#essaypost

[appendixd]

Video games, Body Types, and The Lack Thereof

Hello Gamers,

Why is it so that walking by Vespucci beach, in Los Santos, the most common NPC character is a white woman? Skinny, petite and wait,  all of them are the same? The outfits are different, sure, okay maybe there are some skin variations too but how is it so in such a densely populated city there is a critical lack of body diversity?

Body diversity wasn't really that important in gaming until recent years where movements towards body acceptance and diversity in the real world.

When 3D gaming was primitive it made sense why NPC diversity didn't exist. You practically had polygons, very limited hardware specs, and programmers had to use tricks up their sleeves to use up all the juice of the hardware.  It was difficult to even consider focusing on body types alone, and much easier to copy paste different heads on the same body. Games like the original GTA were entirely top down and relied on swapped textures, but GTA III is known for having repetitive pedestrians. The "same hat different pedestrian" problem was just getting normalized.

Animating 3D bodies early on was nightmarish. They would look horrifying if they got too detailed, which is why developers would default to stylized, slim proportions because they were easier to work with without getting them wrong. Less math to calculate and less room for error. Fat, curves and muscles, on the other hand require a lot more calculations for the polygons to not look like melting wax.

But then in the 2000s it gets even more uncomfortable. By this stage games now can do decent 3D character models, but games like dead or alive still choose feature petite, anime style, big breasted women while having the hardware capacity to make and show body diversity and instead represent a very specific ideology about which bodies get detail and which don't.

There's a well documented thing in game development where the default placeholder model used during development is almost always a slim white male, sometimes literally called "the mannequin." That default has a way of persisting into shipped games.

What does it mean now? Well, rest assured gaming has been taking some positive strides.

The most diversity in NPC types I saw was in Cyberpunk 2077, more specifically there is an NPC who you need to have a boxing match with, his wife is also there but interestingly she's pregnant. You can see her body mesh is clearly made for a pregnant woman, and it amazed me, a shook me a little because it probably was the first time I've seen a pregnant woman in a videogame. 

On the other hand I know I started this with a complaint about GTA V NPC diversity, but the recent GTA VI trailer showed us a snippet of the beach and we can see multiple different feminine body styles which definitely makes me much more hopeful about the future, as some games have begun to treat NPC and bodies as people, rather than background texture.

[rowanthestrange]

Doctor Who is a TV Show. I invented that tag for the TV Show theory, but here I want to apply it to its actual meaning. What does that mean in the real world for what we’re trying to achieve, why we exist? Tw Interstellar Song Contest content incoming.

What is Doctor Who for? Doctor Who is a vehicle for educating better political values to the masses. The Normies. Doctor Who is not a vehicle to reflect our pre-existing personal political values back at us. If you are writing Doctor Who that way, you are actually doing it wrong. I want the phrase “show don’t tell” to die in a fire due to its misuse, but it has application here. The point is to present elements of a calculation so the audience can come to the political position as if All By Themselves, able to use the episode as a framework. This is what helps those messages stick.

For example: we don’t shout how queer people are humans too, we show the audience that, so that they come up with that opinion All On Their Own. We introduce Jack, have Rose a little weirded out by it like a typical person of the time, the Doctor casually say the future’s like that and show he doesn’t have a problem, and have Jack be cute, charismatic, and heroic, so Rose and the audience go ‘oh this is fine actually’.

So we pick an episode that will be one of the most casually seen it can be - between Fifa and Eurovision, plenty of bars aren’t even gonna turn that telly off.

An audience of Normies, even more than usual, ok cool, what does that mean?

(Now for the sake of ease I’m going to ignore A) the other things this episode is about like the Armenian genocide and their years of fighting to be allowed to recognise that in their songs at Eurovision (Armenia’s song this year being ‘Survivor’ is probably the closest they’ve come without it being banned or censored to death) and B) the fact this was written and filmed around/over two years ago before recent events and more people including statistically you became aware of the extent of the Palestinian plight, but obviously you as a person can hold these facts in mind.)

