The Trolls Are Feasting

(The problem with saying "Don't Feed the Trolls," is that every time you say it, you do...)

The latest blogstorm is all over the place, but it feels highly reminiscent, and I had to think about it a bit before it came to me. Way back in the misty early days of the internet, like less than a decade ago, there was quite a bulletin board culture which has dissipated to a large extent (much to my regret), and boards produced a strange creature, the Troll.

(Personally, I learnt about Trolls the hard way, in what I thought was a flame-war over napoleonic cavalry tactics of all things, way back in about 1997. Dragons can't hurt Trolls, of course, they keep hiding under the bridge.)

It isn't just that internet anonymity produces bad behaviour, or that the lack of facial and social cues impede communication, or even that it is effectively impossible to socially shun anyone, although those are all true, it is that there is a fairly small subset of people who are Trolls. Trolls have a bunch of justifications, being the devil's advocate is pretty typical, but that is not what they are at all. Trollishness is not even confined to the internet, I have met a few in real life, though they find it harder to operate without the anonymity.

(And incidentally, it is a gender neutral occupation; well anecdotally, females seem to outnumber males in Real Life, and males outnumber females on-line, but there is no fundamental difference in viciousness, though there do seem to be gender differences in method.)

Back in the day, trolls were called gossips, as the kind of people that liked behind the scene spreading stuff around that would get everyone into a frenzy, without anything being attributable. The dark side of the internet is that it has made it all so much easier. And more powerful.

Trolls are people who willfully and with purpose stir things up, and while they can be extremely viscious, that really isn't the point. And they don't much care about which direction the general stir up is going. I'm not even sure that they want to be noticed, though some do, mostly they want to have an impact somehow, so they will do everything they can to upset people. I suspect that they feel that they hardly exist, and are bored with what existence they have, so they want something to happen, to make people act and react, and how or why really doesn't concern them, just that they had some impact on things I guess. And any sense of consequence is off the map. Back in bulletin board days, we could sort of identify the trolls, and ask people not to feed them (Do Not Feed The Troll, or DNFT); in the blogosphere, it is much harder, as the communities are much larger and less inter-familiar.

So now we have big debates about whether the internet is inherently misogynistic, what is free speech (no won't link to that troll-nest), responsible posting, and so on and so on: great heaping mountains of troll-food, really, and sure enough, the trolls are feasting.

I rather doubt it, but the comments are open for trolls, come and see if you can get a meal here.

If continued....

Things that Suck Lately

1. The new daylight saving time dates. Nobody told the computers, now dates and times are all fucked up everywhere. I'm not sure that the very marginal savings are worth it at all. It sucks.

2. Calgary Traffic Planners. The city is impossible because it was designed in the 70s, on the model of quiet neighbourhoods with limited access points, and everything forced onto a number of high volume "trails." Sounds great, but what do you do when the trails are over capacity? Turns out, there isn't anything you can do. Except suffer. We are totally locked in, and what we are locked into is traffic hell. It sucks. What sucks even more, is our complex, inefficient, expensive, and generally pathetic (and for the last little while, Working to Rule) Public Transit system. That sucks too.

3. Now Canada's Senate is mostly a joke, and its committees moreso, but this takes the cake. The Security & Defence Committee has pumped out four reports in the last few days, two rather sensible (I rather like the one on how we put such huge efforts into collecting a very small amount of revenue on cross-border shoppers, maybe we should just give up on that and give everyone a $2000 exemption and not waste our time trying to catch people with (lame) beer by getting all fascist on their asses over sovereignty by limiting their purchases).

But the last of the four is about the most completely inane and stupid (asinine, that was the word I was looking for) government report I have read in donkey's years. Apparently, we are putting too much money and effort into defending our Northern coast (where the oil, diamonds, trade-routes, etc are, and where the US and others dispute our sovereignty) and not enough into defending our other coasts. Because they are vulnerable you see. Vulnerable to who and what? On the East and West, the closest country is like thousands of Ks of open nasty water away, and there is no conceivable reason anybody would make the investment necessary to engage in even minor skulduggery. So obviously, we should spend a gazillion bucks defending them, sure.

