Judging Religion

The New York Times had an excellent editorial today about defending the religious freedom of Muslims.

The hypocrisy it mentions (right-wing Christians trying to deny Muslims the ability to build mosques or wear religious garb in public, despite the fact that many of these are exactly the same accommodations Christians complain about not getting) is certainly one reason why this discussion is annoying. The other one is the common question of why the NYT would publish a defense of Islam, or why liberals would support it, given the religion's flaws.

I can certainly understand the sentiment, frankly. I don't hold Muslim views on gender roles in very high regard. I think Shariah law can be easily abused to oppress others. And I don't really like it when people propose laws that criminalize things like blasphemy and apostasy.

Then again, I don't hold a lot of Christian doctrine in these areas in very high regard either. (Or Jewish, particularly Orthodox Jewish, or Mormon, or some Buddhist sects... and so on.) If the best one can say about their religion is that its extremists aren't quite as bad as a different group's extremists, it's not a compliment. And any criticism I'm going to direct towards Muslims for their failings is going to fall on a number of other groups as well, whether that's for gender roles, using their religion as an excuse to obtain political power, trying to force others to live by religious laws, or any one of a number of other things.

That fairness I'm going to abide by in my criticisms also has to be applied to other matters of law as well. I can't deny only Muslims the ability to build mosques. I'd rather deny everyone the right to use their religion as an excuse to discriminate, but if we're going to allow Christians to do it, we're going to have to allow other groups to do it as well. I can deny Muslims the right to use Shariah law in many cases (like divorce) where it would be a burden on the other party's rights - but then, Christians can't just ignore divorce and marriage laws either, so that's still entirely fair.

Essentially, the point here is that any liberal defense of Islam extends exactly as far as the leeway we're willing to extend to any other religion and no farther. If any Christians have a problem with that - if they think our religious freedom laws grant too much ability for Muslims to infringe on others' rights - they might want to ask themselves who asked for those laws to extend as far as they do. And whether they're willing to live with the consequences of rolling them back.

Intelligence and Certainty

There's one line in particular in this editorial that deserves to be strongly highlighted:

Indeed it was precisely because they were well-informed that they were able to hold their opposing certainties so firmly...

There's a lot I don't like about the editorial, but its argument that more well-informed people paradoxically can make more errors in supporting questionable points is quite good.

It gets to the point where I actually trust someone less if they're particularly vocal about how rational and well-informed they are, particularly if they're using those traits to argue that they should be paid more attention than the obvious idiots they're talking with. Logic is an excellent tool, but it can be used to make bullshit seem acceptable just as easily as it can be used to actually find the truth; someone who is treating it as an incorruptible force for good isn't going to be watching out for the errors that can creep in.

There's also another point: It's usually a good idea to remind oneself that not everyone who comes to a different conclusion is going to be a useless idiot. That doesn't mean one has to find compromises or points of agreement, since it is always possible that even an intelligent person is completely wrong, but it usually helps avoid some degree of rancor if one remembers that most people do try to have reasons that sound good to them.

And one final detail - ultimately, this particular conservative author concludes that the accusations made against former President Clinton were more truthful than we were willing to admit, and that the accusations against Justice Thomas during his confirmation hearings are still vague and possibly unknowable. This matches up well enough with what the author might want to be true that I'm forced to conclude knowing all this is no magic wand to prevent bias either.

 

Law and Compassion

This entire blog post from Love Joy Feminism is worth reading, but there's one part I specifically want to focus on. Specifically, I want to talk about the roles of logic and emotion in our decision making, particularly when it comes to legal issues.

Law is certainly a field that does not generally lend itself to emotional appeals, and there are good reasons for that. Given that the extent to which people react to emotional appeals varies depending on the situation and the person, they aren't usually a good fit for a system that needs to treat people in similar circumstances as equally as possible.

However, our laws don't exist just to perpetuate themselves, nor are they always perfect and applied perfectly. Meeting the purpose of a justice system and accounting for its fallibility often will require some degree of mercy from the people enforcing it. Managing to do so while still treating everyone at least mostly equally is extremely difficult, but the other option (no mercy at all) leads to problems that are at least as bad in the long run.

Which brings me back to the original post and its remark:

Sessions’ insistence that his interpretation of the law is logical while others’ interpretations are polluted by emotions is no more reality than is the stereotype that men are “logical” and women are “emotional.” The reality is that we all have access to both, and that no one makes a decision based solely on one or the other.

