dear garden,

humans have a problem they like to call climate change (it used to be called global warming but then they realized the warming part is probably the least problematic part for them). it’s a big thing in politics and people love to ask whether or how much which humans are contributing, but it’s all a big distraction. remember the other day talking about (victim) blaming and pointing fingers? it’s the same thing with this, just bigger and more official.

almost everyone agrees* that humans are capable of messing with the climate if they really want to (for better or worse). on a completely unrelated note, almost everyone agrees* that the climate is doing weird things that we don’t like. so all those debates over whether humans are causing it, and which humans are causing the most (they usually group them by countries because this way they can point fingers at any of the bad guys they don’t like, and blame the whole thing on them), are very silly. after all, assuming the previous claims are correct, almost everyone agrees that having hurricanes and droughts everywhere is bad, and that we should look for ways to stop them from happening so much.

but then we spend a lot of time wondering whose fault it is and who should have to bear the most responsibility, and nobody wants to do more work or spend more money than they’re forced to do, because we’re lazy and stingy, and bla bla why should we do more when someone else is doing less etc. but the answer is obvious: it’s because if everyone just spends all their time demanding from others, and nobody actually gets the stuff done, then the stuff doesn’t get done and everyone (including ourselves) will be worse off (because of the hurricanes and stuff that keep throwing us around)

but luckily you will be okay because realistically life will continue to survive and grow and keep you pretty and colorful, even if humans don’t like your new colors. so i guess it’s okay

*citation needed

dear garden,

i wonder how “that’s victim-blaming” as an argument became so popular. by this, i mean, when people go, “how dare you blame the victim? the perpetrator is the only one to blame!” obviously it’s silly to fully fault the victim for being the victim of someone else’s harmful actions, but i think people rarely ACTUALLY do that. for example, if alice leaves a wallet out in some public area and walks away for a few minutes, then it wouldn’t be very surprising if someone steals it. surely everyone agrees that the direct cause of the theft is the thief’s actions. it’s reasonable to blame the theft on the thief. but it’s also reasonable to say that, if alice doesn’t want anyone to steal her wallets, then she should not leave them unattended in public. a lot of people would probably agree with that, but it doesn’t mean they’re “victim-blaming” in the above sense. it’s just that there are reasonable precautions alice can take to avoid having her stuff stolen.

i think the problem is that people are very silly-minded. people love to assign blame. and in the context of “cause and effect”, they subconsciously tend to attribute exactly one cause for each effect. it’s easy to blame exactly one person for all the bad things in any given situation. scapegoating is great for everyone else, as they walk away with clean hands and cleaner consciences. but this very isolated view of cause and effect (or fault and consequence, or however people want to term it) is a very unhealthy way to look at things. all sorts of things happen all the time, and their interplay results in all sorts of other things happening later. saying that the theft was predictable and the victim could have taken measures to prevent it, isn’t the same as saying the victim is “the one at fault”, or “the only one to blame”, or so on. i think it shouldn’t be interpreted that way, because that’s not a very helpful way to think about things.

ultimately, the goal is to prevent undesirable events from happening. this is because we feel bad when we get things that we don’t want. (it sounds silly to say this out loud, but it’s important to regularly take a step back and justify our goals to ourselves.) the reason we want to prevent theft is, because it makes us feel bad when we get our stuff stolen. but the thing is, blaming people doesn’t prevent thefts, nor make them any desirable. nobody (reasonable, i assume) wants to have his stuff stolen just so he can blame the thief for something. even if the thief is blamed, caught, and punished, and the stolen items are returned, the victim still probably felt bad at some point. so blaming anyone doesn’t really help much at all, except maybe to make certain people feel a bit better, after something unwanted already happened.

given that goal, we shouldn’t really focus on blaming anyone at all. who’s at fault, or how much so, is really beside the point. all that matters is that alice can take certain actions to mitigate unwanted things. and for example, if she doesn’t want the wallet stolen, then she should probably try not to leave it unattended in public. this doesn’t just apply to when someone brings up the idea of victim-blaming. just in general, blaming people is usually unhelpful for solving problems.

i guess the other problem is that accusations of victim-blaming often come up in discussions of sexual assault, and people get super freaky about stuff like that. they tend to become all riled up, so it’s normal that they act and think even more irrationally than usual, if alice was assaulted and then someone says alice should’ve been more modest. but to mald about it is still missing the point. sure, people shouldn’t sexually assault her to begin with, but that part is out of her control.

knowing that some undesired event is a possibility, and that other people’s choices are out of her control, and that she can decrease the possibility by taken certain actions, a reasonable conclusion is that she probably should take those actions, to give her the best chance of avoiding undesired things. this is basically just a simple observation, and it doesn’t necessarily mean she’s to blame for what happens as a result of her choices. after all, no matter who you blame after the fact, it doesn’t change what happened. there’s no point assigning blame, when all we really want is just to avoid unwanted things. accusing people of “victim-blaming”, and countering with “the perpetrator is the only one to blame”, is just unhelpful. and worse, it can derail a helpful discussion by misleading people into a debate over semantics or other silly nonsense, because honestly, it’s really easy to make people lose sight of their own goals.

but then again, i guess i don’t really expect humans NOT to be silly-minded. they’ve never been very good at being helpful or knowing what they want anyway