Are Fines Unjust?

Even a $10,000 fine is cheap for a millionaire

In society we generally consider several different types of punishment acceptable for different crimes. We have (in some places) the death penalty, imprisonment, community service, and monetary fines as the most common types. All of these are intended to serve one or more of the following purposes:

• Keep high risk people from being able to re-offend (imprisonment, death penalty)
• Have some kind of cost to the offender so they are less likely to do it again, and to deter potential offenders (all types)
• Provide a feeling of justice being served to the victims (all types)
• Provide rehabilitation to the offender to reduce chances of re-offending (imprisonment)
• Raise revenues for the police and the state in general (fines, community service in an indirect way)

Fines are used very frequently as a punishment for non-violent crimes and in particular, crimes that are often committed by "regular" people: speeding, parking violations, minor property damage.

What I want to argue here is that monetary fines are an unjust form of punishment and that we should consider replacing them in all cases with community service, imprisonment, or something similar.

Resource Deprivation

Monetary fines differ from the other forms of punishment in one significant way: all of the other punishments effectively deprive the offender of time. You take a certain amount of time and force the offender to do something they don't want to do with that time: some sort of community service, sit in a jail cell. And what is significant about that is that everyone, rich or poor, has (roughly speaking) the same amount of it, and can't create more.

A billionaire can have orders of magnitude more money than a homeless person, but even paying for all the best medical services money can buy, can't really get more than a few years of extra time. And time lost can't be replaced. The opportunities that are missed are often missed for good because time keeps moving forward and can't be re-experienced.

So a punishment that involves time deprivation is much more likely to be an equal deterrent to all people than one that involves monetary deprivation. A $500 fine for illegal parking isn't going to deter a millionaire in a rush anywhere near as much as a minimum wage worker, but 40 hours of community service will.

Equal Punishment

Some countries, such as Finland, use a model for some fines that is based on the income of the offender, rather than having an absolute value to the fine. This is definitely an improvement, since it means a rich person will get a proportionately greater fine, but it still doesn't solve the problem. After all, a millionaire can typically get by losing, say, 10% of their income better than a person who is struggling to make ends meet. The simple fact is that even if you hit a wealthy person with a proportionately larger fine than a poorer person, it's never going to affect them in the same way.

I suspect that the very reason fines exist for many of the (non-violent) crimes that a rich person is likely to commit is because the rich and powerful push for it. Monetary fines just become a cost of doing business. To a rich person, an illegal parking fine is just an expensive parking space. A speeding ticket is an "express lane" fee. Even when we look at the crimes committed by investment banks over the last decade, tens of billions of dollars have been paid in fines but generally no jail time or even admitting guilt by any of the parties. The fines are literally just treated like an extra tax for their line of business.

Time based penalties change all of this. It equalizes the punishment and costs something that is precious to everyone. And when it comes in the form of community service, it also allows things to get done that are often hard for local government to justify when they have to explicitly pay for them. It effectively serves as a form of cheap labour, so it's like revenue raising, except that it's done directly in the form of labour, so there's no opportunity for monetary revenues to be siphoned off inappropriately by government departments.

Perverse Incentives

The other very useful feature of time based punishments is that it removes the perverse incentives that monetary punishments create for law enforcement. When the police can directly generate revenues via fines, then there is an incentive to allocate more resources to the types of policing that generate revenue, rather than the policing that is most needed by the community. There are plenty of stories of police being given quotas for things like speeding fines, and this sort of situation is unlikely to result in the best outcomes for the community.

Of course, police services are often underfunded, so it's not surprising that they will overpolice in ways that generate revenue. But it will also be the case that when it's known that the police have this revenue source available, they are also less likely to receive direct funding in government budgets, which creates a vicious cycle. So they will also probably be better off to have this revenue source closed off, so the government has to accept that it must directly provide 100% of the funding, and the police can get back to doing what's best for the community.

Are Blue Zones Worth Paying Attention To?

Life in a Blue Zone

Blue Zones are a concept being promoted by the company Blue Zones (surprise!). The basic premise is that they looked at longevity statistics around the world, and found several places where longevity is unusually high. They then looked at what things these places have in common, with the hopes of coming up with rules that can be applied in other places to increase average human life expectancy.

