Comprende?

The trouble with history is that we tend to focus on the least identifiable characters. To an extent, i mean go back to hunter gatherer times, we don't, we call this period pre-history.

But what were most people doing in western europe and northern Africa when Julius Caesar was walking around? Most people were toiling the fields.

See what I'm saying? Probably not. But it's the old ordinary versus special causes, and we are for the most part blind to ordinary causes. Let's say 5% of the population are especially influential. Then 95% are ordinarily influential. The 5% don't regularly occur and so we notice both them and their impact. A "management by exception " approach. 

Most of us live quite ordinary lives resembling quite closely many other people. 

Here though is the point, look at a serf or a slave 600 years ago, what did their lives comprise of?

Days of toil to sustain their existence, support their family and pay taxes to the church. Reduce that further, you have people toiling away in service to an imaginary being. (Even allowing one of the major religions to be true leaves the majority of people serving an imaginary being.)

Now look to modern western life. What has changed?

People toil in service to imaginary beings. Just the details change. The gods are corporations, for the most part, legal entities whose interests most people dedicate most of their waking hours to. No more real than the pantheon of gods were.

The elites derive their authority from these persons, but are still subject to time and chance.

This is no conspiracy this is a habit we possess, perhaps no different than our ability to engage in sport or root for fictitious characters. 

Get what I'm saying?

Relationship advice reduction

Date somebody who is happy.

Furiosa & Others

Mad Max: Fury Road is totally worth seeing, a film to capture the imagination. I'm not really a long time fan of the franchise. In fact I tried to watch the original and was surprised to find it almost set in regular regional Australia. I didn't expect it to be about a cop taking a vacation in a post apocalyptic world. It was late, I picked it up in the middle, and I was tired and I gave up.

I'd heard some buzz about Furiosa, artists in my news feed were doing fan arts and some female friends on face book making a lot of typed noise about how exciting a character she was. I was excited, trepidatious even to see a strong female character, and I guess my expectations were ratcheted up to expect something I'd never seen before, a breakthrough, a gamechanger, a new character - to evolve into an archetype. Because I have an intense personal... I couldn't say interest, being a man... but curiosity about the challenge of writing/creating the SFC.

'The strong female character' is problematic, and the history of cinema is littered with spectacular failures and near successes and it turns out to be for me at least, an activity that bends the mind into a pretzel. These failures I feel are succinctly parodied right here.

Mark Twain wrote 'they didn't know it was impossible, so they did it.' and it's possible that the stuff I've looked at when looking into gender is a case where more information confuses what I might have intuitively or naively got right before contemplating. What I'm saying is, that it's entirely possible and even probable that I am stupid.

Seeing the film last night though, what was the true revelation of Furiosa was the insight into the invisibility of my own privilege. Furiosa will be memorable to me as part of an ensemble of memorable characters in a memorable film.

I had the sense that she was nothing new. But I'm very often guilty of hype backlash, my confirmation bias looks to evidence to support the contrary. On my ride home trying to prove the nul hypothesis, I did find it hard to recall any of her precedents. Like literally coming up blank. This was what whacked me in the face, given that Furiosa is just a character that drives a truck and fires some guns.

It appeared a land grab, an ideological land grab. A real coup for what I have thought (perhaps more specifically to men trying to write female characters) was the best process I have come across. I wouldn't be able to track down the tumblr picture that was my source, but it's basically:

How to write good female characters:
1. Create an awesome character
2. Make them a woman

For me though, the admission I have to make is my own prejudice and biases and stereotypes I carry in my head about gender that makes this process the best I've found, for me. Which is to say, I use an augmented version 1 is really - write a man. Then step 2 is having done this, go and put an 's' in front of every 'he', change the 'his' to 'hers' etc. For me it's important because it prevents me from trying to write a female character, which if I do, I lose the authenticity. Stephan Donaldson once wrote about his 'The Gap' series that every character came from him, so was him and think this is generally true.

And it comes to my mind that the difficulty with which I could recall Furiosa's precedents is key. The technique above plays to my ease of recall for writing strong male characters - batman, daredevil, every samurai ever, superman, mad max, John McClane, John Rambo, Indiana Jones, every video game avatar just about ever. And that's just naming protagonists, and sticking to the more dated and narrower archetype, forgetting revolutions like Peter Parker - the first two dimensional hero and the many nuanced flavors of strong male characters. Villains can easily become antiheros etc.

This morning, Furiosa's precedents came in a wave. The perplexing thing is that one of the trailers before mad max was for the next terminator film, yet I couldn't think of Sarah Conner (her terminator 2 incarnation, rather than the original) which in turn points further back to James Cameron's other sequels in the form of Ripley in Aliens, and if you are talking a visual precedent for Furiosa, certainly Ripley in Alien 3. Then you have Tarantino's female characters, Jackie Brown came first, but Beatrice/The Bride in Kill Bill is perhaps more salient.

But of course, it depends. For me, there's a mind-pretzel bending fine line. And from my reading 'What does it mean to be a woman?' is a very hard question to answer. One I am particularly unqualified to answer, admittedly, because I don't even have access to the unintelligible subjective experience of being a woman. But being female, or gender across the spectrum is not reducible simply to the biology of sex. People do transition, do have fluid genders, do have gender identities that don't line up with their biological sex. Even biologically, sex is difficult to draw a line between. There's a whole spectrum, of which our professional sporting institutions and regulating bodies have been trying to answer definitively and scientifically for a long time.

The test of course is going to be - can other women identify with the character as a woman. If so, you have a female character. But when dealing with the hazy clouds of attributes in the Venn diagrams of 'masculinity' and 'femininity' the art comes in, (and I'm little practiced at it, and likely as such to be bad at it) in drawing attributes from the overlap the 'strong' sector if you will, and combining it with the less represented attributes in protagonists that make a for a 'female' character.

The limitation of my above simple two-step method, is that I throw out the female circle from my venn diagram, create any male character I like, and then just draw them as female, or in film, cast a woman etc.

At this point, I should point out in terms of equality between the sexes, there's a really simple question to answer, and that is: even if a protagonist is just the same archetype but a woman as all the male archetypes that came before, just by increasing the number and frequency with which female versions of male characters appear you are moving towards equality. Similarly, if female CEO's are no different in leadership style than male CEOs, you still want more female CEOs because it's about a greater distribution of the opportunity to be CEOs. That part's easy, at least to answer if not implement.

Being born into male privilege, and white male privilege at that, it would be misleading to say I particularly care about equality between the sexes. As a creator though, I am far more concerned with a character being good, and being memorable.

I saw this post in my feed: http://chrisvisions.tumblr.com/post/119564551366 and if somebody finds the character important out there, and loves them etc. Then they are important.

For me though, my qualitative evaluation is that this character is bad. Badly conceived and poorly executed. She actually seems ham-fisted to me. Bad writing. Just as a super-hero she is what I would describe as 'over-powered' like Superman, who struggles to be interesting under the yoke of his world posing only one credible challenge to his physical robustness - kryptonite. Furthermore, being a double-minority or a two-for as executed here by being a gay latino, comes across as heavy handed something Det. Kima Greggs from 'The Wire' as a character did not.

I also find a failure that being gay latino has come at no threat to her ability to service fans, or compromise male gaze.

I can stand back and say that building up the cast of female comic book characters is across the board good. But this character I would rate as a poor concept, a crappy one, to join the ocean of crappy male characters that populate the comic universe. See Sturgeon's Law on the futility of finding crappy counter examples.

An argument could be made though, that to typecast lesbians in portrayal as being hairy legged, hairy armpitted butch characters of no appeal to sweaty mouth breathing overweight teenage boys is to stereotype lesbians, reducing their femininity and equivocating femininity with being weak. I don't think anybody actually makes this argument, and I wouldn't hold it up with what little I know about America. Going back to hark a vagrant's satire of strong female characters though, I don't think giving a character super strength and fighting ability offsets then putting them in a bikini top and hot pants.

There in lies the challenge, for me at least, whom cares more about aesthetics than equality between the sexes. The answer to the equality question as previously stated is easy, at least easy to conceive, it just needs doing.

Equality is the question 'are women missing out?', I think there is an unanswered question (possibly, it may have been answered and I'm too stupid to percieve) of 'Are we missing out?'

