Star Wars and Innovation

"If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got." -- Henry Ford

People have been complaining more and more in recent years about the lack of creativity on the part of the major motion picture studios and other big media producers. We seem to be getting more and more sequels, prequels, reboots, and transfers of IP from one medium to another, and less original content. The term franchise is now so standard that we don't even think twice about whether movies should exist as a franchise in the first place.

It's easy to point the finger at the big studios not being willing to take risks, or trying to maximize profits by making movies that have brand familiarity in order to make marketing easier and more effective. But I think we all know that we're a large part of the problem due to the way we vote with our wallets. If we keep paying for the same old shit, we'll keep getting the same old shit.

There is a limit to the number of big budget movies that can get released each year due to the time required to launch an effective advertising campaign. So studios will put their safest movies in these slots and throw huge money behind them, until we stop making these movies safe bets. New innovative ideas will keep getting crowded out of an already saturated market until this happens.

The Lone Ranger is a perfect recent example of how the public can effectively kill a cynical franchise attempt if they want to. The final verdict is still out at this point in time, but I think it's almost certain that there won't be a sequel. Spewing any old piece of brandname recognition at the audience in a desperate attempt to make money should not be rewarded by us, and this is how we do it.

On the other hand, the huge failure of John Carter last year is the kind of thing that scares studios away from trying something new (or at least adapting something that is relatively unfamiliar to most of the audience). And so they inevitably go back to churning out more shitty superhero movies because that's the current safe bet.

Or Star Wars.

Star Wars is now 36 years old. We've seen multiple movies, TV shows, computer games, and all manner of merchandising tie-ins. Now that Disney has paid $4 billion for it, there is going to be a shit-ton more in the next few years. They've already announced plans to release a new Star Wars movie every year. There is a Star Wars theme park opening. There will be all sorts of game tie-ins and anything else Disney can think of to make the most of their investment. Disney has a nice new lucrative reason to continue not to innovate any time in the near future.

There's lots to love about the Star Wars universe, but when will people finally have enough and ask for something new? Sure, if someone asks you, "Would you like a new big budget Star Wars movie or game?", anyone who grew up on it will probably say yes. Why wouldn't you want it?

But we need to stop thinking in those terms, and start thinking in terms of the trade off. Do you want a new Star Wars thing so much that you're happy to not get other things? What if, back in 1999, it had been, "Would you like a Star Wars prequel, or this new movie idea called The Matrix?". We would have lost a huge cultural phenomenon all so we could get, "Ani! Meesa too lazy to make new idea!" This is what we're doing every time we keep paying for the same old shit, and we never get to find out what alternatives we missed out on.

It's been 36 years of light sabers, the Force, and barely disguised racial stereotype aliens. It's been a fun ride, but can't we just let this fucking franchise end already? Wouldn't it be nice to have some new memes and cultural references in the next decade or two? There are so many great fictional universes out there to create and explore. Do you really want to be on your deathbed when you're 80 years old and still be wondering what other adventures Yoda got up to?

Used Games

With the recent announcements of the Xbox One and Playstation 4, there has been a lot of attention given to the used games market, and what policies would be put in place regarding the ability to sell used games for these platforms.

It's well known that the major games publishers do not like the used games market, since they do not get a cut of these sales, and there have been various attempts at diminishing this market, such as EA's Online Pass program, which made each game ship with a single use unlock code for online access, and required a purchase of around $10 to unlock online features if that used copy was sold to someone else. Since EA has the policy of including online features on every title, this amounted to decreased selling value of all EA titles in the second hand market. EA has recently cancelled the program.

It's easy to paint the publishers as the evil entities in this discussion, particularly since they do a spectacular job themselves of constantly reminding us that they are only in the industry to make profit, with little to no interest in promoting the creation of good games for their own sake. However, it's important to acknowledge that games retailers have been a big part of the problem, with a track record of pushing the sales of used games (at often only a very small discount to the brand new copies), and making it harder for consumers to buy new copies. This results in higher profits for the retailers, but reduces profits to the publishers, and thus to the developers, putting an increased strain on the industry.

The third side of this triangle, that is generally overlooked, is the consumers. How much responsibility do we have for the current games sales landscape? After all, we cast the final vote with our wallets, and while that doesn't give us dominating power, perhaps we are more responsible for the current state of affairs than we like to admit.

