On Altruism and Living a Good Life in a "First World" Country

A friend of mine asked on facebook recently if she should feel guilty about living well in a prosperous part of the world, when so many people around the globe (both local and distant) are suffering from hunger, poverty, and worse.

This isn't related to writing or Gamebooks (although there are exciting things going on on that front! I intend to follow the Windhammer prize, now that we've reached that time of the year again) but I feel that it's worth sharing.

For context, this friend is in training to be a flying trapeze artist. I know, right? XD


First, be aware that overall, violence, poverty and cruelty are on the decline worldwide. Yes, we hear about these horrible things happening every day all over the world, but compared to how things were 500 years ago, or 2000 years ago, or even 50 years ago, overall quality of life (by several measures) has increased dramatically, even if you only look at the poorest third of the population.

Second, self-sacrifice only goes so far. Specifically, I want to draw a distinction between altruism and martyrdom. Altruism is where you do something for others /because it makes you feel good to do it/. We all want, on some level, to be good for the world. It's not an unambiguously selfless act. It's rewarding. But that feel-good, arguably even selfish aspect to it is important because it keeps you going. If you sacrifice past what you can bear, then you can no longer help others. Be kind, and be good, but take care of yourself first. You have so much potential good for the world in you, whether it be creating something that didn't exist before, doing something beautiful to bring joy to others, or even just filling an important organizational role that helps keep our massive, complex society running. If you burn yourself out in the name of "good" you kill the goose that lays golden eggs.

Third, our system is actually pretty amazing in that (in general, and with exceptions--it's not perfect!) capitalism rewards people who provide something good that makes the world a better place. If your flying trapeze work brings something amazing into the hearts of people who watch you, they'll pay $15 bucks a pop or whatever to come watch it, and you get to survive and keep doing it. There's nothing to feel guilty about in this. You need training, a home, food, and some personal satisfaction in life in order to keep providing the service that you provide to the world.

Honestly, the best thing you can do for the world is specialize in what you love and excel at, and do that with all your heart. We're a community--no one person can do all the jobs. It's not your job to cure Aids, or solve the economy to raise daily-income rates around the world, or even provide some food and shelter to the local homeless dude (unless you make it your job, in which case do your best!) Someone else has dedicated their life to founding a nonprofit to support a homeless shelter that feeds and shelters people who need it. Trust that they will do their job. Your job is to become amazing at flying trapeze, so that when that manager at the homeless shelter is feeling depressed about the futility of it all, you can inspire them and remind them for a second what flying can feel like.

Find what you bring to the world, and do it well. That's a far greater gift that you can offer than selling all your possessions, giving the money to charity and dying in Alaska.

Guys, I found something which offends me!

This is a little out of line with my normal content, but I think it's important. There are people out there claiming that the Boston bombings were staged. http://govtslaves.info/oregon-emt-graduate-questions-boston-bombings-use-of-actors/

Need I say... WTF?

First of all, this is a major public event with hundreds if not thousands of witnesses, that directly impacted the lives of everyone in one of the major cities of the US. Staging something like that would be nigh-impossible. Not to mention that the internet is full of people claiming to know, or know someone who knows, one of the victims. The sheer budget required to hire that many liars to spread the word on the internet would be prohibitive. It's ridiculous to assert that this event was staged.

So where the hell does this guy get off claiming so? There's no reason we should let him get away with that.

I mean, I'm all for a dose of healthy skepticism. That's not what this is. This is blind idiocy. Furthermore, it's blind idiocy that downplays the suffering of real people.

*Sigh* Everyone deserves the right to speak their opinion, even those of us who are blatantly wrong. That's part of what keeps the system healthy. But I've got the right to post my opinion too. Without further ado, here's why this article is blatantly wrong:


1) As a commenter points out, bleeding out from limb loss is mostly a myth. When an entire limb goes, major arteries tighten up to prevent immediately bleeding out.

2) In the scene of mass chaos and fear, describing those hand gestures as signals looks, to me, absolutely ridiculous. The woman is dazed and confused, and just left her hand where it was. The man with no legs is just trying to stand up.

3) The African woman and the man in the hood and sunglasses are not "fine" in the earlier pictures. They're half-buried under a man with no legs. Clearly they were in the blast radius. Just because they're not missing limbs doesn't mean they aren't stunned, possibly deafened, possibly injured. I am not at all shocked to see both of them laying down a moment later. Anything else would be much more odd.

