Too much work to do. Might not be one tomorrow either for reasons.

Let’s talk articulacy.

There is a fundamental error in the natural thinking patterns of the highly articulate.

Say you’re a highly intelligent and articulate youth. ^[1] You want to do something exciting and dangerous. Your parents, naturally enough, don’t want you to do it. So you angrily challenge them to give you one good reason why you should not do it.

And say your parents are good people but of average intelligence and articulacy. They know there’s good reasons not to do this crazy thing, but they are neither intelligent nor articulate enough to be able to spit them out right away.

You, the arrogant teen, then say “Hmph! I didn’t think so. ” And storm away, thinking you didn’t just win the argument, you proved your case.

But you’re wrong. You haven’t proved a thing except that you think faster than your parents, and you presumably already knew that. There could still be very good reasons not to do the activity and you would never know because you have confused articulacy with reality.

That’s the fundamental error. If you follow that logic far enough, you see that by confusing winning an argument and proving a point, you end up with a worldview limited by the articulacy of those you happen to encounter and argue with. The inability of people to prove you wrong has no bearing on whether or not you’re right.

Reality just plain doesn’t work that way.

But it’s an easy delusion to fall into because the reptile brain at the core of all our noggins insists that if you win the fight, that means you’re right. Winning at anything gives people a rush of confidence and pride that can have a powerful effect on the psyche and distort our sense of reality, which is, of course, a product of higher, less primitive forms of thought.

The hierarchy of the mind, sadly, is in a sense extremely unjust. The more primitive parts of the mind hold veto power as well as override priority over the more sophisticated and, dare I say, human parts of the mind. That is why it takes a very specific kind of mental strength to resist what our very powerful primitive minds, which have at their disposal one’s entire endocrine system, are saying.

And I doubt anyone has developed total immunity to it. We are, at best, lucky enough to be able to hold on to a few pieces of the big puzzle called Truth against our inner Godzillas.

Luckily, as a species, we can communicate these truths to one another, and that means there is a possibility they will accumulate.

It is hard for many of us brainy types to accept that we too are subject to primitive, tribal instincts. After all, our higher brains are so well developed and we can easily prove how we are able to produce very impressive sounding verbiage at the drop of a hat. It is all too easy to slip into thinking that this makes us special and not subject to the baser instincts.

But that is the arrogance of the ego talking, not rationality. No matter how high you build your ivory tower, its base will still be in the id, and it is literally impossible to move entirely into the upper reaches of your tower while pulling the base out from under you.

The only way to develop any sort of resistance against the distortions induced by our primitive minds is by acknowledging them, owning them, recognizing them as valid and worthy parts of ourselves, and most importantly, listening to them.

The tendency in intellectuals is to ignore the input of the id and to treat it as noise one must tune out into order to be logical. And that’s not a bad thing to do. It is fundamentally correct to say that the deep abstract reasoning skills necessary to the development of the higher intellect rely on just such a tuning out. There is much thinking that simply cannot be done with emotion getting in the way.

The trouble comes when this filtering out of the id’s messages becomes one’s blanket response to reality. Under such a regime, the id never gets expressed or listened to or even acknowledged.

This can be, in a word, disastrous. When ignored, the id runs rampant, pushing the ego out of the way and leading to a life that is out of control, chaotic, and the exact opposite of logical, all while the ego sits in its lofty tower cooking up facile justifications to explain how all of this is, in fact, logical and sane.

That’s no way to live, and yet, it is a pitfall into which many of us smart types easily fall, myself very much included. It is a very sophisticated system of self-delusion because it wears a cloak of logic reasonableness. A lot of people make the decision every day to turn away from reality in favour of the world of the mind and let nearly anything happen to their lives rather than face the truth.

But the id’s truth is just as important to your life as the ego’s. The fact that it can distort the results of objective thought does not make it worthless. It is where emotion lies, and emotion is the entire reason we do anything. The id may not tell you what reality is, but it will tell you who you really are, and its alarms and warnings make for a very good roadmap to what is going wrong (and right) in you if you but take the time to interpret them rather than sticking your fingers in your ears and pretending it isn’t there.

