How I stopped worrying and learned to accept trans people

 It occurred to me the other day that I have never really talked about trans identities on here. I'm not trans, after all. When I was Catholic, I didn't mention the subject because I knew how everyone around me felt about it and what they would say. And when I stopped being, it actually didn't change my opinion at all because I had already accepted trans identities for a while by then.

But given that trans people seem to be the scapegoat for a lot of people right now, I thought it would be a good time to come out and say something, in the one place where I've done most of my religious and ethical thinking. Social media isn't a great place for that kind of conversation.

It actually started in late high school or college, when I watched a House, MD episode. You probably know the one: a girl collapses and House finds out her chromosomes are actually XY, which is medically relevant for some reason or other. House immediately starts calling her "he" because chromosomes are everything, even though everything else about her was female. (This is a real medical condition that happens sometimes and isn't always discovered.)

It left me puzzled. Obviously she was a girl. She looked like a girl, had been raised as a girl, and was quite insistent that she was a girl. My parents pointed out that sex does come from chromosomes, and I asked, but does it? Surely it's a combination of factors and in her case she's more girl than boy?

They said that, well, imagine a case where a boy looked like a girl in some way, surely it would be cruel to call him a girl if he isn't one, and after all the truth matters. My private conclusion was, in a case like that we should just ask the patient. Because clearly it doesn't really matter if somebody's a man or woman anyway. Nothing bad happens if she calls herself a girl. And it makes her unhappy to be called a boy. So shouldn't that be the end of it?

My next exposure to the idea was when Marko was little and I was reading lots and lots of blogs by religious mothers. I had wanted to see how other moms were doing it, especially if they were religious and had a lot of kids. A blogger I read had a post about how her husband had recently transitioned, and the problems that raised among their family and church. It was a heartfelt post, and the blogger was fully in support of her now-wife. I read it a few times and thought--well, why do those people care so much? It's a little weird but it clearly made the person happier. And what do I know about gender, really? I can't say how I would respond to feeling that I was a man inside, because I don't feel like a man inside. I can say that I wouldn't like to be a man outside, given that I feel like a woman inside, though I don't know exactly what I'd do about it. But she feels like a woman, dressing and acting like a woman makes her happy, so how is it anybody's business?

Of course, I assumed the Catholic Church had a problem with it, but the couple wasn't Catholic, so I didn't worry about that angle.

Later, however, I discovered the Catholic Church didn't really have a teaching on it. (There's been a few statements since, none of which I'd exactly call authoritative.) An oversight? Maybe. But clearly two thousand years of tradition hadn't happened on a reason why it had to come up. People in the Middle Ages did crossdress sometimes, and it usually wasn't a problem (unless you were Joan of Arc).

I thought, what if it's no different than that girl with XY chromosomes? There's something about them that is male (in a trans woman's case, her whole visible body) but also something about them that is female (her mind and inner sense of self). Isn't that the same as being intersex? And when someone is intersex, shouldn't we just let them choose?

The result was that when I did have a friend who actually transitioned, it was met with nothing more than an "oh? good for her." A lot of friends dropped her immediately, and I have to say I still don't understand that. Even if there was a Catholic teaching she was breaking (which I don't think there was), people break Catholic teachings all the time and Catholics are very selective about whom they drop, and for which sins.

I assume it was because it's weird. It makes them uncomfortable. They got used to having a male friend and now were expected to adapt. It's a life choice that does affect other people in a way, because humanity has an obsession with gender, with knowing everybody's, and with judging them according to the standards of that gender. People don't know how to react.

But not knowing how to react isn't the same as being a victim of a crime. It still affects a trans person way more than it'll ever affect you. Life--an ethical life--involves a certain amount of putting up with people and situations that make you uncomfortable. Disabilities, injuries, age, mental illness, all affect the way a person interacts with you and how you feel about it, and yet you put up with it because a person is a person.

Of course it raises deeper questions about what is a gender, anyway, and how do you know. Is gender a real thing that exists or only a social construct? And if it's a real thing that exists, how does our brain know which one we are? And if it's a social construct, isn't it a construct that's necessary to the running of society?

These are much bigger questions, on which I have opinions but not very firm ones. I think gender is first and foremost a category, and the thing about putting things into categories is that some things defy categorization. So what gender means to me, as a person who fits reasonably well into one of the two boxes, is going to be different from what it means to someone who doesn't fit well in the box life put them in. I'm perfectly willing to draw the lines of those categories different ways, or to imagine new boxes for new people I meet.

But we don't really need the answer. We can really, truly, just mind our own business. Because what the House episode really taught me is, calling someone he who doesn't feel like a he is pointlessly mean. It didn't change her treatment and it didn't change the way she lived her life and it didn't change the way other people were going to treat her given she looked female. All it did was make her upset while she was undergoing a medical crisis.

I feel like this country is bit better off when we stop policing other people's gender, and just let them tell us the best way to respect them. And if that's a bridge too far, we could always just leave people alone.

The meaning of suffering

When I was Catholic, my life was pretty hard. Some of my difficulties were specifically caused by being Catholic. I didn't see suffering as a reason not to do anything--in fact, I sometimes sought out things that would make me suffer more, because I thought it was good for me. But my religion also gave me ways to handle any suffering I experienced. It all felt meaningful. And it was all, of course, going to be canceled out by future reward.

Now, my life is still difficult. There are things that are easier now that I decided to see suffering as a bad thing, a thing I could avoid by making different choices. Unfortunately, not all suffering can be avoided, especially not without causing harm to other people. So there's still suffering.

The difference is that now there is no answer to any of it. No meaning. If suffering is actually bad, then there's no bright side and no reward for putting up with it. It simply is.

If suffering, on its own, is purely bad, you'll avoid it more, which is good. I see some major problems with people failing to see suffering as bad, but rather priding themselves on being able to put up with it / see meaning in it / offer it up. Notable is Mother Teresa not giving painkillers to the dying, even though she had them available, because she felt suffering was the kiss of Jesus. From my perspective (as a person who does not believe suffering is the kiss of Jesus, or anything good at all) this is terrible. But I see similar attitudes in Catholics I know, who are pretty willing to tell you how much their life sucks, but pretty unwilling to make any real changes. Because, after all, it's only suffering, it's not sin or any kind of lasting harm.

I certainly had that attitude as a Catholic. I didn't want to suffer, I didn't worship suffering, but I just didn't see any point in avoiding it. My goals were different. So I always tried toughing out headaches instead of taking anything for them, only taking something when it was already bad and therefore not very responsive to medication. And I took jobs and situations that I knew would be hard on me, because I thought being pushed harder would be good for me.

Now, I take steps to avoid suffering. I put my kids in school, in large part, because having them all at home all the time was making me miserable. There are good things about it for them also, but it was including my own happiness as a point to consider that really pushed me over. I take ibuprofen when my head first starts to hurt. If I want some ice cream, I eat some dang ice cream. I'm not chasing suffering.

But suffering still happens. I still have chronic headaches. It took me years and years to go to a doctor about it, and then I did that and they still didn't know what the matter was. My kids are still overwhelming, and I have already done all the things that might make that job easier on me without neglecting them. I am still living through a global pandemic that makes me isolated and lonely.

And this time, there is no reason for any of it. It just sucks.

It kind of takes the pressure off, in some ways. I don't have to offer it up. I don't have to worry that complaining once in a while robs me of merit. I can cope in whatever way helps and isn't harmful.

But at the same time, a lot of coping strategies have been lost. "Hold my breath and get through it"? I have only one precious and unrepeatable life, and it's being wasted on being unhappy. "Things will get better"? Yeah, maybe, but maybe they won't. I don't believe in heaven, and this life is notoriously unfair. "Offer it up"? There is no logical reason why me suffering will help anyone else ever, and no evidence it ever has.

I don't regret having moved away from a belief system that valorized suffering. When I see suffering as a problem to solve, I make better choices, both for myself and when it comes to helping others. But at the same time, I wish there were some option that allowed me to see a meaning in meaningless suffering without denying that it is, in fact, bad. Something that made me feel I can have a week where I'm overwhelmed and struggling and nothing good happens, and yet somehow it's okay, something has been gained.

