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<channel>
	<title>Armed and Dangerous</title>
	<atom:link href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/wp-rss2.php" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
	<link>http://esr.ibiblio.org</link>
	<description> Sex, software, politics, and firearms. Life's simple pleasures...</description>
	<pubDate>Fri, 03 Jul 2009 02:36:54 +0000</pubDate>
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		<title>The Hand-Reared Cat</title>
		<link>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1128</link>
		<comments>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1128#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 02 Jul 2009 04:36:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>esr</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[Technology]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1128</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In a recent comment, I wrote:

Oddly enough, our cat often does come when called, and is rather good at figuring out what humans want and doing it. A few days ago a photographer came out here to take snaps of me for an AP story on NedaNet and was quite startled when I asked the [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>In a recent <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1119#comment-237986">comment</a>, I wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Oddly enough, our cat often does come when called, and is rather good at figuring out what humans want and doing it. A few days ago a photographer came out here to take snaps of me for an AP story on NedaNet and was quite startled when I asked the cat to turn around so her head would face the camera, and she did it.</p>
<p>Our cat’s behavior is not doglike servility, though. She pays careful attention to human hands because she associates them with being petted, and she’s a total friction slut. As a result, you can often fetch her, or get her to move, with hand gestures. I made one that directed her attention towards the photographer.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>By an odd coincidence, my wife Cathy insisted less than an hour later that I should watch a video of the Moscow Cats Theater (I&#8217;d post a link, but I haven&#8217;t found that exact one from here).  And we both noticed something; as the cats are walking tightropes and so forth, the human trainers are using encouraging, guiding gestures that seem&#8230;familiar to us.  And, in fact,  the cats often seem visually fixated on the trainers&#8217; hands.</p>
<p><span id="more-1128"></span></p>
<p>Wild!  It looks very much as though Cathy and I have accidentally trained into our cat one of the same responses the Moscow Cats Theater people use to program their far more elaborate tricks.  </p>
<p>I am reminded of something I heard a lion-tamer say once; training big cats is not about dominance, it cannot be; it&#8217;s about pleasure and reward.  Nor does it seem irrelevant that the cats in the video looked <em>happy</em>. I think what we were seeing was not work to them, it was guided play - motivated not by fear of doing poorly but by love of their trainers.  </p>
<p>Our cat behaves the same way; she walks towards a gesturing human hand because she loves getting attention from her humans and believes the hand will pet and cherish her. Everything in her experience confirms this. (On the rare occasions we have to discipline, we do it with a shout or a squirt bottle.)</p>
<p>More cat ethology:  some time back, I examined the <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=867">mystery of the purr</a>. My commenters and I never arrived at an explanation of why the cat&#8217;s purr is so appealing to humans that I found entirely satisfactory. Now, science may have provided one.</p>
<p>It seems there&#8217;s a woman named Elizabeth von Muggenthaler (wonderful name, so redolent of mad science and gothic castles!) who has discovered that cats purr in a range of acoustic frequencies that are widely known in the medical literature to stimulate tissue healing, especially of bone and connective tissue. </p>
<p>Ms. Muggenthaler does not propose to junk the conventional account that cats purr to express sociability and/or contentment, but she suggests that cats purr as a form of self-healing as well, and has designed various clever experiments that appear to confirm this.</p>
<p>She may also have explained why humans enjoy the sound.  Like purring itself, the healing effects of gentle vibrations in those particular frequency ranges have probably been significant in the mammalian line long enough for humans to inherit a mild instinctive  tropism for them.   I wouldn&#8217;t be at all surprised if the human ability to be come fond of certain varieties of repetitive mechanical noises has a similar ground.</p>
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		<title>RFI on 1911-pattern carry guns</title>
		<link>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1119</link>
		<comments>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1119#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:40:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>esr</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[Technology]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1119</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[This is a bleg for information on 1911-pattern handguns optimized for concealed carry.
Since receiving my most recent death threat, I&#8217;ve been carrying a Glock .40 pretty continuously.  The .40 is an excellent weapon, but has two drawbacks from my point of view.  One is that it has a 5-inch barrel and a relatively [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>This is a bleg for information on 1911-pattern handguns optimized for concealed carry.</p>
<p>Since receiving my most recent death threat, I&#8217;ve been carrying a Glock .40 pretty continuously.  The .40 is an excellent weapon, but has two drawbacks from my point of view.  One is that it has a 5-inch barrel and a relatively wide frame, it&#8217;s really designed for external holster carry rather than concealment, and while it can  be hidden on a person my size it&#8217;s not really comfortable for continuous wear.</p>
<p>The other problem is that it&#8217;s not a 1911-pattern .45.  Yes, I know, there are arguments for double-action and smaller calibers, but 1911 is what I <em>like</em> and thoroughly understand.  That feeling of comfort and confidence is a valuable asset and could make a life-or-death difference in a clutch situation.</p>
<p>Therefore I&#8217;m soliciting information on 1911-pattern carry guns.  The search specification is this: 1911-pattern .45 with a three-inch barrel, optimized for concealed carry with as few projecting parts to snag clothing as possible.  I know of one weapon fitting this spec, the Kimber Ultra II Carry.  I&#8217;m interested in pointers to functionally similar weapons, reviews, personal experiences, and recommendations.  I will entertain offers of sale and would not turn up my nose at used guns in good condition.</p>