This sounds like a noble goal, but how useful is it in practice? Am I just being a big bringdown by questioning the value of the project?

The obvious first point to consider is that Blue Zones is a for-profit company, so we should at least be careful about assuming that they're acting in our best interest. This doesn't necessarily have to mean that they are sinister or imply malice on their part, but it's important to be aware that if they didn't come up with useful answers as a result of the project, they'd be out of business.

Now, on to the Blue Zones themselves. What are the regions that are considered Blue Zones?

• Sardinia, Italy
• Okinawa, Japan
• Loma Linda, California
• Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica
• Ikaria, Greece

These places all have unusually high life expectancy. So we just see what they have in common, and that should tell us how to replicate the results elsewhere, right?

Sample Sizes

Not so fast. One important thing to consider first is sample size.

Say you were looking at the statistics of your country, and you wanted to see where the highest rate of, say, renal cancer was. You will almost certainly find that it's in some small town somewhere. Now, check the stats for where the lowest rate of renal cancer is. You will probably find that it, too, is in some other small town. One of these towns must be doing something really right, and one must be doing something really wrong, right?

Not at all. The problem is that whenever you have samples with a small number of components, it's very easy for luck to throw off the sample. In a small town, you only need a couple more or less cases of something to throw off the stats for the whole town, because the sample is so small. So a couple of extra cancer cases make it look like something is going on. In a big city, you'd need a lot more cases of something to affect the overall stat in a noticeable way.

Applying this knowledge to Blue Zones, we need to be careful if any of the locations has a small population. What do we find? Well, Ikaria has a population of only around 8000. Loma Linda is around 23000 people. Nicoya is around 25000. Okinawa and Sardinia, on the other hand, are both above one million people.

So of these five locations that everything is being based on, three have very small populations that could easily get skewed statistics. That doesn't mean that they do, of course, but it's not a good sign.

Transferable Traits

One big problem with the whole concept of Blue Zones is that when looking for the things that each location has in common, by necessity the researchers are only looking at traits that are transferable to another location. Since the very goal is to replicate the results elsewhere (and sell some books in the process), if it turned out that, say, high altitude was responsible for longer life expectancy, this would end up being ignored because you can't transfer that.

Or, noticing that several of these populations are quite small, what if the very fact of living in small villages rather than big, crowded cities is a major reason for longer lives? Again, you can't sell that as a solution, so it has to be ignored.

It could well be that many of the common traits being promoted are actually just coincidental and have no value in increasing longevity on average (assuming that there is even a genuine longevity increase in these places to begin with), and that the things that actually matter were completely overlooked.

Isolated Traits

Consider another issue, which is whether or not you need several traits working together to get the desired results. Can you just identify several things that these places have in common and assume that each one individually is useful? Maybe without several working together you get no results, or even worse, negative results? Imagine if you found, say, that drinking alcohol and living at a high altitude worked together to increase longevity, but just alcohol on its own actually decreased it? Well, you would now be exporting shorter life spans and bad advice!

And the even more interesting thing could be that there are common traits in these different places, but they need to be combined with some other thing to get the right results, but the identity of that other thing is actually different in each location, like in Loma Linda they eat lots of beans, while in Ikaria they bathe in hot water a lot. And if you do one of these things along with drinking alcohol, you live longer (let me be clear that this is just a hypothetical). Well, these wouldn't be identified by Blue Zones, and so once again you'd actually be exporting bad advice to others.

Quality of Life

Finally, there's the actual question of whether Blue Zones is even looking at the right thing. Longevity is obviously nice, all things being equal, but are all things equal? Living a long life is not the same as a life worth living, and most people would probably choose a shorter, happier life over a longer, more miserable one.

If living a year longer involved decades of eating bland food, or painful exercises, or being sedentary and expending as little energy as possible, etc, maybe that wouldn't be a worthwhile tradeoff for most people. Rather than looking for the places on Earth where people live the longest, perhaps we should be looking for the places on Earth where people are happiest, and try to replicate those results?

