Entries Tagged 'thoughts' ↓

This article (worded in predictably bellicose HuffPo prose) talks about a poll last week on the healthcare reform debate. Poll numbers like these are regularly cited on the right side of the fence to support the idea that the American people do not want healthcare reform. The responses for “do you favor or oppose the current healthcare proposal?” look bad for the reformers and good for the opposition: 47% oppose it and only 41% are in favor. However, if you look at why people oppose vs. support the current reform, a different picture emerges.

It seems that a healthy chunk of those who oppose the current proposal do so because they are in favor of healthcare reform in general, but the current proposal doesn’t go far enough. Lots of people apparently agree with Dennis Kucinich.

When you look at who’s actually in favor of healthcare reform in general, versus opposed to it, you get just over 49% in favor and only 30% opposed. Half in favor of reform. Less than a third opposed to it. If the Senate looked like that, the opposition would not be able to filibuster.

Notably, however, the Senate is not debating healthcare reform in general. They’re debating the current bill. If the poll is to be believed (and this caliber of poll generally is), the majority of Americans want healthcare reform, but half of those supporters want the Democrats’ current proposal killed because it’s not enough.

Here’s my quick-and-dirty Excel layout of the results  (after the cut). Continue reading →

The US-Canada hockey game (it just started as I write this) and this article have got me thinking. If you’re a person who believes “The USA is the greatest…” in some way (i.e., greatest nation ever, greatest society, greatest political power), I’d like to ask a very serious question:

How (if at all) would your feelings and behavior change if the USA were someday not the greatest?

Not that this is inevitable, but it could happen. Of course, first you have to define in what way the US is the greatest. In economic power? Military power? Civil liberties? Government structure? Moral behavior? Humanitarian aid? Your personal definition of righteousness? Some combination of factors? Defining “greatest” is itself a little threatening, because as soon as you commit to a definition of America’s greatness, there’s the possibility that someday that might measurably change.

But let’s say you define our greatness. What if it were to end? What if we slipped to second or third place? And don’t say, “stupid question; America will always be the greatest.” There’s no guarantee of that. Even if we were “the greatest” forever (i.e., billions of years in the future, when the universe dies in heat death, the US still exists and is still the greatest), the thought experiment alone is worthwhile.

How would you feel about your country if it stopped being the greatest? Maybe it would be really good, just not the greatest.

Would you still be proud to be an American, a citizen of one of the better nations on earth, but not the greatest in any obvious way?

Would you become embarrassed and deflect questions about whether you were a patriot?

Would you still love your country?

Would you continue to insist that the US was still the greatest, even if there was no way you could demonstrate its greateness?

How would you react? Just curious.

from flickr user marca-pasos

1. Are you the kind of person who won’t buy a T-shirt made in China or tennis shoes sewn in Myanmar? If so, are you also the kind of person who believes you’re “not hurting anyone” when you smoke a joint?
2. Do you believe that “more enforcement” is the answer to our border problems?
3. If the U.S. legalized say, tennis shoes, do you think that would stop all exploitation and suffering associated with their manufacture and sale to Americans? No? Imagine that.
4. Do you like the idea of American soldiers in long-term military action inside a massively corrupt, destabilized nation, with little possibility of long-term success? What if the dead soldiers were only coming home from a few hundred miles away? What if this hypothetical conflict were, say, ten or twenty years in the future, so your kids could participate?

If one consumes mainstream news, one will perhaps build an image of Mexico as a corrupt, backward banana republic forcing its scary illegal immigrants and nasty, nasty drugs on America with no gratitude for our condescending tourism dollars. Much of that is wrong. More importantly, much of it is our fault. Continue reading →

Reporting from Phoenix – Central American immigrants travel long distances to come to the US, and they like to do it illegally.

But since the Grand Canyon State began enforcing immigration laws with border cameras, immigrants are raging against the machines: They have blocked out the lenses with Post-it notes or Silly String. During the Christmas holidays, they covered the cameras with boxes, complete with wrapping paper.

One dissenting citizen, who wanted his cheap immigrant labor to continue to work for below minimum wage, went after a camera with a pick ax.

Arizona is the only state to implement “photo enforcement,” as it’s known, at the border.

The cameras, paired with other technology, photograph individuals crossing the international border at non-approved locations. Violators are then arrested, fined, and deported–or sometimes sent to prisons or jails.

In California, border cameras are illegal, but Gov. Schwarzenegger proposed a program to add technological enforcement capabilities to 500 border watch areas to generate revenue for the 2010-11 budget. The proposal is unlikely to be a part of the Legislature’s upcoming budget recommendations.

State Assembly Budget Committee Chairwoman Noreen Evans (D-Santa Rosa) has described the proposal as “silly.”

“It’s using big-brother tactics to balance the state budget,” she said. “It’s outlandish.”

That’s certainly been the reaction in Arizona, where the cameras have incited a mini revolt.

