The definition of insanity

The definition of insanity, of course, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. So we are told by Albert Einstein, who was a marvelously smart man, although I'm not aware of any particular credentials he held in the field of mental health. Still, let's accept that as at least a valid definition of insanity.

And has there been any better example of such repetitive insanity in the last 50 years than American policy toward Cuba?

Let me state upfront that I'm not a fan of the Castros. They appear to have been brutal thugs when they took over 50 years ago, and they continue to be brutal thugs today. Their removal from power in Cuba is a worthy goal, both on behalf of the Cuban people and in terms of American regional interests. I believe that this motivation was a significant portion of the reasoning behind the American embargo that was put in place after our catastrophe at Bay of Pigs and remains in place to this day. (If I'm feeling generous, I'll say that it was the primary motivation, although other motivations definitely played a large role, i.e. 'showing the Soviets that our penis is bigger than theirs' and 'protecting the economic interests of American companies and businessmen who have been using Cuba as their private fiefdom with our political support for a generation.')

There's only one problem. It hasn't worked.

From the trenches of #GamerGate

EDIT: I thought the argument was over, but it's flared up again, so I've added some more of the arguments below.

Republished from an argument with a friend-of-a-friend on said friend's facebook wall. The person with whom I was arguing professed not to be a member or supporter of GamerGate, but held some very GamerGate-ish views of Anita Sarkeesian, including, in the preceding posts, arguing that the reason she 'attacked' video games was to intentionally draw hate with which to increase her own popularity and victimhood.

My response after the jump:

Thoughts on the election

Well, that's over and done with. I'm mildly disgruntled about the results, on both a state and national level. It's not like the Democrats particularly deserved to win either, but the number of positions shifted to the GOP, as well as the overall strength of their victory, means the crap that won't get done over the next few years will be slightly more unpalatable than the crap that wouldn't have gotten done otherwise.

As a copy editor, I get to follow election news whether I like it or not. As such, here are a few of my takeaways from Democalypse 2014:

There's a definite downside to being a gamer these days

I realized something the other day. All my life, I have self-identified first and foremost as a reader. I took an obscure pride in being the kid from whom the teachers always had to confiscate books in class, and even after I stopped doing that, I still majored in English in large part because that's what someone who loves to read ought to do. So it was disconcerting to realize that I spend considerably more time and energy playing video games, reading about video games and thinking about video games than I do reading (even counting reading news stories online, which I do), thinking about reading or following the publishing industry.

On its own, that's a little sad. While there definitely are video games of such richness and artistry to elevate the player's perception of the world in the same way that a good book will do, they are few and far between in the game industry, and the vast majority of my gaming time is spent on games with much lower culture capital to offer: MMOs, match-based multiplayer games and single player games with stories that exist to get you to the next gameplay objective. These games have their own sort of value - in particular, the social aspect of these online games is a big part of my life these days - but it's not the same value I'd be getting from intentionally seeking out and exposing myself to the best stories told by the best thinkers.

So that's a cause for regret, but a relatively small one. A bigger issue is that if there was ever a time not to want to think of oneself as a gamer, this is it.

(Unhappy words about GamerGate after the jump.)

A deeply unappealing decision

Busy couple of weeks, including moving to a new apartment. Good to be back.

So, Wisconsin politics are less fraught than they were when I first started this blog, but only because I started the blog during a time of quite unprecedented fraughtitude; things remain less than collegial in the halls of Madison, the moreso now that the governor's race is heating up for round 3: this time not with Tom Barrett!

There are a number of things going on that could affect that race (in particular, the long-simmering John Doe investigation which has been tied up in highly technical procedural knots for weeks, resulting in some supremely uninteresting wire stories. My take: I think Walker and co. truly believe that their reciprocal backscratching with 3rd parties like club for growth met the letter of the law, and that they wouldn't recognize the spirit of the law if it attempted to gnaw off their sexual organs of preference). While there are ongoing sideshows regarding reproductive rights and gay marriage, the main thrust of this election seems to be economic. The Walker camp argues that they have balanced the budget and made life easier for local governments to do the same and that the state has added 100K+ jobs under his tenure. The camp of his opponent, Mary Burke, counters that he balanced the budget on the backs of public workers and recklessly cut tax revenues, that Wisconsin lags all the surrounding states in job creation, and that in any case, he had promised 250K+ jobs in his first term. The Walker camp counters that she was commerce secretary under previous Democratic governor Jim Doyle and therefore must be responsible for the crushing deficits and highly unpopular chicanery undertaken to resolve them seen during his tenure. The Burke camp counters that he's a doo-doo head, etc., etc.

