Here’s some of the input that’s been bubbling around my tired brain:
Trent Lott, and the controversy over the GOP’s assumption of the Dixiecrat’s ‘states rights’ strategy.
Acidman Mars great post on his own background and transitions on race.
The discussion of the postmodern analysis of speech quoted below.
And finally, an afternoon and evening spent judging a high school debate tournament where the two topics debated were the balance between national security and individual rights and new federal funding for mental health services.
Let me try these in some rough kind of order.
When I was a kid, I had a bunch of ‘helper parents’; adults who helped take care of me after school and who spent a bunch of energy on the slightly lost, grim young kid that I used to be. A couple of them were African-American men who worked for my father. They were rough rural men, who had come to Los Angeles from the South both for economic opportunity…for the jobs that the factories and construction projects in the booming 1960’s California offered…and for the social opportunity for their children. They told me so.
Each of them had pictures of Bobby Kennedy in their homes; some had pictures of JFK as well. But it was to Bobby that they gave a kind of masculine worship, because it was Bobby who they felt had fought for their rights and lives when the Civil Rights crises of the early 1960’s came to a head.
It was the strong hand of the Federal Government, backed by federal or federalized troops and federal law enforcement, that backed down the Bull Connors’ and that made sure the murders of Schwerner, Goodman and Cheny were an aberration, not a pattern.
This strong hand provoked a substantial response. The response was, as most human things are, driven by a complicated set of causes. One was certainly the desire of those who felt that African Americans needed to be kept segregated…from political, economic, and social equality…and did not want to be told to stop. Another was almost certainly a regional memory of the last clash between the rights of states and the powerful Federal government. And another still was probably a principled belief that the nature of the American political compact was being violated.
But when the GOP adopted the Southern Strategy, and began to wrap itself in the mantle of ‘states rights’, they were consciously appealing to voters on all three of the levels above, including the one about race just as when they ran the ‘Willie Horton’ ad, they were appealing to the fear by suburban white voters of urban black men.
So as far as Lott goes, his various statements and affiliations put him in a place where he has to actively prove he’s not racist as has, I should note, apparently his mentor Strom Thurmond, who it has been noted has black staff members and sent his children to integrated schools. Like Thurmond, Acidman has wrestled with his past beliefs and come out the other side. He can articulate the changes and take responsibility for the positions he took and the hurt he caused.
I haven’t heard anything like that from Lott.
So I’m perfectly comfortable cheering Bobby Kennedy’s memory while also remembering that I worry that the central government has too many powers, and wondering if in fact certain powers shouldn’t be devolved to lower levels of government or even toward individuals. Does this make me a racist? Nope.
Now, as noted below, I’m not uncomfortable with taking positions that are contradictory. I believe that the world is more complex than our speech about it, and that in action (in the sense of political action, or praxis) we need to acknowledge that complexity.
Part of that complexity is about the fact that we are both members of groups, and individuals, and that understanding human behavior requires that you understand behavior in both contexts. There’s a moral, action-oriented dimension to this that I’ll fold in shortly.
One point made in the quote from the post below is:

What we have then are two positions about the nature of speech. The postmodernists say: Speech is a weapon in the conflict between groups that are unequal. And that is diametrically opposed to the liberal view of speech, which says: Speech is a tool of cognition and communication for individuals who are free.

