#but i assume actually killing people would end up with like. a demographic crisis for the apocalypse

[tchaikovskym]

"Let's just kill all the entities; they're just evil, so it's ok." Martin. Martin! Listen. Look at your boyfriend. Who is he?

[peaches-and-honey-and-the-moon]

Some thoughts on reality shifting. It's a decently long post that may not quite make sense sometimes. But just a few things I wanted to talk about. If anyone wants to talk about it with me, i would love that!

I love the theoretical of reality shifting because it's a neat idea. To be able to move your conscious from your current timeline/ reality to a new one. Similar to astral projecting in a way, but seemingly more permanent if you're able to perfect the ability to do so. You could theoretically move to a reality where harry potter like magic is the norm and you could be a protégé student in your magic school where fair folk walk among humanity. You could become a powerful vampire in a secret society. Or even move to a reality where you're living the life you've always wanted like falling in love and being successful in the job you love, no trauma from your current reality. Life still has it's hardships, but you're able to overcome them with grace because you gave yourself those abilities in your scripting for your new reality.

And maybe the ability to shift realities is totally real, and the few times I attempted it were failures simply because I currently lack the control and power to shift successfully. Maybe that's totally a possibility. I could only know with more practice.

However, the foundations of reality shifting seem weak to me and raises some "ethical" concerns. Maybe moral concerns is more accurate to say. Such as, you currently would already, theoretically, be existing in the world you wish to shift to. A flesh and bones, living version of you. But that person still has a consciousness and a life up to the moment you switch to that reality. What happens to that consciousness when yours from your current reality enters that one and enters that body? do you trade bodies and realities? If so, I would assume in most occasions this would be nonconsensual because you're forcing them to exit their known reality and world into your "old" one where they would have no clue what is happening or where they are. Maybe, in that case, there should be communication if possible for you two to knowingly switch, making it a mutual shift. Maybe, your two consciousnesses merge to create a new one. However that seems like it would be nonconsensual as well, because you would be forcing yourself into that body and forcing that existing "soul" so to say, to merge with yours. Maybe then you could shift yourself into a newborn baby, scripting that you remember who you were before at certain ages so that when you hit the age you shifted from your original reality you fully remember everything and are fully aware of your actions. That still would have similar issues with what I stated above, but arguably less so because you would be starting as a newborn with no grasp of anything. (I would like to think this way would be the best so that you grow organically in the new reality, thus as you grow, you grow establish in this new reality. Therefor, growing up with the rules of the world.)

Another issue I have is with the scripting of your shift (this one is more nitpicky and probably just something I have thought about. I am aware this may be an unpopular opinion/ moral fear about scripting and shifting). You could script trauma and awful events. Scripting in self harm and other negative things. The issue I have with this is because in doing so, it feels as if it is being glorified. I say this because, with everything you could write in, you still would choose to write in those events (such as sexual assaults', abuse, etc..). It feels similar to when writers add those to their books for no reason other then "tragic backstory". And knowing the internet and how it can be, I know there are people out there who have not experienced things such as sexual assaults' (which I would like to say, I am so, so happy about that. I'm glad for every person who has never had to experience that and similar negative, to put lightly, events). But some of those people would write that into their script for that "tragic backstory". Or putting in mental illnesses they do not have because they "want it". We see that often on the internet with people faking illnesses and disorders or deliberately doing something to cause themselves to have that illness/disorder (which, that last park usually indicates underlying conditions that should be checked out.). And knowing the larger part of the shifting "community" demographic is teenagers. Now, in saying all this, I am not saying to not script things you already have (although, personally i would not.) if you feel the want or need to. I'm not quite sure how to word that, but this point basically boils down to " you don't need a 'tragic backstory'" and that I am immediately critical of anyone who would want to put those sorts of things into their "desired reality".

Another point I would like to talk about is that the other people in the Real people in their own reality, just living their lives. I have seen people who have "shifted" brag to a point about being awful to people in the reality they shifted to. Examples include shifting to Hogwarts and being verbally and even physically abusive to characters they simply don't like. Not even "bad" characters. Just characters they don't enjoy in the franchise.

On that topic, there's also the validity of shifting into franchises such as harry potter. That is a set universe. The books are written. In theory, you would shift into a similar reality that you could actually have impact in. But then, it wouldn't actually be that franchise, it would be an existing reality nearly identical to the franchise. Which has it own morality crisis's. However, that would be incredibly interesting to study that as a whole. To see what's the same and what's different. But again, everyone there would still technically be real people with thoughts, feelings, and lives. So to treat them as merely a lab study would be unethical and frankly disgusting.

Something else, is for people with maladaptive disorders or mental health disorders in general, this can be dangerous. Because, it leads to deeper sort of "drops" into the disorders. Because it could cause harm by thinking that if you convince yourself hard enough and repeat the same mantras and go to sleep listening to the right audios, you could end up in the "perfect life". This way of thinking can cause episodes. I've heard people on tiktok talk about how it has caused episodes. So please, anyone reading this. Be fuckin careful!

A few last things for now because I'm starting to lose my train of thought. But if reality shifting were truly real, that would be really cool and also terrifying. Because if you shift, you can actually be killed or hurt. Everything you went through would be real. If you were only there for a short time, or kept going back and forth, you could severely impact those around you. Who's in charge of the bodies your consciousness isn't in? I've seen things where it's an exact replica of you that just continues on with your "normal" life. As well as, I am of the ideology that every decision we make alternations to our current reality, like the butterfly effect. So how do we explain the ripples that totally shifting your reality would make? How would reality shifting steer the course of the current world, all of the current realities and worlds? What constitutes the right amount of personal power and resolve to actually go through with a full reality shift?

I will probably come back to this later, because I have a lot of thoughts and feelings and like the discussion of these things.

