Half-Baked Thoughts Served Fresh

So I’ve been listening to Dragnet, an old radio program from the late ‘40s through the early ‘60s. It’s an absolutely fantastic show, and I’ve been really enjoying following it. That said, it’s been bugging me quite a bit when I consider their chase protocol. In the episode I just listened to (Episode 29: Garbage Chute) the show ends in a chase. The man fires on them once and then runs. After that they chase him down some streets, and through a dinner, where they exchange more shots and ask the kitchen staff to try and intervene, and finally they stop him by taking measured aim at his as he’s running. I know a lot of it has been changes in societal values and improvements in police protocol cause by a number of accidents, and a lot more of it is simply the matter of it ultimately being a radio drama based on real cases. However, this doesn’t change the fact that they shot a man in the back, rather than calling for backup, exchanged gunfire in multiple crowded areas, and tried to convince unarmed civilians to intercept a man they knew to be armed and dangerous. And this is pretty much how it goes every episode. Very rarely are guns used defensively; more often than not, they’re used as a tool to subdue someone running, and in one case, they actually end up shooting dead a valuable witness, who tried running from custody while handcuffed on a busy street in front of the police station.

In all honesty, if there’s any single thing I’ve learned from listening to this, it’s been to appreciate how much ground has been covered by modern police forces. The newer protocols are designed to improve the survival rate of officers, bystanders, and even the criminals, because shooting your witness for running is counter-productive when you want to bring in their peers.

I don't know when it happened exactly, but somewhere in there I lost my taste for harem anime that feature sexual violence against women or men. You'd think "Well duh! That's terrible!" but it turns out that it's extremely pervasive in the genera, and if you weren’t looking, you probably thought it was outright funny.

At no time was Tenchi ever cool with just about any of these ladies.

The genera has been at least largely reasonable at portraying violence against women as bad. For that matter, there's a part of the genera that loves using the threat of sexual assault against one of the women as an opportunity for the main character to demonstrate he cares/do the white knight thing (which is its own thing, but one questionable trope at a time!) However, the vast majority of sexual assaults against men are not only treated as normal, but failure to accept a woman’s advances is most frequently implied to be a sign of a lack of manliness.

Nothing like spending every morning fleeing from a harasser.

This normalization of sexual harassment against men goes largely without comment. It’s usually played for laughs, and when everything’s said and done, the cast goes back to their daily routine as if this was perfectly normal. However, the psychological and emotional distress of the main character does tend to show. Flinching when women near him make sudden movements, extreme avoidance behaviors, etc all tend to appear to varying degrees by the end of the series. In the Tenchi Muyo series shown at the beginning of this, there’s an entire spin-off series (Tenchi in Tokyo) of him trying to escape from his assailants, only to find himself trapped in the situation all over.

Though most harem genre anime ultimately handwave the obvious fact that most of the ladies in them are at best desperate for the man’s attention and aren’t willing to take no for an answer, it’s in harems with Tsundere characters that the extreme of this problem manifest.

She’s not emotionally ready for pet ownership, let alone a serious romance.

Domestic violence in anime is exceedingly common. But harem anime with a tsundere character pretty much makes the entirety of the narrative about how the woman abuses the man repeatedly, both emotionally and physically. Love Hina (shown in the example above) pretty much made the entire show about the hot & cold relationship between Urashima and Narusegawa, and how Narusegawa’s poor emotional development made her unstable and violent with Urashima. However, Love Hina isn’t a dark anime about rage fueled violence and inner emotional turmoil; it’s a comedy. Narusegawa’s violence is played off as a reasonable reaction for everything from accidental contact to him simply complimenting her. The situation above occurred because someone got the idea that they were on a date and Narusegawa couldn’t admit that to herself. But imagine for a moment swapping the two characters in the image above. Have the man spinning the woman, about to throw her into the distance over someone thinking they were on a date. I would challenge anyone to get that past the censors with a comedic tone. Culturally we say “It’s not right to injure a woman!” and an anime that made light of violence against women would be released to torches and pitchforks. But here, a blatant case of domestic violence committed in a public place, is simply ‘funny’.

