DFW on worship and truth

Not actually from "Infinite Jest," but quite marvellous nonetheless.

The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see [life, the universe and everything]. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship…

Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Taken from that now-famous commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005. Read it here before it disappears behind a pay-wall.

Shabbat shalom, my dears.

Thought for the day

Brian Eno talking to Daniel Lanois about a film on the source of Beauty that Lanois wants to make.

One thing that would be really interesting for your film is for people to see how beautiful things grow out of shit, because nobody ever believes that. Everybody thinks that Beethoven had his String Quartets completely in his head, they somehow appeared there formed in his head, and all he had to do was write them down so that they would be manifest to the world. But I think what's so interesting and what would really be a lesson that everybody should learn, is that things come out of nothing, things evolve out of nothing. The tiniest seed in the right situation turns into the most beautiful forest, and then the most promising seed in the wrong situation turns into nothing. And I think that this would be important for people to understand, that this gives people confidence in their own lives to know that this is how things work.

If you walk around with the idea that there are some people who are so gifted that they have these wonderful things in their heads — but you're not one of them, you are just sort of a normal person, you could never do anything like that — then you live a different kind of life. But you could have another kind of life if you say "Well, I know that things come from nothing very much, start from unpromising beginnings, and I am an unpromising beginning, and I could start something too."

Cognitive surplus

A brilliant article this morning by Clay Shirky:

I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, "What are you seeing out there that's interesting?"

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus--"How should we characterize this change in Pluto's status?" And a little bit at a time they move the article--fighting offstage all the while--from, "Pluto is the ninth planet," to "Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system."

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation. [...]

So that's the answer to the question, "Where do they find the time?" Or, rather, that's the numerical answer. But beneath that question was another thought, this one not a question but an observation. In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: "Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves."

At least they're doing something.

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list... However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

Indeed. Go read. And then participate: Blog, comment, edit, post. Or be an elf.

And put a hammer through your TV while you're at it.

Stuff, part two

Following on from my earlier post on stuff and the having of too much of it, here's a marvellous video on the subject, to stir the outrage of and strengthen the desire for change among thinking persons everywhere:

[Consumption] is the heart of the system, the engine that drives it... That is why, after 9/11, when our country was in shock, President Bush could have suggested any number of appropriate things: to grieve, to pray, to hope. NO. He said to shop. [...]

Guess what percentage of total material flow through this system is still in product or use 6 months after their sale in North America. Fifty percent? Twenty? NO. One percent. One! In other words, 99 percent of the stuff we harvest, mine, process, transport—99 percent of the stuff we run through this system is trashed within 6 months. Now how can we run a planet with that rate of materials throughput?

It wasn’t always like this. The average U.S. person now consumes twice as much as they did 50 years ago. Ask your grandma. In her day, stewardship and resourcefulness and thrift were valued. So, how did this happen?

Well, it didn’t just happen. It was designed.

Shortly after the World War 2, these guys were figuring out how to ramp up the [U.S.] economy. Retailing analyst Victor Lebow articulated the solution that has become the norm for the whole system. He said: “Our enormously productive economy ... demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption ... we need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”

Quoted from the script. The annotations are mine.

In the immortal words of Tonto, "What do you mean we, paleface?"

Tell me again, o great capitalist, why I should make myself poor, my home a garbage dump, my neighbourhood a chemical wasteland, in order to make you a tiny bit more egregiously rich than you already are? Because I think I must have misunderstood something there.

In related news the current sidebar quote from Stephen Fry is from an essay on sustainability, climatic change and the scarcity and necessity of common sense. Long, but worth every word. Go read.

In unrelated news Theriomorph has written a marvellous, moving essay on body, embodiment and the politics of appearances. Also long, but also worth every word. Go read.

Drifting

... through the day. Vague achey residual tiredness, strained voice, mild proto-headache which refuses to either go away or become a real, i.e. treatable, headache. Rose late after nine hours' train travel yesterday, walked downtown for cappuccino, then to the Dead White Male Poet cafe for lunch, then a little burst of translation; now a pause for tea and cookies before settling back to work on the wiki.