When Microsoft announced that the Xbox One would not support used games (or more correctly, would allow publishers to define the policy for their titles, which in practice would amount to the same thing for most titles), there was a huge uproar from the community. Sony capitalized on this, announcing at E3 that they would completely support resale of used games. Microsoft was then forced to backpedal and announce the same.

But, while all this strong support for used games is happening on consoles, the PC gaming landscape is vastly different, and has been so for a while. Steam has grown to become the centre of PC games distribution, a hub for digital purchases, and increasingly for physical purchases. Several of the last PC games I bought, such as Bioshock Infinite, Hitman Absolution, and Remember Me, all required Steam to play.

Why does this matter? Steam does not allow resale of used games. Every game purchased is tied to an account, and can never be resold. Steam has been going now for about 8 years, and this feature of the system has become embedded in the PC gaming landscape with very little resistance from gamers.

Why do console gamers care about their right to resell games they've purchased, while PC gamers have so happily given it up? The console market relies heavily on used games, as much as publishers don't like to admit it. It matters to teenagers and young adults that they can trade in their games towards the next purchase, effectively reducing the cost per game to these people, while older gamers with more disposable income are generally happy to purchase full price and keep their games.

The PC gaming landscape no longer has this feature. It used to be possible to sell used PC games, but no games retailer will accept them any more. Thanks to many of them being tied to a Steam key, they are useless to sell anyway. The physical copy you buy in the store is nothing more than a Steam unlock and physical data backup of a digital purchase, with zero resale value.

Given these facts, is it any wonder that piracy is so rampant on PCs? Sure, it's much easier to download an illegal copy of a game for PC than for a console (which requires a hardware modification), but creating a landscape of "full price or pirate" doesn't exactly help. Add to the fact that I can pop down to my local video store right now and rent any of the latest Xbox 360 or PS3 games for a couple of bucks, crank through it in a weekend, and return it, but I can't do this either on the PC.

We've created an ecosystem that heavily supports piracy on the PC, and we, the consumers, bear a lot of the blame. The allure of 75% off Steam sales is all that it takes for us to happily give away the right of first sale, not thinking about the long term consequences of our actions. PC gamers like to think they're a more sophisticated crowd than the teenage and dudebro console crowd, yet this console crowd seems to have a better grasp of consumer rights and maintaining a sales landscape that has a place for consumers of all income levels.

If we want quality PC titles to keep being made, and to stop the PC games market from being a 95% piracy afterthought, perhaps we need to question the unwavering support for Steam and trading our rights to buy occasional stuff on sale.

Damsel in Distress: Thoughts on Women as Objects in Games

I recently watched the first two parts of the web series being made by Anita Sarkeesian looking at the treatment of women in video games, specifically focusing on variations of the 'damsel in distress' trope. I recommend watching these as they are well made and contain a lot of food for thought and a lot that we in the games industry should probably be ashamed of.




There are plenty of good examples in these videos of women being used as simple objects, like trophies, as a prize for the male protagonist to win, with no will or agency of their own. And there are some pretty embarrassing examples of blatant sexism in video game advertising, such as the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time television ad from 1998 that contains the splash text, "And in the end, willst thou get the girl? Or play like one?"

I wouldn't argue for a second that Sarkeesian doesn't have a lot of good points or that the games industry has been a shining example of gender equality and female empowerment. However, I do have a strong suspicion that she is seeing games a little too strongly through a feminist lens and is not stepping back to consider other possible explanations for some of the things that she insists must be sexism and mysogyny at their core.

It is a common problem with people who are passionate about a particular cause to have a tendency to see everything through the lens of that cause. So you get feminists who interpret everything men do through a lens of sexism, racial minorities who interpret the actions of other races as racially motivated, or anti-religious people like myself tending to interpret the actions of religious people as always being religiously based. Being well aware of this flaw in myself and constantly looking out for when I'm overreaching, I also try to notice when other people do it, and point it out, even when I'm in general agreement with them, as is the case here with Sarkeesian.

Narrative Expedience

I think the fundamental issue here is that she is falling foul of a version of: "Don't attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence". Though in this case I think it's: "Don't attribute to malice what you can attribute to expedience".

Games, like movies and television, often have the need to set up characters and situations quickly, so they can get on with their main purpose. As a result, we often see characters that fit well worn stereotypes, and clichéd situations and character motivations. This is done so that the audience will be able to relate to the situation and get on board the narrative. In a medium such as novels, this is less necessary since there is more time to develop characters and circumstances, but when you're trying to quickly get things established and get the audience on board, tropes, clichés and stereotypes are the standard way to do it.

