A.R. Williams's Blog, page 6

Politically Correct: Part Two

The notion of there being some idyllic past before there was such a thing as politically correct speech, where anything went and you were allowed to say whatever, is patently false.  Okay, so you were allowed to make fun of “sissies” in the 1950’s, and racial slurs were accepted.

But you want to talk about conformity?  The length of your hair, what you wore in public, who you could date, when you got married…  Socially, we didn’t enjoy greater freedom in a pre-PC era, we enjoyed fewer freedoms.  All you would get in a time-travel back to 1950 is greater leeway to be an asshole to minorities and the marginalized, but the price would be personal expression in every other way.  You still would get ostracized for your offensive tee-shirt, not just because it was offensive, but because you were daring to wear a tee-shirt out in public.

Which brings me to the PC backlash.  Trump supporters appreciate that he “says what he thinks,” that he isn’t politically correct.  But in this usage, politically correct is just a stand-in for civility.  And since when did manners become such a bad thing?  Not everything you think needs to fall out of your mouth.  It just doesn’t.  I think horrible things sometimes, I have an arrogant streak and a low tolerance for stupid, but the ability to filter those horrible things and keep them to myself is (or should be) standard adult behavior.

Kindness is never wasted.  If a small shift like a trigger warning on a procedural cop drama on TV makes someone else’s life less uncomfortable, what does it have to do with me?  I’m not living with the aftermath of domestic violence, what do I know of it?  Anyway, we tell parents when violence or nudity is coming so they can choose what to expose their children to…  how is this any different?

Furthermore, punching someone isn’t politically incorrect, it is assault.  No one is telling anyone that they have to be politically correct, but free speech works both ways.  Your right to be an ass is protected by the first amendment, as is my right to point out that you’re an ass. Social norms are evolving to make room for people who once weren’t considered as worthy of notice or respect.  It is your constitutional right to refuse to evolve.  And you’re right.  Nowhere in the Constitution am I granted the right to never be offended at anything someone else says.  Freedom of speech means that just about anything goes, within the limits decided by the Supreme Court.

But our social norms are not constitutionally mandated.  You don’t have to keep up with them.  Still, my question remains: what’s the problem with being civil?  What does it cost you to be kind?

Politically Correct, Part One

It starts with George Carlin.  I’m late to the party, but I’m here now, and the man was admirable.  As a writer, his insistence on words that have concrete meaning resonates.  At the end of the day, they are just words, but they preform an essential function.  We could debate the reasons for this, but it seems like the more visceral the words, the more they convey meaning that can’t be misunderstood.

Once upon a time, I was a contractor with a large organization and the lead for our company was trying to boost morale.  After everyone at the table had talked in circles around the issues, I finally said “look.  We get it.  The company is our pimp and we’re the hookers.  You aren’t going to make the situation better by telling us that we’re in a relationship, but you can stop beating us.”  I made the project manager deeply uncomfortable, but he knew exactly what I meant.  Was it a PC way to go about conveying my point?  Probably not.  But it was effective.

I don’t like mushy language.  Hallmark, while an interesting company, chafes my hide.  Company mission and values statements are probably the worst possible example of mushy language taking over the word.  They string these words together like excellence, integrity, and value, but what does that tell you about the company?  Only that they say the same shit every other company in the world says.  My whole professional life is about puzzling through dense prose to find the meaning and its simplest expression.  Words matter to me.

Bill Maher is one of my favorite social/political commentators.  Thoroughly liberal – I’m not even sure what that word means anymore – he seems to say what he thinks, whether that thing might offend someone or not.  I don’t want to put any words in his mouth, but he seems to think that post-enlightenment western culture, with its rationalism and scientific method and liberal values (taken from wikipedia, because I had to look it up: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, free markets, civil rights, democratic societies, secular governments, and international cooperation) is superior to cultures where women are mutilated, homosexuals are killed, and changing your mind about God is a death-penalty kind of crime.

He wouldn’t be wrong.  In pretty basic measures like infant mortality and longevity, you’re just going to do better in a country that is operated along principles common to Western culture.  Yeah, we had a rough time getting here: dark ages, witch burning, the Inquisition, etc.  But we’re here now and it is a place that was worth getting to.

