Pieces everywhere!

Pieces of me, that is. In some sense.

I found my old tumblr the other day, and yesterday I spent lots of time getting onto Mastodon (i.e. the Fediverse). And I’m realizing in just how many places I have “published” significant “content” (not even counting Amazon reviews, say, but maybe I should).

While procrastinating from the NaNoWriMo book (back at 15,623 words; I’m currently at nearly 29K, and nicely on target, although I did only about 1000 today), I started to list some subset of them here, and tonight I thought I’d just post it. In no particular order at all:

• ceoln.wordpress.com: my weblog. Haha, you probably knew that!
• My old hand-edited weblog, the predecessor of this one, and now merely an archive.
• The Secret Second Life Weblog (where I don’t post much at all anymore, but you never know what might happen!).
• Me on Twitter, where I would doomscroll endlessly, and also post some AI images and things, and retweet and make snarky and otherwise comments on lots of political stuff, and so on. I am coming to sort of wonder what I’m doing there, especially in contrast to the next thing. (Note that I exist there under my Second Life identity, because reasons.)
• Me on Mastodon (aka @ceoln@qoto.org sometimes), my brand new Mastodon (Fediverse) place, which is very much like Twitter except friendlier and not constantly fiddled with by malicious algorithms and billionaires intent on making me angry and unsettled for I’ll click more. Which is very nice! Many friendly people, many of them fleeing Twitter.
• Me on counter.social; originally a Fediverse fork or something, now um… its own thing, albeit with a somewhat familiar feel. If you aren’t on counter.social, you maybe can’t see anything at that link?
• Me on reddit, where I have at times been active in r/zen, r/aidungeon, r/gpt3, r/novelAI, r/buddhism, r/alanwatts, and other obvious places.
• The Beauty Of Our Weapons dot tumblr dot com, my old tumblr where I would pretty much just repost pictures of pretty girls and odd things and the occasional experiment in Photoshop or something. Now I’ve posted a (very) few Midjourney images there also. Hopefully there’s nothing too embarrassing in there that I’ve forgotten.
• Me on Quora, where I have apparently been quite active now and then over the years, and some of my answers (and some of the questions I’m answering) are pretty funny iyam.
• Me on NightCafe; open to everyone, I think: those images that I’ve “published”. Look through my Collections! See the beginning of Yeni Cavan!
• Me on Midjourney: Probably visible only if you’re signed into Midjourney? I’m not sure. See every image I’ve made there (minus the few I’ve deleted) and their prompts and everything! Midjourney is very open that way (unless you pay extra haha).
• Me on Instagram; I post there more sometimes than others. Less now that I’ve not been going much of anywhere! For the past few years! I mostly post real-world photos there.
• Me on PixelFed, the Fediverse (e.g. Mastodon) answer to Instagram (or maybe flickr). As of this writing I haven’t put much there, not certain that I will, but we’ll see! So far I mostly post images I make with Midjourney there.

I should make this into a Page (as opposed to a Post) on the site, and then I could point the profiles of those things above that have profiles, at that, and knit everything together.

Another time. :)

The things we believe

I believe, for instance, that the government of Saudi Arabia addresses violent extremism basically by paying its violent extremists money, in exchange for them promising to commit their violent extremist acts in places other than Saudi Arabia.

I don’t have any evidence to hand for this, and I would not stake a huge amount on it (although I would stake a small amount), but it is something that I believe. It fits in with my theories of the world, I think I read something somewhere once that said it was true, and it just makes sense to me psychologically, fitting in with the motivations of the parties involved.

Various Trump fans and people with whom I argue on The Twitter believe that, for instance, President Obama treasonously sent one or more planes full of billions of dollars in cash to Iran, under cover of night, for some nefarious reason or other.

Stripped of the “treasonously” and “nefarious” and the implication that it was some private project of Obama’s, this is actually true. Just before the Iran Revolution, Iran had paid some U.S. entity like US$400 Million for some weapons or something, and when the revolution occurred, we just sort of held onto it, without of course supplying the weapons or something. Iran was not happy about this, and had over time gotten the attention of the folks at The Hague about it, and it looked like they might be going to find in Iran’s favor for like US$2 Billion for money and interest. To pre-empt this, and not have to either thumb our noses at The Hague or pay quite that much money, we gave them the $400 Million plus like $1.3 Billion in interest, held back until they released the hostages they were holding.

And it had to be in cash because we’d put into place so many sanctions against Iran that they were cut off from the international banking system, so there was no other way to get money to them. And it was at night (if in fact it was, I dunno) because Iran is like 9 hours ahead of Washington DC, so really it usually is, at one end or the other. Also because you probably want as much security (and obscurity) as possible around the moving of that much cash in any case.

People believe that this was treasonous and nefarious, though, because it fits into their narratives. Primarily, the narrative that President Obama was a Bad Guy, who was trying to Destroy America, and would have Seized All The Guns and Put Patriots Into FEMA Camps if the heroic NRA hadn’t stopped him, so failing that he just gave lots of money to Iran so they could destroy America for him. Or something.