4) Descriptions of those two pouring fake blood on the cement, attaching prosthetics, or making hand gestures are inconsistent with the images, and also with the timeline. These images are frames in a film reel. There's probably less than a second between each snapshot. Is that really enough time to attach a fake prosthetic (a VERY convincing one) and then pour fake blood on the cement? I call BS.

5) I don't see any evidence of false staging in the fact that everybody in the immediate vicinity is looking to the one guy who seems to know what he's doing. That's absolutely consistent with any disaster scenario.

6) The author criticizes the "relaxed posture" of several of the less-injured victims. Well, they may be less injured, but they were just in an explosion, do you really expect them to be doing a song and dance? No--they're dazed. Of course they're not doing anything! Honestly, a staging would probably have much more obvious and overblown expressions of terror and horror.

7) "Notice the rips on his jeans have no sign of blood or injury on the skin" Actually, the jeans are quite bloody where they've been ripped. He's not obviously cut underneath, but there are a few reasonable explanations for that, not least is simply that the clothes have shifted since being torn, and the cut part of the leg is no longer showing through the cut in the jeans. It's also totally feasible that a piece of shrapnel caught a loose flap of clothing without getting the skin underneath.

8) "The double-amputee actor is clearly being ignored." Again, this is happening in a matter of seconds, and it's a real disaster scenario. People aren't organized. It'll only be a few more seconds before people arrive to help him, but in these first images, it's just the initial chaos. If everybody were behaving in the most obvious and appropriate ways, that would be far more suspicious.

9) "A small amount of fake blood around him" Seriously? The ground there is carpeted in blood. There may be no arterial spray--as there shouldn't be, given the human body's survival mechanisms--but there's still buckets of bood and gore on the ground.

10) The blood on the african woman in the earlier scenes wasn't obvious because she's wearing a red shirt and has no major injuries, but as discussed above, that doesn't mean she's feeling peachy. She's probably in shock, which is consistent with her facial expressions and dazed attitude in the earlier images as well as with being in a stretcher later on.

11) And our author is back to how the guy with his legs blown off should have bled out from arterial spray, which only re-iterates how little this person knows about medicine.

12) The author closes with his/her credentials, i.e. having "firsthand experience with trauma in the field of EMS work." I'd like to draw your attention back up to the top, where the author specificies that s/he has been "on calls with heavy arterial bleeds, internal bleeding, fatalities, doa’s." Note those two little words "on calls." This person has not been at the scene of these injuries. The author is a phone support nurse. S/he has no idea what these situations look like when you're actually there on the ground. The author's "credentials" are crap, especially compared to some of the ACTUAL COMBAT MEDICS who post in the comments.

13) The site this is posted on is http://govtslaves.info/ Seriously. I could have started and stopped with that.

I understand that everyone wants to feel like a special snowflake, but there is no excusing this level of sheer idiocy, not to mention the blatant disregard for the suffering of the very real people who were injured or maimed. Last word was approximately 20 people lost at least one leg. 

I, for one, will not tolerate assholes claiming that's a hoax. 

Gender and Feminism (or the lack thereof) in Legacy of the Zendari

Thank you to everyone for all the comments on all of the reviews, and especially on my own post-mortem for Legacy of the Zendari. Much appreciated! (I can't believe I've finished all the reviews!)

Anyway, while it's still fresh in my readers' minds, I'd like to bring up one response I got to Legacy of the Zendari which I did not include in my previous post about it: an accusation of sexism.

I was a bit taken aback by this. I consider myself a feminist, to the extent that I firmly believe all people are fundamentally equal. Do I think anybody should get special rights? No, on either side of that equation. That said, if there is an imbalance, effort must be exerted to correct that imbalance. It won't happen on it's own.

While this principle of equality is one that I firmly believe, and want to layer into all of my writing, my goal is not to hit the reader over the head with it every time. Nor do I even think that would be effective.

So I wrote Legacy of the Zendari like I write any piece, by coming up with some characters that seemed both natural and to fit the story and throwing them in.

It never even occurred to me that these characters might add together to create a world view that seemed sexist. Maybe that's my bad for not looking out for it?

I mean, ignorance is not an excuse, but at the same time... you take a character like the Geo-Cure girl (who I believe I named Jenny...). She's not a strong woman--but she's not a strong character. She's existed as a conscious being for like, two and a half hours, tops, by the end of the story. She was born (effectively) fully fledged, a brand new consciousness in the body of a young adult, with all the experiences and feelings that come with that body. Totally unprepared to be rescued by a dashing, heroic RADF agent of the gender she is sexually attracted to.

