Disqus - Friends of creoleindc

Re: http://bigthink.com/ideas/21385

natcase — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 11:00:11 -0000

The illustration is by James Mazzeo, who has collaborated with Young before. See a story about work on the accompanying book at http://www.dynamicgraphics.....

Re: Dowd's Pope Attack 'Is False' | The Atlantic Wire

natcase — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 09:24:48 -0000

"But can it be a positive that so much of the world turns its back on Christ, its creator and savior?"

The fastest-growing religious movements in the world are those in which personal experience of Christ is foremost: Pentecostal, Charismatic and Evangelical movements all play down the importance of the Body of the Church in favor of personal salvation and revelation. So the world is turning its back on the Church, not in Christ.

Re: Help Us Find Our Next Show Revisiting This Topic

natcase — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 21:45:35 -0000

One thing that strikes me about the current debate is how on the anti-same-sex-marriage side it ends up resting on men and women having "God-given" differentiated roles. And yet as of the last couple generations, we as a society do not generally enforce those roles: equal employment, men acting as stay-home parents, equal treatment under the law for property in marriage... all are apparently separate from the debate at hand, but they inform it as ways in which men and women have had their generic, statistical differences enforced by social codes, theology and law. It would be helpful to get an historical perspective on this changing sense of gender roles in religious approaches to the role of women, and how this relates to conservative reaction to same-sex marriages.

My liberal Friends (Quaker) meeting has been marrying same-sex couples under its care since the mid-1980s. What seemed within the meeting like a radical step has become, as with opposite-sex couples, a simple acknowledgment of Divine Grace moving through us. We witness it not only in our marriage ceremonies, but in the everyday lives of married couples and families within our meeting. We recently decided to set aside our right to perform legal marriages until our state's marriage laws are reformed to allow for same-sex marriage; we still perform marriages, but if couples wish to register with the state, that is up to them. We will not act as participants in a process that discriminates amongst the couples married under our care.

The Quaker testimony of Equality has a lot to say on this subject, and several Quaker groups are struggling with the issue of equality for same-sex couples. Some of it is the age-old conflict in Quaker circles between the weight given to Scripture and that given to ongoing revelation. Some of it is the same "ooginess" some straight folk have with LGBT folk. Perhaps if would be useful to talk with members of such a community that have struggled recently over same-sex marriage.

Re: SOF Observed

natcase — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 22:45:35 -0000

Re: Map of the Day: The Problem With Maps

natcase — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 21:19:55 -0000

Sure you can show things at a smaller resolution... it's just more work. Possibly a prohibitive amount of work if you're forced to use non-prepackaged data, as these folks did.

The bigger problem with any qualitative map based on population is how to reflect relative population density. If you have a county of one million, all conservative Christians, it will look the same as the next county with a population of 10, all rabid anarchists. THIS is a tough graphic problem. Maps show territory claimed, and it's how we visually understand our nation as a whole. If you start messing too much with the physical shape of the landscape to adjust for population, you lose legibility.

It's an interesting, maybe even amusing exercise, but I don't find this an especially useful map. They're trying to account for too many variables with too coarse a net. Much more effective a single-theme map like Nike's "Nations of Baseball" map from a few years back. A series of these would make a very interesting series.

Re: Rikers Island Prisoners Left Behind to Face Irene

natcase — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 12:31:57 -0000

Folks, while there is cause for concern, please contain the hyperbole. Rikers Island facilities are all on land at least 15 feet above sea level, above the predicted storm surge. The fact that there are plans to relocate within Rikers is reassuring—there are essentially glorified tent cities right on the waters edge, which are probably not hurricane-ready. But comparisons with Katrina are absurd: the entire city is not going to be evacuated, the jail is not below water level, and most guards will probably not be tempted to abandon their posts to save their homes and families from water and looters. Also, what difference does it make if Rikers is largely fill? This isn't an earthquake. The concern is for flooding from massive rains, and stress on buildings from strong sustained winds. Only if there is some problem with soil permeability will there be any effect, and I suspect this would have made itself evident long before. If anything, the fact of its being a small island will lessen the possibility of serious sustained flash flooding.

