The lows are low, but the highs are home
Month
vael:
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… Though I have reason to believe that, in fact, voting doesn’t even matter; but that’s nothing provable and a matter aside from this.
Apparently, not so, if the politician on a recent Extra Credits episode is to be believed. For those who’d rather not watch the video, he notes that a lot of ridings in the US elections are very, very close and that a concerted effort could easily change the results.
Regarding the selfish nature. You will find as much evidence for my belief as you will to the contrary. My belief is typical with “objectivists” that understand how selfish us sentient creatures are. It’s my belief that life itself thrives: that it is hard to eradicate life completely once it exists. I believe this relates back to our internal mindset to look out for ourselves, and just as pigs do, we can be very social about it. We are social. Societies are the only reason we’re having this conversation. We crave social attention, but it is to fill our own need. I don’t believe this is erasable from the gene of life, but I believe that as a society, we should be doing more to discourage biases and to employ logic and efficiency to as many aspects of our lives as we can. I’m not hoping for Vulcans, I’m hoping for enlightened individuals who can have conversations just like you and I are having now.
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I realize that I’m not anything like an expert just because the topic has come up in a few of my classes (most notably in my cognitive psychology class… go figure), but your absolute certainty pains me. You’re showing your own bias towards believing in “the selfish gene.” I can’t say whether you’re right or wrong, but I don’t feel like you speak from the position of authority that your tone implies. I’m not saying you shouldn’t make strong statements - I’m saying you shouldn’t make them without compelling evidence. With only weak evidence, or in the face of a lot of contrary evidence, you should only make a weak claim.
Aside from that, I hope you can see the trouble with writing from a biased point of view and then claiming bias should be discouraged.
The reason utopianism changed from “the world” to “yourself” is because it was jejune - childishly naive, even arrogant - to believe that we could just simply “better the world”. Well, Hitler thought he was bettering the world. We could agree that picking up trash along the highways and volunteering at soup kitchens is a good thing, but there is no way I could be attempting to posit this “belief system” as a genuine belief system and claim some ways that would objectively be better for the world. It is a subjective matter, but in the newest revision of utopianism’s article, it’s noted that one should attempt to be a positive force in all that they do. Push the world forward. A utopian villain would not be utopian, and yet again, here I am trying to define what a villain would be. Am I a villain for believing that I should ignore the world and let the virus cure itself, that I should just strive to have this “utopia” of ignorance and feel I did a good thing? I don’t know.
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I’m of the opinion that being a “better person” implies making things around you better on some small scale. At a bare minimum, improving the lives of the people closest to you. When you can, do the same for random strangers (or at least don’t be a miserable jerk, even if there are no consequences). There’s much more you can do, but at least you can do that. But I suppose “improving yourself” doesn’t always mean “being a better person.” I think it’s important to do both, though. That’s my own interpretation, anyway.
Ok, so this Kickstarter ends in five hours and most people will have to wait an unknown amount of time to get their hands on a unit after today. But the video should still be available in the future, to blow the minds of future generations.
Here is what you’ll witness in their pitch video: a Pac-man controller built out of pencil lead on a piece of paper, DDR played using buckets of water, piano playing with bananas, typing with alphaghetti…
This Kickstarter is sort of a sweet spot makes it worth posting for me, because the price is really reasonable and the results are unarguably impressive. It brings to mind the Kickstarter for Twine, except that the minimum price isn't one hundred dollars. Granted, Twine seems awesome, except that it costs more to get anything useful done with it, and what it can do won’t blow anyone’s mind. This is Arduino with all the parts included - plug-and-play electronics hacking. That makes me really excited, because I’ve got lots of stuff I’d like to make, but I don’t yet have the skills.
For example: Sacha Chua, who first came on my radar as someone who blogs about Emacs, blogged late last year about a homemade USB foot pedal. Combined with AutoHotKey, that provides for a lot of possibilities - you could do pretty much anything with a tap of your foot. Thing is, I don’t know how I would get started building such a thing.
MaKey MaKey would let me build a foot pedal out of anything I have lying around the house. With more potential buttons, because my understanding is that you can use a configuration file to change what keys it will send. That’s awesome, and you will never convince me otherwise.
You seem to use the word “ignorant” as a shield, Matt. “Someone better explain it to me, because otherwise, geez louise, I’ll never learn and forever be ignorant. NotmyfaultI’mjustignorant.”
So, to answer: How can an ignorant person do the right thing? Educate yourself. Become LESS ignorant. While the Internet is full of rants and it can be hard to take someone’s opinion seriously when it’s followed by “*^@^&!^%@”, there are resources besides the Internet that are easily available.
Go to the Ottawa Public Library website and type in “transsexual” in the search bar (http://ottawa.bibliocommons.com). There are 63 items that appear and all of them are about either stories of trans* individuals or factual books about trans* people in our world.Hell, I’ll lend you a book. It’s called “Luna” and it’s by Julie Anne Peters. It’s about a girl and her biologically male sister.
