Agency: A Case Study

The latest bit of life-threatening trivia that's seen some major media coverage has been the fear of a link between vaccines and autism. Such a link does not exist. The science is there, is solid, and is not an evil plot. So why does the myth persist? As the linked-to story in Wired says, parents are willing to do anything out of love for their children. They are eager and willing to believe in alternative cures, or in radical measures to save their children. A lot of emphasis has been places on this as a failure of rationale choice: vaccines are inherently safer than the diseases they protect against. A striking visual example is this chart discussing the risk of taking the HPV vaccine versus the risk of not doing so. HPV not in any way associated with Autism, but the case against HPV is similar: well-publicized incident of a side effect gone wrong, or of the potential for a harmful side-effect, with little real coverage of the damage caused by not taking the vaccine. To scientists (and, generally, to rational human beings) this makes no sense: the least risky action is desired, and should be taken.

So why the resistance to vaccinations? Agency.

People see themselves as having control over whether or not to get a vaccination; they are upset at laws about mandatory vaccinations, which to them imposes the risk of side effects. In refusing to be vaccinated or vaccinate their own children, this people are acting against the only risk they perceive: that caused by vaccines themselves.

They are, at the same time, assuming that disease is a factor beyond their control. Getting infected by any of the diseases that a vaccine would protect against is seen as something against which they are powerless (or, more likely, unaware), and so isn't a risk to avoid. They've seen/read/researched the stories about things gone terribly wrong with vaccines. But the renewed outbreak of diseases like measles (basically non-existent for my generation and the one immediately preceding it) doesn't register as a new risk. These people, these parents fearful of autism (or more generally the mercury in all vaccines) are making a terrible assessment of the possible risks, but it's not irrational - they just have no idea of the risks where the balance of risk falls.

Most relevantly, they don't see getting vaccinated as reducing risk. Because exposure to disease isn't something they have control over, but exposure to medicine totally is. It's a major disconnect they've developed between vaccinations and disease. The solution? Coming from my social-sciencey background, I'm inclined to think that the problem can be solved by a reframing of vaccination. Vaccinating is a choice just as much as not vaccinating is, and the positive good caused by vaccines is little publicized, and even more rarely seen as an actual decision.

We humans remember when things go wrong. We have a terrible problem with forgetting when and why things went right.

Support Your Local Papers! Gordon Sisters in the Times-Picayuner

Here's something genuinely weird: I don't have internet in my apartment, and I just signed up for a month-long subscription to NOLA's local paper (the Times-Picayune). I'll probably get another when that one runs out. Why? Well, the easiest reason is that I like having something disposable to read every morning. A better answer would be that, with my church membership, apartment, and employment(ish) here, I feel committed enough to through down some more shallow roots.

And the best answer? Have some foreshadowing, and check this space again in a week.

Edit 10/5: After my totally unsubtle buildup, the Times-Picayune story on the Gordon Sisters Window. It does a better job of the history than I do (easy access to newspaper records helps with that), and on the whole, I think it's well done. My only qualms are, funny enough, nitpicking with my ministers language - while it's important to emphasize the good that the sisters did, I think there is little gained in excusing them as "products of their time", instead of focusing on them as "flawed people acting on contemporary notions of justice." To me, what is fascinating about them is not the views they held in common with their peers, but instead how they managed to hold those views and do lots of good works despite them. That said, I think the story does justice to the Gordon sisters, and First Unitarian Universalist of New Orleans decision to honor them as flawed humans. The newspaper article gets the nuance down, and for that I am grateful.

Again, my previous post discussing their complicated historical legacy is here.

Obama Healthcare Quickie

Obama just gave a press conference on healthcare, and my thoughts will probably go up here tomorrow. For now, though, here's a redirect to my blog series on healthcare from the beginning of summer.

Equally important: here's an amazing New Yorker article about why paying-per-test is a terrible plan, and why the Mayo Clinic Model is kind of brilliant.

Self Censorship

It strikes me that self-censorship is an impossibility. When a person feels the need to self-censor, what they are really doing is reconsidering their view in light of their audience. That's not censorship, that's decorum. Or at least, it's a situational awareness. People say what they want all over the internet with impunity, because there aren't personal relationships at stake. But all communication involves that interaction, and while I don't think a person should sacrifice one's opinions for the sake of visibility, I think that awareness of the audience is key.

I mention this because I've spent a lot of time lately debating Armenia with Turkish Nationals online. If I used the word genocide, I couldn't have a conversation. But if I dance around the word, play in the gray areas of war, war crimes, ethnic violence, civilian casualties, and unintentional consequences, I can have a meaningful debate. And that, to me, is far more important that a hard, ideological line in the sand. Discourse needs some flexibility to work, and I'm perfectly willing to not expressly attack people to make progress towards resolution.