The demo went well, but they probably won't buy: what they think they need doesn't fully overlap with the database's feature set. It would have been a single client/server system in any case, without even any data-import consultancy to sweeten the pot: they claim to have no electronic data at all! Hard to believe, but I am certain that they weren't lying: only a fool would willingly set herself the task of manually re-typing paper records, if there were electronic records that could be imported in no time at all at a twentieth of the cost. We shall see.

I bought a copy of the current "Foreign Affairs" to read on the train, as I do once or twice a year (it's published bimonthly). FA is a strange beast, fascinating and infuriating at once, I cannot think that either the left or the right among American readers would be more than half-pleased by any issue—which is a sign that the commissioning editors have done their job fairly. Non-American readers would find the general tone to be very pro-American, every subject is discussed in terms of its impact on America and how it might be leveraged to further increase the wonderfulness of American life and society. "America has made mistakes, but America is not actually wrong" is as close as the magazine comes to criticism.

The stand-out articles this time around are Hillary Clinton on undoing the damage of the Dubyah years, Philip Gordon on whether the war on terrorism can be won, Colin Kahl on the Army's new Counterinsurgency Field Manual (fascinating, download the manual itself here), and a justly damning review of "The Israel Lobby" by Walter Russell Mead.

Yesterday's xkcd cartoon was quite enjoyably nasty.

Dooce has written well on depression and how to deal with it:

I think many people are afraid that if they take medication or even agree to see a therapist that they are in some way admitting failure or defeat. Or they have been told by their boyfriend or their mother or their best friend that they should buck up and get over it, and that asking for help is a sign of weakness. Well then, let me be weak. Let me be a failure. Because being over here on this side, where I see and think clearly, where I'm happy to greet my child in the morning, where I can logically maneuver my way over tiny obstacles that would have previously been the end of the world, over here being a failure is a hell of a lot more enjoyable than the constant misery of suffering alone.

Quite right. Go read. [Updated on Saturday: 1026 comments, almost all saying "thank god for therapy and/or [medication of choice]".]

Today's Friday Favourite is one of the best songs on an album that I wrote about earlier this week. Enjoy.

On turning garbage into wolves

Two quotes. First, from today's FAZ.net (my translation):

Four Neonazis in Mittweida [former East Germany, near Chemnitz] attacked a six-year-old child and cut a swastik in the skin of a 17-yr-old girl who came to her defence. The attacks happened on November 3rd.

The girl only reported the attack nine days later. Police consider her story believable, because medical tests confirmed that the 5cm swastika was not cut by herself. They were also able to find the original victim, who confirmed the girl's report.

According to the girl, four skinheads were pushing a six-yr-old child of a "Spätaussiedler" family in the parking-lot of a supermarket. The child was already crying loudly as the girl shouted that the men should leave it alone. Which they did: three of them knocked the girl to the ground and held her while the fourth cut a swastika in her hip with a sharp object. [...]

The mayor hopes that after publication of the attacks, witnesses will come forward. The girl reported that local residents had been watching the events from their balconies. So far no witnesses have spoken out.

The second is from George Steiner's brilliant and harrowing novel "The portage to San Cristóbal of A.H.":

It was [Hitler] who made real the old dream of murder... With his scourge of speech and divining rod. With his nose for the bestial and the boredom in men's bones. His words made the venom spill... He took garbage and made it into wolves. Where his words fell lives petty or broken grew tall as hate.

One of these days, when I'm in a particularly bad mood, I shall transcribe and post the chapter known as "Lieber's Lament," from which this quote is taken.

Twenty-five down, five to go.

On reading "On bullshit" by Harry G. Frankfurt

I am presently, as you may already have intuited, reading On bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt, "renowned moral philosopher [and] Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University." It is on many levels a wonderful book.

To begin at the beginning, the book is physically lovely: very well made, of a nice size and shape, with a pleasant and highly readable layout; the typography is excellent. To be quite honest, I might well have bought the book on these grounds alone. I am afraid (nay: I am proud, I boast) to say that I do judge books by their covers: if the publishers didn't think it worth their time to engage a good designer, if the typographers didn't care enough to do good work, if the printers were slipshod, then the book's content is unlikely to be much better.

