The song remains the same

At the request of a friend, I popped over and took a look at the doings on BF.com.  This was a mistake, particularly after having read Bill Kristol's column today in the NY Times.  (More on that in a bit)  My friend requested that I look at the White Privilege thread and, of course, it was the same old thing only this time regarding Barack Obama's masterful speech on race.  There was the usual denying of white privilege and the usual copy-and-pastes of the same lists of what white privilege is by the usual people.  Someone, in an obviously mistaken attempt at levity, posted a link to this article at the Onion .  This was met, quite predictably, by attention being drawn to how the satire wasn't funny (it is, in fact, quite funny) and how the words used in the piece were precisely what POC go through everyday, etc. etc. ad nauseum infinitum.  Didn't people actually listen to the speech or did they just hear that the speech occurred?   Here was an opportunity for the POC on BF.com to be heard and, as far as I could read, many of the whites just weren't interested in listening.  What's more many of the POC didn't appear to hear something Obama said about white privilege, to wit:

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren't always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze - a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns - this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

Now, to my mind these are some of the most insightful and bravest words spoken about race in America anytime in my lifetime.  Not only because it is definitely true that, in fact, this is exactly how many working- and middle-class whites feel when they hear the words 'white privilege' but the very idea that blacks have any kind of obligation to do so much as acknowledge that it might hold a grain of truth is entirely foreign.  I will admit that on more than one occasion I have heard whites talk about that and closed my hears to their words, however, as I have grown and lived a bit more and realized what kind of amazing privilege I grew up with because of class and realized that there have been and are white folks who grew up with far less privilege than I did.  This doesn't mean that they don't have white-skin privilege but they do not see themselves as privileged and, to take one example, it is hard to imagine how my best friend from high school could have felt privileged compared to me because he was poor and I lived in a huge house compared to the small apartment then duplex.  It is painful to watch and I didn't post anything on BF.com (and won't after the trashing I got) but it seems that both sides of this debate have entrenched and are now just doing a kabuki dance with one another, both playing their assigned parts to the hilt.  It's almost as if one were watching computers caught in a looping dialog. 

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Coda on blog weirdness

"I think that the protocols of disagreement, how do we disagree and press our ideas, even press our ideas powerfully and yet not turn opposition into enmity...We need to find a way to struggle with one another and not make enemies of one another...what's so bad about the sell-out indictment, it alienates people who might otherwise be allies.  And that's yet another bad feature of the sell-out indictment.  You and I could argue strenuously and after a period of time could say 'let's carry our argument out over dinner' but if during our argument you called me a sell-out we're not going to go to dinner.  In fact, we're probably not going to talk anymore. Because even entering into a disagreement requires a certain level of trust and if you use that language of sell-out you destroy the basis of any trust." (Randall Kennedy on NPR's Talk of the Nation 7 Feb 2008)

When I heard this quote, I had an epiphany.  First, some backfill.  About a week after I posted on my Dreaded Memes blog about leaving BF.com one woman posted something rather, let us say harsh.  The original post was:

Well, well, well. Things sure do look different when the shoe is on the
other foot. I personally saw you sit silently by when another woman of
color was blatantly bashed. And no, it wasn't me, though I am a Black
woman. Don't think the other WOC don't notice your double standards.
You disavow other POC because they don't share your perspective or
privilege. That woman's comments to you were not racist and shame on
you for casting them as such. By the way, I've yet to see you admit
when you are wrong. It's too bad because your general assessment of BF
is accurate, it's just that you only seem to see it when it applies to
you.

Now, I had left BF.com but still had an account there.  If this woman had wanted to say something to me, she could have done so privately either there or sent me an email since there is an email link on this blog.  But she posted it as a comment (and I pulled it and my responses down).  It was meant to a bit of schaudenfreude in my own house, if you will.  I reacted.  I didn't think, I just reacted and for perhaps a day or so, got pulled into the very kind of discussion I dislike where it is about the person and not the ideas.  I try to step back and really think things through so responding like this was somewhat out of character, certainly how I interact online.  But listening to Randall Kennedy discuss his book, Sell Out, I realize why this whole thing bothered me so deeply and profoundly. This was an attack that was meant to hurt.  This wasn't about sisterhood or anything noble.  This was just trying to get a dig in because there was a dig to be had.  Thus the necessity of doing so publicly and playing the cheeky game of not even telling me which incident (this woman had an incident in mind) she was talking about.  It was about shaming, not dialog.  And my reaction to this and subsequent posts, which I will spare you reading, makes a lot more sense to me.

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GOP sources: Romney to suspend campaign - CNN.com

GOP sources: Romney to suspend campaign - CNN.com

And then there were two.  So it comes down to Huckabee and McCain which means that the GOP nominee will be McCain.  You know, gentle reader, as well as I do that the GOP is nowhere near suicidal enough to nominate Huckabee.  Well, I guess that pack of kids Romney has sat him down, realizing that this was their inheritance flying out the door, and said "Dad, knock it quite the hell off.  We have gotten used to being rich. We would like that tradition to continue."

From the "I wish I had said this" grab bag

Both of these worldviews, God-centered religion and atheistic communism, are opposed by a third and in some ways more radical worldview, scientific humanism. Still held by only a tiny minority of the world's population, it considers humanity to be a biological species that evolved over millions of years in a biological world, acquiring unprecedented intelligence yet still guided by complex inherited emotions and biased channels of learning. Human nature exists, and it was self-assembled. It is the commonality of the hereditary responses and propensities that define our species. Having arisen by evolution during the far simpler conditions in which humanity lived during more than 99 percent of its existence, it forms the behavioral part of what, in The Descent of Man, Darwin called the indelible stamp of our lowly origin. (Edward O. Wilson)

Ramen.

