Scalia

TL;DR Your reaction was bad, and you ought to feel badly about it, or at least consider what it meant.

As I'm sure we all remember, back in mid-February we lost an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court by the name of Antonin Scalia. For the sake of clarity, he was indeed a Justice of the Supreme Court, and he is indeed still dead (I checked to be sure). I've had this knocking around in the empty caverns of my mind for a while now, but I thought I'd let the furor settle down before I shouted into the vacuum.

Now, Scalia wasn't a popular justice, and for once in my life I actually agree with the overwhelming opinion of my age bracket. There are very few people I politically disagree with more strongly than Justice Scalia; he was a strict Constitutional originalist and a statutory textualist, which I am not. He was staunchly conservative, which I am not, and he was pretty down on affirmative action, which I have a less strictly defined opinion about. (I was going to say "a less black-and-white opinion," and then I realized that had a meaning I didn't want it to.) The fact that Justice Scalia was a devout Roman Catholic and I am a Berkeley Protestant is an irony of which I am aware, but not one that factored greatly into my opinion of him, for the record.

Furthermore, Justice Scalia was simply an unpleasant person, in my opinion. His written dissents are generally opposed to my own views on almost every issue, and they're all about fifteen or so pages too long and impassioned. I don't recall the specific cases because my brain is made of gelatin, but I remember my outrage when Justice Scalia issued statements pertaining to... well, anything, really. Be it women's rights, LGBT rights, detainee rights, or religion, I as a privileged Millennial liberal would find Scalia's dissents and statements uniformly distasteful.

All that established in detail, the obvious question is: how did I feel when I heard that Scalia had died?

For once in my life, I actually remember the situation very clearly. It was a Monday when I heard, and I was home between class and my afternoon lab, in pursuit of lunch, and I flipped through the Facebook to discover: "huh, Scalia's dead. I wonder who the next justice will be; we haven't had to replace him since Reagan." Not exactly an overwhelming response either way, I know, but I'm a pretty cold bastard on Mondays and when I'm hungry, and suffice it to say I was not significantly perturbed by Scalia's demise, as awful as that sounds.

I paid attention for the next few days, however, and something arose from the spark of Scalia's death that did perturb me. As news of Scalia's death spread, more and more people on social media (that invulnerable bastion of truth and wisdom) shared their responses to and opinions on the matter.

To put it succinctly, the wave of expression in response to Scalia's death, specifically from young liberal people like myself, was entirely unacceptable. I hesitate to use the word "barbarism" because I got censured by several anthropologists about it recently, but know that it comes to mind when I read your posts about the matter, young Millennials.

My lab section that afternoon was three hours long, and after that fairly short span of time, I returned home to discover an absolute tidal wave of jubilation breaking over social media. "Scalia is dead! Feminism triumphs!" was one thread of sentiment, and another was "Freedom triumphs!" Within hours of the news, I remember an Onion article satirizing the dead justice, written about a scenario in which American women were allowed to rule about whether the man's last wishes were carried out, because ruling about what people can do with their bodies, har har har.

I'm absolutely the last person to eulogize Scalia, but this is bullshit, and there's simply no other word for it. Whatever you thought about him, Scalia was a high ranker in our judicial system, and an immensely educated and experienced person. Was he an obviously sour individual who wrote dissents using terms like "argle-bargle" and "jiggery-pokery?" Absolutely, but independently of any of his virtues or failings, Scalia was indeed a person, and this sort of rejoicing over the death of a person is wrong.

First of all, simply speaking, the guy is dead, and death is an unfortunate side effect of life. Scalia, like many people, left behind a bereaved wife and nine (nine!) children, who I am certain do not share your jubilant sentiments about his passage from this world. Put yourself in this situation: if you blew a blood vessel in your brain and died suddenly, tonight, would you want the neighbors holding a gala the next day because they'll finally be able to encroach on your parking space without consequence? Or, for me, if everyone's aggressive boyfriend (see previous posts) just suddenly burst into flames, would you see me out blowing a vuvuzela at their funeral while their family grieved? No, I think we'd all agree that either of these is at best a tacky, and at worst an inhumanly cruel thing to do.

Secondly, we as liberals are constantly criticizing more right-wing officials (and people in general) for this sort of merciless nonsense. What's your opinion of the Westboro Baptists who picket soldiers' funerals and shout at the grieving family that the fallen veteran is going to hell, young Millennials? What do you think about the cold indifference we claim conservatives have to the plight of Syrian refugees fleeing the brutality of civil war and discord? Does that ruthless "us against them" attitude seem at all familiar, now that you think about it?

Thirdly, Scalia himself wasn't even the appropriate target for your vitriol, speaking really frankly. The comments he made that elicited all our fury were dissents written on cases he lost, where our more liberal/progressive/Berkeley viewpoints prevailed. Scalia may have been a sore loser, but a sour winner he was not, for the most part. The anger you feel at beliefs like Scalia's, if it belongs anywhere, belongs in letters to your representatives in Congress, or to your Senators, or to any of the other cogs in the great American machine that creates and propagates the problems we have as a society, or in discussion boards and at rallies where we try to change those beliefs for the advancement and betterment of our culture and country, not chorused with manic glee when we hear of the death of a largely unimportant player before his body has even cooled off.

