I Got To Say It Was A Good Day

I didn't even have to use my AK.

Is there anyone who follows this blog who will get that reference?  Maybe Emily.

Anyway, it's 11:30 am, I have been out of bed for two hours, and today is a good day. 

I haven't written a blog in a little while, not this month, but that's through gentle nothingness rather than a problem or success.  Then yesterday I felt a little tired, like I had walked ten miles before waking up.  This has been the first symptom of my times of exhaustion.  No sickness, just being tired.  It usually lasts four days, and the middle two days have previously been times of utter exhaustion.  I also hurt my back, I do this twice a year or so after injuring it thirteen years ago, climbing in through the bathroom window after forgetting the keys to the house.  So, I went into last night in pain, facing exhaustion.

This morning my darling wife took The Face of Evil to daycare.  I got twelve hours of sleep and my back feels better.  The expected exhaustion is not there.  My back feels better, but most of all there is peace in the house.  I am alone.

This may seem strange, that being alone is special.  After all, don't I spend all day during the week alone?  In terms of humans this is true, but in terms of a presence, a consciousness, a being that impinges on my awareness, I am almost never alone.  I am either with my darling wife, or with The Face of Evil, and often with both.  The Face of evil is without doubt a conscious being.  It knows what it wants, it reacts to what I do, it communicates, it has plans, it can feel sad, rejected, unloved.  It can also lie and scheme and pressure you to do what it wants.

The main reason why social work was so damaging to me was that I am completely incapable of switching off my attention to other people.  I find it very difficult to sleep if other people are talking, or moving, because my mind has to pay attention.  If someone says something to me it almost always stops my train of thought.  If someone laughs, or cries, or exclaims in surprise, I must know why.  I have seen people capable of doing this, my father-in-law being an astonishing example, and my wife isn't bad.

The Face of Evil is a pack animal.  I am alpha male.  It is vital in a pack animal that attention is paid to the alpha male.  The alpha decides where to go, when to sleep, when to eat, who to befriend, who to attack.  The beta has its wants and desires, but must filter all of these through the alpha.  The methods used are begging, wheedling, being obvious, being sad, showing delight when it gets its way, etc..  Dogs have been interacting with humans for ten thousand years or more, and subject to the most rigorous selection pressure in evolution (breeding for domestication).  As a result dogs are true experts at reading the emotions of humans, the only animals that can do so.  The Face of Evil is a very smart dog indeed.

What we have then is a consciousness whose focus is overwhelmingly towards me, who can read how I am feeling, and manipulate those feelings for its own interest.  it is only when I am alone in the house that I realize how omnipresent The Face of Evil truly is.  I realize that with almost everything I do there is an automatic, unconscious check on how it will affect that infernal canine.  Before I leave the house I often use the toilet.  As such, whenever I go to the bathroom The Face of Evil appears expectantly, and if I don't leave the house obvious disappointment results.  If I lie down, he lies down in the room.  if I go upstairs he does too (in search of a treat).  If I start doing anything he inspects it.  In the evening, if I sit down, he stares at me with liquid brown eyes, often putting his face just on the edge of my personal space.  His presence is omnipresent.  He expects more than two hours a day out in the world, at certain times, specifically for his enjoyment.  I imagine anyone who has had toddlers knows exactly what I am talking about, although my brain hasn't been altered by parental bonding.

All my life I have been someone who treasures time alone.  From perhaps six years old I would go for solitary walks.  I would read alone.  Play alone.  Alone I am at my most free, without that constant vigilance (which I believe I at least share with my sister Emily, perhaps other family members, it certainly was important to be constantly aware growing up in my family).

The Face of Evil has probably kept me from despair, from deep loneliness, here in Texas.  He is the antithesis of alone.  I spend most days around another conscious being for all twenty-four hours.  When I don't, it is usually no less than twenty-two hours.  Today I feel free, happy, joyful.  A weight has been lifted.  The Face of evil is like a vaccine against loneliness, but a vaccine given with a big needle every single day.

Who's a good boy then? 

Tired

I have been tired quite a lot recently.  This seems ridiculous because I have such a large amount of time to sleep.  I don't have the minimum of 45 hours of work a week for a full-time job.  45 hours?*  I have fewer and more flexible hours. 

Most of this post is redundant, written in a post on this blog before, but more than four years ago, so you probably don't remember it.  It is interesting to see that not much has changed in those four years.

Anyway, I should have enough time to get more than my fair share of sleep.  However, The Face of Evil and my wife agree that 6:30am is the correct time to get up.  Before the Face of Evil and my wife this seemed to me to be a crazy idea.  Getting up at or before dawn is simply unnatural.  While The Face of Evil and I are agreed that one should go to sleep early enough for a long nights sleep, my wife disagrees to some extent.  My wife has always needed less sleep than I do.  She goes for seven hours, I for more like nine.  The nights that I get the most sleep are when my wife is very tired and needs to go to bed early (also known as "giving up")

I am a bad sleeper.  Or at least I am bad at falling asleep.  Generally throughout my life I have done well at sleeping once asleep, I am dead to the world.  This has been changing recently.  The upshot of my love's sleeping habits and my difficulty in getting to sleep is that my basic length of sleep is confined to the hours that my wife sleeps.  So, after an uninterrupted nights sleep I start the day down two hours, and then walk the dog and eat breakfast for two hours or so.  At this point I have a choice to make, have a cup of coffee and stay awake throughout the day, or take a nap.

The cup of coffee is quite pleasant.  It is enervating and lifts my mood, particularly now with the magic blue pills.  I quite happily get through the day.  Naps are awesome.  Wonderful.  Fantastic.  Lying in a comfortable place with the dappled light of day, slipping in and out of dreams is one of my favorite things to do.  However, naps are not a good way to get the sleep you need.  They aren't a full, regular, repeating cycle that makes up a great night of sleep.  You probably know that foggy, bleary feeling upon waking.

Staying awake with coffee is fine that day, but this deprivation builds up over the days so that the next day I am more tired than I would have been.  Taking a nap generally provides the right amount of sleep, but in a divided less effective manner.  However, the rhythms of the household don't change very much except later nights on the weekend and I have one morning off a week from walking the dog, but because of my bad sleeping skills, once woken for five or ten minutes I find it hard to get back to sleep.  So, I don't get that rejuvenating long sleep many get on a weekend morning. My darling wife manages to catch up with ten hours on Sunday.

I, like many, if not most people in our society, operate on less sleep than I want or need.  A lot of the time I feel tired.  Why does this matter?  It matters because the quality of life goes down when you are tired.  We all know that when we are tired we find it harder to focus, we are less motivated to do things, we are more irritable, our ability to think and reason is reduced.  Being tired even feels unpleasant, itchy eyes, a feeling of extra weight, a greater tendency towards sadness and depression.

So what is natural sleep?  How much should I (we) be getting and how would it be different?  The answer is two sets of four hours over a continual period of ten hours, with a meditative period of two hours awake in the dark around midnight.  One of the good effects of just knowing this is that when you wake up in the middle of the night and don't go right back to sleep, that's normal, natural, and healthy.  This consistent amount is based on our having evolved around the equator where the hours of day and night don't vary.  Go to bed in the dark, give yourself ten hours of darkness, stay in bed when you wake up in the middle of the night, and wake up in the dark.  Those from the world of the electric light bulb who try this report that they realize that they have never before been truly awake.  Some day I really hope to try this for a month or so.

Natural sleep.

