Book Journal: Sword Art Online

... Because of course watching the anime itself or any of the movies isn't enough.

There's a weird thing that happens whenever I try to read the Japanese light novels that some of my favorite animes are based on: I get to the end of the portions that have been translated, get impatient with waiting for more translated volumes to be released, and decide that I am once again going to try to read these things in Japanese.

It's interesting to try, and it's good practice, and in the three months I had with the Japanese version of one of the light novels before the English translation was released, I made it about halfway through the prologue. My comprehension was good for the parts I did reach, but I do need to work a bit on how long that takes me. (The English version of the novel took me less than three hours, of course. For the whole thing.)

But either way. The light novels are just as good as the anime is (which is both praise and criticism, since there are good and bad things about the anime). I've rarely noticed any problems with material being removed or reorganized, unlike with many books that have been made into movies or TV shows in the US. Pacing tends to be kind of odd with them, though - the number of anime episodes that typically comes out of a light novel doesn't match well with the typical number of episodes in a season, which leads to breaks between seasons in weird places, but I don't usually mind that much.

Selecting Candidates

The various writers and editors at FiveThirtyEight will occasionally post some of the group chats they do on various topics. I don't always pay that much attention, because they can be unfocused and hard to read, but some of them are quite good.

Such as this one about the Democratic Party changing their rules about how superdelegates are involved in nominating presidential candidates. There's a decent breakdown of both sides' position and reasoning in there: the faction in favor of the rule change wants to make sure that the superdelegates can't just override the voters, whereas the faction against it wants to prevent the party elites from losing too much of the power they would need to prevent the Democrats from running off a cliff.

One of the detailed arguments against the rule change that I found particularly convincing was the point that this doesn't actually prevent the superdelegates from overriding the voters' wishes. If anything, by specifically defining situations in which they don't get a say and situations in which they do, it might cause some superdelegates to believe that when they do get to vote that they don't have to pay attention to anything except their own preferences.

On the other hand, the idea that ultimately any choice other than trusting the voters' judgment and relying on them to pick the winner is kind of missing the point is rather convincing as well. And there were a lot of interesting questions about how much the results of past elections would have changed if the new rules had been in place earlier; it doesn't look like they'd have changed much.

In the end, while I share some concerns from the chat about whether this makes the Democrats more likely to do something incredibly weird or stupid with their nomination, I don't think this is going to result in too many disruptions to their ability to nominate good candidates. I suppose we'll have to wait until 2020 to see how that turns out.

Skills and Job Requirements

There was an interesting article in the New York Times a few days ago about how sometimes the people with the most talent for a particular field actually make the worst teachers of that subject. For me, it's an interesting opening into thinking about what skills are actually required for various jobs - a topic I suspect isn't as intuitive as it might seem at first glance.

The example provided of teachers is a good place to start, since while they obviously require knowledge of the field they are teaching, they also require clear communication skills and the ability to understand their students. The fact that not every physicist, computer scientist, or other expert necessarily needs those skills is what creates the problem from the editorial.

Leaders and managers in a wide variety of fields are similar to that example, if not more so: many require more skill with communication, planning, and listening than they do in the actual subject matter that the people they lead use. In practice, of course, knowledge of their field is helpful enough that it's a requirement as well, but many leaders run into trouble when they focus on that skill to the detriment of their ability to communicate and lead.

And just about any job requires the ability to work well with others in a number of different ways. This is why it's possible to get fired for being racist, sexist, or just generally hard to get along with; if your bosses can't have you work together with coworkers without risking work-damaging drama, they may choose to get rid of the person causing the drama.

Remembering John McCain

As most people reading this will probably know by now, Senator John McCain died this past Saturday.

As far as I can tell, just about everyone is finding some things to praise him for and some things to criticize about his legacy. They're not the same things, depending on the ideology of the source in question, but that's hardly unexpected. There is, in fact, quite a lot that can be said about him, both good and bad, and to be honest I have no real desire to rehash all of it here. Both the NYT and the WSJ have a number of interesting pieces about him if anyone reading this is looking for something more detailed. I, personally, will leave it at this:

Even with the flaws he had, I can think of plenty of reasons to respect what he managed to accomplish, and I think the Senate and the US will be worse off now that he's gone.

