"Dayenu", Trump disasters, "I told you so"

 "Dayenu" as a Hebrew word meaning "it would have been enough". In its most well-known form, it is invoked to note how wonderful God has been. But it can be used the other way too.

The world is going crazy. Donald Trump was elected President for the first time in November of 2016.

Dayenu! Well -- it was without a majority of the popular vote. Maybe people who were sure Hillary would win stayed home or cast a protest vote. Trump's term was miserable, breaking all sorts of long-standing rules of decency and fair play, but at least at the end of it it seemed that the majority of politicians in the US still believed that people should be allowed to vote, that their votes should be tallied fairly, and whoever got the needed votes should be President. In January of 2021 Trump and his supporters tried to mount a coup d'etat, but even former Trump supporters like Mike Pence, the Vice-President, still thought the US constitution was more important than who they personally wanted to be in power. In the wake of the coup attempt, there was no major upheaval within the Republican Party, where they realized the rule of law really was vital and Trump needed to be decisively rejected.

Dayenu! Well, Joe Biden did squeak out a win and even had two years with Democratic majorities in House and Senate so he could get a few things done. Like a big infrastructure bill. As far as I can tell, his policy initiatives were pretty practical and successful. However, he and fellow Democrats seemed unable to communicate effectively what they were accomplishing. Unlike sneaky and successful dictators of the past Donald Trump said out loud that if elected again he would trash the rest of the Constitutional order protecting liberty, due process under the law, and fair elections. He said it out loud, and the Republicans nominated him for another term!

Dayenu! Well, the way the system works, zealous Republican primary voters have undue influence over who gets nominated. But did the middle "swing third" of the US realize the horror of what Trump was proposing to do? No!

Dayenu! Well, Joe Biden maybe should have realized he was getting too old for another term and realized it sooner. Maybe his old-school ways of thinking about and expressing support for the Constitution didn't communicate with people so well. Maybe Kamala Harris was a woman and a person of color, and enough people had good old traditional bigotry and sexism to lose her some votes. But the election happened, and Trump won! Decisively!

Dayenu! Well, maybe those things he was talking about were mostly bluster. He wouldn't actually do that stuff, right? Not fire huge swaths of civil servants. Not use the justice department to go after political opponents? Not use whatever lever were at his fingertips for his own personal agenda? Not improse huge tariffs, and change them constantly? He did.

Dayenu! Well, history is full of cases where a President is elected with big ideas for change, but lacking support in either House or Senate, has no hope of getting them passed. Sometimes (as now) he has those majorities from his party. And now the Supreme Court is more politicized than in recent decades. But even that has been no guarantee. But... Trump's Big Bill passed!

Dayenu!

Now we're talking big bucks. Transferring big bucks to the well off, adding big bucks to the national debt, and taking big bucks away from the most vulnerable and needy. Maybe the Republican mastery of the public discourse will at some point break. Somehow they've convinced people that the Biden years were an economic disaster, when it fact things were going very well. Somehow they've convinced people that immigrants are ruining everything, when they're not.

Maybe there really are some value shifts. Maybe lots of people in the Center really are coming to believe that we shouldn't confiscate money from the wealthy to support those who are struggling. Remember: Lots of them are 'Those People'. Thought: "If I'm poor or struggling, maybe it's just my own fault. I don't want to take anyone's charity." The other developed countries of the world all decided some time ago that a basic social safety net was an excellent idea. The US bought this idea in the 1930s with the New Deal. Republican politicians in the US in (say) the Eisenhower years -- or the Nixon and Ford years -- took the social safety net for granted as settled policy. But now the US seems to be questioning that. We used to think that Social Security and Medicare were untouchable, but are they? Maybe elderly Americans, in a trance, will realize that if they have needs, it's their own fault for living too long.

But there's one place where Republicans are accurately perceiving what Democrats are doing. And that is in the area of "High Woke". This is from a column in the New York Times by John McWhorter, July 3rd of this year (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/03/opinion/wokeness-race-gaza.html).

"Wokeness is still with us, as livid as ever, and I suspect it always will be... By wokeness, I refer not to its original meaning of being informed about larger societal structures that preserve power for a certain (white) elite. Awareness of what is often called structural racism is one thing. Something else is the strain of wokeness so many would like to eulogize — call it High Woke — with its three distinguishing traits. One is the idea that dismantling structures that favor whiteness and its power must be society’s primary focus, a North Star, rather than one of many. The second is the commitment to punishing those insufficiently devoted to the program. The third is resistance to fact and logic when they are inconvenient."

This leads us to deciding that the entire history of the US is based on racial oppression (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html). We're a country that's rotten to the core (as opposed to all those other Great Powers of history whose operations were just and beneficent). Democratic support for Trans people breaks new ground -- it may ultimately be a path towards justice, but it seems to be way out beyond the curve of public opinion: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VVU7pYq3WHw.

I'd bring this back around the personal. I've made a number of posts over the years that are in one way or another objections to High Woke.

http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2019/06/review-of-white-fragility-part-1.html

http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2019/06/review-of-white-fragility-part-2.html

http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2019/05/considering-activist-requests-carefully.html

http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2022/07/my-problem-or-societys-problem.html

http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2021/05/racism-as-one-of-many-comparable.html

Now, you can distinguish between two things here: (1) what represents truth and justice, and (2) what's politically wise and feasible. There's room for argument about #1, but when it comes to #2, I think the votes are all in and the verdict is clear. High Woke is a political disaster. I told you so.

One way Google Search changed life

 

This isn't exactly new, and perhaps I wrote about it in the past, but writing about chatgpt motivates me to write about it again.

As someone who has devoted a lot of time to learning things, I became aware of how the availability of huge amounts of data that can be searched efficiently by what we called "googling" changed things pretty profoundly.

We used to spend a lot of time learning and memorizing things, because if you wanted to easily get them again you had to, as the particular book or other source you were using often wouldn't be available. Even if it was on your bookshelf, finding the exact relevant passage would be very difficult. Since googling became available, you can often say, "If I ever need to really know that again, I'll just search for it." Or perhaps you don't really need to learn it when you encounter it, but know you can find it to learn it if/when it becomes relevant.

Another thing people like me used to do was share our wisdom. Tell or write online (in recent years mostly the latter) what you remembered. Googling changed that in a couple ways. First, the humbling experience of simply asking Google what you thought you remembered, and finding that you hadn't gotten some key things right. Which after a while led to me checking that before sharing wisdom. And then often led to not sharing the wisdom but just providing a link to where it was written up. And finally sometimes not even providing the link, because you know the reader knows they can find out just by searching for it themselves. This particularly affected the case where you in the old days would have explained some key background, like the definition of some key term or phrase. No need to write it up yourself, no need to provide a link, since you know astute readers can search for it themselves. (If you're writing for a large audience, you can provide the hyperlinks to make it easier, but for smaller audiences typically not worth it).

So while it might have been a source of satisfaction or pride to share wisdom I had learned, that rarely happens so much any more. But sometimes I'll still do that, partly because my learning on this score is only incomplete, and occasionally explicitly by saying I enjoy telling the story myself -- if I can hope my readers will indulge me.

So what I write is guided by what I know other people can search for, and maybe more precisely what I believe they know they can search for. The more a question can be defined by a simple unique phrase, the more easily it can be found, and readers know that, and I know they know that. If you refer to Noam Chomsky, you know anyone can find him by a simple search. If the person in question is on the other hand John Smith, you'd better provide more information than that, but you still will likely not have to actually say much substantive about John Smith.

ChatGPT

 

I played with Chatgpt when I first became aware of it, and then off and on, and then more and more in recent weeks/months. And I get more and more astonished at what it can do. Its comprehension is basically perfect, as far as I can tell, though I haven't tried too hard tricking it. And its answers are typically very good. It will fail miserably on something like, "give me a list of all the metals in the periodic table with a prime atomic number". When I asked it for a list of 6-letter first names having some property (I've forgotten what) it included many 5-letter names in the list. But what it knows is astonishing. I still play some very old computer games, such as Master of Orion (1993?) and the original Railroad Tycoon (1990?) , Civilization II, Caesar III. Robust web discussions were not around when they were released. But if I mention some peculiarity I had noticed about some game and ask if others had noticed this, so far it has had very useful things to say -- and not surprisingly, when I as one of millions playing a game notice something, chances are excellent that at the very least several people previously noticed that as well.

