Flada Blog

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

These are well-known words of wisdom from Ben Parker to his nephew shortly before Ben’s final breath. Sadly, it was left to young Peter to figure out exactly what kinds of responsibilities his powers came with through decades of soul-searching in comics, television series, and movies.

Peter chose to use his powers to help the innocent in a struggle against villain after villain. But, as was highlighted time and again by J. Jonah Jameson, it’s sometimes difficult to tell the good guys from the bad guys. It becomes even harder when the good guy starts acting like a bad guy.

Many people believe that the United States has a great responsibility to exercise its power around the world to come to the aid of the innocent. At first glance, the Spider-Man analogy would seem to support that opinion. However, with further analysis we will see that the analogy doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

What Peter Parker Does

When Spider-Man swings into action, he is almost always selflessly protecting the “little man” against a criminal. It’s rare that the victims are placed into greater jeopardy by Parker’s actions. If Spider-Man’s initiatives commonly caused the victims greater harm, if his motivation was to protect his assets, or to deflate the price of some commodity that he badly needed–we would judge his actions quite differently.

Closer To What We Do

A scenario

Over many years, Peter Parker and everyone he cares about have become dependent on a substance called Agricola. Without this substance he and his friends will suffer terribly and possibly die. There are only a few factories where Agricola can be produced, and as more and more people become addicted the prices steadily increase–economics being what it is.

Fearful of the bad press that he will get from The Daily Bugle if he simply swings in and takes the Agricola that he needs, Parker sets up a secret group called the Collectors Initiative for Agricola (CIA) which, for almost 50 years, infiltrates the various factories by methods such as killing CEOs and replacing them with CIA puppets.

Much to Parker’s chagrin, the puppet CEO of one of the largest factories decides to turn on his handlers and do things his own way. It turns out that this particular CEO is ruthless, ruling his factory with an iron fist. He often goes so far as to kill and torture some of his employees who don’t completely agree with the corporate plan.

Seizing upon the opportunity presented by the outcry over these abuses, Parker decides to publicly attack the Agricola conglomerate. Swinging into action, he quickly kills the CEO and allows the employees to appoint new leadership which will be partly under the control of Parker and his men. Some of the employees are loyal to the previous CEO however and start killing Parker’s men and other employees with whom they disagree.

Conclusion

This scenario would change our opinions of Spider-Man somewhat. Yet it’s remarkably similar to what the United States does with its superpower. What’s worse is the United States takes the assets of its own citizens who largely disagree with its military exercises to pay for those exercises.

It’s past time we do some of the soul-searching that Peter Parker constantly does and learn to exercise our power in a more responsible way.

Any of my readers who are subscribed to my RSS feed will now be able to enjoy my Flada Blog posts and any photos that I add to my Flickr account.

I’m not sure how long this feature has been available at Feedburner, but it is one that I discovered yesterday while upgrading this blog. If you have a blog and would like to have your feed include photos from your Flickr account, it couldn’t be easier to set it up.

1. Log into your feedburner account.
2. Click on the ‘Optimize’ tab.
3. Click on ‘Photo Splicer’ on the left-hand column.
4. Enter the required information in the pop-up box (you will need your Flickr ID # which you can find by looking at the URL of any of your Flickr hosted images).
5. Click Activate.
6. That’s it.

So far I only have a few pictures of my sons on Flickr, but I will be adding more all the time. Enjoy.

I’ve spent the better part of the day upgrading both this and my wife’s blogs to Wordpress 2.5. Although there were a few issues on my installation related to the visual editor, I was able to finally get things working.

As you can probably see, I’m also in the process of doing a complete overhaul of the theme of my blog. Right now it has default photos below the header. I intend to personalize these soon. Please feel free to leave any comments or ideas related to this change.

Regards,

Ed Snyder

We’ve had a 17″ HP computer monitor sitting in a box in the garage since we moved to Pensacola almost a year ago. Prior to that, the monitor was sitting in storage in Norfolk for almost a year. Today, while cleaning out the garage I finally decided that we aren’t ever going to use that monitor again so I brought it over to the drop box for the Navy Morale, Welfare, and Recreation thrift store.

