eyelessgame

I don't think my pop-poli-sci outline will ever become a publication, but it keeps tickling the back of my brain and I keep wanting to get it out there. I don't think it's "revolutionary" in any sense at all; it's very conventional ideas, but I think it structures concepts we all understand in a slightly novel way.

And there's no question it's quite Pollyanna rose-colored panglossian idealism, assuming the best without warrant, and doesn't apply to our current situation. But it is still something we might occasionally do well to consider.

(There's a whole intro that I will skip about the multiple things that got me thinking about this as a young man.)

My thesis is that there are three "great political principles" that have arisen in society, and each of the three is a necessary tool specifically designed to beat back a specific potential civilization-ending threat; each threat has arisen in succession, the successive threats first arising when prior threats were first largely contained, and in each case the previous principles were found to be powerless against the danger.

The first great threat is that of *collapse*, of war of all-against-all, the loss of basic social fabric and trust; and the great principle society invented to combat that was *conservatism* - the respect for authority, convention, god and country, conformity, norms. Conservatism provides ways of settling or containing disputes, of arbitrating who owns what, of making agreements that you can be confident won't be broken, of making the future predictable, of being able to assume more about your neighbor than what you directly experience, when your neighbor demonstrates their adherence to the same civilized norms. (You can see how conservatism is a reflex when civilization is threatened; consider everyone's patriotic displays after 9/11.) Conservatism creates trust and robustly defeats the threat of social disintegration.

But once established, conservatism creates formal hierarchy (among other things), and hierarchy creates the second great civilization-endangering threat, which is *oppression*. And society invented a second great principle, which is *liberty* - the recognition that our institutions must be limited, and structured to serve people and guarantee them rights. Conservatism is powerless to oppose oppression because its very nature produces oppression, but in the same way liberty is powerless to oppose social breakdown, because one first needs society to have structure before any sort of guarantee of liberty can mean anything.

But applying liberty and conservatism alone - defanging and depowering authority, except for that authority needed to maintain order and structure - then creates the third great civilization-threatening danger, which is *plutocracy*, a non-state (and ultimately state-capturing) hierarchy of privilege and wealth, of in-groups and out-groups, which both conservatism and libertarianism are powerless to combat: conservatism says nothing bad about hierarchies at all, while libertarianism has no objection to people using wealth and social influence to gather more wealth and social influence - with the result that wealth and social influence concentrate into privileged groups. And so society invented a third great weapon - *progressivism*, which we might also call inclusion or liberalism; the structuring and use of culture and state to guarantee wide access to resources and limit in-group/out-group distinctions: resource and cultural and legal support for the inclusion of the poor, elderly, and infirm; minority races and religions and cultures; those with culturally-unpopular identity or behavior.

I visualize these three principles as a three-dimensional political compass. Three negative axes, representing threats to civilization; three positive axes, representing the principles developed to defeat those threats.

One problem we face as a society is that policy or social qualities that move society in the positive direction along all three axes - a vector pointing into the first octant - are hard to find, and those that do are in general already baked in, in ways we don't even question or notice, as a fish not noticing the water - so every policy choice we are actually faced with will point positive along the axes of only one or two principles, and will otherwise point negative, increasing the threat (or perception of the threat) that another principle must oppose.

That's the basic thesis. But there's then a second half to this idea.

We all internally buy into all three principles, within their context; we just prioritize our perception of the three threats and disagree over the reality or immediacy of specific dangers. But we also resist realizing that we buy into it all, because to do so feels like a betrayal of whichever principle we feel is most important (that is, which threat is most immediate and least addressed).

Most of the time, when we oppose the application of one of the principles, it is done not because we oppose the principle itself, but because we see its application as increasing one of the *other* threats. Which its honest advocates acknowledge, but their perception is that the threat they face, and the application of their principle, is currently more important. And if you oppose them, it is because you disagree on the importance, or you see the harm to another principle to be more damaging than any benefit to be gained.

And that's why we don't tend to have meaningful political or policy debates: the conservative will advocate for his policy from the perspective of seeing a threat to civilization itself, while the libertarian will object because the policy threatens freedom, and the progressive will object because the policy is discriminatory and oppresses an out-group... but for any given policy, those downsides weren't the intent, but a byproduct of furthering a different principle "that everyone ought to agree with" - and, to an extent, does.

And yet, if you hold to a principle because of the threat it opposes, and you see that threat as a clear and present danger, and propose principled action against it, then how could someone oppose your proposal? Why, they must be against my principle, and thus on the side of the threat itself!

I illustrate this line of thinking, which I assert we all fall into from time to time, with this analogy: "if all you have is a hammer, everyone else must be against pounding nails."

So the basic danger is that as society engages in these talking-past-each-other political disagreements, the advocates for each policy start to believe, and assume, and act as though, the advocates for the other principles are actually advocating *for the threat* that their own principle is designed to combat. ("You *say* you want to move in the positive direction on the Z-axis, but you're lying - you really want to move in the negative direction of the X-axis! You can't really care about Z because I do too, yet I don't want what you want!") A conservative thus starts to believe libertarians and/or progressives really want to tear down society itself. A libertarian starts to believe that a conservative or progressive really does simply want to oppress people and remove freedom. A progressive starts to believe that a conservative or libertarian really is just a bigot or plutocrat, who wants the removal of all diversity and opportunity from society.

And the catastrophic endpoint, if this is unchecked, is that in some cases an advocate for one principle might start *identifying with* one or both of the other threats, recasting them as "actually good", because society and media are training them to identify moving positive on their axis with moving negative on the other, and therefore - since moving positive on their axis is good and necessary - moving negative on other axes must also be good and necessary. And so a progressive might find themselves actively opposing free expression or might see the entire society as corrupt, or a libertarian might cheer for the death of the insufficiently productive, or repeal of all laws, or (perhaps most commonly) a conservative might actively want control over all society, or might be an out and proud bigot.

But I do quite honestly believe it doesn't *have* to be that way.

Reading history of T CrB. (Yes, a little obsessed - there will be a new star for a couple days, and it's rare and it's only been noticed and reported on a couple times before!)

T CrB is a double star about 2625 light years away: a white dwarf and a red giant. (These are always the most fun doubles, it seems.) They orbit each other with a period of about 8 months, and they're a little closer to each other than Venus is to the Sun. (They don't eclipse or anything; we're looking roughly at their north or south poles.)

The red giant is 10th magnitude (small telescope needed) - red giants are bright things (this one's 600x the Sun's brightness) but 2625 is a long distance. The giant's far brigher than the white dwarf. (The Sun at this distance would be about 15th magnitude - that would take a 12" or bigger telescope aperture to glimpse.)

But the dwarf has a much higher surface gravity - it's actually more massive than the giant and its mass is compressed into a much smaller volume. And red giants are big; the white dwarf is almost skimming the outermost layer of the red giant. So the dwarf is stealing matter - mostly hydrogen, because the outer layer of any star is mostly hydrogen.

Normal stars of course spend their time doing nuclear fusion in their cores. Normal stars are fusing mostly hydrogen into helium; hydrogen's way easier to fuse than anything else. A white dwarf, though, is old. And being old, it's enormously compressed, because the core of a white dwarf has used up its hydrogen and helium (and in this case carbon), but lacks the mass to fuse heavier elements, so it's only glowing from residual thermal energy and it's held up by electron degeneracy - so it's far more compressed than a younger star is.

But in this close binary system, because it's stealing matter from its companion, there's an accreting cloud of hydrogen or mostly-hydrogen around this particular dwarf, which - remember - has an incredibly high surface gravity. The hydrogen is being pulled down hard into the star.

And so, every so often, there's so much hydrogen compressed onto the surface of the white dwarf that the hydrogen on the surface undergoes runaway fusion.

At which point, boom. The white dwarf gets ten magnitudes - 10000x - brighter. For a couple days... during which time there's a new star in the sky.

We only know of about a dozen of these long-period catastrophic variables in our galaxy, from what we've so far been able to observe. And of those dozen, T CrB is the nearest, the longest-period, and the brightest one we know - the only one to get easily visible to the naked eye.

We observed it for sure in 1866 and 1946 - and we're pretty sure that we saw it in 1787. Somebody also recorded something that might have been it in 1217.

Which means this is kind of exciting - we know a lot about how these happen now, but we do not know enough to know exactly when it will happen, as in what day or even week. The regularity is still sort of inferred. And its last two eruptions were 80 years apart, but we think this one's going to happen after only 78.

But we're pretty sure. People were getting careful and precise about observations by the 1930s, and they started seeing T CrB brighten a little in 1938, then dim for a while in 1945, before going boom in 1946 - and we've seen it brighten a little in 2016, and then dim for a while in 2023, so we're pretty sure what's coming. Sometime. Between May and September.

The excitement, for me, is in some ways similar to that for a comet. Seeing an unexpected change in the heavens was always a momentous, mysterious, and feared-to-be-disastrous (hence the name: "dis-aster", "hell star") event to our forebears. Those people relied on the constancy and predictability of the stars as their calendar, clock, compass, reminder alarms, and even GPS. And they were pretty sure you could tell far more than that from how the planets moved, even if they were mostly wrong about that part.

But for "unexpected" events - from Halley forward - knowing the cause, predicting the occurrence, and then getting to see the predicted event occur is one of those things symbolizing the triumph of reason and investigation over superstition, and that's one of the pure things I have always loved about the study of astronomy.

I was thinking, some, about "judging the past by the standards of the present."

So. Um. Fellow antiracist rational people. Let's get a little uncomfortable, before going into how we should judge, say, "liberal by 19th century standards" people. Hopefully my little blog here will not trigger problems based on words I'm going to use, because the context is important.

We've found paleontological records of what are clearly not-quite Homo sapiens sapiens from the very recent past. I don't propose to discuss specific finds, but we can certainly agree there were entities, not all that long ago, who were genetically distinct from anyone we today consider human, and by their remains we conclude these beings had more limited cognition capabilities than modern humans. And by "not long ago" I mean in the tens of thousands of years - when genetically modern humans had already been around for a long time.

So let's be disquieted for just a minute. Consider that this means, had certain unknown paleontologically-recent events played out differently, we could have been living in a world today where the racists were right. Racists who believe in, or profess to believe in, real differences in human capability and cognition based on ancestry are demonstrably wrong, today, but consider that had such protohuman entities not vanished when they did, there would be a racist view that would be correct - there really would be "inferior races" living today, genetically incapable of, say, understanding multiplication, or writing a five-paragraph essay.

How would society treat such beings? If they were, say, able to talk and learn language, and basically looked like us, but demonstrably unable to perform as a responsible adult in society?

Moreover, how would their existence impact the acceptance (which parts of our society obviously still struggle to accept) that all ancestral branches of Homo sapiens sapiens are genetically equivalent, cognitively? Would it have been easier, or even harder, to abandon the prejudices that led to the assumption that people from one continent and one hue of skin were different than ("inferior to") those from another?

That's only one part of the disquiet. Prepare to be more uncomfortable.

A species or subspecies can die out for any number of reasons, with any number of contributing factors, but outcompetition by a better-adapted similar variant is very often among them. Which means we're quite likely spared that moral dilemma of how to deal with near-human but non-human cousins, in part, because of the ruthless genocidal decisions of our own ancestors.

We're all ultimately genocidal colonizers, aren't we.

But I get even more uncomfortable when I think about the history of the evolving understanding that the racists were wrong, and about judging the past by the present's standards.

