Trump fatigue

I just read an article about it, and it’s a real thing, for sure. To be burned out from fighting injustice for so long that it just becomes the new norm to you.

I was at a cub planning meeting and one of my fellow leaders started a discussion about how he thinks all Chinese people are liars. And somehow it didn’t even register to me.

Maybe it was because the main joke by the comedian I saw the day before was that women have nice boobs, and that he’s politically incorrect and he doesn’t care. He was trying to find someone to call a snowflake, but nobody was interested in engaging with him, because he was pretty awful.

Maybe it’s because on the beaver leaders in my group was sharing Facebook posts from the “proud boys”, who openly advocate for gender roles to be reset to the 50s, and have “beat up a lefty” as one of their initiation.

I didn’t say anything at the meeting, but why would I? We’ve got one leader who’s been a leader since I was a kid, and he means well, but we still proofread anything he types up because he still genders his talks to exclude boys from cubs.

I’ve got another leader to my right who I listened to tell his teenaged brother that it was wrong to be gay in front of two other senior scout leaders. To my left sat another leader who I’ve seen make posts on Facebook about “those transgendered people”, and heard complain about how she can’t go running outside because their are too many migrant workers.

Add to that the two having the discussion about how they think Chinese people are all liars, and this is the group of people who lead a cub pack.

I don’t think I want to be a part of this any more, but I want to help my son, and he seems to enjoy it. He doesn’t see this side of it though.

The world at large

Our system is set up to make us not trust each other, but trusting is good for us.  Psychologically, and evolutionarily it was good for people to trust each other, and to build villages based on trust.

 

Capitalism is meant to set up competing forces, hoping that the one that’s best wins out, but it doesn’t always.  Especially with the way that having money, or controlling a narrative can impact a result.

 

For example, if two companies can make TVs, the one that’s better is the one that should sell more.  But that’s not really the case in our world, it’s the one that’s perceived to be better that sells more, and that perception gets altered by lies, half-truths, and advertising that’s designed to elicit an emotional response.

 

And it pays to distrust advertising.  If you’re looking for the best deal on a TV, listening to the advertising, or the salesman isn’t going to do that for you usually, this is a pretty common idea.  Analyzing the motive behind why someone is trying to convince you to look at something a particular way is beneficial to the individual.

 

It would be better if we could set up our world in such a way that trusting other people produced the best results for individuals.  We could remove so much anger, so much frustration and so many of our cultural problems if we learned to trust each other.

 

But our world isn’t set up to reward trusting other people.  We should find a way to change that.

The Small Town Effect

Small towns have this great way of convincing people who are in a minority that they’re not in the minority.  I see it where I am a ton.

 

We have this thing in Canada, where the 3 major federal political parts are one Left-Wing, one Left-Center and one Right Wing.  The huge majority of the country is Left-Wing or Left-Center, but sometimes the Right Wing ends up with a majority government and getting to make all the decisions.

 

The people in small towns tend to echo-chamber each other by being exclusionary of those who aren’t from their small town.  They tend not to have homelessness (or at least very little of it), because they don’t have resources for homeless people to protect themselves, but somehow they convince themselves that it’s because they’re better than people in big cities because it’s not there.

 

I don’t think that homeless people leaving town because there’s no help for them in a place is a mark of higher character, but somehow small town people tend to see it as one.  They often blame immigration, inclusiveness or political correctness for why homelessness exists in larger cities, but less so in small towns.

 

And then they sit around and echo their own thoughts to people who agree with them.  Small businesses talk about how they’re better because they’re run by a mom & pop, wearing the fact that they have fewer customers as a mark of pride for some odd reason.  Doing a good job is great, but doing a good job for fewer people doesn’t make you better, despite how many people wear it as a badge of honour and actively talk poorly about every other business besides the only one single option that their town can sustain.

 

Small towns have this ability to only be large enough to successful home one set of beliefs.  And generally only one business of any particular kind.  So you end up with pseudo-monopolies, which is harder on youth in the town who can’t drive to another city.

 

And somehow these small towns are given a larger voice per person in our Parliament than larger cities with more people, or than actual minorities, who are often rejected in small towns because of anti-immigrant sentiments.

 

And some people say if a business is doing something poor, you should vote with your wallet, but you really can’t, there is usually only one option in a small town.  So if that small town business operator is a backwards-thinking, racist, misogynist homophobe, you can either support him or move.

 

And if you’re a teenager trying to make a difference and support progress, good luck, the small town is designed to ensure that’s not possible.  You have to buy your stuff from the homophobe.  Your math teacher is going to lecture your class that condoms working 99% of the time means that if you have sex with a condom once a day for a year that statistically speaking you’ll have 3 babies that year.  The police will drag you home if you’re out past your curfew.  And the churches will support people standing at the busiest intersections with poster-board-sized pictures of photoshopped mutilated fetuses to tell you that abortion is bad.  And not only will the churches support it, they’ll have their own political party that is large enough to gather a portion of the vote.

 

Small towns are systemically designed to prevent forward progress.  Fuck small towns.

Small Towns…

I live in one, and I’m not a fan of it.  My riding elected the youngest ever provincial member of parliament, and this kid is a homophobic conservative spreading falsehoods that my neighbors eat up as fact.

