Average Folks
Huckabee made another crazy, far-right, non-sensical point about, this time, Beyonce...and it seems even far-right voters in Iowa think he went too far.  Way to go regular Americans.

Why is there so little discussion of the fact that we would likely not be faced with the ISIS threat if Cheney has not chosen to invade Iraq (a country with no involvement in 9/11 and with no terrorist activity when we attacked)?  Cheney should apologize for all the young men and women who have died as a result of this ill-advised invasion...and all those currently dying in the battle against ISIS. Regular folks can see this, but Cheney and others like him cannot or refuse to see it.

The president took the radical position of supporting vaccinations today.  It is hard to believe that there are educated elites out there willing to pander to anti-science.  Clarification:  this is not to say science has resolved every question.  But where science is 90+% in agreement (climate change, vaccinations), to stand against this position is lunacy and anti-American.  This is NOT just a case of holding a contrary view; it is calculated and phony and deeply damaging to democracy.

Manufacturing Conflicts

For those of you who saw Dear White People, I recommend watching this amazing 25 minute interview with the director.  He is thoughtful and insightful about the multiple, overlapping conflicts over race and identity central to his film—and his effort to reframe how think and talk about these conflicts.

Michael Gerson, conservative columnist for the Washington Post, wrote a column this week that was reprinted in the Akron Beacon Journal today.  You can read the entire column here. 

Gerson uses Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s recent claim that the most important threat facing America today is the Muslim invasion and colonization through Sharia Law.  Jindal provides no evidence, because there is none.  This is a manufactured conflict, designed to outrage and distract and mislead.

Gerson calls this tactic of amplifying phony conflicts ‘Both appalling and symptomatic’ and a much more serious threat to American democracy that a fake Muslim invasion. 

No surprise that Gerson see one powerful agent responsible for our distorted political communication to be elites who own and run our corporatized mass media, and talk radio in particular.  But notice he does not blame the media alone.  His analysis points to a culpable media AND to the equally important agency exercised by public and private sector elites (like Jindal in this illustration) who exploit the mass media to intentionally distort our political deliberations.

“This rhetorical strategy is a disaster for democratic discourse. It creates a cartoon version of reality in which actual problems are obscured or misdiagnosed. It avoids the hard work of drawing careful distinctions and offering nuanced judgments. It leaves some people on constant high alert; others are exhausted by an endless series of supposedly existential threats and unable to distinguish the real ones.

Above all, extreme rhetoric shapes a certain view of ideological opponents. Climate scientists and their allies, say some on the right, are not just mistaken, they are liars. They are acting out of corrupt financial and ideological motivations. No real debate is possible with people consciously engaged in a fraud or a hoax. They can’t be engaged; they can only be defeated. This approach becomes even more dangerous when opponents are defined in ethnic or religious terms. It creates an atmosphere in which neighbors are viewed as potential subversives.”

It amplifies citizen confusion and frustration with politics, by design.  When more citizens throw their hands up in disgust and walk away from our public sphere, elites like Jindal and the owners of Fox News could not be happier to stay put and fill that void. 

“There are, of course, comparable arguments made on the progressive side. Opponents get dismissed as theocrats or as hopeless defenders of privilege. Such people cannot be debated; they can only be delegitimized and silenced. The strategy on both left and right is the same: to present politics as a battle between the children of light and the children of darkness. Opponents become enemies. Democratic deliberation becomes difficult or impossible.”

Here we see Gerson arguing that the illustration he used (Jindal) should not be misconstrued as a partisan argument. He believes this is a tactic used by both sides.  It is and it is not.  See Mann & Ornstein for the best analysis of this question I have read. I do not agree on the part of Gerson’s argument here that suggests each side is doing this in equal volume, with comparable zeal for brazen phoniness, or with an equivalent willingness to misrepresent, confuse, and damage democracy.

Leaders strengthen democracy when they use this tactic to advance the public interest by bringing to the people (putting on the policy agenda for deliberation) the most important conflicts for us to address, with alternatives and trade-offs clearly outlined.

Public and private sector elites weaken democracy when they use this tactic to advance a narrow private interest (re-presented as if it were a public interest) by confusing and misleading publics and dissipating public energies by focusing us on more trivial issues.