(Ed Note: Armenia is easy for me to do this way, because I don't have a huge personal stake in it; I'm aware of the flaws in that.)

(My apologies for my absence from this blog; I've had more writing this semester than ever before in my life. But school is almost out, and I should be back to the blogosphere in no time)

Placeholders/Mental Gumbo

I've a lot of ideas that have been stewing for a while. I'd like to write posts on all of them, but I figured I'd go ahead and get the ideas out in a very raw, rough form. Here goes.

1. Youth, Technology, Civics.
I want to write a follow-up to my last post, including a lot of my understanding of Lawrence Lessig and technology as used by the young. I think that being on the internet is formative in many senses to how youth understand government, and that actions online by governments which are viewed as protecting youth or artists are interpreted as obstacles, which itself undermines the rule of law. I'd like to talk about making law relevant to youth, first through sane online policy, but also through new government interactivity.

2. Tower Defense Game as Legislative Process
I really, really wish I was good at programming so I could do this. Tower Defense Games are the kind of perpetual casual gamers' version of a strategy game, and basically consist of paths enemies travel and tiles along the path where one can put towers that shoot. I would like to make one for the UK parliamentary system, which is largely a single straight line with lots of room for towers towards the end, and contrast it was a US system, where the paths are circuitous, there are chokepoints at committees, chambers, merger committees, and a presidential veto all along the line to stop legislation from being passed. For added fun, could make it partisan with different towers being able to attack different bills. The goal could be to prevent any legislation at all from passing. Basically, it's an outgrowth of the idea that veto points are choke points, but I still think it would be fun.

3. War Narratives
Watching Clone Wars on Cartoon Network last night, it struck me that most every war story produced in America is derived solely from our narratives of WWII or Vietnam. All our history of foreign involvement (and our internal conflicts) before or since hasn't really influenced our War Fiction. Iraq stories exist as a sort of corollary to Vietnam, Korea is a hybridized "US wins freedom abroad"/"US war machine limited in power" story that straddles those two wars, especially as MASH popularized in its long run. And it applies to fiction further afield - "300" is the WWII story with Sparta as England and Thermopylae as Dunkirk. I'd guess that more major developments in new war stories have come through adding perspectives not previously considered, instead of creating new war narratives.

I'd like to write about all three of these later. If you have a preference, let me know in the comments.

Self-Aware Meta Post

Yeah, I totally squandered inauguration day posting opportunity on something rather light and filler-y. But hey, today was awesome, and I don't have much to add to the moment. But, if you want to read something smart and meaningful without ever dropping the ball, I recommend this post. It isn't a long read, and it says vital things. If you can take a break from frolicking, it is well worth your time.

Oh, and, umm, I'm not the kind of person who cries with joy, but I read his speech (I only saw 6 minutes of the actual inauguration), and I think the emotional impact it had on me was similar. Rhetoric has its limits, but wow. I've always been proud to be American, but it is so nice to have the sentiments behind that echoed, and for my understanding of what being American means to count. There is so much good left to be done, and it is so nice to have a president who asks us to do it.

On Morality

(Editors Note: I am in the process of writing a trial sermon on anti-racism, for no purpose other than some disappointment over the anti-racism sermon at FUUNO last Sunday. In the meantime, I have this piece, which was a response to a friend asking on Facebook how one would define morality. He asked us to define it in the context of a lecture, but one that did not exceed 500 words. I did this, and realized that Facebook is not the appropriate place for such at-length musings, but my blog is. So, here you go. 500 words on morality.)

Morality is one of those wonderfully vague concepts, nestled somewhere between honor and ethics, under the category of justice and in the general area of human interactions. I'm tempted to quote Confucius, about how everything flows from everything being in proper order and circumstance, but morality isn't a fixed set or rigid code to be applied in all situations. It isn't really rigid in execution - this is not channeling Machiavelli so much as it is acknowledging that, in the whole of human experience, internal principles matter only so long as they can be consistently applied to varying circumstances. Coming from a religious tradition where reason predominates, dogma is shunned, and the genuinely unanswerable is acknowledged as such, morality seems to me to be the exact point at which justice, personal philosophy, and social norms collide. Morality varies from person to person, moreso from culture to culture, and yet it circles around a platonic absolute.