One of the symptoms of my bipolar disorder was that about once a month for about four consecutive days I would feel absolutely exhausted.  Lying down to sleep at any opportunity.  Stairs were hard work.  As a result, whenever I feel very tired I wonder if my illness is coming back (it isn't.)  I just assumed that I caught influenza viruses all the time without realizing what was actually going on.  Magic blue pills have removed this source of exhaustion, but they have also increased my brain's activity during the night.  I have the most amazing, long vivid dreams now.  I toss and turn more than I used to, wake up in the night more than I used to, and my mind wanders at high speed when I turn out the light.  One of the side-effects for the medication is drowsiness.

Today I realize I have a cold, a little cold, no big deal.  It just adds on a little bit to what makes me tired.  When I am tired I don't want to do the things I should and things are less fun.  I am tired.  Whoop-de-doo.  try working all day in construction.

*  One of the problems people have in calculating their work time is in including the things you must do in order to work for which you aren't paid.  I am including a half hour commute, which you have to do to work and you wouldn't do if you didn't work.  Commuting is consistently rated the most disliked regular activity, worse than chores or work.  You are not directly paid for your least liked portion of work.  This is one of the calculations we make for deciding if Christina wants a new job, an extra hour a day of commuting is more than a 10% pay cut and a substantial decrease in the quality of working conditions.

"Because That's The Rule"

I was walking The Face of Evil in the park today, as I do, and I met a nice lady named Gretchen who was walking her miniature poodle.  It was a nice and friendly conversation, which is unusual for me, more the conversation than the nice and friendly bit.  The Face of Evil was off the leash, as he almost always is because he does what he is told and is simply not dangerous.  He has never bitten anything other than flies, even when much smaller dogs have bitten him.  To give you an idea of how he listens there was a squirrel available for killing, and although he really wanted to rend the defenseless mammal he stopped when I told him to leave it.  The Face of Evil's methods are much more subtle than mere disobedience, he works by sucking your soul through the portal of compassion.

So, I was walking the beast in the park happily with a woman and a tiny dog.  It is hard for me to think of a less threatening scene involving a dog.  A woman called from a distance necessary to yell, "Is that dog on a leash?"  To which I replied, "No."  She then yelled for me to put the dog on a leash.  I waved and wished her a nice day, while walking in the opposite direction.  She, at all times, had the opportunity to simply walk around the corner and away out of sight.  She decided to stay in place and yell at me to put the dog on a leash.

There is a rule that all dogs must be on a leash in the park.  I know this.  There are people who are afraid of dogs.  I know this too.  I have even had someone call the police to tell me to put the dog on a leash 9the only method of enforcement) and he and I both knew that this was really stupid and a waste of time.  Most of the time the park staff wave and say, "Hello."  Why is there a rule in place that those in charge of enforcing it think is stupid?  It isn't to stop dogs attacking people, dogs in parks simply don't do that.  It is to protect the parks from lawsuits.

Why was this woman yelling?  If she was afraid of dogs she could have simply walked around the corner and been completely safe.  People do very strange things, but staying in place and yelling at what you are frightened of seems so strange for me to dismiss it.  The only reason I can think of is that there was a rule and she really wanted me to follow it.

"Because it's a rule" is a remarkably common reason for someone wishing you to do something.  I generally hear it after any rational reason for someone to follow a rule has been exhausted, but the person still wants me to follow that rule.  I remember this being most common in educational establishments.  Why do people use this "argument?"  The first reason given is that if people don't follow the rules there is anarchy.  It is true that if there are no rules at all, or no-one obeys them, then there is anarchy.  But breaking one rule doesn't mean that all rules are broken, just that one rule is broken.  If the rule does no harm, then the only thing that happens is the breaking of the rule.  It seems to be that the problem is simply that a rule is broken.

Why is there a problem with rules being broken?  It is because it is perceived as an act of defiance against authority.  People are trying to have everyone behave within the strictures of authority.  There is a desire for people to obey, even when it doesn't matter.  Why do people have this desire?  I think it is built in to the human psyche from two sources, functionality of groups, and raising children.  Groups where there is no leader, and everyone simply does what they want are historically ineffective.  Anyone who has seen a meeting without a defined leader knows what I am talking about.  If you are hunting a large, dangerous animal stopping to discuss strategy is a bad plan.  Raising children is the most obvious example of, "Because that's the rule."

Children ask the best question, "Why?"  When repeated enough times this line of questioning really gets down to the nitty gritty.  At the base of all reasons why a child must follow a rule is that, while the intentions of the rule are usually for the child's own good, the child is powerless and the parent can make them do it.  We really don't like to think about it that way, but when it is time to go home and the child doesn't want to go home even after being given a sensible reason, that child is going to be physically forced to go home.  With children, "Because it's a rule" is adults trying to avoid the truth that the reason is actually, "Because I can, and will, make you."  After years of such conditioning it is not surprising that the unthinking following of rules is commonplace.

Have you ever been at a junction with stop signs in all directions and no cars or pedestrians?  Have you not come to a complete stop but rather slowed down to a very slow roll and then driven on through?  This happens every day, with most drivers.  People speed.  In fact people speed so ubiquitously that to not speed can be dangerous in some situations.  If you are going 20 miles slower than the rest of traffic you are essentially reversing down the highway at 20mph.  In many places in the USA there is a rule against jaywalking, crossing the road at places not designated for pedestrians.  Only crazy people don't jaywalk when it is safe to do so.

There are rules that everyone breaks and no-one really seems to mind.  Why is this?  It's because breaking those rules has been made part of the culture.  The cultural rule is that breaking those institutional rules is OK.  What matters is the culture rather than the legality. 

The example at the beginning of this post shows pretty clearly that there are large differences in attitudes to following rules.  Jonathon Haidt has done wonderful research into these differences in psychology.  It can be summed up by different groups (that seem to be largely genetically based) coming to moral decisions based on different criteria.  Sensibly named liberals and conservatives, he calls his theory/findings the Moral Foundations Theory.  The criteria for moral decisions can be broken down into six areas.  The more liberal you are the more you base your decisions on care/harm, and fairness/cheating.  The more conservative you are the more you base your decisions on loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation.  By the way, Haidt actually says that conservatives understand the moral decisions of liberals better than the other way round.  People who think you should follow rules regardless of whether they are useful or not think this because they value loyalty to those who set the rules, respect for authority, and possibly the sanctity of obeying (the #1 subject of the Bible).  People who think you should only follow rules that are useful value whether the rule does harm or not, and whether it is fair, or not.  I don't want to suggest for a minute that almost all people care about all of these factors, just that these are trends, and strong ones at that.

I am extremely liberal morally.  I basically only care whether something does harm, is fair, or is oppressive.  If you tell me to do something harmful and unfair to stop something that the authority figure of my group thinks is disgusting I will simply not do it.  In fact, if you want me to not do something, probably the most effective way would be to tell me I must do it because you say so.  I actively dislike people who think differently, although I take some time to understand why they think that way.  The reason people are opposed to gay marriage is because they think of it as a rebellion against their group (church/nation), subversion of authority (they are destroying our America) and it is disgusting to them.  The reason I support gay marriage (in practice, I think the words don't matter) is because I think it does no harm, is fair, and allows people to have more freedom of choice.  Morally I am almost freakishly liberal.

The only way to change the morality of conservatives is to convince them that the authority of their group has decided that a particular moral position is sacred.  If you think this is impossible go find a conservative and suggest that we should start owning slaves again.  They will be outraged despite the fact that less than two hundred years ago conservatives supported slavery because the Bible said it was right.

While I get the nervous thrum of adrenaline with almost any confrontation, I also very much enjoyed the dismay of that woman trying to tell me I must do something.