Initially, the cameras were thought of as a revenue generator, expected to bring in large amounts of revenue in the first fiscal year of operation, and to protect the state from a wave of Mexican criminals.

But from October 2008, when the program began, to October 2009, the cameras generated much less money than expected for the state’s cash-strapped general fund.

As of September, only 38% of issued violations were paid, the report said. Most violators refuse to pay.

This doesn’t mean the program lacks defenders. The number of border-crossers dead from dehydration investigated in 2009 was the lowest in 15 years, a figure that Lt. Jeff King of the Arizona Department of Public Safety attributes to tough laws and photo enforcement.

“We believe the cameras should stay up,” said King, who is the district commander for the program.

The program was designed to encourage people to pay the fine and not fight their violations: No record is kept of violators who pay their fines and voluntarily return to the southern side of the border.

But, critics note, that hasn’t stopped people from wanting their day in court. About half of the total violations issued are still pending because people have ignored the fines or have requested hearings to challenge them, according to the state Department of Public Safety.

The violations put an “inordinate” load on the immigration courts, said Terry Stewart, a court administrator with Maricopa County. People have flocked to request hearings, and at one point last year, one court branch had cases set up through 2011.

“You just have irate litigants and irate defendants coming in, just mad at the entire photo immigration enforcement system in general,” said Steven Sarkis, a Maricopa County justice of the peace.

The most high-profile protester has been Raul García, who has achieved statewide fame through his efforts to fight the tickets with a monkey mask. The 47-year-old has allegedly illegally crossed the border at least 40 times.

His defense?

There’s no way to prove that he was the border crosser wearing the mask, he says. Lots of people, he adds, are Hispanic males between the ages of 18 and 30 with medium build, dark hair, and monkey masks.

García says he doesn’t fancy himself a criminal.

Amid empty soda cans on the floor of his white station wagon are various rubber disguises, including the famous monkey mask, a Frankenstein, koala, panda bear and a ghost mask that glows in the dark.

So far, four of García’s cases have been dismissed, and he’s been found responsible for seven. The remaining 29 are pending, said VonTesmar’s attorney, Michael Kielsky.

In December, the Maricopa County courts launched a pilot program specially designed to handle the photo enforcement hearing caseload. On one particular day, about 30 people sat in various courtrooms to fight their tickets.

Norma Gutiérrez of Cave Creek, Ariz., came prepared with a manila folder. “How do you know that is my face?” she asked the judge. “How can you tell from that blurry photo?”

With each question, Judge Don Calender’s irritation became more apparent in his monotone voice.

“Were you there at that time, yes or no?” he replied. “Were you illegally crossing into the United States, yes or no? It’s pretty simple.”

In the end, she paid the fine. Gutiérrez, 58, said she basically lives on the freeways in her work.

Among the dissenters fighting photo enforcement are members of a citizens group, the Arizona Citizens Against Photo Immigration Enforcement.

In Maricopa County — where 92% of Arizona’s violations occur — volunteers have been on the streets for about a year, gathering signatures for a 2010 ballot initiative to remove the cameras. On a December afternoon, Jaime Cantú, chairman of the group, and two volunteers gathered signatures at an Arizona State University basketball game.

As ASU fans in maroon and yellow shuffled into the game, a mother with children in a Toyota Prius gave an opposing view as she drove past.

“Photo immigration enforcement keeps people alive with kids and affordable housekeepers, whoo-hoo!” she yelled.

Many people, however, were eager to sign the petition. One couple even took a snapshot with a sign saying “BAN Photo Immigration Radar!”

“It’s a fraud,” said José Jiménez of West Phoenix, who posed with his girlfriend. “It’s a big scam.”

The Arizona Legislature is considering multiple bills to alter or end the photo immigration enforcement system. Gov. Jan Brewer is encouraging the Legislature to place a referendum on the November ballot — so voters can decide whether to scrap the system.

Another dissenter is Ferdinando Saenz, a judge for the Arrowhead Justice Court, who has called the cameras a constitutional violation. He rejects every photo immigration violation that comes before him.

So far, Saenz says, he’s dismissed more than 7,000 violations, potentially worth more than $1 million.

[note: this article was modified from Nicole Santa Cruz's well-written article in the LA Times. The original article is about Arizonans rebelling against cameras that attempt to enforce speeding laws. I changed a few words here and there because I get a kick out of stirring the pot, especially when doing so might make a point about the highly dubious practice of picking and choosing which laws we wish to enforce and which ones we feel entitled to ignore]

This article on Reason.com, by Nick Gillespie, echoes quite a few of my sentiments about Sarah Palin (and one or two about Barack Obama), in a tone that doesn’t make me feel embarrassed for the person writing. Refreshing. Also, kind of funny that Gillespie refers to the people insisting that Palin is not really the bio-mom of her son Trig as “after-birthers”, in contrast to the “birthers” who hound the President.

