Are Children Valuable?

If you're wondering if this article will conclude that children are, in fact, valuable, the answer is yes. So, if you're thinking I'm going to call your children overrated parasites or something, calm down because I'm not. What I am going to do is ask whether or not they are. There does not exist a maxim or axiom I will shy away from without question. All ideas, without exception, become better for being questioned. Some become better because they are reinforced, others become better because they are revised to be more sound, and some become better because they were without merit and the only means of improvement available to a bad idea is its own destruction. So for the purposes of this discussion, I will not simply take it as a given that children are valuable. Indeed, I will not be assuming it is a given that we ought to care for, be kind to, or avoiding stabbing children. These things are true, but the reasoning must be explained. Otherwise, we are just making assertions and no one ever gained wisdom through sheer force of assertion. First of all, we will see that value, in this context, has many different meanings and that I would not agree that children are valuable in all these senses. Second of all, we will discuss the nature of how we're valuing children in practice.

The most common concept of value is the monetary sense. We know that gold, for instance, has monetary value. Are children valuable in this sense? Obviously not. Children are, in fact, expensive and get increasingly so until they achieve full self-sufficiency, which can take decades. Are they valuable in the sense of having some practical merit? To an extent, yes. Children were useful farmhands in earlier times and useful for taking care of us as we get old in modern times. Are they valuable in the sense of being a miracle? No. A miracle is, by definition, a suspension of natural law that is done in one's favor, whereas reproduction is the whole point of the laws of nature. Are they valuable in the sense that their parents care about their well-being and happiness to an extent further than they do of their own? Clearly this is the case. Are they valuable to society as a whole? That's a case by case basis, usually based upon quality of parenting. So, yes, in a few important senses children are, in fact valuable, and in a few other senses they are not.

While children are valuable in certain senses, this does not mean that they are special. Every child is special to its parents and if everyone is special, no one is. Why does any parent need a special reason to consider their child valuable? Look, I don't care if your child is an absolute picture of mediocrity. The kid is valuable in some senses. If nothing else, if a parent puts the kid's happiness and well-being above that of their own, then the kid is valuable because it is valued by the parent. Those who need to see a child as special to see it as valuable do not value children. They value specialness.

-Frank

Ten Reasons I Don't Vote

Having been a nonvoter ever since November 2012, I've wrestled a great deal with the reasons for it. Already, I was threatened by the oncoming storm of hopelessly theocratic lunatics charging the gates of the Republican Party, most notably Todd Akin, and I thought that men like Mitt Romney, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, and such could be, if not ideal, then at least sensible options to lead the party into the future. Romney's failure in the face of my calm assurance he would prevail made the fact that, like Sergeant Schultz, I knew nothing unmistakable and it is that absolute collapse of my confidence in my powers of political discernment that initially threw me from the horse. Well, since then I have acquired new reasons to not vote on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis. Time and distance from defeat and disgrace has made my decision resolutely redoubled. At no point in the days since have I been given a single good reason to enter a polling place again in my life. Presented here are ten of the reasons I no longer vote. Resorting to list form is a way of organizing my thoughts. Before I begin, I want to make it clear that I propose no solutions to the problems I raise and haven't the foggiest idea what to do about any of it. If I did, I'd vote for someone who I thought would do those things.

1. Hate is inescapable.

Vote for the R and you vote for the hatred of the homosexual. Vote for the D and you vote for the hatred of the affluent and anyone born into money. I cannot any longer vote for hate.

2. I don't have the slightest idea what I am talking about.

Age has brought the purest and most terrible form of wisdom there is. That is knowing what you don't know. It was easy to vote when I thought I knew everything. Understanding the world is more complex than I can grasp. I may as well flip a coin before I pull a lever.

3. Compromising what you believe kills you inside.

Socially liberal. Hawkish on foreign policy. Fiscally conservative. The D is the first, isn't the second, and isn't the third. The R isn't the first, is the second, and is the third. So every time I pull the lever, I make a blow against every socially liberal belief I have. Gays, women, uncensored art, drugs, gambling, prostitution, and more all sacrificed because I want tough foreign policy and more financial freedom. That's a deal with the devil and I'm done making it.

4. I cannot any longer tolerate the news.

To be a good voter, you must watch the news. I can't. My life requires I am not constantly mired in maddening futility.

5. I can no longer debate politics with my heart in it.

You have to really care to discuss the issues of the day effectively. I feel myself not caring when I try. There's no there there. This has to do with the lack of certainty I once had.

