On Joining the Conversation

This is a difficult post to write, because I for one struggle when there's a personal tragedy combined or perhaps even engulfed with a general issue. This post is about the general not the personal but the catalyst was the death of Eurydice Dixon, an event that transpired almost 3 weeks ago.

I am in a position where the personal tragedy is salient, because one of my friends is personally effected by the loss and I know he, a family, and a community are all going through very personal grief. While I'm sure those who have lost a daughter, intimate partner, colleague and friend don't want her death to be in vain, I'd bet good money they also never wanted her to be a martyr and never wanted her to mean this to so many members of the public. For anyone who may be personally grieving their loss, I trust you to tune in or tune out of the public reaction as best you see fit, and urge you to prioritize the grief for your personal loss.

Roughly three weeks ago as of writing/publishing this; in the early hours of the morning, Eurydice Dixon a 22 year old citizen of Melbourne, Australia was walking across Princes Park in Carlton when a 19 year old male approached, raped and the murdered her.

This was but the latest catalyst to reignite passions for the issue of women's safety from male perpetuated violence. And this post is about the responses I've been exposed to in the public domain, not the person of Eurydice, and I cannot say with any confidence whether my experiences will be relatable.

I need to acknowledge that the vast majority of people, have reacted with silence, for good or bad and given that silence gives me little to draw conclusions on, I have little interest in the most common reaction and respect people's right not to engage, it may even be prudent as acting and reacting carry risk. Three weeks on though, and almost everyone has gone silent, returned to the status quo with the exception of those personally affected, those who had no option to take her death personally.

I want to write mostly about the reactions that are vocal and in the public arena, namely the calls to join 'the' conversation mostly directed at a category I belong to: men. I want to be the first to point out that this, this post, is not a conversation. I've heard these calls and I probably won't answer them. Thus far I don't want to. Specifically I don't want to join any of the conversations on offer.

My motivations, or lack thereof are not because I want to stick my head in the sand, or deny there is a problem, or shift blame or responsibility. But for lack of any conversation partners where I feel my core contribution wouldn't be 'you should probably sit this conversation out.'

From my vantage point, there are things I notice immediately:

1. A failure of second-order thinking: Taking to the public square and demanding other people do something different instead of doing what they've always done; Is in itself not different, and what people have always done.
2. These aren't invitations to join 'a' conversation, or even 'the' conversation, but 'our' conversation. I always feel like I'm being invited to pledge allegiance and tow the party line. Not invited because I may have a unique perspective to contribute, or because my prospective conversation partners feel they lack the answers or an understanding of my perspective.
3. It is incredibly rare for people to say what they are actually feeling, and that it's on me if I get angry or just irritated. I have to be charitable that most of the most aggressive reactionary behavior is actually just people struggling to express that they feel powerless and scared and are not comfortable sitting with these feelings.

Beyond that, and feel free to judge me in turn, when I receive an invitation to join a conversation I am going to evaluate the qualities of the conversation partners on offer: When I scroll through my facebook feed I am not being hit with an overwhelming impression that those being vocal about the issues of male violence and women's safety are endowed with the characteristics of being thoughtful, dispassionate, critical, skeptical, imaginative, creative, honest, self-aware, humble, modest, intelligent, informed, rigorous, reserved, patient or disciplined.

To be fair, there are definitely voices that are in my opinion far more constructive than others. Voices that from the outset have demonstrated perspective in the simple form of recognizing that most violence against women occurs right at home. There were also voices that gained perspective quickly, realizing that to be suddenly outraged by one of the most a-typical cases of violence perpetrated by men against women, was to implicitly accept that violence against women within the confines of a home, a relationship, a marriage was a norm and not an outrageous one.

Those voices though aren't calling upon me to join 'the' conversation, or criticizing me implicitly for not accepting and executing the proposed reactionary solutions.

And I guess, for your clarity and mine, I should say my ambition in writing this and inviting people to read on, is to get people to consider the benefits of not being reactionary. I would settle even for making the word 'reactionary' salient.

Let's be clear, 'the' conversation about women's safety and men's responsibility to create a safe world in which women can live and work freely has been an ongoing public discussion at least since a man went on a spate of vicious, brutal murders of prostitutes in the Whitechapel district of the East End. A conversation that continued in ebbs and flows right through the rape and murder of Jill Meagher, 6 years prior to Eurydice's murder and significantly, I feel, though not sure how, only a few kilometers away on Sydney Road, Brunswick.

Prior to the events of a fortnight ago, for example, Youtube regularly exposed me to this ad campaign, and while it's short I would ask you to watch it, because there's a wealth of ideas to consider there, and I'm going to refer to it again (and again no doubt). The 'Call It Out' campaign, which Premier Daniel Andrews tweeted out in March of this year, (though I'm not sure of the exact launch date) was launched without the catalyst of Eurydice's murder.

That's the message, the values coming down from the public leadership of Victoria, our elected representatives. And I also note that world-wide there has been very recent public discussion of 'Incels' in popular culture, social media and the mainstream press. Again part of the ongoing conversation, and the collective consciousness within which, men are still subjecting women to violence.

I have to remind myself that people calling on me to join their reactionary conversations; are doing so impersonally. They, like me, forget who their audience on social media consists of, and that most of the people who hear that message are invisible, the 65 people that like the status are but the tip of the iceberg. They are likely to have forgotten that I am one of their facebook friends, (I certainly can not name all my facebook friends off the top of my head.)

So when I find myself rankling that people within hours of hearing of Eurydice's death have the hubris to tell me that I need to listen to them to be part of the solution, they probably aren't thinking of me at all; let alone doing so in consideration of how much time and effort I've invested in really thinking about these issues here and here. Introspection that took place in my space, rather than the public square. But I'm not going to simply dismiss that rankling, because there is useful information in it. I just need to be charitable that the phenomena of public outcry is largely driven by well documented psychological phenomena like the usual-suspect Confirmation-Bias (believing what we want to believe) the Dunning-Kruger effect, the Availability hueristic, the Just-World Hypothesis and especially the phenomena of pluralistic ignorance perhaps the most important idea that skews my perspective. We are collectively and constantly betrayed by our intuitions, especially as problems grow in complexity.

I don't wish to single anyone out, especially an activist friend who walks the walk but I even rankled when they broadcast the question: "C'mon blokes! Where is your outrage? Where is your solidarity? Why are you so OK with the fact that the streets of our city are so unsafe for us? Why are you not considering how much danger poverty puts us in? Why are you not angry at the police for once again making us sit through their boring victim blaming bullshit? WHAT ARE YOU DOING ABOUT IT?" which was prefaced by an observation "I have to say, the silence from my men folk friends is once again deafening."

The complaint is not specific enough to know whether I was included as silent or not, I presume once again people broadcasting are not thinking of me specifically as their audience. But I am going to speculate as to the reason of this phenomena of deafening silence. If your behavior is in itself a 'fight' response to stimulus (making yourself large, loud and hostile), the range of reactions to your behavior you can reasonably expect are: fight, flight, freeze and appease. Silence could be considered flight or freeze responses. Basically retreating or standing still until the threat you pose has subsided. Fight would be the trolling though I've observed little of that I know it is out there, and appease is the 'solidarity' which sounds impressive but it is my experience that it is only appeasing, hoping to say the right things such that no meaningful action can follow.

We all communicate more than we think we do, and the messages we unconsciously transmit are also often unconsciously decoded. I struggle to consciously recognize the difference between anxiety responses and anger responses, but if I don't think about it, just feel it, most of the noise following on from Eurydice's death was anxiety driven, fear disguised as outrage, righteousness.

I don't know of course, I'm not a mind-reader. I can only say that I'd be far more impressed if people took to social media and said 'I feel scared and powerless, what happened to Eurydice was an unwelcome reminder that my very survival is contingent on others upholding a social contract' which I can relate to, rather than 'I'm outraged!' running concurrently to all this is Victoria's latest WorkSafe campaign attempting to establish a social norm that because you're upset it is not (never) ok, to act however you want. I at least, draw a line between this and the phenomena of reactions.

Flawed though it is, things have improved in much of the world, for women since 1888. Female and Trans prostitutes are still disproportionately victims of violence, women are still disproportionately victims of violence and men still greatly disproportionately the perpetrators of it. And the cumulative victims of women murdered by men who are strangers to them, is dwarfed by the number who are killed by men who are their intimate partners. And of course, there are places in the world, which is to say: contexts, where the world is more dangerous for women than it was in 1888.

The call to own the problem, is to move towards or make reality a world in which a woman can be as safe as men are.

I'm happy to take ownership of just about any problem, but only so far. In this case, I am not going to for example, change profession from deadbeat artist to Law or Law Enforcement. I am simply going to respond.

From here on out, this will be a response. Keep in mind it is a response by me, and that's all I am. So this is what owning the problem looks like to me, and it makes *me* really uncomfortable and I honestly feel most people, not only men don't have the stomach to respond in a constructive thoughtful way.

I'm going to divide this into means, motive, and opportunity, as reassuringly formulaic BBC program 'Death in Paradise' has drilled into me. Addressing any of the three successfully should eradicate the problem. But I'm going to preference these based on the content of online reactions which overwhelmingly want the problem addressed via eradicating motive - the motivation, the emotional drivers behind men's violence toward women. My impression is the voices in the public square is calling for 80% motive solutions, a begrudging 20% opportunity solution and in the context of Australia 0% means based solutions.

Motive:

As it stands, most reactions are committed to a fait accompli - we know what to do and just need to do it. I suspect that most of the voices I heard are drawing on a mostly vague subscription to a mostly vague concept known as 'Rape Culture' that to be clear, I'm not skeptical of the concept that culture shapes behavior as behavior shapes the culture, so much as feel it is ill-defined and a hypothesis at best. Rather than a robust theory like Evolution by Natural Selection is. I'm willing to entertain the rape culture hypothesis.

For the record, I will disclose up front I think very little of male 'allies'/male feminists/totally-woke-baes and I am as yet, to have an experience that leads me to furnish them with the respect they are courting in the public sphere.

I bear in mind that it is probably one of the common side-effects of pluralistic ignorance, which is where the people who are most fearful of their private disagreement with the in-group norms being uncovered, try to disguise themselves by being the most vocal and visible enforcers of the norms. For all the memes and public criticisms of 'Not all men..' arguments as hand washing, I read male-feminist posts and I see a man trying to wash his hands and distance himself from 'those guys'. Functionally no different from saying 'not all men...' it's just slightly more subtle.

On three occasions after Eurydice's death I've had to fight down the temptation to comment on a guy's status mansplaining to me that *we* have to own the issue 'okay, step 2?' One of my male friends posted a lengthy piece of prose 'Collect your mates' listing a long list of criteria some of which I fit, and I have to fight the temptation to say to him 'I'm awaiting collection.' whatever the fuck that means.

But of course, the ally's actually skip straight to step 2 to avoid step 1. So what we hear is socially acceptable and 'definitively' 'proven' causes that lead men to think it is okay to rape and murder women. A kind of bounded irrationality that where we've failed in anti-bullying campaigns, anti-terrorism and anti-drug campaigns to understand the underlying causes and propose any effective solutions, violence against women by men is just a matter of lack of will, lack of compliance.

This I feel, is why if improvements and progress have been made, public interest in women's safety and men's violence towards women has probably served to stand in the way of that progress more than contribute. Policy and law-makers, strategists, academics, researchers, expert consultants, social workers etc. people actually invested in solving these problems have to withstand the demand for mob appeasement based on commonly held intuitions.

So rather than fall into an unproductive fait accompli trap, and given that conversation about Eurydice has basically already disappeared and although no women have been raped and murdered in the fortnight following Eurydice I suspect... that has nothing to do with the solutions verbalised on social media being implemented. (I for one was not even collected, and I thought we were mates), how about we actually start with step 1... which is, owning the problem. And I do mean we.

Step 1 to me is the much touted and almost never practiced exercise in empathy. If you haven't come across it, I do highly recommend entertaining the case against empathy. Which comes to mind only because I'm probably unfair. A lot of people calling upon me to own the issue, to join the conversation are clearly empathizing, or attempting to empathize with the victim. And Paul Bloom points out that empathy for victims historically has been used to mobilize people against Jews and African Americans and currently Mexicans. Step 1 actually requires us to empathize with the assailent, the rapist, the murderer because he had control.

So if you're a man, (and this is just my opinion, but what would actually impress me) owning this aspect begins (step 1) with questioning one's-self and starting with but the first uncomfortable question: 'Am I a rapist? Am I a murderer?'

If you are a woman, identify as female or at least not a man, then your perhaps even more uncomfortable question is 'if I were a man, would I be a rapist? would I be a murderer?'

