Free Will, Addiction, and Werewolves

I wrote a little on April 29 about “The Power of Habit”, by Charles Duhigg. Well, I finished it yesterday, and I have a few more thoughts on it.

I’d stopped just past the halfway point before, when it was getting bogged down in business and marketing. It stayed stuck on that path for most of the remainder… talking about Target's marketing schemes and church evangelism and so forth. But once it got to the last chapter it turned back to psychology and then took a detour into philosophy.

The final chapter of the book is called “The Neurology of Free Will”. The two subjects it delves into are addiction and sleepwalking.

The case study for addiction is Angie Bachman, a gambling addict. She lost her life savings, went bankrupt, inherited, and then lost her inheritance. When her creditors took her to court she argued that she shouldn’t be held responsible for the debt, because she was addicted to gambling and so wasn’t in control of her actions. Her expert witnesses showed that the neural wiring for gambling addiction was very similar to that of drug addiction. She lost the case… and her house. The reasons for the verdict seemed to be that, whatever compulsion she had to continue gambling, she had made the free choice to start gambling in the first place.

The case study for sleepwalking was Brian Thomas, who dreamed that he had fought off an intruder and woke to find he had killed his wife. Unlike Angie, he won his case. The jury was persuaded that, although parts of his brain were controlling the movement of his hands, his decision-making brain was asleep.

I suppose they were operating purely on a punitive justice model. Sure, he didn’t deserve to be punished. I can buy that. But if you have a rehabilitative justice model, this view doesn’t make as much sense. If the priority is to make sure it doesn’t happen again, then whether he deserves punishment or not is less important.

It’s tough to figure out the best way to deal with homicidal sleepwalking, where you can’t control your actions and are a danger to those around you. But this is where a thorough background in theoretical morality (IE fiction) comes in handy. It turns out there are good analogies for this sleepwalking. The Hulk comes to mind… he gets a little mad, turns green, and goes berserk. It might be mean to just launch him into space, but it’s hard to argue that it isn’t the best decision.

Or to get even closer, what about werewolves? If you know you’re going to lose control on the night of the full moon, and might hurt someone, then there’s a way to deal with that. You find a safe place to stay the night, and get someone to let you out when you wake up. If you don’t take those precautions… well, then someone has to stop you before there gets to be too many werewolves.

I suppose another way of looking at it would be to bring it back to addiction. Drunk drivers haven’t always been considered responsible for their actions. But that started to change when people realized that they were choosing to get drunk in the first place… however impaired their judgement was at 2AM, they still could have handed over their keys before they started. If the bartender gives them their keys back… well, the bartender has a lot of the responsibility.

Perhaps a gambling addict might absolve themselves of responsibility by putting their assets in a trust. And if they’ve taken that step then the trustee would bear the responsibility.

It’s not a very convenient solution, but it might be better than nothing.

Anyway, habits. Right. So to sum up: make good habits, change bad habits, don’t gamble, carry silver bullets. Hulk smash.

In Lieu Of Blog Post

I swear, I did have a blog post all planned out. I had a topic. I had headings and subheadings and links and references and a title that seemed kind of clever in my head.

Then I worked until 1AM, and decided it wasn’t worth the effort tonight.

So. NDP victory in Alberta. Yay! By tomorrow  - or later today, I guess - I’ll be upset about unequal representation and vote splitting and minorities claiming majorities and all those horrible things. For now, we can celebrate.

Goodnight.

This Post Could Cost Me $11,000

I’m just a few days removed from complaining about the subversion of freedom of expression in France, with mention of similar laws in Quebec… well here’s another big problem in Quebec to worry about.

In the town of Granby, it’s now illegal to insult the police or municipal officials online. Apparently there was already a law against the insults in person, but now it applies to the whole internet. It passed the town council unanimously.

This is the sort of thing that couldn’t possibly stand up to a court challenge, but the town’s government has far deeper pockets than most of its residents. If someone were to challenge it, they could keep winning in court for years, all the way to the Supreme Court, but it would cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars.

So in the long run this is basically a dead letter, but it still has the potential to ruin a few people’s lives.

