no need to wait for the receipt (I had reworked an old post for a psychiatry trade journal, which I would happily have linked you to, except that page 2 is behind a login wall. So here is the version I submitted before the editors edited it, slightly longer with more typos. I am posting this because of the new lawsuit against the American Board of Medical Specialties.) The mission of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology's Maintenance of Certification (MOC) Program is to advance the clinical practice of psychiatry and neurology by promoting the highest evidence-based guidelines and standards to ensure excellence in all areas of care and practice improvement. That's what the website says, I have no reason to believe they are not earnest. But far from succeeding, the program does the exact opposite. We have come to a moment of truth in psychiatry, and we are all going to fail. By which I mean pass. We can start with the 200 question certification exam. The most obvious clue that there was something suspicious going on with the test was that there were no questions about Xanax. How do you measure "excellence in all areas of care and practice" without asking about the most commonly prescribed medication in America, let alone psychiatry? Meanwhile there were several questions about pimozide, a medication which appears to be prescribed exclusively by psychiatrists who want to brag about prescribing it. I was repeatedly assessed on my competence in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, but was not asked to display my knowledge of SSI. You might retort that SSI isn't really psychiatry, but then why is so much of my time spent on it? The only thing I spend more time on is Xanax. But though the missing Xanax was a clue, the insidious problem with the exam was not the content. To see the bad faith obscured by the questions, put aside the usual college freshman complaints of, "why do we need to know about pimozide?" and ask instead, "what happens if I get the question wrong? What happens if I get them all wrong?" The answer is nothing. There are no consequences for failing this test, at all. First, 99% of the applicants pass, I assume the other 1% forgot to bring two forms of ID. Second, even if you fail, you can take it again and again, as many times as you feel it's worth the $1500. Third: there were a thousand easy ways to cheat, here are three: I could have walked out of the building on an unsupervised "break"; I could have Godfathered an ipad to the back of a toilet; or I could just picked up the phone and called everyone. Who was going to stop me? There is more security at a pregnancy test, which made me wonder if how easy it was to cheat wasn't... on purpose. The retort is that doctors are expected to behave honorably, but the honorable ones were going to pass anyway. Those in danger of failing-- the very people the test should detect-- would be most tempted to cheat. Doesn't the ease of cheating render the test unreliable? If the test is unreliable and 99% pass, why have a test at all? Which reveals the gimmick: the point of the test isn't to measure competence, but to convey the impression that competence was measured. The point of the test is to say that a test was given-- and nothing else. The question is, to whom are we saying this? It is as if psychiatry was in denial about its ordinary reality and was trying to create a different identity through the test itself. A psychiatry where there are right and wrong answers. Where pimozide and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy happens, a lot. Let me anticipate your retorts: that the questions are carefully constructed for their validity; that the test itself "incentivizes" learning; that not everyone prescribes Xanax; that if I'm such a smartypants, what system would I use? If these are your replies, you have missed my point: a flawed system isn't better than no system at all, it is worse than no system at all, because at least with no system we are forced to be accountable to ourselves for our education. "Not everyone will be so dedicated." Correct, but now those same undedicated people get an official blessing of their ignorance. Who doesn't walk out of even this ridiculously meaningless exam not feeling smart, accomplished, up to date? And who would dare, after passing, to criticize the exam that warmed his ego? In addition to the test, the Board also requires a nauseating number of CME credits, but these CMEs are an even worse affront to learning. The only thing that CMEs guarantee is that money was spent on buying them, $80 and no questions asked is all it takes, which is even sillier than it sounds since I could go to a number of websites which offer instant and unlimited free CMEs, so long as I skip the long text and just take the post-test, which I can take as many times as I want. I can get 1 CME every 25-50 seconds, depending on my ability to click "b". The retort is that the system is predicated on a certain level of honor, that physicians shouldn't cheat. Fair enough, but if you're trusting them to be honest in revealing what they learn, why not simply trust that they're going to learn it? Because the point isn't the education. The CME exists to say that there is CME; the CME exists to say there is oversight. To clarify: the important criticism here is not that the multimillion dollar CME industry is a gigantic money making scam, something on the level of the 15th century sale of indulgences, because to say that would be actually to defend that very system: the money is a diversion, a patsy, what is corrupt about CME isn't the money but, as the default mechanism for continuing education, it subverts its own purpose. It reduces the interest in actual education so that it can pretend that it explicitly monitors it. If you have a minute to spend on your "education," the system pushes you towards CME. "Why not do both?" Why do both, who can do both? There are only 24 hours in a day. In other words, the system doesn't just fail, it forces failure. Last year there was a large cheating scandal at Harvard, over a hundred students were accused of plagiarism in a government class, and amidst the usual self-aggrandizing criticisms of the college kids as entitled, lazy, or stupid, what no one wondered is why, in an introductory survey course predicated on institutionalized grade inflation and no wrong answers, did the students feel compelled to cheat when they were all going to get As anyway? The terrifying answer is that they weren't cheating to get the right answer, there was no right answer, they were forced to cheat to concoct the answer the professor wanted-- because that's the system. Meanwhile, while they were spending their time "cheating", what real learning could be done? None. So--- why bother with an exam at all? Why not just offer the course and give everyone an A anyway? Because the purpose of the test is to say a test was given, to prove to some hypothetically gullible entity that learning occurred-- and to prove it to ourselves. Which is why our reflex was to criticize the kids, not the system: we are products of that system, to criticize the reliability, let alone validity, of that system would be to open ourselves to scrutiny, to deprive us of a core part of our own identity. "Things were a lot more rigorous when I went to college." First of all, they weren't. Second, even if they were, why, when you got to be in charge, did you change the system to this? Seen this way, these tests, whether Harvard government exams or MOC exams, are nothing more than fetishes: a substitute for something missing which saves us from confronting the full impact of its absence. In less abstract terms, these tests allow us to believe NOT that we learned something, NOT that we know something-- but that there is something to know. Since there is nothing new to learn, therefore there must be a test. The logic of a 10 year MOC exam is to keep us up to date, so it's fair to ask: what in psychiatry has changed in ten years, what are the major advances? Depakote was discovered to be the default maintenance mood stabilizer despite no evidence supporting this, but that fell into disuse at a time oddly coinciding with its patent expiration, which is suspicious but I'm no epidemiologist. Anyway, it wasn't on the test. Anything else? A few new medicines have come out, though none of them appeared on the test either. There's money to be made on the west coast using giant magnets, (fortunately) also not on the test. So? Was the ABPN worried I'd forget how to use MAOIs? I'm never going to use them, I have enough problems monitoring Xanax. The astonishing truth is that despite millions of dollars and hundreds of academic careers psychiatry has