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Speaking of what makes people laugh becoming a moral issue…

Speaking of what makes people laugh becoming a moral issue… published on No Comments on Speaking of what makes people laugh becoming a moral issue…

…this is pretty much the definition of it.

I’m not sure if I want to write a full-fledged post on this topic or not.  As you can see from that timeline it’s a controversy that has been going on since August of last year with frequent twists and turns, and no shortage of different perspectives– but then that’s always the case, isn’t it? There are almost never just two sides. I think some timeless truths about online disputes can be drawn from it, though.  Such as:

  • It’s hard to overestimate the ability of gamers to be arses, particularly of the misogynistic variety.  And I say this as a person who loves to play the video games herself, but the community does have its share of misogynerds.  (I just learned that term today, and this will probably be the only time I use it.  But it’s fitting now, if ever)
  • Reasonable people may disagree, but they don’t threaten violence.  That’s an automatic and permanent revocation of one’s credibility card.  
  • As a debate about the value of something said on the internet continues, the probability that someone will interpret objections as threats to freedom of speech approaches 100%.  
  • Real or effective online anonymity plus an audience doesn’t turn everyone into total fuckwads, but it inevitably works like a charm for some.  

Interesting links of the day

Interesting links of the day published on No Comments on Interesting links of the day

Two very different accounts…

Two very different accounts… published on 1 Comment on Two very different accounts…

…of the same panel at a regional meeting of American Atheists in Huntsville, Alabama on the subject of gender relations:

One says it all went to hell and it’s no wonder a woman who stood up to ask a question ended up in the bathroom in tears with people consoling her.
The other says the woman who ended up in tears was melodramatic and self-righteous, demanding unreasonable special treatment.

Cue the resulting shitstorm.

Neither one sounds impossible, but neither one sounds like the whole truth either.  Not having been there, there’s no way I can know what parts of which were true and which were not.  What I can suspect is that sexism, or at least confusion regarding how people of different genders should treat each other, is not born of religion.  It might be fostered by religious creeds, but it certainly doesn’t require them to exist.

Jen McCreight, who blogs at Blag Hag, frequently writes about the problem of sexism in atheist organizations.  They do seem to attract men in greater proportions than women, which can lead to a “boys club” atmosphere which makes women feel uncomfortable and unwelcome, thereby causing the gender discrepancy to become a self-perpetuating problem (although at this particular meeting of AA the number of women was estimated at 30% by the first source, which is pretty good considering).  Then there’s the additional factor that atheists like to emphasize a commitment to science, and psychological discussions emerging from evolutionary research tend to emphasize differences between the sexes, which can sometimes be confused with pseudoscientific explanations or be misinterpreted even if it’s actually well-researched and presented, and…well…you can see how the opportunities for misunderstanding and discord tend to crop up like dandelions in springtime, especially when people try to use these explanations as justifications for their behavior.

The only solutions I know:
1.  Be mature and respectful.  In addition to facilitating communication, it highlights the fact that your opponent isn’t willing to exercise these capacities and makes them look like the villain.  ðŸ˜‰
2.  Try to be objective.  Don’t take someone’s word for it regarding what happened just because you agree with them general or want to believe that what they say is true.  People who agree with you are still capable of being wrong.
3.  Listen to what people are saying; don’t misrepresent them– creating a straw man version of their thoughts for you to knock down just makes you look foolish.

Some random musings on “forever”

Some random musings on “forever” published on No Comments on Some random musings on “forever”

When I lived in Denmark, a friend told me that no one there receives a prison sentence longer than fourteen years, regardless of their crime.  I’ve since learned that that’s not true, but the idea still baffles and appeals to me, and that has nothing to do with the specific number.  It’s because it suggests that a body of people have cumulatively decided that “forever” isn’t a punishment, that a life sentence is inherently no longer about the perpetrator but instead about desires for revenge on the part of the victim, the victim’s friends and family, and the greater society.  The thought of locking someone up and throwing away the key is immensely satisfying when they have done something to hurt you horribly.  I don’t mean to be at all flippant about this, but it just seems to me that people have a cognitive disconnect when it comes to thinking about “forever” or even “for the rest of your life,” and it gets in the way of our concepts of morality.  I don’t think that anyone should commit or be committed to something forever, or for the rest of their lives, because there is no way for them or us to properly conceive of what that really means.  Our understanding of time just doesn’t allow us to do so.

I’m relatively young, but not very young.  I realize that as you age, the years tend to run together and zip by in a way that would be literally incomprehensible to someone a decade or even a few years younger.  It doesn’t seem like you have changed much between five years ago and today, even though the individual years between when you were fifteen and sixteen or even twenty-five and twenty-six seemed instead like eras.  Still, a person can change dramatically in the span of a single year– any year.  Anyone who has watched their parents virtually turn into different people immediately after retirement, for example, is aware of this.  And yet from the inside, it seems like we’ve been basically the same person all along.  Naturally.  It would be very disconcerting if we didn’t, because the sense of “me being me” would be lost.  It’s common to hear someone say that she is no longer the person she used to be, but when saying that the person is almost always referring to a certain aspect of her character that has changed– not that she went through a complete change in terms of who she is. And yet that’s precisely what often happens.

