TWO WHO? IT MAY CONCERT

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Web Site-blog ::htpp///cyberqill,com
Facebok: http//ww.facbook.cmo/cyverquill
twitters; htp:/www,twittercom//Cyberquil

“eigthy percents success is show Up”! (Woody Ally)

Disclaimers and warning labels have their place.

Above all, they protect companies from getting swamped with lawsuits brought by customers seeking compensation for harm or injury incurred in consequence of having been insufficiently apprised that operating electronic devices while taking a bath may result in electrocution, that drying a wet cat in the microwave will harm the cat, or that abandoning the driver’s seat of an RV in order to go brew oneself a cup of joe in the back as the vehicle is coasting along at 70 mph raises the risk of coming to a sudden and unscheduled halt against one of the cedars lining the highway.

And then, of course, there exist all manner of rating systems for entertainment products; to give, say, a heads-up to “Christian readers” that a particular novel contains references to extra-marital congress, or to aid parents in selecting age-appropriate materials for their children.

Speaking of protecting children—a laudable objective, no doubt—check out the following marvel of a disclaimer that appears in this edition of the U.S. Constitution published by Wilder Publications:

This book is a product of its time and does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today. Parents might wish to discuss with their children how views on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and interpersonal relations have changed since this book was written before allowing them to read this classic work.

Before “allowing” their children to read this classic work? What kid would even want to read it so badly that the question of whether or not to “allow” it were to come into play at all? Can you imagine little Johnny pestering his mom for permission to read the nation’s founding documents, and mom finally caving in on the condition that he clean his room, whereupon the nipper dashes off like a rocket to fetch the broom in eager anticipation of, at long last, getting to read the DOI and the Constitution as a reward for completing his chores?

Assuming an unsupervised child were to get his hands on this classic work, obviously there’s far more danger he’d fashion little paper airplanes out of its pages and launch them at his siblings, possibly hitting one of them in the eye, than that he’d actually settle down and start reading the thing—so where’s the warning label that covers potential ophthalmological trauma from paper aircraft, a small but at least a somewhat realistic hazard this classic work might pose for children?

Even in the unlikely event that—Heaven forbid!—some kid were to volunteer perusing all or parts of it and did so without parental guidance, he or she wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of the constitutional language anyway. Difficult enough for adults to tease out from between its lines what values exactly the Constitution espouses—forget about a nine-year-old’s views on issues like abortion or gay marriage or race relations being in any way shaped by what the Constitution says, as opposed to getting those views hammered into their little minds by their parents and society at large.

Nothing wrong, of course, with parents discussing the evolution of societal values with their children, but none of the topics listed in the disclaimer are specifically addressed in any of the documents included in this classic work anyway—where are the sections that deal with “sexuality” or “interpersonal relations,” for example?—save in those constitutional amendments which explicitly guarantee equal rights and equal protection under the law for all persons regardless of race, gender, or previous condition of servitude; and no pre-teenager is going to figure out on his own what class of persons the term “other persons” in Article I might be referring to, assuming a he or she (a) were even alive to such minutiae and (b) never made it to the amendments that officially invalidate such otherness.

Slapping a warning label on the Constitution as if it were a plastic bag seems neurotic in the extreme, and I’m at a bit of a loss when it comes to providing theories aimed at explaining its genesis … could it be that Wilder Publications is seriously worried about getting sued by incensed parents who might claim that reading this classic work without parental supervision had turned their kids into raving Republicans?

Two plus two equals seven.

That was a joke.

Granted, not exactly a joke of the knee-slapping variety likely to send an audience into stitches, but a joke in the sense that I don’t really believe two plus to equals seven, neither consciously, nor subliminally, nor any other way.

Having heard my joke, chances are you will accuse me of being an unfunny comedian rather than a closet opponent of conventional arithmetic attempting to broadcast my warped views under the guise of humor, just so I could hide behind that claim “Oh, I was just kidding” in case an offended mathematician seems about to cosh me over the block with her abacus.

So when I proclaim that two plus two equals seven and that anyone who believes that two plus two equals four has been brainwashed by capitalist propaganda, people may roll their eyes or demonstratively mime tickling themselves under the armpit in order to signal that my pitiful attempt at humor all by itself won’t suffice to set them laughing, but no one will suspect that this may be the kind of math I actually use when I count the quarters in my pocket to check whether I have enough change for the dryer at the laundromat. (Laundromat. Not “laundry mat.” Frankly, I’m never quite sure if someone is kidding when they tweet that they’re “masterbating at the laundry mat,” and I’m not referring to the potential factuality of the assertion.)

Women belong in the kitchen.

That was another joke. I just felt like saying something dumb again.

But now I run the risk of being charged with using humor as a stealth delivery system to air my misogyny. All of a sudden, someone may confront with the old adage that there’s “truth in humor”; in other words, that if somewhere deep down I didn’t really believe that women ought to spend their lives stirring pots, then I wouldn’t even have thought of such a line, i.e., that everything we are able to conceive of must be rooted in our belief system, or else we wouldn’t be able to conceive of it in the first place.

As per this thesis, of course, I never should have been able to come up with the silly assertion that “two plus two equals seven.”

There are many types of humor. One is to simply say something stupid, which is only fun to do when one does absolutely not believe it to be true on any level. How a listener might be able to tell the difference without mind-reading skills is another story, and when one throws around overtly racist or sexist statements, even though these may originate from a place of ridiculing racists and sexists as opposed to siding with their views, misunderstandings may ensue, and charges of insensitivity may be in order.

However, it doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s any “truth” in those statements from the jester’s perspective. He may be making them precisely because, as far as he is concerned, there is no truth in them.

The statement There’s truth in humor is wrong.

There may be truth in humor.

Big difference.

Although I’ve scored a few small successes and had some good times, for the most part my earthly journey thus far has been paved with failure and frustration, on the career front in particular. Barring some unforeseen peripeteia, my life’s arch slowly but relentlessly bends toward destitution and a rather gloomy denouement.

Since the fat lady hasn’t warbled quite yet, I shall tentatively stop short of referring to myself as a “loser,” but should others choose to bestow such characterization upon me and back it up by pointing to my present circumstances, I wouldn’t really know how to rebut this charge and present a convincing case that my situation constitutes no more than a “temporary” setback that I’ll somehow bootstrap my way out of.

Through the sheer dumb luck of my having been born into a loving middle-class family in an affluent country, to date I have never gone hungry, never slept under a bridge, nor have I ever entertained fantasies of turning to criminal activity in order to make ends meet.

Without my lucky support system, however, God knows where I’d be. Perhaps being forced into complete self-reliance in the absence of a safety net would have jolted my ingenuity into figuring out how to make it in this world. Or maybe I’d be dead, homeless, or incarcerated by now. Hard to say.

Aside from those who comprise my immediate support system as well as a limited and revolving albeit ever-present number of individuals who appear to genuinely think very highly of me—either of me as a whole, or who value isolated aspects of my persona—on balance I would rate my reception on Planet Earth as ranging from indifferent to frosty.

My personal history has been one of feeling ignored, rejected, insulted, shafted, and passed over. Granted, I may have a knack for showing up and offering my services at all the wrong places and at all the wrong times and in a manner not exactly conducive to receiving the warmest of welcomes, but that doesn’t alter my general sense of “nobody wants me here.” (Whether this subjective sense is accurate, exaggerated, or altogether mistaken is entirely beside the point; and I’m certainly not fishing for commentary designed to boost my self-esteem. I’ve already acknowledged that there are always people who like me and who want me here, for one reason or another, and who, if they saw this post, would be tempted to post affirmations of affection in the comment section below. It’s just a matter of how representative of the whole these people are.)

For instance, I’ve always been puzzled at how difficult it was for me to find new waitering jobs in New York City, in spite of years of experience in the field. And I’m talking before the big recession of 2008. The number of application forms I had to fill out and resumes I had to drop off in order to finally end up with a new gig seemed a bit excessive.

What is it about me that appears to instantly disinclines others from wanting to associate with me?

Doesn’t matter, because here’s my point:

I’m white.

If I were black—or a member of any minority with a history of being discriminated against—of course I’d attribute my overall lack of success in this world, at least in part, to the color of my skin or to whatever other feature that might distinguish me from those folks I regarded as belonging the ruling class. I’d simply “know” that my “other-ness” had something to do with my persistent sense of receiving less than the warmest of welcomes most places I went. I could “feel” that the deck was stacked against my “kind.”

Being the white European-looking male that I am, alas, resorting to the “blame society” line of explanations for why I’ve turned into such a capital washout is not an option for me.

