Thoughts on the protests

The equivalences between Tiananmen Square, 1989 and today are understandable, but some big differences remain.

First, probably thousands of people died in Tiananmen Square and throughout the country in response to those protests. Thousands. The official tally, which no one believes, is still around three hundred. People have died in the protests and riots, but not thousands.

Secondly, these protests may change things. If people can maintain their dedication and passion, they can vote to change the President, their senators and representatives, and most important to them personally, change the local government. It’s local government that really affects people and establishes police culture.

I believe in the power of a vote. I believe in the power of the masses. If people want to change their governments, democracy allows them to. I’ve seen a lot of speculation that Trump won’t leave office if he’s voted out, and I cannot reconcile that with the sharp language coming from the military. They’re upholding their oaths to the Constitution. Not the president.

A lot of people seem to think Soldiers and veterans, and I’ll speak of us exclusively, are some mindless army of stormtroopers. Those people think we’re the legions of Bond villains, willing to die for no reason. They don’t realize we’re cognizant, make choices, and think because they don’t know us and write us off with stereotypes.

It’s a lack of perspective. Many of them disagree with us, and instead of really believing people are different, they assume we’re stupid or not people. Perhaps we’re evil. Cops do it to minorities. Everyone does it to members of congress (congress-critters or Moscow Mitch). But it’s laying bare the sharp limitations of the dialogue in America, probably the world, and how we revel in stereotyping those we do not agree with.

You don’t overcome injustice with more, and you don’t defeat disunity by destroying the disunited.

I wonder how much of a role the coronavirus lockdown is causing. I know my temper is shorter than usual. I also know what happened to George Floyd is a travesty, and it’s just the most recent and most published in a long bloody trail from antiquity to now.

But I doubt, deeply, that more anger is the solution. I don’t see any part of the world and think, If they were just angrier, their lives would be better.

There’s way too much fear, and I don’t know the solution to that either. I don’t think it’s guns and violence. Those are symptoms, and the police are scared. Badly, deeply, scared.

The Chinese Communist Party is scared, deeply scared, of its people.

The word triggering took its psychological connotation from a method of defeating phobias. Patients were exposed to ‘triggering’ phenomena, things they were afraid of, in safe situations. The course of treatment desensitized them to their fears. Perhaps understanding is the path forward, with it learning and education. But safety isn’t made in knowledge, but by love and care.

Typos

The Amazon description page typo was fixed. However like Hydra, they return, and I found one inside the book.

I’m offering a typo bounty like a bug bounty. The first person to find a typo gets a free copy of the book.

Also, if you buy the Kindle version and enable updates, in about a month I’m going to push version 1 which will just be errors corrected.

Theism

You ever wonder if God watches the human race like park rangers watch wildlife? Caring, but with a strict non-interference policy?

“Look, I’m sorry you were eaten by wolves/killed in war, but that’s a natural outcome.”

Capitalization

There’s a bit of subtlety in the way Mara narrates things.

She’s five. Mara doesn’t really understand that other people have houses and apartments, that those homes have kitchens and bathrooms, and that people live there.

To Mara the kitchen isn’t just the kitchen in her house that she and her family use. It is the Kitchen, singular, the only one. It isn’t a common noun because other kitchens don’t exist in her world view. It’s a proper noun because when discussing kitchens, she is going to be discussing the Kitchen which is as distinct as the Atlantic Ocean is from other oceans. Probably more accurately, the Kitchen is as distinct as Mom is distinct. There aren’t lots of moms, there is one Mom: hers.

Cassie and Jack would not see it that way. They’ve seen a lot of kitchens, homes, and foster parents. Mara and Hector haven’t. To them, the mom issue would be: there are many moms but this Mom is mine. To Mara, there is only one Mom.

Nor have the younger twins really had the time to think about it. What’s the age of reason? About five? They’re suddenly understanding that yeah, these are things. There are many kitchens. Their parents are teachers. Wait until the fireworks happen when they realize that their teachers may also be parents.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

By William Butler Yeats

I’ve been thinking about those two lines:
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

If by doubt we’re proven to be the best of men, I’m ready to ascend to Olympus.

Anger isn’t going to solve anything, and it turns to poison quickly. I don’t look at anything in modern politics or current events and think, ‘I wish there was more anger here.’ But anger isn’t necessarily bad. It’s just often misused. The trick is taking anger and using it for good, not to hurt the bad guys but to help everyone.

I don’t know how to do that right now. I’m working on it.

Self Publishing

Recent events have certainly helped me put my difficulties with Amazon in perspective.

I think I’ve fixed the carriage return issue. It will take a few days to propagate. The error did not appear on the ebook page, so that’s good.

Mara and the Trolls will come down from AO3 in a few weeks, perhaps a month, when I shift to Kindle Preferred Publishing. That enables me to run sales and advertisements more easily, but they require that Amazon have the lowest price. MatT (heh) can’t be available for free anywhere.