I’m surprised this passed the censors at all, even ignoring the harassment.

When I was younger I saw the hilarity of the situations, and it never occurred to me how real people would feel in those moments. Now with more time and experience, and years of thinking on gender issues and cultural norms, I just can’t enjoy this kind of comedy. Ya, they’re fictional characters, and in the end no actual people are hurt by repeated unwanted advances. However, they normalize a situation that shouldn’t exist, and with some hindsight, it’s just creepy to me.

So here's a question I haven't been able to answer and has been bugging me since this time last year: is gender defined socially, physically, or by some other measure? To word it slightly differently: what does it mean to be a man or a woman?

I ask because it matters in resolving a dilemma that's created by the concept of gender fluidity being acceptable. A physiological definition of gender ascribes it to primary and secondary sexual characteristics, in which case there is no problem with women being mechanics and men wearing dresses since neither of those two depend on either primary or secondary sexual characteristics to be done. Nothing about prominent hips and alternate hip structure intrinsically prevents car maintenance.

But from that perspective, changing clothes one day from men's clothes to women's clothes because "you feel like a woman today" is a sexist act. The implication is that the "woman's" part of that phrase is correct, and by definition men cant wear those clothes. They may not typically flatter a man's figure, but the pronoun you use today has no bearing on that; if you had narrow hips before, saying "she" today isn't going to magically make you fill out a set of yoga pants.

This means that if gender fluidity is an acceptable thing, rather than a manifestation of a sexist culture conflicting with someone's non-gendered internal motivations, that we have to accept that gender is more than just physiology. It has to have a social definition since changing a word changes your gender, and there are things that you are physically capable of doing that you are prohibited from doing by this change in pronouns.

But everything I know about sexism suggests that even the implication that your gender leads to a social prohibition is the telltale sign of sexist thought. It should be amazingly apparent to everyone that the process is wildly sexist, and I would expect it to be reviled. Moreover, we generally regard ourselves as having a moral responsibility to address sexist behavior when we see it, so I would expect a lot of pressure against gender fluid thinking as it typically manifests.

However, that's not the case. In fact, I'm well aware that even the thought that there's an issue with the idea of gender fluidity (and trans behaviors where primary/secondary sexual characteristics are left unchanged) is regarded with extreme distaste. This suggests a hole in my thinking. If everyone thinks one way and you alone think another, it's pretty likely that you're the one who is wrong.

A consideration of local power and global oppression

Listening to 99% Invisible's episode about Soul City, there was a discussion about the generation of Black Power. This lead me to think a bit about the tyranny of the majority, and how to address the issue of minority under-representation. However, the problem is more than what trivial logic would suggest thanks to the fact that minorities are subject to an active effort to harm.

Setting aside the active harm issue for a moment, some quick thinking shows that segregation is the path to self-determination for minorities. To see why, realize that although the minority is, well, less than a majority, there's nothing that says they can't create a local majority by moving around. To give an example, imagine a region with 10 districts and a minority group with 10% of the population. If they're uniformly distributed, they will have 10% influence in each of the 10 districts, which means they will not have a majority vote in any location. However, if they all move to one district, they will have a majority in that district, and subsequently will get to call the shots.

In a representative government this gives them a 10% vote in the overall government (up from 0%.) However, this still isn’t a majority, so they don't have much power there. But, 100% of the people now live in a district that they have a majority in, and thus can dictate how the district operates without compromising. If the system is contrived that local power is more significant in magnitude than global power, i.e. the districts have the majority of the power and the overall government is limited in its power, this means that these people will have significant influence over their circumstances.

From this analysis, you can see that given those circumstances segregation is the key to self-determination; if you want to live a particular way, move to the district where people share your view (for example, an interest in Black issues) so that your viewpoint becomes the local majority.