Many people have trouble understanding how it's possible for arguments like Sessions' to include emotion when they're the ones (ostensibly) arguing for strict logic and reason while their opponents are making emotional appeals, as this point alleges. However, as I noted above, there are some very good reasons to temper justice with mercy... which means the decision to abandon any hint of compassion often has more to do with the desire to punish people or the desire to present a certain image than it does with a logical assessment of what best serves our justice system. Those may be a different type of emotional appeal than the typical stories you get out of criminal justice reform advocates, but they are still emotional appeals.

The Future of the Supreme Court

I largely agree with the idea in this editorial that the Supreme Court is headed for trouble. The increasing partisanship of its members is already damaging its credibility and respect. If that were the only consequence, it would be depressing but not too horrible; people not liking the court or its decisions wouldn't change how their powers are defined or make it possible to defy their decisions without consequences. However, as the court becomes increasingly partisan, I worry that we'll see more people selected for it and more people seeking nominations for partisan reasons rather than because they'll make good decisions about what the law means.

The solutions the editorial proposes, though, don't seem much like good solutions to me. If anything, they seem to argue that we can't fix the problem.

Term limits for the Supreme Court, in particular, isn't a minor change for an institution that was originally designed to have some independence from the electorate's whims. Doing that certainly would limit some of the negative consequences of increased partisanship, but it'd also increase the focus on partisanship when selecting nominees. Given that the problem we've identified is too much focus on partisanship, that seems like a rather contradictory solution at best - then again, if we can't actually reduce partisanship, we may have to do something like this eventually.

And adding more judges is just a temporary patch on the problem, and that only in the unlikely event that it works correctly. If we used it to add some moderates with good judgment, then we could potentially rely on those people to be the swing votes whether or not their partisan colleagues were led astray by bias or not. But adding such people isn't a guarantee; in fact, given that the problem is that the process for selecting justices is being increasingly warped by partisan concerns, it's more likely than not that we wouldn't get people who could help. And even if we did, any balance we'd get would only last as long as it took for a future president to backslide again.

The third solution the article suggests - that existing justices will moderate their views as necessary to ensure the court doesn't end up becoming too partisan - is probably the best idea from my point of view. The problem, of course, is that the same independence which allows them to do that without facing the wrath of the electorate also makes it impossible to force them to do it.

In the long run, I think we need to do a better job of selecting people to nominate - more useful confirmation hearings, for example. Probably, for that matter, we need to look at what makes conservative and liberal judges different at all levels, not just the Supreme Court. Of course, coming to an agreement on which we ultimately want more of is probably not going to happen any time soon.

Book Journal: Sins of Empire

I should probably be reading the second book in this series, since it's the one I haven't read, but it's been long enough since I read the first one that I wanted to remind myself what was actually going on here before I jump back in. (This happens to me more often than I would expect, given how good my memory usually is, but it's not like I actually mind.)

Sins of Empire is the start of the second series written by Brian McClellan. It's set in the same world as his first, although it centers on a different part of the world. I really like both; they've got a lot of interesting political intrigue, fight scenes, and a very interesting magic system. The magic system in particular feels very interesting and relevant even in a world that's closer to Napoleonic War tech than the typical fantasy setting that features magic. The fact that some of it uses gunpowder as a power source for magic probably helps in that regard.

The whole thing does get a bit convoluted (which is probably part of the reason why I'm having to re-read it in order to remember all the things that happened), but that doesn't make it any less entertaining.

Double Standards

There's one other reaction (actually, there's probably more than that, but only one more I think I'll bother mentioning) to the accusations made by Dr. Ford regarding Judge Kavanaugh that I think is worth mentioning.

Specifically, there's a lot of Republicans who are arguing that they can't possibly give way on his nomination over this, because otherwise it would teach Democrats that they can just keep coming up with sexual assault allegations to derail their candidates and nominees with.

... Okay, I suppose that's just a specific example of the third response I mentioned in my last post. But I think it's worth mentioning in more detail, because it's gained quite a bit of traction for something that should be quite easy to disprove. Namely: If it's that easy for the Democrats to just come up with accusations of this sort, why isn't it more common?

One of the primary highlights of accusations that are generally believed, for example, is multiple women accusing the same person, so why would the Democrats only come up with one accusation to use against Kavanaugh if they could just make more? Or, if you prefer, why aren't more allegations of misconduct showing up in close Senate or House races? There are far more of those than there are accusations right now.

This isn't the sort of idea that can be used to discuss any specific incident, of course. However, I think it's important to remember that sometimes what we're not seeing happening can be important.

Responding to an Accusation

I'd put the responses I've seen to the accusation that Judge Kavanaugh attempted to rape someone in high school into one of three categories:

1. It was more than 30 years ago; who cares?

2. There's no way to be certain whether this is even true or not; therefore we should ignore it.

3. What a convenient time for these allegations! This is obviously fake.

I don't find any of them convincing. It's interesting, in fact, how neatly this captures many of the problems the #MeToo movement has been trying to highlight.

