking in this case is pejorative. It’s picking up whatever solution happens to be floating around at the moment, whether anyone is sure it’ll work or not, or whether or not there’s something better to do if we’d just think about things a bit.

It’s the herd mentality.

It’s thinking that the “success” of the automobile and banking industry bailouts ought to be repeated.

It is, as Dilbert puts it here, exactly the same thing as not having a strategy.

It’s certainly something I need to move away from.

It's time to go after the cheese that's been moved. Don't know where it's been moved to, but I'm goig to find it. That goes especially for my writing. Need to think nonconventionally -- avoid some of the traps I've seen new authors fall into (settling for mediocrity being the biggie, followeed only by falling into the template for your genre).

Group Writing

Yeah, that's been my experience. Not that collaborative writing is all that bad, if you've got one person really calling the shots. But to say you're going to get a group of people in the same room and have them come out with a coherent document without carrying with them the baggage of festering hatred towards their fellow "writers" is to lie.

Comix Artists Take Note

Though at times I think Scott Adams of Diblert fame is kind of a goober (sock puppeting certainly comes to mind), I have to admit that one of the things I admire most is that he’s allowed for the finest comic archive ever conceived by a comic strip artist.

I wanted, for example, to find two comic strips related to Dilbert’s company’s business plan being in complete disarray. Ordinarily, with comics like, well, any of them, I’d have to swim through years worth of archives if they’re offered online at all to find them. Not at Dilbert.com. I plugged “disarray” into their comics search engine and had the two comics pulled up in no time flat.

I don’t know if this comes through Adam’s genius, his clout in the industry letting him convince his publisher to offer all these goodies in an easily-searchable online database or if it’s something to do with the world ending in 2012, but I like it. Kudos to whomever came up with the idea.

Oh yeah. He’s got strips with “kudos” in them as well.

Your Subject Matter Expert

So, again Scott Adams demonstrates he has spies somewhere at the RWMC where I work, because we have SMEs to which the reaction is like this -- myself included, I'm sure, in some circles.

It's a mix of strengths, weaknesses, and personality clashes. Some of us carry around reputations for both good and bad -- and I mean both good and bad, because each of us has our good qualities and our bad qualities that make working with us an individual joy and terror. I know for myself sometimes I'm dumb as a rock, and those I work with know it and take pity on me for it.

The better part of valor, of course, is getting to know each others' strengths and weaknesses and building defenses and strategies to work with them or aound them, as the need may be. Soemtimes it works through reassignment, but most of the time each party in the group recognizes that they're just going to have to work with each other, grit their teethm, and get the job done.

Word it Up

This Dilbert comic gave me a pretty good chuckle this morning because, in many ways, it describes my life for both good and bad.

There is much that can be accomplished with writing. At work right now we’re preparing the operational paperwork to open a new waste processing facility, so we’re deeply involved with words. We have to put bows on it all too – but we can’t just word things up willy-nilly because these documents will actually be read and used and revised and revised again as we all work to make them as perfect as they can be.

I’m doing the same with the novels I’m working on. The first drafts, it appears, are plot and character development laced liberally with spots where I word it up and put a bow on it. The editing process means to cull the wording up and to make sure the bows are all in the right place.

Readers, I have to remind myself, are astute individuals. They can tell immediately the difference between something that’s bee worded up with a bow slapped on it and something that’s been carefully crafted and edited. I’m learning as I get older that while the initial writing process might be the most satisfying, the ongoing editing process is the most necessary. Sometimes when we word things up and put bows on it, the wording and bows just get in the way of the central message. I can see that with “Considering How to Run,” and I know now – having put some emotional distance between the book and myself – that some of the bows I’ve got in the book need to be taken off. I know the ones – those that smack of any “modernity,” those that recall us from the fantasy world I’m trying to create to the real world in which I exist now. Those real-world things have got to be cut. And the novel won’t suffer for it.

