A Voice in the Dark

There are a few things I hear over and over again, and they fall into a certain pattern:

“People who have this experience will end up doing this thing.”

There’s a huge variance in what these experiences and things are. If you dress in women’s clothes, you’ll become gay. If you watch porn, you’ll be a rapist. If you lift weights, you’ll become violent. If you play video games, you’ll kill people.

But what if that’s what you want?

Imagine that you’re a child who has been repeatedly brutalised on the playground, and someone reassures you that this happens because you’re just not a violent person. What if you conclude that because you are tired of this, and do not want it to ever happen again, the answer to your problem is to become a violent person? How should you do that?

Well, according to popular belief, you do that by lifting weights. So you might go start lifting weights, and after a few weeks decide that you’re sufficiently experienced in weightlifting to be a violent person. So you go out and act like a violent person.

But the weightlifting isn’t what did that - it was your desire to become violent, which you pursued by lifting weights, which did not actually make you violent. What made you violent was the decision to become violent. You became a violent person, not when you started lifting weights, but when you made the decision. Lifting weights was your gateway because you decided you needed a gateway - not because it naturally and normally leads where you were going.

You can’t ask “why is Johnny violent?” and then glibly respond “well, he wasn’t violent, but then he started lifting weights and became violent”. You have to ask the meta-question, why did Johnny lift weights?

The same thing goes for all of the above. And where this begins to get dangerous is that we say things like this to our children, that if you do this you’ll be that, and this carries two messages we don’t want to convey. The first is that if you actually want to be that, you should do this - and the other is that if you do this for any reason at all, you’re doomed to be that whether you want it or not.

This confuses the question of what really causes people to be the way they are. You have to ask why the two things are connected; the meta-question is actually more important than the naive causal link you might draw from a few ultimately unrelated data points.

Filed under: Parenting, Philosophy
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Scholars have discovered the oldest recorded joke.

Dating to 1900 BC, the joke is from the Sumerians, in what is now southern Iraq:

“Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.”

This joke is apparently a typical response to some obvious statement, e.g. “I couldn’t get a discount on this wine.”

Which just goes to show that sarcasm and fart jokes have always been the fundamental ancestors of all humor. Yes, they are funny, and they’ve been funny for four thousand years. The runner-up is a sex joke from Egypt, 1600 BC:

“How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish.”

Which means farts are funnier than fucking. That isn’t just a hysterical thing to say, it’s also alliterative.

Filed under: Philosophy
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Many times, people will quote statistics, and some clear pattern will emerge that they don’t identify.

Jesse Liberty notes that:

Since President Clinton signed Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, 800 specialists have been kicked out of the service, including 323 linguists of whom 55 specialized in Arabic.

I’m struck immediately that over 40% of the people kicked out of the service under DADT (a stupid rule, but I digress) are linguists.

It does not take a rocket scientist to advance the hypothesis that linguists are gay.

Looking at the number of linguistic specialties in the military, it also seems that Arabic linguists are quite probably less than 18% of the total. Which leads to the added hypothesis that Arabic linguists are even more gay.

But we’re not allowed to say things like that. Freedom of speech be damned.

Filed under: Gay Rights, Philosophy
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I’ve been away a while.

Those of you who know me - if anyone who knows me actually reads this blog; for that matter, if anyone at all actually reads this blog - know that I am generally a pretty stalwart individual. I keep a positive attitude and an optimistic outlook pretty much all the time.

This is not always an accurate view of my mental state.

I have been so drastically and deeply damaged and distressed by the end of my association with RDA, that (alliteration aside) I am not sure I will ever be the same person again. It’s been made clear to me that working for anyone, anyone at all, is simply not a secure arrangement. In the span of two days, I went from being frustrated but optimistic… to being unemployed. I have not recovered. I may never recover.

I have seriously contemplated suicide.

The level of despair with which I have struggled after the events of April 15th cannot be described. I am simply unable to fathom the reasons behind that day. I don’t blame anyone; there’s no conspiracy, no coalition of people who were “out to get me”, no malfeasance or stupidity behind it. It was just not the right place or the right time, I suppose. I wish it had been. I love RDA. I loved working there. I loved all the people I met there.

