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2024-11-04 22:17 EST

Today I have been thinking about choice, and risk, and guilt. Specifically, I think there's a general assumption in our culture, a moral framework, that because our actions have consequences, we must pay for any adverse decisions. Surely there's nothing big happening tomorrow that would lead to these kinds of thoughts.

It's not hard to trace this thinking back to Christianity, and Protestantism in particular. The promise—or punishment—of an eternal afterlife that reflects what you have done is, in popular reckoning at least, meant to encourage good behavior and discourage bad behavior. There is also another implicit part to this—that there is an ultimate authority on what is good or bad, which is contained in a code of presumably sufficient detail to guide your decisions. The commandments, so to speak.

I think this is a problem, for a number of reasons. First, there is the issue of the afterlife, and that ultimate authority, and whether either actually exists. I will not address that here. There is also the issue of whether it actually prevents people from doing bad and encourages doing good—whether you can be scared into goodness. There is a common line of skepticism around this that is analogous to "a lock only keeps honest people out": a "bad" person won't concern themself with ethics, and a "good" person will only be wracked with guilt. It is the guilt element of this moral framework that I take issue with here, and its inevitable consequence of discouraging risk.

It is perhaps not surprising that many Christians (and Evangelicals in particular) are vehemently opposed to actions like divorce, abortion, or even innocuous things like tattoos. Marriage, procreation, and body modification are all supposed to be permanent decisions, and thus things that should be carefully weighed and only done with utmost certainty. This then leads to the idea that living life with such carelessness will cheapen and decay morality. The supposed gravity of these decisions falls apart under the slightest pressure because none of these things are irreversible. Are these things really signs of hedonism, or is are they simply acknowledgments that very few decisions are truly world ending?

There is an excellent piece by Devon Price which argues that there is no "safe life": everything you do carries risk, and that is unavoidable. To me, the kind of overthinking that asks you to avoid risk rather than weigh it is very related to avoiding an action because you (or even other people!) may regret it later. This kind of avoidance is by definition reactionary: instead of being proactive in your life, you become a victim of it.

This brings me back to tomorrow. There has been so, so much moral hand-wringing over the US presidential election. Should people vote for Harris to prevent Trump? If you do, are you endorsing the genocide the current administration is funding? Are you voting justly?

I dislike these questions because they presuppose the Protestant guilt complex. Instead I would like to propose another moral framework.

Imagine the world as a web of interactions between you and every other person. Every time you interact with someone the line connecting you two in the web changes. These are your social relations. They are occasionally symmetrical, but very often not. Most lines in the web are barely anything—these are strangers. But you do still have a line. It's unavoidable; you live on the same Earth.

What is justice in this framework? It's a negotiation between you and every other person. There is no standard set of boundaries; what may make one person feel cheated could mean nothing to another. Communication, honesty, solidarity—these are the elements of justice.

And you will not be perfect. You will hurt people. You will not atone for everything, and atonement is solely with the people you have hurt. You cannot atone for an injustice by dealing with a third person. There is no justice by proxy.

This may make you seem less culpable than in the Protestant framework, but I think that is a simplistic view of it. Especially when considering something as amorphous and world-defining as capitalism or colonialism, you may be culpable of a lot that you haven't knowingly done. For example, a common criticism of decolonization is that it is not the fault of settlers to have been born on colonized land, thus they do not "owe" anything to the natives of that land. However, if you take guilt out of the equation, and think about what settlers have indeed done to negatively affect the livelihood of indigenous peoples, things become clearer, if less manageable.

I don't have an elegant way to end this. I'm not married to what I have written here, but I do stand by it. I think a lot of arguments about morality, however, are trying to square a circle by working within the standards of our society. If there's anything this election has shown, it is that there is no redemption in it, whatsoever.

Tags: 2024 US presidential election • guilt • justice • risk

2024-02-05 22:58 EST

Author's note: I wrote this poem about a year ago, when I was suddenly struck with an urge to express this. I am posting it here for safe-keeping.

Do not mistake the Law for Justice.
They are two animals,
related (God-willing),
but wholly, concretely separate.
Law is of man, fashioned by voice & pen,
as fallible as his biases and faults.
Justice is eternal, ever-permeating,
something unable to be confined to words.
Though I at times may follow the law,
my allegiance is to Justice.
Where the two differ
I will follow Justice unrepentantly.

Tags: justice • law • poetry

2023-12-25 17:36 EST

After many months, I finally have this website up and running again! I switched server clients while trying to install Funkwhale and it messed up my configuration for my web server. Regardless, after a busy half of a busy year, I spent an afternoon and figured it out. Glad to be back, and I hope to use this blog more!

