Random thought for the day

There seems to be a high correlation between the people complaining about "social justice", "political correctness", "feminism", people being accused of being "racist", and said people being or at least acting like assholes, particularly online. By making very sloppy and indecorous arguments, attracting a lot of attention for doing so (often negative attention), and then retreating behind friendly lines and watching the fire burn afterward. Usually quite unapologetically as though they did not realize there would be any problem.

Some or all of those causes have legitimate problems in their public presentation, factual points of agreement or disagreement, and acceptance of critiques along those lines. Some or even many of the people involved in those causes can be sometimes quite unpleasant to talk to. Indeed this is a common complaint leveled at: environmentalists, feminists, atheists, libertarians, conservatives, marxists, etc. That the people involved are often coming off as somewhat intolerant of dissenting views and other crimes against the use of public forums to try to win arguments. But most of the people pointing this out cannot help but to appear to be enormously smug bastards about it as though they are winning something other than this legitimate complaint. And they often seem to pick the more inflammatory or offensive method of expression to do so when something more mundane or polite would suffice. They thus appear to be winning mostly troll-ish opinion and flame wars.

Ordinarily such things don't matter in real life that some number of people might secretly be enormous assholes who are offended that they cannot say regressive things about other people any more. Except we have a Presidential candidate whose entire campaign seems based around taking this manner of argument and rhetoric to its logical conclusion and who seems to be fairing reasonably well in spite of this ordinarily disqualifying limitation. In general, I favor extremely wide uses of freedom of speech, relative even to the extremely wide uses that most Americans think they favor. That is that I do not favor using state power to silence people on almost any basis relating to "offensive speech", and I don't really care very much if we try to use soft power via things like boycotts to silence people we disagree with privately or in this context who we believe are "offensive". I think this is ineffective too most of the time. Idiots and assholes and misogynists and racists and other varieties of poor quality arguments should become self-identifying and self-recommending in that light by allowing them to speak and learning how poorly they have thought of their chosen subjects of speech. But the modern status symbol appears to be assholes "who will tell it like it is" for some number of people. Which is more concerning that there are apparently a sufficient number of idiots and assholes and misogynists and racists.

Sets of doomed conversations

Gun control debates: Nearly always take place between people who have guns, enjoy having guns, and don't see a problem with people having guns as a result and people who are afraid of guns and don't think people should own guns. No progress between these groups can be made as the discussion rarely moves beyond the two sides' fears and into facts or considerations of various forms of legislation or constitutional matters. One side is afraid guns will be taken away, the other is afraid people have guns. I rarely see facts that are clear and decisive pushed forward, and very, very rarely see plans of action that could be considered under current legal interpretations and put into action, or would even work (eg, "assault weapons" bans, which are useless).

Theological debates: nearly always take place between religious people who are unschooled in theology (or philosophy/logic) but attached to their beliefs and secularists who enjoy pointing this flaw in lacking knowledge and well-thought-out reasons out. This is not because secularists can not or will not debate people who actually know something of theology. It's that there aren't very many people who know something of theology (or logic). Most people appear to believe things that they're told to rather than digging into it very deeply or credit subjective experiences and interpretations/perceptions very highly as evidence rather than dogma. Arguing about dogma therefore is a waste of effort for most such discussions as a result. The logical pretzels are very stale and can be seen coming from miles away. I get very tired of seeing Pascal's Wager come up. Pascal is an idiot on this point.

Libertarians vs other libertarians: Lots of holier than thou digressions occur. Various sources of internal worship are established and battle lines are firm. Most of the discussions are pointless anyway since most people are not very libertarian in their political thinking or political philosophy and it results in a lot of theory over reality. Very little of pragmatic advice will emerge that can be sensibly applied to the real world as it is right now (as opposed to the dream world where libertarians somehow rule over a world with various problems willed away as having been fixed somewhere). Libertarians should basically only talk to "normal people" and learn how other people think as a result (probably wise counsel for any political grouping is to talk to people that aren't in much agreement and find out why). I admire some of the theoretical work of libertarian political philosophy. I don't admire the "steal underpants - ??? - profit" mentality at times as an approach to political reform.

What I would define as a doomed conversation:
1) A conversation that will not change either participant's mind. Nothing can be learned (by either party) and no opinions will be amended.
2) A conversation that follows a certain predictable script of "here's point A that always comes up, here's point B".
3) If it follows a certain script, nothing will be learned, no minds will be changed, and anyone can go look for the very first example of it on wikipedia at this point to see what the argument is. We don't need to replay it in order for bystanders to know what's going to happen. So why bother playing it yourself. It's not even good practice for argument and debate. It dulls rather than sharpens the wit and mind.

I used to have a temptation to look down the conversational chess match and see the next 5 moves. If all of them will be taken exactly as predicted, there isn't much point in engaging further, and it's very easy to see where it starts from anymore that I just don't feel a need to be bothered with certain topics. People might learn they are making bad arguments that are easily and predictably swatted down and that following a certain playbook that everyone involved already knows isn't very useful as a result. But this is really unlikely. People involved will most likely disengage angrily, or at least dismissively with something like "well that's your opinion" or "agree to disagree".

That leaves the audience. And the audience is probably bored by the lack of movement/action or considers these too esoteric to bother with a firm opinion that would require investigation. Most people aren't libertarians. Most people aren't theologians or philosophers. Most people aren't gun policy advocates (one way or the other). Ergo, most people don't have much of a stake in the outcome.

Note: abortion isn't on the list. I think this is because there's more wiggle room. More people care at least a little about it, but don't know enough to feel they have a firm opinion. As such, people are often tempted to go for whatever and whoever has made the most compelling argument recently (hence we get a lot of ill-formed and poorly conceived anti-abortion legislation).

I'd also note one reason these debates aren't that interesting is that they're overrun by emotional reactions and stories rather than reasoned arguments.

Minor things I've written about before

Daily Show came around to the story about the diner in North Carolina. 

I was unpersuaded by the take of many atheists that this a serious problem, or that the type of problem it presented was in somewhat analogous to much more serious forms of discrimination (such as genocidal practices, or really even hiring and firing decisions of companies based on religious non-belief). One can readily acknowledge that it is discriminatory legally. But given that restaurants practice many types of price discrimination already (for the elderly, for college students, for military or police/fire departments and so on), it is not a particularly egregious outrage that they might effectively overcharge everyone for food and then decide to offer a discount for something religious like praying over the meal. It also appears the diner amended its practices slightly in the wake of criticism to allow for non-religious expressions, whatever that implies.

