The Mallet of Loving Correction Part 7

It's an interesting question. I don't think having been poor at a certain point in one's life should have to affect one's lifestyle on a day-to-day basis; having been poor doesn't necessarily have to afflict one with something akin to post-traumatic stress disorder when it comes to money, or have caused lasting damage to one's psyche. I'm aware that sometimes it does, of course. But I'm also aware of people who handle that aspect of their past just fine, and don't let their previous poverty fill them with either shame or apprehension. I'm pretty much in that boat, as far as I can tell: Having been poor when I was younger was not fun, but it's not something I dwell on day to day. I have other things to fill up my time.

That said, speaking on a personal level, I am aware of some behaviors that I suspect have at least something to do with having been poor when I was a kid: I tend to save a lot more of my income than most people I know, so that if the bottom drops out of my life, I have a cus.h.i.+on. And when I say "I" here, you should understand it to mean "we," as it's actually my wife who handles the family finances. Without going into actual figures, I suspect we save about 20% of our income on a yearly basis; the current national savings rate is about 4% at the moment (and not too long ago was rather a bit under that). Now, one reason that we can do that is that we make a comparatively large amount of income relative to the national average, so doing a large amount of saving does not cut into our spending on essentials or even much on our frivolities. But even when we made substantially less we were saving quite a lot.

I'm notably debt-averse. Having seen first-hand how debt screws with people, neither I nor Krissy has much in the way of consumer debt. I use my Amex for most purchases I make so that I can have a paper trail for my accountant, but the Amex is a charge card, not a credit card, and I have to pay it off every month (Amex keeps trying to enroll me in the program that lets me carry a balance; I keep telling them that's not why I use them). We have Visa cards as well and also use them, but keep the balance on them low enough that we could pay them off at once without making a dent in our savings.

Likewise, we don't get fancy with the debt we do have, namely our mortgages: We have stable, predictable, boring 30-year mortgages on our properties, thus avoiding the drama of ARMs and other dumb ways to finance the place one lives.

I buy for value over flash: I'm not particularly cheap when it comes to high ticket items, but I also have a tendency to buy solidly performing objects over the hottest and coolest thing, partly because I intend to use whatever I'm buying for a fairly long time. This is why, as an example, the average life expectancy for a car in the Scalzi household is 12 years and climbing and why I still use a television I bought in 1991, and also why, when I buy a new computer, I pa.s.s the old one down to Athena. It's also why I mildly resent cell phones at this point, since I know the Blackberry Storm I bought last November will have a usable lifespan of about two years, which doesn't fit with my lifestyle choices, those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds.

Related to the above, while not notably cheap in a day-to-day sense, you're also not going to be seeing me spend conspicuously; my tastes and most of my enthusiasms are notably middle cla.s.s at best. Part of this is the financial section of my brain asking "why are you spending money on that?" and if I can't come up with a good answer for it, I tend not to buy it. Part of it is also a practical aspect of my personality ("what are you going to do with that?") that keeps me from collecting things if I don't have a use for them in more than a "gee, that's pretty" aspect.

(This isn't always true, of course: I bought the original artwork for the Old Man's War hardcover for about half the advance for the book, primarily because you only have a first novel once, and I wanted a physical commemoration of that. On the other hand, that's also probably the single most expensive thing I have in the house. The thing I spend the most on is books, which drives Krissy a little nuts, because I already have enough of those.) (Related to this: I'm a bit of a packrat, but I don't think it's because I was once poor, it's because a) I'm lazy and getting rid of stuff takes time and thought, and b) I tend to a.s.sociate things with events around the time I got them, so it's like getting rid of memories, and I'm a sentimental b.a.s.t.a.r.d. I sort of need to get over that; at this point I have more c.r.a.p than clear memories.) All of the above can be summed up, I think, as: Don't buy what you can't afford, don't buy what you don't have use for and have enough on hand for when life whacks you upside the head. Which I think in general is good advice for anyone, but in practice tends to be an att.i.tude of people who have experience with poverty one way or another.

