confusion

COVID19, empathy and the ugly side of American freedom

Post date December 19, 2021

Did you know that America is one of the most empathetic countries in the world? In the top ten according to this survey from the University of Michigan [msutoday.msu.edu]. Though the authors of the study do note that the psychological states of Americans have been changing in recent decades – leading to a larger focus on the individual and less on others. So, they hint that America’s rank may drop in the coming years.

This study was released in October 2016. Literally a few weeks before Trump won the election…

I expect that if they re-ran that survey today, after four years of Trump and the continued fracturing of American society, that America would place a lot lower than seventh. I think that personal freedom has trumped empathy for a large portion of Americans. A portion that has so little empathy that they can’t wear a mask, to help everyone —to help society as a whole, the same society they want to make great again— because someone has tried to mandate that help, to protect health care system, to protect the more vulnerable, to try and ensure less people die of COVID19 and other illnesses during the pandemic. They can’t do this to help others because someone made a rule that “infringes on their personal freedom”. Maybe if they weren’t forced to wear a mask they would out of there sense of empathy for others who might get sick? I doubt it.

These people clearly value their personal freedom more than the lives of others. Their version of America washes its hands of any duty or responsibility to helping Americans. It’s freedom, or liberty, as a religion, a blind faith. 800,000 people have now died from COVID19 in the US, but “fuck them, my freedom is more important” is what anti-maskers stand for. “My right to not wear a mask is more important than others right to life”. Another front in their religious war to preserve their precious personal freedoms, to go along with “my right to own a gun, any gun, is more important than others right to life” so we can’t have any common sense discussion on how to address gun related violence and deaths, “fuck the kids of Sandy Hook, fuck the kids of Columbine, my right to an AR-15 is absolute”. “My rights, my rights, my rights…” But never “my duty” or “my responsibility”, or “our duty” and “our responsibility” (one caveat: the more conservative, e.g. Republican, someone is, the more likely they are to be anti-mask, but also Republicans are more likely to have served in the military, which is a often seen as a duty to the country, even when service is voluntary as it is in America.)

Even it everyone wore a mask all the time, people would have died, but it seems reasonable to think a lot fewer than 800,000 would have died. According to this BBC article [bbc.com] from last year, Singapore had 90% adherence to wearing masks (and that seems low to me being here…), still deaths do occur and have climbed steeply in the past 6 months due to the Delta wave. Even if everyone wore a mask always, some would die. But surely if you have any empathy you would gladly suffer a bit of personal inconvenience —wearing a mask— to protect others (as well as yourself) from illness, regardless of if the government mandated it or not? Even if it only saved 10% of 800,000 people, that is 80,000 people who would still by alive thanks to your choice to be a bit inconvenienced by wearing a mask?

The same BBC article says that 73% of Americans self-report wearing a mask, that seems high given all the noise about anti-maskers in the news, 1 out of 4 is a minority but a large minority. Maybe just a very vocal minority. How much is this 27% of people who say they are not or will not wear a mask affecting the spread of COVID19 in America? Are most people in hospital today anti-maskers? or family of anti-masker?

As with seemingly everything in America, masks are a political issue. The MAGA wing of the republican party seems to be vocal core of anti-maskers, just as they are the vocal core of the anti-gun control and anti-abortion. They are also mostly evangelical Christians and it seems that many have forgotten to “render unto Caesar“[wikipedia.org] and to love their neighbor as themselves [wikipedia.org].

It is the ugliest side of America’s obsession with personal freedom that people won’t put on a mask to help American get through the pandemic with as few deaths as possible and a quickly as possible.

Cover image based on “The Ugly American” [wikipedia.org] movie, original poster art [commons.wikimedia.org] from Wikimedia Commons. Incorporating images from: TheUnseen011101 [flickr.com] on Flickr (also on Wikimedia [commons.wikimedia.org]), Blink O’fanaye [flickr.com] on Flickr, and PNGIMG.com [pngimg.com].

photography ranting

My Best Mobile Photos — 2017

Post date November 28, 2021

In the first post in this series [confusion.cc] I said:

I started using Lightroom mobile to take photos on my phone sometime in 2017 so that’s a logical place to stop… let’s see if I can get that far.

Well, I made it, here we go, 2017.

I started the year with the iPhone 6S but, as it’s an odd year I upgraded to the iPhone 8 Plus, the last of the iPhones sans notch. The camera was mostly similar to the iPhone 6S in terms of specs, enough that I didn’t notice that much difference. It did take better low light photos, less noise.

