State of the Me: 2024-2025 edition!!

The year 2024 is wrapping up -- which means that it's time for my yearly self-assessment!! (Buckle in, this is a long one...)

I need to start with my job because that is what consumes most of my time and corresponding mental bandwidth. It's kind of a long and technical (perhaps dull) story, though, so feel free to skip straight to the next section (world events), which is probably more interesting.

My Job

Here's a quick recap of the last few years:

For three years I held a job that was my favorite job that I'd ever had. Since the company was a successful and quickly-growing startup, I had the chance to exercise one of my most valuable skills: growing a startup company up to scalable mode (see my professional blog at startup2scalable.com). I was hired as a DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure Engineer, and I quickly worked my way up to being the Tech Lead of the central DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure team of the company.

I had the opportunity to work with eight or nine dev teams (depending on how you count) -- helping them to get all of their applications running in kubernetes -- with continuous build-and-deployment pipelines tailored to each team's needs. I led weekly workshops and I assisted anyone who wanted help applying new technologies to their projects. And I got rave reviews!

Perfect, right?

Unfortunately, one of the selling points of that job turned out to be a liability. I had chosen the company because I wanted to do something to fight climate change -- and many of the teams I was working with were creating scientific models and other types of projects to help companies reduce their carbon footprint!

...But it turned out that almost all of the money was actually coming from selling carbon offsets. While working there, I learned not only that carbon offsets are questionable in general but that the company I was working for specifically was selling some especially dodgy ones. I learned this from the press like everyone else did. That said, I can't pretend to complete ignorance on this point -- I knew from the list of clients that we were green-washing some of the worst offenders in carbon emissions. But it seemed logical that they should be the ones paying for offsets, right?

Anyway, when the carbon markets imploded and my employer in particular took a thrashing in the press, the money dried up -- which meant throwing overboard all of the ballast such as diversifying their offering with digital solutions, etc. As you can see from my corresponding post from last year, however, I still had hope of some positive resolutions. Specifically, since one of my areas of expertise is helping companies grow from startup to scalable, I have corresponding skills in helping them downsize as well. I could have helped them trim their cloud infrastructure back down to startup size -- while keeping everything up and running.

So, yes, I'm saying I would have kept helping them (at least for a time) after finding out about their business. And the stress and worry of trying to play my cards to make that happen pretty much ruined my whole Christmas season last year. They didn't deserve it, but I had loved that job for three years, and I had the right skillset to really help them in bad times like in good.

The problem is that the top brass showed stunning incompetence, really the whole time. In particular, since they're not a tech company, they didn't have the idea in their heads that maybe the top engineers should be consulted regarding tech & engineering decisions. In their world, there are executives to make decisions and then there are tech/specialist cows to be milked.

Anyway, I could see the wrecking ball coming for my department, and as tech lead, I would be responsible for keeping things running while I didn't have the authority to make the decisions that would allow me to do so effectively throughout the downsizing. So I resigned. If they want to unplug things randomly, then they can explain to the various dev teams why their infrastructure isn't working anymore. I didn't want to resign, but I also didn't think I deserved to be made to take the fall.

A colleague had suggested that I could start my own business, and I thought it would be a good way to recreate the situation I loved -- doing the DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure for a portfolio of teams and small businesses. I had expected that I might get some "garden leave" when I resigned (since others had gotten it). but nope. I had to work right to my last day. So I had with no income while trying to start my new business.

(By the end of 2024, the last remaining members of my team were laid-off -- which meant at least that they got a few months of garden-leave pay plus the right to collect unemployment right away...)

A learned a couple of important lessons from creating my own company:

1. I find paperwork so stressful that a single form I needed to fill out would lead me to waste multiple work days just stressing over it. 

2. While companies do sometimes outsource DevOps and Infra to consultants, they hire consulting firms, not freelancers.

So, ultimately, after several potential clients told me that they could hire me -- but not through my small business -- I gave up. After about two months of no income and no real prospects, I accepted a temporary contract -- even though it wasn't through my small business.

There are a lot of nice things about my current temporary contract, but it's been stressful because it's not really where I want to be long term.

Fortunately, just before the holiday season I found a new job that is right up my alley. I got it and accepted it. I haven't started yet (so I don't want to count my chickens before they hatch, so to speak), but I have very high hopes that this is the right move for me. Here's hoping the "job" section of next year's "state of the me" will be full of wonderful news!

In career-related creative projects, as I mentioned in last year's edition, I've been upgrading my hobby-server infrastructure. I've created a bunch of additional demo projects on my kubernetes cluster this past year -- though, unfortunately, I didn't have time to blog about as many of them as I had planned. Hopefully I'll have more opportunity to write for my professional blog in 2025.

At least I did get a chance to give a talk on kubernetes at the Cloud Native Switzerland Meetup. Here's the video of it:

World Events

The US election was obviously much, much worse than any of my personal worries about my career.

I was actually shocked and surprised that Trump won, and here's why:

Even though we were constantly reminded that the polls showed a statistical tie, I thought they were underestimating the enthusiasm, especially from women. Whenever reproductive rights were on the ballot -- even in "red" states -- reproductive rights would win. And with the fall of Roe v. Wade (not to mention horror stories rolling in about women bleeding to death in parking lots after being refused care), I saw the election as largely a referendum on women's right to bodily autonomy.