This is not to say that “covert” or “institutionalized” racism and sexism (or whatever -isms that denote wholesale discrimination against particular segments of society) don’t exist. They certainly do, although their extent is debatable.

For now, my question is this:

How does a member of a traditionally discriminated-against minority whose life isn’t going so well, and who keeps lumbering from one fiasco and rejection to the next, know whether or to what extent their failures are the result of discrimination, or whether and to what extent they’d be striking out just the same even if they were as white and male as I am?

Because I imagine if, all other things being equal, I were black, I may well have turned into a frustrated and race-baiting anti-white-establishment activist, erroneously pointing fingers in the wrong direction. How could I possibly exclude my minority status from the list of potential explanations for my failure in life? And from not being able to exclude it, how tempting would it be to adopt it and focus on it to the exclusion of all other possible reasons for what’s holding me back?

Blogmasters and operators of online discussion forums often have a written “comments policy” designed to explain to the potentially confused would-be interlocutor what types of commentary are welcome and acceptable on their little plots of cyber-turf and what types are deemed offensive or otherwise undesirable and hence subject to removal and possible further sanctions up to and including the offending party getting slapped with a virtual restraining order.

Displaying official-sounding verbiage of any kind, of course, adds a nimbus of professionalism to any product or operation, destitute of necessary and useful information as such verbiage may be upon reflection.

The typical comments policy reads something to the effect that while disagreement is permitted and vigorous debate is encouraged, blah blah blah, comments that include personal attacks, profanity, or spam, that are sexually explicit or violate any laws, or that stray too far afield from the topic at hand, will not be tolerated and may result in anything from simple comment deletion to banning recidivists from future participation, yada yada yada, usually topped off with some catchall clause emphasizing the forum operators’ sole discretion when it comes to determining what constitutes a breach of etiquette and setting appropriate penalties, i.e., that they reserve the right to remove comments and block commenters at any time and for any reason whatsoever, stated or unstated.

Basically, if you’ve read one comments policy, you’ve read them all. You’ll find more variety in a tube of Pringles than in all the comments policies ever posted on the entire World Wide Web combined.

Stripped of all minutial surplusage and boiled down to their essence, all these policies say one thing, and one thing only. Webmasters could save a lot of time and pixels if instead of the prolix blather they posted this synopsis:

If I (we) don’t want your comment on my (our) site, I (we) will take it off. If you keep annoying me (us), I (we) may block you.

This pithy sentence conveys exactly the same information as do its prolix brethren we keep seeing all over the place. Since it perfectly encapsulates what common sense tells us constitutes everybody’s operative between-the-lines comments policy anyway, there’s little need for posting even the short version.

So who exactly are all these comments policies meant to address, and what sort of confusion are they designed to resolve?

Obviously, so-called “trolls,” i.e., folks intent on stirring animosity and causing disruption, most certainly won’t be deterred by a comments policy, so it’ll be lost on them by definition.

Anyone intellectually and technically sophisticated enough to post comments at all is probably also bright enough to know that whenever they post comments in places where other people (a) have access to the Delete button and (b) possess the absolute legal right to push it anytime they please, any of these comments may get zapped at any time and for any reason, whatever the dopey comments policy may say. A monkey could make the case that virtually any comment falls under some prohibited category. The line “I really enjoyed this wonderful post” could be regarded as either so sarcastic or so dull and unimaginative as to be adjudged offensive and intolerable.

And anyone that lacks the intuitive understanding that the very types of comments commonly listed in comments policies as objectionable stand an inherently reduced chance of remaining on display for very long, most likely won’t gain much more enlightenment from studying a standard-issue comments policy than they would gain from staring at its Aramaic transliteration.

But even if one does possess such intuitive understanding, the problem isn’t trying to figure out whether, say, personal attacks or “offensive” comments are welcome in a given forum—they generally aren’t, whether explicitly stated so in a written comments policy or not—but to figure out what exactly counts as as any of these things in the minds of those that moderate the forum. For something to be considered offensive, it takes an actual person to be offended—if a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?—and what comes across as an “attack” to one person amounts to an instance of innocuous teasing to another.

For instance, a few years ago I got myself banned for life from billoreilly.com because in the course of some conversation on the site’s message boards I had jokingly referred to two other members as “drama queens” in violation of the no personal attacks clause in the site’s official comments policy. Of course, if you’ve ever seen Bill O’Reilly thunder away at his guests, you’d never guess that a relatively innocuous epithet like “drama queen” would be grounds for immediate and irrevocable termination in a forum that bears his name. If O’Reilly participated in discussions on his own message boards, he’d get himself banned for life from his own site within less than 20 minutes.

Michael Hyatt, former CEO of Thomas Nelson, runs an excellent blog on leadership, social media, and personal growth. Some time ago he published a piece on the merits of having a comments policy: to set some ground rules and let people know what to expect. 

So let’s take a look at Mr Hyatt’s own comments policy, where he states that he reserves the right to delete comments that are “snarky, offensive, or off-topic”:

Specifically, I will delete your comments if you post something that is, in my sole opinion, (a) snarky; (b) off-topic; (c) libelous, defamatory, abusive, harassing, threatening, profane, pornographic, offensive, false, misleading, or which otherwise violates or encourages others to violate my sense of decorum and civility or any law, including intellectual property laws; or (d) “spam,” i.e., an attempt to advertise, solicit, or otherwise promote goods and services. You may, however, post a link to your site or your most recent blog post.

To me, this whole laundry list of prohibitions (“snarky”, “off-topic”, “libelous”, “harassing”, “threatening”, “profane”, etc.), once again, boils down to “If I don’t like your comment, I’ll take it off,” the universal rule which, as I pointed out earlier, applies to any forum, and which tells me nothing I couldn’t have guessed on my own using plain old common sense. Without knowing the man, how am I to know what he, in his sole opinion, might consider “snarky” or “offensive”? That could literally be anything, which renders his whole comments policy of rather limited utility when it comes to trying to predict the life expectancy of any comment I’m about to post on his site.

In other words, after reading his comments policy I’m just as smart as I was before. The only way to find out how he defines any of the terms on his list is to go the heuristic route, i.e., to post normally without worrying about the “rules” and then observe which comments survive and which ones get zapped. Needless to say, I can do that anywhere without ever reading any comments policies in the first place, which goes to show that these things are practically worthless.

The other day, Mr Hyatt published a post on the benefits of hiring a remote “virtual” assistant as opposed to a physically present one. In making his case, Mr Hyatt included a list of reasons against enlisting the latter, among them:

An affair will cost you more than you think.

So going with a “virtual” assistant eliminates the risk of running up a hefty divorce bill in consequence of having succumbed to prurient impulses during one of those late nights stuck in the office with a hot secretary.

Makes sense, but then later in the post, Hyatt writes this:

What can an virtual assistant do for you? Anything that does not require her physical presence.

This prompted me to leave the following comment in the post’s comment section:

An affair can cost you more than you think, and a virtual assistant can do anything that doesn’t require her physical presence? Having an affair doesn’t require anyone’s physical presence these days. People have online affairs all the time, you know, sending little pictures and clips back and forth and having virtual trysts via Skype.

Shortly after posting my comment, I received an email from one of the blog’s moderators, informing me that my comment had been deleted as it had “raised some concerns with the community and was deemed snarky/offensive/off-topic” and that if “these types of comments” continue, it could lead to “further action.” The email also included a link to Mr Hyatt’s comments policy as if that policy contained the definitions of “snarky”, “offensive,” and “off-topic,” which, of course, it does not; yet it is precisely those definitions that I would need in order to understand the problem with my comment.

First of all, I’m having trouble reconciling the phrase “concerns with the community” in the email with the phrase “in my sole opinion” from the comments policy—which is it? Either the community determines what’s snarky/offensive/off-topic, or Mr Hyatt makes the call in his “sole opinion.” How can his sole opinion decide what the community deems offensive?

Second, and more germane to this discussion, for the life of me I can’t figure out in what way my comment may have been snarky, offensive, or off-topic by even the most elastic readings of these adjectives.

Sure, I’m aware that the community in question is of the overtly “Christian” persuasion and that people with strong religious convictions tend to become somewhat more easily disquieted by references to certain topics than the rest of us, but the post itself had brought up the concept of an “affair,” which, no doubt, even the most devout Christian is aware denotes a type of relationship a trifle more carnal than merely holding hands in church.