I didn't read "On bullshit" when it first appeared in 2005; I usually don't, but rather wait a few years to see which books survive the bestseller mindset of publishers and journalists to earn a measure of renown. I expected the book to be yet another fashionable item with a half-life measured in days; instead it has become something of an underground classic, one finds references to it in other places, by trusted sources.

Frankfurt begins:

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted.

From where I stand on page seventeen, it's not yet clear where Harry is intending to take us. He sees a significant distinction between lies, humbug and bullshit: they are related but quite dissimilar. The relation and the point of difference is in the speaker's attitude to the truth.

A liar makes a statement that he believes to be untrue*, with the intention of causing his listeners to believe that his statement is true and thus concealing the truth. A recent and typical example is: "they have weapons of mass destruction." The significant point is that the liar is someone to whom the truth is very important, he is aware of it and cares greatly that it not become known.

Humbug is saying something that one knows is untrue, and which one's listeners know to be untrue, but with no intention on either side of believing or causing to believe, as (Harry's example) when a politician rises to his hind legs to say "our great and blessed country, whose Founding Fathers under divine guidance created a new beginning for mankind." A humbugger's relationship to the truth is tangental: he knows that what he says is not actually true, but does not seek to convince anyone of its truth.

A bullshitter tries to improve upon himself and the world by saying things that make him look better, his experiences more exciting, his pleasures more exalting, his defeats more crushing, his enemies more terrifying and his friends more angelic. An example is to say "my joke had them all falling out of their chairs with laughter" when in fact a few people chuckled. A bullshitter's relationship to the truth is one of blithe disregard. He truly does not care, at this time and in this case, what the truth is. In Harry's eyes, this makes him the worst and most dangerous of the three.

It's a fascinating book and I may well write about it again in a few days when I finish reading it. Recommended.

The thought for the day comes from Terry Pratchett's "Thud", which I've written about before.

"What? Tawnee says that what she does is art, sarge. And she wears more clothes than a lot of the women on the walls around here, so why be sniffy about it?"

"Yeah, but ..." Fred Colon hesitated here. He knew in his heart that spinning upside down around a pole wearing a costume that you could floss with definitely was not Art, and being painted on a bed wearing nothing but a smile and a small bunch of grapes was good solid Art, but putting your finger on why this was the case was a bit tricky.

Indeed.

Today's Friday Favourite is from an album that I often play for a while, then set aside and re-discover a year later. The song is a hit from my university days. Musically aware listeners will detect the presence of Messrs Rodgers and Edwards (aka Chic) on guitar and vocals. Enjoy.

Happy Friday and Shabbat shalom, my dears.


* the actual truth of the statement is not relevant: before 1492, a person saying "the earth is flat" would be wrong but not a liar because they were stating something they believed to be true.

Meat is murder

While I waited to get my annual flu vaccination this morning, I picked up a copy of "Stern" and read an article on the follow-up to a scandal in the meat trade last year. (Hundreds of people became ill after eating condemned meat which had been intentionally mixed into produced foods.) It's happened again; it has apparently never stopped happening.

I was shocked to learn that meat can be offered for sale more than two years after the animal was slaughtered! It's not fit for human consumption, of course, and may only be used for pet food, but still: there are cold-stores around the world containing thousands of tonnes of meat that is nearly as old as your pet. All perfectly legal.

We the public are protected against these slowly rotting corpses by a little paper tag glued onto the outside of the packaging. With the tag, it's worth twenty cents a kilo. Should an unscrupulous dealer rip off that tag, it's worth three Euros a kilo.

Are you surprised to hear that there are unscrupulous dealers who rip off the tags? They mix this awful stuff in with fresh* meat, grind it all up to hamburgers and doner-kebab skewers, and sell it to us. Mm-mm good.

When the scandal broke last year, the greater public was enraged at those damned unscrupulous foreigners running the street-corner doner-kebab stands which sold the stuff, poisoning us good innocent trusting Germans; since the guilty firms were not named, nobody knew any differently. This time around, the Stern has named names and published photos. It's a very interesting list, not that the greater public will care.

