Death Is Bad

Wow. So Larry Correia both read my review of Warbound, AND commented on it (in a totally awesome way, you should read it), AND LINKED BACK. I get 50 hits on a good day, Larry’s link spiked that to over 700 in a matter of hours. Yowzah!

I, knowing a good thing when I see it, can’t let this go without a counter-reply. :) Especially because his was a very thoughtful and in-depth reply, and I’d feel bad not saying “Thank you” at the very least. So, to start out, a hearty Thank You for engaging me.

First I must admit to a short-coming. I don’t know that much about how FDR actually did politics. I watch and read a fair amount of political fiction that is produced nowadays. The politicians in these, both the noble and the slimey, are always very shrewd, subtle, and conniving. They speak in understatements and implications, and everyone is pretending to play the game three levels below where they’re actually playing it, and hoping that everyone else thinks they’re only playing two levels above where they appear to be playing. This makes for awesome fiction, and it has colored the way I watch the political circuses our politicians play out for us. May be I’m seeing more levels than are actually there. Or maybe political intrigue really has gotten more intriguing over time. However I cannot actually say that I know enough about politics in the 30s to state that FDR was portrayed unrealistically. I only assumed that, based on fictional evidence. He may have acted like DeVito’s The Penguin for all I know. Which would be very disappointing. So, while I still have vague suspicions about FDR not being all that nefarious, I will admit that I don’t have a leg to stand on.

It is, however, still less fun for me to read. Cuz as I said above, I prefer the modern-day sort of political thriller. Just a personal taste thing.

And that leads directly into where me and Larry differ on our heroes. His next point is that the men acted period-appropriate when they treated women as things to be sheltered rather than people who can make their own decisions. This is true. But it’s also period-appropriate to a story set in the modern day, lots of people still act like that. I don’t think that matters as much, because the hero of a story is an ideal, or at least, closer to the ideal than a typical person. If we were to model ourselves after them, we should be slightly better people for it. And to me, having someone support that sort of view reduces my ability to look up to them. There were people who didn’t feel the need to impose their will on the women they cared for back then, even if they weren’t as common as they are now. I would prefer for my heroes to be of that type, similar to how I would prefer for the heroes I read in colonial-era fiction to not be slave owners and view it as distasteful.

Larry (I gather) views this sort of attitude as something that can be admired. He’s not a bad person or anything, but I disagree with him on that. He views it as protecting the ones you love. I don’t consider menacing the people my daughter loves to be protecting. (full disclosure – I don’t actually have a daughter) And likewise, I don’t consider it protecting someone to take away their choices (which is what was done to Hammer when she was excluded without being given the choice to help save mankind). I can see both of these things as character flaws that make up a multi-faceted character. Especially in Sullivan’s case, given his recent loss of Delila. But in that case those actions would be portrayed as flawed actions, whereas in Warbound they seemed to be presented as positive things.

This is the same reason I found the joy in violence distasteful. I love violence in my fiction.  :) I enjoyed the violence in Warbound. Morgan’s Altered Carbon is one of my favorite books, in part because Kovacs is such a stone-cold badass throughout. Abercrombie’s Best Served Cold is brutal and bloody and I actually bought a physical copy, it was that awesome. However my heroes never enjoy the violence they inflict. They are good at it, and they use it as a tool to get what they want, but there is never joy in it. Desperation maybe, or rage, or even just cold calculation. I don’t know if that makes me a hypocrite. Maybe that joy really is somewhere deep inside, the vicious pride of triumphing over one’s enemies, of seeing them driven before you, etc. Maybe it’s only lip-service we pay to civility by pretending it doesn’t excite us on a primal level. But dammit, these are heroes. They are the idealized man, that we want to model ourselves after, and our ideals really shouldn’t act like they enjoy violence, even if they secretly do.

I won’t comment on the super powers & kanji, as I don’ t have much to add. It is, as he said, a fine line. I thought it was a bit over the line, obviously not everyone agrees. Which, given his popularity, is quite an understatement.

Obviously this is a bit of a philosophical divide which won’t be solved over a few blog posts. Actually it’ll probably never be solved, because people are fundamentally different. Which is why it’s good that we can disagree and still live side by side and occasionally read each others fiction and admit that it’s not bad, just not quite to our tastes. In any case, it’s been a long day and I have another long day before me tomorrow, so I’m ending this here. It was nice to get to engage an author about his work for a while. :)

So apparently even John Green (yes, that John Green) is being attacked as a terrible transphobic misogynistic racist, or whatever. One of the nicest people in the world, certainly the nicest since Mr. Rodgers, is getting threats and hate from the extremist left.

This is something I just would have written off as lunacy not long ago. Like the #CancelColbert surge, or Dan Savage’s “hate crime”. Then I learned about the harassment of one of the most sex-positive and amazing people on YouTube, Laci Green, which scared her off the internet for a while. And it started feeling like a thing that actually has some effect, rather than just two kooks ranting in a basement somewhere while everyone sane ignores them.

Honestly, I’m happy that these people are going after targets like Colbert and John Greene. Exactly because they are such good people that the extremists are made to look like ridiculous asshats.