Fellow Canadians, we have exactly one neighbour, which while it has not exactly proven itself to be invasion adverse lately, and can pretty much take us any time it wants (except that it would mean adding like 30 million instant Democrats to the mix, and pretty lefty ones at that, so I would adjudge us safe as long as we cling to socialized medicine, and they keep electing Republicans), for goddamn sure it would not do it by invading Labrador. Or Nanaimo, for that matter, as much as some of us would like to see the lefty coast and in particular Salt Spring Island occupied by Marines. An armoured column over the Windsor Bridge is far more likely, and frankly, pretty much unstoppable in the long run. Which would really suck.

4. This Spring has truly and deeply sucked. Well, except for the farmers I suppose, the precipitation has been rather good, and the runoff looks promising. But I am tired of what was a mostly brown Winter, and then getting dumped on again and again all Spring. And then dumped on again. Speaking of the farmers, I note that the Barley Farmers are now free to leave the Canadian Wheat Board, which makes sense as they aren't growing wheat. Sorry to be flippant about the whole sorry situation, but as an urban dweller accustomed to being royally rogered by the farming folks every budget (the last one being no exception at all, at all), it sure is fun watching them screw each other over for a change. The suckage sucks back a bit, I guess.

5. I note that this blog is banned in China (while big bro's is not, heh); I suspect it has nothing to do with me, and everything to do with blogger/blogspot, where the Great Wall assumes you are guilty until proven innocent. Speaking of nonsense, here is another piece of highly dubious factoids presenting internet truthiness : guess what, they are selling filtering tech; obviously teh internets are dangerous for children, what a load of unmitigated tripe. Yes there is a lot of porn out there, but I simply do not believe that it is bigger than Big Oil and Big Hollywood combined, simply enough, if it were, they would have a lot more pull on the Hills. No suck jokes here, move along.

6. The RCMP, the Moundies, whatever. They do a pretty good job in small community policing, so obviously they should be our National Police Force defending us from nebulous terrorists. Guess what, at a national level they suck, they are corrupt, out of any sane control, and deeply assholish. Zacardelli was a symptom, not the disease: the RCMP authoritarian structure has the inevitable effect of corruption, who you know becomes more important that what you do, and so on. For many years they defended themselves on the basis of incorruptibility essentially because they were stupid: guess what, stupidity does not equate with incorruptibility, though it might correlate with venality. Honestly, I think we should pay cops a very great deal of public money, so that they don't feel tempted at all, and don't play games, and lean then on them very hard when they go astray. That actually wouldn't suck, but please, the current boss is Stockwell Day, and that truly and deeply sucks.

7. The Immigration Points System. But that is a whole 'nother topic, which will have a long post shortly. Because it is so very important. And currently, sucks is a pretty good description.

If continued....

Lionidas/Jim Jones

Went and saw 300 a couple of weeks back, yes I am both a graphic novel and greek history buff, and and both of me enjoyed it a great deal. Though the two sides pertaining argued a lot, there are actually more than a small number of factual correctnesses for the pettifogging to worry about. (It's just though there is no evidence at all for the leather speedos, on the homoerotic side, and none for the, well let us be generous, perverted drag-queen antics on the Persian side.)

But yes, they really DID say: "We'll fight in the shade then." when informed that the Persian arrows would darken the sky, and they really DID say: "Come and get them." when asked to surrender their arms, and yes, they really did face down a massively superior force for a time longer than you would actually believe, and inflict massively disproportionate casualties. It was the ancient version of Shock & Awe I suppose.

But then that night, I watched part of a Jonestown docu on tv, and then forced myself to listen to the whole horrible reality soundtrack of the event (search for it yourself, if you must), and I thought to myself, what is the real difference? Charismatically lead people to death, in common, for a higher cause, for a dream, for nothing, really. Just what is it that seperates Jim Jones from Lionidas? Both facist leaders of a facist organization built on highly attractive ideals, bringing their followers to certain death, which is in other words, suicide, for the ostensible purpose of defending something that they each actually demonstrably did not believe in. Modern readers probably rarely get the acid in Simonides, his lines are three and four sided blades.