It means that most of those viewers, those Daily-Mail-nonsense-on-social-media-fed Normies idly watching the show between two massive programming events, consider the situation as thus: “There was a big terrorist attack on Israel, and now they’re fighting them so it doesn’t happen again but a bunch of people are supporting the terrorists, that’s crazy.” This is our starting point.

Now what do we want to teach those people?

If you answered

“That Palestinians aren’t terrorists!”

Wrong, actually. Close. But wrong. Why is it wrong? Cus the Normies know for a fact that some of them were terrorists who killed a lot of innocent people. We can say that, that’s ok. We’re not trying to deny reality here in our desire to explain the wider context that the vast vast majority being killed and impacted are innocent. One of the big things that stops people with counter views from being receptive to being educated about issues is the perceived ignoring and minimisation of their own — even secondhand — experiences. That’s in all situations, not just this one.

What we actually want to teach them is the more widely applicable:

“Just because some people have done terrible things in the name of a cause, does not mean the cause itself is unjust.”

This right here? Really hard thing to do. The goal is to say both ‘Mass murdering is obviously evil, but also the cause he did that in service of is NOT evil and in fact good and should be supported’. And we as humans suck at this sort of thing. ‘Heartbreaking: worst person you know made a good point’ - most people just ignore or minimise it. We love to try and make things more separately all good or all evil, nice and binary, and saying a principle can be good even when being gone about by evil means? We don’t want that, don’t want to call those means evil if we think our cause is good, we want to say it’s complicated. Or on the other hand much easier to think the whole thing’s evil, the ideology and all, save neuronal bandwidth. But now we’ve got to get the Normies to achieve that mental complexity, of their own accord, with a terrorist. We want them to come away going “Of course that guy was fucked up, but it’s crazy what the Corporation did to that planet man, and not being allowed to tell people and hiding who they are like that, that’s fucked up.”

This is Big. They have developed empathy for the situation, despite a mass murderer. Do you personally want more, of course you do, we wanna get greedy, go further, but that is a HUGE step. It is THE step. Because once they can hold those two things as distinct things in their mind, they have the capacity to go “well look, see they can’t all terrorists, there were people like Cora, and babies cus that guy was a baby right? And he wouldn’t even have done what he did if they hadn’t set their fucking planet on fire.”

Yes, in global politics YOU made that connection a year ago. You’ve absorbed so much context, so much history, and had enough moral grounding that you already saw everyone as equally human and never stopped. You’re way past that, you’re ready for more. But the Normies watching this between Fifa and Eurovision HAVEN’T yet. They never passed point one - that there was a terrorist attack. They’re still there, no movement. So no, we do actually need to do this step first, it’s vital, it is the foundation of actual functioning empathy. You need a terrorist specifically to be there and to make the audience still root for the cause they represent in spite of their clearly horrific actions.

And then we went even further than that - we have the Doctor take revenge on Kid for having believed that this man violently killed Belinda (whatever she subconsciously is to him), even though by now he knows she’s alive, and we show clearly how WRONG that is. People begging him to stop, even a vision of his own granddaughter. Then his abhorrence over what he did with his own hands. We successfully helped the Normie come to the conclusion that even torturing the specific terrorist that you hate, is bad. It is so hard to get people to not want to hurt your enemies as much as they hurt you. But we managed to get across that no, no, even that revenge you so desperately want harms you both. We got them to think “he should stop torturing the mass murderer, that’s fucked up actually, stop”. That is nothing for most of you at this point, but for a Normie that is a psychological mountain.

Also getting into their heads “surviving a genocide doesn’t mean you get to kill a fuckton of random people, (even if you think they’re all racist and hate you, even though that’s clearly not true for all of them)”, is probably an advantageous sub-message to slide in there while we’re rearranging the furniture in their brain.

Then you’ve got to let them cook. They just underwent a paradigm shift over the course of 40 minutes and may not even be aware of it. Yes, that’s enough for one episode.

