The Oakland hills fire

One Sunday morning in 1991 some friends and I were visiting a friend who was a UC Berkeley student living on the east side of campus. I noticed that the rising sun shining through the window made a bright red square of light on the floor of her little apartment. But a moment later I realized that this couldn't be right. It was maybe nine in the morning; that couldn't be the sunrise. I went to look out the window.

Smoke was curling beautifully around the sun, glowing red in churning billows.

I called my friends over to look. A minute later we were outside, watching a huge pillar of black smoke rise into the sky. Ten minutes later, we had climbed into a car to chase the smoke and see if we could find where the fire was.

Fifteen minutes after that, we realized that we had misread the distance to the fire; the pillar of smoke was much bigger than we thought. And it had already visibly grown. We turned back, and turned on the radio to hear reports of the fire. Firefighters were responding; some places in the hills were being evacuated, but we were safe.

Our group split up to forage for brunch and enjoy a downtown Berkeley ramble. Shortly after noon, from Shattuck avenue, I saw a long line of fire in the hills, black smoke streaming. I telephoned my host — from a pay phone, this was before we all had phones in our pockets — and my friends were worried. They still weren't being evacuated (and it later turned out they wouldn't be) but radio reports kept describing the fire as growing. “Get back here so we can go home.”

By the time I met back up at my friend's apartment, the whole sky was hazy with gray smoke. Making our way to the freeway, we passed through an even smokier neighborhood. The streets were quiet, and there was an apocalyptic air. Streetlights were on, ash was drifting down over everything, the sky was gray and the sun shone a deep red through it. I misquoted Revelation 6:12: “The sky became as sackcloth and the sun became as blood.”

Finally we found our way to the freeway, and sped out of the smoky area, heading back to Santa Cruz.

As one makes the connection from Berkeley's Highway 24 to 880 heading south toward San Jose, there's an overpass at the edge of downtown Oakland that arcs up high before descending to the freeway, where one can see 880 extending to the south. We were facing thick southbound traffic, but northbound there were no cars.

Just fire trucks. Dozens of them, as far as the eye could see, racing north to the fire.

Corey Robin

A little snippet from Corey Robin's excellent book The Reactionary Mind:

The conservative position stems from a genuine conviction that a world thus emancipated [by the left] will be ugly, brutish, base, and dull. It will lack the excellence of a world where the better man commands the worse.

Note that this corresponds with my own thumbnail description of the core of liberalism and conservatism.

Race Forward

Drawn by a good plug from the marvelous Jay Smooth, I took a look at the recent report from the folks at Race Forward. Both the content and the format are good stuff: it's well-produced, and I really love their focus on thinking systemically and sharpening our vocabulary for talking about that.

Both to give you a taste of the report, and to have it handy for other discussions, I'm going to quote their taxonomy of racism.

Race Forward’s Levels of Racism

During the course of our three decades of in-person trainings and consulting for clients of various backgrounds and fields of work, Race Forward has developed definitions for “Four Levels of Racism” — two within the individual level of racism and two within the systemic level — that we re-introduce here. The key distinction is between the two levels of racism, individual and systemic. While we acknowledge the impact of individual acts of racial discrimination, we believe that it is critical to do so within a deeper analysis of systemic racial injustice.

Individual-Level Racism

INTERNALIZED RACISM lies within individuals. These are our private beliefs and biases about race and racism, in-fluenced by our culture. Internalized racism can take many different forms including racial prejudice toward other people of a different race; internalized oppression, the negative beliefs about oneself by people of color; or inter- nalized privilege, beliefs about superiority or entitlement by white people. An example is a belief that you or others are more or less intelligent, or beautiful, because of your race.

INTERPERSONAL RACISM occurs between individuals. These are biases that occur when individuals interact with others and their private racial beliefs affect their public interactions. Examples include racial slurs, bigotry, hate crimes, and racial violence.

Systemic-Level Racism

INSTITUTIONAL RACISM occurs within institutions and systems of power. It is the unfair policies and discriminatory practices of particular institutions (schools, workplaces, etc.) that routinely produce racially inequitable outcomes for people of color and advantages for white people. Individuals within institutions take on the power of the institution when they reinforce racial inequities. An example is a school system that concentrates people of color in the most overcrowded schools, the least-challenging classes, and the least-qualified teachers, resulting in higher dropout rates and disciplinary rates compared with that of white students.

STRUCTURAL RACISM is racial bias among institutions and across society. It involves the cumulative and compounding effects of an array of societal factors including the history, culture, ideology, and interactions of institutions and policies that systematically privilege white people and disadvantage people of color. An example is the overwhelming number of depictions of people of color as criminals in mainstream media, which can influence how various institutions and individuals treat people of color with suspicion when they are shopping, traveling, or seeking housing and employment – all of which can result in discriminatory treatment and unequal outcomes.

Systems Analysis

What it is and why it’s needed — Because the popular notion of racism is narrowly focused on personal prejudice and racial animus, a more complete analysis and presentation of race-related developments is needed. When racial dynamics are not sufficiently contextualized, it is easy to fall into the trap of victim blaming. A systems analysis adds context, reveals root causes and contributing factors, and surfaces possible corresponding solutions. A systems analysis involves an examination of questions: What institutional policies and practices are involved? What are the historical underpinnings and cumulative inequities? What cultural norms and popular ideas are reinforcing the problem? What is causing the racial inequities and tensions and what are possible solutions? If racial justice advocates adopt a routine and robust use of a systems analysis to inform our work — and the way we publicly communicate our issues — we can be a model for other advocates and journalists to do the same.

A big piece of their analysis is that mainstream media do not generally talk about racism on the systemic level at all, and break down “seven harmful racial discourse practices” that need to change:

1. Individualizing Racism
2. Falsely Equating Incomparable Acts
3. Diverting From Race
4. Portraying Government As Overreaching
5. Prioritizing (Policy) Intent Over Impact
6. Condemning Through Coded Language
7. Silencing History

Sophisticated and accessible. Joe Bob says check it out.

Turn the other cheek

Fascinating specifics about Jesus' crafty use of nonviolence.

In Jesus’s time, striking someone of a lower class (a servant) with the back of the hand was used to assert authority and dominance. If the persecuted person “turned the other cheek,” the discipliner was faced with a dilemma. The left hand was used for unclean purposes, so a back-hand strike on the opposite cheek would not be performed. Another alternative would be a slap with the open hand as a challenge or to punch the person, but this was seen as a statement of equality. Thus, by turning the other cheek the persecuted was in effect putting an end to the behavior or if the slapping continued the person would lawfully be deemed equal and have to be released as a servant/slave.

More examples under the link, though it doesn't include my favorite example of Jesus' clever rhetorical jujitsu: “render unto Ceasar”, in which he plays dumb in order wittily observe unspoken assumptions. “Gee, I don't know about money. Can I see one of these coins you're talking about? There's a guy's picture on there! I guess it's his! So if he really wants it back …”

Pro-Life

Huerca Zafada says something I've said about “pro-life” folks which I've said, only better than I've ever said it. Read the whole thing.

In each and every dark pit of desperation, I have never seen a pro-lifer. I ain’t never seen them babysitting, scrubbing floors, bringing over goods, handing mom ^$50 bucks a month or driving her to the pediatrician.

You want to put a stop to abortion? Make a world that doesn't need it.

