Please pardon my delay in responding to you.  I have been busy, and I suppose you have been also.  I hope this finds you in good health.

One of the acknowledged problems with twitter is the 140 character limit, which makes meaningful communication difficult.  I will use this as a way to better answer your questions and respond to your tweets.

We arrived here by my comments with regard to the use of the word ‘sexist’.  I wrote a longer piece about it and sent you a link and you responded with the tweets below.  I didn’t respond to your tweets as they happened, so allow me now.

With regard to your assertion that ‘as a man, you don’t get to be the final arbiter on what is sexist or not”.  My initial reaction to this was going to be, “What are you, a chick?”, but I didn’t post that.  But seriously, you should go down to the store and buy some balls, because someone has ripped yours off.  There is no way that I will agree to your axiomatic statement that being of the male gender abrogates my use of the word.  It is my right to use whatever word I want in my search for communication.  It is my responsibility to make sure, to the best of my ability, that the signifiers I use approximate the signified of the recipient.  (I don’t know if you have read anything in the area of semiotics or ethics, but there are some code words there that you would recognize if you had.)

Somehow, the point was lost that the word being used as a cudgel was ‘sexist’, not ‘lady’.  This persisted after you read my explanation of it in a post titled “On using the word ‘sexist’”.

Your point about humor is well taken.  Context is everything.  Many is the comedian who has made a bad joke soon after some event and had to follow it up with “Oh, too soon?”

Which brings us to your comments with regard to your religion.  You seem to have conflated my responsibility to respect your rights with regard to religious preference with a respect for the religion itself.  Respect for your rights to practice a religion does not equate to respect for the religion you happen to practice.  Lest you think that I am in the habit of mocking religion, let me reassure you that I am not.  Unlike belief or faith in other things not seen or testable, I have seen religion help people live better lives.  Some of these people credit a religion for allowing them to break the hold of addiction, so to me it doesn’t matter if there are thousands of self-righteous hypocrites who are deserving of whatever scorn is heaped on them.  That one who needs religion to not slide into a hell of addiction is reason enough to put down the shovel and walk away from the scorn pile.

But if you want to talk about your religion, I am happy to oblige.  You gave up a Protestant religion to adopt the religion that conforms to a desert patriarchy?  This doesn’t seem to square with your observed tendency  (if I am not mistaken) to support women.  You gave up the New Testament to adopt Old Testamentish doctrine?  There is too much to the New Testament that I can not give up.  Just this week, I encountered a situation that tried me in ways that I did not anticipate.  The words from John 8 comforted me.  ”For he that is among you that is without sin, let him cast the first stone.”  I haven’t read extensively in your holy books, but from what I have seen by those who try to be strict adherents of those texts, stoning is the first option.

Perhaps, like comedy, religion is context oriented.  I note from your brief biography that you live in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of New York City.  I have never visited there.  I have been to the city on business, but have not had to opportunity to explore.  I subscribe to the New York Times and it affords me a window into the region.  I did read “The Color of Water” and I have wondered why it has not been made into a major motion picture.  I picked it up in the airport at Las Vegas on a business trip.  It kind of stood out among the literary detritus and soft porn in the book store.

From what I understand, the Red Hook neighborhood is not part of Bedford-Stuyvesant and my reference to that very good book is not an example of “they all look alike”.  Since I don’t live in your city, my understanding of it is discrete, not continuous. (yeah, that’s an engineering reference).   But it is also a point in the continuum of trying to understand religion.  I don’t know if you have read the book, but the title is part of an answer to a question by the author.  He had asked his mother, “What color is God?” and she responded, “God is the color of water.”  The story of this woman’s search for love and meaning in life touched me, as did the story of the author who also tried to find that love and meaning in life.

