The Future of Abortion

Because I got in an abortion debate recently, I've been thinking a bit more than usual about where this particular social problem is going to go from here.

Here's the thing: I actually can see a world in the future in which abortion is less common than it is now. Perhaps even extremely rare - and I wouldn't mind that one bit.

But that's a world in which abortion has become much less necessary, not necessarily one in which we've convinced people not to choose it. It's a world in which people have easy access to all the tools they need to control when they reproduce, easy access to medical care to reduce the risks associated with pregnancy, and easy access to social support to ensure their children won't be born into grinding poverty.

Perhaps, if I want to look even farther in the future, it's a world in which medical technology has advanced to the point where we can easily transfer a fetus between people or to an artificial incubator - but we're nowhere near that point, unfortunately.

We're not going to get to that world by trying to shame people into not having abortions. Frankly, I don't think that could work without policing women's miscarriages to a ridiculous degree; between that and the women that will start dying trying to induce them on their own, I think restrictions painful enough to work are basically guaranteed to trigger a backlash eventually. Also, we know from a fair bit of research that bans are much less effective than better sex education and increased access to contraceptives at reducing the number of abortions. Even if we ignore that and try to make some combination of bans and social pressure work, though, it would get us no closer to a world in which we actually care enough about women to address the problems that cause them to get abortions.

Addressing those problems will have to be done separately; whether or not we have restrictions on abortion will only affect how people react to those problems without changing their severity. This is something that the pro-choice side tends to be much better at than the pro-life side, frankly. While there are some pro-life organizations that tell themselves they care about addressing those problems, there's always the unspoken detail that the primary goal is reducing abortion. And if that's the primary goal, actually helping to reduce the problem becomes a whole lot less important once the fetus is close enough to term or once the baby is born. Unfortunately, that's exactly what we see out of all too many people - just enough help to stop the abortion and not enough to actually fix the problems. I can understand why someone with limited resources would want to focus their efforts on stopping as many abortions as possible... but if that causes them to spread their resources out enough that they can't actually provide a useful amount of assistance in the longer term, then they're just making things worse in the end.

The worst part, of course, is that many of those problems may not be completely solvable in the long term, and certainly won't be corrected quickly in any event. It's nice to imagine that we can solve poverty, and certainly it's something we should work towards, but in the short term we're still going to have to decide how to deal with its effects on things like abortion, and we should be prepared for whatever we choose to be the status quo for quite some time. 

I'm quite certain that it's not nearly so clear-cut as saying that a woman always has to sacrifice her autonomy, in some cases her health, and in rare cases her life for a fetus.

Limiting Social Media Use

Various calls to sharply reduce social media use are fairly common, such as this one in the New York Times that argues that we're not using our smartphones the way we should, or this similar piece (about the same author) in the Wall Street Journal

I'm not necessarily the best person to defend social media use, since in many ways I already use it in a fairly limited way. I avoid posting things as they happen, since I prefer to take some time to think about what I want to post and the message it sends. I check it more often than I probably should, but tend to focus on random humor sites rather than checking every minor detail of the news or my social media feeds. So I can understand why a lot of these recommendations get made, and I agree with a lot of them.

That said, I feel like a lot of the arguments in those pieces could fairly be applied to any technology more advanced than a simple calculator. For someone like me whose primary sources of leisure are gaming or watching videos about gaming, the notion that I should back off of all of it just to figure out if I actually want to be doing all this seems a bit off. It's a plausible experiment, but not something that's unique to a technological obsession.

Similar concerns apply to work productivity. I can see how focusing on good and useful communication is important... but for someone who works with people around the world on a regular basis, asking to do that without technological assistance simply isn't going to happen.

So while a lot of it is good and useful advice, I think it's important not to get too wrapped up in the notion that technology is ruining our lives.

Political Backgrounds and Aptitude

One of the major benefits to online news is that it's very easy to create interesting interactive visual presentations; today's example is the New York Times with a little graph about what sort of experience and qualifications each of our current members of Congress have.

The write-up they've attached to their graph notes a number of interesting ways in which the makeup of Congress doesn't at all match the makeup of the country as a whole, and offers some speculation on the potential consequences of that. Most of it has to do with problems they might not understand very well (because very few of the people with experience with them go on to become politicians) or ways in which Congress might be more willing to aggressively deal with issues because they disproportionately affect the areas of society that most representatives come from.

While some of it is plausible, though, I don't think I agree with all of it. And I think it's worth considering exactly what we want the job of one of our representatives to be - because depending on how we define those responsibilities, it's entirely natural that not everyone will want to deal with them.

