Sep 30 to Nov 8
Up next: carbonara, as soup.
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"Sodomy I & II Defendent Erects Backdoor to Parliament via Port Dickson - Blocked by Plaintiff, Twitterati, Veterans, and Jesus"
#headlinesthatdidnothappen
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Going for a short run to stimulate myself.
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Konsep Sejarah Melayu jauh lebih luas daripada Negara Malaysia - kedua-duanya tiada berkaitan tetapi ianya selau dipolitikkan. 😛
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(Ethical) principles are like dust and starlight to me. They come, they go, it's just part of the universe, not something I really identify with. But they are empirically observable (behaviours in people).
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Enforced writing - because I like to explicitly manage my memory. Most of these are thoughts from today's jog. It takes 90 minutes to mostly walk 10 kilometers. I am in good health in the grand scheme eight billion, but I am not performing well in terms of being competitive within the high-risk envelope of entrepreneuring leadership in the developed world - one in this bracket, ought to be significantly stronger than I am.
I have been rather short on sleep, of late. Rote discipline ensures that I am able to stuff just enough nutrition (including supplements) and stimulants (caffeine) into into myself that I can be rudimentarily alert and functional at work, despite deoptimised sleep phasing. Sleep is intermittently recovered.
The demands of work vary, of course, between entire days per month of cleaning floors and utensils, and miscellaneous tasks such as figuring out how to optimally repair misfitting bolts installed on doors whose frames have fallen over time. Work on marketing is especially challenging given the current forcing functions. The work, of course pays for itself in terms of information.
I have lived a good life without much suffering since I graduated from high school. These years followed a very brief period of examining the degrees of cultural variations between human populations of similar demographics, yet separated only by a few dozen kilometers in the late nineties. Within a few years of that, I benefited much by then deciphering the information structures of consciousness, and also the architecture of university education syllabi. Following graduation, I turned my time to a long, slow, retirement amid lower priorities - particularly the study of commerce and politics, in my country of birth - subjects which I had systematically postponed for the years before that.
These days, as I can afford to, I make a point to regularly engage with the concerns of those around me who are deeply integrated with local society (generally, I do not believe myself to be one such person - succeeding only in engagement with the community to the extent that keeps me informed of my surroundings).
Over the course of civilisation, there are few voices which say anything truly new. Those who identify primarily with their culture, are outspoken about it. Those who identify primarily with pain or pleasure (empaths, and celebrities), are outspoken about those experiences. As fond as I am of my neighbouring humans on this planet, I do not for the most part, find these little variances to be intellectually stimulating - always, the same old features, packaged in different meat.
Given these thoughts, which remind me of how I have thought about my experiences in the world, I return myself then to the mundanities of daily interaction with my peers.
Off, we go now, back to work.
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Comment on someone's advice on human resource management: "Generally I agree. However (prepare for mansplaining, hehe), I don't accept many complaints from staff in small, new companies which have difficult targets. I generally counsel out staff who aren't interested in the provided targets, given that the kind of company I am in, exists to filter in only the staff who will perform at a certain level of efficiency. The entire enterprise is built on the gamble of finding those people, or failing. :)"
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Civics Education: totally lacking in Malaysia. And so, many people spend the first few years of life reinventing the wheel... on how to vote; how to talk to MPs; how to talk to girlfren lah; boss lah; same same...
#temaharini
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Is it a good day to die? Every day is a good day to die. Back to work. We have lots to do.
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Syrian in Malaysian airport:
THANK YOU
My forum comment:
"Well, if his ulterior motive is...
(a) to maximise his own profit without regard for others... then he is clever;
(b) to request for some sort of moral justice... then he is a fool;
(c) to raise the profile of refugees everywhere for globally better treatment... then he is a martyr for a good cause."
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Forum comment:
//
- "the lady on the bus needs to cover up"
- "the child needs to go back to school"
- "the criminal needs punishment"
- "the madman needs medication"
These are lens framing the issue as "what the individual wants," whereas what is really being asserted is, "what society wants from the individual." I disagree that it's semantics - the underlying propositions are very different.
:
)
//
Take two:
"I don't think the balance is a matter if opposing forces (between i and ii/iii). Grit (i) is a matter of sustained effort under X circumstances. Individual centricity (ii) says the subject should always decide what X is. Communal centricity (iii) says other people should decide what X is. The dichotomy is between who gets to decide (ii vs iii).
In another recent thread, I was discussing the language form of "so-and-so *needs* to undergo/do such-and-such." When we use that language in the second or third-person, really we're exerting (iii), and when we say "I need to do such-and-such," we're exerting (ii).
The cute part is noticing then that all the following situations have the same form of (iii):
- "the woman on the bus needs to cover up"
- "the child needs to quit sex and go back to school"
- "the angry man needs friends"
- "the bad colleague needs counselling"
- "the criminal needs help"
In none of those cases do we actually say what the subject wants. 😁
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Nah, delayed effects of US monetary expansion. Inflation never ends. First you horde it on Wall Street, then you bail out Wall Street, then you raise wages. Rinse and repeat.
:P
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Please don't tell me "Islamification of Malaysian politics is no one's fault," 😛. It's been complicit in Mahathir's agenda since the 70s lah. He pushes for racial polarisation. To subvert him, his competitors* pushed for religious polarisation, and he has had to engage with the competition. The reason he can't disengage from religious politics is because his explicit policy direction is racial polarisation, and the Constitution ties race to religion. He is stuck. He chose the path. Religious polarisation didn't begin with Mahathir, but the path he chose cannot avoid it. Unless you amend the Constitution further**.
Footnotes:
[* within his chosen racial block]
[** or have explicit messaging and policy implementations to depolarise racial statements in the current Constitution]
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Commission for startups?
Why is this under the communications & multimedia portfolio? This is an industrial matter ... /o\
Addendum: as a strategic priority, I'd like it to move under primary industries.
Addendum 2: OK, I forgot about the Ministry of Entrepreneur Development Kementerian Pembangunan Usahawan LOL
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Any commonality between us is purely coincidental.
" Tesla must “implement mandatory procedures and controls to oversee all of Elon Musk’s communications regarding the Company made in any format.” "
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NAP TIME. Data entry is exhausting work.
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Laundry
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Based on the reviews I'm hoping that Venom is devoid of the pretentious emoting that makes Marvel movies feel like they were produced by Disney.
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Drama is a form of analog computation, concerned with security between systems. Maybe we will always be stuck with it. But I hope it evolves out of existence within a few millenia.
