Outrage, Offense, Insult, and Disagreement

It seems to me as though people of the present time are extremely good at getting outraged.  I'm not saying that there aren't things to be outraged about, the idea that my country tortures people is one, but I'm saying that people are really good at finding things to be outraged about and then really going for it.

Here are a couple of examples from the world of sport.  The first is the outrage that came as a response to a cyclist, Peter Sagan, pinching the bottom of one of the "hostesses/models/podium girls who are traditionally present at the presentation of the winner's trophy (at least in men's races). 

The second is just from today's news in which the golfer Sergio Garcia, who does not get along with somewhat black golfer Tiger Woods, said,“We will have him ’round every night. We’ll serve fried chicken.”

 Outrage ensued in both of these cases.  The bottom pinch was equated with sexual assault and the "rape culture."  The "fried chicken" comment was taken to be racist.  In both cases the perpetrator apologized profusely.

Now, I understand where the outrage is coming from, sexual assault and racist insults are awful.  You can't go around grabbing women, and you can't use race to insult people, but is that actually what happened?

The models (actually usually called podium girls) on the podium are there for a purpose.  That purpose is the same purpose as the rest of the ceremony, the receiving of flowers, a trophy, and cash.  to the victor go the spoils and the models represent sexual rewards for the strongest man. If you want there to be something unpleasantly sexist, that treats women as sexual objects rather than real people, the ceremony has plenty of that already. His pinching of a bottom doesn't change the whole tenor of the situation.  I would categorize his actions as naughty, a bit impolite, shouldn't do it repeatedly, should be forgotten by tomorrow.  The best response was from a female pro-cyclist, and for me the main problem about the whole thing is that male races have podium girls but female races don't have podium boys, neither or both people.

As for fried chicken, does anyone really think Sergio Garcia (a Spaniard) was subtly inserting a racist slur familiar largely to Americans who bizarrely connect black people with fried chicken?  Or perhaps he simply said the first thing to eat that came into his head?  My position is that he probably made a mistake, possibly a mistake that he could only have realized afterwards.  I think Tiger Woods' position, "The comment that was made wasn’t silly. It was wrong, hurtful and clearly inappropriate" to be silly.

That's a long time to spend on those two situations, but then that's kind of the point.  Serious outrage, international news over a bit of naughtiness and a poor dinner suggestion.  This stuff is everywhere.  Outrage that makers of GMO food don't want to have to label their food as GMO even though it has been determined to be equivalent (i.e. same ingredients) to non-GMO by the government. Atheists insulted by religious people thinking that without religion there are no morals.  Offended that you aren't impressed by the political views of a particular geographical region.

Has it always been this way?  Has it simply been that before the internet information was so homogenous that all the the things people might be offended about where happening elsewhere?  Are people actively seeking things to get upset about, training themselves to be constantly outraged?  A good half of my facebook are links to pages devoted to being outraged about things.  Is it constant cable news, short attention spans, the certainty of ones own correctness, the assumption of the equivalency of views, that are all creating an outrage background?

For me, people say and do stupid things all of the time.  This week I will say something naughty.  I will also say something jokingly that could be construed as deeply racist/sexist/evil if you wanted to.  This week people will say stupid things that if I took personally would be truly insulting (in the most important cultural work in the USA, the Bible, it says that I deserve to be tortured forever because I am as immoral as it is possible to be, i.e. an Atheist).  Someone who doesn't know what they are talking about will say that I don't know what I am talking about.  I just don't have the energy or inclination to get that upset, that much.

What Brains Are For

What do you think brains are for?  Or, more accurately, what is the main thing that brains do?

I would imagine that the most common answer to the question is that brains are for thinking.  When we think of brains we generally think of our own brains, and we think of our own brains as things that do thinking.  Daniel Wolpert advances an excellent hypothesis in the talk below.  His hypothesis is that brains are for adaptable movement.