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Do Progressives think in terms of strategy or tactics?

First, some definitions:

Tactics, then, are isolated actions or events that take advantage of opportunities offered by the gaps within a given strategic system, although the tactician never holds onto these advantages. Tactics cut across a strategic field, exploiting gaps in it to generate novel and inventive outcomes. Tactics are usually used to spoil the running context.

Strategy is about choice, which affects outcomes. Organizations can often survive -- indeed do well -- for periods of time in conditions of relative stability, low environmental turbulence and little competition for resources. Virtually none of these conditions prevail in the modern world for great lengths of time for any organization or sector, public or private. Hence, the rationale for strategic management. The nature of the strategy adopted and implemented emerges from a combination of the structure of the organization (loosely coupled or tightly coupled), the type of resources available and the nature of the coupling it has with environment and the strategic objective being pursued.

Strategy is adaptable by nature rather than rigid set of instructions. In some situations it takes the nature of emergent strategy. The simplest explanation of this is the analogy of a sports scenario. If a football team were to organize a plan in which the ball is passed in a particular sequence between specifically positioned players, their success is dependent on each of those players both being present at the exact location, and remembering exactly when, from whom and to whom the ball is to be passed; moreover that no interruption to the sequence occurs. By comparison, if the team were to simplify this plan to a strategy where the ball is passed in the pattern alone, between any of the team, and at any area on the field, then their vulnerability to variables is greatly reduced, and the opportunity to operate in that manner occurs far more often. This manner is a strategy.

The question I want to ponder today is what a long-term Progressive political strategy looks like.  All progressives would agree that we need to do something about what we are doing to the environment.  Let's take a look at how the question of strategy and tactics plays itself out in this arena.  Recently, Greenpeace sent a ship, the Esperanza to shadow some Japanese whaling vessels.  Now, the Esperanza had to turn back because of fuel issues but this is a prime example of tactical moves.  There's a gap, and you exploit that gap to your ends which they did because even though they had to turn back, no small amount of ink and bandwidth was consumed in reporting on their actions and Japanese whaling in general. However, it doesn't scale well and isn't a long-term strategy.  It's something you do when you can do it, namely when a whaling fleet sets sail and you're in the position to do so.

Strategy, on the other hand, is longer-term and it is this that I wish to focus on.  So what would an environmental strategy look like?  Let me say, at the outset, that environmental issues are not my forte'.  What I know is from secondary and tertiary sources and not primary sources (meaning I don't tend to read journals written by people who studied environmental science).  So there will be much to criticize in this post but the specifics are less important than the overall picture.

So, what does an environmental strategy look like?  I would say that in order to formulate one, you have to look at the problem as clearly as you can.  I will take just one factor to keep things simple; carbon emissions.  We all know that a large part of the problem is that we burn fossil fuels to power our cars and our cities and that is just in the highly industrialized West.  The big problem is still coming on-line and that is China and India.  We (all of humanity) cannot afford for either China or India to live and drive huge gas-guzzling SUVs in any kind of numbers like Americans.  Yet, we have no right to pull the development ladder up and say "sorry, we recognize that your two great and ancient nations represent a full-third of humanity but you got to the industrialization party too late.  You really should've gotten this far in the early 20th century..."  So how do we address, long-term, the issue of Third World industrialization and all of its attendant issues (deforestation is another big one which, of course, leads to species extinction) while not doing some kind of paternalistic ladder-raising?  So we have three populations (American, Chinese and Indian) that need to be convinced to either accept some more inconvenience and pain (Americans--let's be honest, we could restructure our society so we don't have to drive so damn much) or to take a different industrialization track than the West (ideally, if they could just skip the 19th/20th century style of oil/coal power as a primary energy source this would go a long way). 

Now, the technologies are out there to be used (the amount of carbon I use getting to and from work is minimal because I bicycle, take the bus and take light-rail and none of those are exotics or novel) and there's the potential of solar power to really provide the vast majority of our energy needs (get cars, buses and trucks off of fossil fuels and onto electricity, use regional solar power plants to provide power to cities and, incidentally, our vehicles except airplanes which will need to use fossil fuels for the foreseeable future).  But how do we convince people to change their lives?  My co-workers largely look at me as if I were insane for riding to work, yet they all say they are concerned about the environment--just before they get in their SUV to drive the five miles to their home.  This is the kind of strategic thinking and talking about that I hope to see more of from Progressives. 

As an aside (sort of) Barack Obama was more right than wrong when he said that for the last quarter century, the Republicans were the party of ideas.  They have spent the last quarter century thinking about how to frame their political wants and desires in a way that is palpable and how to counter Liberal and Progressive voices or make them outright irrelevant.  But now, it's the Progressives' turn.  We have the gap in the American body politic (tactics) let's exploit it by beginning to really do evidence-based politics where we try to come up with real solutions for real world problems.


Cheers

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The ultimate betrayal? Really? No, not really Virginia.

NOW-New York State Press Releases

And so it comes to this.  Ted Kennedy, the liberals' liberal has betrayed women (No one asked me) when he endorsed Barack Obama?

According to NOW-NY:  "Women have just experienced the ultimate betrayal. "  This is the final, horrible logic of identity politics come to fruition.  No where in the press release is there anything about how Kennedy's endorsement was for a candidate who is less qualified than Clinton.  And the over-the-top language?  Ultimate betrayal?  Not endorsing a female candidate for President is the worst thing that the Massachusetts senator could do to women?  Really?  Do they actually believe that?

Later they go on to say:  "This latest move by Kennedy, is so telling about the status of and respect for women’s rights, women’s voices, women’s equality, women’s authority and our ability..."  Again, I ask really?  What does it tell?  Only that NOW-NY backs Hillary Clinton because she's a woman first and foremost.  Is it possible that, even taking very cynical realpolitik into account, that Barack Obama is the most electable Democrat running?  Might it even (gasp) be possible that he is imminently qualified to be POTUS? 