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Forum comment: " Just saw the Venom movie. You may have noticed that it's criticised in reviews for lacking in complexity. My partner for the viewing also thought the character lacked development. I thought the character was sufficiently developed - probably because I'm completely superficial and make friends very easily. I certaintly avoid relationships with people who have complex non-verbalised layers - I find those degenerate, whereas I'm fine leaving people like that to their civil rights. What does this have to do with sexuality? I suppose it's just a bit of me that I consider queer - too many people that I meet tell me that humans are expected to be complicated. I generally hold an opposing view. Lol "
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Meningitis is a pain in the neck.
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USA: 8-9pm
MY: 6-7pm
When people stop looking for coffee on Google.
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sloow daay
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Lunch and nap time.
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On a daily basis, which minds do you adjust most frequently? (Whom do you communicate with?)
For three years, the main communications counterparty I have had is: my subordinate co-workers. (Staff quality delivery: positive and negative behavioural feedback on workplace behaviours. Pointing out how speech patterns, personal grooming, spelling, copy, taste, and visual design elements, sales pitches, logistics decisions, and hygiene considerations add or detract from our value-chain.)
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Comments reiterating classic (nothing new, really), positions on sexual assault, plaintiffs, and defendents:
(1)
"Not sure if it's helpful at this point, but there's an article in the Atlantic which seems to toe a palateable medium* of demanding room for (i) plaintiffs to be heard, and (ii) defendents to defend themselves.
Tldr: all people are susceptible to accusations without conviction; the choice remains with individuals if they wish to treat accused-but-unconvicted parties with more or less trust.
* Sorry, without further edits: I may have mangled three figures of speech into one."
(2)
"allow the following comment to say only the worst things about me.
Steps I take daily to avoid being accused of sexual assault and harassment:
- generally avoiding unnecessary eye contact with customers (restaurant)
- limiting eye contact to double-taps for professional acknowledgement of orders (cashier, bar)
- keeping note of when a counterparty (business or casual) indicates a preference not to communicate in private (explicit propositions only; we kinda use statistical inference to form otherwise arbitrary judgments as to when silence indicates a quiet listener or state of sordid discontent)
- asking for age/ID before discussing topics forbidden by law in communication with minors
- most recently, refraining from patting anyone on the back (I screw this up very frequently, as it's a recent addition to my protocols)
- ditto: commenting on the appearance of anyone's choice of clothing or grooming (which is difficult because I do have to issue corrective edits to staff in retail and customers who put certain body parts on furniture; also because I absolutely love discussing forms and so there's a permanent internal monologue going off in my head)
Well, so far, no police or court summonses. But I am very sure that I underperform the ideal, and would not be surprised if I had to listen to accusations of malicious intent or negligence.
\o/"
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Tyranny of the US Dollar? Well I was concerned about this 15 years ago - nowadays I worry about my staffing.
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n-ary logics. woo hoo. also note the benchmark is now computations per watt, depending how you count a computation...
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So my contact turned off Unifi (fibre Internet) in executing an ultimatum, after failed negotiations with his kids on Youtube binging. I suggested a more fluid, yet straightforward, market-based solution: working for their own pre-paid Internet access credits.
The next thing which occured to me was, well, I guess that's how X-year-old female online entertainers get started. Could be a good (horror?) movie. NC17 by definition. 🤔 "Hey hun, could you send like, $500 right now, cause I'm running out of credit. I'll do whatever you like before bed, promise. Gotta get up super early for the first day of school tomorrow." #veryincorrectpolitically
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Empathy: Eradicate it. But I don't expect civilisation to go that way in my lifetime.
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Forum comments: "I'm quite a weirdo, but I can fit in easily when I need to. Loneliness stops being a problem if you analyse it and detach the physical reflexes from the concept of being alone. But this may be considered by some to be too hard, so loneliness remains a problem for them. I was pretty much a hermit by the second or third year of university lol
The article appears to be people who regard "loneliness" as a discomforting feeling, due to social anxiety, or aversion to transparency. So it is very much written from an introvert's point of view.
I'm probably a repressed extrovert - I only avoid people because if I didn't, I would probably annoy the shit out of them and get myself killed or locked up. I otherwise don't mind being alone... there's always so much to... do!"
And then there's like, you know, Tinder...
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Between the class climbing bozos, and the heartfelt morally outraged, I'm not sure which is more of a nuisance in this day and age.
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On
this.
Mostly, I agree with the line of attack. :)
If we go down the list of propositions and analyse them technically, there's plenty of debate opportunity.
But epistemology is rarely the point of these diatribes. They are primarily rhetorical, and her call is to sic attention onto the by-election.
I'm not opposed to Anwars and Najibs in executive office - as long as they can demonstrate enough intelligence to sort out all stakeholders/constituents. The only way to find out is to test them.
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Back to bed.
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Just hurry up and ban smoking.
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Enforced feeding. And groceries.
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Being an emotional crutch is a fun job when it pays well. 🤔
Addendum: it may be distasteful, but I regard all camraderie as emotional disease. Being social for the heck of it is, like the need to masturbate (orgasm, have sex, etc.). These are all artifacts of how our genomes propagate through time. In the long run, civilisation isn't tied to this sort of meat.
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On Bloomberg coverage of Chinese infiltration of US companies via backdoored motherboards. Is it in bad taste to compare gonzo to #metoo?
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Jail for a duration of 1200 times the petty theft concerned denominated in minimum-wage days. How far we have fallen, from an eye for an eye.
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Mahathir campaigns for Anwar in PD: Signs of desperation. Will probably win, but an upset will be funny. Intuitively the odds are even (AI win/lose) from my distance.
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Whatever's causing this week's meningitis is starting to incur a lot of costs. Stiff neck aside, significantly reduced rates of kinesthetic computation mean that all sorts of data is getting flushed out before it reaches utilisation (or is it that the memory loss results in computational failure?). In 15 hours, I've managed to collect accidental cuts on a finger and a toe, although no major accidents have occurred so far.
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Work.
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Forum comment:
" all staff are presumed to be teachable until proven otherwise. I've attempted to train (and have subsequently released at various levels of training) as many as 14 bookkeepers in the first two years of operations.
This may not be an efficient short term approach to talent development, but it helps me focus on the long term goal of keeping the average output-per-staff in the top decile of companies such as ours.
Being a graduate is not an advantageous starting point usually - it just demonstrates a track record of being able to hit "standard hard targets", but it doesn't actually provide any better substrate for reskilling. Lol "
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A good reminder to read up on the history of market regulations vs money supply!
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Not good enough.
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Flake:
I think it is a good headline. It does what it intends to do, which is to push a polarising rhetorical agenda. There is nothing new here. (Unless you thought the WSJ was supposed to be a centrist publication.)
