The Safety of Narrative

Did robots. Had good ideas for new systems, but not for this week. Only made okay progress on motion tuning. I have ideas for that though – maybe T would write a wizard to guide tuning in the future. It could be tied into the ServoNG global debug system for live tuning. And it could help them imagine there’s a real procedure.

I’ve been terrible about day job this week. I half advanced like 2 SRs, and did that silly interview, and nothing else. I’m okay with that, but I am annoyed to still own December SRs.

Got to help DerbyK today, which I always like. It was a stressful day for you, even though it was just sitting around. You were also prepared for violence, which is always taxing. But you did a new thing and it went fine, so good for you. It’s work to recover from a life where you weren’t allowed to feel good about things you did for or by yourself.

Many of you know that I can be useful when you’re trying a new thing. Sometimes I can even help you be excited instead of (or in addition to) afriad. We should arrange for this to happen more often ¹My therapist sometimes worries that I am afraid to try new things. This is one of those things that’s on the pamphlet but not actually prevalent in my life; doing new things – scary things – is often my specialty. But I do agree that being afraid to try things is a hard life, and wouldn’t recommend it for me or you. So let’s do scary new … Continue reading. I like doing it, and if you agree to do it with me, you probably will to.

I talked about my avoidance of multi-session writing in the HA4H chat today, and got some solidarity and feedback from @BPS. They suggested I write to and imagine a specific audience I can distinctly imagine. I feel like you and I already do that, but I appreciated the attention and engagement anyway.

Heard that M is still too sick to talk, but doing okay coping with that. I appreciate you checking in, and I’m proud that you’re feeling safe enough to skip some calendar events in service of your immediate needs. When you’re better I’m excited to discuss candidates for your renewed plans and robots results and HP plots and the ideal shape of anxiety piles, both organic and otherwise.

Talked about the places we imagine danger, and the different stories we tell about why our current choices are better. I feel like I’ve checked most of those places and the most likely place to find danger is behind a mask of authority and a wall of isolation. But I understand where the stories come from, even if they are sometimes harmful.

You imagine that you’re vulnerable because of your X. And other people will think that too – they’ve heard the same stories about what makes someone vulnerable. But I’m reasonable sure that if your X was misleading and you actually Y, Y wouldn’t protect you from the misfortune that was planned (or a worse unplanned one). Y might make it easier for you to inflict more violence, and sometimes that extra violence would be “better” overall, but it wouldn’t keep you safe.

The practical value of Y comes well past the point where most humans stop fighting. Everyone – even children – have the ability to bite off fingers or gouge out eyes or whatever – if they are manhandled by an attacker. It takes several people to safely handle someone who is really fighting. But you won’t, because normal brains stop fighting before that. And even if you did, it wouldn’t make you safe. You’d already be hurt by your attacker, and then hurt again by your own violence, all while people minimize the attack and remind you that Y kept you “safe” by letting you rip apart someone’s flesh with your teeth. I was physically capable of murdering mother by the time I was 8 or 10 – capable of serious injury well before then. It’s not at all clear to me that would have made my life better. And I bet you have similar stories about violence in your life.

Plus the stories we tell aren’t really true. Sometime X gets targeted, but lots of times Y does too. Not for the same reasons, so their risk isn’t always the same, but for lots of other ones that happen under other common circumstances. For example, the official policy of the US government for years has been that military strikes targeting Y are justified by the existence of Y in a place we want to blow up. Domestically Y is often targeted for sexual violence in the prison system ²sometimes this comes up in court transcripts – the judicial assignment of state-backed sexual assault, or selected as targets for violence by strangers for the same reasons the government uses when they enact violence.

We’re all hurt by stories that tell us about dangers that are different from the ones we’ll actual encounter. It makes us unprepared for actual risks and limits us to a life where we prioritize a certain concept of “safety” whether not it actually makes us safe. We’re most hurt by the stories that lie to us about what will protect us, and the stories that tell us who is allowed to need to protection and who must do without. We are all in this together. We all want less violence. Breaking us up into opposing categories is a tool of our oppressors to justify violence, not protection against it.

On a related note, no one lives in war zones. If it is dangerous for people working shift labor to safely buy groceries and pay rent, no one lives there. Not in cities, not in rural places, not in this country, not in others. There might be dangerous things, you might not know how to keep yourself safe, but it has to be safe enough for real people like you to live there, or it wouldn’t have permanent residents. If you imagine otherwise you’re demoting the people who do live there to sub-human status, making the an “other” that isn’t like you in terms of their need for safety.

This recent thread is surprising relevant, including the sub-discussuon of defensive violence: https://twitter.com/NBedera/status/1217893350436569088

On a lighter note, this is amazing: https://twitter.com/tyang209/status/1218284657185214464

And this channel made me LOL for several minutes: https://youtu.be/19JYOVPmwDM

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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