But I started the year with the 6S so lets go back to that. First photo is this beautiful shot taken on an unexpected trip to Antalya in Southern Turkey. On the way to Israel for a work trip in early January my flight was diverted to Antalya due to a snow storm in Istanbul. More info in this post [confusion.cc].

It was only one night, and by the next evening I was sitting on the rooftop lounge of my hotel in Tel Aviv, where I took this shot:

Fast forward 6 months and I took this next shot from a plane on another work trip, this time to Jakarata. This is one of the photos that I think is in my top 10 mobile photos ever. I used it as a background on my phone for a long time.

Up next is another photos from a plane, on yet another work trip, this time to Australia. But this time it’s our first photo taken on the iPhone 8 Plus:

Next up, jellyfish, at the S.E.A. Aquarium in Singapore:

My last two best of 2017 mobile photos were taken in Lightroom Mobile. I started taking photos in Lightroom in June of 2017, but not very many initially, it took a while before it started to replace the default camera app as my go to mobile photo tool. But by the end of the year I was taking them in Lightroom regularly if not most of the time. Today almost any photo I take is done in Lightroom, except for quick shots that I share and then delete over things like WhatsApp.

First up for Lightroom, this car, I think it was in Paragon mall’s underground parking:

And finally, almost at the end of the year, December 28th, this shot of the light show put on nightly by MBS:

So that’s it for 2017. 13 years worth of “best of” mobile photos. Will I stop now. Don’t think so. I’ve had fun looking back, now I will switch over to the photos taken in Lightroom but I think I will go on to 2018, and beyond. But once I catch up to now I’ll have to slow down, once a year post in January? We’ll see if I can stick to that.

goodies

Looking at you

Post date November 14, 2021

Made myself a new iPhone background. Enjoy.

For the background pattern I used this pattern from Wikimedia commons: Japanese_Wave_Pattern.svg. [wikimedia.org] It’s available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International [creativecommons.org] license. That means this image is also available under the same license so go ahead and do what you want with it.

The daruma was traced from this image also on Wikimedia, under this same license: Daruma_doll,_cut_out_03.jpg [wikimedia.org].

Dimensions are based on my iPhone 11 Pro Max. With parallax turned off the daruma’s sit just above the dock. Your mileage may vary.

books ranting

Of Literature and Genre Fiction

Post date November 2, 2021

The other day Richard Geib, who’s website musings I have followed for the past two decades [confusion.cc], posted a new blog entry: My Jane Austen Problem [rjgeib.com]. Before diving into Jane Austen specifically Mr. Geib recounts a period of time in college when he had a voracious appetite for all the famous literature I had heard about but never read. I would read anything and everything I could get my hands on.

The insatiable desire to read, during college, is something I can relate to, along with the fact the Mr. Geib was not a literature student, he was reading out of love for reading.

I never had a late night boring desk attendant job like Mr. Geib but I was nevertheless a voracious reader during college, with the mindset of “so many books, so little time”. I was never a fast reader but I read whenever I could. In and around my college days I devoured a lot of time to literature. I read Dostoevsky [wikipedia.org], Sartre [wikipedia.org], Nabokov [wikipedia.org], Mann [wikipedia.org], Camus [wikipedia.org], Eco [wikipedia.org], Rushdie [wikipedia.org], Marques [wikipedia.org] and more. Reading was my escape from classes, homework and work. I even forced myself to finish James Joyce Ulysses, a book I disliked almost from beginning to end, every critic sings it praises It must be great, right?

As with Mr. Geib my reading slowed considerably in the years after college. Work and, later, family inevitably reduced my reading time. I also struggled for a while in Singapore because there were only a few bookstores and books were much more expensive, to say nothing about having little room to store books. Eventually I move to reading mostly ebooks. I agonized over culling my physical book collections several times, it’s down to only the favorites or those that I have some sentimental attachment to.

Despite all that I have managed to work my way through many of the novels of Hemingway [wikipedia.org], Faulkner [wikipedia.org], Murakami [wikipedia.org], Cormac McCarthy [wikipedia.org], Truman Capote [wikipedia.org] and I even read Cervantes [wikipedia.org]’ Don Quixote [goodreads.com] for it’s 500th birthday. Over the past few years I’ve been reading short stories: the complete shores stores of, the complete collections of Chekov [wikipedia.org], Turgenev [wikipedia.org], Flannary O’Conner [wikipedia.org], and the short story side of Nabokov and Hemingway. As well as select works of more authors.