Any tips?

Some reflections composed on an airplane

Ugliness comes in a thousand colors: cold, white, antiseptic ugliness; dull gray-brown winter ugliness; the grungy, cheap, crumbling ugliness of a city's fraying edges.

But beauty also glitters in a thousand places, some of them very small and hard to notice. The tiny chip in a featureless wall that tells you other people have been here before you, with their stories and their mistakes. Green moss growing under slush, long after the other green things have died or gone to sleep. An old woman's face crinkling with joy behind the counter of a dirty shop.

Seeing beauty when it surrounds you, beside a forest stream or on a starry night, is easy. Seeing beauty in the places that leave you hungriest for it is hard. The delicate feathers of the soul, whose task is feeling out beauty, shrivel up and tuck themselves away under the onslaught of so much ugliness. It hurts to leave them still bare and questing. You harden the outside of yourself as if to face a hard vacuum. You know it will crush you if you leave yourself open.

But if you do, you’ll never see beauty. You might not even feel that part of your soul slowly dying for lack of light. So I leave myself open. I’m not sure I have a choice.

Those of us who leave ourselves open to beauty suffer. We feel all the pain, we are worn away and exhausted from ugliness. Every day it hurts us, living in the world as it is, so battered and bruised and grimy. It feels we can't live among all this ugliness. It feels we will wither up and die of beauty-hunger.

But we find it. We find it, those of us who can't stop questing hard every moment of our lives, who reach out with the delicate parts of our souls, in hope that can't die because it never stops being hungry. A flash of light off a puddle. The swish of tires in the rain. The spark leaping from eye to eye, from soul to soul, as two of us recognize what is divine in each other, no matter how briefly.

There is more pain in this life than pleasure. More ugliness than beauty. Hunger gnaws so much harder than food has ever brought joy.

But in those moments when beauty flames out--tears prick our eyes, the heart leaps upward, and we know it's worth it. The hunger, the quest, the finding, the losing again. Life, in all its ugliness. Just for these moments, if for nothing else.

The city mouse and the country mouse

I grew up at the edge of a city, but I always dreamed of being a farmer or living way out in the country. Living here in a small town has been the closest I've ever gotten to that.

In many ways, living in a small town is the best of both worlds: there's plenty of nature around, but it's still five minutes to the grocery store. And our town isn't so small as to limit what we can access very much. There might be fewer options, but we have doctors, dentists, restaurants, even a (rather minimal) hospital.

Despite that, though, we're moving 45 minutes closer to the big city, to a suburb I'm just going to call Bigger Town. Because what we don't have are jobs that pay a one-income living for a family of six. John's been commuting over 90 minutes a day for about two years now, and that's really sapped his spirit. He's tried and tried, but librarians in this area tend to make under $40,000 a year--it's a job for married ladies whose husbands also work, or perhaps older people who don't want to retire.

I'm sad about it, but I'm also trying to find the bright side in moving closer to the city. Tons of people would love to live near a city, and many would never dream of living anywhere else.

People

Cities are full of things to do. Museums, restaurants, concerts, big libraries, water parks, community theaters, classes for kids. The libraries have more books. The shopping district has more shops.

In the city, there are more people to hang out with. That means a better chance of finding people who share your interests. I could find a writing group near me. I hear there's even a children's Magic: The Gathering club.

Downside of all this is that there are people when you don't want to be with people. Your yard is small if you have any, and you might share walls with noisy people. The streets are never quiet. More people means less starlight and birdsong.

My relationships with humans have always been fraught. The worst thing nature has ever done to me has been a bee sting. So it's no wonder I tend to pick nature every time.

But, you know, I'm looking to relearn how to interact with people, so maybe having a lot of opportunities to do that will be Good For Me.

Nature

The tradeoff for more people is less nature. I live next to the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah River. It's absolutely gorgeous here, especially if you go two minutes or so out of town. Even from our upstairs windows we can see the Blue Ridge. 

Seattle has a giant mountain and two large bodies of water going for it--you still get to look at some nature, even in the middle of the city. Bigger Town isn't like that. It has parks, but you have to go to them. It's flat, and I don't like flat.

Here, we have woods in our actual yard. Okay, a strip of trees, but you can climb them. We have lots of birds. We have redbuds and dogwoods and holly. When I'm feeling depressed, it's hard for me to get in the car and go somewhere. But I can sit at the window or go out in the yard and get some nature therapy. I really feel it feeds my soul.

High population density, I am told, is much better for the environment. Living closer to work means less energy use and emissions. Townhouses and apartments mean less land is taken up with housing and more can be left for animal habitats. Our yard is populated by deer and bears, but that's because their proper wild habitat is shrinking. As roads encroach into the forest, more animals are killed in road accidents. So love of nature should encourage me not to live smack in the middle of it.

And it does, but it's tough.

Diversity

Small Town is more diverse than you'd think, but it's very segregated. The Justice Map shows our current neighborhood as 100% white. Just down the hill there's a little block that's allegedly 100% Black. I'm sure that's at least somewhat inaccurate, but not by a lot. 

They say what you see growing up is what you expect, what you assume is normal and right. I grew up in an ethnically diverse neighborhood, and I think that was good for me. I knew racist garbage for racist garbage early on, because it wasn't accurate to what I'd experienced. I'd like the same for my kids.

Bigger towns and cities are almost always much more diverse. And the town we're moving to is much more shaded and speckly on the Justice Map. Feels . . . I dunno . . . more American. More representative of what this country is actually like.

Politics

Cities are more liberal. It's a reason I wanted out of the city to begin with, back when I was ten million times more conservative than I am now. Small Town is red as red can be. Trump and Thin Blue Line flags everywhere. Racist comments said openly. People lining the street to pray the rosary against gay marriage. Awkwardly, a lot of those people know me and don't know I think differently now, so I find myself constantly being assumed much more conservative than I am. I don't want to start fights, but I also don't want to smile and nod through a rant about how trans people are ruining society.

I find it ironic in the extreme that I was so conservative when I lived in Seattle and am so liberal now that I live here. Maybe I'm a little contrary. Maybe I just didn't understand just how much further right the right wing went.

Anyway, Bigger Town is about 60% Democrat, meaning it's liberal, but shouldn't be a bubble either. I would like to meet some more like-minded people.

Career

A thing they don't tell you, when you're considering a life path, is that most college-track jobs are in cities. College specializes you, and the more specialized the thing you do, the less likely you'll be able to find an opening for it in a town of 10,000. Small towns have openings for doctors, lawyers, dentists, real estate agents, and optometrists. Teachers and librarians too, but the pay will be low. If you have student loans, you might not be able to pay them on a small-town salary.

Plumbers, cashiers, mechanics, barbers, and factory workers are needed everywhere. You can pick a town and live there; there will probably be a job for you. Though if you want to move from a small town to a larger city, you may find cost of living is a barrier.

Cost

You know all that fun stuff available in cities? The vast majority of it costs money. Whereas the entertainment available here in Small Town is largely cheap or free: hiking, wading, swimming in the creek. If we want to pay money, we can swim in the pool or rent a canoe. It's not terribly expensive.

In the city, everything costs so much more. The houses, the groceries, the activities. Making the switch is going to be tough. In Small Town, we've been living (relatively) like kings the past few years. Large house, large yard, cheap groceries. To move to Bigger Town, we will have to downsize by about 500 square feet of house and almost all the yard. We certainly can't keep up the suburban lifestyle some people manage close to the big city. Those houses are like a million dollars.

Aesthetics

I never wanted to be rich, I just wanted to be surrounded by beauty. It took me years of adulthood to realize that beauty costs money.

The country is beautiful, right? My dream was something like this:

It turns out this costs a bundle. If you are poor and live in the country, what you can afford is more like this:

Likewise, there are beautiful, picturesque city neighborhoods, like this one:

But if you're of reasonable means, you're just as likely to live here:

So the short answer is, if you want beauty, try being upper-middle class. Or at least don't try to raise four kids on one income. The first street we lived on in this town wasn't aesthetic at all. Where we live now is much nicer, but it costs an amount that hardly anybody pays out here.