made no progress in almost 20 years, let alone ten, a claim no other medical specialty can make, and the truth which cannot be spoken out loud. Hence an exam. Are you prepared to look inside yourself? When a nurse practitioner asks you what about your board exam is difficult, what will you say? Take a minute, it's important. "Well, it has neurology in it." Note carefully that the psychiatry questions aren't "harder," the appeal here isn't to a higher level of expertise in psychiatry, but an expertise in something else, something "more" than psychiatry, and it is this link that symbolizes our status as "experts." Older psychiatrists will be quick to assert that "clinical judgment" counts for a lot, and I don't disagree, but it's probably not testable, and it most certainly wasn't tested. So what does $1500 buy you? "Existential support." I hope it was worth it. What makes the MOC not just a bad exam but evidence of a pathology is that though college kids have no idea what they're up against, that the system works against their education, psychiatry is the very discipline that articulated these defense mechanisms. It should know better, it is supposed to know better; which means that we are either unable to see what we are doing or believe that we are somehow exempt from this. But here we are, spending time and money on cosmetics and pageantry to pretend that we are learning, to pretend that we are being measured, all the while slinging random neurochemicals + Xanax based on an a suspect but billable logic in the hope that something sticks and no one notices. Frantic activity as a defense against impotence. There is a term for that, but you can bet your career it won't be on the test. Pass.

cue hatred Part 1 here IV. Off topic: Randi strongly believes Facebook has a legitimate place in the business world, and this makes me think Facebook is finished.  I realize this is a speculative trade to make.  The usual anxiety about Facebook's future is that teenagers aren't interested in it, but the more relevant demo here is adult men, especially the ones in suits.  Facebook runs 60/40 women to men.  In the language of self-aggrandizing social media, that's a tipping point.  5% more estrogen and Facebook will be perceived as a women's site and no guy will want any part of it except for guys you will want no part of.  Hush yourself, you have your sexism backwards:  The instant a woman notices a man flipping through Facebook and one eyebrow goes up, you can head to your car and beat the stadium traffic, the game is as good as over.  That's what happened to Myspace.  It tipping pointed into "unemployed/some high school" and The Ruling Class had to sell it to Ima Holla Achoo for 20x less than they bought it.  Now it looks like Windows Mobile, which is demographically appropriate. Lose the men and you've lost Big Business, and at some size point a technology needs Big Business to want it, which makes Pinterest more valuable than Instagram and WhatsApp completely worthless.  This is the story of Blackberry.  The conventional wisdom is that people didn't like their emails in monochrome and preferred the sleek and sexy iphones, but you probably remember all the business casual salarymen proudly carrying around two phones like some bourgeois Frenchman with a dignified wife and a touch sensitive mistress, a couple years in a guy's going to get to thinking, "what am I, a Mormon, how did I end up with two wives?"   When Business was henpecked into supporting the iphone, Blackberry went sadly into menopause and defiantly into Africa.  Plausible deniability requires that I do not explain how layered a joke that is.  V. I want to believe that Randi Zuckerberg is delusional, that because she is so wealthy and famous she sincerely believes if you take a MacBook Pro to a Panera and start a mommy blog or a particle accelerator, follow your passion, you should be a TEDx speaker in no time, but don't forget it's hard work, money isn't everything, and take time out to unplug! But this person was at Davos.  Now I'm confused, was the invite Mark + 1?  That's the easy criticism to make, that she's famous only because of her brother, but nepotism only gets you so  far, Mark has a much more intelligent wife who just graduated medical school and no one is interested in her, and when the media has no other choice but to acknowledge her they do this: I know, I know, it's probably photoshopped.  Still. So on the one hand the media has no idea what to do with an Asian physician except depict her as a borderline psychopath on Grey's Anatomy, on the other hand they are excited to interview a lunatic  who broadcasts the appearance of excessive action-- frantic activity as a defense against impotence-- that's what the demo wants, and if you've been paying attention you will understand the translation: since the target demo has no idea what to learn from the experience of an Asian woman who despite marrying the Powerball became a physician anyway, you get Davos updates from a woman who plurals adjectives.  This isn't a criticism of her, it's a criticism of you: what do you expect to gain from all the haste, the energy, the "finding ways to be creative?"  Unlocking creativity is the third biggest swindle perpetrated by managment consultants, after open floor plans and managment consulting.  Creativity was never the problem, the problem was always the math.  Randi probably read her book herself and I don't doubt that it took months to come up with the phrase "dot complicated", after which she needed a vacation, but she doesn't understand why she wrote the words she did, what forces were acting on her, and what these forces wanted from her that she was elevated to celebrity status.  Consequently, her demo doesn't understand either: they think she's an idiot.  This woman went to the World Economic Forum, which you probably think is irrelevant and you'd be right, but grant that they are at least pretending they are relevant; yet they still allowed her in, knowing full well if anyone found out it could completely obliterate their legitimacy.  Why take such a gamble, to what possible benefit?  Look, if Scarlett Johansson is going then at least you can say Scarlett Johansson is coming, I totally get it, but putting Randi Zuckerberg on the brochure should be brand annihilation.   for the sake of this premise, pretend she came to the 2014 Davos "I'm pretty sure that's Charlize Theron, not Scarlett Johansson."  And I'm pretty sure they're the same person, and just because now she's Rachel Maddow doesn't mean she's serious.  "But she did actually do serious humanitarian work."  Yes, great, how about that.  Is there a blonder picture we can use for the flier? It's probably very frustrating for whoever that woman is to try being anything other than whatever she is because no one will see her as anything but that, but this is the nature of the trade off: you spend your life trying to be seen as something, then if you happen to succeed then you will not want to be only that anymore, you are really something else.  But the world and/or your girlfriend won't listen.  This is especially hard if you simply age out of it, you want to move on with new ideas but the jerk in the supermarket wants you to be the person from '99, which means that the jerk in the supermarket still is the person from '99 and can't understand how calendars work.  "You changed!" he hisses with disgust because you fail to normalize his cortical sclerosis.  Sigh.  You can't punch him, there are witnesses.  There are always witnesses, and they will all be from '99. VI. You would be forgiven for thinking Randi was at Davos merely because she's rich, but consider that Warren Buffett was not there.  He's a capitalist, not a globalizer, so his brand doesn't synergize, in fact, he is the competition.   "No, he knows Davos is irrelevant!"  So why does he go on CNBC?  Buffett is a CNBC favorite, but what's so remarkable about his appearances is that while he is branded as a sober "buy and hold" investor, he is only ever asked about short term trends: are we at a bottom, what will the Fed do tomorrow, etc.  Why?  You know what he's going to say: "You want to buy good companies when they're undervalued," he'll intone over a cheeseburger, callously unaware that there are only 7 minutes until the close.  --What about Facebook?! Buy at 57?!   "Oh, I don't know anything about those new fangled tech stocks, I liked Wrigley's as a child, I understand the company, it offers durable competitive advantage."  --Oh, Uncle Warren, you're so out of touch!  (But the rest of you understand Facebook, you liked it as a child, doesn't it offer competitive advantage...?) What does Watch Us With The Sound Down And Feel Like You're Active need him for?  