1. The Rutgers student who killed himself? Honestly, I don't see all the fuss about it. It would be one thing if he had been killed during a hate-crime. That's something that probably warrants nationwide coverage. However, let's be serious, here, he killed himself.
I'm not condoning the actions of his douchebag room-mate. What he did was beyond the pale. There are federal and state laws that cover this sort of thing and the guy deserves to go to jail for a few years. He probably will, especially given the amount of publicity surrounding this case.
What I don't understand is how this is being blasted across all media as a sort of gay-rights martyr event. I think this young man deserved the same rights as any other person. Clearly, he felt humiliated because of his jerkwad room-mate's actions.
People are portraying this as a call to action. I'm just having trouble understanding what, particularly, the action is supposed to be. I mean, if the message here is that you shouldn't film people having sex without their knowledge, I'm all for that. In fact, so is society. It's actually a crime, punishable by genuine jail time.
If the message is that you shouldn't harass gay people, I'm okay with that, too. I have a special loathing for people who are so busybody that they think they have the right to run around telling other consenting adults how to live their lives.
If the message is that you shouldn't text people and say hateful things, I'm on board with that as well. The kid was a private citizen, not a public figure. I really think the law is behind the curve when it comes to cyber-bullying. We live in an age where a handful of miscreants can publicly humiliate pretty much anybody they want to. We just don't know how to deal with it.
However, turning this into a gay issue? I take exception to that. I don't believe that people should be segmented into little sub-groups with different rights. I believe that human rights should be universal. Making this a gay issue contributes to the problem, in my opinion. Why? Because doing so treats gay people as a subset of the population that is separate and distinct from the rest of society. Considering gay people different is the source of the problem.
People have a reasonable right to have their private conduct, especially their sexual lives, kept private. (With a handful of commonsense caveats, mainly that the conduct is between two consenting adults.)
It's not the fact that gay sex was broadcast on the internet that is the cause for outrage. Gay sex deserves no more rights or protections than any other form of sex.
However, it deserves no less protection, either. I would be just as outraged if somebody took secret footage of their room-mate having heterosexual sex and posted it on the internet. Doing that would also be humiliating to the people involved.
Would it be humiliating in the same way? To the same degree? Why even enter that debate? It's bad, unacceptable behavior to violate a person's privacy that way. Why would we start a game of, "oh, but this one is worse!" It's simply unacceptable no matter who it is happening to.
Saying one is more unacceptable than the other divides the population and reduces the chance for common ground. Very few people want to be shown on the internet having sex. So, let's keep this where it belongs: a privacy issue that applies to nearly everybody. Let's not run off down a rabbit hole of trying to make it a gay-rights issue.
Even the straightest, most fundamentalist Christian or Muslim who is having sex within their own marriage doesn't want somebody to take secret footage and post it on the internet.
It's a human right, and a human expectation of privacy. It should be treated as such. By doing so, it protects not just gay people, but every person.
So, yeah, I'm sad for this young man. I think it must be hard to be gay, sometimes, even in 2010. However, it's hard to be a lot of things in life. I wish he hadn't killed himself, but by doing so, he reacted very, very badly to a very bad situation.
That's not tragedy. That's pathos.
This is something that would have blown over eventually, and with society's enlightenment on the issue of gay rights, it would have been a non-issue in no time. So, I don't think this kid is a martyr. His room-mate is a total cad, and deserves to go to jail. However, he didn't kill anybody.
2. We're now at about the 2 year mark on the huge financial crisis and the government's response to it. I am still of the opinion that the politicians involved need to be punished severely.
The consensus is that the various myriad bailouts did actually have a positive impact on the economy. This is what the politicians envisioned when they voted for the bailouts in their various forms. It is illustrative to remember that when the congress voted down the first TARP vote, the dow dropped 700 points in a single day.
I think the government needed to get involved. Where I have a problem is that they got involved only for a few companies. Wall street banks, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, AIG and GM and Chrysler. The rest of the economy? The bottom line is that the government didn't consider the rest of the economy worth any effort at all. Their view was that by saving the monied and politically connected interests, that the effects would trickle through the rest of the economy.
The end result? A huge, positive impact for those companies who received direct government asisstance. The rest of the economy? Not so much. We're still surviving, but unlike Wall Street, we aren't getting record profits and windfalls.
So, why do I think we need to punish the politicians if they can show that they did, indeed, help the economy?
Because what they did was so absolutely utterly bad. We departed completely from property-rights-based capitalism, and went straight into command-economy communism. The government picked the winners and losers. It rewarded those who were connected, and left everybody else to rot.
If the government was going to do this, they needed to do it in such a way that the reality was reflected for everybody concerned. The banks needed the government in order to survive. The government needed to demand conditions and concessions.
