Scott Adams's Blog, page 361

War and Truth

When I heard that Osama used his own wife as a human shield, I assumed I was hearing a CIA-concocted story. It smelled wrong because it was too movie-like. Portraying Osama as a coward was the perfect way for the CIA to put a damper on Al Qaeda recruiting. We've since learned that Osama didn't use a human shield.

When I heard that our plan was to capture Osama alive if practical, I chuckled to myself. I'm not a Navy SEAL with a hundred operations under my belt, and even I would have blown Osama's head off if I thought he had enough moisture in his body to spit in my general direction. The last thing the United States needed was a trial. Now we know Osama wasn't blazing away with a machine gun in each hand. It was more of a "reaching for something" situation. And as you know, the very best time to consider reaching for a weapon is about half an hour after your secret lair has been attacked.

When I heard that Osama's hideout was a luxurious million-dollar villa, I kept wondering why the only video footage I kept seeing was a Pakistani crack house full of garbage. Since then we have learned that a better estimate for the home's value is $250K. I assume that's mostly for the land. The original story of the million-dollar mansion was probably a CIA invention to make Osama look like a hypocrite.

When I heard that waterboarding gave our intelligence folks the information they needed to eventually connect the dots and find Osama, I thought that seemed a convenient defense for past deeds. Now it seems that there's no way to know if other methods of interrogation would have yielded the same results.

When I heard that the SEALS endured an intense 40-minute fire-fight while sustaining no casualties, I wondered why the terrorists were so bad at aiming. Today we learn that there was only one armed combatant.

You might wonder how all of these rumors got started.  My guess is that the lies were concocted in advance of the mission. The original plan involved killing or capturing everyone at the site who might have been a witness. Had we done that, the CIA could have controlled the story long enough for the fake facts to become common knowledge around the world. The lies would have been entirely justified, militarily speaking, if they had the impact of making Al Qaeda look bad and the United States look good. That's exactly the sort of thing we pay the CIA to do. I hope that was the plan. If it wasn't, it should have been.

Perhaps where things went wrong is that after losing a helicopter, the SEALS couldn't evacuate all of the witnesses. Remember the famous picture of the President in the Situation Room with all of his top advisors. Imagine how busy they were right after the mission, and how many people would need to talk to how many other people to come up with one unified story of events once the original set of lies became infeasible. It would have been nearly impossible to coordinate all the stories. I imagine that one faction in the government favored going with the original fake story, perhaps because the witnesses would not be credible. Maybe another faction assumed the truth would get out, so it was better if it came from the government first.

Given the slow leak of truth, I wonder what other surprises are in store. Remember that all of the fake facts so far had a whiff of hard-to-believe and a bit too convenient. None of the revelations have been complete surprises. So what do you predict will be the next fact we learn wasn't exactly true?

For this discussion, I'd like to take off the table the question of Osama's burial at sea. For the sake of security, let's all agree that the body was handled with religious sensitivity. This was a brilliant way to separate the United States' intentions about Islam versus the terrorists. So if you don't mind, let's not start any rumors about the accuracy of that part of the story.

I'd like to focus on the widely assumed complicity of Pakistan's government. The story goes that it would be impossible for the world's most wanted terrorist to be "hiding in plain sight" so near a Pakistani military facility. The truth is that I could have kept Osama in a guest room in my own house for five years and no one would have known it, as long as I controlled who had access to the house. None of Osama's neighbors knew they lived next to the world's most wanted terrorist.  How would the army facility down the road observe more than the neighbors did?

While it is likely that elements within the ISI have been helpful to various terror groups, it isn't likely that the president of Pakistan, whose own wife was murdered by Al Qaeda, was helping Osama hide. Nor is it likely that many within the ISI knew where Osama was, given the size of the reward for his capture and the risk of letting too many people in on the secret. Our government gains an advantage by pressuring Pakistan to step up their efforts on the war on terror. This embarrassment is exactly the sort of leverage we need. And best of all, Pakistan can't prove a negative, so there is no chance that they can prove they didn't know where Osama was.