The reference I made earlier, to ethics, was to my use of the words, “rights” and “responsibility”.  Those are the two sides of the ethics balance and we need to evaluate them as we make our way in life.  There are those who seem to think that by merely examining rights can situations be resolved.  Politicians are at the forefront of this method.  They find an appeal to rights wins more attention than an appeal to responsibilities.  One of the weaknesses of our Constitution is that it has a Bill of Rights, but not a countervailing Bill of Responsibilities.  It should be noted that there is one class of citizens that seems to think that things can be settled by examination of rights only.  Toddlers.  Anyone who has parented a toddler is well acquainted with the Toddler Rules of Ownership.  This is one version.

1. If I like it, it’s mine.
2. If it’s in my hand, it’s mine.
3. If I can take it from you, it’s mine.
4. If I had it a little while ago, it’s mine.
5. If it’s mine, it must never appear to be yours in any way.
6. If I’m doing or building something, all the pieces are mine.
7. If it looks just like mine, it is mine.
8. If I saw it first, it’s mine.
9. If you are playing with something and you put it down, it automatically becomes mine.
10. If it’s broken, it’s yours.
11. If it’s broken, but you are having fun playing with the pieces, it’s mine again.
12. If there is ANY doubt, it’s mine.

I bring this up, because our concept of human rights, in the Western world, does not spring directly from any religion.  To the best of my knowledge, the concept of human rights is not addressed in the Bible.  Being a Muslim, you can answer better for your religion.  It is my position that our concept of human rights derives from the idea of property rights.  In the Western tradition, that is anchored by the Magna Carta which secured property rights and limited the rights of the king.  The line of derivation continues through the Reformation, which broke the power of the Catholic theocracy and led to Locke and “consent of the governed”.  In my readings of commentary on Islam, I don’t see any such parallel.  From my perspective, Islam offers no path to any continuation of our moral betterment.

I do see we pitiful humans as being on a path of moral betterment.  In the world of things that can be measured, that should be our goal.  I have used the word “measure” several times, and I am using in the context of my epistemological journey.  I have started a taxonomy of truth and have identified the two major types of truth: things that are defined to be true and things that are determined to be true.  In the latter, there are things that are determined to be true by measurement.  Religion lives within the realm of things defined to be true.  But in the world of things that are true by measurement, religion can help us toward a goal of moral betterment.

Moral betterment is only possible through a belief in free will.  Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler write in this paper(PDF) that encouraging a belief in determinism increases cheating.  I have never been comfortable with the expression, “everything happens for a reason”.  That belief precludes random events in the universe and I will not accept that axiomatically.  Accepting that assertion precludes reason.

And that is where I part with religion.  If you rejected being a Baptist as being part of a White culture, I can understand that.  If you note that John Newton was converted and still served on slaving ships, yeah, there seems to be some hypocrisy there.  For my part, if I were to ever return to Christianity, it would be as a Mennonite, if only because of their pacifism.  Baptists gave up pacifism and sided with Oliver Cromwell, but you probably knew that.

I have written before about religion and ethnic divide.  In my hometown of Holland, Michigan, there were extended families in Reformed and Christian Reformed churches.  For those families without two Dutch parents, there were other churches.  The point is this: in a town that was homogeneously white, there were still divisions along clan and family lines.  A cursory look at Islam shows that much of Islam is divided on ethnic lines.  The major division between Sunni and Shia was along ethnic lines.

The story of America is the story of its underclasses.  America has had rich and powerful men, but the dream of America is the dream of betterment, and that dream is most alive in its underclasses.  And the biggest underclass in America are those people of African heritage who have been brought to our shores.   The language that we have adopted accepts this as a characteristic.  The norm is to use the expression, “light skinned Black”, for someone who is nearly as white as the side of my house yet bearing however noticeable Negroid features.  We should weep with joy that there are people of African heritage who would say “I am American” because it is the triumph of an idea over all too observable circumstance.