<p>Attacks on gun ownership and other philosophical/political diatribes will be considered off-topic for this comment thread and deleted.  Yes, I have notified the FBI (which is taking the threat seriously) and the police have my house on elevated watch, but &#8220;when seconds count, the police are only minutes away&#8221;. If you have nothing concrete to contribute to helping me keep myself alive, keep your lip zipped.</p>
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		<title>Misconstruing Mussolini</title>
		<link>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1115</link>
		<comments>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1115#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:34:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>esr</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1115</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;ve been reviewing the history of fascism recently, because the Republic of Iran has many structural features in common with fascism and I think the history of fascism in Europe holds lessons about its future.  And recently I ran across a quote beloved of American leftists in an email signature:
From Benito Mussolini: &#8220;Fascism should [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I&#8217;ve been reviewing the history of fascism recently, because the Republic of Iran has many structural features in common with fascism and I think the history of fascism in Europe holds lessons about its future.  And recently I ran across a quote beloved of American leftists in an email signature:</p>
<p>From Benito Mussolini: &#8220;Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.&#8221;</p>
<p>This quote is often misconstrued nowadays by leftists who view profit-making corporations under capitalism (especially multinational corporations) as instruments of the devil. They love the implied image of capitalist fat-cats and fascist dictators conspiring in gilded opulence.  Alas for them that this quote actually doesn&#8217;t imply anything like that; the terminological ground under it has shifted.</p>
<p><span id="more-1115"></span></p>
<p>The &#8220;corporatism&#8221; Mussolini to which was referring had, actually, nothing to do with corporations, joint-stock or otherwise (in the 1920s the word &#8220;corporation&#8221; did not yet have its modern sense, either in English or Italian).  His use of the word had to do with a feature of fascist theory forgotten by almost everybody but specialist historians.</p>
<p>In fascist theory, &#8220;corporations&#8221; were bodies like unions, craft guilds, professional societies, and grange associations. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism for discussion; see especially the section &#8220;Italian fascist corporativism&#8221;.</p>
<p>What Mussolini was actually enunciating was a sort of organic statism in which the state would bless or admit representatives of various &#8220;corporations&#8221; into its governing councils &#8212; and no, that didn&#8217;t mean Fiat or Beretta but (say) the Abruzzo Building Trades Association, or the Society of University Professors.  </p>
<p>While corporations-in-the-modern sense were not outright excluded from being legitimized &#8220;corporations&#8221; in the fascist sense, neither did they have any special status or power in the system.  Actually, it was rather the reverse&#8230;</p>
<p>It&#8217;s worth remembering that the founders of fascism were mainly Leninists like Mussolini with a sprinkling of anarcho-syndicalists (George Sorel being the best known of those).  Actual fascism retained the founders&#8217; doctrinal hostility to what modern leftists would call &#8220;corporate power&#8221;, never renouncing its state-socialist roots and being (in fact) hostile to <em>all</em> centers of power other than the state itself.</p>
<p>The modern idea that German and Italian fascism were conservative or pro-business ideologies is essentially a fantasy constructed by pro-Soviet propagandists during and after World War II.  In fact, classical fascism never wandered very far from its left-wing origins; corporatism can be seen as an elaboration of the theoretical role of worker&#8217;s soviets in Leninist theory.</p>
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		<title>“This is massacre…this is genocide…this is Hitler!”</title>
		<link>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1105</link>
		<comments>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1105#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:03:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>esr</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1105</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Listen to this CNN interview with an eyewitness to the Baharestan Square Massacre.  If it does not freeze your blood, you are no longer part of any community of human feeling I can recognize.
I am, as of now, DONE with people who say we shouldn&#8217;t &#8220;impose American values&#8221; or &#8220;promote democracy&#8221; in the Middle [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Listen to this CNN <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7zVibjTOO4" rel="nofollow">interview with an eyewitness to the Baharestan Square Massacre</a>.  If it does not freeze your blood, you are no longer part of any community of human feeling I can recognize.</p>
<p>I am, as of now, DONE with people who say we shouldn&#8217;t &#8220;impose American values&#8221; or &#8220;promote democracy&#8221; in the Middle East. They are morally bankrupt.  As of 24 June 2009 they have slip-slid into the category of apologists for genocide.</p>
<p>That woman is shattered.  She has witnessed atrocities no human being should even have to <em>imagine</em>, let alone watch being wreaked on their friends and neighbors and countrymen.  She is pleading with us, screaming for the world to intervene.  </p>
<p>Will we flagellate ourselves over our imagined sins, or act?  This is cause for war - not on behalf of the U.S.&#8217;s particular<br />
interests, but on behalf of all humanity against a cabal of tyrants and butchers unequaled in evil since Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia.</p>
<p>To know of this degree of radical evil, and have the power to act against it but fail to do so, is to become accomplice to the evil.  The time for the overthrow of the Iranian regime, by any feasible means up to and including full-scale war, has come.</p>
<p>Free Iran!</p>
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		<title>Dispatches from the Iranian cyberfront</title>
		<link>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1096</link>
		<comments>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1096#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 22 Jun 2009 09:27:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>esr</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[Science Fiction]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[Technology]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1096</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;ve spent the last seventeen hours living inside a cyberpunk novel.  A libertarian cyberpunk novel.  It&#8217;s been a weird and awesome experience.
