February 2017 – Renaissance Guy

Open Letter: Betsy DeVos

Today at school there was an informational session regarding the policies of the new department of education, and a letter-writing session to the new secretary of education. Unfortunately, in a bitter and illuminating irony, I was prevented from attending and participating owing to a flare-up of my disability. I have therefore resolved to make my point via online open letter.

Madam Secretary,

If I am completely honest, I hold reservations that you are qualified to hold your current post. Your lack of experience with public schools at all is disturbing; and your characterization of education as an industry rather than the duty of the government in protecting the inalienable right of the citizens in accordance with both international law and domestic precedent, is alarming.

With that said, I shall invite you to prove me wrong. I remain open to the possibility that I have underestimated your abilities and convictions, and those of your cabinet colleagues. In particular, your short-lived, halfhearted attempt to prevent the rollback of existing protections for transgender students is quite heartening, despite its failure. However, I should have to inform you that merely paying lip service to the idea of equal protection is not nearly enough, particularly for one who has sworn an oath to uphold it.

Because I do not expect much in the way of expanded services from your office, the main point of your tenure will be to ensure that existing protections for minorities and those such as myself with disabilities are enforced. Your job is to stand up for those who cannot stand for themselves. This is an enormous responsibility, and one that is arguably more critical to the continuing function of our democratic society than the jobs of your other colleagues.

I will hasten to point out, since the papers have brought it to my attention, that the primary motivation for your backing down during the standoff over transgender protections owed to your job security, that your position is most likely more secure than you may be led to believe. Yours is a senate-confirmed position. You, who were evidently the most qualified candidate the president could muster, only barely made it through senate approval. I do not expect the same senators would take kindly to you being asked to resign over adhering to your legally-mandated duty. I urge you to point out this matter to your colleagues the next time you feel pressured to compromise on principles.

In closing, I urge you, Madam Secretary, to prove me wrong; to demonstrate that you are qualified to uphold your constitutional and legal obligations. Prove that you are willing to put moral principles before money and politics. Give me reason to believe, as you put it during your confirmation hearings, that you “fully embrace equality [and] believe in the innate value of every single human being, and that all students, no matter their age, should be able to attend a school and feel safe and be free from discrimination.” Prove that you will stand by your words and enforce the civil rights legislation that ensures that our society can yet function.

Sincerely,
The Renaissance Guy
Registered independent voter, Blogger, and Student

Nailing the Colors

“Throw your soldiers into positions whence there is no escape, and they will prefer death to flight” – Sun Tzu, The Art of War.

Pardon the French

I often find that the hardest part of traveling for me is making the actual decision to commit to traveling. I mean, actually getting places is hard too, doubly so if I have to go through some kind of screening, seeing as how my medical devices, being both electronic and attached to me, set off alarms at every checkpoint, but over the years I’ve grown used to this.

The hardest part of traveling is determining whether this particular event is worth putting my metaphorical money where my mouth is. Not because money, or even travel time, are acutely scarce in my case, but rather because travel, especially in my case, requires a great deal of planning, and entails a considerable health risk.

The trouble with galavanting across the globe lies in the basic physiological fact that my body, unlike most, is not medically self sufficient. Simple sustenance is not enough for me to stave off death; I require a constant and complex life support regime to travel with me, with replacement and backup parts. Certain aspects of this baggage must be refrigerated, all of it requires special hazmat disposal, and from time to time, I still need to cease my activities in order to plug my cyborg components into a wall socket.

In addition to all of this routine hassle, I also must remain vigilant about the very real possibility of a more acute crisis. With increased activity and exposure to heretofore unknown pathogens comes an increased risk of medical catastrophe. And being far from my home and those doctors that are most familiar with my unique conditions amplifies the likelihood that, if something does go wrong, it will become critical.

I am a person who tends to overthink. I like to have the complete information before making a decision, and I like to take my time in doing so. When faced with uncertainty, I am broadly inclined to hedge my bets. A lifetime of chronic illness has taught me great appreciation for the value of playing one’s cards conservatively. This is, after all, the nature of medicine. Err on the side of caution. Prevent rather than cure. Rest, recuperate, and live to fight another day.

