80% Angel

Dead babies aren't funny

One day early in our marriage, the topic of dead baby jokes came up on a mailing list my wife and I were subscribed to, and I was startled to see her go into bloody-minded rage in reaction. I thought the humor was in bad taste but I didn’t understand the violence of her reaction. At this point my wife had children from a previous marriage, but we had yet to have any children together.

Nowadays, having helped birth two babies, one of which came out with an umbilical cord around his neck and needing some help in the breathing department, I understand her reaction perfectly. My first, instinctive reaction when someone makes jokes involving harm to children is to gut them with a bowie knife then and there. Then I remember I live in a civil society and decide that perhaps reporting them to the cops as a psychopath might be sufficient. Eventually I calm down and settle for regarding the speaker as a sadly defective human, and hope optimistically that he or she will eventually grow out of it.

Parenthood changes a person at a very basic level. But that’s not what this post is about. The point is that everyone has something which is Not Funny. Even comedians have their limits.

One of my longtime favorite shows—even though it’s been years since I watched it regularly—is South Park. What I love about Matt and Trey’s sense of humor is that it is relentlessly, aggressively, fair. They make fun of everyone and everything. Liberals. Conservatives. Gays. Straights. Jews. Athiests. Muslims. Scientologists. Kids. Adults. The magic of South Park is that one moment you’ll be having a belly laugh and the next you’ll have an appalled look on your face saying “woah, too far, man, too far. And you know that somewhere, someone else is watching the same show and saying the same thing—only about the parts you found hilarious. And laughing at the parts you found objectionable.

Humor is just one of those things that humans do. I’ve heard that EMT humor is some of the blackest there is; the kind of humor which would make a corporate ethics officer’s head explode. Does that make EMTs bad people? Hardly. Thank goodness for them. If it helps them get through the day, I don’t care what kind of depraved car-wreck jokes they are telling while they wheel me into the ER.

Which brings me to the subject of Sensitivity. I worry a fair amount about being sensitive. I question my own actions and try to get outside opinions. I sometimes yell at people for being insensitive and driving away diversity when we should be embracing it. I rage at my computer screen to see the casual misogyny of privileged male nerds.

But for all that, I don’t feel like I fit in with the Sensitivity people. Lately I’ve been reading /r/ShitRedditSays, a sub-reddit where people highlight the misogyny, racism, homophobia, and general douchebaggery that shows up reguarly on Reddit (as it does in any open online forum). And it’s certainly instructive. I’ve learned some things about subtle bias, about casually throwing around words like “rape” denatures them and desensitizes readers to the true infamy of actual rape.

But at the same time, I find around 50% of the tasteless comments that are linked to as exhibits of bad behavior to be laugh-out-loud funny. Even as I acknowledge that they are insensitive. And I realize that to the other members of /r/ShitRedditSays, these things are simply Not Funny. They are beyond the pale.

Now, I suppose this could just mean I’m a bad person. But I think it speaks to a difference in philosophy. I don’t want a world where we defeat bigotry by being perfectly polite and sensitive to every possible background. I want a world where we defeat bigotry the South Park way: by telling filthy jokes about each other until we all finally realize that human differences are, fundamentally, hilarious. Not wrong. Not shameful. Just really fucking funny.

I do think we need to be sensitive to context. That’s why I worry about subtle misogyny and racism in the land of software engineering. It’s one thing to have a room full of men and women of all races and backgrounds laughing about each other’s differences. It’s a very different thing to have a room full of men—and a lone woman—where the men are all telling “slut” jokes. It’s not that slut jokes are Wrong. It’s the the context which makes them threatening.

Unfortunately, I feel like a lot of people aren’t able to make this distinction of context vs. content. One the one side you have people who, when you tell them that now is not the time and here is not the place, think that you have no sense of humor and want to censor them in all contexts and on all topics. And on the other you have the watchdogs of sensitivity, many of whom seem to think that perfect equality is a world where nobody ever has cause to blush. And I worry that the twain shall never meet, and that I’ll be somewhere in the middle, a stick-in-the-mud to some and a neanderthal to others.