6. My party is doomed.

Cubs fans, (for a long time) Red Sox fans, and Cleveland Indians fans may be willing to back a loser to the death, but I can't. Republican is another word for evil. A whole generation believes that and the social conservatives representing us play into their hands. We're over and I'm not going to keep kicking a dying horse to try and make it go to a destination it'll croak long before it ever reaches.

7. I'm very fatalistic when it comes to policy.

The people will vote as they will and who they elect will do as they do. Having accepted that, I don't really have any fight left in me. I just hope everyone else elects a good government and accept my powerless nonrole in the whole thing.

8. I've never gotten anything out of it.

I've been paying attention to politics since I was 11 years old. For 20 years, I cared, I argued, I watched the news, and I voted. For this, I got the second Bush Administration and the Obama Administration. Yelling obscenities at my testicles would've yielded more impressive results.

9. I'm simply happier not voting.

All the energy I used to use thinking about politics is great for thinking about work, hobbies, philosophy, religion, and any number of other enjoyable activities. What good is being a politico if it makes you miserable?

10. I'm no longer viewed as a threat by anyone.

There's a fire in arguments when people think you vote that isn't there otherwise. This is especially helpful in issues that are tangentially political. People don't jump to conclusions or get defensive when it's clear you've gutted and gelded your own political power. That makes for more peaceful discussion, which is enjoyable.

-Frank

A Unique Way To Live

Only last month, my business failed and I now carry a heavy burden of debt that is only soluble by means of the wealth of my family. While I'll be okay, it has occurred to me that there are many autistics out there who will not because they don't have money on which they may fall back. You see, many autistics are unemployable, even if they seem like friendly intelligent people and are quite high-functioning. Anyone for whom this is the case must discover the fact in quite painful ways. One tries, one fails, and one prepares to do it all over again. Bad enough though this is, each failure brought about by one's disability will be mostly unbelieved, derided as an excuse, or insisted to be soluble. Some autistics, including myself, find riding a bicycle quite impossible, for example, and are routinely disbelieved about our inability to operate the machine. It is as though everyone else can fly when the floor turns to lava, that you are disbelieved when you try and explain that you cannot, and finally that, over your ashes, onlookers peer down from they skyward perch and say, "He just didn't try to fly hard enough." Well, through eight failed careers, I have done my damnedest to fly and I've fallen into the lava every time. The time has come for me to acknowledge that I cannot fly and that I should stop trying. To the extent one needs to have a reason to get up in the morning and have something to do, I have my writing. Freelance writer feels like a euphemism for unemployed, but it is a unique way to live.

The Purple Dragon

A small child has an imaginary friend. The friend is a purple dragon. Curious, you begin talking to the child about the purple dragon. For instance, you might ask, "How many scales does the purple dragon have?" To this, the child answers, "It doesn't have scales." Now this is just ridiculous to you. Maybe you're something of an expert on dragons, having read Dungeons and Dragons manuals about them, whole novel series based on them, seen many films about them, and so on. So you tell the child, "No, all dragons have scales. That's one of the things that makes it a dragon to begin with." Annoyed, the child answers, "Well, my purple dragon doesn't have scales. Not only that, he breathes cotton candy, burrows instead of flying, and poops diamonds." None of this is like anything you've ever heard or read about dragons, but, whether you like it or not, the child is right. His purple dragon is precisely that. While it is unlikely that Dungeons and Dragons will feature a scaleless, cotton candy-breathing, burrowing dragon anytime soon, Bilbo will be terrified of Smaug breathing cotton candy at him, or novel series will be written about kingdoms of dwarves whose riches come from dragon diamond dung, this purple dragon is this child's and this child's alone to define. One is always right in any situation where agreement or even cohesion with the beliefs of others is irrelevant. Of course, any situation that meets that kind of criteria is quite unlikely to have any affect on or relevance to the world at large. Nobody would be much bothered by a small child's definition of purple dragons because, after all, not only is the child's purple dragon not real, dragons in and of themselves are not real. Only about the same number of people who believe in vampires or werewolves believe dragons are real, so there's very little to worry about regarding dragons, including worrying about the people worrying about them. Real world religions in which great numbers of people express faith, however, are another matter. When it comes to religion though, a great number of people believe, not in an actual world religion practiced by many across the world, but in a purple dragon all their own.