When the Democrats responded to the outcry over Biden's age by pressuring him to drop out -- and then when Kamala picked the most progressive person from her list of possible running mates -- I thought, "Wow, the Democrats are finally getting it right and doing stuff that people like!!!"

Trump is a convicted felon who is constantly criming so blatantly that he more-or-less openly ran on a platform of "I will treat the country as my own personal property and sell off everything that isn't nailed down and put the proceeds straight into my own pockets."

The fact that a majority of US voters would vote for that is an indication of a very serious systemic problem. I think the most critical problems are money in politics, misinformation, and election interference. With the media landscape as it is today, it's just too easy for the wealthy to manipulate public opinion. I don't know how to fix this, but I think that unless we can find a solution to this problem, fascism will just continue to rise worldwide.

(There are some additional US-specific democracy issues such as gerrymandering, lack of ranked-choice voting, Supreme Court politicized and open for bribes, other types of legal bribery, etc.)

The political commentators are now dissecting what Kamala and the Democrats did wrong, saying Kamala should have talked more about specific policies than about her middle-class roots. Sure, if she'd been shouting "Medicare for all" rather than campaigning with Liz Cheney, that would probably have helped.

One formerly-progressive news/commentary outlet that has recently taken a horrifying sharp right turn argued that Harris should done more to throw trans people under the bus, and applauded Trump's win as a referendum against the Democratic establishment. :(

If it was a referendum on anything, it was a referendum on the question of "fuck women." Most people were essentially voting on "vibes" (not issues), and there were too many people who just couldn't picture a black woman as president, even when the alternative is a doddering and incoherent criminal who is actively robbing them.

If there was any "tweak" the Democrats could have made that might have put Kamala over the edge, it's that they should have pressured Biden to resign right after the mid-terms. If Americans had had two years of getting used to seeing Kamala Harris as president, it would have made all the difference in the world.

Now I'm kind of at a loss. Up until November of 2024, I had had hope that future historians would view it as inevitable that when Americans had come right up to the edge of fascism, they roundly rejected it. Now I don't know what to hope for or if there is any hope left. We can't even look forward to Trump's unhealthy lifestyle finally finishing him off because is VP is misogynistic slimeball.

Around this time, readers might be reminding me that I don't live in the US. While my kids and I are still US citizens, we're also citizens of France and Switzerland, and we live in Switzerland. As far as France is concerned, they've got some problems too. We got the opportunity to participate in the center-left action to block the fascists in the French legislative elections, but all over Europe it looks like the far right is gaining. I hope that is a wrong impression.

Here in Switzerland, we recently defeated a massive nationwide highway expansion proposal. Thanks heavens I have the right to live in this island of sanity where people are rejecting the inefficient, dead-end path of car-centric transportation. Switzerland also serious issues, but at least on my one favorite issue, I got one bit of joyful news.

Creative Hobbies

My participation in ZEST (Zürich English-Speaking Theatre) continues to be a great creative-social component of my life.

Since I didn't learn my lesson from last year, I agreed to act as head of set dressing for the Spring production "Communicating Doors". I'm half joking -- it was a great experience and I'm glad I did it -- but I feel like it was sometimes more stress and responsibility than I had the time and energy to handle. I'd like to take on another "head of"-level role in some future production -- but not any time soon.

I really enjoy doing backstage work, though. It's a fun and not-terribly-stressful way to help out and be part of the production. As I mentioned, last year Nico and I volunteered to be on the stage crew for their November production of "The Lieutenant of Inishmore", and this year I worked backstage on the costume crew for "Dogfight", which was fun.

Due to a series of scheduling conflicts, I haven't been able to go to improv for about 6 months. The cool part is that Nico has been going by himself -- which I think is a good sign.

My other hobby organization (Main Street Plaza and MAA Books) had some cool developments this past year! Chino Blanco (of the exmo reddit) organized a panel at Sunstone that was intended as a reprise of a panel I had organized more than a decade ago. I even got to participate virtually! Monya Baker represented Main Street Plaza in person, and met some up-and-coming authors.

I'm really pleased with how the Sunstone adventure has livened up our little community! As of this writing, we're currently in the middle of our awards season -- the big yearly event hosted by Main Street Plaza. The voting for X-Mormon of the Year has been pretty lively, not to mention the many nominations for the Brodie Awards!

In family creative projects, Nico and I have been rebuilding Totally Normal Town, and I've got plenty more awesome original builds planned: a new mountain + castle for Elsa, a Japanese garden + temple & dojo, and some city buildings to flan the tracks of the seilbahn.

The only thing that's stopping me from building the next planned items is that as soon as I start on an original build, I get kind of obsessed and can't work on anything else for about a week. I don't have time to do that between now and our trip to Japan (see below), so I have to set it aside for now. But these planned builds are on my 2025 creative project goals list!

Then, to put this awesome city-under-the-stairs to good use, Nico took the lead in directing a new "film noir" murder mystery episode of out Totally Normal Town video series. This was fun for the whole family -- including some memorable performances by Léo and my husband. It also helped me get more practice with video editing. And Nico has got some great new episodes planned for 2025!!