Anyone who was around when I first started blogging knows my feelings about Walker. They've not changed. But despite my pronounced antipathy toward him and his, I'm finding it hard to get a lot of enthusiasm built up for this election, because Burke is an abysmal candidate, with no more integrity, decorum or competence than Walker.

Keep on keepin' on

Not much to say; I was out of town most of the holiday weekend and didn't get the itch to write anything extensive. I'm also looking forward to some upcoming changes: after a year living in the hallway/closet I grew up in, I'm soon to start looking into apartments with a wee bit more space, along with making certain other changes in my schedule and goings on. If it proves interesting or thought provoking, I might blog about it; otherwise, it'll just happen. Have a good week, and look forward to me revisiting and finishing off one of my several unfinished drafts the next time I have a day off. o7

Do I work for Facebook, or does Facebook work for me?

Here's a thought I've been having.

One of the things that Twitter does right is it allows you to customize and subdivide your news feed. If you want to make a list of only people you actually know, you can do that. If you want to have a list of just feminist film critics, you can do that. If you want to have a list of just ginsing growers in Laos, you probably can do that (assuming that there are actually ginsing growers in Laos with twitter accounts, which would not surprise me in the slightest). Google plus has something similar, allowing you to add accounts to one or more custom-made circles that you can check independently. Facebook, though, is all or nothing. There used to be an option to set a given contact to more or less frequent appearances on your wall, but those controls seem to be removed, and instead we see what the FB sorting algorithm thinks we want to see. There are no options that I can find to create specialty lists, and the only option to affect the frequency of a particular poster appearing on your wall is to block their posts entirely, in which case, you might as well not be following them. (You also can set your FB to show most recent posts rather than top posts, but I find that it seems to reset itself frequently, and that the result is flooded by even more garbage posts from pages you liked once four years ago and forgot about)

Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, Facebook's algorithm is designed to serve the dual masters of telling us what our friends are doing and making money for Facebook, to the detriment of the former. In particular, the feed prioritizes high-engagement content with lots of likes and shares. Among a group of friends, this might lead to more people seeing important posts like engagement announcements and the like. When a user follows both friends and other pages, however, the balance seems to become badly skewed toward pages. It's hard for anyone I know in real life to compete with Cracked and The Lion King and Al Jazeera English for post engagement, meaning that the people I actually know and care about are buried beneath posts from national and international pages. Furthermore, even posts from popular pages are filtered by their engagement. Felicia Day has blogged about the problems this causes for her - that it incentivizes her to post things tailored for higher traffic (read: pictures of her being attractive) and makes it harder for views - artistic, social, intellectual - to compete with 'mainstream' views; in effect, Facebook becomes an enforcer of the societal status quo. And that's a problem.

Fault and responsibility

I've been pondering for a while that there is a shortcoming in the English language. If someone does something bad, it's their fault. If someone is in charge when a bad thing happens, it's their responsibility. But we don't really have a word or phrase to describe someone whose actions knowingly make it more likely that someone else will do a bad thing. It's not their fault; the person who actually does the bad thing needs to get the blame. They're not responsible for the bad thing, because they didn't do a bad thing and weren't in charge of making sure other people don't do bad things. And yet, if they hadn't done what they did, the bad thing would not have happened (or at least been less likely to happen).

This has been on my mind for personal reasons - during a disagreement, I used fault/blame language, implying that the person I was speaking to would be to blame if a third party did a bad thing, when what I wanted to say was that his/her actions were making it enormously more likely that a third party would do a bad thing; this did not do a lot to resolve the disagreement. I'm hoping that in the future I'll be wiser about using language that addresses causes without apportioning blame.

But in addition to my own experience, this distinction between fault and contributing cause also, I think, is very relevant to the latest outbreak of bloodshed between Israel and Gaza. If you're fed up with that whole situation and don't want to read about it any more, this is your cue to wander off; otherwise, read on.