The first is probably the one I have the most sympathy with, since I can readily see how someone would change over the decades into someone who would never do such things again, if not actually help and support victims. The problem, though, is that I don't give all that much credit to someone that changes that way because they're lucky. If the person in question can talk about how they've changed and what caused it, then I'd be much more inclined to extend forgiveness... but even then I don't believe it's required for anyone else to do the same.

Basically, redemption is not something one can claim simply because it's been long enough since they last did something wrong.

The second is an extremely common error as far as dealing with these allegations are concerned: the idea that something that is not legally actionable cannot be dealt with at all. There are limits to what can be done outside of our legal system, and that's as it should be; we've set things up so that (in theory, at least) the most severe punishments we hand out only get used when a high standard is met. However, that doesn't mean I'm going to look at a case where we're only barely more than 50% certain the accusation is true in the same way as a case where we're 90% certain it's true.

Basically, we should be willing to take some actions to support and defend victims and interfere with accused people, depending on how credible the accusations are.

Then the third is just flat-out ridiculous. The fact that many people who absolutely insist on not destroying other people's reputations without very good evidence are willing to throw around accusations of malicious false reports without any better evidence than a possible motive is amusing and kind of depressing. Believing that we can't prove the accusations true is one thing, but that doesn't necessarily imply that making them in the first place was a crime.

Schedule changes/New post series

Quick housekeeping post:

I'm going to formalize something I've already been doing and state that I'll be doing one post every weekday and skipping the weekends.

I may at some point decide to skip a day during the week as well and make four posts a week instead of five, but for now I'm still going for every weekday.

Also I've started trying to actually use the tags. This is actually more for my benefit than anyone else's - now that I've realized that I'll quickly end up with a large number of posts in my blog's history, I'd like to make sure I can sort through them more easily. That way if I end up talking about the same topic multiple times (which I will), I can easily find whatever I've already got on that topic. Whether or not I go through the posts I've written in the last two months and add tags... well, file that under "would be nice eventually", which is probably code for "not going to happen".

Book Journal: The Call of Cthulhu

Blame some of the satire pieces I found this past week for convincing me to dig my old collection of H.P. Lovecraft's stories out of my pile of books.

Talking about why I really do like Lovecraft's horror stories probably means starting with the things that will make me dislike a horror story. I don't like the jump scares or buckets of gore that a lot of games and movies in this genre seem to rely on to terrify or disgust the audience. I particularly don't like it when the protagonists get themselves in trouble by virtue of doing something absurdly stupid, or when they aren't capable of stopping the implacable horror stalking them because they're not smart enough to make good decisions.

Lovecraft's protagonists aren't like that, as a general rule. Many of them are supposed to be intelligent people and are written in a way that actually makes them seem intelligent. There's the odd stupid decision involving digging a bit too deeper than one should, but by that time the protagonists are generally doomed already anyway. And the implacable horrors of Lovecraft's works generally are insurmountable threats no matter how smart the protagonists are... they see some measure of success against merely mortal cultists and magicians, and even manage to temporarily stave off the elder gods on rare occasions, but in the end there's only so much mortal investigators can do. This sort of horror story built off of a convincingly terrifying implacable creeping doom is quite a bit more interesting to me than the alternatives.

Of course, there are flaws. Largest is the fact that like all too many people in the 1920s, Lovecraft was horribly racist, and it shows. It's not just a matter of the (irritatingly common) occasional throwaway remark about any non-white people being inferior, either - in several of his stories, the madness stalking the protagonists involves a reversion or degeneration to a more flawed form of humanity... and that generally always involves mixed breeding or flawed bloodlines. It's a serious problem, and there's not much to be done about it but ignore it if you can or just don't read them.

More happily, there's also a wealth of good stuff that is based off of the Cthulhu Mythos, ranging from other books and stories to TV shows, games, anime, and all sorts of other things. It's quite possible to enjoy this particular horror setting even without having read the original material.

Election Forecasting, Part Two

And now FiveThirtyEight has released their Senate forecasts to go along with their House forecasts.

Pretty much everything I said last time applies equally well to this one, and I'd strongly encourage reading their most recent detailed article about their forecasts. To me, the most interesting detail to come out of the combination of the two forecasts is that the most commonly predicted result - that the Democrats will win the House but the Republicans will keep control over the Senate - actually has just under a 50% chance of happening. There's still a decent chance that the Democrats will get the Senate as well as the House, and somewhat longer but still possible odds that the Republicans keep everything.