So if anything raised “concern with the community,” it should have been the blog author’s own reference to banging the secretary. All I added to this already broached concept were the words “pictures,” “clips”, “tryst,” and “Skype” in order to point out that virtual affairs, too, can cost more than you think; in fact, they might be just as risky, or even more so, due to a potentially inflated sense of safety afforded by physical remoteness and the attendant danger of some explicit evidence ending up on Facebook because someone hit a wrong button on their iPhone.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have said “tryst.” Why knows?

But this is what I mean: I could have studied and memorized the comments policy including all the dictionary definitions of all the terms it contains until I was able to recite it all backward, and not in a million years would I have anticipated that this particular comment of mine would be regarded as a violation and earn me a warning. What’s next? If I include the term “cucumber” in a comment, the community will wax “concerned” again and “further action” will be taken?

Ergo, comments policies are a waste of space. If the operator(s) of a forum doesn’t like a comment, they’ll take it off anyway, no matter what it says in the comments policy, especially if the policy contains one or more wastebasket terms like “offensive” that may cover anything—obviously, no one can prove that a comment is not offensive in a particular individual’s sole opinion. And if an individual authorized to delete and block gets offended or disturbed for any reason, how much insight into human nature does it take to realize that he or she may indeed use those powers even without having this contingency spelled out in an official policy?

And I’d like to meet a spammer who, unless he’s read a site’s comments policy, seriously expects his Viagra links to not be subject to removal.

Now you may leave comments in the comment section below.

If I don’t want your comment in my comment section, I’ll delete it.

You think that’s vague? You betcha it’s vague.

At the same time, it’s just as informative as any other comments policy.

One day—I must have been in third or fourth grade—our teacher had “the talk” with us: the talk about the hazards of playing soccer on the sidewalk, a common pastime for kids in my neck of the planet. Invariably, at some point during a game, the ball would get kicked out on the street, one of the moppets would dash after it like a blinkered cheetah after a springbok, not looking left or right, and risk getting struck by a van.

So our teacher moderated a brief class discussion about the risks of sidewalk soccer, and then we moved on to the regularly scheduled periods for the day (math or geography or edelweiss ikebana or whatever other subjects of interest may have been part of the Austrian grammar school curriculum at the time).

Right before school got out around noontime, we received our homework assignment, namely to compose a story that was to contain the following four words:

• Kind
• Ball
• Straße
• Auto

(The non-German-speaking reader may refer to this post’s headline for a verbatim translation, or to the picture below the headline for pictorial representation.)

A few days later—we had all turned in our little stories by then—the teacher returned our exercise books, kindly pointing out in front of everybody that Peter [that's me] had been “the only one who didn’t understand the assignment.”

Apparently, everyone else’s stories revolved around a bunch of littleuns playing ball next to a paved thoroughfare of some sort, resulting in a collision or near-collision between one of the players and an oncoming vehicle during attempted ball retrieval.

I don’t remember what I had written about. All I remember is that for me, the phrase “contains the words” meant “contains the words,” and my story certainly contained those four words.

Maybe by the time I’d gotten around to doing my homework, I had forgotten all about the sidewalk soccer discussion we’d had in class. Or maybe I simply thought that everyone else was going to write about some hapless tyke getting run over while chasing after a ball—yawn!—so I decided to be more creative than that; after all, the wording of the assignment seemed neither prescriptive nor restrictive as far as plot and subject matter, save that it might have discouraged fiction set pre-20th century, where it may have been difficult to refer to a “car” without waxing unduly proleptic; but then again, whipping up some tale about an exceptionally prophetic Neanderthalian child prodigy scientist chiseling his vision of an early BMW into a stone slab while kicking a mastodon skull down an antediluvian gravel road quite easily would have justified even that.

Whatever my thought process—or lack of one—that had prompted me to write what I wrote, I ended up getting ragged on for being the dumb kid in the room who had failed to comprehend a simple assignment.

Conceivably, though, a different teacher might have commended me for having been the only kid in the room to grok that the way the assignment had been phrased in no way limited the subject matter to the “obvious” one. In other words, the assignment may have been deliberately worded that way in order to test how closely we were paying attention to subtleties in language, to wit whether we would simply give the assignment a slipshod once-over and then run with what we had precipitously concluded it must have meant, as opposed to evincing symptoms of mild confusion and hesitation on account of its manifest ambiguity—a telltale sign of incipient intelligence.

So instead of reaping a pat on the back for my impressive attention to linguistic nuance at such a young age and being told I’d make a fantastic lawyer one day, I was scorned for allegedly not paying attention at all. (Granted, I may not have been—God knows what went on in my wee noggin back then—but I wasn’t even afforded the benefit of the doubt, and the teacher never acknowledged, and apparently failed to understand, the ambiguity in her assignment. If someone didn’t get something there, it may have been her.)

Having matured well into adulthood by now, and having racked up a moderate amount of life experience since my grammar school days, I find there are two excellent ways for getting in trouble with people:

1. To take what they say literally
2. To interpret what they say, i.e., to not take it literally

The classic example of the former would be an assistant apprising his superior that a major but difficult client was on the phone, the superior instructing the assistant to tell the client to “go jump in the lake,” and the employee returning to the client with the words “Thanks for holding, Mr O’Malley. Would you please go jump in the lake. Good-bye.”

Even though, strictly speaking, to not tell Mr O’Malley to go jump in the lake would have been an act of disobedience, it stands to reason that the superior neither desired nor expected her directive to be carried out literally (hence the term “malicious compliance” for carrying out such directives in a literal manner after all). Perhaps she wanted Mr O’Malley to be falsely albeit politely informed she was in a meeting and that he should call back some other time, or perhaps thinking aloud that O’Malley should go to hell was her way of saying, “Alright. Put him through.”

On the other hand, I’ve gotten myself into hot water plenty of times by mistaking specific instructions I’d been given for jocular hyperbole and carrying them out in such modified manner as I deemed reasonable and intended by the instructing party, then getting reamed out for not having “listened” properly, which is the converse of getting reamed out for “thinking too much.”

I’ve been called a nitpicking wisenheimer for detecting nuance where I wasn’t supposed to, and I’ve been accused of being a sloppy listener for failing to detect nuance where I was supposed to.

From the perspective of the speaker, of course, it’s always perfectly obvious what he or she meant. But from the vantage point of any listener astute enough—and this doesn’t even require inordinate levels of astuteness—to realize that factors unknown to the listener might be in play at any time, the course of action desired may appear a lot less obvious.

As a general rule, the better we know someone, the better we should be at surmising with accuracy whether and to what extent he or she wishes to be taken literally on a case-by-case basis, although, given the vicissitudes in human nature, this is unlikely to ever rise to an exact science no matter how well we know somebody.

The difficulty is amplified by a factor approaching infinity when dealing with strangers.

Say you’re browsing a dating site, and you come across an interesting-looking profile. In her “Looking to Meet” section, the lady claims to be interested in meeting men “between 25 and 35 only.” You happen to be 39 years old. Should you respond?

Well, if you do respond, you risk receiving as a reply a brusque and acerbic rhetorical inquiry about whether you knew how to read and if yes, which part of “between 25 and 35 only” you didn’t understand. The poor woman may feel hurt and disrespected on account of her expressly stated wishes having been so blatantly disregarded. In fact, fear of not being taken seriously may constitute the Achilles heel of her soul. Over the years, she may have developed progressive psychological scarring and self-esteem erosion due to her chronic sense of never being taken seriously by anyone in this world, and the mere fact that you responded to her profile may have driven her one step closer to drowning herself in the tub.

But on the other hand, she may have specified these very age parameters solely as a safety buffer in order to deter high schoolers and senior citizens from responding, and as long as you’re of legal age and in reasonably good trim, she wouldn’t mind if you were 20 or 50.

Bottom line, if you don’t know the lady—and since you just stumbled across her profile online, you obviously don’t—there’s no way to figure out what exactly she may have meant by “between 25 and 35 only.” If you, a 39-year-old, decide to contact her, you may either come off to her as a half-witted clunk with poor reading skills, or, quite on the contrary, she may recently have broken up with a fussy accountant and be sick of detail-oriented men, so the simple act of ignoring the minutiae in her profile might put you in her good books right out of the gate.

Now let’s assume the two of you clicked, and you hook up for dinner. The check comes, you whip out your Amex card, and your date insists on splitting the damage. What’s that all about? Does she really want to go Dutch—perhaps out of some women’s lib and gender equality mindset, or because she doesn’t want to feel “bought” or as if she owed anything in return; sentiments to be respected, for sure—or does she subscribe to the thesis that a “real man” would never allow a woman to pay for her own food no matter how vociferously she insisted to do so, i.e., your masculinity is being subjected to its acid test?

Once again, you must decide between (a) taking her literally and (b) interpreting her words and behavior, and choosing wrong will likely spell trouble.