I do think the Daily Show's piece was unfair in its depiction of FFRF and Barker specifically, but my impression has been that the expressions of the FFRF and Barker aren't always all that flattering anyway. They can do enough work digging the holes without help. What struck me first and foremost about the story when I first was presented with it months ago was that it didn't make sound business sense to offer the discount at all. And not that it demanded a very public and in-your-face response for it to be abolished. There was a cheap and simple and much more private way to handle this, such as a personal phone call or meeting with the owner/manager to determine the contours of the discount, accepted practices for receiving it, training or discretion offered to the crew to provide it, and so on. Such a meeting or call probably would have sufficed to show the owner this was a foolish idea, and at least that it came from a highly privileged Christian majority position and that a more generally inclusive or respectful attitude to the population of potential diners and customers might be wiser. Indeed, my impression and understanding of religious practices was that public displays of religious faith by other Christians might have been frowned upon as discriminatory even before atheists as exclusionary, and that other Christians are commonly allies in pointing out these forms of religious exclusion. The piece and previous reporting did not illuminate if this more subtle and personal approach was tried and failed, and a more public and direct response was then used instead to achieve a more desirable result. The Daily Show piece and previous stories on this issue strongly implies that it was not attempted to mediate and explain, so I would submit this is unlikely.

What seems to have been more important was to attract attention to it as an example of discriminatory practices excluding atheists. Of which there are many and many of which can have considerable impact upon the lives of atheists in this country and others and for which the resources of atheists can be leveled and concentrated upon improving and reducing the barriers and boundaries that a still distrustful modern Western society like that of the United States places upon us. But for something like this, effectively burning the bridge in order to draw attention to it struck me less as a well-calculated solution which educated the local diner operator and more as a Streisand effect, demonstrating to the Christian majority the lengths to which atheists may go to exclude religion from public life and resulting in a portrayal of atheists as "dicks" even by fellow secularists such as the Daily Show writers and correspondents for cheap laughs.

That portrayal, which is sometimes accurate and deserved as it is for any group of humans, is hardly the necessary means to make an approach of acceptance and tolerance in broad society which includes a vast quantity of religious adherents. We atheists don't need to be dicks and neither do we need to be nice and lay down all the time. But we should be pragmatic. We are outnumbered and should pick our fury where it is actually raised and a the thing should not stand without resistance. We should also be willing to say, yes, that behavior on the part of another atheist was inappropriate or ineffective as a means of achieving a general goal of acceptance and promotion of tolerance toward atheists and secularists in society. This happens often with Dawkins and remarks on sexism or feminism as an example. Whether or not he intends them as such, they are often offensive and counterproductive to a cause of atheism and secularism that is too easily and frequently depicted as an all-white-male boys only club which is ill-attuned to the social problems of others owing to race or gender.

As such. It does not offend me deeply as an atheist that I would not receive a modest discount for my breakfast at this location because I could go somewhere else that I might find a more accommodating business practice or better eggs and bacon. It would offend me deeply if I were refused service entirely were I to refuse to pray over my meal. Or if to work at such a location, I were required to adorn myself with some religious symbols of the owner's choice and practice of faith. This distinction of the scale and scope of the offense should be factored into our reply. Discrimination is discrimination, but discrimination of this type, economic discrimination through prices, is not like genocide or racial exclusion laws. It scales. It would be entirely appropriate to boisterously and immediately and publicly complain and to demand restitution if an atheist is not given a raise on that basis of non-religious affiliation, or denied employment or service from a company or public official.

I do not even say it is necessary that we pick our battles and that a scorched earth approach to any and all forms of discrimination by businesses cannot be deployed. And thus that this should have been ignored as a "nice old lady" doing something weird. Rather, I am saying that the way the battle is fought sometimes matters to the outcome of the war. Winning ugly is still winning yes, but it often costs later on. We are in the middle of a very long road still with a large portion of the public expressing views of hate or intolerance, and many more expressing indifference to the problems of atheists in America. Atheists will require allies and compassion from others as a minority status in a Christian dominated society, allies who will help fight on issues of church and state separation and forms of discrimination that afflict atheists, or on science education policy and other matters which interest atheists in particular at times. Potentially alienating such allies is foolish. That should be considered when picking out the weapons of choice and against who they are wielded.

John Oliver has this show

And on it he seems to talk about all the things I wish people would talk about and be aware of and mad as hell about as I am. And meanwhile is doing so in a sensible and well-informed manner. With some jokes.

1) Prison reform (or at least why we need it)
2) Local and state office elections (the ones nobody pays attention to)
3) Civil asset forfeiture seizures
4) Capital punishment
5) Immigration (couple different ways)
6) Police militarization
7) Drone strikes
8) The stupidity of the Olympics (Winter especially)
9) Global warming
10) Dogs acting out Supreme Court cases. (Okay, that's not really something I wish people would talk about, but it made re-reading the case arguments a little more entertaining).

I wish he had mentioned that the US sugar market not only protects itself from labeling, but also from competition (through exorbitant sugar tariffs and barriers to entry from foreign producers).

The main appeal of the show, for me at least, is that he seems to be conducting long-form journalism pieces disguised as comedic segments. This is something that the format of the Daily Show ordinarily doesn't allow, as it too easily gets bogged down in the same daily grinds that plague the networks it routinely pillories on air. Oh and it is on HBO so they can do an entire segment mocking campaign attack ads by depicting an old man's penis as one of the candidates. So there's that also.

Filed under situation normal

all fucked up

Most of these are questions that people who have studied voter habits and biases/prejudices have known about for years. They are systematic biases (against foreigners, against the economy having grown, etc). Most of them make no sense except in the light of some variety of prejudicial thinking (the probable population of immigrants or Muslims being absurdly high in most countries). The most interesting part for most people would be the absurdly high numbers of some of the actual statistics (Spain's unemployment rate, South Korea's life expectancy).

Still I found a couple of these interesting because they're not part of typical voter bias statistics versus just a general knowledge of demographic data. The voter bias research shows that usually people can estimate general knowledge data closer than understanding expert fields like economics or international trade. But these sorts of particular knowledge upset even that comfortable bias toward random and meaningless errors because they are fueled by additional bias concerns.