Maybe starting with the strict legal definitions as to what constitutes rape and murder, to which if either answer is yes, you should, like Eurydice's killer, turn yourself in to your nearest police station. (Hopefully) more likely you can have a soul searching and excruciating personal inventory entertaining the broader definitions of rape and murder, keeping in mind that some Vegans see no distinction between eating cheese and dairy and raping a human being, and plenty of people regard the consumption of meat as murder, and there are people with the earnest conviction that abortion is murder.

Yes, you may by owning this problem, become a Vegan.

After taking that inventory, the next uncomfortable question to ask yourself is: 'Under what conditions would I rape/murder someone?' If you want me to converse with you, you have to have an answer to these questions. Otherwise we are having a useless discussion about mythical monsters.

I'll even let you cheat off my notes: The murder, or kill a person, question is the easier to answer for me. The conditions necessary for me to kill anyone, would be that I'd have to have assumed responsibility for the well-being of an individual or group. They would have to be antagonized and sufficiently threatened by someone I was not responsible for. The expediency of simply killing that antagonist would have to outweigh the costs of rehabilitating them. (were I responsible for them, I feel I would have an obligation to take on the cost of rehabilitating them). More or less, the exact conditions under which I would fire someone/have someone fired just given the much higher stakes of ending people's lives rather than causing them temporary discomfort. So it would require much higher conviction that there was no suitable recourse, it is easy to make an actuarial decision on firing versus coaching a dysfunctional employee. This rationale is alluded to in the martial tradition of the Yagyu family of swordsmanship, which they compared to when a surgeon harms a patient to remove the ailment that will kill them and thereby save their life. People have to recover from surgery. You kill one to save a thousand. I would note that you can 'kill' a person by changing their behavior, effectively making them somebody else, but that's weaseling out of the exercise.

For me to have agency over the act of murdering a human being, which I know and accept to be wrong, it would be in light of preventing mass-genocide, or even under extreme duress, saving an individuals life. Preferably it would have to be humane and instant with no platform for vindictiveness or cruelty. In other words: the kind of murder that medals are awarded for. But medal or death penalty, there are conceivable but unlikely scenarios under which I would kill a person.

The conditions under which I would rape someone/have someone raped, are not gender specific for me and are by order of magnitude more extreme than the conditions required to murder a person. Because basically, it would need to be a situation where I didn't have recourse to a quick humane death of an antagonist, but for some reason needed that person to remain alive. That's the first part, the second would be establishing that something could be achieved through their psychological destruction. This is very hard to imagine, but perhaps the leader of a tenuous regime, where to remove them would cause an extremely dangerous leadership vacuum but to have them carry on feeling invincible or inerrant was untenable. Louis C K, (himself now a known sex-offender) had a bit about travelling back in time and raping Hitler. Even so, I find it hardly credible to imagine any scenario where psychological destruction of an antagonist became necessary (as in no better courses of action). I find it much harder to think of scenarios where torture of any kind is justified, especially given its inability to deliver any reliable outcomes. Highly implausible but not impossible.

And of course, I then have to follow this up with the exercise in empathy: 'under what conditions would I have to have to rape AND murder someone?' it's easier and harder. The easy answer is that the murder would be an attempt to avoid responsibility for the rape. It's harder because why the fuck am I raping someone if I am going to experience panic, remorse and regret. I can't occupy this empathetic space easily because the conditions previously described mean I would have spent years or at the very least months coming to the decision to commit a premeditated rape only to then panic - a headspace I find hard to imagine, perhaps due to the nature of panic.

But from my answers I can extract something I feel is useful. I would have to be A) in crisis to have agency over what I knew to be wrong. I would also have to B) feel antagonized and threatened by the person (or category) who would become the victims of my acts. I would have to genuinely hold the conviction that it was a solution to a problem. I would never cast them as altruistic acts, they are certainly malicious. And of course: selfish even when justified in utilitarianism terms by defending the interests of my in-group, like some rape-variation of the Trolley Problem.

What if you haven't noticed, I will point out to you though, is that to me owning the issue means positioning myself closer to Eurydice's murderer, not distancing myself - which is what I see male 'allies' falling over themselves to do while 'woke' enough to not cry out 'not all men'.

And I can't do this exercise for women of course, because I am not one. But I don't feel at ease letting the women-I-hope-read-this off lightly while I hold male 'allies' to account. If you are the kind of woman who says vindictive things like 'I want to punch every man in the face' or 'when are we going to stop talking about justice and start talking about revenge' from where I stand, it sounds like you feel it is fine to see a whole category of people as antagonists and yourself justified in committing violence against members of that category. Please sit with the uncomfortable possibility that you entertain the exact same kinds of thoughts that killed Eurydice, but you simply lack the means to follow through. There's an argument to be made about the fairness of taking turns as to who perpetrates violence against whom, given that it's almost always men carrying out acts of violence on women, but I would point out you probably have more in common with Eurydice's Killer than you'd like to ever acknowledge to yourself.

Step 2 now becomes using our imaginations to explore why someone would come to see all women as antagonists, and how he saw raping someone as a way to resolve his personal crisis. Without constraining our imaginations, let's start skeptically looking at rape culture.

The fact that he was lurking in a public park in the dark after midnight, alone, suggests to me that he very well understood that rape was wrong and that there are negative consequences to being caught. As of writing, I am assuming he will plead guilty, however my limited understanding of law means there may be a trial as to what degree murder/manslaughter he is convicted of. Based on what little facts have been transmitted to me, and based on what I can recall from my brief education in legal studies from way back in highschool - I would speculate that the murder charges would struggle given the facts; to establish pre-meditation. I don't know what degree of murder that makes it in Victorian Law, but the rape was certainly pre-meditated.

The hardest empathic gap for me to close with the killer, is not the violence but the selfishness. I can't imagine that rape is about sex, so much as control, and thus perpetrated by people who don't feel in control. I believe, but this is hearsay, based on one interview with one law-enforcement officer in one episode of an ABC series on domestic violence; that this is a consensus view of the profile of offenders: people who don't feel in control. I've had some emotional experiences where I felt a compulsion to try and seize control, and out of control and they were truly awful, typically resulting in writing a pathetic and ill conceived email or letter. In those cases I can vouch that not knowing my own emotional state was of much greater impact than knowing right from wrong, I didn't even subscribe to the normal standards of how friends communicate, my standards were much higher - yet those standards abandoned me. More generally it seems this behavior manifests in me with snide remarks at innocent bystanders.

So all I have is a crude multiplication to take those darkest days of my life and say if that sense of out-of-control behavior were multiplied by 1000, I might find myself lurking in a dark corner somewhere waiting for *anyone* I can dominate for a fleeting sense of control, instead of just being unnecessarily mean because I don't realize what I'm bothered by or even am aware I am bothered.

Where I arrive at through empathy from these questions, is a crude foundation to start imagining solutions from to the motive part of the equation. I perhaps am likely to transplant what I have taken away from my exercise in empathizing with addicts. Things like, but not limited to: how little impact negative consequences have on curbing compulsive behavior, to look at not the destructive behavior but the pain underlying that destructive behavior and where I feel most reactionaries are most tone-deaf: asserting that people have control where they don't feel it.

Which brings me to a third set of questions that may be useful in owning the problem: 'Who would you prefer to be: Eurydice or her killer?' Eurydice's parents? Or his parents? I am assuming the answer is that you like me, would prefer to be Eurydice, than someone who would do that to Eurydice. Hence all the distancing, and not asking the actual hard questions of ourselves. And a distinctly counterproductive lack of compassion in addressing the issue, based on deeply held intuitions about transgression and punishment.

I can imagine that in the interviews of not just this killer, but all killers, even situations where there is a relationship between the killer and his victim, to some extent when asked 'why her?' (as in how was the victim selected) it would reduce down to 'because she was there.' Whether that is the woman who happened to be walking through the park after midnight, or the woman who smiled at him at that party 15 years ago. The stark and ugly, and therefore challenging thought to entertain is that for crimes that cannot be more personal to their victims, they are probably quite impersonal to the perpetrators.

Now here I can start to bring back in and entertain some of the fait accompli conversation points I've put under the umbrella of rape culture. When I look at a case like Brock Turner's I'm more inclined to see the role of rape culture playing an active hand. Turner's actions speak of underlying values, underlying aggression that was present (has to be present, even with alcohol in the blood stream: after all many people get drunk and don't rape a stranger at a party.)

There are factors that suggest Turner's values were shaped by his environment, including the fact that it was two Swedish students (cultural transplants) that felt compelled to intervene and detain him. Furthermore there was his father's letter that indicated that Turner's values were in some part hereditary. This though, like much of the discussion of rape culture is all speculative, and why my lived experience tends to intuitively reject it as a fruitful line of action. However that depends on the definition.

To me 'rape culture' comes to be an extreme subset of a culture that eschews personal responsibility. A subset of a selfishness-culture. That it is acceptable to accommodate your own problems at the expense of others, because you aren't thinking about them or their pain, just your own. One caveat is that in the cases where the violence is personal, all my experience tells me it is likely that the person is trying to communicate the extremity and severity of their own pain to someone they desperately want to understand them. And yes, I feel everyone, myself included is culpable for bad communication.

There is plenty of opportunity for everyone to make small incremental improvements on perpetuating this culture of irresponsibility. I don't believe many of those opportunities however, involve transforming pride into shame.

But the fait accompli and socially acceptable list appear to revolve around a shaming pogrom: Men who don't respect women. Men who tell rape jokes. Men who use pejorative slurs like 'slut' or 'bitches' or 'prostitute'. Incels. MRAs.

Okay. I've looked at the extensive but non-exhaustive list of likely culprits for furnishing the motive to rape a random woman in the dark. And what? Reeducate them?

Let's look at the Victorian government ad again. this ad campaign if you didn't watch it the first time I linked it. In it an ordinary looking guy speaks disrespectfully, and in a belittling way to his girlfriend on the phone while three uncomfortable guys listen to it. Then afterwards they 'call him out' to which he defends it as 'just joking' and they reassure him it's not funny, not a joke, not cool etc.

I have some questions.

Which of those four men, is going to murder and rape a woman? My answer would be, I don't know. It would be nice if it were as easy to spot as the guy who has the least socially acceptable behavior and most outwardly disrespectful attitude to women. But I'm not that confident. My life is populated by too many anecdotes of guys who say all the right things or present a harmless public facade or even outwardly subscribe to feminism who by deed don't respect women at all, bully and pick on them, psychologically attack them and even physically or sexually assault women. If you already find this post long, I wrote a very long, considered and unpopular post on the very question of where rapists are and what they look like.

The next question is: why is this the level of intervention being asked? Why are we calling it out to the 'mate' if it is the woman who is in danger? Why has this guy not already crossed a line in terms of relationships that can be endorsed? Why are these men if they truly don't endorse his values, hanging out with this man? Are we being asked to associate with people we find morally reprehensible in order to reshape their values? Is this what owning the problem means?

It's why when I read a guy posting a long list of 'mates' to collect, I suspect lip-service is being done. We tend to associate with people who share our values, these are the people we call friends. I will concede there is an argument to be made for people having acute, discreet maladaptive beliefs owing to specific family history incidents or mental health issues. Are these so easy to spot though? It would be nice if it was. But again, whose to say the man-bun in the ad isn't smart enough to know what one is supposed to say in that situation, even though he knows himself to be a hypocrite?

Much of the descriptions of what consitute 'rape culture' rape-jokes, female specific pejoratives, violent crime as entertainment, victim-blaming, stigmitization of victims etc. I'm willing to entertain, I also note though, what is missing from the list of rape culture talking points.

There are people who hold as sacrosanct texts, and subsequently deities that treat women as chattel, property. That underpin whole cultures where men believe it a social responsibility to gang rape a woman who is un-escorted by her father or husband. Scripture that has produced cultures like Italy where the response to rape was the woman was married to her rapist to make things right in the eyes of God. Scripture that has produced honor killings to remove the shame of having a daughter that was so 'shameless' as to be raped. Scripture that failed to anticipate the advent of effective, safe and affordable contraception, and struggles to admit that whole swathes of it's moral instruction centered around hygiene is now obsolete or badly in need of review.

I notice this absence, and it tells me that the people calling out the 'notallmen' catch-cry as hand-washing and distancing and sticking-head-in-the-sand are all talk.

Of both the socially acceptable presented 'solutions' and the socially unacceptable ones above because they involve criticizing religion which has become conflated with racism - It is incredibly rare for conversation with mates to turn to the subject of valuing women, but the religious go to Church sometimes weekly, sometimes pray multiple times a day and instruct their children in scripture from infancy.