Personally, I haven’t been to any dating sites of late, although about ten years ago, I decided to take eHarmony.com’s widely advertised and comprehensive (and free) online personality test, as personality questionnaires are always fun to fill out. Took me about an hour to complete the dopey quiz, giving all sorts of information about my hobbies and habits and religious views and all manner of likes and preferences down to my favorite types of candy bars. The results came back that I was, and I quote, “unmatchable,” and I was politely informed that in case I had already paid for an eHarmony.com membership (which I had not), I was eligible for a full refund. So that was that.

These days, my scanning is confined to the Help Wanted sections. Trouble is, nobody’s looking for me there, either. Or at least those employers who might be looking for someone with roughly my peculiar and paltry skill set—in spite of my precocious talent for detecting nuance in the wording of homework assignments in grammar school, I never attended law school—don’t seem to post Help Wanted ads, the upshot being that I regularly respond to ads for jobs the stated qualifications for which I clearly do not possess, certainly not according to the text of those ads.

As a result, every time I shoot off a résumé, I am mindful that the recipient may get the impression that aside from my being utterly unqualified for the position, I’m not even bright enough to understand a simple ad.

In my defense, the only meaningful gig I ever landed off Craigslist was an entirely different one from the one advertised: some editor in chief who had been looking for administrative assistant got such a kick out of my cover letter that she changed her mind about hiring an assistant and instead enlisted me as a freelance writer, which took some writing load off her own shoulders and freed up time for her to assist herself in administrative matters for the duration of my association with her magazine.

Moreover, if an ad says, for instance, “B.A. required,” this may be less of an actual requirement for landing the job than an attempt to reduce the flood of applications from high-school dropouts who are blissfully unaware that words like ur and b4 actually have long forms—you’re and before respectively—and that Caesar had been a Roman general before he became a salad.

Speaking of salads, I know this from my waitering days: unless an establishment puts “minimum 5 years fine dining experience” in their ad, the place will likely get mobbed with applicants unable to carry two empty plates from A to B without the sound of shattering ceramic filling the air less than five steps into their trip, and who will burst into giggling fits when asked what “86″ means, apparently thinking this crypic number might refer to an advanced variation of the 69 position. But if the ad calls for a somewhat exaggerated set of qualifications, the percentage of borderline qualified applicants with any relevant skills or experience at all will be much higher.

All of this, of course, poses quite a challenge when it comes to ascertaining the true and full meaning of seemingly plain and simple language and calculating the degree of expected or permissible latitude of interpretation below or beyond which one is apt to draw fire or ridicule, either for having intentionally disregarded its overt content, or for boasting limited intelligence in the comprehension department.

Fact is, sometimes people mean what they say, and sometimes they don’t.

If we “interpret” their words, we risk censure for poor listening or comprehension skills.

If we take them literally, we risk coming across as attention-seeking smarty pants, or we may be charged with malicious compliance. Or we might miss out on valuable opportunities.

When attempting to read people’s minds between the lines, being aware of not knowing what we don’t know complicates matters tremendously.

Child. Ball. Street. Car.

Go figure it out.

This line, which I’ve circled in red, on one of Twitter’s dropdown menus has been confounding me for some time now.

How exactly is one supposed to add someone from a list?

How about subtracting operating expenses to total revenue? Ever heard of limpet mines attaching from the hull of a ship?

Assuming, on the other hand, the “from” does not go with the “add,” the sentence means “Add lists or remove from lists,” a non sequitur of sorts.

Or the “add” might just sit there in the altogether, logically detached from what follows: you can either add (random numbers in your head or butter to your cake mix), or you can remove someone from your lists—an even bigger non sequitur.

And what’s up with the suspension points as if the invitation to add or remove were the teaser blurb on the dust jacket of a mystery novel?

I suppose the dot-dot-dot indicates that, in addition to giving us the option to add or remove, clicking on the instruction will also present us with an option to create lists. But instead of the dopey dots, why not simply say “Add, create, or remove from lists.” We’re already in preposition mayhem anyway, so what’s the difference? If you can add something from a list, you might as well be able to create something from a list, as God created Eve from one of Adam’s ribs.

And yes, I’m stuck on and obsessed with Lindsey Vonn.

But neither am I “obsessed and stuck on” Lindsey Vonn, nor am I “stuck and obsessed with” Lindsey Vonn. (I wish I were stuck with her, as in a hotel room or an elevator.)

I am stuck on and obsessed with Lindsey Vonn.

Some time ago, the World Health Organization declared smoking to be the “number one cause of death and disability in the world.”

Now, whether the pitiful habit of sucking on a smoldering paper cylinder filled with chopped tobacco leaves and blowing noxious fumes through the landscape indeed resides at the very top of the Grim Reaper’s to-do list, or whether, in reality, it clocks in as item number three or five, is irrelevant.

Fact is, smoking does people in by the truckloads every day and causes unspeakable suffering in the often protracted runup to the terminal gate, not only for the patients themselves, but also to their friends and family members, who have unwittingly been given front row seats to witnessing the tragedy up close and personal in addition to being treated to a load of second-hand tar in their own respiratory tracts.

So what’s going on in the minds of people that smoke? Have they plunged into the throes of an addiction so insidious that their thinking caps have been incinerated beyond repair? And what exactly were those thinking caps doing in the process leading up to the rubicon?

Hard to imagine that only a handful of cigarettes—perhaps consumed for the purpose of sating some youthful curiosity about what smoking tastes and feels like or to guard against the future admonition “If you’ve never tried it, don’t judge it”—could have sufficed to impair a individual’s capacity to reason so severely as to induce him or her to actually adopt smoking as a habit, including the whole slew of imbecilic excuses commonly offered in the way of justifying it.

Like many others, the phenomenon of smoking once again proves the human brain’s spectacular knack for compartmentalization, i.e., for functioning splendidly in some areas while being hopelessly out to lunch in others, e.g., a NASA engineer lighting up at his design table, or Keith Richards with a cancer stick dangling from the corner of his mouth while knocking out nifty licks on his guitar.

Ever seen a smoker point at a passing car for the purpose of arguing, with a serious mien bordering on the comical, that our environment is toxic anyway, so what difference does it make if we smoke or not? Some of these people’s fogged-up brains can’t even grasp the simple concept of risk-compounding anymore. (Obviously, the more our environment is polluted through circumstances beyond our control, the more crucial it becomes to cut back on hazards within our circle of influence.)

Goes to show that smoke and logic don’t mix.

A former restaurant co-worker of mine once openly chastised me for being “rude” and “arrogant” because I would frequently skip the common “hello and how are you” routine and confine my personal interactions to work-related matters for the first hour or two of my shift. And then—guess what?—at the end of the night, this woman habitually plunked herself down at the bar, scanned the room to make sure all customers had left so she could now safely light up, and, with nonchalant unconcern for me or anyone else present who might object to performing our closing chores in a poisonous fog, she whipped the Camels and a lighter out of her apron, being either ignorant or deliberately dismissive of the fact that the anti-smoking laws had been passed not primarily to protect customers but to protect co-workers. The blinkered insolence of her behavior, of course, paled in comparison to mine. Say whatever you will about my laconic airs, but they ain’t carcinogenic.

Goes to show that smoke and consideration for others don’t mix, either.

The recklessness and indifference on display by smokers toward our world and society at large, in tandem with their reflexive tendency to plead innocent on these scores, boggles the mind:

Every time a person purchases a pack of smokes, he or she actively and knowingly supports, if not the, then at least one of the top causes of death and disability in the world—a cause of misery and suffering on par with, perhaps exceeding, the total death and injury wrought by all world wars and the world’s terrorist organizations combined. The exact extent of the damage may be difficult to calculate and hence debatable. There is no doubt, however, that the toll of tobacco consumption on humanity has been, and continues to be, horrific, and horrific at a level where haggling over the precise casualty figures makes no meaningful difference anymore.

I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to be friends with a person who sends regular checks to Al Qaeda in order to subsidize more bombings leading to more injury and death. So why would I want to be friends with a person selfish and reckless enough to actively aid and abet an even bigger source of injury and death, and who does so for the sole sake of satisfying a personal craving, and a pretty ridiculous one at that?

So there you have a seemingly nice and loving and funny and intelligent individual, who then turns around, walks into a store, takes out her purse, and blithely subsidizes one of the top causes of death in the world as if she were guilty of nothing more egregious than taking a pair of pants out of her closet. I look at such people, and my jaw just drops. I mean, creepy doesn’t even begin to describe them.