What if both of those are true?
When I was a sprout, I briefly studied physics, and had one great professor. As he tried to teach us the basics of quantum physics, one point sank in, which I’ll restate in my own words: The world is more complex than our representations, which are, by definition simplifications. Some of the simplifications about the same subject are contradictory, so that in one experiment, a photon is a wave, and in another, it is a particle. The reality is that it is something else … we use the word photon … to which we attach various models. The fact that our models are inadequate doesn’t invalidate the behavior of the real thing.
Similarly, the fact that our models of society are inadequate doesn’t invalidate people’s real behavior, and in fact, they both behave like individuals who freely make decision, and like members of groups, who are influenced by the cultural and linguistic frameworks that they operate within.
Empirically, people behave as members of groups. Advertisers use demographics for a reason. Collaborative filtering (like Amazon’s or Netflix’s recommendation engines) works for a reason…because people tend to cluster in their behavior and likes and dislikes. Why is that, if we are all Roarkian individuals who freely choose our way? We aren’t. We’re taught to be who we are, and then as conscious individuals we create ourselves with the material we’ve been given.
That’s the moral dimension. We’re dealt all the cards, and the rules of the game are set, but the hand still has to be played.
Acidman and Thurmond (Bet you never though you’d see those two names together, eh?) played their hands as free individuals and took the conscious, moral responsibility for their choices, in part by acknowledging that they had made choices.
(Haven’t seen anything like that from Lott.)
Yes, people get taught to be who they are. We’ve slacked off as parents in teaching our kids a whole lot of things. But if you want to get refreshed, go judge some high school debate (the schools in your neighborhood are always looking for judges).
I did yesterday, judging a tournament where my son debated (didn’t judge him, nor anyone from his school … that’d be cheating).
The two topics were on balancing national security and individual rights, and on whether the federal government should fund more mental health clinics.
The kids ranged from awesome (I wouldn’t want to argue with them) to struggling, with quotes from Locke, Rousseau, Hobbes, and Foucault for good measure.
Listening to them, I was struck by the fact the difference between the good ones and the not-so-good ones was whether when they quoted the books, they understood what they were talking about, had some context in history for it, could tie it into a broader argument.
We’re all doing the same thing (even at the highest levels of debate), because we’re struggling to use our limited understanding and limited ability to express it to communicate with and convince each other about a damn complex and fast-changing world.
With the kids, the process is advancing so fast you can watch it, and it’s fun to watch it emerge, and that was brought home to me watching them.
Like the kids, we’re learning, and our understanding is an evolving thing.

Just back from seeing ‘Far From Heaven’, and I’m probably the only arthouse-film loving person in the country who hated it…more on that later (but wait! I can’t stand it! Does every movie in the oughts have to have a saintly black character with no human depth in it? I thought we were done with that with that stupid golf movie…)…but first a rant.
You’re middle-aged and at least semi-well-to-do.
You go see small, quiet artsy films…like ‘Far From Heaven’.
WHY THE @##$$!@# DO YOU TALK THROUGHOUT THE GOD-DAMN MOVIE??
I mean it’s one thing when seeing ‘Eight Mile’ or ‘XXX’…I can adjust my level of tolerance to a rowdy crowd of kids who are participating in the movie.
Bit I almost offered the noisy damn couple in back of us five bucks to go rent a movie so they could narrate the *##@$ damn thing to each other…

I just put up a long winding post on Lott and a bunch of other things, published it, and decided it was incomprehensible.
I’ll go eat dinner and see if I can edit it into something that makes sense and repost it.
Sorry ’bout that…

The usually annoying David Shaw pulls off an interesting article in last weekend’s LA Times (obtrusive registration required, use ‘laexaminer’/’laexaminer’) on the social end economic gap between newly professionalized journalists and the ‘average reader’ they are trying to connect with.

The median annual salary for “experienced reporters” working at newspapers with more than 250,000 daily circulation — the 40 largest papers in the country — was about $56,000 last year, according to a newspaper industry study. Pay for “senior reporters” — and for top reporters and editors at the largest of these papers — is substantially more. But median income for all U.S. workers over 15 is about $31,500.

In other words, many big-city journalists — especially those who set the agenda for what gets covered in the rest of the media — have moved away from much of the largely middle- and working-class audience they purport to serve. At best, they’re out of touch. At worst, they’ve become elitists.

The natural sympathy that most journalists feel for the underdog and for the downtrodden prevents the media from ignoring the poor. The fascination that the American public has with the rich and famous prevents the media from ignoring the upper strata of society. But newspapers seldom write about the middle class, the working class — white- or blue-collar.

“We don’t write about them because we no longer live like them,” says Martin Baron, editor of the Boston Globe. “We live in other neighborhoods, and we don’t visit theirs. And I fear that there is a subtle disdain for their lives, their lifestyles, their material and spiritual aspirations.”

Today’s sophisticated, well-paid, well-educated journalists often have more in common with their sources — government officials, university scientists, high-powered lawyers and businessmen — than they do with their readers. In a sense, that’s not surprising. As the world has become more complex and more specialized, the better news organizations have tried to hire their own specialists — reporters with law degrees to cover the courts, reporters with medical degrees to cover medicine, reporters who attend seminars and write books on various other specialized topics to cover those fields.
…
Sandra Mims Rowe, editor of the Portland Oregonian, recalls a newsroom discussion at the Oregonian this year about a state law requiring tax refunds to individuals, even though the state was in “dire financial shape.”

