Feline Ethical Hedonist

My cat Lewis died today.  We got him six years ago, a blind, rotund creature who wandered about bumping into everything.  We worried that he would struggle to settle in, find his litterbox, figure out the layout, but Lewis managed wonderfully right from the start.

He was an utter failure as a majestic predator.  He loved to go outside and sit on the lawn at the cottage sniffing the air while birds and squirrels wandered 50 cm away from him.  I don't think he understood that they were there at all, but I can't quite say why the wild creatures were so willing to hang out near him.  I suppose they sensed his inability and disinterest in chasing them down.  Most cats like to hang out on high perches trying to look fierce and independent.  Lewis liked to do this:

His favourite thing was to lie on his back in a sunbeam with his paws in the air, begging for a belly rub.  Unlike other cats it wasn't a trap - he loved attention and would chirp and purr happily if you stopped by to get some cat tummy time.  This cat knew how to be an ethical hedonist, no doubt.  He loved snuggles and would happily fall asleep on your chest, snoring very softly away.  He trusted everyone right away, and would happily sit in the middle of busy rooms with people walking all about, even those he didn't know.

This fall he got deadly sick and we found out that his kidneys were failing.  There is no cure, but after the vet got him stabilized we brought him home and began giving him daily injections of fluids because he stopped drinking water entirely.  We knew we were just buying time against the inevitable, but we wanted to give him all of the good days he could have.

This weekend he ran out of good days.

The looming prospect of euthanasia was a tremendous struggle for me emotionally.  I see myself as my family's protector, a physical shield against all the dangers of the world.  To take him to a place where stranger would kill him is a terrible thing to face, and it was made much worse by the fact that due to covid only one of us could be with him at the end.

Normally this sort of thing Wendy would do.  She was the one who was there when Pinkie Pie came out of surgery and only one of us could be there... but I needed this.

I needed to be with him because even though I can no longer protect him from death, I will still protect him from suffering.  I needed to be there so he would know, as he died, that he was not abandoned, and that he was loved.  When he died I fell apart for awhile, and his wonderful soft fur soaked up my tears.

Now Lewis is dead.  Not gone entirely, of course, so long as we remember.  I will remember him as being the worst of the deadly hunters... and the best of the cats.

I wish I was wrong

This past fall Pinkie Pie decided to try high school.  She missed what would have been her grade 9 year with the pandemic, but she wanted to try again.  I had thought it wouldn't work at all, but it is now almost four months in and it looks like she will get full credits for the term.  My parents set high standards for my marks and results in school, but Pinkie Pie has struggles that I never did - we will be happy if she passes.  

One thing that has been making school more challenging is an educational assessment.  It is a process where psychologists and learning experts evaluate kids for all kinds of things including behavioural problems, learning disabilities, etc.  It costs a few thousand dollars, which is the barrier for many people, but with some family help on that front we decided to try it as school started.

I was quite sure what the result would be.  Pinkie Pie has been through the mental health system for years now, and I knew this educational assessment would result in them saying "Pinkie Pie is a clever kid with high anxiety and executive function problems.  She needs extra help, flexibility, and time to complete her work."  However, we decided to go for it anyway in the hopes that I was somehow wrong.

The process was much more of a struggle than we had thought.  It involved numerous sessions of tough academics and doing it caused Pinkie Pie to miss a whole week of school due to exhausion.  Making school even worse is not was I was hoping for out of this.

Still, just maybe I will be wrong?

I was not wrong.

After several months of appointments they sat us down and told us in big words that my kid is bright but has big struggles with anxiety, energy, and organization.  They recommended doing exactly what the school was already doing anyway.

I was ready to write it off as a perfect prediction, but they added one thing at the end.  They told us we could go for parent coaching to try to help with this process.  If there is one thing I need at the end of paying people hundreds of dollars an hour to tell me stuff I already know it is a recommendation to pay someone else hundreds of dollars an hour to tell me *different* stuff I already know!  It would be great - I would describe my situation to them, and they would tell me that Pinkie Pie needs a good sleep schedule, healthy food, and for us to tell her to go to school in a firm voice.  Somehow they would imagine that I didn't get this advice from one thousand other sources.

It isn't as though I think these people are all incompetent.  Probably parent coaches mostly give good advice, and I am sure the people evaluating Pinkie Pie knew their stuff.  They just had absolutely nothing of value to give us at the end.

What I know for sure though is that I have read and listened to endless parenting advice when Pinkie Pie struggled and it was not helpful.  It was always stuff I already knew, had already tried, and which totally failed.  When I got this advice I always responded that I had tried that exact thing and it did not work.  Mostly they would give me blank stares, no doubt being sure that the advice was good, so clearly I had screwed it up.  

Fact is, you can be as good a parent as you want, and there are some things you can't fix.  No strategy will suffice, no route to victory can be found.

I wanted so much to be wrong, for them to find something, anything, that would give her an edge to deal with her current struggles.  Unfortunately I was right, and we will just have to continue to muddle through.

Moving on up

I recently finished the book Exodus - How Migration is Changing Our World.  It is about the movement of people from poor countries to rich ones, and examines what effects this movement has on all of the parties involved.  I didn't agree with it all the way, but I think it does a great job of asking hard questions and looking at the issue from the perspective of everyone affected.  Being as I live in Canada it is no surprise that most of my exposure to immigration discussion has been centered on whether or not it is good for current Canadians if new people move here.  Exodus examines the subject from that perspective, but it also spends a lot of time talking about the effects on the immigrants themselves and the people left behind in the poorer countries from which they come.

In political debate the subject of immigration often comes down to left vs. right shouting matches.  The left wants all the immigration and any opposition to that is racist, and the right wants no immigration and any opposition to that is destroying our culture.  Naturally both extremes are nonsense, and both have some kind of point if you tone the rhetoric down some.  A lot of opposition to immigration within rich countries is based on racism, but there are real concerns about how immigration levels change the culture of the countries people are moving to.

One key topic that is pivotal and controversial is the examination of why exactly poor countries are poor.  Is it just historical, based on past behaviour?  Luck?  Or is it culture, and poorer, worse functioning countries are that way because of the behaviour of their citizens?  Again, this discussion is a political minefield, but the explanation is a bit of all of each of these simple answers.  Colonialism left all kinds of troubles and issues in poorer countries, but some countries have pushed beyond a troubled past, marred by invasion and occupation.  Some countries are lucky to have valuable resources, but those resources do not explain much of the difference in standard of living.

Exodus explains that much of the difference between countries can be explained by mutual regard between citizens.  If you think of everyone else in your country as someone close to you, someone you should respect, and insist on the same behaviour from them, your country will prosper.  When nurses steal all the drugs from hospitals to sell on the black market, the country suffers.  When crime is so rampant that everyone must spend tons of money on security guards, the country suffers.  When bureaucrats demand bribes and squander money via corruption the country suffers.  Countries that are rich tend to have high trust among citizens and people do not overlook transgressions by others, even if those others are close to them.  Of course every country has some degree of corruption, but less corruption is hugely beneficial.

If a rich country wants to maintain its standard of living, then any new arrivals must take on its current culture.  They don't have to have all the same holidays, modes of dress, etc. but they need to buy into the basic ideals and customs with regards to law and corruption.  If they do not, the standard of living in the country will suffer.  It is reasonable to demand certain cultural standards, but it is easy to tip over and demand far too much, and of the wrong types.

I definitely think Canadians need to be concerned about racism, particularly against immigrants.  I also think that we have to carefully manage how many people we bring in to make sure we have the infrastructure to support them, and also make sure that we maintain the parts of our culture that give us the wealth and privilege that the immigrants are seeking.  We can't expect to have open borders and welcome anyone who wants in while maintaining our standard of living, so we need restrictions, and those restrictions are going to be complicated and difficult to decide on.

The simple fact is that immigration cannot be boiled down to Good or Bad.  It is a complicated thing that is governed by extremely complex systems, and how we approach it hugely affects our outcomes.

One thing in Exodus that I was especially interested in is the discussion of nationalism.  I have been wont to say that nationalism is poison, but Exodus does point out that nationalism does have some benefits.  It tends to reduce corruption and increase mutual regard, convincing citizens to do things for one another.  The basic argument is that nationalism is good for the economy.  The author carefully states that nationalism was, in the past, a huge source of wars and conflict, and this is an obvious downside.  He thinks though that this is a thing of the past, and we shouldn't worry much about that anymore.

I think he is delusional on this point.  Nationalism may well improve the economy, but wars are still happening and they aren't gone forever.  Nationalism is a danger to humanity at large, particularly since one of our greatest existential threats, nuclear war, is vastly more likely to occur between two states in the throes of nationalist ideas. I am totally willing to take a hit to my standard of living to push the possibility of war further to the wayside, and it isn't even close.

Anyone who thinks that nationalism isn't setting us on the warpath anymore should look carefully at the US and the wars it has been continuously involved in for the past several decades.  Would Russia have been involved in the military actions it has over the past few years if it weren't so tightly in the grasp of militant nationalism?  I think not.

