Ostara - Element of Air
We've been around the Wheel of the Year once together, so for the next iteration, I'm going to concentrate on the four Elements on the equinoxes and solstices and on four concepts that I see as fundamental to Wicca on the other Sabbats. For Ostara[1] we'll start with the Element of Air.
I capitalize those words because I'm using them as proper nouns. The four Elements, as conceptualized by classical Greek philosophy, are not the same as the elements on the periodic table, and when I say Air, I'm not just talking about the stuff going in and out of your lungs. I'm referring to the archetype, the whole abstract concept which includes what you're breathing, but it also includes the whirlwind and the summer breeze, the freezing breath of winter and the surprise of walking past lilacs in bloom.
And symbolically, the Element of Air represents even more than that. The four Elements can also be construed as broad categories with a wealth of symbolic meanings through what we call associations or correspondences. Most Wiccans, for example, cast a circle (or Circle, if you like) as part of their rituals. Each cardinal direction within that circle is associated with an Element. Correspondences differ - sometimes wildly - but I'm going to discuss the system that I use, which also happens to correspond to the one most commonly used. Just keep in mind that none of this is set in stone - or written on the wind. My associations are:
East - Air
South - Fire
West - Water
North - Earth
Now, since East (there's those caps again) is where the sun rises, it's associated with dawn, and also with springtime, as the "dawning" of the year. So Air also represents beginnings, a fresh start, and even "a fresh breath." You'll find that many of our clichés can be used to summarize these sorts of metaphorical connections; that doesn't mean the connections are trite. To me, it's an example of the way a lot of these metaphors are embedded very deeply in our culture and our thinking, as reflected in and mediated by language.
The Wheel of the Year and the circle also correspond. Each of the direction/Element pairings - called Quarters - is associated with one of the solstices or equinoxes, in my understanding. Yule is in the North, Ostara in the East, and so on. Then the other four Sabbats, often called cross-quarter days, take the positions in between. This makes Ostara the perfect time to reflect on the Element of Air.
Air is associated with travel and movement. Thinking back to the days before cars, this makes a great deal of sense; in Renaissance times, ships depended on the wind, and they were the major form of long-distance transportation. Even after that, steam power depended on using air pressure as a driving force.
In several mythologies, birds are the archetypal messengers of the gods, representing both this association with movement and the function of communication. And, after all, speech literally depends on air. Thus the realm of Air became the domain of language, and also of reasoning, deciding, judging, and other intellectual pursuits. Unfortunately, this is where Air can start to get a bad rap.
While this understanding of the Elements does go all the way back to Greek philosophy, the current understanding of it was transmitted to us in the Western world mostly by way of the Golden Dawn. This esoteric organization, most active around the end of the 1800s and beginning of the 1900s, collected and organized much occult knowledge. They are also the origin of the most familiar design of the Tarot deck, which can give a negative impression about Air.
Tarot originated during the Italian Renaissance and is actually the precursor of the modern deck of playing cards. I'm not going to go into too much history here; the upshot is that in the early 1900s, members of the Golden Dawn designed and commissioned a particular Tarot deck, variously called the Rider-Waite or the Rider-Waite-Smith (RWS), which has been the basis for most subsequent decks in English-speaking countries.
A Tarot deck consists of 78 cards: four suits, with ten numbered cards and four Court cards in each suit, and twenty-two independent cards with their own sequence, which are now called the Major Arcana. As the deck transformed into modern playing cards, the Major Arcana were dropped, the Court cards reduced to three (jack, queen, king), and the symbols of the four suits became spades, diamonds, hearts, and clubs.
In Tarot, the suits are Swords, Pentacles or Coins, Cups, and Staves, and the suit of Swords is most commonly associated with Air.[2] For various reasons, the Golden Dawn created images for these ten cards that included some of the most negative-seeming depictions in the deck. Now, Tarot images are complex things in and of themselves, and I'm not going to try to explain too much of that right here, so let me just say that some of the cards in the suit of Swords have basic interpretations such as depression and grief.
The Court cards, which are often interpreted as people involved in a particular situation, can also take the judging function of Air to an extreme; the Queen of Swords is frequently depicted or described as harsh, even shrewish. The King of Swords is stern and demanding; he's a judge who won't accept an excuse.
With all of this imagery going on, people who work with Tarot a lot, and especially with the RWS deck, can get kind of a negative impression of the Element of Air. There's good reason to think that some of the seemingly negative imagery in this suit isn't drawn directly from concepts about Air, but rather from other mythology that the Golden Dawn incorporated. Regardless, it's important to remember that none of the Elements is exactly warm and cuddly: Fire isn't meant to be played with, Water includes the tsunami and the flooding rains as well as the refreshing drink, and Earth by itself can be as barren and inhospitable as the depths of the desert.
And part of the complexity of Tarot is putting each image in context. While swords are meant for killing, not all blades are intended solely for destruction. Psychologically, the functions of judging, choosing, and deciding are absolutely necessary - when kept in balance.
This is why it's hard to talk about each of the Elements alone. Part of what keeps the Elements in moderation is the way they exist in balance with each other. The spring weather includes the storms which help strip away the last of the dead leaves from last year and the gentle breezes that tease open the new buds. We need both, and the interplay of wind, water, and warmth that moves across the world is what allows for the variations and tempers the extremes.
With all of this in mind - the domain of Air - I invite you to enjoy this Ostara by finding a time when the weather is cooperative and maybe even a place where those sweet-smelling buds are opening. As you reflect on what air and Air mean to you, what roles they play in your life, and how you relate to this Element, take a deep, gentle breath. May it be the fresh start you need!
--Literata
[1] In the Northern Hemisphere, the vernal equinox is approaching, which is Ostara, while in the Southern Hemisphere, it's the autumnal equinox, which is Mabon.↩
[2] This is a point of disagreement which I will address in greater detail in the Litha piece.↩
Mar 19, 2012 4:54:00 PM | guest posts, Literata
Running a Deconstruction, or Devoting Your Life To Complaining About Things You Don't Like
My story closely resembles many of those on The Slacktiverse. Some indeterminate time a few years back, I followed a link-to-a-link-to-a-link and landed who-knows-how on Fred Clark's exquisite Left Behind commentaries. I then immediately dropped to a zero productivity rate as I feverishly plowed through the entire series, from the first post to the last, in a frenzy of reading that left me gasping for more.
Although I don't remember the date or even the year this occurred, it still sharply divided my life into a sort of Pre-Clark and Post-Clark mentality. Here was something that was uniquely incredible to my experience: an eloquent, reasoned individual carefully and constructively picking apart a series that I had a visceral but difficult-to-explain reaction to. Reading Fred's words helped to untangle my own response to the work, and confirmed that I wasn't stupid, or deficient, or alone in my feelings. The experience was cathartic, and also delightfully entertaining. I was hooked.
The only problem with the concept of deconstruction was that by its very nature, it was an excruciatingly slow process. One reading segment a week for a twelve book series would span over the course of years just for that one series. And while the extensive length of time added to the enjoyment, it also meant that Fred Clark was not going to be able to run multiple deconstructions for every little thing out there that deserved a good picking through. Clearly, if we were to populate the world with more of these wonderful, affirming, cathartic deconstructions, it was up to everyone to pitch in.
