A failed attempt at argument

We need to cut way back on the use of force by state agents in our society.  We do need armed people at some point for the extreme cases, but it should be restricted to extreme cases.  I saw a thing online attempting to argue back against this, but it only ended up proving my point.

Obviously this is meant to suggest that you need a cop with a gun to handle this.  A naked guy with his fists raised is such a dangerous thing, after all.

But this is *exactly* what we want social workers to be doing.  We don't need a person with a gun ready to murder this naked dude.  We need someone to say "Hey, what is up?  You seem pretty agitated.  Want to tell me why you are on this roof?" without the implied threat of death or imprisonment if the answer isn't what the emergency worker wants.

Nurses and doctors and social workers and lots of other people have to deal with difficult, delusional, drunk, or otherwise problematic people all the time.  They do it without weapons, because the presence of weapons escalates otherwise safe interactions into violence.

A social worker who can talk naked dude down, figure out what his problem is, and try to help him solve it is exactly how we should respond to naked people on a roof.  (That is, assuming we think that naked people on a roof are a problem in the first place, which they are emphatically not, unless they are doing something else that is an issue.)  We definitely don't need a cop with a gun.

If that naked guy grabs an iron pipe and starts threatening to murder nearby people, *then* we need a cop with a gun.  Let's reduce the number of armed state agents by 90%, hire a ton of social workers and EMTs to replace them, and see how much less violence we can have.  I am confident it will be a lot, and we will make life much easier for the people the cops so consistently make problems for - people of colour, queer people, trans people, and others that are already oppressed.  The police amplify the effect of existing prejudices, so we need to reduce their numbers to the absolute minimum we can get away with, given the occasional necessity for violence by the state.

Black lives matter

What with all the conflict in the world surrounding BLM I figured I should link to a black person writing about his struggles with police.  Neil DeGrasse Tyson wrote a piece on this topic, and one of the key things it nails is how racist policing can't be explained away by 'but the police need to question suspicious people' and similar attempts to ignore the problem.  Tyson's story includes an example of him being questioned for carrying books into a building on campus.  This isn't a thing you would imagine any police officer randomly getting involved with, except that Tyson is black, and the police felt sure that black people don't belong near a physics department.  That is for white people!

Here it is.

One thing I have found interesting in all this is looking at the way people talk about their proposed solutions.  'Defund the police' has become a refrain from the protesters, and I am totally behind that.

Sometimes I have seen people saying "Well, obviously we want to redirect most police funding to social workers, health workers, etc. and shrink the police force, but we don't want to *eliminate* police." but others truly want to get rid of police entirely.  No armed law enforcement at all.

You see similar arguments with regards to prisons.  Prison abolition strictly means no prisons, and some people advocate for exactly that, while others want significant reductions in prison populations.

I am certainly in the 'significant reductions' camp.  There are deeply evil people in the world that cannot be dealt with via fines, classes, apologies, or other similar techniques.  The Jeffrey Dahmers and Robert Picktons of the world can't just be left alone.  We need prisons for such people.

We also need armed law enforcement.  When somebody has a gun and is ready to shoot other people, we need people who are trained to fight them.

But we need so few of those people, and such a small amount of prison space.  The desperately evil and incorrigibly violent are rare.

Traffic control does not need to be overseen by armed law enforcement.  Responding to people who are drunk or high or otherwise causing a fuss does not require guns and clubs, it requires someone trained in social work.  There are so many police functions that simply should be overseen by somebody else, probably somebody with actual training that applies to the situation at hand.

We could reduce prisons populations and police personnel by 90% and it would make me happy.  We do need those both of those things for the extreme cases, but there are way too many cops and they are way too involved in everyone's everyday life.

Changing how the police operate is certainly a good goal.  There are so many things we could do to try to reduce the damage police do in each interaction.  However, the simple fact is that we can do a tremendous amount of good by drastically slashing the number of interactions the police are involved in, and we do that by stripping away the vast majority of their budget and putting it towards programs that bring far greater benefits and far fewer problems.

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.

How to covid

There are degrees of doing social distancing.  Some people have to go to work and wear face shields.  Some people stay home all day and only leave to get groceries.

And some people work in home offices at their dining table surrounded by cubicle walls made of toilet paper.

This wasn't even done for comedy's sake.  Wendy needed walls to separate out the rest of the place from her work zone, and we didn't have anything else that would make such an appropriate makeshift wall.  The wall needed to be opaque, light, easy to set up and move, and unlikely to fall over.  There is literally nothing else in our place that would do.

Pinkie Pie even made a new Do Not Disturb sign for the wall, but unfortunately our printer is dying so we couldn't print it out effectively.  However, here it is, an example of Pinkie Pie's new proficiency with her graphic design program.

This size of condo seemed ideal back when it was just two people living here.  All the space we would ever need!  But nowadays I am cursing myself for not having invested more in a place with just one more room in it.

Sparkly and clean - for now

Awhile ago I had a battle with pigeons on my balcony.  They were roosting in groups, laid an egg in a flower pot, and had thoroughly coated the balcony with poop.  I pulled all the balcony funiture inside to deny them hiding spots, and they stopped coming by.