“The United States has enough real problems and real enemies without the manufacture of artificial outrage.”

Political Correctness is not all it's cracked up to be

Political correctness can increase creativity, an NPR story reports.  The study found that when groups first discussed political correctness their brainstorming efforts that followed (compared to a control group that went directly to brainstorming) produced both more ideas and more creative ideas. Groups that were all male or all female did not show more creativity, but mixed groups did.  

The authors conclude that “men might be uncertain about what may be seen as sexist or inappropriate, while women might be uncertain about speaking up at all and if their ideas will be valued.  ‘But in both cases, by reducing this uncertainty, people were much more open—both men and women—to share more ideas,’ Duguid said.”

Michelle Duguid, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, is one of the authors of the study and this is the citation from her web page:

"Creativity from Constraint? How Political Correctness Influences Creativity in Mixed-Sex Work Groups", Administrative Science Quarterly, with J. Goncalo, J. Chatman, J. Kennedy

National Public Radio is a great source for daily news.  Locally, turn to 89.7 or 90.3 on your FM dial for WKSU or WCPN respectively and you will find NPR news programming on either station.  Best way to survive daily commutes, because the best news programming on both stations is during commuting hours in the morning and after work.

Take the Leap

David Brooks, conservative columnist at the New York Times, recently wrote about online dating.  You can see his full text here.  I like Brooks because he strikes me as usually prioritizing being honest and thoughtful over grinding an ax or sneaking in his sides talking points.  I only sometimes agree with him.

A column about online dating struck me as an odd choice.  Turns out there is some interesting research being done by data mining the big data available on these sites.  For instance, as Brooks noted

“It’s better to have a polarizing profile than a bland one. People who generate high levels of disapproval — because they look like goths or bikers or just weird — often also generate higher levels of enthusiasm.

Racial bias is prevalent. When Asian men are looking at Asian women they rate them as 18 percent more attractive than average. But when they are looking at black women, they rate them as 27 percent less attractive. White and Latino men downgrade black women by nearly the same percentage. White, Latino and Asian women have similar preferences.

When people start texting or tweeting to each other, they don’t turn into a bunch of Einsteins. Rudder looked into the most common words and phrases used on Twitter. For men they include: good bro, ps4, my beard, in nba, hoopin and off-season. For women they include: my nails done, mani pedi, retail therapy, and my belly button.”

I am not sure I know what all these terms mean.  I am sure I do not use them and would be embarrassed to hear many of them used among friends.  

Right before I was about to start feeling superior to online daters, Brooks cut me off at the knees and I immediately recall that two friends whom I deeply respect in every way found their partners through an online dating service.

“People who date online are not shallower or vainer than those who don’t. Research suggests they are broadly representative. It’s just that they’re in a specific mental state. They’re shopping for human beings, commodifying people. They have access to very little information that can help them judge if they will fall in love with this person. They pay ridiculous amounts of attention to things like looks, which have little bearing on whether a relationship will work.”

Brooks then reviews briefly research that suggests dating sites do not do a good job of mining their own data to deliver on their promised match making.  Is anyone really surprised that we do not have an algorithm that finds life partners?  

Then Brooks surprised me a bit with the lesson he chose to draw from this research.  He argues that the algorithm is MIA because good relationships are lovingly unpredictable and we succeed here, not through a linear and utilitarian analysis of net worth and cuticle care, but by taking “the enchantment leap.”

“This is when something dry and utilitarian erupts into something passionate, inescapable and devotional. Sometimes a student becomes enraptured by the beauty of math, and becomes a mathematician. Soldiers doing the drudgery of boot camp are gradually bonded into a passionate unit, for which they will risk their lives. Anybody who has started a mere job and found in it a vocation has taken the enchantment leap.

In love, of course, the shift starts with vulnerability, not calculation. The people involved move from selfishness to service, from prudent thinking to poetic thinking, from a state of selection to a state of need, from relying on conscious thinking to relying on their own brilliant emotions.

When you look at all the people looking for love and vocation today, you realize we live in a culture and an online world that encourages a very different mind-set; in a technical culture in which humanism, religion and the humanities, which are the great instructors of enchantment, are not automatically central to life.