Politics and the lust for power

I was just reading a little monograph about political philosophy on the internets, the way you do, and there came the all-too-familiar moment in which it asserted “and here you see that the professed ideology of my opponents is at best self-deception on their part, for it is revealed that their true motive is pure lust for power”. And I let out a little sigh at this failure of the Ideological Turing Test. It invalidated the piece's whole argument, for me.

It hardly matters what side this piece was arguing. It galls me when I am told that my political ideas are just a mask for my simple desire to exercise power. It galls me no less when people say the same of my political opponents; if we are to understand what is going on, we must credit our opponents with at least a sincere desire for a better society as they conceive it.

Claiming a pure lust for power as the motives of one's opponents is a mark of the unsophisticated. A childish, cartoon view of politics.

So presuming the sincerity of one's political opponents — if not necessarily their honesty or goodwill — is a habit of the politically sophisticated.

But.

What of fascism? Though it rarely takes root, fascism is always with us. Rarely does it profess to be fascism. And one of its defining features is its radical disinterest in policy, its profound insincerity about its ideology, its pure will-to-power.

This makes the sophisticated vulnerable to fascism's deceptions if they do not learn to recognize its scent.

Bruce Sterling on startups and disruption

Chilling and vitally important.

In the startup world, you work hard and you move fast in order to make other people rich.

Other people. Not you.

You're a small elite of very smart young people who are working very hard for an even smaller elite of mostly Baby Boomer financiers … so they can buy national governments, shut the governments down, destroy the middle class and the nation-state.

That's been going on a long time. It's not something you invented; that's a historical development. There's a lot of reasons that the nation-state's got to go. There's a lot of reasons why a middle class is in the way.

But that's what you do. That will be the judgment of history for your startup culture. They're going to say that the twenty-teens were all about that:

“It was a tacit allegiance between the hackerspace favelas of the startups and off-shored capital & tax avoidance money laundries. And what were they doing? They were building a globalized network society.”

And that's what's coming next: an actual globalized network society. You're routing around it from the bottom while they climb over it from the top, but you're both aimed in the same direction. That's why you're in tacit allegiance, whether you know it or not.

And right now everybody lives the way that people used to live under empires in colonial states. We're all auto-colonialized by the austerity. That's your big dragon. That's your actual dragon. Not, like, the little tactical dragon. That's the BIG DRAGON. And you know it's the big dragon because you're part of it. You're actually its brain and its nervous system.

You.

And as long as you are making rich guys richer, you are not disrupting the austerity. You are one of its top facilitators.

More:

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The (sort of) rosy version, from Mark Andreessen:

Speaking of disruption: Tech people like me can sometimes come across as presumptuous/arrogant re disruption of other peoples' industries.

It is possible this is an understatement. I am sure that some of my Twitter friends will expand on this for me
:-).

From this side of the aisle, though, it's less smugness, more the result of hard experience and learning from our own lives and careers.

In tech, our *own* businesses are disrupted by technology change and new competitive entrants at whiplash-inducing rates.

It's shocking how quickly you can go from the hot disruptive upstart to the stodgy disrupted incumbent in tech -- frequently within 5 years.

I've probably been on the receiving end of disruption 30 times in the last 20 years -- almost as many times as I've been on the giving end.

Now, on the one hand, you might say, “How can people live like that?” ... what's wrong with a little stability?

But, what we see is: Frequent disruption is the handmaiden of rapid progress -- and it's a blast to create and work amid rapid progress.

It's not just rapid progress of tech. It's also rapid grown of companies, and even better, rapid development of *people* & their talents.

It's hard to stay in tech for any period of time and not get good at rapid adaptation, skill acquisition... and new product creation.

As software eats the world: Same disruption dynamics always present in tech now applying to many more industries, fields, professions.

Rather than superiority/contempt, what a lot of us feel is deep sympathy/understanding -- even if that's not always how it comes across!

And now we all have the opportunity to learn together -- to make many parts of industry/life more innovative/dynamic, better for everyone.

Poverty

For future reference: Will Someone Please Address (Poverty)

I live wealth. But I am not wealthy. I will never be wealthy, no matter how much money I make or what title I hold, because I have spent over thirty years of my life, the overwhelming majority, orbiting poverty’s gravity well. I have not just “been poor.” I have drunk poverty straight from the jug. I’ve been over, under, and through it. I have at various times hated it, hidden it, rebelled against it and worshiped it, and after 35 very long years, I seem to have clawed my way out of it. But no matter how long or far I walk in the other direction, it’s there. It’s always there.

It’s hard to capture the depth of my sincerity when I said I didn’t want to write about this. If I’m any indication, the last thing your average Recovering Poverty Citizen (RPC) wants to do, is talk about being poor. You don’t climb out of the poverty tar pits by accident. If you get out, it’s because you really want out. Talking takes you back in.

This is relevant to a range of social justice discussions:

As a human race, we just haven’t got a bead on the resource distribution problem. It’s over our heads, it’s intimidating, so people shut down.

The conversation is stuck because individual people are stuck. And people are stuck for multiple reasons, not the least of which is that everyone is freaking out. When somebody opens their mouths to talk about it, somebody else rips their freaking head off and spits down their neck hole.

This conversation isn’t working for anyone. Let’s don’t have it anymore. Let’s start with what we should be talking about.

Highly recommended by a friend whose wisdom on the subject I trust.

Progress

Ariel Sharon
1928-2014

Relentless warrior

I’ll admit it. My first thought was … good.

But my second thought is more complicated.

I've spent a fair bit of time studying and thinking about the fate of the modern Levant, the question to which Sharon devoted his life, and it’s really fucking complicated. When talk turns to Israel, I typically wind up arguing with whoever's in the room. In loopy lefty circles, that typically means defending Israel by patiently explaining the history of the region — trying to stick to those precious few things that are clearly agreed upon as fact — to people who really don’t know anything about it. In staunchly Zionist circles, it typically means criticizing Israel by painstakingly distinguishing Arab Palestians from Syria or Egypt or Jordan, pre-’67 from post-’67. In more daring circles, it may mean talking about how Zionism fits into the history of nationalism and European imperialism, asking why Israel was even a good idea in the first place, or reflecting on whether Brooklyn isn't the New Jerusalem.

So my second thought about Sharon is complicated.

On the first day after a person’s death, I try to honor the tradition of not speaking ill of the dead. I gritted my teeth and did it for Reagan. But I cannot do it for Sharon. I have no tears to cry for him.

Yes, Sharon has been at war with a real injustice, fighting for a people wronged by history. But he has made his war against the wrong enemy, the Arab Palestinian people, by despicable means, awash in the blood of innocents. He has failed as a leader of his own people, robbing them of their honor, their opportunities for peace, and the truth. He is one of the principal midwives of our era of terrorism, leaving a curse for all humanity. We are all well rid of him — even, and perhaps especially, the Jews of Israel.

Israeli Jews sometimes reference Exodus in calling themselves (mixing self-deprecation and pride) עַם-קְשֵׁה-עֹרֶף: “a stiff-necked people”. This is, of course, both true and false — and vividly so of Sharon. I hold distant hope than now, without him, that will change.

So no tears. But today I can hope for the better parts — only the better parts — of his dreams to come true. In that spirit, I strongly suggest that you read the decade-old post from which I just copied this one.

• Times of Israel
• The New Yorker
• Al Jazeera
• New York Times
• Informed Comment
• Jerusalem Post
• Quotes at Salon and Al Jazeera
• Human Rights Watch
• Counterpunch

Posts on this subject are obviously fraught, so:

• I keep an index of resources
• the moral question is simple:
  Palestinian liberation is right & necessary
• the history is complicated:
  I have a survey which addresses many common misunderstandings
• the praxis is complicated:
  antisemitic entryism into the movement for liberation is subtle, pervasive, and unacceptable

Fukushima

Dr. M at Deep Sea News is keeping an index of All The Best, Scientifically Verified, Information on Fukushima Impacts.