[des-shinta]

From what I've read about the latest Kikai Sentai Zenkaiger special, it's supposedly another one of Shinichiro Shirakura's meta-narratives, assuming he's involved with it as he's the producer of Zenkaiger. Do you have any idea why Shirakira loves doing stuff like this, like with the Taisen movies and Amazons?

From just my long observations on the matter and all of his presented conduct... I believe it to be an “I know what’s best, better than anyone else” attitude that leads him to attacking fans and what people Like INSIDE the stories of the content he produces; generally because what he is behind doing ends up so widely (or in retrospect) Loathed by both his target audience and the various peripheral demographics of these series...not helped by him insisting on doing minor variations on the same damn thing over and over again because Shirakura believes that fans have the memories of Goldfish due to him buying into the “TV shows only have a lifespan of around 150 episodes” Myth.  I.E. the 3-conseuctive-years-or-7-western-seasons-year Rule that has long been disproven.  No joke on that, he’s cited it on numerous occasions. Even those who claim to like them generally do for either the wrong reasons, in ignorance of what the content was contextually doing, or in hope that the repeat will be better...when it usually ends up worse.  Which all is consistent with why the man became a producer in the first place by his own words; he hated what he himself was seeing being made that actually WAS Seeing success, and believed he could do it better.  He has not, to the point that literally anyone else using media he’s responsible for has done better with it.  Case in point there, how I pointed out how MMPR season 1 lost or ironed out a grand majority of the failings of Zyuranger, (even though by PR standards MMPR season 1 is only not a bad season Solely because no-one state-side had done a show like it before, and every season that aped it in the Samurai-onwards period has done WORSE than it, thus all the legit bad slots have been taken up).  It breeds a sense of “he hates what other people liked, so will ruin it to force people to see it like HE DOES”, without any self-awareness that assassinating the characters of others for the glorification of his own characters as we have seen time and again from him...leads people to not turn against the people and stories we liked...but on him and his characters that caused this assassination instead. To use an American media analogy, one of the best Short-term comics storylines was a weekly DC comic book called “52″ (If you’ve watched Linkara’s “Atop the fourth wall” series, you may know where I’m going with this.)  the comic line was a spinoff from the event “Infinite Crisis”, filling in a series of events that occurred during a DC-universe-wide Timeskip, that was told from the points of view of minor characters living with the fallout of the IC event.  DC Editor-in-chief Dan Didio purportedly hated 52, and in a leadup to DC’s next major event “Final Crisis” commissioned the Event Miniseries “countdown to Final Crisis”, mandated it’s story direction with no understanding of the event it lead into with no collaboration with Final Crisis’ writer (meaning all of its events end up being 100% noncanon to EVERYTHING)...and put a bunch of people who had no reason to be part of writing such an event or utilizing the characters they were TOLD to use even if they were in no way familiar with how they SHOULD act.  “Countdown” is what Dan Didio considers to be “52 Done Right”...and it is also widely known as one of the worst Comics series Ever made.  Didio never really got over that, thus leading to, when DC Rebooted its canon in the early 2010′s, to use the branding “The NEW 52″, resulting in the moniker being forever tarnished as TN52 stuff is, once more, widely regarded as Garbage. Once more, see your preferred comics youtuber for a larger biopsy on that mess, most of my western comics knowledge has largely come from information Osmosis from Comics youtubers like Linkara and Brian “last angry Geek” Heinz (met both in person several times, they’re very nice), or from my Roommate John who’s a huge comics fan that has recently burned bridges with DC over stuff like “Heroes in Crisis”. But back on point, a lot of this also used in many ways to destroy the old with it’s return/update in favor of The New.  You know that Last Jedi “Let the past die, Kill if if you have to” Line that became the byline for the Star Wars Sequels?  That seems to be what he does *with Sincerity*, claiming with words to respect the past, but *in his presented actions* not caring how it’s depicted at all because he seems to have no respect for other’s past work (even seemingly ones that would seem like his own in some cases) if it’s for the purpose of glorifying what He himself is responsible for.  Case’s in point in that being how Tsukasa was recently Murdered in the rider time specials by being curbstomped by an Ohma Zi-O that by his mere presence Tsukasa should have been Depowering as Tsukasa has the ability to disable ridewatch-derived powers due to his Rider cards, how Zi-O’s head writer flat-out admitted that on Shirakura’s suggestion he only watched the Rider’s film entries to have any knowledge of the franchise depsite continuity in many of them being AU, inconsistent, or not dealing at all with the larger more-focused thrusts of the story that made depiction of most of them wrong and then played writing the rest of...everything by ear and no internal consistency... and going back to the Taisen films...how the awful depiction of the Showa riders actually destroyed their marketability entirely.  And I’m not kidding on that, while Showa Rider legend merch wasn’t a great seller, we have hard numbers evidence reported by the Tokusatsu Network that After Kamen Rider Taisen turned them into Villains in it’s story...the entire market for Showa Rider merch Died.  It’s why you don’t see any past the Drive Signal bikes, no-one wanted them anymore, Bandai couldn’t get them or most of the Showa Rider lockseeds to sell; there was that steep a dropoff in interest. It’s not helped by who he picks out to do these are generally writers that are not very good on their own or are pliable to the desires of the producer they’re working with.  And in Zenkaiger’s case...well, Junko Komura as a head writer has come to have a trackrecord of screwing over characters people otherwise like in favor of those people don’t, which puts her right in his wheelhouse. So yeah, TLDR?  HE does it because he thinks his stuff is better, and anyone that disagrees is an enemy of and IN the content he makes.

[liskantope]

Some thoughts on BLM and our current unrest

[Content warning for death and violence and even sexual abuse (although that’s not part of this week’s issue) and, you know, discussion of a current topic that’s very upsetting for many people. I can’t guarantee that the opinion I express won’t be additionally upsetting although I’m hoping for an open-minded rather than strident tone here. Also, it turned out super long. And I didn’t even get around to the protest vs. rioting discourse!]

