firecat

Neil Gaiman was recently accused of sexual assault. I’ve been consuming his works and occasionally reading his blogs for 25 years. I’ve gradually lost some of my respect for him as a person but I think The Sandman and American Gods are really great works and he has created some absolutely amazing characters.

Opinions and discussion of sexual assault after the cut. No SA details in the post, there might be details in the comments, if any.
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I made this post on a mailing list, but it got rejected for being off topic (which was reasonable) so I thought I would recycle it here for the benefit of the choir. :)

Context: Someone announced a dating event. Some people criticizing the event because it was open only to people looking for opposite sex dating partners (plus the original announcer didn't mention this). Then other people called the criticizers PC. One of them complained that many people these days go out and look for things to be offended about, and they don't pay attention to intent, and intent is what really matters.

So I said,

Intent isn't as important as you think it is. And neither is offense. You are confusing "assuming malicious intent and taking offense" -- an individual response to an individual behavior -- with the broader situation of trying to change societal norms that are wrong and harmful.

If something is normal but harmful, then a person don't need to feel malicious in order to cause harm. They just have to go about their business, unaware of the harm they are causing. In order for society to change, people have to be made aware of harm they are causing and bepersuaded to change. That's uncomfortable because no one wants to change unless it was their idea. But if you believe that a fairer society is a good thing, then it is necessary.

Also, a person who calls out a pattern of harm isn't necessarily offended. They might just be trying to do their part to make society fairer.

Just to make it crystal clear: It is no big deal that this particular event excludes queer people. But it is part of a larger pattern where queer people are excluded from other things that matter a lot, such as marriage rights. It's a good thing for people to stand up and say "Hey, look at the pattern," when they see it. Because otherwise a lot of people won't realize it's even there.

This is the second day in a row that I've been annoyed by something published by The Atlantic.* ETA: Mistake, turns out the other piece I was thinking of didn't originate in The Atlantic; they just published a comment on it.

This article is fascinating in the way it tries to invent a problem and then solve it.

"There's No Such Thing as Everlasting Love (According to Science) (Can't find a by-line. And forgot where I saw it, I'm afraid.)

The problem: Americans are "love-starved" and lonely.

The solution: Change the definition of love so that it means brief moments of connection we have with other people throughout the day, and has nothing to do with commitment, blood ties, or sexual desire. Now everyone can feel love(d)!

Excerpt:

In her new book Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become, the psychologist Barbara Fredrickson offers a radically new conception of love.

Fredrickson, a leading researcher of positive emotions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, presents scientific evidence to argue that love is not what we think it is. It is not a long-lasting, continually present emotion that sustains a marriage; it is not the yearning and passion that characterizes young love; and it is not the blood-tie of kinship.

Rather, it is what she calls a "micro-moment of positivity resonance." She means that love is a connection, characterized by a flood of positive emotions, which you share with another person—anyother person—whom you happen to connect with in the course of your day. You can experience these micro-moments with your romantic partner, child, or close friend. But you can also fall in love, however momentarily, with less likely candidates, like a stranger on the street, a colleague at work, or an attendant at a grocery store.

I think it's a good idea to emphasize the value of this experience, for those who are comfortable enough with face-to-face interaction to have it.

But I'm not in favor of making the word "love" mean this thing instead of the bundle of emotions plus ideas plus intentions plus (in some cases) sexual desire that go with a committed and/or romantic relationship. I'm also not sure I like the idea of having love mean yet another thing. It already means too many things!

And anyway, the solution doesn't really solve the problem that the article described. The article used this evidence that Americans are love-starved and lonely:

• More Americans than before said in a poll that they had zero confidants. (But having micro-moments of positivity resonance wouldn't give you more confidants.)
• According to one expert, 20–35 percent of people are "sufficiently isolated for it to be a major source of unhappiness in their lives." (Would having micro-moments of positivity resonance help with that? Who knows?)
• Rates of depression are increasing (would micro-moments of positivity resonance cure this condition? Who knows?)
• "Nearly half of all single people are looking for a romantic partner." (My reaction to that: Fascinating—more than half of single people aren't looking! And would having micro-moments of positivity resonance make them stop looking, or stop believing that having a partner would help them be happier? Who knows?

