Is Obama a Threat to Osama?
God, I hate to follow that last post with something tendentious and tedious, so I’ll be really, really brief.
You can view Obama’s conciliatory approach to the Muslim world as naïve, or you can view it as strategic. If you don’t demonize all Islam, or all Muslims, you have a chance to turn perhaps the preponderance of the Muslim world in our favor. It’s not enough; economic and political change on the part of some of our allies (read: jobs for young men) are even more crucial to uprooting militancy. But the former must be the reason why Osama, or his posthumous sock puppet, is slamming Obama just now.
I Spoke Too Soon.
A few posts ago I wrote,
The part of Sotomayor’s remarks that annoys me most isn’t mentioned much: her *nudge nudge wink wink* tone when she says “Yeah, yeah, I know, we don’t make law, ha ha,” like you and I know better. That’s where she seems to me to give away a weakness for judicial activism. Her self-correction sounds insincere. It’s also so brazenly in-groupy and parochial — subtext, “we right-thinking folks all get it.”
Wrong. It has been noticed. In a mailing from Human Events (OK, so we’re both wrong that no one else noticed :) ):
But what no one seems to be pointing out is that Sotomayor was playing to this crowd of Duke University law students and moved them to laughter and as she concluded her statement, she smirked… she actually smirked.
That telling wink-wink-nudge-nudge moment, caught forever on video… her smirk… the laughter. Sotomayor is not just a left-wing activist judge who is willing to occasionally legislate from the bench.
She’s proud of her judicial activism; so much so, that she wears it on her sleeve and has no problem yukking it up with young impressionable law students when discussing the matter – even when the cameras are rolling.
The Human Events mailing is essentially a call to go to war over Sotomayor’s nomination, because
If conservatives don’t draw a line in the sand and take the fight to Obama over this nomination, Obama will know that he will be able to steamroll his extreme agenda of government-backed corporate takeovers, socialized health care, wealth redistribution and the advancement of so-called “social justice” down the throats of the American people virtually unopposed.
Read the whole thing. No, actually, don’t. I didn’t. Just take a look. Comments?
Reading Sotomayor’s “Wise Latina” Speech
Now Judge Cedarbaum expresses concern with any analysis of women and presumably again people of color on the bench, which begins and presumably ends with the conclusion that women or minorities are different from men generally. She sees danger in presuming that judging should be gender or anything else based. She rightly points out that the perception of the differences between men and women is what led to many paternalistic laws and to the denial to women of the right to vote . . .While recognizing the potential effect of individual experiences on perception, Judge Cedarbaum nevertheless believes that judges must transcend their personal sympathies and prejudices and aspire to achieve a greater degree of fairness and integrity based on the reason of law.
Whatever the reasons why we may have different perspectives, either as some theorists suggest because of our cultural experiences or as others postulate because we have basic differences in logic and reasoning, are in many respects a small part of a larger practical question we as women and minority judges in society in general must address.
Blacks are “sun people,” Jeffries explains, and whites are “ice people.” New York Newsday quoted Jeffries as telling his students last year, “Our thesis is that the sun people, the African family of warm communal hope, meets an antithesis, the vision of ice people, Europeans, colonizers, oppressors, the cold, rigid element in world history.” Jeffries believes melanin, the dark skin pigment, gives blacks intellectual and physical superiority over whites.
Yet, because I accept the proposition that, as Judge Resnik describes it, “to judge is an exercise of power” and because as, another former law school classmate, Professor Martha Minnow of Harvard Law School, states “there is no objective stance but only a series of perspectives – no neutrality, no escape from choice in judging,” I further accept that our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions. The aspiration to impartiality is just that–it’s an aspiration . . . [emphasis added]
The Minnesota Supreme Court has given an example of this. As reported by Judge Patricia Wald formerly of the D.C. Circuit Court, three women on the Minnesota Court with two men dissenting agreed to grant a protective order against a father’s visitation rights when the father abused his child. The Judicature Journal has at least two excellent studies on how women on the courts of appeal and state supreme courts have tended to vote more often than their male counterpart to uphold women’s claims in sex discrimination cases and criminal defendants’ claims in search and seizure cases.