Well, if it's decidedly "childish," then there's no use discussing it. Deadlock in the culture wars!😁
"There is no currency, for reaching across the aisle."
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You should be familiar with how this stuff works. You should also be aware that it is a common defense mechanism to feign ignorance (I call it the "blur button," with reference to Singlo-Malaysian slang), and a common offense mechanism to feign empathy. As for myself, I have some natural empathy, but I not believe it is where I want my chips, so I have for twenty years trained carefully to rid myself of as much of it as possible.
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Inflation will rise due to monetary expansion, deployed as a policy tool to help cushion federal debt obligations, which were exacerbated by the 1MDB fiasco. (And even without 1MDB, inflation would be constant, and prices would rise, just more slowly, due to debt driven economic stimulus. Malaysia's fundamentals are weak, and have been weak for decades.) Probably wrong. What do I know? I'm just a bartender who reads a little here and there.
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Now begins the daunting task of building a website. It is daunting in the sense that watering the lawn is daunting when you have a roast in the oven on the other side of the house.
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I haven't use git in three years, maybe.
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Now that Facebook has properly integrated story/wall posts on mobile, I guess I'll start using stories for non-archival posts. Except on desktop @&£+_)@-£&#(@@@....
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Banning alcohol in cornershops? This is one of the posts on this page which I agree with, for the sake of elegance. And they should limit nicotine sales to the same shops, so that Muslims who want to smoke are reminded of the categorical damage they are doing to their bodies.
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Sometimes, in the exercise of empathy with organisms that exhibit different environment tolerances, I forget to flush my memory, and unwittingly assume their degrees of discombulation at a given state of the environment. It is good from time to time, to reflect on these events, and to carefully remove any undesireable patterns of weakness which are not actually necessary in one's own operations.
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Work is tiring. But such is the business of humans. I don't particularly enjoy being the intellectual judge and executioner for all issues, but I can't find judges of executioners of appreciable quality on the market, so I suppose, one simply makes do with oneself. Closer still to my life's goal of working till I am no more! That is the main consolation.
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Day off. 12-hour catch-up on sleep. Not bad. The weather is wet; the wet version of my favourite grey skies and dry air; it rains incessantly.
B12 seems to help with deeper sleep and access to dream-states. Still I get to control my dreams, as I do in the day, for the most part; my mental conditioning has not regressed to the point where I am subject to dreams beyond my design, for the most part. I seem to remember that this is how most people think of dreams, as environments that they do not control.
Anyway, today's dream was of some kids (young, fully-formed adults) piloting a hot air balloon from place to place. I was tagging along, standing on a rope loop they had let down beneath their craft. Between holding on to the rope, keeping my footing in the loop, and reading a newspaper, it was a bit of a challenge.
Back to the real world. I think of how The Humanist Ideology tends to associate the the concept of an individual human mind with the discreteness of human bodies. I have a lens that regards human bodies as meat, and such meat as commensurable with any other substrate that runs the information systems which we call the human mind. I think too many people don't think outside the concept of bodies - but that is my bias.
In my view, many people are struggling to understand their minds and their bodies internally, and have not yet found mastery of these to a point where they are bored, and begin to consider how human minds would operate beyond these substrates. To be fair, many other people do think of ideas as primary - writers and evangelists of religions are often in this camp.
Such luxury - to have material and cognitive infrastructure in abundance. As I rolled over my pillow, under a comforter before finding sufficient control over my muscles to hurl that meat off to the bathroom, I continued to think about the virtualisation of human minds. I think of virtualisation in the sense of computational virtual machines. I think (in a very visual way, like watching a movie, because that is how I think), about how human bodies could eventually be modified to access cloud computing. I started thinking about this many years ago when giving consideration to the Matrix (1999) as a serious piece of science fiction - the key question at that time was how to digitise human thought, and it kept me busy for a few years.
Under the sheets, I continued to think about how the concept of legal personhood could eventually be amended to include computations outside the flesh of a human body. Eventually the concept of legal personhood may include a subset of computations unattached at all to a natural born body. At this point, the people who live only in the metal, and the people who live only in the flesh would have equivalent legal standing. It's only a small jump from this, to equating fully-formed human bodies as lacking in personhood.
A hypothetical scenario, which no doubt has been raised before, but which simply passes through my mind on this day before I get out of bed: a society may have some members born in the metal, and some body in the flesh. Both metal and flesh are commensurate. A person from either culture may choose to migrate their functional identity (set of patterns which define them), from predictable metal, to unreliable flesh, in order to study the experience for historical relish. The world would be a place with some citizens purely in the cloud, and some purely in the flesh, some a number of these in-between. Ah, such are the obvious things that stare one in the face daily - but it's no use that these are obvious and present to me.
I put these considerations aside, and prepare to leave my bed in order to work in the present with the flesh in world around me. These sorts of migrations will probably not happen fully within my lifetime, but I do think there is a non-zero probability of such achievement. I already know the data-structures of consciousness quite well, and it is only a matter of legal and biomechanical engineering. I leave it to the mechanics.
I go to live my life, meanwhile. It is not anticipated to be a long one.
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4pm. I am having a non-day. I have only just showered, and will now proceed to behave like a responsible adult. I will clean my office, as that is my duty, and then I will do laundry, because that it also in the service of my duties. I do think about the limits which society, both my formal and informal neighbours, places upon our combined growth - and, I am content with my explorations of justice with regards to our mutual obligations, and the fulfilment or lack thereof. I make a point not to put these things too far out of mind, while pursuing manual labours, as that is what it means to be responsible, and not reactive.
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One of the keys to understanding public policy on the economy is to brain the relationship between [purchasing power / quality of life], [money supply / debt ratios / interest rates / forex rates], and [supply and demand of real goods and services].
Too bad they don't start doing this in middle-school, with the other kemahiran hidup subjects. Building letter boxes out of wood, my ass...
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Comments from a forum:
"The Malays want Malaysia to be French. All other Malaysians want Malaysia to be United States of American. Go figure..."
"I probably want Malaysia to be German or at least Swiss. have always said China's and Singapore's autocracy is preferable to waddling through extended adolescence as a country. Feel free to ignore this comment or rail against it, in the comments. 😛"
"So there are generally two three steps to how many cultures are shaped. First there is a guidebook, the Constitution, then second there are public policy interpretations and implementations, and thirdly the behaviours of the people are modified accordingly.
Malaysia has a constitution that's pretty conservative. It can be interpreted more liberally or less... interpretations and policies prior to Mahathirism, may have been more to the left, but then our dear friend tightened it up from 1970 onwards, retiring in 2003.