High five, low five: Guardians of the Galaxy

First, a note from the management: Google tells me that people are reading this! Granted, Google tells me that sometimes 20 people at a time are reading this in Turkey, which seems implausible, but many strange and magical things are possible on the internet. While I enjoy declaring my opinions to the self-affirming nods of the masses as much as the next guy, loyal readers and Turkish spambots also are reminded that comments are welcome and encouraged from whoever has something to add on any topic (which probably rules out the Turkish spambots, but oh well).

My expectations for Marvel's latest movie were fairly high. Guardians of the Galaxy is rocking a 92% on Rotten Tomatoes (for the first twenty or so reviews, it was 100%) and I had several positive endorsements from friends and coworkers. I have to say, what I saw did not live up to those expectations.  It's not a bad movie - there are things it did quite well, and things it didn't - but overall, I came away unsatisfied. And I'm disappointed, not to mention a little bit surprised; I've usually been in agreement with the general degree of approbation or opprobrium applied to MCU movies, or even erred on the side of liking movies that other reviewers found blah, and it's puzzling that so many reviewers and writers are responding to this one so much more positively than I. Are we sure we're all watching the same movie?

I'm not a huge fan of the traditional 'movie review' - I enjoy reading them after I watch a movie because they sometimes catch things I missed, but they're generally far to short and subjective to guide one in actually forming an opinion - but I kinda liked what I did for the second HTTYD movie, a list of five successful and unsuccessful elements, so I'm doing that again. Read on for five things I liked a lot and five that I liked not so much at all in Guardians of the Galaxy, complete with exhaustive explanations and diatribes thereupon.

Poster a gift from my boss, who saw it in IMAX instead of working on a night the state
supreme court issued three major rulings. I might forgive him eventually.

And yes, there are **SPOILERS.** Duh. Consider yourself warned.

(I've also tried to avoid too much discussion of the overall Marvel Cinematic Universe and the greater interaction of comic books and movies, not because that's not an interesting topic, but because it's too interesting, and to complex, to try to tackle alongside my specific thoughts on GotG. Look for another post on that sometime soon.)

Spend your principles wisely

Missed my update earlier this week, but I have another day off today, so here's a somewhat belated post.

I mentioned in my last post the "Lost Fleet" books by Jack Campbell, which I've been rereading lately (the main reason I didn't have a post together on Monday). While I'm still not convinced that the books are 'good' by any conventional standard, they do have the occasional flash of very keen insight so contrary to the general level of the books that I wonder if they slip in by accident (example: earlier today I read a passage where a character witnesses an orbital bombardment and muses that this is what hell must be: not a place of torment, but a place where death has come and gone and human hands have wiped away any trace that life - human or otherwise - was ever here. I had to stop and think about that one for a bit.)

Another bit that has stuck with me comes from an earlier book. A central theme, inasmuch as these books can be said to have themes, in the series is the conflict and mistrust between military and political institutions and mindsets. One character, attempting to explain the latter to the former, uses an interesting comparison. While military leaders must carefully husband their forces and, if necessary, risk and sacrifice them reluctantly and only in pursuit of essential goals, a political leader must do the same with his principles, defending and stewarding them until the day comes that they must be dearly spent for a more urgent purpose. I thought that was very insightful at the time, and the more I've thought about it sense, the more it has affected my understanding of both military and political conflict and leadership.

Which brings me to the present.

Three stages of mastery

It's a little dismaying to look back at the coursework I did in education classes and realize how little I actually know today about how people learn things. Some I've forgotten in the 5-ish years since Ed Psych, but most I don't think I ever learned in the first place, nor realized I hadn't until I got to actual teaching. But while I don't have much to show for my academic training in learning, I have found a model that I quite like to explain the stages - if not the process - of learning, and on a related tangent, when, whether and how rules ought to be broken.

This almost - almost - pushed me to figure out how to resubmit memebase posters so that I could
say something along the lines of  'Oddly enough, Marvel seems to agree with you ...'

Creating necessary characters

First, some required reading. Before I explain my thoughts on how to fix Strong Female Character problems in fiction (not the sociological or economic forces that sustain them, but the legitimate and thorny storytelling problems that drive well-meaning storytellers so often to use Strong Female Characters), as I am about to do, you should read the following (unless you already read them after I scattered them around in this post, in which case, good job).

https://medium.com/@directordanic/the-problem-with-false-feminism-7c0bbc7252ef

http://thedissolve.com/features/exposition/618-were-losing-all-our-strong-female-characters-to-tr/

http://www.overthinkingit.com/2008/08/18/why-strong-female-characters-are-bad-for-women/

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/08/i-hate-strong-female-characters

Ok, back? Good. Now, a little context: a few weeks ago, a friend posted the first two of those on Facebook, which led to a very interesting discussion in the comments. I kept thinking about the issues raised in these (and the other two, which were linked off the others), and they helped me define the issues I saw with Astrid in the How to Train Your Dragon movies, as described in the post linked above. 