In our private conversations, Judge Cedarbaum has pointed out to me that seminal decisions in race and sex discrimination cases have come from Supreme Courts composed exclusively of white males. I agree that this is significant but I also choose to emphasize that the people who argued those cases before the Supreme Court which changed the legal landscape ultimately were largely people of color and women.
Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O’Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. . . . I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise.
Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.
Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage. . . .Each day on the bench I learn something new about the judicial process and about being a professional Latina woman in a world that sometimes looks at me with suspicion. I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me requires. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences but I accept my limitations. [OK, but tricky balance to be struck — you can’t aspire if you’re too quick to accept.] I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate.There is always a danger embedded in relative morality, but since judging is a series of choices that we must make, that I am forced to make, I hope that I can make them by informing myself on the questions I must not avoid asking and continuously pondering.
However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their ability to understand the experiences of others. Other simply do not care. Hence, one must accept the proposition that a difference there will be by the presence of women and people of color on the bench.
Subversive Sotomayor Thought
I’ve been trying to explain something devilishly paradoxical on Twitter. Either I’ve just run up against the limitations of Twitter, or I just haven’t mastered the medium yet.
What I’ve been trying to say is that while I am repelled by Sonia Sotomayor’s fatuous and politically-correct suggestion that a “wise Latina woman” would necessarily make “better” decisions than a white man, and while I certainly don’t believe two wrongs make a right, or that it’s okay to punish young white males for past preferences they don’t remotely benefit from, there are a couple of things about the “empathy” and “affirmative action” arguments that I understand. I don’t endorse them, because I don’t think reverse discrimination is any kind of solution — fair and category-blind competition is, and rather than “the soft bigotry of low expectations” we need minorities to seize their opportunities to prepare and compete — but I can understand those arguments, and I think that just dismissing them with scorn betrays a huge blind spot.
For over two hundred years it was fine to restrict voting rights and many other kinds of civic, educational, and economic opportunity to white males. Now, it’s no longer okay. We’ve seen the light: discrimination is wrong. Good! But now, suddenly — now that it could go the other way — we’re piously shocked, shocked, by any form of discrimination.
Isn’t this a little like opposing the Vietnam war and laying claim to high principle when a major unspoken factor was that you could be drafted to fight in it?
It’s true: reverse discrimination, as in the New Haven firefighters’ case, is as unjust to individuals as the original kind, and it doesn’t do individuals in the favored groups any favors, either. That to me is uncontroversial. What gets under my skin, though, is conservatives’ lofty moral disapproval of some minority politicians’ liking for racial preferences. What was standard operating procedure for 200+ years but a great big racial preference? Minorities are to be sternly held to a higher standard than our own ancestors, because . . . our ancestors didn’t know any better? Because having suffered from discrimination yourself should make you a better, nobler person? How reverse-racist is that?
Minority politicians like Al Sharpton are just humans who see their chance and their communities’ to “get some.” Given that chance, they’re venal and willing to work any angle. Poor things, they don’t have the benefit of a long patrician tradition of dignified, civilized discrimination. They’re crass and shameless. They don’t have a huge grey institutional Puritan rock to do the discriminating discreetly for them.
By the same token, I’d like to know from the context whether Sotomayor was claiming that her stereotyped “wise Latina female” would make better decisions across the board because of her life experiences, or only that she would make fairer decisions specifically in cases concerning “that life,” the life lived by poor and minority people. The law may not and must not excuse lawbreaking on the excuse of disadvantage (“Gee, Officer Krupke! We’re depraved because we’re deprived!”). On the other hand, it’s a question whether a judge like John Roberts is purely unbiased or whether he does identify with the “power structure” and make decisions that are blind to the realities of a life he hasn’t lived. Bias becomes invisible when you assume that the way you see things is the way they are for everyone.