Bad ideas are bad ideas.  And we should call them bad ideas, even if suggesting there is some kind of an equivalency is the more PC approach.

Now, you can argue about means to an end and what you want out of the exchange.  Most confrontations don’t end with someone having a fundamental change of mind.

So am I politically correct?  Probably not, at least when it comes to talking about and challenging ideas.  I’m George Carlin politically incorrect.  I’m not Donald Trump politically incorrect, which I’ll get to in my next post.

Your Daily Wrongheaded

What are the things that set women apart from men, at least according to social indoctrination?  Emotion vs. Reason, Collaboration vs. Competition, Soft vs. Hard.  And our cultural biases slip through as we collectively value each of those words.  It is better to be strong than to be weak.  Better to be rational than emotional.  Better to win outright than to bring everyone along with you.

But I call bullshit.  In The Why Axis, the authors identify competitiveness as the thing that stands between women and equal pay.  Women don’t go for those jobs that explicitly require competition.  They don’t negotiate pay up front.  They play nice instead of playing to win.  And the author’s answer to this is to teach young girls that it is okay to be competitive.

Maybe that’s part of it.  But what about letting boys know that they are allowed to collaborate?  Why is the answer to push feminine social conditioning towards the masculine?  Looking around, it seems like there is already more than enough zero-sum game thinking out there and that we’d be better off with more collaboration, not more competition.

Book Review: The Why Axis

Several months ago, I decided I needed to know more about economics.  I started with a book that quickly proved itself horrid.  It was called Economic Facts and Fallacies but it would have been more rightly called “why deregulation and free market capitalism is the best model based on a narrow definition of what constitutes good.”  Basically, have at it, to hell with the second and third order effects.  While the author had some good points – too often ecological considerations are more about rich people attempting to protect property values – for example.  But just because the motives behind preserving ecosystems have been impure doesn’t mean we shouldn’t preserve ecosystems.  Anyway, the book annoyed me because dude had a framework that he’d already decided on and used economic theory to “prove” that which he’d already decided was true.

So I gave the book back to the library, made a little gesture of gratitude at the ether, and started on The Why Axis, which I found much more enjoyable.  The authors apply economic testing to social questions, such as how you’d get more kids in the inner cities through high school, what kind of pre-school programs work, and discrimination.  What I appreciated most, in direct contrast to the book mentioned above, was that the Authors came to the questions with curiosity.  They didn’t know the answers before hand, they just wanted to see what the data revealed.

Their results created something of a brouhaha several years ago, because these are the guys who put forward the notion that the gender-based wage-gap is based on social conditioning that discourages women from being competitive.  This topic deserves its own post, so I won’t go into my thoughts on what is wrong-headed about this here.

The Why Axis isn’t going to help you understand the economy any better, but it might encourage you to see the world a little differently.  Which can’t be a bad thing, overall. Also, I’m happy to report that, unlike some of the other books I’ve picked up, this one isn’t 90% filler as the authors attempt to make a one-page concept into a 200 page book to justify the price tag.

Anyway, it is probably in your library for $1.45 in late fees.

It’s a Small Life

This observation isn’t a complaint, just an observation.  I look around at who I spend time with and who I call…  Aside from working hours and relationships, my priorities by way of time and energy is family.  There is no straight answer as to what is going on with my father.  MS, medications, lingering aftermath of a horrible surgery that took place nine months ago…  Not sure.  But we turn inward.

Not the royal we; me and my sisters.  And my dad too.

Not too far from that core are my best friends from high school.  Tink and The Mixologist are in touch as they can manage it between work and their family demands.  Most everyone else is either on a long tether or has slipped away.

I’m grateful for my long-tether friends.  People who don’t hold long weeks of absence against me.  Friends who can start up from six months of radio silence with no feelings and no awkwardness, because none of this is personal.

Even those who have slipped out of orbit entirely.  No negative feelings about this because, for the most part, I think I understand.  We all have our reasons and our methodology for pursuing those reasons.  I can’t be mad about it.

And honestly, if it is going to be a small life, I have no cause to complain about the company.

ChaChaChanges…

There is quite a bit percolating over here.  Changing jobs.  Again. Which is a good thing because Lily just made it rain at the vets with a eye that glued itself shut and some emergency dentistry.