Finally, I'll leave you with this. This sort of gloating at the death of a political opponent, aside from being morally unconscionable, misdirected, and generally repulsive, is a terribly Donald Trump thing to do.

As always, pass this on to people you think might enjoy it or benefit from it, or send me death threats as you think best. I hope you enjoyed the read, even though it's sorta lengthy, and I promise they won't all be this angry. :P

Easy Classes

TL;DR Do work.

Today I'm going to write about a specific pattern of thought and behavior (an ideology or a cultural convention, if I put my Ray-Bans on) I've noticed emergent in my classmates and colleagues at Berkeley. I noticed it when I was a freshman, but it's become more pronounced as I move into upper-division classes with smaller numbers of more specialized people.

The phenomenon, to put it succinctly, is something I've heard called "senioritis," although most of the people who appear to have it are not seniors in academic terms. I've also heard it described as "signature Millennial laziness" by older people who didn't know any better and "that super laid-back Berkeley atmospheeeere," by young people who didn't know anything, but I think you know what I'm referring to.

The way this pattern manifests itself is in how we think about our classes once we've stuck our toes in  and seen if they get bitten off or not. Some classes are hard, and demand the fullest extent of our attention, and other classes are "well I'm just taking it for a breadth requirement, and it's super easy, so like, yknow." A big part of the culture at Berkeley, in my experience revolves around the dichotomy of trying extremely hard with extremely visible results or conspicuously not appearing to try at all. What did I get on the midterm? A 97. Did I study? Of course I didn't; I go to Berkeley, and therefore I must appear as though things are easy for me. It exists for the same reason one gym bro pulls the bar off another after a failed rep of bench and then tells the struggling bro "it was all you, dude, you could've gotten it."

I'm going to take up the issue of what "easy" actually means for a moment, in two different ways. First of all, the simple definition of what the word "easy" means on paper, which a quick dictionary inspection reveals as "achieved without great effort; presenting few difficulties" or "free from worries or problems."

I think this definition is sufficient, but the way we use the word (at Berkeley especially) is dangerously far off what "easy" is supposed to mean.

In my opinion, what an easy activity (be it a class, a lift, a puzzle, whatever) connotes is not an activity that explicitly demands less of your effort, but one that yields better results given the same effort. As I see it, there's no good reason to take a class as a GPA booster and then get a B, for example; if the class is truly that easy, the obvious question is why you didn't completely crush it.

The topic is classes, so I'll stick with it. My classes right now are two upper-division biology and two upper-division anthropology classes, which I thought would be a nice mix of scientific snobbery and humanities pretense mixed up together. I will be honest; this semester is not the most difficult academic experience I've ever encountered. I actually did get a 97 on my midterm, and nothing below a 90 on the others so far.

For the sake of clarity, I need to point out that the midterm I got a 97 on had a mean of 76, with a great many scores under 50, and so we see the problem: the class is easy, strictly speaking, as evidenced by all the people who got A's, and yet we have a great many people failing to conquer said easy class. At a place like Berkeley, with all its pomp and circumstance, I simply refuse to believe that I'm 21% above average, and certainly not reliably 20+% above average in multiple disciplines. I'm not being modest here, really; rest assured I think I'm as fan-damn-tastic as the next delusional millennial liberal, but what I'm not is perfect and uniformly superior across all fields. That's for business majors, who are dynamic team players who are thrilled and honored about things. We all know them.

So what's the issue? We have a room full of our generation's "smartest" people approaching the height of their intellectual powers, and well over half of them missed 40% or more of a test that relied essentially on a basic grasp of the course concepts and a bit of information retention (the test consisted of fill-ins, matching, and some essay questions). I mean, honestly speaking, the mean should have been about 80%, assuming everyone had been paying attention in lecture.

Oh. Oh. I see. This lecture room has half the desks empty during lecture, and during the exam we're at capacity.

This just serves to reiterate the point I made earlier; there's no sense asking me what my super-effective study tips and tricks are if you're not accomplishing the bare minimum of what it means to be a student in the first place. It's kind of like asking me for recommendations on hairstyling products when you're bald.

There's an old Family Circus cartoon where Billy is sitting at the table, talking to his parents about school. "My teacher's real tricky," he says. "She makes the quizzes real easy when I study and saves the hard ones for when I haven't studied at all."It's an obviously ludicrous statement, but I can't help it popping up in my mind when the equally ludicrous situation of a student protesting poor results in a class they've only shown up to for the first day.

I could go on with more examples, but I'll cut it off here, with this: Berkeley students are in many ways the cream of the intellectual crop, and we've spent a long time having things be easy for us. In my opinion, one of the most constructive things we could do for ourselves as people is, in addition to applying the basic effort to be in class and the simple intellectual work of understanding course content, to learn how to try again. No one who matters is going to judge you if you appear enthusiastic about learning and applying yourself, and no one who judges you for taking your education seriously matters.

As always, show this to people if you'd like, or tell me if you didn't like, and so on. I like conversation and debate, despite all evidence to the contrary. :)

March of the Hipsters: GMOs

TL;DR: GMOs are your friends. Embrace our new overlords.

First of all, happy Easter, everybody! It's joyous day for everybody, from Christians of all varieties to the pagans we appropriated the festival from to the merry atheists who just wanna eat Peeps.