It’s difficult to fully convey how disgusted I am with this, but I think I’d better give it a shot. and what better way than by insulting every member of the town council?

Pascal Bonin is a bad banana with a greasy black peel.

Stephane Giard is as cuddly as a cactus and as charming as an eel.

Jean-Luc Nappert has termites in his smile and all the tenderness of a seasick crocodile.

Pierre Breton is nauseating… wait, Pierre Berton is alive? Awesome! I need to read his history of 2005-2015… oh, Pierre Breton. Damn. Pierre Breton is just super nauseating.

Jocelyn Dupuis is a crooked dirty jockey and drives a crooked hoss.

Joel Desmarais is a three-decker sauerkraut and toadstool sandwich.

Serges Ruel is a nasty wasty skunk.

Robert Riel’s heart is full of unwashed skunks, his soul is full of gunk.

Eric Duchesneau stink, stank, stunk.

Robert Vincent is a dead tomato splotched with moldy purple spots.

Michel Mailhot is an appalling dung heap overflowing with the most disgraceful assortment or rubbish imaginable.

Hmm… that should do it. I’d insult all their police as well, but for some reason it’s hard to get their names. Instead I’ll just throw a middle finger in their general direction.

Orange Crush

There are times I suspect that none of the business of elections really matters. None of the polls or advertisements or debates, that when election comes the result will be decided solely by the price of gas.

Certainly I’m not the first person to think this, but an interesting case has developed in Alberta over the past months. Alberta is an oil exporter, and with cheap gas they are having a very bad year. It happens to also be an election year. So this might be an inversion of the usual effect: cheap gas leading to the downfall of the government.

Alberta has been under Conservative rule for a generation. Longer, really, at 44 years. In the election tomorrow there will be lots of new voters whose grandparents were too young to vote the last time the Conservatives were the opposition. The pollsters are saying the Conservatives are out, to be replaced by an NDP minority.

I don’t know how likely this is… Canadian provincial elections have been plagued by inaccurate polling for years, sometimes as a result of people switching from landlines to cell phones, sometimes as a result of overcompensating for that first effect, sometimes due to lack of pollster’s resources, and sometimes it’s just a mystery.

It will be interesting to see what happens tomorrow. Unless a hundred thousand oil workers get their jobs back today, it seems just barely possible.

I don't know if anyone knows what a less conservative Alberta would look like. I guess we should ask some seniors.

Another Shooting

After the Charlie Hebdo shooting in January, I thought perhaps it was finally the year for me to participate in Draw Mohammad Day. Because screw those guys, right? Then came the Chapel Hill shooting in February, which really took the wind out of those sails. I didn’t really want to be associated with the anti-Muslim right wing either.

Now there’s another thing: A shooting at a Mohammad cartoon contest in Dallas. I know, I know, there it doesn’t take much to set off a shooting in Texas. Probably there were three more on that same block today. Both shooters were killed by police, nobody else killed, one security guard injured.

So now the pendulum swings the other way, right? Well, perhaps not. It turns out the event was organized by Pamela Geller, noted racist. Her groups have been labeled as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and her blog’s named after an Ayn Rand book. OK, I’m in no position to judge other people’s blog names, but seriously, Ayn Rand?

It would be so much easier to pick a side here if somebody could manage to not be awful for just a little while.

Skirting the Issue

Sort of building on what I wrote yesterday… in the film they discussed the Hijab and Niqab, and what a shame it was that women were forced to wear them… well, it seems that in France they have the opposite problem.

They’ve banned religious garments or accessories in public schools. Sort of like the proposed law in Quebec a couple years ago, but extended even further. And the latest development is even more restrictive. A teenager was sent home from school for wearing a skirt. It seems that ankle-length skirts are too religious for French public schools?

Certainly when I see that type of skirt I assume it’s a religious thing… I’ve been known to call them “Mormon Skirts” because that’s my first assumption, rather than Muslim, but the basics are the same.

But why ban them? It seems totalitarian. Well, it is totalitarian. I'm not a big fan of slippery slope arguments, but banning skirts is an awful long way down some kind of slope.

