What It's Like to Cry

So, there's something peculiar I've noticed about aging: With each year that passes, I shed tears more easily, particularly at fictional works. Even stories that end on a fundamentally hopeful note, I get choked up and find myself unable to continue, too distraught over how perfectly imperfect the world is and how that fact is eerily represented in works of fantasy.

Change.

Scary though it may be, is more sad than anything in this regard. It represents an inability to simply stop. It highlights our total lack of control over the universe around us. Old friendships fade and new ones replace them; fires sputter and die, to be reborn elsewhere; and like Theseus' ship, our entire lives are slowly recrafted over time, often in unpredictable and massive ways. What's sad is not that the world around us is in flux, but rather, that we cannot, even for a moment, return to a previous time by any means except our memories.

This is especially cruel when our perceived sense of well-being, hope, and happiness was greater in our memories than it remains in the present.
To walk down the road and find the most amazing flower that smelled of spring breeze and the essence of life itself, only to walk away and be unable to remember that scent later, but also unable to turn around and revisit it.

Our linear path forward is one filled with regret and longing. And all I can do is sit here and cry my eyes out for the feelings of remorse others have over the swift flow of time, because I cannot shed tears for my own position in the river.

So what's causing me to cry like this? I know I haven't grown up enough to suddenly be in touch with the sorrow that everyone else in the world (real or otherwise) feel. Maybe it's finally catching up with me, and my need to cry about forlorn happenings is being satisfied through fantasy so that I don't have to feel guilty for deriving my emotional needs from the real pain of others.

And yet... I can't help but continue to take part in stories that offer no happy ending and are riddled with pain and sadness. Is that my body's way of telling me I need to empathize more?

Just another thought for another day.

Some Logical Misconceptions

This supreme court decision has me pissed off for all the reasons you might expect, plus a few more. And not just on the part of the justices. But I want to do due diligence to where err'ybody screwed the pooch on this one.

The argument against providing contraceptive care to women:

1. We're forced to pay, with taxes, for many things we don't necessarily agree with. It's part of being a functioning society. Sorry Hobby Lobby, you don't deserve special rights on that one or else I wouldn't have to pay for war or the salaries of a useless congress.

2. Your entire argument is predicated on the assumption that contraception and abortion are the same thing. Medically speaking, they're not. If they were, you'd run down some very tricky territory wherein doing anything to prevent pregnancy becomes a sin, including abstinence. As such, the claim that it's a "sincerely held religious belief" isn't something I buy. Your definitions are just poorly constructed. Start over and do it better.

3. You still provide vasectomies on your plan? Okay, Hobby Lobby, you've gone past ethical hypocrisy and straight into the territory of legal hypocrisy. The argument loses any weight it has and the facade you've cast on the issue being about "religious beliefs" falls, revealing your desire to either control women's bodies or at least get a free pass from funding the personal medical choices of individual human beings with tax payer dollars. In both cases, you're shitlords.

4. No one has the right to decline anyone medical treatment that is either a health concern or measurably improves their lives. That's the whole point of this healthcare system. Shut up and deal with it.

5. The ability to argue against using taxpayer dollars for anything you deem an affront to your "sincere" religious beliefs is unbelievable. It paves the way for countless absurd arguments that allow individual liberties to surpass the rights of people to be happy and healthy. Moreover, it provides for corporations to surpass those rights as well. This means if it's someone's "sincere" religious belief that hiring black people is immoral, they're allowed to be racist. And since you seem okay with removing the barrier between church and state on this, we're forced to reconcile the fact that this whole territory of ethics is totally subjective and we can pretty much make up whatever the hell we want to rationalize our prejudices.
At that point, we get into thought police; "It's my sincerely held religious belief that being a conservative is immoral, so I'm allowed to not hire someone based on their political beliefs."

6. You don't get to pick and choose. If you want the government and your employees to adhere to your strict moral code, you're going to have to put, in writing, exactly what your moral code is (that may take a while) and then we get to point out how you're profiteering (sin) using goods provided by foreign companies that use sweat shop labor (sin). Worth noting that I'm sure we'd also be able to catch you on about a million shitty technicalities since your code of ethics is based on a book that is almost entirely culturally irrelevant (as far as norms, practices, laws, expectations, and historical context goes) at this point...