For example, while I do think more people with scientific or technical backgrounds in Congress would be good for the country, it doesn't surprise me that the sort of person that likes a job in those fields might not like being a politician. And part of the ideal of picking people to represent us is that we pick some of our best for leadership roles, so one would expect at least some deviations from the mean in that group.

To be entirely clear, I think we do still have a problem as far as our pipeline for political jobs is concerned, and I think we should be more willing to look for talent in a wider pool than we currently do. But I think we need to be careful when we're defining what success in that endeavor looks like.

Book Journal: Safehold Series

... It surprised me quite a lot when I went to check past posts that I've never written one about David Weber's Safehold series before. I guess I'll go ahead and fix that now.

While this series has some interesting science fiction roots, it's a lot closer to historical fiction than his Honorverse series. Most of the action is set within a world that has no access to electricity or really any technology more advanced than sailing ships and crude guns. (At least - at first, and with some exceptions.) So the fighting and politics in this series are a decidedly different affair from the space opera battles that are the centerpiece of the Honorverse.

The attention that Weber pays to the politics and economics that lead up to those battles is no different, though. As with many of the Honorverse books, a lot of the Safehold books talk about a lot of political maneuvering and military strategy, get through one major battle, and then close with the implications of that battle. So they can get a bit dense and slow if you're looking for straight-up military action. Weber does do a great job with the world building (as always), though, and he does a great job of getting us to care about the fate of the characters involved, so I've always liked it anyway.

Interestingly, he also does a good job (at least in my opinion) of making it seem like things are always hovering on a knife's edge for the protagonists, constantly keeping them in danger of being defeated, even when they don't actually lose very often. Under most circumstances, I guess it probably should inspire worries about boring invincible heroes when they lose as rarely as these people do, but I've never really felt that way.

The inspiration for this particular post was (naturally) my reading of the latest book in the series, which for a few different reasons is actually a rather different book than many of its predecessors. Spoilers for the series (and that latest book) follow, so if you haven't read any of it yet (which I recommend you do if you haven't), you've been warned.

The big difference for this latest book (Through Firey Trials) is that with the major military campaigns in the previous books largely concluded, it's a lot more general in its coverage of events than any of them were. All of the books (particularly the later ones) tend to drift across several years of in-universe time, but I don't believe any of them covered fifteen years in one go. That made this one feel like an entire book's worth of filler, frankly; while I'm happy that it moved the story all the way forward to the next major point, I could have wished for something a bit more interesting.

Game review: Super Smash Bros Ultimate

Of course I bought this game. I doubt there's a single Nintendo fan in the world that isn't going to, even if many of them are going to complain.

It definitely has its problematic points. The fact that you start with 8 characters out of the 70+ to unlock means that everything you do for the first hour or two triggers a new challenger to fight and unlock, which actually gets a bit old after the third time you're interrupted in the middle of practicing or just randomly messing around.

I also can't decide whether I think the story mode and the associated spirits to unlock and manage are an interesting way to make Smash characters and battles that feel inspired by other games or just an irritating slog through a bunch of too-difficult gimmicky crap. Finding cool spirits is definitely a fun way to reminisce about some of the awesome games I've played in the past... but managing them in order to get to the point where I can actually win some of the harder battles is just a pain. And there's very little actual story to enjoy after the initial cutscene, either, which means I probably land on the "don't like" side of the scale for the story mode.

And as with every other Smash game, it really shines best with friends, which is a bit of a problem for someone like me who doesn't often invite other people to my apartment. To say nothing of the fact that I'm terrible at it, just as with every other fighting game I've tried.

For all the negativity above, though... it's still Smash, and it's still awesome to blast people away with Robin's spells, cut them to ribbons with Link's sword, or just punch them with Mario. For someone that grew up playing the original Smash Bros game, including literally everything from past games down to the stages themselves was a masterstroke. It's a blatant play on everyone's nostalgia, but that doesn't make it any less effective.

I don't know that I'd unabashedly recommend this one unless you know you'll have regular chances to play with friends. But even with its flaws, any Nintendo fan is going to find more than enough to enjoy in seeing so much of Nintendo's history in a single game.

Standing Up in the Moment

Recently I've run across a couple admonishments on Facebook that women who are being harassed or otherwise believe they might be in danger need to remember that there's a lot they can do to stand up for themselves, usually attached to a number of recommendations about what to do in that situation.

