What I Learned About Leadership by Playing World of Warcraft (part 2)

Last time, I talked about how I got a guild started in World of Warcraft, and a little bit of what made us different from other guilds.  This time, I'll be finishing that conversation, and talking about how it all fell apart.

What I Learned About Leadership by Playing World of Warcraft (part 1)

This has been on my mind lately, so I'm just going to talk about it.  The short version, so you can know if you want to stick around, is that I joined World of Warcraft in year one and founded a guild which went on to become the largest and oldest on our server (it was a roleplaying server, this isn't much of a big deal).  I had a chance to put into practice some of my ideas about leadership, and got results, and it eventually all fell apart due to shenanigans and chicanery.  In the process, I learned a great deal about real-world leadership, but I don't talk about it with people because, in the first place, if they care about my leadership experience then they won't care about a video game I used to play; and second, if they care about a video game I used to play then they won't care about my leadership experience on a roleplaying server.

IMAGE (fork?  dilemma?  horns?)
Caught between the two horns of a dilemma.  Grooooaaaan.

Not a whole lot of sources today, hence the "rant" tag.  Any real-world connections to administrations past or present are left as an exercise for the reader.  Something something upcoming mid-term something.
CUT
World of Warcraft came out right about the same time I put my undergrad degree on hold, due to a crisis of What The Fuck Am I Doing With My Life.  During this time, my life was basically Work-WoW-WeekendsWithFriends, as all my friends were at college.  I had been hyped about the game since playing Warcraft III and really biting into the lore - the "good guy" Human Alliance was pretty racist and prone to infighting, driven as they were by fear and vengeance, while the "bad guy" Orcish Horde was a coalition of misfits, driven by the desire to overcome their literal demons and a history of subjugation.  There's a lot of purple prose, cliche, and overused tropes I'll forgive for a story as social-justicey (SoJuicy?) as that.

Humble Beginnings

I started a guild basically as soon as I could, but I was a naive MMO virgin (virgin to MMOs, not sex - I got into D&D and MMOs well after popping my metaphorical cherry which is not how that works at all actually but this isn't the point right now).  Consequently, I didn't go around begging for the ten signatures needed and then immediately boot them.  Instead, I focused first on recruiting the right people:  I'd party up with strangers, play with them for an hour or two, and then talk with them for a bit if I liked the cut of their jib.  As an intermittent insomniac prone to bouts of mild mania during periods of excitement, I found a fairly diverse group of English and Spanish speakers from around the world.

Thing is, most guilds are about power, prestige, and profit:  winning PvP matches, doing world firsts, making money to buy gear to do the first two, bragging rights on the forums, that sort of thing.  I wasn't about any of that - I wanted to start a family.  I would watch how others played, how they interacted with other strangers, how they responded to loot, and build an idea of their moral compass from that.  If I thought they were reasonable to a first approximation, I'd talk to them about guilds in the abstract, and then we'd decide whether or not to team up.  I wanted people who were in it for the long haul, and I got:  bilingual people from around the world; a couple who wanted a chill guild that wouldn't make huge time demands; people with children searching for a guild where real life comes first; and my second-in-command, a disabled veteran in search of the belonging he no longer got from the military.  A motley crew, no doubt, but I'm the kind of person who recognizes that diversity is strength just because it avails you of insights from multiple perspectives.

I ran my guild with one driving question:  "Is this a guild that I would want to be in, at any level?"  I hadn't the words then, but I was after a Rawlsian veil of ignorance.  I couldn't demand too much of the noobs in return for the prospect of advancement, because I wanted leadership to be fairly stable and not top-heavy; I couldn't demand too much of leadership, because burn & turn is a terrible way to run any organization; I also couldn't give too much power, because then I'd attract the kind of people who want power, whom I deeply loathe.  So every aspect of the guild was tuned to fostering community, camaraderie, and cooperation, especially the mandatory weekly guild meetings:  we met in an un-used arena in the corner of the orcish capitol, gave brief announcements and shout-outs, then held our initiation rites.

Every aspect of this built loyalty, even though I didn't know it explicitly at the time:

• The meetings were mandatory because I knew they wouldn't otherwise happen.  If you weren't physically there on time, you partied up with me or an officer who could watch your position on the map to ensure you were en route.  If you were offline, then no sweat; but if you were on, you were here.
• The meetings were in the Horde capitol but in an unused corner because many people had never seen the inside of this building before - it was an arena tucked away in the corner and no quests brought you there, so it was like a little secret, hiding in plain sight.
• The meetings were brief because I didn't want to sit for a bunch of annoying crap, and assumed nobody else did either.  It was strictly need-to-know information like policy changes and web site updates, as well as shout-outs for good deeds done by the members and/or upcoming events.
• The Rite of Initiation was a gang-style naked beat-in right outside the city gates:  the initiate and a senior member would remove all their gear and duel unarmed.  You didn't need to win, you had to participate.  But soon enough, initiates could be seen grinding the unarmed skill in the week leading up to their initiation, just to put on a good show come clobberin' time.
• The only requirement to be initiated was to attend one guild meeting.  You'd see it was quick, important, and best of all, followed by ritualized violence.  And then you were truly one of us.  We got many a new member from our initiation rites, just curious people running into town who wound up being good fits (or not).

Up-front token effort, reasonable demands, reasonable payoff, ritualized violence, and insider knowledge - the ingredients of any successful fraternity, minus the toxic masculinity.  I was completely unprepared for how well it would take off.

The Big Long Middle

We grew slowly but steadily for the first two years, quickly reaching a growth-rate plateau and holding steady at that rate for a long time.  My second-in-command set up a web site, opening up out-of-game communication channels; this also resulted in a lot of asynchronous roleplaying, further fostering community and group identity.  I actually listened to my guildmates, recognizing good ideas when I saw them and instituting them.  I delegated when I couldn't find the time or interest for a worthwhile initiative - and if nobody stepped up for a needed role, then we let it ride until someone willing did.  I didn't start arguments, or even end them - I moderated them, providing a venue to work out disagreements and find common ground.

By and large, I didn't put my foot down on much of anything (barring some notable exceptions to be discussed shortly).  I was a leader, not a boss - I wasn't in it for the glory or the power, I was in it for the community, and it so happens I just had to build that community myself.  More precisely, I created a space for the community, and then the people who were naturally attracted to this kind of community (after some intense up-front effort on my part) went and built it of their own accord.  It happened organically, too, with as little top-down direction as possible (except to say consistently that the guild should be built from the grassroots up).

This brings me to the one matter where I did repeatedly put my foot down:  what kind of guild should we be?  For the uninitiated, here is a quick breakdown of the general kinds of guilds you'll find in World of Warcraft:

• Player-versus-Player:  PvP guilds are like PMCs, focused on the various kinds of competitions between players of opposing factions and the rewards accrued thereby.  In general, a PvP guild respects cunning, battle prowess, and adaptibility - while there most certainly is a meta-game, those with the skill and time to experiment with it can constructively innovate in this area.
• Player-versus-Environment (Raiding):  Raiding guilds are like corporations, focused on the endgame content of building 40-person coalitions to take on the game's most demanding dungeons.  In general, a raiding guild respects consistency, battle prowess, and obedience - while there is room for flexibility, the overarching point of any PvE guild is to make steady progress through the endgame content in pursuit of a more or less predictable reward.
• Roleplaying:  RP guilds are focused on the characters in the guild and their relation to the world, in a way creating their own character-driven content rather than relying exclusively on the developers.
• Casual:  Casual guilds don't have a driving principle beyond hanging out and enjoying the game.  While less focused, they are also less prone to infighting and drama (though that can happen anywhere).  However, the lack of unifying purpose also tends to reduce the guild's cohesion and longevity.

While our guild was described as an RP/casual guild, because that's convenient shorthand, I really thought of it as a "community building" guild - but explaining that requires more or less this entire post, whereas the RP/casual description communicates sufficiently what the guild both is and is not.  So, fine.  The structure of the guild was also set up such that leadership was more public service than power hierarchy.  You got into leadership by showing a drive and desire to support and mentor those around you, not by putting in dues and then accruing authority.  We certainly did our share of PvP events and even a little bit of raiding, but it was more in the manner of a hobby within the game than the point of the game.

This is getting pretty long, so I'll divide it up into two posts.  Stay tuned!

