Monday, February 5, 2024

Unmasking the Tolerance Paradox

 If we accept the principle that intolerance is always wrong, then we find ourselves in a situation where we are expressing intolerant judgment of others who express views that we find to be insufficiently tolerant. Oddly, this can turn into such a witch hunt that the enforcers of absolute tolerance end up being every bit as authoritarian as the Nazis they're trying to root out. People who truly believe in absolute tolerance realize that their "live and let live" policy must be extended even to those whom they find to be intolerant.

Philosopher Karl Popper warned, though, that this exercise of absolute tolerance will, paradoxically, lead to a society in which intolerant people are given the freedom to spread intolerance.

 

...and thus we have the Social Justice Warriors, the self-appointed agents of the new Inquisition, who ferret out every trace of what they judge to be bigotry, and punish it with extreme prejudice. They make an exception for themselves because, as the radical adherents of most religions, they feel that their cause is inherently righteous, and therefore is afforded a special exemption.

I'm uncomfortable with the acceptance of this paradox, not just because it leads to a reign of terror, but because it's entirely unnecessary. A logical mind should not get comfortable with cognitive dissonance. When two mutually exclusive facts appear to be true at the same time, it's either because they're not actually mutually exclusive, or because at least one of them isn't as true as you thought it was. The tolerance paradox only appears to be paradoxical because it is misstated.

That is, the initial presumption--that tolerance is inherently virtuous--is wrong. Tolerance is not an absolute good. As with most things, too much is as bad as not enough.

The true virtue in what we've been calling "tolerance" was never tolerance in the first place. It's justice. Racism is wrong. Full stop. But the reason racism is wrong isn't because intolerance of any kind is evil. Racism is wrong because it judges the innocent to be guilty. It disregards the free will and agency of individuals and holds them collectively responsible for what others not under their control may have done. 

So if a man of a particular ethnicity robs and kills people, I'm not wrong to hate him for it. He's doing evil things and should be stopped and condemned. We needn't feel guilty about thinking that or saying it out loud. He's bad. But if we then hate everyone of his ethnicity--people who didn't rob anyone and who had nothing to do with his robberies--that's wrong. The reason it's wrong isn't that it's always wrong to condemn people, nor that it's always wrong to condemn people of that ethnicity. The reason it's wrong is that it's wrong to condemn the innocent. 

It's also not that it's inherently evil to make broad generalizations. Broad generalizations are fine, as long as they're accurate. If we agree that murdering children is wrong, for example, then we can confidently make the broad-brush statement that all murderers of children are evil. There aren't exceptions. I don't need to get to know each one of them personally and walk a mile in their shoes before I can claim that people who murder children are evil. I sure as hell don't need to be one of them before I can judge their actions to be evil. 

The reason it's okay to make a generalized judgment against this group is because the grouping is defined by their evil action and not anything else. Let's say there's a group of people called the Blobbersnots who hail from the mountains of Lower Upstanistan, and some of the Blobbersnots murdered children. It would be wrong for us to say, based on those murders, that all the Blobbersnots are evil, because not all Blobbersnots have murdered children. Only some of them have. Hate the murdering, not the being a Blobbersnot. The mistake people make is to think that murdering children is an inherent part of being a Blobbersnot. But unless their culture mandates that all Blobbersnots must murder children as a rite of passage or whatever, it's not true. If murdering children isn't a cultural tradition or a religious teaching among the Blobbersnots, then there's no reason to judge them all guilty. There's nothing in the Blobbersnot genes that predestines all Blobbersnots to murder children.

Most racial (ethnic, religious, etc.) hatred--call it "othering"--is rooted in this tendency to make judgments based on assumptions about things that aren't true of all individuals in the group. The teaching of colorblindness in the 1960s-1980s was all about uncoupling this mental association between a person's status of "other" and the assumption that they're bad. Society was engaged in the process of unlearning prejudice and to judge people as individuals based on their individual actions and ideas. Under this value system, it would have been okay, for example, for me to hate you for supporting apartheid in South Africa, but not okay for me to hate you just for being a white South African because I assume that you must support apartheid. It's the practice and support of apartheid that's detestable, not your skin pigment or your nationality. 

So you see, the thing we're hating is injustice, and people had to learn that just being born into a group doesn't automatically make you guilty of committing injustices. It's difficult to believe that an entire population could have been that simple-minded over something that seems so obvious today, but I saw it. I'm not old enough to have seen segregation (at least not in Pennsylvania and Ohio, where I grew up), but all the adults I knew when I was a child had lived through it, and I got to see their thought processes up close. I listened to their stories and consumed their media. The law had progressed, but the attitudes were still there. Stereotypes persisted. People openly (for a while) made jokes about this or that ethnic group based on the idea that certain characteristics could be assumed to be true of all members of that group. 

When we hear those today, we feel disgust. It's repugnant now to attribute unflattering behaviors to a group based on anything other than their behavior. That is, unless the target is one of the groups that the audience still considers to be deserving of scorn. So, straight, white, conservative, Christian males if you're a liberal. If you're a conservative, there are a whole lot more targets you find acceptable--liberals, vegans, gays, Muslims, environmentalists, immigrants, people with colorful hair or any other sort of unorthodox appearance, people in family or relationship structures other than monogamous, nuclear families, artists, academics, the poor, bicyclists, soccer fans, people who are afraid of guns, cat lovers, anyone who eats sushi, anyone who doesn't worship the U.S. flag or idolize the military, etc. (Incidentally, conservatives, that's why you have the reputation as being the bigoted ones, and why liberals laugh at you when you say that they're the real racists based solely on the fact that Republican Abraham Lincoln opposed slavery 160 years ago.)

Incidentally, if you'll allow me a brief aside, I often find these days that American conservatives hold the right position for the wrong reasons. This--the idea that American liberals (let's just say "Democrats" since that's who they're always targeting with these statements) are "the real racists"--is one such position. That is, they're right, but not for the reasons they think they are. I say this because, by and large, most American conservatives alive today have embraced colorblindness to at least some extent. Observe the prevalence of spokespeople for the right who don't fit the mold of straight, white, Christian male. They're valued, in part, because they don't fit the mold, because they're living proof that what conservatives value are ideas that can be held by people regardless of their ancestry, and because they put lie to the claim that conservatives are racists. 

Liberals, on the other hand, particularly of the "woke" variety, are very racially motivated. They draw lines between races and judge people to be good or bad based on the color of their skin, with white people being the devils and everyone else being the angels. They strenuously reject colorblindness and feel it's right to judge white people as all being undeserving oppressors. It's racist, but as with the tolerance paradox, they make an exception for what they feel is a righteous cause. They aren't truly against racism. They're against racism against people of color. They think it's virtuous to be prejudiced against whites. So while some conservatives still have some racial prejudices, they're actively trying to shed the image that they do, while liberals are fully embracing their own hatred of whites and making broad assumptions about the victimhood and powerlessness of whole races of people based solely on their race. It's ugly, and they need to own up to it before pointing any more fingers at conservatives.

End of digression. It wasn't all that much of a digression, really, as it brought me back around to the point I wanted to make anyway, which is that for all the Social Justice Warriors' posturing about how they won't tolerate intolerance, much of what they're labeling "intolerance" isn't any such thing. It's the opposite. It's accepting that people are self-governing individuals, responsible for their own choices and actions. It's the conviction that each individual ought to be held accountable for what they do as an individual, and not be given a pass or a condemnation because of their membership in some genetic group.

I've been avoiding specific, real-life examples because they tend to be triggering and divisive in such a way that they cause people's rational faculties to shut down, and they react with hostility, completely missing whatever point I was trying to make. So let's return to the Blobbersnots. In America, the Blobbersnots are a minority who carry the nasty reputation of being a culture that murders children. Predictably, the conservatives hate them for the simplistic old "othering" reasons. "They ain't like us! Kick 'em out!" But then the liberals react to that by acting as though the Blobbersnots are the good guys. And the part that I find infuriating is this thing they do today where, instead of making the argument that not all Blobbersnots murder children and that it's racist to assume that they do, the liberals instead are saying, "It's okay for Blobbersnots to murder children if they want to, and you're a bigot if you say they shouldn't!"

And that's a good example, albeit a hypothetical one, of what I mean by saying that liberals often hold the wrong positions, while conservatives often hold the right ones for the wrong reasons. 