However, this is where the intent to harm, and the fact that in the American representative democracy the power is biased to the global level, become a problem, and we’ll need some different thinking. To help make it easy to see why, we'll stick to the example of Blacks in the USA, but understand that this works for any stigmatized minority.

Imagine that American Blacks centralize themselves; possibly even driving the population of several states to the point that they are the majority. At this point they would have significant control of those states, but would not be able to generate a majority in the overall government (since they're still a minority overall.) Given Blacks are generally poorly received by the current establishment (racism is very much a thing,) this will mean that the remaining majority will begin taking hostile actions due to their prejudice. Since the constitution bans the creation of laws against a specific individual, and since it's currently stigmatic to make a law targeting a particular racial group, they can't directly make anti-Black laws. However, with the convenient localization of Blacks in this example, the majority can begin to exert other pressures by writing laws more centered on geography and local demographics.

For example, imagine the Blacks decided to take over New York, Maryland, Delaware, and Rhode Island so that they can have the controlling majority in the northeast. By doing so they've made themselves vulnerable to contrived laws that are unfair against coastal states, states that have long or cold winters, states with high density, etc. They may not be discriminated against directly, but by clumping together they expose themselves to especially strong laws that are selective on geography, which now happens to be strongly correlated with race as well due to the segregation process.

Integration sees this issue and attempts a trade-off. By giving up self-determination and hiding in the crowd, it becomes more difficult to write selective laws. It's not perfect armor, and there are still selective laws (often focusing on economic conditions,) but it decreases the degree to which the effects can be manifest without also harming the majority.

In a conversation with a friend, it was stated:

I'm not going to debate the "All relationships are solely for personal benefit" thing. [...] That's an argument people who don't give a shit about others use to justify not giving a shit about others.

This is something I can disprove rather simply by asserting that single sided relationships are bad. As long as we acknowledge that this assertion is true, then it is implied that there is an exchange occurring; both parties expect to receive something of value for their part in the relationship. With that said, this article isn’t about whether or not relationships are intrinsically altruistic (they aren’t.) Instead, I’m here to talk with you about the currency of relationships.

For example, in the TV sitcom style of friendship, the most common currencies are companionship and acceptance; basically people trade time and camaraderie with each other. A simple deconstruction of Seinfeld shows that the relationship between Jerry and Elaine is based on this. They spend time with each other so that they can recharge and use each other to vent some of life’s problems.

Actually… Time for a tangent. That last bit brings up a rather important point that I think may be at the heart of my friend’s initial comment and also my own disagreement with that comment. As an introvert, being around other people at best is a break even proposition; I need their company (a positive), but tolerating their company costs me energy (a negative.) From my own perspective I can safely say that only my closest friends draw a small enough amount of energy from me that I break even With most folks it’s a loss for me; I’ll need more than just “hanging out” to justify bothering.

An extrovert won’t see it in those terms at all. For them, both the company and the time spent together are both positives on the balance. It may be more or less depending on how close the friend is (and assholes drain everyone, not just introverts,) but in general just hanging out at all is an unequivocal win for an extrovert. If they’re used to friendships naturally having that bit of background currency floating around, dealing with an introvert who’s actually running a negative balance from the contact is going to make them feel like they have to try extra hard to maintain that relationship. This isn’t entirely true, but it will require more work to pin down precisely what the extravert has that costs very little to them that the introvert wants.

But as an introvert myself, it means I need to be more conscious of a few things. Extroverts are FAR more common (2 for every introvert.) I’m harder to be friends with because there’s no “hanging out” allowance like there is between extroverts, for that matter, hang-outs spend the allowance. The answer to the question of “Why do they hang out with me?” is “Because hanging out is profitable, regardless of what other services I provide.”

In the end it will require a shift in perspective on my part. I don’t think like an extrovert naturally. I can’t use my own experiences to understand their behavior. As a result, I need to think more deliberately about how exactly an extrovert sees a relationship.

On the Matter of Beautiful Models and Beautiful People

I was sitting around chatting with a couple of models and photographers one evening and something kinda slipped out of my mouth that initially left me aghast but I came to understand was quite true. In polite company I said:

“As a photographer I don’t care about how beautiful you are on the inside. The reality of the matter is that what’s on the outside is what the camera can see.”

