Why I feel the police are currently the biggest threat to me

This post builds on ideas from my G20 braindump. There may be some repetition.

Let's brainstorm. What bad things could happen to me in normal everyday life?

I could be attacked. I could be sexually assaulted. I could be robbed. I could be abducted.

The police attacked people - there are bruises to show for it. There are reports of the police sexually assaulting people. There are reports of people getting their personal effects confiscated and not getting them back. Plainclothes police grabbed people off the street and threw them in vans and detained them for 36 hours.

Now you're thinking "Yeah, sure, 'there are reports'. We weren't there, we don't know the whole story, we just have someone else's word" That's true. That's also the case where these things are done by non-police perps. I have never witnessed anyone being attacked, sexually assaulted, robbed, or abducted. I've just heard tell about it. But it still needs to be considered a credible threat.

But the difference between regular bad guys doing bad things and the police doing bad things is that it's easier to stop regular bad guys. If some random attacks me while, a passer-by who intervenes would be a hero. If police attack me, a passer-by who intervenes would be charged with obstructing justice. (To say nothing of the fact that many passers-by would assume I'm a bad guy by virtue of the very fact that I'm being attacked by police, whereas being attacked by a random automatically makes me a damsel in distress.) Plus, yes, there is the fact that if a bad guy grabs me and takes me away, the police might try to find me, whereas if the police detain me there's nothing much anyone can do.

Now you're thinking "Exactly! The police are the ones who try to find you when a bad guy abducts you! That's why you should trust them." But that, too, is the case with non-police perps. There are all kinds of not-purely-trustworthy characters out there who might help you when you face a bigger risk. For example, I was once riding on a subway late at night when a drunk guy got on and started verbally harassing people (including me). Another man, a rather shady-looking character, intervened and got rid of the drunken harasser. (He was rather clever about it, too. When we pulled into the next station, he said to the drunk guy "Hey man, this is your stop." The drunk guy replied "Thanks, man!" and got off.) But that doesn't mean I should inherently trust shady-looking men on the subway late at night. They're still a credible threat unless proven otherwise.

Analogy: Some, and maybe even most, strange men on subways are actually nice guys who will protect a damsel in distress. But imagine if there were reports of a number of men who, whenever they saw a woman being harassed in public, would grab her, throw her in their van against her will, and lock her in their basement for a couple of days for safekeeping. Then, just to be safe, they go back out and grab every other woman they can find and do the same. Suddenly, all strange men are threats, even if they are purportedly trying to protect us.

Understand, I'm a law-abiding citizen. I've never been in any sort of trouble, never even had a ticket. If the police have any record of me whatsoever, all it will show is the police checks that I've passed for my job so I can be entrusted with confidential and personal information.

But the police can hurt me as badly as anyone else can, while making it harder for others to help me than if I were being hurt by a civilian bad guy. And based on what we saw during the G20, I cannot trust that the fact that I'm doing nothing wrong will be enough to make them not want to hurt me. So they are a credible threat unless proven otherwise.

G20 braindump

This is not complete, comprehensive, organized, or well-structured. I might add more later or I might repurpose material into better-organized posts. Right now I just need to clear out my head. (I had a good, structured blog post that took all my panic and fear and emotions and expressed it in a way that's informative to others for whom this is all non-immediate, but it took a long time to write and I got too sleepy before I could finish it. So I made an outline of the rest and went to bed. But Blogger ate my outline! I almost feel like this is a conspiracy.)

1. I've been thinking a lot about laws and society lately, even before this all started. I think I like laws. If people are following laws because they're the law (rather than just so as to not be a dick), then laws make life easy. I don't have to fight for my life when I walk down the street. My employer pays me the amount due on the proper date. Stores sell me their products at the posted price. This is good. It makes life easy. And then, instead of having to ceaselessly stand up for myself in every area of life, I can put my energies into learning and thinking and translating and creating, which makes life more pleasant and I think allows me to make a greater contribution to society as a whole. So that got me thinking about why I follow laws and, more than that, why I'm Being Good. Being Good is doing what's right, what's expected of you. Here I'm using it as shorthand to mean that I got a job, go to work, try to be nice to people, try not to mess stuff up, etc. I thought about this long and hard - I've never had to articulate it before! - and I came to the conclusion that it's because I like to be comfortable. I like places where there's nothing crawling out of the walls. I like hot showers and air conditioning and comfy chairs and everything I ever want to eat or drink at my fingertips.

After reading about what happened at Queen and Spadina and then about the detention conditions, I'm utterly terrified because the law, which has always served to make me comfortable as long as I'm Being Good, is now being use to grab people who were Being Good and make them uncomfortable.

So what's my motivation to continue obeying the law? But the thing is, I'm a shy, quiet, stay-at-home kind of person. I'm not likely to break the law too badly just because most of what I want to do is already legal. But what's other people's - people who are more interested in doing things that are illegal - motivation to continue obeying the law?

2. Currently, there exists empirical evidence that the police want to grab me when I'm walking down the street, detain me for hours with no protection from the elements, deprive me of water and give me only food that will make me thirstier, lock me in a crowded room with vomit on the floor, prevent me from being able to use the bathroom for hours and hours and then make me go where people are watching and there is no toilet paper, restrain my arms and then beat me (as though they couldn't already beat me up unrestrained), and sexually harass and sexually assault me. On the other hand, there is empirical evidence that the black bloc people want to vandalize property and taunt people whom they perceive to be part of the problem. The worst thing I could imagine them doing is beating me up if they perceive me to be part of the problem (and I haven't heard any anecdotes of them actually beating someone up), and I'd much rather be beaten up and then at least get to go home than be detained for 36 hours (which might still involve being beaten up).