Before I go any further, I want to make clear that the child-murdering allegory is no veiled reference to abortion. I just needed something extreme enough that everyone can agree that it's bad, and we live in a time of such evil that it's hard to come up with an evil that won't have a faction defending it, so I reached to human instinct ("preserve the species") for an atrocity that so deeply offends our core nature that people across the political spectrum would agree that it's bad. The fact that I have to clarify this, though, for fear that it will be mistaken for a wedge issue that many liberals strongly defend, is a good enough demonstration of what I'm getting at here: liberals often defend evil. They might rationalize that it's about some noble ideal like tolerance, but it really arises from an overdeveloped sense of compassion that seeks to extend unjust mercy--to fail to stop evil and to forgive it instead of smiting it.

One of the best artistic representations of this I've seen is an episode of The Walking Dead called "The Grove" (season 4, episode 14). If you're unfamiliar with the series, it's set in a fictional, present-day America (Georgia and Virginia, mostly) in which all dead people turn into flesh-eating zombies unless their brain is destroyed. In this episode, a young girl of about 12 named Lizzie has decided that the zombies have been misjudged, and that they really just want to be our friends. She likes playing with the zombies (having them chase her) and thinks we'd all be much happier being zombies ourselves. To this end, she murders her little sister so that the little sister can become a zombie and "prove" to the adults that zombies aren't really so bad. That kind of crazy can't be fixed and is a danger to everyone, and so the heroine of the episode, Carol, who had assumed responsibility for caring for these two girls, tearfully executes the oblivious Lizzie, saying, "Look at the flowers, Lizzie," before shooting her in the back of the head.

Lizzie is the embodiment of absolute tolerance. She illustrates the danger of tolerating evil. The zombies want to eat us. Being nice to the zombies by letting them isn't virtuous, it's evil. But the current iteration of American liberalism ("Wokeness") has decided that dedication to niceness is more virtuous than dedication to justice, and so they meet evil with kindness. "Jayjay got shot while stabbing a policeman? That's sad. We should get rid of the police, so people like Jayjay won't get shot anymore when they stab people. Randall twisted his ankle running out of a jewelry store that he robbed? Then we should make it legal to rob stores so Randall won't have to run in fear anymore and risk hurting himself." They protect the guilty at the expense of the innocent. They're so wedded to the idea that all strong and capable people are the villains that they root for many of the real villains.

Friday, December 15, 2023

Noblesse Oblige

 The following was originally posted as an answer to a question asked on Quora.com.

Original question: “Do homeless people deserve to have society provide basic shelter for them? Why or why not?”

The answer to this question is highly dependent upon what you mean by “society.”

Humans are animals. All animals on this planet that we know of—all living organisms, really, not just animals—subsist by consuming resources from their environments. Mostly, they consume other organisms. We do the same.

Except when caring for their own young, most animals display no sense of altruism in voluntarily feeding other animals. To the extent that it does happen, it’s usually done out of selfish motivations, such as when ants raise aphids for food. It’s only in social animals that we see exceptions to this. For example, female lions hunt and bring meat back for their whole lion community. Wolves hunt as a pack and eat as a pack, without any sense of private property. Likewise, a village of humans may all work collectively to plant and harvest a large field of grain, and then share it among the entire village, even those who were too weak or sick to work.

But for most of modern humankind’s existence—all but the last ten-thousand years of our 200,000 to 300,000 years of existence—our chief mode of procuring food was hunting and gathering. Our usual means of obtaining shelter was to make it ourselves from whatever local materials lent themselves best to the task. We made tents and huts and houses out of skins, sticks, logs, rocks, wool, mud, grass, leaves, and bark. Aside from social and familial obligations within one’s band/tribe/family/village, nobody owed anyone else food or shelter. If we offered it to an outsider, it was as an act of kindness, generosity, or perhaps a desire to flaunt one’s wealth. It wasn’t required.

So this is the natural state of things. If you are a mentally capable, able-bodied adult and are free and able to roam your environment to gather food and building materials to make your own house, and you don’t have a house, then that’s your own fault. Go make one. If a storm knocks it down, build another one, maybe in a more protected space this time.

But that doesn’t really describe the situation most homeless people today find themselves in, does it? For most, it’s simply that they can’t afford to rent an apartment. Afford? Where did “afford” ever factor into what I just described above? Money has nothing to do with slapping together mud and sticks. We’ve been doing that since before money was invented. So why should a lack of money keep someone from being sheltered?

There are a couple of things going on, but they’re all part of one system. The first thing that’s happening is that some people—people with armies protecting their interests by force—claim the land and its resources as their own private property. Even if they claim more than they have any personal need for, the system of laws that they set up among themselves says that all the land is property, and that nobody else is entitled to use of someone else’s property. Some of this property is held by the government rather than by private individuals or businesses or other organizations, but even that “public” land is not typically available for all members of the general public to freely gather resources from and live on.

In this system of artificially constructed restrictions, there are people born with no legal right to exist on any spot and no legal right to gather and use any resources but air and sunlight. This is how homelessness was invented.

Humans are clever, though, and these dispossessed people, motivated by the will to live, sometimes find loopholes. Maybe they find public land that the law prevents them from being ejected from, or they find an abandoned house, or the resources of the enforcers are simply spread too thin to be 100% effective in kicking out all squatters and settlers who don’t legally own the land they’re living on. Whatever the case, they sometimes find ways to skirt the law or actually comply with it in a way that the writers of the law never intended. That brings us to the other thing that’s happening.

The other thing that’s happening is that the property owners use the law to create more restrictions to try to curtail the innovative non-landowners who found ways around the property laws. Why do they bother? Is it just pure sadism?

There may be an element of that in some instances, but that’s not the primary motivator. I said above that people will claim more land than they can personally use. They often do this at great expense to themselves. Why? Because land is a finite resource, and once it’s all claimed, the people who don’t have any can be made to pay for permission to exist on any particular spot of owned land. We call this “rent.” Whereas 30,000 years ago, if you, a stranger, built your house closer to mine than I liked, my choices were to leave, risk my life trying to chase you off, or just learn to live with it, under our system today, if you want to live next to me on land that I legally own, I can say that you owe me money every month if you don’t want the police to remove you. We call this “being a landlord.”

If you own enough land, you can collect enough rents from enough people who just want to exist without being threatened with removal that you can live entirely off the money you collect. You won’t have to work anymore. In fact, you can become lavishly wealthy and live like a king. People tend to like living like kings, and once they’ve had a taste of it, they don’t want to go back to scraping in the dirt for roots and grubs to eat. So they set up laws to try to force all non-landowners to participate in this system of paying rent.

How are the landless people to pay, though? Where do they get the money? They have no land to rent out to others, so they must sell their labor. If they wish to be allowed to exist in a spot, they have no choice but to sell their labor. And because they aren’t allowed to hunt and gather food, and no land on which to grow it, they must buy their food, which also requires them to sell their labor. Every resource a person might want other than air and sunshine, he must pay for by selling his labor. In this way, the property owners force the landless people to work so that the property owners don’t have to. It’s a complex form of slavery that inserts just enough steps between the exploited and the beneficiaries to give the illusion that it’s all voluntary. But, of course, it’s not voluntary any more than handing over your wallet to a robber who says, “Your money or your life!” can be said to be an act of charity. “Obey your boss or die” whether by hanging or by hypothermia or starvation, is slavery no matter how you slice it, and I think that it’s high time that we stop kidding ourselves that it’s not.

If you capture a wild animal and put it in a cage so that it is not free to wander the land and gather food for itself, whose responsibility is it to provide it with food? Can the animal be said to be responsible for providing its own food when you’ve deprived it of the freedom to do so? No, if you stick it in a cage, you must feed it. You’ve assumed responsibility for providing for the animal by taking away its ability to provide for itself.

Now, what if you put a wheel in that cage for the animal to run on? Say the wheel turns a little generator to produce electricity, and you sell the electricity. If you pay the animal in morsels of food in exchange for so many turns of the wheel, have you truly restored the animal’s freedom to provide for itself, or have you simply enslaved it, so that its only options are to work for you or to starve itself to death?

When landless people have no income, and we pretend to be charitable by providing them work to do for us in exchange for the right to be present, and to eat food that we make them buy from us, have we actually given them something, or are we just enslaving them?