Most purple dragons I encounter in religion have to do with bias or wishful thinking. That typically goes one of two ways. 1) "I have this particular hatred/love of something, so I'm going to say that my version of the omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent creator of the universe also hates/loves that thing. 2) "While I am aware that the holy scripture I otherwise profess to be in the infallible word of the omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent creator of the universe is explicitly against/for something I am for/against I choose to interpret/flat-out ignore such scripture in such a way that it squares with my own preexisting beliefs." An example of type 1 would be, "Even though Jesus never mentions it one way or the other, I assume he wants me to do everything I can to make life difficult for homosexuals because he hates them like I do." A type 2 example would be, "Even though Jesus was against moneychangers in the temple to a degree of Hulk-like rage, my version of him thinks a three-story gift shop in the Sistine Chapel is in no way hypocritical/begging for a lightning bolt enema." Obviously, these are broad examples that I've not really dealt with in my own life. My experiences mainly have to do with me, naturally, making the atheist case and the believer arguing with me denying the God they believe in has anything to do with whatever morally objectionable or improbable things I've pointed out. By the time they're done compromising and saying they don't believe in, "That God," the deity they've got left is pretty much one they just invented that is, in all likelihood, only worshiped by themselves. One of the most basic examples of this is that when I object to the human sacrifice and vicarious redemption represented by Jesus dying on the cross for all mankind, I am sometimes told that that's not what happened. If the Jesus you believe in didn't die on the cross for everyone's sin, well, you might want to run that by all the churches with a cross somewhere prominently displayed. Although I'm just guessing, I'm pretty sure you'll have a lot of churches to go through.

The whole reason I came up with this purple dragon thing is that I believe that religion actually matters. Like most new atheists, I reject the popular notion that it doesn't matter what other people believe. On the extreme end of the spectrum, religious belief results in planes flown into buildings, murdered doctors, and mass suicide and on the mild end, you get people putting together a personal morality based primarily upon humanism and modernity and slapping terms like, "Christian," and, "Jesus," on top of that because it sounds good and is popular. Really though, the purple dragon is about dealing with the problems on the minor end of the spectrum. Basically, we've got to tighten up the meaning of the words we use when engaging in theological debate. If Christianity can really legitimately be used in the fashion I've described, by which I mean people saying things like, "That's not the Bible, Jesus, God, etc. I believe in," then Christianity can mean anything, which would be the same as it meaning nothing. If your only defense of your religion is to invoke the purple dragon, then you've rendered your religion untouchable at the price of making yourself its only adherent. As someone who was a Christian until he was 26, I'd prefer it mean something beyond, "I'm a good person by my own lights." At that point, it's a dorm debate. Both sides get to feel smart, correct, and massage their raging tumescent egos while generating discourse with all the intellectual value of spit. The oldest and best of my friends used to tell me that every day you must tear your faith down and build it back up, just to see if it deserves to be rebuilt and can stand. Faith that is strong and real can withstand that and mine did until it couldn't anymore. Having a faith that isn't falsifiable, even in its own expressed terms, is cowardly. As rude as I may seem, and often probably am, all I'm asking here is that those who profess belief actually commit and stick to their guns when I object to some part of what they believe in. Changing what you believe in past a certain point means that you, in fact, have a philosophy, not a religion, and that you are working out enough things for yourself that, however flawed you may be, you don't require a deity to do that for you.

-Frank

A Bit Unseasonal

Tis' the season.  What does that mean though?  It means a lot of things to a lot of people and, to some, it means absolutely nothing.  To others, it means nothing good.  Part of me is wondering this Christmas if the part I always find comfort and value in is really a part of the season, or the result of me imposing my own worldview on Christmas.  As ought to surprise no one, nothing religious informs my perspective on Christmas.  While I might want to say that humanism, in fact, is what Christmas is about, that's a term I've only had a proper understanding of since late 2007.  For better or worse and in any event, the highest concepts of good of which I am aware are tied into the Christmas holiday as I have always understood it.  There is not a time I can remember, even during childhood, where it was not about the giving for me.  Gift giving is something I've always seen as a redemptive act, because it says to one's family or friend, "Goodness knows I can be a pain.  I talk too much, have table manners of infamous lacking, don't like any of the things that people who grew up around here in Arkansas ought to like, and I sing at the top of my lungs in less than appropriate circumstances, but right now I want to show you that I know you and that I love you so I have given you something that you want, like, and will find useful.  All through the year, I try and get it right, but in this season I shall do my utmost to show you that I love you and that I recognize I need forgiveness for all the times I fail you the rest of the year."  Giving gifts is a fine concept, but I am told not everyone views it as an expression of love and a demonstration of connection.  How sad is the fact.

