Disclaimer


The content on this blog is my personal opinion and does not reflect the views of the Department of Defense or the US Navy in any way.


Monday, February 18, 2013

Issues and Causes

I'm writing this one mostly because I'm getting very tired of reading Facebook posts that read: "OMG Obama is destroying our military power!"

Or for that matter because I'm getting tired of reading gun advocates making points about the murder rates of various countries versus the gun ownership rates.

Or because I'm tired of reading all the one-liners and talking points about how people are reacting to Obamacare and its impact on the economy.

Or... well I think I've made my point.

There are a lot of issues that share the same problem I've been seeing... and it's not necessarily that I think the conservatives are probably wrong on most of those issues. It's seeing these complicated issues reduced to short blurbs with a simple cause and effect. Really, that's probably an artifact of wandering through my conservative friends' Facebook pages; that isn't really an environment that encourages well thought out debate. (Unless I start getting involved in the comment threads... and even then it's hit or miss. Sometimes I get well-reasoned replies, sometimes I just get rude dismissals.)

Still, it's a little depressing to see. I hate to see ignorance and stupidity spreading without any resistance... and if I try and provide resistance, endless amounts of my time start disappearing into a black hole of researching issues, writing and rewriting my posts to express my points right, and then impatiently refreshing as I wait for a reply. It sparks some good discussions when I take the time, but for every post which I do take the time to respond to, I leave two others alone for lack of time or interest.

That seems like a problem to me. I have to ignore simple one-line memes that take a minute to type because I don't have the hour I need to reply? Why is that not a problem for anyone else... say, the person who posted the meme in the first place? Basically, I tend to accept the burden of proof rather easily, and I don't like just shoving it off on someone else. Their one-line, oversimplified meme isn't being proven... it's just their claim, and they're not bothering to prove it. Whereas I go to more trouble when I'm trying to disprove it.

Which is both good and bad. When it works, it makes me look that much more trustworthy and makes my debate opponent look like an idiot. When it doesn't work... well, I already mentioned how many things I ignore. It probably would be useful if I just told some of these people to actually prove their point and then get back to me, and I have done that on some occasions. The problem is that a simple claim tends to get dismissed with a request for more evidence, even if I'm only arguing that their unproven claim is false. Trying to point out that they made the first evidence-free claim turns the argument into an argument about where the burden of proof should lie, which usually just takes more time. Unfortunately, it seems that almost any claim can be stated in such a manner that makes it seem like the default true claim.

That's not something I think I can change, though. Frankly, I think we need more people that are willing to search for arguments and counterarguments themselves, rather than people that trust the validity of their own point until someone hits them in the face with a powerful enough counterargument. Unfortunately, human nature shows few signs of changing... so I'll just keep doing what I can.

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Fanfiction

... is something I've never been all that interested in. I like world building and creative writing, yes, but I like to do it myself.

Or, at least, I hate to feel like I'm mucking up a different author's world by handling it poorly myself.

Still, I have tried my hand at it once or twice. It's somewhat simpler than creating my own stuff from scratch, since a lot of the setting is already built, and I have a list of characters I can try to use at need. That doesn't entirely excuse me from the need to build my own supporting characters and establish critical details of the setting for people who may not have read that part of the original source, but I would be doing that anyway if I created my own setting.

So the point of this post is in a link: namely, to my FanFiction.net profile. Not much there as of yet, but I'm going to try and get back into that pastime.

It'll probably drop off the radar again in a few months (rampant cynicism alert!) but I should be able to say that at least I tried.

Saturday, February 9, 2013

Entertainment and Stereotypes

Sorry about last week. I was a little busy with work.

Anyway. This week's post was spawned by a random post on a friend's Facebook page; said friend was wondering about the portrayals of various minorities in entertainment.

Or rather, this friend was wondering why people were complaining. The argument in question essentially pointed out that minority characters always being flawless character models wasn't a whole lot better than them always following the same flawed stereotypes; it doesn't help us make any progress towards a society which can ignore details which should be trivial.

Which was a nice surprise, since I agree wholeheartedly with that particular point and don't usually see someone who puts it that neatly and politely. While I don't intend to argue that no reasonable opposition to (or internal disagreement within) the progressive movement exists, I do tend to get discouraged seeing people arguing against points I disagree with with arguments I find it impossible to agree with, and that seems to be most of what I see. (Put another way: seeing misogynistic or racist bullshit deployed against arguments I disagree with forces me to differentiate myself from that crap. Which is probably good for me in the end, but that is not the same thing as comfortable or easy to deal with.)

In any case, my views are fairly simple, and (as I said) align with the Facebook commenter in question. From a standpoint of realism as well as from my own idea of what makes good fiction (which, come to think of it, might deserve a full post of its own eventually), there are going to be some good people and some bad people, no matter what other identifiers may also describe them.  That doesn't mean that every story has to represent the full range of possibilities - most stories don't have that many characters - but it does mean that we shouldn't shy away from acknowledging the full range when it's necessary... or, hell, when the author just feels like it fits. And that means that I'd rather not have just heterosexual molesters, even if the idea of a homosexual molester plays into some unfortunate stereotypes.

Granted, in order for that to be fair, we need to note these things both on good and bad people. I think that's one point which the progressives push most strongly - that the evil characters always have some obvious connection to a minority group while the good characters' connections to similar groups are downplayed. A similar point came up in the Facebook post, namely that the proper solution was to have more positive roles to offset the negative ones, rather than removing the negative ones to leave only positive roles. I can agree that more effort in that area is probably necessary.

And that's just about it, really. People can be either good or bad - and while we can probably get away with leaving these concerns out of some of our entertainment, I think it's worth remembering that we have to acknowledge both.