On Ostracism

I was probably in a position to write this post as early as six years ago, I would have had around 2 years to percolate/steep in my shame. 

The difficulty of the subject of ostracism is trying to write about your experiences with someone who wants nothing to do with you. It's, in my thinking, a difficult subject to write about.

Involuntarily, I hear the voice of myopic ideaologues lecturing me: 'Don't you get it? You fucked up. They want nothing to do with you so leave them alone.' Which makes me shy away from tackling the topic. 

The thing is, I do get it. That's why I don't have a restraining order out on me. That's why I've never been in any legal trouble. That's why I'm a free man. But ostracism is wrong.

And I'm aware, that pretty much every woman I know has experienced ostracism, and I'll just confess I haven't even searched for the accounts of female voices on this subject. I'll merely concede that I'm probably a tourist in the mother country of women everywhere, and plough on with my accounting.

Is Ostracism Violence?

To the best of my recollection, Sam Harris was the first to outline the following dichotomy - that we only have one alternative to resolving conflicts with violence and that is communication.

Ostracism, or the cold shoulder, or ghosting, or cancelling seems to provide a third option - disengagement. 

There's space for this view in the undefined term 'violence'. I maintain that ostracism is violence, albeit much trickier to understand than kicking or punching, pulling hair, glassing, cutting a bitch etc. Those are straight forward.

I'm aware I live in times where a somewhat popular, if fringe, meme is that 'speech is violence' and 'silence is violence' (the latter if accepted would appear to oblige us to accept that ostracism is violence, however that's not the intent of the meme - to my understanding it implies an obligation to speak up lest you're "complicit" in violence)

The case for these memes, is I feel, weak. Naturally the cases haven't persuaded me. Much weaker than ostracism as violence.

I don't really know where to start making the case, so I'll just assert that it's my understanding that in the animal kingdom among social species (like us) being excluded from the group meant death. Not social death, but literal death. I have no idea when or where in history this ceased to be the case. I feel technology and capitalism and the enlightenment and modernity have made the condition of ostracism survivable, much like acute appendicitis.

Lacking the expertise though, I won't delve any further into that line because it'd just be speculation, though I'm confident ultimately that it's true. That there will be animals for whom shunning is just a low risk, safe and cruel way to kill some transgressor. It's just contemplating how historically consequential the effects of shunning were should raise questions as to how thirteen year old girls treat each other.

It's why I wouldn't be surprised if almost every cis-hetero male in their adolescence didn't have an experience akin to having their shoes stolen by their mates and thrown over the school fence, or having their lunch slapped out of their hand into the dirt, or getting a noogie, or dacked, or pantsed in pool, wet willy, squirrel gripped, wedgie, pushed over another guy that was crouching behind their legs, had their school books 'dicked' when they left them in the common room, or beat up, or piled on, stacks-on, or cup caked, tea bagged, dunked, swirlied...etc. and while picking themselves up, dusting themselves off, looked over and saw some girl in the school yard that had been shunned by the mean girls and thought 'man that's fucked up.'

Without expositing my notions of sex differences, my impression is that most men in male hierarchies do not experience life as under a constant threat of ostracism. Social media, by facilitating social interactions at a physical remove, probably have seen more teenage boys living under the conditions traditionally associated with female homosociality. Again, it's all just speculation on my part. And I've had a good 8 years to speculate.

My next case for ostracism as violence, would be common property. That would require accepting that damage to property is violence and I acknowledge this isn't a universal view. I'm unpersuaded that 'property is theft' or more extremely and further down the rabbit hole 'property is whiteness' and what not. I just want to acknowledge people convinced of this, exist. Having taken such views courteously and far more seriously than anybody should, I've arrived at having no further time to entertain them, so back to the schoolyard. 

If someone broke into your locker and stole your Texas-instruments graphic calculator, a day before SWOTVAC, the damages and suffering would be real. 

That's sufficient for me, the notion that because Pizzaro and Cortes plundered Mexico and Peru that it isn't violence to burn down someone's house, smash up their car with a golf club, slash their paintings or throw out all their clothes is ludicrous. Furthermore if 'property is theft' and or 'property is whiteness' it becomes hard to see what is wrong with the actions of colonial powers like Spain, Britain, Portugal, France and Italy when they came in and took all the indigenous people's property by force and duplicity, which is obviously ludicrous.

Anyway, there's not just shared physical property, which I care about the least but that's because of the low dollar value. There is "common property" in social circles, as in spaces that are/were shared, mutual friends etc. Obviously ostracism or shunning in most contexts doesn't work if the mutual friends don't participate in the shunning. This has never really applied to my experiences with being ostracised though. it's worth noting, even with my lack of insight though because from the outside looking in, who mutual friends side with confers power - literally the power to shun.

You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
As reek o the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you;
And here remain with your uncertainty!
Let every feeble rumour shake your hearts!
Your enemies, with nodding of their plumes,
Fan you into despair! Have the power still
To banish your defenders; till at length
Your ignorance, which finds not till it feels,
Making not reservation of yourselves,
Still your own foes, deliver you as most
Abated captives to some nation
That won you without blows! Despising,
For you, the city, thus I turn my back:
There is a world elsewhere. ~ Coriolanus, Act 3, Scene 3, William Shakespear.

I do not share Coriolanus' contempt for those that banished him. But there is some remedy in that sentiment of stepping into your power and letting fly in equal and opposite direction. Again, from the outside looking in, if there's a group of mean girls, and Brittney decides she's had it with Alicia and persuades Tiffany, Connie, Heather and Naomi to all go in on ostracising Alicia... I can't help but look at it in a game theory lens: the complicit mean girls don't become friends so much as hostages, and each time this ostracism tactic is consented to, their own social life becomes ever more precarious because the precedent is set and reinforced.  Aka, you're next Tiffany, you're next Connie etc.

I'm sure there are histrionic and/or narcissistic Queen Bees that fuck up ostracism and go too hard too fast and find themselves de facto ostracised.

But property damage, in terms of depriving a person of access to what is common, by sending them out, is obviously much harder to do when there's a school campus or workplace operating as that common property. However, institutions like schools expel students, workplaces fire people. Is expulsion or termination violence? Probably, technically yes. Society sanctions this violence though, in much the same way it sanctions police's ability to detain people.

The big difference is, institutions can't arbitrarily expel or incarcerate or deport people - socially agreed upon criteria has to be met. Justice has to be justified. Not so with informal social structures. Ostracism could be for sleeping with someone else's partner, to correcting them in public, to wearing the same dress to a party. Arbitrary.

But a school can't expel a student for being Jewish. For stealing property, for fighting, for doing or selling drugs, sure. Employers can't terminate an employment contract for any arbitrary reason either, and innumerous wrongful dismissal suits testify to the violence of such actions. Damages are paid.

In the same way, alright, we are no longer friends, that simply means one of two people does not enjoy nor seek the company of another. They may even actively avoid them. But the right to pick and choose who we are friends with does not extend to taking command of common property, of deciding on which table another is or isn't permitted to sit, of who their friends can be friends with.

This segue's into questions of detainment and improsonment. Are they violence? I say yes. Ostracism is like locking someone out of a very small space, where their prison cell becomes the rest of the world. One might be inclined to think of the space from which the shunned is excluded as the prison cell, the shunner locked in and the shunned locked out. But functionally, the cell walls are there. I can testify.

I can wander for days and months without coming across a 'Truman' wall, but they are there in my email, in my phone, on my socials, in my mind.

I also feel that stalking conceptually is the equal and opposite kind of violence as that of ostracism. Here I feel that few, particularly women, would disagree that stalking is violence. 'No it's just a harmless pass time.' Stalking, simplified to exclude all the other damages it does, is the insertion of someone into another's life without their consent. Ostracism is the expulsion of someone from part of  their own life, without their consent.

Lastly on this question, let's talk rights. Does a person have a right to make amends? To me the question of whether ostracism or shunning is violence is overdetermined even without appealing to being responsible for someone's emotional state (which I would avoid because that's largely why I reject the idea that 'speech is violence') but there's a question of whether ostracism is even punishment or punitive.

Hear me out. Ostracism rather than holding someone accountable is actually holding them unaccountable. In that sense it is identical to life without parole or a death sentence. I may need to inject some clarity, if the ostracism is entirely conditional on something that is completely within the ostracised control - like if they just apologized the ostracism ends, I am choosing to disqualify that as ostracism. Just like there's a large and consequential difference between permitting the incarcerated early release for good behavior and conditions of parole vs someone locked up and the key thrown away.

It's still violence to corral a group of people into coercing an apology from someone, but it's significantly better than the violence of unconditionally shunning someone. 

If you are the kind of aggressive and violent person that is fond of a good shun, my feeling is, the burden of proof is on you that the shunned cannot more constructively redress the insult.

Let me invoke Louis CK and Kevin Hart. Louis CK had distribution of his film 'I Love You Daddy' withdrawn, he lost $36 million dollars, he left the United States and stopped doing standup for a year. Kevin Hart lost his opportunity to host the Oscars. I would say, both men were held irresponsible for their transgressions. They literally couldn't respond. And for some people are still held irresponsible.

I've written about the Louis CK case before, and I can't be bothered looking up the details. Now, I'm not being dishonest when I say, I'm not sure in the legal sense what Louis' transgression actually was. I know he masturbated in front of women. Everyone knows he masturbated in front of women. I just don't know whether it constituted sexual harassment, sexual assault, public indecency or if on account of the issue of consent it occupies a gray area of subjective coercion as viewed by certain academics fixated on notions of power defining truth.

More to the point, the jacking off show had from my recollection ceased maybe 8 years or so before the article that exposed him. The same article indicated that Louis had expressed remorse and apologised to the women. It was just that it was all a private matter. For context, legally the US federal statute of limitations is 180 days, with some states providing for 300 days, or under a year.