Now, if I were a race-woman then this paragraph would begin by accusing NOW-NY of racism because they are supporting a white woman for POTUS instead of a black man.  But I loathe identity politics with such a deep and abiding passion that I refuse to indulge that thought, even though it crossed my mind for maybe a minute.  I do not believe that NOW-NY had racist intentions, just that in their rush to be feminist (a cause I absolutely support) they have merely gone to the other side of the coin.  So let me make this clear:  If Hillary Clinton is the nominee (and I hope she is not for purely political and policy reasons) I will vote for her (what other choice do I have) and I will be well-aware that I am casting a historic vote and if we wake up on the first Wednesday in November and discover that we have elected a female POTUS I will be proud and happy and joyful because she is a woman and it is about damn time we elected a woman.  But it would be indefensible for me, as a feminist, to support Hillary Clinton merely because she is a woman.  It is no different, in either style or substance, than someone voting against her because she is a woman.  I support Barack Obama because I want a POTUS I can believe in.  In the last decade of last century, there was a man I believed was that politician.  I remember remarking to my parents that I finally 'got it' about their love of John F. Kennedy.  And then Bill let me down.  He let me down in policy ways and he let me down by being politically stupid.  But I still want a President I believe in.  Watching Obama, I really understand what people mean when they talk about Kennedy.  Do I think he would make a perfect candidate?  No.  Do I think he would make a perfect President?  No.  But, I am not looking for perfection, just someone competent and in whom I can believe--at least a little.  At present, I believe Obama when he talks about wanting to heal the divisions in America.  I believe him when he talks about trying to rise above the politics of personal destruction.  So far, so good.  I am, of course, painfully aware that he is a black man and that if he is the nominee I will have the opportunity to cast a historic vote and if he is elected I will be living through a historical event that I will be able to tell my granddaughter.  But I will not be voting for Obama because he is a black man, I will merely be voting for him because I believe he can do the job and happy that, finally, I get to cast a vote for a black man for POTUS. 

NOW-NY has succumbed to what many committed activists do; the sirens' lure of identity politics where what you are becomes who you are and thus constrains your movements because you have to do certain things.  As a woman, I'm 'supposed' (using NOW-NYs' logic) to support Clinton because she's a woman.  If I bother to actually study her politics that's all well and good and no one should hold it against me if I do.  But I'm 'supposed' to support her because she's a Democrat (I have a feeling that if it was Condi Rice running, she would not have NOW-NYs' backing but I could be wrong) and a woman.  Nowhere is the idea that there are other, more pressing, political calculations to make. 

Now, I want to be clear, I think Hillary Clinton is an inspiring figure.  However, if you like the sound of President John McCain then Clinton is the Democrat you want him to run against.  The GOP base may not turn out because there's no love lost between them and McCain, unless by doing so they can prevent Clinton from getting into the White House.  Clinton is beatable and obviously so, Obama is not quite so beatable.  But as a woman I'm not 'supposed' to take that kind of realpolitik into consideration.  Well, this woman does because this woman wants to see a Democrat in the White House and a Democratic Congress.  Above electing a black man (which I'd love to see) or a woman (which I'd love to see), I want our nation to stop this destructive slide we are on and I think that a Democrat in the White House is our best, last chance for doing so.  The Democratic party is famous for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory (2004 Presidential election anyone) and this is one year we can't afford to do that (we couldn't in 2004 either but we did anyway.  John Kerry?  Really, he's the best we could come up with?).

NOW-NY is out to lunch but, in the making lemonade from lemons department, hopefully this will be yet another nail in the coffin of identity politics.

Cheers

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Barack Obama, you had me at 'Yes, we can change"

Obama speech: 'Yes, we can change' - CNN.com

I didn't hear the speech, I read it and now I wish I had heard it first.  This was a great American speech.  I hope that twenty years from now, they'll teach this speech.  But that's not what this is about. 

This is about how Barack Obama got me to believe him.  I'm willing to suspend disbelief because he really appears to be the real deal.  A more or less pragmatic Progressive.  I don't expect him to be ideologically pure.  I expect that there are places that folks can make many mountains out of molehills.  I'm sure that all manner of swiftboating will take place.  Yet, I think this man can be the next President of the United States. 

We're up against decades of bitter partisanship that cause politicians to demonize their opponents instead of coming together to make college affordable or energy cleaner. It's the kind of partisanship where you're not even allowed to say that a Republican had an idea, even if it's one you never agreed with.

That's the kind of politics that is bad for our party, it is bad for our country, and this is our chance to end it once and for all.

We're up against the idea that it's acceptable to say anything and do anything to win an election. But we know that this is exactly what's wrong with our politics. This is why people don't believe what their leaders say anymore. This is why they tune out. And this election is our chance to give the American people a reason to believe again.

But let me say this, South Carolina. What we've seen in these last weeks is that we're also up against forces that are not the fault of any one campaign, but feed the habits that prevent us from being who we want to be as a nation.

It's the politics that uses religion as a wedge and patriotism as a bludgeon, a politics that tells us that we have to think, act and even vote within the confines of the categories that supposedly define us, the assumption that young people are apathetic, the assumption that Republicans won't cross over, the assumption that the wealthy care nothing for the poor and that the poor don't vote, the assumption that African-Americans can't support the white candidate, whites can't support the African-American candidate, blacks and Latinos cannot come together.

We are here tonight to say that that is not the America we believe in.