If you write a Doctor Who episode, particularly the ones you know will be seen by a broader audience than usual, you are not writing for You. You are not even writing for People Like You. You are writing to guide people with oppositional or muddled or neutral thoughts to a kinder, more understanding and empathetic way of thinking. That is the difference between writing the show and writing fanfic. You’re writing Doctor Who as a chess match between Empathy and the majority of the audience, where the audience must lose so gently and at their own hands they don’t even realise they’ve lost, and in fact without knowing they were even playing a game at all.

It probably will get a direct second episode down the line - if you believe Rogue will, then you should with Kid’s “I’ll see you again, Doctor”, and his being called ‘Kid’, and his backstory, someone’s got to save the child and we all know the themes we’re playing with, and of course you’re going to realise at the end that you’re going to torture this kid you’re currently holding in your arms. Suddenly there is context. How does the icy hatred in your heart bear up to the understanding of the circumstances of this little life. It writes itself.

But even without that, we already got a Normie with the base position of “fucked up that people are supporting terrorists” to having come away from the show going “I mean it was fucked up what they did to that planet. And all those people and shit, how Cora said they aren’t even allowed to talk about it and people think they’re evil and stuff. Like the guy wouldn’t have done that if you hadn’t burned his planet and killed his family. You can’t kill random people just cus that shit happened to you, but fuck man. The Doctor torturing him at the end with the taser tho, he just kept going, that was crazy.”

We gave that Normie a framework to work off. Got a reference point. Got a way to explain to your kids “sometimes people do bad things for causes we think are good, but it doesn’t make the good cause any less good, but doesn’t mean the bad thing is ok either.” We’re not trying to get people from A to Z all in one go, that’s not psychologically possible in 40 minutes, just A to B. And frankly I think we probably managed A to E, which is great. And maybe we can shoot for E to J next - the level that most of us are operating at. But for a regular person A to E is really fucking good. We got them over that sticking point, that essential hump that allowed them to see a Terrorist™ with empathy, as a person with understandable motivations and even enough of a person that it was bad of the Doctor to torture him. I know you learned that lesson when you were twelve so you take it for granted, you’ve seen everyone as human ‘the whole time’, want to go deeper without feeling it’s deep, skip to the fact the vast vast majority of people being affected and killed are innocent and surely that should be enough. But someone’s always twelve, including the 42 year old bloke who’s ended up watching this after the footie because he’s just a little too drunk to be bothered to find the remote and Eurovision’s in half an hour anyway.

[controlthesleeve]

Rewatching the first few seasons of Cobra Kai reminded me how much more I enjoyed the show when the drama was driven by Daniel and Johnny's interpersonal issues instead of being a good versus evil battle for the soul of the valley.

The show started off with Daniel and Johnny both being flawed people, Johnny has multiple obvious flaws (his alcoholism, his relationship with Robby, blaming Daniel for how his life has turned out, etc, etc), but Daniel is also kind of an asshole. He has internalised the idea that he's "the good guy" to a point where he thinks everything he does is justified, like throwing his money and influence around in the infamous rent-raising incident.

A lot of the conflict in season 1 stems from Daniel's knee-jerk reactions, and the fact that he just assumes that Johnny is the exact same person he was in high school and that he is incapable of changing. You can argue that Daniel was justified in thinking this, but imo the show was more interesting back when he was sometimes wrong about things.

Part of the series premise is that their positions are reversed, with Johnny as the working class underdog to Daniel and his multiple luxury car dealerships, but because Johnny has Cobra Kai and more students than Daniel it feels like they are more or less on equal footing. After Johnny lost Cobra Kai at the end of s2, however, I feel like the power imbalance shifts too far in Daniel's favour. Johnny doesn't even have a proper dojo, and although he uses the warehouse (presumably without permission) he only really has somewhere to teach out of the goodness of Daniel's heart, which puts Johnny in Daniel's debt.

