Social Vulnerabilities, Columbine

Given the recurring threat of shootings (in schools and elsewhere), I figured reading up about Columbine might give me more insight into what causes it.

I hesitate to give an authoritative answer, especially because it looks like at least one of the shooters (Eric Harris) really was a psychopath. At least, most of the experts reviewing the case seemed to think so.

That's something I don't think any of has a firm grasp on, in that the thought processes are so different. I can make educated guesses, based on my fascination with human nature, into the underlying reasons for most people's behavior. Nothing I'd use in a professional manner (i.e. I don't go around diagnosing people, or claiming I know how to treat them, or anything like that)... it's more taking the whole concept of "there but for the grace of God, go I" to an extreme. I figure out what would make me think a certain action is justified, or right - since most people think they are the heroes of their own stories, and therefore don't like to think of themselves as knowingly doing wrong - and can generally guess at the justifications we give ourselves for our behavior.

Psychopaths throw that off, though. Eric Harris at times didn't consider himself the hero in his own story, so in some ways there's a bit less of that self-deception, maybe? A cold calculation of what's in his interest where most people fudge their reasons and pretend they're really doing it for everyone's benefit.

Plus, well, there's that genuine willingness to hurt people, where (as I talked before, regarding the book On Killing) it takes most people more work to cross that line.

Anyways, that's something better left to the professionals, though I do like knowing what sorts of things to look for irl, since we all have probably encountered at least one. (They're not necessarily all violent, and I think there was a recent book talking about the "sociopath next door". And although sociopaths are not psychopaths, and apparently aren't even a medical diagnosis, it captures the notion that people on the anti-social spectrum are everywhere.)

Instead, I wanted to talk more about the underlying social vulnerabilities...

That is, mass shootings are a complex topic in which there is plenty of blame to go around. I do prefer keeping most of it on the person responsible for the shooting, as they could have chosen to react to whatever it is differently, but these shootings take place in a larger context. And it's worth considering that larger context, at times.

The author of Columbine said the following about these shooters:

"Most are desperate boys yearning to salve a deep wound. Insignificance. Worthlessness. Social invisibility. This boy has dreamed and prayed, for so long, of someone loving him, noticing him, above all respecting him. Not that he deserves it. He sure doesn't respect himself."

You could also describe that as frustration, frustration at the inability to become who we want to be. Frustration at a system that is uncaring, that doesn't value the potential we all have inside.

What is it about our system that leaves so many people frustrated and lonely? Wondering whether their existence even matters? And can't we do better?

I've heard all sorts of explanations and guesses for why someone thinks killing a bunch of other people is acceptable, from video games to music to atheism to whatever.

To me, though, this feels like the truest answer. That too many people feel as though 'the system' is a massive machine that doesn't care at all about you, specifically. You're just a cog in the wheel, and easily replaceable, so you're not even a very important cog at that. And everyone else appears to be perfectly fine with being cogs (although that's really not true. Everyone seems to struggle with this in their own way, though most 'normal' people find some way of accepting it well enough to make a living).

I think that also is why medieval fantasies are so appealing, and feudal society. Because we generally fantasize that we're nobles or knights or something, not the (far too many) peasants... and feudal society had relationships. You served as a vassal to someone higher up the hierarchy, someone you knew on a personal level and who (if they were a good liege) took care of you, in turn. It's more personal than the bureaucratic red tape of today, and people kind of miss that.

I think that's also why the military does so well with recruits from the lower socio-economic classes. NCOs generally take care of their soldiers on a personal level you don't see much of anywhere else. They often act like a cruder, tougher mother or father figure, tbh.

I think that's also why the 'Good Ol' Boy' network doesn't seem like such a bad thing to those who fit in. To them, it's not about subverting the system by promoting their buddies - and maybe even covering up for their buddies. It's just networking, building that personal connection with other people in positions of influence. (The real problem is that people tend to feel comfortable with and make friends with people like themselves, so when all the people in positions of influence were of a specific type - like, say, white men - their network tended to be composed solely of people like themselves... and so that personal network was rather exclusionary, giving them an advantage that wasn't accessible to people who didn't fit the mold.)

If such a network was truly open to all, if we could rely on people to find and develop talent even when it doesn't look exactly like them, maybe it wouldn't be so bad. But that takes a lot of self-awareness and effort that many people don't bother with. They can't really explain why they just 'click' with one person and not another, but they do... and so they'll give internships to that up-and-coming young guy who reminds them of themselves back in college, or decide to take a chance on an inexperienced young man, and dismiss everyone else as somehow not having it what it takes, or not being as talented, when it's entirely possible that it's just that they're somehow different and don't 'click' as well.

Vulnerabilities, Exploitation, Columbine, and Various Ramblings

I have some vague ideas on vulnerabilities (in the status quo), how the underlying vulnerability can feed a variety of different exploits (i.e. everyone and their mother has their own solution to the perceived problem), the complexities of fixing something when people are... well...

People. Like the SNL sketch where they demanded someone "fix it", repeatedly, without really saying what needs to be fixed or how it should be fixed or what a fix really involves. And there are people genuinely trying to fix it, as well as con artists and exploiters who will use your need for a fix to try and sell snake oil... and even the genuine attempts to help may be hampered by misunderstanding the problem in the first place.

But, well... most of it's too vague to really write a post about, and I'm a bit distracted right now. Though the distraction is somewhat related... I may write more about that, I suppose.

See, here's what happened. I start my new job next week, and since Barnes & Noble had a promotion going on I splurged on a few books. (Never mind that I still have unfinished books on my 'to read' list.) One was the book Columbine, which I'd heard someone praise on Twitter.

It somewhat surprises me how little I knew about the actual events of one of our first major school shootings. I had definitely heard what I now know to be some of the myths of the shooting - bullied outcasts lashing out at their tormentors and the world in general in particular - and just never really dug into it further.

Given my various interests, and the continued trend towards more and more white boys/men trying to shoot up public spaces, I'm somewhat surprised at myself for not having done so before.

Anyways, the book periodically makes me pause and think for a variety of reasons - the interaction between survivors and the media and the development of those myths, previous reading on true crime and serial killers and how that plays into the analysis of Eric Harris, whether or not parents can/should be blamed for their children's choices, the role of friendships/conformity/peer pressure in getting people to go along with extreme behaviors they wouldn't otherwise have done... as Dylan Klebold may or may not exhibit (I haven't finished the book, and am by no means a psychologist or expert, though I am aware that sometimes two people feed off each other and push each other in darker directions), and more.

It also reminds me of other vague musings that haven't cohered into a solid post yet, about our society today, about white men - like my brothers, and classmates, and coworkers, and yet also Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. About my brother, who was into computers in high school. Even though he never went the direction of some of the worst in gamer culture, he's the one that first mentioned motherboards to me, and 4chan, and the concept of being butthurt. The one who first described social engineering to me, and said that most of the elite hackers were really good at that. Through him I was aware of a lot of the same thoughts/values/ideals that I recognize underpin some of the more toxic behavior on the internet today, though he and his friends never really seemed to get sucked into it that far.