Fair winds and following seas to him and his family. The rest of us have the watch, and will have to do the best we can.

Depressing Positive Stories

There's a lot of social media stories out there about inspiring ways in which people overcome challenges, whether that's finding new jobs, raising money to deal with critical expenses, or donating various valuable things to coworkers in need. It's an inspiring example of how people can make the world better, right?

Unfortunately, a lot of these stories end up being kind of depressing, because they leave many people asking why that level of effort was necessary in order to solve a problem that could be much more easily fixed a different way. That's the topic of the blog post I found which made me want to write about this.

My focus is on a slightly different detail than trying to establish which problems are the responsibility of society as a whole or government to solve, though. To me, one of the most significant points to come out of these stories is that the solutions which the people in them manage to find and use aren't the sort of things that will work for everyone. 

Not everyone has the time to come up with detailed pictures and write-ups to accompany their GoFundMe campaign, particularly not when they're also battling illness - and even those that do have to rely at least a little bit on luck, since it's not like there's a consistently applied standard for what goes viral. And, indeed, something like 90% of all of those campaigns fail - so do we really want to rely on something with that level of success to ensure everyone can pay for medical care?

There was another story about Domino's paying $5,000 to fix potholes in the city of Milwaukee as part of an advertising campaign. Which is certainly nice, but the city of Milwaukee has a public works budget right around $140 million. I don't think relying on private businesses and organizations to make up all of that money is going to happen anytime soon, assuming we even could find sufficient reasons to persuade them to do so.

Or how about the story of the California man that handed out resumes instead of panhandling and got tons of job offers? Well, what do we think would happen if every panhandler was handing out resumes as well? What used to be an example of ingenuity would become routine, and handing out resumes by the side of the road would almost certainly become no more successful than any other means of job hunting - with the caveat that a level of effort not previously considered necessary would now be required.

Worse yet, these stories contribute to the same attribution errors that routinely interfere with our ability to determine what truly contributes to success and failure and what level of effort is reasonable to expect out of people. The story about the superintendent who painted one of his schools over the summer is a great example, and the blog post I originally saw quite clearly explains that a senior administrator spending his time on that job should not be considered normal or required. A superintendent who chooses to do their actual job instead of something like painting shouldn't feel like they've failed. Neither should someone who has been putting a good level of effort into their job hunt without success feel like they've failed because they didn't try something truly unusual, nor should someone who has no vacation days to give to their pregnant or sick coworkers because they actually wanted to use the benefit that comes with their job feel like they've done something wrong - and yet these stories promote a world in which all of these people have.

We can do a better job - as a country and as a society - of finding ways that will actually work to solve these problems. Making a big deal out of specific individual examples that aren't generally applicable isn't going to help us get there. It'll just give us a reason to believe that we only need to support people if they're putting in a superhuman effort already. I'd much rather have a world in which we don't demand that people meet an unreasonable standard before we help them.

Book Journal: Arpeggio of Blue Steel

This week I'm trying to continue with some graphic novels I was reading a while back. I mostly stopped reading them because it was a lot harder to find the most recent manga in the series once I left Japan, but finally had the chance to pick up some of the once I'd missed when I took a trip over there.

Arpeggio of Blue Steel is a science fiction manga in which humanity finds itself beset by strange enemies, the Fleet of Fog - so named because they basically sailed out of the mist one day with ships outwardly similar to those humanity had lost in previous wars but armed with weapons well beyond anything humans possessed. As far as I know, most of the series is about humans trying to find a way to finally defeat the Fog... well, that's how it starts, but it quickly develops quite a few interesting plot lines about everyone trying to figure out what's going on, since clearly not even the Fog itself and its sentient ships know very much about what's happening.

If nothing else, it does remind me that I should probably be spending more effort practicing my Japanese. I was never as good at reading it as I really wanted to be (the difference between how long it takes me to read English books and Japanese books is rather excessive), but even with that in mind, it felt harder to manage than I remember it being.