So we had a situation where Louis had ceased the offending behavior, apologised to the offended parties, then apologized to the general public and acknowledged wrongdoing, and he stopped performing. 

Acknowledging that somebody like Tig Notaro may have a distinct and seperate grievance ie. being coerced by Louis and his manager not to talk about it or bring it up, I feel most people are stuck on the jerking off in front of women thing. 

Given that what's done, cannot be undone, I cannot imagine what more Louis could have done to respond to a behavior he had stopped engaging in.

Kevin Hart's case is much shorter. He was announced as Oscar's host. Then someone dug up homophobic comments from 7 or 8 years earlier, he stepped down. Issued an apology. And eventually he independently came to the conclusion that nothing would satisfy the mob that had mobilized against him.

In transactional analysis there's a life game called 'Now I've Got You You Son Of A Bitch' and in these high profile cases, that appears to be what is going on with cancel culture. The point of the game is not seeking restitution for damage done, but personal gratification. That's why I question whether ostracism or shunning even constitutes punishment. 

I was helped in this understanding by my friend Shamira, somewhere at about the 3 month mark of my ostracism, I was constantly ruminating on what I could do to actually respond to the situation. Of particular torture was that in my capacity as a friend, I wondered if I had made a mistake by respecting my friend's wishes to leave them alone, as they only seemed to grow angrier the more space I gave them.

Shamira informed me of her opinion, which is near as I can recall, that ostracism isn't for the benefit of the ostracised. They are, as it were, a sacrificial offering. If you got shunned, you were basically screwed. You were there as an example to the others.

So holding someone accountable, or holding them responsible generally by societal standards means serving their time, making their penance, restitution, repairs which I believe to be a fundamental human right. Ostracism functions as 'Now I've Got You You Son Of A Bitch' and in practice and function is about keeping someone irresponsible in order to maintain or cultivate the rage.

Shimmy Shimmy Ya.

Fuck it, I will expound my theory of sex differences. I see these as cultural, rather than innate, though I don't see culture as arbitrary, I think it is determined by environment, technology, and yes even genes are going to interact.

For some reason an epiphany came watching Old Dirty Bastard's film clip for Shimmy Shimmy Ya, expressly when he sings:

For the ladies who know me tell them who the fuck I be

For the niggas who know me tell them who the fuck I be

I was like, what a perfect example of masculine aggression. ODB is calling on those in the know to inform the ignorant that he is not to be treated as any old person, he's ODB.

Masculine aggression (not restricted to males) takes the form: 'Get the fuck out of my way.' and Feminine aggression (not restricted to females) takes the form: 'Get the fuck back in line.'

One form of aggression is non-conformist: 'Fuck you I won't do what you tell me.' and all that. The other form of aggression is ultra conformist: 'We all like the fuchsia bridesmaid dresses.'

 And in the spirit of ODB, for anyone who can't handle the cognitive dissonance that ostracism, shunning, cold shoulder etc. is violence might cause, I'd say fuck off you know exactly what you're doing - you are trying to inflict hurt and suffering on somebody. That's the whole point.

Ostracism as Passing the Buck

So in my case, after my own ostracism commenced I disrespected the wishes of my ostracism in two ways. 

The first, I attribute to ambiguity which I'll elaborate on further later. But I would describe these breaches as 'testing', they are kind of embarrassing, or shame inducing in hindsight because they basically punctuated long periods of hoping with these break downs of will and essentially communicating in an indirect way 'hey, is my ostracism over?' Basically, inane emails sent as if nothing had happened. 

I can forgive myself these transgressions though, because it's in my view, so human. If you dump someone in darkness they are going to reach for the walls. It's even puppy like behavior when the amygdala or whatever fails to hold the puppy in the sitting position and sends it charging at whatever the stimulus is.

The second type, was that I reserved for myself the right to make apologies. So by far the most substantial breaches of my ostracism, or shunning, are apology emails. I don't feel ashamed or embarrassed about this at all. If you've done something wrong, you should apologize.

That said, I could appreciate that if any third party were to look at them, they might see somebody bumbling through the darkness, walking into every coffee table in the room and collapsing with a foot in their mouth.

They might look clumsy, incoherent, egocentric, tone-deaf whatever. 

There's a really good reason for that. I got ostracised. Not confronted. Not informed. I got absolutely no means of feedback to figure out exactly what it was I'd done, that was so unforgivable. 

Okay, so say, unambiguously I was in the wrong, and I did something worth severe punishment. The punishment feels severe, I can testify to that. I get I upset them. But now, I am somebody else's problem. Like the troll two billy goats gruff left to their bigger brother to deal with.

'That guy's dangerous. Better lock him out with everyone else. Better climb the fire escape and pull the ladder up.'

And to be clear, it's not that say somebody with a toxic friend or partner is obliged to suffer that toxicity to protect the rest of society. It's more:

'I don't want to see you anymore.'

'Okay. Obviously my intuitions and judgement failed me. Can I get some clarification in order to avoid doing this to anybody else?'

'I said I don't want to see you anymore.'

And sure, somebody manipulative could try to enter an argument, that's something to be wary of. But I would maintain that there are ways to maintain your boundaries. Like:

'Sure, put them in a letter. It might take me a while to respond.'

Ostracism though just passes the offender intact to the next person they will offend. And in my case, I suffer when I make my friends suffer, so ostracism asks me and somebody else to maximise their chances of suffering again.

Friendship, Responsibility, Boundaries and Ambiguity

In my own experience of ostracism, something that amplified the distress of the process was ambiguity. I got a request for space, it was also clear my friend was angry and upset. I acknowledged and then the spacing began.

So initially it seemed like a big but temporary deal. A week? A fortnight? A month? Two months? Three?

It was also entirely the case that initially we both stood to benefit from that space. I needed to cool off and collect myself too. Initially I had no idea that I was being/had been ostracized.

I have a folder in my email labelled 'autopsy' that collected (mercifully) the email exchange that stimulated the ostracism response. I went through that, not attempting to rationalize my actions and absolve myself. But to interrogate what and why and when and how I'd gone wrong. 

I would revisit it every time I saw or heard something that gave me a new framework through which to understand where I'd caused the hurt. Frankly, my attitude was that whatever my friend had said or done was irrelevant given my objective was to ensure our future friendship was safe for them, safe to resume, and how to demonstrate that.

The memories fade and decay, but somewhere between three and six months it became clear that the space was in fact, here to stay. 

Time for delineation, you may be familiar with 'two to tango' given often as advice or reality checks to spurned people unable to deal with a breakup of a romantic relationship. I do not feel friendship is synonymous with relationship. You cannot be someone's boyfriend, girlfriend or otherwise intimate partner without their consent. 

It is simply the case that people are friends to people who are not their friends. Or let me put it this way, Jimmy is Timmy's friend, but Timmy is not Jimmy's friend.

I have in my life, ended friendships, because I came to the realization that I was not that person's friend. I even wound up shunning them, which I regret immensely. I hurt them pretty bad. I ended the shunning and wound up just explaining. That hurt them worse, no doubt because I'd dicked them around with shunning first. 

I see them around though, it's civil, we can converse, there's no need to avoid each other we just aren't friends anymore. I don't know though, they may still be my friend. I don't check, I don't test it out.

With my own ostracism, it is as a friend that I submitted to it, beyond the ambiguous phase where I was testing the boundaries by sending emails intended to 'test the waters' until I was rebuked.

Respecting someone's wishes and boundaries is how one can fork oneself when it comes to being ostracized. 

Why?

Because friends don't ostracize their friends. 

But as a friend, if you are told by a person that the friendly thing to do is to fuck off right out of town (and just to be clear, by the time I left town,  I had accepted as fully I could that I was dead, or persona non-grata to this person. I didn't flee the country because of ostracism or anything.) Then that is how you be their friend. 

That's pretty much all you can do, as best you can.

On the flipside, you can't be a friend, and subject someone to torture. Ostracism is torture, particularly when the condition of uncertainty is built in. 

Scenes come to mind from movies you probably haven't seen, or shows you don't remember. Like when David Spader's character in 'Just Shoot Me' is sent on an assignment to a new office not knowing he has been ostracised by George Segal's boss character. Or in 'The White Tiger' where the protagonist is brought in and his masters are suddenly all friendly to him and saying he is family as they press him to sign a confession that he was driving a vehicle that killed a child. Or Shutter Island where Leo Dicaprio finally has it revealed that he isn't a visitor to the asylum but a permanent patient. 

Alas, I have to grant, it's difficult in the moment to say 'you screwed up and I don't want to repair it, I just want you gone forever. I choose not to confront this.' and I give the benefit of the doubt that the major driver of the ambiguity was that my shunner believed also that it would be temporary.

The moment I really knew that I had lost a friend, was my dog died. She died on her 16th birthday. I'd had her half of my life. That can't happen again unless we get a dog breed that can live to 40. My friend knew what that dog meant to me, and when she died I emailed them and two other friends that knew my dog. My two other friends, as friends do, responded with their condolences. My friend kept their silence, and I knew, I was not their friend anymore.

If I can't move you with my story of a dog, maybe you can pretend you're a football coach on superbowl sunday and while you are trying to give the team a pep call your wife calls asking for a divorce...

How Do They Treat You When You're In the Wrong?

This I learned from dogs. Or maybe... about dogs. Dogs are good teachers in all matters that don't relate to planning for the future.

So it's a generalization, but if a dog submits (rolls onto it's back) to another dog, and that other dog attacks them, it's fairly safe to say the attacking dog has behavioural/socialization issues. 

