Taxation, theft, and “deserving”

Let us consider an idea that perhaps isn’t really worthy of consideration, the idea that taxation is theft. This is a common idea in certain libertarian political philosophies, so I don’t really need to reinvent the wheel. I found a perfectly good rebuttal upon a basic search.

The article suggests three different ways to interpret the claim that taxation is theft:

  1. Theft is a legal crime, and so is taxation.
  2. Taxation is morally wrong for the same reasons that theft is morally wrong.
  3. Taxation is pragmatically bad for the same reasons that theft is pragmatically bad–e.g. claiming it depresses GDP.

I skimmed the comments to see if there were any other interpretations, and concluded we should add one more:

4. Taxation resembles theft in that there is an involuntary exchange of wealth under threat of force.

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Linkspam: July 11th, 2017

It’s time for my monthly linkspam, just a collection of articles I found interesting from the past month.

In the Shadow of the Holodeck – A couple of months ago, my linkspam featured an article by Ian Bogost called “Video games are better without stories“.  This article here reinterprets Bogost as saying “most of even the successful cases of storytelling in video games are, formally speaking, extremely unambitious.”  That is, successful video game stories are still very traditional in structure, rather than offering infinite branching possibilities.  It turns out that people like traditional story structures.  IMHO the problem with branching story structures is that it’s difficult to traverse them in a Hamiltonian path, so you either miss some content or you replay some content.  This reminds me of Scott McCloud’s predictions about infinite canvas webcomics.  Such webcomics exist but it turns out that they’re kind of clunky to actually navigate.

I did end up playing What Remains of Edith Finch, the game that inspired Bogost’s article.  Contrary to what people were saying, this game was extremely literary.  It was a story about stories about death.  But yeah, the structure was almost entirely linear, and it could very well have been told in book form.

Games telling stories? – Here’s another article about whether games tell stories.  It seems to be targeted at people taking games studies 101.  I recommend it to anyone who wants to think about the question more systematically.

An intersex perspective on the trans, intersex, and TERF communities – This is an excellent article that gets into some of the differences in how trans and intersex communities talk about things, and how that can create friction.  Found via Shiv.

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A personal style guide on sex vs gender

It’s common to make a distinguish between biological sex (which includes chromosomes, primary and secondary sexual characteristics, hormones, etc.), and gender (which refers to one’s identity, or to patterns of behavior). The thrust of the distinction is to separate social constructs from biological reality.

This distinction isn’t wrong, exactly, but I have some quibbles. Mainly, I think gender is the bigger and more important concept, the one that you should be referring to in most situations. There are several things that people think of as sex, but which are really components of gender.

Here I will develop my thoughts on the distinction between sex and gender. I’m calling it a “personal style guide” because it describes how I use the terms, but I am not trying to impose this usage on anyone else. I realize some people use the words differently, and there can be some good justifications for this.

Woman vs female

Some people say that “woman” refers to gender, while “female” refers to sex. I think this is incorrect, on both the descriptive and prescriptive level.

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Educating atheists on religious aces

This is being cross-posted to The Asexual Agenda.

Recently, I wrote an article for A Trivial Knot about how aces are affected by Evangelical Christian beliefs about pre-marital sex. This is an important topic, but also an iffy one for me to talk about. While I’m ex-Christian, I’m not ex-Evangelical, and the experiences described are not so similar to my own. Basically, I’m repeating and condensing stories I’ve heard from primary sources, such as the Aces in the Church zine and various bloggers. I worry that maybe I shouldn’t be talking about it at all, except to boost other voices.

But the fact of the matter is that a lot of atheists, especially politically active atheists, already have their own prejudices and presumptions about the experiences of religious aces. I have this platform that reaches a moderate number of progressive atheists, so I feel at least a bit responsible to get them on the right track. Also, atheist activists are not such a friendly group that I want to just send them to primary sources.

This was fresh on my mind at the 2017 SF Ace Unconference, so I attended a session for religious aces. The personal stories shared in that space were confidential and I will keep them that way. I did, however, ask them if they wanted me to share any particular message with my atheist readers.

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Origami: Ace WXYZ

Four intersecting triangles, in the colors purple, white, gray, black
Skewed WXYZ, a model designed entirely by me.  It’s about 6 cm (2.5 in) diameter.

There are two things to talk about in this model.  First, the color scheme is taken directly from the ace flag, which feels timely because last week we were just marching in pride parades.  I really like the color scheme of the flag, and also like how easy it is to make these references even in a very abstract art-form like non-representational origami.

Second, there’s the model’s design.  This is an entirely original design, although it’s based on Tung Ken Lam’s WXYZ Triangles.  Folding diagrams, discussion, and mathematics below the cut.

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Quantum games

Last March, I attended the APS March Meeting, which is the largest annual physics conference in the country (and perhaps world?). During the conference, one of the particularly memorable sessions was about quantum gamification, making games using concepts from quantum physics.

Quantum games are an interesting concept, because usually “physics-based games” are only based on classical physics, specifically gravity and collision. The point of having a physics-based game is to have a relatively complex system where you don’t need to teach players every single detail, because they already have an intuition for how gravity and collision work. But obviously, when it comes to quantum physics, players don’t have an intuition, thus the physics must serve some other purpose.

In most of these games, the nominal purpose is either (a) teach physics, or (b) use player data to help physicists. Although I get the sense that the nominal purpose is not always the true purpose. I’m not that confident in the value of collecting player data, and suspect that the true purpose is more about public outreach. And some of the “outreach” projects kinda felt like they were just a way for physicists to do something fun. Well, whatever persuades people to give you grant money.

Anyways, let’s check out some of these games.

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