Again, this may be why – I’m a slow learner, I know – that many editors advise would-be book writers to write two or three books before they actually get serious about asking someone to read and edit what they’ve written in a professional, potential-to-publish capacity. I’ve learned enough about writing that first novel to know what kinds of mistakes to avoid, and I’m sure I’ll discover new, fresh mistakes – and encounter some old friends – as I write the second and third (which are both underway right now, by the way). Maybe after three or four (or five or six) novels written, I’ll finally get to the point where I’ve written one that shows I’ve finally learned a thing or two – that I’m not just wording things up and putting a bow on it.

Flush Yourself to Safety

Amid all the rhetoric spiraling out of Washington and the major news networks, emerge these truths about the so-called “Buffet Rule”:

1) On wages earned, Warren Buffet does indeed pay less in federal income tax than his secretary.
2) In the aggregate sense, however, your average millionaire pays just under twice as much, percentage-of-income-wise, as do those who are firmly and solidly in the middle class.

Who is right – and whom you believe in this mess – says more about your politics than your ability to do math or understand tax law.

President Obama is obviously interested in tapping into the middle-class (and liberal) rage against the so-called fat cats who in some instances, depending on what figures you look at and how hard you squint, appear to pay less in taxes than their middle-class compatriots. Such a stance paints a caricature of the situation, not allowing for the complexities of tax law that make, for many millionaires, a higher tax burden than what even President Obama seems willing to admit.

Are there loopholes that allow some millionaires to pay less in income taxes than middle class wage-earners? Yes there are. But if unbiased entities such as the Congressional Budget Office, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Tax Policy Center are to be believed, what Obama and the media are selling the American public is true for a minority of millionaires, untrue for the vast majority.

It makes as much logical sense to me as does Rush Limbaugh’s claim that there are more National Forest lands in the United States now than there were when Columbus landed in the Americas in 1492. The statement is true in one literal sense: There was absolutely no land at that time designated as National Forest. So it is true, depending, once again, on that squint and what figures you use.

It is demeaning to the public you claim to be serving and intellectually dishonest to state the case for the minority is the case for all. And no matter how much you might blame media spin or the passion of a political moment for such dishonesty, that the claims being made are dishonest to begin with does not change.

As an independent voter who “voted for change” in 2008, I’m disappointed. The intellectual dishonesty is much more appalling to me than any political circus divided along party lines. I’d like to think that anyone earning an income in the United States and benefitting from government services is paying a fair share of tax. It appears that most people are. I don’t know much about the tax loopholes that are benefitting those minority of millionaires, but before I go screaming on about that, I probably should quietly consider whether the child tax credits and lifetime learning credits I’ve legitimately taken over the past several years (eliminating entirely my federal tax burden) are as correct and right and justified as those millionaire loopholes we’ve heard so much yet know so little about. The circus is inevitable. The lies shouldn’t be.

Godwinning, Well, Anything, Part II

You’ve got to be careful, I think, when quoting a book describing the “social revolution” in Nazi Germany and making any parallels to today’s society.

Yes, I have blogged about that caution before.

Nevertheless, after reading David Schoenbarum’s “Hitler’s Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany 1933-1939,” parallels will be made. I don’t want to be accused of Godwinning anything, so just let me say that these are the parallels I see between what I read in Schoenbaum’s book and what I see in society today. I’m not calling anyone a Nazi, I’m just marveling at how society repeats the same errors and flubs made by those who went before them.

Two of Schoenbaum’s general observations just jumped out at me as I read. The first, from page 199:

The Third Reich was a state of bureaucratized charisma, and no less than a state of permanent improvisation.

The second, from page 275:

The Third Reich proved that a house divided against itself can stand, provided at least, that the occupants have no alternative place to go and that the landlord pays attention to the wallpaper, if not to the walls.

I’m struck, as is Schoenbaum, how much social Darwinism played a factor in the Third Reich, with social moves ranging from deifying the farmer to reforming civil service and labor organization ebbed and flowed with which direction the popular winds were blowing, where easily exploitable institutional weakness was found and where support from high places encouraged further movement.