3. People say I have nothing to worry about if I'm not doing anything wrong. But being denied use of a bathroom for hours and hours, being boxed in on the street and unable to leave, being locked up and denied water - that's something to worry about. To me, that's practically torture. (Yes, there are many worse ways to torture, but that doesn't negate its tortuousness.) People say the police are only trying to protect me, but this is all a threat from which I need protection. In fact, it might be a greater threat than any other I face. If some random bad guy tries to attack me or abduct me in the street, it is possible for other people to jump in and stop him. If some random bad guy tries to attack me in my home, it will likely at least be over in less than an hour. I've also heard people say there's no need to worry because it's just a one-off thing because of the G20. WTF? None of the don't worry people saw this coming beforehand. I didn't hear anyone say "Now, they might grab you off the street on the way to work and lock you up for 36 hours because of the G20, but that's just because of this G20 thing and it isn't going to be happening again." So what other future circumstances aren't they seeing? (Not to say it would be acceptable even if it were just a one-time thing, but if that were true it would at least reduce future worrying.)

4. Analogy:

Are you in love with me? You should be, you know! You should love me! I'm lovable! Sure, I'm not perfect, but who is? I'm just a decent human being doing my best. You'd better love me, because if not you're going to be alone forever or stuck with some idiot!

That's not going to make you love me, now is it? Even if everything I've said there is true, it's not enough to make you love me. I'd need to provide evidence of my loveability, over a long period of time and ideally through some adversity.

Now imagine if there were a bunch of people out there, saying that they're my former lovers, all with stories of how unlovable I am. Some of these people are public figures with a reputation to maintain, for whom there would be no benefit in repeating this information if it weren't true. Their stories are all consistent, pointing to clear patterns of behaviour (as opposed to being one-off flukes), and some of them are backed up with photographic and video evidence.

In that case, I'd have to work even harder to make you love me. I'd have to show, over an even longer period of time and with greater reliability, that it's safe to love me. I'd also probably have to articulate to you what has changed that will prevent this unlovable behaviour from recurring in the future. If I said "Oh, I was doing that because I once had a lover who treated me poorly," that wouldn't be enough to mitigate your concerns. I would need to give you clear specifics of what has changed that this incident in the past will no longer be a problem in the future, and also show positive behaviour over the long-term, including through the kinds of adversity that triggered my previous unlovable behaviour. The more you hear, the more you can't just love me.

This is why I can't just trust the police, no matter how much people tell me I should trust them.

5. I do wonder how much the intimidating sight of massive hoards of police in riot gear led to the escalation.

Analogy:

Imagine you're walking down the street. About 100 metres in front of you, there are half a dozen large, intimidating men, dressed thuggishly. (Whatever you, personally, consider thuggish.)

- Imagine they're sitting on a patio, eating and drinking.
- Imagine they're standing outside a building, smoking and shouting things at passers-by
- Imagine they're standing outside a building, smoking and talking among themselves.
- Imagine one of them has a puppy, and the rest of them are all petting and admiring it.
- Imagine they're all standing in a row, arms folded, blocking your path.
- Imagine they're huddled around a car that has its hood up.
- Imagine they're sitting around drinking beers somewhere where you're not suppose to be drinking, with empty bottles scattered around them.

Your reaction would be somewhat different in these different scenarios, wouldn't it? If one of them called out to you, you'd react differently. Might this not have escalated if, at first sight, the police presence was more like what we're accustomed to seeing?

6. And what are we to make of the fact that the reason given for not stopping the black bloc people from wrecking the city was that they were trying to protect the fence? (The Globe & Mail says the fence was 6 km long, and I've heard numbers ranging from 10,000 to 25,000 for the number of police officers. What were they doing, standing shoulder to shoulder around the fence? Why bother with a fence then?) So they're letting the city get wrecked to protect a precious few elite? Just how many people were behind the fence anyway? Wouldn't it be awesome if some world leader showed the noblesse oblige to say to their security people "Do what you need to do to protect me, but only if it doesn't inconvenience the citizens I represent."?

7. They said they did the massive sweep at Queen & Spadina because they thought some of the people in the intersection were black bloc people dressed in civvies. But how am I supposed to know the back stories of the people in the intersection with me? In a typical crowded intersection on a beautiful day there are like 100 people. What, specifically, do they expect me to do so I can go about life (including crowded intersections) normally without getting caught up in a police sweep?

8. They said one of the reasons they were after these particular people is because they did not dissociate themselves from the black bloc. The thing is, neither did I. Why not? Because what the black bloc did was so fucking dumb-ass that I figured my condemnation of their asshattery would be taken as a given! I've never dissociated myself from Hitler or Than Shwe or Paul Bernardo or Kanye West when he was interrupting Taylor Swift or those dickheads who sit with their legs spread on the subway either, for the same reason (although I'll take the opportunity to do so now). So whom do they want us to dissociate from? Which circumstances require an explicitly state dissociation and which are obvious? How, precisely, do we dissociate from someone to the satisfaction of the police? We need clear instructions on this!

9. Some people have said that the reason the police arrested everyone at Queen & Spadina is because they said not to go past a certain line, and a few people did. (According to the explanation I was given, the people in the video who were sitting on the ground with their backs to the police had crossed the invisible line, but I can't vouch for that personally.) I've also heard people complaining that legitimate protesters did nothing to stop the black bloc people (although we have video evidence that some people did). But how could I possibly stop a stranger from doing something stupid? I'm not big or strong enough to tackle a person, nor persuasive enough to convince them from crossing an invisible line. People don't generally listen to me. That was a method our teachers used in middle school. Sometimes they'd punish the whole class because we didn't stop the person from doing something wrong. Why didn't they understand that if I could get my peers to do what I wanted, I'd make them stop bullying me? Not being influential is...well, I might not go so far as to say it's punishment in and of itself, but it's certainly an inconvenience in every area of life as compared with being able to get people to do what you tell them. And now I have to worry about the police punishing me for being uninfluential in the general vicinity of an idiot.