I believe at this time, if we want to liberalise Malaysian cultural values for all time, we actually need to modify the constitution to move it farther to the left.
Not anticipating quick changes."
//
Rebuttals:
"Mr. A1, Well, I have only lived in {UMNO, PPBM, PAS}, dominated Malaysia for most of my life, so yes, in that context, I think the dominant trend is as such. This is empirically valid - I believe so, but we can debate it. Of course not all Malays exhibit X preference, and as a matter of pedantry, the boundaries which determine who counts as Malay are porous. But if you look at the voices who speak for the Malays in Malaysia, then the Mahathirist position remains front and centre.
I also believe that this is undergirded by the constitution, and that is why I have no problem accepting a Malay-dominated economy or superstate - I don't really care who's in charge, as long as they are ruthlessly efficient. (I actually am more prejudiced in terms of civil rights, along ablist lines, rather than racial lines - I do think weaker contributors to the economy should be penalised, but that is a huggeee subject of its own for another forum/thread maybe).
Aside, I'm not sure where you got the notion that I "want United States of Malaysia." Lol. As for going to SRJK(C), I assure you, my parents asked for my vote when I was six, and I vehemently voted against it, then they sent me anyway, so I have resented their governance ever since. However, being raised in such an authoritarian environment, you may be able to see why I am tolerant of public policies which I don't agree with as long as there's money to be made for oneself along the way... haha."
"Mr. C1 The original article is pretty abstract :), and makes only a few references to concrete policies - mostly it regards cultural history; you're right that my caption was furthermore abstract. I was referring to what has already happened, not what I prefer."
"Mr. A1 the only thing I need to correct you on is outside the scope of the discussion on race. Lol. I don't really curate friendships with all my Facebook friends, it is more of a giant contact list of anyone I have met online or offline. I haven't even met some of these people ever before. You should not assume that any of them (a) like me or (b) are familiar with me.
Back to discussions of racial identity... may I ask why you allow other people's comments on your racial identity to affect how you feel? I think this is one of the core concerns I have with Malaysian society today. Feeling discomfort becomes a major issue. I disagree that this is a healthy component of a pluralistic society. One should be able to normalise discomfort. If we cannot, then there is no point in pretending that we want a pluralistic society, as it would exclude those people who didn't want a pluralistic society. (Of course, this is a contemporary theme in political discourse around the world. And throughout history. Fun stuff for a dissertation.)
Thirdly, no one has actually commented on your particular beliefs. It would be disingenuous or naive to interpret the sentence "people are kind," as having specific existential import to every single person you could think of on a case-by-case basis. What I'm pointing out is that "Malays," don't exist as a discrete object, nor does "everyone else," nor do "Chinese," "French," "United States of American," "Swiss," "German," "Singaporean," "humans," "persons," "minds," "hearts," but that doesn't mean we don't use those words at all to describe states of affairs in the world. (Perhaps also of relevance to the thread from Mr. A2. Also the next point.)
Fourthly, you seem to this that my initial caption on the article says anything undesirable about Malays. Do you notice that it simply compares the Malay narrative to the French narrative? I didn't mean to write a book on it... but if it is really that confusing, and insulting, I may now have to put it on my to-do list, to demonstrate how (whosesoever)'s narrative is just a point of view, and there is nothing commendable or repulsive about it.
Fifth, can we discuss the underlying subject first, on whether you prefer a French or USA-n model, as decribed in the article which the post is about?"
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If "affordable homes," take 40 years of household earnings to pay off, the Ministry of Housing and Local Governments needs to aim a little higher.
Who am I to judge?
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Abolishment of the death penalty. Right, now how are we supposed to get the state to pay for our timely and tidy deaths, if not by committing capital offenses? Will the state legalise euthanasia and voluntary suicide?
*irony*
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Parkour Bots : Staying on brand: I have only this to say: do you really disbelieve that sexbots are the future of companionship?
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Three thoughts come to mind:
1. Haley's outgoing comments on Kushner were well timed.
2. Turkey is the present reminder to Malaysia: a precedent where religious polarisation, led to conservatives electing a "pious" strongman who went on to centralise power and destroy public institutions.
3. Too many Saudi leaders get into headlines for all the... wrong reasons.
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Education public policy: This is one of those issues I'd really like to debate everyone on, except that I can't find a positive return on the expenditure of time to do that lol. Because there are a great many points to debate, and an absence of common knowledge on the subject to begin with.
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"Why are you watching this movie, it is so cheesy?"
"I'm looking at you, and wondering if you realise that your life and that movie don't look very different from my point of view."
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In a war of attrition, everything comes down to pacing. Linearisation of multidimensional resource sinks is the nature of the challenge. (Fractalised value chains from linear resource flows being the converse.) I'm having trouble deciding when to eat, sleep, run, write, speak, account, cook, launder, clean, repair, design, calculate, and masturbate, but, if it was less challenging, I would probably find a way to make it harder out of boredom. So on we go for a while.
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An ordinary day. Tired, without an end in sight, and with much to do. Very much what I expect of the world. And I think, it is good to remind others of the same, that is why I write these things. :)
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Maybe I should dress up as a social justice warrior for Halloween.
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Prison. That's what's on my mind. Nothing new: was training for solitary confinement over fifteen years ago. Yawn.
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Saya berkhidmat bagi pembayaran. Kekuasaan lah, itu.
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I quite happily got this right from a pretty young age. But it turns out that a subset of women are also assholes, and sometimes two assholes will get along just fine.
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It is a late night, which means I will probably not sleep before work begins again. I take this opportunity to reflect on recent social operations. It has been shrill season for a few months, among the heartfelt morally outraged members of (my neighbouring subsets of) society: what with the Malaysian general election, and the continued governance of the Trump administration and its co-conspirators in the senate.
None of this is new to me. It smells just like every year that has passed for twenty-or-thirty-some-past. I have not reduced my constant efforts to remain intune with the geist of the zeit, since I developed an interest in cultural anthropology almost two decades ago. Yet, the increased volume of public speech volumes means that I should expect increased fatigue until I recalibrate filters to ignore the drone of current trends. But the trends are changing quickly, so, for a while: I have not taken my eye off the ball, so to speak.
Perhaps we are on the cusp of farther chaos, though I am intuiting that the system at large is already responding to negative feedback about its recent instigators. I am always ready for war, so to speak, as it has been a point of discipline since I have had the freedom to conduct myself independently.
If negative feedback prevails, then we should soon (months to years) see some mean-reversion in the level of outrage being channeled through the mass (social or other) media. That would be a good time to rest a little.
