Internet complaint box

I've been reading (okay, skimming) a lot of news articles about the fiscal cliff in the last month, and they are frequently followed by a comments section full of poorly informed vitriol. During the 2012 election it was worse.

One of the favorite metacomments from Facebook (via my wife) was how annoying everyone's friends were with their poorly informed vitriol. Barack Obama and/or Mitt Romney were individually the worst thing to happen to this country since Tippecanoe and Tyler Too drubbed that dandy, "Little Van" out of the White House.

There's a lot of hand-wringing among public service types about civic disengagement. People apparently don't vote. But they do complain on the Internet! Can we use that?

Listen up, all you vitriol-spewers! Instead of typing your mauvais mots to each other on the Internet (where they have no chance of influencing anyone other than your children to shy away from you), send them to your congressperson. 

The same typing! The very same words! Just send them to your elected representative. Vent your unfocused rage toward some FOCUS. There, you might have a chance of doing some good. At very least you'll stop bothering my wife.

Find out the names and email addresses of your congresspersons. If you're not sure what to say, there's a big link in Spanish at the top of the page to remind you about your poorly-informed vitriol concerning illegal immigration! Start there!

Where smart fails

Why Intelligent People Fail is a succint catalog of failure.

As Kottke points out, it's pretty much the same reasons everyone else fails.

Intelligence is wildly overrated. Smart is great. But smart has practically no correlation with success, however you define it.

Smart people need to be told this, and they need to continue to see the statistics that back this truth. Because smart people think they're super-special by virtue of an inborn trait. And everyone wants to be smart, and to be considered smart, to the point of self-deception. That's cultish behavior centered around a trait that has recently decided to look down on religion.

I find it personally galling when people use intelligence as a bulwark against theism. Although no one has ever said to me, "I thought you were too smart to believe in God," the surprised looks I've received when I talk about Jesus say it just fine. (On the flip side, a woman once assumed I was an atheist because I "looked so smart.")

Malcontent intelligentsia for the last 150 years or so have tried to con us into thinking that intelligence implies humanism. As in so many other instances though, intelligence corresponds with one thing: Intelligence. MENSA is a disappointing epicenter of this self-congratulatory canard.

You can mix and match intelligence with any other human trait. Anxious. Beautiful. Racist. Musical. Spiritual. Good, bad, silly, it doesn't matter. Intelligence doesn't make you better or worse. It just makes you smart.

The crux of the problem is that people confuse intelligence with wisdom. Wisdom takes you to good and lofty places. Smart just knows how to read the map. It don't know nothing about picking a good route or a good destination.

You haven't lived until...

Certain phrases trip the neuron set in my head that starts my teeth to grind. One of them is this intellectually poor man's version of the simpler, more urbane, "I recommend...".

A brief list of behaviors Internet tells me I haven't lived until I've done:

• eaten beefaroni with a hello kitty spork
• been to the Mayan Beach Gardens
• eaten a "Bacon Explosion"
• seen a 3 yr old sing ABBA
• felt your way along a jungle path in utter darkness, rounding a corner and spotting a pack of hyenas in a pool of light twenty yards away, with no apparent fence between you.
• witnessed a gargantum fireworks display set to Bee Gees (Staying Alive), MJ, U2 and The Prodigy
• LARPed*
• exsperanced pantanal**
• caught one of those high hard ones
• screwed a Catholic girl
• tried to explain arcane primary procedures and nominating rules to an eleven-year-old watching his first Democratic National Convention on C-Span
• shaked your ass of to house music in Barcelona!

Oh my wasteland of an existence.

*I've done this one, and can say with authority that its absence doesn't bar you from life.
** Totally true.

Nobel Prize 2009: from Oslo, with prejudice

I almost didn't want to mention the president's receiving of the Nobel Peace Prize. I wasn't sure I had anything to add to the embarrassingly universal understanding that the award manifested as a bald political statement this year.

But Maggie's Farm pointed me to a collection of other 2009 nominees, and I hope that maybe I can do just a smidge to help bring attention to people who might have been more deserving by spreading that information.

The partial list is at the Weekly Standard blog. This is only a partial list because the Nobel Foundation does not reveal the nominee list for 50 years. They have revealed that they received 205 nominees, 33 of which were organizations. Some nominees were made public in other ways, however.