10. If the police want to get ordinary citizens onside, they could do a world of good with humane detention conditions. One of my favourite guilty pleasures is the In Death series, which are police procedurals (although I'm finding them difficult to read now, bastards!) From these books, I've learned that sometimes the police need to investigate people to eliminate them, sometimes they need to ask questions of people who were present at the time or might have seen or heard something, sometimes they need to go through certain procedures for the record, etc. And because of this, before last weekend, if I found myself questioned by police officers, I would just assume they're doing their job. If I'd had to wait around several hours but I'd been indoors, not handcuffed because I'm no threat, reasonable access to washroom facilities and drinking water, I would totally be right up there with the people who are saying that they're just doing their jobs trying to protect us and we have to accept a certain amount of inconvenience. What makes me fear the police is the prospect of being kept outside in the elements unprotected (because if you're just running down to the corner store and the rain isn't forecast to start for several hours, you don't bring gear for three hours in the rain), not able to go to the washroom, detained for 36 hours, insufficient water, the only food available makes you thirstier, threatened with sexual harassment, overcrowded room, no room to lie down for 36 hours, vomit on the floor, etc. If they'd just gone through the motions of giving everyone the benefit of the doubt, they wouldn't be facing any complaints now.

11. Something needs to be done. We need to have assurances that we aren't going to be rounded up when we're just innocently walking down the street. (Or even if we're walking down the street doing something stupid and/or obnoxious, but perfectly legal and ultimately harmless.) We need assurances that we won't be forced to pee our pants or go without water or be sexually assaulted just because we happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. We need assurances that we can trust our police. There are elements out there that are still threats to us and from which the police are supposed to protect us. You often hear that crimes aren't solved because witnesses don't come forward to the police. How can any of this work if we can't trust our police? This is detrimental to society as a whole!My now-octogenerian grandmother fled with her family from behind the iron curtain and sacrificed greatly her entire life so her descendents wouldn't have to go through this! If they can't provide us with assurances, they should at least provide my grandmother, and all those like her, with a refund!

12. I mentally wrote that last paragraph before I learned that police chief Bill Blair lied about the fence law. So even if they give us these assurances, how can we trust them? What are we supposed to do in a world where the police outright lie to us, publicly and on record, about what the laws are? How is our society going to function?

13. Do the police even want us to trust them? Or do they just want us to fear them? If it's the latter, couldn't they at least have a word with all the people who keep scolding me for not trusting the police?

Edited to add: Since 2007, I'd been wanting Eddie Izzard to come to Toronto, and asking him to do so at every opportune moment. Last month he did just that, and there was much rejoicing. But now I'm even more glad that he's already come to see us, because as it stands right this minute I could not in good conscience ask him to come here. He probably would because he's brave, and from a purely selfish fannish perspective I do want him to, but I cannot look someone I so like and admire in the metaphorical eye and say "You should come here. It's a good idea."

Things They Should Invent: shyness drugs

From today's Miss Conduct:

Two of my co-workers are expecting. One of the women is friendly to everyone. The other will walk by me without replying to a hello. She does this to many people and only talks to her select friends. One of her friends has planned a dual shower for both (it is suspected that this is the only way people would go to a shower for the second woman). I am not attending because of a prior commitment. I had planned on buying a gift for the first woman and giving it to her at a different time, but some people are planning to buy a joint gift for the second woman. I know I am not the only one who feels uncomfortable buying a gift for someone who does not make any effort to be friendly to everyone.

I've seen this sentiment a number of times before, and what shocks me and baffles me and makes me want to weep every single time is that people think this is snobby and malicious, and don't see that it is so obviously a sign of shyness. (Although props to Miss Conduct for recognizing that in her answer!)

Apparently there are a lot of very loud people out there who have no idea what it's like to be shy. They don't know that eye contact is physically difficult. Seriously, it feels incredibly intense and your first instinct is to look away. They don't know that it would literally never occur to us that a stranger/casual acquaintance might want a hi how are you from us, because they're obviously cool people with their own lives so why on earth would they need us? It's not malice, it's a desire to quietly keep out of everyone's way!

And having it interpreted as malicious makes it even worse for the shy person (and, consequently, even worse for the co-workers who do want an eye contact hi how are you). I do eventually unshy once I feel safe in a particular context, with particular people, but it takes time and external validation. Having it considered malice just makes it worse and puts the barrier towards unshying further and further out of reach. If I were the shy woman in the letter, I wouldn't have thought anything about not getting as many gifts as my colleague. Obviously she's cooler and better-liked, that only makes sense. My feelings wouldn't even have been hurt, I would simply have seen that as the natural order of things. However, because that is so obviously the natural order of things, it would lead me to renew my pattern of eyes down don't disturb anyone. That isn't passive-aggressive, that's just the only response that would ever occur to me. However, if I got just as many gifts as the other woman and was treated as an equally valued member of the team, that might make me feel like they do actually want me and are actually interested in me, which would make me more likely to say hi to them.

I've been working on doing the eye contact hi how are you thing for nearly half my life, and it's still work. Making eye contact with someone I'm not close to is like trying to push like magnetic poles together. I can do it, but I have to struggle against my natural instincts to do so. (I even have a memory of adults getting offended at my lack of eye contact when I was a preschool child. You're a preschooler, doing the only thing that it even occurs to you to do (it feels intense so you look away) and grown adults are taking offence because you're not doing the thing that is so against your every instinct that it would never occur to you. What do you even do with that? No wonder I always felt like the world had a secret set of rules that no one had told me about!) It's like doing the splits. You can train long and hard to get flexible enough that you can do the splits, and if you practice your routine enough you will eventually fall into the splits at the right point. But it will never be natural. You'll never get to a place where you're at home, with no one watching, just sprawled out reading a book, and you end up in the splits.

Anyway, my point: someone should invent drugs that make non-shy people feel shy just temporarily, like for a day or two. So people could see first-hand what it's like when your every instinct has you wanting to walk quickly by, eyes down, so they don't see you and you don't see them. Then maybe we'll all be able to understand each other better and unshy people more quickly.

(And yes, I would be interested in experimenting with the opposite drug to make me feel outgoing, but I'd probably end up becoming an addict.)