Yet this mindset is rather incongruous with modern travel. Traveling requires visas, reservations, tickets, invitations, and scheduling, all of which require commitment. One has to be able and willing to certify that they will be in a certain place on a certain day for a certain purpose, regardless of whatever extenuating circumstances may crop up between now and then. There is no option on airline bookings, or hotel reservations, to say “Yes, I will be there on February 24th with two other guests, unless of course one of us has a major health crisis or somesuch calamity.” Rather, it is “I will be there on February 24th with precisely two others, damn the torpedoes.”

This oversight seems to stem from the mistaken assumption that I have control over my life inasmuch as scheduling is concerned. That perhaps I was dealt a poor hand to begin with, but now that I have, it is solely my power to determine how I play my hand. This is absolutely not the case. I have no more control over the timing of my health problems than the average American does over the use of the US nuclear arsenal in an international crisis. That is to say, I can make my wishes known to the powers that be, and I can, on occasion, take indirect action to influence the overall outcome, but on the whole, my role is purely reactive.

In truth, I think this is part of what is so exhilarating to me about travel. Even in something as mundane as traveling across the state to visit friends, I am taking a gamble. I am nailing my colors to the mast, and committing to an offensive battle instead of waiting for my illness to strike first, and for me to react. Each one of these battles carries the distinct risk that it may be my last, and so I must choose my battles carefully.

With this in mind, I have decided to commit to making an appearance at NerdCon: Nerdfighteria in Boston this weekend. I plan to make myself identifiable with an oversized button of the compass-and-pencil seal. If my recently acquired and as yet untested means of button production work as envisioned, I will have some quantity of such buttons to distribute. In other words, come and say hi!

Strike!

Update: Scroll to the bottom of the post for the latest.

This blog ~~is currently participating~~ successfully participated in the nationwide general strike in protest of the United States government’s actions against refugees and immigrants. Access to our archives ~~has been~~ was temporarily suspended and has since been restored.

We do not apologize for this inconvenience.

All complaints should be directed to the United States government.

Update:

The day is over, and access to our archives has been restored. The Day Without Immigrants strike made headlines nationwide, and shut down a good portion of my local area. It is heartening to see people participating in collective action in meatspace in addition to online action.

Perhpas surprisingly, the hit counter actually reached a record since launch over the past 24 hours. I’m not quite sure what to make of this. We received a great deal of positive feedback during this time, which is much appreciated.

The biggest complaint of this strike, aside from those disagreeing with the cause, and the idea of collective action in general, was that it was poorly organized, poorly publicized, and done on short notice. In a sense, this is good news. It demonstrated the ability for quick reaction, and provides feedback for future action; most notably, the planned general strike for International Women’s Day on March 8th.

There have been talks of further strike action on Friday and continuing into the weekend. I applaud this effort, although I fear that attempting to extend this largely spontaneous effort will overtax the limited economic resources and political will of those who are perhaps sympathetic, but not necessarily committed enough to risk their livelihoods. Better in this case, I believe, to play the long game.

One more thing; amid all the demonstrations and media coverage, the super-PAC behind the presidential administrations quietly released a “Media Accountability Survey”. The questions are, of course, horribly biased, and it seems reasonable to assume that this will result in an accordingly biased result. Therefore, there has been an effort by some social media circles to spread publicity of the survey to ensure that it receives a wide sample size. For those interested, the link is below.

https://action.donaldjtrump.com/mainstream-media-accountability-survey/

Statistically Significant

Having my own website (something I can only now scarcely say without adding exclamation points,) has unlocked a great deal of new tools to explore. Specifically, having an operational content platform has given me access to statistics on who is reading what, who is clicking on given buttons, and where people are coming here from. It is enthralling, and terribly addictive.

Here are some initial conclusions from the statistics page:

1) There is a weak positive correlation between the days I release new content and the days we get more views. This correlation is enhanced if we stretch the definition of “day” to include proceeding twenty-four hours, rather than the remainder of the calendar day on which the content was released. This suggests that there may, in fact, be people actually reading what I write here. How exciting!

2) Most visitors register as originating from the United States. However, the script which tracks where our referrals come from paints a far more diverse picture. This could be a bug in the monitoring software, or people accessing the site from overseas could be using proxies to hide their identities.

3) The viewership of this blog is becoming larger and more international as a function of time.

4) More referrals currently come from personal one-on-one sharing (Facebook, web forums, shared links) than stumble-upon searches.