Within an hour after I received a plea for help from Iran,  a regular commenter on this blog recruited me into a hacker network that has been forming to support the [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I&#8217;ve spent the last seventeen hours living inside a cyberpunk novel.  A libertarian cyberpunk novel.  It&#8217;s been a weird and awesome experience.</p>
<p>Within an hour after I received a <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1092">plea for help</a> from Iran,  a regular commenter on this blog recruited me into a hacker network that has been forming to support the democratic Iranian revolutionaries by providing them with proxy servers, Tor anonymizers, and any other technologies needed<br />
for them to communicate over channels the Iranian regime cannot censor or control.</p>
<p>I know this network has contacts on the ground among the revolutionaries.  I don&#8217;t know who they<br />
are, and don&#8217;t want to know.  Most of the other network members are just names on an IRC channel. But we&#8217;re putting together a stealth network at amazing speed. Nothing matters as much as the courage and determination of the Iranians on the ground, but we aim to make a difference in our own way and we have the tools to do it.</p>
<p>This disorganization has only been forming for a very short time. It doesn&#8217;t really have leaders. It didn&#8217;t have even a name when I joined it, though I&#8217;ve given it one that looks like it might stick. Until and unless somebody else steps up to the job, I&#8217;m our public contact.</p>
<p>This role carries a non-zero risk that I will be targeted for assassination, or interrogation followed by execution, by agents of the Iranian regime - we&#8217;ve had more than one death threat against core members already.  I take this risk with eyes open because we need somebody to be public, and I know I&#8217;ve already been a jihadi target since 2006; at least I can keep some other poor bastard out of the line of fire.  I now expect to remain continuously armed for the duration of the Iranian crisis.</p>
<p>Rostam, this is how I&#8217;m answering your plea.  We&#8217;ll do what we can for your people.  For freedom.</p>
<p>To learn more about NedaNet and how you can help, go <a href="http://nedanet.org/">here</a>.</p>
<p>UPDATE:  Actual death threat received.  I have taken appropriate precautions.</p>
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		<title>A plea from Iran</title>
		<link>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1092</link>
		<comments>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1092#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 21 Jun 2009 16:28:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>esr</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1092</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I received an email that deeply moved me a few moments ago.  I&#8217;m going to reproduce it here exactly, except that (as requested) I am omitting the name of the sender.  Because I think I&#8217;m going to need a term of reference for him, I am substituting the name of a legendary Persian [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I received an email that deeply moved me a few moments ago.  I&#8217;m going to reproduce it here exactly, except that (as requested) I am omitting the name of the sender.  Because I think I&#8217;m going to need a term of reference for him, I am substituting the name of a legendary Persian hero.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>My name is [Rostam] , an open source fan and your blog regular commenter &#8230;</p>
<p>Regarding to security consideration,  PLEASE KEEP MY IDENTITY SECRET !!</p>
<p>I wanted to inform you about what&#8217;s happening in Iran , but the the wildness circle of Iran&#8217;s religious and dictatorship regime is so that I can just invite you to check this two link in youtube :</p>
<p>http://www.youtube.com/results?&#038;search_type=&#038;search_query=neda+protest</p>
<p>http://www.youtube.com/results?&#038;search_type=&#038;search_query=iran+protest</p>
<p>Eric, I know that I will maybe face the deadly threats by sending this email. But, I do this because I do believe in freedom.</p>
<p>Inasmuch as, you are one of the most influent persons in one of the most talented community (Hackers) in the world, I humbly ask you write about Iran and what&#8217;s going on there.</p>
<p>Please tell the world that Persian people are fight for freedom . Our fight is &#8220;weapon less&#8221; against a full armored enemy . Our weapon is our great civilization , is our will of freedom and is our prior experience over the history.</p>
<p>PLEASE tell the world that there is no doubt at all that we will see freedom as you saw it after destroying Hitler&#8217;s nightmare &#8230;</p>
<p>Sincerely Yours , [Rostam]
</p></blockquote>
<p>Rostam, I will indeed blog about this.  I begin by publishing your plea, which despite its somewhat broken English is probably as eloquent as anything I could write on the matter.  You have my promise of secrecy.  I will have more to say in coming days.</p>
<p>And, an interesting contrast with <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=290">my last email from Iran</a>&#8230;</p>
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		<title>Responding to Eliezer Yudkowsky&#8217;s &#8220;Overcoming Bias&#8221;</title>
		<link>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1068</link>
		<comments>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1068#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 19 Jun 2009 17:13:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>esr</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1068</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[This was originally email to Eliezer Yudkowsky about his excellent and thought-provoking blog Overcoming Bias (actually, the links here are to the older newer Less Wrong, which has been re-indexed at Overcoming Bias).  Eliezer encouraged me to publish this commentary; I have provided HTML markup and fixed some typos.  Warning: the following may [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>This was originally email to Eliezer Yudkowsky about his excellent and thought-provoking blog <a href="http://www.overcomingbias.com/">Overcoming Bias</a> (actually, the links here are to the <s>older</s> newer <a href="http://lesswrong.com/">Less Wrong</a>, <s>which has been re-indexed at Overcoming Bias</s>).  Eliezer encouraged me to publish this commentary; I have provided HTML markup and fixed some typos.  Warning: the following may be heavy sledding if you are not philosophically literate.</p>
<p><span id="more-1068"></span></p>
<p>Comments on OB posts up to #252.  I&#8217;d have done the whole set, but I need to go fight a fire on one of my coding projects.</p>
<p>These are going to sound far more negative about your writing and thinking than I actually am, because I generally won&#8217;t need to comment on the majority of stuff I agree on unless I can say something  funny or illuminating about it.  Often this is not the case.</p>
<p><a href="http://yudkowsky.net/rational/the-simple-truth">The Simple Truth</a> is funny, but takes an awful lot of time and effort to work its way around to a position equivalent to the Peircean fallibilist formulation of operationalism.  I think you should have chosen a more direct route to avoid fatiguing the reader.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ve noticed before, e.g. in your expositions of Bayesian theory that you have a tendency to run too long and beat the point to death. Alas, this is still true of <a href="http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes">An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes&#8217; Theorem</a> upon rereading. It is formally correct but a pedagogical disaster.</p>
