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August 19th, 2010

YMMA- NIMBY

The Ethnic composition of Muslims in the Unite...

The Ethnic composition of Muslims in the U.S. Image via Wikipedia

(YMMA: a spoof alternative to the YMCA, NIMBY: not in my back yard)

Practically everyone I’ve heard arguing against the Muslim center in New York is either basing their objections on misinformation (mosque, on “ground zero”, opening on 9/11/11, etc.) or repeating the mantra of “Muslims = terrorists”. If there’s an intelligent and informed argument to make against this center I have yet to hear it and suggest it hasn’t yet been made. Even the mildest point of objection (it’s in poor taste, the timing’s bad, maybe later) is actually a negative reflection on the attitudes of a large number of Americans.

Our objections betray our collective fears. And they’re nothing to be proud of.

We are collectively afraid of Muslims. We don’t trust our government or our laws to protect us from their next inevitable attack on our nation. By showing they could get around our security measures and kill thousands of us all on one clear, sunny day in New York they struck us with the greatest weapon an enemy can wield, fear. They made us afraid and we haven’t quit being afraid. Fear is what causes too many otherwise reasonable people to conclude that all Muslims are terrorists, supporting terrorists or refusing to denounce terrorists, all the while refusing to allow non-believers to characterize Christians based on Fred Phelps. Even allowing American Muslims to exercise the rights to which they are entitled as citizens rubs “real Americans©” the wrong way. I recently read an opinion piece in which the writer advocated destroying the mosques that already exist everywhere in the U.S. Dude, that’s not patriotic, that’s not legal and that’s the dumbest way to eradicate hostilities between the army of your god and the army of theirs. It’s putting out a fire with lighter fluid. It also indicates the degree to which fear can drive people to take extreme measures that violate their professed beliefs.

We’re afraid for the future. Muslims in the 21st century present the same challenge to our country that the Russians did in the 50s. The modern McCarthy-ites are reacting in the same fashion that their predecessors did. Muslims are a distant people, a different culture, different language, different religion, odd mannerisms, and they say they want to destroy us. Just like the commies did. How long will it be before the notion of concentration camps for Muslims, here legally or not, is floated by some extremist group?

Actually the Muslims could be considered a “god-send” for the American military-industrial complex. For a while there they were fishing around for a decent enemy, someone with a bad-ass image but hopefully soft enough to lose should we ever go to war with them. They found the Muslims a couple of seconds after a few Muslims found us. God has answered our prayers.

But for too many of the rest of us the Muslims are crazy people, and crazy people scare us. We have cops to keep crazy people away from us. We live in gated communities to keep the crazy people at bay. We’d dig motes if it weren’t for having to comply with all those EIS forms. Muslims are like a biker gang on meth, and they scare the hell out of the average American. They are both crazy and violent.

Here’s my take. The first Americans were resentful of the first “immigrants” that came after them and every generation since has continued to resent anyone who moved in after they did. We see it in neighborhoods. You can hear it in the phrase “They’re coming here and taking our jobs and using our hospitals”. Some folk hate to share. They figure they were here first, or they’ve been here since birth, so they should get preferred treatment by the system.

Americans may resent newcomers, but up until now most of them have assimilated well. They’ve given up “the old way” and have adapted American customs, even helped establish some new ones. They didn’t argue when we told them they couldn’t eat cats anymore. A few got rowdy now and then, like when the Italians became gangsters and mafia members. Real Americans© knew that all Italians were either mobsters, supported mobsters or were related to mobsters. Real Americans© like the Irish all became cops to go after those outlaw Italians. All that blew over, though, and everyone settled down again. More diverse ethnicities were admitted to the ranks of real Americans© through the fifties and sixties. Africans, the Vietnamese and Pakistanis are all permitted take pride in their heritage as long as they continue to pay homage to the main body of real Americans©. Assimilation may go a little rough at first but eventually everyone gets to be a real American©.

But now we get hit with a double-whammy.