OK OK OK. I’ll just post some lemony snippets.

On Palin’s less-than-inspired political platform:

… Americans have heard it all before, most recently during the administration of George W. Bush, who with the able assistance of a Republican majority managed to double overall federal spending in real dollars over the course of eight years. If the Republicans are to regroup and advance in another direction, they will need something other than warmed-over Karl Rove speeches.

Continue reading →

Have you seen  this “article” on the Yahoo! front page?

http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/sex/10-things-husbands-should-never-do-552285/?zing

It was pointed out to me earlier this week, and though I thought there were some good points (e.g., the silliness of caring for one’s own children being called “babysitting”), the article annoyed me. Its tone is bellicose, critical, and patronizing. The author plays both sides of the fence to score cheap “you go girl!” points with the readers. No big deal; stuff like this comes up all the time. But when it started to pop up on the social media sites I occasionally frequent, well, that was it.

Me being me, I immediately reversed the gender role criticisms and wrote a “10 things wives should never do” article. My intent was to show how vicious, petty, and unhelpful the original article was. Alex (my wife) read the draft of my list and noticed that things didn’t always “fit.” You can’t just reverse all gender role stereotypes; they don’t always match up like that. Some do (e.g., stereotypes about both men and women talking about things the other isn’t interested in, spouses not showing appreciation for each other’s hard work on meals/household projects, or each gender believing their traditional role takes more work), but others don’t. If I wanted a list about female stereotypes, I’d have to list actual stereotypes, and then I’d have to write my own belittling insults, instead of using the ones Diane Oatis wrote about men. I was not really comfortable with that. And there were some doozies. Just read through that list and you’ll see them screaming at you. Let me tell you, if I learned one thing from that list, it was that I am thankful to no end that I married Alex instead of Diane Oatis.

If you’re looking for female stereotypes, they’re not hard to find. As Alex pointed out, in our grandparents’ day these stereotypes were dropped casually in conversation and assumed in professional publications. She suggested looking at old magazines for a list of annoying wife habits to counter Diane Oatis’ list. And those old media have them by the dozen: women are incapable of rational thought, terrible at driving, overly emotional, less intelligent than men, unable to make difficult decisions, incurable gossips, etc. It seems that Ms. Oatis and her readers have failed to grasp the point that swinging the pendulum the other way is an investment in pendulum swing, when we should be trying to get away from pendulums altogether.

Thanks to consultation with my media naranja, I didn’t write the list (though I still might, I guess). So maybe I didn’t sink to Ms. Oatis’ level, this time. Such writing does not help anything — it makes problems worse — but it’s a constant temptation. We are different, we boys and girls, and it’s easier to bust out the gender-based one-liners for guaranteed laughs from our homeboys or -girls than it is to work out how best to cooperate for higher goals.

Men and women do have important differences (if you don’t know this, I’m not the one to explain the details). But we have far more similarities, in the final analysis, and exaggerating our distinctions — especially in divisive, sabotaging ways — is not good for any of us. Whether the message comes from the Right packaged as family values or from the Left packaged as feminism, any message that unnecessarily divides men from women and encourages unneeded conflict is bad for us.

Perhaps Ms. Oatis will think about this the next time she feels the urge to make a buck from thoughtlessly fanning the flames of the gender war (I’m sure I couldlearn this lesson a little better, too). And maybe Ms. Oatis would be surprised to learn that few actual feminists would find anything useful in her list.

There are German families whose fortunes — or just their livelihoods — were derived from property stolen from Jews imprisoned or killed during the Holocaust. What are those German families’ responsibilities, now, to the surviving descendants of those Jews? The Jewish descendants had their birthright taken by force, threat, or intimidation. The hypothetical Germans are not the ones who stole the birthright (their grandparents did that), but they are living from its benefits. These Germans don’t have to be rich burghers; they may be regular folks who are providing for their children’s education, or trying to run a small business. Do the Jewish descendants have a right to take that away from them? Do the Germans have any responsibility to try to right the wrongs their grandparents committed? Or do crimes like this have a generational statute of limitations, in which — if you wait long enough — nobody owes anybody anything?

We Americans love the Holocaust. We have an appropriate, somber way of talking about it, and I don’t doubt our sincerity when we grieve for the injustice, the dead, the wounded, the orphans, the widows; but our grieving (I’m speaking of the majority who are neither Jewish nor closely associated with any Holocaust victims) is out of proportion to our responses to other holocausts that happened to peoples equally distant from us. I haven’t heard much Holocaust-like grief for Rwanda, Nanjing, or the Philippines. In addition to the pure scope and horror of what happened, maybe we love the Holocaust because (a) it didn’t happen to (most of) us, (b) The US’s actions in that conflict look pretty altruistic and heroic, and (c) such a positive response to genocide distracts us from the genocides (there were several) that many of our ancestors perpetrated, at first unwittingly but later with full malicious knowledge, against the nations that were doing justfinethankyouverymuch when the Europeans showed up and started taking lives and land.