“Empathy,” however, means imagination if it means anything. It means striving to imagine your way into circumstances different from your own as part of the process of applying the law, a part that may color the application of the law while it must not trump it. That kind of perspective-broadening empathy would be required of a Sotomayor, too, and you’d have to look for it in her decisions on a wide range of cases.
The Mis[t]ery of Writing [UPDATED AGAIN]
It’s been long enough since I tried to do any “real” writing (where you conceive something in your head and then try to execute it, and of course it won’t hold still for its portrait) that I’d forgotten the wisdom of my “Note to self: don’t go there.”
It’s only a blog-essay on the Hubble for my dust-gathering Natural History blog (which died for lack of time and lack of feedback), so it doesn’t quite have to meet the high formal standards of a “real real” essay, to be chiseled into print. But it sucked me in nonetheless — because I’m enthralled by the Hubble and think its imagery is probably a turning point in human evolution, etc. blah, blah, blah — and I vanished from the “real” world. The feeling was in every way like nodding off while driving and feeling my hands evaporate off the wheel, the driver’s seat suddenly go empty. Not least, it’s up to me to keep our life on the road and I can’t let myself be ravished away from the controls.
But there I was yesterday, obsessively reading and linking to more and more, not even caring to tweet or look at my e-mail, struggling to keep formal control of the unwieldy, metastasizing thing, and at the same time feeling driven to be done with it so I could/before I could return to my maintenance and other responsibilities. Both J and the household deteriorate alarmingly fast when neglected. Someone I’ve been urging to blog literally for years has finally begun, and announcing it can’t wait either.
Now I remember why I made a pact with myself not to try to “really write” while taking care of J. Fact checking is bad enough — it has a fainter version of the same obsessive quality, the contradictory drives to overdo it and to get it over with — but while fact checking takes time and attention, it doesn’t take a fraction of the energy writing does. Writing is like being a spider and spinning a web out of your own guts; it’s like welding with an acetylene distilled by your liver. It takes it out of you. To create order that did not exist before defies entropy, which requires a disproportionate input of energy, and that energy is sucked out of your own lower belly. The few times I’ve broken my rule and “really written” something under this regime, I’ve felt drastically drawn and drained. Dracula is blamed.
Meanwhile, you’re driven by the certainty that any minute, the thing you’re trying to get down will get away, or dissolve and change shape. (Writing is probably a lot like hunting in the jungle. If the prey were made of mercury.) You need to focus on its pursuit with laserlike exclusivity. You cannot divide your attention or spare a scintilla of your energy. Interruptions are much worse than annoying, they’re tragic and enraging. And all this is wildly out of proportion; it’s all for something that doesn’t even need to be written. (The more I find has already been written about the Hubble in the same vein, the more I have a sense of redundancy. So then I want to link it all, on the equally false assumption that others are as obsessed as I am.) At best, a few people will read it and be fleetingly entertained or stimulated. My need to write it meets no complementary need in the world; if I didn’t do it, no one would know or care.
Meanwhile, J is weak. A phase? Or a trend? Who knows? All I know is that it’s a vicious cycle. The harder it is to get him up, the less he wants to get up, and the less I want to struggle to get him up, and the more I yield to escapism. But the less he gets up, the weaker he gets.
I need a nap.
UPDATE: On the other hand . . .
. . . (and this point almost always comes, always preceded and paid for by misery; why can’t we remember that??) it’s so neat when it starts to come right . . .
UPDATE II: Now it’s done, and of course I’m soaring (probably also disproportionate) and wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
Star Maps [UPDATED]
[S]ociety can never hope to settle down as in past ages. The social ship has steamed out of the sheltered bays of established tradition and has begun its cruise upon the high seas of evolutionary destiny; and the soul of man, as never before in the world’s history, needs carefully to scrutinize its charts of morality and painstakingly to observe the compass of religious guidance. The paramount mission of religion as a social influence is to stabilize the ideals of mankind during these dangerous times of transition from one phase of civilization to another, from one level of culture to another.
