Entries Tagged 'thoughts' ↓

Here is some rampant, unsupported speculation: Maybe there’s some kind of case to be made for brain lateralization as a metaphor for gender abilities/roles/specializations/uniquestuffs. You know, say that one side was like “male” and the other was like “female.” No, seriously; dig it:

• Specialization obviously occurs.
• There’s some nature going on, but obviously some nurture, too. Separating the two effects can be difficult.
• The apparent specialization effects that appear when averaging across lots of individuals often disappear when you look closely at any one individual. In other words, variation is more consistent than consistency.
• Because of the above point, any interventions or even statements regarding individual specialization are likely to be misguided without really getting to know the individual(s) in question, first.
• Popular belief about specialization is (a) ridiculously simplistic, (b) sometimes inaccurate, and (c) highly resistant to change.

I know, right? It works… at least as far as I’ve taken it. I’m not sure how much farther the metaphor can be pushed, though.

I have a habit of trying to point out logical problems in ideas by suggesting counterexamples. I know proof by analogy isn’t ultimately very valuable, and I know not everything can be demonstrated (or disproved) by examples, but it still seems valid at least as a way of illustrating — in ways people can understand immediately, if I do it right — the problems with certain ideas.

So, back when Mel Gibson’s “The Patriot” was the hot movie, I got several versions of an email circulated by well-meaning LDS people (I have just briefly tried in vain to find a copy of it on the internet… but if anyone reads this they might remember it) alleging that some general authority had, in the case of this movie, suspended the “R-ban,” encouraging people to see it. Because it was so patriotic and authentic and historical.

Well, the movie was R-rated for good reason: violence (IMDB’s parents’ guide gives it a 9 out of 10 for violence & gore). I personally spoke to many people at the time who had given their own R-ban a temporary leave of absence so they could see it. I think it’s pretty clear that we were willing to overlook the violence because of the redeeming quality of portraying historically accurate events important to the founding of our nation (the US, in case this is not obvious).

So I was saying  to my Wif this morning that we should reignite that email chain but this time claim that certain “patriotic” parts had been “censored,” and that good patriots should demand that they be put back in (Note; this was silly speculation and I do not actually intend to do this). Then the email would explain that the “censored” parts were things for which many Latter-day Saints who consider themselves patriotic would probably not suspend their no-R-rated-movies policy. You know, sex scenes.

Gibson’s most violent scenes (famous for their unrestrained brutality) were, as I understand, largely speculation, though it was a war; horrible things happened. But plenty of things that fall outside our internal filters did actually happen, and they involved the men and women we consider responsible for the birth of our nation. How would Mormons’ reaction to Gibson’s film have been different if the one of the important, historically accurate events was, say, a graphic-type sex scene between Thomas Jefferson and his slave, Sally Hemmings? Or a brutally graphic (you know, Mel-Gibson-style) scene where American colonists murder, rape, and destroy the homes of Native Americans, under orders (or in some cases simply with the inaction of) some of our revered founding fathers? What about a zany sex romp scene involving Benjamin Franklin and one of his alleged mistresses?

My suspicion is that no, the Church membership (in general) would not be open to either (a) sex or (b) immoral actions by the Founding Fathers being depicted in any detail (or perhaps not at all) in movies, no matter how historically accurate those depictions might be, and no matter how important the events might have been to the founding of our nation. It seems to me that we don’t need as much censorship as we sometimes think we do; we self-censor very effectively as it is.

So my loving wif has been describing to me an EPIC (or epic-esque) thread on feminist Mormon housewives. It was dominated by a guy named Nick who had some issues. Big ones. And it captured both our attention (honeypie’s and mine). I made word clouds of Nick’s comments and the general thread, for some kind of comparison. I don’t think this exercise really illuminated anything, but it was fun. What I would really love to do, though I don’t want to take the time away from real research to do it, is to look at the functional or other kinds of patterns in Nick’s communication with the fMh crowd, and theirs with him. I personally found his comments to be low in insight (as would be expected from someone wrapped up in his own problems), occasionally sexist, and frequently patronizing. But my heart went out to the guy, anyway; he has a very, very long row to hoe.

Here’s Nick’s word cloud, made of only his comments (with quotes excised).

Here’s everyone else’s comments (Nick’s not included). I wasn’t gonna do this b/c it’s 1am and dude, I’m tired. But this is fun/compelling quasi-analysis. Sorry it’s a different style. I know that makes it a bit harder to compare.

Finally, Here’s the word cloud for the general thread, nick’s comments mixed with everyone else’s.

Not sure I see any deep meaning here, but make of it what you will. It was a fun exercise. For my job I may eventually have need of some very-smart text analysis software; I think I’ve found something to test it on :)

Update: Because this is so much fun (and preferable to the other work I need to be doing this weekend), I did one more thing: a word difference cloud, if you will. The hacked-together list of words in colors (below) represent the magnitude in relative frequency difference between Not-Nick and Nick in word usage. That is, words used a greater percentage of the time by people besides Nick are blue, and if they are used a lot more frequently than Nick uses them, they’re really big. I made the more-frequently-Nickish words green.

