October, 2013 - Death Is Bad

Political Games

Oct 152013

I attended an anti-Monsanto rally over the weekend. People who know me may be a little surprised, as they may know that I’m generally pro-GMO. I am, however, against certain applications of the technology (which should go without saying about any tech, really). Much like I’m generally pro-electricity, but anti-Electric-Chair.

However the recent US budget debacle has taught me something.

On Oct 1^st the Republican party took the economy hostage by shutting down non-vital portions of the government, and refusing to reopen them until their demands are met. Then they claimed that the Democrats were responsible for this shut-down because they “refuse to negotiate” to meet their demands.

Alonzo Fyfe recently said

“few people seem to realize that a “clean continuing resolution” – the traditional government response to this situation in the past – is THE compromise position.

No increase in corporate taxes, no single-payer health care, no carbon tax.

No reduction in corporate taxes, no defunding of the Affordable Care Act, no opening up on the national wildlife refuges for drilling.

Both sides get absolutely nothing – a perfectly fair and equal compromise.

Unfortunately, the Democrats stepped up to this position immediately – very early in the year – refusing to make any demands and suggesting a “clean resolution” from the start.

The Republicans responded by what has become a traditional fashion for them. When their Democrats take two steps forward, the Republicans immediately take two steps back and then accuse the Democrats of refusing to compromise.”

This is what politics has become in the US. One cannot negotiate in good faith anymore – one must start at an extreme position that you wouldn’t actually WANT to become law. Your opponent is doing the same thing to try to make the negotiated settlement closer to what they actually DO want. If you could both agree to start at a reasonable position you could have a reasonable dialog, but if your opponent is going to take extremist positions to game the system you’re forced to do the same (oh look, it’s a coordination problem!)

Likewise, it seems that arguing to put any sort of regulation or restrictions on industrial agriculture means I have to start from a position of “I want to ban all advances in agriculture technology!” so I can be “talked down” to a more reasonable position.

It leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and I’m not sure I did the right thing. I guess I did something, which is a step above doing nothing at all and hoping the situation resolves itself. But there needs to be a better way of fighting extremism than simply taking the opposite extreme position in an effort to balance it out. I fear that’ll just lead to disaster.

Maul continued

Book Club Review, Musings On Present Day, Personal No Responses »

Oct 142013

Several of the people in our book club who disliked Tricia Sullivan’s Maul said they were disappointed by the fact that it was billed as “feminist SF”, because they didn’t consider it to be particularly feminist. Certainly not in the ways of older feminist works that explore gender politics and imbalances in societal power. In contrast, I thought it was quite feminist, but in a more internal way.

Sex has always been a part of feminism. Obviously sexual agency is paramount to all humans, but there has been some disagreement as to what sexual agency really is. There are a number of leaders who believe that women shouldn’t ever go out of their way to be pleasing to men – that this cheapens and demeans them. After fighting so long and hard to be viewed as more than simple sex objects, it’s a travesty to choose to objectify oneself.

But the thing is – being objectified can be fun. When you feel safe and you like the people around you, it is pleasurable to know that they take pleasure in looking at you. Sometimes it’s exciting to be used as an object for someone else’s sexual gratification (yes, only with consent). I find that pleasurable, and I know many others who do as well.

I struggled for a long time with the fact that what is sexy (objectification, submission, machismo, etc) is also intellectually unpalatable. We’re supposed to respect each other and treat each other as equals at all times, right? This was part of the discourse as well – Dworkin once stated that all penetration is violation.

Ultimately, respecting someone includes respecting their desire to be objectified in certain settings. (Or as Daphne Greengrass would say “girls should be allowed to pursue boys in whichever way they please”). Treating each other equally means acknowledging that someone has the mental capacity and maturity to decide what they’re attracted to and how they want to fuck. It means being able to draw a line in life, saying “This is how we act in the real-world, because all people deserve this respect and dignity. And this is how the two (or three or however many) of us act in the bedroom, because we deserve to enjoy the sex we have.” Acknowledging that how we fuck has no impact on who we are outside the bedroom, and has no implications for how we deserve to be treated, is a fundamental part of fixing the sexuality issue.

If we want to rip off our clothes and twerk on some guy’s crotch on stage, that’s how we roll. It doesn’t mean we have any less rights or deserve any less respect. We can still own property, get married to each other, and should be paid as much as anyone else in our skill-level.