For instance, I think they should have demanded concessions such as everybody working for a bailed out bank only gets paid 1/3 of their normal salary.
Lots of ideas like this were floated during the entire history of the many, many bailouts. However, government officials, starting with Hank Paulson and going all the way through to Tim Geithner held the line that no conditions, whatsoever, should be placed on banks.
Basically, that the government should simply mortgage everybody in the United States up to their eyeballs, and the banks shouldn't have to do anything in order to receive this charity.
We could have had a bigger net economic impact if, for instance, we had actually demanded that banks need to conduct small-business lending as a condition of receiving the bailouts. We wouldn't have had to deal with social-justice outrage if we had demanded that the employees of these banks, who should have been unemployed because their banks were bankrupt, were paid something more closely aligned with a reasonable wage, instead of six, seven, and in a few publicized cases, eight-figure bonuses.
Right now, the Wall Street bankers are particularly infuriating because they're crowing that the government will get most (not all) of the bailout money back. There are a few problems with this.
The first is that it's an outrageous lie. We may get (most, but not nearly all of) the TARP funds back, but the government has the banks hooked up to so many forms of welfare right now, it's a joke. Banks basically don't lend money anymore. They don't have to. How are they racking up profits?
They're just stealing their money from the taxpayer, still, every single day. How? One way is that they're borrowing money from the fed's discount window at essentially 0% interest. Then, they're turning around and buying t-bills with the money.
Basically, they're borrowing money from the government for free, then loaning the money back to the government at interest. How can they do this? They own politicians. You don't. Which means, right now, the Wall Street banks are forcing YOU to loan them money, almost interest-free, and then forcing YOU to pay them interest when they loan that money back to you.
To call Wall Street bankers scum would be to do a terrible disservice to scum. They're worse than crackwhores because at least crackwhores are doing something for their money.
The second reason why it's infuriating to see Wall Street patting itself on the back is that... hey... other companies weren't given giant rescue packages.
A company like mine has never gotten government assistance. Not an SBA loan, not a bailout. Nothing. So, in my opinion, any company that got bailout money should have to wait behind every company that never got bailout money.
It's a simply situation of both economic and moral injustice that competent businesspeople, such as me, had to support incompetent businesspeople at a time when we, ourselves, were struggling.
Basically, the government's message was this: "I know you're having a hard time, but we're going to borrow a mountain of money, which you and your kids will be responsible, forever, in order to make sure this Wall Street banker will get a bonus bigger than what your profitable company will pay you over the next 40 years."
Wall Street is partying. Hard. They had bigger bonuses than ever in 2009. They'll be even bigger in 2010. The government forced you to pay for it. We're sufferring, and they expect us to think nothing is wrong.
Things like this are why the conclusion that the bailouts were morally wrong is inescapable. For perpetuating this evil, the politicans who approved it need to be voted out of office.
The Democrats are facing a severe thrashing. Frankly, they deserve it. They've controlled congress for 4 years and the White House for 2. Their main argument appears to be that yes, they're a bunch of incompetent, ineffective, corrupt jerks, but the Republicans are worse.
I have to admit, there's some merit to that argument. However, I think we need to throw the Democrats out. If the Republicans show up and they're the same idiots as we had in 2005, we should throw them out, too. We should keep throwing incumbents out until we get some politicians who understand that you can't just spit in the face of the American people and expect to keep your job.
So, Wall Street? Scumbags and thieves. There's no other way to describe them. The banking industry used to be necessary in order to aggregate capital, assume risk and spur industry. Now, it doesn't exist to do that at all. They exist to steal money from the American people, and to invent new "products" that add no value, whatsoever, to anything, but which scrape a micropenny from a ton of transactions.
They're worthless and letting them fail was the right thing to do. I hope we have another banking crisis, soon.
As a personal editorial note, I can't believe we're facing the biggest economic crisis of the past 80 years, and the two ass-clowns who we picked to handle it were an idiot and a wussy. Is it too much to ask for a strong leader who isn't a moron? I mean, Ronald Reagan would be nice. Bill Clinton would be nice. Heck, even George Bush the Greater, would be nice.
As for Tim Geithner and Hank Paulson? They both belong in the communist Hall of Fame.
By the way, I want to throw a shout-out to Vikram Pandit, CEO of Citigroup. Although initially, he was probably more dense and irresponsible than most in the face of this crisis, he has finally woken up, at least, to the political reality of what's happened. For the second year in a row, he's done his job for a salary of $1.
I would like to hope that he is doing so as a sign of solidary and contrition for all the little people whose lives his company's conduct has ruined. So, despite the fact that I think most Wall Street bankers are thieves and moral degenerates who belong in prison, I still hold out hope that some of them are vaguely human. Pandit is doing a good thing and deserves a pat on the back for it.
Now, if only he could convince some of his amoral and utterly despicable minions and peers to do the same.
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