On Self-Reinventing Apples and Dumpster-Fire Oranges

Julia Salazar beat eight-term incumbent Martin Dilan this past Thursday, and now Bari Weiss is calling her "the Left’s Post-Truth Politician":  "According to The Washington Post’s running count, Donald Trump is averaging 7.6 'Trumpian claims' a day. One wonders how many Salazarian claims Julia Salazar has spoken."  Hmm, that depends on how we define "Salazarian claims" - if we mean it analogically, as in "things this person is known for saying," then probably a lot?  But I think Weiss pretty obviously means it synonymously, as in "just as bad."

I'm gonna go with "not nearly as many."

Pile o' Links!

Not sausage links, though.  Or... golf links.  Or even chain links.  But hyperlinks.

Didn't realize a full week had gone by.  I mean, I traveled to the Frigid Northlands for Halloween, so I have kind of an excuse, but not really.  So here are many cool things on the internet (and one icky, terrible, horrifying thing that is neither work-safe nor mind-safe, behind the cut), which will be followed by a few 101 Interesting Things entries that have been bubbling away on my back-burner.

First, the good folks at Mr. Deity have made a nice little PSA.  Here it is for your enjoyment, just in case you both A) read this blog, and B) were going to vote Republican today:

They also made a great Chik-fil-A promo parody, which rocks socks.

I was also linked an interesting article that puts Obama's last four years in a new light (that of his childhood), and while I can't say whether the author is right or wrong (I mean, I don't know the President personally), it was certainly an interesting and new perspective.  And on the other side of the ballot, an interesting perspective on Romney's candidacy, which is pretty much exactly as opposite as you could get.

And just in case you haven't heard, a retired NSA analyst showed beyond any reasonable doubt that the Republicans have been manipulating elections since at least 2006.  And in case statistically impossible regularities don't convince you, here's the guy who wrote the software.

It looks like things are gonna be OK, though, because the weird things that predict US Presidential elections with absurd accuracy are lining up for Obama.  Say it with me, kids:  "correlation is not causation."

Finally, for something entirely non-political:  Singularity Chess!  This guys has actually made a bunch of interesting variants on Chess and Checkers, as well as a bunch of other cool stuff.  Go check it out!  Sometimes it's in French, though, so you can either struggle through Google's translation, or just look at the pictures.

OK.  Last, but not least.  This is neither work-safe nor mind-safe, so it's behind a cut.  But holy carp, this is one of those things that's so horrifying, you just have to tell other people about it.  Well, I do.  I don't know about you.

Legal Round-Up!

So it's been a new year for almost a week, but I've been in the frigid northlands since the 23^rd which basically means that I'm incommunicado because one of my family's computers has like forty-five viruses (that I could find), and the other is a five-year-old Mac. Argh.

Anyway, we've got a bevy of new laws going into effect, so I thought I'd take some time to go over a few of them. In completely arbitrary order:

Three States Forward: ...and one state back. New Hampshire and DC joined Vermont and Iowa in legalizing gay marriage, bringing the total to five states. Maine backed out like California in a November referendum (Iowa is poised to do the same, if things don't go well), Massachusetts and Connecticut are still going strong.

Drive-by Communications: Wisconsin, Illinois, Oregon, Colorado, and Texas banned texting while driving, bringing the total number to 28 states to pass such measures. You also can't use cell phones at all if you're in a school zone (hands-free devices are still allowed). In the sensible traffic laws department, Wisconsinanians are now allowed to pass on the shoulder and make U-turns when the Moon is in the second house and Jupiter aligns with Mars.

Eat Right, Or Else: Raise your hand if you know why trans fats are bad for you. OK, if your hand is in the air, you can scroll past this. If not, then you should read up: our enzymes suck at breaking down trans fats, and they're accordingly more likely to accumulate in your bloodstream and clog your tubes. So California banned them.

Oregon Recognizes Religion as Disability: Well, sort of. Oregon passed a law that "redefines 'reasonable accommodation' to be more in line with the ADA." Consider the definition of delusional disorder:

Delusional disorder is characterized by the presence of recurrent, persistent non-bizarre delusions.

Delusions are irrational beliefs, held with a high level of conviction, that are highly resistant to change even when the delusional person is exposed to forms of proof that contradict the belief... Typically, while delusional disorder sufferers may be distressed about the delusional "reality," they may not have the insight to see that anything is wrong with the way they are thinking or functioning. Regarding the earlier example, those suffering delusion might state that the only thing wrong or upsetting in their lives is that the government is spying, and if the surveillance would cease, so would the problems. Similarly, the people suffering the disorder attribute any obstacles or problems in functioning to the delusional reality, separating it from their internal control. Furthermore, whether unable to get a good job or maintain a romantic relationship, the difficulties would be blamed on "government interference" rather than on their own failures or omissions. Unless the form of the delusions causes illegal behavior, somehow affects an ability to work, or otherwise deal with daily activities, the delusional disorder sufferer may adapt well enough to navigate life without coming to clinical attention.

Die In a Fire of Cancer: Florida, Michigan, and Arkansas joined nine other states in requiring cigarettes to turn off when not in use. North Carolina and Virginia joined 28 other states in passing some manner of smoking ban, refusing to let restaurant owners (or bars in 25 states) decide for themselves whether they'll be smoking or non-smoking. Oh, and you can't smoke with someone under 16 in your car if you live in New Brunswick.

Fun fact: the EPA's infamous December '92 study linking secondhand smoke to lung cancer was shot down in July '98 in a 92-page Federal trial for basically being a piece of shit (less-than-92-page rundown here). The short version is that secondhand smoke is gross to some people, which is a reason to allow business owners to forbid it on their property, but it is ultimately no more harmful than seeing boys smooch each other - though it's really gross to some people!

There are over 40,000 laws going into effect, and I'm not even going to bother summarizing them all (especially the silly ones, like Texas teens being unable to go to tanning salons without parental consent). But if you, Alert Reader, can come up with some more interesting ones that are either new or changing as of 01/01/2010, I'll be happy to add them in with credit!

Arguing on the Internet: Whose Work Is Sarah Braasch Doing?

So I've been thinking about Christian Missionaries Are Doing God's Work, and re-reading it with a more critical eye. I started off liking it a whole bunch, but then again, I started off agreeing with Sarah in the first place. Now, I think the piece (as a stand-alone essay) expects perhaps a bit too much from the reader, or bites off more than it can chew. Maybe both.

I'm not troubled by the initial revulsion at the missionaries on the plane. I think it's an understandable emotional reaction all on its own, and the conversation Sarah relates between her and her friend shows a great opportunity for growth. My issue starts with "The Ghion was a sea of entitled whiteness."

I understand that First World folks can (and do) cop an attitude of entitlement, especially when they think they're helping others and see any inconvenience as ingratitude (or some such horse-shit). But this is never shown, we are simply expected to believe that an attitude exists without ever seeing it in action, rather than presenting it as a reasoned conclusion from any observation that was shared with the reader. Sarah says, "The only dark faces were those of the employees and the babies," but aren't those the people who live in this country? And isn't the point of a hotel to accommodate its guests? And why on Earth is she complaining that children are being taken from an impoverished nation to a home with parents who can provide for them? I understand that the situation these children are being brought into is far from perfect, ideologically speaking; but I think it's a damn sight better than the destitution in which they would otherwise be raised.

Then there's this bit: "I would have been more than happy to forego any creature comforts to not be staying in the same hotel as every other overfed Westerner in Addis Ababa. ... I decided to soak in the tub for a little ablution." Now, maybe she had no choice in terms of which hotel to stay in. I'm just saying, it makes for a rather awkward juxtaposition to say, "I'd sacrifice X to escape Y; but now I'm going to indulge in X without getting away from Y at all!" When you don't have a choice about Y, sure, you may as well do X anyway. Just sayin'.

Moving on, there's the conversation with the other missionary (from a story logic perspective, this would have been an excellent place to capitalize on that aforementioned growth opportunity). Sarah asks, "Why can missionaries and evangelicals and proselytizers sense a former believer like sharks detect blood in the water, like rapists and child molesters can smell the lingering odor of victimization emanating from the pores of the abused?" I didn't know that they could! But in any event, it doesn't seem like this particular one is doing anything of the kind. Sarah, by her own admission, isolated herself - she put herself in a position where she looked lonely, and this other person seemed to be trying to make friends with her. She reined herself in and remained civil, but it seemed unnecessarily strenuous for her to do so. Was she starting off in a confrontational mood, I wonder?

At the end of it, Sarah simply leaves as soon as her cigarette is finished, which is coincidentally when the missionary is at her most vulnerable. Why not take this opportunity to exercise a little patience and do some missionary work of her own? Moreover, what is this Christian likely to say to her friends about the encounter? Would she glowingly recount the friendly conversation she had with the atheist, who wasn't a fire-breathing Satan-worshipping demon but actually a nice person just like her? Or would she probably have something else to say? Perhaps something that reinforces her preexisting notions about atheists?