It's weird, because I feel I can almost grasp some of the mentality... while completely rejecting other parts to it, and knowing that many white men also reject those parts...

I remember one of them talking about Sarah Palin, for example. Someone who, even if you don't really like her politics or personality, won a beauty pageant and is generally considered beautiful. But he made a comment about how the 'whole package' had to be appealing, and didn't consider her attractive at all. I know attractiveness shouldn't really have anything to do with how we evaluate political candidates (even though it quite clearly does), but I found his opinion more interesting because it goes against the very toxic idea that men are shallow and only care about looks... and where does that toxic message come from, anyway? Most of the people I know... most of the white men who make up my brothers, and father, and uncles, and classmates and coworkers... are not that shallow. And yet there really do seem to be men who care only about how many 'hot' women they can screw.

And it's strange to sort through all that. I have some vague ideas, pure speculation of course, on why certain things appeal, who they appeal to, and what they say about the underlying vulnerabilities in our society, but it's just percolating around in the ol' noggin and not really anything I'm ready to write about. Too fuzzy.


Let's just say I'm reading Columbine, and it's thought provoking for a variety of reasons.

The Shirley Exception

I can't say I'd ever thought of it this way, though it might explain some of that cognitive dissonance we all see:

https://seananmcguire.tumblr.com/post/184936216500

I did want to add something, though. Because the big driver towards the support described in the link was worry about people taking advantage...

I'm game theory, you might say it's "fear of being a sucker".

Given what I'd learned about social dilemmas, game theory, and suckers, I came to a conclusion 20 years ago:

I'd rather risk being a sucker than be a part of the problem.

That is, if cooperation benefits all of us, I'd rather risk appearing naive or foolish in pursuing that than be the cynical type of person who (believing it impossible) perpetuates the worst solution.

Though I'd probably want to know there's a realistic plan in place to make it work.

Anyways, it's given me an interesting take on certain things - like food stamps and the like.

The benefit to those who use it exactly as intended, and society at large - and last I knew, the majority do - makes it worth keeping even if some people abuse the privilege.

Why be afraid that some people will take advantage?

Have systems in place to try and prevent (or catch) it sure. But if you've got something that saves numerous people from starvation, helps children grow strong and healthy (and maybe, just a little, do better at school), why throw that away just because 2% - or maybe even 5% - abuse the system?

Oh, wow... The cognitive dissonance here

https://braincoins.tumblr.com/post/184918631008/the-only-moral-abortion-is-my-abortion

Beautiful

https://www.lawfareblog.com/why-i-do-not-hate-donald-trump

Edited to add:

Saw some responses to this on Twitter, and I think there's a bit of confusion about what it means to love.

Like, they think it means accepting the actions someone makes even if it's hurtful.

Isaac Asimov had a story about a robot, I forget where I read it or what it was called, but his robots are all programmed with the three laws of robotics, meant to prevent them from harming people.

A woman asked the robot various questions, and realizing that the truth would hurt her, the robot lied.

At the end of the story, the robot realized the lies hurt her too, and couldn't handle the resulting bug in its code.

Telling the truth would cause injury, but so did lying.

I may misremember some of this, but I think the point is fairly obvious.

Anyways, sometimes the loving thing to do is to tell someone when they have hurt you, or crossed your boundaries, or are doing something you disagree with.

It's not about controlling them (though it may seem like it to the person you have that sort of difficult conversation with). It's about being true to yourself and expressing yourself...

Saying "I disagree, and can not be party to this" is not controlling. Saying "I disagree, and I will never speak to you again if you do" is.

Umm. The distinction gets blurry easily, and people get them all confused and sometimes say the latter in an attempt to emphasize how strongly they feel instead of consciously trying to control the other party, so this isn't meant to be something you use to hate on people. It's more about illustrating that loving someone can mean telling them when they're wrong (and even though they may take it the wrong way you've still got to do it. Otherwise you're hurting them just as much as the lying robot.)

Cyber War, Cont.

I wanted to add something else before continuing. In the army we talk about 'key terrain', 'center of gravity', 'decisive point', and so on and so forth. I like to start out by giving a conventional example, particularly the mountain pass scenario (if you haven't noticed already), because it's a simple setup where the ideas are fairly easy to grasp.

Or maybe that's just me... I dunno, the way a mountain pass makes it easier for a small force to defend against a larger force makes a lot of intuitive sense to me, as does the possibility that the enemy would get around those defenses by using a lesser known (and probably riskier, but unexpected) smaller pass.

Anyways, starting with that simplified example - controlling the pass, and/or high ground around the pass, makes it key terrain because whoever controls it has a significant advantage. When you control a pass (and the enemy is trying to use it) they generally can't maneuver around you. The mountain itself blocks their way. They also can't spread themselves out too widely, again because of the mountain(s) itself. So if they choose to come down that pass, they are forced to fight you on your terms... forced to present only a small fraction of their force at any one time, which turns a potential 3-on-1 fight into something more like a 1-on-1 fight, three different times. (The larger force still has an advantage, in that the people too far behind to fight are more rested and uninjured and can replace any casualties up front, but a small force holding a mountain pass can slow or stop a larger force for a significant amount of time. Think the Spartans at Thermopylae.)

Controlling high ground is important, too... since whoever has the high ground has better visibility (and thus situational awareness), a better chance that their weapons will successfully hit (archers, artillery... etc), an easier time charging (try running up a hill vs running down... it's pretty obvious which is easier) and gravity can make even unsophisticated weapons like rocks and boulders do quite a bit of damage. I'm sure there's other reasons why high ground is important, but these are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

Anyways, conventional battles make it easy to get the concepts... but the same concepts can be applied to less conventional situations.

In urban warfare, for example, key terrain might include radio stations and television stations, since controlling the flow of communication is important. It can include city hall, police headquarters... and in the US it could also include any store selling guns and ammo. Which, like, means all the Wal-marts, Dick's Sporting Goods, Field & Stream, and local gun shops. (Really, I sort of pity anyone stupid enough to invade us directly, assuming they get past our navy, air force, and army and that we're not reeling from nuclear explosions and/or EMP attacks, or internal issues, or somesuch. I won't say it's impossible, just... well, Red Dawn doesn't seem completely unbelievable.)

High ground can mean taking over skyscrapers or tall buildings (which you can use to create a kill zone, which you can sucker an enemy into.)

So what does that mean for cyber? What is the 'key terrain' when you're not trying to get into a specific organizations network, but are attacking an entire nation/state?

I'd probably be looking at things like those underwater sea cables (which sharks apparently like to eat), the DNS system (since we wouldn't be able to get anywhere if we couldn't translate website names into IP addresses), data centers (as more and more companies store their data on the cloud, a critical data center could shut down who knows how much of the internet?) and more.

Most businesses, of course, are aware of their vulnerabilities and have disaster recovery plans of some sort. I'm not entirely sure how good those plans are, or whether they're enough to continue services in the face of a determined attack, but they're there in some form of fashion.

Though, well... cutting power cables can cause electrical outages just as much as bombing a power plant, and both are physical actions that can be used to take out power in conjunction with (or instead) of cyber attacks.

