Tag: Events of the Day

A good article by Bruce Schneier:

As the details about the bombings in Boston unfold, it’d be easy to be scared. It’d be easy to feel powerless and demand that our elected leaders do something — anything — to keep us safe.

It’d be easy, but it’d be wrong. We need to be angry and empathize with the victims without being scared. Our fears would play right into the perpetrators’ hands — and magnify the power of their victory for whichever goals whatever group behind this, still to be uncovered, has. We don’t have to be scared, and we’re not powerless. We actually have all the power here, and there’s one thing we can do to render terrorism ineffective: Refuse to be terrorized.

It’s hard to do, because terrorism is designed precisely to scare people — far out of proportion to its actual danger. A huge amount of research on fear and the brain teaches us that we exaggerate threats that are rare, spectacular, immediate, random — in this case involving an innocent child — senseless, horrific and graphic. Terrorism pushes all of our fear buttons, really hard, and we overreact.

But our brains are fooling us. Even though this will be in the news for weeks, we should recognize this for what it is: a rare event. That’s the very definition of news: something that is unusual — in this case, something that almost never happens.

Remember after 9/11 when people predicted we’d see these sorts of attacks every few months? That never happened, and it wasn’t because the TSA confiscated knives and snow globes at airports. Give the FBI credit for rolling up terrorist networks and interdicting terrorist funding, but we also exaggerated the threat. We get our ideas about how easy it is to blow things up from television and the movies. It turns out that terrorism is much harder than most people think. It’s hard to find willing terrorists, it’s hard to put a plot together, it’s hard to get materials, and it’s hard to execute a workable plan. As a collective group, terrorists are dumb, and they make dumb mistakes; criminal masterminds are another myth from movies and comic books.

Meantime, stop reading the news. It doesn’t help.

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Those of us who were occasionally bullied in grade school (for me it was during my younger years, much less so in my older ones, and even then I didn’t get bullied a whole lot, but it did happen) might remember scenarios in which the bigger kid is picking on the smaller, and doing stuff like cornering him someplace alone, and refusing to let him pass, and maybe punching him a bit in the stomach or shoulder. Maybe it gets worse, like dumping the kid’s books while he’s in the bathroom. Whatever it is — it’s the canonical style of bullying, what people my age tend to think of when they hear the word.

Remember what the bully always said on those rare occasions when a teacher or other adult just happened to show up, coming ’round the corner at just the right time? “I was just kidding around with him!”

“I was just playin’!”

“I wasn’t gonna hurt him or anything, we were just playin’!”

“I was just joking with him!”

That’s what I think of whenever some comedian says something really awful, gets called on it, and then starts in with the “I was just telling a joke!” defense.

I think that an uncomfortably large amount of comedy these days springs from the same mental space from which bullying comes. And that, no matter what the comedians might wish, is their problem, not mine.

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Good article on the Steubenville, OH rape case:

Where is the challenge to the idea that their lives really are “over”? There is something deeply harmful in all of the adults reinforcing the idea that the lives of teen-age boys are destroyed when a girl says what they have done. There is also something incomplete about just replying that they deserved the consequences (as much as they do). For one thing, it can mean asking a sixteen-year-old to be the one to judge the weight of her own trauma. It isn’t trivializing the seriousness of the sentence to say that teen-agers always think, when one door is closed, that everything is over, and that it’s the job of grownups to explain that it isn’t. A different life is not a worthless one. (Absent parents, not incidentally, are a theme of this story.)

There are more important and complicated questions beyond that, both practical and ethical. Telling those teen-agers that there shouldn’t have been consequences might mean another victim, in another town, years in the future. It also affects what sort of men the boys become, and one has to think that Richmond and Mays, too, have an interest in that. Does it destroy a teen-ager’s life to take him off the path of being an adult rapist? Perhaps it is too abstractly (even annoyingly) philosophical to ask what the “better” life is—one in which you have a remote shot at being in the NFL, or one in which you might be a person who treats others decently? Still, the question is worth asking.

I’ve been just appalled by the tone of the press coverage of this whole thing, which reinforces my impression that we just don’t take rape all that seriously in this country. Just the other morning I was listening to a podcast by a local individual in which he partly opined in favor of some comedian’s “It was just a joke!” defense of a joke he’d made about rape.