Then there's the question of the live video feed to the Situation Room that allegedly went dead just before the SEALS did something that you wouldn't want your elected officials to see. And if they did see it, you wouldn't want your public to know that there's a video of a SEAL killing an unarmed Osama. That was a mighty convenient time for a technical failure.

How about the release of the dead Osama photos? That was never going to happen. You'll see the pictures in a year or two when the emotional impact has dissipated.

What else about this story smells wrong to you?

The Two-Bucket Mind

Last night I watched Piers Morgan interview famous lawyer Alan Dershowitz on the topic of waterboarding and how it might have contributed to finding Bin Laden. I love watching Dershowitz defend his opinions, even when I don't agree, because he's one of the best communicators on the planet. Keep that in mind when I make my oh-so-fascinating point that has nothing to do with waterboarding.

First, some context: My hypothesis is that we humans automatically sort topics into two opposing viewpoints, or buckets. In the rare cases when we encounter a third opinion, we can't easily process it because our brains don't have a third bucket.

For example, on the topic of using waterboarding to get useful information from terrorists, the two opinion buckets are:

1.       Waterboarding works and we should do it.

2.       Waterboarding doesn't work and we should not do it.

Dershowitz expressed a third view that I had never heard until last night: Waterboarding works, but we shouldn't do it.

I stopped what I was doing when I heard Dershowitz' opinion, and waited to see if my Two-Bucket hypothesis would hold true. My prediction was that Piers wouldn't be able to process this third view. I can't find the transcript, but paraphrasing, Piers said something along the lines of "I'm confused. What side are you on?"

To be fair, Piers might have fully understood Dershowitz but assumed that viewers would be confused. It's an interviewer's job to ask what he imagines the audience would want him to ask. Piers is smart enough to know that his viewers are two-bucket thinkers. Dershowitz went on to explain his opinion with his usual clarity. But I'll bet if you did a survey today on people who watched the interview, 80% would say Dershowitz supported one of the two standard opinions on waterboarding, and respondents would be split down the middle as to which one it was.

I came up with the two-bucket hypothesis by observing how some people react to this blog. When I float an idea that doesn't fit into one of the two standard buckets for a given topic, people assume I am an enemy from the other bucket and post comments to that effect. Notice how often the commenters here argue against what I write as if my posts must be supporting one of the two existing buckets. That's the two-bucket phenomenon in action.

I wonder if our brains are natural two-bucket processors or if we have been trained that way by our adversarial political system. In the United States, every issue seems to get sorted into two buckets, with Democrats generally favoring one bucket and Republicans generally favoring the other. I wonder if our political system is making citizens dumber by encouraging us to think that there are only two valid opinions for every topic.

Paying Off the National Debt

Someone (not me) once had the idea of a huge, one-time tax on the net worth of rich people to pay off the national debt in one fell swoop. At the time, based on one definition of "rich," it would have meant confiscating about 15% of a typical wealthy person's assets. Let's say that figure is closer to 25% now, just for argument sake.

For political reasons, this sort of plan would never work. But I'm fascinated by the question of whether it would make sense from a financial perspective. If you offered me a chance to live in a fiscally reinvigorated United States with no national debt, and in return I had to give up 25% of my current assets, I think I might take that deal, with a few safeguards.

The first safeguard I'd need is some sort of constitutional amendment that makes it illegal for the government to spend more than it takes in. I'd also want a constitutional amendment making it illegal to raise income tax rates from current levels.  Without those protections in place, the rich would literally leave the country before considering such a deal.

In the world of personal finance, every expert agrees that an individual should pay off all credit card debt before considering any other investments. But credit cards have high interest rates compared to the national debt, so that comparison doesn't work.  The real benefit of paying off the national debt is that it would have an enormous psychological impact on the economy and free up the money that had been going to interest payments. The typical rich person's investments would probably grow faster under that scenario and end up recovering the cost of the one-time tax in five years. Higher income taxes, by comparison, are not going to stimulate the economy.

The biggest obstacle to this sort of wealth confiscation plan is that the rich would hide assets in order to reduce their one-time tax burden. I think that problem is a big one, but remember that the rich are a limited population and you could audit just about every one of them. And every rich person who had a loan or a line of credit probably has a current balance sheet with a bank. Hiding assets would be risky business.

