Crooked

In August 2023 something new happened to my brain.  I felt it clearly, and described it as 'A key turning in a lock, and a door opening'.  I felt a clear image of a door slowly rumbling open, looking like a tomb door in an Indiana Jones movie.  I could feel the dust shaking down, and just barely begin to see through the crack... and what I saw behind the door was pretty gay.  Not gay as a perjorative, but gay as in 'Damn, men are *cute* now!'

I have always been straight.  I tried a few experiments with men over the years, admittedly fairly modest experiments, and the result was simply 'meh'.  It wasn't objectionable, it just didn't have the magic.  I have liked the idea of being bisexual / pansexual / queer for a long time, but my instinctive reactions just didn't do the thing.  I figured that is just how I am, the way I got built.  You can be as comfortable with skydiving as you want, but if you feel bored when you jump, find a new hobby.

Over August and September I consciously felt my brain rewriting itself, smashing old pathways down and opening up new ones.  Every week I felt more comfort with attractions to men, more desire to try that out, and identified more with queer men in media.

I haven't even acted on this yet in any physical way, and yet I am organizing queer musical nights, watching Elton John biopics, and then deciding I *have* to get myself some of those clothes.

I have also felt my emotions changing.  For many months now I have been more overtly emotional, more easily brought to tears from shows or speeches, and regularly overwhelmed just by thinking about things in my life that used to be no big deal.  It isn't that I am unhappy, far from it, just that the highs are higher and the lows are lower.  I suppose that might not be linked to the sudden change in orientation, but the timing certainly looks suspicious.

What I haven't done is stopped being interested in women.  I haven't suddenly gone full gay, I just flipped over the menu and saw some great new stuff on the back I never knew about before.

The thing I really want to know is why this happened now.  I have been thinking hard about the various things that happened to me over the past year, and there are a few candidates for causes, but the evidence is circumstantial at best.  I got a rainbow tattoo, at the time as a show of solidarity to the queer people in my life.  I painted the fence of my house rainbow for the same reasons.

That painting job was neat in that the children seeing it loved it, and most of the adults thought it was cute... but a couple adults saw the rainbow and absolutely lit up with joy.  You sure could tell the adults who were queer and got hit right in the feelings.

But none of that is a cause for a brain rewrite.  I just don't know why this happened, and I don't know why it happened now.  I was raised in a homophobic era, with the AIDS epidemic combining with regular old bigotry to make 'that's gay' the standard default insult.  My family was comfortable with touch and accepting of differences, but the kids at school and media at large told me the rule is:  You don't touch another man except with a closed fist, you don't talk about feelings, and you don't ever admit you might be attracted to a man.  Even if you get good messaging at home, that sort of thing leaves marks, and maybe it just took me 30 years to tear those walls down.

Again though, that is an explanation, but there is no proof.

One thing I think about is how my story feels different than most I have heard.  Mostly the story I have heard is 'I knew I liked women, but I couldn't really admit it to myself, and definitely couldn't admit it to others'.  My story doesn't sound like that.  I was straight until I wasn't.  That doesn't make it wrong or anything, just different.

I also didn't hesitate to write a coming out post, even though I haven't actually done anything measureable yet.  Several people who are close to me couldn't quite puzzle through why I would do this.  They don't think I should lie or anything, they just didn't understand why it was anyone else's business.  Nobody should care, and I don't owe the public anything, basically.

I have two reasons for writing this.  The first is my desire to set an example.  Every person who comes out makes it incrementally easier for the next people to do so.  Every example of living loud and proud removes a small burden from those who wish to follow that path.  I don't claim that everyone is obligated to be out - it is a personal choice for each of us.  I, however, have partners who love me, family and friends who accept me either way, and security from the rest of the world.  If anyone should be out, I should be first in line.

The second is that I only want people in my life who know me.  I want to spend my time with those who know all of me and love what they see.  If someone doesn't want to be with a queer man, then I absolutely want them to go away.  I think many people are afraid that is they come out, their friends will go away.  I, on the other hand, am afraid that if I don't come out I will spend time around people who don't like the person I am.  I want to live openly and truthfully, and I know there are people that will want to be with me as I am.

Words can be tricky.  Bisexual is the most accurate, clear term.  Pansexual is pretty similar, but less well known.  Queer has a lot of aesthetic appeal, but lacks precision.  I figure I will use them all depending on the circumstance.

I intend to write more posts about this.  There have been some powerful emotional moments over the past few months and I want to talk about them.  Also this transition has given me new insight that I want to share.  I do hope that the renovations in my brain slow down a bit though - it has been a lot these last couple months.

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.

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.

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.

Covid and privilege

One thing that the covid crisis has shone a light on is privilege of many sorts.  The death toll goes across all demographics, but the trend is clear - those with less privilege are dying far more often.  Poor people, people of colour, homeless people, these are the ones dying far more often than white rich folks.  As I understand it this is one of the few situations where men don't have extra benefits - they are dying more of covid than women are.