Even though Mexicans have been entering the U.S. for years suddenly it’s become a scandal. It’s understandable that in a down-economy people will resent anyone who looks like they might take their job, who might work for a lower wage or for fewer benefits. Fortunately, all you real Americans©, illegal aliens can’t get your dreary, mind-numbingly dull middle-management job Denny’s. They can only be your cooks and dishwashers. They’ll never get hired at Microsoft unless it’s to go around emptying trash cans and cleaning up after all the bright kids, the real American© kids, even the ones born in China and Japan. Does the guy who hangs phone lines for AT&T really worry that some illegal Mexican is going to get his job?

And now the Muslims. At least no gang of Mexicans have ever committed mass murder on our shores. Even they realize it doesn’t pay to piss us off. You don’t know what havoc we could wreck with your country if we really wanted to. Neither do we. That unpredictability makes us dangerous, makes us potentially as crazy as we think you are.

Until a couple of months ago I’d be willing to bet the vast majority of real Americans© went about their day totally oblivious to the number of Muslims with whom they interact. You’d think they just found out that kindly Mr. Jones down the street, that nice old man, was secretly a child molester. Suddenly all those anonymous Muslims have become a tremendous risk to our security and/or peace of mind.

Mexicans annoy us but Muslims scare us. A little too different, way too violent.

I know, “who are Americans to call anyone else violent?” Wait until you’ve been here a while. You’ll understand.

So we’ve got the poverty-driven Mexicans invading from the South and terrorists (Also referred to, mostly by liberals, as Muslims) invading from the East. We know how to deal with Mexicans. Arrest them, throw them back, wait for them to come through again. But we don’t know how to deal with Muslims. How does a country like this assimilate a culture with their own laws and own ways that they refuse to give up? How will we ever turn Muslims into real Americans©? And after we treat them like shit, how will we ever be able to convince ourselves that they aren’t out for revenge? We can’t throw them back, they don’t all come from the same place. Even more to worry about, more fear.

Whatever happens in New York, the next few months won’t be pretty.

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August 12th, 2010

The Religious Hate Science

Le Penseur, Musée Rodin, Paris

Image via Wikipedia

I think that overstates the case. I don’t get the impression that the average theist “hates” science, just that they’re too dismissive of it without an interest in actually learning anything about it. I call it “willful ignorance”. “Ignorance” as in not being aware of something and “willful” because this attitude is intentional and encouraged by religious leaders. Christianity and Islam alike show a preference for believing what their leaders say over what science actually teaches. It’s not as if they’ve come to understand what science says about the natural universe and are able to argue against scientific conclusions with an informed rebuttal. They don’t want to make that effort since to do so is not considered a religious virtue. Listening to your leaders and book(s) and disdaining the false and devilish “worldly wisdom” are virtues and is a point of pride for the true believer.

“Hate” is too extreme an emotion to apply to how I see a majority of the religious I encounter every day. It’s more like they just don’t care.

One of my favorite Sagan quotes is: “I don’t want to believe; I want to know“. Any realist understands that we’ll never individually “know” everything. But some of us prefer to always seek to know, to not stop at some point along the journey and declare “I now know all I need to know”. That’s way too presumptuous and intellectually lazy.

Theists will pick and choose what science they will accept and somehow figure out a way to justify it in their own mind. They perceive themselves as having more to lose by actually studying science with an open and honest, skeptical and curious mind than they do by rejecting what openly conflicts with their core beliefs all the while blithely accepting the benefits of science on a daily basis without giving it much of a thought.

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August 6th, 2010

Censorship, the fear of free thought

Image representing Digg as depicted in CrunchBase

Image via CrunchBase

Those who fear the free exchange of ideas will find any means at hand to silence those with whom they disagree. Censorship involves eliminating opposing ideas and voices, ensuring that only a single opinion can be heard.

You’d think in a democratic republic such as ours, those with passionate political beliefs would value the open and honest exchange of opinions. The best solutions to any social problem can only be found when a number of opposing and divergent views can be aired and considered by all of the citizens. The hope is that the best and most practical solutions will rise to the top.