I combined several groups of similar word forms. Those are represented between curly brackets {}.

sexless {woman} listening it’s sex {try} {feel} like out {say} {thing} {want} change even great home must mutual really {sexual} statement {way} {word} what around being better did didn’t each find {get} having {he} herself how {intimate} life lot love may month mormon {need} now often own part patriarchy people person physical please problem same situation something that’s then through whether wow advice again agree always back before best between both can’t case certainly come common community {control} culture day different discussion {do} duty either enough ever every experience express fact family feminist few first form general {go} hard help here hope just kids kind know level long maybe much neglect off others pressure pretty probably put raise rather read relationship responsibility right see simply someone sometimes spouse still subject suggest temple thank these though thought {time} too two understand us {use} we’ve week where while why without work world wrong yet {don’t} abusive address anything care comment desire {give} good hear {husband} man {mean} never notion once point reason seems sense {sensitive} sexuality she’s should sure take together very years yes another blog church etc {marriage} our possible tell {them} comments {issue} least let many men nothing {obligation} well think {wife} believe {make} idea important might matter

Method notes/examples: this method will show a more head-to-head comparison, though it has disadvantages, such as possibly exaggerating small differences in relative frequency. To illustrate what I have done, consider the forms of “you” (you/your/you’re). These are predictably dominant in comments by people besides Nick (a full 5% of wordage!), while Nick used this word group less (1.9%). The difference between those (3.1%) is one of the largest in the word collection, and not-Nick used it much more frequently than Nick did, so it would be big and blue. By contrast, forms of “I/me” (I/I’m/I’ll/I’ve/me/my/myself) were used more often by Nick (5.8% versus 3.4%) so {I} is in big, green font. All quibbles with the method are probably accurate, but I probably won’t have time to go back and revisit this. Oh, and I left out {I} and {you} because they were just massively disproportionate, as well as very predictable, in relative frequency difference.

I sometimes wish I could go get a new PhD in something else–in this case, sociology or anthropology, to study LDS people. I’ve been having some odd thoughts about de facto succession of leadership and participation in the church. I feel, lately, that I have seen a pattern emerge from time to time:

1. Apparently doctrinally-orthodox member distances him/herself from the church
2. Apparently doctrinally less-orthodox member distances him/herself from the church
3. #2 comes back
4. #1 does not

Of course, it could be my imagination, but this combination of those factors seems to happen a disproportionate amount of the time (not necessarily a majority of the time, though). My seat-of-the-pants hypothesis is this: What if this reflects an underlying difference in styles of belief? Members in category 2 (from the list) might have more of a willingness to acknowledge doubts and uncertainty, or to question orthodoxy, than those from category 1. These differences could lead to different reactions when faith-challenging events occur: A few category 1 members might find that their less-considered faith is fatally threatened by such challenges, while more of the category 2 members, despite initial distancing due to the doubts and disillusionment activated by the challenges, may find that their intellectual foundations (built through years of questioning, doubting, and resolving those things) provide them, ultimately, with answers that lead them back to the Gospel.

This is a standard question among many people of faith, and it assumes a lot of things I really can’t back up with data (so it’s rank speculation). But it feels like at least a hypothesis worth pursuing. But I’m not done yet.

The real kicker, for me, is that–if the process I’ve imagined is really happening–the membership or leadership of the Church may gradually come to be represented more and more by those in category 2, with interesting implications. For example, I think (again, no data) that this style of belief may be favored more by people ultimately drawn, for a variety of reasons, to more liberal social-political views, more intellectual pursuits (higher levels of traditional education?), and a less purely-emotional approach to faith.

The results may or may not be good for the Church in the long run; I don’t know. But this is interesting. The world is run by those who show up for the meetings. The Church is the same way.

Dan Savage’s column has always been a sometimes-entertaining example of pandering to one’s audience and earning revenue through controversy. Now, however, Savage seems to have made the leap from occasionally funny sexual entertainment shockster to ideological Doberman. Sure, his narrow-minded bias is employed for only the best of motivations, but isn’t that always the case? The first reply in this column — currently a popular social media buzz-link — is a showcase of dirty rhetorical tricks and blatant bigotry, covered with a thin sheet of popular sentiment (at least probably popular among his regular readers).

“L.R.,” the writer to whom Savage is responding, expresses exactly one opinion that may be taken as anti-gay: “As someone who… does not support gay marriage…” This was apparently enough to justify a very nasty ad hominem, ad your-whole-presumed-social-group-inem attack. Sections of Savage’s reply are reproduced below, with my comments:

“Gay kids are dying. So let’s try to keep things in perspective: F*** your feelings.”

It seems Savage packed the following assertions into that line:

1. Gay kids are dying.
2. You do not support gay marriage.
3. Therefore, there is no need for me to give even minimally respectful consideration to your words.