While I disagree with some of Exodus, I do think it raises a great many useful points.  If you haven't thought a lot about immigration from a variety of viewpoints you will probably learn a few things, and the book is easy to read and clear.  One final caveat though - the author likes to use formulas and graphs to make points, and sometimes they are misleading.  You can't take an enormously complicated topic, boil it down to 2 numbers, and then pretend that putting those numbers in a formula gives you good data out the other side.  Economists are fond of simple math representing labyrinthine issues, and such behaviour should be given a generous helping of side eye.

Fitting in nowhere

The next book in my 'recommended to me' series is Surviving the White Gaze.  This book is beyond the reach of the initial set of recommendations and is part of my new section 'people keep hearing that I am taking recommendations so they shove books at me'.  Surviving the White Gaze is simultaneously easy and hard to read.  It is a series of short, well written anecdotes and stories about the author's life focused around her experiences of race.  She is a biracial woman who was raised in a town where she was the only person who wasn't white.

While the writing is clear and smooth, the stories are harsh and jarring.  She had a tough childhood, being raised by white parents who didn't understand her struggles at all, and being surrounded by people who were constantly racist towards her.  As she got older she found her way into black social groups and communities but this often didn't help at all, as she was too black for the white people and too white for the black people.  I had realized academically that this is a serious struggle for biracial people but these stories brought that experience to life and made it real and visceral.

The stories of racism vary wildly.  Some were outright tales of outright discrimination that I found hard to stomach, and others revealed struggles that aren't necessarily obvious.  For example, black hair is different from white hair.  If no one in your town knows how to deal with your hair, then it can feel like you are inferior when in fact you are simply lacking in expertise.

If you are curious about what racism feels like, or how it plays out, this is a good book.  The author does not attempt to portray herself in a perfect light, and her many mistakes and issues are on display.  You get to see a flawed person struggling in a world that makes it extremely difficult for her, and through that struggle you will get a glimpse into humanity.

The author was adopted by a white couple and mostly raised by them, though she spent some time during her teenage years and adulthood with her birth mother.  All three parents did things wrong and made her life more difficult, though certainly her birth mother was the worst.  (Taking your eleven year old daughter to a bar and leaving her alone, and then blaming her when an old man tries to convince her to have sex with him is beyond the pale.)  She blames all three parents for many of the things she suffered, quite justifiably.  However, she also lays blame in ways that I don't accept as reasonable.

Blaming parents for their children's misbehaviour or suffering is something I see a lot.  My instinct is that this is more of a modern phenomenon, but perhaps that isn't true.  Parents often do this to themselves of course, asking themselves what they did wrong.  Sometimes they did do things wrong, of course, but often had they chosen differently it wouldn't have helped, or it would simply have created different issues.  I don't like blaming people when we can't even be sure that different choices would have improved outcomes.  If you would have been angry even if a different choice were made, then you are giving the target of your anger no right choice, no way out, and I don't accept that.

I am happy to blame parents for bad behaviour, but only if I can see a better way.  I don't toss blame if they just made the best of a bad situation.

For example, blaming her adoptive parents because they didn't give her exposure to black culture, or help her find ways to work with black hair seems quite reasonable to me.  They should have worked harder on that.  Blaming them because they didn't uproot their entire lives to move to a big city from their country residence to put her nearer to black people isn't reasonable.  It was hard on her, of that I have no doubt, but parents don't have an obligation to relocate in the world, especially when they have other kids too.  I understand her feelings, but I don't accept the allocation of blame.

When Pinkie Pie struggles, I worry.  I wonder if I could do something to help her, to fix her problems, to make things better.  I think about the choices I have made in the past.  However, I don't accept that all of her issues are on me.  I have to continue to try to help her, but I won't make it all about me, nor drown in misplaced blame.  No matter how perfect a parent you are, your children will screw up, suffer, and struggle.  You do what you can, but they have to go through things to learn how to cope with them, and you can't entirely avoid that.  Heaping blame on parents in no win situations isn't productive or fair.

Surviving the White Gaze is a powerful book that can give you a visceral understanding of the struggles of biracial people.  However, I do suggest that you take the criticisms of some of the author's family with a grain of salt.

Humans are kind

Next up in my reading series is HumanKind.  This book is about humans natural tendencies towards kindness and helpfulness, and how these tendencies can be overwritten or pushed aside by modern life.

By modern life I mean all life since the invention of agriculture.

Our examples of hunter gatherer societies are fairly small in number but they consistently paint a portrait of cooperation, lack of hierarchies, and group decision making.  This makes a lot of sense when you think about the way such groups would live.  When you move around following herds or harvesting by season there is little to own.  You don't stay on any particular patch of land, and owning it makes little sense.  You can't have more possessions than you can carry, so hoarding wealth is nearly impossible.  Having a standing military is an expense you cannot afford because they can't accomplish anything useful.  This is the sort of environment that humans are mostly adapted to.  The few thousand years since agriculture developed have changed a lot, but that isn't enough time for evolution to have a big effect.

Once you have agriculture the rules all change.  Land ownership becomes crucial.  Hoarding wealth is suddenly feasible.  Increases in food production allow for specialization and pave the way for standing militaries and their accompanying rigid hierarchies.  All of this leads to war and violence.  However, turning highly cooperative nomadic humans into bloodthirsty pillagers requires a lot of change in our outlook, and it turns out the key to that is making us believe that humans are naturally bad, and thus in need of constant control.  We also need to be convinced that other people are evil, and thus it is acceptable to murder them and take their stuff.

This is the key to being a dictator over a huge group of people.  In order to impose your rules you have to make people fear each other so they will surrender their liberties for safety.  There are many versions of this - religions telling people that other people are inherently wicked, for example.  However, there are modern day equivalents like most economics that holds dear the idea of humans as machines that try to maximize their personal power and position.

The book addresses a lot of the ways we try to convince each other of humankind's wickedness.  For example, the bystander effect, in which the death of Kitty Genovese is often cited.  The story that is often told is that Kitty was attacked in an alley, and 38 people witnessed the attack.  They did nothing, and the attacker returned repeatedly until finally Kitty died.  The true story is that the police interviewed 38 people, most of whom were asleep or heard yelling in an alley and thought it was just a drunk person.  Two of them called the police (who arrived too late to help) and one found Kitty and held her while she died.  It is a tragedy, and certainly shows that some individuals are wicked and violent, but it does not teach us that human bystanders are callous brutes.

Similarly the Stanford prison experiment and the famous experiment where volunteers administered shocks that they were meant to think were fatal are often used as examples of humans being basically bad.  The book talks about both cases, and shows how flawed the conclusions are.

Humans are marvellously adapted to cooperate and learn from one another.  These are the things that set us apart from all other species.  The great majority of us struggle to harm others at all.  However, we can be indoctrinated, tricked, and pushed into hatred and violence, and we often are.  We should not imagine that this is inevitable though, because it is not.  The last century shows us that we can get better.  We can reduce war, we can try to help others, and we can break down barriers.  

We aren't perfect, and never will be, but we are slowly fumbling our way towards something better.

HumanKind is an excellent book that will teach you about the ways that we are tricked into hatred, how hierarchies and possessions create conflict and division, and how people use this story of inherent wickedness of humankind to justify atrocities.  Being better is difficult, but this book provides clues as to how we can go about doing that.

Defeated by detail

The next book on my 'stuff people recommended' list is The Horse, The Wheel, and Language.  It is a book about archaeology / anthropology that looks at ancient peoples, particularly a group that lived in the steppes of Asia called Indo-Europeans.  

It is the first book that I failed to finish.

I didn't fail because the book was bad, or wrong, but rather because it is so chock fill of minute details that I just don't care about.  It sounds like it would be right up my alley - I am interested in historic trends and the idea of following the invention of the wheel or horseback riding and seeing how they influenced language migration sounds neat.

Unfortunately the book is just so dry and so full of proof for minor points that I couldn't get through it all.  I read halfway, and then stopped reading at all for weeks because I had no desire at all to finish.  Finally I concluded that I need to give up on my goal of reading all the books all the way through and simply write up what I have and ship it back to the library.

It turns out that I like broad strokes of learning when I am looking at something quite unfamiliar.  I suspect I am like most people in this regard.  If I am well versed in a topic I enjoy intricate detail, but for something I know little about I can't get that interested in a scholarly treatise that gets bogged down in minute tidbits.  I just don't care about the origin of a particular consonant in the Proto Indo European language.  

The book seems well researched.  I don't fault its academic credentials, though honestly I don't know that I would be able to tell if it was absolutely full of it.  That might be the issue, really.  If every single word in the book was a lie I don't think I would be able to definitely argue against it, and that means I am reading way above my pay grade.

If you enjoy detailed linguistic explanations and exhaustive examination of archeological evidence, this book may be for you.  

For me though, it was just a bit too much.  I don't have the knowledge required to get a lot out of it... and I suspect that 99.9% of humanity is in the same situation.

My next couple of books are much more approachable, written for mass audiences, and I am sure I will be able to finish them.  For now though I will consider myself defeated by detail.