I can’t help but think of the reactions I’ve heard to Jesse Bering’s theory about a cognitive constraint that prevents us from conceiving of the cessation of existence.  Basically, he argues, we believe in life after death because we are unable to conceive of being dead.  It’s impossible to do so, because there is no way to be conscious of the fact of being unconscious.  The immediate response is “Of course we can!  Do we not dream when we sleep?”  Sure we do, but that’s not real unconsciousness– real unconsciousness would be awareness of nothing, not even dreams.  Real unconsciousness isn’t sleep; it’s a black-out. You feel nothing during it, but you can sure feel terrible afterward.  Even if you’ve done it, you haven’t experienced it because experience during it is impossible.  In the same way, we think we can conceive of forever, or “for the rest of my life” or “for the rest of his/her life,” but we really can’t.  We can conceive of a really long time, because everyone has experienced a really long time, but that’s as close to “forever” as dreaming is to death.

It’s impossible to tell whether this conclusion is the product or the cause of many of my thoughts about justice and morality, but it is certainly connected either way.  It’s why I consider the death penalty to be more compassionate than a sentence to life in prison, for example.  Make no mistake; I oppose the death penalty– but I oppose life imprisonment more.  Given the chance to be Queen of the World for a day, I would abolish both but allow prisoners to opt for death at any point in their sentencing if they decided that was preferable.  But that would be a penalty they would have to carry out transparently and by themselves.  As horrible as the reasons for and means of committing suicide can be, I consider it a fundamental right, and perhaps if more people agreed with me on that, the means would become more humane for everyone involved.

I cringe when I hear people speak blithely-but-seriously about someone going to Hell, or even saying, as atheists often do, “I wish I believed in Hell so that he/she could burn in it.”   Do you really?  Do you honestly wish that you believed there is a place where people will be tortured forever?   You aspire, in other words, to be the worst sadist imaginable and regret that you’re not?  Because that’s what wishing eternal torture on someone entails.  If you were a sadist-in-practice in this life and tortured someone on your basement in the most merciless way for thirty years, behaving like…I don’t know, a Reaver from Firefly, it would be but a paper cut in comparison to an actual Hell.  Not even that, actually, because of course nothing can be compared to infinity.  How long would it take for your torture to become meaningless?  To become as much torture for the inflicter as for the inflictee?   A shorter time than I’d guess for people who like to invoke this lunatic notion, if they’ve even considered the idea in the first place.  And yet I’m not willing to convict them of sadism precisely because of that– I don’t think they have actually thought much about it.

At the opposite end of the spectrum (one would hope)– “I’ll love you forever.”  Really?  Are you sure about that?  Unconditional love is a nice-sounding idea, but loving someone who has decided after twenty years to become an ax murderering child rapist isn’t exactly a positive character attribute even if you manage to achieve it…and there’s no particular reason why you should, regardless of what Charles Manson’s many female admirers would say.  I would posit, actually, that most if not all of them admire him precisely because of the acts that caused him to be imprisoned in the first place.  If he were to be released and decided to take up a career as a janitor in Montana, much if not all of the attraction would probably be lost.  Again, a personality change over time.  There’s a good reason, I think, why such sentiments as “IIIIIIIII will always love yoooooooouuuuuu” are referred to as “sweet nothings.”  They sound sweet but literally mean nothing, if you’re doing it right.  There are a lot of stupid reasons to stop loving someone, certainly, but a heck of a lot of good reasons as well, and there’s no way to know which ones of either variety are going to crop up until they do.  Surely if you love someone for who they are, you should continue to love them for who they are.  Right?

What prompted these thoughts?  Something very mundane, actually, but still important– a discussion on whether people who have committed to a monogamous relationship are allowed to cheat, if something catastrophic happens which effectively kills any chance at romance.   Dan Savage’s answer is “yes,” if the cheating functions as a kind of pressure release valve which enables the sex-desiring partner to stick around.  But what got me thinking about “forever” was mainly the comment thread in which people discuss  what pledging your life to someone can and should mean.  As a Buddhist might point out, the only permanence is impermanence.  We’re all changing all of the time, and that’s a good thing.

There’s a thought I try to keep in mind.  I debated getting it tattooed, but it’s not exactly elegant wording– clumsy as hell, actually– so have decided against that.  Nevertheless, I try to live by it:
Life is short, so take it seriously.  But life is short, so don’t take it too seriously.

Some thoughts on “opting out.”

Some thoughts on “opting out.” published on No Comments on Some thoughts on “opting out.”

To return to a Michael Pollen note for a bit (sorry), I came across a section of Omnivore’s Dilemma today that devoted some discussion to “opting out.”  The context was home-schooling parents who also decide to buy their food from local farmers rather than from the grocery store, and Pollan described them as having “opted out once already.”  By this, Pollan meant that they had already once said “no” to a segment of American culture to which the vast majority of people say “yes.” 

