Guys in dark alleys shouldn’t get upset if women fear them

I wouldn’t blame a strange woman if she was unnerved by me, a lone guy, if she and I were the only ones walking in a dark alley. I call this the Creepy Default.

This has happened twice, but I was the one unnerved due to doing everything I could not to be creepy (my cane doesn’t help, I suppose). Neither time did the woman walk faster or even appear to notice, but I was flustered.

When I told my friend this, she got upset. She said I wouldn’t hurt anyone and that women have no reason to fear me, alone in an alley.

However, the problem is twofold. [Read more…]

[Mini-fisk] JR Hill, defending monarchy and conflating arguments

ComRes recently carried out a poll for the Sunday Telegraph, asking the question: ‘Do you believe Britain is better off as a monarchy or would be better off as a republic?’ 66% voted monarchy, 17% republic and 17% don’t know. Yet the Observer insists that the Royal Family is outdated. Is it not ironic that, in the name of democracy, the Observer rejects polling suggesting a democratic majority in favour of monarchy? Today, theirs is the minority opinion, and in democracies minority opinions are not carried. So, by all means disagree. We can do that sort of thing in a constitutional monarchy. But perhaps we should admit that it is the republicans who are outdated? (source)

JR Hill doesn’t show us the link of “yet” in his initial comment. A poll showing us what the average person thinks doesn’t contradict an argument from a single person. It doesn’t link in two ways.

First 66% could vote that women should be denied jobs, “yet” a John Stuart Mill could argue differently. That doesn’t tell us who is right in that debate (spoiler: it’s the great Mill), it shows us differing opinions. The “yet” should be replaced by another conjunction, like “and”.

But, that’s still probably wrong because of the second way it doesn’t link.

In saying that the Observer thinks the Royal Family is outdated, the only way for that sentence to link is if the Observer was making a FACTUAL claim based on the same poll data – not a moral argument. It would make sense in this way: “The poll says that 66% voted monarchy… yet the Observer insists the poll says majority voted against monarchy”.

The Observer isn’t arguing how many agree, it’s arguing the idea is unjustified.

Indeed, when Hill says “theirs is a minority opinion”, he again seems to be linking majority with justification of argument. This is an appeal to majority fallacy. And again, the Observer wasn’t describing data which is what Hill is doing and conflating.

Melissa Bachman, hunting and the ethics of outrage

In my latest for The Guardian, I examine the backlash against hunter Melissa Bachman who killed a lion then posted a picture of her successful kill on social media. The backlash, more than the kill itself, worries me. That doesn’t mean I support hunting – I still don’t know my moral position on it – but it does confirm my worry over pile-ons, hate and indications of sexism that poisons much discussion of women on the Internet. [Read more…]

The ethics and integrity of consumer media

I made noises (wrote a Medium post) about maintaining a sense of integrity when reporting and criticising and writing on media that is popularly consumed: particularly tech ones.

It’s really an elongated reaction to the frequent, dirty habit of game and other tech journalists Tweeting pictures of amazing technology, that they didn’t themselves pay for (my follow-up post will argue “not paying” is not the same as “for free”).

I’m ignoring the boring accusations of how it means journalists have been bought by whatever company sent them such swag. I’m interested in what is more essential: that critics and writers and so forth ought not to emulate the base actions of fans.

It doesn’t matter how much they love something – be it an Apple product or the latest Call of Duty – what separates them from every commenter and gamer with a blog, is that they should have a higher (or special) degree of integrity, anchored by their responsibility to us: their readers. When they fail that, they’ve failed their job. And we must learn to recognise it.

(You can probably tell how much I hate all those “unboxing” videos of the latest consoles.)

Engagement rings are bullshit

Engagement rings are bullshit.

My latest for the Guardian was a lighter piece – that actually ties into more deeper elements of my hatred for most things romance – on this.

The comment section is a pleasant (/sarcasm) space of people questioning the usual, irrelevant details of me:

  • Do I really get paid to write this? (Yes)
  • Have I got nothing better to focus on? (I can do many things at the same time and do)
  • Is this a letter/gripe because I’ve been dumped (No, if it was and the relationship hinged on jewellery then that’s a relationship I’d be glad to be out of)
  • I must be obviously single (Not that it’s anyone’s business but I’m in a happy, long-term relationship with an amazing woman who laughed at the comments)
  • I’m a cheapskate (Well done for proving my thesis that marketers for diamond companies can get their customers to shame men/others into purchases of a tradition the marketers started and for measuring love according to shiny rocks).

etc.