We see the same kind of Darwinism at play today, as governments and political parties vie to be the one force that effects change when that change is only window dressing – or wallpaper – leaving the underlying woodwork in varying states of repair and fitness unchanged. The political back-and-forth we get today – and I blame both Republicans and Democrats for this – leaves us with a government more interested in the wallpaper than the walls. And we as a public have no alternative direction to head as third parties are marginalized and our attempts to democratize the republic for which it stands gets lost in the noise.

Bad Decision 4

Sometimes, comics take a bit of commentary a bit too far.

This week, Scott Adams of Dilbert fame didn’t take his bit of commentary far enough. And rather than making a wry commentary on the perceptions we have of ourselves, our own ideas, and how those ideas impact others, by not taking this one far enough, he just ends up being smug – which contradicts, I think, the better premise he could have used in this setup: humility.

Anyway, that’s enough of the preamble. On to the comics:

The key here is that once Dilbert types his great idea into an email, he, too, realizes it sounds kinda dumb. But rather than try to sort out why it sounds stupid even to the originator of the idea, he decides to sort it out later – and then never does it. At least not up through Bad Decision 2 and 3, then on to today’s comic.

The only one who acts sensibly throughout this episode is Wally, who:

1) Likely has no idea what the idea is and is thus keeping his mouth shut, or,
2) Knows what the idea is but is going to articulate his criticisms/concerns in a better way than transferring the idiocy of the idea to the messenger rather than the message.

The person who calls the email ignorant and arrogant errs in attacking the person/perception, rather than articulating why the idea doesn’t work – something Dilbert already kinda knows, since he knows the idea sounded dumb in the email in the first place.

Dilbert, too, however, acts foolishly, turning the situation into an I’m right/you’re wrong debate, rather than turning the conversation to the idea and saying, you know, I kinda felt it was dumb in the email. Maybe the two of us can sort it out by talking about the idea, its merits and its faults, rather than turning this into a personal attack or a pissing match.

Of course, this kind of logic doesn’t make for a good comic, since it’s rational, rather than the “dance, monkey, dance” fodder Adams prefers, because it’s so much easier to use DMD material to condescend rather than to exude humility.

I know. I’m overanalyzing the comics again. Still, I was hopeful Adams was straying out of DMD territory for once. Guess I was wrong. But I’ll wait to see what tomorrow holds, hoping that the smug is only a setup for something better.

A Tiny Bit of Light

Though there are clouds of obfuscation that still abound surrounding pending layoffs where I work, a quick perusal of the jobs targeted for the embiggened round of layoffs planned for September does not include technical writers – which is kinda hard to believe, considering we’re kinda disposable in the industry. Any industry, for that matter.

We’re hopeful that the absence of our job code on the list is a good sign, though given we keep seeing the “several hundred people to be impacted” repeated over and over for this coming layoff we’re not saying we’re safe and happy.

Still, a little ray of optimism enters.

What does that do?

Well, it gives me a little breathing space to try to find a better job with benefits. Not that I don’t like my current job – I do enjoy it a lot. Just still can’t shake the feeling that there’s something better around the corner. Still hopeful I’ll get called for an interview at the Space Dynamics Laboratory here in a few weeks. I called them about a week ago and found out they’re interviewing the “senior” applicants in the first part of July, so here’s to hoping I’m in that pool. I’d still like to work there. Drat that Carl Sagan for filling my mind with dreams of space. I know the SDL isn’t exactly JPL, but you know what, it’s a step in the right direction, don’t you think?

So if this tiny bit of light is true and we’re not on the layoff list, that basically gives me another, what, 3 ½ years until the work here dries up. That’s a lot better than 2 ½ months in my book.

National Cartoonists Day

It's to surprise to my readers that I like my comic strips. And while it's true that my tastes have evolved over the years, two things have remained constant: I've always liked Peanuts, and I've always disliked Alley Oop. Not that I didn't try awfully hard as a kid to like Alley Oop. It just never caught my fancy.

