This assumes, of course, that I have heart....

Alternate title: wherein I answer a flippant blogging prompt with a dignity entirely unworthy of the exercise for vaguely satirical purposes and (of course) my own amusement.
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...the prompt being: 
Five Ways to Win My  Heart

I would like to point out straight away that I'm very grinchy, and due to the commercialization of Christmas my heart is unlikely to grow three sizes anytime soon. 

However, though my good opinion once lost is lost forever,* it's not that hard to earn my good opinion. Here's a cheat sheet:

1. Be Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock.

Obviously this one is never going to happen, because even Cumberbatch only pretends to be the world's only genius consulting detective with devastating good looks. Did I say I'm easy to please? I lied. Moving on:

2. Live your philosophy. That is: be consistent. 

I don't care what your philosophy is.** I don't need people to agree with me, but they need to agree with themselves, and have the cojones to actually follow through on it. 

3. Engage in nerdity.

This requires some explanation: I don't really care what your area of expertise is. If you can make a living by being really enthused about organic chemistry... awesome. If you flip burgers, or fix computers, and spend your free time regaling me with legends of the old Klingon Empire... also awesome. (Maybe?) But have something you can think about deeply, something that you can be creative with, talk to other people about. Care about something.***

4. Even if you don't believe in objective morality, act as if you did. Or rather: even if you think that the rules don't apply to you because you're extra-awesome or something... follow them anyway. 

I'm not talking about an honestly held philosophy here. What I mean is: I don't want to hear about how your sloppy, neo-Nietzschean tripe entitles you to do whatever you want. No one ever thinks 'Well, there are simply superior beings out there, that naturally know better than me, and therefore they're well within their rights to oppress me, and to act without regard to societal norms or any bourgeois notions of morality' and so it always implies that you're somehow better than other people, which, even if it were true... if you say it, you're not just a jerk, but an idiot. Jerks I can tolerate if they entertain me and don't trip little old ladies, but idiots and I... we don't get along.

5. Care about your work. 

You may not like your job. That's okay. You are not alone. It's a safe bet that most people, throughout most of history have hated their jobs. Seriously. Who wants to scythe grain, and then winnow it, and then grind it, and then cook it, all pretty much by hand? And that's if you're lucky (that is, if you don't have a catastrophic hail/rain/drought, and a local warlord doesn't come by and burn your fields, or press you into service, or tax you to death, and there isn't a plague that year).

My point is that in the grand scheme of things, serving coffee is not so bad. I've done it. I hated each everloving second of it, but it didn't kill me. So I'm not denying that some jobs suck. Some jobs are thankless, menial and demeaning. Some of them shouldn't even exist. But that's not the fault of your coworkers, or your customers (if you work in a service industry). It's probably not even the fault of your bosses.

Obviously if your job involves landing my plane or handling nuclear warheads I have very personal reasons for wanting you to care about your job, but I'd like for you to care about what you do regardless. 

Because even if what you do doesn't "matter," you matter. You are connected to other people, whether you like it or not, and what you do affects them. So this isn't about being a good secretary/garbageman/hairdresser/economist/president, this is about being a decent human being. Thinking you're above doing something (whether it's something that you're paid for or not) is a fantastic way to make yourself miserable, even if you're lucky enough to not transmit your misery to anyone else. So please don't do that. 

N + 1- This one is somewhat obvious, so it's not on the list proper: Don't be a jerk. Think about other people. Hell, just think. 

That is: Don't litter like a jerk. Don't smoke while I'm trying to swim laps in the pool. Like a jerk. Don't leave junk lying around on the floor where little old ladies can trip over it. Like a jerk. Don't call people names. Like a jerk. When you have the opportunity to screw stuff up without suffering the consequences: Don't screw stuff up. (Again, if you do it when you're going to suffer for it, then you're not only a jerk but an idiot.)

See? Not hard. I'm actually super-easy to please. 

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*This is basically Jane Austen's subtle way of calling me a judgmental bitch from beyond the grave. 

** Okay, not true. I care a little bit. Okay. I care a lot. But I also know that trying to beat sense into people's heads never works. At least if people are consistent maybe they'll eventually see that they don't like the implications of their philosophy/religion/world-view. (I live in hope.)

*** Of course, being a snob, there are some subjects for obsession that I consider better than others. The (obviously and necessarily incomplete) ranking goes thusly: 

Mathematics > everything

"Real science" and/or literature > having a useful trade/hobby, e.g. being a knowledgeable outdoorsman, mechanic, jam-maker (I don't highly value jam myself, but it fits the criteria, perhaps that's another blog post), quilter, chess-player etc.

Elaborate Star Trek-type universes > Star Wars and weird/dumb hobbies (e.g. Renaissance fairs, bird watching, stamp collecting etc.) 

Weird hobbies >  reality TV or cat memes

**** This seems like a non sequitur but it's really not. Also, stop using the word "boobs." Because it's horrible. No really. I'll even allow you to say "bosom" if you promise to stop. 