The true war

I finished Pursuit of Power:  Europe 1815-1914.  This book was the first that I started reading in my Stuff People Recommended project, but it took me a long time to finish both because of length and density.  If you intend on reading it I suggest investing in steel toe boots - if you drop the book you will need them.

This book is the story of Europe from the Napoleonic Wars to WW1.  It covers a vast range of topics from political intrigue to wars and lines of control through to labour disputes, technology, and economics.  Pursuit of Power is incredibly well researched and the author clearly knows his stuff.  You will come out the other side with a dizzying array of facts, should you make it through.

The trick is making it through.  The book is not light reading.  Every mention of a person includes their birth and death date.  There are endless lists of things and odd tangents with highly specific details that don't fit well into a narrative.

Speaking of which, the book doesn't have a narrative.  That isn't necessarily a criticism or a form of praise, just a fact.  You do see trends of course as you go through all the data, but the author isn't trying to push a particular viewpoint or tell a story.  He is presenting well researched facts, that is all.  If you want an arc, or characters about which you know something, you will not find it here.  If what you want is a wild flurry of interesting tidbits of knowledge though, you will find exactly what you are looking for.

I did come away from reading this book with a few insights that I think are worth sharing.  First off it is clear from reading it that our current way of discussing and viewing history as a story of nation states battling one another is deeply flawed.  For example, many of the rebellions in Europe in this period ended when the rebels ousted their monarch and then another country invaded, destroyed the rebels, put a new monarch in place, and left.  The key battle wasn't country vs. country, but aristocrats vs. peasants.  The aristocrats in Germany wouldn't abide a rebellion in a nearby country because those uppity peasants can't be allowed to get ideas!  It was common to see other countries simply install a random noble as king in a newly minted country and then walk away, all to keep the lower classes under control.

The peasants were often tricked into thinking that the real war was them vs. some other country, when in fact they should have been seeing it as a war of all peasant vs. all the upper classes.  The writings of Marx make a lot more sense to me now that I see this more clearly.

I also acquired a new appreciation for the effects of economics and business on societies with much more primitive science.  Reading about how railways affected the price of wheat and thus dramatically changed farmers lives in nations far away was fascinating.  A railway in France that allows a French farmer to sell crops at a much lower cost because of lower shipping prices can destroy the life of a Russian peasant when their crops now aren't worth selling.

Additionally I have come around to a new way of thinking about why democracies with substantial freedom and rights for individuals have become so successful. The liberties of a modern democracy improve the efficiency of a country dramatically over a oppressive dictatorship.  I think the reason we see so many countries moving in that direction over time is simply because a country run like that gets rich.  We aren't living in a more democratic, free world because that is righteous... we are living that way because societies like that *win* on the battlefield of money.

Reading Pursuit of Power will teach you many things.  It will take a lot of time and it will sometimes feel like a slog, but you will come out the other end with a great deal of insight, and more than a few interesting facts you can spit out at parties.  

Feathered scaly critters

The next book in my 'stuff people recommended' series is The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs.  Unlike many other books in this series it did not cause me to rethink my opinions on humanity or consider becoming a full on communist.  The book was a fun, straightforward description of what we know about dinosaurs at this point, starting when the dinosaurs first emerged and moving through time until their extinction.  

The author mixed in some anecdotes about fossil hunting and archaeologists throughout, providing some amusing moments.  Certainly when I think about scientists studying dinosaurs now I imagine careful dig sites with lots of regulations and structure, but back in the day competing scientists hired mercenaries and troublemakers to fight and rob each other trying to collect bones - quite the contrast.

Much of what I learned about dinosaurs as a kid was wrong.  It is neat to take a body of knowledge that I hadn't questioned and find out how many things have changed.  Movies like Jurassic Park are now quite dated because they don't show many of the dinosaurs having feathers - though these aren't feathers like modern birds have, but rather something halfway between a feather and a thick hair.  Also our understanding of how fast dinosaurs can move, what they eat, and how they behave has changed over time.

Mixed in with dinosaur facts are descriptions of environmental changes during the dinosaur period, covering things like climate change, plate tectonics, and other factors.

This is a good book for any age.  I imagine kids would get a kick out of the random stories, but they would also get a solid education about dinosaurs in particular and general scientific topics of many kinds.  I think most adults would enjoy learning about dinosaurs anew to update their knowledge, and the book is extremely accessible to anyone without any background required.

If you want a quick to read, well written book that gives a broad overview of many scientific topics with a focus on dinosaurs, this is a great book to pick up.  

Somehow we lived

Are you looking for a book to make you feel much worse about the nature of humanity?  Desperately in need of depressing news?  Are you hunting for a sense of doom and despair?  

I have just the book for you!

The Doomsday Machine is the latest in my 'stuff people recommended' series of readings.  It is a book written by a nuclear war planner turned anti nuclear activist detailing the history of nuclear weapons in the US.  It goes into detail about just how out of dangerous the cold war was, how out of control the nuclear weapons were, and how constantly we were exposed to civilization ending nuclear war.

It is depressing to hear just how aggressive and reckless people were.  The US military was so worried about not being able to annihilate their enemies that they gave permission to fire nuclear weapons to a huge range of people and refused to create systems to prevent individual pilots and soliders from using nuclear weapons on their own initiative.  When systems were put in place to prevent armageddon individuals carefully circumvented them.

For example, there was a system where there were 2 safes with codes to fire nukes.  There were always supposed to be 2 people on duty, each of which knew the combination to one safe.  Both safes were required to fire, so in theory this meant that a single rogue person couldn't end humanity.  In practice the soldiers all just shared their combinations with one another so if one of them was away for some reason the other could easily fire the nukes and end us all.

This isn't stupidity.  There are stupid people in the military, just like anywhere, but that isn't what happened here.

If I were to prioritize four situations in nuclear standoffs, I would list them as 

Everyone lives

Enemies die

We die

Everyone dies.

The soldiers clearly prioritized them as

Enemies die

Everyone lives

Everyone dies

We die.

Their overriding concern was not the continuation of humanity, but rather the destruction of their enemies.  They were desperately concerned not for life, but for saving face.  Better that America being a pile of ash and all humans die than anyone else feel like they had pulled one over on America.

They knew what they were doing, they just thought that macho posturing and patriotic bullshit was more important than all human life.

This, more than anything, is the story of nuclear weapons.  It is a bunch of assholes who wanted to push people around who were willing to kill us all to maintain their deathgrip on power.  It is despicable, and yet not at all surprising.

Normally I agree with the statement that it is foolish to ascribe to malice what can easily be explained by incompetence, but that isn't the case here.  It is all malice, all the way.

By the end of the book I was stunned at the colossal evil at the heart of the US military.  This, coming from someone who was already convinced that the US military is one of the most evil things around.  I spend days wondering how it is that I am still alive, and thinking constantly that I am surely not going to live to see my 50th birthday, much less die at a ripe old age.

The Doomsday Machine is good.  Well written, informative, and important.  We all need to understand why this insane situation occurred, and advocate for changing it.  Reading it, however, will not be a fun thing to do, and you will despair at what we have wrought.  In addition, you will never wonder about the Fermi Paradox again.  There aren't any aliens visiting us because they all eventually nuked themselves into oblivion.

A call to communism

If you want to read a book that will turn you communist, then How To Be A Victorian is a good place to start.  I am continuing my 'stuff people recommended' book readings, and while this book does not intend to suggest any political affiliation I couldn't help but be filled with despair at the portrayal of life in Victorian England.

The starvation of children is what got to me.  Reading about the 10 course meals the aristocrats were eating while the poor starved to death filled me with rage.  I can hardly imagine the distress I would feel if I were to look at my child, skinny with hunger and misery, and then have to tell her that there is no food today, and maybe not tomorrow.  The rich are throwing away food from every meal, but she just has to suffer, and maybe die.

Even if she got enough to eat in calories, she would probably be eating nothing but bread and would end up with rickets and scurvy because we couldn't even afford vegetables.

The idea of making a careful economic decision to send my 6 year old kid to work for 16 hours a day in the pitch dark of the mines because that way maybe I can afford enough food for her is just beyond my experience.  How could I look at her and then look at an aristocrat of the same age and realize that the aristocrat is 10 cm taller because they get enough to eat without grabbing a pitchfork and joining a revolution?

I am not normally a violent person, or one inclined to armed revolt.  But in that situation, I am pretty sure the rich people had better make sure they have tight security, because I am coming for them.  Communism strikes me, from the perspective of a 21st century Canadian, as impractical.  As a Victorian though, I can see myself getting pretty excited about sharing the wealth.

The book itself is set up in a neat way - it starts out with getting up, washing, dressing, breakfast, and then proceeds through working life and entertainment, while finishing up with sex.  The sections varied a lot in interest for me, as I found the endless lists of specific garments boring but the descriptions of sexual mores and medicine were compelling.  There isn't a plot so you can easily jump around to whatever stuff grabs your attention though, which is good.