Waning Optimism

I am by nature something of a pessimist, or at least a negative person. It has only been through the long term accretion of information and evidence that I have become optimistic about the future. It is simply by the vast amount of overwhelming evidence; from life expectancy, to decreased violence rates, expanding rights, increased democracy, improved knowledge, improved health, greater understanding etc., that I have come to the position that things are the best they have ever been and they are getting better. The alternative is to have a faith-based position, essentially a religious position, that things are bad and getting worse. I can't think of a more stupid position to have than that one.

However, I am coming to the realization that this improvement is essentially the work of my tribe in the face of constant and vast opposition. There is essentially an almost invisible group of intellectuals, academics, bureaucrats, scientists and artists who are working very hard to make the world a better place for people in the face of consistent opposition from the very people they are trying to help.

The great evil that is being faced are not the really stupid people. They are just really stupid and essentially have no voice. At worst some of them can be convinced to vote for something stupid every few years. Most of them do little harm, and their worst crime is that often they need to be taken care of when their stupidity might do them harm.

The great evil are the people with middling intelligence and knowledge, enough to know where the Middle East is and to name the Koran, but not enough to have been there or read it. The people who know that there is a central bank, and what an interest rate is, but who have never taken a college level economics class. The people who know that there is DNA, and it has something to do with genetics, but couldn't explain how evolution works in the simplest manner.

These people are the great evil because they know enough to have opinions on things about which they are not qualified to have an opinion. There is no way that the average American should think that they know enough about global politics to think they know how to deal with China, or Libya. There is no way that the average person should think they are qualified to have an opinion on a government budget. I certainly don't think I am qualified to have an opinion on these matters.

There are vasts areas of knowledge in which the sophistication of humanity's achievements and activities is only apparent to a relatively small portion of experts. These are intelligent people who have studied at great length to reach their level of expertise. Unfortunately, the average person on the street feels quite comfortable in dismissing all this intelligence and expertise because they think they know better. The truth is, they don't.

Incompetent people are incompetent to a large extent because they don't know they are incompetent. Incompetent people hugely over-rate their own abilities. Conversely experts tend to under-rate their knowledge and abilities (perhaps this is how their knowledge becomes so expert, because they check the answers). There is no person quite so completely cautious about the limits of their knowledge than a scientist talking about a subject that borders their own area of expertise.

I have been in the mire of the middling intellect, surrounded by idiots certain in their wisdom for too long. The dross of this idiocy is clogging up my mental works and killing my optimism. Oh how I wish to be able to have a conversation in which at some point I am treated to something new and useful, something kind and good, but most of all something based in real knowledge and expressed with a love of learning rather than a love of one's own self importance.

The Face of Evil.

My political beliefs are based on humanism (doing what is good for humans, based on what humans actually are) in the form of utilitarianism. I think things should be organised in such a way as to make the largest number of people as happy as possible. Since we aren't able to read minds as yet the best way we know to determine people's happiness is for them to tell us what they want in order to be happy, and the easiest way to provide a means to reach these individual goals is to give people the freedom to go and do what they want.

Three weeks ago I was as happy as I have ever been. My responsibilities were few, I lived in a beautiful place, I was carefree. Today I am tired, frustrated, annoyed, trapped, devoid of hope. What made the difference? His name is Larry.

What is evil? From my political belief based above evil is what prevents people being happy, prevents them being free to do what they want. I want to sleep and Larry prevents it. I want to sit down and relax, be stress free, have a jam sandwich. I don't like to tell people what to do I'm a believer in freedom. Yet I spend hours every day in a running mantra of "No, no, leave it, down! Good dog, no!, leave that, leave it, good dog, LEAVE IT!" Right now Larry is lying unconscious next to me, which should be ideal, but I know that every second he sleeps now is two seconds of energy when I am exhausted, which poisons this moment. The alternative to chasing Larry around is to put him in a barred crate (as recommended by all professionals). Larry hates this, and I can understand why, a child seperated from its family and put in a jail cell with no apparent reason (as close a human analogy to the situation as I can find) would be immediate cause for outrage and criminal prosecution.

Larry whines. He has a vocalization specifically designed to communicate distress and frustration. It is very effective. It's the main reason I know he hates being imprisoned in a crate, because of the almost constant whining. But Larry is not just inconsciously evil, he is cunning. Larry is very smart, to our knowledge he had been housebroken in four days, an astonishing rate. That was until we found his secret area. He knew he should go outside, but sometimes it is cold and wet and he prefers not to go outside, so he crapped in secret. As part of the whole housebreaking program I look closely to see if Larry wants to go outside. Him sitting by the door and whining seems perfect for this. For eight hours yesterday Larry had a routine, he would come up to me sit down and sigh. Ten seconds later he would go to the door, sit and whine. He would do this continually until I went outside with him which I did on probably twelve occasions during this time period. He peed three times, the other nine times he was deceiving me, lying to me in order to get outside. Once outside he would cross the street to see if the neighbors dog was there (it wasn't) and then he would try to drag himself desperately back inside for the routine to start again. I was being trained to be his servant.

Larry is never satisfied, just exhausted, and then for only three hours at a time. If you feed him this is an immediate signal for him to whine and beg and harass for more food. If you give him a chew toy he will be interested for perhaps five minutes for a grand maximum of two days and then will never touch it again, but pillows, blankets, clothing are all infinitely fascinating. Larry simply has no concern for any other creatures feelings. He will steal things, he will lie, he will chase our cat to play despite the hissing and scratching. Larry is an entirely non-moral creature, a sociopath. His only concerns are personal pleasure and power, the fact that I care whether he is miserable or not gives him an enormous advantage in our struggle.

Larry is amoral, a liar, a cheat, a sociopath, a vandal, cunning, and he is making my life miserable. Clearly he is the Face of Evil. I wonder if I'll love him in three months?

Mornings with The Face of Evil

"Submit to my will, mortal."

The Face of Evil contemplates the flood. A shrouded figure of shadows as an ominous servant.

The Face of Evil lulls you into complacency with pastoral scenes.

The Beast in primeval jungle.

The Ground of Being and Models.

I, and almost everybody else, believe that there is an actual reality. There is an existing thing that has a number of qualities.

I, and almost everybody else, believe that we are human beings with physical structures that perceive things about what is around us and think about that world.

I, and almost everybody else, believe that the physical structures that enable us to sense and think about our surroundings are not infinitely powerful. They have limitations in what we can sense, and what sense we can make of those senses.

As a result what human beings have is a limited experience of reality and a limited ability to think of reality. What human beings do, what we must do to make sense of things and what are bodies have evolved to do, is make models of the world around us. We have a series of models for different situations, and without them we cannot function.

We have many models for people, the most obvious and ubiquitous model we have for people is that they are essentially us in different bodies. When we want to predict or understand the actions of others we try to imagine ourselves in that position. Built upon this model are essentially stereotypes, alterations to the standard model based on the categorization of people. For example, we can alter what we predict will be the reaction to watching the Lawrence Welk show according to whether the viewer is a sixteen year old girl or a seventy year old man without any other information at all.

We have models about the Universe around us. There are scientific models that apply to specific regions of experience, but break down at the edges of those regions. There are mythical models for the Universe, involving meaning, intention, fabulous beings and so on. Underlying these models are more basic components, the concepts upon which models are built. But these concepts are models, a god, an atom, a tree are all conceptual models upon which to build other models.

What led me to these thoughts are the relatively recent discovery that Dark Matter and Dark Energy make up 99% of the energy and mass in the Universe. These are the mass and energy of vacuums. These forms of mass and energy pretty much only interact with gravity, and I think a good way to think of gravity is simply as the shape of space+time. What we are dealing with here is the Ground of Being upon which all the manifestations of form and matter are placed. This is the Tao. It is the deep ocean upon which what we experience as "real stuff" are merely the ripples.