A brain is not necessary for a species to survive, plants don't have brains.  However, everything that produces complex, adaptable movement (most animals) has a brain.  Without a brain it becomes extraordinarily difficult for a anything to react to the environment, and you can (almost) only react to environment through movement.  The great example he gives in the talk are sea squirts, which at some time in their lives swim around until they find a place to anchor themselves and never leave.  The first thing they do after anchoring themselves is digest their own brains.  They aren't going to move around anymore and so don't need a brain.

You may think that while this may be true for "primitive" animals, our brains are special in that we spend most of our time thinking abstract thoughts, imagining the future.  Even if you think that abstract thought largely doesn't result in some change in the ability to move, i.e. interact with the environment, I would like to put forward Wolpert's observation that the best computers in the world are now better than the best humans at chess and Jeopardy, while it is an entire post-graduate computing project to open a particular bottle of water, filled with a particular amount of water, and pour that water into a particular glass in a particular position.  If you change any of the parameters for pouring the water it is a new post-graduate project.

In terms of some complicated intellectual problems computers are better than humans.  No computer in the world comes close to the computing ability of a three year old in moving around in their environment.  Moving around adaptably is much, much harder than being a grand master at chess.

Islam Doesn't Cause Terrorism.

I am a bit of a New Atheist and so I think pointing out the delusional stupidity of religion is not only a right, but somewhat of a duty.  I don't mean picketing churches or mosques and yelling abuse, I just mean that any time religion comes up in conversation, putting forth the position of Atheism (which is that religion is a stupid delusion) is of the same worth as Christians spreading the word of Jesus.

However, the New Atheists came into being because of the 9/11/2001 attack and there change in perception from religion just being wrong, to religion being dangerous, and specifically Islam.  Sam Harris has specifically said that the beliefs of Islam cause people to be terrorists.  I think this is not only wrong, but also stupidly delusional, Atheists can do that too.

The first point is the idea that "Islamic" terrorism is some sort of special threat, when it just isn't.  In 2010 around 1,375 people died from terrorist attacks worldwide.  Your chance of dying from a terrorist attack in 2010 was about 0.000025.  This is simply not something worth worrying about.

The second point is that Islam doesn't make people become terrorists, just do the math.  There are about 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, if we ascribe one death per terrorist and assume all of them are Muslim, then 0.00009% of Muslims are terrorists.  This means that at least 99.99991% of Muslims aren't terrorists.  If very, very, very, very nearly all Muslims aren't terrorists then Islam doesn't cause terrorism.

Now, there are certainly parts of the Qu'ran that can be used as justification to do almost anything to anybody.  Islam is a set of beliefs and morals from a deeply unenlightened time, everywhere else at the time was also a brutal, discriminative, unfair, violent place.  Read the Old Testament for something at least as unpleasant.  These justifications are used by terrorists, but justification does not mean causation.

Almost no religious people around the world actually stick to the precise words in their religious text.  Even so called "Christian Fundamentalists" or "Orthodox Jews" don't kill people for adultery, even though it is right there in the Bible (Leviticus 20:10).  Religious people don't just follow their religious texts, they start with cultural norms and then find text to back that up.

Now, compare the threat of Islam over the last few decades to the threat of capitalism, politics, or nationalism.  How many people have died in order for people to make more money?  How many people have died due to totalitarian governments?  How many people have died over their identification with one country or another?  These dwarf those from Islam.

People can find all sorts of ways to justify their desire to kill people.  Islam seems a remarkably infrequent justification for killing people, let alone causing people to kill others.  Islam doesn't cause terrorism, and if you think it does you are as stupidly delusional as those who think there is an all-powerful being in the sky who cares whether you have a ceremony or not before having sex.

It's Not Words, It's The Thing

I am someone who likes dictionaries and the definition of words.  I don't mean that I derive intrinsic pleasure from the definition of words, I just like everyone to know what they are talking about.  A great example of why this matters is a conversation (which led to the end of any conversation ever again) about socialism.