That said, there are more free beautiful things in the country. The spur of the mountains that sticks out over Small Town is one of my favorite things, and I see it any time I drive anywhere. There are lovely drives all over this area. Even just taking the kids to school means driving past people's beautifully landscaped yards, with tulips and flowering trees . . . and yes, some number of crumbling buildings and cars on cinderblocks.

I've had ten years of practice finding the beauty here. I know where it is, and I am familiar enough with the ugly bits that my eye skips over them. Whereas when I go to Bigger Town, I mostly see this: 

The main drag is just one long soul-destroying succession of strip malls interspersed with used car lots. I hate it.

But, of course, there's more to the town than that. There are some lovely parks. There are cute, picturesque neighborhoods. The house we're hoping to buy is surrounded by some patches of trees, so I won't be starved for nature. And the art museum isn't very far.

And perhaps I can see beauty in some unexpected things. I always need to learn to do that more. People, for instance. That's a place beauty can always be found, but fear keeps me from looking.

* * *

I cried today, driving back from the grocery store. I will definitely miss living here. And it feels deeply unfair the way life conspires to push me away from things I want, the way none of the choices are simple and easy, the way decisions made long ago tie us down into consequences nobody wanted. I get so deeply attached to places. I'm sometimes struck with homesickness for a place I visited one time, for one week.

Small Town is going on the huge mantlepiece in my mind of Places I'll Miss Forever. And I'm going to a place that feels terrifying and strange, though I have lived there before. I worry my soul will be flattened out, stomped, suffocated.

But a line of a poem came to me, And for all this, nature is never spent. Flowers grow in crannied walls and sunsets happen everywhere. I need the Earth, but I won't be leaving her. So maybe that's going to be enough.

Consciousness

 A few months ago, I read a book called Blindsight. It's a novel about first contact with aliens, but it was trying to make a point. The argument of the book was that consciousness is a useless thing for humans to have, that we'd all be better off if we blindly did things without being aware of them.

I don't feel it made its argument very well, in part because it fails to narrow consciousness down to a single thing, alternately defining it as self-awareness, empathy, and theory of mind. Those are all very different things!

So it made me want to talk about consciousness. What is it, is it useful, what consequences does it have?

Here are a few things the word "consciousness" is used to describe:

• Taking in sensory data (awareness)
• Being aware of oneself as a thinking person (self-concept)
• Knowing that one's thoughts are one's thoughts and being able to inspect them (introspection)
• Caring about other people (compassion)
• Actually feeling what other people feel (empathy)
• Being able to model what another person might know and feel (theory of mind)

In the book, the hero lacks empathy because of a brain surgery he had as a child, but is still able to model and predict other people's behavior through careful observation. We are told that he's actually better than everyone else, because without that inconvenient "consciousness" he can more clearly see what's going on. At the same time, he actually destroys his own life because he can't react with empathy to his suffering girlfriend.

Another character explains that humanity is the only intelligent species in the galaxy that has consciousness. Everyone else is just blindly doing things and better off for it.  Communication with aliens is like a "Chinese room"--a thought experiment where a person who doesn't know Chinese is able to communicate with Chinese notecards in a room full of them, but understands none of it. Nobody truly understands anything except humans, because we're the only ones with this useless self-awareness.

We're held back by our consciousness. In reality, sociopaths are the most successful and the only flaw is that some people aren't narcissists. We also can't communicate meaningfully with aliens, because only beings without consciousness can properly relate to one another.

This is a whole mess because it's not clear what he's talking about. Some of what he's talking about is self-concept, some is introspection, some is empathy. And all of these have a purpose, even on an evolutionary level! If we are introspective, if we can interrogate our thoughts and recognize them as separate from objective reality, we can arrive closer at a knowledge of reality than we could otherwise. Likewise, if we have empathy, we can cooperate with others and accomplish things we couldn't alone. One sociopath may be temporarily successful, but a species of all sociopaths wouldn't get very far, let alone invent space travel.

Personally, I don't think any of the things described as "consciousness" are true epiphenomena, useless to our practical survival ends. Sensory awareness is pretty vital for acquiring food. Self-concept seems like a necessary prerequisite to introspection, which is important for fine-tuning our perceptions and judgments. For instance, if you don't know that your thoughts are your thoughts, you'll never ask yourself if your thoughts are accurate and seek ways to make them more accurate.

Compassion, empathy, and theory of mind are all necessary for cooperation. Some people lack one or another of these. For instance, many autistic people have impaired theory of mind (they have trouble predicting what other people know or how they'll react), but they are still empathetic and capable of compassion. Conversely, in the TV series Sherlock, Holmes has no empathy but chooses to be compassionate. Still, cooperation works best when we have all of these abilities.

It seems to me that if "consciousness" were truly an epiphenomenon, an internal experience that doesn't help our survival in any way, we would never be able to know if an alien species had it or not. They would have all the capabilities we have, and we'd never know if they were experiencing it in the way we do.

But if consciousness is a thing we can test for, if it's empathy or awareness or introspection, then it's absolutely useful. It gives us abilities as a species that we couldn't have without it. And that's why I think aliens would be conscious too, if they made it into space at all.

Should billionaires exist?

I participated in a written debate recently on the question "Resolved: Billionaires Should Not Exist." Unfortunately, the limit was 1000 words. I have a lot more than a thousand words to say about billionaires, and how much I don’t think they should exist. So here’s the uncut version for you guys.

To be clear, I don’t actually want anybody to try to get rid of billionaires right now. Even Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, both of whom said billionaires should not exist, didn’t propose tax plans that would come close to putting them back in the millionaire bracket. The influence billionaires have on our political life would make this almost impossible to achieve. And it isn’t really necessary, because much (not all) of the good you can do by eliminating billionaires could also be done by taxing them just a wee bit more. But if I could wave a wand and transfer the wealth of America’s 700 billionaires into the bank accounts of the 40 million Americans in poverty, I would do it.

I will start with a caveat: I do not intend to argue that in a future, poverty-free world, billionaires should not exist. I intend to argue that in the world of the present, in which poverty does exist and inequality is constantly increasing, billionaires should not exist.

My argument is that happiness would be increased if the wealth of billionaires were redistributed and they were taxed to prevent them from earning more than one billion dollars, while no serious disadvantages would result.

Utilitarian argument

I will pass over any question of deserving money, since that relies on a sense of justice not everyone can agree on, and consider only utilitarian goals. Would America be a happier place if the money of billionaires were redistributed to the lowest income tiers?

The folk saying that money can’t buy happiness is untrue. Scientists have calculated that money increases happiness, but only to a point. Up to $70,000 a year, every increase in income correlates to an increase in happiness. That’s unsurprising, because much suffering is caused by poverty or anxiety over falling into it. An individual who makes $70,000 can afford a house where he doesn’t have to listen to his neighbors screaming at one another; he can afford to travel to visit family; he can afford a healthy and varied diet and a meal out from time to time; he can afford entertainment and art and time with friends. An individual making the minimum wage of $15,000 a year or less, which includes over 13% of Americans, can afford none of these. Naturally he will be much less happy.

A billionaire, however, enjoys no utility from all that money. A person who possesses $900 million can already purchase anything a person might reasonably want: a mansion with grounds and a beautiful view convenient to a large city; a yacht, a private jet, employees to handle every need. A billionaire has passed, long ago, the point of diminishing returns, where more money can truly increase happiness. The same money will purchase a much greater utility when it is redistributed to the rest of the nation.

The 400 wealthiest Americans have, collectively, 3.6 trillion dollars. Distributed among the 34 million Americans in poverty, it would give each poor American $103,000. That’s enough for a modest house, owned debt-free, or a four-year degree at a public college. The gain in net happiness would be massive.

By distributing this money more carefully, through a long-term basic income or poverty-reducing programs, the increase in happiness could go on for years. As families pull themselves out of poverty, they will increase both production and spending, boosting the economy and reducing social ills like crime and homelessness.

So, once we acknowledge that redistributing money would increase happiness, we can start asking what other consequences such a move could have. Is there good billionaires do that we would miss? Or is there additional harm we could prevent by abolishing billionaires?