The post today, however, is about a group of people who are not happy, and about the thing that makes them so. The post today is about Berkeley-ans, and (if we're totally honest about it) other generally upper-middle-class white people who are at war with all things GMO.

For those not in the know (or not in the care), GMO is a handy acronym for Genetically Modified Organism. Note that this acronym is distinct from both NGO, which is an organization created to bother a government, and OMG, which is what people in Berkeley type when they find out their food is genetically modified.

The issue people have with genetically-modified food, to be succinct, is based in a belief that these food items are heavily engineered by spooky scientists (like me) to be larger, easier to grow, sweeter, and generally better food, by whatever other criteria are applicable. To call it a "belief" is a gross inaccuracy on my part, really; it's just a matter of fact that a great many plants these days have been muddled with in some way or another. One of the more common GM corn crops, for example, is engineered to build little crystals of a protein creatively called Bt, from a soil bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis. These little crystals are in the categories "whatever" if you're a human and "Please God no" if you're an insect, and the theory behind these is to minimize the use of artificial pesticides in the growing of corn. Everybody's pretty happy so far; we're putting less nasty chemicals on our food, and making more of it at that (~10% or so in this case, actually).

The second and more problematic part of the anti-GMO mindset derives from a deep conviction that all things artificial are by their nature unnatural and harmful, and the engineering done by the aforementioned spooky scientists is, indeed, spooky.  The resultant belief, obviously, is that we should get rid of all such products, probably through boycotts, litigation, or legislation, whatever works best.

I pride myself on being, wherever I go, one of the goofiest people around, but this, ladies and gentlemen, is dumb. 

So first off, as a biologist, I'm going to tell you that the whole premise of a "genetically modified organism" as a modern construction is a farce. The greatest engine of genetic modification in Earth's history is nature itself, which is why Darwin came up with that spiffy idea of natural selection as "descent with modification," to put it in his own words. Beyond a simple quibble of terminology, however, even unmistakably artificial engineering by humans is not an unambiguously bad thing. I can tell you this because corn is now corn, and not a horrible inedible bush called teosinte. Linked is a diagram comparing modern corn and teosinte, which are loosely the same plant and still crossable, but obviously, glaringly different due to humans selecting tasty corn to domesticate. Don't try to eat teosinte. https://www.nsf.gov/news/mmg/media/images/corn-and-teosinte_f.jpg

This frame of mind goes back to the same logic as the anti-vaccine rhetoric, and is in my experience largely parroted by shockingly overlapping groups of people; that is, people who don't do the reading. For example, people who rave about the dangers of vaccination usually posit the claim espoused by mainstream news outlets that vaccines contain "toxins." Again, speaking as a biologist, they do not. What vaccines have in them (in the overwhelming majority of cases) is something called a toxoid, which is a rendered-down, inactivated piece of a toxin chewed up into a form that your immune system can be taught to recognize and react to in the event of a later infection.

For GM foods, the same basic sort of sentence surfaces over and over in the oppositional discourse: "the foods have been TREATED with CHEMICALS for the purpose of GENETIC ENGINEERING, which is HARMFUL to the CHILDREN!" (The Children are always mentioned, for some reason.)  Y'know, I've been periodically sprinkling the plants in my garden with a solution that oxidizes in the presence of sunlight to reduce photosystem II, and later reduce plastoquinone and other components of the cascading photosynthetic electron transport chain. That sentence is big and scary and full of lots of words, and the solution to which I refer is a rare and dangerous chemical colloquially referred to as water. The message, in short, is that everything is a "chemical" and can be described in extremely menacing terms if the writer so desires, so do a quick Google search before asking me about THE TOXICITIES IN OUR CHILDREN(???).

Moving off the snobbish issues of science and terminology, the other problem with this belief is a more complicated moral one. First off, the real issue with GMO foods has little to do with the crops themselves and a great deal more to do with the people producing them, which we all like to dress up as a moralistic human crusade on behalf of nature, and whatever. Monsanto is the corporation that springs immediately to mind, being the business that does a great deal of this genetic engineering and so on and so forth. This is not the post wherein I eulogize Monsanto, because God knows they've made enough Agent Orange for quite a few civilizations. What I want to do is point to you, dear reader, out the distinction between what a Monsanto lab technician does with plants and what a Monsanto executive does with business practice. Monsanto's habits of stealing people's land, using patent law on their seeds to screw over smaller farmers, charging exploitative prices for quality seeds, and generally being unpleasant to other people are not in question. I would ask, however, that you express your distaste for these business practices without demonizing the legitimate science behind genetically modified crops and the generally well-intentioned people who enact it.

I would ask that you avoid demonizing this area of science because of the second moral point: as it stands right now, regardless of what you think of them, we absolutely have to have genetically-modified crops. This is because, at the present moment, we have entirely too damn many people, to put it succinctly. More importantly, placing a global ban of some kind on GM crops would be disproportionately bad for a specific subgrouping of those too damn many people, that is, the third world. Africa, for example, is in a bad spot to say the very least; something like half the soil is too heavily degraded to support conventional farming, which I see as a pretty black-and-white signal to employ non-conventional farming.

