Victimhood

I'm considered something of an asshole in the discussion of rape; I'm inconsiderate, frequently rude, blunt, and I don't follow the rules about how things are "Supposed" to be discussed.

My experiences aren't that of a rape victim - I legally am defined as a rape victim, but only because of silly laws.  That's not where I come from.

I come from the background of somebody who has seen a wide range of the victims in question; a victim of childhood sexual abuse by a father, a victim of rape who said no but didn't fight back, and dozens of perhaps the most common, abused wives/girlfriends (I am largely omitting in this discussion, but it is noteworthy, that almost every one of the wives in question was not merely abused, but abusive, like abuse is a language of its own I just don't speak.)

It's the lattermost which color my opinion most strongly, because invariably they are the victims of serial abuse; they leave one abusive husband/boyfriend for another, who they leave in turn for another - frequently leaving and returning to even the same abusive situation.

At first it's easy to paint them as victims of their own psychology, or victims of manipulation - they feel they have no control and must return, after all.

But children are almost always eventually involved as well, and their skipping from abuser to abuser isn't just affecting them; they're forcing their children into abusive situations as well.

I know somebody who has called CPS on one of their own friends - a woman with several kids including one daughter, who my friend is quite certain is being sexually abused by the mother's boyfriend.  The mother is at minimum complicit - she instructed at least one of the kids to lie to CPS about being hit by the boyfriend, which the kid told my friend.  A follow-up call didn't do much more good.

Is this really any different from a woman lying about her own abuse?  Does a mother have greater responsibility to take care of her kids than any woman does to take care of herself?

Not as I see it.  Not one of these women ever ceased to be victims because a man changed; not a one of them ceased to be a victim because society changed.  The only ones who ever get out of their situations are the ones who themselves change.

I have long since ceased to be able to regard a victim as being blameless solely on the context of victimhood; these women see themselves as victims, powerless to change anything.  Telling them they're victims, not responsible for what happens to them, is -not- empowering.  It is telling them exactly what they already think - because somebody who isn't responsible for what happens to them is somebody who has no power to change what happens to them.  They cry, possibly get one abusive boyfriend put in jail - and go right on to another because they didn't learn anything.

Alcohol Abuse...

(This post was written some time ago; clearing out my backlog of posts which I delayed posting for a number of reasons.  For example, the debugging post I delayed writing so even if somebody does figure out who I am, it's impossible to tell what clients I'm referring to.  This one was delayed because I have rules against SVN commits, e-mails to clients, and blog posts while under the influence.)

...as a concept has one fundamental problem:

I am -happier- slightly intoxicated.

I am more productive.

I don't mind repetitive tasks as much.

...I could go on, I suppose, but I'm slightly intoxicated, and it seems unnecessary.  Another point in alcohol's favour.

A slight buzz does not damage my cognitive abilities to any extent that anybody would notice, and I'd go so far as to say it makes me a -better thinker-, for the simple and expedient reason that I'm less likely to drift off into other avenues of thought.

I think Terry Pratchett hits something with a genuine reflection of reality with the concept of "knurd" - which is simply "drunk" spelled backwards, and is an implication of somebody who is, by nature, the opposite of drunk - which is to say, -too sober-.

I've taken exactly one IQ test in my life.  I was above 180.  I was estimated to be in the 220 range (IQ tests fail above 180).  Yes, I know, lots of people make this kind of ridiculous claim.  Believe me or disbelieve me as you wish.  I will add that I was eight or nine at the time, that I was not -supposed- to take the IQ test, that I was given it "by mistake" by a school which was trying to prove I -wasn't- gifted and -shouldn't- be moved up a grade, and that they didn't even bother to give me the test I was -supposed- to have taken, to skip a grade, when my score came back.  My IQ is probably considerably lower now, as it's a measure relative to your own age group, and I've grown considerably lazier in my mental processes since then...

Well, I'm drifting off topic.  The short of it is, I'm a fuckin' genius.  Yeah.

And I'm stating outright, here and now, that alcohol makes me -better-.  Especially mixed with energy drinks or coffee.

Alcohol doesn't make me dumb.  It might make me -dumber-, but it doesn't make me dumb.  And at my intelligence level, it is actually easier to function in the world with a little bit of fuzziness to my thoughts.  Because, let us face it, there's little practical application for genius.  Not only is there little practical application for genius, it's a drawback in almost everything you can do.

I work with my mind for a living.  My job is purely cognitive; everything I produce, I produce from my thoughts.  And my job bores me to fuckin' tears.  I prefer manual labor, to be honest; I'd do something physical if it paid as well as my current job.  I entirely sympathize with the guy on Office Space, except I started with the manual labor jobs, and moved into an office job.

Alcohol makes me better at my job; I'm more focused.  I used to drink small sums of red wine regularly throughout the day; I was extraordinarily productive in this arrangement.  I was gaining weight on this plan, however, so I haven't done that in a long while, and my productivity has declined a bit.

This post?  This post was written on a mixture of gin, vodka, grain alcohol (Everclear), and energy drink.  Oh, and coffee, but that came later.  It tastes awful, I have to say.  But it gets the job done.

So yeah.  I can see where alcoholics come from.  There are some people - myself included - who simply function better with alcohol in their system.