I consider Maul to be a feminist book because it explores these sorts of issues. Sun (teen girl character) is deeply chagrined that what is sexy doesn’t seem very liberated. It was refreshing to watch someone going through the same struggles I did at that age.

Even better – in the future-timeline story, women control all the power in society, and men are very rare. In that world, the average woman is left without any male sex partners, or any ability to procreate. Meanwhile the rich and powerful women at the top have dick-on-tap. All the dick they can handle, and in 31 different flavors. Moreover, all of society has simply come to accept that macho, arrogant, risk-taking behavior is sexy in men, and therefore the males all have to over-exaggerate these features and display them for the women. Even when it’s all a charade. The women, OTOH, don’t care what they look like or bother to spend much time appealing to what men desire. It’s a beautiful reversal of current society, where women are prized for the features that most men find sexy and women display and exaggerate those. It reinforces that it’s not what is considered attractive that’s the problem, it’s the failure to divorce sexuality from other non-sexual concerns.

SF/F Review – Maul

Book Club Review No Responses »

Oct 112013

Maul, by Tricia Sullivan

Synopsis: Two story lines. 1 – Rival teen girl gangs battle in a mall in the present day. 2 – In a future where men are nearly extinct, women use desirable ones as sex slaves and ugly ones as virus test subjects. Two such men meet and try to escape.

Book Review: I saw this billed as a cyberpunk novel and was wary, as I grew up on cyberpunk and this was published in 2003 (long after the era of good cyberpunk). Fortunately it is very cyberpunk in its style and attitude! I give it my cyberpunk stamp of approval. :) It is gritty, profane, and violent, while exploring intellectual themes. The plot moves along vigorously, and the characters feel genuine. The teenage girls actually feel like teenagers (which most authors cannot pull off).

That said, the book does have some problems. Sullivan is terrible at physical descriptions. I didn’t realize 10Esha was black until halfway through. It took me a while to understand the castellations are underground, and I never got a clear picture of them. If I wasn’t intimately familiar with malls I’d have no idea what was going on during the mall half of the book, and even so a lot of the action was displaced and fuzzy. However the many strengths of this book outweigh those problems. Recommended.

Book Club Review: This is one of those books that you can’t simply read and put down. You need to discuss it with someone else, because it’s very non-Western in how it approaches intellectual topics. Western works tend to have a thesis, a point that they are trying to make and drive towards. They must say a specific thing, and clearly, or they’ve failed. My main exposure to the antithesis of this is anime, and so this book reminded me strongly of works like Akira or Ghost in the Shell. It has a lot to say, and often takes philosophical tangents and introduces fascinating ideas. However it simply presents them to the reader to think on, rather than wrapping them together and pushing to “and thus my point is X”. It’s disorienting, and it’s a nice change, and it is perfect for book-clubs!

Different readers will take different things from it for this reason. Those in our book club who focused on the violence and politics ended up not liking it as much, as those were overblown, and this random sex stuff kept getting in the way. Those (like me) who viewed this as a treatise on human sexuality and viewed everything else as simply a motor to drive that conversation – intentionally exaggerated in order to explore the sex issue more thoroughly – ended up liking it much more. This in itself makes for good discussion, and only adds to all the other topics the book covers. Even for those who dislike the story inside, the book makes for great conversation. Strongly Recommended.
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Expecting More Than Nothing

Personal No Responses »

Oct 092013

Last week I was rear-ended. As I posted then, I let the police officer take down the other driver’s info, which he said would be passed on to me in a report, and gave me the report number. I could have taken the driver’s info down myself, but I trusted that this process would work. I had expectations of someone other than myself. Naturally I was disappointed.

The report didn’t have the insurance information. It turns out the other driver didn’t have his current insurance on him (and I suspect he may not have been insured…). I have no way to contact the other driver now. Supposedly his name/address/phone is in that report, but I can’t see it online or have any information relayed to me by phone. My insurance company is not able to access this report easily either, they have to make a written request and turn-around time can be over a month. I can make a written request for that same information (and I will), but again the turn-around time is lengthy and there is a fee as well. All this could have been avoided if I simply remembered to never expect more than nothing from anyone else.