Niiice. I wonder if Mr. Savage would agree with this rhetorical approach in some other context, such as justification to invade Afghanistan. “Mr. President, I feel that a full-scale invasion might be an overreaction.” “Mr. Reporter, Americans are dying. So let’s try to keep things in perspective: F*** your feelings.”

What do you think? Is it OK to use a current crisis to completely marginalize the views of someone who is honestly trying to find common ground on the crisis topic? Perhaps just as disturbing is Savage’s implicit assertion (later to be made explicit) that opinions such as those of L.R. are exactly why “gay kids are dying.”

Moving on.

“A question: Do you ‘support’ atheist marriage? Interfaith marriage? Divorce and remarriage? All are legal, all go against Christian and/or traditional ideas about marriage, and yet there’s no ‘Christian’ movement…”

This one’s not as dramatic, but it’s still a dirty trick. No response to L.R.’s request that Savage tone down his anti-religious rhetoric; instead, Savage attacks the consistency of Christian behavior in related areas. Reminds me of the parody of Bush 43, in which someone asks him a question about his policies, and he responds, “Why do you hate freedom?” Perhaps we as a civilization have become so numbed to the tricks played on us by mainstream-media talking heads that we simply can’t see that a counterattack is not the same thing as a reasonable response to a concern. Also, there have been such movements in the past (except, maybe, atheist marriage), but those who iniated them lost the legal and social battles. I would have thought Savage would know that.

“And—sorry—but you are partly responsible for the bullying and physical violence being visited on vulnerable LGBT children.”

As I would write on any of my students’ papers if they used such logic, this is an empirical question and the statement is unsuported. In this context, I think it’s downright irresponsible. It is incumbent on Mr. Savage to demonstrate that people with views like those of L.R. (recap: loves the Lord; does not support gay marriage; heartbroken about consequences of bullying of gay individuals; thinks we are all imperfect, fallible, and in need of a savior; thinks it’s not OK to believe anyone is better or more worthy than someone else; thinks it is OK to take public figures to task for making blanket discriminatory statements about a large, diverse group of religious people based on a small number of observations) are “partly responsible” for “bullying and physical violence” toward vulnerable LGBT children. What is the evidence of this? How strong is the evidence?

As I tell my students, if you don’t have data to support your statements, at least find good reasoning, and reduce the certainty of your statement accordingly. If you don’t even have good reasoning, then why are you writing such a thing? Test it, Mr. Savage. Use your dollars or your influence to support some research to answer your question, instead of simply flinging the accusations around. It’s not an impossible study: get a nice, representative sample of gay kids or young adults who have been bullied, go find the bullies, do some assessments and data collection with the bullies’ parents, and find out if they’re like L.R. You could also test the assertion that people like L.R. are indirectly responsible for gay kids being bullied, though that would take fancier research design; still hardly beyond the scope of good behavioral science. Wouldn’t that be better than simply accusing anyone who disagrees of sharing responsibility for the deaths of children? I don’t know what the actual facts in this area will turn out to be, but until someone does, perhaps Savage should refrain from lambasting large social groups with what must be assumed to be nothing more than his suppositions.

Early on in the mess o’words, Savage begins to express a discerible “logic.” At this point it appears to be:

1. Gay kids are dying from bullying
2. L.R. says he does not support gay marriage
3. L.R. is part of the reason gay kids are dying.

Except actually there seems to be another point, when we read a little farther:
2 1/2. L.R. is Christian

And that’s where it gets really ugly. How ugly? Let’s find out. Note that Savage never clarifies the extent to which his most vitriolic remarks should be applied, but they seem at least to be for L.R., and to include a vague category of people who self-identify as Christians. Here’s my understanding of the not-very-subtle meaning of some of the remarks:

“…even if those people strive to express their bigotry in the politest possible way…”

(a) “Those people” are a group apart from you and yours, and (b) they are bigots.

“…there may not be any gay adults or couples where you live, or at your church, or in your workplace…”

L.R. lives a culturally restricted life.

“…while you can only attack gays and lesbians at the ballot box, nice and impersonally…”

(1) Voting in ways that limit or redefine legal marriage for people in gay and lesbian relationships is a personal attack on gay and lesbian people.
(2) People who vote like this prefer to hurt others from afar (perhaps they are cowards?).
(3) L.R. is such a person.

“Real gay and lesbian children. Not political abstractions, not ‘sinners.’”

L.R. and/or Christians do not understand the reality of gay/lesbian children, and categorize them as “sinners.”

“Try to keep up…”

L.R. is kind of slow.

“The dehumanizing bigotries that fall from the lips of ‘faithful Christians…’”

(1) Christians who think they are faithful yet hold opinions like those L.R. expressed are not faithful.
(2) Such people say dehumanizing, bigoted things (possibly this means saying they do not “support gay marriage”, though this is not clear).

“…the lies about us that vomit out from the pulpits of churches that “faithful Christians” drag their kids to on Sundays…”

(1) Again with the “faithful Christians” in quotation marks bit.
(2) Children of such people must be forced to attend church.
(3) The religious leaders of such people universally say untrue things about LGBT people.

