Budgeting for Mezzotopia

It's been a damn long time since I was up to blogging; having finally been moved to return to a project I thought might have been abandoned forever, yet another casualty of my ever-shifting life circumstances, I'd like to begin by coining a new word.  We've all heard of Utopia; the inventor of the term took it from the Greek for "nowhere", believing that a perfect society was impossible and that any which claimed to be so was inevitably a lie.  What he proposed to demonstrate this thesis was something more nearly akin to what we have since come to refer to as "dystopia" - a word that would never exist if we were not trying to contrast it with the first.  And I propose to continue this trend by coining a term for an intermediate sort of constructed civilization - neither perfect nor horrific, but simply engineered to be functional, depending for that functionality upon a firm conceptual framework.  This contrasts it with the organically-evolved society we live in, where everybody has their own idea how to run things, and all of them struggle to put their ideas into effect over the objections of those who disagree, resulting in an awkward compromise that satisfies nobody, and generally just looks incredibly sloppy and inefficient.  This, then, is what a mezzotopia contrasts with - by the definition which I am constructing for it, the term necessitates that it have a single ironclad and airtight theory informing its choices, whose purpose is something a little more noble than just granting more wealth and power to the people in charge, but which is firmly enough founded in the undesirable realities of actual life that it avoids the kinds of naive missteps that seem to inevitably ruin all utopias.

Anyway, that was just a notion I wanted to jot down while I was thinking of it; my point in blogging today is something else.  If I was constructed as a roleplaying game character, I would doubtlessly have a severely crippling disadvantage entitled "Caustic personality", given that my blunt and brash style of interpersonal communication seems to piss everyone off.  And one of my many infuriating-to-almost-everyone habits is constantly evaluating the quality of things, believing as I do that nothing matters other than the objective facts, and that everything ought to have its price fixed according to exactly what it is actually, unarguably worth.  My mother has learned to both dread and rely upon this characteristic of mine - when she cooks up some new culinary experiment, she knows she can count on me to offer an unflinchingly unbiased assessment of how well it did (or didn't) turn out, but sometimes she evidently gets tired of me critiquing her food even when she was only cooking to provide for her family, doing the best she felt up to and not really wanting detailed, let alone rude, feedback about every little detail.

That TMI about my domestic situation aside, the point I'm getting at is that I've been trying to asses goddamn everything I experience in life, in much the same manner that Gordon Ramsay assesses the talent of the cooks he employs.  And I've recently come up with a more formal idea about how I could codify these analyses of mine, which I think is more useful than a straight-up "star system" of rankings.  Having somewhat the heart of an economist at times, I believe that quality cannot be evaluated in a vacuum; nobody seriously expects a Burger King hamburger to taste as good as a beef patty cooked at a $50-a-plate restaurant (although whether any burger, no matter how delicious, can possibly deserve a price tag like that is another argument, and one where my opinion currently stands at a very firm and unsympathetic "no").  But you can compare Burger King to McDonalds to Wendys to Hardees to Sonic, and decide which of these loosely analogous burger joints is best in its price bracket - and now, I have a notion of how to get a little more precise than even that.

Here's the concept:  start by assuming that your lifestyle is in a static-state, where your rent and food and so forth are all paid for, and then give yourself a budget for those luxuries your regard as necessary, in order to be living and not just surviving.  The exact amount is for you to decide, because we're thinking in terms of percentages; whether you can spare $10 a pay period or $10M a year, either way you can comparison-shop to avoid getting ripped off (although again, I'm inclined to think persons in the latter category deserve a little soaking, in order to fund the lifestyles of several dozen other people apiece).  Once you've determined the amount you're going to use as your hypothetical "budget" (it could in theory become an actual one, but for now this is just a thought experiment to use when deciding how much you like stuff), you then have to decide, for every item you might like to purchase, how much you'd be willing to pay for that thing.  The result helps you decide how much things are actually worth to you, and when you see an item with a price tag that's close to your current budget's version of that value, you can buy it with a fair degree of confidence that you've made a wise investment.

By way of example, let's look at movies.  With an already-immense collection of owned DVDs, including such stinkers as "The Covenant" that would have been overpriced if I'd been given a dollar to own them, and movies that are halfway decent but nowhere near the $20 I paid for their purchase back when I was richer and more foolish, I have now had to take an extremely critical eye toward the possibility of ever buying a movie again, no matter how good or how cheap.  This system could help me make such decisions.  We will consider three of the recent movies which I most wish to see, and have some confidence I might possibly wish to own:  Luc Besson's "Lucy", Marvel's "The Avengers", and the obscure Hugh Jackman vehicle "The Fountain".  Not having seen any of them outside of trailers (and, in the case of "Avengers", an Inter-netfull of plot synopses and spoilers aplenty), I feel fairly certain that I would consider Lucy entertainingly mindless fun despite its absurd premise, enjoying it special effects much as I did those of "Green Lantern" and "Sucker Punch" despite those movies having similarly flawed intellectual profiles.  "The Avengers" is rumored to be a good movie, but it somewhat fails to speak to me; I'd be sure to enjoy it on some levels, but it doesn't thrill my inner fanboy as much as most superhero movies do, since I've never cared for most of these characters (the only core Avenger I especially like is Hulk, and I prefer to see him standing alone so that the story can focus entirely on his themes), and find it hard to believe that a movie featuring all of them can overcome that barrier as well as "Iron Man" and "Thor" did in their excellent solo films.  I find it a pet peeve that Loki played the villain role in "Avengers" despite having just been in "Thor", and the knowledge that Thanos might be lurking behind a curtain somewhere doesn't up the ante for me, since I consider him a deeply uninteresting villain.  So no matter how much faith I have in Joss Wheedon, "Avengers" is a movie that I plan on seeing in spite of my fanboy opinion, not because of it; the Ultron movie would probably appeal to me more, but is still sufficiently limited in interest that I can easily hold other priorities higher.  Finally, "The Fountain" is an artsy auteur work of the kind that impresses critics but not mass-market audiences, and it's entirely possible that I'll fidget in boredom as I sit through it the first time, then find myself reluctant to see it again thereafter (given that the money you spend buying some physical object, such as a DVD, never comes back -- a fact that I was far too slow to fully internalize -- I now evaluate every durable-goods purchase in terms of whether I expect literally decades of reliable value to return from it).  But in spite of that, its status as a highly philosophical "idea movie", whose premise I can never fully understand other than by experiencing the work in its entirety (summarizing a worldview-changing experience of a film, such as "The Matrix" or "Cloud Atlas", is one thing; actually immersing yourself in it and letting it subtly changing your life is something else entirely, and I feel confident that "Fountain" is another member of this category), renders it functionally irresistable to me.  Though I still have concerns as to whether it's worth buying, or else I'd probably already have bought it, this film overcomes my reluctance much more than "The Avengers" does, and thus I would happily choose it over the other, if they were both on sale for the same price and I could afford precisely one of them.

The question, then, becomes what happens if the movie I want more costs more; situations like this are the entire reason why I have not entirely passed judgment on capitalism, since it is sometimes possible for a modest price to add value sufficient that a less appealing product gains worthiness.  (It is also possible, and probably a good bit more common, for an artificially-lowered price to convince you to buy something which isn't worth even that much, and I've fallen into that trap often enough to be extremely skeptical of any such situation, but not to entirely swing the pendulum in the other direction either.)  That is the purpose of this "budgeting analysis" exercise - to calculate the exact price point, relative to my own resources, at which a better product is worth paying extra for, versus simply costing too much in excess of the competitor for its superior quality to be the most relevant factor anymore.  Thus, I will examine three possible budgets, and place these three movies at the price point which I believe would make them optimally purchaseable for me.  The result in and of itself will only ever be useful to me, but I hope that perhaps some future reader may find the process worthy of the time s/he has spent reading it, and is moved to analyze their own resources and acquisition-wishes in a similar fashion.

* Budget 1:  My own real-life situation at the moment, with no permanent job and only the faintest trickle of incoming funds, barely capable of keeping me supplied with what I regard as adequate quantities and qualities of food.  I have made precisely two payments toward my family's rent and bills in the last three months, a couple more at most during a month-long contract in May and June, none in the preceding spring or winter, and not many of them last year when I worked for the entire summer and not otherwise.  Given all this, $1 per month is an extremely generous purchasing limit for things like DVDs, which I absolutely do not need, but continue to want.  So if I take that as my allotment, then buying a movie for $10 would represent almost an entire year's investment, and I'm not even mentally capable of processing such a long span of time as a unit, so purchases that costly are absolutely impossible.  Even $5 is an insane amount to pay, and only the items I want most severely could command an investment like that.
So on this budget, I would buy "The Fountain" for $5, and probably be unable to bring myself to regret the loss of such serious funds (assuming the movie turns out as well as I expect it to; there is of course always the possibility that, like "The Covenant" and "Ultraviolet", it will turn out to be an absolute stink-bomb whose carefully cut trailer disguised its awfulness completely).  But I would be reluctant to pay as much as $2 for "The Avengers", despite having more confidence that I'd consider the investment worthwhile.  And "Lucy" is so far from winning my confidence that, even if I found it on sale for just 50 cents, I probably wouldn't buy it at all; my aversion to even the slightest nonessential purchase is just too great when I have this few total dollars to work with, and little ability to look forward to acquiring any more.