The end of the beginning

And then God saw the man's spirit, and was afraid. And he gave the man Craft, so that the man would be distracted from his calling. And he gave the man family, so that he too would know fear. And finally he gave the man pride, so that the man would never again recall his true name.

Come see the violence inherent in the system

I think I’m pretty well on record as far as my feelings on police. I think it’s a job description that naturally attracts bullies, the last sort of person who should be given power over people. I, personally, despite being about as law-abiding a person you might hope to find, have had nothing but bad experiences on the rare occasions I’ve been forced to deal with them. I think the militirization of our police forces and rising use of SWAT teams against nonviolent, sometimes innocent, civilians is appalling. I read Reddit, and see stories almost daily of police abuse of power. I know from the public record and from reading frank interviews with police officers that police will protect their own, sometimes to the point of framing innocents if it means keeping a fellow officer out of trouble. I think the automatic characterization of police as “heroes” is stupid.

I am not a fan of the police.

That said, I’ve been seeing some really dumb stuff said about the police lately, and it’s getting to be a bit much even for me.

Context

Let me be clear, I’m opposed to the use of police force to break up law-abiding exercises of free speech. If someone’s sitting in a public park holding a sign which is not obscene by local standards, having a cop come and pepper-spray them and drag them away is Not OK.

In recent days, however, the Occupy movement has started going beyond plain speech. It has begun organizing shut-downs of public transit facilities like buses and subways.

In this post I’m going to confine my comment to the use of police force against protesters deliberately breaking laws or ordinances by obstructing public services or right-of-way. I.e. civil disobedience.

Civil Disobedience

The way civil disobedience works goes like this:

1. You pick a law to break, e.g. the one that says “Don’t block traffic”. Traditionally you pick a law you consider unjust, such as “black people can’t sit at the front of a bus”. But there’s precedent for breaking unrelated laws in order to draw attention to a cause, or to a whole system you think is broken.
2. You break the law while in some way communicating your beef. If you did it right, people notice.
3. At some point, the police come and either arrest you or force you to go away. You are prepared for this, because it’s part of the nature of nonviolent civil disobedience.

How to create a fiasco

Imagine you are a city administrator. Your job is to make sure that the city functions smoothly. If you fail to do that, money is lost, people are aggravated, and there will be hearings calling your competence into question.

You have certain tools at your disposal for accomplishing this task. If a water main breaks, you send in the Public Works people. If people block traffic or transit, breaking the law in the process, you send in the police to clear them out.

Let’s say you’re confronted with the latter situation Here’s how you would go about creating a bloody disaster.

1. Send in police officers trained to react to violence with deadly force. Send them in with just their shirt sleeves and side arms to arrest and/or disperse the protesters.
2. Wait for one of them to panic and start shooting.

How to NOT create a fiasco

Here’s what you do if you want to avoid that scenario. You send in cops dressed like these guys:

Scary looking, aren’t they? One of my friends called them “stormtroopers”, a moniker which, historically, misses the mark a bit.

These cops are dressed in riot gear. Frightening as it looks, this is actually a Good Thing as far as keeping things (relatively) nonviolent goes. These are cops that know that unless things get really out of hand, they aren’t going to be badly injured by a stray rock or elbow. These are cops who are prepared to take some blows without immediately reaching for their sidearms. In short, these are cops who probably aren’t going to start shooting people.

Assuming a) the law is being broken, b) people are causing a public nuisance, and c) these guys have been lawfully directed to round up those people, I’m actually happy that they look like extras from Equilibrium, sans automatic weapons.

But they are using tear gas and pepper spray!

Imagine you are charged with non-lethally breaking up an act of civil disobedience. We’ll assume you can’t just ask them nicely to leave; that would kind of defeat the purpose of civil disobedience. In civil disobedience you don’t put up a fight, but you also don’t comply with official directives to go away.

So here you are with a bunch of people in front of you that you need to cause to not be where they currently are. True, you could go to each protester one by one, read them their rights, and physically haul them in jail. And at a lot of protests this is exactly what happens.

