Feels Fake - Addendum

 When my Catholic school talked about abortion, they talked about the sanctity of life. They said that you can't pick and choose when to value life, basically. And that if you wanted to be pro-life, you also needed to be against the death penalty and other things.

I am not sure I agree with some of their arguments - mostly about end of life. I can't help feeling that the last round of chemo hastened my Mom's end, and that quality of life matters. That, for example, if you can't survive without life support that extending your misery for a few days with life support isn't really worth it, but at least their arguments are consistent.

Which is part of why I find it fascinating when 'pro-life' people also support the death penalty. Seems they don't really agree with that argument.

Anyways, to get back to Charlie Kirk's assassination. The point I was trying to make with my earlier post is that you have to be consistent. That if assassination and murder is bad, it's bad in every case. All the time.

It's bad when it's Minnesota legislators.

It's bad when it's school children.

And when we've created a callous society that shrugs and moves on when those people are murdered, it seems inconsistent to suddenly be upset and start caring just because it was a right wing influencer.

I said that if you actually cared about his death that you wouldn't want to escalate things... but that's not quite true.

Or rather, given some of what Charlie Kirk has said... maybe he actually wanted to escalate the violence, even if it meant his own death?

I personally find it hard to believe. I think it was probably more along the lines of 'it's okay for other people to die, but not me'... but I can't claim to know him that well. Given what he said about the 2nd amendment, maybe he'd understand that his own death was also worth it.

Still, the outrage feels fake. Feels more like people are just upset when the natural consequences of their positions affect people they actually care about.

Feels Fake

I feel like I should say something about Charlie Kirk's assassination, but tbh I never paid attention to the guy. 

What I do find interesting is that the right is really getting spun up about it. I say 'interesting' because we already had legislators shot in Minnesota, and yesterday also marked yet another school shooting. 

Why is this any different? 

No, seriously. If you're actually upset about Charlie Kirk's assassination, were you also upset about those other shootings?

The responses just feel kind of performative and fake to me. I mean, if they were genuine than they'd also want to deescalate the violence. 

After all, deaths of people you care about is a natural progression of escalation and only a fool would think they wouldn't be affected too.

Rules of Thumb

 I figured I'd write some rules of thumb... guidelines for what to prioritize when deciding how to get from where we are to where we want to be.

These aren't in any particular order, but I'll start with the one I talked about earlier:

• Make decisions at the lowest level possible
• Lower levels should have the freedom to add on to, but not take away from policies and decisions made at higher levels

In addition, I'll add the following:

• Any policy that you don't want applying to yourselves is a bad idea (or needs refinement)
• Think of this as a specific version of the Golden Rule. If you think that more people should give up on higher education and focus on trade schools, consider whether you are truly okay with letting your children - or yourself- do so. If you want other people to go to a trade school, but you would be upset if your child gave up on a college degree in order to become a plumber, then maybe that says something. Maybe you're really just trying to stop other people from competing, or you want other people to do the jobs you think are beneath you. 
• It could just need refining, in that if you aren't willing to see you or your loved ones doing whatever... that means you're missing something critical about what you're proposing
• Seriously - if you wouldn't want to live under that policy, then you shouldn't try making others do so
• This applies doubly so for the fools who seem to think a great die off is a good idea. Like Prince Philip here. Fools like this always seem happy to hear about other people dying, but we all know that they don't want their own loved ones to die of disease. Or if they're truly okay with it, then you have to wonder about whether they truly loved anyone in the first place. Enough with these fantasies of making something good out of mass suffering, it's sickening.
• Empower people wherever you can
• A good parent helps their child grow into adults capable of making their own decisions. Your focus should be on helping people make their own choices, hopefully wise choices, rather than trying to impose yours on them
• Yes, sometimes that means they will make choices you disagree with. Either work on persuading people, or look at the incentives and motivations that prevent people from making better decisions. If that doesn't work, consider whether you're wrong. Or are missing something critical. Quit worrying about control, and focus more on leading and building
• A thriving middle class creates stability and prosperity
• This seems pretty self-evident, considering that's one of the things we consider when we assess a nation. Two much wealth disparity tends to mean a country isn't very stable, plus there aren't as many people with the money to buy things... so less prosperous. I'm making a point of it because we've had numerous reports on the hollowing out of the middle class, the growth of wealth inequality, etc... and yet the powers-that-be don't seem to take that seriously. They even support policies that make it worse.
• Nobody wants to die because they bought poisoned food
• This is a dramatic statement to describe a whole category of things. Basically the idea that people unknowingly suffer because unscrupulous businesses sell things that hurt them. If you don't want people solving that with federal regulation, make sure you have an alternative that addresses the root cause. 
• No, expecting unscrupulous businesses to go out of business as the public catches on is not a reasonable alternative. You can consider non-profit rating schemes or other alternatives, but then they will need funding and some method of accurately rating things. Basically it doesn't have to be the government, but whatever your alternative is will probably do similar things, so why duplicate the effort? If your 'de-regulation' leads to more people dying then the root causes for that regulation are just going to keep coming back. Don't expect people to just accept suffering when it's something we can prevent.
• You can't make good policy if you can't accurately assess your environment
• If you've mistaken the root causes, your solutions won't fix anything.
• If you don't assess the results of your policies, you won't know when they need adjusting.
• Everything depends on getting accurate and reliable information. If that information is considered a threat for some reason, then take a long, hard look at yourself. Trying to prevent us from capturing statistics on gun deaths or getting accurate information on climate change doesn't change the underlying truth, it just makes sure all your policy proposals are going to be bad because they're based on faulty information.
• Honestly, quit it.
• Nobody knows everything. 
• Good decision-making involves seeking out different sources of information. If you rely on only one source, then you won't make good policy (see the previous bullet point). Just make sure to evaluate those sources for accuracy and reliability, too.
• People are not robots
• First, that means they react better to stories and anecdotes than 20 page reports full of facts and findings. Keep that in mind when trying to persuate people
• Second, people will not always do what you expect. Be prepared for that.
• Third, this is why counter-intuitive policies sometimes work. It's like how a computer programmer who stops to take a break can come back and suddenly see how to program somethign that was stumping them... productivity is not just a matter of work hours. In fact, trying to force people to grind through some boring and tedious task can make them less productive then letting them have breaks. Learn how to manage people, don't expect them to act like robots.

I'm sure there's plenty more, but that's enough for today.

Side Note

 Coincidentally, I was reading a book (Learning Systems Thinking) and this section right here was remarkably relevant to my recent post:

We expect the people who build software to behave in predictable, procedural, top-down controlled ways. Our preferred communication style reflects these expectations—straightforward, concrete, and concerned with control.

I had not thought there was anything IT specific that was affecting this push for centralization, but that is perhaps because so much of my more recent IT experience has dealt with micro-services and distributed systems.

If the author is true, and I think they understand the programming culture better than I do, then perhaps the tech-bro foolishness is even more related to their original career than I thought.

Centralized vs Decentralized (Prequel to Rules of Thumb)

 I was thinking of some general rules of thumb to use when deciding what paths to take towards our future America, but I think I would have to spend too much time explaining one of the bullet points. So I'm going to go into that explanation first.

There is something almost organic about how groups or organizations develop, and I think they are affected by two countervailing trends.

It works a bit like centripetal and centrifugal force. For those of you who need a physics refresher, centripetal force is the force that moves something towards it's center and centrifugal force pushes something away from its center.

In a similar fashion, as collections of individuals grow, there's pressure to centralize it and a countering pressure to decentralize it.

There is no 'good' or 'bad' here. It's more a matter of strength and weakness. For example, centralizing can lead to consistency and interchangeability. Standardization. Picture nuts and bolts that are all standardized so that you can easily go to a hardware store and pick the right size, as opposed to having to custom-make each nut and bolt for whatever you're trying to use.

On the flip side, centralizing means losing flexibility and customization. It tends to create one-size-fits-all solutions, which may loosely fit most situations but are imperfect and don't do so well for more extreme or rare situations.

There's more to it than that, too. Consider organizational structures...

While we now have the technology that allows one person (like a CEO) to communicate with hundreds, thousands, and even millions of people at once... human limits prevent the reverse from being true.

By which I mean, that CEO can not easily read through and respond to everyone if they replied to his or her e-mail.

The reason I bring that up? 

It's because organizations generally require some sort of hierarchy. Not in the sense of 'better' or 'worse', but in the sense that one person can not directly manage everyone. There's a limit to how much we can manage at once, and part of the reason the military has the structure it has is that we know (through experience) that that limit is somewhere around 7 objects. A platoon leader may have three or four squads, a company commander may have three or four platoons, a battalion commander may have three or four companies, and so on and so forth.