When we talk about the crisis we should think carefully about what privilege we have that impacts it.  I see many people talking about how others ought to behave, and those statements are usually coloured by the speaker's position in life.  Those living with partners strongly object to people seeing anybody outside their home and can't imagine why anyone would.  Certainly there are risks to doing so, but if you are partnered and have somebody around to meet your needs for sex, cuddling, hugging, and whatever else you should be cautious to judge those who don't.

It is easy to talk about never leaving your house when you have somebody at home with you, but telling someone that they should simply never have human contact for months or even a year is a harsh thing when they live alone.  We know that telling teenagers that abstinence is the only way is a failure of strategy, and the same applies here.

That doesn't mean we should all be going to orgies, obviously.  It does mean that we have to accept that human contact is necessary for manypeople, and if you find that easy to get, you should hesitate to judge those who don't.

The same sort of thing applies with wealth.  If you have children and you live in a house with a yard this pandemic is drastically easier than if you are trying to cope with them in a 2 bedroom apartment.  Telling someone that they have to sit in the same physical space as their kids for months or a year is a completely different thing when you can retreat to a study, send them to the yard, or go exercise in the garage.  When you literally can't get more than 4 meters from them, the situation is not the same.

We don't tax people by charging everybody 20k in taxes and just accepting that this crushes the poor and barely tickles the rich.  We charge a percentage, asking those who have more to contribute more.  Something of the same philosophy needs to be considered with the crisis.  Nobody has a pass to going to parties with random people, but people in challenging circumstances should have more flexibility in how they cope than those who have it easier.

There are all kinds of ways we should apply this.  If you are a knowledge worker with highly desirable skills, you need to accept that someone with precarious employment is going to need to return to work sooner.  Surely there are many other kinds of examples, but the general key is to keep in mind that people's circumstances can be wildly different from your own, and that just because you don't find a rule a problem doesn't mean that it is workable for everyone.

I support strong precautions against covid, and I think we should definitely deal with it by implementing universal basic income.  I don't think we should reopen the economy quickly.  I do think though that we should all be careful how we judge others behaviour when they clearly have far less privilege than we do.  Nobody needs parties or conventions, but we do need security and contact, for starters, and we all should put a lot of effort into removing risk, while accepting that someone else may not have the resources to give as much as we do.

Poly in the woods

This past weekend I went to Polywood with Wendy and The Flautist.  Polywood is an event whose name is appropriate and evocative - it is a bunch of polyamorous people getting together camping in the woods.  It has been going for three years though this is the first time I have gone.

The event takes place at Raven's Knoll, a small private camping ground in Ontario.  The grounds themselves were kind of new to me as I am used to provincial parks and backcountry camping but this park was something quite different.  Instead of campsites being really separate and carefully marked it was just a mixture of open grassy areas and woods.  We could set up anyplace we wanted, and that was new to us.  While it was a strange setup, I liked it.  We didn't pick the best spot for our site, but now that we know the location we will do better next year.  Raven's Knoll has a great river for swimming, slow moving and warm, and the weather was absolutely ideal.  Unfortunately the river had a bible camp just upstream so skinny dipping was out of the question.

But all that sort of stuff is background, really.  The interesting bit is what exactly did all those poly people get up to in the wilderness?  From the writeup I wasn't quite sure what to expect.  It was clearly pitched as a family friendly event with lots of talks and socializing, but I have met a lot of poly people and I am definitely not the only one who thought 'orgy in the woods!' when I read about Polywood.

Some degree of hooking up with people happened, I am sure, but the event was really about learning and community, and not about the orgies.

That whole learning and community thing went really, really well.  The best talk I went to was one about Relationship Anarchy, where I learned that RA is pretty much exactly the things I believe.  I suspect I am not a normal looking RA type - being a straight cis man married to a woman who I have a child with isn't really the standard there.  RA is about setting aside the relationship escalator and pushing back on all sorts of relationship norms and rules that society sticks us with.

There is nothing wrong with being married, or being straight, or having kids, or any of that.  The problem (as far as RA is concerned) is the assumption that you should do these things, or that those things are any better than the alternatives.  RA insists that we should refuse to place romantic or sexual relationships first by default, and that we should find our own ways express our feelings rather than simply doing the thing we see in romantic comedies and in greeting card shops.

I love all of that.  Everything in the RA talk seemed obvious, correct, and helpful.  Over and over it said "Figure out what things you want and do those.  Refuse to let societies norms push your relationships into boxes that don't work for you.  By the way, here are a bunch of ways that it tries to do that.  Think about them."  Here is the RA manifesto, if you want a far more complete version of what it is about.

All this made me think that maybe I should relabel myself.  Polyamory does describe me in the sense that I maintain and an open to multiple loving, romantic, sexual relationships at once.  It is accurate.  However, RA is more specific and honestly more precise.  I think my life looks a lot like what people imagine when they think of polyamory, but the philosophy of RA appeals to me more, especially when I consider all the poly styles that I find troublesome.  It is tricky sometimes to figure out what to do in this situation, because polyamory is more useful as a shortcut when discussing with random people (as RA is a more niche term) but among people who really understand both I would rather be known as a RA practitioner.  I intend to think and write a lot more about this in future.