Now they don’t even respond to my emails. Would they be willing to provide a reference in my job search? Evidently not. I’ve been abandoned. Shunned. The only community with which I felt any real connection over those eight months has decided I’m no longer worth their time.

I’ve lived in Washington state for ten years. I have no real friends. America doesn’t provide much of a framework for adults to make new friends. You’re supposed to get them through your job. As a business owner, I was never a friend, but a boss. As a Microsoft contractor, I couldn’t be a friend, because I wasn’t really one of them. And as a former employee, the friendships I thought were forming simply evaporated once I left the fold.

I’m not one of them anymore. The friendship was not a real friendship; it was conditional. It was false.

There aren’t enough Jews in Washington state. I can’t find a good synagogue. My son needs to learn about his Jewish identity and what it means and how to be a Jew in the first place. He needs to meet other Jews. He needs to see that we are really out there, and it’s not just some weird thing his dad made up. He needs at least two or three Jewish friends. Eventually, he will need to have some Jewish female friends, so he’s only confronted with the choice of intermarriage - rather than being compelled to intermarry by circumstances.

I can’t support my family. I can’t educate my son. I can’t even find a friend.

I look back on my time in the Seattle area. I cast my eyes back ten years, and I find the white paper I wrote just before moving out here from Virginia. “I Am Not A Kook”, it’s titled. May 12th, 1998. Days before I left everything and came 3500 miles across the country to meet a woman I’d only ever known online - a woman with whom I have had two beautiful children, even if they don’t know what being a Jew is all about, and with whom I am still deeply and passionately in love. Even if we have an open marriage.

That “paper” (only ever posted online) ends quoting Marilyn Manson: “When I’m God, everyone dies.” Several months after posting it, someone mailed me a Chick pamphlet and admonished me in their handwritten note that “no man is God, ever”. I guess I hit a nerve.

I’m still the same person who wrote that white paper, fundamentally. I still like Marilyn Manson, although his latest album - “Eat Me, Drink Me” - was a little too self-important and pussified for my taste. “Golden Age of Grotesque” was okay; the “Doppelhertz” DVD with it was just plain fucked up, but I sort of expect that from him. I still read Nietzsche, and Kafka. Not as much… but here and there.

I still don’t know who I am or what I want or where I belong.

I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.

And that’s okay, in a sort of cosmic sense. Maybe I’m not really supposed to know. Maybe I just have to shut up and keep going and see what happens. I don’t know.

But there is something powerful and profound in realising that over the past ten years, you have really not changed all that much. There is some sort of cosmic validation there.

These wounds won’t heal, this is my sin.

Filed under: Business, Microsoft, Philosophy
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Culturally, in America, you are what you do.

In a very real sense, that means when you’re unemployed, you’re nobody.

Even though I know, intellectually, this was just a circumstantial mismatch… there’s a part of me still trying to figure out what I did wrong.

Filed under: Business, Philosophy
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I woke up this morning at 2 AM to work on the stuff I’m doing for the EU protocol documentation effort. Around 7:30 I managed to get a big obstacle handled, so I could make real forward progress for the first time since the middle of last week.

And at 8 AM, I found out my employer - RDA Corporation - is terminating my employment.

It’s really one of those things that mystifies me. I came on board to do a specific job, and I was summarily pushed out of the project by a Microsoft FTE who didn’t like my methods. The projects since then had been a bad fit in oh, so many ways… fundamentally, I’m a shirt-and-tie go-to-the-office kind of person. RDA’s Redmond office is largely a virtual team environment, where your work day starts when you wake up and ends when you go to bed and in between you don’t really see anyone or collaborate in any real sense.

I don’t work well that way. I told them I don’t work well that way, from day one. And in my latest position, the state of the infrastructure was very, very immature… large swaths of support materials didn’t really exist, and “features” of the software I was using simply didn’t work. It looked like it would work, so I made estimates accordingly… and then I ended up past deadline because when it came down to the wire, the foundation was mud.