Social Media and Regulatory Goals

It hardly surprises me that many people dislike the idea of regulating social media. I regard the idea with some caution myself, since I think ill-founded or poorly designed regulations would all too easily work against the general goal of making things a bit less toxic online, rather than improving conditions.

However, I think this editorial goes a bit too far in arguing against regulation as basically impossible to do without trying to redefine speech as a collective good rather than an individual right. It is quite possible to argue that people have an individual right to their speech but that it is possible for them to do things with it that will require regulatory or even law enforcement action. One may have the right to jog through a public park on a set schedule, but if that schedule happens to coincide with someone who is trying to stay away, that innocent jog quickly turns into harassment and stalking. The author, to his credit, does announce that harassment is and should remain unacceptable, but I doubt he grasps the extent to which it currently is accepted as a part of some online communities. Or the scale of the actions required to bring our online communities up to the same (not always good, incidentally) standard which currently applies to our public parks.

Also, the closing sentence - that social media is only real to the extent that we allow it to be - is frankly absurd. I've complained about people acting like the Internet is some fantasy world that can be safely ignored before; it's exactly the sort of dodge people use when they would rather not deal with the difficult problems that come with making our world better. Changing how we communicate doesn't make those communications any less real, nor does it make it any less important for us to ensure that the society using those links is one we can all participate in.

Game Review: ZONE OF THE ENDERS THE 2nd RUNNER : M∀RS

Oddly enough, despite only having played one Zone of the Enders game (the one for Game Boy Advance) before this one, I've considered myself a fan of the franchise. I'm sure I would have played more of them if I had any Sony consoles...

Well, now that this remastered version of the second ZOE game has come out on PC, I can finally play more of them. Better yet, since Konami included full VR support, I can play the whole game from the cockpit of the main character's giant robot (or Orbital Frame, if you want to use the proper in-game term).

... It's quite awesome. I've tried a couple VR space combat games looking for one that I can really enjoy, but most of them either don't have a plot that interests me, don't actually have a good combat system, or cause some severe motion sickness. (In some cases, more than one of those problems.) This one, though, manages to avoid all three problems, even when I'm up close and personal with the enemy robots and the view is snapping back and forth between lock on targets as I wipe them all out.

I should be fair and mention that there are some problems. The plot has a couple of good thought-provoking moments, but then there are also plenty of scenes that are simply weird. A lot of the characters' motivations are either poorly explained or just don't make sense, and the same goes for some of the history. And there are some minor control problems - most centered around the way the game handles switching between lock on targets.

Those problems are more than outweighed by the good points. It's just fun to feel like you're actually sitting in the cockpit of a giant robot blasting your way through entire hordes of enemies. It takes a bit of experimenting to figure out which weapons are easiest to use and most effective, but there's enough time and chances to figure it out to prevent the whole thing from feeling like a irritating slog. Overall, I highly recommend this game.

Single Issue Support

While this editorial is mostly addressed to the sort of large donors that contribute to election campaigns, the question it asks is relevant to just about anyone who cares about supporting candidates. Namely: How do you use your support to help build a less polarized political environment?

Specifically, the editorial points at the donations the largest donors provide, and the fact that almost all of those donors provide the majority of those donations to a particular side. It can come up with a decent reason why - most of these donors care about particular issues - but accuses those donors of giving up on too many other concerns about their candidates in order to maximize their influence on a particular point.

I think there's one detail that's missing, though - I suspect many of these people simply won't donate in a race where their side's candidate is too extreme for their tastes. I'm not sure I agree with the notion that anyone who doesn't support moderate candidates in both parties is making things worse.

However, I do agree with the idea that we should be asking our politicians how open to compromise they are, how willing to work with the other side they are, and whether they've thought about why or how they might change their mind on any particular issue. Those large donors have a lot more power than many others to really force candidates to answer those questions, but any of the rest of us can certainly give it a shot as well.

Employee Quality

This anonymous op-ed piece by a senior member of President Trump's administration has certainly caused a lot of sound and fury in political circles. As much as many liberals view it as a vindication of their criticism of the president, I think it's important to remember that this isn't a good thing to be seeing. In fact, there are articles like this one that go so far as to say this sort of internal disobedience in the executive branch rises to the level of a constitutional crisis.

On one hand, anyone who thinks that President Trump's ideas go too far has at least some reason to be happy that there are people actively trying to prevent those ideas from being implemented. However, relying on the president to make mistakes (in this case, not hiring trustworthy or competent staff members) in order to prevent his agenda from going through is not a particularly reliable way to stop him. Nor, for that matter, are we even certain that whoever wrote that article really cares all that much about anything other than making themselves look good - as the second article points out, this might actually make holding the president back harder, and that calls the actual motive of the author into question.