“But that’s not slavery! If they don’t want to work for me, they can just go…work…for someone else.” A slave is a slave. Their slavery doesn’t end just because ownership of them transfers from one master to another.

Let’s talk about the alternative. I’ve said that our current economic system turns the landless into slaves. What would it mean for those slaves to be freed?

Well, we could decide to divvy up all the public and abandoned land and distribute it to the landless people. But then new people would be born, and when parents kick their kids out of the nest, they’d be creating new landless people within a generation. Now, maybe, if we had a government that made a priority of scooping up abandoned properties to assign them to new landless people, and if we put a cap on how much land one person could own so that more could be freed up for redistribution, maybe that could work. I haven’t run the numbers to know whether it possibly could.

But another approach would be to simply undo the restrictions that make the enslavement possible. Make it illegal to charge rent, for example. It’s that simple. Suddenly, there would be no advantage to be had by hoarding more properties than you could use yourself. Maybe you have other uses, like housing your friends, and that would be okay. But as soon as you demand something more than prestige and goodwill in return—like labor, if you’re housing your employees—you’d be in violation of the prohibition against collecting rent. By removing most of the financial incentive to own surplus properties, people would shrink their real estate holdings to avoid the taxes and maintenance costs. Why pay for a house you don’t need and can’t use to make money? People would be giving them away just to get rid of the responsibility of having them. Real estate investment corporations would vanish, and housing prices would crash overnight. I expect you could probably get a little house in a poor neighborhood for about the price of a car.

Short of that, at least remove all the other restrictions to people supporting themselves. Let them start businesses without licenses and permits. Let them build whatever kind of shelter they want to live in without requiring adherence to codes. Let them grow food, even if that food grunts or squawks. Let them grow it to eat or to sell. Stop criminalizing self-sufficiency. That’s what it would look like to end this form of slavery.

But we haven’t done that, and we aren’t doing that, and we aren’t likely to do that anytime in the predictable future, because we don’t want to threaten our property values. Instead, we’re choosing to keep enforcing this system of slavery that requires the non-compliant—voluntarily or not—to be homeless. We effectively put people in a cage and tell them to run on the wheel if they want to eat. When you put an animal in a cage, whose responsibility is it to feed that animal and provide it the other resources it needs? You’ve taken away its ability to provide for itself, so you’re now the provider, like it or not.

So, yes, I would say that landowners who want to keep claiming their right of ownership have inherited, along with their property rights, the responsibility of providing—at a minimum—food, housing, water, and heat to all non-landowning citizens within their jurisdiction. Probably the way to do that with the least fuss is to simply use property tax revenue to fund public housing and food distribution programs. If we wish to acknowledge the injustice of the situation and ameliorate it, we could make access to public food and housing an inherent right of all non-landowning citizens, without tying it to any work requirement. A caged animal is no less deserving of food because it refuses to run on the wheel. If you want to make it responsible for feeding itself, let it out of the damned cage. If you want to maintain the system that creates the cage, this is the price of it.

If you don’t want public housing blighting your community, and you don’t want to put the landlords out of business, then the tax money collected could simply be distributed out to the landless as a guaranteed basic income. But even there, we’d have to put some kind of price controls in effect to prevent increases in rent and food prices from outpacing the landless people’s ability to pay for it. It might be more effective to issue non-monetary vouchers entitling the bearer to one month’s rent, ten pounds of rice, etc., with the vendor then turning to the government for compensation, and the government taxing landowners to make up any deficit. Under such a system, if the landowners start feeling sufficiently pinched, as long as some constitutional protections were in place to prevent the landowners from simply doing away with the landless people’s right to sustenance, the landowners may find themselves entertaining the idea that it’s simply cheaper to share the land, or to turn more landless people into landowners so that government spending is less and the tax burden is more widely shared.

Friday, November 10, 2023

10,000 Tuna Sandwiches

There's a logical fallacy I've discussed previously on Facebook, but I'm not sure I've ever talked about it here. It deserves revisiting, because not only is it growing, it's now deadly. I've looked, but I've never found it listed among named fallacies. Surely, it deserves a name, but I've not yet come up with a good one. 

Here's how it works. We have two people--let's call them Heather and Kristy. Heather and Kristy work at the same business, and there's a fridge in the break room where employees can store their lunches. One day, Heather stole Kristy's lunch. That was a Bad Thing.

Kristy now has the moral high ground. She has been victimized without provocation or justification. Heather had no defensible reason for depriving Kristy of Kristy's lunch, and she did it anyway. There's no equivocating about this. What Heather did to Kristy was wrong. If Kristy wants to make a big, dramatic display of publicly wailing about how mean Heather is, in a bid to get sympathy, she can do that. That's how victim culture works--you win by losing in the most public and pitiful way possible. You gain status and power by being beaten and pitied for it.

So Kristy does this. She wails and mourns her lost lunch and turns everyone against Heather. One might say that, in a sense, Kristy has received her compensation. She's gotten justice already--all the co-workers love her and hate Heather, and all it cost Kristy was a tuna sandwich and a fruit cup. 

Still, for some reason, we don't account it that way. Even though Kristy has been awarded social approval and Heather has been sentenced with social scorn, we don't acknowledge that as having any material value. We still say that Heather is just as fully indebted to Kristy as if nobody had raised an eyebrow about the stolen lunch. In our culture of English common law, social standing is not regarded as fungible, outside of defamation lawsuits. As far as we're concerned, Kristy has yet to be made whole. Kristy is still the aggrieved party, and Heather is the scoundrel. Popularity is just a perk, and being regarded as a pariah is just...nature, I guess.

I want to pause here and just examine that a moment. Once upon a time, public shaming was a sentence. People would get locked in the stocks in the public square. Yes, the stocks were physically uncomfortable, but the point of it wasn't pain. It was that you were being publicly humiliated. Everyone who walked past you during the day, in that busiest part of town, would see that you had been bad. They would sneer and harden their hearts, and you would cry. That was the point of it. When people were publicly lashed, yes, it hurt and left scars. But it happened publicly--not just to terrorize the audience into compliance, but also so that they might look upon you judgmentally. Even further back, we have tales of executions by public stoning, where everyone in town would throw rocks at the condemned. These punishments were as much about social rejection by the collective as they were about physical pain and injury. 

We mostly don't do that anymore, though. Liberals don't want it because they think it's cruel and unusual to make someone feel bad for being bad, and conservatives don't want it because they think that just making someone feel bad isn't cruel enough. But let's get back to Heather and Kristy.

The Bad Thing score is now Heather-1, Kristy-0. The next day, Kristy steals Heather's lunch. Just yesterday, she was getting all the co-workers to scorn Heather for being a lunch stealer, but now Kristy is a lunch stealer, too. The score is 1-1. 

The school of thought that says the social scorn doesn't count for anything would say that Kristy's theft was justified, because she was merely collecting compensation that Heather owed to her. They're even now, right? Heather stole from Kristy, and now Kristy stole an equal amount right back. 

Well, Kristy has been compensated for her loss, but has she been compensated for her feeling of being victimized? Has Heather been adequately punished for her act of unprovoked theft? If we look at her social standing among her co-workers, we could say that yes, she has been. But in this culture, that doesn't count. So on Day 3, Kristy steals Heather's lunch again. Surely, justice has now been served, hasn't it? If anything, it's been overkill. Heather took one sandwich and lost two. The old Biblical standard of "an eye for an eye" has been exceeded. 

On Day 4, Kristy steals Heather's lunch again, because Kristy is still angry, and her idea of justice is, "I get to punish you until I feel better." That's not justice, of course, which is why it is generally dispensed by dispassionate third parties. 

But here's the kicker--Kristy is still publicly denouncing Heather as being a lunch stealer. She's still publicly ranting about what a horrible person Heather is, and the whole foundation of that claim is that Heather is a Lunch Stealer. Someone needs to shake Kristy and say, "Bitch, you're three times the lunch stealer that Heather is! You have no room to talk." 

