My office-mate is a few years older than I and has no computer at home. He is an intelligent and flexible enough guy (though he would deny that), but watching him painfully navigate new tasks on the computer is a stunning illustration of just how much we have learned in the past few years. He cannot scroll properly. Accurately selecting from the dropdown menu in MS Word befuddles him, and the discovery that Excel’s dropdown is different annoys him further. When the cursor turns into a different icon as he scrolls over something he thinks something has gone wrong. Attachments, saving to desktop, using a few key words on a search engine – these do not go smoothly.
I am certainly no computer wizard, though I look like one among social workers. I can guess my way through unfamiliar applications – the directions, vocabulary, and icons seem accessible to my thought – but I am a hybrid between the old ways of thinking and the new. Nor will I ever be anything but a hybrid. My children are newer hybrids, and over time they will likely organize their thoughts according to the networked and electronic world. They may be among the last who are even able to revert to the old ways at need, consulted in their elder years to translate. For even if their children are raised in traditional learning styles now, they will lose those skills from disuse. I can still diagram simpler sentences or work in base 8 with effort, but I can no longer operate a slide rule. Why would I need to, except as a parlor trick?
Not that people do tricks in parlors anymore, or even have parlors. You get my point.
I dimly recall that there are idiosyncratic cursive capitals, such as a Q that looks like a 2; I am quite certain that no one needs to learn cursive anymore. If you doubt that, by the way, try and read old family letters. People had handwriting styles that were difficult even then, but constant exposure to different penmen allowed us to read script. Try it now. Children’s handwriting, still reasonably close to the grammar-school standard, is decipherable. Adult handwriting, only barely so.
Adaptability, flexibility, and willingness give yourself over to the demands of a new technology are not the wave of the future for learning. They are the current wave – it is already upon us. We know that current curriculum design does not reflect the skills children will need, but we are only able to guess at what they will need. We fear to put enormous resources into techniques that turn out to be blind alleys.
Everyone has theories for this, methods folks are just sure will lead us to the promised land. I have seen this pattern in psychology over my career, as various techniques come into fashion as the new messiahs: reality therapy, recovered memories, NLP, EMDR, DBT. As in every field, a few of them will turn out to be right. The others will be neutral at best, damaging at worst. What will be predictable is that aromatherapists will discover that aromatherapy is what people need, dancers will think that children can learn so much from dance, programmers will proclaim vehemently that simple programming should be taught as early as kindergarten.
In that vein, I advocate studying the self-taught, to see what works for them. I was not an extreme autodidact, but a differently-designed educational system would have been an advantage for me. The traditional schoolroom almost destroyed my younger brother, who now has a Master of Fine Arts. Lewis and Tolkien were autodidacts, as were Einstein, Edison, Mendel, and Mandelbrot. The route to genius may even require intermittent, idiosyncratic instruction alternating with periods of leaving the student alone. (I don’t think children learn much leaving them entirely alone. I think it is the back-and-forth style, rigid structure alternating with no structure, which is productive.)
Friday, June 20, 2008
How We Got To Here
Everyone’s got a theory about American freedom, for example, and I won’t be providing any new ones here. One of the most widely-held ideas situates the roots of the American attitude in the Teutonic forests, among the tribes that Tacitus described 2000 years ago. Egalitarian, difficult to subdue, and according more status to women, these Angles, Jutes, Franks, and Saxons are seen as the freedom-loving Germanic peoples, debating at their moots, drinking their mead, pillaging and raping (but nobly), and eventually going off to take over England from whence they founded the colonies that turned into the only nations that are worth a damn.
This freedom-loving Saxon theory comes in both racial and cultural versions. I tend to a soft cultural version of this myself. I find it extreme to push the origin too far into an unrecorded past, but that something different happened in the British Isles and its colonies seems obvious. These Anglospheric theories usually include reference to Magna Carta, the Mayflower Compact, and the Bloodless Revolution of 1688. The Bloodless Revolution wasn’t bloodless, by the way. Magna Carta wasn’t all that magna, either.
Other theories have included the English admiration for Native American tribal councils, particularly the Pemigewassets; Roman Catholic abstract thinkers reflecting on the rights of man; Protestant settlement finally liberated from all traces of Catholicism; a confluence of French legal thought and East Anglian merchant custom; Frisian influence; the Greek Revival; the preeminence of property rights in English Common Law; the search for cultural universals of governance in diverse colonies – I’m sure I am missing many others.
All these theories were developed retrospectively, imposing a teleological framework that leads to Wonderful Us. We trace back through events and ideas and claim to have found a single path. Such thinking does have advantages. It allows us to see patterns that are there, which gives a certain predictive value to our thoughts about the future. Unfortunately we also see patterns that aren’t there, giving a deceptive predictive value to our thoughts about the future. Paths there may be, but if we are picking out a spot on the horizon in our past and retracing toward it, we come to regard our route through the crisscrossing trails as the real path, the natural path, the inevitable path.
It is almost automatic at that point to look into the future with the idea that this is all going somewhere, and that past trends will continue. Such prediction is risky even with physical or even mechanical events. It is certainly hubristic with political and social events.
I have heard it called assumicide.
Christians sometimes think they’ve got an edge that allows them more right to look ahead. We have been given the last few pages of the book, and easily convince ourselves that we have a pretty shrewd guess what’s going to happen next (wink, wink). The problem is, we don’t know where in the book we are. If we knew that we had started the last chapter, then our extrapolations of current events out to the close of the age would likely be accurate. But we don’t know if we have gotten out of the second chapter of human history yet. Heck, we don’t even know if the number of chapters has even been decided. God might be writing this world interactively with us because it’s more fun for Him and better education for us.
There is a wonderful section in the last book of Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain series which compares our understanding of the world to the back of a tapestry. There are hints of the figures on the other side, and patterns that are not wholly illusory. But the threads and shapes on this side are not dependable guides to discerning what the picture is. Nor do we even know how large the tapestry is.
If you’ve still got a big fat section of the book in your right hand as you read, it causes you to interpret what you are reading differently. As you gradually come to the last few pages, the physical construction of the volume tells you that the story is coming to an end. (This is what is so frustrating about unexpected set-ups for sequels, by the way. Not only the narrative, but the object you are holding in your hand has powerfully signaled to you that resolution is approaching. Quotus interruptus.)
Ellen G. White had a particularly detailed retrospective of world history in which she saw, or thought she saw, trends that pointed to a particular future. The path leading to her own subculture’s extreme anti-Catholicism she saw as the natural, rescuing path that God had put his church on; she intuited the future accordingly.
It’s a fun exercise in an election year to attend to the various versions of history and progress being put forward by the candidates. Beware “the vision thing.” It is often nostalgia for a false past masquerading as a glimpse of the future.
Paths, tapestries, books. I think that’s enough metaphors for now.
This freedom-loving Saxon theory comes in both racial and cultural versions. I tend to a soft cultural version of this myself. I find it extreme to push the origin too far into an unrecorded past, but that something different happened in the British Isles and its colonies seems obvious. These Anglospheric theories usually include reference to Magna Carta, the Mayflower Compact, and the Bloodless Revolution of 1688. The Bloodless Revolution wasn’t bloodless, by the way. Magna Carta wasn’t all that magna, either.
Other theories have included the English admiration for Native American tribal councils, particularly the Pemigewassets; Roman Catholic abstract thinkers reflecting on the rights of man; Protestant settlement finally liberated from all traces of Catholicism; a confluence of French legal thought and East Anglian merchant custom; Frisian influence; the Greek Revival; the preeminence of property rights in English Common Law; the search for cultural universals of governance in diverse colonies – I’m sure I am missing many others.
All these theories were developed retrospectively, imposing a teleological framework that leads to Wonderful Us. We trace back through events and ideas and claim to have found a single path. Such thinking does have advantages. It allows us to see patterns that are there, which gives a certain predictive value to our thoughts about the future. Unfortunately we also see patterns that aren’t there, giving a deceptive predictive value to our thoughts about the future. Paths there may be, but if we are picking out a spot on the horizon in our past and retracing toward it, we come to regard our route through the crisscrossing trails as the real path, the natural path, the inevitable path.
It is almost automatic at that point to look into the future with the idea that this is all going somewhere, and that past trends will continue. Such prediction is risky even with physical or even mechanical events. It is certainly hubristic with political and social events.
I have heard it called assumicide.
Christians sometimes think they’ve got an edge that allows them more right to look ahead. We have been given the last few pages of the book, and easily convince ourselves that we have a pretty shrewd guess what’s going to happen next (wink, wink). The problem is, we don’t know where in the book we are. If we knew that we had started the last chapter, then our extrapolations of current events out to the close of the age would likely be accurate. But we don’t know if we have gotten out of the second chapter of human history yet. Heck, we don’t even know if the number of chapters has even been decided. God might be writing this world interactively with us because it’s more fun for Him and better education for us.
There is a wonderful section in the last book of Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain series which compares our understanding of the world to the back of a tapestry. There are hints of the figures on the other side, and patterns that are not wholly illusory. But the threads and shapes on this side are not dependable guides to discerning what the picture is. Nor do we even know how large the tapestry is.
If you’ve still got a big fat section of the book in your right hand as you read, it causes you to interpret what you are reading differently. As you gradually come to the last few pages, the physical construction of the volume tells you that the story is coming to an end. (This is what is so frustrating about unexpected set-ups for sequels, by the way. Not only the narrative, but the object you are holding in your hand has powerfully signaled to you that resolution is approaching. Quotus interruptus.)
Ellen G. White had a particularly detailed retrospective of world history in which she saw, or thought she saw, trends that pointed to a particular future. The path leading to her own subculture’s extreme anti-Catholicism she saw as the natural, rescuing path that God had put his church on; she intuited the future accordingly.
It’s a fun exercise in an election year to attend to the various versions of history and progress being put forward by the candidates. Beware “the vision thing.” It is often nostalgia for a false past masquerading as a glimpse of the future.
Paths, tapestries, books. I think that’s enough metaphors for now.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Celtics Envy
Almost the trifecta of championships, eh? Eli Manning doesn’t make that escape, David Tyree doesn’t make the greatest catch in Super Bowl history, and New England wins three straight major sports championships.
The fun part is browsing through the comments sections on the national sports sites, reading all the deeply resentful people from other parts of the country, complaining about how classless the Celtics/Red Sox/Patriots are, how classless the fans are, how happy they are when our teams lose – it’s the refs, it’s all fixed, it’s all luck, blah blah…and you know it’s mostly envy.
Not that the accusations are completely without merit, of course. Bellichek has some jerk qualities, and whatever the full story on cameras turns out to be and however much effect or non-effect it has had on the outcome of games, he clearly broke rules he knew about. Would the Patriots have been a bad team without that boost? Doubtful. Would they have won all those championships? Maybe, maybe not.
The Red Sox have some annoying people, just like every team does. Boston fans – New England fans, can be boorish and arrogant, sure. I’m not sure they are more boorish and arrogant than any other team’s fans that win. I remind the reader of the riots in other cities when teams won championships. There is some reason for the rest of the country to hate us. Some of the criticism is justified. But. Boston fans, you know with a certainty that much of the resentment comes from the mere fact that we won and they didn’t. That other stuff is just scrambling for justifications, because no one wants to admit that they hate you just because you’re successful.
New England and especially Massachusetts, are among the most politically liberal areas of the country. A lot of those Boston fans who know in their gut that they are hated more from envy than from anything they have done to deserve it, nonetheless refuse to understand this about the larger world they live in. These are the folks who believe that America is hated because of our foreign policy, because we exploit everyone, because of George Bush, because of our arrogance.
Not really. Those negative things are partly true, of course, and we shouldn’t go to the other extreme and discount all criticism. But the European elites hate us because we have rescued them, protected them, created the consumer goods and medical techniques they love, and it is too painful to admit that. Middle Eastern countries hate us because we are rich. Because they have contributed nothing to the world for about 7 centuries except the oil they happen to be living over, they must find ways to delegitimise our success. It should be theirs. They deserve it. We must have cheated somehow.
So remember that when you go to the polls Sox fans, Pats fans, Celts fans. You know in your gut the real reason that the rest of the country resents you, and now you know why the world resents America, and rejoices in our losses. Don’t fall for the excuses again.
The fun part is browsing through the comments sections on the national sports sites, reading all the deeply resentful people from other parts of the country, complaining about how classless the Celtics/Red Sox/Patriots are, how classless the fans are, how happy they are when our teams lose – it’s the refs, it’s all fixed, it’s all luck, blah blah…and you know it’s mostly envy.
Not that the accusations are completely without merit, of course. Bellichek has some jerk qualities, and whatever the full story on cameras turns out to be and however much effect or non-effect it has had on the outcome of games, he clearly broke rules he knew about. Would the Patriots have been a bad team without that boost? Doubtful. Would they have won all those championships? Maybe, maybe not.
The Red Sox have some annoying people, just like every team does. Boston fans – New England fans, can be boorish and arrogant, sure. I’m not sure they are more boorish and arrogant than any other team’s fans that win. I remind the reader of the riots in other cities when teams won championships. There is some reason for the rest of the country to hate us. Some of the criticism is justified. But. Boston fans, you know with a certainty that much of the resentment comes from the mere fact that we won and they didn’t. That other stuff is just scrambling for justifications, because no one wants to admit that they hate you just because you’re successful.
New England and especially Massachusetts, are among the most politically liberal areas of the country. A lot of those Boston fans who know in their gut that they are hated more from envy than from anything they have done to deserve it, nonetheless refuse to understand this about the larger world they live in. These are the folks who believe that America is hated because of our foreign policy, because we exploit everyone, because of George Bush, because of our arrogance.
Not really. Those negative things are partly true, of course, and we shouldn’t go to the other extreme and discount all criticism. But the European elites hate us because we have rescued them, protected them, created the consumer goods and medical techniques they love, and it is too painful to admit that. Middle Eastern countries hate us because we are rich. Because they have contributed nothing to the world for about 7 centuries except the oil they happen to be living over, they must find ways to delegitimise our success. It should be theirs. They deserve it. We must have cheated somehow.
So remember that when you go to the polls Sox fans, Pats fans, Celts fans. You know in your gut the real reason that the rest of the country resents you, and now you know why the world resents America, and rejoices in our losses. Don’t fall for the excuses again.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Pinheaded, Fuzzy-Minded, Arrogant...