If you're talking cyber war as an element of a declared war (instead of a euphemism for antagonistic behavior in strictly the cyber realm), you have to consider that sort of thing. And, to be fair, some of it already is (i.e. we know that there's 'critical infrastructure', like the electrical grid, financial services, and more... so I'm trying to throw out a few obvious and less obvious things to think about.)

There's more to it than that, even. I know John Ringo (in his Posleen science fiction) suggested hacking attacks that might, for example, affect GPS targeting so that artillery attacks hit friendly forces instead of the enemy. Again, I don't really know enough about our GPS system, or cyber defenses, to say whether that's realistic or not. But I sure as heck hope that it's a risk people are aware of, and have countermeasures in place for.

That's assuming you can use GPS in the first place, ofc. Which (with jamming and hacking and other things) is not a given. How many people know how to use their equipment if they can't get GPS, anyway?

I also read somewhere (I forget where) that Russia used hacking in conjunction with more conventional forces in their attack on Georgia, where they disabled servers and attacked various government and news sites in coordination with ground forces.

I'd probably also consider how much of our system relies on just-in-time shipping, and what would happen if Wal-mart (and other companies, particularly grocery stores) lost the ability to tell when they're getting low on something. How long could a city last before it ran out of food, and what are the contingency plans that ensure critical stores can continue to function if/when the internet goes down?

I could probably go on and on about the possibilities, but I think the gist of it has come across... and anything further a) depends on specifics that really require expertise and b) is probably not something I'd want to post even if I did have that sort of expertise.

Cyber War

I heard some good news recently, though I'm going to wait until everything is locked into place before saying anything further.

I have a few more ideas floating around about my most recent series of posts, but a recent cyber attack on an electrical grid reminded me that I never got around to talking about cyber war. So I'm setting aside all the other stuff for a bit to knock this out.

The thing is, cyber is still a pretty new realm... and everyone's trying to figure out what the rules are for using it. I mentioned before that I thought our current understanding was misleading, and I'll explain that in a bit. Just remember that I'm not an expert by any means, I am not involved in defending our systems at this point in time (and I'm sure some measures are classified, so even if I did know I couldn't talk about them) and just because I mention it here doesn't necessarily mean it's a cause for concern.

So why bother? Eh, it's mostly just drawing on my own personal experiences to try to envision what could be, and what I hope experts are already aware of and working to prevent.

All right, enough with the caveats and disclaimers, on to the good stuff.

As a veteran, I am somewhat familiar with the army's doctrine of joint warfare. Much though we enjoy teasing each other, we really do need all the branches of the DoD to do their job. We need the navy to control the sea, because we just can't carry enough of what we need via air. (Ships can carry the equipment a battalion or division needs, to include tanks and other equipment that... well... it'd take far too many cargo planes to do, if you even could configure all the necessary equipment for loading on a plane.)

There's a lot of material out there on how important control of the seas is, and maritime strategy, and although I haven't read all of them and was never in the navy I can see the importance of it. (England was a naval superpower. Athens was a naval superpower. And with our borders basically being two large oceans, Canada, and Mexico, a strong navy is critical for defense as well as offense.)

We need air superiority, even if we like to tease them about being corporate goons in uniform, or for focusing more on fancy and ridiculously expensive fighter jets and less on things like air support for ground forces. Still, I wouldn't want to worry that enemy bombers (or fighters) would bomb or strafe us, so we really do need the air force to do their thing. (Just, you know, also keep the warthog or something similar to support the ground troops... or give them to the army. We need that capability somewhere in the DoD.)

We need the marines, because using the navy to carry your resources somewhere isn't enough... you also need people who know how to secure beachheads or landings or whatever. (I don't really have a lot of experience with their doctrine, most of the time when I've worked with marines they've been used a lot like our army... but my understanding of their role, and the reason they work so closely with the navy, is that they basically specialize in that sort of thing. Ground forces that understand and work with the navy, useful for bringing forces into an area from the sea.)

And, of course, we need the army. We need forces on the ground to secure an area. Troops on the ground. Because somehow, well, people can treat bombing attacks like natural disasters. Blockades act a bit like famine, again... a natural disaster. People don't necessarily feel defeated when faced with those sorts of threats. Not the way they do when they can see enemy troops as a real, living presence. (The Nazis may have been able to gain strength after WWI in part because so many Germans didn't feel like they were truly defeated, and there was a widespread perception that they had been stabbed in the back.)

One of the great strengths of the US military is that all these different forces are able to work together, creating a synergistic effect. That is, troops on the ground can call in an air strike to take out massed enemies. The air force and navy can draw on experienced ground forces to secure air bases and sea ports. The navy can provide mobile ranged weapons to support ground forces...

And so on, and so forth. (Part of our problem with training Iraq and Afghan forces, if what I've heard is correct, is that we're so comfortable with joint exercises that we rely on them... whereas the Iraqi and Afghan militaries are not, and don't have the resources to fight that way. So if we teach them a method that relies on air strikes, then after we leave we still need to provide the air power they're incapable of doing on their own.)

Now, each of these battlespaces have their own tactics, techniques, strategies, etc... and they can also fight without the synergistic effect. That is, there are purely naval battles, purely air battles, and purely ground battles that may or may not influence how the military acts in a joint environment. Or rather, they help define what the base capabilities are, which can then be used for that synergistic effect. (I'm not sure I'm explaining that right, but I wanted to make the point because I'm finally going to bring cyber into this.)

Cyber is it's own battlespace, and we're still learning the tactics, techniques, and strategies for using it on it's own... but we also have to start thinking about where it fits, synergistically, in a joint environment.

As it's own battlespace, well.  Most of what we've been learning is how criminals use it. That is, hacking and methods to prevent, identify, and/or monitor attempts to exploit a system. In some ways it doesn't really matter whether the attacker is a  nation/state, criminal organization, or lone wolf... they all mostly use the same tactics, techniques and strategies to find and exploit vulnerabilities (they just may exploit the vulnerability in different ways... from stealing credit card information, to intellectual property, to ransomware, spyware, etc.)

But criminals are parasitic. That is, highway bandits may attack merchants along the road... but they ultimately depend on that commerce to survive, so they don't really want to stop trade altogether. Criminals may hold contempt for the average law-abiding citizen, but they also need them to prey upon. (I don't think they necessarily think about this strategically, or deliberately think "I'd better leave merchants enough money/trade goods/etc to make the risk of traveling this way worth it or they'll stop coming entirely", but if they were too successful they'd probably have to move locations because nobody would risk taking a trading caravan through their area of control.)

A military, on the other hand, doesn't care about that sort of thing. In fact, if they've got the logistics they need, they may burn crops, block all trade, and practice a scorched-earth policy to make it more difficult for their enemies to fight. Bandits (who need to eat, too) would probably be less likely to do this on a consistent basis... unless their banditry is blurring the line between warfare and criminal behavior, which can happen.

So most of what we've been seeing is nation/states (and other entities) sort of feeling things out... and the difficulty in definitively saying a specific entity conducted a specific attack (and therefore justifying a response) means it's also been a somewhat 'safe' way of attacking each other without quite risking war. The recent Israeli physical response to a cyber attack is another reason I decided to write about this topic, as it may be setting some sort of limit on just how much entities can get away with before their cyber attacks become cause for war. Or, in this case at least, physical retaliation.