What is it that society ought to expect of an educated, literate, non-expert in a given field? (And thus, how should we reasonably judge such a person in retrospect?)

We expect in general that this non-expert person would respect the opinions of experts, and defer to their expertise. If the experts happen to be wrong, but not demonstrably so in a way that an ordinary person can easily experience, it is not reasonable to expect non-experts would transcend the understanding that experts in the field provide.

(Note how big a problem it is that we as a society don't do this today. Think about how much trouble we get into because so many people reject the information provided by experts.)

Now consider educated American or European persons of the 19th century. They are not experts on the science of "race". The expectation would be that they would accept and follow what the scientists tell them.

Science is always imperfect, always evolving, always pursued by individuals with varying perceptions, varying agendas, and so on. But there's no question that the science of the 19th century held the consensus that there were real "racial" differences among humans, determinable by superficial physical appearance (phrenology, anyone?) or knowledge of continental ancestry. The science of the time said, in short, that black people were an inferior race.

That science was, of course, wrong - but better conclusions had to await more understanding of human cognition, more understanding of genetics, more willingness to discard invalid or presumptive data, more ability to shake science free from convenient falsehoods. So during the long period when "essential racial differences" was the published scientific consensus, what expectation should we reasonably have had for the educated non-scientist? What is a reasonable standard to apply for what conclusions that person, living in that time, should have made?

Ah, you say, but there were people who transcended that understanding, and rejected the scientific consensus, and they were, we now understand, reaching the correct conclusion. So why should our judgment spare those who held racist views, since not everyone did?

Yes, there were people who rejected what the experts of the time said. But if, like me, you're something of a skeptic or rationalist, I have just a bit more discomfort to share.

Almost without exception, the objection to the "scientific consensus of the 19th century" on race was a religious exception: the conclusion that there was a fundamental division between man and beast, that every soul was redeemable and saveable, and that human dignity was bestowed by God and should be extended to all who could hear and understand scripture and accept saving grace (one might vary that wording a bit, depending on from which sixteenth century sect their beliefs proceeded.) It was religions, not scientists, who were calling for abolition, civil rights, and so on.

The science didn't get it right until later. A person who was convinced, before science caught up, of the equal worth and equal capability of all humans, was likely convinced by religious argument. The science of the time gave them no support.

Anyway. All this is just to exorcise some discomfort, shaking it loose, letting it go. But sometimes it bugs me just how much rhetorical discarding we do of past people because their experience and writing incorporated the conclusions of past people.

I wrote this something like six months ago and never posted it, but it's in my drafts so ... here it is.

There's a thing we all do, regardless of the quality of our information or opinions: we assume counterfactuals would conform to our assumptions. Whatever the state of the country, economy, and world, if our guy is in charge we assume it would be not as good/even worse if the other guy were in charge; if the other guy is in charge we assume it would be less bad/even better if our guy were in charge. To the extent we identify "our guy" and "their guy", at least - but even if someone's disengaged and doesn't like anybody, they still have an idea of how things ought to be, and imagine that if it were arranged their way, it would be better.

We're supposed to mark beliefs to market, if we're at all honest - since different folks are in charge at different times, how do they fare overall? - but most people don't, because of course these aren't controlled experiments, and it's always way too easy to say that things only looked bad for my side that particular time because of X or Y contingent or neglected-long-term, still-pending consequence. But we all carry with us some preferred illusions, and we prefer not to confront realities that challenge our priors.

None of that's new. But I want to talk about something specific, one where I happen to share some but not all of the dorkage that's led some people to absurdity - and in the process they have hurt a thing I care a lot about.

Something I care about besides, I mean, things like humanity and the planet.

The thing that prompts this is the story that the OceanGate founder wants to put a thousand-person colony in orbit around Venus in the next 25 years. Holy christ this is a delusional fruitbat, we all respond. But here's the thing.

So if you are of about my, or his, age - older GenX or younger Boomer - and you had some interest in science or technology as a kid, then (cue Foxworthy) you might be a space dork. That part is me.

And if you've got any sort of conservatism in your background, racism or money or military or Christian or Heinlein ... then (cue Foxworthy) you might be a libertarian space dork. (That part is of course not me, except some RAH.) Those are the counterfactuals I'm discussing.

We landed on the fucking moon in 1969.

Normal people responded to that with "holy shit look what humans can do."

Space dorks of course responded to it with "holy shit imagine what one day humans go on to do."

But libertarian space dorks...

Libertarian space dorks had to reconcile "government can't do anything" with "government just landed on the fucking moon". That's one hell of a cognitive dissonance.

So they had to invent a counterfactual resolution. Now, some of them of course become moon-landing deniers, with the fuzz of fifty years making it very slightly less obviously ridiculous to deny that it happened.

But the ones who went on to be soulless and get lucky and get rich - those ones, the ones raised on Heinlein and legitimately starry-eyed and legitimately wanting humanity to get out to the stars RIGHT NOW IN MY LIFETIME - they resolved the contradiction in their thinking by positing a different counterfactual.

Their counterfactual was "well shit, landing on the moon must be no big thing, after all, even government could do it. Space flight must be trivial! Imagine how free enterprise will do it! Let's just ignore everyone who tells us it's complicated or hard. To Mars! And Venus! The power of our capitalism will surely conquer far more than just the moon."

And like I said, for rational space dorks like me, it's incredibly disheartening. Because human space flight is hard and dangerous and complicated, and the market will be brutal in marking up these beliefs. (And the basic counterfactual of "imagine how glorious a libertarian utopia would be!" is, well, full-on Marxist in its assumptions, just upside down. But that aside.)

What I hate so much is that this is turning the very idea of human space exploration into a joke. There was always the set of anti-space canards "we should solve our problems on earth first," "we shouldn't be going into space when people are starving", and all the other nonsense demanding that only the absolute single most serious problem be solved, ever, and everything else has to be actively ignored by all eight billion of us because we can only do one thing at a time.

Thing is, those arguments get real oxygen when something I love - the future of human spaceflight - gets taken over by obviously delusional billionaire assholes who are just going to get people killed, and becomes something that appears to lots of people not to be worth humanity's effort and risk.

Killing off hope through the exploration of counterfactual canards.

So I hear they're publishing new editions of Roald Dahl's books and rewording them to remove the epithets kids would throw around like "fat" and "ugly".

I have at least four opinions about this. I'm going to meander.

On the one hand. We do this ALL THE FRICKING TIME. There's things you don't publish. There's things you change because you don't think your audience would want them to be there. There's things you leave out because your tired af of getting letters complaining about them. The first Shakespeare book I read was a school textbook my mom had used, and it censored some of the dirty jokes that 1930s America was likely to understand. I'm pretty sure the version of Treasure Island I read left out the subplot of Long John Silver's black lover - whether because (gasp) interracial love (a typical sentiment of, say, the 1950s) or because she's referred to throughout with the term (gasp) customary for a black woman in 19th century English (a typical sentiment of, say, the 1990s), I don't know; it might have been either.

Which kind of leads into the second point. There's plenty that we censor right now - and that we *agree* we should censor. They don't even try to read Huckleberry Finn anymore in schools, and it's obvious why, even though the shocking offensiveness of Jim's name was the *point* - exactly the same as the same word's use throughout Blazing Saddles, it's shining a bright light on the casual racism it's portraying.

There's a *reason* we don't use language like that anymore, though. Words have connotations. The point of politically correct speech is to avoid connotations that were invisibly excluding, demeaning, hurting people.

But this flows back to another point, too - we can't fix society by fixing words. What we want is a society where such words aren't used *because everyone understands the offense the word would give and chooses not to,* not because we're bludgeoning people into thinking them but not saying them. The problem isn't the words themselves, it's the problems that the words reinforce, the fact that they not only exclude people who are too often made victims already, but also reinforce license to those who so often use such words as part of the abuse they deliver.

Words, or *portrayals*, because after all, both are communication, both are part of storytelling, which is the third hand. We look at the "well-meaning" censorship of other eras and sometimes we laugh at the foolishness... and maybe we shouldn't. They censor genitals on TV and everyone considers that normal, but they censored Jeannie's navel and Elvis' hips and this was considered "prudish". But then a few years later, we made the movie "Lolita", which would be not just offensive but *illegal* to make today and everyone who isn't a total creep *agrees that this is as it should be*. Think about that.

And on the fourth hand, we're talking about legitimate cultural values and legitimate cultural changes, and they profoundly change what we accept and enjoy. When I reread The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, I found it unreadable, and when I tried to read it to my children they were immediately bored, because the culture and language had moved on from this book - it was foreign, unfamiliar, and lacked enough common experience that my children (this was fifteen years ago or so) simply didn't have any interest in it...

...and that point is that culture moves on. There's lots, it's said, of very good literature being put out there all the time; certainly there are tons of writers and tons of books published. Maybe the right answer isn't either to keep or to remove Roald Dahl's "fat" and "ugly" language, maybe the right answer is simply to move on from Roald Dahl.

Every author is a product of their time - and while sometimes that's a justification or an excuse or a context, sometimes it also means that their work ceases to be *interesting to read* anymore.

And on the almost final hand... there was a mediocre book I read years ago with an immortal character; set in the present day, it was framed as an interview with him (and it was not written by Ann Rice, but thematically you're very close); this immortal being chose, for most of his entertainment, diversions from a century or more ago. When asked whether he was out of step with the modern world, he denied it, and instead invoked Sturgeon's Law: almost everything produced in media and entertainment (music, reading, plays, movies, etc.) is mostly crap, and very little is truly worthwhile; he preferred to sit back and let the culture sort this out, since it would preserve and maintain those bits that were important; and then he would enjoy what endured. He had, after all, no time to waste on inferior entertainment. (The interviewer considered this arrogant, and may have been right.) But the point is, yes, every piece of art is a product of its time, but some works transcend it, and we can't eliminate every old book just because it includes things we don't like to hear today.

But Roald Dahl? He was good, but there's lots of good children's books. Don't censor his work. Put it in the infinite-and-growing "historical interest" section of our virtual library, and read your children something else.

And on the final hand. There's this little cultural conservative, or meta-conservative, who lives in my hind brain and now and then wakes up, hocks a brown loogie, mutters about "kids today," and falls back to sleep. And what he would say is the same thing Buckaroo Banzai said during brain surgery, which is the idealization of conservative thought: "Don't tug on that; you don't know what it's attached to." The reason your society needs conservatives is because every time you change something, you need people to go "Wait a minute, think about what you're giving up here", and once in a while they're right.

There is a very common self-brainwashing technique - I've seen it used in everything from professional circles to people talking frankly about their experiences with evangelism - related to imposter syndrome, most commonly described as "fake it till you make it".

You know you're not the thing you want to be - you're not in that headspace - so the thing to do, it argues, is just *pretend* you are, and over time you will brainwash yourself into being it. Pretend you have confidence, for example, and over time you will, almost without realizing it, gain confidence.

Needless to say it often doesn't work - though some have argued that everything about civilization depends to some extent on it - you express an ideal you don't live up to, but constantly challenge yourself to reach it, because otherwise you won't even try, and nothing will get better.

I had one of the closest things I've ever had to a religious experience at the House of Mary in Turkey, contemplating lies, and the real edifices built around lies and the authentic lives lived in the service of lies, and how important it must be to choose our lies carefully.