When Carol Shea-Porter, my representative to Congress, emailed me a questionnaire about energy policy I was irritated at its deceptiveness. It fell into the category of "Do you think it would be better to conserve energy or just use less? Should we punish the oil companies or the auto manufacturers harder? Carol Shea-Porter is interested in your opinion!"
I doubt that last statement strongly. She sent back a reply - I don't mind that it was a form-letter, I just mind that it was an unthinking party-line form-letter.
And thus a reply to the reply, including a quote from her letter in bold:
I doubt that last statement strongly. She sent back a reply - I don't mind that it was a form-letter, I just mind that it was an unthinking party-line form-letter.
And thus a reply to the reply, including a quote from her letter in bold:
"...oil supplies diminishing, exploration and development of oil fields off coastal waters and in our protected lands is not a long-term solution."
Sure it is. Why the hell not? Sez who? (And make the subject agree with the verb, willya?)
Can I make that any clearer? If you only allow one type of solution, you only get one type of answer. The desire for conservation-based solutions is purely aesthetic and romantic - it is, in a very real way, imposing private values on the populace far more than any religious group dreams of.
BTW, the email you sent back to me was truncated on both sides because of poor formatting. I had to guess at the complete quote.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Sonic Booms
Listening for the thunder after the lightning flashes tonight, the sound was confused by a jet aircraft going by. It occurred to me that I have not heard a sonic boom for years. We used to hear them regularly when I was a lad. I imagine they have been declared an annoyance and are not allowed over inhabited areas. Or something.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Number 928 in the Blue Hymnal
See, this is why denominational headquarters sometimes makes me nervous. When I was a Lutheran, stuff like this kept creeping in, which is why I found the Evangelical Covenant (A Lutheran offshoot with pietist strains) such a breath of fresh air. The yearly missions awareness material, with its maundering about the minimum wage* and enviro-nonsense, at least isn't required reading in the ECC.
The responsive prayer #928 includes
And further on
The prayer reads more like an accusation by the composers against folks other than themselves than reading like a confession.
I'm all for doing better. I'm all for prayers of confession that acknowledge we aren't doing enough, that there is still injustice, that our giving and humility should be even more radical. But this comes durn close to a violation of the commandment about not taking the Lord's name in vain. This is ministers making personal political observations and rewriting it in the form of a prayer of confession.
* Hey, didn't unemployment just go up? What are the odds, huh?
The responsive prayer #928 includes
"...from a society in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, compassionate God, deliver us.Except that's not true. And later
"...from a society which makes its weakest and most recent members into scapegoats, compassionate God, deliver us.Most recent members... Newborns? Oh, I get it. I don't recall anyone blaming legal immigrants for much of anything. And if they're not legal, then they're not members, really, are they? It's an interesting debate what the responsibility of Christians is to people in need who are in a mild sense, invaders. But scapegoats were innocent victims, originally. The word has changed to include anyone who is punished disproportionately, but how does that apply here? Being denied a benefit - citizenship - is not the same as a punishment. I am trying to remember what scripture it is that St. Paul advocates that others should have the same rights of citizenship that he had. Perhaps he thought such a change would be good, or even deserved. But he didn't mention it.
And further on
"From indifference to the needs of other countries, from the delusion that you love any other nation less than you love us, compassionate God, deliver us.First off, bad usage of delusional. If you're going to show off your ability to use dramatic language in a publication that people are going to be reading for 50 years, you might want to take care to get the terms right. But, to the content: indifference...hmm. 50% of all the international aid, including 40% of the food aid, comes from the US. Next, there may be America lovers who think that God loves us more, but most that I have heard put it differently - that God has blessed us.
The prayer reads more like an accusation by the composers against folks other than themselves than reading like a confession.
I'm all for doing better. I'm all for prayers of confession that acknowledge we aren't doing enough, that there is still injustice, that our giving and humility should be even more radical. But this comes durn close to a violation of the commandment about not taking the Lord's name in vain. This is ministers making personal political observations and rewriting it in the form of a prayer of confession.
* Hey, didn't unemployment just go up? What are the odds, huh?
Advanced Diagnostics
(Ring. Ring)
On-call Doctor: So what's the trouble you're having?
Assistant Village Idiot: I may have broken a small bone in my foot. I was up on a stepstool, working on a ceiling, and I slipped and came down hard on it. Then I was up and down on the stepstool quite a bit after that.
OCD: Is there any pain?
AVI: Only when I put weight on it. It ached a little last evening, but I didn't have a lot of pain until I got up in the middle of the night. I can't put weight on it.
OCD: So, no specific accident, then?
AVI: Not other than the fall, no.
OCD: It could be an episode of gout.
AVI: I'm pretty sure it's not gout. I was up and down on the foot a lot yesterday.
OCD: It could still be gout. You can take Advil for the pain.
AVI: I don't have any pain, except when I put weight on it.
OCD: Well, take Advil for the pain, three times a day with meals.
This is not the beginning of a comedy routine. This is this morning's phone conversation.
I haven't been to med school, but I'm thinking this would be a fairly atypical presentation of gout. I'm hoping reader Giacomo, an orthopedic surgeon, will back me up on this.
So at the walk-in clinic after church, I repeated my delivery of "I may have broken a small bone in my foot, but if I'm lucky it's just a sprain" to five different people there. None of them suggested gout, so I didn't bring it up myself. The X-Rays looked okay, except for some bone chips from a long-previous ankle injury. Probably just a sprain.
Friday, June 13, 2008
I'm Just Sayin'
If sexism was unfairly used against Hillary and racism is unfairly used against Obama, why is it fair to focus on McCain's age?
I want to smack McCain because of his can't-stop-tinkering attitude: yes, he supports the First Amendment but has a couple of ideas he thinks are better; yes, he supports free markets but he thinks if he can just tweak it it will be even better. That's how stuff gets broken, John.
But Democrats who weren't concerned when Bill Clinton refused to release his medical records lost their right to "express concern" over a healthy active guy whose mother is still alive.
I want to smack McCain because of his can't-stop-tinkering attitude: yes, he supports the First Amendment but has a couple of ideas he thinks are better; yes, he supports free markets but he thinks if he can just tweak it it will be even better. That's how stuff gets broken, John.
But Democrats who weren't concerned when Bill Clinton refused to release his medical records lost their right to "express concern" over a healthy active guy whose mother is still alive.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Human Enhancement
This is an area where I have fully ambivalent feelings. Many technical assists to human biology - eyeglasses, for example - were viewed with suspicion when they were first introduced, but are regarded as unremarkable now. Life extension is becoming almost alarming. Jonathan's daughter has a life expectancy over 100, and serious scientists believe that lifespans over two centuries are possible quite soon. Genetic tinkering is already well beyond any general philosophical consensus about what is "good for us," and what is a legitimate intervention. If we get good enough at remaking ourselves that human striving becomes nearly irrelevant, or important only at the margins, are we still humans?
Not only do I not know where to draw the line - I don't know by what method we should draw the line. This writer attempts to set up a framework within Natural Law.
Not only do I not know where to draw the line - I don't know by what method we should draw the line. This writer attempts to set up a framework within Natural Law.
Permitted, Not Encouraged?
It is an article of faith for both the religious right and religious left that some political situations demand action, and to hang back is to leave Christian duty unfulfilled. Exactly what those circumstances are is contended, and there is wide variety of approach and solution, but the necessity for Christians to act in the larger world to influence the larger human systems is rather taken for granted. It is a very western, especially American, approach.
Evangelicals point to William Wilberforce devoting his life to the elimination of slavery in the British Empire, or Quaker Abolitionists. Liberation theologies would focus rather on confronting the powerful qua powerful on behalf of the poor qua poor, assuming injustice on the basis of their simple existence. The religious left would insist that righteousness be demanded of government in issues of war and care for the poor; the right on issues of biological interference.
I imagine I don't need to describe this exhaustively. Others have outlined these things far better than I could. I recommend First Things if you like to read religious/political discussions among people who are more than talented amateurs. (Most blogs that touch on Christian issues are more exhortatory than thoughtful, providing evidence for familiar POV's. This applies to the essays by clergy as well.) I tend to hang out among the talented amateurs myself.
I also doubt I need to spend much time on the stories of Amos, Jeremiah, and Moses to illustrate Biblical examples of some political involvement, or the NT verses outlining what issues Christians should be concerned about. You know them or could find them pretty quickly. God told the Israelites to organize their society according to just principles, and repeatedly tells individuals to act with justice and mercy toward others.
But is the call to confront larger injustices placed upon all Christians? When there is injustice in one's society, is the Christian obligated to become involved? Assuming the Christian picks the right side of the argument, is involvement always laudable? In the time of Amos, were all who lived in the society obliged to pressure the rulers to make changes, or is that just a retroactive imposition of a value from our western tradition of self-rule?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer long held back from political involvement even in extreme circumstances. I don't doubt that he was permitted to act in Christian conscience, or that Wilberforce, or John-Paul II, or civil-rights workers were permitted their expressions in this sphere. But the idea that if you do not become active you are "participating in the system (leftspeak)," or "tolerating evil (rightspeak)" - perhaps that idea is nonsense. Perhaps such involvements are generally discouraged for most Christians, and only allowed under specific direction of the Holy Spirit.
I ask this because I see how quickly the political goals seem to take over the religious ones in public action, and I figure God knows that tendency in us.
Evangelicals point to William Wilberforce devoting his life to the elimination of slavery in the British Empire, or Quaker Abolitionists. Liberation theologies would focus rather on confronting the powerful qua powerful on behalf of the poor qua poor, assuming injustice on the basis of their simple existence. The religious left would insist that righteousness be demanded of government in issues of war and care for the poor; the right on issues of biological interference.
I imagine I don't need to describe this exhaustively. Others have outlined these things far better than I could. I recommend First Things if you like to read religious/political discussions among people who are more than talented amateurs. (Most blogs that touch on Christian issues are more exhortatory than thoughtful, providing evidence for familiar POV's. This applies to the essays by clergy as well.) I tend to hang out among the talented amateurs myself.
I also doubt I need to spend much time on the stories of Amos, Jeremiah, and Moses to illustrate Biblical examples of some political involvement, or the NT verses outlining what issues Christians should be concerned about. You know them or could find them pretty quickly. God told the Israelites to organize their society according to just principles, and repeatedly tells individuals to act with justice and mercy toward others.
But is the call to confront larger injustices placed upon all Christians? When there is injustice in one's society, is the Christian obligated to become involved? Assuming the Christian picks the right side of the argument, is involvement always laudable? In the time of Amos, were all who lived in the society obliged to pressure the rulers to make changes, or is that just a retroactive imposition of a value from our western tradition of self-rule?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer long held back from political involvement even in extreme circumstances. I don't doubt that he was permitted to act in Christian conscience, or that Wilberforce, or John-Paul II, or civil-rights workers were permitted their expressions in this sphere. But the idea that if you do not become active you are "participating in the system (leftspeak)," or "tolerating evil (rightspeak)" - perhaps that idea is nonsense. Perhaps such involvements are generally discouraged for most Christians, and only allowed under specific direction of the Holy Spirit.
I ask this because I see how quickly the political goals seem to take over the religious ones in public action, and I figure God knows that tendency in us.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Non-Ideological Voting
In the summer of 1997 I asked the gatekeeper at Durham Castle what he thought of the elections. Typical example of a tourist attempting to discover the common man’s thinking from a sample of one (possibly) common man. Said gatekeeper, grinning, thought that it was time Labour had a turn. This struck me as an impenetrably obtuse way to look at self-government. Since that time, however, I have detected what he said out loud not far beneath the surface in the comments of Americans about their elections.
Those motivated by ideology leap to unwarranted conclusions about people who operate non-ideologically. I do, at any rate. A female attorney told me she supported Hillary because men had had plenty of chances to fix things and it would be good for a woman to have a try. I assumed First Wave Feminist Lite. I mean, 54 years old. Attorney. Female. Didn’t even consider Republicans in the running for her vote. Hillary supporter, with a specific reference to her sex. I was quite wrong. In later conversations, I picked up that she is not a general supporter of affirmative action. She is mildly pro-life, and very against partial-birth abortion. She mostly supports the war in Iraq. She is a free-marketer suspicious of unions. She is a Massachusetts Irish Democrat by heritage, and reports sheepishly that she votes Democrat mostly for that reason, even when she disagrees with them.
To one such as I, this is a bit baffling.
I don’t make an artificially sharp distinction here. I certainly understand people taking character, managerial skills, and judgment into account. There are candidates I greatly agree with but would not vote for, plus a few I often disagree with but could see voting for in many circumstances. But it has never crossed my mind to vote for someone because it is their turn, or their party’s or their group’s turn. It even seems rather a step down from voting the bums out in general dissatisfaction.
If one takes the view that elected officials don’t affect much and are mostly symbolic representatives, then taking turns makes eminent sense. More sense than voting ideology, actually.
Those motivated by ideology leap to unwarranted conclusions about people who operate non-ideologically. I do, at any rate. A female attorney told me she supported Hillary because men had had plenty of chances to fix things and it would be good for a woman to have a try. I assumed First Wave Feminist Lite. I mean, 54 years old. Attorney. Female. Didn’t even consider Republicans in the running for her vote. Hillary supporter, with a specific reference to her sex. I was quite wrong. In later conversations, I picked up that she is not a general supporter of affirmative action. She is mildly pro-life, and very against partial-birth abortion. She mostly supports the war in Iraq. She is a free-marketer suspicious of unions. She is a Massachusetts Irish Democrat by heritage, and reports sheepishly that she votes Democrat mostly for that reason, even when she disagrees with them.
To one such as I, this is a bit baffling.
I don’t make an artificially sharp distinction here. I certainly understand people taking character, managerial skills, and judgment into account. There are candidates I greatly agree with but would not vote for, plus a few I often disagree with but could see voting for in many circumstances. But it has never crossed my mind to vote for someone because it is their turn, or their party’s or their group’s turn. It even seems rather a step down from voting the bums out in general dissatisfaction.
If one takes the view that elected officials don’t affect much and are mostly symbolic representatives, then taking turns makes eminent sense. More sense than voting ideology, actually.
Saturday, June 07, 2008
Illness
I am developing an illness - I am not sure what it is. The treatment, however, involves sitting on my porch with an umbrella drink - I am quite certain of that.
Explanations from the general public are appreciated.