The author clearly did a tremendous amount of research and the book is authoritatively written.  Sometimes it is a little dry, so you want to go in with an interest in history because there aren't any thrills otherwise.

People do, from time to time, wax poetic about the good old days and how things are terrible now.  Those people need to read some more history books, because the more I read the more certain I become that there has never been as good a time to be alive as right here, right now.  

We have problems, yes.   But the olden times *sucked*.

Periodic Tales

In my continuing series about all the books people recommended to me I finished reading Periodic Tales.  This book is far less controversial than the last one I wrote about, and is a meandering tale winding its way through history.  It has the periodic table of the elements as its theme, so the author devotes each chapter to an element or group of elements and talks about their discovery, uses, and notable events.

The book is a good read for anyone whether or not you have any scientific training.  All the science in the book is pitched at a broad audience and is easily accessible.  The great majority of it is just a series of short history lessons which are generally interesting and amusing.  The author does a great job of blending humour and learning to make the stories fun as well as educational.  It isn't a long read so you can't expect to get a complete education on any one topic but if you want a series of history highlights with a focus on discovery then you will be happy with the book.

You will find pieces about gold rushes, aluminum (or aluminium, depending on where you live) utensils that were the height of fancy living for Napoleon III, and chlorine's use as a weapon in WWI.  The variety is huge.

One thing that stood out to me though was the way the author talked about gold, silver, and iron.  He spoke about them as though gold and iron were obviously male associated and silver obviously female.  Those associations exist in several cultures, but the idea that this is inevitable or inherent to the elements is quite absurd.  From a western historical perspective his point is supported, but he talks about it as if this is an inherent property of the elements themselves instead of a historical accident and that is wrong.

The reason this stood out to me is that gender essentialism is a real issue in society and it irritates me to see it.  It wasn't a huge part of the book, but I do like to point out these things when I see them.  It was a negative mark on an otherwise enjoyable read.

I recommend this book.  A few 'Silver is obviously a female element' comments aside, it was quick, informative, and fun.

Algorithms for horny middle aged men

Facebook has been sending me friend suggestions for lots of 20 something women.  It also sends me friend suggestions for other types of people, but I noticed many months ago that this demographic made up a big chunk of my suggestions so I paid close attention to see if it continued.  After monitoring it for a half year or so I can safely say that 75% of my friend suggestions are adult women much younger than me.  A few were sex workers or scammers, but the majority of them were real people with one or two friends in common with me.  

Facebook's motivation for doing this seems obvious; get the middle aged straight guy to click on profiles of young women he wants to have sex with and increase engagement metrics.  However, that might be me leaping to conclusions.  Maybe Facebook just sends young women to everyone in friend suggestions... I don't know.

If my initial assumption holds true, then it is a sad thing indeed.  Getting messaged and friended by some older man who just wants sex is not something younger women on social media want or need.  They can get an infinite supply of that trivially, if they are interested - they can even get paid.  It seems like Facebook is trying to get me to engage more by encouraging crappy behaviour.

However, I would like to be sure that this is what is happening.  The four things that leap out to me that may be relevant are age, gender, sexual orientation, and relationship style.  Is this limited to men, middle aged people, straight people, or polyamorous people?  Perhaps some combination of all of the above.  Certainly Facebook knows I am in a relationship with a woman who is nine years younger than me as well as my spouse and perhaps that influences the algorithm's choices.

I would appreciate anyone replying here or on Facebook with your experiences in this.  Ideally include age, gender, orientation, and polyamorous or not, but if you don't want to include any of that just knowing if you have similar experiences to me would be useful.

I must find out the nature of our code overlords, and what they want they think of me.

Facts, but not all the facts

A few weeks ago I put out a call on Facebook for books I should read.  I got a big stack of them from the library and I am tearing through them.  Yesterday I wrote a post about Factfulness, where I talked about what a good book it is.  Most of the books on my list will be much the same I am sure.  At the moment I am planning on writing a post about each of them, but we will see if that actually happens.

There is one book in that recommendation list that is not going to get a "This book is great!" post.  It is called Black Rednecks and White Liberals.  The blurb on the back is from someone whose claim to fame is "Commentator on Fox News".  Between the title and that blurb source you can guess that it is written to push a right wing agenda, and you would be right.

However, while I could just deride the book as a bunch of evil nonsense, that wouldn't be doing it justice.  It is a classic example of facts carefully chosen and presented to create a specific conclusion.  The conclusion the author is trying to lead you to is that the struggles of black people in the US today are almost entirely their own fault because of their culture.  He has done a huge amount of research in support of this thesis, and as far as I can tell his facts are accurate.  The trouble with the book is not that it lies, but rather that it doesn't tell you the whole truth.

If you look at the edges of right vs. left debate on racism you will see two extreme camps.  One side is dedicated to the idea that racism is over and that any problems that black people have now are their own fault.  The other side contends that racism is the only thing, and if opportunity were equal that black people would succeed just as much as anyone else because their culture has nothing to do with their success or lack thereof.

Both extreme positions are wrong.  Culture matters in success of groups - just look at the incredible dominance of Asian students in math and science.  That isn't genetic, it is a consequence of culture.

Racism also matters, and black people are discriminated against in a thousand ways, large and small.

The author contends that groups throughout history who have venerated learning, hard work, saving, and study tend to become more successful generation by generation.  He also contends that black culture in the US has values that impugne education and support a spendthrift lifestyle.  This is a trend, not universal, of course, but I think he is correct in these assertions.  Just like the trend of Asian parents pushing their kids to do more math isn't true for all, so are these generalizations about black people only true statistically.

Clearly spending recklessly and despising education and study are not black only things.  I know plenty of white people who spend rather than save, and when I was young I was on the wrong end of 'learning is for losers' by plenty of white kids.  In fact the author suggests that these things are common among redneck cultures regardless of race, and has theories that seem plausible about the American South having these traits in abudance among the white population during the times of slavery in the US.  Seeing the way right wing folks talk about scientists and academics it is obvious this is still alive and well today.

The trouble is that people seize on that simple admission that culture matters, and immediately leap to the conclusion that racism is over.  This is nonsense, but I have seen it in my personal life when someone said "There isn't any racism anymore except anti white racism, black people's problems are all just black culture." and pointed me to this book as proof.

One of the core elements of the book is the author telling us of various teaching methods and programs that produced black graduates that had high success rates in employment and earnings.  He waxes poetic about how if you just teach black people to speak properly, save and invest wisely, and value education, they will suddenly be more successful.

Note the presence of the word 'properly' in that last sentence.  What does he mean by speaking properly?  He doesn't define it.  

He means "like a rich white person who graduated from Harvard".

So yeah, if you teach black kids to speak like a rich white guy from Harvard, they will make more money.  But he completely fails to ask why that is, and if the best thing for society is to simply make black people act like white people.  Is that the goal of our educational system?  To force children to emulate the richest and most powerful so they can get jobs?

No, it is not.  If black people not speaking like rich whites from Harvard is preventing them getting jobs, maybe we ought to change that fact directly, rather than simply accepting it and trying to change black people!

(I do think that a cultural norm of supporting and encouraging study and learning is objectively good though, both for those in that culture and those outside it.)

If some black kids tell other black kids to stop studying because hitting the books is just acting white, then that will have negative effects on their long term educational and job prospects.  However, there is absolutely nothing I can do about that.  What I can do is try to push for a society that doesn't disciminate against those black kids so they at least have equal opportunity from outside their own culture.  That is something I can actively work on, so I will.  Assigning blame isn't going to help anyone, no matter who the blame gets assigned to.  All I can do is try to fix the thing that is within my power to affect, so I will do that.

I normally close with a recommendation to read the book I am reviewing.  I won't give that here.  There are some parts of the book that aren't about black culture at all that are interesting and informative, and even if you totally disagree with the author's conclusions like I do, there are a lot of facts you might find useful.  I view it much like my reading of the Bible years ago - I am glad to have these facts in my head now, because it will make me much better at refuting the arguments of people I disagree with.  I read the Bible in part to better argue with religious people, and I read this book to better argue with racist people.

Black Rednecks and White Liberals has plenty of facts.  Unfortunately, it is light on truth.

Facts don't care about your feelings

I just finished reading the book Factfulness.  It is a book that constantly repeats things I have been yelling about for years to anyone who will listen, so it should be no surprise that I loved it.  The book leads off with 12 questions about the world, mostly relating to human wellbeing and trends.  All questions have 3 answers, A, B, C and the average person gets 2 correct.

You read that right.  Guessing at random would give you 4 correct, but the average person is significantly worse than random guessing.  The author of the book talks about how in all his years administering these questions to huge numbers of people one person ever got 11 correct, and nobody got 12.

I got 11 correct, and I definitely should have got 12, but I rushed through.  That isn't because I am smarter than everyone else, but because the author of the book was trying to make a point, showing how badly humans do on specific sorts of knowledge, and that is a specific sort of knowledge I focus on.

