Posted by Jim at July 23rd, 2006
Apparently some group in Germany is sticking miniature flags with George W. Bush’s picture into piles of dog poop.
The police are looking for them, but apparently there’s no law against that sort of thing so I’ve no idea what they’ll do if they find them.
Posted by Jim at June 24th, 2006
I’ve been meaning to write about Grand Rapids websites that follow local news and developments for a while now. Here are a few:
Urban Planet: Devoted to covering the “new urbanism” movement, Urban Planet has forums that talk about Grand Rapids property development, buildings, Grand Rapids history (as it relates to neighborhoods and buildings) and discuss the “mystery project” in excessive detail.
Michigan Buzzboard: Discusses Michigan tv and radio news programming and the personalities behind it. In fact, you’ll find some of those personalities lurking quietly (or not so quietly) in the forums.
Local Area Watch: It’s tagline is “reporting the news the news won’t report in Western Michigan.” It seems to be a blog devoted to reporting on things the author doesn’t like about various organizations and individuals in Grand Rapids.
Posted by Jim at April 18th, 2006
We hear a lot about how politics is unnecessarily harsh these days. I was reminded of it recently via both Reddit and Digg. Both linked to reports of what happened during a debate between Al Franken and Ann Coulter. Here’s the opening of the speech plus discussion on Al Franken’s web site. You can read another account with discussion on Free Republic.
If you read the comments on each site, particularly focusing on the comments about Al Franken by Republicans or about Ann Coulter by Democrats, you’ll probably note that they can be intensely personal and rather nasty. I’ve seen (in other places) people of both sides note how the other side constantly uses personal attacks. Reading these discussions makes it pretty obvious that no side has a monopoly on that sort of thing.
I can come up with possible reasons pretty quickly. They might include:
1. The blending of the public and the personal that Joshua Myerowitz suggests that technological communication promotes in his book No Sense of Place. Personal attacks on politicians are a logical result.
2. It could simply be that online communication makes it easier to be rude.
3. it could be that political parties and activist groups demonize the other side too successfully, making rational communication hard.
4. It might be that harshness of political rhetoric goes in cycles and soon this too shall pass.
That being said, it may be that imagining our time is somehow abnormal in the harshness of the rhetoric that’s inaccurate. I always heard that a person should avoid discussing religion and politics if you want to have a pleasant conversation.
Anyway, here’s a list of what I like in a conversation about politics:
1. Discussing the pros and cons of an issue, but, allowing for the possibility that you might be wrong or haven’t considered certain aspects of a problem.
2. Avoiding excessive language. By this I’m not meaning swearing. I mean overly broad statements about the worth of an idea or the worthlessness of a particular perspective (”Well of course you think that, you’re a Republican/Democrat/Scientologist…” or “Bush/Clinton is evil/has no morals/has bodies buried under the East Lawn”).
3. Allowing people to save face. Saying “I told you so” or making it clear that someone with a particular perspective is an idiot means it will take that much longer (if ever) for them to tell you that they’ve changed their mind. Who wants to admit to being a fool?
4. Giving someone the benefit of the doubt. Politics is something people feel passionate about. Sometimes they say something stupid while promoting their beliefs. So does everyone.
I don’t write this under the illusion that it will change anything, but would very much like to talk about politics without having other people go into massive rants in front of me.
Posted by Jim at March 4th, 2006
PVP is a webcomic that generally focuses on interpersonal relationships, work, role playing games, geek culture, and computer gaming. It does not generally focus on social issues.
Last week Scott Kurtz did an interesting thing in that he let us into his head as he was trying to write a black character, something that he’s apparently not entirely comfortable with.
If you read the two comics I just linked in the preceding paragraph you’ll know exactly what I mean by that. If you didn’t you might want to because what follows will assume you did, possibly ruining the humor in the process.
Anyway, I can understand why Kurtz might feel uncomfortable writing a black character. I’m writing a novel–one that includes a black character–and I’ve sometimes felt a little nervous as I do it. There are a number of reasons that a white writer might feel nervous about writing a black character.
The first and best one is simply the need to have the character feel authentic and real to to the reader. If you’re black you will have experiences and assumptions that are different from those of your average white writer. If you are a white writer and you’re realistic, you know that you can only guess as to what those experiences might be. How are you going to avoid screwing things up and making the character feel fake?