I'm not suggesting though attacking religion as a solution. I personally don't face the challenge of reconciling into a consistent position beliefs about rape-culture and beliefs about religion. I've entertained this list of demands, and find at worst what can be said is that none of this behavior helps.

Also fortunately, due to the nature of bio-psycho-social models. I've never sat at that table with a dude with a beard and a man-bun and some douche that somehow wound up my friend or work-colleague disrespecting his girlfriend on the phone. What I'm being called to do, are things I can't action today, or tomorrow, I may have to wait months or years for an opportunity to 'call it out' and the bio-psycho-social model of medicine makes it highly unlikely that I with my values will attract and retain friends who do not share my values. I am however much more likely to meet people who believe a book, independent of their knowledge of the content, is the best source of inspiration and instruction one can find and within it contains much inspired justification of rape and denigration of women.

Again, I've written previously about this issue of consistency and I don't plan on rehashing it.

I see these suggested solutions to address the culture as not the-reasonable-request-to-do-something-simple-but-I'm-not-because-I'm-a-coward-and-hate-women but as a huge imposition to go deep undercover into social circles where values prevail that I don't share and somehow not just retain their friendship without participating but maneuver myself into a position where I will be looked to for moral guidance.

There is also a compelling absence of evidence based on the behavior of criminals to conceal and avoid being held to account for their crimes against women, that anyone is proud of the crimes they commit. Maybe in times of war where historically rape has been a weapon of conquest did groups of men sit down around a camp-fire and openly brag about raping women, and I'd be surprised if this practice had been abandoned world-wide. There may be a group of men somewhere that boast about raping their wives, but the culture I appear to live in is one where that shit happens behind closed doors because friends would intercede or call the police or child-protective services, or perhaps even more simply: because the perpetrators know they ought to be ashamed not bragging.

I could picture absent some Swedes, a place where a Brock Turner of this world, might get some high-fives from his preppy douchey buddies when he told them how he scored behind a dumpster with some drunken slut. So I'm willing to entertain this 'rape culture' hypothesis in that I will distribute condemnation to any guy that shows the poor judgement to boast to me of his crimes rather than distribute high-fives. However, this is not a product of any discussion that has taken place in the last 10 years.

On that front, I suspect that maybe the telling factor for me was non of the fait accompli-rape culture discussion that has gotten so much play on my social media feeds, but instead because I was raised in a family environment of personal responsibility. Because I also don't give high fives to work colleagues who show the poor judgement to boast to me that they routinely steal their soy-milk from the work fridge. (I don't snitch, because it is not part of my value to care about the balance sheet of a publicly traded corporation ahead of an actual living feeling person, anti-social as they may be.)

As such, I've probably rendered myself a bit sensitive about people telling me I need to talk about these issues, and acting like the answers to evidently intractable problem are likely to be simple.

There's good intent behind campaigns like 'Call It Out' and 'Stop It Where It Starts' but then there's Eric Schneiderman. There's also 'This is your brain on drugs' and 'Just say no' and the whole war on drugs, and the war on terror and 'if you see something say something' and it erodes my confidence that this time in this case a mob of people who had the solutions ready to go within minutes of hearing of Eurydice's murder (because they are the same solutions that didn't work last time.) have it right.

Personally, I have to admit bias, that I am on general principle not a fan of any system that requires people to do the right thing, all the time, to work. I call that poor design. And strictly speaking, if you honestly believe you can get people to agree to universal values and demonstrate 100% compliance, you are arguing for disbanding the police and CCTV security measures as well. As with women's safety from men, so too financial market deregulation, to traffic safety, to a share house fridge. So I would look more to 'opportunity' and 'means' based solutions sooner than motivations.

I also don't believe the mind to be an infinitely malleable distinct entity independent of the biology of the brain and nervous systems. I don't much believe in solutions that involve people thinking their way into becoming new people. It's not impossible but it's very difficult. And again I have to remind myself, nobody is to know I'm the kind of person that watches Stanford University's entire 'Behavioral Biology' lecture series by Prof. Robert Sapolsky for fun; when they ask me to join their conversation. (It's really good, and free).

But I have in the domain of addiction walked this walk: To first remove the log from my eye before commenting on the speck in yours. As said Jesus in some form or another. Which is to say, 5 years ago I got slapped in the face with the revelation that I wasn't willing to do what I was asking addicts to do. So I quit forever, cold turkey a bunch of stuff. Alcohol, caffeine, confectionery, cakes, soft drinks, McDonalds, KFC and pornography. Though I've been sober or in recovery for most of the last 4 years, I've backslid or relapsed on all bar caffeine and KFC, though never again formed a habit.

And here's the relevance. I'm being called upon to call out a bunch of behavior that is believed to contribute to 'toxic masculinity' and 'rape culture' - In fairness please respect me by calling on yourself to address behavior that cultivates a culture of selfishness:

Have you quit drinking? Have you quit painkillers? Have you quit coffee? Have you considered quitting either/or paralal parking or checking your phone while in a car? As mindlessly opening your door into the path of oncoming cyclists is the number one killer of innocent cyclists simply acting within their rights and the Victorian Police have run a victim blaming campaign  have you considered giving up driving in fact? Have you resolved to no longer flake/pyke/or give a miss your friends' gigs, parties and other celebrations because you're tired or socially anxious? Have you resolved to never again make a three point turn in your car, instead choosing to go around the block? Have you stopped calling on members of a category you don't indentify with to take responsibility? Have you sworn off everything Japanese? The rapiest rape culture that is simultaneously dominant in pop-culture. Where comics targeted at children and teenagers often use rape as lazy plotting and motivation, and pornographic comics are read shamelessly on public trains again often featuring rape based plots.
Have you resolved to not criticize police or question the local system of law? This sends a message that individuals are free to decide which laws are legitimate and which are not. Have you taken inventory of all the ways in which you avoid responsibility by blaming, excusing, diverting or denying problems when brought to you and resolved to never use these defenses again? Are you an activist? Are you trying to be the change you want to see in the world rather than simply calling on the government or some other entity to fix it? Do you refuse to own property or pay rent? By doing so you are subscribing to a colonialist legacy that is unethical and immoral - people literally owning land and exploiting it for personal gratification, where the land cannot consent. Here's a great one: Have you resolved to ask your friends to justify why they are dating their partners? Are you willing to risk their indignant rejection to express how you truly feel about the guy they bring to your dinner parties? Have you discussed your own attachment style with a qualified psychologist and vowed not to get into dysfunctional relationships?

I want to pull out two examples of things both men and women could address that are as potentially culpable as say something more seemingly obvious like rape-jokes as contributing to rape culture.

The first is drinking wine. It seems entirely reasonable that everyone could quit drinking wine and all they would lose is the intoxicating effect of drinking wine. However the benefits to society at large if we were to eradicate drinking from the culture would be demonstrable. It's hard to deny the roll drinking plays in domestic violence and traffic incidents, probably even household accidents, house fires and accidental death. We would be all massively safer if everyone stopped drinking. And if you feel tempted to say 'but my wine drinking doesn't have any impact on some idiot getting blind drunk and hopping behind the wheel. I drink responsibly.' then you've just said 'not all wine drinkers' and can empathise with the category of people being criticized. My own experience of going completely sober is in fact, that I would never actually ask anyone to do it, rather than ask people to stop judging addicts for behaving like addicts.

And consider not just how comfortable/uncomfortable you might be with quitting drinking to send a message about personal responsibility and condemnation of drug dis-inhibited violence and abuse, but how comfortable you would be calling out your mates for drinking, passing judgement on them and making them feel bad for enjoying a drink. If you can sit comfortably with that, then I have no gripes against what I'm being asked to do, however I am in a position to observe your follow through much more easily than you can scrutinize mine.

The second example of behavior that both sexes can address centers around attitudes towards penetration. Specifically asking if someone has 'lost their V-plates' or as was my recent experience in a long distance relationship, having to field questions about how long-distance sex works, or how one can go without sex in a relationship. Behavior of this kind carries with it an implicit message that what counts in sex is penetration, rather than the acknowledgement that actually counts is not the act but someone's willingness to have sex with you. Aka consent. I have friends who give me a lot of pushback any time I express skepticism over the fait accompli arguments of feminists who have often enquired as to how long it's been since I got laid. Considering in this case a 19 year old perpetrator for whom we know nothing about, do we think the general socially acceptable attitudes to 'what counts' have more of an impact or the theory that he was specifically exposed to a group of male friends that laughed and joked and bragged about rape? I don't know. I don't know if the key influential figure on his attitude towards women, was his mother.

The opportunities for selfishness are myriad, but it remains to me the most promising way of addressing a motive based solution. In a lot of what I suggested above, I actually walk the walk, though there are some examples that serve the purpose of ridicule and hope to bring you to understand why I, for example, am going to consider but not necessarily act on all the aspects of rape culture that have been suggested that I consider. I'm not washing my hands, I'm inviting you to not do nothing and simply point the finger at 'those guys' you so confidently think are the rapists waiting to happen.

I haven't truly been tested, but I have been stressed and angry and in crisis before. At no point did it occur to me that raping someone or killing someone was what was necessary to feel better, perhaps because what was actually bothering me was too salient in my mind. I didn't need to take it out on a random stranger.

What I would like to think though, if tested, was that my notion of personal responsibility would prevail, and I'd probably just opt for suicide as my chosen form of self-destruction though this is still inconsiderate to those who have to deal with the aftermath. What I do notice, because my job positions me well to observe this: is that a sense of personal responsibility is incredibly rare in our (Australian) culture, and it is pervasive such that I couldn't name a category that is a particular culprit, thus everyone has an opportunity through addressing selfishness to own this problem as I have.

And calling on others to own it is not taking personal responsibility. Do what Jesus said, you can at least control yourself. I guess it's also a courtesy to not ask of me what you have demonstrated no willingness to examine in yourself. Since most of the public noise has revolved around 'motive' based problems/solutions you have my blessing to tune out rather than move onto the diminishing returns offered by discussing opportunity and means based solutions.

What I would point out though is that I've been thinking about these issues for a good long time, much longer than 3 weeks, and if you find that you can't be bothered watching videos I've linked to, or related posts I've linked to, articles or concepts I've linked to, I for one, do not blame you. I don't expect you to download large chunks of psychology, biology and legal theory in an afternoon.

It is not washing ones hands of an issue to accept a solution horizon that is multi-generational, to treat it as a lower priority than say climate change or economic justice (all interlinked) things that don't just effect discrete members of society but threaten the destruction of organized human life. It is not washing ones hands of an issue to considerately entertain all angles of an issue while in the meantime more women are dying because there is no solution that will come in time for them.

This very post provides no real answers simply because I've only worked on it in bits and pieces over a period of three weeks, though obviously it draws on ideas and introspection I've been doing for many years. It is in itself a knee-jerk response, and lets recognize that the furore that bursts onto social media is an extreme knee-jerk response by people who are unlikely to go on to contribute anything meaningful to a conversation at all.

Read on, if you're not exhausted already

Opportunity:

Opportunity based solutions seem less righteous but are in my opinion more practical. Here though I feel like Sideshow Bob surrounded by endless supply of rakes to step on. Except those rakes are going to be called 'victim blaming'.

Which makes feel inclined to point out that 'victim blaming' is a judgement statement, it implies intent.

Where 'victim blaming' is a warranted criticism is where it is overtly stated that the victim is responsible for what happened to them, as are the legal defenses employed by the lawyers featured in the documentary 'India's Daughter' where the victim is literally blamed for being raped. (And it didn't fly in that case).

Where though, you interpret some suggestion as implying the victim is somehow responsible, that outrage you feel, I feel, is on you. When Victoria Police Superintendent Clayton stated "take responsibility for your own safety" that he was blaming Eurydice or anyone for what happened to them is your assertion, your chosen interpretation. I personally would prefer if people would be more charitable.

Because there's an alternative interpretation, a more charitable one. That is the Police acknowledging their own limitations to protect the community, and thus doing what they can - which is a list of best practice, risk minimizing precautionary behaviors directed at people who are motivated to not get hurt, raped and killed as well as a frank admission that they can't be there for everyone when they are needed.

Could the words have been chosen better with more sensitivity and less rakes to tread upon? I have no doubt.

But it does point to another uncomfortable question of addressing the issue, which is addressing the opportunity men have to rape and murder a woman who is unknown to them.

Brace yourself because here is the question that responsible people have to ask and many are not going to like it: Is the problem worth solving (this way)?

Specifically, more CCTV, more Police Presence, by arming women as deterrent, through curfews, through profiling, through intrusions and surveillance etc.

