Government by Donation

Last week, someone apparently decided to set up a GoFundMe page for people to donate money towards paying for President Trump's proposed border wall. As of this writing, it's at about $16.5 million out of a $1 billion goal.

I do want to start by pointing out that there are several complaints about this donation project that I don't agree with. As nice as it is to play games with math showing how long it will take to reach their goal or predict that the rate of donations will drop, it's probably not that easy to make guesses about the rate of donations. And while it's tempting to point out how much else we could get other than political stunts with this money, the average donation is right around $50, and all of us are probably guilty at one point or another of using sums like that in a less than ideal fashion.

What I do want to ask is: do we really want our government to work this way? 

The one detail I will use from the math problem I discounted above is that even if the donation rate doubles, it would take months to reach the goal - and years to get the actual amount we'd need for the wall. Even if we decide that's okay for this project, there are a number of things our government needs a bit more urgently than that. We did, after all, learn all the way back before we even had a Constitution that a federal government that can only ask for money can't even pay its debts, much less do anything else.

And making a habit of this also means tying our government's ability to pay for things to the wealth level of the portion of society that favors a particular project or the strength of the viral marketing campaign they can come up with. Both of those possibilities seem like they could make our country very undemocratic if they end badly.

Even if we decide we'll only do it for some limited projects, that still offers an option for people to do end runs around the democratic process by offering conditional donations. There are ways to avoid that, but we'd need to be careful about how we set it up. Otherwise, we'd see the government forced to choose between accepting money for projects that the people don't want or turning down money that it generally needs more of. 

Book Journal: Throne of Glass

One of the nice things about NaNoWriMo is that spending lots of time around plenty of other people who like books is very helpful in getting new book recommendations... I learned about this fantasy series at one of the writing events last month and have just gotten around to actually reading it. (Which means I've finished the first four books in the series and am working on more. I think there are seven books in all.)

It's quite good. A lot of these novels have problems creating any kind of serious internal conflicts for the heroines and heroes; given that I occasionally thought this one was going a bit overboard on the self-doubt and regret, it definitely doesn't have that problem.

Without getting too much into spoilers (read as: you may want to stop here if you haven't read it yet, but don't have to), I also liked the way it brought the main characters into the central conflict of the story. There's a great evil that's hunting for magical artifacts it can use in its nefarious plan... and it's already mostly done with that stage, forcing the main characters to scramble a bit if they want to cause any disruption to the plan at all, and putting them at a serious disadvantage for almost all of what I've read so far.

However, the antagonists still make mistakes too, and the protagonists do a great job of using those to their advantage. It ends up making both sides seem very realistically flawed while still allowing everyone to have their chance to do some very clever scheming and plotting.

Also (major spoiler alert) there's plenty of magical fireworks once one gets far enough into the series, so if what you really want is to read about an entire castle getting melted by a magical blast of fire, you can have that too.

Meritocracy's Weakness

Earlier this month, right after the former President Bush's death, two editorials showed up in the New York Times which drew a fair bit of criticism for their views of what makes the ruling class in the US (such as it is) worthy of their positions in society.

I happen to agree with a lot of the criticism of the first one - I think it ignores a lot of the flaws of the old guard and doesn't acknowledge that sometimes people appear more trustworthy because they look more like us - but it still brings up a useful point, and the second one develops that point further. Specifically, they point out that an elite class ostensibly based on merit alone can still share many of the flaws of an aristocracy based on inheritance and privilege.

It's a useful reminder that designing a system with a specific goal in mind (in this case, to ensure that those at the top of our society are there because they deserve it) is often more difficult than it looks and vulnerable to any number of shortfalls and unintended consequences. In our case, we've hidden or willfully ignored many of the ways in which unearned advantages affect people's results even as we tried to focus on merit alone. And we're not willing to fix it, because the steps we'd need to take to even find the problem look like steps backward to any number of people.

I think the conclusion the second article ends on - that our elites should be aware of how they got there, rather than suffering from any illusions about their place in society - is a good one, even if I think it still paints an overly bright picture of the past. It certainly is a useful detail to remember as we keep trying to find a new way forward.

Strawman Arguments

There have been a lot of interesting stories lately about little things like how the left hates "Baby It's Cold Outside".

To me, one of the interesting things is that I first heard about these things from the conservative people I know calling people stupid for complaining about them, rather than from the liberal people I know actually complaining about them. Particularly given that I have far more liberal friends than conservative ones, it's hard to believe that anything which is a common complaint on the left wouldn't come from the former group first. It almost makes me question how much the average liberal actually believes such things.

Sarcasm aside, it's worth taking a closer look at how and why we complain about small numbers of people complaining about random things. Sometimes it is appropriate to call attention to such things and make a point about poor arguments and extreme views. (If you're hoping I'm about to clarify whether or not I think the liberal complaints in question actually are that sort of extreme view, I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint you, though.) However, there's a dangerously fine line between doing it in a way that limits the scope to just the extremists in question and doing it in a way that tries to make everyone on the other side look like the extremists in question. I get quite tired of people complaining about how nasty the other side's discourse is and then doing things like the latter that simply add more fuel to the fire.

It's also worth looking at what we want done about the problems we complain about. Personally, I don't care if someone decides not to listen to a song or the like, whether their reasons are good or bad. That goes double if it's only a small number of people. Even if they start encouraging other people to do the same, it doesn't affect me much unless I care about their opinions of me. If they asked me point blank for my opinion, I suppose I might tell them, depending on how much I wanted to deal with an argument. But I wouldn't bother a whole lot more than that; their views simply aren't going to affect me much. It irritates me that many of the people I know that claim to be about personal freedom aren't willing to extend the same courtesy to their opponents.

Democrats and Populism

Usually it's the conservative columnists at the NYT that have me shaking my head inside the first paragraph or two... but there are rare occasions where it happens with the liberal ones as well. And this piece about what the Democrats should focus on to win in 2020 is one of them.

The short version is that I don't like populists, and I don't want the Democrats to focus as much on populism as this editorial calls for.