This process is circumvented, though, when one group of like-minded people decide to silence views that don’t agree with theirs. It starts by labeling those with whom you disagree unpatriotic, anti-American, enemies of the state. Once portrayed this way, the road is clear to imprison them or worse. Traveling down this road begins with small steps.

Consider the follow report from oleoleolson at AlterNet:

A group of influential conservative members of the behemoth social media site Digg.com have just been caught red-handed in a widespread campaign of censorship, having multiple accounts, upvote padding, and deliberately trying to ban progressives. An undercover investigation has exposed this effort, which has been in action for more than one year.

The concept behind the site is simple. Submitted webpages (news, videos, or images) can be voted up (digging) or down (burying) by each user, sort of a democracy in the internet model. If an article gets enough diggs, it leaves the upcoming section and reaches the front page where most users spend their time, and can generate thousands of page views.

This model also made it very susceptible to external gaming whereby users from certain groups attempt to push their viewpoint or articles to the front page to give them traction. This was evident with the daily spamming of the upcoming Political section with white supremacist material from the British National Party (articles which rarely reached the front page). The inverse of this effect is more devastating however. Bury brigades could effectively remove stories from the upcoming sections by collectively burying them.

One bury brigade in particular is a conservative group that has become so organized and influential that they are able to bury over 90% of the articles by certain users and websites submitted within 1-3 hours, regardless of subject material. Literally thousands of stories have already been artificially removed from Digg due to this group. When a story is buried, it is removed from the upcoming section (where it is usually at for ~24 hours) and cannot reach the front page, so by doing this, this one group is removing the ability of the community as a whole to judge the merits or interest of these stories on their own (in essence: censoring content). This group is known as the Digg “Patriots”.

A group of nearly one hundred conservatives have banded together on a Yahoo Group called Digg Patriots (DP), and a companion site at coRanks to issue bury orders and discuss strategies to censor Digg and other social media websites. DP was founded on 21 May 2009. Since then, over 40,000 posts have been logged at a steady rate of around 3000-4000 per month. The “Patriots” Network on coRank is a tool to submit Diggs to a group list as opposed to sending an e-mail every time. It also has some tools that make submitting to the list as easy as clicking on a bookmark.

The ring leader of the group is Bettverboten, who issues multiple digg and bury orders everyday. She is a Digg power user who has dugg 70,000 articles and has 1500 submits of her own (18% have gone popular) in one short year on the site. She was previously known as Lizbett before her lifetime ban for offensive and inappropriate comments, and has two sleeper accounts waiting if she gets banned again at loquaciouslola and MsBoop. She is also on Twitter, although her primary focus is Digg, where she has acquired a huge following of power users who are likely unaware that she is gaming the system, and even calling to bury some of her mutuals.

There are a few differences of opinion within DP, although for the most part, they are extremely similar in perspective. They hate Obama. They hate progressives. They hate the UN, diplomacy, and peace/disarmament efforts. They hate reforms of health care, Wall St., and immigration. They hate science, in fact many are creationists, and some even blog about it. They hate the secular nature of our nation. They hate environmental protection, requiring polluters to be responsible for their own cleanup, and especially hate climate efforts. They hate unions and any attempt to level the playing field to give all Americans economic opportunities. They hate the government, except the military-industrial complex. They hate abortion rights. They hate public schools and really hate higher education. They hate anyone in the media except far right personalities like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Michelle Malkin. They hate anyone who doesn’t think Obama is a secret islamist and/or marxist who was born in Kenya. They just love to hate.

The primary function of the Digg Patriots is to censor politically progressive content from the upcoming Political, Political Opinion, World News, and Business sections, so that conservative stories have a better chance to get more traction. To do this, they constantly monitor these sections, progressive submitters, and news websites.

This censorship is not restricted to political articles either. Articles about education, homophobia, racism, science, the environment, economics, wealth disparity, world events, the media, green energy, and anything even slightly critical of the GOP/Tea Party/FoxNews/corporations are targets.