I was thinking of two guys I knew in the Army in 1973.  Sp4 (later Sgt.) Terry and Sgt. Willie Broadnax.  Sgt. Terry was drafted, served in Vietnam, got out, and came back in.  Sgt. Terry talked about hating the Army and various things that had gone on in Vietnam.  He left he Army and travelled to Africa.  He said that people there told him he smelled funny.  And to my nose, the Black soldiers I knew in the Army did smell different.  I have no doubt that pheromone production, along with appearance, is a matter of genetic expression.  Sgt. Terry went to Africa because he wanted to be African.  But he came back and was wont to say, “Fuck that shit.  I’m an American.”  Sgt. Broadnax liked to say that “Uncle Sam tried to kill my Black ass.  He sent me to Vietnam to get killed, but I fooled him.  He couldn’t kill me, can’t kill me.”  I think Sgt. Broadnax had a lot of issues, probably well founded issues, to work through.  His wife seemed like a gracious woman and his kids seemed well balanced.

And the kids are what it is about.  I was raised to see color of skin.  I have tried to not raise my kids that way.  I remember being in the video store one time in Seattle  and another guy was with his kid.  Bookzilla noted how he and I were a lot alike, not how we were different.  I hope our kids can continue to strive toward that goal of moral betterment.

I remember being on Rainer Avenue, near MLK Way some years ago.  I lived about a mile from there and went down to get gas.  As I was fueling, a guy rode up on his motorcycle.  It was an impressive machine.  It was a Harley, white and turquoise with chrome and gold accents.  I have never been a Harley person, but that was a nice looking bike.  The rider was a Black guy, about my size, 6’4″, 230.  The way he rode up was like out of a movie and he could have been out of Central Casting.  Jeans, boots, vest, beanie helmet; he looked like he was ready for a print advert shoot.  He put his bike on the side stand, got off  and turned around in time to see the Chinese guy following him pop the clutch on his sedan, lurch forward and bump into the prized motorcycle.  And it dumped.  Bang.  The Chinese guy was about 5’4″, 120 lbs.  The rider was pissed.  He could have snapped the Chinese guy in half.  After a bit, the Chinese guy got out to help the owner pick the bike up  by lifting on the rear wheel.  But all he managed to do is unleverage the pivot point and slide the motorcycle along the ground.  The rider motioned for the driver (who didn’t seem to speak much English) to back off and he got the bike up and onto its side stand, and started collecting insurance information.

I tell this story because at no point did the bike rider go ethnic on the car driver.  I drove away thinking that the bike rider was a better man than me.  I would have at least made some comments about the driver’s poor driving skills, probably while staring him down.  I also thought that maybe we were becoming better, bit by bit.

I close with an apology for making a reference to your testicles and going shopping.  That was out of line.  If you have read this far, really, I’m sorry.  But I won’t apologize for looking at two things in your bio: “Astrologer. Thinker.” and saying “Really?  Doesn’t one preclude the other?”  Rationality should preclude belief in things like astrology.  Or vice versa.  You should read the paper I linked to above with regard to believing in Fate.

With warmest regards,

Dan

Many liberals and progressives (overlapping sets, just trying to be inclusive in my labels) derided the speech and asked the rhetorical question about targeted killing of American citizens on American soil, whether it was also justified.  One person on twitter said Holder’s position “wasn’t democracy”.

My response is that it depends on your definition of the word “democracy”.  If you mean “government of the people”, such that it is a government that expresses and puts into action the will of the demos, the people, then yes, I’m pretty sure the Holder position is democracy.  I think that using a drone to strike a person hiding beyond the reach of American courts while planning to cause great mayhem and destruction is pretty much exactly what the American people want the government to do.

If you mean “a system of impartial laws, such that social justice is maintained”,  the answer is a little more problematic.  Detractors of Holder asked rhetorically about targeted killings on American soil because they assume the two are equivalent and asking the question invalidates Holder’s position.  This is an example of trying to win an argument by axiom, in this case, indirect axiom.

Most arguments are won or lost in the axioms agreed to by each side.  By choosing the axioms carefully, you can give strength to your position and weaken the opponents.  Overloading definitions is an easy way to do this.  Another is to stage a false equivalence or linkage.