Unfortunately for the realistic writer, however, there’s more of a risk than simply having the character feel not quite right. There’s also the risk of having the character come off as a racial stereotype. Having the character feel fake is merely a technical failure. Having the character turn out to be a racial stereotype (unintentional as it might be) opens you up for public humiliation.
To me this underlines something about current moment in the US experience of race and racism. As a society, we’ve come to the point where most people agree that racism is wrong, but it’s still such a raw wound that it’s hard to talk about it publicly.
The obvious and best solution is to write a person of whatever race (or gender) as first of all a person and hope that common humanity will carry the day. I think about Michael Bishop who included a gay AIDS patient in his novel Unicorn Mountain. Michael Bishop isn’t gay, doesn’t have AIDS and doesn’t obviously have a lot in common with the character.
He made the person feel like a real human being and his gay character seemed as real to me as Samuel R. Delany’s various gay characters (Delany, incidentally, is gay). Of course, I’m not gay so I may have missed something there.
I am, however, a US citizen of Dutch descent and though that’s far from a persecuted minority, it has been interesting to read books in which people of Dutch descent appear. For example, at least in the books I read, the primary association with being Dutch is sailors and traders. Farmers and immigrants to the US barely ever appear–and when they do it seems that they turn out to be sailors.
I remember being particularly irritated by one alternate history which imagined that England never conquered New York City/New Amsterdam. It irked me that in an alternate version of the US with a strong Dutch presence I found little awareness of Dutch Reformed thought or much of a sense of Dutch history other than “sailors and traders.”
There were also structural problems with the novel, but I won’t get into that here.
Making your characters human doesn’t always quite work either and Scott Kurtz is right to be uncomfortable, but as my comments about the above book indicate, writing about white Europeans isn’t as easy as you might assume either. I’m hoping Scott sticks with the character. Even if he makes mistakes in the process, I think he’ll eventually get the character right.
Of course, if he sticks in a character who’s descended from Dutch sailors, I’ll be cranky.
Posted by Jim at February 28th, 2006
I was listening to NPR at some point recently (within the last few months anyway) and heard a professor being interviewed who argued that anti-immigrant feeling in US politics could be traced to the economy. Basically, the idea was that people were more nervous about immigrants when the economy was bad or percieved to be bad.
I can’t cite sources, but it sounds right to me.
I remember my sister giving a Christmas gift to a friend of hers in middle school. Her friend’s father worked for a company that made auto parts. This was during the early 1980’s. The US was in a recession and everyone was worried about how the Japanese were dominating the world economy, how much better their educational system was, and how they were buying US companies and landmarks.
The pencils were made in Japan. Her friend’s father broke them.
He still had a job, but he feared the inroads the Japanese were making in the auto industry.
Nativism has played an on-going role in US politics. Apparently it led to support for the temperance movement and prohibition (in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s) because immigrants were percieved to be the ones doing most of the drinking. It’s showed up on an off throughout our history, but in my lifetime people seem to be most worried about immigrants when the economy is bad.
As mentioned earlier I remember the fear of the Japanese economy in 80’s, but I also remember people being highly worked up about illegal immigration from Mexico back then too.
Think about some of the issues people have been worked up about lately: offshoring jobs (to India or wherever), illegal immigration (again), the whole mess with a company from the United Arab Emirates leasing portions of our ports (often reported as buying our ports for some reason), China’s growing economy, the US being educationally behind other countries (again)…
Basically they seem to be different versions of “those foriegners are taking our money.”
I don’t get too worked up about these issues. I remember Japan. They’ve been in an economic slump for the last 10 years or more now and may be coming out of it, but they’re not exactly the economic force they used to be.
I’m not saying we should ignore issues like offshoring or how US educational effectiveness compares to the rest of the world’s, but, I think a sense of perspective helps.
Posted by Jim at February 10th, 2006
I just thought I’d link to what I’ve been working on for the last week of so. Summit on Racism is a yearly conference devoted to changing the experience of race in Grand Rapids and the surrounding area.
It attempts to do more than just talk about race. The Summit is designed to promote action. People get into groups and then sign up to do things during the coming year. Mind you, not everyone continues to be involved for the year, but that’s okay too.
In any case, this year the speaker’s Bobby Moresco, the writer of the movie Crash. Also, (and more importantly) we’ll be deciding the direction of Summit on Racism and GRACE’s Racial Justice program for the next few years.
It should be interesting.
Posted by Jim at February 8th, 2006
On a gut level, the amount of attention paid to the cartoons showing Mohammed as a terrorist surpises me. Unless you’re an expert in Islam, however (and I’m not), your gut instinct is pretty lousy at understanding religion and world politics.