To be fair, there's a version of populism that I can support, and the graphs in that article about who earns more support as the defender of the working class illustrate why. A lot of these policies are popular because they legitimately do support the working class and are things we should be doing. To that extent, I definitely do want the Democrats to focus on their support for such things and make them a central part of the message.

However, I also think there's a version of populism that focuses too much on economic anxiety and ignores social issues - this was the major problem I had with Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primaries. I can understand that not everyone cares about the latter, but given that the Democrats are going to get blasted by the other side for their social views regardless of how extreme they are, I don't think it's worth compromising on those views in order to avoid distractions.

That isn't the worst of it, though, because there's also the sort of populism that amounts to telling people what they want to hear regardless of its practicality. In particular, there probably are some moderate swing voters out there that want both lower taxes and more government benefits; we've seen that phenomenon before in the Republican, rural sections of the country voting for candidates that promise to cut taxes even as they're voting for Medicare expansions and other liberal policies. The problem is that any sort of promise we make telling them they can have both is almost certainly false - in the Democrats' case, it'd be because we'd feel that we had to raise taxes to support programs (as opposed to the Republicans cutting programs to support their tax cuts whether or not they said they were going to keep the programs), but that would still be the sort of lie that is all too common in politics.

Election Forecasting Accuracy

FiveThirtyEight isn't the only news source I know of that tries to check themselves for errors and talk about why they got things wrong (or why they got them right), but they do tend to be more comprehensive about it than most places are. The specific example which I'm writing about is this very detailed article from last week about their midterm forecasts.

One of the most counter-intuitive things I got from that article is that their probabilistic forecasts mean that they actually don't want to be right all of the time. For example, out of all the races they say are fifty-fifty splits, they'd want to get half of them right - if they were capable of picking the winner more often than that, it would imply that the odds weren't actually even to begin with. So they're actually worried if they're calling too many of the winners accurately, which is a rather amusing problem to have.

They also offered a number of concerns they might want to take a harder look at as they go on to forecast the 2020 election. One of them was underestimating the effects that stronger partisanship was going to have, which is rather depressing but certainly not surprising. The other big one was them discounting polls conducted by partisan groups a bit too much in some cases. It will be interesting to see how they change their forecasts going forward... although we might not figure out how useful any changes are until it's time for the 2020 postmortem.

And then I probably have to admit that one of my favorite parts was the closing portion, which I will just quote rather than trying to paraphrase:

We actually do think there’s enough of a track record now to show that our method basically “works.”... We probably won’t be as accurate-slash-lucky in 2020 as we were in 2018, especially in the primaries, which are always kind of a mess. But our way of covering elections is a good way to cover them, and it’s here to stay.

I'm looking forward to plenty more great reporting from them.

Game review: Epic Battle Fantasy 5

So one of the reasons I didn't restart the blog last week was because I was taking a bit of a break from writing every day... and then the other reason is that I was busy playing Epic Battle Fantasy 5 (which came out on December 1st) every chance I got.

Just to be honest about how much I was playing it - that came out to about 40 hours of play time, or about 5 hours per day from the 1st to the 8th.

I've played previous games in the Epic Battle Fantasy series and enjoyed them quite a bit (my review for 4 is here), so this doesn't come as much of a surprise to me. It's a fairly traditional RPG along the lines of games like Final Fantasy - your party of characters has to go on an adventure to save the world, with plenty of monsters to kill, treasure to find, and cool weapons and armors to use. And these games have always rewarded scouring every inch for hidden secrets and talking to everyone to get clues about other secret areas and quests, so there's quite a bit to do. Or you can just read all the jokes, memes, and RPG parodies that the story comes up with, which as far as I can tell is "all of them"; it's utterly hilarious.

EBF 5 also allows for a number of different play styles - if you want to just breeze through the game to read all of the story and humor, then you can set the difficulty to zero and do that. Or you can play on Epic difficulty and work on mastering the battle system in order to get every single achievement, if you're more interested in a challenge. And you can change between the two easily, since the difficulty can be changed at any time.

I should mention that I do have one or two complaints, though. One is that right around the 15 or 20 hour mark, simply playing through the game starts to feel a bit like a grind. You don't usually need to grind for gold or EXP in the EBF games, even on the higher difficulties, and this one is no exception. But you do still have to deal with the monsters that are blocking your path through each of the areas, and those battles, plus the extra ones you have to go through in order to get all the treasure, start to get a little old after a while.

The other complaint is less of a complaint and more of an acknowledgement that not everyone is going to find every part of this funny. Personally, I find the mockery the author directs at feminism and political correctness (of which there is very little, to be fair) to be more grating than funny, for example. There are actually options now to tone down some of the mature humor and impractical armor designs for the female characters, but not everything is affected by that.

Overall, I greatly enjoy this game's humor, and I enjoy the challenge of trying to get every achievement I can. I highly recommend it.

NaNoWriMo aftermath

Another flawless victory!

... Well, kind of. I made it to 50,000 words, although I probably could have done it sooner if I hadn't gotten distracted at the very end of the month. I'm fine with it, though; this is part of the reason why I try and build up a little bit extra during the month.

As expected, while I did try to keep the blog going, that basically stopped by the middle of the month. Normal posts will resume tomorrow - one every weekday, same as I was doing before November. (The explanation for why this post is being made now instead of me doing this sometime last week will also be coming tomorrow.)

Tallying Votes

Okay, I lied, we will see more political posts this month.

Specifically, it's interesting to note that the midterm election results aren't final yet. To a certain extent, this always happens; there are always some races that are decided by rather thin margins or races where late-arriving absentee or provisional ballots might make a difference. Of course, since Florida is the site for this particular dispute, and because the races in question are some of the statewide races, this instance is drawing a bit more attention than usual. Florida's close elections and history with election recounts almost certainly aren't helping; problems that might go unnoticed in an election that's not close or in a district with no history of problems aren't going to escape notice there.

These debates do tend to irritate me a bit more than most, because they highlight the ways in which most sides here don't care about anything except victory. You'd think we would all easily agree on the notions that we want every legitimate vote to be counted, and that we want to check in detail for any errors in the process that might be preventing the result from reflecting the will of the people. For that matter, there's also the point that some elections will simply be close, and while additional checks are wise in that scenario, we can't allow them to leave the result in doubt for months or more. Balancing those two can be tricky, but shouldn't be impossible.