Is there such a thing as 'female comedy' or is it just comedy, and women have been excluded from it?

Is there such a thing as 'female leadership' (in the corporate sense) or is it just leadership, and women have been excluded from it?

I've heard enough about studies of culturally conditioned gender roles to believe women possess distinct advantages men do not, a specific one that comes to mind was a study of what makes for 'smart teams' and was told the result was a 1:1 correlation between how many women are on the team, the more women the smarter the team due to the higher number of people on a team adept at reading the emotions on other team members faces.

I feel that with Mad Max: Fury Road there is a scripting decision that could easily have removed the character of Furiosa entirely. You just needed an extra scene at the start where Max takes on Furiosa's motivation in the film and he could easily have played both roles as one character. It's a much easier exercise to imagine the film as less than it was, than take a film like Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (same male archetype, same basic plot) or it's western adaptation A Fist Full of Dollars, and try and imagine adding a female co-lead version of the male archetype.

But for me there was a sense of redundancy in Mad Max, as Max and Furiosa were in essence the same character. I suspect most will feel the redundant of the two is Max, and my suspicion would be driven by most of the audience viewing the film as a reboot or new film, and overlook that this is Max's fourth appearance, and his function as protagonist is as tour guide to a new and strange world. A person who finds the cultures he comes across as strange as we do, and negotiates and navigates them as we would. As Terry Pratchett said of his character Rincewind, 'his job is to go around the world meeting much more interesting characters than he is'.

I am sure this post is by and large a mess. Largely because I am a mess of where and when I am interested/disinterested in female characters. The hype I experienced with Furiosa lead to expectations that here was a character that would tell me something new about what it meant to be a woman. In hindsight this was unrealistic and unlikely, Furiosa is a product of the imagination of George Miller, not Charlize Theron.

I am specifically interested in the challenge of the Strong Female Character, my intuition that Ripley, Sarah Conner, Tank Girl, Furiosa, Beatrice/The Bride, Jackie Brown etc fall on one side of a line that gets a tick and other SFCs like Katniss, Hermione, Charlie's Angels (perhaps because they are possessed by Charlie), The Black Widow fall on another side of the line that doesn't quite get that tick.

Then there's characters like Juno, the New Ms Marvel, the new incarnation of Barbara Gordon as Bat Girl, Spider Gwen etc. that while new and positive developments in their respective industries, are of no interest to me (being out of their target market demographics) and also don't really resonate as 'strong' being that they don't pose any competition to male privilege. They simply are starting to break up the monoculture of the women that populate a universe and medium that has almost exclusively tailored to a male audience and perspective.

I could write about Thor's recasting into a female character. There's something interesting in using an existing character with built up equity. But I won't, at least not here.

One thing I have to disclose or at least point out is that my list of the more successful SFC Ripley-Conner-Tank Girl-The Bride-Furiosa are my subjective judgements, opinion treated as fact. And what I note about that list is that every single one of those characters is the product of male creators. Dan O'Bannon/Ridley Scott, James Cameron, Jamie Hewlett, Quentin Tarantino and George Miller respectively.

This is both good and bad, on the plus side it establishes that men can step up and write good strong female characters, being capable of doing so, they should. It's also that if equality is going to be achieved or even approached you have to start with the male dominated industries we have. Progress can be made even while you have producers, editors, writers and directors still being predominantly male as a hangover. Women can go see a film concieved of, created and directed by a man and find a character they can identify with as an entry point to a profession and genre they may have otherwise felt excluded from. Over time this should lead to women creating female action heroes that join this archetypal roster.

The bad is that it detracts somewhat that a small collection of men are making these characters, begging the question that the experience of strength and power come more easily to somebody with the subjective experience of being male. One thing to breath easy on, is that representative bias is almost certainly the basis of this list. Sturgeon's law prevails, there are for each successful strong male character thousands of failed attempts. These men's ability to write strong female leads is most likely a bi-product of their ability to write good strong lead characters period, where most writers fail.

But in the meantime, Diablo Cody, Lena Dunham and G Willow Wilson are writing female leads that are breaking up the monotony (the easy question) but represent characters that pose no threat to male privilege (the hard question).

I have my own character and story in my head for a female lead, which is why I'm interested to see how characters like Furiosa turn out, and how they are recieved. I have aims and ambitions in mind for my own output and I will either succeed or fail. What I take away from Furiosa is that there are stories about women that men can tell. My objective is not equality, not explicitly, and while I'm interested in feminism and don't directly oppose equality between the sexes, I feel it would be misleading to identify as feminist, I am not one, and giving due credit to how much of my behavior is subconscious, would be unsurprised if I am in fact quite chauvinistic or misogynistic in effect, though it is never my intent.

In the very least I enjoy my privilege and as an individual would be reluctant to give it up, though I don't particularly care if every other man I knew lost theirs.

True Dichotomy

I think it is true to the point of truism to say: you either press the advantage or lose it.

Our Dogs

The recent conclusion of my dogs life brought home to me many of the reasons to get a dog. Also much clarity on the nature of grief. Here then is a convoluted collection of my thoughts.

The Day After

The day after my dog died I had to go to the studio and work on my exhibition which was a week away. It was a beautiful day, there was nothing wrong with it except in the continuity of my life it happened to fall right next to the day I put my dog down. It rained sporadically and heavily that day (which I find beautiful) and in the studio the sound of rain is quite amplified by the roof provided which I really like.

Was the day tainted by a sense of loss? I don't know. I can say the week leading up to my dog's death was much harder than the week that followed it. The emotions can intrude upon any moment, before and after her death as the mind prospects or retrospects. Loss can also be bitter or sweet. 

Imagine though that you could take the ribbon of your emotional life and cut it up and rearrange it. You could chuck the grief of loss, of putting down a dog at the start and then have the uninterrupted joy of companionship over the course of it's life. Emotionally you wake up one day with no dog and no grief or sense of loss. You could also arbitrarily through your terrible weeks somewhere in the middle. Would you do it? Would you get it out of the way some time, like eating your vegetables before hitting the proteins?

Would you rather start a relationship with the bitterness of the breakup and then enjoy a comfortable couple of months, years etc before climaxing with puppy love and infatuation? Then to wake up somewhat nonchalant and indifferent?

The first thing is that the terrible feelings of loss are unavoidable, and I would not spare myself the suffering. What is more horrible to me though is the prospect of a relationship ceasing and waking up without suffering the next day because I'd pre-digested it. The time is right, the emotions are right. Grieving may be unpleasant, but I would not avoid it and it can be beautiful. It really only gets ugly when people fight it.

Turns out I was capable of functioning in the wake of my dog's passing. I wanted to. I drew a piece to honor her and my time together. If I had been unable to function I would have made that call also and not gone to the studio. But nothing was forced, nothing was repressed.

The Gift

Bess was old, she lived 50% longer than her breeds life expectancy. She was my second dog and I always thought of her as 'the new dog' even though the longer she lived the greater the proportion of my life she had shared. In fact my new dog had been with me almost half my life. Even so dogs life spans are such that barring a tragedy I should survive my next two or three dogs. 

I think it's a Louis C K bit, I'm not sure but he says the deal of marriage is that you don't die alone. Or rather that one of you doesn't die alone. 

It seems obvious that one half of that deal gets it better than the other. Most people's preference I presume is to die in the company of their loved ones. Particularly their most loved one. 

The worst of my grief was a feeling of apathy towards my own continued existence. An indifference to the reality that I would go on to live a new era without Bess. Being that I recognised the feeling it posed no danger, so please don't worry, indifference is very different to depression or suicidal thoughts. It was much as I feel when I go to a party and contemplate the effort required to talk to strangers and make new acquaintances. A process I will drag my feet through because the rewards are there.

I made two promises to myself, that Bess would feel loved every day and that she would die in my arms. These promises are much easier to keep with a dog than with a person. I managed to keep them, and the last week of her life were stressful because of the thought of dropping the ball so close to the end. It would have been devastating. 

Dogs instinctively may actually want to go away quietly and die, but the opportunity their short lifespans provide all of us, is the ability to experience giving someone company as they die and being left alone in the wake of it. It is good to realise you have the fortitude to be the one who lives on alone. And that you can give this precious gift to somebody else where they by definition are incapable of returning your kindness. As you love a dog, you can become capable of truly loving someone.

