I know I'm a bit behind the times as this story is over a month old, but I thought for a minute I'd record my reaction and thoughts to the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s at the hands of Sgt. James Crowley at his own home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I watched this story as it unfolded and came to a variety of opinions, all very different and very dependent on the details of the situation as they developed. Sooner than scrap all my observations in light of one "prevailing wisdom", in a situation like this it's good to keep track of all the observations. It's part of being open-minded, and makes for a healthy exercise for the brain.

The situation, as it appeared at first

First we really have to just summarize what went down, and this is just a very brief summary because that's all we got at first. In Cambridge a neighborhood citizen called police identifying two men as possibly breaking into a home. The two men were Professor Gates (a prominent Black intellectual) and his cab driver, and it was his own door that was jarred, so he had to bust the door to get in - his home, fair enough. A white police officer swung through to check out the situation, Sgt. James Crowley. When he showed up he found the homeowner, Professor Gates, at the doorway. Many important details omitted until later, we knew mostly that there was some kind of verbal confrontation, and Gates was arrested for disorderly conduct. There were accusations immediately that the white officer was "racially profiling" Gates and that was the only cause for the arrest. Gates was quick to come out to depict Sgt. Crowley as a "rogue police officer" and to politicize the arrest. The disorderly conduct charges were quickly dropped. We'll get into more details as it goes because the flow of details is what really made the situation generate so many divergent views.

So I saw the story and prepared myself for what was predictable. I dislike it when people misunderstand racial issues or use an issue improperly to promote racial special interests. I'm an integrationist, I believe we should all partake in a common culture, and this segregation in the news media is apparent - "race" analysts and spokesmen for race-based special interest groups are a part of the status quo of regular news reporting. Their reactions are predictable and, in my opinion, harmful to the fabric of society as it usually just reinforces divergent, biased opinions. As a Native American, a minority but not an important enough one to have any special interest sway (Native Americans are often mistaken for being mulatto, asian, hispanic or white - I'm not saying people should care one way or another, just stating a fact in my experience), so I have a unique perspective on the situation of race in America. As an American who believes in the "melting pot", I was ready to be annoyed by many people, most of whom represent said pot's chunky bits.

The first reaction I had was to be bothered by people equivocating this arrest with every other biased, racially profiled situation. I have some mixed opinions about racial profiling - I don't particularly agree with grouping together people based on their race or background and saying they're more likely to be criminals. However, to say inner city crime doesn't happen within distinct racial circles - or international terrorism for that matter - is completely silly. Completely off the topic of race, I've always felt gang activity - which is almost always racially influenced, most gangs affiliate primarily on race - is bolstered by the criminalization of illegal narcotics. Take away that revenue source, and you'll notice many racial issues will start to level out as fewer people will be influenced by organized race-based gang activity. Again, that's off topic. In short, while racial profiling is certainly practiced for pragmatic social reasons, it can target innocent people and when it does, it's a public nuisance. As society becomes more integrated we'll quickly see concerns like this fade away, albeit it may not seem that way. As we get closer to the ideal more situations will become sensationalized in the news media instead of reported in the context of an improving society (as in a truly bigoted society, situations are covered up, not reported widely). So if things are getting better, it is my firm belief they will always seem worse than they are, and this is an easy out for people who want to embrace the potential drama.

In my mind the act of racial profiling is just as it sounds, when people are targeted in a suspected criminal situation just because of their race or background. While we often limit racial profiling charges to police, I often think citizens contribute to racial profiling situations. My first instinctive reaction, which I allowed for being wrong - all good opinions allow for the possibility of being wrong (which it was) - was to suspect the caller who phoned in the "break in" to be doing so only because they saw black people on the porch. Of course, as stated, my instinctive reaction was not right, but it's a valid thing to suspect, initially. This was probably the first observation I formed about the situation, before even getting into whether I thought Gates or the officer were in the "right". Now, no cop who receives a call over dispatch about a reported suspected break-in can just not go see what's up, so I can't fault the police officer for showing or inquiring with the people on the scene.

However, what I found often from several black commentators on the news networks, was that they felt it was "race profiling" because the officer - on a virtue of being a white man in position of authority - needed to "win" his argument with Prof. Gates, thus the arrest was sort of an authoritarian gesture of "the man" holding a prominent Black man down. The idea that police officers overexert themselves and sometimes cross a line with citizens is valid, we are at no loss for critical examinations of that on a weekly basis. The news media, in my opinion, has even oversaturated itself with such stories, which is a healthy thing but also easy to sensationalize. However, to the reasoning that this is "race profiling" because a white man was in a position of authority over a black man, I submit the following: police officers feel the need to "win" public confrontations for reasons entirely outside of race. Citizens (sometimes) respect the police, but criminals simply don't, and constantly police officers are put in situations where their authority to handle a situation is challenged by unruly citizens who can sometimes make a dangerous situation worse. Part of the reason we have laws like "disorderly conduct", which are not laws that are intended to ever really be put through the courts, is that it gives grounds to arrest someone who is causing or aggravating an incident in progress. It can be valuable to safely resolve a situation, to calm down aggravated parties, or determine the identities of people on the scene where the identity of a person can be the difference between them being a home owner or a burglar.