So... what happens when we take purely cyber tactics and techniques, and start using them in conjunction with more familiar air, land, and sea forces?

Some Problems With My Previous Example

In my previous team, I gave an example of the diverse opinions I'd want if I were forming a team on ending poverty.

The only problem is, we don't hire people that way... and we really shouldn't. Diversity in general can be shorthand for diversity of thought, but we don't officially hire people for their unique perspective. Instead we hire for a position such as "researcher", or "community outreach", or "grant writer", and then pick the best candidate for the job.

Also... nobody should be the sole representative of any particular group. Consider Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which has two Latina women... one a brainy woman who is uptight and always goes by-the-book, and the other tough, aloof, and far more likely to be a rebel. Having two vastly different characters makes it clear that some of their traits have more to do with who they are as an individual than anything else. (That matters. As a woman, I have to admit I am very, very annoyed when I see another woman stand out in a way that reflects poorly on us all. It makes our jobs harder, because there are always idiots who will look at her behavior and say 'women just can't _____'. It's not fair, it's not right, and yet I don't want to have to work any harder at proving myself than I have to.)

So the best way of getting multiple points of view, diversity in thought and diverse representation of various groups, is simply to have widespread diversity. That means you can hire the best candidate for 'researcher' or 'grant writer' or whatever, and odds are the best candidate for at least some of those positions will be a member of a minority class (especially if you're posting for something like 'professional tennis player' and Serena Williams happens to apply.)

And this is where people really start to lose their minds.

I can't speak for every company (I understand Microsoft has had a bit of a discussion about their hiring practices, and efforts to encourage diversity), but I'll talk a bit about my last company.

Our company set up some diversity training, and well had to come up to corporate headquarters for a day or two to take part in it. Towards the end there was an open question and answer session where the topic of hiring came up, and I realized there was widespread misinformation on how it all worked (perhaps even willfully ignorant misinformation).

Affirmative action, as my company (and I believe most places) practiced it, was NEVER about hiring unqualified or less qualified candidates. It's always been about picking the minority candidate "if both candidates have equal qualifications," which I'll come back to shortly.

There is a widespread belief that companies have quotas, and will hire an unqualified token minority candidate. It's a 'nice' story, in that it fits in very well with what we want to believe. It's so much easier to say "I didn't get the job because they hired that unqualified _____" than it is to say "I didn't get the job because I wasn't the best candidate". And it, quite naturally, makes people feel resentful and angry.

I went to my high school reunion a couple of years back, and became Facebook friends with a classmate I saw there. We're not close or anything, but FB makes it easy to keep casual tabs on people, so wth. Anyways, he was one of our (very few) black football players, and I remember stumbling across one of those heated FB exchanges that gave me the uncomfortable feeling that I'd walked into a room where two strangers were yelling at each other.

It was some discussion on diversity, and hiring, and one guy eventually admitted that he was upset because he didn't get a job, I think it was as a firefighter or something? Anyways, a black candidate was hired instead, and he thought it was all because of 'diversity' and that the guy wasn't as qualified as he was.

And here's the thing... I know it makes a great story in our heads, but how do you really know? Do you have a friend in HR? One willing to be unprofessional enough to talk about candidate qualifications? Did you see their score on some test, and know you did better? Or are you just saying that because you assume they couldn't possibly be as good as you?

You want to complain about how you didn't get hired because of diversity? Okay, I'll listen... but you'd better have something a bit more solid than 'they didn't hire me' or 'they didn't hire a white male'.

And this is why I keep saying white supremacy, and various other current political views, are less about logic and more about emotion. Emotionally, it's hella satisfying to have that explanation for why we aren't where we want to be. Why, for example, I keep getting rejected for job after job, though in my case the more emotionally satisfying explanation is sexism. I don't actually know, though. (Update, btw. I have verbally agreed to a conditional job offer. Still have to finish the paperwork for it, and I'm told the background check can take 6 months to a year, which sucks, but at least I've got a job offer. Now to figure out a way to pay the bills for the next 6 mo or so...)

Getting back to affirmative action, and the reason companies try to hire a minority candidate if both candidates are equally qualified...

The whole reasoning for this is tied, in some ways, to leadership pipelines. Well, maybe not even 'leadership'... but pipelines nonetheless. When companies refused to promote minority candidates, or give them extra training, or do all the other things that allowed white employees to learn and grow and gain the experience necessary to move up to a better position, that meant that minority candidates weren't able to move up to the next step... and blocked them entirely from any of the positions further up the pipeline. Choosing to hire an equally qualified candidate when they were a minority was a way to help fix the damage that caused by allowing them to move through the pipe a little faster. Those pipelines are years in the making. Decades, even. It's not the kind of thing you can do for a few years and call 'done'.

I agree that in an ideal world, maybe even our future world, we wouldn't need such policies...

But it's quite clear that we don't have equal representation throughout the pipeline yet. It's hard to say for sure how or why that is, but when 7 in 10 senior executives are white men, we seem to have some plumbing issues.

From what I can tell, the people who find white supremacy appealing are tired of 'bending over backwards' to try and fix our past mistakes. They feel they (i.e. 'white men') are being discriminated against, are unable to get the jobs they want and so on and so forth, because of our efforts to create diversity... they generally think we've fixed racism, and believe that minority candidates don't have to worry about being discriminated against anymore. That if the employee pool doesn't match demographics, i.e. if the number of minority candidates is less than we find in the general population, it's for reasons other than racism or sexism, and that affirmative action and the like are unnecessary policies that bring in unqualified candidates at the expense of better qualified white ones.

Which might be more believable if we didn't have widespread, consistent, and recent evidence that discrimination still occurs on a regular basis, or if I couldn't see the lack of evidence behind their assumptions about certain hiring decisions. (Or if it wasn't obvious that we, as in 'white people', are acting a bit too much like someone who says 'I'm sorry' when they mean 'I'm sorry that I am feeling repercussions for my misdeeds, can you just quit bringing it up so we all can move on now?' instead of the more sincere 'I'm sorry' that means 'I realize my actions were hurtful, I regret taking part in something that hurt you, and I will do what I can to try and fix the damage.')

Thoughts on Diversity

I saw something on twitter discussing how some people will agree that we need diversity of thought, and use it to emphasize that they don't actually need racial diversity (or other types of diversity), and I wanted to jot down some thoughts.

Most of what I've written here has been coming at this somewhat sideways, in that I feel discussing it in certain ways triggers political biases and preconceptions, and people's minds shut off.

I hope I've done a fairly good job of making the case for diversity in thought (and avoiding groupthink and the like), so here goes.

Diversity of thought and the other types of diversity are related, though somewhat distinct. I'll explain in another sideways fashion:

My uncle had multiple sclerosis, and I only ever knew his health deteriorated enough that he needed a wheelchair. My aunt got onto the topic of universal design after they came to visit relatives in Indiana (driving from Colorado).