Is this an adolescent fantasy? Sure, to some extent. You open the case to find a beautiful, naked girl, who immediately latches on to you. But part of my message there was not just to say, "hey dude, hot times on the horizon!" It's to, hopefully, if I did my job right, raise some very valid moral questions about whether doing anything with her would be morally acceptable. Though she has the body of an adult, she's in spirit more like a child. And you're her only guardian.

Though in the story, one route is to embrace your relationship with her, and there's definitely an implication of where that relationship is going, that's not the only route, nor (do I think), there's any moral implication that that's the correct route.

From my perspective, I certainly wasn't intending that to be "degrading to women." The premise is, well, science fiction, and maybe a little bit of wish-fulfillment, but everything after that, though perhaps a bit cliche, is both realistic within the terms of the world, and consistent to the characters themselves. It seems natural to me that someone who just woke up would latch on to the nearest strong personality.

The other complaint this reader lodged was that every woman in the show was "there to be a romantic interest for a male."

Well, every character is there for a reason. For the Rick and Lisa romance, for example, it's true that Lisa is there "just" to be a romantic interest for Rick--but it's equally true that Rick is there "just" to be a romantic interest for Lisa. I don't see either statement as being relevant. (In fact, neither is there "just" for their relationship with the other, they also flesh out the roles of some of the minor characters in the base, serving functions on the base and presenting minor interactions with the main character.)

The main characters has two potential love interests, but love triangles and the difficult choices those create are a common literary theme, both in high literature and pulp fiction. Any dating game takes this to extremes--are those sexist?

There are only a couple of characters that *aren't* involved in any romance. None of them happen to be women, but that's just because I happened to choose male for the gender of those characters. There was no social statement intended by that decision. It's a military setting, and most military settings today are dominated by men. If anything, I personally am impressed by Minna for being intelligent, successful, and unintimidated by her gruff coworkers and commanding officer.

So, those are my thoughts, but maybe I missed something.

Here's the question I put to you, is this work degrading to women? Does it represent women in a degrading or insensitive light, or relegate them to an inferior position with relation to men, in any way? 

Though a feminist, it is not my goal to wave the feminist flag high and proud with every single piece I write--any more than it's my goal to wave the atheist or gay rights flag high and proud with every single piece I write, even though those are also beliefs I happen to hold. I don't think shoving your morals down the reader's throat does anybody any good. If you want to share your opinions, do it subtly; just raise the question and let the reader decide for him- or herself.

That said, I also don't want to accidentally wave a sexist flag! 

When I tried to express these thoughts to this reader (someone I do know in person), I was advised to seek a "more enlightened male" who could explain it to me. So, here I am, asking for help. What do you all think?

(Though responses from male readers are highly valued, given the subject matter, I would be especially interested to hear responses from any female readers out there!)

Last World War I Veteran died on Saturday

Last Saturday, Feb 4, marked the end of an era. The last surviving veteran of World War I died. She was Florence Green, who joined the Women's Royal Air Force at the age of 17, two months before the war ended.

The WRAF recruited women as drivers, mechanics, cooks and clerical workers, freeing up men for active duty service. Florence served breakfast, lunch and tea in the mess hall for two months, before armistice. Because she was a member of the armed forces during the period of the war, she counted as a veteran.

The last combat veteran was Claude Choules of the British Royal Navy, who died May 5, 2011, aged 110. The last veteran who served in the trenches was Harry Patch, who died on July 25, 2009, aged 111.

Time marches on. The world turns. Our ancestors are left behind, as we come into our primes. Soon, all too soon, we ourselves will be left behind.

The Future of Energy

Getting active with a blog again has reminded me of the energy blog which I was doing earlier this year, before an overwhelming amount of spam and an underwhelming amount of real interest killed my enthusiasm for it. I'm still interested in the question of green energy, and, let's face it--it looks bleak at the moment.

http://www.forexpros.com/analysis/german-solar-cell-company-troubles-signal-cleantech-danger-109052
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2011/12/27/why-the-hype-surrounding-renewable-energy-is-just-that/

When I sat down to write this, it was going to be about how screwed we are. But then I remembered the key ingredient that means there is hope. We're not going to face economic collapse when we run out of fossil fuels, when none of the "alternative" energy methods are capable of producing energy on the scale we need.