Explanations from the general public are appreciated.
Playoffs
The MLB season is 40% over. If the playoffs were today, it would be Red Sox, White Sox, Angels, Rays; Phillies, Cubs, Arizona Cards. Despite all the stirring tales of late season drives and collapses, Runs Scored vs, Runs Against always provides a good second look at a team, to see if it is playing over its head or underperforming. If RS/RA looks similar to the standings, take it for granted that the standings are about what they should be. Of those eight teams, 6-8 will be in the playoffs.
Election II
Wyman's comment under Election I sparked some thought. Conservatives who hope that the election of a liberal will prompt a backlash in 2012 and get them a more conservative president then are overlooking a point that is right in front of us. The unpopularity of Bush is due at least in part to his conservatism. We get focused on how that is an unfair PR job done against conservatives - that the country actually is more conservative than the media but the long anti-Bush tone has had its effect, that conservative views are misrepresented, that adherence to conservative spending principles and small government would have brought a different result, yadda-blah-yadda - but that is beside the point at present. However much we think that people really are conservative if they'd just think about it, or how much better they'd like it if they tried it, the simple fact remains that even Republicans went into some rebellion against conservatism in this round of primaries, nominating a partial conservative instead of a full blood Calvin Coolidge.
Coolidge Tangent: Silent Cal, BTW, was a good conservative but an unpleasant human being. His legendary laconic wit may have wisdom in it, but we wouldn't like him very much ourselves were he running now. His view of the depression he saw coming was that we shouldn't do much of anything about it, just let it ride its course. He saw, I think correctly, that intervention was likely to prolong it, however popular the intervention might be. The depression did go on much longer than it should have because of Roosevelt, so in a pure sense Coolidge was right. But the economy never exists in a pure situation away from politics, and somebody might have just shot him or sent the country in to revolution. We now know that fascism and communism are unsustainable ways of running the economy and the free market works (at least, some of us know that). But at the time that was not obvious. The totalitarian economies billed themselves as more efficient and that made sense to an enormous number of people. The American experiment looked to be coming to an end, to be superseded by a more modern, efficient method. Calvin Coolidge's grouchy refusal to do damaging but popular stuff would have ticked most of us off as well.
Back to 2008: Wyman is right. If we wanted someone more conservative, we should have nominated one. But even we didn't seem to want one that much. The unpopularity of Bush, partly earned, mostly unfair, has sent everyone from the center to the right in different directions looking for a solution, none of which quite matches the others. Before conservatives can attempt to hammer out a national consensus, we need to hammer out one of our own.
Coolidge Tangent: Silent Cal, BTW, was a good conservative but an unpleasant human being. His legendary laconic wit may have wisdom in it, but we wouldn't like him very much ourselves were he running now. His view of the depression he saw coming was that we shouldn't do much of anything about it, just let it ride its course. He saw, I think correctly, that intervention was likely to prolong it, however popular the intervention might be. The depression did go on much longer than it should have because of Roosevelt, so in a pure sense Coolidge was right. But the economy never exists in a pure situation away from politics, and somebody might have just shot him or sent the country in to revolution. We now know that fascism and communism are unsustainable ways of running the economy and the free market works (at least, some of us know that). But at the time that was not obvious. The totalitarian economies billed themselves as more efficient and that made sense to an enormous number of people. The American experiment looked to be coming to an end, to be superseded by a more modern, efficient method. Calvin Coolidge's grouchy refusal to do damaging but popular stuff would have ticked most of us off as well.
Back to 2008: Wyman is right. If we wanted someone more conservative, we should have nominated one. But even we didn't seem to want one that much. The unpopularity of Bush, partly earned, mostly unfair, has sent everyone from the center to the right in different directions looking for a solution, none of which quite matches the others. Before conservatives can attempt to hammer out a national consensus, we need to hammer out one of our own.
Thursday, June 05, 2008
Celtics-Lakers
Ben has known more about basketball than I do since he was eleven, and in those early, obsessive years he regularly predicted the final standings of a season more accurately than the guys at Sports Illustrated or The Sporting News. One year (1996?) he was positively eerie.
So Ben's take on the NBA finals is worth more than anything I could offer, even though he can no longer name the players on fifteen-day contracts for the Utah Jazz.
So Ben's take on the NBA finals is worth more than anything I could offer, even though he can no longer name the players on fifteen-day contracts for the Utah Jazz.
Election
I am notably poor at the horse-race aspect of elections, which is what many in the traditional news sources focus on. Polls, repositioning, effects on varying demographic groups – these interest me mildly, mostly because I have run across enough of it while looking for other information, and have some familiarity with the subject. But I am more interested in the ideas and characters of the candidates than in how well they are selling themselves.
I doubt that anything here is entirely original, but it is commentary you don’t usually see.
2008 = 1976
A McCain-Obama election is 1976 redux. This is Ford vs. Carter. Gerald Ford won the nomination even though he was not an especially conservative Republican. Jimmy Carter ran as a populist Democrat, but turned out in the end to be very liberal. So of the I-won’t-vote-McCain Republicans, I ask If you were voting in 1976, would you sit that one out, now, in retrospect? The counterargument that we got Reagan in 1980 because of it is a fair point. But I think there is over-reliance on the cause-effect angle there. If Ford had won, who would have run in each party in the 1980’s, and who would be the nominees? Would Carter have run again? Would Kennedy be the favorite? Mondale? Would Republican voters feel less need for contrast and be more likely to nominate the elder Bush? Would John Anderson have gone 3rd-party? We have no way of answering these questions – all our speculations are unreliable. We do know we got James Earl Carter as president and that was a terrible thing, then and later.
Racial Prejudice
We have learned some interesting things about prejudice, and if you follow the logic out, African-Americans may have inadvertently given evidence how disruptive even mild prejudice is. Much has been made of the 90% support Obama has garnered among black voters. The Obama and Clinton positions are not that different, so such overwhelming favoritism has led to accusations of racism – and to a lesser extent, sexism on the part of female voters supporting Hillary. The idea seems to be if they are essentially the same, the votes should break out about even in a color-blind, sex-blind electorate.
But this is the type of mild prejudice it’s hard to fault. If they’re the same anyway, why not give the nod to a brother or sister? Isn’t that how most of us would act in everyday situations? Sure, it’s a little unfair, but it’s not like we are supporting a significantly worse person just because they are a group-member. That latter is the prejudice we should be really worried about, right?
But look how quickly it has all gone bad, and turned into a harsher prejudice. When the dust has settled, a thoughtful African-American can bring this up as evidence that even mild prejudice gets away from you very quickly. White Americans tend to think “sure there’s prejudice, but not very much. You can work around it.” That is quite true, and black Americans prove the truth of it all the time. Yet now we see that working around it, getting past it in your own head is harder than it looks, for both giver and receiver. It would be arrogant, not to say silly, to think that this hardening of mild preference into angry prejudice is something that only happens to black people – or feminists.
Okay, I would prefer to think that, and find that my own groups are less prejudiced, or not prejudiced at all. But counter-evidence could be put up for any evidence I gave for the premise. The long-standing point of minority groups, that even a little prejudice can have large effects, now has more evidence. And it is an important Christian idea as well, that even a little sin can wreak great destruction. White people watch Jeremiah Wright and think “This accusation is just all out of proportion. This is nuts. I may not be perfect, or even that good a soul, but I know I don’t deserve this.” Again, that’s true. The anger of Wright and Moss certainly suggest personal issues – and the logs in their own eyes - are clouding their judgment. Yet if small sins can have larger effect than we thought, perhaps the whole matter becomes a little clearer.
In our own hearts we measure how little bad intent we had. In others, we measure the sin’s effect.
The Elusive Archetype
Hillary's supporters want her to be seen as a feminist icon, but it is feminists themselves who have been loudest in pointing out that Senator Clinton is a poor example of the breed. Obama has enormous African-American support, but his story is very unlike most AA stories, and he is rather a convert to blackness, ridiculous as that sounds. Only recently (2004) has he found that this post-racial thing is popular with a certain segment of the Democratic party. Early on, the worry was whether he was black enough. Now it is clear that his last twenty five years have been suffused with racial identity politics, and the post-racial part is mostly his first twenty years and the last two. Politicians often try to appear in different guises - I suppose Obama is no worse than many others in this.
John McCain seems at first look to be an archetypal conservative: older, somewhat irritable, reliably pro-life, his own man, and not only a veteran but a POW, for pete's sake. Perhaps his defections from conservatism are deplored all the more because it irritates conservatives that he should look so promising and be so often far afield.
So this year we have an ill-fitting feminist, an ill-fitting conservative, and a post-racial black guy who is neither all that black nor post-racial. For an electorate that wants, well, primary colors of red, yellow, blue in its primaries, we get exotic near-primaries instead: chartreuse, mango, and teal.
I doubt that anything here is entirely original, but it is commentary you don’t usually see.
2008 = 1976
A McCain-Obama election is 1976 redux. This is Ford vs. Carter. Gerald Ford won the nomination even though he was not an especially conservative Republican. Jimmy Carter ran as a populist Democrat, but turned out in the end to be very liberal. So of the I-won’t-vote-McCain Republicans, I ask If you were voting in 1976, would you sit that one out, now, in retrospect? The counterargument that we got Reagan in 1980 because of it is a fair point. But I think there is over-reliance on the cause-effect angle there. If Ford had won, who would have run in each party in the 1980’s, and who would be the nominees? Would Carter have run again? Would Kennedy be the favorite? Mondale? Would Republican voters feel less need for contrast and be more likely to nominate the elder Bush? Would John Anderson have gone 3rd-party? We have no way of answering these questions – all our speculations are unreliable. We do know we got James Earl Carter as president and that was a terrible thing, then and later.
Racial Prejudice
We have learned some interesting things about prejudice, and if you follow the logic out, African-Americans may have inadvertently given evidence how disruptive even mild prejudice is. Much has been made of the 90% support Obama has garnered among black voters. The Obama and Clinton positions are not that different, so such overwhelming favoritism has led to accusations of racism – and to a lesser extent, sexism on the part of female voters supporting Hillary. The idea seems to be if they are essentially the same, the votes should break out about even in a color-blind, sex-blind electorate.
But this is the type of mild prejudice it’s hard to fault. If they’re the same anyway, why not give the nod to a brother or sister? Isn’t that how most of us would act in everyday situations? Sure, it’s a little unfair, but it’s not like we are supporting a significantly worse person just because they are a group-member. That latter is the prejudice we should be really worried about, right?
But look how quickly it has all gone bad, and turned into a harsher prejudice. When the dust has settled, a thoughtful African-American can bring this up as evidence that even mild prejudice gets away from you very quickly. White Americans tend to think “sure there’s prejudice, but not very much. You can work around it.” That is quite true, and black Americans prove the truth of it all the time. Yet now we see that working around it, getting past it in your own head is harder than it looks, for both giver and receiver. It would be arrogant, not to say silly, to think that this hardening of mild preference into angry prejudice is something that only happens to black people – or feminists.
Okay, I would prefer to think that, and find that my own groups are less prejudiced, or not prejudiced at all. But counter-evidence could be put up for any evidence I gave for the premise. The long-standing point of minority groups, that even a little prejudice can have large effects, now has more evidence. And it is an important Christian idea as well, that even a little sin can wreak great destruction. White people watch Jeremiah Wright and think “This accusation is just all out of proportion. This is nuts. I may not be perfect, or even that good a soul, but I know I don’t deserve this.” Again, that’s true. The anger of Wright and Moss certainly suggest personal issues – and the logs in their own eyes - are clouding their judgment. Yet if small sins can have larger effect than we thought, perhaps the whole matter becomes a little clearer.
In our own hearts we measure how little bad intent we had. In others, we measure the sin’s effect.
The Elusive Archetype
Hillary's supporters want her to be seen as a feminist icon, but it is feminists themselves who have been loudest in pointing out that Senator Clinton is a poor example of the breed. Obama has enormous African-American support, but his story is very unlike most AA stories, and he is rather a convert to blackness, ridiculous as that sounds. Only recently (2004) has he found that this post-racial thing is popular with a certain segment of the Democratic party. Early on, the worry was whether he was black enough. Now it is clear that his last twenty five years have been suffused with racial identity politics, and the post-racial part is mostly his first twenty years and the last two. Politicians often try to appear in different guises - I suppose Obama is no worse than many others in this.
John McCain seems at first look to be an archetypal conservative: older, somewhat irritable, reliably pro-life, his own man, and not only a veteran but a POW, for pete's sake. Perhaps his defections from conservatism are deplored all the more because it irritates conservatives that he should look so promising and be so often far afield.
So this year we have an ill-fitting feminist, an ill-fitting conservative, and a post-racial black guy who is neither all that black nor post-racial. For an electorate that wants, well, primary colors of red, yellow, blue in its primaries, we get exotic near-primaries instead: chartreuse, mango, and teal.
Shall Vs. Will
The workshop I recently taught has had aftereffects similar to what I predicted, though not as bad. The group within the hospital most likely to object has indeed objected often. I have found the discussions unnecessarily contentious over small points, but then, I would. I have tried to keep reminding myself that it might be the AVI who is being petty, and not be defensive. The conflict yesterday morning arose after all the substance of the agreement had been completed and we were hurrying along to discharge the patient, awaiting only the signatures of all parties. The head of the contentious department, after leaving the finished document in his box unsigned until the next day, was personally visited and the paperwork put directly in his hands (by a smiling, hates-confrontation, gentle woman who needed the signature). He sat looking a long while at his computer without saying a word, then took it and read it all word-for-word, all the conditions directing that "Eleanor will take all medications as prescribed...Eleanor will not harm or threaten to harm...", and crossed out each will, writing in shall and stating he would not sign until it was "correct."
It was a rude gesture to begin with, and unnecessarily pedantic even if it had been correct. Worse, it was not correct. Pedants should take care to be correct, as other pedants lurk. So I dashed off a quick explanation of the interchangeability of shall and will in this instance.
I thought my audience here is more likely to be interested in the current state of the shall v. will argument in English usage than most other folks would be.
It was a rude gesture to begin with, and unnecessarily pedantic even if it had been correct. Worse, it was not correct. Pedants should take care to be correct, as other pedants lurk. So I dashed off a quick explanation of the interchangeability of shall and will in this instance.
I thought my audience here is more likely to be interested in the current state of the shall v. will argument in English usage than most other folks would be.
