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Kobayashi Maru and losing with grace

11/29/2018

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Kobayashi Maru.

It's been on my mind recently.

For those of you not up on your Trek, lemme summarize.

Kobayashi Maru is an exam given to Starfleet Academy cadets on a command track. It takes the form of a simulated starship mission, with the cadet taking the exam assuming the captain's post. Other cadets and/or TA's take the posts of the other officers, with a computer controlled scenario.

While underway, the ship receives a distress call from the civilian Freighter Kobayashi Maru. They have struck a mine in the Neutral Zone bordering a hostile territory (usually Klingons). No other ship is close enough to attempt a rescue, nor can higher headquarters be reached.

If the captain chooses to attempt a rescue, one of the bridge officers will remind them that the Klingons may consider a Federation ship entering the neutral zone as an act of war.

Should the captain decide to attempt a rescue anyway, the ship is attacked by Klingons. Enough force is used that the ship will be destroyed with all hands.

The stated purpose of the test is to make a character judgement when faced with a no-win scenario. Choices become leave citizens to die in space or cause a war where none of those under your command survive.

Kirk, famously, in the Trek verse, discovers the nature of the test ahead of time and decides to cheat. (in the reboot film, he rigs the simulation to overpower his weapons and shields and underpower those of the Klingon. In a novel published years before, he gives himself a reputation in the simulator, and the Klingon attackers surrender once they realize they're facing THE Kirk.)

Now, here's what has me thinking about it.

We're living in a post-no-win-scenario world, which rose along with the nerds winning the culture wars at the end of the millennium.

Our current repository of pop culture (by that I mean the 80's), caused a shift in our formative stories. While we still had our "strength" heroes popular since Beowulf like the one-man-army action heroes of Schwartzenegger, Stallone, Segal, and suchlike, more and more of our movie heroes relied on outsmarting or outwitting their adversaries as opposed to simply overpowering.

This was the rise of a nerd hero. Someone too busy typing in front of a screen to lift weights or run up and down hills, but who could use that typing to save the day.

They aren't a new phenomenon by any means. Tom Sawyer was tricking his classmates into doing his chores for him a century beforehand, and cunning heroes like Aladdin and Ali Baba were trying to escape hardworking lives for riches and comfort centuries before that. But the 80's started bringing them in every summer blockbuster season. Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star by literally doing the work of a targeting computer that nobody else could do.

This rose alongside the quest-based video game, where it wasn't a matter of winning or losing, but HOW you won. If you lost a life, you could get another. Eventually, you were going to defeat the game. It was just a question of time, effort, and cheat codes.

And we became a generation who, like Kirk, didn't believe in no-win scenarios.

But what happens when there isn't a third option?

What happens when we really, for good, lose?

I've talked before about how the video game quest attitude has bled over into our culture's problems with consent. How backing off and going away in the face of rejection has somehow no longer become an option, merely throwing different attempts until one works on one object of affection or another.

And in some other ways, we're changing the world this way. Gen X looked at the world and said, "The system is rigged, fuck it." While the Millenials came up behind them and said, "the system is rigged, rig it right back!"

And yeah, while that's brought us progress, it's done more to paper over the problems, and brought up unintended consequences.

Yeah, you can get all the music you want, anytime, anywhere, for a pittance, assuming you're bothering to pay at all. But how many superstars can you actually name today that came on the scene in the last five years? How many honest-to-shit favorite songs came out less than fifteen years ago? Am I just sounding old or am I hitting a nerve?

Yeah, Uber and Lyft are cheaper than cabs ever were. And you can do the work without paying more for your taxi medallion than you did for your vehicle. But cabbies, uber drivers, and Lyft drivers are all making less across the board. And we keep going with whatever's cheaper, fuck what it costs to thems already doing it.

Look at Afghanistan. We just lost three more Americans in the fighting last week. We're actively in a war that's lasted longer than M.A.S.H. was on the air, and for what? We've neither conquered the country completely nor left when it was apparent that we weren't going to. Our no-win scenario is right there in our face.

Look at the blue screen of death half the country flipped into when Donald Trump became president. And the screaming is still going on. There was neither a defeat of him at the ballot box nor a revolution to overthrow him. Just an ongoing campaign of being bigger assholes to your family and neighbors.

We can't concede an election when it's staring us in the face (Grow the fuck up, Stacey) nor bow out of a contentious position even when it looks bad enough to make your entire work look illegitimate (they're gonna be so far up your ass it'll look like an anal beads convention in your office, Kemp. And you earned every last one of them).

The point of the no-win scenario was supposedly to measure one’s character. If we’ve rejected the concept of no-win so much, has our character suffered in the process? I think it has.

Memories told me today of my favorite moment in Game of Thrones. Everybody cheers Tyrion on when he says, "I drink, and I know things." But what captured me is seeing him on his wedding night to Sansa. When he knows his marriage is a sham and even though his culture doesn't even use the fucking word, he refuses to consummate his marriage to Sansa without her consent. And when the terrified girl asks what happens if she never does? The vicious, spat-upon, drunken legendary whoremonger simply smiles, raises a glass, and says, "then so my watch begins."