I hate to say it, and you're probably all going to kill me for it, but that hope is two words: Nuclear Power.

Of course, Nuclear comes with it's own down-sides, of which I'm sure you're all aware. But the simple fact is that it's the only method we have of producing energy on the scale we need, other than fossil fuel. And fossil fuel is both more limited and even more controversial and dangerous. It will only buy us a couple centuries. But that should be plenty of time for the march of technological discovery to completely shift the paradigm.

Let's look at the other options:

Solar Power: Currently unable to produce energy on the scale that we need it. A good way of taking the edge off, but nothing more. To even attempt more would be to blanket deserts in solar panels, (and that still wouldn't be enough) which will probably never be attempted due to the eyesore, environmental damage, and expense.

Wind Power: Cannot produce power on the scale we need, even if the capabilities are maximized. Not even close. Also, it wreaks havoc on already-threatened bird populations, and many people complain it is an eyesore. (I happen to like the aesthetic of wind farms, myself. They are deliciously desolate.)

Fossil Fuels: Nobody likes it, but these will remain a staple for a long time, until other options become economically more feasible. We have enough for another 50-100 years--but that's total in all the earth. To get it, we need to go to increasingly distant and dangerous locations. We're talking arctic drilling, deep sea drilling, and massive implementation of coal plants. I'd rather see nuclear power, which is at least clean when it's working properly. The biggest danger here is climate change due to pumping carbon into the atmosphere, which is a very real possibility--but I think there has been enough international attention now to avert that potential disaster. I hope. God, I hope.

Bio-Fuel: *spitting rage* Don't even get me started! This is the most blind and short-sighted example of environmental activism that I've ever heard of! Expensive, inefficient, incapable of meeting our needs, AND it takes as much fossil fuel in transportation and fertilizer to produce it as it produces. It's a way of taking X amount of fossil fuel and using up a lot of land and money to produce an equivalent amount of Bio-Fuel. Ridiculous. The sooner we cut this the better.
[Edit: It has come to my attention that there is a type of bio-fuel, cellulosic, which is made from wood chips and inedible plant matter such as corn cobs. This, and other bio-fuels made from waste products, are not only OK but fantastic. But growing corn for fuel is ridiculous and should be outlawed.]

Nuclear: Nobody likes it, but it's the only method of producing energy on the scale our society requires. Also, when it works, it's clean. Catastrophic failure of nuclear plants is, well, catastrophic. But when you're providing power to cities, you're playing Prometheus. Nothing is safe.


My Forecast: Continuing scares around energy shortages and battles over protected land for oil rights, but as fossil fuels become untenable due to resource shortages and environmental regulations, the slack will be picked up by nuclear power. This should get us an extra century or three, and by then we should be able to find a solution to the question of getting energy from massive orbital solar-collecting satellites down to cities and industrial centers on earth.

All told, we're probably OK. Unless we don't get filters on those goddam coal plants going up everywhere.

Thank God for Justice, or rather, thank Justice Hellmann

One of the things that I'm finding I'm enjoying about getting into the "blogosphere" is simply the prospect of reading some of the other blogs that are out there. When I was investigating the Amanda Knox and Raffaelle Sollecito story last summer, I came across a blog by a former FBI Agent Steve Moore, who wrote some excellent articles breaking down and analyzing the evidence, and explaining the dangerous violations of freedom and justice that had allowed a single arrogant prosecutor to manipulate the legal system into imprisoning them when all evidence pointed the other way.

It provided me a clear and sound warning against what can happen, when diligence in court is not exercised.

A lot of my friends seemed a little wierded out at the time, that I grew so passionate about these two young people being imprisoned. Why them? Well, frankly, because their case was clear cut. There are lots of "free so-and-so" movements, but rarely do I find one where the injustice is so flagrant and undeniable. I can't stomach that. Sure, it was a celebrity scandal--whatever. That doesn't mean it wasn't wrong.

I am profoundly, profoundly relieved that the Italian courts re-grouped from the original disgraceful trial and freed two innocent people. The fact that they were imprisoned in the first place is still deeply alarming. I hope I never forget the lesson about how bad things can happen to good people when the justice system goes awry.

Thank you, Judge Pratillo Hellmann. Thank you for doing what should have been done 5 years ago. Thank you for restoring your small piece of sanity and fairness to this crazy world.