I also succeeded in one of my personal goals of learning to make animations in Unity!! I had wanted to make some Pokémon Go videos for my channel, but I felt like I wanted a cool, animated intro for them. So I created the following:

Then I used it in two initial Pokémon Go videos: in Budapest and Scuol. As you can see, my video-creation skills still need some work, so that's another of my creative goals for 2025 -- to improve my skills with some new Pokémon Go videos.

I'd actually also like to try to make at least one more animation in Unity (so I don't forget what I learned about how to do it). And I'd also like to finally complete my stated Unity goal from last year which is to create a minimal Unity game that contacts a server (and collaborate with my kids on a corresponding game project).

Then the #1 thing that I'd really like to do by the end of 2025 is to pick up work on my comic book again.

It took me 7 years to illustrate the first volume!! That's why I set it down -- I felt like it was keeping me from working on all of these other projects. But now that I've made some good progress on a lot of my other projects, I feel like I want to work on my comic book in parallel. I have some good ideas for imagery, and I'd like to get back into the fun of world-building.

So my comic book goal for 2025 is to have the second and third volumes completely blocked out -- all pages filled with (empty) panels and text -- and I'd like to do any necessary technical updates/upgrades so that I have drawn at least a few panels before the end of the year.

In addition to my main creative goals, I have a list of smaller things I'd like to get done:

• Review the computerized music creation I'd done a couple of years ago -- see if I can squeeze anything good out of it.
• Update Mormon Alumni Association Books (add more books).
• Blog about my garden -- I learned a lot in 2024, but skipped blogging about it for some reason.
  
• Maybe another hobby website...

Family and Languages

I've grouped my family situation and my language learning goals this year! Here's why:

My husband has been wanting to take a trip to Japan for years -- and this coming Spring we'll finally be going on our trip-of-a-lifetime to Japan!! All four of us!

In order to get the most out of our trip, my husband has decided to try to learn Japanese. For the past few months, he's been using this Renshuu app to practice reading and writing Japanese on his tablet.

After learning French in grad school, I got the idea that I'm a person who likes learning languages. I got a bit of a start on various languages -- and in particular my husband and I had fun learning Italian together back before we were married.

My Italian is still pretty decent because we listen to a lot of Italian opera (and I learned the words to a number of arias). Plus it was just a fun thing to do together. We still have some little catch-phrases we sometimes say to each other from the "40 Leçons pour parler Italien" book that we read together:

• "Gli spaghetti italiani sono sempre al dente!"
• "L'Italia è il primo produttore mondiale di vino."
• "Ma è fantastico imparare una lingua straniera -- soprattutto l'italiano!"
• ...and some expressions from operas: "Poverino!" and "Eccomi!"

The difficulty I've had learning German in Zürich has kind of put me off of the idea that I'm "good at learning languages" lol, but when I saw my husband doing his Japanese lessons, I started to feel tempted. ...Especially after he found me the recordings for "40 Leçons pour parler Japonais" -- the Japanese version of my favorite language-learning series that I've used for both Italian and German.

Anyway, it's been very fun and even kind of romantic to learn a new language together like we did way back in the honeymoon phase of our relationship.

I've actually also improved on my German this year because in my current (temporary) job I have to speak German all the time. And my new Japanese-learning hobby has taught me some tricks that I can apply to my Swiss-German lessons after we get back from Japan.

Our kids are doing well and making progress in their studies. I don't want to go into too much detail because it's their story to tell, but I'll report any new diplomas that they earn. :D

So I guess that's where I'm at in a nutshell! I hope things will go according to plan -- and that things will get better and not worse for us and the world in the coming year!

How to understand Israel from comic books alone

As anyone who follows this blog knows, I love reading autobiographical comic books that are set in other countries. I don't know much about Israel, but during the past couple of years two interesting graphic memoirs came out about people's experiences in Israel, so, naturally, I bought 'em, read 'em, and learned a thing or two!

The first book is Sarah Glidden's How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less , and the second was Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City by Guy Delisle.

Glidden's book is a memoir of her Birthright Israel trip, beautifully illustrated with watercolors throughout. First thing I learned: just for being Jewish one can get a free 10-day, all-expenses-paid trip to Israel!

Glidden's story isn't so much about Israel itself as it was about how young Jewish-American liberals feel about Israel -- also an interesting topic, BTW:

I found the book a little frustrating, though, because she set off with the express intention of confirming her belief in the pure black-hearted villainy of Israel, and her grand epiphany was that it's more complicated than that. Well, duh, it's more complicated than that. If the situation were simple, the conflict would be resolved. Yet, weirdly, she seems taken aback to discover that Israelis have justifications for some of their controversial actions:

Glidden did a lot of interesting research before her trip, and told some great stories about the things she saw matched up with her expectations (or didn't). Yet, there's a limit to how much insight you can gain from a 10-day guided tour, and in the end I was mostly just glad not to have so much emotional baggage around such a complex and important issue. (Of course I'm sure I have equivalent baggage surrounding other equally complex and important issues...)

