ZARDOZ SPEAKS TO YOU, HIS CHOSEN ONES. IT APPEARS THAT THE BRUTALS AND THE CHOSEN ONES BOTH ARE CELEBRATING THE TERMINATION OF THE CURRENT YEAR. ZARDOZ WILL PROVIDE YOU THIS SPACE TO POST YOUR COMMENTS, THOUGHTS, OBSERVATIONS AND, LATER ON, DRUNKEN RAMBLINGS.
GO FORTH AND POST!
ZARDOZ HAS SPOKEN.
By The Hyperbole
The beer you’ll all want to hear about is the one mexican sharpshooter reviewed here, and he got accused of trolling for his efforts. I can relate.
This is my review of the Autumn BIF.
I too have had my sincere opinions dismissed as the contrarian trolling of a prog plant simply because I won’t toe the line and accept the Republic… er… Glibertarian narrative. In fact, I put up with a lot of bullshit around here. There’s no need to rehash the whole Logo fiasco, I’m over that, but what about the Glib specific ‘First’ GIFs I created for the site. Zardoz still trots his out occasionally but that’s it, I can’t remember the last time my Thicc Edit Fairy GIF was used, and I don’t think they ever used my favorite ‘First’ GIF ( the one with the “winking” cat under the One’s top hat). I can handle it though, I’ve had decades of practice accepting rejection. I could mention how I single-handedly ushered in the golden age of commenter submitted articles with a legendary drunken rant, but why bother? What thanks did I get, a nice little e-mail asking me to stop submitting articles that’s what. Oh and you guys are happy to hit me up for construction advice, yet I’ve baked more pizza than any ten of you combined have eaten, I gave you my secret dough and one-of-a-kind sauce recipes, hell, I helped Trashy with his soggy crust problem, and am I respected as a master pie man? Am I fuck. The indignities are almost too many to list. I get no credit for my puns in the pun threads, which are actual wordplay not just using a word related to the theme in its normal way… “Oh a fish themed pun thread, I’m going to add ‘he took the bait’ ha-ha”… How is that even a pun? I mention all that just for the Halibut, it was all water under the bridge. Then mexican sharpshooter tries to poison me, sealing used motor oil thinned with turpentine in a beer bottle.
I may not be able to take a hint but I’m not totally obtuse, so I’m pulling an ‘Eddie’, well maybe not an ‘Eddie’, I’m not going to request that the editors scrub the site of my submissions, and I’m not going to exchange nasty emails with the founders (unless they’re into that kinda thing) but I’m definitely pulling a ‘The guys who’s avatar was a naked dude on a futon with some guitars.’ I hope you assholes enjoy your echo chamber.
How were the other beers?
Thanks to mexican sharpshooter for the beers and Neph for setting this all up. looking forward to the spring B….oh wait I’m outta here, Auf Wiedersehen jerks!
Today I wanted to talk about a local news story. I thought it would be nice to cover a local story. No story here is too local.
This is my review of Deschutes The Abyss 2017 Release (H/T: Riven)
This story starts when a boy from Tucson turned 6 years old. He wanted to throw a party, and his mom thought it would be nice. The problem? Nobody showed up so she did the sensible thing and shamed everyone invited on social media. No seriously.*
RANT ON
– My first problem with this:
The reason the entire class was shamed on social media is because the entire class was invited. Now this is a practice I encountered and I don’t particularly care for it. It forces parents to invite children their child doesn’t like to parties because it may hurt the uninvited child’s feelings. Okay, fine. So I have to invite the snowflakes too. Here’s an issue I had–planning around the idea that 30 kids will be attending this party meant financially allocating funds for a 30 person party. Granted only 10 showed, after they RSVP. If my kid wants to invite other people in his or her class to a party, everyone in the class must be invited. Including the smelly one.
I thought part of the reason we have schools is social immersion? Lets be real, that’s what most people got out of school, it certainly wasn’t reading. By doing this, it eliminates the possibility that a child can grow up knowing there are people out there they won’t get along with, or how to deal with these people. After all, if you don’t want somebody’s company you don’t invite them over. For a parent of a child that has few friends, this might seem challenging but I found a way around this by inviting a few relatives that had kids of their own.
Otherwise if nobody wants to be around you, eventually you figure it out. It makes you wonder if people act the way they do today is the result of poor adjustment to social interactions. Say what you want about social media, but perhaps another issue is nobody ever learned to handle things like confrontation, dissapointment, or failure. When encountered by such things they simply resort to their lowest level of social training.
– My other problem with this:
Another problem I have with this is the kid’s mother went and posted this to social media. Really Lady? Your kid is having a terrible day, so lets take a picture and show the entire world how much you think other people suck. Immortalize it forever. Let me ask a question, is there perhaps a reason nobody showed up? Perhaps the class is mostly girls and had no interest in going to a boy’s party? Perhaps enough people in the class got sick and stayed home? Perhaps your kid is the smelly kid? Perhaps coddling your child is not going to do him any good once you are no longer there to protect him from the world? Am I going to hear from Andrew Napolitano for imitating his writing style?
