Just a Moderate on Tumblr

I think too much. Some of it spills out here. I think internet discussions often lack necessary subtlety, so I try to insert it when I can. Cis/White/Male/Hetero so I guess I'm a supervillain

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My thesis

Every person needs a reason to live. It doesn’t have to be all that lofty, though it certainly can be. What is particularly important, though, is that the reason be allowed to change. There was a long time when I thought I would be some great physicist, discovering new laws of nature and pioneering technologies to carry us forward into the future. 

That dream, I fear, is dead. It died when I woke up today, read my grades, and realized that I’m not made for that sort of thing. I need a new dream, a new thesis. 

It would be a lot easier if I could live forever. I’m sure I know what you’re thinking, what you’ve been trained to think, that living forever would be boring, or lonely, or a fate worse than death, that it would make life lose its meaning. 

I reject these claims. 

I don’t think I’ve truly been bored for even a moment of my life. Bored, as far as I’m concerned, is not some external state; it’s a thing you impose on yourself, a judgement that your current situation is empty of interest. In a sense, everything is boring until you think about it. 

When I was younger, in grade school, my peers often complained that books were boring. I don’t entirely blame them, but their statement of disinterest was incomplete. What they all probably meant to say was that “this inanimate paper is boring when compared against the smorgasbord of color and movement that is television”. On the surface, there was truth to that. Even books with pictures stood still

Like most things, though, it is a matter of perspective. One of the first books I ever read was Oliver Twist. I was young, around four or five at the time, and I didn’t understand most of it (I’m smart, but not THAT smart). Even so, it fascinated me, and not only for the story it told; the book itself seemed magical, because of the name on the cover. Not young Oliver, but Charles himself. Somehow, a man who had been dead for a long time was talking to me, and although I wasn’t really equipped to fully understand him, it stood to reason that someone else must be. Charles Dickens, with paper and scribbles, could put thoughts into someone else’s head. Sure, that other person could decide to accept or reject them, but in the end, everyone who read this story was different because of Charles Dickens.

At the time (and fittingly, at present), I was very interested in space travel, and having no real conception of the arc of history with regards to technology, I spent countless hours scouring Dickens’ many works for a story about rockets. Needless to say, I was disappointed

There are other things I must do.

Bringing it all to a point, I can see no happy ending to the life of someone like me. I know I will die disappointed, unfulfilled, and miserable. My solution is simple; don’t die until somehow, that changes

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A story

This is a story about me. I think it might be a sad one, though that is not yet truly certain. I wrote a book, I’m writing another, and probably several more after that.

Today I got back my grades from Fall semester, and as always, a surprise. The C in Differential Equations I expected (having lazed my way through that particular course); the C- in Electricity and Magnetism I did not.

My professor was kind enough to email me a note explaining his impressions of me, how I was quick to grasp concepts and make intuitive leaps, but struggled with rigor, and double-checking, and, of course, showing my work.

He is not wrong.

This brings us to this moment, the moment at which I must make a decision; I shall either strive to remake myself, scorching away the elements of my current weakness, or I will stay as I am, and seek a new path forward.

The first option seems simpler, safer, probably smarter. But it doesn’t seem like me. My whole life thus far has been a path of least resistance; when I do poorly at something, I focus on what makes me excellent, scorning history for math, critical reading for the sciences, and when I find myself doing well at something that makes me struggle, it has always been due to my adoption of an alternate approach.

In a sense, I have been alive 21 years and learned nothing. All I have mastered is what I started with. I have to pull-myself-up-by-my-bootstraps, burn-the-midnight-oil, hard-work-over-time narrative. 

Obviously, it would be impossible for me to get by had I not been born into my relatively priveleged position.

Perhaps it is impossible even so.

Up until now, I had thought of this blog as a place to express middling political opinions, straddling extremes and finding common ground. As I go forward, I shall consider this place as a lab notebook of sorts to the experiment that is my life

[justamoderateon-blog]

Wealth without work. Pleasure without conscience. Knowledge without character. Commerce without morality. Science without humanity. Worship without sacrifice. Politics without principle.

Gandhi’s Seven Social Sins

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On the wage gap

This is a doozy. The arguments tend to look something like this: “Women make $0.70 to the dollar”

“That’s because they take lower paying jobs and work fewer hours. There’s no such thing as sexism”

“Misogynist!”

And so forth.

Having dug into it, it looks like both sides are sort of wrong. Census data seems to show that hour-for-hour in equivalent positions, men and women earn equally. 

