Jon Lovett, making sense

The Culture of Shut Up - Jon Lovett - The Atlantic:

I don’t want those voices [of old media gatekeepers] to drown out the diverse and compelling
voices that now have a better chance of making it in front of us than
ever before—even as we still have a ways to go. And what I think we have
to do, then, to protect this new wonderful thing of ‘a good idea can
come from anyone anywhere’—is we need to stop telling each other to shut
up. We need to get comfortable with the reality that no one is going to
shut up. You aren’t going to shut up. I’m not going to shut up. The
idiots aren’t going to shut up.



We need to learn to live with the noise and tolerate the noise even
when the noise is stupid, even when the noise is offensive, even when
the noise is at times dangerous. Because no matter how noble the intent,
it’s a demand for conformity that encourages people on all sides of a
debate to police each other instead of argue and convince each other.
And, ultimately, the cycle of attack and apology, of disagreement and
boycott, will leave us with fewer and fewer people talking more and more
about less and less.

On Eich

I will grant that it is appropriate for him to have stepped down. CEOs are public faces of a company and I agree that he and Mozilla made the right call given the backlash.

But I do disagree with the backlash demanding resignation (though I think it is completely appropriate to apply scrutiny to his policies and following of the anti-discrimination policies at Mozilla). For many, many years in this country, the majority were not on the side of gay rights. Ellen came out  17 years ago on network TV and caused a firestorm. My childhood church was kicked out of every Baptist group for accepting people regardless of sexual orientation. Gay and lesbian couples seeking to adopt in the South were subject to rank discrimination despite being stable, conservative family households. In that environment, the argument I made time and time again was for tolerance - having a fair and permissive attitude even if you disagreed with someone. Tolerance was the first step towards building connections and friendships between people with anti-gay attitudes and LGBT folks, and in those connections people could realize the mistake of their bigotry, initially formed often in childhood by fear and rumor. Tolerance was crucial.

While growing up, the stance I and many others took and argued was that marriage was fundamentally a religious sacrament, whereas governmental civil unions for everyone would enable rights to be shared freely. That way, people could get married at my church and the state would have no say in what was allowed to be "marriage."

My problem with this backlash is that we are rejecting the tolerance that was so important in building support for gay rights on the grounds of a religious position. We have no information on Eich's feelings about rights, but we know that he has never been known to discriminate against anyone in his long positions of leadership in the software community. I worry that we are sending a message of "now that our position is in the majority, this is no longer up for debate or discussion. Fall in line or you will be targeted." This has two negative impacts:

First, those with anti-gay attitudes (a majority of California citizens voted for Prop 8) will never have a chance to discuss them openly and be convinced by people like me, because it won't be seen as ok to admit that you might not agree with gay people getting married.

Second, we weaken the argument for tolerance in future debates where the majority isn't with us (and in other countries today, where the majority still isn't for gay rights). It's a lot harder to ask for people to be tolerant unless you demonstrate that yourself.

Silicon Valley's Age Problem - Bloomberg View

Silicon Valley's Age Problem - Bloomberg View: The youth culture of Silicon Valley was remarked upon in the 1990s, but in Scheiber's telling it seems to have actually gotten worse. New industries often start out young, and then age to stately silver as the founding generation stays put at the top. But almost 20 years after Netscape started the first Dot-Com Bubble, Silicon Valley is still in a startup frenzy. And according to Scheiber, investors are looking almost exclusively for disruptive youth, not competent experience.

This has implications for the kinds of projects that get funded -- Scheiber argues that all this disruption is focused on stuff that 25-year-old nerds need, like cab-hailing apps and social networking, and not so much on the things that 45-year-old parents might want.

A musical statement from Ukraine

Says a Dish Reader:

As World War I got underway, Romain Rolland and Hermann Hesse, two Swiss writers, appealed to their war-frenzied friends in France and Germany citing the lede to the choral movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony: O Freunde, nicht diese Töne! sondern laßt uns angenehmere anstimmen! (Friends, not these sounds! Let us rather make more pleasant, more joyous notes). And last Saturday, in Odessa, a Russian-speaking city of Ukraine, one of the cultural treasure-houses of Europe, the city that gave us Anna Akhmatova and Issak Babel, Sviatoslav Richter, David Oistrakh, Nathan Milshtein and Emil Gilels, performers from the Philharmonic flash mobbed a performance of the last bars of the symphony at the Odessa fish market. A decidedly political musical statement. Amazing.