The pushback against assumptions was baked into Polywood in a big way.  When people introduced themselves at talks we all stated our pronouns.  The people running the event stated up front that all gender expressions and identities, all sexualities, and all relationship styles were welcome and accepted.  Consent was talked about often and explicitly.  All of this was superb, and it made the space feel like a spot where people could relax and be themselves.  The pressure to conform, and the pressure of worrying that people were leading with assumptions faded.  It will never be gone entirely, of course, but Polywood was really successful at beating those assumptions back.

It wasn't perfect.  One woman lead off her introduction with an obvious unicorn hunting scenario, and that is all kinds of icky.  There were other views there I wasn't happy about.

But. 

The levels of unhappy I harbored were tiny compared to the rest of society.  It wasn't just a pile of people with identical ideas to my own, and so surely some of those other people disagreed with my ideas just as I disagreed with theirs.  But all of the ideas were close enough to my own to make the space in general feel welcoming and happy.  I learned a lot, met some fantastic people, and I want to go again.

And maybe next year I will see about arranging to combine learning and community building with an orgy in the woods too.  Because I am greedy like that.

Dream chasers

I have watched a couple documentaries this past week about MMA fighters and bodybuilders.  It is always interesting to me to examine the extremes that particular cultures will go to when you examine the most ardent members of those cultures and these did not disappoint.  The shows were full of examples of champions bragging about their victories, desperate to convince the world of their superiority, and down on their luck people struggling to stay in the game despite losses, injury, and despair.

It makes me think that chasing your dreams is a terrible way to live.

Probably more accurately, chasing the wrong dreams is a terrible way to live.  Looking at this reminds me of the Stoic philosophies I read about a lot years ago.  One of their core ideas was that you should strive to compete against yourself, not against other people.  There is no happiness that comes from measuring your self worth by how many people you defeat - there will always be people that beat you, no matter what you do, and then you are betting your happiness on random chance.  You might lose via your opponents cheating, you may lose by genetic lottery, or you might lose by any number of other instances of pure back luck.  Why stake everything on luck when you don't have to?  Measure yourself against yourself, and no one else.

All the people in these documentaries who were struggling to defeat others in competition got their quick highs of victory, but then they had to deal with crushing defeat.  They also inevitably end up broken, damaged, and out of the game.  The ones who actually seemed happy were always those on the fringes of competition, just doing a job.  The people that found joy in these communities seemed to be the trainers, judges, referees, and other behind the scenes types.

The trainers didn't end up getting an injury and then spend years desperately trying to get back into fighting shape, suffering constant sadness and frustration, to inevitably fail anyway.  They just did their job as well as possible and lived their lives.

I have made this choice in my life.  I could have chased Magic, poker, or professional game design, trying to make it in a field full of desperate people.  I don't think that is the way to be happy though. 

There are times when the shining lights and glitter of stardom pulls at me.  I absolutely get the appeal of being one of the names that everybody knows.  But the world isn't fair.  Even if I was excellent in terms of skill and work, even if I gave it my all, plenty of other people are too.  There would be any number of reasons why I could and would lose even if I do everything right.

I am not special.  I have talent, sure, but there is nothing in the world guaranteeing my victory.  The fact that I am the star of my own story means jack shit to the universe at large.

When I look at people like those MMA fighters and bodybuilders I see desperation and misery.  They struggle so hard to fill a hole in themselves and they refuse to see that no matter how many wins they rack up that emptiness will never be gone.

Pick something you love.  Do it a lot until you are great at it.  Become the best at it that you can be.  Forget about how good other people are at it, because that doesn't matter.  Stake your happiness on the striving, not on the victory, because striving is something you can succeed at forever.  Beating your opponents is not.

Put the shotgun away

When I think about Pinkie Pie eventually dating people my mind is filled with images from movies and shows where a teenage girl's father brandishes weapons and menacingly threatens the boys she is going on dates with.  Of course Pinkie Pie may not be dating boys, or at all, but this is what springs to mind when I think about it.

It is horrible, really.

I read a great article about this and it agreed with my views on the subject completely.  The idea that I must threaten people she cares about and chooses to associate with is insane.  Just as absurd is the idea that I should explode with rage should her heart get broken.  While I would spring into action to defend Pinkie Pie from some kind of physical assault I find the idea that I must get revenge on anyone who causes her heartache completely absurd.

Love hurts.  Sometimes it hurts just being there, and it usually hurts when it ends.  That is just a part of the price of being vulnerable and seeking big wonderful feelings.  Figuring out how to navigate that is a part of growing up, and there is no room in that education for angry fathers bent on revenge.

It is practically inevitable that she will feel hurt, cause pain to others, and have relationships that are messy and messed up.  Welcome to humanity.  While I do not wish her to be abused, I know that meddling directly in these sorts of things isn't going to help, and if anything it will hinder her growth.

I know plenty of adults who haven't learned how to navigate protecting themselves while opening up to other people, and I have a distinctly non scientific sense that parents inserting themselves into people's relationships helps create these problems.  You gotta suck, fail, and suffer to figure that shit out, is my experience, and you learn best when you make the decisions yourself and cope with the fallout.