In the last few years, an absolutely wonderful number of deconstructions have popped up. First there were the Left Behind spin-offs[1] -- the expanded universe was too large for any one person to realistically handle, so good-natured souls started flinging themselves on the prequels and sequels and YA targeted novels. Then the field began to expand from LaHaye's brand of Christian fiction to other targets, moving from an emphasis on The Worst Novels In The World to an emphasis on novels that contained equally problematic elements, but packaged in a less overtly evangelical form. Problematic cultural elements of racism, sexism, abelism, and homophobia could be identified and addressed in dozens of other popular series without necessarily demonizing author or audience. Deconstructions became a magnifying glass for discovering how our cultural biases seep into our fiction and play a role in reinforcing and retaining those biases over multiple generations.
A few weeks ago, Kit asked me in jest if I wouldn't like to write a "how-to" guide for deconstructions, considering how passionate I am about the concept and process. (I'm currently running three on-going ones, and have plans to add more as soon as time can reasonably permit.) The thought stuck with me, so here are my thoughts on the running of a blog deconstruction and ways to make the experience as pleasurable as possible for all involved. (At least, I hope so. I've really only been doing this for less than a year, so I may still crash and burn and make a fool of myself online. Tune in to the crash-and-burn!)
1. Decide on source material you can work with.
Doing a deconstruction is a huge time commitment. Fred can probably work through Left Behind for the rest of his life, if he so chooses. It's taken me almost a year to get through the first four chapters of the Twilight book series that is essentially six books long. Even with running a concurrent Narnia feature with Twilight every two weeks, I'll probably still finish the seven-book Narnia series first at that rate. So you're going to want to pick a project that you can live with -- or, failing that, that you can wrap up gracefully if the need arises.
I think, from Fred's writings on the subject, he picked Left Behind because he saw something that he felt needed to be seriously addressed in terms of the religion presented in the books. For myself, I picked up Twilight and Narnia because I wanted to address issues I had with both in terms of feminism. These were popular series that had bothered some portion of my brain for quite some time, and I was reasonably certain I had enough to say on the topic that I could work out a post a week on the topic for basically the next ten years or so.
In some ways, you really want to pick something you either love or hate. There's probably not a lot of incentive to continue to discuss a book about which you don't have strong feelings. For myself, I both love and hate aspects of Twilight and Narnia: I loved Narnia as a child and I've come to appreciate Twilight for attempting to feature an everyday female protagonist who gains the perfect happy ending she always wanted. At the same time I remain deeply frustrated with both series because of the serious issues of sexism, racism, and ableism that I personally feel lurk under the surface text.
Beyond anything else, you want to deconstruct something that will bring you pleasure. When deconstruction starts to become a constant chore, then it stops being fun for you and it stops being fun for your readers. And don't ever feel like you can't respectfully say "this isn't working for me, I need to do something else". We're all in this together, so to speak.
2. Eschew personal attacks.
It's so easy to get so frustrated with a series when it contains problematic content. There's a huge temptation to lash out at the authors, or even the audience who enjoys the series, but usually this isn't productive in a deconstruction. It's one thing to, say, criticize an author who routinely threatens people with hellfire and damnation -- I think there's a lot of moral leeway there to push back against a genuinely toxic agenda.
But your average author is usually just trying to write a book, not push an ideology. If a deconstruction is focusing on the societal issues that leak into works, then the author's intent becomes largely immaterial on a couple of fronts: it's neither a magical shield to protect them nor is it a necessary front of attack when approaching the work.
This is also true for the audience. Pretty much every book on earth has been enjoyed by someone, and the members of that book's audience probably enjoyed it for different reasons. "This is a terrible book and you are terrible if you like it" isn't just going to drive away members of that audience, it's also going to come off as very judgmental and divisive.
This varies according to the material, of course, but it's worth noting that the Twilight fans and Narnia supporters have contributed wonderful and considerate viewpoints throughout their respective deconstructions. Without those wonderful viewpoints, the deconstructions would be essentially one flat note, stretched out through hundreds of blog posts. And nobody wants that, least of all myself.
The goal here isn't to burn a book, its author, or its audience in effigy. It's to tie a book's content into larger cultural issues and examine how those issues can work their way into our favorite books without many of us even noticing. Every book on earth has issues; the goal is to use those to open a meaningful dialogue and hopefully learn something valuable in the process.
3. Call out the little things.
There's the big, obvious stuff in deconstructing, of course. Turbo Jesus.[2] Engine-stealing Edward. The Problem of Susan. But those aren't the meat and bones of deconstruction. They're important posts, but they won't carry you over the months and years it takes to get through the reading.
It's funny what you pick up on when you sit down with keyboard in hand to type a weekly deconstruction post. It's when you're reading through the next few lines, looking for the next red flag to shoot up that you suddenly have Sensible Shoes Vera pop up..[3] Or you have Charlie sabotaging cars long before Edward ever thought to. Or you suddenly realize that the Twilight "Invitations" chapter pretty closely revolves around the concepts you'd already been thinking about that week in terms of elevator propositions and providing people avenues to flee should they choose to.
Or you notice that Santa's "here are some weapons, don't use them" gifts are never mentioned in text again, despite being potentially very useful, and the next thing you know you're questioning why they were put in at all in contrast to the Law of Conservation of Narrative Detail, and for that matter aren't there women war veterans in the 'verse in which this whole novel is set, so it's Santa essentially being disrespectful of that fact and… huh. I guess I just got a blog post out of that.
The big things are problematic and should be called out as such, but they're not where the bulk of your audience is really going to resonate. Chances are they already know about the big things, because they've read one-off blogs and articles about the more problematic elements in a series. What's more, big things are usually pretty easy to identify and point out as problematic -- it's the little things that gnaw at the reader and leave them uneasy with the series but unable to identify why... until a detailed deconstruction puts a name to those little problems.
I think we've had more "ah-ha" moments on my blog regarding ableism in Twilight than we yet have over sexism. I'd like to say it's because I'm just so eloquent in my deconstruction of why a woman falling on her face isn't actually funny, but the reality is that the sexism was stuff everyone had already heard about long before I picked up a keyboard. The ableism stuff, on the other hand, hadn't been covered so much in the mainstream media.
4. Open up to the audience.
The best part of running a deconstruction will never be what you write. You won't turn the most eloquent phrase, you won't have the most obvious-in-hindsight insights, you won't have the epic moments of searing criticism or pitch-perfect reconstructive fanfic. Your readers are going to have those moments.
Those moments make running a deconstruction so incredibly rewarding. When someone posts something that makes me shout, "Why didn't I think to say that?", I feel a surge of happiness just to have inspired their genius in some small way. When the conversation derails for a good two hundred posts over FedEx arrows in George R.R. Martin's work and how it all relates to Twilight and Narnia and Left Behind and intent-being-or-not-being-magic, all I can do as the deconstructionist is look on in joy and awe at this wonderfulness that I am involved in hosting. And when someone posts that my words have helped them understand their own feelings about a work just a little bit better, I want to cry happy tears because that's pretty much precisely what I hope to get out of this, too.
Comments are the water and sunlight and fertilizer of a deconstruction. They are what will get you in front of your keyboard every week because by gum the deconstruction needs writing. So encourage those comments early and often. Allow anonymous posting so that everyone doesn't have to register a username and remember a password and enable the confirmation email and good grief I just wanted to leave a quick comment. Encourage off-topic posting. Speak to your audience, and thank them for their comments. You may think it's obvious that everything they write fills you with joy, but it's like any other relationship: they don't know they're appreciated unless you tell them. Treat them with respect, and remember how fearful you were the first time you posted a comment.
5. Never respond badly to correction.
Remember when I said that deconstruction wasn't negative? That everything on earth has Fail and that deconstruction isn't about criticism but rather about opening up a dialogue? If everything ever written has Fail in it, that means that eventually you are going to write something that has Fail in it.