The fallacy I want to address is that arguably by Day 2 and certainly by Day 3, Kristy has lost the morally superior position of Lunch Stealing Victim Who Has Never Stolen A Lunch Herself. As such, she no longer has standing to point a finger at Heather and denounce her as a lunch stealer. You can play the victim, or you can engage in tit-for-tat, but you can't do both. Once you start using lunch-stealing as a weapon to punish your opponent, you have abdicated the claim that Lunch Stealing Is Wrong. You have now shifted away from the position that Lunch-Stealing-Is-Wrong in favor of the claim that I-Am-Entitled-To-Do-This, even if it also means Lunch-Stealing-Is-Okay-When-It's-Justified.

The thing about shifting to a position of Lunch-Stealing-Is-Okay-When-It's-Justified is that maybe Heather felt justified in her original act of theft. Maybe Kristy had wronged Heather in some way, and Heather decided she was going to get back at Kristy by stealing her lunch. As long as we hold to the principle that Stealing-Lunches-Is-Always-Wrong, then Kristy can claim the moral high ground and say that no matter how she might have wronged Heather previously, stealing a lunch was crossing a line, and that nothing justifies such a heinous act. But the moment Kristy starts stealing Heather's lunches, it's no longer logical for her to make that claim. It's hypocritical.

Maybe that's why I can't find it listed among named fallacies. It does already have a name: hypocrisy. I think maybe the logicians and rhetoricians just couldn't imagine anyone being that unashamedly illogical.

For much of this century, and increasingly in the last decade, I've seen this particular type of hypocrisy being used in petty online debates, and then in politics. Someone will simultaneously denounce their opponent for doing a thing and do the same thing they're denouncing the other side for doing. Pick a position and stick with it! Either your opponent is bad because the thing they did is A Bad Thing, or it's not A Bad Thing, so it's okay for you to do it, too. One or the other. You can't have it both ways.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas attacked civilians in Israel. The position of Israel and the pretty much the whole rest of the world is that attacking civilians is A Very Bad Thing. Israel shouted from the rooftops about how evil Hamas is for doing this Very Bad Thing, and we all agreed. "Yes, Israel, you're right--attacking civilians is a Very Bad Thing." And for the 34 days since then, Israel has been doing the very same thing every single day, only bigger, with much deadlier and more sophisticated weapons. And their justification has been, "But Hamas did it to us first!"

Pick one. Either killing civilians is always wrong, or killing civilians is justifiable when it's done as punitive retaliation. If it's always wrong, Israel has no claim to the moral high ground, because they've done more of it. If it's okay to do as punitive retaliation, then they've gone waaay beyond "an eye for an eye." Israel's retribution has been excessive. 

Further, if you take the position that attacking civilians is fair game if it's done as retaliation for other crimes, then Hamas wasn't out of bounds in the first place, because they were retaliating against Israel for everything Israel has done to the Palestinians prior to October 7th. And if that's the case, then everything Israel has done since October 7th has been unjustified. If you don't like that position, go back to the original one that Attacking Civilians Is Always Wrong. There simply is no logically consistent standard under which Israel has the moral high ground while murdering 10,000 civilians.

Monday, October 23, 2023

Accountability

When people use the word "accountability," they're generally talking about other people suffering the unpleasant consequences of choices of which the speaker disapproves. Basically, when they say they want "accountability," what they mean is that they want people to be punished. But it seems to me that there's another side to that equation. If bad choices should inevitably lead to unpleasant consequences, then good choices should inevitably lead to pleasant ones. I have not found this to be the case.

Conservatives--the people I most often hear calling for accountability for individuals--would respond that if an action didn't pan out, that is ipso facto evidence that it was a bad choice. But if that's true, then most of what we're advised by conservatives is, in fact, very bad advice. Pretty much everything a minister will preach at you in church is setting you up for failure.

Be kind, and the emotionally needy will latch onto you and demand all your attention. 

Be forgiving, and those who hurt you will do it repeatedly, because you've demonstrated to them that you're a safe target.

Be generous, and your resources will quickly be depleted.

Be loyal, and you will be taken for granted.

Be contrite, and you'll be punished.

Be honest, and people will take offense.

Be principled, and you will alienate all who don't share your values. 

Work hard, and you will get exhausted. Work long, and the hours of your life will disappear.

Be humble, and your accomplishments will be overlooked.

Be agreeable, and your needs will be ignored.

But do the opposite of any of these, and you will be despised and distrusted. So it would appear that neither being nice nor being nasty will necessarily lead to getting what you want.

Profit is not about virtue. Neither being virtuous nor being vicious will necessarily lead to gain, because gain isn't about that. It's divorced from any notion of ethics. It's just math. You find a thing, you take it, you have it. Maybe people will love you for it or maybe they will hate you. More likely, some will love you and some will hate you, or they'll all do one and then the other, given time.

But ideas like, "Work hard to please your boss, and he will reward you with raises and bonuses," simply aren't true. It might happen, if, just through some weird twist of psychology, he happens to want to. But most likely, he won't. It isn't logical for him to do so. If you're already providing maximum service at your present wage, he has no need to incentivize you with higher wages. He can already get everything he wants and more out of you for what he's currently paying. You thought he'd just feel socially obligated to give more because you're giving more? There's certainly no legal requirement for him to pay more. It's bad business to spend more on costs than is necessary, and labor is a cost. Yes, he'll be happy you're so easy to take advantage of, and that might put him in a better mood, but it's not going to result in a fatter paycheck for you.

On the other hand, if you take the opposite approach, always holding back, always demanding more, always enforcing your boundaries and not letting your boss have anything he didn't expressly pay for, then he's going to resent you. At the first opportunity, he'll replace you with someone cheaper and more compliant. 

You see? There is no formula for winning in that situation, because the whole aim of the employer is to exploit you for profit. You can no more "win" at being employed than you can win at being robbed. Whether you go along with it or fight it every step of the way will change your experience of it, but it won't ever change the outcome so radically that you end up coming out on top. There simply is no correlation between what your attitude as an employee is and which one of you gets the profit at the end of the day. Employees who think they can change that by changing how they act at work are like a gambling addict thinking he can tip the odds in his favor instead of the casino's by changing his grip on the slot machine's handle.

And so it is with most other types of material acquisition. Whether you build a thing or steal it or have it given to you as a gift by adoring admirers or brutally force others to build it for you, the final balance is that you have it. Materialism is amoral. Not immoral. Morality simply has nothing to do with it.

It could be argued, I suppose, that if you're spending your time and attention on material acquisition, you may be ignoring the needs of others and not acting altruistically. But that argument could be easily countered by the fact that those who gain the most have the most to share. 

I think, when we feel hurt by injustice and call for accountability, very often--maybe not always, but often--what we're really feeling hurt by is that someone was rewarded for breaking rules that existed only in our heads. If, to use the example above, you as an employee believe that your boss is some kind of vending machine where the more you feed a happy, accommodating attitude and hard work into it, the more you'll get out, you'll end up disappointed and resentful. You'll feel like there was a social contract--I do this for you, and you do this for me--and that, since you gave extra, the boss was obliged to give extra. Except he wasn't. You just gave it away for free, trusting that the other party would be equally foolish. When the boss then doesn't fulfill your expectation of going above and beyond what was explicitly agreed to, then you feel like he broke a deal that was never actually made. You think he broke a rule, but the rule doesn't exist. 

In my observations, a lot of times when people are hurt and calling for accountability, this is what's going on. They think things should be a certain way. They think certain rules exist that don't. And then, when they discover the hard way that nobody else is playing by their secret rulebook, they cry "foul."

I could give more examples. This morning on the radio, right after an announcement that a deputy had been arrested for using excessive force, I heard that there's a protest where angry people are "demanding police accountability." An exasperated spokesperson for the police responded that they have so many levels of vetting, supervision, and review that he doesn't know how they could possibly be any more accountable. The problem there is that they're using different definitions of accountability, as well as different rule books. 

From the policeman's perspective, "accountability" means "Here are the rules spelled out letter for letter; if you violate them, you will be punished, and if you adhere to them, you will not be punished." His colleague broke the rules and was punished. He feels that his colleague has been held accountable. When he, himself, follows the rules, and yet the public calls for him to be punished anyway, he feels unjustly persecuted.