The teen pregnancy rate. 
I suspect people don't actually understand what the birth rate is and how to calculate it as one problem with asking people to calculate this figure. Such a figure is typically very low. Most women are not giving birth in a given year of life, and fewer still are doing so as teenagers. If people but reflected back on it for a moment, what's the probable number of girls they went to high school with who were pregnant while they were in a given school year. That figure, per year, could be very high at some high schools, and very low at others. But it wouldn't be a quarter of each year's class. Or a fifth. Or maybe even a tenth at the very "worst" cases. It would be amazing if it were more than one or two girls per classroom (say a "room" of 30). So it would be maybe 5% at most, and most probably less. That's how people should estimate it. They don't have this heuristic ready at hand to think about it. Further, since
a) people believe this figure is going up (it's not, it's going down) and
b) people hear about this as a problem or as parents worry about this as a problem, they imagine it must be very common in the way that we inflate all things we worry about as likely risks.
c) We're also bad with estimating low probability events generally. We like to tack on to those with media attention and fear (school shootings, terrorists, etc).
It's likely that the number gets inflated in the minds of those guesstimating it.

Parents should be taking some precautions that their teenage children should take some precautions against these unplanned events, but parents should also know it isn't very common that every 4th daughter out there is getting knocked up. Actually getting and staying pregnant is not that simple, on top of that teenagers (while they certainly talk a game otherwise), are probably not having sex all the time. Many aren't having sex at all, or not until their late teens. Birth control itself moving forward will be easier to use (IUDs) or easier to come by (condoms and access through health insurance, or perhaps OTC).

Religion percentages.

This is well known by people who aren't religious apparently how many people are of some religious sect or that, or not at all. But yes, the US is no danger of becoming a secular-atheist-Muslim-satanist country anytime soon. Most all of you Americans are Christian or some derivation there of (including that "spiritual but not religious" component, which is mostly "Christians who don't like going to their church" as far as I'm concerned. I can't say I blame them).

A big percentage of you apparently don't know that and apparently many of those confused souls think they are Muslims instead. Or perhaps secret Muslims are a thing after all. I realize that whole Jesus-Mohammed worship must be awfully confusing, but I think they're distinct enough for most people to tell the difference and know which one they might be trying to pretend they are following some of what they said with some seriousness.

No other religious group makes up more than 1-2% of the American population. Jews are common in a few cities. Muslims are common in a few cities. Buddhists are common in a few cities. Mormons are in Utah. Atheists or nones are kind of all over, but they're not anywhere near as common as people like to think. Either atheist/nones or Christians. Still, 15-20% isn't bad.

I draw attention to these two because Americans are particularly bad at estimating both. Canada is a little worse on the Muslim question (same with France and Belgium).

I would also draw attention to the immigration question. This is pretty predictable as an expressed bias of voters. Voters have an anti-foreigner bias built into to their ideological narratives. Either as "immigrants are dirty, noisy, lazy, criminals", with maybe an exception for certain Asian or European countries depending. Or as "people in those other countries are stealing our jobs", either through outsourcing/trade or as coming here to work dirt cheap. To be honest 13% seemed actually pretty high to me. That's almost 40 million American residents. For a country that doesn't make it easy to come and live here if you aren't born here. It seems possible, but seemed very high given the obstacles. Witness Australia or Canada's much higher percentages, countries with somewhat more sensible and lessened obstacles.

The net effect of this kind of research is that politicians and people covering or writing for politicians probably cannot go broke if they keep betting against the American public being well educated and informed on a given subject. And they all know this. The question mark is who these people are and whether they vote. Many of the ill-informed do not. But on questions like these, there are fewer and fewer people who are not ill-informed, indeed, the plebs could be said to express views which are not only wrong, but support ideological holdings and demand policies opposite to those fueled by an informed reality. All getting and encouraging more people to vote does in those circumstances is further deepen the divide between reality and imagination. The crisis isn't participation (again, roughly 2/3s of us are showing up to vote). It's information.

People think there are legions of immigrants, and that they hold some "foreign" and "dangerous" faiths.
People think crime is going up, by leaps and bounds in some cases.
People think the economy isn't growing, or that inflation or unemployment are absurdly high.
People think foreign aid makes up an absurd portion of our government spending (or, worse, that Medicare and Social Security do not).

In some cases they think these things because they are actively misinformed by others. The media runs a lot of crime stories, or covers immigration or the economy a lot, and perhaps on these issues it is to blame for misleading the public. In most cases though the public think these things because that's what they want to think. One of the misinterpretations of a lot of "Faux News viewers are more poorly informed than others" is that the problem is necessarily Faux News. The problem is probably in large part the type of person who wants to consume Faux News as a legitimate news organisation in the first place as their primary source of information. That type of person believes a certain set of things, and doesn't want to hear that their comfortable assumptions about the doom of our time coming from non-existent Muslim immigrants crossing the Rio Grande, having sex with their daughters, and shooting at our schools. The problem with that type of person isn't that someone feeds them their demands. The news have always done this service for the body public.

The problem is how we dissuade them of those demands in the first place.

Mr Williams

Now batting.

One strange part is there are a lot of Dead Poet's Society references. He was good in the film. I have no issues there, and it's even a decent to good movie (although it becomes a bad Julia Roberts movie later). I enjoy the insurgent campaign of teaching being waged as a fan of the idea of teachers more as motivators who capture interest in a subject and spread it around as an infection to students rather than as instructors who drone on about mechanical processes that we must master. As much as the form of instructing poetry as an insurgent campaign appeals to me as a writer of bad poetry (sometimes), poetry is more complicated as an art to learn to appreciate than just getting the feeling down. There's a flow and lyricism to writing, of all kinds, that doesn't come easily for everyone and is harder to do than just through being "inspiring". The alternative stuff mode of teaching it was awful of course. But art is hard and a complicated subject to portray. Writing is more so because it lacks a visual component. Poetry, because it often relies so much on allusion and imagery can get around this (and because we so rarely engage with modern poets, they're all dead anyway as far as most of us are concerned. People rarely conceive of music as poetry, for some reason, possibly just not enough high quality rap is being consumed on a popular level). Even in the film, the principal measure of artistic expression in the plot is someone wanting to act. Not someone wanting to write poetry or music. That's a curious angle for a film to draw many references back to now; the apparent futility of an entire endeavor of human artistic expression. In spite of its many extolled values, it is treated like a hobby than a passion. That bothers me a bit as a reference point for his career. Whitman should stand on his own. He doesn't need people standing on desks to remind us of that. (Williams made a lot of references to Whitman in his films, probably for that reason).