But in any event, I concern myself with the peculiarities of my occupation. There are many stakeholders, many laws, many competitors, and much machinery (human or otherwise) to corral. Always, systems are being built quicker than they can be analysed, and data is warehoused before it is properly understood. This is an appropriate degree of risk given the responsibilities which avail themselves to me. Many would disagree, and I remind myself that such disagreement should be summarily ignored until it is worth either, placating, or destroying, or detaching from.
There is much to do within a few hours. Just the usual muchness. Surfaces to be cleaned and inspected for dirt; advertisement geometries and the storefront much be recreated anew; relationships (quantified in money, not sentiment) must be checked and realigned; documentation for regulatory purposes must be completed; goods and services must be produced; ah, well, that is the nature of my days in this epoch.
On we go. A life in compliance with social norms is thus achieved, in the gentlest possible degree.
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Here's the funny thing about economic policy and computation. I have no moral intuition that old fashioned communism is preferable for society. However, in the light of a future where computation is cheap and widely available, the climax of old fashioned capitalism looks a lot like the moral intuition of old fashioned communism. To be clear neither of the old fashioned models were particularly effective linguistic tools, since their underlying concepts were never modelled with sufficient computation to be completely detailed. The point here is technocrats win again, and if you compute sufficiently deeply from either set of axioms, you end up at equilibrium somewhere in between. Call it computationism if you want, hahaha
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Whether it's decided as computationism of technism, or technoism, or technocracism, whatnot... the interesting thing about the terminology of technocracy is that it posits technology as a distinct class of things beyond what is considered human. But humans are merely a type of information processor. At least, in my opinion. It opens up funner ways to mess with the language at hand.
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What, since when is it a rule that ministers can't flash their Twitter titties?! What puritan nonsense is this?! Get back on the Mayflower... and take the turbans with you! 😛
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So the last (and so far only) time four guys on bikes tried to make a grab for my backpack... I pushed the first one aside, and said, "look, I could have taken your eye out of the socket, do you mind?" And then the second guy swung a steering wheel lock at me, which I parried, severing my little finger, and a ligament on my ring finger. And then I said, "hold up, you can't have my stuff." And then the second guy hit me again, this time on the head, where I now have an x-shaped scar. At this point I figured that the best defense was to enter into cry baby mode, and then the third guy told the second guy that since I was severely injured, they should just leave me be.
And then they left without taking anything, at which point I figured I'd made a profit on the story. (After this, some security guards from the nearest building stole fifty bucks out of my wallet while pretending to hold it for safety. And I couldn't find the missing finger, but the cops did and handed it to me in an envelope - thanks PDRM.)
Anyway, there are three things you can learn from this: (i) how to make me deploy the form of crying for pity, (ii) how not to approach negotiations with me which jeopardise assets which I have fiduciary/job/client duties over, (iii) how I value stories and branding. And the one thing I learnt is... hey, maybe the next time, just take the first guy's eyes out then go straight for the second guy. It's legal, according to this article. 😛
On second thought, as they say, you should always first try to run.
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(This is now a complete draft, on economic terminology and paradigms.)
1. Definitions: Capitalism, Socialism
Federations are always formed by voluntary donations, by compromises of assets (power, wealth, pick any terminology you like) with the intention of (a) reducing inequality and/or (b) increasing total wealth in an economy via specialisation and trade. However, once formed, the controllers of the federation's resources may forget to balance (a, b).
A greater focus on [(b) at the expense of (a)] tends to be called capitalism, and a greater focus on [(a) at the expense of (b)] tends to be called socialism. These two paragraphs provide a definition of the terms that are suitably analysed for the purpose of further discussion.
2. Definitions: Meritocracy (is Capitalism)
In this terse perspective, the following are synonymous: {meritocracy, capitalism, the jungle law}. Meritocracy simply asserts that the law of the jungle should be funded by the federation, regardless of how the capital of the federation was initially acccumulated. Meritocratic extremism increases inequality by definition, when it is brandished as a federal policy (centralised/top-down government). Controllers of centralised capital pools deploy meritocratic policies to accelerate the accumulation of assets in the meritorious. But to be meritorious, is simply to be stronger, faster, or more cunning than the next person. (Drucker, for example, simply calls these manual work and knowledge work.)
3. Definition: Cunning (is Computation)
To be cunning is simply to derive information quicker than the next person. Due to the disparities in [aptitude, and culture] between people, the naturally nurtured (nurtured natural, whatever) inequalities of cunningness between people may be framed as the greatest differentiator of the general wealth between people.
"Information," and "computation," in theoretical terms have rather specific definitions. Those are the definitions assumed here, though an untrained reader may grasp the gist of this post from intuitions about the natural language of "information," and "calculation."
4. Definition: Technology (simply as, Tool)
5. Definition: Technological Disruption (as Deflation of Human Capital)
Reduced costs of computation, via technological improvements in hardware and software, are rapidly deflating the value of each person as a unit. (One may assert that people have a value outside their abilities to compute, but this article does not.)
Rapid deflation of human capital is definitively, the context in which previously established markets (some having stood longer, some shorter) are being upended. (Drucker, for example, simply refers to this paradigm or lens, as that of the knowledge economy.)
As we build machines that cheaply and reliably conduct the computations of: empathy, design, invention, and epistemology... philosophy, art, religion, community service, mental health administration, childhood development, justice, styling, and leadership ... these computations are all, in this epoch, deflated as currency. That's what people worry about when they contemplate the economic disruption of "artificial intelligence."
6. Thesis: The concept of "Information as Currency," and an extended concept of "Competition to Amass Information, possibly framed as Information Economic Warfare," are crucial to the construction of intuitive models for discussing social and political issues in our next few years on Earth. This also concerns discussions of security. (Perhaps this is just a slightly tightened up definition of intellectual property.)
With reference to the many contemporary futuristic and trite views along the lines of, "the end of work is nigh," consider that the deflation of human capital cannot approach its upper limit, when people are barred from access to computation. In this epoch we should therefore expect to see taxes raised on computation, and the development of newer types of computational capabilities. This explains quite neatly the rising costs of tertiary education, and its trickle down effects on upstream secondary and primary education. This paragraph is old hat.
And moving forward, we should expect to see a world where [hardware, and software] automatons are increasingly framed by capitalists as a privilege for the rich, with many normative barriers to their acquisition.
What do we currently know about this? Governments, corporations, and other individuals, all struggle: to develop automatons which provide truly unique advantages to their users. When they do make such a development, they struggle to keep it secret. And when it is no longer secret, they struggle to keep it from being freely reproduced. This is the crux of information economic warfare, for the time being, and the foreseeable future.