There would also be a liquidity problem for many of the wealthy. It's not easy to come up with that much cash all at once. So perhaps the "one-time" tax could be paid over five years. That's five percent of your assets per year, and probably doable. You'd still need some sort of regulatory body to make decisions when a particular rich person isn't in a position to generate enough liquidity. But all of this seems feasible, barely.

I already know you don't like this idea. It sounds more like government-sanctioned robbery than taxation. And I can't make the idea any more palatable by telling you that the idea was floated by Donald Trump during a past presidential cycle. We can all agree that the idea is both distasteful and impractical in our current political system. The only question that interests me is whether the rich, and everyone else, would come out ahead under such a plan. Perhaps such a plan would remove so much investment cash from the wealthy that it would strangle the system.

What do you think? Remember that you have to compare this plan to whatever plan you think is second best.

The Fun Part

Bin Laden is dead. The news made me happy. I don't want to feel pleasure about the death of another person, no matter how much he deserved it. But apparently I don't have a choice. I've been delighted since last night and the feeling doesn't seem to be going away.

This is the first time that another person's death has made me happy. When the Iraqis executed Sadam Hussein, it was simple justice. When drones kill lesser terrorist leaders, I'm pleased at the result, not the loss of life. Bin Laden was different.  Like many of you, I was watching television on the morning of September 11th, 2001 when the second plane hit the second tower. This time it was personal.  For me, Bin Laden's death is deeply satisfying.

This is the sort of event that defines our national sense of self. The United States didn't stop trying to kill Bin Laden for ten years. We Americans might not do things right on the first try, but betting against us in the long run remains a very bad idea. I'm proud to be an American. I want to be on the team that will gnaw through a concrete wall to get it done, even if it takes ten years.

Tomorrow we'll go back to criticizing one another and complaining about just about everything. That is our way. It keeps us sharp. But today, for just one day, let's enjoy a collective victory. Let's remember those who died on 9/11 and in Afghanistan thereafter. Let's think about the level of bravery and professionalism that went into this operation. And let this remind us that we are part of something bigger than ourselves. 

History turns on psychology. The United States has been in a rough patch for ten years. That changed last night. Buckle up; the next part of this ride is the fun part.

Compartmentalizing Versus Smooshing

Did you see the story of the respected surgeon who got in trouble for writing an editorial about the alleged benefits of semen exposure to women? His writing started out all science-like, and referred to an actual study, but concluded with an attempt at humor that went off the tracks. He closed his editorial with "So there's a deeper bond between men and women than St. Valentine would have suspected, and now we know there's a better gift for that day than chocolates."

Apparently the study he was discussing is in dispute. But that's not the real issue. Women saw his closing witticism as demeaning. The surgeon, who has a strong record as a mentor and advocate of women in a male-dominated profession, was asked to step down as editor in chief of the surgeon's newspaper. He apologized for his editorial, but that didn't help.

I have one question for the men reading about this situation and another one for the women. For the men, please answer the following question in your mind before you finish the rest of the post:

Men: Would you have known in advance that the Valentine witticism would be seen as demeaning to women?

Think about your answer before I help you out. I had to think about it for 15 minutes before I figured out the problem. It's a context thing. The author is a respected male surgeon, in a male-dominated field, who wrote about women as if their evolutionary purpose on earth is to be sperm receptacles.

My question to women: Did I get that right?

Why the hell did it take me 15 minutes to figure out why the Valentine joke is demeaning to women? I have a hypothesis. I think some people compartmentalize thoughts and other people mix all new and existing thoughts together. For example, if you view the semen study as an interesting, albeit possibly wrong bit of science, all on its own, it seems harmless enough. But if you mix it with the writer's position in the industry, and his gender, the ratio of male to female surgeons, and perhaps all of the feelings and images of sexism in your entire career, you get a very different result. And because the editorial indirectly suggests that some lesbians would be happier if they had more contact with semen, that's all the matches and gasoline this situation needed. In its full context, the comment looks ugly and sexist.