Because here's the thing: the articles are right. Strong Female Characters as they currently appear all too often in media are a flawed and ultimately unhelpful way to depict gender relations. At the same time, though, Strong Female Characters arose as an attempt to solve these problems, and to replace the even more flawed roles assigned to women before this new archetype was created. And I suspect that the vast majority of content creators who include Strong Female Characters in their works are doing so out of a sincere desire to do right by women, whether for ideological or market-driven reasons, because they have been told again and again about the need to avoid the problematic tropes about women that have been floating around ever since people first started using vocal grunts to signify abstract concepts. While their efforts are not entirely successful and demonstrate a certain lack of awareness and sensitivity on their parts, it's not really fair to demonize the creators who do so, unless they work for Disney, in which case for crying out loud, they should know better by now.

I also think that the debate about gender equity in fiction is too often approached from a perspective of things NOT to do. And to be fair, there are an awful lot of things on that list. But I wonder sometimes if the problem is that we spend all our time telling creators they're doing it wrong and not enough giving suggestions on doing it right. The Bechdel test is one of the more helpful offerings; it offers a basic, easy-to-follow checklist for creators to run through to see if they're doing it right. However, even the Bechdel test doesn't give terribly specific guidance about how to go about fixing a problem once diagnosed, and lord knows it's possible to write a thoroughly sexist and unenlightened story that passes the test; Bechdel is a helpful benchmark, but I think its primary value is as a statistical evaluation of fiction as a whole rather than a litmus test for individual works. And so creators - the test was originally and remains most often applied to movies, the vast majority of which are created by men - know that they AREN'T supposed to make women wimpy and submissive and reliant on men, but actual guidance on what they SHOULD be doing is sparse. And so they make female characters unwimpy and unsubmissive and (at least at first) unreliant on men, and if they're really daring, they try to create TWO such women, but they're still approaching the female sex as a list of don'ts rather than a list of dos.

So let's see if we can fix that.

The birth of nations, or why Iraq is on it's own now

(Alternate blog post title: Good money after bad)

I've already worded out pretty hard this weekend re: How to Train Your Dragon, and I'll be the first to admit that I don't know enough about this topic to hold forth indefinitely. But I've been sitting on this for a couple weeks, and I do want to say a little bit about the current resurgence of violence in Iraq and what America ought to do about it. (And say it now, before things change again)

Supporters of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria wave al-Qaeda flags in front of the provincial government headquarters in Mosul, Iraq. (Associated Press)
(IDK if I'm actually allowed to repost that here, but sue me.)

I was never a fan of the war. I remember during the build-up, when GWB pushed and pushed for Iraq to allow UN weapons inspectors into the country, and they did, and then in one particular news article, I remember GWB describing the no-weapons-here reports coming in from the inspectors as "like the replay of a bad movie." And it was clear to me then that Bush and his crew had decided they wanted a war and that they would find a way to get one. And so it proved to be; Iraq was not an al-Qaeda ally, Iraq was not building or hiding WMDs, and our invasion made a god-awful mess of things that it took us years to painstakingly reassemble. I wasn't a huge fan of John Kerry as presidential candidate either, but I was still horrified that even after Bush started an entirely unneccessary war that already was showing signs of bogging down into insurgency, American voters not only reelected him, they gave him carte blanche in both houses of Congress. I was enthusiastic about Obama's candidacy in 2008 for a number of reasons, but chief among them was that he was not Bush and seemed committed to reversing some of the most harmful things Bush was doing. His record there has been mixed, which is partly his fault and partly that of the Congresses with which we have partnered him, but he did get us out of Iraq.

And that was a relief. Exiting with something approaching dignity did not erase the shame I felt on behalf of my country, but at least it was behind us. And then, apparently just like the entire rest of the country, I moved it into my mental outbox and lost all interest, succumbing to a not-unreasonable case of Iraq fatigue. Sure, I saw occasional news headlines about suicide bombings, but I rarely even bothered to click on them; suicide bombings are just a thing that happens in the middle east, I suppose is how the reasoning goes, and it no longer has anything to do with us.