I'm alluding to Benjamin Franklin's (the non-slave owning founding father) admonition: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

It's a little judgemental, and I tend to recall it as ending "...will soon be deprived of both" rather than the deserving thing, but I try to keep in mind that the Police have to recruit from the same non-uniform, flawed stock of raw material known as human beings as every other institution. I would highly recommend when considering 'opportunity' focused solutions watching Wyatt Cenac's Problem Areas episode dedicated to sexual misconduct by police.

It is possible that advances in technology will possibly make the world safer for women, a friend of mine suggested that machine learning in the style of Cambridge Analytica may use our social media behavior to identify rapists before they rape via algorithms in a Minority Report style future. I could conceive of cost effective drone technology providing a service whereby women can use a phone app to be tailed by a security drone as they walk the streets at night ensuring that anyone approaching them is caught on camera...

except masks, bandanas, a hood, tunnels etc. It might be safer, I'm not sure any acceptable solution will truly make things safe.

We have to consider that any world in which I woman is free to walk the streets at night is one in which a man is free to take it upon himself to rape and murder her. Freedom is not safety.

So I invite you now to empathize with the head of Victoria Police. Tasked with removing every dark corner of Melbourne in existence. With finding exemplary immaculate staff to be positioned to intervene everywhere. Do you feel this is a simple task? One that is not achieved for a lack of will?

If victim blaming statements by law-enforcement are the product of a lack of empathy, that is a two way street that I'd call on you to keep in mind. Statements made by people whose working reality is the constant reminder that they can't police everything but their job would be made that much easier if nobody took needless risks?

On questions of opportunity, I find myself skewered by a desire to be consistent. I'm of a camp that feels that we would all be safer if the Governments of Australia, The EU Nations and particularly The United States of America did not prosecute the war on Terror with such enthusiasm. That fighting terrorism makes it worse. That standing far removed from the personal tragedies of terrorist attacks, beyond the public outcry the impact of terrorist attacks even the Twin Towers attack, are negligibly small.

This isn't a position that says nothing should be done. Just don't invade Afghanistan, Iraq and destabilize the whole Middle East. Don't crack down on civil liberties as per Benjamin Franklin.

Furthermore, I'm skwered by the sound financial advice that in the domain of finance and the question of agency: you don't risk something important to gain something unimportant. As Warren Buffet stated 'you could offer me a million dollars to put a gun with one bullet in a thousand chambers to my head and pull the trigger, I wouldn't do it.'

And that's sadly, the most practical way to reduce opportunities to not get raped and killed by a man who has resolved to go out tonight and rape someone: to not be there.

Which is no solution at all. How many of the lives lost to traffic collisions were the result of something as trivial as impatience? I see people taking dumb risks every time I ride through Melbourne.

Eurydice was walking through a park, mobile phone in hand texting a housemate to expect her shortly. Jill Meagher was walking along a well lit street where her killer was caught approaching her on CCTV. These were risks much much smaller than a single bullet in a gun with a thousand chambers. Assuming roughly even population by gender, this is a single man in a population of 2.4 million men, a fraction multiplied by all the one dark corner out of all the dark corners he could have lurked in, by the frequency with which he chose the nights he could have chosen to await a victim.

It is hard to describe someone as extremely unlucky when there is clearly an agent that is responsible. But many people would describe themselves as lucky to have a partner or friend who equally had agency and responsibility to choose to be nice, loving and nurturing to them.

Plus when discussing opportunity, remembering the issue is women's safety from male perpetrated violence the biggest opportunity is behind closed doors into the home.

Here, the issue of safety has a lot of promise.

I don't think anyone wants police surveillance in their own homes, or a police presence (beyond the fact that police need love too) in the home.

But couples should not be isolated, alienated from their community. What I would call highly-dependent relationships, couples that disappear into each other. Sometimes, as has been my experience in insular relationships, the chief driver was a kind of passive laziness. We stopped going to the effort of socializing outside of the relationship. But some are more transparently dangerous - where your friends don't like your partner and so you turn your backs on eachother to maintain the relationship. Or where you partner places pressure on you to stop affiliating with your friends.

Is that a statement of victim blaming? If you choose it to be. But the fact is a lot of women do have agency to pick their killers. Perhaps even ask their friends to come out and endorse it in a massive, costly celebration.

While the men are ultimately culpable, the point being that decisions are made along the way, and it seems sadly, that if women do a good job of steering clear of men with bad values and attitudes, they become Incels, rather than lift their own fucking game.

Just days before Eurydice died, I did an exhibition on the Italian city of Genoa. I'm not plugged into the Genovese news cycle, I don't know if the city has had any recent high-profile rapes or murders. What it does have is a large labyrinthine historic center of narrow alleyways that I was repeatedly told to steer clear of after midnight. I had the experience of walking through those streets once after midnight. What mostly comes out at 1 am are rats. A friendly African man offered to sell me some drug I didn't bother to get the particulars of, so much as politely declined the sale and he left me alone. Other than that the streets were more or less deserted.

What was strange was that at no point from any of my interactions did I get the impression that Genovese women lived in fear. Even if rapes and murders were a regular occurrence (I have no reason, outside of the home to believe they were). In fact statistically Italy in many ways is identical to Australia, I did look into that.

I ride home many nights each week from work through dark backstreets of Melbourne and I see women walking un-escorted still. Melbourne is probably much safer than the historic center of Genoa at night, except that knowing that, people don't walk the historic center of Genoa at night, and perhaps why prostitutes and drug dealers work and solicit business throughout the day where the customers are.

The more I ponder, the more I think that opportunity is hard to prove. Do the potential murderers and rapists not show up in Genoa's center because the victims don't? I don't know. I suspect like Melbourne women frequently take the risk, and 999,999 times in a million are safe.

In the home is another matter, and I suspect both in preventing men from losing their shit and taking someone's life, and in women protecting themselves from winding up with these men the answer is clinical psychotherapy and learning. Destigmatizing divorce and making women's refuges easier. Reducing unproductive working hours to give everyone more time to spend as a community. Improving job security so people have things like annual leave to take and not only catch up and maintain social connections but reevaluate the routines of their own life.

These are the opportunities I would see tackled.

Means:

Nobodies really asking for these so I won't spend much time on it. But there are some interesting ideas.

I saw a bunch of memes centered on women using a set of car-keys as an improvised weapon in their hands when they walk at night. I don't think these would in a thousand cases make any difference.

I look at men that in my private comparisons I regard as scrawny in build and have to remind myself that they could still easily overpower most women I know. Furthermore, if someone told me I had to fight Conor McGregor or Floyd Mayweather in hand to hand combat but I could have a set of car keys or even a steak knife, I would not feel any reassurance from the knowledge that I was armed.

I thus am of an opinion that the core factor of means is the dymorphism between the sexes in the human species. I would not downplay the import of things like self-defense classes for women as being useful and empowering. But I suspect there are far more men studying some kind of martial art out there and that also, more tellingly in most of societies celebrated forms of violence men are divided into weight divisions because weight/size/reach probably has far more impact than skill.

There is no real solution to dymorphism, which is why I am somewhat relieved nobody took to social media and cried out 'come on men be smaller!' but it's worth maybe some consolation to look at examples of dimorphism in a wider species sense of examples where the female (large sex cell carrying organism) is larger than the male (small sex cell carrying organism).

Spiders, for example have a high prevalence of cannibalism of the smaller male mates. Male lives are generally reduced to being nothing but a transportation device for sperm where women outweigh men as the rule rather than exception. And you may say 'so what, it would be nice for men to have a turn as being reduced to nothing but a sexual function' but I feel anyone looking at the question of whether it is better to be born any spider or any human would fail John Rawl's veil of ignorance.

Plus reducing dimorphism is pure fantasy anyway, what about arming women? It's the failure of my imagination perhaps, but I don't see an ironclad way to give an armament advantage to one category that would keep it out of the hands of another. Even were it legal for only women (including trans-women) to carry knives or hand guns, this would mean ironclad definitions of what constitutes a woman which non of my progressive friends would welcome, and it would make it much easier for men to ilegally take possession of these weapons.

Guns are said to be the great equalizer, but in the good old US of A, it doesn't appear to have equalized squat. It seems by and large, women just don't get as aggressive as men, even with all the reasons in the world to lose their shit.

That's enough on means.

If you want a conversation with me:

You have to accept a starting position that is: I don't get to just believe what I want to believe.
You have to be willing to be uncomfortable, and even wrong.
You also don't get to distance yourself from 'them' in order to sit comfortably reassured that you belong to 'us'. I personally have never related to the need for affiliation though there are some scant few people I wish the validation of.
You have to not ask anything of me that you wouldn't ask of yourself. Exemptions are a failure of imagination.

I'm tired. That's it.

Original Innocence

I have no idea where this one was going, but I'm trying to get back into the writing groove and this seems to be top of my mind.

There's a minority of people alive at this time that like it or not have much of their thinking shaped by the ideas of Christianity. A lasting legacy of the death-bed conversion of Constantine the Great who himself lived almost his entire life as a pagan of questionable devotion.

But that's basically why, if you're of European descent, or descended from the collonized of the British. You know a lot about Christianity and very very little about say: Zoroastranism, or Pythagoreans... Constantine's offspring basically made it a legal requirement for European citizens to be Christian, something that wasn't really relaxed until the enlightenment though eased a little in the Renaissance.

But that's going too far forward. First you have Augustine who conceived of the idea of original sin, which was highly influential on Thomas Aquinas - and this became a shaper of thoughts of all the societies that trace lineage back to the Roman Empire.

Such that I, raised by non-believers, in a secular society give some credence to the idea that I was born broken, in deficit, indebted and need to do something in the course of my life to make myself whole. That I am under some obligation to do something with my good fortune because it was gifted to me and I am not worthy of it.

I'm sure this takes many manifestations, but to me original sin in the modern material world really manifests as the need to live up to our potential. To make the most of our opportunities. That if we rest on our haunches and simply say 'enough' then that makes a waste of our lives. It makes us bad people.

Now there's a place for religion in cultivating ourselves. And how I feel it should be navigated particularly by people like me, who cannot abide the bullshit of deriving moral authority from extraordinary claims, is another post. Richer in my experience are psychology - the understanding of the mind, and practical philosophy - what constitutes a good life.

Much of the work of clinical psychology is, I believe, having to deal with original sin. Specifically that children being egocentric in behavior, internalize and blame themselves for the dysfunctions of their caregivers. There are a lot of adults that believe they failed to make their parents happy, or they failed to save their parents marriage. And it is true some adults have a child in an attempt to save a marriage, or even more children to save a marriage, but the fault lies with that adult, not the child.

Again it's hard to draw distinct defined edges around concepts as fuzzy as religion, philosophy and psychology. They all feed into each other. But I once had a councilor break the therapeutic process down for me into two steps:

1. Look for Patterns.
2. Relieve Tension.

Let's look at that second part. Because it's a part that original sin can contribute to. What is the tension? The 'tension' most often is betwixt our conception of who we are supposed to be, and who we are. Incredibly productive people berate themselves for feeling tired, or taking breaks, or taking days off, or holidays etc. Nice people beat themselves up for viewing pornography. Devoted partners hate themselves for feeling attracted to people who aren't their partners.

There are ample opportunities to beat ourselves up for perceived flaws.

Hopefully you can relate to this notion of tension. Let's now turn to the notion of relieving it - Carl Rogers, one of the nicest people in the history of psychotherapy whom along with Maslow was one of the first to take psychotherapy from simply correcting for pathos (negative) psychology but look at trying to attain the pinnacle of psychological health.

Maslow called this pinnacle 'Self-actualization' the ability to be oneself. Rogers called it 'Congruence' basically a freedom from the psychological pain of cognitive dissonance. And perhaps earliest of all was Jung who called it 'Integration' specifically 'Integrating the shadow'.

Even then, there's an argument to be made that Nietzsche in the school of philosophy who said 'become what thou art' coined the notion of a pinnacle of psychological health. In turn perhaps owing that to Plato, fanboy of Socretes, to whom the unobserved life was not worth living.

I've digressed, let's get back to Jung. Jungian archetypes, 'Analytical Psychology' is I will admit, off-putting for most. It often descends into psychotherapuetic quackery. You wouldn't believe how many times I've been enjoying a youtube talk by a professional psychologist on shadow work and suddenly they start talking astrology and specific advice for star-signs like that's a perfectly reasonable given.