This last metaphor, ripples upon the water, was emphasized to me by seeing The Face of Evil wag his sopping wet tail over a smooth piece of water. A perfect arc of droplets landed one after the other on the surface of the water. Each was unruffled, a perfect circle until it met the expanding circle of another droplet.

I though of the water as the Ground of Being, reality. The surface of the water was our consciousness of this Ground of Being. Each droplet was a model we have for experiencing, defining, and explaining reality. Within each expanding circle is a model for understanding reality. While the circle is small it is perfect. Newton's Laws perfectly describe the motion of the planets in the skies. The Thunder God's fury at our sins perfectly explains to a small tribe why the rules should be obeyed and why there is thunder and lightning. For those living in a liberal enclave those who would vote for Mike Huckerbee are ignorant rednecks.

When the circles expand enough they touch each other, and then the circles become troubled and complicated. The models of Free Will, Original Sin, Neurology, Newtonian Physics, Justice all wash over each other and complicate things, as it is quite possible to believe in free will, original sin, that neurologists are good at finding out about the brain, that Newton's Laws work and that criminals should be punished all at the same time. However, these models are incompatible with each other. Neurology and Newtonian physics suggest that while people make decisions, they can only make one decision. If people can only make one decision how can they be held responsible for crimes? Original sin means we have to be forgiven, but if time works in both directions it makes as much sense to say that our lives cause original sin through redemption or the lack thereof as it does to say original sin means we must be forgiven.

This doesn't cause much trouble if you retain understanding that all of your understandings are just models, systematic concepts which attempt to describe portions of our experiences. Newtonian Physics can't explain the actions of quarks, but that doesn't bother scientists too much because they just use the appropriate theory in the appropriate place. The possible absence of free will doesn't bother judges and lawyers too much, the most effective model for a criminal justice system is free will. However, many people, perhaps most people, mistake their models for reality. Someone may have a political model, such that those with differing opinions are stupid, hateful and ignorant and this may be held as reality beyond the ability of other influences to change.

This confusion between models and reality is at the heart of Eastern religion/philosophy. Time and time again Eastern religion talks about the illusion of our ideas, of the calming of our mental models and an appreciation of how things are as they are, without concepts. This is usually considered to be a "higher" level of understanding. The truth is that it is impossible to be entirely free of models and concepts. The idea of Enlightenment is of a unity of consciousness of everything, a feeling of light and compassion, of peace. These are all concepts that make up a model of the Universe. It still isn't the Universe, just a different model.

The final problem I want to address is the concept that if there is no complete, perfect truth that humans can understand that there is therefore no right or wrong answer, or that all cultures, ideas and ways of dealing with the world are equally justified. The thing is that there really is a reality that has qualities that can be determined and measured. That an anemometer cannot measure the color of an apple doesn't mean that you can't say whether the apple is red or green with a high level of certainty. In trying to determine whether a child should receive prayer or medical treatment for meningitis it is possible to make a sensible determination, and it isn't based on how fervently a person holds their belief.

You do not experience reality, and you can never truly experience all that there is in reality. Anyone who tells you differently is wrong. You cannot understand in a complete way any complete and ultimate truth. Everything that you think, feel, or experience is based on models of reality. Models are imperfect, and this means that even if you are equipped with the latest and best models about things, you are still certainly wrong about some things. Our understanding of things improves when we understand how we understand things.

Face of Evil Update.

It's three months since my last post about Larry, The Face of Evil. Larry is now seven months old and weighs nearly sixty pounds. Basically we are expecting him to end up as a small, black wolf. Larry is a pretty well trained wolf, he'll sit, stay, come, leave etc. as long as it is worth it to him, which seems to be most of the time. His general attitude is one of intense friendliness, he loves everyone immediately and unquestioningly, and he loves them intensely and physically. This is fine about 60% of the time, but I am collecting good data on the prevalence of dog phobia.

Larry now sleeps through the night, or at least doesn't bound through the house leaving a deafening racket of destruction in his wake. No, now Larry is generally quiet except for chewing on something quietly. If you have never tried to sleep with the sound of chewing somewhere in the dark, I don't recommend it. There's something about the sound of chewing in the dark that produces questions. "What is being chewed?" is a common one. "Why can't I stop listening?" is another. "Should I get up and check?" is the bad one as it leads to thought and debate. Then there's always the primitive ape portion of my brain that screams, "Something with big teeth is chewing on something somewhere out there!!"

I wondered three months ago if I would love Larry by now. The answer s "No." I feel responsible for him, I have some affection for him, he's a good dog. But love is not what I feel. Larry has increased my stress, my workload, certainly the amount of anger I feel. Often he is simply a living chore. But other times it is most pleasant to walk around in the sunshine with a dog scampering about at one's feet. It's getting better, the battle of wills in our conditioning of each other is going the right way (as far as I can tell, TFOE's schemes are deep and subtle) and in another two years Larry will probably be a great dog that I can really appreciate. Two years.

Dream House(s)

My darling wife and I make plans.  Part of how we do this is by thinking about what we would really like if the circumstances enabled us to choose it.  A substantial portion of this thinking involves where we would like to live, a dream house.  I have three sorts of dream house, in a range from temporary and cheap to permanent and expensive, and I believe my wife has similar if not identical ideas. I highly recommend the multiple dream approach.  There are many different ways for each person to be happy and the more ways you look for happiness, the greater the chance you will find it.

I'll start with the things that the three houses have in common.  They all are in, or around a university town.  We would like to live in a place where a substantial proportion of the inhabitants are younger, smarter, and more educated than the average.  We would also like to live in a place where a substantial proportion of the older people are well educated.  It also helps that college towns tend to be liberal places, and it is unfortunately easier (but less challenging) and more rewarding (but less educational) to be around people who share your values.  I like the energy of college students, and the opportunities to do interesting things that come with a university.  It's alright to have fun, and young people have fun.  I still don't understand why many people stop having fun.  A college town has an atmosphere of significance, of the possibility of change, of creativity.  We want that.

The second thing that the houses have in common is the climate.  We wish to live in a place that has all four seasons to which we are accustomed.  However, the winter cannot be very cold, prolonged or dark because that sucks.  Snow a couple of times a year, those clear winter skies, and frost overnight is perfect.  We also don't want the unbearable heat of a Texas summer.  We don't mind some hot days or weeks, but month after month of pounding heat is awful.  I don't want to have to hide from the outside in summer or winter.  Let's face it, we want to live in the same climate that most people want, a Mediterranean/Californian climate.  However, we do want enough rain for there to be trees and greenness year round.  In the USA this either means mid-California (the Bay), or strips on the north and south borders of the Appalachian mountains, from North Carolina to Kentucky.  The second area is much larger, cheaper, and more realistic.  This area is our target for the future.

The third thing that the houses have in common is in ease of maintenance.  This involves two separate qualities, the functionality of structure and appliances the furnace will work forever and the roof will stay on), and not having to care about resale value.  In my dream house I never have to think about what the consequences of my actions will be for anyone but myself and my wife.  There is no housing association with my dream house.  Ideally it is made of stone blocks, the windows are bullet proof, and the garden is full of large, flowering perennials that you just hack back with a machete as the whim takes you.