She started explaining just how difficult it was for them to travel... How hotels would say a room was handicapped accessible, but my uncle couldn't fit his wheelchair under the sink and thus couldn't reach the faucet. How they wouldn't have the bathtub/shower configured right, making it a challenge for him to use. How she kept track of which specific rooms along the route had the setup they needed, and would call the hotel to reserve that room in particular, only to arrive and discover they'd given it to someone else.

And these are all things that I was unaware of, because I've never had a problem using the sink in a hotel, or shower, or whatever (and really, after hearing my aunt talk.... if I was designing a brand new home I think I'd try making it handicapped accessible from the get go. Especially if I plan on retiring there. Having the electrical outlets a little higher, the light switches a little lower, the doors a little wider, their latches easier to turn when your hands are less dexterous... you never know if you'll need such a thing and you might as well just plan for it from the start.)

Yes, you can write up a list of requirements for accommodating such disabilities... but it's just not at the forefront of our minds the way it is for someone who deals with this sort of thing on a daily basis.

So someone with that sort of background can provide much needed diversity of thought for teams that need to consider accommodating people in wheelchairs. They could head off all sorts of problems if they helped design hotel rooms, for example. Or buses. Or theaters.

The things we currently associate with diversity - race, sexuality, gender, disabilities, etc - often lead to diversity of thought, so encouraging diversity in general does help. At least, in a general fashion. But you may need to look for and cultivate specific types of diversity, depending on what you're trying to do.

If you're creating a video game, or a movie, or something that you hope will appeal to the largest audience possible, then you don't want to alienate some of your potential customers out of ignorance. (I started following a rabbi on twitter, and she mentioned things that are problematic to Jews that I was completely unaware of. Like referring to Philistines, which... well, I just looked up the Bible passage I was thinking of, and it actually doesn't specify philistines. I thought Jesus had been condemning them as hypocrites, for publicly signaling their faith - and really, it's part of what bothers me about the Christian conservatives, who make such a big show of their faith while generally supporting policies and actions that have nothing to do with what I was taught a Christian would. So now I know, and if I want to discuss that I can do it without using the term 'Philistine.')

But consider a different scenario. You've got a team trying to end poverty, and you're trying to figure out who to hire. Racial diversity is still be important, given demographics and the racial factors involved, but a minority candidate who comes from an Ivy League background may not provide much more insight than any other team member from an Ivy League school. Otoh, having someone with direct experience with poverty would probably be essential if you want to succeed. If you only have one opening, and if you haven't got a diverse enough team already, I'd probably prioritize the candidate with first-hand experience being poor over someone who's a minority from a more upper-class upbringing (but ideally, your team would already have both racial and socioeconomic diversity and you shouldn't have to choose one or the other. I'd also probably throw in some economists from different schools of thought, and a few people with experience running a business, plus people who've been involved with philanthropy, and so on and so forth in order to get the most relevant perspectives on the issue.)

Consider the classic parable of the blind men asked to describe an elephant, each of whom has touched a different part. If you want the full picture of what an elephant is, you have to know how to take their descriptions and piece them together.

Diversity of thought is extremely important, imho, and that diversity of thought often is easier to get when you include the 'usual' types of diversity - race, sexuality, religion, disabilities, gender - as well as socioeconomic status, regional differences, jocks vs. geeks, and more.

Which particular backgrounds are necessary to get the full picture for your task... well, it depends on the task. We don't really know what those different perspectives have to offer until we give them a place at the table, but our picture of an elephant wouldn't be completely if we excluded the experience of the one person who touched it's tusk.

Vulnerabilities - Economic or Racial?

This is an interesting analysis of how great a role the economy plays in presidential elections.

I'm actually posting it because it adds nuance to (and maybe even contradicts) my earlier post on root vulnerabilities like wage stagnation and income inequality, mostly by adding partisan identity and its role in perception.

Marketplace of Ideas, Strategies, Etc.

I posted a link earlier to an article discussing how black feminists on twitter campaigned against twitter trolls who were pretending to be women of color, and said I was saving it 'for later'.

That later is now.

See, I believe there is something to the whole wisdom of crowds thing. I also believe there are ways of disrupting it, preventing the whole from acting in a 'wise' manner. A lot of it has to do with the free marketplace of ideas, and what sort of behavior is acceptable (and not) in advancing your arguments. This also ties in a bit with my previous post, regarding strategies of attack and counterattack.

What I want to start with, though, is with the common reasons people dismiss the 'wisdom of crowds'.

The most common one, I think, is that survey after survey shows that quite a few of us aren't really all that knowledgeable... so it's hard to believe that the whole can be wiser than the sum of it's parts. I think Malcolm Gladwell explains the mechanism behind that rather well in his book The Tipping Point. Sure, if you conducted a survey on something like, I don't know... car mechanics...

The majority of us would probably sound dumb, we'd have no idea what a carburetor is or what it does, or why the car sputters, etc. And that's okay, because if we ever actually need to know that information, we'd go find ourselves an expert (a maven) to fill us in. We'd go to our buddy the car mechanic, or google the symptoms and find a youtube video, or take it to an actual mechanic - though we'd probably want to have some reason to trust their expertise, as there are too many horror stories of mechanics ripping people off.

The point, though, is that even if we collectively don't seem to know much about cars, we generally known how to go the experts when we've got a car problem, and the whole is wiser than the sum of it's parts.

By the same token, during an election people may not pay attention to the blow-by-blow accounts, may not recognize the names of obscure candidates at the beginning, but we have political experts who do pay attention... and they advise the people around them who don't often have time to dig into the facts, and the ultimate winner of an election can be a better choice than you'd expect.

I say 'can', because of what I'm about to get into next:

The wisdom of crowds is not perfect, and there are ways of subverting it. On a small scale, a lot of it acts like my earlier discussion on decision-making, conformity, and groupthink.

If someone quickly gives the impression of support for an idea and squelches dissent (so that people think they're the only oddball who thinks differently, or has no way of identifying who else feels the way they do, so they can't work together to present an alternative) one forceful person can make it seem as though 'the crowd' agrees with an action that doesn't actually draw on the wisdom of crowds.

It's the magic trick by which dictators and tyrants hold power despite having real support from only a fraction of the population. So long as it's the right portion, in the right places, they can control the decision-making process. (And, much like my earlier example where the military is trying to defend against an enemy coming across a mountain, said dictator will sometimes be right, but there's always a risk that they'll be disastrously wrong given their horrible decision-making process. One singular person with ultimate power can definitely make decisions faster than committees, and sometimes committees don't have good dynamics and don't make wise decisions, but unless that singular person with power makes a sincere effort to get diverse opinions and makes a sound plan that takes into consideration all the various concerns - i.e. consider the likelihood that the enemy will come through the large pass or the small pass, and then create a plan that takes both possibilities into account, though focusing on the most likely - they generally don't have the time or knowledge to be expert in everything they need to know, and will probably miss something critical. At some point or another.)

The other thing I wanted to point out is that support doesn't generally come from a vacuum. That doesn't mean that there's actual support for the proposed solution... to go back to computer software, it's more like there's a vulnerability, and malware can exploit that vulnerability in a variety of ways... whether by installing spyware to monitor you, or running a bitcoin mining program, or looking through your files and copying anything interesting. The underlying vulnerability is the same in each case, but the way that vulnerability is exploited is vastly different.