It's the same with Pearls Before Swine. Really trying to like it. I come close several times, but most of the time, no, it's just Alley Oop all over again. And I can't really put my finger to why I don't much care for either of those two strips, either, though Swine's awful puns and plays on words are a big turnoff for me. Never much liked puns as a kid. Except for those that appeared in Wiley's Dictionary. Something about that disembodied, authoritative voice just made the awfulness come to life for me.

Absurdity, like this, I do like:

[He tries in vain to find a comic to fit the absurdity bill here. No luck. Almost all of my comic books are in storage because there's not enough room on the shelves for them. Next house will have lots of bookshelves. And a garage.]

There are better ones than this. Just don't have the time to find one tonight.

Two things started my love affair with comic strips: First, the Forbidden Books -- BC and Wizard of Id collections -- my brother Jeff had hidden on his bookshelf, but not well enough that his younger brothers couldn't find them. Second, "Barnaby," which my sixth grade teacher Mr. Loertscher read to us using what I recognize now as the voice of W.C. Fields as Mr. O'Malley. (It doesn't matter what any of my other elementary school teachers did or any of the stuff they tried to make us learn. My most lasting memories of school will always be of "Barnaby.") My dream one of these days is to find some "Barnaby" comic books in a thrift store. I love to dream that dream. I know they've been reprinted. But to find an original . . .

So who are my favorites today?

Well, Cul de Sac, for one. And Dilbert, for another. And the Dogs of C Kennel I rather enjoy. Overboard. Baby Blues. Yes, I'm a traditional newspaper comic strip fan. None of this magna or DC Comics or anything like that. No. They all appeal to the desire I have to feed the absurdist within.

Cognitive Dissonance

The Scott Adams sock puppetry flap is still making waves on the breathless side of the Internet.

Part of me wonders, however, if he doesn’t have a point or two. Especially this one (emphasis mine):

Some time ago, I learned the hard way that posting messages with my own identity turns any discussion into an orgy of name-calling. When I'm personally involved, people speculate that I'm being defensive, or back pedaling, or being a douche nozzle, or trying to weasel my way out of something. Speaking with my true identity also draws too much attention to the very rumors I'm trying to extinguish. In contrast, when my spunky alter ego weighs in, people generally focus on the facts presented, including checking the source material to see my writing in context. The masked vigilante strategy worked well until recently. And I'd be lying if I said it wasn't fun.

Most of the inaccurate information about me on the Internet is harmless. And negative opinions about the quality of my work are always legitimate. The trouble starts when advocates for one cause or another use me as a whipping boy to promote their agendas. As I mentioned, the way that works is that they take out of context something I've written, paraphrase it incorrectly, and market me as a perfect example of the thought-criminal that they've been warning everyone about. I don't think any of this is an organized conspiracy. I think it's a combination of zealotry, bad reading comprehension, opportunism, and some herd behavior.

I hope, for starters, that I’m not doing exactly what Adams rightly scolds the breathless Internet of doing: Taking his writings out of context to make him a whipping boy (or a hero) for the point I’d like to make. (Read his full post here, so you may get the context.)

Of course, most people, as Adams says, don’t want the context, especially if it comes from the very person being accused of toolishness. We see that all the time, on the Internet and in the news – As soon as someone tries to defend himself or herself, there’s a good faction of listeners who react pretty much like this:

(Once again, you have to click the link for context, so I’m not guilty of doing what Adams rightly scolds the breathless Internet of doing. My apologies to Spamusement.com.)

Yet there is a faction of that faction who will, as Adams points out, react in a different manner if a perceived neutral party presents evidence that something has been taken out of context, or whatever.

So Adams, being a logical person, put one and two together and thought he’d found a solution. That his solution is sock puppetry, one of the few things the breathless Internet deigns to frown upon, shows that logic, even when applied in the best circumstances and with the best intentions, often fails. (Mr. Adams, sorry again for using you as an example in all of this. Yet it’s so easy.)

