"Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine." taught Jesus in the sermon on the mount. Casting pearls before swine is one of those phrases that floats around today but is seldom given the consideration it deserves. On my mission I felt like I was walking a precarious line between sharing the gospel and casting pearls before swine. But anyway I'm not writing now to talk about sharing the gospel. I've wanted to write for some time on sex, and this scripture came to mind when thinking what to write.
Sacred sexuality is one of those new-age sounding things that usually gets thrown around by those that want to talk about how great sex is. That somewhat more snide than I intended remark aside, I think sacred sexuality is entirely real. Sex is something sacred, and that's why in my life it's reserved for marriage (which is also holy). Often in Christian circles the holiness of sex is directly related to the ability to bear children, and while I think we should hold the same gravitas for the acts of creating life as we do to destroying it I don't feel that this is what makes sex something holy.
So what is it that makes sex sacred, then? The words sacred and holy both derive from the idea of setting something apart, reserving something for a higher purpose, or dedicating something to a greater cause. Sex for me is something reserved for marriage. That imbues it with the high purpose of strengthening marital bonds and by extension the family. That makes sex a way to study selflessness and caring for another (without abnegating one's own needs or desires in the process).
I own a book of erotic myths and legends and read one together with my wife the other night. The one we read was (perhaps a little bit surprisingly) rather tame with almost no mention of sex but rather an extended poetic meditation on love, longing, desire, loss, and union. Although when reading we might have been looking to partake together in something a little more saucy, I'll also say I actually really liked this little legend of a lover comforting himself that his "beloved other" was not truly lost because they had become one soul. Sex is a part of that, and that makes it sacred.
Saturday, August 24, 2013
Monday, July 15, 2013
Well behaved women seldom make history.
I've never been very fond of the slogan in this post's title, I guess because the idea of rebellion and, "behaving badly" hasn't held much appeal for me. Imagine my surprise, then, when I found the original author of the famous slogan far from intended the meaning it now holds, and may even agree with me-at least to some degree.
The phrase, "Well behaved women seldom make history," was first written my Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in a scholarly paper on Puritan funeral sermons. Being far from an academic of history myself I've not read the original paper, but after looking into things a little bit it appears that the author's intention was to point out the way these Puritan women weren't seeking fame or glory. The same paper contains the (much more poignant, in my own opinion) line, "They never asked to be remembered on Earth. And they haven't been."
From what I've found about Ulrich's career, the paper may have also served as criticism of the way history is studied. She seems to have lobbied criticism at the historical establishments and their failures to appreciate the effects and actions of the rank and file members of society. When honored as a professor at Harvard it was said
I think this is where my quarrel with the famous quote comes in; it reinforces the idea that to be great or important, to influence history, to "make a difference" one must necessarily acquire fame in the process. The first black president of the United States would not have been elected without a society that collectively let the scourge of racism whither on the vine rather than hold on to obsolete mentalities. Dr. Ulrich addresses the idea, "that 'empowered' women are by definition 'wild' women. That is a very old idea. Since antiquity, misogynists have insisted that females, being more emotional than males, are less stable, more likely to swing between extremes." She also points out that, "Marie Curie didn't win two Nobel prizes by throwing tantrums in the lab." and that Rosa Parks made history not only for her refusal to abide with the bigoted laws of her day but also because she was recognized as a hard working, upstanding, "well behaved" woman (other women had been arrested for the same thing, but unlike Rosa Parks their lifestyle choices made it too hard to build a case to fight the unjust law they were bucking).
In my younger years, probably until about my junior year of college, I enjoyed aspirations to fame and greatness. I wanted to win the Nobel for physics after making my own re-writes to the laws that govern our universe. I still wouldn't mind doing this, or any other number of fantastic ventures, but I'm also content with my current role in life, unimpressive though it may be especially when compared with the grandiose aspirations of my youth. I feel that I will have lived a life of incalculable worth and leave a powerful legacy even if no one remembers my name after 100 years as long as I continue learning and enriching my mind, be a good husband to my wife (and someday I'm sure, a good father to my children), work hard and earn money honestly, use that money wisely, and live in accordance with my values. I don't feel women should be robbed of this feeling of contentment that living an unassuming & simple but upstanding and meaningful life because they are told that they should be empowered & wild, rebellious, and "not well behaved."