Christmas is composed of many things, but there are basically four kinds of ingredients.  1).  Christian ingredients:  Here you've got the birth of Jesus and the surrounding mythology involving the Star In The East, a manger, and three magi.  Throw in anything related to the religion itself like angels and, if you wanna stretch it, Santa Claus and associated characters due to St. Nicholas.  2).  Pagan ingredients:  Here you've got the tree itself, shiny lights, the green and red of holly, ham, and the date of the holiday itself, all of which are pretty much directly descended from the Nordic festival of Yule, which is not an unfamiliar word in Christmas to this day.  The festival involved worshipping fir trees decorated with bits of metal that would shine in the glow of the Aurora Borealis, sacrificing a pig, the holly warding off evil, and the date comes from the time frame of the winter solstice, although the exact date of the 25th comes from when the Roman winter solstice was.  3.  Entirely secular ingredients:  Most of these have to do with snow.  Oh do they have to do with snow.  Snowflake symbols, Frosty, Jack Frost, Let It Snow Let It Snow Let It Snow, Baby It's Cold Outside, Jingle Bells, and on and on.  Other examples are mostly culinary, such as eggnog, Christmas logs, Chex Mix, and so on.  4.  Humanism:  This is the element I'll be able to enjoy about the season even if I spend the holidays alone one day.  Every good story about Christmas, beginning with A Christmas Carol, is about human solidarity, compassion, and forgiveness.  Plenty of things divide us as human beings and there is no need to look for more of them.  You throw a toy in the Toys For Tots bin, give a gift to someone you know won't give you one in return, and you work very hard on generally behaving as though you are the person you know you can and ought to be.

An enlightening way to look at it for me is to review my stance on allowed Christmas in schools.  I am on a weird side of this argument, because I'm kind of saying that a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.  Take Jesus out of it, take the pagan elements out of it, take out the snow and traditional food, and call it, I don't know, Festivas.  Yeah, I remember hearing Festivas somewhere or another, and it seems like a perfectly reasonable replacement.  So long as what's left is full of enlightenment values and a sense that redemption, forgiveness, and generosity are to be extolled as virtues during the holiday, what's important to me remains.  Maybe cynicism's right though and, for most people, it is only about their religion and greed, but I'm a true believer here.  Let the world decide whether to prattle on to schoolchildren about virgin births, Nordic tradition, snow and ice, and Black Friday.  It can decide what it likes and I care not.  Whatever cynicism may be present within Christmas, I reject it.  My Christmas is not the time for that kind of petty nonsense.  Life is hard and the pain of each and every man woman and child on this Earth matters to me.  During this season, I do what I can to show my fellow human beings that I love them and I consider no leap of compassion too grand to make during this time of year.  Believe whatever you want to believe but I'll always believe that all people everywhere need to give and receive compassion and that any definition of Christmas that excludes this simple tenet is unworthy of consideration on my part.  Bring joy into the lives of all you can during the season and don't worry about the name or the meaning of  the holiday because the name never mattered to begin with and if the holiday has any other meaning, I for one, say bah humbug to it.

-Frank

Phone Hacking

I imagine most of the people reading this are familiar with the fact that around 100 celebrities found that private nude photographs of theirs found their way onto the website 4chan and, from there, to the rest of The Internet. Having long-enjoyed the access the Internet provides to pornography, I'm in a position to say that this is an entirely different animal from anything else you'll find on garden-variety website. Nude images and films of celebrities are nothing new. In the past, it was something achieved with a telephoto lens or a leaked sex tape. Lawsuits would occasionally be filed and other times licensing agreements would be met, but that was about the extent of it. These things could be prevented by not going outside naked or by destroying sex tapes if one felt the need to make them in the first place for whatever reason. Motives of the perpetrators were different as well. Paparazzi, unscrupulous houseservants, burglars, and the like, were motivated by money. Money cannot explain this phone hacking business, however, because these pictures are freely available on the Internet. No, this was essentially the bastard child of the traditional nude celebrity photos and revenge porn.