Circling back to some of the traditional political economic terms defined at the beginning of this article. To achieve extremist ends of either (a) capitalism or (b) socialism, requires mastery of information economic warfare.
I leave it to readers to pick a side, or perhaps to attempt some kind of centrism. But in any event, I hope that this article helps to clarify the landscape for future engagements.
Perhaps this serves as nothing more than an analytical/quantification framework for what is called in common parlance, the Knowlege Economy.
//
(Not yet falling asleep. So jotting down a continuation of notes from this morning. Someone should go get some real data and try to win a prize or something. I'm quite sure I remember someone already getting a Nobel for similar concepts, so maybe this is moot.)
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Oh yes, three years old, today.
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Google Ads Scripts :
holy spaghetti nation. After fucking around with iterator objects for a couple of days, I really miss declarative programming. One ought to be able to run SQL-styled queries against the entire Google Ads machinery.
To top it off, I had to use an in-browser code editor that was essentially coding with gmail keybindings. Lol
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A luxurious sleep, catching up. Memory buffers appear to have been recently misconfigured somewhat. 24 hour buffer needs to be more centered oncthe day ahead, not the day past. Also, in general alignment, shorter term buffers need to be subsets of longer term buffers, and preferably there is only one buffer per term.
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Malaysian fighter jet: At arm's length, this sounds like a worse idea than the Perotiga idea. But maybe he knows something I don't.
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I listened to many stories from someone who aspires to be a successful businessman, today. I was reminded that I do not aspire to be a successful businessman any more than I aspire to understand the nature of business. Some of us are commercial due to the absence of abundant happiness, some of us are commercial despite its presence.
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The difference between a "moral education" and a "civics education", is that civics must focus on the hard skills of manipulating the levers of government, and political life in general. Moral education exists to instill values. Civics exists to allow you to co-exist with explicit disagreements on morality. The whole point is to get you to brain how, and why, we do not simply disembowel each other on a whim.
(Attachment: You can read a little bit about the history of the school subject "civics and citizenship education" in Malaysia. It's not done the way I would prefer, as stated in the paragraph above. https://orca.cf.ac.uk/69576/1/Final%20Version%20Thesis%20Haniza%20Mahmood%20-ORCA.pdf )
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Super hero principals: This is unfortunate spin on the part of (ministry, or media?). Putting grandiose titles on executives simply sets expectations which may or may not be well managed by the public. It's all good if the high-performing principals are mentally acute. If not, I would be grimly humoured if targets were missed and they fell into depression.
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Committee reviewing national education: Looks good - I was waiting for the finance people, and they turned up at the end of the deck.
Good balance of humanities, natural sciences, social sciences, industrialists, pedagogists, religious types, age groups, genders, races, etc.
See how it goes.
Addendum: "I think (they) need to add a lawyer, specifically a constitutional lawyer to ensure that the Civics education does more than merely introduce the theory of Malaysian government, but instils the participatory practice of citizenship, along the conduits of power and branches of government written in the Constitution. It's a manual, but few read it, and farther few remember how to use it all."
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Things I've taken for granted for decades (am I too cynical?):
- Mahathir runs everything
- you eat plastic, daily
- most people are too foolish to reliably debate most subjects
- debate is a sport, not a serious pursuit
- life is a sport, not a serious pursuit
- money is a sport; it's a serious pursuit if it's your job to make it though
- sex; ditto
- angry people exist simply to have their buttons pushed
- moral absolutism is much more common than most people think it is, until they think about it, and realise that they are moral absolutists on at least one issue (e.g. thou shalt not kill / hurt people / ignore speech)
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TOTD: Would you rather be the company trying to build motors out of glass, or the one trying to build office tables out of titanium?
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A busy week. Not particularly productive. Lots of salesy talk. A little bit of marketing automation. A lot of dashing around patching things. Not yet dead. Still under siege. Quite mundane. Politics and women have always been low priorities in my life. I did not anticipate: that focusing on commerce would restructure my schedule, via limitations, such that my time spent on these trivialities appears to have expanded tenfold, since before I started a business. Being nonchalant can be a tedious business in and of itself - you get bored and indulge in the theatrical mockery of nonchalance, and other people's lack thereof. I must remember to breath more often, in the hope that it stimulates my thinking a little.
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Good things come to those who wait. Often, that just comes down to waiting for an asshole to die, unless you care to take him or her out by yourself Meanwhile, play craps, stay fit, live a healthy life. Maybe along the way, they will change their ways.
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Three years in. Same outlook.
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Training shy people to lose their sense of shame is much more tedious than waiting for assholes to die. That is why it is noble to be an educator. It requires effort.
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Maybe the next filter for candidates is, "has to think like a cop," which goes beyond having a sense of order, to having an predisposition towards enjoying the political process of enforcing a sense of order. Of course, it can be trained. Very little cannot be trained.
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Weakening the Ringgit to improve exports is a great revenue generating policy. I just wish I knew how much impact that had on necessities like medical imports. Fuck your vacations and iPhones lol.
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Electronic payments dominance: Been waiting for KL to do this for 25 years.
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McKinsey in South Africa case study: Back in the spotlight with the Saudis. I've been out of touch. The opacity of this class of firms has never been attractive, even if the paycheque and subject matter seem amusing. Too much politics.
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Forum comments on how I don't get patriotism (even if I may be a patriot while not getting it).
"Plebs with me,
Plebs before me,
Plebs behind me,
Plebs in me,
Plebs beneath me,
Plebs above me,
Plebs on my right,
Plebs on my left,
Plebs when I lie down,
Plebs when I sit down,
Plebs when I arise,
Plebs in the heart of every plebe who thinks of me,
Plebs in the mouth of everyplebe who speaks of me,
Plebs in every eye that sees me,
Plebs in every ear that hears me.
Amen"
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“Ah you think plebs are your ally? You merely adopted the plebs. I was born in plebs, molded by plebs. I didn't see the other side of plebs until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but boring!”
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To borrow a phrase I learnt from a client, sometimes, Malaysians just need to go suck on a bag of dicks and let people say whatever they want. It would make reasonable debates less dramatic.
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The United Nations needs to quit publishing signed platitudes on what it wants, and start penalising the fuck out of parties that cross clear lines. Well maybe, it needs to draw clearer lines, and maybe we need another world war for discipline's sake. But well, the alternative is peace, and platitudes, and life goes on. Ho hum.
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"I think I've heard of you."
"I'm not hard to find - but why do individuals matter?"