Or not! It's possible, in a hypothetical universe! But maybe someone will read your Not-Containing-Fail post and ask for some clarification because it sure seems like it has some Fail in it to them.
This is a good thing. This is a dialogue. This is not a time to explain to them why they are wrong, because that is not a dialogue. A dialogue is between two people and it reads something like oh, I'm very sorry that my words came off that way. (Here you are apologizing for the impression created, and not in a non-apology I'm-sorry-you-were-offended way.) I was trying to say summary-of-what-you-meant-in-two-sentences-or-less. (Here you are providing the clarification that was requested.) But I can see how that could have come off the wrong way. (Here you are validating the experience of the other person and acknowledging that you are not perfect.) I appreciate you pointing this out to me and I'll try to express myself without that Fail in the future. (Here you are being polite, thanking the reader, and then you are actually going to go quietly think about this for next time and see if there's a lesson to be learned here.)
Remember that learning does not mean you were a bad, wrong, awful person. It means there is at least one perspective on earth with which you did not have experience. Quelle surprise.
Ultimately, the hardest part of running a deconstruction isn't the technical details of the site or the reading or the writing or the comments engine. The hardest part is retaining a necessary humility regarding what is largely a collection of personal subjective interpretations about which you are nevertheless going to feel very strongly. The hardest part is conveying that humility in one's posts so that you are always saying here is my interpretation but note that your mileage may vary. The hardest part is looking long and hard at books that many of your readers like, and being able to do so in a way that doesn't guarantee that on a long enough deconstruction timeline, everyone on earth will hate you. (This is, indeed, my biggest fear in the potential crash-and-burn department.)
The good news, at least for everyone reading here, is that in my online experience, the Slacktiverse community is the kindest, cleverest, most thoughtful online community I've ever participated in. So if any readers can weather my occasional dose of Fail and still be forgiving enough to come back for more, it's the Slacktivites. So I guess my final advice for running a deconstruction is to start here.
--Ana Mardoll
[1] For example: Heathen Critique's deconstructions of Soon and Babylon Rising; Mouse's Musings' deconstruction of the prequel novels about the "Left Behind Kids"; and Apocalypse Review's deconstruction of The Edge of Apocalypse.↩
[2] The Slacktivist deconstruction of the novels has coined the term Turbo Jesus (Short for Turbo Robo Killer Jesus-2000 with his deathly deathrays of deathlyness) for this version of Jesus. [TvTropes: KungFuJesus] ↩
[3] "Sensible shoes" is, of course, a cue that we're supposed to dislike this young woman. Only two kinds of women exist in Left Behind. They can be, like Lucinda Washington, a madonna. Or they can be, like this young woman, the other kind. "Sensible shoes," for LaHaye and Jenkins, means "unladylike shoes," and all women who are not ladies are whores. [Fred Clark, L.B.: In those shoes, February 15, 2008]
As a TvTrope contributor points out: One character, Verna Zee, is depicted in her initial appearance (in Book 1) as wearing "sensible shoes", which is UK slang for being a lesbian. She is later described off-hand (in Book 2) as militant. Guess which character comes out as a lesbian in Book 3? [TvTropes: LeftBehind] ↩
Nov 11, 2011 4:09:00 PM | Ana Mardoll, guest posts
(Trigger Warning: Discussion of Child Molestation/Abortion in the Comments)
Achoo!
"Bless you!" I hear in three-part harmony.
I'd much rather my coworkers (and classmates, and...) said "Gesundheit", the way Mom does, if they must say anything; that's a wish for good health, not a prayer that a nonexistent deity will keep my nonexistent soul from flying out my nostrils. But I don't know how to politely tell anyone to knock it off, and I don't know if it's wise.
I'm not out at work. I'm not out at school. I'm not even out at church; the UUs won't care that I'm an atheist, but as far as the Catholics are concerned, I'm one of them. I'm a holly-lily Catholic, because I was baptized and confirmed and I attend Mass twice a year, at Christmas (holly season) and Easter (lily season). I can't not. It's part of being a member of the [Blue] family.
My brother: *pro-life and anti-marriage-equality arguments*
Me: *pro-choice and pro-marriage-equality arguments*
My brother, quoted with permission: Clearly we're not going to get anywhere this way, so let's try focusing on the primary cause of our difference in opinion: why do you believe that God doesn't exist?
Me: Bzuh? Slacktivist. MadGastronomer. Amaryllis, cjmr, hapax. [S]omehow I don't think theism v atheism is the "primary cause of our difference in opinion".
My brother: Yes, there are various forms of theists who share your political views. How many of them are faithful, well-informed Catholics? Zero. I didn't ask about gods, I asked about God (and to clarify, I am referring to God as the Catholic Church understands Him). If you really believed in God as the Catholic Church understands Him, you could not hold your current political beliefs.
No offense intended to Catholics who believe God considers women and QUILTBAG folk to be fully human and who consequently support abortion rights and marriage equality; rest assured that I'm not talking about your understanding of deity when I say this:
If I really believed in God as the Catholic Church understands him, I would find myself compelled to oppose him.
My brother: No one other than Catholics can trace the authority of their church directly from Peter (I'm sure I could find the list of popes in about 5 seconds). Jesus said that he would build His Church on the rock of Peter, and that the gates of hell would never prevail against it (by introducing false teachings), and as the Pharisees spoke with authority because that sat on Moses's chair, the Pope and the bishops in union with him speak with authority because they sit on Peter's chair.
Me: If God's out to keep the Catholic Church as an institution from falling into error, why is the Catholic Church as an institution doing so much to protect pedophile priests?
My brother: Bzuh?
My brother: [T]he point of government is to protect the people, which would include their souls even if 'soul' were only a metaphor.
Me: Religious beliefs are not something to base public policy upon.
My brother: [W]ho said anything about basing public policy on religious beliefs? The Church and the state both agree that there should be a separation of church and state.
Any Catholic politician who casts a vote with the intention of legalizing abortion, or of protecting laws allowing abortion, or of widening access to abortion, commits a mortal sin.
When legislation in favour of the recognition of homosexual unions is proposed for the first time in a legislative assembly, the Catholic law-maker has a moral duty to express his opposition clearly and publicly and to vote against it. To vote in favour of a law so harmful to the common good is gravely immoral.
Yeah, doing a real good job there of keeping the Church out of the affairs of the state.
I, [MercuryBlue], do hereby give formal notice of my defection from the Roman Catholic Church. I want it to be known that I no longer wish to be regarded as a member of the Roman Catholic Church.
I further declare that I am aware of the consequences of this act regarding the reception of the sacraments of the Church, including the sacraments of the Eucharist, marriage, and the sick, and also with regard to burial.
I undertake to make this decision known to my next of kin and to ensure that they are aware of these circumstances in the case of my being incapacitated.
I acknowledge that I make this declaration under solemn oath, being of sound mind and body, and in the presence of a witness who can testify as to the validity of this document.
There is no one I can ask to sign my apostasy letter with me. Literally no one I know in meatspace is someone I know to be an atheist.
I could ask my therapist, I suppose. But the model letters I found all have the 'sound mind and body' phrase (ableist much?), and she knows exactly what my mental health is like. I could ask someone at the UU service, but I don't yet feel as if I know anyone there. Damn you social anxiety.
Even if I find a witness, I don't know if the diocese will do anything but laugh.
I'm a holly-lily Catholic and I don't know how to stop.
Between writing and posting this article, I asked the UU congregation's busy-bee to sign my apostasy letter, and same is now en route to the parish in which I was baptized. I'll keep you posted.
--MercuryBlue
Nov 9, 2011 6:42:00 PM | guest posts, MercuryBlue
Human Rights Issues in Serbia and Hungary
Trigger Warning: Each section of this piece contains information and links to information/images that may be extremely distressing.