So I won't be caressing a shotgun or sharpening an axe when Pinkie Pie's first romantic partners meet me.  I won't make veiled threats or overreact when they do something stupid and hurt her feelings.  All you can do, if you want to help your kids, is love them and pick them back up when they fall.  Even if blustering threats worked to prevent pain, which it doesn't, it is a shitty thing to do.

An important thing that doesn't exist

Wendy and I were talking about soulmates the other day.  Not as in some mystical nonsense, but rather as a way of talking about someone who is so much the same as you they see all the same things.  A soulmate is someone who understands you instinctively, wants the same things you want, loves the things you love, and who you see yourself reflected within.

That is our definition, at any rate.

We concluded that we aren't each other's soulmate.

That sounds kind of strange to say.  We are good partners and compliment each other well, but that is a different thing than being soulmates.  Wendy finds my relentless hedonistic desires puzzling.  I don't understand why she values a PhD.  Wendy wants to build models of the real world to better understand it; I want to build models of imaginary worlds to better understand them.

A soulmate can be a good partner, but the two aren't the same thing.  I could be a good partner to my soulmate, though our lives would look quite different than the one I lead now.  There would be a lot more gaming conventions and orgies and a lot less children, for example.

On the other hand I don't think Wendy would be happy being partnered to her soulmate.  The things she wants in a partner are different than the things she offers.

I wonder how many relationships struggle along because people decided they had to be partners with their soulmates instead of seeking someone more suited as a partner.  You want to have things in common, of course, and to understand one another, but you don't need that reflection of yourself to be perfect, just good enough.

This discussion was really interesting in my head.  There was a juxtaposition of opinions like "Well, obviously you aren't soulmates, duh, what a silly concept.  Who needs it?" and "But wait, isn't that the thing you thought you had?  Shouldn't you be sad about it not existing?"

It is easy for me to not be sad about a thing and yet consider that perhaps it would be logical for me to be sad about that thing.

In the end I concluded that the term soulmate is arbitrary and not useful to me in this context.  I already knew that Wendy and I are a good team and happy together but that we want different things - why should a label have any relevance?  Thinking about this did make me curious though about other people I know, and whether or not they would use the term soulmate for their partners.  I honestly don't know what way to bet on that one.

One more reason to be 'rude'

A couple weeks ago I talked about the justifications for being confrontational when discussing racism, sexism, and other bigotry.  Most of that discussion (including a bunch in the comments) was surrounding the efficacy of calling people racist instead of simply having polite conversation where you describe the issues with people's actions without actually calling them out explicitly.

It remains unclear to me how well explicit call outs of bigotry work in terms of changing minds.  It gets people's attention for sure, and sometimes that has value.  On the other hand it makes people angry and defensive and that often leaves them completely unwilling to listen.  On the other other hand though, it means that people who see bigoted behaviour and the backlash against it may change their behaviour even if they don't change their minds, and that is a victory, albeit an incomplete one.

But the thing I most missed was the effect conversations have on the people being discriminated against.  If you are a trans person, for example, and you see an online conversation about bathroom bills that try to force trans people to use the bathroom associated with their assigned gender at birth, it is going to be a shitty experience.  There are two ways that conversation can go though, and one is better for them than the other.

One way is that their 'allies' talk nicely to the bigots and don't use confrontational language and pretend like bathroom bills are a thing we can have a pleasant debate about.  This is going to be a miserable experience for the trans reader, as that conversation will make it clear that those 'allies' are people who will happily pretend in public that bathroom bills are morally neutral, just a thing to discuss.

The other way is the allies can tell the bigots that they are bigots, that bathroom bills are oppressive bullshit, and that they can take their evil and shove it up their asses. 

The second way is the best way.  Neither way is likely to convince the bigot to change, but one accurately portrays the evil as evil, and shows support for those who are actually being affected by this.  It allows the trans person in the example to see that there are people who are on their side, people who are willing to go to bat for them, people who are willing to call the bigotry what it is and not hide behind polite talk.

Calling a bigot a bigot may not work well in convincing them, but honestly very little will.  Usually it takes the experience of someone close to them being in the affected group, or simply waiting for them to die.

The best and biggest reason to call this stuff out is to send a message.  That message will be heard by oppressors and oppressed alike, and it matters.

Keeping my eye on the prize

My post about answering a question from Pinkie Pie "Daddy, why do we clean up so much for guests?" got an interesting response on Facebook.  Someone I don't know waded in and opined that mine was an example of the disaster that is permissive parenting.  His basis thesis was that children raised in permissive households do terribly in school, both having emotional problems and testing poorly.  I want to break this down into parts to address each of them separately because I think that will be most revealing.

The assumption is that permissive parenting creates huge problems in school, and the conclusion is that children should be raised to be obedient in a more authoritarian style in order to avoid this.

I don't actually buy the assumption but the person writing it claims many years of experience teaching children, so I would be pitting my opinion against the opinion of a presumably better informed person.  I would greatly appreciate it if any of my teacher friends or family members could shed light on this issue from a more informed or even scientific standpoint.  Does permissive parenting truly make school much more difficult for children?

Let us allow the assumption to hold for a moment.  Assume that children raised in permissive households where they are allowed to ask questions and their opinions are given substantial weight have a difficult time in school and make it hard on themselves and their teachers.  Does it then follow that I should raise my child in a more authoritarian fashion?