The phrase, "Well behaved women seldom make history," was first written my Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in a scholarly paper on Puritan funeral sermons. Being far from an academic of history myself I've not read the original paper, but after looking into things a little bit it appears that the author's intention was to point out the way these Puritan women weren't seeking fame or glory. The same paper contains the (much more poignant, in my own opinion) line, "They never asked to be remembered on Earth. And they haven't been."
From what I've found about Ulrich's career, the paper may have also served as criticism of the way history is studied. She seems to have lobbied criticism at the historical establishments and their failures to appreciate the effects and actions of the rank and file members of society. When honored as a professor at Harvard it was said
Ulrich is a pre-eminent historian of early America and of the history of women. Her innovative and widely influential approach to history has been described as "a tribute to 'the silent work of ordinary people'" - an approach that, in her words, aims to "show the interconnection between public events and private experience."When briefly discussing the famous quote with my wife she quickly arrived at the conclusion of, "Well behaved people rarely make history." There are some striking examples of this in technology. Edison is famous for the popularization of electricity and numerous inventions, but his contemporary and most likely superior Nikolai Tesla is only recently being recognized for his startling genius. Steve Jobs recently passed away to much fanfare and mourning while Dennis Ritchie - inventor of the C programming language and developer for the Unix operating system on which iOS is built - passed away around the same time to little to no fanfare. Tesla struggled with mental illness (he almost certainly had OCD) in a time where it was much less understood or empathized. Jobs was a demanding CEO who while Mr. Ritchie was more likely a quiet academic and engineer. Even these examples show how we focus in on certain celebrities rather than recognizing the many brilliant minds and Menlo Park or Apple that worked under the direction of these magnates.
I think this is where my quarrel with the famous quote comes in; it reinforces the idea that to be great or important, to influence history, to "make a difference" one must necessarily acquire fame in the process. The first black president of the United States would not have been elected without a society that collectively let the scourge of racism whither on the vine rather than hold on to obsolete mentalities. Dr. Ulrich addresses the idea, "that 'empowered' women are by definition 'wild' women. That is a very old idea. Since antiquity, misogynists have insisted that females, being more emotional than males, are less stable, more likely to swing between extremes." She also points out that, "Marie Curie didn't win two Nobel prizes by throwing tantrums in the lab." and that Rosa Parks made history not only for her refusal to abide with the bigoted laws of her day but also because she was recognized as a hard working, upstanding, "well behaved" woman (other women had been arrested for the same thing, but unlike Rosa Parks their lifestyle choices made it too hard to build a case to fight the unjust law they were bucking).
In my younger years, probably until about my junior year of college, I enjoyed aspirations to fame and greatness. I wanted to win the Nobel for physics after making my own re-writes to the laws that govern our universe. I still wouldn't mind doing this, or any other number of fantastic ventures, but I'm also content with my current role in life, unimpressive though it may be especially when compared with the grandiose aspirations of my youth. I feel that I will have lived a life of incalculable worth and leave a powerful legacy even if no one remembers my name after 100 years as long as I continue learning and enriching my mind, be a good husband to my wife (and someday I'm sure, a good father to my children), work hard and earn money honestly, use that money wisely, and live in accordance with my values. I don't feel women should be robbed of this feeling of contentment that living an unassuming & simple but upstanding and meaningful life because they are told that they should be empowered & wild, rebellious, and "not well behaved."
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
The Fourth Amendment in the Information Age
In my last post I mused on the nature of data and how the information about us defines who we are. I was spurned to write this and finished off the post presenting disappoint with Verizon, my cell carrier, and their failure to protect users' privacy and respect their charge in holding data about us. Lately Verizon has been in the news for handing over call records to the NSA, so the wound has had salt thrown in it rather than had time to heal, so to speak. In my investigations into jumping ship from a company so cavalier about it's responsibility to protect who I am in the form my data I've had some interesting experiences.