There are people out there explaining it in a “relatively reasonable” manner. You just have to go listen to them. You can’t just sit back and complain about people not taking the time to explain things when you are not taking the time and effort to understand. And you should take the time to understand. It’s IMPORTANT.
Accidentally pressuring a game character to change her portrayed gender doesn’t make you a “bad person”. Especially since it seems like there’s some debate (judging by the comments) about whether the author’s right on that aspect. But if you end up never taking the chance to learn about the many other facets of sexuality and identity that are out there, you may continue to pass through life with a biased vision of “everyone I see is hetero and as born at birth except when proven otherwise”.
And that may, in the end, really hurt someone close to you. I guess, when that happens, you can always say, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I just don’t think that way.”
But…this says that you didn’t even acknowledge the possibility they could be different from you.
A lack of education about the subject sends a couple messages:
a) you don’t care
b) they’re not important enough to care about
So, go to the library and get yourself a book.
blah blah blah click above to read original
The fact that I used ignorant in at least three different ways in the original post probably makes it hard to keep track of what I was trying to say. Reflects poorly on me as a writer, too, but anyway. Mostly I was refering to different degrees of not-knowing. To my mind, the three different uses are: knowing nothing at all, not knowing enough, and knowing only as much as one can know without experiencing something first-hand. The third is the most problematic, because it’s as knowledgeable as most people can get - but it may still cause a lot of unintentional problems. I just feel like there’s probably some portion that’s always going to be out of the realm of my understanding, no matter how much I may learn.
An illustrative example: I very rarely have “feelings” as such, and that’s really hard for me to completely wrap my head around. Playing a fun video game/reading a good book/etc. almost always feels the same, to me, as watching a sad scene in a movie. I still have emotions, mind you, because I know from experience that I behave angrily, happily, etc. I just don’t have (m)any cues to tell me what emotional state I’m in. Broadly speaking, anyway, most of the time I have to think back and make explicit judgements on my emotions instead of just “feeling” them. I’ve asked a few people, and this doesn’t seem to be the case for them, so it’s probably not just me subscribing to poetic hyperbole about what emotions should be like.
You can read the sentence “I don’t feel my emotions about 90% of the time” as much as you like. You can think about what might follow from that, maybe try to imagine it. That’s what I’ve done thus far as I read the article and the original comments (and a few other things in the past). But it’s actually pretty hard for me to even sort out what, exactly, my own experience even is - I’ve needed other people to tell me in the past that I was clearly angry, jealous, and so on. Figuring out what exactly I have, and what exactly I lack, is hard because I don’t know how else life could be. It’s hard to keep track of at times, and often I’m too busy thinking about other things to be consciously aware of how I’m feeling.
I’m trying to explain this, really, insofar as I understand it and in the clearest way that I can. Hopefully it helps you, the “feelings” endowed reader, imagine what it could be like. I imagine this is the case for most trans people, as well. But I’m not convinced many people can truly, completely understand either of these things - grok them - without experiencing them. Perhaps some extraordinary people have the emotional/social depth to grok the concept from a description in text. But I don’t consider myself one of those people, and so I feel like there will always be something I don’t quite get about gender and sexuality issues. I’d certainly rather understand to my maximum capacity (perhaps some 60-80% of grokking) than understand nothing at all. I’m just worried that the remaining percentage will lead to the majority of well-intended mistakes, each of which would likely be an independent learning experience. So that’s what I was really wondering about - without living that life myself, even knowing a lot of things second-hand, I just might not know when I’ve done something wrong.
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Truth be told, I’m legitimately upset by the idea of having done the wrong thing in Persona 4. As in, it bothers me to imagine trying to help someone I care about but actually just subtly hurting them. One of the problems is mine - that I didn’t know enough to think that there was a different way to read the situation. The other is just the limited interaction you’re allowed in the game, mostly along the lines of “choose Option A, B, or C” where one of the options is always “right” according to the game. To even advance your relationship with Naoto, you pretty much have to tell the game what it wants to hear. Unlike with actual people, you can’t ask a video game character what they want. You have to impose more of yourself on the situation, unless you’re aiming for maximum gameplay benefit.
As far as explaining things to me, what I had in mind in terms of was something like Dys4ia. It's a game (of sorts) by a transgendered woman who goes by Anna Anthropy, which covers the events around her decision to undergo hormone therapy. I feel like it was a great way for Anna Anthropy to tell her story. It’s quick to play and a few of the scenes are more striking, to me, than words alone would have been. I get the idea, a little bit more than I did before. And I wish that all the effort that goes into arguing with people on the internet could be turned into something more useful, like Dys4ia. It just seems like a waste of everyone’s time for knowledgeable folks to respond in anger and start a futile cycle of retaliation, instead of explaining to people how/why they have the wrong idea. Far be it for me to tell people they can’t be upset, obviously, but it makes me a little bit sad to see people getting themselves worked up like this. It just begs for them to be upset again by the exact same people, saying the exact same things, the next time the discussion comes up.