Argument from power

Once a person has satisfied all happiness-related desires, the only thing left their money can buy is power. When you have more money than most other people, you can influence society in a direction you choose. Some exercise that desire by giving to charities related to the world they want: whether, like Gates, to vaccination research, or, like Cordelia Scaife May, to causes like restricting immigration and population control because she wanted to preserve America’s open spaces.

Others exercise that desire politically, by donating to candidates, hiring lobbying firms, or bribing politicians directly. They can also fund media favoring their preferred worldview, as the Kochs or Michael Bloomberg do. Even in our court system, the rich always have a massive advantage over the poor, because they have better lawyers. Large companies can trample small ones in patent lawsuits, and rich people avoid jail time for crimes that would lock up a normal person for years.

In 2014, a Princeton study surveyed the effects of money on politics by measuring how often government policy follows the interests either of the economic elites or of the people at large. Their conclusion was that when the majority of economic elites disagree with the majority of average people, the elites were far more likely to get their way--45% of the time, rather than 18% for average people.

It would be nice to say that billionaires having money doesn’t affect the rest of us. But, since we’re all affected by politics, it absolutely does. This also casts a worrying light on our odds of ever changing the uncomfortable status quo.

Argument from charity

We are sometimes told that billionaires do good because they can donate large quantities to charity. But billionaires give a lower percentage of their income to charity than others. Even the biggest givers in the nation, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, give less than 5% of their income annually. If we discount those two, the rest of the richest 20 Americans give about .3% of their combined income--less than the average American.

Even that charitable work isn’t necessarily helpful. Much charitable giving exists for a tax write-off rather than actually doing good. Money given to foundations can stay within the foundation forever. Donations can be used to strongarm nonprofits into whatever a billionaire wants, or to start organizations promoting a political interest. The Kochs, for instance, give to charity, but those charities are largely climate change denialist media.

If we are to spend funds wisely to help the needy in this country, we shouldn’t leave the distribution of it to billionaires. This money is better administered by smaller owners, nonprofits, and government.

Argument from investment

The next defense of billionaires is that they invest capital in the market. But that isn’t specific to billionaires. Wherever money is, it is active in the market. However, investment patterns are different at different income brackets.

The poor primarily spend their money on their needs. This fuels business at the level of demand: whatever businesses best satisfy the needs of people prosper when people have money to spend.

People of middle income invest money in mutual funds, government bonds, and banks. This fuels the market in general, making capital available for business and government.

Billionaires, however, have more money than they can easily spend. Some goes into the stock market, of course, in the same way as smaller fortunes. Some is spent on venture capitalism--investment in prospective businesses. And some goes to investing in real estate.

How much good is this capital doing, compared to the capital that is simply spent? Funding new businesses is good, but billionaires may not be the best placed to decide what ventures are worth investing in. For instance, the ridiculous juice subscription company, Juicero, was fully funded by the Silicon Valley wealthy, while diabetics are forced to hack insulin pumps because of a lack of innovation in the ones available. Assigning capital to causes is an important job, and having it done by a few super-rich eccentrics might not be the best way.

Money invested in real estate may be the worst for the common good. When a person of moderate means flips a house or buys an apartment building to manage, they usually do add some value. Real estate speculation, or buying large tracts on the promise the price will rise, can do harm. The mere fact that people use real estate for investment makes the price go up, causing housing to become less affordable and driving homelessness. Housing bubbles are an example of this.

Properties owned by large investors are 18% more likely to evict tenants than those owned by smaller landlords. This is because they can easily afford the loss of letting a unit stand empty. In some areas, many units remain empty because the market can’t fill them at that price. Large investors will buy up entire neighborhoods and drive up the price as high as they want, because they have no competition.

Another method of expanding wealth is to extract more resources. The urge for constant growth is a driver of environmental destruction: the pumping out of aquifers, burning of rainforests, fracking. Without the political advantages billionaires have, millionaires aren’t often able to exploit the environment on the same scale. But, since these are not necessary activities we need billionaires to do, we’d be better off with smaller investors.

In short: capital exists, and if there were no billionaires, there would still be capital. But that capital would be assigned by a larger number of people, and thus more accurately aligned to what the market needs rather than the quirks of a few people who need nothing.

Argument from innovation

Another argument for billionaires is that they fund great innovations. But in reality, most innovators do whatever they are known for before becoming billionaires. Once they are billionaires, they may appear to innovate, but more often, they use patent law and buyouts to suppress other innovations.

Bill Gates and Tim Allen weren't billionaires when they started Microsoft. Jeff Bezos started Amazon with $250,000. Elon Musk wasn't a billionaire when he started his first company either. It requires basic financial security to make an invention, but not billions of dollars. After becoming billionaires, these men mostly have not invented anything personally, but rather funded other people's research. This research could have been funded by government or jointly-owned associations.

In fact, in many cases, it already has been. GPS, digital assistants, touchscreens, and WiFi come from government research. Elon Musk's companies Solar City, Tesla, and SpaceX have received billions in government funds, and much of his money came from PayPal, which he didn’t invent at all.

We also have to consider how many innovators and inventors never get a chance to make their big breakthrough because of a lack of opportunity. No billionaires are entirely self-made; they generally come from comfortably well-off families and have college degrees. They have the leisure to work on their ideas and the ability to raise funds through impressing investors or getting loans.

One wonders how many Americans have been just as talented, but held back by circumstances. Maybe they were forced to drop out of high school to make a living, or they were too busy struggling as a single parent, or they had their credit destroyed by medical bills, and never had a chance to invent anything or start a business. It is wildly implausible that all the talent just happens to be found among the well-off. Perhaps we would have many more life-changing inventions if every creative person were financially secure and able to access education and necessary funds.

What would happen to the money?

So, imagine a system wherein it become impractical to become a billionaire. High wealth taxes force billionaires to divest their wealth. Where would that wealth go? Would it vanish? Would billionaires stop doing whatever it is that produces so much value?

Most likely, many of them would choose to donate large quantities to charity--better to at least control where your money goes. Many would divest stock, perhaps by offering employees joint ownership or finding family members to hold some of it. Some would continue as they are, passively earning wealth which goes directly to taxes. And more people would choose to stop at the eight-figure level of wealth rather than the nine-figure level--making business choices that produce a steady level of income rather than constant high growth.

Would it have been a bad thing if Amazon had chosen to stick to books instead of trying to devour the market share of every kind of product that can be shipped? Would it have been so awful if Microsoft hadn’t bought XBox, LinkedIn, Skype, and Mojang? Did the market ever benefit from Warren Buffet owning so many properties? Not at all. If billionaires stopped doing what they do, which is increasing their portfolios through the investment of capital, smaller investors would own those assets. We do not need to “motivate” people to innovate and invest with the golden carrot of becoming a billionaire, because there is nothing only billionaires do that has any value. Motivating people to run reasonably-sized businesses with reasonably-sized fortunes has exactly the same benefit.

None of this would end poverty overnight, but the tax revenue brought in could do a great deal of good. The wealth of billionaires could fund universal health care, subsidized college, rent assistance, better elementary schools, and so on. While billionaires’ efforts to divest money would reduce tax revenue, many billionaires simply can’t help continuing to earn money, and the public coffers would benefit.

The result of this would be a nation both economically and politically more equal than what we have today. The gains of the poor would result in widely increased happiness, and the only suffering caused would be the temporary disappointment of billionaires at not being so rich--though, to be clear, with 999 million dollars each, there would still be little they couldn’t afford. There is no reason we need billionaires.

Love is not self gift

When I was in Regnum Christi, one of the recurring themes we talked about a lot was that love is self gift. It's not a feeeeeling (said in a contemptuous tone). It's the decision to desire the best for the other and work toward their benefit. You don't need any feelings at all!

I ate this up, to the point that it even became a theme in one of my first novels. (One of the many reasons it'll never see the light of day.)  It served me pretty well in a situation where you weren't allowed to pick your friends. Feelings were irrelevant. You simply chose to care about others' benefit. I think I treated people well, within the limitations placed on us, but I got very little enjoyment out of any of my relationships. I felt like no one actually liked me, they were being charitable to me, which isn't the same thing. I wanted to be chosen.