I sent an email to Sprint asking if their company does anything to protect users' data and privacy. Their response was,
Both could of course be true, in fact the latter may be the cause and the former the effect. I find the latter more interesting, though. It's easy to dismiss concern with how a company protects (or more often fails to protect) our information as unfounded worry about "government conspiracies" (in fact, that's exactly who a T-Mobile salesperson ended up characterizing my concern when asking about it at a store location). While the fact that most citizens probably won't be much affected is true and the majority of people (including myself with all my seditious comments coming out on this blog) aren't interesting, influential, or dangerous enough for the government to take the effort to spy on, the issue is far from unimportant for everyone save a few security advocates, legal scholars, and tech enthusiasts.
As I pointed out in my last post we're seeing the importance of the physical diminish. The things that are important to us are increasingly in the form of data accessed in a number of different ways? As these changes in the way we communicate, work, and create emerge so the laws which will govern these new methods of living. And they are being changed.
"The Fourth Amendment (Amendment IV) to the United States Constitution is the part of the Bill of Rights which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures, along with requiring any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause." This worked well for many years when communication took place between two people in the form of physical letters that they could keep on their property and evidence showed up as physical items that, again, could be held on someone's property. These laws are essentially being re-written as more and more of what's important to us has a digital presence.
The fourth amendment seems to grow out of the presumption of innocence. We aren't to be observed, investigated, or seized until some degree of proof of guilt can be obtained. This is what's being eroded by modern electronic surveillance. It echos the complaints by so many in gaming when considering many invasive digital rights management (DRM) systems, "I'm being treated like a criminal when I haven't done anything wrong. They're just assuming I'm going to steal things."
Privacy and the internet is always, and may always be, a thorny issue. There's many conflicting theories, ranging from the internet being a surveillance state, to the assumption of privacy which is continually being shown to be unsupported, to complex privacy policies written by lawyers and mostly ignored by users, to understanding that privacy is only there when one takes the steps to encrypt their data and secure their connections. The internet is increasingly how we live our lives-in both private and public contexts-and after fighting for our rights and freedoms in the physical world we need to take up the fight once more for cyberspace, whether that means holding elected officials accountable, suffering the inconvenience of using security software, or considering privacy and data security when selecting service providers.
I sent an email to Sprint asking if their company does anything to protect users' data and privacy. Their response was,
which I found alarmingly curt and evasive. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't expecting anything terribly profound or telling, I was expecting a sorta non-committal PR department generated canned response along the lines of, "Sprint is committed to protecting customers' data and ensuring their privacy, however we still must comply with any lawful U.S. Government agency request." There's no real way to peer behind the curtain and discern why they responded with the air of, "Oh geez I don't want to talk about this please don't make me say anything why are you doing this to me?" My speculation on the subject, which I feel such a curious response deserves, would be that either Sprint is just as uncaring when it comes to customers' data and privacy and can provide no unembarrassing response to a customer asking these type of questions, or that they are actually fearful of what might happen should they take a stand.Sprint as a company is not commenting on this report. We do not haveany information to share, and that Sprint will not be commenting on thesubject.
Both could of course be true, in fact the latter may be the cause and the former the effect. I find the latter more interesting, though. It's easy to dismiss concern with how a company protects (or more often fails to protect) our information as unfounded worry about "government conspiracies" (in fact, that's exactly who a T-Mobile salesperson ended up characterizing my concern when asking about it at a store location). While the fact that most citizens probably won't be much affected is true and the majority of people (including myself with all my seditious comments coming out on this blog) aren't interesting, influential, or dangerous enough for the government to take the effort to spy on, the issue is far from unimportant for everyone save a few security advocates, legal scholars, and tech enthusiasts.
As I pointed out in my last post we're seeing the importance of the physical diminish. The things that are important to us are increasingly in the form of data accessed in a number of different ways? As these changes in the way we communicate, work, and create emerge so the laws which will govern these new methods of living. And they are being changed.
"The Fourth Amendment (Amendment IV) to the United States Constitution is the part of the Bill of Rights which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures, along with requiring any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause." This worked well for many years when communication took place between two people in the form of physical letters that they could keep on their property and evidence showed up as physical items that, again, could be held on someone's property. These laws are essentially being re-written as more and more of what's important to us has a digital presence.
