Crossing imaginary borders

The undocumented students of the University of San Francisco had educational messages for their campus yesterday. People without legal papers are not all alike; they come here from many areas of the world for many different reasons. These photos show the lawn in front of the library yesterday.

Thanks to Erudite Partner for the pictures.

Welcome to the neighborhood!

Apparently the Sesame Street concept, and Muppets, are licensed all over the world. Zari will be part of locally produced Afghanistan segments focusing on topics like girls' empowerment and physical health.

A Wikipedia article reports that the idea of Sesame Street going far and wide was initially a novel notion:

Many years later, co-creator Joan Ganz Cooney recalled, "To be frank, I was really surprised, because we thought we were creating the quintessential American show. We thought the Muppets were quintessentially American, and it turns out they're the most international characters ever created"

Versions of Sesame Street now run in 140 countries!

I instinctively take this to be a relatively benign cultural development, but I am sure there are those who feel differently.

Do we still believe in U.S. democracy?

A political scientist named Amy Erica Smith investigates this question at The Monkey Cage. She reports on surveys that researchers used to compare political attitudes across the Americas. These focused on two variables:

How do you measure democracy? Every two years, the AmericasBarometer project monitors whether citizens in North and South America think their political systems are fundamentally legitimate — an attitude political scientists call “system support” — and assesses their levels of political tolerance.

The survey asks questions such as: Do you think your country’s courts guarantee a fair trial? Do you think political institutions protect citizens’ basic rights?

Questions on political tolerance ask whether political enemies, including “people who only say bad things about the system of government in your country,” should have basic political and civil rights, such as voting and free speech.

[Emphasis added for clarity.] Here's a chart of the results.

The United States appears to be the most tolerant of the lot; we generally believe that our fellow citizens are entitled to make idiots of themselves however they wish -- and to speak and vote accordingly.

But we are decidedly NOT special when it comes to what they call "system support" -- we have only middling amounts of confidence that our government embodies the rule of law and is doing its job for all citizens. It is a little amazing to see that citizens of El Salvador, Honduras and Mexico -- all of which look from afar like unstable, lawless kleptocracies -- think their governments are more legitimate than we think ours is.

In this research, younger people in the United States generally expressed less "system support" than older people. I can only assume that they simply don't think government is working for them.

The U.S. is a big country with a lot of different people. It would be interesting to see results from within the country broken out by racial, income, and religious groups. Is lack of "system support" -- of government legitimacy -- more pronounced among some groups than others? Which groups?

Governments that survive work to reduce whatever social shortcomings reduce system support. Even capitalists should understand this. The customers can get antsy.

Disabled citizens can be pushed out -- or pulled in -- to the polls

Many states governed by Republican majorities have implemented electoral administration laws that make it harder for poor people and people of color to vote. We tend to picture long lines created by too few and poorly staffed voting locations as well as various demands for forms of identification that some citizens can't produce.

We might not have thought so much about how these impediments fall on citizens with various disabilities. According to a paper prepared for a Presidential Commission on Election Administration:

There are at least 35 million voting-age people with disabilities in the United States, representing 1 out of 7 voting-age people, and the number is likely to grow with the aging of the population. People with disabilities have lower voter turnout than people without disabilities. ... the adjusted disability gap [fall off from levels among similar able bodied people] is close to 12 points in each year.

Broken down by major type of disability, the turnout was lower in 2012 among people with visual, mobility, and cognitive impairments, but people with hearing impairments were as likely as people without disabilities to vote. Turnout was also low among those who reported difficulty going outside alone, or difficulty with daily activities inside the home. The disability voting gap is due in part to lower voter registration, but is due more to a lower likelihood of voting if registered. ...

Given the number of people with disabilities in the United States, these results imply that there would be 3.0 million more voters with disabilities if they voted at the same rate as otherwise-similar people without disabilities. ...

So what sort of restrictions prevent disabled adults from voting? Not surprisingly, demanding a driver's license leaves a lot of people out. Alternative forms of ID usually cost money and/or visits to distant government offices. Disabled people are more likely than the able-bodied to be unemployed or just poor, so costly administrative hoops make for a greater burden. So does requiring travel to a distant polling place or requiring a wait in line. And then, for some, there's the issue of simply getting in the door, as illustrated by the photo above from the Justice Department Civil Rights division.

In truth, there is not much data about what measures would help make it easier for disabled citizens to vote. According to advocate Susan Mizner of the ACLU:

"People with disabilities are just left off the studies," often due to simple barriers to accessibility, Mizner told Vox. For example, she said she’s unaware of a voter access or opinion survey that includes deaf voters, who need to be accessed via TTY or video-conferencing services.