So, given that we know most games are made with men as the target audience, typically teenagers or young adults, it shouldn't be surprising that games will fall back on tropes that this audience will understand. Like action movies, a lot of games are primarily about the action and not focused on telling a deep story or fleshing out characters in any kind of substantial arc. You need a simple, quick to explain motivator for the main character that justifies his actions throughout the game/movie to follow.

The Protective Instinct

Most men have a hardwired instinct to protect, in the same way most women have a natural nurturing instinct. I'm not going to go into the obvious evolutionary reasons behind this; it should be fairly common knowledge. But men, particularly young men, also have the desire to gain respect, be seen as brave and heroic, and so many of our stories and tropes over the years have been based around this.

And this is where women fit in so perfectly. Having a woman in distress as the primary motivator in a story taps in to both the male's protective instinct, that need to save a woman in danger, and also gain respect and be a hero. Combining all of this together is a powerful motivator that most men understand immediately, which serves perfectly for a lot of games.

You could make a game about the hero trying to get back his stolen car, but it's just not going to resonate in the same way. Even the story about rescuing another man is just not the same. Rescuing a son will resonate a lot more than these previous two, but there's just something about protecting a woman that is different. 

Now, this in itself could well be an example of sexism in the sense that men have a tendency to see women as helpless or in need of protection, but it's based on a long evolutionary history of men fighting other men for the possession of women. We may not live in that kind of world so much these days (at least not in Western countries), but the instinct is still there. Removing it would be like telling a woman not to feel warm and fuzzy when she sees a newborn baby. These are some of our deepest instincts, evolved for good reasons.

One other thing to consider is that games often have the protagonist killing hundreds or thousands of people in a way that could only be considered psychotic in the real world. Like movies, they need to be heightened versions of reality to be satisfying, since they are experienced at a distance. We're not actually in the scene, but experiencing it through a screen. So, while in real life, experiencing shooting a single actual human being would be a traumatic experience, in a game or movie, we get to experience a taste of the adrenaline and badassery of being an action hero, without the guilt and trauma of reality.

However, we still need to have a believable motivation for our actions. Especially as games get more realistic, we need to feel like the character isn't going around killing people because his ice cream fell out of the cone. It needs to be reasons that resonate: saving a loved one, avenging a murder, saving the world.

Conclusion

In the end, I definitely feel that we should keep trying to increase the maturity of the games industry, producing games with more complicated characters and narratives, and giving women more to do than be a trophy. We can do this while still acknowledging that sometimes tropes are used simply because they allow a game to get to its primary purpose faster, and not with the intention to be sexist, racist, or any other -ist.

The Last of Us comes out in a few days time, and it's currently being heaped with praise in reviews because of its believable characters. I'm sure this praise is well deserved, and this will be one example of a game that tries to flesh out its female character beyond the usual clichés. But at its heart, it's a game about a middle aged man and a 14 year old girl trying to survive, and if you think they won't be taking advantage of the natural protective instinct of every male who plays this game, you're crazy!

94% of Communication is Non-verbal? Actually, no.

I was recently reading the book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, and in it the author mentions several times the statistic that 94% of communication is non-verbal. That is, the vast majority of information we transmit to others during face to face communication is non-verbal cues, such as body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, and so on, while only a very small fraction of the information we transmit is the actual words that we speak.

I've come across this statistic several times in the past in various places, as I'm sure have most other people (if not the specific 94% number, then probably something very similar). So I finally decided to do a little research into where it comes from, and if it's actually true.

94% is fiction

As you probably already guessed, the 94% figure is not true (if it was, I probably wouldn't be writing this post!). The source of this specific figure is... Kramer. Cosmo Kramer. The character in the TV show Seinfeld. That's right, if you ever see the specific value of 94% mentioned in this context, it has almost certainly come from an episode of Seinfeld.

It's quite amusing to think that various serious books, communications workshops, etc. are using a statistic pulled from a fictional character, but surely this value came from somewhere respectable, right? Well, actually yes, but with some very big caveats that change the value of the statistic significantly.

93% is not much better

The original source of high non-verbal communication numbers like 94% is a paper written by Albert Mehrabian in 1972. In the studies on which the paper is based, he found a value of 93%. That seems pretty damn close, right? What the hell am I being so picky for?