Government Secrets and Our Trust

The need for secrecy

Most people accept that a certain amount of government secrecy is necessary. There are military and intelligence secrets, for example, that are needed to be kept, at least for some length of time, in order to improve country security. This is always a tradeoff though, and you would be hard pressed to identify any single secret that absolutely must be kept. You could take something like, say, the identities of your covert agents in other countries, which seems like it must obviously be kept secret, but to arrive at that point you have already assumed that you must have these covert agents in the first place. Maybe there are other ways to achieve the same ends, or maybe those ends themselves are questionable. There are always other options.

But let us assume that there are legitimate reasons for governments to keep secrets from their country's citizens. There is always the question of what kinds of things the government should be allowed to keep secret. If you asked the government, then they would insist it's only this:

• Things that are necessary for the security of the country

The abuse of secrecy

If that was all, then we'd be done here. The problem, of course, is that there is a long, verifiable history of governments using their powers to make things secret for other reasons:

• To avoid international embarrassment
• To hide criminal or unlawful actions by government employees
• To hide criminal or unlawful actions by citizens with a lot of influence on the government
• To minimize public debate over government actions that the public is likely to disagree with
• To more easily enable government propaganda/misinformation

There have been well publicized examples of all of the above categories over the past 15 years in the US and other countries like Australia and the UK, mostly related to abuse of terrorism prevention powers, but also quite a few in relation to the global financial crisis.

Some of the most disgraceful examples have been when the US government has basically stated that releasing information on their wrongdoing is a security concern because it would foster animosity and hatred towards the US by people overseas if they found out what the US had done! This is, for example, what has been repeatedly said in regards to releasing information and photographs related to the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo.

Think about just how insane a stance that is for a country that claims to care about justice and democracy. To basically refuse to allow justice to be administered because if the rest of the world found out what you had done, they'd kinda hate you for it. Imagine if a murderer in your city was acquitted on those grounds!

Policing secrecy

It's not surprising that these things happen. Governments are made up of people, and those people have their own personal agendas, their own jobs to protect, their own families to provide for. When someone fucks up, either deliberately or unintentionally, it's not at all surprising that if they have access to some way to suppress knowledge about it, they will take advantage of it. We know people are flawed, which is why we should never settle for any system that basically rests on, "Just trust us. We promise we won't abuse this power".

Government oversight is one of the ways we're supposed to be protected from this sort of abuse, but oversight is rarely truly independent and free of any kind of influence, and again, the people doing the oversight are just flawed humans too. We have numerous stories over the past 15 years of financial industry overseers getting too chummy with the people they're meant to be watching, and planning for their own future when they leave government and switch to working for the very companies they performed oversight on. We know that we can't rely on this to keep the government from abusing its power.

At the end of the day, the only real protection we have is whistleblowers. These are the people that tell us what the government and big businesses are actually doing, and letting us know when our trust has been abused. And the war on whistleblowers in the last 15 years has been spectacular.

Extrapolate from what you know

So how can we know how much to trust the goverment, and when to not buy into their claims that they're acting lawfully? We can never really know exactly what they're doing, since that's the whole point of secrecy. The sensible thing to do, then, is to take what we do know, and extrapolate from there.

Whenever a whistleblower comes out with information of wrongdoing, and we can have a reasonable degree of confidence that what they revealed is in fact true, the response of the government tells us a lot. Sometimes they will go with the "few bad apples" argument and insist that the unlawful behavior was an aberration, and justice will be served.

But if this is the case, then you would expect the government to be grateful to the whistleblower and not try to prosecute them. A government that genuinely believes it is doing the right thing and is not knowingly hiding criminal behavior should want whistleblowers to come forward, because those few bad apples give everyone a bad name.

Sometimes the government will insist that the whistleblower should have used internal channels and that releasing the information publicly was unnecessary and damaging. Consider that there is no way that we could know if that's true. A government with effective internal oversight will make this claim, but surely so would one with poor oversight that is actually committing crimes and hiding them. If what the whistleblower is revealing is actually true, then unlawful behavior is taking place, and either there is internal oversight that has been managing to completely miss it, or the goverment is just straight up lying.

If the whistleblower releases information that turns out to be accurate, and also states that they saw no viable ways of effecting change within the organization, then where do you think the safe bet lies here? That the whistleblower was releasing accurate information about wrongdoing but lying about the need to go public (and usually destroy their own career in the process), or that the government was performing all this unlawful behavior but had a totally robust internal oversight system?