(But not the att.i.tude of everyone with experience with poverty, to be sure: there's the flip side of this att.i.tude, in which people who were formerly poor feel the need to show off their new perceived wealth through ostentatious display. I've been fortunate that my showing off gene did not feel the need to express itself that way.) Note I don't think these att.i.tudes of mine are particularly virtuous one way or another; they're simply att.i.tudes that I'm comfortable with and which work for me. But I don't doubt that the reason they are there has something to do with where I have been before in my life, in terms of poverty. There are worse ways for poverty to mark someone, to be sure. In this as well as in other ways, I've been pretty lucky.

Health Care Pa.s.sage Thoughts Mar

22.

2010.

Because the pa.s.sage of one of the most significant bills in history should not go unnoted here: I've been silent here about the health care issue since an entry on January 20, primarily because I didn't have a thing to add to it, in particular this portion: ...contrary to apparently popular opinion, health care isn't quite dead yet. Now the real interesting thing is to see what the Democrats do next-whether they curl up in a legislative ball, moaning softly, and let their health care initiative die, or whether they double down, locate their gonads and find a way to get it done (there are several ways this can be accomplished).

From a purely strategic point of view, I'm not sure why they don't just ram the thing through the House as is, fiddle with it a bit during reconciliation and get to Obama to sign it. To put it bluntly, the Democrats will look better by flipping the GOP the bird and then using the ten months until the 2010 election to get voters back on their side than showing to the voters that despite a large majority in both houses, they collapse like a flan in the cupboard at the first setback. We'll see what happens now, and I suspect what happens in the next week or so will make a significant impact on what happens in November.

And, well. It took the Democrats several weeks longer to find their gonads than I thought it should have, but then again I thought the health care process should have been accomplished several months ago to begin with, back when they had 60 senators. But the Democrats have an apparent structural problem, which is that when they have everything going their way, a lot of them feel that means they should immediately go another way. It took losing their Senate supermajority and the GOP overwhelming the public discourse on the health care process to get enough Democrats in line, with many I suspect motivated by the simple fear that what the GOP would do to them if health care pa.s.sed was less painful than what would the GOP would do to them if it failed.

Basically, I find what pa.s.ses for Democratic legislative strategy absolutely appalling. Decades from now, when they make the ponderous Oscar-bait movie about the struggle for health care (with Jaden Smith as Obama and two-time Academy Award winner Snooki as Speaker Pelosi), it will make for exciting twists and turns in the plot, but out here in the real world, you shouldn't have to let your organization get the c.r.a.p beat out of it in order to motivate those in it to do the thing everybody knows it wants to get done. What the Democrats have managed to do with health care isn't a Pyrrhic victory-I'll get to that in a moment-but it surely was taking the long way around: over the river, through the woods, down into the landfill, into the abattoir, across a field of rabid, angry badgers. Next time, guys, make it easier on yourselves.

That said, the Democrats were magnificently fortunate that, as incompetent as they are, they are ever-so-slightly less incompetent than the GOP, which by any realistic standard has been handed one of the largest legislative defeats in decades. The GOP was not simply opposed to health care, it was opposed to it in shrill, angry, apocalyptic terms, and saw it not as legislation, or in terms of whether or not health care reform was needed or desirable for Americans, but purely as political strategy, in terms of whether or not it could kneecap Obama and bring itself back into the majority. As such there was no real political or moral philosophy to the GOP's action, it was all short-term tactics, i.e., take an idea a majority of people like (health care reform), lie about its particulars long enough and in a dramatic enough fas.h.i.+on to lower the popularity of the idea, and then bellow in angry tones about how the president and the Democrats are ignoring the will of the people. Then publicly align the party with the loudest and most ignorant segment of your supporters, who are in part loud because you've encouraged them to scream, and ignorant because you and your allies in the media have been feeding them bad information. Whip it all up until health care becomes the single most important issue for both political parties-an all-in, must win, absolutely cannot lose issue.

