When know-it-all ignorance blends with xenophobia

There's a story on CNN today about the recent knife attack on children—students—in China. The story itself is pretty typical of modern reportage: mostly factual, but obviously slanted for maximum sensationalism. (Why only "mostly factual"? Well, at one point they say this attack was "slightly different" because the victims were college students. They kind of also forgot to point out that this attack was a gang attack, not an individual one. This, to me, represents a rather large departure from the previously-reported attacks but it doesn't further the sensationalist "OH MY GOD LOOK AT THE PEOPLE ATTACKING CHILDREN IN CHINA!" slant of the story to note that so they move on and hope you don't notice.)

That's not what I want to talk about today, though. What I want to talk about is one of the comments underneath the story by one ignorant know-it-all working under the name "oldthis". Just to make sure I avoid any claims of taking him out of context, here's what he says in its entirety:

Hope this helps for people not familiar with the region: 1 - Guns are illegal in China. If you are Chinese, unless you served in the military, you've probably never even touched a gun. 2 - there is a reasonable degree of unrest in certain regions of China. Afterall it is a massive area and has very distinct differences from region to region. There are very broad civic problems such as those that all countries must deal with, but there are also regions or pockets where some problems are more prevelant than others. Some of the most significant problems China faces right now, that don't have "easy button" solutions.
A - there are 30 Million more men in China than women between the ages of 18 & 35. This is a direct reflection of China's one baby policy that was in place for many years and rual farmers needing a son to carry the family forward as the parents aged. Female babies were often killed. This means that if you are a Chinese male in that group, your odds of finding a mate aren't spectacular, particularly if you live in the country side.
B - China has some significant growing pains: Inflation, shifting populations, large pockets of unemployment resulting from the global economic slowdown, govermental corruption (predominately at the state level), polution, a largely uneducated population, a largely rual population contrasted with "extreme megacities".

OK - gotta get back to work. The point is, by attacking children these guys are attacking the establishment itself. China doesn't really care about an individual, it cares about the group (its the communist way). The only way for these guys to make a statement is to be bold and utterly horrible in their "statement" to the government. Enter kids at govt paid for schools. That said, this attack seems different. It could be that these are some local guys POed that the college boys are "taking all the women" (refer to "A" above). I am going out on a limb here, but given that it was a dormatory that was attacked and the article says (one student had HIS hand cut off) and knowing that China isn't going to have co-ed dorms...it sounds like an attack on a male dorm. The more I think about it...this is definately not the same thing that has been happening where people are trying to make their frustration known to the govt. This is retribution for something. Has to be. 5-6 men could've created a heck of alot more carniage than this. They did a hit and run on these guys either because one of them had wronged a member of the "5-6 man hit squad" or b/c the "5-6 man hit squad" was growing frustrated with the overall presence of that group of people (college boys) in general. The other school incidents only gave this group of ding-a-lings the idea.

So ... where do I start in dismantling this pile of bullshit? I'll stay above an obsessive critique of spelling and grammar or of composition skills other than to note that it sadly fails to surprise me that native speakers of English are, again, proving less able to use their own language than many EFL speakers of my acquaintance. Perhaps I'll just go after the major points in order.

1 - Guns are illegal in China. If you are Chinese, unless you served in the military, you've probably never even touched a gun.

This information would come as a shock to those in the Chinese countryside who hunt to supplement their food intake, who have firearms to protect themselves from some of the more dangerous wild animals and who in general, you know, use guns. Firearms are not illegal in China. They are heavily controlled. There is a difference.

A - there are 30 Million more men in China than women between the ages of 18 & 35. This is a direct reflection of China's one baby policy that was in place for many years and rual farmers needing a son to carry the family forward as the parents aged. Female babies were often killed. This means that if you are a Chinese male in that group, your odds of finding a mate aren't spectacular, particularly if you live in the country side.

Would these be the rural farmers for whom the one child policy doesn't apply? These same farmers?

The one child policy is a policy for urban Chinese, not rural. Indeed, for urban Han Chinese, not minorities. Rural Chinese are permitted to have a second child if the first is a female for precisely the reason cited above as the grounds for the purported infanticide. The rules for minorities, urban or rural, vary by minority and region, but again are laxer than the one child policy inflicted on the Han.

