The Queen of England pardoned Alan Turing for his crime of being gay. That’s over 60 years after the state chemically castrated him for the crime and just 59 years after he killed himself as a result at the age of 41. Better late than never, you say? I don’t think so. I think that late is exactly the same as never. If you show up one minute late to stop an innocent man from being killed, you might as well have never shown up. Better later than never, is a phrase you can apply to lesser things. Sorry we wrongly locked you up for a couple of years. Here’s a hundred thousand dollars to try to make make up for it. That’s better later than never. Sorry we castrated and killed you. That’s not better later than never. That’s exactly the same as never.

In the video over at Crooks & Liars, sculptor Glyn Hughes rightly asks, “What about all the other gay men who were prosecuted? Don’t you think it rather says that if you’re useful to the state, the law doesn’t apply to you? We’ll let you off.” Indeed. How about one big apology? “We’re sorry that we allowed hatred and ignorance and bigotry to rule our laws in England for hundreds of years and so ruined the lives of countless gay and lesbian people?” That might actually mean something for the present. It might actually cause a few people to think, “What minorities are we oppressing right now that we will later have to apologize for?” I’m sure, some later queen will make an announcement that locking up all those drug addicts was wrong. Of course, it won’t matter then. They’ll be off to throwing people in prison for different stupid reasons.

As a society, we are always fond of being accepting of useful weirdos. I wrote about this recently, Unstable Weirdos and Business Success. A business consultant was trying to figure out how companies could keep the good (usable) parts of us weirdos and get rid of the bad (nonusable) parts of us. The fact is that you can’t. If there is a brilliant man who seems perfectly at home in his work environment, it is pure luck. Most of us don’t have that luck and so society misses out on all of the nice things we could add because it’s uncomfortable to have us awkward people around.

Of course, there are places for people like me: academia. But even it has its limits. And look at the way that conservatives think about academia: it’s that place where “dangerous” ideas come from. And even liberals want to turn it into nothing but a training ground for the brave new world of employment opportunities. In other words: the conservatives want the colleges to produce the same old cogs and the liberals want the colleges to produce new and improved cogs. But they are all cogs. And unfortunately for me, I am not a cog. And unfortunately for the society, many, many more brilliant people than I am are not cogs.

Of course, Turing wasn’t a difficult guy to work with. He just had this one small problem: he wasn’t sexually attracted to the “right” sex. It just shows how small minded people are about social deviance. Some day they may throw people in jail for not liking football. Unimaginable, you think? There was a time when some people drank and other people smoked cannabis. Yet almost a million people are arrested for cannabis every year in the Land of the Free. (Irony alert!) And the vast majority of those arrests were for simple possession. So if in a hundred years, I get a posthumous pardon after I died in jail for the crime of thinking that football is the most boring game ever invented, don’t be surprised. Well, be a little surprised. I think pretty highly of myself. But I’m no Alan Turing!

Yesterday, Paul Krugman wrote, Why Corporations Might Not Mind Moderate Depression. What he’s trying to get at in a deductive way is that there might be a level of unemployment that maximizes profits for companies. Under normally circumstances, companies would want a high customer demand. But that requires a lot of employees. And if the company requires a lot of employees, they will probably have to pay their employees more. But if demand is less because unemployment is high, they may be selling less, but this could be offset by the lower wages they pay.

He notes that since 2009, while wages have remained fairly stagnant, company profits have almost doubled. He admits that a lot of factors go into this and that it doesn’t show that there is such a depressed economy that maximizes company profits. But still, I don’t buy it. In general, direct labor costs for a company are low. For example, for your average GM car, only about 5% of the retail price went to wages for GM employees. Of course, there are a lot more wages: the salesmen and all the people who get paid to make the parts that GM buys. But you get the idea. For any given company, wages aren’t that big an issue.

But we’ll see. There is no doubt that there may in fact be some level of unemployment that does maximize profits for the corporate industry generally. There is also no doubt that the way the Federal Reserve operates, it pushes for exactly this kind of situation. This is why Ben Bernanke wasn’t that concerned when unemployment was at 8% and inflation was at 2%. That’s a very pro-business situation.