At a recent party my SO had trusted a friend to bring a few things. I don’t recall what exactly – paper plates maybe? They ended up not coming, and so the item was missing. I told her this was why I never bother asking others to bring things and just personally provide everything that I want to be at any party I host. She complained that all she’d expected from someone else was, really, anything more than nothing. And I replied that this was expecting too much. Expecting more than nothing from someone other than yourself is always expecting too much. I often get more than nothing, and I’m always pleasantly surprised when it happens. But I never expect it anymore.

This mirrors an old quote (which I was originally told was Benjamin Franklin’s, but a googling shows that there’s many permutations of this saying that go back to the beginning of history) – “Expect the worst but hope for the best. You’ll never be disappointed and often pleasantly surprised.” I can’t seem to apply this to my life on a grand scale – I’m still very much an optimist about humanity as a whole. I think we’re getting stronger, better, smarter. Our problems are grand, but our potential is grander. Things are getting better all the time, even if it’s slow.

However I have almost completely internalized this on the micro scale. Individual people often suck. In the words of Charles Schulz (who was likely paraphrasing Edna St. Vincent Millay) – “I love mankind… it’s people I can’t stand.”

Expect nothing from people and your life will go much smoother.

Ow! My head!

Musings On Present Day, Personal No Responses »

Oct 072013

I was in a car accident on Oct 2^nd. I seem to be OK. As far as I can tell I suffered a mild concussion – I was foggy the rest of that day and ALL of the next day. And by foggy I mean I had a hard time holding my concentration on anything, and all my cognitive tasks took longer. I was barely able to get my work done at my day job. :/ And this was after sleeping for 12 hours the night of the accident. I had a hard time carrying on a conversation with my SO, and everything seemed to be happening in a haze similar to a bad hangover.

By the third day I seemed to be doing better though. And I think I’m ok now.

This period was very scary, but I consoled myself with the knowledge that it was temporary, and I would soon be back to normal. But it did provide for an interesting context. Is this what it’s like to be (for lack of a better word) dumb? I can’t imagine doing much with my life in that state. How could one pursue any really challenging goals without the ability to focus and think? I don’t know if I would want to continue life in that state, but I’m not sure I’d have the presence of mind to do anything about it.

Is that what it’s like to be very old, when senility starts to set in? No wonder people don’t want to live forever, if they fear that this is what eternal life would be like.

I can’t imagine what it must be like to be in a profession where blows to the head are common. How do parents allow their children to participate in football games? How is this even remotely legal? How can you function as a human with repeated trauma to the soft, fragile thinking organ? I suppose it should be an adult’s right to use and use-up their bodies however they see fit, but before you’ve reached an age where you’re considered mentally competent to make your own choices, how can any adult entrusted with your well-being watch you doing that? I’m more functional when I’m drunk! (well, not crazy drunk. But I haven’t gotten crazy drunk in a while, and regular-drunk is less debilitating than that blow was). And this wasn’t even a severe concussion – my car was drivable after the accident, and I was able to walk around under my own power.

Remember that article that linked leaded gasoline with crime? In retrospect it shouldn’t be surprising that brain damage leads to bad social outcomes.

I just saw a couple days ago: A high school in Texas, faced with budget issues, cut it’s sports program rather than it’s art/music/math/etc programs. It saved $150k/year and… “That first semester, 80 percent of the students passed their classes, compared with 50 percent the previous fall.” Given my latest experience, I’m not surprised.

In summation – sports that involve blows to the head (football, soccer, boxing, etc) should be banned from schools. Now. Today.

Car Crash

Personal 2 Responses »

Oct 042013

Yesterday I was sitting at a red light when someone behind me, not paying attention to the road, plowed into the back of my car.

My car is still running, although it’s going to need a lot of work. I am extremely grateful to the people who immediately came to our aid. The blow left me a bit dazed and I was wandering circles around my car, trying to figure out what I was supposed to do next. Fortunately I did remember to call my SO and let her know I’d been hit and I’d be home late, so she wouldn’t worry. But after that… what was the procedure? Call the cops? I didn’t have their number on hand…

The six people who stopped and came to help us were an immense help. They called the cops and helped direct us. I’m glad we live in a society where people still do that. I wish I could thank them again.

The cops came pretty quickly, which turned out to be an unfortunate thing. The officer (Ramirez) told me not to bother getting the other driver’s insurance information – he would take care of all that. All the information would be in the police report, and he’d give me the incident number as well as a phone number I could call to get my own copy and any information I’d need. In my foggy state this sounded like a perfectly fine idea. This is the sort of efficiency we like to see! All the information together in one place, easily accessible, and gathered by the authorities rather than the people who were just involved in an accident and my not be thinking clearly (or too injured to write down insurance information). It turns out I forgot the most important rule of life.

