Categories
books

The Life You Can Save

Title
The Life You Can Save
Author
Peter Singer

I have been a utilitarian for as long as I’ve had a label for my worldview. I was greatly influenced early on by the works of Peter Singer [petersinger.info]. Most notably Practical Ethics [confusion.cc] and Animal Liberation [confusion.cc], both of which I’ve written of here on Confusion.

The first thing I read by Singer, in an introduction to ethics class long ago, was Famine, Affluence and Morality an article Singer published in 1972. The idea in Famine can be summed up as “you, and those you know, don’t give enough money to help poor, suffering people around the world, and that makes you a morally bad person”. It’s a short essay, a quick read, but its conclusion was, and in many ways still is, shocking. It’s easy to see why many people have a gut reaction to it, rejecting its conclusion. “How can I be a bad person, just because I don’t give all of my money to others, to others half a world away?” It’s an uncomfortable feeling that you might be morally bad. There are lots of objections to Famine including many academic or more thorough attempts to rebut it.

Singer expanded on the concepts of Famine and published The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty [thelifeyoucansave.org] in 2009 and an updated second edition in 2019. I missed it, not having read much philosophy or ethics in the past decade plus. But last year I stumbled across a series of philosophy lectures on YouTube by Jeffrey Kaplan [youtube.com] which included this episode on The Most Controversial Ethics Paper Ever Written [youtube.com], that covers the original Famine paper. After watching it I went looking for a copy of Famine and I stumbled upon The Life You Can Save. I ordered a physical copy of the book but you can get the ebook and even an audio copy read by some famous people from the link above, for free.

The book covers the original idea of the paper fairly quickly, with the a typical Singer approach of using leading you through a situation where few would disagree with his conclusions, then drawing a large moral equivalence between that situation and something much larger, and challenging the reader to find fault. He then spends the rest of its length addressing various objections or refutations of the moral conclusion that he draws from the parable and analogy.

The larger issue is global poverty and the apparent apathy that the world’s affluent have towards it and its effects. Affluent here means anyone who can cover their basic needs, meaning nearly everyone living in ‘western’, ‘developed’, ‘rich’ or ‘affluent’ countries. Meaning you and me and nearly everyone you know. To back up this accusation of apathy Singer includes significant time on data about giving, people’s perceptions of how much is given, how much should be given, and, the effects and efficiency of what is given or the lack thereof.

The updated second edition also includes a lot of stories about people who give, their money or time. Some were inspired by the first edition, some are an inspiration; rising from their own struggles to devote their lives to helping others.

Crucially there is also a discussion of what the Singer thinks is actually a reasonable, workable, contribution level that everyone can strive for. Even if you don’t live up to the ideal of giving until you are on the edge of needing yourself you can give, more than you think and it will help if you give well and you give intentionally. One of those people inspired by the first edition setup the charity that bears the name of the book; The Life You Can Save [thelifeyoucansave.org]`, dedicated to making giving easy and effective for everyone.

The Life You Can Save is a hard book. Like everything by Singer I have ever read I think most people will have a visceral reaction to it. I can’t imagine anyone having a neutral reaction to it. I think that if you read it and think about it, examine your life and the reality that the book discusses you can only have one of two reactions; you can give and give generously, or, you can work yourself into knots to avoid giving. Once you’ve read The Life You Can Save you can’t plead ignorance of this issue.

Reading Singer’s Practical Ethics [confusion.cc] and, later, Animal Liberation [confusion.cc] were foundational to my own self examination. Practical Ethics is still the single most influential book on my understanding of what I think, the fundamental morals and ethics I use to understand my worldview. It’s hard to live up to a code of ethics, it takes time and effort. It’s important to understand your own code, so that when you need to make a decision in the moment you have something to draw on. The Life You Can Save is more of the same, challenging and important. For myself, I have increased the amount I give, as a regular monthly donation after reading it. I have been giving for years, but I never increased it as my own income and ability to give increased.

You should read The Life You Can Save, get the ebook or audio book for free here [thelifeyoucansave.org] or listen to the full book as a podcast via Apple:

or Spotify:

There is no excuse.

Categories
ranting

Gatorbusters

The original Ghostbusters [imdg.com] was released in 1984. I was six. I don’t remember when I first saw it, maybe as early as 1985, or maybe 1986 or even 1987. In any case I was to young to understand some of the jokes —like Ray’s dream, somehow it was funny but I don’t understand what he was actually dreaming about, and because it was burned into my head from repeated viewing before I was old enough to understand it took a lot longer than it should have to understand that scene. No doubt we rented it from one of the local video stores, maybe the one in Pantops shopping center or maybe the one on 5th Street Extended, of course we also rented a second VCR and setup it up to make a copy. I remember watching that copy it times on summer breaks or on days I was home sick from school.