The good news in all this is that soon a new version of Digg will be put in place that may restrict this sort of activity. Still, it’s worrying that our public discourse is so vulnerable to censorship on this potentially powerful force for good called the internet.

The one thing that these people, who prefer to work in the dark and under cover of anonymity, cannot stand is exposure. The best way to curtail their dishonest behavior is to shed light on it. No one on either side of the debate over the future of this country should be to silence their opposition through such underhanded and devious means. Let’s keep the debate open to all. Let’s make sure every citizen has a chance to be heard.

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July 22nd, 2010

Lest you be offended

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain; “True irreverence is disrespect for another man’s god. Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense”

Freedom of speech, opinion and thought are marks of a humane and intelligent society. Laws against blasphemy are popular among intolerant, bigoted, often theocratic regimes.

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June 6th, 2010

Pondering the future

GO TO THE FUTURE

Image via Wikipedia

These are some random thoughts I’ve had about the future. Share your opinions and speculations in the comments.

  • We’ve taken thousands of young people out of our society at a time of their lives when they are still impressionable and not yet fully mature, trained them to be hunters and killers and transported them to a foreign country unlike ours in so many ways. We’ve kept them there for much of their formative years. Eventually they’ll come home. Is America prepared to deal with thousands of 20 and 30 year old people who essentially grew up as warriors in a foreign land? Do the means exist to help them adjust, to reintegrate into our society? How will we put their skills to use?
  • America has more people in prisons per capita than any other country on Earth. In 2008, over 7.3 million people were on probation, in jail or prison, or on parole at year-end — 3.2% of all U.S. adult residents or 1 in every 31 adults. (Source) Far too many of these people were imprisoned for violations of moral law, drugs, gambling and prostitution, and will eventually be released back into society. While in prison many of these “criminals” associated with and learned from more hardened criminals. Having been branded as criminals, many will employ these new skills when they find themselves unemployable and rejected by their society. By enforcing our useless moral laws we have created a entire criminal class that will affect all the rest of our society. Our federal and state budgets cannot even provide services for the law-abiding among us. How will we provide the funds to rehabilitate this class of criminals? How will we be able to afford to monitor them in case they backslide? What will happen to our culture when a million adult former prisoners re-enter our neighborhoods?
  • Our dependence on oil and other non-renewable resources has not waned, even in the face of the worst environmentally catastrophic oil spill in U.S. history. Electric vehicles and those running on alternative fuels continue to sell poorly. Manufacturers do not see a compelling reason to produce more environmentally friendly vehicles when people aren’t buying them. We don’t even appear to be willing to make small sacrifices that might reduce the amount of oil we need, like reducing freeway speeds. Not only are we a wasteful nation but one unwilling to sacrifice for the common good. Will that attitude change in the future? Will our children be more willing to make the sacrifices we aren’t willing to make? Will we ever acknowledge our addiction to non-renewable resources and do whatever it takes to kick it?
  • Over time we have come to inseparably associate democracy with capitalism. We have enshrined both as the epitome of human society. Anyone who suggests that democracy may not be scalable and workable in the 21st century or that capitalism may not be the best way for people to engage in the exchange of goods is castigated from all sides. We cannot accept the idea that our system may be breaking down and not have much of a future. We are faced with abuses of Wall Street and corrupt government officials and persist in considering them anomalies, not indicators of a weak system. Will we ever be able to consider alternatives to our present systems? Will we be able to listen to and consider alternative theories without demonizing those who suggest them? Can we admit that perhaps, just perhaps, our current models aren’t destined to last forever?
  • Will technology be our savior or present us with a host of new and frightening possibilities we haven’t envisioned or provided for? What will we do with all the workers displaced by the inevitable increase in robotic manufacturing? Will we be able to provide for citizens without jobs? Can we make leisure profitable? Will we have to return to a barter system when money becomes worthless? If a future court makes abortion illegal, how will we cope with an increasing population born to unemployed and unemployable couples? Are increased taxes the answer, smaller government? Will neighborhoods have to take over the maintenance of their infrastructure from the federal government?