Love, of course, is best when it's two-sided. So you give to the other person and they give to you. So why was there so little joy? Why did I not feel loved? And what does that say about relationships where the other person can't do anything in return-like a parent-child relationship? Can it be satisfying or is it all one long sacrifice, hoping that one day they'll be mature enough to love you?

I think I've cracked the puzzle by dividing love into two parts: caring about the other person, and delighting in them. You should like the other person. Their existence and presence should make you happy. You should see the goodness that is already present in them and appreciate it.

Well, I'm sure this is obvious to 90% of you, but I'm going to keep going just to hash it out for myself. If you find it helpful too, great.

For me, knowing that the people who love me delight in me is important and a major part of my happiness. When I was a kid, my mother would often grin at something I did and say, "that's such a Sheila thing to do." I wasn't able to do much for my mother, but the thought that I delighted her by existing and being myself made me feel worthwhile-like I was a net positive in the world.

Whereas no one would be very happy being loved like this: "Here is the dinner I made you. You should know that I made it, not because of any superficial feeeeeelings I might have, but because I have made an act of the will to work for your benefit." It makes us feel unworthy of love - like the service done for us has more to do with them than it does with us.

That said, the delight only, without the service, wouldn't be ideal either. Imagine a friend who always talks about how much they like you, how fun you are to be around, how they look forward to hanging out - but whenever you need some help moving a sofa or getting a ride to the doctor, they're not there for you. You'd soon realize what they are there for is their own emotional satisfaction only, and if it's not fun, they're gone. It's still validating to think you're a fun person, but you'll be closer to the friends that are there for you.

When Jackie was born, I loved her for three months purely as a choice. I took care of her, she lacked for nothing, but I didn't delight in her at all. She seemed like a screamy potato. Then one day, she smiled for the first time, and for the first time, I liked her. Suddenly all the work she required was more of a joy, so much easier to do. These days she is even more of a delight, to the point that I even enjoy our evenings together sometimes, when she's supposed to be in bed. She's fun to be around. I think every child should know that they're fun to be around, that they make their loved ones happy.

I do believe delight can be, in some sense, a choice. You can choose to see the good in another person and appreciate it. This feeds love. But often, we don't have to try, because the goodness in another person is there to see.

Missing service or delight aren't the only ways love can go wrong. If our delight is focused on superficial details about a person, it'll end when they change. Yet, of course, we don't have access to their inner essence, to love that instead. We just approximate as best we can. And sometimes we find we were wrong, that the person whose honesty we loved was actually a liar, and the friendship ends.

Likewise, our desiring-the-good should be focused on their actual good, not a false approximation. Usually it should involve the person's agency, helping them be who they want to be and accomplish their goals, not paternalistically deciding what their real benefit is and imposing it on them. But love does have room for an occasional intervention, when we tell a person that their desires aren't going to do them any good in the long run. There's a balance there.

So there's a great deal more to say on the topic of love besides that it involves delight and desiring the good of the other. But I do think it's a basic definition and a place to start.

And if you're my friend, and instead of "I love you" I say, "I like you" - I'm saying something that's very meaningful to me. I don't mean "like love, but less." I mean, "I'm not hanging out with you out of selflessness, I'm doing it because you are a joy to me." Any kindness I do for you (such as it is-I could do better on this part) springs from that joy.

Is laziness a thing?

I've been reading some things lately saying there's no such thing as laziness.  I mean, definitely people can be unproductive and not accomplish a lot.  But the word "lazy" suggests a voluntary, moral quality, whereas many people who aren't getting things done are actually doing the best they can.

They may have very low energy due to health problems.
They have have executive dysfunction.
They may be depressed.
They may simply have different priorities than other people think they should have.

It would be wrong to call these people "lazy," because their problem can't be solved by being shamed for not getting more done.  And it can be very comforting to look around at the stuff you've done and realize that maybe it actually was your best on that particular day.  I've had a lot of days like that, when I felt terrible about not knocking out my to-do list, only to realize that the reason I didn't accomplish more was because I had a crying baby hanging on me and was operating on five hours' sleep.  That's not laziness.  That's inability.

That said, there is one thing which I think is properly called laziness.  That's when people don't put forth effort when it benefits other people, only when it benefits themselves.  You know the type: holds down a job just fine but leaves boxer shorts all over a shared apartment, trusting that the roommates will put up with the mess.  Or a person who lives in their parents' basement rentfree and won't get a job, but they accomplish all of their own goals just fine.

Now it's okay to prioritize yourself in addition to others.  For instance, I sometimes use my limited time and energy writing books instead of cleaning, because writing the books is important to me, and the rest of the family doesn't mind my spending time on them.  If they didn't support it, I probably wouldn't, because I don't want to let people live in a trashed house so I could pursue a dream they don't believe in.  As it is, I think everyone in the family is okay with the balance I'm setting, so I don't feel selfish about it.

Next time you feel like you're being lazy, ask yourself why.  Are you unable to do even the things you truly want to do?  That's not laziness.  Do you just not want to do them because your neglect won't affect you?  Then maybe you should work on seeing things from other people's point of view.

Green vs. blue

I love personality types.  Some schemes are better than others, and none of them are all that rigorous, but I find it helps me to understand better that some people are coming from a completely different place than I am.

So when a friend shared this with me, I loved it.  Basically, the five colors in Magic: The Gathering can stand for five personality types, or rather priorities.  The way I could summarize it would be something like: White prioritizes order and community; Red independence and action; Black self-interest and ambition; Green balance and nature.  But really, you have to read the post.

Anyway, I read that and saw immediately that in my heart of hearts, I'm green.  I feel on a deep level that everything is so complex and interconnected that you will never understand it, you just have to accept it.  Nature always feels like the right answer to me -- to say, "If you meddle, you're likely to make things worse; stick with what's natural."  I hate taking medicines and I hate processed food.  I would love to go live in the woods like the guy in My Side of the Mountain.

Green has its flaws.  If nature is your highest goal, human ends are going to take a backseat.  Sometimes the most natural thing in the world is death, and humans don't want to die (that, too, is natural).  We are part of nature, but every part of nature isn't just in balance with every other part, it's also, in a way, at war with every other part.  You can't just choose to stand aloof from that struggle, simply because you see it is all part of a whole.  You can't help being part of it, complete with all your needs and desires: the desire to live, to protect your loved ones, to avoid suffering.  Anything else would be a little inhuman.

For the past several years I've been becoming more and more nuanced in my views, realizing that many things that are true are in tension with other true things.  For instance, non-aggression can sometimes lead to change; but that is in tension with another truth, that in some cases nothing will get better without fighting.  And I finally started applying this balance and nuance to my belief in balance itself.  Even Green isn't good by itself.  It has to be balanced with other things.  And what I tend to balance Green with is Blue.

Blue is kind of the opposite of Green.  Blue people are scientists and alchemists and wizards.  It's all about the perfectability of the world -- through understanding it.  The sort of person who breaks a thing to see what is inside.  (Who has, Gandalf reminds us, left the path of wisdom.)  But this mad tinkering is, at its heart, compassionate and optimistic.  It says: there is no reason the way things are is the way they must be; we must improve them for human ends.

Blue on its own is kind of horrifying to me.  Too heedless!  Blue scientists spray the world with DDT first, and find out it kills birds after.  Split the atom first, find out about radiation after.  You can actually destroy the planet that way.  And all with noble ends!

But Blue and Green together temper each other's flaws.  A blue-green person says: Yes, there is a deeper balance to everything; everything is more complicated than you think; it is much easier to wreck the whole thing than to improve it; seek to understand before you try to improve.  But on the other hand, the balance that currently exists may not be the best of all possible situations, especially for our own ends, and one might theoretically create a slightly better balance.