That said, this logic is no outright defense of the arrest. I believe there are certainly some police officers who use the attitude that they are the "law" a bit too far, and you certainly need thick skin to do a job like that. You have to be willing to be yelled at, to a point, and walk away. I believe this is simply the duty of a civil servant in a somewhat uncivil society. We don't teach civility - the idea that you treat others based on principles of being in a free society - we teach the maxim of privilege and power, people tend to have attitude problems based on their acquisition of both (or lack thereof). Bad attitudes, however, are not a cause to slap on the cuffs, although I can see the temptation for that. But before we got too far into understanding the situation, someone else had a say which made the situation a little less forgettable.

Stupid is as stupid does

The President was gearing up for promoting his health care program and had a lengthy sit down with the media. I caught some of the press conference on tv, but turned away before a reporter questioned him about the Gates arrest. Now as a President who is black, I find it asinine that he needs to have a public opinion about every situation in the news involving people of his race (I doubt a reporter would've asked him about the situation were he any other color). That said, the President certainly did have an opinion. He stated, in short, that while he did not know all the facts he thought the police acted "stupidly" in handling the situation. Immediately there was a backlash, but again I have to take another nuanced stance about it. I appreciate the fact the President offered his opinion with clear stipulations about his knowledge of what happened, and understood immediately why he thought the situation was stupid (it is true that there is something wrong about a scenario where a homeowner is arrested at his home for any reason really), in fact that position is very agreeable. That said, I thought the way the police handled it was not necessarily stupid. More on that later though.

As the press backlash continued - Obama later reaffirmed his opinion rather unapologetically - something rather interesting happened. The President called up Sgt. Crowley and had a talk with him, and the next morning made an abrupt and unexpected appearance at a press conference to address the issue again. After having talked with Crowley about what happened, the President reaffirmed that Crowley was in fact a good man, and went back a bit on his position that the actions of the police were "stupid" (he said those words could have been "better calibrated"), by making the admission that what happened was most likely the result of two parties who overexaggerated at the situation - with the insinuation that there were things that Prof. Gates could have done better as well.

I really had to agree with the view that this was something born out of an overreaction - of all parties (Crowley, Prof. Gates, the media) - and ideally it would've been avoided. There was a bit of debate as to whether or not Obama actually was by saying this issuing a form of apology for the "stupid" comment, but I think the manner in which the President addressed the situation actually is more of a "leaving it at that" way to resolve the situation. I don't think the President thinks the situation is any less stupid now than it was before, but he certainly has more deference of opinion on it now than he did at first, and that he took the time to look better at the situation was mighty big of him. After all, there are stupid things about the situation and having your first reaction be that it was stupid, is not wrong in the least. Being the President he certainly didn't have to have say anything more, we've dealt historically with bigger gaffs than that one and I doubt it would've lasted longer in the media than it did. He also had nothing to gain to concede a point about Professor Gates having perhaps overexaggerated, after all Gates had been known to be a political ally of the President during his campaign for election. It's easy to try to make someone (in this case Sgt. Crowley) the "bad guy" and to resist the temptation of doing something easy, he instead tried to do something hard by involving himself directly and being decidedly fair in the process.

More details provide more insights

That said, around this time the police report and other details about the incident start surfacing, allowing people to get a better look at the situation. My suspicion about the caller having perhaps been racially motivated to make the phone call was wrong, at least in the pretense of her making a call because she saw black people - she had in fact thought the men were hispanic, and had been very clear in the 911 audio of her call that she didn't know whether or not it was the homeowners going in, just that the people had busted in the door to do so and that this concerned her. I would prefer my neighbors to have that sort of diligence, there is nothing wrong in that. The notion of it having been two black men on the scene only came from early reports, which were at best cursory summaries of the situation. The callout over the police radio was the same, making no mention of black men on the scene - the idea of which certainly playing a role in many people's knee-jerk reaction to the situation.

Another thing to temper the knee-jerk reactions was the fact that Sgt. Crowley is by far insensitive to the issues of race profiling - he is active in his law enforcement community to educate people about racial profiling. Likewise, a very diverse group of police officers backed him 100% on his actions on the scene, testifying for his character as being an outstanding example of an officer. Sgt. Crowley, whose reputation was on the table because of this incident, certainly had the professionals in his industry on his side and it was hard to just paint him as a rogue racist officer as Professor Gates' earliest comments insinuated. It's easy to point out officers who neglect their duties or do questionably racist things, but Sgt. Crowley simply was not that type of individual from any report of his personal character or track record as an officer.

