So I got the carpets cleaned, and found the CD with the backup on it.
Here are the (way overdue in most cases) additions to the blogroll:
Interesting Liberals
Ampersand
Atrios
Rebecca’s Pocket
Robin Goodfellow
RaptorMagic
Just Plain Good Blogs
The Bookslut
The Daily Rant
exit zero
Insignificant Thoughts
Kolkata Libertarian
Rachel Lucas
Jacob T. Levy
Pet Bunny
RAWbservations
Social Design Notes
Sneaking Suspicions
Oliver Willis

As a consequence of living in the Real World. This weekend, we’re getting ready for two parties we’re hosting tomorrow night, finishing up Christmas shopping, getting the annual family pictures taken, and because if there is a God, she has a malicious sense of humor, dealing with a cat suddenly incontinent because of feline diabetes.
We just got the lecture from the vet in how to give the shots, and dropped the scrips for needles and insulin off at the human pharmacy, where the clerk did not even bat an eye.
My gentle suggestion to TG that we sell the cat to a junkie in need of a source of clean needles was met with a steely silence. I may be sleeping in the garage tonight…
…back to scrubbing the carpet…

I’ve found the abstract of the ‘shoot/don’t shoot’ article, and will see if I can find a copy if I can get to a main library this weekend. Here’s the abstract, from the APA Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:

The Police Officer’s Dilemma: Using Ethnicity to Disambiguate Potentially Threatening Individuals
Joshua Correll, Bernadette Park,and Charles M. Judd
University of Colorado at Boulder
Bernd Wittenbrink
University of Chicago
Using a simple videogame, the effect of ethnicity on shoot/don’t shoot decisions was examined. African American or White targets, holding guns or other objects, appeared in complex backgrounds. Participants were told to “shoot” armed targets and to “not shoot” unarmed targets. In Study 1, White participants made the correct decision to shoot an armed target more quickly if the target was African American than if he was White, but decided to “not shoot” an unarmed target more quickly if he was White. Study 2 used a shorter time window, forcing this effect into error rates. Study 3 replicated Study 1’s effects and showed that the magnitude of bias varied with perceptions of the cultural stereotype and with levels of contact, but not with personal racial prejudice. Study 4 revealed equivalent levels of bias among both African American and White participants in a community sample. Implications and potential underlying mechanisms are discussed.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2002, Vol. 83, No. 6, 1314–1329

I’ve gotta read this…

(and a free movie review)
I really disliked the movie ‘Far From Heaven’. There were a couple of reasons why (for one, I’m as tired of the assumption that the white professional guy is always the bad guy as I am of the use of Arab or Central American cannon fodder in action movies), but the overall reason was simple: I didn’t believe in any of the people, and it was a human drama. I almost believed in the Julianne Moore character, but I felt like I could see the strings dangling from the puppeteer’s hands above, trying to animate her and everyone else in the film.
One of the features I see in bad writing is the fact that the characters exactly fit the page (or screen); one of the things that I like in showing a good character (I’ll use Julianne Moore in Magnolia as an example) is that they are bigger than the screen, that they are more complex, that what we are seeing is not the whole person but a facet of them, a slice through their life.
Hemingway has the famous dictum that authors should write a chapter about their characters and then pull it out and throw it away, to create space in the character’s life that isn’t seen on the page.
In FFH, I didn’t get that feeling about any of the characters. Each was simply there to advance a plot point or demonstrate a theme in the movie, never to take a natural breath. Dennis Quaid was there to demonstrate the hollowness of the Man In The Grey Flannel Suit while Dennis Hasbert was the Noble Savage, simultaneously beset and preternatural in his calm control.
I’ll leave FFH by pointing out that if they had eliminated the anachronisms and left the structure of relationships the same…but made them more subdued, more in keeping with the likely reality of how closeted gays and interracial couples (surprise, there were both in 1950’s America) really acted, the tension of yearning of the characters real feelings would have been offset by the structure of convention and societal disapproval in ways that we would have believed.
And because we would have believed in the characters, we would have felt the impact much more strongly.
But instead, we were presented with simplified ideas of characters, people rendered down to an essence designed to further the thematic and philosophical bent of their author.
Similarly, in much political and philosophical thought, people are reduced to one- or two-dimensional caricatures, and the complexity of the work is similarly reduced.
This is partly just a basic human characteristic, because people tend to fit what they see into what they already know. When participants in the ‘shoot/don’t shoot’ study below saw a black man carrying a cell phone, they ‘knew’ it was a gun, and responded accordingly.
We understand the world, I’ve come to believe in pattern and narrative, and it’s difficult at best for us to adopt new ones. But the patterns are inherently reductive of the true richness and ambiguity of much of what happens. So we get stuck when the world throws up facts that don’t comfortably fit into our preconceptions. I ‘knew’ my Republican co-worker was conservative, ‘knew’ that he had strong feelings about racial issues and policy in the U.S., and so when I met his (African American) wife I had a stunning moment where I had to watch my carefully created ‘story’ about him and race collapse.
In politics, we do the same thing. We expect our leaders to be simple paragons, our issues to be neat, internally consistent and bounded, and facts as they unavoidably come to light to fit into the neat models we’ve made of the world.
We’re wrong.
We have to stop expecting and start seeing, to stop trying to fit messy, complex, breathing people into neat pigeonholes that will advance the narratives we’re trying to impose on the world and our fellow human beings.
Now I know that this may be seen as dangerously close to the perpetual European diplomatic quest for ‘nuance’. It’s not.
It’s a desire to find a way of talking about politics that doesn’t have the shallowness of a bad movie.