This post is long, and since Tumblr for some reason has done away with the light horizontal bars separating sections of writing (I can’t imagine why, and I wish they’d bring it back), I’ll adopt the style of Slate Star Codex and The Last Psychiatrist to mark different sections.

I.

(The following hypothetical situation is inspired by the crimes of Jerry Sandusky of Penn State and Larry Nassar of Michigan State.)

Suppose it becomes public knowledge that in many American universities there are officials working in athletics departments who are using their programs to gain access to children and teenagers for the purpose of sexually abusing them. Say it is discovered that this has been going on for decades at most of these universities, with the perpetrators using their privilege and power to keep the suspicions of the higher-up administrators on the downlow. This would of course become a dominating national news item and lead to a public conversation about how poorly structured the system must be at universities to allow for such despicable crimes to go on, how we as a society are putting people in power who care more about their power than about the basic safety of children and teenagers, and so on. If enough people felt like university administrations or state governments were refusing to take action towards dissolving these corrupt systems, or if they disagreed with the actions being taken, there might be full-scale protests or even riots along with the vigils that would take place in any case. I mean, I believe all of this is basically what happened when the Sandusky and Nassar situations broke out some years back.

Now suppose that in addition, when looking at all these horrific revelations from universities all around the country, it became noticeable that the victims of these sex crimes were disproportionately young people growing up in poverty; let’s say fully one third of the victims were growing up in households whose annual income was under $30,000. (I don’t recall the Sandusky case in great detail but something like that was probably true there to a more dramatic extent since he got access to his victims through a program designed for underprivileged children.) This makes the situation feel even more tragic -- don’t kids from low-income backgrounds suffer enough disadvantages already? These monsters that are protected by The System are adept at preying on the most vulnerable, and clearly this (hypothetical but altogether not unrealistic) phenomenon highlights the vulnerability of those who are not economically privileged.

Now in such a situation, class issues would definitely become at least a minor part of the discourse, but I have a hard time imagining that the entire main thrust of the public outrage would focus on classism, even if (and this is something I can’t imagine either!) the only cases being projected by the media to become common public knowledge, out of the whole series of university athletics sex crimes, were the ones where mainly poor kids and teenagers were targeted. In fact, I expect that if any media outlet tried to present the entire thing as being a class issue and implied that it affected only poor kids, there would be a lot of backlash especially on the grounds of this coming across as a big middle finger to the higher-income-background molestation victims. I just don’t see it happening. Primarily, the outrage would be centered on the fact that university administrations allow high-ranking people in their athletics departments get away with despicable violations of young people for decades. The fact that a disproportionately high number of those young people are from underprivileged backgrounds would be treated as sort of a secondary issue, if properly noticed by the broader public at all.

So, if you’ve read this far you probably see where I’m going with this. And I know that the above hypothetical scenario furnishes nowhere near a perfect analogy to what has people riled up right now. But why is it that in my hypothetical nightmare crime scenario, the prevalence of the crime itself (rather than which demographic is disproportionately on the receiving end) is what constitutes the outrage, whereas in the real-life scenario of numerous documented instances of police brutality and murder, the entire thrust of the public outrage is centered on the notion that this is all about racism, that yeah there must be something seriously amiss in a system that lets cops get away with brutal violence towards innocent civilians but pretty much every single statement expressing that sentiment will frame it in terms of racism while the existence white victims of police brutality is essentially never even acknowledged?

From what I can see, in this age where everyday happenings can easily be recorded by random bystanders and the recordings can easily become accessible to the public, we are seeing evidence that a number of American cops are way, way too liberal with lethal violence, either through direct training or through a tendency towards paranoia of how dangerous a civilian under arrest might be or through psychopathic tendencies that attract certain kinds of people to a profession where brutally violent behavior is too easily excused in the courts after the fact. I don’t know to what degree these relatively few pieces of documented footage reflect a large part of the police force rather than just “a few bad apples”, but on some level it doesn’t matter -- an event like the murder of George Floyd should not be tolerated and the fact that many such instances are happening every year seems unacceptable. This is true regardless of whether Floyd’s race actually played any significant part in Derek Chauvin’s decision to apply very excessive force. Then there are statistics to reckon with -- I don’t have the skillset that some have for knowing where to look up data and rationally analyzing it, but to my understanding it’s quite unambiguous that American law enforcement officers kill a lot more people than the police forces of most other countries, and this would seem to point to a serious problem. I have generally heard that in absolute terms, in fact more white men are killed this way than black men, but relative to the ratio of white people to black people, black men are killed disproportionately often. Of course there seems to be no room whatsoever for discussion of any possible reason this could be aside from purely racist motives on the parts of the cops, which is certainly one of my issues with the whole topic, but let’s set that aside for the moment and assume for the sake of argument that this disparity is entirely attributable to anti-black racism. Even with this assumption, does it make sense to present the entire issue of police brutality as a purely racial one?

Here is another analogy to something that is not only non-hypothetical but is an even bigger current situation: the pandemic. It’s frequently been remarked on that Covid19 has been killing at a significantly higher rate among racial minorities. And yet the broader framing of the crisis we’re in hasn’t been that it’s an African-American issue or that every failure of government officials to respond effectively is primarily an instantiation of racism. The racial component of this is treated secondarily, in fact with far less emphasis than the direct crisis which affects everyone in the country even if not in equal measures.

With the murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Abery, as with every other story of a cop killing of a black person that goes viral, it’s not only that the narrative frames the race component as the primary issue -- the race component is framed as the only issue. This is done in such an absolute and unquestioning manner that I’m still a little taken aback whenever I see each new “We denounce racism!” announcement from almost every company whose mailing system I’m in: my Unitarian Universalist organization, the university I work for, Lyft, Airbnb, etc., not that any of them actually suggest a plan of action beyond donating to Black Lives Matter and other related organizations.