True enlightenment can only come when you accept and integrate both id and ego into a full, rich, informed superego that honors both mind and heart and knows there is not battle because they are two halves of a single whole, and without one, we are incomplete.

We are, when all is said and done, merely very clever animals.

We only go wrong when we forget this.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

There will be not blog post today. Dammit.

(Yes, this is schoolwork. Wonderful, glorious schoolwork. )

The sitcom has been around since the golden era of radio, and yet, as an art form, it’s never gotten much respect. People look down at it as one of the lowest forms of television, despite the fact that over the years, sitcoms have consistently been some of the view audience’s favorite shows, and the shows that touch them the most deeply on a personal level.

And whenever there is a cultural juggernaut like Friends or Cheers, pundits scratch their heads and wonder what makes this particular sitcom different from all the others. In this essay, I will attempt to answer that question with what I believe to be the secrets of making a really good sitcom.

The first and most important ingredient is the characters. People might watch an episode for the premise, but they come back for the characters. The characters need to be founded, understandable stereotypes that either already exist or are easily conveyed with casting, costume, and action. Ideally the viewer should be able to get the basic idea of the character just by looking at them. And while this might seem limiting, there are actually a lot more stereotypes to choose from than most people think. When you bring up sitcom stereotypes, people will think of ones like Short Tempered Boss, Wacky Neighbor, Unrealistically Hot Mom, and so on. But what about the Know It All At Work? Or the Funny (that’s funny, not “funny”) Uncle? Or the Nerdy Kid? How about the Chick Who Has No Idea How Hot She Is? Or the Aging Swingers? Or even that old standby, the Snobby British Couple?

Any writer sufficiently literate in the genre could come up with dozens more. And remember, these are only the foundations of the characters, not their totality. A starting point rather than the finish line. Once you have chosen your stereotype, you can then add the details that make your Sleazy Lawyer different from all the others.

Most importantly, the characters have to be likable. That doesn’t mean they have to be a bunch of cookie-cutter Mouseketeers, though. A fairly wide variety of characters can be likable as long as the writers understand that even the less-nice characters have to operate within certain moral boundaries.

Which brings me to the next key ingredient, which is heart. Think of this as the editorial voice of the show. The show itself must be gentle, caring, and warm. No matter how outrageous or edgy a show is, it has to have a moral center that defines the line between edgy and too far, and that demonstrates that the show cares about the characters as much as it wants the audience to care about them.

Only then will the show engender the kind of trust in the audience that lets people really connect with the show on an emotional level, and make them lifelong fans who watch the show not just to be entertained but to spend time with the characters they love.

Once you have those fundamentals down, then you can worry about making it all funny. People will watch a show with likable, warm characters and mediocre jokes long before they will watch a show with loathsome, cold characters and very funny jokes. Wit is very important, of course. People tune in to sitcoms to laugh, after all.

But if they can’t stand the characters or the show seems callous and cruel, they will not tune in for long.

Once you know you can write funny jokes for warm and likable characters, then you can worry about petty details like the premise. People, mostly Hollywood (or rather, Burbank) types, like to think that premise is the key to a good sitcom because they like to thing that the whole thing can be reduced to formula, but nothing could be further from the truth.

The massively successful sitcoms of the past owed very little of their success to their premises. all had very simple, easy to understand premises that sound ridiculous when stated, like “a suburban family” or “the people who work in this particular office” or “what goes on in this bar”. Nothing fancy, nothing splashy, nothing that makes you sit up and say “By jove, that’s a show I want to see!”.

In fact, being premise-heavy can doom a show. Having your show be about an alien or a kid who’s a robot or a bunch of astronauts severely limits the kinds of stories you can tell while automatically making the situation (and quite likely, the characters) less relatable. That’s a very big barrier to have to overcome in terms of connecting with your audience. You are basically betting that you are so good at the other aspects of sitcom writing that it will overcome that barrier, and that’s just stacking the deck against yourself.