A related problem is that I've never been able to tell whether the stories with particularly convoluted plots should be as incomprehensible as they are when I'm also trying to figure out the language. For all I know, there's a detail that slipped past me because I skimmed over the wrong word which would make the whole thing easier to understand. It makes me very cautious about passing judgment on the series, since my lack of understanding could easily be my own fault.

All of that said, I really do enjoy the series. There's a limit to how bad it can be when you have World War II cruisers and battleships blasting away at each other with plasma weapons and gravity weapons, and I don't actually mind seeing the submarines do things that are flatly impossible by any known laws of physics. And when I do feel like digging though the Japanese dialogue in detail, there's a lot of interesting plot points about the mysteries of the Fog's appearance and what even they don't know about themselves.

Hunting for an Explanation

Apparently there's a campaign underway in some of the more prosperous counties in Maryland to stop expanding the light rail system further out from Baltimore - or even to close existing stations and limit where it operates.

Given that I've basically always relied as much as possible on mass transit and as little as possible on car ownership, I can't think of a single reason that's even remotely sensible to do anything like that. I suppose if the system was operating at a total loss and needed to save money, it might make sense, but even then I'd be spending a lot of time asking whether there are improvements that might help it make more money first.

... And as it turns out, the reason these people have decided to oppose the light rail is because they think it increases crime in their area. Never mind that half of the anecdotes they muster don't show that the criminals they're talking about used the light rail to travel in or out of the region, or that the police department's data doesn't agree that the areas around the light rail have the most drug use and crime. They keep taking videos of the criminals they do find, and clearly we can tell from the number of videos they post that the problem is extensive! (Yes, I'm being sarcastic.)

Apparently none of them ever learned what confirmation bias is, given that they are so clearly falling victim to it in such an obvious way. They would do better to find ways to explain the police data that doesn't agree with their point, rather than point at the limited examples they can find as an excuse to ignore that data.

Media Standards

There's a long list of complaints that much of the right wing has with the mainstream media; editorials like this one from the Wall Street Journal complaining about (the rest of) the media are only a relatively minor part of those complaints. Still, examples like this one are excellent for illustrating why I don't usually like such complaints, whether or not I agree a mistake was actually made by the media source they're criticizing.

One of those problems I see is that many such complaints assume that only a dedicated partisan liberal could want to attack the points the other side is making. Yes, it is certainly possible that all of the news organizations that published editorials about the value of a free press are doing it just to attack President Trump. It's also possible, though, that they actually believe the values they're promoting, and don't care who might or might not disagree with those values. Or they could be entirely reasonable people responding to unjustified attacks, not hopeless partisans launching unjustified attacks of their own. 

I suppose the author would probably say that they're trying since, the author follows that up with a list of economic indicators which he believes the mainstream media is ignoring in their rush to paint President Trump as incompetent. That, though, leads me to my second problem: such complaints rarely set out any consistent standard that both sides can follow. I say that because I could just as easily say the same about this list or about many other efforts to praise the current economy; there are details that never seem to get mentioned in their lists even as they accuse the other side of cherry picking. While it's amusing to watch the right go from proclaiming that the official numbers don't tell the whole story to holding up those same numbers as evidence of greatness (and watching the left go from complaining about cherry picking and inconsistent standards to finding whatever details make the economy look bad), it doesn't give me a great deal of confidence that either side actually cares about following a consistent standard.

That, in turn, makes me question why my side should bother trying to live up to the other side's standards when that inconsistency makes me suspect they'll just change if we do manage to meet them. There is a benefit to having a standard to live up to, and it's important not to dismiss criticism out of hand, but there will also be moments when the right thing to do is to recognize that some criticism can be safely ignored.

Learning from Errors

Fair warning: this is not a particularly positive take on how some Catholics are reacting to the recent release of a grand jury report about yet more sexual abuse cases that were covered up by church leadership.

About the only possible positive interpretation of the notion that many Catholics are more focused on protecting the church itself rather than its members and attacking things that they consider sexual sins that have little or nothing to do with abuse is that we know there are still plenty of Catholics that are reacting in better ways.