I think I can answer my own questions about why the narrative is coming out this way. Some areas of social justice enjoy a much more prestigious position in America than others do, and racism seems to dominate all the rest. (I’ve come to see this as a very American thing, no doubt due to the exceptionally dramatic nature of my country’s struggles against racial oppression, although it’s probably the case in Canada as well and maybe to a comparable extent in other Anglophone countries.) There is no surer way to make an issue more hot-button than by framing it as a racial issue, except in the unusual case (as in my Covid example) that the issue is actually of urgent and immediate concern to all citizens. Opposition to something like police brutality could have some momentum on its own, but as motivation for activism it has nowhere near the mighty strength in our culture that anti-racism does. In the hypothetical scenario about child abuse at universities, we have one type of social injustice, economic inequality, which has mostly been relegated to the background in the recent history of social activism (yes, Bernie Sanders has had a significant following, but my impression is that even many of his most diehard supporters get more passionate about racial inequality than economic inequality, at least when it comes to fiscal issues other than health care reform). Whereas child molestation is condemned in the strongest terms by our society perhaps even more universally than racism is (even though this universality makes it less of a cause for energetic activism -- I never hear anyone complain that “we live in a molestation culture” or anything like that). So, issues viewed as racial have far more memetic endurance than non-racial issues or even the exact same fundamental issues when not viewed from a racial angle.

Or, here is another way that I’ve considered looking at it: because police violence happens disproportionately to African-Americans, police violence could be considered to be “an African-American issue”, and since anti-racism activism is already quite a strong force in modern American culture, the issue of police brutality will naturally find an outlet to the public through the lens of African-American issues. Therefore, this is the only angle from which most of us will ever see it.

Of course the obvious thing that someone would surely point out here is that pretty much all of the examples of police brutality we’ve been seeing for years have white people victimizing black people (George Zimmerman did not present to me as white from the moment I first glanced at him, and by many definitions he is a PoC, but I guess he’s close enough to white that people were able to ignore this). Therefore it seems logical to assume that anti-black racism is the only lens to view these events through. Well, it would be logical except that we should all be able to think critically enough to realize that there are probably tons of videos out there of innocent white people being victimized by cops but those aren’t the ones that go viral. In fact, videos of black people being victimized by non-white cops probably also don’t get very far in the memosphere* -- it’s occurred to me that perhaps if the Asian policeman on the scene had been the one in the center of the frame pinning Floyd to the ground, this atrocity might never have become public knowledge!

(*Did I just make up that term? Google isn’t showing anything.)

And honestly, for this reason, I can’t help feeling particularly bad right now for loved ones of nonblack people who were victims of such crimes while being treated as if their cases didn’t exist.

This is not me trying to covertly imply support for “All Lives Matter” here. I’ve never felt the slightest bit of attraction to that counter-hashtag, which has always struck me as subtly obnoxious in implying that Black Lives Matter’s name is equivalent to saying “only black lives matter”, which of course BLM is not saying. Black lives do matter and in many ways still constantly get devalued and it is good that there’s an activist group out there whose main purpose is to stand up for them. But my discussion above does point to a specific issue -- probably the biggest of two or three issues -- I have with BLM. It would be one thing to say, “Police brutality can be considered a black issue since it affects black people disproportionately, so we should form a Black Lives Matter group and include it as one of the things we want to fight against.” Instead, BLM’s rhetoric strongly implies, “Police brutality is entirely a black issue and we’ll round off the entirety of it to racism and make opposition to it our main plank”. (Compare, from an secularist activist group, “Anti-gay bigotry often arises from fundamentalist religion and the justification for anti-gay-rights legislation threatens separation of church and state; therefore we should consider it an atheist/secularist issue and place gay rights issues among our concerns” vs. “Anti-gay bigotry and legislation is simply a manifestation of religion’s attempt to dominate non-religion so we should make opposition to it our main plank and not acknowledge or stand up for gay Christians.” Again, not a perfect analogy, but I hope it shows where I’m coming from.)

II.

I already wrote a post exactly four years ago describing and criticizing what I called “protest culture”. My point in linking to it here is not to revisit the discussion about Bernie Sanders or even the question of protesters’ deep-down motives but to endorse the following paragraph describing the kind of protest activism I felt (and still feel) could be helpful:

I definitely think there’s an important place in our culture for organized protest.  Sometimes we ordinary citizens need to show our dissatisfaction to the higher-ups in a way that they are forced to notice and not ignore.  But I strongly prefer protests that express dissent from a particular action, propose a concrete solution, and include many people who are able to make nuanced arguments in favor of this solution.  If there is no good consensus as to a serious solution, then I’ll settle for some particular action that is being protested against.  For instance, I would have proudly joined the marches against the war in Vietnam had I been around for it, and would have joined the marches against the war in Iraq had I been a little older at the time.  I would consider joining protests against, for instance, particular amendments I feel strongly about.  I did not, on the other hand, feel comfortable with the “99 percent” movement.  What was it expressing a sentiment against, exactly, apart from the very vague notion that a few people at the top screw things over for the rest of us?  (And by the way, I suspect that demonizing the entire top 1% was too heavy-handed; it’s probably only some in the top .01% who have been doing the main damage.)  There seemed to be little organization to this movement, and little common purpose except “let’s protest for the cause of being vaguely left-wing!”  The best argument I remember hearing in its favor was when a student explained to me the main strategy behind the movement: they would essentially fight guerilla-style by occupying large areas for a very long amount of time in a way that the top politicians couldn’t ignore, never, ever giving it up until things change in Washington.  But I was still pretty sure that at some point, the movement would have to die down, and was willing to bet that this would happen before anything changed in Washington.