<p><a href="http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues">The Twelve Virtues of Rationality</a> was still damn impressive the second time I read it.  Possibly your best piece of writing.</p>
<p>In <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/go/why_truth_and/">Why truth? And&#8230;</a> you overcomplicate the exposition.  All the motives you cite can be explained in a simple and unified way: we are truth-seeking animals because we are prediction-seeking animals because we are control-seeking animals because we are goal-seeking animals.  Or, to go at it from the other end: we want things, so we seek to control our environment, which we can only do by correctly predicting what it will do if we kick it.  The conscious feeling of curiosity and the belief that truth is morally important are just the normal operating noises of our adaptive machinery.</p>
<p>In <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/gp/whats_a_bias_again/">&#8230;What&#8217;s a bias, again?</a>, you appear to be missing an important perspective about <em>why</em> we have cognitive biases.  Normally, &#8220;bias&#8221; generally turns out to be an evaluative shortcut that was useful in the environment of ancestral adaptation, but is now misapplied by brains trying to cope with far more complex and varied challenges.</p>
<p>In <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/gq/the_proper_use_of_humility/">The Proper Use of Humility</a> you write: &#8220;The temptation is always to claim the most points with the least effort.  The temptation is to carefully integrate all incoming news in a way that lets us change our beliefs, and above all our actions, as little as possible.&#8221;  Alas, you are so busy knocking over that bad social-status reasons for belief inertia that you slight a good one: Changing beliefs is not costless, and may commit you to a decision procedure that is too heavyweight to be worth some very marginal gain in utility.  Physics example: if I am doing ballistics under conditions normal near the Earth&#8217;s surface, it is instrumentally rational for me to believe Newton&#8217;s laws rather than Einstein&#8217;s.</p>
<p>Here, and elsewhere, I observe in your thinking a kind of predisposition that is common in analytical philosophers.  You underweight the degree to which computational costs are a factor in theory formation and selection; more seriously, you also underweight the role of motivation in theory-building.  It is not that you are unaware of these factors, it is that you tend to miss predictive hypotheses that lean heavily on them in favor of more elaborate<br />
constructions that are no more predictive.</p>
<p>In <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/gu/some_claims_are_just_too_extraordinary/">Some Claims Are Just Too Extraordinary</a> you write: &#8220;What about the claim that 2 + 2 = 5? What about journals that claim to publish replicated reports of ESP?&#8221;.  Bad move.  These claims are epistemically  of two very different kinds.  You should have omitted the first.</p>
<p>In <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/hg/inductive_bias/">Inductive Bias</a>, you write: &#8220;A more general view of inductive bias would identify it with a Bayesian&#8217;s prior over sequences of observations&#8230;&#8221;  Ding!  You should be this pithy more often.</p>
<p>In <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/hn/your_rationality_is_my_business/">Your Rationality is My Business</a>, you write &#8216;The syllogism we desire to avoid runs: &#8220;I think Susie said a bad thing, therefore, Susie should be set on fire.&#8221;&#8216;  Many years ago, I observed an implicit premise in the way many humans reason which I call the &#8220;Pressure Principle&#8221;.  It goes like this: &#8220;The truth of the claim &#8216;I have a duty to do X&#8217; justifies others in using force to coerce me to do X.&#8221; I reject this principle.  Sometimes, pointing out that it is the implicit ground of an argument can persuade people to reject that argument</p>
<p>In <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/hq/universal_fire/">Universal Fire</a>, you write &#8220;If a match stops working, so do you. You can&#8217;t change just one thing.&#8221;  Indeed.  My favorite example of this isn&#8217;t deCamp&#8217;s match, but E.E. &#8220;Doc&#8221; Smith&#8217;s &#8220;inertialess drive&#8221;. Instant death&#8230;</p>
<p>In <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/hs/think_like_reality/">Think Like Reality</a>: &#8220;You have the absolutely bizarre idea that reality ought to consist of little billiard balls bopping around, when in fact reality is a perfectly normal cloud of complex amplitude in configuration space.  This is your problem, not reality&#8217;s, and you are the one who needs to change.&#8221; Thanks for that; I haven&#8217;t laughed so hard in weeks</p>
<p>Ibid., &#8220;Surprise exists in the map, not in the territory.&#8221;  Yes. Many years ago I published a similar maxim: &#8220;Paradoxes only exist in language, not reality.&#8221;</p>
<p><a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/hu/the_third_alternative/">The Third Alternative</a>: &#8220;The last thing a Santa-ist wants to hear is that praise works better than bribes, or that spaceships can be as inspiring as flying reindeer.&#8221; &#8230; or that the result of attempting to &#8216;correct&#8217; market failure with political intervention is almost always a worse failure.</p>
<p>In <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/i3/making_beliefs_pay_rent_in_anticipated_experiences/">Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences)</a> you choose an amazingly circuitous and vague way of getting to a conclusion that is as correct as possible while being seriously misleading.  The correct answer to the question &#8220;If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?&#8221; is another question: &#8220;Why are you asking?&#8221; That is: what kind of prediction does your goal-seeking require?</p>
<p>You get the prediction part more or less right, but because your gut instinct is to tend to think of theories as cathedrals motivated only by the desire for Pure Truth (choose one per physical system, perfect correspondence required) you miss the fact that the appropriate microtheory of what &#8220;sound&#8221; is may <em>differ depending on the goals of the theorizer</em>.  Instead, you hare off into a lot of fairly unnecessary pseudo-ontology and a random bash at postmodernism.</p>
<p>Note carefully that I am not arguing subjectivism or some sort of Feyerabendian conceptual anarchism here.  The different microtheories of &#8220;sound&#8221; are commensurable, and can readily be fit into a consilient macrotheory; but any clear account of why we might choose either (an answer to the parable) requires an account of the chooser&#8217;s motivation.</p>