It's not his words, it's him, he's the draw, he is the aspirational image of the demo of 35-54yo hopefuls: "Someday I'll be old, but when I am, I'll have become rich through the market."  So keep trading.  And here I have to go back over something.  The harder part of the psychology is that the demo doesn't want to become full time traders, either at home all day or on Wall Street-- that part must remain a fantasy--  because then it would be a job and it wouldn't count; it has to be a side gig, then their success wasn't their "work self" but their "real" self;  no one else can claim a sliver of that success-- not the liberals with their "'entrepreneurs' just pretend they don't benefit from public services!" or the wives with their "behind every good man...!" or the echoes of their father yelling,  "you need to apply to Sperry Rand, now there's a company you can put in forty years with!"  It all happened in their head, no one else can share the credit, it is 100% a consequence of their personal value.    Bonus: if they fail, it can be quickly discounted as merely a hobby-- that wasn't, after all, their real self. The mistake is in thinking this has anything to do with the money.  It's said that most at home traders fail, but this is incorrect: they fail at making money, but they are successful at feeling like a trader.  That is the goal; the money is secondary, which is why they fail at making it.  The buy/hold/reinvest the dividends strategy of Buffet is totally opposite to what's desired, because the strategy does not involve market timing or status updates, it is on autopilot, and there's no "i" in autopilot.  Well, there's one, but it doesn't stand out.  The trading activity itself-- the frantic activity--  keeps the rest of reality away.  You're not your job-- you're something else.  You're not your family, you're more than that.  Things have the potential of possibly happening someday, and no work will have been necessary to accomplish it.  Just you wait. But even that's not true.   The hardest part of the psychology is that feeling like a trader isn't the final goal.  Turn CNBC back on, there's Buffett, and oh, look, there's Peter Schiff.  Peter Schiff is another CNBC favorite, and his presence is even more incongruous until you understand it isn't.   Whatever your opinion of his opinions-- debt/inflation/government/armageddon-- his are more political than financial or macroeconomic rather than technical and anyway they are 100% long term opinions.  He may tell you to buy gold for the coming collapse, but you have a few years to open a position.  So why is he there?  "Because he's right!"  No-- why is he on Fast Money?  Here is the unspoken fantasy that explains the presence of Warren Buffett and Peter Schiff on CNBC:  "Someday I'll be old, but when I am, I'll have become rich through the market.  And then people will want to interview me." VII. Swap out the demo, and this is Randi Zuckerberg.  She believes she is worth all her money, she believes she is more than Mark's sister, she believes she has valuable opinions.  Anyone who disagrees is a hater.  You're just jealous.  "No, she's a fool!"  Then how come she's so rich? Those who are enraged by her are actually suffering from the same delusion she is, which is why her target demo as seen by Davos includes her haters.  The standard criticism of her is that she didn't really do anything to deserve her money-- "she got rich because of her brother"--  but this is a profound disavowal of the reality: she got rich because of timing-- even though her job at Facebook was trivial, she was there from the beginning and got paid in stock options.  What's interesting is that no one makes this criticism of her, because that's what her haters believe is supposed to happen to them.   She timed the market the way you're supposed to; what she did that makes her hatable, therefore, is that she had inside information. I don't begrudge anyone the good fortune of right place/right time, take your money and run, but first drop a knee and be humbled before God reflecting soberly on the knowledge that you didn't deserve it.   I love getting paid, do whatever you can do to get paid, but do not let the money whisper to you that you are worth it, it will be lying and you will believe it.  You hold a fetish of value and not actual value.   But even her haters want the money to mean retroactively they were already deserving of it, this kind of fortune has bypassed reality testing and instead creates a new reality,  it uses the truth in order to lie: of course I'm not rich because of my work product, duh, you can't measure a human being's value based on his labor.  I'm rich because that's what I'm worth.  "Isn't that specious reasoning?"  Oh, dear, sweet, earnest, Lisa, I want to buy your rock. And so the hatred of her, like all hate, is revealed to be a defense.  To her haters Randi is a buffoon, a step above relationship expert, she is too glaringly undeserving of that money; Randi is an obscene counterexample to the logic that the payout mirrors value and self worth.  She is a narcissistic injury for everyone else.  So she's disparaged in a specific way: she doesn't deserve all that money because she got it from her brother. VIII. Not coincidentally, this is the narrative of Davos to the demo that, unlike Randi, will never, ever, ever be rich; but to whom Randi represents a possibility of it:  with globalism comes the possibility of a lifestyle independent of your work product, and, more deeply, that your self-worth will finally be recognized by the world that is happy to pay you just for your individuality.  Why wouldn't it?  Your baby pictures are adorable. To be clear, it's not a lifestyle that could be independent of your work product-- it has to specifically be independent of your work product, otherwise its based on something other than you and thus wouldn't count.  This is why one cannot profit from "nepotism" and "inside information".  Those are bad.  That they are, in fact, actually bad is besides the point: they are the exemptions which prove you are worth your money. It's probably unnecessary to point out that this increase in lifestyle is built on the increased work product of whoever will do it for 30 cents an hour, and anyway it is a red herring.  The real attraction for us isn't just the lifestyle, but that it systematizes-- it makes normal-- not ever wondering: how come we have more lifestyle when we didn't do more work?  How did that happen?  In 2008 it was 1933 and six years later it's 1999, what kind of bananastown calendar is this?  no caption is possible Confused, I run through my checklist: was there a war?  No.  Did they invent a new technology?  No.  Was cold fusion discovered?  No.  Did the aliens come?  Don't look at me like that, did they come?  Then nothing could possibly explain how we are all worth twice what we were worth in 2009, or even 30% more than we were worth in 2007.  "But stock prices aren't based on our worth."  Then what do they reflect?  Our productivity?  Our innovation?  A bet on our future prospects?  I ask you again: Did the aliens come?  And hence Globalism-- the brand, not the particulars-- is attractive because it is the physical manifestation of the logic of disavowal we already use for everything else.    "I don't know how it happened, but it makes sense.  After all, I am worth it."  Economics mirrors psychology, as it always must. So Randi goes to Davos, never once asking why they would want her there?  Convincing her demo of underproducing hyperconsumers that capitalism-- controlling capital-- is pointless and mean, but globalism-- doublespoken as "progress", "human rights", "everything is connected"-- that is a noble cause.  Remember that the "culture" she thinks she speaks for, including those that hate her-- "the startup culture"-- is premised on starting a business in order to sell the business to someone else.   Of course the idea is to get rich-- which sounds like capitalism, if you're retarded, but observe the message that is being taught: that the necessary correlate to getting rich is to give all the capital to someone else.   The power is traded for the fetish of power.  That's not capitalism, it is madness, and apparently Davos and Randi think women especially will heart it.   It'll work for a handful of well publicized people pictured above the caption, "$100 billion!  You could be next!"-- followed immediately by a story about how worthless the business turned out to be, so of course the goal for you is to sell out ASAP;  but the vast majority who have aligned their psychology with this vector will pursue an impossible fantasy at the expense of their labor and their lives.  If you don't believe me, believe Lori Gottlieb.  