Ὦ ξεῖν’, ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε

κείμεθα, τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι.

Me, when it comes to the crunch, I'll hang in there with the corrupt Themistocles every time, he being the guy that actually beat Xerxes after all.

If continued....

By What Authority

In my heart of hearts, much as I earn my daily bread by being a sort of subspecies of social worker, or more accurately, a manager of social workers, I remain an Anthropologist. I simply adore and love the field more than anything, though it became clear to me, much to my regret, that in that field, I am part of the audience, not a player.

Conventionally, Anthro is divided into four areas: physical, cultural, linguistics, and archaeology, and one of the things I love about it is you have to have some basis in all four to be taken seriously. One of the cool things about Anthro is that there is no official definition of it; myself, I basically take it to be a sub-branch of Biology, that concerns itself with a single species.

Me, I always wanted to be a physical anthropologist, linguistics is too hard and archaeology too boring, and cultural anthro is a minefield of PoMo nonsense riddled with amazing counterintuitive deep truths. Physical Anthro though, is all about Evolution, and range of variation, and biochemical clues to evolutionary events, and frankly, bones. Bones are very very cool, and once upon a time, I could identify and precisely name every bone in the human body (well except wrist/hand bones, they are very tricky). That was like 20 years ago though.

I would just love to debate some of the Creation Science/Intelligent Design folks, because I could do it a good deal differently than most of the evolutionary champions, assholes like Dawkins and my own misguided (on this topic) hero Stephen J. Gould. I have an advantage: the other thing that has informed my intellectual life is philosophy and religion; unlike many, and the two above in particular, I actually grok the religious perspective. That, I and think we should emulate the enemy; stop playing defence, and play some offense on their own ground.

My argument would go something like this. First of all, a distinction has to be made between Evolution and Natural Selection. Before we get on Darwin's case, he did not invent the former, it was pretty much a given scientific fact by the time he showed up. So there is no point in talking about Natural Selection until we agree on Evolution. Frankly, Darwinism, Natural Selection, even Punctuated Equilibrium and Spandrels, are irrelevant arguments, from a religious perspective. The real question is simply Evolution: how long in time is the world, and can/did living things change within that span?

And I believe in Evolution because I believe in god, as simple as that. There is simply massive evidence from physics, geology, chemistry, astronomy, hell damn near every field of human knowledge, that the world and universe have been here for a Very Long Time; if the knowledge that establishes that is incorrect, we would not have electric power nor nuclear bombs, simple as that. I would think that it is pretty hard to argue against nuclear bombs, which pretty demonstrably Work. While an omnipotent being could most certainly have created the world from the whole cloth with a history and everything last Friday, any being that did so is essentially lieing to us, multifariously and malevolently. Because I believe in god, I do not think that god is inclined to lie to us, and that is essentially what the creationists are claiming.

But beyond that, let's take it even further into their turf: why on earth are they making that argument at all? Because they are protestants, that is why. Because the fundamental question that all religious leaders face, from all faiths and movements, is this: by what authority do you preach? Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, every one of them got asked that question. (One of the deeply attractive things to me about Islam was Mohammed's answer to that: do you think this kind of poetry could be produced by an illiterate orphan?)

In the christian tradition, the Bible was generally considered to be a set of interesting and useful documents by the church, before the church splintered anyway; human beings at the Council of Nicaea, for example, could actually vote on what was probably true or not. For most of it's history, the christian church relied on Apostolic Succession as the source of its authority to preach, that the source of Truth was the Church, not the text, inspired though the text may be.

Luther changed that: not only was it through Faith that we were to be saved, it was also through common access to the source texts. The Authority then became the Bible, not any corruptible man, no matter how illustrious his appointments. But the Bible is clearly the work of corruptible men, to the extent that it could be voted upon by men (and yes, it was men, not women, though I have no doubt that they are equally corruptible). If we could do it once, there is no obvious rule that we couldn't do it again: let's vote Luke out and Thomas in, for example. Or even better, let us edit Paul in all his beauty and self-loathing.