For those that are thinking that doubling down on campaigns against homosexuality will help at all... well, I think it's clear they've learned nothing. What would stop any such campaign from running into exactly the same lack of accountability and desire to protect the church's reputation that efforts to deal with pedophiles ran into? Absolutely nothing.

Accusations and Consequences

Given that online mobs and the damage they do to lives and reputations has become a rather important topic for many, I thought it'd be interesting to talk about this example of someone spreading flat-out lies online.

Basically, someone woke up one morning to find that a stranger was spreading completely false stories about her being in an adulterous relationship. And it was a complete stranger; the only interaction they'd had previously was arguing with each other over a news story on social media. It took a while to even find out the real name of the person who'd created the story and longer still to get them to recant it - and even then, most of the sites to which the story had been posted refused to remove it.

It's an interesting lesson in the consequences of telling lies online, if nothing else. It still surprises me how many people don't quite grasp that just because it's easier to get away with anonymously telling lies about people online doesn't make it anywhere near the right thing to do. And it surprises me how many people are willing to believe such things could be true merely because there's a single random anonymous story about someone.

... Of course, I'm sure any number of people would ask about when it's right to believe stories posted online about others' misdeeds, particularly in the wake of a lot of the recent wave of sexual assault allegations. There are, luckily, a fair number of details that differ between this false allegation and the much better founded allegations which most of those people would refer to.

One is that I have no trouble believing one or two people might collaborate on a malicious lie about someone, but I have a harder time believing the same about one or two dozen. And I likewise have a harder time believing that people will attach their real name to the lies in question - which the person in the above story did not and which many other accusers will. That may not help the average person on the street investigate this sort of thing very easily, but then that's why I pay my subscription fees to various news sources so that their reporters can investigate it if something major comes up.

Now, none of that would be sufficient to prove wrongdoing in a court, and I suppose there might be some cases where it led to the wrong conclusion. But that mostly means that I'm not going to join any online mobs; I may try to avoid assuming that allegations must be true, but that doesn't mean I have to assume the people making them are liars either. 

It demands my caution in what consequences I choose to impose on anyone's behavior, but when has that ever not been a good idea?

Anime Review: Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Reflection

I've actually had this movie for a while, but since I recently decided to re-watch it, I figured I'd say a few things about my opinion of it. Surprisingly for a Nanoha movie (since I really like that franchise in general), a lot of what I have to say isn't positive.

The general outline of the movie is largely similar to a lot of other magical girl anime and to previous Nanoha animes: supernatural threat targets main characters and/or everyone around them, requiring the main characters to fight to save everyone. While that's not bad in and of itself, the movie is too similar to the plot of some of the older Nanoha movies to really impress existing fans of the series; if I wanted to watch Nanoha A's again, I'd do so, not get a whole new movie.

If it were something that could appeal to people who weren't already fans of the series, that problem might be disappointing but acceptable. However, I think anyone who didn't already know who all these people are would rapidly end up quite confused by the relationships between all the characters, and the references to previous funny or dramatic moments in the series would go completely past them. In the end, I don't think it'd work for new fans any more than for old ones; they could also get more out of just watching previous entries in the series as well.

It doesn't help that the plot is a bit confusing and unfinished in general. That's somewhat to be expected when you're watching part one of a two-part series, and it's still possible to draw some interesting conclusions about what's probably going on or why these people are doing these things. And watching the main characters struggle to figure it out along with us is part of the fun, certainly... but it'd be nice to actually have the details revealed in a proper conclusion. I suppose the next movie could pick up where this one left off and manage to confirm all of those details and tie everything off in a way that makes everything awesome. But I have a little trouble seeing the next movie as anything other than one long fight scene with lots of awkward flashbacks, and that doesn't seem like a good sign to me.

Mind you, it is still a Nanoha movie. There's lots of cute anime girls throwing absurdly powerful spells back and forth, each major character gets time to show off their most powerful magic, and we get to ask ourselves whether the villains' good intentions justify their actions (well, for some of them, not all). It's not bad when all is said and done. But it's still kind of unsatisfying.

Election Forecasting

Finally, I can start obsessively checking FiveThirtyEight and its election forecasts! They released their specific model for the House elections on Friday. (This may or may not actually be a good thing, since I really shouldn't be obsessing over politics, but oh well.)