The first non-purebred-German name on the list is that of the whistleblower: a Serbian truck-driver who spotted a dealer ripping off a tag and notified the police. The next non-purebred-German names are those of the victims: the end-consumers who bought the awful stuff.


* though one has to ask oneself what this word actually means.

Dept. of eternal verities

Still translating. More later in the day, when I get this stuff corrected and sent off.

Miscellany, Friday edition

Mellow and slow day today, mostly spent walking about and talking to friends. Hamburg was nice, but it's also nice to be back in the big small-town of Stuttgart. I noticed something today that I hadn't spotted when I was in Hamburg: there are far fewer garbage cans on the streetcorners here, yet the streets are much cleaner. I wonder why?

In the absence of anything earth-shaking to report, permit me to direct your attention to Mir, who has moved from New England to Georgia and learned a thing or two about the American school system:

There was FIFTEEN MINUTES of an hour-long presentation devoted to why it’s important to have our kids read every day. One quarter of the allotted time. And they did a nice job with the presentation, but I cannot adequately explain how saddened I was, first, that there would be a need to go into such detail and passionated exhortations about this, because we are all readers here and in my happy little bubble of nerddom I can barely comprehend people NOT wanting to read, and second, as I realized that the parents who really needed that pep talk probably weren’t even present.

In this town, in this school, the “rich” sit in class next to kids from the projects, and the school motto this year is “If you miss school you miss out” because attendance rates are abysmal for the kids living in poverty. My bleeding liberal heart hurts when I consider that; the kids who are impoverished can get two free meals a day at school (even if nothing else), and yet they are often absent because—why? Because their parents don’t care? Because their parents are working too many jobs to be home and get them on the bus? Because they’re taking care of siblings? Chances are if they’re missing school they’re not eating, either. My mind boggles. I have taken so much for granted.

Indeed. Go read.

A recent post of Dale's reminded me of a favourite quote from George Orwell:

In this yogi-ridden age, it is too readily assumed that "non-attachment" is not only better than a full acceptance of earthly life, but that the ordinary man only rejects it because it is too difficult: in other words, that the average human being is a failed saint. It is doubtful whether this is true. Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings. If one could follow it to its psychological roots, one would, I believe, find that the main motive for "non-attachment" is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work. But it is not necessary here to argue whether the other-worldly or the humanistic ideal is "higher". The point is that they are incompatible. One must choose between God and Man, and all "radicals" and "progressives," from the mildest Liberal to the most extreme Anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.

Indeed. Go read.

Today's Friday Favourite will be one of the last, because a proposed change in German law would make my distributing such things a criminal offence (whereas it was previously "only" a civil-law matter) and I'm not prepared to risk jail to broaden your minds. (Not that your mind needs broadening, I was referring to the others.) Here's a mellow song for a calm and reflective Friday evening, from 1975.

Shabbat shalom, my dears. Enjoy the weekend.

Who needs horror movies?

From Hendrik Herzberger's article The Darksider in the "New Yorker" of 9/16 July:

[M]any of the details and incidents that Gellman and Becker document [in a four-part series in June in the "Washington Post"] are as new as they are appalling. More important, the pattern that emerges from the accumulated weight of the reporting is, as the lawyers say, dispositive... for the past six years, Dick Cheney, the occupant of what John Adams described as "the most insignificant office that the invention of man contrived," has been the most influential public official in the country, not necessarily excluding President Bush, and his influence has been entirely malign. He is pathologically (but purposefully) secretive; treacherous toward colleagues; coldly manipulative of the callow, lazy and ignorant President he serves; contemptuous of public opinion; and dismissive not only of international law (a fairly standard attitude for conservatives of his stripe) but also of the very idea that the Constitution and laws of the United States, including laws signed by his nominal superior, can be construed to limit the power of the executive to take any action that can plausibly be classified as part of an endless, endlessly expandable "war on terror."