And, finally, we have to ask how we would expect a governement to behave when it knows it has lots of dirty secrets, embarrassing secrets, illegal behavior secrets. If you know that there is lots of incriminating information that whistleblowers could reveal, then naturally you're going to come down hard on whistleblowers, prosecute them and put fear into any other would-be whistleblowers. If you were a genuinely clean government, then why would you do that? Why would you prosecute the people who are helping you stay honest?

So as you see your government try to justify the need to prosecute a whistleblower or sow disinformation about them in order to discredit them, ask yourself if you really think a government that believed it had no other dirty secrets would behave in that way. Ask yourself if it's likely that the whistleblowers have disclosed the only examples of your government behaving badly, and that they are otherwise perfectly squeaky clean. Ask yourself what else the government is so afraid of being disclosed that they feel the need to actively go after whistleblowers.

The only real information we have about how our governments are behaving in secret is what whistleblowers reveal to us, and how our governments respond when that happens.

How the government can regain our trust

So how should a trustworthy government behave? Well, certainly, a government that genuinely wants to keep within the law and not abuse its power should have robust protections for whistleblowers. I can't see any good reason why a government that doesn't want to abuse its secrecy powers would not want a system that encourages whistleblowing.

But also, an honest government would recognize that individual people within the government can't be trusted. There will always be people under different pressures and they will make bad decisions. A good government will recognize its weaknesses and try to set up a system that makes it hard to do the wrong thing, and makes it easier to do the right thing.

One possible way is to make coming clean and being honest always the best option. People in the government try to hide incompetence and illegal behavior because they think that they can contain the secrets and have a high probability of getting away with it.

But what if people in the government instead believed that they had very little chance of getting away with secrets and lies? What if they knew there was a very high probability that they would be found out, and then not only would they be in whatever trouble they would have been in if they had come clean, they would also be in trouble for trying to cover it up?

I think that if a whistleblower releases information on a single illegal act that the government intentionally covered up, and that it can be shown that either the superiors or the oversight of the person/people responsible for the act knew about it, then that whistleblower should receive full immunity regardless of what else they released. No matter how damaging any other information may be, it should be treated as acceptable collateral damage for the government trying to hide illegal acts.

This may sound extreme, but we need a system where a whistleblower has confidence that they won't be punished for doing what is ultimately a good service to both the government and the general public. And we actually need the potential damage to the government to be high enough to act as a sufficient deterrent so that coming clean will always be preferable. We need individuals in the government to be thinking not just about exposure of whatever specific act they are involved in, but the potential exposure of all other government secrets.

Imagine how much better a government would police itself when it was facing that kind of tradeoff. And further, if a government genuinely believes in obeying its own laws, and believes that it has sufficient internal oversight that the general public should trust them, we should ask why they are unwilling to agree to such strong whistleblower protections. If they really are as trustworthy as they want us to believe they are, then they should have nothing to fear, right?

How Facebook Will Probably Manipulate the Next US Election

It's a well accepted fact that money heavily influences US politics, with the candidate who spends the most money usually winning the presidential election. And it's expected that the 2016 US presidential election will involve the most campaign spending in history. But what is often overlooked is that it's not money in itself that wins elections. You can't directly buy votes. So why does the correlation exist?

Money buys attention. At the end of the day, every voter can vote for whomever they want, but campaign spending determines how much they get saturated with information and propaganda for various candidates. Money makes a candidate a household name, pays for billboards and banners, buys attack ads to discredit candidates, and so on. Money doesn't buy elections, it's just a means to influence what voters know, which then affects how they vote.

News media has known this for years, of course, where most readers/viewers understand the political leanings of their source, and aren't surprised to see biased reporting. But what happens when people think they're getting unfiltered information? What if you can make people think they're getting a balanced view, and that view gives the distinct impression that one candidate is better than the others?

This is where social media is the big game in town. People don't think of their Facebook news feed, their Twitter feed, or their Google searches as being politically biased, or the tools of a private company to manipulate what they see and therefore influence what they think. They tend to think of these as neutral sources, possibly biased towards showing them things that are likely to keep them clicking, or advertising for things that they are likely to want. But they don't think of social media companies as manipulating what they think and feel and understand about the world.