One of the things I've always liked about FiveThirtyEight is that they're extremely detailed about explaining where their forecasts come from and how they bring together and weight all the data they use. I see a lot of people that like to complain about election forecasts and polls, stating that they clearly know that such things are wrong, but then can't actually explain where that certainty comes from or how they know what they're seeing is wrong. Or, sometimes, I see people that can explain why they're so confident of their side's chances, but who still end up being overconfident because they haven't realized how limited their information actually is.

FiveThirtyEight hasn't generally had either of those problems. I don't always agree with everything they write, but there's no doubt that they have a superb track record - one would be wise to come with plenty of solid evidence if one thinks they know better than these forecasts.

Book Journal: The Dragon Below

One of the things I've been doing as I prepare to play Dungeons and Dragons in the Eberron campaign setting for the first time in a while is re-read some of the novels I've got which are set in it. In particular, I've been reading the Dragon Below trilogy by Don Bassingthwaite.

Probably the most memorable part of these novels for me, strangely enough, are some of the curses. I still use "Lords of the Host!" (referring to the primary pantheon of good gods in this setting) in place of things like "thank god" or "dear god", a practice which alternately confuses and amuses my non-nerdy friends when they hear it. (Admittedly, it's not unique to this book; "Nine Hells!" is another D&D themed curse from a different setting that I use a lot.) "I swear by the Three Dragons and the Twelve Moons" didn't stick as well as some of the other expressions I can remember, but it's still easily one of the most memorable lines in the entire trilogy for some reason. Not sure why.

As for the rest of the stuff in the book... well, it's a properly dramatic fantasy adventure, with plenty of evil cults trying to restore their gods' power, fighting with each other and with the main characters, and just generally being nasty. There's also a lot of wandering around as the main characters struggle to figure out exactly what the hell is going on, but the story actually does hold together quite well in the end. 

And the combat is excellent; a lot of novels based on Dungeons and Dragons tend to falter a bit on the fact that the mechanics which make for a good experience as part of a tabletop roleplaying game don't always work as well as the basis for a combat scene in a novel. It either makes for awkward combat scenes in which each character takes turns in order, or completely abandons some of the details that limit what normal players can do in combat. These novels generally manage to avoid both of those fates.

Wages and Inflation

I can present all the data I want about how the growth in employee wages hasn't matched increases in productivity, point out how executive compensation has gone up far more than most employees' compensation, or so on... But sometimes a more evocative example is useful.

This Facebook post takes a McDonald's paycheck from 1974 (or so it appears to be, at least; I can't easily verify it), and compares the standards the worker earning it had to meet back then to what we expect our fast food workers to do today. Not content with that, we also look at how much this person would be earning if we adjust for inflation, and the differences in what we can buy today on a minimum wage compared to what was available for purchase in the past.

By any standard, we're paying less for more work compared to the past.

There are, of course, a lot of suggestions for what we should do to fix that. Most of the left is fairly devoted to raising minimum wages in order to fix it; while I largely don't have a problem with this, I can understand how that might have undesirable effects in some areas with a lower cost of living. Unfortunately, waiting for business owners to figure out that they're underpaying their workers doesn't seem like a particularly good solution either.

Stories in Real Life

Half the reason this particular story caught my attention is because I've actually read one or two volumes of the manga it refers to. It's always kind of interesting when the random little things I like start drawing wider attention - in this case, because the comic in question is a decently good view of what it might look like if Japan built and used a true aircraft carrier for the first time since World War II.

Part of the story here has to do with reinforcing the detail that what stories we tell about ourselves and about the other people around us can matter quite a bit. Whether or not this particular one has had a particular effect may be harder to quantify, but it's certainly easy to look at how people are reacting to it and see how it's possible. Sometimes that's not intentional; sometimes, as in this case (given the author's comment about the message he wants to send) it's very intentional.

The other part is my reaction to this specific topic; the reasons why Japan has a self-defense force instead of a military and the implications of that difference have always struck me as quite interesting. I think they're unnecessarily limiting themselves if they avoid having anything too offensively oriented, since in many cases that will mean denying themselves the range they need to defend themselves against some threats. But in the end it's not my decision to make.