I love the whole Kreese&Johnny plotline in s2 which culminates in Kreese taking over the dojo, but the show became so black-and-white after that. Cobra Kai teaches eeevil snake karate that turns you into a bully so Miyagi-do (with the help of Eagle Fang) needs to stop them before they can corrupt the youth of the San Fernando Valley. When Johnny was running Cobra Kai the dojo had its problems, but a lot of his students were clearly benefiting from training with him. Plus, I enjoyed seeing Johnny try to separate the good from the bad and having to reassess what he was taught and try to keep his students from repeating his mistakes.

Anyway, all this to say that I hope Johnny takes back Cobra Kai in season 6

[controlthesleeve]

I'm really not a fan of the way Cobra Kai has handled Kreese's backstory tbh. Both because I don't like the way they portray the Vietnam war and because I don't think it's consistent with the Kreese we see in Karate Kid. The part where his girlfriend dies while he's in 'nam is fine and creates another parallel to Mr. Miyagi, but otherwise the show does a piss-poor job of explaining how he became he man he is.

I'm on board with the idea that the Vietnam war changed him, but I just think they way they go about showing that is so stupid. The scene with the cage and the snakepit is meladramatic in the way we've come to expect from the show, and the point, of course, is for Kreese to save Terry Silver's life (and also explain why cobras, since that was something that needed explaining ig).

My main problem with this (other than that it portrays the Vietnamese as cartoon villains) is that Kreese is portrayed as a fundamentally good and heroic person, who only kills his superior officer after that man has first tried to kill him.

A backstory I think would have made more sense, especially for the Kreese we see in the Karate Kid movies, would have been for him to start out as an idealist, the part where he tells his gf that he's going to come back a hero is a good starting point here, and then gradually erode that idealism as he is gradually consumed by the horrors of the Vietnam war, and the things he's ordered to do. Basically I think Kreese should have comitted more war crimes.

Like, maybe he befirended one of the local interpreters, only to later be ordered to shoot them because they've been giving information to "the commies." Or maybe he's ordered to massacre a village of communists, only to find out that his targets were civillians. I'm definitely not advocating for Cobra Kai to include graphic scenes of Vietnamese civillians being tortured, but there are ways to get the point across while keeping the war crimes off camera while at the same time acknowledging US actions in vietnam. I just think that this is a backstory that would have made more sense for the Kreese that we see in Karate Kid, and it could coexist with the cage scene I guess.

Maybe the showrunners wanted to avoid coming across as as too anti-war or anti-military? I'm not American, but I was under the impression that the US being the aggressor of the Vietnam war was a fairly uncontroversial statement. Idk

It's also just really weird that the Kreese we see in the post-Vietnam flashbacks seems to be fundamentally the same person as before the war. He still seems like he as a lot of softness in him, especially with the way he talks about Johnny. Which is very different from the "nothing but DEATH" guy we see in TKK.

[2centjubilee]

Don’t Laugh At Otherkin

While @sisyphean-marble made an excellent post about why we should respect Otherkin, I feel this somewhat misses an important gap that most people would consider important.  Namely, “what is an Otherkin, anyways, and how is it like or unlike anyone else?”  Time and time again, rights and respect for people who are black, gay, trans, etc. have come about, in whole or in part, because people conveyed their case in a manner that can be empathized with!  Often, some of the most persuasive narratives were those offered by people in a privileged position who nonetheless had spent some time amongst the people in question.  Privilege sure is some kind of thing.

I don’t know I can do that.  However, as someone who spent some time engaged with Otherkin, yet is not one, I figure I would provide a bit of perspective.  This is kind of a cut-down, abbreviated ethnography, because I think history is important.  It clocks a monstrous 1464 words, including this sentence.

Wikipedia documents Otherkin as emerging from the Elf subcultures on Usenet.  This is true but incomplete.  Otherkin seem to have been a nascent identity that, late in the 90s, coalesced out of a mesh of people who asserted their identities as elves, cats, witches, werewolves, dragons, vampires, and other animals and supernatural beings.  Not all of these stayed cohesive with the community (e.g. vampires have drifted closer and further away based on the alignment of the stars), but they were all influential.