That took me over the edge.  This cuts to the core of what has been wrong in this country for most of my adult life. As much as it pains me to cut Clinton out of this picture, but I think that the smart ticket is Obama-Edwards (poor John, always the Veep candidate).  I think that Clinton anywhere on the ticket is too much of a lightning rod and 'd like my son to live some part of his life in a world where a Bush or Clinton wasn't in the Executive, so far his entire twenty-one years has been spent with either a Bush or a Clinton in the White House.  None of which is to say that if she's the nominee I won't support her. 

This is a politics of hope.  A belief that the American people, while not always the sharpest knives in the drawer, can break out of being sheeple when the chips are down.  The country is in a mess, no question about that.  We let conservative ideas dominate the available dialog of solutions for a generation, that didn't work out so great.  There's a space open in the body politic, I hope, for us to turn away from the brink and bring a more compassionate sanity to our politics. 

Read the speech.  It's really quite amazing.

Cheers

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Contractual Obligations

This is going to be very meta-. Since Matthew and I are doing this little project, neither of us having any idea what we're doing, I thought it might be useful—if only on my part—to make a longer preliminary statement. I do this, in part, because misunderstandings can arise in these discussions, particularly if the issue is race, one is black and one has a significant parting-of-the-ways with what could be called ideological orthodoxy. I am not a political conservative. By any reasonable definition, I am a Socialist for most practical economic purposes. I am a social libertarian meaning that unless there is some compellingly good reason for a non-harmfulact or substance to be illegal, it should not be illegal. I am, on principle, on board with the idea that you get to end your own life as you choose. I believe that the war-on-drugs is a massive and tragic failure. I believe that a woman's right to make decisions about her own reproductivity is an inherent right. I believe that marriage should be a contract that people can enter into and if some wish to impose religious ceremony or meaning on it, bully for them. Since there is no reason why two women or two men could not enter into such a contract, I strongly support gay marriage. I oppose the death penalty on a number of fronts although, to be perfectly honest, not categorically. If someone were to, for instance, release smallpox back into the ecology, death would be a fate altogether too good for them. I believe that it is indicative of racism that so many black men are on death row, relative to their representation in the population as a whole. I am no fan of free-market capitalism (regulated capitalism is another story).

In other words, I am a pretty typical left-coast Progressive. That said, my views on race and multiculturalism, in its strongest forms, are not in keeping with Progressive orthodoxy. Why this is so is the subject of this post.

Firstly, it would be helpful to define what I mean when I use terms like 'justice' and 'social contract' because they're very relevant.

I am a Rawlsian Liberal. Meaning that I take a lot of my thinking about Justice from John Rawls' seminal work, “A Theory of Justice”. In it, he articulates the idea of justice as fairness. As a thought experiment, he asks us to imagine creating a society ex nihilo. We get to make a truly just society, wipe the slate clean and start all over. Everyone involved in the negotiation starts from exactly the same place, as equals. The really clever bit is this, no one knows where they will end up in the social hierarchy; meaning that you don't know whether you will be rich or poor, in the ethnic majority or an ethnic or religious minority. No one knows if they will be male or female. The set of rules that this group of self-interested parties would come up with for ordering a society will tend to be a just one. There is a great deal more to it than that, of course. (It's a difficult book, it took me a long time to get through it because it's very dense but well worth the read. )

One cannot help but notice that this assumes a social contract which is the other grounding assumption I make. I believe that humans order society by sets of agreements between parties. We form coalitions, build alliances, have hierarchies, etc. All of these are relational and, ultimately, contractual arrangements. This may be a good thing or it may not be, for my purposes this is simply what is and what we have to work with if we desire to see great social justice and equality.

There is one last important grounding assumption I feel the need to confess. I believe that human beings are animals and that means that we are what we are because evolution. Whatever transcendence we may attain, however brief, we carry our Pleistocene past with us. We are not creatures of the city so much as we are creatures of the village. This also means that we are neither angels nor are we monsters. This means that there are practical limits to the perfectability of humans and thus, to our societies. I think we are not there. This is not it, there's a lot of work to do, but I think a better world is possible just very difficult to obtain and it can only be so much better.

Again, I felt the need to put this out there first before going to the meat of the matter. So here we go.

In order for there to be racial progress, and I think most folks would say that things have ground to some kind of impasse to some degree, we must re-envision what it is we are trying to achieve. We have to re-think what the struggle is about and this will change how we go about thinking about solving the problem. This is not my parent's civil rights struggle. They were involved in the Struggle during the 40's, 50's and 60's in Alabama. That is not where my life is lived, it is not really the life lived by any black folks in America today. This struggle is different and, to some degree, the greater part of it must take place within the black community. It pains me to write that. It pains me deeply to write it. But it must be said. This is not to say that this work is the whole of the thing, merely that it is a large part of the thing.

It is time for the black community, particularly the black intelligentsia, to abandon the strong form of multiculturalism. The strong form states that cultures are sacrosanct. All cultures are sacrosanct and have rights that transcend the rights of people within those cultures. Such that if one is a person of goodwill one is obligated never to criticize a culture except for the dominant one. What this has meant is that a number of things that really shouldn't be tolerated are tolerated and I am talking about things that have been going on in the black community, certainly as long as I have been aware.

Afrocentrism must die.

I will start with the most ridiculous (yes, that's the word I'm using) idea that I think does harm to race relations in America and that is Afrocentrism. At the core of this ideology is the idea that black children will only identify with figures of historical note or with various achievements if the people who performed these feats are of the same color. So the fact that someone built the pyramids is secondary to the idea that these people were black (which they weren't—these were not sub-Saharan Africans). Aristotle did not get his ideas from the library at Alexandria because when he lived,

Obama gives a valiant talk

Obama Takes on Homophobia, Anti-Semitism and Xenophobia at MLK's Church

It was a pointed statement to black parishioners in the pews. He did not hold back.