But I have to imagine that this doesn’t scale above a certain size. And anyway, the costs involved have to be high. How much does it cost taxpayers to arrest, haul away, charge, process, and incarcerate one hundred people for a night? One thousand? It can’t be cheap.

Given those parameters, warning the protesters you will use tear gas if they don’t move on, and then using it, seems like the pragmatic thing to do. It gets the job done fast, no one is permanently harmed, and the city is saved a lot of money.

Why can’t they just leave the protesters alone?!

This is a fair question. Why not just leave them alone and let the city route around them for a while?

Well, again, if you’re in charge of a city, leaving obstructions alone is pretty much exactly what people expect you not to do. People are losing time, money, and patience, and they expect something to be done about it.

But there’s a bigger problem. You can’t just ignore the protesters. If it goes on long enough, sooner or later some fed-up commuter is going pitch a rock at a protester and before you know it you’ll have a real riot on your hands. So if you leave the protest be, you still have to keep a police line around it 24/7. This, again, is not cheap.

Why not just give them what they want?

Since Occupy has explicitly declined to come up with a specific list of demands, that’s not a possibility right now.

Bottom line

The use of police does not make the US a police state. In an actual police state, you are arrested before you get as far as creating an actual protest. And if you somehow do manage to protest, you get shot or put away for life.

If you expect civil disobedience to occur without any police force used at all, you clearly didn’t read the label. This is how the civil disobedience game is played, and as far as I can tell everyone is playing their parts admirably. The protesters are getting their voices heard on national TV, the cops haven’t killed anyone, nobody’s been carted away to mass detention camps. Considering that the way this sort of thing has been handled through most of history (and still is, in many countries) is to just start shooting people until they clear the streets, I have to reluctantly say to the cops involved: this time, you done good.

Needed: One assistant

Yeah, so I can’t avoid this any longer. Time to start creating jobs.

I need an assistant. His or her roles will be many and varied. Certainly they will include managing my calendar. Eventually they may include all sorts of secretarial tasks.

Actually, the biggest skill I’m looking for is the ability to be creative and proactive about figuring out how they can help me. I’m not very good at delegating; I tend to look at all the stuff I do and think “I couldn’t possibly delegate that”. Or, worse than that, there’s stuff I’m sure it hasn’t even occurred to me to wonder if I could delegate it.

So I’m looking for someone who can think up new ways to help me. Beyond that:

• Excellent English/writing/communication
• Very computer savvy. Doesn’t have to have any development chops, but must really know their way around the internet, Google Docs, calendaring, that sort of thing. And none of this “I only understand MS Office” business.
• Probably lots of other stuff I can’t think of right now.

Anyway I’m probably going to put this up on ODesk or one of the other sites that specailizes in this sort of thing, but if you know someone trustworthy and deserving, let me know.

First snowman of the year!

(download)

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First_snowman_of_the_year.zip (445 KB)

May all beings be free from suffering

Sometimes one of my kids gives me the great big bambi-eyed look
because I'm going downstairs to my office instead of staying and
playing with them, or some similarly microscopic tragedy. And I can
barely stand it.

And then I think about the hundreds of thousands of kids the same age
giving someone the same look because their daddy only beats them, or
because they don't have a daddy or a mommy at all, or because their
only toys are now buried in a pile of rubble that used to be their
house, or, or, or...

And it just disassembles me. I want to collapse in a heap and bawl my eyes out.

I am of many minds on that topic.

I mocked the Occupy Wall Street protesters recently; not because of their aims but because they were protesting. You might reasonably conclude from that that I consider their efforts misguided and pointless. This is not, however, the case, and understanding why involves explaining just how weird things are in my head.

One of my many core philosophies is one which I suppose is called Humanism. I believe (among other things) humans must do what humans do. A big part of self-actualization is simply doing that which you are compelled to.

From my perspective, I don’t think the protesters are accomplishing as much towards their goals as they might by, say, starting local businesses which create jobs in their home towns. On the other hand, the experience of simply being at OWS may be a turning-point in a lot of their lives. That experience will stay with them to the end of their lives, shaping their thoughts, coloring how they see themselves and others.