The fourth amendment seems to grow out of the presumption of innocence. We aren't to be observed, investigated, or seized until some degree of proof of guilt can be obtained. This is what's being eroded by modern electronic surveillance. It echos the complaints by so many in gaming when considering many invasive digital rights management (DRM) systems, "I'm being treated like a criminal when I haven't done anything wrong. They're just assuming I'm going to steal things."
Privacy and the internet is always, and may always be, a thorny issue. There's many conflicting theories, ranging from the internet being a surveillance state, to the assumption of privacy which is continually being shown to be unsupported, to complex privacy policies written by lawyers and mostly ignored by users, to understanding that privacy is only there when one takes the steps to encrypt their data and secure their connections. The internet is increasingly how we live our lives-in both private and public contexts-and after fighting for our rights and freedoms in the physical world we need to take up the fight once more for cyberspace, whether that means holding elected officials accountable, suffering the inconvenience of using security software, or considering privacy and data security when selecting service providers.
Thursday, May 9, 2013
Our Data is Who We Are
The physical is becoming less and less important in the modern world. Sure, there will always be a need for physical mediums (after all "There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter"), but information is what reigns supreme in importance. This has always been true, in many ways. As Carl Sagan said, "The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, it's the way those atoms are put together." In another way, humanity has been marching toward this for ages; Since the invention of writing a stone could be transformed into the law of the land or God, a history of a people, or an agreement between two parties. The invention and standardization of money intensified this.
The idiom that you can find out a lot about a person by going through their trash may still be true, but it's been found that with a handful of data readily made available people can know exactly who we are (in this study 4 locational data points were enough to identify 95% of participants). While it's (probably) true that you wouldn't be you without your physical body, too often we forget that we wouldn't be who we are without our memories, habits, and interpersonal connections-all of which computers are increasingly involved in and therefore archiving.
As a Verizon wireless customer I was devastated to see this report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation surveying different companies and what measures they were taking to protect users' privacy. I've known for a while that Verizon was kind of a scumbag company, managing to continue living only because they've acquired a great deal of infrastructure. When (also scumbag, when it comes to users' data) companies like Comcast and Facebook (I'm not including Google even though many might have worries about the amount of data they collect because they did manage to collect 5 out of 6 stars in this survey, and I genuinely appreciate the company) as well as the two lower end Apple and AT&T still manage to find some way in which they can protect users' data rights are still beating out my carrier, I worry.
I'm seriously considering leaving Verizon, and would probably side with Sprint. The financial, coverage, and overall convenience implications makes me hesitate, but I really feel like making sure a company that isn't making any effort to protect my digital self shouldn't be supported by my money. I'd love to leave Comcast for the same reason, and may look into campaigning within my complex to get a different service provider. The power a service provider has in my life is unnerving, considering how important my data is to me. After all, in a very real way the data about me is who I am.
The idiom that you can find out a lot about a person by going through their trash may still be true, but it's been found that with a handful of data readily made available people can know exactly who we are (in this study 4 locational data points were enough to identify 95% of participants). While it's (probably) true that you wouldn't be you without your physical body, too often we forget that we wouldn't be who we are without our memories, habits, and interpersonal connections-all of which computers are increasingly involved in and therefore archiving.
As a Verizon wireless customer I was devastated to see this report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation surveying different companies and what measures they were taking to protect users' privacy. I've known for a while that Verizon was kind of a scumbag company, managing to continue living only because they've acquired a great deal of infrastructure. When (also scumbag, when it comes to users' data) companies like Comcast and Facebook (I'm not including Google even though many might have worries about the amount of data they collect because they did manage to collect 5 out of 6 stars in this survey, and I genuinely appreciate the company) as well as the two lower end Apple and AT&T still manage to find some way in which they can protect users' data rights are still beating out my carrier, I worry.
I'm seriously considering leaving Verizon, and would probably side with Sprint. The financial, coverage, and overall convenience implications makes me hesitate, but I really feel like making sure a company that isn't making any effort to protect my digital self shouldn't be supported by my money. I'd love to leave Comcast for the same reason, and may look into campaigning within my complex to get a different service provider. The power a service provider has in my life is unnerving, considering how important my data is to me. After all, in a very real way the data about me is who I am.