For most of this country's history, we in the African-American community have been at the receiving end of man's inhumanity to man. And all of us understand intimately the insidious role that race still sometimes plays - on the job, in the schools, in our health care system, and in our criminal justice system.

And yet, if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that none of our hands are entirely clean. If we're honest with ourselves, we'll acknowledge that our own community has not always been true to King's vision of a beloved community.

We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them. The scourge of anti-Semitism has, at times, revealed itself in our community. For too long, some of us have seen immigrants as competitors for jobs instead of companions in the fight for opportunity.

Every day, our politics fuels and exploits this kind of division across all races and regions; across gender and party. It is played out on television. It is sensationalized by the media. And last week, it even crept into the campaign for President, with charges and counter-charges that served to obscure the issues instead of illuminating the critical choices we face as a nation.

This was a courageous statement on the part of Senator Obama.  It would be a foolish person who would contend that his words are not necessary or that it took great political courage to make this statement.  It's long since past time that a politician of national stature would stand up and say this in the black community.  What's more, this should go some distance from Obama's earlier gaffe of appearing with an ex-gay minister. 

I wonder, though, if Obama just cost himself no small portion of the black vote with this speech.  Not that the national media will take much note of this since it doesn't play into the dominant narrative du jour.

Cheers

Jacqui

Candidate Huckleberry: Worth the price

NIV Bible (Leather cover): $13.59

Left Behind Boxed Set: $22.00

Nominating a completely unelectable religious fanatic: Priceless

There are some things in life you need to think about, for everything else there's religion.

Huckabee equates homosexuality with bestiality (again)

Election Central | Talking Points Memo | Huckabee Directly Equates Homosexuality With Bestiality

Now, I'm not surprised that he said this:

 

QUESTIONER: Is it your goal to bring the Constitution into strict conformity with the Bible? Some people would consider that a kind of dangerous undertaking, particularly given the variety of biblical interpretations.

HUCKABEE: Well, I don’t think that’s a radical view to say we’re going to affirm marriage. I think the radical view is to say that we’re going to change the definition of marriage so that it can mean two men, two women, a man and three women, a man and a child, a man and animal. Again, once we change the definition, the door is open to change it again. I think the radical position is to make a change in what’s been historic.

The sad thing is that he'll pay no political price for this. 

The Raw Story | Huckabee: Amend Constitution to be in 'God's standards'

The Raw Story | Huckabee: Amend Constitution to be in 'God's standards'

So Mike Huckabee came right out and stated that we should amend the Constitution to be in line with "God's standards". Now, while this is troubling (yes, Virginia, there really are theocrats) let's at least give Huckabee the courage of his convictions. Personally, I like my Christo-fascists out-front where I can see them. The crypto-Christo-fascists are the scary ones.

Self-imposed exile from Butch-Femme.com

I recently left Butch-Femme.com, most likely for the final time.  In my three years, I tried to be a positive presence and while a lot of my posts there were academic or, at least, intellectual they were also, I hope, entertaining.  I wasn't the most popular person there, but my personality isn't one that is driven toward popularity at any rate.  About a month ago, I started a thread on BF where I asked a question about the over-the-top religiosity in the current American Presidential campaign.  In the last few days, a newcomer came into the thread and started ripping on myself and another poster, Matthew, who consistently have tried to use reason and rational argument in our postings.  This poster was insulting (to put it mildly) and the end came for me when she claimed that my posts were coming from the perspective of  'dead white men' and that there was nothing 'black or brown' about my rhetoric.  I know racism when I see it and this was easily the most racist thing said to me on BF.com.  What's more, all of these wonderful, liberal/progressive and allegedly oh-so-open-minded lesbians just sat back and watched.  No cries were raised in my defense or in the defense of Matthew, even while these women were patting themselves on the back for how 'open-minded' and 'tolerant' they putatively are. This was the straw that broke the camel's back.   All points of view are not respected, despite whatever rhetoric is used.  Rather, what is respected is fuzzy-thinking, platitudes and spiritual posturing.  Clear and reasonable thought is put-up with but is not tolerated and certainly not protected in the same way.  If this poster had said to any of a number of other BF member what she said to me, she would have been pilloried and rightly so. 

However, there is more to my leaving than merely a few incidents with a few fanatically New Age posters.  In the course of my three years there, I witnessed people doing everything they possibly could to avoid ever being in error.  By this I do not mean that folks did their homework to make sure that they had their facts straight.  Rather, they took a position that 'all world views are true to those that hold them' which, in one sense, is entirely true.  People do not believe things that they believe to be false.  However, to acknowledge the latter is not to endorse the strong relativism that has become part and parcel of the American Left.  Because if everyone is entitled to their world view and all world views are equally true (well, except a scientific or rational world view.  Say that you believe that the Virgin Mary appears in your tortilla, THIS is to be respected.  Say that humans share a recent common ancestor with chimps, and no such respect is forthcoming) then you need never be wrong.  The logic of this (if you can call it that) is straightforward.  If the person you disagree with can never be wrong, you can never be wrong.  It doesn't matter how contra-factual the statement is, if you believe it, it's true, and therefore it cannot be wrong. 

To offer up another example from BF.com, someone posted some New Age poppycock about a polar flip that is supposed to occur on 12 December 2012.  Now, at some point the magnetic poles will flip but this will not be a physical shift of the planet, merely the magnetic poles.  It has happened before, it will happen again.  Another poster, picking up the theme, claimed that the map of the Earth would change (it won't) and that this would be a sign of 'the final alien invasion' (I am not making this up, I swear).  So, it was left to me to point out what a polar shift entailed, why the map of the Earth won't change and why this has nothing to do with the orbital direction of the planet.  But did it make any difference?  No, of course it didn't!   Folks are still convinced that this has to do with the Mayan calendar, alien invasions and the planet literally being turned upside down!