* Budget 2:  Assuming I got a job that was as good as I can reasonably expect to have at this stage in my life - full-time work at $15/hr, perhaps with occasional overtime, and easy enough work that I can stomach the thought of putting in that many hours each week, to say nothing of desiring and being able to stay indefinitely...well, even that fantasy only begins to address the problems I'm currently having.  I have a lot of back rent to make up, and earning in the neighborhood of $2000 a month will only stop the bleeding, not heal the scars of my long-term financial hardship.  So even in this situation, my monthly budget for entertainment purchases is not likely to top $20.  By that standard, I still could not buy "Lucy" for $5, but for $2.50 I very likely might, though that price must cover both the value of satisfying my curiosity as to the film's contents once, as well as owning the film and being free to watch it again as many times as I please, for the rest of my life.  Thusly, to rent the movie from a video store (if such things still existed), I could justify paying no more than $1.25 or so, as I'm gaining only the first half of the purchase equation (the burden of owning the film and not being willing to throw it away, while it factors into matters, has only a fractional effect, and thus I do not alter the ratio between the view-once and own-forever prices beyond 1:2).  By way of comparison, however, "The Fountain" is of such intense interest to me, and creates such confidence that it would be worth owning long-term, that I would willingly rent it for $5 or even $10, in order to determine whether it's paying a similar amount again (out of the next month's allotment) to make it mine permanently.  In between those extremes, Avengers would be a movie that I would be willing to treat the way I used to treat all movies - buying it if the price is right, passing on it otherwise, and possibly not watching it until years after I scooped it out of a bargain-bin to ensure that the price did not go up again in future (a strategy that I've learned can backfire horridly, as I'm pretty sure I paid more for all three Dark Knight movies than the $5 they all now wear as a price-tag on Target shelves).  It is to my substantial sorrow that it took me so much time and hardship before I could break that habit, but even today I can conceive of the possibility that it is sometimes worth snapping up temporary-sale items that I might reasonably expect to want later...just that I need to do it far, far less readily than I previously did.

* Budget 3:  There's no point in imagining myself a multi-billionaire in this exercise; at that point I would no longer need to have any budgetary concerns at all, and would start needing to put my money where my mouth is about the responsibility that a plutocrat has toward the economy, how he should be compelled to spend as lavishly as he possibly can without bankrupting himself entirely, in order to provide entire local industries with the fiscal support they require to survive.  So, for the top-tier version of this, I'm imagining myself making $40,000 a year; how exactly that could possibly happen I cannot imagine, given my checkered employment history and lack of a college degree, to say nothing of that degree not being "prestigious" enough to impress fickle corporate networkers that hang their reputation upon every single action of one of their subordinates, politicking fiercely in the high-pressure world of multinational conglomerates, and entirely willing to ruin a person's life because they spoke a single ill-chosen word in front of the wrong witness.  (But as usual, I'm ranting and getting off the subject.)  With that extraordinary excess of wealth to work with, I'd be personally responsible for ensuring that my family never misses a payment on our mortgage or utility bills; I could pay twice as much rent as I used to do, thus rapidly making headway upon the debt I've accumulated over three years of unemployment, and I'd still have about $400 a week of money for myself, an embarassment of riches which I could never consume solely through lavish dining and regular purchases of the useful staples I've been living without for far too long.  In this circumstance, despite not having quite doubled my income compared to Budget 2, I can more than double my "mad money" - $50 a month is still quite conservative in contrast to the lifestyle I used to live, when I first started making good money and couldn't believe I'd ever have to stop again...but from where I now sit, in the ruins of those past financial mistakes, it's extraordinarily lavish.
On that end of the scale, paying $5 just to SEE "Lucy" once, before committing to buy it, is entirely acceptable, and I would pretty definitely be willing to sign up for a Netflix or Redbox membership, in order to conveniently obtain access to the film without being burdened by ownership of a physical copy.  (My spell-checker recognizes the first of those two brand names as a real word, and not the second; the latter company's marketing department isn't working hard enough, I guess.)  Conversely, though, I'd buy "The Fountain" sight-unseen for $20 or more, absolutely confident that the director of such a highly-acclaimed work deserves an "upvote" on the global-capitalism version of Facebook that we call "the economy".  (I'd of course only be a drop in the bucket, and not actually have an individually meaningful effect on the tastemakers and dealbrokers of Hollywood - only millionaires can do that, but I'd still make my contribution, just as I still vote in elections, despite knowing that my fraction-of-a-fraction-of-a-percent-of-a-percent effect on the outcome is essentially meaningless.  Why do I "know" that?  I wish I knew.)  Now, at this level of indulgent permissiveness, things are no longer about a single continuum; "Avengers" isn't just a midpoint anymore, but is now the apex of a triangle which leans off into an entire other dimension of evaluation.  So the rules are completely different here, and I'm honestly not sure what I would do.  Maybe I'd buy a copy of "Avengers" sight-unseen, though probably not for full price; maybe I'd pay an exorbitant price just to stream it.  Maybe I'd even do one or both of those things, and then go even further, buying a Blue-Ray player and a features-loaded Special Edition of the movie, despite it being objectively worse than the Fountain (if this indeed proves to be the case), just because it has more extra stuff around and beyond it which can be delved into.  You have those kinds of extra options when your cash flow is this robust, compared to what you're used to.

And that, ultimately, is the entire point I'm getting at with this pretentious exercise in slightly-less-white-privilege-than-the-even-whiter-people-get.  If you're reading this and you're some single mother of three kids who's struggling to make ends meet, you probably consider me the worst of subhuman slime by now, for having spent this much time thinking about how to squander money that you need to get a week's worth of diapers for a baby that's just getting over a bout of colic or whatever.  (But then, you probably don't have time to sit around reading blogs on the Internet, do you?  And if you have eight kids instead, my sympathy for you is entirely gone, but that's a different rant.)  However, I can only speak from the position that I'm at currently; my misery may be minor compared to that of other people, but it is still misery by my own standards, and no amount of fairy magic could exchange this negligible unhappiness for the humble joys experienced by other strata of society, who condemn the upper crust for ruining their lives, yet manage to go about with a smile on their lips and speak honestly about how blessed they feel.  I cannot tell those people how to live; I can only speak to others that are in something vaguely analogous to my own situation.  And in that reality, I am prone to expounding about how to analyze the quality of your entertainment media, to make sure that you aren't paying more than it's worth.  I could go on at even greater length, talking about a lot of other movies I wanted to mention; I could do another analysis on films I have seen but do not own, determining whether to buy them and for how much, since it's a very different question of quality when you know the product and have confidence in it...and then I could do yet another on the movies I already known (whose prices I do not recollect, sadly), to decide whether I should have bought them and what would have been a fair price, based on my current understanding of their contents.  But this entry is way too long already, so I'm going to put off any further work on this notion for another post.  For now, just take this single, nine-point chart (with a question mark in one of the entries) as demonstrating how the system is to be applied, and then decide whether it's worth attempting such application yourself.

What Purpose Happiness

Most people seem to more or less live their life under the assumption that their purpose is to be happy; they might define their own happiness in various ways, but they almost invariably seek it.  We're stuck being alive, whether we like it or not, and so it seems logical for us to think that we ought to try and make our life enjoyable.  But is that really wise?  Is it not conceivable that happiness is merely an opiate, that it prevents us from confronting the harsh reality of our situation, numbs us to the need to make vital changes in our surroundings?

But, then again, what if unhappiness is a sort of mental disease, trying to replicate itself through the promulgation of exactly such theories as this?

On Free Speech and the Pointlessness of Coercion

In most countries, making threats is a crime.  But why?  Say for instance that I tell my friend Gus (I have no actual friends by this name, so this is safely hypothetical), "I'm going to kill you, Gus."  Why should this be a crime?  If I do not have both the intention and the ability to kill Gus, then the threat is nothing but empty words, and completely pointless - whereas, if I do have both of those things, my ability to succeed in killing Gus is only diminished by my providing him with advance warning.  The logic behind these laws seems to be that Gus deserves not to have to live his life in fear of the possibility that I might kill him...but why should he give any credence to my threat if I make it?  The odds that I'd mention killing him but not actually plan on doing it are certainly not any better than the odds that I'd plan on killing him but not mention it.  If he is credulous enough to believe my bald-faced statement is factual, then should he not be more concerned about all the people who might harbor secret grudges that they've never verbalized?  If I were Gus, I'd be more inclined to worry (to the point of paranoia if need be) about lurking assassins under the cover of false friendliness, than to take seriously a probably-joking statement from someone I know, or a completely out-of-the-blue threat from a stranger.

Coercion of any sort is ultimately pointless, since human beings have the ability to lie and they always will have that ability.  If I say "Gus, if you don't get out of my house, I'm going to kill you", and Gus gets out of my house, I am still perfectly capable of killing him despite him submitting to my coerced demand.  Anyone who can act on a threat can do so regardless of your actions, which is why if anyone ever offers me the choice of "your wallet or your life", I will leave the decision up to them as to whether they actually want my wallet badly enough to search my corpse for it, because I'm not about to advertise its location and then risk them deciding to kill me anyway.  All of this works just as well for bribes as for threats; if someone does as you ask, you can still easily refuse to pay them the agreed-upon sum (particularly if you are willing and able to kill them).  Thusly, either positive or negative coercion is entirely pointless, and statements suggesting it can be freely ignored.

Ultimately, the sooner all of humanity wraps its collective brain around the idea that talk is cheap, that words are not reality, that in short we are a species of filthy stinking liars and always will be, the less energy we'll waste on thoroughly pointless activities such as policing people's speech.