I'm a little confused why Good Will Hunting isn't getting referenced as much in popular references I see. Maybe it wasn't as drop dead funny (neither was Dead Poets). Maybe it's too close to the subject matter of loss. But it's immediately where I went to. Maybe I just had a stronger connection to this film than that. He won an Oscar, and he was very good in it, and we're probably seeing why. The best performances of many actors/actresses are when they tap their own reality a little more instead of putting on a mask (that's not the "best acting", but the best performances).

The main issue with evaluating Williams as an actor or comedian (beyond the obvious that it limits our evaluation of someone as a complete person to look only at the body of work they produced for public consumption), is this: He would be the person who was probably the funniest person in any room. But it would be hard to translate the joke later to retell it and explain why it was funny. It's like every other bit was an inside joke that spawned from the moment. It might still be funny later. It will make "you" laugh later. But you won't be able to make someone else laugh unless they were there, or shared in it. The secret to that working is that all of us, I think, want to be funny like that. To make it look like a reflex, a reaction, but actually drive the situation and conversation forward and to say something that people look back on and remember. Even if they have a hard time explaining why they do.

And the darker secret to that working is that's exactly why we would want to do it; so nobody will pay that much attention to us for a while. They will laugh, they will enjoy, they will embrace, and they won't look that much harder. Somebody funny doesn't inspire us to ask "what's wrong with them?" versus somebody morose and sullen and even cynical. And yet the funny man often feels no differently, no less alone or confused, than the sullen one. He just provides a better mask that the rest of us can enjoy.

More words, in furious languor.

There appears to be much going on signifying sound and fury in the world of late. But it is mostly empty.

We have an "immigration" crisis. Except we've had an immigration problem that needed to be addressed for 90 years. Ever since we started closing off our borders to foreign populations and placing onerous restrictions on how and when someone may become a citizen if they wished to live here and raise a family and do the things that human beings tend to do when they live and work and play in a place for a long time. They want to call it home. Like some relentless wheel, this just cycles around again and again as a new crop of nativist biases that either do not make a coherent philosophical point or are factually wrong. Fortunately, it appears there isn't actually a strong support for kicking millions of people out of the country who want to stay here somehow. Unfortunately nobody in Congress appears to be paying attention to that because there's a very loud and politically active group of people wandering around pretending we are being invaded and who does want to kick people out, and which nobody else wants to antagonize but doesn't want to be seen talking to either. Which leaves us within a middle ground position that even fewer people want (things like guest worker programmes).

All this tells me is that we haven't bothered to fix the existing immigration system, and what bills have been proposed primarily don't either. They focus entirely too much on borders and how people get in. That's not the "problem". The issue is how people can stay, if they would like to, and how difficult or onerous we make it to become a citizen, a problem for which I have seen no bill address in a serious way. Huge numbers of people who are residents illegally in the country came here in a perfectly legal way, as students, tourists, or workers and no amount of "border control" is likely to create an environment which catches them and restricts their presence. Large numbers more of people abroad probably would come here and stay if we had a simple system for allowing people to emigrate from their homes. The demands for armed troops on the borders have little resemblance to a solution to the problem. If anything that only amplifies the humanitarian problems by increasing the price and danger of migration across borders, and makes it more difficult for people to leave when they do come here for a temporary basis, thus further discouraging such behavior as say, seasonal labourers who migrate across borders following available work.

I am not all that impressed with liberal solutions either. They can't do very much without Congress acting, but I keep hearing "decriminalizing drugs" coming up. The likely reason for that term is that there's little or no public support for the legalisation of drugs other than marijuana. Decriminalizing, say, heroin does not destroy black markets of the drug, as a major flaw in this arrangement. That does construct the legal arrangement so the users of drugs are not punished (or sellers with small quantities), or at least are not sent to jail and prison, which is a great social victory in its own right. But it does nothing about the establishing of legal markets where sellers of these products can use the legal system for protection of property rights and to arbitrate grievances peacefully through the courts and other forms of mediation. Without that option, the violence remains a significant and sometimes essential component of the existing black markets for goods that are merely "decriminalized". Decriminalization would be better than arresting thousands of people for consensual vices, but it would not solve this problem of an illicit market with artificially inflated profit margins and through which there are considerable issues of gang violence in foreign countries (like the countries the current wave of children are fleeing). Legalisation of marijuana likewise may help some, if it occurs on a broader scale, but will not remove the problem. Consider that some clever Central American drug cartels have branched out into protection rackets for farms, for ordinary domestic crops as limes or avocados and this becomes an even more elaborate problem to disentangle than how our legal system treats the recreational ingestion of mind-altering chemicals as a means to reduce the violence.

And now for something completely different.
A brief digression to rant about (other) silly things.
- This would all be much easier, apparently, if we publicly expended time discussing genital naming conventions from 90 years ago. Fortunately, "Jerry" had already taken on a somewhat darker turn from a cheeky British affiliation as a nickname for evil Nazis or we could be at risk of a wave of named phallic features, similar to the wave of names from characters of popular fantasy novels (Khaleesi, Katniss, etc). Let's just move on. Penis jokes are not too hard.

- If someone else makes a movie about how humans only use 10% of their brains, we may want to consider an investigation if this is an actual problem that there are people employed in Hollywood who somehow only use 10% of their brains. I like science fiction, but the prospect of someone getting suddenly smarter relies on some tricks about consciousness that we don't yet have solid neuroscience to explain, or a mental disorder that is treated (depression being a common example). Honestly all being able to access 100% would mean (probably) isn't that someone would get instantly superhuman powers, but that they'd be aware of ordinarily sub-conscious processes like breathing or sensory perceptions that we filter out most of the time. Maybe memory recall would be better. And that in turn risks a lot of solipsism rather than someone running amok with god-like powers. I realize that people with superior mental recall and eidetic memories are perceived as "superhuman", or that people with very good perceptive abilities (excellent eyesight or distinguishing palettes for foods) are. But we don't need to make a superhero/supervillain movie to sell those and it probably isn't because they "use more of their brain."