Obviously Matt’s (heh) writing will remain most places, including AO3. And if it matters, I encourage all not-for-profit use of my works, including fanfiction, provided they’re disseminated for free. There’s a GNU that covers this, and I’ll figure out which one it is.

Status

It’s been an interesting week in the USA.

You generally find what you’re looking for, so let’s look at some of the good things going on.

The Dragon spacecraft was delayed and later launched successfully. Good on NASA for making the right call to wait, good on the many people who build the thing, launched it, and are monitoring it now.

Various members of their communities came out to clean up someone else’s mess in cities like Minneapolis and Atlanta. People are rising to the occasion. If society grows when old men plant trees they won’t sit in the shade in, society heals happens when communities clean up wreckage they didn’t break.

Pandemic fatalities in the US and much of Europe are coming down significantly.

Mara and the Trolls comes out Sunday night/Monday morning in kindle format.

Target fixation is a thing in car driving, wherein if you look at something, you’ll probably drive your car there. On a track they tell you to look at the road, because if you look at the tree, you’ll hit the tree. In life, look at the positive. Accidents happen, but you’ll probably head towards where you aim.

Marvin Applewhite

In the wake of the Minneapolis protests and riots, locals are coming together to clean up. One of the leaders is Marvin Applewhite.

He has a GoFundMe, but I can’t confirm any of the details in it. I don’t want to post a direct link because it might be a scam. You can find it by searching for “Marvin Applewhite GoFundMe.”

A couple of thoughts struck me.

The first, which someone commented, is that the news doesn’t show this. I don’t think most news is inherently biased to show minorities in bad light so much as they only show the bad light of anything. It’s the old ‘people aren’t out to get you, they’re out to help themselves.’ The news is very much going after sturm und drang. So of course riots and arson will get primetime coverage, and that’s going to dominate over the people trying to help and repair. That’s not right, but it’s different.

Secondly, from pictures, I believe people are out there trying to fix things. In the wake of the anger, people are cleaning. There always are.

Space Launch

At around 2:33pm my time (MDT) NASA/SpaceX are going to launch for the ISS. As I write this, launch is about an hour away. Conditions are red for weather, but there’s hope things will clear up.

I’m equally excited and concerned. Probably my biggest single feeling is worry that something will go catastrophically wrong. Some humans just strapped themselves to a pillar of low explosive and are trying to stretch the bang out so they make it into space. If the bang happens a little too fast, they’ll die.

That’s is why the Space Shuttle was decommissioned. 2/5 or 40% of them blew up killing everyone on board. While it might have held great national pride, 40% kill ratio is just not good enough. The Dragon doesn’t really have a safety rating. This is a first time affair, so there are no statistics.

On the other hand, and perhaps a little more than 50%, I’m excited because if this works, big things are underway. We cannot ignore the symbolism and practical aspects of the USA being back in the manned space industry again. Models are only as good as the data we put into them, and the best way to get that data, the only way to get some, is by doing the deed. We have to actually send people into space to learn about sending people into space, and I take as a premise that sending people into space is a good thing to do.

Furthermore, I don’t think NASA should be building all rockets forever. There will be some things the government should be doing, things that are infeasible for the private sector as well as things that should be discouraged. But regulation should be the domain of the government. NASA should set the speed limits and paint the lines on the road. Building the cars should be done by private companies.

There will be exceptions. A telescope might be better suited to government construction than a private company. I could easily imagine a situation where a resource like position might be found to be unique, and therefore best adjudicated by the government. But technology has pushed merely getting into space out of that role.

Alt-tabbing over, the launch looks go.

On a personal note, I think people tend to ignore how invested they are in things like this because problems arise or other people aren’t. We walk around in ditches with the issues we must address piled high on either side. That’s not a mistake. We need to be mindful of the pandemic, paying rent, or buying groceries, and pay most of our attention to people we know.

But there are a lot of people in the US. If a bunch of them devote 1% of their efforts to space travel, that’s a huge amount of work. And those people rely on others, so we should be grateful even to those who don’t necessarily agree with us.

We should be extra grateful to the people strapping themselves to the rocket. Bob and Doug are the ones who will do the dying if this doesn’t work, and that brings us full circle.

I suppose I’m first worried and mostly excited.

30 minutes away.

Good luck, gentlemen.

Good luck, everyone.

Edit: They just scrubbed it for weather.

It’s the right thing to do. They pushed the weather countdown, and still scrubbed. I get the impression they thought things might clear up 10 minutes past the launch time, but it was an instantaneous window, and could not be delayed.

In aviation this is a big thing. Don’t push safety. If you can’t do it, don’t try. Just do the right thing, even if it is a disappointment.

Impatience is no reason to get someone killed. I’ll be excited for Saturday.