When you add in additional units (such as a headquarters staff or attached special support units) each command will roughly be managing at that limit.

So... we need hierarchies and layers in order to properly manage large organizations, but doing so has it's challenges.

Each additional layer is another potential block in getting a task done. It's another place where someone might be away on vacation and a petition is sitting on their desk. Or maybe they deliberately block something they don't like. Basically, it can slow down the speed at which an organization can respond.

There's also an element of 'telephone' in play, and communication can get garbled as it moves through those layers.

So centralization tends to make an organization slow, inconsistent, and if too much is pushed towards the center than the center can get overwhelmed and start dropping things.

On the flip side, decentralization comes with it's own problems. Like lack of coordination. Situations where the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, and two groups might be duplicating the same work or working at cross-purposes.

The general solution, though this has it's own difficulties and is more suited to some situations than others, is to blend the different styles together.

That is - keep some form of coordination and centralization, but try to delegate and push decisions down to the lowest level possible. That also keeps some level of customization, improves response times, etc.

I think that's pretty much exactly what the American government is supposed to do, in an ideal environment.

Let decisions be made at the lowest level possible. Cities can do whatever the citizens of that city want, and if it's something that requires state-wide decision making it should be done at the state level, and if it requires nation-wide coordination it needs to be at the federal level.

That does cause problems sometimes. That's part of why you might have to brush up on state-specific laws when you move to a new state. But it also allows us to customize our lived experiences. Like how Illinois has legalized marijuana and Indiana has not.

The Constitution lays out what our Founding Fathers thought should be handled at the federal level, and they pretty much left anything else up to the states. 

That's part of why states run their own elections. And states decide the speed limit of their highways. 

But, as I think many of you may have noticed by now, there is pressure to centralize everything, and it's not just because it's inconvenient to have fifty different sets of rules.

It almost seems psychological. People want some decision made, and they almost naturally seem to want it made at the highest level possible. Or rather, they want some big and powerful person with authority to make the decisions and enforce it on everyone else. Which is great when they're making decisions you agree with, and terrible when they make decisions you don't... but the real problem is that you're putting all the decision-making on that one, single person.

And so people clamor for the federal government to dictate the minimum wage, or healthcare, or the legality of certain drugs, or speed limits, or educational standards. And they fight over who controls the power to dictate those things... rather than trying to empower lower levels to make their own decisions on such matters.

The funny thing is, this is what the conservatives I grew up with always seemed to complain about. That the federal government was doing all these things that weren't actually supposed to be handled at that level, and that these decisions should be left up to the states. (States rights... has it's own long and sordid history, and yet again we're touching on racism... but I'm leaving that for later).

What Trump and his allies are showing us now, however, is that they don't actually care about that. By which I mean - they are trying to use federal power to dictate what states should and shouldn't do. 

Big government at its worst.

They've shown this in other ways too. Like Florida trying to use state power to override city-level decisions.

There's more to this topic that I can't really remember right now, but it all feeds into one of the rules of thumb I wanted to mention - 

Let decisions be made at the lowest level possible. 

And a bit of a corollary -

You can add to, but can't take away.

For those who have never heard that before, that's another thing I heard in the military, and the gist of it is this.

A higher command may set a certain policy... like the policy on blogging back in Iraq. A subordinate commander can't remove any of the parts of that policy. They can't overrule their higher command and decide that their soldiers can disregard that part...

But they can add on to it.

The way I picture that is this:

We believe our citizens have certain inalienable rights, and that's at the national level. It applies to every US citizen, and no lower level of government can take away those rights. A city or state can't decide that they can restrict speech in a way that the federal government can not.

On the other hand, a city or state may decide for themselves that they want to fund public healthcare even if the federal government does not. We've already seen that with certain states from before the ACA.

States can add laws restricting the sales of alcohol on Sunday, even though the federal government does not.

This allows us to customize our rules and laws at a lower level, allows people to have their cities or states make decisions that differ from others... while also ensuring that national level decisions are enacted across the nation.

A few weeks back someone asked me why their city couldn't set up some funds to create an emergency stock of food and my answer was that there is absolutely no reason why they couldn't.

It's just that we have generally done such stockpiling at the federal level. I suspect that it's cheaper and easier to do so, since one large stockpile is probably easier to manage than thousands of them (as well as the inconsistency I mentioned above with decentralization - i.e. if you left it to each individual city than there's going to be duplication of effort, as well as some cities that never develop a stockpile in the first place).

Anyways, I wish people focused on this more... because there's quite a few policies we debate as a nation that I think we should really be asking - at which level of government should this decision be made?

And with slightly different nuance 'if we really want X, can we make it happen in our city or town?'

Purpose and Direction - More Musings

There's two ways of considering the path from where we are to where we want to be -

I can focus on the start (i.e. where we are), or I can focus on the destination and try to work backwards.

Focusing on the start is complicated - because that means having a clear-eyed view of where we currently stand. 

And there's not actually a lot of agreement on that, other than that - for whatever reason - we are dissatisfied.

Nobody is happy with the status quo. I don't think someone like Trump could get elected if people were happy with the current situation.

The problem is that everyone has their own ideas as to what's wrong and how to fix it.

I think that's part of why key moments in time are so chaotic, actually. The status quo has some inertia, it just kind of keeps going and going, even as problems continue growing without being addressed.

But once something finally breeches that wall? Puts a crack in the dam holding things back?

Chaos ensues. Only the truly arrogant believe they can control that chaos... over and over and over again we see unpredicted results once that status quo is disrupted.

Consider Iraq. Saddam was a horrible ruler, and his sons were even worse. But there was predictability and stability - of a sort. And our invasion disrupted that.

And we were not prepared for the chaos we unleashed.

Major disruptions to the status quo tend to come with a period of uncertainty, where multiple different forces and factions compete to influence and shape what comes.

It tends to be a messy and complicated process, sort of like how the French Revolution had the Reign of Terror and Robespierre, before Napoleon and many more years of turmoil.

The Russian Revolution also had quite a bit of unrest and violence after the death of their royal family, the Bolsheviks were just one faction in it.

Part of the reason I have so much contempt for the Boogaloo movement is that they don't seem to have any understanding or respect for the violence they're trying to incite.

They probably think that if the upset the status quo, they'll get to control what happens next. They don't seem to believe or care that they and their loved ones will suffer too.

I can and probably will dig a bit deeper into the 'here is where we are the start', but I wanted to explore things from the other end before getting bogged down in that.

Because if we look at our goal, we also get a better sense of what direction we should build in.

Our destination, to draw on all the sources I mentioned in a previous post and consolidate it a bit, is this:

• A nation where people have control over their own government. 
• That control can mean different things at local, state, and federal levels. I've got some rules of thumb I was thinking of that will touch on this in more detail, but let's just say that if people get together and decide that they really want a law, they should be able to make it happen. But that law might be more appropriate as a city law vs state or federal law. We benefit sometimes from having a national standard, but we also benefit by letting each city and state do things their own way.
• Where people can succeed through their own efforts. That success requires:
• Access to education and training
• Sufficient pay so that if you are willing to work hard you can pay your bills and save up enough for that education and training, or even just a nice vacation from time to time
• A meritocracy, where you can get promoted or get the training and education you need based off your own talents. (I can talk a lot more about that, too. But later.)
• Freedom 
• To state our opinions without worry that the president - or some other big and powerful individual - will punish us if they disagree
• To practice our faith as we wish - though with restrictions if that faith infringes on other people's rights (i.e. you don't get to use your religion to justify making other people do things they don't want to do.)

Working our way backwards from this, we can already see some of the challenges we'll have to face. We already know that our government is not truly representative. Since this is a quick overview I'm going to go into depth on that some other time, but there's been plenty of discussion about it already.

We also know that it's getting more and more challenging for people to succeed through their own efforts. Education is more and more expensive, housing prices keep rising, it's harder and harder for people to save up money... oh, and a meritocracy? lol.... yeah, sure. Funny how people like pretending that they succeeded by merit even as they keep supporting policies that block any real competition. Methinks they might not actually believe they're the best of the best.

And as for freedom - well, Trump really has had a chilling effect on that, hasn't he? 

I'm sure there's more I could add to this, it feels like I have to be skipping some key points somewhere. But you get the gist.

Purpose and Direction

The challenges I'm running into in writing this come from a variety of things.

First, for 'purpose and direction', I think we already have some fine goals laid out throughout the course of American history. 