For instance: disease is entirely natural.  We can medicate a disease, but when we do so, there can be unwanted effects.  Antibiotics can create superbugs.  On the other hand, what if we carefully harnessed those forces already within the body to train them to fight the germ more effectively?  That way we could somewhat tilt the balance of the fight toward humans without throwing it off altogether.  I'm talking, of course, about vaccines.  Vaccines are very blue-green.  Of course the more "green" you are the more suspicious and careful you'd be, but at some point you'd have to see that survival is more important than a perfectly natural, untampered immune system.

I feel that most people tilt way too hard toward one or the other extreme.  Too green, and you reject science without even giving it a chance, because you're too suspicious of possible harm to existing systems.  Too blue, and you'll fail to recognize the power of a complex system.  Blue wants to control and perfect everything; Green refuses to control anything because everything is already what it was always supposed to be.

I can apply this to about everything.  Economics: Hayek is green (the economy is too complicated! just leave it alone!) and Keynes is blue (here's a math equation which will let us end depressions!).  Foreign policy: the Green approach is isolationism, even if a genocide is happening next door; but the policy that reigns is usually a particularly stupid kind of Blue that imagines we can force international situations into a favorable balance by getting involved in everything.  Parenting: I started off very Green (just let the kids take the lead!) and have tempered it with some Blue (my kids don't actually know what is good for them sometimes).  Too much Blue would be assuming the right inputs from me would automatically result in good behavior.

I'm going to close with two "litanies" referenced in the original post, both of when I find helpful when it comes to seeking truth.  First is the Litany of Tarski, a very "blue" mantra:

If something is true,
I desire to believe that it is true.

If it is not true,
I desire to believe that it is not true.
Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.

Next, the Litany of Gendlin, which was described as green:

What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.

Both Blue and Green agree on this point: one must understand the world and accept the truth about it.  Which is something I always try to do.  Yes, it's deeply complex, and you're never going to understand it completely.  But that doesn't mean you shouldn't seek understanding -- balanced with humble appreciation of the mysteries you won't ever understand.

Are all communists bad?

I've had an interesting conversation repeated a few times lately.  It's on the question of whether "socialist" is a designation, like "fascist," which is automatically negative, and which should lead us to condemn any person who self-identifies this way.  "Communist," of course, gets an even stronger reaction.

Internet communists can be a funny bunch; they enjoy throwing around Soviet symbology, I guess mainly to shock people.  And I haven't noticed much economic literacy among them, even compared to me -- and I'm no whiz at it myself.

But they don't strike me as evil people.  They don't actually want to eat the rich.  They want to redistribute property.  It can be a bit utopian; they imagine it will be easier than it is.  And I bristle when they say things like "we can't expect a solution from the system, we need a revolution!"  No.  I'm steadfastly anti-revolution.  People imagine it will be a shortcut to drastic change, but really revolutionary change takes time and there is no shortcut.  A revolution usually results in massive loss of life, but the actual change is always much smaller than you'd think.  The French revolution, for instance, was short-lived and ended in another monarchy.

Though my real beef with communism is that it doesn't work -- in no case has it ever actually succeeded, except when it becomes less purely communistic, as China has in recent years.  There are two reasons for this, and I can't say which is more important: first, there are massive coordination problems with distributing necessary goods to a nation, and cash is a really easy way to solve these.  It's imperfect, but "one guy in an office figures out what shoes everybody gets" is even worse.  The second reason is that no communist nation was actually democratic, no matter how much they claimed they were.  This is probably a function of them having been produced by revolution instead of actually the will of the people.  Totalitarianism is horrible and we all know it's horrible, so it should be utterly unsurprising that communist nations which were also totalitarian were horrible.  Fascism and communism seem very similar, not because fascism is really socialist (it's not) but because they're both totalitarian.

Now I'm always the first to say that ignorance is a very serious problem.  If dumb communist kids actually got the government they think they want, it would probably turn out badly, so I would oppose that.  Yet I still do have a different moral feeling toward an ignorant communist than I do toward a neofascist, because the communist is (perhaps very ineffectively) advocating for an end to poverty, while the neofascist is advocating for an end to Jews.  I can look at the (totally imaginary) end states that each hopes for, and can say that I admire the utopia of the communist (which would never happen) more than I do the utopia of the fascist (which, no matter what grounds it was based on, would almost certainly involve depriving some people of human rights even if it worked as planned).

The next objection to communism is that it discounts property rights.  The libertarian says taxation is theft; the communist says property is theft.  The reason for the totally different deontological statements is that nobody really knows what sort of property rights are natural, or how you get them.  Does everyone have an equal right to the goods of the earth?  Or do we earn a greater or lesser share depending on how hard we worked or what we got from our parents?  As I have become more and more of a consequentialist over the years, I've concluded that property rights only exist in the service of human life, liberty, and happiness.  So we should have what property rights help people to flourish, whatever those are.  If it means that some billionaires lose a lot of their property, I don't really care provided it actually serves the good of everyone.  Meanwhile if property distribution isn't completely equal, but that's the best way to make sure everyone has the necessities of life, I'm fine with that also.  The question between capitalism and socialism, for me, is not a moral one, it is a factual one, a practical question of what works best.

Now advocates of capitalism will point to their successes and communism's failures.  They will mention the people that capitalism has pulled out of poverty, and the famines that devastated the Soviet Union and North Korea -- human-created famines which amount to genocide.

But one may also point of the death toll of capitalism.  Isn't every person who starved to death in a non-communist nation a casualty of capitalism?  After all, the food, today at least, is available.  Capitalism boasts of the ability to distribute goods more efficiently that communism, but it too sometimes fails.  More specifically, I might mention horrible disasters that can be laid at capitalism's door:'
The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire
The Bangladesh garment factory fire
The Irish potato famine -- did you know that during the famine Ireland was exporting food?  The Irish just couldn't afford to buy it.
The Opium Wars in China -- honestly, the British East India Company could get its own whole list; China wasn't the only country it ravaged for money.
Belgium's rape of the Congo
Child slavery in chocolate plantations
And I could go on and on.  Water pumped out of aquifers to bottle for profit, while local villagers' wells all go dry.  Farmers evicted from their land so the government could hand it to a multinational corporation.  Terrible conditions in rubber plantations.  Terrible conditions in sweatshops.  Most countries are capitalist and in all of these, there is poverty, death from inadequate healthcare, death from unsafe workplaces, and so on.

But! You might add.  That's not real capitalism, that's crony capitalism.  To which I would say, exactly.  Pure economic systems exist only in the mind.  Advocates can always imagine it could be done more perfectly.  In reality, we should acknowledge the common failure modes exist because it is easy to fall into them.

So what would I advocate?  Some kind of balance, probably.  I have abandoned the idealism that once convinced me everything could regulate itself if only it were allowed to.  You want Oliver Twist?  Because that's how you get Oliver Twist.  Some regulation is going to be necessary, even while it's clear we haven't done enough to separate the regulatory bodies from the industries themselves.  We don't need a revolution on that, we need some tweaks.

When I hear someone say, seriously, that they would like to tweak things in a more socialist direction . . . I'm really fine with it.  There's a lot more socialist things could be before it got anywhere close to wiping out private industry.  Say, a guaranteed minimum income.  Or universal healthcare.  That stuff could be good, possibly, if done very carefully.  Certainly seems as likely to work out well as the opposite.  Now I doubt these people are going to get what they want, either, but they'll try and if they manage a few baby steps, I'd be cautiously hopeful.

And as for communists?  I think it's great that they have made the moral judgments that property rights exist to serve people and that equality is good.  I would agree with them on that; I think this is a moral and compassionate stance.  But I also think that they need to seriously study history and economics to try to find ways to change our current society more in the direction of their dream.  Waving red banners and sharing Soviet memes (which are very offensive to Holodomor survivors, by the way) aren't going to help them get there.

Solstice soup and the carbon cycle

I've been celebrating solstices and equinoxes, in a quiet way, for three years now.  I know it must have been in a quiet way, because although I definitely have been posting about it on facebook, my own husband thinks "nobody celebrates Solstice."  Ha.

I like astronomical holidays because they are for everyone.  You don't have to believe any given thing; the sun still moves the way it moves.  And it brings a lot of thoughts and reflections: about darkness and light, about change, about the cycles of life.

