I Have a Dream (about Tomorrow)

Well, I suppose it's a fantasy.

Tomorrow morning, everybody wakes up and realizes that they just don't want to vote against their conscience and 3rd party candidates take every state that has any.

And RFKjr/Shanahan win the election, despite being on record as having withdrawn.

And every mountain shall be made low, ...

My Wife's Suggestion for US President

My wife is listening to the US election reports on NHK news.

She thinks Harris is ahead by ten points or more. 

But she thinks neither should win, and suggests that the US should learn to get along without a president.

I'm not completely averse to the idea, but I asked her who we should send to all the international summits and such.

派遣。 Just hire a temp.

派遣会社 (haken gaisha) are a particular type of temporary staffing agency here in Japan.

I'm amused, but I'm also not sure it's a bad idea.

I also asked her who would keep Congress in check.

She suggested having elementary school teachers do that job -- by rotation.

There are some problems hiding in the details, but I love my wife's imagination.

A Vote for a 3rd Party Candidate is a Vote against Their Candidate!!!!!

Well, duh, as we used to say forty years ago.

But every vote for the entrenched parties is one more excuse they will take for not changing.

Consideration of Trans-women and Women's Spaces

I'll try to be circumspect, but this is  going to be a little graphic.

eXTwitter user @country_spaces posted about how consent for men in women's spaces cannot be given by men to other men, nor can any woman give consent in the stead of another woman for men to be in women's spaces. If one woman in a group says no, it does not matter what the rest say. It isn't a majority-decides argument. @country_spaces says the answer for that group must be no.

But trans-women are women, according to certain trans-women, and the question should therefore not be raised for trans-women, according to their argument.

What's wrong with their argument? 

Such spaces are only partially relative to sex/gender, anyway.

Well, ...

Among civilized people and even among most less-than-civil people, private spaces are private spaces because of the right of refusal.

Said another way, without the right of refusal, there is no such thing as a private space.

If I can't tell you to get out of my private space, my private space is not private, and it is not mine.

This principle applies regardless of sex or gender.

Doesn't matter if we are both men, if we are both women, or if one of us is a man and another is a woman, or if you are some alien of a thirty-third gender and I am some alien of no gender at all. Without right of refusal, there is no privacy.

In certain public spaces, physiological realities require us to provide private spaces within those public spaces.

Without such private spaces, personal assault, including sexual assault, becomes a statistical problem. Why? Because the whole purpose for these spaces is so that we can let our guard down to take care of private business. And people looking for people to assault will assault people whose guard is down.

We can make rules and laws, but there will always be in any large enough group (large enough meaning more than one hundred in some cases, but more than just one in others), certain individuals who will not exercise self-control in another person's extremity.

So in civilized society, we try to provide those private spaces within public spaces, to the extent that we can.

But logistic realities mean that these private spaces within public spaces cannot be made perfectly private. So we compromise by providing shared semi-private spaces. Not perfectly private, but better than nothing.

in other words, we set up the sharing according to certain statistical realities.

Statistically speaking, women do not assault other women as frequently as men assault women. It happens, but much less frequently than men assaulting women. 

Women tend to respect each other's privacy more than men tend to respect women's privacy.

Also, men do not assault other men as much as they assault women. It does happen, but men tend to be more conscious of men being able to fight back. 

Do women tend to assault men in semi-private spaces? It's not a question we need to ask, if men and women do not share these semi-private spaces.

The difference is significant, and usually is sufficient to make a division of these semi-private spaces based on sex/gender a meaningful protection of both women and men.

Are these shared spaces really safe?

Not perfectly. If there is a rumor that some man has hidden cameras in the stalls of a restroom at a certain venue, women will go to significant personal pain to avoid using those restrooms. (And avoid the venue if possible, as well.)

Men, too, but not so much, since men are less vulnerable in their extremities than women.

So what about trans-women? If they are women, the same should hold for them.

Except, if a woman sees a trans-woman and suspects that the trans-woman is actually just a man pretending, the woman is not going to feel safe in letting down her guard. That, all by itself, nullifies the semi-private nature of women's spaces.