- We are all created equal

- We all have the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness

- Slavery is flat-out evil. Anyone trying to minimize that or claim it isn't that bad is frankly lying to you, or doesn't know their history well, or doesn't consider the people who were enslaved to be real people. Like, seriously... historians risk serious mental trauma when they study it! 

- Martin Luther King, JR's 'I have a dream' speech is inspiring, and a worthy goal too

Let's also add in the American Dream, the belief that every American should be able to reach their full potential if they're willing to put in the effort.

Honestly, we've got a plethora of worthy goals to work towards... and it's very frustrating, to me at least, that so many people today are actively working against these. Can you truly call yourself an American, even?

But even though I know there are people questioning what used to be the American consensus here, I think there are still more Americans who agree with it than don't, and so writing out the reasoning doesn't seem like the best use of time. For now. 

What's more challenging, I think, is 'how do we get from here to there?'

That question brings up a whole slew of issues, too. For example - in pursuing our goals, should we work at the state level? National level? Local level?

Private sector or public sector? 

I can quite easily agree with the goal of creating an America where everyone can succeed by their own effort, but putting it into practice means figuring out how you're going to make it happen, and deciding if you're going to push for federal legislation or try some sort of grass roots campaign at the local level, or perhaps create a non-profit and try to get funding from other members of society.

It's complicated. At least, it is if you want to take advantage of our republican structure and let the lowest level deal with the issues they can. (I can give a whole long speech about Hobbes' Leviathan and the challenges and failures involved with that, but I've written about it before. I might revisit it when I finish mulling over this current question. Oh, and those challenges are exactly why this Dark Enlightenment push for a more centralized and authoritarian system is so stupid.)

And of course any good plan needs to take into account the current political situation and navigate a path forwards. Which means you have to figure out how to deal with the people who benefit from the current system...

As much as I like the idea of ranked choice voting, for example, and believe it's a more systemic fix for the terrible incentives of our current political system, I know that it'll be difficult to convince the people who benefit from the current situation to support any changes.

So any good plan needs to a) accurately assess where we are now, b) figure out how to get from where we are now to where we want to be, and c) do a good job of executing that plan. Build support, maneuver around obstacles, do all the hard work of monitoring and adjusting as needed to make sure we get from our current situation to our desired situation.

And it has to be clear and concise enough to be actionable, but not so detailed that it's inflexible and unable to adapt to circumstances.

Yeah... I'm going to need to think on this one.

Leadership Sleight of Hand

 I was thinking of yesterday's post, where I mentioned that leadership "provides purpose and direction", and have been mulling over the purpose and direction I want to see.

That, however, is a very large topic I'm not sure I'm ready to start. Or, well, I wanted to focus on something else first.

There are all sorts of anecdotes and pithy phrases on leadership, ones you may have heard before.

"Lead by example"

"Don't order anyone to do something you're not willing to do yourself"

"Mission first, people always"

But there's something a bit more foundational that I wanted to discuss. A bit of sleight of hand, you might say.

See - people will live up to your expections. (And down to them, too). This isn't just wishful thinking, either. If you weren't already aware, Harvard did a study where they told teachers they had identified students who were destined to succeed. And lo and behold! Those students did succeed. 

But there was no actual test, no real way of identifying who would succeed or not. The kids succeeded because the teachers thought they would, and so they supported the students more and it turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This applies to more than just school children, and I will also state that subordinates are pretty good at picking up on their leader's thoughts and feelings.

So if you think all your people are incompetent and lazy idiots, chances are you are always complaining about how you're surrounded by incompetent and lazy idiots.

But if you think your people are all talented and brimming with potential? You may just find that they are, in fact, quite talented and brimming with potential.

It's not just wishful thinking, or manifesting reality with your thoughts. It's because when you create an environment meant to help people succeed, most of the time people will succeed. 

Think of every single one of your people as someone full of potential. If, for some reason, they don't meet your expectations, then ask yourself -

• Did I clearly communicate what's expected of them?
• Did I give them the resources they need to succeed? The training, the tools, the funding, the time?
• Did I check in with them, find out if there were any blockers I wasn't aware of? Did I then work to remove the blockers I can?

I would say that for the vast majority of people, just providing those three things will lead to success. And as for the rest?

Well, now you know that they are a bad fit for the role. NOT 'incompetent', or 'lazy'. NOT incapable. Just that the role you hired for them isn't a good fit for their talents and capabilities.

And, if you've done it right, it shouldn't be too hard to document it for HR. What is a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) if not a way of documenting that you've clearly explained your expectations? Documented that you've given them the training and resources needed to succeed? Documented that you've met with them periodically and given them a chance to tell you what's going on with their life?

It's all a painful bureaucratic process that helps document what you should already be doing.

I also wanted to talk a little more about that third point, about blockers. This is probably where leaders have the most room for their own judgment, because blockers are not just things like 'the task relies on someone or something else'. It's not just trouble coordinating with an outside agency, or an inability to test some process because you're still waiting for approval to open the firewall, or some other obstacle within the company.

Blockers can also include "my employee is going through a divorce and unable to focus on work."

We all know that businesses expect employees to do their job regardless of whatever personal crap is going on, but it's also true that people sometimes have temporary situations that affect them, and they can still be valuable and skilled employees.

I've seen this in more tragic and dramatic situations in the military, as well as civilian life, and I will say that people remember how they're treated at times like that. They also remember how their fellow employees are treated.

That soldier who horrifically received news that his son fell into a river and drowned while he was in Iraq? And his ex's boyfriend jumped into the river after him and drowned too?

You'd better believe that getting that soldier back home as soon as possible was more important than any sort of contribution he could make in a combat zone.

And in a later civilian role - that employee who had a heart attack on our warehouse floor? Letting his co-workers take paid time off to process it, and having a grief counselor meet with them later that week was more important than trying to force them to meet business needs in the short term.

Blockers can also be personal issues, though how you handle them can differ depending on the time, situation, and company policies.

What I will say is that you won't get much loyalty by just haranguing people for not doing what you want.

SMH

I saw a whole bunch of headlines lauding Trump for 'cleaning up' DC - as there have been no murders in the last week. 

But here's the thing - when we had troops in Baghdad we saw a reduction in crime too. 

And if it takes a military occupation to stop the violence, it's not a success. It's a suppression. 

If the root causes aren't addressed, then when the troops leave things will return to normal (or get even worse).

And if the troops don't leave? If you can only maintain your reduction in crime by a massive military presence?

Doesn't sound much like freedom, does it?

Which is funny. Because the gun rights activists are apparently willing to accept numerous children being murdered by guns in the name of freedom. (I sometimes wonder if Alex Jones's lies about Sandy Hook we're just so gun rights supporters didn't have to confront that. They can pretend it was all paid actors, and overlook the consequences of their policies).

If freedom means doing absolutely nothing to prevent murderers shooting school children, why are you suddenly okay with massive federal involvement in preventing murders in DC? 

Dark Enlightenment, II

 I have been debating when to write here, and when to write at my (very obscure) Patreon, and I've decided that the Patreon site will be more focused and specialized. I'm writing for a target audience of, well... my vision of America. It's not well suited for stream of consciousness rambling, since I'm actually trying to make it readable for a stranger. Not like these posts that are more like notes to myself.

Anyways, learning about that whole Dark Enlightenment movement has been bothering me. Like wiggling a loose tooth, it just sort of eats away at me, and I wanted to dig into why.

When we are born, we generally accept the world we are born in as 'normal'. And the average person (who doesn't have a lot of wealth and power) mainly focuses on the basics - make a living, raise a family. Many hoping to find love and happiness, and maybe trying to be 'good' like their faith or principles tell them to.

That gives society a lot of inertia. And change... well, change is inevitable, but it's often uncomfortable. Plus change often means that some people win and some people lose.

In other words, change comes... and some people resent and resist it, and some people want it and encourage it, and in some ways the daily politics are an interplay between the two forces.

Too much change, too fast, and resistance builds up. Not enough change, too much stagnation and blockage, and issues also start cropping up.

But... if the status quo has too many problems, if more and more people decide change is important... it doesn't mean everyone agrees on the direction of change. 

If problems have become too big to ignore, people can still disagree on what to do in order to fix those problems.

A truly talented leader and statesman is one who can help bring people together and direct that change in a certain direction. They're able to overcome the competing visions, as well as the inertia of the status quo.

It's very challenging. I don't think I've ever formally thought of it this way, but managing that has been a large part of what drives my interests. 

How do you genuinely fix things, in ways that lead to something better.