In my epic fantasy series (still mostly a series of outlines) the people celebrate four feasts for the four elements.  Spring equinox is the Water Feast, celebrated by dancing in the fields, preferably in the rain, and announcing engagements; summer solstice is the Air Feast, celebrated by lots of singing and flute-playing, and also weddings; autumn equinox is the Earth Feast, celebrated by eating a lot of harvest foods; and winter solstice is the Fire Feast, celebrated by bonfires and staying up all night toasting things on the fire and singing carols.  I like making up fantasy religions.

Unfortunately I can't actually adopt their customs without a tribe of people to do them with me, though I still do like the idea of spending Solstice burning fires.  Our fireplace is still not usable since we need to get the chimney cleaned, so I just lit a bunch of candles.

This year my big thought was about the carbon cycle.  It's not something I really understood until recently, with the help of some science fiction books about terraforming and a lot of news articles about climate change.  What we hear in school is that plants turn carbon dioxide into oxygen.  But somehow I never thought where the carbon goes.  Of course the carbon, together with the water the plant absorbs, become the body of the plant, largely in the form of hydrocarbons--carbohydrates, cellulose, even fat.  That's how the plant stores its energy.  When you eat the plant (or any animal does) you release that energy again, but to use the energy you put the carbon back into the oxygen you breathe, which makes carbon dioxide.  (I'm totally leaving out the nitrogen cycle here, which is also super cool.)

But!  Not all of that hydrocarbon gets eaten by people.  Some of it decays, so that the carbon goes back into the atmosphere--that's why you can't reduce the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere just by planting things and cutting them down.  To reduce carbon dioxide, carbon has to be sequestered--either by large living plants keeping it in use for a long time, or by burying it deep in the ground where it can't be released, as in coal, oil, and natural gas.  The stores of carbon deep in the earth are the result of millennia of carbon sequestration, which gradually reduced the carbon in the atmosphere until it reached modern levels.

That stored carbon is a mixed blessing.  On the one hand, you can get all that energy--millennia of sunshine, all stored up in the carbon.  On the other hand, you can bring our atmosphere very suddenly to prehistoric levels of carbon dioxide.  We have to be very careful and respectful when it comes to that bottled sunshine.  I wonder what colonists on another planet might think, after generations of trying to sequester carbon to make their atmosphere breathable, of the heedless way Earthers just burn the stuff up.

But this isn't meant to be a downer on fire.  Fire is awesome and powerful.  It allows us to live through the winters and make our food nourishing enough to sustain our massive brains.  It's like a little sun, because it releases the sunlight from past years.  And it echoes the way our own bodies burn carbohydrates for energy--fire breathes out carbon dioxide just like we do.  Can you picture a tiny little fire in each of your mitochondria in each of your cells?

In the summer, the earth breathes in.  It stores the sunlight in millions of plants, filling its atmosphere with oxygen.  In the winter, it breathes out--as our fires and our bodies both use up the stored energy, and release carbon dioxide.  We need both the breathing in and the breathing out to stay alive.  It's a beautiful, complex dance to think about.

Anyway, on to the soup.  This is my mother's Christmas Eve soup, which she got from her mother.  Trouble is, no one in the family agrees with me that Christmas Eve is for soup, so I thought I'd make it for Solstice instead.  As an extra benefit, it can be vegan, which was nice given Solstice was on a Friday.

Solstice Soup

1/2 yellow onion
4-6 carrots
4 stalks of celery
1 quart V8 juice
1 cup water
1/2 cup pearl barley
1 can white beans
1 can green beans
1/2 cup frozen chopped spinach
1/2 cup peas
1 tsp vegetable soup base*
1 tsp Old Bay
dash Worcestershire sauce**
salt, pepper, garlic powder to taste
dash Tabasco or cayenne if you like spice

Chop the onion and saute on medium high heat until it is starting to brown.  Add the liquid, chopped carrots and celery, and barley.  Cook for 30 minutes and then add all the other ingredients.  Feel free to sub in or out whatever vegetables you like and have.  Taste as you add the seasonings and don't stop till it tastes right.

*I used Better Than Bouillon, but a bouillon cube would also work.  Beef flavor is good if you don't have vegetable.
**This is technically not vegan because it has anchovies.  A dash of soy sauce or aminos might be good.

I served it with biscuits and there was only a little bit of whining.  At first Miriam whined because she "hates soup" (she does??) and then I told her it had green beans in it and she loved it, but then Marko whined because he does not like green beans.  Oh well.  It got et.

Ignorance and responsibility

You can well imagine, with my strong views on immigration and on attachment, that I've been pretty upset lately learning about the children separated from their parents at the border.  I'm glad the automatic separation policy has been revoked, but detention as a family is still pretty bad, and what is really needed is for their asylum claims to be heard promptly.

Anyway, let's take it as given that I have a strong opinion here.  And naturally I have felt very angry at those who defend the policy.  What has got to be wrong with a person's conscience that this doesn't bother them?

Well, I don't like to rush to judgment so I went looking for where my friends on that side have been getting their information.  Perhaps there's some justifiable explanation, you know?

So I read the DHS "myths" page that a friend-of-a-friend shared.  And I read this article on Breitbart, which paints child detention as a happy daycare that citizen children would be lucky to be sent to.  And it's true, both are masterpieces of propaganda which take careful research to break down.  If you read only those, and nothing else, it makes sense that you'd think people are being hysterical by fussing about this policy.  After all, our country isn't actually ripping children from their parents' arms!  It's rescuing children from human traffickers and keeping them in palatial residences, on the taxpayer dime.  Who could be against that?

Obviously this stuff can also be debunked.  You could read any of these posts:
WaPo: The facts about Trump's policy of separating families at the border
Slate: How the Trump administration defends its indefensible child separation policy
ACLU: The Bogus Reasons ICE Uses to Lock Up Asylum Seekers
Texas Monthly: What's Really Happening When Asylum-Seeking Families Are Separated
Slate: District Court Judge Denounces Forced Child Separation as “Brutal” and Clear Constitutional Violation
Aplus: DHS Called These "Myths" -- But Are They?
I understand why people don't feel as much trust in the ACLU or WaPo as they do in Breitbart.  Somehow they feel Breitbart is on their side and the others are "liberal." I disagree, but I understand.

But at some point I have to say, you're responsible for what you believe.  You're responsible for educating yourself.  Catholic teaching believes in vincible and invincible ignorance -- ignorance you can overcome versus ignorance that's not your fault.  If you aren't allowed access to the internet and all you hear is conservative talking points, I'll acknowledge that your ignorance isn't your fault.  But if you have an internet connection, you could find out.  It's just that people don't want to.

I admit, usually I'm a lot more tolerant of this kind of thing.  We do our best, there are so many blockages to people finding the truth about anything, when we know better, we do better.  But one of the big blockages to finding out the truth is this fallacy: that you're not responsible for what you believe.  That if you already believe a thing, you have zero responsibility to question that because, after all, you think it's true so why would you?

I have to disambiguate a bit here, because I know people are going to be shouting (if they actually pay attention to what I write) "But you say that belief is not a moral choice, that you automatically believe what the intellect presents to you as true!"  And yes, this is true.  But it is a moral choice to investigate in order to find the truth.  It is a choice to set the standard of proof on a level that true things are likely to pass and false things are likely to fail.  There is a right and a wrong way to go about finding the truth, and people all too often pick the wrong way.

Consider the way you react when a big story hits the news.  The natural pull is to do the following: first, you have a reaction based on whether the story confirms or challenges your worldview.  Your brain really doesn't like changing its mind, so it reacts defensively when the story challenges your viewpoint.  You immediately -- barely on a conscious level -- start trying to refute the claims in the story.  Is there a flaw somewhere, anywhere, you can latch onto?  You open another tab and go looking for another article that claims to debunk the first.  But this second article, you don't react defensively to at all.  If there are flaws or holes, you ignore them, because the story seems so obviously true you don't need them.

I know because I do this all the time.  I work really hard to try to stop it, because that's no way to find out the truth about anything, but it takes real effort to go looking for counterarguments for something I want to believe, or take seriously an argument I don't want to believe.  Some people don't make that effort.  Maybe they think it would be wrong to make that effort, because it betrays their "team."  I'm not sure.