With all the misinformation around the internet here are links to articles that we trust. The following provide credible information about what is actually occurring and/or dispel myths about Fukushima radiation that are prevalent on the internet. I will not link to pseudoscience, misinformation, or outright lies in this post or allow them in the comments below. These posts and ideas have received far more attention and links than they deserve already. I provide the author, their credentials, a statement of the misinformation if applicable, the take home message, and my favorite quotes.

Deferring to expertise

A friend observes:

Listening to the nuclear power plant safety portion of John Hockenberry’s NPR show a few minutes ago, I suddenly had a moment of clarity about my own emotional biases. If I’m reading or listening to someone where most or all of what they think or claim has no admitted contradictions, no difficult choices, no acknowledged problems, no legitimate entry for debate or disagreement, nor confession of doubt or uncertainty, I fundamentally mistrust them at a very primal, emotional level, whether or not I know anything else about the issue at hand. The older I get and the more I know and have seen, I distrust even (perhaps especially) my own judgment in inverse proportion to how certain I feel about an issue.

And goes on to say:

Oh, there is a short road from this feeling to crippling self-doubt. It’s also a reason that academics in general are shitty communicators who over-qualify everything. This is really more a feeling than an argument — it’s a gut thing for me. In a way it makes me easy to manipulate in the other direction — all I need is someone who entertains some doubts and ambiguity and I’m foolishly reassured about what they want or think.

As someone who shares this same impulse — and thus of course sees it as a mark of sophistication — I take it as an adaptation to what Julian Sanchez calls “one way hash arguments.”

Sometimes the arguments are such that the specialists can develop and summarize them to the point that an intelligent layman can evaluate them. But often — and I feel pretty sure here — that’s just not the case. Give me a topic I know fairly intimately, and I can often make a convincing case for absolute horseshit. Convincing, at any rate, to an ordinary educated person with only passing acquaintance with the topic. A specialist would surely see through it, but in an argument between us, the lay observer wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell which of us really had the better case on the basis of the arguments alone — at least not without putting in the time to become something of a specialist himself. Actually, I em a possible advantage here as a peddler of horseshit: I need only worry about what sounds plausible. If my opponent is trying to explain what’s true, he may be constrained to introduce concepts that take a while to explain and are hard to follow, trying the patience (and perhaps wounding the ego) of the audience.

Come to think of it, there’s a certain class of rhetoric I’m going to call the “one way hash” argument. Most modern cryptographic systems in wide use are based on a certain mathematical asymmetry: You can multiply a couple of large prime numbers much (much, much, much, much) more quickly than you can factor the product back into primes. A one-way hash is a kind of “fingerprint” for messages based on the same mathematical idea: It’s really easy to run the algorithm in one direction, but much harder and more time consuming to undo. Certain bad arguments work the same way — skim online debates between biologists and earnest ID afficionados armed with talking points if you want a few examples: The talking point on one side is just complex enough that it’s both intelligible — even somewhat intuitive — to the layman and sounds as though it might qualify as some kind of insight. (If it seems too obvious, perhaps paradoxically, we’ll tend to assume everyone on the other side thought of it themselves and had some good reason to reject it.) The rebuttal, by contrast, may require explaining a whole series of preliminary concepts before it’s really possible to explain why the talking point is wrong. So the setup is “snappy, intuitively appealing argument without obvious problems” vs. “rebuttal I probably don’t have time to read, let alone analyze closely.”

If we don’t sometimes defer to the expert consensus, we’ll systematically tend to go wrong in the face of one-way-hash arguments, at least outside our own necessarily limited domains of knowledge. Indeed, in such cases, trying to evaluate the arguments on their merits will tend to lead to an erroneous conclusion more often than simply trying to gauge the credibility of the various disputants …

Update

Scott (whom I think is the same Scott Alexander of the excellent deeply problematic Slate Star Codex) calls his response to this epistemic learned helplessness.

I am obviously just gullible in the field of ancient history. Given a total lack of independent intellectual steering power and no desire to spend thirty years building an independent knowledge base of Near Eastern history, I choose to just accept the ideas of the prestigious people with professorships in Archaeology rather than the universally reviled crackpots who write books about Venus being a comet.

I guess you could consider this a form of epistemic learned helplessness, where I know any attempt to evaluate the arguments are just going to be a bad idea so I don't even try. If you have a good argument that the Early Bronze Age worked completely differently from the way mainstream historians believe, I just don’t want to hear about it. If you insist on telling me anyway, I will nod, say that your argument makes complete sense, and then totally refuse to change my mind or admit even the slightest possibility that you might be right.

Speaking with conviction

On occasion people have told me that I speak too directly. That I state my opinions without saying “but that's just my opinion” and such.

I reject the mushmouthed voice which that implicitly advocates.

Here is a poetic evocation of the principle.

A note about Israel

Posts on this subject are obviously fraught, so first:

• I keep an index of resources
• the moral question is simple:
  Palestinian liberation is right & necessary
• the history is complicated:
  I have a survey which addresses many common misunderstandings
• the praxis is complicated:
  antisemitic entryism into the movement for liberation is subtle, pervasive, and unacceptable

This keeps coming up. So a quick note about Israel.

If you cannot clearly identify and distinguish the differences between all of these things …

• Zionism as a historical movement
• Zionism as a contemporary political position
• the state of Israel as a geopolitical entity
• the process by which the state of Israel was founded
• the state of Israel’s right to exist
• the history of Israel’s policies
• Israel's current policies
• Jewish ethnic identity
• Jewish religious identity
• Jewish racialized identity
• the religion of Judaism
• 1967
• 1948
• The Balfour Declaration

… then your opinion about Israel is not informed enough to be relevant.

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Update

I’ve had some people suggest to me that this post implies a position on Israel’s policies. Since the policy positions people have inferred from this post have never matched my actual position, I think I can rightly claim that any implications you read in this post reflect not me, but Something Else.

My point is neither more nor less than that the atmosphere is full of bullshit about Israel pointed in many different directions. It is hard to develop an informed opinion in this environment, and unless you do the work to become informed, you will fall into somebody’s trap.

Brooks

As a long time David Brooks hayta, I really enjoyed Gary Greenberg's little reflection on knowing Brooks in his youth.

(Evidently fictional but it's deliciously hard to tell.)

TTRPG psychological shock systems

Unknown Armies 2E

The tabletop roleplaying game Unknown Armies has a great system for dealing with the psychological shocks of the characters’ adventures, a more complex iteration of the sanity system from the classic Call of Cthulhu game, in which characters eventually go mad from exposure to Lovecraftian Nameless Horrors.

There are five different kinds of psychological stress in Unknown Armies, each tracked independently. Shocking experiences can make a character either hardened to the stress it presents, or fragile about it, or both. A character might become hardened against encounters with the unnatural but fragile in the face of violence. If a character becomes hardened or fragile enough, other people start to notice that there is something off about them, and ultimately a character pushed too far becomes an insane NPC.