What the heck is the Urantia book? A bizarre mixture of good sense and nonsense:
[T]he greatest error of the teaching about the Scriptures is the doctrine of there being sealed books of mystery and wisdom which only the wise minds of the nation dare to interpret. The revelations of divine truth are not sealed except by human ignorance, bigotry, and narrow-minded intolerance. The light of the Scriptures is only dimmed by prejudice and darkened by superstition. A false fear of sacredness has prevented religion from being safeguarded by common sense. The fear of the authority of the sacred writings of the past effectively prevents the honest souls of today from accepting the new light of the gospel, the light which these very God-knowing men of another generation so intensely longed to see.
* * *
The Urantia Book teaches us that there are three planets near us that are suitable to harbor life, but perhaps not intelligent life, as we know it. However, there MAY BE intelligent life on some of the moons in our solar system.
Even if a planetary moon may appear to have no familiar attributes that would support life as we know it on Earth, it may yet be able to support life-forms that are unlike us, for example, the nonbreathers. The nonbreathers are a fascinating group, and they are mortals like us, except that they are not Adjuster-fused. Their lives are very different from our own, as you will see if you follow the links.
We are told in The Urantia Book that there are nine moons in our local universe which can support the nonbreather type of life, and, intriguingly, “You would be more than interested in the planetary conduct of this type of mortal because such a race of beings inhabits a sphere in close proximity to Urantia.” p564:2(49:3.6)
A brave if sometimes screwy attempt to carry Christian wisdom into an expanded universe.
UPDATE: Related, crazy stuff:
- Did Stephen Hawking put God out of a job? [Word document]
- Notes toward an “atheist theology“:
In short, there are two and only two options. 1. You learn to accept the mythic dimensions of yourself (whatever your particular views on God, no God, or whatever) and learn to transmute them. You learn in other words, as Ricoeur said, to have a second naivete. You take them with an “as if” quality. First naivete or actual mythic faith takes the mythic stories as literally/concretely true as Myers, Hitchens, and Dawkins do with their atheist myth. Numerous theistic fundamentalists could be brought up as examples as well (Pat Robertson, Bill Donahue, etc. etc.). 2. Or you continue to bumble around castigating others for the speck of myth in their eye while never noticing the giant plank of unconscious myth coming forth from yours.
But what myth to teach? The prime difficulty an atheist religion will have if it tries to translate downward into a mythic form in a honest self-conscious manner is that it is hard to form new myths after the rise of the scientific-critical age. Just ask The Mormons. Since the Jewish & Christian myths have such a long history they have that piece of Universe Property pretty well in hand. Which is why attempts to generate counter-myths in Western history almost always (if not always) end up parroting the Jewish-Christian myth: e.g. communism’s ideal state as a secularized version of the myth of the Millennium. Same with liberal capitalism’s argument for the inevitable land of wealth, peace, and liberty when all adopt those mechanisms of economics and governance (”The End of History”).
Probably the best version of an atheist mythos would be to mythicize the up to date scientific story of Creation. You don’t need a god/God for that story but properly done it evokes awe, wonder, care, and humility (the best responses to good myth). It isn’t opposed to religious understandings of the same story–i.e. not a militant anti-theistic atheistic spirituality–though it doesn’t have to be subsumed by the classic religious Western myth either. It makes science, rightly done, a worshipful devotional act (read: 2nd naivete) without worshiping science. And lastly as a good myth it will need to deal with the question of evil, finitude, and death. Given that 99+% of all species ever in existence have gone extinct, this worldview is soaked in death (as well as creative rebirth).
“Oh, Baby, Look At That.”
The Atlantis shuttle crew releases the repaired and upgraded Hubble Space Telescope.
The Biggest Danger to Our Freedom … [UPDATED YET AGAIN]
. . . is, it strikes me, our incompetence.
The inability of so many of us (in the societal sense of “us”) to take care of ourselves, if we had to, in the most basic, practical ways; our dependence on the electrical grid (I felt so stupid reflexively flipping switches during the last power blackout), on experts, on supermarkets and the vast supply systems that fill them . . . this is at the root of “our” willingness to be taken care of and taken charge of by government. It has trained us not to be the masters of our own lives, to be needy, willing, dependent.