This is the face of an expensive dog post-surgery. Anesthetic hits her hard, poor thing.

The Migraine Monster & the Daith Piercing

This guy.

Let’s start here.  If you suffer from migraines, you have my sympathy. And my commiseration.  I’ve been getting them since I was 13, and they’ve gotten more severe over the years, not less.  Right around the time my mother got for-real sick in 2014, my migraines got worse. A lot worse.  In the year since she died, they were both more frequent and more debilitating.

And I didn’t even have it as bad as it can get. I was only suffering in the I-think-I-might-be-sick and the can-you-stop-breathing-because-it-is-too-loud-for-me-right-now kind of way. Other people actually vomit.  I know my triggers: too much alcohol, hormones, and swings in blood sugar. The first I can avoid.  The last, I can put in a lot of effort to control.  The middle one is up to my adrenal system, such as it is.  I did my best.

The neurologist has a shitload of options. Relapax.  Immatrex. Zo… something.  Topomax.  Look them up and check out the side effects.  At least the first three were rescue – meaning you only take them when you have a migraine.  The Zo…whatever one tastes like lead laced with arsenic as it drips down the back of your throat.  The Topomax is also prescribed for weight loss as it makes sugar taste like mercury poisoning.  It also was sufficient to cause significant worry in those who know me best because I stopped being able to form a sentence.  Or follow a chain of words for long enough to gain any meaning out of them.

In the middle of this, my sister sent me a link to a post on facebook about a chick who had gotten a daith piercing and experienced a dramatic improvement in her migraines.  Like any reasonable person, I was skeptical about getting medical advice from facebook.  I did some more research.  Everything I read said loud and clear that there is no scientifically established reason to believe that this works.  Everything I read said that the evidence for this piercing being helpful was anecdotal.

Here is the legitimate trouble with anecdotal evidence: the anti-vaxxers. Vaccinations are statistically unlikely to do harm to your child.  Autism is not a new thing: there were autistic people before there were vaccinations.  Yes, everything comes with a risk and for a kid who has had an allergic reaction to a vaccine, the statistics mean nothing.  That kid is still miserable, doesn’t matter if the chance of an adverse reaction is one in a million.  However, that shouldn’t translate into everyone stop taking vaccinations.  A smallpox epidemic is statistically going to hurt your kid way more than a vaccine.

However.  We aren’t talking about not having your kid vaccinated because your sister’s hairdresser’s kid has autism and the symptoms only started showing up after the kid got vaccinated for measles.  We’re talking about a piercing.  The risks associated with this adventure?  Well, it hurts like a mofo getting it done.  You should do your research and find a reputable piercing professional with extremely stringent disinfection practices.  And after, you should follow the recommendations for care because infection isn’t fun.

I went in and got mine done in December of last year.  The guy who did my piercing told me straight up that he wasn’t a medical professional, that he had heard of people finding the piercing beneficial, that he hoped it worked for me, but that there was no clinical trial or anything to back up the efficacy.  Either way, I would end up with a cool piercing.

Fair enough.

Now, if you decide to do this, my recommendation is not to do it in the middle of a migraine because, and I preface this with the caveat that this was only my experience, the nerves that are involved in my migraines are also attached to the nerve in the approximate area of my piercing.  I’m telling you, it felt like the entire right side of my face was on fire and burning a hole into my eye and back to where the migraine hurt the worst.  It was no effing joke.

In the three months since I got the piercing, I’ve gone from having two or three three-day migraines in any given month to having one three-day migraine.  I can postpone a meal now without the dread of knowing that I’m going to pay for it.  I can have a Corona with my enchilada, if I feel like it.  Six months ago, I did not delay a meal without paying for it dearly.  I did not have a light beer or a hard cider if I felt like it.  The threat of a migraine hung over everything. Now I go whole weeks without thinking about how I’m going to avoid the debilitating pain of my head going haywire.

Is this anecdotal?  Absolutely.

But here is the problem with this guy.  Or the multiple problems with his argument.