On the other hand, a Boston police officer, Justin Barrett, wrote a nasty mass email calling Professor Gates "a banana-eating jungle monkey" is certainly an example to the contrary, and proof that such "bad seeds" exist. Which I might note, is just completely ridiculous, and it's obvious someone would have to have mental issues to make such a comment. Barrett was immediately suspended for his comments. So yes, I certainly will admit bad seeds exist in the police force - Justin Barrett is one good example - you just can't assume though, you have to try to make a fair judgment based on the situation at hand.

It also became apparent that Professor Gates was out of line with the officers on the scene, a black officer who was at the scene backed up Sgt. Crowley's actions in deciding to take Gates in for disorderly conduct. According to police reports, Gates went off the chain and immediately put the race issue on the table, although whether you see it the same way will depend on your idea of what happened. There was little in Gates rebuttal to decline that he had in fact done this, although he did have a few points of contention as to the events that happened. To gather in more detail what happened I submit the following short summary of the encounter, as I can see it from the gathered details:

After the call went out patrolling officer Sgt. Crowley picked up the report of two suspected hispanic males breaking into a home. As it turns out Professor Gates' home had in fact been broken into in recent history - Gates leaves on long trips, in this situation he had just arrived home from China - although I doubt Sgt. Crowley was aware of this at the time. As Crowley approached Gates' door, Sgt. Crowley (not immediately knowing or recognizing Gates) asked if Professor Gates could step outside to talk to him. Gates said no - in a later interview to a Black pride magazine he explained that "I knew he wasn't canvassing for the police benevolent association", and that the way Sgt. Crowley had asked him to step outside made his hairs stand up on the back of his neck like he was in danger. So Gates asked Sgt. Crowley who he was and Sgt. Crowley gave his name and clarified he was answering a call regarding a suspected break-in. As Crowley offered his reply Gates came out of the house (whether Crowley came into the house or Gates came out is a bit disputed between the two accounts, but I'll presume this happened at the doorway somewhere) and insisted that this was only because he was a "black man in America", and implicated the officer of racism. Crowley of course wanted to know for sure if there was anyone else in the house, which is typically the first concern of an officer looking into a suspected break-in situation. At this point Gates said whether anyone was in his house was none of his business and called someone on the phone, stating he was dealing with "racist police officers".

This led to a bit of confusion on Crowley's part, he knew this was probably just an aggravated home owner, but he did not know for sure who he was talking to. So he asked for ID, Gates did not supply his state ID but did supply his Harvard ID, at which point Gates started demanding the officer for his police badge and details, presumably to file a complaint. This escalated as Gates began to insist he "wasn't someone to mess with". After having telling his name twice to Professor Gates, Sgt. Crowley decides to walk off his porch (he stated this was to make an audible radio transmission because he is being yelled at by Gates, who presumably said he would "see your momma outside" - the radio transmissions were recorded and there were multiple points where there was a loud man in the background, presumably Professor Gates). At this point Professor Gates actually follows Sgt. Crowley outside, shouting him down with further accusations of racial bias and that he had not "heard the last" from him. At this juncture Sgt. Crowley warned Professor Gates twice to discontinue the yelling and that his behavior was crossing the line into being disorderly conduct, and Professor Gates ignored this warning, so the cuffs were slapped on.

The account of Professor Gates differs a little near the end, he depicted it like he walked outside into a snare, to a field of officers (Crowley had called for Harvard police to stop by to check up on the situation, as well as a few extra police officers) and that Crowley had no intention other to arrest him for something. But what it boils down to is that Gates felt he was being visited by the assertive Sgt. Crowley and treated in that way only because he wasn't white. He also denied that he had yelled or made comments about Crowley's mother, although I kinda doubt that Sgt. Crowley had cause to make up that comment, it really seems like something an angry Professor Gates easily could've stated in passing probably not think a thing of it.

I'd supplement my opinion here, but I'll let you let the details gestulate around in your noodle and think about sorta the potential gaps here between the scenario in reality and the various summations you can find online from both sides of the coin, while I divert on another brief tangent, then I'll come back to it.

Definitely not a "Beer Summit"

President Obama, during his phone call to Sgt. Crowley, invited him and Gates to show up at the White House for some beers. I certainly stand by a black protester outside the White House I saw on CNN, who thought that it would be more appropriate if they drank juice instead of beer, if not for the fact that it is a bad standard for children then for the fact that beer tastes like ass and I don't understand how anyone can unwind while drinking it. Gates and Crowley got together prior to the "Beer Summit" - as the media was presenting it - and came to reasonable terms. While this is presumably a form of resolution, it certainly contained few concessions. No party really ever conceded any points, nor should they have to. If they did concede anything, it was kept out of the public eye because all we got out of the meeting between Obama, Gates, Crowley and V.P. Joe Biden's little beer bash was a photo op moment and an inaudible conversation.