I could go on at great length about other impoverished areas in similar situations, but I'll summarize for the sake of clarity and concision: an injunction against genetically modified crops would have disproportionate effects on the world's developing and economically disadvantaged nations. Add in the fact that these areas coincidentally happen to be overwhelmingly inhabited by people who are not white, and sprinkle in a dash of "the people advocating such a thing predominantly are," and you have yourself a privilege smoothie with a swirl of colonial ignorance for added flavor.

So, to summarize, I think the anti-GMO movement is slightly more valid in its motivation than the anti-vaccine movement; that is, the anti-GMO movement has a measurable validity that isn't zero. That said, I believe the many anti-GMO advocates could stand to undergo a clarifying contemplation to distinguish the finer fractal points of their issues (science vs. business, for instance) and obtain a little more knowledge of the science behind GMOs and the current state of the globe. I know we live in the United States and have the option to breathe rarified bottled air from Whole Foods if we so choose, but we need to remember that a) any change in a market as vast and diverse as agriculture will take extended periods of time and b) not everyone is so fortunate as to have the option.

Thanks for reading! This is just a big diatribe of my thoughts on the matter. As always, show people if you liked it, or send me an angry letter if you didn't. Bloop!

Boyfriend (The Hey Bud Chronicle)

I had a bit of an incident last year and, intending to learn from the experience, decided to do some science and gather some data. The previous statement was vague, so I will elaborate.

The background goes like this: I have overwhelmingly female friends (for several reasons that I don't actually understand, including but not limited to "random-ass probability has made this the case"). As a person, I tend to be fairly vicious to strangers, but once you get past the obviously-constructed wall of artificial cruelty I'm an unusually kind person. I hold doors for people, and tip waiters generously, and compliment or otherwise support people when they get dragged down by the vagaries of life.

All of which is to say I'm a ravening flesh-eating degenerate from the depths of hell, but that comes later.

The actual incident, in vague terms, involved me being excessively, effervescently nice to someone, and having it come off totally the wrong way, followed by someone's boyfriend telling me several things I don't intend to repeat, threatening me, and all the other usual nonsense or, as they more concisely say in the dialect, freaking the fuck out. I'm a curious person by nature, so I set out to see if this was one isolated, horrible interaction, a general pattern of conduct, a sign of some underlying thing deeply wrong with me, et cetera. I wanted to "figure it all out." There was also some rather ominous homophobia involved, so I elected to test another variable and habitually paint my nails to scout for people's reactions.

In a shocking turn of developments, all my trials went exactly the same way! Goodness gracious, I would never have expected that.

I'll just highlight a particular case for the sake of comprehension, rather than illuminate all the nonsense I subjected myself to. In this case, I had a friend who frequently worked late night shifts and would often skip dinner. I announced to the Universe that I Simply Wasn't Having Any of That, and brought her dinner at work a few times. The operative word there is "few," because after about three of these interactions her boyfriend informed me he was going to beat me fairly severely for trying to "steal [his] girl," as it were. Curious, I sought to soothe the savage beast by telling him I was gay (which is a gross oversimplification for his benefit, but is more useful for explaining the issue away). To this he responded that he wasn't surprised, since I was, after all, "such a faggot," and blocked me after one more threat.

I sat in surprised bemusement for a few minutes, decided the situation was funny, and laughed manically on with my life.

This general pattern, with small variations, was repeated several times, with varying intensity (corresponding with a varying intensity of deranged cackling on my part) and differing overall results. The nails experiment, as an addendum, is turning out to be a wild success: women completely ignore or compliment them depending on who it is, and men almost universally make some off-color comment about losing a bet or request another form of explanation, since I'm obviously obligated to give them one. The "almost" is for the exception of the guy at the counter of my favorite sandwich shop, who said my nails were "hella fly." Love that guy.

I distilled a number of important points relating to the issue: the men involved are all near or total strangers (a cashier at Trader Joe's gave me the "bet" comment, for example). In the case of the Kindness trials, I prompted these reactions from what I might call a "one-order" stranger (one degree separated; we have a common element of social context). In the Homophobia experiment I provoked the comments and so on simply by being proximal to people for some small number of minutes. Addendum: Yes, people can hear you, especially if those people are me. These giant glasses I wear aren't to help my hearing, folks.

Furthermore, all (statistically speaking) of the reactions were strictly negative, and were further organized into a category I would describe as "territorial," or an "invasion response," or something of that nature. The boyfriend problem is an obvious one; to the boyfriend's perspective I'm some kind of competition (more on that later). The homophobic interactions are less easy to explain, and I would welcome advice on them. The explanation I choose to believe (because it makes me cackle loudest) is that the presence of the author in blazing pink nail polish represents a threat to the observer's heterosexuality, which he then needs to validate with other members of the Definitely Not Gay Club (a tax-exempt fraternal society under IRS 501(c)).

In the case of the direct interactions, e.g. the boyfriend cases, a truly alarming statistic developed over time. In not one, not two, but in every single case, the confrontational sentence opened with the iconic battle-cry: "Hey bud."That's just astonishing, really. I have nothing to say; it's weirdly universal. I blame dads.