Delisle, by contrast, spent a year living in Jerusalem where his wife was working for Doctors Without Borders:

Delisle identifies as Christian (he's a francophone Canadian), but he mentions in the story that he doesn't believe in God. (Glidden also mentions in passing that she doesn't believe in God.)

His occupation for that year was a combination of stay-at-home-dad and comic book author/artist -- in particular keeping his eyes open for interesting stories in his surroundings. I had an easier time relating to him since he came upon subject of Israel without a lot of preconceived ideas, just looking to learn what he could. And it was actually kind of fun simply to encounter a story in which a man has to juggle his childcare obligations with trying to find time to do his own projects.

Delisle met tons of fascinating people during his stay, and saw some remarkable things. He taught comic-drawing workshops to a variety of students -- Palestinian as well as Israeli, and the contrast is pretty amazing. He visited Hebron multiple times, guided by people on all different sides of the conflict. He met Bedouins and Samaritans. He met people who were separated from their lands and livelihood by the wall (as mentioned in Glidden's comic above). He watched the Doctors Without Borders mobilize during an armed conflict in Gaza -- and much more! And all of the characters and stories were fascinating and surprising.

ETA: also often entertaining and funny. I hesitated to write that the first time because so many of the situations are serious -- yet the human condition is funny, often even in tragedy.

I have to admit I liked Delisle's book better -- it gave a more extensive and varied portrait of the lives of different people living in Israel and Palestine. But I heartily recommend both of them, not just to learn a thing or two, but as interesting human stories.

My biggest problem with Biblical morality

I know some of you are probably going "Oh, please, where to begin???" But I do have a place where I'd like to begin: the book of Joshua.

In a nutshell, God decides that He'd like to give a wonderful "promised land" to His chosen people. I imagine that -- being God -- He could have used His omnipotent powers to turn the wilderness into a land flowing with milk and honey. Or perhaps He could have anticipated this and reserved a wonderful land for them (by guarding it with cherubim or something). Instead He chose to give them a land that was already inhabited: all the recipients had to do was massacre the inhabitants, every man, woman, and child. What a wonderful gift!

This story looks like a tale from a pagan polytheistic paradigm where the one tribe's God happened to be demonstrating that He's more powerful than the other tribe's God. But let's suppose this really is a tale of an act performed by the one and only God of all humanity. Imagine a child in one of the less-favored tribes -- terrified by the violence and pillage going on all around her -- desperately praying "Heavenly Father, please save my mommy and daddy and me!" and receiving as an answer "Sorry, I can't help you. The privilege of killing you and your family is a special gift that I've given to someone who will be arriving at your house shortly."

To me, this is far worse than the many instances in the Bible where God Himself kills people because this story teaches a deadly lesson: Check your conscience at the church door because God may command you to perform an act of unspeakable evil, and when He does, it is good and righteous to follow His orders whatever they may be.

To any Christian who says, "Oh, that's just the Ooooold Testament -- starting from Jesus, God is all peace-and-love," I'd like to ask the following:

Is this the same God you worship or isn't it? Do you believe He did this, or at least OK'ed this story to go in His holy book? If Jesus really changed things by fulfilling the old law, then please show me the Bible verse where God says "Remember when I told you to massacre the Hittites? And the Girgashites? And the Amorites? And give Me their treasure? In fact, that wasn't righteous at all, that was evil..."

I'm somewhat less worried about Christians who simply don't realize that this is in the Bible or just never really thought about it. But I am more disturbed by educated Christians who attempt to justify and rationalize this, and ask us to "look at it in context." Let me be very clear: There is no context where genocide is right. Even if God is standing right in front of you offering you eternal paradise as a reward for murder and hellfire if you refuse. There may be just causes for going to war, but "I want their land and my God wants their treasure" is not among them.

Now I realize that this harsh post appears to fly in the face of my usual claim of wanting to foster mutual understanding between believers and unbelievers. But this point bothers me quite a lot and presents a stumbling block in my own comprehension of the Christian mindset. (Same for the Jewish mindset and the Muslim mindset, by the way, if they also see this as a story of righteousness.) The whole story seems so incongruous with the ethics of the believers I know, and I'm at a loss to imagine what could possibly be going through their minds as they're reading it in their Bibles.

European dream

I attended a very white high school in the suburbs of Minneapolis. Looking at my high school yearbook, out of my graduating class of 550, I count less than ten faces "of color." And when I say "of color" here, I'm including the Asian students and the kids from the A.B.C. program: the handful of kids brought in from inner-city school districts to get "A Better Chance."

About the only minority my school district had managed to integrate was the Jewish population. I can't really even estimate for you what portion of the student body was Jewish because they didn't look different and they didn't self-segregate. All I know is that many of my friends were Jewish and many were not, and either case was perfectly ordinary. You may think that integrating the Jewish population is no big deal, but considering the fact that a big chunk of my town had been explicitly chartered as "no blacks and no Jews," I feel like integrating the Jews at least showed some good improvement.

In history class, we learned about segregation. We learned about "separate but equal." We learned about the civil rights movement and "separate is inherently unequal" and about forced integration through busing. Just imagine this charming scene of all of these lily-white young faces learning such things from a history book instead of from real life experience. We also got to learn about things like "de facto segregation" and "white flight."