The only important thing about the premise of your sitcom (besides whether it gets the pilot made) is whether it is open-ended or closed. Ideally, it should be open-ended enough to allow for a steady stream of colorful and memorable characters who can deliver the kind of comedy that won’t make sense coming from one of your regular characters. This keeps the show fresh while both allowing the writers the freedom to do nearly any sort of humour they like while also giving you the chance to incorporate very funny character actors and actresses who would not be suited for inclusion as a regular character but who shine like diamonds in a limited role.

If you are lucky, through this process you will develop a small number of recurring characters that can appear once or twice a season and give the fans something to wonder about. Will my favorite recurring character be in this episode?

Therefore, premises like “life in a bar” or “what happens with this squad of detectives” are to be favored over relatively closed ones like “this suburban family”.

Obviously, no essay of this sort could hope to be exhaustive. There are so many other aspects of making a successful sitcom that they could probably fill a whole series of books.

But I think if you have good characters that people like being around, a warm and gentle heart, reasonably funny writing, and a premise that doesn’t get in the way, you will do just fine.

Yup, more schoolwork. Last time, I swear.

1) Explain how Canada transitioned into the welfare state during the 20th century. Be sure to identify and explain the significance of key moments,

Ironically. Canada’s transition into a modern welfare state was largely fueled by the Red Scare and fears of communism and socialism. In that, it was, from one way of looking at it, a conservative (not Conservative) process. It was thought at the time that the only way to keep Canada free of communist tyranny was to take their most popular idea and implement them gradually. Thus, the CCF had a great deal of influence not by being in power, but by being the place where the Liberals got all their best ideas.

Canadian like far-left ideas, but trust the center-left party, the Liberals, to implement them without going crazy.

Thus, the leftward shift towards a modern welfare state was gradual, and not part of any central plan but rather the result of a long series of political battles between the CCF/NDP and the Liberals.

The movement, however, had it roots not in the beatnik intellectual movement but in the trenches of World War I. The model for the movement came from highly organized and effective veteran’s rights groups that formed after the end of WWI. These men were extremely successful in turning the previous model of how you treat veterans – a lump sum payout based on how injured you were – into something very much like a modern welfare state for themselves.

The public quickly picked up on these idea, and wanted the same for themselves. This first emerged in 1932, when the Regina Manifesto was issued as the founding document by what was then known as the CCF (became the NDP in 1967). While its ideals of wiping out capitalism and replacing it with a state run economy never came to fruition (thank goodness), a lot of its ideas would be the ones that the Liberals would crib in order to win elections in the future.

Even more influential was the Marsh Report, issued by the Committee on Post-War Reconstruction after a lengthy deliberation and taking its name (colloquially) from its author, Leonard Marsh. It recommended things like unemployment insurance, children’s allowances, maternity leave, and government funded health care, and while it was largely ignored when it was issued, it is hard to argue with its legacy.

To wit : Universal old age pension (CCP) passed in 1951.
Unemployment insurance was passed in 1956.
And medicare, our crowning jewel and go-to response when people ask what the difference is between us and Americans, was enacted with the Medical Care Act of 1966.

Worth noting is the fact that the building of this welfare state was not a subject of political debate. Everyone, Conservatives included, agreed that it had to be built. All they disagreed upon was how best to do it. Thus, this era is known as the Era of Liberal Consensus.

Also worth noting is that at the end of World War II, we were far behind the Americans in terms of social progress of this type. We had to catch up pretty fast, and of course, in multitudinous ways, we have vastly exceeded them.

To sum up : How did we transition into a welfare state? Gradually, piece by piece, and via the highly Canadian processes of politicians trying to score points off one another, royal commissions nobody pays the slightest attention to at the time, and above all, the most Canadian virtue of them all : compromise.

2) In the post Second World War period culture became more important than ever before in Canada. Explain why and how this happened.

Before WWII, Canada operated in the British sphere of influence. We were, after all, still technically part of the Empire, and seeing as we had developed as a colony of said Empire, all our economic ties, trade deals, and so forth were to the Empire. We traded with the Americans as well, but they were no match for British power and influence.