It's a fine plan-unless you're on the losing side, which the GOP now is. And while the folks in the GOP will be happy to tell you that they are going to ride this baby into majorities come November, they have a very simple problem in that now they're running not against a bill, but a law, some of the benefits of which will immediately come into play, and which removed from overheated nonsensical rhetoric are almost certainly going to be popular. In the first year of the bill being signed into law, insurance companies will be barred from dropping people when they get sick. Do GOPers want to come out being for insurers dropping people when they need their health insurance the most? The new law will let parents keep their kids on their insurance until their kids are 26, keeping a large number of otherwise uninsured young adults covered. Do GOPers want to run on depriving millions of young Americans that health care coverage? In this economy? Seniors will get a rebate when they fall into that prescription drug "donut hole," and the law will eventually eliminate that hole entirely. Do GOPers think it'll be smart to tell seniors that closing the "donut hole" is a bad thing?

So this is the GOP's problem going forward: people love to hate "socialism" in the abstract, but they love their benefits once they have them, and now the GOP will have to go from saving people from "socialism" to taking away benefits, and that's a hard row to hoe. I don't credit the Democrats with a surfeit of brains when it comes to tactics, but if the GOP really wants to run on repealing health care law this year or in 2012, even the Democrats can manage to point out to millions of voters that this means letting insurers drop you or your children from their rolls and making it harder for seniors to buy the prescription drugs they need to survive. Yes, yes: who's killing grandma now?

There's another problem for the GOP. While I think it's likely the Democrats will lose seats this election cycle (as often happens to the party of the president-any president-in mid-term elections), I think the idea that the GOP is going to retake either the House or Senate (or both) is optimistic at best, and the idea that they would be able to retake both with the majorities needed to overcome a presidential veto is the sort of magical thinking that usually indicates either profound chemical imbalances in the brain or really excellent has.h.i.+sh. So Americans will have two and a half years to get used to their new-found health care rights and benefits, most of which in the real world are perfectly sensible, beneficial things, before we all get to vote on who is going to be the next president. Now, perhaps Obama will be voted out of office and perhaps he won't, but if whomever is the GOP candidate in 2012 plans on running on repealing the health care laws, well, you know. Good luck with that. I'm sure Obama would be delighted for them to try.

And yes, what about Obama? Well, all he did was manage to do something no other president has managed to do, a thing upon which other presidencies have foundered, against opposition that was total, persistent and fanatical. I wish he had managed to do it sooner and with less damage to his standing, and that his own inexperience and aloofness had not been a proximate cause to its delay, which it was. I wish his allies in the legislature had not been appallingly disorganized; I wish his opponents in the legislature were more interested in the good of the people they represent than in playing tactical games. What's gotten pa.s.sed isn't 100% of what I would have wanted to have pa.s.sed, not just for what's in it but also for what's not.

But in the end, it got done. We have health care reform. We have it because Obama decided that it was going to get done, one way or another, and that it was worth risking his presidency over-and worth risking Democratic control of the House and Senate as well. Like the GOP, he went all in, but unlike the GOP, he didn't do it just for tactical advantage or for short term advantage of power and party; he did it because when all and said and done I think he really does believe that health care reform is to the benefit of the American people, and that it in itself was more important than just being president for as long as Const.i.tutionally possible.

To be clear, and contrary to GOP thinking, I think this is the act that will make him a two-termer, the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d. But even if by some chance he's one-and-done, I think he can say he did the thing he came to Was.h.i.+ngton to do, and that he did something that was the right thing to do. As it happens, I agree with him; I think it makes moral, philosophical and economic sense for as many Americans as possible to have access to regular, competent health care. It was a reason I voted for him, and in itself is worth my vote for him.

Mind you, there is more I expect from him before he leaves office, whether that's in 2013 or 2017. The fact he got this done-despite everything-gives me confidence that he'll get those things done too.

He's Not Winning, He's Just Not Losing Mar

7.

