Sunday Morning Reading Material: Second Sunday in May 2011: bin Laden had a “mom” tattoo edition
Parents and children and Google.
It’s Sunday Morning. Sundays are for celebrating one’s maternal relations. Alternately, Sundays are for showing off one’s child while visiting the town you lived in before having said child. Then again, Sundays could be for going “OMG! I’m in Paris!” Also? Sundays are for moving back to the USA. Possibly Sundays are for lamenting that one is unable to be with one’s own mother, and hoping that a video will suffice.
This week: the world began wondering why the US would launch a 10 year invasion and occupation of Afghanistan to do something it takes a Navy Seal + CIA team a couple years to accomplish in Pakistan. Also this week, Singapore, held elections where the majority party won with a significantly smaller majority than it had ever previously won with. Also: the Canadians held an election where the ruling minority party was able to secure a majority. Also: the United Kingdom held a referendum where they decided to retain the broken “first past the post” system, instead of going with a far more sensible “instant runoff” system. And in other news: Americans held their annual celebration of a Mexican victory over the French Empire.
Last Sunday, American forces did kill Osama bin Laden, and I’ll have more to say on that later. Many people celebrated, and many others feel that it is ugly to celebrate the death of a human being. I’ll have more to say on that later as well. For now: I think it is fair to say bin Laden left a legacy of death. It is, I think, therefore fitting to commemorate his shuffling off of the mortal coil by giving the gift of life. I do know that for many of my readers, donating money to any cause is an unbearable financial burden. If you are fortunate enough to be comfortable, I do strongly urge you to send a few dollars to a worthy cause.
One of the most awesome and humbling tricks the human brain is capable of is the one yours is performing right now: taking abstract shapes and making symbolic meaning of them. Reading. I have been reading since the age of two, and I literally cannot imagine what it is like to not be able to read. I call it a “trick” because it is not intrinsic to the human mind, but rather something that must be learned. Neural pathways must be shaped, molded, and guided into discrete and measurable tracks that literally change not only how a human things, but the very thoughts the person is capable of thinking. In Detroit, half of all adults are functionally illiterate. This means that they are literally not capable of thinking the same sorts of thoughts that you and I are capable of– that that living-wage employers demand. This is why one of my favorite causes, when I do get the chance to donate, is adult literacy.
I’ve remarked on this before, but science fiction is one of the most-useful genres of literature. It allows the human experience to be freed from historical and contemporary constraints and- if the author wishes- lets us see the underlying truths of the human condition. Granted, science fiction is (like anything else) subject to Sturgeon’s Law (90% of everything is crap), but even crap can be revealing. For instance: how Star Wars authors deal with female characters reveals a great deal about what contemporary society feels the underlying truth of male/female relationships are like.
For a decade, Democrats had been pointing out that Al Qaeda more closely resembled an criminal organization than a governmental one. For a decade we argued that this implied a more strongly law-enforcement mentality than a military one. For a decade, we Democrats were mocked and ridiculed. Obama got bin Laden. Bush couldn’t. I bet Obama spent many fewer taxpayer dollars doing this than Bush did. Between this, Universal Healthcare, and pulling out of Iraq, I’m ready to vote for Obama again.
For some reason the chattering classes take one look at the amazingly low interest rates being offered to the American government, a huge population of unemployed people, and are unable to do the basic math that says America must borrow money now to put people to work. Instead those chatterers are suddenly in a moral panic about debt, insisting that the only way to solve this non-problem is to slash the social services that make America a great nation– and have incidentally kept America’s economy from falling directly into the toilet. Rarely is the question asked: is our media knowing where the deficit came from? Nixon may have been our most evil president. Bush was easily the least-competent. The fun part? Proposed solutions to the deficit would basically amount to a major transfer payment from the poor to the rich. That’s right: rich people are arguing in their own class interest.
The New Republic allows liberal writers on their staff? Who knew?
It is very easy to come up with rules for, commandments about, and prohibitions on behavior. By crafting a set of instructions for the human condition, we reduce the amount of thought needed to perform a given action. Please understand when I say that I understand and agree with the impulse to create rules for behavior. We must also very much understand that rules are but shadows on Plato’s cave. They are not in themselves proper behavior, but merely guide posts to what proper behavior might be. Thinkers ranging from the Christian prophet (“The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath”), to Eric Blair (“[...]correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one’s meaning clear”) have made this point. The only real counter to the lazy habits of thought and writing imposed by glue-stick adherence to rules, consciously think about each phrase before fingers and keyboard engage in the modern dance. Put differently: one must engage in self-criticism before criticizing others.