So if you dare to tread the archetypical road, expect deterrants in the form of outright idiocy. But the basic mechanics of Jung's concept of the Shadow are perfectly reasonable and functional, even independantly verifiable. Perhaps best captured in the sensible words of one of histories great level-headed imperfect human beings Abraham Lincoln 'You can please some people some of the time, and some people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time." and if you can't draw the connection, it's just a fundamental dilemma that any form you take is going to cast a shadow. Confidence to some is arrogance to others, strength to one is weakness to another. Most of our behavior is neither bad nor good but dependent on the context.

And Jung argued that if you don't acknowledge your shadow-self, if you ignore it you will wind up projecting it on other people. Much much later Brene Brown would point out a finding of her grounded research that judgement is all about finding reassuringly worse examples in others of our own insecurities.

So it holds water, even as a simple metaphor. And I was exploring the idea that despite feeling I did a pretty good job of not repressing my darker self, I still had work to do. When I came across this offshoot of Jungian shadow-work:

And though I never dug down into the detail. As far as a checklist of archetypes goes I was able to go through and be like 'tyrant? got it, weakling? onto it. Sadism and masochism? I'm on that like white on rice... the innocent one???'

Now, I have no fucken idea what that specific archetype is. For all I know in the detail the innocence may be a feigning of innocence, a shady character that simply never takes responsibility. The hands-clean banker that never touches the product. But it was a catalyst for me.

It is a fact that part of the reason I see a psychologist, is because I need the authority of a qualified psychologist to reassure me that I'm not responsible for every bad thing that happens to me. A big part of this felt need is that I project innocence onto everyone. The people that prove obsticles to my achievement of more or less constant happiness are doing so not as malicious adults but as scared infants... they know not what they do. At the core of my being is an understanding that people are not against me, but for themselves.

I feel sympathy for some of the most powerful people in society doing en-masse damage to the most vulnerable and the environment which is the super-vulnerable future generations that need an environment to live in. I feel sympathy in the form of 'oh poor baby who hurt you.' To me Tony Abbott or Josh Frydenberg are just infants that need their dad's approval and love or something. I have to remind myself that they are also taking the money, the prestige, while hurting people. That's a conscious effort for me.

And yet the last person I think of as a scared innocent is myself. I repress that I don't know what I'm doing and that I'm largely incompetent. I feel that as the most conscious I have the most choice and the one with the most choice controls the system and whoever controls the system is ultimately responsible.

(Curiously, if you meet people who describe themselves as 'higher consciousness' it reliably predicts a person who will take almost no responsibility for anything ever.)

Another reason you may dislike Jungian Archetype's is Jordan Peterson, one of the most visible proponents of the value of archetypes. And JP is like drugs to me, only in so far as the people who are against him probably need to listen to him more and the people who are for him need to listen to him less. Just as the two extremes of the drug debate both need to move towards the middle.

One of the things I don't like about JP is what I perceive to be his overemphasis on Christian archetypes, but I have to concede in the greater run of psychoanalysis Greco-Roman pagan archetypes are very well represented, so it's kind of like complaining about all the black actors in Black Panther.

But one archetypal narrative that resonates with me from the Christian canon is the story of Saint George and the Dragon, which even Peterson in a round about way concedes is pre-dated by Babylonian God Marduk's battle with Tiamat. Probably because the events of Saint George and the Dragon didn't happen. The historical Saint George was a Roman soldier that refused to denounce his Christianity and was killed.

I have written before that I struggle with a White Knight complex, a chronic need to rescue, and this post isn't about that so there will be little exposition, but the traditional George and the Dragon story goes that this city has a lottery to sacrifice women to a local dragon, and the king's daughter comes up as the next sacrifice. The king offers to pay for a stand-in but no takers. So the princess is kicked outside the city walls to await devouring by the Dragon, and then Saint George happened along and offered to wait with her, then when the dragon shows up, makes the sign of the cross and kills it. With a bunch of variation.

To Christians, this story is metaphorical with the Dragon representing Sin and Wickedness and George represents purity and righteousness and virtue or something. But more broadly, you have the city that represents society/community/the known/safety. And you have the hero archetype who is someone who is willing to venture outside into the unknown and tame it.

The hero basically is someone living a high-risk, high-reward lifestyle. They expand the horizons of the community that by and large play it safe within the comfort of the city walls and the hero either dies and is celebrated, or lives and the king marries their daughter off to him.

My interest in this story was the disparity between my identifying with the hero-archetype (a stable secure life has no appeal to me, seems pointless) and not identifying. Specifically in that I wasn't looking for a princess to rescue, but a Saint Georgina. A compatriot, a counter part. And western narratives aren't rich with female hero archetypes (although history has a bunch, and it's kind of weird that Saint George is much more common iconography than Saint Jean de Arc, who did exist and whether there's a god or not, achieved much of what she is credited with).

Now, I was trying to pick apart this narrative for clues and at the time was noticing how much cultural appropriation Christianity did from pre-existing religious narratives. Especially in the Renaissance where the artists that created more or less 90% of Christian Iconography were cherry-picking Greek Paganism. Like we all picture 'Angels' as... let's face it, beautiful white people with wings. This is not how they are described in any Abrahamic source material, but it is how Cupid/Eros is depicted in Greek Mythology, and because that look is quite appealing as opposed to the monstrous thousand eyed beasts with bronze skin and 6 wings and faces of goats and other animals on the sides of their heads, so we have it.

And Saint George and the Dragon is probably a Christian wash of Jason and the Serpent. As in Jason and the Argonauts. Crucially, Jason achieved most of his tasks entirely dependent on his sorceress wife Medea, not some hapless princess tied to a post to be fed to a Dragon. And my story is much more similar to Jason and Medea than Saint George and nameless Princess.

This however is all preamble to the second piece of a puzzle, and that piece is called Hercules. Greek mythology had several central figures, not just Christ. But arguably the biggest is Hercules/Heracles. Here is a tragic figure that served as inspiration for the Stoics and the Cynics before them. Hercules life was suffering largely because the Goddess Hera unable to punish husband Zeus for infidelity naturally took it out on Hercules. Perhaps the most vindictive act was in adulthood driving Hercules mad so that he killed his wife and children.

Anyway, dig into Heracles sad story as you like, the point is that the Greek's celebrated Tragedies, and they had narratives of human suffering born of what I have taken to calling 'original innocence'. Greek Paganism is a legacy of European Culture and I find it interesting that in Greek mythology more often it was the God's betraying people, than people (like Adam and Eve) betraying God. Hercules was punished by the Gods not for what he'd done but who he was. He was the offspring of an unfaithful husband. Hera's wrath was misdirected.

Similarly the ordeals of Psyche, for whom Cupid/Eros fell for and was subsequently punished by Aphrodite/Venus. The Greek tragedies are populated not by people who were born and conceived of in Sin for breaking God's divine rule, but people who are basically good but punished by circumstance because the Gods are fickle, capricious and cruel.

And like Steven Fry, I too find the Pagan beliefs of the ancient Greeks do a much better job of explaining the chaotic and scary nature of the world than the Abrahamic Monotheism does.

But I want to switch to a different narrative now, to illustrate the importance of coming to know and believe in a concept like original innocence. And that is how people react to assertions that they are bad and full of sin.

Spoiler alert, but at the end of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Jim gets his freedom. The emotional climax of the book though is Huck Finn coming to recognize that Jim the runaway slave is a human being with human emotions. It creates a huge dilemma for him, because Jim is property and the Christian Bible tells him that freeing someone else's property is a mortal sin.

Specifically this happens:

"I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself, "All right, then, I'll GO to hell."

We look back at history and think poor Huck was misguided. Surely freeing a slave rewards you with a place at the right hand of God, and keeping a slave sends you to hell. But that wasn't what Huck believed. Huck was from the south and taught that black people were basically chattel, beasts of burden. Freeing a slave was like stealing a cow, something specifically proscribed against in the 10 Commandments.

It is my experience that if you tell someone they are fundamentally bad, they embrace it. They,like Huck, damn themselves. It doesn't motivate people to become better. It fosters despair and resignation. Hercules undertook his 12 labors not because he was guilty, but because he was innocent. He sought redemption to return to himself, his fundamental conception of himself as basically good. Huck Finn was told he was no good all his life and to this assertion he returned. He is simply fortunate that he lived in a time and place where being bad could manifest itself as the greater good.

Some of the most important words ever muttered were 'There but for the grace of God goes John Bradford' though it's impossible to tell if this is a recognition of original sin/or innocence. I of course would interpret it as innocence believing that the universe is ultimately deterministic. Even people's choices are determined, and many thinkers including the original original sinner in Saint Augustine have bent their minds like pretzels trying to reconcile choice with concepts like predestination.

That mind bending process is to me, by and large a waste of time since I don't believe in an all powerful benevolent God. I just don't have the task of reconciling so I can be indifferent to problems of choice in the face of omniscience (someone who knows what choices we are going to make with our 'free' will).

Having attempted to give myself a cursory education in the history of philosophy, I find Kant's phrase "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." a huge improvement on the concept of original sin. To be honest I don't really get sin. But Kant appears to see us more usefully as something less than the pinacle of evolution: something perfectly adapted to it's environment and resilient to any possible environmental change. Rather we are a work in progress. Prototypes all, just trying our best. And like Hera, our environment may drive some of us mad, but not so mad as to be beyond redemption.

Because at one point, long ago, no matter what life had in store for us. We were innocent. To this nature we can return.

Blergblahblahblergderp

The past couple of weeks, have been punctuated for me by friends asking 'have you heard of Jordan Peterson?' indicating that they have either just heard of him, or they have just become concerned that he is something they need to take seriously. In most cases, the question has not been one of curiosity, but seeking reassurance. That no reasonable person would credit Jordan Peterson. Or perhaps just that they are not the only person blindsided by his rise in popularity.

If you are concerned about the rise of JP, I would suggest you relax, and no need to 'research' what he's all about. You won't like him. He is riding a market opportunity though, by and large created by the popular conventional wisdom of the left.

I offer my shitty synthesis of what you just need to take note of, and meditate on.

1. To argue badly for a cause is the same as supporting the opposition.

This talk by Van Jones, whom hopefully is more likable than JP opens with the words "I think Liberals have a very hard time understanding their role in creating a market for Trump."

2. You probably can't demand empathy if you don't yourself extend it.
3. Empathizing is really, really hard, easy to mistake with projecting, and few people are good at it.
4. Oppression, tragically, is never as personal to the oppressor as it is to the oppressed.
5. Most oppression is a bi-product, an oversight.
6. The world as it is may be flawed, but that doesn't mean it came to these flaws arbitrarily.
7. Popular and egalitarian movements will be defined by the lowest common denominator.
8. Just because you won't let a psychoanalyst put you in a box, doesn't mean you don't behave as if you are in that box.
9. Be skeptical of anyone telling you who you are, but remember also that you are not the final authority on who you are. If it were so, you'd never have met a liar.
10. If you can't entertain dissenting opinions, you will be doomed to live a life under the foot of people who can.
11. It's a poor idea to lie to yourself. Take inventory of any vindictiveness or desire for group membership, and status within a group that may be motivating your righteousness.
12. When Bertrand Russel said 'The trouble with the world is the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt' it was an apolitical statement.
13. You will probably never meet someone 10 times your height, but it is possible to meet someone 10 times your psychological size and it's much harder to spot them coming. So brace for the greater variance.
14. Having everyone accommodate your problem into irrelevance is not only inefficient but does not actually fix your problem.

There, there's plenty of thoughts to feast upon and digest. I could do so myself and perhaps emerge a better thinker and advocate of whatever, and it doesn't require watching hours upon hours of JP lectures trying to force down your distaste to extract some granules of valuable criticism.

On Sexual Harassment

Consider this



In Conjunction with this


and admit that sorting out sexual harassment is going to be tricky. Perhaps impossible. Let's hope not, however any optimistic belief that avoiding sexual harassment is 'simple' and that people are being stupid and obstinate in the face of obvious answers like 'just don't do it.' is counterproductive.

Last night I attended two social functions. At the first, some douche turned up. Within a 30 minute period he demonstrated no capacity to 'read a room' just to be clear there was no sexual harassment perpetrated. The guy was simply inept at knowing when to just fucking shut up, when his jokes, suggestions or comments were falling flat. When he left the room, discussion actually turned to how to get rid of him, and failing that, how it might be possible to ditch the party and reconvene elsewhere.

At my second engagement, a friend of mine hugged me too hard and too long. This is not a problem for me, because I am physically larger than my friend so they can hug away I'm not going to get creeped out or feel insecure. But it happens, and I don't think I was being sexually harassed. A social norm was being transgressed as to how long a hug should last.

I bring up these two examples just because they came up within 2 hours of each other as examples of quite ordinary and commonplace behavior.

