Party for the people

The People's Party of Canada is a new political party that has managed to acquire a whopping 3% of Canadian votes in recent polls.  They are changing the political landscape, drawing on a base of voters that other parties have been ignoring.  That base is pretty much the people who thought that the Conservatives weren't nearly racist enough, and who wanted a party that would work harder to screw over people of colour.

I wish the PPC much greater success.  Not *too* great, mind.  Right about 5% would do. 

We have had a problem here in Canada for quite some time that the official policies of the Liberals have been a bit left of centre socially but right down the middle economically.  The Greens and NDP were far left, and the Conservatives formed many governments because the lefties split the vote.

But the PPC might help end all that.  They have grabbed a bunch of the most bigoted people that used to be reliable Conservative voters and dragged them off to the hinterlands where their votes won't do anything.  If only they can continue doing that, right up to the point where they might actually win a seat, that would be convenient.

Reading the PPC website is hilarious.  They say that immigrants pay less taxes and make less money than other Canadians, so we should keep them out.  Is there any country in the world where this isn't the case?  Doesn't this mean that immigrants take the hardest jobs making the least money?  How in the world is that bad for those who already live here?  They even try to make immigrants sound bad by saying that they use almost as many resources from the government as a long time resident does.

Another way to put that would be:  Immigrants use LESS resources than long time residents.

They also have some nonsense about how previous immigrants were good ones.  You know, people who took on the values of those who were here before.  You can tell this because of all the white people who speak Native languages, you see.  But these new immigrants, they have brown skin, and we can't tolerate that, even though they actually do learn English and, largely speaking, adopt local value systems.

The Conservatives admit climate change is happening, they just think the way to handle it is to pump a lot of oil and hope it goes away.  The PPC though, they aren't having any of that weaksauce.  They are sure climate change is Big Environmentalism propaganda, and they are going to deal with it by pumping a lot of oil and pretending it doesn't exist.

In all seriousness, I can't decide if I like that the PPC exist or not.  They are a bucket of bullshit bigotry, but if they can drag a chunk of the most regressive Conservative voters away that would be super from a 'winning elections' perspective.  Of course it would mean having to hear from those politicans, which I don't like.

Not that the PPC are consulting me about whether or not they should exist.  Their supporters would no doubt have many nasty names to call me if they noticed me, but the party itself is so far from my social circle that I only know about them from looking at polls.

Dodging meteors

I have spent a lot of time laughing at Archer.  Stirling Archer, that is, and his band of bitter, maladjusted misfits.  The show Archer did the super spy / mad scientist thing really well, so long as you can tolerate the characters being a bunch of bigoted assholes.

But the latest season is sad.  It still has Archer's classic banter, but it is set in space in the far future, and the writers seemed determined to use this as an excuse for shoddy, half baked writing.

The latest episode I have watched is a perfect example.  The entire story is based around the crew getting eaten by a giant space monster and their attempts to escape.  Ten kilometer tall spacebound tentacled horrors are absurd, but if you really need one in order to get your story working, I am fine with that.

But don't give me bullshit lines like "We were dodging a meteor storm when we cut through this galaxy and got caught by the space monster."  Galaxies are BIG.  Meteors are FAR APART.  You aren't suddenly dodging a meteor storm in deep space.  You might blast by a single rock while travelling 10,000 km/s, but this is never going to run you into a vacuum loving squid's mouth.

The space monster was necessary, so I am happy to forgive the ridiculousness of it.  However, the sorry set of excuses the show used for getting people *into* the monster was not.  "We came to investigate a distress signal, and when we tried to cut the monster apart in order to get the other ship out, the monster caught us." is at least a vaguely plausible story.  I don't mind making stupid crap up if it is necessary for the plot, but I hate it when writers make stupid crap up because they can't be bothered to spend the 30 seconds required to think up something that holds together.

It almost seems like the people writing this mess actually don't know what the word galaxy even means, the way they toss it around.  It strikes me as plausible that if the entire writing team was asked what a galaxy is they would have nothing more accurate than "It is, like, an area of space?"

I don't mind it when the rules get bent for reasons.  I get that!  What irks me is when the only reason is "I was feeling super lazy."

Writing this episode, or indeed any of the episodes so far, without butchering science and sensicality would have been easy and wouldn't have required any extra time or effort.  Archer went and got sloppy with the writing, as so many science fiction shows do, and it feels like the end of its appeal.

I hate to say it, but I agree

Canada is in the middle of a federal election, and our photogenic, charismatic prime minister Justin Trudeau is hoping that his fading popularity hasn't faded so much that he loses power.