Without this information, it’s difficult for disability rights organizations to compile the necessary evidence to develop a unified strategy (like a class-action suit) to challenge barriers to electoral participation.

It doesn't have to be this way.

According to Nicole Kief, also of the ACLU, Rhode Island

is the first state to say, in writing, that voters with disabilities must have full and equal access to online voter registration. ...

People who are blind or low-vision, people who can’t use a mouse or keyboard, and people with cognitive or learning disabilities would all have trouble using a website that was not set up to be accessible. ...

[The state has written new rules.]

• Experts on disability access to websites must be included in the development of the site and must verify that the site is useable for people with disabilities before it is made public.

• The site must follow certain accessibility standards set by the by the World Wide Web Consortium (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 compliance level AA for you tech geeks).

• The site must comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires all state and local governments to provide equal access to government programs and communications with the public.

All states should be emulating what Rhode Island has done here -- California's online registration form is the only other state that currently meets these standards.

The Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Disability Rights section publishes an exhaustive checklist for how to make voting locations compliant with the American Disability Act. Now it is just a matter of getting thousands of local governments in 50 states to comply with the requirements. Failure to comply amounts to pervasive vote suppression.

More stupid stuff on the horizon

The Pew Research Center has dumped a lot of data from a March 2016 survey of U.S. voters. Little in the findings is surprising.

But I can't help being disturbed by what's caught in the adjacent chart.

When it comes to U.S. engagement with global problems, a majority of registered voters see the U.S. as having a positive impact. Six-in-ten (60%) say problems in the world would be even worse without U.S. involvement, while 34% say that U.S. efforts to solve problems around the world usually end up making things worse. Majorities of Republican (65%) and Democratic (58%) voters say U.S. global efforts usually do more good than harm.

Among Democrats, there is a divide in opinion about the impact of U.S. global involvement between Sanders and Clinton supporters. Two-thirds (66%) of Democratic and Democratic-leaning registered voters who support Hillary Clinton say that problems in the world would be even worse without U.S. involvement, compared with just 28% who say U.S. efforts usually make things worse. By contrast, about as many Sanders supporters say U.S. efforts to solve world problems usually end up making things worse (45%) as say problems in the world would be even worse without U.S. involvement (49%).

That is, only among Bernie Sanders supporters -- and not even a majority of them -- think that the U.S. should stop meddling in other peoples' business.

How quickly we forget. A decade ago, most Democrats and a significant fraction of Republicans had learned from G.W. Bush's excellent adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq that there were limits to U.S. power. Popular revulsion with endless, pointless wars acted as some check on elites.

Whoever is elected in November is going to have a lot of room from the electorate to get the country in trouble -- to do "stupid shit" in the Prez's memorable phrase.

We're going to need a peace movement again in 2017 I fear.

San Francisco's only farm to be displaced

The other day while Walking San Francisco in the Mission Terrace neighborhood, I started noticing these window signs. On some blocks, every other house displayed one.

Many cars also carried them.

Soon enough, I came upon the farm, Little City Gardens, itself.

Neighborhood farmers were working the land as I walked by.

At least one seemed wary of a passing photographer. This happens.

The Save the Farm website tells the story. Apparently this one acre lot has been producing greens and vegetables since 2010, to the delight of adjacent property owners and other neighbors. Ironically, the parcel has been bought by a private Waldorf school whose mission statement includes this:

In building and sustaining bridges between the school, families, and the local communities, we are preparing children to be productive global citizens and stewards of the Earth.

Existing neighbors and farmers are not happy. They have sought to get the city to stop the development through a petition to the Planning Department.

The school tries to allay neighborhood concerns with this FAQ.

An article in Modern Farmer summarizes some of the contradictions.

Neighbors are pissed, partly because the farm is a fun cool thing and partly because it’s much quieter than a bustling private school full of kids who have to be picked up and dropped off every day.

San Francisco has prohibitively expensive land, and Little City Gardens was exploiting a rare unused chunk in a city where an acre of land sells for upwards of a million dollars. ...

In this city beset with fights over development and direction, here's another in an otherwise quiet corner.

We live among killers

Our trigger happy San Francisco police department did it again Thursday, shooting a Latino homeless man in the Mission because, they say, he threatened them with what they call an "edged weapon." He died at San Francisco General Hospital; no name has been released at this writing.[Update: his name was Luis Gongora.]