These boys are teenagers. Theoretically they have sixty more years on this planet, give or take. Whether or not their lives are ‘destroyed’ is up to them — and they are not off to a good start. My sympathies don’t lie with them, however. They lie with a girl who was raped and then shamed for having been raped. Where are the cries for “victim’s rights”?

Oh well.

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…since the start of the Iraq War.

Sigh.

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I’m a little late to the party on this, but:

That’s the note left on the receipt at an Applebee’s restaurant, signed by, of all people, a pastor. Amazing.

Now, the server who was the victim of this bit of Un-Christian awfulness isn’t the one who posted this pic online; that server got fired for her troubles. As a former restaurant manager, I kinda-sorta understand why Applebee’s fired that server, but this whole deal also points out that the old business models and management notions are a bit behind the curve, what with things like social media about. The firestorm of negative publicity toward Applebee’s that shot through Blogistan, Facebookatopia, and the Twitterverse will probably be a lot more costly to the company, long-term, than anything an angry, petulant, entitled, and whiny pastor might have done. (Especially one so full of herself that her first impulse was to demand the firing of every single employee of that restaurant. Yup, you read that right. She demanded that even employees who weren’t even there that day get fired. Ayup.)

The firing of that server is bad, but I don’t think it’s that bad; a server with any level of skill should not have too much trouble landing on her feet at another restaurant. That industry is not exactly known for long-term tenure of its workers, and when I worked in restaurants, whenever a server left, we would invariably hear that he or she had been hired to serve someplace else. I wouldn’t worry about her.

And besides, the real bad actor here was, of course, the pastor. She managed to unleash a perfect storm of assholedom that is really amazing to behold. Stiffing a server is bad, to begin with. (If you choose to undertip because of service issues, it’s best to talk to the manager, because in my experience, no server is going to walk away from a table from which he or she has been stiffed or undertipped thinking, “Gee, I wonder what their issue was with my service?” They’re going to think, “Cheap bastards”, and move on. Trust me on this.) You can dislike tipping all you want, but to flaunt the system is just mean and petty and ineffective. Tips are livelihood to these workers. Treat it as such.

On top of stiffing the server, there is the leaving of the note. There’s so much assholedom to unpack here! First, just leaving a note at all makes clear that the stiffing of the server is not an oversight. Sometimes people really do forget to tip, or other times, there’s the “Hey, did you leave the tip? Nah, I thought you were leaving the tip!” thing that happens. But the note is basically rubbing the server’s nose in shit…and then this pastor invokes God as a justification for it, as if to say, “I have The Lord‘s support in stiffing you!” Plus, the pastor is apparently unaware of the concept of giving ten percent of one’s entire income to God, and kicking back eighteen percent of a guest check in a restaurant to a server. They’re not even the same thing. One wonders how this pastor got through school.

And there’s something else going on here, too. The pastor was part of a large group of diners, for whom Applebee’s apparently has a policy of automatically charging an eighteen-percent gratuity. Why do restaurants have such policies? Because — and this is something many diners may not realize — large parties tend to be bad for servers’ pocketbooks. Large parties often undertip as a matter of course, and there’s a double whammy involved as a large party (a) takes up a disproportionate part of a server’s section, (b) places significant extra demands in terms of time and effort on the server, and (c) tends to be present in the dining room longer than normal tables. Putting it briefly, large parties mean that servers wait on fewer tables, which results in lower income. That’s why a lot of restaurants have an automatic-gratuity policy: to make serving them worth the server’s time.

But apparently this pastor’s group of diners decided to try and skirt that policy by requesting separate checks! Note the total on the bill: $34.93. That’s about what it costs for two, maybe three, people at Applebee’s. So they were already trying to scheme their way out of paying the eighteen percent, and when it got assessed anyway, well, the pastor whipped out her pen and said, “Oh yeah? Trying to hold me to your policy anyway? Bullshit!” Thank God the Internet was ready to exact penance!

What I end up wondering is, what are this pastor’s sermons like. I wonder if she is able to preach on the Sermon on the Mount with a straight face. Perhaps not; maybe she’s one of those pastors who nurses an unhealthy fetish for Leviticus.

Tip your servers, folks. They work hard, they genuinely want you to enjoy your experience, and you hold their livelihood in your hands. Literally. And if you don’t want to tip servers, well…use what would have been the tip money to buy cookbooks and just stay home.

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