In the game as written, when something happens with a higher shock rating than the character’s relevant Hardened score, the player rolls percentile dice against the character’s Mind score to see if they can keep their composure. On a successful roll, they keep it togther and their Hardened rating for that shock goes up +1. On a failed roll, the character’s Fragile rating goes up +1 and the player chooses whether the character freezes, flees, freaks out (screaming et cetera), or goes into a fighting frenzy against the cause of the shock.

In my games, I tweaked this with a house rule where characters rolled against different attributes for the different types of stress:

• Violence vs Body
  a frail character is more likely to panic in the face of violence
• Unnatural vs 100-Mind
  an intelligent character is more vulnerable to dread from seeing something supernatural
• Helplessness vs Soul
  a person with a grounded spirit can better face this threat
• Isolation vs Mind
  an intelligent character has more to think about while alone
• Self vs 100-Soul
  violating their personal norms is more upsetting to a person with a strong spirit

After I originally wrote this post, 3E engaged a similar idea and took it much further! In UA 3E, characters have ten base stats in opposed pairs linked to each stress. As one is changed by encounters with Violence, say, one’s Struggle stat used for fighting improves while one’s Connect stat decreases. This can feed a breakdown spiral: one uses Connect to protect against Isolation shock, so even hardening to a shock creates vulnerabilities.

Over on Twitter, Dragon Cobolt has an incisive comment about how this produces an ethical dimension which contrasts with other games.

So, my friend Jay was recently in a D&D game she had to quickly leave when the party went pretty quickly to torturing a captured NPC for information and it hit me how … the adventure and the mechanics both incentivize and encourage the players to unpeople stuff. And like, torture in D&D is kinda toothless? It’s just a re-themed skill check and if you’re not particularly engaged with the setting or the roleplaying, it can go by in a literal blink. “I rough him up for the password” “okay, that’s a DC12 intimidation check.”

Contrast with Unknown Armies. Unknown Armies actually has a … relatively robust coercion system for when you want to get an NPC to do something they’d rather not — and it’s infinitely more … visceral and bone cracking. Mechanically and narratively, you’re made deeply aware? It’s not just rolling percentiles, you need to know how you’re hurting someone. Hammering their helplessness gauge with threatening to ruin their lives, hammering their isolation by duct taping them up in a cargo container, that kind of thing.

And those things then have effects on your character — using a blowtorch on someone’s thigh? That’s a violence stress check. That’s going to change yourself. The game asks: Are you willing to become the kind of girl who will blowtorch someone’s thigh until they do what you want?

That’s why I’ve never seen the kind of cavalier disregard for NPCs in any of the UA games I’ve run. People … shy away from the pain when it’s real. Which, like … that’s good? I think that’s good.

Vigorously agreed; this connects to the challenge of responsibly thinking about violence in TTRPG design more broadly.

Making stronger shocks more threatening

This similar mechanic comes out of a conversation with Zed Lopez about a game based on 2d6 rolls, rather than percentile rolls.

As in Unknown Armies, for each type of shock characters have both a Hardened and a Fragile rating, with different experiences having a different Rank in the level of shock they produce. Seeing the ghost of someone one knows to be dead might be a Rank 6 unnatural stress, while a Tentacle Monster From Another Dimension which speaks in that person’s voice might be a 10. As in Unknown Armies, if a character’s Hardened score for a stress exceeds its rank, they need not roll. (“Bah! I’ve seen weirder!”)

When facing a shock, one rolls and adds the character’s Fragile rating for the shock, then compares the roll to the shock Rank and the character’s Hardened rating:

• under Hardened
  the character keeps their cool and gets another point of Hardened
• between Hardened and the shock’s Rank (inclusive)
  the character adds +1 Fragile for that shock and the GM chooses their response:
  • fight
  • flee
  • freeze
  • freak out
• above the shock Rank
  the player chooses one:
  • fight
  • flee
  • freeze
  • freak out
  and may also either:
  • add +1 Hardened point
  • add +1 Fragile point

The more severe a stress, the more likely it will make the character snap and become more fragile, and the less likely the player will have control over their reaction. Hardened characters tend to get more hardened still; less hardened characters tend to become more fragile. A high roll — more likely when very fragile! — creates a hard choice, fun for roleplaying.

Fate

This is a comparable house rule for Fate, my favorite TTRPG rules engine. I have tinkered with it at the table but do not yet consider it fully playtested.

Three skills protect against psychological shock:

• Violence protects against violence shocks, and is used for all fighting (and more). The difference in skills for weapons et cetera are all handled using Fate’s stunt system.
• Gnosis protects against weirdness shocks, and can be used to intuit truths about Scary Things one encounters, use spooky magic, et cetera.
• Willpower protects against other psychological shocks, and otherwise operates as written in standard Fate rules.

These skills must be justified by permanent character aspects, one for each level of skill — though an aspect may double up to support more than one skill. For example, a character with the aspects Former Army Commando and Deadly In A Fight could have +1 Willpower and +2 Violence.

When a character encounters a psychological shock, it functions as an Attack. Rather than roll for the Attack, the GM just gives it a value reflecting its severity; the player employs their character’s relevant skill to Defend. A character ignores shocks with an Attack value below their skill (like with Hardened ratings in the other systems). Our Former Army Commando with +2 Violence has no problem witnessing a bar fight (violence shock +1) but must roll their +1 Willpower to run into a burning building (will shock +2). Characters may use stunts, invoke aspects, or get help from other characters when making these rolls, but these do not help ignore the need for a roll.

If the character successfully Defends, their player may elect to harden the character, spending a Fate point to raise the relevant skill, transforming a character aspect into a different one which supports this. After running into that burning building, our commando might turn Proud Father Of Two Daughters into Relentlessly Devoted To Stopping The Cult Of Flames. He now has +2 Willpower but his relationship with the kids will suffer.

If the character fails in Defending against a shock, as normally in Fate the shifts use up the character’s Stress track … and if they cannot soak the Stress, they get a Condition. For these psychological shocks, we borrow from UA and give players their choice from a short menu of Conditions: Frozen or Fighting Frenzy or Freaking Out. (The GM may also offer context specific alternatives.) Fleeing is not a possible Condition because the Fate rules already have a mechanic for characters leaving a scene by conceding a conflict.

A player too impatient to go through the normal process for their character to recover from one of these Conditions may elect to have their character crack. This immediately clears the Condition and gives the character a Fate point, but they must alter a permanent character aspect to make it more troublesome; this may not improve skills as hardening does. For example, after seeing an eldrich horror a character might go from Elegant Debutante to Frightened Of Tentacles, or another character with +1 Gnosis supported by the aspect Aware Of The True Geometry Of The Cosmos might become instead Obsessed With The True Geometry Of The Cosmos.

This supports interesting player choices in the spirit of Fate and reflects how traumatizing experiences permanently change a person.

Internet bullshitpocalypse

Luke O'Neill at Esquire calls this The Year We Broke The Internet.

This is not a glitch in the system. It is the system. Readers are gullible, the media is feckless, garbage is circulated around, and everyone goes to bed happy and fed. BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti admitted as much when explaining, that, when he’s hiring, he looks for “people who really understand how information is shared on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and other emerging platforms, because that is in some cases as important as, you know, having traditional reporting talent.” Upworthy editorial director Sara Critchfield seconded the notion. “We reject the idea that the media elite or people who have been trained in a certain way somehow have the monopoly on editorial judgment.”

I would protest, however, that this is not new. Recall that deceiving us has become an industrial process.

Sodom

The popular imagination has it that in Genesis, Ha’Shem judges and destroys Sodom because of the practice of homosexuality there.

