by Kluwe, Chris
If you decide to overturn the appeal of Prop 8 (boy, that’s a cumbersome one), if you decide to uphold the tenets of DOMA, a lot of professional athletes will take their cues from that, and it will cause a ripple effect as even more people follow their role models, their leaders, their heroes. Those against same-sex marriage will use it as yet another tool to propagate the idea that gay Americans, citizens who pay their taxes and serve in our military, are less than equal. That they don’t deserve the same rights as everyone else. That separate can be equal.
Those for same-sex marriage? They’ll see it as proof, not that justice is blind in this country, but rather that justice doesn’t exist anymore. I would encourage a study of historical societies in which minority groups came to feel that they had no recourse under the legal system; note the actions that were left to members of these groups, as well as how this ended up affecting society in the long run. Some modern examples include Iran, Egypt, Russia, and the United States from 1850 to 1970.
The second reason I’m asking for your consideration is that I believe a strong case can be made for this country’s vested interest in its citizens having more freedom, not less. Our Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution to guarantee the rights of the individual and protect him from persecution by the government. They knew firsthand the tyranny of government turned against a minority and knew what it led to; I’m fairly certain tea was involved at some point. These men were influenced by Enlightenment thinkers, and their underlying goal clearly shines through as freedom. The Ninth Amendment serves as perhaps the best example, specifically stating that the enumeration of certain rights in the Constitution does not take away from the people other rights that are not listed. At every step, the desire for freedom rings out.
However, our founders forgot some things. They weren’t omniscient; they couldn’t see the future, and sometimes they were blinded by social mores of the time. They tried their best, but some stuff—well, some stuff they missed. Stuff like prohibiting slavery, allowing women to vote, removing economic disincentives to vote. Stuff that we later fixed, because we knew it was wrong. Not wrong because of a particular religious or moral creed, but wrong because it disenfranchised citizens of this country, citizens who help make this country great. Wrong because it didn’t uphold that great central philosophy—equality and freedom.
Minor v. Happersett. Plessy v. Ferguson. Citizens denied equal protections under the law. Citizens denied, by the highest court in the land, the same rights as everyone else. Citizens discriminated against for no reason other than that they were who they were. Decisions later overturned, reviled today as ignorant and petty, looked back on as examples of what not to do.
Brown v. Board of Education. Loving v. Virginia. Equality, respect, tolerance. Our Supreme Court sending the message “It does not matter who you are, what the circumstances of your birth, we hold you to be just as equal as everyone else.” Decisions lauded and taught in schools as the pinnacle of just law.
Hollingsworth v. Perry. United States v. Windsor.
What will our future generations say about these cases? Will our children look back with pride? Will they applaud our efforts to strive for more equality, not less? Or will they shake their heads and decry our small-mindedness, our petty factionalism—America divided against itself yet again, fighting the same old stupid fight with the same old worn-out arguments?
Justices, I would ask that you hold this ideal in the forefront of your thoughts as you deliberate on these two cases: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [and women] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Thank you.
Chris Kluwe
American Citizen
Punter
Time’s A-Wasted (Point Zero Blues)
A logic paradox I hear a lot is the time-traveler scenario, and it goes a little like this: “If time travel is possible within this universe and one can travel back to the past and potentially alter the future, why haven’t we seen any time travelers?” It’s a good question, seems to make sense on the surface, but, aside from the obvious explanation (time travel isn’t possible; nerds everywhere wail and gnash their teeth), I believe there’s another possibility that makes sense.
We haven’t seen any time travelers because we haven’t invented a time-travel method yet.
In order for time travelers to exist, they must have some way to reverse the normal causal chain of events (for example, a machine with wibbly-wobbly bits, or mysterious meditation techniques, or an eighteenth-dimension wormhole), and (here’s the important part) they cannot travel any farther back in time than the very first implementation of that method. We’ll call that Point Zero, mainly because it sounds pretty cool.
The reason they can’t go past Point Zero is that if they do, they change the circumstances leading up to the creation of that time-traveling method, thus preventing its existence, thus splattering themselves across the temporal boundary of nonexistence and dissipating into a fine mist that was never there. If you kill your grandfather when he’s a boy, then you never exist, and therefore the possibility of you killing your grandfather never exists (the normal paradox there continues with “but then your grandfather exists so you exist so you can still go back and kill him blah blah,” all of which is unimportant because it’s not dealing with the actual method of traveling back). The universe continues on its way sans one temporal wanderer.
Think of Point Zero as a lighthouse that’s also a wall—the window of events you can potentially travel back to grows wider and wider as time marches on, but you can’t go past that wall; you simply don’t exist once you get past it. Events may constantly change and fluctuate as travelers slip back and forth, but the existence of the method is the only solid constant in a sea of chaos.
So this is great news, right? All we have to do is actually invent a way to time-travel, and we can fix all our mistakes from that point forward. We’ll create a utopia, keep going back again and again to ensure the most desirable outcome until it’s all sugarplums and gumdrop fairies, blissful perfection. Anytime something bad happens, we’ll just rewind a little bit, reload that last save, and make it so it never occurred.