SEALed and Delivered in Libya

SEALed and Delivered in Libya:

Last week, Jathran's forces finally
made good on that threat: they used one of the oil terminals under their
control to fill up a North
Korean-flagged tanker called the Morning
Glory. (For the record, North Korea has since denied having anything to do
with the ship.) The tanker then sailed out into the Mediterranean, defying warnings
from the central government that it would deploy its naval forces to block the ship
from leaving the port. No such action was forthcoming, of course. The security
forces of current Libyan government can't even maintain control over its own
capital, much less over the country's coastal waters.




Had the story ended there, the
result would have been an unmitigated disaster for the government. Tripoli's
impotence and dysfunction would have graphically exposed for all the world to
see. The floodgates for the wholesale looting of Libya's oil resources would have
opened. The forces of anarchy would have cheered. (It's worth noting that a
prime minister has already lost
his job for even allowing the tanker to load in the first place.) But
that's when Washington stepped in.

The Lies of Putin

The Czar's Speech: Putin Takes Crimea - Bloomberg View: One more snarl of anger graced Putin's confident ending. "Some Western politicians," he said, "are trying to scare us not just with sanctions but with the exacerbation of domestic problems. I'd like to know what they mean: the actions of a certain fifth column, traitors to the nation of every ilk, or provoking unrest by worsening Russia's socioeconomic situation? We consider such statements as irresponsible and clearly aggressive and we will react to them accordingly."



After expressing confidence that the parliament and the nation will continue to support him, Putin walked off the stage to a standing ovation.



 It would have been easy to fall under the spell of the moment, to bask in a Russia resurgent. Except for the lies.

This article struck a chord with me because it gets to the importance of truth vs perception. I think the USA has occupied a place where truth and honesty claim an important role in our politics, but actually have not been so present (and perhaps have never been present). We end up looking like hypocrites.



But what Putin is doing - taking over another country with a false narrative - is wrong. It is wrong because the basic rights of mankind depand that their leadership be of them and for them - Crimea is not a ping pong ball to be thrown about. I regret that Russia is doing this because I think it is destabilizing. Power should reside locally - and my own country needs to take that lesson.

I like both these songs.

A film companion

My grandfather

My grandfather died a week ago today. He had an incredibly busy life:

Dr. Cliburn, a native of Newnan, served as Minister of Education of First Baptist Church of Macon from 1954 to 1957, and was then called to be Pastor of First Baptist Church of Thomaston, where he faithfully served for almost 24 years, from 1957 to 1981. He then served on the staff of the Georgia Baptist Convention for nine years. Since his retirement from the Georgia Baptist Convention, he served as interim pastor of 27 churches, and was currently the Treasurer of the Centennial Baptist Association, and was Pastor Emeritus of First Baptist Church of Thomaston.

Dr. Cliburn also served as Mayor of the City of Thomaston from 1996 through 1999. He was an avid historian and a member of the Upson County Historical Society. In 1999 he was presented the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Thomaston-Upson County Chamber of Commerce.

Adding to the above are 26 interim pastorates, writing a long history of the church he pastored, writing another history of the high school his children attended, and a three volume auto-biography that put to paper the sorts of stories that grandparents love to tell their grandchildren, but at such a length to last many hours. He was always on the go, and he was the grandparent with the greatest individual influence on me.

I want to reflect on three aspects of his legacy:

• Hard work, with support - my grandfather worked long hours of all kinds. He wrote original sermons, ran the church, conducted visitations, planned revivals, and was deeply involved in other parts of the community. However, he did so with the support (and patience) of his wife and family, who kept a "pit stop" ready for him as he hurried about.
• Loyalty - he chose not to leave his first pastorate when other churches invited him away, and in fact, never held the same job twice. When my grandmother was hit by a stroke that left her hemiplegic (disabled on one half of her body), he nurtured her through the ensuing difficulties and decades of troubled travel. Without a disabled wife, he might have risen higher, but because of his loyalty he kept himself to a job that involved less travel. Yet, I don't think his experience of professional life suffered for it - he still became a mayor, among other honors.
• Trust and accountability - his life was successful because of the thousands of small decisions he made that were supported by central tenants and ideas, among them accountability. He didn't tolerate slackitude in himself or others (possibly being driven by his own past). 

 I will continue to learn from him for years and years to come.

Travelling to the End of the Road

Beauty amidst chaos in Ukraine

Protesters in Ukraine reportedly took over a museum and someone performed this. I don't know if I can do anything about their suffering (ideas?) but I think videos like this help remind us of the value of every person, even when reports aggregate all protestors/other cohorts together.

Animating Art

B E A U T Y - dir. Rino Stefano Tagliafierro from Rino Stefano Tagliafierro on Vimeo.