With the amount of time people spend on social media now, it would be pretty bad if those privately held profit-driven companies were to take advantage of their completely legal power to manipulate what they show their users, right?

Various surveys have made clear the increasing role Facebook is playing as a news source for many people. More and more people are relying on the news articles shared by friends and the "related stories" links there as a main source of news. So if the items that appeared in their feeds were filtered in order to favour articles that are positive to some candidate or party and negative to others, then these people would be having their opinions manipulated to some degree, and would end up more likely to vote a certain way.

We also know that Facebook is very politically active, spending around $10 million a year in lobbying. This means that the company clearly has an interest in certain political outcomes, and cares enough to be willing to devote time and money to get their way.

One more important piece of the puzzle, we also know that Facebook has both the means and the willingness to manipulate people's news feeds, and can do so secretly if it wants. We know of one secret experiment they did, where they manipulated hundreds of thousands of user's feeds in order to see if they could change their emotional states. They were able to do this in secret and we only know about it because they disclosed it. This means that they probably have done other experiments that they haven't disclosed, but more importantly, it proves that they can secretly do this manipulation if they want to.

And finally, and probably most importantly, none of this is illegal. Facebook has no obligation to be fair, neutral or unbiased in their filtering of what they present to people.

So, when you put all this together, Facebook has the means to secretly manipulate the news that millions of US citizens see every day, and they have political interests that are important enough to them to be worth spending millions of dollars on. Further, they have demonstrated a willingness to do this kind of secret manipulation of their users.

The only real reason to believe that Facebook won't try to manipulate the next US election is if they think it is likely that knowledge will be leaked, and if it is, that it would have greater long term repercussions to the company than not doing it would. Given how deeply entrenched Facebook is in the social media ecosystem, and also given that they could, of course, also limit how much people found out about it if it leaked, I don't think it's that crazy to suspect that they'll do it.

In summary:

• Election results are influenced by the news and information that voters are exposed to
• People are getting a large proportion of their news from Facebook
• Facebook has political interests and already spends time/money on lobbying
• Facebook can manipulate what news and information users see
• Facebook has previously demonstrated the ability and willingness to manipulate user's news feeds, and was able to do it secretly
• There is nothing illegal about Facebook doing this
• The only real reason for them not to do it is if they think the general public might find out and the bad press will hurt them more in the long run than the gain

Now, I've been focusing specifically on Facebook and one particular event here, but most of the arguments apply to other social media companies and other kinds of manipulation. We really do need to be aware of just how much these companies are integrated into our lives and have the ability to control aspects of our knowledge. These are profit-driven companies whose primary purpose is to serve their customers and shareholders, and we're the product. We should not make the mistake of assuming that they have the greater interests of us or society at large as a main priority. They might, of course, but they're corporations. Generating profit is what they're legally obligated to do, and we need to remember that.

Violence and Who Framed Roger Rabbit

I watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit the other night, for the first time since I was a kid. For a movie made in 1988, I was happy to see that it held up quite well. The high productions values and attention to detail clearly paid off, and it was interesting to watch now that I'm at an age where I can relate to the adult characters more. Overall it's still quite an enjoyable movie.

What was different for me this time, though, was the violence. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm as happy watching a good action sequence as the next guy, so that's not my problem. What stood out for me was the casual use of violence, and violence as being funny in its own right. That is, the idea that seeing someone get hurt is funny in itself.

We're all familiar with the old cartoons that this movie is paying homage to, and the fact that they use violence for humour. We've all seen the Coyote get hurt in elaborate ways while trying to catch the Roadrunner. The fact that he is never permanently injured allows us to laugh at his misfortune. Or slapstick like The Three Stooges, where the casual violence the characters aim at each other is funny because they don't actually get hurt.

Or at least, that's certainly how it was always viewed.

But when I was watching the opening cartoon of Roger Rabbit, I didn't laugh once. It was literally entirely about Roger Rabbit trying to save a baby from being injured, and himself getting constantly hurt in the process. The humour was completely based around the inventive ways the writers came up with for him to be hurt. Now, he never gets injured, even when a refrigerator falls on his head, but he clearly gets hurt. And that in itself is supposed to be funny.