This logic recommended to her to drop out of Stanford medical school to join Kibu.com, and now she's a relationship expert.   "But capitalism exploits the worker."  I'll take my chances, because when you get a taste of the money but no access to the capital, you are easily seduced by Globalism-- the brand, not the particulars.  Hence the Hollywood stars, hence Buffett's grandson, hence Randi Zuckerberg, all who act like they belong there.  They do. Every time you hear the word globalism, you should hear three things: 1. wealth uncoupled from work product.  2. Lifestyle as a reflection of your personal self-worth.  3. You give up control of the capital, and by capital I mean you.    "Do I still get paid?"  Sure, but you have to promise to spend more than what we pay.  "How will that work?"  Don't worry, Visa will explain it all to you. IX. It is no coincidence that social media, "everything is connected" (the default is plugged), is a vivid metaphor for globalism, even as so many social media vaginalists think they are against globalism if it is defined as Wall Street.   Propaganda doesn't care about your motivations, so long as you act in the required direction. When social media is branded to men as a positive, the gimmick is that it magnifies their power,  e.g. "the hive mind."  This brand is reinforced even when it is depicted as bad, e.g. men's increased power to stalk, harass, or bully people.  On the other hand, when social media is branded to women with interests and passions but no math skills it's for "finding support" or "community"; nothing powerful is expected to occur there, it's a place to feel safe, "connect" and "have a conversation."  Those are not accidents, and they have nothing to do with biology, they are the result of market research and 50 years of very, very bad parenting. But my generation came of age in a world with social networks... we understand that the business leaders of the future will be three-dimensional­ personalities whose lives, interests, hobbies and passions outside of work are documented and on display. We should embrace this new world. The answer isn't fewer baby pictures; it's more baby pictures. It's not that I should post less; it's that everyone else should post more. Let's change what it means to be professional in the Internet age. The time when your personal identity was a secret to your colleagues is over and done.  And that is a good thing. This is a woman who hates everything.  I know that seems unbelievable given that she adorbs baby pics and is always shown smiling in lipstick three shades too bright for her hematocrit, but don't be fooled, her hate is transmogrified by money and fame and class buffers so it doesn't action the same way it does for Al Qaeda, but if she had a commercial pilot's license she would hit you with it. Think seriously about what she (thinks she) wants:  acceptance of her individuality-- by work.  Not for her work product-- there is none; but for her individuality, by work.  First question: which work?  Not the job you have, it's real, and it's boring.  It is a future "career", the fantasy environment seen on TV dramas where all of life takes place. Second question: why work?  Men are not being taught to want their job to value them, in fact, men want as little to do with their jobs as possible.  Randi and the globalism party bus are teaching women to want "careers"-- more precisely, to want to draw more of their identity from their careers.  The perk of taking your work home with you isn't more money, it's acceptance of your individuality.  Also you get to have to shop at Ann Taylor.  Before you seize on this as a biological flaw in women's character, let me remind you that they want work to accept their individuality because their family and relationships have failed them in this regard.  The only place they feel... happy?-- is when they are at work or plugged in.  "I know The Bachelor is mindless TV, but I just like it."  Keeps your husband out of the room, anyway.  How great is it to be alone? Third question: what are the consequences of Randi's utopian fantasy of your job valuing you as an individual for everyone else at work? She believes her authentic self, via Facebook, should be accepted everywhere, home and work, so the suits should just shut their greed vacuums and embrace her baby pictures, her individuality-- after all, that's why they hired her, right?  That sounds laudable-- except that she's lying.  Ok, I have to pretend not to be sickened by her baby pictures, will she Like me live-posting My Summertime Threesomes?  Huh.  So now individuality has an asterisk: since Facebook should be on at work, everyone's Facebook should be nonthreatening, not mean, safe-- work appropriate.  "Well, stupid, just don't put naked pics on Facebook."  Fair enough, but whereas before it was my poorly thought out choice, now it is not allowed by work. "Well, Facebook shouldn't be on at work."  Duh, of course it won't be on at work, no company would allow Facebook to be on at work, there's work to be done.   So "ok at work" really means "if work saw it" and "Facebook" really means "the internet." "Well don't put naked pics--" You're focused on the wrong side of the equation.  Why should I be careful of my internet behavior?  It's not because it can hurt me, it's because it can hurt the company.  What Randi doesn't realize she was used to say is that your internet life better be work acceptable since there's much more at stake there than at home.  If threesomes are't your thing, try a 2nd Amendment Fan Page or 10 Things I Hate About Senators and see if your job supports your individuality.  See how close to the edge you can get before Facebook itself censors you.  It is tempting to see this as a "war on men" because Randi tests as a genetic female, or a war on conservatives because Randi sounds like a "capitalism with a human face"-progressive who ran pass interference for the DNC in 2008, but I hope you can see that the force would equally oppose anything that was slightly outside of the mainstream.  Randi needs the job to tell her she is valuable, and the job wants frictionless employees.  The war isn't on men or women, it is on individual freedom, it is regression to the mean by suppressing the mean, where mean is defined by its deviation from SFW, according to W.  Since work has encroached on your home life at your request, since you've conflated plugged/unplugged with work/home, then "The time when your personal identity is a secret to your colleagues is over and done.  And that's a good thing."   It's good for the company, anyway.  You may be surprised to discover that the more replaceable you are to the company, the higher standards you are held to, that's what happens when you don't control the capital.  Rather than fostering individuality and creativity, Randi is telling the organ donors to sanitize their internet presence so that it doesn't affect the people who are profiting from your work.  Consolation is you get to post your baby pics and work has to accept it. X. In the absence of a big payday, the only things left that can value us are the job, and the media.   Regularly someone says something "offensive" in the media and the media punishes or fires him, and we debate whether that was justified or not.  The debate entirely avoids the most important point: the media company punished the guy in media.  They could have fired him privately, the way you would have gotten fired from your job if you started YZing all your coworkers.  Not only do they publicly fire him, they force the guy to make a public apology first-- and then fire him anyway.   Who benefits?   The offended victim? But as much as we say we hate their power to judge us, we want them to have this power-- who else is going to have it?  If they have this much power to destroy a person, then how much more significant is a RT?  How great would it be if they acknowledged my worth?  With no power, what other chance do I have?  In the fantastical words of Marshall McLuhan, "there is no sweeter praise than the gaze of a tyrant, especially if it's in HD."   This is what we want judging us, this is the calendar we're using.  Something external that can value us at 1999 levels while the real world is pricing us at 2008 levels.  My face is in my hands and I wonder how anyone could be asked to raise a girl in such a world?  Recently a female cardiologist with a "difficult" 10 year old daughter who had been well trained to want things but not control things asked me if I had read "the study in the New York Times"-- !?!?!?!?!?-- that said that people with the same surname, over generations, continued to achieve the same level of wealth, showing "therefore" that genetic factors were more important than the home environment in determining social mobility, isn't that probably true?  Having to do this sober I asked her, "But didn't you change your surname 11 years ago?  Or are you betting she can just upgrade hers?"  What else could I say?  If you read it, it's for you?