Friday, April 26, 2013
Sharing an Idea
Since I just got married I've been posting about marriage, relationships, and the like lately and I've seen an interesting thing happen, people responded. I got comments, page views, and people telling me how much they liked my last post. It's always nice to hear feedback from others and find out people are actually paying attention. Still, part of me is actually a little disheartened by this surge of interest, because it carries an implication that people didn't read, or just plain didn't care about what I was writing before.
I wouldn't have predicted my newer writings would have eclipsed some of my others, because I find them more personal in scope. Curiosities of my personality, musings on relationships (of which there's already enough literature to fill several libraries of Alexandria, and what I bring surely cannot be that novel), and altogether introspection on how I feel during such a pivotal moment of my life. Maybe I should be honored and awed that others care about enough that they love my introspection. Maybe they feel they're getting to know me better through my writings, and that's what engages them so deeply, and again I should be cheerful to know people like getting to know me.
But perhaps that's also just it. Yes that personal side who loves his beautiful new wife and was eager to marry her is there. Yes, I have thoughts and feelings about romance and love like most everyone else. Yes, I am relate-able in those ways and those are all important to me. There are other things that are deeply meaningful to me, though. These are things that run from boring to meaningless to spurned to intimidating (and therefore avoided as much as possible) to much of the population in which I live.
Often what I write blog posts if not necessarily to change vernacular perspective at least to offer a different one. I find topics of science, mathematics, and technology - and especially the public's interaction with these - of immense importance. These are the ventures of human endeavor that will shape the future to which hurtling toward us faster and faster every day (ponder a moment on the technologies changing the way we communicate and relate to one another that have come to fruition in the last ten to twenty years) and the lijera (Spanish for lightness, but possibly carrying an extra connotation or two that made me want to use it in place of an English word here) with which people take these today is distressing to me.
I was once asked by an aunt something like, "What's it like to be as smart as you are?" My answer was a jocular but wistful, "Lonely," and then by way of explanation, "When I talk about something that I find fascinating and then see the eyes of whomever I'm speaking with glaze over what do I do? Pretend something important to me isn't or speak without regard to a fellow human being."
I wouldn't have predicted my newer writings would have eclipsed some of my others, because I find them more personal in scope. Curiosities of my personality, musings on relationships (of which there's already enough literature to fill several libraries of Alexandria, and what I bring surely cannot be that novel), and altogether introspection on how I feel during such a pivotal moment of my life. Maybe I should be honored and awed that others care about enough that they love my introspection. Maybe they feel they're getting to know me better through my writings, and that's what engages them so deeply, and again I should be cheerful to know people like getting to know me.
But perhaps that's also just it. Yes that personal side who loves his beautiful new wife and was eager to marry her is there. Yes, I have thoughts and feelings about romance and love like most everyone else. Yes, I am relate-able in those ways and those are all important to me. There are other things that are deeply meaningful to me, though. These are things that run from boring to meaningless to spurned to intimidating (and therefore avoided as much as possible) to much of the population in which I live.
Often what I write blog posts if not necessarily to change vernacular perspective at least to offer a different one. I find topics of science, mathematics, and technology - and especially the public's interaction with these - of immense importance. These are the ventures of human endeavor that will shape the future to which hurtling toward us faster and faster every day (ponder a moment on the technologies changing the way we communicate and relate to one another that have come to fruition in the last ten to twenty years) and the lijera (Spanish for lightness, but possibly carrying an extra connotation or two that made me want to use it in place of an English word here) with which people take these today is distressing to me.
I was once asked by an aunt something like, "What's it like to be as smart as you are?" My answer was a jocular but wistful, "Lonely," and then by way of explanation, "When I talk about something that I find fascinating and then see the eyes of whomever I'm speaking with glaze over what do I do? Pretend something important to me isn't or speak without regard to a fellow human being."