It does not.

The problem is that the conclusion rests on an unstated assumption that the most important thing I can do is raise a child that will fit into a structured, hierarchical system like our schools are.  Not only do I completely reject that assumption, in fact I think I should be doing the opposite.  I don't want teachers to have a difficult time but beating my child into being the round peg that the system demands is exactly what I don't want.

I want my child to be curious.  I want her to feel that she has the right to guide her own life.  I want her to feel that she can and should confidently ask for reasons for the things she is asked to do.  I want her to be independent in action and thought and to question the dogma and common assumptions that are made all around her all the time.

When the school asks her to stand and sing the national anthem I want her to question why we sing a song that references God in a country that should respect all religions and those who do not subscribe to one.  I want her to have the courage to say no if she wants to, and know that I will back her up all the way.

I want a child who knows that when an elderly relative demands physical affection that she can say no, and that her decision will be supported and respected.  I want her to push past the boundaries of what everyone expects to find her own path.

And none of that comes from teaching her to obey without question.  My job isn't to raise a person who does what she is told.  My job is to raise a person who forges paths nobody else even thought of, who does things people say you can't do, and who builds things that were thought impossible.  I don't get to that point by telling her that she has to obey because I said so and I pay the bills.

I don't subscribe to some Permissive Parent Philsophy, if there even is such a thing.  Children are almost universally given more responsibility and autonomy as they grow, and I know I give her more autonomy at a given age than most parents do their own children.  I tailor her freedom to her abilities and desires as well as my own sense of safety.

I don't want to create difficulties in school for my child, but if raising her to think, to question, to seek to understand, and to resist orders that she thinks are wrong makes school difficult... then school is going to be difficult.  That is a price worth paying.

Doing my duty

Tomorrow I go in for jury duty.  I haven't done this before, and it is exciting.

I know, I know, it is most likely to be days of boredom sitting in a room with nothing to do, eventually to be told to go home.  Rarely does a prospective juror actually get to trial, and ever rarer yet is a trial that is exciting the ways the ones on TV are.

And yet, I am excited.

I want to understand the system.  I am deeply curious about how jurors are selected, what sorts of questions the lawyers and judge will ask, and what they will tell us.  The things they choose to tell us can be used to figure out what people generally think about the process and how the people running it cope with common misconceptions.

Clearly the people running the jury selection system realize that most people's exposure to this is TV courtroom dramas so they must have to constantly cope with odd ideas about what will occur.

One thing a discussion with a friend brought up was how much I will respect the law when and if I am asked to convict someone of a crime that is not actually immoral.

For example, if I was on a jury where a person was being tried for marijuana possession, could I possibly condemn them to prison for a victimless crime?  It is even harder when we consider that marijuana is soon to be legalized, and I know a *ton* of people that use it.  I can't justify destroying their lives to punish such a 'crime', so how could I justify doing that to a stranger?

I don't think I could.  I want the legal system to be consistent, but if I was asked to convict a sex worker or marijuana user or some other person who should never have been charged in the first place I don't think I could return a guilty verdict.  It simply isn't right.

That attitude might disqualify me from being a juror in the first place.  They don't want people who take writing laws into their own hands - they want people to interpret facts and return a verdict.

(Or they want people who will return a guilty verdict as fast as possible because that is convenient for the system, depending on how cynical you feel.)

Anyway, tomorrow I will go sit in a room for hours on end for no reason.  Maybe it will get more exciting than that, and I hope it does, but the odds are against me.  Still, I go to do my duty, and it is one I take seriously, so I don't mind.

Pears and pineapples

I like to think about what choices I should make in various situations.  For example, if I am buying fruit in the winter I know that bananas are a better environmental and monetary choice than nearly any other fruit since they are cheap because they can be shipped here slowly on a boat and that also makes them a good choice in terms of being low emissions.

Sometimes though I struggle to figure out how to compare two totally different scales.  For example, this year I have been working out a lot.  I like the results.  I look better, I feel better, I am healthier.  But I am eating a lot more protein, and that has a cost.  It seems to me that environmentally speaking bodybuilding is a ridiculous and damaging pursuit.  Being big at the cost of a couple thousand eggs seems bad.

But being healthy is good.

So how do I compare these things?  What can I do to even put those things on the same scale?

It baffles me.

It is further complicated by odd feelings about the very idea of looking good.  People grade each other on a scale based on what else they see around them.  Being the richest person in your social group is a huge bump in terms of happiness, no matter which strata of wealth your social group falls into.  Same goes for how you look.  10,000 years ago people didn't go about thinking that everyone's hair was awful, they just graded it on the curve.

Which means that if I get bigger (and, by most people's metrics, hotter) then I am making everyone else around me feel less hot.  So while that isn't exactly evil, it is definitely an argument against working out being a general good.  It is like some kind of bizarre mad scientist's machine - lifting weights transfers a slight amount of hotness from all the people I know to me.

All of which is saying that working out is good for me, but I have these weird feelings like it isn't actually good for the world.

Not that this is going to stop me from lifting, mind, but it is going to make me think about this stuff a lot while I do.