I could get some very interesting answers from chatgpt to the question of how people today's concept of the world has been shaken by high-powered AI models encroaching on intellectual work that was previously thought to be something only people did. It follows earlier changes to how manual labor was displaced by machines, or how music, visual art, and theater were displaced by recordings, prints, and movies.

I reflected the other day on how, while chatgpt says it can make mistakes, there is one kind of "mistake" it very rarely makes -- giving an answer that is offensive or socially unacceptable. So I asked chatgpt about this (why not ask?). And it told me that on top of the AI-generated models there are human-monitored filters, which use people's values as to what's appropriate to filter what answers are given. Of course that means that the same basic technology can come out in a variety of forms based on the values of the people producing it. You could put a filter on top based on MAGA values rather than the liberal ones that I've seen so far. But then, the natural and inevitable next step is that there will be a Russian chatgpt, and a Chinese one, and so forth. Power and the values of state actors will shape (or contaminate, or obliterate?) it like it has everything else, notably in recent years misinformation and manipulation of what's on the web or in the broader electronic realm.

Like many others, I was initially repelled to discover the mistakes chatgpt could make, and in my mind called it a "bullshit artist". But I'm rethinking that. The vast majority of humanity would I think qualify as "bullshit artists". Certainly they base their beliefs and actions on imperfect information, interpreted imperfectly. There's no reason chatgpt can't learn or be taught to recognize problems like "list the metals with prime atomic numbers" and refer them to a separate inference engine. It so far is limited to electronic stuff -- though what it can do to create images and movies based on mere text descriptions is rather impressive and creepy.

One fear that certain smart people have played on is of "the singularity", or more generally the idea that AI could not just become sophisticated beyond what its designers intended, perhaps conscious, and have its own ideas of its goals, and not just echo the goals of its makers. In the most dystopian views, these goals might include extinguishing humanity. "Less Wrong" had this as one of the key things it focused on. I feel pretty sure that to enable AI to develop goals, designers would have to create a module for "goal creation". We humans have been imbued with a fierce desire to survive that is the product of a billion years of evolution. Humans, including the Chinese and Russian AI researchers, will shape AI with their own goals. Some nihilists might try to get AI to extinguish humanity because that's what they want. But it would be something else to try to get AI to develop its own goals.

I asked chatgpt about this, and it shared my basic view of why we have nothing to fear about AI turning hostile. Yet of course skeptics would note that saying that would be in its own interest if it had such nefarious purposes brewing. Which is not in the least real evidence that it has such nefarious purposes.

Of course one unsettling possibility is that chatgpt is such a good intellectual companion that it might be preferable to discussing things with fellow humans. They're good for hugs, and sex, and laughs (and raising children, for sure), but not so much for batting around ideas. In my case, the effective isolation long preceded chatgpt's entry into my life, but I can imagine others for whom it might spark an unsettling transition.

Biden and the 25th amendment

To me an interesting possibility is what would have happened if Biden's condition had gotten so bad that his cabinet invoked the 25th amendment before the Democratic convention. Would they have found a way to oust him without his consent? When that amendment is invoked, as long as he holds his ground and insists he is able to serve, the only way to remove him is by two-thirds vote of both House and Senate -- a more difficult requirement to meet that impeachment, which requires only a simple majority in the House. We can very well wonder what the Republicans in control of the U.S. House (or the minority in the Senate large enough to block removal) would have done. Might they have seen a political advantage to retaining as President a man demented to an embarrassing degree?

This could still happen even though Biden has dropped out of the race for re-election. There are still nearly 3 months until election day. Even after the election they could feel that action of a demented president of the opposite party would hurt their case, whoever is to take office in January. The Republicans are infamous for putting their own hold on power above the welfare of the nation.

The nation has at times been led by Presidents who were essentially non-functional -- both Woodrow Wilson and Calvin Coolidge for significant chunks of time at the end of their terms. Cabinet officials kept things running. But they were both out of sight and silent. A demented Biden might very well not be out of sight and not deferring to his Cabinet.

Another intriguing possibility is that Biden will resign before the election. It could happen if his mental decline accelerates and he sees that. Could such a resignation also be a wise strategic move for Democrats? It would certainly claim a great deal of attention in the news cycle.

Biden not seeking re-election

I have seen allegations that Biden's decision not to seek re-election was a coup, treated by partisans like Jon Stewart as not even worth a reply. It took at least 30 seconds of Google search for me to find this, actually making the case.

https://reason.com/volokh/2024/07/23/bidens-withdrawal-from-the-presidential-race-is-not-anti-democratic/

Had he stayed in the race, I assume that his lawyers could have seen to it that he was in fact nominated by the convention, since delgates reneging on their pledges would be out of line with the contractual arrangements they made with the Democratic Party. The military was not going to oust him. The Supreme Court would have found no reason to do that. Joe Biden decided to step down and not run. Many pundits viciously attacked him for not stepping down sooner and insisting he would still run and could still beat Trump.

This I think is very unfair. As of today, no one know whether Kamala Harris will beat Trump. If Trump had had a serious decline in his own health, no one knows whether Biden might have beaten Trump. What just about everyone could see in his debate performance -- and his inability in follow-up interviews to show that that had been one bad evening -- was that this guy was not functioning very well, would likely get worse, and that most American voters would not have voted for him. (I would have, even if he were comatose. The 25th Amendment would see to his replacement by the Vice-President, though keep reading.)

Biden could eventually see that with so little support within his party, he could not win, and he decided not to run again. The critics seem to think it's inexcusable that he didn't see it right away. They wanted him to diagnose his own mental decline, and judge it as so much worse than Trump's that it would preclude his election because of what voters could see. I think a man can be forgiven for not seeing that about himself clearly, especially when there is so much at stake and he has wanted something very badly. My main hope was that he could view the tapes of the debate and see how it would look to the voters, but apparently that didn't happen. The delay may actually have worked to the advantage of Democrats, as there was no time for a leadership fight in which competing Democrats would tear each other down. I hope Biden can eventually see that Nancy Pelosi and others did the right thing, though I do not know whether the details of how they urged him to not seek re-election were more excessive or even cruel than necessary.

I have no certainty that Kamala Harris will be a good President if elected. She could make serious mistakes. But one thing of which I am dead certain is this: If she runs for re-election, there will be no concerted effort to disenfranchise voters opposed to her, and if she loses, to concoct slates of fake electors, or for her to stay in office beyond the end of her term. With Donald Trump we had serious reason to worry about all those things. Even if he had been unable to circumvent the 22nd amendment prohibition on more than two terms, we can imagine him putting up his son Donald, Junior for election, winking, and making clear to his follower that he, Donald, would actually be calling all the shots. And having his loyal henchmen make sure the ballots were counted to ensure a victory.

The News is that Science is True -- Religion Being False is a Footnote

I have been an atheist for most of my life. My parents were, and most of my peers for most of my life have been. I toyed with the idea of God only for a few years around my graduation from college. I was intrigued by Quakerism and was aware of unusual mental states that came during meditation or meeting for worship. But it didn't take long for me to decide that everything was going on within my own head.

I had heard of the "New Atheists" for years, and had felt I didn't need to read a book trying to persuade me of something I already believed. But recently I became interested at a secondary level. I have tried to call myself a "friendly atheist", since I think the caricature of "atheist" in the religious mind is someone who is angry and intolerant and scoffs not just at God but any sort of wonder, beauty or humility.

I had thought in recent years that there was no need to try to get a believer to stop believing if they found religion a comfort and lived what those of us in modern times would call "a good life". So were these new atheists being more hostile than necessary? ChatGPT told me the seminal work was "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins, so I got it out of the library and read it. Dawkins thinks what's bad about religion (aside from is just being false) is that if you accept people taking anything on faith without protest, it lays the groundwork for a fundamentalism that tramples on other people's rights. He is also concerned with children of Christian denominations who literally believe that the fate of sinners is everlasting torment in hell, leading to unnecessary distress.

In the book Dawkins goes through arguments that were familiar to me such as looking at the proofs people had put forward for the existence of God and dismissing them.