how hard could it be, none of those circles are actually connected Randi Zuckerberg is CEO of Zuckerberg Media, which, according to its 10-K, is an iphone.  If you have no idea who she is, and you shouldn't, then the answer to your one and only question is yes. In her considerable free time she wrote a book about social media. Here's a question: why does a woman who epitomizes the online world need to write a hardback book?  Could it be there's no money in the online unless you actually own the online? I'm guessing that wasn't in the book.  Ok.    I understand she gives a lot of interviews too, I'm sure they're TEDy optimistic and unactionable, but she's apparently an expert, shrug, here is her insight from six years of watching people work at Facebook: social media is a bad thing, unless it's used responsibly, then it's a good thing.  Settle in for nuance and shades of grey, all 50 of them. She thinks it's important to "find a balance" between plugged and unplugged life, a phrase you hear all over the plugged place but has suspiciously avoided scrutiny and is an example of media allowing you to debate the conclusions but forcing you to accept the form of the argument, in this case that a balance is what is desirable.  I'm definitely not advocating a complete disconnect or complete unplug, that's not realistic... But what I am thinking is that people, we've reached this point where we feel like we just need to be always on. Always answering emails 24/7 connected, and the pendulum needs to swing back a little bit for us to reclaim a bit of our own time... Someone is lying, time to figure out why.  While she misdirected us with "pendulum" and "thinking" and "little bit" which are words vicious ideologues use to sound nonideological and "realistic", she substituted the plugged/unplugged balance with work/home balance, don't think I didn't see it.  Consequently, when someone/Randi tells you about the negatives of being too plugged in, they almost always blame work emails, as if the things that pay for your dinner are what distract you from dinner.   Really?   If I had to make a sexist yet 100% accurate prediction I'd say that it isn't hers but her husband's work emails that she can't stand at dinner, I'm pretty sure that no husband has ever gotten away with telling his still Anne Taylored wife to put her phone away, "the senior partner will just have to wait, we're about to say grace."   I'll cover myself by saying that, indeed, wives do sometimes answer work emails at dinner, however and importantly if this is occurring you can be sure the wife is extremely, extremely bored with everything that happens after 5pm, and this is compared to everything that happened before 5pm which was also *yawns*.  "Huh," she soundboards as she one thumbs a text to anyone else,  "Obama said that, you don't say, pandering to the flavor profile demo, what are you gonna do."   I'll be first to observe Obama has failed in every imaginable way, but Jesus, if that's your dinner conversation, just Jesus.  One of you should cheat just to force the eye contact.  Email is a convenient scapegoat not just because "family time should be protected" but because it gets us out of inquiring what went wrong with our home life that we could ever be tempted by work emails, and the avoidance of this inquiry is highly suspicious, i.e. on purpose.  "Honey," she says putting down her Trader Joe's summer salad, "I gotta take this."  Only in America does gotta substitute for wanna so we can avoid the guilt.  #behavioralgenetics.  You may recall industrialization/capitalism/Carousel of Progress's great promise of fewer working hours, and for the most part this has come true, please observe what we have done with our increased leisure time: filled it back up with work.  There was some consternation that evil capitalism had forced Target's employees to work all day on Thanksgiving, "no respect for tradition or family time!"  But how many of them wanted to be home on Thanksgiving?  The customers sure didn't, they were willing to camp out/throw down to get in a store what they coulda got easier/cheaper/faster from their Zuckerberg Medias.  "But the store itself has the responsibility to respect tradition!"  And only in America do we want the system to force us to do the right thing so we can take the credit.  #behavioraleconomics One of our time's great sociological questions is why we filled downtime back up with work, and the reason is it's better than alcoholism.  At some point during the Truman Administration home life became more stressful than work life, where stressful is defined either as hysterical drama or rheumatismy boredom, and by Reagan II the home was no longer a respite from modern society's incessant demands to produce or at the very least a place to get a nap.  Home became work, it became a work, and not coincidentally this parallels precisely the history of homework.  ("But don't you think kids get too much homework nowadays?"   Sure, if you're doing it for them, you have become so myopic about your kids' possible trajectories that not only do you think faking their grades is their only hope, you think that will work.)  Neither is there home cooking at home, Trader Joe's does it cheesier and anyway it's on TV.  The XYs have long been resigned to this, hence their desire to "get an early start" or eat their lunch in their cars, while little girls were hooked on the potential of a fulfilling work and home life, or at least work or home life, now women are in on the reveal...  and it is shaking their very souls.   WTF.   If home is stressful for adults, think about how bad it is for teens, all they want to do is hang out and talk about how phony everything is and instead they're stuck upstairs with Snapchat while listening to their parents masturbate in separate rooms.  Better than listening to them divorce, I guess.  Part of the reason work and home keep mixing despite our professed desires is that that's how Americans were taught to see an aspirational adult life.  In every TV show and movie after Leave It To Beaver the gimmick has always been that the protagonist's job and personal life overlap-- doctors in love, CIA agents defending their family, late nights at the office trading zingers or abuse stories.  While we no longer think we want the overlap, the shows reinforced the false psychology that a person is something, all the time and everywhere, and the backdrop world "sees" it, accepts it.  This applies just as much to negative depictions of work/life overlap, e.g. the obsessed cop whose wife is now divorcing him because of the job: the point isn't that the overlap is "good", that's not the aspiration; the point is that the structure of these depictions represents the fundamental narcissistic fantasy: a fixed and clear identity-- a character-- seen by a potential audience.  This is why home is not relaxing: we are working to not let it be all that we are. Work, email, and Target's hours, expand to fill the time available, by request.  We took one look at the void and lack of interesting 5pm TV and started texting to anyone as fast as we could.  The truth is we're not overwhelmed by work emails, we just laid them on top to make it seem like we're buried in work.  Here's your #OWS update: work doesn't bleed over into home because capitalism is evil, work bleeds over to home because we have no idea what else to do at home, and thank God we can blame it on work.  "But capitalism reduces human relations to market relationships."  Oh my god, feed Bobby for a second, I have to totally tweet that. II. Together with work emails, the social media evangelists will lump in porn and gaming, because those are seen by the person in the doorway as "bad."  Their inclusion in the plugged/unplugged balance is to get you to accept the form of the argument--that there is a moral balance: work emails, porn, gaming= time away from human relations= bad; while things like Facebook and texting are "used responsibly can connect us all", these require a balance.  "Balance" means "not at dinner", though even this is nuanced, because while you shouldn't check your Instagram during dinner, it's perfectly acceptable to post to your Instagram during dinner, pretty sure that's what it's for.  Here's a foodie tip: the secret ingredient in every Instagramed delicacy is salt, and blowing the whites. The false dichotomy of "the balance" starts even earlier with reversing the direction of the vector of plugged/unplugged.   "You need to unplug" assumes the default is plugged, but the vast majority of our response to the blinking blue light is a volitional search for anything else but now.  It's worth recalling that the phrase, "you need to unplug" came from The Matrix, and the phrase was important because it had an ironic second meaning: not "you need to stop drawing from the Matrix" but "you need to stop feeding it at the expense of your life." "But the internet is soooooo distracting."  No, it's not.  A headline like, "When It Comes To Pubes, You Have The Following Options" feels like totallies but after ten thousand or so similar headlines, aren't you wise to the bait and switch?   I frequently get emails informing me that there are sexy singles available to chat right now, and I never click on them anymore.  On some site I saw a story to the effect, "You're not going to believe what a kitten and Miley Cyrus did at the AMAs!"  Not believe what?  That a Disney approved character-actor "won the internet" by pretending to sing a song written by the middle aged white guy who writes all of the 3:40s in front of a stage background of the hackest internet meme of all time-- and together they cried like girls?  "This. Is. Everything."  Yeah, I believe it.    tell HarperCollins that women will like what you tell them to like, just get a boob to promote it Haters beware, clicking on a link because "I can't believe a stupid person actually wrote such a a stupid article about a stupid thing" is 100% the exact same mental process, and anyway, the system doesn't care about your motivations, so long as you act in the required direction. "OMG, you're referencing something that happened like, three months ago?"  But it was the top story at the time-- so it wasn't that important?  You think you've forgotten about it because it's pop culture stuff, but this is wrong, you've forgotten about it because you are conditioned for novelty, so all topics become forgettable, which, in the logic of the system, is sort of the point of the technology.  "Come on, that's just a bunch of BS, of course we can distinguish between pop crap and things that matter."   Yes, but when the dopamine falls, you won't care.   #SandyHook   "So because social media is mostly a waste of time, we should shut it off and be more present in our offline relationships?"  No, that's what the internet paid Randi to tell you so that the default=plugged.  This standard criticism of social media and texting is backwards: it doesn't detract from real life relationships, it represents a much desired break from them.   Having to be with someone, especially someone you're not having sex with, especially someone you're not having sex with anymore, is very, very hard; having people see you, especially when you're not amidst the symbols that you believe form your "real" identity-- say, a hedge fund trader who has to be home with the kids or a pretty girl in a sweats at a supermarket-- this is a kind of exposure far more embarassing than any selfie.  What if they confuse that as the real you?  You can see a version of this in married couples who talk to each other, joke, eat, raise kids, do couples stuff, but don't make eye contact.  Avoiding eye contact is a way of keeping reserved a part of yourself, to yourself. "I'm here," you whisper to yourself, "but I'm not going to let this all overtake me, I'm more than this."  This message is strictly internal, after all, you may not be looking at them but they can still see you.   Avoiding eye contact is avoiding a full on Sartre moment, the "scrutinous gaze" of the other.  "Umm, first of all, scrutinous isn't a word, second of all, Sartre called it 'the look'."  Um, hello?  My eyes are up here. What the couple should have done to avoid this calamity is formed a shared identity, "this is us".  But how were they going to do this?  Everything conspires to drive them apart, hell, even a big tent TV show would be a shared hour but media loves multiple Nielsen boxes so just go buy yourself another flatscreen and watch your own targeted ads.  On the other hand, when TV ignores demography and tries to make a show for all audiences, you get Laverne & Shirley,  and you get it for eight seasons, so I admit there's no easy solution.  "What about not watching TV?"  Hush your crazy mouth, telling America not to watch a Disney network is a non-starter, and for clarification ESPN= (0.5)Disney; the Princesses, Thors, ABC, the theme parks-- all that combined is merely the other half.  Now you know what's a stake.  The NFL's been handing out traumatic brain injuries for decades, but the moment Disney decided it needed the women that was the end of lockerroom hijinx.  But until it completes the NFL's rebranding as a kinder, bully-free, concussionless game, complete with engagement rings and Us Weekly's "Ten Hunkiest White Or Articulate Quarterbacks", it's going to have to keep broadcasting Nashville.  Please don't make the mistake of assuming that the NFL wants female viewers, it couldn't care less, the ad dollars from beer and trans fats and cars are plenty.  What the NFL/Disney needs is to reduce the tension between females and males over all that's spent on it: merchandise, tickets, time, men would gladly watch all the commercials on Sundays if women didn't drag them to baby showers and home repairs.  Sports are male expenses that women reluctantly accept, but there's always a ceiling and if women were more into the experience then that ceiling could go up, way up.  The key is to rebrand the NFL not as a man's game but as America's game, thus reducing the barriers to consumption. ("You know, you could use an editor."  You could use some free association, it may help you see unconscious connections which drive your life.  "I find that weed helps."  Amateur.) The only shared identity these couples pull off nowadays is "the kids", which is why they can make eye contact easily when they talk about them.  But relationship experts have analyzed today's marital difficulties completely backwards: rather than trying to find some common connection amidst the the turbulent waters of life, they are actually struggling against the current of the relationship to keep themselves private.  This is what they practiced for two or three decades, how can they unlearn the skills?  They fought so many years to be seen as individuals, "be true to yourself", a few years past the exploratory segment of the relationship and a shared mental space becomes suffocating.  So for them, plugging in gives them some privacy, a micro-break from shared reality, under the rhetorical cover of "connecting with others." But why do we need "the balance?"  What does it replace, what went missing?  The very thing Holden Caufield hated: "phoniness", protocol and ritual for seemingly no purpose.  Politeness is fine, but why do I have to make small talk?  Why do I have to pretend to care about the weather?  Why, after a decade of marriage, should dinner be a regular review of the somewhat boring goings-ons of "the day"?  Because that formality is freeing, it allows self-conscious physical bodies to get used to standing next to each other without having to be acting, this includes husbands and wives.  When dinner is a controlled process with "manners" and expected topics of shared conversation and start and end times, as boring as it may get, it is boring, not you.  Women are especially sensitive to this absence of convention, this is one reason for the popularity of Downton Abbey, not to mention alcohol and iphones at dinner.  It is against this background of "phony" convention that teens can productively "rebel" and find their own individuality against a status quo; fighting against an emotionally illogical, arbitrary, unpredictable structure results in learning the opposite lesson, "whatever gets me through the day..."  Without this structure to social activities, when the "natural" conversation stops being interesting-- and it will, even if most of you weren't bad at it-- it would be a judgment about your relationship, about you.  And you'll beg St. Jobs to blink a path to safety because otherwise you have to sit there with no existential support. Texting and social media's slowness gives them their power for this purpose.  You read a text, and it lingers, it keeps your attention because it's all there is; and then you respond with a piece of your real self, and wait for a response... what's happening is time travel-- while you are on pause, the rest of not-your life goes faster.  It is far more efficient at killing time than a phone call. III. What no one will ever say out loud for fear of being labeled -ist is that "finding a balance" is something only women are encouraged to do.  For men it is supposed to be binary, on or off.  "Honey," the wife says without making eye contact, "please put your phone away."  --But it's the senior partner.  "He can wait, we're about to say grace."  Unlike men, women, as a group, are constantly being reminded by the media that social media is a necessary use of time-- just find a balance.  To be precise: it is not marketed as a diversion, or useful, or helpful or fun-- it's necessary to their existence.  The danger is branded as "excess."  And this coincides their role as the primary consumers and consumables, which is why Randi's stupendously uninsightful book is being heralded wherever online women congregate.   The book itself isn't meant to be read, it can't be read, it can only be hurled.  It is a MacGuffin; her interviews aren't promotions for the book, the book is an excuse for the interviews. No, of course she doesn't know this.  I'm sure she thinks she's talented and smart and fiercely independent (two fingers to the sky!), but getting her to televangelize about finding a balance (=the default is plugged) to her demo of underachieving credit card applicants is what suits the suits.   "How come Facebook's board has so few women?" ask the very women who would rather use it than run it.  Randi also wrote a children's picture book about a child who is obsessed with her ipad but "learns to unplug once in a while", tellingly even though Randi has a son she wrote the book about a girl-- a girl she named after the internet.  Get it?  Because she can't.  However, not all women are the target demo of Randi's lip synching, the CEO of General Dynamics is a woman, I think she has a higher security clearance than the entire Senate, and I know for a fact she builds alien spaceships, why not interview her about how she uses social media to promote her brand and make connections and break ceilings?  Because there's no Like button for hard work or triple integrals, which is doubly interesting because calculus was invented to make hard work easier.  "I just don't get math."  Can't do math if you weren't taught to think logically, and logic is tough on kids' self esteems and makes them way less submissive, easier just to put on a video.  "They're obsessed with the Wiggles."  And apple juice, whose fault is that?  So instead of "if you do the same amount of hard work as everyone else, you should end up in the exact same boat as everyone else, and it will sink because none of you know anything about boats," we get Randi Zuckerberg, a lot, who tells us about the occupational hazards of posting baby pictures: First yawn? Adorbs. Facebook it. First hiccups? Obviously all my friends want to see that. Snoozing in a park? OMG, soooo cute! Who wouldn't want to see baby photos 50 times a day? I soon found out. I had some pretty honest co-workers, and one day one of them decided to give it to me straight. "Randi," she said, "Asher is adorable, but you can't keep posting a zillion baby photos. You have a professional reputation to uphold." I just got the bends.  What the hell kind of profession could she have had that she's on Facebook all day and then the only criticism she gets is that her pics are of babies?  Observe that the discussants are both women.  Who does woman B believe will judge Randi harshly for her baby pictures?  Men? All this worry about baby pictures vs professionalism exists in the minds of women, not men, which is why this was in HuffPo, using the atemporal logic of narcissism: if baby pictures can sabotage a woman's professional reputation, therefore she has a professional reputation.  Men are irrelevant to this discussion, a man would never bother to tell Randi anything because the minute a professional man sees a professional woman's baby pictures, she's moved from Bcc: to cc:.   A Cosmo-feminist will hashtag this as evidence of inherent sexism, but you may want to wait a few paragraphs before you hit RT. It's not that babies are more interesting to women than men, it is that baby pictures are more interesting to women than men.  Men would rather look at a picture of a used condom than a baby, this is a scientific fact.  They get that the baby is precious to you, but there is nothing otherwise in a picture to connect to.  Furthermore, showing a baby picture to a man is an aggressive act because it demands a reaction, you showing him a picture of your baby is entirely for your benefit and not at all for his, it is a dare, in much the same way as a woman on a first date telling you she doesn't play games is a dare, a dare you shouldn't take, trust me on this, overpay the check in cash and run.  I'll grant that there is some level of bonding that occurs between women over baby pictures, worth exploring later, but not for men: men will only (and rarely) show photos of their children doing something, the activity is what represents the kid as kid and them as a parent.  Showing a man a baby picture is equivalent to showing a woman a picture of his car.  "A #baby is more important than a car, dontcha think?"  Yes, but a picture of a baby isn't more important than a picture of a car.  "Yeah, but--"  I know.  Logic is mean.  In the world where the media postulates social media as an absolute requirement of the modern era-- the era where everything is fetishized-- no one is permitted to make the distinction between a value and the picture of a value, they are made equivalent, so daring to criticize Randi's baby pictures is made to sound like misogyny or misobaby.  It's not. I love food but if you ask me to look at a picture of a food I will poison your toothpaste.  Be careful: the point is not that a woman shouldn't post her baby pictures, the point is that the system cannot profit from her baby except as a photo, so that in order to get them to do it more-- to be online more-- the system teaches them to overvalue the photo; and this must necessarily be at the expense of the object itself.  #porn. And here again you glimpse the long con: a power struggle packaged as a gender war. Usually you imagine "sexism" as a pervasive institutional power directed top down against you, oppressing you with sexist jokes or heels at work, but it's much more illuminating to understand sexism as just another tool to increase consumption.  An obvious example:  it costs women more to dress professionally, even though they get paid less.  But sexism can be run in the reverse, too, for women's "benefit."   Example: We say things like "the public has a ravenous hunger for celebrity photos," but this is demonstrably untrue, paparazzi pics are almost entirely a product for the female demo, no man wants to see a picture of any of the Kates or their babies or their homes.  However you will never hear this said out loud in the media, they will tell you (and you will parrot) that the greedy force that creates the paparazzi is "America" or "the public's obsession with celebrity"-- men are lumped in with women.  Men's relationship to celebrity  after teenage years is completely different, the pictures matter much less than "information"-- a pic of Lebron is worth way less than his stats.  But the easy money is in digital photos, monetizing envy has very low fixed costs and great margins, and nothing can be permitted to threaten the money, so when Princess Di is driven off the road we blame the paparazzi; but then, in a surprising admission of guilt, the media comes out and accepts some responsibility-- although in a very specific way: "the media has succumbed to the ravenous demands of the public's infatuation with glamour and wealth."  Because if everyone-- not just women, but everyone-- wants this, then women have less guilt about wanting it and men get the sense nothing can really be done to change it.   Do you understand the infrastructure that is necessary to cause people to disavow something that they know with total clarity, just to keep the money flowing?   The moment male America decides out loud that we're harassing actors and actresses not for "our" prurient interest but for women's prurient interest only, to the media's financial benefit, they will require an open carry permit for telephoto lenses; tell them gays also like Us Weekly and they will repeal the First Amendment.  Believe it.  The system repackages a female product as a "public" product to get it past the hairy misogynists who hate women's media because it doesn't wisely use a ball, and if a couple of celebrities have to be harassed or die for their ballless entertainment, whatevs, there's no reasonable right to privacy on the street or on a beach.   The consumers are women, the rest of you pad the numbers.  "It's hard for me to tell what side you're on here." Sides: the form of the argument you've been trained to accept.   Still not convinced?   Swap out "America's celebrity culture" with "America's gun culture" and "male America" with "Senator" and see which Amendment gets repealed.  "Now I'm totally confused what side you're on."  Jesus.  Just Jesus. It's right about here that I should again remind everyone that for five decades we've been repeatedly assured that men are visual creatures.   Time to rewrite the evo psych texts to support the new economy. --- Part 2 here