Fuck Reunions

If there was an afterlife, an eternal existence, I would admittedly probably prefer to be walking my dogs through some infinite parkland with no real awareness that the walk ever ended. That would be nice, that I could handle for all eternity. But fuck it, the afterlife is a ridiculous concept, and by 'ridiculous' I mean 'worthy of ridicule'.

The great thing about a dog is that their ability to pull you into the present moment. I miss my dog, but I have many, many years experience of walking her on a daily basis. And as per the Lana Del Rey lyrics in the last post 'heaven is a place on earth with you' this I think is the truth of walking a dog. If you can bring yourself to be present for it.

The human desire for the infinite, unending afterlife I think is a sickness in the Zen Buddhist sense, so too with abundance. The desire is a desire to calm the anxiety that we are underachieving, the paradox is that in the presence of abundance we are far more likely to underachieve than in scarcity. Infact just juxtaposing the concepts of abundance and underachievement make the previous statement sound like a truism.

There is no need for my and my dogs souls to unite in some afterlife, we achieved the pinnacle of our companionship while alive, and dogs are masters of doing this. Your best opportunity to do so is with a dog. I have it, it's done. Only dementia can take it away, and I am of the opinion that the tragedy of dementia is that I would already have lost the self that holds such experiences.

Like running a marathon or staging an exhibition, I may have the desire to do so again but what is immutable is the fact that I've done these things. The opportunity has not been missed as afforded by my life. I need no second (and infinite) chances to get things right, furthermore, having had the moments walking my dog or even just waking her with a patting session in the morning, or preparing her dinner (or making her pancakes) I was, long before I started my current meditation regime, able to be present and appreciate these moments. Even during years where my mind was a tumultuous place of stress.

The afterlife can only diminish the value of my actual life, and the lives we share with our pets and everyone else for that matter. Economics may not get much right, but it gets scarcity and value right.

Civilization and its Contents

There are only two things I've done in my life where I'm confident I've done well. One is tutoring a refugee and the other is pet ownership. Say what you will about the pitfalls of human civilization, a well cared for dog though is an achievement. Much as I believe life can only be truly enjoyed when you accept your own mortality, to lesser conviction I believe the human race is on the whole probably mortal.

Sustainability movements, like exercise for an individual may be a good idea, but they are no fountains of youth. I don't see particular value in beating up on ourselves from all the mistakes we have made from being a short-sighted ignorant collective. As 'You Are Now Less Dumb' points out, if any member of modern society were able to be transported back into the middle ages, our ability to recreate the modern world would be negligible to laughable. Civilization is a collective effort, and even a leading physicist, biochemist or electrical engineer would be able to make little progress alone.

On an individual basis, we are mostly passengers that on occassion contribute some minute increment of progress to the whole. One thing all of us can do though, is take care of a pet.

We may be plagued by anxieties, fucked up by our parents, under severe economic strain and questioning our place in the universe. But a dog can have a good life, and we can give it to them. And we should. And feel proud of that achievement.

Bess

I euthanised my dog last weekend, her kidneys had failed, and she was deteriorating rapidly. She was my second ever dog, And I've realised that I think of her as my 'new dog'. A recent member of the family, but she was 15 years old, a quikc google search tells me lab life expectancy is 11 years (10-12) which means physically she was the equivalent of a 120 year old. Which she wasn't. She was for one thing, beautiful and without proper scrutiny was often confused for a pup.

She was also, highly mobile right up until her rapid decline.

It has caused me to realise a lot about death, and I plan to write more when I find time. But I just want to talk about my dog Bess. My love.

I had the opportunity to tell her everything I wanted to say to her. She passed with no regrets from me. But it occurs to me that a dog can't speak English really, I think they can understand emotion fluently though.

But that I can write to you Bess, here and now. Because word wise you have as much ability dead as you did while alive so I thought I'd write you a letter.

Not even, it's this. I think Lana Del Rey is a talented lyricist, and with a few subtracted lines, this sums up perfectly what you meant to me Bess:

It's you, it's you, it's all for you
Everything I do
I tell you all the time
Heaven is a place on earth with you

It's better than I ever even knew
They say that the world was built for two

I think the greatest gift in life is to be surprised at just how much you love something. My recent work on mindfulness allowed me to really be present with you, we achieved something together that makes any escapist desires for a reunion in eternal paradise redundant. We had it, and how much paradise do you need?

The experience can never be taken away from me. And your passing now means that it cannot be tarnished ever. Only love can triumph. You have. I have.

Tamper Tamper Tamper

Congratulations you've got the job. Nothing exciting but it'll help pay your bills while you put yourself through Marine Biology.

$16 an hour. Your job, tossing coins. It gets better, you're unionised so at the very least there's a collective agreement in place protecting you from a repetitive stress injury or carpal tunnel syndrome by restricting employers to one toss per employee per minute.

Good job right, no brainer, impossible to take home, and you get to stand around with a bunch of other employees at a similar stage in life or pursuing similar lifestyles and shoot the shit.

Let's head upstairs though, where the numbers get crunched and the bottom line watched. Here's their deal.

For every coin toss resulting in a head - the mysterious benefactor whose tender they won pays them $100. For every coin toss resulting in a tail they receive no revenue.

Some managers sit around looking at the data that comes through after the first quarter of the tender. They crunch the numbers and it turns out using their industry regulated fair coins the average revenue per toss turns out to be hovering around $50.

Now some truth about coin tossing. Turns out, the odds of coin tossing are quite predictable. Which is to say, 50:50 outcomes. I forget where I read it, but a POW once lacking other opportunities did actually empirically test it, in fact I found him right here. Law of large numbers.

Enter 'management' and inevitably tampering. Tampering is an important concept, a really important concept little discussed and little understood. Anywhere. But it nevertheless is a term, an actual term with a very short Wikipedia entry dedicated to it.

Except that page simple though it is, I feel makes it hard to appreciate. Hence our coin tossing job. Now imagine some manager comes in and tells you that anyone who achieves an average toss revenue of less than $60 will lose shifts. You'd be pretty stressed. Because there's actually no real way to game a coin toss. There's no way to bias a 2 sided object (dice yes, coins no) and most importantly there's nothing you can really do to produce the desired results.

Even without the threat of lost shifts and income, just consider the prospect of having a night where you achieved 53 heads in every hundred tosses and being pulled aside by a manager and asked to explain why your (literal) headcount is so low.

The answer is 'variability' it is in fact slightly improbable that it would be so high. Yet this is what tampering is. Furnishing a reason where there is none, because if you can explain your performance you can address it. Which by the way you can 'random chance', doesn't ensure but leaves it entirely possible that tomorrow you will produce the desired outcome. Over the long run of course you won't, nobody will, as the number gets larger you'll approach 50:50. And if management initiatives don't directly fuck up a process in the organisation they can indirectly fuck up the people carrying out those processes by stressing them out.

I feel though that it is an ironclad law of physics that tampering must result in long term detriment. That is, it's efforts are doomed to fail. Tampering will never be as clear cut as demanding children to be taller, or coin tossers to get more heads. But it can take many forms, like a certain number of sales orders per 1000 will result in a cockup and a return. It may seem admirably '6 sigma' to task oneself with eliminating those returns and improving bottom line and reducing waste while achieving higher levels of customer satisfaction.

Unless it doesn't.

It can result in employees juking the stats ie, refusing to take responsibility for their mistake and penalising the customers in order to appease their direct manager. It more likely will simply be more costly  to fix the problem than leave it be.

'Parameters' are established for this purpose. In my own VCE I was semi-confident that I could get a score in the 90's based on comparisons between myself and my own brother who had gone before me. But I felt to get 99.95 would involve exponentially more work, plus I didn't need to get that high for my ambitions. And even if I did work harder there was no gauruntee that I would do any better, I would be getting into new territory since neither my brother nor I had ever really worked hard at school.

Same goes in general, it will cost less to make a 30% improvement in a terrible process than a 3% improvement in a decent one. This is called the law of diminishing returns. Tampering isn't strictly about that, but it can often result in '$10 solutions to $5 problems' basically any problem you can afford is kind of worthy of leaving within your standard parameters.