Sometimes these proto-Otherkin came with factual claims about their existence, which usually did not hold up under the harsh light of empiricism.  However, some felt that they were such things on some sort of mental level, or to have spiritual experiences revealing past incarnations as such beings.  Usually they alloyed their beliefs with some kind of neopaganism, and explored spiritual traditions of therianthropy, sometimes derived from spiritual experiences asserted to be memory, sometimes drawing on existing or historical human cultures, and sometimes just made up on the spot.

In this sense, Otherkin can be understood as a sort of quasi-religious tradition, usually supplementary to any other belief or social system, but present nonetheless.  It is reasonably well documented that believers in a religious tradition can experience subjective phenomena that frequently accord with their beliefs, like visitations from angels or particular gods or so on.  The beliefs seem to shape the mind, priming it to experience those things, but that doesn’t make that mind nor those experiences suddenly invalid or worth disrespect.  Otherkin beliefs can provide the same sort of mental support structure that many people turn to religion for, but in an unfamiliar shape.

The Otherkin phenomenon grew alongside and was influenced and was influenced by the emerging Furry subculture.  This is probably influential on part of why, until the emergence of Fictionkin sometime around 2010, Otherkin as a term was identified strongly with animal kintypes.  Many Otherkin identified also as Furries up early on.  While the subcultures seem to have diverged as Furry became more associated with fetish and roleplay, and Otherkin with their belief system, there remain many individuals who are both to some degree.  I’ve certainly encountered them.

While Furry is nowadays portrayed as just a fetish, it is a bit more than that, having originated as a sort of pan-animal-characters fandom (that, like most fandoms, then turned into lots and lots of fetishry).  Many Furries empathize strongly with one or more animals, and consider them objects of admiration.  It’s not weird at all to want to be strong, powerful, subtle, or to otherwise have any of the other cool traits that other species were assigned by Epimethean Nature, that humans are notable lacking in, save the Promethean gift of knowledge.  Some Furries even consider other animals morally superior to humanity, or desire a simpler existence uncomplicated by the hassles of 21st century human life.  These tend to blur into the edges of Otherkin when they start thinking of themselves in the terms of an animal.

I would be remiss if I did not mention Stalking Cat, The Lizardman, Katzen the Tiger Lady, and Tom Leppard.  As these are all relatively mature people, around their 40s and older, the likelihood of them identifying with Otherkin, a 20 year old community that was still forming when they were getting their first tattoos done, is vanishingly slim.  But these people are still interesting because of the close comparison.  Some of them definitely do it as a circus act and thus hobby/career, such as The Lizardman.  Others had more spiritual reasons, such as Stalking Cat.  Some just really like leopards, like Tom Leppard.  However, whatever the reason, they are the logical conclusion, in some respects, of the Otherkin philosophy -- people who get themselves heavily tattooed and surgically modified (in the future, genetically modified?) to resemble what they feel like inside.  They are also organic, living demonstrations of how the world does not end if you have people running around saying they feel like or want to be animals (or whatever) and covering their body with stripes or spots or scales.  They get lots of looks, and are often pushed to the margins, but some of them have functional, ordinary jobs and exist within society just fine.

So I’ve covered all the sources for Otherkin ideas.  What’s the actual result? Like most communities, there’s a lot of variance.  There are true believers, those who consider the idea mostly fictional but think it is valuable, and those who don’t care, they just are there for social reasons and pay lip service to the ideas.  It is a strongly empathetic community built around accepting “weird” thoughts and impulses as legitimate, sharing grievances about our society being a pain to deal with, et cetera.  Some of its members promote vegetarianism, animal rights, or environmentalism because of their beliefs.

Largely, Otherkin are aware that they are not physically so-and-so animal or supernatural being, that there is some physical gap.  While it can be argued that Cartesian duality results in some irrational thoughts, most Otherkin people seem to manage with their human life just fine.  Psychology is largely concerned with thoughts and belief that are distressing or harmful to the bearer or others, not odd quirks of personal belief.  Yes, some do in fact grow out of it -- a notable example is Lupa, who wrote “A Field Guide to Otherkin” (now out of print), who decided being Otherkin was not very useful for self-description anymore and that they “merely” identified with the wolf as part of their personal narrative.  But for many it seems to be a healthy and helpful idea for these people.