I’ve long grumbled that the story doesn’t really say that. Here’s the passage, Genesis 19:1-5, in which we see life in Sodom.

And the two angels came to Sodom at even; and Lot sat in the gate of Sodom; and Lot saw them, and rose up to meet them; and he fell down on his face to the earth; and he said: “Behold now, my lords, turn aside, I pray you, into your servant's house, and tarry all night, and wash your feet, and ye shall rise up early, and go on your way.”

And they said: “Nay; but we will abide in the broad place all night.”

And he urged them greatly; and they turned in unto him, and entered into his house; and he made them a feast, and did bake unleavened bread, and they did eat.

But before they lay down, the men of the city, even the men of Sodom, compassed the house round, both young and old, all the people from every quarter.

And they called unto Lot, and said unto him: “Where are the men that came in to thee this night? bring them out unto us, that we may know them.”

Ha’Shem sends some messengers to nuke Sodom because of unspecified “sin”. When they get there, Lot meets them and offers them a place to stay, then a mob shows up to rape them. Many other stories in the Tanakh show a preöccupation with hospitality, so I have long read that as an indictment of Sodom horrifically failing to welcome strangers properly.

But Doug Muder offers a bit of lore I didn’t know.

The only place where the Bible explicitly states the sin of Sodom is in Ezekiel

How interesting.

So I have a few translations for you of Ezekiel 16:49.

I like the clarity of the New American Standard translation:

Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had arrogance, abundant food and careless ease, but she did not help the poor and needy.

That said, I usually reach for the New Jewish Publication Society of America Tanakh when possible (as I did with the first passage from Genesis) since Christian translators have a tendency to project from the “New Testament” an interpretive frame on the text of the “Old Testament” which I find fishy. But yeah, that's essentially the same:

Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom: pride, fulness of bread, and careless ease was in her and in her daughters; neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.

Young's Literal Translation, which tries to represent the idioms and other verbiage of the original language as directly as possible has it as:

Lo,

this hath been the iniquity of Sodom thy sister,

Arrogancy, fulness of bread, and quiet ease, Have been to her and to her daughters,

And the hand of the afflicted and needy She hath not strengthened.

Well then.

---

Update: In lively discussion on Twitter, Mike Dwyer points me to Jude 1:7. The New International Version, translated by evangelicals, renders that verse in a way that suggests that sex was the cause of the destruction of Sodom.

In a similar way, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion. They serve as an example of those who suffer the punishment of eternal fire.

What’s up with that? I have two hairs to split looking at Jude.

First, “sexual immorality and perversion” is unhelpfully vague; does it mean homosexuality, or raping angelic houseguests, or what? Second, though the translation makes a strong implication that the destruction of Sodom was a result of “sexual immorality”, it doesn't make the connection as explicitly as Ezekiel does.

Second, a lot hinges on the translation here. Let’s pull up Young’s Literal Translation again. (I’ve inserted some breaks, to make the Greek grammar easier to parse.)

as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities around them, in like manner to these,

having given themselves to whoredom, and gone after other flesh,

have been set before — an example, of fire age-during, justice suffering.

There are interesting things in there.

One is that we have reached the limits of what we can discern without real expertise into the koine Greek of the Epistle of Jude. We could see this as a description of causes: “having had nasty sex, Sodom has been destroyed”. Or we could read this as a parallel construction: “having given …” and “have been set …” could be taken as two comparable aspects of Sodom, with an implied relationship but not an explicit line of causation from one to the other.

How are we to reconcile Jude with Ezekiel telling us “the failing of Sodom was that it was rich but did not give to its poor”? I read Ezekiel as making a stronger connection, but I wonder.

If we do take Jude as telling us that nasty sex in Sodom was a cause of the city's destruction, can we get more specific about it? “Whoredom” and “gone after other flesh” are oblique. Was it homosexuality? Houseguest rape? Angel sex? What?

Let’s take a close look at the Greek. I’m not a real scholar of Koine Greek, but a little nosing around on the web reveals a great deal.

“Gave themselves up to sexual immorality” and “having given themselves to whoredom” are both translations of the Greek word ἐκπορνεύσασαι, which appears nowhere else in the Bible. The root word here is πορνοε (pornos!), meaning prostitution. Okay, that’s a classic. The Tanakh and the Epistles counsel against visiting prostitutes. (Though I must note that in the Gospels Jesus can be easily read as speaking in prostitutes' defense.)

And what of “perversion” or “other flesh” (or “strange flesh” as in the King James Version)? The Greek is σαρκὸς ἑτέρας — sarkōs heteras. Yes, heteras is the same root as heterosexual! So it is impossible to resist asking why if the Bible wanted to condemn homosexuality would this not read sarkōs homos, “same flesh”, instead?

This reading of the Greek is certainly consistent with my reading of the story in Genesis as a story about hospitality — “going after other flesh” meaning attempting to rape strangers or visitors. It could be an allusion to ἑταῖραι, the courtesans of Hellenic society. Or Jude might even be talking about sex between humans and angels — angels being of a different kind of flesh than humans. This is not so fanciful as it sounds, since we have not only the episode in Genesis 19 but a description of sex between angels and humans in Genesis 6:2, as well as other references in apocrypha not included in the Bible today but which likely were known to Jude. It's even plausibly a condemnation of bestiality, though there's no other Biblical reason to suspect that in reference to Sodom.

But I find it impossible to read either ἐκπορνεύσασαι or σαρκὸς ἑτέρας as describing homosexuality.

---

Updates:

A look at the midrash from Chasids includes this:

It was announced in Sodom, “Whoever will give bread to a poor person will be burnt at the stake.”

Plotit, the daughter of Lot, who was married to a prominent Sodomite, once saw a poor man who was so hungry that he was unable to stand. She felt sorry for him. From then on, she made sure to pass him every day on her way to the well, and she would feed him some food that she had stashed in her water jug.

People wondered how the man managed to live. Upon investigation, they discovered her act and prepared to burn her. Before she died, she turned to G‑d and cried, “Master of the world, carry out justice on my behalf!” Her cries pierced the heavens, and at that moment G‑d said, “I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached Me.”

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg brings in more sources:

But there’s a parallel scene in Judges 19 — one with language and narrative cues that are so parallel to the Sodom narrative that clearly one of these stories intentionally echoes the other. There, too, there are strangers who arrive in the evening, who go to the city square, there are locals who ignore basic tenets of hospitality, a mob of men demanding the male guest, so that they may have sex with him, and the offering up of women instead.

In the Sodom story, there is a miracle that saves Lot and his family, and the people of Sodom are condemned to death; in Judges, a woman is handed over, raped and murdered—and the perpetrators condemned, with God sanctioning the waging of war against them as vengeance. The people who raped this woman were horrific violators, same as the people of Sodom attempted to be, and God is not on their side. Whatever is going on here, the problem isn't loving, consensual sex between men.

Interestingly, the Jewish tradition -- including Biblical sources — doesn’t believe that the sin of Sodom is homosexuality, sexual assault, or even poor hospitality.

Rabbi Michael Harvey says many of the same things ... and before getting to Sodom he points to something I had somehow never seen before about Leviticus 20:13.

וְאִ֗ישׁ אֲשֶׁ֨ר יִשְׁכַּ֤ב אֶת־זָכָר֙ מִשְׁכְּבֵ֣י אִשָּׁ֔ה תּוֹעֵבָ֥ה עָשׂ֖וּ שְׁנֵיהֶ֑ם מ֥וֹת יוּמָ֖תוּ דְּמֵיהֶ֥ם בָּֽם׃

“If a man lies with a male as one lies with a woman, the two of them have done an abhorrent thing; they shall be put to death—their bloodguilt is upon them.”