Needless to say, I don’t find this very plausible. If Obama had wanted to destroy America, there were lots of other things he could have done, and didn’t do. Also he just seems like a very smart, beneficent, and cool guy to me. The Saudi government, not so much; they seem like selfish rich people who would not have huge reservations about just bribing their extremists to go elsewhere rather than doing anything more fundamental about them. So the first story fits my narrative, whereas the second doesn’t.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t think there is any truth of the matter, or that I think I’m just as likely to be wrong as I am to be right. Quite the contrary, I believe that the story I believe is probably true, and the one that they believe is almost certainly false.

But it is interesting to think about how each putative fact does not stand alone, is not believed by itself, due to specific evidence for or against it; but rather exists as a supporting fact in a somewhat-consistent narrative.

And that, perhaps, the right way to try to get to the truth, and/or to get to consensus, is to try to find another narrative that one’s interlocutors also believe, and that the facts up for evaluation fit into differently.

(Note that “You’re an idiot” is a particular claim that will almost never fit into the addressed party’s narratives, and so isn’t much use for finding consensus there, although in some cases a significant fraction of onlookers may agree with it and applaud.)

Before I forget

• As I mentioned, I did that Zen thing the other week, and it was great, and I haven’t gotten around to writing any more about it, but at least I have that unordered list.
• One additional thing on that: what I asked Ryushin Sensei at dokusan was “Why can’t we see out of each other’s eyes?”. We had some good talking about why that is.
• I’ve been to Greece! Rhodes, Greece, in particular. That was great also. Here is a Faceface thing where I mention it, and there are a bunch of related pictures (with some narrative, even!) in the Insta-gram (you’ll probably have to scroll down to a greater or lesser amount to encounter them, or you could maybe jump in here say).  We passed through London (England) on the way out and back, also, so I have all them stamps in my passport-thing.
• Relatedly, I have now been parasailing! It turns out to involve no skill whatever, and to be surprisingly peaceful!
• Speaking of The Face Book, I have posted various things there!
• I think I have decided not to do NaNoWriMo this year, but I have just discovered this wonderful thing (and also posted it to Facebook): National Novel Generation Month. Here is my statement of intent; I can definitely write a program to generate a 50,000-word novel sometime this month. What fun!
• The Twitter is full of wild enigmatic things; one of them (Two Headlines) is done by the same person who thought up NaNoGenMo (and who does all sorts of cool stuff); another, MEDDLING HETERO FOOL aka direlog_ebooks, is just a mystery.
• The Republican Party won lots of elections yesterday, as I (or my Second Life secret identity) predicted; here’s hoping this results in the obvious progressive victories two years from now.
• I apparently have a Moto 360 now! It is a sort of a watch! Or a smallish watch-shaped secondary I/O device for one’s phone! I can’t think of anything much that it’s actually useful for, but that’s what I would have said about smartphones not too long ago and now I use mine all the time, so Ya Never Know.
• And I’m sure lots of all various other stuff that I should try not to forget, but right now I am going to go off and think about automatic novel generators; be good!

But it’s not that simple

On Twitter I follow a few rational-seeming right-wing types, to try to avoid the echo-chamber effect, and yesterday one of them posted about the big kerfuffle where MSNBC implied that the Right Wing might not like interracial marriage, saying how offensive it was and all.

I replied, as one does, saying that, um well, isn’t disliking interracial marriage sort of a Right Wing thing, after all? One of the other people in the thread gasped at how horribly offensive I was being, and we went back and forth a little with me trying to suggest that certain attitudes about race really are, as a matter of historical fact, associated with certain political factions, and they (from my point of view) ducked and weaved a little and then got quiet. I was really impressed, though, with how thoroughly the person seemed to live in a world where interracial marriage (and maybe even same-sex marriage) weren’t a right-left issue at all, and right wing racism was just an offensive myth.

In trying to decide whether to follow this person also, I looked at their earlier “tweets” (and ultimately decided not to follow them), one of which was something that reminded me strongly of the kind of thing that I might have posted like 25 years ago myself, if posting was something people did then, back when I still identified as Libertarian.

And since I seem to be never getting around to that Grand Unified Why I Am Not A Libertarian Anymore posting, I thought I’d at least post about this.

The “tweet” in question was an image, one of those “image that is basically just text” images that social media so loves. It said:

The Rich Man, the Poor Man, and the Politician
A Tale of Income Inequality

There is a rich man and a poor man.
The rich man makes $1000 a day.
The poor man makes $10 a day.
The difference in their income is $1000 – $10 = $990 a day.

The rich man builds a factory.
Now the rich man makes $2000 a day.
He gives the poor man a job at the factory.
Now the poor man makes $100 a day.
The difference in their income is $2000 – $100 = $1900 a day.

A politician decides the “income gap” has grown too large.
He taxes the rich man $1000 a day, gives it to the poor man.
The rich man can no longer afford to run the factory.
He closes the factory. The poor man loses his job.

Everything is as it was before.
And the politician takes credit for “closing the income gap”.