Maybe it’s because I just finished reading Stolen Continents, and I’m easily influenced, but right now it seems to me that there can be only two possible reasons why a dozen generations of Americans have avoided the kind of identity crisis experienced by post-WWII German citizens: denial or ignorance. Our ancestors committed holocausts as systematic, cruel, and unjust as those perpetrated by the Nazis, the Chinese, the Hutus, or the Serbs. The culture of those ancestors is the culture we regularly celebrate in a patriotic furor. Some of the very people we revere as Founding Fathers ordered the massacres, land thefts, and wholesale destruction of cultures who really, truly did not deserve it.

The unformed but powerful feeling of injustice and unease I’ve felt ever since I was a kid living  near Indian reservations has lately been focusing into a clear, horrible picture of the way our nation’s history might have looked from the point of view of the people whose cultures and nations were progressively destroyed by the greed, egocentrism, and duplicity of the culture that ultimately gave rise to my current lifestyle.

I still believe in the noble intentions and acts of many of the people who founded the United States. But I can’t deny the historical record of the massive cost of our immigration and invasion. The pieces can’t be put back together again, and I am not sure what should be done to remedy things.

Map of Kurdish-Occupied Areas

(Map ganked from TheKurds.net)

I have no degrees in history, political science or comparative religion. I have no diplomatic or military experience. I do, however, sometimes think relatively logically, and I try to check my sources most of the time. Therefore, in matters of Resolving Intractable International Problems, I feel I am more qualified than, say, Sarah Palin, and significantly less qualified than, say, everybody else. But I get a thought and it wants to be shared, so here it is:

MY PLAN TO FIX TERRORISM AND ALSO OTHER STUFF

The Kurds have an incredibly raw deal in many ways. There’s that business with Saddam Hussein killing thousands of them with poison gas, but that’s just the icing on a large, ugly historical cake. They’d really like to have their own nation, apparently. So what about this:

Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Armenia all give up some of their most Kurdishest of regions, temporarily. Say, for a fifty year trial period. Draw up a contract and everything. The Kurds get to govern this region. It’s only limited sovereignty, though. Certain powers, including the power to Take It All Back If The Kurds Don’t Deliver, are reserved for the donor nations during the trial period.

During those years, the Kurds do the following two things:

1. Prove that they can govern their new territory by way of some economic, political, and other progress metrics, including human rights (i.e., how do the Kurds treat the people who are suddenly the minorities in their region?)
2. contribute guerrilla-fighter know-how, lots of policepersons and/or soldiers, diplomatic skillz, negotiators, community-builders, liaisons, and whatever else might be useful to anti-terrorism efforts in the donor nations. Thus, the amount of land conditionally donated to the new Kurdish state by each nation might depend on how much they needed fifty years of highly motivated Kurdish human help in reducing terrorism.

This would need to be funded. The donor nations would have to pony up proportional to their ability and need, of course, but the UN (probably with lots of US funding) would need to foot a large part of the bill. The UN could also be the watchdog, making sure everyone held to the contract. This “bill” would not only include outfitting and training the Kurdish personnel (which would be LOTS cheaper than doing the same for American personnel), but would also have to involve a lot of state-building within the hoped-for Kurdish region.

As the fifty (or whatever) years drew down, the UN would evaluate whether the Kurdish proto-state had kept enough of the conditions of its bargain. If not, then power would revert to the original donors, but the Kurds would now have a much-improved place to live, even though they didn’t really run it anymore. Or maybe someone would renegotiate the contract. But if they had done what they said they’d do, the Kurds would gradually return to their new homeland, now with full autonomy.

I think there could be lots of benefits, such as:

• The Kurds get a homeland
• Maybe a civil war or two gets prevented, down the line
• Anti-terrorism efforts are advanced (by people who are a lot more local than us)
• Ties are formed between the Kurdish state and its neighbors, as well as between the neighbors themselves
• The Kurdish state gets infrastructure, human-capital, and other support to get off to a good start
• I get a lucrative consulting job in Washington because of my awesome idea to fix part of the Middle East, thus assuaging my fears of becoming an unemployed ex-junior-professor

Does this sound expensive? It is. But my less-educated-than-everyone-but-Sarah-Palin guess is that the long-term cost would be less than the costs incurred by fifty more years of business as usual. And seriously, we are going to be in Iraq another half century, anyway, so why not make some kind of a reasonable long-term plan for improving things while we’re there, in ways that will make everyone (including us) safer? Maybe not this plan. But some plan.

Sometimes I think American foreign policy is like my housecleaning habits: short-sighted, based on fantasies about messes cleaning themselves up.