Sometime between the time Ghostbusters came out and the end of the 80’s an incident occurred at Berry Steam Plant in Alabama where my grandfather worked. Not for the first time an alligator crawled into the discharge pipes to enjoy the warmth on a cold day. I don’t recall all the detail of the story as my grandfather told it but, basically, the plant could not use the pipes with the gator in there and they called animal control or whoever it is you call, but it was taking too long and they needed to use the pipe. So, a bunch of burly steam power plant workers went out and wrestled this alligator out of the pipe and back down to the pond or river.

To commemorate this someone at the plant —I don’t know if it was my grandfather or someone else— had some silk screen shirts made with a Ghostbusters inspired logo of a gator caught in a ‘prohibition’ circle with a slash across it. Around the circle it says “Berry Steam Plant”. And the gator is wearing a hat (I don’t know why, but I imagine it’s just the type of hat a typical burly power plant worker would wear back in the day?).

I remember my grandfather giving us all shorts, I think I had a green one, and there were red ones too. Anyway, I while ago when I was at my mom’s I ran across what it probably the last one of these shirts, a red one. And I brought it back to Singapore to keep.

APC_7237
Original Berry Steam Plant Gatorbusters tee-shirt, circa mid-to-late 1980’s
Categories
photography travel

Venice, Italy, November 2023

I first visited Venice in 2002, I spend a long day tramping around the city with a college friend. We didn’t stay in Venice, that was too expensive.

I returned to Venice in 2007 with my Wife, part of our honeymoon tour of Italy.

IMG_4075
The Grand Canal from The Rialto in the morning light

This time my daughters and my mother and youngest sister joined my wife and I. We spend three nights. We flew into Milan and took the train directly to Venice, choosing to see Milan as our last stop so we didn’t need to rush to make a flight on the last day.

We visited all the important sights —the Doge’s Palace [wikipedia.org], St. Marks Basillica [wikipedia.org], The Rialto [wikipedia.org]— spent lots of time walking around the streets and squares, at a lot of good foot and gelato, and took a trip to Murano [wikipeida.org] —for the glass— and Burano [wikipedia.org] —for the colorful houses.

IMG_4354
St. Mark’s Basillica in the late afternoon sunlight

We were lucky to get into St. Marks at just the right time of day, to have brilliant late afternoon sun steaming in the windows and giving all the cold mosaic walls and ceilings an amazing glow. St. Mark’s is inspired by the Chruch of the Holy Apostles [wikipedia.org] in Constantanople which no longer exits. But the influence of the Byzantium style of churches and church decoration is obvious. St. Mark’s reminds me of Hagia Sofia [wikipeida.org], it’s nowhere near as big and it actually has a lot more golden mozaic everywhere you look (thought in absolute terms maybe Hagia Sofia has more, it’s so damn big…). Hagia Sofia is one of my favorite buildings in the world, and I get a similar feeling in St. Mark’s just based on the decoration, the mosaics and the marble and the domes. It was absolutly beautiful in the golden light.

IMG_4757
Mask at Ca’ Del Sol

We also visited a shop, specializing in masks and costumes for Carnival, called Ca’ Del Sol [cadelsolmascherevenezia.com]. We did buy a couple of masks but this place is like a wonderland. The floors, walls and ceiling and many tables are covered win masks. Manikins modeling full costumes stand in the corners. The old guy working there was a total character too, playing it up. Few things say Venice like a fancy carnival mask and Ca’ Del Sol, had the most fancy ones your can imagin.

Of course, the girls also needed their required Gondola ride. It’s just a thing you have to do when in Venice.

Did I mention gelato? Having discovered Gelato at Amarino’s in Paris in 2022it was a must to have actual Italian Gelato. (I didn’t write about it but we went back to Amarino’s every night after we found it, no matter how cold it was in Paris.) I even got to show them where I first had Gelato (that was in Milan). My older daughter made sure she knew where an Amarino’s was in every city we were visiting in Italy so she could have Amarino’s every day. (We did try a few other placed, but the quality of Amarino’s was consitent and higher than most easy to find tourist places).

It was not a long stay, Vinice is still expensive, and while it might be nice to spend a few more days to see everything, a few days is enough. Enought to wonder though the streets and allyways, over the bridges. Enought time to get a feel for why Venice is so famous. From Venice we took the train to Florence, but that is another post…

You can see the full Venice, Italy, November 2023 [flickr.com] photoset on Flickr.