History of Belgrade Pride
The first attempted pride parade in Belgrade was in 2001. The police did not adequately protect the participants and a lot of violence ensued. Trigger Warning: graphic violence and hate speech against QUILTBAG individuals In this YouTube video of Pride 2001 you can see what happened. Here is a map of anti-QUILTBAG attacks in Belgrade, from 2001 to 2009.
There were a few attempts to hold parades after that, but they were cancelled when the police could not guarantee the safety of the participants. In 2009, anti-QUILTBAG graffiti and signs were put up all over the city in anticipation of the parade and they was not removed, creating an atmosphere of fear. They remained for months on end. The message was "ЧЕКАМО ВАС" -- We're waiting for you. The yellow posters are pretending to be from the ministry of health. The date on that link is for 2010, but the graffiti was the same both years. That link goes to the website of a hate group.
Some activists fought back with graffiti: stencils of various superheroes were spraypainted near the anti-QUILTBAG graffiti, with the captions "I have arrived!" or "You're waiting for us?"
In 2010 Belgrade finally succeeded in holding a Pride Parade. The graffiti didn't appear until a few days before the parade. Every night, when we went out, the posters and hate graffiti would surround us. I was afraid and walked quickly. Every morning, I would see public employees washing the graffiti off and removing the posters, which made me feel hopeful again.
On the day of the Parade, we set out early for the park. When we got within sight of the cordon, an elderly woman approached us to ask if we were going to the parade. I was momentarily afraid -- we weren't safe inside the wall of police yet -- but she looked harmless. I said yes. She said "Oh good. I hear so much on television against you people, and I don't understand it and I've come to say that I'm on your side."
We passed through several lines of security. The police were in full riot gear, and scanned us with metal detectors. I'd never seen so many police in my life. Our parade was peaceful. The three lines of police, each a city block apart, kept us far away from what was happening outside our bubble. Here's a video of us marching. (You can see me briefly in this video.)
Afterwards, we piled into the backs of blue police vans, about 10 of us per van, where we sat on each other's laps in the dark as we sped through the riots and out to dispersal points throughout the city. We took a cab to someone's apartment and huddled around the radio, waiting for news that it was safe to go home.
Beyond our peaceful bubble, policemen were fighting thousands of angry rioters. The BBC has some pictures of the riots.
Gay Rights in Serbia Now
The government hasn't done very much to help QUILTBAG rights since last year's parade. Suddenly, just a few days before this year's pride parade was to occur, the government banned the parade, despite its having been planned and registered well in advance. The reason given was that they couldn't ensure the participants safety -- the same excuse which had been given for Pride 2009's last minute cancellation. Although the linked article says that the organisers of pride would proceed with the parade despite the ban, they were ultimately unable to do so.
Then, on the 15th of this October, a woman was stabbed in Belgrade. She was wearing a shirt with LGBT symbols. She fought off her attackers, survived, and has just been released from the hospital. (Details in Serbian here). Her arm will remain in a cast for some time and afterwards she will go through rehabilitation. Her attacker has been released from prison pending trial, because he's a minor.
On 19th October, a protest was held in front of Serbian government headquarters. Article in English here.
Roma Rights in Serbia
In other news, Amnesty International is petitioning the Serbian government to pass a bill regulating the forced evictions of Roma from their homes.
This is an ongoing problem in Belgrade. Last year, at the time of our parade when it was quite cold, we learned that 19 Roma families had just been evicted without notice from their homes.
Labour Camps and hate crimes against Roma citizens of Hungary
And closer to home, Hungary has unleashed a new Hungarian Work Plan (PDF in Hungarian). We now have labour camps for the unemployed that are specifically targeting Roma.
These articles are focusing on Gyöngyöspata, a village northeast of Budapest, where the Roma are also facing attacks from vigilantes, but there are two other work programmes in the country right now, with more and more expected to form in the future.
Additionally, Roma in Gyöngyöspata are being targetted with fines. Roma women have been fined as much as $250 for pushing a baby carriage in the street where the sidewalk was impassable. A Roma girl (age 10) who picked up a stick was fined $125 for carrying a weapon. An injured adult was also fined for carrying a weapon when his crutch was redefined by the police as a weapon. A person helping to push a broken down car was fined for driving without a license. Most of these families owe as much as $500 in fines, which are taken directly from their wages. As a result, their children are going hungry.
Things have been especially bad there since a member of a radical nationalist party was elected as mayor. In contrast, the only time anyone I know personally has been fined for an offense of this calibre, was a couple years ago when a (white) drunk female friend of mine was fined $15 for peeing in public one night, a fee that's much more in line with what people here can afford -- just expensive enough to act as a deterent, but not bank breaking.
Setting aside the racist and ableist natures of the mandatory work programmes (any disabled person who is determined able to work can be sent to these camps too), this doesn't even make economic sense. It would be cheaper and faster to do this work with machines. It doesn't make sense from the perspective of helping people to get jobs either: these people aren't being given tools to gain employment in the 21st century job market, but rather the 19th century job market.
There is no upward mobility in these work programmes, no way for a person to learn from their valuable experience with scythes and pitchforks and use those skills to get a job that pays a liveable wage. The overseers of these programmes admit as much, but say it's more about getting them used to the concept of having to work 8 hours a day, which hails back to the prevalent racist stereotype that these people avoid work, are thieves, and are only good for making babies. In reality, they are a people desperate for work, who are unable to be hired because employers don't want to hire Roma. They are working without access to toilets, and even if the job is 6 hours away from their home, they have to take it and live on site in a trailer.
Since the start of the programme in Gyöngyöspata, four workers were fired for missing a couple days work when they accepted another short-term job which paid three times as much. Refusing to join a work programme or being fired from one means means losing the right to unemployment benefits for the next three years. They were originally to be paid $300 a month, which is less than the minimum wage ($400), but more than unemployment benefits ($150/month on average). But 70-80% of their wages have been garnished, and so they are earning closer to $75 a month. Some of them have earned as little as $40 a month.
It is ridiculous to think that anyone would choose to live off of the $150 a month a person can get in unemployment benefits instead of getting a good job and earning $600 a month (the minimum liveable wage in my opinion). A lot of people are unemployed here, but it is not because they don't want to work.
The only benefit of this costly, backwards thinking plan is to massage the numbers and make it look on paper like we have more people with meaningful employment than we do.
--[redacted]
Oct 31, 2011 9:56:08 AM | guest posts
Samhain - Listening at the Doorway of Winter
Samhain has its roots in an ancient Celtic fire festival. It falls at the boundary of October and November, marking the end of autumn and the beginning of winter.[1] Samhain is a time of transition, an in-between space. It is a liminal time (from limen, the Latin word for threshold) Samhain is a doorway, connecting golden harvest time and cool, still darkness. Across the threshold, the seasons meet and touch. They stand in relationship.
As I've said before, I believe that relationship is the essence of Wicca. In Samhain's liminal beauty, I see a celebration of the challenges and ineffable fulfillment of living in relationship.
Folklore holds that liminal times and spaces (crossroads, thresholds, midnight, Samhain) bring us to a closer relationship with the Otherworlds, lands of enchantment and imagination. The Veil between our everyday world and the Otherworlds begins to thin. The inhabitants of the Otherworlds reach out to us and make themselves felt.. The nature of those inhabitants varies across stories and traditions – they may be the Good Folk, the puca and the bean-sidhe, the kelpie of the well and the hinkypunk of the marsh, and other kinds of creatures as well. Many of the secular traditions of Halloween are inspired by the tales of these creatures, playing on the possible relationships between humans and spirits.