It might seem grossly unfair, but I maintain the ability to judge people when I've already been found by myself and or them to be in the wrong. 

I was making a round of apologies to my friends for basically selfishly leaning on them to pursue an addiction, and one of my best friends when I apologised to him unexpectedly unloaded on me with years of pent up dissatisfaction.

We are still best friends, and I took all his feedback on board and tried to redress the issues he raised. I'm still trying almost a decade later. I also told him about my dog theory and he in turn took that on board, so it was quite a constructive exchange. 

Interestingly the friend that shunned me was on that same apology tour and was the only one to refuse my apology on account of the behavior I was apologizing for they shared and hadn't reached the point of being willing to cease it.

Just for the record, I have two emails pinned permanently to the top of my inbox, and one of them is a friend's peerless response to my apology:

Who are you? 

Come on don't need do that, we are always side by side. 

So, love is free to you to give. 

Keep asking me my love to you. 

You can get it as much as you want and whenever. 

Brian of Nazareth said 'Judge not lest ye be judged' and it holds true. If you've been ostracized, maybe as a friend, you have to respect that ostracism, but you don't have to respect the choice to ostracize you.

Which I don't. Beyond it being cruel and unusual, it doesn't appear to be effective. My friend, (my friend) went from seeming together, mature and responsible to just getting angrier, and more afraid the less they confronted me and the more time passed. They seemed to grow in their incapacity.

I was talking it over with my friend Jon, or rather we were talking about the concept of forgiveness, which very few people get the direction of. The common intuition/misperception appears to be that if you don't forgive somebody, you hold some kind of power over them.

I believe the reverse is true. I think most people conflate forgiveness with endorsement and that's where they get caught up. My friend Jon said, and it made an impression on me:

'If you don't forgive someone, then you're letting them live in your heart and your head.' 

On reflection, I think it's worse than that. Particularly in the case of permanent ostracism. I feel someone out there actually maintains a shrine to the worst incarnation of me, while depriving themselves of my best. I think that's what ostracism takes.

Tiger by the Tail

Somebody eats your lunch out of the office kitchen fridge. So you burn down their house.

There's a threshold where the punishment exceeds the crime. 

Another reason I can't respect ostracism, is the ease with which for the shunner, you wind up holding a tiger by the tail, and if you let go that tail...

To be clear, this isn't a threat. If my shunning were to end tomorrow, all I'd do is probably cry, like the Kid Detective, at the hours of friendship lost over 8 years that can't be got back.

The thing is, that there was this sweet spot between the 3 month and 1 year mark, where I was at peak contrition. I took responsibility, I was apologetic, I came to them on my knees, and they chose to turn the thumbscrews tighter. That's where my loss of respect became salient.

Somewhere in there, what was done to me, exceeded in damage, what I had done to them. 

Yes, you can argue that I kicked things off. That I 'started it'. My feeling though is that by that logic, it leaves us defenseless in situations where say, a lover that discovered an infidelity murders their partner. I maintain that all we can take responsibility for are our actions, we can't take responsibility for someone else's reaction. 

When I play out the ever more remote prospect of reconciliation, I imagine what would take priority is my initial insult. Parked in the 'parking lot' or 'bike rack' is the issue of their response - my ostracism. Reconciliation isn't really possible if we don't discuss the fact that they shunned me for the better part of a decade and counting, for my transgression. And yeah, I take into account that at a certain point maintaining ostracism is much more an act of omission rather than commission. Most days I don't think about it, I'm sure it's the same for them.

That's kind of the tiger they have by the tail. I think what also makes it difficult is that, in the course of 8 years, I managed to forgive myself.

I know what I did, I feel confident I know why I did it, and I haven't done it again. I actually don't need their forgiveness. (and one never does.)

7 years ago, to read the emails I sent, induced such shame that I could feel the blood drain from my orbital frontal cortex. I literally experienced psychosomatic blindness trying to force myself to confront myself.

As recently as four years ago, which I think was the last time I reviewed my emails, I basically saw a few sloppy things here and there I would change, but that it was basically okay.

And that's a big risk of ostracism - you get angrier, and the shunned gets better. I think there were probably even some things I chuckled at, much like when I randomly pick out a blog post I wrote ten or fifteen years ago.

Certainly it helps to not feel shame if you know you already apologized for something you did. It recontextualizes it.

I think what I've outlined here, as a 'Tiger by the Tail' scenario, is actually a revelation that helped me finally accept my ostracism. 

It's the curious case where the power dynamic shifts. I'm no longer belly up unable to look them in the eye. I likely see the situation as they would have to see it, to initiate a reconciliation - it wasn't such a big deal, perhaps they overreacted.

But the ostracism is a big deal. While I accept it, it's something I wish my friend hadn't done, because it's hard to come back from, even if there's an understandable ulterior motive, or circumstances in their life. But...it can't be good for anyone if ostracism is sustained by shame.

I hope they can forgive themselves. Precisely the kind of well wish that could make blood boil and tack another decade onto my ostracism. But their forgiveness is trading at a historic low. Unless it's the forgiveness they withhold from themselves.

An Opportunity to Sit With Shame

Shame is very very powerful. Just ask Brene Brown. I'm not going to talk much about shame, just that in my opinion, there's almost nothing a person won't do to not feel shame. If you've been ostracized, be cautious of self-medicating.

Some people are natural 'fuck you' people when they are admonished. A bunch of us though, it just confirms some deeply held belief that we are worthless pieces of shit.

What I will say for ostracism, is that it gives ample opportunity to sit with and experience shame in your body. To recognize and make peace with it. The hollowing out feeling, the implosion of the meat of your face. The psychosomatic blindness. The deindividuation.

Like eating a porcupine though, once I started sitting with my shame and making peace with it, I didn't stop. That shame, has no power over me.

Maybe think of being ostracized as like winning a free entry into an ultramarathon you hadn't trained for. That's the opportunity to seize.

Surviving/Making the most of Ostracism

At two weeks I told myself three months. At three months I was already telling myself a year. Between the second and fifth year, it was only fleeting moments I remembered and cared.

I saw them once, on the street, I had broken my usual routine because I got a flat tire and was cutting through a pedestrian heavy area with my bike. I saw them, they didn't see me, near as I can tell. They seemed happy, I kept walking.

Diogenes of Sinope was abducted by pirates to be sold as a slave. I can't find the anecdote, it was maybe in a video when I was binging Diogenes, but he complained to the pirates that his breakfast was insufficient. They gave him food, and the other captured slaves asked him how he could eat in circumstances like this, and he was basically 'my complaint has been rectified'. 

Cynicism is Stoicism Plus. The best friends the shunned and ostracised have are acceptance, forgiveness and responsibility.

For a while responsibility might involve soul searching, contrition, restitution. You'll probably grieve. Even before I knew the ostracism was permanent, I cried a lot in the first two months. It's a good opportunity to listen to Pink Floyd, anything else that makes you purge that sadness.

After a while though responsibility becomes an obligation to just make the most of things.

Your prison cell, your island of exile is so vast. There's no need to forget, just wander.

This was my prison cell:

This was my prison cell:

This was my prison cell:

I'm still in my prison cell, and life is good. 

It's not that my friend is dead to me, just I dead to them. I have dead friends, I still love and care about them, so 'dead to me' doesn't make much sense anyway. 

I've written about my friend's suicide, and much as that clearly fucked me up. Ostracism hurts worse. Because it wasn't everyone, just me.

You've been exiled to the literal rest of your life. Every day the number of things you've unwittingly said goodbye to, grows, be that friends or family, or pastimes you enjoy. Allow the things you know or fear you can never enjoy again to preoccupy your mind as little as possible.

Bake something. Do something. Go somewhere. Not to flee them, or yourself. But to go to somewhere.

And yes, I would be remiss if I said, just as I feel ostracism is the likely wrong reaction to conflict, there are wrong reactions to ostracism, that you are responsible for.

Do it wrong you get a restraining order, or a jail sentence. 

Hope is going to torture you, desperation will fuck you up.

So if you've been ostracized. I'm sorry. Good luck. Make the most of it. The water isn't so cold.

And I'd rather be shunned, than shun.

Approximating Intelligence: Conversation Starters

This follows on from a post I did about the topic of 'Monkey See, Monkey Do' but the overall theme of these ideas is how less intelligent people mitigate the advantage of more intelligent people such that intelligence is not a 'winner take all' trait. The topic of this post is some variation of ye olde 'never let the truth get in the way of a good story.' and is really about how unintelligent ideas can effectively hobble intelligent people by draging them into conversations and arguments that don't merit starting.

My best attempt to put it succinctly is that there are conversations that are complete wastes of time, they do not merit embarking upon. Something simply is the case, and as such there's no point speculating on what isn't. A Conversation starter is to exclude the necessary fact that obstructs the possibility of conversation.

Examples: The world is an oblique spheroid. Cryptocurrency isn't currency. Homo sapiens are dimorphic. There is no compelling evidence of the supernatural. etc.

Now when I worked in a call center, I would ask my coworkers ridiculous hypotheticals, and one style of answering an absurd or ridiculous hypothetical took the form: 'Well I just wouldn't be in that situation so I would never have to make that choice...' which is to entirely miss the point of a ridiculous hypothetical and that is entertainment.

I'm not the fun police. Questioning a vegan as to whether if nobody was around they would pay $2 to ride a unicorn that was crying over its captivity, may be inconsequential on account of unicorns not existing (sorry mum) but it is still entertaining.

In an attempt to be brief, I'm going to be blunt. I spent 3 months corresponding with an anti-vax friend. It was a long exchange. It ran into the arse-end of the Joe Rogan podcast interview of Dr. Malone. I found it easiest to respond to a podcast with a podcast, namely Sam Harris interviewing Nicholas Christakis.