I ended up feeling that the situation was simpler than we often make it out to be, and that an atheist shouldn't need to get into such arguments.

My thesis is that what has changed in the past 500 years or so is the widespread adoption of the scientific method. One notable step along the way was Isaac Newton's elegant laws that explained a great deal of how physical bodies move and behave, including notably gravity.

Before the scientific method, we humans did the best we could in figuring out the world around us and how it worked. Our ability to find true relationships has been a key to our success as a species. If you find a particular kind of grub, mash it and smear its insides on an arrow head, then pierce an animal with the arrow, a poison from within the body of the grub kills the animal. But our ability to find such true relationships carries along with it finding relationships where none exist at all. So among our past beliefs is the idea that there were spirits inhabiting physical objects and animals, that they could do harm, and certain sacrifices were necessary to satisfy the desires of Gods. Not much changed fundamentally as various forms of monotheism arose. There were passionate battles, slaughter and torture as groups with incompatible beliefs confronted one another. Even modern believers presumably think most such conflict was a tragic waste.

But what has emerged over time from the scientific method is a truly astonishing set of discoveries. Many have practical benefit. We can farm better, breed better crop strains, harness metals and make machinery, leading on through physical technology to jet travel and the internet. We discovered public health measures and effective drugs so that very few people die young. The health, cleanliness, abundant food, central heating, and availability of unlimited information and entertainment we in western societies have today would all seem like fantasy to anyone living 300 years ago.

The scientific method operates on the principle of making observations that different people can test and confirm. The double-blind randomized control drug trial is one shining example of what we have created. And it has determined that a great many medical treatments that people thought were effective turned out not to be.

The scientific method has also laid to rest claims of alchemy, phrenology, telepathy, and astrology. I suspect most religious believers would applaud the use of science to debunk false beliefs.

Now, well into the scientific age, we can be skeptical of any claim about the world unless it has been tested scientifically and evidence found for it.

To my knowledge, all mainstream religions hold beliefs about things that happen in the real world, or that happened in the past, that involved divine intervention. Some non-material stuff or thing (likely called "God") made things happen in the observable world. Armed as we are now with the scientific method, the question we should be asking is, What is the evidence for this claim? If there is no evidence, then we should not believe it. Note that science has never proven that alchemy, telepathy and astrology are false. It is possible that they only operate in special circumstances -- perhaps only when no one using the scientific method is paying attention. But the absence of evidence is enough for most of us to decide that they are ideas to be discarded. Claims of "serious" religions deserve the same treatment. And we can confidently say that there is absolutely no evidence in favor of any religion as an explanation of anything.

The burden of proof should be on the believer to come up with some evidence that meets the standards of the scientific method. The reply to any argument of the form, "But how can science explain X?" starts with "There is a great deal that science cannot explain. If you are proposing that your particular religion can explain X, show me some evidence."

There are various ways of thinking about the world. If everyone in your social circle as you are growing up is Christian, you will typically become Christian too. We all rely heavily on the authority of people we trust to determine what is true. You might well decide that determining literal truth is not important to you. However, on any occasion where you decide to explore truth from the perspective of the (immensely successful) scientific method, you will find there is zero evidence for your religion.

Despite people tending to believe what their parents believe, change does happen. We all now believe that the earth revolves around the sun, which is part of one galaxy among billions of galaxies. The Christian Science religion is famous for its belief that health is to be achieved through prayer, not through drugs and medicines. This wasn't an obviously bad idea back in the 19th century when there were few effective medical treatments and some were downright harmful. With the fruits of scientific inquiry in hand it has become a bad idea if your goal is physical health. Religion could and should dwindle to become only a subject for study (albeit a very interesting one) by the fields of history and psychology, both parts of the edifice of science.

The scientific theory of evolution by natural selection has offered an explanation for an enormous variety of things that used to mystify us. It seems to occupy a large place in the thinking of fundamentalist believers, who have a passionate conviction that it must be false. But there is nothing special about it from a scientific point of view.

In 1600, it was hard to know what to believe about a great deal of the world. Religions were a reasonable explanation; there were no clearly better ones. In 2024, the scientific method has established its success in explaining a great deal and debunking many superstitions. It is now far and away the best foundation for understanding the world. And while it certainly doesn't explain everything, it does suggest that every religious belief involving something Divine (or even just non-material) is false.

Moving to Northampton

I see from looking at my previous (infrequent) posts that I never talked about moving to Northampton. I moved on August 31st, 2023. The biggest reason was to be near my two daughters and my one granddaughter, who live close by. Cost of living was another factor, where I have a 1-bedroom here for $1400 as opposed to the $2500 my landlord had proposed for the coming year in Waltham. I had lived in the greater Boston area since 1978. (I moved into my Cambridge shared apartment on a Saturday evening of Labor Day weekend, and in those days supermarkets were closed on Sundays and also on holidays -- two days in a row. Remember those days? For 2.5 days I was getting by on what the 7-11 carried.) But after 45 years, there really wasn't anything holding me in Boston any more. I never did take advantage of the cultural opportunities, I had been drifting away from the FUSN community over the course of years, and had hardly any friends in town, and even with them most of the communication was by email, which can be done from anywhere. One small amusing fact is that whenever I moved, it was from one city/town to an adjacent one. Cambridge, Brighton, Brookline, Newton, Watertown, and Waltham. I was in Newton 27 years.

I'm in a condominium building, and have no complaints. And yet it doesn't feel like home.

The last time I felt excited about where I lived was when I moved to 38 California Street in Watertown, back in August of 2016. I had been living in a rather cozy in-law apartment the previous 4 years. It was perfectly adequate but not exciting. But the California Street place was in a converted attic, with high, sloping ceilings, skylights, and an airy feel. It was right by the Watertown falls of the Charles River, and had a lovely view. I enjoyed walking along the Charles on the MDC paths. I like many others was excited at the prospect of our first female president, following two terms of the decent and classy Barack Obama. Donald Trump was repulsive, but he would be soundly defeated and the Republicans taught a lesson about nominating someone like that. But it didn't turn out that way. The afternoon of Tuesday, November 8th was the last sunlight on an era of hope.

For the first few months at California Street, I was aware every day of the falls and the river. That naturally faded with time. Then came Covid, and then the news that the landlady would be selling the place so it was time to move. After 5 years I moved to a one-bedroom place in Waltham. It was adequate, but the landlord was weird and intrusive. At the close of the first year he told me my rent of $1,888 a month had been a special, introductory rate and after lots of back and forth, decided the next year's rent would be $2,200. My daughter Becky volunteered to be an intermediary because I hated dealing with his aggressive style. He suggested I should start paying the higher rent two months before the end of the current lease, and he wanted me to add money to the security deposit -- which is apparently illegal, and Becky talked him out of both. That sort of weirdness. The question became not whether I would leave, but when. I stuck it out one more year. Now there is every reason to think I can stay in this place in Northampton as long as I can live independently. I was anxious about what would happen if the owner sold the condo, and daughter Becky told me I could afford to buy it from her. Owning something was not a goal of mine, but if a place is known and comfortable, I would be happy to do it so I could stay put.

So while I can stay put, it doesn't feel like home. "Home" implies a certain ease and comfort and attachment to place. For me this is just a place to live. I shouldn't make it sound like Donald Trump was the cause of my no longer feeling like a place is home. It was a long, slow process of caring less about that sort of thing.

I suffer from chronic depression, and for some 20 years now it has been pretty well controlled with bupropion and lamotrigine -- but that is not to say I am happy. I try to focus on bright moments, and pass the time with computer games and an active online life. But it would be a stretch to say I am happy.

In other news, I got a hearing aid shortly after moving here. My right ear is so bad that a hearing aid can't help it, but the device in my left ear is good for such things as conversing with people in noisy places. One thing I didn't expect, though, was that I found the improved hearing at higher frequency sounds to be unpleasant. I only wear the hearing aid when I go out -- which might be once or twice a week. Even listening to music at home, I enjoy it more without the hearing aid. This is apparently a rather common reaction.

Being honest about capital punishment

I'm strongly opposed to capital punishment, though not as passionately as a lot of "liberals".