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I miss college. There are no interesting libraries in Malaysia, so far, on my map - so let me know if you have one.
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Time to clean ze fridges..
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Honest question: are moustaches sexy because they make him look like he's munching on bush?
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Never thought I'd be Googling male and female models for work, but hey, sex sells.
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Comment on DIY charkoayteoh:
High temperature sautee - that's all you need to know. So if you are using a low power energy source, such as an electric range or hotpot, then simply reduce the quantity of material to be cooked so that it can get hot enough to maillardise with burnt edges within 30-90 seconds total cooking time.
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Comments on motivations.
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I'm generally bored - so my only motivation is curiosity. Otherwise, I'd probably just donate all my organs and suicide for lack of anything interesting to do.
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I disagree with statements such as, "curiosity is healthy." It (curiosity) just happens to be sanctioned by society, because on average people have an intuition that having a dumb reason to stay alive is better than dying.
I may disagree.
I tend to think that people should be indifferent about life or death. And it is a celebratory affair whichever path one picks.
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Comment on why some rallies fly flags, while other rallies fly pink hats.
The choice of signalling morphology follows the signaller's intuition about what is as risk.
Politics in the US is largely a war between people who are both plutocrats and narcissists. Leaders just happen to pick specific issues to champion, to harvest votes as a resource base to fuel their personal agendas as leaders.
A leader whose personal intuition is, "that the biggest wrong in the world is the absence of empathy," will fly a flag that says EMPATHY on it, and that helps him to remake the world as he sees fit. He then appeals to the resonant insecurities of others like him, and it forms a party.
Likewise a leader whose personal intuition is, "that the biggest to my happiness is the introduction of dangerous neighbours to my hood," will fly a flag that says NATION on it, and likewise she will appeal to resonant insecurities in the masses to consolidate power so that she can remake the world as she sees fit.
That's all really... it just comes down to what you perceive as a threat.
In Malaysia, you can start with the Malay Dillemma (book), lol
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To the sister of someone I love:
Long time no see, girl.
You look good.
Stay happy.
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Unnerving.
But that's the challenge, is it not?
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Uber-esque apps:
The situation of an efficient monopoly would demand that:
- they raise average prices to increase their cash buffer
- they insure their own customers against surge pricing
- they lobby for government support to ban venture capitalists from re-inventing the wheel and destablising any gains achieved from consolidating the market (make it illegal for any company to incur negative margins while subsidising price wars - via the intepretation that this is predatory pricing behaviour)
- in return for such government protections, an efficiently monopolistic taxi service would have to divulge great amounts of accounting data particularly about its margins, actuarial calculations, and operating costs, to the Accountant General (government)
- this is effectively an efficient nationalisation of taxi service, which seems to be the only rational exit for a company with Uber-esque bloated valuations; a quaint view I have proposed for a few years; the business model is really about getting governments to outsource consolidation of the market to the private sector;
- after all, logistics is becoming more and more like a utility, so should we not manage logistics companies more and more like power companies? (I have also fielded the view that online social networking should be similarly regulated; I'm not sure about search 😛)
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When's the Nobel prize in economics going out for a model that helps policy makers control borders between different economies, to make labour supply more efficient?
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Broad money expansion leads to inflation too. If federal credit is loosely granted unequally, to only a subset of the population, then that subset will invest in asset classes which have high barriers of entry to those without access to said credit. This is why we have real-estate bubbles. The proposition that open market purchasing by the fed isn't the same as printing money is a fallacy - it's printing money, and that money ends up only in certain places.
Random thoughts over conversations between breakfast and lunch.
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Mahathir asking people to go abroad, earn money, and come back: Ladies and gentlemen, a shining example of a horrible incentive system. Don't do this in your organisation.
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I'm not sure which camp is more annoying: fundamentalist socialists who believe in the intrinsic economic value of meat, or fundamentalist capitalists who believe in the intrinsic economic value of meritocracy.
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The Empty Core of the Trump Mystique:
Was asked to comment on this article.
//
Personally, I'm of the Thielian bent, that the whole point of electing Trump is to allow shit to hit the fan every so often. But this is a snobbish view.
A whole tier below that aesthetic is the aesthetic of nationalism. Which is where strategists like Bannon come in.
As for the article itself (I only skimmed it EXTREMELY briefly), it appears to be a sentimental rant on deep intuitions, espousing one theoretical lens, and not a succinct analysable thesis.
Maybe Trump's presidential career has never been mysterious to me because I have thought it would be a tremendously interesting mechanism since as long as several years ago. I guess it depends on what you idealise in the world.
I don't idealise his xenophobia, plutocracy, or misogyny. I also don't idealise polite society. I think there's a lot to be said for his rhetorical ability - communication is after all about understanding the audience and conveying a message the audience understands (even if it is false). I think I have enjoyed watching his presidency so far, so perhaps the article is written by someone not like me, realising that Trump could only be reasonably appreciated by someone like me.
I think there's more to be said about policy, or culture and how it can or should be manipulated.
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Ok, this will sound quaint. Or silly. My grandfather was a Chinese army fellow, and he did a spot of espionage, eventually working as a consultant to the Brits to help efforts againt the communists in Malaysia. So my dad was really into WW2 documentaries, fiction, etc. and that extended over time to Cold War era stuff. I mean fifty years of spy fiction just littered around the bookcases of the home I grew up in. I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and especially with the onset of Internet technology, I simply assumed that anyone who wanted to could hear and see anything they wanted to about you as a civilian. I still do. Lol.
Before the GE14, I already had a set of customers at my office who were said to be working as propagandists for the Najib administration. Maybe they were on MEIO payroll, I do not know. It was quite amusing to see them all stare when I briefed a foreign shareholder on the political realities of Malaysia: that in my experience, I had never grown up in a country with rule of law.
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Post-GE14, The Exec is slowly decentralising power back to the Legislatives, but the Judiciary has not yet been properly re-endowed with balanced powers. If one were to use that lens to impute what the balance of powers should be... maybe, the Judiciary will be worked on after the first 1-3 years. Hopefully sooner rather than later.
Edit
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Trying to figure out if country-labour relations should be modeled like corporation-labour relations or like corporation-investment-portfolio relations. Maybe all talents should be modelled as investment portfolios, but that is a bit tedious. But possible.
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Palliative care is tedious and futile. It is also socialist, and an expression of love. It just reminds me of running a pub - you're just helping people more happily than when they first found out that they are dying. All those restaurants giving people a reason to live? Misguided - no one has any rational reason to live. They're just distracted.
