How do you do it?

I am in the unfortunate position of having to use a shared restroom at least twice a day, due to the fact that I leave my house for employment. This is not a good thing as I’m sure you know. Especially when entering stalls I wonder about how other men use a restroom. I don’t leave any traces of having used the place. Most people seem to leave many traces. Many many many traces. In fact, if I had to guess how other men use toilets, it would go something like this:

First, pull freely from the toilet paper dispenser. Rip the paper into shreds and cast them upon the floor with contempt. Now climb the stall, one foot on each side, shimmying your way up until you are near the ceiling. Now take a dump and make a game of trying to aim your poo into the toilet. Likely, you’ll miss a bit. Pee a bit for good measure. Likely, you’ll miss a bit again. Flush, or don’t, it’s really up to you. Before you leave, write something ironic in a black sharpie, or comment on someone else’s sharpie message. Don’t have a pen? Just scratch your reply with something sharp. Oh and before you go, make sure to yank some pubes and sprinkle them liberally over the seat.

This is quite literally the state I find the stalls in most days. If this restroom was in the subway, or shared with zoo animals I might expect it. But I seem to work in a respectable office building. Most people dress well, speak in full sentences, walk upright, have cute little Obama pins, all that good stuff. But put them in a bathroom and apparently they revert to drunk horses*.

* Yes, horses get drunk and when they do, they’re assholes.

I wouldn’t normally bite such obvious link bait, but really stupid articles have a way of gaining traction when not responded to. It also seems that a lot of otherwise smart people are quick to blame “free markets” for the current crisis and call it a day. So I’ll quote some really good reactions to Jacob Weisberg’s amusing assertion for Slate that libertarianism is not only now finally a bankrupt philosophy but the cause of our current financial crisis. Right.

First, Will Wilkinson:

If you think “libertarianism” caused the financial crisis, you’re either stupid or dishonest. Weisberg’s argument comes down to the single, simple thought that but for the resistance of Greenspan, Gramm, and Cox to certain regulatory proposals — a libertarian resistance — the crisis would not now be upon us. And so libertarianism is to blame. Accept or reject that thought as you will. It remains that, on Weisberg’s own accounting of things, the crisis would not now be upon us but for countless other contributing causes. So what to make of the light-years-from-libertarian ideological assumptions behind the rest of the regulatory regime? Why, nothing at all! And that’s what it means to be a hack.

Jesse Walker of Reason quotes one of Weisberg’s smearier attacks:

The worst thing you can say about libertarians is that they are intellectually immature, frozen in the worldview many of them absorbed from reading Ayn Rand novels in high school. Like other ideologues, libertarians react to the world’s failing to conform to their model by asking where the world went wrong. Their heroic view of capitalism makes it difficult for them to accept that markets can be irrational, misunderstand risk, and misallocate resources or that financial systems without vigorous government oversight and the capacity for pragmatic intervention constitute a recipe for disaster.

And responds:

The “heroic” view of capitalism may well be popular among high school Randites. But what serious adult libertarian, whether or not he went through a Rand phase, argues that markets run on heroism? We argue that markets are a discovery process filled with trial and error; that businesses misunderstand risks and misallocate resources all the time, and that this is why we need market discipline to keep them in line. Instead of that discipline, during the lead-up to the current crisis, they received first a gushing river of subsidized credit and then a series of bailouts.

When you don’t believe in the heroic corporate chieftain, it should be equally hard to put your faith in that alternative fantasy, the heroic regulator: neutral and public-spirited, always attuned to market failure, constantly prepared to right the ship of commerce. Instead we favor a decentralized system of checks and balances, of which the most important are the checks imposed by an open, competitive marketplace. Not because it’s heroic, but because it can ruthlessly cut a would-be hero down to size.

Strange Times

Am I allowed to post gloating Sox posts when they win but completely ignore it when they lose? No, I suppose not. So in case you didn’t know:

They lost.

Taking it remarkably well so far. I mean, we did just win the Series a year ago, I’m not some Yankee fan than expects to win it all every year. Losing to Tampa Bay would be insulting if I wasn’t so busy being confused. This is like opening the newspaper and finding out the boy with Down Syndrome who corrals shopping carts at the supermarket married Heidi Klum. You just don’t see things like this coming. Not sure if that’s more insulting to people with Down Syndrome or the Rays but either way, these are strange times. Series at the Trop, starting Wednesday.

The Long Suffering Tampa Bay Fans

Here’s my problem with this whole idea of long suffering Tampa Bay Fans. It would be completely true if Tampa Bay actually had fans. But they don’t. There is no such thing as a Tampa Bay Rays fan. If you’ve ever watched a Rays game (and the only reason you have is because they were playing your favorite team) you noticed either that the stadium was empty or that it was filled with fans of your team. Let me repeat, there is no such thing as a Tampa Bay Rays fan. So how are they suffering? Every single hat I saw during game 1 of the ALCS was one with the new logo, purchased this year. These people haven’t suffered. They’re a minor league audience who showed up for Bobblehead night.

I do give them credit for avoiding the use of towels, a disturbing trend in Major League Baseball, but call me in 10 years when you’ve actually been following your team for a decade and then we’ll see how much you’ve suffered.