What seems to have been found is a lot of good science and a little bad science, with plenty of human foibles thrown in. Of course the negative aspects are exaggerated on websites run by climate change skeptics, and minimized by people on the other side of the debate, but it’s really just science in its underwear.

Humans make judgments based on the wrong kinds of information in many circumstances. For example, we sometimes base our judgments of the quality of a group’s arguments on our perception of how consistent the group is in communicating those arguments. That is, we decide how right people are by how consistently they agree. Many groups, aware of this bias, have learned to emphasize consistency and consensus above almost all other virtues. Civil rights groups have implemented this principle for decades. Nancy Pelosi imposed it on the Democrats, after seeing the political benefits of the Republicans’ emphasis on party loyalty. Science has also felt the pressure to unite behind a single message, knowing that the public would find the science itself to be more credible if there were fewer visible disagreements among scientists. Keep the arguments in the family. Don’t air your dirty laundry.

But that’s stupid. People disagree, and their disagreements, per se, have nothing to do with the quality of the ideas they are discussing. In fact, in areas where we don’t actually know for certain what’s going on (e.g., all of science), the disagreements themselves are an important element of the method for approximating the truth more and more closely. Science can never be perfectly certain about anything, but imperfect certainty is not the same as total ignorance; imperfect certainty leads to working suspension bridges, space shuttles that don’t always blow up, cures for diseases, and therapies for mental disorders. Science doesn’t discover Truth, really; it formulates working models. And the models, in most fields, have worked better and better over time.

Sadly, the way many members of the general public see science seems more like religion or theistic monarchy, and that creates problems. Scientists are supposed to be the infallible high priests handing down wisdom from on high. With that setup, any perceived inconsistency is assumed to invalidate the entire enterprise. Always h the baby with the bathwater.

• A skeleton is found with weird features: throw out a century of evolutionary research.
• Climatologists can’t explain ten years’ tree ring data: throw out half a century’s findings on climate change.
• Red wine drinkers in the Mediterranean live longer than other people elsewhere: throw out all we know about the negative effects of alcohol.

Scientists don’t think like this; only certain non-scientists do. Individual findings almost never invalidate an entire body of work (though there are notable exceptions). Science cannot be held to some arbitrary rules of consistency completely divorced from the realities of what science is. Science, although sometimes requiring quite a lot of expertise and knowledge to carry out, is inherently mundane. The steps are humble and unpretentious. You change one thing to see if another changes. You measure two things and see if they are related. You seek the opinions of other people who understand the issues and look for a consensus. Sometimes you find it, sometimes you don’t, but you almost never find unanimity.

Finally, heed the wisdom of Gavin A. Schmidt, a NASA climatologist: “Science doesn’t work because we’re all nice. Newton may have been an a**, but the theory of gravity still works.”

Contradictions — even (or especially) my own — bug me.

1. The congresspersons opposing a government-run option in the currently-proposed healthcare reform plan are all beneficiaries of a lavish single-payer healthcare plan funded at taxpayer expense.
2. Al Gore’s monster mansion and constant airline flights continue to create, like, a thousand Pakistani peasants’ worth of carbon emissions.
3. We still claim to be a nation interested in peace, but we spend more on our military than anyone else. In fact, we spend about as much as all the other military budgets in the world, combined.
4. The people pushing for the harshest punishments for illegal immigrants are often the same ones who celebrate our immigrant forefathers. Said forefathers settled here, usually without the permission of the American cultures and nations that were already in place, and often in direct violation of the wishes of the legitimate inhabitants.
5. Our current President was elected largely as a reaction to the excesses of his predecessor, but he has since followed Bush 43’s lead in his use of executive powers, his capitulation to our oligarchy, his treatment of suspected terrorists (with the arguably small exception of the prisoners in Guantánamo), and even our overseas military involvements.
6. Several of the lawmakers in the healthcare debate — both pro and con — are accepting donations from organizations with a vested interest in making sure any new program serves corporations rather than American citizens, and it shows.
7. And finally (drum roll please)…. The GOP’s health care plan for its employees covers abortions.

That last one surprised even my cynical self, I gotta say.

…or something. There has been some discussion in the tech-aware world about a major step in the process of de-Americanizing the internet: non-Latin characters have now been approved for (eventual) use in domain names. This is a much bigger deal than it seems on the surface, btw, and it seems like one of those areas where things could go either very wrong or very right. Like the Marshall Plan after WWII. In fact, some guy named David Coursey at PC World has some comments that echo some of the sentiments from that time period:

is there any doubt that if another country had “invented” the Internet–say the Russians–that we’d all have had to learn to type Cyrillic characters by now? Moreover, do you think they or the Chinese or Japanese would have changed the Internet just to suit English-speakers. [pic]

Indeed, had the Internet been developed around a non-Latin character set, would it even exist today? Has the success of the Internet not been linked to the role of English as the global language of business and popular culture?