“…give your children license to verbally abuse, humiliate, and condemn the gay children they encounter at school.”

(1) Children of people like L.R. (or perhaps just Christians with similar views on gay marriage) perceive their parents’ statements (e.g., “I do not support gay marriage”) as license to do all that stuff to gay children.

(2) I think it’s implied that these children apparently actually do such things.

Savage rarely specifies how frequent or common his accusations are, within the outgroup that L.R. belongs to, and that’s another cheap debate trick: leave that kind of thing undefined. The impression is of pervasiveness, but if anyone ever accuses you of that, you can point to your vagueness and claim your comments were only intended to apply to a minority of the target group.

“Your encouragement—along with your hatred and fear—is implicit.”

(1) Holding these opinions is the same as encouraging your children to hurt others.
(2) Such opinions are evidence of personal hate and fear (presumably toward gays or LGBT-related issues).

This is another old trick: characterize opinions differing from yours as being due to some socially-unacceptable impulse (i.e., hate and fear), implicitly ruling out the possibility that they might arise from any rational or positive motivation or mental process.

“…having listened to Mom and Dad talk about how gay marriage is a threat to family and how gay sex makes their magic sky friend Jesus cry…”

(1) Those who do “not support gay marriage” tell their children that gay marriage is a threat to family.
(2) They also tell their kids that gay sex is displeasing to God
(3) If you disagree with Dan Savage on this point, he will publicly mock your most cherished ideals instead of addressing the substance of the disagreement.

“The kids of people who see gay people as sinful or damaged or disordered and unworthy of full civil equality—even if those people strive to express their bigotry in the politest possible way (at least when they happen to be addressing a gay person)—learn to see gay people as sinful, damaged, disordered, and unworthy.”

Since there’s nobody else’s letter being responded to, here, we can only assume Savage is saying that people who say what L.R. said about gay marriage also see gay people as sinful, damaged, disordered, and unworthy of full civil equality. And of course there’s another causal statement, though this one at least has some support in the form of research from other areas: children do tend to accept their parents’ opinions in many areas (though Savage might also want to read up on research showing that this doesn’t happen nearly as much as parents might wish it did).

“…we’re seeing the fruits of [your encouragement, hatred, and fear]: dead children.”

At this point, we can sketch a rough picture of the full Dan Savage Theory of How Gay Children Get Bullied to Death:

Step 1: People (possibly only Christians) who do not “support gay marriage” say things like this where their children can hear it. It does not matter what else gets said (e.g., anything about tolerance, acceptance, humility, equality, etc.).

[unclear: The theory may also stipulate that people with these opinions are necessarily filled with hate and fear, are not religiously faithful, force their children to attend churches where the leaders tell blatant lies about gay people, and tell their children gay marriage is a threat to family. Also, the theory may stipulate that such people are less intelligent than those who have different opinions.]

Step 2: Children of such people perceive such comments [again, not clear whether this only refers to the comments in step 1 or to all the comments Savage later atrributes to his ill-defined outgroup] as license to hurt any gay children they happen to know.

Step 3: These gay children experience significant harm (this is a charitable reading of Savage’s comments), and may die as a result.

If supported, this theory might require some serious changes in how we talk and behave toward gay/lesbian issues (not just toward individuals), because–in the “strict” reading of the theory–simply disagreeing on the point of gay marriage rights is enough to cause your children (or your children’s friends) to bully their gay friends to death.

This kind of theory has serious implications for public policy and debate. If the theory Savage has outlined were to be supported, then we might also reasonably expect to find that:

• Atheists expressing contempt for their neighbors who do not recycle will lead children to bully their non-recycling neighbors’ children to death, even if they also talk about what wonderful people these neighbors are.
• Baptists who talk too much about patriotism may lead their children to contribute to the deaths of children who have doubts about American cultural values.
• Classic rock fans expressing disdain of “emo” music may lead their children to bully emo kids to death.
• Voting a Democrat ticket in the next election and telling one’s family about one’s opposition to the Republican political platform may lead children to kill Republican children.
• Muslims who politely express an opinion that they do not support America’s consumerism or Middle-East interventionism are partially responsible for 9/11.

You see where this is going, and how ludicrous it is. I do not in any way condone what has happened to the many children recently reported to have suffered from bullying or violence because of their sexual orientation. I don’t even discount the possibility that a chain of events like what Savage has so viciously outlined could turn out to be real. This piece of writing is not intended to endorse any particular political, social, or even moral position, except one:

Bad thinking and bad logic are still bad, even when they are employed in the service of a popular (or even objectively right!) cause. Prejudice is always the product of faulty thinking, but those who express it always think they’re being reasonable. If cornered on their sloppy (or even directly unethical) argumentation, they sometimes bust out a version of “ends justify means” rationale. But they are wrong. In many cases, their means are all you really need to know about them.

And then…

“…at schools filled with bigoted little monsters created not in the image of a loving God, but in the image of the hateful and false “followers of Christ” they call Mom and Dad.”