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
A Personal Oddity of Emotional Expression
I'm a scientist. I'm not a poet, an artist, writer, or orator. Well, I think there's a pretty convincing case to be made that mathematics and seeing the beauty of nature in the laws that govern it have artistic merit, I'm at least an amateur writer (I have, like I suspect many do, a few beginnings to books, short stories, or articles), and am actually a pretty decent public speaker (though maybe not anymore, I haven't really done any public speaking for quite a while), but I'm speaking here to my outlook on the world and my communication with others and a scientific outlook has strongly influenced these aspects of who I am. There's two things that I find especially influenced by this background; objectivity and concern for clarity.
I explain that so I can explain this, it's very difficult and a little odd for me to tell my wife I love her. Not because I don't, I'm madly in love with her. Not because I think there's anything wrong or strange about it either, but because it's so hard to know what I'm saying. Often when we are sitting in our apartment together I let those words, "I love you," sum things up, hoping that my feelings are transmitted correctly. In other moments though, when I want to expound on what that means, on the way I'm excited by her beautiful form, the softening spark in me of her amazing smile, the joy I take in her fun personality, or the deep passion when I notice how well read and thoughtful she is, I don't know what to say.
One thing is I feel like I've said it all before, and I hate repetition. Rather, perhaps, I know that expressing something in a new way is more powerful than repeating something you've heard before. Heard enough times anything can seem clichéd. How many different ways are there to say, "You're beautiful and I'm very attracted to you," though? I have a fairly formidable vocabulary, but still there are only so many synonyms for beautiful, happy, and love that one can use meaningfully.
Often, and bear with me through the cheesiness of this statement, words seem inadequate. I can tell how I'm feeling, but how do I express that? And moreover, when I feel something so powerfully, how do I express that with equal power? If I'm to be clear in communicating my feelings, what do I do when I feel something which seems more potent than the words I've been using. Moments where recognition of all her glorious beauty flares up in a way that I guess I've felt before, but certainly feels new and exhilarating surely can't be expressed in a simple, "You're so pretty/beautiful/stunning/gorgeous/sexy," when I've already said that many times before, ¿can they?
I've mentioned before that I have a certain emotional austerity. That doesn't mean I don't feel strongly, I do. It does mean I usually hold off on expressing what I feel, and moreover that when I do I try to strengthen what I say about those feelings in an alloy of emotion, thought, reason, possibly evidence, and probably sources. I can't really do that when I express my love for my wife. I know it's my subjective experience, I know that it's the way I feel, heck I even have an idea of some of the neurochemistry and cerebral circuitry that's powering and processing it, but still my love is real, and I want to let her know that. I'm learning a lot as I learn how to say it.
I explain that so I can explain this, it's very difficult and a little odd for me to tell my wife I love her. Not because I don't, I'm madly in love with her. Not because I think there's anything wrong or strange about it either, but because it's so hard to know what I'm saying. Often when we are sitting in our apartment together I let those words, "I love you," sum things up, hoping that my feelings are transmitted correctly. In other moments though, when I want to expound on what that means, on the way I'm excited by her beautiful form, the softening spark in me of her amazing smile, the joy I take in her fun personality, or the deep passion when I notice how well read and thoughtful she is, I don't know what to say.
One thing is I feel like I've said it all before, and I hate repetition. Rather, perhaps, I know that expressing something in a new way is more powerful than repeating something you've heard before. Heard enough times anything can seem clichéd. How many different ways are there to say, "You're beautiful and I'm very attracted to you," though? I have a fairly formidable vocabulary, but still there are only so many synonyms for beautiful, happy, and love that one can use meaningfully.
Often, and bear with me through the cheesiness of this statement, words seem inadequate. I can tell how I'm feeling, but how do I express that? And moreover, when I feel something so powerfully, how do I express that with equal power? If I'm to be clear in communicating my feelings, what do I do when I feel something which seems more potent than the words I've been using. Moments where recognition of all her glorious beauty flares up in a way that I guess I've felt before, but certainly feels new and exhilarating surely can't be expressed in a simple, "You're so pretty/beautiful/stunning/gorgeous/sexy," when I've already said that many times before, ¿can they?