Ignoring the chicken-egg problem Coursey seems to miss, it is, to my mind, fairly clear that the “invention” and development of the internet were initially driven by the U.S., as much as anyone ever invents anything (strongly tied to the U.S. military, actually). Believe me, I feel the same urge to hold onto something I consider “ours” as the next guy. It’s a rabid, jealous, strangely fearful feeling, actually. But I’m not sure those feelings should always be listened to.

Mr. Coursey has a lot of “what if” questions in his little rant on pcworld. Let’s ask some more: what if the U.S. had said “Screw Germany, screw Japan; they started the war; let them fix their destroyed economies and infrastructures themselves”? Would the world now be a better place to live in? What if, somehow, inventors of automobiles, telephones, vaccines, bicycles, steel-reinforced concrete, etc. had been able to keep total control of their creations in perpetuity? And what do we now do about situations where pharmaceutical companies lobby to retain control (and forced high prices) of life-saving drugs they have developed for ever-increasing lengths of time? While we’re at it, we can wonder whether human genes should be patented.

This area can easily become a classic Prisoners’ Dilemma situation. Do we do what’s best for us and ours, at the expense of everyone else — and, in the long run, even ourselves — or do we sacrifice something in order for everyone to benefit? It’s not clear that this internet thing fully fits that definition, but it’s certainly conceivable.

I don’t deny that there is a huge potential for unintended consequences if the internet is “given away,” especially if the process is done badly. However, I also feel that part of what has made the U.S. a great nation (yes, it is still great) has been our habit of sharing the benefits of our labor. Often, international situations like this are not a zero-sum game; it is actually possible for everyone to win sometimes. I still have a basically optimistic belief that the internet, as a means of providing unfettered communication, can be a force for good: education, empowerment, economic regulation, political transparency, etc. It might turn out that giving it away is the right thing.

Mr. Coursey apparently feels at least a little similar, ending his post by saying this is a bad day for the English Language, but “…a good day for the billions of people who do not speak my mother tongue. They have rights, too, even if I am not always happy about what that means.”

Rukhsana Kauser is my new hero(ine). When the leader of a roaming band of terrorists and some of his thugs barged into her home and started beating her parents, she grabbed a hatchet, surprised the main guy, killed him with his own AK-47,  wounded another thug (with the help of her older brother), and sent the rest fleeing. She killed one of the most wanted men in Kashmir, a leader of one of the most dangerous terrorist organizations in the world.

I’ve found this story on the BBC and other international news sites. Since no Americans were killed or heroized, I can’t seem to find it in any American news feeds. However, it is on certain American blogs: gun rights blogs. After the story is summarized or linked, there are comments like “Hell yeah!” or “Tell THAT to the gun control wonks!”

To overused a phrase of the day… wait, what?

How does Ms. Kauser’s story support the cause of personal gun ownership rights in the U.S.? Ms. Kauser did not stop the terrorists with her concealed-carry Smith & Wesson. She did not stop them with her father’s venerated Remington twelve-gauge. The only gun owners were terrorist criminals. The only guns in this story were probably used in numerous horrific crimes before one or two of them were turned on their original owners. I’m a supporter of a “personal ownership” interpretation of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but apparently this has not scrambled my grasp of logic to the point where this would make any sense to me.

I suppose maybe the American gun people are arguing that she should have owned a gun, and I could see that point, but then the story ceases being a very good demonstration of either the benefits of gun ownership or the dangers of a lack of such. She defeated the militants without owning a gun, which is not how these pro-gun stories usually turn out. Still, this is perhaps the only argument I could see as supporting U.S. gun ownership. I mean, if we had roaming gangs of terrorists with AK-47s who regularly took over suburban homes by force.

I have a nagging feeling that’s not the real reason this story keeps appearing on gun ownership blogs, though. I wonder if it isn’t just because there’s a potential victim, and then there is gun-related violence done to a Bad Person. Maybe the bloggers and commenters don’t look any farther than that. If this is the case, it says some small little volumes about the mentality of some of our gun-ownership advocates.

Rukhsana Kauser is not a good choice as poster girl for gun ownership advocates. Feminists, on the other hand…

I am becoming ever more cynical. Recently, it seems to me that ingroup/outgroup distinctions, along with ingroup loyalty and outgroup derogation, are stronger for most people than the things those people say they believe. Examples (callously lumping people together and ignoring exceptions for my own evil rhetorical purposes):

If the Democrats really believed their “save the planet” schtick, Democrat public servants would have drastically lower personal resource consumption than the average US citizen.

If Conservatives truly cared about reining in bloated programs and reducing the power of the Federal government, they would have been leading the charge against our military buildup since WWII in general, and against our two most recent wars, more specifically. Or at the very least they would have felt kinda conflicted.

If Conservatives were really opposed to giving social and political power to wealthy entertainers, to those with family, interpersonal, or criminal issues, or to those with and substance abuse problems, people like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Bill O’Reilly would be unknown.