As for her conclusion and call to action, I'm half with her, half confused. On the one hand, I agree that the actions of missionaries cause direct and real harm, but on the other hand, Sarah doesn't seem to acknowledge how screwed-up the pre-existing superstitions and circumstances of these people often are. It's not like the Christians need to tell these Africans to believe in the supernatural, they do that on their own already. Really, the harm that the Christians do is... well, yeah, by mis-educating them on sex, they actively contribute to the spread of disease. By not correcting misogynist attitudes, they reinforce those attitudes. Christians are throwing fuel onto an already blazing fire of primitive superstitions, and the fact that the transplanted primitive superstitions are linked to the civilized help these people bring makes for a detrimental juxtaposition on the world stage. Sure.

However, I think her point would have been better served if she limited it to showing how the actions of American Christian missionaries are detrimental to their goals. They want to help people? Great! Go help people! Oh, but if you also want to spread your religion, then there's gonna be a problem. 'Cuz, you see, we checked, and it turns out that religion is bad for people. Her points at the end, backed up with some statistics (perhaps links to news stories concerning the torture of witches inspired by missionaries, or wars started over ideas spread by missionaries, or really any kind of data at all), would have admirably served this purpose. But "they are the apocalypse?" Sure, Christianity's a death cult and all that - as Pat Condell points out, the defining moment of Christianity is its founder's death, and all the benefits accrue after death, and so on and so forth - but I think a bunch of unsubstantiated sneering renders such an apocalyptic tenor a bit needlessly hyperbolic. To wax verbose.

So yeah, as I'm sure can be gleaned from the feedback Sarah's received already, the stuff she talks about isn't entirely unreasonable. However, to someone who doesn't have a background of experience that is remarkably similar to hers, to someone who doesn't know about the racism/sexism/elitism/entitlement that often runs rampant in God's chosen cults, this could come off as a bunch of condescending and confrontational bullshit. That objection could easily be removed with the simple inclusion of a few supporting facts, even anecdotes: perhaps a story of a missionary berating a hotel employee, if such a thing did in fact happen. A good piece of activist writing should educate the reader on problems, not simply state them and blame them on somebody. Or it could just be a rant, but then it ought to get the rant tag, so people know to take it with a grain of salt.

From Metaphysics to Politics: High horses and the myth of identity.

I'd like to start today's philosophical sojourn with a thought experiment. Cut off your pinky in your mind's eye. Are you still yourself? Of course you are. What about your arm? Without your arm, you're still yourself. Both arms, both legs, even your torso - if you could survive as a Futurama-style head in a jar, you'd still be yourself. You'd have lost your gastroenteric and spinal nervous systems, and those go a long ways farther to influencing your "brainy self" than most people realize, but you'd still more or less be you.

The same goes for your hair color. If I woke up tomorrow with blonde hair, but otherwise the same, I'd still be D. If I woke up tomorrow with green skin, I'd still be me. If I woke up tomorrow in a body of the opposite sex, I'd still be who I am, that one thing about me would have just been changed independently of all other things.

How about your past? Take any day of your life, and delete it from your history. It could be the most important day of your life, but you were still you before it, and you'd still go through the changes you'd go through afterwards (although perhaps a radically different set of particular changes) in a continuously changing flux of "you." The same goes for each and every facet of your personality, every emotional reaction you've ever had, and so on and so forth. Take yourself apart, and where is the "you?" There is no "essence of you," aside from a constantly-changing patchwork mish-mash of atoms and the events those atoms have been through.

There is no such thing as "you."

Lots of people, yourself included, have "an idea of you." And as the philosophers Parker and Stone have reminded us, an idea doesn't need to have a referent in order to have effects in the world. The idea of you is a real idea, but it is not the same thing as you any more than your idea of a duck is an actual duck (for clarity, your idea of a duck is not a duck). Actually, when you get right down to it, there's no such thing as "a duck," either (just "atoms arranged duck-wise," which is practically the same thing but not exactly), because all language is language of convenience. So even though there's "really" no such thing as you on the one hand, of course there's "really" such a thing as you on the other. To remain intellectually honest, however, we have to keep both of these senses in mind when we talk about ourselves so that we can make sure that we're not confusing the two in our own minds, conflating them when speaking to others, or equivocating between them while trying to make a point.

Why do we need to do this? Well, to not do this would be careless and stupid, I think. Do you want to be careless and stupid? I don't know. I sure don't. But there's no law saying that you can't be careless and stupid, so to each his or her own, I guess. Keep that in mind for part two, coming soon! (Guess what? Soon is now!)

Much has been said lately, in the corners of the Universe that I frequent (I'm not just talking about the internet here), about all the wrongs that have been done to this group/person at the hands of that group/person. It's a real shame - I'm not being facetious or sarcastic at all here, it really is a shame. Suffering is a part of life, it's not all flowers and rainbows. But then people go and do something weird: rather than actually try to work together to do something constructive about it, some douchebags seem to want only to whine and whine. They seem, for whatever reason, unwilling or unable to get outside their own heads and stop taking things personally. Yes, these things often affect them personally, and that's rotten, but even though it's very real in one sense, it's all in your head in another important sense. Both senses are valuable, because while the former can help you motivate others to be on your side, the latter will help you make your case without whining.

Now, I want to get one thing very straight at this point: some people talk about their problems because they want sympathy, and some people talk about their problems because they want solutions. Some people only respond to talk of problems with sympathy, and some people only respond to talk of problems with solutions. Doing only one or the other of these is incomplete, and that's the TL;DR version of my beef today. As emotional creatures, we need sympathy - so give it when you can! Really! Be sympathetic to your fellow human beings and their experiences. But problems are for solving, too, so offer solutions as well! And when you tell people about your problems, be grateful for what sympathy you do get, and also be prepared to make progress and move towards solutions, which will involve taking a little advice, because it's probably coming your way anyway. So be a little tough on yourself, swallow your pride, and take whatever comes your way as an opportunity to learn.

Or did you think you had the right to tell other people how they ought to respond to you? Or the ability to control how others think of you? You're not the main character, y'know. Everyone's got problems. Sure, lots of people don't know what it's like to be you, but you don't know what it's like to be anyone else, either, so stay off that high horse. Besides, at the end of the day, the world is under no obligation to take you seriously, and you're not entitled to anything. Every single part of you, every facet of your personality, every choice you've made, every word you utter, every action you take, is subject to question and ridicule. So what?

So what, ideed. This is not a rhetorical question, I really mean this: take anything that's happened to you, any injustice you've suffered, whatever storm you've weathered. Ask yourself, "So what?" And keep asking it. So it's wrong - so what? So, it hurts! So what? So this is bad for the whole world! So what? Keep asking so what, and you'll see that dwelling on the negatives is pointless - it's the wrong attitude to take. Yes, it hurts and is bad and is unfair, and yes, that sucks, and yes, that's awful. But so what?

So, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and do something. "I shouldn't have to!" Wrong attitude, asshole. "I already am!" Really? Awesome! Again: so what? We'll go a better way this time: so I'm fixing problems. So what? So I'm making the world a better place! So what? So, things are going to be a little less awful now. So what?

So, hopefully, you're happy with what you're doing and you've found some meaning in your life. So what? Well, isn't that the point? Hasn't that been the point all along? How we survive is what makes us who we are, so how are you surviving? Are you throwing a tantrum, literal or metaphorical, petulantly tapping your foot as you wait for the world to conform to whatever idea of fairness or justice you think it ought to automatically respect? Or are you getting over your bad self, taking care of your own damn needs, and dealing with people by giving them what they need to get on your team and work with you? One of those approaches works. The other is stupid.

This is politics: dealing with people, giving others what they want in order to get them to give you what you want. It's not always fair, it often sucks, but it's how things work. And if you get enough people on your team, you can get things headed towards your way in the long run. Doing this in the best way possible requires an uncommon level of honesty and self-awareness that can only come from refusing to let your wounds define you. If you choose to forge your identity (and imaginary as it is, we all have an identity) from all the wrong that's been done to you, if you insist upon emphasizing your victim status, then you cannot reasonably expect anything other than continuous failure and misery.