My cultural training immediately made me take pause, because culturally that’s a blatant no-no. From a young age we are drilled with “You are a special snowflake and it doesn't matter what you look like on the outside.” Suggesting that someone’s superficial appearance is what matters is generally considered heresy, and is an easy way to get ostracized.

But with some time to think about it, I believe I said that because I knew it to be the truth. To put it in perspective: look at the picture at the top of this post. Is this person someone who reads? Do they throw their trash out the car window? Would they laugh at someone who fell down or help them up?

You might get some broad ideas about that from the picture, but given that this is a cosplay photo designed to make the model look severe and dark, I can assure you you’re very likely wrong. Even now with your adjustment in expectations, you’re STILL wrong. The reason isn't that you’re a bad person; the reason is that everything about this picture, from it’s lighting to it’s angle to the model’s expression and clothing is contrived to make you think something incorrect about the subject matter; the picture simply has not captured any aspect of the interior of this person.

Glamour, fashion, and cosplay photography are all intended to tell a story about the subject matter that is almost always false. The intention isn't to capture the person, it’s to show off some aspect of their appearance. When I shoot models that fall outside of what I want to show in some aspect or another, I take a number of steps to push those aspects out of the picture and highlight the ones I do want to show. I deliberately work to make my photographs tell you only what I want you to hear. The truth of the subject matter is left to folks who do candid photography and even they are generally selective about the truth. Very few published candids show the person when they’re sitting in front of their computer, picking their nose and wondering whether they should have had that second burrito or not.

At the end of the day, photography doesn't capture people; it captures images. The old superstition that cameras steal your soul is actually amazingly far from the truth. If anything, a camera helps the photographer hide your soul from the world and project an appearance completely separate from who you are in the dark.

Understanding that photography is used to convey an image, rather than a soul is important when understanding the photographer and the model. When the two come together, they’re not coming together to capture someone’s inner beauty; they’re coming together to capture someone’s image and appearance. Moreover, unless they have something inside them that is visible on the outside that the photographer is not actively hiding, what appears in the final photo is likely to contain almost none of the person’s true nature.

However, as an audience, and as photographers and models, it’s important for us to remember that although the photograph lies to us, underneath all of that genuinely is a human being. Just because a photo makes them look harsh and devilish doesn't mean they are, nor does a cute photograph suggest that the model is going to go “Nyaa~ <3” after the camera is pointed away. If anything, the dichotomy of the in-frame/out-of-frame appearances of most of the people I work with is outright astounding. Especially in cosplay circles, confident, beautiful models suddenly become nerdy, cat-lady shut-ins once the camera is put away and there’s no more work for the day.

Above: The FCC’s official ruling on net nutrality.

A few years back, a computer picture story called 'XKCD' made a good picture that showed the up goer five. This picture used only the ten hundred most used words. It made me laugh, but also made me thing about the way I speak.

Hard words have their place, but you can say many hard things using only simple words. As a good student I am used to speaking with very long words, and I often say things in a way that is hard to understand if you are not a good student as well. It doesn't have to be like this, and I think it would be good to try to spend some time speaking with only simple words.

To that end, (which is a set of words that together are too hard anyway,) I think it is a good idea to do this several times so that I can get better at this. I don't think it is a good idea to do this every time, but doing it more would not hurt. It may even help me with my work since many people I work with only know simple words since they are from another place.

I've been getting a bit pudgy... Okay, so I've put on 5 pounds since I gave up on the girlfriend objective. As such, it seemed reasonable that it was time to get back on the horse I bailed on and that means discipline. Since for me discipline is best encouraged by tangible data, I acquired a Fitbit.

If you haven't heard of this thing, it's essentially a wearable activity/sleep monitor. It's not terribly accurate as a pedometer, (the crown for that goes to my Gameboy for some odd reason,) but because it measures movement, it's at least a nice broad indicator of my activity levels and helps trim my activity data to ensure that I'm being fair with myself.

