{"id":2336,"date":"2016-06-17T11:27:43","date_gmt":"2016-06-17T19:27:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2336"},"modified":"2016-06-17T13:34:20","modified_gmt":"2016-06-17T21:34:20","slug":"the-big-rock-candy-mountain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2336","title":{"rendered":"The Big Rock Candy Mountain"},"content":{"rendered":"

I haven\u2019t said much about the case of Brock Turner here, if anything. It\u2019s not that surprising, in a world of FSU and Baylor and God only knows how many other schools covering for athletes. At least he withdrew from Stanford under duress in a couple of weeks and they don\u2019t appear to have done much to cover for him. (NB: in the 24 hours since I wrote this part, it\u2019s come out that the Stanford women\u2019s swim team wanted to attest to this dude\u2019s inherent creep factor and inappropriate behavior and may have been discouraged from doing so; if true, Stanford Athletics is a rapist-enabling cesspool. But I digress.)<\/em><\/p>\n

(An instructive comparison is to a school that had a horrifying incident in 2013. That institution called the cops themselves, expelled the perpetrators within 48 hours, kicked another player off the team for obstructing the investigation, and three years on, the establishment the perpetrators drank at beforehand is STILL off limits to all varsity athletes. But I don\u2019t want a cookie for that, because you don\u2019t deserve hurrahs and hosannas for some shit you\u2019re SUPPOSED to do.)<\/p>\n

No, the horrifying thing here in Santa Clara County is that the jury found this brat guilty, and the judge – on the advice of the probation officer, it appears – sentenced him to a whopping six months in jail, when the average sentence is six years in the state pen. And made things even worse by going on at length about how the perpetrator is already suffering and shouldn\u2019t have his life ruined.<\/p>\n

Which is offensive enough even without taking into account the statements from the rest of his family and friends – yes, you expect them to make the best of things in imploring the judge not to sentence their little boy to be married to the guy with the most cigarettes, fair enough. But the staggering tone-deafness of the statements suggests that these people actually think that Brock Turner is the victim of Demon Rum, and that exposure to alcohol is the true perpetrator of this crime and ruined everyone\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

To borrow the sardonic words of PJ O\u2019Rourke, \u201che\u2019s not a criminal. If he were, he\u2019d be poorer and darker-skinned.”<\/p>\n

Santa Clara County in 2016 is the Big Rock Candy Mountain for well-to-do white guys. You come here to live it up and get rich. VCs will shoot money out of a firehouse if you look like Mark Zuckerberg. (This is not a lie or an exaggeration. I am not making this shit up<\/a>.) And you sort of have to ask yourself: what has Silly Con Valley churned out in the last three years? The phone has crossed the finish line, the Apple Watch is officially back to the drawing board (watchOS 3 is basically an admission that the UX needs to be torn up and started over), we have incremental changes at best to things like laptops and networking and buzzword-compliant stuff like \u201cbig data\u201d and \u201cdeep learning\u201d and the like. The action, the growth, the big noise is in the likes of Uber, which will drive you around. Or Doordash or Postmates, which will bring you dinner. Or Snapchat, which will maybe get the girl to send them nudes if she thinks they disappear in 10 seconds.<\/p>\n

It is very very difficult not to get the sense that Silly Con Valley\u2019s main focus is currently set on making it possible to be a fifteen-year-old boy, forever.<\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s the Whiffle Life, as PJ himself eloquently described it. Corners rounded off, edges dulled, difficulty set on Rookie – if you are young and white and male and well-to-do, the red carpet is rolled out for you to come here and live it up, and never mind the hassle and inconvenience of other people in the world. Everything can be somebody else\u2019s problem or somebody else\u2019s fault. If you fucked up, you can be safely caught and placed back on the carousel, because it\u2019s a learning experience<\/em>. And that\u2019s how a candyflipping rapist gets to become a poor naif who never expected that drinking in college would lead him into such an awful situation and he must dedicate his life to fighting the scourge of alcohol which placed a gun to his temple and forced him into this tragic turn of events for his future.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what I\u2019d love. I\u2019d love to roll up behind Brock Turner at Stanford Shopping Center and break his ribs with a ball bat before he ever sees what\u2019s coming. I\u2019d love for him to start to step into the Marguerite bus and suddenly find himself knocked to the ground and stampeded by everyone getting off. \u00a0I\u2019d love for him to walk down University Avenue at 1 AM and walk faster and faster because half a dozen shadowy figures are behind him with another one joining the crowd every block. \u00a0You aren\u2019t special. You aren\u2019t bulletproof. You aren\u2019t safe from the world. There is no Whiffle Life, there is no force field, there is no bubble, and you will not be protected from the consequences of your actions.<\/p>\n

And when he\u2019s gone insane living in fear, maybe the rest of those fuckers will get the message. But probably not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I haven\u2019t said much about the case of Brock Turner here, if anything. It\u2019s not that surprising, in a world of FSU and Baylor and God only knows how many other schools covering for athletes. At least he withdrew from Stanford under duress in a couple of weeks and they don\u2019t appear to have done … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Big Rock Candy Mountain”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2336"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2336"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2336\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2338,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2336\/revisions\/2338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}