In practice, though, whoever is ahead when the recounts start almost inevitably seems to complain that there should be no need for the extra trouble, regardless of how close the results are, what the laws say about mandatory recounts, or what the possible sources of error in the initial count were. Whoever is behind when they end almost inevitably seems to complain that there's an obvious need to triple-check (or quadruple-check, or more) in order to remove every possible error, regardless of how long that will take or how wide the final margin ends up being. I'm sure most of the people involved in these disputes legitimately think that delaying the results of an election or not checking as much as necessary for errors are both problems we shouldn't tolerate. However, how they balance those two concerns always seems to benefit their side, regardless of the facts of the situation.

And if a recount or late-arriving votes actually ends up changing the winner, well, then we all get to deal with conspiracy theory bullshit about those votes being manufactured out of thin air, regardless of the evidence for or against that claim. I suppose I shouldn't be too pessimistic (there aren't claims like that being made in Arizona, for example, despite the post Election Day swing back towards Sinema), but the sort of claims that are coming out of some people about Florida don't exactly build faith in humanity here.

In the end, I don't think it will matter all that much; the recounts are unlikely to change the election result. I'm looking forward to not having to worry about this particular debate any more, but I also think there's a lesson here about tribalism that we should try not to lose sight of.

Demon's Temple excerpt: The Temple's Traps

As she stepped forward, a red light suddenly flickered just beyond their own light’s reach. It quickly spread to cover a circle on the floor, with five points around the edge of the circle glowing particularly strongly - and then lines started to connect those five points to form a pentagram.

“Another trap!” Latoya shouted unnecessarily as the two of them dashed forward. The five glowing points were crystals embedded in the floor, and their light revealed more runes and markings in the floor around the lines that already were glowing right before the red light spread to fill them as well.

Before either of the two could get close enough to do anything, there was a bright flash of red light. When it faded, the light had vanished from the circle, and an armored skeleton armed with a rusty longsword was standing in the center of the circle facing the two girls. It made a hissing noise as it raised its weapon. As if that wasn’t bad enough, red light started to flicker in the crystals again.

“You break the circle before it summons more, I’ll take the skeleton!” Miriel shouted. She pulled her machete, sheath and all, off of her belt, and braced the sheath with her left hand as she charged forward, trying to push the skeleton away from the circle.

The skeleton just raised its sword to block. Miriel punched forward with both arms as she approached, drawing out a loud clang as its sword met Miriel’s machete, and the skeleton’s sword arm shattered from the impact. It slowed Miriel enough, though, that she only managed to lightly bump against the skeleton’s breastplate without moving it at all. It clattered at her as she fell back a pace, and then punched out with its remaining arm; Miriel attempted to parry, but missed and was hit in the stomach. She stumbled backward into the wall of the corridor, gasping for breath.

“Stop playing around and just take its head off or something!” Latoya shouted at her as she crouched behind the skeleton. She hammered away at one of the crystals in the circle, knocking it free, but that only caused the red light spreading through the circle to flicker briefly; Latoya cursed and glanced back and forth at the other crystals. The skeleton paid her no heed, though; it walked closer to Miriel.

“Working - it!” Miriel coughed out. She dodged to the right as the skeleton punched out again; its blow missed her head and cracked one of the stones in the wall behind her. Miriel still didn’t bother with drawing her machete. She just spun to the left and used the sheathed weapon to hammer at the skeleton’s shoulder. The brittle bone shattered, and the skeleton’s other arm fell off.

The skeleton hissed again, but couldn’t do much more than that. Miriel reared back and aimed for its head this time. As the skull went bouncing away, the headless, armless corpse fell apart in a clatter of bone and metal. At almost exactly the same time, there was a loud sizzling noise as the red light competing with their lantern abruptly vanished.

Midterm Election Results

Okay, there is going to be one political post this month, instead of entirely game and creative writing posts.

The one major thing that strikes me about the midterm elections is that I'm not sure there is any kind of coherent narrative here. The losses suffered by some of the Democrats further out to the left and some of the Republicans that tied themselves enthusiastically to President Trump suggests that both parties should be looking to the center - but then there's a number of moderate Democrats that did unexpectedly poorly, some farther left Democrats that did well, and a number of extreme Republicans that managed to survive. I'm sure eventually someone will come up with data trying to show which narrative is stronger overall, but I think the message from this one is never going to be anything other than a mixed verdict overall. Which probably means it's going to be even easier for people to read whatever they want into this one, of course.

I think this election does also suggest that we can expect close elections to continue. There are a lot of Democrats who are hoping that finding a candidate less disliked than Clinton will cure all of their ills, but the defeat of some fairly high quality Democrats this time around suggests that partisanship is just going to keep getting stronger. I worry that this also means each party will stop worrying about margins and just take any victory as a mandate to do everything they want, rather than trying to find the compromises that our system makes necessary. If that does happen, we're going to see even more gridlock than we already have.

Try as I might, I don't think I see any of this getting better soon. Demographic change might help the Democrats a decade or two from now, and the Republicans might hope that the demographic groups they're currently ignoring will be won over by economic gains, but I don't think either is going to make much of a change in the near future. I guess we'll get to see whether tribalism and partisanship rip us apart before some kind of change helps us reunify - and while I certainly am interested in the results of that experiment, the drastic nature of the consequences for failure worries me quite a bit.

Game review: Epic Battle Fantasy 4

Epic Battle Fantasy 4 is a comedy RPG that uses plenty of memes and parodies to tell a story about a bunch of murderous hobos that go out to save the world (again).

For the most part, it is a fairly conventional RPG. A cult has stolen a powerful artifact, and the heroes have to chase them down in an attempt to recover it before Bad Things happen. Each of the characters has different spells, weapon skills, and equipment that they can use to fight their way through the monsters in various parts of the world on their way to recover the artifact, protect the others in the set, and stop the cult.