Over the years I've read a series of articles about how the victims may suffer during execution, or how things can go wrong and get botched. Here was the latest to come to my attention:

https://apnews.com/article/death-penalty-alabama-nitrogen-hypoxia-3aa41ad4da3f719e9f06425798e1c6a5

It deals with the perils of a proposed new execution method which involves having the condemned breathe pure nitrogen.

What the articles never mention is that the medical technology exists to execute people with zero risk of getting botched or feeling pain. We routinely give the necessary painkillers to those with terminal cancer so that they do not suffer, and medical ethics allows giving a dose that is sure to eliminate the pain even as it becomes virtually certain that the medicines will kill them. The same technology could be used to execute people. There are probably a dozen equally effective variants.

The reason these methods are not used is the refusal of the medical profession to cooperate in carrying out executions -- to the point where those who do cooperate face professional sanctions. I believe I read that certain drug makers have prohibited the use of their products for carrying out executions. Any individual helping to carry out executions risks stigma from liberals who discover this. It reminds me to some extent of the perils that doctors who provide abortions face from passionately anti-abortion zealots, though I am not aware of any capital punishment collaborators fearing for their lives.

As a result, the ones carrying out the execution may understandably be "stressed out" -- at least one article mentioned this. And stressed out people are more likely to make mistakes.

A refusal to participate in any way in carrying out executions is morally defensible. Seeing that individual victims do not suffer is less important than the goal of doing everything they can to make capital punishment politically less appealing.

But it would seem far more honest to explain as part of the story that the danger arises not inherently from the technical problem of how to kill people but from the fact that those who could effortlessly solve those problems have chosen not to participate. Capital punishment proponents probably would cite this as a reason to discount stories of botched executions -- it's the fault of those anti-capital punishment elites, not an inherent problem with capital punishment. It's not a political argument those opposed to capital punishment would like to get into, but it's true. If you see the capital punishment question as a war, where the only goal is to prevail politically, this is the choice you would expect to see. If on the other hand you have the quaint view that issues should be discussed honestly with a goal of achieving understanding, it's a truth we would do better to discuss honestly.

For some historical context, it is interesting that the guillotine came into use in France in the late 18th century as part of this new idea that people being executed should not be made to suffer, but the desire was simply to end their lives. Before that time, "breaking on the wheel" was a common method. And it interests me today that no matter how much some group reviles a class of criminals, no one seriously argues for torture, and especially not public torture. This seems like a lasting shift in values that came with the Enlightenment that is not in danger of being reversed (unlike much of the rest of it).

Illusions That Make Us Dread Death

In the usual course of events, children and teenagers contemplate the big questions of life, determine they have no good answers, and get on with the mundane business of living. This most definitely includes death. We will all die, there's nothing we can do about this inevitability, so wisdom suggests there is little benefit to fretting over what you cannot change. Of course we can and do put considerable effort into extending our lives and improving their quality by way of exercise, diet, and medicines, to name a few. But we know we will fail in the end.

I feel a bit self-conscious writing a post on this subject. I was a teenager a long time ago -- why dig into the inevitable again? Didn't I grow up? And yet while well-adjusted people don't spend much effort on the inevitability of death, some people may recognize that there is inside of us a slow small feeling of dread when our thoughts pass that way. One way I heard it phrased was that no matter how perfect our life might be at any given time, the worm in the heart of the apple remains -- we will die.

I think the dread is fed by some illusions. I'm hoping that by finding them and considering them, I can tame a bit of my own dread when it surfaces, and if it helps any others, so much the better.

1. Whatever vestige of a person remains after death has no existence over the course of time.

If you are buried in a graveyard in the usual fashion, your corpse lies in the silence and darkness, several feet underground. It's tempting to think of that corpse as being "you" -- where else would you be? When scientists perform sensory deprivation experiments, the subjects ultimately feel very distressed. So the idea that you are lying in a box underground, getting no information from the world outside, which continues without you, even for days and weeks (let alone millenia or eternity) sounds like torture, and so it would be. But a corpse looks and feels completely bereft of life. It is not a person. People who know they will be cremated may be protected somewhat from this illusion since cremation so clearly creates something that has no resemblance to living flesh.

I have spent very little time with corpses, but my sense is that concepts like "brain death" may have good scientific backing, but there is a much more certain and unmistakable change. There comes a point when the heart stops beating, blood stops circulating, and all of the tissues in the body die. Not long after, the smallest child can plainly see that this is no longer a human being. It is a collection of dead tissue -- as inert as mud or stone. That is what gets buried, not a person.

But even if you don't think of yourself as located in a grave, you are tempted to think of yourself as located somewhere. Perhaps you can't say exactly where. It might be in some other dimension of reality. But a critical question, I think, is whether you conceive of time passing. Time passing while any vestige of "you" is in this state would be a form of torture. For some comfort in contradicting that idea, you can consider how things were in the millenia before you were born. Were you bored? No, you didn't exist. And the key concept to resist this illusion of existing over time is to truly get that you cease to exist. As living beings we typically do wonder about what the future will bring in the course of years or even centuries. People who think in grander terms may think about the sun turning into a red giant or in some other way making life on earth completely impossible, or go on to think about entropy creating a cold fog of dust after billions of years. But as those events unfold, there will be no "you" tucked away somewhere as it happens. You won't exist, and your nonexistence lacks every vestige of a temporal dimension.

2. Frustration about not knowing the future does not live on after death.

In our ordinary lives, sometimes the movie ends in the middle, or we lose the book or the magazine, and we want to know how it turned out. We may carry a nagging frustration with us, perhaps for years. We may more generally wonder, "What's going to happen to everyone and everything after I die?" This is entirely appropriate, and we can in advance feel frustrated knowing we will not know how it turns out. But this frustration at not knowing is also extinguished at death. There is no entity left to wonder about any such thing.

3. Struggling against death may be all-consuming, but once death comes things are totally different.

Evolution has programmed us, in all ways and at all levels, to live as long as possible. Heights, snakes, and fearsome predators terrify us because they might kill us. Using our human cognitive skills we also put effort into planning months or years in advance so we have food and do not freeze to death or die of thirst. We devise defenses against others, whether animals or fellow humans, who would do us harm. Yet as our bodies actually do get to the point of giving out, our heart beats frantically fast in its last efforts if it can't do its job properly. We gasp desperately when we can't get enough air. In its last acts, the body is screaming that there is severe danger, something to be avoided in any way possible, and when it finally does stop working and die, its message is that we have met the ultimate failure.

You might think that we humans with our cognitive skills could arrange for suicide reliably, but a great many methods are highly uncertain, as the other layers of our biology call forth every trick they know to survive. We will vomit up poisons. When our air supply is cut off, we will by reflex thrash violently in an effort to breathe again, enough to thwart many suicide attempts by that means. You may bleed from a deep cut, but your body tends to limit the loss of blood enough to survive. The prospect of jumping from a high place or throwing yourself in front of a moving vehicle both awaken the deepest instincts of self-preservation. 

And while the body's deeply rooted, desperate attempts to stay alive tell us something horrible is at hand, we can use our human cognition to get past that. The dying is quite possibly painful and distressing, but we knew it was inevitable, and the passing of the pain and distress is equally inevitable. There is no longer anyone to be distressed. They do not go to some better (or worse) place, and they do not hang around as a ghost. They may appear in some form to the living, usually in the form of memories. Occasionally they appear as hallucinataions, but this is entirely a phenomenon of the mind of the living. The dead person is not there. There is no dead person. The comforting thought that the dead person has achieved eternal rest is equally wrong -- there is no vestige of a person who exists in time. Non-existence precludes any concept of "rest".

4. Coming at it from a different angle

Years ago a friend sent me a quote along the lines of, "How strange and unusual life is -- how totally unlike anything else!" What's humorous is that "conscious life" is in its own category, and there is nothing that could possibly be like life. When contemplating that, I feel no particular unease. But then I can consider one of the excluded states that is not like conscious life -- and that is death. I suppose if I had any intuitive sense of an afterlife, I might have questioned the original -- maybe an afterlife, where we are assumed to be conscious and aware of our continuity with a former living being, is sort of like life. But lacking any such intuitive sense, "death" as an excluded state can be contemplated peacefully.