B - China has some significant growing pains: Inflation, shifting populations, large pockets of unemployment resulting from the global economic slowdown, govermental corruption (predominately at the state level), polution, a largely uneducated population, a largely rual population contrasted with "extreme megacities".

Anybody who says the corruption in China's government is largely at the state level is ignorant, a liar or a fool. One of the things that has always astonished me in China is the utter omnipresence of corruption. Everybody who can be, in China, is on the take. Those who are not wish they could be.

OK - gotta get back to work. The point is, by attacking children these guys are attacking the establishment itself. China doesn't really care about an individual, it cares about the group (its the communist way).

So the Chinese have been communist for 5000 years? Because, short of that little hissy fit of Mao's (called, for some quaint reason, the Cultural Revolution) there has been basically no change in China's cultural fundamentals. Right down to the purported groupthink. (The reality is far more complex than the stereotype, as is to be expected, but that discussion is far out of scope for today.)

The only way for these guys to make a statement is to be bold and utterly horrible in their "statement" to the government. Enter kids at govt paid for schools.

Government paid-for schools? Which China is he talking about? The China I've lived in for almost a decade has no government-funded schools worth mentioning. Families work themselves to nubs to pay for their children's entry into schools. Schools are government controlled, yes, but certainly not paid for!

That said, this attack seems different. It could be that these are some local guys POed that the college boys are "taking all the women" (refer to "A" above). I am going out on a limb here, but given that it was a dormatory that was attacked and the article says (one student had HIS hand cut off) and knowing that China isn't going to have co-ed dorms...it sounds like an attack on a male dorm. The more I think about it...this is definately not the same thing that has been happening where people are trying to make their frustration known to the govt. This is retribution for something. Has to be. 5-6 men could've created a heck of alot more carniage than this. They did a hit and run on these guys either because one of them had wronged a member of the "5-6 man hit squad" or b/c the "5-6 man hit squad" was growing frustrated with the overall presence of that group of people (college boys) in general. The other school incidents only gave this group of ding-a-lings the idea.

This is the first (and only) piece of insightful commentary this man has made. The first (and only) that is based on a solid observation of fact. The first (and only) that involves speculation that is not, in fact, entirely ungrounded in reality. I'll give him a C- with a little annotation saying "facts are available in published sources; there's no reason to make them up".

Judging the RCMP fairly.

According to William Elliot, the Commissioner of the RCMP, we should not judge the RCMP unfairly in the Robert Dziekanski affair. I agree with him fully. We should be 100% fair in our judgement. We should listen to the evidence impartially and then reach our conclusion. Only then should the RCMP be disbanded and replaced with a force that has civilian oversight of its operations.

The problem Mr. Elliot is having is that the fair facts are utterly damning of his organization. The more facts spill out in this inquiry, the more utterly damned the RCMP comes out. The force has lied, cheated and even attempted outright theft to keep these facts from coming out and, as a result, has lost any and all credibility it may once have had.

The latest (and last) of the four state-protected killers (I refuse at this point to call them "police officers" any longer) has finally given his version of events. This was the guy in charge of the goon squad that killed Robert Dziekanski and his testimony is the most risible of all, and the most inadvertantly revealing. One thing that I missed before (quite possibly because it wasn't reported) is that the four killer goons were sitting down to a meal when they got the call. I think this is an important thing to remember when reconstructing what likely really happened. He also claimed, in the most farcical portion of testimony so far (and when you consider the previous testimony about the threatening stapler position that's really saying something!), that in the ten minutes it took the goon squad to go from their meal to Dziekanski that they didn't exchange a single word. Just how stupid do these people think we are?

Let me piece together what likely happened to lead to Dziekanski's death.