<p>In <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/i6/professing_and_cheering/">Professing and Cheering</a>. you write &#8220;That&#8217;s why it mattered to her that what she was saying was beyond ridiculous. If she&#8217;d tried to make it sound more plausible, it would have been like putting on clothes.&#8221; I found it extremely odd that you did not fully understand what you were seeing, but perhaps that is only because I am a neopagan myself and used to pulling similar maneuvers.  Or maybe you have borderline Aspergers or something and are poorly equipped to process some kinds of neurotypical interaction, including this one (that&#8217;s my wife Cathy&#8217;s guess, and not a hostile one; she rather likes you).</p>
<p>Your lady panelist was performing a mindfuck.  The intent of her speech acts was not to persuade anyone that she believed the Norse creation myth, it was to hold up a funhouse mirror to the religious cognitive style.  The question her provocation was implicitly posing to the audience is &#8220;If you reject this as absurd, on what basis do you maintain your own equally poetic and absurd creation myth?&#8221;</p>
<p>I speak from the authority of direct personal experience here, as I have done the same sort of thing for the same reasons in pretty much the same way.</p>
<p>In <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/i8/religions_claim_to_be_nondisprovable/">Religion&#8217;s Claim to be Non-Disprovable</a> you write: &#8220;Back in the old days, saying the local religion &#8216;could not be proven&#8217; would have gotten you burned at the stake. This is not true in general. Actually, excepting political special cases like the Roman state cult of the Emperor as Sol Invictus, it is weakly true only of monotheisms and strongly true only of one family of monotheisms descended from or strongly influenced by Zoroastrianism (notably including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam).</p>
<p>Most religions outside this group don&#8217;t give a flying crap about the state of your beliefs or &#8220;proof&#8221; or objective correlatives as long as you maintain ritual cleanliness and do what is socially expected -<br />
religion as attire, in your terms.</p>
<p>In <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/is/fake_causality/">Fake Causality</a> you write about phlogiston as a paradigmatic example.  Here&#8217;s a story about that:</p>
<p>In 1992 I was an invited speaker at the Institute for Advanced Study. Yes, this was five years before I was famous; what I was doing there was a seminar on advanced Emacsing.  My sponsor, the astrophycist Piet Hut, took me around to meet a number of the stellar eminences at the Institute.</p>
<p>One of them was a cosmologist whose name I don&#8217;t remember.  We chatted for a while - he was doing interesting work on the apparent quantization of red-shift distributions.  Then I said to him: &#8220;Oh, by the way, I know what dark matter is made from.&#8221;</p>
<p>Eying me dubiously, he said &#8220;What?&#8221;</p>
<p>I said &#8220;Phlogiston.&#8221;</p>
<p>He damn near fell out of his chair laughing.</p>
<p>I disagree with <a href ="http://lesswrong.com/lw/iv/the_futility_of_emergence/">The Futility of Emergence</a>.  There is a semantic difference between saying &#8220;Human intelligence is an emergent product of neurons firing&#8221; and &#8220;Human intelligence is an product of neurons firing.&#8221; The word &#8220;emergent&#8221; is a signal that we believe a very specific thing about the relationship between &#8220;neurons firing&#8221;  and &#8220;intelligence&#8221;, which is that there is no possible account of intelligence in which the only explanatory units are neurons or subsystems of neurons.</p>
<p><a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/jg/planning_fallacy/">Planning Fallacy</a> is the first post in which you have showed me something (reliable predictive superiority of the &#8220;outside view&#8221;) that I had no clue about before I read it.  Well done.</p>
<p>In <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/jo/einsteins_arrogance/">Einstein&#8217;s Arrogance</a>, you write: &#8220;But from a Bayesian perspective, you need an amount of evidence roughly equivalent to the complexity of the hypothesis just to locate the hypothesis in theory-space.&#8221;  Wow. Now that I think of it, there&#8217;s probably a law here: no theory can be confirmed (even in the loose, semi-definite fallibilist sense) by a communication with less Kolmgorov complexity than the theory itself.</p>
<p>In <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/k2/a_priori/">A Priori</a> you wander around the mulberry bush discussing justifications of Occam&#8217;s Razor, and inexplicably miss the obvious and simple one: computation has a cost.  Whenever we multiply entities beyond necessity. we commit ourselves to a decision procedure that is wasteful and will be outcompeted by actors who spend the resources we waste on <em>solving other problems</em>.  You continue to have a  very curious blind spot towards analysis like this.</p>
<p>In <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/k4/do_we_believe_everything_were_told/">Do We Believe Everything We&#8217;re Told?</a>&#8230;sure. I had never actually encountered Spinoza&#8217;s account before, but it now seems obvious to me that it must be true.  For, how else can we evaluate a proposition other than plugging it into the rest of our prediction generators and running them forward to see if there are inconsistencies?  Descartes&#8217;s  neutral &#8220;consider&#8221; is a classic mysterious answer to a mysterious question; he never unpacks it.</p>
<p>In <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/kf/selfanchoring/">Self-Anchoring</a>, you write &#8220;We can put our feet in other minds&#8217; shoes, but we keep our own socks on.&#8221;  It would be astonishing only if this were not true. We solve the other-minds problem by mirroring our own; really, how else <em>could</em> we do it?</p>
<p>In <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/kg/expecting_short_inferential_distances/">Expecting Short Inferential Distances</a> you replicate part of my own thinking about the EEA basis of cognitive bias.</p>
<p><a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/kv/beware_of_stephen_j_gould/">Beware of Stephen J. Gould</a>. I think it is relevant that Gould seems to have been a believing Marxist who took some pains not to bruit about that fact (the evidence is not entirely unequivocal but pretty strong).  At least part of what he was doing with his dishonesty was waging a kulturkampf (virtuous in Marxist terms) against hereditarian thinking.</p>
<p>In <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/lf/purpose_and_pragmatism/">Purpose and Pragmatism</a> you write: &#8220;You find yourself in an unheard-falling-tree dilemma, only when you become curious about a question with no pragmatic use, and no predictive consequences.  Which suggests that you may be playing loose with your purposes.&#8221; Well, yeah. Why didn&#8217;t you get here the first time you analyzed this parable?</p>
<p>In <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/lh/evaluability_and_cheap_holiday_shopping/">Evaluability (And Cheap Holiday Shopping)</a> you write: &#8220;If you have a fixed amount of money to spend - and your goal is to display your friendship, rather than to actually help the recipient - you&#8217;ll be better off deliberately not shopping for value.  Decide how much money you want to spend on impressing the recipient, then find the most worthless object which costs that amount.  The cheaper the class of objects, the more expensive a particular object will appear, given that you spend a fixed amount.&#8221;  How delightfully evil.  Now, the interesting utility-maximization question, given that we do our holiday shopping together, is: should I tell my wife this heuristic or not?  The answer is not obvious&#8230;</p>