Technically this is a spoiler, but they naturally fail, falling just short in their efforts to reach and protect all of the other artifacts in the set and arriving at the final boss arena just in time to watch the final boss get summoned. I say technically because realistically, this game parodies RPG tropes so much that it's blindingly obvious that things are going to work out that way for much of the game. The humor relies on a lot of self-referential jokes (there is no fourth wall here) and culture or gaming related parodies, and while one or two of them felt like an unfair shot to me, the whole thing still manages to be very amusing.

It does manage to be a legitimately challenging RPG, in addition to a parody, though. Particularly if you turn the difficulty up a bit - then one is forced to rely on the right combinations of debuffs and buffs to survive long enough to win. There is a level system that increases your base stats and a skill point system which can be used to buy new skills, whether out of a character specific pool or out of a shared skill pool. There's a surprising amount of creativity in deciding which skills to level first and which skills from the shared pool should go to each character; it's easily one of the more fun parts of the game.

Overall, I highly recommend it.

Demon's Temple excerpt: Investigation Begins

Alex just shrugged. “None of the hotels or tour companies said much about missing people when I asked. Didn’t really surprise me, either; even if they knew, they wouldn’t want to spread rumors for fear of affecting business. I can pretty easily ask about tours in different areas and see if there are any areas around the city they recommend we avoid, but that could indicate a lot of things, including completely mundane threats.”

“Do we know where the missing people were going or where the patrols were supposed to go?” Latoya asked, looking back and forth between Sam and Miriel.

“Not really,” Sam answered. “At least not that I’ve learned yet.”

“The patrols didn’t know which direction would be best, so they were working in a spiral pattern,” Miriel answered. “Unfortunately they were counting a bit too much on the patrols getting word out even if they got ambushed, so they were a bit lax about routine check-ins. We know an approximate minimum distance from the city for our threat and that’s about it.”

“I’ll make sure not to ask about anything too close to the city then,” Alex said.

“I hate to be too suspicious,” Sam jumped in, “but that note about mundane threats does make me want to ask if we’ve ruled out some kind of non-magical threat. I vaguely recall something about terrorism in this country, for example.”

Miriel shook her head. “Most of them have disarmed now. And while I suppose it’s possible, it’s hard to imagine the mundane ambush that could have taken out a dozen soldiers without a single one of them getting any word out, particularly after the first patrol went missing.”

“True,” Sam admitted.

“We’ll keep it in mind, of course,” Miriel continued. “But I think we probably are looking at something supernatural. No idea what effect it could have been yet, though…”

“I don’t suppose they actually could have been spirited away to hell?” Latoya asked half-humorously.

“I think we’d be able to see the magic required to open or close a planar portal from here even if they were halfway into Brazil,” Miriel replied dryly. “We might not detect an active portal, but active portals to hell tend to be hard to miss what with all the demons that typically start coming out of them and wreaking havoc.”

“Don’t think they’d have needed our help figuring out what was wrong if we had one of those, no,” Latoya grinned. “They might have needed to ask for help blasting the entire area to ruins until whatever was making the portal went away, but that’s not what we do.”

All four of them chuckled a little.

Game review: Heat Signature

Heat Signature is, at its core, a stealth game about breaking into spaceships and doing various unpleasant things to the people aboard them. Or it can be an action game about breaking into spaceships and doing unpleasant things to the people aboard them, if you'd rather.

The story in this one is minimal, at best - there's a bit of backstory to the whole thing, and an ultimate conclusion you're working towards, but the two combined make up about 15 minutes. If you read particularly slowly. It's a bit weird to me that I like it anyway, since I typically prefer elaborate stories, but then I can make plenty of amusing stories of my own in describing how I managed to pull off the latest impossible missions.

On that note, the core of the game is the missions you take; these can involve assassinating someone, stealing something, rescuing someone, or capturing someone. You can use whatever combination of guns, teleporters, grenade launchers, hacking devices, or other gadgets you prefer to break through the locked doors in each ship preventing you from getting to your target. Each ship is also guarded by crew with various gadgets of their own, who will be all too happy to shoot you and throw your dying body out the airlock if they see you.

What makes it incredibly fun is the creativity this fosters. With a clever combination of gadgets, it's possible to bust through an entire ship without even being seen - or one could just take a pile of guns and ammo and kill everything on that same ship. Finding clever solutions to some of the more difficult missions is a great way to feel accomplished... although there are also moments when a stupid misclick costs one quite a bit, too. I highly recommend it.

NaNoWriMo update

So the good news is that I've gotten a lot of the preparatory work that I wanted done by now, and I still have two more days in which to do more of it.

The bad news is that none of that prep work has been any of the blog posts that I had intended to write so that I could keep my blog online during November. (In line with every other November tradition, I've apparently decided that now was exactly the right time for me to catch up on old webcomics, old games, and everything else that is going to take up all of my spare free time which I should be using on writing or writing prep.)

I'm still going to try to keep it up, but I'm going to go to a Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule. The first two will almost certainly be game reviews, and the last will be a novel excerpt. At least that's the plan... we'll see how many of the posts I need for that plan actually get written in the next two days, and how many I'm willing to write during the month.

Book Journal: Ghost Fleet

There's a damn good reason this book has been on basically every flag officer reading list I've seen since it was published. Thinking about the extent to which events might actually turn out this way in a real war - and how to either stop it from doing so or helping it along, depending on which side one represents - is arguably the more important part of many military officers' jobs.

It certainly helps that the book makes a strong effort to track actual trends in technology and politics. There are even footnotes to point out the bits and pieces of tech that are either real or inspired by real things. The book is ultimately near-future science fiction, so there's still some stuff in here that is not real (yet, at least), but there's a lot that is. Its use of military terminology - at least as it applies to my own knowledge - uses almost all of the correct terms but still rings a bit false. Overall, it paints a very convincing picture of what its war might look like.

The characterization is... interesting, I suppose. On one hand, it's nice to have characters with interesting quirks, and to make sure that there's no clear division between good guys and bad guys, both of which the book does. However, there doesn't seem to be a great deal of effort spent on character development; while there are some complicated characters, the book doesn't spend time on how or why they've changed. It's kind of understandable, given the time the book spends on talking about technology instead, but it still seems like a flaw. Given that, I'm not sure how much appeal the book will have to people who are neither in the military nor interested in cutting edge tech. It's a serviceable war story, but those aren't exactly rare.