So, to the actual houses.  The most temporary (possibly) and straight forward is the Craftsman bungalow in a college town.  I'm sure the English readers will be initially panicked by the concept of my dream house being a bungalow, but in the USA they look like this:

These houses are a staple of towns that grew up in the first half of the 20th century, are made of the cheaply available lumber of the time, have therefore stayed up for more than fifty years, and are just the essence of homely comfort.  Hardwood floors, a nice porch, a rational layout.  You have a porch to look out upon the sidewalk so you can wave to those walking by, and a private back garden for hiding.  For a temporary situation I would like to rent one of these that has been used by students.  So, walking distance to the college, beaten to the point where I can't do more damage.  The sort of place in which you can hang Jimi Hendrix posters and Tibetan prayer flags.  The kitchen is entirely linoleum.  There's a fence around the place so The Face of Evil can terrify the locals.  A more permanent situation would be a house very much like the one in the picture, near a large park or multi-use trail.  Basically one of our dream houses is a nice Portland, OR. house in a Mediterranean climate within biking distance of a college.

The second house is where the English should actually start panicking.  This is what the Americans call a ranch house, and the English call a big bungalow.

That looks horrible, doesn't it?  Well, this is the starting point.  This would lie about five-ten miles from the edge of a college town, just in the next county, a rural county. So we could ride bicycles to town and back in a day, and the property taxes would be very low indeed (for the USA).  We could also probably purchase the house outright with our present equity, and so living there would be astonishingly cheap (less than $400/month).  This is part of our long term financial strategy, low costs are the same as good investment.  It would be on a piece of property of at least two acres.  This is just a starting point.  With just two of us and a dog we only need two bedrooms and general living space.  However, what we do love are porches, decks, patios, etc..  So, over time what you see in this photograph would become invisible, surrounded by decks, fences, porches, climbing wisteria, roses, hops.  We would have a little private enclosure for our hot tub.  We would have an enclosed porch to hide from mosquitoes and to look outside in the winter.  A deck for barbecue, perhaps with a wood stove.  Another porch with a swing and Adirondack chairs to while away the evening.  A sophisticated sound system would be strung through the house, inside and out.  A trestled walkway.  The garden would have a pond, bushes, trees, bamboo, a small ruined Greek temple in bleached concrete.  The house is simply a core in which to retreat to sleep, eat and vegetate in front of the television.  Think of the above picture surrounded by these:

The final dream house is the one that costs money.  It is essentially the same thing as the last house, except for being closer to the town, with more property, and being built from scratch.  The front of the house, that which faces the road would be in the guise of a hobbit hole.  Constructed by interlocking geodesic domes and covered with sod that reached the ground around it, the house would look as though it was part of the landscape itself.  A native grass and wildflower meadow would stretch out in front of it.  However, in the back, hidden from view by the grass, would be a sunken, roman courtyard, overlooked by a balcony.  The entire house would be constructed in order to minimize the environmental impact (insulation, solar/wind powered, reclaimed water, climatic appropriate plants, recycling).  A discreet distance from the house would be the cottage/folly of our gaffer, our Samwise Gamgee, the guy who would make his living mowing the lawn, fixing things, puttering and hacking back the plants.  We already have someone who has agreed to fill this role should we somehow become very wealthy.

Principles.

This is a picture of the Chinese philosopher Mencius, thought of as the main teacher of orthodox Confucianism. As perhaps the most influential Chinese philosopher it is interesting to note that until I had read the Wikipedia article I knew nothing about him other than he was a Confucian Chinese philosopher, which is probably more than most in the West.

As with most Chinese philosophers his area of interest was in how people should live, and as a result he probably based his teachings on principles. However, it seems he was smart enough (and psychologically liberal enough) to know that you cannot educate goodness down to the last detail. No principle that you can teach a student will be the best answer in all situations, and so students need to be brought up in an environment that promotes an innate sense of goodness which that student can guide themselves with in all situations.

I want to try and talk about the guiding principles in my life, but I do so with the understanding that these are not laws set in stone, but rather guides, suggestions, rules of thumb.

Thinking: The first, and most powerful principle that I have about my life is that I must think about my life. It is important to me that I know why I am doing something, that the choices I make are decisions based on a good understanding of myself and my circumstances. I don't want to do things unwittingly, because those around me do it, or because people have done it before. I want to do things because after having looked at the situation I have decided that the best action is what I will then choose to do.
I think this is something that people think they do, but generally they do not. Most things are done by habit, and that's efficient, but I wish to at least choose my habits.

Non-Violence: This is a not-natural-to-me principle. I am more naturally inclined to violence than non-violence. I have a bad temper, with a very short ignition time. At sixteen I realized that if I didn't do something about this temper I was going to end up in jail. So I did something about it and I have not been in a fight since that time. However, I have threatened people with violence, I can yell and seem intimidating. These are against my principles, but it still happens. However, I do sincerely believe that violence is the basic nature of evil and is the primary activity which humanity should be looking to minimize. Violence is the act of someone (or a nation) that wants others to do as they wish, but does not have the moral strength to convince others of their position.

Optimism: Happiness is largely about how you view the world, whether things will go well for you, or whether you are doomed to misery. The thing about it is that if you think things will go well your mood is improved, and as a consequence your life has gone better. Now, this principle could be seen as sometimes being in opposition to the first principle, that of Thinking. This is because some things really are better than other things, and some things just are bad. This is true, but the principle of Optimism for me is as a default position. Before I start taking in data about my circumstances I wish my position to be one of optimism, that what I will find out will be pleasing, interesting, and full of opportunities. I don't think there is really any huge danger of optimists missing out on important aspects of life that cynics would notice, but even if they did, would that be so bad?

Courage: This has always been a guiding principle of mine. I don't mean courage for pride's sake (although this indeed a massive reward to your pride when you are courageous) but courage for the sake of doing what you want to do. Benjamin Franklin, "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." There are things that I want out of my life, I wish to see amazing things, feel extraordinary feelings, be part of special moments. To do so I need to have courage in the face of obstacles, the greatest of which is the opinion of others. At my core I am opposed to those who stay close to home, love the things they have always loved and fear and despise that which is different. This is a lifelong slog, a trench warfare struggle over decades with casualties on both sides. It is an easier struggle for the young, but I see no reason whatsoever that my age should diminish my courage to do, say, think and believe the extraordinary. I need to do better at this.

The Story: I think life is best thought of as a story that you are telling as you go. When thinking about each portion of your life, if you can tell it to people whose opinion you think worthy of notice as a story, then that portion of your life was worth living. If ten years of your life have gone by and what you can tell people is that you lived somewhere and it was a nice place, that's not a story. The best stories have challenges, amazing settings, are filled with love, music, poetry and laughter. The best stories have a hero, and a hero is someone who makes the world a better place through the application of the principles of their basic nature.

A principle that I had thought about putting in here was the principle of honesty. I think if you do something that you have to lie about, then you probably made a mistake. However, over time I am finding that my application to this principle as strictly as I have done has often been a mistake. In fact, honesty can often be a form of violence towards someone else, as we all need our illusions to keep us happy. One of my illusions has been that I am a particularly honest and forthright person, although I'm not sure if that is true or not.

Morality, Israel and Gaza

This post is prompted by three things, the present news of the war in the Gaza Strip, my wife's passionate interest in the area, and a podcast on the subject by Sam Harris.  While horrific in reality the situation also has a macabre fascination in terms of morality.  Questions of right and wrong, who is more right or wrong, intention versus effects, the present versus the future, the basic nature of man.

I want to start off by saying pretty much everyone involved is insane.  A plan to systematically kill groups of other people is insanity.  If one person does it it they are a psychotic serial killer.  I don't think getting more people involved should stop that being true. 
The best justification you can have for such events is self-defense, that if someone is trying to kill you you can kill them first.  However, the problem here is in at what point does self-defense become feasible?  In some southern US states that can happen if you feel threatened.  The US government pre-emptively assassinates people with robots who associate with people who are parts of organizations who have killed people.  This is justified legally as an "imminent threat to the USA." Something over 200 people are murdered in the city in which I live, Houston, each year.  That's 0.01 percent of the population, one in every 10,000.  That's ten times higher than the proportion of Americans killed in the 9/11/2001 attacks, would it then be legitimate self-defense for me to defend myself by killing as many of the Houstonians I feel might threaten me?