Here then is the tragedy of tampering. Tampering occurs in business models that while imperfect are quite efficient. No brainer business models. This bumps heads with career minded managers. When the villains of Catch-22 reveal their motives they are simple - because Full Colonel is better than Lieutenant Colonel and General is better than Full Colonel. Tampering doesn't strictly come into Catch-22 but the Colonel's demands for tighter bomb formations (in order to make more pleasing aerial photographs) and having the Preacher conduct a prayer before missions are similar though not stat based initiatives to the kind taken by tampering managers.

Tampering I think merits more play, more discussion, more salience. As does risk itself. So keep it in mind, look for it in your own workplace or even everyday life.

India's Daughter

Is the name of a documentary ABC's Four Corners program purchased the rights to. And I watched it. 

The crime was harrowing, the peripheral victims (family & friends) traumatized and devastated and the one perpetrator of the gang rape interviewed... confused.

They are described as unrepentant, the one interviewed certainly maintained that he only drove the bus where the crime took place.

Of course the only information I have is what was in the documentary and I have no information beyond that on either Indian culture or Delhi culture nor India's economic and legal systems. Furthermore, the other convicted members of the gang weren't interviewed and the question of psychopathology was unasked.

As presented though, the perpetrators appear as a product of their culture. It takes the crime beyond it's own immediate gruesomeness. 

The one interviewed assailant, convicted and sentenced to death, feels unfairly treated. Overshadowing this feeling are his espoused views of victim blaming, that women are more responsible for rape than men are. These views articulated obscure a kind of unspoken complaint - that the crime of rape and gang rape are commonplace and these rapists were singled out, apprehended, trialed and convicted when most go unpunished.

What testifies to this complaint is how easily the men were caught, and they were caught because they didn't take the kind of precautions one would take if you expected the crime to end your life. They dumped the two victims naked by the side of the road from the bus where the crime took place, leaving both victims alive. (the interviewed driver speculates that his death sentence will mean that future perpetrators will kill their victims rather than risk them testifying) They drove the bus home and while the did clean it, they parked it outside their residence. Then they stayed home. No paranoid 'I've seen this in the movies' burning of the vehicle and all it's evidence, fleeing town and never coming back again.

Assuming you are likely to be Australian, and if not living in a western democracy US, Canada, Europe. If I told you a common 'crime' committed by most Australian cyclists is running a red light to make a left-hand turn. (right hand for a right-hand drive country), it is fairly commonplace among impatient cyclists. Now imagine you go out and do this on your bike one day. You consider yourself a casual cyclist, you pull up to a red light, there's no traffic around and rather than wait it out, unsure of whether the intersection requires something as massive as a car to be stalled there for the cycle to change, you just ride through the red hooking straight through to the bike lane.

There is in Australia, nothing illegal about dismounting your bike, picking it up and moving to the side walk, then making the turn inside of the traffic light as a pedestrian and mounting your bike. Running the red left hand turn is a lazy shorthand for going through these motions, but is a traffic violation.

That's how you rationalize away the transgression in terms of it's consequences. But 6 days later the police knock on your door and throw the book at you. You are prosecuted and fined, your picture is published from the CCTV footage in the local papers and your name published. Talkback radio entertains rant after rant about you and your irresponsible riding.

Now, there is no question that what you did was wrong. I and you can rationalize it, but strictly speaking it is indefensible. It was undertaken with an expectation though that you wouldn't face the consequences, and this in expectation was based on the observation that virtually nobody faces the consequences of running this light in this way.

When I put myself in this scenario, and try to use it as a basis of empathy, I project and like to think of myself that I can accept that I deserve to be punished. I still feel entitled to a sense of anger and injustice that within my social environment, immediate and broad (culture) other people are committing this transgression and not being punished. I have (arbitrarily or not) been singled out for punishment.

This Indian gang was singled out, self-evident because the media coverage singled them out and the production of the documentary singles them out alone. 2000 officers were put at the disposal of the supervising police officer (I can't recall his rank) and I'm left with impressions, imaginary or not that they were sped through the trial process.

They weren't singled out arbitrarily (I hope) although the interviewed convict felt other people had committed worse crimes and nothing had resulted. 

The convicted men in India absolutely should experience the adverse consequences of their actions. They did what they did, and the get what they get. 'Justice' is a hard concept to wrap my head around, I personally don't believe in capital punishment and I also don't believe in scapegoating.

The perpetrators will be hanged until dead. The scary part of that is the possibility that the cultural factors will be buried with them. I doubt these men felt that rape itself was on the same scale as jaywalking or running lights, but they clearly feel it is analogous insofar as that it is an accepted part of the culture. I couldn't guess how the reconciliation is done exactly, but the defense mounted by the lawyers would not in Australia constitute a legal defense.

By comparison, using a fictitious example simply because I also watched it recently - The Redfern Now Telemovie dealt with rape. The accused rapist's legal defense was in light of the forensic evidence that intercourse had taken place - was that the two parties had engaged in consensual sex and then the alleged victim had attempted to extort money from the alleged rapist.

By comparison the lawyers interviewed in the Indian (real) case presented a defense that did not address issues of consent, or that any of the gang were under duress from another member. Nothing that to my (limited) understanding of Australian law would constitute a legal defense against the charges. From my perspective, in the Indian legal systems the defense consisted basically of pleading guilty to their actions and trying to justify their actions.

I see no real value in me personally dredging up the arguments made, except that they unashamedly confess to a patriarchal - victim blaming culture. Such that the men in their own minds felt themselves vigilantes, meting out justice for in their view 'the natural consequences' of a young woman going out escorted, but not by a fiance, husband and male family member at 8pm at night.

When I lock my bike up in the city and notice somebody else has left their bike lights on their bike. I have the intrusive thought 'somebody will steal those, I should steal them to teach them a lesson.' One quickly followed by 'but I'm not a thief' and though their is some truth to 'opportunity makes the thief' that is not where responsibility lies. 

These men will die, and I would not be outraged if they experienced some chagrin over the fact that they were unlucky to be caught in a society where their crimes, though illegal, are viewed as a risk rather than a strict prohibition. Of any belief they hold that they were vigilantes or somehow conducting moral instruction to a woman, I would believe myself that they are simply wrong, and before their lives end they may or may not realise this.

At the very least, I doubt they will reoffend, with the possible exception of the juvenile whom received the maximum punishment available for a juvenile and remains unnamed. The question as to whether he will come to the understanding that what he did was wrong will remain a question. 

I have severe doubts as to whether and by what incriment Delhi will become safer for women. The question applies also to India at large. One question unasked by the documentary are questions of class, caste and inequity. The lack of information makes it perplexing, the central victim of the crime appeared to be from a poor background but had achieved some degree of social mobility. 

Education is often expounded as the universal panacea to stopping inhumane acts. Watching the large protests of India's educated was quite moving, and were I the government I would have been moved to act and bring the long arm of the law down on these men. I also watch scholars and academics commit slips of the tongue when they refer to India as a 'developing- developed' country and any time I here talk of India as the world's largest democracy I always feel the insecurity behind it. A self-conscious anxiety that the world thinks of India as a poor, backward and superstitious nation. I don't sense national pride but national shame. Perhaps this has manifested an actual policy driven rush of development that seeks to meet the highest of world standards rather than improve the across-the-board standard of living for Indians. 

If one Indian child is recieving the education solution that men and women are fundamentally equal, that victims are not to blame for the crimes that victimise them and so forth, while other Indian children are being taught patriarchal garbage, then I can see how this fatal divide over what constitutes 'common sense' and 'decency' is opening up. 

That though is all speculation, Australia itself has demonstrated it is no exception to men thinking they can use and abuse women, take their lives. I certainly feel a difference in the standard of our defense lawyers is established, but the fact is that our egalitarian education system steers clear of moral instruction and it shows. People in Australia have all kinds of values, women in Melbourne have been suffering for that diversity, and it goes nation wide. 

I remain puzzled, but I think it is worth being that way for now. So that the answers may come in time.