That said, Bloomberg's tone was less than helpful. What if he had said: "Officials have internal evacuation and relocation plans which will be implemented as needed. What those plans are we can't say for obvious security reasons, but emergency planning is an important part of all city services, and we have plans in place we are confident will prevent any loss of life or unnecessary suffering."

Re: On the horrors of getting approval for an ice-cream parlour in San Francisco

natcase — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 11:34:58 -0000

All these regulations and permits were set up by City Council so they wouldn't have to make case-by-case decisions. They were meant to be a "mechanism." Instead they have become a Rube Goldberg machine. And because so many interests either want unfettered "change" or no change at all, ever, the process of sorting these regulations out and rationalizing them will, probably, require a strong-arm politician with benevolent intent, rather than a collective, messy political process.

What I hear in the video is a process hemmed in by ontology: it seems pretty straightforward if you want to open a business that very clearly fits one category, like a Burger King franchise. It would not be hard to figure out where you are zoned for. But if you are "squishy" in your ambitions, or if, like the ice cream parlor, your business crosses boundaries (it's a self-serve, frozen-dessert, large-seating, I'm-going-to-toss-my-zoning-dictionary-out-the-window establishment), you're screwed. To me that's the point: making all businesses fit categories means you will only allow businesses that fit in pre-existing categories. In a community like SF that prides itself on boundary-crossing innovation, what a stupid way to run a city!

Re: How Communal Singing Disappeared From American Life - Karen Loew - Entertainment - The Atlantic

natcase — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 23:21:51 -0000

The problem has roots so old by now they've been forgotten. Communal singing happens when singing is just part of everyday life. When people unabashedly sing around the house instead of turning on the radio, when they accompany their repetitive work with song, either to keep them in rhythm or just to keep them from boredom. Recorded music and radio are the seductive villains of the piece.

I was at a choral camp for adults last summer, and one of the other participants was from rural South Africa, where, she reports, singing is just part of the social fabric. It's the fact that we've made it special, mainly a performance mode, that has driven it out of our daily lives.

There may be no going back. It takes a specific anti-modernist attitude these days to keep electronic recordings out of our lives... I have iTunes playing next to my desk all day, which is wonderful... such an immense and incredible trove of music to barely scrape the top off of! But there is a cost. This is it.

Re: Coca-Cola Tells Sodastream 'Stop Using Our Garbage Against Us' : TreeHugger

natcase — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 00:12:18 -0000

That's US law; this suit is in South African court, under South African intellectual property law. Mileage definitely varies from country to country. Sodastream may well be out of luck on this one.

Re: Mitt Romney in 2011: 'We Cannot Afford' Federal Disaster Relief

natcase — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 12:45:20 -0000

How do tax increases remove money from the economy? Is the government and the money it spends somehow an economy-free zone? The government spends the money it taxes... at the moment it spends more than that, which is the problem conservatives are wringing their hands over. Consumer demand is low because of unemployment and underemployment, and a huge overhang of consumer debt. Huge amounts are spent on defense, which is a much less efficient way to get money circulating in the economy than aid to the poor, and to those who have lost substantial assets in floods. Why give tax breaks to wealthy folks, who tend to bank their money (talk about taking it out of the economy)? Hmm?

Re: Mitt Romney in 2011: 'We Cannot Afford' Federal Disaster Relief

natcase — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 12:47:22 -0000

I live in Minnesota, so I'm safe from earthquake and hurricane. Just don't tell the blizzard and tornado gods I said that...

Re: Trickster and tricked

natcase — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 11:21:18 -0000

How is the character we intentionally bear for a performance more of a put-on than the "regular guy" character we play every day? The latter is just more fleshed out and fully developed. Kumaré may be fictional, but we are all fictions developed over our lives to bind ourselves into something meaningful.

Re: Sparks will fly

natcase — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 09:00:48 -0000

What I find curious is that this article, with superficial changes, could be written about spirituality, community involvement, engagement in intellectual pursuits, or any of a number of other ways we engage the seen and unseen worlds.