The short answer is that there is no difference. If THS prefers “shall” for reasons of its own, there’s nothing wrong with it. However, I wonder at the efficiency of changing wording because of such idiosyncratic preference.I know you are all grateful to know this.
The longer answer: There is a century’s worth of controversy about shall vs. will, and authorities can be found to support several points of view. All of them are quite sure they are correct, which is the usual state of affairs in questions of usage.
In everyday usage, the difference is one of connotation only. Shall seems more emphatic, and people use it to mark an emphasis, to make a command stronger. This may also be used in a mildly ironic way: Shall seems overformal and haughty to some, and its use conveys condescension or pedantry, usually in self-mockery. I use it in irony all the time. Younger people do not regard shall as stronger, however. The word will seems more emphatic to many of them – not my children, of course, but that’s the way the language is changing. I think it comes from less exposure to the King James Bible, even for religious children, which renders Early Modern English, such as Shakespeare, less understandable to them. The shall command is no longer in our bones.
There was an older standard of correct usage which dictated that shall be used for first-person futurity, reserving will for the second and third person. In the reverse, will was used for first-person obligation, shall for second and third person. The problem with this is that the south of England had the reverse rule than America, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, and Australia, but such was the prestige of Oxford and Cambridge that many speakers of English abroad imitated their usage. Your Strunk & White will still insist on this, but both the NYTimes and Chicago Manual of Style do not.
A residual shall/will distinction persists in law and regulatory writing, but several problems arise here as well. American and British legal use differ slightly, and shall is now officially discouraged in legal writing, except in America. Oh, and discouraged or not, there are many Canadians, Brits, etc. who refuse to change because they’re right, dammit, and they aren’t going to drop their standards for anyone. American lawyers are more likely to preserve the distinction that shall is used for obligation, not mere futurity, and is the stronger and preferred term. This is called the American Rule (its counterpart is the ABC Rule, standing for Australian-British-Canadian). Even in America this is becoming obsolete, however. In rental contracts, the use of “the tenant will…” or “the landlord will…” are regarded as unambiguous obligation.
In regulatory writing, particularly in contracts involving scientific or technical requirements, the distinction is preserved most strongly. Many technical writers and translators insist on the use of shall to indicate the strongest possible obligation, exceeding not only will, but even must.
Further note: etymologically, shall is related to “should” and will is related to “would.” They were used as modal verbs to show future tense in an English language that doesn’t really have a decent future tense. The distinction is remote enough that it should be disregarded in discerning current meaning.
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
The Adam Group
When Jonathan was quite young, perhaps about five, he complained in the back seat of the car one day, apropos of nothing "Oh, if only Adam hadn't eaten that apple!"
I always shoot over kids' heads on stuff like this, and I explained - probably at length - that any of us would have eventually done the same, and there is nothing especially bad about Adam. He and Eve might have gone years before the sinned, coming close but avoiding many times; or, they might have sinned first chance out of the box. Either way, that's what all of us are like, and you or I wouldn't have done any better.
This is the great weakness of literal interpretations of Genesis: emotional distance from all the stories, but especially the story of Adam. These are not stories about our ancestors, they are stories about us. Literalism allows us to hide from that.
I have heard teachers make much of how Eve committed this type of sin and Adam committed that type of sin, drawing general conclusions about women and men from that. Any of those interpretations might be so, but again, they allow us a kind of distance from them that seems evasive. Eve's sin is mine, and I need to see myself in that part of the story. I allowed myself to be persuaded. I ate the apple. I convinced someone else to eat the apple. If I had been the human assigned to Eden, we would be in exactly the same mess today. Or worse. For as in David all die. Even so in Christ shall all be made alive.
I always shoot over kids' heads on stuff like this, and I explained - probably at length - that any of us would have eventually done the same, and there is nothing especially bad about Adam. He and Eve might have gone years before the sinned, coming close but avoiding many times; or, they might have sinned first chance out of the box. Either way, that's what all of us are like, and you or I wouldn't have done any better.
This is the great weakness of literal interpretations of Genesis: emotional distance from all the stories, but especially the story of Adam. These are not stories about our ancestors, they are stories about us. Literalism allows us to hide from that.
I have heard teachers make much of how Eve committed this type of sin and Adam committed that type of sin, drawing general conclusions about women and men from that. Any of those interpretations might be so, but again, they allow us a kind of distance from them that seems evasive. Eve's sin is mine, and I need to see myself in that part of the story. I allowed myself to be persuaded. I ate the apple. I convinced someone else to eat the apple. If I had been the human assigned to Eden, we would be in exactly the same mess today. Or worse. For as in David all die. Even so in Christ shall all be made alive.
Monday, June 02, 2008
Anti-Business Rock n Roll
You might notice all of these folks did pretty well in business. The attitude is a pose, to show what sensitive and superior people they are, by stereotyping those awful Other Sorts of People. And we bought it.
Jefferson Airplane's "Lather"
Ray Steven's "Mr. Businessman"
Pink Floyd's "Have a Cigar"
Neil Young's "This Note's For You"
Jefferson Airplane's "Lather"
Ray Steven's "Mr. Businessman"
Pink Floyd's "Have a Cigar"
Neil Young's "This Note's For You"
Sunday, June 01, 2008
Double Back
The post on Public Death as Art drew more comments (19) than any previous post. And some of them were quite good. So you may want to check that again. Thanks Jerub-baal.
The Copenhagen Consensus
Do you really want to help the poor and the developing nations of the world, or do you just want to do those things that feel good?
I have frequent disagreements with Reason magazine, but Ron Bailey is acting more as a reporter than an editorialist here, reporting on the just released results of the 2008 Copenhagen Consensus.
I have frequent disagreements with Reason magazine, but Ron Bailey is acting more as a reporter than an editorialist here, reporting on the just released results of the 2008 Copenhagen Consensus.
Discouraging
My son's church is going to be doing a series on going green. That is discouraging enough in itself, but more so for him, as the church is his employer, and part of his job will be to help get the point of this series across. He has asked what he might say to the pastor about his objections.
Where to begin? If one whispers a word against the green god of this age, one is accused of being in favor of polluting wastefulness. It is considered so obvious that there are enormous environmental problems that even faintheartedness in solving them is regarded as a sin. Nutcase extremists are regarded as a little over-the-top but well-intentioned, while mild skeptics are regarded as little better than Holocaust deniers.
There are decent Christian thinkers on the environment out there, trying to construct a coherent theology, but no one seems to be reading them. I would have some disagreements with those also, as I don't think that stewardship is anything near the highest of Christian virtues, but I can at least see their points in a Christian context. Mainstream denominations seem to like the sharing and Kumbayah aspects of environmentalism. Evangelicals like the self-sufficient/homeschool/gardening/ separate-from-the-world part. Does anyone like recycling for itself, or only for the supposed side benefits it creates?
Most Christian environmentalism is more muddled than heretical, more unfocused than unholy. Yet there are sins of intellect, and lazy, imprecise thinking eventually does more damage than lazy, imprecise gardening, construction, or musicianship. Environmentalism has become the 21st C version of the errors of the 19th C missionaries, insisting that Pacific Islanders wear pants and sit in wooden pews.
Well, that's a lot of complaining. Let's see if I can clearly explain why this particular cause is not part of Christ's.
Whenever an idea rests loosely on many cultural ideas, it becomes difficult to argue against. If you go with focus on one facet, those listening tend to automatically think "well, there's those other things, though." By the time you have moved through the lot of them, there is still a sense that whatever you are not disproving right this minute is still intact.
Christian environmentalists believe that many green interventions are good for society in the long run, or even the nebulous planet itself. As it is part of wisdom to take the long view, it is considered responsible to take the future into consideration. This is usually contrasted with those others who are only interested in short term gain or enjoyment.
Next, it is considered part of stewardship to use any resource wisely. Again, this is not so much thought through as contrasted to those wasteful others who we don't want to be like.
Third, living green and recyclingly is thought to be a spiritual discipline against materialism. You don't want to be one of those selfish people who depends on material goods for your happiness, do you? You want to be one of those spiritual people who live simply.
Coming around the loop back to the first reason again, this living simply is supposed to help poor people somehow, and be good for everyone if you do it.
So if you ask a Methodist pastor who wants to do a series on the environment what the point of it is, you will get shifting answers. God wants us to be responsible stewards of all things he gives us. Well, yeah, but why is this more important than being stewards of certain ideas that actually improve the material condition of the poor - like encouraging innovation, or free markets, or genetic engineering, or medical research? Or being stewards of historical Christianity, instead of jumping from the NT to 1969? Why not stewards of spiritual disciplines, or stewards of the nice things people have said to you? Why not aquifers, or ocean fish, or open highways? What's so special about wilderness and cooler weather?
Well we know the answer: wilderness and cooler weather are very hip now.
We're running out of things, and the church should be a good example. Are we indeed running out of things? Would we be running out of oil if we weren't forbidding drilling in ANWR and the Gulf of Mexico, if we were pursuing oil shale and oil sands? The idea that we are running out of things is more an impression, a worldview, than it is a fact. People feel like it's all going down the tubes somehow, and the church should rescue the people from themselves. Because we take the long view - see above.
Living more simply and thoughtfully can help us focus on the things of God more. Really? Got evidence? I mean, other than looking wistfully over the lake at church camp? Surely you don't think that a life pursuing mere gain and expensive pleasures is godly? Are those our only two choices? We're either looking over the lake quietly with a Bible in our laps or we're screwing up someone's prayer time with our jet-ski? I see no personal evidence that people garden organically have better Christian characters than those who drive chemical fertilizer trucks. There's certainly no data suggesting that people who recycle have better prayer lives than those who don't. Where does this idea of greater spirituality come from? Hint: the idea that God made nature, but we screwed it up with chainsaws and hunting rifles, doesn't hold up real well when you try and define what you mean by nature and intervention. Unless you want to go back 12,000 years and have no crops, no herds, no shelter, just hunter-gatherers.
Are they advocating a particular lifestyle based on fanciful ideas of what village life, or pastoralism, or tribal life was like? Where in the gospels do you find that?
But we use so much in this country, and it's a sin for us to hoard and just protect our own when we should be more generous. So let's feed people. Let's do the things that actually result in hungry people having food, rather than things that make us feel better. Genetic engineering. Europe and North America dropping their trade barriers to poor countries. Getting rid of kleptocracies.
Oil profits, Halliburton, Iraq, health care, and people-hate-America-so-it's-a-bad-witness! Yeah, the post-Christian European nations, the few remaining communist nations, and the Islamic nations don't like us much, especially if you only talk to their journalists and diplomats. The Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, and even animist peoples seem to like us much better. What does that tell you?
God calls us to be good stewards... An irrelevant truth. No one, not even evil multinational corporations like Walmart and Monsanto, is advocating poisoning the wells.
Ben, I think my advice is that it's hopeless. The best I can think of is to ask questions "What exactly do we hope to accomplish? What is the spiritual outcome we desire? Are we hoping that the newspapers, denominational magazines, and local buzz will say nice things about us as good advertising, or do we hope that there is a direct spiritual benefit to this?" Then let it go and hope that this blows over and doesn't come up every year. Maybe you can get them to read about the Copenhagen Consensus if they want to focus on helping the world.
You might also come up with an angle that is compatible with both your ideas and the staff's ideas and put good work and energy into that.
Where to begin? If one whispers a word against the green god of this age, one is accused of being in favor of polluting wastefulness. It is considered so obvious that there are enormous environmental problems that even faintheartedness in solving them is regarded as a sin. Nutcase extremists are regarded as a little over-the-top but well-intentioned, while mild skeptics are regarded as little better than Holocaust deniers.
There are decent Christian thinkers on the environment out there, trying to construct a coherent theology, but no one seems to be reading them. I would have some disagreements with those also, as I don't think that stewardship is anything near the highest of Christian virtues, but I can at least see their points in a Christian context. Mainstream denominations seem to like the sharing and Kumbayah aspects of environmentalism. Evangelicals like the self-sufficient/homeschool/gardening/ separate-from-the-world part. Does anyone like recycling for itself, or only for the supposed side benefits it creates?
Most Christian environmentalism is more muddled than heretical, more unfocused than unholy. Yet there are sins of intellect, and lazy, imprecise thinking eventually does more damage than lazy, imprecise gardening, construction, or musicianship. Environmentalism has become the 21st C version of the errors of the 19th C missionaries, insisting that Pacific Islanders wear pants and sit in wooden pews.
Well, that's a lot of complaining. Let's see if I can clearly explain why this particular cause is not part of Christ's.
Whenever an idea rests loosely on many cultural ideas, it becomes difficult to argue against. If you go with focus on one facet, those listening tend to automatically think "well, there's those other things, though." By the time you have moved through the lot of them, there is still a sense that whatever you are not disproving right this minute is still intact.
Christian environmentalists believe that many green interventions are good for society in the long run, or even the nebulous planet itself. As it is part of wisdom to take the long view, it is considered responsible to take the future into consideration. This is usually contrasted with those others who are only interested in short term gain or enjoyment.
Next, it is considered part of stewardship to use any resource wisely. Again, this is not so much thought through as contrasted to those wasteful others who we don't want to be like.
Third, living green and recyclingly is thought to be a spiritual discipline against materialism. You don't want to be one of those selfish people who depends on material goods for your happiness, do you? You want to be one of those spiritual people who live simply.
Coming around the loop back to the first reason again, this living simply is supposed to help poor people somehow, and be good for everyone if you do it.
So if you ask a Methodist pastor who wants to do a series on the environment what the point of it is, you will get shifting answers. God wants us to be responsible stewards of all things he gives us. Well, yeah, but why is this more important than being stewards of certain ideas that actually improve the material condition of the poor - like encouraging innovation, or free markets, or genetic engineering, or medical research? Or being stewards of historical Christianity, instead of jumping from the NT to 1969? Why not stewards of spiritual disciplines, or stewards of the nice things people have said to you? Why not aquifers, or ocean fish, or open highways? What's so special about wilderness and cooler weather?
Well we know the answer: wilderness and cooler weather are very hip now.
We're running out of things, and the church should be a good example. Are we indeed running out of things? Would we be running out of oil if we weren't forbidding drilling in ANWR and the Gulf of Mexico, if we were pursuing oil shale and oil sands? The idea that we are running out of things is more an impression, a worldview, than it is a fact. People feel like it's all going down the tubes somehow, and the church should rescue the people from themselves. Because we take the long view - see above.