In the same way, the underlying vulnerability may be frustration at the inability to better yourself through hard work. It may show itself (I don't want to say 'exploited' in this case, because many of the people gaining support because of that vulnerability are idealists who sincerely want to improve the system, it's just that their ideas gain traction because of this underlying vulnerability) in support for a particular political candidate...  or support for something like socialism. That's part of why FDR claimed he was saving capitalism from itself (and also why the intense distaste for his policies, and efforts to roll them back seem so short-sighted. If you're not addressing the underlying reasons why FDR and his policies came into being, then all you're doing is resetting the situation to a place where capitalism will fail.)

It may also show itself in support for libertarianism, or whatever. A vulnerability can also be exploited to take us in darker directions, like white supremacists, xenophobia, and the like. The point is that there's some underlying reason people are drawn to support certain ideas, and we have to address that if we want to get anywhere. Much though I dislike those ideas, I understand that there's an underlying fear... perhaps even the same fear driving support for socialism. The fear that you won't be able to succeed through hard work, but in this case you blame it on illegal immigrants and affirmative action efforts rather than the wealthy bilking you out of fair compensation. (This is speculation, and I'm sure there are people studying the topic who can give a better explanation.)

I'm not saying any of these things are the right answer, btw. Simply trying to point out that, well, there's a reason every single idea out there has support, and we shouldn't just dismiss those ideas without at least considering why some people honestly support it.

But this is all describing a fairly honest marketplace for ideas. One where most people genuinely support their favored ideas, and for the reasons given during the exchange.

There are people who deliberately subvert the system. Who, for example, are dishonest about their reasons for supporting an idea. (When I was deployed with the New York guard, I was caught off guard once because apparently we had 'internal reasons' and 'external reasons', and we were only supposed to tell 'outsiders' the external reasons for something. That whole thing rather disturbed me, since we should be able to honestly tell why we wanted to take an action, and having an entirely different set of reasons that was known only to those of us in the unit seemed dishonest. This was for a fairly mild issue, though. Like, it seemed silly that we were even trying to hide our reasons in the first place since there was nothing bad or wrong about our reasoning, which is part of why I apparently crossed an unwritten rule I hadn't been aware of when I mentioned the real reason in a meeting. Seriously, if you have an 'internal' reason and a 'public' reason, you might want to take a long, hard look at yourself in a mirror because you are clearly exploiting a vulnerability of some sort for your own purposes... and if you're afraid to publicly admit what that purpose is, you are misleading all the people supporting you.)

The article about the black feminists on twitter is another example of this, for a variety of reasons. First, though it's not quite the case in this example, we've got the problem of twitter bots... given the tendency to self-censor if you feel you're the only one who disagrees, various people try to manipulate the marketplace of ideas by making it seem like they have more support than they really do. They hope to draw on the bandwagon effect, and get more people to agree with them than they otherwise would have. So they flood social media with accounts saying they support some idea, or disagree with another, and hope to gain traction.

Second, and more specific to this case, they will try to sabotage opposing ideas. In this case by running a false flag operation that tried to make the other side look more extreme than they really were. (This, btw, reminds me of some more historical efforts to disrupt unwanted ideas. Like the Pinkerton agency and it's efforts to infiltration unions and disrupt strikes. Or the FBI, and it's attempts to disrupt the Civil Rights Movement.)

If this was more like a game of Dominion, these would clearly be attack cards... with all the risks and issues that go with that. It refuses to address the underlying reasons why people are drawn to these movements (in the case of strikes, the mistreatment of workers. In the case of civil rights, the frustration with a system that puts up roadblocks and obstacles to every effort you make towards building a successful life, solely because of the color of your skin).

It's like they see the signs of an unexpected program on their system, they assume it's malicious (which... I know I keep saying this is where the analogy breaks down, because it's not. Or not necessarily. Maybe I should say that the hacks can be benevolent or malicious depending on user intent, and the same vulnerability can be exploited to patch the system or break it. The analogy only goes so far, at this point.)

Anyways. They see unexpected activity, assume it's malicious, and instead of digging down to the root vulnerability and patching it themselves, they scramble to create another program that can disrupt or reverse whatever unexpected behavior they see.

This is why I talked about fear and arrogance, earlier. There's an arrogance in believing you know better than everyone else, an arrogance in believing you are justified in doing whatever you have to in order to make sure what you consider the 'right' decisions are made, an arrogance in believing that those actions are justified in your case (and not, when taken by your evil opponents)....

And there's arrogance in assuming that the only reason your ideas aren't more popular is because people are too stupid to understand, and/or that your opponents are too good at manipulating the system.

That there's no underlying vulnerability to patch, no reason to worry about 'saving capitalism from itself' like FDR did, because the only reason there's support for things like socialism is because of... I dunno. People's stupidity, or evil villains, whatever. Take your pick. (You can also make a similar argument about support for white supremacy, tbh. What's the underlying vulnerability drawing people to such a horrible idea?)

But the arrogance is only part of the story, and the other part is fear. See, if you truly believed in capitalism. If you truly believed it was the best system...

Than you wouldn't feel threatened by socialism. You would know that people may try it, but that it would fail, and they'd eventually come back to capitalism.

But fear, fear that maybe capitalism wouldn't triumph, fear that people won't be 'smart enough' to do what you arrogantly believe is the right thing, fear that 'the enemy' can manipulate the marketplace of ideas in its favor, all that fear means you feel justified in doing 'whatever it takes' to fight socialism.

Whether that means supporting the Contras in Nicaragua, or a military-led government in El Salvador, or backing a coup in Guatemala. All were done primarily out of fear, and fear-based policies often have negative consequences. (And, as just one consequence, the instability the US contributed to has created an incentive to migrate. In some cases, by seeking asylum in the US. We have at least some responsibility in creating the mess on our own borders, not that our government would ever admit it.)

Fear is used to justify tactics that undermine the whole wisdom of crowds thing, and makes people focus on the symptoms instead of the root causes of a problem.

Fear and arrogance are used to justify doing whatever it takes to win, and to dismiss any dissent as either stupidity, naivety, or enemy action.

If your ideas are not gaining traction, you're probably missing something important about your messaging. It may be that you just need to make better arguments, or it could also be that you're not addressing something that people think is more important at the moment, or any number of things.

Forcefully attempting to coerce and manipulate people into supporting you is ultimately destructive to the entire system.

Deck Building Games and Strategy Considerations (related to previous posts, trust me)

When I was in college, some friends of mine played Magic: The Gathering. It's a popular card game for... not sure what to call it. The gaming community probably captures it best, though 'gaming' can also include video games and whatnot, whereas I'm referring more to the geeky/nerdy type of people who like science fiction/fantasy like I do, and often play Dungeons & Dragons and various other board games or card games. Like Pandemic. Gencon is for people like this, and it says it's the "largest gathering of tabletop gamers in North America", so I guess that's the proper tag.

My brothers got into it, independently, shortly thereafter so I'm familiar with it even though I never went past being a casual player. They eventually moved on, though not after buying thousands of cards (and gifting most of them to our second youngest brother, HiTek.)