I feel like an old man yelling at the kids to get off his lawn, but I didn't find it funny at all. Now, I wasn't morally outraged or anything, but I wasn't enjoying it either. I was thinking, "Oh, well, this is aimed at kids and kids aren't exactly able to get sophisticated humor, so slapstick and fart jokes tend to be the bulk of the humour they get."

But this also isn't true. Warner Brothers cartoons have certainly been enjoyed by adults over the decades. The Three Stooges was certainly intended for adults to enjoy. And, hell, adults enjoy watching shit like Funniest Home Videos. Clearly the enjoyment of seeing people hurt but not permanently injured has never been limited to children.

What I'm wondering is whether or not we're changing as a culture. Diana felt the same as me watching the movie, so I know I'm at least not alone. And neither of us are pussies who hate seeing violence in TV shows and movies. But it certainly seems to be the case that violence just for the sake of violence isn't funny to us.

And this wasn't just limited to the opening cartoon in Roger Rabbit. Throughout the movie, there was a general level of slapstick violence, with Bob Hoskins' character quite often hitting and physically manhandling Roger Rabbit, and it clearly being intended to be funny and lighthearted. Now, I know it probably sounds like I'm overanalysing and sounding like a stodgy old man, but it felt to me like someone needed to sit Hoskins' character down and say, "Now, now, Detective Valiant, you need to use your words. We don't hit each other here. I want you to sit in the corner and think about how you should treat your classmates."

I would certainly like to think that we're just a small part of a more general social trend in not finding violence funny for its own sake, while still being able to appreciate well crafted humour that happens to involve violence. People getting hurt should generally not be funny to us, it's the very opposite of empathy. We don't need to become overly sensitive and politically correct, but just like most decent people these days don't take pleasure in seeing a bull being killed in a ring, two dogs fighting each other, or a TV character shaking his fist at his wife and saying, "One of these days...POW! Right in the kisser!", it would be nice if we started to move away from laughing when a person gets hit in the face with a frying pan or kicked in the balls too.

Why the Dalai Lama's Teachings Probably Shouldn't Be Taken Too Seriously

I often see quotes from the Dalai Lama on social media and in various places, and I get the sense that many people consider his teachings to be inspirational. Certainly, messages about love, kindness, forgiveness and so on are generally good things, and I'm not going to criticize that. The point I want to raise here, though, is that to western audiences, a lot of these aspects of the Dalai Lama's beliefs get presented and people take inspiration from them, but I notice that his other beliefs, the stuff about karma and reincarnation, tend to be downplayed somewhat.

This isn't at all surprising. To a largely Christian audience and a strongly Christian influenced culture, karma and reincarnation isn't going to resonate very well, while concepts like love and forgiveness are much more universal and things that more or less everyone aspires to. But what worries me is that people end up taking just a subset of his beliefs and as a result, elevating him to a position of respect and reverence that he doesn't really deserve.

Don't get me wrong, he's not a bad person and certainly if more people in the world were like him (in some ways, at least), the world would almost certainly be a better place. But if you want real answers to peace and love in this world, he's not the guy for the job. Take his quotes as your feelgood morning buzz if you want, but don't make the mistake of thinking that he preaches a path worth following.

Okay, what the hell am I talking about? What's so bad about the Dalai Lama?

Well, nothing, really. At least nothing that isn't also bad about other Buddhists, other Christians, and in general, most religious people.

The problem is the karma and reincarnation.

While you might read wonderful quotes about being full of love, the Dalai Lama's belief system is based around karmic justice, the idea that good deeds are eventually rewarded and bad deeds are eventually punished. Because we can empirically see that this kind of karmic justice generally doesn't happen in our lifetimes (sometimes people "get what's coming to them"; plenty of times they thrive their whole lives just fine), this concept is usually also tied together with reincarnation. So if karma doesn't get the bad guy in this life, don't worry, it will get him in the next.

This kind of belief system is obviously more or less impervious to proof. The Dalai Lama loves to make statements that make him appear scientifically minded, such as that he would readily give up his belief in reincarnation if science could prove it false. Now, of course, this isn't how science works, the burden of proof is on him to show that a fantastic concept like reincarnation is real, and it's basically impossible to disprove a vague supernatural claim like reincarnation, especially when no one even agrees on what it really means (different schools of Buddhism all have different ideas on what gets reincarnated and what does not; do you keep your memories, some vague concept of soul, etc). Given that his position as Dalai Lama itself requires reincarnation to be true, it's hardly surprising that he would cling to it, though I don't know if his stance on science having the burden to disprove it is one of ignorance of the scientific method, or a deliberate attempt to appear reasonable and open to change while really believing nothing of the sort.