Melting the Iron Law

Science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle once concocted a bit of wisdom which I've come to endorse quite heavily, which he called the Iron Law of Bureaucracy.  Loosely paraphrased, this dictates that "any organization, regardless of its original purpose, will inevitably be taken over by individuals who care nothing for that purpose, but only for the perpetuation of the organization itself".  So, if you start a charity called The Feed-The-Hungry-Babies Foundation or something, then no matter how much you care about feeding the hungry babies, the people that you hire to fulfill the Foundation's organizational needs (lawyers, accountants, PR specialists, and above all the people who solicit donations on your behalf, who are essentially salesmen, only the product is "feeling good about yourself because you helped this great charity fulfill its mission"), while they might care about the baby-feeding somewhat, care more about keeping their jobs.  Thusly, they will work to turn the Foundation into a more self-sustaining corporate monolith, and their work will result in the Foundation growing and bloating into a more and more bureaucratic, inefficient institution, whose baby-feeding activities are now distinctly secondary compared to the things it does simply to keep itself alive.  All the employees of this giant social machine are now collaboratively working to ensure that they keep their nice stable careers, and very few hungry babies are actually getting fed.  The babies are no longer the point, The FTHB Foundation Incorporated, LLC is the point, and it will only be a matter of time before it ends up buying some Monsanto subsidiary to expand its profit margins, and the new Strategic Vision Manager will "reclassify" the original baby-feeding department as being contrary to their new food-industry platform, which is projected to produce more sustainable earnings over the next six quarters, so fuck those babies really, we all have 410Ks and vacation plans to think about, and that's obviously what's really important.  That's what corporations do, that's their entire nature and purpose - they convince those within the Company stockade to disregard the welfare of anything that isn't part of the Company.  And thus, the Iron Law rules with an iron fist over the behavior of all such organizations; even if they're founded as charities or the like, they still have all the trappings of a corporate entity, and people who have worked for Berkshire Hathaway or Sam's Club Incorporated or the like will end up working for them too, any time they think it better suits their own selfish interests to insinuate themselves into that company instead.

I for one intend to see a day arrive when the Iron Law is provably false.  I'm very interested in figuring out what that would take.  Is it possible to incorporate a charitable trust or the like, and put bylaws into place which no amount of human selfishness and greed is capable of changing?  I don't know if there's any way to do this - what one person builds, another can pretty much always unbuild - but if some way of at least getting close could be found, then I'd like to see an institution founded under a charter which mandates its own dissolution, the exact moment that Job #1 is so much as rivaled in importance by the self-interest of its own workers.  Indeed, I'd go further - while every organization needs to grow and recruit new people in order to remain vital, this one would actively seek to avoid incentivizing anyone to join it, because it would not be interested in having anyone working for it who is even the slightest bit selfish.  If you need to be bribed into taking a job, then that job is not the right job for you; my hypothetical foundation would not want employees who desperately cling to their positions, but ones who are confident that they will land on their feet if and when I shutter the company's doors, rather than sacrifice one inch of its raison d'etre upon the altar of someone's personal avarice.

As one of those desperate, unconfident employees myself, I'm definitely guilty of perpetuating the Iron Law, which is one of the reasons I'm not really pursuing work in the nonprofit sector - I would be too likely to become the kind of parasite I despise.  I prefer to work in the corporate world, even though I hate corporations, because there I at least feel that I have a right to vampirically drain my salary out of their financial lifeblood, while contributing as little as I can get away with in exchange; such economies are the entire reason capitalism exists, the CEO is doing it too, so he can hardly fault me for it.  (Well, he can, but it won't sting me to realize it's true, as it would if I were working for a charity and realized that I cared more for my job than for its cause.)  Nevertheless, as an idealistic and deeply hypocritical zealot for the principles of justice and honesty, I continue to crusade in search of a purpose which can defy the Iron Law's bars, and remain pure enough in its devotion to deserve my allegiance.  Such an agency would never seduce people into its service with false promises of prosperity; it would tell them right to their face that the work is low-paying, frustrating, and capable of disappearing at a moment's notice.  And I, at least in theory, would gladly sign on regardless, because I would be one of the tiny handful of people who want to work there, in particular, not just for the sake of a paycheck, but so that I can feel good about what I'm doing with my life.

This is a Test of the Emergent BS

We as a society decided quite some time ago that we were uncomfortable with notions like socio-economic classes, hereditary castes, feudal arrangements, and other systems for separating people into non-equal categories.  America was founded in the name of equality, with a system of government known as democracy, and since the beginning, phrases like "all men are created equal" have continued to be our touchstone, despite the inherently misogynistic and theocentric qualities they contain, now that we're gradually coming on board with the idea that women are actually people, and that all non-Christians might not in fact be infidels born into damnation (which is so horrific that killing them, in order to save their souls, is the socially responsible thing to do).  We want to believe all people come into the world with a fair shake, that nobody is inherently better than anyone else, and that we are not only equal in value, but also possess a positive quantity of value, rather than just all being equally worthless.

Here's the problem.  Believing all of these things, we do a piss-poor job of actually making them true.  Instead, we simply find ways to make ourselves think they're true, and then blithely turn out backs on that reality, humming a happy tone loudly enough to drown out the screams of the people we've convinced ourselves aren't actually being murdered.

We want people to be equal, so what's our solution?  Capitalism - the most thoroughly un-egalitarian social system short of outright fascist dictatorship.  Mind you, it's ostensible opposite, communism, is the second-worst system at ensuring equality; placing any sort of Party in charge of ensuring the fair distribution of resources to the ostensibly-equal masses clearly doesn't result in Party members getting an equal share, at least not more than occasionally.  But even that's better than having everyone start out with an equal chance at poverty, and allowing a handful of people to earn wealth and comfort and power and prestige, all while a number of other people just as talented and deserving fail, largely due to all manner of random factors.  Our system has a lot of ways to help people succeed, and a lot of other ways to make sure they have very little chance to do so - we want people to be educated, but we refuse to send someone back to college on the taxpayers' dime after they've flunked out three times, and clearly they're not going to be able to afford their own tuition at this point.  So if you were sick the day you took the SATs and couldn't qualify for a grant scholarship, then some random bacterium has cost you your entire future, and now the path your life takes is set in stone, because society has all sorts of rules in place which limit your ability to correct for that sort of unfortunate circumstances, all because we're terrified of the idea that someone - who we claim to regard as our equal - is going to "freeload" at our expense.

We as a nation are not even close to equal; we are unequal in a staggeringly vast number of ways, and while the potential gulf between the highest point and the lowest might be slightly less severe than in some war-torn third-world nation, it's still pretty damn big.  Bernie Madoff got rich by swindling huge numbers of people out of their life savings, and is now cooling his heels in a comfortable minimum-security prison; meanwhile, hormonally belligerent black teenagers get shot dead in the streets by paranoid, trigger-happy, and possibly racist cops, just because they were brandishing a water pistol that wasn't a bright enough shade of blue to be obvious as a toy, given the poor lighting conditions.  Without speculating on how much of the difference between these situations lies in race, how much in money, how much in the difference between street cops and sentencing juries, and so forth, my point is simply this - they are different.  Madoff and his fellow financial wizards in their more-than-your-education-costing suits, whether their money-management schemes fraudulent or completely legitimate, simply occupy a different stratum of civilization than foul-mouthed and reflexively hostile "gutter trash" who would commit willingly commit murder over a nice pair of shoes.  If members of these two groups were magically transformed into each other, resulting in a silver-tongued "ghetto punk" with a high-class accent and a rich white man who swears at police while flashing gang signs, then the former investment banker would probably end up plea-bargaining his way into a shorter jail sentence even while his other half rapidly destroys his entire social circle and squanders 90% of his liquid assets - and they'd still probably never meet exactly in the middle of the gulf that had long separated them.

We're always going to have divisions like this in society; for the most part, we want it that way.  There's an inherent human desire for justice, coupled with selfish egotism (manifested both in excesses of desire and in irrational fears of loss); we work actively to prevent society from reaching a point where every single person enjoys the exact same lifestyle, regardless of how hard they've worked or what they've sacrificed from themselves or how lucky they've been, So, if we're going to have different groups of people, then I say we should openly admit it.  I think I've said before in this blog, that although a hereditary caste system would be an atrocity, there's a great deal of logic to the idea of a qualificational caste system, in which something more complex than, but functionally similar to, your SAT scores or your IQ test or your Meyers-Briggs Personality Profile or a Which Career is Right For You quiz (mix and match aspects of these and a thousand similar configurations, until you think you've got something good enough to work for everyone), is used to explicitly label you as a member of a particular social grouping, and the rules of society are written to openly acknowledge these categories, without any pretense that every one is as good as all of the others.  Someone who's unambigously proven themselves to possess all of the qualities that society has agreed to regard as Good, while suffering absolutely no detectable level of any of the characteristics deemed Bad, gets the highest possible rank in this system, and is treated like an international dignitary, religious figurehead, captain of industry or the like; someone who entirely fails all of the test's qualifications (or refuses to take the test altogether) is proven to be little more than a frothing maniac, and certainly receives few privileges.

It's entirely possible we'll never draft a set of selection protocols sophisticated enough that they deserve to be used as this kind of test; the human equation might well be beyond any and all humans' ability to solve.  But I think that a few attempts ought to be made, in spite of such catastrophic examples of it going horribly wrong as are provided by the novel/movie Divergent, just as I believe we ought not to be scared away from spaceflight by the existence of a billion crappily-written sci-fi flicks, about killer aliens and black holes and the potential next Challenger explosion and so forth.  Socioengineering is a field of study just like any other; it's possible to do it completely wrong, producing the equivalent of a collapsing bridge or an exploding nuclear reactor, but it's also possible to do it right, providing transportation convenience and clean energy.  And since nobody talks about the latter outcome on the news, because Michael Bay never makes a movie about it, because we as a rule find happiness boring and don't devote much emphasis to thinking about it, we spend very little energy toward practical efforts at getting happier, but lots of time thinking about what horrors might result if we tried and failed.