Numbing Out

Apparently cause and effect are an illusion, a projection of the mind. I'm not convinced, largely for lack of trying, but I kind of see what is got at. Because B follows A we supply a cause, causation is actually a conscious attempt to build predictive models. When watching a film the motion is an illusion, we are perceiving a 'moving picture' beause one static image is followed rapidly by another static image but the arc of motion is supplied by our mind. When watching an anvil fall through the sky in a cartoon gravity is not in effect, our perception is.

I do believe in a deterministic universe though where as complex and random as life seems, we are really just a witness to a very convoluted setup of falling dominoes. Deprived of a vantage point to ascertain most designs.

But we can percieve some, even, like gravity, without understanding it. as our confidence in probabilities decreases eg. it looks like it will rain, but who could say if and when it will. cause and effect starts to very much take on a superstitious nature.

I suspect it's our superstition around cause and effect, or causal relationships that bring about the society wide inclination to numbing - specifically most people have an unconscious belief that if they can eliminate the effect, then the cause ceases to exist.

This is all sounding very esoteric, even to me. Let's get specific.

You have a stressful day at work. You get home, and have a glass of wine to take the edge off. Your mind slows and stills, you feel better. Almost as if you have undone the stresses of the day. And what if tomorrow very much resembles today? It's okay because literally 'at the end of the day' you can numb out the experience of all your tomorrows with the stress relieving medication.

Which is to say, most of us have a fairly systemic lifestyle. The system that can be called our lifestyle systematically produces stress. We then append another system on top of that to cope with the stress of our day to day lives.

For me, this ordinary stress is hard to notice. It's present in a baseline way, such that until I practiced a meditation - one that was guided and directed me to notice tension and release it in my body, I was not aware how much facial muscles were tensed day to day.

I would be remiss to overlook that a routine of meditation can be a numbing system. If one sets aside twenty minutes a day to 'release' or 'undo' tension accumulated from your daily routine, you (or I) are only further along the spectrum from somebody needing a scotch to take the edge off.

Not that there aren't meaningful differences along that spectrum.

But this is distinct from addiction which I harp on about but would actually struggle to define. There's a common ground but numbing is more akin to the quality control sense of the word 'Tampering'.

Which is to say, attempting to fix a problem to the opposite effect. Tampering too I find hard to define though, wikipedia isn't much help. Think of it this way, you have an infected tooth causing you continuous pain. Tampering would be to take strong painkillers adding a new daily process to maintain prior comfort levels, treating the pain so to speak. Pulling the tooth out would address the source of pain.

Note that the painkillers though do not address the underlying causes, the infection. The problem in a fashion, goes unchecked. So while tampering in this example treats the pain it does in the long run kill you prematurely.

What of simply working 40 hours a week in a stressful job? Here I personally am not even in the middle of an experiment. I can't really draw any conclusions because my career as an artist is yet to pan out, and that's a career so variable that it's hard to look to precedent. I'm sure in 20-30 years time whatever outcome I'll be confident enough to find more regular career paths to serve as a fair comparison to what my life could have been like. In the meantime though I just have my intuition.

Really that intuition should be self evident, persisting as an artist takes conscious commitment. It is not a routine you can slip into, unlike a salaried position. If I did not believe I was gaining more than I sacrificed, I could not recommit to the artistic pursuit.

Probity

But not quite. I know what I want to achieve, but don't know it. I have merely seen it, maybe just an aspect of it. 

I'm rereading 'The Unfettered Mind' by Takuan Soho, something I read twelve years ago and understood naught of. Not really. The words are intelligible but esoteric. Unlike 'The Book of Five Rings' by Musashi, a contemporary of Takuan. Or even Yagyu's 'Art of War' often referred to in the west as 'The Life Giving Sword' to avoid confusion with the Machiavelli text.

But having direct experience of meditation nhas dispensed with the esoteric nature of the Unfettered Mind. I now find it quite articulate though I can't pretend to knowledge of the higher orders of mind he describes. 

But right-mindedness is the goal, my central goal. And it is incredibly self centered. There is no one word for it, but probity comes close. It is not righteousness because this is often hand in hand with proselytizing.

Achieving right-mindedness is like enjoying a delicious meal. An entirely subjective and internal payoff.

72

To the degree I can be confident in facebook's dating of posts, I have meditated every day for the past 35. You cannot see the mind with the mind, at least I cannot. It is one of the hardest experiences to say with confidence that I have actually experienced the things I have experienced. But I would be willing to testify that I have experienced some weird stuff. Stuff I would never have thought possible through a process as simple as meditating.

I can only suggest you try it, with the possible disclaimer that if you suffer from a mental health issue with 'intrusive thoughts' as a symptom such as schizophrenia or OCD to actually consult someone qualified before undertaking meditation.

The harder effect to determine and disclose is how meditation has effected me in my day to day life. When I am fully distracted by my thoughts and illusion of self, when I am not meditating. I dunno. I try to bring mindfulness practices out into my day to day life, mindful running is extremely hard (and extremely tempting I may go for a run after this).

But last weekend, I should call it weekend+ was new for me, new and weird. First thing was that I'm currently writing my invites for my next exhibition. My brain was fried, and I'm still only half way done. Then the dogsitting began, a process that is psychological torture for both me and the dog I sit. 

She is incredibly anxious and over 72 hours I never witnessed her sleep in my care. There was no way to tell her what was going on and she has not developed any independence. This meant by Friday morning I was both fried mentally from straining my frontal cortex to its limits writing invites and deprived of sleep by a dog.

As an aside, in part with my meditation work, I have chiefly been trying to overcome my own mental habit/addiction of judgement, of getting in others business and failing to differentiate. When I can become aware of myself doing this, I try to redirect to 'what is this telling me about myself' this dog was a great insight into neediness. The problem with neediness is ones ability to expend all your energy trying to obtain somebody elses. This is something I subconsciously loath about myself, particularly when I'm writing invitations. Incredibly self conscious of the neediness of this action.

Aside finished with, my point being I on Friday morning was already in a quite altered mind state. Then I proceeded into a weekend where everything dramatic washed over me like warm water, and everything calm, mundane, even sad, shone like the sun.

I'd had a farewell party dropped on me with slightly over 24 hours notice, for a girl I'd asked out and been completely ignored by. I knew my curiosity would generate more regret than my fear of showing, so I showed. I'm really glad I did. I still have no fucking idea what to make of this girl, but for a throwtogether farewell party of people who share a common first language that I don't, I was made to feel really welcome the moment I arrived.

I sat in an impromptu private concert of music that is just hard to see live in Melbourne, it's hard to hear about, know about and hard to get to, though it is there. It was the highlight of my weekend. And though I sat there thinking - 'damn' and not much else, it made me really happy.

Then in the early hours I managed to get home and get a few scant hours sleep. Then I got to my breakfast date with a friend and managed to express anger, actual anger as he was rude to the help. But breakfast was lunch...

...

...

...

I can give a blow by blow account, but I don't think I can describe the profundity of what it is to feel differently. This weekend bombarded me with feelings, and I was surprised at how much the orientation of those feelings to events had changed from how I lived maybe a year and a half ago. I am vulnerable now, that's the weird thing. and things that hurt, hurt and pass through. When I was hardened up and disassociated from such emotions I lived in a state of constant stress and pain. It wasn't that bad, I can certainly see how someone could live in such an emotional environment for decades and have a meaningful career and relationships and shit. I know that. 

But now though, I take the hit and feel it, and it is a very small thing, leaving me free to seize a moment like that singing in a shitty melbourne share house living room. That managed to outshine feeling wise a whole planned and perfectly executed wedding ceremony in the same weekend.

The feeling of being able to express anger, or just honestly not be excited/underwhelmed is liberating though it could get me into trouble. The self one has to live with without such freedom is the worst company I've had. I do not miss him at all.

I heard about a seperation, and I think I was able to let myself empathise without falling in. I don't know, the stakes is low, but to be in such a mental state and be bombarded with all these people's changing lives, it brings out the texture of my consciousness now. It is like light rain, where before it was more like fractured rock.

I like it. But I need to rest.

3 Directions

Meditation really destroys my ability to write. Such that I have to arbitrarily 'mark the page' just to get things started.

So Metta is the budhist practice of loving-compassion meditation. I've learned the basic form I think now, but it turns out that doing a good quality guided meditation performance is not a simple matter, and unforch, the guided meditations I have thus far used to learn Meta have fallen down on their pacing, making them in themselves a session of dubious value.

