A New Life, A New Me? Maybe, Maybe Not.

So, I moved across the country and am now residing in Boston, Massachusetts. My life is totally different now, and I think it's for the better. This is definitely a life more suited to me, I will say that.

It's interesting though, as I kind of expect to 'wake up' from this, and go in to work at my old job. It's something totally different here, but I'm not sure I'm any different. A lot of this could be because I have such a strong self-presence as it is, that external factors don't really change it. I'm not sure how to evaluate that though.

With all I've been learning though, maybe I should design a research study to test it (-:

I dunno though. I have more control on my schedule, and more unscheduled responsibility. I'm rather pleasantly surprised how well I've handled that as unscheduled responsibility (read: homework) has historically been a problem for me, but I seem to be keeping up with things very well this time. I'm reading more than I ever have before, and retaining it better than I used to.

Yet many of the same problems I had before followed me here, naturally those dealing with relationships. I'm now at two busts, one friend-zoned, and one potential. Plus I'm still dealing with the emotional fallout from my marriage. *sigh*

I guess in aggregate I have to say I haven't really changed, which isn't a bad thing, I really like who I am.

- Jason

A Crazy Idea on Prison Reform?

I was just doing a mental exercise yesterday, and I ended up coming up with a prison system reform idea, lemme run through the exercise though. I was qualifying why I believe in the death penalty, and the circumstances I believe it's applicable. That was pretty straightforward: 1) subject is non-reformable, and 2) the net detriment from killing the subject is lower than the net detriment of letting the subject live.

Alternatives to death penalty were A) let them loose, and allow them to continue inflicting social harm, or B) segregate them from society so they can't continue inflicting harm on society.

After working with option B in my head for awhile, I started to contemplate the prison system as being treated like a segregated community from the citizen community. What are the rights and responsibilities of the citizenry towards prisoners in a case like that? Granted it's kind of how it is today, but what I was thinking was a little different. What I was thinking was that there was a large plot of land that was cordoned off from society, where prisoners could go and build their own society, with it's own economy and so on. Almost like a foreign nation. That way, being a criminal means 'deportation' to the prisoner nation, instead of to a resource-intensive prison. It's less resource-intensive, because the core expense of the prison system at that point would be, effectively, border patrol, as having guards go through the prison nation would be completely useless.

Because the prison nation would have it's own economy and it's own citizenry, it would have it's own GDP, methods of production, and trade, including trade with the regular citizenry. Effectively international trade. Now, some things would be just stupid to trade for, like weaponry. This is a nation of criminals, and it's not exactly smart to give criminals weapons. However, if they're producing common goods and similar stuff, there's not much of a problem in trade there. The prison nation would have it's own laws and government and would (with trade support) be functionally a nation. Immigration would be irrelevant, as the point is to segregate from the main population.

Then I started to think about what the equivalent of reform programs would be in this system, and that's where I started to get more flexible on the idea of immigration. Organizations could exist in the prisoner nation that train, mold and rehabilitate prisoners back into mainstream society. Because there's savings in the reduced cost of enforcement (now just border control), the remaining funds can be put on these kinds of social programs, providing an opportunity to migrate prisoners back to society. With an appropriately rigorous curriculum, it could work very effectively.

An even more interesting thing is that the prisoner nation could have it's own prisoner nation, so the 'dregs of the dregs' could be similarly segregated. It's infinitely regressible too.

Just a crazy thought while I was driving home from Reno today (-:

- Jason

Attempt at a Haiku

Bird stand atop ledge, staring into sunset.
Breeze flows across my shoulders, through my hair and across my skin.
Bird look at me, and say 'Coocoo, coocoo.'
The warm air from the sun rolls across the valley, uplifting the land.
Bird looks at me, staring intently.
I feel the breeze, flowing across me, lifting me.
Bird looks at me, and say 'Coocoo, coocoo.'
Suddenly, I find myself embraced in the breeze, soaring in the sky.
Bird looks at me.
I have wings and I fly.
In the distance I hear a faint 'Coocoo.'
But I fly on.

- Jason

Freedom from Desires?

For the first time, I can see my path without a relationship. It's a strange feeling having a family not being the end goal that I'm striving towards. In many ways it's more practical, but more relevantly: i'm content with it.