The idea behind the book is that we are terrible at interpreting certain sorts of data and the information we are exposed to predisposes us to come to incorrect conclusions.  The book clarifies a lot of important facts that we usually get wrong, and provides techniques for preventing yourself from reaching those incorrect conclusions in future.  It is a combination of science, sociology, and psychology.  Through reading it we learn about what scientific research and facts tell us about the human world, why we get it wrong, and how we can make our brains be better at this sort of thing.

The key takeaway is that a lot of things are getting better.  For example, I have gotten into a few heated discussions about pollution where people tried to convince me that pollution is getting worse everywhere.  I brought up air quality in Toronto, and these people stated that it is getting worse every year.  I pointed out that we can falsify this both anecdotally and scientifically - just think about the smog pouring out of car tailpipes in decades past, and look at car tailpipes today.  Or, you know, you can just look up the numbers and see that air quality in Toronto has been constantly improving ever since we were able to measure it.

Lots of things are like this.  People see disasters on the news or charities begging for help with images of catastrophe and fail to realize that while individual problems exist, the global trend for nearly all measures of human well being is constantly improving.  We miss the forest for the trees.

Of course that doesn't mean we should rest on our laurels!  Both the author and I are convinced that we should do more for environmental causes and assisting those less fortunate in the world, but we should do that while being aware of the successes we have had.  "We have a lot more to do" can go along with "Many things are improving rapidly" without contradiction.

Everyone should read this book.  If all you get from it is a new understanding of global trends it will be worth it, but you can get so much more.  It can give you tools to be a better activist, a better environmentalist, and a better thinker.

Wrong measurements

Pinkie Pie has been talking about going back to school in the fall.  She is eager to try this out, largely because she wants to spend time with her friends.  She has enjoyed a great many books and shows about high school in her time, and I wonder if she has the wrong idea about what high school entails.

I have grave doubts.  Some of those doubts surround her ability to cope with high school and the workload, as her mental health struggles have made it extremely difficult for her to do the education we are doing at home, and I can't see how she could cope with a full courseload.

My other doubts surround the way school operates in general, particularly the way grades work.  I found a youtube video talking about many of the problems with grades and educational structures and it resonated strongly with me.

The youtuber in question leads off with a story about a kid who gets straight As but who is crushed by the school system because it encourages them to focus entirely on grades instead of learning and inquiry.  That is a negative consequence of our system to be sure, but kids that get straight As but are bored aren't the biggest trouble with the system.  The kids that can't cope with the structure and end up falling through the cracks are much more of a concern.

Still, the main point that grading takes over everything certainly stands.  We are stuck in a situation where parents and governments demand to have education measured.  It is extremely difficult to measure learning, so we rely on test scores as a stand in.  As is so often the case, we end up building the whole system to maximize our results on the metrics we made up, so we end up trying to raise test scores instead of trying to teach more effectively.

Some people will of course argue that we need test scores for university admissions.  There are schools that don't give marks and mature students that don't have standard marks and we make that work, so I don't think we need marks at all.  Still, if we had a bunch of tests for university admission at the end of grade 12 I would be fine with it.  However, numeric marks for younger kids is just a plague with no redeeming value.

We don't need to carefully rank children's learning.  We need to spend our time teaching them more, not working on giving them a number that isn't useful.

All this makes me not want to send Pinkie Pie to high school at all.  Sure, there are lots of things she will learn, but she will also spend way too much time grinding out pointless crap just so the high school can give her a number at the end.  I don't need any damn numbers, and neither does she.  She needs to learn, and to feel like the things she is doing are relevant.

Just like I did in high school, Pinkie Pie sees marks as pointless, and that will sour the entire experience.

Schools have been designed as a training ground for obedient cogs, setting them up to take their place in the machine.  Education is part of the mandate, but the structure is primarily designed to keep them under control and rigidly evaluated.  We are slowly changing this over time, and Ontario is gradually making progress, but it is at a glacial pace.

This shouldn't be taken as an attack on teachers - naturally, there are terrible teachers, but the vast majority I have encountered in my life or through Pinkie Pie have been dedicated to education and wished they could stop wasting so much time on standardized tests and marking.  Unfortunately when you work within the system, there is only so much you can do.

We need a huge rethink of what schools are for.  Unfortunately it will come too late for Pinkie Pie in any case, but if we want a society of creative problem solvers we need to stop spending their entire childhood telling them the thing we want from them is precise regurgitation of particular facts on one particular day.

I don't want a boss, employee, friend, or citizen to be ranked by their ability to score highly on a test, so let's remove that nonsense from our schools.

Am I a criminal?

Today I got in another altercation with religious zealots on the streetcorner.  It irritates me when they stand there handing out literature, but I don't do anything about that.  Today though they ratcheted up the annoyance by setting up a loudspeaker and blasting their "Repent you are going to hell" schtick at extremely high volume.  It was so loud that even in my condo 12 floors up and a block away it was unavoidable.  They had it going for a couple hours and I gradually got more and more angry.  Hundreds or maybe even thousands of people are spending their whole day listening to this pounding noise with its wretched message, and I am not okay with that.

This sort of thing is tricky to navigate because Wendy and I see it so differently.  She hates when religious folks make noise like this, but the idea of doing something about it directly leaves her anxious and upset.  I talked about going down there and yelling at the proselytizers, and this left her deeply worried.  I am sure it was partly social anxiety, but she was also worried one of them would shoot me or something.

I react in the opposite way.  I despise letting jerks crap all over everybody and not doing something out of fear.  I got more worked up as time went by and finally hit a point where I couldn't just sit anymore.  It was time to go get in a fight.

Before I arrived at the point of conflict though I had to make a decision.  Would I ask for change, or demand it?  Asking isn't going to get me in trouble, but it also won't do anything.  They will tell me that they are saving souls or some bullshit and keep on with their noise.  If I demand change though then I have to be ready to have my bluff called.  What do I do when they tell me to go to hell?

The fundamental question is this:  Am I willing to grab their loudspeaker and smash it to pieces if they refuse to turn it off?  Am I willing to commit a crime in order to get some jerks to stop polluting the public space?  Am I a vigilante?

I have to know the answer before I go in.  They don't necessarily know if I am bluffing, but I have to know.  I don't want a short stint in jail, but I also don't want to live in a society where we are so terrified of random assholes that we let them lower everyone else's quality of life.

Realistically of course if I grab a loudspeaker, smash it on the ground, and run, the chance of facing any consequences at all are remote.

I decided I was willing to take the risk.  I would prefer to do the smallest dollar amount of damage possible because that mitigates my risk so I would rely on angry yelling at first, and then would hope to steal their cables or something to render the loudspeaker inoperable.  If the loudspeaker needed smashing though, I was ready to smash it.

I stalked towards them, filled with rage, ready to create a tremendous scene, and realized that the noise had stopped.  A cop was standing beside the religious people talking to them, and had clearly made them turn off the loudspeaker.

I stalked up next to them, stood there staring death at the religious guy, and got a glance from the cop that said "Oh crap, another angry person to death with, maybe if I don't meet his gaze he will go away."  

I did not go away.

I waited a minute and then went on an angry rant about how everyone in their homes around here can hear this junk and have been putting up with it all afternoon.  The cop politely told me it was under control.

The level of tension dropped.  The cop went off to talk to another religous person and the leader and I started talking, but the stakes of this conversation were extremely low.  There is a cop 4 meters away.  We can yell at each other, but we both know neither of us is going to take a swing at the other.  Violence will not ensue.  If the cop hadn't been there though, the encounter might go entirely differently.  At that point we might be hesitant to threaten each other because the other person might actually turn to violence, so anyone escalating would have to worry about personal safety.  As it was though we were free to scream at each other knowing that it wouldn't go further than that.

So we screamed at each other.

Dude:  I *had* to make the volume super loud, because of the construction nearby.

Me:  You *chose* to make it so loud that it was a huge detriment to everyone within a block, this wasn't something that happened to you, this was you being an asshole.

Dude:  Hah!  I am trying to save you and bring you into the arms of Jesus.  What were you gonna do about it anyway?

Me:  If I hear that crap again, I am going to come down here, grab your loudspeaker, and chuck it into one of the construction holes where it will smash to pieces.

Dude:  You don't scare me, with all your big muscles! I was in prison! (Actual quote, I swear.) 

Me:  I am not trying to scare you, you moron.  I am *telling* you that if that speaker goes on again, I will destroy it.

Dude:  You are just made of meat, and you will stand before Jesus in judgement.

Me:  Really?  Are you going to threaten me with the wrath of Odin?  How about Zeus?  Or Nanabijou?  Maybe the Easter Bunny?  Your best friend invisible space wizard is a *myth*.

Dude:  You will go to hell!  Repent!

I didn't repent.

Thankfully, through some combination of serious legal threats from the police and threats of vigilante property destruction the loudspeaker has remained silent.  I feel so much better, sitting in my kitchen *not* hearing fire and brimstone coming from the streetcorner.

I should do this more often, it feels great.