This however is probably in the best taste. We don't need America fretting over every little insinuation and difference between two people who have a dispute like this. It's between them to settle as it will always be in every case-by-case basis. It is in that way something of a "teachable moment" which the President had earlier suggested he prefer it be taken as. If we did hear everything Professor Gates said or Sgt. Crowley said about the situation during these private meetings we would've been talking for weeks about certain comments or insinuations. Nobody really agrees with any prevailing wisdom on how to really treat racial issues. That's because most of us are still figuring out how to address the many varied situations that arise from social segregation everyday. There is no single correct prevailing wisdom on the matter.

The White House later came out and downplayed the idea of it being a "Beer Summit", because to them it is was merely a week-long distraction from Obama's key platform issue of health care reform. Speaking of which, health care is another blog post or video blog to come, because I would also like to lay down my thoughts on that. Still I agree considerably with the manner in which the President handled the situation, even when he was up there saying the police action was "stupid", to fault him for any of his reactions or the way he dealt with it is nonsense. There were few people in the media who handled it any better or did anything to put a worthwhile perspective on the situation, and the President at least tried to do this.

That said, I was insulted by one thing in the discourse. There were a number of people, Gates included, who wanted to use this incident as a sounding board for bringing "awareness" to the problem of racial profiling. I don't particularly mind people having concerns about racial profiling, but to use this as a platform for aggravating concerns about it is wrong, because that was part of what made the incident bad. Had Professor Gates not assumed the officer's visit had something directly to do with his race - which it didn't - then there is little chance he would've been arrested for disorderly conduct and we wouldn't have seen it in the news at all. That said, there are things to be concerned about with race and fairness in the criminal justice system, this is just not an example of such a situation. I staunchly disagree that this needs to be turned into an opportunity to "teach" white people about what it means to be black in this country, which is how some people took Obama's "teachable moment" statement. I don't believe by any means that was what he actually meant. That attitude is decidedly arrogant and itself based on racial pride feelings which are part of what perpetuates this problem with race in America. Not every white person in the country should be treated as a racist hillbilly and not every white person with authority needs to walk on eggshells for fear of being called racist. Not saying no such abusive, racist white folk exist, rather that most of them are in the south and smell bad, and I doubt many sired offspring that became upstanding officers patrolling the areas surrounding Harvard university.

The crux of the matter

So rather we come to the center point of this whole conversation, ultimately my opinion on whether or not it was right to arrest Gates in the first place for disorderly conduct. At first, I thought the arrest was an issue of identification at the scene, and if the officer had to arrest Gates because he wouldn't properly offer a real form of ID to present himself, I would've understood that. After all he's responsible for writing a report about who he spoke to at the scene, and needs to identify the people there, that is part of his responsibility when he takes a call on a suspected break-in. However that did not seem to be the case.

What it winds up being is something more along of just whether what Gates did by aggravating the officer despite repeated attempts by the officer to calm down Professor Gates was actually something that qualifies for a disorderly conduct charge. It's not fair to Gates to assume the absolute worst of his behavior, but there is little to contend that he didn't do something out of line. As an officer, if someone is engaging you and they refuse to comply with your requests to calm down, that certainly falls under the disorderly conduct frame of action. It may be your right to talk back to the officer all you want, especially on your property, but there comes a point where your action interferes with his ability to handle the situation in a safe way for everybody. I'm rather torn on the issue. I have little to no sympathy for someone who mouths off to a cop and gets arrested, that said there certainly are times to do just that. Still, cooperation with the officer and setting aside questions about race until later is the best choice of actions. I think a lot of people agree with that, of all sorts of races.

Likewise, while it is understandable that black Americans might ask themselves in the back of their heads when police officers are around if they are getting treated differently, it is not proper in every situation to just assume so and make an ass of yourself as Professor Gates did. If you do just that, you really screw yourself out of a proper understanding of the situation. It breeds unnecessary contempt and loathing not just in other people towards you, but in you towards other people. It's a divisive attitude, and sometimes it is best to approach a situation with the benefit of the doubt. We all have little voices in the back of our heads which tell us we're getting screwed the pooch for being who we are, even the most privileged of us can feel that way sometimes. We have to all sit back and tell those voices to shut up while we deal with the issues in our lives with the one clear voice of reason, unless we want to be assholes or crazies.

That said, I think Sgt. Crowley could've walked off the situation without slapping on cuffs. There was no reason to take him off the scene and take him all the way to the station, booking him, etc. So yes, I would have to side with Professor Gates on the matter of the arrest itself. Ultimately though that was the least of the opinions that one could get from analyzing this situation, and I hope I demonstrated that as we got from the top of this post to here. There are a lot of things to look at with racial issues, and it's not hard to get a little lost, but we have to keep these things in perspective if we want to come to any real, concrete and constructive solutions. Integration doesn't happen any other way.

- Phoebus Apollo

I've been in hibernation lately, a few things going on holding up my life with large periods of little to do, so I've been focused on playing various XBox 360 games, the most recent of which was this week's release of Magic: The Gathering "Duel of the Planeswalkers". It is a fun game but a few these issues to me mean the difference between playing a little of it once in a while and switching over to it as a primary game. I decided to write this up originally to go post on the game forums but decided to make it into a review of sort.