I certainly enjoyed it a lot, though.

Migration Patterns

The title of this article on the caravan of migrants heading towards the southern border of the US rather neatly sums up one of the things I was thinking about the issue: "This Isn’t the First Migrant Caravan to Approach the U.S. What Happened to the Last One?"

After all, if this caravan really is supposed to be a threat to our sovereignty, or anything similarly hyperbolic, then how did we survive the last one?

As tempting as it is to just let that rhetorical question stand on its own, it's probably best if we look at the details a bit more closely. What happened to previous caravans suggests that only a fraction of this one will actually end up at the US border (although a fraction of a caravan this size will still be somewhere around two thousand people). Most of those people will request asylum, and a majority of the people that start that process will get past the first step. At that point, most of them will end up living and working in the US while they wait for their cases to work their way through immigration courts. Most of those asylum seekers will eventually be denied; I don't have particularly good data about how many of those will try to stay in the US anyway, but even if all of them did, it wouldn't increase the number of illegal immigrants entering in a given year by very much.

It's possible that this iteration will be slightly different - maybe the larger size of this group just means there are more people that won't qualify for asylum, so there'll be a smaller percentage that gets past that first step, for one example - but I doubt it'll be significantly different.

I can see how someone looking at that chain of events might be a little bit annoyed, given that it clearly offers chances for people to stay here longer than our laws permit, but I also don't think the opposition I've seen to the caravan has really thought through what our options are to stop that from happening. For better or for worse, our law does have provisions for people to request asylum, and most of the people in previous examples have followed those provisions. Finding technicalities and excuses to deny them entry, or forcing them to go through additional hardships while they're in the US, or any other method that preserves that option to request assistance on paper while removing that option in practice, just makes us look like we're not willing to keep our promises. Or makes us look like we're not brave enough to admit that we actually want less immigration, period.

Of course, we could just change the law so that people like this can't request asylum, or make the standards for granting asylum stricter (as Attorney General Sessions did). It's not quite that simple, though... that does basically say that we want to allow fewer immigrants (legal or not) and provide aid to fewer people. There are plenty of people in the US who don't want that to be the message we send to the rest of the world, and who are quite willing to both advocate for and vote based on that opinion.

Gender Identity Posts

I'm actually not going to bother writing much of a post today. Instead, here are some quotes from some good articles about one particular controversy that came up a few days ago.

New York Times - Trump Cannot Define Away My Existence

"Redefining us won’t make us go away. It won’t restore your world to its precious, boring binary — which, I hate to tell you, never existed in the first place.
All it will do is make people suffer."

New York Times - Intersex, and Erased Again

"I’ve experienced firsthand the consequences of the gender binary in what’s often a non-binary world. It isn’t good for anyone. Certainly not trans people, but also not for a population that’s larger than many think — and that has spent years trying to convince people that our bodies are good enough as they are."

Scientific American - Visualizing Sex as a Spectrum

"Biological sex, on the other hand, appears to leave less room for debate. You either have two X chromosomes or an X and a Y; ovaries or testes; a vagina or a penis. Regardless of how an individual ends up identifying, they are assigned to one sex or the other at birth based on these binary sets of characteristics. But of course, sex is not that simple either."

Shared Values and Goals

By now, I'm sure everyone has seen some variation of the debate about whether or not it's possible to be friends with someone you disagree with politically. Usually, I see the right wing downplaying some of the statements and positions from their side as not worth ending friendships over while the left wing points out that they have no intention of being friends with people that don't care about their basic human rights. (There is a version where the right wing types refuse to be friends with anti-American traitors or something like that, but it's less common.)

Inasmuch as I think either side is always right, I tend to side with the idea that people can and will break friendships over politics... but that's largely because I think that people can and will break friendships for almost any reason whether it's good or bad. "I don't want to" is a perfectly valid reason not to be friends with someone, frankly. 

That said, I also don't think people are under any obligation to break friendships because of politics. I think there will often be situations in which maintaining the friendship is extremely difficult (and possibly not worth the trouble), but there will also be situations in which it's possible. There does have to be some level of mutual respect, and ideally some sort of shared values, though.

Let's use healthcare as an example. Depending on how we define the terms, what the two parties want is quite different: one wants the government as far away as possible from the funding for and operations of our healthcare system, the other thinks the government could do a much better job than what we've currently got. From a different perspective, though, what both parties want is the same: a well-funded healthcare system that improves life expectancy and general welfare for the population.

It may or may not always be easy to focus on the similarities, admittedly. There are often going to be disputes about whether one side or the other is being honest with themselves and the other side about the likelihood of their policies actually reaching the stated goals, to provide one example. But if the decision is made to try and maintain the friendship, those similarities can provide a bond to focus on, even if both parties have to avoid talking about their disagreements.

However, there may be circumstances where no shared goals can be found. Most of the examples I can readily think of involve religious values, because I think those change the way we define a good result in ways that may be hard for the other side to understand or agree with, but I'm sure there are other examples. Even then maintaining a friendship isn't impossible, but I'd expect it would be extraordinarily difficult in that case.

Video Evidence

Today's article from the New York Times isn't the first time someone has brought up digital manipulation of videos and the very realistic fake videos that can be created, but that doesn't make it any less worrying.

That said, I'm actually not as worried as one might expect about the prospect of larger numbers of more convincing fake videos. It will require people to be more cautious, basically, because even the most well-made fake videos still have to explain where the video was made and why it was made. These are details that can be checked and used to determine whether a video is real or not, regardless of how real it looks. And frankly, even if we know the person actually was at an interview at the right place and time, asking them what they actually intended to say and which remarks they're willing to stand behind is certainly a thing we can do.

I certainly don't hold out much hope that people will actually do that sort of additional checking, given that we can't even seem to get a handle on existing sources of fake news. However, I don't think fake videos of this type will add that much more damage over what we've already got.