Death, but not suffering

Canada has finally passed legislation to allow people to receive medical aid to end their lives.  It is about time.  Medically assisted dying is something we ought to have allowed a long time ago, as there is no goodness in making people suffer just to continue life.

Unfortunately it isn't quite the bill I was hoping for.  It allows people who are terminally ill to end their lives, which is good, but it doesn't allow people who are suffering but not likely to die the same option.  It is really important that we don't write off people who are sick, and work hard to give them opportunities to contribute and lead happy lives, but sometimes that isn't an option.  Sometimes people end up in places where their suffering is so great that they would rather not live, and there should be a legal way for them to do that.

I don't know why exactly the government was so intent on this particular implementation.  They pushed their version where only those people who will soon die can access medically assisted dying, despite opposition from the Senate as well as plenty of other sources interested in the outcome.  My guess is that the Liberals are trying to play the centre - appeasing the right who don't want people to have physician assisted dying, but also appeasing the left who do.  Cutting out people who are suffering but not in danger of dying is the middle ground.  I think it is a cowardly act, politically calculated, and not what people need.

We do need protections for the vulnerable, but there are plenty of protections in place.  We don't need to outlaw something entirely just to reduce risk to zero - you make the best safety rules you can and then you move forward.

So I am happy that this has happened, but I wish it happened properly.  It doesn't give me a lot of hope for legalization of marijuana, unfortunately, because I suspect that the Liberals will do the same thing and run down the middle.  Instead of just low level regulation they will probably end up with a mess of rules that make it too expensive or too difficult to get pot for most people and it won't actually end the war on pot, wasting endless time and money.

I had greater hopes for the Liberals.  Perhaps they can yet prove me wrong, but I am not overly optimistic.

Loving the living

Rob Ford, the crack smoking, drunken driving, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic former mayor of Toronto died this week.  I will not miss him.

Toronto seems to be caught in this bizarre state of uncertainty where people feel obligated to say nice things about Ford now that he is dead even though they had no end of insults for him while he was alive.  I know that this is a fairly normal thing for people to do, but I honestly don't understand it.

Say nice things about people when they have a chance to feel good about those things.  If you truly buy into the saying "Unless you have something nice to say, don't say anything at all" then it should apply to the living moreso than the dead.  The dead don't care.  Not that I buy into that saying at all, in fact I think it is worthless.  Often what needs to be said isn't nice or pleasant, and hiding in silence, ignoring the things that are wrong, is not helpful or good.

Obviously you can extend this too far.  I am not going to run over to Ford's house and laugh at his children saying "Haha you dad is dead".  I don't want those who were close to him who are suffering at his death to pay for the things he did.  Such guilt by association is not okay.  But I wouldn't do that when he was alive either.  When he was alive I would mock his policies and call out his bigotry, and I will do the same now that he has died.  I wasn't writing my pieces for Ford or those who were part of his close circle because quite frankly they weren't reading my blog.

Once upon a time I wanted to write something nice about someone who was old.  I talked to people about it, and was advised not to write it because the person might be hideously offended, thinking that I was eulogizing them, as though they were already dead to me.  I think the advice I got was correct but it made me deeply sad that I couldn't say something good about someone until after they had died without causing pain and suffering.

I wonder if this attitude comes from the idea of eternal life of the soul.  As if people still experience pain from seeing me criticize them, but cannot act on the world to right those wrongs or apologize.

I don't know if that supposition holds or not but since I don't buy into any sort of life after death concept it certainly holds no power over me.  I think that cruelty, where it is warranted, is best directed at those who can no longer suffer.  Generosity is best directed at those who can gain from it.  So be kind to the living, and don't worry about the dead.  They no longer care.

The grand plan

The Catholic Church in Canada is weighing in on the issue of euthanasia.  A bishop has issued a statement condemning it and it played to a large number of Catholic churches this week, talking about how Catholics who ask for assisted dying or whose families support it risk the church refusing to perform last rites or funerals.

Personally I would consider the church butting out of services for the dead and dying a big bonus, but I do have real issues with the opposition to assisted dying.

The most common reason I have seen trotted out to support the anti-euthanasia movement is that it is against God's will.  It is a standard variant on the idea that you shouldn't do anything to thwart the divine plan, but this argument is complete hypocritical crap.  The church doesn't mind you going to the doctor for treatment... isn't that against God's plan?  They don't mind you exercising to try to get healthy, but wouldn't do so compromise God's plan for you to die of heart disease at a younger age?  Fundamentally it is absurd that people can apparently defy the plan of a omnipotent diety, but it only counts as defiance when a follower of said deity is personally uncomfortable with the defiance in question.

That is all to ignore the ridiculous idea that laws should be there to enforce God's plan for people.  God itself isn't up to the task, and it needs police officers to provide proper incentive?

The rest of the arguments against assisted dying are almost entirely based on misinformation.  People often assume that a middle aged person can just walk into a doctor's office and sign up to have their parents summarily executed because they have become inconvenient.  However, when you look at how assisted dying has been implemented in other countries or actual proposals for Canada you find that the barriers to taking part are enormous.  It takes a serious commitment on the part of the person wanting to die, examinations and testimony of a variety of health care professionals following strict rules, and lots of time.  There are in fact so many layers of red tape in both current practice and proposed practice of euthanasia that it is far too hard to access, to my mind, rather than too easy.