A note on writing
- All writers are writing about themselves. A very good writer is writing in such a way that, while their reader will know this, has constructed an imaginative reality in which the reader may escape, or clever and well-supported arguments in which they may engage and nod or shake the head vigorously in agreement or anger. But writers are really writing to put down the words about themselves. What I believe a very good writer possesses is not necessarily a command of the language in which they compose words (though the well-placed 5 dollar word helps at times). Instead it is a command of perspective-taking that is possessed. Writers see things as best they can as someone else, be they a character or an interlocutor, and can better convince us that these others are the ones speaking to us on the page and not the man behind the curtains.

This is not the same as "If I were in his/her place". That's a weak sauce to pour over the question of what someone else would or should think. Anyone can do that and it requires no imagination. It is "If I were them in his/her place" that we're after. Assuming a new identity for a brief while, not presuming an identity for ourselves. History as a field of study requires this practice when done properly. It is this skill that it should instruct and impart and not the memorization of trivial dates and names assembled into the proper order.

Levity

I've never been a huge fan of the tea party as a political movement. Despite the media's insistence that they are a collective band of libertarian crazy people, being as I actually am a libertarian crazy person (but usually referred to as a strangely sane libertarian crazy person) my views of them suggested otherwise. It's always looked like a rebranding effort by arch conservatives with a side function as a costume party as a means of selling colonial era hats and attire.

Since Americans seem quite fond of pretending that their political movements represent the views of ancient and deceased political philosophers, lawyers, inventors, and wealthy plantation owners (who owned property that included other human beings) who conveniently are longer alive to represent their views to us and be vilified for having the temerity to disagree with our own preferred version of their views, I have decided to embrace this method acting presentation and declare a new political movement:

The Whiskey Rebellion.

Its political view: government's main function is to drive the citizens of a nation to drink and it will do whatever it can to service this function by being frustratingly busy at things it needs not do and frustratingly inactive at things it need occupy itself at effectively and efficiently.

And also the reason for this as a "rebellion": the main function of citizens appears to be to drive other citizens to drink. We need to rebel against that government by the people and for the people by consuming more alcohol

(except apparently consuming more alcohol makes people more conservative in their voting outlooks, so only up to a point required for social lubrication to be achieved and a position which watches over the inanities of our fellow man more serenely is at work.)

Things to miss

I skipped (most of) the debate. I had a lot of reasons. First, I really don't care very much about domestic policy debates between Presidents. Some amount of agenda setting is useful, but I doubt very much that the various positions between these two add up to substantially distinct agendas worth listening to them debate. Since I missed it, I read up on it instead. These were good ones from the live-blogging/tweet world.

"Continue to burn clean coal." I would like America also to continue to use cold fusion."
In general, people who proclaim a desire for "energy independence" are as reliable to do so and just as reliable to fail to realize that desire. While I think coal is going to be around for a while yet, I don't think we should kid ourselves that the technology is very clean and sound environmentally. In any case, while coal is a big issue in Ohio/WVa/PA, it seems like a dead issue with all the natural gas and fracking coming online instead. 

"Romney argues it's immoral to pass the burden of debt to younger generations. He says he'll cut any programme it's not worth borrowing money from China to pay for. I'm afraid unfunding Big Bird and Jim Lehrer is not going to help much."

The pleasant fiction that cutting things can be accomplished without changing entitlements, keeping taxes low, leaving most loopholes intact, and raising military spending, is persistent. But somebody needs to call bullshit on it. Maybe there's an argument for cutting PBS or foreign aid or art, or whatever, but those are small potatoes that don't impress me when someone says they'll cut it. Romney wasn't even willing to cut Education funding. That's a much larger chunk of change. 

"I suppose the deduction for corporate jets ought to depend on whether they have windows that open." - That joke is going to get a lot of mileage it seems. "Not giving subsidies to Exxon: Good. Corporate jet tax: meaningless. Not giving tax breaks to ship jobs overseas: worse than meaningless." - I'm not sure what, if any, substance comes up in these debates usually. I seem to recall they offered something once in a while. I don't think the "borrowing money from China" or "sending jobs to China" lines are true, relate to anything either would do in office, but they persist because the public believes it seems that China bashing is more fun than taking responsibility for their own failings. 

"He has proposed a tax plan that would inevitably add to the deficit, but claimed he would never pass a tax plan that would add to the deficit. He says he wouldn't bring down the deficit by raising revenue, but attacks Obama for not supporting a plan that would bring down the deficit by raising revenue. And it all sounds rather convincing." - This was vintage Romney. The amusing (or perhaps disturbing, depending on your perspective) part of the debates seems to have been that Obama wasn't calling these bluffs on things like Medicare, defence spending, tax cuts, etc. 

"I'm not sure if I'm learning anything from this debate, but I expect to learn a lot from the fact-checks that will inevitably follow." - Pretty much. Some of the fact-checks preceded it even. 

Since I had already decided who I would vote for, and it wasn't either of those jokers. 
I have the following wonders
1) In baseball, someone (Cabrera) won the Triple Crown for the first time in 45 years. This doesn't appear to be a big deal (it also wasn't his best season, so maybe that's the issue). Given that baseball is actually making quite a lot of money still and therefore must have fans somewhere, I'm not sure why this is. Because he was playing in Detroit? Because he's Latino? Because he was a fairly predictable case to win a TC (Pujols being another)? 
2) I'm still undecided on whether Homeland is a pro-war-on-terror show or anti. It's hard to tell. 
3) The movie Looper was incredibly predictable. It did not meet my expectations but was possibly a decent film anyway. 

Hitting some of the right notes

                       

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I still think there are strong arguments involved that were not touched on here (provision of health care coverage by employers is an insane way to setup health care coverage, first dollar coverage of a predictable health expenditure doesn't make much sense, we require prescriptions for birth control and thus vastly increase their potential costs to women but don't require prescriptions for condoms, etc), but the "war on religion" invention as a convincing argument was necessary to beat down heavily.


Speaking of which, this was also amusing.
                       

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We get it Rick

And so now Perry has gone on air and record as saying that peeing on dead people that you've presumably killed, videotaping it with some pride, is a harmless teenage prank that should be penalized with something under "removing this person from the service of the military".