But I found one on 'self-forgiveness' that produced value, and unlike more cerebral videos of value such as Gabor Mate talks or whatever, this one was more of a practice. With embarassing oversight-insight rather than food for thought insight.

The three directions of forgiveness:

1. Recognizing you've hurt somebody else and asking them to forgive you.
2. Recognizing you've hurt yourself and asking yourself for forgiveness.
3. Recognizing that others have hurt you, and forgiving them.

The words in Italics were what were revelations for me. When you look at that list the three directions make sense. It makes sense and it is comprehensive.

But in meditation I can actually notice what my mind struggles to do and recall and conceive of. While it is easy for me to dredge up and take responsibility for things I have done, that in itself serves as an impediment to asking somebody else to forgive me. This is an obvious (to me now) impediment to self forgiveness. A double standard, if I believe myself worthy of my own understanding and forgiveness, but other people don't.

My mind went fragmented and crazy, trying to hold anyone but me responsible for hurting me. There are of course cases where I have been hurt by others, but I realise now I pay them almost no mind. Quite literally, I have a need for control, a need for me to be the only responsible entity in the system of my life. It's self protective, and a problem. I need to think on this more.

Martketing, A Guided Meditation

Close your eyes.















oh... right.

Okay just relax, into your chair. Take a moment to just notice the sensation of sitting, the contact points between you and the chair. Now breath in through your nose for 4 seconds, now hold it for 2, now breath out for a four count. Repeat this a couple of times.

This has completely destroyed my ability to write. Okay, okay, okay picture yourself sitting in your TV room. Yo tv is connected to a hard drive and you are about to watch a high quality download of Game of Thrones latest episode.

As the somewhat uninspiring open credits roll, your phone rings. You don't recognize the number but for some compulsive reason you answer, you are now talking to me as I ask you to complete a survey.

Notice your annoyance threatening to blossom into a flower of rage as you are solicited to at best forestall your enjoyment of entertaining program. Your offence that some way some how a market research firm has contacted your personal and private mobile phone.

You don't know it, but I don't really give a shit whether you do the survey or not. I have no idea who I'm calling and there's no intention to disrupt anyone from doing any particular activity, just a hope to connect with somebody who literally has nothing better to do.

It's a numbers game.

But this is your phone and it is personal and I am imposing, these are all facts on the ground. You tell me to fuck off, or worse ask me to call somebody else and then hang up.

Now it is your time, your time to watch relaxing, stimulating, anxiety sustaining entertainment.

Notice you are being entertained by your favorite show, and not paying for this entertainment. Yet the show is of high quality*, a great number of people are involved in the process of creating it. Most of them will have worked quite hard and gone through very rough periods to reach the opportunity just to make this piece of entertainment you now have at your disposal to watch, free of charge.

People have taken massive risks to make this show, to be able to make this show. There is a whole graveyard of aspiring creators behind them packed with those who took the same risks and didn't make it.

And you won't pay for the fruits of their labors. You won't pay for something you possibly love.

Notice your mind racing with justifications for your unwillingness to pay. Just notice it, making it right that you don't pay for content. Notice how reflexive it is, and how insistent. Notice how invested you are in your belief that you are a good and moral person.

Just notice it.

All entertainment is communication. And all communication is information. Information can be replicated, digitized, duplicated at minimal cost.

In marketing there are desirable luxury goods we like to buy (like tropical holidays) and necessity goods we have to buy (like a new lawnmower), the stuff we try hardest not to pay for, turns out not to be the shit we are forced to buy, but the shit we cannot get enough of.

And virtually all art and entertainment falls into that category, our insatiable desire for entertainment leads to a need for the cost to be as low as possible. While the quality of heroin may end lives, the price of heroin ruins them first.

Art unfortunately is nowhere near as inelastic as heroin.

In a world where people feel right and justified to get their entertainment for free, they will not pay artists to create art.

Who then will pay the artists? Keep them alive long enough to create the entertainment you need to scratch your itch?

There's no free lunch. And artists I might add, steal from themselves, and given they have more time to consume entertainment in general they are probably the guiltiest group of art thieves.

But you pay for art in taxes, that produce government grants that I feel are killing art faster than would happen if the government redacted their patronage altogether.

You pay for it with lunch, or your coffee, or your beer. Yes beer, much art really exists to facilitate the sale of alcohol. But you do it by paying the casual wages of the jobs artists have to work to sustain the time and space necessary to create art.

There's a lot of friction in that system, artists could make more and better art if they were just paid directly to be artists.

And they are paid by people completing surveys of course.

Here give yourself a pat on the back, you have been consistent in your refusal to pay the artists that create the content you like. The full spectrum from George RR Martin at the top, to the aspirant like me down the bottom.

You don't pay for art, because you love it so much. It's priceless to you.

(I do realise that if you are reading this, you are probably my friend, and ironically being my friend am most likely to actually own a piece of my art you have paid for, and then paid more to be framed. Still the problem of 'free content' is yet to find its solution, better and more dedicated minds than I have looked at the problem and it remains unsolved, for now. Still I hope it provokes some thoughts for you anyway).

*subjectively speaking.

Gripey McGripe Gripe

I've reached a stage where I now know and accept that there's work that I can do that will make me a beeter person to be, and make me a better friend to my friends and lover of my loved ones. So I'm doing it. Beginning it.

I have completed 16 days consecutive meditation. I'm not sure if that's my record, but I plan to continue doing this work until it well and truly is. It's just a part of my day that is now, non-negotiable.

And I've already been to some strange places, and am experiencing really weird visions that I wouldn't expect. Yesterday taking advantage of the stormy weather, I experienced a strange hallucination which was seeing with my eyes closed, I would be looking in a spaced out way at the room, then become aware that my eyelids were shut and hence the vivid image was an impossibility. I didn't open my eyes though, the image would go out of focus as soon as I became aware of it, then collapse into the darkness we usually envision when we close our eyes.

I'm not sure what was going on, I'm fairly certain though that whatever was going on was a product of my mind. The sensations I was feeling were the product of my mind. Nevertheless it's pretty cool to trip like that just through meditation.

My gripe, which is an internal frustration is with a kind of closed minded person who is convinced they are open minded. My particular friend when talking conversationally about my meditation, told me that when they meditate they seek to merge with Jesus Christ.

This is not an insane project. Not in our cultural context. My friend is a devout Christian and she has produced many beneficial personal results from her faith. Nevertheless, my response was 'I wouldn't know Jesus if I merged with him.'

Both an attack and a self-defence against dogmatism, I am not proud of my response except insofar as that I do think it witty. But it isn't the best way I can deal with other people.

But I do have a legitimate gripe, with people who won't entertain the possibility that a phenomena of their experience is possibly a product of their own minds, rather than a communion with the creator of the Universe.

I cannot explain the phenomena I myself have experienced while meditating, but my doubt falls on the side of it being anything but a product of my mind. I do not doubt that my mind is a product of the operations of my brain, I have no good reason to and no incentive to believe otherwise.

My gripe itself is a product of my mind, and I do not know on whose behalf I assume I am angry. For some reason I percieve a boundary has been crossed when somebody claims to know the mind of the omnipotent creator. I myself am fearful of my own hubris.

Ad hominem

Owing to my immense privelege, I always am tempted to speak out of turn. I am not a highly influential straight white male, but I have the frictionless existence of one. Though I have been in many situations where I experienced outsider status, I have never really felt oppression. Not really.

Thus to empathise, to take the perspective of somebody who does experience these things is difficult, but fascinating to me. And there's the temptation upon looking at somebody who is fighting for the freedoms I take for granted, need empirical methods even to notice, to offer up some 'tips' some 'pointers' to those fighting for a privileged position.

Now since my past gajillion posts have been quote heavy (very little of my mind, originates from my mind) here's a bunch of quotes I think we can all agree that nobody agrees with:

"For my part I consider that it is better to be adventurous than cautious, because fortune is a woman, and if you wish to keep her under it is necessary to beat and ill-use her;" ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

"And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race." ~ Abraham Lincoln

"I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place." ~ Winston Churchill.