What is that absolute? Far as I can tell, it is the way to interact with an other, and with any other, and with every other, that is not just straightforward but honors notions of inherent dignity and respect. Of course, we have as always the bugbears of outliers to confound everything - how does on respect the inherent dignity of, say, a child molester? The reply that seems most appropriate, that is the easiest best fit, is that one acts with ones inherent dignity, using the capacity as not-a-child-molester to figure out justice for that individual who has broken rules of both society and morality. And yet, that perspective, acting civilized in the face of acts deemed barbaric, is not enough - too much of that is defaulting to an ingroup/outgroup, and us/them, an acceptable/other perspective. That ignores the relational aspects of this - it is Balder being the god of justice, but largely ignored because he has only kindness and no judgment. And this cannot be the reaction of a vigilante - Rorschach, for all his power as a punisher of wrongdoing, has no capacity to act as a righter of wrongs. In this situation, as in every situation, to act with morality is to acknowledge the harm done, and to work towards a future where such harm is not done again. To not just rehabilitate the individual, but to better engineer the structure of the individuals environment, of the environment of all individuals, so that one can move as quickly as humanly possible to rectify a situation while still respecting the rights of all innocents.

I've been talking a lot about justice. It is what I deem the most important constituent part of morality, but it is far from alone. Justice in isolation is how a society regulates it's internal functioning - morality is how individuals within society function together in a manner that respects justice. More importantly, it is the way that individuals interact with one another without the need for society to do any more than be composed of individuals.

The Year in Commentary

This is usually the time when blogs do one of two things - look forward with lists, or look backward with lists. Being faithful to the blogosphere, it seems I owe the world a list post.

I don't have any "best entries" to look at - half my output was for a primary in an election already decided, and you probably already know what of mine you like. So instead I'm going to point you at two sources for commentary on the year which I think were kind of awesome. Yeah, my list post is a list of two.

1. Ironman
This was certainly The Dark Knights year, in terms of almost everything - it was good, it made a lot of money, it had a good performance by a star who died tragically young. In an election year it had a vigilante, a realist of a public servant, and an idealistic politician all tied up in a mess of a situation, and confounded by maliciousness and chaos. It should have been the narrative to accompany election day.

It wasn't. This year, the best commentary about America as an entity was captured in reviews of Iron Man. Iron Man has no politicians. Iron Man, in fact, is rather minimal - inventor + tragedy = mind change + redemption. And all the while, America is still at war in the background. Tony Stark changes himself in a cave, and he comes back to change not Afghanistan, but to re-orient America. In the comics, Iron Man has become the victorious face of a government that killed Captain America, but in the movie Iron Man is America reborn - this isn't a struggle of identity, this is a coming of age. Captain America is the Greatest Generation - he is an eager and patriotic citizen made exemplary, and in his later years he embodied all the promise America had offered, and was more than a tad upset when it collapsed upon itself in a fit of paranoia and police-state antics. It's a good story, but it's an apocalyptic narrative, not the one of rebirth.

The re-birth narrative is all Iron Man. He literally makes himself over, and thanks to American inventiveness and determination, he sets out to undo all the evil he himself did. This is a narrative captured brilliantly in two separate reviews: one by The Ferret, and one at SciFi blog io9. Read both of them - they are as much about comics and film as they are about where America stands today. And that America doesn't include Gotham.

2. Sinfest
Sinfest is the name of a webcomic. A really, really brilliant webcomic. It's been around for a while, and its well-done art (plus decent humor) had kept me reading it on and off. Then the election got underway, and it is the narrative I will hand my children to explain this year. The humor is spot on, the metaphors used all resonate strongly, and it provides the cartoon narrative with the goofy faces and the cutting insights in a year where much has been made of narrative.

This one - the best attempt at turning Dark Knight into a parable for the US.

These three - the first one is Obama campaigning, the second one is Obama elected, and the third one is Obama taking office. All of them get the narrative of the election done beautifully, and they do it in a few panels.


Here we have Sinfest Uncle Sam, using Star Wars to explain how we got to be where we are. It's beautiful

And here we see the economic collapse, told in a wonderfully self-righteous fashion by the symbols of American wealth we have created for ourselves.

If I haven't fan-boyed enough over this comic, here's the years' end:


Pitch Perfect. Have a good night, everyone.

Fictions

In discussion with Evan, and inspired by Nora, I've decided to do some alternate history short stories. Speculative fiction, historical imaginings, that sort of a thing. It doesn't fit the tone of this blog, so I'm putting them elsewhere.

My fiction blog is Battles of Isonzo. Besides always thinking that "Battles of Isonzo" is a pretty kick-ass band name, it's one of those incredibly pointless parts of history. Twelve battles were fought on the river in WWI, with between 500,000 and 700,000 soldiers dying there. It seems like an appropriate title for futile reminagings.

If you don't mind speculative fiction that concerns war, have yourself a look! And if you do, know that this blgo won't be changing any.