The weird thing for me is that I'm largely in agreement with that sort of project. Not everyone knows or has practiced how to respond in stressful or disturbing situations, and brainstorming or practicing responses ahead of time is a great way to help people who may be less comfortable standing up for themselves become more willing to do so. And having more people willing and able to do that is a major step forward in our efforts as a society to solve these problems.

But there is a major problem, and that is that the posts I've seen are telling people that this is something they have to do, or that they're in the wrong if they don't. To be blunt, that sort of blame directed at people for not taking those actions or for not standing up for themselves in the moment is exactly the sort of reason why anyone ever had to worry about victim blaming.

The problem is that there are still plenty of good reasons for people not to take the risk. There are some creepers who are just looking for a victim and will back off in the face of resistance... but there are some who grow more belligerent when they're confronted. There are plenty of store employees and police officers who will take the side of someone standing up for themselves... but there are still plenty who will regard them as the problem for complaining or fighting back. Even if we can know for certain that things will turn out all right in the end, that's not going to make the short term consequences any less significant... or survivable, for some people.

If someone comes to me and says they don't know what to do or want to try to be more assertive, I'm completely in support of that. But if they come to me to complain that something happened and they felt their best choice out of the bad options presented was to disengage as quickly as possible and without making a fuss, I'm not going to blame them for that. And if I don't know whether they're asking for advice or looking for sympathy, I'm going to ask if they actually need advice before I assume that they must not have known what to do.

I definitely am not going to withhold my sympathy until they've satisfied me that they did everything they could have to stand up for themselves - because even if I could tell for certain that they were too cowardly to stand up for themselves, that wouldn't make them any less deserving of sympathy.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Turnout

There are few things that frustrate me more than tribal politics and gridlock getting in the way of legitimate, important priorities for our nation. Given that improving our system of voting and ensuring that everyone who wants to vote can vote is high on my list of those priorities, it shouldn't be any surprise that editorials like this one from the Wall Street Journal irritate me quite a bit.

As far as I can tell, their primary complaint is that trying to mimic parts of California's voting system for the entire country is going to increase Democratic power across the entire country. They point out a few things about California's system (such as automatic registration, automatic distribution of mail-in ballots, and people being allowed to collect ballots for others) and complain that states should be allowed to decide for themselves how much or how little of that to mimic.

About the only bit of it that I agree with is the concerns about voter harvesting; I agree that it creates too many opportunities for voter fraud and intimidation. Of course, that's also the part that's not in the nationwide bill the House Democrats have put up, so its relevance to those changes is rather low.

Everything else, frankly, comes off as a cheap attempt to poison the well regarding a number of very useful ways to improve voter turnout for everyone by associating them with the biggest Democratic stronghold in the country. The actual arguments against it mostly amount to "it makes voter fraud easier" (which we know because California is still catching those bad automatic registrations) and "states should be able to decide" (which ignores the legitimate interest the federal government has in promoting the health of the entire country's election system). As reasons why we shouldn't take steps to improve turnout, they fall quite badly short; the benefits for the health of our democracy outweighs arguments like those.

Game review: Mages of Mystralia

Mages of Mystralia is so far one of the rare games to actually make it off of my Steam wish list and into my inventory after a year or two. Most of them either make it off my wish list sooner than that, or slowly languish until I forget why I added them in the first place and eventually remove them.

It's good and bad. I don't know if I can unreservedly recommend it, but there are definitely some enjoyable parts, and I'm sure some people will like those enough to bother with it. On the other hand, the slower parts will definitely drive some people away.

The most enjoyable part is the spell design system. Experimenting with the different modifiers and triggers to find out what they do is a lot of fun, and using them to create massively powerful spells that fill the entire screen with homing fireballs is even more fun.

This also, however, leads to the biggest problem: You start the game without any of the really interesting options, and are pretty much guaranteed to spend at least two thirds of the game spamming the same one or two combat spells in an effort to reach the puzzles that allow you to unlock those legitimately interesting options.

The story is a little bit of both. On one hand, the store page plays up the fact that it was written by Ed Greenwood; I enjoyed his work on many Forgotten Realms novels quite a bit, and he mostly doesn't disappoint here either. It's basically the classic sort of fantasy story about a young protagonist who slowly learns that they're the chosen hero and/or have some kind of special power - which is a classic for a reason.

On the other hand, there are one or two moments where it wasn't clearly explained what the next step was supposed to be, and yet the main character seemed to luckily stumble on the right idea anyway, which feels like a bit of an unlikely coincidence. It also ended at something that feels like the halfway point of a bigger story, and I don't see any evidence of a planned sequel.

Overall, it was definitely worth what I paid for it and fun enough for me to recommend it, but I do have to attach a few caveats to that since there are some flaws.