But this only works sometimes. It works for sure if the only thing you lack is confidence. If on the other hand you declare a problem is solved and it's actually not, it doesn't solve itself. If you lack something besides confidence, besides just mindset - if there is a real deficiency or broken process, and you just ignore it by denying it's there - it will fester, it will blow up in your face.

If there are problems beyond just a mindset, you have to *admit and address* the problems. No one likes to do that. Admitting your own deficiencies is humiliating. And addressing it takes enormous work, and sometimes you will fail.

And I think about all this on this day particularly, because one of my children, in fourth grade, came home one day and told us the story of American race relations as it was taught to them in school.

"White people used to think black people were inferior. But then Martin Luther King Jr. gave his 'I Have A Dream' speech in Washington, and then white people realized black people weren't inferior."

That was it. When you distill it down to a ten-year-old's confident and innocent declaration, it's preposterous on its face.

But it took me a minute to realize *this is how a lot of white Americans think it happened.*

I think the mainstream belief of white America, among my generation, has been something not a good deal more sophisticated than that one statement.

If you are white and in your fifties, you almost certainly grew up thinking racism was a problem America "used to have". It was a problem the Sixties, supposedly, *solved* - and more and more, over time, it became a truism that the problem was specifically solved by Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech.

Put that way, of course, no thinking adult would admit to believing one speech altered the entire country. And of course there were real regulatory and legal changes made, gradually and painfully and in the face of strident and violent opposition, that did tear down explicit barriers that used to exist.

But somehow we were all conditioned not to ask the obvious question...

If racism is a thing of the past, and since one speech could not, of course, magically end racism by itself, *at what point do you believe racism actually ended*? If you grew up thinking that racism was a thing of the past, what event actually caused it to become a thing of the past?

There wasn't one. We just stopped admitting it was there.

We faked it.

There's really no getting around that.

We faked it. Some of us, to be sure, faked it in the sincere hope that by *declaring* the impulses of bigotry to be neanderthal, uncivilized, old-fashioned, mistaken, stupid beliefs no longer held by any worthwhile person, over time they would actually become so - and that the economic inequalities that centuries of bigotry and oppression had generated could just be erased... as - after all - America was a land of opportunity, surely. Remove the official barriers, declare minds changed, and they will change, and equity will follow.

We faked it, in the hope that we would make it.

But remember, that only works when all you lack is confidence.

if you lack something besides confidence, besides just mindset - if there is a real deficiency or broken process, and you just ignore it by denying it's there - it will fester, it will blow up in your face.

The carving of MLKJ is unfinished. He half-emerges from unyielding stone.

There is more work to do, and we must first admit the deficiency.

For whatever reason I love to marvel at the problems solved by Renaissance-to-Enlightenment-era science and engineering.

Like how in the mid 1600s they calculated the size of the solar system and the size of the planets, and at the same time figured out the width of the Atlantic Ocean, with the same measurement - a measurement that involved an opposition of Mars and the moons of Jupiter.

...

So the state of things when Isaac Newton was born was that the Greeks had figured out the size and shape of the Earth and the size of and distance to the Moon. Copernicus had suggested that the Sun was the center of the universe as we knew it, Galileo had demonstrated that not everything revolved around the Earth, and Kepler had done the underappreciated-by-comparison plotting out and measuring of what orbits actually looked like, solving the *relative* distances of the planets from the Sun.

Kepler in particular made several absolutely stunning measurements. He figured out that Mars and Mercury had noticeably elliptical orbits. He calculated, from the degree to which Mercury and Venus extended away from the sun, their distance from the sun in proportion to Earth's (about 30% and 70% of the Earth's distance). He plotted the retrograde movements of Jupiter and Saturn and used that as a rough indication of their distance from the sun (about 5x and 9x the Earth's distance). He also looked at all those numbers and figured out math *equivalent to the inverse-square law of gravitation* that Newton would get credit for the following century - that (a) the cube of an orbit's distance from the Sun was proportional to the square of the period of an orbit, and (b) from carefully watching Mars, that in a given period of time, the *area* of a slice of a given orbit is the same; this explained the slower movement of Mars when it was further from the sun in its elliptical orbit.

(The Greeks had also made a stab at determining the size/distance of the Sun - but all they were able to tell was that it was at least forty times as far away as the Moon, that is, at least ten million miles; it was the best they could do. But even Aristotle knew, when he made an Earth-centered cosmology, that the Sun was far bigger than the Earth, but still orbiting the Earth, in his view.)

Anyway. So by the 1600s scientists knew the *multipliers* for how far each planet was from the Sun compared with Earth. We could build the whole scale model. And we had telescopes. But we didn't have a single *absolute* measurement. We didn't know how far it was from the Earth to the Sun, or any single absolute distance (except to the Moon, but that didn't tell us anything else beyond that.)

What we did have, though, was the concept of parallax. If two people standing in different places look in the same direction at the same time, and see the same two things, one closer and one much further away, and then compare notes, you can figure out the distance to the closer object, because the two people will see it in different places relative to the distant thing. Assuming the more distant thing was *way way* distant; lines drawn from the two observers to the distant thing are assumed to be parallel, and the closer object was then in different places relative to the two lines, so you know how big and how far away it is.

So long, that is, as you know (a) exactly how far apart those people are, and (b) that they're looking at the same time, assuming everything's moving.

So. Other than the moon, the closest thing to us that we can see in the middle of the night is Mars (when it's at opposition). We could look through a telescope and see Mars against a backdrop of stars. If we could look at Mars from two different locations on the Earth at the same time, we could measure the difference between the two views, and it would tell us how far away Mars was. (It would also tell us how *big* Mars was.) And once we had one absolute measurement, it was simple multiplication and division to give us the distance to everything in the solar system, since we had Kepler's scale model.

So that's what they did. They sent a telescope with an expedition off to South America and made plans, at the next opposition of Mars, to observe it at the same time on the same night in both Northern Europe and Brazil.

But they had to solve two problems - (a) just how far apart are Brazil and Holland, and (b) how do you know you're looking at the same time? The planets are moving; if your observations are an hour apart, Mars has moved during that hour and you'll get the wrong answer.

You'd think people would have already known how far away Brazil was. They had maps, after all.

Thing is, nobody really knew exactly how *wide* the Atlantic was. Measuring latitude is easy; you look at the elevation of the North Star (or you use more sophisticated star maps if you're south of the equator). But measuring longitude? Nobody had a good way to measure that precisely. Clocks weren't good enough to keep exact time across multiple days as you crossed the Atlantic, and you obviously can't rely on sunrise/sunset since that depends on longitude in the first place.

You needed to measure from an event that was observable at the same time in both places, that *happened* at the same time in both places. You could then use a clock to measure, reasonably accurately, the time since such an event.

Thing is, when you're in wildly different parts of the Earth, there's no earthbound event you can use to set an absolute time.

Fortunately, there are non-earthbound events - the eclipses of Jupiter's moons.

When Io or Europa or Ganymede duck behind Jupiter each time they orbit it, they also wind up in Jupiter's shadow. And during certain times of our year, from Earth's perspective they emerge from behind the planet *before* emerging from the planet's shadow - so when they do emerge, they emerge at the same time for anyone watching. You look through the telescope, and you wait, and then *boom* in the course of a minute or two suddenly Ganymede appears next to Jupiter. No matter where on Earth you are, so long as Jupiter's above the horizon. And this emergence happens once a week.

So that was the entire chain of events... on the same prearranged night with Mars close to opposition, in two places in the world, they watched Jupiter through telescopes, until Ganymede appeared; then swung the telescope to look at Mars and carefully drew its location relative to dim stars very close to the disk. While doing so, they used a compass and sextant to measure Jupiter's and Mars's exact positions in the sky. Then the next ship sailed back to Europe from Brazil, and they compared notes.

The first thing was that knowing that *at this specific moment* Jupiter was in X position in the sky in Brazil and Y position in the sky in Denmark, they solved the problem of where, exactly, those two locations were relative to each other on the globe of the Earth - that is, they solved the problem of Brazil's longitude, and thus the width of the Atlantic. (This turned out to have other practical uses separate from astronomy.)

This gave them the distance between the two observation points. They then took the drawings of Mars's disk against background stars, overlaid them so that the background stars matched, and measured the difference in Mars's location.

This gave them the distance to and size of Mars... which gave them the distance to the Sun, and the distances to all the planets. And they got it right, to within a few percent - four hundred years ago.

(Oh, a note. There was one Greek philosopher whose writings survived who had twigged to "maybe the Earth goes around the Sun", using pretty much Copernicus' and Kepler's reasoning - but there were strong counterarguments at the time, which would have seemed compelling without a telescope: if we were moving, wouldn't we feel it? Moreover, wouldn't there be enormous winds? ... If we were moving, how could the Moon be pulled along with us? ... if the Earth rotated, how would we not fall off the bottom? ... if we were moving back and forth as we went around the Sun, why didn't the stars get brighter and dimmer, and the constellations change size, and the stars themselves show parallax relative to each other (assuming they were different distances away), over the course of a year?)

So maybe you have family members or other acquaintances who don't understand why we can't just tell, say, K-3 teachers "you shouldn't mention sex at all, whether gay or straight" - they want to know why it is that schools can't simply leave the topic of LGBTQ people for "when the children are older," and who want teachers to "just teach the curriculum" and "leave agendas out of it."

It may be tiresome to have to go through this, but let's go through it, because there are people for whom this seems, superficially, reasonable.

Let's talk about literary analysis - a core part of the educational curriculum.

At any level of literary analysis - whether you're analyzing Dostoevsky or Clifford the Big Red Dog - one of the basic tools is to take the story themes, events, setting, characters, any elements of the story, and relate these elements to your own experiences.

Many - probably most - children's literature talks, to some degree, about family members, because family is one of the most important, universal, and relatable elements of a child's life. There has, I would venture to say, never been a kindergarten class that has not read a book that mentioned somebody's family.

And at the level of a primary-grade classroom, the way literary analysis is done, most typically, is for the children to sit in a group with the teacher and talk: pick some element of the book they just read, and relate that element of that book to something in their own lives.

And thus - almost without exception - it will be part of the curriculum of a primary-grade classroom to gather as a group and to have the children say something about their own family.

And this is why it is inevitable that a child will, at some point, refer to "my mommies". "My dad and my other dad." "My uncle and his husband." "My big brother, who we used to call my sister."

Because you are discussing family, and one of the things intrinsic to every LGBT person is that every LGBT person is, or was at some point, a member of a family, and every member of that family will at some point be of an age to attend kindergarten - and might be attending kindergarten while their relative is, at that same time, lesbian, or gay, or bisexual, or transgender - as one might be, for one's entire life.

And when one child says "my mommies", another child will be confused - because some families raise their children poorly - and that confused child will ask how that can be, that a child should have two mommies.

And another child will blurt out "I know what that is! That means 'gay.'"

And all three children will look at the teacher to explain and clarify. And the teacher will have to answer.

And I do not want to shock anyone, but this is not a new thing. There have always been gay people. There have always been gay couples. There have always been transgender people. There have always been children attending kindergarten who are being raised by two mommies, or two daddies, or who have other relatives who are one or another of the LGBTQ rainbow, however open or closeted such relationships might have had to be.

Now while I don't know what the teacher will say, I absolutely guarantee that the worst possible thing she could say is this: "That's something for you to ask your parents about."

Because if she says that, just imagine how many parents are going to storm into the principal's office demanding to know why their child's first-grade teacher GAVE THE CLASS AN ASSIGNMENT TO ASK THEIR PARENTS ABOUT HOMOSEXUALITY.