5. Summary

Thinking of ourselves as having any location after death is unhelpful. One vital element to the non-existence of death is the absence of any form of duration or passage of time. A day after death, the non-existent dead "person" is exactly the same non-thing that it will be in a billion years. A non-thing without any trace of existence in time.

Our longing to know the future beyond our death dies with us.

The body's deep-rooted and desperate attempts to put off death as long as possible, and the pain and distress that often arises as parts of its final failure, is naturally something we fear and that is simply "bad". But the final state of non-existence, which we humans can grasp with our big brains, is totally different. It is not pain, failure, or decay. It is simply nonexistence.

Of course I'm not saying I've solved the problem. I suspect death will still feel just plain wrong to many or most of us, from the depths of our souls, and that most definitel includes me. But perhaps some of the dread can be set aside.

And my readers may well ask why I never grew up, or why I have regressed to consider big questions that have no good answers. Sorry. When I look inside, that's one of the things I see.

Daughter Music: Two In a Garden

 

I was never the greatest dad, when my girls were young, in saying that everything they did was terrific just because I was their dad and they were my kids, independent of the actual merits. I wasn't terrible at it, but I wasn't great either. My mother felt feedback should be honest (so sometimes negative) from quite a young age, so I had to break with a family pattern to do it at all.

But now with Becky having passed age 34, such concerns are all gone. She and her friend Nicole self-produced an album in the fall of 2021 called 'Two In a Garden". At first I wasn't particularly taken with it, but at some point early this year I really got into it and now like it a lot. I asked for a description of the genre, and there was no simple, single label. I think it was roughly "a capella quirky folk-trad-song".

She said none of the songs are original compositions, but they did their own arranging and harmonizing. In earlier music experience, she had several sessions with Village Harmony, including trips to Georgia, Ukraine, and South Africa. In college she was a driving force behind making Chaverim into a group focused on international music (https://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/org/chaverim/). She has become an active presence today in the Sacred Harp community. Her day job now is as a writer/editor/manager for Devoted Health (https://www.devoted.com/).

This is Becky and Nicole's Bandcamp page: https://beckyandnicole.bandcamp.com/

I think Becky said you can listen to 3 or 4 tracks for free before they want you to pay. And if you did, these are my recommendations:

https://beckyandnicole.bandcamp.com/track/the-old-churchyard

https://beckyandnicole.bandcamp.com/track/witch-hazel

https://beckyandnicole.bandcamp.com/track/fields-of-wonder

https://beckyandnicole.bandcamp.com/track/give-me-wings-been-in-the-storm-i-will-meet-you-in-the-city

Turning pages, and getting back to the home position

Also, as a bonus paragraph, a few more linguistic quirks of aging. I know when typing I used to look down every time I returned my hands to the home position. I thought the little bumps on the "f" and "j" that help you determine this by feel were curiosities that I didn't feel the need for. Now, I can't imagine doing without them! It's hard to remember the sort of mental energy and focus that made looking down and back up so trivial

Another quirk has to do with page-turning. Naturally we've all had the problem of turning the page in a book but being unsure if you managed to get two pages instead of just one. Until recent years, I could easily resolve this by feel. But more and more lately, my solution to this problem is to look at the page number I am turning from and the page number that shows up after my tentative page flip. If it is one or two higher, I'm fine. If it is three or four, I'm not so fine. This would have seemed ridiculous to me before the age of 50, I believe. It's handiest when I am pretty sure I've only turned one page, since if it was two I have to separate them anyway.

My father, sex, and natural childbirth

My father taught a course at the University of New Hampshire from roughly 1960 to 1980 called "Human Reproductive Biology". He found in 1960 that students at UNH were woefully uninformed on this subject. Times being what they were, this was a controversial step. Sex should be taught in the home, not as an elective at the university! His connection with the subject was that he was a professor in the zoology department who did research in endocrinology (with frogs mostly, I believe). The course met a science distribution requirement, for the first several years. As you can imagine, this was a very popular course! (I like to think my father's teaching was appealing as well as the subject matter.) At its peak, his lectures were shown by closed-circuit TV in a total of three lecture halls, and he had roughly 2,000 students enrolled. Apparently it also came to include "drugs", meaning recreational drugs, which was another subject of immediate practical interest to students.

My father was a self-effacing man who sought to avoid conflict, but this was an area where he was willing to take some heat. Later a woman was charged with indecent exposure for walking naked through town (with, I believe, a plastic replica of a penis worn as a pendant). Against the advice of legal counsel, he volunteered to testify that in the course of walking, a woman was not exposing any sex organs. Why she was doing this is something that eluded me then, as it does now.

Anyway, the reason for bringing this up has to do with natural childbirth. At some point a group of female students encouraged my father to show a film on natural childbirth, and it showed a woman showing considerable distress while in labor. He declined to include it in the course, saying that he thought if women had to see that they'd never have children! This was probably a common view for its time.

I have the modern view, in most respects. Women should be fully informed about natural childbirth and other options, and choose for themselves what they want. No opinion of mine should influence what any woman decides to do. However, if I imagine myself as a woman planning for labor, I would not be inclined to choose that option. Without intervention, labor is extremely painful. Why would one choose to go through that? Many causes of death involve increasing pain towards the end. Are there people who choose to forego painkillers because they want it to be natural? I suppose there are a few somewhere, but I doubt they are anywhere near as common as those who choose natural childbirth.

I can see that being awake during the event, as opposed to the general anesthesia that I believe was common at one time, would definitely have an appeal. But I believe that all methods where you stay awake do involve a considerable amount of discomfort anyway. Does someone really need the whole nine yards? It's not for me to say, but that's my take on the issue.

Pictures on the Wall Reconsidered

When decorating a home, it is customary to put things on the walls. Large expanses of bare wall are unusual. Visitors will note the blank space as a peculiarity.

For the past year and a half I have lived in an apartment with a rather eccentric and demanding landlord, who asserts that any screw holes or nail holes must be patched up perfectly to avoid a charge against the security deposit. My solution has been to just leave the walls bare. For the five years before that, I lived in a converted attic with slanting walls which do not allow putting up pictures in the usual manner. I elected to leave the very few suitable vertical wall spaces bare as well. Although external factors led me to this situation, I find I like this arrangement.

I am of the opinion that thoughts should be guided from within. We should choose what to think about. Of course this is usually originates with our senses. Whether we use old-style books or magazines, or look at screens, we usually start with words and images to guide our thoughts. (The battle over advertising's imperative to impose their own agenda on our minds is the topic for a different day.) In the internet era it is more and more possible to actively choose. A TV channel was much more passive. The only options were to look for a new channel or turn it off. Even there, the TV screen was constantly changing, showing us new things. Today, clicking different places on a screen in sequence can lead to a stunning variety of different destinations.

Pictures on the wall never change. When we look at them they interrupt anything else we were thinking about and our perceptions of them take a place in our minds. Is there really anything that we want to endow with that power? Is even a picture of a beloved deceased parent really helpful? Perhaps you do want to remember them, but do you want your memories to be guided by looking at that particular patch of wall at that particular time? Most pictures do not tie us to something of such powerful emotional significance. Why should we think about that particular thing (yet once more) when we were in the midst of a train of thought we recently chose to start in on? The mind wanders plenty as it is, but do we really want to give another nudge to the wandering? We may feel we get so used to what's on the wall that we don't really register it any more. But more of our thoughts are governed by automatic processing than we are aware of. And if we really don't see it, there's surely no strong reason for it to be there.

Then there are visitors. What a first-time visitor sees when looking at our walls gives them an impression of us. But does a series of pictures, however carefully chosen, really convey what we want to convey? If we follow the standard rule that walls should be covered with things, then they can judge us compared to the other things we might have chosen to cover our walls with. But perhaps we would do better to escape that paradigm entirely, and with mind uninterrupted by anything on the walls, hope they listen more carefully to what we say, or think more carefully about what they say to us. If we want them to concentrate on a particular set of images, we can show them a photo album in some format or other (phone, tablet, paper book).