More solemnly, the Otherworlds are home to the spirits of our beloved dead, and Samhain is their festival. At Samhain we acknowledge that we exist in the midst of cycles of death and life. The thinning of the Veil at Samhain enables us to affirm and celebrate our relationships with those who have passed over.
During a previous conversation here at The Slacktiverse, someone asked me how I could have a relationship with someone who isn't alive anymore. How would that work, without the other person communicating and responding to me?
I don't find the lack of active communication to be an insuperable barrier to being in relationship with my beloved dead. After all, I have relationships with living people who don't communicate with me (or at least not very often.) Just because I haven't spoken or written to someone in months doesn't necessarily mean I have stopped relating to her. If my partner and I were separated by circumstances, our communications might be infrequent, but the intensity of my relationship with him would not be dissolved simply by time and space.
When I open the door to greet someone I haven't seen for a while, I am often struck by how their presence is more vivid than my memories or imagination of them. I remember the prejudices, the follies, the foibles, as well as the charm, the wit, and the mannerisms, but time and distance can dull those recollections, like a reproduction of a vibrant oil painting sketched in misty watercolors. When the real person crosses my threshold, I realize how much I've forgotten. The relative I haven't seen for years turns out to be both more kind than I remember and more nauseatingly guilt-inducing than I would like to recall.
This, then, is the challenge of trying to be in relationship with someone without active input from the other side. This challenge is clearest in our relationships with the beloved dead, who lack the ability to refresh our memories of their impact and their essence. Renewing those relationships at Samhain teaches me more about what it means to live in relationship with others.
Across distance and silence, I can think about, remember, and hope and wish and pray for the people I love, living and dead. In doing so, I am relating to them. The challenge is to stay open to who those people actually are, not just who I might wish them to be. I must listen to them.
Without listening – without paying careful attention to the reality of those we love -- we run the risk of wearing down the memory to just the parts that are comfortable for us, evening out all the sharp edges and unexpected valleys of the other's personality into a featureless, indistinguishable lump. We can romanticize a lost lover; we can mythologize our beloved but questionable ancestors.
The same wearing-down process, unfortunately, can occur in relationships with people we see every day. Unless we listen, we fall out of relationship with the living person and into an easier but ultimately flawed relationship with a caricatured memory. Metaphorical silence and distance leads eventually to literal distance, when one person says "You're not who I thought you were."
This is why learning to listen is at the heart of living in relationship. It's a challenge to seek out the unexpected, the uncomfortable, the unusual, the unknown. We have to make the effort to acknowledge that someone with whom we're in relationship is really an Other -- someone separate, distinct, different from ourselves and our ideas, images, and imaginings. This process of learning to listen, learning to be open and aware beyond ourselves, calls us to be more than just ourselves as isolated individuals.
At Samhain, we practice this in our relationships with the dead. Just because they're silent doesn't mean we can't listen. One of the traditional ways to relate to the deceased at this time of year is the dumb feast, where places are set for those who have passed over and the meal is held in silence. It combines a fundamental human connection through shared food and drink with an explicit example of listening, of recognizing that for such a connection to be shared, we have to make space and time - and silence - for others. This form of contemplation is especially appropriate as we begin to move into winter, a time when the world as a whole becomes more quiet, more still. We trade speech for silence; that encourages us to engage in other forms of communication, forms which may be more amenable to other kinds of awareness and relationship.
Striving to be in relationship with people who are not immediately present is also a way to learn to be in relationship with others who are present but whose voices are hard to hear. In Wicca, I am in relationship with the land and water, with plants and animals, all of whom communicate with me in non-verbal ways. As with an absent person, it is easy for me to hear only what I want to, to disregard the reality of these parts of my world in favor of the more comfortable constructs inside my own mind. But if I take time to listen, they speak to me, confronting me with the reality of their situation, more vivid and amazing than any imagination of my own. Opening to this awareness also teaches me about how to be in relationship with those whose voices are too often silenced: people who are not like me, people who are underprivileged, people who are far away. When I challenge myself to remember the complexity of the people I love who have passed over, it makes me better prepared to acknowledge the complexities that someone else's life may hold. It teaches me to seek out their voices, hearing from them in ways I might not expect or easily understand; it prepares me to hear even things that make me uncomfortable -- an essential part of an ongoing relationship.
This kind of listening is not necessarily the absence of talking; after all, our lives are stories told in dialogue. But it is dialogue -- not monologue. When we learn to listen, we encounter the reality of relationships, the reality that our stories are all told together. When we listen, we cannot assert complete control over our own narrative by shouting to drown others out; we cannot plug our ears so that no one else's story can interfere with our own. When we listen, we participate in stories of relationship. Listening is an act of awareness, of being present with and in the dialogue that surrounds us.
When we listen not only to the words but to the silence, we discover that the meaning of the story is formed by the silent pauses between words. Without them, all our speech would be incomprehensible noise. The silence is the heart of the story.
The liminal spaces that seemed empty are full of potential and interaction. The fullness of those spaces brings us to fullness, into full participation in the relationships that are the essence of life together.
The stories of Samhain are stories of relationships that cross all boundaries – between autumn and winter, between this world and the Otherworlds, between life and death. The rites of Samhain bring us to the threshold, the doorway, the liminal space where we connect across the boundary between self and other. And so at the threshold of November, I stand in the great silent pause between my story and that of my beloved dead – and I listen.
--Literata and Morwen
[1] Of course in the southern hemisphere summer is just beginning and the upcoming feast is Beltane.↩
Oct 28, 2011 2:13:45 PM | guest posts, Literata, Morwen
It may not take a village to raise a child but someone changed John Galt's diapers
I remember the day I lost my last illusions about the possibility of bravely shouldering one's own load and facing life's challenges using only one's own brains, initiative and hard work.
It was a hot summer's day and spouse and I were taking advantage of our vacation to repaint our spare room when the phone rang. It was Mary [1] calling from a hospital in a city 4 hours drive away. Just a short while before she had gone to the ER after she could no longer bear the excruciating pains in her abdomen. But that wasn't why she called me. The problem was that she was expecting her young son, John,[2] back home from camp that evening. Acquaintances (whose son had been at the same camp) had already started out on the long ride from the big city to the camp to pick up both boys. They knew she was ill and would warn her son but Mary didn't know them well enough to ask them to take John into their home. Nor was he close enough to them to make that a reasonable request. All Mary cared about at that moment was that someone in the family would be there to greet her son when he arrived back home, tired, from his first long time away from his mother.
So spouse and I put down the paint brushes, got into the car and drove non-stop to the big city. We rushed to the hospital, picked up her keys and got to her apartment before John got home. To this day I remember the look on his face as the elevator door opened and he saw someone he knew and trusted waiting for him. He ran down the hallway and I picked him up and told him "Mommy will be okay. Mommy misses you and we will all go to see her tomorrow."
Mary could not have planned for her illness. Nothing she could have done would have prevented it. But Mary did the smartest, most rational thing she could do. She relied on love and family loyalty.
No one changes their own diapers.
--mmy
[1] It doesn't matter exactly who Mary was. She was a relative of mine and her name wasn't Mary.↩
[2] Not his real name. ↩
Oct 21, 2011 1:54:00 PM | guest posts, mmy
A Canadian Harvest Festival
Today (October 10 2011) is Canada's official Thanksgiving Day. The current date (the second Monday of October) was set by Parliament in 1957. One of the reasons it was moved from the previous official date in November was the fact Thanksgiving Day and Remembrance Day (November 11) often fell in the same week.