Re: Web Extra: Goodnight Democracy

natcase — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 11:46:51 -0000

OK, so how is big corporations buying elections different from Rockefeller, Gould and Morgan buying elections 100 years ago, or large landowners and merchants buying elections 200 years ago, or Tammany Hall, or any of the other hundreds of ways economic and social power has swayed the votes of the electorate for as long as there has been democracy?

This nation still has one adult, one vote. We don't have to allow advertising to sway us, and not all of us do. We don't have to let ourselves be bought. We are thinking to small if we say this nation can be bought and that overturning Citizens United is the only way to prevent that.

Think! Talk! Listen! Vote!

Re: Beyond belief

natcase — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 08:49:39 -0000

The problem with "unreason" is the same as that with "atheism." Neither are or pretend to be a coherent system in and of themselves. Instead they are the named non-territories held to be in opposition to the "real lands" of truth. Two thousands on, it is the heathens and barbarians all over again. "Them" is not the opposite of "us" and well developed systems of understanding like Islam, Chinese medicine, and astrology need to be approached each as their own island of the mind and soul, not just as a generic "other."

The key to finding opposition to any system is to look for corruption: places where the ideological underpinnings have been corroded by self or small-group interest. Thus the opposition to GMO's is largely grounded in the aggressive campaigns by large agrobusinesses to own not just the products they buy and sell, but the basic rights of farmers to manage their farms. Farmers are being sued out of business because of cross-pollination from neighboring fields, and people feel rightly that this is an intrusion on the essential structure of a good, decentralized farming system.

We can see the same sorts of corruption wrecking people's trust in representative democracy and the Christian church—one is closer to science in being grounded in a modern sense of diffuse and egalitarian competition, the other is based equally between people's contiuning experience of and desire for the numinous and a millennia-old (and therefore extraordinarily rich) set of stories and social structures.

All living things grow old and decay. Some day Science will be old like the church. Already, as you say, it has ossified at the lay level into high-school "lab" experiments that merely re=prove over and over what has been proven millions of times already: ideas that were new hundreds of years ago. The novelty is not what makes living systems live and work, but the fact that only specialists can understand the cutting edge changes the nature of this beast, and we still rely on that freshness of ancient vision the same way religions rely on the wonder of millennia-old revelations.

Re: Beyond belief

natcase — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 17:13:41 -0000

What I'm saying is that grouping all non-rational (or-not-based-on-repeatable-evidence) systems of knowledge as "unreason" is like calling druids, shinto practitioners, Hindus and shamans all "heathens." It posits an ontological territory that is not really a territory but a "terra incognita." I'm not arguing that astrology is science, or like science, or equivalent to science. Actually, I think that sort of competing claim is one of our biggest problems as a society right now, especially when it's made by religious fundamentalists who want their point of view to carry the same sort of weight as science does. Far better to rigorously define the space you actually DO cover, as creators of fiction do, for example.

Atheism as a concept is the same; it's why I hate calling myself that though I technically am one. It's like my going to Germany and introducing myself just as "not German." It says nothing about where I am from, just that there is no literal "theos" there.

I don't see "unreason" on its own being the problem. I see corruption as the problem. We have all kinds of unreason running around in our heads, and the heads of our neighbors. Our reason can't control all of it. SOME of the non-reason-based tools we have developed over millennia may be useful as ways of living with this part of ourselves. Indeed, shouldn't the goal be to not just "live with" this part of ourselves, but to make it a whole part of ourselves? Find a way for unreason to not just be a second-class citizen, but also not cede total control? Surely it is not an either/or?

Re: Katha Pollitt

natcase — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 18:18:57 -0000

I thought God wanted those things when they were in His interest. It's one reason He doesn't actually poll at 100%

Re: A right to believe?

natcase — Mon, 20 May 2013 10:03:20 -0000

Shane was taking a course within a college. Whether they admit it or not, colleges have points of view. Shane's teacher was teaching within that institution. The real question here is, whose point of view prevails? Religious institutions in particular may insist that coursework hew to the orthodoxy of that religion: that specific points of view be taught, and others not taught. This is the prerogative of any organization, but we in America pay especial attention to and reserve named privilege to religious groups. We don't notice when, for example, West Point declines to to teach Marxist revolutionary ideology to its political science students.