sorry old man, I have a dress fitting to go to Number of people killed: 15 Number of people Katniss kills: 1 Number of times she is saved by someone else: 6 Number of times she saves someone else: 0 But boy oh boy, wasn't she spectacular at practice, 9 targets in 30 seconds, and then she strings up a mannequin. Take a bow.   Badass. I. For context, here is why THG is a sexist fairy tale.  It anticipates most of the criticisms. Except one.  An insightful, even optimistic retort is that at least she's not killing, at least she's made the ethical choice to not kill anyone. But this insight is exactly what you are supposed to think, it is an illusion, and it is why my tally above is also a lie.  She kills one person, but she is responsible for all of their deaths.  From the very beginning of the Game it was immediately true that everyone but one got killed.  From the very beginning, before anyone dies, you are guilty of  everyone's death. That's the Game.  It's not like they went in there thinking, "I'm not going to kill anyone because I am planning to escape this Game." No one backed up their pacifism with suicide.   Katniss's thinking is basically, "I'm not butcher, but I am going to try and survive."    The movie elevates her passivity into a moral act, which it isn't, that's the trick.  This is a closed system.  Whether she shoots them down herself or waits for the psychopath in the group to do it for her, it's the same.  What's important is that this "choice" not to kill, and the personal feeling of morality it (falsely) gives you is how the system survives.  Because you feel good about your choice, "at least I'm a good person," you fight the system much less.  You are less of a threat to the system because you are allowed to believe you're a good person and they're not.  But you're not.  You killed 15 people.  I counted them. The true criticism of the movie isn't that it is too violent, but that it is not violent enough-- it is Disney violence, and whenever you see the word Disney you should instead see "100% in the service of the existing social structure."  The movie presents "not murdering anyone" as if it were a moral option, as if it were true; so that you are not revolted by the fact that you did kill 15 people; so that you do not fight to change the system that forces you to kill 15 people. Just because the system tells you, "the other tributes are your enemy," doesn't mean it's a factual statement, you have to answer the Thin Red Line question: "who's doing this? Who's killing us?"  The Game is rigged to prevent all choice but allow the illusion of choice. There are Good Samaritan laws in place which protect you from liability if you give someone CPR in good faith but inadvertently crack a rib.  But this is nonsense.  The person motivated to offer CPR NEVER thinks about a future lawsuit, he just acts; or, in the reverse, the person who is nervous about lawsuits was never going to help anyway, and thank goodness he can blame it on lawyers.  These laws have the perverse effect of allowing the us passive aggressive techonauts to observe events rather than intervene in events.  "Come on, what am I going to do, you know the litigious world we live in, besides, we have paramedics for that."  So you're telling me that, i.e. for example, my child got hit by a car on the street and instead of Airway-Breathing-Circulation your plan was to shift to Landscape mode?  "Well..." You better burn off your fingerprints and move to Siberia. There's going to be some who will respond with the obvious: "yes, but the fact is, not killing is better than killing-- or do you think putting a gun to someone's head is really the exact same as not doing that?"  And some will counter-retort that it's like war, if you send soldiers to fight you are responsible for their killings.   Both arguments miss the point completely: NOT killing is better FOR HER, because then SHE doesn't have to feel any guilt.  But everyone dies ANYWAY.  Not killing is entirely a selfish act, not a moral one, if my kid gets hit by a bus the driver at least did it by accident, you CHOSE to not help, you are WORSE, see also Steubenville.  "But they did the rape!"  But they did it for you to see, do you not get it? It looks like Katniss is free to make personal decisions, but no matter what her free brain decides, everyone around her dies as planned, huh, that's odd.  The only "free" choice, the only way to beat the Game, is not to play.  If you really wanted to be a moral agent in such a terrible environment, you'd have to convince the other tributes to all agree not to fight each other, knowing full well that the soldiers will therefore come-- that is the point of the maneuver, to expose the evil of the system instead of allowing them their deniability, "oh, we don't kill anyone, the kids kill each other!"  You have to sit there and Prisoner's Dilemna the hell out of this and hope none of the other tributes breaks ranks and opens fire.  It is the only anti-system choice short of revolution. The response that this maneuver puts the individual Districts in danger, too, is, unfortunately, part of the deal. The genius of the system is that it never puts everyone at risk, it presents them with a lie: only these Tributes are at risk. If the Districts themselves don't want blowback, "we don't want trouble", if they "want" to maintain the status quo, they have to send people to participate.  You don't send a Theseus, you send a Katniss, which they did, hence another round of Hunger Games.  She'll look heroic, she'll perform badassly, and nothing will change, which it didn't, which is why even though she won the first movie there was a second movie.   There's going to be some of you who will be confused, "are you saying Suzanne Collins planned this?  No way!  You've totally misinterpreted--"  No, no.  Collins wrote the story, yet she is not aware herself of what she wrote; she couldn't have written the story any other way than from a narcissistic perspective because that's all she knows living in this world; or, to reverse it, had she known, had she written a different kind of story with a different kind of hero, it would never have been published, let alone made into movies, we'd be on Twilight 7. It's here that I should SPOIL that the revolutionaries who do finally fight the system DON'T EVEN TELL HER ABOUT IT.   Everyone around her is extraordinarily heroic and self-sacrificing, they literally drag her bad ass to the finish line at the cost of their own lives, so that she can survive as a symbol, and the rest of you dummies think she is the hero.  Only a taught narcissistic psychology would SEE her as heroic when right in front of you and your eyeballs you can observe she is the least heroic of all.  I'm not blaming you, this is the training we all got.  The sleight of hand of such movies is that it presents an entirely different society (full totalitarianism) in the context of TODAY, in the context of narcissism as expected, as ok, so meaningless acts become exciting and meaningful acts are obscured. Huh, Mags blew herself up with poisoned gas.  Ah well, she was old. But in totalitarianism, there are no individual acts-- that's the whole point of the totalitarian structure, that's what it wants, what it wants you to become. Your acts appear personal and individualized but conform beautifully, they are no threat.  It would NEVER occur to a real Hunger Games hero to show off for upper management, which is why no one else did it, that would be a meaningless act, only we today would applaud this, which we did, loudly.  Badass.  Not to go ancient history on you, but Achilles was the equivalent of a comic book superhero to young boys for two thousand years, it would never have occurred to any of them to applaud him for his trick shots.  It wouldn't have made sense. It doesn't make sense.  It is madness. There are some earnest attempts to apply Game Theory to the Hunger Games, what is the optimal solution?  But unfortunately the people who do this are bad at math.  Let me try to explain.  If 2 tributes are to be randomly selected from a District of, say, 1000 people, then the probability of you being killed is...... 100%.  You can double check me if you want, but the math is correct.  And-- and this is the point-- the math becomes correct if and only if you think it isn't.