Which involves all sorts of value judgements and touches on a lot of underlying concepts. 

Or perhaps to put it another way - as a young ROTC cadet, the Army taught me that leaders provide purpose and direction.

What is our purpose, and what direction should we move in order to get there?

I haven't really answered that question before, other than perhaps some vague platitudes, partly because it's such a large and complicated thing to answer, but a lot of it comes from the values I learned growing up. Both from political science and a deep love for our Constitution, as well as my family - which valued science and faith. Both. My family has always been rather STEM oriented. My father taught science, my brother teaches math, two or three of my uncles are engineers...

And my parents were also devout Catholics. Actually, my sister was asking about the People of Hope because back when my father was an officer in the Air Force and we were living in Nebraska, we took a long road trip to Notre Dame in South Bend, IN for a charismatic event of some sort, and she thought that was the group they were involved in at the time.

Every place we moved to, every new city or town, my parents would become part of a church... and were always very involved. They'd bring communion to the home bound, volunteer to do readings or distribute communion, were regulars at church, etc.

He doesn't ostracize us or make visits difficult or anything, but I know he's disappointed so few of us followed that path.

Anyways.

What I'm trying to get at is that all of those play rather well with Enlightenment values. 

Purpose and direction?

The Declaration of Independence put it best... "all men are created equal" and have certain unalienable rights. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

But that's a very big idea that doesn't really tell you what it would look like. Doesn't really give us the how.

And I could go into some very long posts discussing that in great detail, but what bothers me about this Dark Enlightenment is that it's not arguing over the how. 

It's questioning those very values in the first place. It questions egalitarianism, questions the very idea that all of us are created equal.

It also ignores science and reason (though some of them pretend that they don't). It doesn't think that representative government is a good thing, and is throwing out the hard-learned lessons of hundreds of years of shared experience.

There are cracks in our current status quo, issues that have been festering for a long time... and I think many of us are open to the idea of change. 

Believe that we need change.

But the change these people are pushing for is malicious. It will cause suffering... an unnecessary, wasteful, stupid suffering.

And so I keep circling back to it, like wiggling a loose tooth. Asking myself why.

Why are they throwing all these resources, spending so much money... in pursuit of such a horrible, ugly, pointless goal.

This is not just about the Dark Enlightenment movement either. It's about every single news article or report that shows people working towards a darker and uglier future. It's the white supremacists, the christian nationalists, the MAGA supporters who still overlook Trump's attacks on the Constitution, the wealthy and powerful who enable all of that, and more.

I don't claim to have answers, though I have my suspicions.

I don't have the answers because I'm not in the social circles I think I would need to be, in order to know for sure. 

I make what I consider educated guesses, based off various things I've read and my understanding of human nature... but it's all just my personal untested theory.

And since these forces involve a LOT of people, I know that there's no true one-size-fits-all answer. Different reasons motivate different groups of people.

And still, I keep wiggling away at that loose tooth.

So let me make some educated guesses here.

First, I will say that modern society seems to have forgotten what real leadership is.

I think, sometimes, that people don't appreciate the different mindsets people have in different conditions.

Let me explain that a bit more.

In the Army, when we talk about 'good order and discipline' and 'morale', it's not just some fuzzy feel-good corporate-speak.

It can, quite literally, be a matter of life and death.

The stresses in combat are completely different from the stresses in civilian life.

In civilian life, if you have a bad day at work you can go home, open a beer, vent to your spouse or a friend, and then let it go. Maybe go drinking on Friday, and spend the weekend forgetting about it.

And if you can't let it go, then maybe you start looking for a new job. Bad leadership generally just means higher turnover, and it's a very rare subordinate who will try to bring something up to the boss when they know the boss won't take it well.

 You don't have that luxury in a combat zone. You have to be able to trust the people around you - maybe not with your money or girlfriend or boyfriend, but with your life. Trust that they will do their part, just as you do yours. 

The whole Band of Brothers thing is essential, and divisions that tear a unit apart can be deadly.

Since I wasn't infantry or anything like that, you can talk to the soldiers who went on patrol if you want more on that perspective, but the same is true to a lesser degree to anyone in a combat zone.

And you generally don't have the same stress releases that you do outside of combat.

You're away from your family. You see the same people every day at work (for ~12 hours at a time) and your unit has living quarters in the same location, so even if you might get some privacy when you sleep you're pretty much around the same people 24/7.

Alcohol is forbidden (though I've heard of soldiers finding ways around that.)

There's no movie theater, though you might be able to pick up some boot-legged videos from the little stalls the locals sell stuff at.

There's no real fast food places. Well, depending on which FOB or Camp you're at. You might have some little food truck with little options, but there's a reason so many returning soldiers head straight for a McDonald's or go to a nice restaurant to get a good steak.

Tensions that you might be able to ignore in civilian life will build. Especially six months in, with 120+ degree heat, when you're sick and tired of being around these people and have no real way of getting away.

Plus, of course, the occasional mortar fire or smoke from an IED or tracer rounds.

(And just assume it's all much more severe for our front-line fighters. Really, everything I listed out is tame)

Anyways. The point is, the military has a deep understanding of true leadership, built on a long history of leading troops in the most stressful environments imaginable.

And in civilian life? That perspective is... lacking.

You can found a company and become a CEO and make a lot of money building a large organization - and that requires skills I'm not trying to ignore. 

But you can do that without actually learning how to lead. You can be a tyrant, and subordinates will fall all over themselves catering to your every whim - and the ones who don't will leave. You can tell yourself that they just 'couldn't hack it' or come up with some other reason to justify the losses without looking at your own leadership... it's easy. Doesn't stress the ego quite as much.

That's the path that leads to losing in the long run though, because you start surrounding yourself with yes-men and loyalists and cronies, and all your information comes filtered to meet your preconceptions. Nobody will tell you an uncomfortable truth. 

You start valuing 'loyalty' over competence, and start losing the brilliant people who are unwilling to play along with you.

In the civilian world, well... you can live like that and seem like a 'success' and it'll be fine.

If you actually needed people to trust and follow you though? That's a different story. (You might have noticed that this is lacking, which starts driving your desire for 'loyalty'... but the problem isn't that loyalty is rare or that you have to find the precious diamonds in a field of waste. The problem is that loyalty is earned, and you don't know how to earn it.)

Kings and authoritarian rulers ultimately always fail.

Always.

You might get lucky with one or two. Maybe you have a wise ruler who knows how to actually lead. But eventually, you get someone incompetent who is too powerful to be stopped when they make bad decisions (and generally sees any attempts to do so as a threat, thus becoming a tyrant) and it generally doesn't end well.

Hell, the Bible even points this out in 1 Samuel 8:6-18. Sure, God gave in and gave the people the king they clamored for, but it's pretty clear God wasn't happy about it. 

He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”

Does that sound like He's actually happy about kings? Sounds more like a warning to me.

But here we are, in 2025, and people are again rejecting the Lord as their king and clamoring for a king.

Dark Enlightenment

Wow, I have definitely been seeing the results of these beliefs, but I didn't realize just how bad it was.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment

How did such idiotic ideas take hold upon so many rich and powerful people?!?

Fools who apparently think success in one area means they actually know shit about governance.

'Unskilled' Labor

The additional post here on dishwashing in a restaurant really highlights how experience matters, even for what's considered unskilled labor. 

Trying Patreon

The news makes me feel like everything is falling apart, and I get frustrated that there's so little I can do.

Blogging tends to help with that, so I figured I'd give Patreon a try. I'll probably put current event/America specific things there and use this for general rambling. At least, that's the plan right now. I'll have to see how it goes.

Job Hunting is Depressing

 There have been other things on my mind of late, though as happens far too often I have struggled with how to explain it.

It reminds me of something almost 20 years ago now, when I was working in Iraq. I don't remember how I wound up involved with this, but someone I worked with was deeply involved with biometrics in Baghdad.

Or rather, the situation was thus:

Military technology can either be developed through a very long and drawn out procurement process, or the military can be what's called Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) technology, which may not be tailored to military needs but can be purchased and put in use right away.

The issue with biometrics was that there were multiple COTS options, but they served entirely different purposes.

Some wanted biometrics for badging purposes - store a fingerprint, and then use it to verify that the badge was for the person intended.

Others used it for intelligence purposes. Store biometric information, and also attach all the related reports and files.

There were some other technologies with slightly different uses as well, though I don't really recall them right now.

What I do recall was that there was pressure to go with only one biometric bit of technology, except that the higher ups involved didn't seem to really understand the differences and were pushing just the badging technology.