I'll answer the homophobia one first, partially because I don't fully understand it and refuse to speculate. In short: it's okay that guys are good-looking, guys. It's okay to acknowledge that fact as true, and it doesn't make you gay. Furthermore, even if you are gay, that's not a bad thing; it's just a preference. It's like if I made fun of you for preferring waffles over pancakes. I don't really know who told you being "gay" or "effeminate" or whatever was bad, although I'm just gonna hazard a guess and assume it was your dad. Don't take this too badly, but your dad is, one way or another, an exceptionally experienced idiot. He grew up in a culture that no longer exists and, depending on where he came from, was probably wrong by our standards to start with. You're an adult now, which means that Daddy can't actually be held accountable for you anymore.

The more elaborate answer is to the boyfriend situation because there are a lot, and I do mean a lot of things that are totally and frighteningly wrong with it. Everything that follows is strictly my opinion, and is likely to make me swear a great deal, because I'm fed up with it. Behold my rainbow chariot of unjustified fury.

First up is the territorial response. Succinctly: no. Your girlfriend is only "yours" in the grammatical sense that you're also "hers," and is not a case of your expensive figurines that I'm trying to smuggle out of the country. I'm not a particularly fiery social justice warrior, but for God's sake, guys, women aren't objects of possession that we compete for. We've been over this. C'mon.

Second is related to First, and gets invited to all of First's parties: the competition issue. I'm not competing with you. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I'll just enumerate a few for you. The first one is strictly arrogance, but it works: if relationships worked the way you're implying, you would... lose. You'd fuckin' lose, at least half the time. Say I'm perfectly average in terms of "attractiveness," and you are equally average. This means, every time we meet, your girlfriend has a 50/50 shot at just suddenly, magnetically becoming my girlfriend. This is also true for every other person and their girlfriend.

So, according to the math fueled by your insane cocktail of testosterone and father-related insecurities, if I'm a "rather good-looking gentleman, I dare say," I should be walking around with eight or nine girlfriends I've unintentionally Coulomb's Law'd off other people. You know where that type of thing happens? It happens in a lot of pop songs, which are overwhelmingly written by men.

Third is Second's weird cousin, who only gets invited to the party out of politeness: how you think relationships work in general. If you think I'm gonna walk by with my Ray-Bans over my big green eyes and bait your girlfriend away with a nice piece of salmon, precisely what the hell are you doing dating that person to start with? In the crude, ugly, barbaric "choice" system, she seems to have "chosen" you at least once, for which she probably had some sort of reason. How about a little trust in the integrity of your (notably) better half there, guys?

Fourth is something that First through Third have heard about, but don't really know, yknow? It has to do with confidence and self-respect. It's also sensitive, so try not to write me any death threats. If I'm so intimidating to you, with my big scary "brain" and my obviously gay haircut, why don't you just... get better? Not to put too fine a point on it, guys, but your issue seems to stem not from me doing something wrong, but the fact that I'm doing something right that you're notably not doing. A lot of men I talk to have fairly ridiculous standards for how their girlfriends look (don't even get me started on that crock of shit), and themselves walk around in their plain white T-shirt they've worn three days in a row and shower "like, sometimes." Scared of competition? Yeah, I probably would be too, to be really honest. Scared of your girlfriend's interest being drawn elsewhere? That's extremely stupid, but I have a solution for you anyway: be interesting to her. Wash your fuckin' face and go out with her to a movie or something else she likes. It's not a terribly complicated equation, if you have a brain not entirely composed of raw steak.

My brain is only 85% raw steak, and look how I'm doing. It's easy, guys.

Nice Round Five is Fourth's more genial brother, and this one's on boyfriends and girlfriends both: Manners. Etiquette. Decorum. Politeness. Civility. There are incredibly too many ways to say it in English, but the core concept is preserved. Just be decent to people. There's no call threatening a stranger on any grounds, and certainly not over something as petty as what I'm guilty of. Here's how this interaction went with one of my single friends:

Author: Effervescent Bubbly Kindness™!
Friend: Nah, that makes me uncomfortable.
Author: Oh, shit! I shall desist.
Friend: Cool.

And then we continued our friendship unabated. Nobody got stabbed or bludgeoned. No one is upset. Do you know why? Because that person had enough basic-ass respect for me as a human being to inform me she found something I'd done objectionable. I then had enough basic-ass respect for her as a human being to knock it off, and both of us had enough basic-ass respect to still like each other afterward. We're adult humans equipped with the faculty of speech, so those of you who are still in the sandbox kicking other chimpanzees' shins for their blatant attempts to co-exist with you are welcome to jump right the fuck back into the primordial jelly where you belong.

TL;DR Nah, read it, and think about it, and then tell me if I'm wrong. Or if I'm right. I don't care, because I'm craaaaaazy! (manic cackle)

P.S. I realized this is rambling and incoherent, even by my standards. Accept my concise, contrite apology or, alternatively, see the above articulation of the famous thesis "I'm craaaaaazy!"

P.P.S. One more thing I forgot! Feel free to show this to anybody you want; I don't have some policy labeled "ONLY YOU MAY READ THIS GRRR!" I also have no way of knowing if you do or not, so there's peace of mind for everybody C:

Interstellar, Foresight, and the Fear of Falling

I've noticed a common underlying thread to a lot of media in these last few years, and it's recently become even more insistent. It's especially prevalent in the film and video gaming industries, but pervades in at least some area of almost all American media I encounter.