Participating in these vast systems makes us at once more and less powerful and free. We do not, each household of us, have to spend our days splitting wood and canning fruit, duplicating these basic survival activities and having little time or energy left to get beyond them. We have recreational and intellectual lives that were limited to ancient aristocrats — or to children in the century or so since nonworking “childhood” was invented. No wonder we grow up so late. The educated “elites” can be particularly — harsh word — parasitic in this regard.
I remember visiting Romania in the 1970s and being astonished by the number of Jacques’ friends and relatives who, as a matter of course, and of necessity, could build, wire, and plumb a house, maintain their own cars, make their own booze, hunt and gather wild food and medicinal plants in the woods, raise and butcher pigs and chickens (callous skills my dislike of which I knew to be a luxury), and (the women) preserve food, cook and bake on a wood stove, make and repair their own clothing. These were traditional skills that had not yet been lost in that country village, and they were a way that people preserved their independence under Communist privation and tyranny.
I wonder whether basic physical competence tends to breed political conservatism and independence. People who can take care of themselves would rather be left alone to do so. There were certainly a good number of American hippies who moved to the country with idealized dreams of self-sufficiency. A lot of them came back. Of those who stayed, and became genuinely competent, did their politics change? Maybe not. That would make short work of my theory. But I wonder if many didn’t need to learn from their neighbors and end up learning more than just how to.
If you could put together a short course in basic survival skills, what would the essential ones be? What would you equip people with to restore their sense that they could take care of themselves if they had to? Do you think it would change their outlook on life? Or can such things not be taught in abstraction from actual lived life?
UPDATE: In my inbox just now and surprisingly apropos, the New York Times waxes nostalgic for manual labor:
[N]ow as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses. . . . what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it?
…
High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass.
…
[T]here is wide use of drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their
natural tendency toward action, the better to “keep things on track.” I taught briefly in a public high school and would have loved to have set up a Ritalin fogger in my classroom. It is a rare person, male or female, who is naturally inclined to sit still for 17 years in school, and then indefinitely at work.
…
Over the next six months I spent a lot of time at Fred’s shop, learning, and put in only occasional appearances at the university. This was something of a regression: I worked on cars throughout high school and college, and one of my early jobs was at a Porsche repair shop. Now I was rediscovering the intensely absorbing nature of the work, and it got me thinking about possible livelihoods.…
UPDATE II: In the comments, Edgewise.Sigma links to a proposal for a Museum of Skills — what would really amount to a video library of how-to manuals, as Icepick almost suggested, also in the comments. (Ice said you would need to be able to read, but in some increasingly postliterate, shoot-me-a-YouTube sectors of our world, video would be safer, and having a known library of these would solve the problem of where to find them.)
People have been pointing out the disaster if the skills of farmers are lost as they are driven from the land. Other skills are being lost as our industries go off-shore. What of all the other skills we will need if ever we must defend our shores or can no longer import everything except restaurants and real estate?
We need videos made of all the skills that are disappearing, before the factories, tools, and workpeople are gone. The Arts Councils, or some other body, should divert their less urgent funding into ensuring that as each skill disappears overseas, some tangible and video record is kept so it can be resurrected if necessary. There could even be a register of surviving skillspersons – and an annual march of survivors – people who know how to make yarn or boots or a sewing machine or an electric kettle or a hotwater bottle . . or how to make machines to make them . .. There could be a television program, and libraries could have DVDs.
The author of this proposal is Valerie Yule. And she turns out to be a completely fascinating 80-year-old Australian psychologist! Described as “a writer and researcher on imagination, literacy and social issues,” she has a lot to say — bluntly, concisely — about the state of the world.
UPDATE III: “Civilization . . . is a prison . . . but you get American Idol and Cool Ranch Doritos, so it’s not that bad.”
Ambiance 