But World War II decimated the British, while leaving the USA largely alone. Coming out of the war, the United States was the new superpower due to their economic clout and large population, and the explosion of mass media, especially movies and television, that emerged from the USA after the war only furthered their reach and their influence.

Canada, then, had little choice but to join their sphere of influence instead. Canada needed markets for its products and movies for its theaters, and the UK could provide neither. We could no longer afford to see the USA as simply our wacky neighbour to the South.

Now we had to do business, serious business, with the USA.

But that created a serious problem : how to preserve Canadian culture when it is under attack from American products on every level? Social commentators raised the alarm, and the Canadian government listened, and enacted an aggressive program of protectionist policies aimed at saving Canada from those damned Yankees.

Economically, the solution was straightforward : high tariff walls protected Canadian business by making American products more expensive. This gave Canadian businesses the breathing room they needed to compete with American mass produced goods.

Cultural protectionism, however, was a trickier business. After the war, the Canadian government was desperate to shore up Canadian culture by all possible means, as recommended in the report issued by the Massey Commission. This included but is not limited to :

* Creating the Canadian Council for the Arts, enacted in 1957 by the Laurent government, which is a grant issuing organization that funds Canadian arts on all media and throughout the country.
* Canadian Content rules in Canadian media, which state that a percentage of all television programming and music radio programming must be Canadian, as the government defines it
* Adopting the Maple Leaf, sans Union Jack, as our official flag
* Creating and maintaining the Canadian Film Board to promote the Canadian film industry
* and many, many more

These measures remain largely intact to this day, and while it is hard to definitively determine exactly what long term effects this policy of Canadian cultural protectionism has had, I can say for certain that Canadian culture remains as a vibrant, active, artistically productive entity that is distinct and unique, and that we have our own voice that is no less valid or important than anyone else’s, no matter how hard it can be to hear it over the din from our noisy neighbours to the South.

Whether this is do to government support or simply the fact that in order to deal with the deluge from the South, Canadian culture has learned to float, is up to you.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

(Yes, it’s schoolwork again. Sorry. )

In her article Virtue Theory And Abortion, Rosalind Hursthouse gives a basic introduction to her understanding of virtue ethics, answers some common objections to virtue ethics, then presents her virtue theory analysis of the issue of abortion.
It is that analysis that I will address in this paper as it bears directly on the case presented.
In my opinion, based on my reading of the article, Rosalind Hursthouse would not support abortion in the case presented because none of the possible justifications (worries about Rebecca and Tobias’ future careers, whether or not they are ready to raise a child, the fact that Tobias would have to forgo returning to his home country, etc.) represent a virtuous motivation, either in general or in reference to specific virtues such as courage, kindness, and knowledge, to abort.
I will stress at the outset that this is not because, in her analysis, Hursthouse comes to a firm deontological conclusion about the morality of abortion. Virtue theory, like utilitarianism, is too situationally sensitive to allow for such rigid moral analysis.
However, I think that she makes her opinion of abortion in circumstances like those of Rebecca and Tobias clear when she says :

…to think of abortion as nothing more than the killing of something does not matter, or as nothing but the exercise of some right or rights one has, or as the incidental means to some desirable state of affairs, is to do something callous and light-minded, the sort of thing that no virtuous and wise person would do. (Emphasis is mine. )