Right now it seems he is on the cusp, with the polls showing that the Liberals could quite easily hold onto their majority, but the Conservatives are not far behind and winning is plausible for them too.  The NDP is in a dire state and can only hope that the winning party has a minority government so they can form some sort of coalition.  This won't dissuade me from voting NDP - their policies are the ones I want, and I am comfortable with a Liberal / NDP governing bloc.  As usual, the only thing that I do not want at all is a Conservative victory.  I am angry at the Liberals for reneging on their promise to implement voting reform, but I sure don't want the Conservatives to take over; that would be even worse.

The Conservatives have been focusing on attack ads trying to make Trudeau look bad.  I keep hearing them on the radio and on the internet yelling about what a terrible person Trudeau is.  I agree with many of their criticisms, but we differ greatly on the conclusion.  The Conservatives want me to think that since Trudeau is a problem we should vote them in by default, but this position has some problems. 

Their biggest issue is that the Conservative leader has all the charisma and presence of a box of bolts.  Their ads have sold me on Trudeau's flaws, but they haven't given me the slightest reason to vote Conservative at all, and I suspect their strategists know this.  The Conservative platform is just wishful thinking with regards to environmentalism as they run their usual platform of 'Well, if we direct enough money to big companies surely that will save the environment.'  It amazes me that we still have a system that requires companies to try to maximize their earnings and does not force them to consider environmental consequences, and yet leaders get away with policies that effectively amount to hoping that companies will simply do it out of the goodness of their hearts.

Companies don't have hearts, or goodness.  It is the government's responsibility to design rules to force them to do good things.  Abdicating that responsibility creates disaster.

When your policies are ill defined or disastrous and your leader makes a decent rack to get an expensive suit around, you probably have to resort to attack ads to get anywhere and this is where the Conservatives have landed.  It isn't good for them, but they are making the best of a terrible situation.

I really wish they would discuss their policies in detail because 'we will fix things with the power of positive thinking' and 'more money for the rich' won't play well.  However, they have learned from the Ontario Conservatives that you can have an idiotic half complete plan and win anyway if your leader is beliggerent and angry enough.

The Conservatives actually made one absolutely terrible decision in their attack ads; they tried to bring the Ontario provincial governments up as a reason to vote for them federally.  The ad tried to make it out like Ontario is in a dire state because of the evil Liberals, but right now the Ontario Conservative leader is extremely unpopular and their massive cuts to schools have created enormous problems.  The Conservatives should be doing anything *but* asking people to look at Ontario before voting, particularly just after school started and things are going all awry there.

So yes, Conservative ad team, the Liberals are a problem and Trudeau is a mess.  I agree with you on those counts.  But the conclusions isn't to vote for the Conservatives which are similar but worse - Ontario tried that and it was a disaster.  We actually need to vote for something better, and in Canada right now the NDP is it.

Jerk those tears, hard

Wendy has been watching a lot of Queer Eye and got Pinkie Pie and I into it.  Queer Eye is a show about 5 gay dudes who find someone who is doing laudable public service but who needs help to get their own life together.  Typically the hero of an episode runs charities, works in non profits, or volunteers a ton of time towards community organizations.  However, they have a terrible wardrobe, messy house, ugly hair, and unresolved issues.  Also they can't cook.

Then the Fab 5 show up to make everything better.  Yay!  They do a makeover, renovate the person's house, buy them new clothes, teach them to cook, and help them figure out their life.  Then, with all problems solved, the Fab 5 move on... and presumably the makeover lasts a week, the clothes a couple years, and the reno ten years.  You can't fix everything, certainly not in a week.

And yet I end up crying most of the time watching these shows.  Something about watching a person who is dedicated to helping others but who is hopeless personally makes me desperately root for them.  Seeing their reaction to their messes being cleaned up, to their homes being repaired, and to a new vision of themselves as respectable, together adults gets me leaking all over the place.

I know the show is terribly formulaic and staged.  Not fradulent or anything like that... but obviously they choose the parts they show to generate maximum impact.  They are trying to jerk my tears, and the best way to do that is to have a real story and then tell only the parts that reinforce the main thesis.  I know this, but that doesn't seem to stop me having all the feelings.

Clearly it isn't just about 5 dudes with great intentions.  I could help people pretty easily too, if I had a $100,000 budget for a wild week of shopping.  I don't know shit about grooming or fashion but I can pay people to know that for me as well as anyone.  Much of Queer Eye is just a lesson in how transformative a giant pile of cash can be for people.

I will give them credit for being critical of people though.  The heroes all have big flaws, and those flaws are out there for everyone to see.  Sometimes those flaws get addressed in some satisfactory way, and sometimes not, but that is how helping people goes.  The show really does do a good job of portraying the heroes as people with good intentions and lots of issues.