2012.

Super Tuesday has come and gone and Mitt Romney is doing what Romney apparently does, which is gather delegates to himself in the least impressive way possible. It takes a special presidential candidate to outspend his main rival four to one in Ohio and yet win the state with only a 1% margin-correction, it takes a special candidate to outspend his main rival who is an unmitigated public bigot in Ohio and yet win with only a 1% margin-and it appears that Romney is that candidate.

Meanwhile Rick Santorum, the unmitigated public bigot in question, won three states and led in Ohio for a substantial portion of the evening before dropping only a single percentage point behind Romney in the final tally. That's more than enough for him to stay in the race, particularly because the next stretch of primary states are in the South and Midwest, i.e., not Romney's best territory in that they're full of evangelicals and/or blue-collar folks. Looking at the primary calendar, in fact, it's not until April 24 that Romney gets a batch of states that look generally friendly to him-that's the day a bunch of Northeast states vote-and even then Pennsylvania's in there to mess up his math.

My predictions in this primary season have been atrocious, so no one should actually rely on my opinion, but it looks to me like Romney, despite all his cash and the fact that Santorum is objectively terrifying to people outside the Conservabubble, might not actually wrap this up until the whole d.a.m.n primary season finishes up in June. Santorum is running strong enough to pick up some of the more conservative states, and, hey, who knows, maybe Gingrich will pick up another pity primary or two down there in the South. Or maybe Romney doesn't wrap it up at all, and we have that fabled brokered convention that makes all the politinerds squee with delight. And then what? A brokered Romney/Santorum ticket? Man, I get the twitchy giggles just thinking about that one.

(Dear GOP: A Romney/Santorum ticket would be like handing Barack Obama the largest, most delicious fruit basket ever created. Delivered by a pony. A sparkly pony. With ribbons in its mane. Named "b.u.t.tercup." Just so you know.) Now, those of you with a sense of memory may point out that Obama didn't wrap up his nomination until June 2008 (and that before then, there were 20 debates between the Democratic candidates, nearly as many as the Republican candidates had this electoral season), and that the partisan rancor between the Obama and Clinton camps was pretty impressive. Didn't stop Obama from taking the White House. This is a fair point. It's also a fair point to note that 2008 was a year with no inc.u.mbent in the White House-and that this year the inc.u.mbent is reasonably popular and currently benefiting from a (slowly) growing economy. For this inc.u.mbent, an extended primary season is beneficial, since it keeps his eventual opponent busy beating up and spending money on someone else. And as Santorum is to the right of Romney, it will also make it harder for him to pivot to the center later, to pick up all those independents he'll need to actually win.

It's also fair to note that on the GOP side in 2008, McCain locked up the GOP nomination on March 4. This year's primary calendar wouldn't have made locking up the nomination entirely likely, but there's no reason that by this time someone couldn't have been a prohibitive favorite for the nod. Romney, who was supposed to be, still isn't.

And, I don't know. In a way that's heartening, I suppose. If Romney has shown us anything this year, it's that you can have nearly all the money in the world it's possible to have thrown into your campaign and still be fundamentally unattractive to a large number of the people you need to convince to be the GOP nominee. Money isn't everything in this campaign, although so far it's been just barely enough to keep Romney in the winning column. I do wonder what's going to happen when Romney finally gets to the general election and has an opponent that he can't outspend four or five to one, with the hope of eking out another low-single-digit victory.

Actually, I'm lying-I don't really wonder. I in fact have a pretty good guess what's going to happen to him. I don't suspect he's going to like it.

How I Think Mar

24.

2010.

DeCadmus asks: John, I'm consistently impressed with how you break topical issues of the day down into their const.i.tuent parts; how you reason and make your points (and take apart others') in your comments. I see some of the same at play in your novels; your storytelling and character building.

I'd like to know how you think. Were you taught something particularly useful about reasoning in school? What tools do you leverage to build your citadel of considered opinion and wily discourse?