I grew up learning that Canadian Thanksgiving had deeper historical roots than the American Thanksgiving since we could trace our Thanksgiving traditions back to Martin Frobisher's celebration of his safe arrival in the "New World" in 1578. The French settlers who arrived in what was to become Canada with Samuel de Champlain celebrated autumnal feasts of thanks beginning in 1604. The famous "first" Thanksgiving of the Pilgram Fathers didn't happen until 1621.
So, we were taught, our Thanksgiving came first.
Except it didn't. Because Champlain and the settlers shared their harvest feast with members of the First Nations. First Nations--those who were here first. Harvest Festivals, feasts of thanksgiving for the food which had been grown, harvested and slaughtered in the hopes that there would be enough to last through the coming hard winter, had been held all over North America for hundreds of years before the first European settler arrived.
We can look back on those Harvest Festivals at which Europeans settlers and members of the First Nations sat down at the same tables as the still before the storm of conquest and genocide and I wonder if the descendants of the First Nations participants at those feasts consider "Thanksgiving" as an appropriate description of the event. I wonder if someday we will stop calling this Harvest Festival a day of Thanksgiving and remember that for many members of the First Nations the intervening years were full of hunger, need and privation.
Today I will sit down at a Harvest Festival and be thankful that I can share a meal with the people I love. I'll raise a glass to the millions who lost their lands, their culture, their religion, their languages and their lives.
Perhaps Thanksgiving Day and Remembrance Day should fall in the same week to remind us of the price that others paid that we should be able to sit down safely to our feast today.
Oct 10, 2011 12:30:00 PM | guest posts, mmy
Making a Man of Him
'You're not going to make a man of him. Don't you see that?'
'No. I don't see that. I think [he] will grow up to be a man because he's a little boy.'
- Louise Fitzhugh, Nobody's Family Is Going To Change
The thing about babies, you see, is that they look pretty genderless. Unless they're wearing a shirt that says 'Little Princess' or 'Just Like Daddy', you have to guess. Everyone gets it wrong sometimes, and every baby gets mistaken for its opposite number. I've been known to ask, 'What's his name?' about babies dressed all in pink. My only explanation is that, as the mother of a boy, a boy I care for every day and love with all my heart, I sometimes forget that such things as baby girls exist.
Then someone says something to my son, and I remember.
My son has an upbeat and sociable disposition: if a person comes within his range, he almost always tries to catch their eye and grin at them. If they smile back, he's overjoyed, and will smile again, chatter, rejoice in having made a friend.
'Ooh,' says the clerk we regularly see, 'he's cheeky, isn't he?'
Is my son cheeky? Sometimes. He's playful and unafraid, and cheek is one expression of that. He knows, for instance, that blowing raspberries is forbidden during meals; one too many experiences of getting sprayed with lentil stew made this the first house rule. He blows a raspberry, I tell him firmly that it's naughty and leave the room for a short while. He wasn't winding me up; he was only doing it for the funny buzzing sensation and the satisfaction of making a controllable noise - but then there was that time on the changing table. He kept undoing the Velcro of his nappy; I employed my firm voice and told him to stop doing that. He looked at me with merry contemplation for a moment, then very carefully and very deliberately, he blew a raspberry at me. So yes, he can be cheeky, and it was fortunate that the on-the-go consequence for raspberries is that I avert my head and ignore him; seeing my helpless laughter would not have been good for discipline. But is he being cheeky when he tries to make friends with people?
You see, if he were a little girl, people would be calling him a flirt.
My son loved his pram mobile. It had a jingly chicken on it, and he'd knock it and enjoy the noise.
'Look,' said the man who came to fix our pipes, 'he's boxing the mobile.'
Seriously? Sometimes my son whacks things for the pleasure of using his arms, but is he playing a competitive sport? He is not, on the whole, a competitive baby. Play dates go peacefully. Once he sat in his high chair while, to console his little friend Micky for the fact that his mother was on the other side of the room, I gave Micky a bounce on my knee while singing our favourite dandling song. Concerned my son might feel left out or jealous - and I wouldn't have blamed him if he did - I glanced over. Blow me down, the little guy was bouncing along with the rhythm and grinning from ear to ear. Rather than thinking, 'Hey, that's MY mum!', he was thinking, 'Hey, a party!'
Knowing his habits, I had another theory about why he was batting Jingly Chicken. He is, in fact, a music lover. Singing enchanted him from a very early age. His interest in television programs is directly proportional to how many songs they contain. Offered a cuddle with a toy cat in playgroup, he tinkled the bell on its collar as a first move ('The boys love the bell,' said the teacher), and music-making toys are among his favourites. I don't think he was boxing Jingly Chicken; I think he was playing it.
And I'm pretty sure little girls are not considered boxers.
Every baby grizzles when they're tired and hungry. Towards the end of a long morning, we queued in the second-hand shop, and my son, past his lunchtime and due for his nap, was frazzled and crying.
'He has a terrible temper, doesn't he?' said the woman in the queue.
No. No he doesn't. That one isn't even a question: it's just a fact. She was wrong. He does not have a terrible temper. There's nothing inherently wrong with being angry and I wouldn't love him less if he did have a temper, but in a year of life, I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen him angry. He gets tired, he gets upset, he gets hungry or frustrated or uncomfortable or lonely, but anger is not an emotion he seems to feel very often.
If he'd been wearing pink, she would have said, 'She's upset, isn't she?'
'Hello, trouble,' people say to him. It's like those T-shirts for boys that say 'Little Rascal' - the kind I refused to buy, even though it was going for 25p in the charity shop, because calling a boy a rascal without cause is only going to encourage naughty boys to misbehave and hurt the feelings of obedient ones.
Or at least, people say 'Hello, trouble' when they know he's a boy. Sometimes, for reasons best known to themselves, they assume he's a girl. And then they coo at him - and when I say, 'Actually, he's a boy,' they generally excuse themselves on the grounds that he's good-looking, or that he has beautiful eyes.
Is he good-looking? Heck yes. Of course I think he's good-looking because I'm his mother, but strangers keep saying it as well. And I'm glad for him: looks shouldn't matter, but they do affect how people treat you. It's not fair, but it's a fact, and if it's going to be unfair I'd rather it was unfair in his favour.
Does he have beautiful eyes? Yep. They're a lovely blue-grey with big dark lashes, and they shine out of his face. He gets them from his father.
But good looks, it would seem, are a female purview.
My son has plenty of 'boy' qualities, and I'm pretty sure they're going to attract comment as they become more apparent. He's energetic and intrepid in the playground: he can't climb up the big slide yet, but he pushes himself down it with gusto. He's brave, recovering from bumps and knocks quickly. He's playful and confident in a way that will, I'm certain, sometimes come out in mischief. That he's also affectionate, sweet-natured and gentle, I fear, will attract fewer remarks, though love and courage need each other to do any good.
Give him time, and it's very possible he'll become a 'boyish' boy. Why not? He's a human being, and human beings are interested in exploring their own natures, and maleness is part of his.* My rule is this: the only person who gets to tell me what my son's 'boyness' means is my boy. Everybody has to decide for themselves what their gender means to them, and the interaction between gender and personality is complex and ongoing. If he decides to lead with his 'male' qualities, he'll be a great kid: courage, confidence and humour are excellent things. He'll be a great kid if he leads with his 'female' qualities too: sweetness of temper is equally excellent. He is who he is, and masculinity is something he'll have to come to terms with. I just hope he can manage it on his terms rather than other people's, because other people's terms are alarmingly limited.