My point (assuming, rather charitably, that I have one, and am not just rambling incoherently about what bothers me) is this.  "Caste system" is one of those terms that tends to reflexively scare one's audience away (and my audience at this point is down to about two people from a one-time maximum of five, so maybe I should quit gambling on these), but it doesn't necessarily describe something utterly anathematic, just something that's possible to do entirely wrong.  The creation of different categories of human being is an inherent psychological need we have, and we always get utterly repulsed by the systems that other cultures have come up with, but that repulsion doesn't extend to systems just as bad which we never perceive, whether because they don't exist, or just because we are partially or completely unaware of their existence.  Often times, we hate and reject a proposed utopian social design, because we simply mis-perceive it as being something horrific (this happened with the socialized-medicine struggle; whether you happen to agree with the exact specifics is one question, but the absurd panic about "death panels" demonstrates how utterly irrational people are in the consideration of such questions); just as often, though, we tolerate atrocities because they're easily disguised or concealed.  A lot of the world's systemic injustices are completely fixable, but in most cases, if you don't put a face on a problem, nobody will care.  And if you put the on the wrong place, the "right people" will care less, and may begin actively opposing your efforts - when your cause itself has not actually changed, you've just catastrophically mis-stepped in your efforts to advertise it.

So here's my attempt at putting a nice face on an enlightened "social caste" system.  Let's say that we as a nation openly acknowledged the need to have higher and lower classes of person, but then made ourselves feel better about that desire by re-emphasizing that even the lowest of those classes deserves food, shelter, clean water, clothing, and a few other minimal necessities (we'll leave out education and healthcare for now, since those are the two really big and really questionable ones that seem currently impossible to solve).  So once we'd decided that these were our country's priorites, how would we integrate them?  Simple: grant everyone their necessities for free, as an automatic entitlement, while tripling or quadrupling or so the price of all luxury goods.  Such a system would widen the gap between rich and poor, but it would also make poverty a lot more tolerable, and although it would hurt the rich a fair bit in material terms, it would soften the blow by explicitly acknowledging the perception they inevitably have, that they're just better than other people.  Under this system, struggling 18-year-olds in college probably couldn't afford the latest Xbox, let alone a car - but they'd also never have to worry about flunking out and ending up sleeping on the streets.  Some might be willing to endure that risk in order to have an Xbox, but the majority would probably realize that a guarantee of safety is worth more than the possibility of being able to afford some fun.  And for those who could afford the Xbox even at its vastly inflated price, think of what a status symbol it would become!

A system like this wouldn't fix everything that's wrong with our country by a long shot.  But it'd be a nice start.

Trigger Warning - Rape Analogies

Consider this hypothetical scenario.  Having somehow come into ownership of a scrap of land which is not part of any country, state, county, city, or other legal jurisdiction, a group of people decide to create a new suburb, a gated community which is open only to what they consider the "right people".  Styling themselves as the Town Council, they draft a set of Bylaws which they're confident will make their town a fun, safe, and satisfying place of residence for an entire community; at first they hand-pick everyone who can come live there, but eventually those people start inviting their friends who start inviting their friends, and a large, vibrant community grows.  Because all of these people are cool and they're having fun living here together, it never occurs to any of them to, for example, commit rape against each other.  And they happen to overlook the fact that, when drafting those Bylaws, the Town Council neglected to specify anything about how rape is a crime, since they were perfectly (and sub-consciously) confident it would never happen, among the various cool people who were going to come live in their town.

Then, one day, a woman moves into the town, a somewhat disturbed woman who is absolutely phobic about the idea that she might be raped, with a completely unrealistic notion of how likely it is to happen.  And when she happens to notice that the law doesn't say anything about rape being prohibited, she flips out, and decides to hold a one-person protest rally outside the town hall.  There, she harangues every passer-by she can catch, lecturing loudly and stridently about how utterly necessary it is that every community, no matter how cool its people think they are, MUST make it explicitly illegal to rape anyone, or else they are tacitly sanctioning the act of rape even if it never actually happens.  Most people she's shouting at are good, decent folk who would never rape anyone, and to them, she's just being ridiculous and annoying.

But here's the key point.  If she keeps belting out that spiel at the top of her lungs, day after day, right outside where the Town Council are having their meetings, what does it say about them that they continue to not have a rape law on the books?  Whether they're intentionally ignoring her, or have just managed not to notice her, should not someone perhaps stop kvetching at the deranged woman's unreasonable behavior, and start trying to find out why her concerns - however little validity they have outside of the purely theoretical - are not being addressed?

What is all this an analogy for?  Believe it or not, it started with a GAME, of all things, and the original issue was pretty insignificant, but I've kept pushing the matter because I found it profoundly disturbing that nobody besides me could see a problem here.  Whether or not it ever actually happens, the ability to betray someone on the most fundamental level is an Alpha-Level Offense against the social contracts upon which gaming relies; if you can be "griefed" in the game, and have no defense whatsoever other than to stop playing with the jerk that did it, then I see that as a serious failure on the basis of the game itself.  Nobody in their right mind would want to live in a town that allows its citizens to rape each other, and a game which fails to police griefing is very much the equivalent on a smaller, more trivial scale.  But just because it's all fun and games doesn't mean it should be taken lightly; behavior in a game is a microcosm of behavior beyond the game, so if inappropriate activity is allowed to flourish, even if it never actually flourishes, the failure to actively curtail it sends a very bad message, about the people who are supposed to be taking responsibility for the space they've provided, whether that's the physical space of a city or the ideological space of a game.

Better late than never: My take on Gamergate

I originally wrote this bit in September, and while the Gamergate scandal is pretty much old news by now, it'll only keep getting older.  So since this was the soonest that my general disorganization would permit me to chime in, I thought I'd get my take on this flash-in-the-pan scandal out the gate before it became any more obsolete; I felt that I had something relevant to say, and it's just a pity I couldn't get it said sooner.

I now present the original text, without any subsequent revision.

****

Let's look at the Gamergate scandal.  It's pretty obvious why women are not welcomed into the gaming community; it's because gaming is about escapist fantasy, and for men in general (excluding those who've been "tamed" by women, or were born "different" as statistical anomalies), the single most important fact of the life they need to escape is the fact that they can't get laid.  (A general lack of power in their lives is concurrent with this, and often the two are conflated into fantasies of rape or harems and such - but most men wouldn't turn up their nose at sex where they got everything they wanted handed to them but were not at all in control of the process.)  Women can't understand this, because they don't have a NEED to have sex, constantly and for brief periods which only "reset the clock" for a matter of hours; for the most part they don't need to bring sex into their games at all, but certainly if they do, it'll be more like seducing a single partner for the duration of the game until finally achieving an LTR in the good ending, and less like having slutty elf maidens drop as treasure with every sixth monster you kill so that you can regain hit points by fucking them.

The bottom line is, men want games which objectify women, for the same reason they want games which glamorize violence, minimize social strictures, and award ridiculous quantities of wealth for trivial achievements.  Women getting into the industry are likely to object to this treatment of their fictional sisters, clearly proving that they aren't adequately cognizant on the "fictional" part (though they have a point, many of them men aren't quite on top of that one either).  Men don't want their entertainment watered down and deprived of one of its key features, and so when girls try to horn in, they resist.

A Hard-Line Stance Against Victim Enabling

In the wake of two recent incidents, I need to say something that I probably can't say anywhere else without cutting my own throat, and even saying it here is probably dangerous to my future employment possibilities and such, but I still believe it needs to be said.  We live in a culture of trigger warnings, sensitivity training, and the abrogation of any degree of personal responsibility, and I'm sick and tired of it.  So I'm going to say this, just once, and have absolutely no sympathy for anyone it offends.

If a person commits suicide, the cause of that event is that person's choice, and absolutely nothing else.

Nobody can be "driven" to suicide, and I've had it with society's insistence that they can.  The human urge to survive at any cost is the most powerful force in the universe; it has leveled mountains, conquered the horizon of space, and driven the mightiest (other) predators in Nature to the brink of extinction.  Absolutely nothing can defeat that motivating impulse, other than its own malfunctioning.  If a person does NOT feel the determination to survive at any cost, no matter what happens, then that person is GOING to kill themselves eventually; they will find some excuse, regardless of what anyone says or does to them.  It is absolutely never anyone's fault (not even theirs, since they did not choose to be born with a terminal disease of the mind); no amount of handling that person with kid gloves, respecting their feelings, giving in to their childish demands for attention and coddling and anything else they think might keep their misery at bay, is ever going to stop them from finding some justification for the act that they've been planning their whole lives.

So once and for all, we need to stop trying to silence people who say "mean" and "hurtful" things, because if a person doesn't have a self-destruct system hardwired into their brain, no amount of bullying can possibly change that - and if they do, no amount of bullying-prevention can save them.  This doesn't mean that I'm in favor of actual bullying - it's pointless, disgraceful behavior and it definitely should stop - but what it does mean is that no-one should be mistaken for a bully, just because they fail to walk on eggshells around a mentally fragile person who's trying to get everyone else to act as an enabler for them.  There is a very significant difference between being actively cruel and simply behaving thoughtlessly; the latter is perfectly acceptible, because we don't owe one another anything more than basic interpersonal distance.  And I'm tired of seeing people villified simply because they're not gentle and cuddly enough, when all the sweetness and love in the world can't stop a Robin Williams or the like from doing what their inferior genes have programmed them to do.  We as a species need to face the facts, even when they're painful - life is a take-no-prisoners game, and we cannot afford to waste energy trying to save those who are determined to destroy themselves.  Until we can isolate the root cause of depression, and cure it like any other disease, we need to simply accept that some people are doomed, and it's not worth the effort of trying to protect them, not when it comes at the expense of everyone else who lacks such debilities.