[⋯]

The verse in Hebrew in Leviticus 20:13 shows something that the English does not, namely that there are two words for “male” here. The first is “Ish” and the second is “Zachar.” The verse is a commandment to the men, the “anashim” (plural of ish), telling them that they must not “bed” with a “zachar” as they would with an “isha” (a woman). The verse could have used the word “ish” (man) here, but it does not. At the very least, even a Christian should notice the fact that the author (whether priestly or divine) chose a specific word, and the idea that the two words mean the same thing is absurd. Two kinds of male words means two different kinds of men, thus the verse is prohibiting a specific type of sex, most likely “the kind of sex between men that is designed to effect the power and mastery of the penetrator. Sex for the conquest, for shoring up the ego, for self-aggrandizement, or worse, for the perverse pleasure of demeaning another man is prohibited.”

Productivity versus wages

To have it handy, here's the graph:

Ian Welsh tells the tale.

Creativity

Antoun Nabham, inspired by ‘And I Cannot Lie’: The Oral History of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s ‘Baby Got Back’ Video, observes:

It's striking how the creation stories of great pieces of commercial art tend to share features:

1. Have a principled mission
2. Have a small team of committed people who have enough experience to at least know what excellence feels like when it's in the process of creation
3. Have a strong leader with final authority over the artistic vision, and at least one highly trusted advisor who can change that person's mind when necessary.

Serendipity is an emergent property of certain starting conditions.

You'd think that folks in the culture industries would structure things this way as a matter of course, but actually creating these conditions turns out to require a visionary with will and clout.

Silicon Valley buses

With Google's buses becoming a symbol of the friction between Old San Francisco and Tech Boom Silicon Valley — a tension which I literally embody — I'm finding I need to have handy Rebecca Solnit's brilliant original diary about the buses and what they signify.

Most of them are gleaming white, with dark-tinted windows, like limousines, and some days I think of them as the spaceships on which our alien overlords have landed to rule over us.

Other days I think of them as the company buses by which the coal miners get deposited at the minehead, and the work schedule involved would make a pit owner feel at home.
....
The Google Bus means so many things. It means that the minions of the non-petroleum company most bent on world domination can live in San Francisco but work in Silicon Valley without going through a hair-raising commute by car — I overheard someone note recently that the buses shortened her daily commute to 3.5 hours from 4.5. It means that unlike gigantic employers in other times and places, the corporations of Silicon Valley aren’t much interested in improving public transport, and in fact the many corporations providing private transport are undermining the financial basis for the commuter train. It means that San Francisco, capital of the west from the Gold Rush to some point in the 20th century when Los Angeles overshadowed it, is now a bedroom community for the tech capital of the world at the other end of the peninsula.

What went wrong

Ian Welsh's short essay Living In A Rich Society is a masterpiece of succinct description of how economics, society, and politics went badly wrong in America, telling the tale as well as could be told in under a fifteen hundred words.

Americans voted for suburbia and against black people (and don’t tell me otherwise, I remember Reagan’s campaign, and it was based on racism). The people who made those votes, the Reagan Democrats, mostly won their bet: their house prices went up, they didn’t have to live near people with melanin, and they retired wealthy and went to live in the south, where brown people wiped their butts.

But the price of this was the end of the rich society. The end of a society where you could tell your boss to go screw himself. And it was the end of a society in which big projects were regularly undertaken.

NORAD

Movies and TV shows often feature NORAD, the North American Air Defense Command, which has its headquarters dug deep into Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado to protect it against nuclear attack. Though apparently the Big Board isn't as cool as the one in WarGames, it is a real place.

In December 1955, when it was actually called CONAD, Colonel Harry Shoup was ranking officer when the phone rang. The phone — the red phone that you really don't want to ring, on your watch or any other time. He answers the phone, and has a very confusing conversation. The voice on the other end of the phone is asking a vexing question.

“Can I talk to Santa Claus?”

It turns out that the local Sears has placed an ad in the paper with a phone number so kids can call and talk to Santa. There's a misprint in the ad, and so NORAD has kids calling in every day. One can imagine that first call. Col. Shoup may have let slip who he was and what his job was. The kid wants to know about Santa, and NORAD tracks anything that enters US airspace ...

In 1955, the big board was a sheet of glass with a map, marked up with grease pencils. To help answer the incoming calls, the CONAD team marked the position of a sleigh with eight tiny reindeer. The following year, the folks at CONAD preëmpted any confusion by changing the number of the Red Phone and running their own ad with the number of the Santa Phone.

Mind you, these folks are government employees. Their job is to look for Russian planes. So they're doing this unpaid, on their time off. And every year they got more callers.

Needless to say, as aerospace technology advances, so does NORAD's Santa operation. And of course there's a website. A few years back there was a great video of the Santa tracking systems test done as they tracked Santa leaving the North Pole to attend the Hollywood Christmas Parade which is evidently lost to the ages, but they've recorded quite a few clips featuring deadpan military personnel describing their Santa tracking efforts.

Yes, Virginia

Santa Claus is real.

I’m serious.

Okay, okay: I’m being flippant, too. But when I assert the reality of Santa Claus I’m not merely kidding around, engaging in some Francis P. Church fancy, or participating in the conspiracy of deceit toward small children. I have a point I want to make.

Santa Claus is as real as I am.

Santa is, in truth, more real than I am. He has a bigger effect on the world.

After all, how many people know Santa Claus? If I walk down Market Street in San Francisco, there’s a good chance that a few people will recognize me; I happen to be a distinctive-looking guy. There's a chance that one or two of those people will even know my name and a few things about me, but the odds are greatly against it. But if Santa takes the same walk, everybody (or nearly everybody) will recognize him, know his name, know a number of things about him, even have personal stories about him. So who is more real?

You may roll your eyes and say, “Being recognized is a sort of effect on the world, sure, but it is a weightless, immaterial effect. That does not compare to my ability to do long division, or to chop carrots.”

Or … say … deliver gifts? Each year I deliver and sign my name to one or two dozen gifts under Yule trees. Santa? Uncounted millions.

You may protest that other people bought those gifts, wrapped them, signed Santa’s name, and put them under the tree, but I ask you: without Santa, would they have done all that stuff?

Santa Claus was a motive force which made those presents happen, much as I was the motive force who made my presents happen. I may have Santa beat in the chopping carrots department, but what he does well he does vastly better than I could possibly do it.

Santa has an effect on the world, one far bigger than I have. He’s been at it since well before I was born and I presume he’ll still be doing it long after I’m gone. Santa has a narrower range of things he does than I do, it’s true, but in his area of specialty, Santa outdoes me by an enormous margin.

Again you may roll your eyes, and say, “That’s all true but Santa Claus is not an ordinary flesh-and-blood human being like you and me. When you said that Santa was real, I inferred that you were claiming that he was a human being.”

Yet I made no such silly implication. Of course Santa isn’t a person like you and me. A child knows that. He can jump down chimneys and deliver presents to children all over the world in one night. No ordinary human being could do that. He’s a magical creature, a non-human entity.

Duh.

Once more you may roll your eyes. “Non-human ‘entities’ are not real.”

What, only human beings are real? What kind of ontology is that?

Mount Everest is not real? The Great Red Spot on Jupiter is not real? The Second Law of Thermodynamics is not real? The International Date Line? The Declaration of Independence? Walt Disney Pictures? My memory of my grandfather? The waves crashing on the beach in Waikiki?