The person I was working with was trying to make the case that we needed the other one, but... it was a failing effort.

We'd brief higher ranking people, but none of them really wanted to get involved. There was some Tiger Team that came down from DC that we briefed, and supposedly got positive feedback on... except that only seemed to last until they got back to DC.

In some ways, this shaped my views on organizational change. Like... top down vs bottom up? 

Honestly, you need both.

Or perhaps a better analogy is this. To throw a good punch, you are supposed to use your whole body. The force comes up from the ground, through your legs, you turn your hips and put it all into the swing of your arm. You can do a quick little jab, with just the muscles in your arm, but it tends to be weaker and used more to distract than to really do anything important. You could also set your feet correctly and put your hips into it, but if your arms flail or don't go where intended then your punch is also pretty ineffective.

Proper organizational change is like an effective punch. It should use your whole body. If it's just the top, then you're arms are flailing around without any real strength behind them. If it's just the bottom, your efforts are misdirected and don't go where they need to.

Anyways, there's always people trying to make change happen. To move things one direction or another. And that was my experience with a failure to get support from the top.

The reason I remember it, though, is because of the slowly growing realization that we weren't going to succeed.

That was a rather minor issue to be honest, but I've run into the same feeling at other times...

Like when Mom was dying of cancer.

There's denial. Resistance. A belief that we can (and should) keep on fighting. Maybe another round of chemo, right? 

Maybe another surgery, that would do the trick, and then she can heal and get better and we can get on with our lives.

And there's cycles to it, moments where things seem better and moments where things seem worse, but the overall trend was down.

Nobody likes being negative - or maybe that's just American society? We do seem to encourage people to 'fake it until you make it' and there's definitely some false positivity.

I don't know, it could also be that I'm just overly critical. I think truth is important - despite everything modern society tells us - and would rather a distasteful truth than an appealing lie.

All of which I have been thinking about, because of all the frustration of job hunting.

I know I can do the work I'm looking for. I know any company that hires me would get their money's worth.

But to get nothing back but politely worded form letter after form letter that looks pretty much exactly like the one described here?

I feel that sinking feeling, the sense that this isn't going to work.

But... do I just have to persist? 

Or maybe if I get that GCIH, that would make the difference?

Is that denial? Resistance? Or is that a fair assessment of the situation?

Hell if I know.

If nobody responds... at what point do I need to start considering alternatives? And what are those alternatives, anyway? Should I give up on InfoSec entirely? Look for a DevOps role? Switch to something else?

Again, hell if I know.

All those years in Catholic schooling remind me of what the faithful teach - stuff like "when God closes a door, Jesus opens a window". "Let go, and let God." 

Have faith... right?

Except is that just prolonging the inevitable? Just a reason to keep doing what I'm doing, hoping it will work out before I am forced to do something else?

More and more I think I'd rather be Doubting Thomas, you know. Don't give me one of those tests where I'm supposed to do something crazy, with no proof and no security, and just trust and have faith that things will work out. 

No, I want to see. I want actual, real world proof and not delusions and imaginations.

Sure, Jesus said blessed are those who have not seen and yet believed... but Thomas was still considered an apostle. It's not like he was condemned to suffer for his doubt.

Give me something. Please. Because I'm coming to a crossroads and I don't know which way to go.

Epstein and MAGA

 I don't know what to think about the current MAGA/Epstein news.

First of all - Epstein was pretty nasty, child sexual abuse is horrifying, and the powerful people around Epstein all look pretty damn ugly. It seems hard to believe they didn't know what was going on, if not participated in it themselves.

I, too, find it hard to believe he committed suicide. There's too much incentive for one (or more) of those powerful people to try to silence him. 

But... 

It's not like we have actual evidence, and we have enough conspiracy theories going around. If it was a murder, if powerful people silenced him and tried hiding a client list, they were clearly too powerful for justice to be done.

And as time grew on, it became clear that the issue was being used to manipulate gullible people.

By which I mean - I am absolutely sure that there were people on Epstein's list from both political parties. There's also plenty of red flags indicating Trump could be one of them, though again I've refrained from acting as though it's fact. Anyone who wants to know why can easily find the pictures of Trump and Epstein, or find the quote where Epstein claimed he was Trump's "closest friend".

Which means I figured anyone sincerely upset about Epstein would have known that there was no way in hell Trump cared about or would follow through on any promises of releasing a client list or evidence about Epstein's death.

I thought that the easily manipulated fools would probably continue to be manipulated, and support Trump regardless. And the ones who understood Epstein pimped out vulnerable children to corrupt and powerful men knew that list of men probably included Trump, and others in his circle of friends.

So I will admit I was not expecting this issue to cause such problems in MAGA land.

Did they honestly not expect this? How could it come as a surprise? The indicators were all out there, easy to find...

Hell, that's just one small part of why Trump is so unfit for office. 

I almost want to say 'we told you so', but I just don't see the point in it. It's too late. Those suckers voted that PoS into office, and we're barely halfway into his first year.

I don't like feeling defeated or hopeless, but damn.... this all would have been so much easier if people had done some basic research.

Update and Ramblings

 Well, a week ago it sounded like we were headed for WWIII, and now the news cycle has shifted and we're back to 'normal'.

Actually, it reminds me of when my Mom was dealing with cancer. How her health fluctuated up and down. 

Sometimes she was in the hospital, sometimes she was home and 'normal'... but despite the cyclical ups and downs the overall trend was down.

This time, we had a sitting President bomb the sovereign territory of another nation - without the usual 'treaties' and agreements that allowed us to take action in the other places we've bombed, without a declaration of war from Congress, without all the usual fakery. And the usual people point this out and complain, and the usual people shrug and move on, and it's hard to say that it actually matters.

Except it's an ocean tide sweeping away another swath of sand from the beach called 'rule of law'. Another hefty bit of erosion ruining it all.

*sigh*

And here I am, still looking for a damn job.

It's frustrating, of course. I am 100% sure that if I got hired as a SOC Analyst (what I'm currently applying for the most) that I could do the job, do it well, and the company that hires me would not regret it. I've been studying regularly, working towards the GCIH and doing rooms in TryHackMe, and I'm pretty confident I can do the job.

I am not, however, confident at all that whoever is hiring will ever look past my resume (with a dearth of actual InfoSec experience. Though, honestly... are ELK stack searches when troubleshooting an application in DevOps truly that much different from a SIEM search? Or building a dashboard in either? I think the basic skills are the same, and it's just a matter of using the right keywords and syntaxes and filtering tools... but whatever.)

It is very frustrating, and depressing, and I after so many applications with either the polite e-mail saying they're proceeding with other candidates or the usual black hole of nothing, I am wondering if I need to change up what I'm doing somehow.

I don't really want to change the type of job I'm applying for, even though I'm sure there are other jobs in IT I might have an easier time getting. Idk, I had put off seriously trying to do any sort of bug bounty hunting because at the end of the day I'm far more interested in tracking an incident through massive log searches (with maybe a bit of malware analysis and/or dfir) than I am with actually hacking into things, but at least if I did the bug bounty hunting I wouldn't have to deal with trying to convince hiring managers that I'm their best candidate.

Though maybe I should pull back and consider an even bigger change. Still, I think I'd face the same sort of problems no matter what I tried. 

I mean, blogging still sometimes comes to mind... I do like thinking and writing about things, and it'd be hella flattering if people were interested enough in hearing my takes to actually pay for it.

But it's not like I have a fanbase to build upon, and trying to build a following would probably mean trying to figure out what people want to hear (which would change things considerably) and would also probably take time to get sustainable (if it ever did).

So yeah, probably about as likely as my deciding to take a vow of poverty and join a convent or something. 

Not Directly About Trump Bombing Iran, Though Perhaps Because of It

One of the questions so many of my non-supporting friends and family struggle with is why people just don't seem to care when Trump breaks every rule, norm, and guideline.

Like - do I really have to explain why Jan 6 (and all Trump's lies about the results of the 2020 election) undermine the Constitution? Is it not obvious? 

But on to a more recent post from one of my social media friends.

To set the context - when people I follow post about politics on social media, I take what they say with different levels of credibility. Some of them seem to just parrot whatever the party line is, and they share overly simplified memes that don't really add anything new to the debate. I think they're more just a marker of group identity than an indication of any real understanding of the issues.

That goes for both left and right, tbh. It's worth noting what arguments are being spread, but a substantive policy discussion these are not.

Then there are the ones who show some level of independent or deeper thought, and if not explicitly independent tend more towards the middle of the political spectrum. I sometimes get new and interesting takes from what they share.