So the question I have for the Creationists is this: by what authority do you preach (as in Mark 11:28)? You gonna Mark 11:33 me? You are defending a text, a contradictory and complex text, because that is the only straw you can hold onto in the maelstrom of change and corruption. You reject the Apostolic succession of Rome (and Istanbul) where the church Fathers have actually declared for Evolution, you reject the plain evidence of your senses, you reject the very voice of god in the mechanics of your cars, lights, and ovens, you are trying to tell me that all the things god imminent in the world is patently telling me are lies; well, I begin to think that it is perhaps you, not me, that is under the influence of the Adversary. Just saying.

If continued....

Why Genetic Modification is Pretty Much a Good Idea

My dad was part of the Green Revolution that pretty much saved humanity in the 50s and mostly 60s, and he had a healthy contempt for those opposed to industrial farming. A lot of the ecofringe just don't realize how much of humanity agribusiness is keeping alive, and how impossible it would be to feed them otherwise. My brother and sister in law run a middling to large Saskatchewan operation, and compared to what a farm looked like 40 years ago, well. Although my sister in law likes to refer to her folk as being peasants, nothing could be further from the truth. They are industrialists, pure and simple, in a very capital intensive business.

My dad was all about yields, and at the end of the day, the sustainable yield you can get from x amount of arable land is what it is all about. We may be looking at a long-term demographic bust, but in the short-term, the population isn't going anywhere but up, and everybody still has to get fed, and global warming or no, we are getting closer and closer to a crunch, and frighteningly enough, GM seems to be the only way out, given that arable land is a finite (and likely shrinking) resource. (Dad was, in his time, a big advocate of GM and patenting genes, as it was understood at the time. He knew what it took to mass produce food.)

At the end, while he was still capable of looking to the future, his vision of it was pretty bleak, he saw too many cookie cutter solutions misapplied, and too much investment in supporting industries and not agricultural production itself. He had a bit of rep in drylands wheat production, and worried a great deal about salination through irrigation, a more immediate problem than the disastrous impending doom of the draining of the ancient aquifers, which when you read up on it is very very scary itself. He was big on chemicals too, though I think pretty thoroughly got the darwinian principle that pesti/herbicides were inherently a short-term solution, and that plant breeding or GM was pretty much the only hope for the future.

As a social worker of sorts, I am acutely conscious of the heirarchy of needs. You simply cannot teach a man to fish unless you have fed him first, and that isn't a new idea, William Booth realized that a long time ago. What the agronomists in the 60s thought they were doing was buying us some time, and they did. The Green Revolution was a hack, a workaround, a kludge really, buying some time for a real solution.

The question is, once famine was staved off and we had some breathing room, did we use it wisely?

Anyway, I am much more worried about the basics of our very fragile food supply chain than I am about climate disruption, which will only magnify the inherent problem.

If continued....

Theatre of the Absurd & My Three Rules

So we've got a big story in town, our airport had this Major Security Breach you see (everyone run around in a circle screaming and desperately vote the police more powers).

What happened was that an underpaid private security goon was suspended for some undeclared reason, it was shortly before Christmas and the airport was insane, and his or her brother and sister private security goons launched a wildcat work to rule effort, which bogged down the security theatre considerably, passengers were in line for an hour or more to have their shoes X-rayed and their liquids confiscated.

A desperate Continental manager of some sort, not sure if the passengers would make it or not, authorized the loading of a bunch of bags onto a Texas bound flight, even though he was not certain that the passengers would make it through the security lines. Ultimately, about 30 bags made it through without accompanying passengers, on an International flight at that, and one to the security paranoid US to boot. Woop Woop Woop, Major Security Breach!