“Hey everyone. Check out how much this kid’s mom thinks he’s a loser.” I am sorry, but that’s what I got out of your post.
– The silver lining:
If there is a winner in all of this, its the Phoenix Suns. Yes, I know they suck but lets be real, they aren’t going to get too many real wins. Somebody affiliated with the team saw this, pulled a few strings, and got the kid courtside tickets–to the Suns vs. Lakers game. Pretty nice of them considering somebody would have paid real money for courtside seats to see LeBron play.
RANT END
So how is this beer? I gotta hand it to them, I didn’t think tequila would go well with an imperial stout, but I admit I am wrong. Tequila you see, is not aged nearly as long as whiskey (Anejo is only aged 1-2 years) so it doesn’t take on the properties of the oak barrel like whiskey. This beer is more “woody” rather than “whiskey soaked.” The stout is neutral, without overpowering chocolate or coffee notes. Standard dry Irish style. Good luck finding it. Deschutes The Abyss 2017 Release: 4.2/5
*The possibility of this story being a hoax was pointed out by the stellar editing staff at Glibertarians.com. Should this be a hoax, it does not improve my opinion of these people. Not only would they be liars, they got free courtside tickets to the Suns game and thus were rewarded for lying. Screw that.
Ever get a call from number you don’t recognize? Ever make the mistake of answering it? I know I have.
Recently, the people that own and operate the site were given the rare opportunity to preview an advance copy of a book! Being that that the subject was something that is going to be a highly relevant topic upon its release date, I took the bait. My issue however is that I was unsure how to approach such an article. I will say upfront this is well researched, all the arguments made in the book flow logically, and are diligently cited by respected academic sources. Do I do this right and feature a worthy beer, or do I do this right and generate as much interest as possible? In the spirit of the book’s subject, I decided to review the comment total as a proxy for the interest in my past articles and determined Glibs are much more interested when I drink something terrible.
This is my review of Honey Brown
The book is titled Data in Decline by Steve A. Wood
Given the recent headlines going from predicting blue waves, crimson rushes, brutal mobs, silent majorities, et cetera, all coupled with standard internet tough guy talk between all sides, it seems all too timely in its release. Everyone in the media are driving narratives based on polls, that suggest national or local political sentiment. The problem of course is in several recent elections the polls were wrong, most notably the 2016 Presidential Election. We can speculate how these broken polls affected current political discourse, given that both sides insist they are in the majority thus agendas should fit accordingly and the other side can just shut up. The truth is we really don’t know because there is no reliable way of determining that outside of election day, and quite frankly even then it shouldn’t matter because our system of government is designed to respect the opinions of the minority.
Still, there must be a better way of performing these polls, but not until first identifying what is going wrong with present methodology. Because of the complexity of the subject at hand this is not a book that should be reviewed in a single article. Today the excerpts I am going to focus on are internal biases that arguably drive poor polling results.
A cliche that comes up in discussions in right of center circles about polls is that nobody in the comment section claims to ever be contacted by a poll. Personally, I have—on multiple occasions—during the campaign season of nearly every election since I was old enough to vote. The only respite was 2008, but I was in Middle East at the time. I will let everyone here speculate as to why they keep calling me but sampling biases are always a cited reason. An interesting thing Wood points out, is it may not be the biases of the pollers rather than the pollee being revealed.
Canvassing also creates both a self-selection bias for the simple fact that people don’t often like stopping to talk to people on the street. A canvasser’s cause is generally readily apparent, so individuals with a particular interest in a given subject are thus far more likely to stop and talk to the canvasser. In contrast, others may project their negative biases onto the canvasser and deliberately ignore them as a result. While this can help researchers reach certain quotas, it skews the perceived level of support because little information is gathered from those with less substantial interest in the subject matter.
In the last few weeks I was contacted four separate times by somebody working for a campaign, all of whom were looking for information from me along with gauging my interest in voting. For those interested in knowing: yes, all were from Democrat campaigns. Two attempts were from actual volunteers that came to my door. While I do not believe I am an intentionally sour person to speak with, it is something I have been accused of in the past. I made no attempt at hiding my distaste for their being at my door from while maintaining as polite a tone as possible. At least that is my side of the story—it is not like I pulled a gun, or that they can prove in court I wasn’t under duress at the time.
One simply wanted me to register to vote in the Democrat primary. The conversation took about 3 minutes in spite of my having to explain that not being a Republican does not make me a Democrat. The other actually did ask me what issue I cared about the most, and instead of the standard Glib retort (gay, pot-smoking Mexicans) I asked if he had a list on the tablet he was carrying; I thought it would help reveal who he worked for. The canned response, “not trusting republicans in power,” with no analogue for the other side suggested who was paying this volunteer. In the end my only response was, “the economy.” He then left me alone.