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I think the federal government needs to take the act of ratification more seriously. A public consultation should be performed before the government "signs agreements", which represent the cultural and moral preferences of the citizenry.
The consultation should be just the first step in a bilateral conversation between the federal government and the citizenry. A public report should be presented to parliament on the stakeholders, clustered by alignment of views, and with some sort of analytical commentary on how discordant reactions to the ICERD can be made more coherent. This should be followed by private/public partnerships on funding for programs that work towards the reduction of discordant interests.
It needs to be a very public process, and a very public protocol, not a decision made by a few on behalf of many.
WHAT THE HELL IS RATIFICATION?
You can start here: http://ask.un.org/faq/14594
But what you really want to know: is probably in an as-yet non-existent infographic which communicates the full scope of implications to the Malaysian public.
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Fuck cans. We are going make our own soda water... from anhydrous ingredients.
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As a non-fundamentalist but unfortunately pre-disposed rationalist, I am a strong advocate for the rights of the irrational. You are allowed to be irrational within zones demarcated for irrationality. To take the alternative position would be disconcertingly ablist. The view as I propose it at least attempts a modicum of centrism.
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People are linearisable in my view. I don't find myself more complicated than that, and so my lens is that anyone who believes they are unanalysable is just... inept, or lazy, or lying. Being the change that I want to see in the world, I admit to this lens. LOL
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Empathy is a matter of comprehension; public policy is a matter of public security. Justice? Throw a stone and some definition will pop out of mid-air to throw it back at you. Lol
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I believe in infinitely replaceable labour. For me, giving equity to workers would be purely a business move. I have had this model of running a fund in declining industries where the initial funders repeatedly exit to workers. This sounds like a bad idea, but it can't be 100% bad. Can it?
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Barisan Nasional's shadow budget:
"What's the plan? We need something original. Plans are like looks. What's the plan?"
"Porn tax."
"Noo... Kelantan's already broke..."
"Go back to GST. Delete SST."
"Are you stupid? Don't do the same thing."
"No, plans are like looks, right? Half it."
"Woah."
"It's an original."
"GG, harapan, we're coming for ya."
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Still awake after 12 hours. Messy day. Getting up for stimulus now.
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Just wait for AI familiars, technical tutors, and life coaches. That's a soon to arrive productivity bump on the scale of the steam engine.
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I believe that strong governments are needed for societies of meritocratic individuals. The more selfish the components, the stronger federal regulations should be. The more altruistic the components, the weaker federal regulations need to be. This is just to say that the volatility of war needs moderation. Zero regulations imply either perpetual war or completely altruistic individuals; complete and totalitarian regulations imply either perpetual peace or completely selfish individuals. It's just math.
Caveat: meritocratic here refers not to skill, but to the broader notion of differentiation of reward by trait. In Malaysia for example, we have differentiation of reward by race. That is also a meritocratic trait, as opposed to an altruistic one, in this usage of the term. Here we define meritocracy, individualistic behaviour, and selfishness as the same pattern.
Of course in the history of Malaysian governance, the dominant meme is that the Malays were too altruistic, and that's why government regulations have been put in place to protect to their interest. But then as they have ceased to be altruistic, and as they have come to identify with the merit of Malayness for their reward, the formula expressed then implies that regulations should be increased to regulate their expectations of reward for ethnic traits. I didn't make this up - Tun did, decades ago, in a book. Maybe he didn't make it up either, but he definitely wielded it as a guiding principle of governance. As for the last bit, I still think he needs to write a new book to clarify his updated position on that. But maybe, he will not have time, and we will mostly remember him for the earlier bits.
PS - I can't believe that I have time to think about this shit. But the nature of the world tends to demand that our collective ignorance of statesmanship is more pressing than than our collective ignorance of physics at this point in history. I would much rather be doing pure math...
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If you're looking for a singular concept that ties together Donald's business and political career, try this, "the Republican party has been Trump's most successful [co-branding services] client, to-date."
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When people think I give them a hard time about quality, I tend to write them off as morons. And then I give them a hard time anyway. Lol. Some moderation against quitting is required.
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Malaysia's Samurai bonds:
"Det, they're selling everything to Beijing."
"Beijing bad. Call Tokyo."
"Tokyo and Putrajaya got history."
"No, Tokyo and Kuala Lumpur got history. Last time no Putrajaya. Change garmen twice already. Call lah."
"Ya hor. I call now."
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Stray puppy, 12 inches tall, still alive one week after wandering around Jalan SS22/11. PM to coordinate sightings and probable location.
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“Our heritage is a tourism product. If we do not have any products, then we do not have any tourists. - - Minister, get those states in line!
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On what animals to experiment on: Enjoy yourself, rationalising the differences between mice and men.
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Looking for a social worker in PJ, specialised in addressing schizoid personality disorder, familiar with criminal and non-criminal cases of threats and harassment. Asking for a friend. ;)
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What you have here is a public health issue. The behaviour of the accused has been neither diagnosed by a professional, or formally charged in court. It's trial by social media meanwhile - which I can't condone ;)
As for social work and mental health support: both those supporting the the accused and those supporting the victims should know where to look without a second thought. If we even have to wonder what the proper treatment facility is, then the public health system has failed to be comprehensive.
We can do better.
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The contemporary discipline of clinical psychology is, unfortunately, dependent on: gross intuitions, naive symptomic clustering, an absence of cogent model-building, and a lot of non-analytical/non-MECE terminology. But this simply reflects the crude intelligence of general society with regards to the structure of minds in general, and so society can accept this degree of discipline as sufficient for the formation of lawful standard practices and public policies. I do not endorse the discipline as insightful in a fundamental way - but I strongly endorse it as the lowest common denominator for a model of mind which suffices to enable the rule of law. That is realpolitik.
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This is a poll/discussion on general attitudes towards harassment and predatory social behaviour.
Question: in general, do you think that at the crime should be mainly treated, (A) punitively, by punishing those who engage in behaviours deemed illegal, or (B) as a public health issue, with multiple simultaneous tracks of social, medical, legal, and perhaps punitative support?
--
Context: Whether we like it or not, some behaviours are defined by law as illegal (in layperson's terms, we may say "criminal" for the purpose of this discussion).
Of course, we will not (all) agree on which behaviours are legal or illegal, but those are separate issues from the question above.
---
[Link is in today's mainstream publication. Yesterday, the same publication highlighted a case that's been going viral on social media.]
Background on my interest in this subject: (1) I was colleagues back in the 90s with the chap who's just hit news. (2) I have recently had to engage trial-by-social media on some other issues not related to gender/sex.
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This year is exhausting. Probably what everyone else felt in 2016.