Against the Cowardice of the Corporate World

The modern workaday world is preoccupied, above all other concerns, with the avoidance of conflict, particularly violent conflict.  And I can certainly understand where they're coming from on that; I don't want there to be a great deal of bloodshed and havoc in my day-to-day life either.  But look at the alternative that we have been offered...the hiring process is increasingly done through a series of double-blind third-party contacts, and information is withheld whenever it might be slightly dangerous to admit the plain truth.  As a result, there is no accountability for anything, and the economy spirals ever downward, leaving legions of people unemployed or underemployed, unable to even guess what they're doing wrong in job interviews because they never receive any feedback, as the hiring manager doesn't want to risk upsetting them and possibly causing them to lash out.  Anyone who is perceived as a potential risk is simply shunned, because everyone is terrified of setting them off; rather than take even the tiniest chance of them going postal, society has agreed to give them an extremely high probability of becoming homeless and slowly starving to death.  Would it really be THAT bad to let someone get angry instead, yell and curse and scream, maybe throw a few things or break some furniture?  Even if they wreak violence, even if they kill a few people or blow up a small building - are they not still doing FAR less damage than the system designed to prevent them?  How many buildings worth of people die on the city streets during each harsh winter?  How many people are bottling their rage up inside, then taking it out on anyone who's vulnerable?  Why can't the hiring managers of corporate America just "man up" and take a punch on the chin every once in a while, rather than hiding behind a system that slowly strangles half the population of the entire country?

The Best and Worst Careers For The World - An Incomplete Index

It's been a busy summer here under the Sky that Watches; I've been working a job which, unlike the one I held when launching this blog, actually makes me work hard instead of working-hardly.  I have no Internet at this workplace, so dashing off a quick mini-entry during lunch is an impossibility, and the commute is even more onerous, leaving me little time save on too-short weekends.  Still, I've finally settled upon a topic which is so near and dear to me that, having thought of it and then risked forgetting all about it, I'm making the time to by-gawd-get-it-done.  That topic is work itself - specifically, particular fields of work, and whether they help the world more than they hurt it or vice versa.


Obviously, my personal opinions will influence this list of rankings somewhat, but I'm trying to be at least somewhat serious and objective.  I don't especially care for clowns, but if someone really wants to smear greasepaint over the parts of themselves that aren't stuffed into garish clothes and go caper about in public so that they can be mobbed by squealing children, it's really no skin off my back; they're not causing anything that I define as harm to the world.  No, my vitriol is reserved for professions that, even if some people like them for perfectly sane reasons, I consider to be inherently detrimental to the entire human race by their very existence, with any good they actually do achieve being outweighed by the harm they at least theoretically might.  Conversely, while I sing high praises for those who help the world in tangible ways, even more accolades are owing IMO to those who uplift it more subtly...building a bridge might help people go places, but this doesn't help much if they don't have any reason to travel, and so I prioritize the askers of "why" more highly than the answerers of "how", valuing their ability to imbue the world with meaning rather than merely to accomplish the pointless task of preserving an initially content-neutral existence.

We'll start the list with 5 jobs that uplift society or accomplish great things, followed by 6 (since I'm better at being negative) which fester like cancers in the soul of the world, and over time I'll try to come back and update this list periodically, adding more and more career fields as they occur to me, so that the list will grow gradually toward a middle and perhaps even unify into a comprehensive catalogue, every major field of work ranked according to the importance I believe it holds.  I may have to split some hairs in deciding which particular disciplines to rank separately, and when to lump several distinct strains of study into a single entry; these decisions are subject to later revision, but for now I make them without apology or overmuch concern. 

EDIT - Having allowed this list to stand at 11 items - six negative and five positive - for three months, I've thought of nothing else to add to it until today, when I shall add a single (mildly) positive entry in commemoration of a recent positive event, and then leave the list more or less symmetrical for a while.  I could fairly easily make this 12-item list into "four good, four bad, and four neutral", as the bottom two plusses are damned with faint praise, and the top two minuses are something in the vein of necessary evils; a world might be better off if it did not require either half of this category, but as it stands, the world we live in very much does, and so distinguishing them as "good" or "bad" is perhaps rather questionable.  Still, it makes a convenient narrative shortcut, so I will leave it as it is for now.

Without further ado, let us begin with the best of the best.

1.  Artists
For the moment, I can't think of any contribution to the world more meaningful than the painting of a pretty picture, the crafting of a fine sculpture, the capturing of a once-in-a-decade Kodak moment, the assembly of a geometrically-inspiring tile mosaic on the floor of a public building, or any other creation of visual arts to be displayed for others's eyes, for the purpose of adding beauty and virtue to the world.  For the moment, I'm separating certain other fields of art out and focusing simply on things that you look at, those worth a thousand words and requiring active attention, as I believe their purpose is different; you read literature (even comic books, though they can double as art quite effectively, and some are more one than the other - Jack Kirby's art is almost certainly of greater immediate worth to the world than Stan Lee's writing), and you hear music whether or not you listen to it, but art that your eye simply flashes across for a split-second has little impact on you, while you need only take a fraction of a minute to fully appreciate a visual masterpiece on at least the most basic level.  This "golden mean" between the environmental omnipresence of sound and the active-engagement-requirement of text is probably what elevates pictorial works to what I consider to be the pinnacle of spiritual relevance (and the medieval Church agreed with me, which I firmly believe plays a large role in why they achieved such prominence); you can "grok" a painting/sculpture/frieze/etc. at a glance or scrutinize it for hours, but either way, it takes you beyond the limits of reality into a realm of pure human-mental creation.  There is no higher statement of purpose for our lives that I can think of.  Bill Hicks said it best, literally rather than profanely:  "Fuck artists!"  And do it quickly, before they starve.
(It should be noted that the creators of such works as "The Lights Going On And Off" or "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of the Living", if they qualify for membership in this profession at all, are certainly not the members I intend to applaud with this list; while I consider it eminently possible to be an artist by trade even without ever turning a dime of profit, artwork created solely for the sake of being sold for an elevated price does not qualify as "art" in my book.  Individuals like Martin Creed, Damien Hirst, or for that matter Jackson Pollock are not adding much in the way of cultural heritage to the human species; they're not uplifting our souls or ennobling their nature much, if at all, and the fact that they spawn arguments over what qualifies as "true art" only suggests that they are in fact "anti-artists", who by their existence attack and disrupt the very field that they claim to participate in, and no more accomplish the goals of "traditional" art than a creator of bio-engineered pathogens qualifies as a doctor.)

2.  Authors
Despite being a member of this category myself (at least on an amateur basis), I rank it less than superlatively because, ultimately, I believe it makes a less valuable contribution on a pound-for-pound basis.  While certainly stories are valuable things to possess, they are also relatively easy to conjure for oneself; it takes just as much talent to write well as to paint well, but it takes far less talent to write adequately, and there are far more adequate writers out there supplying whatever demand there is for merely-adequate writing.  Likewise, books take longer to consume than visual artworks, and offer a greater possibility of leaving the audience untouched when he or she gives up on the effort required to apprehend their worth; in short, writing of less than stellar quality is not only plentiful, but of sharply limited usefulness.  Thusly, one more artist is of more immediate value to society than one more writer; while I'm not saying that only the best of writers should write, I am saying at least that a person whose primary vocation is "writer" had best do more than simply "write something"; a unique niche might still have unmet needs, but the "mainstream", whatever exactly it might be, has plenty enough of "just whatever" to satisfy its appetites for quite some time, and those aiming to be successful need to have either superlative skills or an "angle" of some sort.  With all this said, those who do have either of those things are still making an immense contribution to the world...not only can we always use more life-changing literary masterpieces, but also every bizarre new genre that's invented by a writer seeking to explore uncharted territory, perhaps to compensate for a not-quite-sufficient degree of talent with more ordinary works, ultimately expands the mental horizons of humanity's inner world, and that is a priceless and wonderful thing indeed.  We don't need any more mediocre hacks to clog our bookshelves with pabulum we'll never find time for and have essentially already seen, but we definitely can always profit from someone trying to blaze a new trail, even if it ultimately goes nowhere...and if you're not sure whether you're a trailblazer or not, it almost certainly can't hurt to try.

3.  Musicians
I don't want to make it seem as though the creative professions are the only ones I value at all; this was meant to be a Top Ten list (followed by a Bottom Ten), but it's taking too long to write the shortest articles that I feel are worth writing, so I'm not going to have much room in this first draft.  In any event, music has had far too powerful an effect on my life not to get a superlative ranking here; I literally can't sleep without some compositions, and others play a close second fiddle (yuk yuk) to caffeine in getting me woken back up, so my very lifestyle has a rhythm which the music industry conducts expertly.  Whether you create new music or simply perform the works of others, either way your value to the world is tremendous; there is not really a practical limit to the number of live shows that we can benefit from having performed, in order to give us someplace good to go on the weekend.  The only reason why music ranks as low on this list as it does, is that it has a greater potential than the previous two to go horribly wrong; while certainly artworks and writings have been used for evil ends before, they are nowhere near as viciously effective as music which is created to corrupt or brainwash the listener.  While the blame lies on those engineering the mind-virus rather than those who simply propagate it, the fact remains that music can be a very dangerous weapon in the wrong hands, and thus it cannot claim to be as purely beneficial as its sister-arts.
(An honorable mention should be given to the movie industry, which is too thoroughly a constellation of jobs rather than a single one to find any place on any remotely economy-sized version of this list; I might as well mention them here, since the soundtrack is as integral as any other element to the creation of a cinematic wonderwork.  Movies duplicate the first three entries on the ranking by nature and purpose; they provide dazzling spectacles as well as stories and a life-transforming rhythm, and are thusly a great positive influence on the world.  But they also drink deeply from the wells of some of the professions at the bottom of my list...they exist primarily as shameless cash-grabs, often harmfully influence the public consciousness, and are bolstered in a structurally necessary fashion by some of the most destructive branches of law.  Taken as a gestalt, Hollywood is neither good nor evil, though it is certainly juggernaut-like in its power and dominance; above all, however, it is not a single job, and the one that it most nearly resembles is probably this one, so it gets shoehorned into the footnote of this entry for now.)