The concern about it being easier for anybody to disavow things they've actually been recorded saying is actually more of a concern for me. There aren't a whole lot of good ways to prove that a recording that's been made actually is real in the face of the subject claiming it isn't. Basically, the only option we'd have is the same as the above - ask them what they're willing to stand behind, and if that answer keeps changing, then that's the best we're going to get as far as figuring out how honest they are.

Online Reliability

Here's yet another article about new and interesting ways to try and stop the spread of fake information online!

... Okay, that might come off as a bit unnecessarily sarcastic. I actually sort of like the points this article makes about how our reputations are supposed to act as a check on the bad information we spread, and how social media and its different norms about reputation and endorsements have made that check less useful. Attempting to correct that by thinking of new ways to force people to put their own reputations on the line and consider what we know about others' reputations is a worthwhile goal, and there certainly are systems that can help us do that if we're willing to use them.

However, this article doesn't really acknowledge the declining trust people have in sources of information outside their own circles. That's the other reason - arguably the bigger reason - why accusations of fake news have become so common, and trying to spread more fact checking isn't going to help with that part unless the organizations controlling it are trusted by both sides. There aren't any organizations I can think of that would fit the bill, unfortunately.

In the end, such a system would almost certainly end up either being exploited by whichever faction made up the majority of its users, chasing acceptability at the expense of ignoring partisan falsehoods, or trying to be honest and complete and becoming hated by one side or the other for rightfully denouncing their lies. I certainly think we should try to have such things - eventually I think we'll figure out how to make one that actually can earn everyone's trust - but it's not going to be quick or easy. 

The Costs of Climate Change

It hardly surprises me that there are a lot of people, in the wake of the IPCC's most recent report on climate change, who are looking for any reason they can find to downplay the information and recommendations. The Wall Street Journal, for example, had an editorial on that topic; I would summarize their position as "we can't do enough to fix the problem, so why should we waste time and money trying?"

There's a quote that I like as far as a response to that goes. I can't claim credit for it myself, and it certainly wasn't originally intended as a contribution to the climate change debate (it's originally from a web comic), but it still fits this situation extremely well:

"Then get started now. 'There is too much to do' is a terrible excuse for doing nothing."

To be entirely fair, there are parts of the WSJ's editorial which lean more towards the idea that the limited effect we can have on climate change isn't worth the large amounts of money we'd need to spend on the effort. Given that, it argues, we should just focus on increasing our economic and technological strength to put ourselves in a better position to deal with the problem once it actually is at a point where we have no choice.

This is a much more defensible point, but in the end I think even it falls short, because it relies too much on the idea that the necessary changes we'll need to make to adjust for climate change will be simpler and easier at some point. I don't think that's a reasonable belief. Some of the research and development might be a bit easier, but rebuilding our entire power and transportation infrastructure is going to be expensive no matter when we choose to do it. And either way, it's going to take time; putting it off for too long seems like a bad idea for exactly the same reason that waiting until one is already at war to build up their military is a bad idea. Even if the changes we need are more expensive than the damage from doing nothing, I think getting ahead of the problem is probably worth that price.

Novel Writing Prep

National Novel Writing Month is coming up yet again!

I am going to try and keep the blog going, even during NaNoWriMo. (Also, as tempting as it might be to count all the words I write in a day towards my count, even if they're on my blog and not my novel, that would definitely be cheating.) I probably will try and post short sections from the novel I'm writing on the blog every week, but we'll see how well I can actually pick out interesting sections to excerpt. I'm also probably going to try and write some game and anime reviews for stuff I've already played or watched now so that I can just use that backlog rather than having to write new stuff during the month, which means there's going to be a lot more of that and a lot less political commentary during November.

The novel I'm writing this year is going to be a fantasy adventure type of story focusing on a group of investigators trying to survive a trap-filled ancient temple. I have a very good idea of the traps and monsters in the temple, but a bit less detail about the actual protagonists, so I've still got a bit of prep work to do before November.

Book Journal: The Honorverse

The only bad thing about a new Honorverse book is that now I have to read some of the previous entries and remind myself what's been going on... actually never mind, that's a good part.

The Honorverse is a science fiction series written by David Weber - it follows the adventures of Captain (at least at first) Honor Harrington of the Royal Manticoran Navy - which is probably best thought of as the British Navy from the age of sail, except in space. Over the course of 19 books (as of the latest release) and three wars spanning 20 years in the setting, she goes from being the captain of a single ship to being one of the most influential admirals in the entire galaxy.

Weber's skill at world building is on full display here; the companion book describing the creation and organization of the Royal Manticoran Navy draws heavily on the wide variety of real world skills that his friends, advisers, and fans of the series possess. Including stuff from the Naval War College's curriculum about the theory behind how navies and fleets are organized (or so it claims). Some people probably don't like the fact that most of his books only ever get to one or maybe two major battles, since they spend so much time on the political maneuvering and background details leading up to those battles, but I like the detailed breakdown of all the events surrounding each battle, myself. There certainly are some unrealistic parts; there isn't any actual science that I'm aware of behind their hyperdrives or a lot of their gravity manipulation, but that's not a problem for me.

One of the other nice details is that there are fairly clear bits and pieces that are inspired by politics and governments in the real world, but it's still rather difficult to pick out anyone who is all good or all bad. There are some science fiction authors I can think of who quite clearly like one side or the other; all their heroes and villains are clearly on the side they like or dislike. A lot of them still write good books, but it's kind of jarring and irritating to read depictions of politicians or activists who are clearly based on the misinterpretations of their opponents. These books generally manage to avoid that fate, as far as I'm concerned.

Which brings me to the reason why this is one of my favorite series of all time, and why I think it's going to remain so for a long time: It's had a significant impact on a lot of things in my real life. Between the degree to which its world building is based on some real political and economic theories, and the extent to which it avoids reducing either side to a complete parody, it certainly feels a lot safer to draw lessons out of this stuff compared to any number of other books. And the depictions of various military leaders are frankly inspiring - and detailed enough in their priorities, outlook, and demeanor to be worth emulating.

