Things I don't know

As an irresponsible adult, I think it meet that I pass along some secrets instead of guarding them as seems to be expected of me. The biggest secret is that I have no idea. About what? Most everything. Maybe I'm doing it wrong and every other adult has an idea but I'm completely lost.

An example. Do I like a firm mattress or a soft one? I don't know. When I use one, I'm often asleep and not paying attention. And when I can't fall asleep (it is currently 2:05AM where I am, which is, not coincidentally, not in bed) I have no idea if it is because of the mattress or because I have forgotten how to fall asleep. Maybe it is because half of me has to be stretched until it clicks, pops or cracks and the other half is achy. There is no owners manual on this machine that is my body, so I don't know.

What style of furniture do I like? What kind of car would I prefer? Do I like Italian or French food more? I don't know -- do people really care about this stuff? Am I supposed to feel, deep in my heart, that some things are preferable to other things? Either I don't or I do but I don't know what that is. Either way I feel like I'm doing this all wrong.

Shouldn't I feel relaxed and comfortable sometimes, knowing that I have done what needs to be done and chosen what will make me happy? Instead, I just float through life not because I'm too scared to choose but because things don't seem to matter on that level. I'm happy when I'm happy and it isn't tied to the kinds of things that seem to determine life happiness. It isn't that I'm not happy, just that I get the sense that I'm supposed to have a clearer cut happiness as driven by particular things. My sports teams? They win, they lose...either way, my stomach is tied in knots. My job? I feel like I'm faking it there also. I have no fire burning in me to be on the cutting edge of anything; I don't want to sit at work and stare at a computer screen. I want to do what I do and go home and stare at the screen there.

I don't even know if I prefer chocolate or vanilla ice cream. Both are good and at different times, each is preferable. I think it is simplistic to have clear preferences in things because there are too many variables in any given case so a decision that went one way might go in the other direction 2 minutes later. My brain is just whirring away, clicking through situations and possibilities and not settling anywhere. Is it supposed to? I care that I don't care, but I still don't care.

There are clearly things I like. Make no mistake -- there are foods, movies, even people that I prefer or maybe can't really do without, but there is so much more that I feel outside of (for lack of a better or more expressive phrase) and more that I just don't get. Is this what getting older is all about? Gaining such a wide perspective that I can no longer reduce my world into simple ideals to latch on to? Is there something wrong with that? Or is the fault on the side of youthful exuberance which I am fortunate to have abandoned? I don't know.

Anyway, it is now 2:51 and I think I'm supposed to pretend to be sleepy now.

Why I didn't play the lottery

If you are looking for something serious and political, move along. Tonight I deal with dry statistics, probability and current events.

There was a drawing for a 535 million dollar Powerball lottery tonight and I didn't buy a ticket. Allow me to explain why.

I usually don't buy a ticket. This means that though the odds for someone who buys a ticket are 1 in 292 million, for me, they are 0 in 292 million. So, and I have studied this, if I bought a ticket, my chances would increase from 0 in 292 million to 1 in 292 million. That doesn't sound like a lot, but trust me, it is. Think about it -- if I bought 2 tickets instead of one, my chances would increase to 2 in 292 million, a 100% increase. From 2 to 3 tickets is a 50% increase and so on. But from zero to one works out to be an INFINITE increase in my chances. That's a truth -- an infinite increase. That means I would inevitably and unavoidably win! Sounds good, right?

But remember, I have set a threshold for winning the lottery. Tonight the pot was at 535 million. But I figure that there have to be about 5 other people in the country who not only haven't been buying any tickets, but who also have the grasp of probability that I have and who would therefore also buy a ticket and inevitably win.

This would mean that 6 of us would win and my share would be less than my 100 million threshold! So winning wouldn't be worth it. So I sat this one out. You're welcome.

Hate Is guaranteed to have a home if it pays on time, just like anyone else

I'm at a complete loss. This is not new, or unusual but what troubles me is that others aren't at that same loss -- things seem to them to be so obvious and I just don't understand.

Stuff has been happening in the U.S. In a nutshell, there has been a galvanization of people who espouse beliefs based in the hatred of non-whites (racial and religious minorities) and those people have recently massed and protested things which undercut what they view as the fair expression of their beliefs. The removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee was apparently a flashpoint this week. I don't know. I try not to follow the news because it depresses me.