So what is, from one curmudgeonly perspective, a waste of time, is also an absolutely vital point in the personal growth of thousands of people.

From one perspective, they “should” doing something else. From another perspective which I hold equally valuable, they are exactly where they should be, doing exactly what it is best for them to be doing.

This sort of thing goes on in my head all the time, and it makes debating points… interesting. Most of the time I just automatically pick out one perspective that clashes with that of the person I’m talking to. What most people (understandably) don’t get is that the one thing I’m really arguing against all the time is failing to see the world from many angles at once.

Ah! So you don’t actually think they are wasting time, you just wish they’d realize that they are really there for themselves.

No, and that’s where it gets really hinky inside this brain box of mine. I think an essential part of many formative experiences is the beliefs we bring into them. Go to the mountaintop believing you will be transformed, and you will come down a new person. Otherwise you might come down as simply “a person with blisters”. Go to OWS believing you are part of changing the world, and your whole perspective about the world and your place in it may be shifted and expanded.

So forget what I said a couple paragraphs ago; I don’t even want everyone to see the world from many angles! Sometimes it is essential to their humanity to see it from only one. Sometimes it is essential for me to be only one of the many different philosophers living in my skull.

I’m just using OWS as an example; for all I know they turn the tide of public policy and prove my assertions about the outward utility of their movement completely wrong. More power to them.

The point I’m making is a more general one, which is just that my head is a confusing place to be, and I often find my full perspective on anything impossible to express.

And there are the meta-level perspectives, for instance: the realization that this is an incredibly fucking pretentious piece of writing I’m typing out right now. And so on… but I’ll cut it off at that.

Thoughts on (insert protest here)

So I guess it’s generic protest season again? Seems to come around every couple years. I apologize if I sound dismissive; it’s just that these unprecedented, revolutionary outbreaks of nonpartisan grassroots activism seem to happen on a pretty regular schedule.

Then again, I’m over 30, so you should probably take what I say with a grain of salt. You can’t trust people who remember more than two electoral cycles.

I used to march. Where, when, and the topic under contention is immaterial. The important thing is that I realized eventually that protests are good for exactly two things:

1. Building team spirit. There’s nothing like 10,000 people all yelling “hey hey, ho ho, cargo pants have got to go” to make you feel empowered and like you are about to win ANY MINUTE NOW.
2. Reminding you that the Other Team are a bunch of evil, kitten-eating, Hitler-licking fuckheads.

This second point is worth expanding on. It’s amazing what protests will bring out in people. You could go to Washington and protest against armpit fungus, and I promise you at least five dyed-in-the-wool armpit fungus supporters would crawl out of the woodwork just to counter-protest you in the strongest, most Godwin-invoking terms.

And then the capitol police would come and break it up and prove how DC is in the pay of the BO lobby.

Actually, there’s a third reason to protest: to build popular and international sympathy for your cause. Unfortunately, there’s a catch: this one only works if the police come and kill you. And even then chances are the U.N. will just issue a Strong Condemnation and adjourn for bon-bons.

“That’s not fair! We’re being discussed on CNN!”

Mm-hmmm. So does the Bedroom Intruder guy. Best case scenario, $PROTEST_SLOGAN becomes a bullet point in the next campaign cycle, used by someone who initially courts your demographic and then leaves you miserably disappointed.

“You’re just a cynic! Step aside and let positive thinkers change the world!”

I protest! I’m not a cynic. I’m an optimist. I suspect you’re going to win, for certain values of winning, only it may take longer than you want, and it might be more despite you rather than because of you.

The thing about protesting is that it’s fun, and it’s easy. The worst thing that will happen to you is you get taken away in a paddy wagon and become eternally exalted in your social circles as a hard-core freedom fighter. More likely, though, the worst hardship you’ll encounter is having to hold your pee in for a really long time.

Protests are also lazy, and profoundly negative. It’s virtually impossible to hold a positive protest; you have to have an enemy to put together a proper protest; otherwise all the energy drains out of it. Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert tried to hold an apathetic rally, but the lack of energy didn’t last. The idea that we all actually work together pretty well, for the most part, is one which is hard to get excited about. Much easier to focus on that bastard who just took the last slice of cake.

