On Courtesy and Correctness

Courtesy is saying things in a way that make people feel comfortable, and correctness is a quality of things where they align with something – either objective facts, or abstract ideas – that represent the real world. Both have important roles.

So I saw a right-wing advocate say he wouldn’t call Chelsea Manning “she” because in his view, that wasn’t “correct”, because this was really a “he” with gender dysphoria or something.

When you are talking to or about somebody, it’s just courteous to call them whatever they want to be called, even if it doesn’t reflect what you think they are. You don’t get to choose what to call your teacher, your neighbor, your pastor, or your boss. And they don’t get to choose what to call you. If my neighbor introduces herself as Mrs. Smith instead of Joan – and all our street goes by first names – Mrs. Smith she shall be. If Joseph shudders at being called “Joe”, then he will be Joseph. Names are unique sorts of signifiers for people, and there’s no right or wrong except what the (unique) people signified by them indicate is an accurate representation of them.

It is both courteous and correct to call people what they want to be called.

But sometimes courtesy is a guide to correctness. Calling Joseph, Ms. Manning, and Mrs. Smith by their proper names – the ones they want us to use – helps us to correctly signal to our own minds who they are. And that’s the point of a name.

Four Random Wikipedia Articles

The internet isn’t as much fun as it used to be, so my new hobby is going to Wikipedia and picking “random article.”

Article 1:

Tolombeh-Ye Seyyed Reza Aminayi

is a village in Iran.  It has 46 people.

Article 2:

Catheryne M. Valente is a writer. She writes something called “speculative fiction.”  The link says this is a genre that means “any fiction with supernatural, fantastical, or futuristic elements.”  A subheading is “Multimedia and Mythpunk.”

Article 3:

Yuma Scorpions (Arizona Winter League Baseball Team)

Minor league baseball teams have much cooler names than major league teams.

Article 4:

Derek Lundy

This is a Canadian author who is not Robertson Davies.  His books seem to involve boats. And there is one about Northern Ireland.

The stages of catcalling

The internet is so full of cats, and also recently of discussions of catcalling.

They tend to be tedious discussions about gender, but they never offer practical advice.

As someone who was forced by my school to travel from Queens to Manhattan via the E train and the 6 train wearing a plaid or grey knee-length skirt (winter) or powder blue kilt (spring/fall) from the ages of 13 to 18, I learned about street harassment before I knew there was such a thing.  Obviously my approaches have been refined to serve a certain demographic (redheads from Queens in knee-length skirts) but I am sure there are adaptations.  And these strategies have served me for the years during which I have refused to wear skirts (roughly, since I joyfully threw away my spring/fall and winter skirts).  Anyway, for what it’s worth:

Some of these people start at a stage that’s clearly escalated. If so, begin at the level that seems appropriate.  

1. Headphonedeaf.  The first reaction to a stranger talking to you about your appearance, or the uncheerfulness of your appearance, is to have headphones on. If you do not actually have headphones on, you know how you would act if you did have headphones on. Act that way. Because you clearly are not sitting on the subway or walking down the street thinking about the nice people you might meet. You are thinking about something else, and did not notice that the man’s comment was addressed to you. 

The reason: they want attention. These are children eating glue, hoping someone will notice they are sad and will help. The fact that they are adults is the reason why you don’t give them the attention. They have to be hardened to deal with a refusal to acknowledge their intrusion.

2. Emily Post polishing silver.  So they won’t go away and you have to respond. There is one important thing to hang on to: NEVER SMILE. Do not smile. It will go wrong, and it’s also a reward for them, and they do not deserve a reward. Frown, but not angrily; frown like you are polishing silver.  Pretend you are Emily Post, and you have not stopped polishing silver, but have been presented with a conundrum. “I beg your pardon?”  “I’m sorry, I don’t follow; it seems my train has come, good day!”

The reason: Anyone who can think a truly frowning, “I beg your pardon” is a romantic gesture is beyond self-delusion. So you can force out everyone who wants to hang on to the delusion that this kind of thing is welcome. Which turns out to be a lot of them!  After this stage, proceed with caution. Even if the person continues to preserve the forms of polite conversation, they clearly are engaged in some other enterprise. Flee if possible. If not, it’s time to start making noise.

Notes on this stage: I have a good frown.  For all the young ladies: practice your frown!  You need a look on your face that will make middle schoolers spit out their gum. You may want to practice on gumchewing middleschoolers. Or you may remember being a gumchewing middleschooler. That’s the look you want.  Accompanied by the politest phrase possible, this is a solid strategy.  But there should be zero emotion, whatever it is. His discipline problem does not create an emotional impact.

3. If they started with 1 or 2, you have probably gotten rid of them.  But many start at Level 3, and a few do get through Level 2. Here is where you do 3: Irish Cop.  “I’m sorry, sir, I need you to move on.”  You can’t say, not being an Irish cop, “I need to preserve the perimeter.”  But you can say, “You’re crowding me, a bit. Mind moving off, buddy?”  The “buddy” is important. There are certainly many equivalents: a word for a male who is a fellow officer or a member of the same club. That is the word to use. Speak firmly and loudly; nobody nearby should be unclear about whether or not you feel threatened.  I use Irish Cop because it’s easy for me; but there is more than one kind of cop!