Don’t ever trust anyone else with anything important. Insurance information – that’s important. The cop – he’s someone other than me. Sometimes you have no choice and you have to rely on trust, but this was not one of those situations. I could have taken down that info myself and had a personal copy. I’m sure you can guess what happened.

I called the next day and the other driver’s info hadn’t been entered into the system. And the officer isn’t scheduled to come back to work until Sunday. So in the meantime I’m paying for the doctor’s visit and other expenses out-of-pocket, and I have to hope that his insurance company can be persuaded and cajoled into reimbursing me with less than 6 months delay and a dozen hours on the phone. I am displeased, to say the least. Let my stupidity be a lesson – always take down all the info you can. Snap pics of the insurance card. Cell phones are awesome.

I did suffer a mild concussion. More about that next post.

What is Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality?

Personal No Responses »

Oct 022013

This is a cross-post from my podcast.

Last week that I was asked to do a presentation on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality for a local con. I said ok and put together this little talk. The video’s about 25 minutes. It’s for the uninitiated, a brief explanation of Rationality, Rationalist Fiction, and HPMoR. It was my first time doing public speak and I was crazy nervous. The next one will be better, but this ain’t too bad.

OMG porn! Everyone panic!

Musings On Present Day 3 Responses »

Oct 012013

So I guess right now Britain is having a moral panic about online porn. Here is just one recent article documenting this generation-destroying menace. It’s another great example of wide-eyed parents jumping all over the chance to believe anything outrageous because indignation feels sooooo good. It’s almost as stupid as the Rainbow Parties “phenomenon”. (Seriously… ‘nuggets’? How intentionally gullible do you have to be?) And as always, it can be refuted with a simple statistic:

100%

That’s how many men watch porn. All of them. So for every guy that can’t even hold down a job because he’s addicted to online porn, these documentaries conveniently skip over the dozens-to-hundreds of men that are MAKING THAT VERY DOCUMENTARY who have jobs, friends, and normal lives. Plus the almost-every-other-male-in-the-country demographic. If your kid grows up to be like the one guy who can’t function rather than the everyone-else who can, it’s not the porn that’s the problem.

There’s also a huge difference in the types of sex that 12-year-olds are having and the types of sex that 30-year-olds are having. 30-year-olds have actual sex, whereas 12-year-olds have imaginary sex. The difference between these types of sex cannot be overstated. Whatever the effects porn has on imaginary sex, it has much less impact on actual sex. In fact, the impact porn has on real-life sex is approximately the same as the impact Hollywood violence/romance/life has on real violence/romance/life – it makes them seem kinda lame by comparison.

Porn isn’t some magic mind-control drug. Porn is what every guy in the world saw in his mind when he fantasized between the ages of 12 and… forever. It is simply that fantasy acted out on a stage, recorded, and served back to you. The same way Hollywood violence is what people fantasize THEIR violence would be like if they were bad-ass, the same way Hollywood romance is what girls fantasize THEIR romantic encounters would be like ideally, the same way Hollywood life is what people wish THEIR real lives were like, if they were rich and talented and courageous and lucky. Long before film was invented porn already existed, it just existed in the mind and couldn’t be shared as easily.

And then people have real sex and it turns out that just like every other fantasy – it’s nothing like the fantasy. And they adjust and are disappointed and learn and grow and move on. Everyone has to learn that life isn’t like fantasy the hard way – that’s what maturing is. Maybe some people lash out at porn/Hollywood/Disney and scream in rage about how distorted fantasy is, how real life doesn’t meet their expectations, and that fantasy should be banned because it warps the minds of impressionable young children. Those people are idiots. The fantasies already existed. Moreover, it’s entirely possible to enjoy fantasies as fantasy once you realize real life doesn’t work like that.

If they’re that upset about it, perhaps they should use all that energy to try to make their lives more like their fantasies. It’s hard work, which admittedly was never part of the fantasy! But it’s worth it. If it turns out you don’t like the fantasy as much as you thought you would that’s ok… don’t pursue it. But for fuck’s sake, stop freaking out about your kids having sex fantasies. It’s what people do, and kids are people.

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