Set Replicators To Pizza

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yumGlimpses of a brighter future ahead are just plain cool. They’re way better than those glimpses of the future that include a lack of solid ground or people rallying around Kevin Costner tend to be crappy by comparison. It’s one of the many reasons that people love Star Trek, we get to see an idealistic view of the future where things are better. The replicator is one of the innovations on Star Trek that I have always thought was ridiculously awesome.

Imagine having the capacity to just generate whatever you need. It’s an amazing concept that would no doubt destroy many economies and mark an end to the manufacturing and agriculture sectors, assuming it was actually an all-powerful tool that could do the things we imagine. All you would need to do is say I CAN HAZE CHEEZBURGER, and presto, you got yourself a cheeseburger. But there are clearly limitations, or the crew would never need to worry about dilithium crystals. But I’m going way off on a tangent here.

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An Excellent Post On Individuals And Groups

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pluto_animated_talking_phoneI’ve always hated about myself that I have certain pre-conceived notions that I have to fight my way through. I’ll be the first to admit that if I see, for example, a native guy in dirty clothes stumbling, I don’t immediately think, “Gosh, I wonder if that guy is having a stroke!” I get that our brains utilize these sorts of mental shortcuts as a holdover from our more primal past when assigning reactions to stimulii may have been the thing that saves our lives (“That bush is moving, and I know that there’s a big ass bear in the woods around here, so I’m just gonna walk away from there even if it is just a delicious bunny, I’m not willing to take the risk”), but it’s something that annoys me about myself. I am happy to look past my generalizations, but those generalizations exist within me. Frustrating.

But to be fair, I think we all do that, at least to some degree. I remember reading a post on The Crommunist Manifesto about people’s reactions when presented with two candidates for a job, both with pictures, both black, but one darker skinned. No matter how the resumes were associated with the pictures (both resumes were, I believe, similar with one being the obvious stand-out), the lighter skinned guy was the resume the HR people would pick a significantly higher percentage of the time. Even though we believe ourselves to be fair, we have things in our heads that hold us back from that.
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Quick Thoughts On Empathy, And A Link

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200221760-001I will be the first to admit that I don’t have a normal emotional spectrum. It’s actually one of the things that freaked me out while reading The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson. I have a shallow emotional spectrum, but that really is only one of many conditions that make a person a psychopath, and I’m free and clear on quite a few of them. Empathy is one of the things I find most interesting in this regard; I am far more empathic than I am emotional. When other people are sad, I can genuinely feel that for them, but it’s a hell of a lot harder for me to feel it for myself. I don’t know why. Kinda weird, I know.

Empathy is one of those higher functions that I suppose is part of the overall Social Animal thing. That’s not to say that all social animals experience empathy; I don’t want to imagine an ant listening to his buddy and saying, “Yeah, man, I get how awful that must have felt to watch your best friend get stepped on…” But I believe that empathy ties us together socially and helps make societies work.

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Chilling Memoirs From Guantanamo

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slahiMost people think of me as a fairly Liberal guy, but that’s only partly true. There are certain issues legally, economically, and socially where I am much more Conservative than people give me credit. I do, for example, support the death penalty under the right circumstances, and I do believe in a much more frequent use of the Dangerous Offender status to ensure that dangerous criminals with high recidivism simply don’t get the opportunity to re-offend. But I gotta say, everything we’ve heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and all the other US “technicality prisons” (as I like to call them) makes me utterly disgusted. My patience for dangerous monsters convicted of horrible deeds is limited; my patience with gathering up large numbers of people without trial and shit-beating them into confessions is even more limited.

I’ve just finished reading the first of three installments of The Guantanamo Memoirs by Mohamedou Ould Slahi. You can find the redacted versions on Slate’s web site (this link will take you to the introduction by Larry Siems, and then link you to the memoirs themselves), and I felt I had to share this with my loving readers.

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Blame The Parents

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bad{Note: This is ultimately in response to a letter I read today, but is not about that story in specific}

I remember Columbine. After a couple of days of reading all the “OMG WARE WERE TEH PARENTZ” comments, I wrote me a letter to the Calgary Sun. It was very long, and I knew it would not get printed. I was wrong, they printed it but managed to cut it down to a blurb, missing the entire point of the letter and making it pathetic enough that someone else wrote a letter to the editor asking if I needed to talk about all my personal pain and sadness. Or something like that. Jesus, that was years ago, I can’t be expected to remember everything. My intended perspective, though, was to say, “Maybe it wasn’t the parents’ fault. Maybe these were bad kids. Or maybe they were good kids who got pushed too hard by the bad kids they were surrounded by.”