If I've learned anything in a year of mothering a son, it's this: I have no patience with the claim that boys and girls are essentially different by nature. We can't possibly know that, because to know it, we'd have to see nature without nurture, and nature doesn't get a chance. People have been working to 'masculinise' my son - kindly, nicely, with the best of intentions - from the day he was born. We have two sets of vocabulary for the same human qualities.
My oldest friend has a daughter, a delightful little girl who shares a lot of qualities with my son. Both are bold, sunny, friendly children, starry-eyed and beautiful, cheeky and charming, keen on music and fun and people. They're not exactly the same, of course, but they have a lot in common. And I worry for them both. I worry about the day her outgoing nature gets curtailed for fear of men who see her beauty and think that it's for them, not for her. I worry about the day his generous nature gets curtailed for fear of being tagged a loser if he doesn't compete. I worry about the day her playful cheek gets chastised for not being 'gentle' or 'polite' enough. I worry about the day he's told to hide his loving character because love means you're a sissy. I worry about the day her anger gets patronised away as distress, and the day his distress gets punished as anger, and the day she gets told not to be strong, and the day he gets told not to be weak. Our brave, bright, hilarious children are facing two different worlds, and neither world will give them all the room they need to breathe.
Our children are fine people and with love and luck they'll make it to adulthood with their selfhood relatively safe. Mothers do worry, and we should probably try to knock it off and have some faith in our kids. But I see the pigeonholes people are building around our wonderful children, and...
... well, I wish they wouldn't.
--Kit Whitfield
*Probably. There's always the chance that he's genderqueer, but statistically speaking, probably not. If he is, that's fine by me: a parent's job is to try their best to understand who you are and love you for being that person. And hearing how many times a day I say 'Good boy', I'm becoming more aware of how exhausting and confusing it must be if you are genderqueer, constantly getting these messages that contradict your inner knowledge. But as I say, cisgender is statistically the most likely, and that's fine by me too. ↩
Oct 7, 2011 12:40:44 PM | guest posts, Kit Whitfield
On Checkers
Every year, the American Checkers Federation (ACF) hosts a series of tournaments that culminate in a Championship Match. About 56 people compete in the Nationals each year. This last year featured the incumbent champion, Cleveland native Alex Moiseyev, defeating Michele Borghetti of Livorno, Italy with a score of 7 wins, 6 losses, and 27 draws.
Some might find it strange that checkers tournaments still exist, as checkers is in fact a solved game. Checkers is vastly more complicated than, say, tic-tac-toe or Connect-4, but all three games are similar in that 'perfect play' sequences are now known. It happened for checkers in 2007. Computers had been working on the checkers problem since the 1980s, meticulously working out each sequence of moves from 39 trillion endgame positions, then verifying that any beginning position could wind up as one of those endgame positions given perfect play. There now exist computer algorithms that literally cannot lose to human players. (It turns out, incidentally, that perfect play by both sides forces a draw in checkers.)
So where do we go from here? And, also, why are there still checkers tournaments? Hasn't humanity, in some sense, finally beaten the game for good? What's even the point in playing, when no matter what clever and brilliant stratagem one unleashes, the counter is already known and recorded in some hard drive somewhere?
For the first question, one response is to move to a new game with more complicated play that still hasn't been entirely solved. If checkers is finished, move to, for example, chess, a game whose complete solving by computers is expected to occur at around the same time as the heat death of the universe [1]. 'Regular' chess (8x8 board, 64 squares, FIDE rules and regulations) still hasn't actually been solved yet, even if some would argue that it's getting close. There are still new openings and tactics being developed. People can't even agree if either side has an advantage or if the game starts on an equal footing, or if perfect play would yield a white win, a black win, or a draw; all of which indicates a fair degree of uncertainty about what 'perfect play' would look like [2]. Grandmasters still do win and lose against each other. So games in which there is still uncertainty about the outcome -- still room for a clever player to add something new to the books -- do exist. Then why do people play checkers?
After all, while playing checkers can be fun, and can help maintain friendships, and can keep the mind sharp, et cetera, the ostensible purpose of playing is to win. To beat other people on a level playing field, your wits against theirs. Essentially, to be better than them at the game. And for those who want to be 'good' at checkers, their objective is to be better than lots of people. Is there any metric in the game that doesn't, at some level, require comparing one's own ability against others? For aspiring champions, they must want, by definition, to be the best. But now anyone can only hope, at best, to tie the number one champion, a network of computers that ran for eighteen years. Solitary possession of the number one rank is, quite literally, impossible; and any victory against a human opponent may well pale in comparison to the knowledge of what would happen were one to challenge the perfect computer player. Alice may be better than Bob, but both are far inferior to Multivac.
A response might then be that, while computers know all four billion move sequences, people don't. Most human beings aren't capable of that sort of analysis and memory. Nor do most people play Deep Blue-esque checker supercomputers, but rather other people – and then it's a game that can be won. Not everyone wants to be the best; some only want to test their mettle against another
'But,' the naysayer might add, 'Can someone really take up a game, play it routinely, and not at some level want to be the best? And if you really don't care about how well you play overall, why do you care if you win or lose anyway? And if that doesn't matter to you even the least bit, why are you even playing? What satisfaction does it give you that just socializing wouldn't?'.
Or it might be that, while perfection is impossible, maybe the pursuit of it is still worthwhile and engaging. One player may never beat a computer, but if she lasts forty moves in one game, and forty-five in another, that's still progress – and quite good progress to boot, considering the opponent. 'But if the ending's always the same, how could that not get soul-crushing after a while? The futility of it all?'
Or perhaps it's human pride. For the same reason that a bicyclist might not see a motorist's time in crossing a course as something to compete against, a player that doesn't use tools or computers might simply not care what a computer can do. That's another division; and in the human division, there's still improvement to be made.
I wasn't sure at first why this interested me. After all, I don't play checkers, and I'm a rank amateur at chess—nowhere near the level where I could use solved strategies. But I think that this is applicable to more than games. Automation and computer ability is ever increasing, and machines are increasingly able to do things better than humans. But humans don't always seem to want to exploit these capabilities.
To take one trivial example, a digital scale can be used to measure things much more precisely than the traditional analog balances that used to hang in supermarkets. Yet one still finds people using said analog balances in their homes and workplaces. In another case, I'm an amateur baker – I bake bread as a hobby. I could make better loaves (rounder, fluffier, richer) with a fancy bread machine, but I find myself preferring to make it by hand. I also play piano as a hobby, and I mostly play classical scores (as opposed to improvisational pieces). Player pianos and keyboards can, in some sense, play 'better' (or at least more accurately) than I. Based on the research I've seen, I think that robots and computers will be able to play as well as humans (including expressivity, emotion, and other features that are commonly thought to be exclusive to humans) within ten years. And yet I keep on playing...
So – questions for the audience. Do you do anything as a hobby or fun pastime that a machine could do 'better' in some sense? Why do you still do it?
--ZMiles
[1] Of course, some would argue that chess itself may be slowly approaching 'solved' status, at least among the grandmasters (World Champion Bobby Fisher famously worried that chess was going to enter a 'drawn death,' where the greatest players would just draw each other all the time because they'd reached the limits of the game). This has in fact happened with some openings; the Poisoned-Pawn Variation defense to the Sicilian opening very often results in a drawn game, simply because the (supposedly) best moves after such a defense are well known to most professional players.
So what then? Fisher chose to make the rules still more complicated. He invented Chess960, chess with a randomized back row, a vastly more complicated game. Another World Champion with similar concerns, Jose Raul Capablanca, designed a 8x10 board and two new pieces that necessitated new strategies. A third World Champion, Emmanual Lasker, opted for a different tactic; he proposed changing the scoring so that draws could be weighted towards one side or another (i.e., if white is winning and stalemates black, white gets a larger fraction of a point than black). This would discourage draws and, hopefully, lead to more innovative play. Other ideas include giving 'draw' odds – draws are awarded to black as a win, and white gets a bonus on the timer to compensate – and reducing the amount of time for moves, to force play that isn't as well thought out.