More than anyone else, including his mentor and departed co-conspirator, Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney has been the intellectual author and bureaucratic facilitator of the crimes and misdemeanors that have inflicted unprecedented disgrace on our country’s moral and political standing: the casual trashing of habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions; the claim of authority to seize suspects, including American citizens, and imprison them indefinitely and incommunicado, with no right to due process of law; the outright encouragement of "cruel," "inhuman," and "degrading" treatment of prisoners; the use of undoubted torture, including waterboarding (Cheney: "a no-brainer for me"), which for a century the United States had prosecuted as a war crime; and, of course, the bloody, nightmarish Iraq war itself, launched under false pretenses, conducted with stupefying incompetence, and escalated long after public support for it had evaporated, at the cost of scores of thousands of lives, nearly half a trillion dollars, and the crippling of America’s armed forces, which no longer overawe and will take years to rebuild.

The stakes are lower in domestic affairs—if only because fewer lives are directly threatened—but here, too, Cheney’s influence has been invariably baleful. With an avalanche of examples, Gellman and Becker show how Cheney successfully pushed tax cuts for the very rich that went beyond what even the President, wanly clinging to the shards of "compassionate conservatism," and his economic advisers wanted. They show how Cheney’s stealthy domination of regulatory and environmental policy, driven by “unwavering ideological positions” and always exerted “for the benefit of business,” has resulted in the deterioration of air and water quality, the degradation and commercial exploitation of national parks and forests, the collapse of wild-salmon fisheries, and the curt abandonment of Bush’s 2000 campaign pledge to do something about greenhouse gases. [...]

Cheney, Gellman and Becker report, drew up and vetted a list of five appellate judges from which Bush drew his Supreme Court appointments. [...] The result is a Court majority that, last Thursday, ruled that conscious racial integration is the moral equivalent of conscious racial segregation. [...]

[L]ast week, Cheney provoked widespread hilarity by pleading executive privilege (in order to deny one set of documents to the Senate Judiciary Committee) while simultaneously maintaining that his office is not part of the executive branch (in order to deny another set to the Information Security Oversight Office of the National Archives). On Cheney’s version of the government organization chart, it seems, the location of the Office of the Vice-President is undisclosed. So are the powers that, in a kind of rolling, slow-motion coup d'état, he has gathered unto himself. The laughter will fade quickly; the current Administration, regrettably, will not. However more politically moribund it may become, its writ still has a year and a half to go. A few weeks ago, on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, the Vice-President issued threats of war with Iran. A "senior American diplomat" told the Times that Cheney’s speech had not been circulated broadly in the government before it was delivered, adding, "He kind of runs by his own rules." But, too often, his rules rule. The awful climax of "Cheney/Bush" may be yet to come.

Impeach the bastards now, while you still have the right to do so.

Unbelievable

From today's Guardian Unlimited:

Timberlan Addison, two years old, was staying with his 37-year-old father, Timothy, in Tampa, Florida... Timothy had had several brushes with the law, including time in prison for cocaine possession. But neighbours say he was an attentive father who often looked after Timberlan at weekends. Renee Henderson, who lives across the road, described Timothy as "a sweet person". Her daughter, Marquita, was pregnant with his seventh child. Timberlan was his sixth.

That Sunday morning, the two of them had gone out to get some breakfast. Back home, Timberlan was playing, climbing over the furniture, when he reached behind the couch and found a Sig Sauer 9mm semi-automatic... Timberlan pulled the trigger. When Timothy heard the bang, he picked up his crying son to comfort him, thinking he was just scared. Only when he saw the blood seeping through his red-and-white striped T-shirt did he realise that Timberlan had shot himself. [...]

Timberlan was taken to Tampa General Hospital. Timothy was taken to the station for questioning while the police searched the house. They allegedly found two 1oz bags of marijuana in the microwave and more seeds on digital scales on the kitchen counter. They also reportedly recovered a Glock semi-automatic pistol and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, including some for an assault rifle. [...]

Two months later, Timothy was arrested while at his construction job and charged with possession of marijuana with intent to sell, parole violation and possession of a firearm during a drug crime. He still faces state charges of culpable negligence for leaving the gun where Timberlan could get hold of it. Timberlan's mother was at the hearing, where she reacted angrily to the charges. "I forgave him from day one," she said. "These people are not taking into consideration that this man lost his child ... He wakes up every morning crying. He feels like it's his fault."

Whose fault do you think it is? How many separate things are wrong with this picture? Only in America.