What do you think? Is a bright future for ourselves and a bright future for those who come after us assured? Have we really given sufficient consideration to the future we are creating?  Share your thoughts.

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April 25th, 2010

A thought experiment on white privilege and latent racism

Back in 2008 I posted an excellent article by Tim Wise on the topic of white privilege and the latent racism that still haunts America in the 21st century. Tim has just posted more on this important social topic at Ephphatha Poetry.teapartyracism

Let’s play a game, shall we? The name of the game is called “Imagine.” The way it’s played is simple: we’ll envision recent happenings in the news, but then change them up a bit. Instead of envisioning white people as the main actors in the scenes we’ll conjure – the ones who are driving the action – we’ll envision black folks or other people of color instead. The object of the game is to imagine the public reaction to the events or incidents, if the main actors were of color, rather than white. Whoever gains the most insight into the workings of race in America, at the end of the game, wins.

So let’s begin.

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protester — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.

Imagine that a black radio host were to suggest that the only way to get promoted in the administration of a white president is by “hating black people,” or that a prominent white person had only endorsed a white presidential candidate as an act of racial bonding, or blamed a white president for a fight on a school bus in which a black kid was jumped by two white kids, or said that he wouldn’t want to kill all conservatives, but rather, would like to leave just enough—“living fossils” as he called them—“so we will never forget what these people stood for.” After all, these are things that Rush Limbaugh has said, about Barack Obama’s administration, Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama, a fight on a school bus in Belleville, Illinois in which two black kids beat up a white kid, and about liberals, generally.

Imagine a black radio talk show host gleefully predicting a revolution by people of color if the government continues to be dominated by the rich white men who have been “destroying” the country, or if said radio personality were to call Christians or Jews non-humans, or say that when it came to conservatives, the best solution would be to “hang ‘em high.” And what would happen to any congressional representative who praised that commentator for “speaking common sense” and likened his hate talk to “American values?” After all, those are among the things said by radio host and best-selling author Michael Savage, predicting white revolution in the face of multiculturalism, or said by Savage about Muslims and liberals, respectively. And it was Congressman Culbertson, from Texas, who praised Savage in that way, despite his hateful rhetoric.

Imagine a black political commentator suggesting that the only thing the guy who flew his plane into the Austin, Texas IRS building did wrong was not blowing up Fox News instead. This is, after all, what Anne Coulter said about Tim McVeigh, when she noted that his only mistake was not blowing up the New York Times.

In other words, imagine that even one-third of the anger and vitriol currently being hurled at President Obama, by folks who are almost exclusively white, were being aimed, instead, at a white president, by people of color. How many whites viewing the anger, the hatred, the contempt for that white president would then wax eloquent about free speech, and the glories of democracy? And how many would be calling for further crackdowns on thuggish behavior, and investigations into the radical agendas of those same people of color?

To ask any of these questions is to answer them. Protest is only seen as fundamentally American when those who have long had the luxury of seeing themselves as prototypically American engage in it. When the dangerous and dark “other” does so, however, it isn’t viewed as normal or natural, let alone patriotic. Which is why Rush Limbaugh could say, this past week, that the Tea Parties are the first time since the Civil War that ordinary, common Americans stood up for their rights: a statement that erases the normalcy and “American-ness” of blacks in the civil rights struggle, not to mention women in the fight for suffrage and equality, working people in the fight for better working conditions, and LGBT folks as they struggle to be treated as full and equal human beings.

And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis.

Game Over.

I encourage you to read the full article and consider his words.

This is an issue we hoped would go away in the 60s. Racism, like religious belief, is fighting hard to remain relevant while experiencing its death throes.

White privilege is a product of racism. It has no place in a multi-cultural country like America. Racism and its by-products need to be opposed by every clear thinking person. There’s no good reason we should still be battling the ignorance of racists in the 21st century.

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February 10th, 2010

I don’t know

blue smoke cross infinity background wallpaper...
Image by † David Gunter via Flickr

Does the universe have an end, is there a literal and physical end to the universe? Or is the universe persistent and infinite? If finite, what lies beyond the boundaries of this universe?