Meanwhile. In other news, CNN's arbitrary rules on polling and fundraising which were used in various turns to try to exclude Gary Johnson from its GOP debates (but to include Jon Huntsman, who often polled similarly poorly, along with Santorum at times too)... are now being bypassed to allow Rick Perry to continue to attend said debates.

I have to wonder what the hell goes on at CNN. Being as I don't watch it. At this point, in order to get news and information from anything resembling a cable news organisation, either from its airtime or its webpages, one must generally go to either the BBC or Al Jazeera to find reliable and informative pieces and coverage. Even for stories in America. What possible basis could there be for continuing to cover Rick Perry other than that the man is clearly a deranged lunatic who will say strange things and generate ratings? Why is that news that there are deranged lunatics in politics who say strange things?

Why not just leave that to Jon Stewart or the Onion?

Where are all the bright interested people of conscience

We don't have people like that in this country. 

I found listening to these callers-in that none of them were raising really interesting and coherent questions. One would think that watchers of CSPAN, and worse, people calling into a CSPAN show, might possibly be modestly astute political observers. Instead I heard several calls that amounted to "I don't think I like the direction of the country", with no concept of a) what direction the country should be going in, and b) no idea what direction the country is going in. If this was a representative sampling of the sorts of people watching CSPAN, then it's possible that informed rational voters are going somewhere else for such things as information on politics. In which case, what's the point of CSPAN again?

I appreciate being reminded of the zeitgeist. I get it. You people don't like things. I have a pretty good idea that much of this is because many of you have no jobs or were fired, have trouble paying mortgages or health care. I'd like you to phrase this discontent in a way that says "this is what I want from x", x presumably being the state or some other entity to which you are aggrieved. But you're not capable of doing that and instead we get things like Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party.

Gillespie did duck one astute question about public choice problems relating to regulatory capture or rent seeking behaviors. But it was phrased more as something akin to "why don't we just abolish private property so we can have a functioning democracy". I'm not sure I can think of many places where that has worked either as a democracy or as an economic model. In fact I can think of none, particularly at a massive nation-state level like the US. So ducking that question made sense because that part is absurd. I'm also not convinced necessarily that "democracy" is a better model for sorting out most public choice problems than is "markets" or "social pressure in the absence of legal penalties and state involvement". So arguing for "democracy" instead of one of the bulwarks of a free society, private property, seems a little overdone. But so does the idea that these two things must be in conflict and that one must chose between democracy and private property. One reason they might end up that way is that the state often presumes to take private property by force and coercion and the public forms methods of fighting back against these takings. Very effectively I might add. When the state has less cause and method to seize property for whatever ends it views appropriate, generally people will have less desire to resist it (this is one reason why lowering taxes allows governments to increase spending as they often do, because the public has less concern what happens to fewer tax dollars).



Besides, based on these sorts of callers and their comments, I should think encouraging more "democracy" isn't a very encouraging thought anyway.

Humor?

In lieu of my confusion over the pepper spray photo meme, in which I haven't decided whether or not to like the attempt to popularize police brutality for the use of 2 million scoville unit pepper spray onto the faces of peaceful protestors or not, I've also come across this.

I appreciate a nerdy joke as much as any. It is rather plainly written by a very left-leaning fellow from team "Blue" (particularly given the relatively positive approach taken to Ron Paul, other than the shot about his professional work, and the sort of annoyances taken toward Obama). Still, I saw nothing appreciably wrong with some of these depictions. Certainly the bulk of the GOP field is little more than a set of rolling punchlines (Bachmann, Cain, Gingrich, and Perry in particular).

But I'd have to say the Koch brothers would hardly be impressed with Herman Cain, nor would they form some sort of deity to which he responds. He doesn't have their politics, nor does he articulate whatever politics he does have very well at all. If I were them, I would demand a better spokesperson for my views than Cain as a result. Of course, I find the sort of liberal-Democrat froth surrounding the Koch brothers befuddling already. Also there's a funny chart showing the political split over Godfather's Pizza since Cain joined the race. Democrats are suddenly not all that fond of it anymore. I couldn't remember the last time I had any to provide my own opinion, but my opinion of pizza chains generally is already rather low. I wouldn't have required Cain's candidacy to form a low opinion.

Regardless of whether the general public wants polyamory and homosexuality to be on the same moral and legal plane, they actually are more or less on the same moral plane. I happen to think this means both should be legal and tolerated because both mostly have to do with contract law and consenting adults' private sexual behaviors. There are good reasons in practice why polyamory should have a few sensible additional legal and moral elements associated with it that aren't necessary with ordinary monogamous heterosexual or homosexual partnerships, but conceptually it's perfectly fine. Naturally when someone brings up this comparison as though it is an absolute negative, I find it disturbing (I even found it necessary to write into a moral values survey about this distinction some months back. I wasn't terribly impressed with their reply either. They had several sloppily written questions like that).

Overall, I would agree Santorum is a highly bigoted buffoon too, and he flat out lacks the charisma to stake out the Huckabee type candidacy that he appears to be trying to do. But the sort of attitude taken to him here does reduce the comedic value. As in, it's not really that clever or funny to call someone a shitpile. Perhaps it is emotionally satisfying to the person doing the calling, if one doesn't particularly care for the target of such ill humors. But successful comedy isn't just about making yourself feel better. Your audience has to relate to the humor. Humor where objects are seen askew, funny. Humor where the objects become pitiful or enraging, not so much.

The government doesn't kill people, it neutralizes them.

Or depopulates the area.

This is a useful way to look at the impact of public policies, by looking at the consequences of their implementation. If a policy designed supposedly for safety's sake is instead resulting in hundreds of deaths then chances are excellent that it is a bad policy. Perhaps there are safety related regulations or rules that could have been imposed relating to air travel post 9-11 that actually would make people safer.

But:
a) most of them were adopted almost immediately by either airlines, travelers, or the government as things like secured cockpits, more attentive passengers, and better (but not necessarily very good) filters over screening one-way visa travel.
b) we have no official mechanisms in place for determining the actual efficacy of things like harassing passengers at the gate, random searches, nude body scanners, and so on. Studies that are available suggest that either it's an extremely overboard system that wastes of a lot of energy and time and requires too much manpower to be effective, or that even the technical aspects involved (body scanners for instance) are inadequate to the supposed goals of detecting explosives or weapons.