I propose a little test to see if you compartmentalize thoughts or smoosh them all together. I'll give you two statements and see how your mind treats them.

Statements: The dog might eat your mom's cake if you leave it out. A dog also might eat his own turd.

When you read those two statements, do you automatically suppose I am comparing your mom's cake to a dog turd? Or do you see it as a statement that the dog doesn't care what it eats, be it a delicious cake or something awful?

If you automatically compartmentalize new thoughts, I think you interpret the two dog statements as an observation that dogs will eat anything. If you smoosh all of your incoming thoughts together, you probably see my statements as an insult to your mom's cooking.

If you're a compartmentalizer, as I imagine the surgeon is who wrote the article, you probably get in a lot of trouble for it. I know I do.

Birthers

I think the birther issue is good for the country. A modern republic needs some simple and unimportant issues to keep its citizens invested in the process. The important issues of our time are far too complicated for the average person, and I count myself in that group. We need a few simple issues so we can be part of the political conversation without hurting anything. The last thing our system of government needs is regular citizens getting involved in Middle East strategy, healthcare reform, the budget, climate change, or anything else that might matter.

I'm entirely serious. It's healthy that we average citizens have some sort of topic in the political realm that will keep us engaged while also siphoning off some of our activist energy. It reminds us that we have a role in government. It reminds us that we have a constitution. It reminds us that we're in charge, sort of. And it gives the news media something to talk about on slow news days, which is important for keeping that vital institution in business.

Most citizens would lose all interest in government if there were no issues they could grasp. In a perfect world, the largely clueless citizenry, including me, would feel as if we're part of the system while having no power to break anything important. The birther issue is sort of like letting your toddler have a toy steering wheel in his car seat. He feels as if he's doing something useful and you don't have to rely on him to keep you out of the ravine.

The birther issue also feeds our healthy sense of distrust. My view is that President Obama was born in Hawaii. But it's an objective fact that presidents in my lifetime have been involved in covering up substantial lies. It's good to keep that sort of mistrust in the fronts of our minds. What could be worse than a republic in which no one imagines that the president could be a crook?

The birther issue is educational too, as are many of the so-called distracting issues. The birther distraction teaches us that a president has to be a natural-born citizen. Readers of this blog already knew that, but I'll bet a third of the country learned it recently with the birther issue. And Monica Lewinsky taught us a thing or two about impeachment.

Imagine a media that has no topics that can be understood at a sixth-grade level of reading comprehension. That's the sweet spot for clear writing regardless of the reader's education. As soon as you go above the sixth-grade level, you lose about two-thirds of the country, maybe more. The high end of the news industry couldn't stay in business if it only reported on issues that require a high school level of reading comprehension to follow along. We need a well-financed news media to act as watchdogs for the government. Bloggers aren't going to do it.

Now the media is beginning to focus on the issue of President Obama's academic record. This is the very best situation that a healthy republic could hope for. I can't imagine anything more useful than focusing on the educational achievements of the President. And when this issue gets old I propose we focus on the question of whether President Obama is still sneaking a cigarette now and then.

I feel sorry for the serious journalists that feel obliged to cover stories about the birther situation. Perhaps a healthy compromise is to label such issues as "citizen engagement" issues and acknowledge that they have an important role in educating voters and keeping people interested in the system.

Rolling in the Deep

Singer and songwriter Adele has a top single called Rolling in the Deep. You've probably heard it. It's awesome on every level, but two lines in particular are so special that the word nerd in me had to call them out:

We could have had it all,
Rolling in the deep

If there were some sort of a contest for the best ten words ever written, I would nominate that part of Adele's song. What kind of mad genius puts rolling and deep in the same sentence and leaves out the noun?

This is a song about love that went off the tracks. In context, it means they could have had an elusive and special kind of deep love. The genius in the writing is that she leaves out the key word, love. As a general rule of art, the hard part is knowing what to leave out.

It took about five seconds of research to realize that this bit of word magic wasn't an accident. Another of Adele's songs has the line set fire to the rain. There's a whole lot going on with those five words too. And if you think it's easy to combine words that normally don't belong together and make them work, try it at home.  You end up with stuff like "I am the walrus." Sure, that worked out for The Beatles, but probably not because the lyrics were magic.

