Upon Pain of Death

 Musings On Present Day, Personal  2 Responses »
Feb 282013
 

cheneyI’m sometimes confronted with “How can you think no one should be killed? Aren’t some people so vile that they deserve death?”

So let’s take a Boogie Man – someone who has committed great evil while rejoicing in it, and who will never be held accountable. While the details are certainly debatable, I’ll be using Dick Cheney as my Boogie Man. After 9/11 the American people were united and motivated as never before. The entire world community was behind us, “We Are All Americans” was a common refrain. Cheney squandered this unity and goodwill to throw us into an unnecessary war with an uninvolved third party, resulting in the needless loss of trillions of dollars of wealth and hundreds of thousands of lives. The evil he has done is hard for me to imagine. I realize there are worse people alive right now, but they don’t draw my bile like he does, because they weren’t acting in my name.

He will never be punished, but even if he was, it wouldn’t be enough. Even if he was captured and executed, he would believe that he was being killed by the enemies of patriotism and freedom, and he would feel he was going to a righteous death. Even if he was tortured over many days, he would bear it in the knowledge that it was being done by evil people who despise him for being a true monument of The Good. He would think himself a great martyr.

There is only one acceptable punishment for someone like this. They must be taught what they truly did, in a way that is not currently possible. He must become a good person, and then come to realize the horror he has committed. He has to be so disgusted with the loathsome being he was that he spends tormented centuries trying to do penance, trying to find some way to make up for his actions, knowing that it may never be enough in the face of what he’s done. That is the level of suffering that would be appropriate punishment, not something cheap and tawdry like a hero’s death.

I hope this doesn’t turn out to be literally worse than death (and if it is, I wouldn’t support it). I do not wish hell upon anyone. In time maybe he could find some way to earn redemption, some way to make peace with the monster he was. This punishment would be better all around – the world has lost an evil man and gained a good man, and perhaps he will do a lot of good in the centuries he works for absolution. The only possible downside is that other potential murderers would not be as deterred by this punishment, but that is pure speculation – for all we know they could be deterred quite a bit more.

Sadly, this is not currently possible. But our laws should encapsulate our ideals, not our basest instincts. So no – there should be no death penalty. And anyone who dies in state custody should be cryonically frozen so hopefully in due time they can be revived, corrected, and redeemed.

SF/F Review – The Half-Made World

 Book Club Review  No Responses »
Feb 262013
 

HalfMadeWorld_frontThe Half-Made World, by Felix Gilman

Synopsis: Two factions war for control of a Steampunk Old West. A young psychologist (Liv) must find and cure an insane old man who’s mind may hold the key to ending the war permanently.

Brief Book Review: An interesting read, but not a compelling one. The super-human powers that rule the two factions are fascinating, and could have been a great examination of how non-human intellects interact with humans, and how intelligences without the ability to directly manipulate the world can still have huge effects by offering humans things they want in exchange… but it was never explored in much detail. The world itself is beautifully rendered, with great locations and extremely cool chaotic environs in the non-Made section of the world, where reality is still somewhat fluid and objects can change when you aren’t looking – and which doesn’t seem to make much difference to anything, aside from making a great backdrop. Liv is slowly stripped down to her constituent parts over the course of her journey, which is a neat concept but doesn’t have as much impact as it should. She doesn’t actually do a single thing of any importance until literally the very last scene of the book. The book feels unsatisfying because the protagonists are passive, rarely initiating anything themselves – merely reacting to this neat world. While it works well as a mood piece, those sorts of works are usually written as short stories for good reason. It doesn’t quite work at novel length. Not Recommended, unless this is exactly your type of book (and you know it if it is).

Club Review: Unfortunately there isn’t a great amount to chew over in a discussion setting. The villains are painted too strongly as villainous to provoke empathy, and the heroes don’t do much to cheer about. The sets are pretty, but there’s only so much to say about that. It has a very similar problem to Permanence – a lot of cool ideas that are great in concept, but without the execution to make them compelling. Merely thinking up a cool idea isn’t enough, you need to do something with it. Even if this is your type of book, it’s more of a solitary pleasure rather than a group discussion piece. Not Recommended.

I don’t trust any of you bastards (to be real)

 Personal, Speculations  2 Responses »
Feb 122013
 

thirteenth-floorMy life’s gotten pretty darn good lately. I am more healthy, fulfilled, and happy than I have been in any point of my life that I can remember. This worries me. The odds that I would be this happy are very remote. I am a white male in the richest country in the world during a time of relative peace. None of this was under my control. When I look back on all the things that could have gone wrong to prevent me from ending up here, I’m left speechless. And while I’ve overcome a number of hardships to get here, none of them were unrecoverable disasters. The universe did not hit me with small pox before there was a treatment. The fact that I did face obstacles and did overcome them adds to my feelings of happiness with my life, so I can’t even say they were, on balance, terrible.