Liberal Media Bias?

Thanks to a recent Pew study, the blogosphere and Fox News will soon both ring with more allegations of "Liberal Media Bias". Now, the petty thing to do here is quote Stephen Colbert with a comment from his White House correspondents dinner. Since I'm feeling slightly petty, and because it's a good quote, here you go:

Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32 percent approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in 'reality'. And reality has a well-known liberal bias. ... Sir, pay no attention to the people who say the glass is half empty, because 32% means it's two-thirds empty. There's still some liquid in that glass, is my point. But I wouldn't drink it. The last third is usually backwash.

The more relevant quote come from the blog Politico:

As it happens, McCain’s campaign is going quite poorly and Obama’s is going well. Imposing artificial balance on this reality would be a bias of its own.

Here's a better article, one with journalistic integrity. Better, because it is talking about bias, at most it can only be meta-biased.

O Canada

I have saved (in draft form) three separate posts about the possibility of a McCain presidency, about the need for action here at home, and about how even if everything goes to hell I will stay in this nation working to make things better. The implicit point behind all of these posts was to argue that moving to Canada will solve nothing.

Fortunately, I have no need for those posts:

That blue column? Seats awarded to the conservative party.

After the Fall

While I normally pride myself on quality analysis of relevant issues, I've a soft spot for the fascinating and improbable. So this post, as a break from issues that matter, is going to focus on zombies. Now, there are lots of to take when talking about zombies - the zombie renaissance in film is a potent one, and the cultural implications are worthy of analysis. Of course, they've also received a lot of analysis, so it'd be a bit redundant.

More interesting is the zombie beyond film commentary - this is a gallery of the post-apocalypse zombie attack rendered in LEGO. What's fascinating for me there is not the nature of the zombie attack, but the fascination with resistance. The scene is somewhere between a resistance movement, a summer barbecue, and an NRA pipe dream. Playful, certainly, but it's people looking at a world the moment everything goes wrong, and people expecting humanity will make it out in a burst of glory and dashing heroics. Indeed, the emergence of zombie survival guides (this one famously, the AHSFoliage guide much less so) is a testament to prevalence of both impending horrible calamity, and to a certain survivalist gusto.

Equally interesting (to me, at least), is the approach of a friend of mine to short fiction. Her blog can be found here, and if you follow this tag you'll see that almost all of what she writes is short zombie stories. Or really, short stories that happen to have zombies. Zombies aren't ever really the focus of the story - they act instead as a constant malevolent force, one that cannot be changed but can only be killed. It makes all the stakes higher, the presence of a marching assault wearing down her cast of only a few characters. And yet, the characters exist in this hyper-heroic world, the kind epics are written about, and the focus is always commentary on the now, the present world before shit hits the fan, before the collapse of everything as we know. Her characters, even the most optimistic, don't have dreams about a glorious new world, about rebuilt civilization, or about how future generations will remember them. They don't have dreams beyond tomorrow or next week. Everything, instead, is focused on what life was, what it meant to have been alive in this present, this modern era.

The final, relevant, post-apocalyptic speculation I want to mention in this post is of an entirely different nature. Johns Hopkins released a study of who would be essential in a pandemic. Sure, their approach isn't related to zombies specifically, but it does address the potential weakness (if not the outright collapse) of federal government, in this paragraph that reads like a libertarian's pipe dream:

The report recognizes that given the widespread and sustained nature of a pandemic, federal assistance will be spread thin and local jurisdictions must develop their own preparedness plans to ensure they are capable of sustained self-sufficiency. Encouraging and working with local businesses to develop their own response plans can help reduce the burden on local governments during a pandemic. Similarly, individuals and families who can afford it should do their best to prepare for any disaster. The paper notes, the more initiative the general public exercises in stockpiling several weeks' worth of food, water, paper goods, batteries medicines, and other needed supplies, the less vulnerable they will be to a break in the supply chain. In fact, the report emphasizes, it is important for leaders to communicate to the middle class and the wealthy that it is their responsibility to prepare for self-sufficiency in order to free up scarce supplies and allow first responders to direct their attention towards those too poor or vulnerable to prepare themselves.

Now, in the zombie context "first responders" could easily refer to military forces, but it's a reassuring prospect that in a worst-case scenario our leaders (and their medical advisors) feel comfortable advocating self-sufficiency. Part of it is the very real strain on governmental capabilities, and it's nice for that strain and inability to respond to be acknowledged. And part of it lends itself more towards American post-apocalyptic coverage: when everything goes wrong with the world we've built up, we'll fall back on ancient, core (mythical?) values, and we'll do all right.