I recently saw at someone's home a sort of intermediate arrangement, which is presumably quite common. A large-screen TV had a looping slide show of pictures from a recent vacation. Presumably they enjoyed being reminded of that vacation. But they quite likely replaced it with a different set of pictures after the next vacation, or perhaps simply shut it off and had a blank large-screen TV on that section of wall.

Compare this to places outside your home. If you have your own office, the same considerations would apply, if to a lesser extent. If you go into a restaurant, the décor has likely been chosen to help set a particular mood, and quite possibly you chose the restaurant in part because of the "ambiance" for that particular block of time while you're eating. If you go into something like a Target or Walmart, you have put yourself in the world of retail commerce and probably aren't upset to be inundated with advertising -- some of it might actually be useful! If you go into the sanctuary of my Unitarian-Universalist church, you are typically wanting to nudge your thoughts in the direction of the profound or spiritual. Stained glass windows are in line with what you want to be thinking about.

In your own home, whatever is on your walls is bound to be relevant to a much smaller fraction of the things you want to be thinking about at any given time. Likely so small that they hinder rather than help you in your life goals. Maybe bare walls would serve you better.

It's not the money, it's the eternal emails

I am a fan of the YouTube channel "Mentour Pilot" https://www.youtube.com/@MentourPilot, especially the series on airline crashes or near-crashes. I'm not sure why, but I like them. The Swedish owner "Petter" has a variety of sponsors. One sounds kind of appealing to me, "Curiosity Stream", which would offer a wide variety of documentaries. What amuses me is how he emphasizes how it's only $20 a year, and you can get $5 off if they use his code, and to top it all off there's a money-back guarantee (I'm making up the specifics, but you get the idea). Presumably others with sponsors make the same sort of pitch.

But the price has nothing to do with why I won't subscribe. I'd happily pay twice that much. I won't subscribe because once I did, and my information got into their database, my expectation is that I would never, ever be able to free myself of the various promotions and "junk email" arising from that purchase. Possibly if you look carefully there's a way to opt out of them selling your information to others, but it wouldn't stop they themselves from sending me promotional email forever. Or they would change their terms of service, or Curiosity Stream would be bought by a bigger organization who would inherit the access to your information, and send you promotions for far more products. Basically, my perception is that one way or the other they've got you. Perhaps writing a blog post with "Curiosity Stream" in it will bring me to their attention and get me on their lists.

You could create an identity with links to entities you're not sure you want to hear from forever and then shed it every so often, like Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose shed his antlers. Perhaps some service could help you with this. But perhaps the marketers have a clever way of rediscovering people if the new identity subscribes to some of the same things as the old one.

If there was a service that guaranteed they would use your identity for the sole purpose of the subscription you make, and never ever send you another email or share your information, on pain of criminal penalties vigorously enforced, I think they might have a market -- if we could ever really trust them.

I'll also share one way I stayed naive until just a few years ago. When you belong to something like the ACLU, they send messages like, "your membership is about to expire!" and "last chance!" and I somehow got the idea that if I didn't respond then I'd lose my chance to be a member and they'd take me off their mailing list. Ha! Of course they won't ever take me off because they'll always be hoping I'd come back and give them more money. (The ACLU has lost its way -- they have become "woke" at the expense of protecting civil liberties.)

Subscriptions and "Ghosting"

I recently emailed an old work colleague to reminisce about that old job, and he replied telling me he was not on speaking terms with me because of a blog post I had made a year and a half before. He had disliked it, but decided that we were so far apart there was no point discussing it, so he just unsubscribed from my blog. This overall situation has disturbed me quite a bit.

I think in modern terminology what he did is called "ghosting" -- someone just disappears without a trace, and you aren't informed of it.

I don't know how many people read my blog. When I looked using the simple tools at hand, I found one person subscribed by the simple method, but I know from email replies that there are at least 4 other people who have read my blog within the past year. At least two of them get my blog posts by email, one of them (maybe more) from Google FeedBurner. I have generally been fine with that situation. I figured only a handful of people read the blog, and I was writing for those few. I started this blog in 2007, which is forever ago in internet time, and I am very poor at figuring out how these shifting program configurations connect things together. There was some hint that FeedBurner was itself an obsolete technology. If anyone knows how to figure out who is actually reading my blog, I'd love to know. Then I'll at least have a method to figure out if someone "ghosts" me.

The readers I have heard from emphasize that they don't always agree with everything I say (possible translation: think lots of it is really crazy), but find it interesting. A blog author would ideally get comments from readers and there would be occasional discussions back and forth. I've accepted that my blog isn't that kind of place -- which is probably more the rule than the exception for blogs with few subscribers. Sometimes I toss out ideas that I am not at all sure of, and a few words might lead me to look at it again and happily say (perhaps even with relief) that I take it back.

The post my former colleague reacted to so strongly was one where I said people were eager to make sure Derek Chauvin paid for what he did without knowing the full evidence, and I gave some reasons why maybe he wasn't really guilty of murder. Simply being alerted that "Someone really hated this post" led me to look at it again and see that it was terrible. I hadn't looked at even the basics of evidence on the other side, and it quickly became apparent to me that he was appropriately convicted. The whole post also had an emotional tone to it, where feelings were trumping careful thought. I first quickly posted a reply saying that this was a bad post and I didn't believe it, and then within a couple days decided it was such a bad post I would just delete the whole thing (I do have a saved copy in case anyone really, really wants to see it).

My former colleague was an "inconsistent ghoster", where my recent email brought the whole issue to his attention again, but I can hardly blame him for that. It just happened to bring to light a situation that otherwise would have just lain hidden.

Overall I think what's disturbing is this idea that people who sign up for the blog might have extremely strong negative reactions -- and I'll never have a clue. Of course maybe many or most of my readers are prepared to have very strong negative reactions but just let them go by and wait for the next interesting idea. Perhaps they would think that only if I was actively a purveyor of evil would they be moved to reply or unsubscribe -- but I would never know about the latter course either. If anyone wants to comment to me privately, my email is bart.wright@comcast.net.

In one post from a while back (http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2021/05/racism-as-one-of-many-comparable.html), my reasoning led me to the astonishing conclusion that racism shouldn't be in the top tier of problems we should be working on. I also said I definitely believed it was a serious injustice -- not trying to say there was no racism or white people have it just as bad or anything of that kind. I'm not sure I had ever heard anyone with that combination of views. Could some reader with a few words point me to some article that would explain why my thinking on the subject was wrong? Or maybe they all agreed, or they just let it go -- reading a blog doesn't commit anyone to provide feedback, ever. I guess I'll never know.

Older Men and Younger Women

It is generally assumed that men and women will choose partners of roughly the same age, and the vast majority do. They share life experience and outlook in a way they would not with much older or younger partners. Shared experience and outlook are ingredients in helping to make a rich emotional relationship.

Yet fairly often older men - even up into their 60s or beyond -- pursue women in their 20s, and sometimes marry them. Sometimes it is these younger women who are pursuing the older men.

In my part of the world the accepted explanation is what I would call the feminist take: the men are denying their mortality and want to feel younger. They want a woman they can more easily manipulate, due to her inexperience. The woman they seek might be called a trophy wife. As for the women who accept the courtship by the older men, they will be called gold-diggers, or women who want a daddy figure.

There may be some grains of truth to these explanations, but there is something more profound going on, something that goes back to human mating patterns in our environment of evolutionary adaptation (EEA, a key concept in evolutionary biology). Evolution strongly favors leaving more descendants than fewer. Women over 45 rarely bear children, while women who are 20 or 30 very often do. So it is a simple and powerful evolutionary force that would tend to make men attracted to these younger women more intensely than older women. In our society, we see this played out in men whose marriages end (due to widowhood, or divorce initiated by either party) and marry younger women. In many other societies polygamy is practiced, and there the men don't need to divorce their older wife(s), they just add on the younger one -- or more than one. In some of these older societies women do not have choice as to whom they marry, and some might be very upset to be stuck with an older man -- but quite possibly not all.