Sometimes I hate introvert brain

One effect of my highly introverted brain structure is that thoughts and ideas don't always come to me in words. They come to me in abstract, intangible concepts, which then need to be consciously and mindfully put in les mots justes before I can express them. This is why sometimes in conversation I just sit there saying nothing. This is why I sometimes just freeze up in my other languages - when the concept isn't coming out in perfect words, it isn't coming out at all. (Hoshi Sato demonstrates this phenomenon here.) It's actually an advantage in translation, because I'm less likely to become married to the idea that a certain word is a certain concept, so my translations are more idiomatic and I don't fall for calques or faux amis as often. But sometimes it's a disadvantage in real life, because people tend to evaluate you based on the words on the tip of your tongue.

Today this is annoying me especially, because I just read this article, and there's something he's missing. It's a nuance. I'm certain it's present IRL, but the USian author of that article can't see it from where he's sitting. I know it's there. I can feel it in my brain. I could point you to the precise part of my brain where I can feel it. But it isn't coming to me in words.

It's like I'm a fish who has lived in salt water my whole life and has never been in fresh water, talking to a fish who has lived in fresh water his whole life and has never been in salt water (it's amazing what modern telecommunications technology can do!), trying to explain to this freshwater fish what it feels like when ocean salinity levels change. I know there is something he isn't groking, but I can't articulate it because it's both a subtle nuance and an inherent part of my cultural environment.

And, current events being what they are, by the time it comes to me in words, it will be irrelevant.

Analogy for today's Anthony Wolf column

Anthony Wolf writes a column about why it's not fair for a custodial parent to remarry against their kid's will.

I agree with his thesis, but I think it could be explained better, so I made an analogy:

Imagine your daughter is a few years older and has gone off to university. She lives in apartment-style student housing, sharing a two-bedroom suite with another girl. Partway through the year, the other girl decides to move her boyfriend into the suite. Your daughter objects, saying she hardly knows this guy and doesn't want to share her home with a guy she hardly knows. She doesn't want a third person on the shower schedule. She doesn't want a strange man she didn't even choose herself into what has so far been female-only space. She doesn't feel comfortable with him seeing her bras hanging up to dry or her used pads in the bathroom garbage can. She doesn't want to bump into him when she gets up to pee in the middle of the night, or lose the ability to sit in the living room in her jammies and watch movies.

But her roommate insists. "You don't get to control my life," she says, "Aren't I entitled to some happiness?" So she moves in the boyfriend. There's now a man your daughter didn't choose living in her home against her will. That's not fair to your daughter, now is it?

It's equally unfair for you to move in your man against her will. "But I love him!" Yes, and your daughter's roommate loves her man. That still doesn't make it fair to your daughter.

At this point, many parents will say "But I'm the adult, I'm supporting her, I'm paying for the house." Yes, and that makes it even more unfair, because your daughter can't move out of your home. She's completely trapped. Plus, because your man is an adult and your daughter is a minor, he technically has parental authority over her. So think back to the roommate situation, and imagine your daughter's roommate is also her landlord, and when the boyfriend moves in he'll become her landlord too, and she has signed a lease that they won't allow her to break. That's not fair at all, is it? If that were an actual landlord/tenant situation, she might actually be able to take them to court!

So if a member of the household objects to bringing a new member into the household (especially when the current household member is a 14-year-old girl in a female-only household, and the prospective new member is a strange man), do them the decency of waiting until they're in a position to leave if they choose. Four years isn't too long to wait.

(As an aside: Personally, I can't imagine four years being too long to wait to get married in a case like this where you have an extremely good reason to wait. You still have the person in your life, they're still there for you, you just can't share a household quite yet. You've found the love of your life! A four-year wait is small potatoes, especially when you can still see them and talk to them every day.

Time goes faster when you get older. While I'm technically old enough to be the mother of a 14-year-old, given social norms the lady in the column is probably somewhat older than me, so four years would seem like even less time to her. I seriously cannot put myself in that mental place of not being willing to wait.)

How the former Reform MPs can keep their pensions with the full support of the public

In 1993, MPs from the then-Reform Party (now part of the Conservative Party) spoke out against MPs' pensions and said they would refuse to collect these pensions themselves. It has recently been revealed that 11 of these MPs are now in line to collect six-figure (defined-benefit, indexed) pensions.

Here's how they can keep their six-figure pensions with the full support of all Canadians: create defined-benefit indexed pensions for everyone.

The Government of Canada already has expertise in administering defined-benefit indexed pensions: it's called the Canada Pension Plan. Unfortunately, the CPP pays a maximum of $934.17 a month, which isn't enough to live in with any degree of comfort or security.

So what they have to do (as I've blogged about before) is allow us to access this expertise - which is already being paid for by our tax dollars - by letting us put our RRSPs, contributions from defined-contribution plans, and any other money we care to throw at the problem into a fund from which the government will then guarantee a defined benefit. The defined benefit would be such that if you contribute your full RRSP amount, you get a return commensurate with the benefits you'd receive from a good employer-provided defined-benefit pension plan.

Based on CPP rates, I think this would be feasible. Maximum CPP benefits are $934.17, which works out to $11,210.04 a year. Maximum annual CPP contributions are $2,163.15. From this, we can conclude that the experts at the CPP can give you a pension of about to five times your annual contribution. Since your RRSP amount is 18% of your income, they should be able to get you a return close to your pre-retirement income if you contribute your full RRSP amount every year.

Contributing would be optional - if you think you can do better yourself, you're welcome to do so - but it would be there as an option for those of us who don't have hardcore long-term investing in our skill set. And I seriously doubt Canadians would begrudge a few MPs their pensions if we all had the security of commensurate pensions ourselves.

Added bonus analogy for why we need professionally-administered pensions for everyone:

Think back to when you were about nine years old. You knew intellectually that one day you'd have to get a job and make money to support yourself. You understood that concept perfectly well. However, you didn't know what to do about it. You'd never been employed or employable, so you didn't know how to make yourself employable. If you'd had to make yourself employable single-handedly, it would have been a hit and miss proposition. All you'd have is hearsay about what makes a person employable, and even if you grok and agree with someone else's assessment of what you need to achieve, you wouldn't necessarily know how to go about achieving it.