Living more simply and thoughtfully can help us focus on the things of God more. Really? Got evidence? I mean, other than looking wistfully over the lake at church camp? Surely you don't think that a life pursuing mere gain and expensive pleasures is godly? Are those our only two choices? We're either looking over the lake quietly with a Bible in our laps or we're screwing up someone's prayer time with our jet-ski? I see no personal evidence that people garden organically have better Christian characters than those who drive chemical fertilizer trucks. There's certainly no data suggesting that people who recycle have better prayer lives than those who don't. Where does this idea of greater spirituality come from? Hint: the idea that God made nature, but we screwed it up with chainsaws and hunting rifles, doesn't hold up real well when you try and define what you mean by nature and intervention. Unless you want to go back 12,000 years and have no crops, no herds, no shelter, just hunter-gatherers.
Are they advocating a particular lifestyle based on fanciful ideas of what village life, or pastoralism, or tribal life was like? Where in the gospels do you find that?
But we use so much in this country, and it's a sin for us to hoard and just protect our own when we should be more generous. So let's feed people. Let's do the things that actually result in hungry people having food, rather than things that make us feel better. Genetic engineering. Europe and North America dropping their trade barriers to poor countries. Getting rid of kleptocracies.
Oil profits, Halliburton, Iraq, health care, and people-hate-America-so-it's-a-bad-witness! Yeah, the post-Christian European nations, the few remaining communist nations, and the Islamic nations don't like us much, especially if you only talk to their journalists and diplomats. The Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, and even animist peoples seem to like us much better. What does that tell you?
God calls us to be good stewards... An irrelevant truth. No one, not even evil multinational corporations like Walmart and Monsanto, is advocating poisoning the wells.
Ben, I think my advice is that it's hopeless. The best I can think of is to ask questions "What exactly do we hope to accomplish? What is the spiritual outcome we desire? Are we hoping that the newspapers, denominational magazines, and local buzz will say nice things about us as good advertising, or do we hope that there is a direct spiritual benefit to this?" Then let it go and hope that this blows over and doesn't come up every year. Maybe you can get them to read about the Copenhagen Consensus if they want to focus on helping the world.
You might also come up with an angle that is compatible with both your ideas and the staff's ideas and put good work and energy into that.
Magnificent
Over at 10-4goodbuddy, Ben has liveblogged In The Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale. Liveblogging a movie is not a genre that is ever going to catch on. Scrolling down the length to see if you want to bother is daunting. And yet - and yet it is laugh-out-loud funny. You do not have to know Ben or already hate movies by Uwe Boll to appreciate this. Sample comments from what is happening in the movie at the 8.00 minute mark.
Erin - his time predictions are uncanny again.
8.00
A quick IMDB search proves that In The Name of the King is actually written by three people, who between them have a total of one movie writing credit – a horror film from 1989 (!) called The Carpenter, whose plotline is “a carpenter, executed in the electric chair, comes back to finish his dream house, now inhabited by a young married couple.”
The Tagline: “He's Turning Their Dream House Into A Nightmare!”
The dialogue continues to live up to the writers’ remarkable resume.
Statham: “Be safe”
Claire Forlani: “It’s Stonebridge. Of course we’ll be safe”
Dun dun dum! The orchestra moves into the Foreshadowing Movement.
Countdown to family getting attacked – 7 minutes.
Odds of kid dying – two to one.
Odds of wife getting kidnapped – even money.
Erin - his time predictions are uncanny again.
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Just Checking
Commenter Larry (see the penultimate Minimum Wage comment) has been having a blogspot/spam problem of some sort. My reply:
Whoa, Larry. I thought my email was posted on my profile. I went back and fixed that. Thanks.Anyone having a similar problem?
You're talking over my head on the spamming from a blogspot site. I haven't had that problem. It's not something that's happening intentionally from here. If it's one of those unintentional things where someone makes my site unsafe I'll get on it.
Public Death as Art
Jerub-baal has posted interesting comments about the German artist who wants to put a dying person out in a museum as installation art. He has asked for my comments, and at the moment, I don't have any. I will, though. But you knew that.
The post discusses both the morality of the display and the artist's reasoning why this should be allowed.
The post discusses both the morality of the display and the artist's reasoning why this should be allowed.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Minimum Wage
The hospital has a work-training program for patients. Some jobs are vaguely comparable to competitive employment - washing dishes, operating a cash register - but most are much simpler and require few skills. Our rehab department is teaching generic job skills, such as showing up on time, taking breaks when scheduled, not losing your temper when things go wrong.
As currently constituted, none of the jobs are worth minimum wage, if we define worth as something an actual employer would pay you to do. They weren't worth the old minimum wage, either. But if patients do paid work, they must be paid the minimum wage, to prevent exploitation.
When the minimum wage went up, the program had to cut back hours across the board. It still ran out of money, however, and for the months of May and June, no one will get paid to work anywhere. This is in miniature what opponents of the minimum wage have always foretold would happen on the larger economic scale.
Minimum wage laws were originally an attempt to solve a problem. Some employers took advantage of workers, sometimes in small ways, sometimes across entire industries. It would be too difficult for the government to evaluate every position and employee to determine if he was being paid market value for his labor. It is much simpler to decree that everyone who works must be paid x. This solution is only partially related to the original problem, however. Requiring a minimum wage does solve a number of abuses without having to resort to lengthy studies and calculations. But it does not directly address the problem of abuses. How could it? It sets a bottom to the level of abuse an employer can inflict.
In setting that lower limit other ideas crept in. How much is enough to live on? This is a fine and noble question, but it completely sidesteps the question of what a particular type of labor is worth.
Just because a job exists doesn't mean it is worth $7/hour. Just because a car exists doesn't mean it is worth $1000, even though that is what it likely needs to be worth to sell it and buy another car. It might take a great deal of skill and labor to grow cold-weather yams on an Aleutian island and ship them to market in Juneau. That effort may be "worth" a great deal in some cosmic sense. But if no one buys the yams, the effort isn't worth it. So if you are a yam farmer and aren't making any money, but you hire your brother-in-law because he needs a job, how does that job suddenly become worth $7/hour just because someone is doing it?
The idea of a living wage is an extension of this minimum wage reasoning. Everyone agrees that people should be able to obtain food and shelter. But to get there by decreeing that any job they might happen to pick up is automatically worth that amount of money doesn't follow.
As currently constituted, none of the jobs are worth minimum wage, if we define worth as something an actual employer would pay you to do. They weren't worth the old minimum wage, either. But if patients do paid work, they must be paid the minimum wage, to prevent exploitation.
When the minimum wage went up, the program had to cut back hours across the board. It still ran out of money, however, and for the months of May and June, no one will get paid to work anywhere. This is in miniature what opponents of the minimum wage have always foretold would happen on the larger economic scale.
Minimum wage laws were originally an attempt to solve a problem. Some employers took advantage of workers, sometimes in small ways, sometimes across entire industries. It would be too difficult for the government to evaluate every position and employee to determine if he was being paid market value for his labor. It is much simpler to decree that everyone who works must be paid x. This solution is only partially related to the original problem, however. Requiring a minimum wage does solve a number of abuses without having to resort to lengthy studies and calculations. But it does not directly address the problem of abuses. How could it? It sets a bottom to the level of abuse an employer can inflict.
In setting that lower limit other ideas crept in. How much is enough to live on? This is a fine and noble question, but it completely sidesteps the question of what a particular type of labor is worth.
Just because a job exists doesn't mean it is worth $7/hour. Just because a car exists doesn't mean it is worth $1000, even though that is what it likely needs to be worth to sell it and buy another car. It might take a great deal of skill and labor to grow cold-weather yams on an Aleutian island and ship them to market in Juneau. That effort may be "worth" a great deal in some cosmic sense. But if no one buys the yams, the effort isn't worth it. So if you are a yam farmer and aren't making any money, but you hire your brother-in-law because he needs a job, how does that job suddenly become worth $7/hour just because someone is doing it?
The idea of a living wage is an extension of this minimum wage reasoning. Everyone agrees that people should be able to obtain food and shelter. But to get there by decreeing that any job they might happen to pick up is automatically worth that amount of money doesn't follow.
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Too Good
Mythusmage, commenting on Major Tammes' injury at Miserable Donuts, is perhaps not quite sympathetic about the broken finger, even though it was incurred in Iraq.
A hurt finger. Oh you poor child. How you do suffer for your country.
Try hurting your foot and see what you say then. Typing with a bad finger aint nothing compared to hobbling around on a cane. I swear, you kids are spoiled these days.
Why, when I was a youngin' we had to do our own amputations, hand deliver nukes, and pass the driving test while the Iowa did landscaping with those 16 inchers somewhere in a 50 yard radius of our car. When we took on the Italian Fascists in Tashkent during the Quasi War they hadn't invented limbs yet. Had to wield our weapons with tongue and pecker. And you're bitching about a dinged digit.
What a wuss.
You sure you're not a Harvard freshman?
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Smells Suspicious
I am giving a presentation tomorrow about a narrow area of mental health law in NH. I am not an attorney, but the nature of my job means that I know this area as well as anyone. What I am going to say has been vetted by the one person who knows more about this than I do. It is going to be controversial, and resisted, but I know it is correct.
People heavily involved in the issue are very encouraging, telling me that this training and change in the way we do things is ten years overdue. I am going to tell people they have to change what they are doing, but I have no power of enforcement, only persuasion.
The people who have actual power of enforcement have stated they will back me up. But they don't know the law that well, and when challenged, are going to be emailing me emergency questions asking whether we really do have to do it this way.
Most (or all) of the powerful, important people who are telling me I'm right will back down on about 50% of what I'm saying when the challenge comes.
I have seen this before - I am about to be hung out to twist in the wind. I just figured that out today.
Not this time. Not again. I am not an astute political player at work - I still think that when people ask for my analysis they really want it - but this time I'll, I'll...
No, I'm cornered. I'm pretty much screwed.
People heavily involved in the issue are very encouraging, telling me that this training and change in the way we do things is ten years overdue. I am going to tell people they have to change what they are doing, but I have no power of enforcement, only persuasion.
The people who have actual power of enforcement have stated they will back me up. But they don't know the law that well, and when challenged, are going to be emailing me emergency questions asking whether we really do have to do it this way.
Most (or all) of the powerful, important people who are telling me I'm right will back down on about 50% of what I'm saying when the challenge comes.
I have seen this before - I am about to be hung out to twist in the wind. I just figured that out today.
Not this time. Not again. I am not an astute political player at work - I still think that when people ask for my analysis they really want it - but this time I'll, I'll...
No, I'm cornered. I'm pretty much screwed.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Human Rorschach
I have mentioned once before that Obama is a human Rorschach test - people see what they want - but the blog Stubborn Facts has taken this one artistic step farther.
Comparative Myths
If you are a creationist, you believe that we are descended from 2+ people in SW Asia about 6,000 years ago.
If you are an evolutionist, you believe that we are descended from 150 people who crossed from Africa into SW Asia about 60,000 years ago, and our culture descended from an area very near the creationist’s Eden about 10,000 years ago.
Think for a few moments how much that difference affects day-to-day life in America.
Not much, actually.
In contrast, some US Senators believe that the oil companies are manipulating prices to elect Republicans, and are hiding competing technologies. This is insane. The 10,000 members of a serious presidential candidate’s church (plus who knows how many others nationwide) believe the CIA created AIDS to keep black people down. This is insane. A good chunk of our fellow citizens believe in 9/11 conspiracies or that Bush stole the election. These are also insane.
Think for a few moments how much those beliefs affect day-to-day life in America.
Quite a bit, actually.
I’m an evolutionist, in the main, but fail to see why that particular belief is supposed to be the acid test in whether one believes in faith or science. If you were going to start this morning as an intelligent person looking to validate one set of beliefs or another with information you could verify yourself, which would be easier to disprove?
The difference in myths is a cultural marker, not an objective one. Anti-creationists are irritated by creationists not because of science – else they would be more upset at the myths that actually have some effect – but because the creationists’ beliefs scream We are not one of you! We do not acknowledge your culture as superior! They are not the right sort of person, who accepts the right priorities the culture should be run by.
If you are an evolutionist, you believe that we are descended from 150 people who crossed from Africa into SW Asia about 60,000 years ago, and our culture descended from an area very near the creationist’s Eden about 10,000 years ago.
Think for a few moments how much that difference affects day-to-day life in America.
Not much, actually.
In contrast, some US Senators believe that the oil companies are manipulating prices to elect Republicans, and are hiding competing technologies. This is insane. The 10,000 members of a serious presidential candidate’s church (plus who knows how many others nationwide) believe the CIA created AIDS to keep black people down. This is insane. A good chunk of our fellow citizens believe in 9/11 conspiracies or that Bush stole the election. These are also insane.
Think for a few moments how much those beliefs affect day-to-day life in America.
Quite a bit, actually.
I’m an evolutionist, in the main, but fail to see why that particular belief is supposed to be the acid test in whether one believes in faith or science. If you were going to start this morning as an intelligent person looking to validate one set of beliefs or another with information you could verify yourself, which would be easier to disprove?
The difference in myths is a cultural marker, not an objective one. Anti-creationists are irritated by creationists not because of science – else they would be more upset at the myths that actually have some effect – but because the creationists’ beliefs scream We are not one of you! We do not acknowledge your culture as superior! They are not the right sort of person, who accepts the right priorities the culture should be run by.
Superstar
Hey-Bama, O-Bama, Bama, Bama-O,
Bama-Hey Bama-O Bahmah.
Hey BaREE, BaREE, won't you fight for me?
Bama-O, Bama-hey, Superstar!
Bama-Hey Bama-O Bahmah.
Hey BaREE, BaREE, won't you fight for me?
Bama-O, Bama-hey, Superstar!
Monday, May 19, 2008
More NCLB Controversy
Charles Murray is always controversial. He is also very difficult to argue with. His recent article in New Criterion discusses "educational romanticism."
HT: Maggie's Farm
And so, beginning with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the federal government embarked on a series of major efforts to improve education for disadvantaged children that culminated in 2002 with the No Child Left Behind Act. Surveying that history, an analogy occurred to me that I offer as a speculative proposition: America’s federal education policy as of 2008 is at about the same place that the Soviet Union’s economic policy was in 1990.