I have to wonder: If most of the inaccuracies about him on the Internet were harmless, then why go to the trouble of taking on the biggies? Surely, a vast portion of his Dilbert audience (myself included) were generally unaware of or indifferent to the inaccuracies until the Metafilter flap exploded. I guess that’s just a bit of cognitive dissonance – Adams being worried too much about one audience he was not thinking clearly about his effects on other audiences. (Though he does say this in his blog entry):

The next thing to consider is that in my line of work, some types of rumors can cause economic damage to hundreds of people in the so-called value chain. The stakes are high. I know from experience that when a rumor flares up that says, for example, I'm affiliated with one particular interest group or another, the people who hate that group will stop reading Dilbert comics. And they will aggressively warn everyone who will listen to do the same. This was a small problem in the pre-Internet age. Today, a rumor will send an army of advocates to vote down your products on Amazon.com and defame you on every blog and web site that allows comments. It happens in hours, not days.

That Adams thought he could solve the problem in this manner is laughable to say the least. I have grown used to the fact that as far as the breathless Internet is concerned, I hold views that, in context or not, are not popular and are not going to find well-reasoned and copious support. I still may blog about a few of those views, but I’m not going to expect that they be accepted or even interpreted correctly by those who read them. And trying to reason with people whom you already know are prone to “zealotry, bad reading comprehension, opportunism and some herd behavior” is already asking for trouble even if you do it under your own name and not in a manner that the breathless Internet shuns.

The Internet makes such ill-conceived behavior (the sock puppetry as well as the zealotry, etc.) easily accomplished. We’ve lost our ability to filter what we’d say because that least porous of all filters – laziness – is gone, thanks to that glowing LCD screen and keyboard in our collective basements, connected to the world. Mark Twain famously said: “It takes your enemy and your friend, working together to hurt you to the heart; the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you.”

The breathless Internet is both friend and enemy to us.

I could, by the way, see Mark Twain loving and hating the breathless Internet of today, given his famous battles with the Gilded Age’s version of the breathless Internet, or the news business. And I could see him falling into the same logical trap Adams fell into as well.

So what’s the solution?

I dunno. Maybe this.

‘I’m Sorry I Peed in Your Cesspool,’ or "Shaddup Shuttin' Up!'

Soooo, here’s a conundrum:

Who is the bigger jerk in this matchup:

1) The relatively new author who, in the context of criticizing a lightly critical review of one of her books totally melts down, drops a few f-bombs, and then storms off in a huff amid an Internet-coordinated flame war of just about everything she has created and posted on the web,

Or,

2) A seasoned author and illustrator who, in the context of trying to set the record straight on his views on various subjects, sock puppets on a highly-popular weblog and then is threatened with an outing by the admins of said site because, well, the site has no privacy policy to speak of.

Or,

3) The site that threatened to out the sock puppeteer unless the sock puppeteer outed himself.

I’ve got to admit that, in the grand scheme of things, probably No. 2 is the winner here, though No. 3 comes in a close second. Although they did have some legitimate news reasons – in the sense of yellow journalism – to out the puppeteer. Who is Scott Adams of Dilbert fame. Who outed himself on his own blog.

I’m not saying sock puppeting is a good thing. I think it’s an incredibly stupid thing to do. Unethical? Yes. Boneheaded and vexing? Sure, especially when, like Scott Adams, you sign into something using another account (in his case, PayPal) that identified himself by his real name.

Listening to Metafilter (where all of this went down) and Gawker preach about the no-no that is sock puppetry is kind of entertaining, as in general the Internet is to ethics as bowling is to Windsor Castle. But the little guy – and this is one of America’s most endearing qualities that has oozed onto the Internet like a melted malted – likes nothing more than seeing the other guy in the cagal, and it’s even better if it’s one of those snobby, rich, toffee-nosed bungholes with a past (as Gawker brings out) like Scott Adams.