It has become accepted within the Academy that teachers have a right to free discourse independent of the ideological bias of the institution they are teaching within. This independence has value, certainly, but it is a right within our culture, not an inherent human right. We can argue for and against whether this is good (and I do think it is good), but as an employee, university professors by custom have an unusually wide range within with to express their opinion. WIthin wider society, the employer/employee relationship, or even the member/organization structure seldom allows such latitude.

Your essay fails to distinguish between rights and employee responsibility, and it is unfortunate that the student relied on rights in this case. But it should be noted that rights exist within communities: we may claim that (for example) freedoms of thought and expression are "universal," but it is the communities within which they are practiced that define what that right means. All institutions have a pale beyond which expression (cf your lynch mob example), but these are set by the institution. So... should all educational institutions adhere to the broad right to free speech and thought we hold in the United States, or should they be free to impose more limited pale of their choice? As a liberal, I tend towards the former, like you, but there's a strong argument the other way too.

Finally, the student may have been seen to be exercising his right within the larger societal context, because he used that word, "right," which is understood to be at least national in scope, if not universal. In fact, however, he did not appeal to the national legal structure, and the administration did not make its decision within that structure. Shane's "rights" were in fact the rules of the organization, in which one is free to hew to orthodoxy without challenge. In the context of an education which Shane is paying for, and in offer of which he was presumably promised that this orthodoxy was not going to be challenged, and in the context of a class in which the professor was apparently going to grade students based in part on whether they would imagine challenging that orthodoxy, Shane was right. I don't like this kind of education, and object in principle, as you do, but in this case Shane was demanding what he was paying for.

Re: A right to believe?

natcase — Sun, 02 Jun 2013 02:03:51 -0000

Yes, in our country, it is. Higher education is, anyway. Now, "your way" may involve submitting yourself to be challenged in the way I and you and the essay's author would like everyone to be challenged, but is this a universal moral imperative? How do you feel about seminary students being required to accept heterodoxy? This feels like drawing the line, but remember this drawn line is pretty new, dating from the early 19th century secularization of American Higher Education... after the founding of the Republic, certainly. Before then, Shane's experience would have been the pretty-much-universal norm.

Re: A right to believe?

natcase — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 16:44:36 -0000

Shane's student did not censor. The student reported Shane to the dean and the dean censored. This is normal academic procedure. What is at question is the basis for the censure. What the article is saying, pretty much, is that any instructor's academic freedom trumps the right of an institution to set parameters for what is taught, in this case on an ideological basis. Again, one can argue a moral right here, but you're arguing against the way private higher education has been run here and in Europe since forever. The idea of a seculraized, non-ideological truth trumping all is recent. It may make ideological teaching look ridiculous (and I would never send my kid to a religious institution that did not include serious safeguards for individual instructors to question orthodoxy), but this is not some institution or dean or student "breaking the rules." It's the rules themselves being morally problematic.

Re: A right to believe?

natcase — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 08:39:57 -0000

I called the police because someone had broken into the house. The police were persuaded to come to my house and arrest the intruder. Therefore I arrested the intruder. Erm...

When I was five, Johnny punched me in the stomach and I ran crying to my mother. My mother told Johnny's mother, and Johnny spanked him. Therefore I and my mother spanked Johnny. Erm...

I attend a Dogatarian school. In a general religion class, the teacher asks to consider the catatarian point of view, and then says we will be graded based on how well we have opened ourselves up to the cat's point of view. I object to the deans that when I enrolled I was told I would be taught in a dogatarian environment. The dean agrees. The dean (not me) goes to the teacher and tells her or him to knock it off with the catatarian subject matter, that isn't what we teach here. The teacher objects, and eventually leaves to teach at a school that allows the catatarain point of view.

How has the student done wrong? How has the school acted in an internally contradictory manner? The school's point of view may be problematic in the wider global sense, but if so then all religious institutions who want to teach just their orthodoxy are wrong: every seminary, every college, every school. Students, under this point of view, should never be educated within their faith tradition in a way that excludes competing points of view. Period. This is an argument I'd enjoy seeing, but it's different from the one posited here. And the student didn't censor. The student acted as a stoolpigeon on a teacher who violated school policy, and the dean censored, because the dean had the authority to censor.

