The French barometer

I had a houseguest this weekend who was in Toronto to vote in the French presidential elections.  I was somewhat shocked that he would travel 4 hours each way to vote and even more so when I found out that the second round of voting is in a couple weeks and he will travel here again.  The French had a turnout of 80% for the vote which is more than Canada has had ... ever?  I guess the French take their politics more seriously than we do here since this is actually a lower turnout than they have had in the past.  I sure wouldn't travel that much to vote as I have a hard enough time finding the will to vote when I just have to walk two blocks!

A lot of people are using this election as a important marker for political movements across Europe.  The far right National Front party candidate came a solid third place which isn't good enough to get onto the final ballot but certainly shows that there are a lot of people taking an isolationist, blame the others stance.  The National Front wants to withdraw from the Euro and go back to the franc and has a lot of the same rhetoric we see in other extreme right wing nationalist parties in european politics.  I think these parties are really dangerous to stability and encourage divisive, damaging thinking - blaming foreigners and surrounding nations for problems are poor decisions but the crazy anti-immigration platforms we can see in all kinds of European nations are frightening.  

It is easy and convenient to blame all of your problems on 'those people who are different' and unfortunately that sort of scapegoating seems to be rapidly rising in popularity across the pond.  Canada hasn't really developed a party like that, probably because although we have our crazies who blame the immigrants for everything there is a pretty strong public sentiment supporting a multicultural society; we actually don't have that many people who have been here more than five generations or so.  The US certainly has plenty of extreme nationalism in its politics but you find it quite firmly entrenched within the Democrats and Republicans; they have no need for fringe right wing nationalist parties.

It is a worrying trend.  As economic uncertainty increases people seem to be drawn to extremists with messages of hate and who rely on scapegoating vulnerable minorities... I wonder how much of the worldwide trend towards socialism, multiculturalism and peace is rooted in constant economic growth and increasing prosperity.  Unfortunately it seems like there is a very strong correlation there.

Bad, then good, then bad again.

While walking through the grocery store today I noticed a newspaper talking about the group Underearners Anonymous.  I was dumbfounded... a support group specifically designed for people who habitually don't earn much?  A collection of folks who are artists, aspiring actors/actresses, or generally incompetent?  It is one of those things that made me shake my head and wonder what the world is coming to.

When I got home I checked out their website and found out that it isn't much like that at all.  Rather it is a group designed to help people with a wide range of issues that prevent them from being economically comfortable that mainly seem to focus around self confidence and self worth.  It talked about people who habitually asked too little for their services, gave away their time for no reason, etc. and ended up in bad situations.  This sounds great!  Having a place for people to discuss problems like this and try to find support and solutions seems like a good thing.

But wait.

Just like Alcoholics Anonymous they have a 12 step program for recovery and the program mostly involves admitting helplessness and asking God to fix everything.  I do like a few of the 12 steps like admitting to having a problem and trying to make amends with others hurt by the problem but most of the rest is rubbish.  I have no use for God in pretty much any respect but there are definitely levels of dislike.  Thinking that there is something beyond the realm of the physical that created everything and is benevolent?  Mostly harmless.  Thinking that there is a person of infinite power who can fix you but bases their decision to do so on either random chance or your participation in specific rituals and maintenance of particular beliefs?  Preposterous and dangerous.  If we sit around waiting for God to fix our problems we will be waiting a long damn time; we have to do it ourselves.

Note that I don't think that AA or UA for that matter is an evil organization.  I expect they do good things overall but they could do those things without all the religious baggage.

Flipping and Flopping

With Mitt Romney being the Republican candidate in all but name now I did some thinking on how people perceive politicians who change their minds.  Romney is extremely well known for changing his positions on various topics back and forth; years ago his platform could easily be described as middle of the road and he was very 'soft' on traditional Republican practices like being anti-abortion and anti-gay.  Nowadays though he is a hardcore right wing bible thumper, presumably to appease the masses of fundamentalist Christians voting in the Republican elections.  He has been accused of being a flip flopper and if anyone deserves that moniker I think he does... but why is that such a bad thing?

