Murmuration

Murmuration from Islands & Rivers on Vimeo.

Beck's "Clap Hands" on SNL

Beck - Clap Hands (Live on SNL) from Maldoror on Vimeo.

Ladybugs Flying

And the start of a new series of internet videos I adore.

RAMdom thoughts

I watched Jon Stewart's statement at the Rally to Restore Sanity again tonight, as well as clips from the Stewart/O'Reilly debate; here are some riffs off of their words.

• We cannot control what our actions are to others, or how they will be interpreted. We can only control our intentions, praying that the trusts we build can sustain us when we fall short, in substance or superficial appearance.
• "We live in hard times, not end times." - There were those who thought America would not survive 2000, 2004, or 2008. But elections do not single-handily change this country - instead, they express or facilitate long-standing patterns or shifts that may be as subtle as they are powerful. Also, if the US can survive Harding, it can survive anyone. Just sayin'.
• Hate speech is the result of capitalism; some people pay for it, and want it. Those who provide it can and do get rich.
• Sometimes the issues at obvious play in an election are less important than the issues that "everyone" agrees upon, which then go relatively undiscussed.
• "If we amplify everything, we hear nothing." - one of the travesties of music today is that in seeking to provide a stronger sound, music tracks must play at a constant high volume, giving up the artistry of dynamics in the pursuit of pushing as much out as possible, in order not to suffer in comparison to the next track. The same goes for speech, and a press that acts like an auto-immune disease in overreacting just makes us sicker. We don't have the national RAM to process all of this.
• "There will always be darkness" - Original sin is in us, with us, and must be accounted for and expected, as much as we seek to go beyond it.

But talk is cheap, including my own. Obama knows and gets most of this; The Audacity of Hope discusses most of it, including the poignant image of senators speaking without listening from the floor of the "World's Greatest Deliberative Body." To some extent we have traded some sins for others, like overt racism and sexism for more subtle forms, or a willingness to overlook adultery with a heightened scrutiny that destroys lives and relationships. These trends are products of our technology and no one can see where they are actually going - though many will guess, some growing rich in their accuracy.

So how do you pursue systemic change? Matt Yglesias said:

"But I'll say that as I've gotten older and wiser, I've learned that fewer problems than I thought are due to misconduct on the part of individuals and more are due to rotten systems.....The design of the game really constrains what people do. And if you try to act in ways that are contrary to the game architecture, you end up getting replaced."

Thus the only people that can change the game are those that have won it - the "statesmen." I've met some of these guys and I don't know if they have the answers, or if I do. It will take an old-young partnership, and a particular moment where Rahm Emanuel isn't the WHCoS.

The College Rankings Racket - NYTimes.com

The College Rankings Racket - NYTimes.com: So universities that once served populations that were different from the Harvard or Yale student body now go after the same elite high school students with the highest SAT scores. And schools know that, if they want to get a better ranking, they need to spend money like mad — even though they will have to increase tuition that is already backbreaking. “If you figure out how to do the same service for less money, your U.S. News ranking will go down,” says Kevin Carey, the director of education policy at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan research group. The rankings encourage trends that ill-serve the country.

It's all true! And we at Williams know it: I actually regret the folks who come here for "the best" small college education but don't want to see the sunshine, the mountains, the isolation....

Musings

Today, after work, I played soccer for a few hours, then worked more, then got gas (giving some gas money to someone else - not sure why I did that), then saw movie. I think I need to get more sleep for days like these, though - I can function, but everything is a little duller, a little more vague. A whole bunch of thoughts about inequality and conservatism/liberalism have also bubbled up, but the upshot is that I think I want to surround myself with more INTJs. Now, where to find them....

On Freedom

Quoting Michael Ignatieff:

[Isaiah Berlin's] definition of freedom as negative liberty, with the strong emphasis on the absence of coercion, is an absolutely central idea through everything he thought. He said somewhere that freedom is a chilly virtue – freedom is not particularly nice and what people do with their freedom is not particularly nice. It's not justice, it's not equality, it's not a warm bath – it's just freedom. And yet it's the most important human value, because it's the human value that respects individuals in all their singularity.....One of the freedoms that Isaiah valued, which is not very popular, was the freedom not to be a political animal. The luxury of a truly free society is that political involvement is a choice, not an obligation.