 

Judging People

I see a lot of judging going around lately. And I notice that people often invent their own standards of right and wrong just before passing sentence. What this world needs is some sort of universal standard so we'd always know for sure who is good and who is bad.

The Ten Commandments was a start. That list covers some of the basics. But it's a bit dated, and it doesn't cover the important questions of our day, such as who is arrogant, who doesn't work hard enough, who should come out of the closet, who is a hypocrite, who is an Internet troll, and so on. Society is inventing new ways of being bad more quickly than we can evolve the rules to cover the new situations. We need some sort of standard that can keep up.

I'm unqualified for the task of creating this new standard of good and bad because I believe free will is an illusion. By my view, we're born, our molecules bump around then we die. No one is good or bad if we're all just bumping around according to physical laws. Any standard for good and bad behavior that I suggest would be inconsistent with my own point of view.

But for some reason I'm going to suggest just such a standard anyway. Apparently I can't help myself. And my standard goes like this: You're a good person if you work hard at something that is useful to society and you try to avoid hurting other people when it's practical.

I'm big on overlooking victimless crime. I'd go further and suggest that anyone who is putting effort into punishing people who commit victimless crimes is bad.

One big problem with my standard is that we live in a world with limited resources. The simple act of getting a job creates a victim if you consider the next best applicant who lost out. If I stand in line to buy something, I make the line longer for the people behind me. Most of what we do has some sort of impact on others. But let's agree that you can display a certain degree of self-interest and still be a good person. Without some degree of selfish behavior, society would fall apart.

I've been thinking about this because a new breed of media has popped up that takes evil to a new level. Today, for example, spewed across the Internet is the report that Rachel Maddow believes some members of the broadcast media who are closeted gays should come out, as she has. Gawker - ironically named after a vigorous form of self-satisfaction - helpfully lists some broadcasters that they believe should come out.

The thin cover for this evil is the notion that when a public figure reveals his or her sexual orientation it is a form of honesty that helps others by example. By Gawker's view, keeping your private life private can't be a legitimate personal decision, and it can't be the sort of image management that every human with a paying job engages in. We humans are always spring-loaded to judge most harshly any form of information concealment, no matter how victimless. How dare our public figures not disclose what sort of genitalia they prefer! Those lying bastards! How can I trust the news about Libya now?!

By my standard, the allegedly gay broadcasters in question presumably work hard and they don't hurt anyone by reporting the news, unless you count dictators and other scoundrels who try to avoid direct questions.

Gawker, on the other hand, is pure evil. The writers are clearly lazy, based on their output and their lack of research, and their clear goal is to profit by hurting other people. In this case, they're preying on real or alleged members of the gay community for personal gain. That's entry level behavior on the Hitler meter.

I should note that when Rachel Maddow states her opinion that broadcasters should come out, she's not naming names, and she's not trying to profit from it. Her view is legitimate even if you disagree. The problem comes from the Nazi wannabes at Gawker who turned her opinion into a witch hunt for profit.

On a related topic, I'd like to give a little shout out to TMZ. When my recent dust-up with Men's Rights advocates and Feminists hit the blog-o-cesspool, only TMZ contacted me to find out the facts. And upon hearing the facts in proper context, apparently they decided there was no legitimate story there. Or at least I didn't notice one via Google Alert. TMZ put in the work and turned down the chance to take a quote out of context and profit by hurting another human being. I can't defend any other choices they might make, but they met my standard of good behavior in this situation. Gawker and a number of other sites, including Yahoo, had the same opportunity and chose evil.

What's your own definition of good and bad? And how does victimless crime fit into your view?

The Preferred Pain Theory

The common sense view of pain and pleasure is that humans seek pleasure and try to avoid pain. Lately I've come to wonder if that's backwards, or at least incomplete. I see too many examples in which people appear to be chasing pain.