Anyways, Magic has a few problems, in that a serious player often spends a lot of money buying cards, and thus has better cards in his/her deck. Which means they often have an advantage against people unable or unwilling to spend that kind of money.

Dominion, on the other hand, is a deck-building card game similar to Magic: The Gathering, but without its flaws. Everyone starts out with the exact same cards, and everyone has the chance to buy the exact same cards, so winning generally depends more on your skill in creating a strategy and buying the right cards.

I have to go into a bit more detail for the rest of this to make sense, so please bear with me.

In a deck building game, you have to build a strategy that will give you a winning combination of cards fairly reliably. You draw and play your cards in accordance with the rules of the game, and when you've played through every card in your stack you shuffle the discard pile and start all over.

That means your choices will appear in your deck, over and over, changing a bit with every new purchase or trashing of a card.

In Dominion, there are cards that allow you to purchase other cards (coins: copper, silver, gold. And in some expansions, platinum). There are cards that determine who the winner is (victory cards: estates, duchies, provinces. And in some expansions, colonies.) And there are various action cards, that do various interesting things.

You win by collecting the most victory points (each victory card is worth a certain number of points, so a province is far better than an estate), but most of the victory cards don't do anything in your hand. If you drew a hand of normal victory cards, you'd be unable to purchase anything, or take any sort of action.

A lot of the game is about building a deck that reliably allows you to purchase victory cards, while making them a small enough part of your deck that you're unlikely to get a hand full of victory cards.

This is where the action cards come into play, and I glossed over them because they are many. And varied. But you don't play with all of them at once. Rather, you randomly select 10 from whatever sets you plan to play with (there's multiple expansions, with literally hundreds to choose from), and put them in play.

All players are able to read what the action cards do, all players have the same options on what to buy, and winning depends (mostly) on coming up with a good strategy based on the cards in play. Experience helps, because you have a better sense of which cards have a synergistic effect with each other and are worth purchasing.

To give you a taste of what this means: one of the action cards in the base set is the mine, and it allows you to trash a coin and replace it with a better one. So you'd trash the copper card in your hand (not literally, there's a trash pile to discard it in) and put a silver card in your discard pile. Next time you shuffle your deck, that's one more silver card and one less copper. Do that enough, and you'll reliably have increased purchasing power per card.

In a similar fashion, everyone wants to get provinces (or colonies), because it's far more victory points per card... whereas stocking up on estates will just clog your hand, and make it more likely you won't have enough coin or action cards to do anything interesting.

The strategies you choose are entirely dependent on what cards are in play. One of my brothers, for example, likes to use cards that shuffle through his deck quickly. That is, if you have an action card that says something like "view the top card of your deck: if X place it in your hand. If not, discard it."  He can have only one or two high powered cards in his deck, but having action cards that allow him to find it every single time means he doesn't need more... he just flips through his cards until he gets what he needs, uses it... and quickly runs through his deck, shuffles it all back in, and does it again.

Anyways, I went into this because I wanted to talk about attack cards, and their role in the game. See, some of the actions allow you to effect other players. The thief card, for example, allows you to take coin from other players. They have to show the top two cards of their deck and trash any coin, which you are allowed to retrieve from the trash pile. It generally is a royal pain to deal with, especially when you lose a gold or platinum coin. When the thief in play, pretty much everyone has a harder time getting enough coin to buy victory cards (or much of anything, tbh) and the game can drag on for a lot longer.

There are cards that force other players to discard down to three cards (a hand is usually five), or add a useless 'curse' card worth -1 victory points to your deck, or forces you to pass a card to your neighbor.

Now, when I play this with my father and one of my brothers, we generally just choose not to use the attack cards. It's sort of an informal convention, but we tend to prefer it that way. (Ofc, I generally see them when I visit the fam, and we're more likely to play cooperative games like Pandemic anyway. It's been a while since we've played Dominion together, and I'm unfamiliar with quite a few of the latest expansions.)

But when HiTek plays, or my brother and I play with some of his friends, the odds of someone using the attack cards are much greater. Heck, there are even people who seem to take great joy in being as vicious as possible... vicariously, in the game. They're generally quite nice outside of it.

And that's okay, too. Because even though I enjoy the more casual style with the fam, a good strategy would be able to win despite the attack cards in play. If the thief is in play, but the coppersmith is also in play, maybe you stick with coppers and use the coppersmith to increase their value. It would depend on what other cards are in play, though.

Anyways, I wanted to discussion the free marketplace of ideas, the wisdom of crowds (and lack thereof), and ways people try to influence the system in order to get support for their particular point of view, and Dominion seemed a great way to make a few points.

First, that we can establish a 'convention' not to use certain strategies, like purchasing attack cards. Second, that people may not agree to that convention, in which case you need to plan a counterstrategy that takes their actions into account. Third, that once you start using attack cards odds are pretty high that all the other players will, too. (I don't get people who do something shady and underhanded, and then turn around and get upset when their opponents start doing the same thing. You set the standard, you showed them that this is what it took to win, why are you surprised they're doing the same thing, using the same tactics to get one over on you instead? This is also why being a stubborn a-hole to your opponents is a losing strategy in the long term. Sure, they may give in the first few times. It's easier, and they don't really want a fight. But if you have repeated encounters, and they're always losing, eventually they get fed up and decide to get just as stubborn as you. Next thing you know, you're caught up in a pissing contest. Maybe a stalemate, maybe you'll have to concede something, or maybe you wind up in World War III... who knows? But constantly trying to one-up people instead of looking for a win/win is a risky strategy. At least, if the game involves repeated rounds with the same players.)

The fourth bit, the one I puzzle over sometimes, is how you can get people to change the game. Like, once the attack cards are in play, is that it? Are we just forced to accept that the game involves thieves, pirates, and brigands? Or - if everyone finds it unpleasant playing the game this way - can we get everyone to agree to NOT use such tactics?

The latter, well. It's a bit like a social dilemma, in which you'd need everyone's cooperation. And probably some sort of penalty for anyone who thinks they'd get some sort of advantage (generally just a short term one, since everyone else will then start using the same tactics) by breaking it. I think the key there, at least, is having the majority of the players agree that they're not really enjoying the game like this.

So, I dunno. If 'everyone' cheats in a game like soccer, but the players don't really like a game where winning matters less on how good they are at kicking and passing and whatnot than how good they are at cheating... maybe there's interest in cleaning up the game.

And maybe there isn't. I think the first step, though, is getting people to ask themselves whether they're really okay with it. After all, if most people are thrilled at a free-for-all where anything goes, well... good luck getting anyone to agree to restrain themselves.

On Meritocracy, Frustration, White Supremacy, and Other Things.

Most everyone in America agrees that a meritocracy is a good thing. I'm not entirely sure about the history behind that, though I have some guesses. Mostly based on my understanding of history, and how we interpreted various events...

First is that history has shown talent is rarely passed along genetic lines. Or perhaps the conditions leading to developing talent don't, or the talent passed along is for a completely different area, and we force someone with a talent for, say, growing flowers or something into being a ruler. (There were also issues with inbreeding and various medical issues that resulted from that.)