The protester has a loved one who attacked a cop. But from the protester's view, her loved one was not the bad guy. She feels that anything her loved one does is justifiable, because she loves him. The cop, in her view, doesn't even always count as human. It's a pest that gets in the way and is sometimes dangerous. Furthermore, the protester has had a steady diet of being told that she's a victim, that everyone who looks like her is a victim, that everyone she cares about is a victim, that being victims makes them The Good Guys, and that the police are the ones victimizing them, and are therefore The Bad Guys. In her rulebook, anytime a cop hurts someone she cares about, even if it was justified, even if it was in self-defense, the cop is wrong and should be punished for it. When that doesn't happen like clockwork, she's convinced that a grave miscarriage of justice has occurred, probably as part of some vast conspiracy to rig the whole system against her and the other people she sees as The Good Guys. 

This example has nothing to do with material gain and everything to do with ethics. We're talking about people causing each other bodily harm, and sorting out who was right and who was wrong. But both the cop and the protester, like the disappointed employee, feel that someone owed them something and didn't keep up their end of the deal.

The thing about accountability is that it's always something we demand of other people. You almost never hear someone demanding that others hold him more accountable, unless he's challenging them to test how reliable he is, or if he feels he needs others' help to steer him onto the right path. Normal people don't enjoy being punished. We seek to avoid pain. So escaping accountability gives us a feeling of relief. Escaping accountability gives us a feeling of freedom.
 

Once someone has tasted freedom, they feel entitled to it. People who've gotten away for a long time with being unaccountable feel like they have a right to be unaccountable. It doesn't matter where they are in the hierarchy. Whether we're talking about a mayor whose kids never get sentenced for drinking underage, or a petty thief who feels that shoplifting snacks is a human right, all these people feel like if they've gotten away with something repeatedly in the past, then they've somehow earned the privilege of getting away with it forever. When you then trap them and threaten them with punishment, they feel that they are the victims of injustice when the opposite is true.

If you make the mistake of browsing YouTube videos about dating and what people have to say about it, you'll be quickly overwhelmed by both videos of women who feel that their suitors owe them the world while they owe nothing in return, and videos of men who are angry because they feel that these women aren't following the rules. Both are playing by their own rulebooks, and are frustrated when engaging others who don't follow the same rules.

Culture long dictated the rules, but it carried limitations--obligations, which as we've covered, are restrictions on freedom. Accountability curtails freedom. 

It's funny...we paint both freedom and accountability in positive lights. "Freedom" gives us the image of someone on a mountaintop, deeply breathing fresh air, with a vast, untouched wilderness laid out in front of them, with nobody to tell them what to do. (Americans might also picture an American flag flapping in the background and an eagle screaming, but that's...weird. Being accountable to a huge, powerful government is the opposite of being free.) "Accountability" gives us images of justice and order and both good and bad people receiving what they deserve. We think of both of these things as good, but they're counter to each other. Freedom is getting away with doing whatever you want, and accountability means not getting away with it.

And when I say, "getting away with stuff," I don't just mean acts that are unethically harmful to another. It might just be that they conflict with the interests of another. You want the last piece of cake and so do I. There's no rule establishing that either of us is more entitled to it for any reason, and I get to it before you do. You feel hurt and resentful because I didn't offer it to you, or save it for you, or offer to split it with you--all rules that don't really exist.

Maybe it's because I'm somewhere on the autism spectrum, or maybe it's because I've spent the last 20+ years in a multicultural family in a large, diverse, multicultural city, but whatever the reason, I find it difficult to navigate what other people's expectations will be. What one person demands, another will be offended by. You'd maybe think that clear communication would be the key to avoiding these misunderstandings, but you'd be wrong, because often, clear communication is one of the things that people are offended by. They sometimes (more often than you'd think) have taboos against saying explicitly what you mean. Acting without regard to taboos is freedom; it also leads to others demanding that you be held accountable. 

Where do we strike this balance between freedom and accountability? I think it's a more challenging question for people in the West, especially for progressives...at least thoughtful ones. In the East, and among conservatives in the West, there are pretty clearly spelled-out rules and expectations. Rigid cultures dictate exactly what your role is whether you like it or not, and things are supposed to go smoothly when everyone does what's expected of them. At least that's the plan. Progressives rebel against this. They flee the small towns and rural communities to conglomerate in big cities where nobody knows each other and the people come from a variety of cultural expectations. It's freedom! But then, with nobody accountable to anyone else, people run around exercising their freedom--their freedom to make noise in the middle of the night, or their freedom to help themselves to your possessions, or their freedom to shoot people who anger them, or their freedom to be rude in any number of ways. With all this freedom, you get a bunch of unrelated people whose only thing in common other than geography is that they all act without regard for each other. 

I think what it comes down to is that we all want freedom for ourselves and accountability for everyone else. The history of civilization is various peoples' attempts to negotiate how we figure out who gets how much of which. In some societies, they feel that everyone is entitled to equal amounts of both freedom and accountability. In others, they divide the people into cohorts--classes, castes, races, commoners and nobles, or what have you--and then decide which cohorts get how much freedom and how much accountability. 

Isn't it amazing that this is all the further we've gotten with that? We're still experimenting. We still haven't reached any consensus as a species on what the boundaries should be, what we all owe each other as the basic standard for what kind of behavior we find acceptable. It's stunning to me to see how very far away from reaching any such consensus we still are. I reckon that, if we survive long enough to ever get there, we'll then have to struggle with making the same negotiations with species from other worlds. But then again, maybe by then we'll have developed a good system for figuring it out.

Saturday, July 29, 2023

You Are Not the Reason There is Plastic in the Ocean

 

    You've no doubt heard before that a large part of the ocean is covered with massive, floating mountains of plastic trash. Implied or expressly stated is the idea that you, Western Consumer, are the cause of this, and that if only you had quit your nasty, shameful habit of using plastic straws, bottles, and grocery bags, none of this ever would have happened, so it's up to you to save the world by immediately swearing off plastic and supporting the passage of laws that would impose criminal penalties on other people for continuing to use the plastics that you've been told to hate.

Sound familiar? It's bullshit.

There are, in fact, huge, floating piles of plastic garbage. But that's where the truth of it stops. According to Qatica, an organization dedicated to cleaning up the oceans and recycling the plastic gathered from them, approximately 1.5 billion pounds of trash (it doesn't say all of it is plastic, just trash) is dumped in the ocean each year, and nearly half of that trash is commercial fishing nets.

There's more, but let's just get a quick perspective check. I want you to do a quick, mental inventory of all the single-use plastic you've used in the past week. Every milk jug, every bag of frozen vegetables, every cracker wrapper, every fast food beverage cup, every coffee can lid, every plastic film or price tag or blister pack, every Band-aid or plastic-handled cotton swab--tally it all up. And don't forget the plastics that might seem like they're not plastic. Maybe your kid's gummy fruit treats came in a "foil" bag. That's plastic. The milk he's served at school? That little cardboard milk carton is coated in plastic to make it waterproof. The fresh vegetables that you very conscientiously placed in your cloth shopping bag at the grocery store? They were shipped to the grocery in a box that was either made entirely of plastic or, more likely, cardboard coated with plastic.

Okay, so you've got a mental image of all that throw-away plastic you used this past week? Good. Now...how much ocean-caught seafood did you eat in that same period of time? Did you eat any seafood last week? Maybe a can of tuna in a salad or casserole one time? Or maybe there was a fish sandwich from McDonald's? If you eat fish every day, especially if you don't live on the coasts and didn't catch it yourself, that's very unusual for an American. Most Americans' animal protein comes from chicken, beef, pork, cow milk (including cheese), and turkey. Fish and shrimp come in far behind those. Lamb is practically exotic these days, and many of you may have never even had goat, rabbit, or duck, let alone venison, bison, snake, gator tail, etc. It's a fair bet that none of you have ever eaten whale, horse, or monkey. We Americans eat chickens, mostly, followed by cows, pigs, and turkeys. Fish is a once-in-a-while thing for most of us who aren't on the coasts.

Now try to resolve these two facts. You used the amount of plastic that you tallied up, and you almost never eat fish, yet half of the trash--more than half of the plastic--in the world's oceans is fishing nets. How does that make sense?

It's not about you. You didn't put that garbage there, just like you didn't put those fishing nets there. I mean, yeah, when you went to Red Lobster for Mother's Day, you contributed a little bit. But think about how much disposable plastic you've used since then, versus how much fish you've used since then. Who's eating all this fish?