From what I understand, the whole situation comes out of the fact that some Muslims in Denmark found that they couldn’t do anything to the newspaper that printed the cartoons under Danish law. What they then did was to publicize the cartoons in countries with largely Muslim populations. They included two cartoons that were not actually printed in addition to the ones that were. The unprinted cartoons were apparently even more offensive than the ones that were printed.
It would be easy to dismiss the whole thing as having been deliberately created and partially false in the first place if it weren’t for a couple things.
1. Even if the reaction is based on some flawed assumptions, an awful lot of people are very angry.
2. Dismissing the whole thing will just make people angrier.
Personally, I’m inclined to think that the papers have a right to print what they want, but I don’t think it’s as simple as a question of free speech.
As much as it’s true that this whole mess was partially created by the Danish muslims who publicized the cartoons (and by the Danish press which could have apologised before it got this far), it’s not all from that. It was also created by repressive muslim regimes that actively encourage their population to get upset about this sort of thing to distract them from dissatisfaction with their own governments. It was also created by general anger on the part of some muslims about western influence and power over their own countries. It may even be that anger about Iraq and US foriegn policy affect this as well.
In addition, Europe’s own problems in coming to grips with immigration come into play here too.
For me, the question is less about free speech and more a question of how the West should engage with the rest of the world. According to some people, part of the reason for terrorism is that some muslims feel that western culture is overwhelming their own.
When we make no compromises at all, we contribute to that impression. By contrast, if we engage in such a way that the majority of muslims feel that the West is listening, we do ourselves a lot of good.
I don’ t know what will solve the current problem. I see it as a manifestation of several different problems (repressive governments, etc…) that will have to be solved separately.
At the same time, apologies and an attempt to show respect to other people’s beliefs can’t hurt.
Posted by Jim at December 24th, 2005
I’m pretty sure that the the world can survive without another blogger commenting on the “War on Christmas,” but I have an irrestible urge to do it. For those of you who successfully managed to avoid knowing what this semi-controversy is (and I congratulate you on that), I’ll give a quick summary. From what I understand, Steve Gibson, a reporter for Fox News wrote a book arguing that Christmas is under attack, pointing out that there’s a movement toward saying “happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”. From what I’ve seen in a clip from Bill O’Reilly’s show, they link this to the decline of religion in Europe, saying that once you push religion out of the public square you get things like legal prostitution and other social ills.
I don’t agree.
Personally, I think that the source of the decline of the European church can be traced to state sponsorship of religion. In Europe, the state sometimes owns the church buildings, pays the clergy, and generally makes it possible for the state sponsored church to be completely disconnected from public wants.
By contrast, the US has a more “free-market” approach to religion. We give churches no support other than tax exempt status. Our churches have to be dynamically engaged with the culture they live in or die. And they do die. Where are the Shakers now? They used to be huge. By contrast, Pentecostals have grown immensely and so have other religious groups.
It seems to me that what Bill O’Reilly and Steve Gibson are advocating is more akin to state sponsorship of churches than anything else. In this case, of course, it’s more pressuring companies than passing laws, but, what’s the best case scenario if the general culture listens to them? Employees of various stores will say “Merry Christmas” whether they are Christian or not. More stores will have “Merry Christmas” signs instead of “Happy Holidays” signs. This won’t represent an honest desire to honor Christ. It will just be a realistic approach to avoiding a boycott.
I’m trying hard to think of anything good that can come of it.
Honestly, I don’t think anything bad is going to come of it either since I suspect this issue will evaporate once Christmas passes just like the whole “Christmas is getting too materialistic” concern seems to evaporate every year.
At core, the whole “War on Christmas” thing points to a larger anxiety that Christianity is disappearing from our culture. I don’t know if that’s true. Assuming that church attendance represents some level of commitment to Christianity, I’m told that the percentage of people attending church (around 40%) and the sex ratio (trending female) has been roughly the same for much of the country’s history.
If this is true then the “War on Christmas” is more perception than reality.
On the other hand, it might be that numbers don’t tell the whole story. It may be that Christianity is getting less influential and less important to the people who profess it. If so, pushing stores to continue saying “Merry Christmas” strikes me as more of a band-aid than a solution. If people believe in Christ, then it doesn’t matter whether the religion’s holidays are part of public life or not. If people don’t believe, you’re doomed from the start.