I’ve never felt as fervently as I do now that too many law enforcement officers in the US are out of control and some kind of reform needs to be done (or at least strongly considered, in a serious conversation) to the system so that it can be effective in keeping them in check and outlawing certain forms of excessive force. There’s a lot I don’t understand about the demands and risks involved in law enforcement, but I really can’t imagine how there’s any possible excuse for what Officer Chauvin did, or for his colleagues who stood by and watched him do it. One reason I’m bringing up everything I did in the section above is that a massive protest movement based entirely on opposing racism seems to me like the exact wrong way to bring about the kind of reform we need, in part because it fails to recognize that the link from the bare facts of these events to possible racist motives is far less direct than the link to the overpowered nature of American law enforcement.

What is a campaign centered on “Be less racist!” possibly going to accomplish? Yelling at the police to be less racist isn’t going to change the behavior of individual cops who might be subconsciously racist but don’t realize it, many of whom are likely to react with defensiveness (because racism on an abstract level is sufficiently shamed in modern western culture that nobody likes to admit to themselves that they’re being racist). It’s even less likely to change the behavior of individual cops who are maliciously racist. It’s not going to change the policies set in place for law enforcement when, in this day and age, it would be highly illegal and unconstitutional to have explicitly racist policies in the first place. (It can be argued that some of these policies are a part of systemic racism, but then in my opinion the activist movement should focus on attacking those specific policies.)

In fact, I can’t think of any situation, however race-related, where I expect it helps to yell “Be less racist!” except for when (1) you are protesting against a particular law which discriminates against people of a certain (minority) race; or (2) you are denouncing a particular candidate or person in power who has explicitly endorsed racism in public or in private. Both of these scenarios are highly rare in 2020. Maybe there are other neighboring scenarios I’m not thinking of at the moment, but I’m pretty sure our current scenario isn’t one of them.

I imagine that if we set race aside for a moment and focus on police reform, by waiting for background information on the Floyd case to come out and piecing together what led to this injustice and pinpointing which factors led to it, a difference could be made. I’m not saying that this should all be done dispassionately, and in fact acting with passion and emotional force is crucial. And I’m not saying that in the wake of such an obvious murder everyone should just stay quiet until more facts come out. It makes sense to cry out in pain and anger as an immediate reaction, and I’m not going to criticize anyone for doing this, especially someone who feels closer to the tragedy (yes, including through shared racial background) than I do. But letting this get immediately drowned in a rampage against perceived racism and only that, against a system that has shown time and time again that it clearly doesn’t think itself racist at all and perhaps (in at least most of its components) has no deliberate intention of being, doesn’t seem likely to produce anything but further acrimony and polarization.

[TL;DR for these last two sections: it would seem like a more effective response to focus on police brutality and overpowered-ness as the main issue rather than making it all about race.]

III.

I forced myself to watch as much of the video of George Floyd’s final hours and minutes as I could. I didn’t actually succeed in finding the full video, and maybe that’s for the best, because what I did see chilled me to the bone and distressed me more than almost any real-life footage I’ve ever seen. I’m not as eloquent as some at putting my raw emotions in writing and don’t know the words to describe how twisted up it made me feel to “witness” an obvious murder of a man whose greatest “crime” was resisting getting pushed into a police car, and to watch him dying one of the most undignified deaths I can imagine ever being forced on anyone. I felt momentarily physically ill and wanted to cry.

Others in my orbit -- mostly white people; my social bubbles have always been disproportionately white and Asian and certainly nonblack -- have expressed a similar emotional reaction to mine except with the added factor of disgust at the obvious racism present. This was just simply not part of my immediate emotional reaction. On a cognitive level I am aware that there clearly has to be some degree of anti-black racism in law enforcement, even independent of classism and other factors, and that could be of some relevance in any individual case (although it would seem very tricky to assess how much). But this awareness doesn’t have time to kick in when I open a video or news story that’s already been presented to me as “another black man killed by racist cop” which reminds me that this is embedded in a particular media narrative and makes me feel instinctively on guard against letting my perceptions be colored by it.

Black people seeing these apparently all feel on the level of deep, fundamental knowledge that this happened to Floyd because he was black and that it’s a fate they have to constantly fear happening to themselves, or at least that’s what the white people around me are constantly claiming. I feel epistemically helpless when it comes to knowing what the “average” (rather than one of those on the forefront of racial activism) African-American’s take on this is, or how fearful the “average” African-American is of the police on a daily basis as compared to a white person’s, especially prior to the age when videos of police abuse started going viral.

But I’m certain that a significant part of the African-American community is right now in a deep pain that I can’t really imagine, because I don’t quite know how it feels to perceive one horrible tragedy as indicative of something that is done to attack a specific minority that I belong to.

I expect that some of them learn about an incident like this, and an incident like the one with Ahmoud Arbery, and feel on the level of social intuition (I think I’ve sometimes called this “social sense”), developed from a web of personal experiences, that these individual terrible choices clearly had a lot to do with the victims being black. I would be a hypocrite to fault someone for reaching a strong conviction based on this kind of social intuition, because I do it myself all the time -- in fact, I often express such conclusions on this blog. I feel less qualified to rely on this social intuition and my own experience when it comes to race issues, but I invoke it all the time on this blog when I talk about male-female dynamics in order to argue on controversial position on gender relations, for instance, because I do have lifelong ample experience with men and women interacting.

If many black people in America have a deep instinctual feeling for the racial aspect of many of these attacks, then I do acknowledge that a lot of that is probably coming from somewhere other than media narratives. It might come from everyday interactions with police, observing that they are stopped and treated hostilely by the police than their white friends seem to be, or who knows what else. And those voices with their explanations need to be at least listened to. I wish it were easier to hear them through all the tribalistic noise and confusion.

So trying to better understand all this is part of my struggle at the moment. This post might not age well -- I wouldn’t be surprised if I view some of my turns of phrase in this section of it with some embarrassment even sometime in the near future -- but I need to commit myself to trying.

Anyway, I guess all of this is to say that my lengthy arguments above aren’t meant to claim that the instances of police brutality we’ve been seeing aren’t related in some way to racism, but that reflexively framing them in terms of racism seems guaranteed to bring only more pain to an already painful situation.