Until a few years ago I was shocked (and dismayed!) to discover that anyone other than racist misogynistic trash was ANTI-feminism! It was like a literal smack. It took me a while to realize that what they were *actually* against was these sorts of extremist assholes who managed to tar the rest of us by claiming their blind hate was in the name of progressive ideals. I know someone who is better and kinder than just about anyone in any progressive movement who calls himself anti-feminist because of the rabid attacks by these left-wing Fred Phelpses.

When those asses go after obviously good people it reveals them for what they are – the left’s equivalent of the Westboro Baptists. And I hope this will make it much easier for those of us who really want people to just be decent to each other to be able to say “Yeah, look at those dick-waffles over there. THEY are the crazy fucks, NOT us. We are not like that, so please don’t think we are here to attack you. And feel free to join us if you ever want to, because everything you espouse is exactly what our ideal world is.”

The thing is, we all have to be willing to point them out and denounce them, publicly. I really wish they’d organize into a group to make that easier, but for now I’m calling all such people Westboro Leftists. So let me throw in my hat with those saying “Most feminists and leftists are NOTHING LIKE THESE ASSHOLES, and we despise them.”

(yes, I’m saying Not All Feminists Are Like That. Cuz I think it’s a legitimate argument, and I’ve suspected the “Not All Men” meme, while it did have a point, was another aspect of a Superweapon)

added: It was pointed out by a commenter that Fred Phelps identified as a Democrat (the Left party in the US) and ran for office several times as a Democrat. That really surprised me, since religious opposition to gay rights is traditionally a Right position here. So my use of the term “Westboro Leftists” is a bit of a misnomer, as it implies that the Westboro dicks were Right-identified. I should’ve just said “Let’s not be like the Westboro Baptists on any issue.” My bad.

Those of you familiar with Less Wrong may already be familiar with the torture-vs-dust-specks controversy. It asks one to imagine someone going through 50 years of severe pain. Then imagine the smallest possible hurt that still registers as pain (such as a speck in the eye, or a stubbed toe), and imagine a number of humans so inconceivably vast that if they were ALL to experiences that tiny hurt, the total pain would still add up to much, MUCH more than the 50 years of severe pain for one person. The question is raised – which is preferable? Greater total pain spread out, or far less total pain concentrated on one person?

I used to be solidly on the pro-dust-specks side. Spread it out!

A year and a half ago, I injured my knee while skiing. I went to see my doctor and based on various manipulations and questions he said that I most likely had a slightly torn meniscus. If I stayed off of it for a month, did some basic exercises daily, and was extremely gentle with it for six months, it should heal up after about a year.

Of course there was the miniscule probability that it was something more serious, which would require surgery. If that was the case, waiting until this was apparent really wouldn’t make the situation worse. But I could get it checked immediately by getting an MRI. At the time I had minimal insurance, so it would cost me between $1,500-$3,000 out of pocket. Given the tiny probabilities involved, I was comfortable not paying all that money. That’s a good fraction of the down payment on a house.

Nowadays I have pretty decent insurance. My back was bothering me, my doctor thought it was no big deal, but went ahead and ordered X-Rays for me. I paid almost nothing and was told “Yup, looks like normal wear due to aging.”

Now, X-Rays are much cheaper than MRIs already. But my knee issue was much more serious, and if I could have gotten an MRI for $100ish dollars, I very well might have. And in fact, this seems to be what everyone does. When someone else is paying for most of the bill, you buy a lot more of something than you otherwise would, and you get what we have in the USA – a completely dysfunctional health system. Healthcare costs have been rocketing for decades, always growing faster than the general economy, so that now Healthcare spending is almost 1/5^th of ALL spending in the USA. It’s projected to keep going up.

One could imagine a world of a nearly-infinite number of skiers who hurt their knee like I did. Out of this vast number, there is one person who really did have a hidden but very serious injury, which will be made much worse if he doesn’t get into surgery immediately. He will suffer from 50 years of extreme daily pain in his knee. Basic daily functions will be nearly impossible, and excruciating. His life will be awful until the medical tech is created which allows him to get a cloned knee replacement, a very costly and also painful surgery with several years of recovery. All this could have been avoided if he’d simply gotten an MRI. This is the “torture” world.

On the other hand, we can give an MRI to every injured skier with only a nominal copay (as I would have gotten if I’d had “health insurance”). For all but one person this will be a trivial waste, but that one guy will be really happy. This is the “dust speck” world.

This is also pretty close to the world we actually have right now. The world where vast overuse of medical care, due to the off-loading of the cost, has led to such high inflation that now many people can’t get care at all. We all know the horror stories, but for many people suicide is preferable to getting life-saving healthcare because they cannot afford it. The aggregate effects of us as a society choosing dust-specks over and over have added up fairly quickly.

Let’s face it – not getting the MRI was the correct overall choice at the time, regardless of whether I had insurance or not.

I think I’m starting to be swayed to the very-unfortunately-named pro-torture side.