Anger is easy, and satisfying, and you can get it all out at once and have time to grab a beer afterwards. Then you can wait for the anger to have it’s expected effect—pie for everyone, or whatever. And if it doesn’t, you get to be angry again!

Positive action is hard, because you have to make a plan, and then stick to it for days, weeks, or years. You have to take personal responsibility for it, and and you have to actually pay attention to the results and adjust accordingly.

I don’t want to be hand-wavey about positive action; but this article is running long already and I have kids to put to bed. It warrants a whole entry on it own anyway.

So I’ll just leave you with this teaser thought: how many people are involved in (insert protest here)? What would happen if every single one of them named two unique individuals affected by (insert travesty here) and, instead of focusing on their powerlessness and the idiocy/corruption/malevolency of the people responsible, focused 100% of their energy and attention a specific plan of action to make those two victims' lives better?

I, Neckbeard

At some point in my childhood, I remember suddenly realizing that it was weird not to look people in the eye while speaking to them. From that point on, I studied how other people made eye contact, and attempted to mimic it. I tried to learn how to do it just enough, without doing it so much that it becomes creepy.

I still can’t make eye contact when I’m thinking hard, though.

Without going into too much personal detail, I’m fairly certain I have autism spectrum disorders in my family. And I believe I inherited them to a small degree. There were times in the past I probably could have gotten myself diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. But I was only ever affected to a small degreee, and through a series of conscious choices, like that choice to learn to make eye contact, I’ve arrived at a point which at least appears relatively “normal”.

It’s a strange thing, though… I can feel it in my blood. It’s like having a kooky uncle living in the attic of my own head. Being socially appropriate is still an act of conscious intention for me sometimes, and I don’t always succeed.

The connection between the autism spectrum and the field of computer science & engineering is pretty well established by now. I think we’ve all either known, or been, That Guy: the guy that just doesn’t get social interactions the way most people do.

Hell, a decade or two ago we were all That Guy, as far as the rest of the world was concerned. Then something remarkable happened: the world learned to respect us geeks, and we got better haircuts and better t-shirt and got laid.

Well, at least some of us did. We’re all rock stars now. Except the ones who aren’t. And I worry that in the rush to hipness and relevance, some of us nerds have tried to distance ourselves from That Whole Scene; that scene being the one where people with acne and very bad hair obsess over technical minutiae to the exclusion of all other concerns.

I don’t think everyone has the opportunity to make the same choices I did; nor do I think the choices I made were objectively “right”. It’s not wrong to be socially inept. But it can make life a lot harder.

The thing is, the true neckbeards are often also the true innovators. By all accounts Steve Wozniak was/is in that category; fortunately for him he had a good friend and business partner who was more than able to do the talking and glad-handing and occasional ass-kicking.

For every hundred lifelong dorks obsessing over something that no one else will ever care about, there’s an RMS writing the next GNU system.

I guess the point of all this is that sometimes I see someone technically brilliant say something incredibly socially inappropriate, and I think “that could easily have been me”. And I worry that some of my other fellow geeks are so eager to distance themselves from the “bad old days” that they’ll (rhetorically) throw him under the bus just as readily as a jock laughs at an awkward kid with a pocket protector.

We can’t all be cool kids. Some of us can’t even manage acceptability. I hope when I’m old and my brain has crusted over and say loud and insensitive things without realizing, or talk over and over about that one technical breakthrough I had that no-one ever appreciated, or otherwise make a nuisance of myself, that there will be a few people willing to shake their heads and smile and hang around me anyway.

Well and here we are. You sway
with a beat I cannot quite
catch and I am horn rimmed and black socks and
tennis shoes

And I cover myself in the symbols, in the warp and
woof of a simpler space. An escape, a
hideaway in two dimensions.

Dirt, dirty, grime and rot
you are the smell and the taste, ripe and overripe and
bursting, you are the touch and the waist and the grind and the sweat, and I
I hate you because I cannot give
in to you; because I cannot sink my
toes into you; because I am
ephemeral.