However, this author, who hides under the initials “B.W.”, sets up the straw man argument that Coppins thinks the Church is oppressive (he states this four(!) times) and that women are unappreciated. (I’m just going to assume that the author is male, because it sounds as if it’s written by one.) On the other hand, the word ‘oppresive’ is only found once in Coppins’ article, where he writes that Benson’s quote ‘may seem antiquated or opporessive.’ You can be the judge of that:

I beg of you, you who could and should be bearing and rearing a family: Wives, come home from the typewriter, the laundry, the nursing, come home from the factory, the cafe. No career approaches in importance that of wife, homemaker, mother–cooking meals, washing dishes, making beds for one’s precious husband and children. Come home, wives, to your husbands. Make home a heaven for them. Come home, wives, to your children, born and unborn. Wrap the motherly cloak about you and, unembarrassed, help in a major role to create the bodies for the immortal souls who anxiously await.

And the only time Coppins uses the word ‘appreciated’ (‘unappreciated’ appears exactly zero times):

That’s because for many Latter-day Saint women, staying at home to raise children is less a lifestyle choice than religious one — a divinely-appreciated sacrifice that brings with it blessings, empowerment, and spiritual prestige.

Yet, this is B.W.’s main thesis!

I’d like to take on this idea that Mormon women are oppressed because they are expected to stay home with their children while fathers are expected to provide for the family.

The entire article is spent railing against Coppins BuzzFeed and his the extreme left-wing liberal media’s supposed beliefs (which Coppins never even stated), and defending the Church’s openness and understanding of the difficult choices women face, to the point of laughability. For example, B.W. applauds the Church’s flexibility with working women, quoting from the Proclamation on the Family that “Disability, death, or other circumstances may necessitate individual adaptation.” By only naming two of the most extreme circumstances in the human condition, the Church hasn’t exactly opened the floodgates of understanding towards working mothers, at least by this reference.

Whoever this B.W. is read Coppins’ article with a chip on his shoulder. Which is understandable, considering the ridiculous, mean-spirited attacks on Mitt Romney made by liberal media types in recent weeks. Unfortunately, this causes him to fail to notice the giant gulf between the Church’s official statements on working women (which he correctly points out is allowed), and strong words that discourage it. If an official statement told you it’s okay to drive your car to work, but but a prophet strongly condemned it, wouldn’t you feel a bit of pressure to ride your bike, and perhaps a touch of guilt when you drove on a rainy day?

Until statements about working women by Kimball, Benson, and others stop being quoted, the Church’s conflicting statements will continue to cause working women, who do so by necessity or even out of choice, to feel pressure and guilt, and that’s really not fair.

It would be great if B.W. actually interviewed some working Mormon women, and explored issues such as budgetary needs and wants, the desire to stay at home vs. the desire to get out of the house (or just get away from the kids and interact with some adults), weighing possible options that could reduce the cost of living in order to stay at home, and how the women felt about what they were doing. Instead, Mr. B.W. sticks his head in the sand and seems to say, “This is a black and white issue.” (Was this the inspiration for his pseudonym?) “Any perceived conundrum working Mormon women face doesn’t exist. It is crystal clear that working Mormon women are loved and appreciated just as much as their stay-at-home counterparts, and nobody has conflicted feelings about it.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Just check out Feminist Mormon Housewives if you don’t believe me.

Ironically, it’s difficult to even understand B.W.’s own beliefs. Note his attempt to paint the Church as open and understanding of women’s choices:

Particularly note the need for individual adaptation, and the obligation for LDS mothers and fathers to help each other as equals. Contrary to what Buzzfeed and the rest of old media would like you to believe, Mormon women are not only not oppressed by being forced to stay home, they choose their paths individually just as everyone else does. Agency, or the freedom to choose and make decisions, is a highly valued gift from God in the minds of the members of the Church.