There are lots of reasons for a politician to change their stance on a topic and most of them are good ones.  Perhaps they were convinced by other people that they need to act and think differently.  This is usually going to be a good thing because while there are fanatics and selfish people who clog up any issue with bad information on both sides there are usually a substantial group of people who actually try to figure out the best answer and communicate that.  If a politician is convinced to change their minds by experts or advisers I think they will end up doing the right thing more often than not.

A politician could also be changing their views based on polls or changes in public opinion.  The public, by and large, is wrong about many things and ends up voting for circuses instead of sensible investment but politicians are actually tasked with implementing the will of the people.  They are supposed to listen to the public and even though the public is going to be wrong a good chunk of the time I don't think that we can really fault politicians for changing their minds based on what their constituents want.  The dramatic flip flop of political opinion that destroyed SOPA in the US just a short time ago illustrates a very positive example of this.

We often claim that we want politicians who have vision and who get things done regardless of public opinion or naysayers but I think that is a very risky sort of road.  A monarchy is a fine system as long as the monarch really does have the best interests of the public at heart and is clever enough to come up with the right answers and a politician with vision is similar.  If their goals are good and their methods are sensible then things go very well but when their goals are awful or ridiculous (for example, Rick Santorum's entire platform) then things go very badly indeed.  A flip flopper for a leader isn't likely to bring about a Golden Age but it isn't likely to tear a country apart either.

Clearly everybody wants a politician who is a passionate visionary with goals and ideals exactly the same as the voter in question.  We don't really know what we will get when we vote somebody in though so I generally figure I should hedge my bets and vote for somebody who is less likely to really screw things up even if they are less likely to do something brilliant.  If I have a choice between a visionary and a flip flopper (while knowing nothing else about them) I will take the flip flopper.  Too many of the visionaries out there envision a dystopia for me to be entirely comfortable putting one at the helm.

A seat for the landfill

Recently Elli has gotten big enough that our child car seat has become unnecessary since we need to move to a simple booster seat instead.  I figured that since the seat was still in perfectly fine condition that I would hand it off to somebody else to use; it wasn't cheap and there is nothing wrong with it.  Sthenno has a child of roughly the age that would make such a transfer make sense so I offered it to him.  He was happy to get it particularly since free is a very good price.

A couple days later he emailed me to tell me that the seat exchange would have to be cancelled.  It turns out that selling or giving car seats to other people when those seats were built before the most recent set of rules is illegal.  Yes, that's right, not 'not recommended' nor 'potentially less functional' but actually illegal.  Moreover any injuries done to someone in an illegally acquired seat are not covered by insurance companies.  While I love to hate on insurance companies most of the time I can't imagine they are at fault here; obviously they shouldn't be covering illegal car seats.  The problem is that perfectly functional seats are illegal and that my seat in particular is going straight into the trash instead of being used.

This sort of thing makes me insane.  Car seats are a substantial chunk of stuff and represent real money spent.  Whether your argument is that we shouldn't waste people's money or huck perfectly functional objects in the landfill there are good reasons to dislike this situation.  What I wonder is if these rulings were pushed through under pressure from the car seat companies.  Much like the recording industry and the SOPA fiasco in the US the car seat companies stand to increase profits substantially if they can get the government to step in and control the market for them; in this case to destroy any secondary market.  The more often they can change the rules the better because every time they do there is a bunch more of their product in the dump and a lot more people who have to purchase again to obey the law.  Even if the rules don't change at all people are generally going to be really worried about accidentally running afoul of these laws and insurance penalties and are going to buy new seats so as to avoid any chance of disaster.

The safety crusaders are here to bubble wrap the entire world, regardless of cost.  Note that last word.  I don't object to being safe, but rather to the idea that incurring any cost is acceptable for any amount of safety.  That attitude is far too prevalent these days, particularly in government.  We should spend money for safety, but we should spend it in the most effective places since our resources are limited.