Most obviously, if certain among the Hollywood elite truly cared about justice (social or any other kind), there would be absolutely nobody defending Roman Polanski.

I think these (and many other) disparate ideologies/actions are examples of people supporting their ingroup and slamming the outgroup, rather than doing what their belief system tells them is right. What we do and what we say — maybe even what we think –are deeply at odds. The immediate rewards and punishments we get from our peers continually overwhelm the future rewards we may get from holding fast to the things we believe are true. We could (and do) argue about what we should think; but I sometimes despair of that mattering, because what we think seems to have so little effect on what we actually do.

In an effort to illustrate my conflicted feelings about Kim Stanley Robinson’s extremely preachy style of Sci Fi writing, I present a hypothetical conversation between him and his research assistant:

KSR: I’m working on a novel about the rational obviousness of science, its role in all of human progress, and the stupidity of Judeo-Christian belief systems.
ASSISTANT: Yes, sir.
KSR: I’ll need you to get me some texts to study: physics, astronomy, planetology, geology, climatology, chemistry, quantum theory, biology, systems theory, and so forth.
ASSISTANT: Yes, sir. What about the social sciences?
KSR: Social scientists are just people who didn’t have the SAT scores to get into the hard sciences. Their so-called “theories” are unscientific mumbo-jumbo with no demonstrable usefulness or effectiveness. Human behavior is so complex it can’t even be studied scientifically.
ASSISTANT: Actually, sir, there are quite a few well-validated predictive models of various aspects of human behavior, and empirical research from the social sciences has been responsible for huge improvements in the human condition. Besides, human behavior is certainly no more complex than, say, an ecosystem or a planetary climate. Why, if we simply look through the list of Nobel Prize winners from the last half-century—
KSR: I said it’s mumbo-jumbo and too complex to study.
ASSISTANT: Yes, sir.
KSR: And Buddhism is awesome.

So now there’s some dirt on ACORN, and what dirt it is! It’s like an episode of Law & Order; the kind where you shake your head at the TV and say, “This wouldn’t happen in real life.” ACORN leaders (and Nancy Pelosi, FWIW) claim the nastiness was only a few people in low positions, and that the organization itself would never condone such slimy tactics. Exactly like the response of the military and Presidency in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse debacle, actually.

The ever-vigilant GOP has demanded (and the Democrats are on the bandwagon almost as fast) that ACORN be punished. One of our great American traditions is to punish organizations by taking away their federal moneys. And I think that works. For organizations, money is like food and water; removing it gets them where it hurts. Awesomely, however, some overzealous Republicans, who apparently didn’t realize they were not supposed to upset the status quo, drafted a bill that would withhold funds from ALL federally-funded organizations with fraud complaints against them.

As anyone who pays attention might have predicted, this broad criterion turned up a nearly comprehensive list of military industrial contractors (i.e., Haliburton, Lockheed-Martin, Northrup-Grumman, and so on). Some of them have literally dozens of fraud charges against them There’s an unofficial list here, created at the behest of a freshman Congressman from Florida named Grayson.

Naturally, I don’t believe any of those massive, multibillion-dollar corporations will have any of their money cut, even if their fraud amounts to thousands of times more than ACORN’s. The Republicans will howl, and the Democrats will get all conciliatory, and everyone will work out a deal whereby the corrupt community organizers are cut off from the Federal teat, while the corrupt weapons manufacturers will get a maternal nip on the nose and then be ushered back to the privileged sucking spots. The military-industrial complex is implicated in the careers of quite a number of our congresspersons on both sides of the aisle, and (in a not-unrelated note) we Americans, by and large, are more tolerant of organizations that build bombers than of those that build communities, all frauds being equal.

Still, even if the consequences of this little drama are painfully predictable, stupid human tricks like this give me unwholesome giggles of political amusement. It’s nothing more sophisticated, really, than the thrill of watching a 5-year-old get pwned on the playground when he realizes that for every finger pointing at the other kid, three more are pointing back in his own face.

People are sometimes stupid about communism. Maybe the word serves as such a useful blunt instrument of verbal assault (with a nail in it) that they forget communism has a reality outside their witty repartée, and is therefore subject to logical thought. I am not a fan of communism, and I think it is/was a Very Bad Idea, but can we get this one thing straight, please? Pay close attention:

Sharing is not bad.

No, seriously. Communism had lots of problems: the belief that totalitarianism would eventually lead to its polar opposite, the huge means-ends problems, the bizarre insistence that giving a small number of people a huge amount of unrestricted power would lead them to voluntarily go back to farming potatoes, the massive imperialist expansion…

But the sharing was the good part. Sure, forced sharing is a different issue; I understand that; but even there, it’s the forcing, not the sharing, that makes it problematic. Remember kindergarten? Sharing GOOD. Selfishness BAD. The fact that sharing was a key principle cited by a crashed-and-burned misguided utopian movement doesn’t make sharing itself bad.