And thus my white liberal high school teachers encouraged me to think about racism.

I've talked about how difficult it is to avoid racism -- the gut level sentiment that those guys aren't just ordinary people like us -- and I concluded long ago that one of the most effective and painless techniques is to have people of different races and ethnicities interacting with each other in their daily lives, and especially to play together as children, as in Martin Luther King's dream.

But I figured that realistically I'd be one day be faced with a choice between sending my kids to an integrated school or a good school, and not have an option that includes both. As a high school student I fretted over this question, and I basically concluded that I would probably end up sending my future kids to a school system as white as the ones I attended because it wouldn't be fair to my kids to shortchange them on their education for the sake of my idealism.

Fast forward to today. I chose my neighborhood here in Bordeaux, France based on its proximity to downtown and to the tramway line, not the school district. And when my kids reached school age, I was pleasantly surprised with what they got.

It would be a whole additional article to describe how impressed I am with the quality of the education my kids are getting -- the curriculum, the materials, the outings, the programs, and how closely their development is followed. And I didn't have to make the unfortunate choice that I thought I'd have to make. The school is about a third white non-Muslim, about a third Muslim or of Muslim origin, and about a third "other" including black, asian, various hybrids, and many whose ethnic origins are difficult to identify precisely. From the names and from the fact that we're near a large synagogue, I assume some of the kids are Jewish as well. I wouldn't consider moving out to the suburbs to take my kids out of this school.

In France, the education is run 100% at the national level. Every kid of the same age in all of France has the same basic curriculum. The teachers are hired and assigned at the national level. In the U.S. -- as you know -- education is 100% local.

As a consequence, in the U.S. an individual school district or school can experiment with an innovative new program or teaching style that could prove to be very effective and catch on in other places. Impossible in France. As a consequence, in the U.S. if one community wants its kids learning an additional subject that the next town over doesn't want to bother with, they can add it to the public school curriculum. Again not possible in France. As another consequence, the disparity between the rich kid's education and the poor kid's education is dramatically greater in the U.S. than in France.

The disparity creates a vicious circle in the U.S. where bad schools get worse -- as parents who have an interest in their kids' education and who have the means to get their kids out of a poor school will do it.

I'm not claiming that French schools are perfect in the diversity-peace-and-love department. Far from it. Yet I feel like some very positive options exists in some cities here, and I haven't seen anything quite like it elsewhere. Watching the interactions among the kids, teachers, and parents at our school, I get the impression that nobody's even aware of the racial/ethnic differences. I can't tell if it's P.C. politeness or if it really is that after a certain amount of time living in the city you stop worrying about it. And the school does an impressive job of teaching the kids about France -- instilling them with the idea that they're all French -- while at the same time recognizing the diversity by teaching stories and songs from Africa and other countries and having programs where parents whose native language is not French (like me!) come in and read stories or sing songs in their native language.

Recently my little family took a trip by train, and as usual the kids spent most of the train ride drawing and coloring. Nico was getting ready to color Batman's chin, so he asked me for the "beige" (the French term for caucasian flesh-tone). I looked down at the handful of colored pencils I'd brought and found I'd forgotten that one. Before I had even a moment to think what to do, Nico said "That's okay, I'll just use brown," and grabbed the brown pencil out of my hand and colored Batman's face with it. He then proceeded to draw a bunch of other people and colored their smiling faces brown as well.

I feel like I shouldn't have been surprised: it's just a color, after all -- it doesn't mean anything.

Well, it shouldn't mean anything. That's my European dream.

Stand by your home-grown tyrant...?

One of the positive advances credited to the feminist movement is the fact that it is no longer considered a virtue to stay with an abusive husband.

I'm not a historian, but I think it is reasonable to claim that a few generations ago (and right up to the present day in some places, even in the U.S.) it was expected that a man had the right to beat his wife and that the wife was not justified in leaving him over it. Today most modern, educated people are disgusted by the idea that wife-beating could ever have been considered admissable behavior. I suspect that the legal and cultural aspects of this change followed from economic realities: if a father's economic support means the difference between eating and starving, many will conclude that it is better to be occasionally beaten than to die of starvation and exposure. When women started to join the workforce and had greater potential to support their children themselves (if necessary), leaving an abuser became a reasonable choice. The question "but who will feed the children?" finally had a good answer.

Now I'd like to apply the "abusive husband/father" model to the analysis of foreign tyrants. I'd like to talk about this since it would appear that America is in the "regime change" business, thus it makes sense to do some analysis of how such adventures work in order to predict when and why some will welcome a liberator with open arms when others will see a hostile foreign invasion.

Without going out on too much of a limb here, I think that rule number one for being welcomed as a liberator is to convince the people in question that you have their best interests at heart. And a good first step for doing that is to actually have their best interests at heart. It's not enough to say "It is obvious that the dictator of country X is evil, therefore everyone will surely thank me if I kill him by any means I can."