<p>In <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/lo/uncritical_supercriticality/">Uncritical Supercriticality</a>, you write &#8220;Bad argument gets counterargument.  Does not get bullet.  Never.  Never ever never for ever.&#8221;  I think there is a good general rule, but it is vulnerable to misinterpretation.  Buzz Aldrin was right: the correct response to the person who gravely insulted him was to smack the sorry little fucker a good one, <em>even though the insult was superficially framed as an argument</em>.  Similarly, the correct response to a person who says &#8220;You do not own yourself, but are owned by society (or the state), and I am society (or the state) speaking.&#8221; is to injure him as gravely as you think you can get away with &#8212; because though this is formally framed as an argument, it is an assertion of a right to control you that is properly met with violence. (In fact, I think if you do <em>not</em> do violence in that situation you are failing in a significant ethical duty.)</p>
<p>Re <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/ls/when_none_dare_urge_restraint/">When None Dare Urge Restraint</a>: I am among those who fear (yes, &#8220;fear&#8221; is the correct and carefully chosen word) that the U.S. response to 9/11 was not nearly as violent and brutal as it needed to be. To prevent future acts of this kind, it is probably necessary that those who consider them should shit their pants with fear at the mere thought of the U.S.&#8217;s reaction. We did not achieve this, and I fear we are likely to pay for that failure in otherwise preventable mass deaths.</p>
<p>In <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/m1/guardians_of_ayn_rand/">Guardians of Ayn Rand</a>. you write &#8220;Actually, I think Shermer&#8217;s falling prey to correspondence bias by supposing that there&#8217;s any particular correlation between Rand&#8217;s philosophy and the way her followers formed a cult.&#8221;  I don&#8217;t agree.  There are specific features of the awful mess called &#8220;Randian epistemology&#8221; that are conducive to map/territory confusion, specifically the notion that the Law of the Excluded Middle is ontologically fundamental rather than a premise valid only for certain classes of reasoning.</p>
<p><a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/m2/the_litany_against_gurus/">The Litany Against Gurus</a> reminds me of this:</p>
<blockquote><p>
    To follow the path:<br />
    look to the master,<br />
    follow the master,<br />
    walk with the master,<br />
    see through the master,<br />
    become the master.
</p></blockquote>
<p>From &#8220;How To Become A Hacker&#8221;.  (Yes, I wrote it.)</p>
<p><a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/m4/two_cult_koans/">Two Cult Koans</a>: Dang, you&#8217;re <em>good</em> at the Zen-pastiche thing.  Have you read <a href="http://catb.org/esr/writings/unix-koans/">these?</a></p>
<p>In <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/m7/zen_and_the_art_of_rationality/">Zen and the Art of Rationality</a> you write &#8220;And yet it oftimes seems to me that my thoughts are expressed in conceptual language that owes a great deal to the inspiration of Eastern philosophy.&#8221; Well, sure: and the reason you&#8217;re attracted to that is because the good parts of Eastern philosophy that we&#8217;ve imported are all about something that is very important to you, but about which Western traditions lack language that is quite as precise and evocative: namely <em>directed change in the style of consciousness</em>.</p>
<p>In <a href=http://lesswrong.com/lw/mc/to_lead_you_must_stand_up/"">To Lead, You Must Stand Up</a>, you write: &#8216;I briefly thought to myself: &#8220;I bet most people would be experiencing &#8217;stage fright&#8217; about now.  But that wouldn&#8217;t be helpful, so I&#8217;m not going to go there.&#8221;&#8216; Yup. Me too.  But I think your exhortations here are nearly useless. Experience I&#8217;ve collected over the last ten years suggests to me that the kind of immunity to stage fright you and I have is a function of basic personality type at the neurotransmitter-balance level, and not really learnable by most people.</p>
<p>In <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/nh/extensions_and_intensions/">Extensions and Intensions</a> - er, I hope you are aware that you are restating basic General Semantics here.</p>
<p>In <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/nm/disguised_queries/">Disguised Queries</a>, you write: &#8220;The question &#8220;Is this object a blegg?&#8221; may stand in for different queries on different occasions.&#8221; Or, to put it more precisely, the correct microtheory depends on the motivation of the theorizer.  We&#8217;ve been here before.</p>
<p>To be continued&#8230;</p>
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		<title>Reinventing Homosexuality</title>
		<link>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1063</link>
		<comments>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1063#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 18 Jun 2009 03:56:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>esr</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[myself - o]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1063</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;ve recently been reviewing what I know about the historical evidence for how homosexuality has been viewed in other times and places, and doing a bit of additional research into the area.  This, which is partly a response to comments by my regulars on some recent essays here, has led me to an interesting [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I&#8217;ve recently been reviewing what I know about the historical evidence for how homosexuality has been viewed in other times and places, and doing a bit of additional research into the area.  This, which is partly a response to comments by my regulars on some recent essays here, has led me to an interesting perspective on modern debates about homosexuality and sexual liberty.</p>
<p><span id="more-1063"></span></p>
<p>First, let me be clear that I&#8217;m deriving my tentative conclusions from considering (translated) primary sources - graffitti preserved in Pompeii, descriptions of the penalties for cross-dressing in Norse sagas, the lampoons of Catullus, and Japanese accounts of homoeroticism among the samurai are among those I&#8217;m familiiar with. Closer to the present day, I have read ethnological sources on homosexuality among the Afghans and in the modern Arab world, and made at least one relevant observation first-hand a few years back, in the red-light district of Bangkok.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m emphasizing primary sources because this is one of many, many areas where contemporary scholarship is severely corrupted by politics; it is probably no longer possible to achieve tenure at a major American university after giving offense to the homosexual-activist lobby.  Fortunately, I don&#8217;t have that sort of career issue to worry about, and can therefore speak without fear.</p>