Well, as it turns out, this value of 93% only occurred under very specific circumstances: when subjects were reading out single words with positive, neutral (ambiguous) or negative connotations in either positive, neutral or negative tone of voice, or with positive, negative, or neutral facial expressions. So, in other words, when saying a single word with forced (rather than natural) tone of voice or facial expression, people used the tone or facial expression to judge the overall content of the message much more than the word itself.

Or, to put it simply, circumstances that have absolutely no relation to people conducting natural conversations in the real world.

To be fair, Mehrabian never claimed that his studies were providing broad, general answers to this question. That has been done by other people since, who, in a fashion we see so often with the application of scientific data, have taken a paper's results way out of context and subsequently misled other people as a result.

So what is the answer?

It shouldn't be a surprise that there is no general answer to this question. The amount of information transmitted verbally and non-verbally in conversation is going to be highly dependent on the topic being discussed, the conversational nature of the person talking, and also on the person being spoken to. Some people are much more emotive with their tone of voice and body gestures while talking. Some people are better at reading body language and verbal cues.

As we've all learned by writing emails and SMSes, it's often necessary to provide extra markup to plain text (such as smilies or sarcasm quotes) in order to get intention across, so it's not surprising that non-verbal components play some role in communication, and maybe even a big role. But anyone who throws a specific figure at you or suggests that there is a single value for how much of communication is non-verbal, well, that person <sarcasm> is really clever and insightful </sarcasm>.

gSurveillanceState

People have long feared the government invading their privacy and knowing too much about them. The concept of an Orwellian "1984"-style big brother state is almost a cliché, and Americans in particular have been very sensitive to this idea. Since the September 11 terrorist attacks, the loss of privacy in the US has become a much bigger deal as laws such as the Patriot Act provide the government with greater tools for privacy invasion than ever before. This loss of privacy and civil liberties has been noticed and condemned by many, but a large number of Americans have also supported the changes to a large degree due to fear and a need for the government to make them feel safe.

Despite all of this, a new, even larger threat to privacy has emerged in the last few years that everyone across   the globe should be concerned about, since it is rapidly gaining the ability to invade our privacy in ways that the government probably never even dreamed of, and it's happening right under our own noses. We're all aware of it to some degree, but very few people seem to be aware of just how widespread the problem already is, and how much worse it's going to get.

I'm talking about the rise of private companies collecting, using, and selling mountains of data about who we are, where we are, what we do, and who we do it with.

The user is the product

We've entered the age of Big Data, where many companies are collecting huge quantities of information about us, data mining it for their own uses, or selling it on to third parties. Google is probably the most well known example, with Facebook in second place. These companies make no secret of the fact that we, the seeming users of their products, are actually the product. 

Google collects lots of different types of data, from search requests, to location information (on Android devices or using apps like Google Search on iPhone), to browsing history. All of this helps it to provide better services, which is a plus for us, but it's all in aid of the way they actually make their money, by providing advertising with higher click through rates because it can better predict what ads we will click on, or by selling this sort of information on to interested third parties.

Facebook is the same. Their entire business model is based on collecting information about us, our social links, the things we talk about, all so it can sell this data to companies that want to better target us with advertising and offers.

These companies, and many others, are hooking into our online habits as much as possible in order to build more and more comprehensive profiles of who we are. If you use a program such as the Ghostery browser plug-in, you can see the sheer number of third party scripts that run on most of your web pages. As a simple example, I saw 8 different ones when I went to cnn.com. What this means is that, even if you don't use Google or Facebook, they have scripts on many of the web pages you visit which track information about what you do. This is useful data even if they don't know who you are, but thanks to the many different sources of information available to them, they can often link different sources of data together to figure out who someone is (this link gives a simple example of the sort of things that are possible).

Data collecting in the real world

Things don't stop with the online world. There is plenty of data collection occurring in the real world. The obvious examples are credit cards and loyalty cards, all of which collect your purchasing information to sell on. But this isn't done in isolation of the virtual world. Companies are combining all of this information, both virtual world and real world, to build a more complete profile of your interests and purchasing habits.

For example, Facebook has a partnership with Datalogix where your real word purchases in brick and mortar stores are collected (through the credit and loyalty cards), and then compared against the ads that you were shown on Facebook. This means that even if you don't click on a single banner ad, they can still track whether or not you ended up buying the products shown to you, i.e. they can still tell if the advertising was effective!

