Can you hear me now? Rapturous Retards and Multitasking Murderers

Slate has a good article on cell phone zombies. They are an annoyance in all facets of life, but when they get behind the wheel, I prefer to think of them as Multitasking Murderers, people whose blithe disregard of other people's lives and the lives of other people's families, supported by a billion dollar telecommunications socialization program, overshadows the fact that they are merely idiots, and should get them jail time.

Here are some choice passages from William Saletan's excellent piece:

The problem is that physically, you're still living in that environment. Like other creatures, you've evolved to function in the natural world, one setting at a time. Nature has never tested a species's ability to function in two worlds at once.

Now that test is underway.

...

So how is this multitasking experiment going? Not so well. In the Nationwide survey, 45 percent of Americans said they've been hit or nearly hit by a driver on a cell phone. Studies show that the more tasks you dump on drivers—listening, evaluating, answering questions—the worse they perform. They drift off course, miss cues, overlook hazards, and react slowly. In brain scans, you can see the shift of blood flow from spatial-management to language-processing areas. It's the picture of a mind being sucked from one world into another.

...

Today, we're so enslaved to mobile devices that we rely on them even to translate the physical world. Misled by with Global Positioning System devices, people are driving cars into rivers, trees, and sand piles. Twice this year in Bedford Hills, N.Y., drivers have caused train crashes by steering onto the track because their GPS mistook it for a road. Warning signs, pavement markings, and reflective train-signal masts failed to stop them. They trusted the dashboard, not the windshield.

...



The real danger comes from being mentally sucked out of your world while operating thousands of pounds of metal at high speed. Only five states prohibit driving while holding a phone, and if you're an adult with a hands-free phone, no legislator is even proposing to mess with you. That has to change, because research shows that even with a hands-free device, talking on a phone can impair driving skills more than intoxication does. If you need to talk to your spouse or boss, go right ahead—but first, pull over. You're free to visit the other world. Just don't leave your car moving in this one.



another asshole, at perhaps a pivotal moment in the collapse of western civilization?


and another! Anyone can be a douche!

Signs of Intelligent Life Found

In an article titled "Cell phones bane to today's society," evidence there are at least two sane people left. Here's an eloquent comment posted on the article:

Posted by dellaroux at 12:57AM on Sunday, 10/5/08

Self-induced autism is the new national disease. Cellphones create a cotton-wool, internally focused microcosmos in which the speaker is at the performative center, speaking loudly so we'll all know he's got one. Ipods mean I can't point out the rainbow in the sky to passersby because they can't hear me. The young man this evening who sat on his heels with his feet in the seats of the subway stayed there, even when it was pointed out that it would make the seat dirty for the next user. Human consideration is elusive and growing rarer. Germany and France banned cell phone use in cars almost at once. But we have lobbyists to stand in the way of sane legislation and let them be used because of their commercial value. Your right to yell in your cell phone starts where my ear begins. And drivers of public conveyances, whose riders and passers-by are now suffering for their use, threaten more than themselves. They need to admit their limits and live within them.

Texting While Driving

It's really hard to take this society seriously sometimes.

I'm probably doing my blood pressure no favors but below, you'll find the comment I left when I came across someone's posting about Gov. Aaanold Schwarzenegger's signing into law of a "texting ban" (in case it doesn't make it through comment moderation). Though it was written in anger/disbelief and does regrettably use the word "retard" for effect, I think I propose a decent idea.

First, here is the original post, on a blog about traffic, maintained by Steve Hymon at the LA Times.

Texting banned while driving
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has started to sign bills now that the budget standoff is over. The big one today is a bill that -- gasp! -- makes it illegal to text-message while driving in the Golden State.
The two laws that banned holding a cellphone to your ear and driving overlooked text messaging because the cellphone part was hard enough to get through a Legislature that has fattened itself on campaign donations from cellphone providers over the years. The public reaction to that lapse helped spur this bill, which some folk may suggest is pure common sense.
The bill was written by State Sen. Joe Simitian, who also authored the cellphone ban. First offense is $76. Schwarzenegger's comment, via press release: "Banning electronic text messaging while driving will keep drivers' hands on the wheel and their eyes on the road, making our roadways a safer place for all Californians."