Speaking of self-criticism: I used to work as a field representative for an elected official. That official’s district had (shamefully) began as a red-line zone for whites to flee to. This report detailing the racist manner in which cross-race constituents were treated by their elected officials made me wonder how well I did with my own responsibilities. No one likes to think of themselves as a racist– that doesn’t change the fact that a lot of these negative actions permeate society.
Speaking of race: I’m not sure what, if anything, we San Franciscans can or should do about this.
The good people at VALVe recognize that the need to take positive action to make their language as inclusive as possible. What’s interesting here is that they’re not only making a conscious effort at being better, they’re showing a bit of annoyance with “rules” which had prevented them from doing so previously.
My awesomely talented friend has moved to Paris.
A common complaint about the space program is that there are many millions of hungry people to feed here on Earth. I do very much understand this line of thinking, though I consider it almost criminally short sighted. It seems to have taken us 95 years and a baker’s dozen new technologies to confirm a theory Einstein dashed off between grading papers. I don’t know what those thirteen new technologies are. I have a very good idea that at least one of them will lead to an idea that will feed a very many people who would otherwise have gone hungry.
Funranium Labs wants to improve your booze and your coffee with science. Act now and get a 10% discount.
Why the recording industry is in sharp decline.
Osama bin Laden used his natural charisma, organizational genius, and inherited money for no better purpose than mass murder. Before his death, he had built nothing, and yet had filled graveyards. I think that the greatest testimony I can give to the humanity I share with the man is joy at his death. And yet. I do wish that we had put the psychopath on trial. To my way of thinking, justice cannot be served unless someone is allowed to stand up and defend their actions before the world. Without a trial, without some attempt at impartiality, we are left with nothing more than vengeance and slaughter. Sometimes- and it seems that this is one of those times- vengeance is all circumstances will allow for. And yet. I do wish for a different set of circumstances. The Slactivist looks at the hunting and killing of Osama bin Laden from a different point of view.
If you read just one link:
Rob Zacny is introspective. I think saying anything else would be a spoiler for the post, and take away from some of it’s inquisitive mastery.
Fittingly, for a post written on Free Comic book day, this week’s theme was truth, justice, and the American way. I didn’t even plan that. In the comments below, let me know why Batman is more awesome than Superman.
And the final bit of moral instruction can be found here:
No related posts.
Interesting stuff, but I would like to take issue with calling First Past the Post (FPP as I’ll call it) “broken” and calling “Instant Runoff” (we call it Alternative Voting) more sensible.
Their are several problems with FPP. A major one is that political left wing of Britain is quite split up. You have Labour, Liberal Democrats, the Green Party (though they are not huge) and (at least in Scotland) the Scottish Nationalists. But on the right wing you have Conservatives and maybe the UK Independence Party (though they are very minor). All other right wings are too small or too extreme to consider voting for. This means that Conservatives keep getting in because the right wing voters are united in the party they like and the left wingers have a lot of choice. Alternative Voting would help this because it has you rank parties in order of preference rather than just putting one.
The problem with Alternative Voting though is that it doesn’t make a great deal of sense. You get it that instead of having a party get in that 40% of people favoured you have a party that 51% of people thought was alright. How is that sensible? Instead of pleasing 40% you get 51% going “meh, it’s okay,”.
What people really wanted was an entirely different voting system, Proportional Representation, in which the amount of votes a party gets determines the number of Members of Parliament that get in. For example, there are 100 spaces. Party A gets 40% of votes, they get 40 MPs in, Party B gets 25% of votes, they get 25 MPs, and so on. This is a much better system since it means the government represents all the people instead of just some. The Liberal Democrats wanted Proportional Representation but because they are in a coalition (sort of joint-government) with the Conservatives they were made to compromise and go for Alternative Voting instead.
In summary, Alternative Voting just changes the voting system (which is already fair) when what we really need is something to shake up how politicians are elected which is Proportional Representation.