5) Constantly interrupting one’s routine to check website statistics will quickly drive on stark raving mad, as well as suck time away from writing.

These are interesting insights, and worthy of understanding for future posts. Of course, the immediate follow-up question is: What do I do with this data? How do I leverage it into more views, more engagement, and more shares? How do I convert these insights into money of fame or prestige? The idea seems to be that if a thing is being shared, there has to be some value coming back for the sharer aside from simply contributing to public discourse.

While I will not deny that I would enjoy having money, fame, and prestige, as of now, these are not my primary goals in maintaining this blog. If I do decide, as has been suggested, to follow the route of the professional sharer, soliciting donations and selling merchandise, it would not be in pursuit of Gatsbyesque money and status, but merely so that writing and not starving may not be mutually exclusive.

It is still strange to me that I have a platform. That, in the strictest sense, my writing here is a competitor of Netflix, JK Rowling, and YouTube. I am a creator. I am a website owner. I have a tendency to think of those aforementioned entities as being on a plane unto themselves, untouchable by mere mortals (or muggles, as the case may be) such as myself. And in business terms, there is some truth to this. But in terms of defining the meaning of “artist”, “creator” and “writer” in the twenty-first century, I am already on the same side of the line as them.

I suppose the heart of the matter is that, setting aside that those entities actually have professional salaries, there is no intrinsic difference between either of us. They have platforms, and I have a platform. They have an audience with certain demographics, as do I. They receive value from the distribution of their work, and I do for mine (albeit in different forms and on different orders of magnitude).

Growing up, I had this notion that adulthood conferred with it some sort of intrinsic superiority borne of moral and cognitive righteousness, and conferred upon each and every human upon reaching adulthood. I believed that the wealthy and famous had this same distinction one step above everyone else, and that those in positions of legal authority had this same distinction above all. Most of the authority figures in my life encouraged this mindset, as it legitimized their directions and orders to me.

The hardest part of growing up for me has been realizing that this mindset simply isn’t true; that adulthood is not a summary promotion by divine right, and that now that I too am a nominal adult, that no one else can truly claim to have an inherently better understanding of the world. Different minds of differing intellectual bents can come to differing conclusions, but people in power are not inherently right merely because they are in power.

I am not a better or worse human being merely because I happen to have the passwords and payment details to this domain, any more than Elon Musk is an inherently better human for having founded Tesla and Space-X. Yes, the two of us had resources, skills, and motivation to begin both of our projects, but this is as much a coincidental confluence of circumstances as a reflection on any actual prowess. Nor are we better people because we have our respective audiences.

In this day an age, there is much talk of division of people into categories. There are the creators and the consumers. The insiders and the outsiders. The elite and the commoners. The “world of success” as we have been taught to think about it, is a self-contained, closed-loop, open only to those who are worthy, and those of us who aren’t destined to be a part of it must inevitably yield to those who are. Except this plainly isn’t true. I’m not special because I have a blog, or even because I have an audience large enough to draw demographic information. There is nothing inherent that separates me from the average man, and nothing that separates both of us from those at the very top. To claim otherwise is not only dangerous to the idea of a democratic, free-market society, but is frankly a very childish way to look at the world.

You Have The Right To An Education

I am not sold on the going assumption seemingly embraced by the new US presidential administration which characterizes education as an industry, at least, not in the sense that the United States government has traditionally approached other industries. While I can appreciate that there may be a great deal which market competition can improve in the field, I feel it is dangerous to categorize education as merely an economic service rather than an essential civil service and government duty. Because if it is an industry, then it ceases to be a government duty.
The idea that education is a human right is not new, nor is it particularly contentious as human rights go. Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reads in part as follows:

Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free […] Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible […] Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.

The United States lobbied strongly for the adoption and promotion of this declaration, and for many years touted it as one of the great distinctions which separated the “free world” from the Soviet Union and its allies. Americans were proud that their country could uphold the promise of free education. The United States remains bound to these promises under international law, but more importantly, is bound by the promise to its own citizens.

Of course, there are other, more nationalist grounds for opposing the erosion of the government’s responsibility to its citizens in this regard. Within the United States, it has long been established that, upon arrest, in order for due process to be observed, that a certain exchange must take place between the accused and the authorities. This exchange, known as the Miranda Warning, is well-documented in American crime shows.