Fortunately, you didn't have to figure it out yourself. You were in school. People who knew better than you and had already gone through the process of making themselves employable (and acquired extensive training in how to turn children into functional members of society along the way) had a school curriculum all planned out, so all you had to do was keep going to school and work hard and do well. Be a good girl, and the experts will get you where you need to be.

That's what planning for retirement is like. I've never experienced long-term financial planning. Hell, I've never experienced long-term anything. Retirement is over 35 years away, and I haven't even been alive for 30 years (to say nothing of financially aware). I have some hearsay on how to do it, much of which is self-contradictory, but there's too much blind trust, too much guesswork, and even when I understand what I have to do I don't know how to go about doing it.

This is why we need a professionally-administered plan that we can pay into. We need experts who know better than us and are training in turning investments into defined-benefit pensions to make and administer a plan for us, so all we have to do is be good and pay in our designated RRSP contributions. It's simply unrealistic to expect everyone to be able to figure it out themselves, just like it's unrealistic to expect every 9-year-old to be able to figure out how to turn themselves into an employable adult.

Subterfuge

A while back, Language Log mentioned a book called The Big Penis Book. Before moving on to the morphosyntax of the title, the author says "I realize I don't have to defend my interest in the book...". And while he does go on to defend his interest in the book, when I was reading that for the first time back in 2008, it struck me for the first time in my life: you don't actually have to defend your interest in that book. We're all adults here, we can read The Big Penis Book if we are interested in doing so.

It does seem odd that it would take me until the age of 27 to realize that we don't need to defend our interest in whatever thing we might be interested in, but you have to remember that for the vast majority of my life, I was a child. And when you're a child, these things work differently. If you want The Big Penis Book when you're under 18, you have to justify it to your parents. Even if you can acquire it without their permission, they're probably going to ask you to explain yourself when they find it in your room. And even if your parents do allow you to keep it, your teachers at school might take it away and call your parents and try to get you in trouble. And even if you can get past all these grownups, if your classmates find out, they're probably going to call you gay and make your life a living hell. All in all, when you're a child, it really is best and easiest to resort to subterfuge.

The subterfuge becomes a habit - after all, you've never known anything else - and it does take some time and perhaps a bit of external revelation like I got from that Language Log post to realize that in adult life, if you just quietly do your thing, no one's going to judge you or try to stop you. People simply don't care if you're reading The Big Penis Book.

And that's where Adam Giambrone made his mistake.

We're an open-minded lot here in Toronto. No one would care if Adam Giambrone didn't have a partner by his side. How many people can recognize, or even name without googling, David Miller's wife or George Smitherman's husband? The only people were actually interested in Adam Giambrone's relationship status were those who think he's pretty. In any case, especially when you eliminate the demographic who wouldn't consider voting for him because of his age and/or politics, no one would care if he didn't have a partner. No one would care if he was single and enjoying "casual encounters" as they say on Craigslist. A 19-year-old girlfriend would have briefly raise a few eyebrows, but ultimately we'd shrug and go "Meh, they're all adults." No one would especially care if he were poly or in an open relationship with honesty and consent by all parties. Even if he danced down Yonge St. during Pride in a leather harness and fishnets, we'd just applaud and wolf-whistle and gloat about it when comparing ourselves to other more uptight cities in the world. But the fact that he had a long-term relationship, publicly presented himself as part of a long-term relationship - and this in a context where no one would have batted an eye if he didn't have a partner beside him - and then ended up being a cheater was the nail in his coffin.

It's like if he had announced, a propos of nothing, that he's working his way through the complete works of Tolstoy. The press never asked what he's reading, the only people who've asked what he's reading are people who are trying to flirt with him, but he tells people he's working his way through the complete works of Tolstoy. He also makes it known that he keeps a copy of War and Peace in his briefcase, perhaps seeing to it that he's photographed reading War and Peace on the subway. Then someone discovers that, inside the War and Peace cover is not Tolstoy's masterwork, but rather The Big Penis Book.

No one would have expected him to be reading War and Peace in the first place, it would never have occurred to anyone to think less of him for not reading Tolstoy right this minute, and no one would have particularly cared if he was seen overtly reading The Big Penis Book. But the subterfuge is the problem. It's what teenagers do when they don't want to get caught reading The Big Penis Book, and it's unbecoming an adult who would presume to be mayor of a city of millions, especially when the major barrier to his candidacy is seen as his relative youth.

It isn't about lying per se and it isn't exactly about the adultery (although I, personally, do find that distasteful and it is a large mark in the minus column). It's more about the choice to have an elaborate cover-up (i.e. camera-ready long-term partner brought into the spotlight as part of the campaign) of something that doesn't need covering up (i.e. multiple casual relationships).

All of which is terribly unfortunate, because this campaign is already skewing further right than I'm comfortable with.

This must be an analogy for something, I just haven't figured out what yet

I'm currently reading the official biography of the Queen Mother. It seems when the UK was working on creating their National Health Service in the late 1940s, the Queen Mother (who was at that time the actual Queen of England) was opposed to it. Why? Apparently before the National Health came in many hospitals were charity-run, and Her Majesty felt that if the government provides this essential service to everyone who needs it, British subjects might not feel that it's as morally imperative to exercise the Christian virtue of charity.

Overall and in general, she seems very much full of noblesse oblige and not at all an upper-class twit. There have only been two things in the book that made me go WTF (which isn't so bad because it's a big fat book in a completely Other setting and so far all the action has taken place in the first half of the 20th century, when values and attitudes and practices were much different.) But that one just came a slapped me in the face and made me do a triple take.

It must be a useful analogy for something, I just haven't figured out what yet.

Multi-purpose analogy

This is an analogy for a) people who insist that they should be able to use offensive language (as opposed to "politically correct" language) without people taking offence, and b) people who insist that they shouldn't have to edit their translations to eliminate double entendres that aren't present in the source text. (And, as usual, I'm not referring to any of my co-workers here.)

It's like meeting a guy name Richard and insisting, despite his protests, on calling him Dick.

I've posted so many analogies in my blog that it has become an analogy

There are some people who have the attitude "I can do X, so anyone should be able to do X." This often comes with connotations that the people who can do X are just being lazy, and if they'd be diligent they'd be able to do X just fine.