A scientific study like the pharmaceutical company would conduct isn’t possible. You can’t placebo a piercing.  Either you have it or you don’t.  So to come up with something approaching statistical evidence, you’d have to collect enough anecdotal stories to be statistically significant.  Anecdotal evidence, therefore, isn’t to be dismissed, you just need enough of it in aggregate to have it mean something.
If it is the placebo effect, it is still an effect.
Compare the side effects of a piercing to the side effects of *any* of the commonly-prescribed migraine meds.  The piercing is no worse, assuming you take care of it properly, and I certainly thought the hole in my ear was preferable to having my brain seize up to the point where I couldn’t finish a sentence like “I think we should have pizza for dinner.”
One of the treatments for migraines is botox – immobilize the nerves thought to be associated with having a migraine.  Notice “thought to be associated with.”  The doctors can’t say for sure which nerves are associated with a migraine, but they shoot a little botox at some nerves and it seems to work often enough to do it again.  Someone *please* give me a credible explanation as to why putting some metal through a nerve thought to be associated with a migraine is that different than putting botulism toxin into the nerve thought to be associated with a migraine.
Skepticism from someone operating out of theory who hasn’t had a migraine and doesn’t have the experience doesn’t mean shit. The skepticism at that point becomes more about trying to look like the smartest asshole in the room and less about helping people.

If you have chronic migraines, no one can tell you how to live with them or how to treat them.  Should you get your daith pierced?  I can’t say one way or the other. The evidence is anecdotal, meaning there are no guarantees you’ll have the same positive experience as I had.  Here are the options if you get it done: either you will feel a little better, you’ll feel a lot better, or you’ll feel exactly the same as before.  It is possible you will feel worse, but no one can say for sure because there isn’t enough evidence.

If you’re considering trying it out as an alternative to the pharmaceutical options, you’re taking a risk that will cost you somewhere under $120, depending on where you go to get it done.  Despite the skeptics, trying a piercing out to manage the migraine monster doesn’t make you a fool.  It doesn’t make you an idiot.  And even if you end up with a placebo effect, it is still an effect that makes you feel better.

And in my experience, anything is better than the way Zomig (I finally remembered the name of the stuff) tastes.

Google Girl

It’s true.  I’m a google girl.  I have a nexus phone, a nexus tablet, and I run a good chunk of my life off of google products.  Today’s fave?  Keep.  Call it searchable post-it notes for your cloud.

Freemind’s limitation is that these large mind maps get unwieldy.  So much of my writing life happens between places.  The big map is great at the computer.  But if I’m on the bus trying to remember the name of the Ministries that comprise The New Republic of America, Freemind isn’t going to do the trick.

Which leads logically to Keep.  On my phone, in my pocket at all times, and there for me.

Honestly.  I love google.  Now, if they would just let you pick your own color scheme for your notes, I’d be a happy camper.

Editor’s Annoyance: Quotation Marks

Okay people, let’s talk about your quotation marks.  Quotation marks have a specific use: to designate a chunk of text that is directly attributable to someone else.  Or to indicate inches.  That’s what they are for.

Here is the offending sentence, or the beginning of it:

If your “primary” computer is …

Quotation marks are not for emphasis.  They are a rotten substitute for the missing-but-potentially-useful sarcasm font.  Punctuation is there to enhance meaning, clarity, and understanding for your audience.  Don’t put it in there all willy-nilly because you think it makes you sound smart.

I’m going to go back to breathing now.

Book Review: Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

See, this is why self-help books frustrate me.  You start with a concept that can be explained in a paragraph and a list, maybe two at most, and then you turn it into 200+ pages.  Nowhere is this more ironic than in a book preaching the gospel of paring your life and activities down to the bare minimum.  So there is your paragraph.  Let’s try a list.

Don’t do anything you know is a waste of time.
Take the time to think through your options so when you say yes, you mean it.  Be willing to say no to bs.  Make informed choices.
Start with the important stuff.  Don’t get more done, get the right stuff done.
Be self-critical about what you’re spending your time on.  If it is a waste, stop.
Have one priority at a time.  You can’t have everything.
Know what matters and do that.
Set aside time to think.  You need it.
Sleep.  You can’t think clearly without it.

Okay, so maybe some of the examples he gives on how you do these things could be helpful.  Techniques for saying no, for example.  But it comes down to this: take the time to know what matters most and then let everything else go.  If it isn’t love, let it go.

Two-hundred and sixty pages full of words talking about the essentials.  I guess because no one is going to give the guy $16.99 for a book with one page in it.