But to Fredrickson, these numbers reveal a "worldwide collapse of imagination," as she writes in her book. "Thinking of love purely as romance or commitment that you share with one special person—as it appears most on earth do—surely limits the health and happiness you derive" from love.

So OK, where's the evidence that these people without confidants, who are lonely, depressed, and or unhappily single, are in that condition partly because they think of love "purely as romance or commitment that you share with one special person"? No evidence? I thought not. (My own data point: I have depression, and I don't think that way in the slightest. For one thing, when my depression is well-managed, I fall in love regularly, not only with people, but also with ideas, things, activities, and experiences. For another, I'm poly, so I don't share romance and commitment with only one person. And finally, when my depression is not well controlled, then I can't feel love for anything or anyone at all, never mind what my beliefs are about what love is. My actively depressed brain isn't open to micro-moments of positivity resonance.)

There's also a problem in the article with how Fredrickson's research is said to provide evidence about this micro-moment experience. The article states that they only happen face-to-face (rather overdramatically: "You have to physically be with the person to experience the micro-moment. For example, if you and your significant other are not physically together—if you are reading this at work alone in your office—then you two are not in love. You may feel connected or bonded to your partner—you may long to be in his company—but your body is completely loveless") but none of the experiments described included that condition. In one, people listened to a recording and then retold it, but they were in an MRI machine, so they weren't face-to-face with someone. In another, people did loving-kindness meditation, which is something you do in your own head, not interacting with another person.

OK, now that I've said all that, the article reminds me of something else that I think about sometimes. One of my favorite Buddhist teachers, Gil Fronsdal, sometimes says "Adult humans need to love, but they don't need to be loved."

I'm very fortunate that I've never done without feeling loved (have always felt that at least a few people loved me) so I can't speak to that part. But I have noticed that what I get out of loving someone or something is very different from what I get out of feeling that someone loves me. And what I get out of loving people/things is really important to me; I would say absolutely that I need it.

National Public Radio (NPR) has a web page asking for comments on the topic "What does it mean to live in a nation where one out of every three people is obese." (The nation in question is the United States.)

http://www.publicinsightnetwork.org/form/apm/0d2dd143dca7/what-does-it-mean-to-live-in-a-nation-where-one-out-of-every-three-people-is-obese

The lead-in to the comment section says:

Americans are getting bigger. And it's not just changing our health, but our nation's infrastructure, spending habits, economy and state of mind. What changes have you noticed to the way we live? 

Tell us here. Your response will help shape a national reporting project on obesity.

Here are the comments I left them.

What conversations do you have - or avoid having - about weight?
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Claimer: I have a small role working on Wiscon.

I think people who run Wiscon did a right thing by withdrawing Elizabeth Moon's GOH invitation, as a result of her writing a post that showed intolerance of Muslims, and then deleting all the comments on the post.

I disagree with the people who think it was unforgivable that the decision was not made instantaneously.

I don't disagree with the people who think it took too long. I also have sympathy for the amount of time it took, because the decision-makers were trying to deal with a situation they haven't handled before, and that's hard for a sizable group of humans.

I disagree with the people who think it is unforgivable for Wiscon's public communications to have waffled (the initial message was that we would not withdraw the invitation, then we did). It would have been better if that hadn't happened, but see above.

I agree with the people who point out that the length of time the decision took caused practical and emotional hardship for potential Wiscon attendees who felt unsafe as a result of EM's remarks.

I agree that the waffling and the delay made it look like the people who put on Wiscon might not be committed to creating a convention welcoming to people of color and third-wave feminists.

I think almost all the people who put on Wiscon are committed to creating a convention with a social justice focus. Also, we may not be working hard enough on it and may not be sufficiently well educated on social justice issues.