Does Savage really not see the mind-exploding irony (or hypocrisy) of writing something like this in a popularly-read newspaper column when his entire thesis seems to be that even carefully-phrased disagreements about others’ identities can turn into child violence? By his theory, he should probably be responsible (or, as he puts it, “partially responsible”) for about a thousand juvenile-perpetrated murders of Christian children, by now.

Perhaps Mr. Savage’s real reason for writing his vicious little piece was to generate some controversy in non-readers of his column and some good old moral indignation in the readers. Or maybe his real reason is expressed best by one of the first phrases he wrote to a reader who had civilly expressed a difference of perspective:

“Did that hurt to hear? Good.”

So I was getting frustrated with partisan rhetoric about taxes and income. Yes, talking about percentages and rates and proportions and whatnot can often increase clarity with complex data, but sometimes these are also used to conceal or distort some aspect of the information. I decided to make my own graph of 2008 incomes by percentile of the US population, including each group’s income taxes paid. I was working with some chunky data from here, so it’s not a pretty, smooth curve. I used Excel to expand (in an ugly fashion) the groups so you get a rough (very rough) idea of the different group sizes.

The groups are by percentile of income in the US: the lowest-earning 50% up through the highest-earning 0.1% of the population. The height of each bar represents average annual income, and the height of the blue portion within the bar represents the amount of taxes paid.

You’ll notice I had to make the graph extremely big so that the lowest income group’s income even showed up enough to give a hint of a line for the tax they paid.

And 2008 was considered to be a bad year for the super-wealthy.

(click to see the full image with enough detail to be even slightly useful)

US income and taxes by percentile - 2008

First, lemme say I generally have loved LeGuin reads in the past. I found The Left Hand of Darkness to be thought-provoking and well done, and (of course) the entire Earthsea series was brilliant. I finally made it through The Dispossessed, and am of two distinct minds about it.

Mind 1: Her prose is, as always, good. She tackles a topical topic (especially in the 1970s when she wrote this) and gives it some good thought. Her characters are fairly compelling, if somewhat thin. The story manages to move along and come to a satisfying place at the end, with illumination often provided through natural-seeming situations and dialogue. She manages to wrench the heartstrings a few times, too.

Mind 2: It’s preachy, and becomes artistically uneven as a result. The cover material suggests this book is an evenhanded exploration of capitalism versus a radical communitarian/libertarian alternative, but that is kind of like saying Glenn Beck’s Books are “explorations.” The Dispossessed is a unilateral condemnation of capitalism and almost a love letter to a particular conceptualization of communal social society. This bias affects LeGuin’s writing style: the exposition dumps often seem like lectures or cheerleading, the worlds are created barely more than minimally, and even her characters sometimes slide into caricatures whose sole purpose is to advance her political thesis. Here is my tongue-in-cheek fantasy of what Ursula K. LeGuin might have been saying to herself as she drew up the first outline…

“Okay, where to start? I know: two civilizations. One looks just like the US, and is full of spineless, weasely capitalists who are incapable of even imagining anything outside their crass, opportunistic capitalist worldview, and basically they’d all shoot a stranger in the back for two dollars, all except the poor people, who all get shot in the back by strangers. The other civilization is like the USSR, but how it should have been, without that repressive totalitarian thing. It’s the opposite of the Americ– I mean capitalists, so the people don’t own anything and they spend all day working very hard and starving and sometimes dying, even though they never get paid and nobody really cares if they stop working, and they almost never do anything we would think was really wrong, even though there aren’t any laws or police or religion or anything… they all just kind of know what’s right and wrong. They have a bleak, miserable existence but they are soooo soooo happy. Why? Just because, all right? Maybe because they are not dirty, evil capitalists. And they all have vaguely Eastern European-sounding names. And they can have sex with each other whenever they want, without any annoying consequences, like guilt or having to raise children. And the women all want sex as frequently and noncommittally as the men. Yes, this will do nicely.

“Now for a protagonist. Hm. Tall and rugged, of course, and really, really smart. In fact, let’s say he’s the smartest guy in the world, maybe in the whole galaxy. And he is really, really good. I mean, even Americans would say he’s really good. In fact, he’s so good that he makes the rest of his nonauthoritarian communist friends look lame by comparison. He mostly does really brainy math and physics and stuff, but he also gets out and works hard, just for fun, all day long, lifting and digging and hauling and staying  nice and lean and well-muscled and getting dirty and dusty and grimy and taking off his shirt and… whew! I need some air in here!

“Okay, our character needs a love interest, and she is, let’s see… nerdy and brainy and fiercely independent and socially awkward and not very pretty, and she wants a lifelong commitment, even though she’s even more independent and strong and self-assured than the other communist women. But he loves her more than any of the hot girls he can have noncommittal sex with whenever he wants, even though many of them are presumably strong, smart, independent communists, too, and hotter than she is, and less demanding. And he likes babies! Yes, and children. And he makes a lifelong commitment to his not-very-pretty wife (note: this is not marriage, even though it looks pretty much exactly the same) even though almost nobody on his planet ever does this, and even though he could have sex with anyone he wanted, any time he wanted, with no guilt and no consequences. He’s just that great a guy. And he stays faithful to her for years and years, and they always have steamy moments when they get back together and wow, is it getting even hotter in here? Let me go put on something more comfortable. And dim the lights.