Legislative Gridlock

The ongoing train wreck in British politics that is their effort to decide how they're going to split from the European Union doesn't affect me personally much, but I've still been following it with some interest. A parliamentary system such as theirs doesn't usually develop the sort of gridlock which is paralyzing it now.

For anyone that's not familiar with it, normally a prime minister whose proposals lost by a wide margin (i.e. what just happened to the Brexit deal) would expect to lose a vote of no confidence shortly afterward. The entire point is that the prime minister is supposed to command majority support in the parliament, after all. In this case, though, Mrs. May's Conservative Party doesn't particularly like the deal in question, but is still willing to support her as prime minister over other alternatives, and so the normal consequences aren't happening.

Which leaves the British government unable to function in the normal way, and without any other obvious means to either get back to that normal or find a new standard. Not reaching any deal at all by the deadline is a real possibility, as is a deal passing with mostly the opposition parties' support instead of the majority parties. It depends on exactly how much those opposition parties want to avoid the no deal scenario, how much they're willing to help out Mrs. May's government, and what they can get in exchange for their support.

I'm calling those answers "probably a lot", "not much at all", and "who knows; making deals with the opposition isn't that common", which isn't as helpful in actually predicting the future as we might wish. Hopefully they'll still manage to avoid the worst case scenario.

Democratic Coalitions

FiveThirtyEight continues to do an awesome job with their coverage of US elections; they just recently posted several articles analyzing the candidates for the Democratic presidential primary.

... It's all still quite speculative, of course, and as the article warns, there's a lot of stuff in it that will probably look a bit questionable in retrospect. But for an analysis conducted a full year and a half away from the nomination, I think it's decent. It's a pretty good way to think about what the primary candidates have to do and how they could go about doing it, if nothing else - and it's a chance for the Democrats to start thinking about which groups they belong to and what coalitions they'd accept.

I find myself mostly in agreement with the idea that the "mainstream" or "most likely" candidates (e.g. Biden and Sanders) are probably weaker than they look, although I don't know if I really think that means one of the others will take it instead, given how low the name recognition is for everyone else. Then again, there's plenty of time for that to change.

Political Shifts

I do feel a bit weird commenting on internal debates among conservatives, since it feels like that shouldn't really be any of my business (given that I'm not particularly conservative). However, the various ways that some conservatives are responding to Tucker Carlson's recent comments (plus, of course, the monologue itself) offers not just some interesting thoughts on how conservatism might develop from here, but also some food for thought on what's going to happen to liberals in response.

Part of that is because there are parts of Carlson's piece (in between ridiculous misrepresentations of Democrats' priorities, some faulty logic about how we ended up here, and a frankly horrifying vision of how we should fix it) that I am generally able to agree with regarding the degree to which government should be trying to affect our society. If this is the sort of thing we can expect more of from prominent conservatives, there's a world in which they end up drifting to the left as far as government intervention in the economy is concerned. Possibly to the point of actually teaming up with the sort of liberal that cares more about reforming the economy than they do about social justice, although that's a bit of a stretch.

That would, though, leave a lot of mainstream left and right wing people out of that group, and if they wanted to exert any useful opposing force, they might find themselves teaming up as well. That would most likely involve the liberals abandoning some of their efforts to exert control over the economy (perhaps by reasoning that social pressure on companies to do the right thing could make up for the lack of government involvement), and involve the conservatives giving up on some of their opposition to socially liberal ideas.

Basically, we'd shift from a horizontal split on the Nolan Chart to a vertical split. Still a two-party system, but different coalitions and splits between them.

Now, do I think that sort of shift is actually likely anytime soon? Nope.

In the end, I think a lot of conservatives, even if they agree that government policies need to be designed to address various social problems, will still mostly argue that government involvement is what screwed things up in the first place, and simply removing government from as much of our lives as possible will fix the problem eventually. Carlson's piece might convince them to think more carefully about the limited ways in which they are willing to use the government, but I don't think it's going to get them to start turning to government policy so much that they can find common ground with socialists. Similar things can be said about the liberals here; even if they continue to use free market arguments regarding the economic dominance of big cities and pressure on corporate decisions, I don't think we're going to see them abandoning the idea that the government has a major role to play and drifting towards libertarianism.

But I think it's possible enough to speculate on, even if it is quite unlikely to happen soon.

Changing Capitalism

One of the random posts that went through my news feed with the new year was a nice little thing about what we'd remove from the world if we could change one thing. A fairly innocuous and unsurprising post for this time of year, all things considered... except for some of the answers, of course.