I imagine your involuntary reactions to such quotations range from bemusement to throwing up in your mouth a little bit. Of the three white (and as far as I can know, straight) men's sayings your reaction may also entail an ad hominem fallacy.

Let's sidetrack a bit and come back, I promise.

Say you are freshly enrolled in a course called 'The Secrets of Wealth and Power' on day one you take your place at a desk in the lecture theatre and patiently await the arrival of the lecturer.

He enters, coughs a couple of times, taps the lecturns microphone and says 'can you hear me up the back?' puts his glasses on and decides to open with a joke (which I have lifted straight from Family Guy)

'Why did god give women breasts?' ... 'So you have something to look at while they talk.'

Do you get up and leave? The lecturer has just revealed himself as sexist, misogynistic, chauvenistic etc.

Getting up and leaving as a protest is, I should point out, perfectly rational. There is no question in this day and age that the lecturer is grossly unprofessional and almost certainly in breach of his contract and/or duty of care.

What is fallacious though, would be to conclude that he had no ability to impart the secrets of wealth and power. That within the domain of actual expertise he possessed, that listening to his views within his expertise was a highly worthwhile activity. You don't know, and depressingly, there are a lot of well resourced people in this world that share this fictitious characters misogeny.

Then enters the challenge of history - the all stars if you will. If the first quote was the featured one on the blurb of every copy of Machiavelli's 'The Prince' I suspect, but can't know that a lot less people would read it. Even without it, Machiavelli's place in most people's perceptual cages is already in a rogue's gallery of evil.

But to me, the thought that women would never read and study 'The Prince' is really depressing. It is not one of my favorite texts, but it does stand the test of time, exposure to the ideas it contains and the mode of amoral-consequential thinking Niccolo employs is I think important. And if it's only read by straight white guys like Machiavelli himself and Tupak, men will retain a tremendous political advantage over women in the aggregate.

The Prince is not a 'secret' text, but in effect because of the author's identification with an in-group, and subsequent treatment of outgroups in his language of metaphor, it becomes one if the out-group cannot read it without feeling revulsion and the in-group can read it and not feel any personal attack.

An emotional cipher if you will.

The Lincoln quote is one of my favorites of his, only because it so brilliantly highlights the 'ad hominem' in its regretability. In the context of someone like Lincoln, to me the greatest leader in history, saying this one is tempted to make excuses for him. Decontextualising the quote may make it appear worse than it is as well, but still it reveals one way or another something distasteful about the man.

Yet the rest of what Lincoln has said and written is pretty much the finest stuff ever said and written. To me it's so clearly wrong to strike Lincoln out because of this statement, this is the man who ended not just a civil war but the practice of slavery in the the United States of America.

Winston to me is the most ambiguous, I know little about him. My general feeling is that he was the leader that happened to go up against Hitler, as did FDR and Stalin. But knowing little about his merits it is hard for me to make an argument as to what is lost by dismissing him on an ad-hominem basis.

It is important to remember that distasteful actions can't be dismissed either. The flaws in a person's character are part of the whole package. The fallacy in ad-hominem is to say that a person's flaws invalidate their merits.

I was reminded of this by a crappy video I watched. It was about Queer's breaking up with the political parties (in Australia) that claim to speak for them. LGBTI(Q?)* issues are real and present issues, progress is only progress not mission accomplished. But this video I interpreted as a parade of Ad hominem. My interpretation was that the video called for queers to disengage from the political process, if by default. It pointed to Marriage Equality, Sex Party and the Greens all making at least one compromise in policy or endorsement.

Here, my perspective and 'the' Queer perspective (I guess, I noted the hypocrisy of a video claiming to speak for all queers, panning parties it claimed, claimed to speak for all queers) differs.

To me the Greens believe in a whole heap of garbage, but I still prefer to vote for them because on crucial fronts they believe in much less garbage than the major two parties. More so with the Sex Party, and Marriage Equality probably sounds sufficiently specialised to be of only marginally more interest to me than parties whose primary focus is on Duck Hunting and freeway speed limits. My point being, there is a whole spectrum of political parties for a white man like myself to choose from based on who has the greatest concentrated competence to run shit, or failing that the least potential for lasting damage.

Ad hominem is in effect a negative screening process. Whereby you have a criteria for elimination, which the video suggested they use - do one thing we don't like and you are gone. Deal breakers certainly exist, but if I were to adopt a negative screening process I would try to limit the criterion down to what I truly can't live with - genocide, mass deportation, apartheid, imperialism, jingoism etc.

But say every single political party supported the genocide of any permanent residency holding citizens of Sweden and Switzerland. Do I disengage? No, I would be heartbroken, but that is where I would switch to a positive screening process. My vote would be based on the presence of merit.

A positive screening process looks for the presence of things you like.

I've strayed a bit far from ad hominem, and when I think about it, Nietzsche wrote a much better and more succinct bit on this in 'The Genealogy of Morals' the lambs mentioned below I imagine set up a moralistic ad hominem based on screening negatively for the distress caused by the birds of prey, their oppressors:

That the lambs are upset about the great predatory birds is not a strange thing, and the fact that they snatch away small lambs provides no reason for holding anything against these large birds of prey. And if the lambs say among themselves, “These predatory birds are evil, and whoever is least like a predatory bird, especially anyone who is like its opposite, a lamb— shouldn’t that animal be good?”

*The video I saw was read by a computer voice, which is to say de-identified and depersonalised. It nagged at me in a possible application of the ad hominem fallacy that this video was claiming to speak for an entire in-group that I feel has no actual true unified voice (nor should it) furthermore based on the closing essay/afterword of Genderqueer, I have been persuaded that Queer issues are human rights issues. That I don't feel the consequences of the limits currently in place on my freedom of expression are coincidental, they exist though. 

The Hidden Benefits of Ostracism

Ostracism (Greek: ὀστρακισμός, ostrakismos) was a procedure under the Athenian democracy in which any citizen could be expelled from the city-state of Athens for ten years. While some instances clearly expressed popular anger at the citizen, ostracism was often used preemptively. It was used as a way of neutralizing someone thought to be a threat to the state or potential tyrant.
Crucially, ostracism had no relation to the processes of justice. There was no charge or defense, and the exile was not in fact a penalty; it was simply a command from the Athenian people that one of their number be gone for ten years.
A modern use developed from the term is to describe informal exclusion from a group through social rejection, although the psychology of ostracism takes this further, where it has been defined as “...any behaviour in which a group or individual excludes and ignores another group or individual”.^[1] This could therefore be a conscient act or an unconscient one.

I've never before heard the word 'conscient'. And I want to be clear up front - ostracism is horrible, it's a horrible way to treat people, and yourself. The benefits I describe are hidden behind a lot of very salient downside that I won't go into, but among social animals like primates, right through our ancestry the need for social inclusion, acceptance and attachment is a universal one. Ostracism like the death penalty, can't even be justified as a deterrent.

There are in life though, many necessary seperations. It can be a last resort for dealing with crappy people whom harass you, relationships that fail after a time when pushing down fundamental incompatibilities can no longer be sustained, seperation can be necessary for grieving and healing (if you can actually make a distinction).

What line do a draw between seperation and ostracism? I don't know.

But you find yourself ostracised, I found myself ostracised. I accepted it, I got my instruction to be gone from the great Athenian experiment. I have found the following beneficial.

Firstly, as ostracism endures my denial does not. My counterwill reaches exhaustion. It becomes clear that I am merely arguing with myself over questions of justice. I can embrace finally the power of negative thinking and play devil's advocate to myself. Nothing is at stake any longer, no ego. Nothing, nothing changes and finally I am free to explore perspectives other than that which shines the most flattering light on me.

It is also, a most unusual form of stimulus. Because being ostracised, in exile, if only in my own mind means that beyond the initial events, there is no further stimulus. Here crucially for me was one of the key benefits. When I found myself revisiting the same old argument, it enabled me to realise that this was all just taking place in my head. It wasn't something being done to me, but a habit. A mental habit that I am prone to getting stuck in. Not even in the specific but in the general. I am constantly trying to justify myself.

I mean imagine if somebody close to you died, and you found yourself mentally rehearsing the conversations you never had. Clearly, that person can't be driving these conversations, they are dead. It must be you, the entire relationship is now in your head. Ostracism helps you realise you can do this with anybody you know.