Hacking the World

For someone who is ostensibly a computer scientist, I don't actually follow news about things like Def Con all that closely. I'll catch a couple articles (like this one), but I don't go into a great amount of detail about what was done, how it was done, or how we might be able to mitigate the threats.

... Of course, the basic summary is terrifying enough to make an impact even without details. There's a large list of devices which many of us rely on to work that a determined attacker can exploit. About the only defense most of us have is that expending the resources some of these exploits require isn't worth the benefits from compromising our specific devices, and that's not much comfort. Nor does it apply to tricks that take very little time or effort.

In the end, most of us have to rely on keeping our systems updated, reporting problems that come up, and being as careful as possible with the information that can get us in real trouble.

Defining Costs and Benefits

The topic of today's discussion is carbon taxes, whether governments should establish them or not (specifically Canada), and what consequences they can have. With one caveat: We're only going to discuss their effect on whether businesses are willing to invest in things in the countries considering these policies, since that's what today's editorial focuses on.

Okay, I lied. Actually we're going to discuss whether that caveat makes any sense.

One of the common problems I have with the discussion for almost any policy that might impact the economy, whether that's taxes, regulations, subsidies, or any one of a number of other things, is that a lot of people tend to only care about whether that policy will have a good or bad impact on the economy. If it will encourage investment and business growth, it's good, if it won't do those things, it's bad.

The problem I have with this approach is that it ignores the large number of situations in which the policies that deliver the most profits as soon as possible aren't the same as sensible long-term policies. Or situations in which there are serious ethical problems with profit maximizing strategies; child labor and a complete lack of concern for workplace safety might work well in some situations, but have unacceptable consequences in other ways.

What I find most interesting is that many people will make arguments about us not being able to afford things if we're just going further into debt to pay for them and yet not realize that using unsustainable techniques now and relying on our descendants to fix the resulting environmental damage isn't a whole lot different. We can choose to pay more now for sustainable strategies and try to reduce how much damage we'll have to fix later, or we can ignore it and pay even more later to fix all the damage and rush development on sustainable techniques that we'll have no choice to adopt.

Opinions and Perceptions

Oh, now this is quite fascinating.

Apparently there was a study done about whether the actual prevalence of particular opinions matched the perception of a given group about those opinions - that's probably not actually all that unusual, really. But doing that when the given group in question is politicians themselves, and finding that even Democrats tend to overestimate the prevalence of conservative opinions, suggests all sorts of interesting things about why our politicians vote the way they do.

Particularly when all sorts of liberal policies lose consistently despite polling quite well among the electorate. This suggests that's because our politicians literally don't realize how many people actually do like these policies.

It's not a complete answer, and I'm sure that - as usual for most issues - the real truth is more complicated than that. But it's still a very interesting data point.

Objective Standards

I said yesterday I wasn't interested in commenting on the free speech questions coming out of Alex Jones' recent eviction from multiple social media platforms. It may have been more accurate to say I wasn't interested in doing so right then.

Specifically, I'm interested in discussing what standards we're going to use when we do decide that it's time to stop giving someone a platform. As it happens, there's an editorial in the New York Times that argues the companies involved here didn't use the right one.

I'll get one thing out of the way: I actually do agree that the social media platforms probably didn't use the right standard here. I can see how one would correctly accuse Jones of engaging in hate speech, but I would rather have seen the discussion focus on the fact that just about everything he says ranges from merely false to absurdly false, rather than reprising the debate about hate speech yet again.

That said, I think the author of that editorial is either not aware of or not admitting to the degree to which tribalism has poisoned our institutions. I don't think even an actual determination from a court that Jones was guilty of criminal libel would be taken as an objective statement against Jones by anyone determined to defend him; there's no way at all that any process run by the companies themselves would escape accusations of bias, whether they were based on legal principles or not. They certainly get a lot of that nowadays every time a conservative video or post is rejected or banned for any reason.

