news – Jenneral HQ

Now, Less Than Ever

On my corner of Tumblr, there’s a good meme going around, inspired possibly by something Matt Yglesias did a few years back? And it’s been a good workout for my brain, now that school doesn’t seem real anymore because the entire world sort of went on hiatus.

Anyways, so you know how every time there’s a crisis, there’s a bunch of people on Twitter saying “if we only had implemented [my preferred policy] years ago, this could have been totally averted”?¹ The idea is to flip that for the sake of nuance and intellectual honesty. To think of policies you unreservedly support that would have made things a lot worse now, or conversely, ideas that you absolutely will not support, that would have absolutely helped.

I’ve thought of a few things that fit this profile for me:

- - I want higher dependence on mass transit and a severe reduction of car culture. But if more households did not have cars and were dependent on public transportation to get around, then our transit systems would have been truly terrible vectors of disease. Instead, buses currently are near-empty here in Waterloo, meaning that if you absolutely had to go someplace, it’s not as dangerous to use. (I think there’s still decent ridership at peak hours, which is bad. But it could be a lot worse.)
    
    NUMTOT asked for “angry reacts only”, but where is the lie :^(

- - Downsizing your fridge and doing near-daily grocery runs for your food is a fantastic way to increase the freshness of what you eat and reduce food waste. But without the ability to shop for a weeks’ worth of food at a time, households would need to be in more frequent contact with the community.

- - Relatedly, as a #millennial, the whole #supportlocal lifestyle where I go to 4 specialty grocers for specific ingredients instead of one (1) Loblaw is very appealing to me. Now, the thought of visiting even two different stores back to back makes my hair stand on end and I’m very grateful for big-box stores that sell most of what I need.
  - Mass surveillance. Hoo boy, to say that I am not a fan would be a giant understatement. But I can’t deny that contact/proximity tracing would have helped prevent the spread, even if that feels like pulling teeth to admit. I am very angry that many countries are working on developing such tools, and extremely concerned about the further erosion of privacy that this symbolizes as well as the fact that, let’s be real, it won’t be rolled back.
    
    I’m anticipating some quibble about whether surveillance at our current fidelity level is actually effective, but I’m obviously against higher quality surveillance that is 100% effective even more than I am against our current level of surveillance.² Basically, surveillance will help save lives and I’m big mad about that.

What are some things that you support, that would have been pretty bad?

To be clear, I’m not bashing on the “[my preferred policy] would have solved this crisis years ago” folk – such commentary is often valuable and true, and I do not agree with the characterisation that that is opportunistic/in bad taste. [↩]
Okay, so this might not be strictly true. It looks like clumsy surveillance screws over more innocents than having more comprehensive profiles, which might be a worse state of affairs on balance. But in case it wasn’t obvious, I would consider both clumsy and sophisticated state surveillance to be worse than no state surveillance. [↩]

Articles of Interest, December 2018-January 2019

Articles of Interest is a bimonthly post on things that I found on the internet that are interesting. The intent is for there to be 2-3 weeks of “lag” time between when I read the articles and when I review them, for hype to die down on any given hot topic. This is why this post is being published near the end of February. Featured articles aren’t necessarily published in the titular two-month period; that’s just when I read the pieces for the first time.

I’m going to do something slightly different for this edition. Instead of looking at the articles that are the most “interesting” per se, I’m going to use them mostly as a proxy to talk about what’s going on in my personal life. Cool? Cool.

Gwern on nicotine

When someone or something says that “nicotine” is harmful and you drill down to the original references for their claims, the references often turn out to actually be talking about tobacco rather than nicotine gums or patches… Technically, nicotine is not significantly addictive, as nicotine administered alone does not produce significant reinforcing properties.