This shouldn't be shocking, but surprisingly, it seems to never cross the minds of many activists who want to ban plastic straws or grocery bags in the U.S.--the amount of plastic in the ocean is not an indicator of how much plastic we're using. It's an indicator of how much plastic is being used by people who dump their trash in the ocean. Who is that? You?

Did you think that every grocery bag and straw you don't recycle somehow blows out of the bin like a tumbleweed and turns into the little canoe from Paddle to the Sea


No, if you aren't a disgusting litterbug, and you don't recycle your plastics, then chances are, like most people, you put them in your garbage, which is picked up once a week and hauled off to the local landfill, where it is entombed in an insanely watertight, airtight, light-proof, underground vault to be discovered a thousand years from now, probably in the same condition, by future archaeologists or miners. We don't ship it to the coast with instructions to dump it into the water.

So who's putting all this junk in the water?

Well, prior to 1972, everybody was, at least along the coasts and rivers. And it wasn't just household garbage. Industrial wastes, raw sewage, and radioactive wastes were all dumped straight into the ocean like it had a big sign on it that said, "AWAY." Then, 51 years ago, 87 countries got together and signed an agreement called the Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter 1972 (more commonly known simply as "the London Convention"). It prohibited the dumping of certain wastes into the ocean, and regulated the dumping of some others. Eighty-seven. The number of countries that border the ocean is 133. That means 46 countries with coasts never signed this thing. It was updated in 1996 in what is referred to as "the London Protocol." Only 53 countries joined in on that, and it didn't even go into effect until ten years later, in 2006.

Most of the countries dumping most of the waste into the ocean--including the fishing nets--are in Asia. A law passed in Ohio prohibiting plastic grocery bags will be no more effective at getting Filipinos to quit throwing their garbage into their rivers than it will be at getting the Japanese to quit eating whales. It certainly won't prevent any Asian ships from chucking their garbage overboard while they're out in the middle of nowhere.

So am I telling you not to reduce your plastic waste? No. Conservation is a good thing. Most of that stuff is made from oil, and you already know the harm that comes from that--whether direct pollution from getting it out of the ground and refining it, or the lives and limbs lost in the wars fought to secure access to it. The less of it you choose to use, the better. Reduce, reuse, recycle. But don't go drafting legislation based on the idea that whether an Ohioan uses a plastic straw or not is a fight to the death for the survival of our planet's oceans, and that it justifies expanding our criminal justice system any further.

Wednesday, July 19, 2023

Nimona is not appropriate for kids...but not for the reason you think

Last night, I opened Netflix and was looking for something to watch. My 13-year-old daughter said there was a movie she wanted to see. In her words, "It's an animated movie about a castle guard who gets falsely accused of a crime and a girl who helps him clear his name."

"Is it Japanese? It sounds like an anime."

"No. It's called Nimona."

I looked it up. Rated PG, drawn in a style similar to Don Bluth's. Alright, why not? It turned out to be entertaining, surprising, funny, cute, suspenseful, and sad. It was also perhaps the most pernicious, soul-rotting piece of trash I've ever seen. If A Clockwork Orange had been a Pixar film marketed to kids, it might come in second, because at least in Clockwork, you had a sane writer telling a story about a sociopath. It's was meant to be shocking, because the writer himself saw it as shocking. In Nimona, though, the sociopath is telling the story from their own perspective.

You know, sometimes it happens that you search for the answer to a question only to feel crestfallen when you finally find it. For me, that question was, "What motivates school shooters?" Mental illness wasn't invented in the 1990's, and kids had much more access to much heavier firepower in previous generations. Prior to 1934, you could order a machine gun through the mail with no background check. In fact, clear up into the 1960's, a kid could walk into a hardware store on their own and pay cash for a handgun, and nobody would raise an eyebrow. I knew, then, that whatever changed to make school shootings suddenly become a commonplace phenomenon where, previously, they were unheard of, it wasn't an issue of guns being more available or more powerful. There was something different about the young people who were pulling the triggers.

Shooting used to be considered such harmless, family fun that carnivals would hand over a loaded gun to any stranger with a nickel to spend. And no massacres resulted.

I've similarly heard people ask, often rhetorically, why there are so many more transgender children now than there ever used to be. The response is typically that the number has always been the same, but before society was as accepting as it is now, those kids had to keep their gender identities hidden. Now that they feel safe coming out, they're much more visible. This explanation doesn't withstand even the lightest of scrutiny, however. Transgender youth have an incredibly high suicide rate; the explanation for this by trans rights activists is that these kids kill themselves because they don't feel accepted. It stands to reason, then, that the suicide rate among closeted trans kids should have been much, much higher than among trans kids who feel accepted and safe enough to publicly transition. At the same time that transgender identities became common in American schools, there should have been a corresponding precipitous drop in child suicides. But there wasn't. The explanation is a smokescreen. More kids now identify as trans than ever did before. Like school shootings, it's an idea that caught on with a generation and became part of how they see and interpret the world. 

I've witnessed as many males who identify as women or non-binary express anger towards and even commit acts of violence against women, particularly those women they describe as "TERFS"--Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists. Now I understand why. Let me hasten to add that when I say, "I understand," I don't mean that I sympathize. It's merely that I'm now aware of what's going on in the minds of the perpetrators. I know why they think they're justified, even though I maintain that they are not. 

I know why the BLM protesters in 2020 felt justified in burning down buildings and attacking police. I get why there are so many unattractive Instagram models and the like whose whole lives seem to revolve around taking pictures of themselves and then getting involved in drama when they get something other than praise. I get it now...but it doesn't make me feel any better.

Our victim culture has created a generation of narcissists who see a person's worth as deriving from their victimization. Having been instructed by older generations to be inclusive and tolerant, they've misconstrued that as meaning that if they're different, that makes them special and everyone owes them acceptance and approval unconditionally. They feel that if anyone ever rejects them or judges them in any way (even deservedly), they have been wronged. They feel that when they are wronged in this way, they are justified in taking limitless revenge, all out of proportion to the perceived slight. To them, there is no greater crime than someone making them feel bad. So if someone mocks them, judges them, rejects them, or simply unintentionally uses language that causes them to be reminded of their own shortcomings, these kids feel that such a grave crime has been committed against them that all should rally to their defense, and that there is great virtue and cause for celebration in destroying the offender as completely as possible. 

There's only so much destruction one offender can absorb, and sometimes, a kid's rage is bigger than that, so they lash out at anyone who seems like they might be remotely supportive of the offender. And if even that doesn't leave them feeling satisfied, then they'll lash out randomly at the general public, or at a broad demographic (usually the same as the offender). Think of the mass shooters who targeted women, Hispanics, blacks, Jews, Christians, or everyone at a particular school or workplace. You might be thinking, "But those are all marginalized groups." Doesn't matter. The assailant got their feelings hurt by some member of that group, so now everyone in that group is the villain in their story. 

On top of all that, because being seen as marginalized now grants one great status and authority, all the kids want to be seen as marginalized. If you're a white kid, and not an ethnic or religious minority, not disabled, not abused or otherwise traumatized, then a transgender identity provides an easy way to get in on the victimization. Otherwise, you've simply got no street cred and need to distinguish yourself through old fashioned achievement and excellence. What a pain that is! So now, we've got a bunch of straight, white, young males who couldn't compete against their male peers (or felt that they couldn't) because they're not as strong, brave, handsome, skilled, extroverted, etc., who feel that if they just paint their fingernails purple and go by they/them, they're suddenly entitled to be treated as special and entitled to whatever accommodations they wish, because in victim culture, the rejects are automatically the good guys and entitled to compensation, while the people who rejected them are automatically the bad guys, regardless of the reason for the rejection.

We've planted in these young people a value system in which they derive their self-worth by seeking pity, and the way they get it is to depict others as bullies for not showing them unconditional acceptance, even when they behave in unacceptable ways. 

It plays out something like this:
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Minority: *steals something from a store*

Store manager: *sees them* Stop!

Minority: *looking offended* Excuse me?

Store manager: I saw you steal that. Put it back, or I'm calling the police.

Minority: *gasps in shock* How dare you!

Store manager: We've got you on video.

Minority: So? It's just stuff. Stealing's no big deal. It didn't even cost a lot. Quit trying to change the subject. The real crime here is that you're a racist! You're just singling me out because I'm [fill in the victim group]

Store manager: I don't care what [color/ethnicity/sex/etc.] you are. You committed a crime!

