Here is a delightful conflation of prejudice and rights. If your beliefs prevent you from performing your job, you accepted that job in bad faith. This kind of equivocation is disgusting, and I hope she gets the sacking she richly deserves over it.
Wall-terfall
In a recent phone conversation with a friend I was chided gently (or, to be fair, tacitly) for not involving myself in a conversation that he begun via the medium of facebook. Of course, the obvious response to something like this is to adapt the disdainful tone of the habitual Facebook-abstainer, but I think it may be worth considering what I don’t like about it, especially as its popularity has allowed its design principles to cast their baleful influence far and wide.
Leaving the whole content issue aside, the “wall” format that FB copped off of Twitter a few years ago is hell on conversations. The stream of detritus that it represents encourages only the briefest and more cursory interactions, and furthermore encourages monitoring to such an extent that taking time out to string more than a glib aside together prevents its use as intended. Topics are not to be stepped into, they are to be waved at as they go by.
I think that there’s a real false sense here that seeing everything go by constitutes a grasp on the world. The fact that the internet has made everyone a bogoexpert on every subject in existence has been fairly widely noted, and this sort of info-consolidation encourages that no end. Nobody bothers to remember that actually knowing about a particular thing and using it as a lens is the best option a human being has available for real comprehension.
Wikipedia Continues Efforts to be Totally Useless to Computer People
Not long ago some exuberant Wikipedian got rid of the articles for a bunch of non-mainstream computer languages. Now someone has nominated an incredibly famous Perl hacker for deletion. The new motto of the Wikipedia editor is “If I have flung my poop far, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants, whose articles I then nominated for deletion.”
Absent Friends
A couple of nights ago I read “The Wasteland” out loud to C, and I’ve been keeping the containing volume around and reading from it sporadically since. I am surprised at how much I still like it. I imagine that a lot of people go through an Eliot phase at some point, and then decide that the whole thing is a little too severe and get on with things. Sadly, it seems I am a bit stunted this way.
The other thing that has been standing out about it is how contemporary the apocalyptic tone feels. I mean, every era arrives at the conclusion that the world is going to end on its watch, but the particulars tend to vary. The sort of traditional return of the messiah has a certain feel, and the nuclear holocaust of my youth had a rich texture of its own.
Eliot’s interwar poetry sees the impending end of the world as a collapse into filth. Society recedes until all we have left is squalid savagery. In our political climate in which not taking any responsibility for anything is the ne plus ultra, this all starts to feel very familiar. It’s pretty shocking how quickly a handful of maniacs can reverse so much progress.
Sheep
So after a lifetime of not quite getting around to it, I finally read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. While it’s natural for science fiction of that age to seem somewhat anachronistic, I suspect that Dick was a bit of an anachronist even in his own time. For example, he uses “American automobiles of the 1960s” as a multiplicity sufficient to be completely incomprehensible. Also, while this is one bajillion time better than The Man in the High Castle I think I have to just face the fact that I don’t like Dick that much as a writer. He’s more interesting for ideas than execution.
But the ideas are powerful. I don’t remember them (sadly, this is pretty normal), but the night I finished it I had paranoid dreams about people around me being strange beings with motivations I didn’t understand. It was definitely creepy, creepy, creepy. In addition to the obvious source of tension, the book is full of contradictory cues about which structures ought to be trusted and which are purely manipulation.
It’s interesting to note the. . . form of these institutions. The poles represented by Buster Friendly and Mercerism are completely monolithic. At the time I suppose that made sense. Media hadn’t fragmented into a bizarre and riotous ecosystem that made the range of 1960s cars look like the range of 1960s television stations. This, ultimately, is Android’s biggest anachronism, if the reader looks closely. More than the spectre of nuclear war, more than the indefinite lifespan of the pay phone, the notion that the world’s homogenisation was going to derive from a mere handful of sources is an idea that from where I stand seems as if it must have come out of a parallel universe. Here in this universe we’ve long since learned that ephemeral displays of “you” are the key to creating monolithic norms towards which people will move without having to be persuaded.
This Army and This Army
So I spent much of today on the security detail at a Kung Fu tournament. Now that sounds pretty scary, like my job is trying to keep Bolo from killing people and I’ll end up with him breaking my neck with his foot or something, but mostly it meant I had to keep the parents of the younger competitors from crowding the aisles between the rings in a somewhat ironic attempt to coddle the child they have brought here to be kicked in the face by other children.
The reason I was there helping out rather than there fighting is that my shoulder has been seriously borked for a while now. It think I just sort of slept on it wrong and due to some combination of desk jockying and Kung Fu managed to let it get pretty messed up. I am cautiously optimistic that I’m in the home stretch with it, but it has been a trial. It has also been someone illuminating. For example, when I’m sitting on the floor or out on the lawn, my habit in getting up is to simple launch my body off of the ground with my left arm (presumably so I can hold things in my right.) I also tend to lob really heavy things around when I do dishes. I suppose that in a way it’s a reminder that going forward I have to take it a bit easy on the casual displays of strength.
Culture
So while we were at Pix, following a lovely dinner at Bete Lukas, Matthew and I got into a little. . . discussion, as it were, about online education, which was precipitated by his wife telling us that her marketing professor had said, no doubt in the haughty tone of all morons who seek to reduce their betters, that in the future all PHDs would work in customer service, and all education would be online. The discussion didn’t really go anywhere, because Matthew wanted to talk about the ideal learning conditions for fantasy autodidacts, and I warned against the inevitable future in which teaching the children of poor parents would get you arrested. It was fun, but not very enlightening.
In the car on the way home, C (who is distinguished in this context by the fact that she cares more about how real people learn than she does about how hypothetical constructs do the same) said she had to not listen very closely to us, because the conversation made her sad. I had responded glibly to the quoted comment because it is, to me, patently idiotic. The problem is, in America we can do longer laugh off the patently idiotic, especially as it relates to education. As American’s increasingly find it more important to make sure others are worse off than to improve their own circumstances, educators and educational structures are so at risk that even the most moronic prediction may well prove prophetic.
Brother You Guessed
So I got C a Kindle for Christmas. When you turn it off it shows an image, often of a famous author. In this case they chose a picture of pioneering glam rocker Marc Bolan dressed as Emily Dickinson.
Let’s Talk About American Christians
They’re venal ($2.99 for salvation; nice work, Martin Luther) and. . .
What’s New in Version 1.1
Reduced audio file sizes to keep app below 10mb and stabilized a couple of minor bugs that had been reported.
they aren’t smart enough to use computers.
(Via The Zawinksi, who tags the entry doomed, religion and perversions.)