The world is not made better by 5 random dudes showing up with a wad of cash and a pile of cameras to fix one person's hairstyle struggles.  It is made better mostly by silent, unacknowledged grinding by billions of people, day after day. 

One tiny piece, one nearly invisible change, over and over.  That is how things improve, not in a splashy, easy to film moment.

But Queer Eye does give us the sight of people being overwhelmed with gratitude for good deeds done.  Maybe knowing that this is possible, that we can be heroes ourselves, pushes people towards doing good things.  Certainly it is a better example than all the superhero vigilante shows I watch!

Not the real thing

I am an advocate for Universal Basic Income.  (UBI).  I like to read about it in the media to see what people are saying, and a friend passed along an article about UBI as it relates to Alaska in the US.  The article mostly showed how people misunderstand UBI, and how they fail to see what UBI aims to achieve.

In Alaska people used to get between 1000 and 2000 per year from the state.  This is sort of like UBI, except that the amount is simply too small to be a useful comparison.  It does reduce poverty, which is great, but the point of UBI is to allow people without jobs to be able to securely afford a place to live and food to eat.  2 grand doesn't do that, especially in a place where health care is expensive and privately run.  Even calling this UBI is misleading because of the difference of scale.

UBI aims to make it so people can leave jobs that are miserable, dangerous, or otherwise untenable.  They can stop working to try to start a business, have a kid, or take care of someone in need.  They can contribute to society without having to pull a salary.  2k doesn't allow that at all.  It is like studying the effects of long exposure to combat in a foreign country by quizzing people at a paintball competition.  It is kind of related, and perhaps better than nothing, but the information just isn't useful.

There are a lot of worries about UBI out there.  One of the primary ones is how it will be paid for.  This is a serious concern!  Clearly we can make it happen if we want to, as it is purely a resource allocation problem, not a resource creation problem.  However, we have to have a plan, and that plan is going to involve sacrifices.  Sacrifices like taking massive amounts of wealth from the upper classes, for example.  How exactly we take that wealth isn't obvious, but what UBI fundamentally needs to do is transfer wealth downwards, so there are many ways to do that.

In Alaska an incoming politician wanted to increase their payout to $6700 per person.  He had no plan for paying for this of course, so the idea was to massively slash services in order to make it work.  That is nonsense, because letting the roads fall to ruin and cutting back healthcare and other things even further isn't a sensible way to pay for this sort of thing.  This isn't a problem unique to UBI, of course.  Politicians will always promise massive quantities of money for one thing or another and ignore the costs that will be incurred - that is just how democracy goes.

Seeing this foolishness in print though gives me doubts about actually getting UBI implemented.  If people see articles like this and get the impression that UBI is a grand or two a year and think that it is unwieldy even at that, it seems like it will be extremely difficult to get them on board with ten times that much.

And all this from Vox, which is hardly a right wing news source!  I shudder to think about what they would be saying about UBI on Fox News.

We need UBI for many reasons.  Demographic changes make taking care of elderly relatives more necessary, automation eliminating whole industries in short time frames make jobs shifts more difficult, and improving worker bargaining power are all good reasons for implementing it.  But when I see it in print... the misunderstandings make me tear my hair out.

Awake once more

Pinkie Pie's return to school has been going well so far.  It isn't perfect and full of rainbows and unicorns, but it is working.  That is good enough, and after a year of struggling with homeschooling I will take what I can get.

It is an improvement in her life, no doubt, because staying home with me wasn't ideal.  I have the knowledge to teach her the things she needs but our dynamic was a mess and she wasn't learning all she needed to.  She is still having challenges though, and probably will continue to do so.

But for me, her return to school is a tremendous relief.  Yesterday I did something I haven't done in a year - I got back to designing games.  It wasn't much, but I spent time creating new cards for FMB, altering and balancing others, and printing them out.  A lot of my time ends up being about simple, concrete things like cutting up paper with scissors and putting those slips of paper into card backs so they can be easily used.

I felt something inside me that hasn't been there in a long time.  A powerful desire to build, to create, to continuously improve.  I have been a long time now just coasting, trying to get by.  I have been self medicating by watching too much Youtube and letting images of other people's game experiences be my way of spending time.  That isn't so bad as self medicating goes, but it isn't the joyous flow that I can get from creating my own things.  Youtube marathons will never get me in that zone where time vanishes and I wake up having made something new and wonderful for myself.

This makes me want even more to do whatever it takes to get the school experience to work for Pinkie Pie.  It will be good for her in the long run even if it is a struggle at times, and her being out there will give me the mental space to do things that bring me joy.  It will likely cost me on the sleep front because when I am playing or designing games intensely I find it hard to get the thoughts to stop, to convince my brain to finally shut down.