This is what is being done by Holder’s detractors.  The axiom being asserted and linked is that American citizenship bequeaths a set of rights and that those are inviolable.  And that is true.  The fifth amendment to the Constitution says that “nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”.  The false linkage comes about in the preceding clause, “when in actual service in time of War or public danger”.  Holder says that these people have given up certain rights by engaging in terrorist activity, while his detractors do not.

I’m with Holder on this one.  American citizens who go abroad and take on the role of state-players, where they actively plan to attack America and Americans, not as ordinary criminals to gain property or wealth, but as a statement of political purpose, these people are liable for what ever measures the American government takes against them.  If the American government can take them into custody such that their actions can be examined in a court of law, so be it.  But if they are beyond the reach of American custody, then America has a right to take such actions as are necessary to protect its citizens.

Democracy requires more than axioms to work.  It also requires reasoning.

I don’t like it.  When I encounter people using it or any other cudgel word, my reaction is often to poke fun of them, a little or a lot, depending on how much I like them.

In the last week, I got into a couple of twitter spats with people using the word ‘sexist’.  The first was a young woman who is in law school, I think.  She said that the word ‘lady’ was sexist.  I don’t use that word a lot.  “Ladies” was a word used by the printed nylon shirt crowd when I was in my 20’s.  (I am not a fan of printed nylon or synthetic shirts.  Woven patterns are okay, but printed shirts seem rather unimaginative.)  I will confess to using “lady” as an epithet for a dithering female driver, and “chowder-head” for a dithering driver of the male gender.  But I digress.

I responded by saying

I was riffing the cluelessness of “Spinal Tap” where David St. Hubbins or Nigel Tufnel confuses sexy with sexist with regard to the album cover of “Smell The Glove”.  The humor was lost as a guy from New York City leapt to her defense.  His bio lists him as a former Baptist minister turned Muslim.  ”Out of the frying pan and into the fire”, as my mother would have said, but that is a whole other issue.  I was roundly denounced by others who asked if I would say that to my mother or daughter.  One woman got so huffy that she blocked me.  Oh well…  In my exchange with the man from NYC, I yanked his chain a little

He said something about it being a different demographic than he was accustomed to.

Later in the week, a woman said that the International Women’s Day was sexist because there was not corresponding International Men’s Day.  My response was “Self loathe much?” and generated a furious back and forth where I questioned her ability to think logically and she defended her academic credentials (which I had derided).  My agita was fueled by her bio which listed her as an “investigative journalist” for the “Big” media combine of the late Andrew Breitbart.  She let slip that she was a stay at home mother.  Just how much “investigative journalism” do you do while caring for your children and staying at home?

We were past the point where I could point out that there was an IWD because women are discriminated against in many parts of the world and it was an attempt to shine a light on that discrimination.  Hell, in some parts of the world, women are treated as little more than possessions.  That pisses me off and it should raise the ire of any thinking person.

Yeah, I’m a prick sometimes.  But don’t call me that, because it is sexist.

It’s 1944, and police escort a 14-year-old boy into the death chamber. He stands just 5’1 and weighs a mere 95 pounds. He is so small in stature that dictionaries need to be stacked on the seat of the electric chair so that when he sits in it his head reaches the height of the electrodes. His chains are loose around his narrow ankles.

This young boy is about to be the youngest person ever to be executed in the history of the United States. Before there was a Troy Davis there was George Junius Stinney, Jr. and the state of South Carolina electrocuted him.

Stinney was accused of murdering two young white girls. They were eleven year-old Betty June Binnicker and 8-year-old Mary Emma Thames. The two girls went missing one day after they were riding their bikes while looking for flowers on the wrong side of the tracks in a small working class town of Alcolu, South Carolina where whites and blacks were separated by railroad tracks. The girls went missing and were later found dead in a ditch, murdered with a railroad spike.

If a state wants to have a death penalty, let them pass a law such that the executioner is drawn, by lot, from the lists used to make jury pools.  Make it a citizenship duty.  Put that on the ballot and if that is what the People want, I will go along with it.