It isn't just Security Theatre, it's Security Theatre of the Absurd: like any terrorist could have planned the problem and cleverly stuck a bomb on the plane (BTW, aren't those bags checked or sniffed or X-rayed or something anyway?) But it is Security, not rationality, and the real point here was that Someone Flouted The Rules, and That Cannot Be Countenanced, especially in a situation where the rules are so patently insane. So heads are gonna roll and apologies are being tendered and reassurances are being made, and everyone is in a completely foolish fooferaw, and I am sure the end result will a further imposition of useless, stupid, and deeply annoying regulations and procedures.

It rather reminds me of my own life right now, as I do financial year-end, and have to deal with the foolishness of GAAP, which has about as much bearing on real financial irregularities as airport security does on actual terrorist threats, but god help you if you ever say so out loud.

Same day, a Senate committee reveals that it might just have a tiny concern in that while passengers and aircrew all get searched and X-rayed and scoped and who knows what, each and every time they approach an airplane, all the guys wearing turbans and carrying the Koran that fuel, load, and cater the airplane, only get randomly searched about 30% of the time, usually by the same underpaid overworked turban-wearing generally brown-skinned private security goons. Hmm. Move along now, nothing to see here.

Now, thinking about it, I am forced to conclude that silly/insane security theatre is in fact the normal response to terrorism. It is a truism of military history, that as any conflict drags on, the opponents start to look and act and generally be more and more alike. So if terrorism is fundamentally theatrical, and I am very sure it is, I suppose that the normal response is to engage in counter-theatricalism. Which is where we find ourselves I suppose.

What that same truism means for Iraq is pretty frightening to think about, actually.

As an aside, Iraq is certainly proving Rob's Three Rules of Middle East Conflicts (which I may or may not have quoted here before) in spades and then some:

1. In any conflict anywhere in the Middle East, there are not two sides. (Iraq has about six internal ones right now [Shiite Radical, Shiite "Moderate," Sunni insurgent/Baathist, Sunni Salafist/Al Queda, Kurdish, & US Military, though it isn't hard to subdivide each of those pies], and what with Iran, Syria, Israel & Saudi looking in and stirring the cauldron, it's certainly a witches' brew, isn't it?)

2. In any conflict anywhere in the Middle East, there are no Good Guys, just bad, worse, really bad, and unbelievably bad. (Given Abu Ghraib, Haliburton, the refugee morass, and the civilian body-count, I don't think you can really characterize the "Coalition" as being Good Guys.)

3. In any conflict anywhere in the Middle East, the end result will be bad for the Palestinians; in fact, in any conflict, the outcome will be that they will improbably and counterintuitively get horribly screwed over. (The one exception to this might be the first Intefadeh, but then on reflection, maybe not, their big victory in that one being the return of Arafat and the subsequent PLO administration, lucky them.)

If continued....

An odd sort of rant.

Why
See, I can't blog, because like 90% of the stuff on my mind I can't actually talk about. And the other 10% doesn't change much.

The problem I have, is that I can't be neutral, in a blog, and professionally, goddamn but I have to be neutral, or at least seen to be such. Well, some trivia then, think of Rob playing the fiddle while people die in Africa:

Who
The nicest thing about having teenagers is their total lack of fear about technology. Have a few around the house, and they will turn you on to stuff like this (dig in a bit), which may well be the future of teh intertubity. Tonight at dinner they had a robust argument about whether electronic communications a) constituted a real culture and b) the lack of physical human contact resulted in warped, deficient humanity. I mostly listened. Like most internet arguments, everybody was wrong, and everybody was right.

Who Not
There are tens of thousands of Iraqis showing up at border stations. Most are being turned away. If they get so far, and meet one of our embassy guys, they will be turned away as fraudulent, because they had to lie a great deal to get that far, and those lies will be taken as general proof of untrustworthiness. They are probably pretty "non-responsive" too, at that point, and that is all it takes these days, failure to appropriately engage with and divulge to the authorities on demand has become in effect a capital crime these days.

When Not
Went off and saw Fido, and I haven't laughed so hard and long since The Meaning of Life, but I am pretty sure you have to be younger than 60 and older than 30 to get most of the jokes. arrr, errrgh. Yes, Sarah, we are all zombies now.