7. Once you step into the territory of indirect harms being totally acceptable to inflict for religious reasons, you stand outside the door of direct harms. You're allowed to decide what medical treatments your employees get? What's to stop your ethics from demanding that you punish "unethical" behavior with physical force when it occurs in your workplace? What's to stop them from retaliating if your behavior is unethical based on their beliefs?

You see where this is going? It's a dumbass circle that spawns from you deciding that your arbitrarily-determined set of moral stances are allowed to circumvent those of the state. Which means yes, at some point, we do have to accept that there is going to be an imperfect "universal" ethics utilized by our government (spooky, I know) to prevent as much harm as possible.
Your personal quibbles fall outside this umbrella, and you should expect to get rained on as a result. But, by forcing the umbrella to come cover you, you've ripped a far larger hole in it, drastically increasing the number of people whose rights are doused just so you can feel personal ethical comfort.

Good on you, assholes.





My big complaint with the other side right now;

Stop comparing Viagra to contraceptives; this isn't some obvious hypocrisy. Contraception (or rather the prevention of pregnancy) is the ethical ground being argued by these corporations. Viagra is not a contraceptive. By their own ethics, Hobby Lobby is not being hypocritical. You're falsely conflating the issue of contraceptives vs. other drugs with male drug vs. female drug. If Hobby Lobby was arguing from the stance that they shouldn't have to provide healthcare for the personal choice to live a sexual life, then yeah, Viagra would fall under the realm of that and their position would be hypocritical. As it stands, you may not like it, but it's not a contradiction of their argued beliefs. It's BS that they think they can pick and choose, but to highlight Viagra here doesn't make much sense in the context of their argument.
Now for vasectomy? That is a totally valid comparison since they both serve the same function. In that way, Hobby Lobby is absolutely being hypocritical, and they deserve to be lambasted for it.



--


As an aside, I get that you're frustrated that the 5 clowns who made this decision were all males. But I think there's an important concern in tandem here- whether anyone has the right to deny any other individual human being access to healthcare of any kind that is either a medical necessity or else improves a person's quality of life. I address this in #4 above. The precedent set by this case will be that if someone's "sincere" beliefs are that medical care is a sin, then they can refuse it to anyone. If the same 5 had agreed that vasectomies could be banned (I realize that's not the case due to the sexist nature of the argument), we'd be running up against the same moral dilemma in the long run. If we strive only to address that men have no say in women's health issues, then it won't be long before we run into the same (or a similar) problem again.
[My original perspective that people should have a say in issues relevant to others than themselves has been revised significantly based on an argument I had with myself where I talked myself into a corner. If it's an issue of personal health that doesn't affect another living being, no one else has the right to interject. Luckily, I'd only started to make my original position public once and I deleted it. Didn't make too much of an asshole of myself this time.]

Regarding the Defense of Cheating (Game Studies)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=er-E1vxEnic&feature=em-uploademail

Okay- I FINALLY got around to watching this video- it's been on my list for some months now.

I have a number of thoughts on this, since I love exploiting systems.

First and foremost, the video uses some terminology that I don't identify with terribly well.

So, for my own purposes, I'd like to narrow the lines a bit. The video uses:

1. Spoilsports

2. By the Code

3. Cheaters

For a broad discussion, I think these three distinctions are probably fine, but as someone pretty steeped in both game culture and the seedy underbelly therein, it's not fine for me.

Spoilsports come in many shapes and sizes, but to me, it's an indicator of a particular attitude, not a type of person necessarily. To give you an idea of what I mean, let me give you a jumble of examples of types of gamers that typically have this kind of attitude:

1. "Tryhards";

2. Scammers;

3. Hackers;

4. Legal positivists;

5. Abusers;

6. Sore losers; etc

Aptly named "spoilsports" take the fun out of the game in one way or another. These are the people who take rules to the letter in circumstances where it is inappropriate (taking advantage of a simple misunderstanding, for instance). They're the people who can't take losing, the people who make it agonizing to play the game in general. Much of this behavior does not fall under the realm of cheating in any way, shape, or form. Really, it's just behavior that makes other players hate you.

"By the Code" is a distinction that fails to differentiate between "glitches," "exploits," "scams," and even things like bots.

Glitches or bugs are programming errors that result in the game world not functioning properly. Some bugs are completely inert, and some can give players an enormous advantage.