I've mentioned before that I have a certain emotional austerity. That doesn't mean I don't feel strongly, I do. It does mean I usually hold off on expressing what I feel, and moreover that when I do I try to strengthen what I say about those feelings in an alloy of emotion, thought, reason, possibly evidence, and probably sources. I can't really do that when I express my love for my wife. I know it's my subjective experience, I know that it's the way I feel, heck I even have an idea of some of the neurochemistry and cerebral circuitry that's powering and processing it, but still my love is real, and I want to let her know that. I'm learning a lot as I learn how to say it.
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Taxes and Taxation
I recently did my taxes and have also been reading The Federalist Papers and have been thinking a lot about taxation lately. One thing that always strikes me at tax time is the labyrinthine extensiveness of the tax code. I'm terrified of filing next year, trying to figure out how I'll file after getting married, having an HSA, and who knows what else is still to come. The complexity of the tax code is always what has struck me as the most immoral thing about it.
In The Federalist Papers Alexander Hamilton said, "The genius of the people will ill brook the inquisitive and peremptory spirit of excise laws." (emphasis added) We are living a world of privacy concerns. We watch our internet service providers eavesdrop on their customers at the behest of the entertainment industry or for advertising profit, the web services we use constantly collect that details of how we're using them, we keep devices in our pockets which may upload our exact location throughout our day, and we're told to be careful about grocery store discount cards as they can easily lead our eating habits getting sold to an insurance company to raise our rates. In this world of shrinking privacy our government should be working to protect what we have left, but instead we see it complacent and then at tax time bold faced enough to ask and expect us to answer a slew of questions about our investments, medical bills, work location, housing, and 'anything else you might have missed.'
An uncle of mine that prepares taxes has said that he would be unable to do so without the aid of computers. The fact that we have created such a situation is ludicrous. I have more than one uncle who makes pretty decent money preparing people's taxes, so let me make one thing very clear: I don't think there's inherent corruption in the tax preparation industry. There's competition, people concern themselves with following the law, and try to be honest. That said, I don't think it should exist. The fact that the layman cannot pay those who govern him without going through an entity that's insinuated itself through great deal of study and hard work is unnerving. I don't want a people that separated from their government, especially regarding something affects them so directly. This can only be done through an exceedingly simple tax code, far from what we have now where only one who devotes his life to understanding the tax code or is wealthy enough to hire someone who does will get the benefits of it.
This country was founded on many things, but one of them was "no taxation without representation." We believed so strongly that we deserved a say in how and why governments take money from us that we fought for that right. Has the American spirit dwindled to a point where we accept taxes as an inevitability, overseen by some arcane power that we can only glimpse through the eyes of a few initiated elite among us?
In The Federalist Papers Alexander Hamilton said, "The genius of the people will ill brook the inquisitive and peremptory spirit of excise laws." (emphasis added) We are living a world of privacy concerns. We watch our internet service providers eavesdrop on their customers at the behest of the entertainment industry or for advertising profit, the web services we use constantly collect that details of how we're using them, we keep devices in our pockets which may upload our exact location throughout our day, and we're told to be careful about grocery store discount cards as they can easily lead our eating habits getting sold to an insurance company to raise our rates. In this world of shrinking privacy our government should be working to protect what we have left, but instead we see it complacent and then at tax time bold faced enough to ask and expect us to answer a slew of questions about our investments, medical bills, work location, housing, and 'anything else you might have missed.'
An uncle of mine that prepares taxes has said that he would be unable to do so without the aid of computers. The fact that we have created such a situation is ludicrous. I have more than one uncle who makes pretty decent money preparing people's taxes, so let me make one thing very clear: I don't think there's inherent corruption in the tax preparation industry. There's competition, people concern themselves with following the law, and try to be honest. That said, I don't think it should exist. The fact that the layman cannot pay those who govern him without going through an entity that's insinuated itself through great deal of study and hard work is unnerving. I don't want a people that separated from their government, especially regarding something affects them so directly. This can only be done through an exceedingly simple tax code, far from what we have now where only one who devotes his life to understanding the tax code or is wealthy enough to hire someone who does will get the benefits of it.
This country was founded on many things, but one of them was "no taxation without representation." We believed so strongly that we deserved a say in how and why governments take money from us that we fought for that right. Has the American spirit dwindled to a point where we accept taxes as an inevitability, overseen by some arcane power that we can only glimpse through the eyes of a few initiated elite among us?
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