My theory is that our biggest motivator is the need to feel alive, and that pleasure isn't a sharp enough feeling to get us there. When you're bored or lonely, you're feeling something closer to death than life. And so you seek out pain to remind yourself that you're alive. By this theory, the quest for pain is the primary motivator of all major life choices.

One test of a theory is that it can predict people's actions. And indeed you can see that people routinely choose activities that deliver pain. Consider a distance runner, for example. The health benefits of running are largely achieved in the first few miles. The rest is a pain that confirms we are alive.

You might argue that runners get a high, and they get great satisfaction from achieving a better time or finishing a marathon. I'm going to argue that the pleasures are side benefits. But first I will add one more condition to my theory: Everyone chooses the pain they like best. For the runner, muscle pain is the drug of choice. For a soldier in a volunteer army, it might be the fear of combat, or the harsh living conditions. For the entrepreneur, it might be the fear of failing. Everyone picks their own brand of pain. Sometimes we call that pain "challenge" to disguise it.

So far, all of the activities I mentioned have identifiable pleasures. The soldier gets the feeling of pride in serving the country, veteran benefits, and sometimes the thrill of combat. The entrepreneur gets the satisfaction of doing things his own way, and with any luck, riches too. These examples are ambiguous because the participants get both pain and pleasure. And if these examples were the only ones we had, I would not have a theory. We also need examples where people clearly choose pain over pleasure. That would be the best evidence for the theory.

Consider sports. Most sports are designed to guarantee failure for the majority of participants. In amateur tennis, if you join a league, and you start winning more than you lose, the computer rankings bump you up to the next level where you will mostly lose. You would think that a system designed to make participants feel like losers most of the time would become extinct, but it thrives.

Golf is an entire game built around making something that is naturally easy - putting a ball into a hole - as difficult as possible, to guarantee plenty of losing. In football you're normally thwarted every few yards. In baseball you strike out more than you hit. If winning were the payoff, sports would be a business where participants paid opponents to intentionally lose.

Perhaps you think losing is necessary to make the winning feel good. But consider small kids. For them, life is so vivid that they need no reminder they are alive. Every second is a miracle. And little kids prefer activities with no losing whatsoever. Only the winning appeals to them. As we get older, and our sensation of living dulls, we seek the pain that confirms our existence. We seek sports to increase our losing.

You might know people who continuously make choices that put them in some sort of danger, economically, socially, or physically. To you, their choices seem unwise. You assume that the people who make those choices get some sort of payoff you can't understand. I think the payoff is the pain itself, and the attendant feeling of being alive.

If sadness is your preferred pain, you watch sad movies. If muscle soreness is your preferred pain, you exercise vigorously. If economic uncertainty is your preferred pain, you pick fights with your boss. If stress is your preferred pain, you make sure you don't leave enough time to do what you need to do.

This theory came to me recently when a number of people asked me, in all seriousness, if I've gone insane. It seems to the reasonable observer that I've intentionally stirred up more trouble for myself in this blog than can be explained by the pursuit of pleasure. Where's my payoff?

If you look at most of my career choices, they have in common an unusually high risk of public criticism. I like the pleasures of success, but I need the pain of criticism. And because mine is a relatively rare form of preferred pain, it looks like insanity to the casual observer. To me, extreme sports look like a form of insanity. To each his own.

Consider your own life choices as an adult. Do you have a preferred pain for feeling alive?

Unicorns and Stuff

I wonder if any old-time racists still exist. I knew a few racists when I was a kid, back in upstate New York. In my adult life, I don't think I've met one. I wonder, does such a person exist who can watch President Obama on the news, then meet an unfamiliar African-American guy and assume in advance that he's less...what? I might be able to draw comics better than President Obama, but only because he hasn't tried. On every other comparison I wouldn't do so well. I don't think I'm alone. I don't mean to insult you, but if I'm picking teams for chess, debate, Scrabble, or basketball, I'm picking Obama before you. And I don't even know you.

Who among us watches Julliard School graduate Jamie Foxx win an Academy Award for playing Ray Charles in a movie, while doing his own singing and piano work, then doing some standup comedy, then performing his new hit single on the Grammys - the one he wrote, and then thinks "Those black people are so one-dimensional"? Is there a racist somewhere thinking that?