But then note how that directly contradicts the quote he uses from the Proclamation on the Family:

By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children. In these sacred responsibilities, fathers and mothers are obligated to help one another as equal partners. Disability, death, or other circumstances may necessitate individual adaptation.

The reality is much more complex than either of these statements. Not despite, but because of agency, there are consequences to every choice. It’s not always possible to live up to ideals, and everyone’s physical, mental, and financial circumstances are different.

So, how about we put it like this? Working moms are appreciated. Stay at home moms are appreciated. No woman should be judged by her decision to either stay at home, work, or do both. It is both parents’ responsibility to love, teach, and nurture their children, and it is nobody’s business but the couple’s on how chores are divided.

B.W. did get one thing right. He quoted a great message by Dieter F. Uchtdorf:

Our second key relationship is with our families. Since “no other success can compensate for failure” here, we must place high priority on our families. We build deep and loving family relationships by doing simple things together, like family dinner and family home evening and by just having fun together. In family relationships love is really spelled t-i-m-e, time. Taking time for each other is the key for harmony at home. We talk with, rather than about, each other. We learn from each other, and we appreciate our differences as well as our commonalities. We establish a divine bond with each other as we approach God together through family prayer, gospel study, and Sunday worship.

But only when their premises are based on, you know, facts. Not damn lies statistics that said banker pulled out of his nether regions.

The offending post is from no less than the New York Federal Reserve Bank. I’ve ripped apart Fed blog posts before (they’re ridiculously easy) as they’re always incredibly biased. Banks are, after all, stakeholders in our financial system. They’re no less biased about economic policy than labor unions are about minimum wage laws.

So, off our intrepid economists go, waxing mathematical about the Labor Force Participation Rate. Look how it has dropped so! Under Obama, it’s droped by almost 5%. But wait, that’s interesting. This is one of those odd “Percentage of change” charts, not an absolute percentage, and for some reason, 2006 was chosen as the zero baseline. Kind of odd that this moment in time, an economic bubble of gargantuan proportions, was chosen as the “normal” state, isn’t it?

But wait, there’s more from our creative team, one of which looks uncannily like Uncle Rico. Look at all those complex equations they have used to calculate the Labor Force Participation Rate. So is this a metric our smart fellows concocted? Actually, according to Wikipedia, it’s a common economic statistic, and apparently, it’s neither calculated nor measured they way they present it.

Shockingly, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics publishes data and charts for this very metric. Of course, they allow you to see the long-term trend, that the Labor Force Participation Rate has declined since 2009 by less than 2%. Thanks to Wikipedia, we know that this statistic doesn’t include the discouraged who have stopped looking for jobs. And due to the increased numbers of new jobs, we know that over the last few months, more and more people have entered the labor force to begin looking for jobs again. So it’s really not surprising to see this stay flat or even take a slight dip. In fact, it’s expected.

Instead, the New York Fed seems more interested in publishing its made-up propoganda about how bad things are under Obama. Because they would have nothing to gain from a Republican candidate that promises less regulation and less oversight over the financial industry, right?

Here’s the basic list of all the major steps I took.

1. Install packages – tmux, vnstat, sysstat, atop, htop, iotop, mtr-tiny, ndisc6, arno-iptables-firewall, fail2ban, apticron, bzip2, curl, rsync, sudo.
2. Pull down .dotfiles for various apps such as tmux, vim, bash, etc.
3. Set $EDITOR, tzdata, and vi mode for bash.
4. Set up security – authorized_keys, sshd_config, sudoers, fail2ban, firewall.
5. Set fqdn stuff – hostname, domain, name servers, search domains.
6. Set up ipv6.
7. Renice sshd to avoid getting locked out of a box with heavy load.
8. Set up outgoing mail in exim4 for notifcations.

This just gets me to a place of sane defaults but doesn’t include any application setup, backup, or DNS.