Part of the problem is trying to figure out what the metrics are.  Most education “reformers” come to the problem with solutions in hand and try to find data to support their position.  Other times, the “reformers” have more than solutions in hand.  They have products in hand and are looking to sell said products.  But I digress.

Michelle Rhee made a lot of headlines in the Washington DC schools.  Scores were up.  Way up.  But there might be a problem.  It seems that the cameras used  by McGraw-Hill to grade the tests can also record erasures.  And the Washington DC schools that showed the greatest improvements also showed the greatest number of erasures.  Almost all of them from incorrect answers to correct answers.  How anomalous was that?

McGraw-Hill’s practice is to flag only the most extreme examples of erasures. To be flagged, a classroom had to have so many wrong-to-right erasures that the average for each student was 4 standard deviations higher than the average for all D.C. students in that grade on that test. In layman’s terms, that means a classroom corrected its answers so much more often than the rest of the district that it could have occurred roughly one in 30,000 times by chance. D.C. classrooms corrected answers much more often.

Four standard deviations is a lot of standard deviations.  And the classrooms in question were beyond that.

Was there wide spread cheating in certain schools?  Fraud?  Don’t know.

Read the whole thing.

Unlike his unflappable temperament, his lingering failings should and could be corrected. And they must be if his presidency is not just to rise above the 24/7 Spill-cam but to credibly seize the narrative that Americans have craved ever since he was elected during the most punishing economic downturn of our lifetime.

As long as we have personality driven politics, we will have narrative and the means and need to control it.

It is also patently obvious that personality driven politics are very inefficient.  But as long as we have elections where we elect people, that is the way it is going to be.

The Russians celebrate Epiphany with a ceremonial dip in very icy waters, symbolizing rebirth.  Here is one such celebrant now in her traditional costume.

Sometimes, the event is more involved, as shown below.  Here is one celebrant with a deacon.

It isn’t clear what the whole ceremony is about.  Here is a picture of the priest who will administer the ceremony.  I wonder if he knows.

Yeah, I think he has it figured out.

(Actually, he was the first to cross a river and get the cross the Sava River in Belgrade, but I like my story better.)

The story is about Nathaniel Ayers, an African-American man living in Los Angeles and Steve Lopez, a Los Angeles Times writer.  Ayers was a student at Julliard in New York City and, because of mental illness, ends up homeless on the streets of Los Angeles.

Lopez, played by Downey, happens upon Ayers, played by Foxx, while Ayers is playing Stevie Wonder on a violin with two strings.  Lopez researches Ayers story and starts writing about him.  The story of these two men develops and Lopez learns something about homeless people and about grace.  Ayers learns something about coming back.  The movie doesn’t wrap up the story as it is still going on.

The movie had several sequences of great shot selection accompanied by a great score.  There were so many scenes where the direction really nailed the shot selection.  The director does two things: actor direction and camera direction.  I don’t know how much actor direction was at work here as Downey and Foxx were both great.  Camera direction was also outstanding.

This is one of my favorite movies from the last year.

See the video at the 2.37 mark here.  Neda

There’s a great article in Newsweek about Iran.  It is long and it is hard to find a clip that seems to sum it up.  There is this one:

After Obama videotaped a Persian New Year’s message for the Iranian people, reiterating his offer of unconditional talks, most Western commentators interpreted Khamenei’s lengthy and defiant response as a slap in the face. But what would have been most significant to any Iranian listening was a passage at the very end of the speech, when Khamenei said, “If you change, our behavior will also change.” Iran’s supreme authority had never before used the word “change” in such a context, for up until now the Islamic Republic’s position has been that there is nothing objectionable about its behavior. If the Obama administration truly wants to forge a new relationship with Iran, it will have to learn to hear the things Iranians are saying to them, whether it be the Supreme Leader or the rifle-toting Sadoughi.

Dealing with these civilizations is tricky.  Our temptation is to put it all on the face, and go with a simple interpretation of everything that is said and done.  But these are civilizations that have existed for thousands of years and one needs to listen, not for what we want to hear, but for what they are saying.

Read it here.