But even if you do everything right, then you will still suffer failures and setbacks from time to time. That's just how things go sometimes. It sucks. And things aren't always this simple, I know. What I'm saying is, simplify things for yourself. Are you missing some advantages enjoyed by others in society? That sucks! So take them. If you got a sub-par education, go to the library and give yourself a better one. Shitty social circle? Make new friends. Low self-esteem? Start taking steps to improve your life and build your self-esteem on that. Heal your own wounds. Take control of your own life. You can't ever do it all the way, and you might not win, but you can start, and you can keep at it, and you can refuse to let the bastards keep you down. And then you can put yourself in a position to help others like you, because you'll have something to offer, even if it's only the wisdom of your years or the experience of what doesn't work. I mean, you can't fix everything right away; but you can't even start to fix the world until and unless you've started fixing yourself. And complaints never fixed anything.

This post was featured in the 47^th Humanist Symposium.

Arguing on the Internet: Turd-Juggling, the Philosopher's Way!

So while I was researching some stuff for IBD, a post from the blog He Lives came up. Apparently, I was able to do some good for his 'net relevance, 'cuz there are more comments in that one thread than the guy's had in all of September combined (except for this other post from early September - yes, I counted)!

Anyway, I fired what I wanted to be a parting shot (the amiable kind, not the insulting kind), and ended up putting my foot right the fuck in my mouth. What follows is my response to that, since I'm kinda-sorta done with that conversation over there (I apologized for my faux pas, though). As such, it's mainly written "to" a couple of individuals, namely Wandering Internet Commentator and Neil B (with whom I shall be talking some modal realism this weekend). Ultimately, I just couldn't say no to utility calculus (Finally, a chance to use my degree!).

That said, let's take a step back for a second, because I think this moment right here is useful. Let's stick with this "I'm the villain" thing and see where it goes. Did I just make a hate speech? I can tell you that I meant to be inflammatory, but I didn't mean to hurt anyone's feelings. I mean, there was no "hate" involved on my part, so even if whatever definition of "hate speech" you choose applies, I think the term is misleading because I'm just not hateful. I meant to rattle cages just a little, not to poke at what I now see as something more like an exposed nerve; I meant to be irreverent, not sadistic. I was trying to follow the internet maxim: be a douche-nozzle, not a douche-bag. I can't control anyone's reactions, of course, but I truly didn't mean for anyone to react as a parent of an autistic person probably would upon reading my comment. (I just so happened to be missing a key piece of information, namely: that our erstwhile host is one such parent.)

Even here, I'm having trouble trying to draw the line between "participating in the conversation" and "analyzing the conversation," the latter leading me to stick to my guns in what could be seen as the worst possible way of not changing how I was doing the former. I'm really trying to say here, "Look, I'm really sorry about that, because I didn't mean to hurt your feelings in this conversation about feelings. But let's put all that aside for the moment and look at what just happened, because it pertains to that very conversation."

WIC, yes that was Neil B on little old ladies, not you. My bad, and thanks for the correction! I guess that's what I get for posting surreptitiously from work. Neil, you wrote, "I don't see a big difference in terms of probability expectation value, between something clearly wrong might happen to someone, v. something maybe wrong will clearly happen to someone." I can show you what I'm trying to do with math! Hooray! Two caveats: this is not a new argument, it's a translation of my same old argument in the hope that this new perspective will help; second, this is not a mathematical proof, it's just an explanatory model which could be presented just as validly but in a completely different way, should a competing perspective be adopted. My argument, in other words, is that "this is the 'proper' way to look at it."

First off, let's just assign "maybe" a probability value of 0.5, and "wrong were done" gets the arbitrary variable "W," for whatever reason you like. Certainty is C (because we want to see explicitly where our certainty is), and events are E. I think what you're saying could be expressed as, "CW*0.5E=0.5W*CE," or "Certain wrong maybe eventualizing is just as bad as maybe wrong certainly eventualizing." Or, to re-phrase your original in the terms of this ad-hoc utility calculus, "The expected return of a certain-wrong maybe-occurring is equivalent to that of a maybe-wrong certainly-occurring." So far, so good?

Any junior high kid could see that that's a true equivalence for any particular values of W & E (C=1, and is only shown for clarity) because we're just multiplying everything together. However, that "maybe" of 0.5 can change, as the probability of "wrong were done" occurring is affected by attitudes, cultures, proximity, and a million other things. As different cultures (made of different individuals with different attitudes) come together in an orgy of elbow-rubbing, I think it uncontroversial to propose that the probability of "wrong were done" occurring will rise*: actual harm (physical, emotional, financial, etc.) will be done by way of sectarian violence, or bigoted violence, or whatever you want to call it when someone says, "Hey, they're different, so let's get 'em," and then goes and "gets 'em." The left side of our equation has increased in magnitude as that coefficient next to the E has gone up, tipping the scales. And so, says I, we are justified in criminalizing those certain wrongs in order to curb them (though they are not completely eliminated).

Meanwhile, what does the right side look like? Remember that we're talking about something that's "maybe wrong" (i.e. "offense" as opposed to "harm/violence"). And that capacity for offense is a certainty, it's always there. The uncertainty, our matter of chance, is as to whether or not this offense is "wrong" (the open question is not whether "you was offended," but whether "wrong were done"). As an easy example, we have Cory's assumption that I have a penis; whether I do or not is immaterial, I can be offended that he made the assumption at all. As it happens, wouldn't you know it, I decided not to let it bother me (partly 'cuz I'm a steely bitch, partly 'cuz it truly doesn't matter). I had a knee-jerk reaction, but I see that knee-jerk as my problem, and the decision of whether to "merely go with it" and be offended or "rein it in" and not be offended as my decision.

Everyone has the chance to make this decision every time they have a knee-jerk reaction of any kind: do you go with it, or do you rein it in? The knee-jerk reactions themselves are beyond control: you cannot control whether you (or anyone else) will ever have a knee-jerk reaction, and the only way to make sure that knee-jerk reactions don't ever happen is to ensure that people receive no stimulus whatsoever; the only way to do this, in turn, is to shut everyone up and kill them all, so we'll discard knee-jerk reactions as irrelevant to our discussion. They truly cannot be helped, and we're talking about what can be helped (I think). And anyway, nobody self-identifies as an unthinking, inexorable force of nature; feelings are not tornadoes to be avoided (or ignored at one's peril); every part of a person is subject to change. This includes habits, behaviors, thoughts, words, and feelings. And if a person ever asserts that feelings are like tornadoes, then the message is clear: "I cannot be controlled, so when I Hulk out and wreck shit, everyone else better get the Hell away." Such persons have abdicated the realm of douche-nozzlery (and everyone is a douche-nozzle from time to time) and entered the realm of douche-baggery. Be a douche-nozzle, not a douche-bag.

So, given the fact that knee-jerk reactions will always occur no matter what we do, and that people are able to realize that their knee-jerk reactions may or may not be the best way to continue reacting to something, what is accomplished either way? Well, being offended certainly may spur some to action, and that action may be either productive, unproductive, or counterproductive. In either case, our person-in-question will be better-equipped to predict the value of whatever action they're about to take if s/he is calm. And it may even be the case that feigning offense is the best way to accomplish one's goals! Certainly, if one could reap the benefits of perceived offense without actually experiencing the maybe-harm of genuine offense, that would be a productive (though dishonest) move to make. But regardless, the point is that in all cases, you do yourself a disservice by choosing to let others have the power to offend you, and you can reduce your own personal right side of the equation to near-zero simply by changing your mind and deciding not to take offense.

Therefore, everyone should change their mind and decide not to take offense, because no matter what your goals are, zero good is accomplished by getting worked up over an insult. What good does it do merely to be offended? What good could come from offense, but could not be accomplished by another means that bypasses the "offense" process entirely? Zero, and zero, respectively. You create no good by getting offended, and any good that could come after being offended could also be created without that offense ever actually happening (inevitable, unpredictable, irrelevant knee-jerk reactions excluded). In other words, whether a person is trying to push your buttons or not, you do yourself zero help by letting your buttons be pushed. Even if we all adopt the view that I'm being childish by participating in IBD, what does it say about any group that lets themselves be upset by a child? I'd say they need to grow a collective spine, or they will find themselves upset out of all proportion over a whole lot of nothing, and not getting any work done in service of any of their actual causes.

What's more, we can actually do some good by giving people opportunities to practice at not taking offense. Whether people realize it or not, the existence of IBD prepares people for it. They have the opportunity to think, "Gee, IBD is coming up, I better get ready to do whatever it is that I'm going to do for it," whichever side of the fence they're on. The turd is on the table, it won't go away, and we can ignore it, get mad at it, or play with it. I say we play with it, we throw it back and forth, and we laugh while we do it - in the name of Jesus, or Allah, or Kali, or Poseidon, or just plain old good-natured ribbing. It's all turd-juggling, anyway; we may as well have fun while we're doing it. Or, as my friend Rebecca once said to me, "Learn to laugh at your problems, and you will never run out of things to laugh about." IBD is a day of play, not a day of work; but play is good for you, too.