Schooling in fact does have something to do with it. In a formal sense, I've noted before that my degree from The University of Chicago is in Philosophy, and specifically it's a degree in Philosophy with Allied Fields, with those allied field being linguistics and philosophy of language. What this means is that I spent a reasonably large amount of time in school (to the extent that I actually attended cla.s.ses, which is another issue entirely) looking at the how and why of language. If you were to ask me my favorite philosophical treatise-that is, the one I found most interesting in terms of waking up neurons in my brain and making them go "hmmm"-then I would point you in the direction of How to Do Things With Words, by J.L. Austin. My own brand of thinking is not precisely a direct line from Austin's writings, but one very important takeaway I got from Austin, and a thing which crystallized that which to that point I had suspected but had not much thought about concretely, is that words themselves are action; they do not simply describe the world but in a very real sense make the world. Therefore it makes sense to pay attention to the worlds people are attempting to create in their words.

Less formally, both my high school and my college were argumentative places, and I mean that Socratically; in both places if you lobbed out an opinion during cla.s.s (or, s.h.i.+t, just laying about in the dorm), you could expect to have to defend that argument. There's an old joke that at the University of Chicago, when someone says "good morning," the appropriate response is "how do you know?" Now, there are ways of doing this wrong; for a while my once and future college girlfriend was dating one of those college conservatives who liked to posit morally appalling things just to get a rise out of people, and would retreat to "I'm just playing devil's advocate" after he p.i.s.sed people off. I'm pretty sure he ended up being punched in the head, not for being a college conservative (of which Chicago had, oh, just a few), but because he was an a.s.shole. But in a larger sense, if you spend years having your statements challenged by teachers, professors and your peers, over time you learn to argue, and you learn how to challenge and take apart poor arguments.

The gist of this is that by both education and by environment and independent of any particular native facility for words, I was sensitized to the power and value of language, reason, rhetoric and logic, and not only regarding how I used each myself, but how they were used on me, and especially when they were being used poorly.

Apart from all this, but something that could be used integrally with it, is the fact that both as a younger person and as an adult, I spent and do spend a lot of time observing people. This fact is not immediately obvious if your only interaction with me is here on Whatever, where rhetorically I am generally in "let me tell you what I think" mode, but as I'm fond of reminding people, my presentation here on Whatever is performance; it's me, but it's not all of me, just the parts best suited for what I want to do here. Out in the real world, I don't spend all my time pontificating. I spend a fair amount of it watching people.

Without getting too much into the drama of it, part of this was due to early circ.u.mstance: When you're a small, sensitive kid from a poor and often unstable home environment, you spend a lot of your time looking at who could be trouble and who could be an ally. But, you know, part of it is just me. I find people fascinating. I want to know who they are and why they are the way they are. That means you pay attention to them: how they act, how they react, how they interact, and how they do all of that in relation to you, including the words they use with you and on you.

Finally, added to all of this is the simple fact my brain is wired for communication, and writing is my best expression of this fact. I learned early on what writing does for me (both internally and externally) and what it allows me to do for and to others, and this, you can be a.s.sured, was an interesting thing for me to discover. Now, when I was younger, I was smug and thought the sheer force of my personal awesomeness would make everything I wrote brilliant and that everyone would love every bit of it, and this is why I've spent a fair amount of my adult life apologizing to friends from high school and college for foisting my writing on them at every opportunity. Age has taught me about humility and the desirability of editors, but perhaps more charitably it's pointed out to me that paying attention to the rhetorical craft and particulars of my own writing is important if I want to engage and move people.

Having just vomited all that out on you, let me point out that it's not like I wake up each morning and think "today I shall marshal all that I have learned of rhetoric and discourse in the service of justice" and then leap to the keyboard, fresh to the day's fight. I'm nowhere that worked up about my writing. Like anything, if you do it long enough, you end up just doing it without having to think too much about it. At this point, a lot of it is muscle memory. I mean, I do think about my writing, the mechanics and effects thereof, quite a lot. But that's a craftsman considering his tools (or what tools he needs to get and work with to get better), which is usually independent of actually getting in there and doing the work. When it comes time for the typing, what I've learned about how to communicate, argue and reason climbs into the back seat, and the actual act of writing gets into the driver's seat. How I think gives way to what I write.