This passage seems to suggest that Hurst considers one of the tests to determine whether or not abortion is right in a particular case is whether or not the abortion would be performed merely to create a desired state of affairs. We can therefore conclude that, since that is in essence what every abortion seeks to do, and given her other comments about how abortion cannot be treated as trivial or unimportant, her position is that abortions need to be justified by default.
Two potential justifications she mentions are if a woman is in very poor physical health (whether from a great deal of childbearing or something else) and if the woman is forced to do heavy physical labour on a daily basis. Neither of these apply to Rebecca and Tobias.
Nor does Hursthouse’s example of people in circumstances of marginal survival where having another mouth to feed might mean the death of many adult members of one’s community.
Then we come to the issue of having an abortion in order to pursue another worthwhile activity. One could certainly say that my theory of her opinion is inconsistent with the knowledge that Rebecca plans to become a human rights lawyer, a noble career none but the most callous could view as anything less than worthwhile.
But that alone cannot be said to overcome the “merely to achieve some desirable state” objection. The case provides no information on whether or not that dream is realistic, or whether she will succeed, and if she succeeds, if she will be a good human rights lawyer or not. Such a string of uncertainties surely dilutes (but does not destroy) the moral value of her intentions.
And even if we were to accept that, were she to abort, she is bound by destiny to be an excellent human rights lawyer who will improve the world by a significant degree, it is by no means certain that bringing a child to term will make said outcome impossible or unreasonably difficult. Countless women have brought babies to term while achieving and pursuing high powered careers. We have no reason to believe that Rebecca cannot do the same.
Then there is the fact that Rebecca does not feel ready to be a mother. I understand that very few parents do feel ready, and the ones that do later admit that they were wrong. Human reproduction has always been a leap of faith that requires a great deal of “building the ground you’re walking on”, as it were, and so a mere vague feeling of unpreparedness cannot be said to justify abortion, at least not in an ethical system which says that, whether or not the fetus is a person, abortion is a serious decision that is, in some sense, the ending of a life.

The fact that the premature termination of a pregnancy is, in some sense, the cutting off of a new human life, and thereby, like the procreation of a new human life, connects with all our thoughts of human life and death, parenthood, and family relationships, must make it a serious matter. (Emphasis is mine. )

Therefore, because the case meets none of the specific conditions defined by Hursthouse in the article and the article makes it clear that Hursthouse believes that abortion is a serious matter that requires specific justification, I think Hursthouse would not consider abortion a virtuous act in our specific case.

And that’s all he wrote. I am rather proud of my work there, not just because I think I am right *duh), but by how well behaved I was in writing it.

I didn’t criticize virtue theory, even though I think it’s a heap of elaborate nonsense whose real function is to give you a way to sound like you are thinking wise and heavy thoughts that just happen to lead to the exact same conclusion you would have made without it.

I didn’t get into my own feelings on abortion, even though, as you know, I’m agin it. If it’s a baby when she wants it, it’s a baby when she doesn’t, too. To me, the real battle is against unwanted pregnancy, but until that battle is won, there is no excuse to kill a baby, inside the womb or out.

I didn’t even include language designed to deliberately goad my prof in ways that I could easily deny.

Trust me, by my standards, that makes me a freaking saint.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have decided to do my Canadian History research on the Acadian Expulsion, and it’s one heck of a story.

It all started when the British won the Maritimes (or “Acadia”, as it used to be known) from the French. They didn’t like all my francophone ancestors, making them all nervous with their going around being French and Catholic and stuff. (The Crown was Protestant at the time).

So for 45 years, the British tried to convince the Acadians to sign an unconditional pledge of loyalty to the King. ^[1] And the Acadians would not sign. There are a lot of reasons for this to choose from. For one, they did not want to anger their Mik’maq neighbors, with whom they had peaceful relations, to think that they had joined up with the Brits and therefore supported them in the conflict over treaty rights and land ownership battle they were having with the Crown.

That kind of thing can get your towns and villages raised. Not good.

Another reason : They didn’t want their able-bodied young men conscripted to fight against the French. The Acadians has no deep love for Mother France – France had treated them very poorly, and that is why they had left in the first place. But they definitely did not want their young men to fight the French, either.

Really, they didn’t want their young men to fight any war. That was one of the things they liked about being away from Europe. No more soldiers taking all your food and molesting your daughters and ruining your crops with their encampments. No more young men dying pointless deaths because of some squabble between royals who couldn’t give less of a damn about people like the Acadians if we invented negative damns. No more chaos and strife.

They really just wanted to left alone to farm, fish, and fu…. er, have families.