Does that make at least a little more sense?

* - OK, fine, the folks who beat up gays (or slander blacks, or refuse to insure trannies) might just find someone else to beat up for some other equally preposterous reason. But now you're talking individuals, and some bigots meeting some gays/blacks/trannies might also come to realize that they're people, too. The fact remains that different cultures/attitudes/people, by virtue of existing, create more opportunities for culture/attitude/person-based violence, because now a bigot has one more reason to hate someone different. Point is, though it admittedly gets more complicated and isn't "just a wash," we need actual data (not a merely possible counterexample) to not treat it like "just a wash" as I do here. Got data? OK, I'll re-do the whole utility calculus when it comes up.

Prejudice in Action: The Greeks were right, after all!

I've been reading a lot about diversity, inclusion, tolerance, and other such-what in the atheiskeptihumanist blogosphere recently, and it's given me pause for thought. Specifically, it's raised a rather sore point for me, the matter of my own prejudice. I'd like to share some thoughts on that today.

I hate ugly people. It's terrible, I know. It's awful, and arbitrary, and irrational, and harmful, and a disservice to valuable members of my society, and a betrayal of the values I hold most deeply. And I can't help it.

What's worse, I'm not even that great-looking. I mean, I think I look OK, and some people seem to find me fairly attractive and that makes me feel wonderful, but the point is that I'm not even "dump in your Cheerios and you wouldn't care" hot, and here I am pronouncing judgments on other people for their looks alone. I think I have a pretty low threshold for what I see as an attractive person, and I try to find beauty in all that I see in the spirit of "aesthetic optimism" or whatever. But for some things, and some people, I just can't see any beauty and that revolts me.

I confessed this to one of my friends, who responded, "Oh, I'm the same way. I go with the ancient Greeks on this one: ugly people were cursed by the gods." My friend was speaking facetiously (neither of us believes in any gods at all), but that's kind of the level this gets to: with nothing rational or intelligent to fall back on, no moral justification, we jumped right to divine arbitration for our Haterade.

I'm talking about this today because this is the sort of thing we're fighting against, the sort of unreasoning prejudice that we, as atheists, or secular humanists, or whoever, have to deal with. And it's the same sort of unreasoning prejudice that has plagued all sorts of people throughout history: "Lookit them folks! They's differ'nt from us! Let's hate on 'em!" It has been meted out in different degrees, at different times, from different sources, upon different targets, but at root it all comes down to, "They're different, let's get 'em." This one thing will tell us all we need to know about you. It's just false.

Here's the difference: I know this about myself, I recognize it as prejudice, and I fight against it actively because being prejudiced like this makes me feel like a bad person. Whenever I am interacting with someone who I think is ugly, I try my very hardest to shove the "Ah-ha-ha lookit the freak" thoughts to the back of my mind, and haul the "this person is a person and deserves to be treated as such" to the front. I try to take every opportunity that comes my way to beat my lizard brain with the cudgel of tolerance, so to speak, and so far it's working. The disgust and revulsion get a little less intense every time, and the unfamiliar thing that so weirded me out gets a little more familiar, a little less weird, a little safer every time. I see my prejudice as bad, whereas most bigots seem to see their prejudice as somehow correct. "We don't know 'em, and we don't wanna know 'em," and that's just fine and dandy to them, it seems.

This cuts both ways, however. On the one hand, this helps me separate myself from that crowd. On the other hand, now I'm more separated from that crowd, and that makes it harder for me to get into the heads of my fellow bigots and sort out what makes them tick. At the end of the day, that seems (to me) to create a moral difference between myself, a self-correcting bigot, and the greater group of self-reinforcing bigots. I try not to be insular, and when I find myself upset at another's appearance, I recognize it as my problem and do my damnedest to act like I don't think anything's wrong with that person. Or, at least, nothing I would be able to tell just by looking.

And so I see the prejudice of others as another sort of ugliness, an "ugliness on the inside." But is this the same kind of prejudice on my end, wearing a different hat? Perhaps. After all, can people really affect their attitudes? I mean, with practice, of course we can. But if determinism is true, then every uncorrected bigot in history "couldn't have helped it" in the sense that the necessary causes for their correction never came about. And so, trivial tautology that it may be, I can't "truly" help my prejudice for the simple reason that I can only do whatever work it is in my power to do, but no more. Not one jot or tittle. That's a real shame, to my mind. This is of no help in one respect, and of tremendous help in another.

It does no good to simply write off evils of any kind as causally necessary in the past, and therefore insurmountable obstacles. Sorry, that easy way out is simply cowardice in the face of evil. And because the consequences of prejudice impact the happiness of others, this is very much a moral issue, and so we should do whatever we can to make the situation better. So what can we do?

We can treat bigots like people, too. This is the "tremendous help" part, so pay attention! We can try to bring about the causes necessary for their correction. If we must wield peer pressure as a cudgel and metaphorically beat the tolerance into people, well, so be it. But this is a crude solution, and I think we should prefer more elegant ones wherever possible. This means engaging the opposition, keeping the dialogue going, loving our enemies, turning the other cheek, and just generally being the better, more patient people in the confrontation. Ugh, that sounds like work, I know... but it's the hardest and most productive work we can get in this culture war, and it needs doing.

Remember that most people think that they're good people, that they do the right thing most of the time, and that they're generally sane. This is totally false for pretty much everyone, unless you're Norman Borlaug. People need to think these things in order to maintain a healthy sense of self-esteem. Threatening the support of that self-esteem will be seen as a threat to the self-esteem itself (and thus a personal attack), and so we must be careful to be gentle. We must treat bigots, when we can afford to do so, with more care and empathy than they treat us. It's not fair. It sucks, and it's hard work. But it's the best way to make progress.

Each of those clauses in the last paragraph is important (except for the bit about Borlaug - well, OK, it's important but in a different way). For instance, "when we can afford to do so," allows for the fact that, if a fight is brought to us, we may need to respond by fighting. In that case, we are left with no choice, and must defend ourselves against an attack. But this will rarely score points against the other side, except in the general "social visibility" sense that we will make others see that we can't be bullied into submission. This is important, but it won't accomplish our goals all by itself.

We need to be aware of the psychological forces at play, and we need to be somewhat manipulative about how we go about this if we want to have the best effects possible. It's easy to get sucked into the trap of thinking that those who would oppress us deserve no quarter from us, but remember that desserts have nothing to do with it. Do you want to drive bigots away and reinforce their bigotry, or kill them with kindness, no matter how much it defies our own desire for retribution, to have a greater chance of bringing them around to a more civilized way? It's not always such a binary choice - for instance, here on my soapbox, I can pretty much be as loud and intolerant as I want, as my audience is pretty self-selecting - but in many situations, the two chief options will be some variation on, "Satisfy your own impulses and alienate the other person," vs. "Suck it up and make some progress on the other person, even though it hurts to let them 'get away with' being such a twit right now."

I am reminded of Plato's Republic, book one, where Socrates makes a case for the idea that we must do no harm. In discussing justice, Polemarchus volunteers as a definition of justice, "helping one's friends and harming one's enemies." Socrates responds that we humans are fallible and may be unable to judge with certainty who our friends and enemies are at any given moment. Because we may be mistaken, we should strive to err on the side of caution, treating all as friends and trying to harm no one. After all, in the long run, this may earn us some friends and thereby eliminate enemies (in what I think is the best way possible). This stacks up rather nicely with Sun Tzu's injunction to remove the enemy's desire to fight as the best way to achieve victory. Perhaps more appropriately to the situation, this also rings true with the words of Abraham Lincoln: "We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection."

And on that note, I'm done with this. For now.

Poison for Your Brain: On the futility of censorship

Wow. I'm gonna need a second for this one.

OK, so I was listening to Chariots of Iron before work this morning, and I just heard this story from June (local news, ALA follow-up). Short version: some douchebags claim that being "exposed" to a book in the library has harmed them in a way that only a hundred and twenty grand can cure. These folks also want to be able to burn the library's copy of the book (because that will totally accomplish anything at all) and reorganize the library's classification system specifically to restrict access to young adult books by young adult readers.

That's right: when you're going through puberty and feel awkward and isolated and need to hear a sympathetic voice the most in your life, the very parents who won't explain all this stuff to you want to make sure that you can't even read about it, either.