[mysydneymemories-blog]

Why Boomers can't talk about the 'R' word

One reason is a bloke who lives nearby. I don't know him well we've never got much past banal chats about the weather or footy but he hasn't had a job for a few years. I suspect he might have been "let go". Or simply retired. He appears a bit lost, like a man chasing things to do. His bins go out earlier than before. Takes his time over domestic chores. He grew a beard, too, which was a mistake. It's all grey. Makes him look much older than he is. Like a slimmed-down Hemingway. Seeing him, I've opted to keep shaving. Then there's the man I'll call Gary, with whom I worked over several decades. I left; he stayed. I caught up with him a while back. He said he felt under pressure at work and was taking medication for stress. The job was killing him. He had to get out. He did, months later. Then I saw him again at the funeral of another former colleague. He'd put on weight. His face looked puffy. Asked about life since escaping the office grind, Gary replied: 'I don't know what to do now. Wonder if I made a hideous mistake.' Asked about life since escaping the office grind, Gary replied: "I don't know what to do now. Struggle to find reasons to get up. Wonder if I made a hideous mistake." This felt like another warning. Was this what happens when you move from full-time work to no work at all, or bits and pieces of stuff you call work? Is this what retirement looks like? A financial guy had already talked me into a transition-to-retirement scheme. I'd focused on the transition, not the r-word. Skimmed over the bit where a payment was called a pension. But the fact was I'd gradually moved transitioned from a Monday-to-Friday job to a four-days-a-week-job, then to several smaller jobs, not all of which involved earning money. During the four-day phase, Wednesdays were mine. For dog walks. Swims. Shopping. Cooking. Stuff. I loved Wednesday. It was a peaceful island in the midst of a fast-running river I had to cross every week. A place to take stock and not answer calls. But maybe Wednesdays were special because of what came before and after. If I had a week of Wednesdays, things would seem different. I could end up with a bad case of the Garys. Perhaps I'm being unfair to him. It's possible he was just having a bad day at the funeral, which was a shocker. Too long, too many speeches, and a prevailing sense that we were there for a popular man who'd had a heart attack while riding his bike with mates. He was 51. Much younger than me. And still 14 years off what used to be set in stone as retirement age. That's how it was: you hit 65, retired, went off and played golf or got a caravan. Or a Winnebago, like Jack Nicholson's character in the 2002 movie About Schmidt, which explores what happens to Warren Schmidt after he retires from an insurance company. Early scenes show Schmidt counting down the last hour of employment and enduring awkward speeches at his office farewell. Then he's hit by a double-whammy: the sudden loss of his wife and a lack of purpose. He takes off, alone, in the Winnebago, in what becomes a kind of oldies' road movie. It makes poignant viewing now. Nicholson's last film came out in 2010. Since then, rumours have swirled about his health. In 2013, he told Vanity Fair he didn't consider himself retired, just less driven. Appropriately, About Schmidt came out the year Nicholson turned 65 the age still linked with the r-word. It's actually an outdated historical construct.

Appropriately, the film "About Schmidt" came out the year its star, Jack Nicholson, turned 65 the age still linked with the r-word.Credit:Alamy In Australia, a government-funded retirement pension dates back to 1909, when it was paid to men from the age of 65. For women, the magic age was 60, from 1910. These pensions, to support ageing victims of tough times from the 1890s, included income and residency tests. They didn't represent a crushing burden for the government, as just 4 per cent of the population was over 65. Life expectancy was about 55 for men, 59 for women. Today, by contrast, about 15 per cent of Australians are over 65 and life expectancy has leapt to about 80 for men and 85 for women. For any budget-conscious government, that represents plenty of potentially costly retirees. And they can be a cranky lot. Hence Prime Minister Scott Morrison's backdown late last year on the Abbott-era plan, from 2014, to increase the pension age from 67 to 70, starting in 2025. Steady increases in age eligibility would have seen it hit 70 by 2035. This was portrayed as a move by penny-pinching politicians to force honest folk to scrap retirement plans and work until they dropped. Doing his man-of-the-people impression, Deputy PM Michael McCormack told Sky News: "If you're a tradie or a brickie or a shearer in rural and regional Australia, you don't want some suit in Canberra telling you you've got to work until you're 70." Absolutely not. Labor didn't protest about this as much as might have been expected, because it was under then prime minister Kevin Rudd in 2009 that the pension age was lifted from 65 to 67 (from 2017). Rudd's treasurer, Wayne Swan, acknowledged the move would never be popular, but justified it by saying Australia faced a "demographic time bomb". An estimated 22 per cent of the population will be over 65 by 2057. The Council on the Ageing (COTA) says 7.9 million Australians, almost a third of the population, are currently aged 50 or above. Of these, 29 per cent of those still working think they'll never retire. Not surprisingly, it also found that "the expected age of retirement increases as household income level decreases". The importance of financial security becomes clear when I type the words "Retirement in Australia" in the online catalogue for the local library. The first entries include books about the future of property investing and keeping your self-managed superannuation fund simple. These books, not to mention Enjoying Retirement, The Retirement Living Handbook and Women and Retirement ("Challenges of a new life phase") are also popular. Most are already out on loan, with at least one reserve in place. Which is understandable. It makes financial sense to borrow a book instead of buying it. And libraries are popular with older people. Then again, how old is old?

Hillary Clinton was 69 when she ran for the US presidency in 2016.Credit:AAP Turning 50 is the first tipping point, a convenient age for headhunters making shortlists shorter, or managers trimming staff numbers. It's when you're over 50 that you start to receive brochures about investments, superannuation choices and that once-faraway place called retirement. Not 60, when you may find yourself eligible for a Seniors Card (a tad embarrassing, but fabulous for cut-price public transport). Or 67 (thanks, Mr Swan), when perhaps you'll put your hand up for a pension. It's 50. Ridiculous. Ken Rosewall was still winning matches in tennis tournaments in the early 1980s, just a few years shy of 50. And the three main contenders in the 2016 US presidential election Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders were aged 70, 69 and 75 respectively. None are considered retirees.