Given that, it should come as little surprise that I literally never fail to mention this series if anyone ever asks me for book recommendations.

Game Review: Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet

Yeah, I'm still playing around in Sword Art Online's universe. It's not going to end anytime soon either, since even after stuff like this there's a new season of the anime that just started airing. (Incidentally, having read the light novels, I'm quite certain the new season will be awesome.)

I've never really cared that much about the various Sword Art Online games, admittedly (Fatal Bullet is not the first one they've created). A lot of single player games that attempt to mimic massively multiplayer games end up with a lot of useless "chat" or "friend list" features that serve no actual purpose, and force the player to deal with threats balanced for a 4 person party... with one actual person and three AI characters that range from stupid to horribly stupid. It would be more understandable if there actually was an option to play with friends, but there usually isn't anything like that.

Which does actually bring me to my first complaint, since Fatal Bullet has indeed lived down to my expectations in that regard. I would love to experiment with different builds more, and try to work with new people and come up with interesting party setups, but it mostly just feels kind of pointless when the only customization the rest of my party can manage is me selecting from a predefined list. The only good thing that can be said for this part is that I knew what I was getting myself into from the beginning, so it softened the blow a bit.

Luckily, it does turn out that there's a really good character customization system built into the game. It's not just a matter of setting height, weight, eye color, or even the more precise options for just about every physical trait imaginable - there's also a system for modifying (okay, mostly just recoloring, but still) a lot of the gear items as well. My character could look quite different from someone else's even if we had the exact same items equipped; that's always a nice option to have.

As for the gameplay itself... It's at least okay. A lot of the reviews I read compared it to Phantasy Star Online 2 (mostly in the context of "you should probably play this instead", to be fair) and I have to say the comparison is quite apt both in good and bad respects. On the negative side, there's a lot of time spent farming and grinding to find the exact gear you actually want to use, and the story doesn't feel especially elaborate or compelling (yet, at least). But, wandering through the wilderness shooting everything that moves does manage to be fun most of the time, and there's enough interest in exploring the various areas and finding secrets to keep me from dropping it. Also this game actually lets the player jump across gaps, unlike PSO.

In the end, I think I have to agree with the reviews that say it's probably not worth it unless one is either an SAO fan, or the game is on sale - ideally both. Anyone that liked PSO or PSO2 should like this as well, but the SAO brand probably doesn't add enough to make it worth playing this instead of those games.

Community Solutions

There was a very nice op-ed in the NYT today about community organizations working together to solve various problems in their communities. It hits a lot of points that I see a lot when we're looking at successful interventions: careful analysis of data and results, focusing on specific goals and methods designed to reach them, and accepting incremental gains and imperfect solutions rather than trying to focus on the one perfect solution that will fix everything if we can actually get it to work.

Which raises an interesting question: Why aren't more people doing this?

Part of the problem is simple awareness. People can't try to use solutions they're not aware of - which is why seeing this sort of article is always a rather nice thing. Some of it is uncertainty. Trying an unfamiliar solution is always a risk, since it's sometimes difficult to to know whether or not it will work better than what one is already doing.

One of the bigger problems, though, is resources. Most places don't have the money to throw at every possible solution in the hopes that one of them will work. Some of them don't have the money they need to address basic services; paying even more than that to help fix the problems that causes is not likely to happen anytime soon. Most liberals, of course, look at that problem and ask why we're not having the government fund programs like this - but, of course, there's a bit of an ongoing debate about whether the government should take things like this on.

Believe it or not, I think the concerns about spending government money on this are partially valid. Part of the reason programs like this work are because they are community driven programs; it's entirely reasonable to worry that a program run by the federal government would not be able to connect with the necessary people in the community. And there's a legitimate desire to make sure the government is spending its money on useful things that makes turning the government into a funding source with almost no control (or oversight) a problematic idea.

In the end, though, I think those problems can be overcome. It would take leadership and an electorate that was willing to trust each other and their government a bit more to even build a system where we could pay for these things without demanding too much control, certainly. But I think that's a more likely possibility than assuming that private charities and donors will step up to cover the cost of these things on a wider scale than we're currently doing.

Apocalyptic Language

One of the common complaints about political discourse is that everything is too extreme, too hostile, and so on. It really isn't surprising that it's quite a bit harder to compromise when both sides regard the other as an existential threat.

The problem is that both sides, even as they're wishing for civility and compromise, seem to have no problem with being uncivil if they're sufficiently provoked. Frankly, hard as it may seem to believe, that's probably even a good thing; asking people not to react strongly regardless of the provocation is neither fair nor helpful. And probably not possible either.

However, if we're deciding that some degree of incivility is acceptable, we do have to come up with some kind of standard for when it's justified, and we have to apply that standard fairly to both sides. A significant part of the current problem is that both sides might as well be determining whether any particular expression is justified or not based on who's engaging in it - everything their side does is acceptable, and everything the other side does is not. Even when someone agrees that their side has done something wrong, the unacceptable things they can find from their own side (assuming they're even looking for them) are the exceptions and the extremists that nobody listens to, whereas the unacceptable things they find from the other side (which they are generally looking for quite closely) are evidence that the other side really is just that vile.

That tribalism both gives people an endless stream of reasons to keep turning the intensity up (since their opponents are constantly being unjustifiably uncivil) and convinces them not to back down themselves (since anything that might be called uncivil on their side is justifiable). Trying to call other people out for not having good standards quickly becomes problematic, since it's basically inevitable that the target of such criticism will seize on any ways in which their attacker has been uncivil and use them in turn to argue that their attacker isn't helping either. Those debates are rarely helpful; it's not easy to analyze every decision and debate point that's being made to determine who's less justified.

In the end, the only solution I see is for everyone to be very careful about their own critical thinking skills, even if that is a bit of an unsatisfying answer given how easy that is to say and how hard it is to do. There are times when apocalyptic language is called for, but we should all be very careful about when and why we do that.

Detecting Lies

One of the points that's come up in the debate about whether Judge Kavanaugh should be confirmed or not is the question of how well we can or can't tell whether he or Dr. Ford are lying based on their temperaments.