This is so stupid, it hurts my brain. Really, I'm having brain pain thinking about what these yahoos have to be going through. Look, it's like this: even if the ideas they wanted to censor are "bad," censorship won't fix it. You know why? Because bad ideas are easy to come up with. You can't kill an idea. Even ideas like censorship and book-burning (you know, actually bad ideas) can't be killed because some cock-pouch with shit for brains will always be able to come up with these leotarded ideas all on his own. It ain't hard.

The only way you can fight against bad ideas is with better ideas. Period. But these people have no better ideas - more to the point, their ideas about censorship and book-burning are the bad ones - so the only thing they can think to do is to shut up the "source" of those ideas. Well, sorry, the source of homosexuality is the world, not the goddamned Devil. The source of sex is the world, not the goddamned Devil. The source of racism is the world, not the goddamned Devil. As a matter of fact, the source of all the people, events, and ideas from which these insular fuckwits want to "protect" their children is the world. So in effect, what these people want to do is shut up the world, shut out reality, and live in a...

...right. They want to live in a pretend fantasy world. Y'know, with angels and Jesus and fluffy-clouded Heaven. Duh. I forgot all about that part.

Fuckin' leotards.

Clarification Writ Large: On symbolic jackets and social justice

"But you see, Socrates, that the opinion of the many must be regarded, for what is now happening shows that they can do the greatest evil to anyone who has lost their good opinion."

"I only wish it were so, Crito; and that the many could do the greatest evil; for then they would also be able to do the greatest good - and what a fine thing this would be! But in reality they can do neither; for they cannot make a man either wise or foolish; and whatever they do is the result of chance."

When I say that symbols are important, I do not mean in any objective or necessary sense. I simply mean that, as a contingent matter of our psychology, they affect our brain states in ways well beyond their effects upon the "external" world. Yes, this is a false distinction when you get right down to it, but "the differential effects of symbols upon brains vs. rocks" are obviously and significantly different than "the differential effects of hammers upon brains vs. rocks." And anyway, I'm not interested in arguing the illusion of the ego here, since "the phenomenology of brain-having as a private experience" is itself the source and relevant context of this issue. Please be assured that I fully understand I am using a language of convenience here. My goal is to paint a picture that shows the responsible and intelligent harnessing of symbolic emotional content as a noble act, worth every penny of the price paid in harrassment from the opposition and misunderstanding from the Great Many - a price, I shall argue, that we pay no matter what we do.

What makes a symbol be a symbol is that it represents more than it actually is - symbols are cognitive shorthand. In this way, all language, all art, all representative thought, is symbolic: the ideas in our heads of "things out in the world" are mere symbols of those things themselves, and are meant to represent the thing in itself, the inaccessible ding an sich which we cannot "truly understand in its entirety" for the trivially obvious reason that part of this entirety includes things like its exact real-time atomic composition or its true and complete memetic pedigree (depending on whether we're talking about physical or mental "objects" here), and any of a number of relatively useless facts that we unproblematically ignore when crafting our symbols. This gap is recursively inescapable: not only do I have to symbolize a duck for lack of complete understanding, I don't even completely understand the symbol itself as "my idea of a duck," and so I must also have a symbol for the symbol when I try to think of "my idea of a duck, as an idea itself." We do not fully understand our own brains, and so at least as a matter of present contingency, even our symbols can only be conceived of as symbols themselves.

What's more, all our symbols have a sense and a referent, a denotation and a connotation, the thing to which we wish the label to stick and the content of that label as we ourselves have made it. Though the referents can be the same from one person to another in a "good enough" sense for any day-to-day application we'd care to dream up, the sense is always a private thing, and though we may try to communicate this private thing to others (and achieve a great deal of success at times, as I hope to do here), there will always be a gap here, too. Always. This is the very same gap that causes us to need symbols in the first place. Telepathy is the only cure - double-promise.

As a final point of background before I get to the meat of my argument, these connotations are, to varying degrees, packed with emotional content. Symbols don't just have intellectual meaning, they have emotional meaning, too. All of them. "2+2=4," as a representation of a simple mathematical truth, satisfies and reassures me a little bit, but I also find it boring to contemplate for any significant length of time. Our brains keep a sloppy, informal tally of the emotions that have been experienced along with these symbols in the past, and when we are reminded of them (by thought, sight, sound, etc.), our brains dredge up these emotions to remind us of how the symbol has historically made us feel. Though we may deliberately quiet or ignore our emotions, they are always there, and the only sense in which they ever "turn off" is the sense in which our hearts "turn off" between beats - for all intents and purposes, our emotions are a constant running commentary on every aware moment of our lives, however subdued they may be at a given moment.

OK, so we're talking about this culture war that's going on between civilized persons on the one side, who say that unbelievers should enjoy the same freedoms & protections enjoyed by believers, and uncivilized persons on the other side, who say that unbelievers in some way or another are just doin it rong and need to fall in line or accept their place. Balls to that, says I! Insofar as this battle is not fought with literal swords/guns/etc., it is entirely a symbolic one, and we are casting our very best symbols out upon the battlefield like Pokemon and seeing which symbols have the biggest dicks (y'know, to wax symbolic). Wade's caution to avoid attaching our emotions to these symbols and eschew those symbols which hold our very specialest attachments strikes me as an empty one because he seems to be ignoring the context of the entire issue: we're not calmly and methodically arranging Platonic memetic constructs on Platonic cultural substrate here, we're pitting our values against one another in a tooth-and-nail battle for cultural dominance and hoping we come out on top.

I happen to think that we're right, that our methods of arriving at our conclusions are eminently more defensible, that our values are just plain better for any who live under them, and that we can win if only we keep at it. People being the rationalizing sort that they are, the opposition thinks the exact same thing - everyone does - but we take very different approaches to getting there. Point is, at some level, we're saying the same thing: "We are right; y'all are wrong; give us what we ask for and we can all get on with our lives." Being in the minority as we are, our voices can get drowned out at times; we need encouragement to stay in the fight, and this is frelling hard to come by in the public sphere. And so, to remind us of why we fight, of the values behind our efforts, of the bright and shiny future we'd like to see made reality, we create symbols to give us some of that positive reinforcement and encourage us to fight another day. Symbolically speaking, of course. This is a normal and healthy thing to do even when not in conflict, for the general purposes of maximizing utility (if we're feeling formal) and living a joyous life (if we're not) - and maintaining our emotional health is all the more important when it is threatened by derision, distrust, and oppression.

So far, this should all be uncontroversial: I am simply arguing for the intelligent and responsible use of symbols, despite the fact that they may be weaponized against us, and because they can do such a great good to us. Even Silver Garou agreed with me face-to-face that the intelligent and responsible use of symbols is not itself problematic, but his opinion at the time of our discussion was that the problem arises when the Great Many get a hold of these symbols and, well, they fuck 'em up a little - so we need to keep a wether eye to the future even when creating these symbols, on the grounds that the costs are somewhat foreseeable and we should try to minimize the bad consequences while maximizing the good ones. Even shorter: we should be choosy and try to gamble well on our memetic progeny. Fair enough at that! Everything cuts both ways: there is no such thing as an incorruptible good, and there is no such thing as an irredeemable evil (barring, of course, whatever it is that one may stipulate as the standard of good or evil - but that's merely defining your way to victory and not of argumentative interest here).

Symbols have a rather special role in human cultural interactions, though. As banners that may be rallied behind, they can be subverted, split in two, dissolved, forgotten, rediscovered, and perhaps most sinister of all, wielded as emotional cudgels to pressure otherwise normal folk into behaving against their own best interestes and most deeply held values. In a very important sense, symbols are the atoms of the qualia of mind-having: tapping into their power can do both great good, and great harm.

The historical record shows over and over and over again, in excruciating detail and with depressing regularity, how symbols have been weaponized and abused to all manner of evil ends. This is perhaps most obvious in the damn-near-begging-to-be-called-mitotic schisms that have plagued religious traditions: whenever a believing population gets too big to be ruled by a central authority, doctrinal disagreements over the proper use and interpretation of symbols have split the mass of believers in two. Some have led these splits for principled reasons, more have followed for considerably less mindful impulses, but the point is that this sort of zany hijinks is exactly what we want to avoid for our own movement as civilized unbelievers.

But it happens just the same.