This dovetails with a few thoughts I've been having recently about liberalism and conservatism. I may have written on them before, but even so there's a new step to take. Liberalism (and I know the word has baggage but I won't give it up) is primarily about how we envision the world as it should be: a place of goodness, or joy, where woman meets woman and man meets man in a celebration of all that is wise and just, etc, etc. Or just a place where people don't starve or live without rights. It's about where we could be. Conservatism, on the other hand, is about what is, right now. It is about the real: the facts that there is greed, and there is crime, and government can be as much an agent of that as a fixer. It looks upon government as another flawed actor in the system, instead of the change agent that liberalism might see. I don't know if today's conservatives quite fit this description, but since I can't really figure out a policy that's not arithmetically possible, I'm keeping with this definition and hoping that the GOP recovers some relationship with facts and stuff. The beauty of the system above is that conflict is inevitable: liberals always seek to change things, while conservatives are wary. But when both sides align, change is possible. It's like the liberals are the House of Representatives - rabble rousing, and filled with ideas, while the conservatives are the Senate - slower acting, less responsive, but required for ratification. Because ultimately each side needs each other - conservatives know that changes must occur as circumstances shift, and liberals need to know how to sell ideas in ways that respect fundamental human psychology - the endless and inane e-mails I get from Planet Obama are calibrated to be opened by the greatest numbers, even if they lack the high-brow content I would totally gobble up. there just aren't enough voting nerds out there with my kinds of interests. So this is all frustrating, though, because then we have a two-party style system where it can be hard to reform with nuance - there is room for basically two public ideas on a topic at a time. Moreover, and more generally, the laws of human interaction are real (though they vary across cultures), and that means frustration for those out of lockstep. That's why tolerance and the freedom to isolate oneself from politics is so important. Freedom sometimes allows bad things to happen - conservatives know and respect this - but it also allows liberals to try out ideas without worry that they can't return later to the dominant way of doing things. And when ideas work, they can be adopted.

On Pirates of Old

Gimme the Loot | Jacobin:
Being a sailor has never been easy, and it was particularly tough in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To maximize profits, sailors were forced to eat rotten food and bunk in cramped quarters, and were paid on credit – you didn’t collect until you had completed your one-, two-, or three-year bid. And even then, you might not collect. You could die, of course. Or you might be pressed into military service, or forced to work an extra few years on another ship, or forfeit your wages as a punishment for insolence. It wasn’t uncommon for sailors to go a decade without seeing a shilling. Ship captains had absolute authority over their crews in order to enforce discipline. Any complaining or shirking could be deemed “mutinous,” and punishment could range from whipping to hanging to being dangled over the side of the ship to have your brains bashed in.

Pirate ships were different – they were under democratic worker control. Captains weren’t absolute rulers, but elected leaders who commanded only during battle. Day-to-day operations were handled democratically by the entire crew. Loot was divided equally and immediately, and pirates ate – and drank – better than their law-abiding contemporaries. This was the major reason pirates were feared: it was easy to convince exploited sailors to join up with them. And join up they did.

Posting just to say

I don't have a lot of spare bandwidth for substance, but am still posting most every day over at slackfeed.blogspot.com.

Goodbye to Garland

My extended family has been going to Jekyll Island since I was born - my dad and his many first cousins took their significant others, spouses, and then children to Jekyll every summer for a week. Now the next generation (mine) has a bunch of kids, some of whom know Jekyll well. But unfortunately, the quality of the beach has gone way down, with safety issues as well thanks to a riptide. So, we're decamping to another island on South Carolina.

But with that choice (which I understand) comes a goodbye to a house I know very well. I can't say for sure how many times we stayed in Garland, but it's one of the most familiar places to me - from the awesome big chairs to the little room with twin beds off of the kitchen that I and my brother enjoyed. It was a very plain house when we first started, but added on a laundry room, a sunroom, and various other features that distracted from its charm and welcome. I haven't been back in a few years due to work and other conflicts, but my sadness is a testament to the importance of place. Goodbye Garland.

On Josh Weed

So this past weekend a guy named Josh Weed outed himself to the world via blog post. The neat thing about this particular exit from the closet is that Weed is a committed Mormon with 10 years of marriage to the proverbial girl-next-door, and three kids to boot. A few quotes:

I was 13 when I told my dad (a member of the Stake Presidency—which is a lay leader in the Mormon church—at the time). My parents were incredibly loving and supportive, which is part of why I believe I’m so well adjusted today. They deserve serious props for being so loving and accepting—I never felt judged or unwanted or that they wished to change anything about me. That’s part of why I have never been ashamed about this part of myself.