A few days ago I decided it was time to get things looking shiny out there again.

After four rounds of mopping, two rounds of sweeping, and two rounds of poop scrubbing, the place finally looks good again.  Getting the railing windows clean was tricky!  I could squeegee the top 80% of the outside, but that last 20% was going to involve significant risk of going over the edge.  Wendy and I managed to do a passable job my bending our arms under the railing though.

And now I can spend some of my quarantine time doing this:

Critter likes hanging out in the sun, and he likes sitting on people, so this is two of his favourite things combined together.  I love being naked, and I love sitting in the heat, but unfortunately people get all flustered when I am naked, so I have a minimal amount of clothing on to avoid confrontations... but I do have the sun on my skin and a fuzzy critter, so all is well.

And now the weather service has announced an upcoming shift towards unseasonably colder weather again.  Bring on the heat, I say!

Here's hoping that with the balcony furniture back outside again we don't get a return of the pigeons.  Neither side will prosper in that particular war.

Algorithms, smart and stupid

Facebook has been shoving a new ad at me.  I am full of ambivalence about it, because I both want to praise the targetting of the ad and also ridicule it.

The ad was for a jaw exercising device.   It looks like a donut shaped piece of silicone, and the idea is that you chew on it to give yourself a chiselled jawline.  The actor in the ad talked about being 48 and how he used the device to get back his youthful jaw.

I am 41, and into fitness, so that much they got right.

Unfortunately for them, they also assumed that I am ignorant and desperate.

You can't fix saggy skin with muscle exercises.  You also can't remove subcutaneous fat with targetted regimens.  You *can* generally remove subcutaneous fat from your body with exercise, but you sure as hell can't pick a spot and nuke the fat right there.  This jaw chiselling device is a ridiculous scam.  It is no different from the Ab Blasters I saw advertised on TV when I was young.  Exercise is good for you, sure, but you can't pick a spot and nuke it!  You can pick a spot and make it strong, but the body removes fat where it wants to.

Facebook is hit and miss with these things.  It does aim a lot of board game and video game ads at me, which is accurate, but it also really tries to sell me trucks, which is a total non starter.

But the truck ads are understandable.  I am in a age and income bracket where buying a vehicle is plausible.  The most outrageous miss I have ever seen is when FB started sending surrogate mother ads at me.  Much as I might like to help infertile people to have children, I lack some key things that are required for that endeavour.  Shouldn't FB have my sex sorted by now?

I can't quite sort out how much to respect algorithms.  Sending a gym rat like me ads for adjustable home dumbbells during a time when I can't go to a gym?  Great idea!  (I am not buying, but it is a well targetted ad.)  But singing lessons?  Not so much.

The algorithms are getting better, and sometimes they do make great decisions, but we are a long way away from Skynet.

Learning from disaster

The ongoing crisis has taught me some things.  While I hang out at home a lot, I apparently chafe at the requirement of staying home.  I suppose that isn't unusual, but present circumstances certainly bring it into stark relief.  I also discovered that while I support substantial restrictions on our collective behaviour to combat covid-19, some of them really grind on me.

Throughout my life a lot of things I try to do have been criticized by people under the umbrella of 'safety'.  Going barefoot, you can't do that because safety!  Polyamory, you can't do that, because safety!  Marijuana, you can't use that, because safety!

My usual response to this is to bristle with indignation and then swing back, hard.  I tend to go on about how those same people yelling about safety happily support all kinds of things that are drastically more dangerous, and argue that their real issue with my behaviour is simply that I am doing something different than they are used to, but they fall back on 'safety' when they have no real arguments.

Sometimes I don't have time for debating the topic and my response boils down to

FUCK YOU I DO WHAT I WANT.

It turns out the restrictions on behaviour because of Covid-19 push my buttons because of this.  I agree that I should stay at home, and I agree that we must endure inconvenience to make grocery shopping less likely to transmit diseases, and I agree with most the things we are doing.

But damn when authorities tell me how to live because 'safety' my instinct is to snarl and tell them to get bent.

Even though those arguments from safety are well grounded these days I have gotten so used to safety being thrown around as a catch all for 'I have no actual reasons or data' that it really winds me up.

This came up in regards to grocery store population caps.  Recently I was really grumpy after a grocery store visit where the security person enforcing store population sat on his phone ignoring everything and occasionally looked up and motioned a random bunch of people into the grocery store.  The cashiers were standing around bored because the security guard wasn't keeping enough people in the store, and the people waiting in the enormous line were standing close together, often chatting with one another.  Keeping us all in line was simply increasing the danger to all of us, not just wasting our time but also *increasing* our risk. 

It bothers me to restrict people's behaviour for no gain, but it *really* burns my bridge when regulations in the name of safety actually make things worse.  It is a tough thing to argue though, because I actually support greater safety measures that are effective, and if I argue against restrictions people will naturally assume I am in denial of some kind, or that I buy into the 'let all the old people die to save the stock market' thing.

While I don't think I will come out of this mess with new skills, I suspect I will end up at least learning a few things about myself.