To delve for a moment into cynicism, the unwashed masses are a capricious and unruly lot, and we intellectuals cannot ever hope to completely safeguard against their corrupting influence. As Greta Christina wrote in On the Amazingness of Atheists... And Why it's Doomed, our movement is doomed as a movement to descend into the plebeian masses where all other such movements have gone. We infidels, more than any other minority, owe our strength of conviction to the reason, curiosity, intellectual honesty, and willingness to go boldly where we are told even angels ought fear to tread. I'll not belabor the point, as Greta said it better than I can hope to, and if you won't take my word for it then you should see if you feel like taking hers.

The point, as applies to the current discussion, is that we intellectual unbelievers must remain, as philosophers, the conscience of our own movement while it lasts. The key, the sticking point, is knowing how long it lasts. When your average Joe on the street, when a high school dropout from Georgia, when an airheaded model in Perth, when a cowardly radio announcer in London, when a shrill racist in Oslo, when the unprincipled and incurious among us, when the ignorant masses we wish to rise above, when all these people with whom we disagree feel comfortable identifying themselves as the thing we have had to fight so hard to make OK in the public mind, that's when we know we've won. We don't need to eradicate the discrimination completely, we just have to make it OK to be a godless fucking heathen. The discrimination won't disappear overnight, but by the time the teeming hordes have diluted our "intellectual purity," we shall have gotten to the point where our tactics will be outdated and unnecessary to secure the future and social equality of non-theists. From that point, the rest is denouement. And while we're in the lead, it is enough to make sure that we ourselves take care to steward our symbols well; after our part is played, it well and truly does not matter what is done with them, for the rest is gravy and we can't control it anyhow.

There is, of course, always the possibility of a backslide, and we must remain on watch against this just as much as blacks, gays, women, etc. That's really all there is to it - we can't control the Great Many, as Plato knew when he wrote those words above. We can only react correctively to whatever hardships come our way - the rest we should calmly accept as the smoothest sailing we can get.

The killing irony is this: if you're upset that the movement will be infiltrated by "the masses," then the movement as it stands now has become your precious icon. You're getting worked up over "The Atheist Movement," as a symbol, being subverted. And this attitude will prove inimical to progress, as you delay our acceptance by insisting that it's not "for" the foolish, the uneducated, the irrational, and so on. You have forgotten that their numbers secure our equality, and the threat of their shrill, brutish, unthinking retaliation is our deterrent against future injustice. You have become like a cultural Singularitarian, hoping against all reason that we'll reach a critical tipping point and usher in a new age of reason, a new Enlightenment. And maybe our movement will do that - I would informally agree that it stands at least a somewhat better chance of doing so, though I would argue whether that's a chance worth doubling-down on - but do not forget the historical record. Do not forget that collective bargaining has not yet ushered in a Utopia for workers; do not forget that women's suffrage has not yet ended the poison of patriarchy; do not forget that the death of Hitler and the dissolution of the Nazi party has not yet spelled the end for anti-Semitism (or even Nazism in general); do not forget that the desegregation movement has not yet seen the end of the KKK; do not forget that the gay pride movement has a long way to go before we as a species recognize that healthy, happy, sexual love is not limited to one penis and one vagina; and do not do yourself the disservice of expecting that our success as a movement will achieve all of our goals any faster than any of the foregoing, or you will be sorely disappointed.

Please do not misunderstand my intent here: I love the atheiskeptihumanist movement (thank you, Chariots of Iron, for that endearingly clunky and invigoratingly accurate term), and I wish so dearly that we could achieve all our goals and turn the Earth into Secular Heaven. I wholly love and deeply cherish those ideas, I hold them as personal goals, and I recognize that we don't stand a snowball's chance in Hell (mainly because snowballs can't go to Hell, in turn mainly because Hell doesn't exist) of realizing our dreams without doing the hardest goddamned work we can. I am simply saying that we should not let our enthusiasm outstrip our wisdom, and more than atheists, more than skeptics, more than humanists, we should try to see ourselves as representatives of social conscience. Why do you fight for social justice for yourself? Because it's you, or because it's social justice? So why would you stop once you're off the chopping block?

The atheiskeptihumanist agenda is in point of fact behind those of employees, women, Jews, blacks, and "gays et cetera" right now, and we should leverage our full might towards catching up - but once we do, we should then shift our attention to putting out the next biggest fire, whether it's another of ours, or something else, or working all together (I think that would be best, but judging by how trannies got thrown "ENDA" the bus - say it out loud - I don't know if we can really get that kind of solidarity among workers, women, Jews, blacks, the GLBTQQ crowd, and unbelievers). We wear our label with pride right now, and it is our symbol, it is our icon, whether public or private. Like a jacket, it fits right now, and the matter of which jacket we wear or how many we have is a matter of taste and fashion alone (so long as we're all pulling at least vaguely in the same direction). And when our jackets cease to be special or unique, when we see posers wearing them ironically, when we see crowds wearing them unthinkingly, when we see the masses multiplying and varying them unnecessarily and irresponsibly, then we shall know the weather has changed and it shall be time for new jackets.

We'll wear those with pride, too. And I expect each and every one of us to bring to bear the full force of our intellectual and rhetorical might, to the end of popularizing and normalizing them until the normalizing's done, and then it's on to the next social crisis, and the next, and so on and so forth. Social justice is a moving target, and even that is a jacket of sorts, for which I should hope we can one day outgrow our need as well. The important part is that our emotional attachment to our jackets, our pride in wearing them, is exactly the thing which gives us the power to make them popular; the positive things we ascribe to our symbols, whatever they be, are the very things that spur us on to do the good work we do. If you don't need as many symbols as your neighbor, that's OK - and it's OK both ways - and if you see your neighbor getting bent out of shape over one of his symbols, then help him get over his bad self, by all means!

But I hope I've made it clear by now that I think it's kind of silly to say that we should eschew our symbols and their emotional connections just because they have potentially disastrous drawbacks. I mean, so do cars, and we still use them.

Subtle, with Delicate Notes of Frustration: An open letter to those who think Atheist Activism is counterproductive

I've been thinking a lot lately about the fact that atheists are the most despised and distrusted minority in America. Mainly because it just feels weird to say that. Let me explain what I mean.

In general, the label of "unfaithful" has historically been used to tar a person's reputation and justify all manner of acts upon said person, from the slightly annoying (conversion attempts) to the truly despicable (torture & execution). In America, we don't really see this latter end of the spectrum very much - yeah, there was that one wacko who shotgunned his atheist roommate 'cuz he thought his roommate was the goddamned Devil, but the perpetrator was prosecuted as a criminal and received neither encouragement nor sanction from any state body (of which I am aware, at least). The hoopla and hootenanny from the Shelton family... I don't think that's intelligent enough to qualify as any kind of expression - but I kid, and here I am trying to be the Serious Big-Time Philosopher.

I tried comparing this to the suffering and persecution heaped upon other minorities in living memory, and I quickly realized that there is no comparison. Atheists get the occasional sneer, the once-in-a-while thoughtless statement of bigotry, a heaping helping of caricaturization from people I've never met, and of course a cultural undercurrent of distrust. If you ask me, this is nothing compared to lynchings, legalized beatings, Proposition 8, or the Holocaust (OMFGodwin!), to name just a few examples. Now, that's a very subjective matter, and I freely acknowledge that a great many individual atheists have been treated worse than a great many individuals of other minorities which were, in general, "more heavily discriminated against." This is for the simple fact that there is almost always more variation within groups than between groups.

What I'm trying to say here is, I recognize that maybe I've simply gotten lucky and perhaps not experienced my fair share of anti-atheist bigotry, and I can see how someone who has would perceive the situation differently than I do right now. Bearing that in mind, and in light of the social undercurrent running right against us, I don't think we have it all that bad. This is perhaps because of the fact that atheists can be truly invisible if we wish to be: nobody can read your mind (yet!), so you can hold whatever manner of private beliefs you like and none shall be the wiser to your imaginary thoughtcrimes.

Paradoxically, this could be seen as the greatest obstacle in our path. Individuals, faced with overwhelming opposition, can fake theism more convincingly than anyone could fake white, fake man, or fake straight. We infidels can blend in with the opposition, and that can make us scarier since we could be "lurking among them, woooo," and this exacerbates the problem. Stealth is easy, safe, and totally counterproductive. While the maxim that an unbeliever is an easier convert than a believer (because he doesn't have to be un-convinced of the "false god" first - like there's any other kind) paints us as argumentative targets, it at least frames our differences in a way that fosters discussion and socialization!