So for right now, it looks like we're more interested in appearing to be safe but in fact letting more people die. They are likely to let us leave our shoes on soon. Maybe we should be thankful for that much at least. I think it's more like we call it "security" so we feel like we did something meaningful, maybe even patriotic. When it's really "take off your damn shoes you pathetic plebeian scum!". People being screwed with just because they can be arbitrary and petty with the application of power.

Good luck with that, bits and pieces edition.

1) As with the death of Saddam, I'm not greatly troubled that Qaddafi has been killed. But. As with his fall from power and the fall of Saddam, I'm not greatly encouraged that the situation has now been improved. Fighting is the easy part. Rebuilding a country with minimal stable social institutions necessary to guarantee basic human rights and a democratic society, good luck with that. I'd love to be proven wrong that such things could be done relatively cheaply and easily, as promised. But I have a couple hundred years to point out that it hasn't been cheap and easy even with countries that already have minimally stable social institutions that don't need to be built from scratch (Germany and Japan post WW2 for instance). Also. Just because it's a liberal-progressive Democratic President instead of a vile fascistic Republican in office (or vice versa in a few years when this happens again with some other tottering dictator in a mostly irrelevant nation-state, say Syria or Morocco, with the glorious clone of Reagan 2000 as President), does not mean that the underlying mission is now noble and honorable and will be carried out more effectively and successfully. Doesn't work that way either.

2) Further observation of OWS and its spawn has convinced me that it isn't going to be able to mainstream itself enough to matter politically. Perhaps it has, in the vague cacophony of messages and voices, some kernels that will appeal to more people than have joined in. But its underlying message is more about building an alternative structure, an open society predicated on a mostly liberal worldview. This works fine when you have a community of mostly liberal people participating in a free and open assembly with mostly shared views and grievances. It does not work fine when you have a diverse community with competing interests and grievances, including large numbers of non-liberal people (I do not consider some social conservatives to be "democratic" for instance. I consider them to be theocrats.) And that's just on matters where opinion is more pertinent than expertise and knowledge. I have no idea how a vague open community with these competing interests would assess the appropriate format for environmental regulations or tax policies. Good luck with that too.

3) In contrast to that. I think both on the 53% and 99% stuff. You're both bullshitting everyone and knock it off. First off, the 53% and the related complaining among some conservatives that the rest of the population is just a bunch of freeloaders. The appropriate response is either a) the Ron Paul-ish attitude that hooray many people don't pay any taxes! now let's get to work culling government spending! or b) laying out how your general ideology or policy perspectives would improve the lives of those 47%. Bitching about them makes you look like a bunch of whiny narcissists. I expect this sort of thing out of the Faux News types (and Erick Erickson who is stranded on CNN but lives on infusions from Faux). But I am pretty sure not all of the 53% types are Faux News types. At least I don't think they are. Note: The ones who don't realize that they're actually part of the 47% probably are.

Second. Income inequality matters. I get it. But real income growth and class mobility are much bigger problems than inequality in the long run. These are the problems that need to be addressed. Okay, yes CEO pay has skyrocketed. Wall Street bankers make a lot of money. I get these are visible complaints. Problem is I've seen this happen before. The "let's lynch the rich" routine happened in the 1930s too. It did nothing at the time to correct the scourge of income inequality and, more importantly, nothing to recover the economy and restart growth. Talking about the top 1% as though they are scapegoats is an amusing diversion for the rest of the public. But my understanding of the financial collapse in 2008 includes a lot of blame to go around. Some certainly goes on those bankers that everyone seems so mad about. But it also goes on some of the people who took out mortgages on otherwise worthless properties hoping to flip them or, worse, to expand their access to credit and fund their lifestyles. Or on government regulators or other bureaucrats (at the Fed for instance). And so on. Not all of these are people in the 1%. Moreover, the recession was almost global in its effects. That's an ultimately AD problem, not by itself a banking problem. Banks are just grease on the pan. If someone turns down the heat, it doesn't matter how much grease is on there, you're never going to fry anything. As in the late 20s and early 30s, the visibility of Wall St makes it easy to blame, but the problem runs much deeper than something like "a bunch of evil speculators/hedge fund managers". I think there's a strain that taps into the lack of middle class growth or socioeconomic mobility. So there's hope. But it's a helluva lot easier to get people motivated around "fuck the banks!" or "pay my college tuition loans!" than it is to get things situated around complicated problems like fixing K-12 schools and the stupidity of health care benefits being tied to employers. That worries me.

(Addendum: I fully endorse the problem of banks rigging capitalism through regulation and corporate largesse in the political arena, the latest fruits of which being large scale bailouts rather than monetary policy letting the chips fall as they may, etc. And so I fully realize that bankers deserve some ire. I'm annoyed at the idea that they are the only ones who do.

As always my politics are informed by the idea that the public sucks). 

This is pretty much what the protests remind me of

Family values and progressives, news at 11.

I've seen several of these sorts of posts lately

They lean heavily toward the notion that ideological, and especially political, opponents will tend to not recognize why or what causes their opposition to exist in the first place. Since I don't tend to play in political team-building exercises, this helps. And an issue like abortion rights is, admittedly, very hard to debate rationally. Some points are necessary.

1) Pro-lifers are fully aware that lots of people get abortions. This is kind of one of the reasons they're not very happy about abortions being legal and quasi-readily available (and pass laws attempting to restrict access). Pro-choice attempts to say that "everyone gets these", while modestly true in that there's a large minority of women who have had or will have had such a procedure in their lifetimes, aren't exactly helping this fear.

2) What they're not aware of is WHEN most of those abortions are conducted, a fact which most pro-choice advocates are much more aware. 99% are before the 3rd trimester and 98% are before the SECOND. And most of the last 1-2% there is for health reasons (either for the mother or the fetal development). In other words those disgusting pictures about how terrible an abortion is on a fetus, are mostly ignoring that what is being aborted is a collection of cells and is ignoring that the specific circumstances surrounding the most undesirable forms of abortion are precisely the sorts of excuses and exceptions that all but the most ardent anti-abortion advocates say are acceptable (health of the mother for example). More active consideration for WHY people have abortions as opposed to the HOW is kind of important if you want to oppose them effectively. Same arguments I have with anti-terrorism policies, ask why first. Understanding is not and does not have to be the same as condoning or agreeing with the ultimate actions being taken.