So the point here is, just like other religions such as Christianity that comfort people by telling them that the good will be rewarded in heaven while the bad will be punished in hell, the Dalai Lama's teachings on love and kindness are also based on his belief that justice will be served eventually, in this life or the next. He has made it quite clear that he sees this kind of karmic justice necessary for a fair and just world, and he clearly believes it to be true.

The Dalai Lama can afford to love and forgive because he believes justice will come to everyone eventually anyway.

Where does this leave us? You don't really forgive someone if you're counting on them getting karmic justice eventually. You're not showing compassion if that compassion relies on a trust that some supernatural justice will eventually sort things out. If you want to believe in that kind of justice to help make sense of the world, then great, pick Buddhism, pick Christianity, pick any of the religions that give you this promise. Just don't be fooled into thinking that the Dalai Lama is preaching something different.

Now, on the other hand, if you can hear his teachings, and take away from that a genuine ability to love, to forgive, to show kindness, and to not want those who harm you to be harmed in return, then guess what? You're a better person than he is. Don't try to learn from him, because he should be trying to learn from you.

Rethinking the theme of Terminator 2

Not so much thumbs up

I went back and rewatched the previous Terminator movies with the recent release of Terminator Genesys, and while I still very much enjoyed the first one, I found myself not enjoying Terminator 2 as much as I had when I was younger. I think there is still a lot of great stuff in this movie, don't get me wrong, but this time around I found the theme annoyed me. I'm hoping that this post will get across what it was that was bugging me about it.

Main Theme

One of the key messages of the movie is the idea that "the future is not set. There is no fate but that which we make for ourselves". This is fine and not what bugged me. It was the greater theme of learning the value of human life. My issue isn't with the theme itself, but with how poorly the movie actually handles it. There are two main plot points that support this theme:

1. The Terminator learning the value of human life
2. Sarah Connor not killing Miles Dyson and instead choosing a non-lethal approach to taking down Cyberdyne

Neither of these really ends up doing much service to the theme, so let's go over them and I'll try to explain why.

I Know Now Why You Cry

Let's start at the very end. The final line of the movie is:

Because if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too.

This is a nice feelgood line to end the movie on, and it sounds meaningful. We're meant to leave the movie thinking, "yeah, if a lousy machine can figure out the value of human life, why can't we damn humans do it?"

The problem, of course, is that no machine has actually learned the value of human life. A machine in a movie learned it because that's what the script said. But you can't take a profound fictional event and use it as a premise for a logical argument about the real world. You don't base your opinion on human beings on what a fictional robot did in some movie! This is a clever line that feels profound, but it really says nothing.

Now, going through the movie, we see the Terminator go from not knowing why he can't kill humans to apparently valuing human life. We even have the funny exchange where John Connor keeps telling him that he can't kill humans, and he just keeps asking, "why?". The best John Connor can come up with is, "because you just can't. Trust me on this."

John Connor is just a child in the movie, so we shouldn't expect any kind of profound philosophical argument from him. But if the Terminator's arc in the movie is going to be eventually valuing human life, then we need things to happen in the movie to justify that. And as far as I can see, that isn't the case. The movie progresses and as far as we can tell, the Terminator is avoiding killing people because John Connor ordered him not to. But then suddenly, at the end, he apparently now understands why people cry, and values human life.

The movie did no work to get to that point. It just kind of asserts it because it needs it for story closure. There is no good reason for the Terminator to now value human life, other than if he just somehow 'figured it out' from out of nowhere. And if a movie is all about learning the value of human life but can't actually articulate in any real way why human life is valuable, then it more or less fails.

I Almost Did It

The previous issue was a bit nitpicky, but this one I think is the main problem. This is the part where Sarah Connor goes to kill Miles Dyson, but in the end, they decide to take a non-lethal approach to stopping Cyberdyne. We get the scene with her sobbing on the floor as John Connor and the Terminator run in, and she says, "I almost did it". First thing is first, though. The real reason Miles Dyson is still alive at this point is not because Sarah Connor couldn't pull the trigger. It's because of luck and Sarah Connor being a fucking terrible shot.