Anyway, what happened was that in the interview Nicholas casually mentions that the mrna vaccines are something like 5 times more effective than natural immunity. And this was rejected by my correspondent as a baseless claim. I conceded that this claim was asserted without any allusion to the studies that produced the conclusion, but gave it a quick google. And found that if you looked at the mortality rates of unvaccinated people it's something like 1% or thereabouts, and if you look at the mortality rates of the vaccinated it drops to 0.2% or less. So 5x more effective than natural immunity.

Here is the powerful pull of the rabbit hole. I should point out my correspondent friend lives in Australia. Roughly 21 million Australians were fully vaccinated at that point, or 8 in every 10. (and over 9 in 10 when you exclude the child population of Australia). Like to be hesitant about a vaccine at that point, would require morgues to be backed up, hence the appropriate term is anti-vax.

And really, that's it. The conversation can't really take place anymore, unless you find some way to dismiss the evidence.

Which my correspondent did. It was like 'we can't trust any research that is publicly or privately funded' and to be clear I am interpreting/condensing here. 

But this is the principle that is the subject of this post. 

An Argument for Flying

Say you want to fly under your own power. You come to me and say "If I can just jump off something high enough I think I can escape earth's gravitational pull" and then I throw a rock off a cliff and it plunges straight down to the ground below. 

Conversation, argument, over. Without introducing technology, people just can't fly.

You say "well who says that all mass is going to fall to earth every time."

And I'm like 'motherfucking physics that's who.'

And you're like 'I don't believe in physics.'

This might seem like a stupid example, but this shit is happening all the time.

Capital Punishment

A long time ago I was sitting around a table in a Fitzroy apartment discussing the plight of pedophiles. For the sake of argument, we'd all agreed to assume that pedophiles can't be "rehabilitated" in the sense of being cured of their paraphilia. Basically, once a pedophile always a pedophile, this was a premise we'd all agreed to regardless of whether it turns out to be true or not.

Then came the trouble of sentencing, paroling, releasing. My friend, one of my best friends made this extremely frustrating argument it went like this:

Capital punishment is fucked, it would never work, too many problems with it. But it would be good if we could just line pedophiles up and just shoot them.

So I'm no expert on writing syllogisms, but it would translate to something like this:

Premise 1: Capital punishment is overdetermined to be ineffective aka it's fucked.

Premise 2:  There are pedophiles.

Conclusion: We should use capital punishment on pedophiles.

This argument, or more accurately non-argument still annoys me to this day. It's like an anti-begging the question, where your first premise is a rejection of the conclusion. Most people are not this obtuse though to make arguments of the form 'I don't have an argument, here's the argument.'

But it does illustrate the basic form of what I'm calling 'Conversation starters'

Basic Form Conversation Starter

"This doesn't occur in reality, but if we can ignore reality then we have something to talk about."

Approaching intelligence it is rendered into the form "We can ignore reality, so we have something to talk about." that move from "if we can" to "we can" is often really tricky, as in buried under 30ft of word salad.

An Important Disclaimer

I'm likely to touch on issues that most people view very much through an 'Us-Them' prism. I have many friends that I would describe as 'Crusaders' for example, in which like the historical crusaders, they believe what they do is of paramount importance, don't understand what the actual crusades entail and have no idea that the texts the crusade is based upon are not descriptive of reality. 

As such, if for example I say 'Anti-racism has no real basis' you might be tempted to leap to the conclusion that I'm suggesting 'White supremacy' is the natural order of things, particularly if you've already signed on to the Anti-racist crusades. However, Anti-racism is but one approach to combatting racism and inequality in society, there are alternatives like humanism and importantly alternatives that have been far more effective historically that Anti-racism is now set about demolishing.

This is the unfortunate thing, if you have a rat poison that will maybe kill a bunch of rats in your house and definitely kill your own children, two parties are likely to object to you using that poison A) rats and B) people concerned for the wellbeing of your children.

Criticism doesn't just come from people who want you to fail, criticism can also come from people who want you to succeed.

Ryan Chapman

No more beating around the bush. From Greg Lukianoff and Johnathan Haidt's article in the Atlantic in 2015, to Brett Weinstein's talk 'How the Magic Trick Is Done' in 2018, to Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, Douglas Murray, Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Andrew Doyle, Sam Harris, Coleman Hughes... hundreds if not thousands of hours have been spent by world-class minds taking far-left theory very seriously in order to understand and dissect it. Contemporary to writing this post, Douglas Murray and Peter Boghossian sat down to try and concur as to why so many people are taken in by (here referred to as) Woke ideology? I would argue some parties like Brett Weinstein and James Lindsay have been driven insane in the pursuit to understand and overcome it.

In this sense and context 'conversation starters' as approaching intelligence have been a huge success.

I am a big and almost immediate fan of youtuber Ryan Chapman, who like me has time on his hands to look at phenomena like Wokeness as a cultural phenomenon. His breakdown of the intellectual roots of wokeness is (trust me relatively) succinct and simple. Clean like his mid-century-modern décor:

and as per the packaging on the box, it delivers on what it promises - the intellectual roots of woke ideology.

At my own peril of losing you, I'm going to switch to hopefully a simpler analogy: Bitcoin. There's a super excellent deconstruction of nfts and crypto made by youtuber Folding Ideas called 'Line Goes Up - The problem with NFTS' It is over 2 hours long and as at writing has been viewed 8.3 million times such that if you managed to find this, you've probably already seen it.

If you watch it, you wont have wasted your time, however I'm going to employ the dubious word 'should' which is: making a 2 hour well researched, argued and executed video on NFTs being magic beans shouldn't be necessary. The bitcoin conversation shouldn't even get started. Here's a shorter alternative that I'm fairly sure I bring up every time anyone brings up crypto or nfts with me:

The question that plagues me, with bitcoin and its spin offs, is "why don't people immediately notice that Jerry doesn't eat sushi and doesn't wear kimonos" aka Kramer is not actually describing reality.

Easily the best thing I got from 'Line Goes Up' was the sense-making revelation that in the early days of bitcoin, bitcoin enthusiasts were just slapping 'we accept bitcoin' stickers on businesses, whether they did or not (mostly not) and it was hard to validate because nobody used bitcoin to buy anything anywhere and nobody knew anybody who used bitcoin to buy coffees and muffins from the corner store that according to a sticker on its window accepted bitcoin.

And like Kramer, eventually we could see people get rich by virtue of not understanding reality, just as Kramer has his shiny new suit after bankrupting Japanese tourists.

In the same sense, Ryan Chapman traces a line from contemporary 'Wokeness' simply and directly back to the ideas of Karl Marx. One could take Marx back to Hegel too if you like. 

Marx is poignant, because he had his own intellectual produce and historically every one that has gotten excited by and attempted to implement Marx's ideas has brought about a disaster. 

Karl Marx is Kramer, Kramer is even correct about some stuff - the Japanese are big gift givers, Jerry's TV may well be Japanese. But Kramer is crucially wrong about the value of the Yen, and the viability of Jerry's sitcom in the Japanese market, leading all parties to disaster.

But if we ignore the fact that Jerry doesn't eat sushi and wear kimonos, that USD$300 was then the equivalent of Y30,000 and not "practically free" as a price point, then Kramer's ideas can really get cooking.

In the same way if we ignore the fact that nobody is really representative of the group to which they belong, then we can discuss identity politics. (And I do mean literally nobody is representative of any group you can identify with. Based on the 2011 ABS census data, the "Average Australian" was defined of which, not a single Australian in 23 million was statistically average.)

So much as I like Ryan Chapman's analysis, I think the emotional roots of Wokeness, Crypto, Flat Earth, Stop the Steal are a lot simpler to understand and summarize than the intellectual roots:

Enough people want it to be true. aka Motivated reasoning.

The Economics Joke

I got this from Australian Economist Steve Keen's old 'Debt deflation' blog:

A physi­cist, a chemist and an econ­o­mist are ship­wrecked on a desert isle, along with a con­tain­er full of cans of baked beans.

The chemist says that if they can start a fire, he can cal­cu­late the tem­per­a­ture at which a can will explode.

The physi­cist says that she can work out the tra­jec­to­ry of the baked beans after the explo­sion, so that they can gath­er the baked beans and eat them.

The econ­o­mist looks at them in dis­dain, and final­ly says Guys, you’re going about it the hard way. Let’s assume we have a can open­er.

This is a field I hold a qualification in, albeit a minor and unimpressive one. But there's actually a lot of this 'assume we have a can opener' shit going on.

Apples

I have four apples. Benny cries 'no fair!' to the chief. 

The chief makes me separate the four apples into two groups of two and Benny gets to pick which pair he takes home.

Benny demands the pairs be weighed. We weigh them, one pair is slightly heavier than the others.

'For fucks sake Benny just pick the heavier pair.' I say growing tired of this whole thing.

'You'd like that wouldn't you. The smaller apples will be sweeter.'

'I don't give a fuck, I'm hungry I want you to pick so I can eat my apples.'

'...but the larger apples have a greater flesh to skin and core ratio...'

'Yeah so pick whatever. Chief can you make him pick already?'

'I demand a 30 day cooling off period, in which tohm isn't allowed to eat his apples should I determine that the division of apples was unfair.'

'You can have all the apples. Just let me get out of here so I can buy a McMuffin.'

'I want a McMuffin too! Why do I have to eat apples while you eat McMuffins.'

'Fine I'll buy you a McMuffin Benny.'

'Oh what so you can have all the apples?'

'No so I can get out of here and eat something.'

'You're trying to swindle me out of the apples by bribing me with a McMuffin...'

Benny's mistake is that he thinks his problem is that I have all the apples and he has none. Benny's actual problem (because I made him up) is that he's miserable. He's miserable without apples, he's miserable with apples.