“This guy is so smart that even his own communist people don’t understand him and he has to go to the capitalist planet and make them all look very, very bad. Even the good capitalists (actually, there aren’t any good capitalists) look bad when they talk to him. And then he meets the poor people, and all of a sudden he’s singing and marching and defying the government and making impassioned speeches about property and freedom and oh my goodness I need to go lie down I’ll finish this in the morning.”

Yes, that was highly facetious. Sorry, Ms. LeGuin. The book just sometimes seemed like a Harlequin romance novel for frustrated mid-20th-Century progressive women. A hero with no flaws whatever, who does everything exactly right, all the time. A civilization with no flaws (except that this here new generation of young ‘uns is all forgettin’ the principles of the founding mothers!). Capitalists defend their lifestyle with the thinnest of straw-man arguments, and  their civilization has almost no positive side whatsoever. Yes, there’s a Soviet-type nation on the planet, but it gets dismissed and the protagonist pointedly declines to travel there, so we never get to see what might have been a much more illuminating exploration of some of the ideas being dealt with in the book. The narrative stays firmly in the capitalism-versus-utopia vein. The writing was, as always, done pretty well, but it was a propaganda piece. It was The Fountainhead for ’70s liberals.

I will read more LeGuin. She’s still a good writer. Some of her books are at the very top of my personal SciFi/fantasy list, but this book is not among them.

1. Do not operate your vehicle without your cell phone held firmly to your ear. Driving without a cell phone in this configuration is highly dangerous; it could result in missing important updates from friends and family, such as: “Take a left on Tenth Street,” “So anyways I says to my baby momma…” or “I’m right here, girl! Where YOU at?” Do not be concerned about the alarmist “scientists” claiming this will cause you to murder innocent pedestrians, cyclists, drivers of smaller vehicles, or your own children in the back seat. First of all, it would probably be manslaughter, not murder. Second, anyone with a cell phone knows that its use *heightens* your attentional focus. Without a cell phone conversation–no matter how unimportant– to keep you alert, you might become so bored while driving that you drive right into a theater full of nuns, children and kittens. Do you want that on your conscience? I didn’t think so. A phone conversation while you have passengers hones your focus to an even sharper point. Texting while driving practically makes you a fighter pilot on Adderall. Plus, if you do happen to make one of the astronomically rare mistakes people are alleged to occasionally make while talking/texting/websurfing and driving, your phone is right there so you can call a lawyer about those bogus manslaughter charges.

2. Drive a really big truck, no matter what. As we all learned in school, farmers and ranchers make up 90% of the American population, they are the best people on earth, and everyone should want to be like them. Therefore, we all need to drive their vehicles, to show our solidarity with this agricultural majority. It is also a well-known fact that, in a collision between a large truck and a small car, those in the latter vehicle are more likely to die. Do you want YOUR children to die? Then you need a big truck, so someone else’s children will die. If they’re in one of those fuel-efficient deathtraps, they’re probably from out of state, anyway. No biggie. But wait, you say, my own children don’t all fit in the cab of an F-350. No problem! Some big cars are called “SUVs,” embodying all the fuel inefficiency and homicidal potential of big trucks, with none of their ruggedness. These are an acceptable substitute for a true truck. As another alternative, remember that seatbelt laws and “children in the bed of your truck at 70mph” laws are not the kind of laws honest people need to worry about (see rule #4), leaving you multiple options for fitting your children in your pickup. Some people will tell you that we increase our dependence on foreign oil and multinational corporations by driving fuel-inefficient vehicles. Nothing could be farther from the truth! If we burn enough oil, those foreign terrorist-type nations will eventually run out, and then they will go broke and pose no threat to our way of life. And corporations? Please! Corporations are our friends, and we exist in a happy symbiosis with them that can only be disturbed if we question their ability to make us buy their products. So, every time you see an angry look on the driver of a freedom-hating, fuel-sipping weenie car as you park your huge truck diagonally across three spots at the grocery store, remember that terrorist lovers like that person don’t deserve to live.

3. Avoid use of turn signals. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, “turn signal” refers both to the little wand sticking out of the left side of your vehicle’s steering column and to the flashing light effect it produces on the exterior of the vehicle when it is moved up or down. Turn signals are an archaic leftover from the ignorant days of our great-grandparents, like castor oil, phrenology, or civic responsibility. In the bad old days, it was sometimes desirable to let other drivers know which direction you were about to turn, to save them some time and frustration or to avoid killing innocent people. In the modern world, however, turn signals serve no useful purpose. You’ve seen how insanely people drive; science proves that they really are trying to kill you. Do you want them to know what your next move is going to be? Unpredictability is one of your most potent weapons in the battle of daily driving.