So here's my analogy:

I average two blog posts a day. (Yes, I've been lazy lately, but two a day is the mathematical average.) Approximately 50% of my posts (based on a random sampling of several archive pages) contain original creative or critical thinking (as opposed to being links, quizzes, youtubes, diary entries, liveblogging, or emotional angst). I've been keeping up this pace for years.

So before you go assuming that because you can do something anyone can, I'll ask you this:

Where's your blog?

Now I know that there are several people reading this who can blog at a steady rate. But I think we've all seen enough dead blogs to get the point.

"The older you get, the smarter your parents get": two possible perspectives

I've been very frustrated with my elders lately, because they aren't being smarter than me in the ways I need them to be. I'm not talking professional knowledge or knowledge specific to certain hobbies and interests, I'm talking life knowledge and skills that you absorb or figure out just by living life. How to remove a stain. How to invest your money. How to answer the "Tell me about a time when you had a conflict in your workplace" job interview question when you haven't actually had a conflict in your workplace. I keep finding my elders know no more than I do in these areas, and sometimes are two steps behind me. It's very frustrating, and also utterly baffling. I came into the world in 1980 knowing literally nothing. Since then, I've had to learn how to walk and talk and eat and read and socialize and balance my bank account. And during this time, I also developed a certain amount of expertise in stain removal and investing and job interviewing. But my elders, who had already figured out how to do all the walking/talking/bank account stuff long before 1980 and have been removing stains/investing/job interviewing since well before 1980, don't seem to know anything more than I do.

So my first theory is that they have some huge amount of extra knowledge in areas that I can't even see, can't even begin to imagine. So I was wishing that there was some way to tell how much of a person's knowledge you aren't seeing. In the Sims, if a person has five personality traits but you only know three of them, you can see that there are two other traits you don't know. I was thinking it would be so helpful if we could see something similar for people we're talking to in real life. I don't know if it's the same for everyone, but when I talk to someone I tend to get the impression that what I'm getting from them is representative of the whole person. It would be far easier to respect an elder who tells me "wash your clothes inside out" as though that were panacea, as though I haven't already been doing that for a decade, if I knew that I was only seeing 10% of what they have to offer, rather than thinking they had lived for decades and decades and the best they have to offer is that I should wash my clothes inside out.

In a fit of frustration, I tweeted that I've learned more from my elders about what not to do than about what to do. But that ultimately led to my second theory: our elders don't actually have decades of experience on us, because in living alongside them and observing them we're constantly absorbing the lessons they've learned from their decades of experience. I'm not even talking about stuff our elders try to deliberately teach us, I'm talking about lessons that they learn when we're kids - we learn right along with them.

For example, both of my grandmothers are still living in their own homes, but they need their kids to drive them places and help with stuff around the house. I look at that and think that's not what I want my golden years to be like (especially since I won't have kids), so I've already altered my life accordingly by choosing to live in a highrise in a high-density, walkable neighbourhood. My parents were constantly painting and fixing up their house, and I hated it. The smell, the mess, the instability...so because of that, I'm never going to buy a fixer-upper or go charging starry-eyed into a DIY redecorating project only to end up weeping on the floor of a half-ruined room. My parents also took us on a lot of trips, and I hated it. Close quarters, carsickness, lack of control over food and accommodations, and I simply don't get any pleasure out of sightseeing or being on a beach or whatever. So because of this, I'm never going to waste thousands of dollars and a year's worth of vacation time and ruin a relationship on some idealized "OMG, travelling = sexy!"

But I think part of the problem is that our elders think that we're in the same place they were when they were our age. I'm pretty sure at least one of my grandmothers thinks I don't realize that, in being childfree, I won't have any kids to take care of me when I'm old. I'm pretty sure she and her husband bought their house when they were in their 20s without giving any thought to what life will be like at 80 so she assumes I'm doing the same, whereas in real life I learned about the long-term unsuitability of car-dependent housing at the same time that she did.

Analogy: Our elders are like pure mathematical theorists coming up with new proofs and equations. We're the math students decades later casually using those proofs and equations in our applied math textbooks. I certainly could never come up with a way to calculate or prove derivatives, and I promptly forgot the long-form equation as soon as we started learning the product rule and the quotient rule. But I can still use derivatives in physics for velocity and acceleration, etc. Unfortunately, a lot of my physics work is being discounted because the senior academics think my theories on velocity and acceleration are worthless because when they were my age they didn't have a way to calculate derivatives.

Analogy

There's a school of thought that if you're renting, you're completely throwing your money away. I don't feel that way. I think I'm getting my apartment in exchange for my rent. Yes, I have to keep paying for it, but I also have to keep paying for food and utilities and toilet paper. But some people from this school of thought have told me that it's a waste to rent since I do want to own a condo someday, and I should buy something - anything - so my money is going into building my own capital. I prefer to live in the most optimal conditions possible even if I have to rent for longer before I can afford to buy, but people from this school of thought think I should buy something - anything, anywhere - and I can always move or upgrade later when I can afford it.

Here's an analogy for that line of thinking:

"You're wasting money taking those birth control pills! After all, you do want to have children someday. So you don't have enough money or a big enough home or a partner who's interested in parenting any children you might pop out? No biggie, you can always get those later."

Analogy for why you might want a tubal even if your husband has a vasectomy

When reading about the couple who was denied a tubal even though they had two children and their family was complete, one of the most frequent comments I noticed was people saying the husband should get a vasectomy instead.

I know a vasectomy is far less invasive than a tubal, and I know it is a solution that works for a huge number of couples. But some people might still want a tubal even if their husband has a vasectomy.

Here's why:

Suppose some evil bad guy has given you a bomb. For plot purposes, you can't just put down the bomb and walk away - it is somehow attached to you in a way that you, personally, are unable to remove. So you call the bomb squad for help.