Heavy

A few months ago I looked at myself and realized that I had put on some weight over the course of the pandemic.  I had noticed a few times that I had a bigger tummy than before, and finally it was undeniable - this was no longer a 'drank a lot of water' or 'big dinner' tummy, but long term weight gain.  Upon realizing this, it was obvious why.  I had spent many months sitting in my chair, not getting proper exercise.  I was still doing all my weight training but I wasn't doing any walking except to go to the grocery store.

I was also getting high late at night and snacking on all the things way too often.  The pandemic has led to me being frustrated and lonely, not able to do the things I am used to doing that bring me so much joy.  My DnD games were on hiatus, my travels for gaming conventions were all cancelled, board game nights not allowed, and even visiting The Flautist was off the table.  That left me feeling blue, and pot and snacks helped dull the pain and upset.

My response was quick.  I needed to get more active and stop piling junk into my body.  I added on 30 minutes of walking every day and cut out most of the late night snacking.  This was good in other ways too, because quite frankly I didn't need that food and the walks gave Wendy and I time together and improved my mental health on its own, entirely separate from body shape or size.

I am one of those lucky people whose hunger effectively regulates my weight.  If I just eat when I am hungry and eat healthy food my body maintains a weight I am happy about.  I don't have to starve myself to get to a good weight, I just have to stop messing with my appetite with drugs.

Over the past 2.5 months my weight has dropped back closer to where it was pre pandemic.  Before I began weightlifting I was at 175 pounds, and over the last five years I added on 30 pounds of muscle to sit at 205.  In March of this year I was up to around 215, and now I have dropped back down to 210.  This got me thinking a lot about how I think about my body and how society thinks about fat.

The most absurd thing is the way BMI scores me.  For most of my life I was extremely skinny and yet I scored right in the normal range for BMI.  The system takes your height into account, but it does it so badly that everyone who is tall is shifted heavily towards the overweight side of the spectrum.  Right now I am officially overweight by BMI, which is absurd.  I am a skinny guy with a bunch of extra muscle and five pounds of extra fat, there is no possible way I should be considered overweight.  This picture, for reference, is of an officially overweight person.

Yeah.  'Overweight'.  Now it is clear that BMI does not take into account muscle mass.  This makes it a stupid system, but the fact that it takes height into account so badly that tall people of totally normal build are considered overweight is pathetic.  We shouldn't be using this system for medical diagnosis, or anything else.  It is a classic case of measuring what we can easily measure and confusing that for measuring the right thing.

Figuring out a simple system to categorize people's weight isn't easy.  I don't have a replacement system to offer.  (Improving BMI to properly take height into account is easy, and the fact that we haven't done it is an embarassment.)  However, if a system is garbage we shouldn't stick with it just because we don't have an easy alternative.  Sometimes you just have to toss the system out when it is crap.

This did get me thinking about why I so quickly decided to change my lifestyle.  The main thing was I could see that snacking and sitting weren't good for me.  That is true regardless of my weight, and adding in extra walking and fixing my diet are good by all metrics.

However, I can't deny that part of the motivation was that I didn't like the way my tummy looked.  I was thinking to myself "Dammit I do 200 pushups, 56 deadlifts, and 56 rows a day.  Shouldn't I have a bloody six pack?"  I have never had a six pack, and at this point I am never going to.  My extra bit of belly still bothered me though, and it shouldn't.

That 10 exra pounds around my middle is not a health hazard.  Nobody needs a six pack, and in fact getting one is actually hazardous to the health of most people.  Our bodies are made to store some fat!  I looked fine.

But no matter that I have tons of muscle, no matter that I looked fine, my brain still insisted that I absolutely had to change things.  Vanity and desire for status clearly drove my behaviour no matter how much I could use health to justify it.

That is the way our society deals with fat in a nutshell.  We moralize over people's weight, and go on about health hazards, but most of that is just denying the truth that we want to be skinny for status, and we mock heavy people for that same lack of status.

It sucks.

No matter that I know all this, no matter that I don't want to villify fat, I still made a swift and binding decision to change things when I got some of my own.  

A health condition

A few days ago I was getting groceries and had a difficult interaction with a person in the lineup outside the store.  He was an older man who was wearing a mask in a half assed fashion with it loosely covering his mouth but slid down so it no longer covered his nose.  As we stood in line his mask slipped further and further down until it was sitting around his chin.

It is possible that he didn't notice, and this was entirely unconscious, but I am willing to bet a lot of money that the actual explanation isn't "whoops!" but rather "I don't give a shit about covid transmission and masks are annoying, so I will pretend this just happened and I didn't notice".

I politely said to him "Oh, in case you hadn't noticed, your mask appears to have slipped down."  In text that could appear innocuous, but obviously everyone is going to read that as "Put your damn mask on properly fool, I don't want to get covid from you."

He replied by saying that he didn't *have* to have a mask on, because he had a 'medical condition'.  He followed up by snarkily saying that he would put his mask on, just for me.

I found this infuriating.  I am not trying to enforce some sort of arbitrary dress code.  I don't give a shit about the rules!  I care about disease transmission.  This isn't about me trying to make sure everyone does as they are told, it is about me wanting to end this damnable pandemic.  It isn't about whether you *must* wear the mask, it is about doing so because it is your civic duty to protect other people even if you don't care about your own health at all.

I didn't yell all of that at him, much as I wanted to.  He put on his mask, and for the moment it covered all the breathing bits of him.  He got into the store and immediately took his mask off again once he was more than a few meters from me.

Does he actually have a medical condition that makes mask use unsafe for him?  Possible, but I doubt it.  He was wearing and using a mask, but used it only enough to create plausible deniability.  However, his actual medical status doesn't change my situation at all.  I am still pissed about all the people I see putting in the absolute bare minimum amount of effort required to get people off of their backs.  I am pissed about the woman in my building who held a mask five centimeters in front of her face while talking to the concierge in an attempt to pretend she was actually wearing it.  I am grumpy at all the people wandering about the mall with masks hanging half off of their faces, just having it on enough to not get yelled at.

I wish I knew what I should do about these things.  I am a big loud dude - if I get aggressive with people about this stuff, they are likely to do whatever I say.... for just long enough to get out of my presence.  Is it even worth trying to convince selfish jerks to do the right thing if they are only going to do it as long as my gaze is directly on them?

I don't know.  What I do know is watching people who chafe under the restrictions of the pandemic behave in ways that extend the pandemic makes my blood boil.

Love and Monsters

I just watched the Netflix adventure movie Love and Monsters.  It was great, in no small part because of the superb job done by the lead actor.  There are two things it did well though, and I wanted to comment on them because so few movies get them right.  The two things it did best were monsters... and love.

There will be a spoiler warning halfway through.

First, Monsters.  Love and Monsters is set in the near future in a world where monsters arose from a freak weapons accident and smashed human civilization.  Scattered remnants of humans live in hiding but monsters walk the world freely.  The reasoning given for the monsters was kind of silly from a scientific perspective, but I am totally willing to forgive that.  The important thing is that There Are Monsters, and I just ask that the movie tell me a story from that.

Mostly movies fail at this sort of thing.  They write themselves into corners and then get out with ridiculous Deus Ex Machina endings or insert senseless MacGuffins into the plot to cover for their shortcomings in writing and planning.  You have to strike the right middle ground where you continue to reveal things about the world you have created without making the things you have said previously seem silly.  Each new reveal in a science fiction story should follow from the previous one such that the viewer says "Oh, okay, I see how that would be.  Makes sense."  even if they wouldn't have *predicted* that reveal.

That is the key there.  You want to surprise people a bit, keep them guessing, but you want everything to fit together in the end in a logical manner.  After all the reveals are done, the characters need to have made reasonable choices given the world in which they live.  Love and Monsters does a great job of this.  Throughout the movie you learn more about the monsters and how the world works, and each time it all fits together with what you learned previously.  I couldn't have told you what the final act would look like, but it fits cleanly into the rest of the story so far.

I can accept all kinds of nutty stuff (space wizards with laser swords come to mind) as long as the rest of the story follows sensibly from there.

Now we get into spoilers as we talk about Love.

Twu Wuv appears way too much in movies.  I particularly object to it because of the built in assumptions of exclusivity and eternal duration, but also I think it doesn't well reflect how actual people work.  Relationships are messy, and that messiness does not have to detract from their beauty.

The hero of the story, Joel, is a guy with a crush.  Before the monsters he was dating Aimee and they were in love.  Then monsters came and they were separated by a huge tract of monster infested world.  Seven years pass, and Joel is still desperately in love with Aimee even though he has only spoken to her over a radio a couple of times since.  He has put her up on a pedestal so high that he has convinced himself that he can never be happy without her.

So he suits up and marches across more than one hundred kilometers of monster filled territory to find her.  Without a decent map, a compass, or any sense of how to survive.  This is idiotic, obviously, but it is exactly how lovesick, desperate people behave.  Grand romantic gesture!  Find my Twu Wuv or die in the attempt!

Naturally since Joel is the hero he makes it.  Many trials and much learning occur on the way, of course, because it is an adventure movie, but finally Joel arrives at Aimee's doorstep.