At some point, I had an epiphany that folks not only dislike being wrong but that this particular sub-culture is obsessed with never having to admit to error.  From the 'if I don't call you wrong, you don't call me wrong' to the embrace of ignorance as a sign of moral strength and mature wisdom, it became clear to me that the worst thing that could ever happen was that one might have to say "I was wrong" or "I was in error".  And so, by unspoken agreement, a mythology has become an ideology.  The mythology is that we can get through life without having to admit error.  The ideology is multicultural relativism. 

Let me be clear that when I talk about multicultural relativism, I am talking about bromides like the idea that Native Americans are one with the Earth (they aren't, ask the Anasazi--oh, that's right, you can't they wiped themselves out in an environmental disaster), Indigenous People are holistic thinkers, etc.  What's more, the 'we love this' attitude, which I do not dispute or doubt, covers over the elephant in the progressive living room; these ideas are the very essence of racism.  It does not matter that one is coming from the perspective of "this is something to celebrate", the moment you start to say "well, Asians have an affinity for calculus and I respect people who can do calculus so that's wonderful" you have engaged in a stereotype and have made a statement that is, at its heart, racist.  (As a quick aside which I'll take up in another blog post, racism is not just what the guys in white sheets do)  It is racist because it attributes to a group qualities more appropriately adhering to individuals.  Saying "Indigenous People" are holistic thinkers dehumanizes the people talked about.  It does not matter if one is talking about ones' in-group, if one attributes this to something that people of group X are, because they are members of that group, it is still racism and still dehumanizing.  Wrapping it up in nice language doesn't change that equation at all.

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - Greatest Hits - Don't Come Around Here No More

New Telescope/Stupid newbie trick

My spouse gave me a Meade NGC 60 telescope for Christmas!  Since I was a girl, I've wanted a telescope and never bothered to buy one for myself.  This new blog is for me to post my observations and generally just ramble about doing amateur astronomy. 

This morning, four days after I actually got the telescope, I noticed that I had been misreading things.  What I thought was a 94mm eyepiece turns out to be a 9mm eyepiece!  Yay me for being blind!  I don't know why I kept seeing a 4 where there wasn't one but I did. 

So for the past two nights, I've been trying to get acclimated to my telescope by trying to sight in on things in the neighborhood (it's all I've got, I live in Portland, it's been cloudy every night since Tuesday) and was doing this from my balcony (which I know is sub-optimal) with way too much magnification!  At least now I know. 

I managed to figure that out and spent some time starting at a crow across the street.  Since it's cloudy again today, I'll have to do some more observing around the neighborhood. I might even take it up to Mount Tabor and look down on the city. 

Technorati Tags: astronomy,observations,telescope

You're wrong!

On a discussion group I participate in, I had to explain to a friend why people told hym why hie is wrong about logic:

You're wrong because you hold to a world-view that says that people can be wrong. While more 'open-minded' folks hold to a more inclusive world-view where all views are right and no one is wrong, therefore you're wrong. The reason you are wrong is because your world-view is not inclusive, and therefore your world-view is wrong. If you believed that your world-view is right but that other world-views, even world-views that, if true, completely exclude yours, are also correct then you wouldn't be wrong. So, as you can see, the only people who can be wrong are those who believe that others can be wrong. Those who do not believe that others can be wrong, can't be wrong themselves.

Being Liberal

Being Liberal

What does it mean to be a liberal or, more broadly, to be of the American Left in the opening movements of the 21 ^st century? Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton, writes, “If we shrug our shoulders at the avoidable suffering of the weak and poor, of those who are getting exploited and ripped off, or who simply do not have enough to sustain themselves at a decent level, we are not of the left. If we say that this is just the way the world is, and there is nothing we can do about it, we are not part of the left. The left wants to do something about this situation”. ¹ This is a good enough sketch to be workable for initial purposes. Few, if any, of those who call themselves Progressive or Liberal would quibble the above. This argument, however, is not about the goals, broadly defined, of a Left-leaning American politics. Rather, it is about how to go about 'doing something' about those things that we are concerned about and what gets in our way.

I am going to start outright by saying that the worst enemy of the American Left, the invisible chain holding us to one spot, is not the American Right in any of its faces (Christian, Economic or Neo-Conservative) but rather the Left itself! Over the last two decades or so, the Left has embraced a dangerous and self-defeating relativism in the name of idealism. This relativism has caused otherwise thoughtful and concerned people, who truly do hunger for social justice, are genuinely aware of the force of bigotry in people's lives and strive consistently to resist and rise above, to abandon the very cognitive and social tools necessary for change. It is not uncommon to hear people who call themselves Liberal or Progressive railing against logic, rationality or science in an attempt to appeal to some particular belief or another without realizing that this very argument can and is used by those on the Right to be obstructionist of actions such as taking steps to ameliorate global warming. It is equally common to hear liberals railing against white privilege or patriarchy or racism and then, when the subject changes to some injustice taking place in another nation for those same mouths to become shut, their voices withdrawn because of a desire to not be imperialist. Yet, in doing so, it weakens the moral force of the argument against sexism or racism in the West, because it denies the universality of the wrong of racism. If all that there is is culture and culture is inviolate (instead of individual rights having this honor) then who is to say that in some cultures racism isn't a problem?

Do people really believe things like this? As startling as it might seem, the answer appears to be a resounding 'yes', although I suspect that at some level this is only an appearance. It is possible (perhaps likely)that people have not fully thought through their positions to their logical conclusions. It is possible that people simply imbibed a particular kind of ideological Kool-Aid during their college years and, because they were never really in an environment where that would challenged, have never had to actually defend their position in an arena where there would be robust and vigorous debate. If everyone around you believes that, for instance, logical problem-solving is a Western creation, 'privileged' in the West by middle- and upper-class white men and those who emulate them, then you are very unlikely to be faced with someone willing to put up a spirited defense and, at first blush, this argument will seem sound if for no other reason than that it's manifest unsoundess has not been pointed out.