Of course, smokers will defend their practice of funding death by arguing that there allegedly exists one momentous and dispositive difference between funding death via knowingly subsidizing a terrorist organization and funding death via knowingly subsidizing the tobacco industry: namely that people who smoke only do damage to themselves and do so by choice, whereas in the former case, death and injury is inflicted upon innocent bystanders who didn’t ask for it. So they’ll turn it into a personal freedom issue.

Well, that’s a doozy of an argument. Once again, it demonstrates how reality-impaired smokers’ minds truly are when it comes to to viewing their habit in a light tinged with anything resembling rationality. This, most likely, can be chalked off as a side effect of smoke having risen to their heads and crippling neural connections necessary for discerning analysis. (To be fair, we must acknowledge that smokers are terrified of rationality when it comes to assessing their habit; after all, being rational about it can lead to one—and only one—conclusion, to wit that they must quit ASAP; but then, alas, they’d be deprived of their fix. Needless to say, all junkies go nuts at the prospect of losing out their fix, prompting them to come up with the most preposterous rationalizations to continue.)

First of all, why do most dopey youngsters start smoking to begin with? Obviously, because they’ve seen adults do it, and they want to act like grownups. So this obtunded argument that smoking only affects “oneself” flies out the window right there. Unless you live on a deserted island by yourself or with your puff buddies—as I wish all smokers would—whether you like it or not, you serve as an example for children and teenagers, some of whom will model their habits after yours. And if they see you purchase cigarettes and walk around fuming like the Marlboro Man, they’ll go, “Ah, that’s cool, that’s what I’ll do, and then I’ll be an adult, too.”

Therefore, the act of smoking itself invariably perpetuates this deadly habit (a) by subsidizing the industry and (b) by serving as an example to kids and adolescents and inducing them to follow suit.

Second, many kids grow up with parents who smoke, and that’s really taking the cake as far as parental irresponsibility. A parent’s example function aside, if the kid has any genetic proclivity toward cancer, emphysema, or any other medical condition commonly associated with smoking—and there’s no way to know whether he does or not—he may already be on course for an early death by the time he leaves home, simply on account of all the second-hand smoke inadvertently inhaled during his formative years, even if he’ll never light up himself; not to mention a potential genetic proclivity for nicotine addiction, in which case he might be a full-fledged addict by age 12, simply from breathing the air in the house.

Third, in any country with a socialized or partially socialized health care system, society at large is paying for everyone’s medical bills. So that’s another nail in the benighted argument that wrecking our bodies is no one business but our own.

Lastly, and this never ceases to amaze me, many people consider themselves loving and caring, yet they engage in self-destructive habits, usually justified by some sort of flapdoodly philosophy along the lines of it being much better to live a shorter life and enjoy it rather than a long and boring one, manifestly oblivious to, or otherwise not caring one whit about, knowingly increasing the likelihood that one day their so-called loved ones will have to bear witness to their premature physical deterioration, illness, and death, brought on or accelerated by their lifestyle choices, a painful process that can last years—how loving and caring and non-reckless is it to up the chances for putting those close to you through such an experience?

Obviously, there are no guarantees in life, and sickness can strike at any time no matter how well we take care of ourselves. But this in no way absolves us of our responsibility to take into account the odds in favor of certain outcomes and refrain from behaviors most likely to secure disastrous ones, at least assuming we wish to pass the laugh test when insisting we truly care about those around us, a test we’ll flunk badly if we simultaneously take active steps towards inflicting upon them the potentially avoidable agony of having to see us bedridden with an oxygen tube up our noses one day.

Confusing odds with outliers by invoking the chain-smoking grandfather who died in a rock-climbing accident at age 98 versus the health nut who succumbed to a stroke at 35, once again, suggests a mind whose capacity to reason has gone up in smoke.

What goes for smoking, of course, also applies to other deplorable practices, such as the consumption of alcoholic beverages—perhaps with the exception of the occasional glass of wine—and recreational drugs of any kind.

I can only speak for myself, and I’ll try to put this as diplomatically as I can, accompanied by as tolerant an attitude as I can effect, but folks who are either “buzzed” or trippin’ or who’ve got smoke coming out of their ears simply aren’t my favorite kind to associate with on a personal level.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Light up your face with gladness,
Hide every trace of sadness,
Although a tear may be ever so near.
That’s the time you must keep on trying,
Smile, what’s the use of crying?
You’ll find that life is still worthwhile
If you just smile …

A little girl accidentally breaks an arm off her doll and starts crying. You say to her, “Don’t be sad. We’ll fix it. Come on. Smile.”

Nothing wrong with offering assistance to reattach the broken limb.

Plenty wrong with telling the little girl how to feel.

See, children identify very strongly with their emotions. From their perspective, they are whatever they feel in the moment. So if you, even in as ostensibly benign a manner as can be, command them to feel differently from the way they do, what they’ll invariably hear is, “I don’t like you the way you are.” That, of course, is one among many powerful ways to instill neuroses in a child; specifically, to lay the groundwork for a life-long quest for validation by others, including the whole ragbag of personal insecurities that commonly attend such a quest.

So if your paramount objective in life is to find unconditional love and acceptance, chances are you were told to stop crying one too many times.

Unsurprisingly, the psychological term of art for instructing others on how they’re supposed to feel is invalidation. A person will perceive him- or herself as having been invalidated when informed that how they feel—i.e., who they are—is not being appreciated; that their present emotion—i.e., they—ought to be discarded and replaced.

Charlie Chaplin inadvertently composed the unofficial Hymn of Invalidation: Smile, though your heart is aching / Smile, even though it’s breaking / … (In fairness, Mr Chaplin is innocent of the lyrics, lovely as those lyrics may seem until you consider the troublesome thesis they advance.)

And by no means does this concept apply to children only; for what are adults but big infants with an advanced capacity for behavior modification, i.e., for bottling things up and pretending?

Sure, as adults we may conclude intellectually that how we feel in the moment isn’t “who we are” and that being told to smile doesn’t necessarily amount to a wholesale rejection of our entire being. However, our neurological hard-wiring rarely conforms to our rational understanding of the world. Upon introspection, most of us will probably find that our internal response patterns to external stimuli, e.g., to treatment by others, have remained fairly unchanged relative to when we were five years old.

So even as grown-ups, for all practical purposes, our emotions and beliefs—more often than not, our beliefs are but extensions of our emotions anyway, rendering the distinction largely irrelevant in this context—comprise a significant part of our identity, which is why we generally don’t take too kindly to being told to “calm down” or “relax” or “be happy” or the like; for, once again, the message that comes through loud and clear is “I don’t like you the way you are,” and this harks right back to our childhood trauma of feeling unwanted in consequence of experiencing emotions our parental units disapproved of.

The broadside on people’s self-esteem aside, this irritating habit of issuing guidelines regarding acceptable vs. unacceptable emotions bespeaks an eagerness on the part of the issuer to control his or her environment, and this, in turn, suggests a diminished ability to cope with his or her own emotions, manifesting as a desire to regulate other people’s.

Needless to say, a person telling someone else how to feel (or how not to feel) will assert it’s all for the good of the person experiencing the offending emotion. Fiddlesticks. In reality, it’s all for the good of the individual that can’t deal with observing that emotion in the other person. The little girl can handle her sadness over her doll’s broken arm just fine. It’s the parent that can’t handle watching his daughter cry and hence attempts to manipulate the girl’s state to secure his own comfort.

That said, there are situations where controlling someone else’s emotions is called for, such as when a reasonable concern exists that a person’s emotional state might spin so out of control as to potentially pose a clear and present danger to himself or others, either by setting off a medical episode of some sort, damaging property, or physically assaulting somebody; or in a work environment where showcasing certain emotions might alienate clients and negatively affect the bottom line: if you walk around bawling while working at Disneyworld, your supervisor has a point when he asks you to cut the waterworks and cheer up—it’s part of the job description.

Whatever the circumstances, telling others how to feel is an extremely controlling behavior. Nonetheless, even far afield from professional or “clear and present danger” scenarios, exhibitors of this behavior will often insist they’re not being controlling when delivering peremptory directives along the lines of “calm down” or “cheer up” under the gauzy pretext of caring about and wanting to help the other person overcome a painful emotional state.

If the objective truly were to help to the other person—rather than to make yourself feel better by molding your environment so as to reflect your own comfort zone—accepting any emotion on display and trying to understand its provenance would go a much longer way toward being of genuine service in terms of unearthing possible demons that may impair a person’s quality of life in some way, as opposed to waxing dictatorial in hopes that clipping off the tip of the iceberg by fiat will make the iceberg go away.