The man was reportedly “challenging” the officers, according to the police computer automated dispatch system. The officers first fired bean-bag rounds at the suspect, but shot him after he challenged them with the knife, [Police Chief Greg] Suhr said.

San Francisco Examiner

Curious. That's what they always say to defend reaching for their guns. There were witnesses who say something else.

Two of the man’s friends disputed police accounts of the encounter. John Visor, 33, and Stephanie Grant, 31, live at a homeless encampment on Shotwell and said they were roughly 10 feet from the man when police arrived.

Visor said the man was sitting by a wall when police shot him with beanbag rounds.

“He didn’t charge the officers,” Visor said. “He was going in circles. He didn’t understand what they were saying. They just shot him. They just shot him.”

Visor said the man carried a knife for safety but that he didn’t have it out when police arrived.

“Everyone carries something for safety,” Grant added.

San Francisco Chronicle

A neighborhood news provider, Mission Local, caught this interview with witnesses on video:

Friends of man shot by SFPD give statement from Mission Local on Vimeo.

***

Coincidently, the Justice for Mario Woods coalition had already scheduled a unity meeting at Horace Mann Middle School in the Mission. Representatives of Justice for Alex Nieto and Justice for Amilcar Perez-Lopez pledged their solidarity.

A serious, determined crowd filled the auditorium. Mayor Ed Lee -- better get your cops under control or get out of the way. Fire Suhr. Indict and fire cops who pull the trigger. License to kill without penalty should not be one of the job's prerogatives.

Displacement, suspicious fires, gentrification, and murderous cops have ignited righteous rage among the people you thought you could push aside.

No solution to climate change, but delicious

Every time I make a run to Costco, I buy a bag of these. So do a lot of people. They are tasty, durable, and colorful. I wonder where they come from? There's a Canadian connection somewhere, since the packaging is bilingual -- French and English. But they claim to be a product of the USA and California grown at that.

It turns out the Oppy stands for the Oppenheimer Group. This agricultural conglomerate owns SunSelect, a greenhouse grower whose facilities in Tehachapi, CA are the source of the peppers.

Oppy has been in the sustainable agriculture business for decades. But apparently there is a new wave of indoor agriculture coming soon according to an article in the environmental magazine Grist, which bills itself as "a source of intelligent, irreverent environmental news and commentary."

Will climate change move agriculture indoors? And will that be a good thing?
As climate change does its thing to America, what it is going to do to the nation’s food supply is still an open question. Will California’s Central Valley, which grows a third of the produce eaten in the U.S., wither into a vegetable ghost town? Will other locations pick up the slack? Or will agriculture just take a look at the harsher droughts, crazier storms, and prolific insects that the future has in store and move indoors?

... In an indoor farm, water doesn’t inconveniently evaporate. LED lights can lengthen the hours of sunlight so plants can grow faster. CO2 levels can be tweaked. Even as the weather outside goes haywire, plants farmed indoors can live out an optimized version of the weather that they coevolved with — the weather of the past. The best weather of the past. ...

Writer Heather Smith describes the projects of one indoor agricultural start-up which achieves many efficiencies, yet still finds itself producing for niche markets of the affluent. There are still transportation costs and fuel costs -- the problems that have always made availability of good food about so much more than quantities grown.

But ending hunger is about more than just growing more food: It’s also about distributing the food we already grow more fairly, eating lower on the food chain, and cutting down on food that is spoiled or wasted. Each of these could have just as much of an effect as boosting production.

It’s also doubtful whether indoor agriculture can ever be more energy-efficient than just regular farming – even if renewable energy is involved. ... it is not so much about feeding the world as it is about bringing salad to people who feel that they deserve it in the dead of winter, but feel guilty about having it trucked to them all the way from California.

I say this with the utmost lack of judgment, as someone who, while Superstorm Nemo bore down on Boston, walked home from the market guiltily cradling a bag of arugula. I know that my ancestors lived all winter on turnips and potatoes (and, let’s be honest, probably booze). They survived. I would survive, too....

For all my reservations about it, indoor agriculture is ... exciting. The science is interesting. Last I checked, we used a lot of energy to make a lot of things I think are a big waste of carbon, like fancy sweatpants, frozen waffles, and the upcoming Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice. America is going to blow its collective electrons, unabashedly, on all of these things; why not blow them on a salad?

My peppers may not be helping combat carbon emissions as much as some visionaries have hoped; but like Smith, I'm fond of them.

Draft resistance and the Vietnam era

I never did like that Vietnam-era slogan: "Girls say yes to boys who say NO!" As an emerging lesbian and not-quite conscious feminist, boys who thought their draft resistance entitled them to score with girls repulsed me.