I think there was a time in our history when intelligent people could be racist because the anecdotal evidence was ambiguous. Today, I'm almost positive that no one watches Oprah, eats a potato chip, and thinks, "I wonder if African-Americans can succeed?"

I wonder what kind of boss hires a less qualified white candidate over a more qualified black candidate and thinks that his decision will work out well for him. I make fun of management intelligence for a living, and even I haven't seen that behavior. I've never even heard of it from someone else who witnessed it. I certainly understand if you've witnessed it, or suffered from it. I'm just saying I haven't seen it where I live. Clearly that sort of activity is distributed unevenly around the country.

Just to be clear: I'm only saying I haven't personally witnessed overt racism in my adult life. I accept that you have seen it firsthand, if you say so.

Classic racism of the old-timey variety is probably only possible in people who don't own television sets and haven't gone through grade school. I'll grant you that racist prison gangs and neo-Nazis exist. But obviously something else is going on with those guys. Let's call them the exceptions.

In my sixteen years of corporate life I never witnessed or even heard secondhand that anyone had ever been denied a promotion or a raise because of ethnicity or gender. I will grant you that your own experience is just as valid. I assume discrimination must be going on someplace. I'm just saying I've never seen it firsthand, which probably has a lot to do with where I live in the San Francisco Bay area. Any party you attend in my part of the world looks like a United Nations general assembly. When I travel to a more white bread part of the country it's a bit jarring.

Perhaps we need to evolve our language to keep up with the times. Racism is certainly happening with prison gangs and Neo-Nazis. Everyone else might be guilty of something closer to profiling or insensitivity. And the conviction rate for those thought crimes would be running around 100%.

This brings me to the recent Internet tweets and headlines crowing that I'm defending the Republican woman who emailed her friends a picture with Obama's head on a monkey body. Reading that charge out of context, people assume that I think forwarding the photo was acceptable behavior. Um, no. It was shockingly clueless behavior. But I think the most likely explanation of events is the one she gave - that the photo didn't register to her personally as a racist photo. We learned that she's deep into birther conspiracy theory. My assumption is that she probably forwarded every Obama birther email she ever got. To her, this was just another.

The principle that makes stage magic work is that a person who focuses on one thing will be blind to another no matter how obvious it might be on its own. That phenomenon predicts that a rabid birther is far less likely to notice the potential for offending people with the racial aspect of the photo because it's in a birther context. The birther sees it as a birther joke. The non-birther sees it as a racist joke. I believe you could recreate this experiment with a control group and get that result.

If you object to my theory of events on the grounds that no one could be dumb enough to miss the racist suggestion in the photo, remind yourself that the Republican in question is a birther. If you think all birthers are blind to the obvious, it's hard to assume that obliviousness is limited to questions of birth certificates. Be sure you are consistent with your opinions.

You might think the birther issue itself is racism in disguise. But I can't imagine Republicans ignoring this sort of an issue if it applied to John Kerry. If Kerry's mother had been doing some traveling at about the time he was born, and he didn't have a proper birth certificate, it's all you would have heard. While it might be true that all white racists are birthers, it's absurd to think that all birthers are racists.

I've also noticed that many people have conflated this woman's story with some other story of an entirely different person who forwarded a photo of watermelons on the White House lawn. This is a great example of confirmation bias. As soon as you start believing she's a person who sends racist emails, you see all evidence as confirmation of that belief.

Cluelessness is always a competitive explanation with just about any other theory. This story made the news precisely because overt racism has become somewhat rare. In contrast, cluelessness is everywhere. We're swimming in it. And as long as there are at least two viable theories for this Republican woman's actions, I oppose crucifying her based on the theory that some of you can see into her soul. It's bad enough to punish a thought crime. It's a thousand times worse to assume that the thought police can read minds. I don't want to live in that country.

Having said all of that, Republicans need to put some distance between her and their party for practical reasons. That's a separate decision. And if new information about this situation pops up, I'm open to changing my opinion.

And if racism is a big problem in your part of the country, consider moving to the Bay Area. We have excellent parties.