Sarah Connor absolutely pulls the trigger to kill Miles Dyson. But he moves at the last moment when a radio controlled car hits his foot. This is pure luck and by all rights Dyson should be straight up dead at this point.

She then goes on to pour 60 rounds of assault rifle ammunition into the desk he's hiding behind, but his desk must be stacked full of bricks or something because none of them penetrate and kill him.

This still isn't enough. She then heads to the room he's in and fires at him with a pistol, eventually hitting him once in the shoulder. It's only after all of these lousy shots that she eventually has to confront him and his family and then, finally, she's unable to shoot him in the face at point blank range while his wife and child look on.

Hardly 'pat yourself on the back' moral integrity here, and Miles Dyson really should be dead and the movie basically over at this point. Ironically, Sarah Connor would have far more moral integrity if she actually followed through with shooting him at this point, because otherwise it means that she had no problem killing him with an assault rifle from 50 meters away, but not while looking at his face.

But at this point, we're meant to think that what has happened is that she 'came to her senses' and realized what she was doing was wrong. The alternative, not so feelgood answer, though, might be that she was right in the first place, but lost the nerve to make a difficult moral choice once she could no longer stay emotionally distant from it.

Sacrifice

So the issue here is whether or not killing Miles Dyson in order to stop Skynet being created would be a morally acceptable thing to do. The movie tries to argue that it wouldn't be. Now, obviously, if you can solve a problem without taking lives that's always going to be preferable. In this case, we're talking about trading one person's life for the lives of billions of people. It's possible that you may be able to do it non-lethally, and in the movie they find a way, but at a much greater risk of failure, particularly with a T1000 chasing them.

It's a question of whether preserving that one life is worth all the extra risk of trying to find a non-lethal approach. One thing that might seem significant here is that fact that we're talking about killing a person who hasn't actually done anything yet, which makes it seem like some kind of thought crime. But that's where this moral problem differs from anything we ever actually encounter in real life, so we need to be careful. The movie has the unique situation of having precise knowledge from the future of what is going to happen. And this makes it less killing a person for what they might do, and makes it closer to killing them for what they have done. This doesn't ever happen in the real world so we're not built to think well about this kind of situation.

The fact that Miles Dyson isn't intentionally trying to wipe out the human race makes this feel different to than if he was doing it intentionally, but that doesn't change the need to stop him. It means we shouldn't kill him because he 'deserves it', but it doesn't change the fact that killing him in order to stop him might not be unreasonable. Given how large the stakes are, this might be the unfortunate but pragmatic best move given the circumstances.

Consider that, right now, the US has an ongoing drone bombing campaign across several countries in the Middle East, where thousands of people have been killed. Thousands of innocent civilians are knowingly killed as part of this, and not much effort is made to avoid that. Drone attacks aren't aborted if there's any chance that an innocent person might die. Far from it.

And people seem to be mostly okay with that. I mean, people kind of don't like it, but no one seems to be kicking up a fuss or petitioning their representatives. The news media barely talks about it. Most people are happy to not be reminded of it, and to not think about it.

But really, if you're not losing sleep over thousands of innocent people being killing on an ongoing basis, in some dubious, poorly defined war on terror, on what ground can you really be against killing one single person who will guaranteed cause the deaths of several billion people. By what we're currently morally accepting, a drone should be able to bomb Miles Dyson's house and kill him and his entire family and we should just call it collateral damage.

Now, since I don't think the US drone bombing is morally acceptable I can't exactly use that as an argument for killing Miles Dyson. However, my point is more that we accept deaths for the greater good all the time, and when it saves lives we usually consider it a good thing. If one death saved billions of lives, would we really be morally torn about it?

The problem with Terminator 2 is that it avoided the actually morally difficult choice of having to do one bad thing in order to avoid a much worse thing. Making a tough choice, and then living with the guilt of that, that can actually be a noble act. Deciding that you can never take a life under any circumstances, and then muddling through a plan that hopefully will stop the deaths of billions of people if you get lucky, that's actually not so noble after all.