But the nonviolent anti-draft movement was a huge part of the youth uprising that made mass overseas U.S. imperial wars impossible for a generation. The echoes of that time still constrain our government; we fight with a professional military and various hired hands these days, not citizen soldiers. Some speculate that if there had been a draft, we could never have lingered in the Iraq quagmire for nine years ... nor would we be going back now.

San Francisco Bay Area filmmakers are making a documentary about those times and that movement riffing off that unfortunate slogan.

They redeem themselves somewhat in my eyes by interviewing one of my favorite figures from that era who is still fighting the good fight, lesbian political activist Mandy Carter.

Boys Who Said No! - Film Clip #4 (Mandy Carter) from Boys Who Said NO! on Vimeo.

Everyone tries to stop you when they see how close you are to making change ... I am proud of what the hell we have done to make us get here this far and I want to see it as we go farther.

The film will be a valuable contribution to the history of peoples' movements in these dis-United States. Learn more at the website.

Do we still matter?

Have humans made humans superfluous? That's the question behind Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff, a science and technology reporter for the New York Times.

Markoff recounts decades of work by visionaries, engineers, dreamers, inventors, hackers, and scientists in an arena which he divides into two branches. Artificial intelligence uses machines to replace us. That's not a hit against this form of knowledge: much of what we do, from searching email files for key words for lawsuits to driving cars, can be done better and with less drudgery by machines than by humans.

Intelligence augmentation uses machines to extend what humans can do with our slower, far less linear brains. The World Wide Web is intelligence augmentation as is Apple's Siri. They make us more efficient, smarter, and perhaps more creative using our weak human circuits.

I found it interesting that, as a competent journalist who communicates his subject matter interestingly, Markoff tells the story of the once and future smart machines through the lives and careers of a long array of human subjects. People make these machines and this book consists of their stories.

This just reinforces what I take from his book: the meaning of the coming smart machines will be essentially political. In this society, there is no question that if someone can make a (larger) profit by replacing humans with a robot, that will happen. Likewise, if robots can replace human soldiers in war, that will happen. As we know, this is happening; it will happen more.

But at the same time, we can also choose to use technology to enable more people to live better lives. We don't yet know all the avenues that lead that way, but people will find them.

Designing humans either into or out of computer systems is increasingly possible today. ...

Markoff envisions the consequent choices being made by individual genius engineers. But human societies are larger than their leaders and larger than our geniuses. People are going to want into these decisions. It will be messy, but it will happen.

Soda pop and Hillary Clinton

We don't like to be "nudged."

Nudge theory (or Nudge) is a concept in behavioural science, political theory and economics which argues that positive reinforcement and indirect suggestions to try to achieve non-forced compliance can influence the motives, incentives and decision making of groups and individuals, at least as effectively – if not more effectively – than direct instruction, legislation, or enforcement.

That's the lesson I draw from the decision by Philadelphia reformers to press for a relatively large tax on sugary sodas to pay for universal prekindergarten. The Upshot explains that local jurisdictions (aside from the People's Republic of Berkeley) have repeatedly failed to pass tiny taxes while arguing for the health benefits of making soda more expensive.

So how about leveling with the voters -- proposing a more substantial tax to pay for something people actually want -- and if it can be passed, winning the health gains, and a visible public benefit, and creating an instance of government doing the job people want? That is, after all, how democracy is supposed to work. Philadelphia's mayor is giving this strategy a shot.

Public policy that derives from "nudge" theory is technocratic. Somebody thinks they know best and can change others' behavior without enlisting the subjects' conscious assent. Sure, lots of nudge interventions do achieve some of their goals. But when leaders choose to nudge, rather than to try to win majority agreement for their policies, they are being profoundly anti-democratic.

This was reinforced for me by an interchange on Facebook about my post here yesterday. A good friend explained one aspect of her discomfort with Hillary Clinton like this:

I think that for me, in addition to the policy issues you raise, especially foreign policy, my biggest visceral response is around her discomfort and lack of connection with (knowledge of?) grassroots activism as the driver of change. This is why I could only shake my head at her AIDS/Nancy Reagan comments -- no one who was conscious in the 80s could have said those things. Or at seeing her defensive and angry responses to the young protesters -- Black Lives Matter, climate change activists -- who penetrate her bubble. She doesn't "get" them.

That's the distancing piece for me, I think. She'd like us all to go away so she can make change, or manage things, or something. She doesn't get on a gut level that [grassroots action] is how change happens, not by presidents (or First Ladies) deciding to move a national conversation. Rather, we push them.