I don’t know.

Not only do I not know, the sources I regularly depend on to keep me current on scientific research and speculation don’t appear to agree on the topic, either. At the moment they can only propose hypothesis based on mathematics. IMO, it’s one of the two major questions of life we may never find an answer to. The other is what happens after we die to our consciousness and self-awareness. I am pretty confident we won’t be any closer to an answer in my lifetime.

Since it’s unlikely any possibility we suggest will be completely disproven any time soon, we can enjoy science fiction. This is one arena in which I enjoy contemplating several possibilities with no reason to settle on one as most likely.

Due to the limits of our human imagination, we cannot easily conceive of the notion of infinity except through the language of mathematics. We lack experience with the concept of infinity. Our entire Earthly experience has been in the realm of the finite. We know that everything has a beginning and an end. The finite is intuitive, the infinite is incomprehensible.

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January 14th, 2010

A moral dilemma

Anti-Terrorism Billboard
Image by Dave Cross via Flickr

Back in September of 2009 I posted a story here regarding the pending deportation of an individual to his home country, a country that still lives by social codes common to the 1st century. Had he been deported he faced execution for apostasy. Laws against apostasy (renouncing the state religion) and heresy (speaking out against the state religion) are still common in middle-Eastern countries. I wanted to highlight this story because the injustice embodied in his story needed to be exposed.

Several days ago I received an email from the gentleman who was the subject of that post. The following is a portion of that email, with references to the specific country removed so as not to risk further violence against him.

I am writing to you to ask you very urgently to remove this story from your website. I was very grateful for the publicity a few months ago because it helped in my campaign against deportation back to ****, where the law says I would be stoned to death for having left the Muslim faith. But now the presence of this material on the internet is putting my family’s lives in danger, as they have had reports of Islamic extremists in **** using my name and photograph to try to find them, and threatening to kill them because of their connection to me. Please believe me when I say that I have every reason to believe that these men really do intend to do what they say, and that I am in constant terror that they will actually do it. I could never forgive myself if my family were killed because of me. I am therefore begging you to remove all information about me from your website, as soon as you possibly can, and to be especially careful to make sure that all photographs are removed.
I know it is hard for anyone in a Western country to imagine that a whole family could be murdered because one person stops being a Muslim, but in ****, where there are many extremist Muslims who really believe that they will go to heaven for murdering an apostate or anyone connected with him, it really is something that could happen…Please please please help me and my family by doing these things urgently. It really is a matter of life and death.
Thank you very much for helping to save my family.

This request put me in an awkward position and presents a moral dilemma.

I certainly have no respect for any religion or philosophy that would threaten the life of a person or his family over a difference in opinion. In fact I think threats like this need further exposure in order to show the true character of these oppressive and inhumane theocracies. Normally I would gladly name names and be as specific as possible so that no one could question the reality of this personal terrorism. Radical Islam in the 21st century has adopted the attitude and methods of the Catholics during the Spanish Inquisition. They attempt to have heresy declared an international crime and terrorize those who openly challenge their violent tactics. They win every skirmish in which we are too fearful to speak out against them. Al-Qaeda and other Islamic extremists have caused us to go about our everyday lives in fear, fear of the next airplane bombing, fear of reprisals against our troops, fear of our own freedoms.

Yet I am also aware of the fact that no matter how righteous I may feel my position is in opposition to Islamic extremism, I have no right to put this man and his family in harm’s way. I cannot in good conscience risk his family being killed just so that I can be specific in the examples I provide of theocratic inhumanity.

I’m also aware that this could be a scam, a way for the theocracy that this man fears to make sure this story disappears from world view and scrutiny. By sending out this appeal in his name they could ensure that we would willingly censure ourselves and save them the effort of defacing our sites or creating a denial of service attack. After all, a DDoS attack is far more complicated than exploding underwear.

So as not to be hoodwinked, I checked the other sites referenced elsewhere in his email and found that those sites have removed all references to his earlier story. Even their cached pages return a 404 page. This leads me to accept the veracity of his claims.