4.  Engineers
As a great believer in social progress despite its many pitfalls, I must eventually give some acknowledgement to those who achieve more than mental creation; the engineer is pretty much my definition for a person who actually accomplishes something, and I instinctively ascribe to them a solutions-focused and no-nonsense approach to life which, though I acknowledge is not universally found to equal extents among all their members, I still consider to be part of the job's essential nature - and to be a quality which would be of immense benefit to pretty much every member of society who isn't in the previous three categories.  We ought all to be builders of one sort or another, I feel, and those who build structures meant to support the weight of thousands need to prove themselves fairly well trustworthy before they're likely to be awarded the necessary contracts (though tragic exceptions do of course occur, and I may never feel entirely safe crossing a bridge again after what happened on I-35W a few years back).  In general, I think anyone who has what it takes to become a structural designer is an asset which society needs to cultivate the holy living fuck out of, and this is not much less true of most other professions which can lay a non-bullshit claim to the word in their title (such as electrical engineers, who are certainly no less valuable than rebar-and-cementmasons to the creation of our glorious modern world).


5.  Doctors and Nurses
Personally, I have an intense distrust of the medical profession; I prefer to tend my own illness and avoid being billed for the next ten years, and to simply endure any condition which is less than life-threatening.  But I recognize that while some of this is rooted in genuine skepticism toward the purity of Hippocratic altruism in a for-profit hospital system, or in a belief that modern medical science is only a relative rather than an absolute improvement upon shamanistic practices ranging from herbalism to trepanning, most of it is just garden-variety paranoia that I shouldn't consider worthy of basing a social philosphy upon.  While the skills and motivations of a physician are almost certainly not perfect, the chances are good that they're well above the median; ultimately nobody volunteers to spend that much time around people who are bleeding, vomiting, and soiling the bedsheets unless they have at least some altruism in their nature, and so I'm inclined to think that practicioners of medicine are probably more nearly good people than the opposite, even if I'm not ready to trust them very damn far as yet myself.  In general, a healthy world is a better one; I think the Establishment takes this principle much too far, but if the hypochondria were dialed back a bit and the Asclepians reserved their attentions exclusively for those who needed them, regardless of financial motivations either against necessary care or for the reverse, they'd be critical ingredients for that ideal world I want to see achieved within my lifetime.  And, after all, if my leeriness toward hospitals doesn't eventually abate, my lifetime isn't likely to be incredibly long, so I should definitely try to steer myself in the direction of valuing healers and caregivers as much as my lunacy will permit.

6.  Accountants, Taxmen, Bankers Etc.
The fact that I'm adding this somewhat flattering entry is triggered by, but not actually related to, the fact that a person who happens to be an accountant recently did me a favor.  I'm not here to thank him or anything; I just got to thinking about my overall opinion of his profession, and decided it was worth mentioning here.  Rather than being a sort of necessary evil as I would regard both doctors and soldiers as being, accountants are a category that I am largely neutral upon (whereas lawyers I have somewhat conflicted views upon, mostly disliking them but admitting that the best defense against a bad lawyer is a good one, much as with the military, and certainly not marking the entire breed as having quite as inherently negative a nature as anything to do with money-making).    Having taken accounting class in high school, I quickly (though not quickly enough) came to the conclusion that it was excruciatingly boring; even today, I cannot help but mentally stereotype an accountant as an inherently dull and petty bean-counter type, who has nothing better to do than track every piddling detail of an organization's expenses, trying to account for every penny and never let so much as a candy wrapper go unanswered-for.  But at the same time, while I can't envy or even admire that kind of mentality, and would find it annoying any time I was on the receiving end of it, I cannot help but feel as if it is objectively correct behavior.  Everything does have a cost, after all, and tabulating those costs very precisely is responsible behavior.  Accountants' job is to keep track of the truth, in all its fine detail, and I do believe that's a somewhat beneficial thing to do, at least up to a point; outside the realm of caricature, every accountant is a human being, and there are probably very few who live up to the worst stereotypes of their nebbishy fixation.  At least as long as they are reasonable, their determination to check up on a company's millions and make sure they aren't misplaced, helping to ensure that the paychecks of every employee down to the smallest mailroom clerk do not simply vanish, qualifies them as beneficial agents within society, if not terribly exciting ones.  This sort of qualification also extends to other "check up" types within the tremendously complex corporate and fiscal world - tax assessors, collections agents, compliance officers and regulatory bodies, etc.  And as long as we're talking about money, I figured I'd toss in a quick mention for bankers, who I really intended to have in the negative half of this list, but that's based on a lot of the same issues as lawyers, soldiers and doctors - there are some bad apples out there who give the whole field a terrible reputation, but in general, there is at least some redeeming merit in the pursuit as a whole.  Eventually I should probably split bankers out into an article of their own, but for now they can live here, as they at least share with accountants the tendency to take the Little Guy's money just as seriously as that of Mr. Big, and to care for the money itself even if they do not necessarily care for the person.

-6.  Soldiers
The only justification anyone ever really offers for why their country needs a military is that other countries have one; I continue to firmly believe that the magical disappearance of all war-making capability from the world (all military hardware, every weapons depot and command post and quartermaster's station, all manuals of battlefield tactics or boot-camp indoctrination, and all knowledge or inclination that might result in the replacement of these things from the minds of all involved persons) could only possibly be to our complete and instantaneous benefit.  The urge to violence is an atavism within our collective psyche which is long overdue to be flushed down the psychic john into the sewers of history; having invented the capability to annihilate ourselves a thousand times over, we need to stop accepting that any excuse ever justifies resorting to even the least of these methods.  If all formal militaries worldwide simultaneously shuttered themselves by unanimous agreement, and fully annihilated their entire infrastructure in the process, the only thing we'd have to worry about would be informal armies that amounted to little more than undisciplined mobs armed with sticks and rocks, and these wouldn't be especially dangerous to a civilian populace that were pretty much identical to them, only with the advantage of defending their home turf.  The continual escalation of combat capability in every major nation has long-since become self-sustaining and purposeless; it will end only when we all come to our senses and recognize what a colossal waste it is, and every person who voluntarily submits to the grip of that insanity-engine is one step away from the moment when it finally runs out of power.  If you want to serve your community, go work at a soup kitchen, and if you want to make your country safe, go work at a soup kitchen in one of the countries that thinks America is evil.  Because if you pick up a machine gun and go strut around that country "pacifying" it, you're only proving that belief to be right, and there's another guy just like you in that country who is just as eager to kill for his homeland.  Don't be part of the problem; do the much harder work of waging peace instead.

-5.  Lawyers
While it is possible for one to practice law for good purposes, and of course a society with no laws at all is not likely to function very well at all, I still feel confident that I can state with complete accuracy that Law, as an institution, does far more harm than good, simply by virtue of its inherent inflexibility.  Politicians pass laws which don't need to be made, and policemen enforce laws which don't deserve to be upheld, simply out of the misguided belief that The Law Is The Law, and that it is somehow superior not only to any individual human but to any number of same - logically, it can only follow that it is superior to Humanity as a whole, and that eventually it will achieve sufficient power and independence to judge us all guilty of capital crimes against its own monolithic perfection.  On the forefront of that Skynet-like evolution are the middlemen between the aforementioned cops and congressmen - those whose profession consists almost entirely of arguing about what the Law is and is not.  (I believe I mentioned my opinion of those who preoccupy themselves with definitional wankery in the footnote to #1, above; it goes triple here, since the subject is both more "life-and-death-in-importance" and less "interesting-enough-to-be-worth-discussing".)   The fact that it is somehow not obvious to the prosecutor and the defense attorney, upon both of them walking into a room to argue opposite points of view, that one of them must be wrong, a liar, and unworthy of the opportunity to try and win everyone over to believing his wrongful lies, with naught save a more skillful persuasive tactic than his opposite - that alone more than suffices to indict the entire profession in my eyes.  When sums of money far exceeding any possible definition of reason quickly become involved, that is only sour-egg-mayo and rancid butter on the shit sandwich that lawyers are serving mankind in the first place, claiming that otherwise we should have nothing to eat at all.  But common sense and human decency are a delicious eight-course buffet, and we can start enjoying the meal as soon as we, collectively and unanimously, tell these $5000 suits where they can get stuffed.  We must stop acknowledging their arguments as valid substitutes for the absolute and unchangeable truth of the world, even if we're not yet perceptive enough to know exactly what it is; we should still trust it a hell of a lot farther than we should them.

-4.  Priests
Religion is, at best, a questionable blessing upon humanity; there's a good chance that a completely rational and non-superstitious human race would never have left the Olduvai Gorge and would eventually have died off from some local calamity, and certainly without the Catholic Church's iron grip on medieval Europe and Islam's comparable influence on Arabia and north Africa, it's unlikely that the whole "civilization" concept would ever have gotten past the level of small regional empires constantly destroying each other in wars over territory.  The concept of obedience to a central authority, while it has its downsides, certainly also produces measurable results; marching under the Cross or Crescent, taking seriously the concept that all humanity ought to be unified under that one banner, these two branches of the strange tree called Monotheism (with the unfortunate Jews, naturally, residing at its crotch) collectively bore impressive fruit, for without the concept of a single God who required ever-increasing acts of devotion, Mankind might never have aspired so high and reached so far, eventually creating a world in which we ourselves are half-become like unto the Gods as pre-Christian empires might have imagined them.  The question lies in whether religion retains any of that usefulness now that we've literally ascended beyond the sky, building a "babel" called the International Space Station from which we can get a God's-eye view of the entire planet below us, and a halfway decent squint at theunimaginable vastness beyond.  The conflict between old-fashioned Terracentrism and the modern scientific viewpoint, which posits that we are all but insignificant and that the cosmos is basically devoid of apparent meaning, is at the crux of the question of what religion is worth today; many men of the cloth are still finding ways to bring comfort to the human spirit, but many others have become utterly blinded by the absolutism which they believe to be crucial to their teachings (not without reason, since it was necessarily presented as exactly that during the aforementioned forging-of-civilization era).  Motivated by mad dogmatism and an inability to believe they could possibly be wrong about the things they were so sure of, these people become street-corner shouters, pedophile priests, the Westboro Baptist Church, and so forth...religion gives them an easy excuse for insufferable behavior, and because God fails to smite them for using his name to justify their petty atrocities, they assume they must retain his absolute and unwavering support, and proceed unhesitantly to greater and greater excesses in his name.  Ultimately, blaming the priest for the sins of his congregation might be little better than blaming a doctor for not managing to save his patients - but there is such a thing as being too incompetent to retain your practicing license, and even those preachers who don't rouse the self-righteous rabble in their flocks, often don't try hard enough to quell them before they collectively do something stupid and horrible in the name of the church's doctrines.  In naming religion as one of my antisocial categories, I am taking the stance that whatever good individual religionists may do, they are doing in spite of their tool's bad nature rather than because of its value, and that ultimately they are only strengthening its potential for harm every time they use it, even to heal or build.