This mentality seems to crop up a lot among anti-muslim activists. The idea seems to be that since women face so much societal pressure to wear the hijab, they need to be handed a convenient excuse not to... that they need to be able to tell their oppressors “I can’t wear that, it’s illegal”. When I met Maryam Namazie (Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain) while the Quebec law was still being proposed, she made that suggestion. My response at the time was that I would prefer to be on the side that’s not telling women what they have to wear… and that if there is no such side, perhaps we should make one. I don’t think the intervening years have given any cause to change that position.

There are women who want to wear religious garb. Really, there are! It seems ludicrous but those are the facts. There are also women who wear headscarves because they are cold and skirts because they are dancing and ornate robes because they are at the Renaissance festival. It does no good to single out religion as the one reason not to do those things.

The recent ruling from the Supreme Court of Canada shines some light on this... they ruled that secular is different from explicitly atheist. Removing prayers from city councils was a secular decision. Removing prayers but allowing atheist invocations would not be secular, because it's picking a side. I'm not sure that it precisely matches the dictionary definition, but it's at least fair and workable.

If you deny women their freedom to choose, then you are oppressing them just as much as the mullahs. At least as far as dress codes are concerned.

Honor Diaries

Everything is propaganda. It can be overt or subtle, acknowledged or denied, conscious or unconscious. Sometimes this makes it hard to tell what precisely it's propaganda for... but it's propaganda none the less.

Yesterday I went to see two films. “The Honor Diaries”, a documentary about violence against women in the Middle East, and “Avengers 2: Age of Ultron”, a film about punching robots in the face with explosions. I saw the former with a group of friends and the latter all alone… yeah, I have weird friends.

I’m going to talk mostly about the Honor Diaries here, but I might throw in a few shallow comparisons.

Just before the start, we were advised that the society presenting the film hadn’t reviewed its content. We were warned that its funding was questionable, and that its producer was an anti-muslim bigot whose films all seemed designed to whip up a panic about coming jihad. We were warned that one of the subjects is married to Peter Mackay, though nothing was said about what she may or may not have done rather than what her husband may or may not have done.

The introduction was, of course, also propaganda. Everything is. But some of it seems to be true… the producer does have some worrying ties to neoconservatives in the United States and previous attempts to incite a war with Iran. Yikes. And one of the other subjects, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has advocated for “crushing” Islam. Not sure how exactly she wants to go about doing that.

The film is structured as a conversation between 11 women, with frequent cutaways to film footage as they describe one horrible thing or another. And there are many: topics include mandatory burqas, female genital mutilation, acid attacks, forced marriages, and honour killings.

There is a narrow geographical focus here. There is a brief mention of caste-based violence in India, but aside from that the film only covers the Middle East and North Africa. And there is a narrow religious focus as well: One of the panellists is a Sikh, but from what I can remember none of the examples of victims are Sikhs.

This focus might be warranted or might not be, the film really never compares things outside of that region. Perhaps there are similar rates of honor violence elsewhere? All it would have taken was a throwaway line… something like “Women are ten times more likely to be murdered by their husbands in Muslim countries than elsewhere”. If such is the case, the film does not deign to tell us. Instead it is simply presenting the narrative, devoid of the statistics that could provide context.

There is also no comparison with other honor violence. Certainly I’ve heard of such things existing elsewhere… the Southern US and Latin America come up a lot. Are rates of violence similar there? Did the rates used to be similar, but then decline? That could be worth knowing, because success somewhere helps show possible solutions.

The film really doesn’t suggest any solutions, though. It presents some very terrible things, but without ideas what might be done to improve them. The closest it comes is a note at the end to check out their website for further info and to donate. That leaves the film a little… anticlimactic.

The whole thing comes off as trying to subtly suggest violent solutions to problems that aren’t likely to be solved by violence. Certainly the producer’s other films give that impression, just from the titles: “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West”. “The Third Jihad: Radical Islam’s Vision For America” “Iranium”.

Avengers 2 also suggested violent solutions to problems that aren’t likely to be solved by violence… though you could hardly call it subtle. Perhaps the solution to honor violence is punching people in the face with explosions? I dont know. It seems to me that if violence was going fix things it would have worked by now. It’s not as though that hasn’t been tried before.