My emphasis in the interest of clarity.

I'm sure my friend would agree that politicians who actually listen willingly to grassroots uproar are few and far between. Most pols have struggled to get where they are, have jumped through extraordinary hoops to win and hold their prominence -- why should they have to put up with noisy outsiders who don't understand how much they've done already and how well they understand what ought to be done? But sorry, that's part of the job in a democracy.

For what it is worth, I should mention that Bernie's not perfect about listening either. Nobody with the grit and ego to campaign for that job is going to be.

In response to my friend I raised a point about Hillary Clinton that she shares in some measure with Barack Obama. Both of them came up in politics out of a background in Alinsky-type community organizing. And this approach to politics can be as anti-democratic as the technocratic prescriptions of nudge theory.

A couple of years ago I tried to explain how this seemed to be playing out in Obama's presidency.

Organizing has a top down structure and methodology that outsiders may not understand. The organizer, almost invariably an outsider, "cuts the issue" -- defines how people might see their self-interest in their circumstances and might win an improvement. This is far easier within the organizing group if the issue doesn't actually inflame submerged passions or disturb internal entrenched interests -- organizers learn to prefer "small, winnable fights" to grand messy struggles. ... Political passions ... are simply foreign to old time organizing.

I think we see the same limitation in Hillary Clinton as I wrote on Facebook:

The top down prescriptions of unreconstructed Alinskyism probably gave HRC a bad start in appreciating grass roots movements. In that ecosystem -- in her day and too often still -- the organizers controlled defining the issues to the detriment of the creativity of the people. That's a danger in all organizing ...

Politicians have to be taught to value democracy. Watching them jump the awful hoops that are an election, one of the questions I ask about them is, if they come out on top, will they listen to community concerns and grassroots distress? None of them listen as much as we might want, but this does seem a right question. In elections, we get a chance to teach them the necessity of listening.

The photo shows Clinton on her book tour interacting with the stuffed squirrel Republicans sent to dog her appearances. I'd say she'd got the upper hand of this interloper.

But is she likeable enough?

Recently I did something extremely improbable: I devoted nearly half an hour to watching video of Hillary Clinton's national security and counter terrorism speech at Stanford on March 23. I figure this is one of the arenas in which I am going to be most critical of her when she gets elected in November (which I think she will, though conscientious citizens can't take anything for granted.) So I better listen to what she is saying ...

Some of it was not bad. Her repudiation of torture is not only practical (it doesn't work) or prudential (if we do it, others will do it to our troops) but also legal (it violates international law) and moral (it is wrong). That's good and valuable in our next president.

There was plenty I disagreed with. I find it impossible to believe that dispatching the U.S. military anywhere actually promotes anyone's safety. She's just more confident that deployment of U.S. power does the world good than I'll ever be.

But this wasn't what disturbed me, watching the speech. (After all, she's said she respects that old war criminal Henry Kissinger ...) What disturbed me was that I couldn't see her as at all likable. I know she is smart and accomplished; I know that she is capable and tough. Why can't I warm to her at all?

As I was musing about this, I came across a Washington Post article: How can Hillary Clinton and other female politicians be ‘likable enough?’ This is a report on a study that aims to tell women politicians how to jump the hurdle of "likeablity." The authors insist that, for women, this is essential to success. So what to they suggest? The Post offers some of it:

*Don't pose for a headshot. Instead, circulate more candid, informal photos of you engaging in your community -- say hanging out with children on a playground. ...
*Do share personal anecdotes when explaining why you're passionate about an issue or how you've helped constituents. ...
*Don't take yourself too seriously. Have a sense of humor.
*Do work on issues that you value; voters can sense you're being true to yourself.
*Do recognize your hair, makeup and clothes will be scrutinized by voters much more than a man's.
*Above all else, be confident. And you can't fake it. "Voters assessed a woman officeholder’s confidence in less than 30 seconds," the study's authors said.

That seems a useful list. The first item is patronizing; in the speech I watched, this item is relevant but requires contextualization. Here the set up is as if she is already commander in chief -- another view of how she needs to project herself. She did share a personal anecdote about bringing her daughter Chelsea to Stanford, but I can't say it projected warmth. This wasn't material that lent itself to humor; I'm not sure it would be right to expect that here. I have no question she cares about what she was talking about. And I am sure she is coiffed and costumed daily which must be a constraining way to have to live! But after all these years, she's used to that. She aces confidence and on this topic, that's probably the highest hurdle for a women.

