Blackmoor Vituperative

I think it’s telling that the only people in the Star Wars movies that treat robots as though they were people are Luke (who is desperately lonely) and Anakin (who is a mass-murdering, child-killing psychopath). To everyone else, the fact a machine can talk means no more than it does for you and I when our car tells us the door is open or our phone tells us that we have an appointment in 15 minutes.

That a robot has a red arm means exactly as much as the fact an old yellow Fiat has a red door.

[vur-choo siɡ-nl-ling]
verb
gerund or present participle

1. a phrase used by sociopaths when trying to explain the behaviour of someone who has empathy.
    
   “she is collecting cans of food for the hurricane victims, but that’s just virtue signaling”
   “my rape jokes were funny, but I got fired because my supervisor was virtue signaling”
   “people who call Donald Trump a bigot and a sexist are just virtue signaling”

Two centuries from now, humans will still be able to read The Iliad and The Declaration Of Independence, but there will be a huge gap where the late-20th and early-21st centuries were.

Atoms survive. Bits do not.

I have found that it makes my life more pleasant if I try to be generous in what I offer, and modest in what I expect of others. I do not always succeed, and it doesn’t always work out as I’d hope… but that’s okay.

There should be a name for the phenomenon of, “I’m right to believe this even if the reasons I state for believing it are false”. I see it all the time. Guns. GMOs. Black pets around Halloween. Being offended at someone’s costume. No matter how portentous or trivial the topic, facts just don’t seem relevant. It’s not a “liberal” vs “conservative” thing, either: it’s universal.

But it’s easier to block people who spew nonsense than argue with them. It’s not like an argument on the Internet ever changed anyone’s mind, anyway.

My opinion on ethnicity and religion: they are, at most, as important as being a fan of a sports team or a film franchise.

If it causes you to share good times with people in the same group, great. If it entertains you and a competing group to be opposed in a safe and friendly contest, that’s great, too. If it’s an excuse to be mean to other people, or take something away from some other group, or reserve some benefit solely for your group, you are doing it wrong.

Happy Mother’s Day, Moms of America! Now go back to work.

I agree more with libertarians than I do with any other political cubbyhole that I have been able to find, but I think I might not actually be libertarian. Libertarianism is all about putting theory into practice, without exception (that theory being, in essence, “an it harm none, do what ye will“). There are, as far as I know, few libertarians who consider financial exploitation “harm” (I may, in fact, be the only one). But I think one would have to be deliberately blind to look at the USA around us and fail to see the harm done by financial exploitation.

Being “rich” in the USA in 2015 means you have a house and you can pay your bills.

That’s messed up, and it’s getting worse every year.

The thing is, twenty years ago, I was a hardcore libertarian. I sincerely believed that the world would be better if there were no laws preventing, say, an employer from tracking your every move, 24 hours a day. I sincerely believed that the world would be better if there were no laws requiring cars to be safer, or requiring employers to pay no less than a certain minimum, and so on. I didn’t believe these things because I wanted people to be underpaid and driving death traps — I believed that freedom of choice would result in the greater good. So what has changed in the past twenty years? What changed my mind?

Seeing how the world actually works for twenty years is what changed my mind. Because in theory, if everyone is free to choose, they can all choose not to work for employers who invade the medical privacy of every applicant. In theory, they can choose not to work for $2.13 an hour.

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.

When confronted with the “antis” — anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-gun, anti-women, anti-science, anti-South, anti-sex, etc. — who seem so devoted to their agendas of hatred, ignorance, and irrational fear, I am reminded of a line from Anaïs Nin‘s “Seduction of the Minotaur” (echoing a much older idea):

We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.

I think people who persist in clinging to theories that have been soundly refuted by facts should not be called “economists”: they should be called “philosophers”. The consensus among economists is that raising the minimum wage has little or no effect upon employment — because the evidence demonstrates that it does not. The reasons why that is the case are varied, but a major one is that at the lowest-paid end of the employment spectrum, the demand for labor is inelastic. If it takes three people to perform a task, paying them $10/hr won’t make the task require fewer people.

The chart above shows the results of more than 1,400 different studies. The x-axis shows the size of the employment effect, and the y-axis shows that statistical power of the analysis.

The results have clustered around the finding that a moderate wage increase — in line with the administration’s proposal to increase the minimum rate in 95-cent increments — has zero effect on total employment. And the higher a study’s statistical power, the more likely it is to fall on the line showing zero effect.

“I really think that’s a very compelling takeaway,” said Hall, who has testified before multiple state legislatures on the issue. “It puts the lie to the notion that it’s going to be a tremendous job killer.”

(From 1,400 Real World Minimum Wage Increases Show No Impact on Employment, Fiscal Times

Personally, I would go with $15/hr. There is no reason in the world that taxpayers should be footing the bill to make up for the below-subsistence wages paid by employers like Wal-Mart (Report: Walmart Workers Cost Taxpayers $6.2 Billion In Public Assistance). Increase the minimum wage to a responsible level and put the cost of doing business on the business, where it belongs.

Systematically oppressing the bulk of a population is not only morally indefensible, but terribly short-sighted. There are not enough firearms in this country to protect the rich (or just the reasonably comfortable) from the poor, if the poor decide they’ve had enough. Personally, I’d favor raising the minimum wage to $15/hr, eliminating loopholes that allow employers to pay even less than the minimum wage, and then pegging it to the Consumer Price Index (although someone should take a close look at how CPI is calculated to make sure that’s not being manipulated).

The ReThink Prize is offering $1,000 each for the ten best secular commandments, as determined by a panel of judges. The prize is promoting a new book, Atheist Mind Humanist Heart, which promotes a vision of atheism as positive and ethical rather than negative and reactive. Here are ten “commandments” I thought of, although I did not bother submitting them for the contest. It’s just a thought experiment.

1. Be kind to everyone, even when your kindness is not reciprocated.
2. Seek the company of people who appreciate and inspire you.
3. Avoid confrontation, and those who seek it, when possible.
4. Defend yourself and others with violence, when necessary, but take no joy in it.
5. Be generous, even when there is no possibility of your generosity being reciprocated.
6. Do not take what is not freely offered.
7. Be useful, to the best of your ability.
8. Create something beautiful, to the best of your ability.
9. Be worthy of the trust of others.
10. Be true to yourself.

I think that’s a pretty good list, but I don’t think it’s terribly innovative. Desiderata is better.

If I could have gone to eleven, I would have added something about being a good steward for nature, but I ran out of commandments.