HT: Maggie's Farm
Tar Baby
The term tar baby has gone off-limits. Old guys like me might still get away with using it, because we grew up in an era where the term had not the slightest racial connotation. Tar baby referred to the mute human mock-up made of tar in the Uncle Remus stories. Br'er Rabbit got angry at its insolence and hit it, getting stuck. The more he hit it, the more stuck he got. The point was that he had gotten himself into difficulty of his own accord, and was now in a problem he could not get rid of.
The irony, of course, is that Joel Chandler Harris likely reworked an image that he had learned from a black storyteller. The tar baby was black because it was an image of a human in an African-American context. In the same way that Crayola and Johnson & Johnson decided that "flesh tone" was a light tan years ago, neglecting to note that it was not the color of the flesh of a good many of their customers, a black storyteller, when describing a mock human, would of course make him black.
When I looked it up, I found isolated incidents that might have been racial slurs in the use of "tar baby" over the years, but it was a brand-new idea to me just a few years ago. Either someone used it racially to insult a black person, or some black person thought it was a racial slur, and the whole thing snowballed. The most likely explanation is that there were elements of all three - people known to be prejudiced used the term about individual black people with the primary intent of merely describing them as difficult; a hint of racism under it was not wholly imaginary.
It is no good saying that "tar baby" is not racist because it "really" means an inextricable problem in its historical context. Words change, and this is exactly how they change. Legitimately or not, the phrase has acquired a racist connotation. Individuals unaware of this might still use it in innocence for many years to come if they never run across any whisper that it has changed. Mitt Romney was called on the carpet about its use in 1999, I think ridiculously. The papers were full of people claiming that it was an obvious racial slur, as if this were something generally known. Rubbish. I am pretty alert to words and their connotations and I had never heard this before. He was using the term entirely in its older meaning, and some folks were just looking to be offended.
Once these things get started, however, they make themselves true. I would no longer use the term on the chance that someone would take it as racially charged. It's a pity, for we lose a vivid image in our common culture - one that African-Americans gave us, likely. But it now has that connotation, just as gay now means something other than happy, and atoms are known to be divisible, even though the word's origin means uncut or indivisible. It is no good saying that gay "really" means happy anymore than it would make sense to deny the existence of electrons because the word atom means indivisible.
The irony, of course, is that Joel Chandler Harris likely reworked an image that he had learned from a black storyteller. The tar baby was black because it was an image of a human in an African-American context. In the same way that Crayola and Johnson & Johnson decided that "flesh tone" was a light tan years ago, neglecting to note that it was not the color of the flesh of a good many of their customers, a black storyteller, when describing a mock human, would of course make him black.
When I looked it up, I found isolated incidents that might have been racial slurs in the use of "tar baby" over the years, but it was a brand-new idea to me just a few years ago. Either someone used it racially to insult a black person, or some black person thought it was a racial slur, and the whole thing snowballed. The most likely explanation is that there were elements of all three - people known to be prejudiced used the term about individual black people with the primary intent of merely describing them as difficult; a hint of racism under it was not wholly imaginary.
It is no good saying that "tar baby" is not racist because it "really" means an inextricable problem in its historical context. Words change, and this is exactly how they change. Legitimately or not, the phrase has acquired a racist connotation. Individuals unaware of this might still use it in innocence for many years to come if they never run across any whisper that it has changed. Mitt Romney was called on the carpet about its use in 1999, I think ridiculously. The papers were full of people claiming that it was an obvious racial slur, as if this were something generally known. Rubbish. I am pretty alert to words and their connotations and I had never heard this before. He was using the term entirely in its older meaning, and some folks were just looking to be offended.
Once these things get started, however, they make themselves true. I would no longer use the term on the chance that someone would take it as racially charged. It's a pity, for we lose a vivid image in our common culture - one that African-Americans gave us, likely. But it now has that connotation, just as gay now means something other than happy, and atoms are known to be divisible, even though the word's origin means uncut or indivisible. It is no good saying that gay "really" means happy anymore than it would make sense to deny the existence of electrons because the word atom means indivisible.
Laughing At Oneself
The ability to laugh at himself is the best short-cut method to knowing if a guy is balanced, confident, mature. I think this applies to women as well, but it is less a part of women's culture, so its absence may be less of a bad sign.
To laugh at yourself you need (some) insight, perspective, grounding in reality, self-honesty, confidence. It's not an infallible sign either way, as people can be able to laugh at themselves in some areas but not in others; there must also be well-balanced people who don't laugh at themselves, though none are coming to mind at the moment. I can imagine a type of person who is well but does not laugh at him or herself, but I can't think of specifics. Laughing at yourself is a sign of health. People who cannot are often brittle, easily offended by even the mildest criticism, self-important.
John McCain has some ability to laugh at himself; George Bush has a great deal. Hillary Clinton sometimes sounds forced when doing it, but I think at least some is genuine. Does anyone know of Barack Obama laughing comfortably at himself? I'm not picturing it, but I haven't seen a lot of him informally. It may be a very telling sign of his character.
To laugh at yourself you need (some) insight, perspective, grounding in reality, self-honesty, confidence. It's not an infallible sign either way, as people can be able to laugh at themselves in some areas but not in others; there must also be well-balanced people who don't laugh at themselves, though none are coming to mind at the moment. I can imagine a type of person who is well but does not laugh at him or herself, but I can't think of specifics. Laughing at yourself is a sign of health. People who cannot are often brittle, easily offended by even the mildest criticism, self-important.
John McCain has some ability to laugh at himself; George Bush has a great deal. Hillary Clinton sometimes sounds forced when doing it, but I think at least some is genuine. Does anyone know of Barack Obama laughing comfortably at himself? I'm not picturing it, but I haven't seen a lot of him informally. It may be a very telling sign of his character.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
No Child Left Behind
I don't generally hear good things about NCLB. Many teachers find it a useless intrusion that eats up time. Greg Forster at pajamasmedia writes on the benefits of NCLB.
Well, it's another side of the story.
The official justification — that NCLB would make 100% of students proficient — doesn’t pass the laugh test. But the arguments that it harms education, though they seem much more plausible, are also misplaced. And a federal mandate for testing produces important benefits that are well worth the costs.The advantages he lists are likely less-visible to classroom teachers. For example, districts get money, and the budget-creators would likely make teachers ride unicycles if there were significant federal dollars attached to it.
Well, it's another side of the story.
Brief Thoughts on a Shaving Mug
I use a shaving mug and brush because it reminds me of my grandfathers. The odd part of that is I never saw either of them use one or saw one in their houses. By the time I was old enough to notice such things, Gillette Foamy was on the market, and both my grandfathers switched quickly to the easier form, as most men did. They were neither sentimental nor hidebound about such things. They must have used a mug and a brush earlier, but before my time.
So I am reminded of them for false reasons, but the act has repeated so many times its origin is superfluous. Shaving mug = grandfathers. We do not remember events directly - we remember the last time we remembered - and thus bend memories over time. Reminiscing with others, photos, and old documents can correct our slippage somewhat.
For the record, I do not use a double-edged razor, and certainly not a straight razor. I am quite clumsy, and don't want to associate my grandfathers with bleeding and disfiguring myself.
So I am reminded of them for false reasons, but the act has repeated so many times its origin is superfluous. Shaving mug = grandfathers. We do not remember events directly - we remember the last time we remembered - and thus bend memories over time. Reminiscing with others, photos, and old documents can correct our slippage somewhat.
For the record, I do not use a double-edged razor, and certainly not a straight razor. I am quite clumsy, and don't want to associate my grandfathers with bleeding and disfiguring myself.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Post 1300 - Tom Stoppard and Sophistry
I have been rereading my Tom Stoppard, one of the few writers who can cause me to both think and laugh out loud. Today it was "The Real Thing," which came out in 1984 with Glenn Close in the Broadway cast. A section early in the second act caught me. Briefly: Henry, a playwright, is attempting to rewrite a terrible script by a jailed protester, Brodie. He has been put up to this by his activist wife, Annie. The playwright explains why it is not merely bad writing by Brodie, but bad thinking that prevents Henry from fixing it up.
And now to our real subject: Henry later tells his 17 y/o daughter Sophistry is a phrase so neat you can't see the loose end that would unravel it. It's flawless but wrong.
I thought of two quick examples of phrases which sound so very wise but are in fact rubbish. You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war. Well, of course you can, you ninny. Every country in the world does it all the time, except perhaps Sweden. Or how about The earth does not belong to us; we belong to the earth. The nonsentient rock has a natural right of ownership over people, frogs, and paramecia for what reason, exactly?
The reader is encouraged to provide more examples.
Because it's balls. Announcing every stale revelation of the newly enlightened like stout Cortez coming upon the Pacific - war is profits, politicians are puppets, Parliament is a farce, justice is a fraud, property is theft...It's all here: pages and pages of it. It's like being run over very slowly by a travelling freak show of favourite simpletons, the india rubber pedagogue, the midget intellectual, the human panacea... I can't help someone who thinks, or thinks he thinks, that editing a newspaper is censorship, or that throwing bricks is a demonstration while building tower blocks is social violence, or that unpalatable speech is provocation while disrupting the speaker is the exercise of free speech. Words don't deserve that kind of malarkey. They're innocent...
And now to our real subject: Henry later tells his 17 y/o daughter Sophistry is a phrase so neat you can't see the loose end that would unravel it. It's flawless but wrong.
I thought of two quick examples of phrases which sound so very wise but are in fact rubbish. You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war. Well, of course you can, you ninny. Every country in the world does it all the time, except perhaps Sweden. Or how about The earth does not belong to us; we belong to the earth. The nonsentient rock has a natural right of ownership over people, frogs, and paramecia for what reason, exactly?
The reader is encouraged to provide more examples.
Celtics Update
I don't really feel up to it, but tomorrow will be too late.
Cleveland's main chance is if LeTravel gets the benefit of calls in both directions. With one exception, in both of the Cavaliers' playoff series, if LBJ doesn't go to the foul line a lot, they lose. If the stripes call him tight for traveling, he is hampered.
In the first two games, the Celtics contained LeBron. In the third and fourth games, they contained him somewhat. Games five and six, he is back to LeBron James Standard. This is not lack of focus and intensity on Boston's part. James is a great player, and has adjusted to what they have thrown at him. If the C's can continue to keep him out of LBJ Outrageous range, they should be able to get a lead.
I thought during the season that I would be eating my words about Ray Allen being on the quick downside of his career, but in the playoffs he is proving me right, dammit. Garnett has had consistent great games. Paul Pierce has had consistent Very Good games (his defense has been better than expected). If Allen cannot step up from Mediocre to Good, then either Pierce or Garnett will have to take it to another level. There is some hope that players in the 4-8 can step into that slot and put the Celts over the top, but it will have to be two of them, because on average, one of those five will have an excellent game ond one a bad game. Things to worry about: Perkins and/or Davis pick up early fouls (see paragraph 2); Cassell and/or Allen take ill-advised shots.
Prediction - Celtics 88-81. LeBron doesn't get enough benefit of calls, and someone gets hot enough to matter.
Halftime update: LeBron has already been to the line 11 times, suggesting that he will keep getting charity in the second half. He has one rebound and one assist, however, suggesting that he is trying to do it all. Pierce is great thus far.
Cleveland's main chance is if LeTravel gets the benefit of calls in both directions. With one exception, in both of the Cavaliers' playoff series, if LBJ doesn't go to the foul line a lot, they lose. If the stripes call him tight for traveling, he is hampered.
In the first two games, the Celtics contained LeBron. In the third and fourth games, they contained him somewhat. Games five and six, he is back to LeBron James Standard. This is not lack of focus and intensity on Boston's part. James is a great player, and has adjusted to what they have thrown at him. If the C's can continue to keep him out of LBJ Outrageous range, they should be able to get a lead.
I thought during the season that I would be eating my words about Ray Allen being on the quick downside of his career, but in the playoffs he is proving me right, dammit. Garnett has had consistent great games. Paul Pierce has had consistent Very Good games (his defense has been better than expected). If Allen cannot step up from Mediocre to Good, then either Pierce or Garnett will have to take it to another level. There is some hope that players in the 4-8 can step into that slot and put the Celts over the top, but it will have to be two of them, because on average, one of those five will have an excellent game ond one a bad game. Things to worry about: Perkins and/or Davis pick up early fouls (see paragraph 2); Cassell and/or Allen take ill-advised shots.
Prediction - Celtics 88-81. LeBron doesn't get enough benefit of calls, and someone gets hot enough to matter.
Halftime update: LeBron has already been to the line 11 times, suggesting that he will keep getting charity in the second half. He has one rebound and one assist, however, suggesting that he is trying to do it all. Pierce is great thus far.
Monday, May 12, 2008
The Road More Traveled
I just finished Balaker and Staley's The Road More Traveled.
1. Congestion costs us more than we think, in money, time, rearranging our lives, people dying in ambulances, lack of dates, and irritation.
2. We're worried that it's inevitable, so we don't do anything much about it.
3. The solutions that get the most attention are of little or no help.
A: That would be light rail and
B: Getting people to drive less.
4. No, really, those are terrible solutions. A: Railroads cost billions, but only start becoming effective at densities of 5,000 people per square mile. Basically, they work in Manhattan. We see all those people in railroad cars and think how great it is that they're not on the road. We forget that a train is essentially a one-lane highway with intermittent large packets of people. They are a disaster for most disabled people. They only attract people within a quarter-mile of a station - on both ends. Everyone else has to drive and change over. B: People don't want to drive less. They want other people to drive less. Because when you're on the highway, all those other people seem to be going to useless and annoying things that aren't as important as what you're doing.
5. We are told that you can't build your way out of congestion, but yeah, you can. It's been done, but you have to keep up with growth. We would rather that other solutions worked instead, solutions like A: light rail and B: other people driving less.
6. There are also technological solutions for managing traffic, like actual software that co-ordinates stoplights, and quick-response teams to get rid of breakdowns and accidents, and better designed feeder roads, and HOT lanes, which we are just starting to find interesting. Once we get these light rail and rideshare programs through the legislature. Mixed used zoning and telecommuting also work.
7. Some of our most important metropolitan traffic congestion managers think congestion is a good thing, because it encourages people to like A: and B:
8. Private toll roads, especially variably-priced toll roads, irritate people who think only rich people use them. But everyone uses them once in a while, and they work great at reducing congestion. So get over your class resentment.