It is amazing that we live in a society so ignorant that you'd actually need to ban this. LA people are particularly homicidally self absorbed. It's amazing that you get points on your license for speeding, but a piddly little fine for using a phone while driving. Thanks Mobilephone lobbyists and idiot citizens!

And wouldn't you know it, half the comments actually support texting while driving.
I'd say fine, there should be a special, cemented off, separated lane for you retards and your phone and your texting--that way you assume the risk and slowly kill each other off like Darwinian bumper cars.

The icing on the cake is that it was banned by Arnold S., the Terminator. 20 years ago, if you'd told me this scenario would come to pass , I'd of died laughing. Now I just get to look forward to one of you morons killing me with your car. If only I loved irony as much as my life.

I should have added, offer the demonic cell phone companies that have cunningly burrowed their way into a society where no one used to have to call anyone all the time the opportunity to pay for the building and maintenance of these special lanes. Let them text away, in a special lane designed just for them! You could get other corporations to sponsor them too, perhaps sell cigarettes, insurance and liquor at the rest stops, with special wreck lanes with tow service access. I doubt texting chatting folks would mind this arrangement, having to dodge other seriously impaired drivers who think nothing of putting their loved ones and themselves in fatal situations, since it's their right to do this, and the government has no right to stop them. Right?

Fixing the United States Pt I Domestic policy

With all the ideas available, why do we have to keep hearing only old, tired, bad ideas? "Drill Baby Drill" indeed. The Bush Administration has been so historically bad, even Thomas Friedman is making sense. If America is half the country it thinks it is, it will use the Bush years as an opportunity. If Americans can't use the experience of the last 8 yrs to throw our pressing needs into stark relief, we will deserve the fate we get, one which will resemble the dinosaurs. Some good ideas, like reducing the speed limit, issuing licenses for child birthing, enforcing noise pollution laws, or eliminating entertainment news, are impossible to implement in such a careless, dumb, greedy society. But other ideas are easier to work with. The list of things to change is obvious. Any simple fuck or internet hack could come up with them. In order of ease of implementation, here are just a few.

Lifestyle Environmentalists need to put up or shut up. It's swell that you bought that canvas reusable shopping bag. Pull your Prius over at the next light and actually do something by bringing your economic clout to bear on concrete issues. A first symbolic step? Hospitals ("do no harm") and long-term care facilities need to be stopped from dumping their pharmaceuticals into the drinking water supply. Anyone object?

Karl Rove needs to be put in a prison cell. This is a bipartisan issue. Congress cannot be allowed to get any weaker. And I think we'll all feel a lot better.

Create an actual Justice Department to investigate the existing one. Alberto Gonzales, too, needs a taste of justice (maybe for the first time). Subverting the congress, the constitution and the American justice system has to be a punishable crime. Otherwise there is no point to going on.

FEMA needs immediate continuing reform. Mostly because its a damn embarrassment. But also so those American citizens that Bush let suffer and die in the aftermath Katrina didn't do so in vain. Americans need to be certain that the world's richest country can take care of itself in the event of a natural, or other disaster. Undoing Bush's 8 years of cronyism is entirely possible, but it might not be easier than fixing his foreign policy blunders.

Develop some semblance of an innovative energy policy. This is so obvious, even the big oil controlled Republican party is making memes about being under the yoke of our dependence on foreign oil, despite the fact it makes no logical sense for them to say so. Whether global warming is a cyclical thing prompted by a God angered over same-sex marriages, or a man-made self-fucking, we're all gonna die. Question is, do we want to be able to take our last breath, or do we wanna go choking down the black air and water that we created? If Americans want to even start to reverse the legacies of the blithely destructive consumerist lifestyles we're willing to kill for, We need to do the opposite of every thing we have ever done.