A man stopped at a traffic light had a bumper sticker that said, "Stop Obama's Socialism" and the writer thought it ironic that he approved of the socialism of traffic lights.  My position was that the dictionary definition of "socialism" is what socialism meant.  I also pointed out that government produced traffic lights aren't socialism and the guy wasn't suggesting it was, and that the take over of companies such as General Motors actually was socialism.  He became very angry, said that the meaning of words change, and that I was deliberately playing games to upset people.  He was upset because I objected to him making up a new definition of socialism that was not used by anyone else in the scenario.

The meanings of words do change, and that seems a shame to me, but inevitable.  It is inevitable because people don't know what the word does mean and a mistaken version is used to such an extent that it becomes the common meaning.  However, I am in favor of sticking with the dictionary definition(s) as much as possible, pretty much until the dictionary changes itself, so that people can talk about the same subject, something sadly lacking in modern discourse.

However, the things that words are describing don't change, even when the words change.  The Chinese and English words for "dog" are entirely different and yet have the exact same meaning.  It's the words that change, not the thing.

What brought me to thinking about this is the path of words used to describe a thing that people can use as being an insult.  The specific thing that raised this idea in me recently is the effort people are making to get people to stop using the word, "retard" as those who are/have/with (fill in blank) are insulted by its use as a slur.  Here's the thing, no matter what the word is, it still means people with substantially lower intelligence than other people.  When criticizing someone's intelligence, equating them with a label for those with lower intelligence is naturally going to occur.

While working in social work I became very familiar with the process of trying to remove stigma and insult from labeling words by using new ones.  While I was working the accepted nomenclature for someone with permanently lower intelligence than others changed three times, from mentally retarded, to developmentally disabled, to developmentally delayed.  You may notice that that all the words used suggest that this lower intelligence is temporary, something to overcome, rather than the permanent situation it actually is.  in this case the meanings of "retarded" and "delayed" have been changed. 

If you go back further the terms, 'feeble minded", "moron" and "idiot" were also used.  You may be surprised that the original meaning for the word, "moron" meant someone "deficient in judgment or sense."  The word, "idiot" came from a word for "layman, an ignorant or uneducated person."  I fail to see how these terms were more offensive than "developmentally disabled"

All of these terms mean the same thing, and at the beginning none of these words were intended as a slight or insult.  Today, if you call someone a "moron" or an "idiot" they will be automatically insulted.  There has been a long series of words, created with good intention to label some people as having substantially lower intelligence than the general public, which have become insults.  They have become insults because people are insulted when you say they are not intelligent, and I don't know how to fix that, or even if we should.

You may be interested in what term I used when working in social work.  I always found that the technical terms for a person with lower intelligence that was most useful and precise were words such as, "Buck" or "Raynelle," you know, the names of people.  Sometimes I used the words "clients" because I was essentially working for them.

There have been similar changes in terms for race, from negro, to negre, to nigger, to colored, to black, to African-American (which doesn't include the non-black Americans from Africa) and hopefully (in my opinion) back to black again.  All of these mean basically the same thing but have changed because each word meant a black person, and the almost universal opinion (among non-blacks) were that black people were inferior*.  The reason why I am hopeful for the return of the use of "black" is that it is simple, descriptive, and is completely equivalent to "white" and the reversal of the direction of terms seems to mean that being black is no longer generally thought of as being insulting.

I must admit to being entirely baffled by the whole hispanic, latino, Mexican, central American thing.  It can't really be a racial thing because those in central and southern America are made up of every race this side of Asia.  It can't even be a language thing because you can have English as your primary language and still be latino.

Words can hurt, but they hurt because of their meaning.  Changing the word for the meaning does essentially no good.  If we want to reduce insults to people the path is through changing how we view the meanings.  There is nothing inherently wrong with calling someone "retarded" or "negro" if we don't feel there is something wrong with being "retarded" or "negro."  If after half an hour with someone you still think of them as "developmentally delayed" or "African-American" rather than "Bill" or "Nancy" then the problem isn't the word, the problem is you.