1. Congestion costs us more than we think, in money, time, rearranging our lives, people dying in ambulances, lack of dates, and irritation.
2. We're worried that it's inevitable, so we don't do anything much about it.
3. The solutions that get the most attention are of little or no help.
A: That would be light rail and
B: Getting people to drive less.
4. No, really, those are terrible solutions. A: Railroads cost billions, but only start becoming effective at densities of 5,000 people per square mile. Basically, they work in Manhattan. We see all those people in railroad cars and think how great it is that they're not on the road. We forget that a train is essentially a one-lane highway with intermittent large packets of people. They are a disaster for most disabled people. They only attract people within a quarter-mile of a station - on both ends. Everyone else has to drive and change over. B: People don't want to drive less. They want other people to drive less. Because when you're on the highway, all those other people seem to be going to useless and annoying things that aren't as important as what you're doing.
5. We are told that you can't build your way out of congestion, but yeah, you can. It's been done, but you have to keep up with growth. We would rather that other solutions worked instead, solutions like A: light rail and B: other people driving less.
6. There are also technological solutions for managing traffic, like actual software that co-ordinates stoplights, and quick-response teams to get rid of breakdowns and accidents, and better designed feeder roads, and HOT lanes, which we are just starting to find interesting. Once we get these light rail and rideshare programs through the legislature. Mixed used zoning and telecommuting also work.
7. Some of our most important metropolitan traffic congestion managers think congestion is a good thing, because it encourages people to like A: and B:
8. Private toll roads, especially variably-priced toll roads, irritate people who think only rich people use them. But everyone uses them once in a while, and they work great at reducing congestion. So get over your class resentment.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Thursday, May 08, 2008
LaTravel's Line
You have to figure he'll look much better in Cleveland. I expect at least one lights-out performance from him. But LeBron James's line for the first two games against the Celtics looks like one good one: 33-14-15.
And 17 turnovers.
And 17 turnovers.
Wellness Goes Green
Wellness and Green, the two near-religions of our workplace, joined forces today and took over the lobby. Because nothing is more important in psychiatric emergencies than reducing your carbon footprint. Healthy snacks, and chair massages for the people - well, you know, not the floor nurses but the nursing administrators - plus Reiki and booths with emphatic diagrams, made the whole thing look as if the sixth-grade science fair was being held concurrently with Wholistic Workshoppe.
Actually, that is what it was. Oh yes, and prize drawings for things I don't want and no one needs, such as Celebrating Wellness T-shirts. You enter by answering Green Awareness or Rideshare questions on a sheet of paper and putting it into a decorated box - so I guess I should specify that the 6th-grade was also having Valentine's Day, though without sugar, so...so... Montessori Valentines/Earth Day/Science Fair, with massage.
The day before, the Rewards and Recognition program was giving itself rewards and recognition for having existed for ten years.
Actually, that is what it was. Oh yes, and prize drawings for things I don't want and no one needs, such as Celebrating Wellness T-shirts. You enter by answering Green Awareness or Rideshare questions on a sheet of paper and putting it into a decorated box - so I guess I should specify that the 6th-grade was also having Valentine's Day, though without sugar, so...so... Montessori Valentines/Earth Day/Science Fair, with massage.
The day before, the Rewards and Recognition program was giving itself rewards and recognition for having existed for ten years.
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
The Empty Nest - Round Three
Ten years ago we would chat easily with our friends about the impending empty nest. We would be the first in our little circle to have all the children move out. Eight years ago, when Ben was a junior in high school, this new, unusual life appeared on the horizon. We knew that a boy's senior year was often spent out of the house as much as possible, and we wondered what we would do, and what we would talk about. We even had a little money put aside.
Well a dog would have been too much trouble, so we adopted two teenagers from Romania instead in 2001. J-A left for college almost 3 years ago, and Chris graduated highschool and headed off for Texas in 2007. We acquired two dogs that year as well, but no problem, right? One was to be temporary and the other was going to Texas with the youngest. Before he quite accomplished leaving, however, John-Adrian moved back home to attend college online and work, and find a girlfriend - though he said he came home because he was worried we'd be lonely.
Apparently, the absence of a dog was a burden on one of us - so we got two. Now Chris is moving back from Houston (it's a good thing. He needed another year here after high school but was unwilling to consider it then), and we will have two boys and two dogs for at least another year.
Life changes. It doesn't go where you expect it to.
Well a dog would have been too much trouble, so we adopted two teenagers from Romania instead in 2001. J-A left for college almost 3 years ago, and Chris graduated highschool and headed off for Texas in 2007. We acquired two dogs that year as well, but no problem, right? One was to be temporary and the other was going to Texas with the youngest. Before he quite accomplished leaving, however, John-Adrian moved back home to attend college online and work, and find a girlfriend - though he said he came home because he was worried we'd be lonely.
Apparently, the absence of a dog was a burden on one of us - so we got two. Now Chris is moving back from Houston (it's a good thing. He needed another year here after high school but was unwilling to consider it then), and we will have two boys and two dogs for at least another year.
Life changes. It doesn't go where you expect it to.
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Finally
New York Magazine's Kurt Andersen, in an article about how much he supports Obama:
That is a continuing mistake conservatives make in their evaluation of progressives, I suspect. What the fire-breathers of the Right suspect are intentional attempts to skew the information delivered to the people are more often merely evasions of painful realities.
Contrary to the vast-left-wing-conspiracy visions of the right, much of the press never really loved the Clintons - they just feared and loathed their enemies more.Well, it's nice to see what conservatives insisted then finally being admitted. Interesting that what could not be acknowledged in the 90's is now framed as you-never-knew-you-poor-fools. The ability of journalists to rewrite history - not for calculating political reasons but for pathetic personal ones - continues unimpeded.
That is a continuing mistake conservatives make in their evaluation of progressives, I suspect. What the fire-breathers of the Right suspect are intentional attempts to skew the information delivered to the people are more often merely evasions of painful realities.
Americans Overseas
Not only is the article in Commentary good, the comments are amusing as well. It touches a nerve when Americans are criticised by folks from other countries - especially among those Americans who have actually lived in other countries. From the article:
No, and no again. Americans worry about such things obsessively, to my great irritation. For those who do not belief we should submit to the correction of our betters in Europe and Canada, we are not usually unaware of what your criticisms are. We have considered them and found them childish. That is apparently even more unendurable in Davos than our initial disagreement.
The shoe is on the other foot. Americans have considered your criticisms. Will you consider ours?
The third impression I came away with is the widespread view in Europe, as well as among some Americans, that the U.S. has suffered a huge, almost incalculable, loss of “moral authority” (its worth recalling that we heard much the same thing during the Reagan years). The evidence cited is always the same: Guantanamo Bay, rendition and secret prisons, and waterboarding. They are invoked like an incantation. The effect of this is that you would think that the United States is among the leading violators of human rights in the world.From the comments:
I currently work with a Canadian with whom it is impossible to have an extended conversation on any subject, whether it be medicine or rock music, as he invariably finds a way to insert some anti-US remark — when confronted on this after some months of enduring it, he said indignantly and evidently seriously that “You have to to expect this”. He spends much of the day complaining about the U.S. to other members of staff, none of whom are American. They may not initiate the conversations, but they rarely disagree. Most of it is childish: he doesn’t have any new ideas or insights, and he isn’t trying to engage me in a serious, thought-out, view-changing way: it’s just “jingoism, baby killers, too bad Reagan didn’t die, shoot Bush” etc. merely the equivalent of “Yo mama wears combat boots” over and over.and
The next time Europeans do something moral on behalf of someone else will be the first.My particular favorite are those residents of other countries who think it is a particularly significant point that Americans should ask themselves why they are hated - as if the idea has never occurred to us before.
No, and no again. Americans worry about such things obsessively, to my great irritation. For those who do not belief we should submit to the correction of our betters in Europe and Canada, we are not usually unaware of what your criticisms are. We have considered them and found them childish. That is apparently even more unendurable in Davos than our initial disagreement.
The shoe is on the other foot. Americans have considered your criticisms. Will you consider ours?
Monday, May 05, 2008
Musing on Samson and Hillary
I can actually picture that if Hillary does not get the nomination, she could pull the whole structure down around her and endorse McCain. I don't think it's likely, but it is interesting that I can even imagine it. I can't imagine a similar scenario even being possible in my lifetime.
The Cain and Abel Group
The stretch of time from Adam’s sons to Abraham is more than 1500 years, but Genesis lists only 18 (or so) generations for the period, the first half in a few whirlwind verses of Chapter 5, the second half in another bare list in Chapter 11. Nor is that the worst of the age problems. Methuselah lives to be 969, and even then doesn’t seem to die of natural causes, but goes down in the flood associated with his grandson Noah. All this fathering of children at a hundred and eighty and guys living to be seven hundred years old is simply a great obstacle in a literalist reading.
Oh me of little faith, eh? I don’t have a problem with the idea that God could do it. After making a universe, stretching out a person’s lifespan doesn’t seem like much of a big deal, frankly. But what is the evidence that he did? That Genesis gives names that could possibly be people-names (though in other places, such as the sons of Canaan in Chapter 10, they are tribal names) seems rather slender. There is nothing personal, human or identifying about this list that would demand they be individuals. And rather than seeing this increased longevity as a test of belief (Ha, ha, ye faithless modern generation, did ye doubt that YWHW could do this?), I see it as a neon sign that something strange is up in this section.
So what if Moses, when he wrote the words down – or more likely, had them written down in one of those Charlemagne, Alfred The Great deals, because ruling a large group of people doesn’t leave much free time for arduous scribing – thought that these inherited names were individuals? I don’t care what Moses thought, I care what God wants me to see.
That the names are dynasties makes much more sense, especially among a people who were much more group-defined than we hyperindividualistic Americans. Plantagenet and Tudor kings, the Bourbons in France, the Ming Dynasty, the Ptolemaic Dynasty, the House of Saud. Pharaoh, a name for nearby rulers, means “Great House.” So is that an individual name or a group name? Both. Neither.
I don’t think you get to be a good fundamentalist if you merely gloss over stuff that doesn’t fit your simple literal picture. The tribal names in Chapter 10, the second creation account, where Cain’s wife came from – I think we non-literalist evangelicals actually face those issues more squarely. From fundamentalists – mostly contortions.
We get something nice back if we look at early Genesis this way. The Genesis chronology extends back farther than the Egyptian, or indeed any other history, even if we count the murky god-Pharaohs of uncertain date. Pretty good for an illiterate people, I think. Tracing back just past Seth, we get the cultural conflict of settled agriculture versus herding – the story of Cain and Abel – at pretty near the point that archaeology says we should find it in that region. Again, pretty darn good for a people who didn’t have archaeology, or even records.
Oh me of little faith, eh? I don’t have a problem with the idea that God could do it. After making a universe, stretching out a person’s lifespan doesn’t seem like much of a big deal, frankly. But what is the evidence that he did? That Genesis gives names that could possibly be people-names (though in other places, such as the sons of Canaan in Chapter 10, they are tribal names) seems rather slender. There is nothing personal, human or identifying about this list that would demand they be individuals. And rather than seeing this increased longevity as a test of belief (Ha, ha, ye faithless modern generation, did ye doubt that YWHW could do this?), I see it as a neon sign that something strange is up in this section.
So what if Moses, when he wrote the words down – or more likely, had them written down in one of those Charlemagne, Alfred The Great deals, because ruling a large group of people doesn’t leave much free time for arduous scribing – thought that these inherited names were individuals? I don’t care what Moses thought, I care what God wants me to see.
That the names are dynasties makes much more sense, especially among a people who were much more group-defined than we hyperindividualistic Americans. Plantagenet and Tudor kings, the Bourbons in France, the Ming Dynasty, the Ptolemaic Dynasty, the House of Saud. Pharaoh, a name for nearby rulers, means “Great House.” So is that an individual name or a group name? Both. Neither.
I don’t think you get to be a good fundamentalist if you merely gloss over stuff that doesn’t fit your simple literal picture. The tribal names in Chapter 10, the second creation account, where Cain’s wife came from – I think we non-literalist evangelicals actually face those issues more squarely. From fundamentalists – mostly contortions.
We get something nice back if we look at early Genesis this way. The Genesis chronology extends back farther than the Egyptian, or indeed any other history, even if we count the murky god-Pharaohs of uncertain date. Pretty good for an illiterate people, I think. Tracing back just past Seth, we get the cultural conflict of settled agriculture versus herding – the story of Cain and Abel – at pretty near the point that archaeology says we should find it in that region. Again, pretty darn good for a people who didn’t have archaeology, or even records.
The War of the Roses
Admitting for the sake of argument that the use of “tribe” has unfortunate negative connotations when discussing the competing American groups, I propose “houses” instead: House of Lancaster, House of York, as in the War of the Roses; House of Ravenclaw, House of Gryffindor. It has a nice set of historical and collegiate associations that the Arts & Humanites folks might like, and the rest of us won’t mind anyway.
The A & H House (and perhaps every house) believes that it is the rightful ruler, considering the others usurpers, pretenders, and cadet branches. When out of power, their energy is devoted to getting back in; their representatives considered more deserving regardless of qualification; their personal honor tied up with the fortunes of their House.
The A & H House (and perhaps every house) believes that it is the rightful ruler, considering the others usurpers, pretenders, and cadet branches. When out of power, their energy is devoted to getting back in; their representatives considered more deserving regardless of qualification; their personal honor tied up with the fortunes of their House.
Sunday, May 04, 2008
Not Jumping To Conclusions
This Stephen Bainbridge article is an excellent exercise in not jumping to conclusions. There is a piece of federal legislation under consideration, and the link that sent me hinted that Attorney Bainbridge is against it. Barack Obama is one of the sponsors, and the legislation is described with paragraphs directly from the Obama campaign.
I read those paragraphs, and the bill made eminent sense to me - it seemed a no-brainer, and I figured that Bainbridge had it wrong this time. Then I read his reasons why he thinks it is very bad legislation. I was embarrassed that I had overlooked some of the points that now seem obvious to me.
Things are usually more obvious after someone explains them, aren't they? Fancy that. It pays to check out both sides.
I read those paragraphs, and the bill made eminent sense to me - it seemed a no-brainer, and I figured that Bainbridge had it wrong this time. Then I read his reasons why he thinks it is very bad legislation. I was embarrassed that I had overlooked some of the points that now seem obvious to me.