There’s also a religious angle. The Acadians are a Catholic people, and the King of England was the head of the Church of England, so pledging unconditional loyalty would conflict with their loyalty to the Pope. It may seem like a trivial point, but that sort of thing means a lot to deeply religious people like these 18th century Acadians. ^[2]

And, to be frank (ish), some of them would not sign people they were vehemently anti-British.

So after 45 years of trying, the Brits finally got tired of these uppity Acadians and order a mass deportation. This happened in two distinct waves.

In the first wave, the deportees were sent to various places in the 13 Colonies. They were welcomed and treated well in Maryland and Connecticut, but in Pennsylvania, Virginia and Massachusetts, they were denied permission to disembark upon arrival, and left to rot on overcrowded boats where many of them died of disease and the cold.

Not cool, Virginia and Massachusetts!

In the second wave, after the Siege of Louisbourg, the Acadians who has escaped the first wave by fleeing to the Gaspe Penninsula, unsettled lands in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island (then Ile Saint Jean), and Cape Breton (then Ile Royal) were hunted down and captured by the Brits, and either imprisoned or deported to France. ^[3]

All in all, around 11,500 of the approximately 14,100 Acadians (81 percent) living in the Maritimes were deported. Thousands died in the bellies of overcrowded ships, either sunk by the British, left to rot by the Americans, or dying of disease and deprivation on the journeys between France and the New World. The area’s economy was shattered. It was an attempt to commit cultural genocide, to rid the world of Acadians by less than lethal methods, and it is a testament to the strength and values of the Acadian culture that they did not succeed.

Instead, wherever the Acadians were put, they found a way to thrive. And over the decades, many of them found a way to trickle back to the Maritimes, and today, Acadian culture is alive and kicking in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and on Prince Edward Island.

I consider myself Acadian. Je suis Acadien! Vive L’Acadie! Both of my maternal grandparents are Acadian, and so is my mother. My father is from Ontario, and that’s where his family resides. I don’t feel particularly close to them, nor do I particularly like them, and I grew up in the Maritimes, on Prince Edward Island, amongst a lot of other Acadians, and so that is the culture that I identify with.

Not that I have ever been much of a part of it. I have never been very close with my mother’s parents, though I loved them dearly and mourned their passing. And even if I had been close to them, well, nous somme assimile – we are assimilated. My mother spoke French as a small child but remembers none of it. My mother’s parents could find their French if they needed to in order to speak with their relatives, but other than that, never used it.

And me, I have only a little more French than the average Canadian, and that is only because I have retained a lot of the French we all learned in school while others seemed to have forgotten it as soon as they could. And even that has withered away over time. I have lost almost all my French vocabulary, and I don’t remember any of the complex grammar.

I don’t even remember how to put things in the past tense. Sad.

Still, je suis Acadien. if I have an ethnicity (besides Generic Anglo Canadian), that is it. A lot of people can’t understand what that means, to have a strong connection to an ethnic community despite barely being a part of it, but they are my people, and that is all there is to it.

Perhaps it’s just part of my hotblooded and emotional French nature.

Je vais vous parler des gens sympas demain.

Is having certain opinions inherently immortal? Or are all opinions morally equal and it is actions alone by which right and wrong are judged?

We certainly want to judge people’s ethics by their opinions. We want to judge the person who is a Neo-Nazi as morally inferior to someone whose heart is pure and good and filled with love and joy for everyone.

But what difference does it really make? The Neo-Nazi isn’t hurting anyone by believing as he does. And we all agree that he, like we, is free to believe whatever he wants. From the point of view of morality, it can be said, all law abiding citizens are equal. If neither you nor the fellow next door do the exact same things, give to the same charities, do the same “good works”, then what difference can it possibly make that he things Jews are demons and you do not?

Right now, you will be tempted to say “But doesn’t action follow opinion?”. And it certainly does. Some of the time. But more often than not, it doesn’t. Who among us can say we live every iota of our ideals day in and day out? For many people, their opinions and their actions are worlds apart.

Given that, can we really say that the potential for action is enough reason to judge someone’s moral worth in light of their opinions? Is a Neo-Nazi really any more likely to hurt people than a righteous liberal?