Finally, a desire for transformation is common but not universal, as a sort of Otherkin “end game.”  A rare few do wish for a sort of self-annihilation -- an ego-death as a human being and the beginning of an animal life.  But, most that I’ve spoken to want to become something better than either a human or any other animal -- a being with a mostly human mind, but a superior physical body, and perhaps less of the dishonesty and suffering of our current human lives.

Some trans people find Otherkin a nuisance, believing that they are politically unhealthy for some reason.  However, I think the people who are all that interested in conflating the two are mostly oppositional bigots, who also will whisper that trans people are infiltrators on behalf of the patriarchy, scions of Satan, delusional freaks, and so on.  It is also true that trans people face a lot of kinds of bigotry -- with real, fatal consequences -- that Otherkin don’t.  However, Otherkin still get a lot of harassment online, and it is worth considering that very few of them can in fact transform themselves to their preferences, due to technological reasons.  While Otherkin may have reasons that are fundamentally different than transgender people, anyone who does take the plunge and deviates from the societal norm will likely be treated with similar hostility.  Even expressing their feelings, thoughts, and desires -- largely harmless, again -- has already won them quite a lot of pointless bullying and antagonism. So, in the end, I do stand by them, as my pet peeves mean nothing next to standing by people who need my support and will need even more in the future.  No one deserves to be harassed.

So, I finish with some questions.  As another harmless belief amongst many, isn’t it largely unnecessary for people to stamp out the belief in Otherkin?  As technology for the kinds of transformations that Otherkin desire becomes better and more readily available... why not let these people take the next step if they really sincerely want it?  And in the end, as fellow people -- why not leave them be?

[2centjubilee]

Moral Akrasia?

There is a certain failure mode I have noticed in my own morality.  Essentially, I do not believe X should be subjected to harm or ridicule, but I do not find it in myself to argue for this, even when I have the energy to do so or the effort cost is very low, likely due to tribalist concerns or simple indifference.  Part of the reason I became attracted to the rationalist community was because I noticed that some people within it did not appear to visibly experience this failure mode -- that they had in fact cultivated a broader circle of concern and the impetus to act on it.  So I figured I would sit myself down and observe them.

It seems to have worked a little on myself.  I’m not sure if the real inspiration was the words and reasoning produced, or just observing them and holding them up in my mind as exemplars, if not of my own morality then of consistency in the ethical field.  Either way, it inspired me to sit down and review my history with closer inspection.  I noticed my actual actions were out of line with my proclaimed morality, and indeed with who I tend to show favor to, and that I would prefer bringing them up to date, as I value my own compassion. (813 words, rambly)

It did help that the ethical stances of those I started paying attention to were those who already bridged those gaps.  The classical example of this -- this moral inaction, in spite of having every available resource -- in my history, has been failing to argue we should show mercy or at least not take joy in the fate of those who have been judged inappropriate by people doxxing others for “social justice.”  I feel now, very acutely, how low cost that action would have been, when it was in a relatively small discussion group with relatively little risk of backlash and a high likelihood of maybe persuading people to be less awful to each other.  But I am not inclined to be too harsh with myself because it wasn’t exactly like any of the people were active participants.  It also is rather telling that I was able to argue for dropping a similar subject, even when the cost was higher.  Perhaps I felt the stakes were higher, and thus it was of more concern?

I am pretty sure that I still will experience this “moral akrasia” to a degree.  I noticed that sort of inclination towards inaction in a recent conversation.  I played off my indifference towards the person’s social fate as a joke, but I was quite serious.  I don’t feel I ought to harshly judge every such failing to step forward -- there will inevitably be a lot of them, as I must prioritize some things over the others.  But I will try to check myself and ask now if it is really just time, energy, and priorities holding me back, and not some sort of irrational tribalism.