A number of people used it as a nice way to talk about things that were holding them back and things they'd like to do differently in the future. However, a number of people also used it to make statements about some significant things they'd like to remove from the world - greed, capitalism, money, or oil were all named as things by some of them.

Which immediately attracted my attention, because I actually don't agree with the notion at all, particularly as it applies to the specific resources which are often sources of conflict.

Here's the thing: Many of these things, particularly the actual resources, have provided great benefits. There are entire regions of the world that would not be easily habitable without gas-fired heating and electrical systems, for example. Capitalism itself turns out to be an okay way to allocate resources and a better way to self-correct that allocation when something isn't useful or desired than most other economic systems.

The caveat, of course, is that the above doesn't mean these things are an unalloyed good. Over-committing to one specific solution or helpful resource can put us in a bad situation when it comes time to change to a better one or try to address problems with what we have, for example. And while there are a lot of ways in which capitalism is self-correcting, there are a lot of circumstances in which it isn't (monopolies and limited definitions of value being the most prominent examples to me); those situations can't be fixed by purely capitalist solutions. That would be why the vast majority of successful societies have some form of mixed economy instead of pure capitalism, and believing our economic and societal structures are flawless and shouldn't be (or even can't be) improved further seems like unjustified confidence verging on stupidity to me.

But we should be aware of what we've already got and do the best we can to ensure our changes are actually improvements. That's not easy to do (or to agree on), but it's worth the effort.

Townspeople and Politicians

The Wall Street Journal ran an article earlier this week about how Congressman Will Hurd (R-TX) managed to win reelection in one of the closest victories the Republicans managed in 2018. There's a lot of interesting stuff in that article; a lot of it makes me question whether very many other Republicans will actually be willing to lean towards the center in the same way. I think the answer is "not many"... but that's not actually the point I want to focus on.

The one detail I am going to focus on is from this quote:

One lesson of such tours is that Capitol Hill is a bubble. At a taco joint in conservative Castroville, Mr. Hurd asks a breakfast group for their thoughts on the Saudi killing of Jamal Khashoggi, and the table gets pretty quiet. That subject is remote compared with a future bypass on U.S. Route 90. “What people talk about in D.C. is different from what people talk about here,” Mr. Hurd says in the car afterward. “Man, Khashoggi has dominated Washington, D.C., for a month. None of them brought it up.”

While I can see the point the author's going for, that reads a whole lot to me like "these people are too deep into their own bubble to realize or care about what's going on in the wider world". It's kind of ironic that they have exactly the same problem, in that sense, that we're complaining about everyone in Washington DC having.

To be fair, that doesn't rule out the idea that both groups are stuck in their own bubbles - and politicians not capable of understanding what their constituents are going through is definitely a worse problem to have than the reverse. But it's important to remember that the voters can have that problem too, particularly if we want to have politicians that can help lead the country rather than just blindly following the currents of public opinion.

Speedrunning for Charity

Every time I can, I make a point of watching the events that Games Done Quick puts on. Usually I only remember to look for it after the event is already mostly over, so I'm doing fairly well to have caught on relatively early in the week this time.

... But I'm getting ahead of myself. For anyone that doesn't know, Games Done Quick is a charity organization which raises money by gathering volunteers to play games as fast as they possibly can, stream it and their commentary online for people to watch, and using various incentives to solicit donations from the viewers. They're doing this 24/7 for the entire week, and the donations are going to benefit the Prevent Cancer Foundation.

Also, "as fast as possible" usually turns out to be downright ridiculous; watching these people complete games that took me tens of hours to complete normally in two or three is always amusing to watch. It's best when I actually am familiar with the game they're playing, but even unfamiliar games are fun to watch (and sometimes that ends with me deciding to play it myself).

If you like gaming, or like seeing people spend a ridiculous amount of time and effort to do fun and interesting things in new ways, it's probably worth a look. And if you can, it's definitely worth a donation.

New Year's Post: 2019

Happy (belated) New Year!

I've never really been one for resolutions, so I'm not really going to list any here. I like to make sure the goals I set are achievable, and most resolutions I've seen aren't. I suppose I could try to fix that by making sure I set achievable goals - there are some things I would like to do, certainly - but I'd rather just be more private about them.

Anyway, I'll just get back to listening to some of  the music I found over my break - including some from NHK's Kohaku Uta Gassen (紅白歌合戦), which I am actually kind of embarrassed I didn't know about earlier given how much I like Japanese music. Definitely worth listening to some of it for anyone else who likes Japanese music!