-3. Advertisers, Salesmen, and Everything Between
The fact that this list is shorter than it needs to be is becoming painfully apparent; while I sprawled across three closely related categories with my top three entries on the social-benefit registry, the bottom three are all crowded with broad swaths of vaguely related social evils.  Commerce as a whole is pretty much the most virulent strain of social ills, and all three of these final entries are related to it, but this one isn't directly about the exchange of money itself; rather, it's about persuading the person from whom you're hoping to get money (or other valuables, though generally those will turn into money eventually) to cooperate with your wishes, and more generally with changing people's minds in general.  Somehow, when you mention the word "brainwashing", people instantly shrink from a mental picture of Nazi hypnotists convincing you to hold still for a cranial auger, yet they don't even blink as they stare into a television that attempts to transmogrify their opinion of how many months' salary they should trade for a car or a cruise or a piece of jewelry.  I don't indict advertisers as harshly as marketers or sellers, because at least the advertisement wing of the franchise tends to be creative; there are some highly entertaining commercials out there, and the persuasion is usually subtle enough that it's not too hard to push away.  But even so, like a mountain being slowly beaten to sand by the rain of millenia, our free will can only survive so long in the face of the sustained, omnipresent, from-every-direction assaults of the combined advertising industry, which might be telling us to buy Product A or Product B today, or to save up until we can afford Product Y or Product Z, but is absolutely never telling us not to buy anything at all (even an ad for a savings account is trying to swindle you into "paying" today's money, in exchange for a marginally greater quantity of money in the future, but the bank wouldn't offer that trade if they didn't stand to derive much greater profit, today and tomorrow and the next day and beyond, by convincing you not to keep it for your own immediate use).  As advertisers and salesmen deploy their long- and short-range weapons to cut away your resistance, market research aims their shots and stabs toward your most vital organs; a marketer is by far the most useless of these three types of antisocial capitalist scum, since his job is explicitly to reduce a vast collection of datapoints to its lowest common denominator, ignoring every aspect of the truth which doesn't directly contribute to improving the ability of his company (whether employer or client) to extract more money from the customer than their product is worth.  Collectively, these three interrelated fields are all aimed at robbing you of control over your own actions and enslaving you to the ever-fleeting carrot of your own wealth; the process has by now progressed to such an extent that it is basically impossible for any of us to escape the trap.

-2.  Realtors and Landowners
The very concept that land can be owned is a much more recent innovation than the human consciousness that spawned it; while the primitive tribesmen who first invented subsistence farming might have considered the ground they tilled "theirs", this claim ultimately made no difference until some other person came along and disputed it.  There being an absolute limit on how much arable acreage any one person can farm, there would have been little point in stealing each other's land, and thus little reason to consider it owned in the first place, up until the first predecessors of the feudal system arose; when the concept of empire was invented, people began declaring themselves the owners of lands they didn't farm, and demanded tribute from the tenants on "their" land in exchange for some service, usually "us not killing you" or perhaps in the more noble cases "us killing that guy before he kills you".  Feudalism was present in Babylon and Egypt and Rome, pretty much by definition as all of those were "empires", but it reached its absolute zenith in the aptly-named Dark Ages, when a given parcel of land was the property of about ten guys who each owned successively smaller numbers of other parcels, and only the guy whose number was zero actually lived there, giving slices of his pie to all those other assholes that claimed to be protecting him, but would happily kill him and protect someone else if he tried to keep more than the tiniest crumb of crust for himself.  We have progressed nowhere near far enough away from that system.  The concept of land ownership is and has always been ludicrous; the Earth was here before we came along and will be here long after the last of us dies, so the notion that it could be our property is an absurdity on the face of things.  Yet, because of how far the capitalist system has been allowed to sink into its own wallow and somehow never entirely drown, we now live in a world whose landlords beggar the wildest dreams of the medieval dukes, barons, and even kings!  Donald Trump could buy and sell Henry the VIII with the change in his pocket, and nobody today seems to think this is odd.  By claiming ownership over stretches of countryside so large they don't even fit on a single map, today's plutocrats manufacture insanely vast quantities of money from an invisible line drawn on the ground, which exists only in the collective imaginations of everyone they can bribe or bully into cooperating with them.  And the insanity is further compounded when, having seized the land out from under people's feet, the magnate rents it back to them at exorbitant rates, surrendering none of his ownership and demanding to be paid simply for the fact that "their" space is being occupied.
(The same logic will eventually drive some future descendant of Donald's to laser-etch the Trump name onto every molecule of oxygen in the air, and charge the posthuman populace of that era for the very privilege of breathing, which they will happily surrender in exchange for bread-pills and a 3-D television they can watch the circus on.   I weep for the foolishness that did not call bullshit on all this insanity the moment the Renaissance nailed Feudalism's coffin shut; why, oh why, did we ever pull out the stake in its heart, by letting the revolutionaries who had seized the King's palace begin renting it out to their fellow plebs?  Harvey Dent must have been thinking of Robespierre and the Bolsheviks when he came up with that famous quote in "The Dark Knight".)

-1.  Stockbrokers, Insurers, Economists, etc.
Perhaps I'm not quite doing justice to the previous entries by putting them less-negative than this one; certainly, there are good businessmen doing good business out there, and even more certainly, a world completely devoid of business is a virtual impossibility, so any evils inherent in commerce might well be of the "necessary" variety.  But on the basis of my personal feelings about money's potential to go horribly awry, I'm going to go ahead and put the Cult of Mammon up there as the greatest single danger to our enlightened future.  Corporate CEOs and middle managers and stockholders and assorted organizational functionaries, these are all contributors to the harm that capitalism causes, but they are symptoms of varying severity more than they are the disease; I'll likely be mentioning them a little further up the list.  What gets the Absolute Worst mark, however, are those individuals who don't just hoard money, but manipulate it, create the illusion that it does or does not exist where the opposite is true, finessing it like a rapist expertly pleasuring his unwilling victim, and ultimately promulgating the very concept of financial wealth as existing independently of what it represents, the labor and valuable goods which money is supposed to simply stand in for.  Exercising the law of Supply and Demand, to name only the least arcane of the principles involved, enables these invisible-handsmen to obfuscate the hard reality of the world in favor of various layered smokescreens; they set prices based on who wants the product worst, rather than on the product's objective value, and they may even claim that this objective value does not exist, despite the fact that the product is an object that you can hold in your hand or a service that takes time and energy out of your life.  Profiting from the hard labor of others, and then devaluing that labor itself as having lost "equity" due to factors such as "inflation", playing deceptive games with "market share" and "hedge funds" and "expected returns" in order to trick people into paying for empty promises or gamble with their entire future...the villainy of this entire field is so deeply-rooted that I can barely even think about it without beginning to succumb to a frothing rage.  (The fact that most of the work which I am skilled to do is in service of these industries, at the absolute lowest level of influence yet still under the umbrella of their creeping toxicity, helps not in the slightest with letting me see even the tiny bit of silver lining which I suspect might conceivably exist.)

Advertising: What Does And Doesn't Work

In my attempts to build some sort of egalitarian utopia atop the rubble of our currently-crumbling plutocratic thugocracy, I generally try not to think about how anything gets paid for; it's just depressing.  But today, let's tackle it.

I spend a lot of time on YouTube these days, mostly listening to music videos (and I do mean "listening" for the most part, although the option to actually watch them is always there and appreciated on a theoretical level, no matter how seldom I choose to do so).  And while I'm doing so, what advertisements pop up on every third video?  The vast majority of the time, they are advertisements for Chevrolet trucks, various brands of beer, Progressive or Farmers insurance, and a few other things that I am virtually guaranteed never to buy.  Yes, the content that YT provides to me is very valuable, and I get that as things currently stand in our society, someone has to pay the bills.  But why THIS particular someone?  Why am I not advertised to by someone whose guts I DON'T hate, someone whose product I DON'T consider irrelevant at best (the insurance), and a more likely a hugely destructive influence on society (cars have their upside, but at serious cost, and alcohol is completely irredeemable IMO).

I want to be able to contact YT somehow and tell them to take me off these advertisers' lists, so that I can stop having them force their nonsense down my throat, and instead have them fund my usage by showing me ads for things I actually like, ads that might someday tempt me to buy the product....and for now, while I have no money to spare, they can at least build brand loyalty by entertaining me with commercials I'll appreciate.  For crying out loud, I've actually searched for certain commercials after seeing them, added them to my playlists, and then never gotten that ad again AS an ad.  Why is it that, after I've watched a video entitled "Funny Condom Commercial" or something to the point, I don't get other funny condom commercials?  (Granted, I have occasionally searched up "World's Sexiest/Funniest beer commercials", and so Budweiser and Stella Artois and such could be forgiven for mistaking me for a potential customer - but the ads they pay to show me are neither funny nor sexy, and so they're just wasting their money, along with my patience.)