So why can't I warm to her at all? My reaction goes beyond policy disagreement. I asked Erudite Partner if she could name women politicians whose public personas she admired. She came up with Barbara Jordan and Ann Richards. Good ones; it is interesting that are a) dead and b) were embattled Texans. I can't come up with any. There are many women in politics I can support, but none who evoke enthusiasm.

My reaction to Hillary Clinton feels more viscerally negative than is quite warranted. I don't think she is a horrible person though I do think she is sometimes deeply wrong. (She is probably the most high ranking U.S. endorser of the military coup in Honduras that brought in a regime that murders eco-advocates.) I continue to interrogate my own sexism -- after all, none of our U.S. politicians are very good on essential matters of empire and peace. They like their hegemony. But with Clinton, I feel an extra revulsion.

The next presidency -- assuming Hillary Clinton occupies the office -- is going to be challenging in slightly new ways to this feminist. Can readers here warm to Clinton? We don't need to; she'll be way better than any Republican option. Still, I wonder ...

Saturday scenes and scenery: Vets Alley

The city of San Francisco calls it Shannon Street, but these muralists have renamed this Tenderloin byway "Vets Alley." I wandered into it unexpectedly while Walking San Francisco.

The street people and Single-Room-Occupancy hotel residents who have transformed this dingy former urinal and shooting gallery are not your conventional Vets of Foreign Wars types. Nor are they conventional artists. When service in the military has left people so hurt they crash to the bottom, the images they create are not conventionally patriotic.

They run more to bitter ...

or accusatory ...

or defiant.

They seek to preserve the memory of those who didn't make it ...

to draw their pain ...

and still carry care for people still trapped in the midst of a faraway war.

You can find a sensitive description of how a few veterans somehow managed to bring about this challenging project -- and their travails with a system not designed for people like them -- at Hoodline.

Coexistence

It was heartening to notice this sign in the window of a very ordinary city deli in the San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood today. This frightful campaign season has made clear that we need more of this.

It reminded me to point to the work of one of my favorite newly discovered social commentators. Haroon Moghul wrestles with the fraught meaning of Islam within U.S. society at Religion Dispatches. Here's a sample, arising from his reaction to the Mormon state of Utah's recent rejection of Donald Trump in favor of Ted Cruz in the Republican primary.

Unlike many other Republican constituencies, Mormons seem to be repelled by everything Trump stands for. ...

... far be it from me to miss an opportunity to point out how Trumpian authoritarianism parallels Islamic extremism. Though religiously conservative Muslims may hold political opinions that many of us might find uncomfortable, if not outrageous — political illiberalism, patriarchy, ideological and social rigidity (they’d be on the Cruz Crew) — religiosity is also an inoculant against certain forms of violent radicalization. The more you know about Islam, and the more you practice Islam, the less tempted you are to join an extremist group.

As the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding’s Director of Research, Dalia Mogahed, told me, her research “found no correlation between rejection (or acceptance) of violence or religious literacy.” But, she also noted, “people who engage in violence are typically religious illiterates.” She pointed to the lack of religious training, or specific instances in which ISIS recruits purchase Islam for Dummies while on their way to Syria....

...while strong religious beliefs can create social challenges in pluralistic societies (and all societies are, whether they admit or not, more pluralistic than they realize), they can also preserve pluralism, by anathematizing certain kinds of language and behavior. Consider the Mormon Church’s response to Trump against Chris Christie’s craven endorsement; the latter, governor of a very diverse northeastern state joined the Trump bandwagon apparently without a second thought about his new patron’s racism, xenophobia, and belligerency.

In order for us all to get along, we need some inner restraints on how we react to perceived differences. Trump and his followers chafe at being muzzled by "political correctness." The rest of us call this "civilization."

Friday cat blogging

I don't know whether watching the world go by from under a sign amounts to an endorsement or not.

Apparently there's an internet meme about Bernie holding a cat.

Thanks to E.P. for the pic.

Look which Dems are most excited to vote ...

I have to admit, I did not intuit this. According to Gallup:

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton's supporters are more enthusiastic than Sen. Bernie Sanders' supporters, 54% vs. 44%.

I can only interpret this (without data but based on the Sanders supporters I know), that many Sanders supporters aren't much enamored of elections, period. Like me, they love what Sanders is breaking open in this campaign, but the whole exercise is not their cup of tea.

Let's just hope that everyone understands that ANY Democrat is more in the interest of everyone outside the one percent than ANY Republican. Most electoral choices are about living to fight another day, in some other arena.