This is actually a piece that I first read in November, but to be fair I’ve reread it half a dozen times between December and January. For a while now, I’ve been idly thinking about experimenting with nicotine for a) being a more alert and competent student in 8:30 classes and b) positive habit formation, and this is the post that made me start to do more research on it in earnest. I won’t bother summarizing all the interesting things about nicotine here because it’s not worth the effort when Gwern’s writeup is so stellar. But here are some more personal insights:

Even though now that I’ve done enough research to be entirely convinced that nicotine lozenges are incredibly safe, and resolved to take them in an incredibly responsible and safe manner to reduce the already minuscule chance of addiction (never two days in a row, maximum 3 times a week), I still haven’t worked up the courage to buy them on Amazon. This is weird, because I didn’t have nearly the same amount of reservations when it came to starting caffeine, alcohol, and more exotic substances. I think that this is the case because of two main reasons.

One, the anti-tobacco lobby did a pretty good job. What can I say, the experience of having to design a poorly researched anti-smoking poster in fourth grade must have really stuck with me. The second thing is that tobacco is low-status to someone in my social class, moreso than coffee, alcohol, and weed. I remember getting super defensive about trying it out when I first broached the subject with my friend group. I literally think that some of them would have reacted more positively if I told them that I was contemplating starting up a coke habit. And, well, status and class is a very powerful reinforcer of norms, who would have thought.

How To Build a Lumenator (And some other articles on winter illumination)

Once upon a time, a friend was sad. Specifically, they had seasonal affective disorder. They tried to fix it by adding lights to their room during the winter.It didn’t work.They tried adding a LOT of light.It worked.They called the giant bundle of lights they assembled a Luminator. Other people wondered how they, too, might summon a sun into their living room. The task was not exactly complicated or hard, but it was a little confusing and inconvenient. Instructions were passed around by word of mouth, and individuals cobbled together luminators in their own homes. Some of them has seasonal affective disorder, and some just liked their rooms to feel line sunshine all the time.Bit by bit, people’s lives grew brighter.

Aaaaaand, now I have a lumenator!

It pumps out around 10,000 lumens, and it’s bright enough that when you turn it on in the middle of the day with the windows open, it still manages to make the room significantly brighter. I’ve had it for a month now and while I can’t say for sure whether or not it’s made my SAD go away, it does make me ridiculously happy and I will enthusiastically LUMENATE the rest of my house bit by bit.

I first came across this concept in Eliezer Yudowsky’s book Inadequate Inequilibra, which I highly recommend.

[NSFW – cw for female breasts] Posts wrongly purged by Tumblr’s NSFW ban, like this one

Another one:

I’ve been collecting these posts as they come up with the intent of writing a post-mortem after the dust settles, and I’m up to 30ish. I’m very glad that I did, because there were some important pieces and criticisms that are now gone.

There were shitposts, and people talking about their mixed feelings for this platform that they grew up and into themselves on, and informative pieces on the broader implications and why tumblr did this in the first place.

I’ll start on that soon, it’s been a while since I did any sort of interesting longform.

“Where’s My Cut?”: On Unpaid Emotional Labor, Jess Zimmerman

We are told frequently that women are more intuitive, more empathetic, more innately willing and able to offer succor and advice. How convenient that this cultural construct gives men an excuse to be emotionally lazy. How convenient that it casts feelings-based work as “an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depths of our female character.”…Housework is not work. Sex work is not work. Emotional work is not work. Why? Because they don’t take effort? No, because women are supposed to provide them uncompensated, out of the goodness of our hearts.

Since I’ve moved back to Waterloo for my school term, I’ve started hosting some bi-weekly salons to try to mitigate the damage academia is doing to my sense of intellectual curiosity. We started experimenting with doing readings before the meetups and this is the one that I picked to go along with our topic, emotional labour. In a more ideal universe I would have assigned the metafilter thread instead, but we’re all tired students and no one really has the time for 50 additional pages of readings.