Exploit, however, refers to both an action and a noun. An exploit is an advantage that one gets from something within the game. Exploiting is the act of taking that advantage.
For this reason, you can exploit a glitch/bug or you can exploit a game mechanic that is working 100% as intended. To give you an example of how these two things are different, let's look at an actual game scenario or two:

In an adventure game, you come across a wall that, if approached from the correct angle, you can pass through. Unfortunately, passing through it gets you stuck and gives you no advantages whatsoever. This is an example of a bug/glitch, but not an exploit.

Now take that same example and apply it to an online, first person shooter. You can't exit the wall, but it turns out you can shoot through the wall when on the side you're on. This means you're basically able to shoot people without being seen or shot in return. This is an exploit of a bug/glitch.

Finally, swapping to an economy-based MMO, let's say you find a shop where you can buy an item for 10 gold. It turns out, the game is programmed such that the same item can be sold back to the merchant for 15 gold. You buy and sell the item over and over for infinite money. This is a mechanic working correctly, but poorly considered that you're taking advantage of. Therefore, it's an exploit, but not a bug/glitch; you're simply using it to an unintended consequence.

While both of these are considered "in the code," one is clearly intentional (but ill-thought-out) while the other is not intentional at all. That important distinction is sometimes the cutoff point for what players find "acceptable" behavior.


After that, you have the weird territory of "bots" or the automation of any process in-game. A good example is that I'm playing a game right now where I can cast a buff on one of my characters every 8 seconds, but it's kind of hard to tell when those 8 seconds are up while all this other crap is going on. So, I modified an AutoHotKey (a program that automates keystrokes and mouse movements) script to do it for me. This represents an interesting area of the "cheating" discussion, since this is often considered smart playing rather than cheating. You're using a tool outside of the game to improve your performance inside the game, utilizing the game's programming only.

By contrast, you have "hacking," which is a process that involves changing how the game functions through use of outside programs. This is a misnomer, since actual hacking doesn't work quite like that, but in gaming, this is what "hacking" has come to mean. Few people consider "hacking" an appropriate means of gaining an edge since it requires both an outside program and it changes the way the game operates on a fundamental basis in order to give you an advantage.


All that said, this video raises a few interesting points about what these different tactics do to the evolution of gaming both on a macro level and on a micro level. However, this video blurs the line between strategy and cheating, which I don't think is necessarily appropriate. The zerg example, in particular, highlights what I mean here. This is an example of emergent gameplay. A strategy that develops by the players' ingenuity rather than the intention of the game designers necessarily.
This is very similar to the gold exploit I cited earlier, but with one very major difference:

In the case of the gold exploit, a designer's natural response will be "oops" and to come out with a patch to close the loophole. In the case of the zerg tactic, a designer will change nothing in the game, since it doesn't create an imbalance or effectively destroy any individual parts of the game.
In this way, both intention and consequence are important in determining what to label our actions in-game.

Moreover, there's no weight given in the video to the adequacy of the game design. Why does this matter? Well, the narrator addressed it a bit by noting that there are some games where a strategy comes out as the "dominant" strategy that pretty much everyone uses. A strategy that is objectively better than all the others, thus breaking a game and ruining any meta-strategies one might otherwise come up with. A good example of this is a card game, A Few Acres of Snow, which has a tactic that is virtually unbeatable if you use it. A tactic that only applies to one particular player per game. This is not an example of cheating or emergent gameplay, since it's within the game, intentional, and based on the fundamentally poor design of a game's mechanics rather than anything else. The big difference between this and an exploit as cited before is that this cannot be fixed (or at the very least, it cannot be fixed easily). It is too foundational to how the game functions and would require basically remaking the game from the ground up to fix.


In every single one of these circumstances, as the narrator points out, players and designers are being encouraged to collectively determine what is "acceptable" gameplay behavior, what is "good" game design, and how to best progress from where we are to where we want to be in terms of games. I think to that end, there's definitely an extent to which much of this behavior does help the evolution of gaming. Some of it, however, represents a re-affirmation of behavior we already knew we didn't want in games. A lot of this comes in the form of spoilsports who hack. Players who deliberately ruin the game for others at no benefit to anyone using outside programs that are not accessible to other players.
Rightly so, these people are "jerks."