In the latter case, to remain in the realm of metaphor, all you’re doing is trying to incapacitate the regulator valve in a pressure cooker, which might not be the best strategy for preventing it from blowing up at some point.

On a related note, there’s no such thing as a “small deal.”

There are only clues.

If the doctor gave you six months to live, it could be worse: he could have given you three months to live.

If you lost a leg, it could be worse: you could have lost both legs.

If you lost both legs, it could be worse: you could have lost both legs and an arm.

If you lost both legs and an arm, it could be worse: you could have lost both legs and both arms.

If you owed $1 million, it could be worse: you could be $2 million in the red.

If you’re depressed about your age, it could be worse: you could be much, much older.

Whatever you personal situation, it could always be worse. You could be bleeding to death behind enemy lines on an Afghan battle field. You could be paralyzed from the neck down after a televised powerbocks stunt gone awry.

The year could be 1943, and you could be an emaciated inmate at Auschwitz, having pain threshold experimentation performed upon you twenty hours a day, seven days a week.

At all times, there exists exactly one person on earth to whom the threadbare truism “it could be worse” doesn’t apply, namely the unfortunate individual who’s worse off than anybody else on the planet; and even then—who knows?—there might still be room for deterioration.

Thus, if you have a roof over your head, a portly log in the fireplace (plus a spare), are reasonably well-nourished and in possession of four functional limbs, and, being in such privileged trim, voice a grievance of any kind, then, as night follows sunset, you’ll be diagnosed with a condition of diminished enlightenment for seemingly failing to realize that, well, it could be worse.

In other words, that you really have nothing to complain about.

Now imagine your circumstances to be exactly the same—i.e., you have a roof, logs for your fireplace, bread and milk in your pantry, two arms and two legs that you can move, etc.—except everyone else in the world is still better off than yourself. So in spite of your blessed situation, everyone else is younger, fitter, and richer than you, with bigger roofs over their heads and twice the number of logs for their fireplaces. There are no poor, no sick, no hungry, and no downtrodden.

Now how are you supposed to feel about your situation?

Because as per the comparison rationale—which commands that you use others as a point of reference for assessing your personal level of contentment—you now should consider yourself less blessed and fortunate than before, even though your circumstances are identical.

So the question is this:

How would you grade your life situation if you weren’t privy to anyone else’s? How would you feel about yourself if you couldn’t point to other people in much direr straits than yourself and feel grateful for being better off?

Sure, on the one hand, we don’t want to plunge into a funk over a bad hair day, knowing that someone else has just lost his face and arms in a grizzly bear attack.

On the other hand, if someone asks us how we’re doing, it seems a bit odd to reply, “Hang on. First let me find out how everyone else is doing, and then I’ll know how I feel today.”

As mentioned above, the law of relativity works in both directions. If we feel better because there exist others who are worse off than we are, we must also feel worse knowing there are others who are better off.

Ergo, once we employ relativity as our guide, assessing our own degree of happiness gets a bit complicated, as we must make adjustments from both ends.

In principle, considering ourselves blessed because other people live in misery is no different than feeling depressed because our neighbor has a bigger car. In both cases, we allow our own internal state to be dictated from the outside. And once we keep feeling exactly how we’re supposed to feel relative to the world around us, the question arises whether we actually know how we feel about ourselves and our lives.

Yes. It could be worse.

It could always be worse.

We all know it.

So let’s bury the phrase, unless we really want to insult the intelligence and annoy the heck out of whomever we wish to cheer up with it.

No analogy is perfect. On some level, all comparisons are invalid.

In fact, it is precisely the dis-similarities that make a comparison a comparison as opposed to the thing itself. Every situation, every circumstance, and every phenomenon resembles only itself in all aspects, yet comparing a thing to itself holds no explanatory value—their explanatory value, of course, being the reason for resorting to analogies and comparisons in the first place.

Is it valid to compare an ant to a whale or a pickpocket to a serial killer?

Depends on the point you’re trying to make.

Ants compare to whales just fine in that both have eyes in their heads and both have been the subject of intense scientific study. They certainly do not compare in size (although relative to the size of, say, our galaxy, they sort of do) or habitat (except that both reside on planet Earth).

And while a pickpocket and a serial killer hardly compare in terms of the heinousness of their acts (unless the former keeps filching people’s life-saving medicine money), they do compare in the sense that both are criminals with a constitutional right to a fair trial by a jury of their peers.

So before we flip our lids because somebody compared a small-time crook to a mass murderer, we should at least extend the comparer the courtesy of attempting to comprehend exactly what aspect of the two he was comparing and assess whether the comparison might be a valid one with respect to that very aspect, not simply assume he meant to say that pick-pocketing was on par with killing people or that any minor-league purse snatcher ought to be executed like Ted Bundy.

In his poem “Very Like a Whale,” Ogden Nash whales on the practice of drawing comparisons, as he takes tongue-and-cheek umbrage at Lord Byron’s analogizing an Assyrian attack on the Hebrews to a wolf coming down on a fold of sheep:

Authors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutons or Celts,

Can’t seem just to say that anything is the thing it is but have to go out of their way to say that it is like something else.

[...]

No, no, Lord Byron, before I’ll believe that this Assyrian was actually like a wolf I must have some kind of proof;

Did he run on all fours and did he have a hairy tail and a big red mouth and big white teeth and did he say Woof woof woof?

Frankly I think it very unlikely, and all you were entitled to say, at the very most,

Was that the Assyrian cohorts came down like a lot of Assyrian cohorts about to destroy the Hebrew host.

But that wasn’t fancy enough for Lord Byron, oh dear me no, he had to invent a lot of figures of speech and then interpolate them.

With the result that whenever you mention Old Testament soldiers to people they say Oh yes, they’re the ones that a lot of wolves dressed up in gold and purple ate them.

[...]

Of course, to say that those Assyrian cohorts came down on the Hebrews like a bunch of Assyrian cohorts coming down on a bunch of Hebrews would have shed no informative light on the nature of this attack for those unfamiliar with the event; therefore, the comparison with wolves coming down on a fold of sheep was called into service. But since, by definition, the thing invoked to serve as a comparison features but a limited number of characteristics—perhaps only one—also found in the thing to be elucidated via such rhetorical juxtaposition, in the absence of having those characteristics spelled out specifically, a modicum of discernment is required on the part of the listener to figure out what exactly is being compared, which is usually but a narrow slice of the whole caboodle: just because the Assyrians came charging down the hill “like wolves” doesn’t necessarily mean they were running on all fours saying “Woof, woof, woof.” Most likely, a different lupine characteristic was meant.

Likewise, even though a person or organization may not be in the process of orchestrating a genocide and a world war doesn’t mean they aren’t “like the Nazis” in that they might, for instance, be striving to silence their opposition and using Nazi propaganda tactics to disseminate their message.

To intentionally and demonstratively misunderstand the nature of a comparison offered by a disliked party so as to lambaste that party for having made a preposterous comparison is an extremely popular propaganda tactic in its own right, as is the practice of deliberately drawing inflammatory comparisons where less provocative ones would have sufficed, in full anticipation of misconstruction by one’s detractors, thus providing an opportunity to assail those detractors for reckless inattention to nuance in order to score cheap points with their adherents.

Our brains work by association to a fairly alarming degree, and thus one of the paramount goals of propaganda is to establish mental associations between unrelated or scarcely related phenomena. In what way might the half-naked lady be related to the Ferrari in the car commercial, and if in no obvious way at all, why might she be sprawling on the hood? She’s there, of course, to establish an association. In essence, that’s the same technique employed in old Third Reich propaganda footage of rats overdubbed with disparaging comments about disfavored ethnicities; or in more recent U.S. news footage of the burning twin towers overdubbed with unrelated blather about Iraq’s supposed WMDs, an ingenious combination of ad copy and visuals that appeared to have resulted in a stunningly large percentage of the U.S. population believing that Saddam Hussein had been behind 9/11, without any U.S. official ever having articulated such connection.

Therefore, mentioning two people or entities in the same breath, even if only for the purpose of comparing one isolated aspect between the two, invariably sends the subliminal message that they are fundamentally related, even though the comparison’s wording may draw no such full-scale equivalency. Yet a potentially lingering association between two only tenuously related things has now been established.

