

Saturday, October 29, 2016

Analyzing the Ballot







US Senate



US House - MD District 5



Judicial Elections


Calvert County Board of Education




MD Constitutional Amendment



And I do like the special election provision in the amendment.



Tuesday, October 25, 2016

NaNoWriMo 2016

So, I'm doing National Novel Writing Month again this year.

It'll be an interesting challenge, particularly when I compare it to last year's victory. I'm fairly certain that being underway for the entire month actually helped me win. Making time to write might be a little harder than usual, but making it a part of an established, heavily regimented routine was much easier than coming up with a daily routine that included the writing. No outside Internet probably cut down on the distractions, too.

Also, last year's story allowed me to focus heavily on world-building and dramatic battle scenes. In fact, it now needs what amounts to a complete rewrite, since I completely ignored my nominal protagonist in favor of writing cool things about the battles going on around him. I debated making that rewrite my project for this year, but I'd rather write something new from scratch than wonder whether deciding to include entire paragraphs from last year allows me to add those paragraphs to my word count.

Which doesn't mean I'm completely abandoning last year. I'll finish that rewrite eventually (maybe), and I'd always intended to use the fantasy world I created as a setting for more stories in the future. So, I get to take one of the minor characters from last year and write a prequel that talks about their backstory... and adds more details about multiple universes, and the magic system, and other things that have always been part of how I looked at this world, but weren't relevant last year. That's the fun part.

The challenging part is that this is a much more character driven story than last year. Basically all of the conflicts I've got right now are internal affairs or personality driven - I doubt I can even get much in the way of personal combat out of this, never mind the fleet combat that drove up last year's word count. Writing about personal trauma and how people react to it is... certainly possible, but it also makes me quite a bit more likely to question how well I'm doing or agonize about minor details of word choice and reaction. Which isn't good when you're trying to get lots of words down quickly.

Also, is it too much to ask for my favorite authors to not release new books in their series during November? I don't need more distractions... (and I'll probably happily read them anyway).

Monday, October 17, 2016

Learning to Live with Others

I would say that a large part of developing maturity is learning how to interact with other adults in a reasonable fashion. There's a wide variety of different expectations, depending on where you are, who you're interacting with, and why you're interacting with them, but there are also some basic principles that will apply almost anywhere, and several general scenarios that can appear in almost any context.

One of those scenarios is dealing with someone who is being rude and offensive. Ideally, one can ask such a person to not do it again, and they'd honor that request... unfortunately, there are a lot of people who actually like being offensive, and don't care enough about what others think to even try to modify their behavior.

There are two ways to deal with this problem: Tolerate the offensive behavior in order to continue interacting with the person in question, or refuse to interact with them until or unless they act better. It turns out that neither is necessarily more mature than the other - in fact, I would argue that knowing how much you can tolerate and being willing to say something when you've hit your limit is more mature than bottling any resulting frustration up until you explode.

And it is entirely reasonable, when disengaging isn't an option, to note that you have a problem and ask those around you to help. It turns out that demanding other people unilaterally solve problems not caused by them is sometimes a bit much to demand.

That brings us to the other half of the problem: the person who's acting out in the first place. Does anyone really want to tell me that that person is being reasonable and mature in refusing to show consideration for the people around them?

A lot of the people that act offensively will react poorly when called out on it, and attempt to argue that the offended party's lack of toleration is indicative of a lack of maturity (or even mental stability) on their part. The irony of asking other people to show maturity and consideration when they appear incapable of doing the same is apparently lost on them.

Also, it may be easier for bystanders to try and get the reasonable, mature person to show more maturity... but that doesn't make giving up on getting the complete asshole to show a minimal level of maturity the right thing to do. It's also rather inconsistent to then blame the mature person for deciding that showing more toleration is too hard and not doing it - they made the same decision those bystanders did; it's just that the most reasonable action to take differs depending on how one is involved.

In the end, while some consideration for inappropriate or offensive behavior is going to be required, it is also not mature to repeatedly engage in such behavior, nor is it reasonable to demand that only one party in any interaction shoulder the entire burden for being tolerant and mature.

Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Choosing a Side

One of the common points one sees in a political debate is the equivalency between both sides. There's always one person who dismisses both major parties as hopelessly flawed - whether they call for a third party or for fundamental changes to our political system depends on the person in question, but that point is less important.

Of course, each side's partisans will quite happily blast such people for promoting what they see as a false equivalency. To them, it's quite easy to see that the two are not the same - that their side is better and the other side is worse.

I normally side with those that label it a false equivalency. Simply proving that both sides are flawed is not sufficient to prove that they are both equally flawed. The former is quite simple (and blindingly obvious, unfortunately). The latter involves digging through a wide variety of issues, scandals, and arguments to determine how many flaws there are and how much weight each should have. That's quite a bit more complicated, and very difficult to do without letting one's biases run away with one's judgment.

It's also very common to come up with some handy shortcut that simplifies the process. I don't necessarily disagree with the idea that once you've found an unacceptable flaw, or a benefit that you can't do without, then there may not be much point in wasting time trying to nail down more details. The problem is that not considering the rest of the data isn't a good thing; if there's more deal-breakers hiding in other issues, you might have to adjust your criteria for a deal-breaker or start figuring out who else you can turn to. It also makes it more difficult to defend your judgments if you haven't looked at some of the issues, of course (although given the wide range of topics, it's also going to happen at some point).

Better yet, it's possible for two people to run through the same set of data and justifiably come to two different conclusions. Just because I don't place the same weight on something like gun rights as a conservative person would doesn't make either of us right or wrong. That value judgment, like many others about the role of the government or the relative value of our rights, is difficult to adjudicate with reason. I can explain why I value something, explain why it matters, explain what else it affects... but in the end, it's still possible for someone to say that they know all that and point out that they still don't care as much about it as they do about other aspects of the issue. (For gun rights, the example would be me stating that more effort to reduce gun deaths may be worth increased restrictions on the right to gun ownership, while someone else might value the gun rights more.)

Even that is a point that can be argued, and it can be worthwhile to ask people why they feel that way, but such debates tend to stop being about data and start being about philosophy fairly quickly. In the end, the best way to answer the question about which side is better usually involves being specific about which criteria we're comparing.

Sunday, October 2, 2016

Media Bias and Evidence

A lot of people who don't like the way the country is going tend to blame the media either for not mentioning the problems they see or for covering irrelevant non-problems in too much detail.

A similarly large group will refuse to believe anything from a media source they believe is biased - and their standard for bias tends to be whether it agrees with their view of the world or not.

Let's get one thing out of the way: The media is going to be biased. Which issues they cover, how they cover them, or any number of other things can all create a false impression without a single lie being told. Sometimes that can even happen unintentionally if the reporter feels strongly about the issue and doesn't think carefully about how they might misinterpret or misrepresent.

But there's another point here: attacking an argument based on the source and not the content is still an ad hominem - a fallacious argument. There's no exception built into that for untrustworthy sources, because even they can be right sometimes.

Sometimes acting like there is such an exception is a useful shortcut. I don't worry about taking apart every Breitbart article that disagrees with my views; the belief that they are biased and likely wrong is sufficient to maintain my confidence in my opinions.

If I want to prove that point, though - whether to myself or someone else - then a higher standard of evidence than "I think they're biased" is required. That's where I have to figure out how they misrepresented the truth, explain how their evidence also fits a different conclusion, or talk about the parts of the issue that they didn't cover and why they're relevant. That can easily turn into a debate of its own, with one side talking about other aspects and interpretations and the other defending their original characterization. It's worth noting, also, that stating that a media company or specific reporter could be biased or has reason to want a specific conclusion is certainly relevant, as it applies to a motive... but is not by any means a complete argument, until information about how they misrepresented the truth is presented.

Also, the argument that a media source is biased in a specific way or to a specific degree is just as much of a specific point subject to debate as any individual article or issue's coverage is. One can certainly try to treat it as a fait accompli, and given the way most people view even those sources they agree with, it might be accepted without complaint. But even that doesn't make it automatically true.

In the end, frankly, there's no easy solution for the problems that bias in the media represents. Any solution other than a well-educated populace that's committed to the truth and to defending it properly seems like a patch. All of us, ultimately, need to hold ourselves to that standard.