I'm referring to the trope/meme of Mankind's Last Hope; the outlaws have killed the sheriff and started collecting tithes, the skies darken with alien landing craft, Earth's natural resources careen toward total depletion, and rumors abound that Blockbuster is about to re-open. These must surely be the end times, and the only question is whether civilization bleeds slowly out through thousands of tiny needle-wounds, sliding ever so slowly down into mud-soaked, unremembered oblivion or implodes catastrophically in a spectacular vortex of blazing fire and blood-soaked violence. Things are, it could be said, Very Very Bad.

But wait! What's this? A hero appears before us, his gaze piercing and his jawline unmistakably sculpturesque even through his just-rugged-enough stubble. He is one, only one, armed only with his personalized pearl-inlaid revolvers (which can also take the form of swords, magic rings, a set of launch codes, and the common cold) and a steely-eyed will to survive. There is an opportunity, a single shot-in-the-dark chance, and using his skill, resourcefulness, and sheer aftershave-scented animal magnetism, this single point of light will optionally assemble a team of qualified experts to stand against the encroaching darkness.

Their window of opportunity is tiny, and the odds are astronomically against them. Their mission is arguably impossible and certainly suicidal, and there is only one mission; all others have been attempted. And failed. And everyone involved was killed. Especially the characters you liked. It all comes down to this one-in-a-million, trial run-less, desperate trump card play. Succeed, and we might make it. Fail, and we won't be around to worry about it.

Examples of this trope abound, so I'll just list a few that come to mind. The Mass Effect saga focuses on Commander Shepard's suicide mission to defeat the Reapers (sentient machines who destroy all organic life every so often to start over from scratch. Yes, really.). The film Sunshine is about Earth's last-ditch attempt to give a dying Sun a jump-start with a colossal bomb of sorts. Even The Lord of the Rings exhibits this pattern to a certain degree, with the Fellowship's desperately-outnumbered race against time to deliver the One Ring to Orodruin before Sauron can gather enough power to fully freak out and destroy the Free Peoples entirely. More recently, films like Interstellar and a very similar movie whose name escapes me follow a few desperate adventurers on a journey to find humanity a new home (since Earth is so unbelievably, unsalvageably borked).*

These sorts of stories, when well-written, fire my imagination a great deal, and they're undoubtedly gripping to watch. Logic dictates that the heroes lose, but emotional investment (which you have, if the story is well-presented) insists that they absolutely must win, and the conflict between the two halves of your mind only serves to make the conflict on the page or screen all the more sensational. 

I always wonder, however, about a single nagging and extremely annoying question: how in God's name did we end up in such a fix? I know the world outside can seem grim at times, but one minute we forget to tip the waiters and the next minute we're serving them up as the entrée? 

It's the cultural manifestation of an increasingly common thought pattern, I think, and it's one that worries me a great deal. These sorts of stories, as a generality, represent the logical extreme of an assumption that people are not necessarily actively evil, but naturally passive. There's a good deal of evidence in support of this theory, actually, and a great deal of psychology focuses on something called the bystander effect. Especially in crowds, people very frequently become paralyzed by the assumption that Somebody will surely do something soon. Any given individual isn't important enough, or strong enough, or well-groomed enough to actually act, but we're always sure the proper authority or plainclothes hero will be along shortly enough. And so we stand, and Kitty Genovese gets stabbed in front of 38 witnesses.

A related but separate idea is the basis for the Milgram experiment. In general terms, participants were ordered to perform a task that conflicted with their conscience and caused pain to another person (delivering electrical shocks by way of a button, for example). This experiment found that people have a surprisingly high threshold for the unethical, as long as an authority figure told them to do it. Put another way, people are perfectly willing to do bad things as long as there's some ethereal Them for us to put the blame on. "Nah, I was just following orders!"

Both of these effects, and an increasing public awareness of them (along with a host of other things that piss me off extremely, likely to be discussed in the future), contribute to what I've decided is called socially-mediated disassociation of ethical agency. Now, in actual, non-pretentious English, I'd call it the Ethical Shrug Effect, a slightly-less-debased form of nihilism. People (particularly young people, from what I've detected) arrive at some sort of ethical fork in the allegorical road. The young mind in question can't see all the way down both forks, and insists they need more information or input to make an informed, sound, and generally "good" choice. 

The next realization is that we can't have ALL the necessary information about the variables involved in making a decision, because (as I wrote a while back, actually) life is almost infinite in its complexity.  Since we can't have all the information required, we therefore can't make a good choice. Therefore, we don't make a choice at all, because we have an annoying tendency to be looking for better options at all times (another topic). Because we made no decision, we become the bystanders in our own lives, standing and spectating as we drift indifferently through life. We never vocalize our opinion about dinner with friends, so we end up getting generic Mexican food every single time. Aware of our meekness, we then go and talk about the bystander effect with our other friends, or on Reddit, or, say, on a blog.

We never go up to that pretty girl or the handsome guy in class, because we're afraid of that unknown potential for rejection that we've all been told is waiting. He or she's way out of our "league," and so on. We walk timidly by the house echoing with sounds of domestic abuse because it's not our problem, and therefore not our place to do anything. Someone will help, we figure, so we squash the instinctive impulse to do it ourselves. On some grander scale, maybe we as a species do run our planet out of every natural resource because we're too short-sighted to see the danger and too meek to object to those in power if we do. 