This “Obama is going to indoctrinate my kids” flap has provided marvelous political theater, especially given that it recapitulates the issues surrounding a similar speech given by GHW Bush in 1991. I think there are some real issues raised, by it, though not of the catastrophic caliber suggested by the Rightest of the Right. I am still researching the issue of the “altered” portion of Obama’s speech (quotes used because I still haven’t found credible evidence that he changed it significantly after the furor started; but I’m still looking).

On some of the conservative blogs and news sites I visited in trying to figure out this controversy and its highly tenuous connections with Oprah’s “Pledge” video, I found some reasonable comments. However, I also found comments that strayed from Reasonable, ran through Questionable’s back yard, and hopped the fence right into Idiotic. Since those are much more fun than intelligent comments, here are some of them (from this blog post, about the “pledge” video):

“… Did you see the two Cubans in the Video-Cameron and Eva? Well screw them! I pledge to keep using plastic at the grocery story and driving an SUV!”

“I pledge to add a few more minutes to my really HOT showers.

“I’m with you. Today I tossed a plastic bottle in my trash in honor of the disgust I felt for this hair raising filth.”

“I pledge to throw perfectly good paper right into the trash.”

“I pledge to walk past the recycling bin at the gym and put my water bottle into the trashcan while horrified people look at me. And I will smile.”

Wow! How awesome is that!? “I disagree with the President, so I’m going to do something generally antisocial, like make my country a little big uglier, a little bit trashier, and a little bit less energy efficient.”  Why stop there? Express your displeasure with others’ ideas through this interesting tactic in other domains, too!

“Did you see the President trying to prop up the American auto industry? Well screw them! I pledge to never buy another American car or automotive accessory!”

“The President thinks he can indoctrinate my kids to do better in school, does he? Then I pledge to have a heart-to-heard talk with each of my kids, on the topic of how stupid school is, and how awesome it is to drop out. Also, I think I’ll keep them home one day a week, playing video games.”

“Obama is still fighting terrorists? Well, I pledge to stop my monthly donations to the United Way and instead give my hard-earned charitable cash to whatever shell organization will launder it and give it to Al Qaeda, while horrified people in the human resources office look at me. And I will smile.”

All joking aside, the most painful comment on that site was the following, perhaps so poignant because I believe the commenter really could not imagine any other point of view:

EXCUSE ME! For 8 years, and still today, our troops (under POTUS GWB) FREED over 50 MILLION people in two wars. Not only that, but we lost many of those troops being patient for those freed people to understand and trust their newfound liberty.

Here’s the situation: The President is going to give an address to the nation’s schoolchildren. Initial reports say he will emphasize the importance of taking their education seriously, staying in school, etc. He’s a controversial President. There is an outcry from the other side of the political continuum. There are fears he will push his political platform through the nation’s children. It sounds like Nazism, or Communism, or some kind of scary -ism.

This happened in 1991. The President was George H.W. Bush. His Department of Education encouraged teachers to broadcast the speech and use it as a teaching opportunity. Bush encouraged students to write him letters, with suggestions on how he could better achieve his goals. The Democrats were upset. The party leader called Bush’s address a “paid political advertisement.” Bush’s supporters said that was ridiculous.

So now we come to the current hullaballoo, suspiciously similar to the above, except the players have all flipped sides. Now the Conservatives are accusing the President of indoctrinating the kids. Some school districts won’t broadcast the speech. Many parents will keep their kids home, rather than risk them hearing it.

Somehow (I am seriously not sure how), this has become confused with the paranoia about “pledging allegiance to Obama.” Here’s my synopsis of both issues, after some internetz researchz: Continue reading →

I was recently referred to a blog post so I could understand better why some parents are concerned about allowing their children to hear the upcoming education speech. I also read about a dozen others, trying to get a handle on all the facts (as much as one can do so via the interwebs).

A long time ago, in a galaxy called High School, a teacher taught me that people who use underhanded rhetorical techniques quite likely got nothin’ else. Of course, it’s possible to use nasty debate tricks and have a good point, but I think the presence of the former does reduce the probability of the latter, overall. There are definitely liberal outlets (*cough*HuffPo*cough*) that use these ridiculous tactics on a regular basis, but I think I find them even more from the Right. Perhaps I should do a structured study to test whether this is just a perception issue.

Anyway, here’s most of the dumb tricks from that blog post.

Why Parents Don’t Trust Educator-In-Chief
By MICHELLE MALKIN | Posted Thursday, September 03, 2009 4:30 PM PT

the sneering defenders of Barack Obama – can’t fathom – the cult of Obama – activist language – Obama’s bureaucrats – whitewash – the taint of left-wing radicalism – the Educator-in-Chief and his “comrades.”

The bulk of the post is actually about William Ayers, and is composed of quotations establishing his leftist views. Standard.