I think most people underestimate the effect that opting out can have.  As much as I personally dislike being told that I’m opposed to some sort of behavior simply because it’s “different” when I think that it’s actually because I have a good reason for opposing it, it’s true that people often regard things with suspicion because they’re not normal. 

Having read Dan Savage’s sex advice column Savage Love for– gosh– fourteen years now, I would estimate that at least half of the letters submitted are from people concerned about whether their sexual proclivities are normal.  And his answer is always some variant on the same sentiment– who cares, so long as it makes you happy and it doesn’t hurt anyone?  But clearly people do care.  If they’re going to be strange and do things differently, it’s like they want permission to do it.  They want to know that their desires are legitimate, and they acknowledge that having to explain themselves to interested parties for deviating from the norm is taxing, which is why they want assurance that what they’re doing is in fact normal…even though it isn’t.

Yes, I did just compare having weird sexual kinks to home-schooling. 

Sure, the two things are different in a lot of ways, but I’d suggest that the relevant difference here is mainly about taste vs. ideology.  There’s not much you can do about taste– you can either hide it or be open about it, feel ashamed or feel confident, but it’s going to be there regardless.  With ideology, on the other hand, it’s about trying to be a different person than you would be if you were “normal.”  Some people are born into weird ideologies while others convert to them, but there’s often a moral dimension involved either way. 

Opting out is a conscious decision– it requires recognizing that one can choose not to do things the way most people are, and making that choice.  My understanding of homosexuality is that it definitely does not feel like a conscious choice, but deciding to be “out” is.  Even people who can look back and see their homosexuality written on the wall, so to speak, before they even realized it seem to have to go through a period of either going into the closet and/or (if they’re lucky enough to be in an accepting environment) make a deliberate choice to embrace that aspect of who they are and live as openly gay. 

Does having opted out in one dimension of your life make it easier to opt out in others?  Maybe.  At Skepticon 3 philosophy professor John Corvino gave a talk comparing coming out as gay to coming out as a skeptic/atheist, and it certainly sounded like the first experience made the second one a lot easier.   And it’s not necessarily a positive thing– in her book True Porn Clerk Stories, former video store clerk Ali Davis writers about certain customers who have reached the point of renting six or more porn movies per day, the people she’s no longer afraid to label “porn addicts,” having rejected society’s norms in other ways before reaching that point.  Sometimes opting out means taking control; sometimes it means giving up. 

Opting out has costs.  It might mean having fewer things to talk to your family about at Christmas.  It might mean being passed over for a job.  It might, as in the case of ethical choices, mean that people believe you are implicitly judging them for not joining them in your decision, and come to resent you for it.  It might mean that people conclude that you’re being different just for the sake of being different, and mock you because others are being different in a very similar way, as if it’s ever possibly to be truly unique.  It might, in some circumstances, mean that your rights are not acknowledged, or that life is made harder to live in some other way because most people simply do not have the same interests.  Can it suck?  Yes, very much.   It will always be mind-boggling to me to hear or read people say outright– in conversation, in letters to the editor, in debates– that they’re not concerned about the interests of minorities if their own aren’t affected.  Sure, let’s ban tattooing, ferret ownership, strip clubs, Islamic mosques, urban farming— I don’t want any part in any of those things, so screw people who do!

Back to the taste vs. ideology thing.  People who opt out for moral reasons may be offended by having their choices compared to opting out for matters of taste because it seems to negate the seriousness of their committment, but you can’t force others to take your interests as seriously as you do.  To them, it may as well be a matter of taste that you want to wear a burqa, raise your own chickens because you object to factory farming, or make sure your children receive their sex education from you and no one else.  What counts as being in the moral dimension for one person might well just look like a quirk or a hobby to someone else.   And conversely, what looks like a hobby or quirk for the person who wants to opt out to take part in it– getting tattoos, going to strip clubs, smoking marijuana– may have a moral dimension for others who are strongly opposed to it. 

Ultimately, I think that having a lot of people around who are openly “weird” in some way or another is a good thing, because it raises our level of cultural tolerance for weirdness.  The more homogeneous a society is, the more dangerous it seems (and probably is) to be different.  I have no particular desire to wear my hair in a mohawk, join a swinger’s club, or homeschool children, but am grateful to live in a culture where those things are tolerated if not warmly accepted.  It’s clear to me that the pursuit of happiness in a country can take as many different forms are there are members of its population, and it is therefore crucial that we protect each individual’s ability to pursue happiness to the maximal extent possible.  That’s clearly not to say that anything which makes a person happy must be allowed, but that the onus of proof for justifying standing in the way of such pursuit always rests on the person  who wants to do so– not one whose pursuit it is.  Diversity of species on a farm makes the organisms raised on it stronger and better defended from attacks by parasites.  Diversity of interests and lifestyles amongst the population of a society makes individuals in it stronger and better defended from attacks on their own happiness.