Moreover, we do not have sufficient statistical data to actually agree with the assertions of trans-women that they are women in this sense. There are reports of trans-women in prisons assaulting non-trans women at rates significantly above the rates of women assaulting women, and until these reports are proven false, women in shared prisons have no private spaces at all.

And above that, when a trans-woman sexually assaults a non-trans woman, there is a probability of pregnancy that requires much stricter considerations than the possibilities of women assaulting women. 

(Sexually transmitted diseases might be assumed not to have a sexual bias in infection frequencies? Maybe, maybe not. Until we have proof otherwise, we should rather assume that there is more of a tendency for transmission of disease as well when physiological males assault physiological females.)

And what about trans-men?

Careful. Discussion of the concept of shared private spaces in the context of trans-men is way too likely to shine too much light on the whole theory of gender affirmation.

What about the poor intersex people?

I'm going to suggest that letting people self-identify, and supporting insurance-paid gender-affirming surgeries is actually making it harder for true intersex people to have their private spaces. 

Twenty years ago, if a woman entered a men's restroom in an emergency, nobody got too excited -- other than certain men with no sense of self-control who complained that it never happened while they were in the loo. 

And, likewise, if a man apologized for entering a women's restroom in an emergency, he knew he had no right to be there. If he was allowed, he took care of his business and got out. And took a lot of ribbing from his buddies for letting himself get caught in such an extremity.

Very few trans-women apologize. Many seem to actually deliberately take way more time in restroom facilities than necessary.

Twenty years ago, intersex people could usually slip in under the radar. Now it's much harder.

If trans-women insist on unreasonable rights relative to women's spaces, it destroys the privacy of those women's spaces. Society may have no recourse other than to do completely away with shared private spaces in public spaces.

And that would drastically alter our ability to assemble freely, since most venues would have to just shut down completely.

School Loans? School? Why?

I've been thinking about the school loan fiasco.

I think it was Thomas Jefferson who proposed public schools for the poor (there were none in the US at the time), consisting only of three years -- just enough to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Back then, kids would study and go home to help with what it took to keep the family alive. They would usually apply what they learned immediately, which made what they learned meaningful.

Beyond that would be scholarship funding for the exceptional capable learners and apprenticeship for those interested in a trade. Education would continue basically at the interest and will of the individual and his or her family.

There is something to be said for making education available and egalitarian, as we have. But we have gone way too far. Education has lost a lot of meaning, and has become more of a (potentially useful) recreational activity in general, and in some ways just another market to compete in.

I am thinking we should go back, if possible, to making education something that happens at the interest and will of the family (when children are young) and the individual (from the beginning), and back to making it something we do concurrently with making a living.

Why at the interest and will of the family and individual? Because people learn best when they are not being force-fed or spoon-fed things they did not choose to learn.

OH! BUT THINK OF ALL THE LOST OPPORTUNITIES!!!!!!!!!!!

or whatever the argument. No. Just No. Wrong on every level and from every angle.

Educators have always had the ability and opportunity to influence their students to widen their horizons. On the converse, far more damage is done trying to force people to widen their horizons than any benefits gained -- other than benefits to those at the top of the social hierarchy who think they have a vested interest in keeping their position there.

(Not all at the top have such delusions, although forced education does seem to bubble more such deluded people to the top.)

Why concurrently with making a living? Because then we wouldn't need to take loans out to take a mix of classes that are more than half not even relevant to the individual's interests, and more than 90% irrelevant to making a living -- and more than half of which are likely to induce false ideas and ideologies that actually interfere with making a living.

Making a living is not the ultimate goal of education, but opening possibilities to make life interesting while making a living is close to the ultimate goal of education.

The ultimate goal should be something like to help make whole human beings, but people who don't understand what I mean might argue with me instead of looking for a different way to word the goal. The words are not important, and argument may or not be useful, but it would be a distraction from today's rant.

So I'm going to leave the question of the ultimate goal open and focus on the goal of making it possible to keep life interesting while making a living.

Suggesting something systematic is always going to result in promoting non-optimal ideologies, but I'll toss a few ideas out here for examination:

1. Make day-care and pre-school optional again, both in terms of legal enforcement and in terms of requirements for entering primary school grades.
    