I was thinking that everyone would agree with Zimmerman at the beginning of the session and I could then lead people to a more nuanced “actually maybe what Zimmerman is promoting also isn’t that great” state, but what ended up happening was that people were dunking on the article right away. At first I felt a bit put out by this because oh no I couldn’t flaunt my intellectual superiority, but honestly being surrounded by really smart and critical people is cool af, so I got over it pretty fast and now I basically don’t come to salon with any sort of agenda in mind and I just bask in everyone’s conversation. It’s probably an even better thing for my mental health than the lumenators are. If any of my salon members are reading this, sorry for thinking that you were dumber than you actually were 🙁

[NSFW – cw for blood, and graphic bodily harm] Welcome to Hell World

In January of 2005 in the northern Iraqi town of Tal Afar, Samar, five years old at the time, was riding in the back seat of her parents’ car as they returned from bringing her young brother to the hospital. It was getting dark, and nearing curfew, and her father, likely aware of this, was driving faster than normal. Fearing that the driver was a suicide bomber, an army patrol in the area that evening were given permission to open fire and so they did because that is what army patrols do.

I understand if based on the excerpt you already feel tired and don’t want to click through; if I didn’t know the author I would feel the same way. Luke O’Neil’s newsletter is always gut-wrenching and never fails to ruin my day, but I never fail to click on it the instant in appears in my mailbox. He’s got a writing style that hooks me in the belly and he’s good at humanizing the people who aren’t being humanized enough, cutting through the bullshittier parts of the culture war woven by those in privileged coastal enclaves to tell you about the blood and the sweat and the suffering of those actally being crushed by what’s happening in the world today.

If I had to choose only one newsletter to subscribe to, hell world would be it, and I’m so happy that I’ve found it even though it only ever makes me sad.

Thus concludes this ed of articles of interest, hopefully I’ll have a “real” blog post up before the next one hits!

On Toronto Police at Pride

So. Speaking as someone who identifies as queer (NOT that this should matter because purity politics are the worst), I think Pride Toronto’s decision to ban policemen in uniforms from pride this year is pretty gross.

I can’t believe that after all the outcry about Rob Ford not going to pride, we’re sticking up our noses at the thought of the establishment showing their support for us. I don’t understand how dialogues and reparations can even begin if one side refuses to even be in the same space as the other. Common ground is absolutely essential for building rapport, and we’re destroying what little we have.

And if you believe that all policemen live in insular, hate-filled bubbles, why would you want to deny them a chance to leave it? And if you think that the awful relationship that police have historically had with the queer community justifies banning them, why doesn’t this argument extend to mayors and prime ministers?

Regarding queer people who have had a bad experience with policemen and feel genuine fear at having to be near them, I absolutely empathize. They’ve constantly turned a blind eye to our pain, and punished us disproportionately through the over-surveillance of places that we gather.

And if it was any other city, I would think that that’s a pretty big deal. But look, Toronto is really, fantastically, gay. The pride parade isn’t your only option during pride month, to celebrate being you. There’s dozens of really cool smaller events going on through the month, those that aren’t as corporate and visible as the parade. I encourage you to go to them, even if you don’t specifically need a safe space away from cops. But policemen had one event that they had to go to and participate in. That number is now zero. This isn’t progress.

I remember the world being amazed at the wonderful photos of our rainbow-decked police force every summer, a symbol of Canada’s real, amazing progressiveness. As a young person coming to terms with my queerness, it meant the world to me that my country and my institutions would support me, even if my family wouldn’t.

The thought that these photos won’t happen this year breaks my heart. I don’t like the messages that this sends – that police and uniforms aren’t to be trusted by the queer community*, and that the queer community is picky and difficult to work with (in the case of any organization or institution that was thinking of helping us).

If you agree with me, help me make a difference. Take a moment out of your day and jot out a tweet or shoot a Facebook message at Pride Toronto. give arguments, let them know that the people against this decision aren’t just racists and Facebook trolls. pride’s still a while away, i’m sure we can change this if we put our minds to it.

*Ok look, this is true. I don’t want to make any excuses for the gross negligence that is the way the Toronto Police Force treats the queer (and other minority) communities. But I don’t think the answer lies in a withdrawal from their services.