Like - after Jan 6 when I see certain memes, it's probably just the latest partisan campaign. But when someone more in the middle - or worse, more on the liberal side - seems ready to move on from the events of that day, it seems an indicator of general opinion.

A depressing one, really, because it seems less a sign that they are truly okay with what Trump did and more a sign of cognitive dissonance.

Or (as a book about the impact of Gone With the Wind pointed out) it could be that they care more about reconciliation and not rocking the boat. 

Better to just let it go than risk escalating things, I guess? Idk... I don't really see how the system can possibly last once you start letting sitting presidents ignore the Constitution like that.

And yet Jan 6 seemed to fade from collective memory (except for people like me, and I'm sure I alienate some by bringing it up so often. And if it makes people uncomfortable, good.) and we even, as a nation, re-elected the guy who not only failed to uphold the Constitution but practically led an attack on it.

But back to this more recent post, where one of my more moderate follows made a post about people crying wolf, I thought a bit about it.

The post didn't give a lot of context, so I'm not sure what inspired it. It could be all the talk about fascism and tyranny, all the talks about how Trump is a threat to the Constitution.

Except - he truly, honestly, really is. I'm not saying that as some sort of left-wing activist or liberal. I am saying that with all the weight of my political science bachelor's degree and a master's in public affairs.

And no, I'm not saying that because of some out-of-touch white tower academia crap either.

But I found myself thinking about how the arguments against Trump sound to someone who (for whatever reason) doesn't already get it.

It's true that the complaints can sound like hyperbole. 'The sky is falling!' 'Trump wants to be a king!' 

One of my more conservative follows (to his credit, not one that seemed truly happy voting for Trump) made a post back during the election where he commented that with Trump he figured we just had to get through these four years...

And I felt like I would be wasting my breath trying to explain why that was a ridiculously short-sighted and naive viewpoint.

Nobody seems to care.

Or rather, the ones who care already know. 

But it is true that people have been talking about the threat Trump poses for years now. Over a decade even.

Which might be part of the problem? Some of them might be desensitized by now, and once they dismissed the earlier complaints never revisited their judgement with more recent activity.

I think yet another part of the problem though, is that we never truly know when the consequences are going to be felt.

It's like the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back -

Nobody knows exactly when that straw will come. 

Everyone can see the pile of straw building, the weight increasing... but which straw, exactly, will break that back is completely unknown.

If people were to bet on which one it is, some people would place bets well before the camel reaches its carrying capacity, and some will bet much later...

But as long as the straws keep piling on, we all know that we'll reach that breaking point eventually.

This is part of why whenever some world-shaking change happens it's pretty easy to look back and see all the warning signs and the steps leading to that event, but the people living through that time are caught off guard and are completely shocked.

What's one more straw?

People have been predicting a break for ages now and yet life goes on - why would it be any different this time?

So this weekend Trump bombed Iran.

And although many people don't seem to understand this, it's actually a pretty big change.

After all, it is unequivocally an act of war. 

People have become a bit blase about bombings, partly because of all that complicated lawyering people in DC have gone through in order to allow a President to take small-scale military action without needing to go through Congress every time. Whether you agree with them or not, they're the type of thing used to allow us to use a drone strike on an Iranian general back in Trump's first term. 

Said general was in Iraq at the time, and with all our agreements with the Iraqi government at the time was not really considered an attack on Iranian soil, though there was definitely some concern about how Iran would respond.

There's also all the shadow war stuff, where nations highly suspect one another of being behind an attack, but attribution is unclear and it's hard to make a compelling case for going to war.

Trump's recent bombing of Iranian nuclear sites, however?

They have none of these obfuscating details. 

It was a direct attack on another nation's territory, just like Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.

Whether you think it was the right move or not, Trump has given Iran a casus belli... and he never got Congress to declare war in the first place.

This is a HUGE change, especially when we consider how long George W. Bush spent getting Congress to declare war on Iraq. 

Remember all those weeks of media coverage? The arguments that Colin Powell made (and that destroyed his credibility for some)? 

Yeah... this attack had none of that.

None.

And as we so often find these days - I have no idea whether this attack truly could kick of WWIII, or if it will somehow fade away and become yet another Trump thing that gets overlooked and ignored.

The final straw, or just one more?

Heck if I know.

No Kings

 Tomorrow I plan to go to a No Kings protest.

I don't know if it will really change anything, yet I can't just sit by and do nothing while that wrecking crew of Trump and his allies continue to destroy this country.

I wanted to talk more about my reasons here... though I feel as though I've layed them out in most of my posts already.

This protest...

There's a lot of fear going around right now. The feeling that things aren't normal, that the protests might escalate and get out of hand and give Trump the excuse to declare martial law and continue to make things even worse.

And yet, what's the alternative? To stay home and let others take the risks? To be one of the free riders that benefits from other people standing up, while taking none of the risks myself? When the more people that step up, the more likely we are to make a difference?

It's a bit like dealing with a domestic abuser - standing up, protesting... these things might make the abuser escalate into more dangerous behavior, but doing nothing just lets them continue their bad behavior without challenge. 

People are afraid, and so I hear and know the advice we've been given. Try to hide your identity. Maybe wear a mask, or bring a burner phone. All of which makes perfect sense when fighting a truly authoritarian government - but are we there yet? 

Protests are part of freedom of speech, the very first right engraved in the Bill of Rights. We should be able to do so without fear of repercussion, and the very fact that people are worried about that shows the danger we're in.

So despite knowing all that, I don't think I'll take such precautions. Not yet, at least. Not before it's proven necessary.

There's more to my thinking, of course. Some of it is tied in with things I've been musing on as I've been searching for my next job.

That fear of instability, the need for a source of income, has definitely taken up quite a bit of my mindspace right now. I've been studying hard to learn about information security. Doing rooms on the tryhackme site, working through some books a kind mentor sent me for the SANS SEC504 course (which could lead to a GCIH certificate).

And yet, when I get back to my roots and think long and hard about where I want to be... at the heart I have always cared most about this country and my definition of it's national security.

And when I look at the world around me, when I read the news and see what's going on in social media, I am angry.

I studied political science, and public affairs. I served in the Army because I believe in this country. Naive and innocent though it may sound, especially the more I learn about our history and the things we've done, I still believe in the potential we have. 

The Constitution.

The Bill of Rights.

A way of living and deciding who we will be based on government by the people, for the people, and of the people.

A path for change that comes from regular elections, legitimately and without the need for revolution or rebellion.

A path that is in danger, by people like Trump who have no respect for any of that. Who feel that elections that they might lose are somehow the problem, rather than the core of what makes America... America.

Part of what I have been struggling with is realizing that so many of my fellow Americans don't understand that.

That they can see and hear the things Trump is doing and just... disregard it. It's not even like they're knowingly looking the other way. It's like a mirror world where black is white and white is black, and they somehow approve and think that Trump is doing good and cheer when he mobilizes the National Guard (against a state governor's wishes!). Like they don't even understand why that's such a bad thing.

I know that this is more about me than people in general. It's like... in a relationship, right? You have who you think your partner is, and the reality of who they are, and when something happens that isn't what you expected it's hard not to feel angry and disappointed. But they haven't truly changed, they are who they are... it's your expectation of who they are that was wrong, and you are now learning something important about the reality you didn't expect.

So you have to update your mental image of who they are.

I had thought all those people waving flags and declaring how much they love this country actually meant it. That they understood how important the Constitution was, and ultimately cared more about the country than any specific party.

This was... probably, again, naive and idealistic. 

Apparently they don't really mean it, and only wave the flag and cheer when it's a politician they support.

I mean... intellectually I kind of knew this. It's natural human bias at work. Tribalism, nationalism, whatever word or term you want to use. They care more about some stupid party than the nation as a whole, though I'm sure in their own minds there's no conflict between the two (and they think supporting said stupid party will help the nation as a whole - even when the party is doing blatantly unconstitutional acts that undermine all our traditions and rules and laws.)

I don't want to despise my fellow Americans so much, so I try to reconcile that ideal with the reality. I know it's not actually black and white, and I'm aware of some of the layers of complexity... but I'm not really there yet.

There's been so much disappointment. The media, which somehow manages to harp on Biden's health issues for weeks and months and yet doesn't clearly lay out the dangers Trump poses. The Supreme Court, Congress, wealthy tech bros and wealthy people in general. All the powers-that-be that enable this... whether actively aiding and abetting or passively hunkering down.

Black is white, and white is black, and who knows where we'll be in another year? In three?

Still, better to speak out and say something now, then be another free rider.