Learning can be very depressing

I read an article last night about broadening gender and racial representation in Dungeons and Dragons and got to thinking a lot about racism and sexism.  In that particular article it was pointed out that historically DnD books were filled with white men fighting evil; Tolkien wrote all dark skinned people as evil and most women as helpless and that 'style' certainly has continued.  There is a real ray of hope in the more recently issued Pathfinder series which contains a good mix of men and women and also has plenty of people who are very much non white.  My immediate reaction was positive; of course it is good to portray minorities and women in game books, particularly if you want your gaming group to be welcoming to anyone other than white dudes!

The comments were an interesting read but I encountered a position I found really puzzling.  Some commenters really believed that these changes to break the white man mold in DnD were actually a problem:  They thought that this was basically rescue fantasy because the real problems in the world were not the ones being addressed.  I get that.  When we make sure that a paladin in the next DnD book is a black woman we aren't helping minorities and women have income equality, equality before the courts, or even equality in how they are viewed by other people.  Changing pictures in DnD books is a small thing.  I think though that enormous projects covering decades or centuries and involving nearly every living person are not something people can deal with head on.  I can't set out every day with the goal of saving everyone from prejudice; it is too much and too impossible.  I can set out to try to make sure that roleplaying games have diversity though, that is a goal that can be accomplished within my lifetime and which feels like something I *should* do.

Wendy linked me to a post about George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series.  I love this series.  I have waxed eloquent (or not so eloquent, depending on the reader, I suppose) about it in the past.  Reading the extremely angry post about how sexist and racist ASoIaF is made me mad.  Not rational mad, mind you.  Irrational mad.  My toys!  Stop saying that my toys suck!  When you call something I love sexist and racist and creepy it gets me really keyed up, unlike if you call something I love 'of poor quality'.  You don't have to agree with me on quality but words like sexist and racist really do have a huge impact.  I had a desperate urge to write a comment something along the lines of "Argh you are wrong and here are the million reasons why and you SUCK!"  That wouldn't have been especially useful.  Instead I looked up a post that refuted it and felt a lot better.  I can totally understand why the author of the first post got a tremendous amount of hate from the fans of ASoIaF though as I attempt to be aggressive but civil on the internet but many, many people have no such goals and less self control.  Not that I am condoning being an asshat on the internet but I can totally see where it comes from.

Discussing this eventually led me to this post by John Scalzi about how female writers and bloggers face anger and bitterness much more than males on the internet.  The discussion in the comments is extremely long and filled with a lot of back and forth between generally well meaning men who try to grapple with an issue they have a fundamental blind spot on and a lot of women trying to make them understand.  Of course there are also plenty of horror stories of the terrible messages containing death / rape threats and brutal put downs that get sent to women online.  It drives me bonkers because I *want* to understand.  I want to be able to see how women who are really afraid every time they go outside see the world.  I can't get a grasp on the topic unless I can be in their shoes at least to some extent but that worldview is inaccessible to me.

I am not afraid of alleys, or nighttime, or strangers.  I will walk pretty much anywhere without concern.  In my mind, the world is a fairly safe place and other people are often an inconvenience but practically never a danger.  I know rationally that huge amounts of that is male / white / hetero / cis / large man privilege (some of it is surely just confidence / overconfidence) but I can't just shake that off at will.  How can I even engage in this sort of discussion given that blindness?

It is depressing as hell.  It is depressing because there is so much crap out there happening to people.  It is depressing because try as I might I just can't see it from the victim's perspective and my brain continues to tell me that things can't be that bad... since my experience tells me things aren't that bad.  It is depressing that even though I think of myself as more enlightened than the average bear I still reaction to reading these things with internal aggression and disbelief.  The world is sometimes a crappy place and the conviction to do right is not enough.  Reading about all this stuff for hours and hours seems like a good education but it sure does make me feel like crap.