Leave "No Child Behind" policy behind. Solely blaming teachers while still hoping to be saved by the heroic ones is idiotic. There are so many points of intervention, yet government and Hollywood fill our heads with the absurd idea that teachers are the problem. Stop with the willful ignorance about the social context in which schools are asked to operate. Have you tested well you feared for your very safety? Decide whether we want to have teachers in charge of teaching, or just hire test proctors. Understand that comprehensive education reform is more than reliance on critically flawed, barely valid testing system. Notice that schools are segregated. Take a close look at the high-salaried dolts that are running and administrating America's education system. That is where you'll find the key failures. Who do you think hired all the "bad teachers"? Get the (text book) corporations out of education. Think carefully about which administration came up No Child Behind strategy. Obama, among others, wants to make math and science a priority. But students need to know how to read to do anything, including math and science, and right now they don't, so this emphasis is foolish. We shouldn't wonder why we have an electorate full of stupid people who keep making terrible choices as if they have no choice.

The government needs to develop a smart, winning public campaign to properly re-regulate key sectors. Globalization means that we can not avoid regulating the banking and insurance industries. The key is probably to tie fat cat malfeasance to concrete reform so the dull public authorizes some drastic measures. Good news: there's plenty of good examples. Bad news: the rich would prefer to keep getting richer.

Corporate America needs a spanking. Let the big ass companies explain to us why we should bail them out without them paying for it. They will still make money hand over fist if they pay their fair share of taxes. So spare us the bullshit, and the diversionary "small business" tropes. The CEOs and foreign concerns that are exploiting our tax code and lack of energy policy, and benefiting from our largess aren't just like you and me, in case you're wondering. They have a lot more than they need.

Comprehensive electoral reform, forced upon the states if necessary. America needs free and fair elections. We can't continue to hold elections with flawed unsecured electronic voting machines. If Florida won't do it themselves then they need it done for them. Reform the electoral college. It's a ridiculous way to choose an executive. As it is, our Presidents spend their best efforts (and years) campaigning, not governing.

Things that Aren't Terrible

Sometimes, when it comes to a particular thing, event, experience or habit, a complaint isn't warranted. Yet. So it's a good idea to prepare by pre-complaining, because chances are human society will kill it. To those who don't yet grasp the principles behind The Complainant, the following may read like a transparent shill.

What is it?
It's a breakfast cereal, Trader Joe's Just the Clusters Maple Pecan Granola. Damn it's tasty, and I put it on yogurt in the morning.

Why it's not terrible:
Well for starters, the price differential between this granola cereal and the others (Quaker Oats I'm looking at you) is astounding. Also, I really like high sugared granola cereal.

Some drawbacks:
Of course, to buy this product you have to live in a place where there are TJ's then you have to navigate the thoughtlessly designed stores to find it, that is, if you can find a parking spot in their truly idiotic locations (I'm talking to you 3rd and LaBrea TJs in LA [which is possibly moving]).

Odds of total destruction: Fair. Trader Joe's changes their product line quite often, though a) not often enough to keep things interesting and b) they often kill beautiful tasty wonderful products for some or other reason. So enjoy this while you can.

American Ignorants: Palin Grotesque

Steven Wells' article is interesting enough to reproduce parts of it without comment. I hope you go check it out. Sarah Palin is interesting for a lot of reasons, but I am interested in the way in which everything she says is a lie. She and her McCain handlers chose to highlight all her weaknesses by putting each bizarre contradiction and misrepresentation boldly upfront in her introductory speeches and canned interviews ("thanks no thanks" to bridge to nowhere, the Alaskan exploitation of earmarks and federal money, the (forced?) pregnancy before marriage and (forced?) military service of her children conveniently made to serve her political career, etc.) A bold entrance into national politics, setting a nice baseline upon which to build a career as a "Big Liar."

So why has the Republican candidate for vice-president worked so hard at branding herself with the hockey mom label? Of course it might simply be that she's genuinely immersed in ice-hockey culture. The thug who impregnated her 17-year-old daughter (and who described himself as "a fucking redneck" on his MySpace page) certainly is.

"I live to play hockey," he writes. 'Ya fuck with me I'll kick [your] ass'"

And there, I think - in a sweary nutshell - is the reason Palin is so keen to be seen as a hockey mom. In the minds of the effete conservative elite who run the Republican party, the hockey-playing yob who got Palin's daughter pregnant represents an idealised form of American masculinity - unthinking, brutish, willfully ignorant, easy to manipulate, unquestioningly patriotic, proudly reactionary, quick to respond to any perceived threat with overwhelming violence - and very unlikely to ever vote Democrat. Or - by extension - play soccer.