On the other hand, the person in question who I failed to defend this time, is exactly the sort of person who relentlessly trolls social media, uses brigading as a tactic, and espouses openly misogynistic views.  I am not sure they shouldn’t be tarred and feathered, either, which is part of my indifference.  It is rather a shame that their actual misdeeds get so much less coverage than things of much less certainty and importance.

Of course, I used a variant of this argument last time with myself, and it worked marvelously at rationalizing away my inaction.  Should I accept it this time, when now I deem that previous decision inappropriate?  Should the response to those who perpetrate call out culture be that they should finally be dashed upon the very same rocks?  Or should I find some sort of higher moral stance?

No, I know this detour is irrelevant.  I almost accepted this rationalization, but I can tell now I’m trying to distract myself.  Their actual virtue is not relevant to what they stand accused of, which is not of certain accuracy.  I ought not accept someone being punished for a crime they did not commit, even if they certainly have committed other crimes, because that way lies madness.  Of course, I am not certain of the truest story, so I am not sure I could usefully participate anyways, but identifying a real barrier (“lack of truth”) is what I want to do, rather than a merely psychological one (“they’re a jerk”).

Bleh.  I expect my time and energy will still be better used elsewhere than advocating for or against random jerks on the internet, especially ones who have plenty of advocates both for or against already.  But I will definitely think more closely about what sort of opportunities circumstance offers me, and continue questioning my own ethics.

[2centjubilee]

Two Kinds of Bigotry

So there has been something I've noticing for a while and a recent conversation on this fine microblogging platform prompted me to start writing about it.  There seems to be a lot of disagreement on what racism is, and what sexism is, and what ableism is, and so on and so forth for every single kind of bigotry you could possibly describe.  Part of this is guided by people wanting to define themselves as good and their opposition as bad, but there is more to it.  There seems to be a fundamental disconnect in some conversations of how bigotry is experienced, including amongst those who have to endure it.  This disconnect seems to divide experiences of bigotry into two broad classes.

The first definition I am going to talk about deserves some explanation.  It is the bigotry that is arrived at by the formula of "prejudice plus power equals bigotry."  Usually, racism or sexism is highlighted.  This snappy definition, like all snappy definitions, oversimplifies a bit.  The point that was arrived at (in academia, mostly) is that in the institutions of society, the mechanisms of power can transform an existing prejudice into an ongoing societal bias.  This will keep grinding away at the oppressed long after the initial architects of this structure have gone, because it is self-renewing and coopts people into maintaining its power structure, often without them being overtly conscious of it.  And this is what transforms "mere" prejudice into a serious problem.  We can call this institutional bigotry.

This academic understanding of institutional bigotry and how it works in our world can be rather confounding to negotiate, and there's a lot of discussion of whether it even happens.  For various reasons, including having experienced some of it based on gender-related issues, I'm inclined to say "yes."  There are also people who wish to insist this covers all forms of racism, sexism, and so on, and that any other developments in hatred are only outgrowths of this.  I disagree.

The second definition of bigotry is the one we are much more familiar with.  It is when individuals act on prejudice, and the ideas that maintain prejudice.  It is the hand that steers violence against women, and the voice that mocks black people for talking different.  It is very real and terrifying, and we notice it much more easily.  While it can also be enacted by groups, the chief characteristic is that it can remain a problem even if only one person is around to act on it, so we can call this individual bigotry.

Much activism has focused on minimizing the harm of individual bigotry, because it is easily noticeable and understanding why it is wrong is easily digestible.  So individual bigotry, while it can be devastating, has been slowly edged out of society where these efforts are successful.  This has gradually improved the well-being of those who suffer from it.

This results in some confusion.  With two definitions afoot, people start talking about one, and other people respond assuming they mean the second.  As we can see, the definitions are pretty different.  But delineating these two forms of bigotry from each other is useful because while they obviously benefit from and support each other in our real world, institutional bigotry can make itself manifest in people who would otherwise oppose individual bigotry, and likewise individual bigotry can survive without power structures.