A passion for careers

Today I stumbled upon two very different arguments about having passion for your work.  One is a talk by Larry Smith, an economics professor at the University of Waterloo.  I was in Larry's Econ 101 class and was endlessly entertained by his lectures; he was known far and wide for being a professor who both really knew his topic and also managed to entertain.  At least part of his appeal was his willingness (eagerness?) to call everybody idiots and tell them exactly why what they were doing was foolish.  His talk, unlike most TED talks, was not meant to be a feel good, inspirational talk but rather a cold reminder that the great majority of people fail utterly to realize a great career and that it is all their own fault.  He did title it "Why you will fail to have a great career" after all.  He believes that to realize a great career (note he never equates great with profitable) you must find your passion and follow it.  He further believes that there are a great many excuses people use to avoid finding or following their passions and goes on at great length to tell us about these failings.  Classic Larry Smith.

The second article was written by Penelope Trunk and is titled "The myth of career passion and how it will derail you".  Her take is entirely the opposite of Larry's as she thinks that the most important thing to do is to devote yourself to becoming fantastically good at something, anything, and to find engagement in your job.  Rather than drift around looking for the panacea of 'passion' Penelope figures that the best way to love your job is to simply find something you can tolerate and that you are good at and become the best there is.  Specialists make more money than generalists and Penelope thinks that making more money is extremely important.

I figure they are both wrong.  Finding a job you are passionate about is a great thing but it isn't the only thing.  Larry has the idea that if you can somehow locate this passion and then follow it that all the rest of your life is a trivial consideration; I think that is a path to unhappiness for most people.  You may be passionate about saving people from burning buildings but simply not be able to deal with the crazy hours involved in being a firefighter.  You may be passionate about creating art but be quite unable to handle the uncertainty and self discipline required to be self employed.  Sometimes the requirements of following your passion are simply not worth the benefits.  There *are* benefits though to doing something you are passionate about and many times people run away from those passions for the wrong reasons.  Not following your dreams because you are worried about disappointing other people or because your dream job isn't of sufficient status are likely to be terrible decisions.

Penelope has it right when she talks about finding flow and how important it is to happiness.  People who become amazing at a job and can lose themselves in doing it are usually very happy.  The thing is though that everybody has different preferences and talents and it is far, far easier to become fantastic at something you love and are good at than something you are indifferent to and mediocre at!  I could have become an accountant; I have the requisite skills.  I could also have become a game designer.  I could have worked hard, become a good accountant and eventually found a good spot but it is easy, trivial even for me to find flow when building games.  If anything I think becoming a game designer would have been trouble because I wouldn't have ever left the office!  Searching for something that grabs you, that you love, is a fantastic way to become excellent at it and to find that state of flow.

The short version is that finding the perfect career is complicated.  Neither desperately searching for passion nor ignoring it is the best way.  By far the best route is to develop a weighting function and weight passion alongside any number of other variables.  It is complicated, like most things, and defies a simple sound byte.

The Christian thing to do

Recently on Facebook this article got linked to me.  It refers to this other article titled "I'm Christian, unless you're gay."  There was a reply to the Facebook post indicating confusion; the title of the article (I'm Christian, unless you're gay) was unclear.  Initially I thought it was very strange too; is the author talking about changing religions based on who he is talking to?  After a moment though it hit me that this was a use of an anachronistic use of 'Christian' that means being a good person.  For a long time this was common usage in the Western world and you can easily see it when reading books from a century ago.  Being a good Christian person is supposed to mean you are nice to people, treat them as you would want to be treated and forgive them for their crimes.

Of course this is a ridiculous little bit of conceit because I have never seen nor heard of any evidence that suggests that Christians treat other people better than any other religion you could name (same goes for philosophical stances that aren't religions like atheism).  Neither treating other people well nor treating other people badly originated or was popularized by Christianity; it has no claim to moral authority based on history.  Its claim of moral authority based on divine inspiration is of course much more contested though certainly equally false.

I think this sort of nomenclature is much like saying grace before meals.  It is likely to remain in force within religions but is rapidly fading away from popular culture.  The assumption of Christian membership is no longer reasonable and is quickly becoming less so as time passes and the ranks of atheists and 'ostensibly belonging to a religion but really agnostic/atheist' grow.  Based on the author's writing it is clear that he comes from a highly religious family and area which would explain the usage of Christian in this sense.  It is interesting to see that growing up in that sort of environment influences the words he uses so powerfully that his article titles can be difficult to understand for those without that background.