1. Bureaucratic bungling beyond all reasonable (and most unreasonable) levels left Robert Dziekanski tired, confused, dehydrated and distraught stuck in a foreign country where nobody could or would speak with him.
2. He "acted up" as a result. (Anybody who feels this is not a 100% expected outcome should try it themself sometime: being confied in a tin can for twelve hours followed by ten hours of wandering around an increasingly hostile place with no food, no water and no communication.)
3. A call goes in and interrupts four hyper-macho thugs in uniform at their meal.
4. The four decide to get in, get the job done and get out in the quickest possible way. I submit the interruption of their meal predisposed them to using force and violence just out of raw anger.
5. They follow their plan (and yes, I believe they planned this).
6. Dziekanski didn't act the meek, docile sheep they wanted to see, so they tazed him multiple times as a show of power. A show of who's the sheepdog and who's the sheep, so to speak.
7. In a staggering display of callousness they don't take the time to monitor the person they've just electrocuted five times. (Were I a snide bastard I'd suggest they were planning how they were going to continue their meal.)
8. In a continuing display of said callousness they refuse to take the handcuffs off when an emergency treatment team requests it, convinced that the by-now-dead Dziekanski (who they probably thought was unconscious) posed a horrible threat to the four burly, armoured men around him.
9. Oops. He was dead already. Time for the cover-up to begin.
10. They consulted with each other to make their notes tell the same story.
11. Oops. Someone had video.
12. They confiscate the video for "the investigation".
13. The goons' superiors and the RCMP public relations weasels cook up a story that made the killers' actions sound reasonable. They increased the amount of screaming and violence from their victim from zero to a credible danger while reducing the number of officers involved from four to three.
    
14. Oops. The person with the camera isn't docile sheep and wants his video back.
15. Oops. The video makes it to the media.
16. Oops. The media does its job for a change and shows what really happened.

Now if William Elliot and the rest of the RCMP leadership were smart, they'd just 'fess up at this point and say "the officers in question screwed up, as did our training and leadership". But that's not what they do. Instead they circle the wagons and go in all out Massada mode. They pile lie on lie, prevarication on prevarication and build up a teetering, wobbly stack of shit that is now sliding down in a brown avalanche and staining the RCMP's reputation (along with the rest of the country's!) in the process.

And they're still too stupid to see that it's the end.

This is why I think it's time to disband the RCMP and replace them with a real police force with real oversight. I don't want people as stupid as the RCMP have shown themselves to be to be in charge of our national safety and security. If we're going to have criminals running things, at least, for God's sake, let them be smart criminals for a change!

This comes as absolutely no surprise to me

Study: 38 Percent Of People Not Actually Entitled To Their Opinion

CHICAGO—In a surprising refutation of the conventional wisdom on opinion entitlement, a study conducted by the University of Chicago's...

If I never hear the expressions "to each their own" or "it takes all kinds" or "everybody has a right to their own opinion" ever again in my life, well it's 41 years too damned late. Not everybody's opinion is equal. Not everybody's opinion is informed. Not everybody's opinion is interesting. Not everybody's opinion is valid.

As far as I can tell, it is the people who live mediocre lives, think mediocre thoughts and otherwise excel at mediocrity who hold this view. Since they can't actually argue a position that's coherent, believable (or even plausible, at times), they recite mantras to make all disagreement go away.

I really think that The Onion is a better news source than the major news sources, despite being essentially devoid of what would ordinarily be termed "facts". I'm not sure if this depresses me or delights me.

Of course a lot of this comes as a reaction to teaching now. Before I joined the profession, I really didn't "get" Mr./Mrs. Garrison, one of the characters from Comedy Central's South Park television series. The various teaching jokes like "there's no such thing as a stupid question, children, just stupid people" and "OK, would someone like to try that who's not a complete retard?" just fell flat for me. It wasn't until I started doing the job that I realized the pain of being a teacher. There are students I've had in the past who I just inwardly winced at when I saw them eagerly waving their hands to ask (or worse, answer) a question. Why? Well, the two quotes from Mr./Mrs. Garrison say it all, really.

I think that this is the kind of thing that you can really only understand when you live it. I'm sure that many of my rants on software and software development in the past caused blank incomprehension in the non-technical.

Living the Life of Cassandra

I've always felt some affinity for Cassandra of Greek fame. (For those not up on the classics, she was given the gift of prescience by Apollo, who was smitten with her, spurned Apollo's advances and was then cursed to have her accurate predictions of the future never believed.) I have a variant of her curse, you see. I see something. I have a very good idea of where it's going to go. I tell people. I'm not believed. It comes true.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

I had this problem in my places of work, for example: a case in point being the company Entrust. The code name for one version of the software that was being pushed was "Project Banff". It was late and by all estimates was going to be slipping even further behind. Management came up with a "brilliant scheme" to provide "incentive" for getting it out on time.

