Dear Congress (re: SOPA & PIPA)

For the past two years, you Congress, our legislative body has been embroiled in a myriad of conflicts. From immigration, taxation, education, health care, Barack Obama's birth certificate, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, bin Laden allllll the way down to Barry Bonds lying in court, you have ran the gamut of brutal contention. It seems like every issue on the table is a bitter dispute between the Democrats and Republicans. Are you going to play laissez faire or overregulate? Are you going to kick the can down the road, or simply handle your business now. Are you going to act on principle, logic, and virtue or act like politicians and reneg on your promises start your re-election bid the day after Election Day spend most of your time doing meaningless bidding? You've done nothing but the latter, Congress... Which is why your ever-so-consistent stance on the Internet-killing SOPA and PIPA bills is so confounding for me.

For all of the hoopla last year regarding the debt ceiling, Occupy Wall Street, class warfare and all of those ideologically-rooted political impasses, you would think that something so universal as the Internet wouldn't be privy to your spastic rulings, Congress. When did you all come to such a consensus? What happened to the deep-seeded resentments that keep you all on different ideological planets?

I think I know: lobbyists. If one looks at the supporters of SOPA and PIPA, it's a pretty high-profile list of offenders. The major networks, the RIAA, the MPAA and any organization associated with bringing owners (not producers) of content together, are all united in their big-wig support of SOPA and PIPA. That said, it's easy to see why. They're stuck in 2001, Congress!!! Remember that period when downloading music on Napster or Limewire or Bearshare was a Cardinal Sin? I do. I remember when the music companies shuffled their feet at getting into the online sector because they thought the craze wouldn't last. Fast forward 10 years, and it's happening again: media companies stuck in antiquated ways trying to quell the burning bastion of freedom that is the Internet. And you're aiding them, Congress.

You'd rather stifle than uplift. You'd rather be stringent about 'rules' than look at the meaning behind them, and their ramifications. You'd rather cut the cord than figure out how to make a better one. How lazy is that, Congress? Consider this. If you were to pass the two bills your Internet would:

- be 10x slower depending on what service you had and what sites you're visiting
- be dominated by Facebook, NBC, CBS, ABC, Facebook, FOX, Facebook, and Facebook
- have about tenfold LESS sites
- be unable to stream movies, videos, or music unless expressly consented to by the controlling media conglomerate

In short form, the Internet would be zapped back to 1995, Congress. A few big companies would run everything and the whole idea of 'free market economics' would be null. We might as well have AOL Version 1.0 floppy disks again. If you didn't have the money to fight a SOPA or PIPA claim, your site would be off the 'net before you even knew it!

Congress, by passing these bills, you are essentially giving yourselves free reign to dictate what shouldn't be dictated. You are killing Internet innovation at the root by making it a criminal offense to do anything that remotely infringes on any sort of intellectual property. No idea is original, Congress. Lest I get into the finer aspects of intellectual property, I would say that protecting someone's work is NOT wrong. For every word that I've written on this website to be lifted and purported as someone else's would be unforgivable. At the same time, you have no right to say where personal liberty ends and protecting against piracy begins, especially when you've balked at regulating things that matter, like say, big banks, the military-industrial complex, health insurance companies, or oil conglomerates?

It's as if you want the stop the conversation, Congress. That's not democracy. For all of the talk of corporate personhood and money in politics, this is a shining example. Why listen to the people, when you can line your pockets with money from companies who'd rather protect old ways than innovate new ones? That's what politics is about nowadays, isn't it? SOPA and PIPA are just pixels in the greater picture of your failures as of late. If this is too harsh, then good. Censor me. Stifle free speech and free movement of information, so the whole world can see what 'democracy' is all about. I guarantee you'll be doing more harm than any debt crisis, terrorist threat, or education bubble will.

Dear Over-parenting Parents & Schools

via The New York Times:

Most children naturally seek close friends. In a survey of nearly 3,000 Americans ages 8 to 24 conducted last year by Harris Interactive, 94 percent said they had at least one close friend. But the classic best-friend bond — the two special pals who share secrets and exploits, who gravitate to each other on the playground and who head out the door together every day after school — signals potential trouble for school officials intent on discouraging anything that hints of exclusivity, in part because of concerns about cliques and bullying.

“I think it is kids’ preference to pair up and have that one best friend. As adults — teachers and counselors — we try to encourage them not to do that,” said Christine Laycob, director of counseling at Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School in St. Louis. “We try to talk to kids and work with them to get them to have big groups of friends and not be so possessive about friends.”