 

The federal liberals have proposed some tax reforms, that will close some loopholes exploited by those with large families and very profitable businesses.  The conservatives are painting it as an attack on small businesses.

 

It’s horeshit, it’s not true, but the people I’m surrounded by are all big on the Trudeau hate because of it.  If they leave these loophole open, self-employed rich people can pay less tax.  If they close them, self-employed rich people will have to pay similar tax amounts to the rest of us.

 

It’s called income sprinkling.  And it’s where rich self-employed people pay their children who aren’t involved in the businesses a salary so that they don’t have to pay tax on it.  The money somehow ends up back in the rich persons bank account instead of in their kids account, but you know, the kid made the money, and this is the only income the kid had, so it’s not taxed, even though the kid wasn’t involved in the business at all.

 

If these loopholes are closed, it’d be taxed at the standard rates that everyone else pays taxes at.  It’s rich people who feel entitled to a tax discount that are trying to make it seem like the liberals are attacking the little guy.  But somehow, people making 200k/year aren’t the little guy.

 

It’s funny, everyone wants to be seen as the little guy.  Even the CEO of Hootsuite who employs around 1,000 people and own multiple companies worth multiple millions of dollars gives an interview about how these changes are going to shut down small businesses.

 

They’re not, and if small businesses can’t survive playing by the same rules as individuals, maybe we should be rethinking things.

What if I’m wrong?

Oh shit, I’m wrong.

 

What if running and eating healthy foods isn’t the best way to lose weight?  Shit, I may have just exercised and eaten healthy for no good reason.  My health might improve too, oh no!

 

On climate change, we reduced our dependence on fossil fuels, put less CO2 into the environment, now rely on renewable energy and made the world a better place.  But maybe we got that wrong about global warning, shit, we just made the world better for nothing.  Seems fine.

 

On social services, shit we charged rich people a bit more in taxes so they couldn’t afford their third porsche, and gave money to poor people and they spent it on food.  But a few just failed that drug test, shit, we just gave empoverished families food even though a few were on drugs.  Seems good.

 

On immigration, shit we just let in 10,000 people who were fleeing a war-zone so that they can have a chance at a peaceful life for themselves and their children.  But one of them was arrested for plotting a terrorist attack.  Shit, we just saved 9,999 lives.  You know, I’m pretty OK with that.

 

So, what if I’m wrong on these 3 things?  The outcome still seems good.  What if we were wrong the other way?  Climate change wipes us all out, poor families starve and 10,000 good people have to live in a war zone.

 

Fuck it, I’ll be wrong this way a thousand times before I’d take a chance at being wrong the other way.  When I’m faced with a decision that I’m unsure about, it’s sometimes helpful to consider what the reprocussion are if I get it wrong, and to at least factor in which decision I’d be happier with the outcome if I got it wrong.

 

Being wrong isn’t bad.  In most of these cases, I’d be far happier to take these steps and be wrong, than I would be to have not taken these steps.

I love being wrong

This is a blog about being wrong, and why I think it is of the absolute most vital importance that we all start being wrong from time to time.

 

Have you ever met someone, who argues with you, no matter what you say?  And their points are always wrong, but they keep making them, over and over, and over again, constantly trying to make themselves look better, by trying to make you look worse?

 

I’m sure we’ve all engaged with internet trolls who act like this from time to time.  I learned how to deal with them, because I spent a lot of time with a real life one, the best thing we can do, is recognize that if we’re wrong, that’s perfectly OK.  It doesn’t devalue us at all to be wrong.

 

In fact, it’s kind of freeing.  When we’re wrong, we can look at the options, and make new decisions about where we want to go.  We might be able to find a better path than we were on before.  And at the very least, even if we stay on mostly the same path, at least we’ll get off the sideroad where we’re arguing with someone who thinks they’re degrading us by trying to make us look wrong.

 

There are far worse things to be in this life than wrong.  I mean, just imagine for a moment, instead of being a feminist who make mistakes from time to time, you could be a mens rights activist.  That’d be way worse.  Or instead of being a person who has a basic understanding of the world around them, you could be a Trump supporter.  Yuck.  Or a climate change denier…what the fuck are those people smoking?

 

Success isn’t being right all the time.  Success is getting out there and trying, and getting it wrong, and then getting up again and trying again the next time.  Take gay rights for example.  In my home country of Canada, gay marriage was legalized about 15 years ago, but gay men still can’t donate blood.  That’s wrong, but it’s a better kind of wrong than it was 15 years ago.

 

And, while I was googling sources to cite for that last paragraph, I happened to stumble across this.  Holy shit, that’s amazing!  Look at how much pain and suffering has been saved because of one thing, that’s truely incredible.  The USA is still pretty fucked up though, they still get a lot wrong, but that’s a massive improvement.  They’re way better at being wrong than they used to be.

 

I’m going to get shit wrong on my blog here.  I’m going to get shit wrong in my life.  I’m OK with that, I think it kind of comes with the territory of being the kind of human being that recognizes that things can be better than they are.  They already are better than they used to be, but I’m not about to stop on account of that.

 

Nor am I going to let the opinions of someone who’s arguing in favour of moving backwards stop me from advocating for progress just because the progress still has elements in it that are wrong.  I will very happily, and very gladly embrace the wrongness that comes with progress.  Because it’s way better to be wrong than it is to be a republican.