I continued further into the book where Wood discusses potential reasons why the polling data itself may be subject to sampling bias. He provides thoughtful suggestions why this is the case, and presents examples with citations to corroborate his claims. Such as:
If strongly partisan Democrats are far more likely to respond to an opinion poll than strongly partisan Republicans—which is arguably the case since these same polls indicate 52% of strong Democrats trust polls compared to 27% of strong Republicans14—the results of those polls are likely to contain bias. The effect is comparable to Literary Digest’s oversampling of Republicans in 1936 by drawing respondents from populations made up of voters who tended to be more Republican than the overall electorate.
That this disparate impact comes at the same time as the rise in narrowcast media, which allows individuals to curate and filter which information makes its way into their consciousness, makes obtaining participatory buy-in from study population members much more difficult than it has been in the past. People are becoming far more accustomed to actively filtering what information they take in. Everything from ad blockers to phone call filters have allowed confirmation bias, “the seeking or interpreting of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs,”15 to flourish in our daily lives.
True. We all live in a bubble of our own creation. Don’t think you live in a bubble? Guess what this website is. If past discussions here and other dark corners of the internet are indicative of the overall sentiment to polling is they are as trustworthy or more appropriately, untrustworthy as the media outlet reporting it. Its to the point others will simply cite betting odds in Europe as more trustworthy or even use crude methods to neutralize the bias in the data (i.e. just add 5 points to the Republican’s result).
Another example cited as a reason the data is subject to bias:
Facebook defines advertising fatigue as “[w]hen everyone in your target audience has already seen your ad many times, it becomes more expensive to achieve desirable results.”35 More broadly, over-tasking human awareness with frequent interruptions and distractions substantially reduces peoples’ overall functionality;36 populations which have been inundated for extended periods are already operating at a base capacity of 60% at best.37 As audiences become saturated with ads, it becomes increasingly expensive and difficult to reach them, capture their focus, and engage them by any means.
Indeed, I ignore things on my screen as I tire of reading it. It certainly helps that many web pages all put the ads in the same place which is allows for more efficiency in ignoring. These ads sometimes lead to a survey. This is not the only bias that suggests the only people responding to a poll are people that actually want to respond.
Although the Bradley Effect has largely been written off by social scientists, the term has evolved to essentially cover all cases in which respondents lie or otherwise deliberately provide false data to pollsters. The concept continues to live on because the general principle of survey respondents misinforming interviewers has seemingly manifested in other forms.
The Shy Tory Factor is one of those manifestations, one which focuses on political parties and philosophies in general rather than specific individuals. This phenomenon was first discovered in Great Britain, where it was found that Conservative voters may refuse to answer pollsters honestly, indicating that they supported the Tory party less than they did. This effect has also been found to understate support for the Republican Party in the United States.66
[…]
However, due to the already questionable nature of polls, it is possible that the Shy Tory Factor as it is observed is in truth a manifestation of compounded sampling bias and self-selection bias.67 This is difficult to reconcile with the fact that the effect seems to be more pronounced in surveys where the respondents have higher levels of personal contact with the research team, but is worth considering.68
Sounds like there is a some level of truth to the theory that in 2016 people were not willing to tell somebody outside their inner circle they supported Donald Trump. To be perfectly fair, I only mention this because it does confirm my own biases.
If there are so many problems within the polling data that seem so obvious once it is spelled out logically like this, why has there not been any drive to update polling methods?
Just as politicians can suffer from record low approval ratings yet are continually re-elected, pollsters’ clients keep committing themselves to the same groups and practices which have increasingly failed in the first decades of the 21st century. Congressional representatives and senators who keep their jobs despite their track records have about as much of a reason to change as researchers who keep their jobs despite theirs.
Right. There is no incentive in changing anything if the desired result of staying in power continues to be achieved.
Data in Decline, by Steve A. Wood will be made available on Kindle on 15 October 2018. Stay tuned next week for part two where I will provide more excerpts that discuss the problems professional polls encounter when accounting for sampling biases, and their failure to address them.
As for the beer…Honey Brown is terrible. It tastes like adult onset diabetes in a can, and I cannot in good conscience recommend it. I would almost rather have purchased another Earthquake in its stead. Almost. Honey Brown: 1.8/5.
When last we left Don Swissxote, he was musing on Spain’s pursuit of Catalan Independence leaders and the narrow election of separatist or separatist sympathizing parties in the Catalan legislature. So what has change these past few months?
Not a lot.
Spain’s government seems to have realized they had waved a meat cleaver at the Golden Goose that is business in Barcelona (though tourism there seems to be just fine). Some futile gestures, demonstrations and the like have taken place…and both sides have realized they are screwed (here is Teh Conventional Wisdom view).
The populace of Catalonia seems to be split between those that just want to go back to the way things were and those that want to passively resist Madrid. The Spanish government is going ahead toward some rebellion trials of Catalan separatist leaders, but has lowered its efforts at outright squashing of Catalonia by force.
