The Red Staters are right: there is a conspiracy to disempower them

If you think I was kidding about the "sexual permissiveness inherent in red state value," I wasn't. As revealed in a recent study published in Relevant Magazine, a magazine about Christian culture, surveys indicated that Christian teenagers are having premarital sex and abortions just as often, if not more often, than non-Christians. This result is completely in sync with the Red Sex, Blue Sex result from 2008.

Red states values are dependent upon chanelling people into a community-dependent state. It always worked before. Sadly, you can't run a modern, technologically complex society on the backs of people suited for the industrial jobs of the mid-20th century. There is a conspiracy to disempower peolpe who hold Red State values, but it's not being organized by Blue Staters-- it's being organized by Red Staters. They want their televisions and their internet and their cheap agricultural products and even a cure for cancer-- all the things you can't have if your system is organized around the idea that late education is a luxury, and it's okay if a man falls short of acheiving it.

The article in Relevant points out a powerful, and painful, dichotomy for the American Christian community: either it's going to have to swallow the hard truth that young people have sex and start giving them the tools to do it correctly, or Christianity itself is going to have become a minor cult made up primarily of those ill-suited to a world of augmented reality, space elevators, and nanotech cancer cures.

I wonder about these people...

Yesterday, there was yet another conviction against The Followers of Christ, a Christian sect in Oregon that has let yet another child die a horrible death rather than seek medical attention for the boy.

What struck me most in the article was this line: "The Followers of Christ ... believe that life-and-death decisions were a test of faith. God, not doctors, would determine who survives and who succumbs -- even when an illness is treatable by medicine or a minor medical procedure."

Do they wear seatbelts? Get vaccinated? Install GFCI outlets? Do they baby-proof their house against forks in sockets, poisons under sinks, barriers across stairwells? If they sign up for the military, do they stride out onto the battlefield confident that a bullet will find them only if God wants it to?

Men are the new Gays

Is it really that bad for men out there? If the critics reviewing the fall TV line-up out there are right, it apparently is. I've read five different reviews about the new season of television, and so far every one of them has the same reaction: The new line-up is full of shows about how men are idiots.

There are seven TV shows in the line-up that have male leads, and 14 that have female leads. Tim Allen plays a manly-man trying to survive in a world of pomegranate-scented bodywash. Another depicts a man as "gifted" because the ghost of his ex-wife guides him through his apparent testosterone-poisoned failings. Yet a third puts two men into the same apartment, one a prissy Niles Fraiser clone and the other a mancave-reeking meathead, with the theme that, to get the girl, they both have to learn from each other-- except that our Neanderthal is depicted in the opening as "a real man." Real men read sports scores. Real men work out not for their health, but because "adult men" apparently look like Conan the Barbarian.

Look, I'm a firm believer in manly virtues that overlap with, but are distinct from, basic human virtues. I do not believe that the two poles of human sexuality are absolutely congruent. Being a great husband and a great father are distinctly different behaviors from being a great wife and a great mother. I believe in manliness.

But most of the "men" depicted on sitcoms these these days lack the manly virtues. His resoluteness is the single-mindedness of the bull. To the extend that he has a sense of honor, it is an entitled, indignant sort, unwilling to compromise or understand an alternative. His industry is pointless: if he has a job he hates, he's a loser for staying; if he has a job he loves, he's a loser for not being rich enough to leave it behind. His courage is a farce. Self-reliance must be ineffective and shown up.

Linda Holmes, the NPR reviewer, says it exactly right:

Where, on television, are the men who both like football and remember birthdays? Where are the men who can have a highly insightful drink-and-talk with friends? Where are the men who are great dads, great husbands, great boyfriends? Where are the men who are dedicated to important jobs? Where are the men who aren't seeking reassurance about what it means to be men? Where are all the men I rely on in my day-to-day life?

Admiral Adama was probably the last real man I saw on television.

"Steel True, Blade Straight." That's the inscription on Arthur Conan Doyle's headstone. It seems as fitting a motto as any. None of the men I've seen on TV recently could begin to understand it.

Livejournal: Better than Facebook Timeline.

As a Facebook developer, at least for the time I worked at Indieflix, I have access to things most people don't. Like the Facebook timeline.

I enabled it tonight, and I have to say that I'm completely, totally underwhelmed. Really. Because the Facebook Timeline is just that-- a date-oriented view of the data you've given to Facebook. It's simultaneously creepy and banal. The more I looked at it, the more I realized I didn't like it, and the more I understood why.

It didn't tell me anything about myself as a human being. It knew facts and figures, dates and times; it tracked the miscellaneous things I'd like over the years. As Open Graph gets more important, it'll start to track all of the places I go and things I do on the web, most of which it'll do without my knowing (or, really, caring) all that much about it, all in the service of making me a better product to sell to advertisers.

You know what doesn't do that? Livejournal. Or any blogging platform, really, where what you do is talk about your life. It's about the person you always wanted to be.

Facebook, crushingly, only shows you the person you've been. It's for people who have only a TL;DW (too lazy; didn't write) with which to look back on their lives.