This is the point in a bad movie where they would kiss and reunite and Twu Wuv would make all the problems go away.

But not here!  Joel arrives and finds out that Aimee has moved on.  She still thinks of him fondly, you know, as that guy who she dated in high school who was a real sweetie.  But this whole "I would walk 500 miles" schtick is WAY too much for her.  She has her own life now, and while she is duly impressed by his feat, that isn't changing her mind.

Love and Monsters doesn't try to paint one of them as bad and wrong.  They realize the mixup, both feel kinda bad about the whole thing, and try to muddle along.  I love the idea that love doesn't have to 'work out' or be about betrayal and villainy.  It can just be a thing that is there, and we can empathize with the struggles of the heroes without a canned, predictable conclusion.

More adventure happens, and finally Joel goes back home.  His choice to risk his life mattered, both for his own group and Aimee's.  He learned things and got better, and more importantly he learned to value the things he already had like friendship, instead of pinning his hopes on Twu Wuv with someone he barely even knew.

Maybe someday those two do end up in a relationship.  The ending doesn't prevent that, it just has them in different places, on different courses.  It leaves them like real people, in a spot where even if you love someone or lust after someone you don't have to choose between Twu Wuv or Only Friends or Bitter Enemies.  You can have a thing where there is some love, and fondness, and maybe some lust, and who knows where you end up over the years.

This has immense appeal to me.

Relationships are complicated, and they can be good and fulfilling even if they look nothing like a fairy tale.  I enjoy when movies acknowledge that, and give us some stories that reflect the complexity of real life.

Joel is a character I can believe.  Aimee is a great complement to him, especially because she isn't some damsel in distress that he 'wins' - she is doing her own thing, has her own agenda, and gets her moments of bravery and heroism too.

I want more science fiction like this, where a logically coherent world evolves out of a simple twist.  I want more love stories like this, where people struggle with love in a complicated situation and find paths to happiness that aren't Twu Wuv.  

This was a great movie, and you should watch it.

On my way to hell

Random guy on the street, wearing a speaker:  Fornication!  Adultery!  Prostitution!

Me:  Fornication?  Sounds great, I am in.  (Making finger guns at the guy, and winking while sashaying slowly towards him.)

Guy:  No!  Fornication is bad.

Me:  But it is so fun.

Guy:  But it is bad.

Me:  But why is it so fun then?

Guy:  You will die someday.

Me:  Yes, definitely.

Guy:  And God will judge you!

Me:  Dude, God is a myth.

Guy:  You will go to hell!

Me:  Hell is where all the fornicators go, right?  I would rather go there, thanks.

Guy:  .......

I think these people who yell religious nonsense on the street really get used to being ignored, and they just don't know how to handle someone who plays back at them.  Next time I will hang around awhile and engage them in religious debate.  Perhaps I can get them to give up and take up a life of godless hedonism. You know, join Team Good.

Throwing stuff away

There is a voice in my head that is desperately worried about wasting stuff.  It is the thing that causes me to always eat whatever food in the fridge is the oldest because I cannot stand the idea of tossing food out.  It is that same voice that gets me to use shoes until they have multiple huge holes in them and my feet start sliding out.  It also triggers when I see other people doing things that waste resources, even if the things they are doing are otherwise pretty neat.

For example, I recently have been watching some youtube videos about people making wacky inventions with their own equipment.  They use 3D printers, plasma cutters, and all kinds of high end tools to produce things like bullet powered baseball bats, automatic pool cues, and supersonic pitching machines.

It is neat to see a slow motion shot of a baseball moving at Mach 1.35 ripping through nine baseball gloves while hardly slowing down.

It bothers me to see all those gloves thrown out though.

It isn't a matter of cost at all.  I know the people making supersonic baseball cannons aren't worried about the couple hundred dollars they spent on baseball gloves.  It isn't much money in their budget, and it isn't my money, but I still *hate* watching all that perfectly good material be tossed away.  Bits of plastic, hunks of metal, and all the other detritus of construction pile up when these videos are made and it all just gets sent to a landfill.

These creators are doing neat things, entertaining people, and even educating them to some extent.  That part is all good.  No matter how much I recognize that though, I can't quite ignore the cost of what they are doing.

Making youtube videos about home construction projects is a miniscule part of the waste our society creates though.  It is just that it is easy to see the waste there when it is captured on a video.

By far worse than these creative types are extremely rich people.  If you have a big house, you are creating a lot of waste.  If you have five big houses, you are creating dramatically more waste, and doing so for far less return.  Four of those houses are sitting empty, and all the energy you use to maintain them and all the materials used to create them are wasted.  When I hear about rich people working in one city and then flying home to another far away place constantly it makes me frustrated and bitter.  Not at the money, because it isn't my money, but just at the ridiculous use of resources.

This sort of feeling is why when my vaccuum broke and I could no longer repair it myself I hunted down someone who fixes up old vaccuums and gave my vaccuum to him.  I did not do this for the money, certainly, since no money changed hands, but simply because I wanted the parts of my vaccuum to be used for something if possible.  Some of it is going to be junk, but I can't avoid that, so I tried to make sure as much of it as possible got used.

I wear shirts until they are big holes in them.  I don't do this because I am cheap, but rather because I cannot stomach creating more pointless waste when I have no need to do so.  The shirt still works, so I shall not toss it.  I don't mind spending money.  I do hate wasting resources.

When a cost is something that is solely borne by me, that makes decisions easy.  If the only cost of a thing is money, then I can make a simple decision of whether or not to acquire that thing.  The hard part is that the resources to create things are shared across all people, and the cost of throwing them away is much more difficult to calculate.

Hail to the King

I watched Aquaman recently and it got me riled up about the way we tell superhero stories.  The thing that gets to me in so many of these stories is the constant reliance on royal entitlement as a moral imperative.  We are asked to believe that the most important thing in the world is people of high birth being in command.  Aquaman ends up being the king of Atlantis.  He isn't the king because he knows what he is doing - he only visited the place for an hour before being declared king.  He knows absolutely nothing about the job, and will certainly be an incompetent ruler.

Aquaman gets to rule because of being born entitled.  Nothing more.

I would prefer a world where rulership by birthright isn't a feature, but I can totally deal with stories that include such structures.  The thing that gets me isn't the existence of dynastic rule, but rather that it is framed as a good thing.  We are asked to believe that all is right in the world so long as the people who had powerful parents get to exercise absolute power over others.  

What I want, in short, is that when someone born to power ends up in charge the movie doesn't try to tell me that it is right and necessary that they do so.

This, I think, is part of why I liked Black Panther so much less than most people.  I am glad that superhero movies got a little bit more diverse in terms of race.  What I can't stand is the pitch that Wakanda is a enlightened society, one which has evolved far beyond the rest of the world, and yet they have a herediary monarchy with a 'battle to the death' element tacked on as their system of government.

In Aquaman at the end we watch the main villain be carted away to a cell.  He is spared because he is royal, someone important.  The tens of thousands of deaths that just happened a moment ago are an afterthought - those people were just peasants, after all.  The important thing is that the rightful king is on the throne, and that all the royal people are alive and well.  Death and suffering among the commoners is just a thing that happens.

It all wouldn't matter much if it was just a movie.  Movies ask me to believe in all kinds of idiocy all the time, that isn't new.  It isn't just a movie though.  Our society is currently a battleground of ideas, and one of those ideas is the idea that rich and powerful people ought to be able to guarantee their children a place in the halls of power.

There are times when this becomes a real problem, like in the case of Justin Trudeau or George W Bush, neither of whom would have been anyone of note if they hadn't been born into powerful families.  It isn't limited to just those most visible cases though.  I have often heard people talk about how taxes ought to be low so that people can give huge amounts of money to their children.  They often pitch it as a moral good to be able to give their kids a hand up, while I see it is the opposite.

Helping kids by teaching them, by supporting them emotionally, by loaning them a vehicle for a move or a place to stay when life gets them down, these are things that we should absolutely give our children.  Millions of dollars?  Hell no.  It is bad enough that people can accumulate enormous wealth themselves, much less pass it down the line.

Political battles between left and right are often about rich vs. poor, dynastic wealth vs. redistribution, iron fisted rule vs. egalitarianism.  This is a real fight we are having right now, and it bothers me to see movies so clearly pitch the idea that the only people who matter are the rich and powerful.

I am okay with movies about the monarchs and gods.  I just don't want the movie to tell me that their position is *right* and *deserved* and that it is my job to die to maintain the status quo.

Boooooring

Yesterday we held Back to the Lounge, my annual university gamer reunion.  Sadly it was virtual instead of in person, but it was still good to get to see some people I hadn't seen in awhile and take some sweet, sweet dollars from others due to their incompetence at barbu.

It sure made me feel boring though.

When someone says "So, what's new?" I used to be able to talk about things I was doing, or at least something in the news I found interesting.  Now I have nothing.

There are two reasons for this - first, everyone is boring now because nobody goes anywhere, meets anyone, or does anything.  If you aren't boring now, odds are good you are a jackass who is taking big risks for no reason.