I have to guess some cultures are more fertile for enchantment — that some activities, like novel-reading or music-making, cultivate a skill for it, and that building a capacity for enchantment is, these days, a countercultural act and a practical and fervent need.”

Thanks David.  Your column was a great way to start my day today.

Free Speech Took a Battering Again

Discovering New Worlds Very Close By

Animal Dreams is sitting on the end table next to me on the couch.  Waiting.  Just finished Flight Behavior, and before that Poisonwood Bible right after reading my first Kingsolver novel, Prodigal Summer. 

With a few exceptions, my novel reading started in high school English class and ended with high school graduation.  With an English professor partner I usually do not say that out loud, but this past year has been different.  Stacks of books about politics, requiring more dusting than thinking, have been replaced.

Reading Kingsolver is a welcome, if occasionally disturbing, adventure into worlds outside and within myself.  Part of me thinks, ‘hey, I should try to write similarly accessible and gripping stories where readers learn about how politics really works,’ in place of her teaching us about the natural world.

A larger part of me knows I could never actually pull this off.  But it speaks to how deeply I am loving her work.  I am a teacher and now I am her student as well.  

The stories of those in Zebulon Valley helped me see the complicated relationships between predators and prey that, together, create delicate ecosystems we take for granted as always resilient.  The lessons learned about our missionary and colonial impulses—at home and abroad—in Poisonwood Bible felt like the best political science course I had ever experienced. 

Dellarobia’s struggles, (particularly her exchanges with Ovid and his with the reporter), and Kingsolver’s gentle-yet-powerful description of these, help me see our world in finer shades, where climate change looms as an intimately experienced existential challenge to our species, relationships, and sense of self & community.

But I am not going to try to capture all that I love about these novels, because I lack the skill to articulate, perhaps even to fully identify, all the ways these are sparking my interest and curiosity. 

Just wanted to note that this is yet another way Julie enriches my life…one of a million or more, and to take a moment to appreciate her and these novels, the round house and our Christmas ornaments, date night, the noodle restaurant, Grand Canyon, and Cinque Terra. 

Athletes Speaking Out
When a Hollywood film star or CEO or athlete chooses to speak out on a controversial political or social conflict they always run the risk of being dismissed or even ridiculed for speaking out on something they know little or nothing about.

Sometimes the criticism is well-grounded.  This time it was not and the MSNBC coverage of the story gets my nomination for best covered story of 2014.

Here is a Salon story with a link to the MSNBC interview. Ari Melber, filling in ably for the amazing Chris Hayes, asks the right questions and the right follow ups, with just enough pushing to let the union official steadily reveal, one layer at a time, that his comments were more about thoughtless defensiveness than about an honest discussion of the challenges we face.

Andrew Hawkins, a player for the hapless Cleveland Browns, turns out to be incredibly thoughtful and honest and real.  Why would anyone apologize for calling for justice is a very good question.

Of course, the mass media rarely makes connections across stories (or historical eras).  Today we have stories about American's torturing our enemies abroad and American police killing unarmed citizens at home.  While there are many ways to reject mainstream media failures to make these connections, this story is one worth considering.  Calling for us to step back and 'see' ourselves as we are seen by others, the author notes that for Americans (are we unique here?) 'anything other than a black and white world perplexes us.'

Making connections across news stories is nearly always unsettling for the powerful.

"And as soon as I started thinking about the Senate’s torture report in the context of America’s conduct abroad, many other things seemed immediately of a piece. The string of police murders. The Surveillance State. The license granted corporations and the wealthy to purchase elections. No welfare for the poor but welfare for Wall Street. A minimum wage no one can live on. The bold-faced biases of our highest court—and when the judiciary goes, I learned during my years as a correspondent, all else is either gone already or on the way down."

In the end, I still see and experience an America not captured here, but an America likely to become stronger and more like the nation we aspire to become by engaging with the connections being made here.

He concludes that "a nation guilty of torturing its prisoners, shooting minority children, fortifying its oligarchies and surveilling its population 24/7 and everywhere has nothing to teach the world about democracy, justice, civil rights or the other values we profess but do not any longer live by. We have surrendered the franchise, such as it was ever ours."