For the weird truth is that while millions more Americans play and watch soccer than play and watch hockey, millions of Americans stills see hockey as the more American sport.

In the big cities - especially in California and the liberal north-east - soccer shirts now outnumber all other sports related streets wear gear (on non-match days, at least). In Philadelphia - a city that prides itself on its gritty, down-to-earth, parochial fan culture - a stroll around Center City on any Saturday afternoon shows evidence of the massive inroads cosmopolitan soccer culture has made into the American psyche. And it isn't just the shirts, or the soccer decals on every other car-arse. Soccer is everywhere in popular culture - the default choice whenever a movie or TV show needs a scene set at a sports event.

But there remains a brutish, ignorant, xenophobic rump who regard soccer as effete, foreign and profoundly anti-American. And they are of course overwhelmingly attracted to the Republican party. For these die-hards soccer is emblematic of an imagined anti-American liberal (and, whisper it, Jewish) enemy-within out to undermine "real" American culture.

And then there's the sport of ice hockey. Despite the fact that in both ice-hockey and soccer one of the most eagerly anticipated scenes is that of players slapping at each other ineffectually (ice hockey players because they're wearing pads and skates, the soccer players because all their muscles are in their legs and, besides, they've done nothing but play soccer since they were five and so never learned to fight properly), in the minds of what passes for the Republican intelligentsia, the two sports are worlds apart. Hockey is unpretentious, hardscrabble, working class and white. While soccer is French and gay.

In the TV series Rescue Me - about unashamedly macho firefighters coming to terms with both post-9-11 trauma and their role in an increasingly feminised America, Dennis O'Leary and his super tough buddies are amateur ice hockey players. Of course they are. Had they been soccer players, at least a third of Americans would have been confused.

Waidaminnit, what are they saying here? That 9-11 turned these guys gay?

Of course, Palin misreads and underestimates both America and Americans; Republicans always do. On the train home from Philly today the three seats in front of me were filled with teenage field-hockey players - just part of the latest generation of women freed from spectating and cheerleading by America's awesome equality-of-sports-funding legislation, Title IX.

There are conservative Americans who would no doubt find these confident, cocky, assertive teenagers un-womanly and uncouth (and some conservative readers of this blog too. I'm thinking particularly of the reader who described Philadelphia's amazing female "alleycat" bike racers as "extremely unattractive, damaged, self-hating, aggressive femiNazis/lesbians.")

But they're crazy and wrong. These women look empowered, relaxed, athletic and totally in control. And they're America's next crop of young female voters. Not soccer moms. Not hockey moms. But players.

Customer "Service" Phone Service Pt. I

Comcast is now apparently watching you when you bitch on your blog, and getting free press for it from the paper of record, I might add, a paper whose customer service has declined along with their circulation. I wonder if they make the same effort when you actually call them to register a legitimate complaint? Doubtful.

Hopefully the recession will prompt companies, most of which feature feedback systems set up with the main goal of evading accountability, to evolve their service departments. It's probably cheaper to run an effective service operation than to play the games that most companies do just to mindfuck, piss off, and alienate their current customers. Here's a couple of free pointers if there are any corporations looking to better themselves.

After waiting on hold for 3-15 minutes, and after choosing from a menu of options that never seems adequate, a customer does not want to be told by the first live voice that they need to be transferred to another department. The customer, busy praying that the phone-answering party's native language skill matches the task, may be so flustered that they don't realize they have been thrown into the transfer void for their efforts. Many of these calls get disconnected. And transfer unfortunately is not an indicator of increased problem solving expertise, it's just mindless buck passing usually. Why have a menu that does not narrow down the possibilities enough so that I don't have to talk to multiple useless drones? I want to talk to precisely one useless drone.

If I am calling the New York Times for a (extremely common) delivery problem for example, I want the first fucker that picks up the phone to handle the problem. YOU contact someone else in a relevant department if you need to, and do it on your own time. Otherwise, I start looking to take my business elsewhere when I get the chance.