That's not what anybody wants.

So what do the people pushing a "don't say gay" repression want?

Without admitting it, what these people want - the people "concerned" about "agendas" want - is for the teacher to do what teachers did fifty years ago.

"You mean your mommy and her friend, not 'two mommies', right?"

And what they want is for the teacher to insist to the classroom that that is what this poor little child must have meant - because after all, one cannot have two mommies. Mommies just sometimes have "a friend".

That's what they want. That's the agenda that they are trying to legislate.

Don't say gay.

And that's simply not where the culture is anymore. Small children attend weddings with two brides, or two grooms. Small children witness their older siblings coming out as trans. Children grow up *knowing* that these are normal things. Because they are normal things.

Because we are no longer bigots to the extent we used to be, these are, now, normal things.

Just not to everybody yet, and thus we have these people trying to make it not be so - to inflict their own continuing discomfort on the rest of us. To impose their *own* outdated, bigoted agendas.

And they will, and must, lose.

And we know they will lose. Because today's teachers also grew up in families where two men, or two women, might marry - where someone they know had a boyfriend, then later had a girlfriend - where someone they know is not the gender they were assigned at birth.

Or any of this may be the case for the teachers themselves.

The reason they can't answer like they did fifty years ago is that we are better people than we were fifty years ago. And you can't stop us.

Al Gore being back in the news gave me an opportunity to revisit with Kate yesterday something that has really bugged me - and I will never stop being bugged by it.

I say often that 2016 was the most important election of my life, but it has one rival nearly as important, and the rival isn't 2020. The second most important presidential election of my life was the 2000 election.

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, there was a bipartisan, across-the-board assumption throughout American politics that the Electoral College was a quaint relic.

It's probably especially the 60s-70s, when we made a big deal about voting rights, about more and more being brought to a vote, about candidate selection processes becoming more democratic, about distrusting authority and allowing the voice of the people to be heard - but there were columns and articles and papers written, leading into virtually every election (including the runup to 2000), as far back as I can remember, that said something like this:

"It's been over 100 years since the last time the Electoral College outcome differed from the popular vote - Grover Cleveland's loss to Benjamin Harrison - and it is obvious to us all that the expectation is that it never will again. But what if it does?

"The American people won't put up with it. Obviously not. Any president elected by the EC but not the popular vote will be rightfully regarded as fraudulent and illegitimate. And there will be a bipartisan insistence that it never happen again. Expect a constitutional amendment within the following year.

"But what will America do in the meantime, with such a weakened president unable to say he had the support of the majority of the country? How will we credibly say we are exporting the principles of freedom and democracy to the world, when our own democracy is being led by the loser of the election?"

Those weren't just one party. This was the firm belief across the political spectrum. Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, wrote similar things.

Clinton's elections were both severely damaged by the presence of Perot - not because it affected his chance of winning, he won decisively and would have won decisively without Perot's presence, both times - but because Clinton came away with only a plurality and not a majority, and there were significant thinkpieces about his diminished ability to lead, how small he looked in comparison to, say, Reagan, because he didn't win the election with majority support.

And then 2000 happened.

And the Republican Party pivoted away from this consensus, that majority support was absolutely central to a president's legitimacy, on a dime.

And their pivot was, literally, instantaneous. The polls leading up to the 2000 election showed both the EC and popular vote in a statistical tie - but the most likely outcome, by a hair at least, was that Bush would narrowly win the popular vote, but Gore would win Florida and thus the Electoral College.

And in the weeks and months prior, the Republican Party was assembling lawyers, pundits, editorials, legal arguments, key speakers - to argue the case that, should this happen, Gore would have to - for the good of the country, for democracy and America - concede.

They were ready to argue it, right up to election day.

And then the twin coin flips each landed the other way... and democracy died. The consensus - that the president, to be legitimate, had to command, at least initially, the support of the majority, or at the very least a plurality - was gone forever.

America didn't recover.

I saw a factually correct column this morning on the degree to which Democrats have moved left in the last decade. (It was underappreciated in comments that it was a companion piece to another column from last week on how far Republicans have moved right from the already-far-right insurgent outlier they were a decade ago.)

I can't disagree with it on the facts at all, and I found myself interested on the reasons why this has happened. Most of the 2012 Democratic Party platform was talking about economic policy, for example; the 2020 platform was twice as long, had significantly more leftward economic policy, and a large amount of new social policy and positions that were definitely not mainstream Democratic Party positions in 2012.
I had several reactions - the preface to which is the Spider Robinson quote that competes for what goes on my tombstone: "the world turns upside down in ten years, but we turn upside down with it, so we don't notice". It's useful now and then to take stock of what we were saying ten years ago, because it is indeed very different than what we say and believe today.

But I have at least five takes on why it happened.

First of all: there is an upended incentive for whom to court with the platform. The post-WWII consensus was that the center-left and center-right were where most people were, where most politicians were, and the way to craft sustainable policy was for each side to write policies that the other side would engage with, negotiate over, and then grudgingly accept, at least until they regained the majority and could tweak things back more to their liking.

As such, Democrats would write a moderate platform - sometimes even to the right of their own positions - because they had the sense that there were more reachable voters and politicians to their right than to their left, and it was best to call out to them and expect to negotiate with them, that this would be effective, while more extreme positions would lose more than gain, and half a loaf was better than none.

That, it is fair to say, has stopped being the case. The center-left that still runs the Democratic Party is painfully and gradually (but generally successfully) recognizing that there are more reachable voters and politicians to their left (the firm/strident/far left) than there are to their right (the center right) - because there are zero reachable center-right people now. Any conservative who might wish to compromise cannot even conceivably do so, because their own voters would instantly and permanently abandon them.

As such, there is no real hope for the foreseeable future of government through consensus. A platform that championed positions that both Democrats and Republicans could support at the same time would be a blank sheet of paper. The consensus is gone, and the sole hope for progress or enactment of anything is through partisan supermajorities, not negotiation. Half a chance at a loaf is better than futile attempts to reach the unreachable.

----

Second. The reality of economic populism (that insufficiently regulated capitalism - or sectors of wholly unregulated capitalism - shovels wealth to the wealthy and reduces everyone else to paupers) has over the past forty years resulted in what it always results in. (Liberalism exists not because Marx was wrong but because he was right - liberalism is the only thing that can protect market societies from Marxist revolution, and conservatives and libertarians have to re-learn this, it appears, every generation or two, to the great and possibly fatal cost of all society.) Even Republicans are being populist - destructively, because conservative populism is fascism - because they have to be, because every ordinary voter now realizes that none of the wealth being generated is showing up in their wallets.

So there's simply no room left to call for liberal-consensus solutions that would preserve capitalism as it is. The baton passes leftward because we can no longer hold it. The economic order has failed, because as productivity continues to increase and the economy continues to grow all of the gains continue to go only to the top.

Just as liberals warned, when Reagan was elected, would happen in the ensuing decades. We've watched it happen as Reagan's seductive bullshit spent the last forty years upending the liberal consensus that had allowed capitalism to operate successfully.

----

Third is simple: Bernie Sanders. His positions are not actually to the left of what Democrats believe, but his rhetoric has been powerful and strident. He yanked the party in what I believe was a necessary direction (that we were going anyway, and for the rest of all these reasons) but he helped transform the Democratic Party in, frankly, positive and appropriate-to-the-times ways.

He was of course a lousy candidate, would have been ineffective as president, and it is a good thing he did not become the nominee - BUT his campaigns were, at least in this respect, a fantastic demonstration of the way politics should be done - voices and issues raised in the primary by insurgent candidates who raise excitement and passion, even if those candidates don't prevail, should be, and are, incorporated into the platform and the views of the party at large.

It is my fervent wish that the left who supported him would recognize, and take, the win that the massive and transformational party platform changes represent - and it is my enduring frustration that many of them do not, and continue to rail against the phantom menace of "corporate Democrats" when the party platform and party rhetoric is so hostile to that centrist former coalition politics that Sanders correctly recognized would no longer work.

----

Fourth: social issues are centered in the Democratic platform and policies for the simple reason that huge numbers of voiceless people have, in the past decade, found their voice and a plethora of amplifiers. There is much horror from the effects of social media and the internet, but one very positive thing that has come from it is that every group who has experienced social obloquy or discrimination, who has been isolated, felt alone and powerless, who would formerly feel they had to cringe and chuckle at every aggression against them... now every one of them knows they're not alone, that they shouldn't have to just endure what ignorant people have said about them, that they can be here, be proud, be themselves, and they have the right to demand the respect and rights everyone is supposed to be entitled to.

People who finally have a voice are pissed that they've had to put up with this for so long, and are demanding change right now. And they're not wrong. But they're also not at all guaranteed to win, if they don't push shrewdly and intelligently - but we all knew that. And the party has embraced it, and has done so suddenly, where "mainstream" of a decade ago has become unacceptably reactionary today.

----

Fifth and last, though, is this.

Democrats were guilty of a flawed optimism all the way up to November 8, 2016. We believed, even in the dark days of Reagan and W, that the long arc of the universe moved in our favor, at least on social issues. That as the society became more advanced and cosmopolitan, as lives became more complex and layered and richer, as we communicated and traveled and learned more just because life afforded that opportunity when not actually demanding it of us, that inevitably society would become more tolerant, more accepting, embracing more diversity, affording more equitable acceptance and opportunity for everyone.

Even in 2015 we all thought - never mind thought, we were fully confident that - it was going to just gradually fix itself, on its own. Obergefell was such an enormous and instantly-embraced victory, such a powerful indication that we were on the home stretch, that we had conservatives literally writing columns saying "can't we have a little time to adjust? Are we even permitted to negotiate the terms of our own surrender?"

I remember that lament, in response to Obergefell.

That optimism shattered when we saw just how evil so many of our fellow citizens were. When we saw them rip off the masks and what they would embrace - how much bigotry they still felt, and ached to express. How much cruelty, how much oppression, how much hierarchy they still wanted to impose. When they said "you can't legislate morality", they were talking about themselves.

And it has gone backward, shockingly fast. We have had reality slap us in the face, over and over, that this gradual improvement is not guaranteed.

And it has this knock-on effect: ultimately, even if the shattered political consensus is the unequivocal fault of deliberate machinations by Gingrich and his ideological cronies, even if those of us on the center-left still very much believe that the best society we can build is one of a centrist political consensus... I think a lot of us who care to eradicate bigotry don't ever want consensus politics to come back, because we can't see ourselves compromising with what we now know the rest of the country to be.

I remember conversations.

I remember talking with conservatives. Conservative coworkers, conservative friends, conservative family.

I remember these conversations in the 1990s, the 1980s, back to the 1970s. My memory doesn't go back to the 1960s - so I remember, in school, learning about how racism "used to be" this huge problem. We "used to" have lynchings, and Jim Crow, and redlining, and poll taxes, and sundown towns, and the KKK. And the country was full of racists, back then.

And now only little backwards bits of them were left, in the South, and we were Past All That, and Unloading The Dice. And Everyone Was On Board, pretty much.

And I gradually learned about what we really did accomplish in the 1950s and 1960s, just before my time. Truman and military desegregation. The Warren Court, and Brown v Board. LBJ, the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act. MLKJ. I have a dream.

I remember learning about all that. I remember hearing how much got repealed. How laws were passed guaranteeing a right to vote, to fair treatment for a job, for education, for so many opportunities. For women, too, a bit later, and then for gays, and .. yeah, all of that.