1Singer, Peter. A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution and Cooperation. Yale University Press 2000

Sucks to be a Liberal Part 1

It sucks to be a liberal! As a unrepentant liberal, I get to say that because, despite some of the excesses I still believe in much of the liberal program. However, we liberals take some strange stances, many of which we don't realize come back to roost. Recently in a discussion group I participate in, someone made the statement that facts are subjective. Not only is this manifestly wrong and self-negating. Yet, this statement went without challenge by most people on the message board. This is the kind of excess that gets liberals in trouble.

Facts cannot be subjective if, by facts, we mean it in the ordinary sense as a proposition about the world with a high correspondence to the observable world. It is a fact that Earth occupies the third orbital position from the Sun at an average distance of 8 light minutes (93 million miles or 149, 000, 00 0 km). There is no room for subjective interpretation there. It is a fact that normal water is comprised of two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom. You can come up with your own list of facts about the world. Now, there one can argue that some facts are more open to the interpretation of their meanings or significance than others, but you cannot invoke a set of personal facts for your own convenience. If you do, the rest of us are no more obliged to accept your facts without evidence than we are obligated to jump off a cliff just because you say so.

What's more, liberals need facts. The kinds of things that liberals express care and concern about are, largely, evidentiary claims about the world. Either it is true that more black men are in prison than in college or it is not. If it is true, then either the justice system is prejudicial toward black men or it is not. Either women, on average, are not paid as well as men for the same work or we are. Again, this is a claim that, if true, will have evidence for its veracity left around like bear spoor in the wilderness. If what liberals want, truly desire, is for society to change and move in a direction toward greater inclusion and justice then we must admit that we are not there now, that others in society may need some convincing that change is necessary and that the path forward will be considerably smoother if we have facts on our side, with evidence and it is possible to reach some kind of consensus on what constitutes evidence. The logic of this is entirely non-remarkable and straight-forward. If I tell you that I have a ten-million dollars for you and it is yours if only you give me the deed to your house you are going to want some evidence that the money does exist before you start signing your house over to me.

My suspicion is that a lot of liberals say things like 'facts are subjective' or 'all cultures are equal and deserve respect no matter what' as reflexes without actually thinking through the consequences of those ideas. There is a noble and laudable impulse on the left to be non-judgmental, to accept people as they are and to side with the underdog. All of these I support and believe in as well. That said, this impulse does not absolve me of a responsibility to think. More about this another time.

Blogging the commute

There's a woman sleeping on the train. I just sent the picture from my cell phone but can't get a wireless connection on the MAX so the text has to follow when I get to work.

The weekend is over and now it's on to work. My heart isn't in it. The rains and winds are fierce today. Oregon's oldest Sitka Spruce died last night in a high wind storm out at the coast. When I heard about it, as I was listening to the news, I had a moment of pause. This is something OLD, a few hundred years at least, and now it is gone. Yet another singular, clever arrangement of DNA snuffed from this world as all living things must eventually be.

In the meantime, Toastmaster's was really interesting. We had a whole pack of students from PCC and PSU there. This is far from normal. Normally we might have one or two as guests. Then two people from work also showed up at the behest of another co-worker of mine.

Lastly, I (obviously) have managed to get my laptop back to normal. I'm running Kubuntu 7.10 on it using KDE 3.5.8. My desktop machine has KDE4RC1 on it but it's not quite ready. The Plasma applets look insanely great but you can't position them on the screen which diminishes their usefulness.

Hey, Young Americans, Here's a Text for You

Hey, Young Americans, Here's a Text for You

Naomi Wolf continues to urge young Americans to take democracy seriously. She should be praised for her efforts and they should be brought to the fore of liberal discussion in America. One thing she points out that goes along with my earlier post:

But this distressing situation isn't just George W. Bush's fault. Young Americans have also inherited some strains of thought from the left that have undermined their awareness of and respect for democracy. When New Left activists of the 1960s started the antiwar and free speech student movements, they didn't get their intellectual framework from Montesquieu or Thomas Paine: They looked to Marx, Lenin and Mao. It became fashionable to employ Marxist ways of thinking about social change: not "reform" but "dialectic"; not "citizen engagement" but "ideological correctness"; not working for change but "fighting the man."

During the Vietnam War, the left further weakened itself by abandoning the notion of patriotism. Young antiwar leaders burned the flag instead of invoking the ideals of the republic it represents. By turning their backs on the idea of patriotism -- and even on the brave men who were fighting the unpopular war -- the left abandoned the field to the right to "brand" patriotism as it own, often in a way that means uncritical support for anything the executive branch decides to do.

In the Reagan era, when the Iran-contra scandal showed a disregard for the rule of law, college students were preoccupied with the fashionable theories of post-structuralism and deconstructionism, critical language and psychoanalytic theories developed by French philosophers Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida that were often applied to the political world, with disastrous consequences. These theories were often presented to students as an argument that the state -- even in the United States -- is only a network of power structures. This also helped confine to the attic of unfashionable ideas the notion that the state could be a platform for freedom; so much for the fusty old Rights of Man.

In the 1990s and the early years of this century, theories that globalization is the ultimate evil found their ascendancy on college campuses. Young people, informed by movements against sweatshops and the World Trade Organization, have come to see democracy as a mere cosmetic gloss on the rapacious monolith of global capitalism.

We on the Left should take a very hard look at our rhetoric. Things that do not work should be shed. The American Left is dead! Long live the American Left!