A company in Perth known as Inhouse Insights has been deploying technology that picks up the MAC address on your mobile phone when you enter and leave stores in order to track how long people spend in stores to help gauge the effectiveness of sales and so on. I don't know how many other companies are exploring similar avenues, but I'm sure these guys aren't the only ones.

The scary present/future

As if all of these forms of tracking and data collection weren't enough, it's the next steps by Google (and I'm sure other companies will follow) that really take it to the next level.

Privacy concerns have already been raised surrounding Google Glass. Here we have a set of glasses with an integrated video camera and a connection to Google's servers. It's not clear at this point exactly what information Google will be siphoning through these things, but the possibilities are worrying. Sure, we can already take fairly discreet photos and video if we want with cell phones and mini cameras, but these are limited in impact and isolated. Think of society if you have thousands or millions or people walking around with cameras and microphones strapped to their heads. You can usually tell when someone is using their phone to take a picture, but this is not the case with Google Glass. People will be wearing them all the time and we will stop noticing them, yet your voice and picture could be getting recorded at any time.

Now, imagine if Google decides to start capturing data of where the user is at any time and what they are seeing. Not only do they collect lots of useful data about the user, but also about the people they are looking at, without their consent or knowledge. Assuming that the glasses are intended to recognize people that the user knows in order to give useful contextual information to the user, this means that they will also be providing Google with useful information about people around the user. 

And then comes the Google autonomous cars. These cars are just being trialled on roads in Nevada, Florida, and California at the moment, but this will of course expand in the future, like Google Glass, once they become an actual product. But, even now, there is a fleet of these vehicles driving around, slurping up data. The sophisticated sensors on these cars collect many different kinds of data, and again they are connected to Google's servers. So, again like with the glasses, imagine when there are thousands or millions of these cars driving around, collecting data about the drivers, about what the cars see around them, including recognizing other cars and pedestrians. Concerns have rightfully been raised about the privacy violations that this technology can cause.

Some people like to think that Google is a company interested in doing good, and making the world a better place. This may in fact be true, but even if so, it doesn't negate the fact that Google is a publicly traded, for-profit company that primarily generates revenue from serving ads. This will always give it a strong incentive to violate privacy and sell data. Google has a long history of being quite secretive and protective of its own data and information, but showing very little restraint when faced with opportunities to collect other people's information. The collection of wifi data from homes and businesses by the Google Street View cars is one such example amongst many. And their blatant hypocrisy leaves you worrying just how likely they are to ever reign themselves in and not exploit every chance at collecting data on people in the future.

The surveillance state

So, in the end, we now have private companies collection information about us that governments would dream of having. And it's all just to sell us shit. All of this loss of privacy is not to make us safer or to catch criminals or anything noble like that. It's so companies like Google can serve us relevant ads so we buy more crap from their customers, the companies that pay for the ads. Sure, we get some benefit from this, such as more relevant search results, but the two don't have to be connected. It should be possible to collect data and only use it for benevolent reasons without selling it off or trying to manipulate the users and their spending habits. But the primary purpose of publicly traded companies is to maximize returns to their shareholders, so moral and ethical behaviour is generally going to fall by the wayside, which is exactly what we're seeing.

And now, governments don't need to go to the trouble to try and collect private information about us. They just request companies like Google to hand it over to them. Or they can look at purchasing data from data collection companies.

It seems kind of pathetic that in the end our privacy will disappear not because of an oppressive police state, but so some rich assholes in Silicon Valley can make money serving us ads for shoes.

Support Our Troops?

We frequently hear the catchcry "support our troops!", and it's considered almost a self evident truth that we should support the soldiers in our military, regardless of any disagreement we might have with larger scale military policies of our country. People talk about the brave soldiers who sign up and put their lives on the line to protect us, and how we should respect the sacrifices they make for us to be safe and free. To most people it seems that it's almost considered treasonous to be anything but fully supportive of the troops.

In this blog post I want to argue that this attitude does a disservice to all of us, including the soldiers themselves. I want to put forward the argument that blind support of soldiers without holding them accountable as part of the larger scale military apparatus of which they are part is both insulting to them, and to all of the people who have given their lives in the past.