And thus, even though it's done the rounds, videos like the first one annoy me, and it's always a popular message: 'it's simple stupid!' whenever there's an issue that prompts sufficient self-righteousness. However this popular message annoys me.

Here's what the 'it's simple stupid!' camp is assuming away:

1. that people communicate indirectly.
2. that some people are not competent at reading social signals.
3. that there is a large overlap between acceptable behavior, and harassment based on the desirability of the individual to another individual.
4. that people are incompetent at expressing themselves in manners that are always acceptable.
5. that there are people in the world with a fear of rejection, that behave in incongruous ways both encouraging and discouraging potential suitors.
6. that there is mental illness in the world.
7. that there are people who are socially awkward.

I could probably go on, given time. But I can't be bothered spending it. The first video is using levity to address a phenomena that we should really quite reasonable expect.

Whenever there is a huge public outcry about sexual harassment, there are going to be a middleband of men that are horrified at the prospect of creeping out or disturbing or making any woman feel unsafe and yet are worried that they have done just that through plain old incompetence, perhaps by holding a hug too long, or perhaps trying to win over strangers through attempting an ill-advised joke.

The too-long hug, could be creepy, could be a creep getting trying to get their kicks by pressing a woman into them so they can feel their erection. I would guess somebody socially awkward would likely do the old 'asses-out' hug for feer of their genitals making their presence known to the other party, but I suspect in most cases the too-long hug is a form of indirect communication that is attempting to say 'I like you' while immediately gauging the likely response of the other by trying to hold that hug.

Or consider the term 'Love Triangle' if you've heard of it, then I guess you need to reconcile whether love triangles are a myth or whether it may allude to a real social phenomena. I guess formally it would have to refer to some kind of situation where Brad likes Jenny, who likes Greg, who like Brad. But I would guesstimate it commonly occurs without any sexual orientation obstacles where Brad likes Jenny, Jenny likes Greg, Greg isn't interested in Jenny, but all three of them work in the same office, perhaps even the same department. Jenny may groom herself with attracting Greg in mind, she applies makeup and selects outfits and perfumes that she feels enhances her appeal. And they do, just to Brad, not Greg. Brad similarly grooms in order to impress Jenny, but Jenny while polite and professionally friendly to Brad, considers him a sexual non-entity. The trouble for Jenny is, while she is ostensibly trying to narrow-cast to Greg, she is broadcasting much of her message about sexual availability.

Firstly, nothing in the love-triangle scenario would absolve Brad of sexually harassing Jenny. Particularly in a professional work environment. Equally, nothing would absolve Jenny of sexually harassing a not-interested Greg, but thanks to sexual dimorphism in our species and the statistical realities of sexual harassment, Greg is less likely to be bothered by Jenny than Jenny by Brad. Understanding that, Brad in theory could discern that Jenny dresses not for his benefit but Greg's. He could for example read body language that is narrow cast, establish a baseline and notice Jenny only teases her hair when talking to Greg, not himself etc.

But while he could I personally can't argue that he should or every other man on the planet. For one thing, most of my friends don't appreciate it when they catch me reading their body language. The second is that it is a costly solution in terms of time and energy to address failures in what is quite normal human interaction. What Brad needs to understand is the difference between flagrantly unacceptable behavior, and when quasi-acceptable behavior becomes unacceptable through repetition.

The working material, being the general population of the world are going to, like me, have probably fucked up making ice-cubes in a tray at some point. We are talking about people who, like me, have locked themselves out of their house, or their online banking account. Let us give ourselves credit that we will probably fuck up navigating social dynamics at some point, let alone the much higher risk and less practiced sexual dynamics.

I have no problem with the pursuit of an ideal or even improved world for women to live in, I am frustrated by people thinking that it hasn't thus far been accomplished for lack of the simplest efforts of self restraint.

Try, out of curiosity, this thought experiment: Go to some social media account, if necessary a directory of phone contacts or some such. Find the 14th person on the list you know, and I guess gender doesn't matter but if it might to you, select the first friend from the 14th that is compatible with your orientation. Now imagine that tomorrow they approached you face to face and said 'Hey, I am in love with you, I want to spend lots of time with you, all the time I can get, have regular sex with you and plan a future together, how do you feel about me?'

Would it freak you out if you received such a proposal from them? I looked at my account, and I'd have to say while I wouldn't be freaked out, I would be quite uncomfortable to try and devise the best way to reject her.

Yet that is direct communication delivered verbally. It isn't an arm thrown around my shoulder in an act of presumed familiarity, it isn't groping my arse on a dancefloor at a party. It isn't sending me photos of genitals to my phone without solicitation. But I suspect, a lot of people would be really uncomfortable with this direct communication, they would perhaps not like being burdened with the information of someone confessing they are in love with you. I also suspect, you like me don't want to live in a world where that level of directness is what is required to engage someone in a possible romantic relationship.

There is a desirable level of ambiguity to be navigated as two people feel eachother out. Miscommunication is bound to happen along the way. Sometimes it may have unfortunate outcomes in terms of some guy or girl feeling heartbroken and disappointed, and sometimes it may have unfortunate outcomes in terms of someone getting harassed or assaulted.

To be clear though, as a guy, I don't have much experience of what it is like to be routinely sexually harassed. I know the fact is that it is pretty bad out there for women. But nobody, nobody is helped by denying there is some ambiguous middle ground where some harassment will likely have to be endured, and some transgressions forgiven. And guys are going to have to accept that it's likely to be a judgement call made by individuals within the situation. This means some guys that had no intention of ever hurting, assaulting, harassing or even making a woman uncomfortable are going to go down for sexual harassment - because in the end intentions don't matter so much as the effects.

The reason I take that stance is because even if you say 'look hugging a woman because she's your friend is fine, that's not sexual harassment.' A bunch of sexual predators are going to take any inch offered by definitions of behavior that is acceptable and run a mile with it, until they feel it's okay to masturbate into a restaurant pot-plant in front of someone because she's your 'friend'.

I am pessimistic that sexual harassment can be eradicated, that it could just be solved with straightforward education and checking your privilege. That the line can be drawn on any surface that isn't running water. That we'll ever live in a world where Greg can wink and it's not harassment but Brad can't wink without creeping someone out.

My point is not that women are responsible for their own harassment, though take it that way if you must. My point is that the material we have to work with in solving this problem, is very low quality stuff. We can only go backwards by pretending that minds are carved in marble, not squishy grey matter that forgets where it parked the car.

On Voting

I don't particularly ever wish to go viral, nor any idea or suggestion of mine to go viral. Namely because I do not view myself as qualified to generate a sufficiently considered idea to have its upside sufficiently outweigh its unintended consequences.

But if there were one idea I could come close to wishing would catch on it's this decision rule: 'vote for the candidate who spent the least on their campaign.'

Before I elaborate... build a case for why I'd want this idea to catch on, there's some obvious caveats and qualifications - namely that you might have a case where you have an establishment corrupt person and a truly horrific independent who couldn't get funding because their platform is essentially 'I feel like Hitler never had a bad idea' or something, in which case a voters primary duty - to vote for the lesser evil - should supersede the simple vote for who spends the least. Beyond not being so hard and fast to exempt one's ethical duties, this decision rule is very much a limited 'take back democracy' campaign that would not run indefinitely. If it got widespread enough and thus candidates were incentivized into a 'race to the bottom' on campaign spending, then at some point regrettably you might actually have to look at, and weigh up policy again to decide how to vote. Perhaps the nominal end point would be when a Democratic government actually passes campaign finance reform legislation in favor of public interest.

Anyway, here's why I'd ostensibly like this idea to catch on.

1. It is underpinned by something that should be verified, and I believe, has been verified through analysis of at least the United States electoral process. But the finding I believe was that the best predictor of policy is actually not campaign promises or even party ideology but campaign contributions.
I would expect this to be the case, just through pure reasoning. Chomsky does better reasoning than I can, and furthermore actually reads up on this shit, but the picture gets scattered across a bunch of sources, so please accept (but still apply critical thinking) my shitty synthesis.
Basically there's a threshold at which campaigning for public office gets so expensive that you lose your democracy - you move from 1 person 1 vote, to 1 dollar 1 vote. An unfinanced candidate simply cannot win office. If a candidate finances themselves through small contributions from many people, and campaign donations are a better prediction of the policy outcomes than campaign promises by candidates, then in effect the *real* election is the fundraising campaign - and that's best case. Inflate campaign costs out of the reach of small contributions and you have disproportionate representation for those who make greater donations.
The wealthiest people are legal people aka corporations, and corporations are almost exclusively tyrannical in structure. There is in principle not much difference between your preferred candidate accepting 'donations' from a dictator like Kim Jong Un, and a corporate executive. They are both tyrants that preside over a domain that can have conflicting interests to the public at large.
Rationally you would expect campaign 'contribution' or 'donation' to be a euphamism for 'investment' in that given a CEO can also just plain vote, their incentive to move from 1 person 1 vote to 1 dollar 1 vote is to get disproportionate representation. This can even work when they donate the same amount to both candidates, because the candidate is faced with the dilemma of refusing the donation and thus accepting a disadvantage. Hence on some issues it's possible to get no representation from either candidate.
The other point that bears emphasis is that campaign contributions being a better predictor of policy than campaign promises. If a tyrant desires a piece of policy that is universally unpopular - say reducing the minimum wage - then their interest is in having the candidate that represents them get elected, not to convince the public that the policy is a good idea. They can come to a private understanding of the conditions of the donation, and then have the candidate campaign on entirely unrelated issues. eg. you might vote for the 'Marriage Equality' candidate platform because you care about equal rights and their donors are indifferent, but the same candidates intention to deregulate minimum wage is never really featured in their campaigning.
So the rationale becomes pretty basic, the less campaign expenditure, the less compromised your candidate is, the more representative your vote is likely to be.

2. It's simple! The decision rule requires no education beyond being able to identify which of two integers  is the lower number. Someone can adopt the rule with no need to educate themselves into critical thinking, economic theory or even civics. Much like a managed index fund is for many the best way to invest in shares because one simply owns the whole market, needs to know nothing about finance, pays lower fees and achieves higher returns than most managed funds, a voter who uses this simple decision rule doesn't need to pay attention and process any information apart from who spent the least. A simple, objectively verifiable fact.
Democracy is a popular, egalitarian ideal and that means a decision rule needs to be simple, to be applicable at the lowest common denominator of analytical ability and like an economic model produce a better outcome across the population, not necessarily in every discrete case.
While the benefits of using a simple rule are to me clear, the adoption of such a simple solution I realize is wildly optimistic, given that most people are not empirical and sadly persist in the conceit they are smarter than they have already demonstrated themselves to be. There is a wealth of data to indicate that low-cost index funds have outperformed the vast majority of fund managers for years, but lay people still persist in paying high fees to numerous managers who routinely under perform the market - thus I expect most people will still think themselves up to the task of analyzing minute chunks of second hand information as to a candidates policy platform to determine how to vote in their own best interest.
You could have already thought that this rule would have meant Trump over Clinton, given that Trump spent less on his campaign, but you'd be wrong. It would mean Sanders over Trump which is actually incorrect again, because for the office of president it would be Johnson over Trump and Sanders (and I don't know which of the million republican primary candidates was the poorest, but it probably would not have been Trump).
The outcome of any one election is not the point of the decision rule though, although it could produce better outcomes for the public at large, the real beauty is in the incentive it provides. Namely if this was how voters voted, it would incentivise candidates to not take campaign contributions. Both Trump and Obama won their primaries and fans largely because they weren't taking large ticket donations. Then the tragedy (particularly for the Obama campaign) they welcomed with open arms the compromising money in the Presidential campaign because the donations tend to follow votes and not the other way round. Another way of thinking about that is that your preferred candidate gets privatized by virtue of being likely to represent their constituents.
It would free candidates from the obligation towards donors and free them from the donor treadmill - a public office holder after the fact of the election cannot bite the hand that feeds them, because they have to consider their re-election, career, retirement and the future of their party.
If en masse, having your campaign budget expand becomes a liability to you getting elected then candidates obligations move from fulfilling the promises on which they were financed, to fulfilling the promises on which they were elected.