No, doctors are not going to let children whack their parents for their inheritance.

No, healthy people who want to commit suicide will not be helped by this system.

No, children born with developmental disabilities will not be euthanized.

No, doctors who do not wish to participate in euthanasia will not be forced to do so.

All of these are worthy considerations, of course, because if some idiot wrote up rules for euthanasia in fifteen minutes they might not think of these cases.  But that isn't what is happening.  The process has crowds of experts from many fields (including, of course, people who are looking at undergoing assisted death themselves) and has examined successful systems elsewhere as well as looking at creative ideas at home.  Huge amounts of time and effort has been poured in to ensure that the system is not abused.

We normally think that keeping an animal alive in constant agony is immoral.  Euthanasia for animals who have nothing left in life but deep suffering is normal and expected.  We owe the same consideration to those among us who are suffering so much that joy is gone from their lives, and who will die before that situation can change.

Obey, or else

There has been quite the kerfuffle this week surrounding a police officer in South Carolina who attacked a female black student, tossed her halfway across her classroom onto a concrete floor, and was subsequently fired for his actions.  Multiple students filmed the incident on their phones and I am glad they did - it seems likely to me that nothing of consequence would have happened to the cop had the damning videos not been immediately circulated far and wide.

Most of my network is appalled at the video footage and cannot fathom how this could be justified.  If the teen in question had a gun, a knife, or otherwise been very dangerous I could see the officer's level of violence being warranted, but the officer could not have thought he was in any danger.  The man had combat training, could reportedly benchpress 600 pounds (?!?), and was standing over a teenage girl who couldn't have threatened him even if he literally had one arm tied behind his back.  So why did he attack her?

It is an old and familiar answer - she was resisting authority.  That is, she had pulled out her phone for a minute and been told to leave class, which she refused to do.  Refusing to obey direct orders while being black is something this particular white officer could not condone, so in a fit of rage he attacked.   Unsurprisingly he was accused of having a history of prejudice towards black students and a track record of over the top violence - not an ideal candidate to work at a high school, one would think.

But there are those who defend him.  The line of defence they use boils down to a simple idea - she did not obey.  (There is some hand waving about her fighting back, but when someone with literally five times your strength is lifting you into the air your hands ineffectually hitting at them is not assault.)  This lack of obedience, of blind deference to authority, warrants severe and immediate punishment by this line of thinking.  When a cop tells you to do something, you do it, no matter how wrong it may be, and if you do not then expect to be attacked for your temerity.

It speaks to a worldview that I can't get behind.  Essentially it boils down to the idea that doing as you are told by the powers that be is a inherently moral act, and not doing what you are told is immoral.  The natural extension of this is that if you disobey you are bad, and thus deserving of any suffering that comes your way.

This makes me think of the five pillars of moral behaviour model - Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Respect, Sanctity.  Conservatives tend to believe in all five pillars, whereas liberals tend to only believe in Care and Fairness.  It is one of the explanations of why right and left have such a hard time talking to one another... it is difficult to discuss what we ought to do when we can't even agree on what sorts of things we might use to decide if a given thing is moral in the first place.

Attacking the student was not caring.  It was not fair.  It was an angry, emotional response to a lack of respect for his position of authority over her.  That isn't justified, it isn't moral, and we ought to make it clear that blind obedience isn't a moral necessity.

Mixed up

For the past while Nathan Nun, an artist friend of mine, has been building art for my card game Camp Nightmare.  He has a big chunk of it done now and it is time for us to figure out what we are going to do with it.  It has me feeling a bit nervous and unsure, which isn't something I feel at all when designing a game.  It only comes out when I am looking at publishing and selling it.  I don't fret about people seeing the game and criticizing it, but I find the idea of staking a huge amount of money and time on other people's desire to pay for it somewhat stressful.

An entrepreneur, I am not.

 The weird thing is, I can't exactly pinpoint the source of my vague sense of being ill at ease.  The simplest explanation is that I fear failure, but I don't think that is exactly it.  I have never been happy setting my fortunes on the approval of others and letting my sense of self worth be derived from someone else's standards.  It is a Stoic thing - one should let one's own happiness only be dependent on one's own effort and standards.  Why would you allow another person to decide if you get to feel successful or happy when you don't have to?

This sort of feeling was what made university so hard for me.  I often enjoyed the learning and I wanted to know many things but I found it incomprehensible that I would do so much just in pursuit of marks, only to prove to a person that I knew what I know.  I don't care if some random prof signs off on my brains and talent - I know my own worth just fine!  Not caring about marks, indeed even finding the whole idea completely irrational and ridiculous, makes working hard enough to succeed in university a challenge.

It is similar here.  I will end up pouring an enormous amount of myself into a project, hoping to please other people.  There are no end of trash games that make money (Monopoly says hi) and just the same there is an endless list of great games that sold almost nothing.  Luck plays a huge role in it, and the whims of random individuals in the process.  I don't want to stake everything on that!  I would be comfortable betting money on me winning a bunch of games because I know long run my talent will win out, but trying to produce a single project like this is a huge gamble the results of which are far outside me.