Some people seem fascinated with my ugly mug staring at them. I found that sweet.

Gay love burns

Indeed. According to a Christian group in Australia, October’s terrible bushfires were caused by the pesky gays trying to be all equal and love like other humans and shit.

The charmingly-named Christian Snippets Australia has sent many emails to New South Wales lawmakers, since there has been an effort to legalise same-sex marriage.

The group, says Andrew Potts, warned:

..that recent ‘bushfires and gale force winds’ were a ‘prelude’ to what would happen if a bill to legalize same-sex marriage is passed by the NSW Upper House.

As usual, with the threats, their inner-poet comes out as with the warning to the state Premier: “The email warned NSW state Premier Barry O’Farrell to ‘quash the bill or be quashed’ himself.”

Charming.

The terrible destruction caused by the fires won’t be solved by preventing gay people from marrying; but of course mindsets so embedded in finding moral faults via supernatural morality will always have refracted answers. The moral stick bends in the waters of faith, meaning no proper answer to real questions can be solved. Clarity and recognising why these fires occurred – from a scientific and evidence-based political perspective – will solve and prevent this, not prayer or recognised homophobia.

Dear “fans”, we need to have a talk…

Fans of a thing embarrass other fans of the same thing.

In this case: Angry gamers do something stupid that embarrasses other gamers. It’s a story we hear so often, these stories have become an indistinguishable mess of frustrating idiocy; a wrong not merely anchored by entitlement and immaturity, but damage to the very thing we all love: the creation of beautiful things.

The latest is a “petition” to get Gamespot reviewer Carolyn Petit fired from the site. This time it’s not for the usual reason of a “low” score (which sometimes sees reviewers get death threats, even for films); instead it concerns her mention that the game is misogynistic. Readers claim Petit has been pushing her “agenda” (adore that word) and politics for some time and this is the last straw(man) or something. [Read more…]

Suicide, stigma and social media

A US sports analyst chartered his decision to commit suicide.

He didn’t have any of the usual reasons people commit suicide: ill-health, losing autonomy, etc; it was made rationally (as rationally as is possible in such circumstances), on his 60th birthday, and done to prevent any chance of deterioration.

After reading about, I recognised how it touched on a number of themes relating to social media, the way we document our lives, the way some have documented their deaths and what this could mean for reducing suicide and its stigma.

I examined it more in the Guardian.

(Comments are closed on it, unfortunately.)

 

 

Punishment and criminal HIV infection

A recent case in SA raised some questions for me about justice and stigma, and how – in some cases, like HIV – the two can’t be easily separated. That they relate at all was surprising enough.

In my latest at Big Think, I try to outline some dimensions some might be overlooking in their need to see “justice done”.

It’s interesting to note how often people clamour for justice, for something to be done, when a situation arises and yet, how the demand for justice is its own downfall. Or rather unmitigated hysteria. For example, we know that criminalising sex work and drugs – at the very least marijuana – has little basis in reason, but plenty of basis in popularity. As Plato hinted at, laws in democracies are made to be popular not right.

But when justice becomes synonymous with revenge, with knee-jerk moralistic action – rather than thought-out, evidence-based approaches that will help everyone in the society, that will reduce suffering – then we’re no longer talking about justice. We’re talking about mob mentality.

I’m reminded of a powerful scene in The West Wing where – no spoilers – a character’s child is harmed in some way by bad people. The character trolls another in saying they should revise whether capital punishment should be nation-wide and mandatory (for certain crimes). The second character points out that what the other man will do as a father, versus what he should do as a servant of the people, are in conflict; the law is there to be the voice of the latter, for the benefit of all, not a tool to benefit the heightened emotions of a grief-stricken father. What use is law when its wielded by the loudest, the strongest, the most grief-stricken?

This is one of the reasons I consider capital punishment to be immoral – to some degree – since it has no retraction possibility; it’s always closing the door on backtracking our possible mistakes. This doesn’t mean I think capital punishment is the worst punishment – I think, along with John Stuart Mill, that (life) imprisonment can be “a living tomb”, especially as we know reports out of places like Guantanamo, as the incredible Molly Crabapple showed.

Anyway, justice as always is complicated and we mustn’t let our desire for it overshadow its actual purpose in being effective.