That’s a lot of big, famous names, and the list of yet-to-be-read is infinitely longer. I’m listing these names not as a brag but to provide a counterpoint to other books… Because, one thing those names all have in common is they are all Literature in the sense that excludes most genre fiction [wikipedia.org] (a term I just learned from looking for the opposite of big-L Literature); sci-fi and fantasy and horror as well as comics and manga. Things that stuffy old Columbia Literature Professors would look down on.

Why do I read so much Literature?

First, a bit of history, I was not always so, I started my reading journey firmly in genre fiction. Specifically in fantasy. Way back in the fifth grade, in Ms. Venning’s class, where I read The Hobbit [goodreads.com]. I liked The Hobbit and I got a copy of The Lord of the Rings [goodreads.com] shortly after we finished it. After a couple of false starts on LOTR I revisited it in sixth grade because I had an hour long bus ride in the morning and afternoon and reading became my escape. Since first finishing LOTR when I was 12 it has never not been my favorite book and I have re-read it almost every year since.

Like the dwarves of Moria I dug deep into middle earth. A few years later I read The Silmarillion [goodreads.com] and the entire History of Middle Earth series released by Christopher Tolkien. Fantasy was my thing in middle school and high school. At the same time I read LOTR I discovered Dungeons & Dragons (thanks to the Boy Scouts and being snowed in on a trip to Fort Eustis) and I got sucked into the new TSR Forgotten Realms novels that came out around that time.

Sci-fi and fantasy ran in the family. My dad was a big sci-fi and fantasy reader (and comics reader), we had a library full of Isaac Azimov [wikipedia.org], Sir Arthur C. Clarke [wikipedia.org], Edgar Rice Burroughs [wikipedia.org], David Eddings [wikipedia.org], Robert Jordan [wikipedia.org], Mercedes Lackey [wikipedia.org] and many others. Shelves full of Star Trek novels, X-Men comics, Spider-Man, and so many more. So, sci-fi and fantasy were ‘normal’ for me I guess.

Like most American teenagers I had to read a lot of famous literature in school. And like most others I knew it was read-and-forget after the test. A few books stand out, I remember reading Where the Red Fern Grows [goodreads.com] and To Kill a Mockingbird [goodreads.com] as books I, grudgingly enjoyed. But for the most part I had not time for anything but my fantasy books.

That changed in the spring of my senior year of high school. I’m not sure why exactly, but I was home for an extended period recovering from Mono, I had almost a month laying around the house with little energy and for some reason I picked up and read the complete Shakespeare… A onion paper used copy I got from a shop in the basement of The Hardware Store on the downtown mall in Charlottesville (there I got a lot of used books, including the History of Middle Earth series). I don’t even remember why I had this book other than it was a massive leather bound red book that looked cool on the book shelf.

Maybe it was because Shakespeare was in the air that year. The senior class put on Macbeth as a school play that fall and many of my friends where in or involved in the production. We read Hamlet in my senior English class. Of course we had read Romeo and Juliet earlier in high school but more importantly Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet [imdb.com] came out that year too. And I watched Kenneth Branagh’s Othello [imdb.com] movie with a bunch of my drama-room and coffee shop friends that year too.

Whatever the reason I had an epiphany reading Shakespeare. At some point when you read a lot of Shakespeare you get into a groove and you can really read him, it flows and you don’t need to think about the verse, you don’t need to read and re-read the same passages over and over to understand, it just works.

Shakespeare was my first taste of literature for pleasure and it set the stage. But there was a second incident that triggered my pivot away from fantasy. This was more about the literature of “the western canon” being the basis of so much. And all these references and influences in popular culture going over my head. Someone pointed this out on a car ride back from a Rage Against the Machine concert where Rage played a song I’d never heard: The Ghost of Tom Joad. Long story short: I didn’t know who Tom Joad was, despite having, supposedly, read The Grapes of Wrath [goodreads.com] a few years before in school. But as with most books that were part the curriculum it went in one ear and out the other… At some point these incidents triggered a shift away from fantasy to “literature”, what else had I missed?