The bomb squad arrives and tells you you're in luck - this bomb isn't going to go off by itself, it will only go off if exposed to open flame. So the bomb squad goes through your home and removes ever source of open flame. They remove your barbecue and your fireplace and your lighters and your matches and your candles and everything else in the house that might produce or require open flame. Then they say "Okay, no more sources of open flame, you're safe."

Now, by strict statistics, the vast majority of people aren't going to be inadvertently exposed to open flame. There are no sources of open flame in your home, and if you ever see any open flame anywhere else, you're going to run in the opposite direction.

But you still want them to get rid of the bomb, don't you?

Dress code

Today was the first warm day of the year, so, like butterflies emerging from a cocoon, most of us wore skirts or dresses for the first time since last summer. There was a flurry of girl talk as we admired and complimented each other's outfits (many of them bought in the dreariness of March with a longing eye cast towards warmer summer weather), and the conversation soon turned to how each and every one of us, at one time or another, had been prevented by patriarchical or church oppression from enjoying the breezy summer skirt that we'd been longing to wear since March. There were stories of the indignity of being sent home from Catholic school to change, the humiliation of being forbidden by a father to leave the house, the dehumanization of being told you're going to go to hell because you look sexy in that dress, even a now-ex-husband who threw out a beloved sundress because no wife of his was going to wear anything that slutty in public. We were all very glad that we now live such liberated 21st-century lives that we can express ourselves with whatever pretty things we want to wear.

Because my profession is female-dominated and has a disproportionately large number of recovering catholics (Vive la révolution tranquille!), and because my workplace wants to attract the best and brightest of the profession, my employer makes a point of providing a modern, liberated, feminist, secular environment. In this spirit, after hearing our stories, our manager implemented a new policy to ensure that we are never oppressed again: now our dress code stipulates that everyone must wear a skirt that is shorter than fingertip length. No long hemlines, no pants, no stockings, no leggings, none of the tools our patriarchical and religious oppressors used to force us to submit by hiding our bodies.

Of course, everything I've said so far is a complete and total lie. I made up every word of it. We have no dress code (and in fact make a huge point of not having a dress code), we don't have epic girl-talk sessions squeeing over each other's outfits in the office, I don't know of any abusive ex-husbands who threw out their wife's clothes, it's pure fiction. It was hot out today and I did wear a skirt, but everything else is nothing more than a product of my overactive imagination and the glass of wine I had with dinner.

But think about what you were thinking when I said our dress code requires a short skirt. You were probably thinking something like "WTF? That's no fair at all!" You might have been thinking "But what if you don't want to show that much leg?" You might have been thinking "That sounds kind of lecherous and creepy." If you're lecherous and creepy, you might have been thinking "Cool! How can I get a job there!" But I'm certain - I'd bet real money - that you weren't thinking that it's in any way reasonable or helpful or productive or kind or in any other way good policy to forbid us from covering our legs.

By direct extrapolation, it is equally bad policy to ban the burqa in France.

Analogy for banked sick leave

Suppose your employer gives you 12 days of paid sick leave a year, unbankable. (Q: Why 12? A: Because it makes the math easy.) You can use these days at any point during the year, but you aren't going to get more than 12 in a year. And if you don't use them all because you haven't been that sick, they don't roll over into the next year.

Now suppose your employer announces that they're going to restructure things a bit. Not a change in benefits, just purely administrative. Now, instead of up to 12 sick days a year, you get up to 1 sick day a month. You can use this day at any point during the month, but you aren't going to get more than 1 in a month. If you don't use it that month because you're not sick, it doesn't roll over into the next month.

That's less helpful, isn't it? We don't get sick every month, and we don't always get only one day worth of sick in a calendar month. Most months you don't need any sick days, some months you need two. It's less realistic, less fair, and rather arbitrary. And if your employer did work that way, wouldn't it be more tempting than it is now to call in sick one day during the last week of the month just because you're tired or you have a bit of a sniffle or you need a mental health day?

Allowing employees to bank sick leave over a career is better than having sick leave expire at the end of the year for exactly the same reason why allowing employees to use their 12 days of sick leave at any point during a year is better than limiting them to one a month. It is a direct logical extrapolation.

Childfree for Dummies: Part V

Some people dismiss our self-identification as childfree because they themselves used to not want children, but grew to want children when they got older.

As it happens, I used to want children. When I was 10, 11, 12 years old, I had what I can best describe as a strong biological yearning for to have a baby, and even as old as 14 the idea held appeal for me. Nothing ever came of it because mentally and socially I hadn't reached the point where even kissing a boy seemed like a pleasant way to pass the time. But as I grew up and matured, I came to realize that it wasn't actually children I wanted. I wanted a living breathing visible sign to show the world that someone loved me, and when that desire met my newfound flood of hormones it manifested itself as a yearning for a baby.

Does that invalidate your desire to have children, making it merely a childish phase that you will grow out of?

Childfree for Dummies: Part IV

Apparently not wanting children is "bitter, selfish, un-sisterly, unnatural, evil."

Not all my childfree brethern will agree with me or publicly admit this, but I will tell you right here, upfront, that it's true - I am in fact bitter, selfish, un-sisterly, unnatural and evil.

In other words, not at all the kind of person you'd want raising children.

So don't you think I should be sterilized before some poor innocent child is subject to my bitterness, selfishness, un-sisterliness, unnaturalness and evilness?

(Also: Why do doctors who refuse to sterilize patients on the basis that those patients are too young and don't know what they're doing permit those very same patients to have kids?)

Analogy for why introverts have trouble with small talk

This started in response to the comments on this Cary Tennis letter but got far too complicated for a comment thread.

Think of the pool of all possible conversation topics - everything you might ever conceivably blurt out - as a well-organized email folder system. The vast majority of the emails are archived by topic. These are things you can say in reply to productive and substantive inquiries. There are a few emails in your inbox. These are new things that you can introduce during a lull in conversation. And there's a bunch of crap in your spam folder. These are things that are completely useless in conversation. (e.g. "There are four light switches in this room." "The capital of Uruguay is Montevideo".) You hardly ever look in your spam folder anyway, it's all the Nigerian finance minister trying to enlarge your penis and sell you fake university degrees anyway. Sometimes you do go into your spam folder for a specific reason, just like sometimes you do need to know what the capital of Uruguay is, but the vast majority of the time you ignore it and it isn't even worth thinking about.

