There’s something very comforting about the thought of old warplanes sitting in playgrounds and fueling the imaginations of tons of little kids, as if someone had found a way to litreally turn guns into kittens and lollipops.
I really can’t afford to spend money willy-nilly, but goddamn if this doesn’t make me want to buy a gajillion buttons right the fuck now.
Clearing up some Mac mini myths. Most interesting to me are points two through four, which make the mini a much more viable platform for hobbyists and enthusiasts looking for a cheap second computer.
You may or may not have heard of America’s Army, the first-person shooter / military propaganda vehicle. As far as I can tell, it’s pretty much like all the other first-person shooters out there—you run around with a gun and shoot a bunch of people. Only instead of being backed with a decent plot and cinematics (Half-Life 2) or bathing everything in complete darkness (Doom 3), America’s Army has the official U.S. Army seal of approval.
This association with the Army leads to occasionally hilarious results, like when a couple of helicopters staged a mock attack on E3 one year. The latest salvo comes from a discussion on cheating in America’s Army’s multiplayer component:
In the early 1940s, Japan learned an important lesson—let the sleeping giant lie. We may not react swiftly, but when we do it’s with unstoppable force. The Army has partners that deal with cyber crime as a matter of course. These include not just various Army IT departments, but also the Department of Justice, the Secret Service, and the Federal Bureau of Investigations. (…) Allow me to speak directly to the bad guys for a moment: When you get banned, know that we know and have records showing you were doing something that’s a violation of terms of service, breaks your EULA, and also happens to be against the law. We know who you are, and can track down where you play from. We have incontrovertible proof you did something illegal. The Army is angry, and we’re coming for you.
Yeah, you read that right: The Army is coming for the l33t hax0r5. This I’d pay good money to see.
Department Of Failing Nations. As it turns out, social mobility in the United States may be decreasing even as income disparities become more pronounced. The Economist believes the U.S. may be the next Britain, leaving behind its meritocracy in all but name and becoming the class-stratified society the U.K. once was (and still is, in some ways).
Of course, if you’ve been paying attention at all to the U.S. in the past decade or so, you’ve already seen some of this, whether it’s the debate over legacy admissions or the attempts to repeal the estate tax (’scuse me, “DEATH TAX”). As usual, the Economist article sums it all up fairly nicely.
The idea of social mobility is intoxicating. American society, and arguably Canadian society as well, is built upon the rags-to-riches archetype. We celebrate the stories of people who’ve clawed their way to the top, and even now remember the names of people who made a fortune from nothing, as far back as Rockefeller and Carnegie. We look down upon the deadlock of class politics in Europe, point to statistics that say worker productivity is lower in places like Denmark because the lack of class mobility means people have no incentive to rise. It all goes back to a fundamental belief about the worth of human beings, that every child born into the world has no innate abilities or qualifications that puts one above another. “All men are created equal,” it says in the Declaration of Independence. The ideal that a person’s fate lies in their own hands alone is powerful, summing up entire debates on free will versus determinism, on the political and religious intolerances of imperial Britain, on life and liberty itself.
There are few arguments that stand against this most monumental of achievements, the establishment of a flawed but workable meritocracy. The only people forwarding those arguments are proponents of the way things were, and can be taken about as seriously as those who claim monarchs still rule by divine right. If nothing else, America still stands on its pedestal because it still seems like a beacon of opportunity. Everything from the Declaration of Independence to the words of Emma Lazarus, “Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” and the statue they sit under, speaks of acceptance and hope.
The promise of social mobility is part of the reason why I hesitate to move to Europe; centuries of class warfare don’t just disappear, and to live in a place where class distinctions are painfully present strikes me as uncomfortable. But as social mobility begins to sink beneath the waves even as the myth remains, things are changing. Perhaps we’re seeing a new round of class warfare; certainly the Republicans have already taken great strides in attacking the lower classes.
Social mobility, to me, is nothing less than an embodiment of hope. To snuff it out is to lose a central pillar in North American society.