Minority: *loudly addressing everyone within earshot* Y'all see what this racist piece of shit is tryna do? He say our kind ain't allowed in here. Our money's the wrong color or some shit. I shop here every goddam day, I ain't done nuthin'! This ugly-ass cracker's a racist! You betta get up out my face before I have to start something.

Everyone in the vicinity: *whips out cell phones and starts recording video*

Middle-class, white, liberal bystander: (Ooh, here's my chance to use my privilege and score some salvation points against my time in Privilege Purgatory!) *addressing store manager* Hey! You need to sit down and shut up. It's not all about you. This person is speaking their truth. You've had 400 years to tell your side of the story. You need to be questioning your participation in a system that makes it necessary for this person to take what they need when you should be working to remove inequalities instead.

Minority: *feeling encouraged by the crowd, physically assaults Store Manager*

The phone-holders cheer and cry for more. The beating continues until Minority feels better or gets tired. Police arrive. Now their arresting the assailant is decried as a great injustice by both the assailant and the crowd of phone holders.

Middle-class, white, liberal bystander: *going for extra credit, pulls out YouTube law degree and addresses police* She doesn't have to identify herself! You can't arrest her without her consent! Do you have a warrant? Show me your warrant. You have to have one. That's in the Constitution. What's your badge number? I want to talk to your supervisor. You can't ask her questions until she has a lawyer. That's a violation of her pursuit of happiness. You didn't read her the Miranda warning. You have to let her go now.

Cop: Shut up and back off, or you're going with her.

A fight breaks out, someone gets Tased, the video goes viral and all the liberals in the country think the cops were the bad guys, while all the conservatives on the internet argue over which caliber of gun the store manager should have used to murder the thief.
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So what's all this got to do with this cartoon called Nimona? (Spoilers follow.)
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Nimona starts off by giving us the background. There once was a brave and noble woman who defended her community against monsters and founded an order of elite knights to carry on that tradition. Fast forward a thousand years. The setting is a futuristic, sci-fi city with flying cars, but the order of knights is still central to the society. The new graduating class of the knight academy or whatever is about to go through their ceremony where they're knighted by the queen in a big stadium in front of thousands of people. 

But this year is different. For the very first time this year, one of the new knights, Bal, isn't of noble birth. He's a commoner, and literally every single person in the civilization except the queen and Bal's boyfriend (yes, the protagonist is gay, and that's what most of the critics on the internet are hung up on--and why Disney dropped the film) hate the idea of allowing him to become a knight. That was the first red flag for me. Not "it was highly controversial among the townspeople." Nobody but his lover and the queen were in favor of him becoming one of these guardians. Not one. Everyone in the stadium (save for the queen and Bal's boyfriend, who was another knight being inducted) was uniformly against him.

Persecution complex much?

So Bal gets knighted, the crowd (inexplicably) cheers after a long pause, and as Bal is receiving his sword back from the queen, a laser blaster opens up out of the pommel, fires all on its own, and kills the queen, right in front of the entire stadium. Everyone, including Bal, is stunned and horrified. Bal's boyfriend draws his sword and cleaves off Bal's sword arm. Bal is arrested and thrown in jail.

And, just because I haven't mentioned it yet, the queen and all the knights but Bal are white [correction: only in most scenes with the main characters. In a scene where the knights are all lined up, we see that they're all various colors and shapes, male and female], while Bal is kind of olive-skinned and has what sounds like might be a slight Spanish accent. Also, all the other knights are ultra-masculine, jock douchebags whose armor is gold and white or silver, while Bal's, for some reason, is black and gray. Netflixy enough for you? The underdog hero is a minority in as many ways as they could think to make him one, while the whole rest of this knight order and government just scream "white supremacy." And that makes Bal the good guy and the others the bad guys--except Bal's boyfriend...but maybe not except him, since he cut Bal's arm off. Maybe he's bad, too. We're supposed to be uncertain about him. But everyone else, you're supposed to hate, even though Bal aspired to be one of them (but not enough, apparently, to follow the same uniform guidelines when it came to his armor).

Netflix these days is kind of like the old Westerns, where the bad guys all wore black hats to indicate that they were the bad guys, and the good guys wore white hats to tell you they were the good guys. Now, the colors have flipped, and it's their clothes and skin instead of cowboy hats. The dark ones are the good guys, and the white ones are the villains. 



So our swarthy protagonist is sitting in jail wondering what on Earth just happened, when, just as strangely, a girl shows up out of nowhere and breaks him out of jail. Then she starts shapeshifting into different types of animals to effect their escape as they're fleeing the castle with many white-clad knights hot on their tails. 

 


This shapeshifting girl, Nimona, wants to be Bal's wisecracking sidekick. But, aside from the magical shapeshifting and her over-the-top, colorful personality (I smell a narcissist), the thing about her that's really, unusually striking is how casually--no, eagerly--homicidal she is. She thinks it's fun to murder and also thinks it's cute to play up how much she wants to murder. Her approach is basically, all smiles, "Hey, everyone hates you, too! We can be besties and be villains together, murdering everyone we see." Bal wants to solve the mystery of the queen's murder and clear his name so the knights will accept him again, but Nimona is intent on helping him get revenge and encouraging him to embrace his new role as Public Enemy Number One. She hates humanity, yet is inexplicably perky and bouncy. It's like if you fused Harley Quinn and Wednesday Adams, then kicked up the cuteness to the level of Power Puff Girls, and we're supposed to be charmed by this unapologetic blood lust.



From that point on, though Bal remains the technical protagonist in this plot, the movie really gives the spotlight to Nimona. It's all about Nimona and Nimona's personality, Nimona's feelings, Nimona's back story. It's even named after her. Indeed, except for Bal's brooding and uncertainty, she's the only character in the whole film who isn't a flat, one-dimensional NPC.

Fast forward--it turns out that another politician, the "Director" (or the knights, I think) switched the swords to kill the queen and have Bal take the fall for it. She felt that letting Bal become a knight threatened everything the order and their whole society was based on. But she also reveals that Nimona is the original monster defeated a thousand years ago by the order's founder.

Now here's a sticky part--it's true that Nimona is the monster, and yet she faults Bal for believing it. She is the monster, yet she dares Bal to say so, as though it's a trap where, if he vocalizes the truth, that makes him the bad guy. Even when he tries to relate, and asks questions about what it's like to shapeshift, she berates him for being "small-minded" for asking such things. Basically, she flips reality on its head, and he's supposed to just accept it all unquestioningly, or he's the bad guy for offending her, even while she's doing her level best looking for opportunities to get offended. And the film depicts her as clever and witty for doing so, and for making Bal look foolish.



As I was watching this, I thought, "Shapeshifting is a metaphor for transgenderism, isn't it? This narcissistic psychopath perfectly fits the psychological profile of a transgender person." And I wasn't wrong. There are little moments all through the film, some subtle and some more explicit, where someone expressed fear or shock or something other than instant, warm acceptance of Nimona's shapeshifting, and it made them the bad guy, and made Nimona justified in going on an indiscriminate, homicidal rampage.

In fact, there's one scene where Nimona is going full-Godzilla on the city, just smashing it to pieces and killing everyone in sight, when some kind of vehicle goes flying towards a little girl. Nimona slams down her tail to block the vehicle, protecting the girl from being squashed. The girl, though, is terrified. Trembling, she reaches down and picks up a sword, which she then points defensively at Nimona. And Nimona's feelings are hurt.

Let's go over that again. A terrified child is the bad guy for being afraid of a monster that's smashing her city and killing everyone she knows, and the reason that makes her the bad guy is because it hurts the monster's feelings. The monster is supposed to deserve acceptance and trust because she performed the exceptionally heroic act of...not idly standing by and allowing a child to be killed...by events that Nimona set off herself.


There's also a flashback scene where we see Nimona as a young girl. She met another girl in the forest, and they became friends. The friend was initially alarmed by the shapeshifting, but she quickly saw the fun in it, and the two had a great time romping around. But then one day, the townspeople saw the girls playing while Nimona was in the form of a bear. They feared for Nimona's friend's safety, so they took up their weapons and chased the bear away. Nimona fought fiercely, and this frightened her friend--who then, trembling, picked up a toy sword and pointed it at her defensively. This broke Nimona's heart and she ran away. Her friend who rejected her went on to become the founder of the order of knights who protected the town from monsters. 