A lot, but set that aside there is too much to go into the myriad retellings of different forms, the quotes, the nods, the rebellions against. But beyond all that there is a reason that people are referencing these books all the time: They are good, many of them are great. Crime and Punishment [goodreads.com], The Age of Reason [goodreads.com] and Invisible Man [goodreads.com] are, just behind The Lord of the Rings my favorite books today.

So I spent more then 10 years reading almost exclusively big-L Literature. I never completely left fantasy and sci-fi, I continued my annual tradition of reading The Lord of the Rings and regular re-readings of Dune [goodreads.com]. But I was working my way through such a backlog of great books and authors.

And then at some point I came back around to a more balanced diet mixing in a healthy dose of genre fiction with my hoity-toity literature. Moderation in all things, right?

Over the past decade or so I have read (or re-read in a few case) things like Leviathan Wakes [goodreads.com], Wool [goodreads.com], Old Mans War [goodreads.com], The Dark Tower series [goodreads.com] by Stephen King, The Nexus trilogy [goodreads.com] by Ramez Naam, The Hangman’s Daughter series [goodreads.com] by Oliver Pötzsch. The Watchmen [goodreads.com] and V for Vendetta [goodreads.com] by Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman [goodreads.com], Akira [goodreads.com], Fables [goodreads.com], Locke & Key [goodreads.com], and many more. For good measure I read the complete stories of H. P. Lovecraft [goodreads.com] (skip the essays, don’t sully yourself with his racist drivel any more than you have too in the stories themselves.)

OK, I need to stop listing books… there are so many, too many to list, but i recommend everything linked here (except Ulysses, of course 😉, read Moby-Dick [goodreads.com] instead). I have not posted reviews of most of these books here on Confusion. I started back in the day, reviews of books was one of the original reasons for the site, to share my thoughts on these books with my college friends when we were apart, over summers and during my long-strange-trip in Europe. There is a whole category for my book reviews [confusion.cc], but I’ve only written one review in the past decade – fittingly it was for Lovecraft Country [confusion.cc] a fantasy-horror book recommended by a friend who lives in a foreign country. Which, along with The Dream Quest of Vellit Boe [goodreads.com] helps to redeem a small corner of the H. P. Lovecraft mythos from his misogyny and racism. I highly recommend both books.

photography ranting

My Best Mobile Photos — 2016

Post date October 27, 2021

On to 2016! I used the iPhone 6S the whole year so not much new to say about the camera. Looking back at my iPhone 6S photos on Flickr [flickr.com], There are a significant number of photos of sunsets, so why fight it? Let’s start by picking a few of the best sunsets, and let’s go in chronological order. Starting in March, this shot was taken in Phuket, Thailand at Mai Khao Beach:

Next up is this shot from August, taken in Batam, Indonesia. If you squint you can just see the Singapore skyline in the low haze in the center of the horizon:

Next up, this shot taken in Singapore. It’s not a nice as the others but I like the feeling for some reason with the street lights on and the pink fluffy clouds:

And lastly, from December, back in Phuket, Thailand again and at Mai Khao Beach again:

That’s enough sunsets, there are more on Flickr, not sure why I took so many in 2016. But while we are on the subject of Phuket, here is another shot that I like the feeling of:

Another shot from Phuket, is this crazy cool caterpillar:

I started taking the time to cleanup and post my mobile photos due to the extra time the COVID19 pandemic forced us all to take sitting around the house. In one way it’s depressing to look though all the photos that were taken while traveling when I’m stuck at home and at the same time it’s a bit of therapy for the same thing; living vicariously through reviewing the photos and remembering that trip, that place, that scene. I love to travel and while I can’t complain about being ‘stuck’ in Singapore, a safe, clean, easy place to live companies to so much of the world. Even in the midst of a horrible second wave of the Delta Variant, Singapore must be near the top of the list of places to ride out the pandemic. But Singapore is small, you can’t go more then 20 kilometers from my house without needing a passport, I can’t jump in a car or on a train and go out to the country… I have to go out of the country to do that and international travel is severely restricted if you don’t have a very good reason. C’est la vie. Enough of my first world problems for now.

Before we move on, one more travel photos, this time from Sara, Vietnam, is panorama of the rice paddies taken on a cloudy morning hike:

Lastly, staying ‘at home’ in Singapore, is a shot of on of the places I can go during the pandemic, at least when things are not so bad we are in lockdown. Here’s a shot of the super trees at Gardens by the Bay:

Next stop 2017…

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