Some of the nominations appear to be merely symbolic. (They're all symbols, it's just that some are only symbols.) A couple, notably Dr. Denis Mukwege, are doing good, hard work in the world, and could probably get a lot done with a cool $1.4MM.

However, even the revealed nominees deserving of honor do not seem to meet the criteria set forth in Alfred Nobel’s will, that the prize be be given, “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

Despite the roused rabble, President Obama seems to have made strides in that direction. His administration has made unambiguous noises toward nuclear disarmament, Middle East peace, and diplomacy with pugnacious nations. But those strides are not fraternity or abolition. They are just overtures. Nobel's original goals appear lost and irrelevant to the considerations of the recent Prize Committee.

Despite his original misgivings, maybe this year we can all agree to remember that Mr. Nobel invented dynamite instead. At least its constructive potential is clearer than what the Prize has become.

Press 1 for Raging Fury

Here is a superfast way to get me irrationally, cursing, door-slamming angry:

Make me deal with a phone tree when I need to solve a problem. I'm not even going to elaborate on this, because I can feel myself getting angry just thinking about it.

Instead, I'm providing a link to Gethuman.com, a large (and growing) list of customer service numbers for various companies -- even the ones that don't publicize their customer service numbers -- and the means of navigating their phone trees to get to a person as quickly as possible.

You may not get satisfaction, but you'll at least get to talk to someone about it.

Almighty Dollar

Just yesterday I was thinking that I hadn't seen any enormous, secularly funded attempts to grab Christian cash lately. Is my trend-spotting spotty?

Probably! But then today I read this article from the Houston Chronicle about Evan Almighty:

...if Evan Almighty turns into a summer hit, as several competing studio executives predict, the movie could put Hollywood back in the business of making big-budget movies that intentionally embrace sacred subjects.

"For some reason, Hollywood doesn't make this kind of movie," says Tom Shadyac, the director of both Evan Almighty and its racier predecessor, 2003's Bruce Almighty, whose religious message was less palpable. "I don't know if it's out of fear. I really don't. Maybe we're not living as closely to these themes."

For some crazy reason, they're not doing it, huh Tom? Well it's not JUST fear. Don't forget ignorance and disdain!

Our man, John Bock is back too, with ArkALMIGHTY.com, a Craigslist for churchy good deeds. John Goodman (what's in a name?) even pops onto the site to explain the deal:

1. Register your church.
   
2. Tell people in your church to post needs to the site.
3. People at your church check it out and volunteer to meet needs.

This is a not-terrible idea, except that arkalmighty has a movie commercial with viral aspirations artlessly tacked on. Also, the execution is dumb. From the About page:

Maybe there’s a college student who could use help moving into her first apartment, or a widow that could use a helping hand washing her windows, or a recently laid-off worker who could use help polishing up his resume. There are countless needs out there that, up until now, have had no way to be met. But now they do, thanks to ArkALMIGHTY.

Really? There was no way to meet needs before you dropped arkalmighty on us? We couldn't have, say, set up our own mailing list? Or maybe just talked to each other like Christians have been doing for thousands of years? And what if I don't go to a particular church? Do I not get to help people from other places?

I just did a quick check of Philadelphia churches. Thirteen are signed up. Zero have "needs posted." This never-before need-meeter is lighting the Philadelphia church community ON FIRE!

Turns out, Christendom in flyover country was already doing fine, sans condescension.

The privacy policy isn't awful, but the usual marketing stealthspeak means the only information they get out of me is that someone from my ISP visited them and clicked around.

==

Look, you can make the not-unconvincing argument that we can promote a movie AND encourage people to do good things at the same time. I am on this boat! Capitalism and kindness can co-exist! Kinditalism, maybe. Have to work up a better portmanteau.

But the boat I'll watch from the pier is the one where we try to float two gods. That boat will sink. A web site for Jesus with a URL and graphics that clearly indicate its commercial origin does not need a blatant advert on its front page. It does not need to detail my marketing opt-out options. It does not need the avuncular aegis of John Goodman to help sell it. Once again, a Grace Hill Media joint has uncomfortably strange bedfellows.

I'm still willing to give Bock some room. I've never met the guy, and maybe he's glorifying God. I'm willing to be convinced. However, I see more signs of nascent cupidity here than the Big Theta, and that's not the order we've been told to do things in.

One thing I feel pretty good about though: Morgan Freeman plays a better God than George Burns.