The short answer is no, we can't. Picking apart verifiable facts is an excellent way to catch liars at it; looking for tells in their behavior largely isn't. This article lays out several reasons for that, ranging from the fact that what people look for is quite subjective to the fact that we don't have any good way to check whether our past judgments have been accurate or not. Even those people whose jobs rely on detecting lies aren't always good at being able to tell who's lying without being able to check other facts.

That conclusion goes against what most people believe about lying and spotting liars, at least as far as I know. If nothing else, a lot of the stories we tell ourselves are filled with the wise investigators and clever gamblers who can see right through their fellow people. Even if I'd be willing to agree that some of those people might exist, most of us aren't like that, and I suspect people who are that perceptive are rarer than we'd all prefer.

The conclusion does not, however, go against my personal experience - because I've been caught out by a liar or two in my life, and reflecting on those moments definitely does make me think about how difficult it was to spot them at it. It was incredibly tricky to figure out even after I had reasons to be suspicious and was watching the people in question as carefully as I knew how. And in the end, it still wasn't any kind of insight into what they looked or acted like when they were lying that got them caught - it was the facts about what they were doing versus what they were saying that got me to realize I was still being lied to. So I have no problem agreeing with the various studies that suggest catching liars on temperament alone is an extremely hard thing to do.

Game review: Arcade Spirits (Part 1)

So this time I'm actually reviewing a game that's not out for the general public yet. This is possible because I supported the game's creator on Patreon, so I got access to the closed beta test. Yes, this probably means I'm a bit predisposed to like the game, if for no other reason than that I'd hate for something I supported that way to turn out bad.

That's also why this is marked as part 1. I haven't played through the full game yet, and couldn't even if I had devoted more time to trying out the beta given that the full game doesn't exist yet. So there will be another review of this game at some point in the future once I've had the chance to actually play the full version.

Everything I've seen so far is positive, though. Arcade Spirits is a visual novel, set in a fictional alternate reality in which the video game crash in the 80's never happened, which means that gaming and arcades are much more of a mainstream pursuit than they are in the world we actually live in. It's partly romantic comedy and partly a rather serious drama about chasing one's dreams. It also features an alignment system of sorts (which players of some RPG computer games may recognize) - your choices give you points towards a variety of character traits, as well as relationship points with the other characters, and as the story proceeds, that starts to have an impact on how everyone reacts to the main character.

The biggest single point in this game's favor, of course, is Stefan Gagne's writing. He's responsible for writing a lot of the game's story, and I've liked everything he's written ever since I first read one of his stories. The worlds he's built are interesting and amusing by turns, and the characters he puts in them have very realistic strengths and weaknesses - he always avoids giving his characters the idiot ball for no reason, but also doesn't have any boring invincible heroes that I can remember offhand. And the dialogue choices are written in such a way that you can tell what type of person you're going to be, but it's not obvious to the point of parody. That's a common flaw with alignment systems like this game's, but this one avoids it to at least some extent.

One of the other interesting details, though, is the character customization options and how they affect the romantic options. Or rather - how they don't. I haven't actually reached any of those story lines yet, but from what I understand the player is free to romance whoever they like, regardless of what gender they picked for their character. That's not common, and it's kind of refreshing to see it treated as utterly normal and unremarkable.

As for the rest of it, I guess we'll see. Everything I've seen makes me think I'll like this one, though, and I strongly recommend at least giving the demo a look.

Game Review: Shantae and the Pirate's Curse

One of the problems with this review is that I'd like to open with a concise summary, and phrasing it in a way that doesn't leave an overly negative impression is going to be difficult. Shantae and the Pirate's Curse was fun to play, and I think it was worth what I paid for it, but it did benefit a bit from some low expectations on my part.

The game's main character (Shantae, of course) is a dancer (okay) who is also a half-genie (?) whose primary weapon is whipping enemies with her hair (!?)... and that's not even in the top five most ridiculous things this game comes up with. There are a lot of comedies that would lose me very quickly by being this ridiculously stupid, but this game managed to consistently land on the right side of the line between hilariously stupid and just being stupid. Probably by virtue of sheer audacity; it's pretty much impossible to expect anything serious out of this one. 

As a platforming game, it's acceptable. Certainly it's not much of a challenge given that I've been playing games like Celeste recently, but it had enough tricky boss fights and platforming to keep me from getting too bored and managed to avoid being difficult for the wrong reasons (e.g. control issues). The exploration aspects probably would have been a bit more interesting if I hadn't already known where everything was (my introduction to the series was watching other people play it), but there's not much I can do about that at this point, nor is it an actual problem with the game.

In the end, as I mentioned at the beginning - I enjoyed the time I spent playing, and I think I got my money's worth. But there's also nothing here that makes this game exceptional, at least as far as I'm concerned. If you're looking for a quick, not too challenging, and amusingly stupid 2D platformer, it'll do. But if you're looking for something more engaging, this game probably isn't what you're looking for.

League of Legends Worlds 2018

The League of Legends World Championships start today! And unlike some other things that are called the world championships (I'm looking at you, World Series) this is actually a worldwide affair, with teams coming from 14 different regions, some of which represent multiple nations.

My decision about which team to back is pretty strongly based on country loyalty. Which basically means I want the US and Japanese teams to do well and don't want the Chinese and Russian teams to succeed. Then again, it also has something to do with cheering for the underdogs and not wanting some of the people who have always been on top to keep winning - which is why I'd prefer if Korea didn't do great despite generally liking them.

... Of course, I'm not likely to get much of what I want. Japan is doing better than average at an international tournament if they actually manage to win a game, and that's not likely to change this year. The US teams typically just barely fail to accomplish anything useful - which means Cloud 9's victory in the very first game played at Worlds is likely just getting all their fans worked up before we ultimately choke. And the Koreans have never done poorly, ever; only the Chinese teams have managed to take any tournaments off of them and that only recently. I suppose at least the Russians are probably going to lose, so at least I get a little of what I want.

Unfortunately I also don't get to watch in person, since tickets for these events sold out in minutes. I suppose I can hope to find someone selling their tickets (likely at a significant mark-up) but I might have to just watch from home.

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.