That, friends and neighbors, is losing with grace. Something that we're forgetting in our race to win no-win scenarios.

May we learn to do so again before we're forced to in the worst manners possible.

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A few things...

11/26/2018

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One, it is absolutely legal to enter the U.S. and request asylum.
Two, A good-sized unit of the U.S. military came down to the border with all the people and equipment necessary to feed, house, treat, maintain order among and process the paperwork for the thousands of people in the caravan. It still can only process so many people so quickly. If I had to guess why it was taking so long, I'd have to say a cross between wanting to know by name, face, and story exactly who was coming to request asylum, and that simply herding a giant caravan from the border to a razor wire-fenced tent city would look even worse than seeing the long lines at the border.
Three, Tijuana and Mexico itself (which has a new incoming president on Saturday) are already having problems being a staging ground for this caravan, which are only going to get bigger as stragglers catch up.
Four, opinions vary on the size of the caravan itself, but given what I've seen of recent video, I'm gonna make an estimated guess that maybe a tenth of the caravan decided that the lines were taking too long and storming the border was a good idea instead.
Five, when that decision was made, game was on. At that point that one in ten went from being asylum seekers to being invaders. They were repelled with tear gas. I would not be surprised to find out that less-than-lethal means were only available and passed along in the ROE because of two, mentioned above.
Six, choosing to join said invasion mob with children in tow is, at my charitable best, desperation turned to fear turned to stupidity.
Seven, that's also me being charitable and not going with the educated guesstimate that a third or more of the children in this caravan are being trafficked, in which case joining the mob with kids in tow was more of a sense of cruel gambling pragmatism.
Eight, maybe fifty have been arrested by the U.S. and five hundred by Mexico and are awaiting deportation. I haven't heard of any deaths yet, and have no doubt everyone who hasn't to the right of Fox would be screaming to the heavens if there was. As border guard actions go, we're fucking champions of humanitarianism.
Nine, despite that, I'm still hearing multiple calls to shame the US for our actions, the occasional lazy bitching in Trump's direction for it because, I dunno, there's such a dearth of other reasons to do so, and on the other end of the bell curve calls to clear hot and let the canals run with blood.
The whole boiling lot of 'em need to grow the fuck up. Dishonor on their cow.
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NRA needs to start making itself useful

11/14/2018

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Personally, I'd love it if the NRA would do something useful, like lobby a platform of the 2nd amendment applying to all Americans.
As opposed to, say, competing in the 100yrd being an asshole like it's been doing lately.
But let's discuss the Doctors' reactions here.
Phone pics of blood covered ER's. Powerful imagery. Tugs right at the outrage centers, there.
Of course, none of them mention that American gun violence dropped by half in the last 20 years, and has only been twitching upwards recently because there's not a whole lot of further down it can go.
It definitely doesn't mention that, according to Johns Hopkins, medical malpractice kills not only more, but an order of magnitude more than firearm homicides, suicides, and accidents put together.
Ergo, since Doctors having their shit together has an exponentially greater effect over who dies, who lives, and how well than anything myself or any other shooter can do with a gun; then yeah, the Docs might want to stay in their lane here.
I'm not fond of proving assholes right, but that's math for you.
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Drawing Lines

11/5/2018

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"We can agree to disagree and still be friends. As long as your disagreement isn't rooted in my oppress..."
Shut. Up.
No.
Motives are something you discover, not something you assign.
Claiming a motive without investigation is at best lazy and at worst a blatantly willful failure to even try and understand a differing point of view.
Because you can sleep at night by kicking someone that hates you to the curb. After all, they hated you, didn't they?
Doing that to someone who's got a different life and different priorities? Ones that don't put your needs, wants and desires at the forefront? That just might keep you up at night, and that would be hard. Gods forbid an enemy have a point, no?
You know what that reminds me of?
Every bloodthirsty motherfucker I went to war with. Every one that looked forward to killing Iraqis or Afghanis or what the fuck ever because they were all terrorists, weren't they? And even if they weren't, they were all collaborators, weren't they? Too cowardly to fight off the real bastards on their own makes them no better than the guys who flew planes into the towers, am I right?
And it wasn't just the dumb ones, either. Not just the 31-on-the-asvab, cousin-groping crayon-eaters recruited at the head of a holler. No, there were some very smart, highly trained motherfuckers in that bunch.
And that's what that shit reminds me of.
If you want to hate, hate.
But don't barely bother to open your door then have the gall to call it meeting them halfway.
Loving people who do repugnant to you shit is hard. I get that.
But making it easy on yourself to hate, convincing yourself you have a damn good reason? That shit just makes it that much easier to be evil in this world. And we've got enough of that.
So don't you fucking dare sit on your ass in the front row of a guillotine show, whining about how much of a fucking victim you are in the middle of your knitting.
You either learn to hate honestly or you spend some sleepless nights because you know you went the easy route.
Or you realize the hard work's worth doing, get the fuck up and pitch the fuck in.
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