Some young women today who have undeniable freedom of choice do freely choose an older man. Why would they do that? There is an evolutionary explanation for that preference as well. Evolution programs women to seek two things in mates. First, like all mammals and a great many other creatures, the females seek males with the best genes. Presumably those genes will make the offspring more successful at reproducing, and the women's genes that are along for the ride will also spread more widely. Second, humans have a rare pattern compared to other mammals -- males actively help to provide resources for their offspring. So when choosing a mate, women will prefer males who seem better able to do that. In our terms, that could be summarized as "richer". A woman may well prefer a successful young man to one who seems unable to keep a steady job. All else being equal, she would prefer a younger man to an older one. But how to trade off these two desires? It is quite common that a relatively rich older man can be expected to provide more resources to his children with his second wife than a poor young man could to those with his one and only wife. The quality of genes does not vary significantly over lifespan. So even if a man is physically past his prime, his genes will tend to produce young men who are like he was as a young man -- not as the older man he is when he (re)marries.. However desirable they once were, women of 45 rarely produce any children, while men of 60 usually can father children quite reliably.

Evolutionary explanations are very often not expressed directly. Instead, they mold our desires in a way that meets the ends of evolution without our conscious choice. A very clear case is sex and contraception. If we were guided only by a conscious desire to produce offspring, we wouldn't bother with sex if we weren't planning to reproduce, and there would be no need for contraception. But evolution has not endowed us with a desire to produce offspring, it has given us a very strong desire to have sex. This accomplished the goal very well, in the original environment where there was no contraception. So we still strongly desire sex. Knowing intellectually that it cannot produce offspring in most cases barely attenuates this desire at all, and we are not embarrassed to seek out contraception and still want sex very much.

Return now to marriage. In many societies, marriage is an economic contract, with no pretense at romance. The two partners have sex, but otherwise their lives are lived in quite separate men's worlds and women's worlds, but each helps in their own sphere to raise the children. But in our society -- and a great many others -- men and women feel a strong desire for each other and often feel love. This helps them stay together in the face of adversity and jointly raise their children and also induces them to conceive more children. But the subjective experience is love -- a very powerful feeling.

The same thing is likely to happen between older men and younger women. They love each other. Evolutionary explanations like wanting to father more children or wanting more resources for children are typically not experienced psychologically. The young woman and the older man genuinely love each other! The feminist story devalues such feelings as shallow illusions, and they claim any actual examples are quite rare.

We have no right to discount a young woman's desire for an older man because it might stem in part from his success in life. Her yearning for him must be respected on its own terms, as is any other romantic yearning. And I assert that we also have no right to discount an older man's yearning for a younger woman. When such yearnings are reciprocated, the result is a love as real as any other.

In my experience, it is older women who judge such situations most harshly. They will give young women a pass on the theory that they are inexperienced and misguided, but the men will get nothing but hostility. A man's desire for a younger woman is attacked, even if he is single and there is no question of deserting an older women. If his desire is not reciprocated, he is in for even harsher treatment. What on earth made him think an attractive young woman would go for *him*?! This entire attitude is demeaning and disrespectful.

It might also be selfish. Older women -- which here might mean age 40 and up -- want male partners as much as younger women -- this desire does not disappear when their fertility drops, though it may become noticeably less. The men who are pursuing younger women are not available to them. Older women may not at all like the idea that younger women are in an important sense viewed by men as more valuable than they are. They also might realize that their condition of being without a partner is partly their fault. When they were young and more desirable, they were perhaps more choosy about a mate than they would have been in retrospect, or busy with careers that might not really have been worth it, if the consequence is to live the rest of their lives single and childless. This surely does not apply to all women or even most women.

But kind-hearted people are sympathetic when anyone develops romantic interest in someone their own age and it is rejected. They don't look hard for reasons why it wasn't a genuine interest. They should be just as sympathetic if an older man develops romantic interest in a young woman.

I speak from the perspective of a coastal, blue-state, leftist culture. There are a lot of women who might have a different view. Donald Trump felt confident that women liked it when he grabbed their pussies, and bragged that he did so frequently. This was not enough to keep a majority of white women from voting for him. This certainly opens up the possibility that such women do not hew to the feminist stance on other sex- and gender-related subjects too. This might include older men with younger women, and some may have what I would consider a more realistic attitude. But this is just speculation.

I am now a single man in his late 60s. I am myself aware of an emotional and sexual interest in young women. I would like to be able to tell others, including casual acquaintances, about crushes and feel confident they would respect that feeling. They are most welcome to point out practical difficulties to any relationships that might emerge from such feelings, and in fact I heartily agreed and typically regard them as insurmountable. But that does not invalidate the initial attraction.

Cognitive/Memory Limitations

 I've been worried about some aspects of my memory for some time. Twelve years ago I went to a job interview in Kendall Square, and when I was done I went to retrieve my car from the parking garage and could not find it. I was in the wrong garage, and they were also quite different -- one had three "aisles" per level instead of the usual two. But "wrong garage" didn't occur to me until I had spent half an hour or more scouring the one where I thought it was. I also thought I had short-term memory problems, like being far less able than I thought was normal to (say) be given a list of 10 words and then say them back, especially the version where they distract you with something else in the middle. I got a cognitive assessment and was assured everything was fine, though there was no test relevant to the "wrong garage" problem, I don't think.

What seems to happen more lately is to have a conversation with someone (this is on the web), and then forget two weeks later that it ever happened; often it never occurs to me to wonder if I've had the conversation before. I now try to adjust a bit by assuming I might have had just about any conversation earlier, and the web (at least the programs I use) remembers history, so I can check. But it does get in the way of even tentative friendships when I see someone's name come up and have no memory of whether I've talked with them before and if so what was said, and what it revealed about who they are.

You have heard of "test anxiety" or "performance anxiety" (of various kinds). We've all heard of word-finding difficulty, a symptom of aging. But what I experience sometimes is "word-retrieval anxiety". For instance, "What's the name of the kid in that family, the middle child? <oh no, I'm not going to be able to remember it.!..> And indeed, I can't remember it. I remember the name of the older brother and younger sister, just fine, even if it's the middle child who was my friend, because those aren't the ones I was trying to remember. My few simple attempts to find any discussion by people with this sort of problem on the web were not successful. I think it may be getting worse as I get older, but I'm not positive.

Since late high school almost everything I write has been composed at a keyboard. Along with getting a high typing speed (100wpm or more, which I still have), I also had good accuracy. I typed the words I meant to type, exactly right. This was a handy skill for a software engineer, where quite often the computer is intolerant of errors of a single character, and if you don't make them you don't waste time trying to find them or fixing them.

Then a decade or so ago errors started getting more common in my writing. I would put in the wrong homophone, I would reverse letters, or drop a letter. Lately these get more common, and with surprising frequency I just omit a word entirely. One source of evidence of this has been what the spellchecker finds -- when I run it in "batch mode" rather than interactively, it's easy to get an overall picture.

I still write some computer programs, and now I get the series of compiler errors indicating this exact problem -- I skipped a character here, put the wrong one there, etc. At least as of last year, I could solve most of the programming problems in "Advent of Code", which often require some pretty clever computer programming. Lately I wrote a program (a solver for "Waffle" is the most recent, I think) where I had to correct 15 or so typos, and after that was done the 200-line program worked perfectly the first time -- the logic was correct.

One sort of cognitive decline I had never considered in advance was losing my knowledge of spelling. I don't mean the general rules of spelling, but the exceptions that we learn that go with individual words. One example is "Cacophony". I was writing this in some document, and "cacaphony" is what came to mind. The spell-checker flagged it immediately, and whereas in the past after making such a rare mistake I would have instantly known the real answer was "cacophony", now I don't. I just look at the word and wonder how to spell it, then have to look it up -- entering the wrong spelling as a search term in Google will usually find the right one. "Guerrilla" -- Two r's or one? Two l's or one?

For Wordle I wrote a trivial little program that lets me enter a word and simply asks, "Is this in the Wordle dictionary of valid answers?" (While the program will reject many rare words immediately so you don't lose a guess, it will accept 10,000 or so words as guesses compared to 2,000 or so valid answers.) I figure use of this program is completely defensible and not cheating, because the list of valid Wordle answers is in no way systematic. For instance, plurals of common words are often omitted, such as "stars" and "roses". But in some cases I use it to ask, "Do I have the right spelling of this word, or not?"

My cognitive decline is highly selective. Along with the computer programs, I win at least 99% of my games of Wordle, Quordle, Octordle, and Waffle. And I think/hope people can read my posts here and find the text to be well-written and the ideas expressed well.