I don't make this analogy to trivialize economic inequality. Rather to illustrate the perils of misdiagnosis. Benny is motivated to believe that if he just had some apples, he'd be as happy as me. Probably my method of oppressing Benny in the dialogue above is that I don't care and he does. Likely a privileged position if I can give away apples and buy Benny McMuffins, but Benny has poisoned his own mind, such that while the chief as an independent arbiter may view it as fair that we each have two apples and a McMuffin, Benny won't see it that way.

Society probably does have problems if Benny needs to petition the chief to redistribute my apples. I'm not denying there is a problem. I am asserting that Benny has misdiagnosed that problem.

How does that happen in real world examples?

Epistemic Inclusion

I keep promising to myself I'll write a post dedicated solely to the subject of epistemic exclusion. This is not that post though.

An epistemology is a way we produce knowledge. Experimentation for one. Mathematics (a subset of rationalism) another.

Not all epistemologies are equal however. 

So this is my own basic conclusion on the question of including or excluding epistemologies - where epistemologies converge on findings, include them. This is largely to give credit where credit is due. 

For example, revelation, believe it or not, is an epistemology. This is like when God visits someone in a dream and tells them what they need to know.

So the gold standard of epistemologies is generally regarded to be empiricism, repeatable experiments that produce consistent results. 

In a scenario where an empiricist has a bunch of people coming down with cholera, does a statistical analysis of the cases and detects a behavioral pattern among patients that they are using three distinct water pumps in the London area, then samples that water and looks at it under a microscope and discovers microbial life in that water supply that isn't in other water supplies that aren't producing cholera cases, the empiricist determines that cholera is spread by these 'germs'.

Then someone is visited by God in the night and says 'Yo, disease has nothing to do with a persons character, it is spread by these other life forms I created because unnecessary suffering is necessary' then yeah if divine revelation reveals things that turn out to be reliably true include that epistemology.

But if someone is visited by God in the night and says 'Yo, these cholera cases are my punishment for legalizing same sex marriage in a country your citizens have no jurisdiction over, because I'm disappointed in your lack of holy war enthusiasm' then revelation should be an excluded epistemology.

Why?

Because it is my presupposition that what constitutes knowledge is predictive power. I can only claim to know how much money is in my wallet if I can accurately predict how much money I will find in there. 

Or as Matt Dillahunty of the Athiest Experience specifies - knowledge is a subset of beliefs, beliefs held with the highest degree of confidence. Athiest youtuber Paulogia offered me the criteria of 'adjudicated by predictive power.' 

"Confidence" comes etymologically speaking from the Latin "confidere" - to have full trust. In this sense mere confidence is insufficient by itself to establish knowledge. Confidence can be misplaced, my trust is predicated on predictive power.

But One Case Study: Standpoint Epistemology

Standpoint epistemology is basically as I can understand it, taking your subjective experience as sufficient to generate knowledge about reality. (This is complicated because I'm going to assume that standpoint theory is in the critical theory school that rejects notions like "objective reality").

Eye witness testimony is likely an example of standpoint epistemology. It is not a sound epistemology. For example, the biopic 'Hurricane' depicts a limitation of eyewitness testimony when witnesses are coached to identify Rubin Carter as perpetrator of an armed robbery. (and in reality all we know is that witnesses changed their accounts and were inconsistent with each other and their own testimony at different times). 

A more contemporary example is the witness testimony in the shooting of Michael Brown. 

I'm not sure that strictly speaking eye witness testimony is regarded in Academia as a subset or akin to standpoint epistemology. Regardless, witness testimony is something that has been heavily scrutinized through our judicial systems and by the field of psychology such that we know it is unreliable. Unsound.

For example there's Dr. Elizabeth Loftus' work on memory with the famous car collision experiments:

One of Loftus' first experiments, published in 1974, involved car accidents. In the lab she played videos of different incidents and then asked people what they remembered seeing. Their answers depended greatly on how she phrased the question.

For instance, if she asked how fast the cars were going when they "smashed" into each other, people estimated, on average, that the cars were going 7 mph faster than when she substituted the word "hit" for "smashed." And a week after seeing the video, those who were asked using the word "smashed" remembered seeing broken glass, even though there was none in the film. ~ sourced here

 There's inattentional blindness also. Which might combine with "What you see is all there is" Here's the famous invisible gorilla video:

and here's a scientific american overview of the limitations of eyewitness testimony relative to the weight given it by jurors.

How do we know about the issues with eyewitness testimony? Because it gets compared to sound epistemologies like empiricism. We can check its correspondence with reality. Its predictive power. For example an eyewitness identification of a perpetrator should predict their DNAs presence among the forensic evidence even decades after a trial.

Furthermore, as in the Michael Brown case, not only should witness testimony predict things like the amount and pacing of shots recorded on video devices, but it should also predict other eye witness testimony.

If you can keep witnesses independent before giving their statements, if this subjective measure was predictive of what happened, one eye witness account should largely predict the contents of another eye witness account. And as in the Brown case sometimes they do, but sometimes they don't. There's a phenomena documented called 'The Rashomon effect' to add to the pile.

So standpoint epistemology in its attempt to produce knowledge faces all the above problems/limitations of subjectivity. But here's some specific examples of its limitations.

I meet Rhonda at a party. When she shakes my hand she finds my intense stare creepy and intimidating, she notices how much I am sweating and that I mumble 'nice to meet you' in a cursory manner. From Rhonda's standpoint it is concrete evidence of men's objectification of women and failure to see her as an equal. Another day as a woman living under the patriarchy.

When later this characterizations of events are brought to my attention, I give my own accounts from my own standpoint - 

Before arriving at the party I ate my dinner of a Nuclear burrito. It was harrowing I couldn't get my mind off the burrito which was now sitting in my gut like two rabid weasels. I recall Jenny introducing me to someone, but at that stage all I could think of was escaping to a bathroom.

To get around this problem of subjectivity, or 'he-said-she-said' which is a real problem, instead of appealing to a sound epistemology, like I could have produced a receipt or bank statement for my burrito, or the person who waited 20 minutes outside the toilet could have corroborated my account. 

Of course this solution would end the potential conversation about patriarchal oppression, so instead near as I can determine standpoint theory overcomes these he-said-she-said or Rashoman problems by designating "epistemic privilege". Namely that some subjective standpoints count, and others don't. Some examples:

Kristina Rolin states that "the assumption of essentialism is that all women share the same socially grounded perspective in virtue of being women, the assumption of automatic epistemic privilege is that epistemic advantage accrues to the subordinate automatically, just in virtue of their occupying a particular social position."

The above is a fascinating excerpt, because to me it could read exactly as a description of why standpoint epistemology is unsound - it assumes essentialism and it assumes privilege. However I suspect it is meant to be descriptive. A counter example might be a passenger on a flight. The pilot of the plain has power over the lives of the passengers, who ultimately have to obey the pilot's demands - stay seated, fasten seatbelt, don't use the bathrooms, fit your oxygen mask first, abandon vessel etc. If geese fly into the jet engine and force an emergency landing, few people would recognize the subordinate passenger as having epistemic privilege over the pilot. Anyway, another example:

In Harding’s 1986 book The Science Question in Feminism, she distinguishes the idea of a standpoint from the more generic idea of a perspective with the requirement of political engagement: She argues that due to the political engagement of feminists and their active focus on the lives of women, it allows them to have an epistemically privileged “standpoint.”

Which to me reads as 'feminists know women better than any woman does by virtue of their political engagement.' Which may periodically or incidentally be true, I would have to see the argument to be compelled by it. 

 Now to be clear, its not like we can't know anything from subjective accounts. Documenting people's standpoints is highly worthwhile. Where standpoint epistemology serves as a "conversation starter" is privileging it over empiricism. When people start talking about 'truths' 'realities' 'my truth' 'your truth' or 'alternative facts'.

For example, on the recommendation of Youtuber 'Just Some Guy' I read the comic book series 'Excellence' which can be summarized as 'Coming 2 America' meets Harry Potter. The artwork is excellent, and while casting spells with magic wands isn't my bag, there's worldbuilding in there. But I'd say it is worth reading because it is worth having the standpoint of the creative team as data, it's good to know that like they think they have a true analogy of contemporary US society and race politics.

Alas, regardless of it being a true reflection of what the creators believe, there's little to no insight beyond 'this is what some people believe' to be found in the chapters that have to date been released.

Where something like standpoint epistemology approaches intelligence as a conversation starter, is very few people are trained to say 'wait, what epistemology are we using here?' and can get bamboozled by being told that asserting their own counternarrative or appealing to evidence is a form of oppression etc. 

It's also an epistemology that permits things that have also been ruled out by social sciences subjected to empiricism, like mind-reading is a big one.

Remedy

The remedy unfortunately will require cumulative acts of intestinal fortitude, and people who want a better tomorrow may be social casualties along the way.

The key phrase to counter a conversation starter is:

I reject your premise.

There's probably softer ways to word this, a nice one is the question 'is your belief falsifiable?' this was literally the first thing I asked of my anti-vax correspondent. He claimed yes, but that belief was in turn falsified and it took about 3 months of back and forth. 

If I were to obtain some sort of public profile such that I wound up sitting down for 'an evening with Joey Soloway' there's juicy interesting conversations that could start (I single out Joey because of this assertion made in their talk with Hannah Gadsby for the New Yorker festival, it's a handy example that comes to mind):

There's this thing that happens at parties where there's a guy and this woman is passed out and the guy wants to have sex with her because she's passed out and he calls his friend first. What's that about? [asked of cis male podcast hosts] and they just like go silent. [mimics nonwords] "...I don't know"

 I'm like "yeah you know" it's what men do with the degraded half of the divided feminine. They use it as an excuse. They use her passed-outness as a conduit to connect with other men sexually. Her passed-outness, her unconsciousness demands that they experience something sexually with another straight man. And it's her fault for not guarding her egg. ~ transcribed by me, sourced here.