Also, in that time, the 2023 Pennsylvania municipal elections happened, and while very cool socialist candidates (and Pittsburgh DSA members 👀) like Dennis McDermott, Carl Redwood, and Sam Schmidt did not win their races for Allegheny County Council, there are still some less-cool new faces on the council. Check out the updated table for more info!

Tags: Allegheny County Council • website update

2023-02-25 23:29 EST

I was thinking today about faith, and specifically the very different ways that Judaism and Christianity conceptualize faith. In Christianty, faith is rooted in certainty. The kind of "I know God is there and will help me get through things" kind of idea. This is also reflected in the various creeds and prayers and hymns. "I believe in one God," etc. etc.

As I learn more about Judaism the more I am struck by how different faith looks. If Christianity's faith is rooted in certainty, Judaism's is rooted in uncertainty. The story of Jacob wrestling with God leading to his name being changed to Israel is a perfect example. The Jewish relationship with God is to struggle with divinity. I was in class with a rabbi a month or so ago who said that he probably only believes in God every other day, but he can't escape the notion. He's not certain of God's existence, but he is never certain that God doesn't exist either.

Which is a greater statement of faith: knowing that someone will do well and giving them a job, or not knowing that someone will do well and still giving them the job? If we treat the world like we know it, we are never challenged, and we never grow.

Tags: Christianity • Judaism • religion

2023-01-19 00:06 EST

The other night, around 5 AM, I was hit with the realization that, hey, most US presidents have had last names ending in -n. Washington, Jefferson, Clinton... that can't be a coincidence, right?

Sure, it's not like having a last name that ends with n makes you more likely to become president. But on the other hand, it's maybe not a huge surprise that so many of them fit this pattern.

Let's look at the stats. Of the 45 people who have been president (sorry Grover Cleveland, you only count once), their surnames end with the following letters at the following frequencies:

17 out of 45 is not a majority, but it still is a pretty significant chunk, especially when the next closest letter is 11 presidents away. If you actually look at the surnames ending with n, there's a reason it's so common.

Because so many presidents have been of English heritage, and Germanic languages like English like to have patronymic surnames, son takes the cake and is definitely the most common morpheme in presidential surnames.

Future areas of research: how many Americans have last names ending with n? How has its popularity changed over time? What about other federal bodies, like the Senate or the House of Representatives? It is worth noting that with just a glance through the names of the current US senators, only Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson has a -son surname.

Tags: etymology • names • US presidents

2022-11-20 19:00 EST

So despite being a big fan of Tally Hall for the past few years, I've not really delved (delven?) deep into their members' individual careers. So, last week I decided to listen to Joe Hawley's 2016 album Joe Hawley Joe Hawley all the way through for the first time. Overall, I thought it was good, although some points were higher and lower than others. But one of the songs that unexpectedly stuck with me was his song "Crazy F***".

Now, it's worth mentioning that "F***" in the title largely stands for "Food" as opposed to "Fuck" (although it is used as such once in the song). I think this is hilarious. I think it's worth noting that this is the only song in the whole album that is "censored", and the fact that the title leans into that is genius. It's also worth noting that the bleep sound over top every swear word is in tune with the 8-bit portions of the song. It brings to mind a quote about comedy music from Spike Jones Jr. that says "when you replace a C-sharp with a gunshot, it has to be a C-sharp gunshot or it sounds awful." The only other time I've seen this done with censor bleeps is in the Derevolutions' cover of "The Monster Mash", which makes me think we really missed out in doing this back when songs were censored using bleeps.

Regarding the content of the song, I feel like this song is in the long tradition of comedy songs that contain long lists of things set to song, often with intense speed. A first example I can think of is Tom Lehrer's "The Elements". Other examples are the bridge of "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Hardware Store" and Lemon Demon's "Toy Food", which is interestingly another list of food.

The last thing I wanted to mention is that I appreciate Hawley's sampling prowess, both in this song and in the album at-large. As someone who spent most of her teenage years listening to video game music, hearing Hawley rap over a theme from Punch-Out!! and "Green Greens" from Kirby's Dream Land was very fun. The thing that took me a second to realize though is how much the song owes to "Scarborough Fair" (as popularized by Simon & Garfunkel). Apparently the sample is directly from Bill & Ted's Excellent Video Game Adventure.

I like that in addition to musically referencing "Scarborough Fair", it lyrically references it too. The song starts with, "Are you going to eat that crazy food," whereas "Scarborough Fair" starts with, "Are you going to Scarborough fair". At the end of the introduction, the lyrics are, "this was once a true fantasy of mine" in place of the original "she once was a true love of mine". (and then of course, Hawley references the chorus of "Scarborough Fair" with "parsley, sage, rosemary, wait / almost seems like this should be illegal."

Anyway I very much enjoy this song, its comedy, and its energy, and I am glad to have found it.

Tags: Joe Hawley • music • Tally Hall