3) Metaphysics still enters into it. I've seen some blog posts and forum comments over the years attempting to declare that yes, a fetus is and will almost certainly become a human being so metaphysics doesn't matter. What I'm aware of is evidence that a) human fetal development is actually pretty hard and thus a large portion of pregnancies terminate for entirely natural reasons. Miscarriages and who they happen to and how common they can be are something that probably requires more popularization than abortions do. As this means that scientifically we're likely far more uncertain about the viability of a forming human being in a fetal state, particularly at earlier stages of development (like the first trimester, when abortions are far more common), than claims like these pretend to be. b) That a large portion of opposition to abortions comes from an idea about the dignity and importance of human life. Disagreement on this point has less to do about something like a "culture of death", as pro-life crowds tend to claim, and more to do with a more boring argument about the relative value of already existing human lives versus still forming human lives. That is still essentially a metaphysical question. It's not as exciting as "is this alive", to ask something like "does that matter?", or "does that matter as much as X", but it's still certainly an important philosophical question. If more uncomfortable.

4) A core selling point of the pro-life movement and its main line of effectiveness has been the argument that indeed it does matter. At least enough to say that we should probably want a lot fewer abortions to occur. There's however an unfortunate confluence within the anti-abortion movement with anti-birth control movements to make some of the easiest means to prevent abortions more difficult. We know a healthy percentage of abortions occur within situations where greater access to birth control would have likely prevented unwanted or difficult pregnancies and thus the abortions themselves (teens, poor single women, some who are already mothers, etc). If this concurrent train of thought were abandoned or receded into the background instead existing at the same volume of intensity as anti-abortion, we'd probably see more success on the goal of "have fewer abortions" and thus protection of human life by these arguments.

5) We do not see such decoupling because that is properly not the actual goal. Anti-abortion exists as a rhetorical cover for other sets of values underlying this general movement. Usually having to do with the relative value and role of women in society, and often implying a lack of basic human sexuality, as shown by opposition within these same groups to various forms of sex work (some of which has valid concerns, such as forms of sex slavery sometimes involved in prostitution) and disturbances at the sexualised nature of female pop stars or popular culture more generally. Certainly you can object to any of these things independently and find the "Hollywood" world abhorrent or offensive. I'm personally confused as to how birth control has much of anything to do with this however. Presumably the argument goes that its use encourages sex, but there is no evidence ever shown to demonstrate this and in fact the most comprehensive analysis available shows that societies which use birth control more frequently have roughly the same amount of sex, same level of promiscuity, and by roughly the same times and ages on average as a society like ours which doesn't embrace birth control. I'd have to say that the average beer commercial probably will do more to encourage sex than condoms and pills ever will. But maybe that's just me.

It would probably also do more to encourage more abortions than condoms and pills ever would too.

In other words, opposition to abortion occurs on several different levels, and many of these are entirely legitimate concerns about human life and its importance to... surprise!... other humans. But its most ardent and politically active forms seem to come more from a sort of revulsion to popular culture and sex. Same reason that varieties of religious fanaticism occur among largely the same group of people. Factual assessments of the population of people who actually get abortions aren't likely to be very helpful anymore than any other means of telling them who and what for until they themselves take interest in the question of "why". I'm not sure we should expect people who take to literal religious interpretations of everything to be very interested in asking deep questions of "why" for others. They're likely to tell us instead that it's a "satanic" punishment and that this (legal abortion) is why we get a hurricane or an earthquake.

Which is amusing. But in a sad, stupid kind of way.

Noted

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And Gary Johnson gets even less attention still. Not even the knowing smirks and mocking laughter.

How to properly insult a famous person

"Kevin Bacon of pseudoscience" indeed. Few people have profited more from well-intentioned attempts that will in fact harm other people than Oprah. There's certainly a few vaccine "skeptics" who do more actual harm (Bill Maher comes up for example), but they're not making as much money off the effort. They're usually donating time and energy in fact.

I also find the discussion on "alternative medicine" amusing. What do you call alternative medicine that works?: "medicine".

Note also, the debate on sexism in the skeptic/atheist/secularist community is very useful. As I'd note with the problems with right-wing Islamophobia, there is plenty of ruin in any nation, and plenty of problems to point out in any community that could be improved upon. People could still oppose genital mutilation of women in Somalia while also opposing ridiculous sexist behaviors of men in more polite, advanced societies. Just because something is "less bad" than the most terrible evils imagined, or in this case, real, does not mean it is somehow ennobled with the property of being a "good" about which we should say nothing. I compared this to the people who wished that we would stop complaining about the heat over the last week here, where heat indices were topping 100 pretty steadily and the temperature over night was dropping only into the 80s, because there were somewhere people who had heat indices around 130. It's still fucking hot people. It's not magically cooler just because somewhere, someone else is suffering more than you are.

Humorous footnotes

"Incidentally, I find it strange to recall that my education was utterly dominated by two stories: the Bible's and Rome's. Both were disappointing examples of history. One told the story of an obscure, violent and somewhat bigoted tribe and one its later cults, who sat around gazing at their theological navels for a few thousand years while their fascinating neighbors--the Phoenicians, Philistines, Canaanites, Lydians and Greeks--invented respectively maritime trade, iron, the alphabet, coins and geometry. The other told the story of a barbarically violent people who founded one of the empires that institutionalized the plundering of its commercially minded neighbors, then went on to invent practically nothing in half a millennium and achieve an actual diminution in living standards for its citizens, very nearly extinguishing literacy as it died. I exaggerate, but there are more interesting figures in history than Jesus Christ or Julius Caesar."

It's very possible that the (American) focus on Rome instead of Greece or the Phoenicians or Carthage, much less other powerful and/or influential historical cultures and states like the various Chinese dynasties, Shogunate Japan, Prussia, or the Ottoman Turks, in world history courses is due to the specific importance of Rome in the Christian dialectic and that these two end up twinned in over-importance. One obvious reason to note this is the decreasing importance of Rome in casual historical study as it moved to the East and became a Christian empire (the Byzantines). Almost nobody spends a lot of time looking at the sieges of Vienna or Constantinople in a high school history course, for example, relative to the amount of time spent on developments much further in our history, like the various Mesopotamian empires. So yes, when Assyria and Nebuchadnezzar take up more time than, say, Suleiman in our collective lore, there's a problem.

But, to be fair to Rome and Christendom, they're also very long-lasting developments and thus have considerable sway over history as a whole.