4. Ignore optional laws. The US legislature and, shockingly, nearly every state legislature has passed a whole herd of laws related to you and your vehicle, because the government is evil and has goal except to make your life miserable. Luckily, grassroots organizations have managed to get the least important laws classified as optional. These laws include seatbelt regulations, reckless driving statutes, and the ever-baffling speeding laws. Of course no police officer or congressperson will tell you these laws are optional–their position requires them to give you a lecture about public safety or civic duty–but it’s pretty obvious. Look at the penalties. Failing to wear your seatbelt doesn’t get you sent to jail; you just have to pay a fine. Likewise with running so-called “stop” signs or passing vehicles that are merely doing the “speed limit” in town when there’s a solid yellow line in the road. These are clearly activities that pose no real threat to others, and “laws” regarding them represent a contemptible encroachment of private behavior by Big Government. Thanks to wise citizens’ groups, legislators have created “punishments” for these “infractions” proportionate to their potential harm. A good example is speeding. I think we can all agree that serious crimes such as armed robbery, illegally entering the United States looking for work, or public urination pose a clear danger to the very lives of Americans, and these crimes should be punished with mindlessly brutal justice. But if speeding posed that kind of danger to anyone, would states like Texas or Arizona be content with *fines* for speeders? Do armed robbers get a ticket and pay a fine? Do judges recommend that repeat border-jumpers be sent to remedial “classes” for their behavior? Do chronic pot users get away with nothing more than some points on their license? I think not. Therefore, speeding is not really a crime. In fact, the faster you drive, the more likely you are to escape the murderous impulses of the psychopaths in the other vehicles on the road.

5. Your vehicle is your manhood; behave accordingly. This rule applies mostly to men. Never forget that your vehicle is the physical embodiment of your masculinity. That is why you hang those rubber bull-sized testicles from the bumper of your Very Large Truck. What kind of man would want a small, weak masculinity, like a sedan or hybrid vehicle? A pathetic sissy-man. All real men demonstrate their virility and strength through the appearance and management of their vehicles. Yes, it’s popular these days to claim that manliness is somehow tied to things like responsibility, maturity, wisdom, or caring for loved ones. The people who say these things are not man enough to own big trucks. If your truck would have difficulty killing an entire family of six in a head-on collision with said family’s minivan, then you might as well just start wearing pink lace and high heels, Mr. Girly Girl. There is a school of thought asserting that insufficient masculinity can be compensated for with a small vehicle (e.g., VW Golf, Honda Civic, Suzuki Katana or, in truly desperate situations, a Dodge Neon) that has been modified at great personal expense to look very cool, go very fast, and ride so close to the ground that stray pennies would tear off its muffler. I concede that some missing masculinity can perhaps be reclaimed by driving such a vehicle at unsafe speeds on the expressway in a way that has a high probability of hurting at least a few innocent bystanders, but even such a semi-male vehicle owner would feel up to a 30% boost in basal testosterone levels by saving up for a decent truck.

6. Bicyclists have no rights. That’s pretty much all there is to say about this one. If bicyclists are stupid enough to believe the obviously-satirical Texas “law” about not riding on the sidewalk, then they need to learn to look behind them every few seconds and dodge your truck. And they should know that those lanes with diamonds and little pictures of bicycles in them only belong to the cyclists if you feel like allowing their use. For example, if you don’t feel like waiting in the turn lane at a traffic light, or if you see the clear necessity of passing someone in an unpatriotic small car on the right instead of the left, cyclists just need to get out of your way.

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Look, I argue about Arizona’s immigration law, and about people’s response to illegal immigration in general, but it’s not because (as the rabid anti-immigrant crowd is wont to insist when anyone doesn’t toe their particular line) I think illegal immigration is laudable. Of course it’s not. It is, however, a question of costs, benefits, and priorities.

Sure, illegal immigration is illegal. It’s right there in the name. It’s a violation of U.S. law, plain and simple. But so are other things. That’s the point, the rabid anti-immigrant crowd will say: it’s illegal and it’s causing horrible, terrible harm to America.

And that’s my problem: (a) the harm it’s causing is open to question, and (b) other illegal things cause equal or worse harm. It really feels like a group of people is highly dedicated to finding the harm because they’ve already decided that immigration is bad. Which makes you wonder why they really think it’s bad.

I posit that you can’t (with good data) make a serious case that immigration is destroying America, so it’s one of many issues with pluses and minuses and some serious, serious costs if we want to eradicate it.

You want to know what causes a lot of harm, both economically and physically? Bad driving, especially speeding. Traffic accidents killed almost 34,000 Americans last year, with speeding being a main factor in about half of those cases. This costs American taxpayers (even those who don’t blatantly and repeatedly break the law) billions and billions of dollars. Those numbers are many times higher than any estimate of the costs of illegal immigration. People are breaking the law and killing Americans and getting a slap on the wrist. The law is the law! What part of “illegal” don’t you understand? Unsurprisingly, however, I don’t hear Rush or Glenn calling for the National Guard to patrol roads and root out the problem, though. Nobody is pushing for speeding to be a mandatory felony with prison time. I don’t notice anyone demanding that we suspend the constitution so we can be sure to apprehend every speeder in Arizona. Why not? Would it not be OK to give the police a mandate to check the traffic record, outstanding unpaid speeding tickets, etc., of anyone they interacted with who fit the profile of a chronic reckless driver or speeder? You know, a male between 16 and about 25? Domestic violence call? We’re going to have to also check to see if you need to be sent to jail for an unpaid speeding ticket while we’re here.