We're in an interesting time, where our hegemonic nation seems no more than decade or two away from collapse (odds are, though, I'll still be saying this in 2024), and collapse is not something the United States has really had to deal with. But all the science fiction consensus, as much as I can make of it (and as much as one exists) is that we'll survive. Institutions and nationhood may change (or not- they're not really addressed in my skimming of the material out there), but the people as a given will remain. The collapse isn't going to be an end-all cataclysmic event. It's not apocalyptic literature after all; it's post-apocalyptic.

Someone Else's Words

I've a lot I've been meaning to say about Sarah Palin, an awful lot really, but as you can probably guess from my last post, I'm more content to point towards others who are saying what I have to say, but better-phrased.

Here, however, I'm not content to just point you in the right direction. Below is the entire text of a post by Tim Wise. His blog deserves the traffic for this, but what he has to say is important enough to be plastered more or less everywhere. (Added bonus: it tackles both White Privilege and Sarah Palin!)

For those who still can't grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are constantly looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help.

• White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because "every family has challenges," even as black and Latino families with similar "challenges" are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.
• White privilege is when you can call yourself a "fuckin' redneck," like Bristol Palin's boyfriend does, and talk about how if anyone messes with you, you'll "kick their fuckin' ass," and talk about how you like to "shoot shit" for fun, and still be viewed as a responsible, all-American boy (and a great son-in-law to be) rather than a thug.
• White privilege is when you can attend four different colleges in six years like Sarah Palin did (one of which you basically failed out of, then returned to after making up some coursework at a community college), and no one questions your intelligence or commitment to achievement, whereas a person of color who did this would be viewed as unfit for college, and probably someone who only got in in the first place because of affirmative action.
• White privilege is when you can claim that being mayor of a town smaller than most medium-sized colleges, and then Governor of a state with about the same number of people as the lower fifth of the island of Manhattan, makes you ready to potentially be president, and people don't all piss on themselves with laughter, while being a black U.S. Senator, two-term state Senator, and constitutional law scholar, means you're "untested."
• White privilege is being able to say that you support the words "under God" in the pledge of allegiance because "if it was good enough for the founding fathers, it's good enough for me," and not be immediately disqualified from holding office--since, after all, the pledge was written in the late 1800s and the "under God" part wasn't added until the 1950s--while believing that reading accused criminals and terrorists their rights (because, ya know, the Constitution, which you used to teach at a prestigious law school requires it), is a dangerous and silly idea only supported by mushy liberals.
• White privilege is being able to be a gun enthusiast and not make people immediately scared of you. White privilege is being able to have a husband who was a member of an extremist political party that wants your state to secede from the Union, and whose motto was "Alaska first," and no one questions your patriotism or that of your family, while if you're black and your spouse merely fails to come to a 9/11 memorial so she can be home with her kids on the first day of school, people immediately think she's being disrespectful.
• White privilege is being able to make fun of community organizers and the work they do--like, among other things, fight for the right of women to vote, or for civil rights, or the 8-hour workday, or an end to child labor--and people think you're being pithy and tough, but if you merely question the experience of a small town mayor and 18-month governor with no foreign policy expertise beyond a class she took in college--you're somehow being mean, or even sexist.
• White privilege is being able to convince white women who don't even agree with you on any substantive issue to vote for you and your running mate anyway, because all of a sudden your presence on the ticket has inspired confidence in these same white women, and made them give your party a "second look."
• White privilege is being able to fire people who didn't support your political campaigns and not be accused of abusing your power or being a typical politician who engages in favoritism, while being black and merely knowing some folks from the old-line political machines in Chicago means you must be corrupt.
• White privilege is being able to attend churches over the years whose pastors say that people who voted for John Kerry or merely criticize George W. Bush are going to hell, and that the U.S. is an explicitly Christian nation and the job of Christians is to bring Christian theological principles into government, and who bring in speakers who say the conflict in the Middle East is God's punishment on Jews for rejecting Jesus, and everyone can still think you're just a good church-going Christian, but if you're black and friends with a black pastor who has noted (as have Colin Powell and the U.S. Department of Defense) that terrorist attacks are often the result of U.S. foreign policy and who talks about the history of racism and its effect on black people, you're an extremist who probably hates America.
• White privilege is not knowing what the Bush Doctrine is when asked by a reporter, and then people get angry at the reporter for asking you such a "trick question," while being black and merely refusing to give one-word answers to the queries of Bill O'Reilly means you're dodging the question, or trying to seem overly intellectual and nuanced.
• White privilege is being able to claim your experience as a POW has anything at all to do with your fitness for president, while being black and experiencing racism is, as Sarah Palin has referred to it a "light" burden.
• And finally, white privilege is the only thing that could possibly allow someone to become president when he has voted with George W. Bush 90 percent of the time, even as unemployment is skyrocketing, people are losing their homes, inflation is rising, and the U.S. is increasingly isolated from world opinion, just because white voters aren't sure about that whole "change" thing. Ya know, it's just too vague and ill-defined, unlike, say, four more years of the same, which is very concrete and certain.