Up to now my life has been lived based around the idea that I'm striving towards building a family. Now, though my direction is graduate school and a research career, I wouldn't say that I have control over my life. I had the good pleasure to grab myself a copy of Mythos III, the latest Joseph Campbell documentary talking about the construction of the western myth. To my shock and awe the Arthurian legends, and specifically my favorite character, Percival, play center stage. In much the same way that Percival let his horse guide him on the path, so to am I letting my path be laid by the nature before me.

Will I change the world? Who knows, does it matter? Yeah, probably. Do I need to do it? No, not really.

I do know that 20 years from now I will have a life, and it will be a good life. What it will be I have no idea, but I will have it.

- Jason

Moral Relativity

I have to wonder about morality, especially in the untouchable realm of children. I was watching Showtime's Shameless, and in the show there's this 13 y/o Mormon polygamist gal who gets, I presume here, taken by the state from a Mormon 'cult community', something akin to the stereotypical portrait of Mormon polygamy, and placed with a couple on the series. Of course being raised in that kind of environment, the norms are quite different for women, and it's a show meant to shock and awe, so naturally they have that character offering to do chores instead of to just goof off and play like we, the audience, would expect a 13 year old to do. And of course they amp up the shock value when we learn she has a child.

My mind, being the hyper-analytical that it is, went another route than the show's asking it to go. The reaction that the show expects from the audience, and is mirrored by the characters, is that of latent disgust with her upbringing and pity that she's been influenced in such a way to normalize such things. Yet let's think about it here for a moment. How different is that kind of judgement than European explorers charting African villages, finding out the natives eat bugs as a meal, and assuming they're malnourished? The scientific evidence is against it, yet the label remained for a long time.

Now, the counter-argument to this comparison is that there are scientific studies that show what kind of impact that kind of family environment has on children, and how they don't grow up into well-adjusted adults. My counter to that: By well-adjusted, it's meant well-adjusted to 'this' society.

Stew on that for a bit.

What I came up with was this: There's an inherent bias in evaluating the impacts of any method used in a modern society, because we're in the society we're evaluating, therefore we're going to look at 'good' and 'bad' in this society based on the pre-existing lens that the society has.

A colleague has a wonderful footer on her e-mail that helps example my next point: "It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society." (Jiddu Krishnamurti) Why are we assuming our way is the best way, and why are we using that to reinforce behaviors and actions that we, as members of the society, already oppose as harmful. Movements like Occupy wouldn't exist if this wasn't the case to at least some degree.

Now, does that make these child-bride Mormon polygamy communes any better? Probably not, but I'm not in them so I can't gauge if their society is 'sick' or not, I can only gauge ours. And this starts to get to my point: If I can't judge your culture because I'm not living in it, and you can't judge mine because you're not living in it, then to what standard are our cultures being held? There's many answers to this, varying from religious, to scientific, to metaphysical, to simple faith, to a refusal to believe, and so on. Again, it's a matter of consistency, as there isn't a universally agreed upon standard for which to cross-culturally judge.

Here's the scary part: Without that cross-cultural standard from which to judge, this breaks analysis down into simple factoids. There's no longer any pro/con list, no capacity for asking 'is this good or bad.' It's just raw information, without value. And by value I mean that in both senses, value in the sense that there's no value-judgement being made, and value in the sense that it lacks a metaphorical 'this is valuable' component. I would argue that they are one in the same, but that's a rant for another day.

So, returning to Shameless, if there's no universal standard to judge different cultures, then how can anyone legitimately judge the environment that anyone is raised in, be it a child we raise in our culture, or one raised in a child-bride Mormon polygamist culture? Well, I think there actually can be something of a guiding path on this, and I'm going to pull out everyone's favorite naturalist: Charles Darwin. Yes, I'm going to make an evolutionary argument in defense of Mormon child-bride communes, oh the irony!

Consider that in any evolutionary system, all creatures/beings/organisms will develop a homeostasis that's adapted to their function and their environment. Darwin examples this on a genetic level, but you see this on a more immediate level too. Human brain pliability is quite extraordinary. How else do people adapt to changing circumstances? Regardless, ignore the minor tangent there for a moment. The point I'm getting to is this: In a culture that supports women being homemakers and child-bearers starting from an early age, the function of women in that society will require the normalization of those functions. Those functions are adapted specifically for the roles within that society.