And then, last month, Iraq was right back into a civil war. Oh joy.

Bonus post: Dragons pt. II

We interrupt your regularly scheduled weekly program to bring you another ginormous How to Train Your Dragon post. If that's not your groove, go ahead and move on to the next interesting thing on the interwebs.

After writing the first post, I saw the second movie again in theaters (with a family member who hadn't seen it before), and doing so and discussing it afterward helped me localize and identify several things I felt watching it the first time. You will have surmised from my previous post that I very much liked this movie, and you would be correct; in some ways, it is superior to the first. In others, however, it is not quite as strong; my overall preference at this point leans slightly toward number one. In no particular order, here are my five favorite things about HTTYD 2, and with them my five least favorite. Obviously, MAJOR SPOILERS ABOUND for both the first and second movies; proceed at your own risk.

(Edit 7/8/14: Further investigation has helped clarify some of the issues raised in complaint #3; I've amended that section accordingly)

It's the second blog post, so I use the poster for the second movie. See? I'm clever.

A consideration of Dragons

Yeah, I missed my Monday/Tuesday target update, partly because I had company over, but mostly because the post I've been working on keeps getting overtaken by events before I can publish it. I've got a 3-day weekend coming up, so hopefully I'll get it off then. In the meantime, I want to talk about dragons, and specifically, how to train them.

3D optional

I got a speeding ticket from the thought police

First, some housekeeping: in the last 6 months, I have completed courses for a digital photo and video certificate through my local tech school, which should improve employment prospects; unfortunately, it also put a moratorium on job searching while I've been stuck in place. But done now: woo! I've also been promoted to full-time as a newspaper copy editor, which is a welcome development, and spent several months as a freelance writer on Elance before gradually backing out due to coursework and increased work hours; I may return now that classes are done.

I've not been posting much, obviously, in part because for a while I took a break from following much of the news (as much as one can while working as a copy editor). I think I was a little burned out after the high-grain focus of the govt. shutdown and Healthcare.gov rollout (I think I intended to write a blog post about that; at any rate, I had a draft with no text but the title 'who left the three stooges in charge' when I opened blogger after my long hiatus), and I've also been much more engaged in following local politics; our city government in general and mayor in particular have been up to shenanigans, most of which have been exposed and reported by us. In any case, I've lately been getting back on the horse, as it were, and resuming my regular perusal of national and international news, and once again am starting to encounter thorny issues about which I need to ponder. And as always, one of the best ways to test my own thinking is to write about it and see if my thinking holds up.

There are three recent incidents that I've been pondering: the brief and tumultuous tenure of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich; the racist spurging and subsequent ostracization of LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling, and the homophobic tweeting and shunning of Miami Dolphins player Don Jones. The third will undoubtably be a flash in the pan, and I'll not be surprised if the Wikipedia section I linked to is gone in short order, but it was big enough news to make it onto Google, and it ties into the other two.

The questions I'm puzzling over are to what extent, if any, the consequences these three gentlemen have faced for their positions are just, and whether or if at all their rights (moral, rather than legal) have been abrogated. I'm certainly far from the only one who is connecting these dots and asking these questions, but I've yet to see anyone come up with a result I'm fully satisfied with, so let's see if I can do better.

Why beat up the middleman?

So a few days ago at work, while I was pulling state wire stories, I came across one about an administrative ruling approving Enbridge to expand a pipeline across Northern MN and into Wisconsin. This MJS story is not the exact story I was looking at, but is on the same approximate topic and will serve to give readers an idea what's going on.

These WI/MN pipelines have been at a low burn for months or years; they make regular if unspectacular appearances on the AP wire, and I'm sure they are widely ignored by all readers save those already emotionally invested in the issue of pipelines. And even those readers likely give the issue short shrift when compared with the granddaddy of all pipeline issues: Keystone XL.

Keystone XL, of course, has been all over the news for years, and is hotly opposed by environmentalists and conservationalists across the country. Here is just one of the many articles, op-eds and treatises written to express that opposition. And I will admit that for a long time, I reflexively agreed with them, on the general assumption that oil is bad, oil companies are bad, we should fight them on the beaches, on the landing grounds, in the fields and in the streets. I've been thinking more about it, a process catalyzed by the AP story I came across at work, and I'm no longer sure that's the case.