Whose religious liberty, anyway?

I don't know if the final decision will come out this way, but this news says to me that the Supreme Court has decided that religious institutions have to explain how their employees can exercise their religious liberty -- which includes access to contraceptives if those employees so choose. The focus here has shifted from the aggrieved employers who can't bring themselves to sign a piece of paper to the rights of employees! My, my...

I want a country where it is taken for granted that women can get contraceptives if they want/need them. The Supreme Court's stance seems to take that right for granted.

Some history to ponder

On March 29, 1973, the last U.S. soldiers left Vietnam. Almost 59,000 U.S soldiers had died; 2.6 million U.S.personnel had served in Vietnam by the time of the withdrawal. More than one million Vietnamese had died in the 17 year long war. The fighting didn't stop for another two years, at which point North Vietnamese forces overran the unpopular South Vietnamese government that the U.S. had propped up. The final fall of Saigon is the source of the famous photo of people trying to board helicopters from the U.S. embassy roof. But by then, our troops had been out for two years.

In those days, when the U.S. "left" one of its imperial experiments, it left. In Vietnam, this was because the other side "won". Ditto Laos and Cambodia.

These days we don't seem to ever get out. Having kicked the hornet's nest, we stay on but pretend the troops we leave in place aren't in combat. A Marine was killed in northern Iraq last week. In January, a U.S. soldier died in Marjah, Helmand province, Afghanistan -- an insignificant place which has suffered from U.S. attention off and on since 1946. Rajiv Chandrasekaran told that story.

ISIS is a plague on the planet. Any responsible government would be trying to eradicate it. The terror of terrorism makes us stupid and mean, as it is intended to. What we need is to be smart and brave. That's hard, but it is the only stance that is going to preserve healthy communities and states.

Oddly, the billionaire George Soros, himself a refugee from Nazi barbarism before he took up crashing currencies for profit, understands this as well as anyone.

Jihadi terrorist groups such as Islamic State and al-Qaida have discovered the achilles heel of our western societies: the fear of death. Through horrific attacks and macabre videos, the publicists of Isis magnify this fear, leading otherwise sensible people in hitherto open societies to abandon their reason.

... Science merely confirms what experience has long shown: when we are afraid for our lives, emotions take hold of our thoughts and actions, and we find it difficult to make rational judgments. Fear activates an older, more primitive part of the brain than that which formulates and sustains the abstract values and principles of open society.

The open society is thus always at risk from the threat posed by our response to fear. A generation that has inherited an open society from its parents will not understand what is required to maintain it until it has been tested and learns to keep fear from corrupting reason. Jihadi terrorism is only the latest example. The fear of nuclear war tested the last generation, and the fear of communism and fascism tested my generation.

... To remove the danger posed by jihadi terrorism, abstract arguments are not enough; we need a strategy for defeating it. ... one idea shines through crystal clear: it is an egregious mistake to do what the terrorists want us to do. ...

We can't fight ISIS by demonizing Muslims or shutting our borders to refugees. The challenge that confronts the generation that Feels the Bern is not only to take our communities back from the plutocrats, but also to demonstrate that it is possible to build a society where people of all colors and all faiths can work together for the common good. That's the true threat to the terrorists -- and also to the plutocrats.

Our shit has to go somewhere

A recent New York Times article called our city "the Silicon Valley of Recycling". Apparently our garbage monopoly, the creatively named Recology, is a tourist attraction for waste disposal authorities from all over the world.

“It’s like a modern art installation,” marveled Mauro Battocchi, the Italian consul general here. “So fabulous — the people and machines and objects of our lives all working together.”

Foreign officials and others come here to pick up tips on how to handle their own mushrooming piles of garbage back home. ... One group included Bruno Hug de Larauze, president of the Chamber of Commerce in Brittany, France, who likens Recology to an Uber or Airbnb for waste that shows how technology and capitalism can change the world. Plus, the place is just impressive, Mr. de Larauze said.

“It was the wow effect. It was incredible,” he said of his first visit (he’s been twice), and added with a laugh, “It smelled, let me be frank.”

The article makes no mention of another component part of our waste disposal system: the trashpickers who wander the streets, searching for any bit of metal or other goods that can be sold for pennies to commercial recycling operations.

Friends in San Francisco, Marin, and Oakland can find out a great deal more about the lives of these human cogs in the garbage world at one of these showings. If you can, don't miss this sensitive film.

Ticket links here.