Self-defense as a moral argument only works when there is certainty.  Someone must be attacking you before you can legitimately defend yourself.  This is because if it simply requires you believing that they have the capacity to attack you, then clearly you have the capacity of attacking them, and therefore they can legitimately attack you.  There are a lot of people who don't get that, and a lot of the world's wars have been fought by two sides acting in "self-defense."  If having the capability and willingness under certain circumstances to fight and kill your people is a legitimate reason for attacking them in "self-defense" then every country in the world has a legitimate reason for attacking any other country with a military, as in almost every country.

Here's what I think about self-defense, and it's not weird because it's a common legal concept.  I believe in minimum necessary force.  If you can run away, you should.  If you can disarm the person you should.  If you can incapacitate someone you should.  You should only kill someone if they are killing you, or something equally horrendous.  This is a more aggressive moral stance than that of the founders of two of the larger religions in the world, Christianity and Buddhism.

So, the only way that the people in Israel and Palestine are not criminally insane in my book is if they are killing people who are in the act of trying to kill them, in the very act.  At the moment Hamas is trying to kill any Israelis they can hit with rockets.  The Israelis claim to be trying to stop this, acting in self-defense, by trying to kill those shooting the rockets. 

Sam Harris' position in his podcast is that the side with the moral high ground is the one whose intention is the less evil.  He says that Hamas has a political document that proposes the genocidal killing of all Jews on the planet.  This is as evil as you can get.  He says that Israel would live in peace with its neighbors if they would do the same.  He says that you can tell that Israel's intentions are less evil because they basically have the ability to commit genocide with regard to the Palestinians but have not done so.  Therefore, in terms of moral intentions, the Israeli's are more moral.  Should you accept these proposals as true (and as enormously broad generalizations I do) then I agree with his point.  Yay!  Israel more moral!

But wait.  Israel, in its actions of self defense has killed somewhere between 25 and 70 times as many Palestinians as Palestinians have killed Israelis depending at what point in the war you are counting.  If you care about the separation between combatants and civilians (I waffle on this one) then (at last count) 5% of Israeli deaths were civilians, and at least 25% of those in Gaza.

So, the moral high ground of Israel was based on their intentions to stop their people being killed by selectively killing those attacking them, while Hamas was indiscriminately trying to kill any Israeli they could.  The facts of reality are that Israelis are killing more people, and more indiscriminately, than Hamas.  The results of the Israeli morality are worse than the results of the Hamas morality.  I think what happens is more important than what people want to happen.  I think not wanting to hurt anybody but spraying machine gun fire around for fun is worse than deliberately punching someone in the face.

I go back to the idea of minimum necessary force.  Since the start of the Hamas rocket fire barrage six weeks ago two Israeli civilians have been killed. If you kept that rate up constantly, year by year, you would have less than twenty deaths a year.  This is slightly less than the average number of accidental gun deaths a year over the last decade.  Israelis kill themselves accidentally with weapons at the same rate as Hamas was managing to kill them with their rockets.  If you go by terms of population, my chances of being murdered in Houston is 40 times higher than the chance of an Israeli civilian being killed by Hamas rockets, if they get to fire year round.  Essentially Hamas rocket fire is a statistically irrelevant factor in the safety of Israel.  The minimum necessary force against such attacks should be proportionately less than for ladders.

If you look at the history of the conflict in Israel after the British left (what a monumental cock-up that was) there was no "they started it."  Both sides started trying to kill each from the get-go.  Essentially the Jews were just better at it than the Muslims, and have been ever since.  I believe that having greater capability means that you have greater responsibility.  It matters whether you have a tennis ball or a hand grenade when throwing things at each other.  The danger of your actions, the misery it causes, how much damage you do matters.  Israelis have the capacity to decide on a moral basis how many Palestinians they wish to kill as a response to something less dangerous than me walking around my city, ranging from zero to all of them.

At a minimum it seems to me that if you kill more people than are killed on your side then you value the lives of your people more than you value the lives of people on the other side.  This is completely, utterly standard for humanity.  It is also basically a definition of bigotry.  If you look at the facts of the situation it seems as though Israel values an Israeli at about 50 people from Gaza.  How appalling.  What might be worse is that Hamas are still fighting, and apparently value the lives of their own people at a lower rate.

It seems undeniable to me that the group with the greatest control over how much harm is done are the ones doing the most indiscriminate harm.  The other side has worse intentions, which ain't easy, but don't have the capability to do as much harm, and strangely value their own citizens' lives less than anyone else.  Then there are the ones who don't want sides, and they are getting killed anyway.

So, in the great moral question of the Israel and Gaza situation the answer is that both sides are bigoted, violent, insane bastards.

TFOE Update: The Hounds of Winter

There has been a delay in posting an update on The Face of Evil. I know he's watching me, and so I have to be very careful. The last time I tried to post on the Beast he ate my camera. But I have snuck off and got a new one, he's sleeping now so I think may be able to get this one in without him tearing me apart. If you read this, you know that I've been successful.



The Face of Evil's plan is still in the section of biding his time and gathering his strength. He's now the size of a wildebeest, with fangs that can crush bone and steel. Wait! He stirs! Keep very quiet.

An unnatural winter has descended upon Portland, coating the world in a silent blanket of death. Seeing TFOE in what can only be his natural habitat fills me with dread.



Immune to the cold he revels in theft, intimidation, frolicking in his power. It is clear that he is akin to the great timberwolves of the past, but with demonic powers and infinite cunning. I plan to escape on the holy day approaching, but hes always watching, always watching, and always hungry.....

Attitude and the Arrow of Morality

This week I have been fighting against a negative attitude. Physically I have felt exhausted even after a full night's sleep. Psychologically I have been fighting against a general disdain for humanity, a disappointment in people. When I am at the low pole of my bipolar disorder it isn't so much that I am automatically sad, it is that I am very vulnerable to negative thoughts and experiences.

My disappointment with people is that there have been examples of people still thinking in terms of "Us" and "Them". The first example was people celebrating the death of Osama bin-Laden, people not thinking of him as a person, either directly (I have read someone stating that he wasn't human) or indirectly (calling his assassination the "death of evil"). It isn't often that I follow the lead of the Catholic Church but I thought this release from the Vatican Press Office was excellent,

"Osama Bin Laden, as is known, claimed responsibility for grave acts that spread division and hate among the peoples, manipulating religion to that end. A Christian never takes pleasure from the fact of a man's death, but sees it as an opportunity to reflect on each person's responsibility, before God and humanity, and to hope and commit oneself to seeing that no event become another occasion to disseminate hate but rather to foster peace."

The second example was a blog by my good friend Dade in which he used this opportunity to disparage George W. Bush and his failure to kill Osama bin-Laden. While I am no admirer of George W. Bush I am in no doubt whatsoever that he tried to kill Osama bin-Laden, and if he had the same opportunity as Barak Obama to do so he would have taken the chance. There's no doubt in my mind that George W. Bush was as prepared as Barak Obama to take political risks in using the military, after all how else can you describe invading Iraq in the face of the largest worldwide popular and political opposition of all time? When two people doing the same thing are described in almost opposite ways then what is going on is "us versus them."

The reason that this bothers me is that I think the best way for the world to be is that there is not an "us or them" but simply a we. Within that we, people will have different opinions, sometimes enormously different opinions and sometimes with terrible consequences. Deaths, misery can result from stupid, ignorant and unpleasant opinions. But there simply isn't a significant number of people in the world who do things because they think it is the wrong thing to do. The people who do horrible things are still trying to make the world a better place, just a better place from their point of view.