At my last job, I used Spiceworks to monitor my network. At one point, I figured out that they collect data about my network and send it home to their servers, so that advertisers can hit me better. No worries, I thought. I read their TOS and found that the data is supposedly anonymized. That was enough to satisfy me at the time.

Now, I happen to work for a company that sells a product that Spiceworks customers might use, and we discussed advertising with them last year. At the time, we elected not to buy, but they encouraged us to be active on the forums and participate in the community.

So, I did just that. While not the most frequent poster, I got two ‘Best Answers’ and racked up enough points to move up a couple of their levels. You know, typical forum participation thing.

Naturally, I subscribe to the firewall and networking forums, where my company’s product fits in. And a few people asked for advice, and I chimed in with a recommendation to check out our product. Note that I was logged in as myself. I didn’t create fake accounts to astroturf. I’m not in sales, I’m not in marketing, and I don’t get a commission. I didn’t paste in copy from a brochure. I wrote a response tailored to each individual, from sysadmin to sysadmin, addressing their exact question. I have a few years of experience in IT, and I don’t like marketing BS. My responses were completely appropriate.

Next thing I know, I start getting PMs from Spiceworks people. They’re censoring my posts. Why? Because advertisers are supposed to pay. This seems kind of silly to me, because I think I’m providing pretty relevant information. So I check out their ToS:

“You may not post or transmit any advertising, promotional materials or any other solicitation of other users or Members to use or buy products, goods or services except in those areas (e.g., a classified bulletin board) that are designated for such purpose.”

I didn’t do any of the above, of course. I just answered a dude’s question. The number of general posts I wrote is much higher than the number of posts I wrote containing any information about my employer, so I would also argue I contributed quite a bit to the community, without being spammy.

Now, if they want to have a rule that says an employee may not say a word about his company’s products, then fine. Put that rule in the ToS (ironically, Spiceworks themselves would then be in violation of that rule), and tell your salespeople to stop telling potential custoemrs to be active in the forums. But their policy as it stands now is quite hypocritcal.

Oh, and one last thing. One of their employees took it upon himself to email my PMs to my boss. I actually already printed out everything, and we had discussed it at length, and my boss agreed with me, but that’s beside the point. Internet etiquette states that a “private message” is private, and is not disclosed to anyone else without your consent.

So, to wrap it up:

• Spiceworks sends network data to advertisers, which may or may not be anonymized and may or may not be secure.
• Spiceworks censors forum posts.
• Spiceworks forwards PMs to other people.

If you use Spiceworks, consider switching to something else. For me?

I suppose I care more about the regulating agencies themselves than the corporations they regulate. I care more about policy and politics than protesting. But since reform is ultimately a common goal, I tentatively support them.

But in all honestly, I think we have more pressing issues. Such as the erosion of our civil rights, as exemplified by the 2012 NDAA.

It’s cool that you want to pick on Occupy Wall Street. They are whiney, self-entitled morons. You found someone easy to pick on and you’re taking advantage of it. Congratulations.

Keep in mind that most self-respecting progressives that believe in capitalism and liberty wouldn’t be seen within a mile of the OWS protesters.

Also, don’t forget that the right still has its own nutjob wing called the Tea Party. I don’t think you need me to pull up pictures of all those misspelled signs held up by slack-jawed yokels to remember that embarrassment.

Also keep in mind that there are some intelligent people behind OWS, just like there are some intelligent conservatives. The Economist recently posted some coherent demands written by a NYC CPA, for example.

So before you go on patting yourselves on the back on how you proved liberals to be such idiots, remember: America is mostly full of idiots. And so far, the Tea Party is much larger than OWS.

“But I think the Republican candidates are talking about ways to transition this program, and it is a monstrous lie. It is a Ponzi scheme to tell our kids that are 25 or 30 years old today, you’re paying into a program that’s going to be there.” –Rick Perry

Someone on twitter pointed out that Rick Perry just told every retired person that they’re taking money from Bernie Madoff.