-- Bugs --

I had some thoughts to sort out about this new game so I thought I'd lay it down to see what others think. There will be some criticism in this post but I hope it is defined as "constructive" in nature.

First off, I gotta say that I think the game is good. However, some input is needed and I can only hope this reaches people capable of changing something, albeit I doubt it would. The most important thing to address first, I think, are the bugs in the game.

Several bugs I have noticed: during multiple occassions I have gotten "stuck" while zoomed in on a card, this often means missing important moments. A friend of mine was playing with us in a 3 on 3 game, he had the same thing happen right in the middle of an attack phase, which prevented him from casting Holy Day in time to prevent combat damage that turn, dealing a considerable blow to him early in the game.

Another bug I ran into was during an online 4-player game. I froze the card with the X button as an attack cycle was about to conclude just to see what was up, and quickly hit the Y button to return the game to action. Upon hitting the Y button my screen unfroze (it went from blue to normal), but for some reason the game behaved as if it was still unplayable. Freezing like this leaves a bad impression for the other players, as each of us thinks the others are holding up the game. If somehow one of the other players were holding up the game, that fact should've been visible to us so we would at least know what was going on, but it wasn't - so either way this is a bug. The white timeout bar at the top likewise counted down, I was hoping this would forcefully unfreeze the game, but it did not. Everyone quit as a result.

At least one occassion I was playing a mentoring match and the game froze entirely, completely crashing and leaving me at a static immovable screen that wouldn't even pull up the Xbox menu. I do not have any issues currently with my Xbox that would lead me to think this is a Xbox issue.

-- Fixable issues I hope are addressed in some way --

While not a bug per se, I did happen to stumble into some kind of timeout or whatnot during a blocking phase that was particularly frustrating. The attacker had 9-10 creatures coming at me in a last ditch effort. I had the game won, I just needed to assign a few blockers, I didn't need to block them all. As I was looking at his cards taking my time, and there was a lot to look at, I was just about to assign blockers and somehow my blocking session ended and the attacking started. Unfortunately even though I had the game at an academic victory at that point, because I wasn't able to assign any blockers that turn I lost. Timeout should be variable based on the amount of attacking creatures during that phase to give defenders more time to mull over bigger attacks.

One thing I think which should really be fixed is a couple of simple issues revolving around land. For one, it is difficult to get up to the screen and count your land cards when they are bunched together, and they do not bunch together in definitive groups of 5 or 10. It would be nice if there was a simple counter on the board that simply tallied how many land cards you had in play so you knew offhand how many of each you had without having to get up to the screen to count each individual card (on the left side of the land area a little bit of text stating "Islands: 7/8" would be nice, with the left indicating how many are untapped and the right being total lands). I can't simply zoom in to flip through the land cards as there is no simple way to highlight them that I have discovered.

Another thing I'll note about land is that you should be given the option of tapping and drawing your own mana, if you want to. While the game is fairly intelligent about doing tapping for you, and usually this is not a problem, there is a rare occassion where it doesn't tap the land you want. For instance, let's say I have a spell for 2 colorless and 1 red mana, and 2 red mana and 1 colorless. I have 3 mountains and 3 forests. Naturally it is possible to tap the land and leave enough room for decent spells but often times I run into a situation where I'll play one of the two cards and it'll auto-tap all three mountains. Then of course I have no spare mountain to cast my second spell. It may intelligently try to predict situations like this but if it does it isn't absolute as I can recall at least once already where I had this happen to me.

One last bit of advice I might throw out there is the blue timer countdowns that give everyone that buffer space to interrupt, I like them being swift as it keeps the game moving, but sometimes they can go by a little too fast. Maybe they should be swift for certain periods where it is unlikely they will be interrupted (like during the main phase transitions) but be extended for moves which are more likely to be interrupted (creature summons, combat).

Otherwise gameplay is great. Works fine and is simple, takes some getting used to but that is what mentoring and playing with friends on XBL is for.

-- Thoughts for improvement, expansion --

I want to note that I understand that for an 800 point Xbox Live Arcade game that it may be a bit much to ask for the same kind of full featured experience you might expect from the trading card game itself. That said, I would happily pay another 800 points if the developers of this game were willing to add a "customize deck" feature which actually would let me do more than just swap in/out different default decks with their default unlockable sideboard cards, and then take that deck online and fight others with it. I would even, on top of that extra 800 points, pay extra points to unlock boosters and other card suppliments to further customize my deck. A game like this on a network like Xbox Live is really is the ideal way I always wanted to play Magic (let the computer enforce the rules and the players can simply enjoy the strategy and gameplay), after giving up the card game itself some 6-7 years ago, so I'd be willing to invest into it a bit.