The whole point of that scene was to preach to the audience that Nimona wasn't originally to blame. Her friend hurt her feelings and rejected her, so a thousand years of terror was perfectly justified.

Do you see? It might be a made-for-Netflix, whitey-hatin' movie about a gay knight named Bal, but it's really about this blameless, charming, loveable, transforming mass-murderer and her attempt to get back at a society for not trusting her completely and without question. Never is the idea entertained that she should have some sort of responsibility to not freak people out by turning into a bear around little children. Instead, we see her feeling vulnerable before revealing her ability. "You have to promise not to freak out," because the other person being freaked out is somehow them being the bad guy and wronging her, instead of her being the bad guy for freaking them out.

I wonder how many people who eat that up uncritically also spout off about how people shouldn't be allowed to open-carry guns in public because it might make someone feel nervous. "Your right to exercise your Constitutionally-protected right to self-defense doesn't take priority over my right to not feel creeped out!" But if anyone feels creeped out by Nimona turning into other animals, they're the bad guy for feeling creeped out, and Nimona is blameless. Pick a principle and stand by it.

I said above that I wasn't wrong about the whole thing being a self-absorbed whine about the sense of unjust persecution that a transgender person feels after going to great lengths to freak people out. I did some reading on the background of the movie. Disney rejected it because Bal and his boyfriend kissed at the end and had a couple hand-squeezes and affectionate looks at each other through the film, and they felt that was too overt to make them money at the box office. But then I also found who wrote it. Nimona was written by Nate Diana "Indy" Stevenson, whose birth name was Noelle Diana Stevenson. Nate/Indy/Noelle is female but identifies as non-binary and "transmasculine," according to Wikipedia. Nimona was originally a series of graphic novels that was later turned into a movie. She is married to Molly Knox Ostertag, who draws LGBT comics targeted at teenagers and middle-schoolers. 

They'll dedicate their careers to chasing down your kids and flying their freak flag in their faces with queer comic books published by Scholastic and made into rate PG cartoons, but don't you dare get weirded out about it, or they might just have to smash your city for a thousand years.

After the movie was over, before reading anything about its background or author, I told my daughter, "I'm going to tell you what this movie is trying very hard to tell you the opposite of. Nobody owes you unconditional acceptance. If you act like a jerk, and people reject you because of that, that doesn't make them the bad guy. If the only thing that stops you from going on a homicidal rampage is getting your own way and being told what you want to hear, then you're not actually a good person just because you don't go on a homicidal rampage. Sometimes, people will reject you for very good reasons. And even if it's not a good reason, you're not going to be everyone's cup of tea. And that's okay. Not everybody has to adore you like I do, but that doesn't make them bad people, and it doesn't justify being mean to them."

Monday, July 10, 2023

Questioning Truth

 

I’m thinking this morning about truth and deception, and how they relate to competing narratives about reality.

Think about something that you’re so certain of, that you think that anything who even entertains a contrary idea is a fool. I don’t mean something you acknowledge is controversial, but that you have strong opinions about anyway. I mean the sort of thing you think is obvious to everyone, and that the only sort of people who don’t are fringe kooks who are probably conspiracy theorists or cult members. I’m talking about statements like:

-        Earth is roughly spherical--not flat and not hollow with another civilization living inside.

-        The moon exists and astronauts have been there

-        People need to eat food to stay alive

-        Drilling a hole in your head is generally a bad idea

-        Humans are not reptiles from another planet

-        Molesting children is bad

You with me? I’m guessing that for most people reading this, no matter how diverse your social sphere is, you probably don’t expect any sane, non-evil person that you know—even ones you dislike—to disagree with any of these statements.

I’m not going to play the philosopher’s game of delving into how we know these things (at least for now). I just want you to get a grasp on what sort of beliefs I’m talking about—things that you know. You’re aware of them, you know they’re correct, and you don’t for a moment question that they’re correct, because you’ve never seen any evidence to the contrary that actually holds up.

Okay, you know what it is to know something that’s unquestionably true to the point that you have to question the sanity of anyone who disagrees. So what do you think is going on in the minds of people who do disagree?

Well, I’ll tell you one thing—they don’t doubt themselves any more than you doubt yourself. They’re convinced that they’re right and you’re wrong. The see themselves as part of an elite who’s privy to a great secret. They think you’re a mindless sheep who’s eyes just haven’t been opened by “the red pill” yet. They think that your arguments defending your point of view are just a defense mechanism protecting your fallacious belief system.

They’re also probably schizophrenic, schizotypal, or bipolar. This is why you can’t argue someone out of a delusion. To them, the experience was real, and that simply throws all contrary evidence into question.

I watched a documentary last night about fungi. Paul Stamets was in it, of course, along with Michael Pollan and a bunch of others. They spent some time showing pretty pictures and paying lip service to the role of mycelia in the ecosystem (overstating it a tad, in my opinion), and then they moved into talk of psychedelics. (If you’re not aware, Michael Pollan, of “Omnivore’s Dilemma” fame, also got really into using hallucinogens and wrote a book about that a few years ago, so that was his interest in this project—not teaching us how to sautee mushrooms).

Stamets didn’t actually use the word “symbiote,” but there was a theme running through what he and other speakers—all of whom claimed to have gone through profound transformations after having an experience of spiritual awakening on some kind of hallucinogenic (usually psilocybin)—that humans aren’t really a complete, stand-alone species in themselves. They seemed to think that the only way humans could really thrive and be complete was if they became one with the mushrooms, taking them into their bodies and letting it rewire their brains to the optimal state that we can’t achieve without the help of the fungi.

And hearing it, I thought of that fungus that infect ants and makes them climb to a high place before the mushroom erupts from the ant’s head and spreads its spores. Or how Toxoplasma gondi controls the behavior of its host—say, making infected mice fearless of cats so the parasite can spread from mouse to cat.

How do we know that’s not what’s going on here? Maybe these “entheogens” are simply reprogramming the people who take them to believe it’s a good thing and to persuade others to take them. If humans are destroying fungi’s habitat, maybe this is the fungi’s strategy for making us stop—it gives us a religious experience that makes us feel as one with it, and then sets us off to preach to the other people to infect themselves as well.

That’s a very strange thing to believe, but so is the idea that humans are incomplete without entangling ourselves with species of fungi. Which one’s right?

Stamets obviously believes he’s found the truth. But maybe that’s just spiritual madness induced by the mushrooms.

I’ve always eschewed drugs that weren’t medically necessary to treat a disease. I’ve always held that, uninfected and operating normally, the human body is in its ideal state and doesn’t need any outside help to improve. Obviously we need nutrients and hydration, but I’m saying that drugs throw your system out of whack, and then your body goes through a withdrawal trying to correct the imbalance. You can avoid that whole unnecessary see-saw effect by just not throwing off your homeostasis in the first place. Don’t put anything in you that doesn’t belong there.

Stamets’ argument is that these plants and mushrooms do belong there, and that by isolating ourselves from them, we’re harming ourselves.

At least one of us is very, very wrong, with potentially harmful consequences.

So how do we determine which of us that is?

One thing you don’t want to do in deciding who’s right about something is to put your faith with the person who seems more confident. A scientist can express all sorts of doubt and ignorance about how the Big Bang happened, because he honestly doesn’t know. That doesn’t make the Creationist who bangs on about Genesis correct. It doesn’t matter how certain you are of the facts if your facts are all wrong.

My bias is to think that people who ingest substances, experience a mystical ecstasy, and then think that they’ve got all the answers and that the rest of us are blind are not the correct ones. I think they’re suffering a delusion caused by direct chemical alteration of their brain chemistry. I think this even if they haven’t taken any substances. It’s sad, because when people experience this kind of “eye-opening, awareness-expanding” event, they feel so convinced that they’re the ones who are right and everyone else is just deficient.

It's down to a question of whether the red pill or the blue pill is the one that shows you the truth. In The Matrix, they knew, and it was simply an informed choice between disturbing awareness or contented blindness. But in real life, we don’t really know which one is which, and both the red-pill-takers and the blue-pill-takers say that they are right and the other is wrong.