CBS News | Lott Will Step Down | December 20, 2002 11:19:42

To a whole bunch of really good bloggers; I just realized that I deleted the note where I’ve been keeping all the people I’ve meant to add to the blogroll. Sigh. I’ll thumb through the CD-ROM’s and see if I was smart enough to back it up.
Otherwise, it’ll be a week or so before I get enough reading done to do an update.
I’m a moron sometimes…

It’s just great, too. The St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V:

If we are mark’d to die, we are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires.
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England.
God’s peace! I would not lose so great an honour
As one man more methinks would share from me
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse;
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is call’d the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian.’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispian’s day.’
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

I don’t care that Kenneth Branagh is reduced to being Harry Potter’s foil; I hope he’s happy and healthy and being banged into insensibility by starlets every day for his incredible version of Prince Hal, in Henry V.
Every so often, an actor will nail a role so well that every time you pick up the book and read it, you hear the actor’s voice, and when I quoted Shakespeare below, I heard Branagh’s voice. The only other time that’s happened as strongly was in Catch-22; I still hear Alan Arkin’s voice in every line Yossarian speaks.
Sorry, back to serious politics later.

Read this Mercury News article about the legal aftermath of a fatal car accident in the Bay Area, and look at the window it gives into our attitudes about responsibility.

Her attorney, Louis Goodman, said his client is “devastated” by the crash and does not deserve a lengthy jail sentence.
“It’s very appropriate disposition,” Goodman said, referring to the promise of no or low jail time. “It’s a traffic accident. It’s a tragic traffic accident,” but “it’s a risk that motorcyclists take.”

His client was driving 60 in heavy fog, and ran into a group of stopped cars, killing a motorcyclist.
Oops.
One of the things I think about a lot, and will amplify more, is the disconnect between action and consequence. People can’t learn that way.
So we breed idiots like the guy I saw on the 405 (a stupendously busy freeway here in Los Angeles) today, driving in stop and go traffic, reading a document on his steering wheel and driving in his lane by Braille.
And if he’d run me over and killed me, it would have been my fault for being so vulnerable.
This has wider consequences, which we’ll discuss later.

I’ve been thinking a lot about doubt, lately, triggered in part by the great Learned Hand quote below:
“The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right…,”
and thinking about why that matters so much.
I tend to see way to much self-certainty around me, on the Right, Left, Libertarian, Young Socialist, or whatever. In reality, the world is messy and uncertain. One of my favorite examples ever is from Henry V; not the famous St. Crispin’s Day speech, but the scene at the end of the battle:

EXETER. Here comes the herald of the French, my liege.
GLOUCESTER. His eyes are humbler than they us’d to be.
KING HENRY. How now! What means this, herald? know’st thou not
That I have fin’d these bones of mine for ransom?
Com’st thou again for ransom?
MONTJOY. No, great King;
I come to thee for charitable licence,
That we may wander o’er this bloody field
To book our dead, and then to bury them;
To sort our nobles from our common men;
For many of our princes- woe the while!-
Lie drown’d and soak’d in mercenary blood;
So do our vulgar drench their peasant limbs
In blood of princes; and their wounded steeds
Fret fetlock deep in gore, and with wild rage
Yerk out their armed heels at their dead masters,
Killing them twice. O, give us leave, great King,
To view the field in safety, and dispose
Of their dead bodies!
KING HENRY. I tell thee truly, herald,
I know not if the day be ours or no;
For yet a many of your horsemen peer
And gallop o’er the field.
MONTJOY. The day is yours.