Categories
books quotes

The Parable of the Sower & The Parable of the Talents

Title
The Parable of the Sower
Author
Octavia E. Butler
Title
The Parable of the Talents
Author
Octavia E. Butler

The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler should be the book of the moment. You should read it now, in 2024, during the presidential election.

The core of the Parable books is a post-apocalyptic America. Staring in 2024 in a time when America’s worst impulses as a society and climate change have together wrecked America. Poverty, drugs and violence are rampant. Wealth buys what there is of security, the police are pay to pay at best and all too often just robbers themselves welding power for themselves in a dog eat dog world. Public education is a thing of the past. And actually slavery and de-facto slavery —debt slavery— in factory towns has returned. Drug addled gangs roam the streets killing and burning at will. Good people are ground up and spit out. The rich and even the middle class build literal walls around their houses and cul-de-sacs to keep out the poor and the violent. People live 19th century lives in the 21st century, bartering, eating what they can grow or scavenge.

Sower follows the teenage years of Lauren Oya Olamina, who starts life in a walled middle class community, if violently thrust out into the wild and eventually come to found a new community —and religion— that aims to help all of humanity with an achievable purpose, not a spiritual salvation but a path to fixing the real world.

Talents continues the story, showing how bad the world can be to those trying to do good and how people can be misguided into doing horrible things… and how power, even and especially power seeped in righteous faith corrupts people or makes them blind to evil done in the name of their righteousness.

I don’t want to give any more of the story of Lauren and the others away. Read the books. But what I wanted to point out is how close the US feels to this post apocalyptic world. It’s 2024 and of course things are not as bad as they are when the book opens in 2024. But the trends are all there. We are too close to this to be comfortable. I’ll let the story stand on it’s own, here are some choice quotes:

The most scary quotes, have to do with the political movement, a right wing Christian group, Christian America, and their leader who’s slogan is:

“Help us to make America great again.”

MAGA, written in 1993, at the dawn of the 1990’s when we looked to a future we thought was bright. The end of communism, the triumph of capitalism and democracy. Somehow Butler knew. She pulled the threads together and predicted it. Like the Simpsons.

“The purpose of Christian America was to make America the great, Christian country that it was supposed to be, to prepare it for a future of strength, stability, and world leadership, and to prepare its people for life everlasting in heaven.”

That, more or less is the summary of the Christian nationalism [wikipedia.org] of Project 2025 [wikipedia.org] and many of the people behind it. Excluding everyone who doesn’t meet their definition of a good Christian according to their particular flavor and interpretation of Christianity.

Jarret’s fanatical followers were the greater danger. During Jarret’s first year in office, the worst of his followers ran amok. Filled with righteous superiority and popular among the many frightened, ordinary citizens who only wanted order and stability,

Before Trump, before the rise of the Gospel of Wealth, before Nazi’s in Charlottesville. Jarret is an interesting stand-in for Trump. Jarret started as a preacher, not a property investor and reality TV star. But in the end he has political supporters and his out-of-control paramilitary hate groups. The Crusaders, like the Proud Boys and their ilk are extremists and domestic terrorists. And it’s all to realistic that the real-world crazies are only one steep away from the fictional crazies reign of terrors and atrocities.

Even some of the less religious ones support him. They say the country needs a strong hand to bring back order, good jobs, honest cops, and free schools. They say he has to be given plenty of time and a free hand so he can put things right again.

I hear some version of this from people I would not expect, rationalizing Trump, or ignoring his authoritarian and fascist tendencies for a variety of reasons. Often they are considering only one issue but when I ask, “why would you ever vote for someone who sounds like Hitler” they don’t seem to understand.

They have no power to improve their lives, but they have the power to make others even more miserable. And the only way to prove to yourself that you have power is to use it.

This ones strikes a fundamental issue in America politics over the last 30 plus years. The fact that politicians have failed many Americans. Focusing on globalization and a view of the economy based on national level KPIs like GDP and unemployment, politicians on both sides have failed so many Americans. Both rural and inner-city have been left behind and neither party has made any real plan to help them. Their anger boiled over, hatred of the “elites” and the “deep state” are rational given how they failed. Trump road the rural anger into the White House in 2016.

I have watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive. I have watched as convenience, profit, and inertia excused greater and more dangerous environmental degradation. I have watched poverty, hunger, and disease become inevitable for more and more people. Overall, the Pox has had the effect of an installment-plan World War III. In fact, there were several small, bloody shooting wars going on around the world during the Pox. These were stupid affairs—wastes of life and treasure. They were fought, ostensibly, to defend against vicious foreign enemies. All too often, they were actually fought because inadequate leaders did not know what else to do. Such leaders knew that they could depend on fear, suspicion, hatred, need, and greed to arouse patriotic support for war.