Gawker’s follow-up coverage is especially funny, as they pick on Adams for saying:

Adams goes on to explain that the reason he has to keep bashing his critics anonymously on message boards is that lazy internet media like "Gawker, Metafilter, and any other cesspool with an IP address" take his words out of context, and various "advocates for one cause or another use me as a whipping boy to promote their agendas."

And then they go on to do exactly what he writes about:

He throws his lot in with the racist California Republican official who forwarded a picture of Obama's face photoshopped on a chimpanzee:

If your only context is what the Internet says about this story, you assume it's a typical racist act by a Republican who is already guilty by association. But if I add the context that Googling "George Bush monkey" gives you over 3 million hits, and most of them are jokes where President Bush's face is transposed on a monkey, you see what's really going on. Democrats and advocates of civil rights are using the media to further an agenda at the expense of a woman who was probably so non-racist that the photo in question didn't set off her alarms as being a career-ending risk.

We actually agree with Adams on this. You should feel exactly as bad for making fun of Scott Adams as you should about this Republican official's situation.

(And, no, it doesn't matter that the person who sent the Obama-as-monkey email has a habit of sending racist and questionable emails, folks -- what matters is that you're doing exactly what Adams accuses you of doing, and you can't even see it.)

So Scott Adams does indeed have a point, though it’s too bad he had to stoop to this kind of stupidity to make it. And in his eyes, it’s clear he feels he’s done nothing wrong and is turning this event into yet another way to get back at his enemies – does he keep an enemies list? Signs point to yes – with backhandedness.

As always in these situations, there’s much back and forth, with one side saying one thing (like this) and the other saying something else. I’m not going to bother presenting both sides here, as I’m not quite exactly sure both sides are saying. I’m just here for the “Dance, Monkey, Dance” factor, for which both Metafilter, Gawker, Scott Adams and others are obliging nicely.

Then again, this goes back to something I, Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius, tweeted a few days ago:

Reminds me again what Nathan Bransford (this is a good day on MFB for him) said about accepting criticism:

Publicly: Ignore them completely.

Privately: Complain like hell to anyone who will listen.

What Adams learned (or not) this week is that sock puppetry isn’t complaining in private. Especially if you sign in under your own name and call yourself a genius. You end up looking like this:

When you should be doing this:

And, at a bare minimum, remember you wrote something like this (as Gawker points out):

I Feel Your Pain, Ted

A long time ago when I was near to finishing my bachelor's degree, I remember hearing -- and experiencing -- the common almost-grad lament:

All the jobs I see want me to have experience I can't get until I get a job.

That caused a lot of frustration way back when in the fuzzy, cocoon-like world of the mid- to late-1990s, when the economy was robust and companies and government were offering all kinds of opportunities for just the right person.

Years later, I'd like to go back in time to my almost-grad self to deliver the following message:

It gets worse.

I have, right now, a pretty good job. I'd like a better one. But in cracking into the current job market of the early 2000s, when the economy is in the crapper and companies and government are keeping hires to a minimum, the challenges even in getting an interview are astronomical.

Used under the fair use doctrine for commentary purposes.

The bar is continually raised. I'm not complaining about that. I realize that I can't expect to experience a career in stasis: I have to continue educating myself and working to make myself more marketable to employers. Still, there is some frustration. I have earned a masters degree. I have taken that degree and parleyed it into a part-time teaching gig at BYU-Idaho -- but until I actually get a class to teach and am invited back, that entry on my resume is going to bear that asterisk.

Meanwhile, employers knowing that there are a lot more people out there looking for jobs, are able to be a bit pickier. I'm not complaining about that either. Obviously, an employer wants the best-qualified person for the job.

Still, it's frustrating. With every accomplishment I find others that still need to be finished before the next career step may be taken. And I suppose that's just a lesson on life: Never stop learning, because the expectations will always increase.