However, within the first hours of owning it, I was remarkably self conscious of it. What if people saw it? What if they knew I was trying to lose weight! That struck me when I thought about it; why was I so upset that people might be aware that I was trying to take care of myself and collect good data as part of the process?

Thinking on it I’ve got a few things that come to mind. First of all, it’s symbolic of a couple of personality types I do not enjoy: the fitness fanatic, the health nut, and the try hard gadget head. The first two I find vapid and of singular focus, and the last one is someone who’s all talk and no game. I value commitment and breadth, and doing things that I think would associate me with them bothers me.

  Worse, by coincidence I started wearing this thing around the start of the New Year. This is the time of year that everyone and their mother’s uncle makes a hollow promise to themselves to actually get in shape this year. Since actually exercising and not eating more than you need is work, they tend to try to buy thinness. Stuff like fitness trackers, treadmills, etc. I've been doing diet control and exercise (though less rigorously than I should have been of late) for 5 years now; it's why I'm not 315 lbs anymore. I don’t want to get caught up with them and be looked down upon by the people who have properly invested in getting and staying fit.

  In the end, it never ceases to amaze me the number of obstacles I put in my own way towards success. It’s a handy tool that does a good job of characterizing my behavior, and helps me stay on track to a very reasonable goal; if it gets me lumped with a bunch of hipsters, that’s their problem, not mine.

I find myself perpetually riding a teeter-totter on the issue of followers/likes/watchers/favorites/etc and have spent a lot of time in the past considering both their importance and their hazards.

From my exploration I know that much of what drives big numbers here is marketing, and much of the benefit one can see from that is in the artificial ego boost that comes from getting getting likes and faves. However, on the same line of thinking, you adjust to the shift in feedback and in the long run, there must be a gradual growth in these things over the whole of time in order for people to continue to find happiness in things. If you get 0 for forever and then one person likes you stuff it's amazing. However, if all of your stuff gets one one like, you suddenly don't feel successful anymore. The very real fact that you're now just as successful as you were with that very first like doesn't tend to factor in; the way success feels is based on the delta of attention. As such, if the number doesn't grow perpetually it isn't acceptable.

This actually brings rise to a possible way to help keep the numbers in a way that is easier to internalize against our brain's need for changing values: simply track cumulative likes. Integrating the likes/favorites over time naturally produces the cumulative number that makes people feel happy. Reinforcing that each like is important would be a good plan as well. Rather than having kiriban every 100 followers, have a kiriban every 100 likes. This will need to be adjusted for the rate at which you generate them, but the reality of the matter is that people do that already with followers (since exposure begets exposure.)

Thinking on the matter of the afterlife (a train of thought inspired by a joke about becoming a tree after death,) the question of the presence of some manner of "spirit" and what it means to exist after death came up.

The joke largely goes like this: *after discussing an atheist dissing on a catholic's view of the afterlife* "Well, where are you going to go when you die?" "I'm going to fertilize the soil and become a tree"

Personally I would object. The reason is that the "I" in this context is the cognitive mind, which, barring a spirit, arises from the operation of the body in the same way that a program arises from the operation of a processor. When the body dies (again, ignoring any possibility of a spirit,) the systems that give rise to a mind stop functioning and the mind ceases to exist (like turning off a computer 'killing' a program.) But this depends on the assumption that the body gives rise to the mind, rather than the mind being an aspect of the spirit.

With such a broad assumption being necessary to understand the nature of the system, it's obvious then that any reasonable scientist would want to verify that assumption, but how? Well, there's actually a rather simple approach. We know that the mind can cause the body to take physical action, such as lifting an arm, or doing the chicken dance. This means that the mind has the ability to do work on the outside world by way of the body. As such, we can apply the conventional laws of physics to the system and make some quick assessments.