3. There's also a potential for much needed reform in Journalism. If campaign contributions are better at predicting policy outcomes than campaign policy platforms, then journalistic coverage of politics needs to be focused on the fundraising rather than the campaigning if they are true to their mission of informing the general public.
Adopt this simple decision rule and suddenly the only information voters care about aren't the talking heads promising policies they apparantly have no intention of fulfilling, but who is spending what and where that money is coming from.
The United States is well set up, because they have to declare donations and it's all a matter of public record. My own country Australia under the Westminster System, I believe has a less admirable legislation as regards disclosing donations - but it should be noted that the press in the US does an abysmal job of covering and disseminating this most crucial information to the public at large.
Even in a country like Australia though, the necessary information is available to cover the expenditure on campaigns by proxy - media monitoring is already in place to estimate advertising costs based on the numeracy and frequency of ads on broadcast mediums and online. Organisations like Getup! even have the infrastructure in place to distribute 'How to vote' cards that just list candidate by campaign expenditure.

4. It's a massive massive massive time saver. Think about it, when someone says 'Have you heard about what Dutton said on Q & A last night' you can say 'I don't care.' There's only one thing you need to know, so you can skip all the mental taxation of trying to determine whose policy reflects your best interests, especially if the proposed policy is not that predictive of actual policy.
It's fucking SIMPLE! I can't emphasize this point enough, there is just so much fucking pure white noise in public discourse picking over the minutiae of candidates policy and history and all this shit in what is a tragically optimistic overestimation of the influence of discourse and our ability to disseminate our best ideas. Here is something where you can just say 'vote for the candidate who spends the least money and if enough people do THAT then they'll learn to stop taking money.'
Take just one example as an illustration. Just one.
Should you vote for a candidate that supports Capital Improved Value basis for land tax or Site Value? If you don't immediately know, then here's what you need to know - Capital Improved Value basically means the better condition the structures sitting on your land are in, the more land tax you have to pay, whereas if you were to demolish any structures then you would get a reduction in your tax obligation. CIV based land tax favors land banking and speculation, whereas Site value encourages development and optimal usage of the property. Land banking artificially reduces the supply of housing, thus putting upward pressure on land prices, hence CIV is pushed for by Real Estate lobby groups and land bankers, it allows development estates to drip feed supply of new housing as well on the outskirts while reducing the amount of funding local councils receive...
blah blah blah, there's more I could extrapolate on, the thing is with the decision rule you don't actually need to know any of this shit. It means you will probably vote for the candidate that received less money from any Real Estate, Property Development or Land Banking lobby groups.

5. Worst case: The next election we wind up electing a chaotic mess of independents, all grossly under-qualified with very narrow domains they actually care about (one may have campaigned on the single issue of raising Highway Speed limits, another on being Anti-Duck Hunting) but the game as it stands, is broken. An incoherent government would have to come together to compromise and actually think through problems as shit arises and they would have no reciprocal obligation to do anything for any group beyond the interests of their constituent voters.
Historically in Australia, minority governments (like most recently the Gillard Government) have been much more effective than majority governments in passing legislation because they are forced to negotiate and compromise.
The monsters on both sides are the ones running slick campaigns and then quite transparently not representing the people who voted for them.
Yes, there's some chance that en masse we elect a dysfunctional incoherent mob of unqualified independents who send us back to the pols early, and then there's a chance the 2 party systems of the world pull off a 'we told you so, it's one of us or nobody!' but if you hold fast to your resolve, eventually under game theory the competent parties will have to adapt their game to representing voters rather than donors.

I really can't believe how I managed to write so many words over something so simple, I doubt this decision rule is an original idea on my part, and really it becomes similar to government by lottery which I am not adverse to and that certainly wasn't my idea. I just hear this kind of no-analytical-abilities-required solutions rarely, if ever, discussed for all the lengthy discussion of our broken democracies.

So I guess, if you want my vote don't take any more fucking money than needed to register.

On Cynicism

So what was so great about Black Panther?

It isolated it's story and indeed, it's whole world away from the rest of the Marvel Universe, meaning it had no obligation to represent White people. Similar to that test that goes back to the 80's where a film needs to have two named female characters have at least one conversation that is not about a man, Black Panther I imagine passes with flying colours a similar test where 2 black characters get to have conversations with each other that aren't about white people.

It also paints a Utopic African Nation that is not just a facsimile of the current wealthiest nations on earth but casts an African Nation as superior. This is similar to a Total Quality Management (TQM) technique called 'Draw, See, Think' which is where you draw your best case scenario so you can envision it and then start figuring out how to get there. I don't doubt that it is tremendously powerful to see your culture or your heritage held in a positive light after a lifetime of being bombarded with negative associations and connotations. That's powerful stuff, the power of which is easily identified within individuals given the general scarcity of encouragement and positive feedback.

Furthermore, going behind the cameras and digging into reality, a bunch of Black People got paid. Ryan Coogler as Director who co-wrote with Joe Robert Cole also African-American, Cinamatographer was a woman, and special effects employed 2/3rds of the worlds' population. Not to mention that the characters of the film were in fact played by actors who are real people in real life and they took home what was hopefully big-fat-paychecks. In Andy Serkis and Martin Freemen there was enough white men to avoid obtusely alienating them, but they played bit-parts really.

So we've come a long way since Al Jolson, a long way since the last big blockbuster cultural phenomena set in continental Africa 'The Lion King' where barely any of the cartoon characters were voiced by African Americans (though they were more represented than Arab's in Aladdin).

And as Barack Obama said 'Better is good.' and it is worth remembering that.

Yes indeed, Black Panther is a terrific film truly flawless for anyone under the age of 12. As of this writing, I'm living through that period that effects some films known as 'hype' before as I'm willing to bet time will prove, the movie is relegated to it's true significance. Much like James Cameron's Titanic, or James Cameron's Avatar. And I feel as highlighted above^ the good will be simmered down like a sauce on a low heat to what I mentioned, and in the future we are I assume aiming for, perhaps the memory of the significance of an almost all-black cast in a major release film will simply be taken for granted by future audiences.

But right now, it's painful for me to behold. I could just ride it out, I could take no risks and keep my mouth shut so that if it turns out I'm wrong and I'm the minority curmudgeon that didn't get it, then I could let others have a good time... but fuck it, I've been appropriating Black Radical fashion for decades, I had to take shit from my brother for my white-guilt and the sudden influx of hype from my white friends is frustrating, because the Black Panther doesn't deserve the lip-service.

So spoilers you fucking man-child, I'm going to talk about the content, and why with time and digestion it will probably be scaled back to largely positive as a step in the right direction, rather than the sparking of a revolution, because if you close one eye and see with another - it's a problematic film. So much so it's hard to know where to begin.

In fairness, most of the problems can be laid at the feet of predominantly White people, maybe I'll start with the larger group because they are actually easier to deal with. The Disney Corporation, it's Chairman and CEO is Bob Iger, and Walt Disney Studio's is presided over by two White Male Presidents, whom are parent to Marvel Studios also presided over by a White Man who served as producer for Black Panther. And all these subsidiaries are assets on the books of Disney, whom are a publicly traded company with obligations to maximise profits for the shareholders, and take a guess who dominates the asset holding class in America, the world, everywhere.

Thus, if African Americans, and Africans everywhere are turning out in droves to celebrate seeing their cultures portrayed in a wonderful fantastic light for perhaps the first time in their lives, as moving as it is, it is also a mechanism whereby their wealth is redistributed to predominantly the wealthiest white people in global society. Other's have picked up on this and there was some online campaign to try and get the studios to donate 25% of the films profits to outreach as the Titular character proposes to do with the riches Wakanda has sat on for millennia. Unforch, this is happening at a time where Disney can safely tell a bunch of black kids in Oakland to go fuck themselves, and it probably won't hear a peep because attention is focused on other kids telling the NRA to go fuck themselves, nor probably would Disney be wrong in assuming that distributing all their black audience's money to their shareholders will result in them boycotting the next installment of the Black Panther franchise. After all, an abysmal hit rate on adapting comic books into movies has never stopped nerds from forking over their cash.

So that's that, and it's sad, but black communities might take away that they probably have billions of dollars at their command that instead of spending on movie tickets, could be spent on social programs if they could coordinate and market one as easily as Disney can sell a comic book movie.

The problems in the content lay at the feet largely of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (I'm sure it wasn't intended, but as a poweful metaphor, when Stan Lee makes his traditional cameo in the movie, Prince T'Challa has unwittingly just won a big stack of money on a roulette wager, which Stan Lee appropriates for himself.) These famous collaborators are two white men that conceived of the Black Panther back in the 60's. And Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole inherited the legacy of the most progressive minds in comics from the 60's.

And in the opening sequence where an animated black sand is doing the exposition of what the nation of Wakanda is and where it stands today, I was impressed that they alluded to the slave-trade. Of course, the moment they acknowledge the reality of slavery, the great Afro-Futuristic nation of Wakanda becomes morally culpable for it via omission. The Nations leaders literally made a choice of using their superior technology to liberate Africa from the tyranny of Colonial powers, or to seclude themselves and abandon their neighbors. They chose the latter.

I blame Stan Lee, you basically can't have a fictitious African utopia in Africa's Heartland without skewering yourself in this way. Thus the screenwriters could only avoid it by making Wakanda a dysfunctional and devastated nation state powerless to help their neighbors or attempt to tackle this moral dilemma, and I'm impressed they tried to tackle the moral dilemma head on, but I thought about it during the film, and the best solution I could come up with would have been for T'Challa to have been a massive breakaway from his forebears, standing in open defiance to his father - (basically playing the role of his uncle in the film) but it would have to be acknowledged, that Wakanda's isolationist policies leave blood on their hands, in much the same way Australia's appalling handling of refugees in contravention of UN charters we have signed is a source of great national shame.

So Stan Lee screwed them on that one, but the fact is, if you try to sidestep it, then you don't get to portray that Afrofuturistic nation, which I believe at its heart is noble. Perhaps for the given nerd audiences, they could have just ignored the dilemma of Wakanda's culpability. And I should be clear, the inaction of good men is by comparison, nowhere near the evil of actual colonial powers and European slave traders. At least the fictitious nation of Wakanda chose to isolate itself to sit on its horde of magical natural resources, rather than sell their fellow African's into slavery, which while exploited by slavers is likely like all dubious economics, to have been in part facilitated by local institutions. Like our (Australia's) elected representatives and Adanhi.

But the impression I got from the world building, was that Wakanda by and large was so far advanced that it could have been the world's dominant super-power, furthermore, the film establishes an asymmetric intelligence network, Wakanda's ruling power knows well the true state of the world, whereas the international intelligence community thinks Wakanda is one of the world's poorest nation that simply *doesn't* participate in international trade... which is very farfetched. Nothing in the history of the world suggests that a nation can simply choose not to participate in international trade, particularly anywhere on Continental Africa. Opium and artillery forced trade into China, Gunboats opened up Japan, Colonialists competed to build rail lines all through Africa to carve it up as territory, followed much later by Communist powers that still goes on today. In what world does an African nation get to say 'no sorry, we'll pass' 'oh okay then.'? No world, which is why this movie is great if you are under 12 but people in their 30s need to keep their hands out of their pants. Enjoy it for what it is, a nice thought, a beautiful illustration, but a problematic idea.

I apologize for me economics training, and I'm put in mind of my brother telling me about a physicist lamenting he can't enjoy comic book movies because of Bruce Banner's line in the first Avenger's movie 'How many spectrometers do you have? Put them all on roof tops and set them to Gamma radiation!' which he says is the scientific equivalent of 'How many cars do you have? Move them onto the roofs and set them to helicopter!'

In the same way, seeing the James Cameron-Navi like society that had an abundance of wealth and also goat herders, the economics of Wakanda are completely opaque. It is presumably not a capitalist society, because their agribusiness is barely even mechanized, certainly not optimized. They have sky scrapers but no real business entities. There's no international trade and vibranium is a magic substance that can do anything. It appears every citizen has access to bead bracelets that are arguably superior to Smart phones, though the advantages of a 3 dimensional holographic/nano-drone display on a portable device are dubious. At any rate, the people of Wakanda seem to have integrated technology into their lives with no real disruption. Despite the advanced technology they possess, the people seem to live a balanced healthy lifestyle, without consuming excess calories or suffering from 1st world diseases like Cancer and Diabetes.

Maybe they have cures for these, which again, renders Wakanda culpable, even if it is dependent on vibranium, the reserves shown effectively make them the same as the bad guys in sci-fi film Elysium. Sure the tribes are proud of their respective cultural heritages, customs and traditions, but there's no real indication as to how wealth is distributed in the nation of Wakanda. Maybe universal basic income, and maybe automation has pushed them to the point where the royal family basically are the only people that have to work, the rest are hobby farmers or museum displays. But then that leads to the question: what are the showpieces, the goat herders or the skyscrapers?

Alan Moore in his work 'Writing For Comics' stressed the rewards to be reaped from comprehensive world-building, in that if you thoroughly understand the physics and mechanics and economics of the world you have built you don't need to do any exposition, the audience will simply feel it's completeness. I didn't when it comes to Wakanda, and again I blame the laziness of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby who knew a lot about innovating comics and not much else, and Wakanda is a thin facade as a result of their legacy.