What surprises me is that this is precisely what I said at the beginning of the contract: that I was concerned about scope creep if the infrastructure wasn’t what we expected, and the language of the SOW was not specific enough for my taste.

They’re a great company. We didn’t fit well together, but honestly, I’d go back to them in a second given the right opportunity. It’s just that the right opportunity never quite materialised, and I guess they ran out of patience before I did.

I’m kind of lost now. Yesterday, on the way to work, my car just blew up. It’s unsalvageable. I spent four and a half hours on the side of the road with a dead cell phone. It really sucked. And things just keep getting worse.

Momentum being what it is, and since I’m a problem solver at heart, I’m going to finish up the stuff I was working on and send it to my PM anyway. I’ve spent four days trying to get over this hurdle, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to drop everything just because I don’t get paid for it. I’m not really in this field for the money, anyway.

Filed under: Business, Economics, Philosophy
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Every once in a while, I’m reminded that people get creeped out if someone can figure out where they were on a given date and time.

But why does that bother people? After all, if you go anywhere at all and encounter someone you know, that person knows where you were and can tell anyone he likes. Theoretically, you could tell this person not to tell anybody he saw you, but that would just make it worse. And if you didn’t see him, but he saw you, it’s every bit as bad.

I thought of this today because I turned on my Zune to squirt somebody a copy of Black Tide’s single “Black Abyss”, and there on my “Social” tab I saw a gamer tag I knew from XBox Live. Given the range of the Zune’s wireless receiver, that means I know this person (or at least, his Zune) was in building 34 on the Microsoft Redmond campus at 2:30 this afternoon, while he knows absolutely nothing of this.

My personal opinion is that if you’re not up to anything illicit, you shouldn’t care who knows where you were and when. So I should be able to walk up to him and say “hey, I saw you were in building 34 earlier” and he should say “yeah, I was”. But what really happens in these cases is that people act suspicious and say “who told you that, then?” while furtively glancing about. They want to know who told me they were there - because that will tell them who they can’t trust. If I say I saw the Zune listed as nearby, he’ll probably just turn off his Zune’s wireless and then I won’t see him next time.

I get really tired of people being so antisocial. I like to go out and see people I know. I like to run into them days later and say “hey, saw you at the concert last week”. And it really annoys me when they get cagey and say things like “what concert, I didn’t see any concert” and then you realise they blew off their SO to go see it. It’s like everybody I know is lying to the rest of the world about who they are and what they like and where they go. God forbid I see someone coming out of a gay bar.

“What? The uh, the Madison’s uh, a gay bar? Why, I uh, never knew.”

Well, gee, it sure looked like the guy hanging all over you knew. But I won’t say that, because I know what you really mean: “nobody knows I’m gay”. Everybody sort of grasps the idea that appearance is reality, but nobody wants to alter the reality to match their desired appearance. If you don’t want to be caught going out to gay bars - don’t go! Then you can’t be caught. If you want to go out to gay bars, then accept up front that you will be caught, and when you get caught… just draw yourself up and say “why, yes, I was out looking for hot young college dick last weekend; and I found it, too”.

Privacy is a polite fiction we maintain by mutual consensus. That’s all it is. It’s not a right. Expect that people will always know the truth if they care enough to look for it, and it just makes your life so much easier. You don’t have to hide or lie or make stuff up. Just tell the truth. Isn’t that easy?

Filed under: Gay Rights, Philosophy, Security
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In response to my last post, I’ve received email taking issue with it.

Specifically, taking issue with how I had Bob and Joe “hump each other in the butt”.

See, whenever I talk about gay people, some gay person reads it and decides to complain that I’ve made an inaccurate portrayal of gay culture. (Because, you know, I’m not part of it.) And as I’ve been reminded many, many times over the years: gay guys mostly just blow each other. There’s not that much butt humping going on; sure, there’s some, but it’s not what gay men primarily do. I mean, once it’s been there, who wants to put it in his mouth? Eww. Yeah, some people do, but… eww.