2. Limit in-school time to half a day during the first three plus-or-minus years while the students achieve, at their own pace, basic proficiency in reading, writing, and arithmetic.
   
   
3. Part of the reason for limiting in-class time is to allow the students time to apply what they've learned outside of class, as much as possible in natural situations. 
   

In order to get this to work, we're going to have to find ways to promote appropriate places for very young children to play. 

Constructing a market for Japanese-style 塾 (juku) and お稽古 (o-keiko), and similar activities seems to be a partial solution, and may not be out of the question, but it's just pushing the problem off to another version of the same thing. 

Ultimately we need to have the parents involved. Presently, most of what we do "for the children" involves taking the very people who ought to have the most motivation to keep the children safe, happy, and constructively occupied out of the equation. (I know, this is partly because a small number of parents are not conscious of what will happen in the future if they abuse their kids. But it is far more because all too many parents seem not to know how, and seem to be afraid of learning how.)

But where are parents going to get the time to be involved?

Walk with me down a side-path for a ways. What if we got all the people who are on the welfare rolls and had them work two-to-four hours a day on something useful to society?

Competition for jobs would get stiffer, right?

What if we got rid of all the non-essential jobs?

Competition for real jobs would become brutal, correct? 

Why?

Because seven out of eight working hours for most people are spent in things that are not essential, and at least half of our working hours are spent in things that have no benefit to society. (Not including emergency medical workers and such here.)

What are we doing all day long? Fighting the modern equivalent of warfare -- market competition.

Parents should have the time.

That parents don't may be partly on the parents themselves, but it is at this point in our modern society mostly on the people who insist on, having made enough for their own retirement ten times over, or tens of thousands of times over, insist on keeping in the game. 

Somebody donates a quarter or a half of his n-billions of dollars to charity, but doesn't take himself completely off the payroll, off the board, out of management? He is being duplicitous. He should be shamed and shunned. 

If they want to stay in the game? Divest, divest, divest. Get their tanks off the playing field, get out of their power-assisted robot shells and Kevlar body armor and play friendly football like the rest of us.

We have to be willing to get our superstars out of the way -- if they won't move over voluntarily, move them out -- boycott and such.

Cut back on the things we do for senseless competition, and no one, I repeat, no one would need to work for hire more than four hours a day five days a week. Max. 

And with the extra time, there would quickly be plenty of people training to do emergency medical work and such, so even the emergency medical workers, firefighters, and so forth would be able to get their daily working hours way down.

Back to the topic of education.

So what do children do outside of school? That has to be between them and their parents, really.

When does the first year start? That's another thing that parents and children have to work out between them, on an individual basis. 

Oh, and how do you decide when to end the first three plus-or-minus? Again, on an individual basis. 

ALL THESE DECISIONS!!! CAN WE TRUST PARENTS TO MAKE THEM RIGHT?

First, there is no single right decision that can be specified in general. It's going to be case-by-case, and the people in the best position to make these decisions are the parents and the children themselves. No one else has close to enough information. Not government. Not the schools. Nobody else. 

(Think about this. What's the first thing that happens when government and/or schools take these decisions over? Tests. Tests. Evaluations. And more tests. Because they don't have the information. Unless they take over the DNA along with the evening meals and bedtime, they can't have enough information, and not really even if they do that. Institutions bigger than family are too big to be able to work with at the necessary level of detail.)

Second, if we can't trust the parents' decisions in most families, we've already lost our society. Same thing as innocent until proven guilty; we have to trust them until and unless they prove irreparably that they will deliberately make too many wrong decisions that result in repeated serious abuse.

I'm getting off-the topic. 

But I'll note that, if the primary language is not English, more than three years may be necessary. Japanese, for instance, will need another year because they will start with the 仮名 (kana) writing system first, but then they also have to get the basics down for the 漢字 (kanji) writing system, as well. And to make it work in just another year, a new, more regular approach to the kanji is going to have to be developed. Other languages exist in which grammar and character forms interact, and I have to assume those will take extra time.

There's a lot more to think about here, but I need to talk about what happens after the first three (plus or minus) years.

This is where we have to get really creative.

Before we do, no, we don't have to require children who can read, write, and handle numbers to continue institutional education or equivalent. Once they have the foundation, they can continue on their own. The whole reason we have been requiring children to stay in school is that too many haven't been getting the foundation. 