Donald Trump was the oldest person to assume the office of US president, being 70 years, 220 days at his inauguration.Credit:AAP The retirement age, incidentally, varies considerably around the world. In Japan, which has the world's highest average life expectancy (just under 84), incentives may be offered to people to postpone a state pension until 70. In Brazil, the average retirement age is 56 for men, 53 for women. Brazil has generous pensions and a debt crisis. In France, the retirement age has been moved from 60 to 62; in Germany, it's 65 and seven months.

Royal Commissioner Kenneth Hayne. Just as the pension age is less fixed than it used to be, so is the concept of retirement. The titular character in About Schmidt struggles to adapt. All those years behind an actuary's desk were not fun, but what now? And why is it that some capable people still face compulsory retirement? Kenneth Hayne, who turns 74 in June, demonstrated impressive vigour and acuity heading the recent banking royal commission. He was able to take that on because he was deemed too old to continue sitting as a Justice of the High Court. Hayne had to retire from that job in 2015. Since a constitutional amendment in 1977, members of the Australian federal judiciary must retire at 70. The last judge not affected by this provision, having been appointed in 1976, was Justice Graham Bell. He retired from the Family Court of Australia in early 2015, aged 78, and took a swing at the new law on the way out: "These days, 70 is equal to 60 or 55 Judges should be able to go on till 80 provided they pass a medical inspection They are sent out to pasture too early."

Ruth Bader Ginsburg serves as a Justice of the US Supreme Court at age 86.Credit:AAP Three of the nine serving Justices of the US Supreme Court, including the legendary Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 86, would be gone if the US had a similar law. Here, it means that Geoffrey Nettle, who became a High Court judge in 2015 at the age of 64 (the oldest-ever appointee), will hit the mandatory retirement age in late 2020. He will serve a maximum term of just under six years, which seems a waste of a fine legal mind. It's possible we've been looking at all this the wrong way around. Instead of designating a retirement age, perhaps the question should be: how young can you get away with it? The devotees of a mantra called FIRE Financial Independence, Retire Early are reshaping ideas of what early retirement looks like. Forget your 60s; their goal is to bail out in half that time, or, in the case of J.P. Livingston, in your 20s. Instead of designating a retirement age, perhaps the question should be: how young can you get away with it? "I retired in New York City with just over $2.25 million when I was 28," she says on her website, The Money Habit. "I wholeheartedly believe that anyone can retire decades earlier than their peers." The secret, she says, lies in financial planning. (Luck and a solid financial base also help.) The FIRE movement started in the US but has since spread globally through myriad blogs and websites. A father figure is Jacob Lund Fisker, a Danish former nuclear astrophysicist, whose Early Retirement Extreme blog began in 2007. Fisker summarises his philosophy as "a combination of simple living, anti-consumerism, DIY ethics, self-reliance, resilience, and applied capitalism". The baton has now been passed to Peter Adeney, a Canadian. Writing as Mr Money Mustache, Adeney's ideas about very early retirement, which he achieved in 2005, age 30, gained so much traction that The New Yorker magazine profiled him in 2016. "Retirement, in his hands, is a slippery term," Nick Paumgarten wrote. "It doesn't mean playing golf or sitting on the porch. It is merely the freedom to do what he wants when he wants He disdains the idea of spending another minute of his life in a cubicle in order to afford a dryer or a Tesla." The profile described Adeney using a woodworking vice to squeeze limes. His wife, Simi, was quoted as saying: "I've gotten used to it all, but he's a weird dude." Maybe too weird. Last year, a Guardian article about the FIRE movement noted Adeney's influence but reported: "He and his wife divorced recently." Apostles of FIRE have firm ideas about what life should look like and it doesn't include employers. (Children are seldom mentioned, either.) Many have come from the financial or technology sectors and are resting on a solid base. It takes money to make money, or even save money. And as appealing as the idea of ditching a boss in your 30s may be, the question, even more daunting than for someone in their 60s, is the same: what's next? As nice as the idea of ending work in your 30s may be, the question, even more daunting than for 60somethings, is the same: what's next? For J.P. Livingston, "a successful and happy retirement is about changing chapters rather than one static image of constant adrenaline and adventure". But Fisker could be running out of steam. In February, he diverted blog visitors to Bertrand Russell's 1932 essay In Praise of Idleness. Russell is an unlikely poster boy for early retirement. He died aged 97 and was still writing into his final years. Anne Moore would love to follow suit. A social scientist and entrepreneur, she tells me from her Sydney office how she started a software business "at 57, mid-career". Later, she founded PlanDo, which offers career coaching and advocates embracing the idea that careers are no longer linear starting with a junior role and ending at 65 with farewell handshakes. She talks of the much-hyped "gig economy". "People don't retire any more," she argues. "They are working into their 70s." Or longer. Like many women, Moore juggled different sorts of work with raising a family. She thinks the random, disjointed careers familiar to women may become the norm for everyone. Retirement, she insists, "was never, ever on my horizon. I come from a working-class background and always had a strong work ethic. Just as the idea of being a young stay-at-home mum was never attractive, it never occurred to me that I would retire." Work, she says, can inform a sense of identity; can even be noble. The quest is to find work paid or otherwise that is purposeful and fulfilling. And it means thinking about work in different ways.