Simply put, they're doing exactly what they're adapting to do in that environment: survive. It's no different than what happened to the Native Americans after colonization. They adapted to our ways and our methods.

Now, here's the piece that most civil revolutionaries will have issue with: If we take Darwin's evolutionary concepts a bit further, we must include the effects of mutation. Remember, that the key to evolution is both variation and selection. The process doesn't work without both. Within cultures there will be cultural variation, and a whole hell of a lot of it (hence why culture evolves faster than genes).

Now, we, being outside of a Mormon child-bride community, would 'love' to interject our culture into theirs. We see it as too much variation for us to handle. We forget that every community has both variation and selection, not just selection, including Mormon child-bride ones. Who's to say that there's not variation within that community that won't change it over time, more organically, and with less displacement?

There's two arguments I can make from this, so I'll start with the easy one: What I'm advocating for here is akin to Star Trek's prime directive: Do not interfere in the development of other cultures. I sense the logic behind that was covered here already, but this gets to the displacement I was talking about. What;'s wrong with jarring shifts like that? Why is it 'bad' or 'harmful' to 'tame the savages,' as it were? Well, the kind of shock that interjecting modern values into a culture that doesn't share them is akin to the GDP doing a hula-dance of vertical motion. Ok, yes there's progress, but there's also a lot of harm that's done during the transition.

Yes, I realized I also just made a free-market argument for not 'blowing up' Mormon child-bride communities. More irony.

So, back to my main thesis for a moment here, and I'll try to wrap this up as it's almost midnight and I'm tired. We, as individuals, are agents within our culture(s), but not within other's culture(s). I cannot have agency in Mormon child-bride land, and they cannot have agency within my mainstream american values land. However, that being said, both the Mormon child-bride polygamist husband and I can have common culture(s). Do you think it's impossible to find a Mormon child-bride polygamist who's not also a fan of Star Trek? If I do, there's cultural overlap, and there's a place that both myself and this example Mormon child-bride polygamist have in common.

Ok, here's the big one, be ready for it:

It is my assertion that the most constructive, positive, growth-oriented, and less harmful shifts in any population are done in realms that both the shifter and shiftee have personal agency.


I may never get through to the Mormon child-bride polygamist in matters of broader cultural issues, but if they're a trekkie, you can damn well be sure that I can get through to them, and have a very productive cultural exchange, in that setting.

Yes, I did use a 'reductium ad absurdum' fallacy with my entire argument, however I would posit that this applies across ALL cultural divides, be they ethnic, gender, socio-economic, geographical, technological, age, job industry, etc etc.

Make of it what you will, but I think it's an important concept, and one I'm going to stew on a great deal.

- Jason

Normative Patterns

It's an interesting trend that all my conversations about my success (or lack thereof) with women end up being discussions about my personal philosophy and ethics. They're so intertwined and dependent on each other. The values I have in relationships are the primary foundation of my moral reasoning. I have my illogical quirks - I'm terribly paranoid about breaching a person's physical comfort zone - but I consider my moral reasoning to be a pivotal part of my ability to behave responsibly, with an understanding of the full and complete ramifications of my actions.

Modern relationships are built on deception, misdirection, illusion and delusion, To build something different, it must be formed differently. An honest and sincere relationship must do away with all of the illusory components of modern relationships, and instead be built on principles such as honesty, openness, trust and understanding. Yet, the irony of this is that in pursuing relationships in that fashion I am setting myself up for failure. The common woman (or perhaps all women, I've yet to meet one who deviates from this pattern) will expect modern relationship behaviors. When she doesn't get them, she will assume the relationship is invalid on some level and dispose of it. Since I will never start a relationship on lies, I will continually be considered to be invalid as relationship material.

Not a pleasant thought.

It's frustrating because so many women profess to be beyond modern gender roles, yet when it comes to some basic interactions and expectations, it's a lie. Where are the courageous women? Those that bold to be who they are, outside of the ever-present gaze of society? Those who have the courage to question what society teaches them? Or has societies lessons become so ingrained that they've confused societies mandates with their own feelings? In that eventuality, are women so blind that they can't distinguish between an authentic feeling and a social meme?