Procrastination in action

Or "inaction," as the case may be. There are of course many things which are much more important than blogging, at this point in time exactly forty-eight hours before I leave for the airport; so of course I am blogging rather than doing any of them. My (call it) reluctance is in some way an expression of fear of what I will find buried and half-forgotten in the mess. If I stopper up my ears so as to hear no clucking, can the chickens be said to be home and roosting?

In other news I present for your delectation an editorial from the Portland Mercury:

It's time for the Democrats to face reality: They are the party of urban America. If the cities elected our president, if urban voters determined the outcome, John F. Kerry would have won by a landslide. Urban voters are the Democratic base.

It's time to state something that we've felt for a long time but have been too polite to say out loud: Liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America. We live on islands of sanity, liberalism, and compassion--New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, St. Louis, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and on and on. And we live on islands in red states too--a fact obscured by that state-by-state map. Denver and Boulder are our islands in Colorado; Austin is our island in Texas; Las Vegas is our island in Nevada; Miami and Fort Lauderdale are our islands in Florida. Citizens of the Urban Archipelago reject heartland "values" like xenophobia, sexism, racism, and homophobia, as well as the more intolerant strains of Christianity that have taken root in this country. [...]

If Democrats and urban residents want to combat the rising tide of red that threatens to swamp and ruin this country, we need a new identity politics, an urban identity politics, one that argues for the cities, uses a rhetoric of urban values, and creates a tribal identity for liberals that's as powerful and attractive as the tribal identity Republicans have created for their constituents. John Kerry won among the highly educated, Jews, young people, gays and lesbians, and non-whites. What do all these groups have in common? They choose to live in cities. An overwhelming majority of the American popuation chooses to live in cities. And John Kerry won every city with a population above 500,000. He took half the cities with populations between 50,000 and 500,000. The future success of liberalism is tied to winning the cities. An urbanist agenda may not be a recipe for winning the next presidential election--but it may win the Democrats the presidential election in 2012 and create a new Democratic majority.

Quite right. The article is less academic and more amusing (to an urban blue-state mentality) than these excerpts suggest, well worth reading.

In other, other news here is a series of wonderful Flash animations of scenes from office life using only typography. Brilliant.

On violence and civil society, part two

Three reactions. Beth thinks hard about what went wrong:

Of course gun control is part of it, but easy access to guns in America is not new. Unless we look at what makes America a society so in love with violence - as reaction, as solution, and as entertainment - there's no hope for change. Furthermore, who were the other people killed yesterday, or the day before, their deaths financed by my tax dollars? Is any one of those deaths a lesser tragedy? And who were the young American men or women who witnessed or caused those deaths, sent into war at 18 or 20, emotionally and psychologically unprepared, ignorant about the people and country to which they were going, yet heavily armed, and placed in a position of fear and, sometimes, chaos? What is the damage being done, in my name, to countless people who, if they survive their tour without physical damage, then return to a society which has, meanwhile, been websurfing for Prada knock-off handbags and worrying about whether Jennifer Lopez is getting a divorce?

and Rana picks up on the entertainment value of violence (in reply to Beth):

I do find personally compelling the argument that part of this is due to a culture of violence in this society, a culture that is taken as normal and unremarkable. I still remember, when I was an undergraduate nearly two decades ago, this one incident that sums it up well for me. At the time I was living in the Russian-speaking dorm, along with several other students and a native speaker visiting from Moscow. They were showing "The Shining" one evening, and I invited this woman to attend with me. She was horrified and terrified by the violence in the film - and the implied violence - and was even more astonished and disturbed by the fact that many of the people in the audience were laughing at Jack Nicholson's behavior.

while the Rockstar Mommy rages against the sensationalizing, rude, crude, intrusive media coverage:

Showing these things over and over and over again is doing absolutely nothing but finally giving this kid —this psychopathic mass-murdering cowardly crybaby little fuckhead— the attention and fame that he wanted. Did they learn nothing from Columbine? Did they not hear him reference Columbine in his video? Do they not realize that all this over-saturation will only put more ideas in more kids' heads? ...