Of course, there's also the possibility that unelected bureaucrats and political appointees exerting this much influence over policy is more power than they should be wielding - I'm reasonably certain that's where the idea of a constitutional crisis comes from. I don't think things are that bad, myself - it's another crack in the appropriate distribution of powers and oversight responsibilities that our system is supposed to rely on, but compared to all the damage we already had, this particular example doesn't make things that much worse.

Media Credibility

Whether or not one blames President Trump for changes in how we look for and decide to trust various media outlets (I, personally, think he's merely the latest step in an ongoing shift), this article about how teens are looking at media is fascinating.

... Frankly, I think calling it terrifying is just as valid.

However, it's not necessarily because I think their mistrust in the various traditional media outlets is misplaced. I do, in fact, think that a lot of the mistrust of traditional media outlets is misplaced, but I can at least understand where it comes from. And even I think a little bit of questioning where they get their information, which details they choose to emphasize, and what they do and don't report on is a useful habit to have, so long as it isn't taken to excess.

The problem, for me, is what we choose to replace those traditional sources with. The end of the article mentions that many of these people trust individual journalists and news-related social media more than traditional media. I can, to a point, understand that it's easier to trust an individual person than it is to trust an entire editorial board; it can be much easier to understand how and why one person makes decisions, as opposed to having to figure out the intersecting motives of and influences on entire groups. However, that one person also generally has fewer resources available to control their own biases or check their own errors than a group will have. For that matter, the limits one person faces may introduce biases that can't be corrected for on their own - in particular, one perspective on a given situation isn't always complete enough to be helpful.

Trying to correct that problem by gathering a group of people together to run a social media page may create something that avoids the typical biases of a media group and has the reach and influence that individual bloggers or reporters don't. However, it adds biases of its own, since such groups usually rely on the positive regard of their audience in order to continue to exist and to keep their influence. What those groups of people wan't isn't always driven by a rational regard for the truth, so a group acting in service to their wishes can quickly and dramatically depart from useful and trustworthy reporting. And while the lack of any advertisers or subscribers is sometimes a benefit, in freeing such pages from top-down control, it also prevents any control from being exercised over a group that is not acting in good faith.

Which, I suppose, isn't a reason to regard traditional media or individual reporters as inherently better than social media pages or individual bloggers. But I would really like to see people actually apply the same critical eye that is currently being turned on traditional media to the latter category as well. I don't think most people do, to be blunt.

The Riddler: Competitive Coin Flipping

One of the things I do every Friday evening or Saturday morning is check the math puzzle column that FiveThirtyEight runs, called the Riddler. It ranges in difficulty from merely ridiculous to something very near impossible, as far as I'm concerned, but then it's been a while since I did any kind of detailed study of math.

(This is also why I'm not doing a weekly series about this - because about half the time I read it and immediately decide that I'm not going to spend my time slamming my forehead into whatever wall they've come up with.)

But, the express puzzle for this week actually seems interestingly doable, so here we go!

For this puzzle, I decided to plot out the different ways this game could develop. Since it's based on coin flips, there actually aren't that many of them - 4 possible results for the first flip from each team, and then 4 more options for the second, for a total of 16. While I would expect a fair number of games to require more than two flips, any additional game states will be identical to the conditions at the start or following one of those first flips.

For example, one of the options for the first flip - both teams getting tails - leaves the situation for subsequent flips no different than what we had at the start of the game. Another option - tails for the Blue team, heads for the Red team - doesn't allow either team to complete their sequence, but can start Red's sequence; if it shows up anywhere, I know the game is in that particular state for the next flip.

Plotting out all the states fairly quickly leads to the conclusion that Red has an advantage. Assuming the coins are fair, there's a 25% chance each of ending up in a state where either Red or Blue can win on the next flip and the other team can't. But on the second flip, even if Blue has the advantage, they can't hold on to it; they'll either win, hand the advantage over to Red, or reset the game. If Red got the advantage, they can hold on to it; they will either win, hold on to the advantage, or put both teams on equal footing. And if neither team got an advantage on the first flip, that's either a reset or - if both teams got heads - then there are equal chances of Blue winning, Red winning, a reset, or Red gaining the advantage.

Simply put, there are a lot more ways for Red to gain an advantage and to hold on to it. A better mathematician than me could probably come up with the exact odds, but this looks clear enough for me to conclude that Red is a safer bet. (At least, assuming I didn't screw something up.)

And now I can start working on the longer classic puzzle... yeah, don't expect me to be posting about that one any time soon.