So Spain looks like a pack of shitheels if they come in swinging clubs and dragging people off for trial for “rebellion” when the populace seems committed to a sort of passive course of ….something. Political gridlock has set in, when you look at the Catalan parliament. Federally, the Catalan pro-independence bloc might be able to cause the current PM’s government to stumble…but what might replace it? If the rest of Spain sees the Catalans jerking them around, they could vote in people promising to kick Barcelonian butt a lot harder than the current Socialist government.
So we have a populace that will not use force to free themselves, and is not making too many waves right now, versus a central government that won’t crack heads and is leaning on the economy and votes of …the place that wants to leave. Of course, some silly things will still be happening, around the edges (what, no appeal to mediation by the Dalai Lama, the Commercial Court of the Canton of Zurich and the military junta of Burma?).
It is almost as if two semi-bored chess players see a stalemate coming, and are in hurry to push any more pieces. I sure didn’t see this coming…but it is so very…modern European, isn’t it?
ZARDOZ SPEAKS TO TO YOU, HIS CHOSEN ONES. CONTINUE YOUR MASSIVE AMOUNT OF COMMENTS TODAY – NO LINKS ARE NEEDED! ZARDOZ HAS SPOKEN.
I occasionally get the fiction writing bug and put together a short story. Usually they suck because I’m not a creative writer and I’m usually just blowing off some creative steam since I write highly technical documents at my day job. Anyway, I have a start of a short story I’d like to share for the hell of it. If there’s sufficient interest, I’ll write and post more of it on here.
————
A subtle jolt signaled the end of the ride for Lt. Van Balych. The doors to the elevator slid open with a light rumble, and his first step onto the gravitative section of the NASS Umbique was a bit shaky. He hadn’t been in space in quite a while, and he had forgotten that it takes a day or so to get one’s space legs under them. The hallway he stepped into seemed neverending, an artifact of the wholly uninspired design of the Nakayama-class orbital patrol frigate. “Brutalism meets Flash Gordon,” quipped another Ensign during then Ensign Balych’s first space assignment, also on a Nakayama-class orbital patrol frigate.
These frigates were disproportionately sized for their role in the North American Space Force, almost 80% the size of a Xie-class cruiser. However, the asteroid belt wasn’t nearly as contentious a place as had been expected, and the cruisers spent most of their time doing the job of orbital patrol frigates anyway. In a political “compromise,” the newest generation of orbital patrol frigate, the Nakayama-class, was designed to be the best of both worlds, a frigate with the resources of a cruiser. The result was a 700 meter long ship that looks like a boxy rolling pin. An ungainly angular command section contains a bridge, a forward engineering compartment, and a forward weapons array along with an associated magazine. The middle 500 meters consists of a spindly core around which the gravitative section rotates. The gravitative section is a 5-deck modular cylinder kept at 0.85g. Each module is a 500 meter by 50 meter rectangular strip that can be fully isolated from the other modules in case of emergency. The modules interconnect with adjacent modules through bulkheads every 100 meters. The rear section is a bulbous EM drive section. There is an aft engineering section and an aft weapons array, but they are usually remotely controlled unless heavy damage is taken at the front of the ship or maintenance is required.
Van looked at the instructions projected on his glasses and began walking down the monotonous beige corridor, passing door after door of crew quarters. One of the nice things about having a ridiculously oversized ship was the fact that everybody got their own room. “26-B-12,” he mumbled under his breath, passing an Ensign in a purple trimmed uniform, indicative of a weapons controller. Yes, NASF ripped the whole colored uniform thing from Star Trek. It was supposed to be a morale boost, but it is more of a fleetwide embarrassment than anything. Van looked up from his half-aware cadence down the hall to see 26-B-17 on a door to the left. He shifted his gaze to the other side of the hall and acquired 26-B-12 a few meters further down. As he reached his arm out to push the entry button on the wall, the door recognized his wrist implant and opened with a mechanical whirr. “It’s an accordion door, of course, because that’s the least complicated type of door to design and maintain. These doors never fail!” Van sarcastically thought, remembering back to the multiple occasions during his stint on the Svenson when the door to his quarters jammed.
Van stepped into his new quarters and was hit with a familiar smell. Despite the Umbique being almost two years old, nobody had been in this room since the pre-launch inspection. The new quarters smell was unmistakable. He dropped his duffel on the downright luxurious queen sized bed and scanned the room. The configuration was familiar, bathroom to the left, closet to the right, bed in front, desk next to the bed. Around the edges of the floor were angled windows that reminded Van of prisms. They were an attempt to give a view of the starscape that wasn’t just a porthole drilled in the floor. Officers were assigned quarters on deck 5, and non-comms were assigned windowless quarters on deck 4, a not-so-subtle insult given that the quarters on deck 5 could hold the entire 220 person crew thrice over.