When I dropped it off, a woman came up to me and asked me if it worked. I told her that it had worked great when we replaced it and it’s just been sitting in a box in our garage since we replaced it with a flat screen monitor.

So then she asked me if “all it needs is a hard drive or whatever.”

I told her that it isn’t a computer but just a monitor so to make it work it would pretty much need a whole computer–including a hard drive.

“But it shouldn’t need much, right?”

“Just a whole computer,” I replied.

“Well the neighbor girl comes over and uses my computer a lot so maybe I’ll take it for her to use. If it works.”

By this point, I was pretty well convinced that the woman didn’t have a clue that a monitor is not a computer but only displays information from a computer.

“Well, it worked great when I disconnected it from the computer that’s now using a flatscreen monitor. I hope your neighbor’s girl enjoys it.”

I really didn’t know what else to say.

You hear the words “extremist Islamic terrorists” thrown around a lot these days. The people who use this terminology will be quick to point out that they don’t believe all Muslims are extremists or terrorists, but implied in their original statement is the idea that all terrorists and all extremists are Islamic. To those of us on the sidelines, it’s often difficult to discern a difference between them and the people they hate so much.

Boca Raton Republican Debates

While talking about “extremist Islamic Terrorists” it’s impossible for me to not think about this past week’s Republican debate in Boca Raton, Florida which was broadcast on MSNBC. All but one candidate is running and campaigning on voters’ fear. The fear that we will be attacked by some massive army of radical Muslims. They remind me of the anti-WalMart crowd or the anti-corporation crowd that is so fearful of Walton’s ghost hiding in their closets or the Microsoft under their beds.

The problem with such fear is that corporations grow large for one of two reasons (or a combination): they produce goods or services that many people want at prices many people are willing to pay, or they are propped up by government welfare. (I should note that welfare does not mean “letting people or businesses keep more of their own money” but means things like laws that don’t apply universally, subsidies, and grants. Calling tax breaks “welfare” is simply a rewriting of definitions in order to confuse the masses reminiscent of Orwell; thanks, Ralph Nader.

Redefining Terms

In the same way, those who thrive off of the public’s fear of terrorism come up with new definitions for old words in order to confuse the masses. Surrender, which the online Free Dictionary defines as the act of giving up one’s person, one’s possessions, or people under one’s command to the authority, power, or control of another is redefined. Unless we accept that we possess or hold legal authority over Iraq and the sovereign Iraqi people, to leave Iraq can not be called “surrender” without a redefinition.

They also use the word “insurgent” as if it were a negative thing. An insurgent is one who stands up to an established authority. So initially, who were the “insurgents” in Iraq? And now, there really isn’t an established authority, unless you count the sham puppet government we’ve put there.

Then again, redefining terms to suit your ends is nothing new. Propaganda has existed for a long, long time.

Heath Ledger’s death

The morning after Heath Ledger’s death, a few of the instructors where I teach were discussing it. One of them said, “Good! I’m glad he’s dead.” Then he proceeded to call Mr. Ledger a few derogatory terms that are often used to reference homosexuals.

I told them that I had been a Heath Ledger fan since the first time I saw The Patriot. Ledger struck me as a wonderful, fresh young actor with a lot of potential. The few other movies I’ve seen in which he acted confirmed my initial opinion. So I asked the instructor in question why he disliked Heath Ledger so much. It pretty much boiled down to the kiss in Brokeback Mountain, which is what I had suspected. Homophobe Instructor explained that, “God hates queers,” and that what they do is unnatural and sinful. At one point in his diatribe, he also stated that he (and presumably God) would be happy if all homosexuals were dead. I didn’t push my counter (and far more rational) views because I have to work with this extremist Christian Terrorist on a daily basis.

Yet, I was immediately reminded of something Mahandas Ghandi once said: “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”