I remember that. And I remember those arguments with conservatives. All the way back, as far as I remember. Best friend in grammar school, two houses away, was a religious conservative. We got into big arguments.

I remember conservatives saying two things. Two things about all this. And I don't think I really understood them, not till the past few years.

The first one was this - I remember them saying nobody was racist anymore. Nobody said the n-word out loud anymore (not till they were really drunk). Nobody was going to be like that anymore; it's just that now those blacks, those Puerto Ricans, those folks from other countries, were making accusations, not giving us any credit for what we'd fixed, "playing the race card" - but it was all over now, they all got a fair shot, and look, they know this one black guy, friend of theirs, respectable, successful, nothing wrong with that, there should be more like him, they have no problem with it. See? Not racist.

But the thing is... they said something else. They said it about affirmative action, about antidiscrimination laws, about antibigotry legislation. About everything that they called "do-gooder" or "bleeding heart" or "liberal" legislation.

"You can't legislate morality."

They would say that, a lot.

And I think that I completely, completely missed what it meant. Because, to a degree, I believed the first thing - or rather, at least I believed that they believed it.

I believed them when they said they weren't racist - not as such. They just didn't think those additional laws did any good. They thought the dice were unloaded now. That enough had been done. They were wrong, and I argued that they were wrong. But they really believed - because they said they did - that the stone had turned, that the 1960s had ended racism. It was gone.

Except they kept also saying that other thing.

"You can't legislate morality."

And yet they made us believe that somehow racism just ... went away. The racism they used to follow, to believe in. That everybody like them used to believe. Because they were racist, for sure. They were absolutely convinced "the blacks" deserved to be poor, that they were lazy, that they weren't like us.

But that they somehow changed - the 1960s changed them, and now nobody was racist anymore.

I know that they were racist before that, because now and then it would pop up again. And they were family, or they were friends whom I could argue were wrong, or they were coworkers you had to find ways to get along with. They'd back off from those things, or say what they said wasn't racism, nobody's racist, they're just saying... that.

And I kept missing what they were saying.

They were saying - they were telling me, out loud, that you can't legislate morality.

So what changed?

What was it that changed, from WWII through to the 60s, exactly?

Rules. Legislation.

Desegregation. Busing. End of Jim Crow. Civil Rights Act. Voting Rights Act. End of redlining. End of sundown laws. Affirmative Action.

Legislation.

You can't legislate morality. They kept saying that, and we kept disagreeing.

What they were saying, out loud, was that we hadn't changed them at all.

Not one fewer racist. Not a single one of them repented. They never changed their minds. They just figured out how to lie about it. And they even tried to tell us so.

Everything that allowed Jim Crow, redlining, sundown towns, all the rest - every bit of it was still there.

We'd just gotten the upper hand and forced them to hide it. That's all it ever was.

And they told us so. "You can't legislate morality." They said, out loud, that all the legislation in the world was never going to get rid of their bigotry.

And I missed it. I think everybody I know missed it. I think all of white liberal America missed it. For decades, while they went on to raise their children and grandchildren to be exactly the same sorts of bigots as their parents.

The kinds of bigots who knew how to hide till it was time.

And they warned us. All the laws in the world weren't going to change them one bit. They were always going to be exactly the same roaches crawling out from under the same swastika-shaped rocks, as soon as they amassed the means to do so.

If we beat them, we must legislate the fuck out of them. You can't legislate morality, but you can use legislation to expose immorality - and then you can beat it into submission. You can't change them. But you can beat them.

If all you can do is shove them under rocks, shove 'em back under rocks. And figure out how to fumigate.

But we will not forget what they said. If you can't legislate morality, then at least you can use it to punish immorality.

And we will. Make no mistake.

Because we've seen what happens if you don't.

OK, magat.

I'm going to tell you the truth. I know you think we lie to you. Sometimes we do. Here's where I admit it. I'm going to tell you only the truth here. I may be a lying liberal the rest of the time, but this right here is the truth.

First of all, I wear a mask. Fuck you if even think about being a dick about me wearing a mask.

And I need you to wear a mask too.

You think I'm trying to make you wear a mask because I'm pretending that I care about you, that I don't want you to catch covid. Like I care.

Wrong.

Wearing a mask won't protect you. I know it won't and I'm not lying to you. Not unless it's a N95 or whatever the hell that is. That's what you heard and you're absolutely right about that part.

But that's not why. I'm not pretending to care. If you're a magat, I don't really give a shit if you die of covid. One less Trump voter. I'm okay with that. Just so we're clear.

But I still need you to wear a mask.

Do I sound rude? I'm not. I'm being honest. I stopped caring about you for a reason. You and all the other magats have for years been mocking liberals for caring about people like you. You don't need it. You don't want it. You think we're just pretending to care anyway. So you convinced me. I don't give a shit about you and I'm willing to say so. I'm being honest, like you thought all along.

I don't care if you get covid, like I said.

I really don't. Die for all I care.

I still need you to wear a mask.

Because the problem's this: you might not be dying of it.

A lot of people get the disease and don't even show symptoms. Over half, doctors currently estimate.

That means you might have it and not know you have it.

But you will still spread it.

Now I know it sounds like I'm accusing you of something. I'm not. If you have covid and don't know it - it's not a sign of weakness. If you're infected and have no symptoms, it's cause you're strong. Your immune system is manly! You can get an erection and satisfy your girl! It's TESTOSTERONICALLY HETEROSEXUAL!

So calm the fuck down. If you have it and don't know it, you're like half the people are going to be. It's fine. Nothing 'bad' about you. I'm not insulting you. It's just a thing that happens.

You could be so manly that you have covid and don't even feel it, because it's so weak to you.

But you can still infect *me.*

And I care about me. You get that, right?

So I need you to wear a mask.

Anybody who has the virus can spread it. They spread it by breathing. And, not like I care, but you're still breathing.

I know you don't trust people who pretend they care about you. I'm telling you the truth. I don't give a shit about you.

I care about me.

That's something even you can understand, right, magat?

You understand when a guy cares about himself. I know you understand this. I get it.

Don't even worry about what else I might care about. I care about me. I don't want covid. I don't want to die.

I want to prevent my own death.

If someone with covid breathes near me, multiple times, and I breathe near them, I could inhale the virus. We share the same air.

I know sharing is girly and you hate it. I hate this part too. If we both have to be in the same place, I have to breathe your air. I can't stop it either.

Fucking cope with it. I do.

The thing about even a cheap cloth mask is that when someone wears it and breathes out through it, the cloth stops the water droplets that carry the virus.

No shit. That's what it does. I'm not lying to you, remember.

If I have the virus and wear a mask, I keep it from you.

If you have the virus and wear a mask, you keep it from me.

And like I said, I don't want to die. Just like when you buy an AR-15 because you don't want to die.

You keep saying that even though you *could* kill me with your AR-15, you won't. Out of courtesy.

I appreciate that. I'm wearing a mask even though I don't care if you, magat, live or die. I'm wearing it as a courtesy. Just like you are, courteously, not shooting me.

I appreciate your courtesy.

So prove you're not a worthless human being. Show common courtesy.

Show courtesy with your breath. Don't kill people.

One last thing.

I know you're confused about the point of covering your nose too. I mean, we both know what part you use to breathe. It's what we used to call you before 'magat', after all. We know what you use to breathe, and it's not your nose.

Cover your nose anyway. Because you might sneeze.

But most of all, wear a goddamn mask.

... so it's an excellent place to post spoilers.

OK, so Rise of Skywalker.

I go to Star Wars movies to enjoy a rollicking space opera, to hopefully not have my intelligence insulted much, and to watch the bad guys lose. By that standard there is literally nothing not to like in this movie.

Like with TFA and TLJ, I had at least a dozen moments of "Ah, well, yes, I liked this scene when I saw it in the original trilogy, so - sure, why not, let's watch it again." But in this one, more than in the others, they were really conscious and deliberate about it, and often the reprises had a point.

Though a character named Ben turning to the audience and pretty much admitting that the writers changed their minds about a character's parentage and that that's why he lied about it in the last movie is a reprise I probably didn't have to see again.

I was a little disappointed that Rose had such a small role. Would have liked to see more of her.

Just as with TFA, the Poe and Finn banter just makes the whole thing a blast of good fun and without those two this wouldn't have been even half the movie.

It was made for the fanboys. It's all about payoff, callback, closure. They hit all the points. There's nothing approaching even the superficial depth (if that makes sense) of Yoda's lessons to Luke in ESB. It doesn't try to be deep. It doesn't try to change your worldview. It's a western. You walk into the theater, 150 minutes later the bad guys have lost but good and you're smiling and you got to be a kid again and didn't have to think too hard. There is a place in this world for movies like that. (Ahem, James Bond, anyone?)

The movie's pace is really something. There's really no time to waste anywhere. There are a lot of abrupt cuts where I actually would have liked to see the spaceship land, people get out, have a little more transition - but the direction trusts you to keep up.

There's a little eyerolling combination of deus-ex and obvious foreshadow (which is odd because they're kind of opposites) - but the fact that you can predict that the cavalry will come around that hill is both, well, solid story structure and also loses a little bit of the suspense because it only happened because it had to happen since otherwise the good guys would lose. It is not a movie that tries to subvert your expectations, not if you are used to how Star Wars characters act.

I found the core storyline - Rey and Ben's arcs - pretty satisfying, actually. They didn't do what too many lazy stories do - the good guy and bad guy meet up multiple times, and each time till the last time the bad guy gets the upper hand because he's better at it, and in the climax the good guy finally wins because Reasons. The good guy won because the pieces were all finally in place and the bad guy really didn't quite get it. It was well set up.

Nothing will make me feel eleven again - so it's not ANH - and nothing will blow me away like ESB did when I was fourteen, so it's no ESB. But I might like it better than RotJ, and certainly better than any other Star Wars movie - not that there's a whole lot of competition. It's up there for me near Rogue One, because it's not quite as well-crafted but it's a lot more fun and you walk out with a much bigger smile.

I understood, but never really shared, the TLJ love some people have - and the assholes who hate TLJ because of the strong female roles are, well, assholes. But TLJ doesn't really belong very comfortably in the Star Wars universe, and really doesn't work well thematically as a sequel to TFA - similar to how I felt about Solo, TLJ would have been better off as its own movie. You could feel TLJ squirming in the uncomfortable confines of the setting. RoS is a Star Wars movie down to its DNA; it hit the Star Wars notes and - like a good Bond movie - it was exactly what I came to see.

It almost completely ignored The Last Jedi. But I think it had to - as I have said before, that movie ignored too much Star Wars canon. (The clearest nod to TLJ was that Finn and Poe came up with a plan for the climax that was simply not going to work, not without help. But they got the help this time, I guess because it was the third movie of the trilogy instead of the second. Like I said, deus ex and obvious plot structure both.

I might go read some of the critical reviews now - I understand reviews were mixed - but honestly given (a) the anchor-weight of the prequels and (b) the jarring juxtaposition of TFA and TLJ it had to reconcile, it hit all the notes it needed to hit, and I had a lot of fun in the theater.

This was wrong. He was sure this was wrong.

Around him were men and women of all colors, ages, nations of all the world, in the largest crowd there had ever been. Ahead, remote and yet seemingly right before him, was the Throne, and Him Whom the prophecies named. The Lord Of All had come into His own. The Kingdom was nigh.