I, however, have news for you, people of the world. These are all possibilities, it's true, possible outcomes in the grand tarot of life. Unpleasant possibilities, nothing we would wish for, but it's essentially down to chance, right?

Wrong. Life is so infinitely complicated as to be random to our perception in some ways, and the sheer unpredictable chaos of it all can be overwhelming. In the voluminous morass of seemingly random red smudges, however, there are clearly-defined line segments, collimated bars of order so hot they're blue, continuously advancing rays of choice and will. One of those bright blue stars burning through the chaos, dear reader, is you.

Before this goes any longer, I'm going to truncate for the sake of brevity, and boil it all down to a single word of advice. From all my life experiences (and they are many and varied), all the peaks and troughs, there's one single word of advice I wish to hell someone had given me. So if you're reading this, and no one has told you this yet, or you're just in need of a reminder:

Choose. Make a choice, any choice. Hell, it can be the wrong choice, and some of them will be. It is infinitely better to explain what went wrong while you tried to do right than explain why you did nothing in the face of wrongness.

TL;DR Bad things happen, but you can choose good. The only way to become a virtuoso is the brave humility to mess up the scales.

Adam and Eve

So for anybody who's unaware of the story, it goes like this: God woke up one day and decided He was awesome, so he made a little dude in his image and called this little dude Adam. Being an empathetic sort of divine energy mass, God realized little Adam looked lonely and decided to tear out one of Adam's ribs to make a little lady friend for him, and named her Eve. Realizing His living dolls needed a house to play in, He then created a paradise on Earth for them to live in, called Eden.

This was ravishing, as far as God and the two newcomers were concerned. Unfortunately, God had also made a snake at some point, who may have been an emissary of Satan, or the Big Ugly himself, and in either case was one of those individuals you invite to your work party even if you don't want him there, because otherwise he will be quite put out.

The garden of Eden also had a tree within it, which carried fruit containing knowledge (of some variety; people get twisted about this part a lot). Adam and Eve were told to "not bloody well eat that," so of course they decided to listen to the mysterious snake in their garden and eat it anyway. When He found out his creations had realized they were naked and invented fashion, He was reportedly quite peeved and cast them out of the garden, making them mortal and cursing them to live in the world and Original Sin and yadda yadda.

So, if you take this story literally (which you shouldn't, because that would be stupid, but we'll get to that), people take issue with several points. First of all, man being created in God's image is a problem for a lot of people. Additionally, the idea of women being created out of men (and, implicitly, secondary/inferior) gets many people in a twizzy, and the idea of original sin pisses off pretty much everybody.

Before I really start, I want to point out that the entire argument over this story is pretty much moot, because it's in the book of Genesis, which is in the Bible, which is a religious scripture, and is therefore a giant mass of allegory written by people inspired by a brush with the divine but informed by the sociological and cosmological context of an ancient society. That, however, is a long sentence with lots of words, and we don't like them round here.

The first point!

The idea of the Imago Dei (humans being modeled after the divine) is irritating to people for a few reasons. Some take the idea to mean that we're modeled after a sublime being and should therefore be rather more sublime ourselves, and are frustrated with our flawed species. Others take this to mean that we are inherently subservient to that sublime being, and nothing gets people angry quicker than saying there might be something more interesting than they are. Indeed, the idea of being "made" at all has come under a lot of fire, because of the "creation vs. evolution debate."

I won't talk about this at great length, because the idea of debating it bores me, to be totally honest. I'll just frame my opinion in two points for you.

1. I don't think we interpreted the "made in His image" part quite right. I think what was meant was: "we were made by the divine, of the divine." Since the entity in question is divine, I doubt we look much at all like it, and indeed I doubt it "looks" like anything as we'd understand it.

2. The debate over whether creationism or evolution is the right theory has never ceased to amaze me. It seems to me that yeah, everything did have a single origin; it was probably the Big Bang, we think. For people who think this should disprove the existence of God, or whatever point they have, I have a point. What specifically you believe in actually has no bearing on this, now that I think of it. Does anybody (sane) honestly believe that, through our mortal intelligence and scientific apparatus, looking at the workings of the infinitely vast and complex universe around us, we could ever possibly figure it out? 

The second issue!

It bothers people that, in this allegory, women seem to have been created strictly for a man's companionship, and were made out of him, implying fundamental subservience. That's pretty understandable; I think all genders are equal and ought to be treated that way, and this binarization in the creation myth bugs me a little too. I think, however, we could alleviate this by thinking about it a little more.

Firstly, for humor's sake, remember that Adam was made out of some scraped-together dust to have "dominion over the Earth," which at that point basically made him God's appointed cat-sitter/gardener. If ever anybody (presumably male) starts to get uppity with this story as part of his argument, just toss him that one.

Secondly (and more seriously) I think it bears keeping in mind that, before eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve didn't have much of a sense of the world around them. They weren't even aware that they were naked, to give you an idea of the state these folks were in. Realizing this, then, I have to conclude that Adam and Eve couldn't even have known gender existed, and therefore (because gender is largely a matter of perception), it didn't. We look at this story in terms of our established gender binary, which is the source of our anger and angst over the topic. However, it bears keeping in mind that this binary is a culturally-mediated phenomenon, and there's nothing inherently binary about the nature of things. To cut this short before I ramble, I'm going to compare culture to quantum mechanics (because obviously). We perceive things to be binary: white and black, male and female, yes and no, whatever. The universe, however, is actually made out of things that defy this binary perception; we named them "positively" and "negatively" charged, in keeping with our perceived binary structure, and then we found out there were neutrons and oops.