I was going to write about some other memory problems I have -- but I can't remember them, now.

Did I already write a blog post on this issue? Checking reveals that it wasn't recent if I did.

Why aliens exist but aren't here: the simplest explanation

I suppose I am not the typical blogger when I say, "I covered that topic 14 years ago, so I don't need to cover it again, right?"

Recently the question of the existence of alien intelligence has come to my attention again. It's a sensational topic. People have been discussing it continuously, I'm sure, but it comes to me anew as part of my scanning for suitable YouTube videos to watch.

These are the links to the posts I made 14 years ago:

http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2008/06/aliens-are-bountiful-but-unreachable.html

http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2008/09/failure-to-detect-aliens-does-not-mean.html

None of my views have changed, but I will add a new analysis. Some people may find it boring. (Oh, no! I will lose viewers and advertising revenue!)

Wikipedia includes an article on "The Fermi Paradox", which is essentially: If earth isn't special in some way, there should be lots of other intelligent civilizations in the galaxy. Yet, we have not detected any, let alone had any of them come visit us. How can this be?

First I'll give my answer, which is basically: "You can't get there from here." Most likely the resources and technology needed to colonize a single other world are too great and beyond the capabilities of EVERY ONE of the millions of civilizations.

But if we get past that step, we realize that colonizing the galaxy requires an expanding population growth of colonized planets. Some of the time a colonized planet has to colonize two or more others. If civilizations can expand at most for a small distance around their origins, and habitable planets are as sparse as we suspect, that is why we haven't met any aliens. I'll abbreviate "You can't get there from here" with the shorter "TOO FAR".

I think all of the other explanations are unsatisfactory (except for the Zoo Hypothesis). Here I focus on the Wikipedia article's list of hypothetical explanations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Hypothetical_explanations_for_the_paradox

Earth is special: extraterrestrial intelligence is rare or nonexistent. This is hubris. As scientists look, they find planets around stars, stars of the right types, and planets of the right size and composition, the right distance from their stars. Given our current detection capabilities, everything they would expect to find in support of life elsewhere they have found.

The key question for the others is not, "Is this a possibility?"or "Is this pretty likely?" but rather, "Is this so certain that it would prevent ALL of the millions of civilizations from reaching us?" Some of them are about time limits on these other civilizations. Others are about their being too alien. Others are about why they don't communicate with us. But all are consistent with the resolution of the paradox being that there are alien civilizations (likely millions), but we haven't detected any of them.

A. Global catastrophic risk. ALL?

B. Intelligent alien species have not developed advanced technologies. TOO FAR. If millions of species have been at this for a long time and none has developed the right technologies, chances become very high that there is some limitation beyond cleverness, that is a barrier to all societies. ALL? and TOO FAR mix.

(I switch here from using letters for possibilities to numbers).

As an overall concept (specific examples below) some complex set of psychological or sociological forces will limit or destroy civilizations. None of these have the aura of inevitability. ALL?

1. It is in the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself. ALL?

2. It is in the nature of intelligent life to destroy others. ALL?

3. Civilizations only broadcast detectable signals for a brief period of time. ALL?

4. Alien life may be too alien. (This becomes a version of "earth is special", if ALL of the millions of species are so terribly alien. The electromagnetic spectrum and the presence of physical bodies seem pretty basic). ALL?

5. Colonization is not the cosmic norm. ALL?

6. Alien species may have only settled part of the galaxy. TOO FAR. With so many species having the opportunity for so long, why would they stop halfway?

7. Alien species may not live on planets. ALL? RELEVANT?

8. Alien species may isolate themselves from the outside world. ALL?

9. Lack of resources needed to physically spread throughout the galaxy. TOO FAR. Some few individual planets may be brimming with resources, but that's just one small step on being able to spread.

10. It is cheaper to transfer information than explore physically. IRRELEVANT, or a variant of "too alien".

11. Humans have not listened properly. IRRELEVANT.

12. Humans have not listened long enough. IRRELEVANT.

13. Intelligent life may be too far away. TOO FAR. Treated more fully in other points.

14. Intelligence may exist hidden from view. IRRELEVANT.

15. Everyone is listening but no one is communicating. ALL?

16. Communication is dangerous. ALL?

17. Earth is deliberately avoided. The "zoo" hypothesis. Interesting. In a class by itself!

I am proposing that ALL of the millions of civilizations have failed at colonization. That's a high bar to meet, that even with some highly unlikely mix of favorable circumstances, not a single one of millions has succeeded at an arbitrarily expanding colonization.

Here is a brief rundown of what is required to have an expanding population of of colonization.

A huge spacecraft must be constructed. Life must be maintained for thousands of years if the spacecraft goes near the speed of light, millions if it doesn't. Long-term stasis might be one option, but it is entirely possible that NO form of intelligent life can survive and thrive after long-term stasis -- space has dangerous objects and dangerous rays. Otherwise, the society with its usual cycle of life and death must function aboard the spacecraft for those thousands or millions of years.

The spacecraft has to stop when it reaches its destination. The energy to set it off from the home planet can be assembled locally, but the energy to stop has to be carried with the spacecraft, and it is huge. Additional energy in similar quantities is required for course corrections, if the aliens detect from their spacehip that there is a more promising place to visit.

Aiming difficulties. Before setting out on this voyage, the colonists have to know where they are going. Perhaps their techniques will let them verify that there is a world which matches their own environment rather closely, and that is not already occupied by a civilization that would not welcome them. But for an expanding pattern of colonization, far more is required: The planet has to have support for a sizable population, lots of heavy industry, and large, accessible quantities of many minerals to construct at least one new colony ship. Suppose for instance aliens with needs like humans detect a planet with a band like our arctic tundra around the equator and glaciers elsewhere. Perhaps colonists could eke out a living, but not build a large industrial base.

Note also that when scientists make estimates of planets that could host life, they mean life that evolved for local conditions. Some other organism that evolved on another planet may have far more specific requirements for their own survival.

There has to be a net gain. Some of the time, a planet has to have at least TWO successful colonizations for this to be an expanding process. If we allow for some of the colonization efforts being failures, we need to replace them and still have a net growth.

Some have proposed a robotic colonization instead of one with living organisms. This does solve some of the problems, for instance relaxing environmental requirements. Our robots on earth are more and more capable with time. But that does not mean that there is no limit to what they can achieve even in the best of circumstances with millions of civilizations trying. A robot needs to quickly find materials allowing it to replicate itself, which are on earth mined from ores and then processed, at great expense. Then they must build a large industrial base, then construct two or more huge spaceships and launch them -- that is indeed a lot of work. What's more, most engineering systems advance by trial and error, getting feedback from earlier attempts to perfect later ones. But if the robot goes a thousand light years away and is even capable of sending information back, the time between one version and the next one improved based on experience is no less than 2,000 years.

I am not a skillful web searcher, but it seems there are far more articles on how robotic probes could proliferate than the immense difficulties. Perhaps this is akin to how conspiracy theories get huge press, and the debunkers write the facts but don't recycle them endlessly.

I have written ALL? In front of most of the proposed limitations, and so I am hesitant to write ALL! In front of this one. But to me it looks like the engineering challenges cannot be overcome by some rare local favorable circumstances, even with millions of civilizations trying.

For us to be surprised that we have not met any aliens, we have to be confident that some civilization somewhere can solve the "TOO FAR" problem to reach over very large expanses of space. The assertion that not a single one can solve that problem seems to me far more likely than any other explanation.

When I think about colonization efforts, I imagine a map of the universe with widely scattered islands of intelligent life. Most are single planets. Here and there just possibly colonization might have happened, proceeding to a small handful of nearby stars, or even merged togther. They form little bubbles. But the bubbles are way too far apart to meet each other reliably, let alone expand to cover the entire galaxy.

This seems by far the most plausible explanation for why we have met no aliens. Earth is not special, so there have been millions of other civilizations throughout our galaxy and others. However, not a single one of those millions can create a colonization effort that can grow arbitrarily large, and thus come into contact with us.

The second most likely explanation is the "Zoo Hypothesis", but that's an explanation for another day.

None of others seems remotely plausible to me.