On the other hand maybe it is just the fact that I am doing something far outside my experience that is making this seem daunting and I am just using this Stoic construction as a way to dismiss the entire process as a way of avoiding facing it head on.

So it seems to me that either I am just running away from my destiny, from pursuing the thing I obviously should do, with pointless philosophical prattle.... or I am raising honest and real objections to the necessity of getting a lot of people to give me money to validate my artistic creation.  Can't really say which, at this point.

But it does seem like I won't ever *know* unless I go after it and find out.

The thing to do

People often want to help out, to make the world a better place, but it is a damn tricky thing to figure out what sort of help is best and how much help exactly you need to deliver to feel good about yourself and be justified in putting your feet up and relaxing.  If I volunteer at the food bank is it enough, or should I be working a second job to have more money to donate to educating young girls in developing countries?  This article has some great thoughts and the beginnings of answers and it got me thinking a lot on this topic.

Simply put there will always be problems and no matter what any individual does everything will not be fixed.  That leads to decision paralysis and people giving up because they can never reach the point of feeling like they have done enough - there is no obvious signal to tell you it is time to head to the bar.  What we do have though is the knowledge that if everyone gave 10% of their income to effective charities we could wipe out pretty much all of the world issues easily solved with money immediately.  So there you go, we have a straightforward, measurable, reasonably achievable objective.

More is needed than that of course because you not only need to help but also avoid doing more damage in the first place.  Donating a lot of money to charity is obviously not a licence to go about saying "Dude, that is just so gay!" as an insult while maintaining impeccable moral standing.  You need to listen, learn, and adapt your habits to try to do less damage with your passing.  Giving charitably is a wonderful thing but no amount of it can remove the need to not be an asshole.

I had a discussion with Pounder awhile ago on this topic and he asked how I felt about the moral implications of someone who makes a lot of money and donates a huge amount of it to charity (Example:  $100,000 salary of which $30,000 is donated) when compared to someone like me who spends a lot of time yelling about social justice and puts in a few volunteer hours here and there.  I think the clear answer is that the $30,000 trumps my contribution in terms of raw efficacy but that doesn't translate necessarily into the moral high ground - after all, I have much less money to give.

This really reinforces a very important point about trying to improve the world:  People will contribute in any number of ways and as long as they are in fact helping we must respect those contributions even when they are not the contributions we would choose ourselves.  If you can't figure out if you are helping enough or how you should help that simple benchmark of 10% is a fantastic guide.  It isn't as though is it objectively right but it certainly meets the standard of being plenty good enough.

For life

Marriage pundits drive me bonkers.  This article, in particular, makes me insane.  It is a piece about how awful it is that people have divorce parties and how if everyone was just dedicated to marriage that divorces wouldn't happen.  The author, after all, is dedicated to his marriage and obviously everybody who gets divorced must therefore be lazy and weak.  If they were just committed and willing to work at it then everything would be fine!  After all, he has been married for three years and he is sure it will last sixty more.

Hogwash and bullshit, to put it mildly.

First off, divorce parties are not, as anyone who thought about it for five seconds could attest, about celebrating the breaking of a vow.  They are not about being happy that poor decisions were made or about a glorification of giving up.  They are about being happy that an unhappy time in life is ended.  Divorces, it should be noted, are *not fun*.  They are hard, divisive, expensive, and heart wrenching.  Being done with them and finally being able to get someone toxic out of your life is a fantastic feeling.  A divorce party is about celebrating the end of lawyer visits, moving out, negotiations and pain - a worthy thing to celebrate if there ever was one.

In the article another person makes the point that people change and that sometimes that means you should get divorced.  The author counters by saying that we should just accept and work with change, after all, his wife likes different things now than she did when they got married.  Again this argument is willfully missing the point.  Change doesn't mean liking golf instead of hockey as nobody breaks up over trivialities like that.  It often means things like

-My girlfriend that you didn't know about (or you were pretending to not know about) is pregnant
-I don't plan on ever having sex with you again
-I have taken up a new religion and expect you to focus your life around it
-I need to spend years away from you following a dream I have just discovered I have
-I have become an alcoholic
-I am gambling away all of the money we have and then plunging us into incredible debt

To suggest that people just need to suck it up and continue slogging along through such things is absurd.  Oftentimes when people divorce the reasons are as serious as these and to compare them to insignificant changes in taste is insulting and ridiculous at best.  Assuming that all those divorces you read about only happen to bad people is flat out victim blaming.

Even if nothing as serious as the things above happens, sometimes divorce is just for the best.  The success of a marriage is defined by the happiness it brings not whether or not someone dies.  If all you care about is making sure mortality occurs go marry someone with a terminal disease who only has months to live.  I can virtually guarantee a successful marriage in that case!  The only reason to celebrate marriage is if it promotes human flourishing and staying in a miserable match does not accomplish that.  At the end of a marriage we should evaluate its success by the joy it brought; whether it ended by death or by contract is irrelevant.