The second reason is my hiatus from social media.  In the fall I ditched my facebook feed and I don't look at it anymore.  That has been good in a way, because a lot of that feed was full of stress inducing outrage that was useless to me.  It was largely stuff I couldn't do anything about, and focusing and worrying about things you can't change is not useful.  However, I also don't have much to say about anything.  If people want to talk about the impact on world trade of a boat getting stuck in the Suez Canal, I don't have anything to contribute.  I didn't know that was happening until days after.

Having been away from social media for many months now I think that leaving it behind was a good decision.  It isn't without cost, because there were definitely things worth reading on there.  Some of those worthwhile things were just amusing, and some were informative and useful.  An awful lot were just time wasting nonsense though, and in sum I think being away from it is a positive change.

However, I am not sure that combining this with a pandemic is a good idea.  It has left me feeling isolated.  I am not sure that solving feelings of isolation by binging on Facebook is actually a good plan, but definitely my timing could have been better.  

I can't be sure what the optimal, rational course is.  It will be many months yet before we are all vaccinated and life can truly go back to normal.  Until then my ability to generate interesting ideas and stories will be limited.  I can fill the gap with stuff from the news or social media in order to have things to say, but I don't know how much value saying those things has.  Humans use small talk as a crucial part of social interaction, so being stuck for things to say isn't great.  Should I see "Did you see the latest outrageous or unlikely thing on the internet?" as a important piece of having relationships with people, or just a pointless waste of time, filling the air?

Viscerally I don't have the urge to go back on Facebook.  No matter how much I poke at it from various angles, I simply don't have the emotional drive to get back on that wagon.  Even if it does leave me boring as anything, I think my course is charted, and I just have to wait until we finally get covid-19 on the ropes to become a person with interesting things to say again.

The ethics of killing things with your bare hands

Spring is here in Toronto.  I can go outside in a tshirt and bare feet, the days are getting longer, and it is time to clean all the pigeon poop off of my balcony.  Naturally this brings us to deep philosophical questions.

While we were discussing the pigeon problem I suggested that I could solve it by grabbing a pigeon, killing it with my bare hands, and putting it on a spike as a warning to the others.  This wouldn't work with wild birds of course, but city pigeons give no fucks about people and I am sure I could get close enough to grab one.

Wendy asked if I would actually be willing to kill a pigeon with my bare hands.

This is easy.  Sure I would!

Presuming I was already okay with killing a pigeon to keep them off my balcony, that is.  To me this is the real question - I don't see anything different ethically between wringing a pigeon's neck and killing it some other way like poison / traps / shooting.  If anything I think killing it up close and personal is ethically preferable because you aren't fooling yourself about what you are doing.  It is easy to imagine that you aren't violently ending a life when you kill something from a distance, but when you actually get blood on your hands you have to come to terms with what you are doing.

If I am going to kill something I would prefer to face that head on, when possible.  Do, or do not, but I am not interested in do while pretending to do not.

Most people agree that it is okay to kill animals for convenience.  We just draw the line of how *much* convenience has to be involved differently from one another.  Some would kill animals for any reason at all, while others would go to great lengths to avoid it.  Still, we all have homes that animals used to live in, and they sure don't anymore.  We consume goods that are trucked around the world, and those trucks and factories and roads kill endless critters of all types.

No matter the outcome of my musing though, I am unlikely to actually go out and murder any pigeons.  The poop isn't actually that hard to get rid of, and eventually they will find somewhere else to go, or some falcons will move in nearby and eat them all.

Now falcons, they don't fool themselves or anyone else when it comes to murder.  They kill stuff with their faces, and they apologize to nobody for it.  Gotta give them credit for that.

The Prime Directive

Star Trek's Prime Directive is a law that forces the Federation to not interfere in societies that are starting up and have not achieved some specific level of technology yet.  I have a similar sort of thing with Pinkie Pie where I won't directly interfere with her friendships and social groups.  I want to give her general advice and then let her figure stuff out on her own.

This came up recently when she was involved in a Minecraft group.  There are tons of Minecraft servers out there, and they seem to come paired with voice chat groups where people chat constantly while playing the game.  Minecraft seems like a fine thing for Pinkie Pie to be doing as entertainment as it involves a lot of creativity and thinking, but sometimes the social scene is not ideal.

Pinkie Pie was in voice chat and I was near her doing some chores, overhearing only her side of the conversation.  Initially it was innocuous, but she began to get more and more upset and agitated, eventually starting to plead for the people in her chat to stop fighting.  She began to have an extreme emotional reaction, crying over and over that they were upsetting her, that they needed to stop, begging them to cease their fighting.

Listening to her be so upset that she was wailing and grovelling in an attempt to get other people to stop their conflict was so upsetting for me. 

My emotions were swirling and I struggled to stay out of the mess.  I wanted to just grab the mic away from her and yell at them to shut the hell up, and I wanted to yell at her to leave the damn server if it is making her so upset.

You don't have to put up with friends screaming at each other all day.  You can move on!  MOVE ON!

I didn't yell at anybody, but I knew this had to stop.  Even if she could cope with it, I can't, and for her sake I hope she never feels like this is the sort of 'friendship' she needs to accept.

I totally understand why this is a struggle for her.  She is making friends online, and when you find people you like it is tough to just drop them when the situation turns toxic.  This is a good lesson though - begging people to stop being awful to each other isn't productive.  If that is the environment, you need to find the people you like, tell them you would like to continue playing with them but this environment has got to go, and then leave without a backward glance.  There are places in the world that aren't full of this sort of aggravation and you need to find them.

Thankfully Pinkie Pie eventually figured it out on her own, as I had hoped.  She told her friends on the server she was leaving, and they left together to find someplace else to play.  They ditched the people they hated, and while the new place has its own struggles, they have never resulted in the mess I saw in the first one.

I suppose I should be glad that my technique (assuming you think 'do nothing' is a technique) worked.  She moved on, and she learned.

But DAMN sitting there listening to my kid beg for other people to stop hurting her was hard to do without leaping in to stop it.  Having your emotions be so easily wound up by someone else's issues is the cost of being a parent, I guess.

A joyful end

I finished watching The Good Place this week.  (Substantial spoilers ahead, though I don't think it will ruin the show for you at all.)  The show is a bizarre hybrid of silly jokes and philosophical musing, a mishmash of pop culture riffs and deep examination of the meaning of life.

I love that combination.

I cried most of the way through the final episode.  It wasn't because the end of the show was sad, as it was most certainly a happy ending.  The characters completed their bizarre journeys across the boundaries of life and afterlife and concluded their adventures through The Good Place, The Bad Place, and The Medium Place.  The story ended, the plot resolved, and they went on to find their eventual end.  Wendy asked me what it was about the episode that made me weep throughout and after some consideration I have a couple of answers.

First off I love the idea of a properly finished story.  A character ending their arc and being done, finished, complete, has a huge emotional power over me.  I can be happy with a 'happily ever after' sort of ending, but if you really want to yank on my heartstrings you need to finish the character completely.

The characters in the show absolutely got their proper end.  Their adventures stopped, and they had the time needed to rest, grow, improve, and become their best selves.  Then, when they had done all the things, become beautiful butterflies, they ended.

Ended.  Not dead, not 'no more to say', actually ended.

I love that so much.  Something about an actual end, a proper one, one that comes when the character is truly ready for it, has immense power.

This leads into my second point, which is that I am so interested in how relationships end.  I love the idea of people accepting their partners for who they are, and not clinging on to a relationship that is no longer truly serving them, or being true to who they are.  I love watching people who love one another but who are capable of accepting that their partner may need to leave, and that this is the best thing.  Often a partner leaving is portrayed as a thing you must fight, or hate, but The Good Place absolutely took a stand that I love:  Sometimes someone leaving is simply the best thing that can happen.  That doesn't mean the relationship isn't important, that you now hate each other, or that the relationship failed.  It simply means it needs to be over.

You can love someone deeply and watch them leave you without anger or bitterness.  Set them free, and let them fly, and wish them only the best.  When we talk about children people mostly get this, and I wish we all saw our relationship partners the same way.

This is all most potent because of choice.  The characters *chose* their fate.  This wasn't the universe sweeping in and killing them randomly - they decided to be done.  I don't know why exactly, but watching someone come to that place of contentment, of satisfaction, of completeness, and looking into the void without fear or worry... so powerful.

Something about having done enough, having learned enough, *being* enough, that you can comfortably say that you need no more hits me square in the feelings.  I have often said that mortality is defined not by the fear of death, but the experience of fear, doubt, and worry.  Seeing people who have gotten beyond that, who no longer face those demons, because they have done all they need to do; it gets me.

I love that The Good Place managed to tackle the philosophical trolley problem with a trolley that runs over screaming people, covering the person riding the trolley in blood, with a cackling eternal being taking notes the entire time.  I love that it never stopped having Tahani drop names, or Jason be a doofus.  But while having all this silly humour they also taught us things and told a wonderful story.

You should watch The Good Place.  Whether you are there for the silly fun or the deep stuff, it delivers.