Most violent crime has absolutely nothing to do with personal belief and a lot more to do with money and sex, two notoriously nonpartisan subjects.

A Neo-Nazi junkie and a liberal junkie are equally likely to steal your car stereo system.

It’s understandable that we want to judge people as morally inferior when their opinions are odious to us. Humans are a highly empathic species and therefore we don’t hear or read opinions, we ingest them. A powerful instinct compels our minds to try to merge our map of reality with the ones we hear or read, and this leads us to having to either swallow the odious opinion (one that fills us with genuine disgust, as if it was a bodily waste product) or reject it with great force.

And this is not at all a pleasant process. In fact, it’s one we would rather had never happened. And so, on a simple emotional level, we get angry at the source of our distress, namely both the opinion and the person who has that opinion.

After all, they could have believed anything, or so we would like to think. Therefore they are morally responsible for the pain they have caused us by exposing us to their disgusting opinions. Right?

The problem is, that is not so much about morality as about who we choose to be around or be exposed to, and to treat that the way we do the ethical evaluation of actions is highly problematic.

Few people would disagree with the notion that we all have opinions that someone else would find odious, no matter how pure and saintly we consider ourselves to be. Therefore, the harm done by opinion alone can be seen as equally applying to all people, at least potentially.

We might say that some opinions are far more likely to be odious to a larger number of people, and therefore are more likely to harm others when exposed to a general population.

But that would suggest that the morality of an opinion is subject to a kind of majority vote, and how many would be willing to (even if it were possible) change their opinions if it turns out most people don’t like them and would be upset or even disgusted by them?

Then how can we ask our Neo-Nazi neighbour to do the same?

The more we examine the issue, the clearer it becomes that, quite counterintuitively, there is no ethical basis to judge that a person with even highly malevolent and erroneous opinions is any morally better or worse than anyone else if the actions remain the same.

This fits perfectly with our dominant cultural belief in freedom of thought and expression. We, as citizens of the liberal democracies of the world, believe that everybody should be free to say and think whatever they like, no matter what.

And that is an easy position to endorse when we are thinking only of ourselves and those like us. In the deep machinery of the democratic zeitgeist, we tend to imagine that difference of opinion are like differences of taste – mildly disquieting but ultimately harmless, like preferring Game of Thrones over Breaking Bad, or liking chardonnay over Merlot.

But matters of taste exist in a special protected category in our minds in which it is generally accepted that all are equal because all are about what an individual enjoys, which is a subject about which the individual themselves are considered to be the only experts that matter most of the time.

This is not true for the rest of opinion, however. The rest of opinion lies in the realm of worldview, and as I said before, we humans have a strong instinct to merge our worldviews, and thus, our need to defend our existing beliefs from being overwritten by new ones.

After all, if we believe our current beliefs to be the correct ones, then to change them to ones we thing are incorrect is to willingly believe that which we think is not true, and that is cognitively impossible.

So our desire to think opinions odious to us are morally wrong in and of themselves is perfectly understandable. But it cannot be said to be rational, or ethical.

Having said this, I do not expect anyone, myself included, to stop judging people by their opinions. Rational or not, justified or not, it is something so deeply fundamental to our psychology that I am not sure stopping is even possible.

The best we can do is to remember, when presented with odious opinions, to take half a step back and ask ourselves, “What does this person actually DO?”.

Odds are that their actions are not nearly as different from your own as you might like to think.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

In other words, my need to get my shit together.

Here I am, in my second favorite White Spot (Richmond Center), waiting for my prescriptions to be filled and for my food to arrive. And wondering about my life and how I live it.

Remembered, at the last minute, that my flash fiction assignment is due at 8 pm tonight. Panicked. Threw together something cute, complete with the twist ending that flash fiction seems to require. 103 words. Very flash.

But the thing is, I shouldn’t be doing a last minute slapdash job on important assignments. I am capable of so much more. I have all the skills necessary to be a far more together and organized person. I can totally design a system to keep myself on schedule with my schoolwork, and therefore makes my lufe far less stressful by making sure I do readings and homework at a time when I am racing against the clock.