As it stands, Magic is going to be filler for me until I get to the next XBLA title I want to play, Battlefield 1943. Whether I return to Magic will depend on exactly what kind of DLC and bug fixes get applied in the meantime, as the game stands now I don't see myself coming back to it on any regular basis but that could easily be fixed by offering a few improvements like better deck customization. Controlling how many land, character and creature cards I have in the deck itself is necessary for proper strategy. The first thing I'd do is go ahead and get some more enchantment destruction spells in my base decks... then you get into possibility for card trading over XBox Live which would really boost the popularity of card expansion DLC.

I'll suppliment this whole "plea for adding custom decks", which from what I read is really the biggest complaint about the game, with a good point I observed on some of the forums: if you don't get a chance to really get into the gritty of customizing decks - from scratch - you are substantially shortening the lifespan of this game. A shorter game lifespan will have less reception to whatever DLC they DO decide to release for the game. The less forward you go in the respect the more it will make DLC pointless. I really hope the developers realize that this is the difference between a "great" game that could last for years and a game that will last a few weeks to a lot of people. If these issues were fixed I could probably get all my friends to go online and download it.

-- Mentoring --

The mentoring system is a great idea... I went in and met a lot of level headed, cool people on there. I got about 8 games in and got ranked a 5 on all of them which was cool. That said, I realized about 3 games in the only reason people were using the mentoring feature was to play for free on the trial game. I couldn't tell if anybody was in there to actually get help playing the game. The trial users definitely seemed to ask a lot of questions and did need help for a lot of things, but that sorta was a little crappy after realizing I wasn't really mentoring anyone who really wanted help to learn the game.

-- Game setting tips --

I also wanted to share some recommended changes to the gameplay settings, available under the game's "help & options" menu under "settings". I noticed people I was playing with weren't changing these settings too much, so I thought I'd point them out for people who didn't notice they were there:

1. I turned off display hints but obviously you can leave that on if you prefer.

2. Hold priority I turned "on", that way every main phase requires an input from the player. I'd rather have a few minor delays in the game than let the game skip through because it doesn't think I have something to play during a phase.

3. Combat animation I turned off, didn't need it.

4. You can turn on browsing the entire library when you pick a card out of it, but obviously it gets reshuffled. In the interest of expediency I decided against turning on this feature, but it is an option.

5. Auto assign damage and simplified targetting are two features which should be "off" by default, but aren't. While most of the situations you get into this is fine, assigning damage during multiple-blocking situations in combat and being able to target yourself or your own creatures can be vital. I had at least one game I recall where a player was trying to steal a creature of mine and I didn't want to wait until the next phase to prevent the action, but I couldn't because I wasn't able to target him because of simplified targetting.

Alright, that's enough ranting I hope people found it useful/thoughtful. Later.

Just thought I'd pop on for a moment and do a quick video to followup on my previous review of PCSX2, a Playstation 2 emulator for the PC. It is coming along smoothly and works much better than it did back in my review of it a little over a year ago.

The Pitch: A little over a year and a half ago I reviewed PCSX2, a Playstation 2 emulator, and it was of a middling quality. During the initial review it even crashed on me a couple of times. While it was playable, it was very painful to play. Well, development on the project has picked up quite a bit, and speeds and compatibility are very noticably improved. Still using the same machine, I decided to record my latest results. Version featured is 0.9.6. (I have finished both Shadow of the Colossus - speed hack settings a must for that game - and We Love Katamari using this emulator.)

Also featured: my strategy for using emulator save states for hunting metal slimes. Now if I could just figure out a way to make that alchemy pot work faster...

Get it: http://www.pcsx2.net/
Specs: AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+, 4GB of DDR2 RAM, Nvidia Geforce 8800 GTS 320MB (a bit old now, I know)

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I've done a lot of thinking on the precise nature of ethics, given that ethics grants a fundamental understanding of the relevance of all other philosophies. Trying to tie down a base of knowledge to a single set of ideas is difficult, but a very important thing if you want your ideology to be consistent. Then again, logic and consistency are not two virtues extolled by the average American public. In fact, I will assert that you can balk at logic and consistency and still be a very functional member of American society.

What I find about most people is that nobody is really inherently evil or good in the way they behave. Rather they act in a manner befit their attitudes, which are compromised mostly of whimsy. A lot of what most people do makes no real sense whatsoever, despite people trying pretty hard to find justifications. I find justifying human activity to be a pointless and wasteful activity. For the most part, the average person has only a rudimentary and simple understanding of their own likes, dislikes, dispositions, and they act accordingly. A lot of the time, this means people act to their own detriment. A lot of our understandings of society rely on assumptions to the contrary: for instance, markets presume to work because we assume people act in their own interest and thus this facilitates exchange. I would assert one of the central failings of these ideas is that people really don't adhere to even common sense principles. To many people it is simply not important to consider this.