That said, institutional education can be done in a meaningful way. And if we do it in a meaningful way, the reason some kids won't want to continue will be that they have some better option more appropriate to the educational path they want to take. And that's not a bad thing.

How do you make school meaningful?

What has more meaning to children than the real world?

4. Bring the real world into the school.
   
   
5. Half of the day can be retained for guided instruction -- lecture, practice, labwork and etc.
    
6. But the guided instruction part should be entirely elective.
   
   
7. Students need meaningful problems to solve anyway because humans are problem-solving animals.
   
   
8. But students who have meaningful problems to solve will generally choose naturally what topics they need to solve them. That's why students can be allowed to choose their own course.
   

How do you give them meaningful problems to solve?

9. The school should operate as a microcosm of the students' real world. Give them opportunities to experience things they will experience in the real world as adults.

Sure, cleaning and helping in the cafeteria if there is one. But manufacturing, setting up and operating stores, working with money, operating in-school postal systems, making and enforcing rules, the whole thing.

Under adult supervision, of course. Parental involvement, of course. Probably using an in-school currency to reduce temptation to the supervising adults. But, to the extent that it can be relatively safely done, letting the students apply the things they are learning in real-world ways.

In middle school, a similar approach would continue, but the currency of the real world would replace the in-school currency, the internal postal system would integrate with the external system and so-forth.

In high school, most students would begin to learn trades and/or begin to work on actual research projects coordinated with local colleges and research institutions.

College/university would become integrated with industry, such that most students would actually be working their way through school.

Yes, this would require that the current totalitarian intellectual property regimen would have to be significantly weakened, but that is a given. Published works that remain under copyright for the life of the author plus seventy years is insanely beyond the control for a limited time that the Constitution granted, and basically gives the artists' associations powers that the government is restricted from, powers that the government should not be capable of giving. 

And the patent mess, where the threat of suit is of more consequence than actually going to trial and getting a decision allows invalid and expired patents to be wielded with as much effect as valid, original, new patents also must be resolved.

Just as important, the existing databases have to be fixed. You can't attribute when you can't trace where your ideas came from.

You can't teach and you can't learn if every day becomes a trip through an IP minefield. This is no small part of the current cost of education.

Loans and their repayment are the tip of the iceberg here.

Thoughts on Dobbs vs. Jackson (clinic)

I had not intended to take time on this, but I think, in the aftermath of Dobbs vs. Jackson (clinic) it's important for voices for sanity to be heard.

(I should not be understood to assert that I am, myself, especially sane, but I think my voice for carefully considered response is a voice for sanity.)

First, Roe vs. Wade was right but wrong. It used bad legal reasoning to come to a conclusion that was expedient and probably even necessary at the time. Also, the legalistic guidelines in the decision did constitute judicial legislation.

Likewise, Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, while it sort-of fixed the judicial legislation problem, attempted, but failed, to fix the legal basis of Roe vs. Wade. 

And we need a legal basis. 

Without a legal basis, we have have the nation riding a seesaw that is threatening to come off its fulcrum or just break because too many people are riding it too hard.

I do not like the idea of amending the Constitution. Amendments tend to turn out to be atomic bombs when wrenches or hammers should have been sufficient.

The Constitution would allow Congress to pass a bill that 

1. encourages the States to refrain from creating a legal framework or even an environment of repression against women in laws regulating abortion, 
2. encourages the States to pass the actual duty and authority for regulation down to individual communities, and
   
3. prohibits any state from punishing anyone who crosses state or community boundaries to obtain, assist, or perform an abortion in another state or community.
   

Yes, when I say "encourage", I do mean that we must give the states and communities room to try to figure out the best approaches for their people. 

(Really, this is what should have happened immediately after the decision in Casey at the very latest.)

Note that I am not taking a middle-of-the-road approach here. I am firmly of the conviction that abortion, while not exactly murder, is close enough to killing that the current anything-goes attitude has become a moral albatross, and an indirect contributor to the public ennui that breeds violence in general. 

(Don't kid yourself. Ennui does breed violence, and is the primary driver in the current expansion of violence. This world was never intended, by nature, evolution, or any other creative force by which it may have come into existence, to be completely friction-free. 