"On time" for them was, if memory serves, the end of August of that year. Realistic estimates for completion put the real delivery date around October. This was unacceptable, so one of the VPs—the development VP—came up with this brilliant incentive scam scheme: if the product is shipped by August, the company would take all the developers and all the testers out for an all-expenses-paid trip to Banff for a week (or maybe two? -- memory fails from so long ago).

Now I was in an unusual (or, as it turns out, not so unusual) position in Entrust. I was a lowly software developer. Further, I had absolutely zero ambitions for a management role. Yet I think I may have been the only person in the whole company who'd actually taken, you know, honest-to-goodness management courses. Further, I was one of five people I knew—none of us managers (sorry, Jeff – you had no budget, so you were a supervisor, not a manager)—who actually read... well, anything, really, but especially books and articles on management and motivation. And what I knew from my training and my reading (as did anybody else in the vanishingly small group of us who knew anything on the subject) was that performance bonuses tied to a timetable failed. Always. 100% of the time.

You see, the management thinking behind such bogus schemes is that workers are malingering and grossly overestimating the time required to do tasks. If they are given an incentive, they'll stop goldbricking, put their noses to the grindstone blah blah blah blah blah blah. But this is, not to put too fine a point on it, total bullshit. At least in high tech it tends to be total bullshit. (It may be in other fields too, but I'm not in a position to knowledgeably discuss such.) In reality, in high tech the workers tend to be strongly self-motivated and, if anything, are too optimistic in their estimates. A fairly popular agile development process (or unprocess) has, in fact, as one of its techniques a way of calculating just how overly optimistic developers tend to be in their estimates and using these calculations to get a better approximation of the real amount of time required. So when you have an estimate for delivery in October, one thing is 99% certain: the absolute earliest that it will be delivered is in October. Further, any attempt to squeeze it out earlier without reducing the features to be delivered will have the opposite of the intended goal. You will delay final delivery.

I pointed this out to the VP in question. (Stupid me: I believed him when he said he was interested in employee feedback!) I further made the prediction that the actual delivery date, if this incentive plan wasn't unhooked from delivery date, wouldn't be August nor even October. I said that the delivery date would be more like March of next year. I was, of course, not believed. Because the VP in question, based on his almost months of experience in upper management, believed firmly that he could mutate reality just by wishing it so.

Fast forward to August. The release is a disaster. Only a small number of groups had actually delivered their stuff by the due date (the toolkit group I was part of being one of them – Jeff's influence here, and true to the "no good deed goes unpunished" adage he was viewed with suspicion for this). The product is nowhere near ready. The delivery slips past August. Past September. Past October. Slips all the way to April of next year (proving my point that developers are overly optimistic, seeing as I had predicted March). Because exactly what I predicted happened: an initial push of hard work started. Then people noticed that, despite putting in 12-hour days (testers especially), no real extra progress was being made. In under two months the whole company realised that the Banff incentive wasn't going to happen. In that time the developers and, more so, the testers had burned themselves out completely. Despair set in, followed by ennui. Developers didn't care any more, so the product slipped further and further and further behind. When it was finally shipped in April, this was with features scaled down on top of everything else.

So how was my foresight rewarded? With a rueful "I guess you were right", right? Wrong. My foresight was rewarded with an accusation that I had personally seen to the project's utter, complete failure. I was specifically named by the VP as one of the reasons for the failure. I guess my negative vibes (which didn't actually impact the productivity of the team I actually worked with, oddly enough, seeing as that team was one of the very, very few who delivered everything on time for the Banff trip...) were transmitted to the company as a whole—even people I had never met—and caused the project to die. Or something.

So why am I regaling the world with this tale now seven (or is it eight?) years later? Because this is only an example of what hits me every damned day of my life, practically. Joan giving me another perfect example of this.

On Friday Joan's laptop (my old Sony) starts acting up. The "L" key doesn't work at all and the "Backspace" key is flaky. I tell her, very candidly, that the computer needs to be repaired; that we should take it in on the weekend. Joan, of course, doesn't believe the only person in the household who knows anything about computers. Besides, she wasn't going to need the computer for anything in the near future anyway.

Well, the distant future of three days later, she's got a big task to do that needs the computer. (This being China she's given the big task with under 24 hours of notice before it's due, of course.) And not only is the "L" key not working now, nor is the Backspace working at all. Nor the delete. Nor the right arrow. Nor the shift key. Nor ... You get the picture. Too bad nobody warned her at all about having to get it fixed, eh?