Most people have given up on politicians. After all, politicians have been promising to return us to the glory, wealth, and order of the twentieth century ever since I can remember.

I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched

Climate change denial, the pandemic and its economic consequences, and the culture wars seem to fit the bill…

Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments—the ones abolishing slavery and guaranteeing citizenship rights—still exist, but they’ve been so weakened by custom, by Congress and the various state legislatures, and by recent Supreme Court decisions that they don’t much matter.

This one hits close to home. The Supreme Court didn’t gut these ones, but they have been on a rampage recently overturning “settled law” and bending over backwards and contorting themselves into knots to justify their immunity ruling.

Jarret insists on being a throwback to some earlier, “simpler” time. Now does not suit him. Religious tolerance does not suit him. The current state of the country does not suit him. He wants to take us all back to some magical time when everyone believed in the same God, worshipped him in the same way, and understood that their safety in the universe depended on completing the same religious rituals and stomping anyone who was different. There was never such a time in this country. But these days when more than half the people in the country can’t read at all, history is just one more vast unknown to them.

The desire for some mythical time when America was “great” and the lack of how limited that greatness was (great for who?) or what it took (high taxes, high government spending). Education hasn’t fallen so far that only 50% are literate but the susceptibility to online misinformation and disinformation seems to affect at least 50%.

Ok. Enough. We’re fucked and somehow she predicted it.

You should read The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents.

You should read them now, this year. You should read them before the US presidential election. You should read them after the overturning of Roe vs. Wade and after the Supreme Court gutted checks and balances and all but declared the president a king by granting unbelievably broad absolute immunity from criminal prosecution.

Their good books but also scary prophetic. I don’t think I can explain it without spoiling it. It made me think, it made me concerned, in a few places it made me hopeful, but mostly it made me concerned about many things I’m already worried about.

Categories
ranting

Still Biden

He didn’t do well. He’s never been an inspiring speaker, and he looked old and out of it during too much of the debate. But it’s him or Trump, that’s how the system works. I can’t see how a decent old man, even with dementia, who’s administration is filled with competent people that are broadly aligned with my political views could be worse than a narcissistic bully who is surrounded by sycophants, christo-fascist and nazi wannabes. I’ll take Biden over Trump. I would take Biden over Trump if Biden was in a coma on Election Day. I wish there was another choice.

I spoke with a friend when I was in the US, long before the debate. They said their objection, or their concern, with Biden was he would die or resign and Harris would be president. They didn’t like Harris —I’m not sure why, we didn’t discuss it— and they didn’t want four years of Harris. I told them they must have failed civics class, I told them that someone who is not the elected president taking over the office in case the president dies or resigns can only server two year as the unelected president (see note below). Then an election must be held. On top of that, two years of Harris is still better than four more years of fake-and-bake Hitler.

In the end, it’s the same to me. The choice boils down to the Trump or Biden, to the Republican candidate or the Democratic candidate. I don’t believe the DNC will replace Biden at the convention. My own ballot from Virginia will have other choices but they are false choices.

In 2020 the Virginia presidential ballot had three choices: Republican, Democrat and Libertarian. This year it may have more, maybe RFK Jr. will be there running with his brain worm for VP. But, to me, even if I agreed with the third party candidates it would be stupid to vote for them. I’m voting against Trump. I’m voting against everything Trump stands for. Any vote other than Biden is a vote for Trump. Not voting is a vote for Trump. An intentionally spoiled ballot is a vote for Trump. There is no room for protest or idealistic votes for third party candidates or spoiling a ballot or not voting.

The choice is black and white, red or blue, republican or democrat, Trump or Biden. Given Trumps disdain for the law and for democracy I can’t imagine a scenario where I would not vote for Biden.

Note: It seems I’m the one who failed civics, I just read the twenty-second amendment [wikipedia.org], and it says:

No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.

So, it seems that if Biden was elected and resigned on day one, Harris could server out the whole term, but then would only be eligible to be elected once. And if Biden made it half-way and then resigned Harris could server the remaining two years and still be elected twice. So I apologize to the people I may have mislead.

It should also be noted that Donald Trump is on record as saying he would be president for “10 to 14” years. Which would violate the 22nd Amendment. Wikipedia points to other; Truman, Reagan, and Clinton who disagreed with the Amendment. It also notes that there have been 54 resolutions introduced congress to repeal the Amendment.

Personally, I think we need more term limits, not less. I think we need limits on Senators and Representatives too. And maybe even Supreme Court Justices. I think it was a mistake that the constitution does not impose limits as getting congress to vote to limit itself seems like a lost cause.