Social Security is a government service rendered in the form of cash, paid for by taxes. It’s no different than any other government service that is paid for by many but used by few, such as fire and police protection, food stamps, and farm subsidies. Social Security is not, and has never been purported to be,  an investment instrument, with dividends and a guaranteed or promised payout, with shares growing in value at or above the market rate.

Ironically, the funding level of the program for a given generation is directly dependent on how many children they have, so it would seem that if one wants to guarantee solvency of the program, he would encourage as many people as he can to have as many kids they can afford.

By Perry’s definition, the federal government itself is a ponzi scheme, since it collects taxes from everyone and distributes them amongst various programs. Likewise, a church that relies on donations which it then distributes to fund its operations is clearly a ponzi scheme. Even businesses collect receivables and use those payments to fund other aspects of the business. Rick Perry’s campaign is taking donations, so he himself is a ponzi scheme! Everything is a ponzi scheme!

Of course, that is correct. If you were to average out all of my political beliefs on the scale, I would fall somewhere on the moderately liberal side. Ten to fifteen years ago, that was solid Republican territory. Now, it’s Democrat land. That doesn’t mean I am moderate about everything, and it doesn’t mean I like the Democratic party today, either.

What if I was strongly in favor of gay rights, and also gun control? Does that make me a centrist? Or a polarized schizofrenic? Or perhaps that just makes me a libertarian. This is why I can’t defend or attack an ideology itself. They all have their place.

However, I have no patience for the Republican party. I used to vote Republican. I believe in capitalism, low tariffs, and gun rights. But over the last few years, the Republican Party has been hijacked by simple-minded extremists. If you’ve watched the debates, notice how Jon Huntsman appears so reasonable compared to to his peers. They’re not even his peers, they’re like monkeys fighting over a banana. And sadly, he doesn’t have a chance at winning. From pushing selfishly flawed ideas like trickle-down economics (a concept Reagan himself disproved), to head-in-the-sand refusal to listen to science on climate change, to battling monetary policy with fiscal policy arguments, much of what they say just makes no sense.

So when I bash Republicans, know that it’s not because I’m a Democrat (I’m not) or an Obama-lover (absolutely not). It’s just because they deserve it.

Independent: Liberalism, conservatism, and libertarianism are all only partially correct, and are all partially wrong.

Surprisingly, nobody’s ever asked me what this means.

Philosophically, binding one’s beliefs to a single ideology is only defensible if one can prove it to always be correct. Any Philosophy 101 class could find edge cases where all of these break down. You know how Newtonian physics don’t work at atomic, subatomic, or extremely large scales, but they’re just right for certain everyday objects? It’s kind of like that.

It’s not difficult to prove this concept. Liberalism, when drawn out to its fullest extent, becomes communism. Conservatism, when carried to the extreme, becomes fascism, and libertarianism turns into anarchy. Clearly, we’re all just varying degrees of centrists.

Going deeper to a spiritual level, all of these ideologies are “philosophies of men.” A Christian will remember Paul’s warning to “not be taken captive by vain philosophies, according to the tradition of men.” In politics, ideologues are often put on pedestals. Yet any single pure ideology is clearly flawed. So we dilute them. You there, you’re a liberal, but you don’t think the welfare system should indefinitely support lazy slobs? And you over there, you’re a conservative, but perhaps think that a tiny bit of regulation of the financial industry would be helpful–maybe just enough to break up those “too big to fail” banks–so that it doesn’t self-destruct (again) and take the country down with it (again)? Congratulations, both of you have just proven your own ideologies to be wrong. The liberal must admit that incentivizing laziness by witholding consequences is expensive and wasteful, and that the concept of liberalism is therefore flawed. The conservative must admit that at least some government regulation is necessary and even helpful to the economy, and thus laissez-faire is a false prophet.

If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll accept these statements as truth. If you’re not, you’ll find a report from a think tank that just happens to subscribe to your ideology that proves me to be wrong. Ironically, you would have only proved my post title to be correct: Blind followers are blind.