What a lot of us forget is that most of what goes on inside society doesn't have any firm rules or requirements and by no means must make any sense. So making sense of it all is necessarily a difficult challenge, by no means does it need, ultimately, to make sense. That goes for the economy, politics, science and is thus extended to all human activities. We define our own conventions, for the most part, and while we certainly adopt educational norms in our various societies, no single society of mankind has ever adopted a real consistent understanding of the base function of knowledge itself. That is because seeing and demonstrating tasks and skills is more fundamental to our ability to grasp things than thinking very deeply about them. I guess you could say I'm a skeptic of the civic functionality of reason. Emotive, expressive ideas built on an untrue ideology can result in a functional, healthy society (inasmuch as the function and health of society are not judged by how silly they are, and rather, how they culture, progress and live). If such is true, many generations could pass through life blissfully ignorant and somehow figure to get by. This may be silly sounding, but the understanding of this idea itself reveals quite a bit about the vices and virtues of humanity.

This being a given truth (and really that whole insight warrants its own article), attempting to define purpose and ethics to the human mind is difficult. What do we really know for sure? In fact, who am I to even say one way or another? When contemplating it all we quickly cave in on our own nonsense. I am an atheist, too, making this whole process a bit more involved. I really don't believe there is a god, and naturally a religious stance fills in some of these holes.

Well, my first reflection goes back to a religious man who was asking similar questions of things back in the early 1600's, Rene Descartes. He thought the best way to approach this problem was to create a method which would help him make sense of basic truths, and then build from that. I believe his assumption was correct way to begin, but the method he created is no single absolute principle by which to start. Methods, like his - which was a form of methodological skepticism - have no intrinsic worth. They are models by which we filter our many understandings. One could take a diametrically opposed "method" - like irrational presumption - and come to the same necessarily true idea. I guess what I'm getting at is that methods are not important to understand necessarily true things, because once something is realized to be necessarily true, it is incontrovertibly. As in, it would make no sense to deny something found to be true regardless of the methodology you use to come to your rationalized conclusions. Descartes, picking a reliable and sound method, came to understand one fundamental truth that makes a cornerstone of knowledge: that we exist.

This, to me, is really the best starting point for understanding conscious thought, I like to think of it as the first principle. Descartes' insight is simple: he wanted to figure out what in the realm of the world is real, and to do that he pretended that everything he knew was some grand deception. He figured that no matter how deceived he might admittedly be about reality and his perception of it, there was one thing he was not deceived of: that he existed. If he doubted his own existence, the substantiation of his doubt meant there was an object - himself. Whatever he might be, his doubts proved that he was at very least a "thinking thing". Otherwise he would not be capable of sustaining the doubt required to contemplate his own existence in the first place. He found the truth of "I think, therefore I am". He was by no means the first person with this idea, but deserves credit for this articulation as we popularly understand it today. Consciousness of oneself and the reality of existence is something that we all intrinsically understand, but few of us actually contemplate to great length.

From that point Descartes was able to substantiate little else. His attempted ontological proof of god from that viewpoint was admittedly on unsound basis. I almost think he didn't quite believe that part of his meditation as strongly as he said he had, but he did reiterate a belief in it later in life. Still, I'm sure Descartes had the time to hear about how Galileo's ideas were received by the church, so I take his level of dedication to the topic with a grain of salt.

So where do we go from here?

If I think and therefore I am, we have a basis for considering our experiences real, and we have established the premise of logic, that subjects (in this case "I") have definite meaning and can be given attributes (in this case, existence). If I can show one subject being given definite meaning and thus am able to associate an attribute to describe it, then I've proven my point. Thankfully this ties into the first principle of "I think therefore I am". As if I were proven wrong, then "I Think Therefore I Am" is nonsense, as the subject (oneself) cannot be given the attribute of existence if attributes can not be associated with subjects. I might frame this argument as such:

If 1 is untrue, then we're unable to identify what "I" actually means, and the notion of ideas becomes brittle indeed. While a "subject" can refer to many things, in this light, I mean that something which is a subject is a topic, notion or idea. All ideas, notions, topics, etc. bear some sort of definition, if they did not it would be impossible to differentiate them from one another. The notion of self - "I", the id, whatever you want to call it - is an idea which can be described, and that is what I mean when I say it is a subject. If it was not an idea which can be described, then no attribution could be deigned for "I". Thus, you would have to reject the notion of "I think therefore I am", because you could not identify yourself differently from anything else. Again by the act of thinking you identify yourself, thus we see how this statement must be true. Merely by describing oneself, you become something which bears description, thus "things" can bear description. Follow me on this one, as it is an important point to retain as we proceed.

If 2 is untrue, then while we might be able to identify ourselves as a "thing", we could not associate an outside idea - existence - with it. The point I am getting at with this, is that all logical prepositions consist of this pattern of thought, involving the necessary assignment of subjects to attributes. Thus, just as existence is an attribute which describes a subject, a subject is an object, idea, topic or notion which is being described.