Heroes

There is a long history of considering certain people as heroes, certain occupations in our society as heroic. We will sing praises to the bravery of people such as firefighters, police officers, and of course soldiers. We recognize that while most of us have fairly safe jobs, some people choose careers that put their lives in genuine danger, and that they deserve extra respect as a result of this. Sometimes we will single out a particular person who does something especially brave, and call them a hero.

It is no surprise why we do this. We all have an inbuilt sense of self preservation, but society often needs people to take personal risks for the benefit of others, so pretty much all human cultures have developed various mechanisms, rituals, and so on surrounding bravery, honor, doing your duty for the country/tribe/group, and making heroic sacrifices.

Soldiers are a very interesting case that stands apart from all of the others. On one hand, they are the ones who often have to take the greatest risks, but on the other hand, they are the ones who have a purpose solely focused on destruction and killing. While a firefighter is tasked with saving lives and stopping property damage, and a police officer is focused on keeping peace and only resorting to violence when necessary, the very purpose of a soldier is the projection of force, of killing other human beings and destruction of enemy infrastructure.

While it is true that the military can often be involved in 'peacekeeping' missions or tasked with rebuilding things, the former is really just making a visible threat of violence, while the latter is clearly a secondary use of a large number of able bodied people and equipment, and more cynically, good public relations. If the primary purpose of the military was construction and rebuilding, then clearly their primary tools would not be rifles, tanks and battleships.

So we always need to keep in the back of our minds that despite any particular acts of bravery and courage performed by individual soldiers, we have given these people the power to kill other humans, and they are part of an organization that sometimes brings them to justice when that power is abused, but also quite often does not, and so we need to hold them to a very high standard. And to do that we need a culture where soldiers can be freely criticized when they don't meet that high standard, rather than the usual, "oh, that was just a few bad apples, all the rest of the soldiers are shining examples of perfect morality, we promise".

Volunteers

One reason behind the respect paid to soldiers is the long history of conscription. In a society where people are forced to fight and risk their lives, basically a form of slavery, it's not surprising that we would find ways to make this seem more positive. By mixing in concepts like honor and duty, and having parades and public holidays and all sorts of ways to 'reward' veterans, we can take the sting out of being forced to go and kill people and possibly get killed.

The situation is a bit different when people are volunteering for this role, though. There may still be plenty of bravery and courage involved in what soldiers do, but the fact that they're freely choosing to put themselves in that position should not be ignored. While I'm sure that many soldiers have noble ideas of duty to their country and protecting their loved ones, the fact is that many people volunteer for much more mundane, sometimes even selfish reasons.

It is no accident that serving in the military has always been the province of young, testosterone-fueled males. As much as we try to become a more civilized society and as much as violence is decreasing in our society, we can't change the tendencies towards conflict and fighting that have evolved in humans due to their usefulness over most of our history. Many young people, particularly males, seek action and adventure, and freely admit that this is a large factor in joining the military. This doesn't make them bad people, by any means, but it does mean that we should be cautious about blanket support of people who choose to go seek action and adventure and kill people.

Then there are people who want to travel, or simply who want a job. In a small town with high unemployment, there may not be much local work available, but any young person can sign up for military service (though, of course, they may not be accepted).

And finally, we can't ignore the people who actually enjoy fighting and violence, and have very few avenues to legally engage in those activities. Just as arsonists can be drawn to fire fighting and people who enjoy holding power over others can be drawn to the police force, it should come as no surprise that people who enjoy violence will be drawn to the military.

The point of all of this is not to defame soldiers and imply that they're all doing what they do for bad reasons, but just to make it clear that the old days of people being forced to fight for their country have passed, and in this day and age we should not just blindly support anyone who volunteers to go and kill people. They might have good reasons for wanting to do it, but we are right to question those motives and not just assume that they are always positive.

More Than Dumb Grunts

When we're not fighting anyone, or when we're fighting a popular war, the issue of supporting the troops is much simpler. Everyone is generally happy to do it. It's when we're arguably doing the wrong thing that the question comes up. If you think that the US (and it's allies, like Australia) had no business invading Iraq and Afghanistan; if you think people should be held accountable for the thousands of innocent civilians who have been killed in these invasions/occupations and simply written off as 'collateral damage'; if you think the widespread sexual assault of female cadets and subsequent cover-ups and culture of silence at our military academies is unacceptable; then the question has to be asked how much soldiers should be held responsible for these things.