Needless to say, believing that someone will be a great ruler because of their father or mother has been proven wrong repeatedly.

Add to this our particular American history, namely that a lot of people with absolutely no aristocratic blood (as well as second or third sons who had no chance to inherit) came to American and were able to succeed.

That sense of frustration, of being unable to become who you should be? That's part of what drew people to America, where none of that mattered. Or didn't used to.

I think there's a tendency for the people at the top to try to secure their positions, and in the process make it harder for anyone further down to move up... thus leading to an aristocratic class (even if it's not always called that). For whatever reason, human nature or something, they then tend to grow arrogant and believe they deserve their position... by virtue of their aristocratic blood in the past, though that's not the only justification... but they generally fail to realize that there are others with just as much talent (or greater) in the lower classes. And thus fail to realize that there's a ton of frustration as people with talent are blocked from ever doing better.

This is what the French Revolution brought home... because the French Army did amazingly well once it cleared the 'dead weight' of arrogant (and mediocre) aristocrats who though they were the bees knees. Suddenly talented people who used to have absolutely no chance of becoming field marshalls were able to show their stuff.

Imagine how frustrating it is, to know you're more smarter and more capable than the officer you're reporting to, and to also know that it doesn't matter. It never matters. Because they're noble, and you're nothing.

Most of what I said is not, I think, controversial. It's part of why we value being a meritocracy.

And it's also why it's so frustrating that people in power continue to believe we're a meritocracy, even as they solidify their grip on power and make it harder for talent to be recognized and developed in those who aren't born wealthy. Socioeconomic mobility wouldn't be correlated so strongly to parental income. That's why all the articles about rich people buying their way into Ivy League colleges matter. That's why unpaid internships, which are only doable if you have the resources to pay for room and board on your own, matter. That's why companies that only hire from Ivy League colleges, that mostly admit students from privileged backgrounds in the first place, matters. (And that's also why it's a problem that people who come from such backgrounds are hired by others with the same backgrounds, and work only with people like them. Because they all tend to view the world in the Exact. Same. Way. Which means that they don't even know what they're missing, what an alternate viewpoint would have. Like... I don't think having an Ivy League education is a bad thing, at all. But if I were building a team of geniuses, I'd want to make sure I had variety. Some with an Ivy League background, some with a public school background, someone with real world practical experience getting things done... the specifics would depend on what I was building a team to do, ofc, but I'd want to get a good spread of viewpoints on the team. Otherwise... well, what's the point of having five people with the same background if they all see things the same way and have the same opinion on a subject? Might as well just make it one... )

But whether or not we're still a meritocracy and what to do about that... well, go ahead and do your own research. I wanted to address something else here.

The Romans lived in constant fear of slave revolts, and from what I understand the South did, as well. Slavery is a system that by it's very nature prevents people from living up to their full potential. Consider what it would be like if Maya Angelou was never taught how to read and write, if Serena Williams was never given the chance to play tennis.

Imagine the level of frustration you would feel, if the world constantly sent the message that all you were good for was flipping burgers.

Consider that people tend to live up (or down) to expectations, like the students who blossomed during a Harvard experiment. That if you give people the right tools, set them up for success, more of them will make it than you'd think.

White supremacists would essentially force a large portion of our population to live with that constant sense of frustration, that constant inability to live up to their full potential.

Aside from the immorality of it (and I think there's plenty of that), the white people who are supposed to benefit from it won't, because under such a system they will NEVER be safe or secure.

Such a system would require a constant boot on the neck of anyone not white, because if there's one thing we've seen throughout history it's that we all, all human beings, resent being shut out like that. Such a system may successfully cow most of the people, most of the time, but there will always be dissent, and at some point that boot will lift, and then we'll be right back to dealing with all the crap we're dealing with right now.

I would, quite frankly, rather patch this vulnerability here and now instead of spend an unknown number of years making people miserable just to wind up right back where we are.

Like, seriously? We need to find a win/win, a system that lets everyone reach their full potential, and anything less than that is just plain stupid. White supremacy is stupid. (Which is probably why it's more about emotion than logic, I guess.)

On a related note...

Have you ever had one of those moments, generally a sort of quiet stillness, where you're forced to realize you're not really happy with where you are? Maybe it's your toxic work environment, maybe it's your significant other. You realize that you tend to push the thought to the back of your mind as you deal with all the day-to-day stuff... doing your job, or spending time with your SO, or whatever... but in those quiet moments where you get the chance to sit back and reflect, you realize that something is off. And even though doing something about it will be hard (quitting your job is scary, and there's a comfort in sticking with what you know. Same with breaking up with someone... because who knows when you'll find someone else, and whether they'll be any better).

And maybe your brain is telling you that you ought to do the sensible thing. Ought to keep your current job. Ought to stick with your significant other. Whatever. But after more thought, and reflection, you come to realize this is something you have to do.

That sort of thought process is generally what I think is a sign we're in touch with that inner self, or higher power, or whatever you want to call it. It's that quiet voice that speaks to us in stillness, challenges us to make decisions that aren't always logical and safe, but that ultimately lead us to be our more authentic selves. Lead us to be live more fully, more true to who we are.

I won't criticize people for making the 'safe' choice, because it's scary as heck to do otherwise. Especially if you're thinking about leaving your job when you've got a family to take care of... though sometimes life has a way of forcing you out of that comfort zone anyway. That job you despise, the one your thinking about leaving... they may not think you're what they want and may wind up firing you later (and maybe not.)

I brought that up because, as far as I can tell, most homosexual and transsexual people have had a similar thought process. There might be some places where you can publicly say you're a homosexual or transsexual, and not feel as though you're taking a huge risk. Maybe. But by and large, that's not the case. They may lose their job (like a friend in ROTC, who got kicked out of the army when he came out... back before they changed that policy.) They may get killed, like many transsexuals are, especially when they decide it's time to tell a potential significant other.

And so, on the one hand, there are people who have done a lot of soul searching, who know that there are a lot of real risks and consequences to publicly stating their preferences, who know they'd be safer and more secure if they could just pretend to be 'normal', and who somehow still feel like this is something they have to do. Homosexual, transexual, asexual, pansexual, whatever-the-heck else there is... I don't always understand it, personally. I've never wanted to be any other gender than the one I am. But I don't need to, because I would never presume to know what someone wants or needs better than they do themselves. And I can recognize that these identities describe something they've thought long and hard about, and that they feel more authentic, more like who they are supposed to be, when they acknowledge this aspect of their identity.

On the other hand, we have people who claim to be speaking on behalf of God... which is quite a presumption in the first place... and yet, so far as I can tell, speak with the voice of hatred and fear.

I think it's fairly obvious which voice sounds more genuine to me.

The thing about being raised Catholic is this - the Protestant movement forced this little thing called the Reformation, and the Catholic church had to adapt to what the people wanted. In one of my grade schools a priest tried explaining that dynamic, that it's not a one-way relationship. The institution itself, the priests and nuns and whatnot, are human and can make mistakes.

Anyways, this is one of the things I think they deserve push back for, and maybe eventually they'll be another little reformation.