It's such a fascinating conversation starter, but there likely isn't a conversation actually there unless I as a cis man am so completely out of touch and Joey somehow happens to be in touch.

Where any and all conversation of these social-science type discussions probably need to begin with is the question:

Is literary criticism a sound epistemology?

Or something like that. My example seems to be more a kind of Freudian analysis that presupposes a universal experience, and of course standpoint epistemology and mind reading. This circles right back to the transition from the basic form of "This doesn't occur in reality, but if we can ignore reality then we have something to talk about." to "We can ignore reality, so we have something to talk about."

In the above example we've skipped the part where we establish that this is a thing. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure date rape and taking advantage of drunk and passed out women is a thing. What is not established is that men who take sexual advantage over passed out women also habitually call their straight male friend and that with this addendum that's a universal male experience. 

But see! The conversation has started. 

What needs to happen is: 'fascinating insight, how did you establish any and all of the claims you just made?'

Afterword: Clarity

As near as I can guesstimate the real trick of conversation starters that approaches intelligence seems to be based on a propensity of some subset of people to render equal 'difficult to understand' with 'intelligent'. 

Here I have to posit, but cannot prove, the existence of a certain kind of person, that say when you try to explain the elliptical orbits of the planets around the sun and how that translates into the transit of Venus across the sky from the perspective of earth, they are hearing something true and factual, but they don't necessarily understand the explanation. They believe you because you seem to know what you are talking about.

They are using a rule-of-thumb their own kind of epistemology, that is: if an argument is too complex to understand accept the conclusion.

Which leaves this hypothetical person vulnerable to bamboozlement or idea smuggling.

It's annoying to engage in conversation or argument with someone about the safety of vaccines when they reject all the best data available to lay people off-hand, and instead favor anecdote but not just any anecdote only anecdotes that support the conclusion that the vaccines are dangerous.

It's another thing altogether to be arguing with someone who is spewing out nonsensical word salad, whether they be New Age Spiritualist, Christian Apologist, Bitcoin Enthusiast or Radical Leftist.

It is worse to be sent onerous 'reading material.'

The sum total of my experiences with these started conversations is that with time and energy and intense concentration they all say 'Assume we have a can opener'

It's hard to stand your ground and say 'I reject your premise' when you have no idea what it is they are saying.

So I return to Ryan Chapman again with his video on what constitutes a Good Argument, which is refreshingly informal while still being insightful. The last aspect of a good argument is on the subject of clarity. 

He winds that section up with a quote from Karl Popper, here's an expanded version that I feel also captures that heuristic of equating incomprehensibility with intelligence:

Many years ago I used to warn my students against the widespread idea that one goes to college in order to learn how to talk and
write 'impressively' and incomprehensibly. At the time many
students came to college with this ridiculous aim in mind, especially
in Germany. And most of those students who, during their
university studies, enter into an intellectual climate that accepts this
kind of valuation - coming, perhaps, under the influence of teachers
who in their turn had been reared in a similar climate - are lost. They
unconsciously learn and accept that highly obscure and difficult
language is the intellectual value par excellence. There is little hope
that they will even understand that they are mistaken, or that they
will ever realize that there are other standards and values - values
such as truth, the search for truth, the approximation to truth
through the critical elimination of error, and clarity. Nor will they
find out that the standard of 'impressive' obscurity actually clashes
with the standards of truth and rational criticism. For these latter
values depend on clarity. One cannot tell truth from falsity, one
cannot tell an adequate answer to a problem from an irrelevant one,
one cannot tell good ideas from trite ones, and one cannot evaluate
ideas critically-unless they are presented with sufficient clarity. ~ The Myth of The Framework, Chapter 3: Reason or Revolution?

In that sense there's been a long conversation going on about alternate epistemologies and 'other ways of knowing' that in itself really should have been over a long time ago; maybe in 1994 with Popper's Myth of the Framework, or Chomsky saying postmodernism consists of nothing but truisms and has no real content. 

No doubt earlier, but because that conversation is ongoing it has enabled a lot of conversations to start that shouldn't have.

This post on the other hand is over.

Maximillian 'Max' Jesus Esq.

 I don't share much of my life here in Mexico, and one reason (among many) is that I live a life now where most of my anecdotes are about dogs, kind of like when Reese joins a dog pack in Malcolm in the Middle. So brace yourself for a dog anecdote, but it was a win for us, well except for the dogs Doki and Usma who by-and-large didn't care.

It began with our usual morning walk. Though I go to pains to make sure these walks aren't routine, because as a house husband I try to maximise productivity through killing two birds with one stone we typically have two-and-a-half destinations for morning walks: the supermarket, the carneceria and/or the mercado which is opposite the carneceria.

For those 2.5 different destinations I have at least 10 different routes to take the dogs by so they get the intellectual stimulation of sniffing pee-stained walls that are different from the walls they sniffed yesterday.

Anyway, I'd taken the most straightforward route to the carneceria yesterday, and I'd padded out the shortened distance by stopping in our neighbourhood park we always have to cut through and throwing Doki's ball for fetch, while Usma grazes in a nearby garden bed selecting and eating the tastiest blades of grass. 

This gave our party of three the maximum chance to encounter a bunch of neighborhood dogs by virtue of standing still and letting them come to us. This created some minor chaos when it was time to leave with other people's dogs wanting to come with Doki and Usma and after some sorting we got the respective dogs all walking in the right direction.

This is so banal an occurrence that it is not anecdote worthy. I was making egg and bacon "McMuffins" so I stopped at a fairly shitty bakery "Croissants Alfredo" to pick up my favorite substitute for English Muffins. That's where our duo of dogs picked up another tagalong dog. 

Some vocabulary: Street dogs are dogs that get turned out by their owners because they are underfoot, or because the house is empty while parents are working and kids are at school, in Mexico, a bunch of dog owners just let their dogs lie out on the pavement and wander the streets as they please confident they will return home as per their routine. Stray dogs are dogs that live on the streets, nobody owns them, they are homeless. Stray dogs are rarer than homeless people, generally picked out by their mange. 

In Guadalajara, Mexico, in our 'Colony' or Suburb, Street dogs are neck-and-neck if not the majority of dogs compared to the less visible house dogs like ours and the few fellow dog-walkers I spot throughout the day.

In Australia, house dogs are the clear majority. Street dogs are almost non-existent because our councils function rather efficiently such that there's only so long your dog can wander streets unescorted before a nice person might check its collar for a contact number, or a precious busy-body calls the council to come pick it up. 

Thanks to a lack of interest and subsequent credulity in Catholicism, in Australia most pets have been desexed, are registered with the local council and possibly have a microchip in their ear. This is not the case in Mexico, which means that the majority of street dogs are male but more to the point, you can turn your dog out here and be reasonably confident nobody will pay it any mind.

I appreciate that while many street dogs are fine; in our neighborhood we are quite fond of street dogs Princessa, Whiskey, Blackie aka "Don Perro" and Pachino, enough street dogs are public nuisances that I have come to believe that having a system like Australia which renders street dogs non-viable is indeed social progress. (As is most dog owners being out of the breeding game via spading and neutering your dogs. We should read A LOT into animal rights groups like the RSPCA and PETA being so enthusiastic about taking away your pets reproductive rights.)

So at first, when Doki and Usma attracted a third collarless Chihuahua-mutt, I thought almost nothing of it. One of the most immediate things I find annoying is when street dogs are latching onto our dogs and they do a shit in front of witnesses. Because I walk Usma and Doki off leashes, I am self-conscious that people will assume the tagalong dog is also mine. There's also good odds I'm carrying a bag of shit and I can read the confusion on my neighbors faces when I clearly do pick up dog shit but refuse to pick up the shit a dog in my company did in front of their house. 

Which is what the collarless street dog did as soon as I got out of Croissants Alfredo. But whatever, I walked two doors down to tie my dogs up out the front of the carneceria and head in to chat to Gustavo and buy biscuits for Ale, bacon for our "McMuffins" and an iced tea for me. The dogs are making a minor motherfucking ruckus being tied up and still being bothered by this collarless street dog.

This in hindsight is the part I feel most terrible about, but in my mind this dog strikes me as in the annoying street dog category.

An annoying street dog is the kind that ignore all the signals Usma and/or Doki have had enough of having their buttholes and bits sniffed now. 

So I unleashed Doki and Usma, which allows them to flee attention and thus makes them less snarly and barky and snappy, and then I tried to shepherd this street dog off. 

It was "one of those" though that would not just reluctantly head off in the opposite direction but try and sneak around an obstacle like a parked car. Also not helpful when I'm shepherding is that Doki aka "Doofus" and Usma aka "Dawdler" don't take advantage of my ability to physically intimidate street dogs (one of my messages to Alejandra she enjoyed most this year was "I chased off this dog and it fled today, I felt like a big man.") and put some distance between them and the annoying street dog. This was one of those kinds where Doofus and Dawdler decided instead to come and investigate what I was doing, trying to shoo this dog away.

So I gave up and we just walked home, with the street dog following us the whole way. In retrospect, the failure of my shooing strategy was the first clue I wasn't dealing with a street dog, as maybe it's reluctance to let go of Doki and Usma's walk was that it had nowhere to go.

Up until we got home, absolutely nothing was noteworthy. There was a annoying + size = menace street dog I dubbed 'Lonely Boy' for example, that wouldn't leave our dogs alone, I couldn't shoo or shepherd away but closing our front door on it gave it enough pause for thought to find someone else to bother.