This is my life, almost every day. See why I feel for Cassandra so much?

OK, this scares me.

It seems that the UK wants to follow the American path to Nazism. This war on an emotion is turning into a great tool for the authoritarian instinct. When will Canada follow suit? When will Canada join the USA in suspending civil rights and join the UK as one of the most surveilled countries in the world? I suspect it will be sooner than anybody thinks, cynic that I am, but this is one of those rare cases where I'd be really super-happy to be wrong.

I think it's instructive, for those in Canada who think "it can't happen here", to compare a couple of things. Specifically I want to compare police presence in Canada (and, quickly, the USA) to police presence in China. Of the two countries, China is the one referred to as a police state (and despite the tone of this message, I actually agree with that designation). Yet here's the funny thing: while living in Canada -- Ottawa, to be specific -- I had more official interaction with police officers (as opposed to social interaction or just happening to see them in passing) in an average month than I've had in China in nearly six years.

Yet China is a police state, but Canada is not. How sure are you of this? Think carefully before answering, because the price of a wrong answer is the freedom that is supposedly the cornerstone of our society.

Let me kick it up a notch. A long time ago I went to Houston for a job interview. (I was even offered a job, but idiot border regulations torpedoed my chances there. "Free Trade" has as much relation to freedom of trade as the "Democratic Korean People's Republic" has to democracy or the people.) The experience was an eye-opener in many ways. In one concentrated dose I got some of my stereotypes of Texas obliterated (Houston is an astonishingly diverse and cosmopolitan city!) and horrifyingly confirmed (the gun culture is at the level of insanity -- one of the people who interviewed me brought out a handgun to show off after I admired a "sculpture" that turned out to be a hard disk after being shot several times). I also had something nasty confirmed about the "Land of the Free". In my grand total of ... say 36 hours ... in Houston, I had more interaction with police officers or other gun-wielding officials of the state than I would get in a typical month in Ottawa or in six years of living in a police state!

And this was years before 9/11.

So if you really don't think a police state is possible in Canada (or Britain or the USA or wherever), keep this in mind: you're already half-way there. The USA has essentially suspended habeas corpus -- it's just going about it the smart "salami tactics" way. It also has a long history of taking laws intended for one purpose and applying them generally (War on Plant Products, anyone?) as time passes. The UK has more official surveillance cameras, both in terms of population and in terms of raw numbers (if memory serves), than any other nation. (The USA has fewer official cameras, of course, but for that can subpoena any camera logs they like should they feel they need it, so the effect is largely similar.)

And Canada? Well, I'm out of touch with Canada right now. I've been away for an absurd length of time and internal Canadian news doesn't often reach the international press. Given Canada's history, however, it's only a matter of time before we import Yet Another Bad Idea from the USA. The time span for that ranges from 5 to 20 years with the pattern being the dumber the idea the quicker we tend to take to it. So I really am afraid that Canada is following the USA's lead into Nazism.

Which leaves me in the awkward position of wondering if living in this police state isn't a better choice right now, especially given that I've got an expanding family to consider.

How to Waste your Time, the Intellectual "Property" Way

So the CBC has a story about the US government taking China to WTO arbitration over "piracy". (Please insert here the pro-forma rant about how piracy--the real thing, not copyright infringement--is a heinous crime in which people die whereas nobody has ever died from copied DVDs and CDs. I'm tired of typing it out again and again. Why don't you idiots at the RIAA and MPAA just call it "The Entertainment Holocaust" if you're so intent on grotesquely distorting words and concepts for rhetorical gain?)

Of particular interest in that article is this passage:

American companies contend they are losing billions of dollars in sales because of rampant copyright piracy.

Which planet are these people living on? The Chinese, for the most part, can barely afford movies at the infringed copyright rates (ranging CDN$0.25-$1.50 depending on quality)! What on Earth makes these morons think that jacking up the price to $10+ is going to have any impact on their income?

I think it's time for someone to kidnap copyright lawyers and entertainment company executives and force them, at gunpoint, to live in the countryside of China for a year without access to their millions. Then, maybe, they'll just grab a clue and figure out that their fight is self-defeating.