Not so fast.
You see, whenever someone travels back, he completely wipes out whatever happened in the universe from the point he traveled back all the way to the point he arrived at. Butterfly effect, chaos theory, fractal branching—a tiny change introduced into a complex equation (and what could possibly be more complex to us than the universe?) alters the outcome in a million billion tiny unforeseen ways, ripples propagating across an infinitely vast pond, and the more time that passes, the larger the divergence. A traveler from Imperialist Singapore looking to slightly alter the path of genetic research brings about the rise of the Fifth Sudanese Reich, crushing the nascent island empire before it can encompass the world; a Free Anarchy Moscow agent slips back to alter the marriage ceremony of the duke of America for tax-break purposes and plunges half the planet into nuclear winter that a Mutant Jesus Reborn cleric then prevents from ever happening; competing travelers all racing back earlier and earlier in order to wipe the others from existence by preventing them from ever being born; the one constant being the ability to travel back to when that first switch was flipped…
Unfortunately, the farther your timeline is from Point Zero, the more certain it will be erased in less than an instant when someone travels back to change things for his own interests, and only one person will ever know you existed (until that person too is negated by someone who arrived a picosecond earlier) (who will be obliterated in return) (and so on and so forth). Traveling back a small distance produces small changes; traveling back a large distance produces impossible changes, and trillions of possibilities will occur and disappear without any sign of their passing. Countless loves will never be consummated, countless wars will never raze countless hopes and dreams, c
ountless scenarios will never resolve—because someone will always be heading back to Point Zero to rebuild the world the way he thinks it should’ve originally been.
In fact, once time travel is invented, the only actual outcome anyone will ever see is the incomprehensively brief instant that is the smallest unit of time possible in this universe before the method is destroyed—by either the massive influx of would-be alchemists fighting over who gets ultimate control, or whoever finally figures out that the only way to create a stable future is to blow up any possibility of rewriting it. All it takes is one person in the infinitely large realm of timelines to go back to Point Zero and shut the whole thing down, and we’ll never even know what led him to do so.
We can only hope the explosion isn’t too big.
Kiss My Ass
You know what really pisses me off? Those stupid super-thin toilet-paper sheets that make you feel like you’re wiping your butt with a cardboard rag. They have the consistency of rough sandpaper and all the staying power of an ice cube inside a five-hundred-degree oven.
It’s not the consistency or the durability (or lack thereof) that makes me upset, though. It’s the idea behind it.
You see, the reason these abominable little squares of hell get sold is that they’re cheaper than normal toilet paper (which doesn’t make you feel like you’re scouring your rectum with a steel-wool brush), so of course some brilliant middle-management person looking to streamline proactive efficiency in the name of confratulating the herpaderp says, “ERMAGERD, we can save five cents a roll on toilet paper, WE’LL TAKE ALL THE HELLSQUARES,” and then there’s nothing for it but to bend over and accept the pain.
Unfortunately, Bill from Accounting’s brilliant plan doesn’t actually save any money. I’ll use some simple mathematics to illustrate why (along with nice round numbers for easy mathing!).
Let’s say one normal roll of toilet paper costs two dollars. You’re conscientious, so you use two sheets per wipe, just enough to get the job done, and we’ll say there’s one hundred sheets in the roll. Each wipe costs you four cents.
Now let’s look at the shitpaper. We’ll say it’s super-cheap and you’re saving 50 percent, so it costs only one dollar for a roll. There’s the same hundred sheets in the roll, but each wipe requires six sheets, because anything less and you’re literally smearing your own feces around in your hand as the wafer-thin material shreds apart on contact (I’d recommend using Bill’s shirt to clean off if this happens).
Total cost per wipe? Six cents.
Carrying the square root of negative one and dividing by zero, we find that even though each roll of recycled broccoli-stalk fiber is costing you only half as much as a roll of regular toilet paper, you actually spend 150 percent more per wipe. This means you’re actually LOSING MONEY over the long term (trust me, it’s numberology).
This is called valuing short-term gains over long-term consequences, and it’s driving me insane, because it’s not limited to just toilet paper.
Mortgages? Check. Who wouldn’t want to pay an extra 125 percent on top of the value of a house because it’s easier to make just the minimum payment each month? I mean, it’s not like you’d need that extra one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars after thirty years of payment, right? Might as well give it to the bank, I’m sure they’ll put it to good use.
Credit cards, payday loans? Sign me up! Do you want to know why all those friendly people are so eager to give you money? Because they know you’re not going to stop and think about what the actual long-term cost is. That two-thousand-dollar big-screen you just put on the Visa is going to end up costing you close to four thousand dollars if you make only the minimum payment each month. You could have had TWO big-screens! That’s DOUBLE the pornography- and motor-sports-viewing potential, and you would have had it if you’d used your brain for more than keeping your ears apart!
Environmental issues? We’ll take care of those, one tiny little step at a time, doing the bare minimum to scrape by. Sure, our children may have to evolve gills and learn to swim because we’ll flood the entire planet, but at least we all had our choice of iPod-case color and Happy Meal toy. Fuck it, it’s not like we’re going to be around to care anyway, right? Let them deal with the mess.