I think introverts have a stricter spam filter than extroverts. We have things in our spam folder that more extroverted people would consider suitable conversational openings. There are fewer things in our inbox, and some of the things that (by conventional social standards) should be in our inbox are in our spam folder.

For example, it would never ever in my life occur to me to ask a casual acquaintance about their vacation plans. The topic was simply in my spam folder, right in between "I have a hole in my sock" and "I had two cups of coffee today." (Yes, these are things I might just announce to a close friend, but, as I've blogged about before, it works differently for close friends.) When I read someone mention that as a possible topic of conversation in the Cary Tennis comments, a lightbulb went off. "Oh, THAT'S why people at work keep asking me that!" Because it was in my spam folder, I figured they were asking me for a particular reason, just like if your best friend sent you a penis enlargement email you'd assume they have some particular reason for doing so.

So where extroverts can just reach into their inbox - the first page you get to in any email interface - to find an appropriate topic, our inboxes don't have enough topics. So first we have to come up with the idea of looking in our spam folder at all. Then we have to sort through it trying to find something that's less crap. We can't give them just anything from the spam folder, we have to sort through the whole thing (and how much crap is in your spam folder right now?) trying to find the conversation equivalent of, say, a shoe sale flyer rather than penis enlargement spam.

And the other problem is, once we find the exact conversational nugget we need in our spam folder, we think "Hey, there's some useful stuff in here, let's filter less strictly so it ends up in the inbox!" Then we set our spam filter too low and end up with all kinds of crap in our inbox, and the next think you know we're walking around offering to enlarge people's penises. This manifests itself in the phenomenon of people who claim to be introverts going off on a babbling rant about themselves or their interests. Because all the stuff in our inbox tends to be stuff we're genuinely interested in, if someone treats one of our spam topics like an inbox topic we assume they're genuinely interested.

So unless you want us randomly free-associating and dumping the entire contents of our mental spam folder on you, you'll have to either tolerate our pauses or take more than your share of the lead.

Edited to add: Having been bullied adds another dimension to all this. My bullies would often ask me questions that would sound perfectly innocuous to outsiders and that adults with benign intentions may well use as fodder for small-talk, but the bullies would use whatever I answered as fodder for bullying.

For example, they might ask me what I did that past weekend. If I didn't do much of anything (which, objectively and outside the bell jar of adolescence, I rather quite enjoy), they'd mock me for not having any friends. If I did something with my family, they'd mock me for spending time with family because I don't have any friends. If I did something with friends, they'd mock me for the insufficient coolness of my friends or our activity. In the weird world of middle school, it was a loaded question to which every possible answer was socially unacceptable.

So because of all this, a bunch of topics that appear benign to outsiders are quarantined in my mental spam folder because they look just like emails that have previously given me viruses. After having been judged so often for my answer to "What did you do this weekend?" I wouldn't dare ask that of an acquaintance or co-worker any more than I would ask them "So are you a top or a bottom?"

Tamil

Let's talk about the word Tamil.

Tamil is an ethnicity. They are a people of shared ethnic origin who live in India and Sri Lanka. It is also one of the most, if not the most beautiful-looking languages I've ever seen.

The OED defines Tamil as follows:

a. One of a non-Aryan race of people belonging to the Dravidian stock, inhabiting the south-east of India and part of Sri Lanka. b. The language spoken by this people, the leading member of the Dravidian family. Also attrib. or as adj.

The concept is similar to Basque or Punjabi or Uyghur.

There is also a paramilitary organization known as Tamil Tigers. They define themselves as a liberation army, others consider them a terrorist group.

In any case, here's the important part:

Not all Tamils are Tamil Tigers.

It's probably safe to assume that most, if not all, Tamil Tigers are Tamil. However, not every Tamil is a member of the Tamil Tigers. In fact, I'd hazard based on pure demographics that the majority of Tamil people are not involved in the Tamil Tigers at all.

Analogies:

1. In Quebec, there is a political party called the Parti Québécois. In the mid-90s, they were working to separate Quebec from Canada. However, not all Québécois want to separate Quebec from Canada. (In fact, as I recall, 51% of them didn't).
   
   
2. In the UK, there is a political party called the British National Party that is opposed to immigration. However, that does not mean that every British person is opposed to immigration.
   
   
3. In Ireland, there either is or was an organization called the Irish Republican Army that would bomb things. However, that does not mean that every Irish person is into bombing things.

I know many of us first encountered the word Tamil in the phrase "Tamil Tigers", most often in something that was negative about the Tamil Tigers, so our first gut reaction upon hearing the word Tamil is "bad!" However, it is simply an ethnicity and, like all ethnicities, is morally neutral in and of itself and encompasses all types of people.

Analogy for being incapable of faith

As I've mentioned before, the reason I'm an atheist is because I'm congenitally and inherently incapable of religious faith. My brain just doesn't bend that way.

Not everyone can grok this, so here's how it works:

Think of colourblindness. A person who is colourblind only sees one colour where a person with normal vision sees two colours. The colourblind person simply cannot see the two colours. They cannot be talked into seeing two colours. They cannot be reasoned, threatened, bribed, coerced, seduced or manipulated into seeing two colours. If they're crafty and a good actor, they might be able to put on a good show and convince people that they can see two colours, but the fact of the matter is they can't.

Another analogy that might work: if you're monosexual (I know some people don't like that word but it is le mot juste in this case), think about the prospect of being sexually attracted to the gender you aren't sexually attracted to. You just can't, can you? You could fake it, sure. You could even look at someone of your non-target gender and see intellectually why someone might be sexually attracted to them. But you just can't actually feel it yourself. Similarly, I can fake religion, and I can see intellectually why a person might engage in, say, Judaism or Buddhism. But I just can't do it for real myself.

What I'm still trying to figure out: are there actually people anywhere who can truly change their faith on demand?