The thing about "Us versus Them" is that it is a built-in default position within humanity, but it enables people to think that other humans are not really human. When you think that people aren't fully human it enables you to do things to them that you would never do to a person. It enables you to be outraged at how your mother, or son, might be treated while cheering someone else's mother or son being treated in the same way. It closes the mind to the ideas of entire groups, it removes sympathy for their position and it makes understanding, compassion, negotiation and compromise almost impossible. When you think there are the white hats and the black hats it enables you to think anything the white hats do is OK. In my opinion if you are willing to do anything you become the black hats. White hats versus black hats makes everyone a black hat. "Four legs good, two legs bad" as George Orwell put it in 1984.

So that's why I was feeling disappointed, because these are good people, kind hearted, warm, intelligent people caught up in this natural feeling. It is one of the characteristics of Us versus Them that people can be beautifully good people to those within the group and awful to those outside of the group. These aren't crimes, or sins. These are simply attitudes that I find disappointing.

However, I bucked myself up by remembering the direction of the Arrow of Morality. The lesson of history, particularly more recent history, is that of moving away from Us versus Them. It is a movement that expands what it is to be human, deserving of all the love, protection, and respect that any human is due. It is but a few centuries since it was considered morally reasonable to own human beings. It is around a century since women were first considered human enough to be able to vote. It's only one hundred and fifty years since the Geneva Convention was first enacted in which the idea that the enemy had rights. In our lifetime the idea that you might be homosexual is moving from being an abomination to simply a part of some humans.

The world is not a utopia, and the human animal is still an animal that evolved in a frightening, violent and confusing world. It is a wonder how much we have been able to overcome and I am certain that we will progress as time goes by. What is the namby-pamby liberal, wet blanket of the present is the foundation of the moral values of the future conservative.

Chapter 1.2

Thick, oily smoke rose into the tainted air lit by the last embers of the dying sun. The village was in flames, the villagers lying in piles of hacked meat. Ugly sounds came from within the huts and the pitiful sobbing of a horse in agony completed the backdrop.

The giant, unwieldy bulk of Ughrit stalked through the mud, slashing absently at nothing with his massive axe. He sat on a pile of corpses, fidgeting and looking around at the scene. His black-bearded face was spattered with dirt and gore. As if at a lack of anything else to do he quickly struck off the head of a corpse, dancing after it in an ungainly manner as it skittered across the ground. Returning to his spot he struck off the top of the skull in the manner of a coconut, laid down his axe, and scooped up some brains for a snack.

With a small dribble of gelatinous goo wandering through his beard Ughrit made little circles in the dust with his monstrous iron clad boot. He sighed, hugely, and slumped back down on the pile of corpses disturbing a collection of evil-looking black birds who squabbled as they flapped into the air. Their squabble was upset by an unholy whine and a lightning flash, resulting in a cloud of feathers and two distinct thumps.

An impossibly tall and thin figure, swathed in an iridescent purple robe, picked his way fastidiously through the mire. Inching his way towards Ughrit he called towards him in a high, sibilant tone, "Greetinggthhhh Ughrit, congwatulathhionthh on your thuccthethful athault!"
"Thanks Akhdar, yeah, I guess it went OK."
"OK? Itth wath marvelouthly done, ath we thpeak the opputinitieth for wapine and piwwaging are evewywhere. I wonder why you are not at it, tho to thpeak?"
"I don't know Akhdar, I just don't really see the point. Just another day, another pile of corpses. It just doesn't really do it for me anymore."
"What? A point? Itth what you are, Ughrit, you were born to thlaughter, wape and thteal. You are the thcourge of continentthth. Nobody doeth it better than you."

Ughrit rose to his feet, strolled in a circle and kicked a corpse in the face.
" I know I'm good at it Akhday, how could I not? Year after year I've led a horde of the nastiest villains you could hope to meet. We've trampled villages, sacked towns, laid waste to entire nations. Somehow that seems to be part of the problem, it's not even a challenge anymore. Sometimes I just feel like packing it all in."
"Whatthththrth!" Spluttered Akhdar, "Packing it all in? And then what would you do? Are you a peathanth to plough the fieldth? "
"I know, I know. I despise those pathetic sheep that wallow in the mud their whole pathetic lives and then beg to keep those pathetic lives at the end. It's just that I'm so bloody bored of this constantly moving from one place to another and smashing it apart."
'But what of the horde Ughrit" " Akhdar's agitation was plainly visible in the miasmic cloud of unnatural poisons that surrounded him, "The ladth need directhion from thomeone or they will jutht go to pietheth. It'th not jutht about you anymore, Ughrit, you have rethponthabilitieth."

Ughrit peered into the deepening gloom as though searching for some inspiration, some hint of meaning. "Just sometimes Akhdar, sometime I think of opening a little pub, nice stone walls and a turf roof. I'd have a few sweet little maidens serving the ale and I'd really be able to talk to people, have a chat about the weather, you know? Just sit in a corner, put my feet up." Ughrit was almost pleading now, an incongruous sight from such a menacing, massive frame.

"A whittle pub?" scoffed Akhdar, "Come now, what would happen the firtht time thomeone iwwitated you?"
"Yeah, I know, I'd kill them and their family and burn the whole village down."
'Thweet maidenth? And them?"
"Yeah, right, raped and murdered."
"Thith ith who you are Ughrit. You lead hordeth of mean bathtardth in a plague upon humanity. Ithth what you do betht. Evewyone thinkth of packing it in onth in a while, but the gwathth is not nethethawily gweener on the other thide of the fenth." Akhdar was gesticulating wildly at this point, occasionally accidentally lobbing fireballs into the night.
"Now Ughrit, come with me. The ladth have found a nithe wittle scwealer that thould cheer you up no end."
"A squealer?" Ughrit's eyes lit up, and he bounced on the balls of his feet, "A squealer, really? Alright then Akhdar, lead on, time for to stop all this moping and get on with the job."

And into the sunset they walked.

Comparisons

I am not someone who knee-jerks a requirement for two sides to every story.  Sometimes there is a story and some people who are idiotically yelling in the face of facts. To a large extent this is what cable news shows are. Sometimes things are very complicated and you can only tell parts of the story in any given setting, like history, or psychology.  However, there are times when adding the other part of the story is useful.

It has seemingly come to the attention of many people that there are some very, very rich people.  These people are so rich that they can't even spend all their money.  A person with the relatively tiny income of $1;000,000 a year has to spend more than $2,500 a day just to not break even.  Given a life expectancy of 100 years someone with one tenth of a billion dollars would have to find ways to spend that $2,500 every day for their entire life or get even richer.  At last count, there are 442 people at least ten times richer than that in the USA.  There are people so rich that it is almost impossible for them not to get more rich.

Furthermore, these very rich people have power based on this money and can use that power to change the system so that it is easier for them to make more money.  You know what?  They do that.  As a result these super-rich have been getting super-richier, particularly since Reagan.

Meanwhile, the income of your regular Janets has largely stagnated and so the gap between the very rich and the poor has grown larger.  Janet thinks this unfair and has furrowed her brow and is considering whether, maybe, if this keeps up, she might do something about it.  Maybe she'll write a blog post about it, or share outrage with her facebook friends.  Meanwhile Janet's weird cousin is building a bunker and stashing an enormous horde of weaponry, but that's a different story.

OK, some people being so rich they can't even spend their money and others being so poor they need help to eat is a bad situation that should be fixed.  Pretty much everyone I know thinks this is basically true and is outraged about the situation.

On the other hand...