Van stepped into the bathroom, which automatically illuminated upon his presence. He looked into the mirror and swept off the remnant disheveledness that lingered from the four hour ride to orbit and then to the Umbique. He had been greeted by a Lieutenant Commander at the airlock and couldn’t remember her name. She was cute, if a bit swallowed up by her high-collared uniform. Balych toggled through the menus on his glasses with a sensation that resembled muscle memory and called up the ship’s crew roster. In a matter of a few seconds, he had filtered the list and found a picture of a soft-faced Lieutenant Commander trying her hardest to look tough. “Lt. Cmdr. Aria Snelling,” the dossier headlined. As quickly as he had looked up the information, he shut down the search and focused back on his reflection, running his hand across his cheek. He frowned at the rough feel of the five o’clock shadow and returned to his duffel to retrieve his laser razor. A quick two minutes later, he was baby faced and bald, which was how men were expected to groom themselves these days. He had a mild shudder as he thought about growing a beard and hair, which were considered old fashioned and a little bit tacky. Van gave his quarters one last glance before walking out and heading for the bridge.
Lt. Balych had been assigned to the Umbique as Chief Compliance Officer, a natural extension from his prior role as a Senior Compliance Liaison at Space Consulate Canaveral. His task on this cruise was to ensure the regulatory compliance of all transports flying the common transit routes between the asteroid belt and the Inner Ports. Human space travel was still in its infancy, and very little exploration had been done outside of the asteroid belt. However, a few colonies had been established on the Moon and on Mars for various industrial purposes, including ore refining, spaceship manufacturing, and automated manufacturing for Earth consumption. These Inner Ports, including the many ports on Earth, were abuzz with commerce. The transit routes that connected the Inner Ports with the asteroid belt were traveled by a unique group of people, the Boomers.
The elevator slowed to a stop with a small jolt and Van felt the last of the gravity go away. He held onto the railing until the doors slid open. With a small push, he stepped into a small corridor and eased back down onto the floor. The command section did not rotate, and technically had no gravity, but a magnetic field interacted with metallic microfibers woven into his uniform to provide the illusion of a minimum of gravity, something like 0.2g. It was enough to be able to walk around, but took some getting used to. Regulations stated that a crewmember could only spend 6 hours per day maximum in magna-grav sections of the ship to prevent the onset of microgravity ailments like bone density loss. Van walked past a couple of doors that led to command crew conference rooms and stepped up to the door at the end of the hall marked “Bridge”. He almost smacked his face into the door as a buzzing noise accompanied a red flashing light to signal his denial of access. A moment later, he heard an alarm sound from the tactical station on the other side of the stubbornly closed doors. Van quickly located the access list for the bridge on his glasses and scanned the list for his name. He found it instantly and confirmed that the access code on file matched to his wrist implant. He stepped forward again and the door slid open. The tactical officer pivoted in her chair and quizzically looked at Lt. Balych as he rolled his eyes. The bridge was vaguely reminiscent of the old NASA mission control center in Houston. He had never seen it in person, but there was a faithful mockup at Space Consulate Canaveral that he had seen many times. Three rows of computer stations were stacked in front of one another, all facing a bank of three screens at the front of the bridge. Van stood on a riser near the rear of the bridge and was looking downward at the command center. Three chairs sat in the middle of the large riser, a surprisingly large space for only three chairs and an emergency console on the back wall. The flurry of activity overwhelmed Van’s senses for a moment before his mind was able to adjust.
The bridge crew consisted of a Captain, two Commanders, four Lieutenant Commanders, and six Lieutenants. The Captain and Commanders inhabited the three throne-like chairs in the back of the room. Lt. Balych approached the throne and cleared his throat. It was time to put on a show. In his best Swahili, he addressed Captain Mbeke. “I have been transferred under your command as of today, March 18, 2162. I am glad to be of service to you.” He intentionally and expertly avoided any offensive gendering, sideways glances, and assertiveness. It was especially difficult to keep his eyes from wandering when addressing Captain Mbeke. Xhe was a mountain of a woman, err, gender-nonspecific human. The image kept popping into Van’s head of mashed potatoes, because Mbeke’s morbidly obese body had the color and texture of mashed potatoes with gravy. Lt. Balych had addressed morbidly obese Captains before. 40% of Captains required a mattress instead of a command chair because they were too big for the command chair (which was already designed for a person of 450 pounds). However, Captain Mbeke had wedged xherself into the command chair, clearly in denial about xher 600-plus pound girth. Van had researched Captain Mbeke prior to boarding the Umbique, and knew much more about xher than likely anybody else on the ship. Captain Mbeke was born Stephanie Dawson, and was the daughter of Second Consul Blandon Dawson, one of the most powerful politicians on Earth. After spending 6 months living in South Africa, Stephanie Dawson became trans-racial and transgendered, and eventually changed xher name to Salani Mbeke, coopting a traditional Congan surname. Most senior officers were appointed directly to their positions due to political connection, and Captain Mbeke was no different. She was 32 when she was appointed to the Captaincy of the Umbique, without even stepping foot at officers’ school. Similarly, the Commanders and Lieutenant Commanders had all likely been appointed to the vessel as political favors. Running an orbital patrol frigate was seen as a cushy job for the elites, given the low danger, the high amount of control, and the sumptuous allure of harassing the junior officers and non-comms. Normal people like Lt. Balych capped out at Lieutenant, with a select few making it to Lieutenant Commander.