But he had found himself on the left side of the throne. And all around him was weeping, and gnashing of teeth.

For the King was saying something - He had finished speaking to the endless (but seemingly small) crowd to the Right side of the Throne, and He had now turned to His Left. And His Words echoed, sounding exactly as the Trump of Doom, to the man's ears.

"For I was hungry, and you gave Me no food. For I was naked, and you did not clothe Me..."

The man shook his head. That could not be. "No!" he cried.

And among all the weeping and wailing, the Lord of All heard and saw the man's lament - for He saw all - and fixed His gaze upon him. And it seemed to the man that, while all of heaven and earth paused, the Lord spoke only to him, and listened to his cry.

"Lord, why am I here, upon Your left, with these... goats? For I kept your commandments, and praised Your name, and consorted only with the righteous."

And the One upon the Throne nodded. "You sought to do right. But much is expected from him to whom much is given."

"What do you mean, Lord? How was 'much' given to me?"

And it seemed to him that the Lord of All rolled His eyes. "You lived in a time and place where almost all the infants grew to adulthood. You died of old age after a life of good health, with your children around you. You had access to education, transportation, self-determination your whole life. You had antibiotics and indoor plumbing, for My sake. I could go on. I think it fair to say much was given to you."

"But Lord, in what way did I not make good use?"

"Hear Me again. 'For I was hungry, and you gave Me no food. For I was...'"

"Lord, that is not so. I gave to charity!"

"Yes, you did, to those charities you considered worthy. But money to a charity helps only a few. You had it within you to turn those few loaves and fishes into enough for a multitude. And you did not. And you were proud, in your refusal."

"Um, Lord, forgive me, but I do not understand."

"If a peasant is generous only to the less-fortunate peasant he meets, he has done right in My eyes. But a king has responsibility to all the people, to the people he has not met, and thus must do more."

"Huh? I was no king, Lord. I was a plumber."

The One upon the Throne raised an eyebrow. "Who ran your country?"

He blinked. "Uh... the president? The congress? Uh..."

The Lord affected impatience. "You know better. You were told better in the education you were freely given by that nation, that you might rule it well. Your presidents and senators and representatives were not there by divine fiat. I performed no miracle to decide their destiny. You put them there. You, and all like you. You voted. And you gave of your time and your money to their campaigns."

"But... the men and women I voted for all praised Your name. They were certainly more Christian, more pious, than the ones whom I voted against."

"Was I speaking of piety? Did I say, 'For I was hungry, and you were pious? For I was naked, and you praised My name?'"

"Well, no, but I trusted them. They spoke of You."

And now the Lord did truly roll His eyes. "They were politicians. Do you trust in what a politician says, or rather in what he does?"

"What he does, Lord."

"And did the pious ones use the power you vested in them to feed the hungry or clothe the naked?"

"Lord, neither side really said they'd do that."

"I did not send My Son again, if that's what you mean. All politicians are human, and flawed. But your votes were for those who would call for less help from those who had help to give. Your votes were for those who would do less for the poor, less for the sick, less for the hungry. A government not of Me but of My Adversary."

"My Lord, I was taught government programs take from those who earned and gave to those who did not work or earn. They make people dependent."

The Lord sighed. "All charity gives to those who do not earn. Any charity will make some of the needy dependent. But these are My children, not yours. If the content of their character is deficient, that is for Me to worry about. When you have two coats, and you come upon a man who has none, you give him one of your coats. I did not say, 'give him your coat, but first, extract a promise that having a coat will not make him lazy'."

"But Lord, if these things are done with taxes, then it is not my choice. It is not to my virtue that I pay taxes. If I don't pay taxes I go to jail. If it's coerced, it's not virtuous to give."

"And I did not say you failed to pay your taxes. The virtue lies not in paying taxes but in voting. And for whom do the tax collectors work? They work for the government. And who decides the government? You, the people.

"In your nation - a government, lest you forget, that is of, for, and by the people - you are Caesar. When you 'render unto Caesar', you render unto yourselves. And in doing so shrewdly, your few loaves and fishes multiply, and feed the multitudes. You clearly did have a choice, because you chose leaders who would instead destroy those services, who would let Me starve."

"Let ... you?"

"I say to you, listen to My words. 'For I was hungry, and you did not feed Me. For I was naked, and you did not clothe Me.' You listened instead to the words of the Deceiver - that no one should have what he did not earn. You believed this despite being surrounded by gifts you did not earn - the society into which I chose to place you. You did not build that society yourself. You inherited it. You did not earn your education, or your freedom, or your wealth, any more than a man can 'earn' My grace."

"Lord, I wasn't wealthy. And what I did have, I earned..."

"I speak of antibiotics. Of indoor plumbing. Roads. Schools. Parks. The Internet. Of life nearly free from violence, illness, and want of necessities. Of 'freedom,' which you so proudly trumpeted in ignorance of what it meant. You think you earned that? By the standards of all of My children, you - born into the middle class of your nation - were born into immense wealth. What you mean to say is that you were not wealthier than enough of your neighbors, and only did better than many of those born to less privilege. I am not impressed with what you 'earned'."

"But Lord, would it not just make us all worse off to pay taxes to help the poor?"

"I made the science of economics more complex than that. But that need not be your concern. Does it not make you worse off to give of your own money to the poor? Did you choose not to give to the poor because it will make you less well off? No you did not refuse, that far, for you understood my words to peasants - but you refused to hear my words to kings, and you were a king. And you listened to the words of My Adversary, who has always known that to destroy your nation he need only make you believe avarice is a virtue.

"And to turn avarice to a virtue, the Adversary uses a simple weapon, and that weapon is fear. You, standing on the shoulders of giants, cowered in fear. You voted to ensure others would have no hand up. You voted for cruel policies, because you were afraid. Not afraid of losing the wealth you had, for these policies would not have made you a pauper, and any study of history would have told you that - but instead, sharing in all this wealth you did not earn, you were afraid: that one with less wealth might get something he did not earn.

"I told you about hypocrisy, of motes and beams. I told you the high places must be made low and the crooked paths made straight. But now" - He paused, and His voice grew deeper, and more final.

"Now, hear this, for the last time. When I said 'Be not afraid', I meant it."

And the Lord turned away from him, and resumed His speech. "...For when you did not help the least of these, you did not help Me."

"I'm sorry your son is sick, but that doesn't give you the right to use my money to save him."

Yeah, it kinda does.

If your neighbor's house is burning down and they're yelling from the second story window, and you decide "well, I'm sorry he's trapped in the fire, but that doesn't give you the right to use my ladder to save him", we're going to ignore you and take your ladder. And if you actually raise a fuss about it, we're going to burn your shit down.

That's how living in a society works. You have property rights. But society is what guarantees your property rights. So you only have property rights for as long as society agrees you do.

Your rights depend on other people agreeing to them. Always. And if someone disagrees that you have the rights you claim, you can only force them to respect your rights if someone more powerful than they are agrees that you have the rights you say you have. And the most powerful force in society is society. So if society chooses no longer to respect your "property rights", it's no longer your property.

You now want to play absolutist games with what I just said, of course. You want to go reductio-ad-absurdum immediately and say "well that just means I have no rights to anything that someone else wants, that's what you're saying."

And of course it's not that at all. What I am saying is that all "rights" are negotiated tradeoffs, none of them are absolute, and while people have to commit to the outcomes of negotiations, they do so in order that society be able to maintain itself, which includes an unspoken assumed mutual respect to do your part as necessary to maintain that society.

And you know this already. Every right you assert for yourself is an imposition on other people (you are imposing on someone, some entity composed of other people, the obligation to take affirmative action, where necessary, to see your rights respected.) Every right another person asserts is likewise an imposition on you - a restriction of your prerogative to act as you choose.

That's what society is. Mutual agreed assurances. Explicit contracts are a subset of the social contract - in fact the idea, the meta-idea, that explicit contracts have any power at all is itself a part of the unspoken, implied social contract.

Which means if you're breaking the implied social contract, you have no basis for claiming your rights under an explicit contract.

So how do we set up explicit rules to keep this implicit society intact? This is a hard problem - we have to make rules that make pragmatic sense, that make sense for people, foreseeing as much as we can. A right to property makes pragmatic sense - but that right is never going to be absolute.

Because people want to not die more than they want to respect property rights. That's just how it is. Property rights aren't absolute.

Pretending it is will eventually run you up against the harsh reality of other people. Society is willing to support your right to your property only so long as you support society. Including, where deemed necessary by society, the surrendering of specific parts of your property under what is deemed conditions of sufficient need.

How much? How far does it go? One solution is the mob of people in front of your house demanding a ladder because it's an emergency. But a better answer, for most scenarios, to the question of how much your rights are worth versus how much needs to be provided to the common good, is that that is what the vote is for. It's what the vote, and the Constitution, and precedent, and protests, and letters, and public debate, and representation, and everything else about government and society and law are all for. It is your right and responsibility to advocate for rights you want protected - but you have to make it in the interests of others to see your rights protected. Or we simply won't protect them, and we - collectively - are the arbiters of what rights you actually have.

So in the burning building and ladder scenario, you are arguing for an absolute right to "your property", when it comes at the obvious and direct cost of others' lives. And your fellow humans in your society are telling you we're not going to respect that right when it carries that cost to us.

You might or might not convince us otherwise. But simply asserting a property right as though it were natural law?

You are going to get your shit burned down.

Thoughts on Veterans Day - and also Armed Forces Day, and also Memorial Day.

Why do we honor soldiers? I have tried - as I generally do - to think through the problem: what is it that is unique about a soldier, as opposed to other sorts of public servant, that justifies the extraordinary honors they receive? I think I have an answer that satisfies me - but it is not the one that people normally give.

First, let me explain my problems with the normal answers.

Does a soldier put his life on the line for me? Sure. But so do firefighters. And firefighters don't get three different holidays every year. And doctors, who put their lives on the line to battle epidemics. And police officers, who will head directly into every dangerous situation our own flaws produce. Heck, some years it's more lethal to be a sanitation worker than a soldier. They all serve us and sometimes die in the line of a dangerous duty. There is nothing unique about a soldier's role just from its danger.

Yes, they'd defend me to the death if they need to. But a lot of people would. And if my life were to be on the line to protect my community, I'd give mine, if it meant the difference to many others' lives. That's basic humanity, not rare honor.

So is it that soldiers *save* our lives? We'd like to believe so, but surely not in most cases. Since WWII it's really hard to see an armed conflict that was opposing an existential threat to the United States, not if one's at all rational about it. Yes, American interests are served by our soldiers, but also by the State Department's diplomats and the rest of our representatives, public and private.

And I guarantee the folks at the CDC, the FDA, and the DMV have saved all our lives multiple times over. The little old lady who checks the eyesight of the eighty-year-olds with expired licenses and, over their protests, denies them a renewal - how many lives does she save? Yet she doesn't get three holidays every year.

The honor due a soldier is not for the lives he saves. Many others save more lives, more directly, more certainly, and at lesser cost.

No, it's something else - but it is something real. We honor our veterans for a very good reason.

It's not that they save our lives. It's not that they die for us.

It's that they are, of necessity, trained to *kill* for us.

A strange reason to honor them. But an *essential* reason.

I have not served in uniform. But I've listened to how they train, what they are prepared to do, and for the ones who have seen combat, I've listened to their tales of what they've done.

By the standards of any civilian, of any civilization, they become monsters. They have to. And they do so for us.