If you are not familiar with revenge porn, it is essentially when an ex in possession of sexually explicit images of a former lover disseminates said images on the Internet in order to damage said former lover out of one form or another of extreme hate. There are places online where such material is collected and displayed, sometimes with information regarding victims included. Porn is a descriptor here only because of the sexually explicit nature of the content. While the goal of pornography is simply to sexually arouse the viewer, the goal of revenge pornography is simply to hurt the victim. Those who view it are doing so in order to feed off the hatred that inspired the act of disseminating it. They revel in the humiliation, the misogyny, the voyuerism, and slut-shaming inherent in such material. What the images hacked from these celebrities' phones have done is take revenge porn to a whole new level. There is no longer any one man enraged at any one woman. The misogyny has taken flight with the very concept that any beautiful woman's most intimate moments ought ever be her own utterly gutted and gelded. 

If we're ever going to get a grip on the problem that this incident represents, we need to stop looking at it as pornographic in nature. My longest standing celebrity crush is one of the victims. She has a film that features her as naked as I could possibly wish to see her. In this film, she is well photographed, well-lit, and generally presented in the most attractive manner possible. Why on Earth would I want a grainy cell phone picture of her naked? It is inferior in every measurable way except that she gave consent for it to be seen by anyone in the case of the motion picture and consent to very few people to see it in the case of the hacked photo. Voyuerism is popularly understood to be the act of enjoying seeing somebody else naked, but that's not technically accurate. A voyeur only enjoys it if the victim is unaware of being observed. It is the lack of consent and the feeling of power and control that is the turn-on. If that sounds exactly like rape, that's because it is. Once that is understood, something like a full understanding of the problem is at hand. 

Prologue And Thoughts On Writing

This is the first real post on this blog and it will give you an idea of how I ended up here with the daily updates that begin with this post. Writing or academics related to it have formed most of my adult career path, with seven years studying at Drury University to learn my craft. However, back in 2008 the economy went pear-shaped and I felt the need to get a career skill that was more marketable than writing, so I went to culinary school. Eventually, that led to me starting up a dessert company that just recently failed. Over the years, I've discovered that autism renders me unemployable, whatever skills I may possess, so I may as well embrace my education, training, skill, and talent of writing. Typing out my thoughts for whomever my readers might be avoids all the pitfalls associated with autism. Poor social skills don't limit me because I have no coworkers, subordinates, or superiors. Physical limitations in dexterity and coordination don't limit me because all I have to do is work a computer and keyboard. It won't pay much, if at all, for a very long time and I may very well earn nothing from it, but I'm at peace with that.

Writers are part of the general community of artists, but we don't really get to be cool. We get to be tortured alcoholics, at best. That's why so many male writers want to be Hemingway. Somehow, he pulled off the trick, not just of being cool, but also being badass. By definition, the writing process is a solitary, if not necessarily lonely, one. Alone with our thoughts, we must predict the reaction of our audience and the best way to do that, I think, is to aim very broadly for interest. As long as the writer inflames interest, even if it is the panicked censorship of book burning, that writer had not made the reader bored. So that's the promise I wish to bring to my writing here and anywhere else I may publish in some capacity. You may not always like my writing, but I will always do my damnedest to ensure that it is well done and that the reader is not bored. Controversy is inevitable at times, as my prior writing career has made me well aware. Whenever you're writing about something about which you are passionate, there will be someone else equally passionate about that something in the opposite direction. Fortunately, I've spent enough time in both college and the Internet that I've no problem arguing with people on just about any given point.

The only real rule about what I'll write here is that it must be something in which I am interested. Requests can be submitted to frankcritic@hotmail.com, and I will consider whatever anyone sends in terms of writing ideas. They say to write what you know though, and I'll submit that there are areas in which I may claim expertise in one form or another. These area include atheism, baking and pastry arts, movies, popular culture in general (especially of the 1980s), cigars and pipes, politics (don't expect a lot of that), marketing, grammar and style, and geek culture. With my time freed up, I'll be doing my best to keep myself informed and well-read enough to keep up with the zeitgeist. I am quite looking forward to returning to writing professionally in every sense except I don't get paid for it. Right now, there are countless freshmen in college and many of them will end up majoring in English, writing, journalism, or the like. There is no promise I can make to those countless hopefuls that they'll ever pay the bills with this and no one else should make them that promise either. What I can say is that this craft is a hell of a lot of fun and that, if you really love it, you'll always do it, whether or not that's a good idea.

-Frank