It is true that brutal dictators typically use a great deal of force and intimidation to maintain their power. Yet there is a non-negligible component in which a home-grown dictator can convince his people that he's one of them, that he's interested in making their country great, and that any brutality and repression are necessary measures to protect the people from hostile foreign threats. Even in a case where anyone with eyes can see that the leader is, say, using the nation's resources to build himself a giant palace instead of building hospitals and schools, that doesn't mean that people will necessarily prefer a destructive foreign attack that ends with the country's resources being silently pumped into foreign pockets. It's not that different from the selfish man who mistreats his family yet shares some DNA and common interest with them and is bringing home at least part of his paycheck vs. an outsider who offers no tangible support.

There exist some Americans who explicitly favor a cynical policy of maintaining U.S.-friendly control over foreign resources regardless of whether it is fair or of the effects on the people living in the countries in question. But I think such Americans are a minority and that typically hawkish Americans are sincere in believing that a given military action will eventually lead to improved conditions for the people of the given foreign country. And in some cases this is probably an accurate assessment. But that doesn't mean that a military solution is always the best solution or that it's necessarily even always on the list of good solutions. Lately America's foreign policy is starting to look like a neighbor who says "Mr. So-and-so keeps beating his wife -- I should really do something about it... But what? I know! I'll go burn their house down! That will surely correct the problem."

I recently read an article (hat tip to Paul) that talked about evidence that babies as young as five months old prefer people who speak their own language over people who speak a foreign language. Frankly, I think humans tend to have a natural mental barrier that keeps them from empathizing with foreigners and from seeing immediately the human parallels between a foreign situation and one's own situation. It's not an insurmountable barrier, but it's one that takes a conscious effort to overcome, as I will illustrate below:

Now there are a lot of rumors floating around that Bush is planning an air strike against Iran. And people are probably saying that it's necessary because Iran is very close to having nuclear arms, and since its government is horribly repressive, Iranian nukes pose a grave danger to the entire world. I heartily agree that nuclear arms in the hands of the current government of Iran pose a grave threat to world peace. However, the assessment of the advantage of an air strike only takes into account the most familiar (American) perspective.

Let's use this situation to do a little thought exercise of picturing what it would be like to be a citizen of some other country. I'd like you to take a moment to imagine how this proposed air strike would look to you if you had been born (1) in Iran (2) in some other Muslim country (3) in China or North Korea.

Here are the responses that come to my mind:

For #1, I don't think any reasonable person in Iran is looking at the disaster in Iraq and thinking "I'd like to have that kind of help in my country too." Most likely, the average Iranian will see this attack as concrete evidence that there is a very real foreign threat and that their government is right to pursue a nuclear program in self-defense. An ordinary Iranian (who might otherwise have been pushing his government for needed reforms) would likely turn to his own government for military protection against the foreign danger, and view such things as political executions as necessary for national security -- in much the same way that Bush has persuaded many Americans that the use of torture is a necessary measure to ensure their safety.

For #2, I'd be very worried to see a pattern of the heavily armed U.S. launching unprovoked attacks against Muslim nations.

For #3, I'd be thinking, "So Bush gets to decide who can have nuclear technology and is ready to back up his decision with bombs? Are we next?" Even if China and North Korea have no fondness for Iran, they would logically start thinking about defensive treaties to try to contain American aggression. At worst, they could see U.S. military might as a threat to their own national security and use Bush's own "pre-emptive defense" doctrine to justify launching an attack on the U.S....

So, yes, Iranian nukes pose a grave threat to us. But so do Chinese and North Korean nukes, as do those in other countries as well as the various arms that have gone missing from the former Soviet Union. And think how much more of a danger they will present if World War III begins and we're the aggressor nation that started it.

My recommendation? Try to reclaim the moral high ground. Go back to respecting international treaties so that we can expect other countries to respect them as well. Cooperate -- really cooperate -- with honest people all over the world to recover lost weapons and stop international criminals. Don't be satisfied with "Hey, at least we're not as bad as the terrorists." Actually be the good guys so that there will be no confusion in anyone's mind as to who the bad guys are.

Persepolis

If after seeing Persepolis viewers stop reducing Iran to bearded fanatics, if they see the inhabitants of this country as human beings exactly like them and not as abstract ideas (Islamists, terrorists...) then yes, I'll feel I've succeeded.

When I first saw the trailer for this film -- with the Muslim girls in a car daring each other to take off their veils and the like -- I knew I wanted to see it, and the above quote (by the writer Marjane Satrapi? It was unattributed in the ad I read, translation mine) clinched the deal: I had to go off my cinema-fast and take the time to go out and see a grown-up movie.

Satrapi's goal was the first thing that came to mind when I read Johnny's "What's your issue?" meme (seen also in Vernal) asking what issue you're most passionate about. My primary issue is to try to convince people to make the effort to see other human groups (foreign nations, ethnicities, etc.) as ordinary people, more like "us" than different. I don't think I've done a terribly good job on this (I have a list of planned posts that are eternally coming up but never ready to post...), but as a first step I'd like to recommend this excellent film. And when I talk about recognizing the humanity of ordinary people in Iran, this is not to be mistaken for "taking their side against our people" in the case of armed conflict. What I'm talking about is trying to see more than just the guys with the guns (on both sides), and how seeing a bigger picture affects the types of conflict resolution strategies that are possible.