Our commenter in chief made the error of neither naming/labeling the protesters nor placing blame securely and exclusively on them. A firestorm ensued because even after he decried the hatred he reiterated that there was blame enough to go around. Memes exploded with righteous fury and talking heads went on and on about this. The Tweetmaster reminded us that the counter-protesters were doing the same thing when trying to assemble and strip rights from others and brought up the slippery slope argument -- if we remove Lee then do we next remove all slave owners (Washington and Jefferson)? On one hand these are reasonable concerns:

1. schools named after slave owners are having names changed and people want to separate themselves from that legacy and

2. it seems unreasonable to shout down voices that demean races or religious groups just because they are unpopular opinions to have, since the freedom of speech extends to all,

but on the other hand, totally dumb.

2a. Those shouting down the Neo Nazis seems obviously proper -- we fought the people who acted on those ideas so why would we condone their opinions now, and

1a. Lee isn't being removed because he was a slave owner but because he was a general of a rebelling force, an enemy. We don't have statues to Rommel in German communities in the U.S. He was also a general who denied the primacy of the construct that is the United States. He lost. We don't have to celebrate him, no matter his other (potentially) good personal qualities.

Does that make this all simple? Not by a long shot.

I remember very few things from middle school Social Studies class (apologies to Mrs. Liebman -- I wasn't "not trying" but I was certainly "not getting it"). One thing I remember is the tenet "It is the obligation of the majority to protect the rights of the minority. When the minority becomes the majority, it must do the same." I also have spent some time studying the first amendment (in graduate school). I learned what was protected and what isn't. I learned what is actionable after the fact and what kinds of expression are subject to a priori restraint. And I learned that what developed (either because of the American revolution, or if you are a more honest historian, a bunch of years after that) was a respect for the freedom to say unpopular things. The government cannot suppress a sentiment simply because it is controversial. As long as it doesn't run afoul of those categories which are not protected, people have the right (with a permit) to assemble and shout it.

Now, as much as I'd like to be, I'm not a naive, pie-in-the-sky liberal who buys into the ACLU, no questions asked. If I were, I would be a lot angrier at this invention called a "hate speech" statute which denies people the right to say things that are considered hate speech. On one level, this is laudable -- why should we allow people to say hurtful and (frankly) disgusting things about individuals or groups? Shouldn't one element of the minority we protect be its right to dignity and equal status and not disparagement? But isn't the hater also a protected minority? Whose rights, um, "trump" whose?

When I was growing up there were people who would make my life difficult. My parents, sagacious as they were, often advised "ignore them and they will go away. If you give a bully attention, he wins." That was interesting advice and well-intentioned. The bully does want to be acknowledged so, when ignored, he often then ramps up his attacks. Will he eventually go away? Maybe. I don't know. I was not very good at ignoring because I also heard that "silence equals death" or at least "silence is tantamount to agreement." If you don't raise your voice in opposition, you are tacitly acceding to the bully's position. Those two pieces of folk wisdom are at odds here and this is where I get lost.

Protesters have the right to assemble and shout horrible things. I think. Counter protesters have the same right. Not everyone agrees with any one particular opinion and in the free market place of ideas, don't all have the right to be heard? Or maybe, some positions are so abhorrent that they, by definition, should never see the light of day? Holocaust denial is a crime in many countries. Is this healthy? Words and ideas do infect and influence behavior; is it healthy to expose young people to unchallenged hateful ideas which will lead to violence or repeats of oppression? But censorship creates a backlash and resentment (and hearkens back to "the greater the truth, the greater the libel"). Your hate speech can drive someone to want to strip me of my identity and rights, but if your hate speech motivates me to punch you in the nose should you be silenced or should I have to control myself? Whose rights are paramount here? And, with our recent focus on safe spaces and trigger warnings, that slippery slope reemerges: who gets to decide what topics or words are off-limits? The pope drew one line. A college professor might draw another, and a plumber from Iowa, a third.

So we have the alt-right which marches with swastikas (allowed in the Skokie decision) and the intolerance of outsiders and the alt-left which marches with muzzles and gags, and intolerance of intolerance. One side wants the right to hate, the other, the right to muzzle hate. And both are protected but are both equal? Some people (OK, me) are more of an alt-tab, or possibly a shift-F5 kind who want to go back to playing Castle Wolfenstein. At least there, I knew who the bad guys were.