Some years ago, PETA released an ad featuring a picture of a chained animal leg next to a picture of the chained leg of a black person, the obvious message having been that slavery was slavery and suffering was suffering, irrespective of the group or species affected. Predictably, many African-Americans became outraged at PETA for “comparing black people to animals.” Of course, black people are the ones with a recent history of having been treated like animals, so the comparison was accurate. Moreover, animals compare to humans (black, white, or otherwise) in myriad ways, the capacity to experience pain being but one. Just because animals don’t compare to people in every respect doesn’t mean they don’t compare to people in any respect. (Ironically, Abraham Lincoln once made a similar comment about blacks relative to whites, namely that the two groups didn’t compare wholesale but did compare in some respects, such as the right to freedom and to enjoy the fruits of their labors—still a frightfully backwoods attitude to espouse by modern standards, but a highly advanced and progressive one at the time. And a pretty clever one at that.)

Obviously, PETA’s aim wasn’t to reduce black people to animals, but rather to elevate animals into the human realm, at least when it came to experiencing agony. In this spirit—and speaking of whales—PETA recently filed a law suit against SeaWorld for violating the 13th Amendment rights (ban of slavery and involuntary servitude) of killer whales by forcing the captured cetaceans to entertain the crowds. So PETA went one step further, not only comparing black people to animals but to killer animals, which, once again, was bound to draw a heap of flak from African-American activists worried about the wrong mental associations being established by said comparison, valid as it may be when properly understood.

Trouble is, of course, one can’t really rely on anything to be properly understood, especially when emotionally charged subject matters are called upon for the purpose of making a point, a practice inherently liable to sowing confusion as to the comparer’s true motives and prompting charges of gratuitous provocation.

In short, compare with caution.

The pride of states, as well as of men, naturally disposes them to justify all their actions, and opposes their acknowledging, correcting, or repairing their errors and offenses. (John Jay, Federalist No. 3)

The ability to vanquish one’s pride and fess up to one’s mistakes sounds like a commendable quality, and usually it is.

Some people’s willingness to concede their errors in judgment, however, appears to be confined to one particular class of faux pas, the admission of which offers more of an opportunity to brag and gloat than to exercise genuine humility.

Granted, I’m not familiar enough with Keith Olbermann’s blunder acknowledgment patterns to charge him with possession of a limited range when it comes to admitting his lapses, but his most recent display of contrition regarding his pink slip from Current TV presents a perfect example of precisely the kind of mistake that doesn’t require much pride-swallowing to own up to:

I screwed up really big on this. Let’s just start there. I thought we could do this. It’s my fault that it didn’t succeed in the sense that I didn’t think the whole thing through. I didn’t say, ‘You know, if you buy a ten-million-dollar chandelier, you should have a house to put it in. Just walking around with a ten-million-dollar chandelier isn’t gonna do anybody a lot of good, and it isn’t gonna do any good to the chandelier.’

So according to Mr Olbermann, his big screw-up consisted in having injudiciously elected to put himself into in an environment that would make for an intolerable mismatch of excellence between himself and the bungling schlubs that comprised it.

Of course, it is quite possible to overestimate other people’s aptitudes and, in consequence, be hobbled in one’s efforts to attain goals and maintain quality standards that depend on the competent cooperation from others. Anytime this happens, a mistake has been made, and admitting it amounts to a simple statement of fact, not necessarily an act of braggadocio.

At first blush, an individual may indeed appear admirably mindful of his personal imperfections as he launches into rhetorical walks to Canossa that would rival the self-flagellation sessions of Silas the albino from The DaVinci Code, openly confessing to his foolhardy choices in an oh-what-a-work-of-progress-I-still-am kind of way.

Yet upon close examination of the nature of these foolhardy choices acknowledged in so ostensibly self-deprecating a manner, it may turn out that, in one way or another, they all concern instances of having failed to anticipate the shortcomings of other people relative to his own brilliance, as if to say, “I terribly messed up, for I simply didn’t foresee how everyone else wouldn’t be able to function at my own level of magnificence.”

So the only real failing such an individual ever admits to is his propensity to put faith in others who subsequently prove incapable or “not ready” to keep up, or otherwise unworthy of the trust placed in them.

While, at times, such an assessment may be right on the nose, as some folks certainly do function at a higher level than others, either in isolated areas or even across the board, it invariably comes across as a show of self-satisfied—almost gleeful—bravado rather than a humble acknowledgment of having erred.

Far be it from me to advocate unwarranted modesty, but if the only thing a person ever seems to blame him- or herself for is that they should have known better than to expect too much of other people, we’re either dealing with a very honest and more highly evolved specimen of human than commonly encountered, or someone who perpetually seeks to self-aggrandize behind a smoke-screen of pretend repentance.

The pride of men naturally opposes their acknowledging their errors and offenses.

Except for the kind of error whose acknowledgment aids in conveying an air of superiority.

Just because, on balance, I spend more time defending Fox News against half-witted broadsides by those whose analysis of the network does not appear to extend much beyond regurgitating catchphrases picked right off the Fox-bashing grapevine—i.e., who have fallen for the very type of propaganda they profess to denounce (“The Fox News Paradox“)—than I spend joining in the criticism myself, does not mean that nothing which emanates from “the most powerful name in news” ever gives me pause.

Case in point, during a news conference on Monday, President Obama said this regarding the specter of “Obamacare” being struck down by the Supreme Court in Department of Health and Human Services v. Florida:

Ultimately, I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress. And I’d just remind conservative commentators that for years what we’ve heard is the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint, that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.

Sure, one could quibble about whether a majority of 279 affirmative votes out of a total of 530 really qualifies as a “strong majority” as opposed to a “narrow squeak.” And—given that since Marbury v. Madison, the number of duly passed federal laws overturned, either in whole or in part, by the Supreme Court hovers around 160 and counting—heaven knows what the former constitutional law professor meant by “unprecedented” and “extraordinary.” (Besides, after actively agitating in favor of and then signing into law such a, well, unprecedented and extraordinary piece of legislation as the Affordable Care Act, frowning at the prospect of another branch of government doing unprecedented and extraordinary things seems quite an unprecedented and extraordinary instance of the POTUS calling the kettle black, pardon the pun.)

But a funny thing happened to these presidential remarks on the way to Fox News, specifically to Bret Baier’s Special Report.

We all know that in order to provide fleet-footed programming so as to guard against overtaxing modern audiences’ ephemeral attention spans, editing soundbites for length is quite common in commercial television. Out of a statement of 30 seconds or more, originally delivered in a continuous manner, we’re used to being shown a sentence here and two sentences there, probably out of sequence and intercut with all manner of other information, commentary, charts, and snazzy sound effects, with the result that most news segments these days look and feel like HD versions of a typical Peter Gabriel video clip from the 1980s—remember Sledgehammer?

That said, going to the trouble of excising one paltry “that” from the middle of a sentence seems a trifle excessive even by 21st-century infotainment streamlining standards. Although, strictly speaking, it was a “that … uh,” not merely a plain “that,” that wound up on Fox’s cutting room floor, such an instance of micro-pruning can hardly be justified as “editing for time.” News networks may be under perpetual pressure to keep things moving along at a brisk clip, but no one can be in so much of a hurry as to be killing simple conjunctions for the mere sake of alacrity.

Recall that President Obama had said this:

And I’d just remind conservative commentators that for years what we’ve heard is the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint, that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.

The “that” after the word “restraint,” linking the following clause to the preceding point, signifies that, rather than Mr Obama himself ragging on Supreme Court justices for being unelected, he was taking a dig at conservative commentators for having done so on previous occasions, namely whenever legislation favored by the right was struck down by this “unelected” panel of nine.

So rather than himself knocking the members of the Supreme Court for being unelected, the president simply reminded conservatives that should Obamacare be overturned, they had better refrain from abruptly modifying their own previous characterization of the Court’s members from “unelected” to “fair, independent, and brilliant.”

In this edited Fox News version of Mr Obama’s comments, however—you can watch it here at the top left of the page, starting at time 1:16—his sentence abruptly cuts off after “restraint,” and the sound immediately picks up at “an unelected group of people…” as if this were a new thought unrelated to what came before, like this:

And I’d just remind conservative commentators that for years what we’ve heard is the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint. [CUT] An unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.

One quite clearly notices the cut, and even in the absence of an audible pause it is obvious that something is missing after “restraint.”

Subconsciously, when we can hear that a cut has been made, we expect that more than just one little conjunction has intervened (otherwise, why bother making a cut in the first place?), probably more like at least a whole sentence, or even several sentences or paragraphs. Enough, in this case, to obtain the misleading impression that the president had reminded conservative commentators of their own condemnations of judicial activism, then made some other point, and then taken a personal swipe at Supreme Court justices for being “unelected.”

The sudden visual change from footage of the president speaking at his news conference to footage of the Supreme Court building right after the word “restraint” underscores the deceptive impression that two separate thoughts were expressed.