But, again, that chess is becoming solved is by no means settled upon. Lasker worried that it was… and Lasker's World Championship was in 1894 (Capablanca's was in 1921, Fisher's in 1972). We've gone more than 100 years since then, and people are still winning and losing games, so perhaps these fears are a bit too soon. ↩
[2] For those who don't play chess: each player has the same pieces and the same movement options to begin the game, but white always goes first. Statistically, about 56% of grandmaster-level games that aren't drawn go to white, and 44% for black. Thus, many argue that white has an advantage. But some counter that having an extra move can occasionally be a major disadvantage in chess (this is called zugzwang), and that white has to reveal itself and its strategy before black, which has the option of picking a response rather than striking into the unknown. They argue that the white victory odds are due to psychology – those playing black don't believe they'll win, so they don't – and most people not knowing how to play black (i.e., the great debate over whether black should attempt to equalize position first before attacking, or if should attack first and not worry about white's ostensible first-move advantage).
Grandmaster Weaver Adams, whose title indicates substantial knowledge of chess, once wrote a book with the premise that white should be able to win with perfect play. This earned him widespread ridicule. Of course, without knowing whether black, white, or neither has an advantage, determining perfect play is not really possible. Grandmaster Andras Adorjan responded that it's best to play as black, also earning him his share of mockery. For more information, see Wikipedia: First move advantage in chess. ↩
Oct 5, 2011 1:16:00 PM | guest posts, ZMiles
I attend a Unitarian Universalist (UU) church. I am hesitant to call myself a UU, because I'm not firmly convinced that I am one (as, perhaps, will be clear below), but I find the congregation provides what I need in the way of a spiritual home, and I am comfortable there. The UU's don't seem to mind what I call myself, and that's probably all for the good.
Unitarian Universalism is a non-creedal religion. It has historic links to Christianity, but it isn't really a Christian denomination. It is an open and welcoming religion, allowing a safe worship space for people of all creeds and backgrounds (and those with no creeds, and muddled backgrounds) to worship with like-minded individuals.
In the late spring, the congregation that I am currently attending holds a ritual for their young adults as they transfer out of Religious Education (Sunday School, for those of you in a Christian church setting, or with that background) and into the Youth Group. (I assume this is fairly common among UU congregations, but the only other congregation we have attended didn't really have a community of youth – I think we had a youth for the majority of the time we attended, maybe two.) Actually, the ritual is preceded by about a month of mentoring and group consideration, culminating in the creation of an individual credo – a personal statement of belief that is true for that young adult at that point in their personal life. At the Young Adult Service in the spring, the participants are invited to share their credos with the congregation. This can be both a deeply moving and deeply frustrating experience for the congregation. Our youth are often passionate about their beliefs, but, equally, they are often un-tutored. Two years ago, for instance, the whole group of youth decided that they would include a reference to evolution in their credos – so all seven or eight youth asserted that they "believed" in evolution. Evolution, as far as I'm aware, does not require "belief", any more than gravity or Newton's Third Law. It just is. "Belief" was the wrong word in the context; perhaps evolution was the wrong concept for a credo.
At any rate, early this summer, the teen children of our minister (one at college, one preparing to head off) decided to revisit their credos and present a service on how their beliefs have changed and grown since they were youth. This highlighted for me the fact that there's a good chance you won't have prepared a credo. And, since much of the congregation have come into UUism from elsewhere (it's that sort of religion), many of us have never considered, in a formal way, what we actually believe. So, that was the first seed.
Over the summer, it is often difficult for me to attend services. And yet, every service this summer (at least, so it seems to me) that I DID attend focused on the idea of belief, and personal faith, and personal faith journeys, and the creation of, or realization of, a sense of personal belief and personal theology. Repeated seedings of the idea, with extra watering. So, I sat down to write my own credo.
Now, it seems to me that a credo serves a couple of purposes. One is private – it is valuable to establish for yourself a firm idea of what you, personally, believe. Establishing for yourself what your core beliefs are enables you to decide how you will live your life. Even if you are a participant in a creedal religion, this process has some value – you should look at your collective creed and decide what, specifically, it means for you – else what's the point? You're just mouthing words, otherwise, without thinking about the significance of the words.
The other purpose of a credo is public. In Islam, a public statement of faith – the Shahada - is one of the pillars of the faith, one of the five things Muslims are required to do in order to be considered Muslims. In most creedal Christian denominations, there is a public sharing of a statement of faith – a communal recognition that these words, this passage, defines what it means to be part of who we are. Creeds are about creating a group, forming connections, strengthening bonds. So, a credo, a personal statement of faith, should perhaps also be a public statement. It should provide an opportunity for others to say "yes, I see where this comes from," or "thank [insert deity], I'm not the only one who feels that way," or even "this is nonsense, how can you possibly believe that?" A credo, unspoken, is only half of what it could be. With that in mind, here's what I came up with as a credo:
I believe that Jesus was the Son of God, sent to Earth to present the good news; fully man and fully divine (or else what's the point?). (mostly, I am not a Unitarian…) But I don't insist that you believe that, nor do I believe that those outside of that belief tradition are going to hell. Increasingly, I find that I don't believe in hell at all – I believe in a God of infinite love, and a heaven which is broad enough to contain everyone without diminishing the experience for anyone. (…mostly, I am a Universalist. That is why I'm not entirely comfortable describing myself as a UU.)
I believe in the Kingdom of Heaven, and I believe that, to the extent that we can create a just, equitable society on Earth (with liberty and justice for all, freedom of conscience, some form of democracy, etc etc), we are building that Kingdom here and now. I believe that the construction of that Kingdom is our purpose. I believe that there are many paths along which we might travel in the construction of the Kingdom.
This is my path to the Kingdom. There may be other paths, but this is the one that feels right to me. I've always been told that, in Heaven, we will know all – that all the mysteries will be revealed and all the questions will be answered. Thus, I believe that Heaven is a great library, where all needs are and can be met, adhering to the five laws of the library (as proposed by S. R. Ranganathan. I have to thank hapax for introducing me to these):
1) Books are for use.
2) Every reader his [or her] book.
3) Every book its reader.
4) Save the time of the reader.
5) The library is a growing organism.
I believe that, if we follow these laws, we can work towards the Kingdom of Heaven, through a mutual reading and sharing of knowledge and information, and the creation of a network of engaged and interested readers and sharers of knowledge. If there are those among us who are trapped in the darkness of ignorance, through their own actions or the actions of others, we are all diminished. Our best selves constantly seek Truth, and support the constant seeking for Truth of others. Our best selves test everything, hold onto the good, and seek more things to test. Through this process, we enlighten ourselves and spread the light to all who surround us. From one flame, many candles are lit; when all candles are lit, darkness is dispelled everywhere.
(That all sounds nice, but it's a little difficult to apply. So I came up with some action statements)
Denying access to information or knowledge on the basis of its content is wrong.
Withholding needed information and knowledge is wrong.
Presenting false or misleading information, knowingly or unknowingly, is wrong.
Failing to seek needed knowledge or information is wrong.
Willfully reveling in ignorance is wrong.
Being content with what you know is wrong.
I will end as the minister's kids did, with an admonition – what's your credo?
--Mike Timonin
Oct 3, 2011 12:54:00 PM | guest posts, Mike Timonin