Move Along

EDIT CIRCA 2024: I'm opting to leave up original posts that I'm... not especially fond of, because I think it's important to understand and face our respective intellectual and emotional journeys. With that in mind, however, this post is no longer applicable. I slowly curved back as a feminist over the three or so years after this post. There are elements of it that I still agree with, but I think I ultimately misread a truth about social movements in general, which is that they're all movements with large elements of passion next to large elements of reason. Even in scientific fields meant to be relatively unbiased by emotion, I think people are generally uncomfortable confronting the fact that it's absolutely riddled with passion and manipulation for the purpose of sending a message. 

I'm not perfect and I never will be. But on this issue, I think I came around in the right way. Sure, my biggest strength is carrying an analytical and critical approach to issues, but that doesn't have to be devoid of compassion or passion. People are suffering and they deserve to be heard, respected, and cared for. Regardless of anyone else's motivation for or approach to social issues, my own motivation and approach can be about both empathy and logic. And for anyone whose approach I disagree with, I can safely ignore them unless they solicit my opinion. For the morbidly curious, my original post is below:

 

This is a personal post more than anything to document the moment whereupon I have decided to no longer identify as a feminist.

To be clear, I believe in equal rights for everyone, I believe in the existence of privilege (and its weight towards males, whites, and heterosexuals, as well as those who can pass), and I believe that gender roles are an absurd contrivance of a culture that is regressive at best.

The reason I'm finally picking a side of the fence to fall on in this issue is because it has become apparent that feminism is not a place for discussion. It is a place for passionate movement and sympathy only.

I am not suggesting that this is a bad thing, but rather that it's irrelevant for me personally. I cannot offer the sympathy sought after by feminism since I am a man who knows not their struggles, and I cannot abide by passion that is not carefully tempered when it is for the purpose of a social movement.
I do not contest the necessity of pure force of will or passion in the fight for equality and the fight to end atrocities committed out of prejudice and bigotry. However, I will not participate in a movement that sees this passion as mutually exclusive with careful consideration of words and actions.

As the very height of privilege incarnate, my dis-alignment with the movement will create no ripples; it will be a surprise to no one, and it will be seen (by the few who choose to waste the energy) as confirmation that this is a zero sum game and it's us or them.

But I am tired of trying to apply my one strong skill to the grounds of feminism. Rhetorical criticism is expected for the refinement of papers and formal arguments. But for ideas, chants, slogans? It has no apparent place.

I will continue to fight the horrendous wave of racism, sexism, and prejudice when and where I see it.

Because this is assuredly a testament to my gross ignorance, my willful support of the status quo, and proof that I'm a misogynist jerkoff, I will expect and accept any friends who wish to distance themselves from me for this position.

No. No, Nope, Nope, No, Nu-uh, You're Kidding Me...

Everyone who's had the displeasure of engaging in a spirited debate with me knows that I'm extremely liberal in a firmly moderate way when it comes to issues of feminism. I still consider myself a feminist, but I go out of my way to call out what I see as problematic behavior on both sides of the fence. I try desperately to see both sides of any argument. While I believe feminism is and was a necessary movement that has afforded so much good for our society, I believe that with any movement, there are extreme elements that not only provide their own problematic viewpoints, but also pollute the roots of the movement in subtle ways.

But I'm absolutely not here to harp on what I perceive to be the shortcomings of a social movement that I support (this time). I need to blast the other side of this issue, because holy shit are privileged white males tearing out my last nerve (I say knowing full well that I fall squarely into that demographic).

Today, I had the misfortune of stumbling upon a Reddit thread about a false rape conviction. Predictably, the comments in it were largely misguided, shameful, abhorrent, and downright ignorant. There was, however, one gem that carried a glossy sheen more blinding than the rest;

http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/264tdv/til_brian_banks_was_ordered_to_serve_5_years_in/chnt6jv

I had originally upvoted (Reddit's system of Likes) this comment having interpreted it as a mockery of how absurd it is that we don't focus on the problem of rape in our society and instead focus on the concerns that arise from that problem. I thought it was really clever at first glance!
Then I saw the first few comments under it and re-read it a few times.

Dear Christ, I think this person is actually making fun of the root phrase about teaching men not to rape...

And the subsequent comments are virtually all agreeing with this person... How is that even..?
No. Alright. Back up. I'm going to try to pick this apart, one grueling misconception at a time.