“Parents sometimes say Johnny needs that one special friend,” she continued. “We say he doesn’t need a best friend.”

That attitude is a blunt manifestation of a mind-set that has led adults to become ever more involved in children’s social lives in recent years. The days when children roamed the neighborhood and played with whomever they wanted to until the streetlights came on disappeared long ago, replaced by the scheduled play date. While in the past a social slight in backyard games rarely came to teachers’ attention the next day, today an upsetting text message from one middle school student to another is often forwarded to school administrators, who frequently feel compelled to intervene in the relationship. (Ms. Laycob was speaking in an interview after spending much of the previous day dealing with a “really awful” text message one girl had sent another.) Indeed, much of the effort to encourage children to be friends with everyone is meant to head off bullying and other extreme consequences of social exclusion.

It's a sad day and age when kids aren't allowed to just be kids. It's even sadder when adults feel the need to intervene out of some self-obligation to protect kids from bullying. I understand that bullying is an issue and that the repercussions for not attending to bullying problems can be fatal (see: Columbine). That said, trying to create an artificial 'group' of friends is downright ridiculous. Parents, while I'm no expert on child development, my childhood years are not that far behind me. I can remember having in my 10 (give or take) years of childhood 3 exclusive best friends. No, it wasn't always pretty when arguments and fights did occur, but you have to learn how to deal with it. Over-parenting parents, by making kids be friends with everyone, you're slowly yet surely weeding out discernment, among other things in a child's life. If a kid has to be friends with everyone, then he's really good friends with no one. The child gets no sense of what he does or doesn't like in a person because he's forced to like everyone. It's almost torturous to think that kids have to be nice to and play with everyone, simply because a school administrator says so. What's worse is the false sense of security that children grow up with because of such sheltering.

When I was a kid, there was freedom: freedom to make friends, freedom to stop being friends, freedom to be hurt by friends and freedom to make up the next day and go on about our days like nothing ever happened. Parents and schools who force kids to be friends with everyone, you're building up artificial security, in that these kids never will experience rejection in its most natural form. By holding the reins on organic relationships, you're allowing kids to grow up thinking everything will simply fall into place because 'that's what the teacher says'. Instead of fostering natural development, you're raising these 'bubble' kids, who have everything in their lives vacuum-packed and hermetically sealed. You don't allow them to experience pain or hurt at a young age, so when they enter the 'real' world (I don't think there will be a 'real' world in 30 years) everything is a shock to them. Kids will grow up, and at the first sign of adversity, they freak out because nothing's ever gone wrong.

That's not to say that we should toss children into the fire and see if they make it out without burns. It means they should be free to run, jump, slide, hang, fall and ride out with whomever they see fit. If the friendship doesn't work, so be it. Kids are born with two things inherently: a clean slate and natural resiliency. Hindering either of those leaves a huge void in their development, both socially and emotionally. Parents, stop trying to raise the perfect generation of kids and allow kids to be kids. We will never live in a Utopia, and sheltering the next generation won't ensure that anymore than brain-washing and full censorship. Word to Dystopian literature...

Dear Google

via The NY Times:

Google said Tuesday that it would stop cooperating with Chinese Internet censorship and consider shutting down its operations in the country altogether, citing assaults from hackers on its computer systems and China’s attempts to “limit free speech on the Web.”

The move, if followed through, would be a highly unusual rebuke of China by one of the largest and most admired technology companies, which had for years coveted China’s 300 million Web users.

Since arriving here in 2006 under an arrangement with the government that purged its Chinese search results of banned topics, Google has come under fire for abetting a system that increasingly restricts what citizens can read online.

It's always a great thing when corporate America stands up for what is right, in a humanitarian sense. Whether it's Nike NOT working Asian children to the bone, or GM trying not to kill their employees' pensions, companies that care about something other than their quarterly reports are always a good look. Google, you've always been groundbreaking in terms of human resources, and how your company was run. That's why you suspending operations is so dope. You're like the Gandhi of the internet age, refusing to eat unless everyone's search engines are treated equally.

Yeah, we know having China on your roster was a security risk because people were hacking your site to get access to it. Yeah, we know you'll probably have to let go of a hefty amount of Chinese workers. In the short run, this might hurt. But in the long run, this sends a message that no country should be able to censor its people. Information is a right everyone needs to be afforded, and China is trying to play hardball, for what reason I don't know. It's not as if the Chinese people are a downtrodden, poor population. China is actually losing out by not cooperating with you. Hopefully they know that. Lord knows no one of the 1.3 billion heads in China wants to lose all of their e-mails and contacts. That'd be the real tragedy...