We know that by having the mind act on the body that it must either be part of the system, or add energy to the system. If we pick the most simple approach, say the mind puppeteering the limbs directly, we can quickly look to see if the energy that has to go in to the system is being sourced entirely by the body or not. Practically this is a very easy measurement and the fact that exercise can help you lose weight pretty clearly shows that this kind of puppeteering isn't happening (as does a million other things.)

But this isn't the only possibility. We know the brain is active when a muscle is moved, and more than that, breaking nervous system connections between the brain and muscles cripples the ability to voluntarily move muscles, so it would be reasonable to assume that if the mind is acting upon the body, it is likely doing so via the brain. As such doing our conservation of energy test requires looking at the brain itself.

However, isolating the energy consumption and availability in the brain is vastly more complicated than the same measurement in muscles. The reasons are numerous, but the biggest is that the amount of energy required to cause large changes here is very small relative to the total energy in the observable system; a single action potential in the brain, just a few microjoules, is sufficient to cause an entire limb to move. This makes in-vivo measurements basically impossible.

To make up for this, normal science would have us make these measurements in-vitro: pull a neuron out and see if it activates without any observable energy in the system. Here the other factors in the system would be on the same order of magnitude as the signals we're looking for. However, I suspect most arguments for a soul would easily reject this approach as a single neuron is unlikely to have a soul (and by extension a mind that arises from it.)

Failing that the next approach would be to remove as much of the unnecessary material as is humanly possible to bring the scales at least closer. Since this means cutting a brain out of the body and measuring it, this would only be done on an animal analog for ethics reasons. However, most religions hold the view that animals also do not have a soul either, so even if they have a mind, it would be expected to arise from the body rather than from a soul.

This leaves us in a rather sticky situation in that the quantitative measure of a mind's influence on the body is nearly impossible. It's quite a shame too! The reason is that if a mind exists as an aspect of a soul, but can act upon a body, that makes it an energy source. Conceivably it would be possible to harness the power of the soul by way of it's mind/brain interface to power machines, electronics, cars, etc. It's not necessarily free energy (it is unknown at present where/how a soul imparts energy into the body and what rules apply to that energy,) but it would be an avenue of research worth pursuing of it's own right.

The shifts recently in my life that have reclaimed a bunch of the energy I was expending in trying to please others have brought into focus a lot of interesting things about my relationships with others.

First, and foremost, other than not posting anything on Facebook, I have not meaningfully changed my interactions with others. Seriously. It's all the same ol', same ol'. No one interacted with me on Facebook before, so removing it from the equation doesn't change much. And yet, one thing I've found is that people report that I'm more distant.

It isn't a tested causation, but it would be realistic to believe that other people were "friends with my Facebook profile", if that makes any sense. It's as though they felt like they were part of my life simply because they were getting regular, passive updates from me about it. I'd say I'm surprised, but to be honest I've felt the same way about several people. When everything's considered, I know very little about a large number of people who I used to claim as "friends" if you discount the information I knew from their Facebook feed.

What's most surprising to me is the shift in my own demeanor. Last time I ditched Facebook, it helped a bit with the various depressive issues, but was by no means a solution. This time around, ditching Facebook was only an indirect consequence of a larger campaign to stop caring about figuring this girlfriend thing out. Disconnecting from the rather complex social network (not the Facebook kind, the ol' fashion handshaking style) greatly reduced my stress and I suspect, my depression issues.

But this underlies an obvious observation: it's well known that people are, on average, less happy in the presence of internet social networking. I wonder how much of a skew there is from the people who are normally introverts? I know for me the issue seems to have been feeling like I had to invest in these hundreds of people I really didn't know. I'd imagine extroverts find a great deal of pleasure in social networking. It's like a never-ending party. But for introverts like me, well... It's a never-ending party. No escape, no rest. Just people, 24/7. People to judge you, people to judge yourself against, people who want to talk, people you're afraid of because you worry that that don't talk to you, people that you're afraid of because they probably will talk to you. Just all of the terrible parts of parties with the conventional lure of perpetually new content to stimulate yourself with. It's addictive and harmful in the same breath.