At LessWrong HonoreDB wrote:

 Geese will instinctively gorge themselves when winter is coming on.  Eat a goose right after it’s fattened itself up for the winter, and you get a delicious treat that died happy.  The problem is that geese will only do this if they believe food may become scarce during the winter (or their instinct to gorge only kicks in when the environment is such that that would be a reasonable inference; it’s not clear whether it’s the goose or evolution doing the analysis).  If they realize that food will remain available during the winter, they eat normally.  And there are quite a few possible clues–farmers trying to replicate Sousa’s setup have discovered that cheating on any part leads to unfatted livers.

  • Even as chicks, geese cannot be handled by a human, or encounter other geese who have been.
  • There can be no visible fences.
  • Geese cannot be “fed,” rather a variety of food must be distributed randomly throughout a large space, with the placement constantly changing, so that the geese happen to come across it.

This seems to mirror my life up to now. Things are great, I’m happy, and it feels like this is due to a combination of luck and skill, and not any outside manipulation. This makes me suspicious. Life is too good, especially for an impartial uncaring universe. I am increasing my probability estimate that I exist in a simulation, and the creators of this simulation are Friendly enough to human intelligences that they ensure we have decent lives. Which would also require that people who’s lives are terrible – the Dalit slumdog in India – don’t actually exist, they’re only weakly emulated to make our lives seem better by comparison. If we’re going that far, it’s possible that almost no one else actually exists, just as that geese’s environment was almost entirely fabricated.

I don’t take this solipsism very seriously. It seems like a good way to slip into complacency, to allow your fellow man to suffer because he isn’t real, and to slack off in the fight against Death because it won’t actually happen. But it still worries at the back of my mind sometimes, a persistent niggling feeling that this is literally too good to be true and nothing is real.

(to any benevolent AI’s monitoring my life for happiness – I’m not actually complaining. This shit is pretty awesome, don’t throw me any tragedies just to try to convince me this is real, thanks. :) )

Outlasting the Crazy

 Personal  No Responses »
Feb 052013
 

closeencounters2554I’ve always had strong religious sentiments. I guess the term would be “spiritual”, but it sounds like a stupid word for someone who doesn’t believe in the supernatural. I sometimes feel jealous of the reality-minded folks who’s brains aren’t susceptible to a spiritual hijack. So I’m somewhat proud of a recent(ish) victory over my irrational tendencies.

I was smoking out on the patio (back then I was a smoker) late one night when a bright light appeared above and behind me – I couldn’t see the source because it was close to the roof but behind the peak of the building, just a bit out of sight. It acted and felt very much like an alien craft. My heart started racing and I got that first little burst of adrenaline when you know some bad shit is about to go down. My intuitive systems knew I was in the presence of extra-terrestrial life.

Of course I knew this isn’t what’s actually happening. But knowing something isn’t real, and feeling it are two completely different things. I tried to wrestle my intuitive system into submission. Asking myself “What are the chances that an incredibly sophisticated alien race has come to this planet secretly, crossing trillions of miles, just to abduct me? Now what are the chances that I’m over-reacting to some sort of visual illusion? Even the chances of a stranger playing an elaborate hoax on me are astronomically greater than a real abduction scenario! Heck, I’m more likely to be spontaneously going insane and seeing things. We have proof of that happening all the time, but never has there been any solid proof of alien visitation.”

The sense of Alien didn’t actually go away. Emotional beliefs are irrational bastards. But I didn’t do anything stupid – I realized my Elephant was throwing a fit, and just held on until it was over.

This sort of “recognize the error and let it pass” has been extremely useful in real-life circumstances as well. A couple months back I was feeling suffocated in my relationship. I wanted out, saw all the upsides of leaving, and noticed that there were almost no downsides. Fortunately I had experience with this sort of lurch before, and I knew on an intellectual level that this was wrong. This is by far the most amazing relationship I’ve ever been in, and it’s nothing but awesome. This was just a temporary fit of insanity, and I would soon regret acting upon it. So I did nothing. I continued as if everything was normal and waited for the insanity to pass. A week later it went away and I was once again happy, and relieved that I was able to outwit my insidious back-stabbing Elephant. It took some learning, but I can learn, and he’s stuck with just the same old bag of tricks.