Persepolis is a story of revolution, political upheaval, and religious oppression, yet all of that is the background for the human story that takes center stage. Marjane is a lively, bright kid (later teen and adult) growing up the best she can under rather extreme circumstances. It shows what it's like to be an ordinary person forced to wear a veil and what it's like to go about your daily business in danger if you speak out (and even if you don't). In a realistic way it shows her conflicted feelings about her identity as an Iranian woman.

All of that description probably makes the film sound like a typical foreign "watch it because it's good for you, not because you want to" art film, and I'm sorry to make it sound that way because it's fascinating and it's funny in places in addition to being exciting and dramatic. Part of me wants to call it entertaining, but I'm dancing around that word because of the horror and violence of the film. It is quite the opposite of the typical "entertaining" movie violence we see these days (visually graphic, emotionally distant) because even though the visuals are simplistic cartoons, you know that the violence being portrayed is very real.

Still, Marjane's courage -- and that of her mother, grandmother, and others in the story -- makes this a story of hope for humanity pushing up through the cracks of terrible circumstances.

Is religion the problem?

Should we try to eliminate religion entirely? Deconvert the world?

These are the big questions making the rounds of the atheist community these days.

I say it depends on what your goals are. Let's say for the sake of argument that the goal is to leave a human-habitable planet with a sustainable human society on it for our descendants. Preferably a free and open society, and not some bizarro soylent-greenish solution like "okay we have enough resources for everyone to live happily until they're thirty, then we have to eat them..."

Given our current globally-interdependent world, creating a sustainable human society/lifestyle will require a great deal of cooperation among all of the peoples of the world.

(This post will be full of unsubstantiated claims and opinions like that one -- please feel free to dispute any or all of them in the comments.)

I think religion can hinder cooperation and understanding among peoples, but I don't think it's necessarily the primary obstacle. And setting out with a goal to eliminate religion can interfere with more important goals.

Consider the goals of freedom of/from religion, separation of church and state, and a free society with a shared secular public sphere. Consider the goal of high-quality public education, which is what allows people to recognize the difference between actual freedom and the slogan "freedom" (and vote for the former in a democracy). All of these are goals where lots of believers can get on board with us.

There's one thing to keep in mind about believers who are political moderates: Just because they're not violent/dangerous/insane, that doesn't necessarily mean they're not attached to their faith. If they get the impression that the ultimate goal of science education (and/or freedom of religion) is to eliminate religion, many will feel threatened and start to sympathize with the theocrats. There's no reason to alienate our allies like that. Keeping crap-masquerading-as-science out of the schools is not some sort of stealth evangelizing for atheism, and it benefits the whole society. People of differing worldviews can coexist and interact in a free society as long as they agree to do so.

Some say that if there were no religion there would be no war. After all, it's easier to convince people to go out and kill other people if they think it's God's will. God kills people all the time, and carrying out his will is -- by definition -- good. And it's easier to convince people to risk their own lives if they think martyrdom leads to paradise, not to true death.

Still, I think that -- even without religion -- the root causes of war would still be there. War is fundamentally about competition over resources.

People who feel confident that they will see their children grow up to be successful adults have little to gain and lots to lose from violence. The most dangerous people are those whose prospects are so bleak that they're better off taking resources by any means, including killing and risking death. I talked about this in my fertility, mortality post. Any human community can be persuaded to get along with any other human community -- regardless of religion -- as long as it's in their interest to do so.

I would argue that the converse is also true: That (regardless of religion) any human community can be persuaded to kill any other human community if it's in their interest to do so. Humans have a remarkable ability to stereotype and make assumptions about any human community they see as "other." It's weird, but while you naturally see that your own community is full of all different types of people, it's nearly impossible to avoid mentally flattening different races and nationalities into cartoon caricatures. Even educated people who know intellectually that foreign societies have the full spectrum of human qualities still have a difficult time feeling on a gut-level "they're more like us than they are different." Actually living in a city where you're surrounded by people of different origins (or living in a foreign society) seems to be the only way to see that people are the same, and even then it's not clear whether you're learning that "people everywhere are just people" or whether you're merely expanding your own community.

The problem (as well as the "adaptive" value) of mentally simplifying other groups is obvious. The belief that "they're like that, they're not ordinary people like us" is what paves the way for the belief that "they can't be reasoned with; we have no choice but to kill them."

I think that the meta-strategy for peace and sustainability is to see to it that the children of every country have a real opportunity to grow up healthy (again see fertility, mortality for details). See to it that every parent has the expectation that all of his/her children will live to adulthood, which makes it so that investing themselves completely in raising a few treasured children well (and not a quiver-full of disposable warriors) is the most attractive strategy.

How does religion play into this? Regardless of what is written in any official holy book, most people are going to act in their best interest. When it's time for war, those who like the scriptures about God killing all the infidels will rise to power, and when it's time for peace, those who prefer the passages about God loving everyone will rise to power. I figure we might as well make friends with that latter group and compare notes with them. They're the ones who are in a position to sway the (political) opinions of the average believer.

Let's look at this in terms of strengths and weaknesses: The advantage that the fascists, racists, fanatics, and theocrats have is that they enjoy lockstep, unswerving, unquestioning obedience from their followers. Their disadvantage? They can't get along with their closed-minded counterparts in any other racial/ethnic/religious group.