Hypernormalization

 I read an article that captured my current feelings all too well. This strange feeling where the news, social media, and almost everything online shows an ongoing dumpster fire...

And yet my day to day life is pretty bland and normal. And not just that, but (as the article also mentions) -

...the institutions and the people that are in power just are like ignoring it and are pretending like everything is going to go on the way that it has

It is definitely a surreal feeling, especially when everyone seems willing to ignore things that I had previously thought were impossible to ignore.

Like all that classified material that had been found in Trump's bathroom, which was dismissed so carelessly.

The media could harp on Hillary for months, is still harping on Biden's health... and when it comes to something like this, all we hear is crickets.

Which isn't exactly a surprise anymore, since the same thing happened with Jan 6. It only seems to take a couple of days before what should have been a bipartisan and uniting moment of horror at the damage done and support for America (and the Constitution) somehow just got quietly ignored. 

Oh, a fig leaf was given to allow people to pretend that what happened wasn't really all that bad. "Protest that got out of hand" or whatever convenient excuse was made to allow people to pretend that there was nothing different or unusual or somehow threatening the Constitution.

It's that disconnect... that cognitive dissonance...

That I keep struggling with, even as it makes me tired and upset and I try to get a break I keep coming back to it. Like wiggling a loose tooth.

Part of me feels a little silly that I find this so hard to understand. I mean, I've talked before about how I had an entire college level course that discussed how hard it was for people to be logical!!! The fallacies, the pattern-recognition that makes it hard for us to truly think logically, the heuristics...

The emotional anecdotes, which are very powerful.

As they mentioned - you could do all your research on what the best car to buy is, but as soon as someone you know tells you that they had a bad experience with particular make and model? You're probably not going to buy it, no matter how much the research shows that was probably an outlier.

I know this, I've known it for a very long time.

And yet I'm still shocked and surprised. 

I think, looking back, that I thought it would be different when it really mattered. That ofc people would be illogical and swayed by emotions and anecdotes when it comes to something like buying a car, but surely when it comes to something as important as our Constitution and the entire nation... people would do their research? 

I've done it myself, to the point where frankly I don't trust anything on facebook unless I've doublechecked it. Because you get some cute little meme and it conforms to all your biases and prejudices and it just plain sounds true (or fake), but is it really?

It's part of why I looked up tariffs, even though I was pretty sure from my previous economic education that I knew tariffs would end up making prices rise for consumers. It's just that Trump was so unashamedly willing to claim that there was no impact, so I figured I'd at least double check.

Well... that was a bit unusual, because most of the time it's not even worth checking anything he says. It's almost always a lie.

Which gets back to the next frustrating bit - which is that nobody ever seems to call him on that!

Did Mexico ever pay for the wall? The wall that Trump promised to build?

Does anyone even care any more?

It's quite clear that Trump has 'won' by pushing everyone's emotional buttons.

Even worse, it's so ham-handed and obvious that it's hard to believe anyone falls for it!

Illegal aliens eating dogs? Really?!? You really believe that?

I've complained before about how he makes everyone smaller. Uglier. Pettier.

Fearful.

He brings out the worst in people, and it boggles my mind that people support him for it.

And yet...

Institutions and people in power just ignore it, and act like it's just some grand new tactic in typical political games. 

It's like we used to have the Cardinals play the Cubs, and referees would make the call whenever something was questionable.

Now someone is paying off the referees or putting someone from their team in the referee position, and everyone watching the game is just cheering on like normal and ignoring the increasing frequency of moments where someone steals a base and the other team claims they had tagged them out, and instead of replaying the cameras and getting at the truth it just turns into a fight for who can get the referee to make the call that benefits their team the most.

And newspapers write glowing articles about what a great strategy it was, and questions how the other team is going to counter the manipulation of the referees.

Article on DOGE

https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/what-doge-gets-wrong-about-tech-and

The Goal

 I talked about people follow their programming, and how some of the time some of us are more alert, awake, and aware than at others.

Which brings me back to the goal - helping people be more conscious of their choices, so that they are free to choose who they want to be.

This all sounds simpler in my head, or rather it feels obvious. Now that I'm trying to write about it, though, it's not so easy.

Let's start with conscious choice. That means I don't want to trick people into doing what I think is best. I want them to be aware of their own mind, their own wants and needs, so that they can choose what they think is best.

Which is not to say I don't have my own thoughts or preferences. Rather, it gets back to my personal distinction between persuasion and manipulation.

I can talk all I want about what I think is best, try to come up with logical arguments (and perhaps not so logical) but at the end of the day the other person always has a choice. That's persuasion.

Once you start trying to ensure the other person can only make the choice you want them to, that's when it gets into manipulation. Trying to hide alternatives? Cover up information that doesn't suit your goals? Make them feel afraid and defensive? Lie about your own motives?

Those are all tactics of someone who is afraid that the other person won't choose 'correctly' on their own. You don't trust them to choose the way you want them to on their own, and you're trying to control them so you can force them to make that choice anyway.

And the thing of it is, manipulation might seem to work for a time, but I think in the long run it will always fail. Like car salespeople - the ones who manipulate people into buying cars they don't really want (or that are lemons that don't really work like they should) may make a sale... but their customers are not likely to be repeat customers, nor are they likely to encourage their friends and family to use that salesperson for their next car purchase.

The salespeople who are honest and straightforward with their customers tend to do better in the long run.

That conscious choice also should be free from fear, because people don't really think straight when they're afraid. This is part of why interrogators have a 'fear up' approach. And it also applies to making people afraid by lying about immigrants eating dogs, or the level of crime among immigrants, or the level of crime in general.

That dissonance between the actual crime rates and the perception of crime? Yeah... that's some basic political manipulation going on, and it really annoys me that making people afraid like that has been 'working', if by 'working' you mean that the people doing so have won elections.

In addition, conscious choice means working to fix any cognitive dissonance. That gap between what you say and what you do? That's generally a sign that you're not fully aware, and it's hard to make good choices.

Shadow policies? Where a company says they oppose bullying and sexual harassment, but don't actually address it when employees bring such issues forward? That's cognitive dissonance on an organizational scale, and getting angry at the employees who step forward just exacerbates the issue.

Which is not to say that you have to respond in any particular way. This is all about how people think and organizations decide, it's not telling them what to do when faced with cognitive dissonance, fear, or any of these other things I'm pointing out as signs that people aren't consciously making choices.

And that's because my belief is that when people are free from manipulation, are unafraid, and are fully aware and in control of themselves, that we all benefit.

That God didn't make life a zero-sum game, and the choices other people would make when they're fully free to do so are no threat to me, but rather will make it easier for us to find a win-win.

Everything that gets in the way of that - the fear mongering, the cognitive dissonance, the reality manipulation and attempts to discredit anything you don't want to hear?

Those all are unnecessary, and just make everything harder than it has to be.

Woke

 In my previous post I implied that most people were following their programming... but it's not really as simple as that.

It's more like - sometimes we're more alert than at others. Myself included. There are times we go on auto-pilot, for example. Like when you drive home and realized you spaced out and don't even remember the drive.

At other times, well. That's what all the stuff about mindfulness is about, right? If you meditate, concentrate, you can bring yourself more fully in the moment. You could almost say that sometimes people are sleepwalking through life, and at other times we are...

Woke.

Yes, I know that term has become politicized and given negative connotations. I'm not even necessarily using it in the way people think, except I think in some ways my usage is closer to the original meaning. That when we are aware, and focused, and can sit and think about our history and how we've treated minorities over decades, that the ones who can listen and respond without that reflexive defensiveness are woke.

Of course, that sleepwalking? When most everyone around you is acting like that, the ones who are awake can be a bit like Jonathon in The Mummy.

As for the right wing trolls that try to get a rise out of people... rather than trying to blend in like Jonathan does here, it's more like they're looking at these sleepwalkers and deliberately pushing a big red button that triggers their defenses.

Except I don't think many of them are doing it because they're any more awake then the ones they're observing. It's more like they've reprogrammed themselves... like they're playing a game where they get more points the more times they hit someone's button.

I do wonder about Trump though. See, the sleepwalkers tend to just follow social norms. Those invisible rules that surround us all, and they seem to do it just because that's how it's done. That's what they learned to do, without really any thought behind it.

The way he ignores all those norms and conventions?

I can't tell if that's because he's more awake - but malicious - or if he's just programmed like some of those right wing trolls. 

Again with the question - deliberate malevolence? Or just malevolent programming?

But let's bring this back to the sleepwalkers with the big red buttons.