They are trained to rip away the fundamental constraint of civilization - of respect for life - and, so that they can be directed, but also so that they can be redeemed afterwards, *substitute another set of constraints* - that of order and regimentation, of hierarchy. Of rank, and service, honor and duty. Those constraints are there for a reason beyond helping the military achieve its objective; the traditions and rules of the military are there to service the souls of the temporary monsters that comprise it.

We honor them, because the nature of their service means that they must hand away and set aside a part of their humanity for the duration of their service - to be willing to kill, they *must* set aside part of their humanity -- and it is our role to remind them that there is yet a human place for them when they return.

The honor due a soldier is not merely our respect and admiration per se. It is also *their path back to us*.

Those who die in their service, we honor them so that we show all who serve that we do not forget their humanity. That we hold it for them, here at home, for when they return. And if they do not, we honor their human memory, and their place in society, which they voluntarily gave up on our behalf - not when they died, but when they enlisted.

For my first programming job I worked for a guy who was ... well, pretty awful, but I learned a lot of basic software engineering from him.

One of the things he said: as a small business owner, the complexity of doing his taxes had reached the point where there wasn't a "right" way to do them; it was more like buying a used car. By filing your taxes, you're making an offer. If the IRS audits you, they're making a counteroffer, and the audit is the negotiation.

The ironic humor aside, that anecdote has stuck with me. It strikes me that the more you work in business, and the higher the level you work at, the more you see all of law and government that way. To be successful, you must push as relentlessly as you can, try to get away with as much as you can, and you see every rule and regulation, every taboo and tradition, strictly as an obstacle; everything becomes focused on overcoming obstacles.

And every interaction is a way to find leverage to overcome those obstacles, or push their effects onto other people. It's not about right and wrong, it's about winning and losing.

And maybe the people who don't think that way about everything simply don't become as successful businessmen overall. I expect it is so. That's how competition works.

(There are of course exceptions. That's how probability works. And people who actually *make products*, which overlaps with 'business' but isn't the same thing, sometimes care deeply about those products, and their effect on people and society. But "business" itself is different from production.)

We all know this about the attitudes of businessmen. We expect this. We have all sorts of anecdotes about "it's just business". The only reason to think a businessman will act in *your* interest is if his interests and yours align, and that's up to you, not him.

So here is the thing to understand about Trump.

He naturally sees every interaction - with customers, with competitors, with employees, or with law enforcement - as a situation to try to work to his personal advantage. Every law, every regulation, every limit, is seen not in terms of its intent but in terms of its personal effect, and solely that. He's lived that way his whole life - and has had enough advantage that he's never learned the drawbacks of thinking this way. This is all he knows.

Nothing is about right and wrong. Nothing. Those are abstract concepts that, if he had believed in them, he would never have gotten to where he is, said what he's said, done what he's done. Sure, laws, traditions, rules, they all exist; they're the terrain. He is navigating the terrain; that being in a position of power means he now reshapes it as he goes does not concern him (except making his own path smoother).

So it is useless to think he is considering whether he has "broken the law", or "done anything wrong". He has attempted to negotiate to his advantage, and sometimes has negotiated with people who have leverage over him. He knows that some of that negotiation, if made public, would produce a disadvantage to him - leverage that others can use, revealing ways that his interests and others' differ - so of course he seeks to keep those negotiations private.

But he doesn't believe that any of his dealings with Putin "crossed any lines", because he doesn't believe in lines; he just recognizes there are forces that could cause him trouble, and he seeks to find leverage to get out of that trouble, any way he can. Never mind what "precedent" he sets. It's all about what he can actually *do*, period. The terrain afterwards is for other people to worry about.

If Putin has leverage over him - and I think he does, but we don't honestly know what or how much, except for what's been uncovered so far about his finances - then that's just how business is done too. Of course you do what the person with leverage over you tells you to do (e.g. Syria rebels). You stay out of trouble that way - you avoid them using that leverage. And he sees *nothing whatsoever wrong with that.* He does the same thing to everybody he has leverage over. It's just business.

But when it comes to our own government, he understands "you work for me" to mean one thing only - it means "you will act the way I want you to act". Period. I have leverage over you: I decide if you keep working, drawing a paycheck, exercising the power your current position gives you. So if you want to keep your job, you do what I say.

So I believe he's honestly confused about why, as the head of the executive branch, anyone in the executive branch might have any other reason to be working there except to do what he wants... and what he wants is, of course, to gain personal advantage: power and money (and probably adulation and fame; he cares about those too). He figures anyone who doesn't have the same priority shouldn't be working for him.

And since everyone who does federal law enforcement reports ultimately to him, I'm certain he believes that law enforcement is *by definition* on his side; that he can use it to gain advantage. It's natural. FBI, CIA, NSA, Justice, and everybody else, are part of his organization now. There's absolutely no reason even to entertain any other thought.

So understand his frustration and confusion. How could a federal prosecutor come after him, when the prosecutor - like all federal prosecutors - *works for him*? Mueller is simply a bad employee and should be fired, and he doesn't understand why that might be bad. Sessions didn't do everything he could on behalf of the guy he works for, and probably should be fired. Why are they following "rules" when they're in charge of enforcing the rules and can just decide not to follow them? Who's going to stop them if they don't follow the rules? It doesn't make sense to him.

That's how a businessman thinks: if you work for me, you should be on my side all the time, and do anything I ask, and the only reason not to is if you are physically prevented from doing it; otherwise, if that's not what your priorities are, go work for somebody else.

That's why electing a businessman as president is a bad idea.

---

I first wrote the above a year ago today - it popped up in facebook and it's a good enough long-form presentation of my thoughts to preserve on a blog. I went on to make these follow-ons in comments; they don't really fit with the flow of the essay, but they fit with the content:

So of course he's looking into pardons. That's not an admission of "guilt", it's a powerful form of leverage he can use to get valuable employees out of trouble. Its not a "last resort", it's a tool in the shed. If people are getting in his way, he can just use pardons to get the problems out of his way. Why shouldn't he? It's like declaring bankruptcy to get out of having to pay what you owe. It's a tool. It's there. Use it.

And of course he was asking about nuclear weapons from his first briefing onward, and was confused about why he "can't" use them. They're right there. He has the *power* to use them. Exactly why shouldn't he? What happens *to him* if he does? If nothing bad happens *to him*, and by using them he can gain advantage, of course they're what he should use.

And again, go back to the election. He said and did all sorts of things that just aren't done because they harm the electoral process - but why should he care about that process? Why should he care if claiming millions of illegal votes causes people to distrust elections? It gives an advantage to him. Why should he *not* use information brought to him by a foreign government? It would help him win, and the point was to win. Never mind that it damages the institutions of the nation; why does he care about that? He cares about winning.

Long post.

I have many well-meaning friends who describe themselves as "independent", or "lean conservative", who voted for Trump, or at least didn't vote to stop him by voting for Clinton.

This is a response to all of you - not any one in particular; there have been several.

I have tried a couple times in the last few days to explain why it is that politics are rather more personal to me - given that my children aren't white. (It's by no means the only reason. But it is a reason why I care as much as I do, and since it's a personal reason, it's more immediately understandable.)

Y'all's responses have been, well, sympathetic - but they follow a predictable pattern.

You say things like "I just want everyone to be treated equally," and "Someone's race doesn't matter to me" (and of course "I don't like a lot of what Trump says, but a lot of what he says he doesn't really mean." I note that I have never had to make that kind of excuse for any politician I've ever supported.) And in general you make the convincing case that in your personal dealings you are fair, unbiased, and have no prejudice or bigotry. Those of you who are family would, I'm certain, embrace my children as family and see absolutely nothing "other" or "foreign" about them.

But see the thing is this: I DON'T CARE. Telling me that you're not a bigot doesn't give me any new information. If I'd thought you were a bigot I'd have disowned, unfriended, and cut off all communication with you. I already know you're not a bigot. You're a nice person. That's NOT THE ISSUE.

The issue is that YOU VOTED FOR RACIST POLICY.

Are most people bigots? No. But are there bigots around? You damn well know there are. I'm white and 52, and in that half century I've regularly had other white people make a comment, tell a joke, sneer an observation, that was shockingly, overtly racist. And I know you have had it happen too.

It's almost always said in an undertone. It's almost always expressed "as a secret between you and me." Sometimes they ask permission - "can I tell you a joke about black people?" (example punchline to one such example of sparkling wit: "by their last names." Don't tell me you haven't been told that one.)

Let me tell you something about bigots.

They think you are one too. They think that bigotry is all over the country, that most ordinary white folk think like them, and are scared to show it. They are used to bigotry being "coded" and whispered and carefully hidden from the people who might embarrass them for it.

Hopefully there aren't that many of them. But they're spread around everywhere - and most of the time you don't know, because you're white too. Sometimes it's the guy selling you a hot dog. Sometimes it's the cop you meet. Sometimes it's the guy who's hiring you. Sometimes it's the guy approving your loan, or the guy running an auction for something you want, or the lady baking you a cake.

Sometimes it's the dad sitting next to you watching marching bands perform, who says maybe Folsom High's jazz band is so good because, y'know, it's Folsom, the prison is there, so maybe it's genetics, because we all know about those people - not that he means anything by it.

And sometimes it's the cop who pulls my son or daughter over for speeding, or for a burnt-out taillight, or because THEY AREN'T WHITE.

All those assholes have believed for decades that they're the leading edge of a Great White Reclamation of the country. You can read their literature. They've been waiting.

Here is what you did, when you voted for Trump.

YOU MADE EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THOSE ASSHOLES BELIEVE THEIR TIME HAS COME.

And EVERY SINGLE THING TRUMP SAYS AND DOES reinforces this. He is enabling them to act on this. All those things he says that you don't like, that you don't think he means? The bigots like it a lot. They think he means it. And his policies support it.

The cop who wants to harass black and brown people? He was always going to get "thin blue line" cover from other cops. But now he doesn't think he has to worry whether his partner might report him.

The guy who doesn't like to hire black people, but has been working to avoid looking like he doesn't like to hire them - and so has made the occasional exception - now doesn't think he has to make the effort.

My kids get mistaken for Hispanic once in a while. Some of them get mistaken for Hispanic consistently. That's always been true. In the places they've lived, so far, it hasn't resulted in anything bad happening. But YOU MADE THEIR LIVES MORE DANGEROUS, because of the color of their skin and the shape of their faces.

That fear is what those bigots want. And you gave it to them.

Compared with the power and effect of what your vote did, your personal feelings about people with different skin color really don't matter at all. So yes, I believe you that you don't treat anybody differently. I also think it is an excuse.

I said you were sympathetic? Here's the thing. If you actually cared about what my kids face now, you'd ask a question that not a single one of you have asked.

The question you would have asked would be "What can I do to help?" That's the question that people who actually care would ask.

And if you had asked that question, I would have had a very simple answer:

Stop supporting politicians who caused this to happen.

Don't just talk about how "well, I don't like everything he does - but I'm sure you didn't like everything Obama did".

Some things are dealbreakers - at least when there is an alternative. No, I didn't like everything Obama did - but there was literally nothing of his that I opposed where it was obvious the other party would have fixed it.

In this case, you are condemning my children to - at best - a more dangerous, second-class citizenship, where they have to wonder, with EVERY INTERACTION, whether they're dealing with a bigot who's going to feel emboldened by Trump to show off his bigotry on them.

Sometimes that interaction will be with an armed man who will literally face no consequence at all if he decides to shoot them.