If you’re curious, you can go to any casino in the world to see this principle in action. Do you know why there’re so many luxuriously magnificent buildings in Las Vegas that ply you with free drinks and food? Because the house always wins. Always. Vegas understands long-term consequences. That’s why that little green 0 and 00 are on the roulette wheel, and why you’ll get kicked out if you start counting cards. They want you to play the odds, because they know what the odds say. Pro tip: They’re not in your favor (shhhh, don’t tell anyone, though; I like getting free drinks while wandering the floor).
So let’s continue shipping all our jobs overseas to fatten the corporate bottom line. Let’s continue laying off our workers to pay for another multimillion-dollar CEO bonus. Let’s continue cutting our science funding to build more missiles and mortars. Let’s continue picking tanks over tolerance, handguns over health care, entertainment over education—all the stupid shortsightedness that makes this world such a fucked-up pile of shit.
Just don’t expect to clean it up with toilet paper. That’s not going to work at all.
(p)Recognition
I was browsing the app store on my phone the other day, looking for a decent game to pass the time, and I had a moment of unusual clarity. I was reading a review of a popular franchise and people were upset that it was going to be available only on mobile iOS platforms, that they couldn’t play it on a more traditional gaming medium, like a 360 or DS or PS3.
I read their words, their complaints, and all of a sudden, it was as if I were reading gibberish. What they were saying didn’t make sense to me; I literally didn’t understand it.
I had a confuse.
People were angry over the fact that a traditional video-game franchise, made by a company that had grown to prominence during the eight-bit and sixteen-bit eras, had an entry that could run only on a machine that made those traditional consoles look like a caveman banging two rocks together.
Buh?
I mean, take a moment and think about it. The piece of hardware in your hand or your pocket, that device that’s called merely a phone, has every single capability of any gaming system from fifteen to twenty years ago, in addition to its being able to make voice and video calls, and people are angry when games are released on only that platform. They get profoundly mad. Frothing-at-the-mouth, vitriolic-rant, online-petition-with-thirty-thousand-signatures upset.
We’re talking seriously butthurt here.
I want to know why.
Why are these people so angry? Why are they so upset that something we would have killed to have ten years ago is now considered rubbish?
When did we forget how to recognize that moment where the future becomes the present? When did we lose that sense of wonder that right now, RIGHT NOW, we are capable of accessing any recorded media or literature in the entirety of human history via a palm-sized portable device? When did we become inured to the fact that if we were to describe our current tech level to someone of even twenty-five years ago, he or she would most likely lock us up in the insane asylum or tell us to go back to our parents’ basement and read more nerd books?
When did we become immune to just how impressive our tools actually are?
We have power plants that work off reactions that are found in stars. We can talk to people on the other side of the world like they were right next door to us. We use a system of geosynchronous satellites to navigate our personal automobiles, some of which run on pure electricity. I’m currently writing on a machine that automatically spellchecks my words, that can reallocate my finances, that communicates through thin air with a giant network of other machines all across the globe in case I need to look something up, and that also edits music and videos I could make appear on demand i
f I were so inclined. The only thing it doesn’t do is brew coffee, and that’s because I don’t have a wi-fi equipped coffeemaker (which I now know is an actual thing because I just Googled it).
If you told Ronald Reagan he would have the ability to shut down an Iranian nuclear-weapons facility by writing some words in a coding language, he’d have lost his mind. We are living Star Wars here, people.
Why are we so incapable of examining the wonder around us? The terror around us?
I believe it’s because we’ve forgotten how to remember the short-term past. We’re so enthralled with what might be, with what potentialities await, that we rarely stop to look around and see what is. What we’ve created from what we used to be, the slow shifts that add up to drastic change, these are buried in the mind’s memory banks and left to lie in their sepulchral dust, forgotten in the mad dance of now and tomorrow. Sure, we can open history’s archives and learn lessons from one hundred, two hundred, three hundred, or more years ago (for those who care to look), but we have a curious set of blinders when it comes to events that happen in our own lifetimes.
Why can’t we see the constant flux that surrounds us through a twenty-five- or fifty-year period? Is it because most of us judge the world based on our personal experience, and in our personal experience, changes accumulate over time so gradually that we don’t even notice?
Don’t bother thinking that one over, I’ll answer it for you—yes. Just look at all the stories from people saying climate change isn’t real because they wore sandals in the winter or jackets in the summer (never mind the increasing severity of weather patterns and seasonal fluctuations!), those who ignore statistics in favor of anecdotal tales (you’ll totally win the lottery this time!), or the multitudes who consistently choose short-term gains over long-term losses because the latter is diffused over a much broader spectrum (too big to fail now, but look at those quarterly reports go!). Hell, look at all the poor people who perennially vote for rich people to take more and more of their rights away and then wonder why social inequity keeps rising. We’re a pretty fucking dumb bunch of animals when it comes to paying attention to what’s going on in our lives, I’m not gonna lie.