Often (though not always), when individual soldiers can be found to be committing crimes, they are held accountable. But what about the larger scale misconduct, such as fighting illegal wars? How much are other soldiers complicit in these things through their silence; through not taking reasonable actions to bring about change; though voluntarily re-enlisting and perpetuating the problem? How much should we continue to support them, and how much should we hold them partially accountable for helping to keep these things happening?

The way I see it, we can either consider soldiers to be nothing more than dumb grunts, brainwashed into obeying orders without question, and not capable of seeing the bigger picture. Or we can see them as intelligent individuals who can make moral judgements, and in which case, who have a responsibility to make the hard calls rather than just going with the flow. When your job is killing people, going with the flow should not be acceptable. 

I'd like to think that our soldiers aren't just dumb grunts, and so I think we do them a disservice to treat them that way, which we do when we just blindly support them and not hold them accountable for the apparatus they are a part of.

The real heroes are the soldiers who speak up despite a culture of silence when they know of illegal activities done by other soldiers. The real heroes speak up when they think the higher level military objectives are wrong and innocent people are being killed as a result of it. And the real heroes don't keep volunteering to help their country continue to do the wrong thing, even if that means they have to leave their friends behind when their tour is up. Real heroism is making the hard choices. I don't pretend for a moment that I have the strength of character to be that kind of person if I was in the military. But I don't ask my country to give me a gun and let me go kill people, so I don't need to be. For those that do ask, I think we need to hold them to a higher standard, and make words like 'honor', 'duty', and 'hero' actually mean something.

Making Public Holidays More Inclusive

As we head towards Easter and the two public holidays that coincide with it, it makes me think about the changing demographics in Australia in recent decades, and whether we're getting closer to the time when we need to rethink our religious public holidays.

Australia has no official religion and protects both freedom of religion and freedom from religion in its constitution. This means that no Australian should be forced into any particular religious practices or discriminated against on the basis of their religion, or lack thereof.

Given that Australia has been an overwhelmingly Christian nation until recent decades, it's not at all surprising that we have several public holidays based around Christian religious events. At the present time, Christians still make up around 60% of the population, with about 30% being non-religious, so there hasn't been a strong push towards changing this. Non-religious Australians have a history of being fairly easy going when it comes to issues like these, so most of the push for removing religious public holidays would come from people of non-Christian faiths, who are still a very small minority.

Why change things when the majority is happy with the status quo? There are a few reasons:

• The majority will continue to shrink over time and will eventually no longer be the majority. You could wait until then, but why cling to things desperately once you can see what the future will hold. Why not embrace them sooner?
• Having public holidays based around holy days for one specific religion makes our constitution a lie. We can't honestly claim to have freedom of religion and no favoured religion as long as we treat one differently to all of the others. The number of practitioners should be irrelevant. Either we have an official religion or we don't, but we shouldn't be hypocrites.
• We have our fair share of racial problems in Australia, particularly with the poor treatment of minorities, many of whom practice non-Christian religions. By giving Christianity a favoured status we contribute to this problem and make it worse.
• If non-Christians are quite able to get by in Australia without having their holy days as public holidays, then surely Christians can manage to do the same.

I think replacing Christmas Day as a public holiday would probably not be necessary. This day has taken on so much secular meaning and built up secular traditions that it can be fairly considered a cultural day, not just one for Christians. It helps that a lot of the Christmas traditions have pagan rather than Christian origins, but in the end, the point is that most people enjoy Christmas trees, giving presents, Santa Claus, etc without associating this with religion.

Good Friday and Easter Sunday are a different matter. Although we have the Easter Bunny, Easter eggs, and general excessive consumption of chocolate, I'm not sure that this is widely practiced by non-Christians, though perhaps this is changing and becoming more widespread, in the same way that Halloween is slowly becoming a thing in Australia, and no longer just an American holiday. So there might be an argument for keeping Easter Sunday, but I think Good Friday definitely has to go. It is absolutely a Christian specific holiday and really has no business being a public holiday.

So what should we do instead?

There are a lot of options. Western Australia should probably have a Mining Day public holiday! Northern Territory needs a Why The Hell Am I Still Living Here Day.

I think the best options would be to make Mothers Day and Fathers Day public holidays. Everyone can relate to them, and having public holidays based around bringing families together seems like a good idea in this age of ever increasing busyness.

What public holidays would you pick?