The reason: It’s kind of fun. Also: they don’t know what to do. Usually they just wilt away.

4. This one depends. If you are in a very public situation you can use it but if nobody else is there you should immediately skip to 5. 

Anyway, 4: pure aggression. All the anger you have felt 1 through 3 you can let out. “Get away from me, now.”  Form a fist.  Whatever works.  This will cause many to flee *you* in terror.  They’re cowards.

The reason: They realize that in order to continue they will have to employ violence, and if there are people around they will start to get scared.  Also sometimes even if there isn’t anybody around.  Also, part of them worries: what if this girl beat the shit out of me?  They should worry that you could out of pure fury.

5. I have only ended up here a few times. But: enter a store, or some facility with a camera, and tell a person behind a counter or whatever that you feel unsafe and could you please stay until the person is departed. If the dude is still following you, point at him.  The person you are asking for sympathy from will likely sympathize with him, but the point is that at this point his only option is violence. So stay, call a friend, do whatever.  Even if they sympathize with him, they won’t kick you out.  If he tries to talk to you, respond using stage 2 tactics, with a smattering of stage 3.

The reason: It’s not that the person will actually help you. But he will not be sure of that, in the meantime, he will get bored.  Really!  You’ve called for backup. This is bad because it is also boring for you. But it is a little satisfying to watch them get bored and angry but not be able to bother you to console themselves.  

 Anyway!  Everyone has a strategy, so that’s mine.  

What’s yours?

 

 

I want trains

I can’t stop with the Bridgegate mess. Though I think someone should make a pun about EZPass for it. “Bridgegate” is stupid.

 I don’t ever want to have to learn to drive a car, and I want everyplace to have public transportation so I can get there.  Driving a car is dangerous and expensive, and parking a car is boring and expensive. Cars are just a thing that makes places build giant supermarkets with giant parking lots surrounded by grassy, weedy, garbage strewn plots. The whole complex is a cause of ennui. This is the fault of cars, which I dislike. 

A few years ago, NY and NJ got federal funding to build a new Hudson train tunnel  – there’d be greater capacity in the infrastructure that provides the few alternatives  to the GW bridge and the Outerbridge and the Lincoln and the Holland. But it got quashed because governor Christie, after initially supporting it, said it would cost New Jersey too much money.  Instead he built roads and things in New Jersey. Why do I care about roads in New Jersey that I can’t even get to? It was a worthwhile project, and it’s sunk because of roads. For cars! Cars have enough roads.

And now his pals have been found out planning, executing, and covering up a three day traffic jam so the folks who *have* to drive their cars into the city *can’t*.

That’s entertainment! It’s always best when it’s happening next door.

Grrlz Coding!

There are lots of people who are launching initiatives to teach various disenfranchised groups – girls, the homeless, low-income youth – how to code. Their reasoning is that coding is a marketable skill that enables its proficients to *make things* in an information economy where manual labor has largely been shifted to groups so disenfranchised they’re treated as dispensable.

Writing code is basically making a machine do a thing. Certainly, developers need to know how to make machines do things. But it’s not enough to know that. Developers also have to know *what* the machine is supposed to do and the best way to make the machine do it.

There are always a number of options, and which one is best usually depends. It depends, to give a few examples, on how many users there will be, how much time there is, how proficient the users are, what the existing data structures are like, what the system is for, how much use it will get, how secure the application needs to be, how accessible, and to whom it should be available and accessible.

So developers have to listen to what’s requested, determine which approaches are available, decide which one is best, communicate with whoever’s making the request to verify that the right variables are being combined in the best way to get the best result, code, and deploy the code to a machine or repository or wherever it’s destined to go.

Coding is the smallest part of this, and if the other parts are done thoroughly most of the time it is only a matter of figuring out how to express the desired behavior in whatever the language is. The massive failure rate in technology projects shows that code that compiles and a viable piece of technology aren’t the same thing.

Knowing how to write well, however, is critical in every stage of the process. Writing out the expectations and the constraints in a project or part of a project sets up the constraints. Writing up the different possible approaches and their potential pluses and minuses is important to getting the machine to do the thing it does in a way that’s efficient in the environment it will operate in. Communicating with whoever wants this software made about the pros and cons of each approach and determining which pros are most desirable and which cons are most undesirable is important. When a developer writes code, that developer usually also writes comments in the code to explain what’s happening to other developers who might pick up the project and work on it. Deploying the code and allowing user access requires communication as well – telling users the work is done, how to access it, what to do if there are any problems, and what it should do and how it should do it is part of that stage.

If you can learn to write well, you can probably learn to code well if you want to. But learning to write isn’t a discrete or tidy process. People who write well often read a lot over a period of years. They read lots of things, many of which are well written. They frequently write things that other people read and they receive and attend to feedback. Often they gain this skill at school, where highly trained individuals spend time going over their work and ensuring it is as good as it can be.

This harder learning process is, of course, not what is being promoted for girls, the poor, the homeless – the people who made things and washed things and typed things on typewriters when we still did that kind of thing in this country.