I am noodling about some conversation around a current event, but not directly addressing the event or the people who are involved in it.

http://tempest.fluidartist.com/moonfail-reasonableness/
(I agree with this post 100%.)

http://www.jimchines.com/2010/09/reason-anger/

There is some fascinating discussion in the comments of this post.

http://www.jimchines.com/2010/09/reason-anger/#comment-15949 D. Moonfire:
I try really hard not to only pay attention that are “reasonable”. I think it very important to read about unreasonable, insane, and otherwise brain-dead people from the simple point that I’m looking at them from my point of view. If I stuck with reasonable, then I’ll be just confirming the biases I already have (I believe the proper term is confirmatory bias or something like that). I won’t learn anything more and I’ll just put myself in a bigger hole that I’m already in....I think it critical to see the world from points of view that don’t agree with you, those unreasonable people out there.

Two things strike me here. One, I agree that if you only pay attention to people you consider to be acting reasonable, you'll end up with confirmation bias. Two, when you see "reasonable" opposed to "unreasonable, insane, and otherwise brain-dead," and you see "unreasonable" defined as "points of view that don’t agree with you," it's easy to see why conversations go astray. It's easy to end up with "Be reasonable" meaning "Agree with me" and "You're not being reasonable" meaning "You're not agreeing with me and therefore you're insane or brain-dead."

http://www.jimchines.com/2010/09/reason-anger/#comment-15990 Laura Resnick: It’s also worth noting that -emotion- is highly over-valued by many people, i.e. the notion that how strongly you feel about something has a direct corollary to how informed, valid, or inherently correct your opinions are.

I don't like the word "over-valued" there. What she's really talking about is public behavior, not emotion, and what she's really saying is "People who publicly express emotions are taken more seriously than people who don't." And personally, as a cold fish, I don't like that. But I don't know that this translates to publicly expressing emotions being "over-valued."

http://www.jimchines.com/2010/09/reason-anger/#comment-16307 Skennedy: Any motivations ascribed to thousands of individual comments and tens of thousands of opinions spread on peoples’ own blogs are straw men - easy to dismiss compared to the rainbow of actual diverse opinion.

YES YES FUCKING YES. But this reply is probably right:

http://www.jimchines.com/2010/09/reason-anger/#comment-16310 Resa: ...but humans are tribal creatures and tend to think in tribal terms...

I now have almost automatic reactions to phrases such as "those people": "which people do you mean, exactly? what makes you lump them together?") and I am glad of these reactions. But I probably retain more tribal-creature thinking than I am aware of.

graymalkin sent me an article about introversion. I think the article is OK and I think that articles debunking myths about introversion are generally a good idea. But there are some ways that this article ends up reinforcing some myths about introversion, and it has some other problems.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201008/revenge-the-introvert

Here is my understanding of introversion: Being drained by spending time in social environments (as opposed to gaining energy thereby). Needing alone-time to recharge.

Here are things commonly associated with introversion that I think are not inherently part of introversion: Shyness. Social phobia. Social awkwardness. Invariably being quiet in groups. Being unable to think on your feet. Disliking to perform.

Following are some quotes from the article and my comments.( Read more... )

http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2009/05/05/RSSReadersModeledAfterEmailClientsAreFundamentallyBroken.aspx

Looking back at the time I’ve spent working on RSS Bandit, I realize there are a couple of features I added to attempt to glom the river of news model on top of an email based model for reading feeds. These features include

* the ability to mark all items as read after navigating away from a feed. This allows you to skim the interesting headlines then not have to deal with the “guilt” of not reading the rest of the items in the feed.
* a reading pane inspired by Google Reader where unread items are presented in a single flow and marked as read as you scroll past each item

Gosh, that sounds just like Usenet.

Part of this is from a comment in leback's journal.

http://jorm.livejournal.com/94477.html says that everyone is socially retarded, and proceeds with a list of behavior rules that we all should follow. I agree with many of the behavior rules.

But he lost me when he wrote "Everyone is on the Short Bus of Social Interaction to some degree or another." It's one thing to say "I hold extremely high ideals for social behavior, and no one measures up to my ideals." It's another thing to say that everyone is retarded. The latter does not take responsibility for your own attitudes. Besides, it makes no sense.
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