I know not if the day be ours or no;
You don’t know. You don’t know if you’re winning until after you’ve won, and still you have to press on in the face of that not knowing. That’s a pretty good statement of the human condition.
There is something about ‘not knowing’ that seems to terrify many people, so they do soemthing about it: the decide to ‘know’, and close their eyes to anything that might contradict their knowing, and then they try to live their lives with their eyes closed.
Look I’m not going to collapse a thousand years of the philosophy of knowledge into one blog post, even if I could. But let me suggest some things in broad strokes.
I often feel like what is going on in the world of politics is a clash of ideas more than a clash of people. I meet people with whom I sometimes violently disagree, and I find them warm, personable, decent human beings. And yet we – all of us – get hung on someone’s idea that doesn’t fit into our constellation of ideas, and we get intensely focussed on refuting it or on beating them into submission to get them to give up the ‘bad idea’ that posesses them.
And so one of the traits I despise in modern politics, and that is blossoming in the blogoverse is the neglect that the other folks are people, with all the subtlety, complexity, contradictions, and history which that involves. Instead, they become proxies for their idea, and the battles between people become battles between ideas.
I could take half and hour pull a thousand citations from blogs on the left, right, and radical center to demonstrate this. I won’t, because then it becomes an attack on them, on the author and I’m suddenly doing exactly what I’m trying to criticize by attacking them as a person for a snippet of one thing that they said at one point in their lives.
This matters a lot because we have to find a way to deal with each other if we are to live together, and to do that we are going to have to become tolerant of doubt, uncertainty, and complexity.
This ties in with one of my earliest themes, the idea of a ‘4th Generation” liberalism, in that it is an effort to unite my core political values (liberalism) with a recognition of uncertainty and complexity.
So in the next few days, I’m going to try and explain what this is, why it is an issue, and what we might do about it.
Next: THE WORLD IS BIGGER THAN YOU IMAGINE IT TO BE

In today’s L.A. Times, Norah Vincent’s current column, Putting the Brakes on Blowhard ‘Bloggers’, (intrusive registration required, just use ‘laexaminer’/’laexaminer’) gives an object lesson in what’s wrong with the media class today (an extension of the point I made below).

If the Internet is a frontier, then the online self-publishing phenomenon called Web logging, or “blogging,” is the virtual Wild West where any old varmint with a Web site can shoot his mouth off. A recent decision by the High Court of Australia, however, could civilize the Internet, perhaps to the detriment of the 1st Amendment.
…
This wouldn’t matter so much if it meant simply that major media outlets would have to spend more time fending off complaints. After all, they can afford to, although all such costs eventually trickle down to consumers.
But what about pipsqueak bloggers who can’t afford to protect themselves from the umbrageous hordes at home, let alone abroad? The Australian precedent could burden them immeasurably and thus raises the question: Is policing speech in the blogosphere a good and necessary thing or just another way to mum the common man?
Actually, it’s both, which is why there is cause to be heartened and concerned.
We should be concerned because, until recently, the blogosphere has been a haven of free expression.
Though libel law has always applied to Web content, most bloggers have flown beneath the radar, making it possible to disseminate their sometimes injudicious remarks with virtual impunity. And most of the time that has been a good thing because, unlike in the gated confines of print newspapers and magazines whose hand-picked and bowdlerized letters sections abrogate reader feedback, anybody can participate in public debate on the Net. One-man bands such as Instapundit, Kausfiles, andrewsullivan.com and a hundred smaller operations are spicing the debate, keeping the media powers honest and putting our free press through its paces.
But there’s a flip side to this. As much as the blogosphere is full of brave and vital input, it’s also full of the careless, mad and sometimes vengeful ravings of half-wits who will say anything, especially about established journalists and writers, just to attract more attention to their sites. This can get ugly when content is unregulated.
…
(emphasis added)

So ranting about average citizens, politicians, or the bad car repairman on the corner is excusable. But if you dare say a word about your betters…watch out.
Overall, I’m frustrated, because she does raise interesting issues about the maturation of blogging, and the increased responsibility that bloggers are struggling toward (as opposed, say, to the typical Usenet political thread participant). As folks who have dealt with me here and in real life know, I’m also a serious believer in ‘civil’ discourse, and in the futility of commentary that consists only of snarky slams.
But if you want to know what’s wrong with Big Media today, you have to look into the eyes of its practitioners and see the insularity. Norah Vincent has given us just such a look, and I want to thank her for it…
(edited for tone)