It’s not easy to keep the blinders off. How can one be sure to keep an open mind? It’s probably impossible. Satire and humor are a good start. Reading multiple viewpoints is must. Since so much of the national debate centers around economic policy, edumacation is mandatory. If you’re not at least reading the two opposing viewpoints of the highly-regarded Becker-Posner Blog, you’re not qualified to participate in the conversation.

Of course, every individual will see politics through her own lens of life experience. Often, this is more of a weakness than a strength. Even a lifetime of experience is purely anecdotal. Few Americans that have consumed 20, 40, or even 60 years of television and music could compete in VH1′s World Series of Pop Culture. I’ve read a dozen or more science books yet am not even qualified to introduce a scientist at a conference. My point is not that a little bit of humility goes a long way. My point is that a lot of humility still doesn’t get you anywhere. Does anyone doubt their knowledge is limited? When you don’t know what you don’t know, how can you firmly claim that “America’s policy on X should be Y,” especially when you’ve never studied X or researched Y?

For this reason, the educated guess is king; the inevitable result of a world with problems that can’t and won’t wait for well-researched answers. And that’s okay, because behavior is unpredictable, policy must be ever-adapting, and it’s impossible to predict the right answer every time. And that’s my point. It’s not good enough to give an educated guess based on a flawed ideology. As much as it gets my goat that the fat cat bankers got away with secret bailouts and golden parachutes, I know that deep down, Bush and Bernanke were right–letting the banks fail would have annihilated any chance we had of preserving a modern, civilized society. And as much as it saddens me to see a homeless family on the corner, I know that as a whole, society suffers less due to the vast benefits of capitalism than it would under communism.

So, am I a liberal, a conservative, or a libertarian? I am neither and all of them. I am for correctness. I am for looking at the issue carefully and providing the greatest number of benefits to the greatest number of people. In other words, I am for optimization. That educated guess? It better have the most evidence showing it to have the highest amount of the desired effect at the lowest cost.

And if you start to argue policy about what that desired effect should be, it’s time to turn it around and look again at that optimization curve, and determine policy based on that.

On a higher level, wouldn’t that be a supreme being’s ultimate goal? Show me a god who is not on the Happiness Maximization plan and I’ll show you a god who doesn’t understand calculus. No doubt, atheists already agree.

All political ideologies are partially wrong, and at least all are partially correct. Prove me wrong in the comments.

I should have taken a hint. From myself.

It wasn’t long before I got back into web design, then more general IT projects, and finally as a full-time network administrator. Every move I’ve made has been towards something more technical, and I’ve enjoyed it all successively more.

Every corporate “IT guy” reaches a point where he’s tired of fixing people’s printers. He’s tired of removing spyware from Windows, he’s tired of migrating users’ Outlook profiles to new computers, and he’s tired of the politics revolving around the web filter and the size and quantity of everyone’s monitor.

At least, this one was.

After spending a couple of years deciding what I didn’t like (direct marketing, web design, email marketing, desktop support, Windows servers), I finally decided to dig into what I really did like: Unix and Linux. And it’s been very satisfying and very fun.

More importantly, it’s led to a new job opportunity. So my familiy and I have up and moved across the country. Goodbye beaches, goodbye great weather, and goodbye amazing sushi restaurants. Hello nice people, hello good barbeque, and hello cheap houses.

And hello, new job. I’ll be working as a Support and QA Engineer at Calyptix Security. Calyptix is run buy some extremely talented and intelligent people. For example, if you’re an old-time redditor, you probably remember this post, which caused quite a ruckus on the site, as accusations of hackery and tomfoolery abounded. It turns out, I now share an office with the gentleman (and scholar) who posted it. I only just discovered this about an hour ago.

Moving inevitably brings challenges and stressors. But it can also bring the opportunity to learn and grow. Because of that, I say: Change is good.