1. I somehow escaped reading To Kill a Mockingbird during my school career. But since the ‘sequel’ (which, as I understand it, is actually a rough draft that Harper Lee’s estate found in her papers and published with minimal involvement from her, but that’s another story) is on my reading list this year, so I figured I should finally tackle it.
Somewhat to my surprise, I really enjoyed it (I say ‘to my surprise’ because it’s a book dealing with racial issues that is a darling of the academic establishment: I’m as prejudiced against that sort of thing as the Grand Wizard). It’s a lovely slice-of-life story about being a child in small-town Alabama in the 1930s, and it really nails the perspective of a child, with all the bittersweet experiences of growing older.
Perhaps most importantly, the characters are all excellent, with vivid personalities, virtues, vices, and uncertainties.
2. What I particularly appreciated was the nuance with which the racial issues were handled; the townsfolk are at their worst when those come to the fore, but the book skirts a delicate line of showing the wrongness of their behaviour without condemning them as just irredeemable human beings. Indeed, the whole point of the book is not being quick to condemn or judge other people, but to try to see things from their perspective. The townsfolk are in the wrong, but on some level they know they’re in the wrong, they just don’t have the fortitude or mental equipment to fully grasp that. Nor is it uniform: the judge, the prosecutor, and a few of the population do their best for the young man on trial, the newspaper editor quietly stands watch during the one scene where things threaten to get violent, and even the potential mob turns out to be human and comes to its senses in time.
Again, the main theme of the book is empathy: “getting inside someone else’s skin and walking around a while.” Even people who seem the most unpleasant or strange or repulsive.
3. Though I also like the fact that not everyone is redeemable, not everyone just needs understanding, and ironically enough the climactic crisis of the book comes about because Atticus Finch failed to see things from another man’s perspective: not because he didn’t credit him with enough humanity, but because he credited him with too much.
It reminds me of a line from Starship Troopers: “Somethings, the more you understand, the more you loathe them.”
This may be the only time someone has cross-referenced To Kill a Mockingbird with Starship Troopers.
In any case, this is one book that I’d say has definitely earned its place on the list of American classics.
4. I’ve been watching some internet drama this week. You may recall my piece earlier on how to identify bad faith arguments. Well, that controversy, between Ross and Pirate Software, has now exploded with multiple YouTubers weighing in, almost universally on Ross’s side.
Apparently, this was not the first time Pirate Software annoyed people with this sort of behaviour. I don’t know anything about that, and I really don’t care (again, never heard of him until now), but the up shot is, the EU Citizen’s initiative that Ross was trying to get passed, and which has a month to go, has jumped nearly 200k signatures just this week thanks to all the attention this is getting.
It seems that when people hear about this issue, they tend to agree that the current state of affairs is unacceptable. Ross’s exemplary behaviour as a content creator (non-confrontational to a fault, gives thoughtful and detailed answers to criticisms, never asks for money without being fully transparent about where it’s going, etc.) and overall positive personality certainly doesn’t hurt either. The contrast between the smug, rude self-proclaimed developer with corporate ties blatantly misrepresenting the controversy and the laid-back ordinary dude who once likened his ideal role in the campaign to a guy in a duck costume really could not be more stark, particularly when one’s position is “I’m okay with games being destroyed, and it would be just too hard for developers to prevent that,” and the other’s is “consumers should be allowed to keep the thing they paid money for without having it destroyed by the very people who sold it to them.”
5. Anyway, it’s been gratifying to see new life injected into the campaign, though we’re not out of the woods yet. So, on the off-chance that there are any EU citizens among my readers, or if any of my readers know any EU citizens, or have large platforms than I do, I would strongly urge you to go sign the initiative or at least spread the word about it.
This is really a rare opportunity; it is a genuinely grassroots effort (that is, begun and led by ordinary people, not backed by some interested power broker) to tackle a specific evil (the erosion of property rights) and which actually has a snowball’s chance in hell of working. Campaigns with all three of those don’t come along very often. So, if you hate the way society’s going, if you find the assurance “You will own nothing, and you will be happy” to be a dystopian nightmare, you should try to support this initiative if you can. The day is far spent, but it is not over yet.
Here’s a link to the website with more information, a video of Ross answering questions about the campaign, and a link to the initiative itself for any EU citizens who happen along:
Initiative Link: https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home
6. Libertarians may object to the idea of government getting involved at all. Me, I am not a Libertarian, and I think this is a clear-cut case where government should get involved.
Without getting too far into the weeds, any government’s role is to order the disparate elements of the community toward the common good of the whole. Each of those elements have certain properties and motives that tend in certain directions. The government is supposed to recognize when those tendencies are liable to become harmful to the whole and curb them. So, to use a gardening analogy, the state isn’t supposed to force the string beans to grow, but it is supposed to recognize whether and how the beans are likely to start messing with the tomatoes and arrange things accordingly.
A for-profit corporation exists to grow and make as much profit as possible. This can be a good thing by spurring innovation, providing for needs, etc. But it can also get out of hand and become harmful to the customer, because the well-being of the customer is not the purpose of the corporation.
If a company can destroy its own products post-purchase, forcing the customer to buy another product, then, from their perspective, there is no reason for them not to do so, because that would maximize their profit (unless it were to drive customers to a different company that didn’t do that, which is unlikely when the products are unique and the time frame is irregular). But that is harmful to the customer because it destroys his property.
The above is an example of a harmful tendency which it is the government’s legitimate role to curb via regulation.
(And yes, there are a lot of useless or predatory regulations; n I’m saying you need nuance and logic in judging which are which)
7. Incidentally, an example of regulation being needed came in the 1904 sinking of the General Slocum. This was a steamboat servicing the waters around New York City that caught fire while transporting a church picnic on an excursion. Many, many things went wrong, including the crew not telling the captain about the fire for a full ten minutes and the captain (for reasons best known to himself) ignoring many potential landing sites nearby and steaming full-speed ahead for a island some miles distant before jumping ship at the first opportunity. But one in particular involved the safety equipment.
Life-jackets in those days were mostly made of cork wood. As it turns out, the company that sold the life-jackets to the General Slocum had decided to cut costs by only filling the jackets partly with cork. In order to make the weight the same, they filled the rest with…scrap iron. A fact only discovered during the sinking (because everyone who tried to use a life jacket sank like a stone and died).
The upshot was that, of 1300 passengers and crew, over 1,000 died, mostly women and children. It was the biggest single loss of life in New York History prior to 9/11.
President Theodore Roosevelt called for immediate Congressional action on the life-jackets issue, though he noted that it wasn’t too surprising that there weren’t any such regulations in place, since who would expect a company to be that sociopathically indifferent?
Regulations exist because about the early 20th century it was discovered that there is no limit to how callous and predatory people will be to maximize profits.
I suppose a Libertarian extremist might say “well, no one will buy from that company again!” Which I’m sure would be a great comfort the 1,000 or so grieving families. Not to mention the other life jacket companies might be able to conclude “We can make a tidy profit just so long as no one actually needs to use the equipment, and how often does that happen?” And the passengers conclude “whatever you do, don’t put on a life jacket!” The market for safety equipment (and the minor issue of actually having any) thus breaks down absent the intervention of an entity with no profit motive and the authority to enforce rules that may potentially cut into profits.
Again, correcting harmful tendencies.
Serpent's Den 