When
Because we are all zombies walking into a future where everything can't be solved by devouring humans. The evidence, such as it is, is there, and if you look at the numbers, well, there really isn't much we can realistically do about Global Warming. It is going to really really suck for the next century or so, although the old anthropologist in me suspects that there has to be an upside or two out there as well. Jeremiads from Gore and Suziki are apparently going to come true, its sackcloth and ashes time, but the fact remains, to make the kind of ecological choices they are calling for will be to beggar ourselves beyond belief. Are you ready for massive personal poverty? Do you think we have a system that can inflict it in any way equitably? And can it be done in a way that doesn't make the intrusions of the state in the Patriot Act look like a joke?

Why Not
It may be tacky, it may be so yesterday, but I just loved Stomp at the time, and have been collecting all the works on YouTube. That, and La La La Human Steps (can't find a link that I really like), a group that makes me proud to be Canadian, and proud that my Canada includes Quebec weirdness and wonderfulness. And I am so looking forward to the Winnipeg Folkfest this year, what a freaking lineup!

What
At work, we are engaged in the annual silliness of the year-end cash burn-off. You are prudent with the public's money so you have some left over, or the public actually hears you and gives you a whack of cash, in February; but guess what, everything ends March 31st, and then you have to pay anything leftover back, which leads to silly spending decisions. This isn't accountability, this is flagrant waste. As our accountant says, it is like winning the lottery on your 90th birthday, you can be pretty sure that the money won't be spent sensibly. Please Please Please treasury boards and auditors the world over, let us carry stuff over, the world does not in fact end at midnight on March 31st, and even if it did, you can't take it with you, right? Since the world doesn't in fact end, please let us take it with us?

What Not
My mission in life seems to have pretty much always been, telling people that things have to be paid for. Good ideas do not pay for themselves, at least not in the up-front pay the power bill by Friday kind of way. I have gotten pretty good at telling people bad news. Over the next few weeks I am going to have to give a whole bunch of people various pieces of bad news. Basically, I have to listen to some serious market signals, in various markets and aspects, and engage in some creative destruction in order to make some good things happen. I am acutely conscious, in my business anyway, that creative destruction and market realities are not good for folks that are struggling just to hold on, since they do in fact have to pay the power bill by Friday.

If continued....

Samaritans

Good Samaritanism can be a very dangerous thing.

A couple of weeks back we had one of those tragic child deaths in town, the kind that drives the media into a frenzy, and normally I wouldn't comment, or refer to the horror and tragedy of it, but in this case, a Good Samaritan was part of the nauseating chain. What happened was, a mom was running some errands, and stopped by an office for just a sec to run in, and left her two kids in the car, one of them, the 2 year old, apparently asleep. The car was running and powered up; while she was gone the toddler woke up and started climbing around the car, got up on the handrest and her foot pushed the power window down, and then after her head was out of the car, back up again, strangling her.

A passerby eventually noticed, got the now limp girl's head out of the window, and seeing nobody about, laid her down back in the car and instinctively (it being Winter) closed the door before running off in search of help or a phone to call 911. Mom came back before help arrived, and checking the girl, thought that she was still asleep and drove off, not noticing for a further 40 minutes that there was a problem.

Now who knows, if the good Samaritan had not come by, the results might not have been any different. But if he had left the door open, even though it was winter, or not tucked the kid in so lovingly but rather left her splayed out, or been lucky and been carrying a cell or been lucky and had someone passing by, things might have been different. Or they might not, except for the horror of driving around for 40 minutes with a dead child in the back seat and not knowing it.

It is just one of those tragedies, and thank god that we have good Samaritans around, god bless them, they do their best. But as a social services professional, I surely understand the deep instinct and experience that impels the police and fire department and authorities generally to tell you not to do anything but call for help, to cooperate with the kidnappers/hijackers, to not interfere. Because I've seen it go awry, from all the best intentions, so many times.