It’s in reference to things like this that I envy Orthodox Christians. They use a different calendar for determining when they celebrate religious holidays. As a result, there’s no confusion between what’s going on in public life and what they celebrate religiously. They get to have a Santa Christmas and a “real” one a few weeks later.
It makes obvious what I think is the real truth of things–the public Christmas has little if anything to do with Christianity. It’s a civil, commercial holiday that piggybacks on the religious holiday. I’m inclined to enjoy it for what it is and try not to confuse it with the celebration of Christ’s birth that goes on at the same time.
Posted by Jim at December 20th, 2005
Those who know my reading tastes know that David Brin in one of my favorite authors. He wrote Startide Rising (winner of a Hugo, a Nebula, and an award from Locus), which was probably my favorite book during high school and college.
Turns out that Brin has a blog.
Recently Brin wrote an article about what he thinks is wrong with both the Republican and Democratic parties these days. I don’t really want to go into it in detail here, but I’d just like to mention that I think it’s interesting.
Posted by Jim at September 29th, 2005
In reading Ed’s blog today, I ran across a post that raised some issues that I can’t help but respond to.
So let’s think about Graham’s essay. The gist of it seems to be that high taxes on the rich makes start-ups not worth the risk for venture capitalists because they just don’t pay off well enough. Thus we shouldn’t overtax but we should make the use of wealth transparent so that wealth doesn’t result in great power.
I’ll take the second assumption first and make a couple comments. First, the idea of logging all transactions sounds pretty good. It allows a person to see what wealth affects and it’s already in practice in the form of being able to check who gave what donation to which politician. So presumably we’d take this a little further. I’m curious as to how far though, and, who does the watching. The government? Private firms? Also, what’s transparent? Is every ATM transaction open to everyone’s inspection? Is it limited to people with wealth or am I included?
In all honesty, I don’t really think it’d be possible to monitor financial transactions to the point that everything’s transparent. Even if we could, I’m not convinced that living in a society where everything’s transparent is automatically desirable (I’m open to it though).
Even if we could monitor transactions to the point that wealth’s effect could be monitored, I don’t think that we could monitor the connections between wealthy people. As in “Bob” went to college/is related to “Joe” who’s sister is married to a senator or something. That’s the sort of connection that can get people favors. Monitoring that sort of thing would be hard or impossible.
That being said, let’s get back to the first issue then… I think Graham’s right in that if you tax too much, you do discourage investment and you probably do discourage innovation.
However…
What I’m not sure about is what sort of policies he’s imagining when he talks about shifting money from the poor to the rich, or for that matter, what he means by poor. Is it using exorbitant taxation to move all the poor into a better economic bracket? Or is he against paying to move people off the streets and into homeless shelters? Or is it simply any policy that causes taxation of the wealthy to go past some magic number of return on investment?
Just for the record, I tend to think that exhorbitant taxation seems more likely to result from war and natural disasters for the near future. Even if Bush refuses to raise taxes, we’re going to either have to either pay more or spend less to get rid of the debt. Either way, social spending is likely to be less of a priority for a while.
As such, I’d like to balance the thought that exhorbitant taxation on the rich reduces innovation against another thought: Unmet physical needs also reduce innovation.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs posits that people need to met certain minimum physical needs before they can concentrate on education and creative, risky ideas. I think the theory’s likely to be right in its general assumptions even though I might want to quibble with what Maslow regarded to be the highest of human needs.
To my mind what matters is the kind of inequality. Inequality isn’t so bad if it means that Bill Gates is exceptionally wealthy but a large group of “poor” people exist that have enough to eat, have air conditioned apartments and can pay their bills. Inequality is very bad thing if it means that there is a large group of poor people living on the streets, having only emergency room healthcare, or digging through dumpsters for food.
The good news is that our proportion of the former sort of poor people is larger than the latter. The bad news is that the latter sort of poor people still exist.
We lose the potential innovation of all those people scrambling for basic survival as long as their basic needs aren’t met. When they don’t have food on the table, they aren’t coming up with the next innovation in online commerce.
What I wish I knew was how long people typically stay in poverty in the US. Also, what effects does growing up in poverty have on a person’s future ability to think and create?
What I’m saying is that taxes vs. profit is a very narrow window to consider the topic of economic inequality under. It may well be that once a person brings the damage of poverty on a person’s potential into the equation, you might find that higher taxes would be a better choice.
I’m not saying I know the answer, I’m just pointing out that there’s more to be considered than taxes and their effect on venture capitalists.
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