I mentioned Aziz, a kid I knew in high school. Aziz was a prick, but he came by it honestly. He was targeted by a bunch of people on a regular basis, and (if I understand the story correctly) wound up pulling a starters pistol on a group of guys outside the school who wanted to yet again kick the crap out of him. A bus driver saw a kid with a gun, tackled him, and “saved the day”, ensuring that Aziz would be kicked out of school and, for all I know, wind up with a criminal record. I said before, Aziz was a prick, but he wasn’t a dangerous monster. But it was a fine example that sometimes someone gets pushed into a position where ugly things happen.

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On The Arts

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artsThere are very few people in my life today who knew me before I hit high school. To those of you who know me, you would be amazed at the difference in who I was prior to high school, and I’m not talking about physical differences. I was painfully shy and quiet. I describe myself as a shadow back then, a quite shade who slipped through with nobody really noticing his existence. I had a very small core of friends, and that was that. But in high school, things changed. In high school, I got involved in theater.

I had always been involved with the arts. I was in school and church choirs, but always as a part of the ensemble. I would never have tried for a solo. I took band, where I comfortably stayed in the Third Clarinet position, tucked in the back and away from scrutiny. But in grade ten, my sister convinced me to audition with her for the school play.

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At Least We Can See It Coming

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toilet-flushI get annoyed when people talk about the end of Western Civilization. All empires have crumbled, and therefore this one has to as well. That’s not true, in my opinion. Empires crumble for a variety of reasons, but generally corruption and mismanagement are the keys. An empire that managed those two forces would stand a very good chance of long term survival. But as much as I think a properly run Western Civilization or American Empire or whatever you want to call it could survive, I can’t help but doubt it will happen.

The West grew to power both with military might and economic savvy. I think that’s probably the two key ingredients to every successful and dominant philosophy. America has certainly kept up the military might, and one could argue that Canada has done so as well through smart friendships. Years ago, a nazi asked me what I’d do if China invaded, and I laughed because America probably wouldn’t want a Communist regime invading a major trading partner who shares the longest uncontrolled border on earth with them. Sometimes when Big Brother is watching, he’s also watching your back.

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Catching The Jesus

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catchingI’ve always liked that phrase. I don’t know if it actually comes from the world of professional wrestling, but that’s the only place I’ve ever heard anyone say it, and they really do have their own lingo that came from carny life, so it might just be a unique term. But I’m stealin’ it, and we’ll get to why. In wrestling circles, when a guy catches the Jesus, it means he found religion and suddenly has moral problems with his vocation of choice. Sometimes this has meant that the person has to quit doing it, sometimes it means that the person has to suffer through an immoral job in an immoral world and hope that Jesus doesn’t hate on them too bad come judgement day, and sometimes you create Christian wrestling groups that utilize evangelism and professional wrestling to preach to the masses. Please, don’t do that last one.

To me, though, Catching The Jesus was always what happened when people first got “into” their faith, and how they, at least for a little while, became so totally wrapped up in the wonder of this new truth they had found. And I’m not saying I’m above this; I know when I lost my faith, I Caught The Jesus in my own way and became an insufferable prick to all around me. Okay, to be fair “became” is probably the wrong word. I have always been an insufferable prick, but the whole atheist thing was definitely far too much a topic of conversation at the time.

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Waiter, Can I Have Some Tea And A Side Of Violent Crime Please?

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vcrimeI’ve been the victim of a violent crime, and lemme tell you, it sucked. A face full of pepper spray and a gun in the back of the head while some dick grabs the $300 in the safe just isn’t half the party you’d think it would be. And, being a guy who has lived a long life and seen a lot of stuff, I have had friends victimized far worse than I. It sucks, and there seems like little we can do about it. The crime rate has, if I understand correctly, been steadily falling, and that’s a good thing, but wouldn’t it be nice if there were things we could do to make it fall more sharply?

I saw an article on Pharyngula this morning called How do we reduce crime? that peaked my interest, and it led to this intriguing article from the Washington Post about a dozen ways that have been shown to reduce crime, and I thought I’d share. I don’t know that I agree with every point, but there are two I wanted to discuss here.

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