For example, institutitional bigotry usually preys on ignorance and internal blind spots, often resulting in problems that are subtle, even if they have big effects, like people with black-sounding names getting less callbacks.  Meanwhile, if you put a white man with overt racist prejudices against black people in another country, he'll... probably still be racist, regardless of whether white people are on top of the food chain there or not.  History suggests he will try to colonize the area by pitting the locals against each other.

Nowadays we see individual bigotry becoming more and more unpopular in society, even amongst those who nominally espouse it, such as the KKK insisting they're "not racist."  I have my doubts as to their sincerity, as one might expect, but it is a sign of the times.  But as one problem diminishes, the other grows in relative size.  Consequently, opposing the bigotry that has been built into and hidden inside institutions has become more valuable as a pursuit.  We can naturally expect institutions to become the primary focus of most anti-racist and anti-sexist activism, and right now that shift in focus is ongoing.  This is also part of the motivation to redefine racism, sexism, and so on, but that doesn’t mean patterns of behavior changed.

The evidence suggests strongly that both forms of bigotry exist, and though they are intertwined, they are distinct enough to be considered separately.  Because one form of bigotry uses humans as, essentially, unwitting pawns, while the other is purposeful and malicious, it is useful to disambiguate wherever possible.  Neither is a desirable state of affairs, but distinguishing helps when you are laying a much different charge at the feet of the accused.  It also might prevent people from rehashing the same arguments over and over again.  Either way, the only way we will win this is through understanding, and this is one small step people can take towards that.

[2centjubilee]

Who Cares About Your Soul?

Let us say there is a quality that makes you “you.”  It is what distinguishes you from me.  Evidence is starting to suggest that the difference is mostly one of bandwidth, but that is irrelevant.  It is reasonably obvious from human aesthetics and philosophy that we do not experience qualia in the exact same way as each other, and so we do not “stand in the same place.”  So, you are you and I am me and never the twain shall meet unless we do some complicated neuroscience.  This division creates something we might call continuity of experience, and most notably, separate ones.

Now, a common objection against uploading and similar possible technologies is that your continuity of experience is not transferred...

Your information, whether the recording is destructive or not, “wakes up” on this new substrate.  This new being might be you in every way, we might copy you down to the last molecule, but then those two look at each other, and because there is only weak, noisy bandwidth between their brains (eyes, ears, etc.), they have different continuities.  So this continuity is something that is not your brain’s connectome -- not simply your information -- that makes you into “you.”  Given prior history on this conversation, we might call this a “soul,” for it is something that makes up your personal identity that is not identical to your brain.

This objection suggests uploading needs to be a more complicated process if we want to preserve our continuity of experience -- our “soul” -- through the transfer.  There’s lots of arguments about how this can be done and whether that matters and so on and so forth, but suffice to say it is a major stumbling block in transhumanism.

Here’s my problem:

If my lover dies, and I want them back, I don’t care if it’s them or a copy of them.  The person will be the same in all respects save one I will not experience.  I will grieve that their “soul” has been lost, and I will feel empathy for the departed, but if you give me the option to perfectly copy them, if you give me back all the moments of joy and happiness I was hoping to have with them, I will smash the button, unless their last will directs me otherwise.  Likewise, the world can benefit from certain individuals being preserved and recreated in this way, even if their “soul” has gone.  Because we know we are in a physical universe made of physical things, if this copy is indeed flawless, then aside from the resources spent, the difference between bringing them back and them continuing to live is one we cannot taste, as it were.  If we decide that, say, Stephen Hawking has not finished his life’s work yet, a work we consider important, and we have a copy of his connectome, we might well decide to restore him from backup in the event of his tragic demise.

For you, your death under this scheme would be a loss, absolutely.  I do not wish for anyone to die.  But for everyone else, restoring you -- even if it is “just” a copy of you -- is a gain.  A gain of a person they were happy to see, who they miss in absence, who they want to love and laugh with.  A person who others might reckon was more important than they thought themselves.

So...

What does your soul matter, anyways?

I don’t want anyone to die, but... I don’t want anyone to be alone, either.