How to Be a Good Commenter Sep

18.

2012.

One of the things I'm proud of at Whatever is that the comment threads are usually actually worth reading, which is not always something you get with a site that has as many readers as this one does. Some of this is down to my moderation of the site, and my frequent malleting of trolls/idiots/a.s.sbags, but much of it is also down the generally high standard of commenter here. I do a lot less malleting than I might have to, because the people who frequent here do a fine job at being good commenters.

And I hear you say: Why, I would like to be a good commenter too! Not just here, but in other places where commenting occurs online! Well, of course you do. You're a fine upstanding human being, not some feculent jacka.s.s with a keyboard, an internet connection and a blistering sense of personal inferiority that is indistinguishable from common sociopathy.

So for you, I have ten questions to ask yourself before you press the "post comment" b.u.t.ton. Yes, ten is a lot. No one said being a good commenter was easy. But the good news is that the more you're a good commenter, the less you'll actually have to think about being one before you type. It becomes a habit, basically. So keep at it.

Here are your questions: 1. Do I actually have anything to say? Meaning, does what you post in the comments boil down to anything other than "yes, this," or "WRONG AGAIN," or even worse, "who cares"? A comment is not meant to be an upvote, downvote or a "like." It's meant to be an addition to, and complementary to (but not necessarily complimentary of) the original post. If your comment is not adding value, you need to ask whether you need to write it, and, alternately, why anyone should be bothered to read it. On a personal note, I find these sort of contentless comments especially irritating when the poster is expressing indifference; the sort of twit who goes out of his way to say "::yawn::" in a comment is the sort I want first up against the wall when the revolution comes.

2. Is what I have to say actually on topic? What is the subject of the original post? That's also the subject of the comment thread, as is, to some extent, the manner in which the writer approached the subject. If you're dropping in a comment that's not about these things, then you're likely working to make the comment thread suck. Likewise, if as a commenter you're responding to a comment from someone else that's not on topic to the original post, you're also helping to make the comment thread suck. On a busy blog or site, there will be many opportunities to talk about many different subjects. You don't have to talk about them in the wrong place.

3. Does what I write actually stay on topic? As a corollary to point two, if you make a perfunctory wave at the subject and then immediately use it as a jumping-off point for your own particular set of hobby horses, then you're also making the thread suck. This is a prime derailing maneuver, which I like to dub "The Libertarian Dismount," given the frequency with which members of that political tribe employ it-e.g., "It's a shame that so many people are opposed to same-s.e.x marriage, but this is just why government has no place legislating relations.h.i.+ps between people, and why in a perfect society government steps away and blah blah blahdee blah blah." If you can't write a comment that isn't ultimately a segue into topics you feel are important, ask yourself why everything has to be about you.

4. If I'm making an argument, do I actually know how to make an argument? This I believe: Most people really can't argue their way out of a paper bag. It's not their fault; it's not as if, in the US at least, we spend a lot of time training people in rhetoric. Be that as it may, if you are making an argument in a comment, it will help if the argument you're making is structurally sound. It's not my job to teach you the basics of rhetoric, but I will at the very least note that at Wikipedia there is a fine list of logical fallacies, which I beg you to peruse and consider. I will also say that in my experience the single most common bad argument is the a.s.sumption that one's personal experience is universal rather than intensely personal and anecdotal. Sorry, folks: you are probably not actually the living avatar of What Everyone Believes and Knows.