What bothers me more is that employers don’t have that much to gain by keeping employee wages at rock bottom. Investing in new technology and employee training is far more important if the employers want to make a lot of money. But we constantly hear them grumbling about labor costs. (But don’t be confused: lack of demand is the biggest complaint of business owners—now and pretty much forever.) So what’s with that? I think that’s a class thing. I’ve watched time and again as employers allow great employees to leave rather than trying to entice them to stay.

Employers don’t want to ever admit that they are part of the company. They want to think that they are the company. That’s what was behind all that screaming about, “I did build that.” It was all them: the owners. It wasn’t something they did inside a social structure that allowed communities with things like roads. And it sure wasn’t something they did with the help of their workforce. (Interestingly, employers claim that employers aren’t part of the building process because they were paid. This makes no sense, because the business owner was also paid for building the business. As with most “conservative” thinking, it is not deep.)

I think the biggest thing that is different between 1945-1975 and 1976-present, is that the post-war period made people think they were working together. By the late 70s, we had forgotten that we are all in this together and the era of “Greed Is Good” started. And that’s where we are today. I don’t know what we are going to do about it, either. If the attacks on 9/11 caused our leaders to think that tax cuts for the rich and welfare cuts for the poor was the way forward, I’m not sure there is any hope.

As always: the very least we can do is vote.

I just came upon a really good example of what is wrong with the right-wing media. Actually, it is the second one I saw today, but I left the other one because although it was a complete mess reported as a great conservative victory, it was too complicated to describe. This one is clear and simple.

Newt Gingrich and Robert Reich were both on This Week With George Stephanopoulos. They were discussing the war on poverty and Reich was arguing that things worked well at the beginning but that it has been basically killed by the Republicans.

Gingrich responded, “This is baloney… Every major city which is a center of poverty is run by Democrats. Every major city.”

As far as the right-wing publication Down Trend was concerned, that was the end of the conversation, Gingrich Destroys Reich: “Every Major City Which Is a Center of Poverty Is Run by Democrats.” All the article added was, “Ouch!” (Italics in the original.)

Of course, that wasn’t the end of the debate. For one thing, anyone who knows Robert Reich knows he is too much a fighter to let that stand. For another, what are we to believe? That Reich crawled away to lick his wounds? Even the lamest of debaters would have some counter argument.

You had to read The Raw Story or another liberal or mainstream publication to get the whole story. In Robert Reich Hammers Newt Gingrich After He Blames Democrats for Increasing Poverty, we get Reich’s response:

First of all, [former New York City Mayor] Michael Bloomberg is not a Democrat,” Reich shot back. “What’s happening in America is happening all over America. And it is happening in a way that has to do with the fact that wages, median wages, are going nowhere and rents are going up. And there’s absolutely no response in Washington or elsewhere.”

“Newt, I’m surprised you are not taking responsibility here,” he concluded.

The conservative publication presented the video, cutting it at exactly the point to make it look like Gingrich had made his great rebuttal — Ouch! The Raw Story showed the segment to its end.

It did give Reich the last word, but that’s just because of where things end. I don’t doubt that Gingrich has a response. But Reich has already shown him to be spewing lies. I suspect that we would get more of that if he continued. [Note: both the videos have be removed. -FM]

This is a big part of what is wrong with American politics. The right is given “news” that is intentionally deceptive.

There is no doubt that Brian Carey who wrote the Down Trend article knows that he’s deceiving. To him, it is just propaganda for the cause. There is a place for that. But it should not be presented as journalism. In this way, liberals are far more ethical. As a result, we get a citizenry who are especially ignorant on the right. That’s a recipe for disaster.

I really don’t know how these right-wing hacks live with themselves. My job is very easy. Most liberal policies really are the best in a practical sense. They are also generally popular (at least until the conservative PR campaigns begin). So I have no trouble calling out bad liberal policy.

Liberalism is overflowing with good ideas, so we don’t have to push every idea that comes along the way that conservatives do. It must be really hard to be a conservative political analyst. I feel for them, but what they do is evil.

If our culture were working properly (and it is in as bad a shape as our politics), such people would be ostracized. And that would go a long way toward fixing the problem.