There are various kinds of things that are real. How does Santa Claus not qualify among them? He is recognizable, distinct, has observable effects on the world.

Santa Claus is real.

It should be evident at this point that I am using Santa Claus to make a point about how we think about reality, about the limits of simplistically materialist ontology, about what I call the pagan sensibility which recognizes a range of different kinds of forces in the world and honors them. I’m using Santa as a familiar example of the pagan conception of what the gods are like.

I still love the special kind of understanding of the world which only the natural sciences provide. But the question of human experience does not respond to those tools. My own subjective experience is one long un-reproducible result. And what I see when I look at human experience is that we have strange encounters with subtle, non-human forces in the world: The Job Market, The Artistic Process, Morale At The Office, Murphy’s Law. The ancients called these bodiless forces spirits, angels, gods, and so forth; they are names for the ways in which humans experience and process these encounters with the forces in the world. And just as the New York Stock Exchange is real — a non-human entity, a pattern in the world, with a certain character, with things we perceive as preferences, intentions, and even moods which a person can interact with — so too the gods of the ancients like Hermes, Thor, or Jesus are real. So too even “made up” entities like Santa Claus or Chtulhu are, in an important sense, real.

We can get clever about how, in our human experience, we interact with these entities: how we think and act to get the response from the world that we want. That process, after spooky old Aleister Crowley’s usage, is convenient to call “magick,” because its methods are the things we associate with the word: rituals, symbols, and meditation. If that seems silly — and frankly, there are times when it still seems silly to me — I consider that in college I learned to predict the movements of cannonballs and invisible electrons by meditating on occult symbols drawn on a blackboard. That’s magick.

Westerners who take seriously magick and engagement with a range of gods and other entities have a funny name: Pagan. And okay, that’s me. I’m now at a point in my life where that funny name doesn't seem too awkward to apply to myself: sure, it’s easily misunderstood, and puts me in a category together with some pretty embarrassing folks … but doesn’t any language in talking about spiritual experiences have that problem? Heck, most Christians feel that way, and they have a much bigger propaganda machine than Pagans do.

Santa is a thing that happens when the human frame encounters its own impulse to give gifts: it grows images and stories and names, it takes on a life of its own greater than any person can command.

Santa Claus is real.

Hail Santa! Bringer of gifts! Indulger of children! Herald of the Yule! Spirit of generosity! Elf of good cheer!

Hail and welcome!

---

Update: In The Santa Template for Pagan Worship, Aaron Leitch looks closely at Christmas ritual and makes the case in even more explicit detail than I have.

It will surely amaze you to find out that Santa Claus is a modern deity who fits each and every requirement of ancient Pagan deity worship. What follows is not about the well-known Pagan origins of the Santa Claus image (aka, Father Christmas — who has close ties to Germanic images of Odin). Instead, this is about the modern incarnation of Santa himself as a Western deity.

The manner in which we moderns deal with Santa Claus, and Christmas in general, is exactly how rites to Gods were performed in ancient times. Knowing this, it can provide an awesome sounding board against which to test our methods of dealing with any God we choose. At the very least, it offers us a glaring contrast to our normal Neo-Pagan methods.

---

I've been quoted on The Wild Hunt, where there is more commentary on Santa by other Pagan bloggers. And I have a later story about a a Pagan Christmas miracle from LaSara Firefox Allen. And Visions of Sugarplums, a story about a Pagan getting a surprise visit from Santa.

Fascism has no programme

expanded March 2025

I occasionally find myself having to explain that fascism is not quite an ideology as we ordinarily understand one. It doesn’t have a defining governing policy, or economic policy, or foreign policy. It has, indeed, a hostility to specific programmatic commitments, defined instead in its attitude of nationalism, belligerence, and naked will-to-power.

Mussolini provides clarifying examples. Italian historian Roberto Vivarelli:

From the very beginning, for example, the relation between words and deeds among Mussolini and his followers was very peculiar, and words were used not to state any firm conviction, nor to outline a definite political program but, rather, to arouse emotions that would generate support for a changeable line of action.

Robert O. Paxton’s landmark analysis The Anatomy of Fascism:

Fascist leaders made no secret of having no program. Mussolini exulted in that absence. “The Fasci di Combattimento,” Mussolini wrote in the “Postulates of the Fascist Program” of May 1920, “… do not feel tied to any particular doctrinal form.” A few months before he became prime minister of Italy, he replied truculently to a critic who demanded to know what his program was: “The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our program? It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. And the sooner the better.”

In an unnerving conversation with an avowed fascist on the internet, he once said to me:

I am enlightened enough to reject all forms of self-delusion. And when ideology is transcended, only will remains.

This relates to a related pattern of speaking in bad faith, and I have a long post which addresses how this fits into a general understanding of fascism.

Calling in

Ngọc Loan Trần writing at Black Girl Dangerous notices a familiar challenge.

What happens when thousands of people who all “get it” come together and everyone knows something about “the work”? We lose all compassion for each other. All of it.

I witnessed all types of fucked up behavior and the culture that we have created to respond to said fucked up behavior.

They propose adding “calling in” as an alternative to “calling out”.

I don’t propose practicing “calling in” in opposition to calling out. I don’t think that our work has room for binary thinking and action. However, I do think that it’s possible to have multiple tools, strategies, and methods existing simultaneously. It’s about being strategic, weighing the stakes and figuring out what we’re trying to build and how we are going do it together.

We need to work on this.

Holy Guardian Superman

image courtesy of a lovely post about the Last Son of Krypton
at Theory of Everything Comics

Max Landis is terrible person, but he understands Superman:

a person who could do anything, and chooses to do the right thing out of kindness, not obligation

A Buddhist would call that बोधिसत्त्व.

Superman’s moral judgment is perfected, he feels no fear, his compassion is limitless, and he is empowered with siddhis of every real or imagined human capacity to a divine, superhuman degree. He draws his powers from the golden light of the Sun.

Those who know the chakra system might call this अनाहत (anāhata), the heart.

But Superman is a Western god, transmitted to us originally by a couple of Jewish kids from the holy city of Cleveland, so his symbolism is perhaps best understood in terms of the Hermetic qabalah. In that system we find a close mirror to अनाहत in תִּפְאָרֶת (tifareth) — literally “beauty”, associated with the number six, the Sun, the color yellow, and the metal gold. Superman is traditionally depicted wearing the blue of חֶסֶד (chesed) — “mercy”, the protective and sustaining sphere, corresponding to four, Jupiter, and tin — trimmed in the red of גְּבוּרָה (gevurah) — “strength”, the fierce and active counterpart to חֶסֶד, corresponding to five, Mars, and iron. Over his heart Superman has an emblem which shows his sigil over a field of the yellow of תִּפְאָרֶת, bound within a five-sided shield in the red of גְּבוּרָה.

He bears the Hebrew angelic name Kal-El (קול-אל), “The Voice of God”. His father bears the name Jor-El, which may be a contraction of יהי אור-אל “(There Will Be The) Light of God”. His mother bears the name Lara, which may mean “Of The Initiation”. His cousin Supergirl bears the name Kara Zor-El, which may mean “Call To God’s Stranger”.

The aspirant may benefit from meditation on the significance of these colors, sigils, and names.

More commentaries

More pop Buddhas from io9.