All I know is, people not knowing the truth is one of the major forces for evil in the world.  People aren't evil enough to make all the evil we see on purpose.  Instead, they create that evil through ignorance, and no one confronts the evil because of further ignorance.  We always used to ask, "How did the Holocaust happen?  How did the Germans agree to gas the Jews?  How did no one else stop them?"  But we know the answer, I think.  The answer is that people chose to believe it wasn't that bad or wasn't happening at all.  The government had soothing answers, like that Jews were just being sent somewhere else, somewhere pleasant, where gentiles should be so lucky to go -- and on the taxpayer dime!  Rumors of the camps had reached America, and Americans said, "That's ridiculous.  That's overblown.  That can't be happening."  So they turned away boatloads of Jewish refugees, afraid that Communists might be sneaking in on those boats.  It was a terrible thing to do, but they did it based on the information they believed.

But why did they believe that information, rather than the truth?  I guess because they had a preference.  It's hard to find the truth when you strongly want one answer to be true.  And people don't wind up asking the crucial question, "What is true?"  Instead they ask, "Is there a way this can be false?"  When you approach a news story or any other source with the plan to debunk it, you aren't seeking truth.  You're defending yourself from truth.

So you know what?  I'm done excusing bad behavior on the grounds of ignorance.  If somebody, say, denies their child a blood transfusion on the grounds of religion, I'm through with saying, "Well, it's their belief."  Those are terrible beliefs, seriously, they don't ever worry about whether they are false?  You have a responsibility to check if your beliefs are true.  Even if you were raised with them.  Even if you have heard a lot of positive arguments and the only negative arguments were weak ones brought up in apologetics class.  The main responsibility still lies with the leaders of that religion, but everyone who is a part of it also has the responsibility to check it for themselves before they do morally questionable things.  If you make an error in reasoning, I will try to understand, but if you don't even try because you think your beliefs aren't your responsibility?  I'm going to judge the heck out of that.  Because I've heard that a lot of times and I'm getting tired of it.

I'm also done with people who comb through dozens of websites to find one rare tylenol side effect, but explain away side effects of "natural" teething tablets or adult aspirin because they like those treatments.  At some point you've got to notice you're trying to confirm your own biases.  I know because I've done it.  At least have the humility to recognize that you could be wrong, so don't pass yourself off an as expert all over the internet on every topic you read a couple of articles about.

I'm done with people who yell FAKE NEWS at anything they disagree with, and then pass around sketchy unsourced stuff without factchecking it.  You get a pass on the first time, because you didn't know, but after you've seen it debunked and the promised FEMA internment camps didn't show up, then you know you made an error and it's on you to tighten up your standards.

I'm done with people who look at rape victims cross-eyed because "they can't proooooove they were raped" -- except for Juanita Broaddrick and a few choice others, whose assailants you don't like.  Are you unaware that you accept eyewitness testimony for a million other things every day?  When do you start to notice the double standard?  Why is "can't be certain, but he probably did it" abandoned for "you can't prove it so it didn't happen" the second it's a rape case?

And I'm angry at those who defend the splitting up of families.  I'm not just angry at Trump, Sessions, and the rest who dreamed up this policy and know what they are doing.  I'm also angry at all the people who refuse to even entertain the idea that their heroes could be doing something wrong.

Seriously, people.  Make an effort to be objective.  Be skeptical of the things you want to believe as well as the things you don't want to believe.  Ask yourself, "What is the truth, and how can I find it?  What is a method that is likely to reveal the truth?  If I am wrong, how will I know?  What are the risks to being wrong?  How sure am I?"

Because at this point, I'm beginning to think that the root of evil is actually ignorance.  And a lot of that ignorance is willful.

Appropriating victimhood

In the progressive movement, there tends to be a sharp division between victims and allies -- if you are a victim of something, the rules are different for you than they are for allies.  Likewise if you are an oppressed minority, the rules are different from someone who is more privileged.  Privileged people are supposed to do all the work to understand those who are oppressed; they can't speak for them; they're supposed to listen.  Intersectionality is the understanding that people can be privileged in some ways while oppressed in others.  For instance, a white person may be privileged due to skin color, but oppressed due to poverty.  So because of that, they are supposed to listen to black people on the subject of racism, but they're allowed to be central in a conversation about poverty.

I don't really have a problem with all that.  I learned early in life that a good joke punches up -- that it's funny when someone respected or powerful is the butt of the joke, but when you pick someone disadvantaged, it's just mean.  But there's a new trend that's beginning to worry me.

See, in a competitive culture, everyone wants to be powerful.  You hide your weaknesses and try to be brave, because peers will be merciless.  Ours is more about a preferential option for victims -- we try to be extra nice to people with an obvious disadvantage.  But the problem is, soon everyone wants to be a victim.  After all, that's how you get sympathy.

And that's how this new trend got started when everyone started claiming to a victim.  Men?  Victims.  White people?  Victims.  Christians?  Victims.  It doesn't matter that these people have (in our country at least) the vast majority of both political and economic power.  They can always point to some disadvantage they have.  Men, for instance, commit suicide more often than women.  White people are accused of being racist sometimes.  Christians get mocked in ways that, in our country, polite people never joke about Muslims.  Basically people from dominant groups are arguing that political correctness -- the protection of "victim" groups -- has turned them into the new victims.

I find it pretty infuriating, because the hidden assumption throughout is, "We are being oppressed, so in order for things to be fair, we need more power than we have."  Which is a reasonable thing for a group that is actually being oppressed to say -- I mean, yes, black people could stand to have more money and women should hold more public offices and people should harass immigrants a lot less.  But if you're not being oppressed, it raises the question of what you actually want.  If you are speaking for straight white males and you claim that your group is being oppressed, what can possibly be a corrective that will satisfy you?  You already have most of the government and the CEOs of most Fortune 500 companies and most judges and most police officers and on and on and on.  What do you want, one hundred percent straight white males?  Or are you just concerned that some straight white males care too much about women and minorities, to the point of ever hiring them or awarding them custody?

I guess I have three main points here.

First, it actually matters whether or not you are being oppressed.  Microaggressions like jokes or wearing your culture's clothing are no big deal generally if you're not being oppressed.  Irish-Americans generally can laugh at St. Paddy's Day jokes because they're not meant seriously; but one hundred years ago those were dead serious and Irish people would never have laughed at them.  The difference is that when you're denied jobs, service in some businesses, and a position in respectable society, those jokes hurt a lot more.  So I don't think it's hypocritical to say that you shouldn't make black people the butt of jokes, and at the same time say that white people should have a thicker skin if they hear an occasional joke about themselves.

Second, suffering and oppression are not the same thing.  Oppression suggests that something is unfair, that the oppressed person has a lack of power which needs to be rectified somehow.  So I will freely agree that a man who identifies as incel is probably suffering.  I empathize with it.  But I can't agree that he is oppressed, because he has everything reasonable for him to have: a free shot at convincing someone else to love him.  We all have that, but we can't have anything more without encroaching on another person's freedom.  To call himself oppressed suggests that he doesn't want women to have freedom, and obviously women feel threatened by this.

Third, maybe it would be better if, at least when talking with the general public, we phased out all this talk about victimhood, oppression, and privilege and talked instead about fairness.  Everyone should have the same things, and any small differences should be about making up larger differences.  If we talk about fairness, it soon becomes clear that fairness is the last thing (for instance) that MRA's want.  They want every situation where things are unfair for them to be rectified (no domestic violence shelters for women unless men get one too!  equal custody!) but they generally want to keep any inequalities they benefit from.  That's a distinction that can be lost when we're busy arguing about privilege (a word many conservatives find offensive) or who the real victim is.  It's possible that men are victims of some things -- weaker friendships, poor mental health, a lack of role models -- and women are victims of other things, like rape or discrimination.  So it's not a matter of victims and oppressors, heroes and villains, as it is about rectifying things in our society that cause unhappiness -- preferably without taking away anything from anyone else.