If there must be advertisements for the media to exist, then we as a society need to seriously re-evaluate the effectiveness of current distribution models.  Because what we have right now is the equivalent of trying to woo a woman by breaking into her house at midnight, shouting "LOVE ME GODDAMMIT!" into her ear, and then repeating this nightly for ten years.  Except that in the case of advertising, she can't get a restraining order to make this treatment stop.  Budweiser, Chevrolet, Progressive...please realize that your relationship with me is abusive, and needs to end.  Your financial leverage over me is not a valid excuse; there are plenty of other companies who can be funding my leisure activities, and who I'll actually appreciate.  So knock it off already.

It's Not a Competition

We in America have very much bought into the concept of Economic Darwinism; we're rightly a bit uncomfortable with the idea that everyone should struggle against everyone else so that only the strong survive, and we at least are a little squeamish about acknowledging this reality within our social lives, but we never hesitate to see it flourish in our entire capitalist system.  We apply competition as a filter in nearly everything we do - the assumption is that if you eat at a restaurant, they have to give you quality service, because otherwise there are other restaurants you can eat at.  And the same logic is extended to the house you buy, the car you drive, the computer you play Angry Birds on, where you work, which university you attend, and even which multinational corporations expand into new markets while others collapse into bankruptcy or government bailout.  We as a culture simply assume that if everyone is contesting for supremacy, they will all do their best work, and we will reap rich fruits from their contest no matter which one wins.  The trouble is, though, this doesn't actually work to any real extent, for a wide variety of reasons.

The biggest of these reasons is that competition doesn't just allow two participants to try and out-excel each other; it also enables them to directly attack one another, undercutting their rival's efforts anytime it would be more cost-effective than boosting their own.  This is most visible in our political process - rather than explaining why you should vote for him, each candidate will simply explain why you should vote against his opponent.  Elsewhere, corporate espionage is a multi-billion dollar industry; one company assumes all the costs and risks of developing a new technology, while another simply waltzes in and steals the plans while sabotaging the prototype, potentially being the first to patent the invention as long as they can destroy all the evidence of their thievery.  It doesn't matter whether this only happens on rare occasions; the very fact that it's possible demonstrates that our system's foundational assumption is invalid.  It's possible to win a competition without actually being the fittest (unless of course your definition of fitness is very broad indeed, which might work for Nature, but is pretty incompatible with just about every human attempt at a system of ethics.)

There are other issues that can prevent a competition from being strictly a race to the high-water mark, but I'm not in the mood to sit here and list them all, so I'll just wrap it up by saying this: as long as companies are solely concerned with the bottom line, they have a great many strategies available to them, and being actually good at what they do is only one of these options, not necessarily the one that's most likely to work or that they're most interested in attempting.  I have a huge problem with that fact.

Policies Against Violence (and my "role models", more or less)

Today in an employment-training class that I've decided to take, we were given a handout which details the responsible organization's policies, which are mostly the standard boilerplate that literally all corporations, profit or nonprofit, with more than about five employees are invariably required to use today.  Prohibitions against sexual harassment, discrimination, workplace violence and so forth are used without a moment's thought, because it has today become unacceptible under any circumstances to dissent with the politically correct majority's officially designated opionion.  And for the most part I'm okay with that, but something about that last one (not the "and so forth") has always kind of rubbed me the wrong way, and today I managed to figure out why.

I am strongly prone to the use of forceful rhetoric in my passionate argument of those (many) issues where I have a deep conviction as to my beliefs.  I often swear, even more often use violent imagery, and sometimes even do things like punch my other palm or beat my fist once or twice on my chest, just for the sake of emphasis.  While I've seen other Zero-Tolerance Workplace Violence Policies before, this is the first time I can recall having read one explicitly call out verbal belligerence as something to avoid...while this policy was fairly apparently a "reasonable for the sake of nobody wants to get punched," rather than "zero-tolerance for the sake of avoiding litigation in case someone punches someone else and we are perceived as not having condemned the action strongly enough", and I'm thus fairly certain that I couldn't be held as being in violation of it unless I actually used genuine threats or the like, it was still something of a shock to recognize that I had sort of breached this policy before it was even explained to me, and so I considered it at some length (and fortunately was never called upon to sign "I agree", only "I acknowledge receipt of this policy"; I've been known to take the former with disproportionate seriousness and am not prone to signing it when any misgivings occur to me, even if they are very tentative).  It took until after a lengthy walk around the neighborhood, and then most of the way through my bus ride home, before I had fully digested the mental meal, and came to the conclusion that it spurred me to, one which I thought was important enough to be worth blogging about.

I've had many heroes and inspirations before, and today I asked myself which historical figure I most want to be like; usually I automatically answer questions like that with my three stock admirations: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and Mohandas Gandhi.  But having phrased the question in this particular way, I decided that these answers would not suffice; Lincoln believed in the redeeming value of hard work as I do not, King was profoundly religions, and Gandhi was committed to living pacifistically under even the worst of circumstances, a degree of acceptance and endurance that I can only dream of being capable of.  So while I continue to consider all three paragons of humanity, I don't outright seek to emulate them.  Thusly, on the spur of the moment, I came up with two new, at least semi-accurate answers to my own question:  Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.  I've always idolized the idealized version of the American Revolution, but of its best-known architects, Washington was a soldier and Hamilton did money stuff, so even if their efforts were necessary to the success of the rebellion and the fledgling nation, I don't consider them terribly good role models, as war and finance are not things I ever consider admirable no matter what benefits they may bring.  Jefferson, however, wrote the Declaration of Independence, and Franklin drafted the Bill of Rights; both of them were idea men, visionary statesmen (and in Franklin's case also a scientist) who argued passionately in favor of ideas which they believed could change the world, and succeeded in doing so.  Both of these will do splendidly, at least for now, as examples for me to follow.  They wrote words that forged a new nation in line with their principles; I want to do the same, and once again found a regime which better satisfies my ideology, regardless of possible opposition from the ruling monolith whose thumb I have been under for longer than I can stand.

So, speaking of bloody insurrections against the resident evils of unjust government, you can see why I might think that a blanket prohibition against violence, in a workplace just by way of example, isn't the best idea ever.  But that's not it exactly...it's not like I'm pro-violence or anything, even in the face of fairly serious provocation.  I don't believe that killing people solves much of anything, ever; much as the idea of toppling ivory towers and making the lifeblood of oppressors run in the streets may occasionally appeal to me, I have zero desire to actually live out such a harrowing experience, even if success in my stated aims was guaranteed after a price in exclusively-villainous lives was paid.  So it's not that I'm saying we should have violence in the workplace - but I am, very decisively, saying we shouldn't have workplace policies prohibiting violence.  Why?  Because I believe they have the opposite of their intended effect.

H.P. Lovecraft once wrote "The oldest and greatest emotion of man is fear, and the oldest and greatest fear of man is fear of the unknown".  I myself once wrote words to the general effect of "anybody can get used to anything in time".  Put these together, and the message is clear - you can adapt to whatever you may experience in life, but it's very difficult to deal with something that's completely new and foreign to you.  When something you never expected, maybe never even imagined, suddenly happens, there's an effect of paralyzing shock, a deer-frozen-in-the-headlights reaction as your brain scrambles to cope with the sudden occurrence of the unthinkable.  And so, if there's some form of misery we don't want to have to deal with in our daily lives, the worst thing we can possibly do is make that thing unthinkable - because that means that when it happens (and Murphy's Law dictates that, inevitably, it will), we have no hope of handling it effectively, because we're too stunned by the simple fact that it happened.  Thusly, in creating a violence-free zone through the use of laws and policies, we do not protect the people in that zone from violence.  Anyone can break that policy at any time, with consequences they may or may not even care about; a suicidal, nihilistic madman with nothing to lose is a thing that can totally exist (more and more frequently, in our society's current state of economic and interpersonal desperation), and laws or punishments ranging from expulsion to imprisonment to even death mean nothing to such an individual.  Instead of protecting people, all you do with a policy like this is insulate them from the experience of violence, and give them no opportunity to learn strategies to cope with it.  What happens if you're never exposed to chicken pox as a kid?  Same principle here; if you grow up in a bubble and never face any risks, you'll be completely unprepared to defend yourself when something finally does go wrong in your world.

Thusly, as a person who never wants to be a victim of violence, I want these anti-violence policies to go away.  They don't actually work, they make things worse rather than better, and they encourage a false sense of security instead of providing actual aid in keeping people safe.  Ultimately, I agree with the writers of these policies; I want to see a day when everyone can be absolutely sure that violence will not strike in the middle of their workday.  But I have no such confidence now; those policies are empty promises of my safety, which a single fist or bullet could shatter at any moment.  What will protect us?  The dawning of a day in which all people have become utterly inured to the threat of violence, being so completely comfortable with the possibility that it will happen, so confident that they can handle whatever comes, that there's no reason for anyone to ever bother initiating a conflict.  Bullies and brutes use violence as a tool of coercion because it works; in my opinion, it is one of the very few things which actually does.  So in order to feel safe against it, I would need to see it robbed of its persuasive power, and the only way that can ever happen is if our entire society becomes completely devoid of the fear of violence, instead seeing it as just another unfortunate reality to be handled competently if it happens.  We already have this kind of attitude, toward things like tornadoes and building fires; we know they're unlikely, but we make plans to prevent panic and ensure smooth traversal of such vicissitudes.  Man-made disasters should be viewed in exactly the same way, because they are no less inevitable; in any society where every human isn't a mind-controlled robot, some percentage of people are going to snap and lash out in sudden ultraviolence, and we need to accept that as a reality to be dealt with, not obsessively litigated against.

If nobody cares whether violence happens or not, then it almost never will, because it won't be an effective tool for getting what its wielder wants.  So I want to see people develop thick skins and confident survival strategies; that way, the next atrocity that happens will be the first step to ensuring that atrocities will eventually stop happening altogether.