Alecturer told me the real value of a University degree was that it told an employer you could get something done without being told what to do all the time. In a similar vein, while ostracised you can genuinely do your own healing, your own redemption. You have the space to do so, and no possibility of doing so cynically. Our exiled Athenian can go 'woah, so people saw me as a potential tyrant, I need to work on my people skills and cooperation.' But doing so doesn't reduce the sentence, communications are down with the parole board.

And I guess if you find yourself ostracised, the best thing I can say to you is that I sincerely believe every human being is worthy of redemption, and equipped with the authority to redeem themselves. You may never come back from the wilderness, but you can be whole and complete.

Hipsters Don't Exist

'hipsters' are just consumers. Regular old consumers.

Have you ever tried to be off-season, unfashionable? It's far harder work than being on trend.

Word From the Wise

Aristotle defined hubris as follows:

to cause shame to the victim, not in order that anything may happen to you, nor because anything has happened to you, but merely for your own gratification. Hubris is not the requital of past injuries; this is revenge. As for the pleasure in hubris, its cause is this: men think that by ill-treating others they make their own superiority the greater.

I looked this up following a discussion with a work colleague yesterday on Pride. From a theological viewpoint pride itself is viewed as a sin. I think pride is fine, judgement is what I wish to stop.

I would agree in my experience, what I take pride is followed closely by comparison and judgement. Hubris is definitely a problem for me. But taking pride in oneself is a wholly worthwhile exercise, much like cultivating gratitude.

Pride is what makes an investment in experiences so worthwhile, it is perhaps a form of gratitude. Aristotle's definition is remarkably close to a description of bullying. A role I have played in my life.

The ancient Greeks were pretty amazing. To think we were sufficiently advanced in language and ideas that early, and that so much of our thought and philosophies are still derived from that ancient language. More recently Ben Franklin said:

"Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame."

And so I have found it to be true. Aristotle and Franklin were bouth undoubtedly wise men. Note that they were wise enough to know the minds of those they describe and likely experienced first hand the mindset.

Like me.

Like you?

8 out of 10 cats

The show is based on statistics and opinion polls, and draws on polls produced by a variety of organisations and new polls commissioned for the programme, carried out by company Harris Poll.

When eating and unable to do anything else with my hands I turn to back episodes of 8 out of 10 cats. Not the greatest show, but a reliable featurer of Sean Lock and Jon Richardson.

Normally something like a British Panel show would not be worth writing about, but 8 out of 10 cats is noteworthy not just because it has no Australian spin off that I know of, but also because it's poorly made.

It's first segment which despite being first, takes up 2/3rds of every episode consists of sort of open conversation between panelists on what were the most 'talked about' topics in Britain.

This is the thing, almost every week in Britain, one of the three most talked about things is one of 'The X-Factor' 'Britain's Got Talent' or 'Strictly Come Dancing'

I imagine this reflects news coverage, twitter trends and whatever other social media platforms that their diagnostics can glean.

I suspect I shouldn't draw too many conclusions from low budget comedy panel shows, but I do suspect that this is objectively verified.

It isn't just a perception that everyone's disillusioned with politcs, the economy etc. and obsessed with celebrity. But people's attention really is on 'reality tv'. The people aren't just disillusioned, but willfully illusioned.

I stopped following news quite some time ago. And more recently stopped reading my news feed on facebook even. This for me was the realisation that nothing in the newspaper is particularly important for me to know.

But in the UK at least, news coverage is dedicated to reality tv shows. Shit that isn't just unimportant to know, but at best a synopsis of shit that isn't news, because they are covering events that transpire on air.

I don't really live in a world of TV viewers, and haven't for quite some time. So I'm simply not qualified to make any suppositions about Australia. My work occassionally has me experience the bizarre phenomenon of 'My Kitchen Rules is on.'

But I couldn't characterise the public at large as a bunch of reality tv feasting slack jawed yokels. I don't think that is going on. But it certainly could be, and at the very least a lot of 'talent' shows are being produced and advertised.

In 1993 'Red Faces' was a rip of the US 'Gong Show' that was a segment in the middle of the program 'Hey Hey It's Saturday'. It quite possibly found more stars who made better livings than everything from Idle, X-Factor, Australia's Got Talent, the Voice etc. combined. The thing is, now though our whole TV program appears to be reality-talent shows, and disillusioned as you may be about the state of politics, These shows have an even worse record at producing competence and longevity.

And that's worrying.

Immaturity and Emotional Competence

"There's a wonderful feminist book by Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur. It discusses how the exclusive role that women have in early childraising distorts child development. When the woman is married to an immature man, she is also a mother to her husband, so she hasn't got the openness and energy for her kids." ~ Gabor Mate, When the Body Says No.

I liked this quote so much and so instantaneously that I went to post it in a fb status update because I wanted it to be seen. I couldn't though because I felt without laborious explanation it would be seen as me griping about my own father, rather than myself.

I don't know how long it has been since I posted, but the time in between then has had me traverse much mental terrain. I feel quite reoriented towards my life, in a way both subtle and dramatic.

As Misaki would say of me 'I'm proud myself' for the uncanny foresite demonstrated in previous posts here about my penance and here about denial that turned out to really accurately describe what I went through in the last couple of weeks. (despite the fact that it turns out I don't know how to spell 'penance')

My subconscious kicks me in the arse some times. I actually have come to live in awe of it, and be moved by how desperately some times it tries to communicate with me.

One such time was in the semi-lucid waking hours of February 2nd, a Monday where I drifted into a dream I did not wish to wake from. This dream sparked off a chain of mental & emotional events. For starters, my penance actually began to work. The time and space that had built up as part of my penance suddenly clicked into place. By accident more so than design (but hey, subconscious?) I had managed to do the work that was necessary in order to do the work that was necessary in order to do the work that was necessary to actually serve my penance.

I drafted up a document that I think belongs historically along with the Cyrus Cylinder, the Napoleonic Code and the Declaration of Independence.

A veil of denial was lifted and finally I could confront myself without dissociating from myself. I could look at what I did, without dismissing it as some stupid former version of myself from 5 months ago - a totally different person (untrue).

Not that it was easy, shame and my brain still made it difficult. I didn't go metaphorically blind. I went literally blind trying to read my own words, once I had tasked myself with what to look for and relaxed all defenses of my ego. It was incredibly painful, and delving this dark aspect of myself had natural limits to endure. I could not do it all in one sitting. I cringed at my own actions too frequently and then literally went blind and couldn't perceive the words on the page.

But I got through that. It's an interesting experience that I could recommend to nobody, unless you really don't want to keep being a cunt into your future to everyone you know and care about.

So I wrote my apologies for what was owed.

And then I turned and I think finally took a walk in my new neighborhood. My quality of life improved immediately now able to understand and accept my actions and their consequences.

Leaving me with myself, and nobody else. (...and I must admit a forlorn terror knowing I would have to, at some point, tell Misaki just what I had done.) Here's what needs saying about acceptance - is that it is incredibly liberating. It's a good day.

Which brings me to emotional competence, immaturity and emotional repression. This is what I have to work on now. For me, maturation means accepting that I can no longer coast by letting myself behave like the child of my early developmental years. That means finding emotions that I experience below the level of consciousness and that I unconsciously repress and actually finding healthy ways to express them.

Everything is culminating. Step one is to do the work of mindfulness. The goal truly is the path with mindfulness. I know from past experience that it works and it works immediately. I have committed though to doing this daily, for 30 minutes trying to build up to 1 hour. This is what I owe to myself and everyone in my life.

I have the critical amount of self-awareness to now go the extra step and actually gain some semblance of control of myself. It's time to move from my substance sobriety onto behavioral sobriety.

I suspect currently, this means recognising a lot of stress and anxiety and stopping myself from repressing them, ignoring them. As recently as last year I wasn't aware I even experienced anxiety. (though it would be misleading to label myself as suffering from anxiety)

My penance also indirectly lead to having the space and time and inspiration to recognise my own anger as my own (rather than external) and both deal with it and let it go.

I plan to do the same with judgement. To catch myself, be aware and interrupt myself from escaping into judgement.

These are my particular obstacles to maturity. Emotional competence is what I need to overcome them. Building this emotional competence is my task now.