Sad, but I believe that the latter is the truth. Society has effectively brainwashed women into following an internal feeling that society itself has created. It's like the desire for independence, it's an artificially and socially imbued desire that people have acclimated to so strongly that the need to be independent has been normalized into the human condition, when instead it's a social meme.

*sigh* where are the women who actually bother to look beyond the trivialities of what society imposes on them, and who dare to relate beyond social conditioning? This goes beyond the 80/20 rule, where 20% of a population is actually free thinkers. Then again Milgram's experiments were about much more radical deviations from the social norms, and not tests asking people to deviate frm the social norms. How must the experiment, and the results change if that criteria is changed?

*sigh*

Ultimately it makes for one lonely Jason.

The 'Alpha Gene'

I guess as an inaugural post I should elaborate more on the purpose of this blog. This will be more of a personal diary. Public of course, and open to the world to see, that's just the kind of person I am. Less academia here, more raw feeling.

So, to start off this one, I discuss the ever elusive 'alpha gene' in the male population. The rest of the nerd/geek world knows of what I speak. There's some characteristic, genetic or otherwise (probably a meme actually), that gives some men the ability to draw and interest women, despite whatever their character is otherwise.

I definitely do not have it, and it hurts like hell to see women whisked away by that ineffable alpha-male quality. My principals dictate that I not behave as they do, it's too crude, manipulative and callous, yet it also works.

Then again, considering the patriarchal/hierarchical structure of the modern world, am I at all surprised? No, not really. It's highly frustrating to live in a world like this. Of all the many thousands of years that homo sapien sapien has been around, why did I have to be born into this era? I'm not suited for this machismo BS. IT's what everyone expects, and it's what everyone does. The men seem to (largely) fall in line with it, and the women seem to find it unquestioningly attractive. This leaves men like me, capable, intelligent, strong, out to dry.

There's really no escape from it. I live my life by my principles. Without that, my formidable intelligence would turn viscous. I don't underestimate it when I say that I'm capable of a great deal of evil. I have this wonderful gift, the gift of being clever, the gift of seeing how my actions affect things beyond myself, and how everyone's actions similarly ripple outward. I choose to use this for good, to let my ripples prove a positive force in this world by being principled, by being honest and open and just and compassionate. Even when I'm beaten down, even when I have everything I value taken from me by this harsh cruel world, I still stand up and continue to do good. I continue to help and continue to support and continue to give. I push myself beyond what most would consider reasonable, beyond what some consider even possible, to do this. I make myself weak to help others become strong. These are my principles, and I stand by them and believe in them, because through my actions more than myself can be strong. The sum of what I can give is much larger than what I can get, so I choose to give and give, because the net benefit outweighs anything else I could do with that capacity.

Yet it is exhausting, it is tiring, it is wearying. I teeter on a complete emotional collapse on a regular basis, even more so as time goes on and I suffer the slings of the modern world. In a cruel irony, the very thing that gives me this great gift of giving, the very reason that I am so capable of doing so, is exactly what denies me the ability to have my need(s) met. Work isn't something I value, and though my schooling is meaningful to me, it doesn't really amount to much in the grand scheme of things. Love, compassion, caring, respect, intimacy and sacrifice, the same things I give freely, are the things I value the most.

Imagine that, the very things I want for myself are the things I give away freely. That speaks of who I am, probably more than anything...

Yet, my selfless actions deny me access to those things, because I live in a world where the malicious and self-centered are the loved and respected. People like me are tools, used an exploited because we can be, because we are so principled. Our greatest strength, our principals, are our greatest weakness. We value not money, power, sexy women, fast cars, firm abs. The values of the modern material world are irrelevant to such as us, and in that being the case we are exploited for it, because we truly believe that by not valuing those things, by valuing each other and what we can give, that we can make the world a better place.

It's not sustainable, and eventually I will break. What that will mean, I'm not sure, I just hope I'll have been so expired by then that I can't do any harm with what power I will have left at that time, and maybe I'll have touched enough lives along the way in a good and helpful way that my net impact on the universe will have been good, and not ill.

Or so I can keep hoping, for if not, I can always be satisfied that I held out as long as I did against the impossible.

- Jason