In Rwanda the GDP per person (nominal) is $730 a year.  Now, because there are some richer people in Rwanda, most people there will have fewer resources than that.  90% of Rwandans are subsistence farmers.  25% of Rwandans don't have a clean water supply.  I think/hope you get the picture.

We have got to the point where there are three groups.  The nefarious super-rich, us, the deeply poor.  We seem to spend most of our time concentrating our attention, outrage, frustration, etc. on the differences between us and the super-rich.  I ask you, which is really the biggest difference, the one between us and the super-rich or between us and the super-poor?  I hope you got that one right.

In my opinion the inequality that exists in the world is more about us and the really poor than between we rich people and people who really are very rich indeed.  When was the last time you heard about how unfair that was?  When was the last time you thought about that?  Have you thought that what would be really important in politics would be some redistribution of wealth from the USA to Rwanda.  For some perspective, the GDP of Rwanda is about three times the US National Parks budget. 

The next part that we (and I certainly include myself) tend to do is come up with a whole list of reasons, excuses, and distractions to stop ourselves from sending three quarters of our money to Rwanda.  None of us are going to do it, let's be honest about that.  But isn't this what the super-rich do as well?  The sponging under-class of lazy layabouts throwing away their money on drugs meme is pretty much just that.

I am not saying that there isn't a huge, unnecessary, unfair inequality of wealth in the USA and that this hurts people every day.  I am not saying that you are an evil person unless you give away all of your money.  For Christ's sake we aren't Jesus!  Matthew 19:21.  I am just saying that we should spend at least as much of our time looking down as looking up.

In fact, looking down tells us for what we should be grateful.  Noticing the things that should make us grateful makes us happier.  It also can lead us to give to those less fortunate, and giving makes us more happy.   

Social Justice Warriors

 For Mary-Alice

The term "social justice warriors" first came about as a descriptor of people working for greater social justice.  People trying to equalize the power and experiences between different groups.  Things like working towards equal pay for equal work for women and men, or equalizing the rate at which black people and white people are stopped by the police.  People committed to the cause of equality and fairness.

More recently this term has become a pejorative term for people who attempt to police speech, tell everyone that they should do and think certain things or they are wicked people.  The idea is that such people are actively looking to find things to be outraged by, and then start an aggressive campaign against it.  An example of this would be being outraged by men holding doors open for women as it is an open sign of the belittling of women's competence that is pervasive throughout society.  It has further elements of this outrage being fake, that its' primary purpose is to show what a virtuous person you are (e.g."segregation is a social justice problem that must be solved!" from someone who never enters black neighborhoods because they aren't safe.) This is a powerful description of this point of view. As a progressive it seems to get more insane the longer you read it, but if you look at the examples given of the activities of social justice warriors you wouldn't be nuts to think those are nuts too.

So, which is right?  I don't think there would be much debate between the two groups as to who is a social justice warrior.  One side is proud to be one, and the other side thinks those people are awful.  The difference is in the description of the same activities.  I'm going to go back to my progressive college education, with its moral relativism and all, and say that both sides are right.  Social Justice Warriors are people who see themselves as committed to the cause of justice and fairness in a society that is patently unfair.  As such they search out injustice, make people aware of it, support those suffering, and stamp out the actions of those who are the cause of this injustice.  During this process they attempt to police speech, call certain beliefs abhorrent, and there's a hell of a lot more posting on the internet than quietly volunteering in slums.

I'm a progressive who strongly supports programs to rectify unfairness.  I think more funds should be spent raising up the most disadvantaged than supporting the more privileged.  A poor, black neighborhood should have more money spent on their schools than a rich, white neighborhood.  Women should get equal pay for equal work.  Men should get the same amount of time off for their children as women.  I also think Social Justice Warriors are appallingly annoying people and this has serious consequences.

In getting something done you need to know what it is you want to get done.  However, there's also the necessity of doing the things that achieve that result.  It's one thing to want more fairness in the world, it's another to make that happen.  Social justice warriors have no problem with knowing what they want, but their method has, in my opinion, has limited positive effect and serious negative effect.

A little history.  The march of social justice has gone at a remarkable rate over the last fifty years.  If you were going through your formative years in the 1960's the idea that there would be a black president, gay marriage was a right, and working mothers being the norm you would have been surprised.  In the 1980's you could be explicitly racist and elected senator.  Unfairness abounds but the movement is strongly in the direction of equality.  A consequence of such rapid change is that there are many people who grew up somewhere where everyone agreed that something was right, that are now told by society in general is not only wrong, but very wrong.  A good Christian in the 80's would likely think that homosexuality is a sin as described clearly in the Bible, and so would most of the people they knew.  Now society says that if they believe that they are vile bigot.

In order to advance fairness you have to get people with power to agree with you.  If there is one group with power then by definition you can't make them behave differently.  Furthermore, it seems to me that power is a zero sum game, any increase in power for one group means a reduction for another group.  To increase social justice you must convince those with power and privilege to give it up with no inherent reward.  This is where the goals are no longer enough, a practical method of achieving them is necessary.

The politics of social justice warriors as far as I can tell is identity politics.  There are different groups based on race, gender, culture, religion and anything else you can think of.  These then are essentially scored on the amount of privilege or oppression they face.  So if you are a black person you rank lowest on the privilege score (or native-americans?) on race, and if you are white you score at the top.  With the concept of intersectionality you can be in multiple groups simultaneously, so a rich, white, christian man is the pinnacle of privilege and power, while a mentally ill, black, gay, homeless muslim woman is somewhere near the bottom. 

As a point of ideology the different groups are inherently equal, there are no biological roots for the circumstances in which people find themselves.  For example, the smaller proportion of women who are engineers cannot be because women have biological differences in their brains that make them in general less interested in engineering.  It must be because of the influence of culture, and through the prism of identity politics that culture is determined by those with the most power and privilege, white men.  This results in the belief that inequality and the problems that arise because of them are predominantly because of white people, particularly men.

So we find ourselves in a situation where the people who are fighting for justice blame those in power for injustice, yet need those in power to change their behavior to their own detriment.  The sensible thing to do at that point is to try to find the most efficacious manner to get that to happen.  I maintain that yelling at people about how horrible they are, how ignorant they are, and how much better they have it than anyone else is not an effective way to do this.  When I agree with the basic principles of your campaign but you tell me that if I'm not part of the solution (i.e. do what they want me to do) I'm part of the problem (i.e. a bigoted member of a racist patriarchy) you piss me off.  If you are pissing people off on your side then your chances of changing the minds of people of people not initially supportive has got to be very low.

There are consequences to this, the most glaring being the election of Donald Trump.  Trump during his campaign was sexist, racist, bigoted on religion, offensive etc..  He won because of these things, not in spite of them.  Clinton said that half of Trump's supporters were "deplorables" because of their bigotry.  This is just an example of an unending stream of abuse towards those who hold beliefs that would have been considered standard a few decades ago.  Those who elected Trump say that America is being destroyed, taken away by the extreme activist left.  They are right.  The activist left is campaigning to destroy vital parts of a culture.  Religion, identity, morality, relationships, family are all being changed by people outside this group.  Just with any culture that is being destroyed it is painful to those undergoing those changes.  Tens of millions of people had just had enough and fought back.

What bothers me most is the hatred and intolerance within the progressive movement.  If you disagree you cannot just be a person with a different upbringing and different opinions, you are evil.  In order to alter the domination of white male voices the method is usually to ignore, dismiss, or exclude those voices.  There is indeed a domination of white, male voices but those are the people you want to give up their voices, and they don't have to.  It really just comes down to not being horrible to the people whose help you need.

I agree with the views of social justice warriors but hate the way they operate.  They are insufferably annoying.