In fact, the only way to accuse Obama of having attacked the Supreme Court for being “unelected”—consider recent headlines such as “Republicans slam Obama over warning to ‘unelected’ Supreme Court” or “Obama Accuses Supreme Court of Judicial Activism”—is to view his “unelected” comment as entirely distinct from his preceding admonition directed at conservatives for having disparaged Court decisions in the past on account of its members having been unelected.

Am I’m making too big a deal out one missing conjunction?

Well, it is precisely the subtlety of this cut twinned with its seemingly deliberate and pre-meditated execution that worries me.

Fact is, the “that” didn’t just vanish by itself. Some director or producer at Fox News must have instructed an editor to kill the “that … uh”—a time saving of all but two seconds, which can’t possibly have warranted the trouble of performing the surgery—, then splice the now split sentence back together and change the visual at the exact moment of the splice.

It just seems like a heck of a lot of extra effort compared to simply leaving the sentence intact as it was spoken—why cut it in half and ditch one word in the middle?

Other than for the purpose of ginning up some justification for attacking the president over something he hadn’t quite said the way it was presented, can you think of an alternative theory as to why the “that” may have gone MIA? Could this have been just an innocent and inadvertent technical gaffe?

You could argue that if Fox’s intent had indeed been to sell the president’s sentence as two distinct thoughts unrelated to one another, why not simply cut the sentence in half, as they did, and then air the two halves separately, i.e., with some other commentary inserted in between, rather than play it in one truncated chunk?

Frankly, I’m a bit puzzled by this missing “that.”

The infamous Sedition Act of 1798 criminalized “false, scandalous, and malicious” writing against the government and certain government officials. Critics of this law pointed to its apparent conflict with the First Amendment, which sets forth that Congress shall “make no law abridging the freedom of speech.” 

Proponents of the Sedition Act argued that no such freedom was abridged, as no one was prevented from disseminating any writings against the government, no matter how scandalous or malicious, as the Act provided for no prior restraint, only for subsequent punishment: everyone was perfectly “free” to sound off as they pleased and suffer the consequences should their comments be deemed in violation of the Sedition Act.  

These days, we’re witnessing a rerun of the debate over the nature of compulsion, as proponents of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) keep insisting that charging a penalty for the refusal to purchase health insurance does not amount to compelling people to buy insurance.

In the words of one Obamacare spokesperson, “It imposes a penalty, and a penalty is different from forcing people to buy.” That’s because, I suppose, everybody is perfectly free to skip purchasing insurance and pay the penalty instead. (Upon being asked what might happen if a particularly refractory individual then refused to pay the penalty, another Obamacare advocate put forth that in such an event the troublemaker would continue to be “reminded” to pay it, but stopped short of elaborating on the precise nature of these “reminders.”)

As per this curious thesis, the prospect of suffering sanctions for a particular behavior does not constitute a restriction of the freedom to engage in it: as long as people have a choice between either (a) complying or (b) not complying and getting paddled for insubordination, no compelling is going on.

But what is the hallmark of being compelled—rather than merely advised or encouraged—to behave a certain way other than the expectation of undesirable repercussions for not behaving this way? What exactly does it mean to receive an order as opposed to, say, an invitation or a suggestion?

According to the dictionary, an order is a “command, direction, or instruction, usually backed by authority.”

In essence, an order is the act of communicating a behavioral preference the non-compliance with which will entail unpleasant consequences for the recipient of such communication, i.e., result in punishment: some authority figure lets us know how he or she would like us to behave, and if we refuse to “cooperate,” some form of pain will descend upon us, e.g., a grounding, a beating, a fine, imprisonment, perk withdrawal, or employment termination, to name but a few classic examples.

“Pain” refers to anything we perceive as unpleasant or uncomfortable and would thus prefer to avoid, and “punishment” is the kind of pain associated with insubordination.

Anyone in a position to inflict pain upon us if we don’t yield to his or her desires has authority over us. Rather than an innate personality trait divorced from external circumstances, authority is a fluctuating phenomenon that emerges from a given situation. If I let the Emperor of China stay at my house and he ignores my rules of conduct, I can inflict pain upon him, i.e., I can throw him out. The reverse, of course, applies the moment I set foot into China. Whoever happens to be in a position to levy discomfort upon someone that defies their druthers has authority over that person.

Government implies the power of making laws. It is essential to the idea of a law, that it be attended with a sanction; or, in other words, a penalty or punishment for disobedience. If there be no penalty annexed to disobedience, the resolutions or commands which pretend to be laws will, in fact, amount to nothing more than advice or recommendation. Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 15

Whether or not we’ve received an order is entirely a function of the potential for unpleasant (= painful) consequences our disobedience will bring about, not a function of the intent of the issuing party, nor of the manner of delivery. Individuals that have no authority over us (i.e., who are in no position to levy sanctions and discomfort upon us in case of our non-compliance) can bark what they consider “orders” at us all day long, but if no pain attends our refusal to play ball, these aren’t orders.

However, if people begin to annoy us (= cause us pain) by persistently attempting to mold our behavior to their liking, and compliance seems to be the only way to shut them up (= bring relief, as opposed to more pain in consequence of our ongoing failure to comply), then their instructions are, in fact, orders.

On the other hand, many orders that don’t walk and quack like orders—i.e., that aren’t phrased as sentences ending in exclamation points (“Jump in the lake!”) and delivered with an imperious mien—are full-fledged injunctions nonetheless.

A former superior of mine had a habit of delivering his orders in the guise of favor requests. He would say something like, “Peter, can you do me a favor and get a haircut?” This meant I could either (a) get a haircut or (b) go look for another job. He wasn’t asking for a “favor.” He was telling me what to do, and my refusal to comply would have resulted in painful consequences for me, in this case loss of income. The fact that he spoke softly with a smile and articulated his wishes as if they were non-binding entreaties didn’t change the fact that they were orders.

If we are punished for denying someone a favor, no “favor” was asked of us. We were given an order. If your wife withholds sex because you denied her the “favor” of doing the dishes, you were ordered to do the dishes (assuming you lament rather than look forward to the carnal time-out). In principle, this is no different from ignoring an order in the military and being tossed in the brig on bread and water as a result: in both cases, someone relates to you how he or she would like you to behave, you refuse, and pain follows in direct consequence of your refusal. The precise nature and intensity of the pain do not alter this underlying principle: either you cooperate, or else.

The most insidious kinds of orders are the ones that are being sold to us as something else:

Let’s say you’re stuck in an environment where escape is difficult, such as your home or workplace, and another denizen of said environment makes a suggestion or extends to you an invitation of some sort. (Since people rarely suggest or invite unless they would prefer their suggestions and invitations to be accepted rather than rejected by the recipients, giving suggestions and extending invitations are ways of communicating desired behaviors to others.)

For whatever reason, you reject the suggestion or decline the invitation. Now the other person gets mad at you, calls you “stubborn,” testily snipes at you to “do whatever you want,” the atmosphere turns sour, and you can’t really get away, because that’s where you live or work. This, of course, is a rather painful consequence of your refusal to cooperate. You’re being, in effect, punished for not dancing to the other person’s drum. You weren’t given a suggestion or an invitation. You were given an order.

So when trying to determine whether you’ve been given an order as opposed to a genuine invitation or suggestion, simply ask yourself this:

What will happen if I don’t do what that person has communicated (in whatever manner) that he or she would like me to do?

And if you’d rather avoid that which is likely to happen if you fail to behave in accordance with that person’s wishes, you’ve been given an order.

If a policeman communicates to you that he’d like you to show him your license and registration, you’re free to either (a) comply, or (b) put up with the consequences of not complying.

If your roommate communicates to you that she’d like you to remove that ugly Schiele painting from the kitchen wall, you’re free to either (a) remove it, or (b) live in an atmosphere chilled by a woman’s scorn and having your Schiele keyed one day.

No matter how seemingly apples-and-oranges various situations appear to present themselves on the surface, at bottom the following 3-step mechanism indicates the presence of an act of external compulsion:

1. Someone lets us know how he/she/they would like us to behave
2. We refuse
3. Our refusal results in pain

Anytime pain avoidance figures as our sole motivation for complying with someone else’s wishes, we’re being compelled (= ordered) to behave a certain way, whether the compelling party consents to such characterization or not.

If we don’t want to do something, and our only two options are (1) doing it or (2) getting whacked for not doing it, we are being forced to do it.

The prospect of unpleasance, of whatever kind, as the price for insubordination is the very quiddity of force, whether imposed by the sword or by gentler means.

And there’s no such thing as voluntarily purchasing insurance in order to avoid the fine for not purchasing it.