Then there's the thing I'm seeing online that resonates least with me, and that is the character of Erik Killmonger, the most problematic aspect of the whole film. It's hard to blame Killmonger on Stan Lee too, because I suspect he's a more recent character and having just checked, yes, again he is the creation of white guys so that's some small consolation.

We meet him in a museum that inexplicably and uniquely doesn't label any of it's displays, and while I love his haircut's similarity to De La Soul's De La Do, he for some reason has gotten the museum's expert curator to come down and explain what would be on the display cards if it were any other museum in the world. This lady, though as culpable as any beneficiary of the legacy of colonialism is in my opinion, an employee of an organization that may have a passion for African culture and conservation. Nevertheless she is killed via poison, that was somehow guaranteed to be served to her by Killmonger's confederate posing as an employee in the lobby. A poison that takes effect at the perfect time.

This is just a classic dumb plan, the same as the Joker's inexplicable expectation that at midnight the odds of the barges exploding was somehow at it's peak rather than it's lowest probability in 'The Dark Knight'. What's more problematic for Erik Killmonger or Michael B Jordan, is that he has all the most painfully bad lines in the film, and he doesn't play it as a militant black activist that says naive and dumb shit all the time, nor do the actors play off of him. I believe the word is 'didactic' he is the character that hits us with a sledgehammer to make sure the political message gets across, and it's embarrassing.

Consider the potency of if he'd just asked pointed questions of characters he interacted with about their own moral culpability in the plight of black people the world over, he could have been a thoughtful, sensitive charismatic bad guy that left us in a genuine moral dilemma of who to root for. Instead he says shit like:

"How do you think your ancestors got these? Do you think they paid a fair price? Or did they take it, like they took everything else?"

and perhaps worst line of the film:

"Bury me in the ocean with my ancestors who jumped from the ships, because they knew death was better than bondage."

Not only because the ancestors that jumped from the ships were the least likely to have any descendants, or that a comparison of a life in slavery compared to incarceration in Wakanda are probably not comparable, but because Killmonger is half Wakandan, he is descended from the people that stood by idly, capable of helping and expelling all colonial powers from the continent, and unfortunately is likely descended from ancestors who owned his other ancestors on his mother's side.

I love Michael B Jordan in the Wire, and in Creed, but he was given real shit to work with in Black Panther. His character in the end, making no sense at all, spending his whole life seeking connection to his home land, he then immediately sets about alienating himself from Wakanda until he is defeated and at the very moment he gains acceptance and compassion he chooses to end his own life. For all his political rhetoric, he turns out to be a hot mess.

Now, I want you to consider this narrative:

An African-American in line with the constitution and by his birthright ascends to the highest office in the world's most powerful nation. During his meteoric rise, the validity of his birth is questioned, having an African father and an American mother. He produces documentation of his citizenship but it is still doubted by some belligerent members. Once in power, he presents his vision for radical reform to bring antiquated policies of his nation into the 21st century. While he receives enthusiastic support from some quarters, and grudging loyalty from others, a more conservative faction set out to undermine his agenda and block it from transpiring. This faction seeks backing from outside powers to try and overthrow the legitimate new leader from separatists with a demonstrated record of resenting social progress in governmental departments. After resurrecting the champion of the nativist movement and calling in some debts, the faction then mobilizes to dismantle the policies put in place by the new leader and restore their native champion to power and the status quo. They compromise CIA officers in executing their plan and manage to escalate partisanship in their country to the point that citizens and government officials are clashing with each other. The new agenda is effectively blocked and stifled, and the nativist champion is restored to power whereby he immediately starts implementing his own naive dip-shit policies with little understanding of history, the world or international relations or economics.

This is both the story of Obama-Trump and Killmonger-T'Challa. I don't know what was going on, but it fits. All except in two dimensions - T'Challa is for the most part, articulate where Killmonger rambles lines straight off the top of his head without any seeming thought. So temperamentally the roles are reversed, Killmonger speaks like Trump and relatively T'Chilla speaks like Obama.

The second way it doesn't fit, is that Killmonger reveals scars for every person he killed in service of the CIA and in preparation for his revenge against the son of his father's murderer. Making his revenge motive morally bankrupt having inflicted the suffering of his youth on potentially thousands more people dwarfing any possible justification for taking revenge. Also it turned out, selling weapons US style to change the balance of powers was stupid. Wakanda just needed to take control of international airspace, shipping lanes and satellites with their superior technology to become the world power, albeit there was no evidence they had any countermeasure for nuclear threats. Apart of course from Vibranium.

And yeah... it's difficult, you have a lot of black on black violence in the third act as the characters struggle with the metaphorical internal conflict, and there's no way to avoid that without putting lots of white people into the cast. So you are trading off on goals, the writers had a LOT of mechanical connundrums to deal with thus the failings in message I suspect are the results of trade offs between representation, honoring source material and cannon, and navigating the tricky moral dilemmas those first two present you story wise. Such that you have husband and wife attempting to kill eachother while heroic white CIA guy uses drone ship to kill black pilots, and we are supposed to root for him?

Representation also ultimately made the titular character a hero it was impossible to root for, besides knowing he was in the forthcoming Avengers film and therefore destroying any possibility that he might actually die, and accompanying tension, in his opening set piece Token Damsel-Not-So-Helpless trope sandwiches him into a protagonist not worth caring about. I've noticed that one solution to female representation in action films and by extension comic book films has gone something like this - it used to be that heroic cowboy in White Hat surmounted impossible odds to rescue a helpless girl tied to train tracks and it always went down this way. Audiences liked this, but got sick of seeing women portrayed as helpless and useless and dependent on men. So they just shifted the scenario slightly, such that now superhero breaks through enemy lines surmounting impossible odds and demonstrating his potent virile masculine nature, while damsel in distress tokenistically takes out her immediate guard and maybe escapes her bonds just as the hero arrives to discover she is not so helpless after all.

T'Challa has this sequence trying to fetch his ex-girlfriend for a funeral. Spoiling her mission (so that she was in control the whole time until he fudged it up for her) and freezing such that he has to be bailed out by his personal guard. Then ultimately while he has a dig at Trump, suggesting it is better to build bridges than walls, this ill-advised move by the one African nation with true self-determination to cede it's advantage to the global community comes basically from him trying to get back with his ex. It's a bad policy procedure, and I really wish he'd bothered to sit down with Chomsky or Yanis Varafoukis or anyone that may have explained to a head of state what is likely to happen to a state that opens up it's trade to globalization...

I mean ultimately, it's a dumb fun comic book movie, based on ideas had by two white guys in New York almost 60 years ago.

So why is this post called 'On Cynicism' a word I hardly use or can spell without technological assistance. In part it refers to what I am often called, perhaps accurately given my suspicion of motives. But it mainly refers to cynical marketing, which is what is happening to you.

The motives of movie studios can be known, the reason you are getting Wonder Woman and now Black Panther is because marketers have figured out they can use your beliefs to sell you shit. It is cynical marketing because they suspect you'd rather just hear about your ideals than actually act on them, and they can make money off of that.

So here begins (yes, begins) a little crash course in marketing.

Marketing is process of communicating value. More understandishable, it is the marketers job to make you feel good about purchase decisions, and thereby increase profits. They are interested in how to make you want to buy things, and how to make you want to make other people want to buy things.

Much of the science of marketing is like a super-specific hopped up version of psychology. Having studied marketing and subsequently learning about clinical psychology, there's an extent to which clinical psychology is decades behind marketing. Which is problematic.

One thing they do though, is they are particularly interested in the difference between what people say they want, and what they actually want.

So here's two simple marketing concepts.

There are two kinds of people in the world - opinion leaders and opinion seekers. That's the first concept.

Now there's a hierarchy of needs, that while not concrete, predicts human behavior well enough to be considered valid. Basically you will only have the energy to live your truth if you feel esteemed enough by yourself and your peers, you'll only worry about how you are esteemed by your peers if you first belong to your peer group, you will only be concerned about belonging to a group of people if you have secured food and shelter, which in turn you won't care about if you are being chased by a bear. This is known as 'Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs'

Put the two together and what do marketers suspect?

Opinion leaders feel secure enough in their identity to be primarily concerned with expressing themselves, they are 'self-actualizers' these are the people whom you say 'what's with the cut on those jeans? Nobody wears them like that anymore' and they respond 'whatever, this is how I like them.'

Most people (about 3/4) are opinion seekers, they look externally for cues to tell them how to behave because they are focused on belonging. These are people who keep up with the latest trends, these are the people who image-craft on facebook.

And marketers spend a lot of time researching who's who. In many industries, marketing's role is basically to identify opinion leaders (via people called 'cool hunters') document them, then tailor products based on the opinion leaders opinions, and then mass market them to opinion seekers, who by and large need permission to adopt new styles/thoughts.

Malcolm Gladwell's book 'Tipping Point' is a much easier in depth way to learn about this process than completing a marketing degree like I did.

Now I don't work in marketing or even sales anymore, and I don't really keep up with the trade publications because I never have. But I feel 5 years ago if people said 'Image-crafting' you would have thought of people posting photos of beach holidays and date nights and all the highlights of their life making you feel as though your life was a complete and utter failure.

I would posit, that these days the predominant form of image crafting is broadcasting your political views on social media, something Jonathon Haidt calls 'value signalling' on my newsfeeds at least if you want to get cheap likes, you don't need to get engaged or book an international flight or have a baby anymore (though I'm sure they all still work) so much as rail against that politician or topic everyone hates, contributing little to furthering the discussion and preferably simply parroting someone else's ideas.

I'm often struck by how much social progress feels like the fashion industry to me. Most of my morbid-voyeurism has traditionally been dedicated to feminist ideas, but the high turnover disposal of discussion topics seem to reflect the seasonal fashion trends rather than suggesting that roughly every 3 months major problems are actually being resolved. eg. manspreading, mansplaining, gaslighting, emotional labor, intersectionality, #metoo ... none of these issues I feel have been resolved to my understanding, it just seems like there's the same competition for novelty to raise one's profile and displace the current opinion seekers that marketers tap into. Feminism just doesn't seem to make money out of the same turnover.

But what I suspect happened is that the marketers that work for Disney, identified that maybe 4 or 5 years ago the opinion leaders were the outspoken ones on issues of social justice. Then particularly in the comic market they noticed all the online chatter about representation etc. and noticed the migration of opinion seekers into the progressive camp. Young people have traditionally always been more left leaning, more egalitarian than generations before them, but there previously wasn't much social status to be gained by being obtusely so.

Now there is. 10 years ago, all my female opinion leader friends were engaged in imploring women to call themselves feminists. Nowadays all my female opinion leader friends appear to be quietly backing away from what feminism has come to mean (this is pure supposition on my part).

Tragically, as marketers give people just looking to belong permission to adopt the opinions previously held only by opinion leaders, some opinion leaders can ride high on the sudden surge of public sentiment. Others get suspicious of their own beliefs if a majority of people buy into them, and these are the opinion leaders that don't have a heartbreaking fall from relevance.

With a Whitehouse populated by a White Nativist administration looking to somehow return America to the 50's (before Black Panther was published) then it's pretty obvious that the traditional youth anti-establishment rebellious streak that tries to forge an identity of their own by pushing away from the values of their parents and even older siblings, is probably going to react to the times by competing to see who can be most progressively left.

The cynics are the marketers (and I guess me also) that feel that your ideology is basically arbitrary, what matters is your status among your peers and maintaining your membership to it. Thus, Black Panther, Wonder Woman is probably more a repition of cranking a well proved money machine than genuine social progress.

I'm confident in this because people seem to have forgotten that a black man was actually democratically elected to the highest office of what is really the most powerful and technologically advanced nation on Earth. Last year, an almost all black cast and production crew won 'Best Picture' for what is basically a perfect film called 'Moonlight'.

In conclusion, there's a possibility that I was simply primed to see Black Panther how I saw it. Just that day I'd watched a video about the sociologist who dubbed Walt Disney 'the most dangerous man in America' and in the 1920's had observed how Hollywood managed to get people concerned about the plight of fictitious situations than the plight of the real world. Shuffling out of a packed cinema surrounded by nerds who think developments in the Marvel Cinematic Universe are really important just reminded me of this.

I'm in two minds, maybe it is a shared disgrace how much we care about comic book movies, and on the other hand, maybe it's for the best that nerds squabble over fake shit to prevent them from fucking up policy on real issues. That latter option feels like a dangerous idea though.