Anyway, I’d be happy to read books and inch my way closer to the limit of my understanding (if there is one). Truth be told, I have literally never in my life independently thought “I should find a book about this topic.” For better or for worse, I’m a child of the internet age. It works pretty well for the topics I consume the most information on - there’s very few good books about the things that flow through my RSS reader on a daily basis. Seems I was led astray in this case, because the quality of discourse in my corner of the online world isn’t that great. Not surprising, since it’s probably full of folks like myself. Scary to consider how much we can hear what we want to hear, these days. Best not to stare into that abyss for too long, lest it stare back and undermine some of the more basic beliefs in your beautiful foundationalist inverted-pyramid (or otherwise ruin your favourite epistemic visualization).
[click for a response from a concerned friend and take two of this whole idea]
Fortunately for me, I’m pretty much your typically privileged, white, middle-class, heterosexual male. I try to keep an open mind, though, especially after moving to Ottawa where diversity is the norm. At least, when I realize there’s something I have a limited point of view on - something easier said than done. Depression, perfectionism, and a handful of similar mental health issues are about the only things I can really understand. One thing I have a lot of trouble with wrapping my head around is gender and sexuality issues, because being a straight man makes me about as far removed from them as you can get. Part of the problem is the us-vs-them mentality that seems so prevalent among people who have to deal with these issues first-hand. While I can’t claim to be extensively educated on the subject, it does happen that a couple times per year I run into a piece like the linked article.
The formula seems fairly predictable: the author stands alone against the tides of unforgivable ignorance and spits vitriol at those of us who have the misfortune of being - and I think this is important - more or less incapable of understanding their position. There’s just no way for me to conceptualize being of a different sexual orientation or gender than I am. What I do understand is being hurt, and having a desire to lash out at injustice, and taking one’s frustration out on innocent bystanders. And that’s what I always seem to see, and it kind of sucks, because I don’t think it makes things better for anyone. It keeps the injured parties in a cycle of rumination and anger, and it drives away people like myself who would really like to hear their stories and try to understand just a little bit more.
If you read the article, take a moment to read through the comment thread. It’s not horrifically long, actually. You don’t need to read a whole lot - just enough to see NonsyM (the original author) only make aggressive/negative comments and say things like “it is not my job to explain to you why this is a problem”. I think that last comment is actually the opposite of the case - it seems to me that the whole reason that trans characters are treated the way they are in Atlus games is because no one on the team knows it’s an issue. They’re ignorant of their ignorance. If no explains to them that, say, their treatment of Erica and Naoto is harmful, why would they stop? Obviously making a minority the butt of a joke is wrong, but with those two characters, the transgression is more subtle.
From my point of view at the time that I played Persona 4, the thought of Naoto as a transgendered character never entered my mind. I didn’t consider it because it wasn’t part of my view of the world. I saw Naoto as a girl who didn’t want to be a woman because of the way it lead people to treat her - the only motivation for presenting herself as a man was to get the respect she deserved. If she could get that respect as a woman and be more comfortable with herself, all would be well. So my take on the romantic path with her was a familiar sort of white knight role - help her gain confidence and overcome what I perceived as insecurities over being a woman. So the comment that frames the final scene with Naoto as “peer-pressuring those you love into changing their gender presentation to better suit your sexual preferences" comes as a complete surprise to me - I thought I was doing the right thing.
I really don’t think that makes me a bad person. Now that it’s been suggested, I can understand a reading of Naoto as a transgendered character. If I had looked at the character in that way, I would have made a different choice. But this is an argument based on a handful of lines of dialogue, and not the rich discussion you would have with a real human being. You have a limited number of dialogue options with Naoto, and they’re offered to you by the game’s writers. In real life, you could suggest that someone try to work out whether they’re a woman who is uncomfortable with themselves or a man who is stuck in a woman’s body. Rather than having to guess or impose your own desires on them, as you have no choice but to do with Naoto, you could follow their lead. At a guess, I would imagine that the developers are people like me - people who can’t help but see Naoto as a woman made uncomfortable by society, and don’t necessarily think a discussion about their gender is necessary.
Ignorant folk like me won’t know any better unless someone can explain it to us in a relatively reasonable manner, and saying "you have nothing to contribute to this discussion and I will not educate you” doesn’t help anyone. If the people with first-hand experience are too fed up to enlighten the rest of us, how can we possibly do the right thing? You can kinda sorta enlighten yourself if you extrapolate through the profanity and the other anti-pleasantries that arise in internet debates, but it shouldn’t be so hard. The easiest, and probably only, way for us to really understand is for someone to swallow their frustration and teach us.
Leaving people to wallow in their ignorance only perpetuates the problem. It means someone else will probably have to put up with them the next time they feel entitled to share their opinion. You can’t make ignorance go away by avoiding it; greater education is the only permanent solution.