The Art of Societal Change

The single most important thing a campaign for societal change must do is this: It must change itself.

"Be the change you want to see," in the words of Gandhi.

Sun Tzu addressed this in terms of war in a dozen different ways - the single most important thing one may draw from him is that, before defeating the enemy, you must first defeat yourself.

Campaigns which do not live up to their own standards, campaigns which -cannot- live up to their own standards - which is every progressive, socialist, and communistic movement - must ultimately fail.  This is not to say they cannot change government, that they cannot change society - but not in the ways they hope.  The hypocrisies necessary to these philosophies ensure they cannot change themselves, and hence cannot change society, in the manner they hope.  (See the percenters who refuse to give up their own globally exemplary wealth to feed the starving elsewhere, for example.)

The internet has given such campaigns immense power to communicate, to engage in the self-policing activities necessary to ensure that they live up to their own standards.  The "enemy" is basically irrelevant; this has been particularly apparent in the second amendment rights movement; gun control advocates have increasingly been pushed into irrelevancy.  It's important that the campaign has the facts on its side, but it is more important that it has done such a remarkable job pushing damaging elements to the periphery.

The most important thing for a modern campaign to do is precisely the activity of self-policing.  Scandals are fine if the campaign reacts appropriately to them; in the era of free information, scandal cannot be avoided, only dealt with.  The popular political parties, as campaigns, have been doing very bad jobs of dealing with their own scandals, which is a large part of their current state.

I routinely piss off the people on my side of the debate; I'm more likely to attack them than my enemies.  This is necessary, and it is necessary that a good movement be willing to rebuke and dismiss individuals in its membership, no matter how important they may seem.  Movements that cannot or will not do this will die.

Hitchens was willing to take to task his own.  He was a kindred spirit, if opposed in ideals, and represents a dying breed among his own.  I do not think the left will soon recover from his loss.

STEM

This seems a popular topic on the blogs right now, on account of it having recently become politically relevant, so I thought I'd throw my two cents in.

If a convention somehow containing every critic of Finnegan's Wake (chosen as one of the hardest subjects in English literature to understand) suffered a critical architecture collapse, and every one of them died, would society suffer any serious setbacks?

What if a convention containing every single kernel-level driver programmer (chosen as one of the hardest subjects in programming to understand; substitute BIOS programmers, if you wish, or even trivial branches of architecture or engineering) suffered the same disaster?

What advantages do liberal educations confer which extend beyond the first couple of semesters of material, which STEM majors are already obligated to study?  The fact that this is a challenging question to answer in liberal arts educations, but -not- in STEM majors (where the answer is fairly trivial; advanced studies are for specialization in field, specializations which industries depend upon), sums up the divergence.

Success

Following up on The Profit Motive, what constitutes success?

Ask a socialist, and perverse to naive expectations, the word is almost certain to mean -financial- success.

Ask a capitalist, and perverse to naive expectations, the word is almost certain to mean something far more personal.

Socialism is to a great extent defined by its deification of money; sometimes it's an evil and vengeful god, sometimes a benevolent one whose worshipers are the real problem, but the theories of socialism are money-centric; in bygone eras they were property-centric.

Capitalism is not.  Do not be confused by its name, or forget that capitalism was named by its detractors, who saw capitalism as about ownership; socialism from its root was obsessed with wealth, and capitalism was named for the holders of wealth by people who saw the accumulation of wealth as an inherently bad thing.

Capitalism is defined by choice, as mentioned in the profit motive.  Most important of all, the choice on what to do with your life - a choice which is missing from socialism, though few socialists would admit that taxation at its root is the loss of choice about what ends your efforts go towards.

The modern rhetoric of war as a political metaphor - the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on illiteracy, the war on this and the war on that - this is a useful metaphor.  Because taxpayers are all draftees in that war, whether they want to be or not.  This is the root loss of choice, of freedom.

And all of these wars come down to a single artifact - measure of success.  Socialists want everybody to be successful, by a particular definition of success, without regard to other definitions - and theirs is the financial definition.  Poor in money but rich in love is not success to them, it is tragedy.

That's not to say the reverse is tragedy, either.  The beauty of choice is that the person who foregoes love for money is as free to do so as the person who foregoes money for love.  We choose our own success.  And by and large, we achieve it.

Costs vs Benefits vs You Shouldn't Do That It's Bad For You

I've recently taken up cigar smoking.

I'm doing it properly, so I -only- have to worry about mouth cancer, not lung cancer.  Only.

But y'know what?  Fuck it.  I like it.  I like nicotine - I discovered it first smoking a cigar in Las Vegas, and moved on from there to chewing nicotine gum, and cigars taste better than the gum (and give more nicotine, and are cheaper).

I like the taste.

I like the fact that my duster is going to smell like smoke and becomes an effective hippy repellent.

And I like the ritual of it.

The benefits of cigars outweigh the risks, and more broadly the costs, to me.  If I would live forever if I didn't smoke cigars, sure, maybe not, but I'm not going to - I'm going to die no matter what I do, and in the meantime I'd rather live on my terms.

"You shouldn't do that" is a cost-centric way of viewing the world; it ignores the benefits.  "You shouldn't do that" is the habit of people who have no sense of Other; they cannot comprehend that other people would or should have different values than they do.

It is the habit of both the Right and the Left, and it is the habit of authoritarians exclusively; it is to some extent necessary for authoritarian beliefs in an otherwise moral person, because it enables them to make dictates which they believe everyone fundamentally agrees with, but that some people are simply too weak of character to go along with.

I am...

...an atheist.