5. If I'm making a.s.sertions, can what I say be backed up by actual fact? I know you believe what you believe, and that's nice for you, but if you want me or others to believe what you believe, then I'd like to see the data, please. Otherwise I'm just going to a.s.sume you are talking out of your a.s.s, and I suspect most other people will make a similar a.s.sumption. The nice thing about the Internet is that facts, backed up by trustworthy sources-complete with references and methodologies!-are reasonably easy to find and link to. Wikipedia drives me up a wall sometimes, but the one undeniably good thing it's done is to train a generation of nerds to ask: "[citation, please]". As the obvious corollary: 6. If I'm refuting an a.s.sertion made by others, can what I say be backed up by fact? Because often comment threads are filled with the sounds of refutation. However, refutation without substantiation is not refutation at all; it's just adding to the noise. Don't add to the noise. Noise is easy. Be better than mere noise.

7. Am I approaching this subject like a thoughtful human being, or like a particularly stupid fan? I originally wrote "stupid sports fan," but that was being unfair to sports fans, who are no more likely to be stupid and irrational about their favorite sports team than gadget fans are to be irrational about their favorite bit of tech or media fans their favorite series of books/shows/movies, or politics fans to be about their favorite ideology. The problem is when these sort of folks descend on a thread and get all rah-rah for their "team," whatever that team is, and things get dreary and sad, fast. Look, everyone has their biases and inclinations and favorites, and that's fine. This doesn't mean you won't come across as a brainless plumper for your side when you, in fact, plump brainlessly for them in a comment. If your comment boils down to "WOOOO GO TEAM [insert person/thing here] h.e.l.lS YEAH" then, again, you're the problem with the comment thread, not anyone else.

8. Am I being an a.s.shole to others? Yes, I know you think you're being clever when you are being snide and sarcastic about that other commenter, or about the original poster. I would remind you what the failure mode of clever is. Also, being a complete p.r.i.c.k to others in a comment thread is an easy tell to those others that you can't make a sufficient argument on any other ground than personal abuse. Which is not a good thing for you. Now, it's also important to note that not everyone starts off being an a.s.shole to others-commenters can begin responding to each other politely and then as things go on become more and more frustrated and exasperated until one or both (or more! Because comment threads aren't always or even usually one-on-one discussions) go Full a.s.shole. So it's worth keeping a tab on things. Two things here: One, a.s.sume good will on the part of others when talking to them; two, just because the other guy goes Full a.s.shole doesn't mean you have to follow his s.h.i.+ning example.

9. Do I want to have a conversation or do I want to win the thread? Some people have to be right, and can't abide when others don't recognize their fundamental right to be right, and will thus keep making attempts to be right long after it is clear to every other person that the conversation is going nowhere and the remaining partic.i.p.ants are simply being tiresome. When you get two or more of those people in the same thread, well, the result can be grim. I'm not saying that you are one of those people who absolutely has to be right, but, right now, I'm thinking of that xkcd cartoon of the guy who won't go to bed because someone is wrong on the Internet. Does that cartoon resemble you? Be honest, now. If it does, then there's a pretty good chance you have to be right, and you have to win the comment thread. Which, to be blunt, makes you a bit of a bore to have a conversation with, and means that there's ultimately a really good chance you'll eventually end up being an a.s.shole to someone because you can't let it go. Don't be that guy.

10. Do I know when I'm done? I'm not saying you should enter each comment thread with an exit strategy, but on the other hand, it wouldn't hurt. It's okay not to make a lifetime commitment to a comment thread. Likewise: If you're having a conversation in a comment thread that's going nowhere, it's okay to admit it and get out. Letting the other dude have the last word will not mean you have Lost the Internets; really, quite the opposite, in fact. Similarly, if you find a comment thread is making you angry or sick or p.i.s.sed off, walk away. If you find that the reason you're still in a comment thread is to thump on someone else, go get some air. If the thread has stopped being fun and started to be something like work, seriously, man, what the h.e.l.l are you doing? Go away. It's a comment thread. In short, know when to say when, and if you don't know, then pick a number of responses that you are going to allow yourself in a thread (five, maybe?) and then stick to it. And finally, if you announce you're leaving a comment thread, leave and don't come back. No one likes a bad faith flouncing.