Alan Moore says:

Superman is the Sun that all others revolve around. The story is a representation of an alien being who comes to Earth and just so happens to blend in among humans while using his unique abilities, not to rise above us but to help us. He cannot be a god because gods are dictators who set rules for others to follow. Superman sets rules for himself and uses these rules for our benefit. The myth was perfected from the 1950’s through roughly the 1970’s under the pencil of a severe talent, Curt Swan. If America has a legend comparable to the ageless myths of antiquity, theirs is Superman.

Bitter old Harlan Ellison says:

If one of the unarguable criteria for literary greatness is recognition, consider this: In all of the history of literature, there are only five fictional creations known to every man, woman, and child on the planet. The urchin in Irkutsk may never have heard of Hamlet, the peon in Pernambuco may not know who Raskolnikov is; the widow in Jakarta may stare blankly at the mention of Don Quixote or Micawber or Jay Gatsby. But every man, woman, and child on the planet knows Mickey Mouse, Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Robin Hood … and Superman.

He is more than the fanciful daydream of two Cleveland schoolboys. He is the 20^th-century archetype of mankind at its finest. He is courage and humanity, steadfastness and decency, responsibility and ethic. He is our universal longing for perfection, for wisdom and power used in the service of the human race.

Of all the literary creations of American fiction, Superman, after all these years, born of a “dispensable, disreputable” genre, is the only one that seems certain to get Posterity’s nod. And that is because, simply put, he is our highest aspirations in human form.

Marvel Studios understands Superman, and he isn’t even their guy:

Abraham Erskine:
Do you want to kill Nazis?

Steve Rogers:
Is this a test?

Abraham Erskine:
Yes.

Steve Rogers:
I don’t want to kill anyone. I don’t like bullies; I don’t care where they’re from.

Sean Kelly reflects:

The trick to Superman is that while he is physically more powerful than everyone else, dilemmas of conscience are often as difficult for him as they are for us. The question becomes not whether Superman can do something, but which of the options available to him is the right one?

In a team dynamic, the question becomes - since Superman believes in free will and teamwork - how does he convince someone else of the right course of action, without threats or coercion? How does he inspire the right things? How does he foster those team dynamics?

Superman is neither omniscient nor omnipresent. He doesn't know everything and he can’t be everywhere. He does actually need his teammates, both for things he can't do and for perspectives he lacks. Figuring all that out is the crux of a good story, not just seeing if there’s a rock he can’t lift.

In the course of a smart Twitter thread about actors who have played Superman, he also says:

The other day, James Gunn was saying that he’s looking for a Superman you want to hug, and I think that’s right on the money: Yes, Superman should convincingly be able to pick up an ocean liner but also fill in for Santa Claus if Santa gets the flu.

[⋯]

Clark Kent is not an act. Clark Kent was discovered, as a baby, by kindly farmers. They named him, loved him, raised him with their values. He grew up a good kid, in a loving home, not knowing where he came from until he was older, not knowing what name his biological parents gave him.

Consider this dialogue:

Okay, if you and Batman fought, who would win?

The Joker.

I’m serious, for real, who would win?

Batman.

For real?!

For real.

Aren’t you stronger and faster and you have laser eyes and he doesn’t?

Yes.

So you would win?

No, he would win.

Do you even know what you’re saying?

I do.

How would he win?

I’d let him.

What?! Why?!

If you knew Batman, you’d know. It’d mean a lot to him.

So?

He’s gone through a lot. He deserves some happiness.

Don’t you deserve happiness?

Winning fights doesn’t make me happy.

What does?

My family, my work, my dog, this.

This?

You, Alice. Talking to you, seeing that you’re good, that makes me happy.

More than beating Batman?

Yes. A lot more.

James P. “But A Jape” Sandoval tells us that “‘Superman is unrelatable’ is Luthorian propaganda and I will die on that hill”:

Four beautiful pages with just thirteen words, from Superman: Red & Blue, tell the same story:

Superman Meets Shazam is the only Angry Superman story I love. His anger comes from his compassion, and the conflict is resolved with more compassion. Joshua Middleton’s art exemplifies how good comics art is often a matter of good acting.

Why Superman Is My Hero is a meditation on a perfect one-page Superman story from All-Star Superman in which Superman says “you’re much stronger than you think you are”:

[content warning: suicide]

I have struggled with depression ever since I was ten years old. It had crippled me emotionally. I was 27 years old, no college degree, no job, and no will to live. I decided to kill myself after Christmas.

And then my sister’s boyfriend loaned me these comics. Superman is dying of radiation poisoning and is trying to complete all of his tasks before he dies, but he still takes the time to save a young girl who is about to jump off a building.

I cried for hours after reading this. I identified with that girl so much, ans I could almost hear Superman telling me that I’m stronger than I think.

Now, every time my depression starts to rear its ugly head, I just repeat his words and imagine him hugging me when I'm standing on the edge. It works better than any medication or therapy I’ve ever had.

Now I’m in college and at the top of my class. I have friends. I have a life. And I don’t care that he’s a fictional comic book character. He still saved me.

Another commentator says of that story, “a pitch-perfect example of pikuach nefesh, the Jewish principle that ‘saving a life’ is the greatest thing a person can do”.

Cheryl Lynn Eaton tells us:

Superman (and kind characters of great power) are interesting because morals force them to depend on strategy over brute force.

Superman keeps getting hit with the trolley problem over and over and over — and his response is always, “No, I’m saving everyone.” And then he does it. He finds a way. And that’s amazing.

And on the rare times he doesn't find a way, he is absolutely devastated. And we are too. We grieve with him. No one is collateral damage to Superman. Ever.

Last thing. The difference between Superman and nearly every other hero — even his teammates — is that Superman doesn’t have an outgroup. You are Superman’s friend, a member of his community, until your behavior towards the community proves otherwise. And that is both admirable and dangerous. When you’re invulnerable it is easy to live life that way. Doesn’t go so smoothly for the rest of us delicate meatbags.

To that point, I have to give the last word to the pitch-perfect Superman & Lois TV series. He works to save everyone. Everyone. Even the villains. Especially the villains.

Two components of the liberal project

In Is The Safety Net Just Masking Tape? at the New York Times, Thomas B. Edsall makes a number of observations

Two years ago, Mike Konczal, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, opened a productive line of inquiry in a blog post called “Are We at the Completion of the Liberal Project?”

Konczal described two approaches to the liberal state. In the first, “you would have the government maintaining full employment, empowering workers and giving them more bargaining power.” In the second, “you would have a safety net for those who fell through the cracks.”

These two approaches, according to Konczal, should not be looked at as an either-or proposition, but as mutually reinforcing and interdependent:

I don’t believe those two can exist without each other. Without a strong middle and working class you don’t have natural constituencies ready to fight and defend the implementation and maintenance of a safety net and public goods. The welfare state is one part, complementing full employment, of empowering people and balancing power in a financial capitalist society.” In practice, Konczal writes, the political left has abandoned its quest for deep structural reform — full employment and worker empowerment — and instead has “doubled-down” on the safety net strategy. The result, in his view, is “a kind of pity-charity liberal capitalism.

Konczal’s poignant description of the problem goes a long way toward explaining the current struggles of the left. The question is whether there is an effective worker empowerment strategy at a time of globalization, offshoring and robotization.

Edsall proposes a set of policies going forward that progressives like me would love to see … but then argues that it's hard to see how they could succeed politically in our current environment.

And in the longer term, I cannot see how his full-employment policies are a solution. With robots doing more and more and the limits of material resources pressing, “full employment” seems neither possible nor desirable.