And that's the sense in which the various companies' decisions seem reasonable to me. When no standard is going to be acceptable, why would one bother going to more effort to meet a standard that has a minuscule chance of wider acceptance? It's not a decision I'd want our legal authorities to make, but it's quite an understandable decision from a business perspective. Even if I wished the companies in question had made the decision a different way, I'm not sure I care enough to actually register my displeasure with them in any meaningful way.

How we get back to the point where there are objective standards we can use in these situations is an interesting question, and the only answer I have is to ask what institutions are even left that enjoy support and trust from all sides. Or, more likely, how we rebuild that trust in some of the institutions that used to have it.

Finding the Center

Recently, several social media outlets basically announced that they were kicking several pages and accounts run by Alex Jones off of their services. This has, of course, kicked off the rather familiar debate about what constitutes an infringement on someone's free speech and whether or not the companies in question can or should do these things.

I'm actually not interested in commenting much on the free speech portion of this question. Instead, I'm going to focus on some of the examples that conservative defenders of Jones are reaching for - specifically, examples of liberals who have done objectionable things and haven't been kicked off of every major social media platform.

It's actually kind of instructive, and a little disturbing, to see what sort of person or what sort of behavior some people believe makes one a left-wing version of one of the most famously absurd conspiracy theorists in the country. I certainly don't think any of the comparisons I've seen are even remotely appropriate; I think people forget far too easily about the extent and absurdity of the conspiracy theories Jones has ranted about for over twenty years. 

A lot of it can be attributed to the way that the echo chambers we live in shift where we think the center is. If one could reasonably argue that the moderate right wing types look like the center, the more extreme examples look moderate, and the lunatic fringe looks like the extreme right, than one might be forgiven for thinking that Alex is just as far away from the center as the original extreme left. However, I don't think defining the center that way is reasonable.

This, of course, isn't a defense of the liberals involved; I certainly think the liberal examples I've seen aren't acceptable either. However, expecting me to react the same way to those isolated incidents and to Jones' consistent absurdity is not reasonable.

Addressing Socialism's Rise

While I'm not sure I like this editorial in every particular, I do like its final challenge to the capitalists in its audience: telling them that if they want to stop socialism from continuing to gain ground, they will have to address the problems we're seeing with inequality and a lack of economic mobility

Of course, I'm quite certain that the various people I argue about welfare and regulations with would argue that they are trying to address the problems in our current economy, but that the liberals in our government insist on meddling and ruining their efforts. Or something like that.

Largely, though, when I get into those arguments, I tend to get either a lot of talk about countries like Venezuela that are used as examples of socialism's failures, or a lot of details about how more of what we're already doing will make everything better. Neither is particularly convincing as an answer to the difficulties we currently face.

The former, of course, isn't an answer at all. It suggests that one specific set of ideas applied a certain way won't solve the problem either, at best. It neither proposes a solution of its own nor is it sufficient to prove that any of that set of ideas can never work, regardless of the extent to which they are applied or moderated by free market ideas.

The latter is more of an attempt to solve the problem, but it doesn't take into account that our current moves towards less regulation and taxes haven't done much. Nor does it take into account the simple fact that such measures haven't always been necessary in order for us to see growth and improvement; there have been times in the past when we've been better off despite not following all of the ideas that are currently being demanded in the name of growth.

Book Journal: Mercedes Lackey

A quick explanation: In order to have something on the blog that's not just me reacting to whatever news article attracts the most attention, I'm going to be experimenting a bit with some weekly posts on other topics - for example, me talking about whatever novels I'm reading (or re-reading) in the past week.

... I suppose if I didn't read any novels in a particular week, I might have a bit of trouble with that idea, but then I've not had a week like that in a long, long time.

Anyway, on to this week's reading.

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I've been re-reading some of Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar and Elemental Masters novels this week. (If you want specific examples, I'd probably pick the Collegium Chronicles for the former and Phoenix and Ashes for the latter.) There's a lot of both of them; I actually didn't pick up Lackey's Valdemar novels for a long time simply because I wasn't sure where to start. That little problem didn't get resolved until I asked a friend for recommendations.