Got it? Then comment away.

How to Know If You're Cheating Jun

8.

2011.

Since it's a topic of discussion these days.

Scenario: You've just done something physically and/or emotionally intimate with another consenting adult human being who is not your spouse/partner.

So, gonna tell your partner?

a) Yes.

b) Any other response.

If the answer is "b," then there's a really excellent chance you're cheating.

"Cheating" is not about whether you've physically met someone, whether they're in the same room with you, the levels of dress you or they are wearing, or whether what you're doing with them can be quantified on a baseball diamond. Cheating is allowing another person into a level of intimacy your partner expects to be theirs alone. That level of intimacy is not uniform from person to person. There is no guarantee that your partner's expected level of intimacy will be entirely congenial to you; in that respect what qualifies as "cheating" is not up to you.

Most people get that. Most people also don't want to hurt their partner and/or don't want to get caught doing something they know their partner will consider cheating. Which is why any other response than an unqualified "yes" to telling your partner about an intimate encounter with another consenting adult human being is a good first indicator you've just done yourself some cheating.

(If you're having intimate encounters with someone who is not consenting and/or adult and/or a human being, you have other problems as well, which we will not delve into now.) Note that in my formulation, what anyone else other than your partner thinks is cheating (or not) is immaterial, because those other people are not in the same relations.h.i.+p you are with your partner. Friends/family/workmates/strangers may choose to think you're a cheating horndog; they may choose to think your partner is being entirely unreasonable about what const.i.tutes "cheating"; they may think you both are idiots. They can have any opinion they want. They can also go fly a kite. In the end, the opinion you need to be concerned about is your partner's.

If you're not an idiot (or brand new to the relations.h.i.+p), then you probably should have a good idea what const.i.tutes "cheating" in your relations.h.i.+p. If you don't know (and aren't content with being branded an idiot), you should probably ask. It will be a clarifying discussion, if nothing else. If you don't want to ask, a) you're an idiot, and b) here's a tip: if you ever find yourself in a situation where you ask yourself, "this thing I'm doing, it doesn't really count as cheating, does it?" then the answer is probably "yeah, it does." Because if you have to ask, etc.

You're welcome.

How to Lose the House Sep

15.

2010.

Just for fun, I'm going to go off on the Democrats today.

Nate Silver over at Five Thirty Eight now estimates that there is a two in three chance that the House will go into Republican hands in the next session, and while my own (rather less statistically robust) estimation is that the odds are less favorable to the Republicans than that, neither is it particularly favorable to the Democrats. I think the House could go either way, and if the Dems do retain the House, it will be by a very thin majority, indeed.

I don't particularly wish for the Republicans to take over the House, although if they do it's not bad for me: John Boehner, presumptive House Majority Leader and the orangest man in American politics, happens to represent my district, and given the voter demographics here will do so until there's nothing left of him but a small, russet melanoma. And I'm a well-to-do Caucasian man in any event, the demographic which the GOP is prepared to prop up indefinitely at the expense of all of the rest of you. Sorry about that. But if the GOP do take the House, it won't be because Americans actually prefer the current Republican platform, which can be summed up as "let's forget 2008 ever happened," but because the Democrats have been so woefully incompetent on so many levels.

Not in pa.s.sing the legislation they have, which they were in fact elected to do-and if you plan to say in the comments "but Americans didn't want that legislation," please jam it back into your insipidly partisan brain hole. Obama was pretty d.a.m.n clear what his intentions were when he took office, and the American people were on board enough to give his party large majorities in the House and Senate. Where the Democrats have shown complete incompetence is in how they went about their legislative agenda (i.e., like unherdable brain-damaged stoats), and how they've allowed the GOP-and its crazy nephew from the attic, the Tea Party, as well as its bullhorn Fox News-to frame everything they've done as one step short of eviscerating live kittens and feeding noisily on their carca.s.ses on live TV.