Seebach Exhibit 7

Tumblr is full of jokes about “steal the declaration of independence”, which are (Jesse informs me) references to a move called National Treasure in which Nicholas Cage intends to do this.

So, the thing is. It strikes me as really weird that people would care. We know what it says. It’s not as though, if someone steals it, we suddenly owe the UK 235 years of back taxes. We have really really good pictures, we have detailed records… It’s just a thing.

So there’s this sort of disconnect where the huge emotional weighting seems crazy to me. Yeah, it’s all old and valuable and stuff, but so what? This is like those religious people who wouldn’t burn a copy of their holy book to keep someone alive in the cold. Dude, it’s just a thing. Turn off your symbolism processing for a few seconds and think like a rational animal.

Living on this planet is like being surrounded by people who absolutely must run away if they see a hawk silhouette, and if you ask them why they do that, there’s a 50% chance they run away because they thought about one.

So there’s this guy in Tennessee, part of their legislature. He says stupid stuff, like claiming that it’s virtually impossible to transmit HIV through heterosexual sex (not true).

A restaurant refused him service because of this. Some people are trying to spin this as being hostile to the religious beliefs of Catholics (he apparently is one), but this is not reasonable; the Catholic Church does not teach that HIV is only spread by gays, for instance.

There’s a lot of questions here. Is it permissible for restaurants to refuse people service based on something other than health risks, ability to pay, and so on? Everyone seems to agree that refusing service to black people because they’re black is not-okay. Religions, probably also.

Public behavior, though, gets into a different category. Clearly you can refuse someone service based on bad behavior they’ve engaged at within your facility before, and I think most people would expect this to extend to things like, say, personal clashes with staff. If a host refused to seat someone who had, say, previously beaten up a member of the host’s family, it might seem a bit weird, but it’s clearly not a civil rights violation.

And that’s the thing. The restaurant’s behavior may be annoying, and you might think it’s wrong, but I don’t think it’s a civil rights violation. The odious behaviors the Senator has engaged in are not membership in a protected class, they’re consciously chosen decisions to do things — and very harmful things at that!

Honestly, I think it’s sorta cool. The chances are that at least one person will die as a result of someone believing the very bad medical advice our hero has given the world; I mean, people do assume that Senators don’t just make up stupid stuff, or cite to advice columns from the 1980s as evidence about medical claims.

Fundamentally, I don’t see anything wrong with this that wouldn’t also be wrong with refusing to host the KKK or some other group whose bigotry is further from the mainstream’s comfort zone. It’s still bigotry, it’s still destructive of society, and I am glad to see people refusing to pretend that it’s normal or acceptable.

Attempts to research this failed, so I went to National Camera and checked it out. Yes, the S30 works fine with Mac. The dozens of badly-done fake blogs selling software to allow you to copy the stuff off it are, so far as I can tell, meaningless; it works fine.

That said, it is easy to see why people would be confused, as it’s easy to plug the camera in and not see anything, or see only still photos.

What you need to know:

1. There is a camera-vs-play button; using this toggles the camera between a camera mode and a playback mode, and the latter also turns on USB connectivity.
2. USB connectivity shows only the data for the mode the camera was in; if you had it in still photo mode, you see photos, if you had it in movie mode, you see videos.

So far as I can tell, given that, the camera works fine for iMovie/iPhoto. I would know more, but I don’t have one. Someone buy me one and I’ll update this post. Thx.

So, I wanted to add tumblr to my Android tablet.

There is a tumblr app for Android. So I searched for tumblr in the Market.

I have hundreds of results. Not one of them is the app whose name I typed exactly. This is because the search does not give any preference to an exact match. So everything that has the word tumblr anywhere in any part of it is an equally good candidate.

This kind of crap is why I don’t consider Android a remotely credible competitor to iOS. The people maintaining the Android ecosystem have given no thought at all to making it even possible to do very simple things like “I want to look for an app with a particular name.”

(Or maybe the app exists but won’t work on this tablet. Who could tell? There’s no way to find out from here.)

While browsing for something else, I stumbled across a remark by Tyler Cowen observing the benefits of polite discourse. Or at least the disadvantages of rudeness.

Here’s the thing. There’s a very noticeable difference between friendly and hostile discourse, and in the vast majority of cases, friendly is more effective in many ways.

As Kahneman’s most-excellent Thinking, Fast and Slow points out, people tend to substitute proxy measures. People develop a sense for what tone of conversation is acceptable, but most of the time they’re measuring proxies rather than the actual emotional tone, especially in writing.

Tony Campolo’s amazing speech at an evangelical conference makes the point eloquently:

I have three things I’d like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don’t give a shit. What’s worse is that you’re more upset with the fact that I said shit than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night.

He was censured for using inappropriate language, as I understand it. Ne’er has a point been so thoroughly proven by its rebuttal.

What this means is that it’s vital to have control over your tone. If you cuss habitually and without consideration, you are communicating nothing to people who don’t mind, and communicating crassness or stupidity to people who do. But if you never cuss, you’ve cut out a significant portion of the expressive range of your language. Furthermore, if you never cuss, people who do will tend to pick up the impression that you’re prissy; they won’t take you as seriously, and they may well perceive you as holding them in contempt, whether or not you do. The willingness to meet people partway on language usage is a very powerful tool for making friends.

Similarly, if you are constantly hostile in conversations, you accomplish nothing. But… If you are never hostile, if you dare not give offense, you are again denying significant expressive range.

I think it’s vitally important to be able to disagree in a civil manner. But I also think it’s useful to remember that you have the option of choosing not to dignify a particularly odious position with a polite response. This is a completely ineffective communications tactic if used all the time; it makes you out to be totally lacking in self-control, and probably a jerk. But if you are able to be respectful and kind 95% of the time, when people see you drop that and tell someone to fuck off, it does have great communicative power.

My mom points out: All of this includes also baseline references for the people you’re talking to, as well as your existing knowledge of the person you’re hearing talk. It is complicated. My tumblr blog is written much more “offensively” than this one, but both are much more cuss-friendly than a lot of people I know would tend to write; on the other hand, they’re tuned for some of the people I am trying to reach as readers. I can be more polite (and be judged inauthentic), or more coarse (and be judged callow or ineloquent). Rock, meet hard place. Hard place, meet rock.

As with most of life, choice of tone rewards conscious and intentional decision-making.