We lost (as in wandered away, not anything worse) a kid once, from our summer day camp on a field trip, because a good Samaritan thought he was lost and essentially kidnapped him while looking for help. The kid was a little spacey anyway, and spoke little English and didn't have enough information on him/her to help much; luckily the cops were very clever, and managed to figure it out and get him home. Mom was seriously outraged, and so was I at my staff that had bungled it, but still.

The child protection case that bugged me the most was an example of the same thing; some Good Samaritan volunteers with little experience of troubled family dynamics chose to believe a troubled teenager over a troubled but pretty competent parent, eventually taking sides in a complex situation that they simply had no grasp on, and phoned in allegation after allegation until the family was hopelessly snarled in the system for no good reason, and much suffering and expense was entailed all around before we cleared it all up, and the Samaritans hate us to this day. But I am sure they acted for the best motives and with the best intentions; they just had no experience at all with social work, let alone with a large and complex family from a very alien and traumatized background, under the severe stress of settlement and integration.

But you know, I honour them all. Because for all the times you hear of things going wrong, or I have to end up dealing with the consequences of things going wrong, somehow when it goes right you basically never hear of it. Most Good Samaritan work is totally under the radar; largely it is little things that hardly anyone notices. Imagine the passerby had happened to be walking by just at the moment the window had gone up, and fixed it immediately, and then been nice about it when mom showed up; there would have been no story at all. I am very sure that those scenarios happen all the time.

Even when the Samaritan does something pretty heroic, if there isn't a dead body, let alone an injury, well you just don't hear about it often or much.

So, even though I am a professional that has and am sure will continue to have to clean up all the messes created by Good Samaritanism gone astray, and Lord knows there have been many and will be many again, good for you, do your best, please try and exercise as much common sense as you can, and take a second or two if you possibly can to think the situation all the way through, but don't you ever stop. Do not defer ever to the professional advice telling you to leave it to the pros, if there isn't a pro there, and even when there is, pitch in and help.

Because even the pros make non-obvious mistakes, like this one, that cause harm, we do it all the time. Hopefully we learn from it, but it is a simple fact of life.

Of course, lawyers aren't really human beings, so I expect that there will be law-suits a plenty.

If continued....

Malice

If something bites you on the ass once, you can be pretty sure that it will again, when you least expect it.

It has become clearer and clearer to me that this blog is problematic: there are real consequences, and so I have to police myself. It is not so much a matter of yes or no, as how much, and I have gotten that how much wrong more than once. But it makes me think, the real difference between a blogger and a journalist is the journalist's non-interest, the somewhat higher degree of freedom from consequence about what they write.

I confess, I do not understand evil. Big systemic evil, torture and despotism, yes, I do understand and mourn. But personal maliciousness, no I do not. The gleeful willingness and deliberate intent to do harm to others at some or even great investment and even cost to yourself, simply for the pleasure you somehow get for doing someone harm, that is a whole mind-set I simply cannot grok at all. I simply cannot believe that any human being can behave in that way, although I am confronted with the evidence to the contrary pretty much every day.

We put it all under the "bullying" hat these days, and imagine government spending and rebranding will cure it. Me, I try and ignore it as best I can, but truthfully the malicious have done actual damage to my life and career from time to time, and ruined a few things I loved, and I am sure they had much joy thereby. I wish I had it in me to hate those people for more than about an hour, but somehow I just can't keep it up.

Mostly it makes me very sad, which I am sure they enjoy too.

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Don't Believe Everything You Read

Well, now I know how the government guys feel. The press has been hounding it, the opposition has been platforming it, and there we are, having to say things like "it's before the courts" or "well for privacy reasons" and all the other shit you hear when you really want to know what is going on.

And the whole don't believe everything you read in the newspaper bit? Oh yeah. They've been barking at the completely wrong tree, and taking the absence of response to them as absence of response back in the day to the family, which is completely and utterly wrong.

And everytime I think about talking, I remember that a bunch of my colleagues, and maybe even I, will be talking into a mic, under oath, about two years from now. And then I shut up, no problem.

If continued....