By whatever means we came into existence as a species or race, we are problem-solvers. We need problems to solve. This is, in fact, one of those great chances for us to act together to actually work to solve a problem instead of just trying to throw money and legalistic rules at it.)

I am also firmly of the conviction that a woman must know that she has means of recourse against incest, rape, serious health issues, and even seduction. 

Abortion should not be the first suggestion. The technology may be safer now for the mother than in the past, but it still is not risk-free. And, really, it runs against the human drive to preserve the species, even if you don't find any other moral issue with it. (Among other moral consequences, consider that men who encourage the women they have sex with to have abortions do not learn self-control any more than the women who resort to abortion to appease them learn how to say no.)

Abortion should remain available as one option. 

Other options need to be presented at a much higher priority, such as support for women who are pregnant and/or raising children without a support system. Yes, we need to revisit the welfare system of the welfare state we have created.

You just can't have a national welfare system that works. Too many of the details can't be determined without context, and the context does not exist at the national level. Even the States are too large these days, but they have a better chance of being able to set up a framework for the individual communities to work within.

One thing we can do at the national and state level is provide incentives (both negative and positive) to corporations and individuals who cross state lines to make excessive profits to let social conscience become a greater motivation in employment, work environment and scheduling. (What? am I attempting a radical change in topic? Nooo --)

Among other things, here's one idea that many hypercompetitive types seem to think has gone out of style, but --

Yes, employees raising children and/or taking care of elderly parents (etc.) do deserve at least equal effective pay compared with single employees because, even if they need more time off, they are helping maintain the economic ecology within which the company makes its profits. The taxation and corporate regulation systems could be fixed to encourage corporations and their investors to do so.

The problems we are facing as a society are deeply, deeply tangled, and trying to fix any one of them with a quick, big ideological band-aid is just not going to work.

On the Russian Manifest Destiny

A FB friend, Carolyn Rabe Tinney, has been sharing some analysis pieces with me, 

One is an analysis of Putin's strategy in the Ukraine that explains his state of mind in more clear terms than simply "delusional":

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/398089.php?fbclid=IwAR2ZI6Z-VUN0cmXNVobEarGC98JrLUT8L1e8bpoKvVVlT6y9s63TZmB3n9c#398089

Another is an explanation of the mindset he has expressed, of carrying on the destiny of a thousand year-old empire:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/12/putins-thousand-year-war/?utm_source=pocket-newtab&fbclid=IwAR11zm_yHHdPPCtywXutJDDd_HYKzgIVnDZliGkg883HMFz6FdMcVQTE-x4

So I am finding myself of the opinion that the best prayer I can pray for the people of the Ukraine -- and the people of our world -- is for the leaders of Russia to have their hearts softened and their minds enlightened as to the futility of power politics.

On power, I reference a peculiarly Mormon scripture from the book of Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price, Abraham chapter 3. Read the whole chapter, note especially v. 19, in context.

https://abn.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/pgp/abr/3 

No matter how big you get, there is always someone bigger to take you down. 

And ultimately, there is God.

Even if you don't believe in God, there is nature -- time and death. 

Fighting them is futile.

Nothing we build in this world can ever be permanent. Not empires, not our own strength. Empires fall. Humans, every human, eventually gets weak and dies. 

Believing in your own superhumanity is exactly the same as taking the comic books of the western world seriously. This is the fatal sin of the very Nazism they despise.

So we need God to find someone to sit Putin and the members of the Federal Assembly down and ask them, what will Russia do after they die? Where do they expect to find someone to carry on the destined legacy they have convinced themselves is theirs? 

Why do they think they have a chance to succeed in building a permanent Russian empire when every Tzar before them has failed? 

And what use is it to build an empire that will ultimately crumble to dust?

But that is precisely the question that ultimately leads, not to Democracy, but to governments that recognize that the freedom and sovereignty of the individual citizen -- the will of the people -- is the only real, viable basis for government.

And it seems to be the question they refuse to face, I suppose because they think it will cost them their glorious destiny to admit it is just dust. If they could only face the question and find a real answer, how much greater a destiny could they fulfill?