This dog didn't move on. Sparing it no thought after I got home, I started to hear howling.

Dogs howling is pretty rare. My dogs growing up Lil and Bess rarely barked, and never howled. You've almost certainly heard dogs bark and dogs whine, but maybe not howling:

So this story was a win, and this was really when Max won it. By behaving out of the ordinary, he just hung out at the front of our house, howling.

It was unusual, and just as an aside but it reminds me of those moronic morality plays that probably still populate youtube, tiktok etc. In fact I know they do, because I tried to find an example on Youtube and I just refuse to watch or share videos with titles like "Undercover billionaire changes homeless man's life (shocking!!!)" even if they have 6.7M views already. But the one's I think of are where the playwright is trying to prove something by having a homeless person ask for change and show how many people ignore them or get annoyed with them, then they dress them as a business person and have him ask for change and almost everyone is willing to help them out.

The moral is I'm guessing something like 'don't judge people by appearances' or 'look how awful/hypocritical people are' and I've always maintained, these morality plays prove nothing. If anything it's just that people with limited information manage their scarce resources by giving small amounts of money to problems that can be solved by small amounts of money and they don't small amounts of money to problems that will likely be sustained by small amounts of money. If that's too cryptic, I'd restate it as this:

A person who looks like they sleep rough asking for change is not in any way shape or form irregular or unusual. In many cities of the world, it is not unusual to be asked for change by people who appear to be sleeping rough multiple times without crossing a street. It is relatively rare to come across someone who appears to be gainfully employed asking for change. It is even rare to give such a person small amounts of money and then turn around to see them ask the next person to walk past for a small amount of change. So the big difference is, that one stereotype will not be satiated by pocket change, the other stereotype can be reasonable expected to be satiated. We can conclude that people are generally happy to help, but are wary of futility.

So Max gets credit for being a business man asking for small change. He differentiated himself from the run-of-the-mill street dog by camping on our doorstep and howling, cueing myself and our neighbours into paying attention and trying to figure out what was wrong.

My first theory was that he wasn't particularly bright, and had gotten lost by following Doki and Usma's buttholes. So I tried to lead him back to the park and he wouldn't follow me. I knew we needed to go to the supermarket latter to get lunch stuff and I'd take the dogs so we'd try again then, hoping he'd follow Usma and Doki back to the park and then remember where home was and go there, or at the least, take an interest in some other dog and leave our street and stop howling.

The howls did stop, so I assumed he'd moved on. And he had, he'd moved three doors up and was just chilling in the shade of a tree.

I tried the next plan a little later when I took the dogs to our local supermarket, but he wouldn't follow. He came down to sniff Doki and Usma, but would not follow and leave our street. He retreated. 

When we returned 45 minutes later, a Senor from the factory opposite our house where our landlord/neighbor borrows ladders to climb onto our roof and into her house when she forgets her keys came to tell me the dog had been howling, and I clarified that it wasn't one of mine and I don't know where it's from but by this stage it had been hanging out for four or five hours on our street. 

Another man from further up our street brought it dog chow in a bag and I put out a container of water. This guy tried to coax it into eat and drink but he wouldn't let anyone near him. I started to suspect some kind of trauma, and it also ruled out the prospect of me picking him up and carrying him to the park.

I messaged Ale who was now out getting her laptop repaired to tell her it was like living in the puppy's first howling video. Ale said she was walking home from the train station, so I decided to try luring him back to the park again with Usma who was really not keen on a third walk for the day (it's 30-32 degrees Celsius every afternoon for like the next 4 months here) but I dragged her on the leash and this time I was successful and Max followed us.

We ran into Ale just around the corner of our house a few hundred meters from the park, Ale suggested we all go to the park and hope he would follow us. She had asked at Michoacana's (the biggest icecream and milkshake franchise in Mexico where you can get a litre of sugar for AUD$1.40) if anyone had been around asking after this dog, and they'd said no. 

We got to the park, and Ale had obtained somewhere a Jack Link's stick of jerky and managed to get him to eat from her hand. I said ambiguously 'well he's following us home now' and then Usma pushed herself in front of him as if to say 'hey! where's my jerky?' 

After some sitting, Max howled, which moved Ale's jerky clogged heart and she decided to ask the staff at Croissants Alfredo if they recognized or knew the dog. When she came back she reported that they'd seen him around but didn't know who he belonged to. Ale said there's a facebook page for our neighborhood and she posted a 'is this your dog? come and get him.' post there, before scrolling down and spotting him!...in another 'is this your dog? come and get him.' post made by our neighbors three doors up where he'd been chilling all afternoon.

Now, some more Mexican culture, in Australia if you were to ask 'is your dog a rescue?' it would be implied that someone had adopted that dog from a dog shelter - the "rescue" part is that we rescued a dog being cared for from being humanely euthanised, to manage shelter capacity.

In Mexico if a dog is a rescue, that means somebody took a street/stray dog home and started caring for it. I'm not sure if it's even a 1 step process (my rough translation 1. approach slowly and pat it. 2. take it home and love it):

photo credit: Instagram.com/Soy_DogVader

And Max was endearing, I was feeling the name 'Sparky' at this point, and we could take on another dog but we were not the first and best option compared to someone who was considering getting a dog at this point. So Ale created a post on her personal page to see if anyone wanted to adopt this dog we'd found.

Then one of the Park locals, walked past with one of his three dogs that I don't know by name but certainly see on an almost daily basis. Ale asked him if he knew our mystery dog. He said he did, that he lives around here and he'd previously tried to walk him home but he doesn't want to go home.

With this confident response, my perception shifted - we were dealing with a street dog with an extremely shitty owner. It was a big relief though because it now just seemed a matter of time before word would drive the owner to come pick up their dog and any residents of our street would have the opportunity to give him a piece of their fucking mind.

In fact, this is where on balance despite my affections for Princessa, Whiskey, Blackie and Pacino on balance street dogs are a nuisance. The best argument I can think for the practice is that it is potentially more humane than trapping a dog indoors for hours with no real stimulation. But to use economic speak, street dogs are an externality, it is abdicating an owners responsibility for a dog onto the community, whether that means having to slow down in order not to hit the dog as it crosses roads, or other dog walkers having to chase off or otherwise get rid of your dog when there's no owner there to call them, or the people who tend to the park that have to pick up after your dog or the residents that have to clean up after your dog because you don't.

Even the street dogs I like, likely have a shortened life expectancy greater than strays but shorter than house dogs. Lula, not quite a street dog but a shop dog, recently died because she got into a fight with other street dogs.

So through the unproductive heat of the afternoon Ale and I settled down to eat our belated lunch. I should point out that all the while that Max took refuge on our step, or the step 3 doors up and howling, we were constantly checking on him. I was feeling it inevitable that he'd wind up in our house when the sun went down if Max's irresponsible owner didn't turn up to collect him.

Ale was thinking a good name for him would be Chato ("Flat") because she thought he was a Chihuahua-Boxer cross. Then she got a message, and that's how we found out Sparky/Chato's name was Max.

Max had gotten lost and wound up almost 5km from home, 4 days after he went missing before happenstance had him glom onto Usma, Doki and my morning walk. 

Max had stopped howling because three doors up our neighbors with a dog called Matilda were out on their stoop comforting him. They'd also successfully coaxed Max into being patted and was securely purched on a lap receiving constant reassurance.

We informed them of Max's name and then Ale compared notes on the timeline of Max's adoption of our street. After about 20 minutes, Max's family arrived to pick him up.

Relieving such a state of anxiety both in dog and man, is a very sweet thing. I'm sure none of us wanted to budge for the payoff of witnessing a lost dog reunited with his owners. 

In a testimony to Usma's seperation anxiety, Max's response to seeing his owners after 4 days living on the streets was very subdued compared to Usma's response to seeing Ale after an hours separation.

While Max was cradled in the daughter's arms, we got the missing pieces of Max's puzzle.

One of the daughter's of the family, not present had taken Max with her to Morelos Park, 5km to the North of us. She carried him, meaning that Max wasn't well oriented to where home was relative to the destination, a Michoacan opposite the Park. She'd left him to wait outside while she got her sugar fix, and some pendejo kicked Max, causing him to panic and flee. That was the last they'd seen of him.

He'd then wound up heading South instead of West and kept on heading. 4.2km via unknown route to wind up where, credit where credit's due, he'd found us. 

His owners speculated that the neighbors three doors up from us, had a front door that looked a lot like theirs and that's probably why he got attached to it in particular. Even down to the DIY dog flap of unattached fly-screen. 

This happy ending, needs to be remembered as an ordeal that ended in relief, a precious second chance. I recall, every time, with annoyance, a former colleague of mine describing an incident to me where her smart phone got snatched but some hoodlums in the Melbourne CBD who then ran straight into some police officers and she described it as a real 'God moment'. All affection I have for my former colleague aside, she knows we have this point of disagreement, but I recall sharing reassuring glances of incredulity with colleagues in the break room to this attribution.

Presumably, should the hoodlums have got away clean with her phone, this would simply not be a 'God moment' but something else. God's presence or absence oddly coinciding with the presence or absence of a tax-funded public institution that has been refined over centuries in an ongoing scientific process. 

And of course, God gets credit aparantly for putting police on a street corner, but not for putting thieving hoodlums there to steal the phone. Or maybe those hoodlum's life purpose in the eyes of our Creator is to afford one of the devout a truly trivial demonstration that God's there and he cares. Just as he cares and loves for the young people who were predestined to live the kind of life that motivates phone snatchings. If only they'd open their hearts to Christ... their life could be marginally better.