And that wasn't a dealbreaker for you.

And the worst part of all of it?

Black fathers give "the talk" to their sons before they become teens. All of them do. (Go ask.) It's the list of how to behave around law enforcement. That you have to treat the officer as a dangerous animal. The specific things you always do to avoid provoking the officer. Do only certain specific moves, only when told to, always say it first, move slowly, always act in full compliance, go out of your way to avoid looking like a threat.

They know the rules.

I don't.

I don't know what to tell my children. I don't know how to prepare them for this world that your vote has forced them to live in.

Compared with that, your niceness - your lack of personal bigotry - doesn't matter for shit.

You fucked up my children's lives. I know you're a nice person. So am I. I still don't forgive you for it.

[When I visited the House of Mary in Turkey four years ago, I had a revelation, one that affected me as profoundly as any religious experience, about economics and the space program. This is the current state of my attempt to express it coherently.]

Somebody thought of that
And someone believed it
Look what it's done so far

the weird thing.

the weird thing is that fake it till you make it is how the world really works.

Brin talked about it in The Postman. Terry Pratchett makes it one of his central and most-quoted scenes. It is such a weird, weird effect but it's real. Lies become truth. Myth becomes truth. Because of belief.

I've seen it in good ways and in bad. I've seen it rewrite history and rewrite economies and rewrite reality.

It's the story of the Gettysburg Address and John Sutter and the moon landing and Ronald Reagan and the House of Mary and Donald Trump. It's tulips and eastern spices and bitcoin and money and God. It's Jeremiah and St. Paul and Mohammed and Joseph Smith and L. Ron Hubbard.

You assert something that's false - that's absurd - that isn't true. That isn't real. And people - for whatever reason - believe in it. And despite that core being fake, a real edifice is built around it. And people believing the lie - committed to the myth - they build things around the myth, the unreality, and those things they build are real. Are accomplishments. Are things that build an economy and move money. That build a community.

You decide to build a temple to nothing: to a myth. But people believe in it and give you money to build the temple. And then people build a real building because of the myth. They invent new ways of building and write it down and other people use what they learned. And you pay people to build the temple to nothing. And with that money, they feed their families and buy shoes and pots. And so the farmers and cobblers and potters have more money. And they can buy better houses, which somebody is paid to build, and they buy better plows and more animals and a bigger kiln and artwork to hang on their walls, and people are paid to do all of that. And somebody brings a spice from over the mountains and now people have money to pay to have more spice brought over the mountains.

And meanwhile the temple to nothing becomes a place where people go, and listen, and stare at the stained-glass pictures somebody got paid to make, and they spend time there thinking, which they only do because there was a lie that doing so was very important. And they come up with new things, new stories, new ideas, new ways to live their lives. And some of those new things are lies. Myths. And they go and they tell people those lies, those absurd things, those myths. And people commit to those myths. And they go and build something else real. And we get a colony in the middle of nowhere, where people can now live and couldn't live before, all because of somebody's lie.

And without the myth you'd never have had any of it. We tell each other things that are true all the time but it's a lot harder to convince anybody to build a cathedral when you can't just make up the reasons why you need one. Making the case for something that's real means people figure out reasons to do less and achieve the same purpose. Why build a library when you can google? But you can't just google a religious figure, you need the whole church - why? because the myth says so. So we do the big complicated thing because of the lie, but we don't do a big complicated thing because of the truth - and the lie becomes more important than the truth, because it moves money around better, and because once you built it you wind up getting something you didn't realize was important till all the edifice was there.

And because we all spread around ideas that weren't true, we decided it was important to protect these buildings that were put up for things that weren't true, and collected there a whole lot of things people wrote down that had nothing to do with the lies that the building was built for. And then when civilization collapsed around them, those places stayed around and kept saying things that weren't true, but some of what they were saying still meant people got to eat, and farm, and eventually looked some more at all the things they had written down and started remembering things they'd forgotten how to do, and because of it they started building other things again, and came up with brand new ideas no one had had before. And some of those ideas were lies.

Somebody invents the idea that the mother of someone who other people wrote about and invented false superhero stories about may have lived in a place, and tells a lot of other people about this and gets them to believe it and believe for no reason that this idea is important, and it makes a city appear where there wasn't a city before because so many people thought it was important, and people build places to live there and farms and places to eat and make shoes and pots and learn human anatomy and they make pictures of the mother of the person, and other people come there and pay them for copies of their pictures. And nothing about the story was real, but everything they built was real, and without the lie they would never have built any of it. And a lot of people live there - a lot of people were born there and get to live happy lives there and would never have existed if it weren't for the lie.

And people who have different ideas about how to arrange possessions and how people in charge of other people should behave start disagreeing, and because of that disagreement they decide to see who can go and plant a flag on another world first, because it will help decide which one can build the best devices that could end all of our stories.

And in the process of playing a plant-the-flag game we get Velcro and better ways of preserving food and we figure out more about how muscle tissue works and we suddenly figure out how to store lots of information in small spaces and we totally transform the world - and we learn that if we don't change what we're doing we'll wind up killing everything in the oceans and changing the weather so the plants don't grow. Because we played a game to plant a flag for no reason, and without the myth that being the first one to plant the flag *meant* something we wouldn't have invented all that.

It's so weird. It almost turns me into a postmodernist. The way in which "reality-based community" was used as an epithet and in some ways turns out to be right. And it is terrifying to those of us who know truth and care about what's real and what's not - and yet the reality is that the things that aren't real become so much more important than the things that are - because you can't argue with a lie. You can't argue with unreasoning, it just is. Someone bases their argument on a chain of reason, you can argue the chain and disagree with their conclusions - but someone just asserts a thing without proving it, and people believe them, how do you argue with what they say the implications are? You can't.

It's how civilizations rise but it's also how civilizations fall, if we let it. It is really important to choose our myths - our lies - very carefully, because myths do things so easily that the truth cannot do at all. ("We hold these truths to be self-evident"). And yet we're not careful at all. Because the real things built around the lie are terribly, terribly important, but since the lie is not real, how can you possibly tell which lies are going to make good things, and which ones bad?

Maybe I need to tell a lie about it.

A teacher left a loaded gun in a bathroom yesterday. At Marjorie Stoneman Douglas high school.

You know, a lot of bright students today take AP Stats. It wasn't offered when I was in high school.

I inherited from my father the conviction (which has matched my lived experience) that, after basic arithmetic, the most critical mathematics discipline for people to be taught, and to carry an understanding of with them throughout their lives, was statistics - more important than algebra, far more important than geometry or trig, and more important even than calculus.

We all know countless instances of how we're lied to by those who rely on people not understanding basic statistics. I want to focus on just one.

A Parkland teacher was arrested for leaving a loaded gun in a restroom. It's the second instance since the Parkland massacre of a teacher leaving a firearm in a restroom. And I'll get to the significance of this in just a moment, after this diversion.

Some of you may remember the fad of Total Quality Management. The premise of TQM was that it could eliminate mistakes through a simple mindset. The mindset was this: can you spend one minute completely avoiding making a mistake? Yes. Thus, you could do that for another minute, and another, and another. It adds up to an hour, therefore you can spend an hour without making a mistake. And a second hour, and a third, and thus eventually you can spend a day - and never make a mistake in a day.

You get the idea. Long times are just short times added up. What you can do for a little while you can keep going. Mistakes can be eliminated. And it's complete horseshit.

There's nothing wrong with training people to be more mindful, to be more aware of the ways mistakes can be avoided. You can decrease, overall, the number of mistakes made. But you can't eliminate them - and if there's a danger of a mistake being made, the danger doesn't go away. If you move people into areas where there's more risk of a mistake being made, mistakes will be made more often.

That is what "risk" means.

The problem is with the premise. The correct answer to "can you avoid all mistakes for one minute?" is not "yes", it is "almost certainly yes". And it is the "almost certainly" wherein the whole thing falls apart.

Because that's how math works. Something that almost certainly won't happen over a short period of time almost certainly *does* happen over a longer period.

And this means you can't just rely on conviction, or intent, or personal anecdote to decide which the better course of action is: you have to do the work, figure out the probabilities, DO THE MATH, and choose the better course of action, based on …

… statistics.

You're not personally helpless. You can make anything less dangerous, if you make it your personal priority. Since you only live for eighty or so years, if you're careful enough a lot of you can avoid a catastrophic mistake for your whole lives. And you can absolutely - in fact this is most of what policies are for - make social choices to reduce dangers. Change rules, require training, provide incentives and penalties. And they'll work to an extent - based on …

… statistics.

But the one thing that is absolutely, provably futile is thinking you can make the unsafe safe for everybody just by telling everybody not to make any mistakes. You, and the people you know, might end up in the fat part of the curve - you probably will! That's what "the fat part of the curve" means - but there will always be people on the skinny part, the part where the mistake happens, and you can't stop it or prevent it by telling them not to be there. And if the right set of circumstances combine, it will be you who winds up in the skinny part. The unlucky one. The one who made a mistake. (It wasn't your fault, it was…. Right! Exactly! Just like for everybody else who made their mistake) It required an unlikely combination of circumstances. Who could have predicted that it would have happened? To you, personally - nobody could have predicted. That it would have happened to somebody - that is a trivial prediction. Of course it will. How often? Study, do the math, and you'll be able to predict it almost precisely.

What does this have to do with leaving a gun in a bathroom?

It's happened twice so far, since some teachers have gotten the idea that it might be a good idea to carry a firearm in a school. A couple others have gone off in class, some from demonstrations by professionals.

Were they careless? Sure. Did they make a mistake? Of course they did. Could they have individually prevented them? Sure could have. Was it going to happen anyway, somewhere? You can bet your life on it.

Humans being human, they made a mistake. We know enough now about human nature - we've studied enough about it - that we can actually predict pretty well how often people will make a given mistake.

It is completely predictable - it is a statistical certainty - that if more teachers carry guns, more guns will be accidentally left in bathrooms, more guns will be accidentally discharged in classrooms, and guns will be stolen by students and used.

Do you think the solution is just to tell teachers - tell all firearm owners - that they need to avoid mistakes?

If you carry a firearm today, will you remember not to leave it in a bathroom?

Almost certainly yes.

Almost certainly.

That's the point. If you own a firearm, if you carry a firearm, you are almost certainly safe. So is each person carrying one. Almost certainly safe. Today.

This minute.

And if you can be almost certainly safe for a minute, you can be almost certainly safe for another minute.

But you don't get to add together "almost certainly". You have to multiply together "possibly not". What is virtually certain not to happen today is virtually certain to happen eventually.

Then multiply that by the number of firearms. What we know is unlikely to happen here is certain to happen. Somewhere. Over and over.

That's exactly what the problem is.

Profile

eyelessgame

June 2024

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
						1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28	29
30

Syndicate

Page Summary

Style Credit

Style: Neutral Good for Practicality by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Sep. 12th, 2026 04:26 am

Recent Entries

One draft, of the Three Principles concept

T CrB

Let's Make Some People Uncomfortable

Heinlein, billionaires, ideology, Elon Musk, and Venus

On Bad Words

Only A Dream

Astrocartographic geeking

Not Saying Gay

The apocalyptic tragedy of Gore 2000

"Democrats have moved leftwards... a lot"

Legislating morality

OK, magat

No one reads my journal...

The Parable Of The American

Rights and property

Why We Honor Soldiers

On Electing A Businessman

What You Did

Revelation at the House of Mary

Statistics