Food Inc.

I hadn't watched it originally, because I didn't expect it to provide any new information. It didn't...but it was a brilliant piece of propaganda. Propaganda in the perfectly neutral sense, not: the Nazis telling each other how much better the world would be 'if we could grind those dirty Slavs under our perfectly clean boots,' sort of propaganda.

Just as an example: in the beginning of the movie they pan across some of the vast cornfields in the midwest. This was a great move, because you can say that there are around 92.3 million acres (sic) devoted to growing maize and 75.2 million acres (sic) is devoted to soybean production. All of it's true. But trying to make people understand the scale of our grain/seed production is nigh on impossible. Spending a good minute scrolling over vast fields is a start though. It doesn't matter that it was only the tiniest fraction of what's probably in the surrounding area, it makes an impact on people, which is what the entire film is about.

It takes a lot of space to feed the animals that feed over 300 million people, and it would still take a mindboggling amount of space to feed us even if we all became vegetarians at this very instant, but we don't even eat all of it, we export around 1,850 million bushels a year(that's around twice the amount that we use to make HFCs and all that junk.)

Our exports are one of the issues that Food Inc brings up: because curiously the subsidies that create low grain prices here in the U.S affect other countries (we don't live in a vacuum, who'da thunk?) This means (simplistically) that Mexican subsistence farmers who grow maize can't afford to grow their own food and get to look for work here in the U.S. There are only so many menial tasks to go around, but the slaughterhouses have their arms open wide, so a large number of "undocumented" immigrants end up working for low pay in terrible conditions. Why is this not "slavery?" Beats me. There's also a lot of debt slavery, chicken farmers who are hundred's of thousands of dollars in debt and make maybe 20,000 a year (I assume that's after taxes, but still..) because the companies they sell to also loan them the money to build chicken coops and dictate how the chickens are cared for. This happens in other livestock situations, but they talked about chickens. Probably because the daily removal of a dozen or so dead chickens was visually impacting.

"From seed to the supermarket" was a great way to explain this vertical integration (whether it's technically vertical integration or not, that's how they were explaining it) and the consolidation of control in a few large production companies. The good thing about this is that if one company decides to make a beneficial change that makes a huge impact on the whole market; the bad part is that the standardization and lack of variety -- in fact the industrialization -- of our food production has actually increased the quantity, but decreased the quality of our food (compare ancient einkorn and emmer protein percentages to modern wheat's for instance.) This was happening before the Green Revolution, but the process has been accelerated by genetic modification and other new agricultural methods. Not only is our food lower in quality (and flavor, but that's secondary) but because of the antibiotic-resistant bacteria it's actively unsafe.

I felt very uneasy about the meat safety section. They had a mother who lost her toddler to a particularly nasty serotype of E. Coli. Of course I feel bad for her, and of course I understand that one person talking about their little kid has a more personal impact than saying "16 people died yesterday due to contaminated meat," but I still felt like I was being manipulated. What she wanted was more regulation and because of how things work here in America I doubt that it would help much. It's rather like unions, they were wonderful and completely necessary in the first part of the century, but they're of limited utility now that certain well delineated rights and protections are established. Currently they're really only good for hampering decision-making and providing teachers I know with some way to complain about non-voluntary organizations. What meat companies should be forced into is labelling meat batches, and they shouldn't be allowed to impinge on people's free speech. They also should actually pull "recalled" meat off the market, the woman in question later found out that her son had eaten meat that was supposedly recalled some time before and people were still serving it.

They had several people who were unwilling to speak (because they depend on these large companies for their livelihoods,) but there's also the fact that people are prosecuted when they say anything negative about the structure or production methods or either agricultural development companies like Monsanto or livestock processing companies like Tyson.

Documentaries like that are created in order to increase awareness. They are basically proseltyzing, which is a technique that I don't have a problem with. It really depends on what the "cause" is. How else are you supposed to tell people about something? And even if you could do it perfectly neutrally, who would then have an incentive to educate anyone on a specific subject. They don't have any viewpoint that they want to promulgate, so the argumentative basis of human logic is ignored, so not only do people not have a reason to "teach" but other people aren't convinced, they don't understand as easily and they don't remember.

That's one thing I found very striking: the end. A lot of the time you'll leave a movie/documentary feeling all fired up and thinking "This must be stopped! We're going to make the world better!" but without anything real to do. So what they did at the end of the movie was list real, achievable goals for individuals. They didn't say: "We need to stop this" or some other diffuse thing, they didn't even say "buy organic..blah blah." They said "Eat more vegetables... cook at home...buy local produce.. because businesses have to respond to their consumers" all sensible things, which a lot of us could figure out, but they were definite and practical. That's how people remember and how things get changed.

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by the way, the resources I've linked to may not be the best of everything available, but I didn't link directly to voluminous sources. Those are easily found, but I felt it would disrupt the flow of thought. It's all verifiable. If you have better and equally condensed resources please tell me.