Given a choice though between the numbness of scrolling videos and the gritty eyed tiredness that comes with creation and flow, I will take the latter every damn time.

I might not be able to do it

I find encouragement a puzzling thing.  I recognize what I am 'supposed' to say in situations where people are feeling unsure of themselves, but I don't like doing the standard thing of saying "I am sure you will succeed!" in response.

There is a post by TheFerrett recently that echoes some of my sentiments.  He struggles with people telling him "you got this!" when he expresses doubt or worry about his ability to succeed.  For him, that response is terrifying because he suddenly feels like they assume he will succeed, which means that if he does fail they will see him as an irredeemable loser.  Telling him that you are sure he will overcome just adds to the pressure he is already feeling because he knows that he might not prevail.

What TheFerrett wants them to say is "I will love you even if you fail."  He wants reassurance that his life isn't over if he doesn't manage to get it done.

I don't feel that way.  I find people saying "I know you will succeed!" unpleasant, but not for the same reasons.  I end up being irritated because they are lying to me, or they are refusing to accept my evaluation of the situation.  Most of the time they know that I might fail but they are claiming to feel certain of my success anyway.  I don't want to be lied to.  I don't want to be patronized.  If instead they actually believe it is impossible for me to fail, then they are simply dismissing my assessment of the situation and telling me my doubts are unfounded.  I don't want to be gaslit either.

I know people aren't setting out with lying to me as a goal.  Nor do they plan on belittling me.  Their intent is to make me feel happier and more confident.  Unfortunately intent isn't magic, and those words make things worse for me, not better.

There is another sort of response that I get at times, which is for the listener to leap in and desperately try to solve the problem themselves.  I don't like this because their solution usually involves doing everything their way instead of my way.  Sometimes they have good input but usually I have thought and researched my strategy extensively and it is much better informed than they plan they suggest after a couple seconds of consideration.  I am not looking for rescue.  An offer of "Can I help somehow?" is appreciated, but "Here, this is how you must go about solving your problem." is not.

So what response do I want then?

TheFerrett wants people to tell him that he will still be loved even if he fails.  This isn't such a bad approach with me, because honest encouragement is a fine thing.  But saying "Don't worry, if you fail, I will still love you." isn't exactly the thing I am wanting either.

I am looking for "Oh, that sounds difficult.  What is your strategy to deal with this?"  If I am describing a struggle I am having and my doubts that it will go the way I want it to, I generally just like to have somebody to talk to about it.  Verbalizing my thoughts and plans can lead to greater understanding and refinement of those plans, and an extra brain occasionally comes up with angles I hadn't seen.  Going back and forth with "Okay, so if you are doing X, you must have already figured out how to cope with Y, right?" helps me with my ideas. 

This sort of discussion helps emotionally because I feel better when I have talked out my plans, and can sometimes help logistically by finding flaws in them.

When someone says to me "I don't know if I will succeed at X." my response is to say something like "You are capable of this.  But you might fail anyway.  I will care for you whether or not you fail.  The world is big and history is long, so if you fail, there will be more chances to succeed."  I like this sort of thing because it is encouraging, true, and accepts their doubts and worries as real.  It also correctly positions the consequences of failure as a setback, not a cataclysm.

Back to it

Today Pinkie Pie went back to school.  For the past year she has been home with me, attempting to do the homeschooling thing.  It hasn't gone great, largely because her struggles at school were not fixed by being at home.  But now we are testing out the being at school thing once again to find out if we can make it work.

I can't figure out how I feel.  I am oscillating rapidly back and forth between worry that this year will fall apart and we will end up right back where we were, and relief that she is out the door, doing the thing, and it might all work.  I can feel the tension in my shoulders tighten and loosen, wax and wane, and I don't know where it is all going to end up.

It isn't particularly important that she gets high grades in school.  Ideally, of course, she would find school easy and smash all expectations, but realistically I am just pinning my hopes on her staying there, passing her courses, and being mostly content.

Kind of funny how the things we hope for shift so radically from what we had thought they would be in times past.  My parents expected straight As from me, because they knew I could manage that if I bothered to try.  When Pinkie Pie was young I had figured I would end up in the same parenting situation; turns out that life doesn't much give a crap about where you expect to end up.

I so desperately want this to work.  Homeschooling has been one of the hardest things I have ever done, and it has worn me down in so many ways.  I am not suited to it in the best of cases, and this isn't the best of cases.  I want these hours where it is just me here without the constant sense that I should be forever pushing Pinkie Pie onward and nearly always failing.  I want the time to myself to play, to work, to think.

But there isn't a lot I can do to make it happen.

So I will wait and see.  Sit and hope.