“The refund would amount to several hundred dollars per family,” Rowe says, “and our journalists were sitting around saying, ‘Why doesn’t the state do something about this law and balance the budget instead? A few hundred dollars isn’t that much.’ But to many of our readers, several hundred dollars is a lot of money, and we have to make sure our coverage isn’t biased in that way.”

The growing gap in income and education between journalists and most of their potential readers — and the difference in values and lifestyles that often derive from that gap — is a problem for newspapers already weakened by competitive pressures and declining public confidence, especially in a weak economy, with a rapidly growing immigrant population.

He looks at it from a media marketing point of view, but it is also another piece in the puzzle I’ve been playing with lately.
The overall picture isn’t clear, but I’m thinking that the disconnect between the people who think and write about stuff for a living and those who make and do stuff for a living is fairly large…and that the impacts of that disconnect, in politics, economics, and social development are even larger.

Acidman Mars gets his rant on in a big way. The topic: race.
You want ballsy honesty, you want the truth?? Yeah, you can handle the truth, and here it is.
There are more Acidmans in the world than we recognize. Not nearly as many as I wish there were…
I have to piss on his feet just a little bit though (hey, I yam what I yam). For every Richard Mack who walked through a brick wall of prejudice and came out the other side, how many didn’t?
I’ve had the honor of meeting one of the Little Rock 9. He and I actually disagree on a number of things, and I was happy to wrestle with him as we talked over the dinnertable.
But I looked into his eyes as he talked about what it was like…damn. Any words I use are inadequate. I can’t imagine it, and I have a really good imagination.
We’ve come a hella long way, and I’m proud of what we all have done…of my dinner-mate, and of the Acidman too.
Doesn’t mean we’re done yet.
(added link to Little Rock 9)

I finally got some time to scan the Blogverse today, and found a gem over at Matthew Yglesias’ &ltirony&gt although Matthew seems to mistakenly feel that putting blogs in alphabetical order on blogrolls is a Bad Thing &lt/irony&gt

…All together, it’s worth taking note of a certainly historical naivete that undergirds a lot of libertarian approaches to property rights. The patterns of ownership and wealth that currently exist in the US have been profoundly shaped by the government’s decision over a period of about 100 years to recognize and enforce property holdings that took the form of ownership of other human beings. One might want to add that the wholesale expropriation of North America’s indigenous inhabitants played a significant role as well. The point is that it’s not as if whatever property folks own nowadays came down to them through a series of morally pure transactions that would be desperately tainted by government interference. The state and coercive appropriations are the roots of property ownership all the way down.

The conservatives share the libertarians worship of property rights as-they-are, and somehow take them as handed down on stone tablets, rather than as evolving social constructs (which they are).
(Note: I’ll have more to say on containing contradictory positions sometime soon)
Having said that, I’ll switch sides and note that while property is an evolving social construct, a respect for property rights is nonetheless a critical part of what I would see as a just society. Because it’s mutable doesn’t mean it’s anything we want it to be.

Sometimes it just doesn’t pay to be nice.
But actually it does, because you get to sleep at night in the warm comfort of a good conscience. And even better, sometimes people go out of their way to make a point for you.
I’ve talked in the past about the ‘liberalista’ (I’m looking for a word for the high-profile liberals who I believe have hijacked the leadership of the liberal movement and the Democratic Party…that will do until I come up with something better) attitudes, and the underlying position of obnoxious superiority.
Avedon Carol posted a couple of times a response to my MESS OF CRACKPOTTAGE post below; I noticed that there were multiples, and that she had clarified her point and wasn’t trying to link me to Ann Coulter (ick), and thanked her.
I was too quick on the ‘send’, because this is the email that crossed mine:

I tried to post a response in your comments (twice) but they don’t appear to have gone through. I said something like this:
———-
My post wasn’t about yours – everything I had to say about that I said in my original comments to you. MY post was about Tom Scott appearing to believe that if Alec Baldwin says something stupid, it means Ann Coulter is not a crackpot. I posted the full exchange because I wanted to make it obvious what a non-sequitur his response was to mine.
Oh, yeah, and while “our” crackpots are a few scattered individuals in the entertainment industry, the Republicans elect theirs – not just to Congress, but even to Senate Minority/Majority Leader status.
———-
BTW, if the kind of support I was getting for my writing was of the caliber of the comments you got to this post, I’d definitely ask myself what I was doing wrong.
Avedon
(emphasis added)