The third problem!

People of all denominations get upset by the idea of original sin; those who believe it feel variously doomed, hopeless, and unworthy, and those who don't assert that it's a tool to make people feel inferior to keep them in line. I thought about this one for a long time, and came to a few points that change the nature of the issue.

For the first one, stick with me in the Christian tradition for a second. Adam and Eve, as with all other things, are actors in a great divine scheme of Stuff. They were made from dust by God, and to dust and God they inevitably return. In the Christian idea, God is a funny being; He simultaneously knows everything that will happen but does not void the principle of free will. Knowing this, then, He made Adam, Eve, the tree, and the snake, and caused them all to come together. Given that God knew what the result would be and still chose to combine all these ingredients in His Great Big Chemistry Set, I have to come to the following conclusion: He knew, and humans eating the fruit (that is, allegorically becoming self-aware and knowledgeable actors) was what He planned.

Furthermore, the "punishment" for their "transgression" was to be sent out into the Earth we're all familiar with, away from the unique intermediary/semi-divine plane that was Eden. This was enacted in response to their new status as beings equipped with knowledge that they themselves had chosen to acquire, and they were left to their own devices on Earth.

Well, now, hold on a minute, what the hell?

Adam and Eve were ostensibly created to have dominion over Earth, and that's where they wound up, freely roaming and founding the great family that is humanity. They were also supposedly created in the image of God, a being of infinite knowledge, and they wound up with great knowledge of their own.

Finally, Adam and Eve were "punished" to wander the Earth for the duration of their natural lifespan, ending with death, at which point they would return to the transcendent state. I want you to do something for me now, dear reader; go outside your house, or apartment, or dormitory, or wherever you live. Lift your gaze away from the pavement and the bustle, and look up at the sky, at the treeline, at the ocean, whatever you can see. Feel the wind, hear the birds sing, smell the falafel frying, whatever, and think about anything you want, using that miraculous instrument that is your brain.

Adam and Eve (those lovely metaphors again) were "punished" by being placed into this state.

Not a very harsh sentence, in my book.

TL;DR It's long as hell, I dunno. Religion is metaphor, God is you, me, everyone we know, and everything we don't, humanity is in a good spot.

The Frog

Brace yourselves, everybody, this one's gonna be random.

So if you have a frog and drop him in really cold water, he immediately goes "OI WOT" and jumps immediately back out, as he finds the freezing water to be most disagreeable. Replace the cold water with some near boiling, and he will issue the same proclamation and leap out almost instantly. In either of these extreme situations, the frog is instinctively aware that, if he remains, the water will kill him.

People are like this too; we have a highly-evolved intuitive sense for danger. That's the human advantage in evolution, and the key to why our seemingly physically underwhelming species has lasted so long. We may not outrun the lion, but we're aware of the signs that lions are near, and to a certain extent we have an extra, inexplicable sense for danger. To call it the sixth sense is inaccurate (we have far more than five senses), but the term serves to describe the phenomenon. I don't need to give you examples of this because everyone has experienced the sensation; nothing is outwardly wrong, but you just get a feeling.

In this way, humans share an animal's sense for painful situations, as well as an anticipatory ability to avoid them based on their precursory signs. That's fine. Consider, however, a different scenario.

If you drop the same intrepid little amphibian into a pleasantly warm pot of water, he won't react to it at all, and think something like "ah yiss, dis is niiiiice." That's his natural temperature, after all, and even we mighty humans can relate to the enjoyment of mucking about in warm water. So, he (and we) will swim around aimlessly and enjoy the experience.

Here's the problem: what if you turn the temperature up? Not a lot all at once, mind, but incrementally, a little at a time.

This is a strange paradox. Once the frog gets used to the starting temperature of the water, a little additional heat just feels like the pleasant warmth from earlier. He adjusts again, more heat feels nice again. This can continue for a while, until the temperature gets to the point of fatality, at which point the frog will again think "ahh, pleasant warmth" and, as they say, croak, having never realized how hot it was getting.

"What a foolhardy amphibian, to not notice he's being boiled!" we mighty humans proclaim. "I would surely get out of the water."

Well, that's the issue, isn't it? We humans are even more adaptable than frogs as far as temperature is concerned, having our own internal mechanisms to adjust our bodily function rather than being totally subject to the whim of the environment as cold-blooded creatures are.

Getting used to a temperature is easy, and you can motor along through life at basically any temperature. Spikes in temperature (dangerous situations) are obvious and can be managed; we're smart, generally, and we have fair bit of knowledge about how to not die. Consider, however, the frog who never notices the temperature slowly rising around him because he's so acclimated to it. When you suddenly feel something boiling up inside you and the temperature is spiking, stop and ask yourself:

"What temperature have I been at?"

TL;DR Being used to something =/= it being a healthy state.

P.S. I came to this realization after burning myself in the shower. Just in case someone thought I was being insightful or something :P