And so, because anti-atheist discrimination is typically so non-violent, and because atheists are so shrilly and embarrassingly painted as "bad guys" in the media for trying to claim some space in the marketplace of ideas (bus ads, anyone?), and because it's so much easier for us to remain individually silent than to organize collectively, and because tolerating intolerance is actually a genuinely important part of civilization, we take a lot of heat for being out, loud, and proud. Should we not turn the other cheek, live better than our oppressors even by their own standards, and be content with the freedom of our own minds? Surely it is better to endure what hardships one can, while not imposing hardships unnecessarily upon those less prepared for them.

But this, too, is vanity and vexation of spirit.

Why, yes, we could patiently endure the backlash from our bus ads, and apologize for inciting excitable children to embarrassing behaviors over words on a sign; and blacks could have patiently stayed at the back of the bus instead of fighting for their right to do as they please. Yes, we could patiently endure the backlash from voicing our opinions in public, and not incite the opposition to further annoying nonsense; and gays could patiently avoid holding hands or kissing in public, instead of doing as they please and fighting whoever tries to get in their way. For that matter, we could simply accept the necessity of pretending at faith if we wish to run for public office, or just stay out of the sickening mess that is American politics; and women could have scrupulously married only men with matching political views, and stayed out of the voting business. Any injustice may be met by turning the other cheek, in point of fact.

What I'm saying is that we shouldn't have to. Nobody should. While the discrimination we face tends to be less violent, easier to avoid, and just generally lower-key than that faced by other minorities, this does not excuse the discrimination. Nothing does. It well and truly does not matter how nice any set of water fountains is; either we're drinking from the same fountain or we're not, and that's what counts, The End.

So to those who advocate quiet tolerance of theistic bigotry, to those who say atheists should let theists go their way and not worry too much about being able to go ours, to those who think that the only good atheist is a self-effacing atheist, I say: You are not our friends. You may wish to be our friends, and that's wonderful, but you are acting like our enemies because you are telling us to lie down and submit, you are telling us to restrain our efforts for social change, you are telling us to use our greatest strengths directly against our most deeply held values. I say, to Hell with that, and shame on you for offering!

But wait - perhaps I am being a bit presumptuous for assuming that you, the General Reader, have thought out the implications of your exhortations as thoroughly as I have. Maybe you honestly didn't see it that way, and maybe we've been talking past each other. Well, I have to say that I am hurt that the above chain of reasoning is not intuitively obvious to you, but I do believe in exercising individual patience with other individuals in order to find common ground. After all, we're all people, and people fuck up & hurt each other from time to time. That sucks, but we have to live with it. How can we move gracefully forward from here, together?

Well, it's like this: we don't want to forcefully remove religion from people's heads, we don't want to take their gods away from them, we just want to have our own elbow room like everyone else. We are willing to let the believers continue to think and express whatever they like, provided they extend to us the exact same courtesy and in all the same ways. Right now, they do not. There is a social asymmetry, and that is the root of our complaint, that is where the bigotry is. It's subtler than many other forms of bigotry, and while that makes it easier to live with, it makes it all the more frustrating when we hear that we ought to live with it. I mean, I'd rather live with this than with Jim Crow laws for atheists, to be sure! But what I'm saying is that a free society and an unrestricted marketplace of ideas entails that neither of these injustices should be an option. We should not have to settle for this. And we don't want to, so we're not gonna.

So if you think that the morals of religion are better than those available to atheists, fine. Go on and disagree with us. If you think that the benefits of religion outweigh its costs, fine. Go on and disagree with us. If you think that religion enriches the human experience instead of warping and stunting it, fine. Go on and disagree with us. We can disagree on these things; it's OK, I promise. In fact, because I like you so much for even trying to give good advice, dear General Reader, I will even go so far as to double-promise. We can get along just fine without getting our way on these issues, no matter how long the disagreement goes, just as long as there is a social symmetry that allows us to breathe freely in an environment of vigorous debate and intense disagreement. We're really OK with this! But if we ourselves aren't also being afforded these very important courtesies, if we are being told to sit down and shut up, if we are told that who we are is just too much for some to tolerate and that's our bad, if we are told that we're better off pandering to the delusions of superiority that so often occur as a side effect of the God-smack, if we aren't also double-promised by the opposition that it's OK for us to disagree with them, then we're not getting along. And that's just not cool. And when you're not cool, then nobody's going to listen to what you want to say.

So help us get our two scoops of justice as swiftly and satisfyingly as possible, or get out of the way, or accept that we won't take anything you say seriously; because we aren't interested in entertaining the opinions of people who have neither constructive suggestions nor even passive support. Pro tip: telling us that it is counterproductive to be who we are and speak our minds openly and honestly is tantamount to telling us that openly and flagrantly defying injustice does not combat injustice. Or like saying that condoms exacerbate the spread of HIV. It's false, and it's so blatantly false that it's an insult.

Poison for your Brain: Stephen Hawking should be DEAD! Long live Stephen Hawking!

Thanks to PZ for pointing this out:

"The controlling of medical costs in countries such as Britain through rationing, and the health consequences thereof, are legendary," read a recent editorial from the paper. "The stories of people dying on a waiting list or being denied altogether read like a horror script...

"People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless."

The paper has since been notified that Hawking is both British and still among the living. And it has edited the editorial, acknowledging that the original version incorrectly represented the whereabouts of perhaps the world's most famous scientific mind. But it has not acknowledged that its mention of Hawking misrepresented the NHS as well.

"I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS," Hawking told The Guardian. "I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived."

source

Well, that's a pretty clear conditional statement from the IBD: "If Stephen Hawking were British and therefore subject to the NHS, then Stephen Hawking would be dead." Guess what? Stephen Hawking is British and therefore subject to the NHS, and Stephen Hawking is not dead; the conditional statement is false, and the argument which the point is supposed to support is therefore stupid. OK, fine, flawed. But still.

I will never understand how such out-and-out lying passes muster in the American populace. Sure, sure, Investor's Business Daily may have made a merely-ironic-but-honest mistake... but seriously, nobody over there knew that Stephen Hawking is British? And nobody thought to check before going to print?

What are you, new?!

This isn't funny any more. "Atheists have no morals" is funny. "Obama wasn't born in the USA" is funny. "Stephen Hawking died for lack of health care" is funny. But these are all funny because they're manifestly false and relatively harmless in my day-to-day life. "Baseline nationalized health care dedicated to raising the minimum standard of living will result in mandatory euthanasia and no children getting any health care at all" is not funny; it's obviously false and stupid, stupid, stupid. It's a kind of stupid that is downright dangerous, if you ask me, since the other lies from the Right are matters of empirical fact which can be disproven with even passing knowledge of... well, anything. This, right here, is not that. This is something else.

This is different because it's screwy logic that preys on a clear and obvious misunderstanding of the pitch: if you listened to Obama at all, you'd have to know that what he says is not matching up with what is said about that. So the citizens on the Right who buy this horseshit are in the unenviable position of either A) thinking themselves informed for listening to the commentary on an issue alone (and buying it despite its obvious insanity), without actually paying any attention to the issue itself, or B) hearing the commentary and being informed on the issue and still going with the commentary, in flagrant defiance of all logic.

I don't know which is worse.

Le sigh. Look, it's like this: everyone is afraid that, should shit hit the fan, someone I care about might not have access to health care. That's a rational fear, and I get it. However, if you live in America, that's a rational fear in the current situation. It's been a rational fear for... forever. The people you love will die, and some of them will die for stupid reasons you don't like. That's how it goes, man. Obama's proposed changes are aimed at minimizing the extent to which this happens, and that means putting a price tag on human life just like we do now. You know why we put a price tag on human life? Because sustaining human life has a cost. Who's gonna pay yours? You do! Well, more accurately, you pick up where your parents left off as soon as you enter the work force and file independent on your tax returns. You make money, and you use some of that to sustain your life, and you do what you like with the rest. And right there, whatever it is that you spend before you get into your disposable income, that's the cost of your own personal Human Life, plain as day in beautiful green dollars and cents. Hooray!

But what if shit happens and you don't have enough? Well, that's what insurance is for, and insurance isn't going away - it's being supplemented. It's getting better. The uninsurable have a baseline below which the government won't let them fall, and while the quality of that thing will vary with the costs of doing that thing, the private sector will now have an objective goal: do it better than the government. If you think you can get something better from the private sector, fucking go for it! More power to ya! (Just be prepared to pay!) If you can't, or don't want to, then Obama's changes are for you, and suck though they may compared to something you can't afford anyway, it's better than nothing at all which is where things are right now. And if you've got the money to afford health care on your own, then nothing will be able to get in the way because you can afford it.

Fuckin' Hell, what is so hard to understand about this?