<p>Most educated people in the U.S. and Europe have a default model or construction of homosexual behavior which I will call &#8220;romantic homosexuality&#8221;.  Romantic homosexuality is homoeroticism between equals; men or women of roughly the same age and social position, with the relationship having affective elements similar to the emotional range in heterosexual relationships (from one-night stand through lifetime marriage).</p>
<p>At one opposite extreme from romantic homosexuality is what I&#8217;ll call deprivation homosexuality - homoerotic behavior by men or women who are normally heterosexual but isolated from contact with the opposite sex for long periods of time.  I won&#8217;t discuss this further in this essay except to note that for good analysis of what goes on in (for example) prisons, the difference between deprivation homosexuality and other kinds is significant. </p>
<p>We are generally aware of two other types of homosexual behavior.  One is pederasty: homosexuality between adult men and adolescent or prepubescent boys in which the older partner is always, or nearly always, the one doing the penetrating.  It is a significant datum, to which I&#8217;ll return later, that neither modern Western culture <em>nor any other that I am aware of</em> has  a well-defined category equivalent to pederasty among women.</p>
<p>The last category I&#8217;ll discuss here is what I&#8217;ll call domination sex.  In this kind of homoeroticism, penetration is equated with dominating or humiliating an inferior, the slave, the prisoner, the catamite, the helpless object.  It is in this spirit that Sioux Indians threatened to rape the corpses of their defeated enemies, and gangsta rappers speak of &#8220;making him my bitch&#8221;. It provides the threat and the hostile charge when someone says &#8220;Fuck you.&#8221;</p>
<p>When we examine the behavior of humans in the large, over a broad sweep of history and culture, and compare it with homoerotic behavior in nonhuman primates closely related to us, a startling pattern emerges.  Romantic homosexuality is almost all of what we see in homosexual human and higher-primate females, but <em>almost none of what we see in homosexual human and higher-primate males</em>. </p>
<p>Over and over again, the pattern of male homosexual behavior in pre-modern sources is overwhelmingly one of pederasty and domination sex.  And not just in pre-modern sources but in most of the present-day world as well.  When I tried to brush off a pimp in the red-light district of Bangkok who waved a brochure full of naked women in my face, he didn&#8217;t ask me if I wanted to fuck another man instead - he tried to rent me a boy.  (I refrained from punching him out, because I recognized that from his point of view it was a reasonable next question.)</p>
<p>We may further note that there are, broadly speaking, two contending models of &#8220;normal&#8221; &#8212; acceptable or semi-acceptable male homosexual behavior &#8212; observable in human cultures. In one model, that of the modern West, romantic homosexuality is relatively tolerated, while pederasty and domination sex are considered far more deviant. I&#8217;ll call this the homophilic construction.  It&#8217;s what most of my readers accept as normal.</p>
<p>But in the other, older model, pederasty and domination sex are considered more &#8220;normal&#8221; than romantic homosexuality. In cultures with this model, the &#8220;top&#8221; in an episode of pederasty or domination sex is not necessarily considered homosexual or deviant at all; any stigma attaches to the passive partner.  Romantic homosexuality is considered far more perverse, because it feminizes both partners.  I think of this as the &#8220;classical&#8221; construction of homosexuality, as it describes the attitudes of ancient Rome - but it persists in cultures as near to our own as South America and the Mediterranean littoral.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s the classical construction that is the rule in human cultures.  The homophilic one is the exception; in fact, I am not able to identify <em>any</em> culture which held to it until after the Industrial Revolution in Europe.  And not all of Europe has acquired it yet.  Even in the English-speaking countries, where the homophilic construction is most entrenched, the connotations of sexual insults and threats in our language still reflect the older model.</p>
<p>To put it another way, the male homosexuals of the last two centuries in our culture have engaged in a massive reinvention of homosexuality that is still underway. Specifically the male homosexuals; lesbians began the game with romantic homosexuality as their dominant mode.  I have not identified any culture in which it was considered more normal for lesbians to have sex with prepubescent girls or with dominated inferiors.</p>
<p>Why this asymmetry? I suspect, ultimately, it can be traced back to a tragic flaw in mammalian neural architecture - the fact that the limbic system handles sexual arousal and the anger/fear arousal involved in dominance transactions among social animals with adjacent circuitry that can relatively easily become cross-wired </p>
<p>Only this can really account for the observed fact that some (mercifully, only relatively few) human beings derive visceral sexual satisfaction from killing.  The use of anal penetration as an expression of dominance, and of accepting it as a submission ritual, probably has the same source.  It is phyletically old enough to be found not only in primates but in other mammalian lines as well. And, in the nature of things, it is not a threat females can make; thus, while thrill-killing is neurologically possible to females (and there have in fact been female serial kllers), domination sex has been pretty much outside of the repertoire.</p>
<p>This analysis raises two interesting questions.  The first one is about the past: what changed?  That is, how did the homophilic construction replace the classical one, where it did?  I&#8217;m only speculating here, but I think the proximate cause may have been the sentimentalization of family life around the turn of the 19th century in Europe, which in turn was enabled by a sharp fall in infant mortality rates.  Both processes started earlier and moved faster in England and the Anglosphere than they did elsewhere.</p>
<p>The other interesting question is whether this reinvention is sustainable in the longer term.  If my analysis is correct, modern homosexuals are bucking a pretty strong biological headwind.  How strong can be judged by a chilling little statistic I picked up years ago from a how-to manual written by homosexual SM practitioners for newbies, er, learning the ropes; it noted that, adjusted for population size, male homosexuals murder each other at a rate <em>26 times</em> that of the general population.</p>
<p>That suggests to me that a tendency for male homosexuals to drift into the darker corners of domination sex is still wired in beneath the modern homophilic construction.  It might take actual genetic engineering, of a kind we don&#8217;t yet have, to fix that wiring.  Until then, I wish them luck.  Because (and here I make the first and only value claim in this essay) whatever one&#8217;s opinion of homophilic homosexuals might be, the behaviors associated with the pederastic/dominating classical style are entangled with abuse and degradation in a way that can only be described as evil. Modern homosexuals deserve praise for their attempt to get shut of them.</p>
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		<title>How to Type with a Foreign Accent</title>