I would say that a large part of what I do is try to find ways of... Idk. Kindly trying to wake people up? Gently? To bring things to their conscious awareness without triggering the big red button.

Which is part of why I found leadership positions exhausting, at times. It's a lot of work to carefully think about what to say, so that you can get the point across without triggering an automatic defense. You have to think about all that stuff they say, about using 'I' words and avoiding accusatory 'you' statements.

Also part of why I'm picky about who I would date. I don't want to have to constantly watch how I say something in order to make sure that they don't take it the wrong way. Once in a while is fine. We all have that big red button and we all have things that will make us feel defensive. It just... shouldn't be to such a degree that you can't talk about the things that bother you. 

If something is bothering you and you feel like you can't bring it up, you're forced to either constantly suppress the issue (which, especially with people sleepwalking through life, rarely works and just means whatever it is tends to come out at the worst times and in the worst ways) or you end up bringing it up and having them react predictably badly and then the relationship is damaged. Neither is very good, and certainly not the way I'd want to build a relationship with someone I hoped would be a life partner and helpmate.

(This is not to say you have to be cruel or demanding or always tell them negative things. It's just that if it bothers you enough that you can't really let it go, then you should be able to bring it up in a way that gets it addressed. Whatever it is. 'Addressed' doesn't mean they have to do what you want, but they have to show they heard and are willing to work towards some sort of solution that lets both of you be okay.)

You could say the same for the Americans who've suffered due to racism and other mistakes. Honestly, we probably don't deserve black Americans and other minorities for their willingness to overlook so many slights and other infuriating behaviors.

Russian Misinformation

Saw this post about Storm-1516 discussing Russian disinformation activities, and it reminded me of a loosely related point. 

A while back I'd been reading about Russia and Putin's rise to power, and it was talking about how the KGB (or their successor org, I forget the exact details) blamed the west for the collapse of the USSR and essentially started to hide resources to fund efforts to continue fighting the West. (Which is part of we why it's so hard to tell if anything done in Russia is done by criminals, the government, a business - or generally a blend of all three).

Anyways, at the time I found myself wondering - if they hadn't misdirected so much of money, would the dissolution of the USSR have been so painful? 

It reminds me of a story I had heard, which supposedly illustrates a common Russian mindset, though I don't know enough to say whether that's true or not. Basically a man was jealous of his neighbor, because his neighbor had more goats than he did. So given the chance to make a wish - rather than wish he had as many (or more) goats, he wished for his neighbor's goats to die. 

Anyways, I can't imagine all those troll farms and disinformation campaigns are cheap. Well, who knows? It's not like I can find a breakdown of their budget. 

But I do have to wonder - how different would it be if they'd spent that money in Russia? 

Trust

 Something I read asked about trusting other people. Our brothers and sisters... and as I thought about it, about whether I trust people, I find myself thinking the answer is - 

No.

That's overly simplistic, of course. I don't think that people are inherently dishonest or untrustworthy, actually. So this post is about feeling out my thoughts on the matter in order to clarify that.

What I trust is that people will be... people. That they will be true to themselves, really.

But what does that even mean?

It's like... people often follow patterns without thinking. Almost robotic, as though they were a program. If you know their history, nature and nurture, what the inputs are, they will generally respond in predictable ways.

That is not always the case. I do believe in free will, and that people can change or rise above their pasts. I just don't think many people exercise that free will.

To give an example - when confronted by something that feels like an attack (criticism, failure, or something just not going 'right' the way they expect) most people will get defensive. And perhaps even lash back.

If you put it in a martial arts context - if someone throws a punch, most people will punch back. 

There's a whole lot of other options, of course. Turning the incoming punch into a judo throw by stepping in and aiding and directing the momentum. Stepping aside so it misses. Blocking. And so on and so forth...

But most people don't really learn how to control their responses and deliberately choose one. They perceive an attack, they punch back.

Of course, not all of those 'attacks' are true attacks. Sometimes it's just feedback they don't want to hear. And I like to think it's better, if you have the time, to perhaps sit with it. Just think of what happened, how you feel about it, and what your options are... and then choose the one that best gets you where you want to be.

Most people don't really bother, imho.

So you see something like Facebook, right? And they get criticism, and it feels like an attack, so they get defensive and want to punch back.

Something similar happens (or is perhaps exacerbated) when you feel your livelihood is threatened. Your status, your income... of course people who benefit from something like oil will get defensive when told that their entire livelihood puts the world at risk. 

In an ideal world, of course, they might initial believe such claims are false and dismiss them... but as the evidence mounts, and especially when a scientific consensus forms, they would reevaluate that and act accordingly.

But we all know that that hasn't happened. For the most part, at least. Even if (if they had accepted it and acted accordingly) they might have managed to shift everything so that they no longer depended on oil for their status and livelihood, or even worked to ensure a smooth transition.

No, it's more natural to double down and work to block anything that threatens that.

Same with control... anything that appears to threaten their ability to control something comes across as an attack, and a threat. Even though things would be better (and not just for the ones they are trying to control!) if they learned to monitor that sort of instinctive response and choose better responses. 

After all, while you may not have direct control if you come across as supporting people in their own goals you can often have more influence than if you're perceived as a threat right back.

Learning to listen and enable other people in the pursuit of their goals is better, imho, then having control and using it to steamroll over what they want.

I don't like to pick a political party because most of the time the extreme partisans appear as little more than programmed robots. You say your party supports or opposes something, and the partisans follow along like lemmings without really giving it any thought.

And you lose all that complexity, all the grey areas, all the potential for alternatives. It all becomes black and white, your side is good and the other side is evil, and in the process you demonize the other side and justify whatever your side does.

Reflexively

Without really even thinking about it.

And if you aren't careful, you learn to dismiss any argument that doesn't support what your side is pushing. Ignore any criticism. And then you start forming a bubble, where all you hear and see are the things that reinforce what your side wants.

I don't generally think either side is evil or bad (except for the cynical manipulators who know they're lying for political purposes. It's one thing to honestly believe the science was bad, and another to know and accept they're telling the truth and still propose policies and push influence campaigns to block any potential solution. Especially when it's coupled with callousness and an 'I got mine, how you do?' attitude. Though evil sometimes sounds overly harsh and judgmental, even if the end results sure seem evil.)

So in that sense - I don't trust people to evaluate a situation with an open-mind and make wise choices. I don't trust them to get past what appears to benefit themselves the most, especially when fear or hope are affecting their thought processes.

And I don't trust that they will hear criticism and use that to improve something.

Which does make it really, really, really hard to fix anything.

Take all the talk about 'woke' politics and DEI and all the crap the Trump administration is doing. 

They are trying to cover up the bad things in our history, and act as though even mentioning them is an attack.

Except - those things did actually happen. The Tulsa race massacre happened. Sundown towns were a real thing. 

Our history is incomplete when we pretend otherwise, in ways that have a real and horrible impact on people who are still not treated like real Americans today.

Saying so feels like an attack to certain people, though. So rather than sitting with it, thinking about it, and learning how to handle it in ways that will let us do better... we get Trump targeting Smithsonian programs to block any sort of discussion on those topics, and claim that the Smithsonian is the one that is divisive and rewriting history.

They remove pictures of American service members who earned medals, simply because they are black.

It's things like this that lead to discussion on 'white fragility' and 'toxic masculinity'... because how can we ever address racism or live up to the ideals mentioned in our founding documents if we can't even discuss our failures without leading to bs like that???

So do I think people are generally bad, or liars, or anything like that? No.

But I don't trust them to act logically, or respond to criticism well, or to know how to get past their own programming.

Well, that's not quite true.

People can 'get past their own programming' if they have certain types of life experiences. I mean, obviously people do. Sometimes. 

It's just that there's no fast and hard rule about when and how it happens, and some of those experiences are arguably just replacing their programming with something else rather than helping them learn to consciously choose their own.

After all, to people who want a specific result and have the power to force the outcome, conscious choice appears to threaten that outcome too. If people are consciously choosing, you can't manipulate them and force them to choose what you want. You have to offer your arguments and hope they're persuasive enough on their own.

Very Thought Provoking

https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/the-status-cheats

Jotting Down a Thought

Read more of the book... Perhaps I was too kind in my assessment yesterday. 

Anyways, it gave me an idea for something... But ofc I don't think I'd have the interest, resources, or time to really develop it. I just was thinking about what sorts of alternatives to Facebook would be possible. 

It'd probably have to be some sort of subscription service too, if only to avoid the worst excesses that come when your business model is more about using knowledge gathered from people to make your profit.