I don’t have to be the sort of person who doesn’t act until it’s an emergency. I don’t like that sort of person and I don’t want to be one. So it is time for me to make a solid,  concentrated effort to get my poop in a group.

I have already figured out that i need to SCHEDULE my coursework, not just stick it in a note file I never look at.A

And it is going to mean regaining my lost self-discipline. I let myself fall apart over the holidays and it is time to put myself back together as someone. I can respect and admire.

After all, I am an extraordinary human being. It’s time I acted like one.

The cute young couple at the table next to mine totally  just did the “one shake two straws” thing. How Archies can you get?

The guy did most of the talking (natch) and babbled inanely the whole time. If I had been his date, I would have been rolling my eyes and checking my watch. But she seemed quite happy with him.

Then again, she is Japanese, so….ya never know.

Done eating. Time to get my drugs and go home.

(—)

Home now. Made my way home all slow and casual like. Shopper’s to 3 road and Cook. Sit on bus bench, relax, soak in the clear night air rinsed clean by rain. 3 and Cook to Buswell and Cook. Another bus bench, another rest. Then from Buswell and Cook to home.

I’m all by myself in the apartment. That’s normal for a Saturday night. Joe and Julian are off playing board games with Joe’s parents. So the apartment is empty, and very quiet.

Which is kinda lonely…. and kinda nice.

Like I have said before, growing up with two parents and three siblings all in the same house meant the house was rarely silent, except in the middle of the night. I never particularly minded the general homey hubbub. It just meant there were people around.

And for someone who developed a strong tendency to self-isolate, reminders that I was not as alone as I felt were rather comforting.

Had a nice meal at White Spot, as usual. Tried one of their latest creations : a mac and cheese hamburger. They added their version of mac n’ cheese to the menu last year, and now they are riffing on that ingredient, including,I kid you not, mac and cheese fritters.

I can feel my arteries clogging just at the thought of it. Um, no. That crosses the line for me.

It’s like this picture I saw recently of a bacon cheeseburger with Krispy Kreme donuts as buns. So very EWW. There is absolutely no reason to create such a monstrosity. Surely nobody with a functioning prefrontal cortex can think it would taste good. The only motive for creating such a nightmare is compulsive decadence backed by deep and heartfelt self-loathing.

It does seem odd to me that I have come to a point in my life when people are making things too unhealthy for me. It’s not like I have a long history of being a health nut or something.

The only healthy habit I have ever been able to maintain is drinking lots of water. And even that is mostly driven by the same oral fixation that made me a fat guy to begin with.

You know…. seeking reward through the mouth.

Water might not be the most exciting beverage in the world, but it’s the cheapest and easiest to get, and I can have as much of it as I want.

And just because it isn’t as rewarding as most beverages, that doesn’t mean it’s entirely unrewarding. It’s all about what you expect out of it.

Back to the point. The point is that I never thought I would be the one saying “That’s horrible! Why would anybody EAT that? Have these people no self-respect or at least a self-preservation urge?”

The judged becomes the judge, I guess.

I have installed my new monitor. It is kewl. A big big 22 inches, and flat. The increase in size doesn’t have a huge effect. The eye quickly adjusts.

But it’s a widescreen monitor (I was told video games will soon start requiring them), so I am now seeing the Internet through a rectangle instead of a square.

Which is slightly odd. I don’t quite know where to put my eyes sometimes. I am sure I will adjust soon. Until then, it’s slightly annoying, no more.

The real adjustment will be when my new computer arrives some time next week (between Wednesday and Friday). Right now, the picture is the bigger, but the resolution is the same because I was already at the maximum resolution my graphics card supports.

But when the new computer arrives, I will be able to double the resolution at least, and that should make for quite the visual impact, at least at first.

And my computer will be new and shiny and good instead of old and busted and lame.

Still, I have had this computer for so long that I knew it will be a sentimental goodbye when time comes.

Maybe I will be able to find it a new home.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.