So I’m following a path that allows me to speak out against state-sponsored terrorism against its critics while preserving this man’s anonymity. My post about him has been removed from public view and all references to his name and nationality in this post have been expunged. All that I’ve left intact is the story of a man who by speaking his mind and holding unpopular beliefs has been subjected to intimidation and death threats by a religion so insecure in its own validity that it can only maintain its authority through such practices.

Perhaps keeping the identity of this individual hidden achieves an important purpose; it allows us to understand that this issue is larger than one man against one intolerant regime. Thousands of people in totalitarian theocracies suffer every day by being different, by being non-believers or believers in other religions, by being gay and being women.

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December 25th, 2009

America-Land of Lost Dreams

of the United States Declaration of Independence
Image by kolix via Flickr

In 1963 Martin Luther King made his famous “I have a dream” speech. Two years later many of those who shared his dream rioted for six days in Watts. What happened, what changed?

Nothing. And that was the problem.

Those who heard King’s speech and wanted to share his dream were hoping that the ideal he expressed would one day soon become a reality. The nation’s founding fathers expressed many of the same ideals. Living only 300 years after the arrival of the pilgrims, they were aware of what we seem to have forgotten these days, that the pilgrims didn’t come here to establish a democratic society which would guarantee freedom and equality to all Americans. They were escaping religious intolerance, seeking a land free of other Europeans where they could set up their own religious society and practice their own intolerance toward anyone not of their faith. As we’ve witnessed so many times throughout human history, an oppressed minority wanted to be the oppressive majority. The pilgrims didn’t want freedom for everyone, just for themselves and those like them. Three hundred years failed to produce much of a change in attitude. Sure, Thomas Jefferson wrote “… that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…” in the Declaration of Independence, but it’s clear he equated “all men” with the rich, White male class to which he and all the members of the Constitutional Congress belonged.

Another nearly 300 years has passed since that time, and again very little has changed. We like to think that we live in a classless society, that everyone has the opportunity to succeed and obtain wealth and influence. We talk about our democracy, ignoring the fact that a representative republic is not necessarily a democracy. We live in a dream, a fantasy world perpetrated by the rich, White males in power to keep us from seeing reality.

The sad reality is that in the 21st century America, not all people are created equal, that we are not all endowed with certain unalienable rights. Not all Americans are free to pursue life, liberty or happiness. America has classes, and while a few fortunate souls may be able to break free of their “place in society” and improve their lot, far too many others are locked into an endless struggle to live from paycheck to paycheck, unable to afford an education that might allow them to better their circumstances. Too many Americans born into poverty live their entire lives in poverty, and usually condemn another generation to the same fate by not being able to provide for their children a life any better than they endure.

And who are the rich, White males who still hold power in the U.S.? The majority of them are men who haven’t earned their wealth themselves and therefore have no empathy for those unlike themselves. They are born into wealth and privilege, and no matter how badly they screw up or embarrass themselves they are seldom demoted from their class. Members of the upper class enjoy privileges denied the rest of us. Their children are welcomed at the best universities and they, of course, can afford to send them. Our children are fortunate if they can afford junior college. Their children go to West Point, ours to Ft. Hood. They enjoy the perks of wealth and power the rest of us can only dream about.

Many people on both the left and right of the political spectrum are lamenting the collapse of the American dream. Well folks, that’s because that’s all it’s ever been, a dream. We have failed to establish “freedom and liberty for all” as a concrete fact in this country. We have allowed rich, White males to retain their positions of power and influence because we were grateful for the scraps of opportunity we were thrown. We accepted our lot because we were told that to rock the boat would mean the end of our country. We were warned that malcontents and radicals threatened our way of life. And who told us these lies? The rich, White men in power who knew that equality for all would mean less privilege for them. So they made sure to tax themselves less, govern themselves less and ensure that we never read the rest of the Declaration. For instance, the following complaint against King George could be applied to many politicians today: “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.” Those in power also fear our taking seriously these words from the Declaration, written immediately after “…all men are created equal…”:

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

I was 15 years old in 1969. In my teens I was a radical anti-government liberal. I had watched Kennedy be assassinated, listened to King’s speeches, watched the Watts riots on TV and Nixon be elected president. I saw the war in Vietnam as a death pool for the children of average citizens. The kids of the rich, White males stayed at home and went to university. The rich, White males chanted, “America, love it or leave it”. I wanted to change it because I loved it. Like a father watching his son sink into addiction and making every effort to turn them around, I wanted to aid in the “intervention” of America, to help it become the country we all dreamed it could be. The 60s radicalized me, made me determined to try and make the dream a reality. I failed, my generation failed, and succeeding generations have failed.

We are leaving our children a country mired in class, privilege and inequality. We have failed to establish a direction for our country while allowing it to become a debtor nation. We have failed to uphold the ideals of our founders and have even failed to keep the dream alive. Now we face the ugly results of our failure.

If, perhaps when, our country falls into anarchy and chaos, it won’t be because we allowed gays to marry or gave women the vote. It will be a direct result of our failure to heed the admonition of the Declaration of Independence to remove an oppressive and non-representative form of government and install one that gives the power, privileges and opportunities to all citizens regardless of status, sex or color. We have accepted what is instead of fighting for what could be. We have adopted a new dream, more like a nightmare, in which we count ourselves fortunate to be able to scrape by every day while the upper class enjoys the fruit of our labor. We have become a nation of slaves. Slaves with no dream of freedom.

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December 6th, 2009

Consciousness-Edge

Stanislas Dehaene, Toward a Science of Conscio...

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There’s an interesting write-up and video at Edge on the nature of consciousness. From the introduction:

On October 17, Edge organized a Reality Club meeting at The Hotel Ritz in Paris to allow neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene to present his new theory on how consciousness arises in the brain to a group of Parisian scientists and thinkers. The theory, based on Dehaene’s past twelve years of brain-imaging research is called the global neuronal workspace. It promises to offer new tools for diagnosing consciousness disorders in patients.

“For the past twelve years”, says Dehaene, “my research team has been using every available brain research tool, from functional MRI to electro- and magneto-encephalography and even electrodes inserted deep in the human brain, to shed light on the brain mechanisms of consciousness. I am now happy to report that we have acquired a good working hypothesis. In experiment after experiment, we have seen the same signatures of consciousness: physiological markers that all, simultaneously, show a massive change when a person reports becoming aware of a piece of information (say a word, a digit or a sound).

“Furthermore, when we render the same information non-conscious or “subliminal”, all the signatures disappear. We have a theory about why these signatures occur, called the global neuronal workspace theory. Realistic computer simulations of neurons reproduce our main experimental findings: when the information processed exceeds a threshold for large-scale communication across many brain areas, the network ignites into a large-scale synchronous state, and all our signatures suddenly appear.

But this is already more than a theory. We are now applying our ideas to non-communicating patients in coma, vegetative state, or locked-in syndromes. The test that we have designed with Tristan Bekinschtein, Lionel Naccache, and Laurent Cohen, based on our past experiments and theory, seems to reliably sort out which patients retain some residual conscious life and which do not.

“My laboratory is now pursuing this research intensively on patients, animals, human adults and young children, with the hope of turning our brain-imaging measurements into a real-time monitor of conscious experience. The time thus seems ripe to share this work with a broader audience of readers interested in cutting-edge science and technology, but also those concerned with the philosophical, personal and ethical implications of these findings.”

The questions regarding what consciousness is and how it impacts our lives are numerous and fascinating. Investigating consciousness is essentially our brains attempting to understand themselves. Some speculate we’ll never fully understand consciousness because we’ll never be able to make objective observations using the very organ we’re trying to understand. Yet in the last decade or so we’ve developed new tools that allow us to explore our consciousness better than before, and may allow us to draw conclusions we couldn’t using only our minds in the effort to understand our minds.

(Tip o’the hat to Josh Ellis on Friendfeed)

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