Cultural relativism is killing liberalism

            I am, by no means, the first Liberal/Progressive to make the observation that the American Left has lost its way.  What I have noticed is that in the name of multiculturalism and being accepting of 'the Other' it has become next to impossible to criticize anything happening in another culture for fear of being painted with the label 'imperialist'.  On a lesbian message board I participate in, the case of a Saudi woman, who was sentenced to six months jail and some 200 lashes with a whip for being in the company of a man not related to her by blood or marriage came up.  A number of women, in fact the vast majority of them, reflexively stated that we had no right to say anything about the harsh treatment this woman is being faced.  The reason?  Because this was Saudi society, not American society, and therefore any suggestion that the idea that a woman should not be able, under threat of punishment, to associate freely was entirely beyond critique!  Re-read that sentence because it is a shocking statement.  Women who are feminists, who putatively support the feminist idea that women are human beings and should be treated equally, were entirely unwilling to condemn a law that is predicated upon the very idea that there is something inherently wrong with women that they must be forbidden to associate with men they are not related to by either blood or marriage.  What kind of feminism is that?  It is modern, 'Liberal', feminism which is so entirely reflexively anti-American and anti-Western that those who hold to it cannot even bring themselves to condemn female genital mutilation. 

 

            Whatever the West does is ipso facto wrong because the West did it.  Whatever other cultures is ipso facto beyond criticism because they did not happen in a Western culture.  So I was treated to the spectacle of someone comparing, in all honesty one must assume, FGM with the piercing of a little baby girl's ears.  Now, as far as I am aware, the ear lobes are not places where this piece of hypo-allergenic will cause permanent hearing loss. 

 

            While liberal commitment to anti-imperialism is certainly noble and a stance I absolutely support, it can be taken too far and when we, as liberals or progressives reflexively refuse to condemn the doings of other cultures because they aren't American culture we do a disservice to ourselves as progressives.  This reaction is just part of a larger pattern in American progressive thought.  This larger pattern is the lack of a coherent philosophy of what it means to be a liberal.  This is not to say that progressives do not have things that we will condemn.  We pay lip-service to anti-racism, to egalitarian economics, to being against religious fundamentalism but it is largely lip-service and not much beyond it.  If you press a little and dig a bit then you will find an unwillingness to say that anything much is actually wrong. 

 

            On this same discussion group there have been numerous discussions about world-view and the general zeitgeist is that all world-views are equally valid and that the Western way of viewing things is just one amongst many.  This may be something that makes us feel we are entirely safe from being judgmental but it is more a cop-out and a refusal to either call someone wrong or to be called wrong ourselves.  It is particularly ironic given that the world-view of, say, Fred Phelps must also be given the 'all world views are equal and none are truly wrong' consideration if you take that position.  Now, no one in this group is willing to admit that Phelps and his ilk may be correct.  However, there is simply no recognition that the logic of strong relativism must apply even to those ideologies most harmful to gays and lesbians. 

 

            The logic behind this is extremely straight-forward.  If by all world-views one truly means all, in the ordinary sense of that word, then one must admit that the Christian fundamentalist who states that their brand of Christianity is the only truth must be correct.  Now, of course, it should be painfully self-evident that this cannot be the case.  Given the overall arc of Christian fundamentalism, it either is true (e.g. there is a God, this God has a very specific plan for humanity and a zero-tolerance policy for any deviation from that plan) or it is not.  There are no possible worlds where there is a God who requires you to accept Jesus as Lord and Savior is correct and where other religions are also true.  It is logically incoherent to say that both are true in the same world.  If the relativist is correct then they are incorrect because this means that the world-view that states 'all ideas are not equal in their truth claims' is also correct which negates the first proposition.  Why this isn't obvious to all thinking is beyond my comprehension. 

 

            I long for an American Left that is capable of actually standing for something in a strong manner.  The American Right has left us a large gaping space which we could claim and hold.  That space is being evidence-based.  By this I mean it in the sense that social workers do in evidence-based practice.  Instead of taking the position that X is true because X is good liberalism, we should first ask ourselves does X make sense given what we can observe about the world?  Global warming offers an excellent example.  Either there is evidence for global warming (and at this point almost everyone who knows bugger-all about climatology agrees that global warming is happening) or there is not.  Now, while it is true that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, it still stands that if there is no evidence it does not make economic sense to advocate policies based upon the idea that there is because it 'saves the environment'.  However, if there is evidence for it then it not only makes sense to implement policies to alleviate or stave off the effects it is irrational to do otherwise.  The American Right has, for the most part, abandoned evidence as a sine qua non for advocacy and that space in the American polity is open.  Another good example of abandonment of evidence that I associate with the Left (although, strictly speaking, it is not) is the 'autism is caused by the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine' meme.  This pernicious meme has lots of cache on the Left although the evidence is not there.  Not only is the evidence not there, there is evidence to the contrary.  Namely that mercury, the alleged causative agent, is no longer used in the MMR vaccine.  It hasn't been used for six or seven years and yet the incidence of autism continues to climb even though, relatively speaking, most school-age children are still being given the vaccine.  If the MMR vaccine were the cause, what one would expect is that there would be a tail-off of autism cases in children who reached the age that MMR is administered after mercury was no longer used as a preservative agent in the vaccine.  Yet that isn't observable.  Does that make any difference at all?  No.  Why?  Because people have it in their heads that the vaccine causes autism and therefore that is what it is caused by. 

 

            The Left really cannot afford to be so sanguine about ignoring evidence in favor of ideology.  The Right has a number of tools in their boxes which do not rely on evidence to make headway.  The most powerful of these is the religious impulse.  Nothing turns people out to your side more than the idea that some Invisible Friend wills it.  We have a space to actually be the reality-based community. I think we should seize it.