I’m not going to comment directly on the Isla Vista massacre. I managed to avoid it for four days, and I don’t want to get dragged in. But I will finally post something I’ve been kicking around in my head for months (years?) but I’ve been unwilling to say out loud. And maybe still shouldn’t.

Maybe some lives really aren’t worth living. It seems that humans have natural happiness set points. Life events will temporarily raise or lower your happiness, but eventually you revert to your natural set point, resulting in the Hedonic Treadmill. Which is why some people in abject poverty are, overall, happy and fulfilled; while others living in a modern economy with no material wants and every advantage in life are miserable and end up killing themselves. If Hemmingway and Cobain couldn’t find peace in their accomplishments, what chance does anyone else have?

We acknowledge that some people, suffering from terminal diseases, have more pain than joy to look forward to in the remainder of their lives. The humane among us accept that they should have a right to end their lives a bit early. What of those who are fairly young and in decent physical health, but whose underlying emotional or neurological damage means the rest of their life will always be more pain than happiness? I doubt that we can identify someone like that with any accuracy – it seems that very often those who think their misery is unending find that five or ten years down the line it really does Get Better. But there can’t not be people whose lives really will be awful forever, who really are better off dead. It seems cruel to chain them to an existence that they don’t want and can’t bear.

And every now and then, one of those people will snap and lash out, killing innocents on their way down. I cannot advocate suicide, as for most it will get better. They shouldn’t abandon their lives just as it looks gloomiest. With the notable exception of those who are on the verge of taking others with them. Anyone like that really should keep the damage localized to just themselves. Societies in the past have been pretty good at encouraging suicide under certain conditions. Maybe it shouldn’t just be about honorable deaths for captured or disgraced warriors. Maybe we should have a term for the honorable suicide of one who fears they could be a danger to others; and celebrate such selfless acts when they occur. It may be better than the alternative.

The really sad part is that I think this, as outrageously unlikely as it is, is still more likely than our society deciding to spend the effort to seriously address mental health issues.

I’m currently enrolled in a leadership-training program (for reasons I won’t get into). I was told to give a brief presentation on the most impactful lesson from our first training session, several weeks ago. This is the text of what I presented. The last part was… modified… to fit into corporate expectations. I’ll post what my summary would have been if I’d been able to air my true feelings early next week.

In what I’ve come to think of as the 6F/9F Event, we were given a paper, face down. As a group we were told to flip it over and count the number of Fs on the other side, and given 15 seconds to do so. This sentence was on the other side.

Fairness is the final result of years of effective effort combined with the experience of diversity

(note: this next comment wasn’t in the presentation: can we take a moment to marvel at this masterpiece of meaningless feel-good-isms? It’s like the corporate overlord version of a fortune cookie)

If you try to count the Fs yourself you’ll see that there are 6 Fs. Except there aren’t. There are actually 9. However almost all fluent English readers will count 6. The reason for this is the word “of”. Of is a simple preposition, and contains no information in itself, it’s a basic modifier for other nouns. As such, fluent English readers basically integrate it and skip over it as they’re reading. There are three “of”s in the sentence, and since they’re skimmed over the 3 Fs in them aren’t counted. This was of course made worse by the time pressure.

What I found infuriating about this, and why it still comes to mind sometimes, is that it was used as an example of detail-oriented personalities vs. broad-picture personalities. It was claimed that people who saw 6Fs were more of the broad-picture, over-arching master-planner types, and people who saw 9Fs were more the meticulous, attention-to-detail types. They even gave these people names –  the 6Fs and the 9Fs.

But this was wrong! This test doesn’t differentiate those personality types at all! It only points out an interesting side effect of how parts of grammar are processed by fluent readers! The only sorting of people this test can do is to separate those who’ve seen this test before and remembered the trick, and those who haven’t. Needless to say, nearly everyone was in the 6F group.

Yet, amazingly, this didn’t stop anyone from accepting their new identities. A test was administered, and tests are definitive. So people who I know are highly-detailed people, and who admitted in that lesson they’d always thought of themselves as “9Fs”, were now generating reasons as to why 6Fs are superior. Specifically why being a person who counted 6 Fs is more desirable than being one who counted 9. I was speechless.

But eventually I came to the conclusion that this was a good lesson. Earlier we had a section titled “Tailoring Your Leadership To Your Audience.” It was mainly a generational-difference sort of thing, and we moved past it pretty quickly. But in retrospect, the 6F/9F Event was a perfect example of that sort of tailoring.

It didn’t matter that “of”-skipping didn’t actually measure how intensely people paid attention to details. What mattered is that as long as people thought that it did, it served as a very useful and very memorable tool for demonstrating different natural levels of detail-orientation. The way the test smacks you in the face with those three missing Fs is really pretty jarring, and it really brings a very visceral aspect to the lesson. It doesn’t matter that it isn’t true, what matters is that it’s a very good teaching aid.

As such, I think the lesson worked double-duty. In addition to the nominal “difference between detailed-view/broad-view people” lesson, it was also an object lesson in the very essence of tailoring how you do something to have the biggest impact on your audience. It obviously worked on me. I’m still thinking about it.