Asshole Mitigation Plan

Since the last post, I’ve spent a week or so working on handling things that I had been avoiding. A lot of stuff was handled…and a lot of that promptly became problems again. Taking one step forward does not mean resolving a problem, most of the time, because many of our systems are designed to […]

Let’s say I don’t want you to do something. If you don’t do the thing, I will either reward you for not doing the thing or I will do nothing, depending on the circumstances. This includes my mood and other resources. If you do the thing, I will either punish you for doing the thing

So we’ve defined the broad limits of what an asshole is: someone who can’t natively anticipate the consequences of their actions. If you happen to look at the news, you’ll see a lot of examples, naturally, given that Shitler and MAGA are all over the place. Of recent note are the MAGA idiots in the

Okay, so now I’ve defined what an asshole is. The next thing to define is why. Why assholes? If they’re so bad, so insidious, and so destructive, why do they even exist? Isn’t natural selection supposed to get rid of traits that are bad for the survival of the species?!? (No, by the way; natural

What is an asshole? So far, I’ve mostly discussed low-scale manipulative and controlling behavior, stuff with low social stakes that’s pretty easy to overlook. I’ve touched on domestic abuse, systemic abuses—like pushy marketing emails and the health insurance industry in general—and catastrophic abuses, specifically the current Shitler dictatorship and his bootlicking shock troops, ICE. Basically,

I don’t wanna write about this: as soon as I knew what I was gonna choose to write about next, I started trying to avoid it. When I did start writing, I ranted for a while because I didn’t want to think about how bad I felt thinking about it. I deleted the rant, started

ICE is out murdering people in the streets of Minnesota today (and other locations, including detention facilities) around the nation. So fuck it, let’s talk about “doing enough” and despair. “What can I do?” “Am I doing enough?” “Why aren’t other people doing more?” “I can’t fix everything, so I might as well give up.”

In the last post I did something I knew was gonna push people out: I questioned whether the screens around you were clean or not, and whether or not you knew how to clean them. That is, I questioned whether or not the solution to a very minor problem was within your control or not.

POSIWID. I’d like to bring this term to your attention. It means, “[The] Purpose Of a System Is What It Does.” POSIWID is a way of looking at a system and determining its purpose by ignoring all the claims about what a system does or should do, and focusing instead on what it actually does.