I particularly like Lackey's approach to the magic in her novels. It manages to make magic feel properly mystical and elaborate without making it seem too weird and unknowable. There's also a lot of references (particularly in the Elemental Masters novels) to a number of different belief systems, myths, and other bits and pieces of mysticism, which makes it that much more interesting to find all of them and learn about those legends as well.

And her Valdemar novels have always had some very well-written heroes and heroines; they're neither unrealistically flawless, nor so badly flawed that one wonders how they ever manage to be competent. Their problems are understandable and realistic, as is the character growth that solves those problems - sometimes it happens a bit faster than one might expect with the help of some of their spiritual advisers, but then the books do have to have a conclusion to them eventually.

Trends and Aberrations

It's always interesting when something like the Wall Street Journal posts something I actually agree with - and even more so when I recognize the name of the author as someone I ordinarily wouldn't agree with on much. No matter its source, though, this editorial makes a good point about whether or not we should be expecting a return to civility once President Trump is no longer occupying our attention.

Its answer, to put it simply, is no. The argument is that President Trump represents the culmination of existing trends in politics rather than something completely outside of them, and I largely agree with that view. It's one I've often set forth in other areas, such as when people complain about the news media, or complain about the inability of the government to do anything, or so on... A lot of people making those complaints ignore the ways in which we can influence those institutions and the ways in which those institutions will naturally shape themselves to fit what we want out of them. It should surprise nobody that the increasing polarization of our government mimics what we're doing to ourselves in other areas. And I'm impressed that this editorial is willing to blame both sides equally for that; I'm not sure it's precisely correct, but it's still more than I would have expected out of this particular author.

The one point I do disagree with is the argument that lowering the stakes will help. Decreasing the power of the federal government may help a little bit, but throwing that power back onto the state governments or even further down will give those places more license to govern in increasingly partisan ways themselves. Getting rid of it entirely, to my mind, simply means that other parts of society will take it and use it in even less accountable ways than our government would.

In the end, I think what we need are more institutions that both sides are willing to trust. Ideally, we'd have media organizations that both sides trusted to tell the truth, but at this point I don't think the right will ever trust the mainstream media again, even if they were to somehow become utterly flawless, so that's not particularly likely. Even just having some moderate politicians that both sides trusted to have the best interests of the country in mind and to listen to both sides' ideas would be helpful, but that requires the people to unbend enough to actually elect such politicians, which is also not particularly likely.

Game review: Cultist Simulator

Pretty sure the detail that makes this game a proper simulation of being a cultist is the level of devotion it sparks that makes time completely meaningless. (Also known as: wait, why is it suddenly past midnight?)

More seriously, Cultist Simulator is basically a deck building and resource management game. Your character's own health, reason, passion, and money are the primary resources (augmented later by your disciples, occult tools, and esoteric lore once you manage to find any of it). Oh, and you have to manage your fascination with the occult and your existential dread in order to stay sane... and you have to watch out for entirely mortal hunters who don't like sharing a city with someone dabbling in the forbidden arts (or the various supernatural creatures such a person summons) for some strange reason.

Despite the cards you accumulate being one of the primary mechanics, there's also some real-time strategy elements, because all the actions you do with those cards function on timers. Some of those timers will force you to use cards - you'll keep losing the funds you need to pay for food and shelter as time moves on, for example. Other timers simply dictate how long it takes for your actions to bear fruit, so if you don't watch out, you'll occasionally find yourself in need of a resource with no way to actually produce it in time. Most of those timers range from 30 to 90 seconds (there are a lot of minute timers), which is probably why the game burns time so fast. There's always something new coming up in just another twenty seconds or so; it adds up quickly.

The game does a great job of being very strange and mysterious; its lore really does evoke the feeling of hunting after unusual and unknowable things. Unfortunately, some of those unknowable things are basic aspects which in any typical game would simply be explained in a tutorial. While I appreciate there are thematic reasons not to do that in this game, it leads to a lot of false difficulty and confused fumbling while you try and figure out exactly what the game is expecting you to do next. I think it's still worth it, but I won't deny it's a bit frustrating.

Now if you'll excuse me, my cult's enemies grow ever more persistent. I need to get back to summoning some eldritch horrors to send after them.