		<link>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1058</link>
		<comments>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1058#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:40:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>esr</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1058</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I spend a lot of time on IRC channels and discussion forums where many of the users are not native speakers of English.  Recently one of these expressed surprise when I observed: &#8220;You type with a foreign accent.  What is your birth language?&#8221; He knew, of course, about speaking English with an accent, [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I spend a lot of time on IRC channels and discussion forums where many of the users are not native speakers of English.  Recently one of these expressed surprise when I observed: &#8220;You type with a foreign accent.  What is your birth language?&#8221; He knew, of course, about speaking English with an accent,  but he hadn&#8217;t encountered before the possibility that the same cues could be observable in written English.</p>
<p>Herewith , some instructions on how to type with an accent.  All the examples I will give are utterances I have observed in the wild.</p>
<p><span id="more-1058"></span></p>
<p>To sound generally foreign, omit elisions and contractions normally used by native speakers.  Type &#8220;I do not think I have the time&#8221; rather than &#8220;I don&#8217;t think I have time&#8221;. </p>
<p>To sound German, put commas in places that do not correspond to speech pauses in English. &#8220;I do not know, how he could have believed that.&#8221;</p>
<p>To sound Russian, omit definite or indefinite articles.  &#8220;No, you cannot have cheeseburger.&#8221;</p>
<p>To sound like a speaker of Hindi or Urdu or one of the related languages, emit wordy run-on sentences that begin with &#8220;Esteemed sir&#8221;, like:  &#8220;Esteemed sir, I would be grateful if you could direct me towards a good book on Python because I am attempting to learn programming.&#8221;</p>
<p>Understand, none of these errors actually interferes with comprehension.  I&#8217;ve found that these second-language speakers are often more worried about the quality of their English than they need to be.</p>
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		<title>Protective camouflage and holy victims</title>
		<link>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1046</link>
		<comments>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1046#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Jun 2009 10:43:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>esr</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1046</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Today I&#8217;m going to repeat a story from the blog Alas! and discuss it, because&#8230;well, the author does not seem to have grasped the actual implications of what he wrote.  It&#8217;s what I think of as a &#8220;holy victim&#8221; narrative, but the actual lesson is not, perhaps, what the author intended.


There was one girl [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Today I&#8217;m going to repeat a story from the blog <a href="http://www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/2009/06/02/two-youtube-videos-recommended-for-progressives/">Alas!</a> and discuss it, because&#8230;well, the author does not seem to have grasped the actual implications of what he wrote.  It&#8217;s what I think of as a &#8220;holy victim&#8221; narrative, but the actual lesson is not, perhaps, what the author intended.</p>
<p><span id="more-1046"></span></p>
<blockquote><p>
There was one girl I spent a lot of time with. A pixie-like joy of a person, Dawna, who wore her blonde hair almost totally shaved, and strung chains on her jeans. People who saw her knew there was something unusual about her. They didn’t take joy in her oddness, in her willingness to sing in the middle of the street, in her humor, in her desire to leave strange and beautiful things in public places for strangers to find and puzzle over. They shouted “dyke!” at her from car windows; they deployed store guards to follow her around; they sneered and snarled.</p>
<p>When I was 17 and Dawna was 15, she went out with me and started acting very strange. “Is she on meth or something?” a friend of mine asked. I said, “I’m sure she isn’t” — but I was wrong. She was on meth. She called me that night, crying. She’d been taking a lot of drugs for a long time — to try to deal with the pain of her isolation, the pain of how people pricked and pained her, and othered her, and told her she was nothing.</p>
<p>I told her I’d help. I arranged for her to be transferred to my high school and set her up with the teachers who’d been best for me. Nothing worked; the teachers who were more than happy to deal with my casual attitude toward authority had no tools in their kits to handle a girl who was too depressed to go to class. I’d thought they would recognize in her, as they had in me, independence and intelligence. I suppose they did. But even if they wanted to, there was nothing they could do.</p>
<p>I always worried Dawna would die. I thought she would overdose or commit suicide. When I read a few years ago that she was dead, and the obituary hinted at a cause of death that couldn’t be announced to potentially scandalized ears, I knew I was right.</p>
<p>She was twenty-two.</p>
<p>Dawna lived twenty-two years in the toxic hatred of our homophobic, gender policing, joy-killing world. And then it murdered her.
</p></blockquote>
<p>We are supposed to react to this story with pity and loathing at the death of the holy victim. Sorry, but my reaction was that Dawna was clearly asking for what she got.  If she didn&#8217;t want the local monkeys to &#8220;other&#8221; her, why did she dress funny?</p>
<p>Important rule of living:  you can <em>be</em> weird, or you can <em>look</em> weird, but you can&#8217;t usually get away with both.  </p>
<p>Clever deviants - like, for example, myself - make a point of not <em>looking</em> like an obvious threat to the mores of their time.  I&#8217;m a neo-pagan anarcho-capitalist gun-nut who talks about my way-out-of-the-mainstream beliefs and often gets the press to cover them sympathetically.  I fill auditoriums!  I am <em>much</em> more successively subversive than J. Random Punker in his chains and studs exactly because I <em>don&#8217;t look weird</em>. I could be as gay as a treeful of parrots and it wouldn&#8217;t slow me down a bit.</p>
<p>The world did not kill Dawna. Dawna&#8217;s bad choices killed Dawna.   Bad choice #1: taking a visibly oppositional stance without having the inner strength not to buckle.  Bad choice #2: taking nasty drugs to cope with bad choice #1.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s going to sound harsh, but I don&#8217;t have a lot of sympathy for the girl.  She played stupid and lost - wasted her potential on mere display.  If she had really wanted to change the world, rather than staying stuck in shock-your-parents mode until she died, she would have dialed back on the presentation and been an articulate but relatively normal-looking advocate for sexual freedom, or whatever.</p>
<p>Costume or substance. Posturing or efficiency. Looking like a threat to &#8220;the system&#8221; or actually being it.  Choose exactly one&#8230;.</p>
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