----- 

7. Why do you not choose to be “true to yourself” and live the gay lifestyle?

First of all, I understand that when people refer to a “gay lifestyle” they are talking about a lifestyle that includes gay romantic and sexual relationships. But I want to point out that because I am gay, any lifestyle I choose is technically a “gay lifestyle.” Mine just looks different than other gay peoples’. My hope is that other gay people will be as accepting of my choices as they hope others would be of their choices.

-----

If you know and love somebody who is gay and LDS (or Christian), your job is to love and nothing more. Let go of your impulse to correct them or control them or propel them down the path you think is right for them. Do what you need to do to move past that impulse.  Do not condemn the choices your loved one makes. Love. Only love. Show your love in word and deed. Embrace them, both literally and figuratively. I promise they need it—and they need to feel like they can figure out this part of themselves in a safe way without ridicule and judgment. It’s what Christ would do. It’s what your loved one needs. Accept them. Love them. Genuinely and totally.

I happen to be a mirror image of Josh in a lot of ways (wants to marry a girl/have kids, is religious, has thought about being a therapist, male) and a polar opposite in others (straight, believes homosexuality is compatible with Christianity) and I think the post is really helpful and useful because it lives in a space of privileged heterosexuality (a strong belief of many Americans) and acceptance of homosexuality (a belief often not held in common with the former). How many people do you know that truly believe its ok to be gay, but that straight marriage is still better?

The most frustrating thing about this post is that it still seems biased against same-sex marriages. It's always seemed a little silly to me for straight-marriage-only proponents to jump on that bandwagon, when straight-marriage has been so diseased as an institution for so long, given high divorce rates and so on. Same-sex marriages are much better family units than broken homes, but somehow they are seen as the "threat" to the American family.

The other interesting thing for me is this quote, from a reader of Andrew Sullivan's:

But I don’t quite agree with your assessment of Josh. While he certainly makes, by FAR, the most clear-headed, honest and endearing appeal I’ve ever heard from an ex-gay (I know he doesn’t use that term, but that’s essentially what he is), I don’t think his story is benign. In a perfect world - one with no homophobia or religious intolerance towards gay people - gay men who want to marry women should be free to do so without criticism.

But we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in a world where rampant homophobia means that millions of gay couples are desperately fighting for the right to marry and protect their children, where young gay kids are killing themselves at astonishing rates and where far too many young gay men and women are torturing themselves in therapies that promise conversions to straightness. Taking stories like Josh’s at face value hurts all of us.

Josh seems like a nice guy who may not intend to use his story to influence other men in similar situations, but rest assured, his story WILL be used as fodder by the anti-gay industry. Every homophobic Mormon (or Catholic or Protestant or Jew or Muslim) who reads this will now have at least one more story where a gay man was able to overcome his desires ("see, just because you’re born that way doesn’t mean you have to act on it!"), only helping to cement their intolerance.

This is one of the big struggles between liberalism and conservatism - in a world where the tide flows in one direction, is it ok to judge testimonials like Josh's with a handicap? I don't think so. We should be able to say that this is honest account is helpful and a useful window to someone's life, and decry a culture that would twist and abuse it. I don't think Josh is responsible for how his story is used, any more than the leaker that blows the cover off of a scandal and ruins an otherwise healthy political career. Yes, your leak has "harmed" the political agenda of your party, but is that your fault? Or when others cast blame on the accusers of rape, because the visible source of discord is the speaking victim, not the attacker (who is often known and respected). Sometimes speaking truth creates discord, or allows it. The only people who should be judged for that are those who do it professionally - Rove, etc.

We aren't more creative, but we do have powerful computers

Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit | David Graeber | The Baffler: Might the cultural sensibility that came to be referred to as postmodernism best be seen as a prolonged meditation on all the technological changes that never happened? The question struck me as I watched one of the recent Star Wars movies. The movie was terrible, but I couldn’t help but feel impressed by the quality of the special effects. Recalling the clumsy special effects typical of fifties sci-fi films, I kept thinking how impressed a fifties audience would have been if they’d known what we could do by now—only to realize, “Actually, no. They wouldn’t be impressed at all, would they? They thought we’d be doing this kind of thing by now. Not just figuring out more sophisticated ways to simulate it.”