HOWEVER

This in no way invalidates the fact that women in our society have less earning power than men. It’s just for a different reason than we thought. Women are systematically discouraged, and at times even barred, from high-paying fields and positions. They are taught by society that it is not their place to work, and take fewer hours as a result, or perhaps because they have domestic tasks dumped upon them as well. If that isn’t sexism, nothing is. Preventing men and women from doing the same work is just as bad as, if not worse than, paying them differently for it

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On fat-shaming

Body positivity has gone in some strange directions. To put my own two cents in, I think everyone is beautiful, and unless someone is actively hurting others, nobody should be shamed for being who they are. So long as everyone has enough to eat, it shouldn’t matter if some people eat more than others. 

With all that having been said, some things need to be cleared up: Firstly, obesity is not caused only by genetics (though there are likely both genetic and epigenetic factors). The fact that obesity rates differ across countries (this one in particular) handily proves that. Obesity is caused by genetics, overeating, poor eating, and underexercising. 

HOWEVER Obesity does not inherently cause health problems. If you think about it, this isn’t surprising. Having fat on the outside of your body does nothing to your internal organs. It does not damage your heart, or your blood vessels, or your kidneys, or anything. It can potentially cause joint problems, but that’s not the issue most people jump on. What DOES cause health problems is our food industry. Fat people aren’t sick because they’re fat. EVERYONE is sick because we’re all being poisoned. It’s a subtle thing. Over the past few decades, “obesity-related” health problems have risen at a faster rate than obesity itself. This suggests an underlying cause, namely the food we all eat. We blame obesity because it’s easy to do. Humans are like that. 

Perhaps another important question is what would happen if obesity DID cause these problems? Would people have a responsibility to be thin. Honestly, given our culture’s attitude towards smoking and alcohol, I don’t think society is ready for that conversation.

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On transphobia

It’s amazing how often we forget that people are people. The reason it surprises me so much is “person” is the only label that truly applies to everyone. There are lots of other labels we like to use: Gay, straight, trans, cis, black, white, etc... Labels like these are to be expected. We use them to break down the world into categories, letting us process an incredibly complicated reality in bitesized pieces. Of course, these labels get us into trouble. Transphobia is one such instance. There is a lot of argument about whether gender is a social construct or a biological one. I fall in the middle of that one, though that is a thing for another time. Of much more importance is the fact that we think gender is important. To be specific, that a person’s gender matters more than their basic humanity. 

Trans and non-binary people are assaulted and killed at a disproportionate rate. Why? Because, for some reason or another, some people think it’s okay to hurt another person if their genitals don’t meet your expectations. At this point, it doesn’t actually matter whether trans people are “moral” or not. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a choice or not. What matters is that there are people who care so much about other people’s crotches that they are willing and eager to do violence when frustrated with said crotches.

If you think trans people are somehow amoral, that’s fine. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. However, nobody is entitled to hurt others because they feel uncomfortable

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On reverse racism

So far as I can tell, the term doesn’t make sense. Don’t praise/condemn me too quickly. There is a subtlety here that warrants notice. Every time I read somebody saying to “Kill all white people” it bothers me, in no small part because I am white. But I am forced to ask myself WHY it bothers me. Is anyone actually going to kill me? Of course not. Does anyone even want to? Again, unlikely. Deep down, what makes me so uncomfortable is not fear, but rather the fact that I’m being stuffed in a box. Am I white? Yes. But I am human first. This is not “reverse racism”. It is just racism. I am being dehumanized by another person because of the color of my skin. I will admit, of course, that people who look like me used to do (and still do) some pretty awful things. An oft-paraphrased saying in these sorts of conversations is “The sins of the father do not pass down to the son”. I believe this very strongly.  HOWEVER While guilt is certainly, not passed down, duty is. People often say that “slavery is over” and “I never enslaved anyone”. Again, these things are true, but putting out a fire is not the same thing as rebuilding a burnt home. My ancestors crimes are not mine: but the money and privilege those actions bought is. I am not guilty, but I am responsible. I live my life on blood money. If we (white people) choose colorblindness, we don’t make things worse, but the truth is that things are BAD and we aren’t making them any better either. Giving up our privilege to help the disempowered isn’t reverse racism. It isn’t regular racism. It’s just justice. TL;DR: Not all white people are racist, but we are privileged. Anyone can be racist. Ending slavery isn’t the same as fixing slavery. White people aren’t guilty for wrongs of the past, but our power makes us responsible for setting things right.