Re: A right to believe?

natcase — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 19:44:46 -0000

I think you're edging toward the absurd here. Perhaps over it. Guns do not have legal standing, nor do we generally give them any responsibility for the damage caused when they are used. The Dean was not an inanimate tool, nor are the police. We entrust them with their positions because they are capable of judgment. In both cases, that judgment is largely made within the context of the institutions they represent. In the Dean's case, the same institution the instructor accepted employment under; in the police's case, the same institution that I as a citizen or resident claim what rights to protection and privacy I may have, and which I believe the intruder is violating. In appealing to the Dean or the police, I am essentially making an argument to that institution and then allowing that institution, as represented by the dean, the police, and/or to any authority they may then call upon, and then I am leaving that argument there. If the Dean had declined—if the college in question were, as the author says, more "enlightened"—then the student would be SOL... authority appealed to, appeal rejected. Likewise if the police found out it was my daughter sneaking in late, they would probably decline to arrest her.

Is this really so hard to understand? Do you really think deans and the police operate like machines at the will of an operator, like a toaster or a gun? Did Shane's student really just pull a vending-machine tab and POOF! out popped a judgment that he wanted? If he thinks he did, he's going to be very disappointed in future life. We all operate within the rules and structures of larger organizations, and all of these structures impose limits that sooner or later we won't like. We have to do X because we are an employee, member, next of kin, or otherwise part of something bigger. It may be a free country, but even there we are obligated to pay taxes and obey laws.

And in this case, within the context of his employer's rules, Shane's teacher was in the wrong. While we may applaud him for standing up for critical thinking, we also need to acknowledge that the school was well within its rights to do what it did.

Re: A right to believe?

natcase — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 12:16:37 -0000

The Nazi example is a red herring, because the overarching institution is so repellent. If you make the same argument about an intruder in a school being found out and reported by a student, and subsequently shot by police, then really is the student responsible for the intruder's injury/death? And to ordinary Germane, this was the impossible situation during the Nazi era: how to be a "responsible citizen" while also being a decent human being.

If I tell someone something and they act upon it, this is not my responsibility. It is only my responsibility to regulate an overall system that I have some say in. If another student in Shane's class felt otherwise (and it seems likely there was at least one who felt qualms about how the whole thing was handled by the college) and stood up and protested, I would say hooray! but not on the basis of how that student acts towards the teacher. The student would be protesting the structure within which all the actors in this play are working.

"Everyone doing their job" is a basic group dynamic. In some cases, the ideological basis for the group involves a lot of free will (secular liberal arts colleges, for example, encourage this kind of freethought). In other cases, the ideology of the group greatly restricts how individuals can act within the group (cf. the military). It is silly to maintain that the liberal point of view is the "right" way of operating. Consider that wonderful bit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail about the "anarcho-syndicalist commune." It's absurd in the context of a chivalrous quest, in a world of kings and serfs. Now, one could argue that all rigid structures are inherently bad, and if that is your point of view, well, I guess you are entitled to it, but I disagree. Structure is not inherently good or bad, and often total free agency is a terrible thing to bestow on someone.

Re: Ladder to heaven

natcase — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 08:05:40 -0000

Beautiful. Thank you.

Re: So Single Black Men Want Commitment. Really?

natcase — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 09:27:21 -0000

I'm white, so take this with a grain of salt, but I remember being desperately lonely and single, and (A) wanting a serious, steady rock of committed relationship, and at the same time (B) not having a sweet clue how to get one. I tried singles ads, I tried asking friends and women I liked "out" and I am certain I was wearing what cartoonist Michael Jantze called "the stinky t-shirt of desperation." There is something in our broad social definition of what it means to be an acceptable male that makes it nearly impossible to find a healthy relationship that leads to marriage from ground zero without a lot of teeth-gnashing. I can easily believe that there are a lot of men, of all races, who in the quiet of their rooms say, dang I wish I had someone here with me. And a lot of women, of all races, who see men doing the ridiculous, tie-yourself-in-knots-trying-not-to-look-like-you're-in-junior-high things we do, and think oh for god's sake surely there's a grownup in this pile of idiots somewhere. It's twisted, but there you are.