White privilege is, in short, the problem.

Also, here's another short bit, in video format, that I can't help but recommend.

Progeny or Progidy

I'll be back blogging more regularly when I'm in New Orleans again (don't worry, I will be soon). In the meanwhile, I am proud to offer to you a brand-spanking new blog. This blog is in the great tradition of Albuquerque-snark (a la Burque Babble), and with the same love of current events (though not the love of journalistic standards) that fuels AHS Foliage.

I present to you, Kittens for Jesus. The author is young, smart, and disagrees with me interestingly while still being firmly on the left. Start at the beginning, and you shouldn't be disappointed.

Russia, Georgia, and the Stateless

The war on Georgia has turned out to be way more interesting than just "Gah Russia Evil", and even more complex than "Western geopolitical entanglement causes problems". It is, like almost every issue ever, brought about by numerous disparate conditions. Is some of this renewed Russian militarism? Under Putin, certainly. Does the influence of NATO and the West partially explain the precarious position Georgia has placed itself in? Certainly, but lets not forget that the Georgian government had to at least be complicit and was almost certainly deliberate in these plans. But those are factors that exacerbate the situation - they cannot act without a catalyst. In this war, as in so many others, the catalyst is native, and is a desire for self-determination.

Wars for self-determination are among the most complex in existence. In antiquity, the Greek city states fought together to remove an invading foreign force (Persia). As soon as that ended, the Greek city states that had done the most fighting for the independence of others began to form their own empires, becoming the new overlords. More recently, the United States was founded by provinces seeking self-determination enlisting the aid of a foreign ally. Frances motives were not so much about democracy and freedom but about spiting the British, and it is fair to say that Russia is not a big fan of self-determination, but has a major investment in being regional hegemon, and in keeping the West confined to the West.

The province seeking autonomy in this case is Abkahzia. The News Hour had a fascinating segment on the province/nation recently, and I highly recommend it. The people interviewed are well aware that they need Russia to make the split into an independent nation. They've had every other avenue into the international community cut off, and so working with the powerful neighbor to the north is worth it. At this point in time, it looks like the move will pay off, and that they will keep a sovereignty. Russia may even gain an ally. But that situation is only part of what I want to talk about here.

The other part, the big elephant in the room when Russia is supporting self-determination, is Chechnya. Chechnya has wanted to be indepenent and fought for that independence for a surprisingly long time (centuries, or really ever since it wasn't independent). The Olympics have broguht to light another stateless nation, that of "Chinese Taipei", or as they are actually called, Taiwan. China is of course also well-known and well-protested for its domination and control of Tibet. Ever-present in the media and the public consciousness is the fluctuating autonomy of Palestine under Israel. And Iraq has for many brought to light the existence of Kurdistan, which is a state that has parts in Iran, Turkey, and Iraq, and has yet to achieve real independent nationhood.

Adding to this mix, the ever-reliable wikipedia has a list of stateless nations. I didn't count them all, but it looks like it's well over a hundred. There's even an organization of "Unrepresented Nations and Peoples". Unusual for me, I have no real point with this. I just think it is fascinating to know that this world order, this division into color-coded maps and broken sectioned-off territories is so hugely inadequate. It seems nationhood is so enticing that almost any nation has a smaller group inside wanting out, willing to dissolve the collective in favor of the specific.

UU Presidential Campaign

While I'm a strong advocate for the separation of church and state, that doesn't mean I feel morality and governance should be exclusive. And like most people, the morality system I am most comfortable with is the one adhered to by my religious denomination (qualifier: these are the principles of UU congregations, not of UUs themselves, though Unitarians tend to agree with them).

That out of the way, here would be the focus of a presidential campaign I would run, with policies sorted by the principle they fall under.

• The inherent worth and dignity of every person;

There would be no barriers for marriage between two consenting adults. Sexual orientation and gender identity would be added to the federal roster of hate crimes.

The drinking age would be lowered to 18 - legal adult status should confer all the benefits of being an adult. I would appoint only justices who would rule laws such as cell phone bans that target only teenagers and curfews as unconsitutional. I would endeavor to end the criminalization of youth.

I would veto any proposed resurrection of the PATRIOT ACT, and I would do my best to end the one already in place. Civil Liberties would be guaranteed and fought for.

• Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;

Justice domestically would be re-thought. 1% of the US adult population is in prison. There is no way to justify this - even dangerous deviancy can't be all that deviant if it affects 1-in-a-100. That makes it almost normal. The big focus in rethinking the US criminal Justice system would be an emphasis away from jail time for victimless crimes (to either fines for committing the act or decriminalization of the act), a lack of disparity between state and federal sentencing laws (an emphasis away from federal drug laws here), and moves towards a system that rehabilitates.

Welfare needs to be moved away from a system of shame, and I think that looking at it as a vital task of the government, of society, to provide for the people most screwed by capitalism. Not that we should do away with capitalism; it's a great system, provided government steps in to pick up where it leaves people destroyed. The changes I'm thinking of are "free health care to everyone on welfare (and eventually universal health care. Hey, if post-WWII Britain can do it, why not the richest country in the world?), government-subsidized child care, etc. And all this could be funded by, get this, a windfall tax on oil revenues". (qaulifier: I'm following the advice of a current Foliage Commandant here)

There would be more tax forgiveness for charitable donations.

Affirmative action would be changed so that race or life below a certain economic threshold allowed eligibility.

While it wouldn't be possible in the space of even a couple of presidencies, a shift of the justice system away from one that punishes for the benefit of the state to one that facilitates recompense so that parties in conflict end in right relation would be pursued.

• Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;

This one, good though it is, is denomination-specific. It would just affirm Supreme Court Justice appointments to those who respect a diversity of religious opinion.

• A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;

No Child Left Behind: Local 'burque blogger and perennial favorite of Duke City cynics, Scot Key has a good run-down of why the law has failed everyone. Under the UU-informed administration, this law would be done away with.

A free and responsible search for truth and meaning is impossible without qualified teachers. I think a national initiative to make public school teaching positions both high-paying and prestigious would create greater demand for teachers, and supply would adjust accordingly. Debt forgiveness programs for commitments to teach for 2-5 years in inner-city schools would be extended. The "responsible" search would be accommodated by a change to longitudinal testing, where each grade would be tested against their performance from the previous year; the tests would be a valuable metric to see what teachers were successful, what students were independently failing and in need of different practices, and this metric would be used to create a more reliable way for performance based hirings and firings. It's a hint of the free market, but that brings freedom and the potential for systems to self-perfect.

• The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;

I'm an ardent supporter of Lessig and his Change Congress initiative. I realize that elected officials can take the pledge and act accordingly, but that this reform focuses on citizens being able to take public information, call politicians on it, and hold them accountable. As such, measures to ensure and create greater, moire useful transparency would be proposed, as would laws protecting citizen activists who hold politicians accountable.

Internet freedoms fall as easily under here as they do anywhere else, so I here is where I say support Net Neutrality, where I believe that individual freedom and privacy are fundamentals that most be adhered to at all costs online, and that warrants are needed for the government to access information online. While telecom immunity was recently passed, I believe that there shall be no protection for companies who act against their great moral and constitutional obligations to protect citizens privacy; acting under orders is not a sound defense, especially when the orders come from government but contradict founding tenets of government.

• The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;

We need a new foreign policy. One that respects the rule of law, one that respects international standards, and one that treats terrorists as enemy nationals and not as stateless actors; the risk and the damage caused to innocents outweighs all the benefit done by the detention of terrorists, and has long since eroded any ideas of the United States as a moral bastion and an exemplar of conduct.

The US would negotiate a withdraw from Iraq at the UN, with elected Iraqi leaders taking part and with an eye towards stability in the region as paramount. Under UN authorization the US would be allowed to continue its efforts to stabilize Afghanistan.

Th US, under a UU-informed administration, would support multinationalism, and would abide by international restrictions when it comes to the unilateral use of force. But the US would also use soft power to advocate for freedoms abroad, freedoms that it would no longer be denying to citizens, or to foreign nationals detained within the US. The US would go back to being a signatory and supporter for the International Criminal Court, and would allow for the trials of US leaders accused of war crimes.

• Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

The federal government is the trustee of public lands, and no land that is currently held in common would be privatized. That said, I believe it would be worthwhile to explore the possibility of minimum-impact domestic drilling, but that would be only supplemental to the development of green energy sources, and the smart development of modern nuclear reactors 9which would borrow technology and inspiration from France, who is 30 years ahead of us at this). We have a right and a duty to protect the environment, but it is politically impossible to at every turn chose the environment over people. This is about interdependence, and the best way to be a good steward is to see to it that meeting the needs of humans is met in a way that best protects the environment. Treating people and nature as oppositional hurts people, weakens the causes of the environmentalists, and makes green-friendly politicians vulnerable in elections to those who would despoil the earth.