I'm sick to death of this kid getting this kind of attention. He was a coward. He was a pussy. He was a self-centered, schizophrenic freak. No wonder he didn't have any friends. A good kid with issues doesn't turn into a psychopath, it's born into them. There is no glory in what he did. What he did does not make a statement. We are not in "The Matrix." This is not "Natural Born Killers." Killing people because you're sad does not make you cool. And killing yourself so that you don't have to deal with the consequences makes you the lowest scum of the earth, just below the news media.

Quite right.

On violence and civil society

Teju Cole writes well this morning (he always writes well, actually, but today's post spurred me to action):

Yesterday was Patriots' Day. If you didn't hear about it, it's because it isn't a well-known holiday... Another thing you perhaps did not hear about was yesterday's carnage: thirteen Iraqi servicemen shot to death in an ambush, another three accidentally killed by American soldiers, a university professor assassinated in his house in Mosul, and three people tortured and shot just north of Baghdad.

These items are, in my mind, related to yesterday's mass murder in Virginia. For me, the question has almost nothing to do with gun control. The Swiss are far more heavily armed than we are. It has to do with the story America tells itself about itself...

There are American qualities that are worth being patriotic about. I can't help but think that, were our leaders, and the people they represent, to pay closer attention to those qualities, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in today. We need to hear more from those among us who can help us stop entertaining ourselves into a stupor. We need to stop torturing people, so that we can rightly decry it when it happens in other countries. We need to stop making humiliation a national sport. We have a good thing going here, a deeply flawed but good thing, a heavy historical burden that, with mindfulness and patience, we might work our way out of. But now we're on the cusp of fucking it up. Our present is absurd: a country full of wise and thoughtful people run by idiots.

Indeed. Go read.

The example of the peaceful, heavily-armed Swiss is apposite; Canada has just as many guns per capita but a twentieth of the murder rate. I think gun control is a very good idea and should be implemented: there is no reason at all why a sane person should have an assault rifle at home, and every reason why insane people should be forbidden to; but gun control on its own will not solve the root problem.

The issue at root is why so many Americans are apparently filled with an uncontrollable, undirected violent rage.

Ade, Kurt

Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.

And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on. Read the rest of the article.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr., 1922-2007. RIP.

Confession

I dropped out of university.

It happened without my noticing. I just took a term out to earn some money and get some experience in that which we laughingly call "the real world," which turned into a year, which turned into a decade and more. I just lost interest in my studies, or rather the experience of earning money and the chance to work with computers was much more interesting than hanging around in college. Another promising young-ish scholar lost to Mammon.

Does it matter? Yes and no. It has no bearing at all on what I do, it's irrelevant to my computer work; but not having a degree definitely restricts what I could do. I cannot start an architectural practice, nor can I become a full partner in someone else's office, because I cannot get professional insurance without professional qualifications.

It certainly matters in so far as it affects my feelings about myself, which are complex and contradictory (and not just in this context, but that's another story). At the time I didn't give a damn, because I thought that I could always go back and finish the course; but a quarter-century later it is clear that I will not go back. There is a large amount of wounded pride involved, that I didn't have what it takes. I am ashamed of having quit after putting my parents to such an expense of money and hope. One of the reasons why not walking away from G is so important, is that I did walk away from college.

On the other hand, I would say in all modesty that my level of educatedness is the equal of any of my fellow students. If that wounded pride is what now drives me to learn languages and to try to understand Nietsche and Lao Tse, then I'd say that having it has been a good thing. Even at the time I was surprised and saddened by the Engstirnigkeit of my fellows, most of whom knew nothing but architecture and didn't perceive any lack in themselves for it. I own more books than all other architects of my acquaintance added together, and the curiosity and Weltoffenheit that lead me to want to read them is something that I'm very proud of.

Do I regret dropping out? Yes, definitely. The true purpose of an undergraduate degree is to demonstrate what the Germans call Sitzfleisch: the ability to sit still for a very long time, the implication being that you don't give in to boredom or discouragement but will continue until the job is done. This is something that employers like to see; but more importantly it is something that is very much worth seeing in yourself.

There, now you know. Let's see whether I have the courage to leave this up.

Dilbert strikes again

File this one under the truth hurts.