Guilty pleasures

For the most part, I don't have them. Either they aren't pleasurable, or they don't make me feel guilty. I find most stupid television and movies boring, and don't watch them. And when I re-read (yes, re-read) _Crystal Singer_ by Anne McCaffrey, I don't feel guilty. Now, I am aware that it is a supremely terrible book. It is not well written, it is formulaic, is is predictable, the characters are not well drawn, and logic there is none. Absolutely no part of it stands up to casual scrutiny, much less careful scrutiny. And yet, I read it with real pleasure and sometimes even read the sequel _Killishandra Ree_, which is exactly the same only worse in every possible dimension. And I enjoy it, too.

But scratching? An insect bite? Oh, yes, there is a guilty pleasure. I resist. I remind myself that it doesn't help, it only makes things worse. I distract myself. I argue with myself. And then, sometimes without even realizing I've made a decision, I start scratching. And the first few scrapes are a weird combination of intense relief and heightened itchiness. As the scratching progresses, I start to feel waves of pleasure and relief, and then intense relief along with minor pain -- usually by this point I've scraped off rather too much skin. Usually, the itching stops before the pain gets intense, and then there are a few moments of blessed comfort. But with every scratch, with each wave of relief and pleasure, there's that absolute knowledge that I'm only making things worse. That I'm spreading the bug juice to which I'm so allergic, I'm damaging my epidermis, and the healing of which will cause more itching, and the absolute, experimentally validated certainty that bites that I scratch will itch more often and for longer than bites that I leave the fuck alone. And yet, there I am, scratching that damn bite, and it feels so good. There is no point during the scratching process where I am not thinking, "Stop, just stop, just fucking stop right now." And when I finally stop, I feel stupid and guilty. Sometimes, the relief from the itching is literally less than a minute in duration. And then, there I am again, resisting, igorning, then scratching.

tl;dr: fucking fleas

Gossip and Power

I half-heard an article on the BBC radio this morning while I was working. The article was on gossip, which the defined in part as evaluative. Just facts about someone isn't really gossip, it's the facts coupled with a judgment that makes it gossip. They also talked about the ways in which gossip was punished in the past (some pretty gruesome things were used in the Middle Ages), and they mentioned that evaluative talk is also one of the ways in which we establish and enforce social norms. They talked a bit about how repressive regimes attempt to prevent such talk.

So, I only heard part of it, because work, so I didn't hear if they drew the connection between gossip being usually considered a female crime, and the repression of women. It makes sense that gossip would be one of the ways in which people on the wrong end of a power equation attempt to control their lives. Indeed, the article did point to examples of gossip about corporations being one of the ways in which consumers gain power over the corporations. It would also make sense that gossip would be one of the ways that women exert power in their social space. And so it would make sense that it would be a deprecated form of exercising power.

I also am reminded that I believe Deborah Tannen once did a study which showed that men gossiped a great deal more than women, but they didn't call it that.

Capital punishment as a systems problem

(Posted elseweb, but I liked it well enough I'm putting it here, too.)

When I contemplate capital punishment, I find that the implementation details always swamp the more abstract question of whether or not it is moral. If one temporarily assumes that there are situation in which it is moral for “the state” to take the life of one of the citizens, then one is left an indigestible lump of impossible problems. Again, for the sake of argument, let us assume that there is some number greater than zero of actions for which we all agree that capital punishment is appropriate. So, first, we have to determine whether or not such an action has been committed by a particular person.

Now, justice systems are more or less good, depending on time, place, precedent, and skill, but all of them boil down to a human being attempting to make a judgement about the actions and intentions of another human being. Experimentally, we seem to have determined that this process is best done by people not immediately affected by the crime, so we have people who were neither participants nor witnesses attempting to determine both facts and motivations. (Yes, motivations. This is why first degree murder is different than manslaughter. Intent actually matters a whole hell of a lot in law, and it should.) This is a hard problem, and the higher the stakes, the harder the problem becomes. When an actual life is on the line, the entire process gets warped by the weight of the possible decision. And since one of the outcomes has no possibility of a take-back, people on both sides of the issue have a huge stake in owning the “truth”. A prosecutor seeking the death penalty has a huge investment in having the outcome be unquestioned. This leads, inevitably, to a system which tries to defend those decisions, to hide errors, to minimize problems, and often, to cause proponents to double-down on their position. When making a mistake is unthinkable, people don’t stop making mistakes, but they do work very hard to remove institutions that make it possible to discover those mistakes.

In any society where there is inequality, the death penalty will always fall most heavily on the disadvantaged. This is structural to the way jurisprudence and equality play out. Those in power will always be more willing to believe heinous things of people that are not in power than they are to believe it of their ownselves. Access to justice will always be mediated by access to the levers or power: money, influence, connections. And so, it will always be the case that those with less power in a society will be more likely to face stiffer sentences, including death. And this fundamental inequality on the most basic right, the right to live, highlights all the ways in which the justice system is flawed and failing. Fighting to make the system fairer is a good fight, necessary, we must do it. And I’d start with getting rid of the death penalty, because it is so completely permanent. Nobody ever recovers from a case of death. People do manage to build lives after having been wrongly incarcerated for decades. Not the life they would have had, but still, a life.

Implementing the death penalty must always, as well, coarsen and damage the society that implements it. The public spectacle of hangings and the like of a hundred years ago is distasteful. More importantly, it causes the spectators to exercise the opposite of empathy. This is not good for those people, it teaches them ways to divorce themselves from the common weal. It helps people find ways ignore our interconnected lives. The damage it does to the executioner should not be ignored. Our current system of committing these acts in private, with the only onlookers grieving family and revenge-driven survivors, is despicable, hypocritical, and has the smell of pornography. It allows us to have this thing which is unthinkable, which is incredibly disturbing and for many people unwatchable, but hidden politely away so that we don’t have to think about it. I do think that of the two, the latter system of it being so obscene that it cannot be part of common experience, is the preferable. But I hate the idea that my society is condoning an act so obscene it cannot be carried out in the light of day.

Killing people isn’t always wrong. But institutionalizing the killing of people comes with serious social costs which we often pretend don’t exist.

Capital punishment is a systems problem. The system cannot be made to work.