Things are usually more obvious after someone explains them, aren't they? Fancy that. It pays to check out both sides.
Disney Princesses
They seem to be everywhere, and I don't even have daughters. I am guessing that like the American Girl dolls, which princess you pick - or force/encourage your daughter to pick - is an expression of some value. Belle is a reader, and so is the compromise choice for those mothers who would rather have a princess-free zone but are tired of fighting. Pocahontas likely serves the same function for green mothers. I don't know if Mulan is actually more popular among Asian mothers/daughters, but there is apparently going to be a 9th, African-American princess based on The Princess and the Frog coming out in 2009, and the olive-skinned Jasmine is likely more tolerable among the anti-blonde crowd. There are three retro, traditional princesses. I'll bet they wanted to work in Tinkerbell, the Britney Spears of Disney girls, but couldn't find even a bad excuse to call her a princess. The Little Mermaid will have to stand in for the trollop demographic, I suppose.
The Heart of the Matter
Come to this sacred table, not because you must, but because you may;
Come to testify not that you are righteous, but that you sincerely love our Jesus Christ, and desire to be his true disciple;
Come not because you are strong, but because you are weak;
Come not because you have any claim on heaven's rewards, but because in your frailty and sin you stand in constant need of heaven's mercy and help;
Come not to express an opinion, but to seek a Presence and pray for a Spirit.
This a part of the liturgy for the communion table in many churches, and was in ours this morning. I have heard it attributed to an Anglican Bishop John Hunter, but admit I don't know its origin. Well, yeah, I guess I do - the Holy Spirit.
Friday, May 02, 2008
The Simple Answers
It is not merely that the answers are simple, so simple that everyone knows it will work. The odd thing is that everyone also finds the ideas radical, impossible - the territory of nuts and cranks. The obvious has become so politically impossible, for very bad reasons, that the following will meet with eye-rolling in many quarters. Yeah, the Assistant Village Idiot just doesn't get it. They're right. I don't.
Build 100 nuclear power plants, as Jerry Pournelle suggests.
Drill for the oil we know is there, as Samuelson at the Washington Post suggests.
Yes, yes, I know it's ridiculous. But why is it ridiculous? Energy problems solved until the year 2100. We can move on to other things. Technologies we have within a decade of feasibility right now - do we think that none of them will work? We have an idea that it's all ungreen, unenvironmental somehow. Compared to...
Confine yourself to reality, please.
Build 100 nuclear power plants, as Jerry Pournelle suggests.
Drill for the oil we know is there, as Samuelson at the Washington Post suggests.
Yes, yes, I know it's ridiculous. But why is it ridiculous? Energy problems solved until the year 2100. We can move on to other things. Technologies we have within a decade of feasibility right now - do we think that none of them will work? We have an idea that it's all ungreen, unenvironmental somehow. Compared to...
Confine yourself to reality, please.
Oh, That Liberal Media
The AP carries a story about a blogger criticising Al Franken. The lead paragraph:
Next, we have the LATimes commenting on the Boston Globe's criticism of Hillary Clinton. The money quote:
EAGAN, Minn. - Senate candidate Al Franken wants to talk about jobs, health care and global warming. Republican blogger Michael Brodkorb wants to talk about Franken's failure to pay all his income taxes on time.No, Brodkorb wants to talk about Al Franken's failure to pay his income taxes until a court made him. That paragraph would be the expected spin coming out of the Franken campaign - we expect spin like that from the candidate himself. Not from the AP.
Next, we have the LATimes commenting on the Boston Globe's criticism of Hillary Clinton. The money quote:
"If Clinton ends up the Democratic nominee, will the leading journalistic voice in one of the nation's most liberal states endorse Republican John McCain?"Wait, wait - I thought the Boston Globe was an example of unbiased reporting of the news, like the LATimes itself! You mean the Times thinks the Globe has a slant?
Thursday, May 01, 2008
Taking Our Temperature
Gary, a co-worker, complained about the length of the election season today. This is common in NH, because along with Iowa, we get started on presidential elections about two full years before the new president takes office. We are swamped with polls and the whole horse race aspect of elections. Gary looks wistfully at the British system of announcing that a new election is going to take place in six weeks. Surprise! We're having an election! Americans never get to know that joy.
It's easy to see why that would look attractive to him. But it will never happen here. These lengthy election seasons happen because really, Americans like it. We must like it because, however much we complain, we don't fix it. Heck, we don't even threaten to improve it. This is how we do democracy here, by constantly taking our own temperature. I will give you a moment to contemplate the unfortunate images that anyone older than forty has about that, with reflections on how appropriate that is to what I'm saying. But you will refrain from mentioning it in the comments, right? No matter how apt the analogy is.
We do these polls; these constant discussions about how racist/sexist/colonialist/greedy/ignorant we are; this navel-gazing about how all our generations - Greatest, Boomer, X, Millennial are doing; this obsession with taking our own temperature. It is not merely that we have more sociologists per square meter than everyone else, but that all of us play at amateur sociology as well. We love this stuff, and we love to complain about how everyone else is obsessed with it.
Other countries don't do this. Even the Brits, Australians, and Canadians, who could be expected to be most like us, don't come near us in this. They are admittedly more self-absorbed than other nations on this score, but this obsession is supreme in America.
America is the farthest left among the conservative nations, and farthest right among the progressive nations, precisely because of this. We're like an overcautious driver stuck in a car going 100 mph, panicked at the consequences of going too far left or right for even a moment, hyperalert and screaming at the passengers.
We should hate this about ourselves and try to change it I suppose, but when you think about it, it's kind of fun. We cover more territory than anyone else, all of us certain that disaster is about to descend on us. And I guess it would if we didn't keep constant attention on each other. Far left or far right extremism probably would happen if we weren't all grabbing for the wheel and arguing about the map. Screw the passengers; we're having an adventure here.
It's easy to see why that would look attractive to him. But it will never happen here. These lengthy election seasons happen because really, Americans like it. We must like it because, however much we complain, we don't fix it. Heck, we don't even threaten to improve it. This is how we do democracy here, by constantly taking our own temperature. I will give you a moment to contemplate the unfortunate images that anyone older than forty has about that, with reflections on how appropriate that is to what I'm saying. But you will refrain from mentioning it in the comments, right? No matter how apt the analogy is.
We do these polls; these constant discussions about how racist/sexist/colonialist/greedy/ignorant we are; this navel-gazing about how all our generations - Greatest, Boomer, X, Millennial are doing; this obsession with taking our own temperature. It is not merely that we have more sociologists per square meter than everyone else, but that all of us play at amateur sociology as well. We love this stuff, and we love to complain about how everyone else is obsessed with it.
Other countries don't do this. Even the Brits, Australians, and Canadians, who could be expected to be most like us, don't come near us in this. They are admittedly more self-absorbed than other nations on this score, but this obsession is supreme in America.
America is the farthest left among the conservative nations, and farthest right among the progressive nations, precisely because of this. We're like an overcautious driver stuck in a car going 100 mph, panicked at the consequences of going too far left or right for even a moment, hyperalert and screaming at the passengers.
We should hate this about ourselves and try to change it I suppose, but when you think about it, it's kind of fun. We cover more territory than anyone else, all of us certain that disaster is about to descend on us. And I guess it would if we didn't keep constant attention on each other. Far left or far right extremism probably would happen if we weren't all grabbing for the wheel and arguing about the map. Screw the passengers; we're having an adventure here.
Everyone Orders Off The Menu
There are topics which attract unoriginal comments delivered in overconfident declaratives, as if the author has learned important secret information you might not have heard before. Discussions of the existence of God invariably bring out guys who just have to tell you that religious belief is a result of people being afraid to face reality. Oh goodness, no one’s ever had to confront that opinion before, eh? Golly, we never thought of it that way – if Augustine and Luther had had to deal with that argument the whole faith would have just fallen apart, y’know? I guess we’ll all have to go back to the drawing board now.
I was at an outdoor medieval event years ago, all the participants in costume. A car with several young men drove by, and one leaned out to yell “F – You!” Gee, do you write your own material? drew a laugh, though the car was out of range.
Politics brings out equivalent bromides: You can’t legislate morality. The oil companies had record profits last quarter. All those jobs are going overseas. A lot of rich people don’t pay any taxes. If you talk about education, someone has just got to compare things to their own school days, which were much better. Someone else has to bring up that just learning facts isn’t education, kids need to be taught to think about what it means. Sports: You know they don’t call traveling anymore? Those guys take an extra step…
Cliches have their value; they wouldn’t have become cliches if there weren’t some truth in them. It is the speaker’s determination to share these profundities with all present that gets under my skin. Folks are convinced that these are fairly original thoughts that they thought up themselves or learned from unconventional sources. A lot our holiday customs have pagan origins. No, really? You sure? A lot of wars have been started because of religion. Yeah, Western European Christians did attack back for fifty years out of the 1000-year Islamic Crusades, that’s true. And Western Europe did have a century-plus of religious wars 400-500 years ago. And this is particularly relevant today because…? Irritating.
Intelligent people, or those who consider themselves so, often think that they haven’t ordered off the menu for their beliefs. They went back into the kitchen themselves and made up their own dish. Well that’s great, Gustave. It looks a lot like a ham sandwich, but I’ll take your word for it that you made it up yourself. My, my, Selena, what a great idea to dip chicken into egg and flour and then fry it.
Twenty years ago when I was in the Prometheus Society a lot of guys were writing interminable essays of what they thought about God, reality, and the meaning of life. At one level these were original. The writers had thought through many issues without consciously imitating other thinkers. This does take considerable brain power and perhaps deserves some credit. They hadn’t looked at a cookbook. They had, however, taken materials from the bins that were there. They used flour, eggs, and sugar – they hadn’t discovered them. They arrived at a vaguely cakey substance which they brought out triumphantly, expecting applause. They deeply resented being told they had discovered cake, and not a particularly good one. What you’ve described is a lot like logical positivism, Herb. You might want to read up on that and save yourself further trouble…Yeah, that’s the difference between deductive and inductive reasoning. Fancy that.
I suppose there’s some comfort in knowing that if you are making this error, you are at least making the same error that many people with high IQ’s make. Clever foolishness is still foolishness, though.
There are deeper and deeper levels of this, with genuinely intelligent and curious people working through issues on their own, which I suppose is a good thing. They want to show that they can cook for themselves and not just take what’s plunked down in front of them like any old Baptist or Presbyterian. Yeah, fine. So you made it all the way to inventing the cheeseburger on your own, but you don’t call it a cheeseburger because it’s got a new spice or sauce combination. Yes, look! You sliced your new peanut paste and preserved fruit on bread on the diagonal. You’re going to call it “sorbet?” Great. No chance you may have run across that idea somewhere before?
Actual original chefs learned from other chefs, and their creations are expert recombinations of previous ideas. They didn’t start from the beginning, wondering if rocks are edible.
I thought of picking on atheist/agnostic/whatevers in particular today, but I’m feeling expansive. Political guys, social critics, you’re all in there. You guys all ordered off the menu just as much as those you criticise. The buffet, the salad bar…that’s all on the menu. The self-congratulation is just not warranted.
I was at an outdoor medieval event years ago, all the participants in costume. A car with several young men drove by, and one leaned out to yell “F – You!” Gee, do you write your own material? drew a laugh, though the car was out of range.
Politics brings out equivalent bromides: You can’t legislate morality. The oil companies had record profits last quarter. All those jobs are going overseas. A lot of rich people don’t pay any taxes. If you talk about education, someone has just got to compare things to their own school days, which were much better. Someone else has to bring up that just learning facts isn’t education, kids need to be taught to think about what it means. Sports: You know they don’t call traveling anymore? Those guys take an extra step…
Cliches have their value; they wouldn’t have become cliches if there weren’t some truth in them. It is the speaker’s determination to share these profundities with all present that gets under my skin. Folks are convinced that these are fairly original thoughts that they thought up themselves or learned from unconventional sources. A lot our holiday customs have pagan origins. No, really? You sure? A lot of wars have been started because of religion. Yeah, Western European Christians did attack back for fifty years out of the 1000-year Islamic Crusades, that’s true. And Western Europe did have a century-plus of religious wars 400-500 years ago. And this is particularly relevant today because…? Irritating.
Intelligent people, or those who consider themselves so, often think that they haven’t ordered off the menu for their beliefs. They went back into the kitchen themselves and made up their own dish. Well that’s great, Gustave. It looks a lot like a ham sandwich, but I’ll take your word for it that you made it up yourself. My, my, Selena, what a great idea to dip chicken into egg and flour and then fry it.
Twenty years ago when I was in the Prometheus Society a lot of guys were writing interminable essays of what they thought about God, reality, and the meaning of life. At one level these were original. The writers had thought through many issues without consciously imitating other thinkers. This does take considerable brain power and perhaps deserves some credit. They hadn’t looked at a cookbook. They had, however, taken materials from the bins that were there. They used flour, eggs, and sugar – they hadn’t discovered them. They arrived at a vaguely cakey substance which they brought out triumphantly, expecting applause. They deeply resented being told they had discovered cake, and not a particularly good one. What you’ve described is a lot like logical positivism, Herb. You might want to read up on that and save yourself further trouble…Yeah, that’s the difference between deductive and inductive reasoning. Fancy that.
I suppose there’s some comfort in knowing that if you are making this error, you are at least making the same error that many people with high IQ’s make. Clever foolishness is still foolishness, though.
There are deeper and deeper levels of this, with genuinely intelligent and curious people working through issues on their own, which I suppose is a good thing. They want to show that they can cook for themselves and not just take what’s plunked down in front of them like any old Baptist or Presbyterian. Yeah, fine. So you made it all the way to inventing the cheeseburger on your own, but you don’t call it a cheeseburger because it’s got a new spice or sauce combination. Yes, look! You sliced your new peanut paste and preserved fruit on bread on the diagonal. You’re going to call it “sorbet?” Great. No chance you may have run across that idea somewhere before?
Actual original chefs learned from other chefs, and their creations are expert recombinations of previous ideas. They didn’t start from the beginning, wondering if rocks are edible.
I thought of picking on atheist/agnostic/whatevers in particular today, but I’m feeling expansive. Political guys, social critics, you’re all in there. You guys all ordered off the menu just as much as those you criticise. The buffet, the salad bar…that’s all on the menu. The self-congratulation is just not warranted.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)