The ubiquity of the Miranda Warning is not merely a coincidental procedure, but is in fact an enforced safeguard designed to protect the constitutional rights of the accused. Established in 1966 in the US Supreme Court Case Miranda vs. Arizona, the actual wording is less important than the notion that the accused must be made aware, and must indicate their understanding of, their constitutional rights regarding due process. Failure to do so, even for the most trivial of offenses, is a failure of the government to uphold those rights, and can constitute grounds for a mistrial.

The decision, then, establishes an important premise: Citizens who are not educated about their rights cannot reliably exercise them, and this failure of education represents sufficient legal grounds as to permit reasonable doubt on the execution of justice. It also establishes that this education is the duty of the government, and that a failure here represents an existential failure of that government. It follows, then, that the government and the government alone holds a duty to ensure that each citizen is at least so educated as to reasonably ensure that they can reliably exercise their constitutional rights.

What then, should we make about talk of turning education into a free-for-all “industry”? Can the government still claim that it is fulfilling its constitutional obligations if it is outsourcing them to third parties? Can that government still claim to be of and by the people if it’s essential functions are being overseen and administered by publicly unaccountable individuals? And what happens when one of these organizations fails to educate its students to a reasonable standard? Can the government be held accountable for the subsequent miscarriage of justice if the necessary measures to prevent it were undertaken in such a convolutedly outsourced manner as to make direct culpability meaningless?

As usual, I don’t know the answer, although I fear at our present rate, we may need to look at a newer, more comprehensive Miranda Warning.

Discovery, Ho!

I like the feeling of discovery. Being able to create new things is awesome, but it’s also great to find new things that other people have made. I enjoy the sense of exploration in learning about new phenomena and places. This joy of discovery is the main reason I love learning in general. Even when, for example, in the field of history, there is very little “new” to be discovered, there is still the possibility of unearthing a novel correlation or interpretation that can challenge the way we understand the world around us.

This week, my attention has fallen on the online scavenger hunt being arranged by John Green of Vlogbrothers (and many other things). The actual experience is very spoiler-heavy, and so I will do my best to avoid giving too much away for anyone who is interested on following through. The place to start is the Vlogbrothers YouTube channel. As of writing, the latest two of John’s videos (but not Hank’s, who allegedly, is just as clueless as the rest of us) are a part of the puzzle. There are plenty of hints in the comments section, but be warned, there are also spoilers.

The project is early enough that it’s not entirely clear what the endgame is here. There is much speculation, and circumstantial evidence to support it, that this whole charade is a build up to the release of a new book. Others have suggested that this is a fun side project to bring the community (known affectionately as “Nerdfighters”) closer together.

What is apparent so far is that the main nerve center appears to act as a sort of “virtual speakeasy” for dedicated followers, with the answers to the weekly riddles serving as passwords. This is a neat idea for a community as large as Nerdfighteria, as it acts as an effective barrier to spammers, trolls, and complete outsiders, while not being exclusionary to those who are genuinely interested.

Of course, debates over “spoiling” the passwords for others, particularly in the YouTube comments of the videos where the riddles are provided, have already sprung up, with strong arguments both for and against making it easier for others to find and gain access. Riddles have been criticized for being too region-specific. Current members are already looking to the future with dread as more and more Nerdfighters crack the puzzle and start pouring in.

More than anything, however, is a sense of excitement. Some are merely excited to have cracked the puzzles. Others are excited for the possible release of a new book, or else to determine where the remaining riddles, and the ongoing series of cryptic hints by John and his co-conspirators, lead. Still others, such as myself, are merely excited to be present. To take part in this massive story, wherever it leads, and to share it with like-minded community members.

The atmosphere is reminiscent of that of yesteryear’s NerdCon: Stories, arranged and attended by much the same group. Recounting that experience on this blog has been on my list, and given these new developments, will likely be moved up in my priorities. Suffice it to say, however, that the feeling is good, if somewhat strange. There are plenty of casual obscure references which I do not understand, and plenty more that I do. It is clear that, even this early, there is a solid sense of community, something which I find welcome and refreshing with all the talk of being divided going on in the world.

I do not know what will come next in this project. But I am excited to find out. In the meantime, Don’t Forget To Be Awesome.