Because this logical argument follows, we know that the notion of "things" (ideas, notions, topics, subjects) and "attributes" (descriptive properties) are necessary forms of language. Because if they aren't, then I think therefore I am breaks down into gibberish. Thought being something to be described does not gain an association to "I" or an association to existence and thus becomes nonsense. Likewise, if 3 and 4 are untrue, then we've failed to provide a concrete proof for the notion of subject/attribute relationships in this, the principle Descartes and so many skeptics have found as being really the only sound one. So whereas Descartes is correct in finding we exist, the conclusion of that also substantiates that logic exists. As a principle, logic - the study of properties and propositions - requires subjects and attributes such as the "self" and the attribute of "existence".

Which is funny, Descartes doesn't quite prove god actually exists as he set out to do, but he does prove that the idea of "god" and the notion of "existence" do, because while language barriers can have us find alternate uses and meanings for the word "god" and "existence", they are necessarily descriptive properties that are real. At least, as real as language and vocabulary that ultimately generate the descriptions are.

The second part of this notion I want to analyze is what really gets me back to the point of my little rant, that being of course ethics. We established above that we think, and exist, and that subjects and attributes of our existence are fair things to consider - logic exists - its only limitation being coherent language to communicate the ideas. Of which, the most base communication, that I exist, being necessarily true and thus a good place to stage our furthered observations. So what does this possibly have to do with ethics? I think the important thing to consider is as follows...

I think therefore I am.

If you accept "I think" nothing outwardly compels you to accept "I am", to arrive at that you must make a conclusion, you must decide that "therefore" one, then the other. Of course we are all free to decide one thing from another, but if we all accept the Descartes maxim here, then we all accept that we all decide at least that one thing. Thus independent volition, or will, exists. If it did not, then there would be no therefore, and thus no conclusion, as no ideas could be consulted without a will or volition to contemplate them. A conclusion, which in the structure of logic simply acknowledges the truth of some idea, is an act or volition. You would have to decide, upon volition of the will, that it follows from thinking that one does in fact exist. If you denied this, then you reject the notion of "I think therefore I am" because there is no therefore and again as said before, if you reject that basic notion, then we find ourselves in a state of nonsense. Effectively, reason - which is a byproduct of our ability to decide and conclude things based on prepositions which we don't always word so straightforwardly as we are now - exists in the same light as logic does.

You see, you could say that ethics don't exist without some great outside influence, such as a god. I might argue that ethics necessarily exist, as the notion of ethics arise from the notion of conclusion. Conclusion is an idea inherent to logic itself, which again while being limited by our language and capacity for imagination, is a real thing. The idea of concluding something or acknowledging the truth of something, is an act of will, the conclusion that one exists the first real fundamental act of ethics. Ethics, in this light, being the assumption that we ought to do some things over other things. In this instance, we all ought to conclude that we exist. This is if anything my first commandment. If you do not acknowledge that you exist, there is literally no point to communication, as you cannot effectively comprehend anything until you actually make this acknowledgement. To put it another way: we already established that we think, we established that things exist, and that we exist because we think. Well by making this initial assumption, something nearly every conscious human being understands intuitively, we've made a judgement, that judgement being a recognization of our own existance. We have no cause to actually conclude one thing from any other thing, that we can is to me a defining property of intelligent conscious life.

So, to wrap up, I would assert that if we exist - and I cannot really assert if you do or not, at least from the methodologically skeptical point of view, but I know I exist - then I in making that determination substantiate that logic exists as does ethics. If logic did not exist, rather if I could not relate concepts to others, then the terms become impossible to define. If ethics do not exist, then I have no basis for making conclusions, as will and volition is an activity. We showed this with the one idea you can't really deny, but another way to put it is that if 2+2=4, the mathematical operation while being a logical one is still an act requiring a decision. The decision being, something equals something else. This requires will and volition on the part of the observer. Of course, one could deny that 2+2=4 especially if they abstract or silly reasons to do so, but nobody can really deny that "I think therefore I am" as denying that effectively renders any part of logic, reason, deduction and in fact reality void.

Many theories of god's existence tend to attempt to prove god exists as the thing which substantiates reason and ethics. Descartes tried to prove god existed as the "guarantor of reason", the thing that effectively proves reason is a sound concept. Really, it's the other way around. Because Descartes made the correct assumption that he existed, so must reason by necessity, and so must ethics. Unless you believe it is impossible for god not to exist, you must conclude now that ethics does whether the god does or not. Perhaps the truest thing that can be said, is if you are an entity which is conscious, a being in the truest and simplest sense of the word, you might consider yourself that "I am that I am". Which, quite oddly enough, is one of the famous transliterated versions of the name of Yahweh, the Abrahamic god of the Bible. Perhaps one of the most stark things that ever made sense to me in a religious text, was a god describing himself as a being which is, as this is a foundation for understanding all other things that are. Interesting, really.

I thought that was a set of thoughts worth sharing, sorry if it sounded a little rambling. Later,

- Phoebus Apollo