And so too, Max was unlucky that some cunt kicked him. He was lucky to run into myself and the other dog lovers that populate our street. He could have run west and got his bearings and only be missing for one or two hours tops, or located the next day as the search began with posters in his home neighborhood. He could have run North or East and I'd never know his story, but it quite probably would have worked out the same. 

He could have been very unlucky and met someone worse than someone who kicks a dog, because there are people who murder dogs for whatever unfathomable reason. He could have been hit by cars crossing the indeterminate number of streets he crossed before I got to him. He could have been lucky and his owners unlucky if somebody just liked the look of him and adopted him in the one-to-two-step-process of Mexican 'rescues' making no effort to determine if anyone was missing or looking for him.

Then there's all the matters that weren't luck. It's not luck that I strongly empathise and sympathise with dogs, to the point they hack my brain and take over my faculties. I feel terrible about trying to shoo Max away, given the ordeal he was going through. 

It wasn't luck that Max had no collar, dramatically increasing his vulnerability to being lost for prolonged periods. It wasn't luck that Max didn't know his way home. Small as he is, he is clearly capable of walking up to 5km. 

It also wasn't luck that Max's behavior drew attention and resources to his plight. A quick google tells me dog's were domesticated somewhere between 14,000 to 29,000 years ago, or 2.3 to 4.8 times a young earth creationists duration of all existence. Staying on our street and howling was by far the biggest contributing factor to Max's rescue.

And there's the incomprehensible, the black box of what a dog is thinking. Did Max end up in our park via a random walk? Was he incompetently thinking he recognized landmarks all the way and stopped in our neighborhood on the 4th day in a state of confusion. On the morning of publishing this article, I ran a 9km round trip to the park where he went missing and back to my house. 

It seems "truly" a "miracle" that four days later Max was in my local park. I don't know when he actually arrived, he could have been there all the previous day. It's just that the journey is simple but not straight forward, as in straight, forward. A major freight line needs crossing, then there's major 4 lane arterial roads, two of them, before you get to our sleepy neighbourhood tucked behind the bread and cake factory. In the backstreets there's so many opportunities for unfriendly dogs to send a lost dog off in random directions.

Of course the odds of a shuffled deck of playing cards coming out in any order is astronomically small (literally 1/(8x10^67), or more than there atoms on planter earth) yet we know the cards have to come out in some order. Just so, it's lucky Max ended up in one of the times and places that would lead to his owners finding him, but there's probably less outcomes of where a stray dog can wind up after four days in Guadalajara.

If I locked myself out of my house and forgot my wallet and Ale was away making rain through the power of dance and my housemate was competing in Roller Derby and my landlord was visiting a relative, I would get hungry. 

Dog's don't have this problem. The streets of Guadalajara offer an abundance of calories if you are willing to eat off the ground and out of Garbage bags. The climate is also friendly to homelessness this time of year. 

Factoring in as much as I can to the limits of my imagination, the outcome of a lost dog story in Guadalajara is: Random. Once you lose control, it is reasonable to do what you can and maintain hope.

It might seem then, that the story is much the same in Australia. The thing is, somewhere between every week and every month in my Mexican neighborhood new 'Se Busca/Have you seen' posters go up for missing dogs. It was a rarity when I lived in Kew, between one and three a year. 

I speculate that the 'have you seen' posters in a city like Melbourne have a much lower ratio of happy endings. Once it comes to the putting up posters stage, things are not looking good. (You still should though, during the lockdowns a local music store had their cat disappear, he was returned after three months, don't know what the story was, I never have a reason to go in there.)

But that's because I would also speculate that 1) your dog isn't on the streets all day everyday to begin with. 2) your dog is not going to be confused with a street dog and paid no mind. 3) if a local doesn't take an interest in the unescorted dog in their street, the council will.

So most dog escapes in Melbourne, Australia are resolved very quickly, maybe before you've even had a chance to notice your dog was missing. 

Before the fact of your dog going missing, you'd probably rather be a dog owner in Australia. After the fact, it's probably better to be a dog owner in Mexico. In Mexico you've probably got a 50/50 shot of finding your dog after days or even weeks. It's just instead of the dual efficiencies of the rarity of stray dogs making them conspicuous and having a bunch of council workers regularly driving through your local streets, it's probably going to get into the system and back to you.

An Australian might widen their search parameters by visiting an ever increasing diameter of animal shelters, Max's family had to widen the net through like, actual detective work, following leads until they stumbled on rumors he'd been spotted in our suburb, and then checked our neighborhood's facebook page.

Mexico is how things work in a libertarian worldview.

So we run into the shortfalls of not requiring a dog-ownership license. Mexico has a dog culture that I imagine Australia hasn't had since the 50s or 60s (including racist dog names). Our household is on the frontier of the new school of 'pets as surrogate children' model that dominates Australian urban dog ownership. 

Plenty of owners clearly mentally categorize dogs as distinct from family members, something I now struggle to comprehend. They are something between house plant and family member. It's likely many dogs in Mexico are owned first and foremost as home security measures and secondarily as domestic pets.

Max is a family member, but I'm guessing he gets carried a lot, picked up a lot. Of course he's a lapdog, but I feel Usma is less vulnerable to winding up in a strange neighborhood 5km away. (Though clearly more vulnerable to having her amygdala seize control of her control levers and running her straight under a vehicle).

Because there's a spectrum of dog ownership, rather than a binary. I feel dog owners need to think of their dogs as selectively bred captives. You have a moral obligation to look after their mental health, not to thrust that upon them because you wanted a dog but feel they need to appreciate the realities of the modern gig economy.

Dog's don't quite get the recent innovation of cars. They probably had horses figured out as a trampling hazard, but even born after the advent of TikTok dog's are slow adopters of technology. They need mental and physical stimulation through regular walks along novel routes. The added perk of this is that they will know how to get home.

My first dog Lil was too smart for her own good, that and my dad was not smart enough to weld a Lil proof latch on our backyard gate. She was able to push it open with her nose and regularly not so much 'escaped' as 'took herself for walks' she only went missing once and was found the next day. My friend Hayden conveyed that news to me at school. 

But usually we would get reports from neighbours of seeing her sitting waiting for it to be safe to cross the road to Lake Wendouree. 

Anyway, the point is dogs can learn, and perhaps most controversially, learn to cope somewhat with independence. They can learn their neighbourhoods and learn to walk off leash. In Australia, most councils are able if not obliged to fine you for not having your dog on the leash, but in 15 years of owning Bess I got one warning despite walking her off-leash every day.

I approve of the law though as a deterrent, the best argument being that no driver can be expected to know my dog isn't going to run out into its path and if they don't fancy killing a dog; are forced to slow down just by being in proximity. And there are no dog licenses, so there's no way anyone can reasonably expect any dog owner to have any control over or instill any discipline in their dogs. Giving council workers discretionary powers to issue fines based on the behaviors of dogs and owners is probably the ideal arrangement.

Again, I feel that Max's owners are loving, doting owners as evidenced by the efforts they went to to track Max down. They did their necessary part to recover Max. I also don't know the lap-dog/toy breed too well in terms of temperament and what not. 

So in no way shape or form do I want to confuse or conflate Max's owners with what I want to touch on next, which is what I will call the 'Narcissistic Owner'.

I use the weighty term 'Narcissistic' deliberately, with the plague Narcissists are upon the economy. People defined specifically to be hyper sensitive to and motivated by esteem, with little to no sensitivity to their cognitive or affective empathy.

To clarify what I, and potentially only I (because I'm not a qualified psychotherapist), mean by the prefix 'narcissistic' is that it is the plague of people who want to be a supervisor, a team leader, a manager, a C-suite executive, a CEO, a doctor, a surgeon, a founder, an entrepreneur, an influencer without wanting to deliver any of the value (do the work) those positions entail. They just want the good table at the restaurant, the attention, adulation, the salary, the perks etc.

And for a narcissistic owner, they want a dog, they don't want to pick up after it, take it for regular walks, take it for novel walks, take it for sufficient walks, take it to the vet, pay the vet bills etc.

Again Max's owners, are not the kid from 'The Puppy That Lost It's Way' they near tirelessly sleuthed and hit the pavements and the socials to find Max. 

However, this is a problem for dogs worldwide. Narcissistic owners disregard the interests and incomprehension of their pets in the same was as narcissistic employees disregard the interests of their subordinates, their managers, the shareholders and the community.

I do think given dogs capacity to learn, that owners have a responsibility to educate them just as they do with a child. 

I've already mentioned my suspicion that the influence of Catholicism might have something to do with why so many street dogs aren't spade or nuetred here. Paradoxically, I'm also thinking the influence of Catholicism may have something to do with the culture of dogs in general - in Mexico I feel people empathize less with dogs. 

There are certainly dog lovers and enthusiasts, but there also appears numerous people who regard dogs as meat machines, rather than thinking, feeling creatures. Australian philosopher Peter Singer talks about an expanding circle of empathy, that we as a species should continue to care about people on the other side of the world, and maybe one day care about people that will live in the future, and eventually all animals.

I suspect Mexico has a slightly more contracted circle of empathy, where dogs are just another beast God gave those he made in his image dominion over. 

It was nice to see Max's howls mobilize our street to attempt to feed him, take care of him and find his or a suitable home for him. A country like Australia has largely legislated and regulated empathy for dogs in, such that our largest concern are likely Narcissistic owners. 

Anyway, after Max was safely off back home, Alejandra and I celebrated a rare double high five, so Max's story was a win. Our neighbors three doors up, did say 'see you next time.' when they said goodbye to Max. So this story might have a sequel, and that sequel might suck. But I think it will be quite some time before Max's owners get anywhere near complacent. 

As for the dickwad that kicked Max. Well, your story can't be going that well if you are kicking a dog minding its own business.