For those who want a free, open, secular/pluralistic society it's the opposite: Everybody has an opinion, nobody will unquestioningly follow the leader through right and through wrong. So our weakness is that most of the time we're marching in a bunch of different directions at once. But our strength is cross-cultural cooperation. Every race, creed, and culture has its open-minded people, and by definition their superficial differences aren't a barrier to working together.

If we can agree (atheists as well as people of faith) on meta-strategy, we can start to make progress on how to carry it out. It's easier said than done at every step of the way, though, so we'll see...

Think for yourself, starring the Internet and you!

I try to be a little wary of the idea that progress is always good; that human history is a parade of advances and improvements. Really, some innovations are good and some are not so good.

When it comes to the Internet though, I just can't contain my optimism!!!

My love song for the Internet goes a little like this:

Tyranny thrives on ignorance; so do intolerance and hate and the violence they inspire. The antidote is education, and the Internet can distribute a good dose of it.

Some will argue that the Internet is as good at spreading ignorance as it is at fighting ignorance since people can (and do) post tons of things that are false and wrong. Even wikipedia is riddled with errors. Or if it isn't I've just posted a false statement myself right here. ;^)

But I think that the Internet is a huge boon to educating masses of ordinary people for two main reasons:

1. The Internet gives people access to a wide range of perspectives from outside their own social/comfort zone that they would not have access to otherwise.

2. The Internet trains people to think critically for themselves.

And as a bonus, we have #3: It's so much fun that you end up learning things without even trying to.

Why do I think the Internet encourages people to think for themselves?

Think about how mass media works. Whether it's television, radio, books, newspapers, magazines, etc., you are encouraged to absorb. Sure you might analyze the information you've absorbed, but there's no real motivation to do so. Mass media divides the population into the producers of knowledge and the consumers of it, and never the twain shall meet.

Traditional media encourages the belief that "if it's in print, it's true," or alternately "Accurate unbiased news comes from a few established sources and everything else is the wacky fringe." It costs money to produce and distribute books, TV programs, etc., so media companies typically have an interest in building a reputation for being accurate and unbiased in order to build an audience. That's a good thing, but it means that if you question every newscast -- complaining about how much they aren't telling you -- the average person will lump you in the same category with crackpot conspiracy theorists.

Really it's better to keep in mind that there's an ocean of stories out there that aren't covered by the trickle of the standard media stream. Traditional news sources deserve your respect inasmuch as they earn it with careful, thorough reporting. But even when reading the big stories from reputable sources, it's beneficial to see multiple perspectives side-by-side (as you get in response to a search query or see in the comments of a blog entry). It forces you to assess for yourself who is the most credible and whose arguments make the most sense. It trains you pick up on hints of bias in even largely unbiased sources.

What's more, if you participate in blogs and forums, you get immediate positive feedback for coming up with original, intelligent, and insightful comments. You also get immediate positive feedback for thinking your ideas through carefully so you can express them clearly and concisely. Rambling or regurgitating an undigested party line will get your comments ignored. The result is daily exercise for your critical thinking skills.

Some people only like to frequent sites that cater to their own point of view. This encourages groupthink if the site succeeds in suppressing other viewpoints. However, on the Internet you're really never more than a click or two away from an opposing view, and many are tempted to make those few stray clicks. Additionally, even sites that cater to one viewpoint typically allow opposing comments: as a close-at-hand example, look at how the members of the Bloggernacle and of Outer Blogness cross-post on each other's blogs.

On the Internet, you're constantly presented with unfamiliar viewpoints even if you're not actively looking for them. Here's a typical example taken from my everyday blog reading. The permabloggers -- all with a similar background to each other -- were discussing violence in the Middle East with an understandable American "it's far away" attitude when they were confronted by someone with personal friends in the middle East urging them to remember that the "collateral damage" civilians are people too.

In blog-and-forum-space, you're encouraged to respond to unfamiliar viewpoints. That requires you to think about them and about your own position.

Now you might be saying "Chanson, you crazy optimist you -- most people are not discussing serious issues or current events at all online: they're exchanging pokemons and celebrity gossip!!!"

I contend that even reading and posting nothing but fluff to the Internet trains people to broaden their horizons.

Regardless of what everyone says about the deplorable spelling, grammar, and punctuation on the Internet, regular exercise at reading and writing improves one's composition skills.

More importantly -- even if your activities on the Internet are purely social -- you will almost certainly be socializing with people outside your usual real-life social boundaries. By that I mean you'll make friends people who are different from you in one or more of the following ways: economic class, education level, race, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, age, and other similar social barriers that make it unlikely you would have met your Internet friends in real life. And no matter how open and tolerant you are intellectually, it is nearly impossible to learn deep down that those outside your familiar group are just ordinary people like you unless you actually meet them. There's no substitute for it -- it's the true antidote for bigotry.

I'll bet your "think for yourself" reflex is kicking in right now. You disagree with me? Then you're planning your insightful objection in your mind, working out just the right way to phrase it. Then you'll post it and everyone can decide what they think of your position.

If you were reading this in a magazine, that wouldn't be the case.