Gosh, there are so many things to talk about here…
…the first is that my team, the Democrats does in fact elect fools as well.
Cynthia McKinney, anyone?
…the second is that marvelously perfect tone of self-righteousness in the last paragraph.
See, here’s the deal. I’m a liberal because I respect pretty much everyone. I was taught this by my father, who was always as polite and respectful to the poor and low as he was to the rich and powerful (in fact, maybe a bit more so). I think that the poor and powerless are typically pretty good human beings who are on the wrong side of circumstance, and that part of the job of government is to make that condition bearable, and to make sure that it isn’t structural…that you’re not on the wrong side of circumstance because your parents were, or because of your color or sex. That way their kids will have a chance at living in big houses and spoiling their children into insensibility like I do.
But at root, it comes from a feeling that the least of us are as human and worthy of dignity as the best.
But somehow, we have managed to raise an intellectual class who believe in liberalism in no small part because it allows them to feel superior to others.
I think Avedon has pretty much declared on which side of that divide she stands.
(Embarrassingly forgot basic blog etiquette and link to the blog discussed. Corrected.)

Ann Salisbury uncorks on the California Legislature as they duck and cover to avoid the hard choices the budget crisis is going to require.
Hard to choose a favorite line, but I’ll settle for this:

…although all these legislators begged the voters to elect them, they appear to not be interested in tackling the difficult problems. They are seriously considering turning budget issues over to the voters (again). What, exactly, are these folks getting paid to do?

You go Ann!!

So I was stuck in traffic riding my motorcycle to the client site today, which meant that the ride was more contemplative than usual (if I’m riding through traffic, I can’t think about anything but riding).

And I was thinking about Avdeon Carol’s post, and what it is that I find so grating about many people (not including her at this point, since I don’t know her well enough) who share the general “attitude space” I’m trying to talk about.

And I had an idea I just had to try out on you guys.

A long time ago, I talked about the moral importance of hunting – that I felt it somehow wrong for people to both eat meat that they buy in the store and yet somehow they deny their responsibility for the life that was taken for their consumption. For me, having hunted somehow solves this problem: I have taken the responsibility, I have had my hands up to the elbows in the bloody mess, and changed something from an animal to meat for my table.

But when I read much of what comes from the left, I’m left with the feeling that they want to consume the benefits that come from living in the U.S. and more generally the West without either doing the messy work involved or, more seriously, taking on the moral responsibility for the life they enjoy.

We enjoy this life because a number of things happened in the world’s (our) history. Many of them involved one group dominating (or brutalizing or exterminating) another, or specific actions (Dresden, Hiroshima) whose moral foundation is sketchy at best.

“Do you think one can govern innocently? Purity is a matter for monks, clerics, not for politicians. My hands are dirty to the elbows. I have shoved them in filth and blood,” Hoederer says in Sartre’s “‘Dirty Hands’.”

Part of political adulthood is the maturity to realize that we are none of us innocents. The clothes we wear, money we have, jobs we go to are a result of a long, bloody and messy history.

I see my job as a liberal as making the future less bloody than the past.

But I accept the blood on my hands. I can’t enjoy the freedom and wealth of this society and somehow claim to be innocent. I don’t get to lecture people from a position of moral purity. No one spending U.S. dollars, or speaking with the freedom protected by U.S. laws gets to.

In case you’re wondering if our tax dollars are actually doing anything about terrorism…

(from the JAMA via Course of Thought)
Police Detainment of a Patient Following Treatment With Radioactive Iodine
To the Editor: We recently treated a 34-year-old man for Graves disease with 20 mCi of iodine 131. Twenty-four hours after treatment, his radioactive iodine uptake was 63%. Three weeks after treatment, he returned to our clinic complaining that he had been strip-searched twice at Manhattan subway stations. Police had identified him as emitting radiation and had detained him for further questioning. He returned to the clinic and requested a letter stating that he had recently been treated with radioactive iodine.
This patient’s experience indicates that radiation detection devices are being installed in public places in New York City and perhaps elsewhere. Patients who have been treated with radioactive iodine or other isotopes may be identified and interrogated by the police because of the radiation they emit.
…

Well, that’s good news…