Captain Mbeke, leaned up into an erect sitting position, a fire building in her eyes. A guttoral exhale signaled that the fury was about to be unleashed, a song and dance Lt. Balych had experienced many times before. He tried to act and look as unimposing as possible, hoping to let the gale pass with minimal damage. In perfectly unaccented English, Mbeke screamed, “YOU DARE BUTCHER MY LANGUAGE?? YOU HAVEN’T EVEN BEEN ON MY SHIP AN HOUR AND YOU INSULT ME??” Her arms shook with rage, the dangling fat counter-rotating and flapping like a flesh-colored flag in a hurricane. The sound of skin-on-skin slapping was vaguely sexual, but only disgustingly so. Van purged the thought from his mind before the thought of a walrus mating with a bowl of jello made him visibly cringe and offend the gelatinous woman even more. Mbeke shifted over to look at one of the Commanders and said in a broken voice, “The safety of this bridge has . . . been. . . violated!” Her lower lip began to pout and water glistened deep in her fat-swollen eyes, her words punctuated by a rhythmic heaving whistle unique to such a morbidly obese person trying to suppress her sobs, “I’ve. never. been. so. humiliated. in. my. liiiiiiiiiiii-hi-hi-hiiiiiiifffffffffffe!!” She broke down into a blubbering mess, her pasty mashed potato skin turning bright red with the effort. The Commander to her left motioned to one of the Lieutenants who escorted Lt. Balych off the bridge and into one of the command conference rooms. Van was happy that the ceremonial victimization of the Captain was finished. Tradition or no, he could never shake the thought that it was a bit ridiculous. There were better ways to put new junior officers in their place.
Lt. Eva Baxter dropped the portable reading device on the conference table with just enough gusto to signal to Van that she didn’t want to be there dealing with onboarding a new bridge officer at the moment. Even though Baxter was likely a normal person who went to officer training school and didn’t come from a life of privilege, the systemic disdain held by the appointed senior officers tended to infect the rest of a ship like a virus. “Here is all the information about your job responsibilities, the layout of your bridge console, access parameters, your shift assignments, and protocols for communicating with senior officers. Read it all and memorize it,” she gruffly monotoned, punching buttons on the reading device. With a final button click, the entirety of the manual was uploaded to Van’s glasses, as indicated by a progress bar projected on the bottom of his left lens. She then proceeded to look him head to toe, a gesture he knew all too well. “We run the consort system here, have you been a consort on any of your previous assignments?” her disinterested demeanor staying unchanged, despite the shift to a sexual conversation. “Yes, I was consort to a Commander on my previous space assignment,” Van responded, momentarily flashing back to a memory of a sexual encounter with Cmdr. Bordreaux on the Svenson. “Good,” the emotionless Lieutenant dismissively muttered, “you’re not the Captain’s type, and the Commanders both already have enough consorts, so you may end up with a Lieutenant Commander.” An unofficial policy adopted on some of the most female dominated ships in the fleet assigned the male junior officers to female senior officers for sexual liaises. Neither the men nor the women needed the sex, as sexbots and sex toys were more than adequate to satisfy any sexual desire they had. However, the consort program gave the female senior officers another avenue to show their disdain for the junior officers, and especially for the wholly emasculated male officers. Consort sexual encounters were notoriously humiliating to the men. Some of the women even took perverse joy in pegging their men while making every effort to let the men know that they were less than trash. Lt. Balych had been lucky the first time. Cmdr. Bordreaux was a bit more traditional, and wasn’t particularly comfortable with the dominant role she was supposed to take in the consort relationship. Mostly, she just wanted companionship. Van was nervous that he’d get a true believer in the consort system this time around. His ass clenched at the thought.
Uh oh… you don’t get a direct call from SP when things are going well. It was a bit hard to hear her, with the Cartoon Network on at a high volume in the background, but she told me to come to the command center right away. In person.
That meant BIG trouble. More than Morrissey trouble. More than Electric Ants.
We all filed in the conference room and took our seats.
It was announced that we had a STEVE SMITH problem. Funny…I thought mexican sharpshooter had his tiny ass dog back, and STEVE SMITH was on the way to rape reindeer or roger Santa or somesuch. It was much worse than that…
We had credible intelligence that STEVE SMITH was really headed to the Netherlands…to the ICC. He was going to turn himself in for RAPECRIMES against Humanity. Worst of all, he was going to roll over on us. We had put him up to it, for site content! None of us wanted to go sit in Slobodan Milošević’s old cell and die waiting for trial in the Hague. So what were we to do?
mex begged off, having just had a scrap with the RAPESQUATCH. Understandable. SugarFree was willing, but he was a bit tied up with an odd situation at work. Something about a valuable member of the team had gone missing, and he was on the trail to find him. I looked over at Warty, but he demurred. He was too busy building a Brazilian Ju-Jitsu robot, to act as a sparing partner. The last guy he sparred screamed like a damned soul when Warty dislocated both his shoulders…and a kneecap…and an ankle. Oddly enough, nobody in the gym wanted to practice with him after that.