The apparent loser may be the winner

All mankind is forgiven, but the Lord must die. This is the revolutionary import that, two thousand years ago, a group of radical Jewish writers appended to the scripture of their religion. Because they did so, millions in the West today worship before the image of a deity executed as a criminal, and -- not less important -- other millions who will never worship at all carry within their cultural DNA a religiously derived suspicion that somehow, someday, "the last will be first, and first last" (Matt. 20:16).

... The crucifix is a violently obscene icon. To revere its visceral power, children of the twenty-first century must imagine a lynching, the body of the victim swollen and distorted, his head hanging askew above a broken neck, while the bystanders smile their twisted smiles. Then they must imagine that grisly spectacle reproduced at the holiest spot in whatever edifice they call holy. And yet to go even this far is to miss the meaning of the image, for this victim is not just innocent: He is God Incarnate, the Lord himself in human form.

Winners usually look like winners, and losers like losers. But thanks to this paradoxical feature of the Christian myth, there remains lodged deep in the political consciousness of the West a readiness to believe that the apparent loser may be the real winner. ... One of the many implications of this epilogue to God's life story has been that in the West no regime can declare itself above review. All power is conditional, and when the powerless rise, God may be with them.

So opens the prologue to Jack Miles' Christ: a crisis in the life of God, this scholar's own epilogue to God: a biography. Both books treat ancient scripture not as revealed reality, but as literature, tracing the development of their central character, the Lord God. Instead of erasing scripture's contradictions -- the tensions within the picture of its central character -- Miles treats those tensions as part of the narrative from which emerges the story's import. This is how Miles explains:

... when one reads in this way, many vivid scenes are recovered for the characterization of the protagonist that, because they did not happen, historical criticism must read as the self-characterization of an author.

Did a heavenly host of angels sing praise at Jesus' birth as Luke reports? For historical purposes the answer must be no: Angels have no place in secular history.

For literary purposes, however, even secular literary purposes, the answer may and indeed must be yes ... For the literary critic, the song of the heavenly host, no matter that is unhistorical, enhances the angel messenger's characterization of the newborn Jesus as "a savior who is Messiah and Lord" (Luke 2:11). What matters for the literary effect is not that the account cannot be verified (a laughable notion) but that it wakes echoes of a dozen exultant Psalms ...

Miles draws out the implications of his reading:

Why does the New Testament exist at all? ...Literary criticism as I have attempted it here prefers to remain within the assumptions of the story and to rephrase the question as Why does God do it? Why does he become a man?

... And why, if he has to become a man at all, does he choose to become the unlikely man he becomes? ... God's power was such that, in his prime, he annihilated in minutes the mightiest army in the world. More than once, he compared himself to a great marauding beast. Why does he become a defenseless peasant who, when the authorities sentence him to death, offers no resistance and ends his life as a convicted criminal? ... Rather than a further development of God's character, does Jesus, the Lamb of God, not seem its terminal collapse?

Yes, he does, and the condition for a literary appreciation of the New Testament is a willingness of the part of the reader to see this ending as horrifying or ludicrous surprise. God the Son is not at all the kind of man one would expect God the Father to become. ... What makes the surprise subjectively urgent as well as logically possible for God, given his previous life, is that he has something appalling to say that he can say only by humiliating himself.

The Lord of All the Earth, to use the grandest of all his Old Testament titles, arranges to have himself put to death as the King of the Jews not to destroy hope as he destroys himself but only to replace a vain hope with one that can still be realized. The old hope predicated on invincible military power must yield to a new hope predicated on the inevitability of military defeat but anticipating the kind of victory arms cannot win....

... [The story's] effrontery cannot be appreciated unless the God of Israel has first been confronted in all his untamed and terrifying intensity. That of all gods, this god should be imagined to have become of all men this man; and that, repudiating everything he has always seemed to be, he should have had himself put to death by the enemy of his chosen people -- that is a reversal so stunning that it changes everything back to the beginning. The Rock of Ages cannot die as God; but as God incarnate, the Rock can be cleft. God, shattered, can descend to death; and when he rises to eternal life, he can lift his human characters up with him. ...

***In this volume, Jack Miles wrestles with the hoary problems of Christian theology: theodicy: why a good God allows evil to win; and atonement: how Jesus' death somehow is Good News. He rejects and supersedes the notion of appeasing a Mean Daddy that infects so much Christian thinking.

If anyone finds Miles intriguing, I'd recommend reading God: a biography first. In that book, Miles convincingly establishes his bona fides as a sensitive linguistic interpreter and as a thoughtful respecter of ancient texts. Christ: a crisis in the life of God really is an epilogue, quite a wonderful one.