No. No one is saying that, despite the far higher death toll from illegal speeding than from illegal immigration.

If the anti-immigrant movement is really only concerned about our safety as Americans, then the question of why they aren’t pushing for tough penalties and profiling of those who commit much more dangerous crimes is a good one. It applies to speeding, white-collar offenses, safety violations in coal mines, hunting accidents, and a whole passel of other things where the illegal behavior of a few harms many. Why have the anti-immigrant crowd picked their particular crusade instead of one of the many others where the economic and human harm is so much more clear and egregious? The answer to that will tell us something about the mindset of those pushing the anti-immigrant agenda.

The facts about illegal immigration are not yet fully known (though there are some useful data on several issues), and they often shift with funding sources or ideological biases. It seems clear that illegal immigration has risen in the past two decades, though we are far from the historical peak. Illegal immigrants occupy lots of jobs, though how many of those would be taken by Americans otherwise is debatable. Immigrants pay taxes and social security (not always knowingly), and their purchasing dollars go into the American economy. Even the service fees on the money they send back home contribute to Wells Fargo’s revenue. There is some evidence that illegal immigration boosts the economic fortunes of the middle class while harming the poor. You’d think the Tea Party would be all over that.

Some illegal immigrants take advantage of social services like medicaid, emergency rooms, food stamps, education, etc. Others are arrested for crimes, sometimes violent. It is extremely difficult to gauge how many crimes are committed by illegal immigrants, but only the most obviously anti-immigrant organizations “find” a percentage greater than those committed, per capita, by long-time American citizens. Muddying these waters is the fact that some immigrants come to the US specifically because they are criminals or they want to commit crimes (e.g., human traffickers, smugglers, drug dealers), and others are recruited into crime because of their immigrant status or their legal vulnerability (e.g., the drug industry, prostitution, gang membership). Balancing these criminal elements are the many more illegal immigrants who are, essentially, family members looking for jobs and trying to stay as far from official notice as possible.

Some studies find that the net economic impact of illegal immigration is positive, and others that it’s negative, though even these clarify that it’s not much, compared to the benefits doled out to legal Americans. You can argue that even a single dollar given away to an illegal immigrant is too much, and you’d have a solid basis to argue. Would you also argue that we need to catch every single white-collar embezzler, pot-smoking college kid, or stock fraudster in America, no matter how much of our tax money that takes? Why not?

Down here near the border (and in Arizona, New Mexico, and California), the issues get more polarized. These areas bear the brunt of the costs of the Mexico-US drug trade and some of the most negative consequences of illegal immigration. We also have disproportionately large numbers of both legal and illegal immigrants who don’t seem to cause any harm. Places like South Texas, where most of the people are Hispanic, demonstrate ambiguity about enforcement; you get both strong pro and con opinions expressed, with plenty of “meh” in between. Places where Anglos make up the tax base tend to show much more consistently anti-immigrant sentiment.

Illegal immigrants do not outnumber the legals. They also don’t show some kind of rabid resistance to acculturation into American society. Overall, my take is that the majority of illegal immigrants are similar in many respects to legal American citizens, espousing similar values about family, freedom, and economic choice. Maybe that’s why so many Americans have such an opposition to them.  It would seem that most of those who cause the most problems are associated with the situation where the richest country on earth (with the most voracious appetite for recreational drugs and underaged prostitutes) is situated right next to a country still firmly in the developing world. Bad problems, to be sure, and they need some serious solving; but blaming immigration for the drug trade is like blaming BP for our dependency on petroleum.

I have problems with our immigration laws and philosophy, sure. We are ideologically (and some biologically) descended from illegal immigrants. Our forefathers in many cases hosed the Native Americans (who were doing just-fine-thank-you-very-much) to no end, squatting by the tens of thousands on their land and refusing to leave, killing the legal residents instead of respecting their laws. Well, we’ve been here two centuries, and the US is awesome in many respects, so perhaps we should forget about that, but it’s still pretty hypocritical to claim that we are “original” or “native” Americans and ban everyone else. Jesus had a parable about stuff like that.

Maybe immigrants are bringing nasty diseases like tuberculosis to the US. OK, then we need to issue a LOT more work visas. This will bring those coming here for upstanding reasons (wanting jobs) through the legal checkpoints where they can be screened for such conditions. And maybe there’s too much drug money and trafficking going on (all right; there most definitely is). Then we need to put our money where our mouth is and stop smoking weed and snorting blow. Seriously. But immigration is not the problem, in itself. It’s a red herring for entitlement, spoiled adolescent thinking, and probably a good dose of xenophobia.

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.