OMWC told us no way in Hell he was going to risk CPS kicking the door in while he was gone and end up with a warrant for a “Home Alone” case. SP couldn’t leave, as the site would crumble. Plus she was usually engaged in some sort of mortal combat with WordPress or Comcast or someone like that. BrettL and sloopy had links duty, and small kids. Riven was stuck in an endless meeting loop at work…kind of a beginning of Superman type prison thing. Sounded awful.
HM volunteered, rather Heroically, I thought. But he had to stay and do some linguistics work for us. We have hopes for a rather profitable return on a Anime-Twerk-Thicc-English interpretation app. So he was told to stay and work on it. Anyway, if that CUMMIEBOT ever returns, we need HM to deal with it. Guess who that left… Me. Obviously ZARDOZ could not go undercover. Besides, he was too sympathetic to STEVE SMITH after the RAPESQUATCH helped him dry out last year. SEA SMITH…yeah, family loyalty.
Fine. OK. Guess I am it. This should take a week or more to do some recon, and lay in wait for THE STEVE SMITH SANCTION.
I will do my best to send reports. I have to go pack now.
P.S. I want to be back in time for the wailing and gnashing of teeth this will bring.
Whenever someone proposes a course of action the first thing you need to do, before you can act on the proposal, before you can even decide whether you agree with the proposal, is to understand the proposal. This seems so obvious that no one could ever dispute it, but it involves thought, so it frequently happens in our personal lives and seldom happens in politics. We will get to politics eventually and try to understand how this basic human ability to understand and evaluate proposals completely falls apart in the public sphere, but first how does it actually work?
Let’s look at a personal life example: Chip walks up to Jose and says “Jose old chum, I have had a thought, I would enjoy your company at a Venezuelan feminist cooperative vineyard’s, artisanal, non-GMO, gluten free, fair trade wine tasting this Saturday, would you like to come?” (Chip is WokeAF™)
What is Jose to do?
First Jose parses the words. This happens rapidly, but does involve a surprising amount of cognition.
Jose old chum,
(Ok, I am in fact Jose)
I have had a thought,
(Ok, Chip is a douche)
I would enjoy your company at a
(I am not really fond of Chip, and suspect he is only asking me because he thinks he gets WokeAF™ points because my skin is darker than his, so my inclination is to say no, but maybe the event will be enjoyable)
Here in the cognitive process Jose skips ahead past the adjectives to the underlying event, he will return to the adjectives, but they can’t fulfill their descriptive purpose without an object.
wine tasting
(I like wine)
this Saturday
(My Mother in law is visiting this weekend, so maybe this is a good plan)
Now Jose gets around to the adjectives.
Venezuelan
(I am Honduran by birth, came to the US to work hard and improve my lot and therefore have neither a sentimental attachment to Venezuela, nor a desire to ‘virtue signal’ by supporting a communist dictatorship)
feminist cooperative vineyard’s
Dissonance begins as Jose struggles to understand the relevance of this adjectival phrase to a subject that seems unrelated to sexual politics, or the ownership structure of the vineyard.
(WTF?)
artisanal
Dissonance increases for another reason.
(Yeah, kind of guessed we weren’t going to be tasting factory wine. Is that even a thing?)
non-GMO,
As mentioned previously, Jose likes wine, and is aware that oenoculture has involved hybridizing, genetic selection and other methods of modifying the basic grape for more millennia than humanity has been writing things down.
(Bull)
gluten free,
(Ok so if the wine is fortified with spirits they aren’t wheat or barley based I guess?)
fair trade
As Jose is not mentally retarded, nor does he huff his own farts, these words float past him and have no impact on the decision; they are semantically null.
Jose has now understood the proposal: He is invited to spend Saturday with Chip, who is extremely annoying. There will be wine which Jose enjoys, stupidity, which Jose does not enjoy, pretension which may provide amusement, and finally, escape from a day of listening to his Mother in law. He weighs the pros and cons and reaches a decision:
“Sure Chip, sounds great, what time?”
Jose’s Mother-in-Law enjoys giving her daughter advice about how to improve Jose. She does this loudly and in Jose’s presence. Jose would likely have agreed to attend a Nazi Mime performance rather than stay home this Saturday. He has heard a proposal, thoroughly understood it, evaluated the obvious effects, considered alternatives, and reached a rational decision. Reason has triumphed and liberty has produced a minuscule increase in happiness!
Now let’s look at how this works in Politics:
A Grassroots Movement (the good kind with talking points and paid protesters courtesy of The Open Society Foundation, not the bad kind made up of lots of deplorable who come together because they are wrong about an issue) proposes a new law banning Assault Rifles. Their stated reason for this law is that Assault Rifles are used to commit mass killings, and we need to do something to stop the killing of schoolchildren.