1. You know how many women I would have raped by now if it wasn't for someone teaching me not too? /s

This is not how sociology works. People are not born bad or good as you are implying, anonymous internet patron. People are actually taught what behavior is acceptable to model and what behavior is unacceptable to model. This is why people in impoverished homes are more likely to commit crime- their upbringing often lacks an educational background as well as structure and discipline, while the environment encourages a life of crime for a number of factors.
People are not born rapists, nor are they born saints. People are taught how to act, and our individual personality adjusts to our environment combined with how we conceive of the world as we age. This accounts for individual differentiation, since biology does play some role. This explains why identical twins, reared separately, still wind up very similar to each other despite differing environments. It also explains why environment directly impacts crime rates, IQ, and a host of other life factors.

In short, what I'm saying in response to you is "Maybe a lot! Who knows?"

2. None of this in any way defends the original quote. But I know that a lot of feminists just like pissing in the face of men, and love issuing long screeds in defense of the indefensible.

No one is defending false rape allegations. They're defending the ideology that we should fix the root issue, which is poorly raising our children and poorly reinforcing our culture. Most feminists are just looking for things like making sure that they and their loved ones aren't being raped. Spitting in the faces of men specifically is something we might more appropriately attribute to specific, extreme sections of the feminist movement. The quote itself is completely defensible for the reason I stated above.

3. I've recently been seeing people give advice about how to stay safe at the Fifa World Cup in Rio. Shouldn't they be focusing on instead telling the criminals in Rio to stop?

Sorta', yeah. Telling someone when they're already a criminal to stop isn't very effective though (still better than waiting until after they're done and punishing them). No, what the quote means is that we should teach our kids how to appropriately behave, which includes nuanced differentiation between what is and what is not okay. Leaving any open gaps invites people to learn the lessons from society directly. This, in turn, perpetuates the problem. When we have a society where, for example, 33% of Pakistani police believe that women sometimes deserve rape, then we're inviting our kids to potentially take these lessons away as acceptable.
By our inaction, we are potentially allowing our children, peers, loved ones, students, etc. to make the incorrect assumption that some rape is "legitimate" and some rape isn't.

4. lol a feminist blog. bleh. No there isn't a "sea of rape" going on. ffs. Just because feminist said so. Is a bullshit blog women are all victims etc. Just bullshit.

In fairness, this depends on your definition of the hyperbole "sea," however, going by the statistics found here once again: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics
We can use the UN's baseline of 250,000 reported rape/rape attempts per year in 68 countries.
If we assume the low-end of the UK's studies which estimate 75-95% of rapes go unreported (and I can't imagine how many attempted rapes go unreported), then we can assume that 250,000 is, at minimum, only about 1/4 of the actually number, indicating at least a million per year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate

That's about double the estimated homicide rate per year in the world.
So yes. Yes I would use the word "sea," going purely by low-estimate statistics. The blog post that was linked to you was not to be taken as a study or a fact, it was to be taken as an argument which presents studies, facts, claims, and a logical progression of thought.



I'm so angry, I can barely see straight.

Perjury sucks. It is illegal for good reason.
Provided the account in the article linked is accurate, the woman who did this deserves the book thrown at her.

But you know what would stop false rape claims? If we address the societal problem of talking about false rape claims as though that is the major issue at play here- if we address the societal problem of ignoring rape is a serious concern- if we address the societal problem of dismissing some rapes and holding others as "legitimate"- if we talk about why people grow up and commit crimes, maybe we'll fix the over-present crime itself, which would fix the false reporting of that crime in tandem.

What is being advocated here by these people is akin to a doctor trying to treat the numb arm symptoms of a heart attack without treating the fucking heart attack or, even better, addressing what caused the heart attack in the first place!

I'm not going to fare particularly well with this message, but I am going to post a copy of this argument on several of the offending comments on Reddit.

Okay!

My fingers look like they've been run through a wood chipper, but if that's the worst to come out of this descent, I'll take it.
My mood has picked up quite sharply, and the feelings of doom and gloom are vanishing with the rain. (Normally, rain makes me feel good, so I'm not sure what this is about)
Suicidal ideation was there, but brief.

I'm sorry to anyone who may have worried about me. This crap is still new to me since the medications are doing weird and unpredictable things to me. I appreciate your support and concern, and if I don't voice that appreciation enough, it's because I'm a butt.

We're gonna' take this one step at a time, and be careful and cognizant for a little while.

*deep breath*
We got this.

Welp

Goody.

They're back.
Let's see how long I can ignore them this time, eh?