I function better with a bit of tobacco, too, but I'm saving that for when I'm old and my heart is more likely to go out than my lungs.  I'm not particularly concerned about my liver, as, while I function better on alcohol, the absolutely horrific taste means I rarely actually drink it.  I prefer red wine because it tastes an entirely different kind of nasty which masks the taste of ethanol.  (I can taste shit most other people can't, incidentally; I have a talent for identifying what spices went into a meal as a result.  Ethanol tastes the way polyurethane smells, if you're curious and can't taste it.)

Bitter Edition

Voting for the welfare state is like having unprotected sex with an irresponsible person who wants nothing to do with you.

Fifteen years later you realize you have no money because you're having to pay for the living expenses of immature people who can't and won't hold a job, who go to school learning pointless shit with no productive value instead of working, who despise you for believing in the value of hard work, and think they're smarter than you.

The problems should never have been allowed to reach the point they're at now.  The American public deserves what's coming to it.

My Debugging Skills...

...are not top-notch, apparently.  Spent the last two and a half hours trying to figure out what was wrong with a message.

Turns out, nothing.  It was the addressing that was messed up.  The trading partner used the service proxy's address as the service endpoint.  Resulting in the service proxy routing the message to itself, declaring the message a duplicate, reporting that error back to what it thought was a client (and was actually itself), and being quite startled at the response it got back from what it thought was a third party trading partner (and was actually itself) declaring that the message it had just sent was a duplicate.

At least we had the proxy checking tokens for duplicates.  An infinite loop in our request gateway is a pretty big DOS risk.

Interesting Times

I'm not particularly afraid of what's happening.  I'm young, I have a career in a field which is not merely in demand but hopelessly understaffed, and I save a substantial portion of my income and still have substantial room to make cuts in my lifestyle.

We're rapidly approaching a dead end, and are still accelerating.  Libertarians have been predicting this moment for something like twenty years - the brief respite of the Clinton era, funded largely by a technology bubble, was not enough and will not return.  We consume and spend too much, and the hard stop is looming ever-closer.

The far left has proposed a budget which increases spending and relies on economic growth to survive.  Republicans have proposed a budget which decreases spending, but not nearly enough; it merely postpones disaster.  Many on the left honesty believe that printing off more money to finance the federal budget is fine, and many on the right honestly believe we can get out of the mess we've put ourselves in by blaming the left and cutting their programs only.

We live in Interesting Times.

I'm a hardcore Objectivist, but one thing makes me different from many of my fellows - I believe rule of law trumps final destination.  How we get there is more important than that we get there.  That's not what makes me different.  What makes me different is that this applies not only to the way things should be run, but how we get to the point where things are running that way.

Any change must be gradual; we can call businesses or individuals parasites until we're blue in the face, but ultimately people have structured their lives and business plans around expectations which the government has created, and government must allow sufficient time for plans to change; it is not merely destructive to change the rules on short notice, it is immoral, for the same reasons that government changing the laws under which contracts are governed and making those laws apply retrospectively to contracts signed before the law was passed would be/is immoral.

Rule of Law is not merely a pragmatic position, but a principled one, and it takes precedence.  Rapid changes to the way our society is structured are not principled, they're arbitrary.

A principled position dictates therefore that we cannot even make the changes we need to make right now.  They needed to have been made twenty years ago; it's too late now, and we're in for some pain.

The changes that are necessary?  Taxes increasing over a period of five years, and then decreasing again over the next five.  We can't expect to grow our way out of this problem.

Spending decreasing over the same ten year period.  Regularly.  Social programs have not achieved what they set out to achieve; scrap them, but do so gradually.  People need to be able to plan for changes in our societal structure, remember.

Scrap social security over the next years, sunsetting further benefits so that after the ten year period, nobody is due for new benefits (leaving existing benefits in place until the people in question die.).  We should not ever be -obligated- to be in debt, which is what Social Security amounts to.

Surprising...

H/T: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/06/free-market-harassment.html
Link to article: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1743691&http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1743691##

Short of the article: Women get paid higher wages in jobs with higher levels of sexual harassment directed at women.

The surprising piece of information to me is that men demand higher wages still to put up with sexual harassment directed at men.

Hansen's point revolves around the idea that this wage premium makes sexual harassment in some sense okay, a proposition I agree with; wage premiums for sexual harassment are a natural extension of my belief in the legalization of prostitution.  Nobody who thinks prostitution should be legalized should be opposed to this.  (I would like the facts of which companies and occupations which have high levels of sexual harassment to be public knowledge, to optimize this relationship, and ensure that men and women negotiate for fair compensation in advance.)

My point is going to be directed at the fact that men demand higher premiums - this fact flies in the face of my expectations.

There are a few different possible explanations; one could be that averseness to sexual harassment is more extreme in women than in men (that is, more women than men who do not want sexual harassment are not willing to put up with it for any price premium, or put the price premium out of the market).  Another could be that the study itself is flawed, something I never discount.

One possibility I cannot exclude, however, is that men are simply more averse to sexual harassment, and are more likely to leave such a job, or to demand higher wages to put up with it.  Rephrased conversely, in a way that matches my expectations more closely - women are more likely to put up with such a job without posing any additional demands.

I insistently believe that the solution to many of the problems women deal with is not to raise boys more like girls, but to raise girls more like boys.

Blurb

Nobody should study martial arts for the purpose of self defense without also studying the use of firearms; in order to be capable of reacting appropriately to firearms, you must not only understand them, you must understand how your opponent will use them, what mistakes your opponent is like to make, and what his weaknesses will be.

Every martial artist should be proficient in the use of firearms if he takes self-defense seriously.

Studying martial arts without studying firearms is studying the punch without studying the block.