For the purposes of this essay let’s not spend time on the question of what Assault Rifle means. Pretend it is actually a thing, because while the definition is not available now, and will no doubt end up making no sense from a functional standpoint, the proponents will come up with some set of characteristics for their ban. We will also use a simplified, made up proposal rather than the text of any actual bill because otherwise no one except lawyers will read any further. And not even the lawyers will understand everything that is included. Instead let’s try to understand and evaluate the really scary, dangerous thing in this proposal; no, not the rifles, they are not nearly as scary as A NEW LAW!
To understand the proposal obviously means to understand what the proposed law does. The proponents have stated that their goal is to stop the mass killing of schoolchildren. That is a goal every human, with the possible exception of Peter Singer, agrees is worthy. Does the law actually do this? What does this law do? Well to answer that we have to consider what any law does, and how it does it.
Historically the law was divided into two parts. The Criminal Law, which acted by inflicting punishment on those who were guilty, and the Civil Law, which acted as rules by which to judge private disputes, determine liability and assess some form of redress. Modern legislators, following the lead of Academic Lawyers[1] , dispensed with the formal division into separate codes, and as a result (probably the point of the change) have blurred the distinction between guilt and liability. With the proposal here we are dealing with the Criminal Law.
The Criminal Law acts by imposing a punishment for some act. In the case of a proposed new law there are only two possible ways it can have any effect. It can provide a penalty for some behavior that was previously innocent, or it can alter (increase, decrease, change in kind, or eliminate) the penalty for some behavior that was already criminal. So what does our hypothetical proposed law do?
Per the text made up for this essay:
It bans the ownership of AssaultRifles™ and provides jail terms of up to 5 years and fines of up to $50,000 per violation.
Per the stated goal:
It stops school shootings
Per reality:
It adds penalties for some newly criminalized acts, increases the penalties for some existing crimes, and has no effect on other existing crimes.
Let’s look at what falls in each of these categories:
By definition, only law abiding gun owners can possibly fall into this category. So this law has its strongest effect on people who own an Assault Rifle, but do not use it to rob anyone (already criminal), assault anyone (already criminal), or kill anyone (already criminal). Obviously this doesn’t get us to the stated goal of ending school shootings.
This category may actually affect some criminals. It adds another charge that can be applied to robbers who use Assault Rifles, thugs who assault others with Assault Rifles, and killers who murder with Assault Rifles. So what effect can we hope for?
5 years is a significant penalty, on a par with existing penalties for the most serious robberies and assaults, and it is quite possible that the threat of an extra 5 years might deter a robber, or some thug from using Assault Rifles, but it probably won’t prevent them from committing the underlying crime. A quick perusal of the record shows that Assault Rifles are seldom used in these crimes. Probably because Assault Rifles are expensive, and frankly awkward to carry around. So most likely the few criminals affected will simply do what the vast majority already do and use a different gun, or a knife.
What about killers? The stated goal of the law seems to imply that it should affect killers. Murder carries penalties ranging from 10 years on up to the death penalty. It is possible, that an increase of 5 years might have some effect on those killers who might expect to be sentenced at the low end of the range. 15 years is more than 10 and maybe our hypothetical killer will think “I’ll do 10 years to kill that #@$%^&, but I ain’t doing 15!”
Of course the legally defining characteristic of killers who might expect to be sentenced at the low end is THAT THEY DID NOT PREMEDITATE THE KILLING! So… not going to affect killers at all then?
And we finally work our way around to people who shoot up schools. Mass shooters don’t get sentenced to 10 years. If they survive the shooting itself, they get life without parole or the death penalty. Adding another charge to the indictment cannot possibly deter school shooters. Even the proponents of these laws understand this, they just gloss over the fact that illegal does not mean non-existent. This is apparently a hard distinction to grasp.
What is the difference between illegal (which is what a ban makes something) and non-existent (which only reality can make something)? Consider an example that has a certain relevance to a discussion of a law that prohibits possession of an object. Heroin is illegal; and despite being illegal, demonized in every form of communication, subjected to decades of massive law enforcement effort, having billions spent to eliminate it, and incidentally being highly poisonous, every city has neighborhoods full of people who use it daily. Unicorns are non-existent and thus, despite being the epitome of adorableness, good in every way, beautiful, magical symbols of wonder and purity, there are none.
So what is the result of our careful examination of what is actually being proposed? It appears to be a proposal to make millions of law abiding citizens into criminals and to do absolutely nothing to stop mass killings. By their fruits shall ye know them. Gun bans of any sort are targeted at law abiding gun owners. They have minimal effect on criminals and, in fact, even that minimal effect decreases as the seriousness of the crime increases. They simply cannot prevent mass killings.
[1] a group of people who have done as much for the cause of liberty and justice as Pol Pot or Stalin
Truce time is done… resume combat in this open thread. Time to go find some pizza. Which type, we will not say.