This is a cute Just So story, very typical of, maybe even a little more complex than, the average Libertarian Just So story.

But, like all of them, it leaves out so much that it ends up pretty much completely irrelevant to reality.

These people really need to read “The Jungle” or something.

But short of that, here’s a slightly more realistic version of the story.

The Rich Man, the Poor Man, and the Politician
A Tale of Inequality

There is a rich man and a poor man.
The rich man makes $1000 a day.
The poor man makes $10 a day.
The difference in their income is $1000 – $10 = $990 a day.

The rich man builds a factory.
Now the rich man makes $20,000 a day.
He gives the poor man a job at the factory.
Now the poor man makes $100 a day.
The difference in their income is $20000 – $100 = $19900 a day.

The rich man’s factory pollutes the air that the poor man breathes.
The products the factory produces are poorly-made.
The poor man’s working conditions are dangerous and unhealthy.
The health insurance the poor man buys from the rich man’s insurance company
will drop him on a technicality if he gets sick.
Once he’s too old to work, he will have nothing.
Taking into account actual quality of life and not just money,
The difference in their income is $20,000 – $5 = 19,995 a day.

A politician decides there is too much “inequality”.
He taxes the rich man $8,000 a day, and the government uses that:
To enforce laws on clean air, product safety, and working conditions.
Not to mention Obamacare. :)
To provide the poor man with Social Security.
And to prevent unfair labor practices.
The poor man joins the union and his pay rises to $200 a day.
The rich man can still afford to run the factory;
after all he’s still making $11,800 a day.
Taking into account actual quality of life and not just money,
The difference in their income is $11,800 – $200 = 11,600 a day.

Which is still quite a lot, but
the politician can take some credit for “reducing inequality”.
And things are generally fairer and cleaner.

Sadly that second one won’t really fit on a Twitter placard…

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Off to Florida for a memorial service for Dad at his church down here. It will be good to talk about him to more people who knew him, and to hear from people who knew him in this part of his life.

I decided to bring only the iPad, because it’s just a few days and it let me travel very very light, just my Christmas present messenger bag. Bringing the big laptop (and therefore the cooling pad) would have at least doubled the space and weight, and bringing the work laptop would probably have meant doing work, and I’m still on vacation, dagnabbit!

(I did do work email on Monday; fortunately it looks like basically nothing significant happened after I wrote the triumphant “we’re all done for the year!” email and teleported away.)

So I miss SL, and to an extent I miss WoW (although with WoW the longer I don’t play it the less I tend to miss it), and I even miss Portal (stayed up late Monday night installing it on the big laptop via Steam, and getting I think about halfway through the post-chamber-19 section; having played through it before on the playroom computer definitely helps).

But I’m catching up with Twitter and the news (How about them wacky Iowa Republican caucuses, eh?), and here I am writing in the weblog even. So that’s all good.

Fascinating to see the Twitterverse getting Verizon to back off of a new nickel-and-diming fee, just like the Bank of America one last month, and the whole splitting-up-Netflix thing (“Qwikster” lol) before that.

Keep an eye on the “Paypal forces destruction of antique violin” story; maybe the next crowd-driven policy change.

(How is that even legal? If Paypal doesn’t make the payment, presumably the object is still owned by the almost-seller, so how can they make the almost-buyer, who doesn’t own it, destroy it? Very odd…)

I need to write more sometime about my disillusion with the big-L, and to some extent the small-l, libertarians, and with Ron Paul in particular. Pains me a bit now that I once voted for him for President, although I’m not entirely unhappy with the message that I intended that to send.

Government truly is pretty bad at various things. Some of those are things that therefore the government shouldn’t do. But significant ones are ones that we need the government to do, and that therefore our only option is to have them do it, and keep a really close watch over them (over ourselves) at the same time.

Even if we take the libertarian line that the only proper role of government is to prevent force, theft, and fraud (and I’m no longer sure that I do), it turns out you still need a significantly large government, because force, theft, and fraud can be big, subtle, powerful, and very well organized. However much we might want to believe it, Sheriff Taylor isn’t going to keep either Organized Crime from terrorizing the countryside, or Big Business from polluting the water, or Wall Street from stealing billions of dollars from its customers, with just his smile and a comical deputy or two.

It’s bright and sunny and unusually cold in Florida this morning; frost on the car windows! Pretty though. I’m sitting looking out the big windows, typing with my thumbs and wondering how differently I write with this tool than with other ones. Another interesting question…

Autoxenophobia

Well we all have a face
That we hide away forever
And we take them out and
Show ourselves
When everyone has gone
Some are satin some are steel
Some are silk and some are leather
They’re the faces of the stranger
But we love to try them on
— Joel, B

I (well, Dale) invented this word over on Twitter, where people were talking about similarities (or not) between anti-gay folks who turn out to be gay, and anti-pseudonym folks (see Google Plus Nymwars), who might be, say, afraid of odd nameless, or oddly-named, things within themselves.

Autoxenophobia: use it often!

Fear of the Stranger Within…