I most definitely am not agnostic, although I am what is referred to as a "weak" atheist (There is no god because there is no proof of god, rather than there is no god and there is proof that there is no god), which some people sometimes classify as agnostic.

But bloody hell am I tempted to label myself agnostic sometimes.  Self-described atheists, by and large, are evangelistic -assholes-.  They worship harder and louder than most the religious I've encountered.

(Agnostics are rather preachy too, actually, load of stuck-up gits.  But they're less irritating about it than the atheists are, at least thus far in my experience.)

I attended a "humanist" meeting.  Once, and only once.  It is essentially an atheist meeting, only they call themselves humanists because... I don't know why.  There's probably a clever historic reason.  Or not so clever.  I'm curious, but not so curious to go and find out.

There was some interesting discussion, and one older atheist, who was facing death by cancer, asked the group for advice on how to handle dying.  It was rather sad.

But more attention was paid to an atheist who wanted the atheists in the group to distribute atheist literature on streetcorners and a rambling woman who apparently had a PHD in neuroscience who spent a half hour basically saying that religion was a mental disorder.  I stopped listening there.

That was the first humanist meeting I attended.  It will be the last.

Christians are right about atheists.  And "secular" by and large means atheist, not areligious.

It's my experience moreover that atheists replace faith in god with faith in something else, quite typically in government or Science with a capital s, which is to say, the institution rather than the process of science.  I'm frequently enough accused of being anti-science because I question the conclusions of scientists that I've ceased to be fazed by it.

And anymore I prefer the religious.  At least they aren't arguing for the wholesale destruction of the most potent intellectual process ever devised.  That's what every atheist shouting down the questioning voice of the skeptic is really arguing for, after all.

Creationism in schools is harmless by comparison to doctrinal "science," which does more to destroy scientific reasoning than any force I have yet encountered.

Quantum Mechanics

I've fiddled with these thoughts for nearly a decade now.  I've considered their value, and if I'm correct, it's inestimable.  If wrong, well, nothing lost.  I'm bored with them, however - if I AM correct, I'm too far ahead of modern physics to be able to do anything meaningful to advance the ideas.  I need more anomalies.

So, Orphan Wilde, who makes no claim to being a studied physicist, on quantum mechanics.

First, it's not the observed which is uncertain, it's the observer.  The earth isn't the center of the universe, nor is the sun, nor is our galaxy; nor are we the center of certainty.  Our minds behave the way they do because they are four dimensional - and one of the products of this is that our observations are skewed across a chunk of probability-space.  We can't isolate these values because they can't be isolated; the particles are real, Einstein was correct, we're just observing a larger bandwidth of them than the single probability-moment that we think we do, which leads us into crazy conclusions about the way matter "really" works.

The process of observation represents a movement of our minds, not the universe.  Relativity and causality are maintained.

And an interesting side effect of this is that our brains are effectively quantum computers.  Cool, huh?  Also, free will is a product of this.  But don't expect that to mean anything to you; your past choices are permanent. And if that statement makes sense to you you should see a shrink.

Second, gravity is a wave.  It's a wave which propagates along space-time it has already bent, more; this produces a steeper gradient closer to mass, and a shallower gradient further from mass, producing the illusion of a wave which slows down as it escapes matter.  This is the grand unified theory, in case you're wondering; gravity is one side of this gradient, the cosmological constant is the next side over, when the gradient is positive.  Atomic configurations are the product of gravity flipping one way and the other.  It also produces bizarre space-time curves around black holes, but that's nothing new.

Third, quantum mechanics is fundamentally wrong; energy doesn't come in discrete packets, it forms a continuum.  The finite set of stable configurations of matter in a closed system produces the illusion of discrete packets; until and unless energy accumulates in sufficient quantities to shift to another stable configuration, the configuration remains identical.  Shifts from one stable configuration to another produce predictable energy emissions, producing the illusion of discrete packets.

Fourth, entropic interactions reverse themselves according to the direction of gravity.  Five years ago I had a clearer idea what this meant.  Today I'm less certain; it was an important idea to me then, however, so I'm writing it down.

Fifth, the big bang never happened.  I don't have any evidence of this, but it seems a natural progression of the past thousand years of science, in which each center of the universe in turn was proven to be just another unexceptional point.  Anytime somebody claims there's an exceptional spot in the universe fix them with a steely gaze and ask "Really?  Another?"

Controversy!

I encountered an article arguing for racial profiling on, among other grounds, the following: Minority drivers are significantly more likely to be pulled over at night.  (The difference is apparently more pronounced at night than during the day.)

...I'll wait for a moment while that processes.

Minority drivers are most likely to be pulled over when it is least obvious that they are a minority.  Setting aside one person arguing that police use military infrared binoculars (really?) to target minorities, this strikes me as a very interesting bit of information.

I'd like some real statistics on the matter, however, rather than taking an unsourced article at its word (even if it is using the data to argue the opposite point I would make).  Anybody encounter statistics like this?

I'd love to get my hands on some raw data including vehicle models, as well.  (Gang activity in a five mile radius of the ticket location would be too good to be true.)

In case it weren't obscenely obvious enough, this article piqued my interest on the matter of racial profiling, and I'm considering doing some work to see if the data supports the theory of racial profiling as neatly as it is represented to do so.

My suspicions are that, if you isolate the variables, there's actually going to be a substantial negative racial profiling mechanism at work, as a result of police sensitivity to racial profiling and the fact that non-racial profiling - targeting high-crime neighborhoods and certain vehicle makes/models - produces nontrivial racial bias in the data.  I base my suspicion on the belief that racial profiling in addition to nonracial criteria should produce substantially greater divergences in traffic stops and penalties for minority drivers than is actually the case.