ABC newsreader Ian Henderson was happy to retire at 65.Credit:ABC Despite the rigidity applied to judges, ideas about retirement are, as Moore suggests, becoming more fluid. And I'm not the only one who resists the r-word. ABC Radio's Jon Faine recently announced that this year would be his last behind the microphone in Melbourne. He told a caller who rang to lament his pending departure, "I'm not retiring. I'm just going to be doing other things." Faine, now 62, says of his decision to move on: "Inside my head it is very important. I hope to still stay engaged, useful and busy, but not in an all-consuming job like this." I've heard many people ranging from cricketer Mitchell Johnson to former Victorian premier Jeff Kennett express variations of the same sentiment: once you start talking or thinking about retirement, you've already gone. We all thought Malcolm Turnbull was gone when he was deposed as prime minister last August. He even suggested he might go quietly. Then he went to New York. When he returned in October, he declared: "I'm not engaged in politics any longer. I'm retired." Hmmm, maybe At least Turnbull didn't shy away from the r-word. Another who didn't was Faine's former colleague Ian Henderson. Late last year, at the traditional age of 65, the Victorian TV newsreader declared that after 38 years at the ABC, it was time to embark upon "a long-hatched retirement plan". A key component was "a bush block; a couple of acres to play with". He calls me from there to discuss his new life. He'd talked of retirement, he says, because it was something people could grasp onto and understand. "I was informed partly by memories of my own father, who retired at 65," says Henderson. "He was a commercial traveller, a Depression boy; got one job and stuck with it. By the time he got to retiring, he was very much over work. I think he saw ahead a golden age that was perhaps not quite realised ... His idea of renewal was to build a dream home, something he did twice. He withdrew from the community, became quite isolated. To me, that was something of a cautionary tale." I was conscious that I needed a few things to fill the void; occupy myself. But it's also good to survey the horizon, see what's out there. At the bush block, Henderson says, "there's no shortage of projects; [my wife] Susie and I are consumed by them." So too, their adult children. There's a tiered organic vegie garden. And he's taken up baking bread. "I was conscious that I needed a few things to fill the void; occupy myself. But it's also a good idea to survey the horizon and see what's out there." Since he left the newsroom he's been spotted back at the ABC, doing some work for Catalyst. So has he un-retired? No. "When I stopped, I did not rule out dabbling in other projects. But I was not looking at a second career. My criteria for new things are that they are interesting, worthwhile and fun." The Catalyst project, which involved chatting to centenarians with a strong sense of purpose, ticks all those boxes. I'd thought he might fit the old stereotype of retirement: out at 65 to play golf. Hendo loves his golf. A knee problem, however, has restricted his time on the course since he stopped reading the news. Still, he declares himself "soooo busy there often aren't enough hours in the day". Later, he sends a photo of his tomato plants. With a caption: "My Babies". Some women like Sally, whom I've known for more than 40 years choose to reshape their lives. She did this once before, moving from the corporate world to a career teaching English as a second language at a high school. She stopped doing that around the time she turned 60. "If pressed, I would say that I'm retired in one sense of the word. But I'd rather say I'm just living in a different way. I've not withdrawn but restarted." I'm retired in one sense of the word. But I'd rather say I'm just living in a different way. I've not withdrawn but restarted. She expands on the theme: "I still derive an income, but not through recognisable activity what some call work. My income tax statement looks different. I still have goals and monitor my own performance. I am making different types of connections with people whom I wouldn't call colleagues or friends, but who share similar interests. I describe myself as 'occupied' rather than busy, because busy is a state I was constantly in as a teacher for 13 years. "I occupy myself now with activities which are of my choosing, including new activities for fun and out of curiosity. I have time now although I haven't fully capitalised on it yet for listening to more classical music, reading more widely and broadening my exposure to culture." She's working on a family-history writing project. She's tried ballet. ("It's meant to be an absolute beginners' class, but no way are they all beginners. Especially that 11-year-old with her hair in a bun, a pink tutu and pointe shoes!") And she's considering a beginners' hip-hop class. "I am having fun and have absolutely no regrets." American futurist Glen Hiemstra addresses the "what next?" question in this way: "The first quarter of the 21st century will see a great reinvention of the third phase of life, away from classic retirement and towards something like 'life fulfilment'. The end of retirement and beginning of life fulfilment may be a kind of liberation." Or, as an ad puts it: Shouldn't your retirement be the start of something new? Sure. But what, exactly? There are all kinds of possibilities and no simple solutions. In search of answers, or perhaps just some interesting questions, I enrolled in philosophy classes early in my not-retired life. I ended up doing two terms, which seemed like enough when Rudyard Kipling's poem If was wheeled out for inspiration. The classes taught me the value of pausing; of taking time out, even for just a few minutes, to dwell on the moment. And I liked the notion that anxiety can simply mean thinking about the future. Wondering, and often worrying, about what may lie ahead. I never told the Tuesday-night tennis guys that, for much of one year, my Wednesday nights yes, Wednesday, once my special day were occupied pondering topics like The Power of Beauty. I have lunch with Michael the lawyer in the city, not far from his office. He can't recall me losing my cool over his repeated jabs about "retirement". That's not surprising: it was some time ago. It also confirms that the incident meant more to me than him. He agrees the concept of retirement has changed dramatically since we both started working in the 1970s. It's something he's pondered, too. A few years ago, he was politely nudged out the door of the big law firm where he'd been a partner. Experience can matter less than billable hours. He faced an unsettling period that left him convinced he wasn't ready to walk away. So he sucked it up and moved on. Talked to people. Got offers from smaller, more flexible law firms. He's doing fine. When he insists on buying lunch, I protest, politely, then wonder if he reckons I can't be earning much in my new life. Stop it, I tell myself, you're being too sensitive again. Later, I send a thank-you message and can't resist two last questions. Can he imagine retiring? And what would that look like? "No," he replies. "I think 'retire' will likely exit my and others' lexicon. We will all just gradually wind down work, tennis, our social lives and everything else, until we fade away." I tell him I hope this will be no time soon. "Fading away" is another type of transition; something more unsettling than what we've known. Perhaps we can keep talking about this at tennis again next Tuesday night. To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times. Most Viewed in Money Loading https://www.smh.com.au/money/super-and-retirement/welcome-to-the-minefield-that-is-21st-century-retirement-20190409-p51c98.html?ref=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss_feed