~

I know, this is a lot. And yeah, it's mostly moot because I'm unelectable anyway. Still, I think this is a good idea of what a president informed by my take on UU values would espouse. If you have any other ideas of UU presidential aspirations, or re-thinking of how I see the principles applied to governance, feel free to leave a comment.

Narwhal Windup 2

This is a tradition I am borrowing from BoingBoing, a borrowing previously explained here.

The post I just wrote is long, heavy, and while I think it is meaningful, I need something light to balance it out. So, here it is: Laughing Squid has a great write-up of one of my favorite authors. The author is Scott McCloud, and they do a decent job of summarizing what makes his work tick while being concise and thoughtful. Enjoy!

Filling out the Blogroll

I've been meaning to add a few more blogs to my sidebar. These are blogs I get ideas from over and over again, blogs I will delve into with commentary, and blogs that are just good. I can't say they're worth a read every day, but they are worth a glance more often than I link to them.

Stuff White People Do: This is fantastic, and part of that is how the blog is still struggling to understand what it is about. I've written about the blog before, and rather recently. I've been reading it for much longer, when I saw it buried in a comment thread at Stuff White People Like. The blog then was rough, and a little glib. Now it's matured into something that is still rough, but does an excellent job of showcasing the uncomfortable discussions of race and privilege. The unspoken last part of the title is "Stuff White People Do (with privilege that enables them to ignore race and to affirm white identity while paying lip service to racial equality)". That's a lot of subtext, and the blog bears it in a properly uncomfortable way. And it does that in a really good way. It's hard to recommend something that sounds so unpleasant, but the experience is worth it, and it isn't as bad as it first seems. It's the learning kind of uncomfortable, not the terror kind.

The Bedford Hillsian: I've linked to this one recently, and to be honest, I don't know all that much about it. It was hiding in my shelves of links for many months, and it was pleasant to stumble upon again. Specifically, posts by the unbeatable kid (it's a collective blog) are good, in my social-justice political-science-y way. The few weeks have seen the Ron paul video I linked to, the native american names of military helicopters and what the type of names selected means, and an Onion video that cuts to why many debates are poorly portrayed. I like it, enough to worry it might put me out of a job; fortunately, the posts are all short and to the point, keeping my monopoly one essay-length musings.

Independence Day

There's a lot this holiday brings to bloggers: skepticism, location-based pride (or scoffing at location based pride), the opportunity to examine national triumphs, the best lead-in to extol the granting of self-determination to colonies still remaining. The Fourth of July on the blogosphere is our nation examined through it's ideals.

And we sit here, far close than we imagine, to the brink of a third imperial exercise in the first decade of this new century. This video, found on a fantastic blog I need to add to my blogroll, is of Ron Paul making a speech in congress. He's intelligent and made as hell, and this time he manages to give his piece with respect for the integrity of the United States original mission, and international law. Watch it, and temper the bleakness of what he his discussing with the fact that the US has a strong tradition of intelligent dissent. At the very least, in history books we can go down as having people strongly object to the mistakes we make in the name of force. We are a nation with strong currents and strong undercurrents, and the record will have us as bitterly divided but well-intentioned. The nature of our nation is a contentious one, and for all it's flaws, at least it lets us have our cake and eat it too.

General Wesley Clark

I was going to get the video from the MSNBC site, but it was convoluted, and the video I did find was frustrating, disparaging meta-commentary. So I'm going to embed a youtube video, because it isn't a soundbite, and because this is something that cannot be condensed into a soundbite:



To clear my biases, I support General Wesley Clark. In 2004, when I was four years too young to vote, I convinced both of my parents to support Clark's bid for the presidency in the democratic primary. Clark is, as best I've found, an exemplar of sensible military policy, and of sensible military policy on the left. That's my bias.

That said, this whole debacle over what he said is more or less the exact flaw of soundbites, and no person should be eviscerated for something they said taken so out of context. Watch the video. It's only a few minutes, and you'll be smarter than most people on the issue, so it's worth it.

Wesley Clark said that McCain wasn't in an executive position in wartime. He said that McCain's military service and time as a POW are admirable aspects of his character, but they don't relate to his ability to make national security decisions. They aren't proof of how he would act when he is in charge of the world's best military, and how he would deal with being responsible for the lives of millions of innocents. That is what General Wesley Clark said.

It was brought up that Obama doesn't have this experience either, but that's kind of the point: McCain's military experience, while an important part of his character, doesn't count as foreign policy experience. This places him on square one with Obama, and when you take away experience as McCain's credential, Obama can stand on his own for his policy intentions. And from where General Clark is sitting, Obama's planned policies make way more sense.