The fact is, I remind people of butt humping because it is funny. Imagine the Burger King meets Ronald McDonald at a singles bar. That’s sort of amusing. Now imagine the King bringing Ronald flowers and candy; that’s slightly more amusing. Picture them frolicking through a flowery meadow, and you’ll probably giggle a little.

Now imagine the King humping Ronald in the butt.

Come on. It just doesn’t get funnier than that. Oral sex isn’t as funny, because you can’t see both faces. And it’s important to say something funny, because straight people - which, lest we forget, are almost all of the people - are uncomfortable with the subject of homosexuality. Just like the openly gay frequently adopt a humorous and flamboyant persona to defuse the apparent threat they represent to a man’s masculinity, not because it’s accurate, but simply because… well, you just can’t be angry at them. The sort of guy who has a problem with gays is usually the same sort of guy who won’t hit a girl, and when you’re even more girly than most girls, he simply can’t beat you up. That used to be rather important.

Face it, gay people are just funny by nature. It’s hysterical to think about how the first gay men got started; I mean, how uncomfortable was that conversation? Even if gaydar already existed, you had no clue what it was detecting. “There’s something about Larry.”

Homosexuality is still pretty new, as an open component of American culture. Give it time. It’s not like Europe, where gay is a word like tall: everyone’s a little tall, even the short ones… the question is how tall.

We’ll accept it in the end. We just have to relax, and take it slow.

Okay, that’s my last butt humping joke today. I have work to do.

 

Filed under: Gay Rights, Philosophy
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Anthony de Jasay writes an interesting essay about the current teaching of economics. I do, however, take issue with his arguments.

When he covers the question of inequality, he calls the notion “undiluted bilge”. But the fact is, economic growth increases income inequality. The argument that capitalism causes inequity is, indeed, fact. What is not fact is the liberal assertion that income inequality is bad. Income equality - like trade - can be bad, but there are significant mitigating factors. What de Jasay fails to consider is that certain negative effects of income inequality are - in particular - bad for the government, and it is in the government’s best interest to mitigate them. While he correctly perceives that it is in no way society’s best interest that is served by government sanction, he fails to recognise that it is only incidentally in the liberal American’s best interest.

The liberal, after all, deifies the government. The government does not serve an economic purpose, nor does it serve an imperialist purpose; it serves to enforce the will of God on the people, or - in the liberal mind - to impress objective morality on the citizenry. Nothing could be further from the truth… government exists solely to maximize its own power and perpetuate its own existence. When the liberal willingly assists it, he drives toward the eventual removal of all individual liberty in favor of institutional liberty - which, to the citizenry at large, is no liberty at all.

The conservative (waves hand frantically and points to self) believes somewhat differently: that government is a necessary evil, but its will to power must be restrained by conscientious and self-sacrificing individuals.

Government officials are like zombie hunters; you send someone in to fight, and then you wait in a safe place until you see him wandering stiff-legged through the Capitol building moaning “subsidies, sanctions”. Then you have to shoot him in the head and put someone else into his office. It is inevitable that your representative will be corrupted; it is imperative that the corrupt are removed. You cannot win. All you can do is keep fighting until you run out of people who are willing to fight. Then you lose.

Filed under: Business, Economics, Philosophy, Politics
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A Jewish acquaintance besieged me with all kinds of data demonstrating that Jewish children in mixed communities, as opposed to strictly and exclusively Jewish communities, are more likely to leave the synagogue.

Well, yes. People who are offered a choice will make a different one more often than people who are actively protected from the notion that a choice can be made at all. What I fail to understand is how a child who remains Jewish because he doesn’t know there’s an alternative is in any way a good thing. Is he going to raise his children to take pride and joy in Judaism? No. He’s going to raise them to think being Jewish is a burden, a curse, something to be lamented rather than enjoyed. And I think that’s even more of a crime than leaving the fold.

Filed under: Parenting, Philosophy, Religion
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